The rat

I love this book — Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, by Sam Savage, from Coffee House Press.

It's charming. A rat who reads and eats books. Love and reverence for books. The comfort books provide both body and mind. While I'm drawn to books about books, booklovers' books, they often disappoint me — too much sentiment or too much sermon, often just meaningless name-dropping. In Firmin, the book-love is just enough in evidence without ever feeling like a cheap trick. Firmin the rat is hopelessly romantic; Firmin the novel is not.

From a very simple premise, we have a window onto humanity and despair through the cracks in the margins of existence. It's seedy, and brimming with life. And surprisingly gentle.

Firmin begins his life in a used books store; he is far too busy absorbing and being absorbed by books to know a real rat's life. It's a while before Firmin is able to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, and though he consumes plenty of it, it's questionable whether he ever fully digests it. Apart from books, Firmin's pleasure is to scurry out among the lowlifes to take in late-night pornographic movies at the local theatre, which carries a different kind of romance altogether. His world is turned upside down when he discovers all is not as he imagines it to be, people are not what they seem — the proprietor tries to kill him. Firmin sets out to make contact with humans; his effort is disastrous, but it brings him into a relationship, complicated and beautiful in its way, with the science fiction writer who lives upstairs from the shop. This time, Firmin has a greater understanding of the dynamic he has entered into:

Jerry talked and I listened. Gradually I learned more and more about his life, while he, one can safely say, learned less and less about mine. Due to my natural reticence, he had a free hand with my personality. He could pretty much make me into whomever he wanted, and it was soon painfully clear that when he looked at me what he mainly saw was a cute animal, clownish and a little stupid, something like a very small dog with buckteeth. He had no inkling of my true character, that I was in fact grossly cynical, moderately vicious, and a melancholy genius, or that I had read more books than he had. I love Jerry, but I feared that what he loved in return was not me but a figment of his imagination. I knew all about being in love with figments. And in my heart I always knew, although I liked to pretend otherwise, that during our evening together, when he would drink and talk, he was really just talking to himself.

The thing. Two things.

One: The novel opens with a couple epigrams, one being that old teaching "...he did not know whether he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man." In Firmin, there's a kind of metamorphosis, from rat to human, from fiction to life, and both back again.

Two: Jerry's novel is about an alien race that mistakes rats as the dominant species of Earth. (Which is maybe why Firmin likes Jerry.) It merits a little consideration, that there is something — no, not dominant, but — meaningful in the human rats, the marginalized, the forgotten, the drunks and the whores. What it is to be human. To be the protagonist of one's own narrative.

I began to spend most of every day on my back, all four feet in the air, dreaming and remembering, or else playing the piano, remembering and dreaming. I could see that my dreams were changing. They were getting soft and nostalgic, with a kind of crepuscular flare around the edges, and I didn't have many exciting adventures anymore. I missed the past terribly, even the awful parts. I never forget anything that has happened to me and scarcely anything that I have read, so by that time I had stored up an awful lot of memories. My brain was like a gigantic warehouse — you could get lost in it, lose track of time, peeking into boxes and cases, wandering knee-deep in dust, and not find your way our for days. Sometime shortly after I moved in with Jerry I had begun to play with the past, tweaking it this way and that to make it more like a real story, and I had begun mixing my memories with my dreams. This was probably a mistake, since the more I played with them the more they came to resemble each other, and it was harder and harder for me to tell the things I remembered from the things I invented. I was now, for example, unsure which of the figures was really Mama, the fat greedy one or the thin, worn sweet one, and whether her name was Flo of Deedee of Gwendolyn. All the archives existed only in my mind. I had no external check, no diary, no old family friend. How could I verify? All I could do was compare one mental image with another image, equally suspect, and in the end they all got tangled together. My mind was a labyrinth, enticing or terrifying according to my mood. I was losing my footing, and the odd thing was that I didn't care.

See the discussion at the LitBlog Co-op (a couple posts aren't properly tagged, including the comments by Sam Savage himself, so check the November archives to get all the good bits).

Really, an excellent read.

Counting the days

Helena was flipping through the pages of her calendar, and before I could think up an excuse to be elsewhere, she had me listening (feigned attentively) to her count every single effing day of every single effing month of the whole effing year. She knows how many days till her uncle's birthday (a handful), and how many to her own (very many). (My brain had glazed over and I'm unable to recall the exact numbers.)

Yesterday we played in the snow. Here Helena ceremoniously presents an emissary with a symbolic chunk of snow to appease the gods of winter, that the winds will not make ice statues of us, that the polar bears will not take us for popsicles.

Bits

What I'm thinking about:
Margaret Atwood's take on arts funding. If you haven't read it already, do. And check out the dirty little debate over it at Bookninja, where, if one must take sides, I'd be trumpeting merit over financial need. Not that any of this affects me personally, apart from my being a citizen-consumer of "art."

Atwood starts her piece hinting at a kind of art-brain-drain, a problem that might indeed be helped by having money thrown at it. But she doesn't go anywhere with that grain for an argument, and no one else is pecking at it, which has me thinking, more than anything, that my comprehension skills are defective and deficient.

What I'm puzzling over:
How to translate "twunt."

What I'm dreaming about:
Sex in space.

What made me sad:
Solveig Dommartin died.

What I'm reading:
I'm in the final stretch of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun. At some point this evening I'll retrieve from my go-everywhere bag Firmin, by Sam Savage, the opening pages of which had me laughing out loud on the metro earlier this week.

A week into February and I haven't cracked a chunkster — I'm leaning toward Powers' Goldbug Variations, it being the shortest of my options and thus seemingly perfectly suited to this shortest of months for my one-a-month plan. But I just don't know yet.

I never figured I was susceptible to the February blahs, but the last few years would give evidence to the contrary. This year, so far, so blah. Reading, blah. Blogging, blah. Cat puking all over my bed, blah. Helena home sick, blah.

What I'm listening to:
Thelonious Monk.

What I'm going to do next:
Nap. Me and Monk and Miéville, with the kid and the cat.

The Doctor and us

One of the things, of very many, that makes me a bad mommy (or, arguably, just feel like one) is that I watch Doctor Who with my 4-year-old daughter. (Is that hipster parenting, or what?)

Whether or not it's too narratively sophisticated for the 4-year-old mind, many parents would find it objectionable for its scary monsters, frightening situations, and violence.

(Helena's educateur had overheard her reminding her father that she'd be watching Doctor Who that evening, so he made a point of catching an episode himself. His only comment afterward to J-F: "weird." That sounds judgmental to me.)

None of these concerns outweighs my deep-seated need for a peaceful Monday evening watching my television program of choice. (Sure, I watch other programs, but none regularly.) We tried to get her to bed swiftly so that I'd be sitting comfortably and undisturbed by 8 o'clock, but she knew something was up — she dawdled, she resisted. And I was not willing to sacrifice this selfish pleasure for the sake of my daughter's well-being. So I walked away, and she followed me, and a monster of a habit was born.

I rationalize it. It's bonding time. It's not breastfeeding, or storytime, or a bath. It's something so completely outside ourselves, beyond the bonds dictated by family. It's a shared pop cultural experience.

I like that we've planted a seed of open-mindedness in her. A respect for science fiction. For space exploration. I like that she's introduced to idea of alien life and time travel, regardless of whether they're a real possibility, for the philosophical implications that must then be considered.

Helena loves monsters. And robots. Sometimes they scare her, but mostly they thrill her. Occasionally she whimpers a quiet "I'm scared" and burrows her face into my arm.

I'm not too worried about the "monsters," particularly when many of them are not essentially malevolent — they're just misunderstood, trying to survive.

The best part is, Helena asks questions.

(Possible spoilers ahead.)

This week's episode I was wary of. Children were disappearing off the streets. Creepy kids' drawings were coming to life, or trapping life. I feared Helena might take it a little more personally, relate it more directly her experience of life. But it was not so alarming as previews had suggested (episode guide).

An alien life form had essentially possessed the body of child. Its spaceship was broken. It was lost and lonely for its brothers and sisters. So it literally drew the London children into its energy field. But it wasn't a mean creature; itself it was a child, and doing what it could to survive, if a little selfishly and at the expense of others. The Doctor helped it go home.

We talked. Just because you're sad or lonely doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want. Just because you're young doesn't mean you can't be helped to understand and to do right.

We talked about drawing. How drawing can help you express your feelings. How it can make you feel better if you're sad or lonely. The difference between a drawing and reality. (One drawing depicted the girl's father as he appears in her nightmares, an emotionally twisted, dream version of reality.)

There are issues. Moral dilemmas. Logistical problems. Ongoing narrative developments. Things that are more sophisticated than contained in a half-hour Dora episode or a Kevin Henkes book. Things Helena's mind has the potential to grapple with, and some of that capacity is already afire.

The thing is, Helena likes Rose. (Not Barbie! Rose!) She asks where the Doctor is and cheers when he comes on screen, but she worries about Rose. And the thing about her liking Rose is, well, Rose is going to die.

Scenes from next week's episode reference a previous story in which the Beast said Rose would die in battle.

It's inevitable now. I know it's coming, if not next week, then soon. But I don't know how to brace Helena for it.

Magic

Helena closes her eyes, tight, tight, tight, stretches out her arms, and wiggles her fingers. (Sometimes she uses a magic wand, but one isn't always on hand when you need it.) Slowly, loudly, she intones:

"Par la magie de mes doigts, [chose x] disparru!"

(Actually, "disparrait," would be the grammatically correct way about it, but she says what she says.)

The chant was inspired by her theatre class — they would bring the teacher's puppet to life, later returning it to its enchanted sleep.

Helena knows the power of magic.

The first thing she wanted to disappear was a tea towel. She was "helping" me fold laundry. Quick thinker that I am, with her eyes closed so tight, I swiped it away from in front of her and tucked it under the bed.

A glint in her eye, a gasp, and a smile. She proceeded to disappear the rest of the towels.

It's when she tried to use her skills in the bath — I was precariously perched, the props she chose were fragile or unwieldy, and hiding places were awkward — that it occurred to me I may have unwittingly enabled her to believe that she really had magical powers. Or perhaps it was just a test of my complicity.

She makes me disappear. And Papa. She magics us back into existence in odd places. For some reason, the magic doesn't work very well on the cat.

She asks us to make her disappear. She reminds us we have to close our eyes tight for the magic to work. We here her pitter-patter down the hall. We trace her by her giggles. Her act is complete with "where am I?" and "how did I get here?"

Sometimes she casts a spell with no warning and the magic doesn't take. I suggest she didn't have the right stance or a magical enough tone. Slower and louder gives me more time to work my magic.

Still, there are times I'm caught off guard, not fast enough, and she catches me in the act. I catch a quick scolding (no, mama, let the magic do it) and the glint in her eye: there are things of which we must not speak.

Listen to the radio

I've by chance tuned in to Wire Tap a few times, and after stumbling into it again yesterday, I'm convinced that it's the funniest, most wonderfully scripted and performed entertainment out there.

Show highlights are online.

In particular: Howard enlists Goldstein's help, Cyrano de Bergerac style, to pitch some poetry to the editor of the Regina Quarterly — "45 seconds, a very valuable commodity in the poetry world."

"The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not a metaphor; it's a broadcasting corporation."

Drunroll, please...

Contest: Un Lun Dun-inspired place names.
Prize: Bang Crunch, by Neil Smith, signed by the author.
Winner: Danielle, of A Work in Progress, for Nomaha, which is beautiful in its simplicity. (Please email me, Danielle, with your postal address.)

Thanks, everyone, for playing. (I may have to do this again — it's an entertaining way to get rid of some of the excess books stacking up around here, as well as to discover some otherwise silent readers and their blogs.)

(I grew up in Sans Catharines (near Niagara Fell, or, in the opposite direction, Shamilton), Untario. I lived for many years in Nottawa. Oh, I could do this all day. I have been doing this, for far too many days, with random place names around the globe. Please get me outside of my own head.)

Un-place: contest! with prize!

(Originally posted January 30, 8:07 pm. I'll be keeping this post up top for a bit, cuz it's fun! you should play! even if you don't want the prize.)

One of the books I've been most looking forward to this winter is the new novel by China Miéville, this time writing for young adults. Un Lun Dun is set to hit store shelves February 13, but I'll be tucking into my review copy tonight.

The title comes from the name of a city in an alternate reality, which a couple kids slip into. Un Lun Dun. Un-London. Get it?

The world has other alternacities, of course. Parisn't, No York, Helsunki, Hong Gone.

The contest:
So, what's the name of your alternaplace, of the city you live in, or your neighbourhood, or your hometown, or where you went to school, or where you are right now (it must be a place you have a personal connection with)?

The prize:
The commenter with the cleverest (or silliest, or weirdest) response (as judged by me, probably) will receive my review copy (previously read by me; like new!) of Bang Crunch (really, it's worth reading), by Neil Smith, signed by the author earlier this evening (secondary contest: guess how many glasses of wine I had at the book launch). (International responses are both welcome and eligible. Contest closes February 3, midnight EST.)

Me? I live in Montsurreal.

Cinnamon crocodiles

I am drowning in colour.

The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, is under discussion at MetaxuCafé by the Slaves of Golconda.

The novel, or collection of stories, was originally called Cinnamon Shops, after one of the stories therein. "I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls."

Since I first started my hunt for a copy in Polish, I've been rather obsessed with the matter of the title. Whereas Cinnamon Shops is breathtakingly fantastic, the Street of Crocodiles is bleak, bordering on grotesque. The two stories are so opposite in tone; to give the title of one over the other to the collection seems to me to impose a mood on the reader. I'm genuinely puzzled by the title switch.

Cinnamon Shops is truly full of wonder:

These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish, and incense; of the aroma of distant countries an rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars, and, most especially, strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.

I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers' most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries.

I spent much of the last week trying to establish the right mood by which to read this. Dipping into my collection of Polish folk songs, and old Polish crooners. Skimming through early 20th century poetry, the program notes from some of the plays I'd seen, my course notes on Młoda Polska and modernism.

(I discovered the existence of what might be the perfect mood music, but it won't be in my possession for weeks yet (I tell myself it's better suited to Schulz's other book anyway). Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: A Tribute to Bruno Schulz, the Cracow Klezmer Band plays the music of John Zorn. John freakin' Zorn!)

I circled around Schulz and 1934, listened to multiple renditions of the suicide tango, never quite getting the book-reading ambience exactly right. I have a sense of what came before Schulz (Witkacy), what came after (Gombrowicz), and what happened alongside, but Schulz himself is unique.

There's little information available on Schultz, biographical or critical. (Also, I am mystified to discover that volume 3 of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary, the volume that details his friendship with Schulz, is missing from my shelves.)

In the end, there was nothing for it but for Bruno Schulz to create his own mood.


My response — uninformed, the one from my gut — to this book: I am drowning in colour, and light, with shadows. It is overwhelmingly visual.

From the first page alone: "the blinding white heat," "dizzy with light," "blazing with sunshine," "golden pears,"luminous mornings," "the flames of day," "the colorful beauty of the sun," "shiny pink cherries," "transparent skins," "mysterious black morellos," "golden pulp." And it goes on. Everything bathed in melting gold, drenched with honey. It's an assault of light and heat. As I become acclimatized to the mid-summer, the colours begin to appear darker, richer: velvet bruises, amber, heavy black sleep. Then the birds: splashes of crimson, strips of sapphire, verdigris, silver; thick flakes of azure, of peacock and parrot green, of metallic sparkle. The yellow-white light, the bright night of winter offers up cinnamon and violets.

The stories have little plot, but they are full-colour sketches. They are connected by time, place, character. They feel like a grown-up reaching back in time to his childhood, for a memory grounded in his visual sense but which keeps shape-shifting.

Schulz himself states that:

"It is an autobiography — or rather, a genealogy — of the spirit . . . since it reveals the spirit's pedigree back to those depths where it merges with mythology, where it becomes lost in mythological ravings. I have always felt that the roots of the individual mind, if followed far enough down, would lose themselves in some mythic lair. This is the final depth beyond which one can no longer go."

I find Schulz in his stories puts into words what I've seen in the quintessentially Polish visual art that preceded him. (Ironically, I find that his own artwork is of a very different school, a little bit grotesque, cartoonish. I am unable to reconcile his own drawings to his words.)

The first visual reference I made was to Wyspianski (1869–1907), likely most recognized as a playwright, whose murals and stained glass flood the Franciscan church in Krakow. It's positively hallucinogenic, enormous flowering vines crawling the pews and walls. I'd hate to attend mass on drugs — it smells of violets everywhere — for fear the sunflowers would bite my head off.

Schulz would not have met Wyspianski, but there's no doubt that he would've been familiar with his work.

Witkacy (1885–1939), an artist of many talents, also perhaps best known as a playwright, promoted Bruno Schulz, befriended him, corresponded with him.

All these artworks preceded the publication of Cinnamon Shops by some dozen or more years, but I see them as part of the same tradition.

Different children

My weekend centred on children: us depositing our child with her grandmother, me lounging in bed Saturday morning to finish reading The Children of Men (PD James), us wandering out later in the day to the cinema to see the film adaptation (and I felt like such a terrorist smuggling in a shawarma and a bottle of water).

I have a fondness for dystopian literature, so even while some call James's novel mediocre, or substandard to her usual genre output, my instinct is to defend the effort.

The premise here: the human race is infertile. (Fertility issues are also central to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, my copy of which inexplicably is nowhere to be found.)

Dystopian novels are not generally revered for their sublime prose. They often come in the form of a travel report from a distant place. They are above all novels of ideas. While some feature wonderfully developed characters, they generally offer us types (the docile, unquestioning citizen; a totalitarian ruler; a heroic, rebel element) fleshed out only enough to make the point and advance the moral of the story.

James's novel is about half and half traditional 3rd-person narration and diary entries, presumably to give us a glimpse into Theo's inner workings. Theo's not exactly likable, but he doesn't have the complexity of character I suspect James intended.

He'd had a child, once, but accidentally ran her over. In the movie, much more sensibly, his boy was victim to a flu pandemic — Theo has a normal, personal, emotional investment in the fate of the planet, not driven by the guilt of extreme and unusual circumstances.

Book: Theo's cousin is omnipotent Warden of England.
Movie: His relation has some not clearly defined position of power in the government (he also has a child).

Book: Theo is drawn into the intrigue by a relative stranger he's attracted to (roll your eyes here).
Movie: Theo's drawn in, much more credibly, by his ex-wife, who has a history of political activism, and the promise of monetary compensation.

Book: Theo needs to be convinced by an inept group of 5 that there are problems under the existing system.
Movie: There is chaos in the streets and known rebel factions. The system is obviously not working very well.

Book: Theo witnesses one of the state-organized mass suicides — some participants seem less than willing. Theo hears of the inhumane conditions of the penal colony form the sister of an escaped (allegedly wrongly convicted) inmate. The group of Five Fishes also demands a general election, rights for the immigrant workers brought to England to combat the labour shortage, and a stop to mandatory fertility testing (because it's degrading and pointless).
Movie: The Fishes are protesting the treatment of immigrants, who are denied full rights, routinely rounded up into refugee camps and deported. It is implied that the rest of the world has gone to hell, possibly the result of war.

Book: As the group travels, they are attacked by an extremely violent gang. The incident is an unfair surprise, the existence of such gangs having been mentioned casually just once.
Movie: The group is attacked, but it makes sense in the context of the unrest everywhere in evidence.

I won't tell you the respective endings.

Wikipedia summarizes the book and the movie.

The novel is flawed but enjoyable. Read it if, like me, you have a fascination with dystopian literature.

The film is astounding. The mood is perfect. The script improves on characters and back stories in ways I hadn't thought possible while reading the book. You don't need a stupid love story. You don't need for Theo to be an Oxford historian, or to have killed his child. You don't need for him personally to take control of the government for resolution.

We did question the logic of the depicted future, but only after we'd left the theatre and thought about it.

Theo's friend Jasper in the book points out some of the pluses of a world without children:

"It doesn't worry me particularly. I'm not saying I hadn't a moment of regret when I first knew Hilda was barren; the genes asserting their atavistic imperatives, I suppose. On the whole I'm glad; you can't mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensation. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now for the rest of our lives we're going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, the pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed. I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret."

Problems that stem from the premise, which neither book nor movie adequately addresses:

Is it long enough (book: 25 years; movie: 18) to feel the effects of a labour shortage? The youngest citizens are only just entering the work force; the lack of replacement workers shouldn't be felt for another few years. (The disappearance of child-centred industries would first result in massive unemployment.) If there is indeed a labour shortage (and since people continue to die without being replaced), shouldn't immigrants be welcomed? Any strain on resources by immigrants should just about equal the resources freed up by the unborn numbers. While it's natural to want to protect and preserve resources, given the infertility scenario, it's for a finite period.

I'd have thought one of the biggest and most immediate effects of mass infertility would be sexual violence, combining a lack of fear of consequence with a sense of desperation. The book addresses this: the instinct loses out to disinterest, a sense of pointlessness and depression.

Would the effects be quiet and hidden (book) or massive and obvious (film)?

The book covers some of the side effects of the crisis: for example, how pets are treated like children. It's typical of dystopian novels to include details of fairly mundane goings-on. This is rightly kept out of the film.

Book: Excerpt.
Movie: Official site.

J-F says, not that his opinion counts for anything, that it's one of the best movies he's ever seen, to which I raise my eyebrows. He says, "Yes, better than Pulp Fiction."

Literary boozer

Patrick Hamilton, looking somewhat more proper than I'd imagined, but quite possibly very drunk (from Through a Glass Darkly). His suit's all rumpled, and he's probably just splashed water on his face and freshly slicked his hair and he thinks we can't tell.

Also, there may or may not be an event celebrating Patrick Hamilton on his birthday, March 17.

I've read 4 of his novels now, and must read them all. I've been saving up Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky for some of kind of drunken midwinter reading binge I feel coming on (though I've wet my whistle on its opening chapters already); Hangover Square arrived on my doorstep just the other week and should get me through the reading binge hangover. The obsession continues.

All for one

Helena went to the movies yesterday. With her daycare group. Without me.

She's a little sketchy on the actual story, but was immensely impressed with the theatre itself. "La télé, it's big as the wall. It's big like me! Bigger!"

It'd slipped my mind that this was something of a new experience for her. Previously, she's seen only Chicago on the big screen — she was barely 2 months old and slept through most of it (but I wonder if this has anything to do with her fondness for musicals).

Yesterday's feature was a stop-motion animation of one of my favourites. You're never too young for the classics.

Excellent snow

The other evening, I'm sitting by the window, watching the snow fall. I jump up, to find the song, put it on the stereo.

Helena, often witness to my bursts of musical inspiration, doesn't always appreciate my taste. But she perks up at the opening tones. "Wait, Mama."

She comes back with her saxoflute. "Listen. It's the same." She insists I play the song from the beginning. "Wait, Mama."

She comes back with her Kyrgyz clay bird ocarina. "This one too — it's the same." She hands it over for me to play.

We start the song from the beginning again. "Wait, Mama."

She rummages through the kitchen cupboards. The old coffee tin with rice grains.

Now we're ready. From the beginning again. We jam.

Excellent birds.

Literature by foot

Ryszard Kapuscinski, died yesterday in Warsaw, age 74.

"There is, I admit, a certain egoism, in what I write," he once said, "always complaining about the heat or the hunger or the pain I feel. But it is terribly important to have what I write authenticated by its being lived. You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage, because the author is always present. I sometimes call it literature by foot."

It's sad that it takes a death to inspire me to finally get around to an author I've been meaning to read for ages.

Thoughts on David Copperfield

(...the novel, by Charles Dickens, not the magician, whom I keep picturing as the protagonist.)

1. It's so optimistic, which is maybe an odd thing to say about a novel in which unpleasant things happen and so many people (in a couple cases perhaps needlessly) die. It was declared when David Copperfield was born by sage women in the neighbourhood that he was destined to be unlucky. This turns out to be not true. Which is maybe the optimistic point: we are makers of our own destiny no matter what circumstance we are born into.

2. Why, why, why does Daisy persist in seeing Steerforth in the most favourable light? When they first meet at school, Steerforth takes advantage of him, and David acquiesces to him. Steerforth has this charismatic hold on people, which we learn about more through the reactions of others than directly. (Dicken is much better at describing ugly than good.) David does tend to see the good in people and their potential and give them the benefit of the doubt, but this goes too far.

3. The women seem so much all the same. Even when they're silly, they're kind and good. And when they've been led astray, they're at heart kind and good. Through crusty exteriors, kind and good. Or they're just kind and good (Agnes is too good to be true; I kept confusing Annie with her). The kvetchy Mrs Gummidge is maintaining a facade; she is, of course, kind and good. Even the mothers of those despicable characters are guided by love for their sons. They are all unwavering constancy and devotion, to something or other. (Miss Dartle is loyal to the object of her love, to her own detriment; Miss Murdstone is loyal to her brother and their principles.) Kind and good, or at least devoted, is not a bad thing for women to be presented as being, but it's a bit boring, even if they are sometimes slightly disguised. Julia is perhaps the only exception, coming back from India shallow and passionless, but her fate is an afterthought and never examined. Betsy Trotwood has more dimensions than the other women, having a mysterious past, a strong will, and seeming independence, but she is, undeniably, kind and good.

4. Uriah Heep is one of the most delicious villains I've ever had the pleasure to encounter — not so much for what he does (plenty others have done far worse), or how he does it, but for his gloriously uncomfortable, writhing physicality. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to be rid of him.

5. Yes, I'd like some more Dickens, please. I read Tale of Two Cities in high school. I remember having turned all the pages of Bleak House shortly thereafter, but did not retain any of the story. There are other books by other writers I like better. But some people think Dickens is the best. I'm prepared to read more, to better understand why he's considered a master, before pronouncing a verdict.

That's 1 down (750 pages), 5 to go.

Who's worried?

Months ago I came across a trio of Kevin Henkes books, remaindered, cheap. I couldn't decide between them, so I bought them all. Helena was a big fan of Kitten's First Full Moon so I thought she might like Henkes at the next reading level. I worried that she might not, that it might've been smarter to try one out before committing to all 3, but then rationalized that if it came to that, I could easily find them a happy home.

Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse I was certain would be a hit (and this eventually proved to be true).

I worried a little about Lilly's Big Day — how to explain the concept of flower girl, of wedding, of marriage (none of which J-F and I ever have had or will have, excepting, of course, our marriage of minds and goals to build a life together, blah, blah, blah). Helena hasn't questioned these yet, either as pertains to the story or to our life.

I worried mostly about Wemberly Worried. Because, you see, Wemberly worries a lot, about everything, and Helena doesn't seem to worry about anything at all. I worried that the book might instill worry rather than assuage it.

I worried about when to give her the book. When I bought it, Halloween was just around the corner, and Wemberly worries about her costume being just right, about there being too many butterflies, about being the only butterfly. I was worried enough about Helena liking her costume, and that she might actually care what other people think. I worried for nothing, it turns out, but I thought it better to hold the book for her birthday.

But Wemberly worries about her birthday too, that no one would come to her party, that there wouldn't be enough cake.

So finally Helena received all 3 books for Christmas. It doesn't surprise me that Helena prefers Lilly over Wemberly, and pores over Wemberly's illustrations hoping to catch a glimpse of Lilly (she's there). She finds humour in Wemberly's situations, but seems a bit puzzled by her worried condition.

I ask Helena if she ever worries, what she worries about. She sighs deeply. "Yes. I worry about my dolls. And my stickers."

I don't mean to undervalue the worries of Helena's big little life. Worry for her dolls to means motherly worry, her loving, doting care of them, that they're fed, washed, dressed, blanketed. But her stickers? We don't use stickers for rewards here; they're just plain fun.

Now I worry about putting words in her mouth, but she needs prompting. "Do you worry about losing them?" "Yes. I worry about losing my stickers." I suppose this to mean they must be accounted for, affixed as she finds fit.

No worries.

With a bang and a crunch

That's what a short story's supposed to do, I think. Bang. Crunch.

And short stories are poignant — at least the one's that register on my radar.

Neil Smith is a Random House New Face of Fiction for 2007 (the honour last year was bestowed on Ami McKay, The Birth House). His debut volume, Bang Crunch, collects 9 stories, all of them poignant — not wipe-a-tear,-aww poignant, but hollow punched-gut poignant.

My bias: I'm generally not a big fan of short stories. I like them well enough when I come across them in magazines, but I don't often search out volumes of them of my own accord. What jumped out at me about this book's description was the originality of the scenarios and that several of them seemed to touch on science and medical conditions, so I accepted a review copy.

Here are stories about the aftermath of a school shooting, a store detective and a pair of gloves, a support group for people with benign tumours, a young man who's a model for his artist father, an experimental play in a mentored drama group. They are "an exploration of the human need for connection, however tenuous or absurd, and at whatever cost."

The title story is about a girl with Fred Hoyle syndrome (a fictitious condition, to the best that I can determine), in which the aging process is speeded up and then reverses:

After your guests blow their noses into the hankies that your mum embroiders with the show's name, Through the Ages, they usually apologize for their tears and the blue lady, her skin a denim colour from ingesting colloidal silver, wonders how she can cry when you, Eepie Carpetrod, won't live much beyond your tenth birthday. Your mum argues you're eternal, that your mind and soul will expand forever like the universe, an allusion to the Big Bang theory, which you explained to her over lunch, tomato soup and saltines, but you know what your death will be, your brain collapsing under its own weight, the Big Crunch.

The pace is frenetic, to match Eepie's experience of life, and the second-person narration is weirdly effective in its matter-of-factness (you know, you live, you die).

Of the 9 stories, one I didn't like much at all (too many characters, too fast) and another I thought weak for its first-person narration. On of my favourites ("Jaybird") is also the longest, by a long-shot, at 66 pages, playing to my preference for the meatiness of character you find in novels.

From what I can tell — several of the stories having been previously published in various venues and Smith himself talking about some of them being written after the volume was contracted for publication — the stories were not conceived as a collection. They are not tied together by place or character (though a couple are) or theme.

There are a few common traits though: I'd guess that Smith's interest in science and medicine is a little stronger than your average Joe's, and that Freud might have something to say about his relationship with his mother (mothers are embarrassing, overbearing, absent, or useless — the attitude balances out over the volume, but there were enough negative references for me to notice and wonder).

What they do all have in common is that they're quite depressing. They don't offer much hope beyond a sense of "it's all right," which is, well, all right. Probably better not to devour them in one sitting though, but one at a time, slow but sure, for their full bang crunch.

I look forward to seeing what Smith can do in a novel.

Excerpt: "Isolettes."

Also: "Scrapbook," in Maisonneuve (September 2004) (full access for print subscribers only).

Interview.

Neil Smith will be reading from Bang Crunch on January 30 at Paragraphe Books in Montreal. (I'm going to try to be there.)

Open your notebooks

The Guardian book club this month discusses Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.

The first column about the novel outlines its structure, the multiple narratives told in separate notebooks.

She finally writes the golden notebook, where she is reconciled to her different stories of herself. "It's been necessary to split myself up, but from now on I shall be using one only."

(This novel affected me deeply, yet I've been unable to write about it. I recognize in myself multiple paths, tangled. They initially seem to veer off in opposite directions, but I can't follow all of them to their logical conclusion, so they come to overlay each other and fold back in. Over the years, I've lost the ability to compartmentalize — I no longer switch hats with ease, but wear them all at the same time. In some ways I think of this blog as my golden notebook, the integration of my fragmentary self.)

John Mullan is discussing The Golden Notebook with Doris Lessing today — how badly do I wish I could be there! — and will be podcast.

Everyone is invited to discuss the novel online. Maybe I'll finally piece together some of my thoughts.

Fickle

As an infant, the giraffe (Ginger) was Helena's constant companion. The elephant (Fred) would occasionally substitute. Perhaps she herself now identifies them with her babyhood. Whatever the reason, they've been left behind.

She entered into a string of relationships, a serial monogamist, with occasional one-night stands. One dog, another, a litter of kittens, then the little pink bear.

At age 2 and a half she found Nyo-Nyo, a bigger bear, blue. He'd been given to her shortly after her birth by my mother. He'd been bought originally for another Helena, my grandmother, who'd been ill and wanting a teddybear, but this bear never made it to her bedside. He'd been sitting in my mother's closet for years.

Nyo-Nyo, and his record for longest-lasting love, was usurped by a lion.

His name is Poilly — that is, poil ([pwal]), the French for animal hide, with the English "-y" suffix, for a uniquely franglais name (think "Furry" with a bilingual twist).

He's just a baby. Helena tells me he's a boy lion, just 1 year old. (He is in actuality older than that, and came to us direct from South Africa, courtesy of my sister.)

Certainly Helena's relationship with Poilly is the most intense to date. Partly, I'm sure, this is due to her age — a heightened imagination and capacity for role-playing (or script-writing), or a greater need for transference. The fact that he's a handpuppet enhances these factors — his expressiveness matches hers.

Poilly goes with Helena to daycare more days than not. He eats at the table with us. It goes without saying he shares Helena's bed. He's a constant companion, accompanying us on all sorts of excursions. He flew with us to Washington. He joined us for Christmas at my mother's house.

It surprised me, then, that for that 7-hour car trip, Helena insisted he sit apart from her. She doesn't want to vomit on him, she explained (she has a history of carsickness on these long hauls). She was not sick in the car; Poilly was spared.

But Helena did have a stomach flu the other week, catching us all off guard in the middle of the night. Poilly was an innocent victim, absorbing all her ills.

Poilly was carted away with the first round of blankets and towels. She asked after him — Poilly's having a bath, I said — but soon forgot him. Helena needed her mother's comfort even more than his that night.

She asked for him the following day, exchanged pleasantries with him, and let him be, still preferring her mother's comfort, I thought. But days passed; Poilly, it seems, was abandoned.

She coddled a bunny for a few days.

Sadly, after a proper laundering (sponge-cleaning simply wouldn't do), Poilly's glorious mane had been transformed into a frizzy afro. He looks, well, funny, and I feel sorry for him.

I confronted Helena on the issue. I considered the ickiness factor, and assured her he was thoroughly clean, no need to worry about les microbes. But no, it's his hair, she confessed; he looks funny.

I don't know if my moralizing had an affect — it's not nice to treat your friends that way, I said — or if she's simply getting used to his new look. Poilly's back in her good graces, joining us for supper and various other activities. They're sleeping together again, but I don't think they'll ever be the same.

Bathrooms

Witold Rybczynski on the evolution of the American bathroom, with the good sense to suggest a bookshelf be added.