Born in a bad time.

Lately I've been reading books that leave me incredibly pissed off that I wasn't born at a different time. Case in several points:

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Caplan. I'm not sure what I find so appealing about living through the early stages of the Cold War. Maybe it's just the numerous references to the RAND corporation that make me envious. Fun fact: I learned about this book from a paparazzi photo of Renee Zellweger in which she was using it to shade her face from the camera's glare.

The Road To Woodstock, by Michael Lang. I could probably talk about this book all damned day, because as many of you know, I am a big fucking hippie and moving to Kingston has only made me embrace this aspect of my personality moreso than ever before. This book is full of amazing anecdotes about the festival and the days and months leading up to it and also includes full set lists and a timeline of performances. Every little side story seems like the best one yet, and I'd like to synopsize them all for you, but I'll leave it with this: I really, really wish I could have seen Pete Townshend smack Abbie Hoffman in the face with a guitar when he tried to commandeer The Who's set.

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, by Dervla Murphy. Dervla Murphy started cycling the world on her own in the 1960s, and she is TOUGH. Within the first twenty pages she gets attacked by wolves and totally fends them off with a pistol she's carrying in her saddlebag. She goes on to get in a fight on a bus in Afghanistan and basically tear things up across the globe, and she writes about these crazy things that happen to her on the trail with typical formal UK prose, and it is awesome fun to read. The copy I borrowed from the library is clearly an early edition, and has the publication values of an original Bobbsey Twins book, all cute line drawings of a lady on her bike passing camels and following a dotted line across a pre-USSR map of the mid-eastern world. I'm so glad no one threw this one out of the collection before I got to it.

Unrelated: I was listening to Cross Country Checkup on my drive back to Kingston today. It was all about the purported end of the economic crisis, and every caller had a sometimes absurd, always poignant anecdote that called bullshit on the notion that we're all on the mend. All that talk of mills shutting down left me with this song stuck in my head.



I have such a schoolgirl crush on early 70s Rick Danko.

Back to the land.

The Man Booker International Prize list came out yesterday. This award is different from the standard Booker in some way, and you will have to read the press release yourself to find out just how, because I got bored halfway through the first sentence. Lately I am somewhat disillusioned with literary fiction. With a few exceptions, those high-profile public-intellectual books just aren't doing it for me anymore. I blame a decreasing attention span, a recent obsession with the Runaways series by Brian K. Vaughan (serious genius) warmish weather, and my weekend rafting trip up the Ottawa River. The latter has resulted in me half-assedly learning more about the great outdoors, adrenaline junkies, and simple living. So far this pursuit has manifested itself in checking out every Jon Krakauer book from the library and googling international standards for the difficulty of white water rapids, but don't worry--pretty soon I will be doing everything in an extreme manner.

Speaking of simple living and crazy wilderness, in a grand gesture of CBC Radio serendipity, the first thing I heard when I got home all sun-baked and waterlogged on Sunday night was a particularly uplifting episode of Dispatches. Usually Dispatches is my least favourite hour of the week. 6:30 on a Sunday evening is an undeniably depressing time of day, and listening to segments on bombing girls' schools in the middle east or the increasingly screwed-up wetlands of Tahiti or whatever this week's feel-good item may be always makes me want to stick my head in the oven. But this past weekend, the radio was on my side, and I was treated to an interview with Dervla Murphy, this incredibly honest, eco-minded woman who travels the world by bike and has written an awesome-sounding catalogue of travelogues on places from India to Siberia to Europe. I usually hate travel writing, but just listening to her rail on traditional hotels and the lazy way westerners travel and tick their meaningful experiences off a list as they go made me want to dive right into her books. And I will, if anyone ever returns them to the library.

I guess what I liked best about her is that she is this feisty, funny old lady who looks like your grandmother but continues to beat a path around the world on her own terms. I'll never be a traveler, but I'll always admire people who do things their own way.