Kurt Vonnegut died today.
So it goes.
Here's a great excerpt from his memoir:
In this exclusive extract from his forthcoming memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is horrified by the hypocrisy in contemporary US politics
Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show
But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.
Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.
"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon?
Give me a break!
It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law!
It is the US Constitution.
But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone
Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".
George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?
And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves!
Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it.
This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.
I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.
In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America, to be published by Bloomsbury on February 6, price £14.99
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
I am officially older than young, but I still need my parents
I am no longer young. Although I am not sure exactly what you could call that, because as Shazz and I decided last night, we are not middle-aged yet, although we are heading there at a rate of knots.
We decided this while sitting digesting our lovely roast beef Easter dinner that I had cooked, while Himself washed up and the young people watched tv on Kitty's pink tv in her bedroom with the lovely new green and cream fern patterned comforter.
We were wondering at the strange turn of events that had led us in the course of one year to be ecstatically happy that we were just sitting in an apartment doing this instead of out dancing around a pool table in Bearly's Blues 'n' Ribs, which is what I think we were doing last year.
It's been a long weekend...
And then I read the Irish Times this morning and find that less than 5% of young people know the first commandment: Remember the Lord is thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before Him. Which I know of course, as well as the other nine, in the right order, although I tend to get coveting and actual adultery mixed up. Because they're the same thing, aren't they?
So I am definitely not young anymore. But today, at least, for the first time in three months, I don't feel ancient.
Sometimes you have to break on the wheel to get off it.
Coming into this weekend, I was in pretty bad shape. The trip to Ireland had flattened me emotionally, which is why I've never actually written about it. Financially we were in a very precarious state, as we were facing into a job search for Himself and had to spend all the wriggle room money to buy a car to facilitate his being able to actually get to work in the city of crappy bus services.
Despite all that, I was fairly positive about the search: I knew he'd get something that would have a future for him in it; it was going to be all about how long we would have to stretch the budget.
Until next Thursday as it turns out.
So we knew when we got on the plane to leave Ireland, which was the hardest thing I think I've ever done, that it was going to be a tough couple of months. Then just to turn the wheel a couple of degrees tighter, just to be sure I got the point of whatever lesson Saturn is supposed to be teaching me about life, we came back to the coldest January and February this girl has experienced.
And a new member of the household.
Unrelenting mornings at the bus stop shivering in minus thirty windchill, scrambling to and from the bank, the post office, the Legislature, in howling winds that felt like they were peeling the clothes off you; and none of my clothes worked properly. And of course, I couldn't buy any new ones.
If you haven't done three months of minus temperatures and severe wind chills with absolutely NO body fat on you then you have NO idea what the hell I am talking about.
Add to that the two month job search. Which turned out great in the end, but which then involved waiting for the weather to improve so the job could start and then the usual Canadian bullshit about the payment cycle. Which is some chrissake insanity about always starting a job in the middle of a payment cycle and then having to wait weeks and weeks for your turn to be accepted onto the cycle and then it messing up and then finally getting a pay date when you're at your wits end and then that being a mistake etc, etc, blah di fuckin blah...
It happened to me too when I started working. The bastard Government still owes me two weeks wages. I will get it when I leave apparently. I won't get the effing interest I suppose.
This country suffers from the crappest administrative sector on the planet because they leech off the back of their unbelieveable resource wealth. They wouldn't last ten seconds in Ireland, most of them. There would be rioting in the streets if people kept back two weeks wages until you had left your job.
You betcha there would be.
Add to that finding a school, furnishing a bedroom, being a mother from scratch to a girl who thankfully is a very forgiving person, finding a new way to live all together with no outside because it's covered in snow and ice, and no trips to the movies or the mall or anything to ease the drudgery...
I didn't know what to do to fix all of this, so I did what I do when I don't know what else to do.
I worked.
And I cooked.
And I cleaned.
And I ordered people around relentlessly.
And I thought about where the hell my life was going. And how I had ended up in this place.
But I didn't say a word to anyone.
Which is where I made my big mistake of course.
I am a shit hot cook by the way. I can make a three course meal for three people that includes every bit of winter nourishment necessary for facing a day of minus thirty and driving hail out of a can of chick peas and three carrots and what's in my stores cupboard!!
I should be a quartermaster.
I can marshall the combined possessions of three people in a small apartment and render them invisible to the naked eye.
I can predict to the second when the bathroom supplies need to be replaced, and remember where I saw them on special offer, and remember to bring the coupon card with me and get the effing store to pay me to take the stuff off their hands.
I can manage the bills so that they get paid but we still get to eat that weekend.
I can do all of this on NO CREDIT.
And we still found the money for the pink television and the Japanese comforter.
Because I rock. And Himself rocks. And we are unstoppable when we are together.
The reason I could do all this is because about half-way through February I had decided to stop thinking about my life and get with the project. Seeing as I was the project manager.
In lieu of thinking, my brain started to get obsessed with my hair. A Canadian winter does nothing for your hair, and I hadn't been for a 'do' for a long while anyways, so my grey was starting to show. I had long, wiry, orangey, matted piles of the stuff that wouldn't do anything except squeak into a pony tail that made me look like the old English Royal that they had locked in the attic.
My brain started a little mantra in my head - want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done. Getting my hair done became a mythic milestone in my crappy life.
When I got my hair done, everything was going to be okay and the summer would be here, and Saturn would stop kicking us in the nads and we would sit outside in the sunshine with a beer and a steak and watch Kitty hang out with her new friends and Himself would caress my shiny, soft, brown hair (which he had stopped doing because his fingers were getting caught in the matts), and we would smile at each other in the knowledge that yet again the combined forces of the universe, despite their best efforts, were not able to tear apart what Himself and I have put together so carefully and lovingly.
Of course my brain, being my brain, had a second, lower mantra going about the new Shiseido eye cream Eileen had advised me to try. Which is still a pipe dream. All this because as well as having the hair of a shetland pony, I had dark circles under my eyes that were starting to evacuate south to my jawline.
From work.
Work....
On top of having a totally pointless winter session of the Legislature, we were renovating in work. So we had to move our offices around and live out of boxes for weeks on end and endure buzz saws and builders walking around yelling into their mobile phones and no kitchen and the smell of carpet glue and dust and general mayhem for six weeks.
Then everyone in the office got the stomach flu.
Except me of course.
And then we had to get ready for the Spring Budget session, which is a test designed to suck the will to live out of a person.
A month of ten or twelve hour days, stressed colleagues, stressed MLAs, a disinterested media (the worst possible audience for needy politicians), a population who are just trying to get the hell to the opening of the fishing and BBQ season in one piece, and no real issues to get to grips with. Just endless hours of droning by Ministers who seem to be capable of dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back for running this province into the ground.
And still the wind howled every day around Downtown Halifax, pulling what was left of my life force out of me, piece by piece.
I couldn't really focus on the vitally important issues of the day, being a little focused on getting us all through this winter, so it became increasingly difficult to put in a productive day. Then a money-making scheme I had concocted, whereby I would do extra work that needed to be done for extra cash, was refused by the powers that be. A simple decision; based on regulations I didn't know existed.
No discussion. Sorry about that.
They'll probably never understand how close I was to going postal that day.
Consequently, I lost the ability to sleep at precisely the same time Himself started work and had to set the alarm for five thirty am. We would go to bed early, fall asleep fine. Then I would wake up around three am, bathed in sweat, head screaming PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, about whatever... carefully, carefully I would wriggle away from Himself's arm, do my yoga breathing and try to calm down, nearly be asleep and then my brain would JOLT me awake again. I would get to sleep around four thirty. Then the alarm would go at five thirty and that would be it until 6.55am, which of course is five minutes before I have to get up.
Isn't it always the way.
But it was okay, because Himself was doing brilliantly in work, first person to get taken on full time after all the training was done; liking the work, making new friends and generally getting on with things.
We had made handmade cards out of my photos and I was selling them in work and I was bringing in a few bucks every week, which was the fun fund. So we were starting to have some actual fun at the weekends. In a middle-aged, boring sit at home with a bottle of wine and a dvd kind of fun way.
And Kitty was doing great in school, scoring As all over the place and making new friends and earning more money than us in her job.
So I just kept moving along; one foot forward at a time. And pushed it all to the back of my head and lectured myself about all the women in the world who have bad months every month and how this was a good learning experience.
And the winter dragged on and bad things happened to people I care about and there was nothing I could do to help. And new babies came into the world, and I couldn't even send a card.
But that doesn't matter, because it doesn't make me love them any less.
And it was at the bit of the winter when you can just see spring around the corner, because you had a hike in the sunshine and you could hear the birds building their nests.
Then when Kitty got paid for the first time (after she had finally made it onto the pay cycle of course), she tried to give me some money for the bills. Because she knew I had had to pay my immigration fees (over a thousand dollars) that week and she felt bad because I was worried about money.
That was the moment when I realised I was going to need more than a hair do to fix the hole that self-enforced frugality had opened up inside of me. But I pushed that thought to the back of my head and said it was her money and she was to keep it for herself and do what she wanted with it.
Which is to buy a Razr phone of course, which I think is a stupid waste of money of course. Which is under negotiation at the moment.
I am nothing if not inconsistent in my parenting.
And then my mother texted me and said she'd put some money in my credit card account for Easter.
I was sat in the gorgeous Gabriel's stylist chair getting my grey covered and the bottom eight inches hacked off before you could type MUMS R THE BEST!
Easter was here and I had four days off and I was going to get lots of sleep and it was all going to be fine the week after because it would be the last week of the parliamentary session, and the pay cycles would kick in together FINALLY and we could buy the BBQ without having to sell a kidney to do it, and the sun would shine and the winter was nearly over and I was GOING TO MAKE IT (WITH MUM'S SPOT ON TIMING AS USUAL).
Saturn must have been laughing his moons off...
The weather forecast had been mumbling about snow for a few days, but I had been studiously ignoring it because in my world it doesn't snow at Easter, even though when we went to Costco to get the Easter roast I nearly fell over with the wind. And then on Friday, when I went to get my hair done the furies were HOWLING around downtown and rain was pelting itself against the windshield of the car.
That night I couldn't sleep. Spent the whole night awake worrying about my immigration status. Over which I have no control.
Next day, Kitty went to work and Himself suggested a drive up the Musqodobit Valley to scout canoe and camping locations for the summer and get some fresh air.
I think he thought that the drive would have a soporific effect on me. Like it does on a cranky baby.
We were going to take the scenic route home down the Eastern Shore, which is magical.
Halfway up the valley there was a break in the hills and we could see as far as Pictou County.
Well we could have if the BLIZZARD bearing down on us hadn't been in the way.
Turned the car round, drove like maniacs back to the city.
That night, a foot of snow dumped itself on Halifax.
And I fell apart. Finally.
Colombo called. To see how I was. The effort of not telling her set me off finally. I wept down the phone, silently. She just chattered on so I could pull myself together, but the genie was out of the bottle.
I wasn't going to cry. No sirreebob.
So I yelled at Kitty. Then I yelled at Himself. Then I realised what I was doing, so I stomped out into the snow and stood there yelling at the effing universe until I was blue with cold, then stomped home and lay in bed, trying not to cry.
Then my mother texted me to say that Smoothie's Version 2 had opened that night, and everyone was there, and it was great.
So I thought for a long moment and then decided that there are some things that you can't do by yourself so I sent out an SOS by text and she called and I wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept down the phone at her.
She said, I wish I could give you a hug.
I wept a bit more.
She said, just imagine I'm giving you a hug.
I howled.
The way I should have the day I left Ireland and I thought my heart was going to break into a million pieces. Instead of wrapping a sheet of ice around it so I could keep going.
And eventually she made me stop crying and laugh instead and the Queen Dad got out of bed (it was two in the morning in Ireland) and grumbled about politics and ice hockey and made me feel like I was the most special girl in the world as he always does, and then I was able to make them put the phone down and go to bed. And I had a glass of wine and helped Himself celebrate the Maple Leafs squeaking into the playoffs.
And then I went to bed and slept like a baby and got up and lit the Easter candle because it is the symbol of a new beginning, and cleaned the house and cooked supper for Shazz and her boy who is in Kitty's class in school and we all ate until we were stuffed and then we watched Blood Diamond and thought about how pathetic our problems really are.
And now I'm still a bit sniffly and tired, but it's all going to be fine.
So what have I learned from all of this.
A family can live quite easily on a small amount of money, but it wears you out after a while. So those of us who are more fortunate should always bear that in mind when we think about the way other people spend their money. Sometimes something as useless and tawdry as a pink television can represent a lot more than plain old consumerism.
When you are in trouble financially, and you are trying to work your way out of it, be very careful whom you ask for an opportunity to do that. Being casually turned down is soul-destroying.
I already knew that people who purport to care about the working poor generally don't have a clue what they're talking about. Now I know it to be true on two continents.
If I hadn't had to do Lent as a child, I probably wouldn't have been able to do this. There was a reason other than religion why we had religious ritual. And we need something to replace it. An Observer Magazine frugality drive is not quite what I have in mind.
I live in a society where there is very little to do without money and a car.
I know who my Canadian friends are. I had figured I did, but now I know for sure.
Rabbit stew is very nice with fennel. But it is just as good without it.
My parents ROCK! (But I knew that anyways) If I can give Kitty half the life skills they have given me she will do fine.
She and I are going shopping today for a new pair of sneakers which she needs, and then we're going to look at phones which she wants. She has bowed to the inevitable, poor girl!!
At least her inevitable is not that she's no longer young.
Happy Easter!
We decided this while sitting digesting our lovely roast beef Easter dinner that I had cooked, while Himself washed up and the young people watched tv on Kitty's pink tv in her bedroom with the lovely new green and cream fern patterned comforter.
We were wondering at the strange turn of events that had led us in the course of one year to be ecstatically happy that we were just sitting in an apartment doing this instead of out dancing around a pool table in Bearly's Blues 'n' Ribs, which is what I think we were doing last year.
It's been a long weekend...
And then I read the Irish Times this morning and find that less than 5% of young people know the first commandment: Remember the Lord is thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before Him. Which I know of course, as well as the other nine, in the right order, although I tend to get coveting and actual adultery mixed up. Because they're the same thing, aren't they?
So I am definitely not young anymore. But today, at least, for the first time in three months, I don't feel ancient.
Sometimes you have to break on the wheel to get off it.
Coming into this weekend, I was in pretty bad shape. The trip to Ireland had flattened me emotionally, which is why I've never actually written about it. Financially we were in a very precarious state, as we were facing into a job search for Himself and had to spend all the wriggle room money to buy a car to facilitate his being able to actually get to work in the city of crappy bus services.
Despite all that, I was fairly positive about the search: I knew he'd get something that would have a future for him in it; it was going to be all about how long we would have to stretch the budget.
Until next Thursday as it turns out.
So we knew when we got on the plane to leave Ireland, which was the hardest thing I think I've ever done, that it was going to be a tough couple of months. Then just to turn the wheel a couple of degrees tighter, just to be sure I got the point of whatever lesson Saturn is supposed to be teaching me about life, we came back to the coldest January and February this girl has experienced.
And a new member of the household.
Unrelenting mornings at the bus stop shivering in minus thirty windchill, scrambling to and from the bank, the post office, the Legislature, in howling winds that felt like they were peeling the clothes off you; and none of my clothes worked properly. And of course, I couldn't buy any new ones.
If you haven't done three months of minus temperatures and severe wind chills with absolutely NO body fat on you then you have NO idea what the hell I am talking about.
Add to that the two month job search. Which turned out great in the end, but which then involved waiting for the weather to improve so the job could start and then the usual Canadian bullshit about the payment cycle. Which is some chrissake insanity about always starting a job in the middle of a payment cycle and then having to wait weeks and weeks for your turn to be accepted onto the cycle and then it messing up and then finally getting a pay date when you're at your wits end and then that being a mistake etc, etc, blah di fuckin blah...
It happened to me too when I started working. The bastard Government still owes me two weeks wages. I will get it when I leave apparently. I won't get the effing interest I suppose.
This country suffers from the crappest administrative sector on the planet because they leech off the back of their unbelieveable resource wealth. They wouldn't last ten seconds in Ireland, most of them. There would be rioting in the streets if people kept back two weeks wages until you had left your job.
You betcha there would be.
Add to that finding a school, furnishing a bedroom, being a mother from scratch to a girl who thankfully is a very forgiving person, finding a new way to live all together with no outside because it's covered in snow and ice, and no trips to the movies or the mall or anything to ease the drudgery...
I didn't know what to do to fix all of this, so I did what I do when I don't know what else to do.
I worked.
And I cooked.
And I cleaned.
And I ordered people around relentlessly.
And I thought about where the hell my life was going. And how I had ended up in this place.
But I didn't say a word to anyone.
Which is where I made my big mistake of course.
I am a shit hot cook by the way. I can make a three course meal for three people that includes every bit of winter nourishment necessary for facing a day of minus thirty and driving hail out of a can of chick peas and three carrots and what's in my stores cupboard!!
I should be a quartermaster.
I can marshall the combined possessions of three people in a small apartment and render them invisible to the naked eye.
I can predict to the second when the bathroom supplies need to be replaced, and remember where I saw them on special offer, and remember to bring the coupon card with me and get the effing store to pay me to take the stuff off their hands.
I can manage the bills so that they get paid but we still get to eat that weekend.
I can do all of this on NO CREDIT.
And we still found the money for the pink television and the Japanese comforter.
Because I rock. And Himself rocks. And we are unstoppable when we are together.
The reason I could do all this is because about half-way through February I had decided to stop thinking about my life and get with the project. Seeing as I was the project manager.
In lieu of thinking, my brain started to get obsessed with my hair. A Canadian winter does nothing for your hair, and I hadn't been for a 'do' for a long while anyways, so my grey was starting to show. I had long, wiry, orangey, matted piles of the stuff that wouldn't do anything except squeak into a pony tail that made me look like the old English Royal that they had locked in the attic.
My brain started a little mantra in my head - want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done. Getting my hair done became a mythic milestone in my crappy life.
When I got my hair done, everything was going to be okay and the summer would be here, and Saturn would stop kicking us in the nads and we would sit outside in the sunshine with a beer and a steak and watch Kitty hang out with her new friends and Himself would caress my shiny, soft, brown hair (which he had stopped doing because his fingers were getting caught in the matts), and we would smile at each other in the knowledge that yet again the combined forces of the universe, despite their best efforts, were not able to tear apart what Himself and I have put together so carefully and lovingly.
Of course my brain, being my brain, had a second, lower mantra going about the new Shiseido eye cream Eileen had advised me to try. Which is still a pipe dream. All this because as well as having the hair of a shetland pony, I had dark circles under my eyes that were starting to evacuate south to my jawline.
From work.
Work....
On top of having a totally pointless winter session of the Legislature, we were renovating in work. So we had to move our offices around and live out of boxes for weeks on end and endure buzz saws and builders walking around yelling into their mobile phones and no kitchen and the smell of carpet glue and dust and general mayhem for six weeks.
Then everyone in the office got the stomach flu.
Except me of course.
And then we had to get ready for the Spring Budget session, which is a test designed to suck the will to live out of a person.
A month of ten or twelve hour days, stressed colleagues, stressed MLAs, a disinterested media (the worst possible audience for needy politicians), a population who are just trying to get the hell to the opening of the fishing and BBQ season in one piece, and no real issues to get to grips with. Just endless hours of droning by Ministers who seem to be capable of dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back for running this province into the ground.
And still the wind howled every day around Downtown Halifax, pulling what was left of my life force out of me, piece by piece.
I couldn't really focus on the vitally important issues of the day, being a little focused on getting us all through this winter, so it became increasingly difficult to put in a productive day. Then a money-making scheme I had concocted, whereby I would do extra work that needed to be done for extra cash, was refused by the powers that be. A simple decision; based on regulations I didn't know existed.
No discussion. Sorry about that.
They'll probably never understand how close I was to going postal that day.
Consequently, I lost the ability to sleep at precisely the same time Himself started work and had to set the alarm for five thirty am. We would go to bed early, fall asleep fine. Then I would wake up around three am, bathed in sweat, head screaming PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, about whatever... carefully, carefully I would wriggle away from Himself's arm, do my yoga breathing and try to calm down, nearly be asleep and then my brain would JOLT me awake again. I would get to sleep around four thirty. Then the alarm would go at five thirty and that would be it until 6.55am, which of course is five minutes before I have to get up.
Isn't it always the way.
But it was okay, because Himself was doing brilliantly in work, first person to get taken on full time after all the training was done; liking the work, making new friends and generally getting on with things.
We had made handmade cards out of my photos and I was selling them in work and I was bringing in a few bucks every week, which was the fun fund. So we were starting to have some actual fun at the weekends. In a middle-aged, boring sit at home with a bottle of wine and a dvd kind of fun way.
And Kitty was doing great in school, scoring As all over the place and making new friends and earning more money than us in her job.
So I just kept moving along; one foot forward at a time. And pushed it all to the back of my head and lectured myself about all the women in the world who have bad months every month and how this was a good learning experience.
And the winter dragged on and bad things happened to people I care about and there was nothing I could do to help. And new babies came into the world, and I couldn't even send a card.
But that doesn't matter, because it doesn't make me love them any less.
And it was at the bit of the winter when you can just see spring around the corner, because you had a hike in the sunshine and you could hear the birds building their nests.
Then when Kitty got paid for the first time (after she had finally made it onto the pay cycle of course), she tried to give me some money for the bills. Because she knew I had had to pay my immigration fees (over a thousand dollars) that week and she felt bad because I was worried about money.
That was the moment when I realised I was going to need more than a hair do to fix the hole that self-enforced frugality had opened up inside of me. But I pushed that thought to the back of my head and said it was her money and she was to keep it for herself and do what she wanted with it.
Which is to buy a Razr phone of course, which I think is a stupid waste of money of course. Which is under negotiation at the moment.
I am nothing if not inconsistent in my parenting.
And then my mother texted me and said she'd put some money in my credit card account for Easter.
I was sat in the gorgeous Gabriel's stylist chair getting my grey covered and the bottom eight inches hacked off before you could type MUMS R THE BEST!
Easter was here and I had four days off and I was going to get lots of sleep and it was all going to be fine the week after because it would be the last week of the parliamentary session, and the pay cycles would kick in together FINALLY and we could buy the BBQ without having to sell a kidney to do it, and the sun would shine and the winter was nearly over and I was GOING TO MAKE IT (WITH MUM'S SPOT ON TIMING AS USUAL).
Saturn must have been laughing his moons off...
The weather forecast had been mumbling about snow for a few days, but I had been studiously ignoring it because in my world it doesn't snow at Easter, even though when we went to Costco to get the Easter roast I nearly fell over with the wind. And then on Friday, when I went to get my hair done the furies were HOWLING around downtown and rain was pelting itself against the windshield of the car.
That night I couldn't sleep. Spent the whole night awake worrying about my immigration status. Over which I have no control.
Next day, Kitty went to work and Himself suggested a drive up the Musqodobit Valley to scout canoe and camping locations for the summer and get some fresh air.
I think he thought that the drive would have a soporific effect on me. Like it does on a cranky baby.
We were going to take the scenic route home down the Eastern Shore, which is magical.
Halfway up the valley there was a break in the hills and we could see as far as Pictou County.
Well we could have if the BLIZZARD bearing down on us hadn't been in the way.
Turned the car round, drove like maniacs back to the city.
That night, a foot of snow dumped itself on Halifax.
And I fell apart. Finally.
Colombo called. To see how I was. The effort of not telling her set me off finally. I wept down the phone, silently. She just chattered on so I could pull myself together, but the genie was out of the bottle.
I wasn't going to cry. No sirreebob.
So I yelled at Kitty. Then I yelled at Himself. Then I realised what I was doing, so I stomped out into the snow and stood there yelling at the effing universe until I was blue with cold, then stomped home and lay in bed, trying not to cry.
Then my mother texted me to say that Smoothie's Version 2 had opened that night, and everyone was there, and it was great.
So I thought for a long moment and then decided that there are some things that you can't do by yourself so I sent out an SOS by text and she called and I wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept down the phone at her.
She said, I wish I could give you a hug.
I wept a bit more.
She said, just imagine I'm giving you a hug.
I howled.
The way I should have the day I left Ireland and I thought my heart was going to break into a million pieces. Instead of wrapping a sheet of ice around it so I could keep going.
And eventually she made me stop crying and laugh instead and the Queen Dad got out of bed (it was two in the morning in Ireland) and grumbled about politics and ice hockey and made me feel like I was the most special girl in the world as he always does, and then I was able to make them put the phone down and go to bed. And I had a glass of wine and helped Himself celebrate the Maple Leafs squeaking into the playoffs.
And then I went to bed and slept like a baby and got up and lit the Easter candle because it is the symbol of a new beginning, and cleaned the house and cooked supper for Shazz and her boy who is in Kitty's class in school and we all ate until we were stuffed and then we watched Blood Diamond and thought about how pathetic our problems really are.
And now I'm still a bit sniffly and tired, but it's all going to be fine.
So what have I learned from all of this.
A family can live quite easily on a small amount of money, but it wears you out after a while. So those of us who are more fortunate should always bear that in mind when we think about the way other people spend their money. Sometimes something as useless and tawdry as a pink television can represent a lot more than plain old consumerism.
When you are in trouble financially, and you are trying to work your way out of it, be very careful whom you ask for an opportunity to do that. Being casually turned down is soul-destroying.
I already knew that people who purport to care about the working poor generally don't have a clue what they're talking about. Now I know it to be true on two continents.
If I hadn't had to do Lent as a child, I probably wouldn't have been able to do this. There was a reason other than religion why we had religious ritual. And we need something to replace it. An Observer Magazine frugality drive is not quite what I have in mind.
I live in a society where there is very little to do without money and a car.
I know who my Canadian friends are. I had figured I did, but now I know for sure.
Rabbit stew is very nice with fennel. But it is just as good without it.
My parents ROCK! (But I knew that anyways) If I can give Kitty half the life skills they have given me she will do fine.
She and I are going shopping today for a new pair of sneakers which she needs, and then we're going to look at phones which she wants. She has bowed to the inevitable, poor girl!!
At least her inevitable is not that she's no longer young.
Happy Easter!
Sunday, April 01, 2007
That wind didn't shake my barley!
Spoilers included.
I might have known that Ken Loach and I wouldn't agree about what happened in the Irish Civil War.
Why is it that people who are slightly to the left of you, are miles and miles away, whereas people who are slightly on the right of you are only slightly to the right of you?
Not that I mind really. Except for the fact that I know there's a whole cinema full of Canadians who now think that my grandfather and his fellow Free Staters were bastard mercenary pigs who only fought the War of Independence to protect the rich and perpetuate the capitalist system that ground the poor under.
Also they think that a shower of west-Cork Republicans would think nothing of having a Jackeen socialist member of the Citizen's Army fight with them.
Which is of course much more ludicrous than the idea that my grandfather fought for anything other than what he thought was the best for his people.
However, as most of the dialogue in the film was conveyed in a thick Cork accent, I can only hope that they are confused. As most Canadians are about Ireland.
Even Himself. Who has had several lectures on the subject. As we left the cinema, I was explaining why the Free Staters had shot their own people, using a reversal of the England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity argument.
"They thought that the British government would use the continued Civil War as an opportunity to re-invade the south."
Himself considered this, then said, 'but they did anyway.'
"No, they didn't."
"Yes they did."
"Ehhhmm, no.."
"So there were no British soldiers in Birr when you were growing up?"
"No!"
"Oh."
Silence descends as we walk to the car and I try to think what I might have said to make him think that.
I might have known that Ken Loach and I wouldn't agree about what happened in the Irish Civil War.
Why is it that people who are slightly to the left of you, are miles and miles away, whereas people who are slightly on the right of you are only slightly to the right of you?
Not that I mind really. Except for the fact that I know there's a whole cinema full of Canadians who now think that my grandfather and his fellow Free Staters were bastard mercenary pigs who only fought the War of Independence to protect the rich and perpetuate the capitalist system that ground the poor under.
Also they think that a shower of west-Cork Republicans would think nothing of having a Jackeen socialist member of the Citizen's Army fight with them.
Which is of course much more ludicrous than the idea that my grandfather fought for anything other than what he thought was the best for his people.
However, as most of the dialogue in the film was conveyed in a thick Cork accent, I can only hope that they are confused. As most Canadians are about Ireland.
Even Himself. Who has had several lectures on the subject. As we left the cinema, I was explaining why the Free Staters had shot their own people, using a reversal of the England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity argument.
"They thought that the British government would use the continued Civil War as an opportunity to re-invade the south."
Himself considered this, then said, 'but they did anyway.'
"No, they didn't."
"Yes they did."
"Ehhhmm, no.."
"So there were no British soldiers in Birr when you were growing up?"
"No!"
"Oh."
Silence descends as we walk to the car and I try to think what I might have said to make him think that.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
The first springtime hike was uphill - finally!
We went on the best hike today. We go most Sundays, but this one I researched properly and it was a winner - it actually had an UP bit. That's one of the things I miss most about Ireland - walking in the Wicklow mountains, or in the Kerry mountains, or the Mayo mountains. There are no mountains in Nova Scotia. Nothing you have to climb for forty heart bursting minutes until you get up onto a bit of a ridge and see a view and have a breather before the next leg-destroying six miles. In the rain.
Here, it's all flat marked trail.
B-o-r-i-n-g...
But I searched and searched and searched and found the Salmon River trail.
One of the things I love about Nova Scotia is that this trail is four miles outside Preston, the African Nova Scotian community on the edge of Dartmouth. So it is less than forty minutes from the house and still it is pure back country.
The first part of the hike is a scramble over dead trees littering the lakeside and a haul across an old bridge that's been pretty much destroyed by the winter. The lake is still frozen but all around the sound of the ice cracking and splitting and LEAVING could be heard. Then it was straight up for twenty minutes, up an old Mi'k Maw trail onto the top of a barren.
A barren is a burren with moss, by the way.
This was like a mini-Ayers Rock. When we got to the top, we had a spectacular view of the valley. Bald eagles are really common here apparently, but it was still a little early for them to be fishing. Next time, hopefully.
The sun was really warm at this stage, so we sat for a while and enjoyed the view and had some water - first time I needed water on a hike since I got here - and then we made our way down to the river.
It is unbelieveably peaceful to be making your way along a river bank trail that exists because people have been making their way along it for various reasons, mostly involving food, for ten thousand years at least, safe in the knowledge that this bit of the earth hasn't changed all that much in the meantime.
As we were walking along the riverbank, Himself started to notice a plethora of gnawed sticks.
Beavers, he said.
I love beavers. They're really industrious for absolutely no reason in the world. They spend all their time cutting down trees to dam rivers that don't need to be dammed because trees are going to fall into them eventually anyway.
No wonder they're the Canadian national emblem...
Then we rounded the corner and there it was, a bit scruffy after the winter, but a big dam all the same (picture down a bit further on the blog). Looks like the guys have a lot of gnawing to do this summer.
Then we saw a pair of wild ducks poncing around in the river, so Himself went to scare them into flight, so I could catch them on the exciting new action zoom lens. Despite his best efforts, they ignored him and sailed past in a stately manner.
Not being used to humans and all that.
It wasn't until we were halfway up the river bank that we met three other people. One of whom was our neighbour Lyse. We always bump into Lyse on these hikes. She of course had hiked about fifteen miles already, but we like to stop and take photos and potter and collect gnawed stuff etc., so we are a bit slower. She was with Gear Guys, who had their GPS locaters attached to matching shoulder straps on their hi-tech Mountain Equipment Co-op rucksacks. They were spotting fly-fishing spots for next week, when the season opens.
Then we stopped for lunch, which was great today because Leonard had organised it.
Walking is a fun time for Leonard and as he is from India originally (although he has been Canadian since he was a teenager) fun involves interesting food and drinks. Hooray! We had to stop him bringing nice bottles of white wine on the walks as I was getting too sloshed to walk properly and starting to fall over a lot. Which I don't like as it is supposed to be the time of the week when I am healthy.
Today he brought samosas and other interesting Indian foods and oranges and (heavy) bottles of Orangina for our lunch .
Because his daughter makes Christmas candles from the bottles.
I work for Leonard as a researcher and he is my favourite politician on the planet ever and I love Leonard (but don't tell him) even when he's annoying me to death, by making me do work I don't want to do because I am lazy...
But I particularly love him when he's walking.
Pinstriped trousers tucked into Dr. Martin boots. A completely inappropriate (for walking) sports bag full of food slung across his back. And a half-gnawed beaver branch for a walking stick this time.
I wonder what Gear Guys made of him?
By the time we finished eating and chatting and drinking Orangina and coffee and having some almond and cranberry granola bars and chilling out the sun was starting to go down behind the old growth pines on the riverbank so we set out for home. I stopped to take a photograph of some nice lichen on the limestone with some icicles hanging off it and Himself sat on a rock with his beaver branch that he'd found too and said, I don't want to go home.
I know how he felt.
So it's Sunday night now and Himself is in bed because he has to get up at 5.30 and Kitty is puddling round in the bathroom and I should sign off and go get ready for another week of mayhem.
But hopefully amidst all the beaver activity that is the Estimates debate next week, I will hold today in my heart.
For a few days at least.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Book reviews from winter reading
I am reading a lot at the moment, having rediscovered the joys of the library in an attempt to encourage Kitty to read. However, she seems to be getting books from school, so mine are going by the wayside.
Having said that, she doesn’t think much of the books from school. One would think being in a position to allows you to force a teenager to read, i.e. a teacher, you would give them something GOOD to read.
The library on the other hand, is full of great books and even better librarians who treat every teenager in there as if they are made of solid gold. Consequently, the young adult section is full of them reading and watching movies and working on the computer.
However this is Boooorrrrinnnggg…. Apparently.
How do you get a child to read? There’s the question for today…
Anyways, this girl, who didn’t want to do anything else but read when she was young, presents this lot for your review. Here’s the scoring system.
A+ = glad I read this book. You should read it. The world is a better place for the presence of this book.
A = interesting in terms of subject matter or style. Glad I read it for that reason, but not really adding to my understanding of my reason for existence.
Ho hum = self-explanatory
UNCSYWYLRTB = under no circumstances should you waste your life reading this book.
I’m going to put the score in before I review the book and then see if I remember it right by reviewing the book. If I’m wrong I’ll rescore it.
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
A
Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home town to keep an eye on her father, who has early stage Alzheimer’s. She works as a biology teacher even though she is a doctor like him. Her altogether more together sister Hallie is in Nicaragua working with peasant farmers to increase their yield organically, despite the Contras attempts to stop her. As Codi falls in love with Navajo local, Loyd Peregrina and begins to enjoy teaching, can her rubbish self-esteem or other circumstances in her life and past hijack her new-found happiness?
As with all Kingsolver novels, the themes are environmental issues and filial responsibility. She writes novels about having to start being a grown up in your early thirties, about how crap it feels to have to fulfil family and societal duties, and each one of her novels put forward the premise that, at the end of the day, building a strong family and caring for the environment are the only worthy concerns.
Reading a Kingsolver novel when you are feeling crap about being a selfish thirty-something in the dark corners of your soul is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t feel so goddamn alone and that takes the edge off the selfishness. Which is not such a good thing when you’re supposed to be trying to eliminate it. On the other hand, you get to the end of the novel and think, mweh… the alternative sounded pretty cool.
So why do I keep reading them? Well, firstly, they’re pretty goddamned popular. Lots of copies in the library, and I like to keep up with the Oprah book club types. Secondly, I like writers who write from their place in the world as much as I like those who concentrate on the art of writing or imagining. And unlike many female literary types (as opposed to chick lit), Kingsolver is a good writer who always throws in a couple of interesting side issues and teaches you a lot. This novel focuses on the Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico, their art and the amazing pueblo cities they built and still live in. Sounds like Arizona would be a good holiday trip someday.
Be Cool
Elmore Leonard
UNCSYWYLRTB
I do not get the point of Elmore Leonard. Also, I can’t read his novels now without thinking of John Travolta. And since Chili Palmer has a lot of sex in this novel, I found it quite off-putting.
In this novel, Chili Palmer (hero of movie Get Shorty) is thinking about doing the third instalment in his three movie deal, and like the previous two (Get Leo and Get Lost), writes the script by living it. Enter a former shylock colleague who gets topped while having lunch with Chili, some Russian mobsters, a potential Americana star from Odessa Texas, a totally corrupt music executive called Raji and his sidekick, the gay Samoan bodyguard, Eliot Wilhelm.
Much mayhem ensues, Chili dabbles in the music industry, despite nearly being thrown out a window by the Samoan he wins out in the end and the new movie goes into pre-production.
Boring drivel.
The Dead of Winter
Lisa Appignanesi
Can’t remember a thing about this book, but it is on my bookshelf so I must have read it.
The Globe and Mail said this was a cleverly conceived plot about the strange and terrifying power of love. Now that I read the back cover I remember: this is a crime novel set in Montreal and rural Quebec. Rural Quebec is this year’s planned road trip, so I think that’s probably why I bought it.
Madeleine Blais and Pierre Rousseau are childhood sweethearts from rural Quebec. Madeleine becomes a famous movie star and dumps lawyer Rousseau heartlessly. A couple of Christmases later, she turns up hanging in her grandmother’s barn. The police decide it’s suicide and close the case, but Pierre knows it’s murder because she had called him just beforehand. That must be how you know, then.
Pierre’s investigations in Montreal get the killer on his tail and the usual mayhem ensues before the plot is satisfactorily resolved.
Ho hum, although there are two satisfying twists to the tale that I only saw coming about half a mile off.
The Island Walkers
John Bemrose
A+ (but I’m not sure why).
This is a debut novel that got nominated for the Giller, Canada’s big literary prize, a year or two ago. Set in south-western Ontario, it charts the decline of an industrial town called Attawan through the eyes of a young man Joe Walker, whose father Alf gets involved with labour agitators who are trying to organise the town’s textile plant workers.
The labour agitator is an Irish guy called Doyle, which is a nod to the fact that many Canadian union activists and organisers of the fifties and sixties were in fact Irish immigrants. Pity they never get any credit for what they did at home in Ireland. Better keep that for the Democrats in the States, I suppose!
The town is bisected physically and class wise by a river, and it is on its edge that most of the action takes place, from the teenage couplings and rivalries described in the early part of the novel, to clandestine union activity. The mill is taken over by a Montreal company who bring in the usual productivity changes (ie redundancies), and try to root out any attempts to organise the workers by buying off their natural leader, Alf Walker, with a supervisory position.
Alf married above him (an Englishwoman he met during the war) and finds himself caught between his principles and her desire to move up a class in the town.
The portrait of Alf is very compelling, of Joe less so. I found myself seeing my father in Alf’s struggle, which is strange, as they are not alike really.
Alf’s desire to provide for his family leads him to an act which may or may not betray his comrades and lead to the death of a friend. The author switches viewpoint from Joe to Alf for this part of the novel, and Alf’s struggle with his guilt is the best third of the novel.
The first two thirds, which focus mostly on Joe’s perception of the town and his family and developing the movement of the story, are a little laboured. I never got into Joe’s skin, or developed much empathy for him. The whole plot could have done with a bit of a cull.
However, Alf and his co-workers and union buddies are very well drawn. They were all from the same ‘character group’ though, if you know what I mean. Bemrose needs to work on his range. If he can pull a group of diverse well-drawn characters together for his next novel, and go easier on the water imagery, then he’ll have a cracker on his hands.
I’m downgrading this to an A for Alf. Good starter novel though!!
The Secret River
Kate Grenville
A
Speaking of dads, mine gave me this over Christmas. Dads are generally very predictable, aren’t they? The Queen Dad usually gives me novels about a) Australia or Southern Africa, which are b) rural in setting, c) mostly historical or set in the recent past, rarely contemporary, and d) thematically, generally involve some discussion of how the principal European colonial powers messed up the rest of the planet for everyone who happened to be there first.
Sure enough, The Secret River is mostly set in colonial Australia, circa the turn of the nineteenth century, and involves transportation and other colonial outrages. This one has lots of boats, though, which gave it an additional kick of interest.
William Thornhill is a happily married waterman on the River Thames, who gets into a spot of bother due to the big freeze of 1806, steals some lumber, gets caught doing it and is sent to Australia.
Thornhill uses his waterlore to throw off the yoke of servitude, buying a sloop to bring supplies upriver to the early settlers. Eventually he makes enough money to buy his own land, which he settles with his family (who chose to be transported with him).
Trouble is, his land is sacred to the local Aboriginals.
Thornhill’s intuitive response is to try to manage the conflict and build a dialogue with the locals. Unfortunately, not all the settlers agree, and their views push him into an unfortunate choice when the conflict reaches a head.
The initial part, set in London, is an excellent description of the watermen of the Thames, not a subject of which I knew anything. And the descriptions of the Australian outback are so vivid that I felt I was there without ever having visited Australia.
Brilliant characterisation and unfolding of the eventual conflict between Aboriginals and settlers. With lots of sloops. Excellent read. Particularly if you like boats.
The Pick Up
Nadine Gordimer
A+
Because of the Queen Dad (see previous review), I have a deep interest in South African and Australian writing. Nadine Gordimer is my second favourite SA writer, after JM Coetzee who is the MASTER of contemporary, post-conflict literature (better even than our own Ronan Bennett) and who consequently should be read in detail by everyone on the planet.
Coetzee has a dark emptiness inside his stories that is so terrifying and bleak, I can’t figure how he controls it enough to write sentences, never mind complex, demanding novels. Sort of like Murakami, or Pamuk, but with a Western European sensibility.
Anyway, enough about Coetzee.
I got The Pickup in the library and have sent it back, so consequently I won’t be able to remember any of the characters names. I never can. But the book is about a rich South African white woman who falls in love with an illegal Muslim immigrant from an unnamed African country (Saharan though), and who accompanies him back to his village as his wife when he gets deported.
I thought about this book for a long time after I finished it. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you why I did without spoiling the ending.
Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers
When they get back to the unnamed country, the SA woman has to live in the family home with him, in a village on the edge of the desert. She falls in love with the desert and the lifestyle, and begins to think how they could develop wealth in the town with her trust fund. Hubbie meanwhile puts the kaibosh on that, as he spends all his time trying to get a visa to somewhere else.
Finally, he gets a green card and celebrates a chance to make it in the States. Only thing, she’ll have to live with her ditsy mother in California while he drudges in Chicago, as he’s not going to expose her to the seaminess of being an immigrant to the States. She hates her mother, so on the day before they leave, she announces that she’s staying with his family. He is astounded and furious, but leaves without her.
The end.
The dichotomy between her need to escape the capitalist wealthy countries of which she’s a privileged member, and his fierce desire to get into any of them is one I had never thought of before. Gordimer highlights this beautifully in the context of an unlikely love story.
The Wildfire Season
Andrew Pyper
A
“Ross River is a town clinging to the outside world at the end of the Yukon’s loneliest road. It is also the hiding place of Miles McEwan, the town’s hard-drinking, fist-fighting fire chief. But the slow burn of Miles’ self-imposed exile is about to explode.”
That’s the blurb on the back. This book is great for three reasons:
1 – it deals with bush fires, and the people who start them. A large part of the novel deals with the crew that fight this fire and the investigation into how it started.
2 – one of the principal characters is a total mother-fucker of a she Grizzlie. I dreamt about her for nights afterwards.
3 – one of the other characters is a watcher – sits in a big tower for months on end, spotting fires. Currently that is my ambition in life.
A rip-roaring read, excuse the pun. People who know tell me it’s exactly what the Yukon is like. Next year’s road trip maybe. Pyper has two other novels, Lost Girls, and The Trade Mission, which got excellent reviews too.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marissa Pessl
UNCSYWYLRTB!!
“Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink” – Jonathan Franzen. Yeah, well you’d know all about foam, Jonathan!
Some nice person bought me this for Christmas, and I can’t remember who because I opened my presents when I was a bit drunk on Christmas Eve and forgot to write the name of the gifter on the novel, which is how I normally remember. So apologies if the gifter reads this. The book itself is a beautifully presented hard-backed edition so I will treasure it for that reason, but ...
... what a (huge) pile of annoying shite.
Dazzling debut my arse! This girl has been writing this novel since forever. Every book she ever read is in here somewhere, the whole enterprise feels like a series of book reports, book-ended by her diary entries about the teacher she had a crush on.
Plot in brief: Precocious grade 12er with handsome witty academic dad moves to new private school and meets astoundingly charismatic teacher who has select group of cool students round for supper every Sunday. Precocious girl tries to get in with the ‘in’ crowd. Weird, murder-related stuff happens, with completely OTT ending involving the Minute Men. Sound vaguely familiar in parts to anyone who has ever read the Secret History?
Ms Pessl says in the afterword (when did they become de riguer) that she thanks ‘my amazing husband Nic, my Clyde, who graciously watches his wife disappear alone into a dark room with her computer for ten or twelve hours at a time and asks no questions’.
I don’t think Nic is the one needs to be asking the questions love, if you don’t mind me saying. What is Nic doing while you’re in the dark room, eh?
And by the way, if you arrange your chapters as Core Curriculum (Required Reading), with such chapter titles as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Madame Bovary, would it be too much to ask that there be a CONNECTION between the chapter title and the content?
I present my case on this novel with a random excerpt:
“When I’d raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms Simpson’s question regarding Primary Themes in Invisible Man (Elison 1952) (which turned up on Summer reading lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn’t Quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin (BTW - That novel that E. Annie Proulx wrote about a guy, pudgy, with an eroded chin, i.e. The Shipping News, was very popular and often re-read by people, by the way, so you should probably think twice about ripping off lines from it again, Missy!), already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn’t brilliant or inspired, it also wasn’t crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen page syllabus only covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallwey wouldn’t be such Child’s Play, such Easy Victory.
Sigh. Five hundred and four pages of this shite. With drawings.
You’ll be glad to hear that Radley beat her to valedictorian. Naturally, there were extenuating circumstances, of the kind you’d find in that US magazine that keeps track of UFO sightings and Elvis and such like.
UTTER SHITE.
Having said that, she doesn’t think much of the books from school. One would think being in a position to allows you to force a teenager to read, i.e. a teacher, you would give them something GOOD to read.
The library on the other hand, is full of great books and even better librarians who treat every teenager in there as if they are made of solid gold. Consequently, the young adult section is full of them reading and watching movies and working on the computer.
However this is Boooorrrrinnnggg…. Apparently.
How do you get a child to read? There’s the question for today…
Anyways, this girl, who didn’t want to do anything else but read when she was young, presents this lot for your review. Here’s the scoring system.
A+ = glad I read this book. You should read it. The world is a better place for the presence of this book.
A = interesting in terms of subject matter or style. Glad I read it for that reason, but not really adding to my understanding of my reason for existence.
Ho hum = self-explanatory
UNCSYWYLRTB = under no circumstances should you waste your life reading this book.
I’m going to put the score in before I review the book and then see if I remember it right by reviewing the book. If I’m wrong I’ll rescore it.
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
A
Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home town to keep an eye on her father, who has early stage Alzheimer’s. She works as a biology teacher even though she is a doctor like him. Her altogether more together sister Hallie is in Nicaragua working with peasant farmers to increase their yield organically, despite the Contras attempts to stop her. As Codi falls in love with Navajo local, Loyd Peregrina and begins to enjoy teaching, can her rubbish self-esteem or other circumstances in her life and past hijack her new-found happiness?
As with all Kingsolver novels, the themes are environmental issues and filial responsibility. She writes novels about having to start being a grown up in your early thirties, about how crap it feels to have to fulfil family and societal duties, and each one of her novels put forward the premise that, at the end of the day, building a strong family and caring for the environment are the only worthy concerns.
Reading a Kingsolver novel when you are feeling crap about being a selfish thirty-something in the dark corners of your soul is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t feel so goddamn alone and that takes the edge off the selfishness. Which is not such a good thing when you’re supposed to be trying to eliminate it. On the other hand, you get to the end of the novel and think, mweh… the alternative sounded pretty cool.
So why do I keep reading them? Well, firstly, they’re pretty goddamned popular. Lots of copies in the library, and I like to keep up with the Oprah book club types. Secondly, I like writers who write from their place in the world as much as I like those who concentrate on the art of writing or imagining. And unlike many female literary types (as opposed to chick lit), Kingsolver is a good writer who always throws in a couple of interesting side issues and teaches you a lot. This novel focuses on the Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico, their art and the amazing pueblo cities they built and still live in. Sounds like Arizona would be a good holiday trip someday.
Be Cool
Elmore Leonard
UNCSYWYLRTB
I do not get the point of Elmore Leonard. Also, I can’t read his novels now without thinking of John Travolta. And since Chili Palmer has a lot of sex in this novel, I found it quite off-putting.
In this novel, Chili Palmer (hero of movie Get Shorty) is thinking about doing the third instalment in his three movie deal, and like the previous two (Get Leo and Get Lost), writes the script by living it. Enter a former shylock colleague who gets topped while having lunch with Chili, some Russian mobsters, a potential Americana star from Odessa Texas, a totally corrupt music executive called Raji and his sidekick, the gay Samoan bodyguard, Eliot Wilhelm.
Much mayhem ensues, Chili dabbles in the music industry, despite nearly being thrown out a window by the Samoan he wins out in the end and the new movie goes into pre-production.
Boring drivel.
The Dead of Winter
Lisa Appignanesi
Can’t remember a thing about this book, but it is on my bookshelf so I must have read it.
The Globe and Mail said this was a cleverly conceived plot about the strange and terrifying power of love. Now that I read the back cover I remember: this is a crime novel set in Montreal and rural Quebec. Rural Quebec is this year’s planned road trip, so I think that’s probably why I bought it.
Madeleine Blais and Pierre Rousseau are childhood sweethearts from rural Quebec. Madeleine becomes a famous movie star and dumps lawyer Rousseau heartlessly. A couple of Christmases later, she turns up hanging in her grandmother’s barn. The police decide it’s suicide and close the case, but Pierre knows it’s murder because she had called him just beforehand. That must be how you know, then.
Pierre’s investigations in Montreal get the killer on his tail and the usual mayhem ensues before the plot is satisfactorily resolved.
Ho hum, although there are two satisfying twists to the tale that I only saw coming about half a mile off.
The Island Walkers
John Bemrose
A+ (but I’m not sure why).
This is a debut novel that got nominated for the Giller, Canada’s big literary prize, a year or two ago. Set in south-western Ontario, it charts the decline of an industrial town called Attawan through the eyes of a young man Joe Walker, whose father Alf gets involved with labour agitators who are trying to organise the town’s textile plant workers.
The labour agitator is an Irish guy called Doyle, which is a nod to the fact that many Canadian union activists and organisers of the fifties and sixties were in fact Irish immigrants. Pity they never get any credit for what they did at home in Ireland. Better keep that for the Democrats in the States, I suppose!
The town is bisected physically and class wise by a river, and it is on its edge that most of the action takes place, from the teenage couplings and rivalries described in the early part of the novel, to clandestine union activity. The mill is taken over by a Montreal company who bring in the usual productivity changes (ie redundancies), and try to root out any attempts to organise the workers by buying off their natural leader, Alf Walker, with a supervisory position.
Alf married above him (an Englishwoman he met during the war) and finds himself caught between his principles and her desire to move up a class in the town.
The portrait of Alf is very compelling, of Joe less so. I found myself seeing my father in Alf’s struggle, which is strange, as they are not alike really.
Alf’s desire to provide for his family leads him to an act which may or may not betray his comrades and lead to the death of a friend. The author switches viewpoint from Joe to Alf for this part of the novel, and Alf’s struggle with his guilt is the best third of the novel.
The first two thirds, which focus mostly on Joe’s perception of the town and his family and developing the movement of the story, are a little laboured. I never got into Joe’s skin, or developed much empathy for him. The whole plot could have done with a bit of a cull.
However, Alf and his co-workers and union buddies are very well drawn. They were all from the same ‘character group’ though, if you know what I mean. Bemrose needs to work on his range. If he can pull a group of diverse well-drawn characters together for his next novel, and go easier on the water imagery, then he’ll have a cracker on his hands.
I’m downgrading this to an A for Alf. Good starter novel though!!
The Secret River
Kate Grenville
A
Speaking of dads, mine gave me this over Christmas. Dads are generally very predictable, aren’t they? The Queen Dad usually gives me novels about a) Australia or Southern Africa, which are b) rural in setting, c) mostly historical or set in the recent past, rarely contemporary, and d) thematically, generally involve some discussion of how the principal European colonial powers messed up the rest of the planet for everyone who happened to be there first.
Sure enough, The Secret River is mostly set in colonial Australia, circa the turn of the nineteenth century, and involves transportation and other colonial outrages. This one has lots of boats, though, which gave it an additional kick of interest.
William Thornhill is a happily married waterman on the River Thames, who gets into a spot of bother due to the big freeze of 1806, steals some lumber, gets caught doing it and is sent to Australia.
Thornhill uses his waterlore to throw off the yoke of servitude, buying a sloop to bring supplies upriver to the early settlers. Eventually he makes enough money to buy his own land, which he settles with his family (who chose to be transported with him).
Trouble is, his land is sacred to the local Aboriginals.
Thornhill’s intuitive response is to try to manage the conflict and build a dialogue with the locals. Unfortunately, not all the settlers agree, and their views push him into an unfortunate choice when the conflict reaches a head.
The initial part, set in London, is an excellent description of the watermen of the Thames, not a subject of which I knew anything. And the descriptions of the Australian outback are so vivid that I felt I was there without ever having visited Australia.
Brilliant characterisation and unfolding of the eventual conflict between Aboriginals and settlers. With lots of sloops. Excellent read. Particularly if you like boats.
The Pick Up
Nadine Gordimer
A+
Because of the Queen Dad (see previous review), I have a deep interest in South African and Australian writing. Nadine Gordimer is my second favourite SA writer, after JM Coetzee who is the MASTER of contemporary, post-conflict literature (better even than our own Ronan Bennett) and who consequently should be read in detail by everyone on the planet.
Coetzee has a dark emptiness inside his stories that is so terrifying and bleak, I can’t figure how he controls it enough to write sentences, never mind complex, demanding novels. Sort of like Murakami, or Pamuk, but with a Western European sensibility.
Anyway, enough about Coetzee.
I got The Pickup in the library and have sent it back, so consequently I won’t be able to remember any of the characters names. I never can. But the book is about a rich South African white woman who falls in love with an illegal Muslim immigrant from an unnamed African country (Saharan though), and who accompanies him back to his village as his wife when he gets deported.
I thought about this book for a long time after I finished it. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you why I did without spoiling the ending.
Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers
When they get back to the unnamed country, the SA woman has to live in the family home with him, in a village on the edge of the desert. She falls in love with the desert and the lifestyle, and begins to think how they could develop wealth in the town with her trust fund. Hubbie meanwhile puts the kaibosh on that, as he spends all his time trying to get a visa to somewhere else.
Finally, he gets a green card and celebrates a chance to make it in the States. Only thing, she’ll have to live with her ditsy mother in California while he drudges in Chicago, as he’s not going to expose her to the seaminess of being an immigrant to the States. She hates her mother, so on the day before they leave, she announces that she’s staying with his family. He is astounded and furious, but leaves without her.
The end.
The dichotomy between her need to escape the capitalist wealthy countries of which she’s a privileged member, and his fierce desire to get into any of them is one I had never thought of before. Gordimer highlights this beautifully in the context of an unlikely love story.
The Wildfire Season
Andrew Pyper
A
“Ross River is a town clinging to the outside world at the end of the Yukon’s loneliest road. It is also the hiding place of Miles McEwan, the town’s hard-drinking, fist-fighting fire chief. But the slow burn of Miles’ self-imposed exile is about to explode.”
That’s the blurb on the back. This book is great for three reasons:
1 – it deals with bush fires, and the people who start them. A large part of the novel deals with the crew that fight this fire and the investigation into how it started.
2 – one of the principal characters is a total mother-fucker of a she Grizzlie. I dreamt about her for nights afterwards.
3 – one of the other characters is a watcher – sits in a big tower for months on end, spotting fires. Currently that is my ambition in life.
A rip-roaring read, excuse the pun. People who know tell me it’s exactly what the Yukon is like. Next year’s road trip maybe. Pyper has two other novels, Lost Girls, and The Trade Mission, which got excellent reviews too.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marissa Pessl
UNCSYWYLRTB!!
“Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink” – Jonathan Franzen. Yeah, well you’d know all about foam, Jonathan!
Some nice person bought me this for Christmas, and I can’t remember who because I opened my presents when I was a bit drunk on Christmas Eve and forgot to write the name of the gifter on the novel, which is how I normally remember. So apologies if the gifter reads this. The book itself is a beautifully presented hard-backed edition so I will treasure it for that reason, but ...
... what a (huge) pile of annoying shite.
Dazzling debut my arse! This girl has been writing this novel since forever. Every book she ever read is in here somewhere, the whole enterprise feels like a series of book reports, book-ended by her diary entries about the teacher she had a crush on.
Plot in brief: Precocious grade 12er with handsome witty academic dad moves to new private school and meets astoundingly charismatic teacher who has select group of cool students round for supper every Sunday. Precocious girl tries to get in with the ‘in’ crowd. Weird, murder-related stuff happens, with completely OTT ending involving the Minute Men. Sound vaguely familiar in parts to anyone who has ever read the Secret History?
Ms Pessl says in the afterword (when did they become de riguer) that she thanks ‘my amazing husband Nic, my Clyde, who graciously watches his wife disappear alone into a dark room with her computer for ten or twelve hours at a time and asks no questions’.
I don’t think Nic is the one needs to be asking the questions love, if you don’t mind me saying. What is Nic doing while you’re in the dark room, eh?
And by the way, if you arrange your chapters as Core Curriculum (Required Reading), with such chapter titles as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Madame Bovary, would it be too much to ask that there be a CONNECTION between the chapter title and the content?
I present my case on this novel with a random excerpt:
“When I’d raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms Simpson’s question regarding Primary Themes in Invisible Man (Elison 1952) (which turned up on Summer reading lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn’t Quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin (BTW - That novel that E. Annie Proulx wrote about a guy, pudgy, with an eroded chin, i.e. The Shipping News, was very popular and often re-read by people, by the way, so you should probably think twice about ripping off lines from it again, Missy!), already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn’t brilliant or inspired, it also wasn’t crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen page syllabus only covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallwey wouldn’t be such Child’s Play, such Easy Victory.
Sigh. Five hundred and four pages of this shite. With drawings.
You’ll be glad to hear that Radley beat her to valedictorian. Naturally, there were extenuating circumstances, of the kind you’d find in that US magazine that keeps track of UFO sightings and Elvis and such like.
UTTER SHITE.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Three Days to Spring - here's the first Fly of the year
This morning is typical Paddy's weekend weather.
Wet. Grey. Dull.
Enough said about the weather. Spring is coming in three days. The entire population of Canada is as stir crazy and sick of winter as I am, so the spring equinox is A BIG DEAL here.
Just to put the tin hat on the crappy sports day that was yesterday, Montreal beat Toronto to get into the playoffs and Toronto are out.
This is a big deal apparently. Himself is very upset. As is the boy wonder nephew Branden.
I'm talking about ice hockey by the way.
I watched a bit of the game (game, not match, doncha know) and as far as I could see Toronto were the best at beating the other team up, but apparently that doesn't count. Also, while Toronto were beating up the Canadiens, the umpires just stand around and watch. I asked Himself why they didn't stop the fighting and he said they wait until the players fall over before they intervene.
For guys on skates they can fight on their feet for a remarkably long time.
And apparently it's okay to ram another player at speed into the goal uprights.
I have no time for any game that involves body armour.
The Queen Parents called at some unearthly hour of the morning (for them, not me) to comfort me in my hour of woe and the Queen Dad informed me that Ireland had knocked Pakistan out of the Cricket World Cup and were into the last eight. So not to worry about the rugby outcome.
And then I saw Luke had put the same comment on my blog this morning.
This is what I love about Irish people.... they find comfort where they can get it.
Here's a thought... if by some miracle Ireland gets into the World Cup cricket semi-final will you all get time off work to go to the pub and watch the match?
I mean it would only be fair to support the cricket lads the same way as the football lads, wouldn't it?
And then Roddy Doyle could write a book about Fitzer and Paddy Mac and whoever paddling to the Carribean in a souped up Ford Transit van and how they got in with the reggae heads and had a few smokes and realised that not all foreigners were terrible.
Anyways, enough about the weather and the game, I got the first Fly of the year the other day.
I mean The Stinging Fly. It's a creative writing compendium from Ireland. Accent Monkey bought a subscription for me for Christmas. Nice pressie. You get told about it. You forget about it. Then one day you come home from work and there it is in the mail box.
The name comes from a Plato quote (about Socrates): God has especially appointed me to this city, so as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly...
Edited by Declan Meade, it contains essays, creative writing, poetry, reviews, photos and new lyrics. This issue has an excerpt from Eugene McCabe's new novel in progress, which is about nuns and which is a perfect short story in itself.
Good stuff generally. Particularly the poetry. However, I am at a loss to understand the three short stories in the review. I never did get the point of short stories if they weren't written by Alice Munro. I didn't really like any of these ones. Someone should tell me sometime what the current thinking on the short story is, as I am too lazy to research it myself.
And the two essays were not essays as I understand the form, although maybe the form has moved on and I have not realised.
However, as always in Ireland, the poetry more than makes up for any weakness in the prose writing end of things.
I'm trying to pick a favourite, but I can't, so here's one of the ones I liked, and I'm a big fan of Caroline Dowling's writing anyways, with apologies for printing it here if it's not a good vibe, etc.
The Cardigan
Her face flushed
When he gave it to her
unexpectedly on
Christmas night.
He'd picked darker colours,
brown and black
trimmed with a
cream crochet thread.
He said it suited her.
She said it felt tight.
Hemmed in her shoulders
strait-jacketed her arms
chest bursting when
fastened. Weeks of
wearing helped her grow
into it. Moulded to her
shape she felt every
knitted row - cable after
cable of blanket stitch,
garter stitch, back stitch,
stocking stitch, coiling into
patterns of Mondays and
Tuesdays, wash days and
Mass days. On Saturday
nights out she'd leave it
open, her underneath top
cheering on her red lipstick.
Sometimes after chips on
the way home he'd tell her
to button it. She could
do it with her eyes closed
It costs fifty euro to be a patron of The Stinging Fly. They don't have enough patrons. There's your birthday and Christmas presents sorted for a year or two.
Off you all go then.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Happy Paddy's Day my arse
This afternoon, after a poxy cold wet icy morning, I eventually venture out into the aftermath of last night's ICE STORM to go shopping. I have to endure OIRISH music in the supermarket and stupid drunk people with shamrocks painted on their cheeks saying 'top of the morning' to each other. I have to endure the racist taunts of the wanker wearing the union jack jacket in the Liquor Store. I have to endure Blockbusters on a Saturday afternoon which has NO MOVIES I WANT TO SEE.
And then I finally get home and check the news and find out that we've lost the Six Nations Championship by a whisker, a mere three points.
Again.
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO EFFING DO TO WIN THE EFFING SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP?
WHAT?
We're the second best team on the planet and we still can't effing win the poxy six nations championship. In a single season, we cannot beat England, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy.
WHY?
Those perfidious French BASTARDS stole our six nations championship away from us again!!!
By scraping a victory against us a few weeks ago, they edged to the top of the table today. And beat us by three points!
BUT THAT'S NOT WHY!
France had to beat Scotland by twenty four points or more to win the Championship.
So Scotland let them win by twenty seven points.
Just to be on the safe side.
THAT'S REALLY WHY!!
Our so-called Celtic cousins, forever more to be known in my house as wee skanky traitors , helped them.
IT WAS ST. PATRICK'S DAY, you miserable sheep farming bastards...! Could you not kick the effing ball straight for once in your wee lives?
Accent Monkey's over there for the weekend, I hope she's giving people a piece of her mind!
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Things I love-hate about Canada - part the third
Quality of life.That's why we're all here. Apparently. Those of us that are left in Nova Scotia are here for the quality of life.
The Nova Scotia government PAYS for, using MY tax dollars, advertisments saying 'Come to Life'. Meaning, come to Nova Scotia for the quality of life.
We're so broke we can only afford three words. The other six are too expensive.
They show this ad, USING MY TAX DOLLARS, to ME, on my tv channel.
After I stopped shouting 'stop showing the fucking advert to me, I'm already here', I thought about it and now I have one question.
Define it.
They never do.
If they did, those of us that are left would leave on the next train.
If we could afford the prices.
Having said that, I am here, I am still here, and now that it's March and the winter is over, I do like the quality of life here.
There's no traffic.
There's hardly any yuppies and they all live in Bedford so I only have to see them when there's a Tory meeting I have to go to for work.
The pubs are nice.
The restaurants are great.
The scenery is awesome in a quiet way - I've burbled on about it enough not to have to describe it again.
The people are lovely, even if they are too polite and self-contained for my liking.
The food (in the summer) is fresh and organic and reasonable.
The book shops are pretty cool.
The conversation is pretty intellectual.
BUT.....
and this is a big but....
most people who live here can't afford any of those things.
So,
COME TO LIFE.
If you are a reasonably well off and healthy just pre-retiree.
Nova Scotia is the Florida of the North.
Get used to it boys and girls.
Either market yourself as such, or stop putting that stupid ad out.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Things I love-hate about Canada - part the second
Politeness.As most of you will know, Canadians have the reputation for being the politest people on earth.
Canadians talk about this a lot, they are quite proud of this tag. Nova Scotians add to it their tag of 'friendliest people in the world'.
Coming from the land of a hundred thousand welcomes I know what a ball of smoke the concept of friendliness can be, so I'm not even going there today.
The question about Canadian, or Nova Scotian in particular, politeness is not whether this is true or not, but why it exists in the first place.
So I went rooting around Wikipedia for some answers. And lo and behold, there's a theory about politeness. Why am I not surprised? There's a theory about everything, isn't there?
Politeness Theory
Politeness consists of attempting to save face for another. Simply put, model persons want to maintain others’ face, but nevertheless are often forced to commit face threatening acts. Thus, politeness strategies are developed in order to formulate message in order to save the hearer’s face when face threatening acts are inevitable or desired. This means that the speaker avoids embarrassing or making the listener feel uncomfortable.
So, politeness is a construct designed to get other people to acquiesce to your needs without feeling that they have lost face.
And here was me thinking that politeness was 'a good thing to do'.
Apparently, the majority of Canadians believe the same, telling pollsters recently that they were polite because that was how they were reared. That would explain a lot. In Nova Scotia politeness is often given as a necessity rather than a gift. I am of the opinion that if you don't feel like being polite then you should be grumpy. Therefore, I HATE IT when people are polite to me because they have to be and then glower at me because of it. Here in Nova Scotia, mostly in work, I often come across politeness which barely conceals disdain, contempt, aggression, rage, passive acceptance of being trampled underfoot, or just plain dislike.
I'm still not done with feeling crap when it happens.
I often think it is me. My politeness techniques are different to theirs and the difference grates on them, or so I rationalise it to myself. I get archly teasing about my 'Irish temper' and my 'Irish directness' (in the Nova Scotian 'I am polite but you are pissing me off so much I am grinding my teeth, so I am going to put you down so I can feel better about the whole thing' manner which they have nailed perfectly in this province).
But if politeness is a construct designed to get other people to acquiesce to your demands, then that's a whole different kettle of fish, isn't it?
Back to Wiki:
There are four main types of politeness strategies: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-the-record or indirect strategy.
First, bald on record strategies do not attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s face. This strategy is most often utilized by speakers who closely know their audience. With the bald on record strategies there is a direct possibility that the audience will be shocked or embarrassed by the strategy. For example, a bald on record strategy might be to tell your sister to “do the dishes. It’s your turn.”
This would be my normal way of operating in the world. I assume everyone I meet is a friend I don't know yet, so I assume that if I don't closely know them that I soon will, so I go for them baldheaded.
This tends to terrify the shit out of your average Nova Scotian. Those people who are not terrified become my friends. Easy peasy.
The second strategy is positive politeness and this strategy attempts to minimize the threat to the hearers face. This strategy is most commonly used in situations where the audience knows each other fairly well. Quite often hedging and attempts to avoid conflict are used. For example, a positive politeness strategy might be the request “I know that you’ve been really busy lately, but could you do the dishes?”
Normally, if someone has been really busy lately, I will do the dishes for them. So I don't tend to use this one too much. Consequently, I am really bad at it, and even if I do use it, I come across as being sarcastic and so it generally backfires.
The third strategy is negative politeness which presumes that the speaker will be imposing on the listener. The potential for awkwardness or embarrassment is greater than in bald on record strategies and positive politeness strategies. Negative face is the desire to remain autonomous. Thus, a request without consideration of the listener’s negative face might be uncomfortable: “I need $5” is awkward if five dollars is outside the recipient to the question’s financial capabilities. But if the speaker, knowing that the listener wants to maintain their autonomy, adds an out for the listener like “I know you’ve been kinda strapped for cash, but could I borrow $5?”, the listener is more likely to give them that money because the request showed a respect for their ability to maintain autonomy.
I tend not to borrow money from friends unless I absolutely have to, it being the root of some evil. Having said that, when I am asking for something that will involve a Canadian losing face, I tend to forget (for that read 'don't bother') to add the required add on.
This is where I hit the wall in Canada. In Ireland if you do this, the person will either say no, or show through a facial expression that they really don't want to do it. At which point you back off and say 'don't worry about it'. At which point the Irish person would either not worry about it, or spend twenty minutes telling you it was NO PROBLEM while you said, NO NO, DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT, and face is saved by having a row over who was prepared to be put out the most.
In Canada they don't do this. They just stare at you with an expression of panic. The more insecure ones flap their hands around a lot. I am always at a loss for words at this stage and this kind of encounter drives me crazy.
It doesn't help that I still don't really know what is an acceptable favour to ask a Nova Scotian. Not very much of a favour or a HUMUNGOUS one I think. In between ones leave them flailing.
The final politeness strategy outlined by Brown and Levinson is the indirect strategy. This strategy uses indirect language and removes the speaker from the potential to being imposing. For example, a speaker using the indirect strategy might merely say “wow, it’s getting cold in here” insinuating that it would be nice if the listener would get up and turn up the thermostat without directly asking the listener to do so.
This of course is what girlfriends do to their boyfriends. To no effect. I did it this morning actually. Woke Himself up and said 'I'd love some coffee'. To which he said 'mrufufrahaslummmnn' and went back to sleep.
Bastard. Had to get up and make my own coffee.
Anyways, politeness, the ultimate fitting in to a new place test.
I'm probably scoring a C minus at the moment.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Things I love-hate about Canada - part the first
Northern LightI just finished Jane Urqhuart's The Underpainter last night. A great novel, beautifully understated in Urqhuart's manner. Apparently she came up with it during a stint at Memorial University in Newfoundland.
It's the story of Austin Fraser, an American minimalist painter who is telling his life story from his vantage point at the end of his career. His life and work spans the early part of the twentieth century.
From his teenage years he spent his summers painting landscapes on the Canadian shores of Lake Superior and Lake Ontario.
The story is about what an utter bollox he was to everyone he ever met, including his muse, lover and long time friend Sara, whom he painted for fifteen summers and then abandoned when a painter friend remarked on how cold his paintings were, how loveless.
Reminded me a lot of an ex of mine actually.
But that's not what I'm writing about tonight.
The novel talks about light a lot, in particular the Canadian winter light. In one particular scene, he has a little panic about his life, after inadvertently causing disaster to visit some friends, he travels to see Sara who must ski across the lake for a day to meet up with him. He sits in his hotel waiting for her to appear on the horizon.
The shopkeeper told me the temperature was thirty below zero. But the sun, the white blaze was everywhere and so the chill seemed irrelevant.
Or
I sat in a room blade bright with sun. Prisms angled towards me from the bevelled edges of mirrors, and anything made of metal - the lamp base, a castor on the foot of my bed, my zippo lighter - glared.
This is my world in the winter. And it's breathtakingly, achingly, deceivingly beautiful. I wake up every morning facing the most glorious colours of dawn streaming in the eastern window of our room.
Then I go into the eastern facing bathroom and look in the mirror and see EVERY LINE AND WRINKLE AND GREY HAIR AND FRECKLE AND BLOCKED PORE.
There's a lot to be said for the soft fuzz of an Irish dawn drizzle.
Billion dollar bust in winter's last gasp
I'm being hopeful about the last gasp of winter.
The billion dollar bust is today's shock announcement that Halifax is withdrawing from the Commonwealth Games bidding process, due to the proposed bid at $1.6 billion being about a billion dollars over budget.
As a colleague said today, the Tories, they'd fuck up the Lord's Prayer.
So you've got a cabal of Tories that run this province. And some of them are in the government. And the rest of them are in key positions of influence and authority around the province. And the ones that are in the government hired some of the other ones to run the bid process and gave them $14.3 million of my tax dollars to come up with a winning bid.
That we could afford.
So the lads went off and toured the Commonwealth in first class luxury and came back with a great bid.
For about a billion more than we can afford.
And then there must have been some kind of row and the political Tories shafted the merely influential Tories, and now there's some kind of Tory bloodbath going on.
I'm a simple person, who doesn't really get the nuances of politics in this province too well, as I am constantly being told by the clever people I work with.
But here's my question:
Did the political Tories not think of calling the influential Tories to tell them that the funding cap was going to be about a billion dollars, and to bring in a bid round about that amount?
Obviously not.
If not, why not?
In the spirit of the cbc.ca Test the Nation quiz happening next week, is the answer:
a) they're complete effing morons who shouldn't be in charge of a £12 billion budget anymore;
b) they shafted the influential Tories because they didn't want the Games to happen;
c) they thought they could get some more money out of the federal Tories, and gambled for the big win and lost, or
d) some other obscure Nova Scotian reason that I'm too simple (and by that I mean European) to understand?
Anyways, I'm waiting for Redser Byrne to send me his grateful thanks from Glesgey, who are sure to win the bid now.
Even I was embarrassed today and I'm a come from away.
The billion dollar bust is today's shock announcement that Halifax is withdrawing from the Commonwealth Games bidding process, due to the proposed bid at $1.6 billion being about a billion dollars over budget.
As a colleague said today, the Tories, they'd fuck up the Lord's Prayer.
So you've got a cabal of Tories that run this province. And some of them are in the government. And the rest of them are in key positions of influence and authority around the province. And the ones that are in the government hired some of the other ones to run the bid process and gave them $14.3 million of my tax dollars to come up with a winning bid.
That we could afford.
So the lads went off and toured the Commonwealth in first class luxury and came back with a great bid.
For about a billion more than we can afford.
And then there must have been some kind of row and the political Tories shafted the merely influential Tories, and now there's some kind of Tory bloodbath going on.
I'm a simple person, who doesn't really get the nuances of politics in this province too well, as I am constantly being told by the clever people I work with.
But here's my question:
Did the political Tories not think of calling the influential Tories to tell them that the funding cap was going to be about a billion dollars, and to bring in a bid round about that amount?
Obviously not.
If not, why not?
In the spirit of the cbc.ca Test the Nation quiz happening next week, is the answer:
a) they're complete effing morons who shouldn't be in charge of a £12 billion budget anymore;
b) they shafted the influential Tories because they didn't want the Games to happen;
c) they thought they could get some more money out of the federal Tories, and gambled for the big win and lost, or
d) some other obscure Nova Scotian reason that I'm too simple (and by that I mean European) to understand?
Anyways, I'm waiting for Redser Byrne to send me his grateful thanks from Glesgey, who are sure to win the bid now.
Even I was embarrassed today and I'm a come from away.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
How well do we know each other
Here's a bit of email fun from Matt in the States. You can tell Matt and Queenie are REAL busy today... the answers in the example are mine. The numbering is not mine!
Welcome to the new edition of getting to know your friends. Okay here's what you're supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun! Just copy (do not forward) this entire e-mail and paste into a new e-mail that you can send. Change all the answers so that they apply to you Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person that sent it to you.
1. What is your occupation? policy analyst
2. What color are your socks right now? Grey wool
3. What are you listening to right now? The sound of the construction workers in my office
4. What was the last thing that you ate? Belfast burger and fries
5. Can you drive a stick shift? yes
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Cerulean blue
7. Last person you spoke to on the cell phone? Leonard Preyra
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yes, I do, Matt, he's my agony aunt of choice
9. How old are you today? 36 years, seven months and three weeks old
10. Favorite drink? Barolo, coffee, grapefuit juice
11. What is your favorite sport to watch? rugby
12. Have you ever dyed your hair? Have I ever not!
13. Pets? not currently
15. What was the last movie you watched? Lawrence of Arabia last sunday on the history channel
16. Favorite day of the year? Christmas Eve
17. What do you do to vent anger? shout at the nearest person, write on my blog
18. What was your favorite toy as a child? my rocking horse
20. Hugs or kisses? hugs. definitely
21. Cherries or Blueberries? blueberries
22. Do you want your friends/family to email you back? yes
23. Who is most likely to respond? my mother
24. Who is least likely to respond? My brother
25. Living arrangements? Apartment on Chocolate Lake, Halifax
26. When was the last time you cried? Yesterday when I said goodbye to my friend Kevin who is going to live in Vietnam
28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to? Matt - 1990
29. What did you do last night? cooked supper, scavenged with Himself in the posh part of town (garbage night - he's an Aquarian), and got a walnut antique washstand with mirror and a mahogany wine rack, parked in Dingle Cove and looked at the stars for a while due to teenager taking over apartment, went home, braided her hair, read in bed
30. Favorite smells? mown grass, grass, cooking garlic and ginger
31. What inspires you? the opportunity to become competent at something really difficult
32. What are you afraid of? being old and alone
33. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? belfast burgers
34. Favorite dog breed? Jack Russell
35. How many years at your current job? 1.5
36. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
37. How many states have you lived in? Countries - Ireland, Spain, Canada
38. Favorite holiday? Labour Day weekend
39. Ever driven a Motorcycle or heavy machinery? No
40. Do you have a house phone that is NOT cordless? no
Welcome to the new edition of getting to know your friends. Okay here's what you're supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun! Just copy (do not forward) this entire e-mail and paste into a new e-mail that you can send. Change all the answers so that they apply to you Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person that sent it to you.
1. What is your occupation? policy analyst
2. What color are your socks right now? Grey wool
3. What are you listening to right now? The sound of the construction workers in my office
4. What was the last thing that you ate? Belfast burger and fries
5. Can you drive a stick shift? yes
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Cerulean blue
7. Last person you spoke to on the cell phone? Leonard Preyra
8. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yes, I do, Matt, he's my agony aunt of choice
9. How old are you today? 36 years, seven months and three weeks old
10. Favorite drink? Barolo, coffee, grapefuit juice
11. What is your favorite sport to watch? rugby
12. Have you ever dyed your hair? Have I ever not!
13. Pets? not currently
15. What was the last movie you watched? Lawrence of Arabia last sunday on the history channel
16. Favorite day of the year? Christmas Eve
17. What do you do to vent anger? shout at the nearest person, write on my blog
18. What was your favorite toy as a child? my rocking horse
20. Hugs or kisses? hugs. definitely
21. Cherries or Blueberries? blueberries
22. Do you want your friends/family to email you back? yes
23. Who is most likely to respond? my mother
24. Who is least likely to respond? My brother
25. Living arrangements? Apartment on Chocolate Lake, Halifax
26. When was the last time you cried? Yesterday when I said goodbye to my friend Kevin who is going to live in Vietnam
28. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to? Matt - 1990
29. What did you do last night? cooked supper, scavenged with Himself in the posh part of town (garbage night - he's an Aquarian), and got a walnut antique washstand with mirror and a mahogany wine rack, parked in Dingle Cove and looked at the stars for a while due to teenager taking over apartment, went home, braided her hair, read in bed
30. Favorite smells? mown grass, grass, cooking garlic and ginger
31. What inspires you? the opportunity to become competent at something really difficult
32. What are you afraid of? being old and alone
33. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? belfast burgers
34. Favorite dog breed? Jack Russell
35. How many years at your current job? 1.5
36. Favorite day of the week? Saturday
37. How many states have you lived in? Countries - Ireland, Spain, Canada
38. Favorite holiday? Labour Day weekend
39. Ever driven a Motorcycle or heavy machinery? No
40. Do you have a house phone that is NOT cordless? no
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Faffing around with some good ole Kentucky boys
That's what I did in work today.
Gosh, Queenie's job is so laid back and interesting, I hear you all say.
I wisht.
Electricity generation Fuel Adjustment Mechanisms. That involve Fuel Adjustment Factors. Which is where the faffing part comes in.
With some consultants from Kentucky. One of whom sounded just like Jim Rockford from the Rockford Files.
And a load of lawyers in black suits. And some environmentalists. Who were the people not wearing the suits.
For five hours.
Environmentalists don't get to bill for the hours they spend at these sessions.
And neither does Queenie.
Sigh.
Anyways, off to Cape Breton tomorrow for a little spin around the offshore industry.
I always wanted to drive from the top of Cape Breton back to Halifax via Stellarton at one in the morning in February.
The last time I did this trip with this driver we nearly died and I got the worst flu of my life.
So those of you who believe in that kind of stuff, pray for me.
And those of you who know with whom I am travelling, stop laughing.
See you all Saturday!
Maybe...
Gosh, Queenie's job is so laid back and interesting, I hear you all say.
I wisht.
Electricity generation Fuel Adjustment Mechanisms. That involve Fuel Adjustment Factors. Which is where the faffing part comes in.
With some consultants from Kentucky. One of whom sounded just like Jim Rockford from the Rockford Files.
And a load of lawyers in black suits. And some environmentalists. Who were the people not wearing the suits.
For five hours.
Environmentalists don't get to bill for the hours they spend at these sessions.
And neither does Queenie.
Sigh.
Anyways, off to Cape Breton tomorrow for a little spin around the offshore industry.
I always wanted to drive from the top of Cape Breton back to Halifax via Stellarton at one in the morning in February.
The last time I did this trip with this driver we nearly died and I got the worst flu of my life.
So those of you who believe in that kind of stuff, pray for me.
And those of you who know with whom I am travelling, stop laughing.
See you all Saturday!
Maybe...
Katharine's an Auld Dog
Katharine can’t be bothered to remember how old she is, but she remembers the Berlin Wall coming down and the Tiananmen Square massacre so that’s all right then. She likes old stuff and drinking pots and pots of tea. Like Queenie she has come to Canada from Dublin, unlike Queenie she has settled in Niagara.
Nothing beats a good night’s sleep. I’m evangelical about sleep. When I was a small child I often daydreamed about a perfect world where everything could be done from bed (including driving). Thanks to my laptop, mobile phone, and the internet I’m well on my way to achieving that dream.
If I’m not expecting a visitor I won’t answer the door. The chances of encountering something nasty or boring are too high. People are too quick to open doors and answer phones to people they don’t know, and with a little bit of reflection probably wouldn’t want to know. Easy intimacy is two people lying about themselves to each other. Privacy is the greatest gift, don’t piss it away for a high myspace rating.
Music is dangerous. A very dear friend once said ‘You’d be this perfect girlfriend, except you hate music’. I don’t hate music, I just don’t trust it. Music manipulates your emotions. It brings you to undesired highs and lows, it pushes out all self and breeds itself into your unconscious. That’s its power, and it is wonderful and dangerous, and utterly, utterly untrustworthy. You have to be really careful with the music you listen to because it fucks with your soul.
A man who cooks is a fine thing. Just as long as he’s not prissy or prideful about it. Cooking is not an opportunity to indulge in high-tech, shiny-cock, gadget buying and it’s not something extraordinary that demands lavish praise. It’s a natural expression of love, millions of women all over the earth do it every day.
I remember remembering being in the womb. I was 4 and my parents left me with my grandmother for the winter. They put me to bed and left. I had a nightlight shaped like Donald Duck, but I was still very lonely and scared. So I curled my knees up to my chest under the blanket and put my thumb to my mouth and the moment I did it I was stunned by a sudden flood of feeling. It was something I had no words for, and still don’t really. It was complete peace. Not just the absence of pain or worry, not just security; it was something completely alien from anything I knew and yet it was utterly familiar. I remember thinking very clearly ‘I have felt this before’. But I could not remember having ever curled up like that. It was very strange, and it was the first moment I ever became aware of memory as a part of my being. That there were parts of me I did not know I knew. I think discovering these unknowns is one of our reasons for living.
Every woman should spend at least one day a week braless. It’s good for your circulation. And don’t buy M&S. They’re rubbish. Conversely, every woman should buy a set of outrageously expensive underwear for herself once a year. Not valentine’s day red, lacy crap but something really stunning. If you’re going to be poked by underwire it might as well be by something that makes you look great.
I have never believed in looking for love. Sex yes, love no. Apart from anything, sex is more reliably found. And yet, without the emotional connection, it is more often than not crap. So it’s better not to overthink the whole matter and just get on with what you’d be doing anyway.
I believe in God. But I don’t think it’s polite to go on about it. I pray, though.
We need to live with animals. Animals remind us that there are other lives intersecting our that are not human, and do not have human needs or priorities.
I’m completely stunned by the fact that I’m living the life I’ve always wanted because it’s not like I had a grand strategy. If anything I followed the path of most illogic. My life has been a concatenation of random events, predictable disasters, and strange coincidences. Most of my ‘important’ decisions were based on dreams that I had. And yet here I am, doing a job I love in a great location. Life is very, very strange.
Auld Dog is an intermittent column on this blog, where people offer their pearls of wisdom for the rest of us to ponder. If you would like to be an Auld Dog, send 600 - 700 words of wisdom, along with a bio and photo (or I'll write/ pick them) to auld.dog@gmail.com and I'll post it here.
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