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.

they don't write them like they used to.

Karla Kuskin died late last week. As a kid, I was extremely obsessed with two of her books: The Philharmonic Gets Dressed and The Dallas Titans Get Ready For Bed. They're picture books, illustrated by the inimitable Marc Simont (also the genius who brought Nate The Great to life), and they are exactly what they sound like: spare but poetic accounts of musicians getting ready for the night ahead and football players putting on their pajamas.

Her LA Times obit sums up the boring glory of these books: they "celebrated mundane routine." The New York Times does it even better, noting the way the books describe the things that happen when we're not around to see them. That's exactly what I loved about both books when I was a kid. Reading about the absolute pettiest details of people's daily ablutions was so satisfying and comforting. It felt cozy. I also loved the voyeurism of each story; reading these books was like peering through a hundred dilapidated keyholes, and helped fuel my childhood nosiness (which I still prefer to think of as curiosity). These are pretty simple books, but they opened up this incredible adult world to me, the secrets of the musician's boudoir and the sight of a soaking wet football giant, the clumsy cellist hailing a cab with an instrument in tow, the exotic notions of other people's lives.

It's so sad when we lose a great artist, but I love that I spent this afternoon revisiting a chapter in my literary education.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to enact my own tribute to Karla Kuskin: the librarian passes out.

Did you ever know that you're my hero?

Two things happened to me last week to get me thinking about heroes.

1. A colleague came back from a Loretta Lynn concert with reams of awesome pictures, which she ecstatically shared with me, talking about how frigging unbelievable it was to see her up close after listening to and loving her for so many years.

2. I read I Met The Walrus, by Jerry Levitan. The book is actually a follow-up to Levitan's Oscar-nominated short film about his surreal encounter with John Lennon in Toronto, just a week before the Montreal bed-in. Levitan was a ballsy, Beatles-obsessed fourteen year old whose risky move--stalking John and Yoko at their hotel--paid off with the opportunity to interview the couple and record the experience. (He also scored free tickets to Englebert Humperdink at the O'Keefe, but that's less short-film-worthy.)

I haven't seen the movie, but after reading the book, I want to. This is such a sweet, lovingly-told story of a kid like so many other kids who loves the Beatles so much his heart nearly bursts when he hears the White Album for the first time. I was that kid once. I remember a rainy summer morning at the cottage we used to rent, sitting on the floor in the living room and listening to a scratchy old tape of Beatles songs my dad had recorded of his LPs. That might have been the first time I ever heard If I Fell. I also remember another summer at that cottage a few years later, then in my pimply, chubby, misunderstood teen years, lying on that same floor and listening to Helter Skelter on repeat, feeling so motherfucking badass. (I also listened to I Will no less than a million times that summer, to redeem my reluctantly sentimental heart.) And I spent most of the second year of my masters listening to Abbey Road more than any other album, partly because I believed--and still do believe--that You Never Give Me Your Money is the greatest song ever produced. The Beatles have always occupied a huge space in my musical soul, partly because they remind me of my youth, my family, my parents passing on their musical legacy, and partly because they were just so timelessly cool, political and weird and otherworldly compared to the other bands who meant so much to me.

But all that is kind of beside the point. Reading I Met The Walrus, especially the parts about the sheer dumbfoundedness that comes with meeting one's greatest hero, I paused and thought about my own heroes. I realized that unlike Jerry Levitan, I don't really have a hero, not someone someone I'd risk my life or my reputation to meet, anyway. Levitan also talks about Trudeau, another of his personal idols whom he also got to know, and I felt this incredible envy, that he came of age at a time when public figures in this country were actually worth admiring. I can't say that I've ever been truly inspired by a politician. And I've certainly been inspired by a million artists, but I don't know if I'd ever really sell my soul to see them face to face.

Maybe Joni Mitchell, although I bet she'd be a crank. In fact, I want her to be a crank. Or maybe Dylan, although I bet he'd seduce me and never call me back. In fact, I kind of want that too. Maybe Douglas Coupland, because it was his writing that made me want to write even more when I was a teenager. I don't think he'd be a dick, although I'm sure I'd freak him out like most fangirls do.

Maybe we're in a post-heroic era. What do you think?

Also, tell me this song isn't amazing. I DARE YOU.

Here's to the happy couple.

I've been stewing and stewing over how to address the sad and extremely deeply felt event of John Hughes' death all week, to the point where I've given myself writer's block in the process. Not good, friends. Not good. So instead I'm putting those feelings on hold for now, because this weekend is pretty much going to be the best weekend of all time. Saturday is my best friend's wedding. I never get tired of saying "my best friend's wedding," partly because it is the name of one of the goofiest movies ever made and no pop culture reference could be less apt. But mostly I never get tired of saying it because it is going to be so frigging fun, and because I love the happy couple so frigging much. There's nothing I enjoy more than tripping out in my head about how fast life moves and how much things can change and stay the same all at once. This party's going to be a big old object lesson in that very thing, with a side order of spinach dip and love.

This morning when I woke up, my mind was on this funny channel-surfing kick where different ridiculous Freya moments kept passing through my head--the time I played After the Gold Rush and made her cry, the time she wrote out a whole Gord Downie poem in a letter to me from a tree planting camp in Alberta, the time Greg, then only a casual twinkle in her eye, showed up on our Walmerhaus doorstep bearing Balderson cheese for one and all, the time I came home to find her curled up watching one of my My So-Called Life videos proclaiming, "Cait, this explains so much about you." So much has changed in the last ten (TEN!) years, and yet so much is still exactly the way it always was, and either way it's all the way it ought to be.

Which probably makes this next thing fitting. My favourite love poem, and maybe my favourite poem, is "Departure," by F.R. Scott, which maybe isn't even a love poem at all, since says goodbye more than it says hello. But more than that, it's about the vast landscape that becomes a part of every relationship when you live in this snowy minefield of a country, the eternity of the natural world and of the love you could find there, knowing it might not last forever but hoping that it does.

Departure

Always I shall remember you, as my car moved
Away from the station and left you alone by the gate
Utterly and forever frozen in time and solitude
Like a tree on the north shore of Lake Superior.
It was a moment only, and you were gone,
And I was gone, and we and it were gone,
And the two parts of the enormous whole we had known
Melted and swirled away in their separate streams
Down the smooth, granite slope of our watershed.

We shall find, each, the deep sea in the end,
A stillness, and a movement only of tides
That wash a world, whole continents between,
Flooding the estuaries of alien lands.
And we shall know, after the flow and ebb,
Things central, absolute and whole.
Brought clear of silt, into the open roads,
Events shall pass like waves, and we shall stay.

--F.R. Scott

Here's to you, Tony and Lily. I searched the annals of YouTube for "We're Hardcore" but clearly Gord hasn't left the digital footprint one might have hoped for. Anyway, this one's just as good, and just as true.

The lord helps those who help themselves.

So it's no secret to many of you that I am a bit of a sucker for the self-help genre. I think I like self-help for the same reason a lot of people do (at least, I sincerely hope, for the sake of humanity, that people share my reasoning): these books make me feel better about myself. You read Date Like A Man and you say to yourself, "Well, at least I'm not having unprotected sex to please guys!" (I so, so wish I were exaggerating on that one.) Or you pick up He's Just Not That Into you and muse, "At least I don't take life advice from a book based on a dubious line from a dubious television show!" (And then maybe you get a little meta about how they made a MOVIE of a BOOK based on a QUOTE and WOW POP CULTURE IS SO CRAZY. Or maybe that's just me.) These books make me laugh, they make me wince, and every once in awhile, they make me think semi-seriously about how I cope with certain situations and people and problems. I might not heed the authors' advice, but they definitely get my psychological hamster back on the wheel.

Or at least, they used to. I think maybe I've reached a point where I'm either too self-righteous or too cranky to read these books anymore, even in jest. After a long, sweaty day at work yesterday, I sweatily picked up Why He Didn't Call You Back from our new books display, figuring that at the very least it would give me something to giggle at before bed. How wrong I was. Instead of drifting off to sleep on waves of moral superiority, I laid awake and flipped each page fuelled by rage. I cannot even begin to tell you how mad this book makes me. The basic premise is a quasi-scientific "study" borrowed from the syllabus of the so-called "research methods" class you have to take to become a librarian. You know, surveys, qualitative analysis of episodes of The Office, that kind of thing. Anyway, the backbone of this woman's "research" is the Exit Interview, which organizations use to get a beat on why people are leaving their jobs and figure out what they could have done differently. She goes on and on about what a great technique this is for the business world. The idea of applying this principle to dating is so clinical that it makes me want to cry. And then she takes the resulting "data" and creates ten archetypes of failure with clever names like Debbie Downer (someone who wears too much black and is negative), The Closer (someone who wants to have children and is seeking a long term relationship--what an unrealistic expectation for dating!), and Bitch-In-Boots (I think this is just someone who is mean and wears nice shoes? I kind of lost her train of thought here). AND THEN she tells you all the things you should do to basically not be yourself anymore. AND FINALLY she includes a script for performing exit interviews on your own dates to see just how bad you screwed up in the eyes of your potential suitors. I know, I'm as disgusted as you are.

This book is a perfect storm of shame and self-doubt, and it presupposes that you're a hot mess, it's just a matter of figuring out what kind. It's the Lucy Van Pelt school of therapy. I know the whole premise of self-help is to examine oneself I know they usually go above and beyond anything that could be considered rational self-assessment, but this one seemed particularly egregious to me. The thing about Why He Didn't Call You Back that really tips it over the angry edge is this: not only does the author ask you to examine your own faults, she also asks you to solicit feedback on your flaws from the people around you. This is fucked up, and not even the cute appendix of "success stories" (including one from her own husband about how she drank a lot of Dr. Pepper on their first date--I'm as confused as you are, people!) can detract from the fact that this book is designed to make you feel bad about the way you are. Not to mention the inherent weirdness of applying business principles to the supposedly fun and fabulous pursuit of a life partner.

Anyway, I'm declaring a personal moratorium on self-improvement for the rest of the summer. I'm going to help myself by purchasing wine coolers and making playlists for weddings and burying my nose in Martha Stewart Living, because if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are few problems that cannot be solved by trying a new panzanella recipe or doctoring up your dining room chairs with a little bit of gingham ribbon. Seriously.

Happy Friday, ducklings. Here's a song to kick off the long weekend dance party.

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.

Sylvia Plath, get out of my head.

When I was thirteen I was, like so many other angsty teen girls, a wannabe poet and a wannabe suicide risk. I also had a borderline unnatural obsession with being published in Seventeen magazine. Everybody knows that no self-respecting seventeen year old actually reads Seventeen--this periodical (if you can use such an esteemed word to describe it) is meant for the twelve to fifteen year old set. Before you learn to drive, before you start sneaking out to go to peach schnapps-fueled house parties, you read Seventeen and dream of one day having a boyfriend and maybe buying a Hypercolor t-shirt.

Anyway, the sad-sack teenagae wastelander that was me at thirteen could not have been more delighted to discover that Sylvia Plath had actually once won the Seventeen short story contest. (Incidentally, she's not the only respectable author who has--Curtis Sittenfeld, Meg Wolitzer, and a handful of other seriously great woman novelists have also graced its pages.) Wow, I thought to myself, this Sylvia Plath character really has it all--publication in an established magazine, a suicide legacy, great bangs. I need to learn more! This was truly the level of my analysis when I checked out a bunch of her books from the library before a family trip to the cottage. I spent the better part of a week in the loft, devouring The Bell Jar (that was the same summer I read the Catcher in the Rye, I think--ah, to be a completely unwitting cliche again) and working out a timeline for literary fame and fortune. First, I'd win the Seventeen contest. Then, I'd intern at a better magazine. Then, I'd stick my head in the oven (or maybe OD on pills? I couldn't quite decide). My life's work was figured out.

Luckily, years of therapy and a serious attitude adjustment set me on a different path, and I didn't give Sylvia a whole lot of thought after that, excluding a brief period after her biopic came out, when I became obsessed with her wardrobe and the way she layered cardigans over one another. Until this weekend I don't think I'd read any Plath since I was a teenager. Then on Sunday night, I was skulking around a friend's place, looking for something to read. "Here," he said, from behind a Patrick O'Brien paperback, "you'd probably like this," and threw a battered copy of Plath's collected works at me. Bear in mind that this person has also urged me to read The Dark Tower series and had two James Patterson books on his bedside table. It was probably the weirdest recommendation he'd ever passed along. It turns out that he had to read it for an English class in another life, and he'd never thrown it out after he gave up on academia. I'm glad he didn't. There's something really vulnerable and strange about reading someone else's copy of a book, especially one that's been underlined and marked up and dog-eared within an inch of its life, one that you'd never in a million years think you'd find in their possession. It kind of makes you think about the writer and the person in a totally different way.

So I guess this isn't really about Sylvia Plath. It's about writers coming back into your life for random reasons at random times. And it's about finding something good to read under a trash heap, and finding some part of yourself long forgotten too. Has this ever happened to you? If not, I hope it will soon.