My Ántonia

There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

My Ántonia  was published in 1918, and while it was considered "modernist" and a groundbreaking piece of feminist writing at the time, it was fatally old-fashioned to my sensibilities and I was never completely engaged with it. As a record of pioneer life in Nebraska (just a couple of decades past "Indian times"), it's no doubt valuable and is in many ways interesting, but it joins other such "classic" books like Anne of Green Gables or Age of Innocence as just not my cup of tea. 

This book begins with two old friends on a train, travelling through the Midwest, and reminiscing about a striking figure from their childhoods: the Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. One of them explains that he had taken to writing down his memories of Ántonia as he travelled and offered to show his companion what he had assembled -- this transcript is the remainder of the novel, and since the narrator confessed that he was no writer, it is meant to explain and forgive the book's lack of plot or other literary conventions. I understand that this intro is slightly different from the original (in which the pair of friends are obviously a man and a woman -- supposedly the two halves of Willa Cather herself -- who agree to each write such a memoir but only the man, Jim Burden, actually carries through), but in either case, it's an unsatisfactory conceit to me: If it's meant to be a book of reminiscences about Ántonia, then why are there whole chapters on Jim's time at college without her mentioned at all? And if it's meant to be personal recollections, then how can Jim act like an omniscient narrator and include the thoughts and feelings of other characters? And if it opens with the transcript being handed to a reader, I would have liked it to end with the reader's reaction. 

And while many chapters had straightforward narration, some were interrupted with what felt like true anecdotes that were imposed upon the book wherever they fit in. Some stories were exciting (like Russian Peter's story about the wedding party and the wolves or Ántonia's about the tramp and the threshing machine) but I was unimpressed by the inclusion of the entire plot of the stage play of Camille and Jim's weepy reaction to the melodrama (and even if this was an important and personal event in Cather's life, it had nothing to do with anything -- and least of all with Ántonia). And while I acknowledge that this may have all been very modern and groundbreaking in 1918, it jumped along like a series of vignettes that didn't hang together as a complete whole for me.

There is much lovely prose in My Ántonia -- and especially when Cather is writing about the landscape that she so clearly loved -- and the characters are described vividly and exhaustively. I enjoyed this of the unlikeable Mrs. Cutter:

She was a terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, raw-boned, with iron-grey hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes. When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved, like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very colour and shape of anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full, intense eyes.

With some racism, religious/cultural superiority, and dated language, there was a whiff of the archeological about this reading experience, and as I've said of some other classic books: while I can understand the importance of a buckboard wagon, I prefer to go for a spin in my modern four wheel drive. But as grumpy as this review is making me sound, I was indeed affected by moments like this:

There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Mind Picking : The Man of Mode

It's not a copyright abuse for a Mom to copy/paste a student newspaper article onto her blog, as a digital scrapbook, is it? I hope not because I want to share this:

The Man of Mode

 Mar 27, 2014  Will Wellington  Arts & Culture  0

---

The School of English and Theatre Studies’ Winter 2014 MainStage Productions presented a modern remaining of George Etherege’s 1676 comedy, The Man of Mode, influenced by John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. photo by Stacey Aspinall.

The School of English and Theatre Studies’ Winter 2014 Mainstage Production of The Man of Mode underwhelmed, but represented a step in the right direction.

Campus theatre-lovers have few major theatrical occasions to anticipate. They have the directing class, or “409,” festival in the Fall semester; the annual Curtain Call musical; the “Ensemble Festival” in the Winter; and the Mainstage Production every Fall and Winter semester, directed and designed by theatre professors and built and performed by students for course credit. Mainstage Productions often feature large casts and ambitious designs. They are, presumably, meant to be the best the theatre program has to offer.

Last semester’s 1984: Room 101 was an embarrassment technically, politically, and aesthetically. Turandot, in Winter 2013, took far too much time to deliver far too few laughs. And the Fall 2013 production of If We Were Birds featured a stunning design by Professor Pat Flood that, unfortunately, outshone the lackluster performances.

Despite this spotty track record, I was excited for The Man of Mode. The script, the cast, and the central directorial conceit – namely, the decision to set George Etherege’s 1676 comedy in director John Hughes’ the world of The Breakfast Club – all suggested that this show would be a welcome improvement. The Man of Mode tells the story of the scoundrel Dorimant (Gordon Harper), who falls in love with the resistant Harriet (Felicity Campbell), but first must shake off his ex-girlfriend, Mrs. Loveit (Kennedy Thompson), and his current mistress, Belinda (Maya Stein), with the help of the chatty Mr. Medley (Jake Fulton) and the clueless Sir Fopling Flutter (Danielle Fernandes).

It sounded like fun, more than one could say for 1984, Turandot, or If We Were Birds. And it was fun. The music was fun. The dancing was fun. The Day-Glo, eighties-kitsch design – for which the crew and the wonderful Pat Flood must be commended – was fun. And a number of very fun performances carried the show for its lengthy duration. Thompson gave the third compelling performance of her first year as the beleaguered Mrs. Loveit, delivering the antiquated dialogue with clarity, variety, and great comic timing. Marc Quintaneiro and Rebecca Kelly played older characters with focus and precision. And Ariel Slack played the daffy Lady Townley with laudable conviction.

Thompson and Slack specifically impressed with performances as loud and tacky as the décor. Unfortunately, not all of the cast could out-act the scenery, and often the central action was the least interesting thing on stage. The major performances, with the notable exception of Thompson, were undistinguished. Harper, Fernandes, and Citron (who featured in the subplot) performed competently enough, but they have all done better. Fulton failed to live up to the comic potential he displayed in last semester’s 409 Festival, barreling through his lines in a monotone, and Campbell was a decidedly bland romantic lead. Director Scott Duchesne’s method for enlivening a flat scene seemed to be to invent some peripheral amusement to distract the audience, often involving the stoned Lady Townley.

It is telling that the biggest laughs went to Ben Williams, whose character had a negligible influence on the plot and who did little more than saunter on and off stage in a pair of voluminous bell-bottoms and a wig. Regrettably, despite all the engaging marginalia, one could not help noticing the central action and that it was so often dull. Like the early scene where Dorimant and Medley perched in swivel chairs to swap lifeless exposition, the scenes without any background activity tended to droop.

John Hughes never seemed to have trouble with exposition. He may be most remembered for his affectionate vision, but his best movies (think of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) are so effective because they are so precisely styled, so efficiently choreographed. By uniting style and substance, they imbue even the chore of exposition with pizzazz. The Man of Modemay have had some style, but it had too little substance. In its nifty design, its standout performances, and its sense of fun, it represented a step forward for The School of English and Theatre Studies, but campus theatre-lovers continue to go unsatisfied.

Later Edit:

With Kennedy and Zach both working at the pork plant this summer, but working in different areas, they didn't always have the same breaks and would meet different people. Zach mentioned casually to someone that he and his girlfriend, Kennedy, would be doing something or other, and the guy replied, "That's not the Kennedy who goes to Guelph, is it?"

Zach replied, "Uh, yeah."

"And was she the one who got those amazing reviews for the play she was in?"

"Uh, yeah."

"She must be really good, eh?" This guy then explained that, as he will be starting at the U of Guelph in September, he has been reading all the archived school papers online and was impressed by what he had learned about this Kennedy person.

Of course.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.

Part travelogue, part history lesson, and part science journal, in The Sixth Extinction author Elizabeth Kolbert assembles more than enough evidence to support a fairly uncontroversial claim: Throughout the history of the Earth there have been five major extinction events (like the presumed asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs), and while it may be happening too slowly for us to realise it, we are in the midst of the sixth such extinction event -- a catastrophe in the making which can be laid squarely at the feet of the Earth's "weediest" species: man.

While Kolbert explains how current global warming and the acidification of the oceans will lead to an acceleration of the loss of climate-sensitive species, she also outlines how, from first contact with the Neanderthals in Europe or with the megafauna of North America and beyond, humans have always been the extinctionators, wiping out every species that can't keep up reproductively with our marauding ways. This is a risky line of reasoning, however, as it removes any responsibility to change: we've always done this, it's human nature, the fruits of sitting at the apex of evolution, and really, if there hasn't been an appreciable consequence for killing off the mastodons, what's really the harm of melting the ice caps and saying farewell to the last of the polar bears? There are aesthetic and certainly moral reasons for protecting them, but Kolbert doesn't get into all that.

In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert travels the globe, joining researchers as they monitor at-risk species. Whether golden frogs in Panama, brown bats in New York State, or a Sumatran rhino at the Cincinnati zoo, you get the sense that Kolbert is getting there just in time to say goodbye to creatures who will never be seen in the wild again, and while these looming extinctions can be blamed on human actions, I couldn't have prevented any of them and again this removes any sense of responsibility or even urgency regarding them. (Apparently all the Central and South American amphibians and North American bats are being decimated by -- two different -- fungal infections introduced by international travellers, and in addition to the loss of habitat and poaching that we all know has put large forest animals at risk, Southeast Asians are now snorting ground rhino horn as a high-class party drug.) Again, what's really missing is how all of this is going to affect humans: will the loss of all the amphibians and bats lead to swarms of West Nile Disease-spreading mosquitoes? Will the acidification of the oceans stop at killing off the coral reefs (admittedly tragic) or lead to the collapse of the food chain and the fishing stocks that we actually rely on (an outcome that we'd be more likely to fight against)? Remember Sean Connery in the movie Medicine Man, finding the cure for cancer when he ground up one particular bug that lived in one particular flower in the Amazonian Rain Forest? Imagine him shouting, "I found a cure for the plague of the 20th century, and now I've lost it!" and then read:

As we don't know, even to the nearest million, how many tropical insect species there are, we're not likely to notice if one or two or even ten thousand of them have vanished.

Imagine not knowing to the nearest million! And then imagine, providing that they don't actually hold the cure for cancer, that even a million tropical insect species disappear overnight -- does it matter? Some local, specialised food chains will be disrupted (from plants to birds to mammals), they'll probably even all go extinct along with the insects they relied upon, but other species will move in (from plants to birds to mammals) and humans will probably not even be affected -- or notice. That's cold-hearted, and doesn't really represent how I think, but nothing in The Sixth Extinction rallies against it; indeed, there's very little concluded at all.

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world.

Big ideas -- things we as individuals can affect, like climate change -- are not really the focus of this book. Rather, it asserts that we are a species who have always changed the balance of diversity and we continue to do so, perhaps even to the detriment of our own lives; we may be ushering in the age of the intelligent rat society. Or perhaps not -- we are great adapters, after all. If anything, this book made me more optimistic that we can survive the extinction event that we're causing (that we have been causing for tens or hundreds of centuries), and I'm sure that wasn't Kolbert's point. But what was her point? This bit near the end left me scratching my head:

If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap.

This is the first time that Kolbert lays responsibility on the reader and it only made me feel defensive: I didn't strangle the last Great Auk, I'm not snorting ground rhino horn, and I'm not the Typhoid Mary who infected all the golden frogs with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. And know what else? I didn't spend four years jet-setting around four continents to gather research for a book. But I know, I know, like Al Gore and David Suzuki, Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental sins don't count because she's getting the message out. However, in this case, I don't know what the message was.

The Day of the Triffids

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

I don't think I could have stumbled onto a more timely book: Comet showers blind the majority of the Earth's population (likely somehow caused by the Cold War era Russians and their sneaky weaponisation of space) while lethal GMOs are (literally) running amok. Think The Walking Dead meets Little Shop of Horrors by way of Jurassic Park with José Saramago's Blindness thrown in. Imagine waking up sighted but the great majority of the people around you are huddled, moaning and weeping with fear, some jumping out windows to escape their horror. There are already fallen bodies in the streets, some obviously murdered, and the power and other services are off; probably forever. Disregarding for a moment how unlikely it would be that a person's first reaction to blindness would be suicide, just looking around at the hundreds or thousands of essentially helpless people you see falling apart around you, ask yourself: How likely are you to be a selfless hero, to gather everyone together and start taking care of them? Or, like our protagonist Bill Masen, would you initially step over the bodies, careful to remain out of range of the grasping hands, and make your way to the pub for a brandy? 

I say timely because, not only are the Russians presently rattling their sabers, but I have been reading way too many books lately about how we're on the brink of the end of civilisation, if not the end of the world itself, and GMOs are no doubt more mistrusted right now than they were 60 years ago when The Day of the Triffids first appeared. 

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

It's all so fragile -- isn't it? -- and that's something we all know; a fact that's probably even truer today than it was when John Wyndham wrote this book; if anything we've drawn nearer to the brink and become even more reliant on technology. This was an interesting and exciting read, but it was also philosophical about what kind of a society can be created post-apocalypse: We've all seen Rick Grimes gathering the helpless together, and we'd probably all like to think that we'd be the to-serve-and-protect-Sheriff-type in that situation, but faced with limited resources and great needs -- and under constant threat from the killer triffids -- what would I do? And no matter what choices I make for myself, how could I influence or resist the choices that other survivors might try to impose upon me because of their visions for a new society? Good stuff, leaving me with plenty to think on.

The Ice Bridge

Starlings are not native to Canada, having been introduced by the Acclimation Society of North America in the 1800s in order to transplant to the U.S. every bird species found in Shakespeare's plays. Although they have acclimated very well -- thousands of them even spending their winters in snow-covered Canada -- many consider starlings to be a pest species, crowding out the native birds and causing a nuisance with their noise and waste. Interesting choice then for D. R. MacDonald to name his female lead, the California artist who flees her broken marriage for the isolation of Cape Breton, Anna Starling.

The Ice Bridge (also known as Anna From Away) is a meditation on loss and solitude told from the shifting perspective of two characters: Anna Starling and Red Murdoch -- a life-long resident of the area who is mourning the recent death of his one great love, Rosaire. The two are an interesting contrast: Anna's loneliness could be attributed to her own choices (a weak commitment to her marriage and a desire to run away) while Murdoch's is heart-wrenching (he took loving care of Rosaire as she wasted away from a brain tumour). They muse on and then discuss the failings of their own parents' marriages and it's interesting to consider that Murdoch had enjoyed the strongest relationship, though he and Rosaire had never married (or even lived together). They both find redemption through their art (Murdoch in his carpentry shop and forge and Anna with her drawings), and they also find healing in nature while acknowledging that the unspoiled surroundings were at risk of change: with no local economic opportunities, many residents were renting out family homes as summer cottages or selling outright to foreigners, while some of the younger folks, those who don't move away, consider riskier business (I was amused that Murdoch would be so against the drug trade when his family had tacitly supported earlier rum-running).

MacDonald's prose is lovely and lyrical, and especially when describing nature scenes, but the plot here was a little thin to me -- these were two unequal griefs and Anna's casual attitudes towards sex and drugs, along with her unrepentant disloyalties, made her fairly unlikeable; too much the pesky starling amongst the domestic sparrows. In Breagh, however, is a glimmer of hope -- she bridges the generations, remaining loyal to her roots while fashioning Celtic-themed clothes for the summer tourists to buy (and it's interesting, again, that she doesn't need a man in her life to get along).

Although The Ice Bridge updates many of the same themes, I much preferred MacDonald's Cape Breton Road, and insofar as it tells a similar tale of criminal enterprise, I preferred the plot of Lisa Moore's Caught. 

I probably had more than a one star difference in my enjoyment of The Ice Bridge compared to Cape Breton Road, but such is a 5 star rating system. Other spoilery things I liked in this book was the scene where Anna witnessed the dog thrown from the bridge (and her later agony over the scene, worked out through her art) and the scene where Anna falls through the ice and Murdoch saves her. I've mused before about the disadvantage that second wives must have when it comes to not having "grown up" with their spouse during the lean and hungry years, and this scene captures some of that:

"Chet, my husband, sold his solid, safe Volvo sedan and bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle." She could see it, smell its exhaust. A simple-minded Freudian machine, gleaming between his thighs. From those high handlebars he'd slung his thin physique. On a downtown street one morning she had suddenly seen him blare by, hearing the Harley first, the chesty accelerating stroke of its engine, then looking up to spot his ponytail flying, his chin high, and she had actually admired him for those two or three seconds, that rushed grainy image of him, a person he might have been, braver, bolder in some way that mattered, but could never be except for mere moments in his wife's eyes, she who had been his lover once, at maybe the best time of her life, of his life. Did Alicia Snow know that, would she reckon with it? Anna knew things about Chet that Alicia would never know or notice because she wasn't looking for them. But now Anna wondered how fair this memory of him was, how she might easily exaggerate its vividness, mock it. Surely he could call up selective memories of her, embarrassing, unflattering. Had he? "His girlfriend liked to ride on the seat behind him. I never would've."

I shudder at the idea of Dave mocking me, and the most vulnerable moments of my life to which only he had been the witness, to someone new. Double-edged sword, that. 

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

won•der [wuhn-der] verb
1. to think or speculate curiously.
2. to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe; marvel.
3. to doubt.

What a curious title Richard Dawkins chose for the first part of his memoir -- An Appetite for Wonder -- since he proceeds to make the case that he was never particularly filled with wonder as a child (a fact that was something of a disappointment to his wonder-filled parents). This should have been a fascinating life story: Dawkins was born in Africa at the twilight of the British Empire; he attended a British boarding school, complete with bullies, "fagging", and at least one pedophile; he studied at Oxford alongside of a lot of sciency people that he name-drops (I had only heard of Desmond Morris); he lectured at Berkley in the 60s and participated in some of the counter-culture there (which he now regrets as youthful naiveté); he returned to Oxford where he wrote some of the earliest computer programming; and he became a successful author, popularizing (if not originating) the contemporary genetic theories of the early 70s (although he did coin the word "meme") in The Selfish Gene.

It should have been fascinating, but that list I just typed is way more interesting and far less annoying than the unexamined, self-congratulatory, self-referencing bloviation that Dawkins compiled here. I listened to this on audiobook (which Dawkins himself narrated very well) and right now I can't find the quote, but when talking about the death of his mentor, Mike Cullen, Dawkins said something like, "His life cannot be summed up better than in the eulogy I wrote and delivered for him…" and then he delivers it again for us. I can find the quote that follows this up because it has been included in others' mocking reviews: ''I almost wept when I spoke that eulogy in Wadham chapel, and I almost wept again just now when rereading it 12 years later". If there's one thing we learn in An Appetite for Wonder, it's that Dawkins is often moved by his own thoughts and words.

But for the most part, this is quite a dull book (and especially the very long and detailed descriptions of experiments Dawkins performed at Oxford on chick-pecking and fly-grooming behaviours) with songs and poems and his positive book reviews thrown in (three bad reviews for The Selfish Gene were attributed to two left-wing extremists and one on the opposite side of the spectrum). 

The subtitle of this book (The Making of a Scientist) is also just barely addressed -- Dawkins' father, a biologist and alumnus, pulled some strings to get his barely qualified son into Oxford, but since the young Dawkins didn't have the marks for Biochemistry, he was offered a spot in Zoology. After a lifetime of preferring novels to exploring the countryside and a school career of pointedly refusing to visit the observatory or to take advantage of the other "marvelous facilities", Dawkins allowed his father to pull some strings and make him a scientist (and, of course, this was a happy circumstance because I'm not denying that Dawkins has made many fine contributions). 

Based on this book, Joseph Anton, and God is not Great I have come to the realisation that my idea of hell (which, ironically, none of the three authors believe in) would be to be locked in a room with Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Hitchens as they debate which one of them is the greatest genius; a wonder for which I have zero appetite.

I should be generous and include the one story that I liked: Dawkins' grandparents lived on a farm on the coast of England, and when WWII broke out, it wasn't uncommon for them to see German bombers flying overhead as the planes returned home. Once, while Grandpa Dawkins was riding his bicycle, he saw a German bomber drop his payload on what, from his perspective, was the homestead where his family was. Overwrought, he threw his bicycle into the ditch and ran all the way home. That was an amazing image to me.

And I should also complain that Dawkins has plenty of venom when speaking about religion (ie, equating God with Santa as ways that we unfortunately undermine children's faculties for critical thinking). He even says that he believes that (as per a family joke) had he been swapped with another baby who had been born on the same day at the same hospital -- a boy born to religious missionaries -- he believes that he would still have been an atheist. I can't imagine what evolutionary advantage to genes it would be to be an atheist, but I suppose I'll need to defer to Dawkins' expertise here.

The Inconvenient Indian

Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America just won this year's RBC Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction and I must confess that I find it a curious choice. Although the stories he shares are undoubtedly true, he prefaces the book by saying that this is not a conventional history because then he "would be obliged to pay attention to the demands of scholarship and work within an organized and clearly delineated chronology". It is, rather, "a series of conversations and arguments that I've been having with myself and others for most of my adult life", but out of respect for history "I've salted my narrative with those things we call facts, even though we should know by now that facts will not save us". Definitely not a work of fiction, but I am still musing about how this book fits whatever criteria the RBC Taylor Prize committee considers.

In any event, I really wanted to like this book. Reading the author bio, I was struck by the fact that he was a Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge at the same time that I was a student there -- and I did take two courses in his field way back then. The first (intro) course was taught by a soft-spoken Professor -- a Native man in braids and a bone choker -- who told us stories; fascinating mythologies and cultural anecdotes. What I remember most about the course was that there were no tests, just one research paper -- on any Native topic we chose, and I wrote an overview of the Tlingit nation. Could that have been Professor King? (The second course was taught by a fierce and brilliant Native woman who first told me about most of the outrages I encountered in this book -- and she made such an impression on me at the time that I might have been caught up in a chant of "Where are the warriors?" had one broken out.) In a nice symmetry, King is now a Professor at the university where my daughter studies. I am also interested in books about Natives (fiction and non-fiction) because, not only do I join my voice with those whom King mocks as constantly asking "What do the Indians want", but as I'm 1/8 Mik'miq (enough blood for me to have first cousins with Status cards) I have family history of my own to add to the conversation.

But, as much as I wanted to like it, here are some of the problems that I have with The Inconvenient Indian:

Out of ignorance, disregard, frustration, and expediency, North America set about creating a single entity, an entity that would stand for the whole.

The Indian.

Or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have said, “One name to rule them all, One name to find them, One name to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”

After making that complaint, King proceeds to lump all of the North American settlers together as "the Whites", and no matter how systemic the policies of extermination and assimilation may have been, I am no more responsible for the massacre at Wounded Knee than I am for the racism he has personally experienced -- yet we are, indeed, all lumped together. And speaking of assimilation:

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated," could well have been spoken by John A. Macdonald and Andrew Jackson. Or Stephen Harper and George W. Bush.

I have no idea who Stephen Harper or George W. Bush have tried to assimilate -- lumping them together makes it sounds like a reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars -- but as wrong-headed as those invasions may appear in retrospect, who were they attempting to assimilate? Actually, every time King mentions Prime Minister Harper he does it with a sneer and that may reflect the author's views as an ivory tower elite as much as his views as a Native man. This comes off as very petty when he mocks Harper for a "stingy" apology -- which apology Harper made in reference to the abominable Residential School System in 2008 to an assembled group of First Nations in the House of Commons -- an apology that at the time was accepted and promised the beginning of healing. (King also complains that the Native elders who attended the ceremony dressed themselves like "Dead Indians" -- in feathered headdresses and buckskin -- but I fail to see how that was anyone's decision but their own.) Another complaint:

North America defends democracy as the cornerstone of social, religious, and political enlightenment because it is obliged to think well of itself and its institutions.

And:

You might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism.

Throughout The Inconvenient Indian, King demonizes not just Christianity (for which I empathise with his view re Natives) but also democracy and capitalism. I've heard it said before that it's not fair for "the Whites" (to use King's term) to judge the Native population by how well they participate in our economy -- unemployment on reserves is often shocking -- but I honestly thought that Natives (to lump them together a la King) wanted for there to be more employment opportunities available to them (and this is apparently just another form of paternalism). And it wasn't before I read this book that I understood why Native bands push back against individual members having title to property -- I have often heard that idea proposed (not only would individuals then have some capital to invest or start businesses, but home ownership might spark the pride that would prompt people to take better care of their houses) -- but I do now see how that could lead to a band losing their entire reserve, piece by piece, within a few generations (and I agree that's more likely due to tricky developers than the Natives' inability to make good financial decisions). What I don't understand is how the individual Native bands can thrive or even survive if they don't participate in the capitalism and democracy that surrounds them -- and King doesn't offer any solutions (even regretting the lucrative casinos that some bands have opened).

The question of "What do the Indians want?" is turned around to "What do the Whites want?" and King answers: land. That's really simplistic -- I have never in my life met anyone who wishes that the Natives would just dry up and blow away so that we can finally get their land (and remember -- I lived in Lethbridge, Alberta at the same time that King encountered terrible racism there). I have met many people who, like me, wonder often: how do we help the Natives? As a lumped together group, they are certainly not invisible here in Canada (and, yes, most of the news we see is negative) and I don't know one person who thinks the status quo is fine -- but that swings both ways: as much as no one wants to see children in northern Labrador  huffing gasoline or a toddler in Alberta  shot through the walls of her home, no one has a lot of patience for Native occupiers attacking elderly folks  or reports of millions of dollars being mismanaged by tribal councils while the reserves they govern suffer horrifying poverty. King says that it comes down to sovereignty, but like a lot of people, I don't really understand what that means: for Native bands to continue to receive millions of dollars from the federal government with no accountability; even to each band's membership? For the government of Canada not to intervene on the reserves, even when they become a haven for black marketeering? Recently, the government of Canada has ceded greater responsibility for education to the reserves, along with a couple billion in new funding, but is the government not then allowed to monitor those education results?

What I do know is that The Inconvenient Indian is an angry book. Even the humour -- said to be hilarious and sagacious and represented in the quotes I used above -- is really just snarky and off-putting. 500 years of mistreatment by "the Whites" should cause anger in "the Indians" and the glacial pace of treaty settlements in Canada is a national embarrassment -- something must be done -- but, although King writes as though the occupation in Caledonia, for example, was justified, the rest of Canada just sees armed terrorists in masks and I don't see how this new militancy will lead to settlements. I don't know if most Natives know that the vast majority of the rest of Canada wants for them to be happy and healthy and pursuing whatever lifestyle will most fulfill them, but if they want for us all to band together to put pressure on the federal government to do the right thing once and for all, we'll need to be won over: think Martin Luther King instead of Idle No More (because blockading commuter trains and allowing yourself to be represented by the bumbling Chief Theresa Spence gains no supporters where I live). 

The Inconvenient Indian is a valuable collection of the historical injustices done in the names of colonialism and expansionism and also an interesting look into the mind of "one of Canada's premier Native public individuals" -- it's certainly a worthwhile read -- but its anger often rubbed me the wrong way and it lacked a vision for the future; fatal flaws to me. 

The Goldfinch

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you...You see one painting, I see another…it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but -- a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.

I'm starting with this meditation on the nature of art because I believe that it's the whole point of my reaction to The Goldfinch -- this book did work its way into my mind and heart, and judging from other readers' reviews, that isn't a universal experience, and that has to be okay: I reckon it isn't expected to be. 

I am glad that I actually, physically, read this book because, although I have heard that the audio version is pretty good, I found the punctuation to be so purposeful and artful that it served its own role; that of the brushstrokes and paint layering and structural choices found in the eponymous painting itself. An example (random and perhaps not perfectly illustrative of my point):

Delivery boys from D'Agostino's and Gristede's pushed carts laden with groceries; harried executive women in heels plunged down the sidewalk, dragging reluctant kindergarteners behind them; a uniformed worker swept debris from the gutter into a dustpan on a stick; lawyers and stockbrokers held their palms out and knit their brows as they looked up at the sky. As we jolted up the avenue (my mother looking miserable, clutching at the armrest to brace herself) I stared out the window at the dyspeptic workaday faces (worried-looking people in raincoats, milling in grim throngs at the crosswalks, people drinking coffee from cardboard cups and talking on cell phones and glancing furtively from side to side) and tried hard not to think of all the unpleasant fates that might be about to befall me: some of them involving juvenile court, or jail.

At the risk of sounding all Strunk & White fangirl, the punctuation in that passage delights me as much as the visuals it paints -- the semicolons and parenthesis, and then that final colon -- it may only be speaking to me, but these are masterstrokes to my eye. I know there are complaints about the long summing-up paragraphs at the end of this book, but the fact that some bits are in square brackets totally redeems them to me (nerdly, I know). This was such a visual book, but again, I understand if I am in a minority of readers who valued the craft as much as the plot. In the end, it's analogous to the fact that this work affects me:

While this does not:

Both are considered masterpieces, yet they don't speak to me -- personally -- equally. And The Goldfinch affected me in such a strange and personal way -- I was anxious and disturbed throughout much of the book; and not just because I was worried about the fates of the characters (and especially Theo) and the painting. What I found most disturbing was the way that so many characters refused to answer questions that were put to them: from Theo not responding to the investigators and counsellors he first meets; to Boris showing up and not answering any questions about where he's taking Theo and why; to Kitsey refusing to respond to the accusations Theo levels at her. This was a peculiar level of tension that Donna Tartt maintained -- periodically reminding me of -- over the course of a long book, and in my reading experience, I am grateful to any book that provokes an emotional reaction from me -- whether positive or negative. And of course most of my feelings were negative: I would agree that most of the characters are unlikeable, and anyone who would call this story Dickensian would be forgetting the fact that orphans in Dickens novels tend to be plucky urchins who fight against and overcome unfairness and adversity while Theo succumbs to and wallows in his tragedies. 

And, sure, there was an unevenness to the plot -- I really enjoyed the beginning part in NYC (even forgiving logical lapses like how Theo escaped the museum -- with the painting -- undetected) and found the initial part of the section in Las Vegas, with Boris, to be amazing. In a review for The New York Times, Stephen King wrote, "Tartt depicts the friendship of these two cast-adrift adolescent boys with a clarity of observation I would have thought next to impossible for a writer who was never part of that closed male world: the interminable talk and speculation, the endless TV watching and pizza eating, the dope smoking and small thefts, the kind of rapport in which a single cocked eyebrow can provoke howls of helpless laughter." But it went on for too long, in my opinion; too much of the same with the drugs and the movies and the stolen candy for dinner. And I didn't love Theo's new life in New York (after the initial reunion with Hobie, which I did like) but it picked up again when Boris drops back into the scene. Over all, this book was probably too long; the subject matter not requiring an epic (even if it took 12 years to write, and one assumes, had much edited out as it was). 

But that's the big picture -- the painting viewed from a distance -- that doesn't appreciate the small strokes that can only be seen from up close. I appreciated this bit as it sums up my own worldview:

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love.

And these moments of irony stuck out to me:

"People die, sure,” my mother was saying. “But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle."

And:

There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

And to those who would complain that there is too much irony in The Goldfinch -- too many Dickensian coincidences to make it believable -- Tartt makes a pre-emptive response: After Boris explains why all of the coincidences may point to the steering hand of God or fate, Theo says, "I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.' " Boris replies, "Yes -- but why give it a name? Can't they both be the same thing?" Well, can't they? Another point that Tartt made in this book:

That life — whatever else it is — is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

Tartt was swinging for the fences in writing The Goldfinch; attempting to create art; the appreciation of which is always a subjective experience. It worked for me, may not work for you, but as always, I admire those who try to transcend and make something that "Death doesn't touch".