Status: normal

Head-y
A few weekends ago I went to the hospital. I thought my brain was going to explode. I get migraines quite regularly, and I've learned to cope — some ibuprofen at the first signs and a couple hours' sleep in a dark room as soon as the day-to-day allows will usually head it off. But they've been getting worse over the years.

I'd been battling a virus, even worked from home that Friday, as the effort of wearing something other than pyjamas just seemed a bit much that day. Was it a migraine I felt coming on? The pain of it woke me up; the pain of it had me throwing up for hours; the pain of it had me clutching my head and walking round in circles, scared that my eyeballs might squeeze out or that I'd start bleeding from the ears. This wasn't normal.

Of course, at the emergency room they couldn't simply shoot me up with drugs, much to my chagrin; they had to ascertain what was the matter with me.

Why do you say it's a migraine? Because, well, it's like a migraine, only it's so much worse I thought it might not be. Have you ever been diagnosed with migraine? No. Have you seen a doctor about these headaches? Uh, no. How long have you had these headaches? As long as I can remember. Just how bad are these headaches? I'm pretty much incapacitated for a couple hours — the light is screaming, I want to throw up, sometimes I throw up, I have to sleep it off. Your mother never took you to doctor for these headaches? Uh, no.

Various swabs and bloodwork, extracting a sample from inside my sinuses, some basic neurological tests. A CT scan — more frightening than ever I imagined it to be. I faced it alone, J-F having just then gone off to address the parking situation. Like some wierd ancient relic of technology with a Myst-like drone. I never felt my heart beat so hard. What happens if I move my head? if I twitch? I feel a twitch. My heart is going to leap out of my throat. Will I disintegrate or explode?

All negative.

The doctor can't tell me anything I don't already know: It's "just" a migraine. You obviously have some virus; that must be making it worse. She offers me an intravenous painkiller, but 8 hours on, that seems like overkill. (But oh, I would've killed for some earlier.) She gives me some antiinflammatories and sends me home. I want toast. And I'm unreasonably — it's completely backward! — afraid to sleep.

I've been referred to a migraine clinic.

Child-ish
An xbox 360 has recently been introduced into the household. I am unreasonably upset over the fact that I can't play Fable as a female character. I am unreasonably obsessed with the Ratatouille demo, which is unreasonably hard.

Last weekend, Helena started making valentines for all her classmates. Make a list, select a card, match an envelope, line them up, choose a chocolate, line them up. Write a name, cry, "Mommy, can you write "R" for me?," learn to write "R," select a new card, write "R" perfectly. Add a sticker, add matching stickers to the envelope, cry because they're not symmetrical, find another envelope, write the names all over again, stuff the envelope with a card, a candy, a chocolate, seal it with a sticker heart. We do this for hours. All day. And the next day too. Everything is pink and red.

I've spent every day since telling Helena, really, I think it's too early, we can't deliver them just yet, Valentine's Day isn't for more than another week, no one will even recognize what it's for, wait, didn't you forget someone on your list, you can't take them till they're all ready, you can't take some for some kids and leave one little girl out, that wouldn't be nice, it's still too early, if you take them now what will you have for your friends on Valentine's Day, maybe you should wait. I buy some time: one morning I suggest we take the leftover gummie hearts — we can leave one for everyone in their cubbyhole. She may have finally forgotten about the cards.

Book-ish
I've been reading faster than I can document it. No, not exactly — I'm managing to find time to read, at the expense of sleep, but can't find time or energy to write about it. Which is a shame, because The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Perez-Reverte was extraordinary, even though I don't think it exactly works as a novel; it's a powerful meditation on both art and war, and I recommend it highly.

Also read last week: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, by Janna Levin, of which I'd known absolutely nothing but to which I was committed it from the moment I read its title. Madman! Turing machines! Actually it's a fictional account of certain events in the lives of Kurt Goodel and Alan Turing. Geeky mathematicians!

(More on these books after I rein life in and dictate some terms on how my time gets allotted.)

"If the world were to end tomorrow what book would you read today?" is the question posed at Reading Matters. Answer: the book I've just passed the midway mark of: Zig Zag, by José Carlos Somoza, a real page turner! (What if you could, with complex camera arrangements based in string theory, see the past?) That is, the end of the world wouldn't change my reading habits at all, except that I'd probably have no time for reading, what with engaging in wierd and complex craft projects with a 5-year-old and trying to recpture some romance with my other half before it all goes up in smoke, but I'd really, really like to know how this book ends. I should go find out now.

A multiplicity of languages

The European Commission's "Group of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue," chaired by Amin Maalouf, one of my favourite writers, this week delivered its report on its discussions on the contribution of multilingualism to intercultural dialogue.

The report — A Rewarding Challenge: How the Multiplicity of Languages Could Strengthen Europe — according to the press release "makes proposals on how languages can foster intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding, establishing a clear link between linguistic diversity and European integration." There are some introductory comments on the question of identity (a matter on which Maalouf has previously written eloquently about) and a discussion of the general implications of what it is to live in community of 23 official languages, with the basic conclusion that everyone ought to learn another language. Simple.

I rather favour this bit, as it gives the example of Joseph Conrad, whose linguistic mix (albeit in different proportions) I happen to share:

For the people of Europe, old and young alike, intensive and in-depth knowledge of a language and all the culture that it transmits is a major factor of fulfilment.

In a civilisation in which communication is becoming so important and in which there is an increasing amount of free time, to add to one's existence this exploration of another linguistic and cultural universe can only bring enormous professional, intellectual and emotional satisfactions.

Moreover, mastering a personal adoptive language and familiarising oneself with the universe of its speakers should be conducive to a more outward-looking attitude to the world and others, and strengthen the sense of belonging to Europe ; not at the expense of belonging to one's country or culture of origin, but in addition to it,
particularly as, in his or her relations with the speakers of the personal adoptive language, a European citizen would naturally tend to extend to them knowledge of their own country and their own culture.

[...]

For those Europeans whose mother tongue has a dominant place in the world, and we think immediately of the British, acquiring a personal adoptive language is probably even more vital than for others, given that the temptation to remain ensconced in
monolingualism is probably much stronger than elsewhere. Without a special effort to promote, from the very earliest age, the intensive learning of an additional language, the advantage which English speakers today have would rapidly become eroded, and the globalisation of their mother tongue would have an adverse effect on their competitiveness at both individual and collective levels. This paradoxical pattern of events was stressed in no uncertain terms in a recent study commissioned by the British Council.

It might perhaps be worth stressing here that some Europeans should obviously choose English as their personal adoptive language, following the example of Joseph Conrad who was of Polish mother tongue, had French as a language of international communication, and became one of the greatest writers of the English language. It is important for English to retain and consolidate the eminent place it holds as a language of culture rather than being straitjacketed in the role of instrument of global communication, a flattering but detractive role, and one which is potentially a factor of impoverishment.

How many languages do you know? What is (would be) your personal adoptive language?

TUATW

I had it in my mind for some time to post a discussion topic on a Doctor Who forum (a couple of which I follow). Finally I muster the courage (nerds can be so intimidating), but in doing a little background check for my write-up, I find my topic is a nonstarter.

Doctor Who was created with the intention of teaching kids a little something about science and history. I'm not so sure about the science bits: Much of it is beyond theoretical — purely fictional. Other science is of the sort I take for granted but Helena cannot yet fully grasp the implications of or get excited about (for example, cooling systems).

History on the other hand, is an unexpected source of delight for me and education for Helena. My 5-year-old daughter reveres Madame de Pompadour, l'amoureuse of the king of France, as a smart cookie. We've talked about Shakespeare and the story of Macbeth, Dickens and A Christmas Carol. I'm thrilled that she should have this interest in literature, as something not forced on her by her mother but as she herself has extracted it from pop culture and cool.

Trying to tempt Martha to stay on at the end of last season, the Doctor exclaims, "Agatha Christie! I'd love to meet Agatha Christie!"

And this is what I wanted to speculate about. Would this season's literary episode feature Agatha Christie?

You don't need to be very internet savvy to find the answer to this question, so I won't tell you. (I'm finding I miss the days of uncertainty and having to wait.)

So here's the remaining question I may yet post to one of those forums:

What literary meeting would you like to see the Doctor undertake?

Some answers are all too obvious to yield very surprising television: HG Wells, Jules Verne.

But here are some meetings of minds and circumstance I'd like to witness:
Sir Thomas More (Utopia!)
Leo Tolstoy
Jorge Luis Borges
Dr Seuss
(And I'd love to see something a little thousand-and-one-nights.)

Change your mind

Something to think about for the rest of the year...

The Edge Annual Question — 2008:

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

I won't pretend to have read all the responses; I've skimmed them at random. There's enough there to keep you reading for days, and thinking for weeks.

Kevin Kelly, editor at Wired, has this to say:

Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. All the attempts at headless collective writing I had been involved with in the past only generated forgettable trash. Why would anything online be any different?

The success of Wikipedia has changed his mind.

Things other thinkers have changed their mind about: Nuclear energy — these days it's much easier to see that the benefits outweigh the risks. There are some rambling entries regarding God. The nature of the differences between the sexes. How dinosaurs came to be extinct (asteroid!). Brian Eno changed his mind about Maoism.

For Alison Gopnik, imagination is real, and I'm citing her response in full because I think it's super interesting, and I see the evidence surrounding me every day to bear this out:

Recently, I've had to change my mind about the very nature of knowledge because of an obvious, but extremely weird fact about children — they pretend all the time. Walk into any preschool and you'll be surrounded by small princesses and superheroes in overalls — three-year-olds literally spend more waking hours in imaginary worlds than in the real one. Why? Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans — especially vivid for an English professor's daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

The greatest success of cognitive science has been our account of the visual system. There's a world out there sending information to our eyes, and our brains are beautifully designed to recover the nature of that world from that information. I've always thought that science, and children's learning, worked the same way. Fundamental capacities for causal inference and learning let scientists, and children, get an accurate picture of the world around them — a theory. Cognition was the way we got the world into our minds.

But fiction doesn't fit that picture — its easy to see why we want the truth but why do we work so hard telling lies? I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability. I said as much in a review in Science and got floods of e-mail back from distinguished novel-reading scientists. They were all sure fiction was a Good Thing — me too, of course, — but didn't seem any closer than I was to figuring out why.

So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.

I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room — the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people — all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too. I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best — take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.

In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true — they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

I have changed my mind about relatively little, but then that's mostly because I've always been so slow to make up my mind one way or the other at all. That's something motherhood changed about me: suddenly, I had opinions, dammit! but least of all regarding the rearing of my child. Suddenly, I saw the relevance of the price of tea in China, and it mattered that I took a stance. In this way I have changed my mind: better to know something, believe something, however fleetingly, and change one's mind as new data become available, then to withhold opinions while waiting for a perfect analysis.

What have you changed your mind about?

Please, sir. I want some more.

Some months ago, amid casual small-talk at the office, a coworker piped up, "Hey, does anyone want my copy of Oliver Twist? I just can't get into it."

While it's not the Dickens I had in mind to read next — and I am determined to read many more; say, one a year or so — it is one of his better known works and a popular favourite. And it's hard to turn down a free book besides. So I took R up on his offer.

It languished in my desk drawer for some time; then the day came that I was ready for it — I turned it over in my hands, examined the illustration on the cover, checked for introductory notes (none), read the blurbs only to discover: it's abridged!

R was the brunt of some jokes for this, and the book stayed in my desk drawer. Till the day I faced a metro ride home with no reading material (having been driven in the morning and preferring not to lug my current, 1000-page epic read with me). An abridged book is better than no book at all, right? I'm not so sure.

Something about it felt off from the start. How much of that is owing to the fact of my awareness of it being abridged is impossible to gauge. But I felt an obligation — to both the book and my coworker — to read it.

Have you ever read an abridgement? Have ever read both an abridged novel and its version in full? How did they compare?

I'd like to know at what level, in general, abridging takes place: Are sentences shortened and vocabulary simplified? Are whole paragraphs and chapters cut out?

Let's find out, shall we:

In great families, when an advantageous place cannot be obtained, either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, for the young man who is growing up, it is a very general custom to send him to sea. The board, in imitation of so wise and salutary an example, took counsel together on the expediency of shipping off Oliver Twist, in some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port. This suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or would knock his brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentlemen of that class. The more the case presented itself to the board, in this point of view, the more manifold the advantages of the step appeared; so, they came to the conclusion that the only way of providing for Oliver effectually, was to send him to sea without delay

.

(I'm sure it comes as no surprise that Oliver is not, in fact, sent to sea.)

According to a quick consultation with an online version, the paragraph that immediately precedes this one in my copy occurs some 9 pages beforehand in a previous chapter, omitting entirely an encounter with a Mr Gamfield and his donkey.

My copy has 346 pages, the online version indicates 509; 39 chapters versus 53. Mine was "specially abridged for Puffin Classics," which fact also leads me to assume somewhat greater care was taken than it might in other publishing houses.

I'm mere pages away from the end and not particularly compelled to find out how it turns out. The story is certainly melodramatic, and the bad guys are bad in full Dickensian nefariousness, but I'm not fully drawn in. The book feels choppy. That may be in part due to my personal reading circumstances; Dickens's writing may not have been at it's best here (?); but mostly I blame reckless abridgement.

More than once I had to backtrack and in a couple specific instances wondered how some characters had entered upon the scene. It's clear to me that neither vocabulary nor complex sentences were simplified. But I feel shortchanged on explanations. If the context of the above excerpt is any indication, I expect many colourful anecdotes were omitted and subplots considerably pared down.

Why does anyone read Dickens? For the crazy plots! While his descriptions add colour, they could stand some paring down; cut back on plot, on the other hand, and the whole book starts to unravel. Crazy coincidences without those meticulous interconnections start looking far-fetched to the point that I'm no longer willing to suspend disbelief.

So I wonder what is the point of abridging Dickens? If to appeal to younger children, I'd've taken another tack: "translate" to modern day language (yes, of course, the language is beautiful and ought to impart all sorts of educational benefits, but I'd leave that for kids already keen on reading Dickens, or at least reading), but leave the story alone. This abridgement failed to entice me, and it confused me; I don't see that it would be any more successful with younger readers. I don't plan on reading Oliver Twist in full, and I will ensure I steer clear of abridged novels in the future.

All thoughts on Dickens in general, Oliver Twist in particular, and the idea and practice of abridgement welcome.

I marveled to the limits of marveling

I don't know why I like this story so much:

The emperor said: "O Amar! You speak verily, and your words are to our liking! The gates of the city are two farsangs from here. Both of you take an arrow and remove yourself thither. Whoever shall return first after handing his arrow to the guard on gate, shall win precedence over the other!"

The two acquiesced, and at the emperor's orders they were each given an arrow. Both arrayed themselves and set off like lightning, running shoulder to shoulder, flying like sparks, like arrows shot from a well-strung bow. They had gone some distance from the royal procession when Amar purposely lagged behind, and Aatish managed to put half-a-league's distance between them.

Those who witnessed this said, "To no purpose Amar lost all his prestige and distinction by making such a perilous wager with Aatish, who finally outpaced Amar!" Aatish was about to reach the gates of the city and show the soles of his feet to Amar, when Amar leapt into the air realizing that people would be throwing ridicule at him. The Father of Racers and Tumblers of the World turned a somersault alongside Aatish, delivered him a kick in flight, and bit him hard and so strangled his neck that Aatish fell flat on his back, all his speed and quickness having fled him; the taste of agony alone remained in his mouth. As a stone struck Aatish's head during his fall, it splintered his skull, and he lay all bathed in a rivulet of blood. Thus shocked and confounded he fell unconscious.

Amar then took Aatish's headdress of an ayyar and, handing his arrow to the guard, said to him, "Mark me well! I am Amar Ayyar! The renown of my ayyari has reached the lands and kingdoms of far and near! In me the deceiver finds no refuge for his device, and I give the liar the lie! Beware, lest you be prevailed upon through bribery to bear false witness and state that it was Aatish who first handed you the shaft, and that Amar arrived and delivered his later! Woe betide you, O lad, should you lie! Beware and be warned, and let not greed be your undoing! Speak verily before the emperor, and do not dissemble or speak false!"

The guard was much bewildered at these words, and marveled to the limits of marveling at their import and at the calamity that had thus visited him uninvited. Amar retraced his steps, and took himself to the emperor's presence. After kissing his stirrup, Amar produced Aatish's headdress to him, at which the emperor broke out laughing at Amar's roguery. Then all the flash and flourish of Aatish became things of the past, and he was so embarrassed that he never again showed his face in the court.

— From The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.

On Pamuk's Other Colors

I missed Claire Berlinski's review of Pamuk's Other Colors when it first appeared in The Globe and Mail, which is just as well seeing as I was just then having a tough time of getting through the final pages and, by the sounds of it, this review would've reinforced my sense of its paralyzingly depressing nature, but the ongoing reactions (1, 2, 3) to that review are asking me to reexamine my own response to Pamuk's essays.

I agree with Berlinski's characterization of Pamuk as a "melancholic egomaniac." It did indeed become quite tiresome to be repeatedly told 1. how much he loves books and 2. how depressed he is. But she misses the boat in not acknowledging him as a significant novelist.

This week Keith Gerebian comes to Pamuk's defence.

Pamuk reveals why writing begins for him with disquietude and produces more of the same if it does not go well. [...] His ruminations on disparate things [...] show a major novelist in a minor, lighter key, but one whose sense of enchantment is fuelled by a mordant comic irony (the essay on Istanbul earthquakes) as well as a fascination with phenomenology.

[...] Filled with arabesques, pleasantries and nimble wit, Pamuk's essays on literature, politics, art, architecture and autobiography show us a writer who wisely refuses to have his sense of national identity manipulated by anyone - including Americans and Turks - while he continues to find a different style to suit different subjects.

He is conversational and playful in the essay Meaning, just as he is profoundly aesthetic in Bellini and the East or keenly satiric in My First Encounters with Americans. He is a shrewd, subtle literary critic on Sterne, Gide, Dostoevsky, Rushdie et al., and, despite Berlinski's outrageous misrepresentation of his perspective on Nabokov's Lolita (has she really read this essay?), he reveals himself as a man who can be amazed by his world and the dream of being a storyteller.

The book is depressing, but in my own defense as a reader I can recognize that while I don't like the way the book made me feel, and though it made me roll my eyes more than once, it also made me consider some aspects I hadn't before regarding what goes into the construction of Pamuk's novels (I do have to wonder if Berlinski has read any) — what makes Pamuk a writer.

Suffice it to say: I far prefer Pamuk the novelist to Pamuk the essayist, but Other Colors is not to be dismissed out of hand.

Big books

A challenge to sink my teeth into: Chunkster Challenge 2008.

I wasn't able to meet my own self-designed standards last year, but I better know my limitations for it, and I'm willing to play by more relaxed rules this time: 4 books of >450 pages, read between January 1 and December 20. (Hosted by So Many Books, So Little Time. Sign up before March 1!)

Ahem. My candidates:

1. Currently reading: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (948 pages, including notes). This is the first book I started reading this year; I'm on page 162.

2. Up soon: The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, by Alexandre Dumas (751 pages, including appendix), received recently. I've read a bit of the introduction, and it's hard not to find the existence of this manuscript a little suspicious. Of course, this increases my enthusiasm for reading it — I'm determined to prove it's a fake.

3. The book I couldn't finish last year: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (1079 pages, including footnotes). I'll try again. Really. I left off at page 85. I may or may not revisit those first bits.

4. Something else. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. Or maybe this is Pynchon's year. Maybe.

(Via.)

Sisters

Happy Birthday, Ivonna!
(With regrets that we didn't manage to see it together this year.)

Colours and follies

Weeks ago, I dipped into Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors: Essays and a Story, as I said I would. I start in the middle and find myself driven forward, wondering what happens next, and finally it occurs to me to ask what came before.

Sampling these essays at random, it turns out, is not the best approach. The preface holds the key. (Sadly I was not forced to read the preface when first I opened the book.) Pamuk has arranged these ideas and fragments deliberately, into a continuous narrative.

I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me — a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words — and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writing a center, a frame, and a meaning. I would like the sensitive reader to pay as much attention to my creative editing as to the effort I put into the writing itself.

So I start again from the beginning. And there is a story to be told here.

I don't remember why I turned over the corner of this page in "On My Name Is Red." Maybe for some realization regarding Pamuk's relationship to painting — he grew up wanting to be a painter. Or maybe for this: "My fragility, my filth, my depravity, and my shortcomings — they are not in the fabric of the book, in its language or its structure, but they can be made out in the characters' lives and stories."

I've come to like Pamuk less than I like his novels. He refers often to going through rough times, loneliness, depression. His taking refuge in books quickly loses the sheen of romanticization; his escape into books feels quite desperate. But then I think: this too, this whole book, is contrived to manipulate me. There are essays on and insights into Istanbul, a childhood lived therein, earthquakes, Nabokov, literature in general, and more. They are if sincere, as first I thought, depressing; if not sincere, then a little more awesome for the force of their combined structure, but disillusioning. I'm not sure which state I prefer.

*****

If ever again I turn to freelancing and work from home, I might follow Pamuk's example in establishing routine and discipline: dress and prepare in the morning as if for the office, leave the house, walk round the block, re-enter one's house-as-office, and then at the end of the day pack up and leave to walk back to the same space this time home.

*****

Just before Christmas I picked up Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies. My expectations were low, as most reviews, both published and personal, were lukewarm about it.

As it turns out, it was, for me, the perfect book at the perfect time, lifting me out of the noise of Christmas, and out of the depressing funk Pamuk had cast, to float just beyond the reach of stress.

For all their outlandish behaviour, grand gestures, and bold words, there was something so perfectly ordinary and believable and interesting about all the characters, which I suspect I may not perceive in this way at any other time of year. I'm losing the details of the story already, but certain observations and characterizations (what kind of man where's a white shirt and tie around the house in the afternoon?) have left a mark.

What lucky fools we all are.

*****

Christmastime is the time of the annual jigsaw puzzle. This year I would initiate Helena into the family tradition — where by family, in this case I mean me and my sister, and it was never really planned so much as it just worked out that way, that we would one or the other of us receive a puzzle at Christmas and have to start it straight away, hunching over the dining room table, squinting, for one, maybe two, near-sleepless nights, our mother pleading with us can we move the puzzle please, where are we going to eat, it's so dusty, but we did this for years, every year, I don't remember how it started, now we have to plan a little because we are less likely to spend sufficiently long periods of time together under the same roof.

I'm surprised at how geeky the whole puzzle endeavour is this year. That I should build up the significance and the fun of the puzzle is one thing, but I was compelled to plan, to consider the initiation — that Helena is capable of 100 pieces on her own but I would not want her to feel daunted at the sight of, say, 3000 pieces each the size of one of her fingers, not her whole hand, that I lit on the perfect enticement: a Doctor Who theme, bearing a geek factor all its own, which I researched and special-ordered, settling on a product not dated by a specific Doctor's face nor that of a specific companion, and a modest piece count, well in advance, and wrapped and put under the tree.

I keep thinking of The Gold Bug Variations: she watches the 2 men puzzle together at the cabin, one of them searching the board to find a fit for the piece in his hand, the other searching the table to find the piece that fits a chosen spot.

For years, forever, I was of the first type. I'm shocked by the realization that I am now the latter. I'm certain that the attitude must reflect one's philosophical approach to life, but I struggle with what exactly that might mean.

*****

Thursday, Helena (age 5), after years(!) of denying her father's teasing suggestions that she has a daycare amoureux — Poilly is the only one, she insists (they do sleep together after all) — announces that Emile est son prince, and they're going to marry — Emile is her amoureux, and today they kissed on the mouth!

She interrupts our occasional stolen moments, in the car, at the grocery: "Why are you doing that? Why are you doing what Emile and I do?"

*****

Friday at lunch I gather myself up to go the post office and discover I must've lost my sister's birthday present on my way into work. This distresses me to tears. The website of the metro's lost and found advises it can take 48 hours for an object to reach the central office; they're closed on the weekend; my sister's present will never reach her in time — and these revised timelines rely on the fact that there is kindness in strangers, to turn in a small plastic bag containing a box and a scrap of wrapping paper sized to cover it, but untaped because we ran out of tape at home. I let myself cry over this, because I can't be seen to be phased by the $5000 mistake I made at work, which was uncovered earlier this week, for which my stomach is in knots, over which I've lost sleep. I spend the afternoon obsessing over what I might give my sister instead, though still late, and fixing other people's faulty graphs and references so they might obtain FDA approval. My way home I scour the ground — the corners of the metro station, and outdoors, the shapes of fresh snow mounds — for that small white plastic bag. I console myself, that this is the cosmos taking a little something back for all the free books and door prizes I've received lately, that someone else may benefit by this.

My sister's birthday present is sitting on the shelf inside my front door.

*****

For the umpteenth time we watch the Doctor Who episode "Utopia," and this umpteenth time it occurs to Helena to ask me, "What does 'utopia' I mean?" I summarize the concept as best as I can, but before I get round to explaining how Thomas More coined the term, she is laughing. "Me-topia, Me-topia, Me-topia!"

I record this here not as an instance of the cute things the child says, per se, but because I marvel at how her brain works.

*****

Saturday we stop for gas. As J-F is pulling back out onto the service road, he asks me for his gloves. "I don't have them." "Where are my gloves?" I make a joke, but as soon as I say it, I know it to be true: "You probably left them on the roof of the car." The car has turned, it's too late to stop, and dangerous now to slow down. We watch in the rearview mirror as one glove flops onto the road. We're halfway into the curve of the exit ramp when the wind lifts glove number two and throws it into a snowbank. I laugh, or else I would cry. The gloves I gave him for Christmas.

We track back through the parking lot that's on the other side of the ditch, only it's winter and the ditch is a 20-foot high pile of snow, the length of... I don't know how to measure length in the suburbs, but it must be about 4 city blocks. J-F stops the car and goes over the top.

Just as I start imagining what terrible accident might've transpired on the other side of that white wall, I notice the dark speck ahead running toward us, waving one black leather glove overhead.

We drive forward, just outside the gas station we'd started from. Repeat.

My unoriginal gift. His gallant grand gesture.

(I think he's lost them since.)

*****

The snow had been falling like oobleck. I take respite in thinking that Montreal that night bore a striking resemblance to a magical Persia of centuries ago.

"The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths." (From The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction.)

On The Adventures of Amir Hamza

Let us not forget its glorious subtitle: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction (which has to be the very best subtitle ever!).

From The Washington Post:

The Adventures of Amir Hamza represents a marvelous dovetailing of fantasy, history and religion. This book demonstrates the ways that colorful storytelling can be an important part of both religious texts and adventure yarns, and the way a charismatic figure may become something very like public property, capturing the popular imagination and giving storytellers a vessel for their ideas.

From The New York Times:

Even in translation, "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" is a wonder and a revelation — a classic of epic literature in an interpretation so fluent that it is a pleasure to sit down and lose oneself in it. The story line itself is endlessly diverting and inventive, and the prose of the translation is beautifully rendered.

Moreover, the book gives a unique insight into a lost Indo-Islamic courtly world. For although "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" was originally a Persian production set in the Middle East, the Urdu version shows how far the story was reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the original Mesopotamian place names survive, the world depicted is not that of early Islamic Iraq, but of 18th-century late Mughal India, with its love of gardens, its obsession with poetic wordplay and its extreme refinement in food, dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindi names; they make oaths like "as Ram is my witness"; and they ride on elephants with jeweled howdahs. To read "The Adventures of Amir Hamza" is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire — those night gatherings of soldiers, sufis, musicians and hangers-on that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures, a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager faces crowd around.

First chapter.

See also the translator's blog.

I received a copy some weeks ago, but it wasn't till a few days ago that I decided to commit to it, breaking in the new year with this new book.

I'm on page 53 and I've yet to meet Amir Hamza, but every page thus far has been laden with riches. Truly marvelous.

The best of the season

Best read of the year, hands down the oh-my-gawd-this-book-is-so-devastatingly-inside-my-head book:
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

Best book published in 2007:
Well, I didn't read them all, did I?, but I have a fondness for Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje.

Book that made me cry:
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton, in particular The Plains of Cement, being Ella's story and the last of the trilogy of novellas published under that umbrella title.

Book that didn't live up to its hype:
The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver.
Oh, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, was a pretty gawdawful excuse for a dystopian postapocaptic novel — hated it.

Best "discovery":
Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño.

Book I couldn't finish:
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.

Book I feel I wasted my time on:
The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks.

Most awesome book to have received as a review copy and keep on one's coffee table:
The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats, introduced and annotated by Philip Nel.

Book I've raved about and recommended to the most people, and to cross-dressing lesbians in particular:
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.

Book whose publication I'm most anticipating:
The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

Book (on my shelf) I'm most looking forward to reading — OK, books plural, I can't pick one, but oh, which one do I start next?, I can't decide:
The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, by Alexandre Dumas.
The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.

Number of books read in 2007, including the one I expect to finish in the next day or two but not counting the one (of the 2 listed above) that I intend to start when I crawl into bed tonight: 50.

Books I'm still thinking about, 1 and 2 years after the fact, and concerning which I continue to have revelations and mean to explore further (in writing, here):

— War and Peace (read 2006), the crux of my idea being that the post-hunt scene — the meal, the dance — is central, the near physical centre of the novel, but the heart and soul of it too, and a turning point, when characters finally feel — know — their Russianness, and the French militarily begin to flounder, almost as if this reclaiming of Russianness thumbs its nose at all things French and aristocratic to claim a moral, soulful victory over war itself.

— Don Quixote (read 2005), having an understanding (thanks to Alberto Manguel's Massey lectures) of why it is a quintessentially Spanish book — while its themes are pretty universal, blah, blah, blah, I hadn't understood what was so Spanish about it, why it should strike a chord in the Spanish soul more so than that of any other reader, and realizing that it is because it taps into a cultural memory, that the Spanish reader may not even consciously know, that the book parallels Spain's own history in its struggle for identity, with there always being some doubt as to whether it is authentically Spanish or Moorish in origin, with any physical/cultural/social artefact evidencing the one often masquerading as the other.

Hours spent watching Doctor Who this holiday season (including the Christmas special, available on youtube if you didn't already know): infinite, matching the number of times we've said "Allons-y, Alonso!" in this household.

Poet avenger

Discuss:

What we expect from poets is that they avenge evil somehow.

— From "A Note on Poetic Justice," in Other Colors: Essays and a Story, by Orhan Pamuk.

[In what must be a subconscious attempt at editorialization, I keep typing "pests" instead of "poets"...]

When books talk to each other

Doris Lessing meets Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

It's a way of unprivileging our own position as readers, reminding us, as Ms. Lessing does, that we are only one of the many sets of people who will leave traces of themselves during this planet's existence.

(Via ScribblingWoman2.)

What I read this past week

(Whittling my way through the stack.)

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks.
Hmm. Didn't like it much. It's not exactly "Rubbish!" but nor would I name it one of my "top 100 novels of the century." There's some humour in it, the kind that makes you chuckle uncomfortably. It's unsettling, not least because you have to rely on a narrator that seems not entirely credible. Frank in his childhood killed a few kids, but it was just a stage he was going through. But Frank's boastful, and he exaggerates, and he's prone to melodrama of a macabre kind. So we don't know. So many things are left unexplained — the questions, of course, drove me forward. But. Hmm. Surprise ending, yes. The ending makes the journey worthwhile, though it only raises more questions, but it finally places the whole of the book in a context by which to ask and consider the right questions.

Right. I'm not convincing anyone to read this book, am I? It's not without merit. It's weird and kind of creepy (to its credit), and I would recommend it if you have a thing for exploring gender roles and social experiments (of the 'let's raise the kid by homeschooling/by extreme indulgence or the opposite/by dumping the responsibility on distant relatives' kind, kind of).

The Mustache, by Emmanuel Carrère.
Neat. Great premise: A guy shaves his mustache, the one he's worn forever, and no one notices, not his wife, friends, or colleagues, so he figures they're playing an elaborate joke, but his wife's insistence leads him to think she must be crazy, or that he's crazy, and his whole sense of self — his whole life — unravels.

I liked the movie better. The focus is a little different: you spend the book inside the husband's head, but in the movie you watch the disconnect in a married relationship. The acting is superb: silent glances convey pages of 'he knows she knows he thinks she's thinking...' (And the soundtrack featuring Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is perfectly hypnotic.) But the book has a better ending, that he's "appeased by the certitude that now it was over, everything was back in place."

Nobel words

Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture: On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.

Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

One down, far to go

This week I read Doris Lessing's The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, her sequel to Mara and Dann.

It wasn't so much of a letdown as I'd been led to expect. On the other hand, while it could stand as its own story, I don't see it working for someone who doesn't have the baggage of Mara and Dann.

For all the other characters named in the title, it's mostly about Dann. I'd've liked to hear more about Griot. But Griot doesn't seem to know himself very well — he doesn't remember his childhood; he realizes that he's not particularly clever, or charismatic, or ambitious even, and he's jealous of people who are; he's never really questioned himself or his way about things — no one's ever asked him "What did you see?" (but really see) — but maybe he's just starting to when the story ends.

As I said, it's mostly about Dann — Dann wandering around and not doing much at first, and then Dann moping about and being depressed. Which finally made sense to me, because if you've been wandering around your whole life struggling against starvation and drought and slavery and tyranny and war and evil in general, and you somehow get past it all, and you keep wandering around and all you see around you is people fighting more of the same kind, or some variation, of starvation and flooding and slavery and tyranny and war and evil in general, you start to think what is the fucking point of it all. Which is what Dann does. And like all the millions of people who've lived Dann's life and got past it, Dann gets past it too. More or less.

The writing is simple. In Mara and Dann the style helps lend it the quality of fable. This story doesn't have the sweep to let simple stand; it's more psychological and could do with more exposition. On the other hand, given the phrasing, I can hear the story being told — it's of an oral tradition — which lends it sincerity.

Blah, blah, blah, don't bother reading it unless you're a big Lessing fan; it's kind of depressing.

*****

I'm finding my reading rhythm again. I hadn't realized how important was reading on my short commute until I'd lost that rhythm. And how important it is to have this respite as the weather grows colder and the commute becomes more unpleasant (I no longer shake my head and gripe to myself — I speak up. Don't lean on the pole — 6 people need to hold on to that pole. Move away from the door — look, 3 people could stand in that pocket you've created — no matter if you're getting off next stop. Speaking up gets results, dammit.). The trick is having a book in hand; it's not good enough to have one tucked in my bag somewhere. And just do it: read while waiting, read in the metro, while standing and hanging on for dear life, but considerately — keep your book close; rummaging about in your bag will not do. Read while waiting for your espresso (allongé 3/4) to be drawn. Just do it, like going to bed early and eating right and walking more and blogging.

Easy Reader

"Top to bottom and left to right, readin' stuff is outta sight!"

The other books lying around

In no particular order (except for maybe they happen to be piled this way, and ordering them in any other fashion is beyond me for the moment).

(At this very moment I am between (fiction) books — but just for the moment, having finished New Grub Street last night and intending to choose one of the following for when I tuck into bed early this evening. Oh, but which one?)

The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalib Lakhnavi.
An Islamic saga dating back to perhaps as early as the seventh century, chronicling warriors, kings, tricksters, fairies, courtesans, and magical creatures. Which I received on my birthday actually, but it's a review copy, so I'm not really sure it counts. But it kind of does, cuz it's an awesome gift of a book. "Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction"!

The florid news writers, the sweet-lipped historians, revivers of old tales and renewers of past legends, relate that there ruled at Ctesiphon in Persia (image of Heaven!) Emperor Qubad Kamran, who cherished his subjects and was a succor to the impecunious in their distress. He was unsurpassed in dispensing justice, and so rigorous in this exercise that the best justice appeared an injustice compared to his decree.

Excerpt.
Blog.

The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, by Doris Lessing.
Because I love-love-loved Mara and Dann, and this is the sequel, and though I hear it's something of a letdown, I have-have-have to know what becomes of them.

Only Revolutions, by Mark Danielewski.
A review copy, received at the time of its release in paperback. I keep turning it over and over. Still I can't make up my mind which end to start reading it from.

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks.
Because I've been intrigued by the write-ups of a few of this author's books, and last spring's discussion at Bookblog made me pick up a copy. I'm not sure if there are actually any wasps in it, but it seems to have enough else (its surreal quality! and a psychopath!) to recommend it, including a blurb on the back cover from The Times (London) calling it "Rubbish!"

Zig Zag, by José Carlos Somosa.
I loved The Art of Murder by this author, not least for its genre-blending but most particularly for its utterly unique premise. Zig Zag seems to lean toward more conventional SF, and I expect it will complement nicely the discussions we've had in this household of late regarding the possibility of watching the past as it unfolds (if you travel x light years and have a superstrong telescope...).

The Mustache, by Emmanuel Carrère.
Something a little metaphysical — that age-old problem of identity. A couple bloggers wrote about it last year, and I saw the movie in-between. My copy includes another novel, Class Trip, but I'll try the mustache on for size first.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker.
I hadn't meant to buy this book — I have another unfinished Pinker by my bed, and having read a full 3 of his already, I don't expect anything exactly new. Which is fine, because even if I'm familiar with the concepts, any idea he chooses to flesh out will make an interesting and entertaining read. But then I went to hear his presentation on the book, and I got caught up in all the excitement and bought one to get it signed. Yes, I will write about the lecture someday, but now I feel I should really read the book first to do it justice.

(The problem with reading non-fiction, for me, is that I need to digest it in small bites. Which means I need to be reading something else between meals. Literary snacking. Which for me is vaguely unsatisfying, and leaves me feeling spread thin, unfocused. I don't like this feeling, but don't see a way around it.)

Other Colors: Essays and a Story, by Orhan Pamuk.
Another review copy. I've dipped into it a few times. It's not the sort of book to read in one sitting. I will endeavour to post snippets and my thoughts about the book (I have some!) accordingly, from time to time.

Do you think I can read them all by year's end?

Of course, there's a ton of other books lying around, most notably Infinite Jest, which I vow to finish, erm, someday. Somehow I don't see myself even starting on Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle this year.

I, for one (probably the only one), wouldn't mind having an ebook reader. Heck, I've wanted one for years. Guarantee me that it won't be obsolete anytime soon and that books I actually want to read are available in this format, and I'm sold (assuming it's moderately priced). I've run out of shelf space as well as space for more shelves and money for more space.

Are you reading anything good right now? Anything great? Anything in particular you're trying to clean off your plate?

The books lying around, and Grub in particular

(Which post turns out to be really about just the one book, my having lost focus, or found focus, and saving some other ramblings for later.)

Books received for my birthday: None.
It's like no one really knows me.

Books I have hanging about the house, and which I'm dying to read, but seem to have absolutely no time for:

New Grub Street, by George Gissing.
This is a library book it seems like it's taking me forever to read, but it feels like very suddenly I'm approaching the end. I looked into Gissing on the recommendation of... something I read somewhere, ages ago, by someone I respect (was it Doris Lessing?), and because of comments regarding Patrick Hamilton to the effect that Hamilton is the literary descendant of Dickens via Gissing. Well, I'd read some Dickens, so now some Gissing.

I don't find Gissing to inspire page-turning the way either Hamilton or Dickens do, but he does show keen insight into the workings of the world. Two things in particular fascinate me about this book:

1. Publishing — is it about art or about business? which only goes to show that the various crises the publishing industry regularly faces along with the criticisms hurled at bestselling authors for writing to formula and having no literary merit are not new.

2. Women. The period covered is one of transition: women are finding independence and starting to earn their own way in the world without shame. The Married Women's Property Act has just come into effect.

The matter of divorce: "Isn't it a most ridiculous thing that married people who both wish to separate can't do so and be quite free again?"

Gissing is modern. He's a feminist.

(And it's this transition in women's status that I find profoundly interesting. There's a little of this in Hamilton, and more of it in Christina Stead's Letty Fox; women working in shops but still aspiring to husbands of means. I've read books about women on estates with servants and about modern women, but very little about those in between, as if they never existed, though they may be the most real of all.)

Oh, and 3. The middle class, the admission that there is one.

"Biffen," he continued, "when I first made his acquaintance, had an idea of writing for the working classes; and what do you think he was going to offer them? Stories about the working classes! Nay, never hang your head for it, old boy; it was excusable in the days of your youth. Why, Mr. Reardon, as no doubt you know well enough, nothing can induce working men or women to read stories that treat of their own world. They are the most consumed idealists in creation, especially the women. Again and again work-girls have said to me: 'Oh, I don't like that book; it's nothing but real life.'"

"It's the fault of women in general," remarked Reardon.

"So it is, but it comes out with delicious naiveté in the working classes. Now, educated people like to read of scenes that are familiar to them, though I grant you that the picture must be idealised if you're to appeal to more than one in a thousand. The working classes detest anything that tries to represent their daily life. It isn't because that life is too painful; no, no; it's downright snobbishness. Dickens goes down only with the best of them, and then solely because of his strength in farce and his melodrama."

It sounds like a backhanded compliment to Dickens, and Gissing may even be asserting his superiority over him. The whole thing's laden with irony: Of course, this is exactly the sort of novel Gissing has written — the daily life of the working class.

And the women characters (although not exactly work-girls), meanwhile, want to read precisely this kind of novel:

"Best or worse, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love; what silly nonsense it is! Why don't people write about the really important thins of life? Some of the French novelists do; several of Balzac's, for instance. I have just been reading his 'Cousin Pons,' a terrible book, but I enjoyed it ever so much because it was nothing like a love story. What rubbish is printed about love!"

"I get rather tired of it sometimes," admitted Edith with amusement.

"I should hope you do, indeed. What downright lies are accepted as indisputable! That about love being a woman's whole life; who believes it really? Love is the most insignificant thing in most women's lives. It occupies a few months, possibly a year or two, and even then I doubt if it is often the first consideration."

Edith held her head aside, and pondered smilingly.

"I'm sure there's a great opportunity for some clever novelist who will never write about love at all."

"But then it does come into life."

"Yes, for a month or two, as I say. Think of the biographies of men and women; how many pages are devoted to their love affairs? Compare those books with novels which profess to be biographies, and you see how false such pictures are. Think of the very words 'novel,' 'romance' — what do they mean but exaggeration of one bit of life?"

"That may be true. But why do people find the subject so interesting.?"

"Because there is so little love in real life. That's the truth of it. Why do poor people care only for stories about the rich? The same principle."

Gissing's a realist, with a touch of the cynic about him. This novel does deal with matters of love, in fact, but these are matters of business and of complications, and of how other (better?) relationships are sullied by these.

And I'm enjoying this novel because it's nothing like a love story.

Has anyone else read Gissing?

I was 5, too, once

(33 years ago today)

Today she is 5

"All my love to long ago"

Waiting for the Doctor

In 1984, you could exterminate a Dalek by pushing it out of a 2nd storey window.

Since the 3rd season of the new series of Doctor Who ended, Helena and I have been borrowing the old series from the library. Our selections are made in a haphazard fashion — in this sense I'm revisiting it the way I saw it in my youth, and Helena is experiencing it for the first time much the way I did: randomly, but memorably.

A current favourite: "The Resurrection of the Daleks." I marvel at the seeming ease with which the fearsome Daleks are disposed (see in particular this clip, through to about 1:39).

We're glad to know Davros now, as he's rumoured to be returning.

And we'll be scouring the web this weekend for a glimpse of the 5th Doctor.

See also Ed's impression of "The Caves of Androzani."

"Un tas de complete vieux bollox."

Did anyone besides myself actually read Kate Mosse's Labyrinth through to the end? Did you hate it as much as I did?

Do you care that Mosse has a new book out (Sepulchre)? Will you waste your time on it?

Read the digested read instead.

The literary man of 1882

"...But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I — well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits. Now, look you: if I had been in Reardon's place, I'd have made four hundred at least out of "The Optimist"; I should have gone shrewdly to work with magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and — all sorts of people. Reardon can't do that kind of thing, he's behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson's Grub Street. But our Grub Street of to-day is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy."

— from New Grub Street, by George Gissing.

The 2007 Massey Lectures

...one of which I was fortunate enough to attend (more on this as soon as I'm able)...

Read: The City of Words, by Alberto Manguel.
Listen: The Massey Lectures, broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas, November 5 – 9. The Q&A sessions that followed each lecture will likely not be aired on the radio, but will be podcast.
Participate: House of Anansi Press forum.

Browse past Massey Lectures (to read or listen, by the likes of Doris Lessing, Carlos Fuentes, John Ralston Saul).
The Massey Lectures: background.

Pirate girl

It was February when she announced she wanted to be a pirate for Halloween, and every few weeks thereafter, she reminded me of the fact.

For the third year in a row, Helena showed up at daycare in "home-made" costume. I'm not averse to spending the money on a prepackaged ensemble, but we've yet to come across one that satisfies Helena's whims to her standards.

Pirate, fortunately, is a fairly straightforward costume to assemble. This year's pièce de resistance: parrot on shoulder.

Halloween has been, and undoubtedly will continue to be, one of the toughest days of the year for me as a mother. I continue to grapple with encouraging Helena's individuality, while fearing for the potential devastation of not fitting in.

Meanwhile, Helena has the distinction of being one of very few non-princess girls.

"The snows of yesterday"

The war came. My friends fell away, most married and soon were showing their young bodies much swollen in parks, and, later on, were sitting with their fair and dark hairs pinned up, in new cotton Mother Hubbards, playing watch-dog to baby carriages. They looked very youthful, more than I did, and very vapid, as if they had never been to school and never read a book. They looked like themselves at the age of four; and soon — after that — but I'm advancing the clock a bit — they had with them replicas of themselves at the age of four; and by that time had aged, looked careworn, a bit thinner, and were urging me to go back to Mother, get married, think of the older values. They kept asking me if I believed in those ideological salves; if ideology itself was not the soporific of the people and whether women especially ought not to go back to the old race-ways. Later on, this emptiness of head gave them heartaches. They became unhappy with their husbands. If their husbands were away at war, needing something to think about, they became the most serious possible little nuns of the progressive school movement and worried about diet, and should you spank Junior! But where were the lively, smart girls of my adolescence — where are the snows of yesterday?

— from Letty Fox: Her Luck, by Christina Stead, published in 1946.

"Oh, nothing frightens me!"

For the little terrors in your life: The 13 Ghosts of Halloween, written by Robin Muller and illustrated by Patricia Storms.

The story's told in verse and singable to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas, and we do slip into and out of the melody as we go. It's about 10 kids with 3 pets making their way through a haunted house.

Our copy's in French, but Patricia's charming illustrations need no translation.

Helena is particularly fond of the menacing "deux tête ratatinées" (wrinkled heads?), which happens to be very hard to say. While I twist up my tongue, this bilingual family is puzzling out translations for ourselves, a pleasure of a challenge when dealing with a vocabulary that's a little beyond the everyday.

We've been having a lot of fun counting up monsters and subtracting children on every page. The colours are fantastic, the clocks are crazy (we sure know when midnight is), and the creatures are gruesomely entertaining.

The book is also a big hit at Helena's daycare: "Non, je n'ai peur de rien!"

Patricia's blog: BookLust.
The sneak peak and other background.
Interview.

Thanks, Patricia!

Words and stuff

Or: how I plan to increase my IQ by 10 points in less than 48 hours.

Wednesday night:
Alberto Manguel delivers the 2007 Massey Lectures: The City of Words.
"How can stories lend a whole society an identity...?"

Thursday night:
Steven Pinker presents his book: The Stuff of Thought.

Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.

So how is it that two seemingly parallel constructions:
The City of Words
The Stuff of Thought
— are in fact not?

The city is made of words.
But.
The stuff makes up the thought.

My brain hurts already.

"The secret bustle of red blood"

This Lydnam Lodge was a folly and could never pay for itself. "Every egg cost a dollar," said Grandmother Morgan; but the Lodge was a convenient place to quarantine her children as each one reaped a wild oat; and it was a senseless delight, a pleasance which she felt she would allow them. She did not care for it herself. Grandmother Morgan, once she found she could not in any way turn the place into a boarding house, stayed away from it. She missed the clink of china and glass, the endless brushings of brooms, the glimmer of clean windows, the smells of rooms overfurnished with bedspreads, toilet covers, and women. She missed the bottles hidden in boot boxes, the crystal sets, the card games — especially perhaps the big poker game at which she herself was such a hand. She liked the cutting of lawns, the consultations with plumbers and plasterers, the quantities of goods in drawers and cupboards, the bustle of company, the thieving and picking, lashing of competitors, the brawling, the fight for life. Where can you feel it more than in a hotel or in a money game? She never objected even to what went on in the rooms, if these humam frailties were kept out of sight. For that was life to her, like the secret bustle of red blood, a woman who longs and fornicates and a man who thirsts and sucks. What was there out in the country, among the chickens and plants?

— from Letty Fox: Her Luck, by Christina Stead.

Used books in Montreal

"Walk into a good second-hand book shop, and there's an interesting selection made by a person, not a committee."

"It's the human aspect that's fun," Raymond says, "because the shop takes on the colour of your neighbourhood." Mount Royal Ave., home to a string of used-book shops is "a very human-level street. You wouldn't have that kind of success in, say, Brossard where it's all cars. Used-book shops don't work as drive-throughs. But if there were a couple in each neighbourhood, you'd find a lot of very different shops, and books."

The girl and the cat

It's taken almost 5 years, but she's finally bigger than the cat.



The cat is not particularly enamored of this turn of events, but he's shown more patience this last month — heck, the whole 5 years — than I ever thought possible.

You know, life

(In which the verb "to feel" is used to excess.)

Aurgh. This happens every so often: so much to say, no time to say it. All these glorious jewels and lumps of coal losing their immediacy, and amounting to nothing much, really.

See, even that paragraph above — I wrote it 4 days ago.

Umm.

Reading. I've done some. I feel like I'm in a slump. Nothing I pick up quite grabs me, with the notable exception of Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, which has sat in a stack for years, a gift I simply had no interest in, but one evening I just picked it up, opened it, and started reading. Very poetic. It took a while to find the rhythm; in typical Ondaatje fashion, it's not entirely chronological, and not always obvious whose story is being told. But find a rhythm I did, and whether I understood what was happening didn't matter much, I was along for the ride, but then the last portion felt like a different book entirely, and then it was over, and again nothing I pick up quite grabs me.

The Post-Birthday World (Lionel Shriver) I read weeks ago. While I expected it to devastate me, it didn't. It was compelling enough, but kind of ugly. The language, the characters. If you haven't already heard, basically it follows two trajectories from a critical decision point (a kiss!) in the protagonist's life. Great concept for a novel, but none of the characters apart from Irina felt real, which maybe isn't a flaw, the point being made that we really are the heroes of our own lives, all the others merely bit players. I felt distanced (deliberately?) And of course, it's kind of the point that neither path has an entirely satisfactory conclusion, but it was more depressing than that — just ugly. It made me feel dirty even, to dare to consider the "what if," which I'm not sure was the point or has to be the case. I feel scolded for considering that things, banal things, could be any different than they are. Or maybe that ugliness isn't really there in the book — I'm juxtaposing it from some other part of my life (but where?) onto what I read, or expected to read. There's a different kind of discomfort with this book than with Kevin, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe identifying that discomfort is the point.

I'm trying to read The Railway, by Hamid Ismailov, but I'm getting nowhere.

I'm trying to read The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper. I'd had it in the back of my mind to get to this someday, and one day there it was in front of me, a used copy with a dark, sketchy cover and great illustrations within. It felt like a sign, finding it that day, when I was at loose ends for what to read. But. Maybe I'd appreciate it better in the dead of winter.

Yikes. Is that all I've read (been trying to read) lately?

I've picked up Danielewski's Only Revolutions off the stack countless times, but I get hung up over which end to start reading from first, and that's just too hard for now.

I read, a month ago already, Patrick Hamilton's Unknown Assailant, being the last part of the Gorse Trilogy (the first two bits of which I read about a year ago, and this third having been not previously available). I had things to say about it, I think, and I'm stunned to discover I didn't document those thoughts here. It's decidedly weaker than Hamilton's other books, but still there was insight into character, less Gorse's than that of his victims (and I think that's a strength).

I'm starting to worry that this slump, this mood, might colour whatever book I choose to pick up next, that the next book if read at any other time might be the greatest novel ever, but in current conditions might go unrecognized by me.

So there you have it. Blah.

Work is a bit trying these days, for various reasons but a major one being the office just moved to a new location. And while it thrills most of my coworkers, it bothers me that we're now on top of a shopping centre with its massive food court giving the illusion of choice and I have to walk through the mall to and from the metro, threading my way between glassy-eyed shoppers who don't know the rules of escalator usage, and I've yet to settle on a coffee spot, and when I do, I'll still have months of training the barista to know to start my espresso, allongé 3/4, as soon as he sees me coming. All of which makes me feel angry.

The long drive to see my mother for Thanksgiving, and the long drive home, with near intolerable sleeping arrangements in between.

And I feel sick. My head won't stop hurting, partly for inadequate sleep, partly for the noises and fumes of the final renovations of the new office space and the fact that the temperature is not yet balanced (ie, it's fucking cold). And now I'm just whining. How pathetic.

I'm just not altogether here.

The girl, though, through all this is fabulous. And I feel remiss for not documenting her full fabulosity. I will try harder.

And my cat is amazing.

I did find a book this week. By accident. I'd never heard of it. I brought home Letty Fox: Her Luck, by Christina Stead. From the opening page, it feels perfect. (Does it qualify as chick lit, I wonder.) I feel a little bad for leaving other books unfinished (it's out of character, besides), but I think I'm going to go read it now.

"Fourth-rate science fiction"

Doris Lessing is a favourite of mine, and today she won the Nobel prize for literature.

The veteran US literary critic Harold Bloom has so far provided the only voice of dissent. Describing the academy's decision as "pure political correctness", he said to the Associated Press today that "although Ms Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction."

I was introduced to the work of Doris Lessing almost 20 years ago, in a class on dystopian literature: we studied The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five.

The Fifth Child made me dread having children. I think of this book often; when I look at my child and think how lucky I am, I am choked by the realization — the sense Lessing imparted in that slim novel — of how little control I have over who my child is.

I happened to be reading The Good Terrorist in the early part of September 2001. It's the banality of the protagonist's life that stunned me.

Mara and Dann is, for its fairy-tale quality, my favourite, from which I learned to play the game: What Did You See?

All of these affected me quite profoundly.

And there were others in between.

I read The Golden Notebook just a couple years ago. I haven't yet managed to write about it. The best books are the hardest to write about. Even the preface had me crying out, "Yes."

From "Problems, Myths and Stories," in Time Bites:

...when you belong to a reading generation, there is a whole web or map of references, information, knowledge that you have taken for granted; you realise that reading has been a parallel education, filling and extending what education you in fact did have. With contemporaries you talk from inside this web, or net, or reference,...

From "A Reissue of The Golden Notebook," in Time Bites:

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record.

I quite agree.

Give me fourth-rate science fiction any day.

"Humanity entered a new space age"

"I say without hesitation and without excuse that this is a turning point in history. Never has the threat of Soviet Communism been so great, or the need for countries to organize themselves against it."

— British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, November 1957.

Sputnik, launched 50 years ago today.

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