Shelved

Bedtime is altogether different with a new kitten in the house. For many weeks, Rosie has been confusing "bedtime" with "playtime."

Helena had hoped Rosie would sleep with her and would scoop her into her bed in the evening. But Rosie wouldn't settle down on command, and then it took far too many minutes to corral the kitty out of Helena's room, so now Helena doesn't even bother — she closes the door behind her to make sure no feline whips through her dreams.

Come my bedtime, Rosie is no better at settling down, but as I usually read for a while, it doesn't bother me too much. She circles the bed, surveils the territory, clears the corners of invisible predators, attacks my toes. She is curious about my reading material, and when my book lies open on the bed she creeps up onto the page as if trying to discern those strange markings. I remove her. The dance repeats itself. She eventually tires.

Last night was quiet. I read. When I turned over to turn off the light, I discovered Rosie was close by after all; she's found herself a comfortable niche among the mass market paperbacks.

Strawberry

I have a basket of strawberries hanging on my balcony. I am unreasonably excited about this.

As a teenager, many summers I picked strawberries on farms to earn some extra spending money (though having eaten a significant portion of my haul, this was hardly a profitable activity). But never have I grown my own berries.

This photo was taken a couple days ago. This morning Helena deemed the biggest of them had reddened enough.

Picked and eaten. The finest strawberry she's ever tasted!

Tomorrow will be my turn to sample one. A couple dozen more are currently in flower.

Goddamn phonies

Last weekend the kid had another birthday party to attend, obliging us to drive out to the burbs and exchange pleasantries with other parents with whom we have nothing in common except for our offspring being in the same kindergarten class (why do suburbanites send their kids to school at the end of our street? and why can't the downtown parents find fun, age-appropriate birthday activities for their children in the neighbourhood they live in?).

In those few awkward moments before we abandoned our children to the care of the unwitting parents who'd extended this invitation on behalf of their fresh 6-year-old, the conversation fumbled a bit, but being that there was a cinema complex in the mall in which we'd assembled, movies seemed a natural subject.

J-F mentioned he'd like to see the new Terminator movie, and I smiled in a kind of solidarity — it's certainly one of the coolest trailers I've seen in ages. Who doesn't love to watch the post-apocalypse?! Apparently, all the parents of my daughter's peers. We were promptly advised that the Star Trek movie is far superior — it's multilayered! — and were snubbed for the duration of the ritual smalltalk. J-F fails to understand their lack of appreciation, and has been fuming over this incident for days.

So it comes as a kind of vindication to learn that J.D. Salinger broke his public silence this weekend to share his fervour for the latest Terminator movie.

[Apparently he's developed quite a bit of literary material over the years, all of which appears to be "without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."]

J-F can keep company with the likes of Salinger while the goddamn phonies pat each other on the back.

That subspecies of readers

The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon."

— from The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel.

Summer reading issue

I've never really planned my summer reading before, but then, my child has never finished a school year before, so it happens that we're all of us going to take off some time together, and much of that time will be spent simply hanging out, some of it in town, and some of it at the cottage, and "hanging out" means I should have a couple books on hand, particularly since "hanging out" to J-F means fishing, and we all know I'm happier with a book in my hand not catching any fish than having a fishing rod in my hand and not catching any fish, and I just bought a chair for my "garden" (where "garden" means stone courtyard with a couple pots, a couple baskets) that has armrests large enough to sit a drink on, and a footrest, all of which adds up to it being a perfect chair to while away the summer in, reading. I really am unreasonably excited about this chair, and the prospect of reading in it, but oh well, and notice how I've barely mentioned the kid; I guess I expect her to occupy herself.

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I've essentially finished reading this ARC already, and will write more about it in a couple days. I fully expected this to drift into my "summer" reading, but I couldn't put it down, and, well, now it's done. (I thought Shadow of the Wind was grossly overrated. This novel, on the other hand, I enjoyed immensely.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño. I'm trying to pace myself. I loved part 1, but I couldn't stop there. This put me ahead of the schedule for the reading group I'd happened upon. But while I subsequently ate up parts 2 and 3, I want also to consider them thoughtfully. I started on part 4, but as fate would have it, I was in no mood to read about gruesome murder details that day in the métro. So I've set it aside until I find a clearer mental space and the time to be able to write about it as I go.

The Sun over Breda, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The further swashbuckling adventures of Captain Alatriste! I let out an involuntary exclamation of joy when I came across this at the bookstore last week. Obviously it was meant to be, meant for me, and meant for me now.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Being that everything I know about Brighton I learned form Patrick Hamilton, I thought I should broaden my education. Not that I'm particularly interested in learning more about Brighton. But I read an excerpt a while back, and was thoroughly wowed.

The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie. Which remarkably I'd never read — I read dozens of Christie novels during my adolescence, but evidently not all — and I've been wanting to read ever since I saw that Doctor Who episode. Plus, I love the packaging.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Everyone who's read it, raves about it, including a coworker for whom I'll be using this as a test book, to gauge whether her taste in books is reliably compatible with mine or not. I had a hard time figuring out what trilogy exactly she was so crazy for, as the title of the first book in French is Les hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes (nothing about a tattoo there).

(I ordered these last three — Greene, Christie, Larsson — from Amazon. It's tough economic times: Gone are the days when "ship when entire order is ready" meant they'd probably send you the bulk of your order straight away anyway. This makes me nervous, as the order is awaiting the release of the Larsson in paperback, and estimated package delivery is a day into my vacation time, and I kind of have to convince the family that we really ought to stick around town for a day or two before we trek off into the wilderness, to ensure that I have books with which to trek off.)

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Because it's the Infinite Summer! Which sounds way more promising than that infinite winter when I didn't manage to finish it! And! I'll be covering the same geographic territory while I revisit the same literary territory! Like it's fated!

(Interesting reading related to DFW: About designing the inside of a DFW book.)

There's not a chance (is there?) that I'll get through this list before I have to show my face at work again; but I'm racing through pages lately, and set to cross titles off the list before even my vacation officially begins. I am prepared to steal back the copy of Spook Country (William Gibson) I picked up for J-F if I have to. And provided I'm on home ground when the pile runs out, there's the Nelson Algren I've been meaning to get to...

There's a good list of paperbacks in time for summer in this weekend's Montreal Gazette, a couple of which I vouch for (Petite Anglaise, by Catherine Sanderson, and The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, although this one isn't exactly light reading), and a couple more which greatly interest me.

I also like the list in The Telegraph. (You'll find 2666 and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I can't recommend highly enough, therein.)

What are you reading this summer?

BFF

On our walk to school in the morning, Helena very gravely tells me, "Mommy, you're my second-best friend now." I've been usurped.

"Me and Rosie, we do everything together."

Including growing up too fast.

A walk on the beach

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Economy of words

Last week I found a near-pristine copy of a 1974 editon of Words into Type.

I paid $10, at Cheap Thrills.

On December 27, 2004, someone bought this same book, used, at the Barnes & Noble in Burlington, Vermont, for $7 (USD), with a gift card, according to the receipt I found inside.

In 2000 (or was it a year or two earlier?) I saw the book, new, in a bookstore in New York City (or was it Washington, DC?), leading me to believe that in fact it wasn't so hard to find in the United States. I didn't have $48 (USD) to spare that weekend. I left the book on the shelf.

I have been looking for this book since 1996.

A quick search shows me that this book is more widely available (affordably) than once I thought (I swear I looked high and low when I first got Internet access in 1996, but I guess I gave up on that avenue of pursuit too early; I have carried this title over from one list to PDA to another over the years, and pulled the list out for reference in countless used book stores), but this does not lessen the joy I take in my great find.

Lots of grammar! Great indexing! Definitions of useful things like "apposition" and "cognate object"! Twenty-two pages devoted to the comma! What all those copyeditors said was true! This is the greatest reference ever!

How much is this book worth?!

The part about the critics

I'm greatly enjoying Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

By sheer coincidence, of which I have the luxury, I stumbled upon a bloggers' discussion, cohosted by Steph and Tony Investigate and Kiss a Cloud. I don't know who these people are, but they seem to love books, and have interesting ideas about this one in particular, and that's all good. I'll be checking in there as I progress to see what others make of this book.

I posted an excerpt and some comments a few days ago. Below are some of my thoughts, still relatively fresh, having completed part 1.

Archimboldi
The name is easily confused with Archimboldo, to Pelletier's outrage and horror we learn on the first page. His paintings are, in my opinion, grotesque, but inviting scrutiny.

By his early mention, Bolaño invites the reference. This book is having an effect similar to that of the paintings: surreal and weird, faintly beautiful, not what it appears to be.

Greek
— "Pelletier was more intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother of the nine muses."
— "...Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses, and that both thought of Morini as Eurolychus..."
— Pritchard to Pelletier, regarding Norton, "'Beware of the Medusa.'"

There are allusions here. Yeah, I have no idea.

Coincidence
Edwin Johns, the (fictional) artist who cut off his hand to use it in a self-portrait, relates an argument about coincidence.

"And as far as coincidence is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence." [ed: Just trying to wrap my head around this... No coincidence because there's an enforced(?) structure, whether the natural structure of geography and physics, or the social/economic structure of scheduled workdays. The more order there is, the less chance for chance. But how is this suffering, exactly, apart from being at the mercy of all this order?]

"As if coincidence were a luxury?" asked Morini.

[. . .]

"Coincidence isn't a luxury, it's the flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

"What else?" asked Morini.

"Something my friend couldn't grasp, for a reason that's simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still call him that) [ed: Who's Johns's friend anyway?] believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. [ed: Wait a second. Being a painter, Johns actually paints with paint (and body parts). Is his friend a painter? or a writer? Is Johns simply being metaphorical here or is there possibly something more to it?] He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In the hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."

Coincidence, then, is evidence of a God who doesn't care, who has no interest. (How is this different from there being no God at all?) But it's just a simile. Why invoke the simile if it's only to negate the vehicle?

Art
The story of Edwin Johns fascinates me. Could this personage and his claim to fame be based on a real artist?

Art is an act of self-negation. Johns certainly negated his painting hand. (Also: the only true representation of a thing is the thing itself.) Archimboldi is so negated as to possibly not exist at all.

Once in Mexico, Amalfitano explains to the critics the relationship between Mexican intellectuals with power. There follows a long and rambling yet beautiful passage, ultimately senseless, so Amalfitano admits, in which the shadows of the writers have slipped away, and this negates the worth of the intellectuals and their authority, or transmutes the intellectuals into something else entirely (reckless gods, or beautiful monsters, but pathetic all). (And here, when the intellectuals retire for the night, comes my favourite sentence: "The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.")

Violence
The violence is jarring. My jaw dropped at an early instance, when the little gaucho is looking at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, and here there is an image so startlingly horrific (which I will not repeat here), and then it's gone, wrapped up, uncomfortably but dismissively, as if there is nothing threatening about this "clumsy young butcher."

Then there's the taxi incident. The cabbie wasn't entirely innocent, but surely he didn't deserve all that was brought down upon him. Pelletier and Espinoza have acted "out of character," but I think that's part of the point — we never know, often don't even suspect, what we're capable of, particularly if pushed or provoked, till it happens.

One of the critics commented that the cab driver, in calling the streets a labyrinth, had unconsciously quoted Borges ("I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London)"). Is that where the violence sprouts from? The cabbie feels he's being called an idiot, so he calls their woman a whore. Are they defending her honour, or their own authority as critics? Or does it stem from something else entirely?

There is more violence to come, I know. The above episodes really came out of the blue, with my primary response in both cases being, "What the hell just happened?" Presumably, subsequent episodes will follow in this pattern?

The dreams
Are creepy. And very realistically dream-like.

Morini
Morini really interests me because he's more an observer than a participant in all the events of part 1.

His fascination with Johns seems unhealthy. I'm not sure what it's founded in. Purely academic — philosophical — curiosity? Upon first hearing the story of Johns, "The urge to weep — or else, faint — persisted, but he restrained it."

I think it's this quality that saves Morini. Restraint.

Morini is all about critical detachment.

As a contender for Norton's affections, he detaches himself, and from his outsider's position he wins her.

Similarly, his interest in Archimboldi never consumes him to the point of dropping his real life to chase some crazy tale to Mexico. His interest remains professional and reasonable. He does, however, enable the others' obsession with Archimboldi, bringing word of his sighting to them. (Coincidence? Did he foresee how the others would react? Part of me want to believe that Morini is Archimboldi, but I don't think I can make this hypothesis fit the facts.)

Maybe Morini represents the reading audience: a bit perverse, voyeuristic, but reasonably so and with restraint (the one quality all the other characters seem to lack).

Summary
This is a lot of me having no idea, and raising (or repeating) more questions than I dare answer. But greatly enjoying the ride.

Gratuitous kitten picture

Under the tulips. Rosie likes flowers.

Dislocation

More about The City & the City.

Dislocation
Miéville on the nature of the cities and the sense of dislocation that accompanies detective stories, for their holes — not flaws — in logic:



Epigraphitization
"Deep inside the town open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious, and delusive streets."
— from The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.

(I read The Street of Crocodiles a couple years ago. It's rather surreal. And it's not surprising that it be referenced by Miéville.)

Machicolation
I have a special fondness for writers who use this word (and Miéville does) — machicolation — because it's a word I encountered and that stumped me in the spelling bee in grade 11, when I was asked at the last minute (well, with about 10 minutes to spare) to represent the school in a regional contest, and I don't think we even had rules regarding definitions and etymology, but I surmised the reader was mispronouncing "matriculation," which was the only word I knew that sounded remotely close to what I was hearing. Of course, I know exactly what it is now.

Linguisophistication
Miéville does some interesting tricks with vocabulary. Besźel and Ul Qoma each have their own language; words are also borrowed from English. At some point I half-expected this book to have a Clockwork Orange–like glossary of terms (which novel I read through without having realized there was a glossary, relying on my own sense of Polish to understand the Slavic-based argot), but the neologisms, however clever, were also very natural in context — no glossary required.

Spoliation
Some reviews and comments are up at Library Thing. I'm a bit concerned now that my own comments may spoil the discovery of the grand conceit for readers. Even though the condition of the cities, their relationship, is suggested in the descriptions and through word choice early on, it is only gradually revealed. But it is for the most part laid out within the "beginning" section of the book (although even at book's end, not entirely clear).

Separate and interminable suburbs

If all experience is more than the sum of its parts, is it in any way possible to reconstruct a semblance thereof by analyzing its constituents?

Of course there is.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Although I treated myself to a copy of 2666 at around Christmas, I'm only just now getting over the the Bolaño glut I experienced at that time and getting past the intimidation this book carries with it, and getting on with it. To this point, about 100 pages in, I'm loving it, and finding it a much smoother (more cohesive and coherent) read than The Savage Detectives.

I have the 3-volume paperback version, slipcased, chosen with commuting in mind. It's beautifully designed! The image is a detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele, dark, brooding, and apocalyptic; the book title is a bold counterpoint (reminiscent of Wild West posters — Blackoak font?) in vulgar red.

From certain angles (well, most), the only visible writing is 666 (as pictured above).

I've been reading in the métro, and this book has garnered far more inquisitive glances from my fellow passengers than most, struck by its beauty or afeard of my satanic presence.

Elementary urban arithmetic

"Stick us to crowds," I told him. "And to crosshatching." More people, and where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

China Miéville is cool. His new book, The City & the City, also very cool. It's billed as an existential thriller. The thriller part I get; it's a police procedural with overtones of a political conspiracy. So far, so cool (even if not cool or thrilling, or heart-pumpingly horrifying, on the same level as the Bas-Lag books).

The existential part I'm still grappling with (in a good way). The cities, you see, Besźel and Ul Qoma, share the same physical space, grosstopically speaking. They're kind of quantum-state city-states.

The best I can wrap my head around it, it's like when you don't have cable TV and the reception is just plain shitty, and you get two pictures coming in on near the same frequency, and you can actually watch one or the other of the programs if you focus your attention just right.

There are physical, spatial difficulties associated with this set-up, for the cities' citizens, as well as for my own understanding of the concept. There are borders, checkpoints. And there is an independent authority, Breach, to keep breach of the rules to a minimum.

To complicate matters, throw in a mythical third city, the grail of the murder victim, and investigated online by Inspector Borlú in the forums at fracturedcity.org (which URL redirects users to the publisher's site).

"Orciny's the third city. It's between the the other two. It's in the dissensi, disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma's and Ul Qoma Besźel's. When the old commune split, it didn't split into two, it split into three. Orciny's the secret city. It runs things."

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown — records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then these black-box centuries of urban instigation — certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the sensor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth — then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style townhouses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making thins so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

So. This idea of the double (or triple) city, this crosshatched interweaving — really cool.

It's implied that Besźel and Ul Qoma are divided along religious lines, Jewish and Muslim, though on rereading certain passages, I can't be certain that the example of the DöplirCaffé with its side-by-side kosher and halal counters wasn't thrown out as an example merely analogous of the kind of coexistence there once was or might be hoped for or is occasionally illicitly achieved.

Regardless, it's clear that the two cities have very distinct cultures and political differences: separate languages, modes of dress, trade agreements. They are peopled by nationalists and unificationists, though mostly just by regular people.

Inspector Borlú once attended a conference on policing split cities. Budapest, Jerusalem, Berlin. To include Besźel and Ul Qoma in this class was an insult. The boundary between them is not a physical one described by our known spatial dimensions. This is not a matter of East and West. Besźel buildings occupy the same physical space as Ul Qoma buildings, each with their own architectural features. The separation is a state of mind, a citizen living in their own culture and simply refusing to see the other.

I've been thinking a lot about this as I walk the streets of my own city. While there are sections of Montreal that are distinctly French and distinctly English, I live and work in an in-between, and I live in that mixed city in a different way than do my francophone colleagues. We are so bound by our habits, if not our prejudices, to see the streets as having different cultural textures and colours. I've never noticed this café or that shop because they are not part of my English world; they are mere dark doorways I pass quickly by and pay no attention to. On other stretches of street, these dark patches may loom ominously. How you see your space is a trick of your mind as much as it is a function of your visual cortex.

Despite having cleverly used the laws of the two cities to his own advantage in terms of jurisdiction and played the natural tendencies and prejudices of their citizens, the murderer is found out eventually. Inspector Borlú achieves a unique status upon closing the case, a kind of promotion to working for a rather different authority. And I'd love to read about his further travails in topolganger policing.

The wild boys of Tozeur

For some reason, likely sparked by a passage in 2666, I find myself, as I'm treading the familiar path from the métro to my office, thinking about Touficq and Brahim, and trying to recall how to spell his name, maybe it's Toufiq without the "c" — I still have his name written in his own hand on a scrap of paper in my photo album — I never did write to him, though I thought about it — although admittedly I haven't thought about it for years now. But today I find myself wondering who were they really.

Toufiq cut hair, he cut my sister's hair; I don't know if Brahim did anything other than hang out at the hair "salon" and zip around on his moped. Everyone knew them, but they were their own gang of two, although maybe it only seems this way, maybe it was because of us, that they dissociated for our benefit, to devote themselves to caring for the foreigners. It's Toufiq who found us at the bus station while waiting for his sister to arrive. She wasn't on our bus. There was another bus later that day that Toufiq went to meet, but she wasn't on that one either. I heard about her return a day or two later; I'm not sure if she's one of the sisters I met.

I don't remember anything about Brahim except for his Fremen-like eyes. But it's Toufiq who tried to kiss me in the inky night of the oasis. I was terrified. I'd never known after dark could be so dark. We could hear the murmur of the crowd at the restaurant, Le Petit Prince, metres away, but the electric lighting was soaked up by the night and did not reach us.

I don't know why I'm thinking about it now. I've skimmed back through the pages of 2666, and I can't see what the memory trigger might be. Something to do with the mysterious Swabian and the lady, or Archimboldi's planned trip to North Africa.

I'm the age now that Toufiq's mother was then. Still a remarkable beauty, Ethiopian, head high and scarved, but considered old. Mother to a brood of 8 or 9, she would not travel to distant lands, she rarely left home. But thank Bourguiba, the sister was getting a university education; she would be a doctor.

They rode us out on mopeds late that last afternoon, those wild boys, Toufiq and Brahim, to watch the sun set over the Tunisian desert. That's when my sister and I were separated; somehow we couldn't catch up with each other. Toufiq and I looked out over the desert before the setting of the sun — we saw a caravan sailing along — and he took me home for supper. So I didn't see a full and proper desert sunset. Later we drove into the oasis, and he switched to English to declare his love.

My sister and I didn't find each other till midnight, just in time, at the station; we boarded the bus to return north, to the sea.

For some reason today I wonder who they really were. They belonged there, but didn't. Their minds were bigger than that town. They had hearts of adventurers. They were plotting an escape. Maybe it was just pretend.

Byatt, podcast

Eleanor Wachtel's interview with A.S. Byatt, recorded at the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, was broadcast yesterday on CBC's Writers and Company and is now available online (podcast page; MP3 file).

I haven't listened myself, but I trust it faithfully represents all I was witness to and includes the endlessly fascinating asides I neglected to write about.

My report of the interview.
My review of The Children's Book.
My early impressions.

What order actually looks like

When they were alone, Ironside said, "I never thought this would be easy."

"Sir, may I ask you a question?"

"I wish you would." He ran his hand along the schedule for today. The film of Trotsky next.

"What if that" — Pishkoff swept his scarred right hand to indicate everything outside the room — "what if that is what order actually looks like?"

"Pardon?"

"We're here to bring order. I know. But what if this mess is the natural state and what we're doing is ridiculous?"

"You can't believe that."

"I think people get tired of fighting, and for ten years, twenty years, they agree: let's stop. You have some silk, I have a cow, your daughter marries my nephew, we'll drink, it's good, happily ever after, the end. But it's not the end. It's always chaos and shouting and homicide in the end."

Ironside shook his head. "I don't think that's right."

"Why are we fighting now?" Pishkoff presented a well of intelligence behind eyes cobwebbed with despair.

"Honestly? For our lives," Ironside whispered. He missed Pishkoff.

Unexpectedly, Pishkoff snorted.

"There we are," Ironside said. "I was worried you'd lost your sense of humor."

"You know what the peasants believe? They think the devil gave man a sense of humor."

"Why would he do that?"

"So we laugh at our problems instead of solving them."

There's a hell of a lot going on in this book. It may be saying something profound about war, and America's involvement therein. As much about today's wars as yesterday's.

A very entertaining book, Sunnyside, a kind of comedy, but a tragedy too, but only if you think about it really hard. The novel starts on a day in 1916: Charlie Chaplin is sighted in 800 locations. Pretty absurd, really. But what do I know? Maybe it happened.

There's no way to sort out (for one as myself, ignorant of this time period) what bits of which characters and what events they face are based in fact. Doesn't matter.

We trudge through World War I, as seen from Hollywood, but also through France and Archangel (Archangel! My own family has connections to Archangel, during a later wartime.). I don't care much for war stories, or dogs, but there's a lot of both in this book and it turns out that they're very interesting.

This — this book — is what order looks like. Not that I'm any kind of expert. But the way the jokes are set up and the fact that they pay off are evidence of a fine bit of construction.

This is the dawn of celebrity culture. Some people don't see it happening at all, but those who do struggle with how to bend it to their advantage or for the American good, if they can be bothered to care. What you can get away with, and for how much money.

One of my favourite characters is Bill McAdoo, former Secretary of the Treasury, Chaplin's hero, the man who signs the dollar bills, who holds an almost perverse fascination with the Hollywood industry, at first it seems as a factory of potential propaganda, but overwhelmingly as the great experiment to help achieve and prove his grail of economic and social function: the pleasure equation.

It's about squirrels and pigeons.

It's about image versus reality, whether it be of war, of celebrities, or of how it all gets processed in our individual heads.

When they'd lived in Beaumont, there had been that day when Chaplin was seen everywhere. What if that happened all the time? What if people's images were suddenly all over the place, thousands at a time, and this had been going on for years? Maybe there were times a person was projected when there was no projector, and people we met on the street were just these strange modern ibburim invested with living souls, and that's why the movies were so compelling; it was part of our collective memory. Maybe that was why acting was so attractive: you got the chance to be everywhere at once, and you could pretend to be many different people, the way nature intended. No one would have known about these ibburim until now, because now certain people were famous. If, for instance, she, Rebecca, was everywhere, and there were thousands of Rebeccas in cities and villages and in the ocean an on mountaintops, who would know? No one except her, and only if she ran into herself.

Excerpt.
See also my first impressions, with a little clarification.

L'horreur de la richesse

Yesterday I forsook the company 5 à 7 for a book launch.

The book is about a frog, and the launch was at my daughter's school. Robert Soulières unveiled Le prince des marais:

Un prince et une princesse vivent dans la richesse et l'opulence, ce qui rend le prince très malheureux. Il a horreur de la richesse, des banquets et des nombreux serviteurs qui l'entourent. Il ne désire qu'une chose : un baiser de sa princesse. Un jour, ne supportant plus ce chagrin, celle-ci cède à la prière du prince et redevient crapaud. La princesse, seule et triste comme jamais, est soudain frappée par une idée. Elle téléphone à sa vieille marraine, son amie, sa confidente. Elle seule peut comprendre et apaiser son tourment...

Helena's quite pleased to have her own copy and personally inscribed. She tells me she particularly likes this book for how the pictures lend themselves to her being able to tell her own stories, which speaks more to the value of the illustrations than the narrative, but... whatever.

The school annually has a semaine littéraire, celebrating books of all shapes and sizes. Helena led me by the hand and proudly showed off her own handiwork: four books (or was it even more?) of her own devising, design, and binding. The class together had produced a yoga instruction manual, which they distributed to all the school's students.

Book production: so simple, a 6-year-old can master it!

(Last year's open house.)

Lovely Rosie

Last weekend, as my Facebook friends already know, I went out for groceries. But I came home with a kitten.

I dragged the family out of the house on a drizzly afternoon on a vain quest for specialty cheeses. Yet, the first shop we stepped into was a pet store.

On the walk home, we start throwing names at her, to see what would stick. Helena tried Rose (and, with a chuckle, the names of other of the Doctor's companions: Martha, Donna, Sarah Jane). Luna feels right for about 20 minutes. J-F and I don't offer many counter-suggestions (we like "Luna," and it seems right that the naming should fall to the girl). Within the hour, however, "Rosie" seems to be settled. (Never mind the doll and the 2 or 3 stuffed animals who already bear that name.)

She is now known variously, by Helena, as Rosie Benigni and Rosie the Pony. I call her Rosie Gattaca, for her genetically superior cuteness. J-F calls her Stapler, for the way you can casually swipe her up off the table and pass her to whoever asks for her. Today Helena called her Lollipop.

It's hard to gauge her size from this photo, but that bundle of cuteness can just about squeeze herself into my size 8 sneaker. She has a shoe fetish to rival my own.

She is the family cat. (Calvino, on the other hand, was my cat, long before I considered family.) And yet — naming aside, with whatever rights of ownership that go along with it — she feels like mine. I picked her, out of the dozen behind glass. She sleeps on my pillow. She jumps over my stacks of books, and stretches out across whatever novel I may have open in front of me. (Maybe I want her to be mine more than I care to admit; maybe I need her to be mine.)

She is adorable.

She chases her tail and plays with her shadow. She somersaults. She carries her toy mouse in her mouth, gingerly and proudly. We have yet to determine if she is the sort of cat who prefers toilet paper rolls over crumpled-up wads of paper (I think she is).

We are overdosing on cuteness. She is seriously, too, too cute. I mean, even her poo is cute. It's all just so disgustingly cute.

That first night, I feared that her purr was broken. But then suddenly it came, deep and constant. Rosie is here to stay.

Chicken soup

Today I was up at the crack of dawn making chicken soup from scratch.

The smell of it followed me all day. My fingers like boiled carrots. Like I'd bathed in broth this morning. I splashed this fragrance through every corridor I walked.

It smelled not like my mother or grandmother — like me, in a place. Not the home of my childhood. Not my grandmother's house (certainly not in her later years). I can't quite place it.

Good for the soul nonetheless.

Maybe the smell is the smell of my house. Maybe my daughter will someday try to place a smell in her childhood, to pin it to the day her mother made chicken soup from scratch.

How it made her feel

"It's a secret."

Washington Irving's old Dutch-style house: Sunnyside.

She had spoken like a girl — it was impossible to keep Sunnyside secret; everyone knew they were going to Sunnyside, everyone knew Sunnyside was there. She wanted to keep secret how it made her feel.

— from Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold.