non-fiction

Sitting in the park a few days ago, my friend Maggie told me that she doesn't read fiction.  I don't think I had ever heard that statement before. A small handful of people have admitted to me that they only read fiction (for various reasons) but never the other way around. Maggie said simply that she does not like made-up stories. 

I read everything but I had luckily just finished Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals by Hal Herzog so I had something to recommend to my exclusively non-fiction friend. 

I borrowed this book from my friend, Ryan, because I am always interested in reading about human-animal relationships and how people justify their treatment of other species. Herzog examines a lot of the psychology around our human-animal interactions and presents his findings in an accessible way with interesting stories alongside studies. For example, when he starts getting into the meat issue, he sets it up alongside research he did into modern day cockfighting. 

This book is about more than the dissociative techniques that humans use to separate themselves from their dinner. It covers cuteness, social norms and taboos, the evolution of dogs from wolves, laboratory experiments, activism, and the morality of using information gathered through exploitation. 

I don't have any quotes for you because my page markers have all mysteriously fallen out... But I recommend it. If you like non-fiction.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). Image from Google Images. 

book club

For the first two months of summer I laboured through the first Game of Thrones book. I love the television series but I do not plan on reading the rest of the book series. I would recommend the books only if you have not seen the show. After that, Robyn lent me a stack of lit and I whipped through four novels in about ten days.

I had never heard of The Sisters Brothers or Canadian author Patrick DeWitt but I am extremely pleased that all changed. The Sisters Brothers is the story of Eli and Charlie Sisters. It is 1851 and two professional killers (I prefer "cowboy assassins") are traveling across the somewhat grim and definitely violent landscape of Gold Rush America on a mission to end a man's life (nothing out of the ordinary there). 

"You are just like Mother, in many ways."

"You're not. And you're not like Father, either."

"I am like no one."

He said this casually, but it was the type of statement that eclipsed the conversation, killed it. He pulled ahead and I watched his back, and he knew I was watching his back. He stuck Nimble's ribs with his heels and they ran off, with me following behind. We were only traveling in our typical fashion, at our typical pace, but I felt all the same to be chasing him. 

But I would not accept the coins and he said, 'Don't think I am going to force it on you. I am overdue for some new clothes anyway. Do you think your mangled, brainless horse can make it to the next town without hurtling itself off a cliff? What's that? You're not smiling, are you? We are in a quarrel and you mustn't under any circumstances smile.' I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. 'No,' said Charlie, 'you mustn't smile when quarreling. It's wrong, and I dare say you know it's wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.'

We mounted to leave the camp. I kicked Tub in his ribs and he lay down flat on the ground. 

We headed south. The banks were sandy but hard packed and we rode at an easy pace on opposite sides of the stream. The sun pushed through the tops of the trees and warmed our faces; the water was translucent and three-foot trout strolled upriver, or hung in the current, lazy and fat. Charlie called over to say he was impressed with California, that there was something in the air, a fortuitous energy, was the phrase he used. I did not feel this but understood what he meant. It was the thought that something as scenic as this running water might offer you not only aesthetic solace but also golden riches; the thought that the earth itself was taking care of you, was in favor of you. This was perhaps what lay at the very root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

Image from Google Images. Quotes from The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2011).

not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

 
I am trying to keep some fiction in my life post-holidays. Abraham Verghese's novel, Cutting for Stone, has been an excellent escape so far. The setting is exotic, the characters rich, and the narrative engrossing. 

Settle in to this. 

Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here Hema felt she;s tricked time; with her twentieth century knowledge she had traveled back to an earlier epoch. The power filtered down from His Majesty to the Rases, the Dejazmaches, and the lesser nobility, and then to the vassals and peons. Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?
 

I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special  language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease.
 

He invited me into a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles at the threshold. It could be addictive. 
 

If this was what brave felt like - numb, dumb, with eyes that could see no farther than my bloody fingers, and a heart that raced and pined for the girl who hugged me - then I suppose I was brave. 

The bow tie was his idea. In all things, especially when it cost little and did no harm to others, Ghosh was his own man. The bow tie told the world how pleased he was to be alive.

All quotations from Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2010).

back to vietnam

After reading The Lotus Eaters, Kalie lent me The Beauty of Humanity Movement which is a gorgeous book that leaves you emotionally stirred and oddly hungry. Actually, the hunger is not too odd since the protagonist is dedicated to pho. I read it over Christmas break while I was in Penticton and I bet you can guess what our first meal back in Vancouver was. 

Anyway, I strongly recommend this book and I do not want to give anything away but I will try to set the tone.

Hung is a man governed by such principles rather than any laws, particularly those ones keenly enforced by the police that are of greatest inconvenience to him and those he serves. When the officers come to ticket him for trespassing or operating without a licence after he has had the peace of setting up shop in the same location for a few consecutive days, his customers will be forced to run off clutching their bowls, sloshing broth against their freshly pressed shirts, losing noodles to the pavement, jumping abroad their motorbikes and lurching into the day. 

Hung's crime is the same every day, but sometimes the police are in more of a mood to arrest a man than fine him. 

Hung recognizes each man by the state of his hands: the grease moons under the nails that mark a mechanic, the calluses of one who works a lather, the chewed nails of a student writing exams. 

Maggie found herself in a world of teenagers, a generation fuelled by hopes and hormones, people who had no interest in being dragged back to the past. They face forward, the future, the West. The past is abandoned: the pain of it, perhaps; the shame of it. It's old men Maggie must turn to now, old men with their ailing, fading memories and their fears. 

[Her mother] still looked elegant stripped of her makeup, just less able to conceal the disappointment that showed in the lines around her mouth. 

Every time Maggie looks in the mirror she fears seeing evidence of that same disappointment. It is both a surprise and a relief to see her father's eyes reflected back at her. A glow of obsidian. Animated and alive.

Quotes from The Beauty of Humanity by Camilla Gibb (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2011). 

overworked

I am the busiest I have ever been in my young life. That being the situation, I am letting you know I am alive and leaving you with an adorable photo of Kurt Cobain and a fun fact: Kurt Cobain loved drinking Quik. 

In high school, I read a biography on Cobain written by Charles Cross called Heavier Than Heaven. I would highly recommend it. I have re-read it numerous times. In fact, maybe I will pull it out again over Christmas. And maybe I will put on some Nirvana now since Bleach is obviously the perfect paper-writing soundtrack (maybe).

Clearly I have big plans for the holidays. 

xx A.

Photo: Source Unknown, sorry.

those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back

 
Before we went on holiday, I read a really excellent novel by Tatjana Soli. The Lotus Eaters tells the story of three photographers coming from very different places covering the Vietnam war. I really do not want to say much. I will give you some teasers but seriously just read it. 

No getting around the ghoulishness of pouncing on tragedy with hungry eyes, snatching it away, glorying in its taking even among the most sympathetic: "I got an incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child. A real tearjerker." Afterward, film shot, they sat on the returning plane with a kind of postcoital shame, turning away from each other.

On each assignment, she would question soldiers about what they had seen of Vietnam. There answers were strangely resistant.
Mostly, their worlds were sealed by perimeter wire and bunkers, bounded by the luxuries of C-rations, sodas, cigarettes. They lived in a universe limited to their weaponry and machinery, their chain of command, and so in the most fundamental sense it did not matter in which country they fought. They were immune except to the most basic facts of topography and weather. Vietnam was not mysterious to them, not the history or the land or the yellow faces. Uncovering the secret of place was considered nonessential. 

Looking around, she wondered how she had gotten there, why she needed this. Such a cliche to expose the war, or even wanting to test oneself against it. ...Nothing she would do, including photographs, could have any effect on it.

The fastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war - would outlast time itself. 

From the dim stairwell, she noticed for the first time that the wood at the back of the door was black with oxidation; one of the panels had a hairline split through which sunlight showed. From outside the door had appeared sound, unbroken, and it was only her unlimited time that allowed her to notice this.

All quotations from The Lotus Easters by Tatjana Soli (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2010). Image from Google Images. 

fuku

Did I mention I've been reading a lot? I kept telling people I was reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which apparently is easy to mishear as "Oscar Wilde". Then we would have a rather confusing conversation until I specified what I was reading was written by Junot Diaz. Anyway, Oscar WAO is definitely worth checking out. 

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, was even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boycrazy. (To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders).
 

The Mongoose [is] one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, aka the Carribean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record - 675 BCE, in a nameless scribe's letter to Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon - the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed. 
 

I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappeared like everything disappears. Without a trace. I would have lived far away. I would have been happy, I'm sure of it, and I would never have had any children. I would have let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me. That was the dream I had. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. 

All quotations from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007).

off to norway

YES. It is summer and I am ripping through pages of fiction and fact with reckless abandon. I recently finished Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay and Out Stealing Horses by Per Peterson. Now I am well into The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. 

I read Ramsay and Peterson in quick succession and, although I am a big Gordon Ramsay fan, Peterson was the obvious stand-out. Ramsay writes in a way that is very predictable if you have watched him on television or read any of his cookbooks. It is very straightforward and explanatory. He is a chef. 

Peterson is an author. A Norwegian author. His writing works its way into my brain and makes me want to visit a wicked winter wasteland that I have never seen before.

Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.
 

What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible. 
 

So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old. 
 

The windows are lighted, and I can see his shoulders in the yellow frame and the back of his head without a grey hair yet and the television on at the far end of the room. He is watching the news. I don't know when I last watched the news. I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving. I do not want that. I will keep myself company. 
 

[T]hat the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one that we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. 

Quotations from Out Stealing Horses by Per Peterson (London: Vintage Books, 2006). Image from Google Images.

groovy

I highly recommend Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. I am going to classify this one as a psychedelic California crime novel. There is A LOT going on. But you can handle it. 

It is hard to give you amusing and eerie tidbits, not because the book is not amusing and eerie but because you get caught up in the words and then tidbits turn into chunks...

By the time they got to the checkout, they had somehow acquired an extra hundred dollars' worth of goods, including half a dozen obligatory boxes of cake mix, a gallon of guacamole and several giant sacks of tortilla chips, a case of store-brand boysenberry soda, most of what was in the Sara Lee frozen-dessert case, lightbulbs and laundry detergent for straight-world cred, and, after what seemed like hours in the International Section, a variety of shrink-wrapped Japanese pickles that looked cool. At some point in this, Sauncho mentioned that he was a lawyer. 
"Far out. People are always telling me I need a 'criminal lawyer,' which, nothing personal, understand, but - "
"Actually I'm a marine lawyer."
Doc thought about this. "You're a Marine who practices law? No, wait - you're a lawyer who only represents Marines..."
In the course of getting this all straight, Doc also learned that Sauncho was just out of law school at SC and, like many ex-collegians unable to let go of the old fraternity life, living at the beach - not far away from Doc, as a matter of fact. 

Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds, and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore. Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all.

Image from Google Images. Quotations from Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).

loud+close

Since spring in vangritty apparently means loads of rain (which is great for my mint plants, not so great for my bike tires' ability to brake), I have been reading indoors. A lot. Quelle surprise. I have not seen the movie but yesterday I finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. He also wrote Eating Animals. I highly recommend both. For different reasons.

A few words... 

I knew I would need more letters... I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me. 
What kind of letter? my grandmother asked. 
I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
You want a letter from me? she asked. 
I told her yes.
Oh, God bless you, she said.
The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own.

"Well I'm not taking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "But you did do it, so..." I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!" "That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. 

 "Because what's really fascinating is that she'd play the call of a dead elephant to its family members." "And?" "They remembered." "What did they do?" "They approached the speaker."

Image from Google Images. Quotations from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (New York: First Mariner Books, 2006). 

reading list

 
Con's truly amazing mum is in recovery mode at home and I have been trying to compile a reading list for her with a focus on fiction. Here it is.  

Please remember that I have not had time for non-academic reading since Christmas break (and before that, the summer) so if you are perturbed and think I am missing something that is trending right now  and am therefore woefully out of touch with the current lit scene... you are correct. 

FOR THOSE OF US WHO GET TO READ WHAT THEY WANT WHEN THEY WANT 

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
Jade Peony by Wayson Choy


And Elaine has already read this but if you have not, please do so: Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls.

Photo from Google Images.

any distraction will do

I won't let us get a Christmas tree until Friday because (1) I want it to live as long as possible, and (2) I want to be (basically) done exams so I can get festive. So without Christmas plans and dreams to distract me from studying, I decided to start reading non-school stuff again (the joy!) and I wanted that reading to take place on my new ipad. I don't know if you know this but most of the classics are FREE. Obviously now I am 139 pages into The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. And I think Mr. Wilde is trying to tell me not to study. Rascal.

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in his choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual powers, and consequently they all appreciate me very much.

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. 

But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. 

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. 

Quotations from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (London: Ward, Lock & Co), 1891. Image from Google Images.

what you don't know CAN hurt you. and others. and the planet.

So much of our lives revolve around food and, even if you don't want to hear it, there are a ton of things that you need to know about your food options, before you decide who to give your money to. "Food" isn't what it used to be. Literally. If I tried to explain details of the so-called-"modern" food industry to my Gramps, he would a. not understand at all, and b. think I was bullshitting him. He is an ex-farm boy from Saskatchewan and he assumes food is still manufactured with similar care and animal husbandry continues in a similar way to that of the traditional family farm.

Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, is a really freakin' awesome investigation into the difficult decision we make every meal about whether or not to include animals on the menu. Foer is a likable guy who battled with vegetarianism and omnivory. And you are all getting this book from me for Christmas. Or you would be, if I could afford to do that. 

Let's discuss.

We care most about what's close to us, and have a remarkable easy time forgetting everything else. We also have a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing, especially when it comes to food. Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.

We can recognize parts of ourselves in [animals]... but then deny that these animal similarities matter, and thus equally deny important parts of our humanity. What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves. 

The eat with care ethic didn't become obsolete over time, but died suddenly. It was killed, actually.

No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.

Factory farming is the last system you'd create if you cared about about sustainably feeding people over the long term.

The most ecologically sound farms raise plants and animals together. They are modeled on natural ecosystems, with their continual and complex interplay pf flora and fauna.

Some thoughts on intelligence. 

Dr. Stanley Curtis, an animal scientist friendly to the industry, empirically evaluated the cognitive abilities of pigs by training them to play a video game with a joystick modified for snouts. They not only learned the games, but did so as fast as chimpanzees. 

Fish build complex nests, form monogamous relationship, hunt cooperatively with other species, and use tools. They recognize one another as individuals (and keep track of who is to be trusted and who is not)... They have significant long-term memories, are skilled in passing knowledge to one another through social networks, and can also pass on information generationally. 

Eat your garbage. 

We're messing with the genes of these animals and then feeding them growth hormones and all kinds of drugs that we really don't know enough about. And then we're eating them. Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff, and we're making a science experiment out of them. 

If consumers don't want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn't eat meat. 

In the world of factory farming, expectations are turned upside down. Veterinarians don't work toward optimal health, but optimal profitability. Drugs are not for curing diseases, but substitutes for destroyed immune systems. Farmers do not aim to produce healthy animals. 

Living in a shithole. 

All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population - roughly 87 000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals. 

Communities living near these factory farms complain about problems with persistent nosebleeds, earaches, chronic diarrhea, and burning lungs. 

In only three years, two hundred fish kills - incidents where the entire fish population in a given area is killed at once - have resulted from factory farms failures to keep their shit out of waterways. 

"Clear-cutting" the oceans. 

Trawling, almost always for shrimp, is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting rainforest. 

Although one can realistically expect that at least some percentage of cows and pigs are slaughtered with speed and care, no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.

The Rundown.

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Image from Google Images. Quotations from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009. Bold emphasis in the final quote added by yours truly. 

the row

I am reading Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. It is one of his shorter novels at 144 pages. Steinbeck writes for a certain era and, to my surprise, not everyone can get into his words. Once I was in a book club and only two of us finished The Grapes of Wrath. There was so much to talk about but some readers found the language too colloquial to be accessible. So preview a Steinbeck book before you buy it. But, you should know, he is a master and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Once you get him, you will be happy you made the (minor) effort. 

With no order or cohesion, I present to you some excerpts:

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch, You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that may be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves. 

Our father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our father who art in nature.

Once the safe got locked by mistake and no one knew the combination. And in the safe was an open can of sardines and a piece of Roquefort cheese. Before the combination could be sent by the maker of the lock, there was trouble in the safe. It was then that Doc devised a method for getting revenge on a bank if anyone should ever want to. "Rent a safety deposit box," he said, "then deposit in it one whole fresh salmon and go away for six months."

Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucency of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, A little era of rest.

Photo from Google Images. Quotes from "Cannery Row" in The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2009.

mad men

For Grace, After a Party

by Frank O'Hara

You do not always know what I am feeling. 

Last night in the warm spring air while I was

blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest

me, it was love for you that set me

affire, 

and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of

strangers my most tender feelings

writhe and

bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, 

isn't there

an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside

the bed? And someone you love enters the room

and says wouldn't

you like the eggs a little

different today?

And when they arrive they are 

just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather

is holding. 

Poem from Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

my slow exit from hibernation

Spring leads into summer and somehow that leads to a lot of quick-reads. Those funny, easy books that are a hundred percent amusing and straight-forward enough to pick up and put down in the park and at the beach. Perfect example, Douglas Coupland. When you have too much time, those 'summer books' will last you a (rainy) day.

I am still in thought-provoking, romantic and memorable winter reading. The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud is the kind of book you can read with the tv on but you'll miss something, so slow down and absorb some great Canadian lit. It didn't win the Giller Prize for nothing.

"[J]ust before we got to the border, for some time by then returned to silence, my father said, "If you could remember one thing and have that be your life, what would it be?"
"What would it be for you?" I asked.
"I asked you," my father said. "It was a question for you."
I felt suddenly tired. The effort of conversation was after all a very great one, and this was more than I had bargained for.
"I don't know. That's a difficult question," I said. And we left it at that.

My own sadness seemed, at those times, to draw itself in - a complete and separate object - so that it seemed to have nothing to do with me anymore.[..] No, it had to do, instead, I think - that sadness - with those certain smells or shapes or colours that call up a certain moment, or a feeling, just a whiff of one, that you can't quite place. Just something that fills you with a weird longing, all of a sudden. Like you're homesick. Only not for any place that you've been to. And the smell, it doesn't remind you of anything that you've ever smelled before. And the colour or the shape is not one you can connect to a recallable landscape.

Quotes from The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010. Photo from Google Images.

like you went to see Lord of the Flies at The Queen E and bought a tee shirt.

Hi Friends.

The good news is I (read: Connor) found a wicked company, based in Brooklyn, NY, that sells printed tee shirts and pullovers featuring classic book cover art. They're called Out Of Print and you can check out their stuff here. I was pretty much thrilled and I picked out a Catcher in the Rye white women's tee and a Moby Dick light blue pullover. I love it when my nerd self gets to influence my stylish self.

The bad news is it takes 15-20 business days for your purchase to make it to your door when you order internationally.

Today is day 13.

Image from http://www.outofprintclothing.com/Mission_a/151.htm.

refusing to excuse fanaticism

Most of you know I am an enthusiastic biography (and autobiography) reader. As long as the narrative is well written and thoughtfully organized, I don't care if I am reading about a scientist or a socialite, an artist or an activist. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel, was interesting in two ways. It was interesting (borderline riveting) as a life story and also interesting because Ali offers personal insight in response to ways of thinking about immigration, integration and messy cultural conflicts between Muslim countries and the 'West'.

Definitely check it out.

"In Somalia, little children learn quickly to be alert to betrayal. Things are not always what they seem; even a small slip can be fatal. The moral of every one of my grandmother's stories rested on our honor. We must be strong, clever, suspicious; we must obey the rules of the clan."

"In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind."

"Haweya began going to restaurants with the money Ibado gave her. A young woman, on her own, in a restaurant: this was absolutely unheard of. She would order lunch, and then, in front of everyone, she would eat it, slowly, while reading a novel. Waiters and male clients would badger her but she just told them off. This was hugely deviant behaviour."

"The soldiers were the worst: there was no money to pay them, and bands of soldiers would raid houses, preying on ordinary people. Occasionally there would be an outburst of gunfire, and children would run out into the street, responding to the sound of the bullets as if they were fireworks."

"These white people didn't frighten me. they seemed uninterested, but that was welcome. I had taken two airplanes on my own, I had wandered around the streets, and teh world did not seem as dangerous as my mother and grandmother had warned me. Everyone was anonymous here, but it gave me a feeling of freedom and power to be managing my way around these strange places. I felt safe."

"I had decided I wanted to study political science... I tried to explain that I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa. Why there was so much peace, security, and wealth in Eruope. What the causes of war were, and how you built peace."

"What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and socities must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolernace so that they can recognize and deal with the problem."

Photo from The New York Times, 4 February 2007. Quotations from Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. New York: Free Press, 2008.

wilderness

To celebrate or commemorate or simply in recognition of my twenty-fourth birthday, I decided to read Into the Wild, the biography of Christopher J. McCandless, by Jon Krakauer. I'm 24. He was 24. It just felt right.

Due to the brevity of Chistopher's life and the very way in which he travelled and lived, he did not exactly leave an extravagant amount of personal information for a biographer to work with in order to reconstruct a life story. I do think Krakauer did the best he could with interviews, letters, photos and Christopher's sparse diary entries. Fortunately, Chistopher (or, "Alex") made quite an impression on quite a few folk.

Into the Wild is a short 203 pages and Krakauer takes many opportunities to compare and contrast Christopher's motivation and experience to other adventurers... Gene Rosellini, John Waterman, Carl McCunn, Everett Ruess as well as the author himself. I think the author is trying to do two things here: somehow reinforce through the retelling of the daring exploits of others that Christopher was not insane, stupid or arrogant, and also to flesh out the book a little since the second-party description of Christopher's young life can feel a bit barren at times when much must have been happening but little was recorded.

All in all, a quick and interesting read.

"Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny."

"The prevailing Alaska wisdom held that McCandless was simply one more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death. Dozens of marginal characters have marched off into the Alaska wilds over the years, never to reappear."

"McCandless didn't conform particularly well to the bush-casualty stereotype. Although he was rash, untutored in the ways of the backcountry, and incautious to the point of foolhardiness, he wasn't incompetent - he wouldn't have lasted 113 days if he were. And he wasn't a nutcase, he wasn't a sociopath, he wasn't an outcast. McCandless was something else - although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps."

"Nuance, strategy, and anything beyond the rudimentaries of technique were wasted on Chris. The only way he cared to tackle a challenge was head-on, right now, applying the full brunt of his extraordinary energy. And he was often frustrated as a consequence."

"I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has just begun.
Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, example -> A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. all true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy if the Life Aesthetic.
Absolute Truth and Honesty.
Reality.
Independence.
Finality - Stability - Consistency."

"Billie and Walt wander in and out of the bus for the next two hours. Walt installs a memorial just inside the door, a simple brass plaque inscribed with a few words. Beneath it Billie arranges a bouquet of fireweed, monkshood, yarrow, and spruce boughs. Under the bed at the rear of the bus, she leaves a suitcase stocked with a first-aid kit, canned food [and] other survival supplies."

Quotes from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Photo from Google Images.

maddaddam

My little brother and I are big ol' fans of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic fiction. I read Oryx and Crake and lent it to him, he got The Year of the Flood for Christmas and lent it to me.

Years ago, I believe Oryx and Crake was intended to stand alone but now it is officially the first book in the MaddAddam Trilogy and that is a great thing because now we get a more detailed look into a well-developed future obsessed with science, violence and self-preservation from multiple viewpoints. I don't find that the two books depend on each other, they do, however, interact smoothly and compliment each other effectively.

"As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it's been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef - bleached and colourless, devoid of life."

"His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay."

"[S]he was dragging the cow bones into a pattern so big it could only be seen from above: huge capital letters, spelling out a word. Later she'd cover it in pancake syrup and wait until the insect life was all over it, and then take videos of it from the air, to put into galleries. She liked to watch things move and grow and then disappear."

"One day we'd seen a scaly girl running down the street in daytime, with a black-suited man chasing her. She sparkled a lot because of her shiny green scales; she'd kicked off her high heels and was running in her bare feet, dodging in a out among the people, but then she hit a patch of broken glass and fell. The man caught up with her and scooped her up, and carried her back to Scales with her green snakeskin arms dangling down. Her feet were bleeding. Whenever I thought of that, a chill went all through me, like watching someone else cut their finger."

"He handed me a chunk. I put it in my mouth. I found I could chew and swallow if I kept repeating in my head, "It's really bean paste, it's really bean paste..." I counted to a hundred, and then it was down. But I had the taste of rabbit in my mouth. It felt like I had eaten a nosebleed."

"Her story was that I'd been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with."

"[T]hen I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I'd drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way."

"Too late for such a warning: Toby had already smelled something that came close to the aroma of the bone-stock soup her mother used to make. Though she was ashamed of herself, it made her hungry. Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together."

"The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby - being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We'd rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it."

Quotations from The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009. Cover image from Google Images.