Books for tactility

Of course, the point of books is exploration, and it was very exciting to see Harriet realizing that this morning. I've been helping her "read" her touch and feel books for a while now, but this morning she reached out and did it herself. I read to her all the time, and she seems to listen, and she looks at the pictures, but this was the first active response she's ever shown to a book, and it made me very happy. Books are for touching indeed, and soon they'll be for eating, and one day you'll be reading and have the world in your hands.

RIPs

Must admit that fateful day that took Farrah and Michael had me rolling my eyes only, but it does seem a bit much that Wednesday saw the deaths of Ted Kennedy, Ellie Greenwich and Dominick Dunne, each of whom meant a lot to me. Kennedy by virtue of being a Kennedy alone, and there was a time in my life when I lapped up Kennedy bios like they were fiction (and they sort of were). I know Ted Kennedy was both a hero and a dastardly villain, but I'm most amazed by a story I once read alluding to about him having sex with a woman in a crowded restaurant. I could find no further details, but it's the best story I've ever heard. As far as I know, Ellie Greenwich got up to no such thing, but her music has been part of the soundtrack to my life ("I met him at the candy store, he turned around and smiled at me. You get the picture?" "Yes, we see.")

But since we're talking literature here, let's focus on Dominick Dunne. Which means we're not talking literature with a capital L, but I loved his books. When we lived in Japan, we frequented Wantage Books, a used bookshop in Kobe. Wantage Books was an English bookshop, which was rare and wonderful, and we'd buy at least ten books per visit. (It's odd to remember what a precious commodity readable books were then, and how easy it was to take them for granted again). It was at Wantage where I found Various Miracles, my favourite Carol Shields book, discovered Margaret Drabble, and bought up every Dominick Dunne novel in the store. Stuart and I were obsessed with them, and remember reading them on my train commutes to work, gripping mass-market paperbacks that fit perfectly into my purse. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and A Season in Purgatory (speaking of Kennedys), People Like Us, and besides, he was Joan Didion's brother-in-law, so I felt better about the whole thing.

There was something about the foreigness of our every day surroundings that made Dunne's novels like a tonic. American, and glamour, and scandal, and intrigue-- we devoured it like the books were bad for us, and perhaps they were, but they satisfied. They were delicious. And then I remember, after a string of Dunne novels, reading something else finally and being confused when there was no fil*tio by page three. I've since adjusted back, but I'll always remember how perfect his books were at the time.

Alternate Endings

"You know all those blank pages they have at the end of books? I always thought they were there so that if you didn't like the way the book ended, you could write your own ending. I wrote rediculous alternate endings on those pages to pretty much every book I ever read as a kid... I pretty much made everything a happy ending. Leslie dying in Bridge of Terabithia was just a dream; Winnie decides to drink from the spring and run away with Jesse in Tuck Everlasting; Elizabeth returns to Frobisher Bay forever in The Other Elizabeth; Walter's death in World War One was just a case of mistaken identity in Rilla of Ingleside. Oh, and the end of every one of my Nancy Drew books now features a love scene between Nancy and Ned. I was so frustrated that he was supposed to be her boyfriend, yet we never saw them kiss!"-- Amy Jones from "Amy Jones in Conversation" by Katia Grubisic, in The New Quarterly

The Mem Keeps Coming

Sometimes one thing leads to another, or else it just leads to the same thing over and over again. The latter in this case, which is the case of children's author Mem Fox, beginning with her book finding its way into my house quite indirectly. From reader comments, I discover that everybody loves Mem Fox, and get some further Mem recommendations. The next week at the Library Story Time (which was incredible, incidently, are we ever lucky to have the Toronto Public Library system available to us!), the librarian pulls out Fox's latest Hello Baby, as well as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. (They are so good!) And then today I walked into a bookshop near my house and found a copy of Mem Fox's Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. Naturally, I bought it. Tomorrow I expect I'll run into Mem Fox in the grocery store, never mind that she lives in Australia...

So lucky

Harriet is three months today, which means I've got every right to post baby pictures. And we've got some gorgeous ones, taken this weekend by our friend Erin who makes everything beautiful, as well as another one displaying the ever-elusive, always precious Harriet smile. This third month has been a very fine one, real life returned to us. Harriet sleeps in her crib now, and for such long periods of time that I'm a very spoiled mom. During the past week we've gotten so that I get to come back downstairs after putting her to bed, rather than just collapsing into bed exhausted.

I kept a journal of letters to the baby throughout my pregnancy, and my plan was to write it throughout the postpartum too, but I didn't write a word until Harriet was nearly two months old. Which is interesting-- I've thought so much about how there is so little record of what that period is actually like for anybody, but I know that for me, I had no desire to write it all down so in essence to live it twice. Once was most certainly enough. It is, like much of motherhood, I am learning, better just to get on with it.

But part of the struggle, for me, was that my feelings weren't at all what I'd expected them to be. Not only did I not know how to articulate them properly, but I was uncomfortable even trying. I'd wondered if I'd see my baby and recognize her from the start, but I didn't. Getting to know her has been a slow and involved project, and of course I have to say that of course I've always loved her, but it's much more complicated than that, really. I've had to grow into this love, or perhaps it's that my love for her is so entrenched within me that I barely recognize it. It's way below the surface, is what I mean, so that I find myself staring at this tiny stranger and wondering who she is, and yet when we're apart, she is the string of thoughts in my head. Meeting her needs is such a primal urge I'm scarcely conscious of it, and yet it's overwhelming. When she's sleeping, I want her to never ever change, and at the same time I'm so eager to mark her progress, to meet this person she's slowly becoming. I can't remember what I ever did before, who I was then, but I also don't feel substantially changed. In that I've been Harriet's mother forever and ever, is what I mean by that. Or something quite different at the very same time.

I've heard tell of complaints that Toronto's had a very rotten summer, but I've missed the rotten, playing with my baby under shady trees, taking long walks, taking her to yoga, to the library, to the museum to sit on a bench and watch the fish swim. We've cut down on our evening walks now that the baby goes to bed early, but they were what got me through June and July when Harriet screeched on schedule, and I will remember the fresh air of those nights with fondness forever. Too many trips leading to ice cream, but it kept us happy and sane(ish). And now lately, we've had weekend trips away, a jaunt over to Toronto Island, and we're going away this weekend too for a tiny getaway, just for fun, just for summer. The summer that I thought would be lost to me, because certainly I do not remember June, but it all comes back, slowly, it does. And we're happy, if not always, and so lucky, always, always.

Thinking is not a performance

I've just started reading The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens, whose novel The Girls I loved so very much a while back. And I'm starting Amy Jones' fiction in The New Quarterly, which makes me look forward to her forthcoming book What Boys Like. Online, Lawrence Hill discusses his problem with the overuse of To Kill a Mockingbird in schools. Writer Laurel Snyder on overcoming her Twitter addiction: " It’s the idea that thinking is not a performance, hard as that can be for someone like me to accept."

Define "tuffet"

"The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a prenatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This may well be true of some, but was not true of me. My reading list didn't grant me access to the particulars of adult life, but to its moody interstices, the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. Like a child reciting nursery rhymes, I was consumed by the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Well, can you, even now, define "tuffet"?)" --Lizzie Skurnick, from Shelf Discoveries

Patticakes

Photo by E. Smith

Swimming by Nicola Keegan

Swimming begins, "I'm a problematic infant, but everything seems okay to me." Narrator Philomena, draped in rolls of baby fat, goes on, "I live simply; when something doesn't seem okay, I scream until it is again... I am nine months old and the longest I've slept at one time is one hour and forty three minutes." Poised on the edge of the pool before her first aqua babies class, she is slipped into the water and finds herself "liberated from my fleshly prison of gravity." Philomena swims and she swims, kicking and rolling, amazing all those poolside, and when pulled from the water, she spits up, pees on her father, and then falls asleep for fourteen hours.

Her parents keep checking on her after: "It is an unspoken fact that they can finally love me now that I'm out cold. They bask in this love, as waves of breath ebb and flow, causing the dome of my stomach to stink, then swell. The silence of the household has opened a space for hope."

I elaborate this first chapter in such detail in order to explain that Swimming isn't what it sounds like. The journey of a girl from a small Kansas town swimming to Olympic stardom, an American-type story. Interestingly, however, Keegan turns out not to be American at all, and it shows in her writing. Her narrative reminiscent of Kate Atkinson's in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, both books dark and hilarious in turns, eccentric family histories beginning with the narrator's birth, except in the case of Philomena, this birth actually takes place that moment she first gets in the pool.

Only in this first chapter, however, do we get a sense of Philomena in the pool-- how it feels to kick, to float, to duck underwater. Though swimming remains her passion throughout her life, "passion" isn't the right word exactly, because swimming is more a means to an end, which is survival. Sink or swim? She chooses the latter, so that instead of swimming as the main exploration of the narrative, the sport is a metaphor for how Philomena lives her life. Tracing it back it to its very origins, she says, we all start out swimming anyway.

Despite her aptitude for all things aquatic, Philomena receives little encouragement from her parents regarding swimming. Once again, this won't be the expected tale-- of prodigies worked to the bone, of childhood lost. Her preparation for her olympic career isn't years and years of practice and determination, but rather an eccentric family to start with, compounded by tragedy. In her mid-teens, Philomena starts swimming to save herself from nothingness, to avert her mind from traumatic memories, and her natural ability is still apparent. So that she catches up fast and she begins to win. Winning itself the object, the race, ripping through the water instead of focusing on what's around her. She becomes the omniscient narrator of her own life, with all the distance that might imply, and her friends and family she renders brutal caricatures, because this is how life is bearable.

Swimming is Keegan's first novel, which is obvious at times. Not that the book reads like a novice effort, but instead it's clear that Keegan has poured into Swimming absolutely everything she's got. The shape of the book is not quite perfect, but its substance is something remarkable. So that I hope that Keegan has not exhausted her store, and I look forward to seeing where her talent takes her.

Songs blasting by outside my window #2

I Want Your Soul by Armand Van Helden.

Not an alternative

"It is not that I think every person should become a parent, or would claim that childbearing enhances one’s creative capacities (although I do think such an argument could easily be made given that childbirth, perhaps even more than other life-changing experiences, broadens one’s sense of meaning as well as being). It is that being a parent — a mother, especially — should not be narrated as an alternative to having an engaged, creative life, as if one must choose one or the other or be crippled by both." --Amy Lavender Harris, "Pure Light"

Breaking up is never easy, I know.

Now reading Swimming by Nicola Keegan, which wasn't at all what I expected, which is probably a fine thing. I'm also reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is more than I expected, which is an amazing thing. Its contents are so diverse, surprising, current and consistently excellent. I'm not sure if it's wrong of me to say it's more "magazine" than "journal". And not because it's less high-brow, but just because it's interesting. I also just broke up with a trashy novel I was expecting to love and tell you all about, but it was crap, or at least its first 124 pages were, and life is just too short to find out if the rest of it is better.

I IS for Toronto Island Ferry

We had a wonderful day away from the mainland.

The Incident Report by Martha Baillie

Something happens when you work in libraries for too long, even part-time. I learned this the day a patron came to the circulation desk asking to borrow a stapler, and I had to explain why this was against our policy: "If we gave it out to you, then we'd have to give them out to everyone." It was a sorry power trip, from up there on my desk-high perch, and I even felt like kind of a hero. Averting mass stapler lending, which really means holding off CHAOS in the library, the foundation of our society. Where would we be without me?

But I was not the worst case. One librarian where I worked had seen fit to apply labels to every object at the circ desk and the place where that object was to rest. "Pencils" said one tin, "erasers" said another. "Paper Cutter" lived in the "Paper Cutter" place. "Coats" on the closet. This was the Dewey Decimal System gone mad!! I wrote "Floor" on a post-it note, and placed it underfoot. My colleagues, being librarians, failed to see the humour.

But I love it. I don't think I've always been like this, but after a cumulative five years of library work, my own books (and CDs) are always in alpha order. Out at the library, I am always made steady by the sureness of call numbers-- that everything will be where it is supposed to. I used to relish shelf-reading, and not just because I got to browse the stacks, but whenever I found a volume out of place and put it back where it belonged, I'd performed a task even more worthwhile than keeping would-be stapler lendees tamed. I love libraries. I love cataloguing. May the god of order forever reign.

At the Toronto Public Library, as I now know, employees are instructed to log incidents which take place on their shifts. Martha Baillie's novel The Incident Report is made up of such logs, Miriam, her protagonist, seeing fit to order her life to fit the confines of these reports. Perhaps a way to order chaos indeed, as her job sees her engaging in bizarre (and sometimes dangerous) interactions with those on the fringes of society. Her incident reports "resembling a pack of cards" stacked in a desk drawer, containing records of what you might expect (and what you couldn't possibly imagine but some of which probably comes from truth [Baillie is a librarian in the Toronto Public system]), but also episodes from her personal life (which include a man she meets while sitting on a park bench during her lunch break), and from her history (usually about her father, and a tragedy in her past).

Miriam's strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie's exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward).

This is a clever little book, but not too clever, for it is mostly beautiful. Rich with literary allusions that aren't the point, but still round out the universe. And rich too with story, which goes to show that you can make stories happen anywhere.

Children's Writer Mem Fox

Our next-door neighbours were having a clear-out this week, and found a copy of a book they thought we might be interested in. Harriet, You'll Drive Me Wild! is a delightful little picture book about a pesky little girl and a mom who loses her cool. Spoiler alert: happy endings in sight. We love it, and I'm quite happy that through this book, I've discovered its author, Mem Fox too. She's an Australian writer of 33 children's books and a literacy educator as well. Her excellent website features her full bibliography, biographical information, and lots of other fun stuff, including articles and addresses she's written for parents and teachers about promoting a passion for reading, including "Ten read-aloud commandments", "If I Were Queen of the World (...on how to read before school)", and "Winning the War Between Books and Television" (which acknowledges that television is an excellent medium for turning children onto books). Fascinating stuff, all of it, and because I'm so glad to have found it, I wanted to share it with you.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Inevitably, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Orange Prize winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun was going to be a tough act to follow. (We at Pickle Me This adored this book back in 2006). But in a curious way, Half of a Yellow Sun anticipated Adichie's new excellent collection of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck in its wide range of voices and points of view. We find similar scope in Adichie's stories, which take place during different points during this century and the last, are voiced by first, second and third person narrators, whose characters are male and female, and young and old, and are convincingly realized for all this variousness.

The voices are all African, however, which makes The Thing Around Your Neck a difficult work to approach. Adichie actually critiqueing this difficulty within her stories, many of which take place in America, dealing with the ignorance Americans view Africa with (and of course, Americans would not be alone in this). In the story "The Thing Around Your Neck", a Nigerian woman working in Connecticut begins a relationship with a distinctly Africa-philiac man, and notes that, "white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same-- condescending". In the story "Jumping Monkey Hill", a Nigerian writer called Ujunwa attends an African Writers Workshop near Cape Town, and the white instructor critques stories for not being "reflective of Africa, really," or for being "agenda writing... [not] the story of real people." (Interestingly, however, the retort to that is that the story actually happened to the writer, and I do know that a story having happened in life does not necessarily make it plausible in fiction, but anyway...)

So I'm not sure if it would be condescending to say that I liked these stories very much. I do know, however, that one of the reasons I do so like Adichie's writing is that reflecting Africa is not necessarily their agenda. First, because she goes to great lengths to show the variousness of "African" experience (it is an enormous continent after all), and because even when her work tells stories from important points in history (as in Half of a Yellow...), it is the story that makes the history come to life, and not the other way around.

My one criticism being that the voices and experiences of African women in America were a bit samey-- they arrive with big dreams, are disillusioned by their visa sponsor, work at dead-end jobs, and remark upon Americans' obesity. Which might mean that this experience is all too ubiquitous, perhaps, but I was not convinced. The stories themselves were strong, however, and in their perspective reminiscent of those in Jhumpa Lahiri's collections: immigrants navigating the perplexing foreign land that is the USA, and this reframes the familar for a reader like me. And then that the African stories, even at their most dramatic (and there is certainly action here) show the every-day in a land so far away.

The Thing Around Your Neck sounds like a cacophony, voices on top of voices. And this collection certainly makes evident that Adichie is up to the short story form.

The Children's Book's longlisting is good news

My two weeks on maternity leave before Harriet was born were spent so unbelievably well, perpetual sunshine and copious ice cream. Lots of reading and writing too. She was scheduled to be born on a Tuesday, and the Friday before AS Byatt's The Children's Book arrived in the mail. At more than 600 pages, the book was a rather daunting prospect for the final weekend of my wonderful, self-indulgent baby-free life. But I also knew that if I didn't get the book read then, it would sit unread for months and months. (I didn't know much then, but I knew enough to know that was true). And so into the book I plunged, 200 pages a day (in addition to all the other things that had to get done that weekend). It was such a brilliant way to read the book, to become so steeped inside it, and I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. And it stayed on my mind during those first few weeks of Harriet's life, when my mind was tied up on knots for various reasons, and the book is the one thing from that whole time that I remember vividly.

All of which is to say that I'm glad it's on the Booker Prize long-list, and I'll be happy if it wins.

Read my review of The Children's Book.

August

T is for Toronto books

Oh, no one tagged me, but I want to play too. To join Rebecca and Kate in compiling their top Toronto books. I'm not sure I can come up with fifteen, but this is the best I can do off the top of my head. (Update: Fourteen. I'll do my best to think of another. Update Update as inspired by Rebecca: YES! BOOKY! Update 3 see below).

1) A Big City ABC by Alan Moak: I have the original edition of this book, with Exhibition Stadium instead of the SkyDome under "B is for baseball". And I is for island ferry indeed. The illustrations are beautiful, and I remember spending considerable time examining them closely when I was small. (This book was re-released in 2002, and will be coming out in paperback in October).

2) The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood: I love the depictions of Ward's Island (I is for island ferry, see above) especially, but the entire book captures the city's neighbourhoods brilliantly. I was also quite fond of the university setting when I was getting ready to become a student in Toronto myself.

3) Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: Shows the fringes of the city back when the fringes were newly constructed bungalows in a sea of mud up around St. Clair Avenue. And the ravines! And then revisits to find the city changed by the 1980s, with grey skyscrapers that were like tombstones.

4) Headhunter by Timothy Findley: For a course I took called "Reading Toronto" in university, I read works including some Morley Callaghan, Fugitive Pieces, Alias Grace, The Swing in the Garden by Hugh Hood, and this book. I'm not cheating by stocking this list with my course syllabus, but Headhunter has to be included as it's stayed with me ever since I read it, particularly the scenes in the Toronto Reference Library.

5) Stunt by Claudia Dey: I is once again for island ferry, and P is for Parkdale. Eugenia Ledoux's narrative is Toronto as an underwater dream.

6) Muriella Pent by Russell Smith: The reason I ever took a walk to Wychwood Park, Smith's most recent novel is Russell Smith the novelist coming into his own. Also notable for Brian Sillwell's basement apartment.

7) Helpless by Barbara Gowdy: Once again, the neighbourhoods. Here is Cabbagetown, the dodgy end, portrayed as a place where people live and where community happens.

8) Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig: Toronto underground, in the deepest ravines and down in the subway's depths. Helwig creates an unfamiliar city out of Toronto in the grip of panic.

9) When I Was Young and In My Prime by Alayna Munce: P is still for Parkdale, and for poetry too, Munce's poem/fiction hybrid an extraordinarily rendered feat. Toronto stands for onward and away as the narrator grapples with her grandparents' decline.

10) The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper: Terrifying! And you could plot it on a map, which is Terrifying! doubly.

11) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad: Here is great urban fiction, undeniably set in its place. Which is Toronto 'round the turn of this century as lived in by a media/culture/cool savvy journalist who's less savvy about where her life is headed.

12) Minus Time by Catherine Bush: I found this to be an imperfect novel with so many perfect components, one of which is its depiction of Toronto. Particularly a Toronto not-too-long-ago already lost, the Robert Street tennis courts/ice rink which had been the home of the narrator's now-demolished childhood home. And not just because it's around the corner from my house.

13) In The Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje: I know it's cliched, we're supposed to hate this book, and though I've loved it less with each reread, it still makes the Bloor Street Viaduct magical to me, as well as the majestic RC Harris Water Treatment Plant (which I despair they no longer offer tours of).

14) Unless by Carol Shields: Much of it takes place in a fictional small town north of the city, but the heart of it is set on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, just across from Honest Ed's.

15) The Booky Trilogy by Bernice Thurman Hunter

15.5) Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound (or blackberry subway jam) by Robert Munsch

Not my bag

I hate jazz. I've never liked it, there was a time when I pretended I did and tried to learn to like it behind the scenes, but I never managed. I gave up pretences and decided to just hate it hands down the day a jazz-loving former co-worker walked into the staff lounge where someone else had put a bit of The Great Satan on the stereo, and co-worker waggled his head in a be-bop style, looked confused and said, "Hey, I thought this was my bag." Which summed it all up for me, and that was the end. My beloved Tabatha Southey illustrates her jazz-hating experiences in this week's column.

Now reading/not reading/etc.

I am now reading Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it. The "book reports" it contains remarkable, not just because Lizzie Skurnick indulges in good nostalgia, but because of the subtext she unearths the second time around-- her treatment of classics, including Daughters of Eve, Harriet the Spy, Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade, and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit demonstrate something wildly substantial (and subversive) going on in YA literature back in the day.

I've not managed to read through a single magazine/periodical since my daughter was born, and so I've got a stack beside me on my desk right now and no clue when I'm going to get to them. (FYI: my "desk" is now an end-table beside my gliding chair in the living room, which actually works out quite handily.) There are so many books and so little time that periodicals hardly seem to factor into the equation. I should probably make a new blog label called "Not Reading" and then I could write about it all the time.

Last Friday I had to spent two hours waiting at the Passport Canada office, and they'd probably never seen anyone happier to wait. Mostly because I HAD A BOOK IN MY BAG and BABY WAS ASLEEP IN HER PRAM. Baby stayed asleep for two hours (and then, having exhausted her patience/goodness resource, proceeded to be horrible for the rest of the day, so much so that I was destroyed by evening, but alas) so that I had more uninterrupted reading than I'd had in 2.5 months. It was extraordinary, particularly as I was reading the marvelous Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Only problem with that being that the book was so engaging, I felt like I'd lived the lives of 31 mothers that day, which probably contributed to my destroyment by 5 pm.

Anyway, speaking of waiting, Rona Maynard on waiting-room lit and Marilynne Robinson's Home. Rebecca Rosenblum's submission tips for aspiring writers is also worth a read. The great Lauren Groff, illuminatingly, on rejection notices. What's wrong with charity book shops? is an interesting (though not conclusive) response to questions raised in the thought-provoking article "Selling Civilization" from Canadian Notes and Queries.

Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we're off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and "tickle rhymes" for all. (I'm not sure if it's sad or amazing that this is my life now.)

Family Fun

Harriet can't wait to learn to read so that she can join in the family fun.

Weed whacking?

From Alex Good's piece on negative book reviews: "Critics in this country are often accused of enviously cutting down our tallest poppies. For the record, I don't see a lot of this happening, but even if I did, I would be inclined to think it good horticulture rather than conduct motivated by one of the seven deadly sins. The tallest poppies are precisely the ones that need the attention of a critical weed whacker. They suck up all the oxygen and take the most nutrients from the soil, crowding out all of the up-and-coming green. Better to pull such plants out of the ground, shake the dirt from their roots and toss them on the weed pile."

Inarguable. The problem, however, is that Good's metaphor is all too apt, and "whackage" seems to all too often pass for literary criticism in Canada, all clumsiness, frantic motion and violence implied. Is a poppy always necessarily a weed either? All thoughtfulness and consideration go out the window, and we're left with paragraphs such as the following (from here):

"For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever."

I have chosen this one example (which, admittedly, comes not from a review, but from an essay about Canada's critical climate) because it's so typical. The writer engages not at all with said poppy's work, but instead their reputation. One could get the sense from these generalities and such immediate dismissal that the writer has read very little Atwood, actually, or none at all, relying instead on quipsy barbs overheard at literary dinner parties. This sort of thing is boring, lacking substance, and also alienating to readers who will read it and, no doubt, regardless of where their sensibilities lie, will then "merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever."

Whacking, no. Pruning, perhaps, which in lacking bombasticism will earn the reviewer far less attention, but might begin a literary conversation that actually takes us somewhere.

No one told me how crazy

"No one told me how crazy you can become in those first few months, when your body chemistry is changing, when your entire life has been altered from the moment the baby was born and nothing will ever, ever be the same again. People don't talk about these things, perhaps because they don't want to scare you. Perhaps they don't tell you because these things fall away so quickly after the baby arrives that those who would tell no longer remember. And if they do tell you these details before you have had a child, they have no meaning, and no context. These are truths you must seek and know alone, in the quiet late-night hours when you are rocking the baby, breathing in the tender newborn scent."-- Christy-Ann Conlin, "Wired at the Heart" from Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood