Tunesday : Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet

(Knoffler, M) performed by Dire Straits

A lovestruck Romeo, sings the streetside serenade
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade
Says something like, You and me, babe, how about it?

Juliet says, Hey, it's Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack
He's underneath the window, she's singing, Hey, la, my boyfriend's back
You shouldn't come around here, singing up at people like that
Anyway what you gonna do about it?

Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start
And I bet and you exploded in my heart
And I forget, I forget the movie song
When you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

Come up on different streets, they both were streets of shame
Both dirty, both mean, yes and the dream was just the same
And I dream your dream for you and now your dream is real
How can you look at me, as if I was just another one of your deals?

Well, you can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold
You can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold
You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin
Now you just say, Oh, Romeo, yeah, you know
I used to have a scene with him

Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry
You said, I love you like the stars above, I'll love you till I die
There's a place for us, you know the movie song
When you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

I can't do the talk like the talk on the TV
And I can't do a love song like the way it's meant to be
I can't do everything but I'd do anything for you
Can't do anything except be in love with you

And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be
All I do is keep the beat, the bad company
And all I do is kiss you, through the bars of a rhyme
Juliet, I'd do the stars with you any time

Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry
You said, I love you like the stars above, I'll love you till I die
There's a place for us, you know the movie song
When you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

And a lovestruck Romeo, he sings the streetside serenade
Laying everybody low with a love song that he made
Finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade
He says something like, You and me, babe, how about it?

You and me, babe, how about it?

So, last week, I wrote about starting university in the Spring of '86 and meeting a new group of friends that made me feel free and alive. As close as we immediately were, and as close as we essentially remained, I also met someone else that first semester who would have an even bigger impact on my life: my first true love, Glen. So much of what I've written so far feels like it has been leading to this point in my life's story, and now that I'm here, I don't know what I really have to say about this time; I don't know what significance it has outside my own head. The story of how we met is a good start for getting it all out of me; like an emetic, or an exorcism.

Sometime midsemester, there was an event called the "Loose Ladies Cabaret", and all the female members of VOMIT attended together. It started in the pub, where only women were allowed for the evening, and we drank cheap shots and learned and sang together bawdy songs ("He gave me inches one, I said 'Baby, this is fun, roll me over in the clover and do me again'"), and there were games and draws with sex shop toys as prizes; I imagine the intent was to get the ladies all loose and randy before the event opened up to guys, too. It's no shocker to say that I've always been a bit of a prude, so I had an evening of hilarity with the drinking and the singing with my girlfriends, but didn't participate in the draws or the games because I couldn't imagine being presented with one of the "prizes", let alone bringing anything eyebrow-raising home to my parents' house. 

At the end of a couple hours or so of cheap drinking, the event moved into the main building of the campus where a large room (maybe a gymnasium?) was set up like a typical high school dance, with a bunch of guys hungrily waiting for us loose and randy (and tipsy) women to arrive. My friends and I sat down on benches along the wall, but within no time, we were all being asked to dance; up on the floor and back again; just like a high school dance, but with bar service. I danced with a few different guys, but I stayed up on the floor with one guy for a string of slow songs, and as we slowly turned in a close clutch, I began to wonder if I had "met someone". When the beat picked up again, this guy asked me if I had something "to smoke", doing that pinched fingers toking mime. As I've said before, I wasn't into drugs, and when he told me to stick around while he went off in search of pot, I sighed and returned to my spot along the wall.

When I got back to the benches, none of my friends were where I'd left them, and there was this other guy sitting in our spot. As I had left my purse and jacket right where he was sitting, I said, "Excuse me, I think you're sitting on my stuff". He smiled at me, jumped up -- revealing my belongings -- and apologised. I was half -distracted by this guy I had just been dancing with -- was he coming back? was I even interested in someone who would abandon me to get high? as if just meeting me wasn't mindblowing enough? -- and I was so distracted that I wasn't really appreciating this guy who was standing right in front of me. Of course this was Glen, and the moment that I really stopped and looked at him, I was thunderstruck by his warm doe eyes and his lopsided smile and his big, beautiful body. Glen was over six feet tall, worked out, and usually wore tight t-shirts that strained against his pecs and biceps; I had never met a guy as young as we were who had spent that much time pumping up his muscles. What I didn't intuit was that a guy who devoted that much effort to his own body probably loves himself more than anyone else, but that negative stuff comes later. For now, I had been captured by Glen's orbit; a helpless victim of gravity and magnetism and cheap drinks. He asked me to dance.

Glen and I danced to every song for the rest of the night, and if that other guy ever came back looking for me, I'll never know. Before the night was through, he asked for my phone number (which I supplied, duh), and we made a plan to get together a few nights later for coffee and dessert at a trendy cafe. 

We hadn't talked much at the dance, so all I knew about Glen was that he was a student at the university (because the Loose Ladies Cabaret was only open to students) and that he'd be picking me up at 8 on a Tuesday. I was waiting nervously by the door when I heard a ground-shaking rumble coming ever closer down the street. It was so loud that my Dad, who had been in the kitchen, came out to see what doom approacheth. When Glen parked his Chevy Nova (much like that picture I selected this week) across the street and started to climb out, my Dad (who had never asked me one question about the boys I dated through high school), called from the living room window, "Who is that?" I replied that his name was Glen and he was there for me. Then Dad asked, "Well, what's his last name? Where does he live? What does he do?" I had to admit that I didn't know any of those answers, and even though Dad started to say that that meant maybe I shouldn't be going anywhere with this "stranger", the doorbell was ringing and I was rolling my eyes and telling Dad the name of the restaurant we were heading to. What did Dad (a car guy) fear in that engine's rumble? I opened the door, and there was Glen -- probably even more gorgeous and mountainous than I had remembered -- and I introduced him to Dad and left. Once I saw just how big and shiny his car was (Glen told me later that he had had a custom paint job done by a friend at a pro shop who had snuck in "handfuls and handfuls" of expensive gold glitter to the paint mix; had added several extra layers of clearcoat on top), I wasn't sure that I shouldn't be embarrassed to be seen getting into it; this car was totally pimp. And when Glen started the engine and I was suddenly inside the growling beast, I was half excited and half embarrassed and more than a little thrill-nauseous -- like climbing to the top of a roller coaster peak -- to be beside this guy who suddenly promised danger and excitement. At the dance, I had had no clue that Glen was the kind of guy who would drive a car like this; I couldn't wait to get to know him; to start the ride.

When we got to the restaurant, Glen was a total gentleman, pulling out my chair and deferring to my preferences. I soon learned that he wasn't actually a student at the university -- he was friends with a guy who went to the school and through him had heard about the legendary Loose Ladies Cabaret. When he got to the pub area to see how to get in, he met a girl he knew (I eventually learned that there was a "girl he knew" everywhere we'd go) whose handstamp was still fresh enough that he was able to press it to his own hand and get access to the second half of the evening. I learned he was from B.C., had spent the six months after high school working (and partying) in the resort town of Jasper, and had moved to Lethbridge to live with a sister for a while; he was now working in the produce department at a grocery store until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. Glen was just so real and warm and interested in my own boring story that we hit it off instantly. By the end of the evening, we had plans to meet again, and the rest, as they say, is history. I'll leave off this week on the happy beginning.

As for this week's song choice: Dire Straits was Glen's favourite band, and even though this particular song came out long before we met, I hated the Brothers in Arms album (couldn't stand Money for Nothing or Walk of Life when they came on the radio, which they would have around the time I met Glen), so I went back in their catalogue for a more appropriate song choice. That's not to say that I thought of us as Romeo and Juliet (this was not a forbidden love despite my father's initial uneasiness), but even this song has an unhappy ending and that's about right. I also want to note that I've never seen this video before, and isn't it awful? That is the least sexy dancing -- for him and for her -- that I have ever seen. On the other hand, other than the glasses and if he were taller, the guy in the video looks kind of like Glen, and after I grew out my hair, I didn't look unlike her. Star-crossed after all.

He says something like, You and me, babe, how about it?
You and me, babe, how about it?

A Clockwork Orange

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange – meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

A Clockwork Orange is a book I've always meant to read, with a movie adaptation I have always succeeded in avoiding. Even so, the book and movie are such pervasive cultural phenomena that I went into this experience with mental pictures of tall glasses of milk and bowler hats and Malcolm McDowell's eyes being forced open as he watched ultraviolent movies. Even so, I was unprepared. Unprepared for the violence, deftly cushioned by an invented language. Unprepared for the solid social commentary at the book's core. Unprepared to identify with little Alex; whether he's acting like a sociopath, being tortured in the name of reform, or being manipulated for political ends. A Clockwork Orange isn't a perfect book, but there is so much good in it that I'm sure it will stay with me forever. Long and spoiler-full from here so I can remember the details.

What's it going to be then, eh?

In the beginning, we meet Alex and his droogs – a costumed gang of juvenile delinquents that get wasted on drugged milk and rumble, rape and thieve, assaulting their bourgeois victims with impunity; in this near-future world, the government seems incapable of protecting its citizens. The invented language of nadsat (based on Russian slang and Cockney rhymes, with some Shakespearean thous and thys thrown in) does soften this depravity: the prose is so lyrical that you nearly forget that you're reading about horrible acts. Alex himself is no dumb criminal: we are to understand that he is transported by classical music (and particularly by Ludwig van), and he reaches states of ecstasy while blasting suites and concertos in his bedroom:

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.

What an observer wouldn't see, however, is that in these flights of fancy, the music is impelling Alex to further violence:

As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music , which was one movement only, rose to the top of its highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.

Obviously, Alex is a lost cause; a classic sociopath. When the government does begin a crackdown on crime and Alex commits an accidental murder, he is sent off to prison (it is at this point he states, “And me still only fifteen”; I was properly shocked by his tender age). The story skips ahead two years and Alex has behaved as a model prisoner, even helping out in the chapel (where he can often be seen reading a bible: just like with Beethoven, Alex is inappropriately transported by the Passion of Christ; fantasising about being a Roman soldier scourging Jesus' back, nailing him to the cross). Despite the chaplain's protests, Alex is selected for the “Ludovico Technique”; an experimental reform program that could see him released within a fortnight. This is where Alex has his eyes forced open while shown scenes of rape and murder (with footage from Nazi and Japanese concentration camps thrown in), and as he is injected with an emetic before these sessions, his body quickly learns to associate violence with crippling nausea. Since these films were usually shown with a classical music soundtrack, a side effect is that Alex can no longer bear to hear the music that he loves (and another side effect has him crippled by normal sexual attraction). It is here that the chaplain raises his loudest concern: as a man who believes in a physical hell, the chaplain worries that by removing Alex's free will, the Ludovico Technique has imperiled his soul:

Is the man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

In the last section of the book, Alex is released from prison, and when he is confronted by an old man who he and his droogs had assaulted earlier, this old guy and his friends are able to give Alex a weak-fisted beating that he is physically incapable of defending himself against. When the police are called in, Alex is horrified to see that the officers are two old acquaintances that he had mistreated: not only are these thugs indicative of the government's new tough-on-crime agenda, but they also give Alex a thumping that he can't fend off. After being dumped in the country, Alex finds shelter at a nearby home (coincidentally, a house that he and his droogs had hit), and the man who lives there is (coincidentally) an anti-government agitator who wants to exploit Alex's experiences before the upcoming election. The man's friends get involved and Alex finds himself utterly without control.

"Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?" And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: "Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?"

When the group locks Alex in a room while they decide how to use him, a neighbouring flat begins to play classical music and Alex loses control of himself; eventually jumping out the window in a suicidal fit. He wakes up in hospital, where he has been informed that the doctors were able to surgically reverse the Ludovico Technique. The American version of the book (and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation) end here; with Alex plotting to resume his old life. In the original British version, the final chapter sees Alex with his new crew of droogs. Alex has become bored with the fighting and the old in-out in-out and begins to fantasise about a cottage of his own; a cosy fire, a wife, a son that he can protect from harm. In the prologue to my edition, Anthony Burgess gripes that the American publisher insisted on the cut – explaining that the redemptive ending is veddy veddy British to Stateside readers – but Burgess makes the point that without the character experiencing growth, it's not technically a novel. Even knowing this going in, it was hard for me to decide where A Clockwork Orange should have ended. As I immediately watched the movie after finishing the book, I couldn't imagine it with the redemptive epilogue tacked on; in a way, Alex being allowed to choose his life of crime is a type of growth and I don't know if the idea that teen hooliganism is just a natural phase that one goes through is a conclusion that I'm comfortable with.

A Clockwork Orange is the type of book that, upon finishing, makes me immediately want to know more about its author. Here is what I learned: Anthony Burgess was from Manchester (and imagined the setting of this book as a Manchester/Leningrad/NYC hybrid); he was a polyglot (who not only understood the Russian that he borrowed for his nadsat slang, but invented the language used in Quest for Fire); while he was in the army, his  wife was brutally raped by four deserting American soldiers (which inspired the savage attack on the writer's wife in this book); he was a self-taught pianist and classical composer (and would have preferred to have been remembered for his music); after being misdiagnosed with a brain tumour, he quickly dashed off a bunch of novels as a type of widow's pension (he claimed to have written A Clockwork Orange in just three weeks and never thought it one of his best books); he was considered a mythomaniac and any or all of the preceding facts may have been invented. Apparently, the title of this book is from traditional Cockney, and the first time that Burgess heard someone say, “That's as queer as a clockwork orange”, the writer inside him filed it away as a perfect metaphor for something. When, in the early Sixties, Burgess read an article about the government considering aversion therapy to deal with juvenile delinquency, he knew he had found that something: in a way, you can perfectly see the influences that led to the writing of this book, and yet, in a lesser writer's hands, this might have been mere violence-porn. Even so, Burgess himself said later, “A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his job to show.” And to a degree I agree with him – not only is the theme of free will vs social control repeated over and over, but even the lovely subtlety of the title is lost through frequent repetition; it was even the title of the book that was being written by the author/activist within the book:

Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: "That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?" Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: "– The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen –"

(I did note that the phrase was never used once in the movie, but perhaps not incidentally, when I asked Dave and Kennedy if they caught the meaning of the title from the film, they did not.) It is only this slight tendency towards didacticism that made me say that this is not a perfect novel, but the lyricism of the invented language and the brilliance of the central theme force me to not reduce my rating by much; this is a rounding up to a full five stars. I loved it.

And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.

More from Burgess, and his views on government control vs free will, can be read here. 

Before I started reading this book, I was thinking that my first encounter with the story was when Ken had bought the Mad Magazine with the movie parody for A Clockwork Orange on the cover, and that he, and then I, had read it on a summer roadtrip over to PEI:

But could that be true? That says it came out in June '73 -- Ken would have been just nearly 7 (and he would have been 7 by the summer and our trip) and I would have been 5 1/2 -- would we really have been reading Mad Magazine and a parody of this X-rated movie at that age? I have a perfect memory of doing just that... 

The Fireman

Out of the frying pan and into the Fireman.

The Fireman, even at 750 pages, is a quick-paced read. The year is nowish and some new disease – Draco Incendia Trychophyton, known colloquially as Dragonscale or 'scale – has begun killing people. Identified by the gold-flecked black stripes on their skin, the infected will eventually start smouldering, and inevitably, spontaneously combust. So, not only is the healthy population afraid of becoming infected by the sick, but as homes and stores and forests begin to burn down around them, even biohazard suits offer little protection in the end. Society divides itself between those who are infected and just trying to stay alive and those who believe it is their duty to root out and destroy the threat. This is a really interesting concept, and as everyone seems to be talking about Joe Hill and what a master of horror writing he is, I happily picked this book up...and was pretty much underwhelmed by the experience. Spoilers beyond here.

FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the ’scale might’ve been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides.

The main character of The Fireman is Harper Grayson; a school nurse who discovers that she has the 'scale weeks after becoming pregnant. When her husband Jakob sees the tell-tale signs on her body, he assumes he is also infected and begins to fantasise about them dying on their own terms, with romance and music and a lethal cocktail. While at first Harper more or less sees the beauty of this plan (especially after watching nonstop terrifying coverage of the disease's spread on TV), she eventually decides that living until the baby is born is her only goal. When she makes a run for it, Harper is taken in by a cultish community that has learned to control their smouldering infections and prevent combusting: by singing together in harmony, this group is able to “join the Bright”; an alternate plane or hivemind that placates the spores that have infected them. I liked everything about this idea: that the spores combust their hosts as a means of transmission when they sense stress hormones that might threaten their own existence (and who with the Dragonscale on them wouldn't feel stressed?); and that whether a person is singing in harmony with a group, getting a thrill out of collecting likes on facebook, or participating in a lynching with an ugly mob, the brain release oxytocin (the “social networking” hormone) and this is the key to safety. Too bad the healthy people are more interested in eradication than containment and won't listen to reports of how it can be controlled: and especially since the Cremation Crews that patrol the streets are setting free the infectious spores with every mass immolation. Here's the kind of thing I didn't like:

Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.

There were a lot of references to writing (Jakob was an aspiring novelist), and in the end, I found it to be all a bit wink-wink-nudge-nudgey. And as to the content of that quote: acknowledging that that might be a male fantasy doesn't change the fact that this is exactly what Joe Hill has written: every time Harper gets into trouble, the Fireman – a British professor of mycology at NHU who has learned to control his spores to put on pyrotechnic displays – shows up and saves her. I did not find Harper to be a strong female protagonist and I was constantly annoyed by her obsession with Mary Poppins. I liked the Marlboro Man and his shock jock radio program; loved Jakob getting unhinged and the mental image of him tearing through everything with a snowplow (but hated that his failed novel was called Desolation's Plough). I was also annoyed by the fact that, even though Harper, Nick, and the Fireman could all shoot balls of flame from their hands (and the Fireman could do so much more), they were constantly in danger from the Cremation Crews and didn't think to use their powers until death was imminent. I was also annoyed that we are told that Jakob is a talented acrobat (he can ride a unicycle and walk a tightrope) and we are shown that Harper is an expert archer, and neither of them need to use these skills later on. And I was annoyed by this:

I spent three hours hiding in a cupboard today, with my ex not a dozen feet from me. I had three hours to listen to him talk about the things he's done to the sick. Him and his new friends. Three hours to listen to him talk about things he'd do me if he had half a chance. From their point of view, we're the bad guys in this story. If he sees me again he'll kill me. If he had the opportunity, he'd kill everyone in camp. And after he did it, he'd feel he had done a good day's work. In his mind he's that guy in the cowboy hat from The Walking Dead, wiping out the zombies.

I've seen reviews that say The Fireman is a welcome break from all the zombie stuff in pop culture today, but this infection of spores is not dissimilar from a zombie apocalypse; there are the infected humans who go on living and the healthy ones who are frightened of catching it; of being killed by standing next to someone as they go up in flames. What's the difference, really, between that and zombies? From a certain perspective, the folks with the 'scale are the bad guys; the Cremation Crews are doing exactly what “that guy in the cowboy hat” does. And can we talk about that? “That guy in the cowboy hat”? You've heard of fictional zombies and The Walking Dead but not Rick Grimes? This kind of talking-about-without-naming happens a lot: a character talks about reading a Cormac McCarthy novel once, about the end of the world. People hunting dogs and each other and frying up babies, and it was awful or The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or possibly in the back of a wardrobe. So, in addition to nonstop references to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis and a spoonful of sugar, Joe Hill squeezes in a reference to his Dad's work there, too, wink-wink-nudge-nudge. I just didn't like the writing. The prose is mostly short, declarative sentences, the dialogue is forced, and the humour doesn't rise above jokes about farting smokerings or the Fireman constantly trying to prove that the British are more “inventive” at cursing than Americans. This is an example of “artful” writing that made me roll my eyes:

Father Storey drowsed in one bed. Nick in the other. With both of them asleep in the same pose, and with the same frowning look of concentration on their faces, it was impossible not to see the close familial resemblance. The child was still inside Father Storey somewhere, as a fly remains perfectly preserved in a bead of amber. The old man waited for Nick, a baggy overcoat that he would be ready to slip on in six decades.

This is my first Joe Hill and it's not in his typical horror genre, so I can't quite dismiss him wholesale. As I opened with, this is a very quick read despite its size, so I can't deny that it kept me going. I liked the concept, but not its execution. I liked the momentum behind the inevitable battle between the infected and the Cremation Crew, but I didn't like the very end at all. I really didn't like all the soap operish drama at the Camp; so much of this could have been cut to keep the action tense. This is a low three stars for me overall.

Our Lady Of The Lost And Found: A Novel

She was a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost. She was the only one of these wood or marble or plaster Virgins who had ever seemed at all real to me. There could be some point in praying to her, kneeling down, lighting a candle. But I didn't know what to pray for. What was lost, what I could pin on her dress.

After recently reading and highly enjoying Diane Schoemperlen's new book This Is Not My Life, I decided to go back and check out her earlier work. I mistakenly thought that it was Our Lady of the Lost and Found that netted her the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and now that I've read this book and found it rather dull, I don't know if I have the desire to seek out her actual award-winning novel. Such are the vagaries of the reading life.

In this book: We meet an unnamed middle-aged, single, successful author, living alone and contemplating her next novel. One morning she discovers the Virgin Mary (another middle-aged woman in ordinary dress, with a suitcase by her side) standing in her living room, and when the Madonna confesses to being tired and in need of a place to rest for a while, the writer invites her to stay. The routine week that follows is described in exhaustive detail, and interspersed, are dozens of accounts of historical Mary sightings. Both the dull minutiae of domestic life – so many lists! – and the unembellished details of the sightings – one after another after another – became very boring to me, but I do understand that, in theory, it all served a purpose.

With or without Mary, it seems to me that history itself, the actual unfolding of events through time, takes no prisoners: everybody dies in the end. But the writing of history takes them by the thousands: prisoners of interpretation every one; prisoners of revisionism, positivism, determinism, deconstruction, reconstruction, skepticism, subjectivity, twenty-twenty hindsight, tunnel vision, cause and effect; prisoners of the paradox of being stuck in their own place and time.

During and after the visit, the writer muses philosophically on the nature of history and whether what we learn in textbooks is a fair account of it. As a writer, she understands how those who have recorded history had to make decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. And as a woman (and particularly when in the presence of “the most important woman in history”, Mary), the narrator is confronted with the fact that “official” history tends to be the stories of men's pursuits (primarily war-related). The dull details of a purse's contents, a typical Saturday cleaning routine, or the items one might purchase at a pharmacy, while boring, do serve to balance this male-centric view of what is noteworthy. But it's still boring. The narrator also spends a lot of time pondering the natures of truth and art and faith:

Now I see that the opposite of fact may not be fiction at all, but something else again, something hidden under layers of color or conscience or meaning. If I were a visual artist, I might call it pentimento. If I were a historian, I might call it palimpsest. But I am a writer and I call it the place where literature comes from. It is a place akin to those “thin places” in Celtic mythology. Like the thin places in both palimpsest and pentimento, these are threshold bridges at the border of the real world and that other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended. Now I see that the opposite of knowledge may not be ignorance but mystery; that the opposite of truth may not be lies but something else again: a revelation so deeply embedded in the thin places of reality that we cannot see it for looking: a reverence so clear and quiet and perfect that we have not yet begun to fathom it.

When an author starts writing about Heisenberg and paradox and “thin places”, I tend to sit up and take notice; these are some of my favourite themes. But Schoemperlen made it all so dull and rambling and about her and her processes, and just like listening to an inebriated stranger trying to school me on politics, much of the time I could only smile weakly and mentally check out. About halfway through the book is this passage:

As I listened to some of Mary's longer stories, the more meandering ones, those more liberally punctuated by tangents, digressions, and tantalizing asides about other saints, other shrines, other times, I trusted her in the way a reader trusts a good writer. I trusted that no matter how disparate or disjointed the stories might seem in the telling, still they would indeed amount to something in the end.

That seemed as though Schoemperlen was asking me to trust to her to pull everything together, and while I do think I understand where she was trying to go with everything, the payoff just wasn't worth the tedium of every page. And I don't think I will trust her again. It is a wonderment to me that reviewers on Goodreads are split between giving this book one and five stars; this is love it or hate it I guess; I can't get worked up beyond a middling three star rating.

Tunesday : Cheese & Crackers

Cheese & Crackers

(Gordon, R) Performed by Deja Voodoo

Went to the store to get something to eat
Went down the aisle where they sell their meat
A woman standin there with a tray
She looked at me and I heard her say

Cheese and crackers, anyone?
I said...No!
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
That's why I said no

Went to a party just the other night
Up at the party I was feelin all right
They were servin wine and the wine was fine
So I drank some wine and I had a good time
All the time feelin fine havin time all the time 
Drinkin wine and havin a time all the time

Then a woman comin around with a tray
She looked at me and I heard her say

Cheese and crackers, anyone?
I said...No!
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
That's why I said no

Went to the doctor I was feelin blue
Went to the doctor what else could I do?
Doc looked at me and said I can see you got good nourishment
I said I know that
He said just to help you out go see my nutritionist
So behind the door that said nutritionist sat the nutritionist
I said are you the nutritionist?
She said uh huh
I said maybe you could help me out, the doctor sent me
She said I've got just the thing for you

She said
She said
She said
She said
You know what she said to me?

Cheese and crackers, anyone?
I said...(What?)
I said...(Help me)
I said...No!
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
I don't like'em
That's why I said no

In the timeline of my life, I'm up to early 1986 when I first started university. Because Kevin had started on time in September, he had already made some friends, and as the months went by, I wormed my way in and we all made a pretty tightknit group. This is the group that (totally ironically; I always feel the need to underline that) called ourselves VOMIT (the Victorian Order of Many Intelligent Trendies; and while we all kind of hated that it ended in "Trendies", we loved that it started with "Victorian Order" and went with it). This was the group of friends with whom I felt I could totally, at last, be my most authentic self, and with the new ideas I was being exposed to at school, this was a time of incredible growth and awakening; as though every day I had lived before had been in a kind of dream or cocoon; I can't overstate just how happy I was to be exposed to bigger ideas and freer people than I had ever known before. Let's meet VOMIT:

Probably the most influential new friend I met at university was Michelle. She was from Calgary (totally big city girl compared to what I was used to) and she had white-blonde hair that she teased and crimped into a cloud around her head, her clothes were thrift store chic, and she also wore the pointiest black witchy shoes all the time. She was top of her class in high school and one of the reasons she came to Lethbridge was because they gave her a full scholarship. The other reason was because she had grandparents in town and they let her live in their basement suite for free. Here was this smart, beautiful, achingly cool girl who had her own apartment, furnished in matchy Ikea furniture that I thought was the height of style at the time, and she knew all the newest music, had a gorgeous boyfriend (he could have fronted Duran Duran) that could sleep over any time she wanted (Michelle guilted her grandparents into keeping such things a secret for her); she had freedom and success and confidence in her own tastes, and I didn't just want to have what she had, I wanted to be her. One of the first times we were at her apartment, Michelle asked me what kind of music I liked, and before I could answer, Kevin blurted, "She likes old stuff. Like the Beatles." That was no doubt to lower my cool factor in front of the trendsetting girl that he met first, but Michelle smiled and said, "Oh, like the Ramones?" And, again, Kevin interrupted and said, "No. Like the Beatles. Just the Beatles." Now, while that hadn't strictly been true for years, I couldn't really say that I was actually into Top Forty dance music, but before I could say anything, Michelle smiled again and said, "That's really cool." She was my favourite.

Rob was from an even smaller town outside Lethbridge, his Dad was a high school math teacher in the city, and while he had been raised as a sheltered Mormon, Rob lived in Lethbridge during the school year and pretty much lived as he liked. He was really tall and thin with his hair cut short in the back and flopped down over his eyes in front, he wore thrift store clothes and ironic t-shirts, and was one of the quickest-witted people I've ever met. He sometimes DJed at the university radio station and he knew all the coolest new music. He was also shy and quiet, and while he also was a high academic achiever, he never tried to stand out in the group. Which is why he stood out in the group.

Jaybo was Rob's roommate, and more than anything, he reminded me of Duckie from Pretty in Pink -- from the clothes (and hats) to the exuberance; to be around Jay was to be smiling. He eventually got a girlfriend who didn't become a part of our group (I don't know why; I don't even remember her name) and they changed the main area of Jay and Rob's basement apartment into a harem tent-like environment with hanging scarves and huge pillows and rugs all over the floor, on which they would have all night sex (apparently, according to Rob). While we used to hang out at this apartment quite a bit, we eventually avoided it (where could you sit?) Within a couple of years, Jaybo and this girl got married in the theater in Fort McLeod and VOMIT was there in the audience to watch.

There was a second Michelle and she lived in the neighbourhood of the university. She had a fraternal twin sister and you wouldn't think they were even from the same family. The twin was tiny, dressed like a typical 80s rocker chick, and didn't attend post-secondary; she certainly didn't think much of us weirdo looking people that her sister hung around with. On the other hand, Michelle was super smart, tall and broad-shouldered, and had a much prettier face than her sister. Michelle was also into the new music and the thrift store clothes, and when she went to the hairdresser for a new wave look, she came back in tears: she had had her hair buzzed off with just a few longs wisps in front that curled over her eyes. She was devastated by this haircut at first, mostly because it wasn't very feminine on her big frame (she did look a bit like a drag queen), but she eventually embraced the look and she never grew it out in the time I knew her. Michelle was never a follower.

There was also a second Rob. He was a preppy, all-businessman wannabe. He wore sweater vests and dress pants to school and drove a brand new Mustang that he was paying off himself and super proud of. This Rob was totally peripheral to my life, but he was as much a part of VOMIT as any of us.

Hillary was Rob's constant companion; a girl preppy who wore designer clothes. While she was always around, I think it was just to be around Rob; she didn't really embrace the weirdness of the rest of us. While we all waited patiently for Hillary and Rob to finally get together, I wasn't surprised to hear, years later, that Rob finally came out of the closet. Which is too bad for Hillary and her lovelorn shadowing, but too badder for Rob: he knew so many gay guys through our group that we would have been the most supportive of friends to come out to.

Although Curtis, my openly gay friend, was still in high school, he went to the bars with us on the weekend and was totally VOMIT. He started university that fall and took an apartment in an old house in town. He and I would often hang out there of an evening, drinking instant coffee I brought along from home, me knitting, he rug-hooking. Domestic bliss.

Nancy was the only girl I still hung out with from high school. As I said before, she and I lost our place in the old tribe at the same time, but our new tribe was better anyway.

Kevin, my other friend from high school, told me he was gay over lunch one day during this first semester of university. As Curtis had already come out to me the year before, I didn't have the brief flash of "how do I really feel about this?", and while I was surprised, I wasn't shocked. When I asked Kevin if he had a special someone, he blushed and admitted that his secret boyfriend was the last member of our group, Jeff.

Now, that did surprise me because Jeff was an ultra-macho, captain-of-the-football-team, aggressively-flirtatious-with-everyone kind of guy. Something about him had always made me uncomfortable and it just may have been this double life boiling under his surface; it was Jeff's demand that the rest of us weren't supposed to know that he and Kevin were a couple. Eventually Kevin would admit that Jeff was prone to abusing him. When Kevin and I were in Europe together that first summer, it was with Curtis that Jeff had his adulterous fling; Curtis told me that Jeff liked things "rough".

Now, to the song choice this week: In their role as DJs, Rob and Michelle brought Deja Voodoo to our school for a concert. This was loud, fun, unintimidating punk music and the show was an amazing, crazy time. When Michelle was talking with the band afterwards, she learned that, while they liked touring well enough, they did miss being able to cook something homemade. Michelle offered them the use of her kitchen, and the next day, they showed up with bagsful of groceries. Now that's a picture of domestic bliss: a couple of guys with tattoos and piercings and leather and ripped jeans, chopping veggies and tofu to make a Thai soup (which I had never had at the time and thought was amazingly worldly). Oh yeah -- most of VOMIT was there to watch them cook and eat, too. One of the guys had picked up a Penthouse Forum at the grocery store -- a magazine with just the "true" encounter stories -- and he explained that he found it to be the funniest reading material on earth. So we asked him to read to us. So, as the small apartment filled with the smells of boiling basil and lemongrass, this authentic punk rocker started to relate to us a raft of stories that all began with, "I never believed it could happen to me..."

That's enough for today. More on VOMIT to come, but here are a couple of group pics:

Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories

In Chance Developments, Alexander McCall Smith has taken five of what he calls “orphaned photographs” – old black and white pictures of people that have survived without any information about their subjects – and based on the photos alone, has imagined a love story around each one. Only with the first story (Sister Flora's First Day of Freedom, which is prefaced with the photo of a woman standing in a shaft of light in a train station) does McCall Smith make a metaphorical connection between the photo and his character (which is nearly ruined when, in the moment, Flora is indeed very aware of the shaft of light and its effect upon her), but in the next four stories, the photos themselves are present in the narratives (in two stories, characters are discussing the people in the photos, in the other two, the reader is present as the photos are taken), and this literal treatment is fairly typical of McCall Smith's unsubtle writing; these stories are not particularly intelligent or interesting; they are certainly not art. This is very light reading, not to my taste, but I have no doubt that McCall Smith's regular readers – of which they are legion – will be charmed by what they find here.

The story Dear Ventriloquist is illustrative of my complaint of literalism. My edition of this book begins with a special “Author's Note to Canadian Readers”, in which McCall Smith explains that he has family ties to Canada and spends much time here. As a result, he had always wanted to set a story in Canada, and when he found an old photo with a man in a Stetson and a vaguely bouldery background, he had found his inspiration. In this photo, the man is kind of sitting on the lap of a woman in Edwardian dress (it looks to me like he's sitting on a boulder with his legs half-draped over her lap, but it's written that he is sitting on it), and if the title of the story hasn't clued you into the story's content, I'll fill it in here: the pair are performers in a circus, and when the woman's trailer burns down – with her ventriloquist's dummy inside – the man (a lion tamer) volunteers to act as the prop in her new act. Hilarious! This lion tamer has only one big cat – William Lion Mackenzie King – and that's such a highly clever play on the name of the contemporaneous Prime Minister of Canada at the time – William Lyon Mackenzie King – that the lion tamer needs to spell out the joke for Eddie (who is actually the protagonist of this story; the photographer rather than the photographed). It is explained to us that Eddie's father is a Quebecker, and when the boy had to correct his father's English once (explaining that “you don't know nothing” is a double negative), Eddie followed that up with “I know it's difficult for you – being French and all...” But that is the only instance of Eddie's father not speaking properly British (as a matter of fact, it annoyed me highly that everyone from this Quebecker to an Aussie to Scotch and Irishmen over the course of these stories would use the fussy phrase “That's as may be”; that struck me as implausible every time I read it). This story could have been set anywhere, so what was the point of stressing its Canadianness? The literal interpretation of the photograph simply shows no art or subtlety; even the love story was predictable.

There was one passage in the above story that might have gotten interesting: Eddie (as a conjurer and fortune teller in the circus) was telling the lion tamer that he knew for a fact that the Prime Minister routinely sought the advice of a fortune teller in Kingston. The lion tamer was taken aback by that, and though he repeated it to the ventriloquist, it came to nothing; what might have added some juice to this plot was just an interesting factoid; and one that all Canadians know anyway. I have the same kind of complaint about the final story, He Wanted to Believe in Tenderness. This story is set in Australia, and as the inspiration photograph shows a man and woman in militaryish garb, McCall Smith propels the action towards the man joining the army at the dawn of WWII. Again, something interesting might have happened: David was shown writing letters to the girl he left behind from his boring deployment in the Pacific when their base was suddenly attacked by the Japanese and he was taken prisoner. But instead of actually showing something interesting like a Japanese POW Camp, McCall Smith jumps ahead to David in a military hospital years later, where he refuses to let anyone see him because he has wasted away to skin and bones. That's so frivolous as to be nearly insulting, and even though I understand that McCall Smith's intention was to focus on the love stories inspired by these photos, the love story that follows this setup was so mawkish as to be nearly insulting. (And I have to admit that I'm confused by the love story too: Before the war, David had fallen in love with a Jewish woman who worried that her father would disown her if she married outside her religion. Yet after the war, in the aftermath of the Holocaust when in my mind their community would have become closer and more interested in preserving what was left of the bloodlines, this Jewish woman was more inclined to abandon her family for David's love. What was McCall Smith's inspiration for adding this unnecessary Jewish angle?)

I am tempted to include passages of the uninspired prose, but as I am working from an advanced reading copy, that's not quite done. This was a very quick, unsatisfying for me, read, but I don't regret spending a couple of hours with it; if only to confirm that I am not a fan of Mr McCall Smith.

I was in the lunch room one day when one of my coworkers at the book store came in, asked me about my weekend, and when I returned the pleasantry of inquiring after his, he told me that he had had a fine weekend attending a writers' retreat. That was interesting enough that I asked him the obvious followups -- Was the weekend about solitary writing time or group exercises? Had he been writing long? Had he ambitions about publishing? -- and while I was primarily asking out of politeness, I wasn't uninterested in his replies. After talking about his weekend for a while (and admitting that he had been told he was good enough to pursue writing professionally), he then pulled some pages out of his briefcase and said that I was welcome to peruse his work. Now that could be sticky, eh?

I couldn't really say no thanks at that point (although, to be fair, he gave me every chance to decline), and as he started before I did, I was left alone with his pages as he exited for the sales floor. Before he left, he explained that he liked to use Humans of New York posts as story prompts, and he routinely uses a photograph and the accompanying one line quote (never using a picture with more than a single line of explanation) to imagine an entire back story for the person. This is not dissimilar to what McCall Smith was doing, and in my coworker's favour is the fact that he wasn't limiting himself to love stories.

So, in the end, I read two of the offered stories before I had to start work myself, and while they weren't wildly inventive, they were both solidly written with clever, ironic slants. And my point is this: McCall Smith's stories don't really rise above the technical level of my amateur coworker (who is a retired school teacher), and I expect more from a high earning professional writer. I was able to genuinely thank my coworker for sharing his work with me, I was able to say that I had enjoyed reading his stories, but I don't know if there's a market for what he's doing (which, naturally, I kept to myself). On the other hand, Alexander McCall Smith is one of the most highly published authors out there...