Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

I am a huge admirer of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, having been fascinated by her memoirs Infidel and Nomad. With Heretic, Hirsi Ali is less autobiographical, but for the first time, she is optimistic about the future of Islam and its adherents' relationship with the rest of the world.

I believe a Muslim Reformation is coming. In fact, it may already be here. I think it is plausible that the Internet will be for the Islamic world in the twenty-first century what the printing press was for Christendom in the sixteenth.

In Infidel, Hirsi Ali divides Muslims into three broad groups, not based on doctrinal differences (like those between Sunnis and Shiites) but on philosophical approaches: Medina Muslims are the fundamentalist radicals who follow Muhammad's warrior philosophy that was first seen at Medina, and comprise about 3% of Islam (or 48 million people worldwide); Mecca Muslims are “loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence” (and make up the clear majority of Muslims, following Muhammad's first peaceful revelations at Mecca); and Modifying Muslims are those dissidents within Islam (or former Muslims, such as Hirsi Ali herself) who want to prompt a Reformation.

I have identified five precepts central to the faith that have made it resistant to historical change and adaptation. Only when these five things are recognized as inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified will a true Muslim Reformation have been achieved. The five things to be reformed are:

1. Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina;
2. The investment in life after death instead of life before death;
3. Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence;
4. The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong;
5. The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

Hirsi Ali goes into detail with these five precepts – giving historical background and demonstrating how each area is feeding the radicalisation/loss of rights that we are seeing today – and it makes for a very interesting read. I especially appreciated the notions that 1) Muslims have daily cultural reinforcements that confirm the afterlife is more pressing than the here and now (such as responding “Inshallah” or “God willing” if someone says, “See you tomorrow”), and that 2) Along with the imperative of jihad, this focus on death is what makes it so easy for a person with a certain mindset to be willing to strap on the dynamite vest, and why that person's family would be happy about it; often celebrating a suicide bomber son's death as a wedding (knowing full well that upon death he would rise to the highest level of heaven and meet his black-eyes beauties). It's that mindset that I've always found impossible to imagine fighting against – how do you stop people who want to die? 

Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that “true Islam” has somehow been “hijacked” by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.

In addition to this notion of Muslim responsibility – an appeal to the so-called Mecca Muslims to become more vocal when their radical co-religionists perpetrate outrageous acts of violence – Hirsi Ali also wants those in the West to become more vocal. In particular, she wants the “tolerant liberal multiculturalists” to become more intolerant of senseless violence; for people like Ben Affleck and President Obama to stop conflating criticism of Muslim terrorists with Islamophobia. 

Crimes against human reason and against human conscience committed in the name of Islam and shariah are already forcing a reexamination of Islamic scripture, doctrine, and law. This process cannot be stopped , no matter how much violence is used against would-be reformers. Ultimately, I believe it is human reason and human conscience that will prevail.

It is the duty of the Western world to provide assistance and, where necessary, security to those dissidents and reformers who are carrying out this formidable task.

And again, what I liked best about Infidel was that it is optimistic that change is possible, and coming from Hirsi Ali, it made me feel optimistic as well.

The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

Libraries have shaped and linked all the disparate threads of my life. The books. The weights. The tics. The harm I've caused myself and others. Even the very fact that I'm alive. How I handle my Tourette's. Everything I know about my identity can be traced back to the boy whose parents took him to a library in New Mexico before he was born.

In The World's Strongest Librarian, author Josh Hanagarne outlines the many challenges that he has faced throughout his life – extreme Tourette's, challenges to his faith in the Mormon church in which he was raised, infertility struggles with his wife – and also the bedrocks that saved him from complete despair – his supportive family, books, and weight lifting. At six-feet-seven, two hundred and sixty pounds – with a background in kettle bell training and participation in at least one Highland Games – Hanagarne likely is the strongest librarian in the world, but he's not exactly the world's best memoirist.

Each chapter in this book follows the same structure: A list of the subjects that will be dealt with (by Dewey Decimal number); a madcap story from Hanagarne's job as a librarian at the Salt Lake City Public Library (preventing the homeless from watching porn on the computers, asking security to help a schizophrenic track down the source of the voices in his head, chastising a mother who let her children rip up books – and then watching those children get slapped); followed by a related section of his own biography. In the final chapters, as Hanagarne has had time to reflect on the lessons he has learned in life, he includes long platitudes about the value of faith and family and the enduring necessity for public libraries (shocking stuff, right?) For a person who appears to have an inspirational story to tell, the book that Hanagarne wrote here just feels so flimsy and surface; there's very little blood in these bones. 

I really liked Hanagarne's description of his Tourette's and how it has impacted his life since it first appeared when he was around six. From the shunning of his classmates, to the impact it had on his Mission at 18, to the increasingly violent nature of his tics, Hanagarne certainly taught me a lot about the disorder. What he didn't do was to engage me emotionally with this part of his struggle – he shared a lot of facts without sharing his reactions – and personifying the symptoms as “a visit from Misty” (for Miss Tourette) served to further distance me as a reader; not only did I find that too cutesy, but how am I to empathise with a struggle that the author places outside of himself?

I also really liked Hanagarne's description of Mormon faith and life – without proselytising, he was able to show what a supportive and loving community he came from. I appreciated the closeness of his family (I loved that when their father told the four kids that they could each bring a friend on a fishing trip, they chose each other) but I wondered where his parents and siblings were when he was at his lowest points – they aren't really characters in Hanagarne's life story unless he wants to mention how much he loves them. When he eventually realises that he can't accept the teachings of the church on faith alone, his mother, wife and bishop are all loving and accepting of his decision, so what might have been an interesting bit of narrative tension, fizzles out.

I was really interested in Hanagarne's involvement with Dragon Door and kettle bell training and how that led him to Adam T. Glass:

Adam is a former air force tech sergeant, an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and the sort of hard-ass who describes poor haircuts as “a lack of personal excellence”, even though his hair is currently poufy and awful and makes him look like a Dragon Ball Z character.

That Glass – a man with autism – could coach Hanagarne into a mastery over Tourette's was, finally, the sort of overt triumph over adversity that makes an engaging memoir (and especially when Glass is such a fascinating character himself), but then Misty reappears and the whole kettle bell thing becomes just a weird hobby.

I admire Hanagarne – you can't help wondering about the kind of person who becomes a librarian because he can't remain still or quiet – but this wasn't a great book. I do see that The World's Strongest Librarian has plenty of rave reviews, so this must fill the bill for plenty of others, just not for me.

A good library’s existence is a potential step forward for a community. If hate and fear have ignorance at their core, maybe the library can curb their effects, if only by offering ideas and neutrality. It’s a safe place to explore, to meet with other minds, to touch other centuries, religions, races, and learn what you truly think about the world.

Hanagarne makes many platitudinous statements about the importance of libraries, even in these changing times; even if people aren't interested in books, he wants everyone to acknowledge that A community that doesn't think it needs a library isn't a community for whom a library is irrelevant. It's a community that's ill. I don't know how I feel about that -- certainly libraries were essential for the democratization of knowledge once upon a time, but now that we all have the sum total of human learning on our smart phones, is a physical library more important than any other community center? And I say that as someone who uses the physical library weekly.

Here's my first library memory: It was summertime in St John and my little brother and I walked to the library with a wagon. We were maybe 6 and 4? Having very few books at home, I loaded that wagon up with everything Kyler and I wanted, but when we went to check them out, the librarian said there was a limit to how many we could have. I always had confrontation-with-adults issues, and I have no memory of this librarian being nasty to me about this, but I was obviously upset about the "confrontation" when I got home. My mother, upon hearing that a librarian had dared to censor her daughter's reading material (my mother, raised Catholic, was hyper sensitive to censorship and the hated Indexing of books) either called up the library or hotfooted it down there to make sure everyone knew that I had her permission to take out anything I wanted, that information was not to be shielded from me, etc. I have no idea how this conversation actually went but it became one of her standard stories of my childhood: I came home upset because a librarian wouldn't let me take out some books I was interested in and she fought the system for me. This is a very heroic story for her, but here's the simple truth: I don't remember my mother ever taking us to the library (but I suppose she must have at least once if I had my own card at 6 or so). Heroic would have been taking me there regularly so I wouldn't think I needed to bring a wagon. 

And apparently, my mother was a frequent user of this library. Another of her favourite stories was how she would love it when we kids would ask her a question she couldn't answer because then she would go to the library -- sometimes for a whole day -- and research until she had our answers. I also have no recollection of ever asking my mother a question that she came back with an answer for at some later time. And that might all be a failure of my own memory; I'm sure my own kids won't remember all of my heroic motherhood efforts.

After we moved to Stouffville, I honestly don't remember if I got a library card and don't remember taking out books, but by then, we could borrow interesting things from our own school library. I do remember hanging out at the Stouffville library with my friend Terri Ann, reading a slang dictionary, trying to get each other to read out the definitions for words like prick and ass. I was probably 12 then, and that must seem unbelievably naive now (we wouldn't have found it fun to pronounce the bad words) and I wonder if I would have been a terror if I had an internet connection back then?

Then we moved to Lethbridge, where I can't even picture the library in my mind. I would have to guess I was never there (though there is a chance one of the youth orchestras I was in practised in a library basement?) That doesn't mean I didn't read, because I bought a lot of Stephen King over those years.

I moved up to Edmonton, and again, I was happy to buy my books and Dave and I made near weekly trips to the Wee Book Inn to look for interesting paperbacks. When I was in college there, I used the public library a lot for research (and for some reason don't really remember using the college library). When I was in my last semester, the city introduced a $20/year user fee for a library card, and I just couldn't spare the money. They did have a policy that you could have the fee waived if you signed a declaration saying you couldn't afford it, but that would have been embarrassing. I just stopped using the library.

When we first moved to Cambridge, now a family of three, it was into a really small townhouse, but we were overjoyed to have it. I was also delighted when, soon after, a new building was erected for the high school nearby, and as a savings measure, a branch of the public library was put it in. What a great blending of needs, I thought: the high school will have a fully stocked library and my kids will become a part of the larger educational community before they ever start school. What I didn't count on, however, was that high school students -- with their shoving and cursing and all around terribleness -- would be loitering around the common entrance if I took the girls during school hours. But, the oasis of the library itself was worth running the gauntlet though.

Our library has wonderful programs for kids and I really appreciated being able to bring my girls from the time they were babies until they were old enough to lose interest. Storytimes with crafts happened a few morning a week, and every Wednesday evening, and since I didn't have a car, it was the only place we could go that was walking distance (excluding the parks that we loved for outdoor play time). In the summer, as we didn't have air conditioning at home, it was a cooled off paradise where we would spend many happy hours. In the winter, it was a cozy shelter from storms outside (and easily reached by mother-powered stroller). When the girls got older, there were summer reading competitions that kept them reading while school was out, and they eventually attended programs on their own. Despite all my efforts at raising the girls in a book rich environment, however, neither is really a reader now. (But, as I remember it, I wasn't quite such a fanatic myself as a teenager, and to be fair, they read their devices constantly.)

Two stories about our library: When Mallory was only around 2, I had brought her and Kennedy to a Wednesday evening program. Mallory was too young to actually attend, so she and I looked at books in the children's section while Kennedy mastered glitter glue inside the program room. Out of nowhere, Mallory leaned away from me and barfed up a giant, orange, carrotty mess onto the carpet and then started crying. I jumped up, soothing Mallory while the lovely male librarian came scurrying over, and wincing at the pile of barf, told me I could go clean up my baby while he cleaned up the barf. I protested that that couldn't possible be his job and he bravely smiled and said, "Yes, actually, it is my job. Don't worry about it." Mal is totally embarrassed by that story, and as I rarely miss a chance to point out that lovely male librarian to her, I can't miss a chance to memorialise the event here.

My other story relates to Hanagarne's embarrassed interaction with the porn-watching homeless guy. It caused quite a stir here in Cambridge when a former police officer attempted to protest the availability of porn on the library's computers after he saw a homeless man downloading some. It became this huge censorship issue, and in the end, it became an issue of human rights: poverty advocates wanted to know just who the hell all of us with private access to pornography were to block the only access that these disadvantaged  people had. And so far as I know, the end result was that our libraries have neither filtered access to porn from the public computers nor is there a policy of librarians themselves intervening when people complain. 

So I'm full circle back to censorship and need to wonder if my mother would have hotfooted it down to the library to insist that my computer access not be censored, or is that level of righteousness reserved for Lady Chatterly's Lover? (Not that that's what I was trying to take out as a child, lol.) Is access to information an absolute? A human right? And what role should a library play in a changing world? Certainly, I took advantage of as many children's programs as I could for the girls, and they're trying to remain relevant locally: rebranding as Idea Exchange (we're not just a library!); encouraging people to bring food and drinks in with them (why go to Starbucks when we have free wifi too!); holding conversation circles (no one will shush you!); there's even a rarely used Rockband set up for "jamming". And as I said, I use the library constantly myself; although I reserve all my books online and no longer even need to interact with a librarian as I use the self checkout. For what I need now, a vending machine would work just as well. A vending machine and my laptop. So, despite my long history with libraries, and despite the local efforts to remain relevant, I don't know if Hanagarde and his platitudes have it right: with a smart device and an internet connection, don't we all have a non-censored library in our pocket anyway? 

Tunesday: Lovesick Blues

Lovesick Blues

(Mills, Irving / Friend, Cliff) Recorded by Hank Williams Sr. 

I got a feelin' called the blues, oh, Lord

Since my baby said goodbye

Lord, I don't know what I'll do

All I do is sit and sigh, oh, Lord

That last long day she said goodbye

Well Lord I thought I would cry

She'll do me, she'll do you, she's got that kind of lovin'

Lord, I love to hear her when she calls me sweet daddy

Such a beautiful dream

I hate to think it all over, I've lost my heart it seems

I've grown so used to you somehow

Well, I'm nobody's sugar daddy now

And I'm lonesome, I got the lovesick blues

Well, I'm in love, I'm in love, with a beautiful gal

That's what's the matter with me

Well, I'm in love, I'm in love, with a beautiful gal

But she don't care about me

Lord, I tried and I tried, to keep her satisfied

But she just wouldn't stay

So now that she is leavin'

This is all I can say

I got a feelin' called the blues, oh, Lord

Since my baby said goodbye

Lord, I don't know what I'll do

All I do is sit and sigh, oh, Lord

That last long day she said goodbye

Well Lord I thought I would cry

She'll do me, she'll do you, she's got that kind of lovin'

Lord, I love to hear her when she calls me sweet daddy

Such a beautiful dream

I hate to think it all over, I've lost my heart it seems

I've grown so used to you somehow

Lord I'm nobody's sugar daddy now

And I'm lonesome, I got the lovesick blues

Continuing with the theme that my parents' songs were my favourite songs when I was little, Lovesick Blues was something that my Dad taught me to sing. He would play the guitar, and he and I had a few songs that we would sing together for fun. Now, you better believe that I adored any opportunity to do something with my Dad, but what was fun in our rec room was also a source of incredible stress whenever my Dad would try to get me to sing with him in front of other people. I remember outright refusing to sing in front of some of his friends, and one time, we were at his parents' house in Nova Scotia and I gave it my best shot, but afterwards, all my Grammie said was, "Maybe you could get her a little microphone or something." I've always had terrible stage fright, and at maybe five-years-old, my grandmother couldn't hear what I was squeaking out when I was standing right in front of her. Of course, Dad found my "obstinacy" embarrassing, and if I wasn't going to be a trained monkey, he wasn't going to play with me anymore. So, that didn't last long, maybe a year of singing together?

As for the song choice, Dad had some strange tastes (our other big number was Lying Eyes by the Eagles). I don't know if he really considered the words of these songs and whether or not they were appropriate for me, but I do know that he must have changed some of them: Looking up the lyrics just now, every site has the line "She'll do me, she'll do you, she's got that kind of lovin' ", but I remember that as "She'll want me, she'll want you...". Dad must have changed that, or maybe he remembered it wrong when he taught it to me, but he was quixotic enough to teach me cheating songs on the one hand and try to clean up the lyrics on the other.

Maybe he thought that was the right song for us because of the repeated use of "daddy" in the lyrics as I was the only one of his kids to call him that (mostly because I only have brothers). He asked me once to never stop calling him daddy, but of course, I eventually did; it's hard to use affectionate terms -- without feeling like a hypocrite -- for someone who basically frightens you. I stopped using "daddy" when I realised he hadn't earned it.

A loosely related illustrative example: One time, Dad was building himself a custom amplifier (he wasn't serious about music, but he could play guitar, and he had a couple of friends who came over sometimes to jam). Me and my brothers (maybe my Mom, too?) were in the rec room watching TV and Dad was in his workshop next door. I could see and hear him and knew he was getting frustrated as he attempted to staple black vinyl onto the plywood box he had made. As he cursed under his breath, pulling and stretching the vinyl flat and failing to get the staples in just the right spots, the atmosphere became incredibly tense. And then -- you know, I remember feeling something was coming but was still shocked when it did -- he came bursting through the doorway with the box over his head, yelled something like, "God damn cursed thing", and smashed it down on the floor between all of us before stomping up the stairs. I couldn't believe that he had destroyed something that he had put so much work into -- and as kids who never had enough of anything, the waste of materials was shocking to us, too -- but I just remember the feeling of stillness, the fear and wondering will he be coming back and who will have to pay the price for that outburst?

Yeah, so that's why he ain't nobody's sweet daddy now...And also funny, I always refer to Dave as our girls' daddy: Go ask daddy, where's daddy, maybe daddy knows. As they are teenagers (actually, Kennedy is nearly 20, yipes) they don't usually refer to him as their "daddy" anymore, and that's  normal and fine, of course. But if there's anything I'd want them to understand, it's this: their own daddy earned as much affection as they can spare for him. 

But let's remember happier times: when me and my daddy were singing together in the rec room -- no other people, no pressure of performing in public -- it was a rare and special time; such a beautiful dream.

Rockbound

“An’ what might ye be wantin?” said the old man, the king of Rockbound.
“I wants fur to be yur sharesman,” answered David.
“Us works here on Rockbound.”
“I knows how to work.”
“Knows how to work an’ brung up on de Outposts!” jeered Uriah. “Us has half a day’s work done ’fore de Outposters rub sleep out o’ dere eyes, ain’t it!”
“I knows how to work,” repeated the boy stubbornly.
“Where’s yur gear an’ clothes at?”
“I’se got all my gear an’clothes on me,” said David, grinning down at his buttonless shirt, ragged trousers, and bare, horny feet “but I owns yon dory: I salvaged her from de sea an’ beat de man what tried to steal her from me.”
Uriah’s eyes showed a glint of interest.

Despite being published in 1928, I found Rockbound to be a highly interesting read, not as fusty and old-fashioned as classics can sometimes be. In it, the orphan David – determined to claim his rightful 1/10th share of the mile-long island of Rockbound, off the South Shore of Nova Scotia – washes up, keen to prove his worth. Over the next 300 pages and 20 or so years, the boy grows to manhood, ever straining under the island's blood feuds and the constant hectoring of his greedy Great Uncle Uriah; the self-proclaimed king of the realm. 

Onto this framework, author Frank Parker Day grafts vivid descriptions of the land and sea; the back breaking work of fishing and the cleaning of the catch; and the daily routines of the men and women who would choose this life. The most interesting scenes (for me, at least) were when characters would share the local folklore: describing famous haunts; the shenanigans of Johnny Publicover,the local ghost catcher; and even a conversation with the devil himself.

Well, you'se heard how nigh de Sanford ghost was to ruinin' Sanford. He had all de women an' children skeert, an' de men, too, an' dey was dat skeert, dey was goin' to give up dere fish stands an' move to oder parts o' de main or maybe some o' de islands. Why, dat ghost use' to roll beach rocks down de front hallway when de men folks was away, an' naught but women and children huddled roun' de kitchen stove, and snatch gals away from dere fellers on dark roads, an' he were dat audacious he use to whang on de back o' de church at evening meetin'. One night he gits dat bold, he reach in t'rough de back winder wid a brown skinny arm an' put a glass o' rum on de side o' de pulpit when de minister was a-preachin' a sermon on temperance. Warn't dat audacious?

Parker Day also included a fictionalised account of a contemporaneous shipwreck, lost at sea in a sudden hurricane:

The vessel, deep-laden, was travelling at the rate of twenty knots, and a tooth of black bottom rock whipped bottom and keelson from her as cleanly as a boy with a sharp jackknife slits a shaving from a pine stick. Two thousand quintals of split fish and the unwetted salt dropped down upon the yellow sands; out came the spars with a rending crash, and deck and upper hull turned over. Within ten seconds of her striking, every man of the crew was in the sea. Away they went, young Martin still lashed to a bit of bulwark among them, poor scraps of humanity, weighed down with soaked clothing and long boots; a flash of yellow oilskins, hoarse cries that made no sound in the fierce tumult, and they were gone. Some swam a stroke or two, some clung for an instant to trailing rigging or broken dory, but few clung long in that mad breaking sea.

Winner of Canada Reads for 2005, with Rockbound Parker Day has memorialised a long gone time and place and I completely enjoyed my time revisiting that world. I note quite a few reviewers say that they couldn't get past the idiosyncratic dialogue and that's why I include samplings of it here; surely that's not incomprehensible to all? I enjoyed every bit of it.

Honestly, I think Rockbound holds up as well as anything from its time. Out of interest, I looked and these are the bestsellers from 1928:

1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
2. Wintersmoon by Hugh Walpole
3. Swan Song by John Galsworthy
4. The Greene Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine
5. Bad Girl by Viña Delmar
6. Claire Ambler by Booth Tarkington
7. Old Pybus by Warwick Deeping
8. All Kneeling by Anne Parrish
9. Jalna by Mazo de la Roche
10. The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

And of those, I can only imagine myself reading  the Wilder. Of course, I have an interest in the South Shore of Nova Scotia, as that is where my father is from and where my parents retired to. It's funny that when I read in the endnotes of Rockbound that Parker Day eventually retired to Lake Annis, I assumed that was the same place as Annis Lake, which is attached to the lake my parents live on. But no. Lake Annis and Annis Lake are two very different places, in two different counties. Only in Nova Scotia.

The Children Act

Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.

It was interesting for me to read The Children Act so soon after On Chesil Beach because author Ian McEwan might have been writing about the same two characters, set thirty-five years apart. While the earlier work dealt with newlyweds, the current novel is about a couple, approaching sixty, who have their safe and settled marriage rocked from within: Fiona, a High Court judge dealing in Family Law cases, has been informed by her husband Jack, a professor, that he has an opportunity to have a passionate affair with a much younger woman, and as he thought he deserved this one last shot at rapture, Jack assumed he wife would appreciate him being upfront about it; that she would be a good sport and give her blessing. Fiona was not a good sport. (And anyone who has read both books will see the obvious parallels.)

Just as her home life is in maximum turmoil, Fiona is given an emergency case file: Adam, a Jehovah's Witness just three months short of his eighteenth birthday – and therefore, three months short of making his own medical decisions – has leukemia, and without an immediate blood transfusion, would soon die. The quick trial that follows – Fiona keeps all legal arguments brief because of the timeliness of the emergency – reasonably represents all of the legal/religious/moral viewpoints that are at play, and when Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, she finds him to be charming, intelligent and a precocious and artistic soul. Although her eventual judgement has far reaching consequences, and despite the fact that the case seemed to affect her emotionally at the time, Fiona is able to close the file and move on once it's over.

This coolness seems to be the key to Fiona: Always ambitious, she had put off motherhood until it was too late as she pursued her career; a fact that seemed to be ultimately acceptable to both her and Jack. On the bench, Fiona took pride in her “correct and elegant” judgements, hoping to be quoted and cited in future trials. Even more pointedly: Fiona is an accomplished classical pianist, but no matter how Jack encouraged her, she couldn't bring life to the jazz pieces that he asked her to learn; whether in music or jurisprudence or her marriage, Fiona is uncomfortable improvising beyond what is written, and the few times she acts impulsively, the results are painful. More than anything – more than the hurt of her husband wanting to have his fling – Fiona is dedicated to keeping up appearances.

She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.

There is much irony in a judge who rules in divorce cases having to deal with a challenged marriage; Fiona finds herself behaving just as badly as the wives she needs to caution from the bench. But more than anything – as with the central case involving the Jehovah's Witnesses – The Children Act might be an examination of the need for the cool rationality of the law to overrule the superstitious beliefs of religion: Fiona recalls cases where she needed to prevent a Muslim father from taking his daughter to Morocco, where she needed to intervene in the education of children from an Orthodox Jewish sect, and where she had to decide the fate of conjoined twins whose Catholic parents opposed separation if it was a death sentence for one of the children. As with the several comments about climate change in this book, atheist McEwan doesn't miss many opportunities to insert his beliefs. In this regard, Fiona and her literal interpretation of the law is his perfect mouthpiece.

I enjoyed the legal bits in this story and there were some nice moments within Fiona and Jack's marriage, but it didn't blow me away; there's very little that I want to quote or remember. The Children Act was made more interesting to me because of its parallels with On Chesil Beach, but it didn't make me itch to read more McEwan.

There have been some high profile legal rights vs religious rights cases in Canada lately, and I am uncomfortable with our judges' reluctance to treat Native children the same as non-Natives; while the dominant culture should be hesitant to impose colonial-type thinking, all children in Canada deserve the protections of the courts. After the recent death of Makayla Sault  (who was allowed to stop chemo in favour of "traditional treatments" that somehow involved the fraudster quackery of the Hippocrates Health Institute of West Palm Beach, Florida), I was encouraged to read just yesterday that another Native girl and her family have decided to put her back on chemo. I understand that this is a thorny issue, but as with Fiona and her case law, that's what we have a court system for.

Where I Belong

“You must be shaggin' all the girls in Petty Harbour, are ye?”

“No, b'y,” I said. “All the Petty Harbour girls my age are my first cousins.”

“Jesus, that never stopped anyone in Petty Harbour. The closer the kin the better the skin.”

I decided to fight fire with fire. “I heard there's a Townie or two going around with an extra toe or finger,” I said.

He sniggered. “I'm just effing with you, b'y,” he said, impressed that I'd had the gall to rib him back.

Petty Harbour is twenty kilometers outside of St. John's, Newfoundland; a fishing village of five hundred people, divided by a river into a Protestant and a Catholic side. In this community, the Doyles were known for generations as the best singers around, and in 1969, Alan Doyle was born into this family; into this community. Eventually, he would become a founding member of the Celtic Rock band Great Big Sea, and in his memoir Where I Belong, Doyle charmingly relates how it was his Petty Harbour background that gave him the tools he would need to chase his dreams.

This isn't the carefully scripted memoir of a practised wordsmith, but all of Doyle's best stories have the polish of well-worn tales; you just know he has repeatedly told the story of Frank and the fishing hook or of his and Perry's dangerous trek in search of skin mags – probably hundreds of times before – and Doyle's warmth and good humour shine through each tale. He may be the same age as my younger brother, but it was amazing to me that he seemed to have a childhood that was very similar to my mother's, a generation before in Charlottetown, PEI: both were born into Catholic families, with lots of kids sharing small bedrooms; both had mothers who baked fresh bread daily (but my own Pop taught me to eat it with both butter AND molasses); both were shot at by a cranky old man with a salt-loaded gun as they attempted to steal crabapples; and both were punished by Nuns when they earnesttly asked unanswerable questions. My mother, however, didn't need to poop into a beef bucket on the back deck until she was six. Such a Townie.

Where I Belong tells Doyle's story right up until the founding of Great Big Sea, and I found that very satisfying (and if he has a sequel in mind, I'd happily read that, too). What he did wonderfully here was to illustrate how a Petty Harbour childhood – cutting cod tongues, learning guitar for Folk Masses, performing hundreds of solo gigs in St. John's' pubs while attending Memorial University – was the best possible training for a rock star: Doyle paid his dues many times over and it's easy to root for his success. It's also easy to be charmed by someone who so obviously loves his family and his humble roots – someone who never thought that pooping in that beef bucket meant his family was poor – and what he captured here of life in a slightly simpler time in rural Newfoundland is definitely worth reading.

It may not be obvious why I seemed to like this book but only gave it three stars, and I hope the illustrative quote I opened with answers that question; the writing isn't really literary and I need to be true to myself and my ratings system despite enjoying getting to know Alan Doyle. His writing voice is every bit as charming as he appears to be in this video:

My Pop might have been a fiddle player, but I don't remember any kitchen parties; I'll have to ask my mother whether there were any when she was a kid. On the other hand, my friend Cora's parents were right from Ireland and I attended many kitchen parties with them. Cora and I had our regular list of songs we were expected to sing (we had sweet harmonies on Mull of Kintyre and we always got a huge response to the Meow Mix commercial, "Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow..."), and even when I went to Ireland with them in 1982, we brought our flutes along because we had some instrumentals worked out too, including a song Cora's brother Sean wrote specifically for us. Just like the Doyles, my friends the Ryans sang with joy and confidence and I am grateful to have known the unique communal feeling of a real Celtic kitchen party.

I also want to note that several times my mother fried us up a mess of tongues and cheeks and we loved them. I suppose anything dredged in flour and fried in butter is going to be tasty, but tongues and cheeks truly melt in the mouth.

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

That was the question I worried at, that I gnawed at like a bone, a cast-off rib too stubborn to share its marrow. And when at last that bone broke, what truth escaped its fracture, was by it remade: for even our bones had memories, and our memories bones.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is a strange and twisted narrative; a lost Brothers Grimm from the pre-sanitised days of a medieval Black Forest; a time when it was perfectly reasonable to tell tucked-in children about a huntsman chopping open the conscious wolf's belly to free Little Red. This is not a fable – with some aphoristic kernel at its center – but a fairy tale; red in tooth and claw and bursting through the limits of the plausible.

It begins with a young married couple, unnamed, who have left their families and travelled to an unreal and virgin hinterland in which to begin their lives together. While the husband fells trees to build their house, the wife has a violent encounter with a cave bear that leaves them without material possessions, but grants the wife the ability to sing anything into being. When she suffers a series of miscarriages, the wife sings down the destruction of their world, and as the husband continues to pressure her to try and try again for a baby, the wife turns to subterfuge to grant his wish. As a meditation on grief and loss, gender roles and marital expectations, In the House has much to say.

What if I could become deep father and she deep mother and the foundling or the fingerling our deep child, and what if the whole world I had known – all that lake and dirt and house and woods and bear and what was not a bear, all that father and mother and child and ghost-child and moon and moons – what if all that was failed forever, doomed by our years of childlessness, our despair over those long years?

Yet In the House doesn't present a straightforward allegory, but rather, is relentless in its offering of outlandish ideas; each sentence wondrous strange, but the paragraphs somehow not adding up to something more. Perhaps it should be approached like a book of poetry: consumed in smallish chunks and only expecting the whole to be vaguely cohesive. I cannot deny that I was swept along by paragraphs like this one:

At the sound of my voice, the bear slipped, staggered, the front of her body lower than the back and now sliding sideways, and as I tightened my grip on the pommel of a protruding shoulder blade, the bone shattered, became a handful of dust. The bear cried out, bent the wide wedge of her head back upon me, and she was near blind then too, one eye clouded, the long-drooping other caked with layered rheum and salt, grinding as it turned in its orbit. She opened her mouth to make some warning, but there was so little growl left in her, too little to waste. Snot dripped from her caved nostrils, and the remains of her lips drooled white clumps of thirsty spit, and the cords in her neck jumped between her bones, so that I could see her stretched muscles working her toothless face, that countenance no less fearsome for its lack of skin, of underlying blood with which to make its hate known, and to that face I said, I'm sorry.

Yes, this is a lot of quoting, but for a work like this, it seems only fair to let author Matt Bell speak for himself. In the end, I can only say that I was enjoying In the House while I was reading it, but struggled to get through it, and upon reflection, didn't get much out of it but an admiration for its language.

And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.

Tunesday: Cultural Appropriation as Pop Song

I think that for most of us, the first songs we liked were the ones that our parents listened to. Here, I'm going to share two related songs that illustrate the types of music each of my parents liked. For my Dad:

Kaw-Liga

(Rose, Fred / Williams Sr., Hank.) Recorded by Hank Williams Sr.

Kaw-liga was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
Kaw-liga just stood there and never told show
So she couldn't never answer "Yes" or "No"

He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped some day he'd talk
Kaw-liga, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine

Poor ol' Kaw-liga, he never got a kiss
Poor ol' Kaw-liga, he don't know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red?
Kaw-liga, that poor ol' wooden head

Kaw-liga was a lonely Indian, never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maid with the coal black hair
Kaw-liga just stood there and never told show
So she couldn't never answer "Yes" or "No"

And then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol' Kaw-liga stayed
Kaw-liga just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree

Poor ol' Kaw-liga, he never got a kiss
Poor ol' Kaw-liga, he don't know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red?
Kaw-liga, that poor ol' wooden head

My Dad loved this old Country style and I remember him always turning Kaw-Liga up when it came on the radio; the two of us belting it out. As my Dad's own father was half Mi'kmaq, and definitely identified as Native to outsiders, I wonder what my Dad thought of the theme of this song, though? Did he wonder at Hank Williams putting in the war drum beat? Was he offended by "is it any wonder that his face was red"? Or was it simply a different time, and as my Dad never embraced anything Native about himself, was this song a way to reinforce his position as a member of the dominant culture? I was surprised when this song was on the soundtrack of Moonrise Kingdom, but of course, Wes Anderson was using it ironically, so I suppose that preempts anyone from calling it a cultural misappropriation. Wink wink, this is really awful stuff, right? We're smart enough to know that... 

And for my Mom:

Running Bear

(J.P. Richardson) Performed by Johnny Preston

On the bank of the river
Stood Running Bear, young Indian brave
On the other side of the river
Stood his lovely Indian maid

Little White Dove was her name
Such a lovely sight to see
But their tribes fought with each other
So their love could never be

Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love big as the sky
Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love that couldn't die

He couldn't swim the raging river
'Cause the river was too wide
He couldn't reach Little White Dove
Waiting on the other side

In the moonlight, he could see her
Throwing kisses 'cross the waves
Her little heart was beating faster
Waiting there for her Indian brave

Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love big as the sky
Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love that couldn't die

Running Bear dove in the water
Little White Dove did the same
And they swam out to each other
Through the swirling stream they came

As their hands touched and their lips met
The raging river pulled them down
Now they'll always be together
In their happy hunting ground

Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love big as the sky
Running Bear loved Little White Dove
With a love that couldn't die

So the biggest contrast between them was that if my Dad liked old Country, my Mom liked old Rock 'n Roll. Running Bear was a song that she would definitely sing at the top of her lungs and her running joke when we were kids was that she was just slumming with us until the day she "got discovered". My Mom can definitely sing with a huge voice, and as her kid, I believed that she was a great singer and totally believed that she would one day be "discovered". I wasn't upset about that -- I didn't think it would involve her leaving us or anything -- and since my mother was younger and prettier than anyone else's Mom, it seemed totally reasonable to me that she could be a superstar if only the right person caught her voice as it carried on the wind. It was a total mind-freak for me, then, the day she pointed out that she might be a loud singer, but she's not really a good singer, and the whole "getting discovered" thing had been her idea of a joke. That's what's funny about family mythology: kids believe everything their parents tell them and sometimes it takes until we grow up before we recognise where they were wrong (you know, like with the subtle racism and cultural misappropriation inherent in these songs we were taught to love).