If not now, when?

Back to blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:33:00 +0000

I don't remember taking this photo and I don't know where it was taken other than somewhere in the Lower Mainland (could be Burnaby or New West, I guess, but I just don't recognize the background). The notes on the original flickr post indicate I stole the sweet peas somewhere and my focus for the shot was what looks like an air bubble in the glass (despite the fact that this glass does not have an air bubble).

So I dunno.

But it's nice to have figured out how to rescue the blog that got lost when I neglected to renew my domain name but left it pointed at the domain name I no longer own for four years.

So - back to blogging, it seems. I've been working on several other projects, including one I call the #badpoetryproject. It's not that I'm setting out to write bad poetry. It just seems inevitable, so it's a pre-emptive hashtag.

2014 reading

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:19:00 +0000

Just a list for now - 50 54 in total (I'm surprised at how little I've read when it seems I spent a huge chunk of every day doing precisely that). Of those 50 54, ~~three~~ four were rereads (although again I thought I'd reread more this year than usual). Confusion reigns. I got rid of so many books when I left Alberta. I'm not missing them at all, although they were certainly difficult to part with (that makes sense if you know me). But there will always be books.

I gave up competitive reading last year or the year before. By competitive reading I mean staying on top of at least the Booker, Giller and Governor General's award short lists reading, and ensuring I'd read all the year's Big New Books in a timely fashion. It was stressing me out - I felt like my reading was being directed by malevolent algorithms designed by publishers and colluded with by librarian hold requests. In other words, I was driving myself nuts and for what - a leisure activity?

Luminous this year: Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which I wanted never to end; Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows; and Ben H. Winters' dystopian trilogy beginning with The Last Policeman. I have a real aversion to those dystopian tales so it's a huge compliment to Winters' writing and his characterization that I read all three in the series.

(Just added: Robinson and MacLeod plus two more of the Ian Hamilton Ava Lee series - January 4, 2015. N.B. There are two 'started but not finished titles that should be included - Susan Delacourt's Shopping for Votes and Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan's Tragedy in the Commons: Former Members of Parliament Speak Out About Canada's Failing Democracy.)

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

No Great Mischief - Alistair MacLeod (reread on the news of his death)

The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - Ian Hamilton

The Two Sisters of Borneo - Ian Hamilton

Back When We Were Grownups - Anne Tyler (reread)

The Wild Beasts of Wuhan - Ian Hamilton

Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life - Trevor Cole

Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi

Just One Evil Act - Elizabeth George

Small g - Patricia Highsmith

The Wildfire Season - Andrew Pyper

Emancipation Day - Wayne Grady

Fault Lines - Nancy Huston

The Lady Elizabeth - Alison Weir

When Will There Be Good News? - Kate Atkinson

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag - Alan Bradley

Let Me Be Frank with You - Richard Ford

Benediction - Kent Haruf

The Emperor's Children - Claire Massud

The Last Life - Claire Messud

Digging to America - Anne Tyler

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson

The Orenda - Joseph Boyden

The Burgess Boys - Elizabeth Strout

The Shadow Girls - Henning Mankell

Bedtime Story - Robert J. Wiersma (reread)

Medicine Walk - Richard Wagamese

The Bear - Claire Cameron

The Land of Dreams - Vidar Sundstol

The Beautiful Mystery - Louise Penny

The Last Policeman - Ben H. Winters

Evergreen - Rebecca Rasmussen

Hell Going - Lynn Coady

Countdown City - Ben H. Winters

World of Trouble - Ben H. Winters

Corduroy Mansions - Alexander McCall Smith

All My Puny Sorrows - Miriam Toews

Dead Politician Society - Robin Spano

Death Plays Poker - Robin Spano

The Second Deadly Sin - Asa Larsson

Until Thy Wrath Be Past - Asa Larsson

A Treacherous Paradise - Henning Mankell

A Fatal Grace - Louise Penny

The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith

Standing in Another Man's Grave - Ian Rankin

Trespass - Rose Tremain

Mount Pleasant - Don Gillmor

The Child's Child - Barbara Vine

All That Is - James Salter

Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (reread)

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt (reread)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

Helpless - Barbara Gowdy

One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson

The Betrayers - David Bezmozgis

Photo: You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm. - Colette

No idea where I got this ornament, but I laughed when I read the quote. As long as I do them with enthusiasm, then.

The Unsuspected Poet

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 05:57:00 +0000

Going through some my parents' stuff (which I was quite sure I'd gone through several times before, but apparently not thoroughly), I came across an undated and untitled poem written by my father. I had no idea he'd ever written one, and the funny thing is that it looks like a first draft as there are only two cross-outs. This one is 100 per cent autobiographical (and untitled).

In 19-74 promotion came our way.
Away from Ottawa, friends and French
We travelled east to Scotia shores
For a year or more we worked like hell
And lived in Dartmouth like a snail in a shell.
With pioneer heart we packed our bags -- our books with bricks for shelves were moved
To Shubie and the Sutherland place.
A deal was struck, a fee arranged.
We then fell prey to a knave so foul --
our prized possessions proceeded to fly
As fast as a mouse in the jaws of an owl

I'd love to know when it was written and why he never sent me a copy of it - I know I used to send him my poetry until he offered me money to stop doing so (hasn't stopped me writing 'em, Dad, and thanks for the cash - it was a more than fair rate given what most poets earn). It's an odd rhyme scheme: A, B, C, D, D, E, F, G, H, G. But then he always was an original.

A few notes of explanation:

Away from French: he means away from the torture that was a year-long French immersion course, not away from Francophones. Some of his best friends were Francophones. Although he was so distraught when his department moved to Hull (out of temporary quarters in Ottawa's west end that were thrown up just after World War II and were well past their 'best buy' date) that he started car pooling. Because, as he claimed, 'All Quebec drivers are crazy.' (Sorry. But you have to admit, the Montreal driving style does differ from that of other cities. And at the time, Quebec roads were inferior to Ontario's. Of course that statement was broad enough to include all Anglophone drivers resident in the province as well.) This explains why, on trips from Ottawa to New Brunswick, we had to travel through the US, crossing the border into upstate New York and safely crossing back at Calais, Maine.

Becoming officially bilingual was necessary to his chances for promotion in the federal government and key to his retaining the job he had. The move to Nova Scotia was prompted by the fact that there was a unilingual English position available in Halifax and it was closer to his family in New Brunswick. After 25 years of willing conscription into my mother's family's matriarchy, he wanted to reconnect with some of his own family.

My father had a scientific mind rather than a literary one, although he was an avid reader of Westerns (how I wish he'd had a chance to read Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers - he would have loved it) and had what I thought were rather surprising enthusiasms for W.D. Valgardson's and Gloria Steinem's work (in fact I seem to recall he 'borrowed' Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions and I had to buy myself another copy). He'd hated Latin so much in high school he deliberately scored 2% on his exam, knowing they would conclude he was a hopeless case and not make him take it again. My mother and I spent two weeks trying to figure out a phrase he didn't understand, only to realize it was 'chapeau de paille.' Important to know how to say 'straw hat' in French when you're working for the Inland Waters Directorate of Department of the Environment. Personally I would have worked on vocabulary like 'salt water intrusion' and 'glaciers' but hey - far be it from me to second-guess language instruction.

Oddly, after two cerebral hemorrhages, we had taken him to the Montreal Neurological Institute for a second opinion on what was causing the strokes, while we stayed in Ottawa, visiting when we could. On one of my visits, I was amazed to hear him speaking perfectly fluent, totally grammatical French to another patient in the sunroom. "I have a wife and daughter in Ottawa - they're coming to visit me soon," he said. The disinhibition of right brain damage isn't always a bad thing, as those of us who've discovered we're much more fluent in our second or third languages when drinking know. If only they'd served beer for breakfast at the French immersion classes!

When they first moved to Nova Scotia my parents rented a two-bedroom apartment in a high rise. Not only was it on an ambulance route, but they were frequently awakened by the woman upstairs dropping one of her high heels on the floor. They would wait in vain for the other shoe to drop - and apparently it never did. They lost a lot of sleep during that year, between the ambulances and the neighbours. And they just found the concept of paying rent bizarre after more than 15 years of home ownership.

So they started looking for a house in the country with some land, and ended up buying an unrenovated Victorian house in "Shubie" (Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia). Full of antiques, some in excellent condition and others not so, the deal was they would buy not only the house but all its furnishings as well. You can guess the rest - the best pieces had mysteriously vanished when they went to take possession of the house. Not sure who the knave was, but presumably a friend or relative of Mrs. Sutherland who arranged the removal of the furniture on her behalf. But the supreme irony is that the name of the village of Shubenacadie is commonly believed to be a corruption of "Je suis bien en Acadie." Oh Canada.

It's almost over - and I can't wait to see the backend of this year

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 20:44:00 +0000

I've always preferred odd-numbered years to even-numbered ones but after living through 2013, I think that's about to change. This week I spoke to a good - although not close - friend who had her world implode over the course of this year. It's ironic that our birthdays are the same day (although she's 16 years my junior) and has had the same kind of year as I have, although in different ways.

Where to begin? An overseas client who's owed me money (although I generously discounted my time on that particular invoice and was billing him for only 10 hours when I had actually - at his insistence - worked 16) for more than a year jerked me around yet again, promising to pay 'in a couple of months.' I let those couple of months lapse and followed up. I gather it's a jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today scenario. It's not just that he owes me money for work done - it's not just that we had a retainer deal that fell through as well as the promise of more work - it's not just that I have no recourse (other than blogging and tweeting about it, which I won't do). It's that when you're a solopreneur, a single client not paying can sink you because you've set aside time to work on that project and you've neglected marketing to others because you didn't think you had to.

I was determined not to spend another winter in Lethbridge and Southern Alberta, so I worked towards getting the condo listed by July 1. The condo market in Lethbridge is lousy at the best of times (100 condos listed every month, only nine sell). The first crushing blow was being told I should list the condo for almost $5k less than I paid for it, despite having invested $40k in renovations. New doors, new windows, new furnace, new hot water tank, four out of five new - and top end - appliances, new carpeting, new flooring, a new bathroom, and every room professionally painted since I bought in 2009. That doesn't include all the hard - and unappreciated - and absolutely necessary volunteer work I did on the board to ensure needed repairs and regular maintenance actually got done.

I consulted five real estate agents all told, however, and they all said the same thing. So rather than jeopardize the prospect of a sale by listing too high (which is a no-no in this particular odd market, where people don't believe in negotiating and just vote with their feet when they think the price is too high), and listed at the ridiculously low figure. Everyone who saw the condo loved it - and loved what I'd done with it. I even got compliments on how clean it was (me! the world's least secret slob! I'm still looking for things I threw into cupboards prior to every viewing).

My real estate agent was wonderful. But the only offer I almost got was conditional on the sale of another condo in a bedroom community just east of Lethbridge. Since there are few amenities in that community and people retire from there to Lethbridge, half the market for condos (those downsizing) just wasn't present in that community - only the first-time, 'getting into the market' buyers. So it could have been a year before the potential buyer's condo sold, leaving me in limbo for that entire time. So - no thanks.

Just as I was in the final stages of getting the condo ready to list, I sent a tweet about the Globe and Mail redeeming itself with its investigative reporting on Doug Ford's past, citing numerous sources that would lead one to conclude he had indeed been involved in drug dealing in the 1980s in Etobicoke. This tweet caught the attention of a guy I had been friends with - and very briefly dated - when I was 18. Not counting Roger in kindergarten, he was the first man who ever proposed to me. Heartbroken over someone else and coming way too early in our relationship, the proposal totally freaked me out at the time. But it was a long time ago and I thought it was cute that he was getting in touch with me again, was pleased that he remembered me fondly (as I remembered him). I'll spare you the details, but he avidly pursued me, to the point of announcing he would move to Lethbridge. And then, without telling me what was going on, he started to lie to me (or had been lying to me all along, who knows?), about the fact he'd changed his mind about having a relationship with me (which would have been fine had he been honest about what was going on), and refused to discuss the situation with me. His lies took a particularly sinister form: by claiming he had decided not to come to Alberta because of serious health issues, I was frantic with worry about a man I had fallen in love with in addition to being hurt by his changing his mind.

Additional fall out from this whole escapade was realizing that a close female friend was actually one of those 'mean girls' I never encountered in high school. I really started to wonder when she started saying things to me like, 'You're remarkably self confident about seeing a man you haven't seen in 40 years.' Because of course, he must be Dorian Gray and I'm the only one who's aged? This of course was on a par with her telling me repeatedly 'your skin tones change after menopause' (um no, they don't - one's hair colour tends to change, but one's skin tones are one's skin tones - you don't suddenly go from being fair-skinned to olive-skinned) and 'it's almost impossible to lose weight after age 40' (tell that to my scales - I've lost more than 40 pounds in the last four years without dieting, counting calories obsessively or significantly increasing my exercise level). The icing on the cake was when she suggested that I wasn't really hurt by the particular person who'd lied to me and jilted me but because I wanted 'a' relationship, not specifically a relationship with him. I'm glad that when she last texted to say she'd call me soon, I responded by telling her that we had a lot to discuss - including the volume and tone of her unwanted, unasked for, and almost invariably bad advice and prognostications. Friends like that one does not need. And for the record, saying that I hate living and working alone does not mean the solution to the problem is a relationship - a job is every bit as good a fix as a relationship would be. Sharing space with a roommate is another fix. The last two are probably better.

While I have concluded my ex is mentally ill, the real damage is not that someone rejected me. What has taken a hit is not my ego - I am as attractive and as lovable as I was before this incident, no more and no less - but my ability to trust people in general and men in particular is at an all-time low. Which doesn't augur well for ever having another relationship. I am now leaning to the 'don't do it' side of the equation rather than the 'if it happens it happens and if it doesn't it doesn't' now.

I also discovered - finally going for a physical for the first time in far too many years - that I need to have my gall bladder removed. It was my real bladder I was worried about (it's fine), but thanks to advances in medical diagnostics, the ultrasound revealed a problem of which I was blissfully unaware. My GP has been wonderful throughout this whole thing, and while I can't say I'm looking forward to the surgery, I have learned to appreciate my doctor for the rare and wonderful creature she is. It's a relief to let my doctor be my patient advocate - I've become used to doing that work myself, and it's nice to not have to do someone else's job for a change! We won't know whether my gall stones are cholesterol- or pigment-stones till the surgery is done. I suppose it doesn't really matter. Getting this dealt with has delayed my departure from Alberta. But I need to leave. Frankly I think Alberta needs to secede from Canada. This is the fourth Canadian province in which I've lived. It's the only one in which I've felt like a rudderless alien.

Shortly after the condo listing expired, my fridge caught fire. I must call the repair shop to get the results of the autopsy they conducted. The service repairman said in 35 years of repairing fridges he had never seen anything like it. He was very clear on the fact the fire had started in the bottom freezer compartment and was due to some sort of electrical fault. I knew there was something wrong when all the fridge's light bulbs went out at the same time and then the replacement bulbs burned out within 24 hours of being installed. And in fact I had called the repair shop twice about it, only to be told, basically, 'run along, little girl.' I was surprisingly calm throughout this whole incident and GE seemed very anxious to make things right, replacing the fridge even though it was a year past its one-year warranty and covering the costs of pick up of the old fridge and delivery of the new. So the only thing I was out was the cost of the ruined food, which wasn't too bad as I had been deliberately not buying in bulk while the condo was on the market.

Of the good things that happened in 2013 (and there weren't a whole lot of them):

My only surviving full cousin on my mother's side tracked me down on Facebook and we are now having the relationship I wish we could always have had. Better late than never. When we talk on the phone he calls me 'love' and it is so gratifying to discover it is possible to not just pick up where you left off more than 40 years ago, but that our mentally ill, evil sibling parents (his father, my mother) did not succeed in destroying our ability to connect and our desire to be family. I love it when he calls me to test drive his new web site on the mobile devices I have that he doesn't. And it is tremendously healing to know that he has survived the same kind of invidious, malicious emotional abuse I experienced, has lived to tell the tale, and has found both peace and love. It is also a relief to be believed. My mother was an amazing con artist, and trying to explain to members of my family who were snowed by her and who don't understand how relentlessly she tried to destroy me emotionally has led to fractured relationships. As I said to another cousin this year, "If you have fond memories of my mother, treasure them but keep them to yourself. But if you want to have a relationship with me you will stop arguing with me about how she 'wasn't that bad' and you will stop taking her side, because she's dead, I'm not, and I am done with listening to her lies, whether they come out of her mouth or out of yours.'

My friend Mark stayed with me for the month of September, with his two sons spending the weekends. This was tremendously healing for me and a good lesson for me about how sharing life with and helping others can help you help yourself. Riley-who-is-four and I spent two Sunday afternoons 'reading' illustrated dessert cookbooks. He'd look at the pictures and then show me the page so I could tell him what the dessert was called (a lot of fanciful names go into naming desserts - we were intrigued by the 'Queen of Puddings' that appeared in both cookbooks) and we could discuss the difficulty to make, ingredients required, and how yummy it would be. I made my first rhubarb galette with rhubarb from Mark's father's garden. Riley of course had a special, age-appropriate job in the creation of the confection: I got him to use my meat-tenderizing hammer to pound the brown sugar cubes the recipe called for into crumbs. And he attacked that chore with gusto. I had to ask both the boys to stand back a little so I could actually roll out the dough, so fascinated were they by the whole process of making something from scratch. Riley might well turn out to be a pastry chef. But if he doesn't, that's fine. I learned something about how to get children excited about reading and something about not talking down to them. Mark was in stitches watching us sit on the deck in our matching lawn chairs having our seriously sweet conversations. Plus Mark turned me on to Modern Family, one of the world's few tolerable sitcoms since Murphy Brown.

David and Danielle have been wonderful to me. Whether it's showing up at my door with two apple pies and four apple crisps, helping me get the condo ready to list, or resolving my car's battery problems by installing a trickle charger, they are love, friendship, and faith in action. I am blessed to have friends like them. My friend Jeff also showed me his version of love in action, checking in with me by phone and email as often as he could when I was in the most devastating phase of grieving the relationship that was not to be and always making me laugh. When I told him the former mayor had snubbed me twice during a single meet and greet during the election campaign, it was impossible not to laugh when he asked me, 'Are you going for three?' And I am much closer to my friend Danica, who is struggling but has never lost her ability to laugh. I was particularly amused when we were talking one night and she said (she's a psychologist), 'You're analyzing me - keep going - I love it!' In my next life (although I don't believe in reincarnation), I will have a different mother - one who doesn't disparage my gifts while simultaneously insisting that I achieve, achieve, achieve. I would have been a great psychologist.

Finally, I got to work the local municipal election as campaign manager for a non-incumbent councillor. It was the first time in a very long time I had an extended period of doing work that challenged me (and Wade can be a very challenging person, although in a good way most of the time. The rest of the time I've learned to just agree to disagree.). I learned a lot; my self confidence was restored; and I was reminded of the joy of working.

So - on to 2014. It can't - and won't - be a repeat of this year. That's why I've reused this photo of blackberries I picked in Port Coquitlam, BC. I call it 'Plenty.'

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:31:00 +0000

Both my world and literary views were, I will confess, warped by reading The Great Gatsby far too early in life. Fitzgerald's 'spoiled priest' rush to judgment, the notion that one must always remember not everyone has had the same advantages in life, and the obviously untrue concept that life offers 're-dos' have had a profound effect on my life. Luckily I'm open-minded enough to admit when I'm wrong, accept that a re-do at least leads to closure and may be necessary for that reason alone, and have realized that having an opinion is not quite the same thing as being judgmental.

So for many years I have accepted the notion that Zelda was a mistake for F. Scott Fitzgerald, that their marriage contributed mightily to his financial woes and his lack of productivity, and as one of the world's biggest fans of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon, wished he'd married someone else.

I was, therefore (having read the Nancy Mitford bio of Zelda as well as Zelda's own novel, Save Me the Waltz, many years ago), reluctant to read a novel about Zelda. Luckily for me, the Twitter community of readers convinced me to give Z a try, and I'm grateful.

Update: after posting this review, I got a lovely email from Esther Bochner, senior publicist at Macmillan Audio, asking if I'd like to post an audio clip of Z to my review. I said I'd be delighted - and here it is.

Therese Anne Fowler has made me rethink my attitude to Zelda, and to come to some radically different conclusions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's struggles - and about his ambitions. I had never thought about Zelda in the context of her own era - a time when women had so few options and when smart women were no longer content merely to stand by their men, defer to their opinions and be content to be the 'little woman' or 'the woman behind the man.' Zelda's refusal to be overshadowed by Scott takes on a whole different complexion when viewed in this context, as does her desire to achieve. We'll never have the definitive answer to who was more competitive with whom, but in reading Z I was having stomach-roiling flashbacks to a lot of the lines in Gatsby about being able to redo and rewrite the past, as well as some uncomfortable challenges to my own intellectual status quo.

Among the questions Fowler poses in Z are these: why was it F. Scott Fitzgerald was so very willing to promote Ernest Hemingway's work to his agent, editor and publisher, and yet persistently ensured that the most his wife ever got on her own work was a joint byline? Why wasn't he content to be the best writer he could possibly be rather than acknowledged as the best living American novelist? And why did he persist in emulating the filthy rich to the point of almost-bankruptcy over and over again, while simultaneously despising them and condemning them morally bankrupt? Why didn't these contradictions occur to him? More important for Zelda, why did he insist the women in his life be content with being nothing but decorative appendages whose sense of self-worth derived solely from that of the men to whom they'd attached themselves?

The genius of this novel is not that it's an unflattering portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather that it's finally a fair portrayal of Zelda, a woman caught between a rock and a hard place: her father's social standing (and societal expectations of women in the 1920s) and her husband's overweening ambition. There was little room for Zelda to flourish in that small space. And the fact that she didn't do so isn't really so surprising when you think about it.

Two by Henning Mankell: The Man Who Smiled and Before the Frost

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:46:00 +0000

I'm on a Henning Mankell/Kurt Wallander kick these days but am reading the series in no particular order. I did try to read a non-Wallander Mankell recently and failed in the attempt - it was Depths and I couldn't get past the first five pages. I had similar issues with Before the Frost, but to nowhere near the same degree (more on that subject later).

The Man Who Smiled, first published in 1994 and first translated into English in 2005, is classic Wallander. After shooting a suspect and taking a year-long leave of absence, Wallander has decided to leave the police force entirely. In his time off he's done a lot of brooding, a little travelling (with embarrassing results as a result of his drinking), and finally come to grips with his drinking. Fitter and more stable than he's ever been, he still feels like he's floundering. But returning to police work doesn't seem like the solution, and he's actually in his boss's office, about to sign his retirement paperwork, when he suddenly changes his mind and decides to return to work, convinced that the deaths of a father-son lawyer team are both murders and connected, although the father's death has initially been ruled an accident.

Once again, Wallander's attention to detail and his creative approach to crime and problem-solving makes him the man you want for the job. A visit to the scene of the accident and the discovery of a chair leg by Wallander turns out to be just the clue that cracks the case and leads to Wallander's successfully wiping the smile off the face of The Man Who Smiled. To say more would be giving too much away, unfortunately. But part of what makes Wallander such a richly developed character is his angst, and there's lots of angst here, as he continues to attempt to be a good son, a good father, and to have a life as well as a career. While a minor character, Wallander's father is never dull, and the predicament he gets himself into in The Man Who Smiled is rather comical. So much of Wallander pere's character is revealed when he gets arrested for getting into a fist fight at the liquor store (he took a number, didn't notice when his number was called, tried to jump the queue and insist it was his turn, and punched out both the next person in line and the clerk - oh and failed to pay the taxi driver for the trip to the liquor store as well). All while claiming he had every right to defend himself. It's these moments of black comedy that make Mankell such a compelling writer and Wallander such a fascinating character - because who hasn't had to deal with parental-generated embarrassment at one point or another? And why does it always come at a time when work is at its most frantic and demanding?

Sadly, Before the Frost, published in 2002 and translated in 2004, is far less satisfying. The angry, confused, unstable and much-worried-about Linda Wallander has decided as she approaches 30 to join the police force and has just finished her training at the police academy. She's waiting to join the Ystad police force when her friend Anna disappears. She's staying temporarily at her father's apartment, and, having always been an elusive and shadowy character both to her father and in the other Wallander mysteries, I was excited to find out more about her. Unfortunately, this one doesn't really work, because Linda just isn't a developed or empathetic character. She persists in intruding her concern about her missing friend into her father's current investigation, and while it turns out she's not wrong to do so, there are some really implausible scenes in this novel (the one where she throws an ashtray at her father's head and the willingness of the Ystad police force to let her trail along and insert herself into their interviews is also a little hard to swallow). Sadly we get little of Kurt's perspective on the investigation, and as a result the examination of cult mentality and behaviour suffers as a result.

Luckily I can circle back and read some of the others in the Wallander series I haven't got to yet, because while Linda Wallander is definitely her father's daughter, she just doesn't work as a character. In trying to figure out why, I've concluded it's not because Mankell's trying to write from a female point of view, it's because what makes Kurt Wallander work as a character can't be superimposed onto a woman half his age who hasn't experienced the societal and criminal sea change her father has. The impatience and weariness works for Kurt, who's continuing to push himself while trying to cope with the fatigue of middle age. In Linda this manifests as brattiness, an unwillingness to listen and learn. And while that might augur well for character development in future books, I can't foresee it happening. While all the curiously about Linda that's built up over the course of the Kurt Wallander novels is satisfied in Before the Frost, I ended up regretting having been curious. And that's never a good thing when novel-induced.

Helen Humphreys' Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:20:00 +0000

A beautiful book with a beautiful cover, I think I will always be grateful to Helen Humphreys for writing Nocturne.

It's fascinating on a number of levels, and as usual there is an odd synchronicity in my reading. I'd just finished Therese Ann Fowler's novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and was reflecting on how unfair I've always been to Zelda, blinded by my fangirl reaction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Z, while fiction, makes a strong case for Fitzgerald's struggle to finish Tender Is the Night being not the need to support Zelda and Scottie, but for his own alcoholism and lack of self-discipline, his desire to party with and pretend to be one of the independently wealthy, as the reason he struggled with his novels.

To my surprise, Humphreys' elegy to and ongoing conversation with her brother Martin, who died at age 45 of pancreatic cancer, is a meditation not just on grief and loss, but also on the sacrifices inherent in choosing the artist's life. If you've read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Tillie Olsen's Silences, you'll already know how hard it is to be a woman and a writer - particularly a married woman and a writer. (Add children to the mix and it's amazing there are any female writers.) One of the things that makes Nocturne provocative is that Humphreys takes this idea one step further, renders it non-gender specific, and explains what is required (at least for her):

'...to write well, to write fully, to really get inside a novel, I have to leave the world I actually live in. I can't have distractions from the story, which means living alone, and creating an environment of calm and routine - wearing the same clothes day after day, eating the same food - so that nothing from the real world interferes with the creation of the fictional one.

Over the years this has worn me down and created a kind of loneliness that is hard to live with, and surprisingly hard to leave....

My being is enmeshed with what I do. And this is why, in spite of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you one last time. Writing is what I have, and it's how I make sense of experience.'

Martin Humphreys was a concert pianist, composer, music teacher, son, brother, friend, boyfriend. You can still hear some of his recordings on his MySpace page, and I am listening to him play Leos Janacek's "Our Evenings" as I write this review. And I am close to tears, not because of the music but because of the sad truths of Nocturne: "Increasingly I would rather live a perfect day than write about one...."

Priority None: Mel Lastman's looking smarter every day

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 21:52:00 +0000

I was living in Toronto during the storm of 1999, and I remember it well - buses sliding backwards down hills, switches on the subway freezing, and the hoots and catcalls from the rest of the country after Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman called in the army to help with snow removal. As someone who grew up in Ottawa, it was a little hard to understand why Toronto was so ill-equipped to handle the snow, and word at the time was that Mel and the rest of Toronto City Council hadn't yet signed the contract for snow plowing and removal and that's why the city was brought to its knees by this early-season storm. Oops. Ottawa used to get at least two blizzards a year - nowhere near as many as Montreal. But I remember snow piles that were at least five feet high.

Little did I think, however, that I'd end up living in a place where it snows (a lot) and yet the city's snow removal strategy was 'wait till it melts.' [Update November 15, 2012: from the minutes of the Lethbridge City Council meeting held November 13, 2012. When the Deputy Mayor and another member of Council (who had read my blog post) raised the issue of snow removal and snow plowing at this meeting (thank you!), the City's Director of Infrastructure Services indicated 'Priority 4 roads. (local streets) are not plowed or sanded even in an extreme event. Intersections may get sanded when icy conditions are identified as a hazard.' [emphasis added] So despite the fact Lethbridge's public transit system is inadequate and you may not be able to get to a bus, that's pretty much it - you're on your own.]

Welcome to Lethbridge, AB, and chinook country.

I'll be the first to admit I live in a 'remote' area of town, an area known as Hardieville. We don't have many sidewalks and we don't have many street lamps and we don't have pothole-free pavement. One member of City Council has told me my neighbourhood is considered one of three 'slums' within the municipal boundaries and therefore gets little in the way of road repairs or city services. Our bus service is sporadic (those dependent on public transit would probably describe it as erratic, as I have often given carless neighbours lifts when the bus schedule seemed to have changed without warning and they got tired of waiting more than an hour for a bus that comes every half hour). We do, however, still pay property taxes. As vice president of my condo association, I've raised the issue of snow removal every year for the last three years and voted twice to tender the contract to someone who will get the job done. Our condos are four four-plexes, and we actually do have a sidewalk in front of our buildings.

As a result of my vote, we're now using a lawn care and snow removal service that gets the job done, promptly and conscientiously. We're not going to be responsible for anyone breaking their necks on our little portion of sidewalk, and by noon on Tuesday, October 23 our sidewalks and walkways were cleared of the 10 inches of snow that fell the night of October 22. In other words, we're doing our bit to comply with the City's bylaws regarding snow removal and keep people safe. And yes, this was a freakish early storm and yes, an unusually large dump for this time of year. All the more reason, knowing it was the first storm of the year, that many people hadn't yet had their snow tires put on, to ensure the safety of residents.

The City of Lethbridge seems to have no such concern for its citizens, however. The temperature dropped after the snow fell and the roads turned to ice due to warmer temperatures during the day. I think there was at least four inches of ice on the road by the time I ventured out with the car on Wednesday of last week. I got stuck at the super mailbox, and only the fear of having to abandon the car while it blocked half the road lent me the determination to keep trying to get unstuck while the wheels spun on the ice (the great thing about living in a not-too-densely populated area of town is that there aren't too many other drivers going by to jeer, 'Drive that car, lady!'). By Thursday I wanted to know why our street hadn't been plowed yet - and whether it was ever going to be. It seems Lethbridge is divided into Priority 1, 2 and 3 routes. I knew from Twitter updates and City web site postings that Priority 1 and 2 routes had been plowed already. I was, however, astonished to discover that instead of then going on to plow Priority 3 routes, the City had, in its infinite wisdom, chosen to go back over the Priority 1 and 2 routes a second time. Despite the media release assuring people that residential (Priority 3) routes would, in fact, be plowed. I must live in a 'priority none' part of town. (As an aside, I just love the way municipalities put their employees on the firing line by listing them as the contact for releases, even though they have no media training and aren't able to make decisions that are defensible - Lee Perkins is a good guy and he actually understands snow removal in a way only people who've lived in places where it's done well do.)

I would happily have taken a bus to get where I needed to go if I thought I could safely get to a bus, three or four blocks from my house. But you know what? I haven't invested in ice cleats for my boots - and I don't intend to.

It took a phone call to the City to get the streets in my neighbourhood sanded Thursday night - 72 hours after the storm. By Friday I felt safe enough to venture out to get some groceries and - irony of ironies - pay a parking ticket at City Hall. I just can't wait for December, January and March, when average snowfalls will be similar to the storm we've just been through.

So, City of Lethbridge, unless you want to buy my condo from me (I'll take property assessed value at this point), you will start plowing my street within a reasonable time period when it snows or you'll be hearing from me. Again. And again. And again. I have a series of very fetching berets and a couple of friends with big enough trucks to ensure I can make it to City Hall. I also have a natural ability to project, access to media, and quite a bit of experience making snowballs (my aim's not bad - you know - for a girl). You have a responsibility to ensure the safety of your citizens and you're falling down on that job - big time.

Being good without faith: review of The Young Atheist's Handbook

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:54:00 +0000

This review appeared on Goodreads in July 2012 while this blog was in limbo, but I had always intended to review it here, so here you are - with some additional content:

In his foreword to Alom Shaha's Young Atheist's Handbook, A.C. Grayling talks about the importance of developing a questioning mind. Shaha quotes Ani DiFranco when she asks, 'What if God is just an idea/Someone put in your head?' In The Young Atheist's Handbook, Alom Shaha asks – and answers for himself – the question, 'What if God is just an outmoded concept we no longer require now that we have generated more data about our universe than any one of us can ever hope to successfully process?' And, by implication, he is also asking, 'What will it take for us as a species to accept that no life will be filled with unalloyed joy and good luck, and how can we learn to cope with misfortune without the crutch of religion while remaining good people?' His handbook is an attempt to answer that question on a supremely personal level, although, as he admits freely, it is not precisely a handbook.

Alom takes us on his journey of loss, inconsolable grief, defiance, and ultimately the acceptance of his lack – rather than his loss – of faith. Part of that journey includes an examination of the familial and socio-cultural pressures put on children to accept and observe a faith they are not permitted to question. Islam may be the most difficult of the world's major religions in this sense, as the form in which it is exported throughout the world often amounts to the prophet's words being repeated and obeyed without translation, study or debate. (I should hasten to add that I am not an expert on Islam – or on any other religion, although my own defiant and questioning attitude made me, shall we say, an unsuitable candidate for Sunday School).

Growing up on a Council estate in London as the eldest surviving child of five, Shaha was one of many Bangladeshi children transplanted to the UK during the 1970s. By the time he was 13 he had experienced the death of his bipolar mother and had begun to confront his own personal truth: that if he could not believe in the concept of heaven, he did not, in fact, have faith.

'with my mother dead and a deep lack of respect for my father, I was relieved of the reason why many atheists I know, particularly ex-Muslim ones, continue to pretend to be religious. I no longer had a desire to “protect” my parents from being upset, or from being “shamed”. I was free of the pressure to believe what my parents believed. But this is a pressure that most children have to live with well into adulthood, and it helps explain why ancient religions have managed to survive into the modern world.'

The Young Atheist's Handbook is simultaneously a subtly nuanced examination of the process of intellectual and emotional development as it applies to faith, and a work of creative nonfiction in which the author's memoir is interwoven with an admittedly superficial look at the role of religion in society. Shaha doesn't claim to be either a religious or a philosophical expert – but he doesn't hesitate to try to situate his own experiences within a broader context.

The combination of a tragic death (and, let's face it, life, as Shaha's mother seems to have been neither successfully diagnosed nor treated for bipolar disorder) and lack of respect for his surviving parent led Shaha, at a time when the process of separation and individuation is probably most acute (adolescence) to seek answers in science rather than religion. And in studying science and becoming a secondary school science teacher, Shaha has been able to accept uncertainty and take consolation from the scientific process:

'science wasn't about certainty and rigid facts, but rather a process that made use of deduction, logic, rationality, observation, and experimentation to draw what are ultimately tentative conclusions, leaving the way open for better explanations or theories.... Science offers us a uniquely successful way of understanding the world and our place in it; it can provide intellectual thrills like nothing else; and it is, possible, the greatest of humanity's cultural achievements.'

While it may seem – to those of us from less rigid cultural backgrounds – that a book like this is self-evident and perhaps unnecessary in 2012, an email a friend shared with me recently leads me to conclude it is not the case. Close to 1000 words in that email were expended on the need to ensure a three-year-old wasn't abandoned to the Canadian 'public' school system but would be enrolled in a 'Christian' school instead (with fees of up to $10,000 per year). The email from the child's grandparent included an offer to help with and/or assume the tuition costs.

I have often wondered, as a person who has never had faith, how we can help ourselves and our children to create our own moral frameworks without that debate being framed by theologians of one brand or another – how do we even manage to have the debate about right and wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, if we don't even set aside an hour a week as individuals and family members to talk about these things? While The Young Atheist's Handbook doesn't precisely answer that question, I am somewhat consoled by the following:

'Scientific evidence points to the fact that our morality is a product of our biology and our evolutionary history, and research suggests that we are all endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong.... religion simply provides us with an easy way to express and share it [moral behaviour]. There is no need to invoke the existence of God to explain why humans are moral creatures.'

Disclosure statement: A copy of the Australian edition of The Young Atheist's Handbook was given to me by the author. Currently available in Canada only as an ebook, but I'm hoping that will change soon (October 2012).

Louis meets daisy

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:24:00 +0000

Louis meets daisy, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

The blog has been rescued from the limbo in which it's been suspended for oh, I don't know, a year now.

It's been a year of changes and technological and reno challenges, not least of which is my decision to adopt a kittoon. Technically Louis was already an adult by the time I got him. But don't tell him that.

I now spend my mornings drinking coffee while burbling at the cat. This morning I decided to tell him how much I love him (really, I am truly, madly, deeply in love with this animal) as a 10-pound cat attempted to drag a 10-kilo bag of cat food from its hiding place on a low shelf in the kitchen into the living room. Because I might forget it was breakfast time. Hang on, Louis, it's not 8AM yet - we're on a schedule here. Oh - and mwah. Mwah mwah mwah.

Pemberton Springtime

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Pemberton Springtime, originally uploaded by dbsteers.

I will have my ashes
scattered here
so you can visit, love.

Reader review/Booker correlation or not?

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:33:00 +0000

Yesterday someone tweeted it would be interesting to see whether the Booker Prize went to the novel with the most reader reviews (using the Guardian Books as the reader review source). I think this is rather unfair, since it's a British publication and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending was the hands-down winner on that site (only four of the six shortlist nominees this year are UK authors; the other two are Canadians).

So as the 2011 Booker is about to be announced, I thought I'd use another reader review site (Goodreads) and we'll just if there's a correlation or not. Here are the stats:

The Sisters Brothers - 4685 reviews
Jamrach's Menagerie - 2046 reviews
The Sense of an Ending - 1862 reviews
Pigeon English - 1730 reviews
Snowdrops - 1013 reviews
Half-Blood Blues - 581 reviews

Update: And The Guardian called it!

This just in via Twitter:

ManBookerPrize Man Booker Prize

The winner of the 2011 #manbookerprize is Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending!

Every year is the year of the short story

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

2011 is not only the Year of the Entrepreneur, it's also the Year of the Short Story, I've belatedly realized.

Who cares if the year is three-quarters done - both themes are worthy of celebration. I'm working on a volunteer project in my community to celebrate the former.

But as a bit of a boost for the latter, here are some wonderful short story collections I'd like to share with you (bonus: three of these writers were actually discovered by me in 2011). I'm taking their injunctions seriously, and have not only written this post, but am hoping the hashtag #yoss will take off on Twitter.

Sarah Selecky and her marvellous collection, This Cake is For the Party. I was late to this particular party. Now I don't want to leave (i.e. I'm reluctant to return it to the library. I am upset the title story got cut.) I find her writing process fascinating. I can't wait for more of her work.

Julie Booker's phenomenal Up Up Up. Julie does some interesting things with the short story form in this book - and was roundly criticized by one reviewer for writing short stories that were too - short. Aritha Van Herk and I had an excellent snicker over that one at the writing workshop I attended (and she was teaching) in Fernie this summer. In fact the whole class had a good laugh about it. And yes, I was name-dropping there. Deal with it.

Jessica Westhead's And Also Sharks. She and another female Canadian writer seem to be reversing a tradition in Canadian publishing of producing a volume of short stories and then going on to write novels, something that's never made to sense to me, given there really are more novel-lovers out there than short story-lovers (at least in terms of buying books). But that brings me to a point I was going to make anyway - I'm told this is not the case in the UK, where no publisher will consider bringing out a volume of your short stories unless you've already produced three or four successful novels.

That info is courtesy of Hari Kunzru, whose own collection of short stories, Noise, I'm dying to read. As a treat, here's his story "The Culture House."

The amazing Robin Black collection, If I Loved You I Would Tell You This, was released in paperback in 2011 as well. On Shakespeare's birthday, no less. If you haven't read it - it you must.

And while I certainly haven't succeeded in buying - or in reading - every single edition of Best American Short Stories, whether you think you're not a short story fan or know that you are, it's always a wonderful starting place to discover American writers from whom you're going to be hearing a lot more in decades to come, as well as ones you should already have been reading. The combination of a series editor working in conjunction with an annual guest editor makes this a consistently astonishing collection. In fact, I'm feeling a little faint with book lust as I notice the guest editor of the 2011 edition is Geraldine Brooks.

I'm now dying to get my hands on a copy of Robert Boswell's The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. Came across a review of it (somewhere) recently and while I no longer remember what they said about him (and it), I know it was enough to make me write it down so I'd remember to beg, borrow, or buy a copy. As if the title alone weren't enough....

For (slightly) longer reviews of books I've read and rated, you can find me on Goodreads.

Cormorant Books kindly provided me with a copy of And Also Sharks, a lovely surprise because I was expecting a copy of Michael V. Smith's Progress and the other was a bonus treat.

House of Anansi sent me a copy of Up Up Up - out of the blue, as is their wont. Don't stop!

Fear, loathing and frustration on Writers in a Digital Age Panel at Fernie Writers' Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:56:00 +0000

The final panel session of the 2011 Fernie Writers' Conference (held at the Arts Station after the last of the student/workshop participant readings on July 23, 2011) was 'Writers in a Digital Age' and was supposed to be a discussion about whether eBooks will change the way we write and writers and social media.

Panel participants were Dave Margoshes, writer and poet, moderator (DM); Angie Abdou, writer (AA); Warren Cariou, writer (WC); and Robyn Reed, Acquiring Editor of Freehand Books (RR).

After a brief introduction of the panel and the topic by Dave Margoshes, each member of the panel was asked to speak. Please note: I'm not an automaton. While I take good notes, these are not direct quotes but rather paraphrases. If you feel I've misrepresented what you said, please get in touch with me and I'll be happy to correct.

AA: We were also going to talk about authors and social media. In terms of ebooks, let's talk first about pricing – they're about $6. But instead of authors getting royalties of 10% for paper books – which means if your book sells for $20 you get about $2 per book – royalty rates for ebooks are much higher – 50%.

In terms of social media – a lot of authors are stomping their feet and saying, 'we don't want to promote our books.' In fact, at the recent Saskatchewan Festival of Words, one well known science fiction writer said he believes in a division of labour: he writes the books; it's the publisher's job to edit and promote them. But the demand for writers to get involved with social media seems to be coming from readers, who want a more active relationship with authors these days. This means there's a lot of potential for engagement via social media, but it's time consuming. [Actually, from everything I hear and see, the demand for authors to get involved in social media is coming from publishers, most of whom don't understand social media themselves and show little desire to learn. There are some doing an amazing job. From what I see, it's less than 10% of those who've plunged into social media willy nilly. And writers have started doing their own marketing and promotion because they've finally realized it's the only way they're going to be able to sell their books, because publishers actually seem to be worse at promotion and marketing than they used to be. Again, there are exceptions to this sweeping statement. Readers have certainly responded very positively to authors who engage well - and more - with them. Whether we were demanding it or not I'm not so sure.]

WC: For the last year I've read ebooks almost exclusively on my iPad and have exclusively bought ebooks. It provides 'a kind of freedom from the encumbrance of the physical weight of books.' This has already changed the way I read. 'There's a cornucopia of books available at the touch of a finger,' and ebooks also give you the 'ability to carry around your entire library.' Those are the ebook pluses. The negatives, if reading on an iPad, include reading on the same device on which you can check your email, which can lead to 'distracted reading.' There's also a lack of connoisseurship factor and perhaps a lack of authenticity due to the sheer availability of texts. He mentioned an article he'd read, written by a musician re the digitization of music and that this had led to songs becoming increasingly trivial. A publisher acts as some guarantee of quality. [See my comments at end of the post on this topic - it ain't necessarily so in the 21st Century. But hear hear for Warren immersing himself in this new delivery system!]

RR: Ebooks are primarily about reproducing rather than producing, that is, they're usually not originals. Available through Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and through publishers' own web sites. She said she was concerned about losing the integrity of design in the transition to ebook process, since some ereaders allow people to choose their own fonts and 'paper' colour. The design process needs to be valued. She then talked about how the role of the writer has changed in the digital age – authors are now a brand and need logos and social media platforms. She said the way we choose what to read has changed and authors have to think about how their online presence changes the way we buy books.

DM: We've talked about how ebooks and social media change how we read, buy and sell books. But we haven't yet talked about whether ebooks will change how we write. Does technological change have an effect on how we write?

RR: Talked about Nicholas Carr's writing about the digital age and said that if you want to find a specific book, you just have to Google it. Carr writes about whether the medium [I'm more likely to consider it a delivery mechanism than a medium, but never mind] changes the way we read or write. We tend to scan when reading digitally and words on a screen are more readily digestible.

AA: Hyperlinks and video included in ebooks will change the way we read.

DM: That's already changed on blogs.

AA: Heard of a piece via Sandra Birdsell about how the typewriter would be the death of writing. [In other words, quality concerns always accompany technological change.]

WC: Word processing did affect the way people wrote – writing multiple drafts becomes naturalized. I tell my creative writing students to try writing without a computer for a change. But it's hard to tell how ebooks will affect writing.

DM: The proliferation of self publishing due to ebooks is scary. There have always been vanity presses that 'don't have professional standards.' Ebooks have really blossomed. I was curious about the ebook self-publishing phenomenon and bought one of Amanda Hocking's books [although he couldn't remember her name] and it was crap. [I don't think Dave Margoshes is part of Amanda Hocking's target market in even her wildest dreams. I really wish he'd bought an ebook by an author he knew and/or actually wanted to read so he could better assess what I think of as an alternative book delivery system. I also wish he'd read a book that had been written by someone other than - you know - a teenager. Conventional wisdom still says poets mature early, prose writers later on, yes?]

AA: The science fiction author at the Festival of Words who advocated continuance of 'division of labour' was RJ Sawyer, who seemed to think author self promotion success stories were all hearsay. She cited the example of Terry Fallis, whose podcasts and self-publishing ventures led to winning the Stephen Leacock medal and to a traditional publishing deal for his two novels.

WC: From a reader perspective, readers can be intrigued by authors [who are self promoting].

The session was then opened up to the audience, with first comment/question coming from Aritha Van Herk. I'll identify the questioners/commenters when I can, but since the event was open to the public, I didn't know everyone in the room.

Aritha Van Herk: Really it's the editors who will be the new arbiters of quality. Editing is the key part of the publishing process, and if a self-published book is edited by someone you trust, you'll invest money to buy it. Sadly there are very few editors being trained or paid.

AA: We're talking about substantive editing here, not copy editing, by the way.

RR: We've entered a different phase in the creative writing process – accessibility is the issue. Printed books take a minimum of eight to 12 months to produce – ebooks can take far less time.

Andreas Schroeder asked, but will ebooks change the way writers write? That was the original question, yes? Will they change writerly decisions? Will interaction with readers lead to choice of one ending rather than another? [Apologies to Andreas here – my cryptic notes read something like 'enc. cmd. response' but as I recall, this is what he was getting at.]

DM: The film world has been using audience market research for years.

AA: Some aspiring writers are being encouraged to get onto Twitter long before their books are even published, since there's often a two-year lag between manuscript sale and the book's appearance. My advice is to start using social media in the time between final edits and actual appearance of the book. But sometimes I feel like I spend all my time doing Facebook updates. [I disagree with this advice, actually, for a variety of reasons, chief amongst which is that there is no 'one size fits all' strategy for either social media or for marketing books. In my experience, already-established authors can afford to wait to engage with social media because their following will grow very quickly - they're already household words, the publication of a new book still drives backlist sales, and the effect of public relations and marketing is cumulative. New or lesser known authors need to engage early and in different ways with social media. I would also put Facebook at the very bottom of the list of any social media efforts an author is making. The demographics that Facebook provides can't be easily used by authors trying to sell books because there just aren't any stats available on who buys which books based on age or gender – all the data you get is going to be anecdotal and from live sales in actual bookstores – good luck gathering that information. Furthermore, I don't think readers flock to Facebook. It might well be useful to target books with regional appeal only. But publishers who've used Facebook ads say they've had far greater success using Goodreads ads. And you're looking at a built-in platform with more than 5 million readers on Goodreads. I'm not sure what you're looking at on Facebook – the great unwashed?]

RR: Social media can distract from writing efforts and can lead to abuse of social media platforms. [See my comment above. My biggest pet peeve with publishers these days is their insistence that authors establish a social media platform and presence when they themselves have not done so. No wonder publishers think readers don't buy books based on a publisher's brand – most of them don't even seem to understand the concept of branding. They've obviously never seen me at the Hurt Penguin or the Virago sales, where I buy bagsful of books by authors of whom I've never heard, based on my faith in the publisher's brand. Remember the Vintage Contemporary Classics series that was introduced in the 1980s? I bought most of that line too. Of course, McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library was a triumph of anti-branding that was reminscent of Soviet-era 'art': they managed to make every novel in the series look like a colonial yawn that could substitute for a sleeping pill.]

WC: What about the current bestseller Go the F*** to Sleep? [whose success was fuelled by an unintentional viral marketing campaign – see article here.

DM: Will enhanced ebooks include reviews, for instance?

RR: Publishers are giving 25% royalties for ebooks, not 50%, due to lower production costs - 50% royalties would just destroy publishers. Ebooks are edited carefully as well (when produced by traditional publishers] but ease of distribution leads to streamlining of the production process and how quickly books can be produced.

Alison Calder then demanded that the panel talk about 'the book' and talk about writing, not about marketing, selling, or producing books. She seemed a little upset.

WC (who is Alison Calder's husband): We value the book.

AA: I try not to push my obsessions onto my creative writing students, but rather to help them achieve their goals.

Tom: On the subject of writing and social media – we're facing a difficulty – the absence of readers of books. Creative writing students now think they should write, and other people should read.

AA: It's the reality TV generation.

Tom Wayman: Is there any hope that there are still/will continue to be people who read critically and carefully?

RR: I'm worried about ereaders leading to skimming rather than actual reading, especially for the young adult market (those aged 14-19). All the writing aimed at that market seems to be about vampires, and narcissism on the writing front has been enhanced by blogging.

Gordon Sombrowski (who was in my workshop and whose first book of short stories will be published by Oolichan Books this fall): Skimmed reading leads to skimmed writing – we need to read critically.

RR: But there are still good educators who are teaching people to read critically.

WC to Tom Wayman: There's the danger people are not engaging as deeply with the text when reading online or on ereaders. But this allows other ways of approaching a text, especially for things like sound poetry, which is enhanced by the technological potential of being read online. Sound poetry like that produced by bpnichol demands to be heard, not just read. [Fairly substantial paraphrasing going on here.]

Sid Marty talked about James Keelaghan's songwriting course – he doesn't accept musicians into his course unless they already know at least 80 songs. How to translate that to creative writing classes and not let people who don't read into them. 'If people don't read, they don't know how bad their writing is.'

A member of the audience who identified himself as a software developer working on iPod, iPad and iPhone software said that there is always resistance and fear in the existing marketplace when technological change occurs, and that he was hearing a lot of fear from the panel and from audience members – the notion of music self-publishing led to fear that a 'sea of rubbish' would be created and distributed by 'bedroom artists.' He also talked about the gaming market: games used to sell for $40, but are now selling for $2.99 per game. But, he said, the quality of the games hasn't diminished with the price cut – what's fuelled the price cuts is the fact that so many more people are buying and playing games [i.e. economies of scale have kicked in as market base has increased exponentially]. Ebooks and self publishing means there can be zero friction between you, the author, and your audience – but you need to find the right price, and it is not going to be $20. App developers are selling a lot more apps for a lot less to a lot more people.

I'm not sure when I made my comments, but I did want to challenge some of the things the panel had said. I said I was glad Angie had brought up the higher royalty rates for ebooks and she replied that some publishers were offering only 7% royalty rates now – while 10% was standard and it could rise to 12% or 15%, overall the royalty rate was decreasing rather than increasing. I talked about the fact that ebooks are ephemeral and that the larger publishers are completely missing the boat by pricing them far too highly. I said that while opinions re the 'sweet spot' ebook price point ranged from 99 cents to $6.99, larger publishers were shooting themselves in the foot by pricing ebooks at anything higher than the price of a mass market paperback because these are ephemeral objects, not tangible ones (and that most of the larger publishers in Canada and the US seemed oblivious to this]. I also talked about how Harper Collins in the US has essentially announced that by allowing only 26 'lends' of its ebooks, it's transformed the transaction from a purchase to a rental.

DM: I'm glad someone mentioned fear. We're afraid not only of ebooks but of all technological change. He asked Robyn Read if some publishers were angry about ebooks.

RR: I was at a conference recently where I hoped everyone would be excited about ebooks, but instead everyone was scared. We resent software. We comment on blogs etc. but we don't comment fairly. We're living in the age of snark – and it changes the way some people write.

Another audience member said the discussion reminded him of the way the introduction of the printing press was received - as well as radio and television. 'A story is still a story.' There's no reason to fear new technology. What we're missing now is acceptance of the fact that the role of traditional publishers will become even more important – and that that was also the role of traditional (rather than etail) bookstores.

AA: To play devil's advocate: has writing today become not about good writing, but rather about celebrity?

WC: Poetry writing is very strong in Canada. But it has never been a money maker.

AA: Does poetry work on ebooks?

RR: Fear is necessary.

Another audience member suggested that the panel wasn't giving readers enough credit – that the inclusion of many classic novels free on ereaders and available online through Google Books was leading to an increase in reading the classics by young readers.

That was a lovely note on which to end, and whoever the young woman who raised that point was – thank you.

A few thoughts of my own that I wasn't able to express during the panel discussion (in addition to those appearing in square brackets after the panel members' remarks):

No one talked about the sheer volume of books being published these days or about the fact that publishing a million books per year will inevitably lead to a crisis for bricks and mortar retailers, who simply cannot afford to rent larger and larger spaces every year – it's just not realistic.
Aritha Van Herk was really the only commenter who rang an alarm bell that needs to be rung at five-minute intervals: publication by a traditional publisher no longer represents (if it ever has) any guarantee of quality whatsoever if there are no longer any editors working at publishing companies. And there are, indeed, fewer and fewer skilled editors working at traditional publishing companies.
No one talked about the horror stories of books being rushed into publication to meet imagined or real market demand without any editing whatsoever. And I can certainly attest to the fact that this does, indeed, happen, and not to first-time authors either.
And there was a certain irony in hearing so many poets in particular at the conference expressing fear and loathing of all self-publishing and not really distinguishing between vanity press publishing and self-publishing that involves actual substantive editing and is, in many ways, one response to a publishing model that everyone seems to agree was handicapped to begin with in small markets and is becoming increasingly enfeebled and confused as time goes on. What about all those little poetry chapbooks, chaps? Did all those poems benefit from editing before you started selling them at your readings and on your web sites? Until you can all say yes to that, I'm thinking, hold back on sweeping dismissals of everything that's self published. And don't assume that just because one of the big Canadian publishers put their stamp of approval on the self published novels they picked up to make a quick buck that they actually assigned an editor to work on it. Because I'm pretty sure, in the case of one author mentioned in this post, that that really didn't happen.
Not to be TOO bitchy, but I found it rather irritating that the word 'curation' wasn't once mentioned by the panel - Warren Cariou came closest to it when he talked about lack of connoisseurship and market research. I cannot imagine a similar panel of US or UK authors and publishers who would not have focused on this concept in a panel on authors in a digital age.

Resources:

Here's a good article I found today that supports my contention that your social media efforts have to start earlier rather than later and gives you some idea of where you should focus your efforts.

Here's an article I wish I - and the panel members - had read.

And apparently there's a UK psychologist named David Galbraith who's working on the way writing influences creativity, so he might be a resource to answer the question none of us could answer, whether ebooks will affect the way we write.

The Canterbury Trail Mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:13:00 +0000

The Canterbury Trail Mountains, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

Since the WiFi at the Fernie Alpine Resort is rather spotty (at least for me and my iPod it is), I wasn’t able to live tweet the panel session of the Fernie Writers’ Conference I attended this afternoon and thought I’d blog about it instead.

Because there’s another event this evening and I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 11AM, this is going to be a quick and dirty blog post, with hyperlinks added later.

Panel topic was, Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Panel consisted of Alison Calder (AC), Aritha Van Herk (AVH), and Andreas Schroeder (AS), with Peter Oliva (PO) moderating.

PO began the session by quoting Michael Ondaatje, who apparently once said that he’d heard a writer’s research was like panniers. He didn’t know what a pannier was, so looked it up and learned it was either containers in which you could put things or the framework that held up a Victorian woman’s dress. But by the time he’d learned this he was at least a third of the way through writing The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and it didn’t really matter much.

PO posed the first question to the panel: are creative writing programs and workshops therefore designed to create the framework for the pannier contents.

Marina Endicott piped up, ‘What about the student with nothing in their panniers – or, alternatively – with bloated panniers?’

AC said to some extent creative writing programs involve a redistribution of the wealth of the pannier contents, involving a certain amount of trading. (This immediately put me in mind of the quilter’s stash and the trading of not only small quantities of fabric but of the peer learning process that goes on when you quilt with others – the solutions proffered by other quilters are often both far more creative and far more practical than anything you’ve been able to come up with yourself. You’ll see a minor panel theme is textile-based.)

AVH said Michael Ondaatje can use anything and make it work, but that the gathering process teaches you both constraint and restraint.

PO then asked whether the panel had any teaching creative writing horror stories and told one himself. He’d had a student in his class whose work was very promising and he encouraged him to pursue a career as a writer. He subsequently discovered his student was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who could play the most musical instruments – 115 in all. He was horrified to learn that to fund his writing career his student had begun selling off his instruments, saying he was tired of playing in smoky bars anyway. This happened just as smoking bans in bars started to go into effect. We didn’t learn whether the student became anywhere near as successful as a writer as he had been a musician.

AS told the story of a female student who – like those people who have as many surgeries as possible (I couldn’t help but think of Elizabeth Taylor) – had workshopped the same manuscript for more than 20 years, attending workshops and classes with some of Canada’s most distinguished writers. It was in great shape after 20 years of editing, but when he had the presumption to make a suggestion about how it could be improved, she said, ‘Well! Mordecai Richler didn’t say that was necessary.’

AVH said she’d a female student who submitted three 500-page manuscripts, which she diligently read and commented on, providing feedback on all three. ‘Huh,’ replied the student, ‘that’s what last year’s writer-in-residence said too.’ But of course she hadn’t made a single change to any of her submissions in the intervening year.

Dave Margoshes began the audience participation portion, saying that you don’t teach talent or imagination in a creative writing course, but you do teach craft and an appreciation of the revision process. While Jack Kerouac talked disdainfully of rejecting everything that smacked of being ‘crafty or revised’ he was really talking about the contrived.

PO said you don’t hear about Kerouac’s notebooks, and implied that the notion that his final published was written as a single long stream-of-consciousness teletype was a myth and that there was a process, which undoubtedly involved rereading, selection and editing, whether self-editing or by an actual editor prior to publication.

AS said he doesn’t believe in one-draft wonders, and that they’re the exception, not the rule.

Marina Endicott talked about private tutors and learning from reading, which isn’t a part of creative writing course work. She also said that actors don’t expect to be successful based solely on their talent or skill without undergoing training, and asked why anyone would think it would – or should – be different for writers.

AS said there’s a notion that taking a creative writing degree program or workshop has, to some extent, the same taint as athletes on steroids, but in fact plays are usually written then workshopped, making them collaborative endeavours involving feedback from directors, producers, and actors. He also talked about the story that circulated about Jerzy Kozinski’s first novel, The Painted Bird: some say Max Perkins’ (Kozinski’s editor) contributed 95 per cent of that novel with his extensive rewrites of what amounted to a first draft.

AC said all writing is essentially a collaborative process involving friends, family, first readers, and editors.

AVH said even though some people can stand on their toes they don’t become ballerinas without training, training, training, and more training. Creative writing programs teach ways of using language, and, more important, teach people to get out of their comfort zones so they can make use of ‘all the muscles we use when writing – not just one’s biceps.’

She then asked if there was a book in all of us.

AC said, there may be a story in all of us, but not necessarily a book. Let’s face it – some people are boring.

PO told the story of Margaret Atwood on a cruise ship. She encountered a doctor who told her he was thinking of becoming a writer. Yes, she said, I’m thinking of becoming a brain surgeon myself. Angie Abdou suggested this story was somewhat apocryphal and that she’d heard the writer was Margaret Laurence. Someone else said they’d once been asked, ‘So are all Canadian authors named Margaret?’

AC said that in order to get out of her own comfort zone and get away from the well-worn paths she usually travels as a poet, she’d started working collaboratively. This forces her to – if she finds herself writing about elephants yet again – ask herself the question, ‘would this work better if it was about a turtle rather than an elephant?’

AVH said you have, as a writer, to look for what will discomfit you most.

AS said that while creative writing programs aren’t therapy sessions, they can indeed force people out of their comfort zones (the implication being that this a good thing in terms of creativity).

AC said that it was always a good idea to work outside your genre and try something new – if you’re a poet, take a prose workshop; if you write non-fiction, try taking a poetry course.

AS said in UBC’s MFA creative writing program you have to take classes/workshops in a minimum of three different genres.

PO talked about the vast increase in the number of MA programs in creative writing that currently exist.

AVH said this was especially true in the US, where the number of creative writing programs - many of them online - has increased from about 300 to 1200 in the last 30 years or so. Of course, she said, a fair bit of this amounts to nothing more than ‘tuition harvesting’ on the part of post-secondary institutions. (I found this a refreshing cynical admission.)

Angie Abdou asked a question of her own, followed by another posed to her on Twitter. Angie’s question was, ‘If you’re thinking of taking a creative writing program, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give a potential student?’ And then passed on the question from Twitter, which was, ‘why are students being pushed into MFA programs in creative writing – which primarily teach you how to teach, when there are no jobs available teaching creative writing, rather than MA programs which would teach you how to write?’

AVH said you need to look closely at every program and think about what your goals are. It isn’t easy to get the information you need, but you need to look long and hard at the faculty, and not just who’s listed on the masthead, since they may well not be doing any of the teaching. She cited the example of an author named Malcolm who’s listed as being one of the instructors in a UK creative writing degree program – and he’s basically window dressing. Marina Endicott knew who she was talking about but we’ll have to fill in the blanks re the writer’s last name (and that of the university) when we remember who it is (if you know, please let me know via a comment – it might save one of us waking up at 3AM shouting the guy’s name).

AS said the lack of positions available for teachers of creative writing was directly related to lifting age of retirement requirements for profs, and that Baby Boomers can now continue to work till they’re 90 at universities. The point of the UBC program is to prepare students for a career as a writer, not to prepare people to teach creative writing. And UBC’s program is unique among creative writing programs in Canada in that there are no course work requirements, it’s all workshops. He also said that UBC used to hire on CVs only, but that degrees held have assumed greater importance and that a recent dean wanted everyone teaching in the creative writing to have PhDs. There’s been a temporary reprieve on this issue, but degree requirements to teach creative writing continue to edge up and an MFA is the rock-bottom requirement.

He also said fact finding was a difficult process and that the one thing every student contemplating taking a creative writing degree program should avoid was a program where the teachers were intent on creating disciples.

AC said she’d finally remembered a student horror story. She said every year, when she asks if there are any questions, someone will ask ‘how do I get an agent?’ As a poet, she says, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. And that as a beginning writer, this is putting the cart before the horse (ok I’m editorializing a bit there, she didn’t actually say that, but it’s what she meant). ‘You don’t need an agent,’ she said, ‘you need to learn how to write!’

AVH said creative writing programs always focus on working on craft, never on the business aspects of a writing career. (From my perspective as someone who tries to help authors market their work, and that of many agents, publishers, and booksellers, I’m betting this is something we’d like to see addressed in creative writing programs taken by adults, but never mind….)

PO quoted Roberto Bolano, who said, ‘short story writers should be brave’ and Mark Twain, who said, ‘a tale should accomplish something and arrive somewhere.’

AVH said her one rule in her creative writing classes is, ‘no guns, no killing – let your characters live’ – you don’t just to get them kill them off by shooting them or having them killed by a bus when stepping off a curve.

A workshop participant asked what was the one thing students should bring to a creative writing program.

AVH said her favourite students are those who know how to celebrate the local, and said Andrew Wedderburn had been in her class. One of the other students told Andrew he couldn’t write a book set in and about Airdrie, AB, ‘because no one’s ever heard of Airdrie.’ His novel The Milk Chicken Mom is now being published. And it’s set in Airdrie. (Obviously no one said this to Dianne Warren before she wrote Cool Water, or Angie Abdou before writing The Canterbury Trail.)

AS said that when he’s reading manuscript submissions for admission to the UBC program, he doesn’t give a damn how good the writing is – what he looks for is a lively imagination, because this is something he can’t teach or transmit, and without it good writing doesn’t really matter.

AC said she looks for what’s produced as a result of assigned exercises, that the students she gets excited about are those whose imagery is striking and original and that direct her to look at things in new ways.

I then asked my devil’s advocate question regarding training and academic qualifications for those who teach creative writing. Surely, I said, there’s some merit in having someone teaching actually know how to teach (although an MA, an MFA and/or a PhD are certainly no guarantee of a good teacher). Writing workshops 30 years ago were often treated by authors hired on the basis of their CVs (i.e. the work they’d produced as writers) as paid vacations, and that I’d taken two, taught by well known Canadian authors, who had absolutely no plan at all. At the second one two of us had read and I had happened to bring with me a copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and to compensate for the instructor’s lack of a plan, we’d done several of the group and individual exercises he’d provided.

PO said he likes to teach using the Socratic dialogue model, teaching his students how to critique and how to learn distance – that teaching creative writing involves direction given by a good teacher.

AS said that teaching creative writing can be done very badly and that there’s often a closed loop system in play, where classes are highly scripted and there are no surprises and no challenges. This doesn’t work for everyone, and when it doesn’t, sometimes a one:one tutorial system works. He also said they can’t always make an exception for the students who aren’t benefiting from the workshop approach, which was a shame because young writers are very vulnerable.

PO then quoted some (highly questionable) statistics on writers’ lifespans. Poets and fiction writers tend to live much shorter lives than non-fiction writers. We’d all like to see the source of those stats, I think.

At this point we were a good half hour over our allotted time, so I didn’t get to ask my final question: If you were choosing a creative writing program, which would you rather take, the one John Gardner taught at SUNY Binghamton (taught by an obviously very dedicated instructor at an institution that doesn’t have an amazing reputation for creating successful writers), or one taught by Raymond Carver (who seemed to have been, one way or the other, barely there) at the Iowa Writers Workshop, which has an astonishing track record of producing successful writers?

On the Outside, Looking Like a Writer in Desperate Need of an Editor

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:48:00 +0000

This week I took a detour from my usual reading after seeing a rather surprising Tweetstorm regarding Walrus Magazine's review of Rupinder Gill's memoir, On the Outside Looking Indian.

The Tweetstorm centred on Emily Landau's audacity in writing a negative review and the question was asked, 'couldn't they have found a brown girl to review it?' I didn't get into it. My question would have been, Why should they have? And my snarkier comment would have been, Here we go again with yet another version of the appropriation of voice argument. Frankly I'm fed up with this nonsense when attempting to evaluate writing. I doubt very much Rupinder Gill's intended audience is other 'brown girls' in the same way I doubt very much that Joseph Boyden writes for other people of aboriginal ancestry (he's certainly not sufficiently First Nations to make it in that category, and in fact, like Louise Erdrich, suffers from some pretty ugly reverse racism from First Nations folks).

Wary as I am of Walrus Magazine's lit crit and reviews, based as they are on a desire to be provocative rather than fair and reflecting a sensibility that is peculiarly 416-Toronto while thumbing its nose at the 905 area code and the majority of Canadians, and having found another, diametrically opposed review of OtOLI, I decided I was going to have to read it for myself and make up my own mind.

Luckily the library had it and it was a quick read. It was also a bewildering read on many levels.

Gill is the second child in a family of four girls and one boy (the youngest). Growing up in Kitchener Waterloo, she was isolated within her own family, as there isn't a significant IndoCanadian presence in the area. (Take a look at the demographics - IndoCanadians aren't even listed - there are barely any Italians in K-W!) And the book is both a memoir of her childhood spent in front of a television set and of her 31st year, in which she attempts not so much to recreate her childhood, but to overcome its legacy by finally doing some of the things she wished she'd done as a child. To some extent this book should really be compared with Eat, Pray, Love I think - except for the fact that Gill's year of living goal-mindedly was self-funded and - well - I refuse to finish reading Eat, Pray, Love.

Among the many things Gill's childhood lacked: summer camp, sleepovers, dating, and dog ownership. The child of first-generation Punjabi immigrants, Gill's parents wouldn't let her - or her sisters - do many of the things we think of as classically Canadian. As a WASP who's old enough to be Gill's mother, I have to begin my quibbling here though. Yes I had a dog. Yes I went to summer camp for four years in a row. Yes I learned to swim there. Yes I've been to a grand total of two sleepovers and I remember one of them. Yes I was allowed to date in high school - although I didn't do it much (nor did many of the other kids who attended my academic high school - we were busy with music lessons, student council, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam and nuclear testing, orchestra, theatre, sports, etc.). What I wasn't allowed to do was watch unlimited quantities of television - au contraire. I wasn't even allowed to read for pleasure until and unless my homework was done. And I certainly had household chores - by the time I was in high school I was responsible for doing all the dishes, cleaning the bathroom once a week and both vacuuming the living room and sponging down all the furniture (the pets, a cat and a dog were officially mine, therefore the responsibility for feeding them and for cleaning up after them was also mine).

And so, the year she turns 30, Gill takes tap dancing lessons, investigates dog ownership and decides she's better off as a dog aunt (after one of her sisters does eventually acquire a dog), quits her job as a TV publicist, attends a week-long summer day camp as a counsellor, spends two months in New York where she takes some swimming lessons, and goes to Disney World. More important, she comes to some sort of understanding of and reconciliation with her childhood and her parents, whose strictness regarding appropriate activities for a good Sikh girl chafed so much when she was growing up.

So this book's premise is just fine. Whether you accept Julian Barnes' character's dictum in England, England that over the age of 25 you're no longer allowed to blame your parents for anything or not, Gill's desire to live purposefully rather than whinily is to be applauded.

But then there's the book itself, and Gill's writing skills. For someone who in high school was voted 'most likely to become a stand-up comic,' Gill's writing indicates she needs either one hell of a good editor or a writing partner. From the book's first page: 'In Indian adolescence you never break free of the rules. You cook, clean, babysit, clean, get good grades, clean, be silent, clean, and don't challenge your parents in any way -- especially while cleaning.' That paragraph could work vocally, but timing's everything in comedy, and with the flat delivery of print, it doesn't quite cut it. There are repeated 'jokes' about IndoCanadian facial hair - from the 'hibernating slug' that is her eyebrows (have you ever seen a photo or a self portrait of Frida Kahlo, Rupinder?) to the 'sideburns' she artfully arranges her hair to hide.

Then there are the earnest segments, as when Gill's asked for - and been denied - a three-month leave of absence from her job and decides to quit instead.

'On Monday morning I walked into my boss's office and said the two words I have been agonizing over for the past week: "I quit." As they came out of my mouth it was as if I was having an out-of-body-experience. I couldn't believe it, but it was done. I offered more than a month's notice. I would stay until the end of August and then I would be cast out into the world, jobless, clueless, and full of hope and excitement. I was. In fact, I could not wait.'

There are myriad examples of Gill's awkward prose similar to the one above, but for me the failure to use contractions ('I could not wait' as opposed to 'I couldn't wait') is indicative of someone who's neither a naturally good writer nor someone who's been properly edited. During her swimming lessons she stays 'under the water' rather than 'under water.' 'The second I would extend an arm' - 'Zoe splashed a downpour onto my face' - 'I needed to get everything in line for a chance to return to NYC once again, and not just as a visitor.' This is prose written not in dialect but just badly.

The issues Gill raises are important ones. I've been fascinated by the immigrant experience and by the pressures on first-generation Canadians, caught between two worlds and two cultures, for decades now. The whole 'vertical mosaic vs melting pot' (Canada's approach to multiculturalism vs the US's) notion was first articulated just as I was entering university and embracing my own young adult freedom. She's not unthoughtful, and she's not silly. But oh did this book need to be sent back for a rewrite and very very carefully line edited. I'm very glad her 'second childhood' changed her life. I hope she succeeds in her goal of writing for television. However, since my taste runs more to gritty, dark, cerebral television dramas (or so Netflix tells me), I won't be salivating at the prospect of watching a show written by someone who grew up on a steady diet of Welcome Back Kotter and Three's Company without gagging. I'll be sticking with The Wire and Mad Men, thank you very much, and continuing to give Hot in Cleveland a miss.

Oh and by the way - for an absolutely phenomenal interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire, and someone who's committed to pushing the boundaries of television - take a look at this.

Music Mondays for an ESL class - Alberta

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 13:28:00 +0000

Ian Tyson Four Strong Winds lyrics

Valentines, feminists and fathers

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:58:00 +0000

You make me laugh, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since my father died. This photo was taken when he was about the same age I am now, so I suppose it's an appropriate one to use for this post.

This version of the photo (which was, I believe, taken by cousin Douglas Ward), is cropped. In the photo my father is standing, looking down at my mother.

They had recently moved from Ottawa, my mother's home town, to Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, a village of about 3000 people 40 miles from Halifax.

My dad had been working for the federal government for quite some time, and despite a year-long French immersion course, it seemed unlikely he would ever be certified bilingual. Without that certification it was unlikely he'd ever get another promotion. I'm not so sure he really cared about that, but my mother certainly did. So when a unilingual English job came up in Halifax, he applied for and got it.

My parents rented an apartment in Dartmouth for the first year they were in Nova Scotia. It was the first time in a very long time they'd been tenants, and they couldn't seem to grasp the idea of paying rent or of sharing a building. They were on an emergency route, and were frequently awakened in the middle of the night by ambulances howling as they tore past the apartment building. Then there was the woman upstairs, who came home long after they'd gone to bed and would drop one of her shoes on the floor of her bedroom, waking them up. They'd wait in vain for her to drop the other shoe so they could go back to sleep.

After just over a year of this, they decided they'd had enough, and started looking for a place in the country, a little hobby farm from which they could commute. After looking at only three houses, they decided to buy an old, unrenovated Victorian full of antiques in Shubenacadie. It came with close to an acre of land, but in a long narrow strip that included a railroad right of way, and was next door to one of the remaining farms in the village.

I'll spare you the saga of the renovations and of the foolishness of the purchase, except to say that the house (while boasting some truly lovely Douglas fir woodwork, particularly a cathedral-ceilinged living/dining room and some primary coloured stained glass windows), had absolutely no insulation, was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen - and that the commute to Halifax took close to an hour. Oh, and that their purchase coincided with the OPEC oil crisis. All of a sudden the house didn't seem like quite the bargain they'd initially thought.

None of this matters, though. I'm musing about the irony of a tweet from Alain de Botton that I saw shortly after logging on to Twitter this morning, which is so singularly a propos I have to wonder if he's reading my mind.

'Perhaps the most unambiguous victory of feminism has been to ensure that fathers properly nurture their children.'

When I try to explain to people that my father was my primary caregiver, I'm often met with blank stares and certainly with a profound lack of understanding. It's not just that he - born in 1926 - pitched in on diaper changing (although one of his favourite stories to tell was how he'd changed my diaper on the glass counter of a Buffalo department store display case and how helpful the sales girl had been in this endeavour - hard to imagine this happening now, isn't it? 'We have washrooms for this purpose, SIR.')

My earliest memories are of my father singing me to sleep when I was still in my cot. I was diagnosed as hyperactive as a child, although it may just have been the result of a gluten intolerance I outgrew by the time I was seven. Certainly I had trouble getting to sleep and terrible insomnia until I was close to 30. My dad's repertoire consisted of Baptist hymns and the occasional popular song. 'Little White Church in the Vale' was one of his specialities, as were 'You Are My Sunshine" and 'Beautiful Beautiful Blue Eyes.' If you don't recognize the latter or are having trouble Googling it, look up 'Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes' instead - my father changed the title of the song and its lyrics since I was a very blue-eyed, blonde haired child at the time. One night he forgot to change the lyrics (he must have been tired) and I was inconsolable. He never made that mistake again.

Having taken a year's maternity leave when I was first born, my mother had returned to work. Initially we lived in an eccentric flat on the top floor of my grandmother's house, and she looked after me during the day. My father would often come home for lunch even then. After we bought our own house, there was no daycare, and my mother stayed home for a couple of years to look after me. I have almost no memories of this time at all (which I find a little odd, since I was almost five), except for one fierce argument in the kitchen of our new house in the Ottawa suburb of Alta Vista. My mother was determined that I wear my winter coat to school. I was determined that I would not. (It was January - in Ottawa - what was I thinking? Probably, 'you're not the boss of me!'). I believe my mother won that round.

According to her, I drove her back to work. Certainly if there were more arguments as ferocious as the one about the winter coat, I see her point. But in truth, she had always considered herself a feminist and a career woman. Domesticity wasn't her thing. Neither was motherhood, although she tried, in her own way.

My mother's return to work just as I started Grade Two posed numerous problems relating to child care. Day cares didn't exist at the time. We lived only two blocks from my elementary school. School didn't start till 9AM - but both my parents had to be at work by 8:30. That problem was easily enough solved - I'd just stay at home for half an hour or so after they both left for work. I got home from school by four o'clock. My cousin Marsha, in high school at the time, was hired to babysit me after school. Getting dinner started was also part of her job. There were a couple of times Marsha had something she had to do after school. In those instances, my Aunt Pearl swung into action and took us all - my cousin Sandy and her houseful of foster children - to the movies (I'm still not so sure Lawrence of Arabia or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea were appropriate viewing for an eight year old, but never mind).

But because we lived so close to the school, they wouldn't let me take my lunch - I had to go home, and the school was adamant at the time - they were educators, not babysitters. So be it.

Eventually my parents came up with a solution. My father would come home to make me lunch every day. He'd already started making breakfast every day when my mother went back to work. He seemed to love the problem solving inherent in the timing of bacon, eggs, toast and coffee, and within a few weeks he had the whole thing sorted out. Lunch wasn't anywhere near as difficult a challenge - soup and sandwich doesn't require the same kind of precise timing as bacon and eggs.

When I got sick - and I had most of the usual childhood illnesses, perhaps more until I had my tonsils out the summer I was eight - my maternal grandmother was always there for us. 'Bring the baby over here, I'll look after her,' she'd say. When I got scarlet fever, her house had to be quarantined. I was isolated in the apartment upstairs, and everyone had to take penicillin. This was, I thought, suitably exciting and exotic.

I'm not sure why he first got involved with the bicycle safety workshops - whether that was preceded by his joining the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or not. I know there'd been a child from my public school who'd been killed by a car because the Elmo the Safety Elephant flag was permanently lowered at my public school. But the bicycle safety workshops became an annual spring event, and my dad was always both the behind-the-scenes organizer and front and centre in delivering the workshops.

He initially got involved with the PTA because I was having trouble in school - not my grades, but with my grade two teacher. I'm not sure what the first warning sign was, but I do remember a fuss at the Christmas party over the teacher not believing something I'd said and demanding a letter from my parents to confirm I was telling the truth. When my father started digging into what was going on in the classroom, he was told by the principal that yes, they realized she was a bad teacher, but that she had so much seniority no one could touch her. Yes, I could be transferred to another class, but it would mean my leaving the accelerated program, which was the alternative to skipping a grade - we spent about seven months in each of grades one through four rather than 10, and sped through four years of school in three.

My father was enraged on my behalf. And he started digging into the issue. He joined the PTA. And he discovered at least half a dozen other children who were having trouble with our grade two teacher. Some of them had started bedwetting. Others had broken out in stress rashes. Some were having nightmares. A few were suddenly getting average or poor marks, even though they'd done significantly better in kindergarten and grade one.

Eventually grade two ended (although it was the beginning of grade three for me part-way through the year). My father stayed on the PTA. Eventually he became its president. Other than the bike safety workshops and reassuring other parents that their children weren't mentally ill, I'm not sure what he did there.

What I do know though is that the effort my father made during those five or six years was extraordinary. I don't know many men who'd be willing to step up to the plate to the extent he did. Between the breakfast and the lunch making (and supervision), the PTA meetings and driving my babysitter cousin home, he must have put in at least four hours a day devoted solely to my welfare and nurturing. Somehow he never made any of it seem like a chore. He never made me feel that he resented doing any of the things he did, that he'd rather be having lunch with a colleague or even just having a sandwich at his desk, just as he never made me feel he'd rather be watching TV, reading a book, or even enjoying adult companionship with my mother those nights he'd sing me to sleep. Most important, he never made my mother or me feel that what he was doing was 'women's work' or in any way unnatural - even though my mother was one of a grand total of only two 'working' mothers among my classmates.

After a series of cerebral hemorrhages in his early 60s, my father had severe anomia and became an expert at circumlocution. My mother and I would ask him what he'd had for lunch, and he'd say, 'A round thing on another one of those round things.' We were puzzled by this, but confident he'd eaten something. I decided to spend some time with him before he died, and moved back in with my parents when I was in my early thirties. It was difficult for all of us, but in some ways it was worth it. I'd taught myself how to cook after leaving home, and the brain damage my father had sustained had made him a lot less resistant to vegetarian cooking (his attitude when I'd cooked meatless meals before he got sick was, 'It's good, but there isn't any meat in it.'). I made him a curry once and he ate it with relish, saying, 'Oh, I like this - it has those little round animals we never used to eat before you came to stay with us.' I never open a can of chick peas to this day without thinking of their alternate name.

With only spotty occupational therapy, he wasn't comfortable using the phone after he got sick and never initiated calls. My mother would call me and put him on the phone. He'd forgotten the conventions of telephone conversation, and no longer knew he was supposed to say hello at the start of conversations and goodbye at the end. Instead he'd say, 'I love you.' I never minded.

There's something fitting about the fact that he died on Valentine's Day. If I'd ever needed an excuse to celebrate a made-up holiday that I find intensely hypocritical in an alternative way, his death gave me a permanent out. What I learned from my dad is that there's nothing passive or commercial about love. It's a noun, but it's also an active verb. It's something you show people 365 days a year, whether it's making the tea or shining someone's shoes for them or just being there for them, letting them know you're on their side and that they're not alone in the world. It's not about roses and diamonds and champagne.

Thank you for teaching me that, Dad.

Allan Frederick Seeley
May 21, 1926 to February 14, 1991

Canada Reads 2011 - Day Three, Final Round

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:27:00 +0000

As part of the Canada Reads format changes this year (again, more to come on the whole subject of Canada Reads itself and how it differed from previous years later), the debates were compressed into a three-day span, with a vote to eliminate the third book of the five happening early in the third show and then the final elimination vote happening towards the end of the hour.

Here's the recap:

After the surprising revelation that Debbie Travis had been unable to finish Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans on Tuesday's show, she came in for a lot of heat on Twitter. Frankly I felt sorry for her. If you dislike a book enough to not easily be able to finish it, you must really dislike it a lot. And if you've given 100 pages or more of it a try, even judging duties shouldn't mean you have to finish it. There were some really ugly tweets about Debbie. I found them rather sad. (Is now the time to mention that I'm still 13 pages from the end of Madame Bovary and have been since 1973? I tried to reread it recently because it was one of the books on the Kobo reader I'd bought and I just couldn't do it. I still hate that book, and I don't have to finish it to know why I hate it.) Anyway, like the conscientious new Canadian she is, Debbie got off Twitter fairly early yesterday afternoon, vowing to finish reading The Best Laid Plans (I could hear her thinking, 'even though it might kill me').

Ghomeshi introduced the final round of this year's Canada Reads as 'Canada's Annual Title Fight.' (There's a reason I'm emphasizing the way the show bills itself which won't become obvious till I do my 'What's Canada Reads All About?' post - which may not bear that exact title.) To save myself a little typing and italicization time, I'm going to use abbreviations this time around for both the panelists/host and the books themselves.

JG - Jian Ghomeshi
GL - Georges Laraque
DT - Debbie Travis
SQ - Sara Quin
AV - Ali Velshi
LC - Lorne Cardinal

TBLP - The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
TBC - The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou
Unless is short enough to type and italicize
EC - Essex County by Jeff Lemire
TBH - The Birth House by Ami McKay

JG asked GL how he felt about the elimination of TBC on Tuesday's show. GL responded that he takes everything personally, plays to win and that he thought he'd finish third at the worst. He also said he'd a deal with Debbie (this apparently had been revealed on yesterday's show - somehow I missed that). That's ok though, said GL, 'I know her, I know where she works.'

DT said, 'It's not Survivor .... This is not about us. And this is not about the authors.... What we're looking for is the most gripping novel.'

GL pointed out that DT's having named Digger as her favourite character in a nominated book other than the one she was championing, her voting against it was surprising.

JG said GL's announcement Tuesday that he was going to throw his weight behind TBLP had never been done before on Canada Reads.

GL asked why it was so surprising/shocking that he'd support a book that might help with the electoral process. (Since he's the deputy leader of the Green Party, that does make sense.) And was it more shocking than the news Debbie hadn't finished the book?

DT said she wasn't an athlete, a politician, or a singer. She described herself as, 'An ordinary person who likes a good read. That's all I care about. It's not about us. These authors are fabulous. What's important about this competition is getting Canadians to read...and getting them talking about books.'

DT described the reaction to her confession about not having finished TBLP as 'furious.' JG implied she should have realized people would be furious with her, because 'people are invested in these books. The Q is: if you didn't finish TBLP, why did you vote against EC and TBC?'

DT said she'd finished TBLP last night. She obviously hadn't changed her mind about it, saying that she didn't feel '... connected to the characters, found it confusing.' She said TBH is very similar to TBLP – people are fed up with politics but it's a good book to get people interested in politics. TBH isn't about politics, it's about democracy, and that democracy starts at our kitchen tables and it starts with women.

JG then told SQ she'd gone from loser on day one to king maker on day two, as a result of her having to break a tie - her vote against TBC meant the book was eliminated. SQ said mom called her to fill her in on the Twitter response and that she'd asked her mom, 'Do I look mean on TV?' She said she 'has a hard time being completely honest about these books. It's tough.' (Which I found quite an odd statement, but I think it goes to the point I made previously about her not quite getting what strategy is, which means she can't come up with a good one.)

JG asked SG, 'Do you have a strategy going into this?' To which she replied that she was impressed by Debbie and Ali and just genuinely loves Unless.

JG then asked AV about the fact that GL had crossed the floor in political fashion after AV and TBLP had taken some beatings during Tuesday's show.

AV said TBLLP was a call to action, that he'd run into Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi in the CBC building and that there was an example of, 'It's pie in the sky, it's not going to happen.' thinking being wrong. "Naheed Nenshi is a brown Angus McClintock,' said AV. JG pointed out that Nenshi was a willing candidate, then described TBLP as a satirical take on Ottawa politics and asked AV, 'You're at one of your CNN dinner parties. Austin Cooper asks you about TBLP. What do you say?'

AV said he'd talk about the fact that it's a book whose subject is the fact that 'all people want is fairness in democracy ... people don't think they're heard by their elected officials. You have to vote and you have to be involved.'

JG asked LC what he thought about all the Canada Reads drama. LC replied, 'I think it's exciting' and said his girl set him up with Twitter two days ago so she's tweeting on his behalf. (I presume he meant his daughter, not his wife/girlfriend/significant other.) 'The authors are top notch all the way around.'

JG quoted the first sentence of Unless. 'It happens that I'm going through a period of great unhappiness and loss right now.' LC pointed out that Shields 'also writes with very dry humour and depth and complexity ... you're taken out of yourself ....' (Finally someone mentions the humour in Unless! Because those letters Reta wrote but didn't send to various members of parliament were some of the funniest things I've ever read.)

JG said there'd be two debates today – after the first there'd be a vote to eliminate one book. After the second debate another book would be eliminated, leaving us with the winner.

JG pointed out that panellists had barely mentioned TBH except for DT defending and asked, 'Why is that?'

LC replied, 'we should talk about it. It is just a regional novel and folklore just being retold. It's about a very specific group of people ... there's been a lot of talk about it being about the Halifax explosion but that's actually a very brief section of the book - we spend more time in Boston than in Halifax.'

JG asked, 'It's too east coast for you?'

LC replied that it's not a life he's ever lived – he's never had to fish for cod – 'it's hard for me, being a prairie boy, to identify with this, except for the isolation.'

GL said, 'It is a good story, but we're talking about the essential book ... this book empowers women .... (not, presumably, men). He also said if he hadn't had to read it, he would have stopped. JG asked if GL was saying TBH didn't speak to men. GL replied that TBH shows how men were 100 years ago – you know men were bad then – it's empowering to read that book (for women).

DT said, 'This is ridiculous – you're both completely wrong. It's not just about women – not all the men [in TBH} are pigs.' (Which is something GL had said in earlier debates - rapists and pigs.)

SQ pointed out that Hart Bigelow is good. (No one mentioned Dora's brother Charlie.)

DT said she'd spoken to Ami McKay and that as a result of reading TBH, women are going into the medical profession, becoming nurses and midwives because of it. 'It's a book about community and we learn from this book. It's about a 19-year-old woman who's inspirational.' Women will read it and say, 'Well she did it.' DT also said it's important, given the shortage of trained medical professionals we're currently experiencing, and SQ agreed with her.

JG then said to AV, 'You and I are men. I found this book very powerful.'

AV replied that he'd first enjoyed TBH because it was great storytelling and that he'd like to see it made into a movie. 'Dora Rare is everyman – this remarkable strong woman – not respected for her youth, her gender, or her profession ... but wins her race.'

JG then asked the panellists what didn't work for them.

SQ said she didn't feel invested, that she liked the story and that the book should be read by men and women, although she didn't feel as moved by it as by some of the other books.

JG said, 'We spoke about TBLP. When it comes to Unless – it was written in the early part of the decade - times have changed.' He asked if Unless wasn't a bit of a feminist polemic that no longer resonates.

LC replied that he didn't think times have changed for women, women still aren't included in our day to day lives or in Parliament, the voice of women is not being heard. 'This book contains that voice – she whispers in your ear.' (Have to say, I have a whole new appreciation of Lorne Cardinal as feminist male after listening to these debates - go Lorne!)

JG asked if Shields' voice wasn't too heavy handed?

LC disagreed.

SQ mentioned that all the remaining books could be considered feminist and said that no one had touched on the fact that TBLP has a very strong feminist storyline – Angus'd dead wife was a prominent feminist - and said, 'that's the most inspiring thing about what's left of the books.'

JG revealed the results of the online voting, which indicated TBLP should be eliminated, then TBC (which would have left Unless as the winner). Now it's time to point out one of the flaws of the online voting process - which LC said on Tuesday he didn't trust. Just for fun I thought I'd see how the online voting process worked. To my dismay, I was able to 'vote off' TBLP three times on Tuesday - for no particular reason. After three votes I figure I'd proved my point, that the online voting process was totally skewed and its only real value was its potential psych-out factor when the panellists were told of the results.

GL voted to eliminate Unless (now this was odd really, given what he'd said about TBH throughout the entire contest and about the way DT had voted to eliminate TBC the day before).

LC voted to eliminate TBH.

AV voted to eliminate Unless

SQ voted to eliminate TBH.

DT voted to eliminate TBLP (which she should perhaps have done yesterday?).

Since this produced a tie, JG turned to the Canada Reads rules, which states that the panellist who hasn't helped to create the tie has the deciding vote. At which point DT recast her vote to eliminate Unless rather than TBLP, thus leaving only TBLP and TBH in contention.

JG then talked about the publication history of TBLP. When Terry Fallis first wrote TBLP, the literary agents and publishers all ignored him – this book was initially self published. Fallis submitted it for the Stephen Leacock award and it won. A week later he had a publisher. This 'sets up a bit of a David and Goliath situation. TBH is the best known book that's on the table – it's already a bestseller – should it be taken into consideration that one of these books has become an indie publishing sensation?'

SQ said it was important to note, but how a book's sold in the past doesn't and shouldn't matter – we're not being told to pick a book that hasn't done well – we're picking something we think is essential.

JG reminded people that when Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage was up against Paul Quarrington's King Leary, there was a feeling that the Findley had had its due while King Leary (which was out of print at the time it was in contention) had won partly because it was felt it was a book that hadn't been appreciated sufficiently when it was first published.

DT said TBH and TBLP 'should be the last two books in the running. It's the same story. An essential book has to grip you. Both of them are talking to Canadians about "we want change and how do we do change?”' She said TBH is a democratic book about grass roots' which once meant sitting around your backyard fence or the kitchen table and now means Twitter and blogging. 'Women talk – we're losing that – we're losing our communities. There's no difference in being around a kitchen on the East Coast than in downtown Toronto. If either book wins, it's great because it's created talk.' (Thus obliquely attacking LC's point about TBH being too regional a story, which sadly seemed to end up being the fatal blow.)

JG asked again, 'The self published story – does it mean something at this point?'

AV said, 'Only insofar as it relates to the story. Both books are about aspirations – about becoming empowered – both are essential. TBH is about the issues that women face ... but this book is about the current thing that affects us most in the world – the context is different but that context swings things in favour of TBLP.'

GL asked what would change if everyone read both books? If they read TBH, people would learn that things have changed. But in Canada people don't vote. If people read TBLP this will change Canada. 'That's my job, to encourage people to vote more. Not voting is a bigger problem.'

SQ said, 'That's very hopeful – to think these books would be read by young people today.' And admitted she made the graphic novel debate about youth vs age. And seemed to regret having done so. (Good move, since she gets her MOTHER to read Twitter reactions to her.)

AV said surveys show that of the young people who don't vote, their biggest issue is they don't know enough about the system. He said he was almost as interested in finding the Angus McClintocks in this country as in having TBLP win the Canada Reads contest - he'd like to find five people who say 'that's interesting.'

SQ said she liked TBLP, thought it was great.

AV asked her if she might run for office. SQ said no.

DT picked up on the 'find five people them' and suggested she'd be happy if her championing TBH lead to finding five people who'd go into nursing, midwifery or become doctors.

SQ agreed both books were inspiring – but not to high school students. (Another mysteriously irrelevant remark, I thought. Takes a while to get a book onto a high school syllabus and personally I'd prefer folks keep reading their Shakespeare, but that's just me.)

DT then asked AV, 'How's your book doing in the book clubs? TBH is one of the top books in the book clubs.'

GL replied, 'Yes but mostly it's women reading.'

AV mentioned that both TBLP's protagonists were surrounded by strong women. And that there was a third strong woman in the book

JG then mentioned that Valentine's Day was approaching and asked the panellists which of the two remaining books they'd recommend to someone they loved.

LC said he'd give TBLP to his brother who's running in the next federal election because its descriptions of political machinations were humourous and you need a sense of humour when you get into the House of Commons.

SQ said she'd give TBLP to her dad, who reads newspapers rather than books, but would probably like TBLP.

GL said he'd give TBLP as a Valentine's gift, because of Angus's letters to his dead wife.

AV and DT were then given a few moments to make the final pitches for the books they were championing.

AV said TBLP 'made people laugh, it made me laugh, it made people cry at the same time. It can inspire you. This can help you understand more about it [the political process]. People can effect change. People can change things for women, for immigrants, for themselves.'

DT said, 'I think change begins at home. [TBH is] about a young woman – our young people are very lost today – this is a book that says, you can make it, you can have a voice – TBH is a bestseller – this is a book you cannot put down, male, female and young people as well.'

JG announced the final vote 'to make a book a bestseller.'

AV: voted to eliminate TBH

DT: voted to eliminate TBLP

GL: voted to eliminate TBH

SQ: voted to eliminate TBH

TBLP wins Canada Reads 2011

LC: voted to eliminate TBH

JG said this was 'kind of a remarkable turnaround.'

AV said, 'I hope it moves the needle a little bit to get people involved in the democratic process. Everybody really got behind this – we really accomplished something this week.'

DT said, 'the idea of this is fantastic – everybody should go out and get both books – if a book can inspire us – if we get a new nurse out of TBH, if we get a new politician out of TBLP - we all win.'

SQ said both arguments were very strong – she went back and forth re both books and stopped thinking of the debate as in terms of what she herself would read – 'this turned almost into a job' - but that since the most essential book of the last decade criteria had been given, TBLP fit that criteria.

LC said Terry Fallis is a fantastic author, TBLP a fantastic book, that he has a penchant for humour (everyone laughed at this, although Corner Gas has never succeeded in making me laugh), that he thinks Canada has a penchant for humour as well – 'look at all the talent we've exported to the US!'

JG said he had Terry Fallis on the phone.

Fallis said, 'If I'm sounding a bit muffled it's because I'm curled on floor of my third-floor library in the fetal position breathing into a paper bag. I haven't touched down yet. I'm amazed and truly grateful.' Then he told AV he might just write his biography now, that he thought AV had done an amazing job defending TBLP, and was passionate but polite. He said AV had really presented the merits of the novel effectively, which was tough to do given it was up against such wonderful books.

AV said, 'you and the other authors did the heavy lifting. To you and the other authors – thank you for giving us such great stuff to work with.'

Terry Fallis will be interviewed by JG on Q tomorrow.

And that's it for Canada Reads 2011. Sort of. Except for the fact that it's provided all of us with a great deal of food for thought. Now excuse me, I'm just off to pick up my copy of TBLP before everyone else gets there ahead of me. Of course I'm middle aged and I do vote. But never mind - I want to read those love letters of Angus McClintock to his dead wife.

Canada Reads 2011 - Day Two, Round Two

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:26:00 +0000

After the reminder from Jian Ghomeshi that 'We're looking for the essential Canadian novel of the last decade,' he referred to Canada Reads as 'Canada's annual title fight.' I mention this because I think a lot of people are taking Canada Reads waaay too seriously (although more on this subject in subsequent posts, after the 2011 competition is over. But then I gather some folks watch those Idol shows too, as well as other televised abominations like So You Think You Can Dance? - you may think you can dance but it's quite obvious to me that you're deluded.).

Defenders of the four remaining nominated titles (The Best Laid Plans, The Birth House, The Bone Cage, and Unless) discussed the contest at the top of the show. 'This,' said Ali Velshi, is serious business.... I want to make the best case that I can, and the most relevant case that I can.'

Reflecting on the fact that Essex County was eliminated yesterday, Lorne Cardinal said, 'I was the heel, I just happened to be sitting in the number three [voting] spot.'

Ghomeshi mentioned again that Unless was trailing in the online poll on the first day of the contest. Lorne Cardinal said he was surprised, since Carol Shields is one of our premiere authors, and Unless is a literary gem. At this point Ghomeshi pointed out that Unless did not win the Pulitzer Prize, but that The Stone Diaries did. It was unclear from the conversation whether Lorne Cardinal had actually been confused about this or not, but it was nice to get it cleared up. 'She's still a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist though,' said Cardinal, which nicely covered his factual error – whether inadvertent or deliberate.

Georges Laraque appeared on the show wearing a T-shirt made by Angie Abdou with a photo of the two of them on it. He pointed out that she has the least funding support of all the books in the contest (presumably because The Bone Cage was published by NewWest Press, a small Western Canadian publisher, while the other books have the marketing muscle of Random House Canada, Harper Collins, and McClelland and Stewart behind them).

Today's show featured author descriptions of the novels, which was a pleasant change of pace, followed by 30-second defenses of the books. Terry Fallis said that The Best Laid Plans, which won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, was 'the story of an accidental MP.' Ali Velshi declared the book is essential because we're all fed up with politics. 'This book is about making democracy work ... and it's as current today as it was when it was written.'

Ami McKay's clip described The Birth House as being about science at the turn of the 20th Century. 'Dora Rare...is destined to become the midwife for her community, but she's reluctant.' Debbie Travis went on to say, 'It's about a changing world ... it's about holding onto our traditions and embracing our future,' and about 'using our past for the benefits of today.'

Angie Abdou summed up The Bone Cage very succinctly by saying, 'The Olympics leaves its athletes' broken souls. The Bone Cage shows why.' Georges Laraque amplified this theme by saying it's a novel about 'what happens when a body fails' and that 'we all face failure.' He also reminded listeners that it's a 'story about love' (the love Sadie has for her grandmother).

A 2002 Carol Shields recording described Unless as 'The voice of a woman, a 44 year old mother with three daughters,' one of whom has become a derelict who lives on the street with a sign saying 'goodness' hung around her neck. 'This is the great loss that I'm speaking about.' Lorne Cardinal said Unless is a novel within a novel within a novel, written in the 'language of love, loss, laughter and hope,' full of 'transcending moments' and 'stellar' writing.

Ghomeshi's opening question for this round was, 'Which of these four remaining books is the best written?'

Velshi pointed out that, 'Well written can mean many different things to many different people' and said that to him, well written meant accessible. While Shields is the most accomplished writer, The Best Laid Plans is the most accessible of the four remaining novels in the competition. 'It's satire ...a little bit of humour and a little bit of sarcasm.... It's not a dark book, but it's about a very serious issue. It makes you laugh every two seconds.'

Debbie Travis pointed out that there's a big difference between an accessible book and an essential book. 'We're here for the essential book.' But she continued by saying The Birth House was the best written. 'A book is a fantasy, it's a world ... it's like watching a movie.... You're involved in this story, you look up from the book and say, 'oh, I'm not in 1917.''' She found Unless predictable. 'My book has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it draws you in.' (See below for more of Debbie Travis's thoughts on Unless – and for her confession re The Best Laid Plans.)

Georges Laraque came out swinging by stating, 'This contest is not about picking your favourite book.' 'Everybody has to relate to that story.' 'If you go with your personal choice, that's being very selfish.' 'Everybody knows people who are into sports.' He then said Shields' Larry's Party should have been the Canada Reads contender, not Unless. 'Unless was hard to get into ... the wording.' 'Our role is to get Canada to read more.' If Unless is selected ... 'they'll never read again.'

Sara Quin responded with, 'I totally disagree' and picked Unless as the best written of the four remaining books, describing the story as beautiful and moving. (Which of course has nothing to do with the way it's written, story being plot, not style, but never mind.) She also liked The Best Laid Plans for its entertainment value. 'You could pick up this book in an airport ... it's easy to read, it's a great story ... it's the quickest story ... it's the easiest read.' She then said, 'It's a bigger idea, a more universal issue,' a remark that didn't really become clear until later in the debate.

Lorne Cardinal of course stuck with Unless as the best written of the four novels, saying, 'Structure is key to understanding content.' He then immediately undercut the argument he may or may not have been trying to make re the structure of Unless by actually talking about how well the book is written: 'You can flip it open at any page and read it out of context, pick any page and read and it will jump out at you.'

Debbie Travis said Unless is 'beautifully written, but it's two books in one.' 'She writes about writing a book' and felt the 'story that's going on within the story is too introspective.' Which may have been a response to the red herring regarding structure introduced by Cardinal.

Cardinal responded by saying Unless is 'a novel that promotes thought and debate and that's the point of literature.'

Velshi then said Unless is 'not as easy a book to read' as The Best Laid Plans and if accessibility is what you're going for, it's not the most accessible but it 'does cause you to fire different synapses.'

Cardinal responded to Velshi's claim that Unless is not easy to read by saying, 'woman's voice is under-represented in our literature [sic] canon today,' that Shields was a victim of her own success and that her work is currently suffering from 'The Munro Principle' – she's already won a lot of awards. He then startled everyone by saying if Unless were taken off the table, he'd pick The Birth House (as best written? As most essential read? That wasn't quite clear).

Ghomeshi summarized this year's nominees as all being about loss: loss of a daughter (Unless), loss of career hope (Essex County), loss of mobility (The Bone Cage), 'The Birth House has all sorts of calamities, ' Angus in The Best Laid Plans loses his wife and writes to her after her death, then asked the panelists, 'Which book deals with loss most memorably?

Sara Quin said Unless, and talked about the scene where Reta drives around the block looking for her daughter, who's living on the streets, finally spots her and is happy because she sees her daughter's wearing gloves on a cold day.

Georges Laraque talked about Sadie losing her grandmother in The Bone Cage. 'She takes time to see her grandmother and it's killing her inside ... but she still needs to focus ... when she loses her mobility that totally kills you – it's heartbreaking – what is she going to do, how will it affect her spirit?' 'Nothing is guaranteed.'

Ghomeshi interjected, 'I found it an incredibly powerful meditation on loss when she loses her mobility.'

Sara Quin then talked about The Best Laid Plans' Angus writing letters to his wife after she was dead and how touching she found them. She then spoke about focus and drive and the parallel between being an athlete and being a musician. 'I hurt my finger and I can't even wash my hair properly,' she said, immediately followed by 'that was silly.' Since I'm already being accused in this blog of being anti Sara Quin, I'll just let that one go, shall I?

Cardinal spoke about Unless again. Shields, 'writes about loss, but she also writes about hope .... she writes about the fragility of our lives' and about '... a child discovering the world and their place in it.'

Debbie Travis pointed out loss was a theme in all five of the books. But, 'I don't think the writing of The Bone Cage and The Best Laid Plans can hold a candle to Unless.' And then, having answered the previous question about which book was the best written and having reluctantly named Unless this time, she said, 'What I hated about the book [Unless] ... was I was so not interested in her writing journey...' The real corker in today's debate came next, when Travis confessed she hadn't been able to get through The Best Laid Plans. She got angry with it – felt her time was worth more than this – didn't find it funny at all. In fact, she said, it was 'so unfunny I wanted to throw it away. I liked the Scottish guy. I'm not interested in Canadian politics.'

Velshi then pointed out that, 'Debbie is very very stuck on this idea, like many people, that they don't like politics.' His alternative interpretation is that The Best Laid Plans is a, 'a story about inspiration for change.' To which Debbie Travis replied that the inclusion of Angus' letters to his dead wife were an excuse for bad writing. 'You said be truthful.'

Ghomeshi returned to the conversation, saying that 'Unlike most CBC game shows – winning Canada Reads can actually be pretty lucrative' and claiming that it fuels book sales in the same way (although not to quite the same extent) as The Giller Prize. (Note: I'm working on another post on this subject for next week.) After winning Canada Reads, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes sold half a million copies, said Ghomeshi.

The four remaining authors were asked what they'd do for their books' defenders if the book won the Canada Reads contest. Terry Fallis said he'd not only owe Ali Velshi big, he'd write him in as a character in his next novel. Ami McKay announced Debbie Travis would have to renovate her kitchen if she doesn't win. Angie Abdou vowed not only to do an Ironman contest, but to peel oranges for her defender. Anne Giardini, Carol Shields' daughter, said she'd buy Lorne Cardinal some Haida artist earrings.

'You can't talk about Canada any more without talking about how Canada has changed in the last few decades – it's incredibly diverse,' said Ghomeshi, then asked, 'Which of these books best speaks to Canadian society today?'

Cardinal said he wasn't sure, that each appeals to a cross section and some are very specific to certain audiences. The Bone Cage, he said, is about athletes – and then went on to describe the structure of the writing as 'a bit convenient.'

'If someone were to say, these are all "white books" what would you say?' Ghomeshi asked. To which Cardinal replied, 'Well, obviously they are.' He went on to talk about the appeal of Unless to women and the fact that it was written by a woman. 'It's ridiculous to think women haven't contributed to the literary form.' (I didn't quite follow this line of reasoning, as three of the five books nominated this year were written by women and focus on female protagonists, but never mind.)

Sara Quin agreed the novels weren't very diverse, but then explained her previous airport remark by saying there was 'a celebrity nature' to The Best Laid Plans and that there was something universal about it, as with all big best sellers – 'it's paced in a way that we've become used to expecting in books and films.'

Laraque defended The Bone Cage by saying, 'This is not just about sports. The Olympics aren't the point – it's the journey.' And then attacked Unless by saying it was hard to read. Velshi repeated that The Best Laid Plans is a call to action.

Ghomeshi updated listeners on the online polling and stated that while yesterday Unless was the book chosen for elimination, today it was The Bone Cage, with Unless following closely.

Debbie Travis said The Birth House is about community and 'the forever-changing roles of women and men.' It's 'so relevant today' and 'it's a novel you'll never forget.' (Presumably also one that doesn't inspire rage for its sheer unfunniness either.)

Cardinal said he didn't trust polls, that 'I can't apologize for excellent writing,' and that while The Best Laid Plans is 'great brain candy, it doesn't delve deeply.'

Laraque got the final word before voting began, saying, 'We have to talk about the book ... that inspires people to read.'

Voting results

Debbie Travis voted to eliminate The Bone Cage.
Georges Laraque voted to eliminate Unless.
Lorne Cardinal voted to eliminate The Bone Cage.
Ali Velshi voted to eliminate Unless.
Sarah Quin voted to eliminate The Bone Cage, breaking the tie.

Laraque's reaction was spontaneous but controlled: 'I'm so mad right now.' 'I'm speechless.' 'I'm in shock. That was not supposed to happen.' 'I don't understand it ... when I picked this book ... I picked a book that would make a difference.'

Ghomeshi described The Bone Cage as 'an outstanding, moving novel.'

Cardinal said, 'it's just about the writing' and that 'structurally Carol Shields is head and shoulders the best writer at this table.'

Travis said, 'I really looked at the writing of The Bone Cage ... this is an important book ... this is a book that should be read in schools ... but I don't think the writing is as good as Carol Shields'.'

Sara Quin said she 'thought it was the weakest of the books ... I felt like I needed to be consistent.'

It is interesting that The Best Laid Plans and The Birth House haven't had any votes against them to date. It's even more interesting to me that after confessing she found The Best Laid Plans too infuriating to finish, Debbie Travis voted to eliminate The Bone Cage. In the meantime, The Bone Cage defender Georges Laraque indicated he'd be supporting The Best Laid Plans until/unless it was eliminated.

Tomorrow: another book will be eliminated at the beginning of the show.

Canada Reads 2011 - Day One, Round One

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:32:00 +0000

I'm just going to assume, for the purposes of this post, that everyone reading it already knows about Canada Reads, that everyone knows it's the 10th anniversary of this annual Survivor crossed with American Idol contest, and that the format has changed slightly this year, with far more reader/general public involvement via social media, and that the task this year was to select the 'must-read novel of the first decade of the new millennium.'

This year's nominees are:

Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans, defended by Ali Velshi

Ami McKay's The Birth House, defended by Debbie Travis

Angie Abdou's The Bone Cage, defended by Georges Laraque

Jeff Lemire's Essex County, defended by Sara Quin

Carol Shields' Unless, defended by Lorne Cardinal

Here's my synopsis of what happened during the first round – when the defenders got to vote to eliminate one of the five books nominated.

Velshi mounted a spirited one-minute pitch for The Best Laid Plans, talking very quickly while mentioning the fact that it's a 'fast-moving political satire set in the Ottawa area' and as such, was an important book for all Canadians to read (since politics affects all of us, whether we vote or not). His pitch was serious but also humourous, and he got a big laugh when he said 'if you choose another book, it's like choosing the radish as a national vegetable.' Touching briefly on voter apathy (on the rise in inverse proportion to voters' ages), he described the novel as 'not only a call to action' but something that 'can actually work' to combat voter apathy.

Debbie Travis was no less eloquent in her advocacy of The Birth House, and she scored some real points for taking the novel out of its 'historical' context and placing it in a broader human and contemporary setting. 'It's about what really shapes society,' she said, set at a time when modern medicine, the emancipation of women, and the first of our two 'world' wars were all factors in Canadian society. Cleverly pre-empting potential attacks on The Birth House as a 'likely to appeal to women only' novel, she said it was about men's role in society and that it represents an examination of 'the best of tradition, the best of the future.' She nicely wrapped up her pitch by saying it's a particularly appropriate novel to read at a time when we're struggling to cope with the fact that any 'new technology changes us' as a society.

Georges Laraque came out swinging in the nicest possible way when he talked about The Bone Cage. It's a novel for 'kids, teens, adults, men and women' he said. (The only people left out were pre- and elementary schoolers and the multi-gendered.) Without alluding to the fact that Canada had recently hosted the winter Olympics, he focused on the book's universal themes and appeal. While it's a novel that does explain why Olympic athletes are so driven, he said, it's a really about the very human struggle to 'beat the odds.' 'Life is a battle – this is what this book is all about.'

Knowing that she was defending the contest's one graphic novel, Sara Quin made a fatal strategic error by choosing to tackle the subject of graphic novels head on, instead of talking about the book she was actually supposed to be promoting/defending. While she did mention that she'd chosen the book because of its 'haunting connection between characters' and said that the illustrations made you 'feel like you're in the book,' she also spent far too much of her initial one minute talking about how Essex County 'transcends the genre' of the graphic novel.

Last up was Lorne Cardinal, whose pitch for Carol Shields' Unless began with a mention of her Pulitzer Prize (which an earlier Shields' novel, The Stone Diaries, had won, but never mind). Cardinal focused on the universality of the book's theme – loss – and described it as 'a symphony for the eyes,' a novel that 'transcends words' through the multi-dimensionality of its characters. He implied the novel was a haunting work of fiction that lingers 'in our minds.'

At the end of this round, Jian Ghomeshi summed up the five novels' appeal, saying that going into day one of the Canada Reads live event, The Birth House and Unless had been categorized as novels primarily appealing to women, The Best Laid Plans as interesting to political junkies only, and Essex County to indie hipsters.

Laraque's response to this statement was to say, 'we want people to read more ... if we pick the wrong book, they'll never read again.' He then took a shot at The Birth House, saying most of the men in the book were 'pigs, rapists and warriors' (who wants to read about that?). Velshi attacked Essex County, saying it was like the iPad of books – to which Sara Quin hastily responded, 'we need young people to start reading books' and 'the iPad saved Apple.' Lorne Cardinal was more of an equal-opportunity attacker, saying that The Best Laid Plans 'could turn people off voting and reading' and describing Essex County as a book that represented 'the gateway to reading' rather than reading itself. Unless, he said, is a book that 'gets people thinking about things rather than things.' Oddly this actually made sense – what he was trying to say was that Unless gets people thinking about life and issues rather than material goods. Laraque returned to the attack on Essex County, asking whether it could be considered 'the essential novel' of the last decade. Quin said something, but Laraque trounced her soundly by saying, 'you say it's a novel, but Jeff calls it a cartoon.' Even though I'd already gathered from tweets that Essex County was going to be the first book eliminated, for me it was at this point in the program that I knew it was going down – and why. Poor offense on Quin's part and an even poorer defense? I knew Essex Country was history.

Ghomeshi then asked the panelists, 'Aside from the characters in your own book, which character resonated the most for you?'

For Velshi it was The Birth House's Dora, a character who embodied the contrast between 'modernity and tradition' and who had 'one foot in the old world, one foot in the new world.' Lorne Cardinal chose Jimmy LeBeuf from Essex County, a character whose 'best moment' – his one game in the NHL before a career-ending slam into the boards - had shaped and transformed the rest of his life. Oddly, at this point, Sara Quin piped up to deny there was a character named Jimmy in Essex County, and talked briefly about two other characters, Lou and Vince, before remembering Jimmy. Georges Laraque chose Angus from The Best Laid Plans, saying 'he has kind of my personality' – described by one reviewer as 'witty and charming.' Sara Quin picked Reta Winters from Unless, because she was a writer and a mother, and because she was moved to tears by the grief and longing in the book's passages that described Reta's missing her daughter. Debbie Travis chose Digger from The Bone Cage, saying 'it's a book about striving...and failure.' She said that as someone who wasn't a sports fan, she hadn't expected to like The Bone Cage, but that she was fascinated by Digger the wrestler. Knowing that failure 'is crippling in the end,' she was 'interested in the journey people take to be the best they can be.'

Ghomeshi then said that the least popular novel to date from the voting public was Unless, but that 'the nation awaits' the first panelist vote. And here are the results:

Georges Laraque
Voted to eliminate Essex County

Sara Quin
Voted to eliminate The Bone Cage

Debbie Travis
Voted to eliminate Essex County on the grounds that it did not meet the 'essential' reading criteria.

Lorne Cardinal
Voted to eliminate Essex County on the grounds that it isn't actually a novel, but is, rather, a collection of short stories.

Ali Velshi
Voted to eliminate Essex County.

At this point Sara Quin went on a bit of a subdued rant, saying the other panelists 'represent a demographic that isn't going to read this book' and that Essex County 'will capture a younger viewership' [sic] while the other novels represented choices that were 'more traditional and safe.' Which was a little odd and not terribly gracious.

Tomorrow: round two of Canada Reads.

For all the information you could want about Canada Reads, here's the official page. And if you don't mind hearing the news before you've had a chance to listen to the show yourself, follow the #CanadaReads hashtag on Twitter.

Update: See this review of Essex County if you want to get some sense of what the book's actually about - something that none of the Canada Reads panellists managed to convey during the three days of debates. Spelling of characters' names have been silently corrected in this post after reading the review. (February 9, 2011)

Here's the Canada Reads Day Two roundup. And here's the roundup for the third and final day.

Continual Christmas and all the best for 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:31:00 +0000

Just came across this again (had found it via flickr a couple of years ago). Whether one celebrates Christmas or not, the sentiment expressed here is bang on.

Let
No Pleasure tempt thee,
No Profit allure thee,
No Ambition corrupt thee,
No Example sway thee,
No Persuasion move thee,
to do any thing which thou
knowest to be evil;
so shalt thou always live jollily;
for a good Conscience
is a continual Christmas.

Benjamin Franklin,Ben Franklin's Wit and Wisdom, Peter Pauper Press

The Last Summer (of You & Me): Hemingway on estrogen

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:41:00 +0000

If Hemingway had decided to write a Harlequin romance, The Last Summer (of You & Me) would probably have been the result. Not having read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants or any of Ann Brashares' other work (and not having realized this was her first foray into supposedly adult rather than young adult fiction), I was curious about this novel, and recently picked it up in a secondhand bookstore.

While some reviewers find Brashares a 'beautiful writer' I'm afraid I'm going to have to beg to differ. It's bad enough that she treads on territory so well worn as to be dangerously slippery (both the coming of age novel and the most fundamental of plots: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back). She creates characters who manage to be simultaneously 'thin' in the E.M. Forster sense and unlikeable (unless you really have a penchant for young men and women who prefer to passively brood rather than, you know, get the therapy they so obviously need).

Alice and Riley are sisters; Paul is Riley's best friend. They've evolved a Fire Island code as children who spend their summers living next door to each other, vowing that nothing will ever change between them. Inevitably, change does happen, and these characters are singularly ill-suited to coping with it. One thing that doesn't change, however, is their passion for Rice Krispies. I was tempted to calculate the number of bowls of cereal poured and consumed in the course of this novel, but it's the kind of detail no one really needs to know. Someone must have told Ms Brashares that in order to develop characters you must know what they eat for breakfast. Her creative writing instructor must have left out the second half of that idea, which is that while the writer must know this, it is not necessary to communicate it. In fact, it's rarely a good idea to do so. Since I'm hoping those of you reading this review won't be reading the novel, I'll fill you in: the second most popular breakfast food in which these characters indulge (you know, when the cereal box is empty or they're feeling extremely daring) is bacon and egg sandwiches from the local store. All righty then - you needed to know that, didn't you?

Now for some passages for The Last Summer (of You & Me) to give you some idea of the quality of the writing, which I consider mesmerizingly bad.

'She was only twenty-one. A virgin until two weeks ago, and he wanted to attach himself to her physically, mentally, emotionally every minute of every day, for now and ever. Of course it was too much. He was right to be suspicious of himself. He'd know that when he finally opened up to her, he would blast out like a fire hose, destroying everything in his path: every spark, every tender thing.'

Is it just me, or did you too burst out laughing when you got to the phrase 'blast out like a fire hose'? (I'm sparing you the sex scenes which precede this passage - you're welcome.)

'And though she rarely saw Paul wearing layers and walking in winter light, she began to suspect that the similarity between this man and Paul did not stop with his walk. She looked at the man's hand, the one that wasn't involved with the blond woman's arm, and she knew the hand. She knew the fingers. Her body, badly attached as it was, would have whimpered if she hadn't caught it in time. Her breath shuddered. Her heart mismanaged its work of beating.'

Hmmm. Women are blonde, men are blond. What was it to which her body was badly attached - I seem to have missed that. Oh yes - because it's not there. Body whimpering - there's an indelible image. Isn't there a TV series called The Ghost Whimperer?

'He wished he hadn't let himself have that thought. He knew it was a trick. He knew it at the time, but he'd done it anyway. He'd spent his life girding himself against that very trick, and he'd gone right ahead and fallen for it.... A part of him wanted her to call on the phone just so he could tell her off properly. He imagined she would try that emasculating strategy of wanting to be friends again. She'd already ripped him apart; he wasn't going to let her pick through the bits to see which ones she still wanted. He wouldn't give her the opportunity to assuage her guilt by being friends with him. But anyway, he didn't get to tell her off because she didn't call.'

Ahem. Fiction editor asleep at the wheel here? At this point I've completely forgotten what the tricky thought (outlined in the paragraph immediately preceding this one) was: oh yes, that rather than sell his Fire Island summer home, he should keep it for Alice. But wait, the house has only recently been signed over to Paul. And yet he's been thinking he should keep it for Alice his entire life? Now I'm confused.

'There was a familiar feeling he knew he could feel right now. It opened in front of him like a hallway, beckoning him to walk down it. He could resent her for her beauty. He could feel threatened by her again. He could be threatened by the fact that Alice had already won the adoration of two little girls who now lived in his house. His path in life was not exactly original. Who could live next to Alice and not fall in love with her? And she, being so easily loved, did she really need his, too? What could she want with it? What did he have to offer?'

His hot bod, obviously, as we learn a few pages later:

'He looked impatient for her return. He grabbed her up as soon as she'd tiptoed back into the room and with ardent determination, he finished the job of undressing her. He lay her on the couch and made love to her with a solemn face and a joyful body.'

I'm pretty sure he laid her on the couch and then got laid, but why quibble about grammar when you have phrases like 'ardent determination' and 'a solemn face and a joyful body' to savage?

Apparently Warner Bros. has bought the movie rights to this novel and it looks like it's scheduled for release sometime in 2011. I'm not surprised the script has already had to be rewritten twice. Making silk purses out of sow's ears isn't an easy task. Still, the movie might be worth watching just for the sake of the soundtrack. Personally I'm dying to hear the score that'll accompany those solemn face/joyful body sex scenes.

Words of wisdom from Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:50:00 +0000

What a fabulous first novel Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal is - pushing the boundaries of fiction in a way few have done. I think The Guardian's review sums it up far more insightfully than I ever could, but this passage made my blood run cold.

The saxophone teacher, in whom many of the girls from the private school at which the 'sex scandal' takes place confide, must, of course, deal with the girls' parents as well as she decides which pupils to accept or reject. It's the least favourite part of her job. But this scathing and deadly assessment of the mothers' aspirations was one of the best passages in the novel:

'"I am never quite sure," the saxophone teacher says, "what is truly meant when the mothers ay, I want my daughter to experience what was denied to me.

'"In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter's image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. When these mothers say, I want her to fully experience everything that was denied to me, what they rightly mean is, I want her to fully appreciate everything that was denied to me. What they rightly mean is, The paucity of my life will only be thrown into relief if my daughter has everything. On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be incapacity; it will be sacrifice. I will be pitied more, and respected more, if I raise a daughter who is everything that I am not."

'The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, "The successful mothers--musical women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls--the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter's behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable."'

The Rehearsal is published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart. Buy, beg, or borrow a copy - it's well worth the read. If Catton can produce this kind of work at age 25 (before she even graduates from the Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program), what will she be doing at 30? 40? 50? Stand aside, Yann Martel - you ain't seen or produced nothin' yet that can hold a candle to this young woman.

Quotable women - Fay Weldon and Mary Gaitskill

noreply@blogger.com (Ruth Seeley) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:23:00 +0000

No time for a full-length review of Fay Weldon's 2005 novel She May Not Leave (Atlantic Monthly Press). Pick up a copy of the remaindered hardcover for a song while you can. At first I thought it wasn't as delightfully acerbic as her previous work, but I changed my mind about that as got closer to the novel's climax and Weldon's trademark (at least I hope she's trademarked it) denouement, in which she gives a plot twist so definitive you're completely bowled over. I think one of the things I like best about Weldon's writing - in addition, of course, to the fact that she is the most pragmatic and realistic feminist I've ever encountered via the printed page - is that she really doesn't telegraph what's to come. She's sly. There are hints. But the story has sufficient propulsion that you note significant details without pondering them too much.

Anyway, two great passages/lines from She May Not Leave:

'"It's in the nature of women to report the bad behaviour of men to other women: he did this, then he said that, I can't stand it a minute longer. They don't expect to be taken seriously."

Serena agrees that it is certainly safer to report one's wrongs to other women than to men. She tells me how recently she was sounding off about Cranmer to a male friend and months later when she saw him again he said "thank God, you two are still together - I thought you were splitting up", and she couldn't even remember what the quarrel had been about, except that she had been very angry at the time. What woman ever can remember?'

And then there's the priceless (and oh so true) line: 'Anger is a great cure for fear.'

I started out well with Mary Gaitskill, reading (and loving) her first two books, Bad Behaviour and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. And then I don't know what happened - somehow I missed Because They Wanted To and Veronica. I'll have to catch up, because I believe she's one of the most important contemporary writers around. Don't Cry, her 2009 collection of short stories, leapt out at me from the library shelves though, and I snapped it up immediately. In some ways Gaitskill could be viewed as Fay Weldon's American granddaughter (I wonder what they'd both think of that notion?). 'Mirror Ball' is one of the more fanciful stories in this collection, but it deals with a subject that has long preoccupied Weldon: the soul-stealing effects of trying to be a heterosexual woman in a world that demands you be a feminist. 'The Agonized Face' tackles some of the issues of female solidarity, ground Weldon's trod many times, especially in her amazing story "Alopecia" (from Watching Me, Watching You).

The passage that really struck me from this collection was from another story though, 'Folk Song' - perhaps because I've got to know so many scientists recently on Twitter, and have watched the skeptic movement in the UK in particular adopt a very hostile and divisive stance - to homeopathy, to alternative medicine, and to those who still have faith - guaranteed to polarize opinion, couched in terms of ridicule I think is ultimately counter-productive. The scientists and skeptics for whom I have the most respect are those who admit that scientific research has an amoral aspect at its very heart - and this passage sums up that notion so very neatly:

'Yet with science, anything is possible. With science, rats have been tortured by electroshock each time they press a lever to get a food pellet. Rabbits have been injected with cancerous cells and then divided into control groups, one of which was petted and the other not, in order to investigate the role of affection in healing. Scientists do these experiments because they want to help. They want to alleviate physical suffering; they want to eradicate depression. To achieve their goal, they will take everything apart and put it back together a different way. They want heaven and they will go to hell to get there.'