On the tiny scale of my life, it’s been a good year. And these are some of the things I want to remember when I think of all the ugly things that have happened in the public sphere this year.
- Visiting my 95 year old great-aunt–the last of her generation and a woman I wish I knew better.
- Ridding myself of the ugly government-issue file cabinet Dg bought me in a moment fire-fearing panic when I was in grad school (no really—he thought my notes and bits of papers so artfully arranged around the apartment would spontaneously combust in the night.)
- Covering up more vile green baseboards–even if it took four coats of gleaming white to make the world right. Only six more sets of green trim to go.
- Discovering an Indian takeout place craftly hidden in a local convenience store
- Taking my first road trip in many, many years with my brother. No politics were discussed. No one was killed.
- Spending time with my far-away niece who turned out to be as wonderfully silly as her cousins.
- Replacing hideous and original pebbledash with dull vinyl siding this disappointing many mice and bats.
- Making progress on the editing project even if it is temporarily stalled.
- Growing genealogy on both sides of the family after a long silence.
- Knowing most of the family is healthy and happy. Wisdom escapes us—we substitute a wide and cheerful range of foolishness.
- Working from home in calm and quiet instead in a cubicle and worry.
- Continuing miracle of the public library and its online request system.
- Cooking: raspberry jam, braised golden beets, curried parsnip and pear soup
- Making it through yet more rolling layoffs with paychecks that allow for necessities, luxuries, and charities.
- Being happy.
Grim news out of South East Asia: rising death toll, bleak predictions, all too easily imagined horrors. And the perverse juxtaposition of tourists returning safely home with the rows and piles of the dead left behind.
An image from the unending flow of television news stories has made me decide to hope: A child wearing a black motorcycle helmet with full smoked glass face screen hunkered down in front of a packing case re-arranging the long black hair of a hairdresser’s mannequin. A small child at play despite it all.
Our donations have gone to the Red Cross; other organizations are listed here.
Like Michelle at Oranges and Lemons, I’m not likely to try the guinea pig that makes the BBC’s list of 50 things to eat before you die. What strikes me about the list, though, is the predominance of meat and fish on the list–only two types of fruit make the list and veggies are missing altogether.
My list would include
Asparagus
Baked Beans (no, not the stuff from a can)
Beets
Brussel Sprouts (preferably sliced fine and sauted with grainy mustard)
Carmelized Onions
Cashews
Dunshire Blue Cheese
Gelato
Oatmeal Bread (no not the stuff from a plastic bag)
Old Cheddar Cheese
Olives
Parsnips
Parmesan Cheese
Potatoes
Raspberries
Red Peppers
Rhubarb
Risotto
Russet Apples
Smoked Cod
Shortbread
Sweet Potato
Tomatoes
Wild Strawberries
A dangerous day. Rain, rain, rain on top of ice. I am not heartened by knowing that the region I live in historically gets 50 hours of freezing rain a year.
Since this is the winter I have decided to get over being pertified of walking during and after winter rain, I headed out into the downpour to get another batch of groceries. 
I fortified myself with the jet fuel that comes out of our coffeemaker and my mad-genuis invention: a Swiffer walking stick. The jaunty teal handle looks ridiculous but the thing is light and can lie harmlessly in the bottom of a knapsack waiting for nasty weather.
I made it down the hill, across the treacherous parking lot full of cranky people who are generally unaware of the pedestrian phenomenon–at least today no young brainless buck yelled at me for having the gall to be annoyed that he nearly decked me with his grocery cart–and back up the skating rink/swimming pool without crashing down and busting myself or the eggs.
The house now smells of wet wool.
Closest to hand and still true:
One may now drive for many miles along country roads and see nothing but abandoned pasture land covered over with spruce trees, with here and there the crumbling remains of a barn or farm-house.
Charles W. Dunn Highland Settler: A Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia (1953)
I am very fond of the wee dog in this cover-photo–all because of its name: “Watch”.
And though I never lived in a house like this, its image makes me homesick.
Meme via Little Professor and others
Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is sitting on the counter waiting to be taken back to the library. I went looking for a copy to buy to give away for Christmas but had no luck in finding a copy in my local megabkopolis.
Since I discovered comic books late (and sought out those that featured lots of pastels and kissing), and since I didn’t have a radio till I was at least 16 (and god help me if I changed the station on the kitchen set and risked exposing us to Elvis Presley or, even worse, Hank Snow), I’m sure I missed a lot of the texture of the book. All the same, Lethem makes me laugh and worry and think. It’s been a long time since I thought about how the details of childhood games were used to create hierarchies that seemed both inexplicable and necessary. And I’ve never understood my brothers’ culture (school, scouts, and stuff): Lethem moves me a little closer.
Reviewers generally praise the book, focusing on its treatment of boyhood, Brooklyn, race, and the shift in focus in the second half of the book. A fan site collects together Lethem’s interviews and in its news section offers a playlist for a two CD soul compilation to accompany the novel.
Most reviews comment on the superhero aspect of the book—from the title to the magic ring which sometimes provides power to fly or to be truly invisible. Some cite this as magic realism, others as a flaw in the novel’s fundamental structure. Lethem himself presents the wish for superpowers as something more ambivalent
I guess I wanted to write about what we all want and can never have-the ability to rise above our lives, the ability to see our worlds from an impossibly privileged angle, the ability to rescue other people, or ourselves, from fate, the ability to slip between the seams of the world and disappear, to know what others are doing or saying when we’re not present, the ability to change identities. It seems to me that for the purposes of the book I wanted to assert that we’re all wishing to be superheroes, yet the kind of powers we’d wish for change utterly as we fall through one disappointment to the next. (source)
Somehow I’ve managed to read about 14 or 15 or the books included in the IMPAC prize long list, one on the GG list and none that were on the Giller short list. Slacker.
Andrea Levy’s fourth novel Small Island won the Orange prize earlier this year and has received positive reviews for its treatment of Jamaican immigration to England. The novel traces the nature of escaping from one small island to another that turns out to be small in its own way. Levy wanted to write this book to explore her parents’ experiences as members of the first wave of Jamacian emigration to England. She wanted to look at that immigration.
But one thing that I remembered whenever my parents talked about their early days in England was that they always mentioned the white people who took them in. And so from then, I always realized that immigration is a dynamic. It’s about the people who came and the people who they came to. (source )
London becomes the uneasy space in between the west indies of Jamaica of the west indies of the India-Burma border. None of the characters are easy in their places; there’s a restlessness in all of them—except perhaps Bernard Bligh. One of the strengths of the novel is its ability to represent the multiple nature of racism and yet at the same time deal Bernard, one of the novel’s most blatant racists and the novel’s loneliest character, with a compassion for the effect of war on him and earlier on his shell-shocked father.
In their focus on Levy’s exploration of race, reviewers and interviewers underestimate the ways in the world wars shape the fates and attitudes of the characters: shell shock, riots, the blitz, inter-racial affairs, religious riots, camp accidents, labour unrest. Hortense’s and Gilbert’s future in a hostile England grows out of these losses. Queenie and Bernard Bligh are marooned in their rattle-trap house.
Useful interviews and reviews: here, here, here,here, here and here.
In the week and a half that I was house bound with a chest cold, I missed the shift to shorter days, Halloween cause it’s not Halloween if you can’t see the kids careening in their costumes, and the change from fall to near-winter. In the days I’ve been in bed have whipped leaves off the trees and changed the smell of the neighbourhood. Instead of ripe, fallen leaves, the neighbourhood now smells of dry, crumbling, cold leaves, What was red and yellow is now fading and crumpled brown. The light has changed with the baring of the trees. The rain and wind are no longer just autumn rain—it’s blashtry. Now we’ll have weeks of cold air and bare branches before the snow arrives.
