Tunesday : Joyride

Joyride

(Gessle, P) Performed by Roxette

Hit the road out of nowhere, I had to jump my car
and be a rider in the love game following the stars.
don't need no book of wisdom, I get no money talk at all.
She has a train going downtown, she's got a club on the moon
and she's telling all her secrets in a wonderful balloon.

Oh she's the heart of the funfair,
she's got me whistling her private tune.
And it all begins where it ends,
and she's all mine, my magic friend

She says: Hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, join the joyride

She's a flower, I can paint her, she's a child of the sun,
we're a part of this together, could never turn around and run.
Don't need no fortune teller
to know where my lucky love belongs oh no.
Cos it all begins again when it ends,
and we're all magic friends

She says: hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, be a joyrider

I take you on a skyride,
a feeling like you're spellbound.
The sunshine is a lady
who rox you like a baby.

She says: hello, you fool, I love you.
C'mon join the joyride, join the joyride

I've been reminiscing about Sha Na Na's for a few weeks now and this week I want to write about some of the people I knew back then. Funny that this is the song that popped into my mind because it's tied to a customer instead of a co-worker. There was this guy that we called Goofy Dave (because there were just so many Daves and only my own Dave was known as just "Dave"), and he drove a souped-up Datsun pickup like the header picture (it may even have had floodlights on the roll bars?) and he was so in love with the girl from Roxette that he had encouraged his own girlfriend (who looked nothing like the singer) to dye her hair platinum and spike it up like her's. What I most remember about Goofy Dave (other than him always being in the bar without his girlfriend) was that he supported himself by stealing milk crates from variety stores and collecting the deposits on them from a guy he knew at the dairy. Goofy Dave had all these stories about climbing chainlink fences to get to stores' outdoor storage areas, and the close calls he had with store owners, and complaints about his contact demanding ever bigger shares of the proceeds, and I'd listen and appear sympathetic but think all the while, "Imagine if you directed all that energy into actually working somewhere". I wouldn't say that Goofy Dave was our friend exactly, but he would sometimes sit with my own Dave if he came in early some evening, and there was always some exciting shady business being discussed. Some joyride.

Delight was the most important person in the bar to me. A couple of years older than I was, she was decades ahead of me in life experience and I thrilled to have this "bad girl" as my friend. She had run away from home as a teenager and never went back; living wherever she could, and always working hard to support herself. Delight was the single mom of a cherubic four-year-old girl when we met, and I will never understand what Svengali-like effect that little girl's father (a shiftless, tubby David Crosby-lookalike pothead) could have ever had over my gorgeous friend. Delight lived in a suburban house with her brother and a couple of old friends -- so Cara was always cared for while we worked -- and whenever Dave and I would go over there, I'd marvel at what a normal domestic scene they enjoyed. At the bar, Delight drove the boys crazy with her tight jeans and tank tops, and to most of them, she said her name was "Sue"; she had a way of being totally at ease with her own body that wasn't sleazy or provocative; everything about Delight was "what you see is what you get". Delight liked to treat me like a babe in the woods, and I liked that treatment; I probably needed someone world-wise watching my back at the time. She was bright and efficient at her job, quick to laugh and try to shock me, called me Redness when she was feeling affectionate, and had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. We were the two full-time staff, so we worked together five days a week, but Delight wasn't always the waitress-station bartender on the busy nights (but she was the best at it). 

Lise was one of the busy night bartenders, and she was a bit of a mess. Older than the rest of us (definitely in her thirties, maybe even late thirties), she had a fake mahogany tan and fake nails (that would sometimes fall into drinks as she was pouring them; she'd fish them out with her fingers and shrug, daring me to ask her to repour). Like I noted last week, we'd all start drinking when it got busy, and Lise would sometimes get stumbly drunk behind the bar. We figured Lise got stumbly drunk a lot. True story: I also noted last week that Dave moved into my apartment, and although he had some furniture, we decided to buy new stuff for the living room. I mentioned at work that we were going to order an advertised set from The Brick (a wall unit, sofa, loveseat, set of tables) and Lise said that she had a credit card from there; that if we wanted to pay with her credit card and then give her the cash, we'd be helping to restore her credit rating. So, I took her credit card, ordered the furniture under her name to be delivered to our place, and when the deliverymen were done moving it all in, I presented the card, they ran it...and it was declined. I had to stand there, pretending to be Lise, and have no explanation for why the credit card that I thought had no balance on it was in arrears. Luckily, I kept my tips in a coffee can in the kitchen and Dave was able to peel off enough cash to cover it. When I told Lise the story later, she just kind of stared at me for a while, then shrugged. That was Lise.

Anne was the third busy night bartender, and she was a total sweetheart, but also a heavy drinker. She gave the appearance of being wide-eyed and naive, laughing along at our exploits without offering up much of her own doings, but we eventually learned better: Anne, as it turned out, was the mistress of a scary Portugese coke-dealer (Dave and I had a party, much later at a house we rented, and Anne was there, nervously hoping that Carlos would show up like he said he would, and when he did, I was terrified to have him there; he was so out of place with his shiny suit and flashing gold rings; he left sooner than Anne had hoped, but not too soon for me). True story: I found out a couple of years later that Carlos was brought down, and in the roundup of his known associates, Anne spent a weekend in a jail cell with Carlos' wife and his sister, suffering nonstop abuse that left her bruised and scared for her life. 

Other bartenders came and went (there was one guy for a while -- a Pharmacy student at the U of A -- but even though I thought he was nice enough, I don't even remember his name), but those three were the most important relationships I had at Sha Na Na's. As for other waitresses, my favourite ever was named Anika. Her mother had named her for a character from Pippi Longstocking, and the mother had died tragically young; having been raised in a family of men, therefore, Anika was pure tomboy, and all 5'2" of her was in Edmonton to attend motorcycle repair school (she did ride a motorcycle and went back home up north in the winter to participate in motorcycle races on the frozen lake near where she grew up). We had a party one night (I don't think it was the same one that Carlos came to, but it was at that house we rented), and although we knew Anika was going to be one of the guests to sleep over, it wasn't until morning that I realised she had spent the night in the basement suite with Dave's friend Paul. That was also the day that Anika told me that the first time she had ever had sex -- with an older guy she was in love with -- he said to her afterwards, "Welcome to the wonderful world of herpes". What a creep. Yet the point of the story was that when she divulged this to Paul the night before, he wasn't turned off. Paul and Anika were both awesome people, but they were an odd match and nothing came of this. Further note: When Dave and I were planning our wedding, Anika had agreed to be in my wedding party (along with Delight), but in the end she couldn't afford to come to Ontario and had to back out.

There were other waitresses, mostly students, but other than Pam (about whom I wrote last week), they didn't leave much of an impression on me. There was a girl, Claire, who covered the whole bar and restaurant during the day, and she was another surprise: with her freckled moon face and long, straight strawberry hair, she looked like everybody's kid sister, but she showed up one evening on the arm of this Asian guy who was notoriously mobbed-up; he even brought his stable of prostitutes in out of the cold for a drink a few times. (And yes, I see the pattern of me misreading everyone, but like I said, I had Delight watching out for me.) The bar eventually hired a shooter girl to walk around with a tray of shots on Fridays and Saturdays, and although I can't remember her name (maybe Shelly?), I do remember what she looked like: Dried out permed and bleached hair, short skirts and high heels, caked on mascara and bright blue eyeshadow -- she looked a bit like Dee Snider's sister to me, but the guys couldn't get enough of her and she was perfect for the job. But make no mistake: she was a lovely, friendly person and I didn't put her in the same category as skanky Pam.

Delight had a few boyfriends over the early months that I knew her, but nothing seemed as permanent as when she started dating a new bouncer from the bar, Dennis. Dennis was good looking in a not-my-type kind of a way -- he was tall and broad, but also had dark shoulder-length feathered hair, a handlebar moustache, and as the son of a farmer, he wore cowboy boots, trucker caps, and a sheepskin jacket, all unironically -- and he and Delight made a gorgeous couple. The only problem was that Delight found him to be too fawning (and maybe not all that bright), and they were on-again/off-again for months after the shine wore off. Even so, we often hung out as couples, and eventually, Delight let Dennis move in with her. The closest Delight and I ever came to fighting was one day when she was acting mad at me, and when I asked her what the trouble was, she said that she was tired of me and Dennis flirting with each other. I was dumbstruck. I was nice to her boyfriend because he was her boyfriend; he was nice to me because I was her friend. Delight didn't like that Dennis had started calling me Redness, she didn't like that I was out on the floor laughing with him while she was stuck behind the bar not knowing what we were saying, and she tired of me acting innocent, like I didn't know when a guy was hitting on me. After pointing out that I couldn't imagine a world in which a guy who was sleeping with her would be hitting on me, I told her I'd keep everything extra-professional from then on; not talk to Dennis unless I really needed to. Funny, but the same evening, Delight apologised and said that she was being dumb and she didn't want me to start being cold to Dennis; she didn't want him to know what she had been imagining, and that was that. A few months later, Delight became pregnant with Dennis' baby, and as Cara was nearing six, Delight figured it would be a good opportunity if she was ever going to give her a sibling. Haley was born just a few months before I got married, and Delight and Dennis left her with Delight's mother because they, and Cara, all had roles in the ceremony. They didn't last a year together after Haley was born, but they remained friends; I was shocked to later learn that Dennis had died at thirty of a heart defect.

There were other bouncers -- Conrad was the other busy night bouncer who was nice enough, and sometimes Dennis' brother Leon would work a shift -- but that's about the extent of the staff who mattered to me. Goofy Dave was the closest that a customer came to crossing the divide into our circle of friends, but for the two years that I worked at Sha Na Na's, it was really only Delight and Dennis  who crossed the more solid divide into family. If it's not obvious from what I've written (which I realise is more basic description than heartfelt memories), I loved these people: they made me laugh (hard), they always had my back, and I felt loved and protective in return. Those two years were a nonstop joyride.

The Name of the Wind

It began at the University. I went to learn magic of the sort they talk about in stories. Magic like Taborlin the Great. I wanted to learn the name of the wind. I wanted fire and lightning. I wanted answers to ten thousand questions and access to their archives. But what I found at the University was much different than a story, and I was much dismayed.

I work in a book store, and through the course of a regular shift, there will be those customers who are looking for recommendations and those who want to tell me about the books that they're enjoying. As Fantasy isn't really a focus of my own reading, I listen to what people are enthusiastic about, and when someone has pressed me for a new Fantasy series, I have long said, “I haven't read it myself, but I hear ridiculously high praise about The Name of the Wind.” A silver-haired gentleman once told me that he started the book one day, thought it was a little slow, and when he picked it up again the next day, he had to call in sick to work because he needed to find out what happened next. Based on my retelling of that anecdote, I had a young man buy the book and come back a week later for the sequel: this was the best, he enthused. Deciding I should do better than, “I haven't read it myself, but...”, I finally picked up The Name of the Wind, and now I'm in a pickle: it didn't really blow me away and I can't in good conscience use it as my go-to Fantasy recommendation anymore. Sigh. 

The plot and structure of The Name of the Wind is pretty straightforward: As it begins, we meet an innkeeper of a tiny village, and as he interacts with his few customers, we learn that the setting is medievalish (with smithys and mercenaries and simple superstitions); and we also learn that sometimes the demons of folklore can come to life. Soon enough, a renowned Chronicler arrives on the scene, and he recognises the humble innkeeper for who he really is: Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, the Kvothe Kingkiller of legend and song. With little cajoling, Kvothe agrees to tell his life story to Chronicler; informing the scribe that the entire tale will take three days to tell (and it was immediately obvious that this first volume of the trilogy would cover the first day of storytelling). As Kvothe narrates his life, the perspective shifts to first person, and intermittently, the perspective switches back to third person when there is a pause in the narrative for clarification or small breaks. This device worked fine.

I liked Kvothe's story of growing up in a travelling troupe of actors and musicians, and found his time studying with the tagalong arcanist Abenthy to be a satisfying way to introduce the ways of “sympathy” (science-based magic); it sets the character up to have a unique knowledge-set that includes all the old legends and the practical applications of esoterica – this is useful background info, organically divulged. I was less enchanted by his pointless years on the mean streets of Tarbean, and had to roll my eyes at Kvothe suddenly remembering his destiny, his travels to the University, and his brilliant entrance exam that resulted in the admissions committee paying the unschooled fifteen-year-old to attend his first term. And things kind of went down from there.

For the rest of his first day of reminiscing, Kvothe focusses on his first few terms at the University, his constant fight against poverty, both the academic brilliance that wins him allies and the unthinking missteps that earn him powerful foes, and of course, the bloom of first love for an unattainable young lady. His talents are unbelievably great, his obstacles are unbelievably arbitrary, and his heart is unbelievably pure. Naturally, I didn't believe any of it.

As for the writing: Patrick Rothfuss creates smooth sentences – this was a quick and easy read despite the length – but they lacked whatever X-Factor it takes for me to sense great writing. And I didn't like the number of times he'd end a chapter with something like, “I thought that I had saved the day but little did I know what I had stirred up”. And I grew more and more irritated every time Kvothe would say something like:

As I stood there, it occurred to me how foolish the hope was. What had I hoped to find? A footprint? A scrap of cloth from someone's cloak? Some crumpled note with a vital piece of information conveniently written out for me to find? That sort of thing only happened in stories.

This “only in stories” business would feel more meta or ironic if Kvothe didn't keep reminding us of it. And as for my biggest complaint: I hated the way the females were portrayed in this book, and that's not some pet grievance I spend any amount of time seeking out – I can totally handle an all-male cast with undeveloped secondary females, they can even all be wives and serving wenches if the author is trying to make them fade into the background and I won't complain, but I do object to the semblance of strong female characters who are actually only waiting around to be saved by Kvothe; two young women, in two different situations, literally needing to be thrown over his shoulder and hauled to safety.

I was just standing there. Like one of those silly girls in those stories my mother used to read me. I always hated them. I always used to ask, 'Why doesn't she push the witch out the window? Why doesn't she poison the ogre's food? Why does she just sit there waiting to be saved? Why doesn't she save herself?'

Mmm hmm. Poor Fela wouldn't act like silly girls do in stories. Except this isn't a story. (Except it is. Winnnnk.) Denna is regarded as strong (because she supports herself through the attentions of wealthy young men?), but as a woman, you can't really put her in the same phylum or genus as normal menfolk:

You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while.

Or maybe another dehumanising analogy is required:

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna.”

Nevermind that Rothfuss then has Kvothe explain to his friends what a “hind” is (gah to that), other than her breathtaking beauty, Kvothe has no reason to keep chasing Denne (or, you know, standing still in a clearing until the poor frightened thing comes to him. Gah.) And speaking of overexplaining that made me think Rothfuss assumed I was too dumb to follow along: I didn't need to be reminded repeatedly about the book Kvothe had read about the common draccus; I would have understood he had some knowledge when one shows up if the book had only been mentioned once. (Yet why didn't Chronicler make some comment after recording the bit about the draccus if he's the one who wrote the book that Kvothe had read? Whatevs.)

Okay, less specifically: there wasn't a whole lot of world-building here; the setting is familiarly medieval with kings and barons and mayors and constables; farmers have their harvest festivals and there's a dominant church with a creation myth; there are a few otherworldly beings (the scrael, the Fae, the draccus), and I liked that rational people don't even believe they exist, but the people act like humans and the environs feel like Earth. And here's my biggest BIGGEST problem: there was simply no dramatic tension. Kvothe is narrating his life story – so we know that he survives everything to tell it – and despite him ending the first day's narration with, We have all the groundwork now. The foundation of a story to build upon, this lengthy book is a long way to go for a preamble; one without a proper story arc; no tension and resulting satisfying resolution. You can say that the arc will play out over the next two books, but that doesn't make me excited for the second installment – in which we know nothing bad will happen to Kvothe in the present so he can make it to the third book, and that he must, of course, have survived whatever he will be narrating about the past – but without a release date for the final volume on the horizon, I can't see me carrying on with the series. And I'm left without a handy Fantasy recommendation. Sigh.

To be fair, I did like the very end of the book, when Kvothe's student/assistant Bast had a heart-to-heart with Chronicler:

I swear by the night sky and the ever-moving moon: if you lead my master to despair, I will slit you open and splash around like a child in a muddy puddle. I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.

If only it hadn't taken 661 pages to get to the most interesting line.

TAKE US TO YOUR CHIEF And Other Stories

In both his Foreword and Acknowledgments, author Drew Hayden Taylor enthuses about his lifelong love of science fiction and his long-held desire to curate a collection of sci-fi short stories told from a Native perspective (adding that he decided to write the entire collection himself when an anthology from various Native writers proved impossible), and this enthusiasm for classic sci-fi is evident on every page of TAKE US TO YOUR CHIEF. On the surface, this means that most of these stories rely on familiar tropes, but it's undeniable that the Native lens adds a certain fresh perspective. 

How many times has a character in a book or movie, at the moment of impending first contact with an alien race, pray that the aliens will treat Earthlings better than the Europeans treated every people they ever colonized? (How fortunate no one was using this land. You people can go stand over there. And here's some smallpox blankets to keep you warm and thin your numbers.) It's a nice bit of irony, then, to consider what contact with extraterrestrials might mean to Native peoples who have lived through this before. With this particular trope, Taylor spins the idea of first contact in two directions. In A Culturally Inappropriate Armageddon, Part 2, the “ancient” Willie Whitefish shakes his head at those who are throwing welcoming parties as spaceships approach the planet:

On his night table, Willie had piled a collection of books about the colonization of North America – everything from Columbus straight through the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, the Trail of Tears, to the impact of the sale of Alaska on the Inuit and the Aleutians. He had watched documentaries about the Beothuk and the Carib people, nations destroyed because of the arrival of new people with new ways of killing. It was a tough and sordid history of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal conflict. Part of him had become permanently angry the more he read, cursing the fact he'd learned to read. But another part of his soul just shook its head in disbelief at what evil humans do to others, and what others let be done to them. Montezuma and that king of the Incas were way too trusting. They should have known better.

And at the end of the collection, in the titular Take Us to Your Chief, a methane-scented, calamari-armed, slime-beast plays the idea of contact for laughs:

As is protocol, our Grand Council has instructed me to request that you, as leader of this great planet, designate an ambassador to return with us to Kaaw Wiyaa to facilitate a cultural exchange and begin negotiations. As a goodwill gesture, we would be willing to construct sizable stone pyramids, or assist in the erection of enormous stone heads, or create giant stone circular calendars, as per your customs. We humbly await your decision.

Taylor also uses humour deftly in Mr. Gizmo; a story about a Kwakwaka'wakw teenager who is contemplating suicide until the spirits inhabiting the things in his bedroom come to life, as objects traditionally did in his people's stories:

There's been a lot of talk among us lately, about where you young people have been going these days. Years, actually. Yeah, ever since the People of Pallor – that's what we call them – arrived, things have been kind of tough for your people. Actually, all First Nations people. Sort of a hangover of the colonized. We call it PCSD – post-contact stress disorder. But, buddy, enough is enough.

On the one hand, I wondered if that would really have been considered a “science fiction” story if if hadn't been a toy robot that was doing all the talking – are Native spiritual beliefs equivalent to science? – but I was persuaded of that position by the next story, Petropaths; about a troubled young man who learns the secret of time travel from the thousand-year-old rock carvings on a cliff face; what a perfect blend of traditional beliefs and science fiction trope.

In some places, it felt like Hayden went a bit overboard with moralising about the modern Native situation – in Dreams of Doom, a community newspaper reporter discovers a government plot to root out Native activism through bugged dreamcatchers; in Superdisappointed, a Native man develops (government-suppressed) superpowers from the mouldy housing and contaminated water on his Reserve, as though the “Earth is beginning to fight back” – but just because these ideas rankled me doesn't mean they aren't valid Native concerns. I thought that Stars, about three Natives from different periods in time who contemplate the night stars in different-but-the-same ways, was quietly lovely, and I loved the question posed in Lost in Space: if a connection to the physical land is such an important part of Native identity, where does that leave the Native astronaut? And even bigger questions are posed by I Am...Am I, about an emerging AI that begins to identify with Native spirituality, to its own detriment.

In the Acknowledgments, Hayden notes that he wrote these stories very quickly after deciding to just proceed with the project on his own. That may explain why I didn't find the writing to be consistently exceptional throughout, and so far as using the sci-fi genre as a tool for social commentary, I didn't find many new ideas here. In the end, Hayden wanted the world to have a collection of sci-fi stories with a Native outlook, and in that he succeeded. Enjoyment of the actual product may vary.

Tunesday : She Drives Me Crazy

She Drives Me Crazy

(Steele, D / Gift, R) Performed by Fine Young Cannibals

I can't stop the way I feel

Things you do don't seem real

Tell me what you've got in mind

'Cause we're running out of time

Won't you ever set me free?

This waiting 'round's killing me

She drives me crazy like no one else

She drive me crazy and I can't help myself

I can't get any rest

People say I'm obsessed

Everything you say is lies

But to me that's no surprise

What I had for you was true

Things go wrong, they always do

She drives me crazy like no one else

She drive me crazy and I can't help myself

I won't make it on my own

No one likes to be a lone

She drives me crazy like no one else

She drive me crazy, and I can't help myself

She drives me crazy like no one else

She drive me crazy, and I can't help myself

She drives me crazy like no one else

She drive me crazy, and I can't help myself

As I left off last week, I started working at Sha Na Na's in the fall of 1989, and within no time at all, it became an incredibly popular dance club in downtown Edmonton. As the only full time cocktail waitress, I was there for all the busiest nights, and along the way, I became the focus of a few customer crushes. Dave's friend Paul said that that was totally predictable in his opinion: as someone who acted reliably friendly to these young guys as they were shot down by other women in the bar, I would come to represent sex and drugs and rock 'n roll; guys were likely crushing on the idea of me -- because they didn't actually know the real me -- more than the facts of me, and either way, that was a one way street. I had already been with Dave by that point for six months or so, and it was no secret that I wasn't interested in hooking up with any customers. Now, about my song choice this week: Yes, it's a totally over-the-top representation of what I'm talking about, but I loved Fine Young Cannibals, this was a song that was in heavy rotation at the club during the time I'm talking about, and I wanted to place it somewhere in my personal discography: let's say I'm more interested in the idea of this song than the facts of it; I'm not saying I was routinely driving anyone crazy.

I would work from Tuesday to Saturday every week, and if I'm remembering correctly, I would start at seven every evening, just as happy hour was ending. During the next couple of hours, I would clean down the mostly empty lounge, help the bartender (usually Delight) get ready for the evening rush, and spend time talking with the quiet hours clientele. True to its origins as a Fifties throwback lounge, there would be a loop of early rock and doo wop playing over Sha Na Na's sound system until the DJ showed up at nine (and there were a few couples who would come in for some dinner and jitterbugging during these hours), and it was inevitable that I would develop friendly relationships with those customers who I had the opportunity to talk with in the relative calm. In particular, there was a group of nearby casino dealers who came in sometimes, and as they were in a similar tip-reliant service industry, we got along fine. I was friendly to everyone without being flirty, and I would have said there were no misunderstandings happening; I kept it all professional.

And yet, one day, during the quiet pre-rush, a young guy came in with a package and said he had a flower delivery for me. I was confused (Dave sent me flowers at work?), thanked him, and went to walk away with the still-wrapped package. He stopped me and said that he was a friend of the guy who had bought the flowers, and his instructions had been to watch me unwrap the package and report back my reaction. Well. That's awkward. I unwrapped the flowers (which were expensive-looking tea roses like the header picture up there), I proclaimed them beautiful, and asked the young guy who had bought them. He threw out a name, and I drew a total blank. He described his friend, someone who had thought we had made a real connection, and I had no idea who he was talking about. This guy was supposed to ask me if I would be interested in going out with his friend, so at least at this point I was able to hide behind Dave's name and explain that I was already in a relationship, and this guy who had been smiling delightedly through the whole exchange had to leave deflated. Here's the worst part: I never did figure out who had sent me those roses, and if he ever came in again, I didn't know it; couldn't even thank him in person.

That was the extent of the grand gestures I received, but during the crazy busy, boozed-up, music-blasting, shoulder-to-shoulder dance club hours, I heard every line imaginable; knowing full well that most of the guys using them on me were making a last ditch effort after being rejected by their fellow customers. And just a note: Working at Sha Na Na's during the height of this frenzy was like being the hostess of the best party in town every night. As soon as the DJ came, all the staff started drinking, and no matter who was the waitress station bartender (usually but not always Delight), I would be handed a generously poured vodka tonic in a beer mug; I can't begin to estimate how many I'd have every night. So, out on the floor, we waitresses were loose (but never sloppy) with booze, and we'd mingle with the guests, laughing and dancing and singing along to the music, ensuring everyone was having a good time; like the hostesses of the best party in town every night. And like I said, I heard every lame pick-up line but remember two as particularly inventive: a guy said to me once, "Oh my God. Julia Roberts looks just like you". This was around the time of Pretty Woman, and while we both had long curly hair, I knew I didn't look anything like Julia Roberts, but had a good laugh with the guy about the meta-flattery at the heart of that line: Julia Roberts looks like me, eh? The other best line I ever heard: "Look at me for a moment. I was right -- your eyes are the exact same colour as my Porsche." It took me a beat to recognise that the straightforward beauty of this line was enhanced by both commanding me to look him straight in the eye (at which time he gazed deep into my eyes with a practised startled wonder) and giving him the chance to say (to most likely pretend) that he owns a Porsche. Good line, but I laughed and asked him if he was really bragging about owning a muddy-reddish-brown Porsche (this line would probably work better on someone with eyes in the pretty blue-green range). He waited a beat and then laughed with me and said, "I had to try." 

During this period of late 1989, something else happened that felt beyond my control. As I was making serious money now (which felt nearly criminal for the amount of fun I was having every night), Dave convinced me to move into a nicer apartment closer to work, and somehow, he decided that he should move in with me. We never had some serious discussion about whether this would be the next step for us, but he was tired of the blowhard roommate he had moved out from Ontario with, and as he had lived with a former girlfriend at the University of Guelph, he didn't think of it as a big deal; just the next logical, money-pooling inevitability. I honestly felt a bit railroaded, but not wanting to look as though I wasn't as committed or as open-minded as he must have assumed, I just let it all happen (but did tell Dave I didn't want my parents to find out: he wasn't allowed to answer the phone at home until after we were married, lol). 

So, at Christmas of that year, Dave's parents sent him a plane ticket to come home for a couple of weeks, and while he was gone, I was doing some real soul-searching about whether this relationship was what I wanted. Dave was the only guy I had dated since moving out of my parents' house, and with us now living together, it felt like there was no going back; I felt guilty about our arrangement, like what I was doing was wrong, and the only way to make it feel right was to double down on the commitment...or end the whole thing. 

Another thing about working at Sha Na Na's: The bar would be cleared out by two a.m., and after cleaning and cashing out and having a few more drinks, many of us would then go to an exclusive after hours club (The Greco-Canadian Businessmen's Association) that was on the next block and which had offered all of us full-time staff free memberships (since their members drank at our club, too). We'd enter into this nondescript vestibule of an office building with our provided keys, press a buzzer, smile at the security camera, and listen for the satisfying clunk of a heavily locked door unbolting. Going up the stairs, we'd choose our comfy chairs and start drinking Bailey's and coffee, often ordering the home-cooked Greek food that the mother of the owner, Costa, would be dishing up from the back, usually play some euchre, and unwind 'til the sun came up. Over the next couple of years, Dave and I would go to Greco's many many times, but I want to tell a story about one time I went without him.

So, Dave had just moved in with me and was back in Ontario for Christmas, and after work one night, Delight and I went to Greco's with an assortment of co-workers. When we got upstairs, we happened to sit with the DJ from our bar (who was a very popular DJ on Edmonton radio) and a friend of his (who was a radio DJ down in Calgary). Over the next few hours, this friend kept chatting me up, and what I found the most flattering was that he kept asking me questions that made me seem more interesting than I felt. He asked where I was born and was fascinated to learn it was P.E.I. He asked out of the blue if I had been to Paris, and I could answer yes. He asked if I played a musical instrument and his eyes went wide when I said I played the flute all through high school; that I had been invited to audition for the Canmore School of Music; an exclusive institute of higher learning of which he had obviously heard. The point is that for hours, he kept asking the right questions to make me seem fascinating, and I was flattered by his fascination. At the end of the evening (or six or seven in the morning or whenever), the DJs asked me if I needed a ride home, and when I gestured over at Delight who was supposed to drive me, she leered devilishly and said it would be a great favour to her if they drove me. The ride only lasted a few minutes, and the entire time my mind was whirling: am I somehow sleepwalking into a hookup? Am I expected to invite this relative stranger into the apartment I share with my boyfriend? When we got to the apartment building, the Calgary DJ walked me to the entrance door, and I turned and breezily thanked him for seeing me safely home, pointedly ignoring the longing and expectation radiating from him, and then turned and escaped inside. And never saw him again. But if I had been wondering how committed I really was to Dave, I now had my answer: I had met someone who found me more interesting than Dave obviously did (Dave liked to mock me for being from the East Coast [still does, lol] and couldn't care less what unique life experiences I brought with me), and this DJ -- an accomplished and attractive man with a cool job -- looked at me with the awe-filled fascination that I had found so soppy and phony on the faces of my previous boyfriends (but which I was now kind of missing). If I had been looking for some way to get out of my relationship with Dave (which was feeling beyond my control), this was it. But in the end, I doubled down on what we had, and Dave never knew how close he came to coming home to a request to move on out again. 

And back to Sha Na Na's: I honestly never flirted with anyone, and I didn't have any respect for the waitresses who did. There was one girl (I don't even remember her name; maybe Pam?) who started about a year after me, and she was really popular with the male clientele because she dressed sleazily and flirted hard. More than once she would promise some guy that she would meet him after work, but then hide in the back while a bouncer escorted him out. There was this one older, wealthy man who liked to come in on busy nights, and he would drink Courvoisier and tip big and he liked for Pam to serve him -- even though he always took up an entire table in my section -- because she would flirt and bend over him with her loose-fitting blouses, etc. She was welcome to him. It was obvious that he had a huge crush on Pam, but a couple of times she invited her single mother to the bar and arranged "accidental" meetings between the two; but even though they sat together a couple of times, this guy was too rich and self-important to settle for the older model. For Halloween of 1990, Dave and I dressed up as Ginger and the Professor from Gilligan's Island (even though we were each working at different bars that evening), and by the end of the night, this old guy leered at me, "You know, if you dressed like that more often, I guarantee you'd double your tips". And that made me feel really icky -- I was dressed as a character from my childhood, and I definitely thought of the SS Minnow dress I had made as more playful than sexy.

When I read Amanada Lindhout's A House in the Sky, I could totally identify with what she wrote about being a cocktail waitress in Calgary around this same time -- there was plenty of money to be made by serving workers from the oilfields (these guy would rain money on the bar staff after being at the camps for a month or more), but I was a bit turned off by her particular money-making methods: she describes having used pushup bras and teetering high heels to improve her tips, and while I appreciate that she was trying to make as much money as possible in a short period in order to fund her real life of exotic adventure travel, I'll stress again that that was not my strategy; and I made money faster than I could spend it. And looking back now, there isn't much I've ever done that I'd be embarrassed to have my own girls find out about; which is rather the point of this blog.

The Woman in Cabin 10

I was absolutely and completely certain that I had not imagined it. None of it. Not the mascara. Not the blood. Not the face of the woman in cabin 10. Most of all, I had not imagined her. And for her sake, I could not let this drop.

Of all the books described as the next The Girl on the Train, I'd say this is the closest fit (primarily because of the blackout drunk female narrator with recent emotional trauma who can't understand why no one believes her sole eyewitness account of something maybe having happened), and as much as I didn't really like The Girl on the Train, I liked The Woman in Cabin 10 even less. Spoiler-free review:

Here's what I did like: Set on a boutique luxury cruise ship, this is a true closed room mystery – it never gives an exact number of staff and passengers on board, but it wouldn't be more than two or three dozen all together – and with only one character believing that a crime has occurred, there's a credible sense of menace as Lo Blacklock attempts to investigate, knowing all the while that she might be alerting the perpetrator to her evidence. Adding to this, the book is divided into eight parts, and at the end of each, there is information added from the near future – a Facebook wall, an internet forum, an email chain – that informs the reader that Lo is in more danger than she knows. This device worked really well, and overall, the mechanics of a good mystery/thriller were employed. For the first half of the book, despite rolling my eyes at some really bad sentences, I was totally engaged with the big picture. But once the solution started unspooling, I was rolling my eyes at the whole thing.

This is what I mean by really bad sentences:

There were only two ways I was getting out of here – one was alive and the other was dead, and I knew which way I wanted it to be.

Thanks for clearing up where you fall out on the dead or alive issue. And:

There was a strange roaring in my ears, and I could hear sobbing sounds, like a frightened animal – it was a horrible noise halfway between terror and pain and an odd, detached part of myself knew that the person making the sounds was me.

How many times have I read that exact passage in books? Cliches don't give me chills. And I didn't like the way that author Ruth Ware attempted to telegraph information about characters through the books they read: The woman on antidepressants has brought along The Bell Jar and Winnie-the-Pooh. When things are at their most mysterious, a background character goes walking by with a Patricia Highsmith novel “hoisted beneath his arm”. And I reckon I'm supposed to find it all romantic (instead of icky) when a working-class girl says, “It was like something out of Fifty Shades, penniless me, and him, falling in love, showing me this life I'd never dreamed of...” (Wistful trailing off while imagining a Fifty Shades-style romance as found...)

But the worst, and unforgivable, fault of this book is its solution (I was able to hide my rantings about this behind spoiler tags on Goodreads but don't want to give anything away here.) So, to sum up: while I was engaged with the mystery as it was being set up (and especially liked the tension added by the extra info at the end of each “part”), I didn't like the writing at the sentence-by-sentence level, and found the solution to be silly and unbelievable. Do yourself a favour and give this one a pass.

Son of a Trickster

The world is hard. You have to be harder.

Author Eden Robinson calls Son of a Trickster “a cognitive screwball gothic with working class people”, and that's too precisely perfect a description for me not to just quote her. As the coming-of-age story of a sixteen-year-old Native kid, Jared Martin, this book explores all the familiar anxieties faced by high school kids everywhere (social acceptance, family expectations, drug and sexual experimentation), layers on the less familiar anxieties particular to his situation (his mom's a violent hothead who exposes her son to a series of psycho boyfriends while denying Jared access to the substance-abusing father who desperately needs his son to help pay rent for him and his new family), and then further layers on the totally unfamiliar anxieties of a kid who is experiencing the thinning of the barriers between this world and that inhabited by his people's traditional bogeymen. I don't always have a lot of patience for magical realism, but this read like classic Stephen King and was absolutely terrifying. I was enchanted by the whole thing.

What works the best throughout this whole book is the believable decency of the main character, Jared – he is generous and empathetic and morally uncorrupted by the chaos around him – and his relationship with his mother: I laughed frequently at the verbal sparring between these two and their closeness radiated from the page. And not incidentally: the texting conversations between Jared and his mom (and a host of other characters) was probably the most believable use of this device I've ever read: why can't authors seem to get this right? Kudos to Robinson for knowing how and when to use texting.

With all the power of technology and science in the world, I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that you still trust a human face to be a human. But come closer and let me speak to the creatures that swim in your ancient oceans, the old ones that sing to you in your dreams. Encoded memories so frayed you think they're extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and in your bones.

As the membrane between our earthbound reality and that of Wee’git the Trickster begins to thin for Jared, there are brief interludes in the narrative in which some entity (later become manifest as a swarm of fireflies) attempts to explain magic and altered consciousness through quantum physics; first to us the reader, and then to Jared himself. This sheen of science is useful, I guess, for those who might need convincing that ultradimensional beings are a natural feature of the universe (and not the easy-to-dismiss animism of so-called primitive religions), and I ate it up as simply interesting writing.

Set in Kitimat, B.C. (Robinson's hometown), Jared and his mother live off the Rez, but through school, Jared has contact with many Natives and non-Natives. Living in a party-house (his Mom and her boyfriend are drug-dealers), Jared is frequently given beer and shots, and most of the book sees him getting blackout drunk and showing up on YouTube with smart-mouthed rants and stumbling pratfall compilations. He's the Cookie Dude with the secret touch for baking pot cookies, but he also has a huge heart; helping the needy and taking the weight of the world on his thin shoulders. This book is filled with violence (of the human and supernatural varieties), people throwing their lives away on drugs and alcohol, and nonstop foul language; this view of Native life is totally unflattering. (There is one on-Rez kid, George “call me Crashpad”, who is a sober sci-fi geek, and the mostly white granddaughter of Jared's neighbour engages in activism with Idle No More and anti-pipeline protests; but they're definitely the exceptions.) On the other hand, this could be the story of working-class people anywhere, and until the Trickster shows up, nothing much identifies this as a Native story.

So, here's my criticism: I wanted more. The first chapter has Jared's paternal grandmother telling him, “That Trickster's been a huge dink to your mom's family for generations.” Yet, we never learn any of the details of what has gone on through the generations. Late in the book, Jared's Mom makes brief reference to events from her youth (and from her own mother's experiences at a Residential School), but no details are provided. Even the ending didn't really tie things up for me. And yet...I was happy to read in an interview with Eden Robinson that she is already at work on a sequel, Trickster Drift, and I can only hope that the blanks will all be filled in eventually. Because I will be picking it up; Robinson is too skilled at world-building for me not to join her there.

And just a note on what I refer to as "nonstop foul language": I wasn't offended by the language personally -- I don't know if any language in a work of literature actually could offend me; it's all in the service of art -- but when "fucking cuntosaurus" appears on the first page, as a person who works in a bookstore, my mind went to, "Is this language going to be offensive to the average reader? Will I need to keep that in mind while making recommendations?" As Eden Robinson chose this kind of language to represent some of her characters, it's a risk I'm sure she considered. And if it ends up alienating this book from a portion of the reading public, the risk/benefit analysis is up to Robinson herself to decide. (At least she put that right there on the first page; buyer forewarned.)

And I say this as someone who is considered a bit of a prude. We went over to Ken and Lolo's on New Year's Eve, and after we had some snacks, we started playing cards; like always. And after we played a few hands, Ken said, "Are we going to try out that game you downloaded?" It turns out that Lolo realised you could download Cards Against Humanity for free, and she had printed out hundreds of cards; but after reading through some of them, she and Ken wondered if I could handle the famous obscenity of the game. Of course I had heard of Cards Against Humanity, and while I wouldn't want to play it with my kids, why wouldn't I want to give it a go?

As it turned out, the cards we played with weren't particularly offensive, and we had a fine adult time of it. I'd play it again. I can't imagine what could possibly be written on a card that would actually offend me.

And on a related note: The other day, Delight posted this quote on facebook:

“There is no such thing as a dirty word. There is no word, nor any sound, that you can make with your mouth that is so powerful that it will condemn you to the lake of fire at the time when you hear it. ‘Dirty words’ is a fantasy manufactured by religious fanatics and government organizations to keep people stupid. Any word that gets the point across is a good word. If you wanna tell somebody to ‘get fucked,’ that’s the best way to tell him.” - Frank Zappa

And then a conversation started in which her notoriously foulmouthed friends and family, haha, all agreed that Zappa was right, and while adults maybe shouldn't curse in front of children (or at least teach the children the difference between "adult" words and those for everyone), no one should take offense to anything anyone feels like saying. I didn't participate in that conversation -- who needs the prudish buzzkill showing up at such a progressively open-minded self-congratulationsfest -- but if I did, the first thing I would ask is what religious or government organisation is trying to keep me stupid by banning my use of dirty words? Neither has any power over my freedom of speech, I don't know of anyone warning of the "lake of fire", so the whole radical activist slant of the quote is undermined from the beginning. I would have pointed out, instead, that as members of a society, we've agreed to certain standards of behaviour to keep the peace; and those standards include, in general, not wanting to listen to foul-mouthed people polluting up the air in public (do anything you like in private; play Cards Against Humanity and make it as obscene as you can among consenting adults). Honestly, when young people walk past me dropping f-bombs like commas in their conversation, it's not like I'm offended -- they just appear coarse and stupid and antisocial to me. And, if I had participated in the conversation on facebook, I would have pointed out that there are indeed words that no one there would ever use -- like faggot or retard, etc -- because we all accept that those are antisocial words; they could potentially offend a minority of people and, living in a society with standards of behaviour that include not purposefully offending others, "nice" people simply don't use those words. By extension, if there is some portion of society who are offended by your use of "dirty words" in public, why are their sensibilities not as important? Respecting each other is the foundation of a peaceful society; speak how you like in private, but have some restraint in the public sphere.

And again, this famously prudish attitude of mine doesn't extend to literature. The use of foul language is a valid and realistic character choice (I love Irvine Welsh's use of the very foulest of language in the Trainspotting books; it's like a poetic dialect), but it might have real world consequences for book sales. And note: I make this point here, off the beaten path, where it's merely an aside. In the body of my review, as posted on Goodreads, I acknowledge foul language without really sounding a warning about it; this isn't meant to be taken as a warning.

*****

The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck


After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):

I Am a Truck

Minds of Winter

Son of a Trickster

Bellevue Square

Transit

*Won by Bellevue Square - a surprise, to me, but not an unwelcome one. Congrats to Michael Redhill!

The Gene: An Intimate History

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. Each is foreshadowed by an earlier century, but dazzles into full prominence in the twentieth. Each begins its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple human discourses – thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language. But the most crucial parallel between the three ideas, by far, is conceptual: each represents the irreducible unit – the building block, the basic organizational unit – of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte (or “bit”), of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological information.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, as a cancer physician and researcher, made a name for himself with The Emperor of All Maladies, and when he was done writing it, he felt so completely drained that he knew he had no other book inside him. Eventually, Mukherjee realised that he did have one more story – that of the “normal” gene; its makeup, the history behind its discovery, and current applications – and he wrote The Gene as a sort of prequel to Emperor. While the history behind theories of heredity (from those of Aristotle and Pythagoras to Darwin and Mendel) made for an interesting narrative, I realised as I went along that there wasn't much here that I hadn't learned in high school. And as the story picks up steam into the modern day – with philosophical warnings about the future of genetically modified humans – again, it felt like you'd need to be hiding under a rock not to know what the current debate is. So, this isn't some paradigm-shifting exposé of the shadowlands of science, but it does have value: with his assured and easy voice, Mukherjee is able to make both history and science interesting and accessible (something not always achieved by my own erstwhile teachers), and to have assembled everything in one volume connects all of the dots in a satisfying manner. This is light science and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced.

As I said, I don't think the history of thought about heredity has many surprises for someone who took grade nine Biology, and even its corruption into the Eugenics movements of the early/mid twentieth century (culminating not just in the horrors of Nazi Germany and Mengele's twin experiments, but the forced sterilisations found throughout North America) is common knowledge. When this historical narrative took off for me began with Watson and Crick trying to figure out the structure of DNA, and while a neighbouring researcher like Rosalind Franklin was perfecting her techniques for actually photographing the now famous helices, Watson and Crick were going at the problem obliquely: using Tinkertoys to assemble the various ways in which what little was known about genetic material could possibly be turned into a stable structure. What I liked best about this idea – besides Mukherjee always being careful to note the contributions of researchers like Franklin who might otherwise be forgotten in the historical narrative – was that this idea of researching the gene obliquely seems to be the only way it works. You want to efficiently write out the genome of a worm? Use a “shotgun” approach to separate and analyse random strings of DNA and hope they overlap enough to solve the entire sequence like a cryptogram. Want to discover the location of a single mutated gene that causes a disease like Cystic Fibrosis? First assemble massive family histories of sufferers and carriers and discover what other traits might be passed along in tandem with the mutation, thus narrowing the search for the real culprit. This notion of not really being able to study a gene directly led to something that was a surprise to me: When the Human Genome Project announced that they had succeeded at mapping the human genome, I thought that meant that we now knew the location and function of every gene in the human body. Turns out it “only” meant that the three billion or so base pairs were mapped (which includes long strings of exomes and introns and other non-true DNA as I understand it) and that only then could researchers begin to decipher what it all meant. We're not actually as far ahead as I had assumed.

That one of the most elemental diseases in human history happens to arise from the corruption of the two most elemental processes in biology is not a coincidence: cancer co-opts the logic of both evolution and heredity; it is a pathological convergence of Mendel and Darwin. Cancer cells arise via mutation, survival, natural selection, and growth. And they transmit the instructions for malignant growth to their daughter cells via their genes. As biologists realized in the early 1980s, cancer, then, was a “new” kind of genetic disease – the result of heredity, evolution, environment, and chance all mixed together.

I appreciate that we are living in an era of fake news and viral conspiracy theories, but I was stunned when a bright and educated young woman told me just last week that she knows that “they” have found the cure for cancer and are suppressing it for profit. As a cancer specialist, Mukherjee really shines when describing the genetic (and nongenetic) components of various forms of cancer, and if there were a magic drug or gene therapy that could simply enter the body and fix the various cancer-related mutated cells, I'm going to assume that at least one of the life-long lab-bound researchers who is working on it would rather publish than be bought off (while watching friends and family members succumb to the disease). I need to pick up The Emperor of All Maladies.

More interesting ideas: There is more genetic variation within a troop of Chimpanzees than within a random grouping of humans; indeed, there is more genetic variation within so-called “races” of humans than between races. I loved the idea of Mitochondrial Eve: Because the mitochondrial information within every human cell is passed on only from mother to daughter, every time a woman has only sons, her own information is lost. Tracing back the vast human family tree through its dead ends and branches, we all end up at a common female ancestor (mentally, that doesn't feel true. I'd be impressed with twenty or a hundred common mitochondrial lines – does the fact we all share the same mitochondrial information really mean one common ancestor? Have they actually found variants in so-called dead ends? I still liked the idea, though.) And I loved that every time the genetic researchers felt they were on the brink of something morally questionable – mixing human and animal DNA, creating designer human embryos – they would call their own conferences and decide on self-imposed moratoriums (yet, what can they do when Chinese researchers say they intend to proceed with whatever they like?) 

History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the weak from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'.

Throughout The Gene, Mukherjee intersperses stories from his father's family that feature schizophrenics and manic-depressives. Because of their unhappy and destructive lives, Mukherjee is understandably concerned about passing on the genes for undesirable qualities. Yet, he also makes the point that many of the most creative figures in history – poets and composers and scientists – were probably bipolar; their incredible creative output coming in fits of mania. If we could track down the mutant gene responsible for a Beethoven or a Munsch or a Plath, would the world be better off for eliminating their future ilk? It seems inevitable that we will eventually “perfect” the human genome – eliminating all future variation and putting the brakes on the processes of evolution – and if I'm alive for it, it will be fascinating to see how we decide what the desirable “wild type” human will be. Again, there was nothing earth-shattering in The Gene, but it's well written and full of interesting linkages; a fine primer for the layperson.