Love Everlasting

I listened to this short audiobook and my only complaint would be that it clipped along a little too quickly; there was little time to consider the words and phrases that had been selected so carefully by these famous men in writing to their loves. The biographical information on each couple was almost more interesting than the letters themselves. For instance, the eventual suicide pact between Heinrich von Kleist and the terminally ill Henriette Vogel made his letter all the more poignant. (I wish I could find it online to add it here because it was so touching to me.)

In this age of texts and IMs, many young people don't even email each other anymore. I wonder if the age of the love letter has passed, if there will ever again be something as permanent, and especially, I wonder if, by not taking the time to consider and name their feelings, if young people today might not even be aware of the depth of their love, for in a sense, to name is to know.*

A standout from this collection, to me, is George Bernard Shaw's letter to ‘Stella’ Beatrice Campbell. It dispenses with the flowery and romantic language of many of the other letters and seems, somehow, more authentic; the type of letter I would want to receive.

February 27, 1913.To ‘Stella’ Beatrice CampbellI want my rapscallionly fellow vagabond.I want my dark lady. I want my angel -I want my tempter.I want my Freia with her apples.I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour,laughter, music, love, life and immortality ... I wantmy inspiration, my folly, my happiness,my divinity, my madness, my selfishness,my final sanity and sanctification,my transfiguration, my purification,my light across the sea,my palm across the desert,my garden of lovely flowers,my million nameless joys,my day’s wage,my night’s dream,my darling andmy star...George Bernard Shaw 

This collection ends with a letter from Lewis Carroll to a ten-year-old girl he had befriended. Knowing that he was infatuated with the young girl Alice (who had inspired his famous books), I found this creepy and wondered at its inclusion.

Christ Church, Oxford, October 28, 1876My Dearest Gertrude,—You will be sorry, and surprised, and puzzled, to hear what a queer illness I have had ever since you went. I sent for the doctor, and said, "Give me some medicine. for I'm tired." He said, "Nonsense and stuff! You don't want medicine: go to bed!" I said, "No; it isn't the sort of tiredness that wants bed. I'm tired in the face."He looked a little grave, and said, "Oh, it's your nose that's tired: a person often talks too much when he thinks he knows a great deal." I said, "No, it isn't the nose. Perhaps it's the hair."Then he looked rather grave, and said, "Now I understand: you've been playing too many hairs on the pianoforte." "No, indeed I haven't!" I said, "and it isn't exactly the hair: it's more about the nose and chin."Then he looked a good deal graver, and said, "Have you been walking much on your chin lately?" I said, "No." "Well!" he said, "it puzzles me very much. Do you think it's in the lips?" "Of course!" I said. "That's exactly what it is!"Then he looked very grave indeed, and said, "I think you must have been giving too many kisses." "Well," I said, "I did give one kiss to a baby child, a little friend of mine." "Think again," he said; "are you sure it was only one?" I thought again, and said, "Perhaps it was eleven times." Then the doctor said, "You must not give her any more till your lips are quite rested again." "But what am I to do?" I said, "because you see, I owe her a hundred and eighty-two more."Then he looked so grave that tears ran down his cheeks, and he said, "You may send them to her in a box." Then I remembered a little box that I once bought at Dover, and thought I would some day give it to some little girl or other. So I have packed them all in it very carefully. Tell me if they come safe or if any are lost on the way.Lewis Carroll 

*And, as it turns out, I'm not the only one musing romantic on the death of the love letter as this February 14th article explains:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/14/expressing-affairs-of-the-heart-frivolous-emails-texts-have-replaced-the-sappy-love-letter/

Mind Picking : Jeopardy!

Stretching ourselves for $200, Alex

Several years ago, my younger daughter said to me, “You're the smartest woman I know.”

Modesty, if nothing else, made me protest, “I don't know about that – just look at your aunts. One has an MBA, one is a CGA, and one left a good career to become an RMT, wanting to heal people. They all go to work every day and prove just how smart they are.”

“That’s the point,” my daughter replied. “They all spent a lot of time and money on school and now they work hard every day while you sit around the house doing anything you like. That’s why you are the smartest woman I know.”

Of course, I protested that being a stay-at-home mom is both a privilege and a sacrifice, that not having opportunities to go out and prove myself can be a little soul crushing – no dice. I didn’t change her basic assumption.

Fast forward to early this January, and while watching Jeopardy with my husband he turned to me and said, “Honey, you’re the smartest person I know. You should try out for this.”

There was a message on the screen that there will be an upcoming contestant audition in Toronto and a website was provided for the online test. I turned to him and said, “Everyone knows how easy it is to shout out answers in your living room. I would only embarrass myself if I was on TV.”

“What have you got to lose?” he asked.

I shrugged, but I knew the answer. I would never risk making myself look foolish. I would rather have people in my life think that I’m a reasonably intelligent and polished person than be publicly exposed as nervous and hesitant.

And that’s assuming I would pass the online test and the live audition!

What if I failed to even qualify? And then I began to worry to myself. What if I actually got on the show? I have nothing, no story at all, that I could talk about with Alex during the contestant interview. I’d look like an idiot.

I actually worried about this. I live a quiet, happy, conflict-free life that provides few interesting anecdotes. Certainly nothing worthy of television.

But then I thought about my daughters, about how I could be a better role-model for taking risks and I did the online test.

It was much easier than I thought it would be. I was answering questions without hesitation, confident in everything I typed, and then on question 49, the screen went blank. I don't know what happened, but I’m assuming my test didn’t go through.

Yet, I’m pleased. I took this first step towards trying something uncomfortable and writing this story down, thinking about sharing it at the risk of looking foolish is another step in that direction.

To anyone reading, maybe this can be the year we all stretch ourselves a little. And if I ever do get on Jeopardy, maybe I'll even have a story to tell.

As it appeared in the Cambridge Times.

1Q84

A true story:

When I was in high school, during an evening of sharing freaky but true stories with my friends, Nancy said that she was going to tell us something she had never told anyone before. Apparently, when she was a young girl, she would periodically be visited by Little People in the middle of the night. She would know they were coming when she woke up in her bed feeling paralyzed. Her eyes were the only part of her that she could move and she would scan the baseboards, knowing that that's where they would appear. First a few splinters would fall away, and then a hole would be visible, through which numerous small, gnome-like figures would materialise. Without fail, one would jump up on her bed, climb onto her chest and begin talking to her, chattering away and, according to Nancy, making sure that she couldn't tell what the rest of them were up to. No matter how she tried, Nancy couldn't move or speak, and although the gnome on her chest seemed cheerful and friendly, she was terrified. After a time, the interlopers would finish their business, depart through the baseboard and replace the splinters so perfectly that Nancy could never find their entrance by the light of day. Neither could she ever remember what the gnome on her chest had been chatting about. This was not the strangest part of her story.

As I said, these visits only happened when Nancy was a young girl, and they had not occurred for some years at the telling of this story. However, just a couple of weeks before, her older brother had come to her with a strange story of his own. Apparently, Ron had spent the evening before at the drive-in with his friends, and as was his habit back then, he had been drinking heavily all evening-- enough so that he had fallen asleep and the friends he came with had left with other friends. Ron woke up just as the second movie was ending, and as he found himself alone in his truck, decided he might as well leave right then. When he went to reach for the key in the ignition, he discovered that his arm was paralyzed, soon realising that the only parts of his body he could move were his eyes. As he scanned the interior of the truck, movement caught his attention, and there, on the dash in front of him, was a small, gnome-like creature. It smiled and laughed and starting telling him that he'd be a fool to drive home in his condition. Struck with fear, he tried to agree, grunting and blinking, and the gnome disappeared. Ron was suddenly able to move again, and, seeing someone he knew in the car next to him, he was able to get a safe ride home.

Obviously, the rest of us were covered in goose bumps as Nancy told this story. She assured us that she had never once told her brother about the visits she had received from the Little People, and although the rest of us found the whole story to be more than a little terrifying, Nancy had a different view: she now believed that the gnome that had visited her brother had likely saved his life, and looking back, she couldn't ascribe any malevolent purpose to her night-time visitors; that it was all a matter of interpretation, of perspective.

This is still not the strangest part of the story, to me.

Within about six months, the movie Cat's Eye came out, and I saw it in the theater with the same group of friends. The movie is made up of three short stories by Stephen King, and in the third story, a story written specifically for the movie and not previously released in any collection, a small gnome-like ogre creature enters the room of a sleeping girl, through the baseboards. First, the wood splinters and then a hole is visible. This nasty creature enters the room, climbs onto the bed, perches on the sleeping girl's chest, and attempts to suck the breath out of her. She is only saved by the stray cat that she has been trying to convince her mother to let her keep.

I can't describe the feeling of worlds colliding that this caused; the overlapping of fantasy and reality and not quite being able to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. And after the movie, Nancy didn't want to talk about it. If I reacted so strongly, I can't even imagine how she felt. 

Oh yeah, I just checked and Cat's Eye came out in 1985. That means that Nancy likely told us this story in 1984, or 1Q84, and that brings me to the book.

I started reading this without really knowing what it was going to be about, but having read Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I figured it would be a bit of a mindbender. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the first time Tengo mentioned the Little People. My skin crawled, my heart raced, my vision narrowed. Even before anything had been described about their appearance or actions, I thought of Nancy and her night-time visitors, and whether they climb out of a dead goat's mouth or bust through the baseboards, I believe they're all the same thing. I know I have said before that I don't have much time for Magical Realism as a genre, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe that a type of magic might be real; that there are events going on beneath the surface of our everyday lives that can't be explained by science or math or logic. There's so much Jungian imagery in this book, and even though I know little about what Jung taught, I'm left believing that the Little People must be from our collective unconscious; that they represent some archetype as I understand them. 

"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat. "Ho ho," the other six joined in.

Those words filled me with an ambiguous sense of dread; like the characters in 1Q84 , I have no way of knowing if the Little People are good or evil or something else; something predating man and god and time. I know this book has some seriously mixed reviews, averaging out to being regarded as a steaming pile of staggering genius, but I wonder if the readers' experiences are mostly informed by their consciousness of the archetypes. As Tengo's father says, "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation." Without an explanation, I believe I understood this book viscerally; it started with the Little People, but everything from the town of cats to a sky with two moons seemed reasonable and somehow both ancient and timeless.

For those who don't connect to the details of the story, Murakami sprinkles several metafictional comments throughout the book, acting as a pre-emptive counterargument to his critics, such as:

One reviewer concluded his piece, "As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but the readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness'…"

Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story "put together in an exceptionally interesting way" that "carries the reader along to the very end", who could possibly call such a writer "lazy"?

To get back to Jung and archetypes and synchronicity, when I finished this novel I sat quietly turning it over in my mind for several minutes, and then stretched and got off the couch, overdue for going to bed. I glanced at the clock and it read 11:11…

But that would be a true story for another time.

An Improvised Life

At the beginning of An Improvised Life, Alan Arkin relates a conversation he once had with Madeline Kahn. As this was an audio book, I'll just paraphrase it:

Having long admired Madeline Kahn and her many talents, Arkin asks her which of these gifts was her primary focus. After thinking for a while, she couldn't really say."Well," he asks, "what did you start out wanting to do? Was your first impulse acting?""No," she replies."Singing?""No.""Playing the piano?""No.""Being a comedienne?""No.""What was the first thing you thought of doing?""Well," she said, "I used to listen to a lot of music when I was a little girl. And that's what I wanted to be. The music."

For a memoir, this is a short book, but as it's read by Alan Arkin himself, it's entertaining and sometimes thought provoking. I haven't seen that many of his movies, so my mental image is stuck pretty much at Little Miss Sunshine, and as that's about the age he was when he wrote this book, I suppose it's fitting. So, as I walked and listened, this grandfatherly figure shared some stories about how he got into acting, the struggles and sacrifices that entails, some very few stories about fellow celebrities, and quite a bit about his acting process and how he arrived at it.

I'm no actress, let alone an artist of any stripe, but I am interested in how art is created and Arkin lifts the curtain on this mystery somewhat; that strong acting is when you are the character, not just acting like the character; that, like Madeline Kahn, you become the music. 

My Week With Marilyn

I like a lightweight audio book when I'm walking, and I admit this fit the bill: no great lessons or revelations, just a self-aggrandizing story released 50 years after the events apparently took place, long after anyone else is still alive to dispute the facts.

So apparently, a 23 year old nobody, acting as the Third Assistant Director (a self-described gopher) on The Prince and the Showgirl, is the only one who can talk Marilyn Monroe into finally believing in herself. Not only that, but Colin Clark gets Marilyn to stop taking pills, to stop listening to the questionable advice of her hangers-on, to stand up to Laurence Olivier, to come to a deeper understanding of her husband (Arthur Miller at the time), and to show up on set on time and ready to work. And not only that, but Clark holds her hand through a miscarriage and refuses all sexual advances from "the most famous movie star in the world".

If one can believe every word Colin Clark says, it's even sadder to hear in the appendix that near the end of her life, Marilyn tried to get in touch with him one last time. After struggling with himself, should he call her back? shouldn't he? (why wouldn't he??), he was relieved when no one answered the phone.

He ends with:

It wasn't that I'd abandoned her, certainly not in my heart. It's just that there was no one left to save her.
Poor Marilyn. Time had run out.

Like I said, I like a lightweight audio book when I'm walking, but this one was a bit of a strain on the rolling eyeballs, most especially when the baritone British narrator put on his breathy Marilyn voice. There they go again, straining and rolling…

A Prison Diary

As I walk my doggy for an hour and a half every day, I like to take advantage of the time listening to audio books. With respect to the narrators, I get impatient with one person doing the voices of multiple characters, so I tend to listen to nonfiction, and for the past while, have been downloading mostly memoirs. As this title also fit into my mild interest in true crime and incarceration, I thought it would be a good choice for me.

I must admit that I've never read any of Archer's fiction, but given his popularity, I assumed he'd do justice to a prison diary-- and that he does. I don't know if he assumes that the reader knows the details of his conviction, but he gives none in this book beyond protesting his innocence, excoriating the associates who "set him up" , and repeating every conversation he has or letter he receives that confirms his belief that the Judge at his trial treated him unfairly. His experience seemed to mirror that of Conrad Black, A Matter of Principle, whom I'd admire, and as I listened to his prison experiences I wondered to what degree Lord Archer, like Lord Black, was a victim of a malicious prosecution.

I had to admire Archer's adherence to a 6 hour/day writing schedule behind bars (though what else did he really have to do with his time?) and he managed to collect fascinating stories from his fellow inmates. Although put in with lifers (mostly drug dealers and murderers) for his three weeks at Belmarsh, Archer appears to have met many fine men who were willing to give him protection, extra rations (of the food his Lordship was willing to eat), and a sympathetic ear. Like Lord Black, Archer found the entire experience to be a real eye-opener about the realities of justice and incarceration and the wasted opportunities to rehabilitate and educate those who might be capable of returning to society and making meaningful contributions.

On the other hand, I became bored of Archer's biggest complaints: not being able to purchase an adequate supply of bottled Highland Springs water and only once gaining access to the prison gym for a proper workout. Also annoying: as I mentioned above, I don't like when narrators do multiple voices, and at one point in this memoir, a letter is read aloud from a Dr. Chang, Optometrist, who had a customer interested in ordering a pair of frames like those Archer wore at his sentencing. The letter is read in the most offensive "chinky flied lice" accent imaginable. Why?

Like the author, I was relieved when he was transferred to a medium security prison after three weeks, and I understand that his memoir picks up at that point in the next volume (which is not available as a download from my library). Interested to learn about the details of his charges and any aftermath, I researched Jeffrey Archer and was bemused by what I found. Perhaps he was never the innocent man he protested to be, but then again, how many in prison proclaim their guilt?

In the Belly of the Beast

In a journey that began with Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, I spent some of last year indulging in true crime stories. One of the things that Pat Brown does in the book mentioned is make a clear distinction between Psychotics (who can be cured, or at least managed, with drugs) and Psychopaths (who don't have underlying medical issues but are cold and calculating and have the makings of becoming serial killers if social conditions create them that way). Intrigued by one of her stories, and by way of a recommendation found in the writings of Dominick Dunne, I read The Executioner's Song, in which Norman Mailer wrote a "nonfiction novel" about the killer Gary Gilmore and his quest to compel the state to enforce his sentence of execution.

As the story goes, while assembling vast amounts of material into his book, Norman Mailer was contacted by Jack Henry Abbott, an incarcerated convict, who offered to educate the novelist about the real inside workings of penitentiaries and the criminal mind, an offer that, based upon the intriguing voice of the convict's correspondence, Mailer eagerly accepted. I found The Executioner's Song to be a bit sterile and bloated, but was intrigued by the relationship that Mailer developed with Abbott and was led to In the Belly of the Beast.

If half of what Abbott writes is true about sensory deprivation, starvation, torture and humiliation by prison guards, constant/crippling fear of other prisoners and the emasculation/infantilization of the prisoners, then it's easy to see his point about how it's the penitentiaries themselves that turn budding psychopaths into full-blown murderers. I could only console myself that he was writing of a time 40 or more years ago and the treatment of prisoners must be improved by now; that I may as well have been reading about a Dickensian workhouse for how removed the situation is from what I assume to be reality today.

Mailer thought that Abbott, a self-taught expert on everything from Philosophy to History, was a literary genius, deserving of another chance in society (although to be fair, he didn't agree with the killer's Marxist views). Lending his weight at a parole hearing, and offering a job to the convict, Mailer was able to get Abbott released and they were soon gratified to see Abbott's correspondence to the novelist edited into this volume. Within six weeks, Jack Henry Abbott had killed again and went on the run.

I suppose that looking into the aftermath of this book has very little to do with what lies between its covers, but since Abbott spends most of the book blaming society in general and the penitentiary system in particular for the man he had become, it might be instructive to consider (as Pat Brown, the criminal profiler, would) to what extent his psychopathic tendencies were at play during the writing of these letters; to what extent the convict was conning the novelist into giving him another chance at freedom and at killing.

I don't know if it's appropriate to talk about whether I "liked" this book or not (I can't say if I did, truly) but it is an interesting piece to fit in to my reading journey of late.

The Snow Child

I've seen this book listed as an example of Magical Realism, and as that is a genre that really doesn't resonate with me, I think that it might miss the mark with The Snow Child. I feel alienated from the characters in books like Song of Solomon and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as though there is no way that I can identify with characters who could just fly away from their problems, literally, but since these novels are celebrated as "important works", I have read them in the same spirit as I eat spinach and turnips.

But then there's The Snow Child. Books about grieving mothers always touch me, shock me and leave me weeping, and though I have not known tragedy in my own life, there's something obviously cathartic about trying on someone else's grief, teasing at the edges of the emotions one hopes to never know intimately.

Mabel and Jack have known tragedy with their only child arriving stillborn and decide, in late middle age, to relocate to the Alaska wilderness and attempt to use their New England farming skills for frontier homesteading. When a little girl they make out of snow one night is discovered knocked over the next morning, coinciding with the appearance of a mysterious little girl flitting around the edges of the woods, they have to wonder, "Is this magic? A lost child? Cabin fever?" In the land of the Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun, the answer doesn't really matter; they relocated precisely to open themselves up to new experiences.

This story follows the conventions of a fairytale, with a familiar story arc and lessons learned along the way, but as it made me cry in empathy three different times, it nourished my soul in the way that spinach and turnips never will. Eowyn Ivey, raised in Alaska, says that she had spent a lifetime of reading trying to find stories that told of her experience, but finding none, felt like an orphan in the literature of her country. Hanging her novel on the framework of an old Russian fable, she has used beautiful language (no doubt with a genetic, if not environmental, nod to the author's mother, a poet) to describe a landscape and time, though far away on each count from this Canadian, that resonated with me fully and left me sated and satisfied by the end.

Ru

In the preface to a print copy of The Darwin Awards, it warns to only read a couple of the stories per day in order to get maximum enjoyment out of them, and it's true that the stories tend to run into each other and lose whatever poignancy they might have if you slowed down and savoured them individually. I felt that Ru could have benefitted from the same warning.

The title, "Ru", is defined as: in French, a small stream, but also signifies a flow – of tears, blood or money; in Vietnamese, a lullaby. This seems to be the first of the koans one encounters, something to mull and turn over like a gumdrop in your mouth, sucking off the sugar before getting to the chewy center. Every vignette that follows, at a page or two in length, is like a koan; a riddle that might need some further thought, often ending in a gorgeous turn of phrase that cries for a savouring on the tongue, but since the scenes are so short and the next one starts right there on the next page, I found myself skipping ahead, chewing away at the sweet centers, before fully unwrapping and enjoying each treat as it came along.

Moving forward and backwards through time and space, from childhood to adulthood, Vietnam to Quebec and back again, Kim Thúy paints pictures both beautiful and ugly, and when you realise that this is essentially a memoir, the heart breaks for the disrupted childhoods, the loss of homeland, the refugee experience that Thúy describes, that Thúy has known, and the title, in both senses, is fitting and true.

It may require a reread to savour the sugar. It begins:

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns. 

I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.

I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life's duty was to prolong that of my mother.

A koan, a gumdrop, a stream, a lullaby…

Mind Picking : Why, Hello!

First of all, I must confess that I'm adding this introduction after the fact, like a year after the fact, because I realised that the in medias res first post of this blog did nothing to explain why I'm here; why now; why at all.

I had been a member of goodreads for a few years, enjoying the reviews and recommendation of strangers over there, but not really willing to add my voice to the fray...right up until the day I regretted not having kept track of every book I've ever read, for my own purposes if no other. I challenged myself to read and review 100 books in 2013 — and even in the beginning I knew that was a big goal, more than I would read in a year if it wasn't a challenge. Once I started those reviews, I realised that the books I was reading were dredging up memories — too personal for a goodreads audience, but sometimes they were things that I wanted to make a record of. After a few months, once I realised that I could probably reach that 100 book goal, I decided to finally figure out how to make a book blog and it was pretty easy to copy/paste those reviews over here.

More than just duplicating my reviews, though, I began to think: What if I did this for 10 years? What if I reviewed a thousand books? Wouldn't that be an excellent record of who I am, or for future generations, who I was? This really got me thinking: We didn't live near my grandparents or aunts and uncles and cousins when I was growing up — I don't know those people at all, and that's a regret of mine. I certainly wish I knew my grandparents better, and especially now that they're all gone, and I realised that maybe someday I will have grandchildren who might like an intimate glimpse into my mind. I know that's a bit of wishful thinking, perhaps, but here was my secondary purpose: As a stay-at-home Mom, I haven't done much to make a mark on this world (and I say that with the full knowledge that "it's the hardest job you'll ever love" and "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world", blah blah, but a permanent niche carved out in the wilderness motherhood is not) and I'm partly writing this blog to leave that mark.

A year in and I haven't said anything I'm embarrassed about, and I suppose it should be said that this isn't a record of my secret and twisted thoughts, ha ha, but it is a glimpse at what's going on in my brain. If, somehow, this is read someday by my beautiful children or their families, I hope you find some insight into where you came from. Like an ochre painting on a damp cave wall, I am simply trying to affirm I was here, adding my mark — even if somewhat anonymously — to the collective marks of all human experience.