Stunt by Claudia Dey

I've approached Claudia Dey's novel Stunt so differently from the other books I read, and this has been the case from the very start. Because I must confess that I didn't actually ever intend to read it. For though I admired it from afar, I like my realism, thank you very much. I didn't really care to read about tightrope walkers, postcards from outer space and strange-named girls who age in a night. Until I heard Claudia Dey read from her novel, at the Fiery First Fiction fete just a few weeks back. And it occurred to me that my presuppositions were all wrong, and probably yours are too, because I don't know that I've read encountered a book like this before.

Dey read from the beginning of her novel at the reading, and I was immediately entranced by her narrator's perspective. So solidly fixed inside the head of this small strange person, noting her neighbour, "Mrs. Next Door": "She matches her lawn ornaments. She walks like she is figure skating. She carries a first-aid kit. She is always calling out the time. Bath time. Suppertime. Homework time. She is the cuckoo bird of mothers..."

This narrator is Eugenia Ledoux, devoted daughter of Sheb Wooly Ledoux who disappears one night leaving a note that says, "gone to save the world/... sorry/ yours/ sheb wooly ledoux/ asshole". He's addressed it to her mother, to her sister, but Eugenia's name isn't there, and so clearly, she believes, he meant to take her with him. She's waiting for him to come for her. Find me is her whisper.

And then, of course, her mother disappears, Eugenia and her sister double their ages in one night, Next-Door's house burns down and there begins a perpetual lawn sale. Eugenia runs away to a houseboat on Ward's Island, following clues towards her father's whereabouts, which are contained in a library book, the unauthorized autobiography of a tightrope walker.

Naturally. I was explaining the plot today, and everyone looked confused, and somebody sought a label for it-- "magical realism"? But no, not really, though there is magic magic and realism in abundance (all the detritus of the earth) but it's not the right template. I really have no idea what to compare this to, but I can say that it works. That I think of the tightrope, hovering miles into the air, but how taut it is, how strong and sure. The strength and sureness key-- you might call this book a bit of whimsy, but never has whimsy been so controlled, so calculated. The language is so fundamental. Every word, every sentence, every symbol in this book means something, and even the ones that don't.

My approach to Stunt was different in that I couldn't break the spell. I couldn't make notes in the margins, think too much about connections, because I was reading. I couldn't break this novel down into parts, because it would ruin everything, for now at least. No doubt the parts are essential, but right now the whole seems so complete.

Life in a Tree

It pleases me to no end that this is the view from my door. Made all the more significant by the fact that I live right in the middle of a very large and busy city, but out here on our deck, we could be anywhere. We bought a table and chairs yesterday, and this morning I was sitting out with a cup of tea and a paper, listening to birdsong and drinking up the sun. We've been barbequing regularly for the last month, but last evening was first when it was warm enough to be outside. The last two weekends have been full of friends, fun and potato salad, and luckily, it seems, time enough for everything.

The Wait is Over

"The earliest recipes for this vegetable are about 2500 years old, written in ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, suggesting Mediterranean as the plant's homeland. The Caesars took their asparagus passion to extravagant lengths, chartering ships to scour the empire for the best spears and bring them back to Rome. Asparagus even inspired the earliest frozen food industry, in the first century, when Roman charioteers would hustle fresh asparagus from the Tiber River Valley up into the Alps and keep it buried there in snow for six months, so it could be served with a big ta-daa at the autumnal Feast of Epicurus. So we are not the first to go to ridiculous lengths to eat foods out of season." -- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Last summer it was well-documented when three events coincided to change our lives. The first was the garden, our first, and through some miracle it grew, bearing melons, tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber. Second was our local farmer's market, which we started attending at the end of July, and these visits brought us yellow tomatoes, blue potatoes, abundant squash and extraordinary cheese. And third was that we both read Animal Vegetable Miracle, an extraordinary story, from which we learned about seasons, how we're connected to them and to the earth through the variety of things we eat. Because we'd really had no idea before, and coming to understand was the most amazing (and delicious) education. I'd missed twenty-seven asparagus seasons by that point, and so I swore I'd never miss another.

Ontario asparagus appeared in our grocery store last week, and we've been eating it by the bundle. Looking especially forward to the local farmers market here in our new neighbourhood starting up in less than two weeks, so we'll be able to catch the end of the asparagus crop there.
And then we'll follow the culinary season, as we're learning to do, feasting on the vegitannual. I'm rereading Animal Vegetable Miracle too, but taking it slow, following its seasons as they mirror our own. We've also got a garden here at our new house, albeit in pots--the plants of which some failed to survive a run-in with squirrelly types sometime last night. Such are the challenges though, and how pleased we are to face them. Here at our house we're looking forward to a delicious summer ahead.

Below, check out the pie I baked last weekend, made with the localest of rhubarbs. And do note that we're going to see Barbara Kingsolver on Tuesday, reading at This is Not a Reading Series. I think that tickets are still available.

Epizoodic

From Bryson's Diction for Writers and Editors:

Epidemic. Strictly speaking, only people can suffer an epidemic (the word means "in or among people"). An outbreak of disease among animals is epizootic.

A Nice Cup of Tea

My first tea ceremony took place in a crooked Tudor house in the English Midlands, a sign outside indicating which seventeen century king had once stayed there. The tea was simple, Cream Tea, pursued mostly for the sake of scones and jam. Made with PG Tips pyramid bags, the tea steaming in its pot and too hot yet to drink so I prepared my scone-- spread the Devonshire cream thickly, topped it all with a dollop of jam.

Such an initiation into Englishness was not at all lavish, would even have been austere if not for the jam and cream indulgence. But it was a sacred ritual undeniably, every element essential, from the currents in my scone to the teacup's rattle in its saucer. To the reverence bestowed on that steaming pot of brew, steeped to perfection. Poured to be admired: a nice cup of tea.

Tea in England is remarkable for its permeation into ordinary life. While I lived there, I studied the soaps and I soon learned "I'll put the kettle on" would be the first response in any crisis. I've always loved the news stories of power surges following pivotal episodes of Coronation Street or EastEnders, Britons rising from their sofas to put their kettles on at the very same time.

I was pleased, however, upon marrying an English man and becoming part of his family, to gain a view onto Englishness beyond the television's. And though the soaps' depiction of ordinary life turned out not always to have been accurate, the tea thing was spot on.

At my in-laws', we partook in the tea ceremony eight to ten times a day. Without ornamentation, of course (scones and jam are special occasions), but the steaming pot stayed fundamental. Each day was constructed around its tea breaks, a cup taken with meals and then to follow them. Tea was the bedrock of our everyday, plus a pick-me-up in a pinch ("I'll tell you what you need right now— how about a nice cup of tea?").

When my husband and I moved to Japan a couple of years later, I was only vaguely aware of the Japanese tea ceremony, a thousand year-old tradition rooted in Zen Buddhism that is, like so much of the culture, hard to explain. Practitioners enroll at Tea Schools and study for years to become proficient both in the actual preparation of the tea and in the ceremony itself. They must also study calligraphy, flower-arrangement, the art of wearing a kimono, among other things.

As tea lovers, we were both interested in Japanese tea and with great enthusiasm, we'd soon prepared our own ceremony. Purchasing a round Japanese teapot and a big bag of green tea leaves, and of course we knew how to brew it— pouring on the leaves (we do like our tea strong), adding boiling water, and we waited for it to steep.

When the time came, we poured our tea into mugs and sipped, not even tentatively. The bitterness was troubling but, trying for cultural sensitivity, we ignored it. And even after we realized the tea made us sick to our stomachs, we continued to make it. Reminding ourselves of the health benefits, that we'd get used to the taste, and as Japan was where we lived now, stiff upper lips would be maintained.

My Japanese tea experiences were an initiation into Japaneseness only as much as they affirmed that I'd never really belong there. Affirming that we were outsiders, for otherwise wouldn't we have known that green tea is to be prepared weak, with water past boiling to avoid bitterness? We should have let the tea steep for just a minute or two, consuming it in small quantities— in cups more like thimbles than our cocoa mugs.

This was all properly demonstrated when we attended an actual tea ceremony. Kneeling on the tatami mats in our proper places as guests, with our host dressed in a kimono, her quiet demeanour setting the tone. She purified the tea bowl with a special cloth, added green tea powder and then hot water, and stirred it with a bamboo whisk. No scones, we received a small sweet instead, the colour of cherry blossoms and made with pounded rice. We bowed as we received our tea.

But when I say that we didn't belong in Japan, I don't mean that it didn't become home to us. As in the tea ceremony, the two of us were guests taking part in a ritual we would never fully understand, but it was our everyday life for a while. That it couldn't have gone on forever doesn't mean we miss it any less.

In Canada, where we live now, our tea ceremonies continue. We put the kettle on first thing in the morning, and it's the first thing we do upon arriving home at the end of the day. We can do caffeinated or herbal, and we now know how to make green tea delicious. Our ultimate indulgence is High Tea at a posh hotel downtown, but we save these occasions for fear of spoiling ourselves.

And tea at our house is certainly not without its own charms— I can whip up a batch of scones in twenty minutes, and we eat them with jam made from strawberries we picked last summer. The tea brewing in our little white teapot, the very centre of our household.

Tea remains a sacred ritual, undeniably— the world stopping for pleasures we've come to know by heart. Linking our past and present, the places we've been to how far we've come. A delectable definition of home.

An attentive reader

"It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There's something about the rhythms of the language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meaning in the book that can't be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don't understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism-- clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information. Facts... just the surfaces of things." --Paul Auster, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers

I decided I had to read Why Women Should Rule the World after I heard Dee Dee Myers interviewed on CBC's The Current last month. Her intelligence and experience made a remarkable impression, but it was her optimism that was so inspiring. Coupled with the absolute sensibility of her message: that empowering women is good for everybody. The title is provocative but Myers means it, defining world-ruling as "[taking] advantage of all that each of us has to offer."

This book's strength is its fusion of disparate ideas to form a comprehensive whole-- so refreshing. Part of it is the politically sensitive nature of Myers' material-- she's doing a lot of elaborate sidesteps on the way towards her arguments, in order not to be read as in attack mode.

But more than sidestepping, Myers articulates her ideas well beyond polemics. Part of this is her book's hybrid nature: part memoir, part treatise. She is able to illustrate her own experiences in politics, the ways in which being a woman hindered her own advancement-- as White House Press secretary she was given more responsibility than authority, which seems to be a typical story; how she was told, when she protested a subordinate colleague being paid a higher salary, that he had a family to support; the struggle to be likable in authority, which men are rarely faced with. Myers worked as Press Secretary in the Clinton White House for two years, worked in writing and television afterwards, and then got married and had a family.

She writes, "That's my story, but..." The "but" being key, that hers is not the only choice. "Women want and deserve not only the flexibility to manage work (and family) from day to day, but also the ability to make choices that allow them to pursue their goals across a lifetime." Her focus remains on power, however, because "[a]ssuming that women-- even women with children-- don't want the top jobs means that too many women will never get the chance to make those important decisions for themselves."

Myers' reality is complex, and she asserts that women need to accept and support women whose choices are different from their own. She thinks of herself as a feminist, but from watching her son and her daughter she's certain-- "[it] isn't nature or nurture: It's both." She acknowledges aggressive tendencies inherent in men in particular, but realizes these inherited traits aren't our destiny. Dealing with the example of Margaret Thatcher: that it is too much to expect one woman to change everything, and surely her position altered the world's opinion of what women were capable of.

That different can be equal: "That doesn't mean that every man should be expected to behave one way, nor every woman another. Rather it means that women's ideas and opinions and experiences should be taken as seriously as men's-- regardless of whether they conform to traditional stereotypes."

Through her own experiences, statistics, and interviews with other women, Myers illustrates the various ways women can be systemically excluded from power. Showing that this is dangerous, not just in principal, but in terms of economics: she shows women as "the engine driving economic growth worldwide," and not just with their immense consumer power, as she cites studies showing that Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards have significantly higher returns on equity, sales and invested capital.

Myers explains that men and women experience the world differently, and she demonstrates how traits typical to women, such as negotiation skills and collaborative strengths, can be highly effective in business. Moreover that women's own lives are strong training grounds for management experience-- motherhood in particular. She cites examples of women playing key roles in peace processes around the world. That in achieving "critical mass"-- wherein women are not token, but a strong enough force to actually make a difference-- everybody wins.

Myers is not overtly prescriptive-- the general nature of her arguments ensures her book's relevance is wide. Surely different institutions must find their own way towards solution, by Myers's book is undeniable impetus for them to do so. I would like to think a man would read this, and find it as fascinating as I did-- and not get defensive. That women could cease slinging internecine arrows for a little while, and understand that ganging up on each other is part of a game we don't have to keep playing. The world can be better.

"This isn't what I think," writes Myers. "It's what I know."

New books

New books! On the weekend I got Stunt by Claudia Dey, and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (ed. Vendela Vida). Now reading In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill. Have just come down with an obsessive need to acquire a copy of The Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews.

Free to Be...

I went to see Free To Be You... And Me this weekend, performed by kids at The Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts. I'd never seen the show live before, I don't think, though I'd watched the movie plenty of times in elementary school, and I think there was a book, and I had the record too. But of course there was much that I'd forgotten, and it surprised me too how relevant the material still is-- which is nice, that it can still be enjoyed, but too bad too, that the message is more necessary than it's ever been. Of course it's simplified-- I see now that simply giving William a doll and feeding tender sweet young things to the tigers was never going to change the world. The show is a product of a different way of thinking, but still, it lays down a terribly substantial foundation. I've always adored it, and was thrilled to discover most of the movie is available online. Check out Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing "When We Grow Up" (a video that is only the smallest bit creepy). And Marlo Thomas driving a taxi in "Parents Are People" was always my favourite.

Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña

I chose Shari Lapeña's Things Go Flying by its cover, and the novel didn't disappoint. Though I chose it for its first line too, "Harold's recent hobby of reading obituaries at breakfast was his only new hobby in years." Setting the stage for an off-kilter story, irreverent and fun. Also as lovely and delightful as the cover suggests.

Things Go Flying is the story of a family at a point of crisis: Harold Walker becoming preoccupied with death and acting strangely, his wife Audrey ambivalent about losing control of her household as Harold breaks down. Their teenage sons doing teenage things. Also Harold is being visited by spirits, and, well, Audrey's got a troubling secret of her own.

Lapeña's narrative is dizzying at first, rapidly flipping between the four members of the Walker family. Which gets easier as the book goes on, but also serves to emphasize the radically different spheres each character inhabits, how far apart they are. Harold Walker is the common man we've encountered in books before-- in Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother, or Carol Shields' Larry's Party, for example. An ordinary guy finds himself in some extraordinary trouble, though Harold's trouble is even more extraordinary than usual. His wife Audrey, however, is decidedly novel in her creation-- the overbearing wife and mother, killing herself with martyrdom and the very best intentions, but here so fabulously drawn on the inside and out.

Between Harold and Audrey, and their sons, Lapeña demonstrates the variety of ways in which family members drive one another crazy. Her story engaging in all its twists and turns, and, though undoubtedly fun and amusing throughout, it all comes to take on a deeper resonance.

All questions

Post the brilliant The Dud Avocado, I've got no answers but all questions over in my post "Encounters with Books: And the trouble(?) with comic heroines", now up at the Descant blog.

Good news

My good news of today is that my short story "On a Picnic" will be appearing in the Fall issue of The New Quarterly. TNQ is an amazing magazine, and I feel so lucky to be included.

Sally J.

I continue to be obsessed with Fine Lines by Lizzie Skurnick, but my obsession was mammoth this week as she reread Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is one of my favourite books ever. I last read it when I was 24, and enjoyed it more than I ever had. It's a fascinating book, which I've forever linked with Ann Marie McDonald's The Way the Crow Flies in terms of point of view, dramatic tension, and certain thematic concerns. Sally J. certainly meets my requirement for children's books worthy of adult rereads: that it becomes a whole new book when you encounter it again, this change providing elusive insight into your childhood perspective. In this book especially, Judy Blume writes from way way up over her readers' heads, and they end up constructing her world in the same misconstrued (and wonderful) way they approach their own.

I am also excited because Lizzie Skurnick is writing about The Girl With the Silver Eyes next week. I used to love this book, in hope that pharmaceutical-induced mysticism was the key to my social ostracism but alas, my eyes were brown. Further excitement: that Skurnick promises Norma Klein to come (and it is common knowledge that we love Norma Klein here at Pickle Me This).

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I've not had much to say lately, suffering from a sudden dearth of original thought. Hoping to ease myself back into consciousness, however, I'd like to touch on Rebecca. The image at right being from the copy I read, a mass-market paperback passed on by my friend Bronwyn (who'd ended up with two).

I knew very little of Rebecca previously-- had one impression that it was a ghastly florid romance with no literary worth, and it was also confused with she of Sunnybrook Farm. My interest sparked, however, when one of my favourite book-bloggers began her "Daphne-Fest". She'd just finished reading Daphne by Justine Picardie, and I'd fallen in love with Picardie's non-fiction back when I lived in England. I was also intrigued by DuMaurier's ties to the Brontes, and I was reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall at the time. So round-aboutly, I came to read Rebecca. Quite late too, as everyone else I know who has read it did so in their early teens, and found it somewhat pivotal. I can certainly see why.

I enjoyed the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century gothic with modernish times-- like Jane Eyre with automobiles! Naturally, I'd always associated such a narrative sensibility with all things archaic, and so to see it in this context made it new to me. The Jane Eyre references coming often related to this book, though I must assert I thought Rebecca more original than it was made out to be. Connections between the two books were a bit tenuous, incidental-- this is a book that stands up on its own. And a fascinatingly constructed novel for a variety of reasons-- that we never learn our narrator's name for one, "the second Mrs. De Winter", though we learn it's an unusual name, difficult to spell. The love story's trajectory less predictable than might be imagined, and the arc of the novel itself, for I have never encountered an ending more perfect. Unexpected and expected at the very same time, and that we do not come full circle. Of all the gaps throughout this novel, particularly this: "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea."

Always being taken for a librarian

"I had always assumed that a certain sense of identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts' bar, I looked like a tart. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking that after all this was a very good thing for an actress. But it was depressing, anyway. Not so much the thing of looking like a prostitute. I mean, except for the inconvenience of the moment, I found that rather thrilling, but the whole episode was forcing me to remember something that I'm always trying to forget and that is, that in a library as well, I'm always being taken for a librarian. No kidding. My last Christmas in New York, I had an English paper to write over the vacation, and there was this public library I used to go to, and no matter where I sat, people were always coming up to me and asking me where such and such a book was. They were furious too, when I didn't know. It was eerie I began to feel that I actually was a librarian. The wood growing into my soul and stuff. I suppose I am rather an intellectual." --Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

The girl still can't dance

The girl still can't dance. When she's had too much to drink she still flails her arms, knocking drinks out of hands and poking tall people in the eye. Sometimes she abandons fluidity altogether, and jumps up and down on the spot instead— a terrible legacy of Kris Kross and Cypress Hill. When she's dancing sometimes, people think she's kidding but she's not. Celtic is all the rage right now, but when the girl gets her knees up, someone always gets kicked.

Born full grown, or make room for a hero

"For a writer those things are what you start with. You wouldn't have started a story without that awareness-- that's what made you begin. That's what makes a character, projects a plot. Because you write from the inside. You can't start with how people look and speak and behave and come to know how they feel. You must know exactly what's in their hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on the stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply the right thing at the right moment. And the same character would be written completely differently in a novel as opposed to a short story. In a story you don't go into character in order to develop him. He was born full grown, and he's present there to perform his part in the story. He's subservient to his function, and he doesn't exist outside it. But in a novel, he may. So you may have to allow for his growth and maybe hold him down and not tell everything you know, or else let him have his full sway-- make room for a hero, even, in more spacious premises." --Eudora Welty, The Paris Review Interviews, II

Unless

This past weekend has ruined me, and I remain in a coma. Or perhaps I just can't stop reading Rebecca long enough to focus on anything else. And I have a stack of books-to-be-read up to my elbows, so thankfully this weekend is a long one and I can fill it well.

Last evening I attended the Fiery First Fiction event, and it did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed hearing Nathan Whitlock read from A Week of This (which I read last month), Shari Lapeña read from her book (which I've got upcoming), and then there was Claudia Dey who must have sold her book a thousand times. Personally I'm not sure how I'd live long without it-- her reading was unbelievable. Coach House is publishing wonderful books these days; remember Pulpy and Midge? And I also want to read Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig.

Read Claudia Dey profiled in The Toronto Star. Watch "the list of books that make the best use of their type" at Baby Got Books. Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories reviewed. Margaret Drabble is characteristically excellent in "The beginning of life should not be a subject for a crude polemic".

Today whilst reading The Danforth Review on A Week of This, I was surprised to see my own review referenced. Bryson's points are interesting, and I found quite illuminating his assertion that novels "are fictional inventions of imagined worlds. They are performances of language, and the references they make to each other-- explicitly or implicitly-- are of greater interest than a novel's photo realism." True enough, perhaps, but then isn't the novel quite a multitudinous thing? And don't we all approach it differently?

And like Heather Mallick, I've noticed this month's issue of The Walrus is decidedly short on women writers. "Apparently you can't have a good magazine unless women are writing it," writes one of Mallick's avid readers. But you sort of can't, actually, in this day and age. Not if you're writing a general interest/current events magazine, and women are writing practically none of it-- is this really surprising? The only pieces written by women are two of four "field notes", one of four book reviews, a poem by P.K. Page, and one of nine letters to the editor. (Perhaps the whole issue is the answer to Austin Clarke's story title, "Where Are the Men?") What all this signifies exactly, I cannot venture to say. But then to me the facts appear as such, I don't actually need to say anything.

In related news, I'm looking forward to reading Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers. Check out coverage at The Savvy Reader.

Same jeans

Things are mad here. We would suggest that when you're organizing your mother's surprise 60th birthday party, you actually bring the bag filled with those party things you've spent weeks preparing to the party. This way you don't leave them in your backyard, discover this after driving two hours to the party venue, and then have to drive all the way back to Toronto (and then back to the venue again) which means you'd drive about 600 km in one Saturday afternoon. This would probably also ensure that you're not insane at said party, spearheading its descent into rampant debauchery. Who would ever have thought a 60th birthday party could get so out of control? It really truly did, my mother perfectly surprised, particularly to see my sister who lives on the other side of the country. A house full of bright lights, loud music and garish prints, and full of friends, and full of family, and we're truly fortunate these last two are one and the same. (I would post pictures, but they're unsightly).

Fiery First Fiction

Oooooh-- Fiery First Fiction! A fantastic promotion by the Literary Press Group. Events are being held across the country, and I'm looking forward to attending Monday night's in Toronto at Supermarket. FFF is promoting 14 first novels published by Canadian small presses. Buy one at participating independent bookstores and get a free durable book bag-- I just got mine, and durable IS the word. I love it. Though I could only get one book today (I am trying to curb book buying habits to no more than one daily) so I selected Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña. And yes, I chose it by its cover, but I think I'm on to something good.

I was at the bookshop with my friend Bronwyn, which has always been one of my favourite experiences. She'd also brought her spare copy of Rebecca to pass along to me, so it's been an evening of fine new acquisitions.