booktherapy

Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

2010-08-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

When you are in your bed by 7:30pm and willing the sun to go down on a dreadful, oh call it a baroquely dreadful day filled with anguish and unusual cruelty, the very last thing you think you need is to read a book about a father who says things to his son such as, on his first day of kindergarten, "You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life."

There is a certain ring of familiarity to this sort of parent. One of mine would say to us as we crawled home after a schoolyard brawl, "It's a dog eat dog world, get used to it."

The other parent would look at my tattered brothers and say "Looks like you were talking when you should've been listening."

So, cold is the temperature of the comfort we are accustomed to, sadly. But still. Does a whole book of it sound like the sort of thing you want to read? Especially when you've surely lived with it long enough to satisfy anyone not fully a masochist? More to the point, at this special moment in the history of our life, is this the sort of book that's even healthy?

Turns out Sh*t My Dad Says is astonishingly good company on a bad day, if for no other reason than it does a body good to laugh out loud when you think you might have lost the knack altogether.

The seal of sadness was broken with this gem:

On Spending the Night at a Friend's House for the First Time
"Try not to piss yourself."

Sage advice indeed.

Justin Halpern's dad is full of sparkling gems of advice like this. Halpern Senior has a remarkably foul mouth for someone who is a doctor of nuclear medicine,whatever that is, but maybe we don't know enough about the profession. What comes between your garden variety foul-mouthed mean parent's "I just tell it like it is" and the elder Halpern's is that beneath the crusty crust, he is truly and magnificently decent. He notices that the smelly unreliable pitcher in Little League is the troubled son of an alcoholic and takes him under his wing, in a brusque and crusty sort of way, then tells off the smirking self-satisfied parent who dissed the kid, you know, "trash talking" such that the poor hapless child was utterly thrown off his game. You have the impression that telling off a kid is ok in certain circumstances, dissing a victim is not. No, that's just being a bully. And, for that matter, Little League is about playing a game and therefore everyone gets a turn regardless of whether you're winning or losing. "You pitched a great game, you really did. I'm proud of you. Unfortunately, your team is shitty....No you can't go getting mad at people because they're shitty. Life with get mad at them, don't worry."

You learn a lot of valuable lessons from Mr. Halpern. Liars are number two after Nazis as the worst thing to be. And it's best not to cheat. "Cheating's not easy. You probably think it is, but it ain't. I bet you'd suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately." Now, that is worthy of consideration. As one who cannot tell a lie in part because my memory is so bad I immediately get caught, this had a pragmatic ring to it that gets you to the right answer without any fancy high-stepping around thorny ethics issues: Don't cheat, it's harder to do it well than you think it is. Play nice with others. Don't leave your toys where someone else likes to put their ass. And so on.

And, "you always have the right to be an asshole -- you just shouldn't use that right very often."

Can't argue with that.

It would be interesting to know what Mr. Halpern might offer as advice to someone trying to reach a coma state at 7:30pm. Probably something like "Get over yourself. Everyone has the right to be an asshole, but it's not worth feeling this bad about one."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society + The Other Hand

2010-03-23T06:04:00.001-07:00

It is a rare and fine thing to find a book so good you can't wait to get home to it, and lucky me, I've found two in a week.

Both are anchored by the direst of circumstances and times but both have such a life affirming lightness, without being affirmation-oriented in the least, so as to make it true that great art must come of great hardship.

Let us begin with Guernsey, and because this is vaguely British it might well be pronounced "Jersey" and mean that other place in the ocean, off the big island. But no, Guernsey it is, in print anyway, Jersey really is somewhere else. No idea how it's pronounced by natives, but I'm suspicious that it isn't as obvious as it should be.

The mouthful of a title -- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - is a bit of a set-back to be honest, promising something along the lines of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or maybe those large lady detectives, both referring of course to a series of books with cutesy titles which run perilously close to cloying cutesiness. But don't let the cuteness put you off. Nor the format -- it is a story told in letters but each is so compelling and funny and alive with character that you more or less forget that this is a literary trick that grows tedious.

Geurnsey is a gorgeous island occupied by Germans during the second world war. The hardship perpetrated on both the soldiers and the civilians was horrible, but maybe less than what was happening on the continent. Evil and cruelty and grief are revealed slowly, as are the character flaws and gold-star good things about each person within the tight circle of the literary group, a kind of book group where each member talks about what they've read or loved. But that's just the back drop of course. The interesting thing is what is endured and how, and what comes of it. Can a book about war be joyous? Ya ya it can.

The Other Hand meanwhile is dark and beautiful in a completely different but somehow related way. It has a slight scent of that other book with a mouthful of a title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in that a great deal of the pain that is felt is articulated through a very small, very clever boy. It is another book about struggle and unfairness, but it also is so anchored in engagement and life that it, too, is somehow rendered a joy to read.

The Private Patient, PD James

2009-10-18T03:35:00.001-07:00

The great thing about reading murder mysteries when life is stressful is that no matter how bad your day was, it was certainly a lot worse for that poor dead person. Somehow we horrible members of mankind find it comforting to know we're slightly better off than someone else. And then there is the lovely predictability of the form of the genre, and habit is always soothing.

PD James is especially good for the seeming paradox of the comforting mystery. She is more British than the Queen, always has people dressing in "fawn" as though beige were the answer, and then her characters drink lots of tea and want to reach out and hold beloved people undergoing grief but hold back and merely watch, yet somehow we are to understand they are nonetheless good and caring....the formality of her world restores order in the troubled mind.

The Private Patient is a relatively recent work, and having just read a very, very old James it had a ring of familiarity. Much like The Skull Beneath the Skin (circa 1982), there is a group of people in a mansion in the country, alas one of them is murdered and then one by one each of the guests is revealed to have motive and means. Well, James churns out these books at a clip and can be forgiven for revisiting a few story lines.

Those who follow her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who sounds like the dreariest man alive if you strip out James' own infatuation with him, might be distressed to learn that in this one he marries some equally dreary sounding woman named Emma, who for no apparent reason is apparently beloved and revered by everyone who meets her. Dalgliesh is a detective and a poet, and anyone who has ever met a real detective will know how deeply unlikely it is that such a man would exist, if for no other reason than he'd have been laughed off the force long ago. Cops are macho boys' club members, "poets" not allowed.

In this novel the dreary Dalgliesh, who ruminates a lot, doesn't say much, leads a carefully controlled existence, really feels bad that his girlfriend/fiance Emma's close friend has been raped, and really wants to reach out and hold good old sobbing Emma, but decides it's not appropriate to do so. He aches to do it though, but doesn't, because he felt it would be "an insult to her grief" (huh??) and he was "afraid she would withdraw. Anything would be better than that." The man is clearly a cold hearted nutter. If such a response occurred in the real world Emma would have called off the wedding after putting a dagger through his icy chest.

Nonetheless it's an entertaining read with lots of twists, Big Reveals, murky motives, the whole lot. A classic.

There is a nice, very literary bit at the end which is worth pondering -- something you don't find in your average murder mystery:

"It was for her, not him, to decide how much she had been harmed by him. He could have no lasting power over her without her connivance."

Then

"The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have."

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2009-09-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

London was a-twitter about the new Breakfast at Tiffany's, the first-ever stage production of the book and beloved story of Holiday Golightly, a young woman of sketchy morals and indeterminate provenance who delights in New York and goes to Tiffany's when the world is too ruthless. The book by Truman Capote was selling out at bookstores, and magazines and fashion spreads were devoted to the "new" Holly, or at least the actress now playing her.

The play's producers were very careful to warn all that their production was 'very different' from the movie, and they followed Truman Capote's novella extremely closely. Alas they followed the words and not the nuance of it, and thus their play is indeed very different from the movie. It is not stylish.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is an iconic fashion movie, and there is not a woman alive who has not at some point in her life wanted to look a little like Holly. Or, show me the woman who denies this and I'll show you a liar who no longer fits into the little black dress she owns.

So pity the poor star and pity the poor costumer who must walk in the footsteps of Audrey Hepburn and the movie from which a million fashion dreams were made. The producers of the theatrical version avoided the trouble by setting the story in the 40's, with more or less period costume, rather than the uber-elegant late 50's of the film. This is accurate in one sense -- while the story is told in the late 50's, the narrator is recalling events that occurred 15 years earlier.

Why the playwright chose to lift dialogue and copy directly from the book and yet the producers ignored the very specific descriptions of Holly is a mystery.

Truman Capote, being a southern gentleman and maybe on account of being a gay man, had an acute sense of women and their style. He loved the "swans" as he called them, Babe Paley and Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli -- his friends and all wildly gorgeous and elegant, who indeed live in popular imagination as fashion icons even today.

The swan of his imagination is of course Holly, and she emerges fully formed-- small, slim, elegant and ephemeral. She comes from no where, she makes herself up as she goes along, she is an enigma that is nonetheless as identifiable as the statue of liberty.

Capote describes her extremely carefully. Her cropped hair is various shades of tawny blonde, her eyes are wide set and flecked, slightly squinty from the need for glasses. She wears only sunglasses though, prescription, day or night. She is ballerina-like, and wears simple, elegant black dresses; she is never seen without pearls in her ears and excellent shoes. She won't read bad news without putting on her lipstick first.

Given that Holly exists during the war years, what Capote has described and the movie depicts is an utterly modern and fresh style -- Holly's is simple, spare, fresh and elegant despite the depravity of her actual existence. Her refined, intelligent style is a counterpoint to her utterly modern set of values. She won't turn on a friend, she is open to the weirdnesses of others (in the book she likes dykes as housemates and is willing to spank men if that's what gets them through the night) and though she profits from it in the form of $50 per trip to the loo, she has compassion for the freaks and fragile souls that cross her path, making a point of ensuring even the ugliest little man feels tall and handsome. She is utterly American in that she is her own invention and always on the road to somewhere else, a free spirit who nonetheless gets scared of all that freedom. Moreover, she is open about the fact that the only real career path for a woman is a man and so she wants a rich one. This forthrightness, if that is a word, is out of its time; Holly is set in the war years and born in the straightjacket 50's. The clue that she knows it, Capote knows it, and the subliminal affirmative message in the movie is her style. Simple, straightforward, and not as easy as it looks.

In the book and the movie, Holly is different from the others; younger, less constrained, more sleek and modern. In the play she fits in, she is part of the scenery rather than standing away from it as a beacon of what is to come. While it might be "just clothes" to many, Capote and the filmmaker used clothing as semaphore of something bigger and better than mere cloth. Her style is as much a character as the character of Holly herself. How profoundly the players on the stage and those guiding them have utterly, totally, missed the point.

And what a shame. It would be interesting to see what Holly might look like now.

Direct Red -- Read it, STAT!

2009-07-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Direct Red, subtitled "A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession" is an unlikely candidate for the term "good read" -- how sympathetic are we really to surgeons, those aloof and arrogant uber-doctors who swoop in, make a pronouncement then move on? Who cause such terrific agony and evoke such great fear?

Perhaps Gabriel Weston's book is so wonderful to read because, while she clearly has a vocation as a surgeon, she also had a passion for books and studied literature. Each chapter describes another aspect of what it means to have a life in your hands, literally, and each shows another example of how there is no such thing as "easy" surgery. Even a simple tonsillectomy can go awry.

But the book is also very much about Weston's inner conflict between being a cool intellectual and a person with a soul -- both are necessary for greatness as a surgeon, but neither quality sits well with the other. She talks about how she overlooked an ailing child, essentially gave him an aspirin and told him to go back to sleep without really considering why a young boy would have such a severe headache. He died. She talks about how terrified she was to make her first difficult call as the senior surgeon on a case, knowing that in the world of surgeons she'd be a laughing stock and her career would be over before it properly began if she were wrong. In that instance, she saved a life.

Direct Red is not a long book. It is probably a necessary book, humanizing a group that doesn't really want to be seen as merely mortal, and describing a side to health care rarely seen and poorly understood. Luckily it is so wonderfully written you won't mind taking the medicine in the message.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played With Fire

2009-05-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

It is rarely a good idea to know much about the author of any novel, lest the "novel" part begin to seem less a work of imagination and more one of therapy. But the author of these two books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, is a shadowy figure lurking in the pages and is curious, mysterious and puzzling in his own right.

The main character of the books is an idealistic journalist and what a great coincidence, so is Stieg Larsson, the author! the "Girl" is a super-brainy computer geek who can find out anything with a few keystrokes. This sounds about as interesting as your average newspaper but hang on, the stories take flight despite the reporter-rhetoric.

By his author picture on the back covers we can see he is a typical reporter -- soft and squishy, not that attractive but not entirely un-; a bit nerdy, clearly a guy who didn't score big in highschool. He is dead, and these two books were published, part of a trilogy, posthumously. We anxiously await the third, as they improve as we go.

Larsson is also a bit pervy if the books tell us anything at all, a plain-faced and doughy man with a big kink and wild imagination, who is unlikely to have had much of the action he writes about. But then again, pervs don't often care much for beauty. His main character is a sexually voracious skinny boy-girl, almost autistic, who dislikes much communication. Talk about gift-wrapped for a man. The great news is she gets breast implants in the second novel so is skinny as a teenage boy, but with knockers. Gift-wrapped with a bow.

Larsson, it is said, is dead, felled in some way mid-story, while covering some intrigue. Sounds a bit perfect to me. I hope this is instead a massive marketing stunt and there's even more where the Girl came from.

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld

2009-04-29T05:04:00.000-07:00

It is hard to imagine that the bland Laura Bush could inspire anyone to do anything other than yawn, and this is why some people write books and you don't. Curtis Sittenfeld has written a terrific novel imagining the inner life and background of the woman who puts the "dull" into dullsville, whose automtaton smile and colour blocked clothes seem to suggest Stepford is not too far from Reston, Virginia. American Wife is an imaginary look into that blank brain, and in fact any brain of a certain generation of good upstanding women who somehow manage to cause no harm, or at least manage never to be actually blamed for the harm they do. That's quite a skill.

The young "Laura" is actually Alice, to whom some dreadful things happen. So far so interesting but as imprinted as she is by tragedy or startling discoveries she manages to actually say very little. She owns up to nothing, really, not even a christly crap that wrecks the plumbing in the one and only bathroom a dozen people must share -- she lets events wash over her and smiles and nods and goes with the flow.

Alice is called up short by two people, and not until the near end of the story. The great question is then posed -- is being "good" the same as being not too bad? Is "good enough" ever good enough? And what responsibility does the president of the free world's intimate partner have to ensure he doesn't run off and kill thousands in a country he previously would be unlikely to be able to find on a map? But she got away unscathed from something similar -- perhaps that then becomes simply the way things are done. You simply smile and get away with it, and everyone thinks you're nice. What a rich reward for doing and being so little.

The Believers, Zoe Heller

2009-04-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

Zoe Heller is a phenomenally gifted writer. Her novel What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal is delicious in its cunning, perfectly describing the malevolent passive-aggressive manipulation that either is caused by or causes loneliness. She perfectly captured the essence of a character we all know but who slips away from us at the moment we think we've nailed her. There are so many "sweet" old women (and they are so often women) who tabulate and track the actions and foibles of others strictly for the purposes of judging them harshly. The momentary feeling of righteousness is the essence of their addiction. No one is allowed to be too happy, or too carefree.

The Believers, Heller's newest book, is already slated for the movies. In it is an acerbic mother whom many of my friends will recognize, a true bitch of the "it's a dog eat dog world, get used to it" school of maternal feeling. So relentlessly cruel is she that we can't quite pity her for wanting so badly to believe in the story of her marriage rather than the marriage itself. It's hard to see her side of things or to feel sorry that she stoically put up with a philandering husband knowing that the marriage was a constant while his flings were flings, only to find out that he actually did love someone else and moreover, had a FAMILY with her. No, actually, we sort of see his point. I'd run to the nearest warm heart, too.

This book will be a movie and probably a very good one -- Patrick Marber, who wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal is not only a friend of Heller's but the screenwriter of this, too. The book is entertaining enough, Heller is a terrific writer, but it is not altogether good. The Believers of the title are those in an idealistic family who are struggling to believe in a higher purpose and reason to live while being unable to actually connect with life. Each character is cut off and shut off save one, the one who didn't believe in much malarkey at all. She is the tragic sister who believed what her bitch mother and father told her -- that she wasn't very pretty and certainly not that smart, she shouldn't expect much. Luckily for her she got over that, a sign that not being a believer is maybe the best route to happiness.

So, this is a decent book for discussion purposes, a book club pick if there ever was one. But it's just that. Decent, not delicious.

Waiting for the blow

2008-11-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

I've taken a break from Edgar Sawtelle, because my own life has become slightly more tense and the sense of impending doom was getting to me. Something will happen to these mute, sweet, defenseless characters and I don't know what it is except it will be sad, and bad.

In being mute Edgar taps into a heartbreaking boy who has followed me all my life, in different forms and found in different books. These are the boys I grew up with, and boys who grow up anywhere where having a feeling is simply not discussed. Not that it is un-masculine, it simply isn't there. When I asked my brother how his friend was doing after a breakup with a woman and mother of his kid, whom he'd been with for at least a decade, my brother shrugged and said "he's awright I guess, saw him at the bar the other day." In their inability to say, process, live whole, these boys get into big trouble. Another friend was one of these, a brilliant boy who appeared that he really was going to beat destiny. He was the youngest-ever full time photographer at a photography-heavy newspaper, he was fearless but also sensitive enough that he could always get the amazing picture of the victim, or the family, or the utterly raw look of someone who has found pain unbearable -- all the stuff of daily news photography. There was something young and vulnerable about him and even victims of terrible crimes felt some kindred spirit.

He was a bright light and going far until destiny grabbed him in a near-Shakespearean way. Drugs given by his Iago quickly became an addiction, or perhaps drugs were the Iago, making him paranoid, bitter, angry. He was no longer the hard-working wunderkind, he started to mess up, not show up, started to be aggressive where his sweet self would have opened doors and hearts.

Finally he seemed like he was going to pull out of it. He went to rehab, he came back to work, he seemed if not his old self at least someone we recognized.

One day he missed work, then the next day, then the photo editor suggested a friend and fellow photographer go round to the house to see what was up. I think they expected the bacchanalia of the past -- women, bikers, smoke, coke. What he found was our sweet friend in the back seat of his car, in the garage, the car having run dry of gas. Dead but looking merely asleep.

This is what happens to boys who cannot speak, express, deal. I don't know what will happen to Edgar Sawtelle or his dogs, but there is an Iago at work or perhaps a Claudius...someone up to no good. Too scary to go on, I've taken a break to read murder mysteries. At least with these we care less about the characters and know what to expect.

Reading the writing on the wall

2008-11-03T13:05:00.000-08:00

And here we are, on the eve of an election and the eve of history. But what history? America is not the first racist country to elect a black person or a woman; it is, however, more proud of this achievement than others.

Every newspaper and blog is covered in thick election coverage and what a journalist friend calls the "hagiography" of Obama. No one thinks he will lose, and so as the heir apparent will soon, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, start to have his day in the light.

Of all the dark horses in this race and all the hiding in plain sight, it is Obama who has gotten off lightest.

During the primaries it was Hillary Clinton who took a lot of the fire, today it is the bumbling of the Palin-McCain camp. Palin's outfits alone have taken many an eye off any appropriate ball. Obama had the good sense to tell his own story in a couple of books, being sure to add the odd, small mea culpa -- I wonder if any of it is terribly sincere. The comment that his memory of his first kiss with his now wife "tasted of chocolate" sounds very Judy Blume. Or Ross and Rachel. A bit twee, in other words. It's a small thing, but it has the tone of an oft-repeated story valued for its "cute"; it reminds me of someone trying to show his affectionate side rather than really having one.

Now he will take on the full weight of history. He can't but fail. Far too many hopes, dreams, ill-defined expectations are resting on his head.

Great campaign though.

Edgar Sawtelle

2008-10-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, on the heels of a few setbacks and a sorry breakup, I got a dog. My first.
The decision was as thought out as anything life changing can be, as in, not very well thought out at all because how can you decide on the unknown? I realized that I don't get along with people, I live a life with no responsibilities beyond getting myself out of bed and washed in the morning (and getting out of bed proves harder to do than you'd think), a life of utter self-indulgence when you look at it. I was living a life very much as I'd lived it since the age of 18, as a student....relentless "what do I want now, how can I make ME happy now?" and it was frankly boring.

So, with no partner and no children to look after I decided on a dog, a very small one because I am actually afraid of dogs. I thought tiny would be easier. I have had a great many cats in my life and a cat didn't answer the urge -- they are too independent, I wanted something that needed me. Some reason NOT to head to a bar after work. I needed a reason to go home and to like it there.

Enter Bear, as seen to your right, a very teeny beast and one, I'm given to understand, only her owner could love. She is haphazard in terms of obedience, annoyingly yappy, and a bit of a fright to look at with her long hair that is almost constantly in dreadlocks because she despises being brushed and prefers to wash her own face. In fact, though her teeth are all of 1/8 of an inch long she can indeed draw blood if you have a brush in your hand. However, despite her flawed character she is decidedly my dog, never fully happy when I'm not with her (or so I try to believe). She likes to be nearby at all times, content to watch me read books if that's what's going on; when she sees the mascara come out she starts to cry at the bathroom door by way of persuasion, "please please take me with you". When I was most depressed over yet another hard breakup she sat at my feet and stared into my face, whimpering and crying as I did not allow myself to do. My only fear in life now is that somehow I will not perfectly look after her, and if real harm were to come to her, it would kill me. I don't know how people have courage to have children -- it must be terrifying to love anything or anyone that much.

And so we come to Edgar Sawtelle, a wonderful book sometimes told from a dog's perspective, about a relationship between a silent boy and man's (and a boy's) best friend. When the boy forgets himself and Almondine can lick his face, the dog spins with joy. The dog is the boy's voice and protector, the dog is thrilled to have a job to do.

Permeating this story is a sense of dread, quiet and almost hidden but there. You know that maybe on the next page or the one after it, something will break your heart. This is the way of mute beings whether they are silent because they cannot speak or silent because they don't know the words to use. They will break your heart because you want to protect them from what they cannot comprehend or communicate, and as such they are a victim to it.

I don't know what doom is impending, just that I feel it. I have not finished this gorgeous book. But you should start it as well.

Signs of the times

2008-10-24T06:55:00.001-07:00

It is very difficult to read a book when current events are so compelling.

You won't know this because no one cared and no one voted and nothing changed but Canada had its own attempt at an election. But off course the real extravaganza is the American one.

Here we have America choosing its prejudice as much as its president, selecting between a white woman of girlish affectation and gargantuan ambition and a black(ish) man who felt glorious enough himself to pen not one but as I count it three memoirs already at the ripe old age of 47.

Though this choice would seem to suggest that America will be forced to take a step forward toward enlightenment regardless of who becomes president, one half of the choice is a big step back.

Sarah Palin is no modern woman; rather she is All About Eve, the duplicitous bitch from high school, that catty Joan Collins character in a TV show, an archetype we'd hoped had disappeared.

She has spent $150,000 since August on clothes and make-up and why not, it's showtime. The self-described hockey mom is running her campaign exactly as she ran them as a would-be beauty queen -- all cute winks and charming "you betcha"'s, answering those tough questions about foreign and economic policy as cleverly as any Miss America contestant who is required to be prepped for that sort of thing to show dimension, to show that she is not merely just another pretty face. And Palin, as vice presidential candidate for a man The Lancet suggests is medically fragile, is sitting in that cat-bird seat -- as any beauty pageant watcher knows, first runner up will ascend to Queen should the winner be unable to complete her rein.

For we women raised to assume the radical feminists just before us had strafed the chauvinistic world so we could live without having to turn the world on with our smile, it is disconcerting to see a woman succeed on the basis of a wink and a prayer. She uses all the wiles we thought, or hoped, would have no further resonance anywhere but a dinner party. Like so many Cassandras we say that such tactics don't really work anymore but we are wrong, they do work, we still live in a world that likes its women perky and cute -- and substance, well, that's great for people doing the boring stuff like foreign secretary work or something. What we have here is someone doing Sexy Secretary, up-do, glasses and pencil skirt included. She exhibits a calculating, raw ambition and for all her claimed affection for Joe Six-pack seems about as warm as her native state.

That "cute" works is depressing. But it works all over the show -- in a recent article, Kate Moss describes her relationship with her boss as one where she has merely to wheedle "please Uncle Phil" and her wish is his command. To connect a model with a presidential candidate may seem crazy but look at it -- Moss is supposedly one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, a self-made success story, cleverly turning her stylishness into money by partnering with Topshop. Sadly she is a business woman who gets by on cute as much as acumen but perhaps it is excusable if not laudable -- she does get by on her looks. It makes you appreciate Madonna more, another savvy businesswoman who would bust a ball as much as play it. Thank heaven for her, one of the few girl-powerhouses who, we suspect, never wheedles.

It's a troubling time to be female. I would say it is a troubling time to be American, but sadly, the significance is larger than that. Imagine Palin, defender of the free world, in discussions with Putin. Let's hope he has a kid in hockey or we're toast.

Always say thank you

2008-09-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Margaret Visser has the kind of voice that a Brit might call "plummy" though it seems to me to be something closer to caramel or dark fudge sauce. In other words, she is someone you want to listen to even if she's merely reading the phone book.

Who is she and how do we know this? At first we thought she was an academic dug up by the diligent producers of the CBC -- she was a regular on Morningside back when it existed; she may still be a regular of the CBC but I am not.

Lucky for us, though, she is also and perhaps foremost an author of remarkable books on tiny subjects, "micro histories" they are now called, now that this has morphed into a full-on genre.

A beloved much earlier book, Much Depends on Dinner, was about dinner --she traced the history and social mores behind the most typical of plain suppers, roast chicken with potatoes, corn -- and how each element came to be on our plate and its place in the world of agriculture, commerce, culture. She spoke of it weekly on the radio, and reading it was even better. Delicious.

Her newest book is The Gift of Thanks, a clever bit of scholarship on the history and meaning of gratitude. Fingers crossed that if there is an audio version, she is the one who is reading aloud. That would be something to be grateful for.

Gratitude is often in short supply.

There is very little that is more alluring, charming, engaging, warm.

Twenty-four hours ago I left the memorial service of a woman I never met but wish I had; a woman who had such a force of personality, whose life force was so strong that I, a total stranger, was touched by her, moved by her example, and I like all of her friends and her family am determined to learn from her so that she did not die in vain.

In short, she was a great many things that can be summed up by the fact she was grateful. She loved life and knew it to be a gift, she lived every moment, she fought for things worth fighting for and laughed at the rest. She could see the funny side, she chose to be thankful for what she had rather than lament what she didn't -- and what she didn't have was profound. She didn't have health and therefore didn't have time, the time to see her kids grow up or to see her garden bloom. No matter.

From the stories her friends and family told of her, from the deep grief they feel, from the photographs that show her bright smiling, always smiling, face it is clear she was remarkable and someone put on earth to show the rest of us how it's done. In particular there were two photos of her with her husband -- one on their wedding day, one where she is leaning her head against his shoulder and what we see is the utter contentment and quiet happiness of loving and being loved, and knowing that love will never be forsaken.

She loved. Loved life, she loved her family, she loved her friends, career, books, music, her garden, her home. She was postive, a light in the darkness, she did not take for granted, not anything, not one thing.

Appreciate more. Be more kind than is necessary, everyone has their own struggle. Show gratitude.

What a good book at the right time.

Reading like a man

2008-09-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

There is a stack of books on my bedside table which makes me feel quite manly. I've never known one, a man I mean, who has the stick-to-it-ive-ness to settle on just the one; rather, I've witnessed the casual browse through this book until it gets sloggy, then that one, maybe back to the first, always on a search for whatever it is they search for. Excitment I suppose.

It's enough to make a girl shake in her Laboutins. But let's assume a reading pattern isn't a lifestyle....

When Will There Be Good News is another fantastic story by the fantastic Kate Atkinson. Her first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is on my permanent list of suggestions for anyone jaded by books and in need of a read. The direction her writing has taken was not predictable by this first excellent attempt; she's moved from the initial appearance of literary fiction tending to chick lit to become a sort of mystery writer but of the best kind. There is a story, there are real characters and real pathos, the mystery feels eerie and sad rather than formulaic. And, Atkinson can capture a child on paper like no other. That we did see in Museum.

Lover of Unreason is a biography of a minor character (a personal favorite though you won't find these on the best seller lists), the tragic second wife of Ted Hughes, a man who is either a cad beyond comprehension or the unluckiest bastard on earth. Perhaps we should check the bedside table for clues. You will recall his first wife Sylvia Plath offed herself after giving the children their lunch, sticking her head in the gas oven. At least the children were saved. Not so the child of Ted and Assia Wevill, a tortured (maybe by Ted, maybe not) beauty and a poet in her own right. Assia grew up the cherished and spoilt daughter of a lazy physician and his wife; the family fled Nazi Germany for Israel where daddy was one of a multitude of physicians caring for impoverished and not very sick people without healthcare insurance to mitigate any costs. So, times were a little tough. How she meets Ted and why she ended up with her own pretty head in the oven we don't know yet. As I say, I'm reading like a man, a little here and a little there.

Both books are equally compelling in their own way you see.

Maybe that's a larger metaphor than I think......and an answer to the mystery of Mars.

It's been a while

2008-08-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

Writing has taken the place of reading over the summer -- there has been scant time to sit on the terrace with a good book and a glass of wine, few free Saturday afternoons to lose to someone else's story.

What a shame.

A summer without reading, a summer without a whole wodge of great books and the adventures they bring is a summer without sunshine.

And we've had that, too!

The good thing about rainy fall days is....it's wonderful to tuck in, light some candles, adjust the lighting and dive in to the books again. This we will do.

The banality of evil

2008-06-10T20:22:00.001-07:00

I have never understood the term "the banality of evil". Having seen it, evil seems anything but banal; in fact, quite the opposite, creating a gushing, sickening wash of adrenalin that is perhaps addictive to some. That the perpetrators of real cruelty seem so casual about it might lead one to think that there is a banality to evil but even then the effect of the actions is so profound that their relative calm in the face of it seems to add to the horror. That one becomes inured to evil, or cruelty, is also nothing but a mask.

So why think about Hannah Arendt's apparently wise words now?

I have just watched, twice, a police interview almost exactly a year ago with serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo. The police were questioning him about the 1990 disappearance and murder of Elizabeth Bain, as the man convicted of killing her, her boyfriend, has been freed by the courts and there is no one else around to take the blame.

Canada is a small country and once we have a star that star will serve for everything. Ralph Benmurgi is a TV personality of dubious merit who will always find a home somewhere on the CBC; you'd think only Margaret Atwood ever wrote a book and the poor woman is called upon for a quote about everything from what is "Canadian" (answer: a beer) to the weather; Anne Murray needs never record again and will still be our national songbird and we have the one good serial killer so let's let him fill in for every mystery remaining on the books.

Bernardo, I had been told by insiders, had gone to fat in the dungeon-like prison he will die in but that's not true -- the interview, broadcast today on national television, shows a man who looks somehow younger than he did at trial as though there is a picture in an attic somewhere growing more haggard and wrinkly by the day; he is thin as to seem delicate. I didn't cover all of his trial and so only heard his voice on tape as he was raping young girls, when there was a barely contained joy in it, and that joy was chilling. In the tape of his interview his voice is light, airy, slightly whiny, hardly scary at all except in its somewhat flat tone and weirdly feminine quality. He looks not like a vicious, sadistic torturer, rapist and slow murderer but rather like a guy who'd be beaten in the schoolyard just 'cause.

Is that what the banality of evil means? I don't find it that at all. He is terrifying for being so easily hidden, he really can pass for one of us. For a nothing-to-be-scared of less-than-us in fact.

I interviewed his last rape victim who lived, if living can be what you'd call it. She was nearly dead from the attack and police told me that they were convinced that whoever did this to her would murder the next victim, her injuries were such that their guess was he was scared off somehow. She spent the next weeks and months shattered, unable to leave her home, sleeping curled at the end of her parents' bed like a frightened dog. How did it happen that she was raped? She knew there was a rapist afoot in her neighborhood when she got off the bus late that night, someone got off right behind her. She turned around, scared, and saw Bernardo and thought "whew, I'm okay." THAT's how mild he looks.

Having heard the interview I would have to say I have no idea at all if he was lying or not. He didn't admit to abducting and killing Elizabeth Bain, a young university student who vanished one sunny afternoon and whose body has never been recovered. He seemed to have little interest in what was being asked of him and the police seemed to have little interest in asking it -- you have never seen or heard anything as deeply boring as a real police interview. I suspect they save the good stuff for when the recording machines are turned off. Given that he will live for the rest of his days in a 5x8 ft. cement box you would think he'd be willing to trade information on where her body can be found for cable TV or a lakeside view -- the dungeon he lives in is on the shores of Lake Ontario -- but it seems no such deal was offered. If he killed Bain he couldn't be assed to say so, and he couldn't be assed to deny it very vehemently. Why should he do either? Nothing much changes in his world and her parents' torment about simply not knowing what happened to her would matter not and nought.

Bernardo seems utterly harmless and yet is capable of unspeakable acts. The court artist who drew him daily during his trial suggested maybe he raped and then killed and then tortured-and-killed in an escalating madness simply so he could feel .... SOMETHING, to be relieved of the bland dullness to which an unfeeling psychopath is sentenced. So how perfect that his criminal sentence was not execution, but life -- actual life, not criminal justice life, he will never be released from prison in a small blank cell to the end of his endless days -- he has been sentenced to utter boredom. The worst and only torture for someone like him.

I think my own understanding of the banality of evil must be in this flat affect, that the only one who suffers is the victim and those around the victim, that the perpetrator apparently moves on to live much as he did before. Maybe in a nice flat somewhere, maybe in a prison cell. Maybe it doesn't matter. Evil only matters to the victim, the perpetrator will never hurt. He can't be made to hurt, he doesn't have the stuff. Victims of casual cruelty will suffer the more for this. Their pain cannot possibly be answered.

The living rape victims and the parents of the dead girls must be driven insane by thoughts of what Bernardo has done and what he has destroyed, and I liked the idea that Bernardo was sentenced to boredom, it seemed Biblically fitting, it seemed like it would really get to him, really drive him equally mad. But there is no justice. The calm and casual guy the police interviewed that day seems just fine. He is in prison, sure. He really doesn't seem to mind much.

On Hillary

2008-06-08T09:29:00.001-07:00

The weekend papers are filled with "what she did wrong" stories and analysis but the best words that say the most about Hillary Clinton are Hillary's own.

In true Clinton tradition, her final going away speech seems to have been tear-jerking, memorable, historic. The NYT reports that "For 28 minutes, standing alone on a stage in the historic National Building Museum, Mrs. Clinton spoke not only about the importance of electing Mr. Obama, but also about the extent to which her campaign was a milestone for women. She urged women had supported her -- who had turned out at her headquarters, flocked to her rallies and poured into the polls to vote for her -- not to take the wrong lesson from her loss.

" "You can be so proud that from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States....To those who are disappointed that we couldn't go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours."

"At that point the cheers, mostly from women, swelled so loud that Mrs. Clinton's remaining words could not be heard."

That is an elegant bit of reporting and if you think it's easy to pull off in the heat of such a moment, it isn't. But more than that, what an elegant speech. Obama did himself proud as well, in being respectful to Hillary for her role in inspiring his own young daughters.

History will tell, but it seems that Hillary's team failed to fully understand the effect of online to influence people and to drive community, a movement. Much as historians now say the dramatic shift that swept JFK to power was his ability to intuit the power of television while Nixon did not, this may be the great learning and deeper understanding we are to have about the media age we now live in. More traditionally, it seemed to me that Hillary could not win for losing -- that the candidates were neck-and-neck but it was spelled as her failure and her loss, not his failure to gain a greater groundswell if he was so damn popular. Maybe that's the rub when you were a front-runner. She seemed to play an old-fashioned political game of pulling in chips, playing hardball with her opponent and risking "bitch", of being a down and dirty. We are told now that this was the tone of the Clinton years and it is out of fashion now. Who knows what went on in the backrooms at Club Obama. He seemed to be able to keep the weather sunnier, regardless of what may become the truth.

Obama became a master showman, his early tentative and timid tone now replaced with glorious presidential (at least as far as we see in movies) rhetoric. Maybe that's all a president needs to be, much as that is all (I think) a Queen needs to be. Stand for something, give the people something to believe in, stir their flagging hope. After that, doesn't much matter what you do. Maybe you shouldn't go to war unless it's really, really clear you need to. Aside from that, being president might be the easiest job in the world.

We love Bill Clinton, and why? Because he spoke so well. Seemed so charming. We forgave him everything including ....what did he do for a living again?

How perfect that he now makes his living....speaking. Play your best game, that's the message.

For all the talk of "change", ironically, Obama seems very Clinton-ish, with his warm wash of wonderful words. We may have seen Obama's best game. I don't think we've seen Hillary's. And right now, that seems a pity.

Sex and the City

2008-06-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Boys have their toys plus Matrix, Die Hard, James Bond and Val Kilmer films. Girls have Sex and the City.

Who would have thought that a so-so column in a so-so newspaper would become a so-so book would become a blockbuster mass movement?

During my more annoying or pathetic jags my brother will call and say "Hi Carrie, is Samantha there?" in an attempt to conjure a more cheerio my deario attitude, to help me get my groove back. My brother lives in a tiny town in the middle of the bald open prairie -- that he, a man's man in a remote empty wilderness not only knows that there is a Carrie and a Samantha but can articulate their relative merits and differences shows just how deeply the friends from NYC have permeated the culture.

Millions of words have been written about the SATC movie launched last week -- apparently most tickets are being purchased in groups, a sure sign that girls and their girlfriends are flocking; Cosmo parties are held in theatre lobbies; even a group of breast cancer survivors added seeing the flick to the panapoly of things they bond over, as reported in the New York Times.

Critics suggest that the movie isn't that good, which seems to be missing the point of it. The movie exists because there is not a woman in North America who can't identify which of the four friends she most resembles. The series itself was not much more than a fantastic cartoon that somehow wiggled its way into resonating with the way women really live, or would really like to live, in all life's messy glory. As television, SATC dared to show women as both venal or silly and at the same time deeply loyal at least to each other -- as caricatures they managed to be more nuanced than a lot of other versions on a lot of other shows. The fab four were both decent and shallow, they fought and made up, they drank too much and swore far too much, had sex with deeply inappropriate men and were as non-committal in relationships as men appear to be. In the early going someone wrote that SATC was not actually about girlfriends at all but rather about four gay men or more accurately, four big queens. Over time, what made them hugely appealing was that not one of them was good or bad, they were flawed just like real people but they had one huge dreamy advantage over the rest of us -- they had each other, through thick or thin. They didn't have to put their eggs in a relationship basket, each had THREE strong people in their corner at all times.

That bond of friendship is the real appeal, because it's so wonderful to contemplate and so rare. Years ago, when I was suffering my first huge heartbreak a friend -- a guy -- looked at my tear-dripping face and said simply "You need some good girlfriends." He was so right! and yet good girlfriends, or friends period, are hard to find. Twice in my life great friends, colleagues I worked with for years, turned out to be about proximity; once we were no longer in each other's faces, quite literally by means of workspace, I saw little of them. Girlfriends come and go with the vagaries of boyfriends and husbands and babies and soccer to attend to; there is almost always something a bit more important than getting together with your gal pals. So the luxury displayed weekly on SATC, TV version, was not so much the Manolos or the thousand-dollar t-shirts, the luxury was the solid footing each woman had with the others. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte each knew she could call at 3am and the others would rally, she could count on the others to show up for brunch, she could count on her friends to both celebrate with her and save her as the moment required.

The movie may have messed with this essential DNA a bit, rendering the girls a little less distinct -- one criticism is that in the film they've even started to dress alike -- but the groundswell of grassroots approval shows that real live women, grown ups, weren't ready to say goodbye to their fake friends. Perhaps the series and the movie also stand as a template for creating better real ones.

The things you read....

2008-05-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Purity Ball is a nine-year old invention created by the Wilson family, a family with a ton of children some of whom have names like Khrystian. That's Christian, in case their prediliction escapes you.

This is ostensibly a really nice thing, sort of like its sister the Debutante Ball, wherein girls are presented to the world and each other by their fathers.

Both the Deb Ball and the Purity Ball, to my way of thinking, and you can call me cynical, put the ick in sick.

Let's return for a moment to the Purity Ball. Here girls get dressed up in ballgowns to go on a date with Dad. Their dads stand up and swear that the girls will remain virgins until their wedding nights. Or until death if no one takes them off the market. The dads swear they will be good examples, keep it in their pants, and won't run off with the secretary leaving the moms behind. The language is probably crafted more nicely, but that's the gist.

See for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/us/19purity.html?scp=1&sq=purity+ball&st=nyt

I have one of those non-modern dads who brought home the bacon and cooked it on Sunday mornings, who fixed things, who was the go-to for discipline when my brothers and I were particularly badly behaved, and who remained largely silent in my life. He was always very gentle and nice to our kittens, and adores my tiny dog. It's quite amusing to see this huge 6-ft 2-in man playing with a 3-lb scruffy mutt. We lived with a nice sort of benign indifference -- I knew he was always there should I need him, and I never did mostly because I knew he was always there. If you see what I mean.

Growing up is never easy, but it is especially not easy when you are closely scrutinized. How do you become yourSELF when other people are weighing in on what you should think, do, decide? Add to this the perceived humiliations and mortifications of adolescence. To have your dad stand up and talk about your purity, to talk about sex, strikes me as a huge infringement on something deeply personal and quite frankly none of his business. That he should have such an interest strikes me as a bit creepy.

How about this. How about if dad behaved like a good father every day, and how about if mom and dad sort of led by example? You know, skipped the "do as I say not as I do" trip? How about they raise their kids to have self respect and confidence? And then how about they simply step back and watch you flourish?

Rather than take you to a dance and swear to your virginity, which is fundamentally and utterly yours to protect or abandon as you choose. One of the few things you can use as a marker of the transition between childhood and being a grown-up.

Mommy dearest

2008-05-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

So you think you have the mother of all mothers.

Read this, from the Times:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3842502.ece

"Michel Houellebecq is a literary icon whose novels have been acclaimed by critics as the cruel illumination of a troubled era.
But France's most celebrated and controversial contemporary author could be pushed off his pinnacle following an astonishingly vitriolic attack from a critic with a unique insight into his oeuvre.
She is his mother - and she is threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.
In a book of her own to be published next week, Lucie Ceccaldi depicts the cult writer as an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty. "

And oh, she does go on:

" “This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame,” Mrs Ceccaldi, 83, writes in L'Innocente, an autobiography."

Seems he started it, according to her. See, he wrote a book in which a despicable character called Ceccaldi abandonned her kids and took off to have sex in a sex community on the Riviera.

He could at least have changed the name I suppose.

The mother of imagination is a warm and soft place to go to be told that everything is going to be alright, you are just fine, you are wonderful, you are everything you hope you are. The maternal instinct, we are told, is an instinct, that it automatically kicks in and swathes progeny in the warm glow of unstinting love and approval.

Would that this were so. "Mother" is one of the enduring myths of civilization but in fact, if we were to look at the facts and the writing on the wall, that instinct kicks in intermittently and relatively infrequently.

My view may be warped by years of crime reporting where I was daily astonished by mothers who backed their abusive husbands versus supporting their sexually abused daughters; who stood by as fathers shook their babies to death or frankly, shook them themselves; who weekly participated in the shocking physical and emotional abuse of their own children. It always interested me that so long as there was a man to blame the courts would punish him more harshly, giving more prison time to him than the mother when in fact, to my way of thinking anyway, it is SHE who is further against nature. But the myth is so prevalent that even crusty judges cannot quite believe clear evidence and therefore mommy mustn't really have been entirely to blame.

But my view is also influenced by my circle of friends -- I have just one acquaintance who says she has the best mother on earth and who turns to her mother for love and support when she's feeling the world is against her. The rest of us have a slightly more distant relationship. Another of my friends has a mother who asked her if she were putting grey highlights in her hair now, and who was constantly petulant about the lack of attention she was receiving despite daily phone calls and weekly visits. My own mother is famous for various quotable quotes from my childhood, including "It's a dog eat dog world, get used to it" and "you look okay when you're fixed up" and "you think we're the Waltons -- well we're not." For those too young to know what the Waltons might be, it was a television show about dirt poor southerners in the Depression who nonetheless got along and loved each other deeply. Despite poverty they were a blissfully happy family. What a fairy tale! Interestingly, old age and forgetfulness has led my mother to query "I am not sure why my children don't come for Christmas, I always thought of us as being like the Waltons." Another girlfriend, daughter of a harsh mom, always said there was no way Madonna could be Madonna if her mom were still alive. That's worth pondering.

That said, the cold splash of water that was often my mother's advice or input sometimes had exactly the right effect. She could in a comment, something like "oh for god's sake", take the air out of my adolescent and neurotic horrors and make them manageable. She was kind of a checkpoint. If she thought no biggie, no biggie it is. I far prefer this to someone who joins in the madness to help sort it out -- this is the style of another friend's mother who is constantly nattering and worrying and fussing that her granddaughter seems unfriendly and what's going on in her mind and should we call a doctor. The granddaughter is adolescent and suffers age-appropriate moodiness, so what if she doesn't want to hang with an old lady. I want to scream at this woman, "It's a dog eat dog world, get over it!!" One of the nicest things about an ex of mine is that when I was upset about stuff, like being hideous and deformed or something, he'd listen, clearly drift off into a reverie about some football game or errand he might have to attend to, and then say in a perfectly pleasant tone: "oh shut up you dreary bitch" and instantly I was laughing and felt entirely better.

We believe, though, that we should have constant approval from our mother and mine was of the view, well, you know her world view as stated above but essentially, "I don't want to send you in the world thinking you're amazing so that the world can shoot you down". In protecting us from that eventuality, she often made even home seem a tad scary.

The other day I was whinging about fatness and my colleague, in frustration or just to shut me up so he could get back to work actually turned around and took a look at the lamentable legs in question. "It's not so much that you're fat as your pants are too tight" he said, totally misunderstanding the intended effect of the outfit. As I freaked with all kinds of sputtering "WHAT?!" comments, he quickly wrote a number on a piece of paper and said "Hey, I think you are an 8.5 despite anything you are wearing." EIGHT POINT FIVE??? The attack on his poor psyche continued, despite "What, that's a good score!" and so on. He could not understand that I don't want truth from my friends, I want consoling. I want "no, actually, have you lost weight?" and "wow, you're hot, you are a 14 out of ten."

Poor lad could not understand that truth is not intrinsically valuable, truth is actually of no use. If I wanted truth I could look in the mirror. If I wanted truth, I could call my mother.

What we want is the warm bath of approval, from the only one on earth whose approval we crave and the only one who can actually make us believe it. Interesting that even the cleverest and most talented among us struggle for and don't receive it.

Petite Anglaise

2008-04-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

There is a minute sub-genre of chick lit that I like very much. Let's call it "how to be French". Everyone should want to be French I think, and happily there are a number of authors who feel the same way.

So. We loved Entre Nous - about releasing the inner French girl, and How To Be Impossibly French with loads of quotes and advice from Ines de la Fressange and others. There are books on the French by Edith Wharton and of course Gertrude Stein, too, but let's not get too serious about this. The books on "how to dress like a French woman" are almost universally disappointing and outdated. This is a very, very mini sub-genre as I mentioned.

The newest recruit, currently clocking at something like 200,000th on the Amazon best seller list, is Petite Anglaise, about a British woman and Francophile, moves to Paris, has a baby whom she calls Tadpole, and lives with a husband she names Mr. Frog. Not very nice, that Froggy bit but it's her call.

I should love this book, which is both memoir and a brief history of blogging. The author, Catherine Sanderson, started a blog about being an English girl in Paris a long time ago, (well, long in terms of online if not world history) it took off like wildfire, she rolled the experience into this book.

The memoir is also about how to lose a husband by blogging.

Sadly Catherine is as annoying as the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love.

The mini genre emerging in chick lit is, then, something along the lines of "how self absorbed can I be without you realizing it and throwing the book against the wall?" Or, hitting "close" on the blog -- I went to the source the other day and read the latest entries on http://www.petiteanglaise.com/ where Catherine gets accolades from dozens of commentators on her daughter Tadpole's prowess with a Sharpie, on how clever/cute is the kid, on how lovely life sounds with The Boy (the new man, after Mr. Frog was dispatched) and so on. I guess this is blogging at its best -- the minutiae of the quotidien which we can all relate to and admire. Certainly Catherine admires her own self and what a good mommy she is. Why, she feels really BAD when Tadpole is going off to the grandparents, and is charmed when Tadpole says "it's okay mommy, you'll have The Boy to play with."

Dear god.

But, art follows life follows art.

A good friend of mine recently found himself at a dinner party, seated next to a young woman with a couple of kids. He didn't realize that said mom was an executive VP/creative director of a huge, multi-billion-dollar empire. And why would he know that? All the talk at the dinner table was of the vacation just taken or the vacation about to be taken; plus kids. In fact, the woman didn't become animated or engaged until my friend in desperation launched a question of his own: "So, with the children, the birthdays, uhm, do you give presents to ALL the kids or just the birthday child?"

I'm not saying that this woman needed to talk about work. I am suggesting that being where she is in life, coming from a family of astute art collectors and philanthropists, and being an industry leader, there might have been something......interesting...... to offer a conversation.

It is me who is out of synch, obviously. Catherine's blog is very, very popular and you, my friends, are rare.

Ah, maybe this is all too harsh. Is it deep and profound to love to read books about being something you are not? Hardly.

Though every book, in its way, offers at least the possibility of emerging, after the last page, as something you were not. Something better.

A book or a blog that is really and truly just about me the glorious me me just as I am me me me stands as a failure of imagination. Cute as you and your kid may be.

The stories you tell, the stories you tell yourself.

2008-04-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

Booktherapy is built on the idea that a book can be therapeutic, can tell you what you need to know when you needed to know it, that a good book can nourish your soul.

What is a book, any book, but a story?

So, this is a story I was told, it is not yet a book but I understand it will be. It affected me deeply.

A friend of mine recently had lunch with a woman he has known a long time, a woman who was his right hand and helper in projects that kept his family in ribbons, bows and private school.

This woman is luscious apparently, well known and appreciated for her heavy auburn hair and her delicious curvy and milky body, specifically her glorious breasts, now removed.

Her sister has died of breast cancer and she is fighting same but at lunch, in the way of some brave soldiers against this insidious and silent enemy, she is jaunty and optimistic and actually down to earth funny about it all. Cancer has a focusing effect on some people. As a brilliant lawyer used to say "this will knock the birdshit off the pump handle" -- suddenly you are faced with your own body warring against itself and the truth that we live only in the present, we only know we have this very minute, becomes utterly tangible. Some die of this idea, some thrive with it.

This woman, on her way to her radical mastectomy, asked for one last look and popped her top to take a view of the girls before being wheeled into the killing room, the room of their demise. Her glorious hair is sacrificed to chemo, and much of what you could have thought was her is now gone. What is truly her is shining through.

That last request, the request to take a last look at her breasts is an idea that has intrigued me since I heard it.

I have lost close friends and relatives to cancer, I have a gorgeous painting -- macabre to most people, utterly beautiful to me -- that is an ode to cancer and its defining effect, how it renders us merely a casing, soul against a recalcitrant and unruly body that suddenly turns enemy. Cancer hovers very near to all of us, the lucky among us stand near and not within its grip.

Cancer is the body turning against itself and I think this is the core of why this story has so gripped me.

I have fought against my own body all my life. After an eating disorder, not yet well but not the weight of a child either, I nearly walked with my nose in the air, so horrified was I to catch a glimpse of my own leg, thigh, belly, arms. Today it would seem that to some I am curvy or at the very least "athletic" -- shop girls often admonish me when I am freaking in front of the mirror: "Love your curves! men love curves!" I am not suggesting I have a sexy body but strangers call me so. To me, this body is something to fight against.

This woman revelled in her sexiness and is sorry to see it gone. But not too sorry, it's more like nostalgia, there are more important things now. One of my friends, a wild woman, had a couple of kids and thereafter various things sagged and dropped and she said "oh well, my body served me well, I had a lot of fun with it at the time" -- a perfectly healthy approach I think.

What struck me is this. Would I have wanted to say goodbye to these old friends? I wonder if I would miss them if they were gone. I don't want to sound more shallow than I have to, but they have often gotten in the way.

What this woman has shown me in high relief is that you can turn against your body or your body can turn against you. The salvation is being at peace with the whole.

On writing well

2008-04-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

In journalism school they teach you that Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is one of the best stories ever written. Why? Because it was written in spite of Frank Sinatra, he might say TO spite Frank Sinatra and the story of the story is, Gay Talese could not no how get an interview with Frankie. So he interviewed everyone else and wrote a story about Frank anyway, and it was more revealing than anything that Frank himself could or would have divulged.

Unauthorized biographies should be a lot like this and often are not. Magazine stories should be like this too but nowadays there's no celeb worth her fairy dust who would turn down an interview, so the need never arises.

Or does it?

Celebrity is a science now, for those who have that particular DNA. Having interviewed a few famous people myself I can say that they quickly develop a veneer of .... veneer, actually. It is virtually impossible to get beneath it. Celebrity culture is such, too, that the Faustian deal is never risked, not many writers would dare irritate the publicist (if not the celeb) who might provide the big "Get" later on and down the road.

So, we can only ever see what we are supposed to see.

Imagine then the delight of reading the profile of Madonna in the May issue of Vanity Fair. Madonna, we are given to understand, is a master controller. It's always all about her, with her you get what you get, she sets the agenda and the tone, she is the centre of the universe and the universe is a damn fine place to be...this is what we glean from the lifetime she has spent in front of us. In the fascinating film, Truth or Dare, the filmmaker asks her (as I remember it) if she'd like to do something or other off-camera. Her then boyfriend Warren Beatty, no slouch of a celeb himself, says "she doesn't want to LIVE off camera" -- and you'd have to say he'd know.

I've seen many interviews with Madonna and except for the strange chat with David Letterman where she giggled and cussed and appeared out of control (see the first video above...this is where we learned that if you pee in the shower, you can prevent athlete's foot -- an utterance that made prissy Letterman blanch) she puts the boring into bored so calculated is she. I suspect that she controls her own facade even with her husband and why not, I suppose -- reality can be so messy, and ordinary. In the current case, the VF writer, Rich Cohen, was clearly getting vintage Madonna, a full serving of banalities and key messages with not a hair or a breath out of place.

And so he wrote his own story. Cohen is not Talese, but this story is nonetheless a solid read and far more revealing that Madonna would have otherwise allowed.

And the pictures are amazing. She really is an image.

The Current Cinema

2008-04-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while you come across a startlingly fine sentence, one that brings you up short and makes you pay new attention.

I'm not saying anything about dogs, but guess which sentence appealed so much in this excerpt from a review of Funny Games, found in the New Yorker:

And so, like shackled prisoners trudging back to the rack and the thumbscrews, we start once more, with an overhead view of a family car pulling a boat on a trailer along rural roads. The family comprises George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), their ten-year-old son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog—a lolloping golden retriever named Lucky. If there is one lesson we learn from “Funny Games,” it is not that malice is rooted deep in our soiled nature, or that capitalist society has made an unhealthy fetish of violence, but simply that, if you want to avoid such unpleasantness, ditch the retriever. Everything that happens to George and Ann could have been avoided with a pair of Dobermans, or an underfed Scottish terrier with a working knowledge of Nietzsche.

Read the whole good thing:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/03/17/080317crci_cinema_lane

Men Who Read

2008-04-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

A recent essay in the New York Times suggested that a woman was trying to justify her recent dumping of some guy by saying "Can you believe it? He hadn't even heard of Pushkin!", vainly attempting to use literary taste as a measure of compatibility.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ex=1207627200&en=508fc64c5777d5b0&ei=5070&emc=eta1

If this were truly the measure, I would be a virgin. I am decidedly not.

I have never seen a man actually finish a book. I've heard many TALK about books; one ex TALKED about his book irritatingly and incesssantly before falling into a Van Winkle slumber. "Oh my god this is the BEST book I've ever read!" he'd say as I was trying to read my own. "Best! Oh wow this is funny can I read it to you?!" "The insights! SO right ON!" .... Thunk. End of. No more need of the best book of his life. Ever.

Another ex looked very bookish, being tall and slim with that sort of schoolboy style and the narrow glasses all the young men seem to wear. We melded our bookshelves briefly before he moved back out, so I knew he'd at least made a stab at purchasing books but to my best recollection I remember the sound of hockey games on the television and much discussion about movies but, again, no books.

In fairness I have been known to fake book knowledge as well, much like the time I waxed poetic about the crazy filmography and use of colour in Zukerbaby, obviously a German flick, while talking to one of my country's biggest theatre impressarios at a party. I'd seen the trailer and extrapolated -- I don't think he'd gone much further either.

So while I can CALL something "Dickensian" and while I do love every word I've read of Great Expectations and even today referred to Havana as "Miss Havisham's city", I have never completed a Dickens novel. Proust has something to do with remembering a pastry. Mrs. Dalloway did a few things one day, Ulysses and Odysseus are the same guy, and I once had to ask the spelling of Sissinghurst when taking a recommendation for a good florist. We all do it. Fake it I mean.

Only in at least this ONE instance, the bigger fakers are men.

From M, on What Was Lost

2008-03-16T06:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the great read. Was so happy Kate fell to her death. That's a strange thing to say but I felt afeared the whole book through that I would be reading "lovely bones." So a big thank you goes out to Catherine Oflynn for her refined craft.

What's fish paste?

M

The Innocent Man

2008-03-05T14:03:00.001-08:00

Being stuck on a plane for ten hours within 24 is my version of an inner circle of hell. Thus I purchased a total of four emergency books, all the grey bricks of mass market, as a possible opiate -- the real book was locked in the checked luggage and too heavy in all ways for carry-on, and the spectre of being forced to watch the bad movie or reading the card with the safety features was just too formidable.

For emergency reading I choose only murder mysteries, as they are the most reliable and you cannot take a chance on being bored to tears by some "literary fiction" experiment. As well, in an emergency run through the airport bookstore, it's best to buy in bulk, or at least buy two books, just in case.

The fascinating-sounding Ruth Rendell began to have the eery air of familiarity quite early on, and then I could predict the next big clue, and then realized I'd already read it. The next, an Ian Rankin, was just too dull -- it seemed to have something of a political twist to it, which was just tedious.

Imagine my delight, then, to embark upon The Innocent Man by John Grisham. I'd forgotten all the hoopla about this book and began reading it as though it were any old murder mystery and noticed that its tone was that of an extremely well written legal brief. What a good idea! I thought, what elegance and restraint this shows.

Only later did I tumble to the fact that this is THE book, the one quite extensively reviewed and commented upon as Grisham's departure into what can be called True Crime but is better simply thought of as a terrifically well-researched look at gross injustice.

What a service he has done. What a shocking story. And sadly, at the same time, how commonplace -- you can swap out the names and places and be as easily reading the very excellent Redrum the Innocent, Kirk Makin's investigation and revelation of a similar miscarriage. In a small town it does not pay to be a bit weird, and never underestimate the sheer bloody-mindedness of bad cops.

How wonderful that Grisham should have turned his fine mind and huge audience to spotlight the terrible failures and prejudices that led a flawed but innocent man to death row.

What Was Lost....or, Vogue

2008-02-25T12:36:00.000-08:00

What Was Lost is one of those books you will be hearing about everywhere, as it has enjoyed one of the debuts that seem to happen with greater and greater frequency: a hitherto unpublished and very young author comes out of the gate at a gallop, wins or is shortlisted for things her elders can only dream of, and the book soars to the top of bestseller lists worldwide before being optioned by Miramax (if that's what Miramax does) or Plan B, the production company begun by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Plan B options all the good books.

The story begins with a charming take on the Harriet the Spy genre, with Kate Meaney, not mean at all, junior detective. With her notebook and trusty partner Mickey in tow (Mickey being a stuffed monkey who wears a striped suit and spats) she trails suspects through the big shopping centre near her home.

Like Harriet she is sort of lonely and quite an outsider and therefore develops into an interesting, engaging and original character. Her best friend is the son of the news agent, who is really much too old to befriend a ten year old. But, he's a bit of a misfit too and friendship occurs wherever it occurs if you wouldn't mind keeping your filthy suspicions to yourself.

And then the story veers off into a tale of dead ends of all kinds, missed opportunities, missing people, the dead and deadness. Is "deadness" a word? It is certainly a feeling and it pervades the book like the smell of every shopping mall with a fast-food court.

As it turns out, Kate gives someone a life while her disappearance off the face of the earth ends many others, namely that of her friend who could never shuck the suspicion that he was involved in her vanishing. Throughout the book I was hoping that Kate somehow managed to escape the council estate she lived in, managed to disappear into a new life as any undercover junior detective should be able to do.

Heavy treading, this.

The thing is, the entropy, the vortex of same-same and the slow, imperceptible death of hope can really catch even a tiger by the tail. It is so easy to slip into a relationship that's all very nice but not very good, a job that is just a job, it is so easy to let guilt and weakness define you.

I was reading over the weekend a story about how Hillary Clinton is coping with the reality that she may very well not win the nomination despite her hard work, worthiness and determination. One thing struck me -- she is pragmatic, the story said, and knows well enough that someone has to lose but right now she's still got to keep on winning and so simply does not read or listen to anything that nay-says. She needs to keep her eye on the ball, she needs to stay optimistic.

What a practical thing to do. Simply don't let the bad stuff into your head.

And so, as an antidote to this very excellent but nonetheless heavy book I read Vogue cover to cover. Our Biggest Spring Issue Ever! Why Vogue? It is relentlessly upbeat even when it isn't -- even the sad stories about cold mothers and sensitive daughters or whatever are sort of couched. Mother and daughter are attractive and have loads of advantages -- I mean really, they're profiled in Vogue! Vogue is the home of the vitamin enriched sons and daughters of money in the bank, to re-use one of my favorite phrases, and on every page there is the assurance that everything is possible, a pretty girl can decide to design a bag and voila! she's a successful entrepreneur! You can marry a prince really and truly! You can have a glamorous-sounding job that is both truly glamorous and so are you!

Sometimes you need the fairy tales of magazines to offset the hard truths of fiction.

Then We Came to the End

2008-02-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while you recognize hey, I'm marching to a different drummer. I live outside the zeitgeist. I'm not the maven on this one. Actually I just don't get it.

Such is my feeling upon completing this first novel which has won great critical acclaim, near-awards and bestseller status. So thrilled with it is its publisher that there is a run of advanced reading copies for the trade paper edition, all the better to further activate buzz from those who didn't receive the hard cover ARC. In fact, the publisher's letter on the back of this same advance reading copy alludes to The Great American Novel with comparisons to Gatsby.

Gatsby? Really?

My first crack at this book was in New York, where I was staying in a fabulous hotel in the lower east side mere steps from the Bowery Mission. The combination of the tension of the book, which is about a bunch of advertising types undergoing a series of layoffs, plus New York plus the up close and personal view of where being down and out can take you all added up to shelving it.

But so many of the great readers in my life have loved this book I felt I had to give it another go. "Get past the first 100 pages and you'll love it!" they said.

Love it I did not.

The book is written in the royal "we" but that's not annoying. It is written about a group of people so morally vacuous that diatribes about the serial numbers on "buckshelves" seems reasonable. Their collective madness and unravelling leaves little to glom on to, none of the characters seem either very nice or even very smart.

Take for example one guy who is distraught because his mistress won't commit to an abortion. "My life will be ruined" he laments -- not, "I ruined my life" by which he really means "I ruined my wife." This is a common strain in real life I admit, so perhaps kudos to the author for noticing.
Among the others of "we" are those who go to McDonald's to observe a grieving mother who cannot help but go to the ball room where her dead daughter played, in order to conjure the child. They observe but in a "can you believe it?!!" way which I am happy to say I don't recognize.

One of the best sections is about the feared head of the agency, who has made many "walk Spanish" (down the plank) to joblessness, who is terrified of the hospitals that will not cure her cancer but rather subject her to numerous humiliations before she dies. Fair enough. This cancer-addled woman loses her mind but finds that her boyfriend is capable of generous, compassionate, imaginative care of her -- really, his approach is knight on a white steed -- but then he feels he needs to tell her, lest she get the wrong impression, that while he will help through the puking and the aching and the other forms of horrible, he really has to say that there's no future for them.

How startling, how cold, how tragic to know in the face of your own mortality that no one actually loved you enough. That someone so lovely did not love you enough.

This book is devastating and that is, I suppose its beauty for sturdier souls. It has a Russian, not American, vibe -- the dispassionate reportage of moral failings strikes me as distinctly of that ilk rather than the rather grandiose and affirming Great American Novel. It is a consummate act of writing. That the author gets away with "we" so easily, and deals with 9-11 so elegantly (my pet peeve is with books that use this as a plot point -- c'mon, try harder....) and lets its characters (there is no protagonist but "we" -- kind of profound, that...) squirm in their own cheap squalor -- well, that's some good and disciplined writer.

Sadly this is not, to me anyway, an enjoyable book. Necessary, prescient, smart, maybe. But bloody hard to face.

Listen to the music

2008-02-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

Being utterly unable to focus and read anything remotely challenging I find myself in a swath of magazines, celebrity gossip and fashion websites and hidden behind a stack of otherwise utterly embarrassing Chick Lit and murder mysteries (one felt so oddly familiar I must have already read it but of course could not remember who died or why I cared). And please Harlen Coben, stop making me think you are Dennis Lehane -- I buy these Cobens only to hurl them against the wall. Cannot stand the lovable lug who stars in these and his completely boring "perky" girl next door girlfriend.

The season of hearts and flowers has, thankfully, just slid by -- the cinemas are still filled with date night Rom Coms but that will pass soon enough. Still, the season has led me back to easy-to-read, because so often read before, poetry.

I find myself drawn to the cadence and language, and the shimmer of the big ideas behind the beautiful words. Reading poetry, especially familiar poetry, is soothing and soul-feeding -- it feels like rubbing fingers against smooth and warm worry beads and is a faithful reminder that the quotidien is not all there is.

Poetry soothes as music does, holding a rhythm akin to heartbeat. Shakes up the brainwaves at the same time.

Try it. Try reading Auden, my best friend when not in the thrall of Eliot (I did say it's great to return to the familiar) or even the Sonnets: "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds".... Okay, so you grew tired of this one after all those weddings of your youth but still, this is an encouraging assurance that it's not you it's him, isn't it? My favorite Sonnet is 119. That's a sonnet for a girl who's been around, let me tell you.

Or Anne Sexton. Or read "Daddy" and count yourself lucky. Or William Carlos Williams. Read To Elsie, where "the pure products of America go crazy" -- this is a poem for someone who grew up in ugliness and maybe beat it, a wonderful show of understanding and empathy for those who could not. It ends with poignancy, and if you don't feel the fire of "gotta keep kicking against the pricks" then you are Elsie and have a friend in Williams: "It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off/No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car."

Poetry makes you think bigger, in spite of yourself.

Chick Lit

2008-02-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

I know it is a huge money-maker for publishers and movie companies alike but so-called chick lit irritates me. Shopaholic? Get over yourself. Bridget? Too hapless by half. I swear we women do ourselves no service by having these heroes in our lives.

So imagine my acute surprise to discover myself addicted to books by Marian Keyes. These are uber-chick lit and I cannot put them down. I hope Marian is in some garret in Ireland somewhere typing her fingers to bloody stumps because I am very nearly finished the entire oeuvre.

These books should have nothing going for them according to me, with my current and perpetual prejudices -- they take place in the UK, there are many cute Britsy phrases ("dashing over the road to the shops" when you mean crossing a major artery to go to a store); there are references to places and "shops" that are strictly off-limits as all of the above are reminders of he who must not be remembered. Worst of all, love always turns out just fine in these books, and this is super-verboten.

Still, Keyes' books are charming and funny, lighthearted in fact, which is exactly what we need in heavy February, when the sun has gone missing for what is now months at a stretch. The characters are not so much hapless and quirky as they are completely mad, or vile but in a funny way. In Anybody Out There? a sister consoles her very recently and heartbreakingly widowed sibling by saying "lucky you he didn't run off with some other woman or I'd have to kill him" or words to that effect; this is comfortingly familiar in that it is precisely the kind of consolation my mother would give me, she being of the "it could always be worse" school of sympathy (sic).

Keyes' stories are set in big cities rife with amusing and attractive men -- this is where they veer into full-on fairy tale but not without precedent. She is not so far from Jane Austen -- I know there are lots of nuances in Austen, I'm not denying that, but it is kind of frustrating that no matter how desolate the village or impoverished the girl there is always a dashing man "just over the road" to save her from a life of squalor. I live in a city of millions and I can assure you there is no dashing man anywhere in sight.

Rules are made to be broken, and the rule against chick lit is hereby bent. Do try the Keyes backlist. These books add a ray of sunshine to a foggy day.

Women's Murder Club

2008-01-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

Here is a life-saving tip: The bleak, grey, flat middle of winter is no time for serious endeavour. And certainly no time for serious literature.

One year at about this time I embarked upon What is the What, a terrific book on the right day but a killer at this time of year. The world described therein seemed so relentlessly awful I thought I might as well hang myself. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I took this time to de-tox, extruding the excesses of holiday spirit, and learned that life without tox is barely worth living.

This is a time of year to eat up Cosmo magazine and any Rom-Com you can find -- does a movie have Meg Ryan in it? Julia Roberts? Cameron Diaz in a pinch? Great! Bring it on!! I am addicted now to W-network, or the "women's" network (the word "pathetic" is silent) and have seen every single episode of Sex and the City and Friends at least a dozen times, have watched Hugh Grant pull his forelock fetchingly over and over again, and have seen so many happy endings I am coming to believe there is no other kind. Desperate measures are required in order to overcome the bloody weather.

The newest entry for the Friday night attentions of single women everywhere is a TV series based on James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, which I had never heard of until television did them over. I have never been drawn to Patterson and always thought of him as a super-jock in the murder mystery arena. So this chick-lit thing of his intrigued me.

In the TV version, Angie Harmon has the role of the lead woman, Lindsay Boxer, a San Fran homicide detective who takes time out from her intense murder investigations to drink margaritas with her girlfriends at a bar called Susie's or something. Angie has learned a lot about policing from her time at Law&Order; she's good in this role but nonetheless she looks a bit like a man in drag and it makes no sense that we are to believe she's the hot one. Doesn't matter. This is Chick-TV and I'm all over it.

The oddness of James Patterson doing something along the lines of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series led me to the bookstore, and for reasons of bookstore inventory I have started the series at No. 2, cleverly called 2nd Chance.

It is drek. Funny enough, it doesn't matter. Like bad junk food you just can't stop eating it up, and though the premise falls apart a bit and the big Kaboom of the "reveal" tends to whimper, it does take your mind off the drizzle.

Patterson is a best-selling author and there's no accounting for it really, except that the pages turn effortlessly which is, I suppose, what it takes to sell that many books. He is no writer. For example, he doesn't dally with explaining much -- we learn that the four women of the "club" (Boxer, a detective; a medical examiner; an assistant DA; a crime reporter) are "like sisters" because they keep saying so. So much for character development.

Patterson is such a clumsy writer it sort of makes writing look super-easy, in the way an abstract painting can look like something your kid could do. Except your kid didn't do it, and if given the chance to try you would discover that actually, your kid can't do it. I thought briefly, before I became engrossed in it, that really, I should just write one of these things myself. I know I can't.

Patterson is doing what I could not do myself. His dopey Murder Club is capable of being entertaining when it is darn hard to think of a good reason to get out of bed and put your boots on for another slog in the slush. For that he deserves every penny he has earned.

Big Think

2008-01-21T14:11:00.000-08:00

Big Think seems like a good idea. It's a facebook for smarty-pants, a MySpace for intellectuals, a meeting place and distribution centre for Big Ideas.

What it actually is, is boring.

How is this possible?

I wonder if this website is simply an old concept hiding behind new drapery. Essentially the premise is, this is where to go for the brainiest new thinking from very intelligent people. That sounds compelling. And yet it is not.

When you think about it, any good magazine is a clearing house of ideas and trends and acute observations; when you Big Think about it, all turns into earnest and academic chuntering on about stuff that might matter but to whom exactly?

A case in point: Why are you a vegan? Oh jeez, do I CARE???

The problem is, I think, and I don't big think, is that these are ideas without the grounding in "why" -- good ideas for most of us, and certainly the most of us that make a website work, become GREAT when they become relevant. Esoteric is merely that; greatness comes in touching the soul, moving the heart, inspiring many other minds to bigger things. Without the grounding an idea is Rapunzel -- something we can see, sometimes, but cannot touch.

I heard about this site from the great NYT, and it was too early for Times to tell if the site was actually GOOD.

In any given issue of said Times, and certainly any issue of the magazine, I am inspired to be more than myself. I'm inspired to think about why 'good' is moral; why those delightful all-accepting totally optimistic souls with Williams Syndrome nonetheless fail to connect; who is really controlling the economy and how. There is a big idea -- blue sky -- and grounding. Perfect earth.

Not so this website.

I believe we are living in a visual age, a casual age, a discombolutated multi-tasking mad-paced dissociated age. We need not just intellect but soul. Ideas and heart.

The idea behind BigThink is big, and beautiful. But it needs to feel as well as think in order to be truly relevant.

That's what I think, anyway.

But don't let me tell you what to think. Check it out for yourself. http://www.bigthink.com/

Good readers

2008-01-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

One of my great friends is tangent-oriented. He read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while on a beach in Jamaica and then consumed Robert Louis Stevenson from there, drifting to Treasure Island (yes, more appropriate to the locale) and others, and now is on a serious Victorian kick.

Current faves include Sherlock Holmes. Interestingly, Holmes really is a cocaine addict, which seems most modern, and in A Study in Scarlet, the first novel, is devoid of any interests other than those pertaining to forensic detective work.

What's intersting, if it is, is that these characters and others, like little Alice who goes to Wonderland, seem like someone we know. In truth we do not.

And so I picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to see what really went on there, as well as a few Dickens tomes just to make sure Oliver Twist is who I thought he was. I am going to dip into Holmes as well, insufferable as he seems, just to get to know him a bit better.

The Misanthrope

2008-01-13T07:28:00.000-08:00

AA Gill has a poison pen dipped in sulphurous vitriol. And my word he's funny. Yes he says what you would say if you had the courage or the clever or the refreshing lack of what we call "filters".

Read this and weep. With laughter. I did.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/a_a_gill/article3150287.ece?Submitted=true

See you in the funny pages

2008-01-07T05:03:00.001-08:00

It is a rare event to find something laugh-out-loud funny in the business section. In fact, we could suggest it is near never-happens rare.
But, the NYT business section last week had a story about the battle between Jay Leno, a funny man with a late night talk show, and David Letterman, also allegedly funny and with a late night talk show.
There is a writers' strike in the US right now that is threatening the very fabric of the country, meaning that very soon there will be nothing new to watch on TV. Whether anyone actually notices is another issue but it is certainly riling up some people, mostly the writers themselves.
These writers have made a deal with Letterman such that they can for some Byzantine reason write for him despite this strike; not so Leno who decided what the hell, I used to be a funny guy, I'll just do it myself.
He did, and people laughed their heads off; his ratings soared. Letterman, despite the phalanx of writers, was not so funny. Ratings there soured.
What a quandry!! The writers' guilds then went into swift action, saying that Leno MUST NOT BE FUNNY until the end of the strike. He must not write his own stuff, he must sit still and wait for them to figure this problem out. And it is a big problem. If he's funny without them, what do THEY do for a living? My god, is it possible that Leno can DO HIS JOB?? Are writers obsolete? Is Letterman just plain boring? So many questions! So few answers!
So the writers are flipping out. Leno says too bad, seems I'm pretty good at this and I'm going to keep on keepin' on.
Now, here is the metaphysical issue that the writers could do some thinking upon in their newly-acquired strike-permitted spare time: is it the WRITING that is the problem? So, if Leno just stood up and said stuff off the top of his head would that be okay? Is there a difference between what he thinks up and what he writes down? There cannot be...so where is their guild's jurisdiction?
Not to put a damper on a good story. I cannot wait for the next episode.

Fifteen Days

2007-12-29T09:44:00.001-08:00

My friend Blatch, as the author is known, has written an adventure book. Fifteen Days refers to key dates in the Canadian battle to save Afghanistan, mostly from itself. The book is meant to illuminate the new Canadian military for those of us who thought Canada didn't have one.

In many ways there could be no better assignment for Christie Blatchford. She is one of those rare women who truly loves men, especially those who do brave things with uniforms on -- cops, hockey players, soldiers for example. She loves those who do their duty. Who feel they have one in the first place. There is an early scene in this book where (and I am going to get ALL the terminology wrong) a platoon was doing a route reconnaissance and spotted Taliban. Official procedure is to note this information in the official way, exactly the same each time, which is to announce "contact, reference X, 600 metres left" or somesuch. Instead what the eyes of the platoon barked to the others was "Jim, they're on the right! Fuck 'em up!" That boy, whoever he was, just won himself a spot in Blatch's heart forever. She loves that kind of get-it-done.

Now that I think about it, who WOULDN'T love that man? That was bloody sexy, what he did.

As I say, Blatch loves manly men, not for what they can do for her status or bank account or how they can worship her wonderfulness but rather in a pure and admiring way -- she simply loves that mysterious club they all belong to where they innately know how to do things like "fuck 'em up" and are willing to go there and do it, whatever It is. Those of us who live in big cities with all their urban glossy-haired fat-free-yogurt-eating metrosexuals, could easily have thought this breed of man extinct.

The men described in this book are heroic. Solid, true, decent, and that rare thing, brave.

I am not far into this book, which reads like a Boys' Own adventure novel, fast-paced and exciting, not unlike great hockey coverage actually, and what is starting to really hurt is knowing as I read about this man or another, he is going to die. I'm going to lose him. I know he (or she) is one of those killed in battle and I can hardly bear it. Imagine the high price Canadian families to whom this man is son, lover, dad, pay for this effort, and they pay it willingly.

I would tell you more but I have to get back to my book.

The Uncommonn Reader

2007-12-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

What a charmer, what a delight, what a fantastically wonderful and clever little story this is! The Uncommon Reader is of course the Queen and she becomes ADDICTED to the written word to the chagrin of all around her. But that is just the barest outline, what is so compelling is the wit with which this fable is written.

Imagine if you will the equerries fixing the crowd so we can be through by lunch, pre-populating the crowd with the answers to the usual dopey questions so they don't have a fit of "omigod it's the QUEEN", teaching small talk on the fly. But then the Queen stops asking where they're from and how long was the drive and asks -- egads -- what they are READING!! Stunned, flummoxed, caught for words they croak uh ma'am, I'm from Brighton.

Well, something like that.

There is a lovely scene where the Queen decides to honour these authors she has come to admire so much and learns the lesson we all do. But for a meagre handful, when it comes to authors it is all in the book. A more dull or self-ref-and-reverential crowd you are unlikely to meet. Back when I was in book retail we used to want to seduce our customers by holding "Author Events" which were readings at their worst (seriously, unless you are in your jammies and about to go to bed do you want someone to read aloud? their own stuff?) or brief (sweet brevity) chats about the inspiration behind the book. The one exception was Martin Amis and if you ever have the chance to hear him speak about anything, go. Another exception was the youngest daughter of Charles Lindbergh whose name escapes me, who wrote some kind of memoir. Could have been interesting, given that the most famous Lindbergh child and the only one anyone can readily bring to mind is a dead baby. She told the story of taking her own son to see a Lindbergh museum, where the Spirit of St. Louis was housed. The museum keepers had a cherry picker there so that she and her son could rise from the ground and see the famous airplane up close. She reached her hand and touched the cockpit and said to her boy, "Isn't this amazing?" and he said "Yeah!!! For sure!!! I've never been in a cherry picker before!!!!" The book bombed but the event was nice.

The Queen's author event was not this successful.

The Uncomon Reader is, sadly, a short book but please, please, read it. It will make your day.

Wild Mary: A Life of Mary Wesley

2007-12-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

Mary Wesley is a British author whose career took off like a shot at the age of seventy-something. This is brilliant news for those of us suffering yet another mid-life crisis.

As happens with many a biography, the introduction is the best part. From this excellent precis we move on to a rather tedious array of dates and dates -- who Mary was seeing or slept with during what month and year -- sort of putting the pin in the idea of "wild".

But back to the intro for a moment. Here we see Mary, the widow of a failed writer, who has written a kids' book which was published without much financial success, who cannot make ends meet, whose kids are strange or estranged, who suffers illness on top of poverty, who has one of those literary agents who, finally, after trying for years to flog the mss for Jumping the Queue and Haphazard House, sends an "encouraging" note to her client: "I don't feel we would have much chance of anyone willing to take either of these books. However I shall be very happy to keep the Mss and mention them to publishers as I see them, just in case someone is adventurous enough to give it a try." Damn me with faint praise! Luckily Mary took much the same view and then matters into her own hands.

What this wonderful intro shows is that Mary was too down and out to even be counted as down and out. That's how out. Her diary during one weekend reads, for each day, "ILL. Very ILL. Very ILL, raving. very ill." And then something wonderful happened.

Mary sold her damp cottage and moved and then, only then, life took off. Finally a publisher took her odd and adventurous Jumping the Queue, about a casually cruel and used up, cheated upon wife's decision to simply off her self (charming? indeed. Blew the dust off that British middle class "we're so lovely" thing) and voila, Mary churned out a book a year to raves for the next decade.

What Mary shows is that however dreary and despairing you may feel, so long as you are alive you still have a chance. And, slightly less maudlin, eventually perhaps talent will out. Mary's voice as a writer is fresh, acerbic, true and what she proves is that life didn't start with YOU -- your grandmother's generation was at least as sinful, smarmy, adventurous, crazy, sick, perverse, fun, funny and vile as yours. She just didn't say so at dinner parties and then publish the memoirs. Mary had the courage to say so.

I found these pages terrifically inspiring. Had I been sick and raving in a damp and remote cottage with nary a soul around to give a shite, had I been married to a hugely ineffectual dreamer, had I bothered to have kids who then could not be bothered, had I been impoverished and repeatedly spurned for the one thing I thought I could do (write), well, I may have jumped the queue. I tend to think if WILD SUCCESS has not found me yet, it never will. Ha. Mary was still reeling at my age, and WILD SUCCESS was still years away. But it was there, as was a hugely energetic and prolific and exciting LIFE. Amazing! She could NOT have felt any better than I do and look what happened!!

Now, if the rest of the book were as light and cheering as this we'd have a best seller for the ages. Sadly, the book tames Wild Mary. But, I'll press on and let you know if there are any other great lessons to be found. Suffice it to know that life starts when it starts, and isn't confined to age.

The Girls, again

2007-12-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, The Girls is not exactly as I thought it was.

The girls are conjoined twins and they are about to die because, well, conjoined twins do not live all that long and because one of them has an aneurysm that is about to end her life which means the other will die, too, by bleeding to death.

Being conjoined means of course that there is literally a shadow, a friend for life, the "other" who we are truly attached to -- but what this wonderful book shows is that as close as two people can be, it is impossible still to know one another.

The twins remember things differently though clearly they both witnessed the exact same thing; they protect each other from truths deemed to painful; they are often annoyed with one another. But most surprisingly, though they share every single thing, they don't know each other terribly well.

So, on a fundamental level, we are each utterly alone. No matter how attached we believe ourselves to be.

The Girls

2007-12-17T07:46:00.000-08:00

Perhaps all of life is the search for The Other, that soul which completes your own. Isn't this the promise of all love affairs, isn't this the hunger that makes spinsters and bachelors crazy?

In other hands The Girls by Lori Lansens would be peculiar or downright macabre. One thinks of Barbara Gowdy and her fascination with freaks and their strange ways, forced upon them by mismatched anatomy. A story detailing all their ins and outs probably tells us something about the human condition but not anything that you can take with you to a dinner party. The Girls, on the other hand, uses a peculiarity to tell the truth about something common to us all.

Ruby and Rose are conjoined twins, attached to one another literally at the head and therefore deeply attached through the heart. Ironically, because of their fixation, they cannot see one another and rely on mirrors when they need to look each other in the eye. Imagine being so close to someone and not to be able to actually SEE them -- isn't this something interesting to contemplate? How much of knowing is seeing, and how often does someone we know very well become invisible. What the soul knows the eyes don't need to see.

Well, it's a thought anyway.

Being so strange means in some ways that they have each other but no one else; they literally cannot live apart. All of life is a negotiation and every second is obviously spent with a witness -- you can see that there is a down side to having so close a soul mate.

The "other" is also the thread woven throughout The Thirteenth Tale, where Margaret was a conjoined twin whose "other" was sacrificed so she could live. She seeks her other constantly, and sees her in the reflection of her own face in mirrors and blackened windows.

Both books are fantastically good. Both describe a closeness and yet a yearning for something intangible which is missing, a lack that must be essentially human.

Like Margaret, I have always wanted a sister at the very least, a twin at the best. I have missed my unborn sister terribly. I don't imagine her so much anymore but when I was a child I felt her absence acutely, my ballast against the cruelties of the world.

The thing is, and it is just a passing notion, even if my sister and I were joined at the head if not the hip, there are things she would not know or like. Even conjoined we are essentially alone.

How sad is that?

Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps we can live in our own private paradise no matter what.

Between the lines

2007-12-08T20:21:00.001-08:00

Amazing what you can read when you are ready to read between the lines.

All the fearsome truths, all the dangerous realities, all the things too frightening to face lie there plain as day, upright and ready.

You learn, between the lines, what the end of the affair really means. You read what the boss actually wants of you -- less you, more company mandate and task at hand; in fact, best if there is no "you" at all, just the delivery of numbers, business, perfect projects accomplished with the least amount of kerfuffle possible. Just say "yes" in the language he best understands.

Mostly understand what the cowards are trying to say -- they are the ones who most frequently lurk between the lines. If the words are wonderful and the actions are less so, you are in this netherworld.

It is easy to misunderstand what Between the Lines actually means. We are taught to forgive, we are taught that relationships are hard work, we are taught to accomodate.

If I were ever to have a child (and I will not) or if I were ever responsible for the guidance of one most especially a girl I would say this. Read the writing on the wall. Take the news bravely. Accept it and move on, knowing that you are worthy of better news and better treatment. This will protect you from having to live with the lies and deceptions of those who can't quite say clearly what they really mean. You'll see it in the first place.

Eat a little something

2007-12-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

I am commitment phobic only as an eater. Despite the most imploring waiters trying to seduce with today's most special special or catchiest catch, I would rather have three appetizers or five bites from someone else's plate. This drives my friends and lovers crazy. It's amazing how possessive some people are about their food.

So, it was a wonderful affirmation of near Oprah proportions to read the New York Times' story on the death of the entree. (for a full bite of the real thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/dining/05entr.html) The rationale? Too many bites of one substance is just too....boring. Now, those of us raised to feel guilty for all the starving children in countries denied the luxury of grey beef and over-cooked vegetables will certainly suffer an anxiety attack at the thought that decent food is "boring" but that is what makes one newspaper a courageous truth-teller while others are merely earnest.

" “As a diner, the idea of me chewing 17 bites of one thing and another 17 bites of another is absolutely boring, and not how I want to eat,” said the chef Mario Batali." Can you get over that? How ballsy!

But the thing is, and it has been the thing for a while, it's far more fun to taste a lot of things than to settle on just one choice. I don't know what your excuse is but it is sheer ADD on my part. I can't actually decide or focus on WHICH kind of shrimp I want, or whether the lamb dumplings are preferable to the crab. Let's get them all.

When you think about it, this is more suited to our lifestyle than the plate of protein with a side of starch our parents and grandparents felt was their due. We are not ploughing fields. We are not hammering nails. We barely need more than a bite in order to keep all functions functioning. That we want to spend that bite or two wisely, to make it an experience, is in its own way practical. Eating is not mandatory in the way it was for toilers and hewers, it is now a social experience. Don't skimp on it.

Black Swan Green

2007-12-04T02:04:00.001-08:00

I didn't think growing up had much to say for itself except that one day we knew it would be over. As a sad kid I always projected myself into the Future, where things would be better (they could not be worse) and I lived more happily in this fantasy world than in the real one.

Lately though I've been drawn to books either intended for young people intent on growing up (it does seem to be a choice nowadays) or about young people trying to grow up, and the latest in this reading series has been Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, touted as being the "British Catcher in the Rye." Always beware of these sorts of references. They are never true and frankly do a disservice to both books.

Leaving that pet peeve aside, this is a good book. In it we have 13-year old Jason Taylor who lives in a sleepy village called Black Swan Green where there are no black swans or swans of any colour. Jason stammers, different from stuttering, which makes speaking a high-pressure situation. Imagine having to dodge words fast enough not to give away the fact you are dodging them; imagine not being able to rely on your very self to speak your very own mind.

For a number of reasons central to who he is Jason is set upon by bullies. I liked this part very much, having lived in a few sleepy places myself. Those who live in big cities, I've noticed, talk about the pastoral pleasures of small town life and in my experience small towns are more venal and vicious than a city in that word spreads faster and you can't get away from it, there are no other circles for you to live in.

Behind this drama is another one. Unbeknownst to Jason, because he is young, and obvious to us, his parents' marriage is disintegrating. What is also clear to us but not to Jason, his dad is hanging by a thread at work. This is nicely played in the book, a champion bit of writing in that Jason pays no never mind to the signs and we can't miss them. See, we did learn a few things along the way after all.

Jason is bullied mercilessly and frankly, not being overly astute politically myself, I could see no way out of it. But all of a sudden Jason grows up, grows into himself, takes on the bullies in his own way, tells the truth, tells lots of truths and suddenly, simply by standing up for that very thing, the truth, the sting is gone. Bullies slayed. The crippling fears he has felt disappear. All in the power of a small action and a few clear words.

Jason grows up, in other words, and it happens all of a sudden as it probably does in life. Is that how it is? One day we are children and then another day, all of a piece, we are not? I liken this to the stomach flu, my best definition for utterly defined and impermeable states of being -- in illness we cannot actually imagine ever feeling well; healthy, we cannot imagine the feeling of sick.

And while Jason has been as benignly indifferent to his parents as they are to him (well, except for the fear of punishment thing) and despite the fact his father seems a prat, the fact his family is shattered is a change he finds hard to take. Naturally. His father has nearly bankrupted his family to look after another woman which believe you me is the talk of the town in good old Black Swan Green, but life is not so stark. As it turns out, the woman is a childhood friend, far more plain and speaking less "posh" than Mum but nonetheless the one dad prefers (to be brutal about it) or the one that fits him better. The father, now that his own truth is out, is softer, kinder, more human.

Leaving his home for the last time, the home that is no longer his in any way, Jason fights tears -- after all, he's a man now and nearly 14. "It'll be all right," his older sister says. "In the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very all right."
"That's because it's not the end."

So there you go. As far from childhood as we may be, there's still something to learn. If it still hurts, it's not yet the end.

With the Grace of Liberace Go I

2007-11-25T09:50:00.000-08:00

Is it cheating to write about books other people have read which I have not read myself? Oh dear, we hate to cheat.

In my beloved NYT I stumbled across a story written by a soul sister. She felt she gave awful parties and so did some research and began collecting books on "gracious living" written years and years before Martha Stewart put pan to parchment paper. She found "cheerfully deranged" tips for not only throwing a nice party but for living glamorously, and who doesn't want to do that? Not you, really? Well, try it before you judge it.

This initial interest led to collecting said books which now take up a special shelf in her library. At first my soul sister Jancee Dunn would kick off her parties by actually reading aloud the stranger bits to the laughter of the crowd. But I think she started to get something more out of them and stopped making so much fun of these helpful friends.

When I was a kid on the bald open prairie (we at home rarely said "prairie" without the "bald open") I craved a life less dusty. A life that maybe had more people in it, and people who did things other than talk about the weather which is, to be fair, a live or die element of life on the B.O.P. Somehow or other I got my hands on an old home economics text book which was probably in a box picked up at an auction as I cannot imagine anyone picking such a book out for me in a second hand book store. Anyway none of that matters, what matters is the book was a fascination for me. It talked about how to BE in the world, how to dress and speak and how to keep hairbrushes "fresh" and things like that. Can you imagine anything so intoxicating to a pre-adolescent freaked out by the judgement of the world? Never mind that the info was even then already two decades out of date.

This sort of "ideas for living" book is now a constant favorite though books of this nature are hard to find. Yes we have Martha but she's sort of, I don't know, stern and what we want is something a bit more celebrating. Jancee sums it up nicely: "...the more I read these cheery books, the more I discovered that what I loved about them was their offbeat joie de vivre, their plucky contention that with wit, verve and maraschino cherries, anybody can live a fabulous life."

That's sort of a nice idea on a rainy day, isn't it?

My own book list includes Elegance by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux who contends that god may not have made you beautiful but anyone can be elegant with the right gentle direction. The book speaks of women of the past who seem to have changed clothes about five times a day (morning dresses? what that?) but what the book really says to me is be respectful of your very own self. Then there is Entre Nous, A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl which is similar in intent. A French girl thinks before she speaks, guards her privacy carefully, chooses intellectual pursuits over the giddy charms of giddy charms. Very encouraging advice for a woman who feels like the trick pony at parties. Even The Bombshell Manual of Style, written in 2001 so a relative newcomer to the genre, has its place in that it encourages us to take good care of ourselves and to vet any new friends and boys to test their worthiness before they are allowed into the inner sanctum. That's kind of a fun idea.

Jancee has done even more sleuthing than me and so I am now on the hunt for some of her finds.

"The dictum of these vintage books was always "Be larger than life" -- markedly different from the message of modern-day tastemakers like Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus, who propose the more succinct "Be me." " Doesn't that sum up the current oeuvre? Martha is a dictator, telling me to clean up my room. I hate that.

I like the idea of the old girls' eccentricities (in Sex and the Single Girl, for example, Helen Gurley Brown suggests a brunch cocktail made of boiling down four cups of coffee to one, then adding gin and vanilla ice cream. Madness! But probably makes for an interesting party....) I like the idea of having FUN with life, and if Jancee calls that being larger than life, so be it.

You can't do anything about the weather or the face god gave you. Might as well throw a party.

Books for kids

2007-11-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

Back in my day, books written for "YA" or young adults as it is called now, involved sporty girls who got themselves into scrapes. On the young end of the spectrum there was Harriet the Spy (a personal favorite, nosy little writer that she was) and Trixie Beldon and of course dear Nancy Drew (pain in the butt I always thought, bloody prissy princess). Back then, life was harsh but the books were gentle -- Nancy, for example, had no mother (interesting, that) and a lovely dad, she was perfect, poised and pretty, there was some housekeeper or other around, and her friends fell into two cardboard camps: there was a tomboy and there was a soft and gentle nice girl named Honey if I recall, who was "pleasantly plump" whatever that means. Once you graduated from these sweet tomes you were onto real books, like The Catcher in the Rye and such before you moved on to Harold Robbins or Henry Miller for instructional purposes.

Lately I've been reading a number of books meant for young people, and what a sea change. It may be trite to say it but it seems to me that LIFE for young people has become gentle and easy (buy me take me show me being their mantra, and their parents snap to attention and buy, take, show) but their books are harsh. It is amazing to me that adult writers can so powerfully depict the pain and angst of childhood and youth. These books are like perfume -- as a scent can immediately transport you back to a time and place, these books artfully remind me of the crushing griefs and embarrassments of a cruel world we barely understand.

What I Was is written by the amazing Meg Rosoff, who also wrote the wonderful How I Live Now. Both describe youth as being its own country, cut off entirely from mysterious adults and their mores.

What I Was speaks of the chaste love affair (of the deep friendship kind, the best kind) between two boys. This friendship is the only softness either knows; the narrator is in British boarding school which we are given to understand is cold in every way and filled with bullies and the ever-dangerous weak, both bent on destruction. It also speaks of the intense passions of that age, and what I had not considered is how transforming they are. And they are. I remember well a great love of my life, my best friend in highschool, who went off me for a reason only she knows. The anxiety and despair this rejection caused can still bring me to my knees when I think about it. It set me up for a million disappointments -- an early lesson, yes, and a painful one.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell also describes a young British schoolboy, this one a stammerer who is tormented by Hangman (who gets in the way of the language he wants to use) and Maggot, inner demons both. His parents are each in their way soulless, fighting with each other about something that lurks beneath the surface. Adulthood looks dreadful, the present is fraught with the cruelty of peers and our boy must make his way through minefields of all kinds -- even his own inner spirit works against him, strangling his words.

I have said it many times but still, I don't know how we survive childhood. Few of us survive it intact. It is wonderful to me that writers can turn such experience into wisdom and art.

In a way reading these books is therapeutic. We recognize the slights the protagonist is enduring, we went through them ourselves. We support him, love him, want to protect him. We hate his enemies. The lesson then, is that the wounded soul really did deserve to be cared for, it is so obvious on the page, and this is something we can take into life. Kind of a revelation, that.

The stories you tell yourself.

2007-11-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

She is five. Hoping for good news. She is with two people, waiting -- one loves her but she doesn't know it or feel it; she loves the other absolutely and can't know or feel that the love is not reciprocated. The news comes and it is not at all what she hoped for -- the baby is a boy. What this means, for her, a girl, is that she has no sister, no ally, no hope. She is utterly, totally, alone. No one will help her or save her. Or know her, for that matter. It is now all over. Her last chance.

She reacts badly. Shattered, crushed, destroyed. Her eyes are coals, bright and shot with tears, haunted, horrified. Unbelieving. It cannot be true. That the universe can be so cruel and so dead set against her. She is five.

I hate him she says, I hate him already and the aunt says (the treacherous aunt) No you don't. So. It is utterly true. No one sees her, knows her, cares. She is on her own now and now she decides -- she doesn't know she decides, she's just five, but she decides nonetheless -- well, if they all want to hurt me, if there is no one in the universe to love me, I will hurt myself ten times as much. I will exceed their hurt, I will excel past where they would go, I'll show them. She's five. It's five year old logic.

Love in the time of dementia

2007-11-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

The story in the NYT's Week in Review begins thusly: "So this, in the end, is what love is."

The story is about love and age, and begins with the example of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman named to the US supreme court, and her husband who suffers from Alzheimer's. He is in a nursing home and has fallen for someone else, and Sandra is pleased. The O'Connor's son reports that his mom is happy to see her husband of 55 years happy and content, and even visits the new couple, chit-chatting with them as they hold hands on a porch swing.

New love, the story goes on to say, is all about the thrill of it all and wanting to be happy. Old love apparently is about softer things and wanting someone else to be happy.

There is even a claim in the piece that as the brain ages (that means, as we age) we become easier to please, more inclined to see the good over the bad, better able to deal with the vicissitudes of love. Studies guaging reactions to positive and negative scenes indicate that young people react to the negative, middle aged people see a balance and the elderly respond only to the positive. As people get older, therefore, they seem to naturally see the world in a more positive light.

Oh my, there is so much to say about all this.

First of all, where are these studies and what lobotomized old people did they find to do them with? I have worked in many a nursing home including those filled with Alzheimer's sufferers and other demented souls and I can tell you, the elderly are often deeply crabby to the point of pure evil. It may be sunny and lovely outside and everyone may be perfectly pleasant but by god, you should have understood that the mushy squash goes on the LEFT side of the plate.

The O'Connor "love" story strikes me in a few ways as well, and few are positive. First of all, and this is an idee fixe of mine, it is definitely a man's world. Here we have a demented old man in a nursing home and he can still find a date. There is no mention of the brilliant, talented and accomplished Sandra having same; in my own case we have an imperfectly sane bombshell sitting at home alone on a Saturday night. Ms O'Connor, WHERE is the justice in all this? This story strikes me as being painfully close to that of Stephen Hawking's sorry love life -- wherein we have a man who is virtually helpless and has had to depend on his good wife for absolutely everything including the messy bits having to do with bottoms; he is a man who is undoubtedly weird, certainly weird to talk to with that manufactured computer voice and all, and yet he still is able to run off (though "run" may not be the word) with the nanny, his own nanny but nevertheless. He may be twisted to gnome proportions and impossible to understand but by god and by gar, he still has romantic options.

If this sounds like the twisted gnomes of the world don't deserve love, forgive me. Of course that is not what I mean. It is that no matter what, MEN are still considered sexy and attractive, a "catch", long past the point where a woman is. Why can't the world love an adventurous woman is it does and adventurous man?

In my next life, please let me be a man. And if yes, may I not be born into the time of Amazons? I want just once to feel what it's like to be a winner.

What the studies and the article seem to suggest is that as we grow older we grow wearier of the fight for that elusive happiness of being loved absolutely by someone we love absolutely. We grow accustomed to compromise, to infidelity, to the let-down -- a crumb is okay, at least it's something.

Perhaps this beats abject heartbreak at 80. Heartbreak today nearly kills me, I don't know if I could withstand such a thing with a frailer heart than the one I have now. Perhaps this general giving in is simply biology -- the body's desire to survive where the heart and mind would not.

Shutter Island

2007-11-11T09:23:00.000-08:00

I love a good shimmy-shammy, in books if not in life. Others might call this the "surprise ending".

Asylum by Patrick McGrath is a terrific example of this type, and even Incredibly Close has a bit of a twist; in movies it's as famous as The Sixth Sense though even better versions include Lilith or Bunny Lake is Missing. Playing a trick on a dear reader is a noble tradition in mysteries spawned by Agatha Christie but it's really best when it is more psychological that that. What do you know, and how do you know you know it?

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane is such a "hey wait a minute" story. Lehane elevated himself above the average one-a-year mystery writer with Mystic River, a truly complex story of not knowing what you know and the madness caused by pain and injustice. Shutter Island predates that book and contains elements of its consideration of how much grief the human mind can tolerate.

To say much more would give away the surprise. If you have a rainy Saturday afternoon to yourself, spend it on Shutter Island.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

2007-10-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

There is a character in current literature that always haunts me long after the last word is read. He is a small boy, smart beyond smartypants, an outsider, solid within himself but vulnerable to the taunts and torments of other children, he is a brave little soul striving to be his own man in a world that mocks him.

He was the literal, solid, inadvertently hilarious son of a single mom in About a Boy; he was the brave autistic soul trying to figure it all out in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and he is Oskar Schell, the absurdly clever and so deeply wounded boy in Extremely Loud.

Oskar loves his dad and his dad loves him. In fact, Oskar is lucky enough to have that parent and friend who truly SEES him and loves him, who knows and applauds his tiny madnesses and quirks. He has, in other words, what we are all led to believe we deserve -- someone who loves him unconditionally. And then something terrible happens.

It can be a cheap trick to use 9/11 as a plot point, and it's become a bit too easy to throw that in to make a book "relevant". But in this book 9/11 or something just like it is imperative. In fact, the author makes us think about the effect of the devastation in a slightly new way -- one of the hardest parts of the tragedy is Oskar doesn't really know what happened to his dad, how exactly he lost his life and this seems like a hole that can't be filled, as the coffin can't be filled. There was a dad and then there was .... nothing. And, Oskar was sent home from school on that terrible morning, and got home in time to hear the many, many messages his dad left for him. Why didn't his dad say "I love you"? Why didn't Oskar pick up the phone? There is a truth to the human condition when facing what must not be real, and that truth could not be told otherwise.

Oskar's brave struggle to heal his broken heart broke mine. Such a smart little boy, and one trying so hard -- often things that happen in his day give him "heavy boots" but sometimes, luckily, he feels like "one hundred dollars." He has a grandmother who loves him utterly, and a mom who protects him like a guardian angel, silently and unseen; he lives in a cocoon of caring but it doesn't matter. See, his heart is broken and he needs to walk through that country until he finds a new state of being.

I don't know why this sort of boy means so much to me. I remember once having lunch at school in the very small and harsh town we lived in briefly. Among us that day were a few of the rawboned, extra-large farm boys who were probably a bit too old to be in Grade 8, which I was at the time, and one in particular was singled out for ridicule. He was a boy who didn't say much and why would he, and he ate his lunch silently ignoring the rest of us including the other boys who were teasing and throwing things and being obnoxious as boys are bound to be at that age and always....he opened his thermos and poured out a cup of chocolate milk. It was not fancy store-bought chocolate milk but something homemade and kind of grainy looking, and this made the other boys howl with laughter. They made such fun of him and his poverty, and he resolutely turned deaf. I couldn't bear it then and remember the scene with pain often -- someone loved him and wanted to soften his day a little, and that small gesture turned into yet another means to hurt him. Oskar's little quirks so lauded by his dad -- maybe his inventions or jewellery or the business card he made for himself -- made him the object of fun among those who loved him not at all. Never think childhood is innocent. Its casual cruelty would kill us all, which is why we become adults.

What We Talked About

2007-10-18T16:50:00.000-07:00

I have just spent a few meaningful hours in the company of Anthony Robbins -- there were a few hundred (thousand?) others but he was talking to me, me, me.

Oh my god I love this man. First of all, he is HUGE in every respect -- huge personality, huge head, teeth, hands like plates. But mostly, he is a huge presence and you could call him god-like except for his profane and totally guy-next-door way of speaking. It's great, really -- god made man.

What's brilliant about Tony, and I feel I can call him that, is that he was SO far ahead of the curve, a huge wave currently flowing through psychology, books, self-help. First of all, he was the original coach, back when we didn't have coaches for everything from potty training to career building, when coaches were the gruff guys on the field. Now it's an industry and an industry created by my good friend Tony.

But more than that, he was onto something WAY before even the shrinkiest shrinks cottoned on. He recognized that if you start to think differently, you THINK DIFFERENTLY -- that changing your mind changes your mind. Oh I know this sounds like one of those zen riddles that mean nothing (what animal walks on four legs then two then three etc etc) but it is true. There is a movement today in plasticity, psychiatrists and neurologists coming together to really understand that the brain and the mind are one, and that changes in thinking can change the chemistry and the physical nature of the brain itself. Which in turn changes psychology. And so on and so on. Tony caught on to that idea early. He also recognized that we are physical beings, and that our physiology - the very way we move - changes the way we see the world.

Tons of books have been spawned via his thinking. The Success Principles by that chicken soup guy Jack Canfield or Canned Field. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. O Magazine. Tons of stuff.

Oh my, I do love my Tony.

He is so right. Stand up, jump, shout YES! and then how do you feel? My heavens, you FEEL BETTER!

But there is more. He stands for the proposition that you live your life, it doesn't live you; that you have the power to change, that pain is a sign of a misalignment between what your blueprint of life is and your actual life, or a misalignment between your STATE of mind, or your STATE as Tony calls it, and where you need to be.

He has some good mantras but that's not all he's about -- though lots of pretenders to his throne might be only mantrasities. For example, in life "I hope this works out" is not a decision. It's a preference. So, not powerful enough to qualify for what you need to do to live the best life you can. Or, how's this one: "Your STATE of mind when you learn affects what you learn." Think about that for a moment. Or this: When in pain, you have three choices (and only three): Blame. Change your life conditions. Or, change the blueprint of what you wanted out of life.

It is utterly simple. It is utterly human. It is utterly correct. It only looks simple and obvious because he's been able to articulate it so clearly.

My Tony has changed my life. Watch me go.

A Fatal Inversion - more

2007-10-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Guilt is an insidious, corrosive thing. I once knew a therapist who had two mantras: suffering is optional and guilt is unnecessary. Except it isn't, most of the time -- guilt and the desire not to feel it is what keeps most of us more or less moral. In other words, it is what passes for conscience.

Donna Tartt's wonderful The Secret History looked at what happens to people when they do in fact get away with murder. The result isn't pretty -- each of the students of the swish college who was part of the killing of Bunny went awry in some way. It is a kind of judeo-christian view of things, isn't it? Because what the theme suggests is that we know when we've done wrong, we expect to be punished for it and sliding by upsets the natural order of things.

Interestingly, A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) has a similar theme. In her version, though, it's not so much getting away with murder that's the problem, it's not knowing how long you are going to get away with it, and that's the trick when doing bad things. It's a ticking time bomb and sooner or later, someone's going to blow it for you.

The characters in Inversion are all thieves -- one steals the mansion from his father when he could as easily share it; another steals for the sake of it; a third steals the oxygen out of the room through her utter dullness, yet another steals whatever he can, be it a heart or a soul or his wife's time. At one point a baby is stolen, and dies and then murder is committed to cover up this sorry fact. The only one who seems to get away with it in any real sense is the most mad of the characters, who somehow seems to come into her own after the deed is done.

But for the nutter, the fragile psyche who stole a baby out of some post-partum fit of madness, each of the characters then goes on to live an abbreviated life, a quashed life. The energy it takes to keep the lid on things, to prevent any loved one from opening it, to stay hidden, ultimately kills the soul in all of them. So, no one actually gets away with murder. Not the dead, and not the living. To paraphrase a well-known convict, in murder "everybody dies." And in keeping secrets, partaking in the shimmy-shamy, the flim-flam, the cover up, the endless compromises of keeping lies hidden, in living the half-life of feeling guilty -- well, in that case, everybody dies as well.

A Fatal Inversion

2007-10-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

Does anyone do "creepy" as well as British writers? They invented the murder mystery, right? Even tea-sipping spinsters are in on it. In fact, when you think about it, doesn't "Creepy Macabre" sound like someone you wouldn't want to meet at boarding school?

Am knee deep in A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell posing as Barbara Vine (creepily enough, she dedicates this book "with love from Barbara" -- as though this Barbara person were, like, real) and thus far we know a woman and a baby are dead, we know that some sexually active but not perhaps active enough (we have the requisite Rendell inhibited character here, too) young people are spending stolen time in a glorious country house one of them has inherited but can't afford to keep, and we have a sort of Secret History knowledge that yes, the group knows and must keep secret that something sinister and bad (well, murder) occured in the house for some reason yet to be revealed.

There is a beautiful tension to all this, as we wait with bated breath to learn who this poor dead woman is and why she came to such a fate. We know that the inheritor of the country house went on to good things, and the most overtly sexual of the houseguests is a doctor who has taken his interest to the specialty level, being an ob-gyn who is deciding if it is time to move to Highgate from Hamstead. References also to Muswell Hill and other places that are for me shots to the heart which is why we SWORE, vainly, not to read any books set in London or England or the UK.

Be that as it may. Vine/Rendell is wonderful at depicting the shallow soul, propelled by a deviant self-interest, moving inexorably toward a final act of departure, such as murder. Which of these idle young people ends up dead and who the killer? So far any of them could go without much of a loss to humanity; we know the boys are safe from the dead part, though the baby may implicate one in the death.

Cannot wait for nightfall and another dose of Sinister Macabre.

More Cruelty TV

2007-10-03T18:15:00.001-07:00

It is entirely possible, and I'm given to believe it is, that Gordon Ramsay is a great chef. Having just watched a jag of Kitchen Nightmares I can hardly believe such a beast was ever called to a nurturing profession. What is more giving than the desire to offer people good food? And who is more bloody-minded and cruel than our Gord?

I watched a segment of a show where our Gord goes into a fairly run of the mill restaurant and orders lunch. He finds the crabcakes, as billed, perfectly good and finds everything else overwrought. No shallots in the shallot-infused sauce over the apparently dry Atlantic salmon, too much garlic in the green beans, a pasty zucchini pancake. A lovely-seeming gentle manager who was THRILLED to have our Gord enter his establishment was eviscerated, the chef and owner called mediocre despite the crabcake, the chef/owner and his wife/partner asked if maybe they shouldn't just shutter the place.

Easy pickin's Gord. Truly.

Not only that, as a study in character, doesn't it take a particular and not necessarily honorable personality to be able to so easily be cruel to people who are inclined to admire and respect you? Did they ask to be COMPARED to you? only in the most oblique way. And yet our Gord tears a strip off them for not being .... more Gord.

It is interesting to me that some professions are called to answer for their sins right off the bat and others can slide along merrily, mailing in mediocrity whenever they want, and they seem to want to a lot. But a restaurant is reviewed, criticized, judged in its first week and as per biblical prophecy, so it shall be written, so it shall be done. Nail it and you're great, miss and you're dead no matter what. Lawyers can win or lose and that's expected, they aren't actually publicly judged for their prowess with the point; teachers can slide for years and still deserve a huge pension; even reporters who are ostensibly judged by their word every day can last a long time before someone says hey, you missed every scoop ever offered by a dumptruck.

Now, to be honest, I feel it is better value to eat a vastly expensive but amazing meal than to consume calories at a fraction of the price. Most days I'd rather go hungry than eat something poor. But a restaurant is merely a business like any other and each finds its level -- there are a lot of people who think Buffalo wings are the height of great cuisine. Frankly, some days, in some conditions, so do I. For many people food is food.

So why is it interesting to us that a horrible man but great chef should find a modest restaurant modest? The poor bastards didn't claim to be more. Is "constructive criticism" ever constructive? and to what psychopath? I cannot bear TV's current interest in showing the falling face, the brave front, the batted-back tears. Fine if it's about exposing the church to its sins or a government agency to its failings. But these are honest people trying to earn an honest buck. If Gord could find similar fault at a peer's restaurant, go for it. But this exercise in nastiness seems utterly gratuitous. And, I don't think there's a higher purpose such as teaching America to eat better. America, for the most part, and willingly, merely wants to eat.

No, this is "great television" and it sucks.

Getting back to the fraction of the whole

2007-09-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

I suspect this book is what is known as a "romp." It is wry, funny, ridiculous and yet hits at many truths despite its Alice Through the Looking Glass aspects.

The biggest truth is, of course, the truth about weakness and I will hammer away at this so all bored by it should leave now. See, weak people are destructive people. They want to avoid responsibility and certainly cannot bear to actively hurt anyone but man o man, what havoc they end up being responsible for. In this book, Martin is the weakest of the weak and he manages to burn down a town, send his brother into a life of crime, blind a man, break a few hearts, send a woman to her death. All for wishy washing around.

Yet sins of the fathers are not necessarily borne by the sons. Martin's son Jasper shows some strength of character in spite of himself, even though at one point he is shamed to admit that his one passionate decision is to murder someone. Well, it's that kind of book, it kind of works at a certain pitch.

The book is nicely cynical, too. In one instance the players are admiring a sunset, a vivid and extravagantly coloured spectacle made so by smog -- an instance where man's doing surpasses God's.

Ostensibly this is an amusing tale of family and character. Family. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.

Well, in THIS family, maybe you can.......

A room of one's own.

2007-09-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Misery loves company. Does it? Actually, no, I don't think so, I think misery loves solitude and the comforts of hiding under a pile of coats. As well, I have never approved of the "it could be worse" school of thought. What is that, something to look forward to? That even in grief you are outdone by others?

Of late, and at the behest of someone looking out for my improved psyche, I have been reading books on the subject of surviving childhood. Many quirks of personality it seems are actually old, fossilized habits learned long ago to offset the power and control of those who looked after us. Lots of the characteristics of those around us are also based on these primal fears and deprivations -- how anyone survives childhood is a central mystery and we should all try our best to be reincarnated as beloved cats. Hell is other people? Hell is being people.

We may survive the past but do we thrive, and what changes are indelibly wrought by the baroque cruelties suffered? Here's the thing. I don't adhere to the idea that to be an artist one must suffer, but suffering does sometimes lead to beauty. Think of natural wonders of the world -- it's the stress that creates the diamond. And here we come to Henry Darger.

A friend sent me the images here, and suggests this book is incredible. Why? Here is what she says: "Incredibly interesting (albeit sadder than sad), self taught artist/writer, a recluse, a janitor. These photos reveal the tone of his environment in a very intimate and quiet way. Here's the photo that inspired him to begin his writings."

She goes on to say "I like this excerpt from the guardian: Why is Darger so popular? Many would argue that it's because his art is truly different and truly beautiful. That may be so. What is certain is he led a life of such suffering, neglect and isolation that he makes Vincent van Gogh look like a party-going fat cat."

You want to come back as a cat. Trust me.

A Fraction of the Whole

2007-09-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

The weak shall inherit the earth the slidey bastards and you want to know why? Because they don't care about anything but their own weakness and so they can crash, burn, wreck and ruin like nobody's business. They really are terrible to have around.

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz spells all this out very succinctly. We have Martin our fifth-business who instigates all sorts of things in his slidey weak way. Like what? Like getting his brother not just into trouble but into crime because HE, Martin, didn't want to get beat up in a schoolyard fight.

How so you ask? Pretty easy when you're a weak bastard. Martin was in trouble with the bullies and so told his avid little brother, a terrific sportsman, a phenomenal athlete, that the bullies were CHEATERS. Well. Gasoline to a bonfire. The little brother goes on to beat up the bullies and the bullies stab him in the leg, ending his sports career. Then they tell him that so long as he joins their lives of crime they won't kill Martin (big loss if you ask me but I'm not the little brother in this one.) The brother, Terry, takes to crime like fish to algae and goes on cleaning the world of cheaters.

Terry, you see, believes in something. Martin not so much. So he goes on wreaking havoc by trying to slide out of things left right and centre.

The Martin story is very funny and I'd tell you more but I'm not finished yet. But it's pretty clear, weak wins. Well, maybe the weak don't WIN but they don't seem to get hurt or roughed up much either so we might as well call it winning.

Jekyll & Hyde

2007-09-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

It's good to have friends who read, because they do a lot of the legwork for you. One good friend and terrific reader recently told me he had read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the first time, in fact read Robert Louis Stevenson for the first time, while on vacation in Jamaica and was so mesmerized by it and so enchanted by the good writing he's now on to (what may have been more appropos in the first place) Treasure Island.

Now, it is not many who would take a misty and dark gothic horror to the beach. Yet fewer would be riveted while the sun plays on the waves and screaming children make sand castles but there you have it. But he spoke so highly this book has been on my list ever since. He once said to me, when I was complaining about how hard it is to find a really good book among any season's new releases, "Why do you waste your energy when there is so much that is tried, true and has passed the test of time?" He sent me on the path of Iris Murdoch, splendidly prolific and a rich vein should you like her work. Sigh. Back to Sue Grafton.

As I am still avoiding any book with anything to do with love (why o why is every damn book about love? honestly, as a culture we are obsessed with love. Why when there's so many of us are people still alone??) I took J&H with me to the country house where I do my best reading. It is back to school time at my local bookstore and there were piles of "classics" on the first table you trip on, prominent among them being this one and it seemed sort of a sign from God.

Imagine my distress when I opened the book and discovered that it is one among SIX "books" in a rather narrow tome.

I asked Kristin, a publisher and whose house I was in, if this could possibly be right. Is Jekyll and Hyde a SHORT STORY??

"I have no idea I've never read Stevenson. Or Dickens. Let me look at the book," she said, helpfully. She read the copyright page and a few others that tell things to publishers and handed it back. "Ask Tom."

Now, Tom has been in publishing since Christ was a cowboy and all Kristin and Tom's homes are made tinier for being lined with every book ever published in this fair land. Even the bad ones. Of which there are, sadly, many. You'd think he'd know about so commonplace a "classic."

"I have no idea. Ask Rebecca," he said. Rebecca is sixteen and had no interest in this exchange, as she was deeply immersed in Blindness, a book I have never been able to make head nor tail of. I think it's about a bunch of people who go blind for some reason.

I was loathe to read a book that might be a fake, to spend the time on the wrong thing but plunged ahead anyway. My Reader had said the fascinating thing is Hyde (the scary one) freaks people out, they feel immediately cold and unsafe in his presence but there is virtually no description of what he looks like, he is faceless and amorphous.

In fact no one and nothing is much described in this novella, as I have learned it definitively is. The premise is interesting. Jekyll wants to obliterate his dark side, and so invents a potion that separates him from his monster. Hyde becomes his alter-ego, so that he is all good, the other is all bad. The problem is, as time goes on it is harder and harder to revert back to Jekyll, it takes more potion and more energy and more time until eventually Hyde is the ego, and Jekyll all but disappears.

Stunning to me is the psychological relevance of this -- and this, before Freud had committed a word to paper. Try to supress that which is negative and it will grow and destroy you. It will BECOME you. What you fear becoming is what you will be, if you cannot integrate and synthesize the pain of it. Think of what ensues with those who supress sexuality, or those who want to be seen as ONLY sweet-natured and then turn passive-aggressive and truly horrible. Interesting that this and other stories came out in the suppressive Victorian era. The artists were clear about the destruction they saw, and no one heard a word.

I liked also that the bad part could be hived off with a potion -- hello cocktail hour.

Fascinating really, essential reading for Psych 101.

Smart guy, this Stevenson.

My Life.....In France

2007-08-21T18:03:00.001-07:00

I had lunch today with someone I have known for years, but who would not have become such a friend were it not for the fact that two years ago she was dying. Or, if not precisely dying, fighting for her life against a cancer she seems cured of. That she was ill gave her time and a timorousness that allowed me in -- prior to that she was a hard driving, ambitious, fabulously successful ad executive living a life I could barely imagine, and her life didn't allow for the likes of me. She was on a fast track and I was busy picking daisies. Or something.

In fairness her cancer was merely the biggest of her concerns at a time that tested her strength. Her beloved father died, her daughter fell and broke both arms, she was fired after about a year of abuse from a job she loved and hated. And then she was sick.

As she proceeded through treatment she needed other things to think about and so we worked together on a small project, and I think loved one another's company; we became friends, finally, not merely acquaintances. Because of the grief and pain we were both going through, while our own, we now had very common ground and the kind of wide open space that allows you to say things and admit fears you otherwise would protect both yourself and your listener from. In our case there just didn't seem to be much reason to bother with such niceties. What we were going through was in the book of Life's Hard Lessons, it seemed stupid not to share the wealth.

Today we met at a favorite bistro where we order the EXACT same thing every time, a delicious and simple French lunch with a glass of wine. We caught up. She is healthy, seems completely recovered and is gorgeous and robust again, the papery quality of her skin gone and a bloom in its place, her ginger hair now wildly curly and finally utterly her own. She has eyebrows, eyelashes, energy.

And now comes the rest of her life. I feel I have a second chance now she said. I feel I have been given a special opportunity and I think to myself, is this what my life is? This job, this routine, this? This is all it is?

So change is brewing.

Mid-life crises have been given a bad name, maybe by the disgruntled, content spouses left on the curb and the families perfectly happy with the routine, the job, this. My friend says perhaps if she hadn't gotten sick she wouldn't have noticed the routine or thought there was anything MORE at stake. I'm not so sure. I am also having a mid-life crisis, I prefer the term "awakening", without one drop of chemo or one night's fear of imminent death.

There is a yearning, she said, for more, to follow a dream, to live somehow more creatively. "I want to do something, I just don't know what it is." The question then is, what is your bliss? What are you passionate about? Easier asked than answered! It is so hard in adulthood to dream a dream or unleash from expectations and disappointments and what IS.

I don't know what I love, she said. And then she said "actually, I love food. I would love to eat and drink, how do you make a life about that?"

How indeed.

Which brings me, and I hope her, to My Life in France by Julia Child, a wonderful memoir of Julia's awakening at an age not so much younger than us. Julia followed her husband to Paris and France after the second world war and discovered a love of....food. She and her husband followed this food with an unswerving passion, taking time off from eating only to repair their gall bladders. If there was a dish reputed to be excellent at a small restaurant on a cow path in southern France, they went. If there was something rarely concocted but would be concocted this once, at this cost, they saved and they savoured. The result of this passion as we all know now is Mastering the Art of French Cooking (which took YEARS to create) and the first ever cooking show on newfangled TV -- this spawned a massive industry.

Julia's unadulterated love for food and all things French is refreshing, as is her candour which I suspect is unbeknownst to her. She stole that cookbook out from under a French woman's nose, it would seem her beloved husband might be a touch...exuberant as my boss would say, gay as the rest of us might. He was also a bit of an underachiever shall we say, and perhaps an artist only in her eyes. They were an eccentric couple of bachelors, really, but all of that is by the by. The wonderful thing is the boundless enthusiasm she feels for this amazing discovery: Food is meant to be a pleasure, it is not merely fuel, something that hadn't dawned on her Yankee self until she found herself in Europe.

Passion and enthusiasm are always not merely attractive but compelling. Finding passion, what we love, what part of life gives us the most pleasure, is what God meant us to seek.

What We're Not Reading, take two

2007-08-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

This is so commonplace now that I hesitate to bring attention to it but earlier this month as I was paging through the New York Times I came across a story, rather small, on an inside page, about an Army private sentenced to 110 years for the rape of the Iraqi girl and the killing of her and her family.

Perhaps this story didn't need to played any larger -- after all, this is not the first soldier involved in the incident to be sentenced. It's not the first time that the story has been reported. Still, it is an unusually high sentence for such a crime, a remarkable sentence really. And for whatever reason, while this story is well known it has never, to me, grabbed the attention it deserves. That the soldiers involved are facing such penalties has not received the attention this deserves -- usually there is something of a pass given to soldiers who lose it, their penalties have never, to me anyway, seemed large enough.

As it happens I was at dinner with an old friend, a sound engineer (is this what they are called??) who had that very day finished the last touches on a new Brian de Palma film -- a remarkable feat, shot and completed within four months. The subject? The rape and murder of the Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. The movie, she says, is harrowing and a return for de Palma to his days as a maverick. It is shot as though by news cameras, security, rogue grabs on videocam -- raw, real, unrepentent.

The movie is receiving positive buzz so far but is deeply disturbing and I cannot imagine what it was like for her to lay down the sound. I remember well the trial of serial rapist and serial killer Paul Bernardo -- no one but the jury was allowed to see the actual video he and his wife took of their rape and torture of two young girls but the sound of the thrill, the barely contained joy, in his voice and the keening of the girls torments me still.

My friend said she feels the movie makes us complicit in the crime but I disagree. It forces us to look at it, to understand who to hate and how much. This is the important new role of communicators other than media. This child was raped while her family was trapped in another room, unable to help her but able to hear what was happening as soldiers one by one attacked her, as other soldiers held her down. Her family was killed before she was, and then she was shot in the head. In my experience in covering crime I would say this was the soldier's only mercy -- one of the cop reporters I knew used to say rape victims are the same as murder victims, they're just not dead yet. Afterward, her small body was set on fire. It is terrible to read these words, worse yet to witness the acts even as a fictionalized account and yet all this happened. It happened on our account, as an outcome of the "war on terror". I don't feel I've been able to read nearly enough about these events despite what some might call a "media saturation"; that the longest sentence in memory was doled out a few weeks ago and that the story didn't warrant better play is a shame. Therefore I think it is honorable that de Palma saw fit to document this atrocity, and it is probably a duty of ours to witness it. It's a shame we will need to go to a cinema and pay for the privilege when it all should have been on the news, but that's the way it is. The Canadian Broadcasting Company once saw fit to call television "the fifth estate" and I would suggest that the fourth, media, typically newspapers, are no longer any estate at all. We are lucky there are always storytellers, though, ready to take up the cause.

Pictures are a thousand words

2007-08-16T12:03:00.000-07:00

Reading is all very well but sometimes the best thing in the world is to look at pictures, like a child, imagining a life behind the image.

To this end I spend an inordinate amount of time on The Sartorialist, a delicious blog about style. Sart simply goes off into the world and photographs people who look intertesting to him, and his egalitarian and kind disposition to what makes a great picture and good style is refreshing and rare in the fashion world. Not only that, he's a lovely writer so if you do find yourself craving the written word, it's occasionally there for you. He captures all kinds of people including those with the etched faces and demeanors of people who would be shocked to be considered "fashionable", appearing to be far busier simply living or thinking or working hard or suffering or enjoying, un-self-consciously.

I am excited to the point of not sleeping, too, to know that the September Vogue, Bazaar, the European editions, Harper's Bazaar and various style sections will soon drop on the doorstep. I love fall -- the time of re-invention. The real beginning of the year.

The Book of Tells

2007-08-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Boys are trouble.
Thorny (I said THorny) friendships, sticky (in the sense of tricky, not in the sense of commitment god forbid) relationships, torment -- these are my special skills. I guess I like the tumult, or am a sucker for pain, or enjoy the tangle.
Or maybe it's just a habit.
There a few books that should be required reading for people like us, and the one I am liking best is The Mind that Changes Itself because it has nothing whatsoever to do with "self help" but rather is a beautifully and kindly written explanation of a frontier of brain science that suggests our "brains" are actually our "minds" -- and that patterns of thought become entrenched in the moorings and make-up of the brain as an organ in the same way muscle memory becomes nature to an athlete. We just get used to thinking in certain patterns and the very good news is, we can unlearn these patterns pretty easily. How encouraging!
Now, if I really took this book to heart I wouldn't be reading the other stuff I am, but I am....I find myself re-reading emails I've collected in a file called "Walter". This is not his name, and I didn't create this file but it was on my computer from the last user and so it now houses the correspondence of my ex-love and me, and is as close as I may come to the testament and truth of what was between us. I find reading it useful to reassure myself that I am not crazy, that those sentiments really were as real as black and white. Or flashing pixels. That the sentiment was shared, at least briefly.
I wonder if this will now replace "letters", the way we know of artists and writers and thinkers of the past. If stupid mis-typed and poorly spelled jokes or the quotidien details -- "Went for a run and then ate some porridge, yum!" will become the means by which we come to know the inner workings of minds great and not so.
It is certainly a torture to re-read these things. While there is "I love you" and then the less incriminating "love you" and plenty of "I miss you" and "You were on my shoulder all day today" there is also....the absence. Gaps we didn't see the first time. We read email with a certain framework, through eyes that belong to a mind that is convinced of something. It is not the same as something written down on paper -- though the look of the printed word is similar (how were we to know that of ALL the dumb classes we took in highschool, the one one we really needed was typing??) it is actually and truly less stable. The medium is the message, oh yes the medium really IS the message -- so much is mis-read, misinterpreted, hastily and poorly understood.
On this we will create the knowledge of the temper of our times. On these seemingly ephemeral texts we will base biographies and histories. (We know of course there is NOTHING ephemeral about email, it is most persistent as well as often pernicious.) Probably not a good thing. It isn't even a good way to understand the workings of our own hearts, and the hearts of those we thought we knew.

What We're Not Reading

2007-08-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine loves a thriller, now that she's later in life and some of the other thrill is gone. We were speaking of The Unknown Terrorist which she has not read and which I was trying to describe. The thing about this book is its apparent theory that terror turns us primal, less human, and thus the thing we are trying to protect, this Life and Society and Democracy and so on becomes that much less worthy of protection. She said, and she may be right, "I don't know why we think 9/11 is so remarkable. Where we are wrong is in thinking that They want what we have. They despise what we have."
She went on to tell me of a woman she knows who has had no other career but marriage and who now lives off the avails of divorce, alone in a mansion of more than 8,000 sq.ft. This same woman has other homes and cars and the things we collect because we are us and strong and free and because we can. When you think about it, this is obscene.
And so my friend, who lives in Florida most of the year but who is not American, nor Canadian, nor Jamaican really nor British though she sounds it, this friend who is a child of the universe who has a right to be said "the problem is the media."
It inflames me, always, when The Media is blamed for Whatever It Is, and in fact The Media takes a hard knock in The Unknown Terrorist.
But my friend is of the media and said the issue is that there is no longer anything we know as news available to most of the population. What passes for news in the place where she lives most of the year, a small town in hellish Florida, is local and only local, who said what to whom and who may have stolen the boy scouts' pocket money...what happens in the World is never reported nor considered and the only "world vision" available in this small town might be Fox or a talk show or Judge Judy.
Now, this is worth considering.
I have many friends who would consider themselves intellectuals or artists or both and who take it as a badge of honour that they don't read newspapers; many of them are still adhering to that dated fashion of Irony and so boast that they know Gawker best, or The Superficial, or Defamer, all of which have done us the favour of being literal as to their content.
When one of my styley friends said to me long ago, when I was still a newspaper reporter, that she never read the paper I took her to task. We live in a democracy and so it is our civil DUTY to now the news however we learn it, in paper or online, to let Them know we're watching, to pay attention. This is why media is the fourth pillar. This is why there is something like a right to photograph Lindsay Lohan after a bad night.
It's been a long time since I've raised this argument but it seems germaine just now. Pay attention. Yeats said the world falls apart when "the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity." Interesting that he could not have foreseen that lacking conviction could go even further, toward a concerted effort to not merely lack conviction but lack even the interest to know what might be worth being convinced about.
If a bomb drops in the woods and no one hears it, did Lindsay Lohan go to rehab for another round?

The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan

2007-08-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Let's say you set yourself up thusly: ice cold beer, hot summer day, an apparently well-reviewed thriller in your hands and let's say you embark on what you think is a jaunty summer's read.

And what if what you were reading were far closer to literature, far darker and more tragic than even the bloodiest thriller could ever be.

The Unknown Terrorist is a frustrating book if you dislike chase movies and The Fugitive and misunderstandings that could be easily cleared up if someone just SAID something and Kafka. I dislike all those things and so found this a wearing story. And this is what the story is about: Set in Australia, a stripper named the Doll happens to have incredible sex with a swarthy guy she's met at something along the lines of a Pride parade....coincidentally this same swarthy guy saved her best friend's kid from a riptide the day before. She wakes up the morning after this incredible sex and he's vanished and within moments it turns out he is a suspected terrorist and now so is she, as her image has been caught in the security camera of his antiseptic building. On the run she goes.

And then the political and philosophical intention of the book kicks in. She is thought to be a terrorist and all media and police and whatever they call homeland security are freaking out because my good heavens, a terrorist is loose in our beloved city. The venom and vitriol spew. We must protect the beauty and sanctity of our culture, our freedom!! and what is revealed is the repulsive thing we seek to protect, and how ridiculously fundamentalist we have become in our belief what our way is the only way.

I have always wondered what the boys who went to war in the first and second world ones thought they were fighting for. We know now of course, and what a noble cause it was. But the other side also went to war and thought they were fighting for something. What if this time what WE are protecting is the terrible and unworthy thing?

Here is a quote from the book, to give you a sense of its heft:
"Politics places a man at the centre of life, and in permanent opposition to the universe. Love, to the contrary, fills man with the universe......Love is never enough, but it is all we have."

Now, what could this possibly mean? I take it to mean, among other things, that the will to SURVIVE, to live, is a crass impulse. When in survival mode we are unthinking, unbelieving, unrefined. It is the worst of us, it is where the animal lives.

I am that reader who reads every word of a book, from the copyright page on through to the very end where the author is said to live in X with his X and X children. Some of the best words of this book lie in these pages. Flanagan says "Though art is mostly theft, larceny is no guarantee of worth. Whatever resonance this tale possesses, if any, it must be rightfully attributed to those men and women who have created our own times. As Shakespeare -- who rarely invented his own plots ...wrote in Henry IV, Part I: "Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it" -- a most beautiful line lifted from Proverbs. "

The meaning of this book is simply that. It is hardly a fiction. It is being created now, every day. As Flanagan says in these last pages you might miss, "I took this novel from everywhere -- ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks -- no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better."

It's quite a book in the final analysis.

So, my friends, read it and weep.

The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

2007-07-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

I find incompetence deeply irritating. I don't think those who can't work a cellphone are charming; those with no sense of direction are a burden; I am not amused, ever, by anyone who tends to eat a few times a day and claims ineptitude in the kitchen -- everyone can boil something up, or anyone who doesn't feel like doing that can order in, it's not that hard. Not WANTING to cook is quite another thing, as is hoping someone else will work out the boring stuff. Good on you if you can find someone to do your dirty work for you, but please don't cloak it in "I'm so sweet and dopey."

I myself am deeply incompetent at all the things I find dull, but I don't try to make it into cocktail conversation. I have never balanced a cheque book (preferring to spend until the phone calls start) and have no idea really how to do taxes -- I screw it up and take the hit. I'm no good at domestic chores and can't work a power drill. So, I hire people to do those things and never speak of them.

There is a whole section of literature, if it can be called that, that is all about the cute incompetent. Bridget Jones may have started it, let's blame her. This Slummy Mummy book was excerpted in Vogue and it seemed light and funny so I bought it but sadly it is as tedious as Bridget except I have fewer things to relate to. I understand fully that the responsibility of looking after myself is as much work as I'm prepared not to do well and I already know the alphabet so I thought it best not to have kids. This book is about the incompetent mummy who just can't keep it together but adorably so. Poor thing, she's trying to flirt but discovers yesterday's underwear balled up in her jeans; she can't believe another mummy can manage a gorgeous coat without jam or egg stuck to it; she never gets out and her life is a pile of unfinished laundry. I can't stand her.

Why oh why is the ruling female in current fiction this dopey hapless woman with bad hair? (and if you doubt me let me reassure you: She ALWAYS has bad hair, the wrong outfit on, sends emails to the entire company, needs to lose weight/stop drinking/stop smoking/stop fantasizing, she needs a system. She is always a mess and the day Mr. Right walks through the door she's in sweatpants and the door falls off. Yet it all works out in the end. )

I once knew a woman who was either the first woman ever to be made partner at her law firm, or was the first woman ever in Germany to be made partner. Either way a glorious example of what to do right. When she had her baby she told me she often went to work with pablum stains on her Lagerfeld. "Well, that's it, that's my job and that's my son," she said with total confidence and she OWNED it -- she was a mother and a lawyer and the pablum stains were a badge of honour in a good way. She was not intending to be cut a break as a hapless cutey.

I am so very tired of this Bridget-type character. I don't actually relate to her. I don't want to relate to her. Please writers everywhere, let her go away and learn how to cook.

Mister Pip

2007-07-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, after a great love walked out without adequate reason or explanation (to my way of thinking anyway) I decided that's it. I'm done. I'm out. As of today I will be Miss Havisham and I give up on the whole bloody thing - relationships, men, love and all that comes and goes with it.

I realized every time I tried to be conventional, convention blew up in my face. So, my life would be about other things -- the pursuit of beauty, art, intelligence, words, and would NOT be about the pursuit of a happy husband, three kids and a dog. Over time I have become comfortable and relieved about this.

But my mantra was always I am Miss Havisham -- thing is, I had no idea who she is and so I read, or started to read, Great Expectations. I stopped calling myself Havisham.

A few days ago I ran into an old friend and former colleague who has never steered me wrong with books. She is an expert and books are her profession but more than that she has a delight in fiction that matches my own, and she has the ways and means to savour the best the current publishing season has to offer.

Judith recommended two books, Mister Pip being one. It isn't available for sale yet but by begging shamelessly I received an advance reading copy and devoured this book yesterday.

Great Expectations begins with a kind of a poem: "My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

Mister Pip begins similarly, with naming, this time: 'Everyone called him Pop Eye."

This is a first novel and few have such big subjects or flights of imagination that this one does. Mister Pip is the story of a story and the grip of storytelling, the escape of stories, and the fearsome power books, reading, ideas can have. It is set on an island somewhere in the world near Australia and there is some kind of fierce and awful war going on about something or other. Interestingly, there are many books being written and published now that have an amorphous and cruel war as a background -- How I Live Now being one -- a war as seen and experienced on the ground. That is, with no explanations, as something felt but not understood. It reminds me of trying to understand a painting by looking at it up close -- you can see that it is a painting but nothing else is known.

The fathers, older boys and most men have been swept into whatever the battle is, leaving the women, children and Mr. Watts, also known as Pop Eye. There is nothing to do, the teachers are all gone and so Mr. Watts decides to re-open the school and to teach the children whatever he can. His biggest lesson is the story of Great Expectations, "the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens." He reads a chapter a day and Matilda, who is the teller of this story of a story, falls into the spell of Pip and his world, and it becomes as real to her as the mysterious world in which she really lives.

"What I am about to tell results, I think, from our ignorance of the outside world. My mum knew only what the last minister had told her in sermons and conversations....she had heard that man had been to the moon but was inclined not to believe such stories. She did not like boastfulness. She liked even less the thought that she might have been caught out, or made a fool of...."

And therein is the crux of this delicious book -- the mothers of the schoolchildren are afraid of what they are learning, and begin to loathe the man who is, they fear, taking their children from them by having those children inhabit a very different world than the one they live in: a world of ideas and imagination rather than what IS. But over time the mums start to come to the school and start to teach what they know for sure -- the meaning of blue, for example, or how to watch a crab to know the weather. They also start to fall into the power of new ideas.

Matilda comes to know Pip to be as real as any other person she knows, and she puzzles over his decisions. Puzzles over why he would leave his birthplace and call himself Handel -- but a name becomes the truth of a thing, the identity of a thing. She puzzles over why Pip continues to love Estella -- and learns that we sometimes love imperfect things, and love things we cannot have. Through the book she learns the world.

Ideas both create and destroy. When the "rambos" come to the village looking for this Pip character, Mr. Watts is killed; Matilda's life is saved by an idea that gives her hope, strength and courage.

Later Matilda learns she may not have been so different from her mum, having to rely on what she is told rather than what she can learn for herself. When she finally has a copy of Great Expectations in her hands she realizes that she wasn't being read the text but rather Mr. Watts' version of the text -- the story, in other words, as he knew it. And this is as it is with every book -- we can only know what we know of it, not the truth of it. As with the Christians who, once the printing press made the Bible more widely available, realized that the priests may have been selling them a bill of goods, Matilda's faith is shaken.

Mister Pip is a big, big book told like a fable and fairy story, in a deceptively simple manner. It is a book about the effects of being cut off, as the islanders, or cutting yourself off, as Miss Havisham, and the poignant and destructive results of that. It flip-flops between showing that truth can save your life -- Mr. Watts could simply have said I'm not Pip, he's a character in a book -- and a story can save you, as it did Matilda. It flip-flops between what is "truth" versus "story" at their core -- the mums fear the story but live off many of their own, an idea like "blue" is as tangible as eating. It is also about having the courage to learn and understand things that are painful, the implication being that innocence is perfection but cut off, experience is imperfect. Are we better for knowing rather than not knowing? It is hard to say, really. But knowledge draws us as surely as the children were drawn deeply into the story of Pip. Whether we live or die of it -- it being our ability to accept the truth and the power of ideas which often means first facing the fear of being a fool -- depends on whether we are Havisham, Estella or Pip. And I can tell you for certain that you can change your mind about which of those you want to be.

Other Women

2007-06-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

As a reader I am lazy. I try hard to read edifying, improving things and yet always fall for a good story like a pretty face.

As a means of learning something while being entertained I read The Other Boleyn Girl -- to be truthful this was inspired not a little bit by a movie starring Scarlett Johansson, who is always a good thing even in a bad film. Being Canadian and therefore taught only the history as seen through the prism of this young and juvenile place -- such a stark country, history as taught in school amounted to who said what in Parliament and the tale didn't improve with the re-telling -- I had never learned a damn thing about England and its romping royals until the days of Chuck and Di.

Henry VIII is more or less the Clinton of his day, known more readily for sexual exploits than any Good Works. What do we really know about Henry and his era except he had a thing for women, had a number of wives (I thought eight but the number is slightly lower) whom he beheaded when he got tired of them (in truth he didn't behead them all but did behead them more often than is truly ideal).

I am always drawn to the story of the underdog, the watcher, the minor character in a major life. These are the observers, the truth tellers, the ones who have the freedom to say, or express, how it really was. The other Boleyn girl was tragic Anne's sister, Henry's first fling.

This is a page-turner, what's known as a "romp", a truly wonderful suntan lotion scented Saturday afternoon read. I swear there are improving aspects to it, too -- for example, it does outline the history of Henry (from the waist down but still) and is a testament to the significance of family and court politics, there is an encouraging tale of Mary, the "Other" and her love of her children and how despite having to lay down for the King she found love, a happy relationship, a nice man within the muck. All good, and it inspires a quest for more knowledge -- at the end of this book Elizabeth I is a dark horse to say the least, so HOW, pray, did she manage to become perhaps the greatest ever ruler of an empire -- and a woman when such were distinctly an underclass. Curiouser and curiouser.

Brimming with confidence I talked to a good friend of mine, very intellectual, who loves and seeks out Jacobean Tragedies (whatever they are) whenever she's in a theatre town like London. I'm not sure when the Jacobean period would be but it sounds long ago and so I mentioned that I'm newly fascinated with the Tudors and dying to read more about how Elizabeth managed to gain the throne, saying that I was on a quest for more learning. Which I thought my friend would appreciate and applaud. Ha. What led to this new interest she asked and when I said it was the wonderful Boleyn Girl book she snorted. Rather rudely if I am honest. "A Harlequin at best."

What a smack-down!

I wonder what she would say of the Josephine B. trilogy I've just devoured. Again, what a wonderful character in history and what a modern approach Jo had to family, love, passion, her children. What a close, knowing, passionate and adult relationship she had with Bonaparte. Talk about in-law trouble! Talk about adultery! (not hers, though she's been smeared in history).

There are so few relationships we see up close. We see our own, though that is akin to trying to understand a mural from an inch away. Forest, trees, a mishmash of hope and desire versus truth. We have seen a marriage from up close through our parents, clearly no experts. So we learn of the myriad ways of love and life through books. Only these can offset cultural and societal expectation of love and happiness and real estate, the essence of what I see of the "relationships" all around me. These historical figures were circumscribed by a set of rules sometimes literally set in stone and yet they lived as moderns -- following their hearts within these confines in a way that looks liberated and liberating to these millennial eyes.

Cruelty TV

2007-06-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

This is not about books. It isn't about reading. This is about flipping through channels and seeing something horrifying on TV.
For about a minute I watched American Inventor, a show I've never heard of and I hope you haven't either. I watched a gorgeous, chubby little girl show off a nice picture she'd painted, and I saw I don't know, say five adults tell her she wasn't good enough. I saw this brave little creature fight back tears and then lose that battle, I saw her crushed little face, her shiny happy expression turn to sorrow that surely cannot be erased.
Who came up with this idea? When did utter cruelty to children become entertaining? Why do I read and hear about how violence on TV is bad for kids and walking to school alone is bad for kids and the internet is bad for kids when some beautiful little girl's parents allowed her to be exposed like this and grown ups who should know better sit in judgement of her ideas and her creativity and her very self?
This must be stopped. Is anyone else appalled by this?
I can hardly believe I saw it.
If she were to report that her parents judged her homework so harshly, that someone in her family did said these things her apropos of a pleasant conversation about something she'd created there would be Children's Aid and police and therapy and anguish aplenty.
Please, please please make it stop. This show must be stopped.

Esquire

2007-06-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

I love magazines. I adore the fairy tale life as per Vogue, Elle, Bazaar; I love the thinking in the essays of Harpers, The New Yorker, all the usual suspects. I love Paris Vogue for its arty kink, beautiful enough to leave out on the coffee table without making you seem perverse. I don't love the edgy new 'zines that don't seem to have much writing in them, or pictures for that matter, just a lot of space and a graphic designer's ego-nourishing attempt at something interesting -- these magazines tend not to be around that long.

I have also loved men's magazines -- and I don't mean Playboy and Hustler but Esquire, GQ, Maxim, the others. I've liked that they tend to make the distinction between art and ad, so that unlike women's magazines, you won't see an advertisement for shampoo and then an article on how best to wash your hair. Men's magazines seem to assume a basic intelligence in their readers. My favourite of these is Esquire I think, for its coherence -- every single story is an aspect of "man at his best" -- and for the writing which is far less uniform and blandly flawless as what you find in, say, Vogue. Esquire is a collection of the writing of individuals. While the overall message and theme and focus is always consistent and clear, each story holds the voice of its writer. I suppose an analogy might be the choir - lots of individual voices, one complete whole. You will, though, find stories on topics pretty similar to how to wash your hair, but written with a wry "we know you don't really know how to do this" sensibility that somehow seems interesting and fun rather than offensive which is how a similar story in Glamour can come off. I learned new tricks on how to wash dishes in Esquire, for example. Key factor when washing fine china and crystal: line the sink with tea towels before filling with water, so there are softer edges should you clink.

In Esquire I learned also the chilling truth of the psyche of a serial philanderer. The story was called something like "I've had 3,000 affairs" or was it 30,000? and was a first-person look at someone who simply cannot connect with women or himself. He admitted he is plain as porridge to look at, a salesman, utterly unremarkable but for this feat of the seduction of women. He can smell their vulnerability, he comes in as the nice guy they'd never suspect was capable of what his does by habit at this point; his wife found out once and said more or less, well, let's not talk about that. It's hard to know who to feel sorry for in that instance: her for her marriage to a cad or him for being married to someone who couldn't care less about herself or him. Where else but Esquire, with its willingness to help a man be his best, would you see so searing and insightful a profile of a serial offender?

Because I have read all the Vogues and other favourite magazines already this month and because I was in an airport and because I haven't visited Esquire in a while I picked up the latest issue, which has a picture of Angelina Jolie on the cover. I like Angelina, I think she is one of the more interesting women in her circle and while the marriage of plain-jane Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt never made sense to me, the connection between the two gods, Angie and Brad, seemed perfectly like-attracts-like. So I have never borne her ill-will for homewrecking and hurting one of America's sweethearts.

The picture on the cover and inside is weird, Angie looks robotic and inhuman, not the super-human goddess she usually is.

Perhaps that is a sign that something is amiss with Esquire, or maybe I've grown out of it. This time the articles on "how to wake her" seemed cutesy to the point of gagging. (Waking her doesn't involve a quick, hard thrust but instead breakfast in bed with a rather complicated recipe for what, in the end, is scrambled eggs.) There is the cutesy story of a joke (lame) told by a beautiful woman. There is a cutesy story of Ten Things Men Should Know About Women by Tea Leone which is cute cute cute. And, far more confident and assured than most women are. So what we have here is a fantasy world and a fairy tale where men are a bit awe-shucks and women are all (and I mean all) gorgeous and sexy and confident. It is all about the cult of Me, Manly -- all so boy brat I left my issue behind in the seat pocket in front of me, where the card explaining the safety features of this aircraft also hides, unread.

That said -- the profile of Angelina Jolie is extraordinary. I can't tell you if she and Brad are still an item or not. I can tell you she is building a sustainable Millennium Village in Cambodia, building a soy milk factory, water system, roads and a school on her own dime. She is reading international law. She is working out UN policy on countries such as those her children come from. She is trying to ensure that every day, each of her children receives enough attention from her that they feel equal and confident. She's trying to make a difference, to fill an emptiness she feels by doing something for the world rather than shopping. Maybe she's a freak and crazy and all the other things they say about her. Maybe it takes someone crazy to save a village no one else cares about.

Esquire is irritatingly "I'm just a cute little boy and don't you love me" but I didn't read this about her in Vogue. I did learn where her trench coat comes from. That fact is a little shameful when you think about it. No wonder Hillary won't win the White House and women still struggle for power -- as a very culture we take it away from each other.

Works of Imagination

2007-06-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

The lineup to see Gore Vidal talk to Adam Gopnik on a theatre stage (which doesn't at first have the most exciting ring to it) was a full sidewalk wide and four blocks long, a wonderful thing to witness for an author and not a rock star or Paris Hilton. How encouraging! Upon closer inspection the crowd was definitely of a certain age, perhaps not a full head of hair or set of teeth in the lot. Ah well, you take your fans where you can get them.

Vidal is vital but very elderly, an "old" 81 if you see what I mean, wheelchair bound and a bit shaky in everything but the mind. Sadly the combination of his old man's voice, a poor microphone and acoustics and my own aging ears meant that I could barely make out what he was saying, though I was perhaps alone in this -- the rest of the crowd laughed uproariously at various junctures and I laughed along too, so as not to seem as though I didn't get the joke. You don't want to appear stupid anywhere near Vidal.

One thing I did hear was the answer to Gopnik's question about what writers Vidal admires these days. The short answer I think is "none". Why? "Writers today seem to want to TELL IT LIKE IT IS!" lamented Vidal, who cried there is no more flight of fancy or work of imagination. Hence an interest in children's books.

"Telling it like it is" is certainly a trend, and now people aren't even hiding the fact the story is autobiographical. The first such book I recognized was Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, which I found remarkable because it was about very ordinary people doing ordinary things, to whom nothing happened. And yet it was a good read. It takes a fine writer to pull that off.

However, I think Vidal is wrong. Some of the most entertaining books lately are those that are entirely made up and fanciful -- Harry Potter of course being a most obvious example. The Time Traveller's Wife is a story entirely of fantasy, and I'm not speaking merely of the time travel. This book encourages us to think there is such a thing as a destined soul mate, a recognizable twin in the world. It's a comforting if erroneous thought. Is this book a part of any pantheon, will it live through the ages? Probably not. But as a pleasant and leisurely Saturday afternoon read it sure beats Stone Diaries. Same goes for The Thirteenth Tale (delightful, and also poignantly about twin-ness, finding the "other" who completes you) or Special Topics in Calamity Physics. None of these have the intellectual heft to attract the likes of Vidal I'm sure. That said, these books provide a kind of nourishment sorely missing in a frantic and dire world. It is wonderful to get lost in a book again, any book that offers its larger truths in colourful, whimsical packages.

Sister Age

2007-06-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

Aging happens suddenly, in discrete increments, with a thud, not a gentle creeping up on you like you'd expect. When I turned 40 I suddenly, overnight, gained 10-lbs and grew a belly that wasn't there before; at 45 suddenly I can't read the prescription label. And yes, there are a few prescriptions. Such is age.

Another victim of age is memory. There was a time when mine was a steel trap, I could remember plots and titles and intricate details of everything I read -- now I look at the covers of beloved books and I can't recall anything about them except that I enjoyed them. In some cases, of books that are truly well-thumbed, I see handwriting in the margins and think wow, that sentence made an impression on someone....but that someone, I judge from the handwriting, was me. It must be akin to the onset of Alzheimer's, to know that you know that face (cover) and yet -- sister, daughter, mother, friend? Not at all clear.

As a younger booklover I kept everything I read even if I hadn't liked it much, out of respect for the writer who toiled and I suppose also out of respect for my own self, who also toiled, spending that amount of time and effort getting to know the story. It seemed akin to burning a book to get rid of it in any way, even if that was to give it to someone worthy. After spending some years in the book business this changed. A survival instinct kicked in. There are so very many books you see and to keep all of them makes the apartment ever-smaller. I also shifted thinking on reading itself; I was drawn to the book company I worked with because I was committed to its original mission: connect booklovers to the books, inspire people to read. I embraced this fully and so it seemed somehow selfish to keep a book I'd enjoyed. Better to let it fly free, to inspire another soul. I began (and continue) to distribute everything I love to anyone I think needs a good few hours and inspiration.

But the memory, well, that is getting in the way of things. The books I've loved in the past reside with me still, on my bookshelves or bedside table, and should anyone want a suggestion on what to read (something I am proud to say I am asked quite often) I had a running, physical, literal list of literature to refer to and suggest. Now I'm sketchy. I know I have loved a lot of books so far this year. But, because the books no longer live with me like children I tend to forget who they are -- I loved The Thirteenth Tale but now don't quite remember why; there was another book about something what was it now, it was interesting maybe if I stop thinking about it it will suddenly pop into my head ...It gets all jumbled. So, I think I need to revert for very different reasons, keep my friends close so I can recall them well enough to introduce them to others.

Sister Age, by the way, is a terrific book by the very terrific MFK Fisher. Now, what it's about exactly -- you know I can't tell you. But read it, it's good.

Essential ASP.NET 2.0 and Building a Website for Dummies

2007-05-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

I have a theory about professions and those who know me should skip to another paragraph because they have heard this all too often. A profession is a language and only those within it know what the language is, and this ensures that the rest of us must pay fees (sometimes exhorbitant) to avail ourselves of those who know it. A professional will tell you that the definition of "profession" is "self-regulating". Eg., Law is a profession because there are law societies that get mad at people who are lawyers and who behave badly and so on and so on. Nice for them to say. The reality is, and trust me, the language thing.
So, when you recieve a lawyer's letter telling you that you must pay your ex-spouse another gazillion, you yourself could write back "piss up a rope" but that would be wrong and not the right language. Instead you must hire a lawyer who will talk to you about why your spouse has a point (an hour or two at a rate of hundreds per) and then will write a letter back saying "piss up a rope my learned friend" or thereabouts for another few hundred and you will be no further ahead and that many lawyer's fees behind.
Such is the nature of a profession.

A profession I have to deal with daily comes by many names but let's just call it technology for short. This is a vast black box in many a corporation and it is those in technology alone who will say yay or nay or yay by how much money to any idea, strategy, innovation or thought you may have. None of us not conversant in the layers of meaning of Lord of the Rings AND Star Trek AND South Park AND whatever game has just been released have ANY idea of what is the what so we can't truly argue. We lie back and hope they'll do something for us and not to us, and hope further for the best. It is easy to feel the dark of the black box. When I last built a major e-comm website, for example, we had a concept for how best to present our merchandise and showed the tech team the idea in a photoshop sort of document, as per how we might present a magazine page. Oh no simply cannot be done my god are you crazy the internet cannot do such things no no no we were told and I am not joking later that same DAY we saw a live version of same, created by some rebel on the tech team.
So.
I am working now on a major redesign of another major website and so I am hoping to head such events off at the pass (or the past) by knowing MORE THAN IS EXPECTED about the applications we are using.
All travel, perhaps especially intellectual, starts at the bookstore.
So I went to my local big box wonderful rich bookstore and looked for books that would tell me what I needed to know about the platform I would be using and the applications and flexibility I could count on.
I bought Essential .net 2.0 because the intro was nicely written and I could sort of get the gist. I bought the Dummies book because I realize that while I use terms like "applications" like crazy, I am not sure I could win a round of Reach for the Top if asked to express the exact definition.

The sum of this reading is I want to tell you about not the books that are written, but the ones that should be.

I understand one word in ten of Essential ASP.NET 2.0 and there are pages and pages devoted to code which is entirely revealing I'm sure to those already in the club. I love that coders, those remote folk who don't seem to communicate with the rest of us, use such sweet terms as "children" to refer to what I might (though I may be wrong) call sub-pages. This from those who also use names like "Mozilla" to describe a browser. A browser to me is someone wandering around a store waiting to be inspired ("no thanks, I'm just a browser") whereas "Mozilla" is close to "monster" ("leave me alone, I'm a monster"). A very different feeling is conjured. This may not be the essential point this book is making.

Building a Website for Dummies is, sadly, way too dumb.

So all this preamble leads me to this simple point: if there are courses you can take on "finance for non-financial executives" and such, why can't I find a book that tells me what I might want to know as NOT A TECH GEEK about .net? What my business can now accomplish, what great customer service I can provide, what wonderful contextual content I can give you, a visitor to my site, so that you find what you need to know without having to search too hard? Where is "technology for non-tech executives"?

I think this is a big gap in the market.

So I am not describing here what you can read but what you cannot. Sorry.

The Age of Innocence - more

2007-05-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

I must have read this book a half dozen times now, and I've seen the movie about as many. The movie is worth it, too, not just for extended views of Daniel Day Lewis but have you ever seen a glove, a demure one, not as per Dita von Teese and her ilk, handled so sensually and erotically? In those early days of manners and layers and layers of dressing you take your sensual pleasures where you can.

If we focus strictly on relationships and not the larger views of art, culture and social mores, this book is cautionary and richly detailed. Edith Wharton tips her hand in terms of where her views are on the worth of the individual versus the group in that the warm, alluring, clever, imaginative Countess Olenska is a far more captivating character than the conventional, dreary (but sweet! oh so sweet) May.

Newland Archer thinks he is a good man but like many who take this as a virtue, he is merely a weak man who follows where he is led. He has a passionate flirtation with Olenska but balks at the social cost of being in a relationship with someone so original. She has his heart and soul, but something else -- what IS it, this thing inside so many people that causes them to compromise living their true lives?? -- moves him toward May.

And then May outplays him. Plays the oldest trick in the book. While he can faithfully explain his unfaithfulness to her -- he had to marry her, it was expected, but he doesn't LOVE her you see, he loves you Olenska!! May gets pregnant.

So what we know of Archer is that he is deeply, deeply unworthy. Olenska removes herself from the fray and at first you can think poor dear, he betrayed her and she is sad and sorry. But she isn't I don't think. He has played both sides and she now finds him tedious. And forces him to accept the choice he has clearly made. No more cake eating for Archer.

In the end Archer has May and a family and Olenska retains her intriguing life and her circle of interesting, artistic friends and, in the end, the interest of one of Archer's children.

But who has won?

Neither. There is no winning of course -- Archer has a family and the love of children and conventional success and social position. Olenska, and I relate to her I blush to admit, I hope I am not overestimating how deeply interesting I am (though in fairness Wharton has ensured we ALL prefer Olenska) Miss Olenska has her circle of witty and intellectual friends who we know for sure are fascinated by her and adore her from afar. It is not fully spelled out but it seems she has never had that great soul-touching love. Perhaps it is impossible to love someone so glittering and glorious, as she is extraordinary enough to elicit fear (that you might not measure up, that if she left YOU the hollow absence would obliterate you). Both Archer and Olenska remain admired but unseen and unknown to their last day. Perhaps the point is their only chance at being truly known, and loved, was with each other. And Archer choked.

It's good that he recognized he choked. In the end his son asks if he will come into the salon to see Olenska again. He has the good grace to stay away.

Returning to the Age of Innocence

2007-05-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

When distracted by distraction and unable to sink properly into a book it sometimes helps to revisit past loves. One of these is The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

There are few writers as truly modern or perceptive as Wharton, who depicts a grasping, aspiring, acquiring culture that should be long dead but alas is thriving, in much the same form as it was in her day. People will say Wharton writes of society and its manners and mannerisms, and I find her acute eye for what goes on among women, and women and men, particularly instructive. She missed nothing, and not much has changed.

The Age of Innocence speaks particularly loudly to me. Newland Archer loves Countess Olenska, said to be disgraced in the eyes of her peers. Olenska is not disgraceful in the least -- she is strong, smart, real and since those around her are merely strong and smart, she loses. She is far too dangerous, far too rich a brew or too adventurous a choice for the sad Archer to make and he instead is swept into the seemingly gentle May's seemingly gentle embrace.

But May is far more devious than Olenska, and plays her cards well. She is not thought to be anything but sweet and slightly stupid and so hides in plain sight, she is the reasonable and expected choice and lives the life she wants without hesitation or obstacle. Archer and Olenska not so much.

Would that Archer were stronger, or not so concerned about "ought".

I read this book years ago when I played the Olenska role in another life, the whore to another woman's virgin. I lost then, too, but lost only the man. Like Olenska, I retained the life of a seeker, a thinker, a real person which perhaps is better in the end....fewer babies, yes, but fewer regrets as well.

Perhaps I am mistaken about that. In a world made up of virgins and whores, the virgins seem to do pretty well. They are satisfied with less. They understand the weakness that brought them their victory and they're fine with it, they don't care that much about truth and beauty anyway. Just comfort and the joy of knowing you have a place and you're always in it.

Lucky ducks.

Reading and distracted from distraction by distraction

2007-05-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Quick question: How distracted to you have to be in order to be unable to focus on even a murder mystery?

Answer: Pretty damn distracted.

Murder mysteries are literary junk food, the go-to when under stress and pressure when something more shall we say challenging, like a proper novel, is way beyond the brain cells. But, here's the thing -- my eyes run over the pages and I turn them at intervals but I have no idea what I'm reading.

I'm currently wading through The Lighthouse, NOT by Woolf who wrote something about a lighthouse but PD James. You can't get more of a warm bath of a book than a PD James can you? And yet here I am on page 75 and I have no idea whatsovever as to who is dead or why I care or who is talking just now. Maybe the murder hasn't happened yet. No, can't be that, the police and Dalgliesh are in attendance. Ok, so, the choice is to start over or give it up.

I had similar issues with the apparently very good Hakan Nesser. He is part of a trend among publishers to find hugely popular mystery authors from countries that don't publish in English, buy up the rights and issue to us. A trend started by the "discovery" of Henning Mankell, also a million best seller in his native land who is a newby here.

I don't know much about the Nesser book but I CAN tell you that his author photo shows a very handsome man who lives in Sweden and New York. No mention of "Lives with his wife and two daughters" so this is good news....have I mentioned he's very handsome? I wonder which bars he goes to in New York, and I wonder how tall he is maybe I can google him or perhaps would he possibly by some fluke be on facebook let me check that out...

See? It goes nowhere, I finished the book and again, I can't tell you who is dead but the mystery of Borkmann's Point is solved no later than the last page and as I recall some of the sentences (not of the jail kind) were very good. I do remember that.

OK so this is becoming a desperate situation, I really love to read. So, I've tried magazines, the default of defaults and generally speaking I read them, well, Vogue anyway, as a book, starting at the first page and reading every word because if Anna Wintour thought the story is important, it is. Alas I've found myself turning pages without absorbing much except that Kate Moss can look a little hippy in straight leg jeans and flats, how interesting even a supermodel can look like she has a big back yard how interesting hmmm best never try that look myself remember to always wear heels yup good idea.

See? I've gone pathetic.

That Extra Half an Inch - Victoria Beckham

2007-05-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Posh is one of those rare women (but they are always women) who gets to stand for everything bad in the world. Take her out and you solve a number of issues at once -- England would have won (something or other) and Spain would win (something or other) the universe would be less shallow and women everywhere would get a free kick at her glorious husband. She is a lightning rod for criticism and controversy, the woman can't wear a pair of jeans without being called names, and can't try to do something useful with her life without being called a dilettante. Like there aren't LOTS of women who have married their way to owning a bikini store.

Poor rich Posh.

I've just read that extra half an inch (the lack of caps is for accuracy, none appear on the shiny pretty book cover) and what we have here is the world's best girlfriend. Vic is a girly girl in a household full of boys and she is utterly oblivious and unrepentent about it. Her book is about style and living the girly life, dressing up, feeling good about yourself (for knowing about lipgloss not for saving the bloody world and let's face it, the former is easier to achieve than the latter so why set yourself up for failure) . It is fun and frothy, and what becomes clear is that Victoria is really nice and exactly the right person to take with you shopping, exactly who you would want in the seat next to you on the plane. This is no small matter -- taking anyone shopping with you is fraught with peril, as in, do these pants actually look good or is she gloating quietly that I really do look fat in that; trapped on an airplane with boringboy is a pain worse than turbulance.

For the new love of Posh I've also checked out her official website and blog and it is equally charming and delightful, equally sparkly and cute. But it is also more than that -- Posh is funny, disarming, self-deprecating in an amusing and not nutty way (welcome to LA Posh). Check her out, she's terrific: www.dvbstyle.com.

And you know what? Those jeans with the crowns on the bum are great. I don't care what you say.

Eat Pray Love - the final analysis

2007-05-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

Eat Pray Love would seem a perfect book for me right now, truly. And yet, I found the chipper tone and cutesy jokey manner way too, well, chipper and cutesy -- I am not so sufficiently past the things that ail me, those same things that were ailing the author, to be able to laugh along with her. That said, the book has had echoes I didn't expect.

Author Liz Gilbert embarked on a journey of the heart and soul to try to reclaim herself (or perhaps to actually find herself in the first place) after a difficult divorce and a heartbreak over another seemingly perfect man. I am heartbroken that a seemingly perfect man has decided against Uz, or the Uz we knew anyway, and so the journey Liz took was of special interest. Rarely does a book and the therapy it is supposed to do match so perfectly.

Liz and I would likely not be friends -- her determined optimism gets on my nerves. As well, I cannot imagine wanting to meditate in a place where drinks are decidedly NOT served, and am bored senseless with the idea of chanting and getting spiritual-- the heart of the book and her life. This is more my flaw than hers, I readily admit it. She is both lighter and deeper than I am, and both ends of that spectrum took me out of the book's flow.

However, Liz did offer wisdom and her book has stayed with me in ways I didn't expect. She took months off to meditate in an ashram, a real one, the kind you find in India, and she clearly broke through to the very soul of herself. She found the core of the universe. But she also found one truth that resonated deeply and may resonate with anyone who inexplicably cannot see the forest for the trees with men, and who attaches herself to what they colloquially call "bad boys" or at least men bad for her. Because such a thing as hitching yourself to someone bad for you does not actually make sense, there has to be a neurotic reason for it.

What Liz discovered is that she loved most not the man she was with but who he could be-- she loved her vision of him, in other words. This is perilously close to a narcissist who loves only an image. But if I were to be painfully honest I would have to say that I loved who I knew he could be, who he was on the way to becoming....not so much who he reverted to and who he IS, in fact, right this minute. People don't change, anyone will tell you that, but it isn't actually true. People sometimes don't STAY changed, that's the thing.

That I loved someone who no longer exists is not truly a consolation -- it's a death, really, and I grieve it deeply. It is frustrating that he COULD have existed. But that is a selfish thing for me to wish, of course.

Still, for this small piece of insight and small peace of mind, the book was well worth the experience.

Eat, Pray, Love more

2007-04-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love is doing what I've always wanted to do when my heart was broken, which is the BIG feeling, or when my heart had turned to dust, which is the utter LACK of feeling and the state I associate with depression. She is on a trip of discovery, discovering herself mostly, eating and drinking and exploring her way through, at this point in the book, Italy.

This is the cure I've been told. When you're heartbroken the only way to recover is to fall in love with YOURSELF. Do things for yourself, pamper yourself...I used to imagine that if I needed some soul-nurturing I would sit at the narrow lake-facing bar at Canoe with a glass of something utterly amazing and simply watch the inland freshwater sea. Maybe I will do this next week instead of eating lunch.

I say that but I know I won't do it.

There are two books I'm reading now, to try to get through the morass. The Brain that Changes Itself offers a heartening bit of encouragement, the bottom line being something akin to "Just think about something else". My therapist says the trick is to simply (ha! "simply". Fools! that's like "fall in love with yourSELF" -- it you could do THAT you wouldn't need the help....) rewire the brain, train yourself to do different things, learn new things, break the indelible pattern....the brain, you see, gets accustomed to doing the same things over and over again so love with people who are cruel to you becomes comfortable because, well, that's what's always happened. Think of it as muscle memory of an emotional kind.

This "just think of something else" theory is probably a good idea and I am no doubt oversimplifying the theory of this book to the point of insult but it is so WASP-oriented, so unnatural a response, I find myself slipping off the premise. It is also a theory oddly reminscient of the ex's go-to reaction to absolutely anything emotional. Eg.: "The smell of roses always makes me sad." "Stop smelling them then." We call this "being Yorkshired", Yorkshire being where he says he learned this bit of emotional wisdom.

I am also reading Soul Murder Revisited, which I bought by mistake (who knew there would be TWO books with Soul Murder in the title? happily, both by the same man so....) and this is striking closer to home. Being in a bad relationship with someone devastatingly cruel is masochism, and masochism is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. Through long experience you come to side with those who hurt you, you come to believe you deserve it. In fact the idea that you don't is not just absurd and laughable but angry-making. A sadist destroys because that is more bearable than feeling vulnerable to love, and frankly anyone who loves him, TRULY loves him, is an idiot anyway because he is unlovable.

Yup, it's all a sickness. Maybe it would be better to eat pastry in Rome. It may not be the cure but it's a better diversion.

Eat, Pray, Love

2007-04-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

There are few books that would seem to hit the spot I'm currently in better than this one.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert is a memoir by a woman who needed a BIG CHANGE, who realized her life wasn't working, who had to get over someone. Well, two people, the husband she dumped and the man she fled to in order to feel better about about the husband she dumped.

My good friend who recommended this to me recently said "I love the book. I wonder if I like her?" and this is kind of the question. It is good therapy, she is endeavouring to find the essence of life as it should be lived, to realign values. I just wish she didn't sound quite so smug...if some of the pain or truth that caused her to wander the world were more apparent.

Maybe I'm just jealous that to heal herself she could afford (if only the time!!) to travel, explore, learn.

Let's see how this one turns out.

The Emperor's Children by Clair Messud

2007-02-01T10:57:00.000-08:00

There seemed to be little reason why this book found itself on any "best of the year" lists. Truly, it is a nice story of a group of fairly shallow characters populating the Upper West Side of New York, or characters with ambitions of same, but is it more than that? And, I shouldn't have been reading it at all, in that it takes place in the city where I lived with the ex and I've sworn off any book, movie or song that reminds me in any way of the life we led; however, the emperor's children as depicted were sufficiently unengaging and unworthy of respect that it seemed okay. Anyway, we lived on the lower east side and everyone knows UWS is a whole other universe.

In the end I did find the book useful in my own personal therapy. One character, Danielle, is an oddly attractive friend of the gorgeous, talented and lazy Marina, and Marina's father, an eminence gris or dirty old man depending on your politics develops a crush on her and then embarks on an affair with her. I run away from love stories at the best of times and certainly now, when the very thought is a dagger to my heart -- but this one was sufficiently sordid it had an appeal to my cynical side. And, as per the older man in my life, Marina's father does away with poor old Danielle when she becomes just a tad too inconvenient. He slips away and into his big grown up life as though there were nothing else to do, no greater truth to own up to beyond the one he invented for himself, no regard for the "truth" he devised with her. He lacked courage, he lacked charm, he lacked anything approaching a backbone and yet anyone looking upon him would see a very big man on campus....and this is a curious scenario that I find often in my own life and quite often in the lives of others. So many wizards of Oz out there, pretending to be grown ups and yet mired in games of make believe.

Danielle nearly loses her mind and her life over this betrayal, and why not -- he had led her into love as though all were safe for her. Or, more or less safe, as safe as anyone in love who feels love is requited needs to be.

If I may be so bold, there are three passages that save this book entirely, pushing it beyond page-turner into something that could live forever. The long suffering and mostly whole wife of the cad says "...I had to learn to see him clearly, and learn not to be disappointed." I've never been able to do that, and perhaps this is one reason why boys-as-men flee from me. Better to run before you are dispatched. Better to leave before the truth is out.

And then there is this: "...what nobody knew or could ever know, of course, was that you'd found your other half, your Platonic completion, and then your self -- he'd been her self..." I loved this line, so perfectly did it answer what I have not been able to -- as in my own situation, WHY did my own particular cad so imprint me? And why did his departure mean so much, when reason should say good riddance?

And then this, on the heels of the above: "...if anyone could see her they'd mock her mercilessly for being fool enoughto get into this situation and, having got into it, for behaving this way." Amen.

The Places That Scare You

2007-01-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

Some books follow us around, dogging us, goading us to read them.

A long time ago I was in a similar state of romantic distress (when oh when will I learn??) and a good friend of mine recommended I read the entire output of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun. He was the religion ("ideas, opinions and beliefs") buyer for a major bookstore chain and he was always trying to get us to buy his stuff. I bought the books but didn't bother to read them, and took to drinking instead.

But here I am again. And again, Pema Chodron has come back to haunt me. Her book, The Places That Scare You, was recommended without reservation by a gentle reader, and this time I am accepting the prodding of fate. I am actually reading When Things Fall Apart, since they did, and I was heartened by a passage where Chodron says she was led to Buddhism through anger at her husband. She was sipping a nice cup of tea one day and he pulled into the driveway of their home, got out of the car, slammed the door and told her their relationship was over and he wanted a divorce. This sounds so strikingly similar to what happened to me (the drive-by shooting nature of the End, the sudden-ness and one-sidedness of it) that I thought, okay. Show me how you got over it.

I'll let you know.

More what is the what

2007-01-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

NYT's Michiko Kakutani calls What is the What by Dave Eggers "a startling act of literary ventriloquism" and this sums it up with typical brilliance. It is a wodge of incredible writing and better reporting on a point in one country's history when the unimaginable was everyday.

I am as yet just half way through this fine book (fie on Eggers for calling an inferior example "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius", I hope he regrets that), and our hero Valentino Achak Deng has just buried his childhood friend, a boy with whom he shared a crib, a village in Sudan, history. William K walked beside him on the trek to Ethiopia (what madness, frying pan to fire, or dirt desert to ... dirt desert) and on this day, William K simply sat down beside a tree, closed his eyes, and died. Others died more magnificently or certainly with more violence; this was a startling death for Achak in that it was so gentle a slipping away. And profound. "I could not remember more than a handful of those days that we had not been together, that I had not run with William K. We wre simply friends who lived in a village together and expected to always be boys and friends in our village." It does not seem to be an unreasonable expectation, certainly not an extravagant one.

Yet William K walked until all energy and life ebbed away. He did not reach the next place, neither Ethiopia nor adulthood. William K, we know, was a fabulist, he invented a rich and wonderful Ethiopia where the Sudanese were well-fed, could drink all the cool water a body could want, had power. His Ethiopia was magnificent. Maybe he had to die before he could die of disappointment.

I wonder what it takes to survive, why one body does and another doesn't. These two boys were born together and stood side by side, yet one died and one did not. Victor Frankl thought it was attitude, in a way, that saved some from death in concentration camps. William K had a very positive one, and so his death is all the more worrying....if hope, that magic element, doesn't help, my god think of the consequences.

As Achak says, "It was a broken world...that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K."

What? is the What??

2007-01-16T17:05:00.000-08:00

Dave Eggers made a bit splash years ago with the quirky, cheeky and weird A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the story of what happened next when Eggers' parents both died and he was left to care for his little brother. I was working in books retail at the time and this seemed to be the first of its kind, a post-modern but heartwrenching work of perhaps not staggering genius, but a kind of genius nonetheless. Lots of us didn't quite get it, and lots of us felt we ought to like it even though we didn't really and thought the diagrams were a bit much; nonetheless we supported this book and now we all know it went on to staggering sales and launched a career for Eggers in publishing and groundbreaking of all kinds.

The title should have been more of a tip-off than it was.

My first brush with Eggers the man was at the Horseshoe Tavern, a still-gritty bastion of what was arty Queen West in Toronto. It was an odd and perhaps courageous place to hold a book event, and maybe even tickets were sold. Unheard of. What ensued was not so much a reading as a performance, with Eggers, all adorable curls and pseudo-humility being the bratty smart ass and his friend (or a performer) riffing with him, dressed as a superhero, The Wolverine. Not much reading got done, or even talking -- it was more an SNL sketch than anything else and at the end, Eggers invited questions from the audience. Some brave souls obliged.

Eggers then "answered" with snide remarks and sarcasm, and most of us got the joke and resisted raising a hand. One man, though, persisted. He was older and stood up and asked a reasonable question. He asked Eggers how his family viewed the book, because in telling his own story he of course co-opted theirs, and what is this like, especially when one family member, the little brother, was so, well, little and thus possibly even more vulnerable than your average subject. Clearly this was a reasonable question asked by a man who not only had read the book but seemed genuinely curious about what the answer but be, and yet Eggers was relentless in his schtick. Made fun. Tossed off. The man persisted yet further, put the question another way, only to be shunted aside by The Wolverine and Bratty Dave. I hate to see book lovers mocked, ever, and certainly hate it when the mocker is the author himself. It was ugly.

I decided then never to buy another Eggers book, should there be one, and have never purchased McSweeneys or The Believer or any of his other apparently fabulous bits of publishing. I did almost bend the rule when I heard about his literacy organization in New York, where kids learn to love words and reading through their work at a superhero supply store (long story, but a good one).

However, I find myself unable to keep to my Eggers-free promise.

The NYT Book Review so raved about What is the What, it seemed we finally had a work of staggering genius (not the first time this lucky bastard will see THAT in print).

But that may not in itself have been enough.

However, I have had my heart broken and have been spinning inward and inward again, unable to lift my head some days. I wanted to read something about someone who had bigger problems than I do, just to take my mind off it.You will hear much more about What is the What from actual book critics who will tell you important things about this important book. It is a "novel" and an "autobiography" (this sliding around is typical po-mo and typical Eggers, no?) of one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan and it embarrasses me greatly to admit I was a reporter once, who covered actual news, and I knew nothing of this mass movement, this horrible bloodbath in the Sudan than left children enslaved, abandonned, or murdered, and I knew nothing of the tribe of young boys walking by foot to what they hoped would be the safety of Ethiopia. The carnage and evil is breathtaking, the everyday hardship, and the courage -- and luck -- of our hero profound.

The story thus far is told in a lilting, formal and yet poetic way. In a soulful way. In a way that is careful of language, trying not to say too much or overstate what surely must be tempting to embellish if only to satisfy a primal sense of rage over the atrocities children were forced to witness.

I am not yet finished this book. But yes, it is about someone whose problems are worse than mine. Who faced real carnage, not the casual betrayal I did. It has taken my mind off things. And turned it on to others.

Entre Nous. Every girl needs an inner French girl

2007-01-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

It is used far too much but when you really look at it, really make the words mean what they might have the first time someone used what is now a cliche, "broken heart" is terribly descriptive. Something is broken, jangly, all sharp edges. Something essential is now detritus. Something isn't working anymore.

I'm too old for it but having my heart broken has left me untethered and unable to remember what used to interest me. Nothing does, much; not anymore. Some call this "losing the centre" and that's how it feels -- where there was once focus and comfort, a path and a long list of shared habits there is now....nothing. A blank. A blank that nonetheless hurts like hell.

My friends tell me the cure is to turn inside, though not in mourning. They mean return the focus from HIM to myself, they encourage all manner of pampering and indulgence. I used to say the same to them, when it was their turn to be in bits on the side of the road. Damn hard to do, though, when the "self" that was once loved and assumed lovable has been so summarily and peremptorily rejected. It's hard to get selfish when you wish your self would just go away.

But as in all things, there is a cure in a book. Not a typical self-help book though I cast no aspersion, there may be good ones out there. I have been reading, over and over again, Entre Nous. I have just recently felt a twinge of interest in releasing my own inner French girl. We all have one, let's face it.This little silly frivolous fun book is the doctor's orders. It tells of doing just what we must in this condition -- tend to our own garden, pull in a bit, don't give away so much. Be respectful of your own time and your own self -- body, spirit, mind. Dress better, take good care of your skin, nurture your interests and your mind, be a little mysterious. Know your own worth and make sure that any applicants for your time or good humour are worthy of your time, interest, energy. But mostly, nurture your mind and your soul. Become happy in your own skin. Don't give up solitude too easily. Learn to value yourself so much that you can spot a monster a mile away....because you really would rather spend time on your own than with someone not quite appreciative enough. Love yourself the way you wish he did.

Too crazy? Mad? Silly? It's working.

books for broken hearts

2007-01-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

Reading has always been a solace and an escape-- but I’ve found even books now contain landmines. Since my baby left me I can’t bear anything that takes place in New York (where we lived) or London (where he is now) or any place in Britain for that matter (gone are Ruth Rendell et al, decent mysteries, all UK fiction) ; love is out (natch) and therefore gone is anything smart and sassy and all chick lit; and so too are books about writers (he is one and there is a plethora of these. “Write what you know” yes, but honest to god fiction means you get to make stuff up) reporters (he was one, and this means even movies are no distraction, Scoop is definitely out, The Devil Wears Prada iffy) So this leaves me pretty much with murder mysteries set in Chicago (if I skip over the bits where the heroine has a love interest/tussle) and children’s books. Happily, however, I have found a few good reads which will soothe an aching heart and if it not be aching, will at least entertain you.
How I Live Now is pegged as YA, a book for kids, but that sells it short. It is a story about children, yes, or rather "young adults" and alarmingly it is set in England but not an England any of us could possibly know -- it is a country of another time, embroiled in a nameless, amorphous war that takes all parents away and throws the children into a kind of chaos. The war makes no sense, the children are defenseless and struggling to survive, to figure it out, to find comfort if not joy; power fails, systems fail, rules fail. The story captures the creeping anxiety that The Painted Bird does, without being quite so brutal. So why read it? Because it is also beautiful, a story of survival which quite frankly hit the spot, because we all need to consider, in the age of terrorism (or terrible acts, per ex) "how I live now."
I have also been addicted to two books I blush to talk about -- Elegance, by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux and Entre Nous - A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl by Debra Ollivier. It is my theory that great books, or books we love, are a function of when we read them as much as their actual content. When you need it, there is nothing like The Fountainhead to stir you -- years later not so much. I am not proud of this but in my state of inner turmoil and sadness it is refreshing to read a how-to manual on being more French, and hopefully more alluring, as per Entre Nous; Elegance is a book on, well, elegance and how to attain it, or how a woman attained it in the late 1950's and early 60's. This is all about taking good care yourself, preserving inner peace, the remaking and remodeling of a self which in my case was left behind by a beloved. These books are fun but they are also a way back to centre when you are feeling too raw in the world -- both speak of discretion and looking after your own soul.