Weird cute things

Playing at the park or schoolyard, we often interrupt "regular" play for imaginary picnics and pretend naps. Recently Helena's begun to watch imaginary TV.

Playing hide/chase, this time the menace being an unseen lion, Helena announces she's going to kill it. I bite my lip at this — I'm not keen on banning any kind of play outright, particularly since exposure to this kind of play is pretty much inevitable, but it does make me uncomfortable; for the timebeing, I let myself watch how she herself incorporates such outside influences. Her hand turns into something like a phaser (she definitely does not call it a gun). And so she goes lion-hunting. She shoots. Then (and I loosely translate/paraphrase her toddler French): "Oh, no! The poor lion! I think he's hurt! We have to take him to the doctor!" So we take him to the doctor.

Some mornings she gets out of bed and happily proclaims, "J'ai grandie!" (I've grown!)

At the mall last week: "Look! Il y a deux soleils!" I have no idea what she's talking about. The lights? "Deux soleils! Look! Un juste a coté l'éléphant." Still, no idea. "Puis un avion and a raccoon, avec le soleil!" (Yes, that's a pretty accurate transcript of her language switching.) Soleil, éléphant, avion, raccoon, soleil. S. E. A. R. S.

Some evenings, Helena asks me to sing her to sleep. Sometimes she has a specific song in mind. Last night, she stopped me midtune. Because her teddybear was crying. Because her teddybear didn't want to hear this song. OK. But she begged me to continue. So I did, but the damn teddybear started crying again. Finally, Helena buried him under her blankets, making sure his ears were plugged and he wouldn't hear.

The other morning, while looking for her magic sandal (that would be the weird part of the anecdote), she tells me (and this part is hopelessly cute), "Tu es la plus belle des princesses!"

Back to work

How I spent Easter and the week that followed

Trips to the park: Approximately 15.

Chocolate consumed: Countless.

Smingus dingus antics: None. Completely overlooked. I'm devastated by this realization.

Bottles of wine consumed: Not nearly enough.

Shopping expeditions: Mostly pointless, overly long, and unfair to small child.

Number of televisions playing at excessively loud volumes for excessively long periods of time and setting my whole body, not to mention my temper, on edge: Two.

Tempers lost: Mine, for reasons I don't yet have the perspective to wholly define. I won't count the little girl's episodes of frustration as they were hardly meltdowns, and none of them her fault but clearly attributable to boredom, glitches in routine meals and disrupted bedtime rituals, and not being paid attention (!). I have much griping to do actually, and am still waiting for my temper to fully settle before venturing an exposition of multigenerational family female dynamics.

Migraines suffered: Two, one of which is ongoing.

Despondent Leafs fan in a days-long funk: My brother.
Exuberant (perhaps overly so) Habs fan: That would be J-F.

Books acquired (at bargain prices):
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women — to correct the oversight in my reading education.
Miéville, China: Iron Council — because I've been dying waiting for the mass market paperback, and this remaindered hardcover was super cheap.
Pinker, Steven: The Language Instinct — because my old copy was never returned to me.
Pearl, Matthew: The Dante Club — just because.
Wallace, David Foster: Infinite Jest — because some people think it's a big deal.
Walsh, Bill: The Elephants of Style — because I've been meaning to.

Books recovered from my mother's basement:
Boston, Lucy M: The River at Green Knowe
Clifton, N Roy: The City Beyond the Gates — both of which I have no recollection of, and I'm curious to rediscover why I thought them worth saving.
Collodi, Carlos: The Adventures of Pinocchio

DVDs acquired:
Watership Down
Middlemarch — Yay! With Rufus Sewell. Yum! Am deliberating how best to watch it: In one late-night 7-hour marathon? In daytime lunch-hour snippets? Daytime viewing should be postponed till after I've delivered a batch of work this week, and till after I've done my effing taxes. Consecutive evening showings would have to wait till the Habs are eliminated from the playoffs. Should I dispose of the child for a weekend? Do I make J-F watch it with me? Salty snacks or sweet? How many bottles of wine for 7 hours?

Movies watched:
The Adventures of Pinocchio
Saw II
Miami Rhapsody
History of Violence
Domino
Creep — which is excellently creepy!

Books read:
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
I did not read it as a young girl and thought I should. Frankly, I'm glad I didn't read it as a young girl, as I'm afraid to think what effect all the moralizing and godliness might've had on me. Ugh. The last few chapters were just awful. Still, I suppose there are some worthwhile lessons to take from these women regarding formation of character, so long as one has the ability to identify the timeless from the hopelessly dated. Weird, too, to read it on the tail of Middlemarch, to see the contrast between American and English sensibilities at a similar time period, although holding it against the mature and complex workings of Middlemarch also highlighted how juvenile Little Women is, not only in that its intended audience is young, but in how simple (and I mean that derogatorily) its construction and messaging is. I did enjoy its soapiness, however, and I suspect it's probably better read while not under the influence of PMS.

Buchanan, Andrea J, ed: It's A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters
Blog book tour alights here May 5.

Glennon, Paul: The Dodecahedron
That is, I finally finished it. I have much (good) to say about it.

Walsh, Bill: The Elephants of Style
I love this guy, and trust him. He's funny; his points are well reasoned, and the reasoning is consistent and common-sensical.

The denouement
Bouts of car-sickness: Helena, just once, on the return trip, about 3 blocks from home.
First thing on arriving home: birthday party for 11-year-old cat, complete with hats and cake.
Hiding under the bed from excessive displays of toddler affection: one 11-year-old cat.

Later, gators

I've actually been wanting to share quasi-interesting things with you — the reading I attended last weekend, cute weird things the kid is doing — but all week I've been plagued with work deadlines and a sick child (why must those things always coincide?). But that'll have to wait. We leave in the morning to visit with family. No Internet (gasp!). Back in 10—12 days, haven't decided yet. Miss me. (I miss you terribly already.)

ABCs

(Because it's a quick and pleasant diversion from all else. Well, it's something.)

Shelly's Booked by Three for April (via Pages Turned):

Name 3 books you liked, titles which start with A, B, C (one per letter).

All the Names, José Saramago
Balthasar's Odyssey, Amin Maalouf
Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold (Please write another book.)

Name 3 authors you like whose names (given or surname) start with A, B, C (one per letter).

Auster, Paul
Byatt, A.S.
Calvino, Italo

Name 3 books on your To Read list with titles starting with A, B, C (one per letter).

The Art of Murder, José Carlos Somoza (from which I heard the author read this past weekend — more on this later)
Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Brought to you by the letter "H"

Helena is home today with a nasty cough, runny nose, and slight fever, but with a mostly sweet disposition. She's home today to fulfill the law that demands she prey on my guilt and mothering instincts on the day that's the worst possible day for her to be encroaching on my time, what with my having a work project due in a couple days.

She's napping now, and I've decided to go ahead and blog cuz, hey, the day's pretty much a write-off workwise anyway.

What makes it worthwhile: she sits beside me at my desk, picks up a pen and writes "I" on the legal pad. "Mama, c'est 'I.' C'est pour toi: Isabella." Then "H," a recognizable capital "H," "pour moi, Helena." She writes a thousand "H"'s, half of them on my arm. Then "X" — I don't know why, other than that she can, but she writes "X" and calls it "X" likes she means it.

Recent lightbulbs
Noted here for posterity before I forget and because I don't think I'll ever get 'round to writing something clever and meaningful about any of these points individually:

She operates the CD player with ease, although despite my best efforts her taste in music leaves something to be desired. (I try to listen as a 3-year-old, and remind myself how normal it is for children, such naive creatures, to like children's music. Why should I hurry her to have "sophisticated" tastes?)

She is almost as proficient with the DVD player, inserting her program of choice. I used to cringe at her handling DVDs (and CDs) and did what I could to dissuade her, but we're past that now. She knows triangle is for "play," square for "stop."

Back in February she figured out the computer mouse, or her hand was finally big enough, coordinated enough, to make it do what she wanted. The lightbulb that correlated mouse movement with cursor position had already been illuminated. She favours matching and memory games.

Friday she drew a spider that looked like a spider and a mouse (of the mammalian variety) that looked like a mouse. Sadly, these pictures have not been preserved as they were drawn on the palms of my hands.

Marching on

I finished reading Middlemarch, because I hate reading more than one book at a time and also I'm not very good at it. I find myself unable to focus on anything properly, too much going on, too many loose ends, and the distraction spills into my nonreading life, on top of which there's the feeling of lack of accomplishment, leaving things unfinished, delaying that peculiar sense of satisfaction in being able to cram a read book into its alphabetized position on the shelf.

So I finished reading Middlemarch, because I could, and because I couldn't help myself, schedule be damned, it's that engrossing. And I'm brimming with things to say about it, most particularly in agreement with Virginia Woolf's comment that it "is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," but on this point I will restrain myself, because there's a schedule after all. But I'm glad I didn't read it 15 years ago, because while I'm sure it would've made some impact, served as a warning of sorts even, I most definitely was not a grown-up.

Would it be premature for me to say this may be the best book ever?! Really, it's that good. You should read it.

I'm loving reading it this way though (aside from not being able to read much of anything else alongside it), rereading sections as they come up for discussion, and again as other people's comments point me to specific passages. I could've read it in a matter of days, enjoyed it and been done with it, but now I'm absorbing it, which leads me to realize how flawed my usual reading experience can be, how much missed potential I've let drift by, which is fine, usually, but some books are worthy of more attention than I give them — the trick is to know which ones.

So I'm already wondering, what next — I mean, aside from the stuff on my nightstand — what else would be suited to this kind of group reading? Dare I say, it's more like school than a bookclub, in a good way, as discussion happens along the way, not in one sitting at the end (though, come to think of it, even at school, books were assigned and often not discussed till they were finished). Still, there are books I did read a dozen years ago from which I might benefit rereading as a grown-up (eg, The Master and Margarita, The Sheltering Sky), and there are classics that to appreciate fully one should take time and companions. But how to know which ones? So what next?

Science writing

For my daily bread and butter I read, and try to fix, an awful lot of less than elegant science.

In the Guardian, Ian McEwan, in an expanded version of a talk given at the London School of Economics to mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, explains why the writing is as important as the science:

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. There has never been a science book quite like it. Drawing on the work of a handful of scientists, it bound together genetics and Darwinian natural selection in a creative synthesis that amazed even those few who were already familiar with the concepts. It hastened a sea change in evolutionary theory, it affected profoundly the teaching of biology, it enticed an enthusiastic younger generation into the subject, and spawned a huge literature, and eventually a new discipline — memetics. At the same time, and this is the measure of its achievement, it addressed itself without condescension to the layman. It did so provocatively, and with style.

"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose, we are cast aside. But genes are the denizens of geological time: genes are forever."

It is a lovely phrase, "shuffled into oblivion", and the analogy with cards — the hand being the information, the cards themselves the genes — is apt, economical and informative: true eloquence. In the years since then, Dawkins' work might be seen as one extended invitation addressed to us non-scientists to enjoy science, to indulge ourselves at a feast of human ingenuity. Just as we can sit around the kitchen table and discuss operas, movies or novels without being composers, directors or novelists, so we can engage with this subject, one more sublime achievement of accumulated creativity. We can make it "ours" just as we might the music of Bach or Bill Evans.

Ian McEwan further proposes a canon of science literature; accuracy is not the most important criterion.

We need to remember the various discarded toys of science — the humours, the four elements, phlogiston, the ether and, more recently, protoplasm. Modern chemistry was born out of the futile ambitions of alchemy. Scientists who hurl themselves down blind alleys perform a service — they save everyone a great deal of trouble. They may also refine techniques along the way, and offer points of resistance, intellectual cantilevers, to their contemporaries.

I say all this somewhat dutifully, because there actually is a special pleasure to be shared, when a scientist or science writer leads us towards the light of a powerful idea which in turn opens avenues of exploration and discovery leading far into the future, binding many different phenomena in many different fields of study. Some might call this truth.

Immigrant stories

I've never been a big fan of short stories. Their length makes them hard to do right — develop the characters adequately, tell exactly all that's required for whatever there is of a plot to work. And when they are done right, you're left wanting more.

Natasha and Other Stories, by David Bezmozgis, is utterly right: charming, poignant, honest. All the stories share the same context.

I found myself wondering how many people would relate to, or at least enjoy, stories of the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience, circa 1980s Toronto. But obviously, this collection has already been widely acclaimed be people other than me. In these stories I recognized little bits of my own past — not strictly "immigrant" and no longer confined or defined by but still, then, firmly within that community, of another Slavic heritage, over the same time period not so far from Toronto. Silly, I know, to be grasping for similarities; but there are insights still into how my family acts and thinks:

My mother noted the size of the house. Maybe three thousand square feet with a big yard. Also, it was fully detached. This was two substantial steps beyond our means. Between our apartment and a fully detached house loomed the intermediate town house and the semidetached house. A fully detached house was the ultimate accomplishment.

I don't know what others will find in these characters' lives. Humour, compassion, suburban reality.

My favourite line:

The sun was neither bright nor hot and the outdoors felt conveniently like the indoors: God's thermostat set to suburban basement.

Stories:
Tapka
The Russian Riviera

Excerpts:
The Second Strongest Man
A New Gravestone for an Old Grave

Dispatch:
Dubbing, Italian-Style

Reviews:
London Review of Books
The National Post

About:
Quill & Quire: profile
The Atlantic Monthly: interview

Reading group guide.

Women, writing, etc

Highlights from an interview with Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, which I've never read:

• If I were running a political movement today, I would focus on children and how parents are being screwed.
  
  
• It's possible to be a writer, a mother and a wife, without necessarily killing yourself.

Anniversary

Fifty years ago today my parents were wed.

My father lived to see but 21 years of marriage. I marvel at my mother's continued devotion to him.

Creamy goodness

We came out of our metro station this afternoon and saw the cremerie across the street lit up and open for business. So after supper, we took a little walk. As did every other family with small children in the neighbourhood, not to mention young lovers and gaggles of teens. I wouldn't be surprised if the first day of ice cream season is their busiest.

I'd planned on being content with watching Helena enjoy her vanilla, maybe lap up her leftovers, but I ended up taking a strawberry cone for myself. Which is just as well, because we both like both flavours, and on a good day (like today) we're both pretty good at sharing. Tomorrow evening we'll bring J-F with us and get chocolate too.

Books! Flowers!

Yes! We're still reading Middlemarch! Discussion of Book III is now underway.

I have my ticket to see David Bezmozgis, Tim Parks, and José Carlos Somoza next week at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. I haven't read anything by any of them but was lured on the strength of Bezmozgis' reputation alone. As it happens, I found a copy of Natasha and Other Stories in the sale bin yesterday, and figured I may as well see first-hand what I'd got myself into. I whipped through the first half of the book last night in bed. It's lovely.

By the way, if anyone's interested, Susan Glickman herself responded to my little rant regarding the lack of information regarding her just-released novel and provided a synopsis.

Also from the sale bin: Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. I enjoyed a previous work of hers, but having heard her in interview a couple years back I was thoroughly turned off by her self-centred self-importance and thought I could never read her again. However, I've heard nothing but good things about this book, and I couldn't resist the sale price.

The sale-bin pièce de resistance: Harold and the Purple Crayon! Many thanks to Suzanne for first alerting me to existence of this little gem, lodging it so firmly in my memory banks that as I ran my finger over its spine I was able to instantly recognize it for what it was. Helena and I have so far read it twice together (and I read it twice on my own) — it's a hit. While it does have some troublesome existentialist underpinnings, for the time-being we will revel in Harold's resourcefulness and his ability to immerse himself in his art.

There's still a tiny patch of dirty snow in our courtyard, but there's no denying that spring is in the air.

Helena crafted a play-doh flower for Papa, which I didn't have the heart to disassemble.

Near her daycare, they're selling gerber daisies, which I can't resist, to support AIDS research. Lucky me, as they were packing up for the day, they threw in an extra handful.

Growing pains

Oh, but there are growing pains! That is, a million little weird things about the girl, some of which greatly annoy me. Some of which are fucking annoying.

It's been (and will continue to be) a long week. J-F's away. Helena is moody, stubborn, and testing me.

These annoyances have been going on for a few weeks, directly correlating, I think, to her insistence on sleeping sans diaper (or overnight pants), which means about half of those nights she wakes up having wet her bed and the rest of the nights she wakes up because I guess it's become a habit, which means she's generally not as well rested as she ought to be. Nor am I.

Friday night she woke up screaming. She cried and I paced with her and she complained about her ear. No fever and I couldn't see anything in the dark, and god forbid I turn on a proper light and incur the wails resulting from the bright sting to her eyes. A dose of Tylenol, an hour of her crying and my pacing, and we fell back to sleep. Morning came and I gave some thought to taking her to a clinic, but nothing close by was open, and there was the pesky logistical matter of getting J-F to the airport and the more emotionally wrenching one of seeing him off. Taking Helena to a clinic was just so damn inconvenient, particularly since she claimed she felt fine, and she seemed fine, so I didn't, because that's the kind of horrible mother I am.

Tuesday Helena gives me a hard time about getting ready to go to daycare. I give us both a minute to calm down, got my own shoes and jacket on. I find her curled up fetal-like on her bed, feigning sleep. So I tuck her in and stroke her hair, call the daycare, and Helena sleeps the morning away.

Wednesday morning she tells me she wants to stay home, and I feel guilty. I have no work this week. I had plans for a little spring-cleaning is all. And my daughter wants to stay home, dare I say spend a little time with me.

Helena's back at daycare today for an excursion to the science centre, which I've been building up in preceding days so she wouldn't show too much resistance in the morning.

When it's good, it's really good. But the bad is frustrating beyond belief.

1. How none of her socks are comfortable for her. Or shoes. But it starts with the socks. And I've always given this rather serious consideration, given her history with eczema, always the worst on her feet and ankles, which look fine at the moment. But every year for the 3 years of her life so far, as winter gives way to spring her baby flesh turns scaly and she starts to scratch it raw. So. Cotton socks. Are hard to find. And I find myslef wondering if 95% cotton, 5% lycra is enough cotton. But the princess has issues with loose threads and noticeable seams. The Dora socks she screamed to own have never been worn. I've been turning most of her socks inside out so the seam across the toe isn't directly rubbing her feet. But add the pressure of shoes and she still feels the pea through the mattress.

2. How none of her underwear is comfortable for her. Most mornings she tries on all available clean underwear, usually settling on the last pair. If we're staying home, the underwear comes off within the hour. I've bought dozens of pairs of underwear, some cheap, some expensive, all 100% cotton. Some days I think we've found a comfortable fit, and I determine to buy a dozen exactly the same, but I've already cut off the tag (because tags irritate Helena, even more than the scratchy remnants often left behind), so I don't even know what size they are (they could be anything from 3 to 6, depending on brand and style). But it doesn't matter, because there's no guarantee that what she settles for one day is good enough the next.

I honestly can't gauge how reasonable or not she's being. No one should have to wear uncomfortable underwear! But don't we all put up with a little discomfort now and then? Maybe I should never have let the first pair come off.

3. Last week on entering the living room she freaked out that J-F's shoes were on the floor in front of sofa (but not even casually strewn, but placed neatly). Freaked out.

4. Hand-washing, dawdling over. This more than anything leads to tears. And I find this odd, because she used to love washing her hands. She scolds her cousin (so-called, as shorthand for a complicated not-directly-blood-sharing but in-the-family relationship), who's a year older, for not washing her hands after using the toilet, even bringing her a stepstool and leading her hands under the tap. So she knows she's supposed to, she knows how, but she defies my telling her to.

5. Bedtime used to be so easy. We left her to cry it out in her crib only a couple times when she was a baby. But sleep generally came easy. There were occasional glitches, after long days with visitors, when travelling or upon our return, for a few weeks when we moved house — all understandable. But recently, after a story or two, she looks at me sadly, "Je ne veux pas rester tout seul." I acquiesced a couple times, sat with her till her breathing changed, but I fear I've created a monster. It seems a small price to pay, 10 minutes watching your angel drift off, but...

But.

Underwear! for everyone!

Today marks a rite of passage in our household. Helena and I were chatting this morning about getting out shopping today, and she suggested we add pull-ups to the list. I had to think about this.

Helena hasn't worn pull-ups for some time. She has, however, been wearing a diaper overnight, until a few weeks ago, when after a few evenings of unfastening and refastening diapers and Helena tugging and crying it was determined that size 6 diapers really are too small. Genius that I am, I suggested she wear a pull-up, of the half-bag still sitting in the cupboard — not the greatest in overnight protection but better than nothing. Then we ran out. So I bought some "overnight pants," although the reassurances on the package that bed-wetting is common did make me wonder what age-group these are intended for (it never struck me as a problem that my 3-year-old can't stay dry at night). But it turns out they're kind of big. Not monstrously, but enough so that Helena won't even consider trying them on. So I told Helena she was a big girl and she didn't need to a wear a diaper or a pull-up at night — she could sleep in her underwear if she wanted to. So there's been some bed-wetting recently, and some laundry, but not nearly so much as I expected there to be, and when there is, I offer up the overnight pants, but she won't hear of it. So I wondered why she thought we should buy pull-ups.

It turns out, they weren't for her, but for Teletubby Dipsy. The pull-ups-aren't-toys argument and the they-cost-money factor didn't make make much impression on Helena, maybes because Dipsy's been wearing her too-small diapers for weeks already. So I suggested maybe Dipsy didn't need diapers or pull-ups anymore.

So today, our two Tubbies, Dancing Elmo, and a baby doll are sitting around the house fully toilet-trained, wearing Helena's too-small underwear. And birthday party hats (cuz they were there).

Last night

When I finally went to bed last night, I just lay there, my body clenched into a tiny ball of a fist against the cold air and J-F's sleep-moans, swinging against as yet undreamed nightmares about having disturbed authorial tone and leaving some participles dangling in my wake.

I couldn't sleep. I couldn't brave leaving my coccoon to retrieve Middlemarch or The Dodecahedron. Instead I reached my hand out cautiously and settled on Stefan Grabinski's The Dark Domain, giving way to a fitfully dark place indeed.

I slept eventually. I dreamed about a dodecahedron, and about AS Byatt — her book's ribs struggling to hold their intended shape, holding boxes within boxes within boxes, contents under pressure, and Alice was inside.

I held the dodecahedron in the palm of my hand, admiring the elegance of its geometry, even if the edges are a bit rough. It could almost fold in on itself. It's made of metal scraps, hollow inside. The air whistles through it. Alice wants it.

Just so you know

1. Work deadlines are creeping up on me, preparing to bash me on the head from behind and leave me unconscious.

2. Sunday evening, the child threw up. Copiously. And all over me (2 different outfits), in addition to all over herself (also 2 outfits), her blanket, the sofa, the floor. She hadn't been showing any signs of illness. I think it had more to do with our afternoon snack, when I made hot chocolate and she ate half a box of cookies when I wasn't looking (even if they were those delicate almond thins). Monday morning she rushed into our room exclaiming, "I'm not sick anymore!" It seems she's drawn some correlation between feeling better and throwing up specifically all over my pants.

3. This morning, child refuses to go to daycare. This is unusual. I can't bring myself to force the issue. No fever, but general malaise and a bit of diarrhea. Mother-in-law is expected to swoop to the rescue shortly, so maybe I will meet my deadlines after all.

4. Over the last week, I've been sneaking peeks at The Dodecahedron, by Paul Glennon. So far, it's amazing. More on this later.

5. It seems I've been leaving typos in my wake, wherever my personal and professional correspondence has taken me these last couple days. This does not bode well for work at all.

Seatbelts! So we can be safe!

Yesterday morning, while I was already at work at this very desk, J-F and Helena were driving downtown, to work and daycare. Helena taps J-F on the shoulder from the back seat. She waves, "Hallo, Papa!" all smiles. Seconds later she has clambered up into the front passenger seat, so proud that she can unfasten the buckles of her carseat (which she's just about outgrown) and exercise such mobility. J-F is, well, in traffic, busy driving, and all he can do is yell, terrify her into a state of paralysis so that she desists from climbing or squirming. Helena is in tears.

They arrive at daycare, Helena still very much distraught at the nonstop verbal lashing she endured till they reached their destination. Her educatrice inquires as to the problem and upon hearing about the misadventure proceeds also to scold Helena.

The good that comes from this: the morning's activities were scrapped in favour of watching a video on car safety. Helena was asked to do a presentation to the rest of her group, along the lines of "This morning, Papa was very angry at me..."

City of words

The 8th edition of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival takes place April 5–9, 2006. The programme is now available.

The website is hellish to navigate and information on the authors, their works, what they might be discussing or reading from is scant. (Case in point: the title of Susan Glickman's first novel, The Violin Lover, has a certain appeal to me, but that's simply not enough to entice me to attend its launch or a reading of it when I weigh the cost of admission and my precious time against the unknown. Is it a romance? historical? experimental? what? If you don't tell me at least some basic stuff like that, I'm not paying to find out.)

Here are some of the events that hold interest for me.

Readings, of course:
I'm planning on seeing David Bezmozgis, maybe Yann Martel, a couple others. There's a temptation to attend Leah McLaren's reading, only to heckle her, but I'm not sure I want to pay money for that privilege.

Remembering Irving Layton:
A panel discussion, including a former prof of mine.

The Good Old Bad Days:
A conversation about Montreal in the 40s, including William Weintraub, author of City Unique, which is a fascinating read.

This year's Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix honours Michel Tremblay.

Monsterpiece Theater presents

The King and I