into the west

Saturday, October 9, 2010

north york, toronto; when you are engulfed in flames

What a great title. I actually picked this book up at Munro's, Victoria's iconic and conveniently tourism-hotbedded (a word? no) bookstore—and, I discover now, "Canada's most magnificent," lucky me—and read about half of it as I was packing up to move and flying across the country. But it was the first book I finished in my new (evidently rather dangerous) neighbourhood, and so the experience shifted to a distinctly Torontonian one.

Indeed, it was the book I was reading my first night, when I discovered much to my chagrin that out there in Ontario, Labour Day and other holidays mean something: that everything is closed. Everything. I spent my first night wrapped in Pashminas, contemplating the cultural assassination this was likely implying. I was reading it when I discovered that the courses in my Environmental Studies program insist that you print hard copies of all of your assignments, despite the fact that three of my four courses have Moodle pages. When I discovered that liquor stores close at nine. That it is a common practice for grocery stores to package their produce in styrofoam. That the city releases warnings against swimming on certain days. That someone in Montreal thought that Calgary was in British Columbia. Smiling at people encourages them to follow you home. Museums tend to be free Wednesday afternoon. Bus fare works only in one direction, and only if you are confident of your travel path. Bus drivers seem to know every single street and business in the city (not true of Victoria, which is much smaller).

Point is, the title made entirely too much sense to me as I mired in picky-detail culture shock. It's not things like population and multiculturality and the 40-minute subway ride that have been throwing me, but the inconsequential details taken for granted. So Sedaris was the perfect companion in my bewildered wanderings through Ontario's quotidian absurdities. He deliberate examines of the nutty little details of life; indeed, he relishes in them:
I've always admired people who can enter a conversation without overtaking it. My friend Evelyn for instance, "Hello, so nice to meet you," and then she just accepts things as they come. If her new acquaintance wants to talk about plants, she might mention a few of her own, never boastfully, but with a pleasant tone of surprise, as if her parlour palm and the other person's had coincidentally attended the same high school. The secret to her social success is that she's genuinely interested—not in all subjects, maybe, but definitely in all people. I like to think that I share this quality, but when it comes to meeting strangers, I tend to get nervous and rely on a stash of pre-prepared stories. Sometimes they're based on observation or hearsay, but just as often they're taken from the newspaper: An article about a depressed Delaware woman who hung herself from a tree on October 29 and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. The fact that it's illegal to offer a monkey a cigarette in the state of New Jersey. Each is tragic in its own particular way, and leaves the listener with a bold mental picture: Here is a dead woman dangling against a backdrop of scarlet leaves. Here is a zookeeper with an open pack of Marlboros. "Go ahead," he whispers. "Take one."

I'd like to think I'm a blend of the two, but then think back on the conversations I've had here; so many have started with, "Well, when I got here on Labour Day..." and ended somewhere around the fact that you can evidently recycle styrofoam. Usually I'll include what I routinely call "the one fact I knew about Toronto before I got here": it's illegal to drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday. The story's changed, slightly; I now know that it's not "Young," for one thing, and it's become much more dramatic with the East/West divide. "Did you know," I'll say, and we have a ready-made conversation.

Then enters the mouse who makes tactical use of the collection's title, but I'll leave it to the sale rack at Munro's to share that one with you.

Friday, October 8, 2010

massey hall, toronto; squirrel seeks chipmunk

New (school) year's resolution: I'm just going to stop promising sequels.

WARNING: Plot spoilers ensue.

David Sedaris was in Toronto last weekend to read from his latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I'd like to begin by saying that the reading was just excellent; Sedaris has a quirky sort of stage presence, combined of more or less unequal parts of golden comedic timing, self-effacing asides, and what he claims a listener to have described as a "Muppet" voice. These are all presented with a sort of seriousness, however, belied by the occasional snicker at a particularly absurd turn of phrase.

Needless to say, I was delighted by his reading. I'm always a little nervous before a reading begins; not everyone is instructed in or practices the art of reading aloud, and it can drastically alter the way I receive a story on re-reading post-reading. I leave it to you to untangle that. But Sedaris reads as he writes, and had the humility—arguably unnecessary in what is obviously a tour of promotion—to give some of his reading away. Granted, it was another form of self-promotion, but still; I appreciated his enthusiasm for the other voices on his latest audio book.

But what, you ask, does this have to do with his book?

Well, a fair bit. I purchased the book right before the reading, and hadn't had a chance to glance through it. So I didn't notice at the time that he was leaving pieces out, ending stories early, and that the omissions changed the stories. It was only while waiting in the idolatrous line afterward that I began reading. Actually, the line was so long that I read almost all of the "bestiary" by the time I made it to Sedaris's "friendly friendship," a self-consciously anthropomorphized series of short stories about animals as people. As Sedaris introduced (imagine square brackets, as this is a week-old paraphrase), "I was going to call them fables, except that I think I'm too immoral." So I won't call them fables, either; maybe ineffables.

This collection is distinctly different from any of the others I've read; rather than a series of sidesplitting essays explicitly about the adventures of Sedaris et al, the reader is introduced to the interanimal relations of a wide array of humanimals. "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk," for example, from which the title and fantastic (heh) cover illustration by Ian Falconer is taken, describes an interspecies romance cut short by the prejudices of family...and by jazz:
The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? "Oh, I like it to," she'd said—and so eagerly! Then again, it could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more horrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infected flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide.* And she had claimed to like it!

The chipmunk is persuaded by the intolerance of her family and her own lack of education about squirrels and their culture to break it off. She eventually marries another chipmunk, has a family, and eventually uncovers the meaning of jazz, first as a genre of music, and then in her own personal revisionist narrative:
When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

The story ends on this note of potential and mourning, and a touch of senility, and is therefore representative of not only the collection as a whole, but also Sedaris's reading. If these stories were sonnets, they would be Elizabethan instead of Petrarchan, with a beautifully macarbre volta in the reader's last breath.

Though remarkably problematic from an ecocritical perspective—something that I hope to pursue in more depth later—this collection forwards brilliantly Sedaris's past thematic criticism of human intolerance. By displacing the stories via species, the bestiary invokes a sort of Jamesonian remove—though not temporal—for the reader, who is encouraged to laugh at his or her own foibles and follies. And, as is usual with Sedaris but particularly sinister in this collection, this laughter is complicated by the illumination of darker underlying normative prejudices and truths, made palatable—and unexpulsable—by its seductive comedy.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, I pronounce thee a success, a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century dissatisfied adult. Read the stories alone, aloud, or alchemically; they're worth the time.

*Here, I would like to just acknowledge the recent public response to the series of suicides prompted by heteronormative intolerance, and to extend my condolences to the families and friend of the youths. Also, I would like to link to some resources that might be of use to anyone struggling with similar issues. There is a community for you.