A lake is a lake is a lake

Why is looking at water so refreshing?

We’ve been camping on this lake for the last few years. I almost missed the trip this time; on the day of our departure, I came down with the stomach flu, which was like being wretchedly out of focus with myself. But I felt well enough the next day to come out and join the boys. I was hollow and glad.

Have you ever noticed that for anyone who has waterfront property, their lake is the lake, as if there were no other? The lovely thing about public parks is that they inspire that feeling of ownership among everybody who uses them (thank you, Teddy Roosevelt). This is our island, our lake. We claimed it by walking its perimeter.

In the campsite beside us was a man holidaying with his family. His father had once been a park ranger at the site; his mother had been pregnant with him there. When she was ready to give birth, she had to take the boat back to the mainland. On the ferry I met a steelworker who said he’d been coming for thirty years. He had a small boat that he dragged on a trailer all the way from Michigan. He said that last summer a large boat had nearly sunk him, right beside the island. He’d driven the boat back as it was sinking, the throttle underwater, between his knees. It was his lake, too. After all, it had almost killed him.

We were there for the fourth of July. I went looking for fireworks in the dusk. All around me, fireflies flared in and out, bursting into flame and dying into darkness. I could hear the fireworks but I couldn’t see them; they were blocked by the treeline and by the curve of the shore. I’d given up and was heading back to camp when brightness caught the corner of my eye. I cut through the woods and to the beach and caught those gorgeous, spendthrift explosions, doubled in the mirror of the black water. Yes, I know that the fireworks were not for me. During the day there was an actual watermelon eating contest. All we did was swim.

I took Nabokov’s Pnin to the beach. It is a perfect bagatelle, about a Professor of Russian who is mild and dreamy and feckless and unsuited to the world. The book was written as a series of separate sketches for The New Yorker, but there is something graceful and elliptical about its rambling. One chapter is set at a country house that hosts a catch-all of Russian refugees and emigrants every summer. The chapter ends like this, with a dying fall:

“On the distant crest of the knoll, at the exact spot where Gramineev’s easel had stood a few hours before, two dark figures in profile were situated against the ember-red sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day.”

Goodbye Mirror

I’m still sad about the news that the Montreal Mirror has published its last issue. It seems that this kind of announcement, in its suddenness and severity, is becoming more typical. Cultural institutions, programs and archives are vanishing overnight, as though, if they are pulled quickly enough, the transition will be less painful. These losses are going to shape our future in ways that are difficult to forecast.

A mirror is not always a space that reflects what you are; instead, it can be a screen for imagining possibilities. The Montreal Mirror (and later, The Village Voice) worked that way for me back when I was a teenager and new to the city. There, though through a glass darkly (those unsettling back pages), I encountered all kinds of possibilities. I was talking to J. about it and he said, you mean like sex, politics, music, culture? The list seems inflated, but he’s kind of right. There was the suburb where I lived and went to high school and then there was this heterotopia , this imaginary city that included all kinds of other spaces. I learned that I could live there too. I’m going to miss the way the cheap ink rubbed off while I was reading, so that I left my fingerprints all over the pages.

Yes, I know about the Internet, cause and compensation for all of these losses.  But a net  is not a mirror. The Montreal Mirror had our own city as its focal point. On the web, there are so many places to get lost. Of course, there are local websites which will take over the work of fostering encounter and engagement. But the net is also contained by the filter bubble, the increased atomization and dissociation encouraged by the proliferation of hyper-specific websites. One of the things about the Montreal Mirror was that there were so many listings and events that I would never in a million years really want to do or see but I still liked knowing about them: heavy metal concerts, drag races, community meetings about swimming pools. If alternative weeklies made us flaneurs in our city, the way most people search the web is a little more like a drone: we hone in. And then there is the question of how people who want to talk and write about culture and politics will ever make a living wage. Ira Glass and David Lowery have me worried about the diminishing opportunities for young people who want to continue to make it new. I’m thinking we need to change that ubiquitous, annoying Gandhi phrase, ‘be the change you want to see in the world,’ to the less romantic but more achievable, ‘pay for the stuff you want to see in the world.’ Because otherwise, you and the world are going to have to do without it.

Skipping Bloomsday

Lisa: Oh, it must be Bloomsday. Every June 16, lovers of James Joyce follow the route taken by Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses.

Bart: What you’re saying is, we’ve run out of fun things to do.*

I skipped out on Bloomsday this year. Since I began to work on Joyce, I’ve been at a Bloomsday conference or event almost every June 16th. This year, the conference was in Dublin. I missed seeing friends in Dublin, but I didn’t really miss the odd rituals and hagiography that go along with great-single-author conferences. I didn’t miss Joyce charades, for instance, or the repeated testing of Joyce’s axiom that red wine is roast beef and white wine is electricity. And I didn’t miss the odd art-life confusion that you wouldn’t think would be quite so endemic among people who study fiction for a living. Stephen Dedalus does not want to be your friend.

Working on a single writer, particularly a consuming writer like Joyce, can encourage Cyclops vision. At a Budapest Bloomsday years ago, I sat at a table with a well-known Joycean who said, “Let’s face it, Virginia Woolf may be a good writer, but she doesn’t hold a candle to Joyce.” That moment had its counterpoint at a Bloomsday event in Jerusalem which had been awkwardly appended onto a Dickens conference. The confused Dickensians all gathered in the one Irish sports bar in Jerusalem. They kept saying things like,  “But surely Joyce is all just language games, isn’t it? I mean, he just doesn’t have the deep humanity of Dickens, does he?” Me and my friend Ruben did a reading of Ulysses, and after that one woman kept asking me if I was an actress. When I said no she said, “But are you sure?”

I’m rereading Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, which is the best and funniest book on academic conferences ever written. She perfectly captures the mix of academic hubris, fantasy, ambition and rivalry which occurs when people have lived too hard and too long in just one corner of their mind. I’ve just finished the section at the Isaac Babel conference in Santa Cruz. Babel’s daughter Nathalie, who is the guest of honour, keeps saying to a Professor named Janet Lind,  “IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?” Batuman loses her luggage on the way to the International Tolstoy Conference. She ends up wearing the same clothes every day, and fellow participants assume she is a Tolstoyan bound to austerity. Her story reminded me of the time my luggage went missing in Venice, which has the most negligent airport in all of Europe. I was on my way to the Joyce school in Trieste. I bought a cheap black sundress in a shop by the train station and wore it until my luggage arrived the day before I left, just in time for me to drag my suitcase back home. Because my room had no full-length mirror I didn’t realize that the dress I’d bought was translucent from the back. Years later, at another Joyce event, a fellow alumni of the program said, “And what was with that dress you were always wearing in Trieste? You could see right through it!” “Why didn’t you say anything?” I said, and she replied, “I thought you liked it that way.”

My best Bloomsday was in Austin, Texas. I watched some friends eat barbecue and felt glad that I was a vegetarian (Lestrygonians). I took a long walk and ended up at the state capitol. There was a rally going on, in support of a cop who had been arrested for badly beating Mexicans who had been trying to sneak over the border. His pastor was up on stage. “He’s not the criminal,” the pastor said, “They’re the criminals, with their drugs and their crimes, corrupting our America.” A group of minutemen formed a human wall between the protest and the counter-protest with their round stomachs and broad backs, dressed identically in black t-shirts and wraparound sunglasses. One of the counter-protestors, dreadlocked and skinny, yelled out from his pocket of like-minded friends “Your God was a Jew!” (Cyclops). I got lost while looking for the Shakespeare bar on the chaotic slutty sea of 6th street, and when I found the bar I was kicked out because I wasn’t carrying ID (Scylla and Charybdis, Nighttown). I watched the largest urban colony of bats take off against the humid nightblue fruit of the evening sky.

Isn’t the point of Ulysses that everyday is Bloomsday if you are paying attention?

*That isn’t my favorite Lisa Simpson literary quote. My favorite is this:

Soccer Mom

I didn’t want to be a soccer mom. I remember when the term became ubiquitous, back in 1996, when Clinton was running for President, long before I had children. Soccer moms were SUV-driving, ponytail-wearing harridans obsessed with their kids and with no lives of their own. I would have none of it.

It’s funny how much of getting older involves accepting group identities from which you once fled. Is that maturity or compromise? As it turns out, the term came into political circulation when a woman named Susan B. Casey ran for Denver City Council as “A Soccer Mom for City Council.” She said it was meant to show voters that she was “just like them.” She also had a PhD, but that wasn’t just like them, so she didn’t emphasize it.

I’ve met a few moms with PhDs at practice and at games, including another English PhD. I’d chatted with her a few times before I realized we were in the same field. That surprised me; I thought I had radar for other English Professors, and she looked so healthy. Anyway, I’d already decided to reclaim the label, after reading the vitriolic definitions in the urban dictionary. We are all soccer moms.

Besides, it’s an unreasonably pleasant way to spend a summer evening.

Meet me in the drunken light. There will be popsicles, I promise. At the end of the evening all the children will line up in rows and as they shuffle past each other they will shake hands and say, good game good game good game good game.

Summer Reading

Summer is for sitting in courtyard cafes and having espresso with ice cream for breakfast and for reading, reading, reading. Here are some of the best books I’ve read over the last few weeks.

Lauren Groff, Arcadia.

I am such a sucker for hippie utopias turned dystopias. Groff is an elegant writer, and her book shades from recent past to near future almost imperceptibly, so that it takes a few pages to realize that the novel has shifted from coming-of-age narrative to a subtle kind of science fiction. I’ve noticed that strategy in a few novels recently: fictions that begin in a shared past, move through the present and then sidle forward into a speculative future that feels all the more intimate because it hasn’t been announced from the first page with Star Wars style stage setting–“a long time ago in a galaxy far far away…”. Jennifer Egan does something similar in A Visit From the Goon Squad as does Chris Ware in Lint. It’s an interesting technique, and it makes a disintegrating, dangerous future seem extremely close.

Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century.

I used to think that Tony Judt’s last name was “Thatantisemite” as in “Tony Judt Thatantisemite” because that’s how people talked about him after he published this article.  But they did him a terrible disservice, and themselves a worse one. This is Tony Judt’s last book,  composed as a series of interviews, which means that Yale historian Timothy Snyder asked a few careful questions and Tony Judt replied in brilliant full paragraphs that go on for pages. His ALS had advanced so far at that point that he could not write the book he had been planning; instead, he spoke it. The book is full of reading and learning and ethical self-confidence and intellectual high seriousness. He turns the twentieth century around in his head and gives it back to me, complex but crystalline, along with a long list of books I have been remiss in never reading – Heda Kovalys’ Under a Cruel Star, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I am going to have to spend the rest of the summer following his bibliography so that I deserve this book.

At one point  Snyder and Judt are talking about the role of the intellectual, and Snyder says, “We remember Cassandra, but no one remembers what her unpleasant truth was.” Here is Judt’s reply.

“Fair enough. The unpleasant truth is normally, in most places, is that you’re being lied to. And the role of the intellectual is to get the truth out. Get the truth out and then explain why it is just the truth…I think the danger of thinking of intellectuals as inspirers is that we will ask them for grand narratives again, or for large moral truisms. And the larger the truism and the grander the narrative, the more they’ll look like the kind of inspiring intellectual that we think we want. And I don’t think we want that.”

Tony Judt gets a shout out from Zadie Smith in her recent article on austerity and British libraries. That’s because he’s the intellectual we want, in that old sense of “want”–meaning that he’s the intellectual we lack. We need his tonic truth-telling, and we are the poorer to have lost him.

Roberto Bolaño, The Secret of Evil

Some of these pieces are unfinished, and most of them are very strange, and it matters not at all because Bolaño is so brilliant that he can turn a description of an old photograph into a meditation on romantic and philosophical entanglement and a description of a family vacation into a hammer to crack your heart. He’s God’s own mashup of Borges and Kerouac, only funnier than either of them, and when I first read The Savage Detectives a few years ago I walked around feeling like someone had given me a present. This also contains the best zombie story I read all year (and I read a surprising number of zombie stories this year, including this and this). It’s less a story than a fifteen page summary of a B-movie that never existed, and it first appeared in Granta’s horror issue, which will now also join my summer reading list. But the very best thing about it is that it begins with these opening lines: “You’re not going to believe this, but last night, at about four a.m., I saw a movie on TV that could have been my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on this bitch of a planet, it scared me so fucking shitless I tell you I just about fell off my chair.” Now that’s how you start a zombie story.

I should also mention the Stefan Zweig novellas Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman and The Royal Game, Patrick de Witt’s The Sisters Brothers and Ablutions, and Octavio Butler’s Parable of the Talents. But my worst summer reading has to be Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch 22. It isn’t just the dumb take on the Heller title. Nor is it the fact that he slips into French when describing the ravissant shoulders of Martin Amis’s old girlfriend, even though that made me feel like I was being groped right through the pages. And it isn’t only his description of the word games that he and his buddy Salman Rushdie plays–substituting dirty words in the titles of famous books and movies –as if they were the astonishingly clever gambols of fucking wordsmiths rather than something that pretty much any literate twelve year old has tried and already grown out of. Though he does describe those games four times. No, it’s the insufferable, self-justifying, bombastic tone he takes when talking about his stance on Iraq and his role in inflaming Islamophobia and the politics of fear during those black years. Sorry, Hitch, you may be dead, but you’re still not right.

And here is my best summer reader. If biology is destiny (and it is) he is destined to spend the rest of his days stumbling down the sidewalk with his head in a book and hiding a magazine on his lap under the dinner table. Poor child. As J. said, there isn’t enough Dav Pilkey in the whole world.

Two Cheers for Les Casseroles?

Remember when we had the big student strike of 2012 and the grand protests and the nightly marches and then the students and the government met and the students admitted that they’d overreacted and had been silly and vainglorious and sometimes violent and the government said that the students had their hearts in the right places and they were really sorry that it had taken them so long to realize it and they were especially sorry to have enacted undemocratic emergency legislation which was now immediately repealed and they would never ever do it again and then they reached a compromise and shook hands and hugged because it was after all such a relief to have it over and had a huge party to celebrate on the street with little carré rouge jam squares for everyone and actual casseroles, the kinds with tuna and pasta and cheese in them?

Negotiations did not go well today, and it looks like Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois will not get a settlement for his birthday after all. In the meantime, the casseroles have gone viral–they’ve spread all over the city and throughout the world. It’s unclear if the protests will end even if the students reach a settlement, since they seem to have gathered their own inchoate momentum. Les casseroles have even reached my neighborhood in the West End of the city. They start every night at 8:00 at the park–my unofficial front yard. A visiting friend once told me that I live on Sesame Street and the first night of the casseroles had a kind of Sesame Street quality. You expected to see Oscar banging his trash can lid, grumpy but happy. Grown ups and children made lots and lots of noise, and it was heartening and jolly and festive, at least until 9:30 or so, when the procession came back from terrorizing latte drinkers on Monkland Avenue and woke up my son. Do you know that expression, a conservative is a mugged liberal? Suddenly I felt very strongly that these protestors have really gone too far and somebody should do something and how would they like it if I came down the street at seven in the morning banging my pots and pans and if they really cared about education they’d let kids sleep so that they can get up and go to school in the morning. When does an ideologue become an asshole? Who is on the streets because their conscience led them there and who is just intoxicated by the party? What happens when the energy awakened by the protests take on its own unpredictable momentum?

The carnival turn of the protests seems to have turned up the volume but dispelled most of the violence, both on the fringes of the movement and on the part of the police, who have backed way off. I was thinking about this New Yorker article published a few weeks ago which claimed that those most mistrustful of state repression are the ones most likely to provoke its greatest excesses–which is maybe less a matter of having been right about the state all along than a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Charest has tried an authoritarian solution and has rather dramatically failed. He’s multiplied dissent, not contained it.

100 Days

I didn’t go to the demonstration today for the students. Today I went for myself. I don’t even like demonstrations. I was reading Patrick deWitt’s novel Ablutions and he has this line about a group of drunks “singing in the single voice of a runaway giant.” That’s how I generally feel about crowds. I can’t bring myself to chant–I choke right up. But do you know what I like less? Government bullies who think fundamental democratic freedoms are disposable.

Two enterprising young men were selling socialist classics at a little card table for five dollars apiece. The rain held off and so did the police.

Some people wore face paint to get around the mask laws.

This woman is waving to her minions.

Some people wore masks, but on the back of their heads.

And some people wore very little at all.

This woman wants to dance with you.

And these two, obviously, prefer to dance with each other.

49 Ways to Reject Bill 78

I’ve been making the mistake of reading the comments sections on the articles about Bill 78. Don’t ever do that; you will despair of humanity. The combination of poor logic, plain viciousness and bad spelling are a nauseating accompaniment to my Sunday morning coffee. But it’s good to get a sense of why so many people are so angry at the students and are willing to compromise their own rights in order to get back at them–that punctures the filter bubble a little bit and gives me a sense of public opinion outside of my small world. Large sections of the Anglo public are like a Bond martini on these protests: shaken, not stirred. If I was a student leader I’d look at those comments and instead of responding with self-righteous ire I’d try to gain back some sympathy and to pull back on some of the more disruptive actors. More street theater, fewer broken windows, that kind of thing.

But as a citizen, I’m shocked at Bill 78. It’s never going to survive a Charter challenge and is not designed to do so; the bill will likely expire before it gets struck down. Charest’s cynicism in passing a Bill that contravenes fundamental freedoms (two or maybe three) during an election year is just stunning and is a much bigger issue than the tuition hike. 50 people is a class trip or a big family picnic or a kid’s soccer game. The fact that it isn’t meant to be applied to any of these groups only underlines that this is a discriminatory bill, meant to be used only against opponents of the Charest government. And once a law is passed, there’s no guarantee it won’t be used, even in situations that nobody ever thought would be applicable. Once a further precedent is set for passing emergency measures for non-emergency situations there’s also no guarantee that further measures won’t follow.  This is a bill written in haste and spite that sets a vanishing margin of legality for public assembly, association and protest.

There’s more to be upset about: the back to work legislation that makes me feel a tiny bit of sympathy for Air Canada employees for perhaps the very first time in my life; the transparent attempt to cripple student organizations;
and of course, article 29 which says that “anyone who, by an act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, help, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offense under this act is guilty of the same offense.” Under this article, police are already monitoring Twitter and Facebook for liability. This blog post might even qualify. The Education Minister says she trusts the police to administer the new law responsibly, and I’m sure that in relation to her, they will. As Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread” (thanks, J).

In response to the new bill, student groups have started posting disclaimers alongside protest announcements, so let me say that I do not “recommend” you go to the big march this Tuesday. But I have another idea, one within the bounds of this new law. What if there were micro-protests all over the city of exactly 49 people, in phalanxes of seven by seven? 49 Professors. 49 mothers. 49 women with tattoos of manga characters. 49 man-children who should rethink their facial hair. 49 little dogs named Francis. 49 readers who think The Marriage Plot was overrated. 49 hacked Little Miss and Little Mister characters. 49 groups of 49, all over the city, marching peacefully in support of civil liberties. Who’s with me?

Mother’s Day Dandelions

So Mother’s Day was lovely and lucky. There were daffodils and tulips that my boys bought with their own allowance and homemade cards and early morning yoga and a trip to the Botanical Gardens with all of the other mothers, moving together like a zombie horde, muttering flooooowers and bruuuuunch. I love it that they don’t charge admission for the outdoor gardens until after Mother’s Day; it seems such a civilized gesture.

But because I’m a curmudgeon, I also did some reading. The chapter “Mother’s Day Bouquet” in Leigh Eric Schmidt’s book Consumer Rites does a good job of summarizing the history of the holiday. It turns out that Mother’s Day in America has a couple of different origin stories. Abolitionist and activist Julia Ward Howe wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Around the World” in 1870, later known as “The Mother’s Day Proclamation.” In 1872, she asked for the establishment of a “Mother’s Day for Peace” on June 2nd. She never succeeded, but she celebrated the day on and off for thirty years with like-minded groups of early feminists and pacifists. I was struck by this line: “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn/ All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country/ To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” So at the breakfast table I mentioned Howe to my boys, and stupidly, spontaneously blurted out, “So that’s what I’d like for Mother’s Day! Don’t ever be soldiers!” They looked at me as if to say, forget it, we already bought you tulips.

Fifteen years earlier, Ann Jarvis began something called “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” –church based groups of women who fought for better hygiene in order to reduce infant mortality in West Virginia. When the Civil War began, the groups nursed soldiers fighting on both sides during the Civil War, and when the war ended they held “Friendship Day Picnics” to try to reconcile the divided South and North. When Ann Jarvis died, her daughter Anna began a memorial service to honour her legacy. A few years later Anna Jarvis managed to turn the memorial for her mother into a day for all mothers, and Mother’s Day was made a national holiday in 1914. As the story goes, Jarvis was disgusted by the rapid commercialization of the day that she had called sacred. She sounds so crabby and contemporary, “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.” The holiday was a boon for florists, and is still their biggest week of the year. Each year the celebration grew larger, and each year there were renewed attempts to criticize its debasement. In 1921 a minister suggested that all the bouquets be replaced by a single hand-picked dandelion.

So my boys picked a dandelion. Or twenty.

Oh mighty and august congress of mothers, what would life look like if we spent a little more time talking about Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe and a little less time talking about this?

The Art of Fielding (and other novels that didn’t win a Pulitzer)

I’ve been thinking about the failure of the Pulitzer board to award a prize for fiction this year. This morning the NYT  has an article on the books that shoulda-coulda won, and I feel a little scooped because I was also going to argue that David Foster Wallace should have taken it for The Pale King–not, as Sam Anderson argued, because it was the best novel of the year but to make up for not recognizing Infinite Jest back in 1997. I have a superstitious belief in retroactive literary justice, and a little bit of guilt about the amount of time it took me to recognize the greatness of Infinite Jest (it might have taken me less time if the DFW fans had been a little less rabid about it, but I’m ready to admit that they were right).

A couple of weeks ago Ann Patchett argued that the Pulitzer board had a responsibility to award the prize in order to celebrate and support the craft of fiction. Awarding a prize is a little bit like assigning a book on a syllabus, but on a much larger scale. It’s a vote of confidence and a wink to readers. The prize is going to be subjective and is going to be a little biased and that’s fine; that’s how culture gets disseminated. But sniffing at all of the books that came out this year and stepping away from them with a disappointed huff; that’s just disrespectful. It implies an absolute taste test which every single work of fiction published in America last year failed. The board is like a grade school teacher looking at a classroom of eager students and informing them that none of their essays was worth the prize. Junot Díaz was the single fiction writer on the board so yeah, Díaz, I’m looking at you.

And no love at all from the Pulitzer committee for John Jeremiah Sullivan. I think this was the best American book I read this year.

I’m not going to say much right now about The Art of Fielding–I’m saving that for a post on campus novels this year. That was just an excuse for the baseball picture at the head of the post. But I am going to vote early and vote often for the Pulitzer prize for fiction 2013, which until further notice should go to Lauren Groff’s gorgeous second novel Arcadia. Although George Saunders has a new collection coming out this year, so I’ll wait to make my final decision.