Stephen Florida

In my private corner, I spit on the ground. I tell myself I will come back to that thing I've left – that spit – in fewer than ten minutes, and I will have won. I've done this thing so many times that I know when twelve minutes are up, I'm on a schedule, I'm a creature of habit and something clicks, and then I go from privacy into the gym and to the edge of the mat and wait for my opponent, I'm skin and gristle and little water, Stephen Florida without end Amen.

Steven Forster was an orphan and a somewhat talented high school wrestler when a full-ride scholarship to a mediocre college landed in his lap – albeit getting his name completely wrong – and with no other options or ambitions, Stephen Florida was born. I know I often complain about writers with MFAs having had the juice educated out of their writing – and that's very nearly the case here, with writing that feels very deliberately crafted instead of craftily effortless – but author Gabe Habash has written a character so peculiar yet identifiable, and created such a weird and uncanny atmosphere in which to place this unlikeable antihero, that I ended this book with nothing but admiration for what Habash was able to achieve (even if I can't say I really liked the book itself). And note: With a daughter, Kennedy, who was a one season high school wrestler – she effortlessly made her way through the ranks to the Provincials, where she first encountered someone trying to actively hurt her, and suffering bruised ribheads requiring medical attention in the first match at that level, she lost her nerve and retired from the sport – I had enough familiarity with the wrestling world to perfectly visualise these scenes. Also note: Kennedy relayed to me the "checking the oil" move the first time she was told about it, but being a girl, the old "five-on-two" never came into play.

Although Florida is single-mindedly focussed on wrestling – he's in his senior year of college as the book begins, so he has one last chance to fulfill a promise to his dead grandmother to one day win a national championship in her honour – he has also been meeting his course requirements throughout the years; somehow absorbing a liberal arts education along the way. Having earned B's and C's in such classes as Culture of Global Capitalism, Arthurian Romance, and What is Nothing?, Florida's inner monologue – juvenile, narcissistic, unpolished – is studded with learnings despite himself, leading to nicely jarring passages like this one:

What I'm thankful for: this season, drive, motivation, success lust, that I'm not fat, that I'm not a handicapped, that I don't have fucking spina bifida, that no one can hear my thoughts except me, that activeness forestalls the sludge of the cosmos, that my hands are big for my size, Linus, Oregsburg, that my great-grandpas put it in my great-grandmas and that my grandpas put it in my grandmas and that my dad put it in my mom, that I wasn't born in King Leopold's Congo or Siberia, that my sinuses are a high mountain cave and there is a little grendel in there tending her mushrooms, that I'll never have too much time on my hands, that there are other wrestlers out there waiting for me to come tear them down, my grandma, that I have a job to do.

Hints are dropped throughout about the hardships Florida has faced – from the early loss of his parents and childhood best friend to his fellow college students avoiding him as “cute but weird” – but in the first section of this book, things are looking up: he's winning his meets, he's found a sort of friend to mentor in a talented Freshman wrestler, he's found a sort of girlfriend in a warmhearted artist, and he's found a sort of family in an aunt who reaches out from the blue. We're always in Stephen Florida's head, so any rays of sunshine are a relief from his sudden bouts of violence, his bizarre proclamations, the Suicide Prevention pamphlets in his desk drawer. But when things start to fall apart for Florida, not only do increasingly strange events start to occur in the outside world – a green notebook full of poetry and dark warnings, a strange confession via CB radio, a gorilla mask in the shower – but his inner obsessions extinguish any sense of hope:

More and more things keep happening to me. Insignificant things and significant things and boring things and sacred things and terrible things and nice things and strange things. They disguise themselves as new events but really I know what they are, they're ancient events that have happened before and they've just run to the back of the line to wait their turn again.

The tension and uncertainty made for such a charged reading experience: Stephen Florida wants one thing – a national wrestling championship – and while on the one hand he's pretty unlikeable and hard to root for, on the other, his focus on rigorous training, asceticism, and self-denial (and as graduation approaches, the realisation that his college education hasn't prepared him for a job in the real world) makes the reader believe that he has earned this one thing when the world has given him so little else. A sports book has a concrete form – a setup, a setback, a final showdown that can end in one of two ways – but with such a disturbed main character and an atmosphere that kept me off-balance, Habash pretty much transcends the formula: ultimately, the plot (and its often unnecessarily bizarre twists) was less important than character/setting/atmosphere, and I'm sure I preferred it that way.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn't reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of ourself but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more open-hearted and altruistic – that is, more spiritual – idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

How to Change Your Mind dovetails so nicely into my reading interests about the brain and consciousness and picks up some related threads that other recent reads wove for me (in particular, What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson and Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich), and continues a course of inquiry that I left dangling decades ago (with reads like Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism by R.C. Zaehner and The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda) – left dangling because, as someone raised on shocking Afterschool Specials, the flashback scene in Go Ask Alice, and the horror story of kindly Art Linkletter's tripped-out daughter jumping off a building because she thought she could fly, I knew that I would never consume acid or 'shrooms or peyote as a shortcut to enlightenment; institutionalised fear worked its trick on me. How odd to have been sent this ARC of a book by Michael Pollan – whose only previous work I had read was The Omnivore's Dilemma, back when I was interested in the philosophy of food – just at the time that other books started talking about the resurgence of research into psychedelic therapy. This book came at such a good time for me, and so perfectly suits my interests, that's there's some danger of me overrating it; I'm giving it five stars anyway. (Usual caveat: As I read an ARC, quotes may not be in their final forms.)

How to Change Your Mind is divided into sections covering the history of research into and the eventual banning of psychedelics (and especially the invention of LSD and the introduction of psilocybin – the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” – to the West, which both occurred in the mid-twentieth century), Pollan's recent personal experiences with psychedelics, a brief section on neuroscience and how psychedelics impact the brain, and the uses to which these chemicals are being put to therapeutic study today. As a journalist first, Pollan is present in each part of the book – interviewing subjects and describing his own experiences – and every bit of it was interesting to me.

Pollan writes that nearly every culture on earth has used psychedelics – the exception being the Inuit, who simply don't appear to have access to the right chemicals in their environment – and with reference to the “Stoned Ape” theory (that prehistoric experimentation with psychedelics might have shocked the brains of early hominids into becoming us; although this theory isn't widely accepted, at any rate, these early visions of “the divine” might explain the persistence of religious belief throughout human civilisations), he makes the case that their use has been widespread throughout time and place. There are, of course, nonchemical ways of achieving a psychedelic experience: the characteristic dissolution of the ego can be attained through meditation or hypnagogic breathing techniques; the nineteenth century Romantics – Emerson, Whitman, Tennyson – were so in awe of nature that they became one with it and wrote about it in language that prefigures the accounts of acid trips; Appollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell describes his sudden mystical experience when viewing the Earth and its place in the universe from space:

Suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the bodies of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness...It wasn't 'Them and Us,' it was 'That's me! that's all of it, it's one thing.' And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of, 'Oh my God, wow, yes' – an insight, an epiphany.

I can't help but think that if most of us can't achieve (or won't put in the work to train ourselves to achieve) spontaneous mystical experiences that have the potential to show us that all of humanity is connected and deserving of love, then what's the harm in guided recreational use of psychedelics? On the other hand, you can kind of see why there was such a backlash against Timothy Leary in the Sixties: if everyone does tune in, turn on, and drop out – if everyone suddenly sees the pointlessness of their worker bee lives – then who will keep the lights on and the grocery stores stocked and streets ploughed while the rest of us are seeking higher consciousness? It feels ironic to read of Aldous Huxley's enthusiasm for widespread LSD use so many years after writing Brave New World, where he seemed to be advocating for the more authentic life lived by the savages in the wild who weren't blissed out on Soma. One way or the other, psychedelics are making their return to respectability:

So maybe this, then, is the enduring contribution of Leary: by turning on a generation – the generation that, years later, has now taken charge of our institutions – he helped create the conditions in which a revival of psychedelic research is now possible.

Recreational (or religious/shamanic) use of psychedelics has never gone away – and Pollan was easily able to find trained and experienced guides to help him safely use LSD, psilocybin, and “the toad”. I was impressed by the level of attention that all of these guides paid to preparation (the set and setting that primes the mind), their care of Pollan during the experiences, and their training in helping him make sense of his trips after the fact. I was also impressed by Pollan's efforts to describe the ineffable, as well as his apparent transparency in sharing what seems such private encounters with himself. These guided trips seem to be like compressing years of therapy into a weekend (it can be Freudian or Jungian, depending on how you prepare your mind beforehand), and that sounds valuable.

Even more remarkably, there are reputable institutions currently conducting research into using psychedelics to combat depression, addiction, and obsessions (what all of these seem to have in common are brains that are stuck in destructive modes of thinking that can literally be rebooted – like shaking a snowglobe – by a single acid trip.) Terminal cancer patients who are given psychedelic therapy discover their loving place in the universe and accept death as nonthreatening, smokers realise that their habit is pointless, people with depression (so far, temporarily) see the beauty in life – even Bill W, the founder of AA who had quit drinking after tripping on belladonna, is said to have wanted psychedelic therapy available to alcoholics; his philosophy of fellowship and surrendering to a higher power comes directly from what he experienced on his own psychedelic trip. 

Love is everything. Is a platitude so deeply felt still a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To re-saturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deepest of truths, hidden in plain sight. A spiritual insight? Maybe so. Or at least that's how it appeared in the middle of my journey. Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious.

Pollan is careful not to conflate the metaphysical with “God” – even avowed atheists who could only describe their experiences as having been “bathed in God's love” still assert that they don't believe in God after it's over – but as the common experience seems to be seeing oneself as a part of all creation, and as this fosters a feeling of love for all humanity, it's hard to see what governments are afraid of by banning the recreational use of psychedelics (except for that whole needing the worker bees to keep the lights on and the grocery stores stocked and the streets ploughed). Full of history, science, and personal experience, How to Change Your Mind suited me and my interests perfectly.

And because I so like synchronicity: The other night, Dave and I were watching Norm MacDonald's latest standup special and we thought this was one of the funniest bits -

 I don’t drink, so I’m no good at parties for that reason. And drugs, I don’t do them. Used to. When I was a boy, young, I would do anything, you know? LSD, that was about the strongest drug I ever did – acid. I don’t know if you’ve ever done acid, but… When I was young, they would tell me, “You have got to be careful with that acid, on account of you can do it,” and then you have a flashback. Like, ten years could pass, 20 years could pass, “and then you get a flashback.” So I thought, “Well, that sounds like a good deal,” you know? I went to my drug dealer Frank. I said, “Frank…” is there a drug on the market where I pay you $5… I take the drug, I get high, “and then, 20 years later, I get high again?” He said yes. And I think of myself as somebody who’s good at stretching his drug dollar. But the point of the whole thing is for me to tell you young folk… that it’s not… it’s not true at all, you know? Because I have not done LSD since I was a teenager. Ten years have passed, 20 years have passed. Sadly, 30 years have passed. And still… no flash… What a gyp that turned out to be. I… Just more horseshit by the big acid companies if you ask me. I don’t want to… I don’t want to get too political, but… If you think big acid… cares about you, the little guy… They care about their third-quarter profits. That’s what they care about. 

Funny as that was on its own, it begs the question: are flashbacks really not a thing? I referenced Go Ask Alice in this review because it really affected me: there's a scene (if I remember it correctly) where Alice, after many months off drugs, is babysitting and has a flashback; is found in a closet clawing at herself to "get the spiders off". While I always thought that a drug-induced metaphysical experience would be fascinating when I was a teenager, I also thought that if I ever wanted to be a mother, it would be crazy to put myself at risk of losing control like this - what if I was pregnant someday and had a flashback and tried to claw the alien out of my tummy? (I have never heard of this actually happening, but Alice scared me straight.) Pollan doesn't write about flashbacks, but he does warn that a young person who would otherwise be at risk of a schizophrenic breakdown could be put over the edge by psychedelics (just as can happen with the stress of university or a bad break up). Between Pollan describing his own thoughtful experiments and him quoting Jung's belief that everyone should try to have a metaphysical experience in middle age, I could totally see myself seeking out one of these underground guides.

Which makes me a hypocrite - as a rule, I'm not impressed by drug users (although I drink), and I have no problem thinking of my imagined quest as spiritual and elevated, and at the same time, young people at a rave with their glow sticks and their MDMA as debauched and juvenile. I can be touched by the idea of this great sea of interconnected consciousness out there that can be accessed through a guided journey, but roll my eyes at New Age healers manipulating "energy fields". I want to see the face of God but can't bring myself to follow religion.

My coworker Carrie - a lovely and upstanding Christian woman - asked me the other day what I was reading, and after I described this book, I asked her if she would take illegal drugs if it meant that she could see God. She said:

I would. I haven't seen God, but I have felt Him. You know I go to a Pentecostal church (I didn't), and when the Holy Spirit is present, you can see it rolling through the crowd. People start to talk in tongues. People experience healing. And as the Spirit rolls over me, I fall to the ground in a wave with everyone else. My husband always says, "There's no way I'm falling", but when the wave is rolling, down he goes. And no one has a mark or a bruise after - Spirit is on the move and just gently overwhelms you and you carefully collapse. Now, I haven't seen this, but others have told me about miracles; about having limbs grow back.

I must have looked increasingly surprised by this, because that's where Carrie stopped and smiled; her right hand hovering over where she had demonstrated a left hand "growing back" thanks to the Holy Spirit. While I would love to have this kind of faith, I was inwardly thinking about the power of suggestion and the hysteria of crowds; skeptically dismissing another person's experience as superstition while elevating my own ideas as science-based. I understand my hypocrisy, and also understand that Carrie and I share the same desire to make sense of our worlds. If there are guides who can prep a psychedelic experience, keep me safe in the moment and act like therapists after the fact to make sense of the journey - if flashbacks or other side effects aren't even a thing - the only thing holding me back would be my ingrained distaste for recreational drug users; which is more an effect of my upbringing in an era of anti-hippie backlash than anything I've actually observed. So much to think about, and that's why this book seems to be appealing to something particular within myself.

Tunesday : Whole Lotta Love

Whole Lotta Love

(Bonham, J /Dixon, W /Jones, J /Page, J /Plant, R) Performed by Led Zeppelin

You need cooling
Baby I'm not fooling
I'm gonna send ya
Back to schooling

A-way down inside
A-honey you need it
I'm gonna give you my love
I'm gonna give you my love

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

You've been learning
Um baby I been learning
All them good times baby, baby
I've been year-yearning

A-way, way down inside
A-honey you need-ah
I'm gonna give you my love, ah
I'm gonna give you my love, ah oh

Whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

You've been cooling
And baby I've been drooling
All the good times, baby
I've been misusing

A-way, way down inside
I'm gonna give ya my love
I'm gonna give ya every inch of my love
I'm gonna give ya my love

Hey!
Alright! Let's go!

Whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

Way down inside
Woman, you need, yeah
Love

My, my, my, my
My, my, my, my
Lord
Shake for me girl

I wanna be your backdoor man
Hey, oh, hey, oh
Hey, oh, hey, oh
Ooh
Oh, oh, oh, oh

Cool, my, my baby 
A-keep it cooling baby
A-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby

I wrote last week that this week's Tunesday would be about my younger brother's wedding, and now that I'm here, I'm finding it hard to shape my message about it - that was a weird day for my family, it began the cooled relationship we now have with K and C (they're too digital for me to want to make this post easy to find by putting their names together in it; it's not for them and it's certainly not meant to offend them), and I really don't want to overstate what a weird day it was and make it seem like we're feuding because of it. We're not feuding; I love them both, but this may explain a bit why we don't see them too often. Led Zeppelin was always my brother's favourite band (although he has apparently given them a rethink recently, agreeing that they probably stole all their best bits from earlier, and unacknowledged, African-American blues singers), so this song is for the him who would have appreciated it back in 1997.

My brother met his future wife when he returned to high school - K had graduated from grade 12 in Alberta, and taken a year of university, but when he then moved to Ontario with our parents, he decided to return for a year of grade 13 in order to boost his grades and get into the best possible post-secondary school now that he actually cared about his future - and K and C were together for nine years before they got married. Over all those years, my mother thought she had developed a special relationship with C, and certainly, Mum would have done anything for her. In the time that Dave and I had been living in Ontario again, we spent many a Saturday night with my brothers and their partners while Mum babysat Kennedy - I would have said that we had an ideal relationship and there was much closeness, laughter and bonding.

In the months leading up to their wedding, K would complain that his future mother-in-law was controlling too many of the details, but as C deferred to her mother in all things (as she apparently still does), "Mo" (as she likes to be called) was effectively the wedding planner; and what Mo said was law. This not that, these not those. My mother held a bridal shower at her house for C (because Mo said it would be tacky for the bride's mother to host it herself), but Mo was in charge of all the details - the decor, games, food - and as I arrived and surveyed the platters of tiny triangle sandwiches, the crustless white bread dyed pink and green and yellow, and saw Mo and her sisters bustling around and refusing any help from my own mother, in her own home, I could see which way the future lie.

Mo also thought she could control K's bachelor party, but my older brother took that on; Ken resisting all of Mo's suggestions, despite her insistence that she should have a say if the men of her family were invited. The party was held at some pub, and Ken and Dave "kidnapped" K the night of, clamping a homemade ball and chain to his ankle that K would need to carry around with him all evening. There was a lot of drinking, games and gambling that raised money for the groom, and the venue didn't mind that they had brought a giant pot of chili for the guys to eat near the end of the evening. Apparently our younger brother was so drunk that when he spilled chili on the dance floor, he then dumped the whole pot out and proceeded to break dance in it. When the owner then kicked them out - they were done anyway, the older men having left hours earlier - K then started to break dance in mud puddles in the unpaved parking lot to "clean up". Ken still wouldn't let K get into his truck, so they threw him in the back and let K get pummeled as he rolled back and forth, half passed out, on the drive back to Ken's house. Ken and his wife had just bought this place, and as K fought the guys as they tried to carry him up the stairs and throw him in the shower - grabbing and breaking the potted plant from halfway up the white-carpeted staircase - Dave had to go rent a carpet cleaner the next morning before Ken's wife saw what disaster K had wrought.

I don't even remember the details of all of the back and forth and the negotiations of who would pay for what that spooled out over that year (my parents were on the hook for a lot of it), but I can say that Dave and I were totally broke at the time. Still, we were (along with Kennedy) in the wedding party, and between the custom-made bridesmaid gown, Dave's tux, and my mandatory salon hair and makeup, it cost us a little more than five hundred dollars (that we really didn't have) to participate in their wedding. Money is a petty thing to mention, but it was so weird the way it all played out - Mum offered to buy their cake topper, because she had bought mine for my wedding, and at Mo's insistence, that turned out to be some crazy expensive piece of Belleek pottery (to "honour their Irish heritage"), which Mum bought and which was then displayed beside the cake. It was apparently a custom in their family for the bride and groom to use the engraved silver souvenir cups from their Baptisms as the cake toppers at a wedding, but that wasn't a custom in our family - we have no "engraved silver souvenir cups from our Baptisms" - but having learned this, Ken and I bought such a small silver cup for K to use as a shot glass at his bachelor party. This was not acceptable to Mo, and in the end, their wedding cake was topped with just C's cup; as per their tradition. Weird, right? I don't want to get into all the half-remembered details, but the months of planning were just one weird thing after another - this was Mo's wedding and we were playing by her rules.

Jump ahead, and the night before the wedding, there was a rehearsal and a rehearsal dinner, and the last thing my Mum asked Mo before she left was when they should show up for the pictures that would be happening before the wedding. Mo, apparently distracted, replied when the photographer would be showing up at their house, and that was left at that. We girls went to K and C's house to sleep, Kennedy was with me too, and in the morning we went to the salon and got dressed and went to Mo's house. Kennedy was asked to be the "Ring Bear", and she had the job of walking up the aisle with a little white teddy bear that had mock wedding bands attached to a ribbon; that was an adorable idea and we were delighted to have her included. Mo was close with her next door neighbours and had babysat the little girl and boy who lived there, so they were the flower girl and "tissue holder" (Mo had sent away for some promotional Scottie tissue holder [that white teardrop-shaped plushie that was their mascot/logo at the time] so Thomas' job was to walk solemnly up the aisle with it, looking for people who might be teary-eyed). When we got to Mo's house, Thomas decided that he'd rather have Kennedy's teddy bear, and being two years old, she protested when he grabbed it from her. I gently explained to Thomas that he would need to give it back, and as he screamed in my face, Kennedy crying behind me, Mo came running and told me to let Thomas have whatever he wanted; my job was to get my own kid in control. I was stung, but not really surprised. The photographer started taking candid shots of C and her family, and when my parents and grandparents showed up - as they had been told to? - Mo flew at them and started yelling that they weren't supposed to be there, my parents weren't supposed to see the bride before the church, they weren't needed for pictures until after the ceremony, who told them to interrupt their family time, etc. My mother was obviously stunned, tried to explain what she had thought was the plan, but Mo wanted them gone and Mum had to get herself and the old people back to the car, with nowhere really to go and it far too early for the church yet. When we did show up to the church together, Mo immediately beelined for my mother and continued yelling at her about not keeping to the schedule, and Mum had to retreat to the bathroom in order to get away and prevent herself from crying; Mo followed her and kept yelling at her from outside the closed door. (K asked me to be understanding: it was very stressful for Mo to watch her baby getting married, but our mother was watching her baby getting married, too; I can be accused of not always empathising when our Mum is acting nutty, but I did feel for her on this day.)

C was a gorgeous bride, and the ceremony was beautiful; every detail she (and her mother) had sweated over turned out perfectly. Kennedy was given her teddy bear back in time to wander up the aisle with it, hesitant and sucking on a finger from her free hand, and I think she must have sat with my parents during the ceremony. We went downtown for some beautiful portraits - including my parents and grandparents this time - and with the stress of the vows over with, I thought that maybe Mo could relax and enjoy the rest of the day. Maybe not.

We got to the reception hall - a newly renovated and gorgeous pavilion overlooking Lake Ontario - and in an example of C's brilliant planning, Dave's sister Rudy was there to sit with Kennedy during dinner and the speeches, and to quietly take her away when she became too tired. C's sister and I were tasked with handing out little craft packages for any kids in attendance (more planning brilliance), and after I handed packages meant for some kids on their side (who I had been told couldn't make it) to some kids from my side who hadn't been accounted for, Sherry started screaming at me, in front of these kids, saying that I had no right to give those away. I hadn't spent any significant time with Sherry before this - I only knew that she was a bit of a black sheep that my brother didn't care for - and I don't even remember what I said to her in reply, but I know it ended with me hissing that she better not say another word to me; we were not our mothers and I didn't have any reason to take abuse from her in order to preserve the peace (by which I mean: these latter words were thought, not irreversibly spoken). Sherry and I didn't exchange words again until the Baptism of K and C's son six or so years later; we remain polite but uninterested in one another to this day; which is fine.

The dinner was impressive, the atmosphere of the building was lovely, and C and her mother's decorations were perfect. Even so, there was a strange vibe. A coworker of my father's who had been invited - an Egyptian man whose beliefs might have played a part in his response - told my Dad later that he found it strange that the tables seemed perfectly divided between our side over here and their side over there with no mixing between the two; and that he sensed their side giving ours the evil eye all through dinner. For what's it worth, that's how an outsider saw it. (Note: My parents had way more money than C's parents, but they acted like they had more class. Apparently, because we don't give engraved silver cups to babies at their Baptism or dye our tiny sandwiches pink and green and yellow, we are little more then Hillbillies.)

The speeches came and Dave, as the MC, did a great job keeping everything moving along with jokes and efficiency. I remember my Dad getting choked up as he gave a speech - saying he thought that C was like the brightest bulb on a Christmas tree the first time he saw her in a group of K's friends - and while I don't remember most of the other speeches, K's friend Mark brought the house down. At first, he came up and started rambling about K and his friends and then he said that he was here to finally expose a long buried secret about Dave. Mark walked off to somewhere, and when he came back, he was holding a poster of Dave from a high school play, and as Mark strode from table to table to show it to all of the guests, he kept exclaiming, "He's Peer Gynt! Dave's Peer Gynt!" As the MC, Dave was standing off to one side in all of this, his face stunned and bewildered - why would anything be about him? - and I nearly peed myself laughing so hard (and I was so glad that Rudy was there to see it; she had to stop herself from peeing, too.) Meanwhile, Sherry was beside me stony-faced, not seeing the joke in it and acting like Mark was the biggest Hillbilly of us all (as C and K's high school friend, I don't know how he reflected on my family, but somehow he did) and the entire crowd was divided between those on my family's side of the room who were laughing and those on C's side who apparently found the whole thing distasteful. Mark then grabbed his guitar and started singing a song about K and C - he had reworked the lyrics to Hotel California to explain where K had come from (Alberta) and how their love story had played out (fated) - and it was hilarious and loud and too long, and still, one half of the room was enjoying ourselves and the other half acted like the display was beneath the dignity of the occasion.

Rudy and Kennedy left soon after dinner, I was relieved to leave the head table and get away from the cold-shouldering Sherry, and as I was enjoying spending the rest of the evening mingling with my own family, Ken suddenly came up to me and said, "Why haven't you been drinking?" I replied that someone needed to drive us all home. He clasped his hands together in a mock goody-goody gesture and said, "You're pregnant, aren't you?" I looked at him seriously and said, "If I was, I certainly wouldn't announce it at my little brother's wedding. Today's for him, so let's just leave it at that." But Ken knew, and some of our other relatives knew before the weekend was out, and I sincerely hope neither K or C ever thought I wanted it that way - I had planned the timing of this pregnancy specifically not to draw attention away from their day. (The picture at the top - which was the only picture we were given from this wedding, is actually our first complete family portrait - Mallory was definitely already there with us. It was Rudy who took this picture and gave us a copy.)

I don't even remember what else transpired throughout the reception - whether my Mum and Mo had further words - but my family's overall poor treatment, and my younger brother's reluctance to protest or otherwise interfere, set the stage for our ongoing family dynamics. I honestly don't remember if Mum and Mo have been in a room together since that night - my parents were retired to Nova Scotia when K and C's son was born, so neither of them were present for any showers or birthdays or whatever family events over the years - and that's weird, too. I know my Mum was hurt on that day, and I understand why K and C have embraced Mo's support over all the years that my parents have chosen to live away from us, but there's a distance between them and the rest of us that began at the wedding. There's a coolness, but there's also a whole lotta love. And that's all I've got to say about that.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

On February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations – I was born a crime.

It took me long enough to pick up Born a Crime that I thought, by now, I knew the full meaning of the title – that having a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother made Trevor Noah's very existence a criminal act – but it wasn't until I actually read it that I realised how much more insidious the plan of apartheid's architects: South Africa was divided into more categories than simply “black” and “white” (including “colored”, “Indian”; the black folk divided by ancestral tribe with the learning of each other's languages discouraged), and with his light skin, Noah didn't fit into any category; not only could he not be seen in public with his father, but with a dark-skinned mother, he couldn't be seen in public with her (or anyone from her family) either. I suppose it's a poor reflection on me that when I look at Trevor Noah I see a black man, but when he was growing up, the kids around him considered him white; a confusion and a degree of separation that followed him throughout his school years. In his book, Noah recounts his childhood and coming-of-age as apartheid began to crumble, and with his trademark wit and charm, he had me by turns laughing and crying; this book was an education for me, and in a way, a love letter to his remarkable mother:

My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that my mother started her little project, me, at a time when she could not have known that apartheid would end. There was no reason to think it would end; it had seen generations come and go. I was nearly six when Mandela was released, ten before democracy finally came, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom could exist. A hard life in the township or a trip to the colored orphanage were the far more likely options on the table. But we never lived that way. We only moved forward and we always moved fast, and by the time the law and everyone else came around we were already miles down the road, flying across the freeway in a bright-orange piece-of-shit Volkswagen with the windows down and Jimmy Swaggart praising Jesus at the top of his lungs.

I remember being in Chem class in 1985 when our teacher – the stereotypical mumbly-mouthed and nerdy science guy, with greying and greasy hair flopped over thick-framed glasses, and chalk residue palmed down the legs of his baggy dress pants by the end of every class – came into the lab, rolling a TV/VCR combo, saying, “I want to show you something.” The idea of a movie in our boring Organic Chemistry class got us kids excited, but as it began, what we saw was more confusing than any equation or formula Mr. Kireefe had ever taught to us: This was a documentary on South African apartheid – something not one of us students had ever heard of – and it was matter-of-fact about gruesome violence and allowed nice-looking white people to expose their ugliness through casually racist statements and it explored all the ways in which the black majority of that country were effectively enslaved at a time when we students believed that slavery had ended long before we were born. That this could be going on in the 1980s, and that I had never heard about apartheid in any of my other classes – that it took our weird Chemistry teacher to take it upon himself to show us what we really needed to know about the world – blew all of our minds. How could something as ugly as apartheid have lasted for generations in South Africa and the rest of the world never even talked about it? Mr. Kireefe must have been just on the edge of the changing ethos because it was only a few years later that Nelson Mandela was released from prison and apartheid officially collapsed – but according to Trevor Noah, that didn't mean that life suddenly became easier for black South Africans; racism and poverty didn't abruptly disappear.

The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.

Now, to be specific about the book: Born a Crime is a collection of eighteen stories instead of a straightforward chronological record of Noah's life; so each chapter has its own story arc, with some later chapters retelling parts of a previous story in order to fold it into the new story arc – and while this felt a bit unusual as a format, it totally works. This book came out before Noah became the host of The Daily Show, so there's nothing here about “The Industry”, but it was gratifying to learn that he was enjoying success on stage (as a comedian) and screen (as a television host) in his homeland before he made the leap to the U.S. When watching Noah on TV today, I'm always amused by his voices and mimicry, and it was interesting to tie that into his early facility with languages; his childhood attempts to fit in with whatever group he found himself with:

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

Maybe some of the writing is cliché-ridden, and maybe some of the stories could have been edited a little better, but Trevor Noah had a fascinating life to relate – a narrative of a time and place we shouldn't ignore as though apartheid never happened or was too long ago to affect the world today – and with charm and wit (and a story of a mother that ends in an incredible place), the reading of this book is a highly enjoyable experience. Even when it made me uncomfortable.

Two more stories that couldn't find a place in my review:

I was shocked to see that more than one reviewer was turned off by Trevor Noah's "Hitler" story; a fact that could only mean that those reviewers didn't really understand it. When Noah graduated high school, he started hanging out in a black suburb ("The Alex") and he and his friends got some gigs DJing street parties. One of his friends there was actually named Hitler, and he was an amazing dancer, so Noah added him to the crew. Noah explains that education for black students was so poor that no one would have actually known who Adolf Hitler was - it was just the name of a man who was so powerful that white folks enlisted black folks to help fight him - and never having learned the details of WWII or heard of the Holocaust, Noah's friend Hitler's parents wouldn't have had any bad associations with the name. (Noah also makes the point that every society thinks their own tragedy is the most tragic - if you asked an African who the biggest monster in history was, they'd be more likely to choose Cecil Rhodes or Belgium's King Leopolde.) So the DJ/dance crew had no idea what was so offensive about them performing a gig at a Jewish private school, all the dancers gathered around their star, raising their arms in the air as in any Hiphop performance, and chanting, "Go Hitler! Go Hitler! Go Hitler!" There's uncomfortable comedy and social commentary in that scene - the kid named Hitler, his parents, none of  friends, had any idea who the Fuhrer really was, by design of the country's segregated education system - and I don't think the story was meant to offend; anyone offended just didn't get it. (By contrast, I found the "little boy turd" story to be funny, but agree that it went on way too long about the fact that everybody shits, and these are the mechanics of shitting...this was the kind of story that I thought could have been edited better. I wasn't offended, just thought, "So what? Get on with it.")

And Noah told a story about a time his dog ran away, and when he tracked her down, Fufi had found a new little boy to hang with; she refused to come when Noah called her, and in the end, his mother had to pay the new family in order to bring Fufi home again. Noah learned from this experience:

I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.”

And if that's how Noah actually feels about people and relationships, I find that very sad.

Heart Berries: A Memoir

This story is yours, culprit of my pain. Which one of us is asking for mercy?

Heart Berries is a memoir by the Salish writer Terese Marie Mailhot, told over eleven “fractured” essays. Growing up on Canada's West Coast, this could have been a sadly familiar-sounding Reserve-based childhood tale, but Mailhot is a writer with an edge and an MFA. Her “narrative” is beyond the ordinary (with an artist/activist mother whose correspondence with an American prisoner formed the basis for a Paul Simon project, and an artist father whose life with his second family was documented in the NFB film Hope), but it's her heart that Mailhot puts on display here; her pain and need and grief that evokes the universal while insisting that this is a personal project that exists independent of my experience of it. I could have marked beautiful or otherwise striking passages on every page – in the introduction, Sherman Alexie quips that Mailhot puts “the 'original' in aboriginal” – but from the material at the back of the book, I felt chastened by that greed: Mailhot's words are not beholden to my evaluation of them, but I will say they moved me.

I wrote like I had something to prove to you. The stories were about the Indian condition alongside the mundane. Most of the work felt like a callback to traditional storytelling. Salish stories are a lot like its art: sparse and interested in space. The work must be striking.

We learn early that after a messy breakup, and some threats of self-harm, Mailhot committed herself to a brief stay at a mental health facility. While there, she was provided with a pen and notebook, and through a series of unmailable letters to her former lover, Mailhot began to write her story. Like Salish art, her writing is “sparse and interested in space”; the essays in this book comprise only 130 small pages, but they contain a big life. Mailhot's story is her own, so I'll not outline it here.

I woke up today, confused, inside of something feminine and ancestral in its misery. I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage. My illness has carried me into white buildings, into the doctor's office and the therapist's – with nothing to say, other than I need my grandmother's eyes on me, smiling at my misguided heart. Imagine their faces when I say that?

And yet, I can't help but include at least this one quote that contains something of Mailhot's politico-poetical voice and viewpoint. My edition of Heart Berries ends with a Q&A between Mailhot and Joan Naviyuk Kane; an Inupiaq American poet and fellow MFA. Kane's first question about the field of Native memoir, and Mailhot's experience with it, elicited this answer from the author:

When I look at these books, the distinctions are clear; the voices are present and impactful; different, obviously. Not so much Elissa's book – and people could stand to write about it more because her work is fascinating and cerebral and new – but the genre-marketing of Native memoir into this thing where readers come away believing Native Americans are connected to the earth, and read into an artist's spirituality to make generalizations about our natures as Indigenous people. The romantic language they quoted, or poetic language – it seemed misused to form bad opinions about good work.

And that is what I find so chastening: the last thing I want to do is to excerpt the lovely bits – the romantic or poetic passages born of Mailhot's pain – in an effort to support my (bad) opinions about her (good) work. Which is a pickle for a regular goodreads user; and especially since Mailhot is a writer with an MFA – this isn't diamond-in-the-rough naive-genius or traditional Native storytelling; this is a unique voice, but one formed through education and practise. In answer to another question, Mailhot writes, “Because I'm an Indian woman someone might call my work raw and disregard the craft of making something appear raw.” I recognise that danger, but as Mailhot and Kane toss around phrases like the “polemic voice”, writing pain into “phenomenological circumstance”, and the “politicization of grief”, I also recognise that these writers, with their prestigious MFAs, have been willingly trained in the tradition of the “colonisers”; shouldn't I feel less the interloper for consuming something so evidently crafted for the purpose?

Nonetheless, I was moved by Mailhot's story; by her life and the art she makes of it. This book can't be generalised into some "Native memoir" category, but I reckon it has value for anyone interested in the unique lives of fellow humans.

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Shortlist 2018

• All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Story by Elizabeth Hay
• Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance by Will Aitken
• Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot
• In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by Judi Rever
• The Woo Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong

*Won by All Things Consoled

What Are We Doing Here?

It is no accident that Marxism and social Darwinism arose together, two tellers of one tale. It is not surprising that they have disgraced themselves in similar ways. Their survival more than one hundred and fifty years on is probably owed to the symmetry of their supposed opposition. Based on a single paradigm, they reinforce each other as legitimate modes of thought. So it is with our contemporary Left and Right. Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness.

What Are We Doing Here? is a collection of “mostly lectures...given in churches, seminaries, and universities over the past few years”; reflecting not only Marilynne Robinson's usual preoccupation with Calvinist thought, but extending her ideas to the current American political climate. Because these lectures were given so close together, but at different venues, they often circle and repeat the exact same points over and over again; making this, as a reading experience, slightly more tedious than necessary. These essays are challenging (I can't imagine sitting in an auditorium and listening to Robinson speak without the benefit of going back and rereading the passages I didn't understand the first time through), and they're sometimes dry, but I never found them boring; there's definitely value in collecting the current preoccupations of such a deep thinker in one place like this.

When Stephen Hawking died recently, the social media that I follow included posts by religious folk who said such things as, “I am deeply saddened that he died not knowing God the Creator of all things”, and responses from those “rational thinkers” who then replied with, “You can believe in an invisible sky fairy all you like but, if he does exist, screw him for inventing ALS.” (I would like to note, with utter neutrality, that in A Brief History of Time, back in the 1980s, Dr. Hawking stated his goal to describe the universe in such a way that no creator God was necessary; I don't believe he accomplished this, but either way, he's either currently in possession of the ultimate truths or simply extinguished – what we believe about it is no longer relevant.) It's where Robinson responds to this particular public discourse – wherein religious belief is seen as primitive and unintelligent and scientism is seen as definitive and rational – that I was most interested. 

Our ways of understanding the world now, our systems and ideologies, have an authority for us that leads us to think of them as exhaustive accounts of reality rather than, at best, as instruments of understanding suited to particular uses.

As a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Robinson has watched as the humanities have lost their presumed validity as an area of study. Centuries of rising humanism has pushed our gods to the edge of relevance, but we now find ourselves in a post-humanist world – where it is fashionable to call humans the least of Earth's animals and regret our effects, and even our presence, on the planet (beliefs that I see on my own social media every day) – and if we no longer see value in humans, we certainly don't see value in studying the humanities at a post-secondary level. Our meanness of spirit (the transformation from “Citizens” to merely “Taxpayers”) resents funding public institutions of higher learning, insisting if we do that the young should only be studying “trades”; not recognising that it is through the humanities – art, music, literature – that humans have been expressing what is divine in themselves all along. Over several of these lectures, and especially with regards to the discovery of dark matter, Robinson makes the point that science is continually making observations that contradict what we previously thought was “settled truth”; why do we believe that science is truth in itself instead of simply one method for observing the world? Science dismisses the felt experience – mind and conscience – as mere side effects of evolution, and in several places, Robinson wonders why we don't challenge the “cynicism as ultimate truth” of Richard Dawkins, et al:

Who can show me a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of anything resembling a selfish gene? The prejudice that allows these theories to claim the authority of reason and science is, among many other things, a slander on reason and science.

And in a later lecture she ties it all up thusly:

Science before the twentieth century supported the assumption that reason was, as the physicists say, flat, that like the laws of nature its rules were the same everywhere and in all circumstances, and that whatever they could not countenance was an error, a primitive survival, a mystification. Then along came quantum physics, relativity, a theory of cosmic origins, and science ever since has been constantly at work at a new poetry, trying to capture something of the startling elegance, novel to our eyes, that eventuates everything that is. Crucially assisted by dark matter, of course, which seems to hold the heavens together and about which little else can at present be said. Only grant that a great, creating holiness is at the center of it all, and one must arrive at something like the extraordinary language in which the ancients invested their perceptions. For the ancients, the great, creative holiness was the intuition, the conception, that forced their language so far beyond the limits of the commonplace. Science departed from its origins in religion not so very long ago. If these two great thought systems are not now once again reaching a place of convergence, the fault lies with religion, which, in a fit of defensive panic, has abandoned its profoundest insights and has never reclaimed them.

Surely, where science and religion converge must be a lovely and satisfying place to live. And while this was the most interesting thread for me personally, it wasn't the only one in this collection. Robinson makes much of Americans' lack of knowledge of their own history and origins – and especially with respect to the (apparently unfairly maligned) Puritans; the freedom-fighting abolitionist knowledge-seekers who founded both Harvard and Yale deserve to be remembered for more than the pejorative “Puritanical” (more than once Robinson asks, non-rhetorically, if there weren't witch trials in the South at the same time). Robinson traces and retraces the religious writings of Jonathan Edwards and quotes from The Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs by John Foxe; with several references to the Golden Rule, Robinson seems to be making the point that if we were to recognise the divine in both ourselves and in our neighbours, there would be no poverty or income disparity – the death of God was the death of faith, hope, and charity, which led us directly to where we find ourselves today, yelling at each other over the internet.

There are two personal pieces in this collection that don't seem to fit with the scholarly tone of the others, but they are both fascinating reads. A Proof, a Test, an Instruction is on the personal relationship that Robinson developed with President Obama:

Having spoken with the president, having had some direct experience of his humor, his intelligence and courtesy, and his goodness, I consider it probable that those who have opposed him so intractably did so because they knew how remarkable a leader he could be. They were threatened by the possibility of a great president, one who could lead the country in a direction they did not favor and give prestige to a vision they did not share.

And the final essay, Slander, was on Robinson's aging mother and how watching Fox News made her fearful; tormented by anxieties and regrets:

I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America. I would go to hell for it, too, a fact she considered both regrettable and just.

Where this kind of Left-Right chasm can open within a family, it seems obvious that there is something wrong with public discourse today. Robinson's writings have given me much to think about in this regard.

There is a Catholic priest, Fr Raymond J. de Souza, who serves as a columnist for the newspaper I read, and he was one of the commentators who wrote about Stephen Hawking upon his death. I didn't realise that Hawking had served on the Vatican's Academy of Sciences for over forty years, and that he was happy to celebrate the Catholic priest, Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, who had conceived of the Big Bang Theory; from my perspective, there's nothing fundamentally contradictory between some level of religious belief and what scientific observation has discovered about the universe. Even so, de Souza ended his column with:

Professor Hawking expanded the limits of what physics tells us. It is an elementary part of the philosophy of science that there are limits to what physics can tell us. Hawking insisted, by assertion and not evidence, that there were no such limits, that there was no metaphysics, just physics. Which means that Hawking’s world — despite the fact that saw farther than almost everyone else — was, in the end, rather small.

So, naturally, in our combative climate of internet discourse, the primary response in the comment section revolved around, "Hilarious that pedophile priests from the corrupt Catholic church think they have anything to say about science and scientists."

So turns the world.