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.

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.

fernwood, victoria and slocan; the cat who walks through walls

Consistency continues to be damned. (Not really, but for the purposes of this post, we'll pretend sincerity, a phrase I prefer to leave unexamined.) It just so happens that I suddenly stopped reading the aforementioned Glavin and Adams texts—through no fault of their own, of course—in favour of some very well-thumbed Robert A. Heinlein tomes with the shift of the weather. It's finally sunny again here in Victoria, which apparently makes me want to dip into the (un)familiar Tertius, space-time twisters, and sassy female counterparts¹.

Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. (382)

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was my first encounter with Heinlein's future history, the summer after high school graduation (makes this post somewhat appropriate, as I now re-read—albeit not for the first time—in the summer after undergraduate convocation). My dad, an avid reader, had recommended his work several years earlier, but I chose literature as my site of teenage rebellion and refused to read any of "that science fiction crap." I was a fantasy girl, with a(n un)healthy dose of the classics and children's lit, and would not submit to my father's erratic taste.

In retrospect, this may have been ever so slightly ridiculous. But hey, I wasn't spray-painting old growth forests, burning down public monuments, or some inverted version thereof.

So this, like the Robinson post, will travel—space suit notwithstanding—and like the story itself, will muddle with the concept of time, as my imagination carries rather more immediacy to the hammock in my backyard, long since disintegrated, where I first met Richard Colin Ames Campbell, protagonist and narrator:

It was a gay ending to a happy evening. There was still the matter of the stranger who had had the bad taste to get himself killed at my table. But, since Gwen seemed not to be aware of the unpleasant incident, I had tabled it in my mind, to be dealt with later. To be sure I was ready any moment for that tap on the shoulder...but in the meantime I enjoyed good food, good wine, good company. Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life's innocent pleasures. (6)

So begins the "rollicking" action described in the New York Times review (excerpted on the back cover); within a few scant pages, Richard and Gwen are engaged, married, and exiled from several planets. Then the story gets interesting.

But what I particularly like about this novel (and did on the hammock), is/was/will be not so much the plot, which purposely ignores gaping questions and careens through the laws of probability and believable storylines,² but the characters subjected to it. I remember the intense early summer green of the backyard cherry trees from which I was suspended as I imagined myself into the role of Gwen/Hazel Nowak/Stone/Long/etc. Apart from an intellectual attraction to Ames/Campbell, Gwen/Hazel's role appealed to me at the time as an ideal lady, smart, sexy, savvy, and comfortable in command:

But it was Gwen who brought down the house when Auntie finished her highly-coloured [sic] account. Gwen did it with pictures.

Listen carefully. Gwen had used all her ammo, six rounds, then—neat as always—she had put her Miyako back into her purse. And pulled out her Mini Helvetia, snapped two frames.

She had tilted her camera down a bit, for it showed not only both bandit vehicles but also three casualties on the ground and one bandit up and moving. The second shot showed four on the ground and the superdoughnut turned away.

I can't figure an exact time line on this but there must have been at least four seconds from the time she ran out of ammo to the time the giant wheel turned away. With a fast camera it takes about as long to shoot one frame as it does to fire one shot with a semi-automatic slug gun.

So the question is: What did she do with the other two seconds? Just waste them? (177-78)

Upon revisiting the story, I note to my slight dismay the idealized nature of her character; rather like Lizzy Bennet with Mr. Darcy, I wonder at the creature of Heinlein's vivid imagination and the implications of her impossible polish. But the narrative is playful and self-deprecating, and continually conscious of its profound SFicity. In the end, I appreciate the fact that her pedestal, while not as wobbly as my hammock, includes feist and personality; she's perhaps made even less attainable, but at least thereby functions as a confirmation of genre—and is neither distressed damsel nor femme fatale.

This was the first book I intentionally dogeared, the first I was bold enough to underline (though in pencil; belt and suspenders!), and the first that described cats, to my mind, satisfactorily. Indeed, I will likely use it for an intended future project on the depiction of felis domesticus in literature as an example of the potential for delicate treatment of the cat as individual rather than composite cliche. When I crack its spine, I can smell the sultry, almost stifling aroma of dusty oiled cedar walls marinating in second-floor heat—my childhood bedroom—and taste the sticky sweetness of the tiny backyard cherries (as opposed to the huge, pale Queen Annes wrapped around the front of the house).

At the same time, my current and past selves grapple with atmosphereless Luna and the sybaritic Tertius, communities of the distant imagined future in an almost-parallel universe where lifespans are dictated only by accident and there is space enough, and time. So even as this rereading takes/has taken/will forever be taking place at home in Victoria's Fernwood neighbourhood, in another ficton (which concept will be expanded and featured in my next post, I promise), a young(er) girl who feels impossibly old is discovering adult Heinlein for the first time as she nibbles on baby carrots from the family garden.

¹A note on the latter: Heinlein has been accused of misogyny, which accusation was rebutted by Spider Robinson in favour of "Bob" as a champion for women. I find myself toeing the line between these extremes; Heinlein writes some of the most interesting women I have yet to encounter in any sort of literature, but they tend toward the superhuman, such as in the case of Gwen Nowak. His occasional adherence to prescribed gender roles I find myself forgiving when I remember to look at publication dates (and biographical information, as much as I would hate to admit this most of the time) and consider the leaps in sexual politics and gender relations that he does male—wow, Freudian slip—make.

²"My most outlandish tales are the ones most likely to be true—as that is the literal truth. No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe" (Time Enough For Love 31, another Heinlein I'll be chatting up in a few posts).

[intermission]

On extinctions.

yyz, yyc, yyj; melancholy elephants

En route back home from a lightning trip to Toronto, I read bits of several books, but finished first Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants, short (primarily) speculative fiction. I can't promote the title short story enough, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's something about the resolution, perhaps, both of the scene and its players, determination in the face of silent desperation, of probable failure leading to sociocultural death, that appeals to me. It insists earnestly that small victories are essential. That changing huge sweeping behaviours happens not once, but continually, gradually. And that, try as you might (and likely should, since people tend not to learn best second-hand), you can't do much of anything entirely alone. (Here, I would like to offer my condolences to Spider and his family for the passing of his beautiful wife, Jeanne, inspiration for The Stardance Project, and offer this gem rather than my own clumsy, awkward words.)

The second story in the anthology, "Antinomy," claims for its title "the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel" (45), aligning urgent contradictions with dramatic suffering and remarking on the strangeness of the word's disuse. It seems, though, to modify the anthology's title, describing the melancholy of the elephants—people of the future, caught by the efficacy of their own record-keeping and resource-devouring in an eminently unsustainable downward spiral of literal and figurative consumption.

"No Renewal," originally published even earlier than the collection's 1984 release (ominous?), is rife with tubercular spasms. I read this one in the Calgary airport, sipping on a gin and tonic as I waited for my transfer, and its fixation on "lasts" was troubling. Conforming to Fredric Jameson's description of the role of SF, the story projects itself into a consequential future where the protagonist owns "for all he knows, the last small farm in Nova Scotia" (126). This farm is conceptually isolated, "bordered on three side by vast mined-out clay pits, gaping concentric cavities whose insides were scraped out and eaten long ago, their husk thrown away to rot." In place of the neighbouring farms of his childhood, Douglas has for neighbours the oddly mixed metaphor of "an apartment hive, packed with antlike swarms of people." The story idolizes rural pastorality, yearning for the "sawmill, rushing streams, hundreds of thousands of trees, and acre after acre of pasture and hay and rich farmland" of yore that perished in the fiction when "the petrochemical industry died of thirst" (126–27). Though Robinson often tackles heavy themes, he rarely leaves the reader in despair, preferring generally to somehow turn his stories hopeful. But the hope in this particular excerpt is a bleak one, and the "birthday present" cantankerous aged Douglas can expect is reminiscent in its blessing of young Smeagol's ill-gotten gift; his expiration date's shadow looms ominously with the end of even artificially subsistence agriculture and, particularly in juxtaposition with the next story, "In The Olden Days," cultural heritages.

The interplay of antinomy and the "Melancholy Elephants" fixation on infinity is the key to uniting the stories, I think: "I think it comes down to a kind of innate failure of mathematical intuition, common to most humans. We tend to confuse any sufficiently high number with infinity" (12), and act accordingly:

Well, it takes a lot less than [ten to the eighty-fifth, "the current best-guess for the number of atoms in the universe"] to equal "infinity" in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, "That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever." We looked at the sky and said, "That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke." We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking. (12)

So now what? 25 years later, we're still fixated on the infinite, even though we're running out of all sorts of things, including the hydrogen mined for the kids' balloons at Victoria's World Partnership Walk (and, according to one earnest ten-year-old, the turtles who will eat said balloons if released by his younger brother). While some of the individual stories in this collection refute Robinson's tendency toward hope, the tales fit, one way or another, into an arching narrative of extinctions, of creativity, of ways and forms of life, and to the hopefulness of enlightened sharing. His characters mature through the textual bildungsroman to marital, sexual maturity. By honing and focusing his earlier characters, many of whom have to forced from their self-absorption by the epiphanies in their mini-narratives, to the eminently adult "High Infidelity" and finally the phoenix of "Rubber Soul" as a cultural maturing and rebirth. It is important to the growth of the elephants that they strive for dynamism; even the progressive tendency of the bildungsroman is challenged by the non-sequiturs, stories like "The Chronic Offender" that resist a simplicity of development and the framing narratives of "Melancholy Elephants" and "Antinomy" with their profound anxieties. Extinctions, the stories earnestly confide, are complicated—and unbelievably important.

Today's focus on extinctions inadvertently but quite conveniently segues with the topics of my next posts, Terry Glavin's Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions and Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Reading these three texts concurrently, especially coming out of Don Gayton, certainly informed my reception of each. Now, how to reconcile these looming extinctions with drinking imported gin suspended in an airport, waiting for my next flight?

Stay tuned.

interlude continued

A quick word on the absentia: I have been houseguest-sitting for the past few days and have not had a chance to do any reading at all. I did, however, cruise the used bookstores of Victoria and the Times Colonist book sale and found a whole bunch of gems. Pocketbook considerably lighter, I am now the proud owner of the following titles, which will hopefully make their way onto this blog in the near future:

From Munro's,
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (w/aigu over the second "u"—and the only "new" book in the bunch)

From Russell Books,
Andrew Dobson, The Green Reader
Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (this should be the next post, as I was reading it with Gayton—a stark contrast and fascinating juxtaposition)
Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change
Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking
Pojar and Mackinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, including Washington, Oregon, and Alaska
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World
Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants (which is my favourite of his short stories, so I hope the anthology is as good)

From Snowden's,
C. Miller, Some Parasites of British Sheep, with Some Suggestions for Their Eradication and Control (complete with advertisements for a tantalizing variety of "sheep dips")

From TCBS,
Henry Beard, Zen for Cats
Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods
Deborah Coates, Cat Haiku: The Ancient Art of Japanese Poetry—Cat-Style [sic]
Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women
Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: A Mystical Excursion into the Natural World
Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women
Ted Harrison, Children of the Yukon
Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki
Monte Hummel, Endangered Spaces: The Future for Canada's Wilderness
Ken Kiernan, This...is British Columbia (whose second installment I recently found at Fireside Video, which has a fascinating array of gardening texts and romance novels)
Nancy Larrick, Room for Me and a Mountain Lion: Poetry of Open Space
Bruce Mitchell, The Love of Big Cats
Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf
Ian Niall, The New Poacher's Handbook (not sure if this is serious or not...will report back)
Bhikku Nyanasobhano, Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dhamma in the World Around Us
Reader's Digest, The Bedside Book of Nature
Sierra Club, Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists
Mrs. Herbert Strang, The Great Book of School Stories for Girls: Play Up!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (nope, didn't already have it...)
Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
- - - ., Weirdos from Another Planet!

Some common themes making their way throughout, certainly. It will be interesting to see where the attention wanders over the course of reading.

In the meantime, let me direct your attention Glavin-wards with this brief, but compelling, excerpt:

The simple premise of this book is that all these extinctions are related. The intent of this book is to explore the relationships among and between all of these extinctions, and one cannot even begin to do that by relying on the prism of environmentalism. As a separate category of thought, environmentalism is of little use in comprehending the scale of extinctions the world is suffering. Extinction is the fate befalling the things Hosea described—the wild and the tamed, the land and everyone that dwelt therein, and the beasts of the field as well as the fowls of heaven. All these extinctions are part of the same phenomenon and properly part of the same conversation. The forces at work in the world are "not well understood," to borrow the vernacular of scientific journals. But they are cultural forces. (Waiting for the Macaws 5)

Thank goodness (which stubbornly tried to typo as "goofness" three times; perhaps a sign, but I feebly resist).

interlude

Not strictly to form (then again, I've always favoured the functional), but there is a new Robert Hass book, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His work, including the title poem, has received mixed reviews, but the poetry of Robert Hass will always be among my favourite.

Hass himself is delightfully helpful; while working on Ecodemia, I stumbled across his team-taught course in poetry and the environment, and emailed him to ask for the syllabus and permission to use it on my site. He not only obligingly complied, but encouraged my fledgling idea by suggesting sites like River of Words as good fits for the site I had in mind.

So, thanks again, Dr. Hass. I will be picking up the book this afternoon, and reading it in the woods somewhere so I can come back and write it up. This is going to be fun.