"Murder and champagne follow"

Slate has collected the opinions of a motley crew on the standout cultural happenings of the year.

Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) extols the virtues of the 1950 Mexican film Aventurera, this year released on DVD:

What is the film about? Ninon Sevilla, in a fervent, twitchy performance, plays Elena, a young girl who endures sexual temptation, the breakup of her family, a suicide, and dance lessons in the first 10 minutes of the film. Following that, Gout thoughtfully provides a brief flashback encompassing all the events of the past 10 minutes. Murder and champagne follow. White slavery is involved and unrequited love. Also, table tennis. . . . Also, it is a musical.

I so have to see this movie.

A series of unfortunate allusions

Have you ever wondered if there was a hidden message in Sunny Baudelaire's exclamations of "nonsense"? Are you puzzled by the directive that you should never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter?

Who is Lemony Snicket, and why all the morose dedications to this Beatrice woman?

Quidditch.com invites you to "check out some of these notable allusions in the series, which leaves no dystopia unreferenced."

The site also offers plentiful links, notably:
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized FAQ.

(Link via Kids Lit.)

Sadly, burdened as we are with small child, we have not seen the dismal film version of this unfortunate series. Apparently the closing credits are stunning and, though nothing else in the movie is, worth the price of admission.

Christmas without treacle

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, by Paul Auster, first appeared in print in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1990. The story made another appearance in the film Smoke, also written by Paul Auster and starring Harvey Keitel (Auggie Wren) and William Hurt (Paul, a writer).

This year for Christmas the story was published as a gift book, 36 pages sprinkled with illustrations by Isol, spine wrapped in red cloth. I saw it for the first time while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping last week and had to have it for myself.

I love Paul Auster, not least because in these pages he so clearly articulates what I was struggling to express just last week:

I spent the next several days in despair, warring with the ghosts of Dickens, O. Henry, and other masters of the Yuletide spirit. The very phrase "Christmas story" had unpleasant associations for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle. Even at their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairy tales for adults, and I'd be damned if I'd ever allowed myself to write something like that. And yet, how could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story?

Paul Auster can.

The story-telling is matter of fact and fairly emotionless, but there are pauses for reflection and some axiomatic gems:
"If you don't take the time to look, you'll never manage to see anything."
"As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true."


 

The pictures are warm colours. Some things are sharply in focus, while background things are sketched in. Scenes are gridded and boxed. Isol is effective in conflating the story's "action" to a two-dimensional plane.

I won't tell you the story here, but I will tell you that it is framed within one of my very favourite ideas, which has lived with me ever since I saw it expressed in Smoke. Auggie Wren takes a photo every morning at the same time of the same view outside his cigar shop. I think about his act almost every day. "By planting himself in one tiny corner of the world and willing it to be his own, by standing guard in the space he had chosen for himself," he is photographing time. This is how we all mark time, though we may not do so in such regular or recognizable patterns and we, most of us, don't have tangible photographs to show for it.

If you have 17 minutes to spare, you can listen to the NPR broadcast of Paul Auster reading the story, Christmas Day 2004.

The conspiracies within

My first reaction to today's Salon piece on The Da Vinci Code (by Dan Brown) was puzzlement. Did it really take Laura Miller this long to realize that the idea for the Code came from a suspect piece of research (Holy Blood, Holy Grail)? Or did she have fresh insight on new evidence?

Miller has an epiphany: what draws people to the Code is not characterization or plotting, but the seed of "truth" on which it is built — the grand conspiracy of religion.

(What's the big deal if Jesus married and had children?, you ask. Something to this effect: Jesus' leaving a bloodline throws into question the central tenet of the Catholic Church — Christ's godliness.)

HBHG is a shoddy (though fascinating) work. Its authors seemingly hoped
to legitimize it through extensive footnoting and obscure references.

Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln are the Moriartys of pseudohistory, and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is their great triumph. Their techniques include burying their readers in chin-high drifts of factoids — some valid but irrelevant, some uncheckable (the untranslated diaries of obscure 17th century clerics, and so on), others, like the labyrinthine family trees of various medieval French noblemen, simply numbing, and if you trouble to figure them out, pretty inconclusive. A preposterous idea will first be floated as a guess (it is "not inconceivable" that the Knights Templar found documentation of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's marriage in Jerusalem), then later presented as a tentative hypothesis, then still later treated as a fact that must be accounted for (the knights had to take those documents somewhere, so it must have been the south of France!).

HBHG was reprinted to profit from the code phenomenon (my own copy, about a decade old, is called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail), and its authors are suing Brown for breach of copyright of ideas and research.

Miller sorts out some of the facts from the fiction in the Code as well as in HBHG, as countless others have already done to capitalize off of the Code's success. She's happy to point out authors' mistakes.

What Miller fails to grasp is that even Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and its acknowledged inspiration, was not wholly original, and the factual inaccuracies of it don't matter as much as she thinks.

For as long as there has been a Church, people have questioned the authenticity of Christ.

I love conspiracies. Not because I believe them, but because they dare to question the status quo. In the guise of entertainment, conspiracies offer a framework by which millions of people who would otherwise never step outside of themselves are allowed to explore ideas they would shun in polite society.

Favouritism at the office. Forged documents. JFK. Aliens. To think, Christ may be the biggest conspiracy of all!

The Code taps into the smudge of paranoia we're all born with — the inner voice that wonders if all is as it seems, that poses doubts, that asks who is in control. It's the same seed of consciousness that grapples with free will and God.

Being fabulous. 

Helena's igloo. 

Traditions old and new

When any two people come together to form a new family, there is a blending of traditions. Our respective family traditions are rooted in the customs of our respective heritages: French-Canadian and Polish — perhaps a little harder to blend than in your average couple, not because of the vastness of the differences so much as the strength with which they are held.

That said, every family has its own patterns of behaviour, even as a product of its history, uniquely its own.

One of my favourite family traditions is the jigsaw puzzle. On returning home from midnight mass, my sister and I would break open the box that one or the other of us had inevitably received among our gifts (unwrapped Christmas Eve). It wasn't unusual to stay up past 4 in the morning, making sure the border was assembled and pieces were appropriately sorted. After a few hours' sleep, we'd be back at it. I prefer to spend Christmas Day dressed in new pyjamas.

My mother is often sad at Christmas. In part, this comes from trying to recapture a Christmas from her past, though that ideal picture-perfect holiday had never been captured to begin with. She still hopes that we will gather 'round the piano and sing carols — not any of those modern Christmas songs about Santa either. We've never had a piano.

Since I'm away from them this year, those traditions cannot be upheld, only remembered.

My own vision of an ideal Christmas, so clear that it's almost a memory, consists of everybody pyjama'ed and curled up in their corners, reading by the fireplace. I've never had a working fireplace.

As it is, as a new family we've determined that we will all of us, toddler included, dress our Christmas tree together, no matter how late in December we manage to coordinate it.

J-F has sworn that Christmas Day will be the day of the wearing of the Habs sweater. (Curses! Why did I ever buy it for him that Christmas 5 years ago?!)

I do a reading of The Grinch.

This year was quiet. Fun and games, books and movies, and food. The years to come undoubtedly will see other traditions evolve.

This Christmas has turned out to be the Christmas of playdoh. For all the gifts Helena received, by far her favourite was the one I picked up at the dollar store. For a dollar. Playdoh, with which Helena makes carrots. Then more carrots. (I've been trying to inspire her in the direction of bananas, but no success yet.) I was a little more ambitious: cats, mice, radishes, apple trees, various vehicles, elephants, roses, daisies, and llamas. I feel I may have missed my calling in life.

I look forward to spending the rest of the week unravelling The Globe and Mail's annual (monstrously colossal) Christmas crossword.

The toddler, the monkey, and the shrink

We have a Christmas tree! Finally. It's not dressed yet, but we have our tree.

Helena was home today and it was lovely. Mostly. Except when she turned into an unpleasant little monster for no apparent reason for hour-long stretches at a time. Maybe a molar. Or gas. Maybe I'm just out of practice.

Or maybe she's figured out that I've pretty much decided not to get her anything for Christmas. (Though one would think this would elicit extra nice behaviour. Two-year-olds sure have a lot to learn.) We did pick up that easel for her, though I hardly expect her eyes to light up when she unwraps that. Some eye-rolling maybe ("Mommy thinks she's still playing The Sims"). I'd tucked away a book or two for her, but again, not a lot of spontaneous glee likely to result from this. My best shot at toddler joy is the vat of playdoh I picked up at the dollar store.

I'm still feeling ambivalent about this holiday season. Other bloggers offer up a lot to think about, assigning tasks that will go unanswered by me for the time being.

This month the monkey asks:
What would you do if you had a free year, all to yourself, to dedicate to whatever you wanted? Assume money was not a problem — you've just received a $60,000 Monkey Grant.

Travel? Write?

I don't know. I might just spend the whole year thinking about, and that could be a very worthwhile endeavour.

Sleep? I miss sleep.

The First Annual SC&A Holiday Blogger Challenge is also under way:
If you are a leftie blogger, go out and find three rightie blogs to say something nice about. Write a post about it on your blog, and leave a comment on their blogs. If you are a rightie, do the same for a leftie. If you are a mom, do the same for a angsty teen. You get the picture.

I'm not sure that an angsty teen is quite the opposite of me. Most days I feel like an angsty teen.

But this is an exercise worth doing. Get to know people who are very different from you. Be nice to them. The question begs to be asked: What is my opposite?

Growing up late

"Sooner or later . . . most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity."

Yes. Mediocre. Most of our kids are mediocre. Sure, each is special in his or her own way, but when it comes to smarts and successes, they can't all be geniuses. Ah, the vastness of mediocrity.

This is probably harder for parents to accept than it is for the children themselves. Particularly when the parents are, umm, my age — a generation born in a period of transitioning parenting styles. Generation X hasn't yet confronted its own mediocrity. We parents just don't know any better.

Go read this article now. I don't know where to begin in quoting or summarizing this article. Much of what it says is not new, and is obvious, but it's worth repeating.

I think my kid's a genius. I need to be reminded that Helena is her own person, that I cannot expect her to live out my dreams and ambitions. Even when she develops her own, she will fail. She'll figure things out. From this we will learn and move forward.

Parents need to realize their kids aren't disadvantaged by the occasional setback; they're normal.

Did you know?: "Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess."

"Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."

Parents overprotect and micromanage. These behaviours and responses to them become systematized in, for example, grade inflation. All of which breed ineffective coping mechanisms, sanctioned by today's technologies as they're assimilated into our society and culture; for instance, the instant gratification that cellphones enable.

Because of all this, it takes longer to grow up. "Postadolescence" lasts year more than it used to. You may be 30 years old before you're an "adult."

(Is that necessarily a bad thing? We live longer, we work longer. Our childhoods may be filled with never-before-felt pressures, so why not extend adolescence, assuming it's enjoyed?)

Parental anxiety has its place. But the way things now stand, it's not being applied wisely. We're paying too much attention to too few kids — and in the end, the wrong kids... [R]esources are being expended for kids who don't need them.

There are kids who are worth worrying about — kids in poverty, stresses Anderegg. "We focus so much on our own children," says Elkind, "It's time to begin caring about all children."

Books for Christmas

Except for the Grinch, and Dickens' A Christmas Carol, I'm not a fan of Christmas books.

This list of Christmas books is refreshing in that it includes cookbooks as well as humour and coping techniques.

Still, when I think of Christmas books, it's primarily children's books that come to mind.

Other lists and bookstore displays would have me believe that seasonal books are either frivolous things, often geared toward boosting consumerism, or strongly moralistic and overtly religious fables, designed to instill the "true" meaning of Christmas.

I'll start brushing up for next year. Such books were never part of my childhood. I may yet find a happy medium, a story that's nonmaterialistic and which mentions neither Santa nor God. Maybe it doesn't have to be about Christmas at all... (Suggestions and reminders welcome.)

Christmas books for me are not necessarily books about Christmas or those set in cold, snowy winters; they're the books that Christmas gives me the time to luxuriate in — the time to stay up late, wear my pyjamas all day, huddle under blankets with a new book.

The biggest "Christmas book" this year, already purchased by 263 million people, is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and will be available in stores July 16. I want one of those.

Songs of innocence

I realized something about Helena's songs. It turns out they're not obscure French nursery rhymes that I'd have to spend hours researching. She makes them up!

We've been playing with her shape-sorting castle. Helena embarked on an elaborate dance-like pattern with all the characters — king, queen, court jester, and squire (well, he looks like he should be a squire) — exiting through the drawbridge, leaping from turret to turret, then plummeting to the floor.

And all the while, she sang! The lyrics were mostly gobbledygook (or possibly French), but the words "castle," "king," "queen," and "tombé" were clearly intelligible. Steady rhythm and a recurring musical motif constructed around these particular four characters.

There are other games and other patterns, with other songs. She makes them up!

A jazzy Aristocats-inspired "oh yeah" finishes off many of her tunes.

Helena's musical appreciation and competence has risen to such a level that she now sings along with us in the car to Blur's Song 2. Woo hoo!

In praise of expensive shampoo, and various stupidities

It's stupid cold outside. The wind chill factor gives us -39°C.

Stupid black beret I lost at the grocery store this weekend. I lose one every year.

Stupid baby waking up at 5:30 am. It's inhuman.

In praise of expensive shampoo. I've been an Aveda girl for years, but I ran out of shampoo almost two months ago. It hasn't been convenient to replace it, so I've been using Helena's baby shampoo instead, which keeps my hair clean enough. Finally I got around to buying some of my usual, and I feel like I have million-dollar hair — lush, beautiful hair. I almost don't need to keep that salon appointment I scheduled for this week.

Stupid Ikea lamps and their nonstandard lightbulb requirements. Stupid me for not noticing and buying such lightbulbs while we were at Ikea a few weeks ago. Stupid lightbulb I finally tracked down, whose packaging clearly indicates it is a match to that indicated on the Ikea product, still doesn't fit.

In praise of the South American musicians at the metro station this morning and their soul-liftng panpipes.

Stupid SAQ being on strike. Now where are we supposed to find champagne and vodka with which to toast J-F's birthday this evening? Sure, we can get cheap red wine at the dépanneur, but then how will we know today's any more special than any other day?

In praise of fancy pastries conveniently located in the café over our metro station.

Stupid key chain with its shiny smoothness and jangle of attraction. Helena likes keys; rather, my keys. The keychain is a heavy and stylized silver cat, a talisman of sorts. Like one of the rocks you pick up at the beach, only you don't throw it into the sea, you just hang on to it cuz it's weathered smooth and you like the weight of it in your hand. Sometimes it's easier to let Helena play with the keys than it is to listen to her tantrum about not being allowed to play with the keys. After searching for more than 10 minutes, I found them in a plastic shopping bag tucked behind the catfood under the kitchen sink (one of the usual suspect locations, actually), along with a flashy-nosed reindeer, a small canister of playdoh, a no longer operational toy cellphone, and an odd creature with wheels for legs.

In praise of stupid music recitals. We pay a small supplement so Helena can enjoy the benefits of "music lessons" at daycare. This morning was the session-end recital. For 8 minutes a young woman played tape-recorded selections at excessively loud volumes and gesticulated wildly while 9 toddlers banged sticks together and shook their maracas, or not, and parents observed, mostly through the lens of their camcorders. Helena hung onto my leg, though she lives for this stuff ordinarily. She even turned down Xavier when he asked her to dance. J-F and I went for coffee afterwards so we could get all the pent-up mocking of small children and hippie instructors out of our system. Ah, music!

Finders keepers

In response to my desperate cries for help for my book addiction, and in homage to the perverse thrill in the magical appearance of a long-hunted book, a friend sent me a book. A graphic novel actually. Finder: Talisman, by Carla Speed McNeil.

You can read the first portion of Talisman online:

TALISMAN is about a book...It's the kind of book that makes you think that if you can somehow swallow it whole, you'll be magically imbued with the skills and abilities it contains — but once you get it home, it's just another collection of interesting words and attractive pictures.

My edition includes endnotes. Although I like to believe that art should speak for itself, I admit that often we don't know how to listen or what to listen for. The notes are there to elucidate the text to the reader, not to condescend. Notes can even become part of the art.

McNeil's notes read like the director's running commentary on a DVD. Mostly interesting, sometimes insightful, but far from essential to appreciating the story.

I've enjoyed a handful of graphic novels. I tend to read them like I do books — I glance over the illustrations, but mostly I find they distract me from the story – which is in the words (or so I've been conditioned to believe).

I haven't yet figured out how much of the story is in the pictures, how much I need to pay attention to them, how much I'll miss if I dismiss them. (Here, they're in black and white.)

What stuns me most is the feeling that my brain has been picked, that here laid before me are thoughts and emotions seated deep in my past. Somehow, in this form, matters of consequence are distilled to their essence.

How can I begin to enumerate the points that resonate with me?

It's dedicated "to the kid with the book." That would be me.

A book is imbued with significance according to who gives it you, who reads it to you, and what it is you're trying to escape from.

It's never how you remember it.

It faded away. I couldn't remember it. Like a dream. Just bits and pieces. But it was so vivid.

(I remember an image I read that I've never been able to retrace. I think it was in a short story, probably a collection edited by Alberto Manguel. A character was being led down a hallway or staircase and was struck by the portraits lining the passage. The expressiveness of the female subjects. He realizes the photos capture these women on the brink of orgasm. I thought this added a unique dimension both to the character making the realization and the character who lived there. The image has stayed with me for well over a decade now. However, I'm haunted more by not being able to find its source. As if the page was destroyed after I read it.)

The criticism that reading voraciously doesn't require thinking or acting.

The problem of being a perfectionist:

The next day I'd swear I wouldn't put down a word until it was perfect in my mind (which meant, of course, that I would never put down a word. Period.)

(For a while I thought I wanted to be writer when I grew up. I remember hearing Peter Gzowski interview Timothy Findley. Findley laughed at the notion of people wanting to be writers. You either write, or you don't. It doesn't take schooling or special equipment. Pen and paper. And you write. You're a writer. At which point I realized, as much as the idea of being a writer appealed to me, I wasn't a writer. Not yet, anyway.)

Like our hero, Marcie, I own at least a half-dozen really pretty blank journals that don't deserve my scribblings. They remain blank. Thank goodness the internet's so ugly — I scrawl all over that.

The talisman we need to get whatever we're doing done. Paul Auster fetishized a notebook in Oracle Night.

Something about magic. The possibilities. All fitting into a bigger picture.

Author profile.

Interview regarding origins, processes, and directions:

It incorporates aspects of speculative science fiction with family drama; the high technology of cranial jack computer interfaces with houses set within living trees; the political games played within and between extended clan families. McNeil describes the series as aboriginal SF. "It has to do with 'primitive' cultures meeting 'advanced' ones," she explains. "Scalps and scalpels, trackers and trackballs, ritual magic and videogames."

Shaping the postapocalypse

Margaret Atwood considers some plots for novels and some of the difficulties certain elements present.

Who shall we follow in the course of this doleful story? I vote for Chris and Amanda. They are a nice young couple who’ve had great sex in Chapter One, or possibly Chapter Two. Then realisation has dawned on them, ruining their plans to renovate their kitchen and install a new round eco-friendly refrigerator that pops up out of the kitchen counter. They flee to their summer cottage, as civic order breaks down in the once-thriving town where they live and people start eating their cats and goldfish and the dried ornamental sunflowers in their dining-room floral arrangements.

And if you still don't like Margaret Atwood, then you have no sense of humour. Or you're not very smart. Probably both.

(Via the Literary Saloon.)

Ups and downs

Down: I didn't get the job I wanted, which, it turns out, I wanted very badly indeed, but I did not recognize this (nor did I stop myself from saying stupid things during the interview) till it was too late to do anything about it.

Up: Helena after she pees in her potty, or pretends to pee in her potty, wipes herself with toilet paper that she disposes of in the real toilet. She flushes and waves "Buh-bye pee-pee!"

Down: My mother. I've always considered our relationship good, but never close — she was never my confidante or friend. It works for us. Except for those few weeks that one spring when I was floundering about at university. I won't air our current strife here, but it unsettles me enough that I wish I kept a private and anonymous journal, maybe on paper, just to get it out of my system. (Aha! I could do that!) I'm fairly certain the problem — my problem — lies in the sense of obligation one feels toward Doing the Right Thing, I just don't know what that is.

Down: Being a mother, in the context of my current feelings toward my mother. How powerful and fragile the bond between mother and daughter. How fucking scary.

Up: Apparently I don't need psychotherapy, maternal issues notwithstanding.

Down: Christmas. It's almost here. At least this year, the panic is striking a little earlier than usual, which is more conducive to productivity and results dammit. Although, this year holds less stress. But much ambivalence. No travel, no mother, no brother or sister, no unrealistic expectations and weird schedules, less presents. And I miss that. More sleep, more snuggling, more movies and books. More...EASE. Less tradition. Makes me a little sad, really.

Down: For the third day in a row, to retrieve the little one from daycare I braved the perils of public transit during rush hour, all cold, unpleasant, busy days. Herded like cattle. Sheep. Lemmings.

Down: There are streets that are sloped and slippery. The fronts of my thighs hurt from tensing up against the potential fall.

Up: The festive dress I picked up for Helena. And the cute jeans, because they were on sale. And the cozy pyjamas, cuz she deserves some that don't have weird stains on them.

Up: The way Helena goes on about Père Noël, only she says, "Pe-o-e," and I am mystified that she would find this easier to say without the consonants.


Up. 

Grinch mother

I am a terrible, grinchy mother.

I sent Helena to bed last night, even though Dr Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas was on television.

In all fairness, I didn't know the Grinch was on TV till after I'd put Helena to bed. I thought for a moment about retrieving her, but then I thought that would just compound the awfulness of my parenting abilities and misplaced priorities.

Everybody knows the Grinch is far more important than bedtime.

I love this Christmas cartoon. It makes my heart pound and stop and weep and smile.

Nobody reads Dr Seuss like Boris Karloff, and the music with its delicious lyrics is spectacular. "Your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk."

(J-F and I were listening to this song the other day and lamenting the lost art of the insult.)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas is the first book I bought for Helena, for her first Christmas two years ago. We'd started a little library for her before she was born, and she'd received books from friends and family, but this was the first book I chose for her — for the little person I was getting to know, as much as for the person I hoped she would become.

I even inscribed it — something corny about her causing my own heart to grow three sizes.

I read it to her that Christmas. Reading to her was so much easier then, when she couldn't crawl let alone run away, when she wouldn't turn pages before I'd reached the end, when she wouldn't point at every single object on the page and demand some acknowledgement of her naming abilities and descriptive capacity. She was a captive audience.

The book's out on the coffeetable now, waiting for the moment to strike when we simply must visit Whoville. Who knows whether we'll linger or simply pass through.

As for the cartoon, Helena may have to wait until next year.

Someday, I hope she'll forgive me.

Which random number are you?

You are 716.

To take this quiz, click here.

It's beautiful.

Very unfortunate events

Lemony Snicket, on Daniel Handler having children:

Mr Handler informs me that his first child has recently survived his first year, and is seriously considering learning to walk. The creation of this child was encouraged by the observation of other children, and also for the usual reasons, such as having piles and piles of children's books lying around the house without any children to read them, and a sneaking suspicion that one is getting far too much sleep.

The haze of real life

A day late and a dollar short. I don't even know exactly what that phrase means, but that's how I feel.

I blame video games. Not for my not knowing. For the feeling.

But more about that in a minute.

I've received a BoB nomination. That's BoB. Best of Blog Weblog Awards 2004 — The Best Personal Blogs You Ought To Be Reading! So this is the part where I say it's an honour just to be nominated.

Now I also feel obliged to spread the word of BoB. I know that the 19 of you who regularly read my ramblings don't go in much for awards or ratings. But in case you stumbled here by accident and you're into blogging, you should know about BoB and the great work the people at BoB are doing. Support BoB. It's about the little blog, the blogger's blog. "The BoB Awards go out of their way to recognize the great efforts of those online diarists who blog about their[sic] minutiae of their life."

Also, there may be some strangers passing by to review the nomination, so please be nice to them. There. Have I whored myself sufficiently? (I'm guessing pointing out their typo won't do me any favours.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled entry.

I've been struggling to meet a deadline for work. At the expense of sleep, quality time with my daughter, quality time with the guy I'm shacked up with, time spent buying Christmas presents for others, time getting film developed and writing up and sending out Christmas cards (is it too late now?), time spent getting that bank mess straightened out. You get the idea. But not at the expense of time spent reading.

While the job struggled to take shape and monster hunts with Helena were limited, I read another stupid novel. Isabella just had to have her little book fix. How inopportune.

I'm tired and cranky. Mostly, I'm in an I'm-such-an-inadequate-mother funk, frittering away my days so that evenings and weekends I can tell my little girl, "Mommy can't play right now. Mommy has to work." We send Helena to daycare so Mommy can have bubble baths and read novels.

(Whine: but I really needed that bubble bath — it's been a rough few weeks, and then there was that whole interview thing that had me completely distracted from work anyway, and I can't be a good mommy if I'm not in myself, rested and happy. Blah, blah, blah.)

I blame video games.

Only this time it's a video game in the form of a book. Specifically, the form of Codex, by Lev Grossman. (I have it in paperback, courtesy of QPB, but it seems it's generally not available yet.)

Edward should know better. An investment banker with a couple weeks off before taking up a new position in London should know better than to get sucked into a video game. Or into a search for a heretofore thought imaginary mansucript, cataloguing a library, getting himself tangled up, albeit at a distance, in the personal drama of one very rich and secretive family.

He really should know better. Some of the reviewers consider this a flaw, that the protagonist is too stupid to be believable. I think it adds colour to his character — don't all of us (even you successful types) do things against our better judgement? I should've known better.

The author holds down a day job as book critic for Time. He's read enough books to ask some interesting questions about the fate of the narrative in a technology-driven society. He's not the first to do so, and he won't be the last to scrape together a novel from these ideas.

Lev Grossman's literary thriller Codex transcends the current vogue for the archaic—explicitly linking the 14th and 21st centuries by considering the respective, and not entirely dissimilar, powers of parchment and PlayStation. It's an artful, populist, conceptually ambitious exercise in what Umberto Eco has labeled "postmodern medievalism" (a microgenre pretty much dominated by the Italian semiotician's own The Name of the Rose and Monty Python and the Holy Grail). An addictive meditation on narrative addictions, the book toggles between the disconcertingly lifelike virtual environment of a state-of-the-art video game and an increasingly dreamlike dusty-stacks search for a lost, possibly apocryphal Chaucer-era manuscript.

The cracked code proves disappointingly primitive and the double-crossing machinations are almost perversely low-stakes. If anything, there's a modest, slackerly charm in the manner Codex fulfills its thriller obligations. You can sense the author's sheepishness about stepping on the suspense pedal. The closest to a brush with danger is a brief, awkward confrontation on the sidewalk; there's no car chase, just a climactic cab ride over the Manhattan Bridge to nowhere more sinister than brownstone Brooklyn.

I couldn't put the book down. Grossman somehow (how?) captures the compulsivity of video games and translates it to text.

The best games have a complex narrative structure. Unlike the passive activity of television absorption, and more so than books they delude you into thinking you are in control, an active participant with power over your characters' fate. But your characters' worlds only extend so far as someone had the foresight to code them.

Edward at a LAN party:

They were all in it together, a Local Area Network of brothers in arms, bound by the electric bond of virtual combat. Could a book do this?

Well, yes. When it incites discussion. Admittedly, reading is more of a solitary pursuit, but video games even when designed as single-player adventures retain the same immersive and compulsive qualities.

From the New York Times:

He's a stranger in the world of computer gamers and programmers, just as he is in the library; we enter it with him: "He was starting to see what people found so addictive about these games. Momus had none of the slapdash inefficiency of reality: every moment was tense with hushed anticipation, foreordained meaning. It was a brighter, higher-grade, more compelling, better-engineered version of reality." You might say, just like fiction.

Breaking away from this novel left me with the same hungover quality as after playing games far into the night, when the digitized world invades your sleep and transforms your real-life instincts, when you look for trapdoors in uneven surfaces and plot escapes through alleyways you'd never noticed before. Feeling forced to repeat mundane tasks till you get it just right, or in case you're missing something.

(Do people younger than I experience that nausea, or is it so much a part of their lives they don't notice it?)

How does Grossman achieve this in a book? Maybe the credit lies more with the reader, like with the player, than we give credit. The willingness to give oneself over, to accept the rules, to step into a universe of someone else's creation.

Some call the ending abrupt and disappointing. The ends of games are generally anticlimactic — you feel jolted back to reality; where do you go from here? But I fail to see a better resolution. Anything "flashier" would ring false. The ending was logical, fitting, open.

The novel does bear out Grossman's conviction that books are not a threatened medium:

Books are beautiful, and we have deep sentimental feelings about them, but that's not why they'll survive. They'll survive because nothing else can do what they do. And that helps me sleep at night.

The book's finished. The job I was working on is done. Now onto more important matters: who will be the next apprentice?

Morning rush hour. 


I think my geraniums are dead.