Mind Picking : Happy Halloween VII

For various reasons, this summer I embarked on a project to explore the river that runs through the city where I live, and one of the experiences that I most looked forward to was "Whisper to the Moon", described on its hosts' website as: Join SNIPE as they paddle down the Grand River where they share ghost stories and legends of the Six Nations Territory, then as they lead you on a paranormal investigation of Chiefswood National Historic Site. I've written an earlier Halloween post about how Dave and I have been on several paranormal tours - so this experience wasn't really that unusual for us to undertake - but ultimately, that evening was unlike anything we had experienced before. 

We arrived at Chiefswood National Historic Site - the mansion that served as the home of acclaimed Victorian Age Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson; now a museum dedicated to her and said to be haunted by both Pauline and her sister Eliza - a little before the tour was set to begin. In our group were me and Dave, Rudy, Dan, and Kennedy, and the first weird thing that happened was that, out of nowhere, Rudy shouted, "Ow!" and had to take her brand new Fitbit off her wrist: it had overheated, burned her arm, and shorted out the screen. Rudy, who had been very nervous about coming with us because she believes that she attracts paranormal activity, later said that she had been mentally warning any spirits to leave her alone when her Fitbit suddenly heated up and died. Another group got out of their truck to meet us - a man, woman, and their teenage son - and it soon came out that the woman was a medium and she reported that when she walked up to the building earlier, it was very active; a woman in white and a woman in black both paced the floors and took turns standing in the upstairs windows. Another solo woman pulled up, and she soon joined us in the parking lot as well. We were then met by Todd - a member of SNIPE (Six Nations Investigators of Paranormal Encounters) - and he began by apologising and saying that his partner (and the tech expert of the group) Artie was running late; that he always runs late.

As we stood around waiting, Todd endeavored to entertain us by telling us about how he got into paranormal investigating: his sister had been a "seer" when they were growing up and she was so scared of the shadowy presences in her room at night that Todd used to sleep on her floor to protect her. It was frustrating to him that he, who wanted to see something from the other side, never could, while his sister was so scared of her gift that she eventually forced it to go away. Todd now uses technology to compensate for the extra sense he hadn't been born with, and while he has rarely seen anything inexplicable with his eyes, he assured us that he has captured countless supernatural encounters on his various cameras and recorders; evidence that we would be presented with when we later returned to the Homestead. Anticipation made the time spent waiting almost sweet.

A few more stories and some mostly patient waiting later, and Artie pulled up and needed to tote some AV tech into the mansion before we could leave. The SNIPE members then realised that they didn't have quite enough space in their vehicles to transport the entire group up the river to the starting point, but when Todd said that either we could take two trips or some of us could sit in the back of the pickup for the short drive, he got more volunteers than he expected: In the end, the five in my group plus the teenaged boy all sat on the paddles and lifejackets in the back of the truck while more comfortable interior seats went unused. I have no doubt that our guides were inwardly rolling their eyes at our eagerness to have this jolting, open-air experience that would be a ticketable offence for us off the reserve. (Maybe it was even ticketable on the reserve, we were just going along with the offer. When Dan asked when the last time any of us had ridden in the back of a pickup - which wasn't totally unusual for people our age - I told the story of my Uncle Eric's awesome campfire prank that I have written about before.) A bit more fuss at the launch point and we were off. The boat was of the sturdy inflatable kind used for white water rafting, and of the eleven of us on the excursion, six of us were perched on the sides paddling, two (Rudy and the medium) got to sit on interior seats, Todd steered from the rear, and Artie sat facing us in the front, ready to tell stories and answer questions.

(I should add as an aside about the overall experience: It was a little disappointing to hear about the things they "used to do". They used to try and provide more of an authentic Indigenous experience for their guests by having a bonfire lit at the Homestead for when they returned from paddling, and they would serve up traditional foods like strawberry juice, corn soup, and scones. But they decided to stop that because when everyone would then go to explore the Homestead, the guests' stomachs would be growling distractingly as they digested the unfamiliar foods in the otherwise eerie silence. And they used to wait until it was dark before launching the boat and then let the evening play out as late as everyone wanted, but starting this year, their director wanted everything run on a schedule, and everyone out of the house by midnight. I was really looking forward to paddling in the dark, and since we went on the first night of the season - July 13th - I suppose it's my fault for choosing the day with the latest sunset [and the most commitment to following a new schedule], but I was satisfied when it became full dark before we landed again at the Homestead.)

As we began, Artie explained that this portion of the evening is always directed by the guests. Some groups want to talk politics, some want history, and some need to spend the whole time on the river telling their own stories. To begin, Artie said they always go around, with everyone introducing themselves and either telling a story of their own paranormal experience or sharing something from their favourite spooky book or movie; something to get everyone in the mood. Artie began with his own first encounter: When he was a young boy, his parents had gone out for the evening, leaving him in the care of older siblings. Artie was in bed, and supposed to have been asleep, when he saw the flash of headlights moving across his wall as they always did when his parents were coming up the driveway. He figured his parents were home and he dove under his covers to pretend to be asleep. When he failed to eventually hear the sound of an engine approaching, Artie looked out the window and saw that there was no car in the driveway, but looking over his shoulder at the bedroom wall, he could still see the two spots of light shining there. Artie eventually gave up waiting for his parents and went to sleep for real, and when they came home the next day, his parents were sad to inform the kids that their great-grandfather had died the night before. Artie is certain - was then and is now - that the lights were his great-grandfather's way of saying goodbye, but his practical parents have always claimed that he imagined them after the fact.

Dave was sitting to Artie's right, so he was called upon to go next. Dave explained that he is open to stories of the supernatural but is skeptical because he has never seen anything for himself. He talked of sharing a love of horror movies with his daughter - gesture to Kennedy - and then, as though he just thought of it, he said that we even took her to Long Island to see the Amityville Horror house and ended on a joke about Kennedy being plagued by flies afterward. Kennedy was next and started with, "Thanks Dad, for telling my story about Amityville, that I was going to talk about because it happened to me..." and she proceeded to retell the story about visiting the Amityville house and finding flies around her for months afterwards, even in the dead of winter. To Kennedy, this isn't a flippant or insignificant tale and she told it seriously and she told it well. Rudy went next and told of the old house she once rented that she was sure was haunted - she often woke up feeling like there was a looming yet friendly presence in the room - and that her landlords just said, "Yeah, we know" when she reported it to them. The teenaged kid, Ethan, went next and he also had a story about seeing a presence in his room when he was two and his grandfather had passed. And then the solo woman, Paula, went next. She had two stories, and I'll share my favourite: A friend of hers was a new mother and she and her husband slept with their daughter's crib in their room. One night, apparently, the friend bolted upright out of a dead sleep and said, "You've got the wrong Wilkinson." And as she and her husband were startled awake by the declaration, they both watched as a black mist that was hovering over their infant's bed formed into a ball and flew out through the wall. They later learned that a few blocks away, the husband's cousin - another Wilkinson - lost his own infant that night to crib death. 

Todd, in the rear, was next and he said, "I've already told you about my earliest experience with the paranormal, so I think I'll tell you about my latest. A couple of weeks ago, we were hunting in an abandoned house in Hamilton, and there was one stairwell that I just didn't feel comfortable using. I set up an audiorecorder on the landing there on a hunch, and when I played it back the next morning, I could hear what sounded like a little girl, with the voice of a saint, saying, 'Help me.' We went back a couple of nights later, and this time we had my twin brother with me. I didn't tell him why but I asked my brother if he would set up the recorder on that landing, and when I found him later in the kitchen, he was sitting on the floor just sobbing. I've known this man for what? For forty-nine years, well all my life, and I haven't seen him crying since we were kids. And when I asked him what was going on, he said, 'I don't even know. I'm just feeling so emotional.' I'll tell you right now that when we get asked to come out and investigate something, ninety-nine percent of the time there's a logical explanation for what's being experienced. But one percent of the time we can't explain things away, and it's for that one percent that we do this."

The medium, Cheyenne, went next, and she explained that, like Todd's sister, she has had the gift for seeing spirits since she was young; and like Todd's sister, she was scared of it and tried to suppress the ability. Now that she's older, she's trying to embrace it as a gift, and experiences like this evening are her way of stretching and testing herself. She also explained that their son has the gift as well and she is intent on helping him to develop it. When someone asked her if she could see spirits on the boat with us she said yes, wherever she is she can see two or three spirits alongside every living person, and on the boat was no different. Her husband, Peter, went next and he explained that he is a skeptic - has never experienced anything for himself - but like Dave, his mind is open (everyone chuckled about the unbeliever married to the clairvoyant). I was next and told the story of the haunted house my family lived in after I moved away, and for Dan's turn, he told the story of the ghost dog that lived in the first house he and Rudy bought together (both of these stories, as well as Kennedy's, are recounted in earlier Halloween posts). All of this did set the tone, and by the time this bit of storytelling was done, Artie told us we could stop paddling and just listen to the river before he'd start talking again. And between the birdsong, the intermittent jumping fish breaking the glassy surface of the water with tiny burbles, and the great blue heron that kept hopskotching ahead of us along the darkening riverbank, I certainly felt more in tune with nature at this point; perhaps even more in tune with supernature.

Now, Artie wasn't kidding when he said that the paddling portion of the evening would be led by the interests of the group, so it would be no surprise to report that enjoyment is probably tied to how interested one is in the answers to other people's questions. Someone wanted to know if the Grand River had been an important trade route, and someone wanted to know if Artie could tell us about the history of Chief Joseph Brant (who led the Six Nations out of the USA after the Revolutionary War); someone even wanted to know if "First Nations" is his people's preferred group name. No matter the question, Artie always paused, took a breath, and answered to the best of his abilities. (Artie did make the disclaimer that he does not speak for his nation or his community, that he's just a guy who has stories - and as he eventually described the various committees, learning groups, and panels that he's a member of, I certainly don't discount his knowledge - but I respect that the setting is informal and he's just sharing what he knows.) And another disclaimer: Artie told us several stories that he explained he really shouldn't be sharing (tales of local secret societies or stories about other nations' beliefs and practises that aren't really his to talk about), so I've decided not to record those here (but I will say that I liked his story about the first time he brought up secret beings that are said to live in the woods, and as that first group floated down the river learning about them, a big rock fell into the water as though meant to threaten him to silence.)

Eventually, Artie would always bring the conversation back around to the "spooky stuff", and I liked the way that his and Todd's stories would meld together. Artie explained that when he was growing up on the reserve, the big threat that parents used to keep kids in line was, "If you don't behave, the flying ass is gonna get you." And Artie laughed and said that he always wondered why he should be afraid of a "flying ass". Like, what could it do to you? Was it enormous? Could it knock you down and fart on you? But then from the back of the boat, Todd said that in collecting stories from the elders, he learned that around a hundred years ago, there had been a murder on the reserve, and in order to hide the evidence, the murderer had cut up his victim's corpse and buried the various body parts in separate graves. Legend had it that all of the parts - including the ass - go flying around at night, seeking justice and each other; over time, each generation just whittled the legend down to what they would pass on. Todd had recently collected a story about a man who went to his kitchen in the middle of the night and was startled by a knocking at his front door. When he peeked out the window to see who was there, he was terrified to see a disembodied forearm and hand, knock-knock-knocking on his door. He did not open it, but it would seem that those body parts are still out there. 

As part of the secret society stuff, Artie mentioned good and bad witches, and from the rear of the boat, Todd said, "There's a story for that. I have a cousin, just the same age as me, and when she was six she started telling about how when she and her siblings were trying to sleep at night, they would hear thump thump thump, loud pounding on the roof above their heads. It got so bad that her parents went to a witch to see if he could find out what was going on. The witch came to their house, and even though he hadn't been told what specifically had been happening, when he got to the front door he looked up at the roof and took a quick step backwards: refusing to enter their house. The witch went back home, brewed up some medicine, and brought it back to the family. He gave the medicine bag to the oldest son, because their father wasn't home, and he told him to go up on the roof and sprinkle the medicine around, being sure especially to get the four corners. He explained that a bad and jealous witch was landing on their roof at night and putting spells and curses on the family. After the medicine had been distributed, he warned that when the children heard the witch thump onto their roof that night, they were not to look out the window for any reason. And when the night did come, the children heard the thump thump thump of the bad witch landing on the roof above their heads, but this time it was followed by a blood curdling scream. And my cousin, being only six and sleeping on the top bunk in her room, turned just in time to see a form falling past her window. She yelled out, 'I know who that is', and then passed out. To this day, my cousin alone knows who the bad witch was but she's not capable of telling anyone - every time she tries to say or write the name, she passes out. That happened on Sixth Line, not far from here and you could ask her yourselves. Actually, you know the big green propane tanks we have beside our homes out here? You can still see the dent on the side of theirs where something, someone, fell off the roof onto it. But the thumping stopped. I remember when I was nineteen and I got my first car, I was cruising around, just loving being out driving in my own car, and I dropped in on my cousins and they were all sitting around their kitchen and telling spooky stories. And then my cousin told this story about the good and bad witches and I swear when I got back out to my car, I didn't want to drive around anymore - I was looking up at the sky and wondering what's up there."

I loved this back and forth storytelling - covering the legends from long ago and the results of more recent investigations - and I thought that Todd and Artie's opposite styles (Todd was open and friendly, eager to share; Artie was more guarded and careful with his word choices, even if he was more likely to curse and bordered on gruff) complemented each other and made for a whole and satisfying experience. In response to questions about his people's belief systems, Artie told us the legends of how Grandmother Moon and the Big Dipper were put into the sky, and briefly, he summarised the story of the great Seneca chief and prophet, Handsome Lake. During the eighteenth century, Handsome Lake watched helplessly as his land was overrun and his people were decimated. Like many of his dispirited people, he took to drinking, but after one particularly long bout of drunkenness, Handsome Lake became very sick and was apparently granted visions of the future. It is well known that Handsome Lake became sober after this experience (and that he wrote down a code of moral behaviour that he wanted the Iroquois people to follow), but it's less well known that Handsome Lake told fantastic stories of the future he saw: one that included cars and airplanes and their associated pollution. He predicted that his people would continue to lose their lives and that those who survived would lose their language and their culture, and he urged the Iroquois to participate in Longhouse Ceremony to preserve what they still could. Artie says that according to the elders of today, the 1950s saw very few people who could speak the language any more, and when they did hold Ceremony, maybe five or six people would show up. According to Artie, when he attends Ceremony today, the longhouse is so crowded that he can feel the dancer behind him breathing down his neck, and according to Artie, this was all part of the prophecy: apparently Handsome Lake predicted that a generation would come when the longhouse couldn't hold everyone who wanted to participate in Ceremony; and according to Handsome Lake, that generation would be the final generation. 

By the time we arrived back down river to the Homestead, the sky was inky dark and the moon - waxing gibbous and eighty-seven percent full - shone brightly across the still water. The birds were mostly quiet, a few reservation dogs barked their complaints, every now and then someone set off some firecrackers that thumped in the distance or a lone fish would jump and splish close by; the fireflies beaming back and forth at the edges of sight. I had had a fascinating experience on a new stretch of the Grand River - satisfying the original purpose of the outing - but the evening still held more surprises.

We were ushered into the Homestead and seated in its dining room for a presentation of evidence that SNIPE has collected; Todd and Artie now joined by another partner, Tom, and his daughter (just today, the CBC had an article on Todd and his daughter and their work with SNIPE). There were several video clips of orb phenomena (Todd explained that they pick up orbs on their equipment all the time and were just showing us some with unusual shapes or movement patterns) and some audio clips of voices that could only be heard after the fact on their recording devices. The medium suddenly burst out with, "I can't keep this in any longer. When we went under the bridge on the river, a woman in a flowing white dress floated down and joined us. She's just so happy that you are sharing the history of the area with people and she often joins you and wants you to know how happy she is." Todd and Artie just nodded and thanked Cheyenne, saying that they have been told about the woman in the white dress before.

One video clip showed the interior of an apartment that belonged to a young man who begged SNIPE to come and investigate the odd goings-on in his home. Todd explained that when they started filming, they locked the guy's cat in the bathroom, but when it started freaking out in there, they told him he could get it. The clip shows the guy opening the bathroom door, turning on the light and picking up the frightened cat. As he turns his back to the bathroom, a black mist crosses the door frame and the light turns off again. As the guy runs toward the camera, the light turns back on. Artie said that at this point, the guy and his cat were cowering behind Todd, just terrified. I asked if there's anything they could do for this guy - did they sage the place or otherwise try to clear it of spirits? Then Todd explained that SNIPE are not cleansers - they only investigate and record phenomena - but while they had had a medium along on that investigation, there was nothing she could do for him either. Apparently, only the victim of a haunting like this could cleanse his own home and this young guy's mental state was too disordered to create a calm and clear space. And besides, according the medium, the guy was surrounded by the disordered energies of everyone in the other apartments, too; "cleansing" would be futile. That was all new learning for me. (As was Paula's question about a cleansing ceremony she had heard about: apparently, if you're being plagued by a poltergeist-type spirit, you should host a feast and set an extra plate for the being. When the meal is done, burying the poltergeist's plate will rid the home of it. Artie said that he had heard of such feasts, but in their tradition, you bring the spirit's plate to a river, a clean place being the solution. I didn't get the sense, however, that SNIPE participates in such ceremonies as part of their work.)

There was an audioclip of a little girl asking Todd to stay with her (a different one from the little girl who asked Todd to help her a couple of weeks earlier, and it sent shivers up my neck to hear it) and another from a time that Tom got disoriented in an attic and the medium who was with him said that something had grabbed his spirit and taken him to the other side (Tom then told us, looking completely honest, open, and still a little shaken, that it's always hard for him to hear that clip because he knows it's his voice but he has no recollection of anything from that experience). SNIPE explained that they usually share more evidence at this point, but it was already well after eleven, and if we had to be out by midnight, we'd better be getting upstairs to explore.

Before we went up the stairs, Todd asked if anyone wanted to hold a lantern and Dan took one to lead the way and Peter took the other to bring up the rear. Todd then asked if anyone wanted to hold this other device - based on Xbox Kinect technology, the screen shows a split image with an infrared blob of anyone it's pointed at on the right and a dot-to-dot stick figure of that person on the left. If there happens to be any spirits present, they will show up as a stick figure on the left without leaving a heat signature on the right side of the screen. Dave put up his hand quickly and was in charge of this device for the rest of our time in the building. When we got up to the top floor, the medium started going through the rooms, telling Dan at one point that Pauline Johnson was standing right beside him, later pointing at a cubby door and saying that it made her feel sad. Todd started his audio recorder, asked us all to be quiet, and then asked into the air if there was anyone around who wanted to speak to us; they could talk or knock or communicate any way they liked. And there was no response that I could hear.

We started moving through the rooms again and the medium told Dave, "There's something right there. Point the device right there." And when Dave pointed his screen to an empty room, he could see a stick figure dancing like a marionette on his screen even though the room was obviously unoccupied. Blew. His. Mind. Then the teenager, Ethan, asked Dave to bring the device into another room: when Ethan had stepped into the room a few minutes earlier, he felt a cold breeze and a poke in his ribs. We all went into that room and Dave panned with the device, but all we could see were the heat blobs and stick figures of the people we could see with our own eyes. Then the medium said, "Todd, there's a little boy standing to your right." Todd said into the air, "I'm right here if you want to hold my hand." And as soon as Todd stuck out his hand, a little stick figure resolved itself (on the screen) at his side, leaned into him and reached up a hand. For the next few minutes, it was undeniable that something resembling a little boy was on the screen beside Todd, although the infrared side of the screen only recorded Todd himself.

And all too soon, the director appeared to say that we were out of time and we needed to clear out. This portion of the evening might have felt rushed, but I can't say that any of us truly left disappointed. When we returned to the parking lot, Rudy mentioned that she had brought sage for cleansing, and Todd said that he would join us and Paula was fascinated - she knew nothing about sage or its purported cleansing properties - and the medium offered to make a ritual out of it. So, in the end, we nine gathered in a circle, in the dark, in the beam of a nearly full moon, while Cheyenne wafted us with sage smoke, chanting low about goodness and light.

And here's my overall impression: Dave said that the entire time we were in the house, he felt the hair standing up on the back of his neck and shivers running down his spine. And because he was the one directing where the device would be pointed - and because the stick figures moved in response to the angles that he turned the screen to - he can't see how anyone could have faked what he was seeing with his own eyes. Dave 100% accepts what he saw as proof of something surviving death. I'm still more skeptical: on the one hand, I reckon it would be possible to somehow have a video file that can appear on the screen at the flip of a remote switch and seem to move in concert with Todd. But on the other hand, I don't know why SNIPE would want to trick us like that. It doesn't seem like a totally slick operation (the late start, not having enough vehicles to transport us up river, taking too long on the river and not having enough time in the house), so high tech trickery doesn't seem part of their MO - but then, they might be relying on off-reserve people's low estimation of their savviness in order to pull a fast one. But again, why? To sell more seats on future tours? Maybe. Maybe the medium in our group was a plant, too (but that's hard to believe; her family made up a third of the paying group and didn't seem like actors; when I asked the rest of my group about this, no one believed they could have been plants). Maybe it was all a hoax - from the stories to the purported evidence to what we could see on a videoscreen with our own eyes - but the SNIPE members we met really seemed more open and honest, more curious themselves about the supernatural, than that kind of trickery would presuppose. 

So skepticism aside, if I did encounter any real "evidence", it was all technological (Rudy's dead Fitbit and the split screen device), so I still can't say that I have had a paranormal experience; I have to think of "experience" as something that I record with my own senses. But I can also 100% say that if we did encounter something in the Homestead that night, it wasn't scary or threatening; it was just people - people that have moved on to a new state of being - and that's a positive and encouraging impression to have left with. Make of it all what ye will.

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Girl, Woman, Other

life's so much simpler for men, simply because women are so much more complicated than them

Combining poetry and prose, eschewing capitals at the beginnings of sentences and punctuation at their ends, reading mostly like a collection of short stories (featuring twelve protagonists and the countless other characters who flesh out their histories), Bernardine Evaristo has crafted a loose and freefloating form in Girl, Woman, Other that allows her to flit between interior monologues and exterior dialogues, exploring the experiences and relationships of girls and women (and one “other”). Her subjects range from a teenager to a nonagenarian (but by detailing entire lives, we follow most of them from childhood through middle age), most of the characters are black (or mixed race), most currently live in England (although we do learn immigrant stories of those who came from Africa or America or the Caribbean, and the stories of those who went back), and many of the characters are feminists/activists/queer. The cover's overleaf notes that this book is about “centering voices we often see othered” and that's where I found this read to be most successful: I was very interested in the wide variety of ideas and experiences that Evaristo has included in this book and I am unsurprised that it (co)won the Man Booker Prize; this is important and it's literary. On the other hand, it could get a bit dull. It was a bit long. I don't know if it needed quite so many characters to make the point that the black British woman's experience is not monolithic. Yet, they all deserve to be heard; it seems a conundrum of a complaint that we got too much of a good thing.

As a sort of framing device, Girl, Woman, Other opens with the story of Amma: a black, feminist, lesbian playwright whose decades-old antiestablishment theatre company has finally broken through and her latest play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey (about fierce warrior women from Benin), is about to open at the National Theatre in London. After learning Amma's life story, the sections that follow introduce characters who are close to her, and then peripheral characters and the people who are close to them. In the end, many of these unrelated characters find themselves at the play's afterparty. In the book's epilogue, there's a scene that demonstrates that we are all more related than we may know.

So, this book is about girls:

when Yazz talks about her unusual upbringing to people, the unworldly ones expect her to be emotionally damaged from it, like how can you not be when your mum's a polyamorous lesbian and your father's a gay narcissist (as she describes him), and you were shunted between both their homes and dumped with various godparents while your parents pursued their careers?

this annoys Yazz who can't stand people saying anything negative about her parents

that's her prerogative

And women:

Nzinga was a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking, radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder, living and working on wimmin's land all over America before moving on, a gypsy housebuilder

Dominique was a drinking, drug-dabbling, chain-smoking lesbian feminist carnivorous clubber who produced theatre by women and lived in a London flat

she soon became a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking radical feminist lesbian housebuilder on wimmin's land called Spirit Moon, which only allowed lesbians to reside there

And other:

Megan wondered aloud how she could put her gender-free identity into practice when they were living in a gender-binary world, and that with so many definitions (sane and insane, she refrained from saying), the very idea of gender might eventually lose any meaning, who can remember them all? maybe that was the point, a completely gender-free world, or was that a naive utopian dream?

There are characters who engaged in mixed race relationships long before they gained wide acceptance, feminists who were radical in the Seventies, lesbians who paved the way for others, and modern university students who consider themselves “woke”: and all of them lecture others on sex/gender/social theory; and that might get tiresome if there weren't other characters pushing back or gently mocking their earnestness or evolving their own beliefs. There are also conventional relationships – straight marriages and divorces; having babies, losing babies; cheating and faithfulness – and Evaristo treats them all with equal respect:

Penelope decided she would go to college, marry a man who idolized her, become a teacher and have children
all of which would fill the gaping, aching chasm she now carried inside her
the feeling of being
un
moored
un
wanted
un
loved
un
done

a
no
one.

I included long quotes (and especially that last poetical one) to try and give a sense of the writing style; it may not work for everyone. As for me: I enjoyed each of the twelve pieces separately, and the underlying concept, but I'm not sure if it added up to a novel that I loved. Even so, it's worth four stars for ambition and execution; it certainly does centre those voices which have traditionally been othered and there's plenty of value in that.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss

Once we understand that obesity is a hormonal imbalance, we can begin to treat it. If we believe that excess calories cause obesity, then the treatment is to reduce calories. But this method has been a complete failure. However, if too much insulin causes obesity, then it becomes clear we need to lower insulin levels.

My back story, which isn't necessary for this review: About a year ago, my sister-in-law invited me to join a “boot camp”-type gym with her at a time when they were starting a ten week “body transformation challenge”. A half hour, intense, workout at 6:45 every morning and a calorie-restrictive nutrition plan did lead to weight loss and a general uptick in my overall fitness, but within six months or so, my results plateaued (leaving me in not a bad place, but still, I had to wonder what changed). This gym apparently understands the phenomena of weight loss plateaus and began a new challenge at around that same time: a Whole30 nutrition plan, with many of its what-to-eat recommendations contradicting what I had been told six months earlier (in particular, the zero calorie artificial syrup that I had been putting on my daily protein pancakes – which syrup I had never heard of before they told me to buy it – was now a poison). This worked for me, too, but I found Whole30 to be unsustainable (and the “30” in Whole30 does indicate you're only supposed to eat this restrictively for a month at a time). I was now very confused about what to eat, so I went to a Registered Dietician, and after keeping a food log for her for a week, she told me I was eating very well and to keep it up; follow Canada's new Food Guide for life and I'd be healthy forever. That didn't feel helpful; I was still not convinced that I knew how to eat anymore, and that made me feel stupid at my age. Six months later, my weight has been creeping back up despite restricting calories and there's a new challenge at the gym: I'm precisely counting macros, weighing my chicken breasts down to a fraction of a gram and only eating my macros in certain combinations at certain times of the day; and yes, it's working for weight loss, but I don't want to do this for the rest of my life either. I'm doing everything recent medical wisdom has been recommending – eating less and moving more – but I can feel that there's a set weight that my body wants to be at and I'm getting tired of feeling like I'm fighting my own body to make it healthier. Once again, my sister-in-law had a recommendation: Rudy heard that The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung (a Toronto nephrologist who treats the end stages of livers damaged by “diabesity”) has a radical new theory of what makes and keeps us overweight; so I bought and read the book in an evening. I can report that Fung's conclusions make sense (they certainly explain my own experience), and with humour and easy-to-understand analogies, his book is a very readable scientific history of how the medical and dietary establishments have failed in their recent approach to fighting obesity (it's no coincidence that obesity rates rose dramatically at the same time both were pushing low fat/high carb diets). But as readable as I did find Fung's history of scientific research into obesity, I don't know if this is what everyone is looking for in a book like this: my sister-in-law, who is not a reader, would do well to take it as given that Fung has properly read and interpreted the studies and skip right to the last two chapters on what to eat and when to eat. His basic conclusion: Excess calories don't make us gain weight, excess insulin does. Excess insulin is produced when we consume too much added sugar, too many overprocessed carbohydrates, or eat too often during the day so that our insulin levels never have a chance to go down. Persistent excess insulin leads to insulin resistance, which forces us to eat more and spike our insulin higher, leading to even more weight gain. This eventually sets our body weights higher – so that if we consume fewer calories, our bodies will compensate by burning fewer calories – leading to weight loss plateaus that can only be overcome by changing up our dietary plans every few months or intermittent fasting. Everything Fung writes makes total sense; so many ideas made me think, “But I knew that already, didn't I?” That's the long and longer of it and I'll just add a few more ideas that were particularly interesting to me (also not necessary to read as part of this review):

Hormones are central to understanding obesity. Everything about human metabolism, including the body set weight, is hormonally regulated. A critical physiological variable such as body fatness is not left up to the vagaries of daily caloric intake and exercise. Instead, hormones precisely and tightly regulate body fat. We don't consciously control our body weight any more than we control our heart rates, our basal metabolic rates, our body temperatures or our breathing. These are all automatically regulated, and so is our weight. Hormones tell us when we are hungry (ghrelin). Hormones tell us we are full (peptide YY, cholecystokinin). Hormones increase energy expenditure (adrenalin). Hormones shut down energy expenditure (thyroid hormone). Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. Calories are nothing more than a proximate cause of obesity.

I appreciated how often Dr. Fung reiterated that “Move more, eat less” simply doesn't work – even if this maxim has made it very easy for doctors and laypeople to fat shame those who are persistently overweight (that plus-sized person is both gluttonous and slothful; two of the Deadly Sins; obviously no self-control), that's not how weight gain works. We do have control over what and when we eat – which does cause weight gain – but with the medical establishment and government food guides both giving us bad advice for the past fifty years (carbohydrates should not make up the base of the food pyramid; there is zero evidence that fat accumulates in the arteries to cause heart disease; breakfast is not the most important meal of the day and can be safely skipped in order to prolong insulin depletion), so many people are in the same boat as I am: simply no clue how to eat. Fung's prescription:

Reduce your consumption of added sugars. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. Moderate your protein intake. Increase your consumption of natural fats. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.

In addition, Fung recommends only three meals per day (it is also no coincidence that obesity started to rise in conjunction with the idea that we need snacks in between meals; humans are not grazing animals) and to stretch the fasting period between our last meal of the day and our first for as long as possible. And when weight loss plateaus, it's time to fast: Fung adds an appendix to this book which shows how to achieve a twenty-four or thirty-six hour fasting schedule, and with plenty of fluids (including broth at midday), he assures the readers that they won't be uncomfortable after the initial jolt; and besides, intentional fasting has always been a part of traditional human society:

This is the ancient secret. This is the cycle of life. Fasting follows feasting. Feasting follows fasting. Diets must be intermittent, not steady. Food is a celebration of life. Every single culture in the world celebrates with large feasts. That’s normal, and it’s good. However, religion has always reminded us that we must balance our feasting with periods of fasting – “atonement,” “repentance” or “cleansing.” These ideas are ancient and time-tested. Should you eat lots of food on your birthday? Absolutely. Should you eat lots of food at a wedding? Absolutely. These are times to celebrate and indulge. But there is also a time to fast. We cannot change this cycle of life. We cannot feast all the time. We cannot fast all the time. It won’t work. It doesn’t work.

Overall, I trust that Fung is onto something with his insulin-resistance theories; obviously, what I've been told about appropriate nutritional choices my entire life isn't the whole picture. I'm not, however, 100% convinced that his approach in this book – while admittedly of adequate interest to me personally – will be engaging for every reader: you need to get through many pages of “The government pushed cheap, processed carbs as the bulk of the recommended diet for decades because they also subsidized farmers who grew wheat and corn, leading us to overpaying taxes to both produce our own poisons and medically treat their effects after the case” and “The medical establishment continues to push 'Move more, eat less' as the key to weight loss because, even though it doesn't work, it puts the onus on the patient to manage their own care and relieves them of responsibility”: a little too much smacks of conspiracy theory, which I've seen far too much of in books on nutrition. However: I have learned over the last year that eliminating processed foods and refined carbs makes food that tastes good and makes me feel good. The piece I was missing, I guess, was the intermittent fasting – and I'll have to really consider if that will make sense for me.

Frankissstein: A Love Story

How strange is life; this span that is our daily reality, yet daily countermanded by the stories we tell.

Frankissstein sizzles with ideas and well-turned phrases and intertexuality; it is historical fiction and a love story (or two) and a prescient parable for own times; it is timely and timeless and I lost myself within these pages. Jeanette Winterson put so much into this book that it probably is too much, and some scenes went so over the top that her point seems lost in the stratosphere, but I can't help but admire what she went for here; on a shelf of boring same-sameiness, Frankissstein certainly stands out. I can see why the Man Booker jury put this on their longlist, but as much as I loved it, I can also see why it didn't make the shortlist. Did I mention I loved it?

The gentlemen laugh at me indulgently. They respect me up to a point, but we have arrived at that point.

The book begins in (and hops back and forth to) 1816, at the famed Swiss holiday home in which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. This opening is gorgeously wrought – the love story between Mary and Percy Shelley, the fireside debates with Lord Byron and the others of their party, the daemon of creativity that seizes Mary's brain; all beautifully captured – and as much as these sections are set in the past, with discussions on the locus of identity, gender roles, and exploitative Capitalism, Winterson sets the stage for her themes to rhyme throughout the ages. In the present, we meet Ry Shelley (a woman-to-man transgendered doctor) who meets and falls in love with Victor Stein (a visionary scientist seeking to free consciousness from the body in order to achieve immortality) and his business partner Ron Lord (who is at the leading edge of the sexbot industry). Rounding out the group from the present who are doubles for those in the past are Polly D (like Byron's physician, Dr. Polidari) – a Vanity Fair journalist trying to get an interview with Stein – and Claire (like Mary's stepsister, Byron's lover) – an evangelical Christian who is against Stein's work of freeing a mind/soul from its body, but who can nonetheless see the value in Lord's sexbot work: what could do more to lead a lonely Christian away from sin than such a willing and incorruptible partner?

I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. That isn't surprising; we feel or have felt that we're in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body.

There are so many obvious parallels between Shelley's story and Winterson's – one mad scientist attempting to put the animating spirit into a slab of meat, the other attempting to carefully remove it, all while unwilling to imagine the monster he might unleash – but having the main character of the modern sections be transgendered allows us to ask questions that are more fundamental to our experience as humans: Are we more than the bodies we're born into? If we reach the Singularity and humanity exists as pure consciousness, will sex or gender play a role at all? And for that matter: as “sexbots” become more human, will it be possible to abuse their bodies? Do they even have gender? Throughout the conversations in the past and the present, these questions and many more are considered, and it all made for interesting reading.

I like reading. It's the only way to understand what's happening in programming. It is as though we are fulfilling something that has been foretold. The shape-shifting. The disembodied future. Eternal life. The all-powerful gods not subject to the decay of nature.

Frankissstein is a goldmine of literary allusions and references. I was glad that I read Frankenstein (and the graphic novel biography of Mary Shelley, Mary's Monster) last year, allowing me to recognise much about this story and its creation. Winterson also throws in everything from Pygmalion and Shakespeare (not surprising that it's The Winter's Tale she references when that's the play she reimagined in The Gap of Time), to some millenias-old Gnostic gospels which, in their substance, seem to prefigure binary code and the freeing of consciousness. The poets wax poetical and feminism is discussed through the lens of Virginia Woolf's work and that of Mary Shelley's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In scenes that I found fascinating, Mary Shelley is called to the infamous Bedlam mental hospital, where a man claiming to be Victor Frankenstein himself begs her to set him free: whether author or scientist, it would seem, we are forever responsible for the fruits of our creation, and this is a heavy burden indeed. On the other hand, there is much funny in Frankissstein (even if I thought that much of the sexbot material went unnecessarily lowbrow, that's its own kind of warning for our future), and consistently, it entertained and gave me much to think about. What more could I want?

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Toil & Trouble: A Memoir

Here’s a partial list of things I don’t believe in: God. The Devil. Heaven. Hell. Bigfoot. Ancient Aliens. Past lives. Life after death. Vampires. Zombies. Reiki. Homeopathy. Rolfing. Reflexology. Note that “witches” and “witchcraft” are absent from this list. The thing is, I wouldn’t believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch.

Like so many others, I read Running with Scissors when it was first released – telling the sad/funny story of a shocking childhood, it was a publishing phenomenon and established Augusten Burroughs as a superstar memoirist. When I followed that up with Dry (about Burroughs' lost years as an alcoholic copywriter), it felt like another intriguing puzzle piece had clicked into place, “Aha, that's how he got from there to here.” When he later released A Wolf at the Table, I was horrified to learn of Burroughs' cruel and abusive father (yet it provided another puzzle piece) and I was later gratified to learn that he had finally found love and stability with his husband, Christopher, in Lust & Wonder; you could definitely say that I'm a fan of Burroughs' style and tone, and having lived a life outside the bounds of anything I've known personally, his stories are always intriguing and provocative. With his latest, Toil & Trouble, Burroughs reveals that he's a witch – he always has been, as was his mother and grandmother (and long generations) before him – and while this didn't quite have the satisfying click of another puzzle piece being snapped into place (is he pulling our legs here?), his personal stories are as intriguing as ever and the details of his practise of magick (witchcraft not Wicca) was interesting to me as well. Most importantly, I continue to enjoy Burroughs' engaging writing style; this feels like checking in with an old friend, and I was happy to learn that things are going well for him.

Witchcraft is not supernatural; it's hypernatural. Witches are by default attuned to the thrumming network of connections that exist just beneath the obvious surface layer of reality we all experience. They are able to visualize an outcome to such a powerful and intense degree that something on the quantum level is triggered; a particle feels observed and thus decides whether it is in this state or that state.

So, you're either going to believe or not believe that Burroughs is capable of some degree of premonition and that he is also able to use spells (really just a method of focussing his energies on a desired outcome) in order to influence the future. Because he was quite young when he discovered his “gift”, Burroughs was able to bond with his mother over witchcraft, and in the years before she had a mental breakdown, discussing magick and its uses seems to be the main form of nurturing that Burroughs received from her. Burroughs tells a few happy stories from his childhood, but this time around he also shares that being a witch was probably something that marked him as different to others as a child, and he tells more stories of being bullied by other children and the teachers at school; this was an unhappy childhood long before his mother sent him to live with her lunatic therapist:

Possibility was my fuel. It was the One Thing that prevented me from slitting my wrists on any given horrid day. The fact that at any moment, everything could change. As easily as you could be hit by a car, so you could be carried away by one.

As a sort of framing device for revealing to the world that he is a witch, Burroughs explains how he decided he wanted to leave Manhattan and move to an old house in the country somewhere. Knowing that this would eventually happen, Burroughs needed to influence his husband (an avowed New Yorker till death), using both spells and his experience in marketing. The moment that Burroughs knew this move needed to happen was while out walking their two dogs past a brand new upscale playground in Battery Park at night; watching in disgust as it was overrun with giant rats:

This is a conglomeration – a rally, really, of rats that have traveled to get here. Not the relatively small “maybe-it-was-a-big-mouse” creatures that scuttle across the subway tracks, the hipster playground rodents are massive, overstimulated from munching on the Adderall tablets that tumble out of smock-dress and jeans pockets during the day. These are meaty, fleshy, muscular rats on stimulants, dragging their weighty genitals over all the bright yellow, sky blue, and fire-engine red child-friendly surfaces.

Naturally, the move to the country does happen and this provides for many interesting and funny stories. The tone veers into David Sedaris' deadpan-witness-to-the-horrifying-range-of-human-types territory (there is a retired opera Diva in the next house over, a foul-mouthed handyman, a surfer dude arborist; all material for dry and cutting observation), and after he becomes good friends with their area real estate agent, Burroughs is brought along to meet some of her more eccentric clients, including a former male model, now in his sixties and preparing to sell his bizarrely decorated home in order to move to Europe for his comeback:

“I'll show you the master bedroom next,” he says over his shoulder, expecting us to follow, which we do, across the hall and into a large bedroom with a centrally positioned four-poster king-sized bed draped with multiple mink blankets, beneath which is a deep red velvet bedspread, beneath which are deep red satin sheets. Perhaps a dozen – probably more – pillows are positioned at the head of the bed, each “dented” perfectly in the center with one decisive karate chop of the hand. On the wall opposite the bed is a collection of framed photographs – Jefferey in Paris! Jefferey in the snow wearing a fur and laughing, his teeth one shade whiter than the snow itself! Jefferey in a white tuxedo, arms crossed and smiling! Jefferey in a powdered wig and waxed moustache! And in the center of these photographs is a gigantic oil painting of his face set like a rare blue diamond into a gilt rococo frame. His own face would be the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth thing he'd see each morning.

(It's hard to tell if that passage really captures how bizarre this encounter was; every scene builds to a vibrating thrum of the uncanny.) Like me, I'd imagine anyone who has been following Augusten Burroughs and his memoirs since the beginning will be happy to read that the move to the country has been good for him, his husband, and their (at the time of writing, four) dogs; the witch stuff is interesting but didn't really blow my mind. I was pleased to read that through (the purported use of) magick, Burroughs has reached a place of reconciliation with his long dead mother, and for someone with so many ghosts, Burroughs is in a place of calm and happiness. Another intriguing story, well told; I'll continue to check in with Burroughs for as long as he keeps writing.