My dad was determined to take care of me properly. He made pancakes and cookies and sewed my clothes. He was actually good at that. He was a little worse at what he regarded as an integral part of parenting: the dispensing of life advice. But, nonetheless, it was one of his favourite things to do.
Wisdom in Nonsense is the transcript of a talk that Heather O'Neill gave as part of the CLC Kreisel Lecture Series in 2017 (the Canadian Literature Centre itself having the mission “to engage in scholarship, foster research, and promote public interest in Canadian literature, with a view to enhancing an understanding of Canadian literature’s richness and diversity”). Other speakers in this series have included Margaret Atwood (on the Canadian literary landscape of the 1960s), Lynn Coady (on the digital vs physical book debate), and Tomson Highway (on the many languages and communities that have shaped him). That seems like an eclectic mandate, and for O'Neill's part, she titled her lecture, “My education. On unusual muses and mentors. And how I had to teach myself everything in order to cross the class divide.” In essence, this is a series of essays on the curious lessons her single father passed down to her (Learn to Play the Tuba [and you'll always have a job] or Never Keep a Diary [because it can be used against you in court some day]), and along the way, O'Neill reveals the gritty landscape she grew up in and the outcast characters she fraternised with; all recognisable to anyone who has read her wonderful novels. Ultimately, I don't know if this, as is, would have wide appeal (or if it really measures up to the topics other authors tackled in the Kreisel Lecture Series) but I enjoyed it well enough and would love to see the story of Heather O'Neill and her dad stretched out to book length. Random quotes –
From Lesson 6, Never tell Anyone What Your Parents Do for a Living:
By teaching me to lie about who I was, my dad instilled in me the notion that the differences were actually superficial. They were just outward trappings. And if you were to change coats with a rich person, then you would immediately become one. In life there will always be someone trying to take your personhood away. Someone trying to get you to think you are less than they are. It happens with colour, it happens with gender, it happens with class, it happens with education. There are people who will have you believe that class is hereditary. That you are less of a person. I was a child of a janitor, but he wanted me to be treated like the child of a professor of philosophy.From Lesson 8, Crime Does Pay
As a child, I was crazy about cheese. So in the evenings my father would stop at select grocery stores to steal the most expensive cheese on display. At home, he would arrange the cheese in cubes on a plate that was covered in a pattern of rabbits: blue cheese, camembert, gruyère. He would pronounce them in funny ways because he couldn't read very well. He would bring out the plate while we were watching television, and we would eat them with frilly toothpicks. We'd turn from the episode of The Benny Hill Show we were watching and nod at each other whenever the mouthful was particularly delightful.From Lesson 10, Respect Old Timers:
I feel that I need to pause for a moment and interrupt this train of thought – just in case you're getting the idea that my dad was this wonderful guy. Full disclosure: he was an asshole. There's no way around it. His behaviour was pretty shocking. He was the kind of guy who would be watering the grass, then turn the hose on someone walking by, thus instigating a fistfight. My father would always brag about the bar fights he had gotten into as a young man. He claimed that the most underrated weapon in the world is the ketchup bottle. It is inconspicuous in your hand and creates high drama when it is smashed against someone's head. In the interest of journalistic integrity, I thought I'd put that out there.This book is very short – just forty pages after the introductory bits – and I am glad for the hints it makes about the influences that O'Neill brings to her writing. It might be more interesting to watch or listen to O'Neill delivering this lecture, but it also made me curious about the rest of the books in this series. Certainly worth the time I put into it.
