May 17th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews Wilket Creek Park and Edwards Gardens

Sunny Sunday afternoon at Edward Gardens.

I have been a fan of Wilket Creek Park for ages. It’s a great running park with a formerly dirt, currently blacktop (still softer on the knees than cement) pathway. It’s green and pretty and well-enough trafficked that even a lone jogger plugged into an iPod doesn’t feel about to be set upon by hooligans (as you can in some of the TO parks). There are lots of different ways to enter the park, but I prefer the big Leslie entrance just south of Eglinton. You can take either the 34 or 51 busses to Leslie, cross and walk north to the park entrance on the west side of the street.

The first thing you will notice if you do this is that this is a car-based part of the park. Far more popular than either the 34 or the 51 is to drive to the park, and often through it. There is tonnes and tonnes of parking, and if you turn left when you get the chance, long winding roadways between the lots continue for a good ways. I don’t know the name of this park (most parks in TO seem to be contiguous, bleeding into one another) but there are pretty paths here, lots of picnic grounds and even coal pits for barbequing, but there is also, always, the roadway.

If picnicking is not your priority, or after you have eaten it, I would recommend heading right/north, into Wilket Creek park, which is purely for pedestrians and, in my opinion, nicer. There we have that long, newly blacktopped path, running right beside the aforementioned creek. It’s quite leafy and shaded in full summer (ie., as of now) with enough sunlight dappling through the leaves as to be quite flattering to one’s companions, children frolicking in the dirt, rocks, brambles, things that look like raspberry bushes but aren’t (I have never found any edible raspberries along Wilket and believe me, I’ve looked), rocks and birds and other nice things. It’s a lovely walk and takes maybe 30 minutes if you amble. It’s also all on one level, so it is perfect for people who can *only* amble, as well as folks in wheelchairs or pushing prams, the elderly, etc.

Now, I did say I used to run on this short, crowded, slow-moving path, but I am a) not a fast runner and b) an early riser. If you run early early, or on a weekday, it’s only mildly peopled and perfect for a quiet, non-speedy jog–ditto cycling. But the people running and biking on it on the very nice May Sunday afternoon that was yesterday were moving at a snail’s pace and swerving into the trees and looking quite frustrated. Maybe not ideal, but that’s your call.

Once you’ve done all this walking/biking/wheeling/whatever, you wind up at the very lovely Edwards Gardens. Here there is a path and some bridges and lots of children doing unsafe things in the creek, jumpign from stone to stone. There are also some stairs you can climb to a higher level of the gardens (here we leave behind those on wheels, but I believe there is a level entrance/parking lot from Laurence, if you prefer).

That’s what the picture above is–the higher portion of Edwards Gardens, taken from a bench far up the incline. I believe if one heads northeast through the park, one would end up at some greenhouses I’ve never been inside but look very nice. I however was content in the gardens, soon abandoning the bench for the nice cushy green grass, and reading in the Sunday sun. I really don’t understand people who say Toronto isn’t pretty–do they refuse to come out from under bridges?

May 13th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews “The Cursing Mommy” by Ian Frazier

Now, you know I take The New Yorker as a direct letter from my chosen diety, and I do quite like the work on the magazine of Ian Frazier but I just can’t quite be happy with his recent string of Cursing Mommy columns.

These aren’t about wishing 7 years bad luck on a mother, but rather a mother who curses. These appear sporadically in the New Yorker’s humour column, Shouts and Murmurs. CM narrates an advice show in a similar manner to a cooking show–“Now I’ll just go over here and get the…” and Frazier’s columns are the transcripts. Cursing Mommy hates her “useless” husband, is usually fed up with her (rarely present) offspring, seems to live a nice middle-class life (has a fax machine, lots of liquor, no job and guests for dinner), and can barely see through her blinding rage. She is also frequently drunk.

I think you can see where I am going with this…

The most recent installment, from the April 26 issue, is Rx from the Cursing Mommy: Cursing Mommy discusses the situation of her infirm and widowed father, and how she struggles with all the nonsensical communications sent to her by the retirement home where he lives. She begins to offer some reasonable advice–staple together, label and file all communications–but then is undone by the fact that the stapler isn’t working.

CM has real issues, and she states them articulately (though not particularly humourously): her “betwixt and between generation [is] responsible for the health needs not only of ourselves and our usually oblivious spouses but of our children and our aging parents, too.” She gets no help with her father, though “at some point he became involved with a woman named Marjorie, who is quite a bit younger and larger than he is, and she has taken an apartment not far from the nursing home.”

That’s the scene, surely not unrelate-to-able–the US health-care system really is labyrinthine, and it’s even worse when you are negotiating it on behalf of someone else far away. From the personal RR files: My folks went through this with my grandparents, a continent away, so I do know that CM is right that it’s crazy-making (and yet my folks managed not to go crazy, or even curse that much, and they don’t even have a fax machine).

But CM does go crazy, and I felt fairly bad for her, and not at all amused. You tell me–funny or sad?

“And then [wham wham wham wham wham] the fucking staples STILL aren’t coming out! [Wham wham wham wham.] And now they’re coming out three at a fucking time! Oh, I so despise this shit! [Wham wham wham wham wham.] And the fucking Bush Administration, too—how I loathe them! [Wham wham wham wham wham wham wham.] Did it work? [Wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham.] All right, I think it worked.”

I suppose part of my issue is that Frazier is a middle-aged man, and I feel like he doesn’t get to make fun of women struggling to stay sane. But of course, this would be as offensive as it is–or isn’t, depending on your viewpoint–if I wrote it or indeed if a stay-at-home-mom did (do we like the acronym SAHM? I find it hard to pronounce). But I also totally feel like, simply as humour, this is falling flat because it’s the wrong format–this is physical comedy and probably should be an actual TV show (SNL sketch, anyone?) and not prose. Visuals come at you faster, and if they are hilarious enough keep a girl from going all “is that anti-feminist? Is he saying women are so dumb they can’t even cope with staplers?

I would like to tie together my two theses: 1) this column is vaguely misogynistic and 2) this column is not all that funny, but I can’t seem to. I guess one thought along those lines is that though this particular column would still not do it for me even if it were written by a woman, I’ve read *much* funnier accounts of the SAHM life (I guess I can type it even if I can’t say it) that were written by the women who lived them. That actual on-ground point of view is missing here–it is very much mocking from outside rather than humourously commiserating from inside.

Maybe Shouts and Murmurs should stick to columns based on silly press-release copy–I like those.

May 3rd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Date Night*

It was pretty much obvious that I would see Date Night even though the reviews weren’t amazing. I have been a big fan of Tina Fey ever since she and Jimmy Fallon were Weekend Updating–no one has more slang terms for “vagina” in her repetoire and no one says them with more flare.

I always forget why I like Steve Carrell–unlike most humans, I’ve never seen *The Office*–and then I remember *Little Miss Sunshine* (which I rewatched over the holidays and still love). Oh yeah, and he was the *40-Year-Old Virgin* too. Yeah, I like Steve Carrell plenty.

So it’s disappointing to see such stellar comedians struggling to elevate this film above “fine” or “funny enough” or “not a total waste of money.” And it is *slightly* better than those things, but largely on account of their efforts. The script is solidly silly, which is no way to be. There are no risks, there are no non-stock characters (sexy calculating babysitter, foozball playing loser male friend, teary-eyed histrionic female friend, supercompetent superattractive male special ops…should I go on? You can probably guess if you’ve ever seen…any other movie).

The premise is that Claire and Phil Foster’s marriage, bogged down by kids, work and life in the burbs, has lost its spark and, in a reasonably pathetic effort to regain it, Phil proposes to take them to the hottest restaurant in Manhattan on a Friday night without a reservation. Which, sorry, makes Phil look like a moron, when he clearly plays the character as a reasonably bright guy.

There are a *lot* of slipups like that in the script–some far worse. On Phil and Claire’s first depicted date night, Claire mentions that the next evening they have bookclub. At bookclub, she mentions that the evening after that, they have a date. Who has a date every other evening, especially with two small childrens and another excursion on the intervening evening (she says with a touch of envy?) Also, Phil is later described as a “tax lawyer” though the shot of him at work shows him explaining a modest tax refund to his dumbass clients–something *accountants* and their assistants do. Oh, and that poster showing Carrell wearing lipstick and Fey with a kissprint on her face? Inexplicable, because that scene doesn’t happen in the movie.

I’m harping–this is minor stuff, but indicative of a film made with a minimum of care. So Claire and Phil steal an unclaimed reservation at the restaurant by impersonating the reservationees, only to find themselves help to account for those folks’ attempt at blackmail. The best part of the whole movie is when they are dragged out into the alley midmeal by evil henchmen. Claire, thinking they’re just in trouble for the reservation hijinx, takes her bowl of expensive and fabulous rissotto with her. When one of the thugs knocks it out of her hand, she cries, “Great, now I’m going to have to pick that rissotto up of the ground to eat it!” Ha!

Should I get into the plot thickeners? I should not get into those, for those are dumb. They go to a spooky boathouse in Central Park, they break into a realty firm, they steal a car and crash it into a cab that gets stuck on the grill, they are forced to pose as strippers…blah blah blah. It’s all highly unlikely yet utterly predictable, and hard to even care–obviously, for such likeable people, things are going to work out just fine.

But they are so nice, so charming and funny and self-effacing, so clearly much smarter than whoever wrote the script…it’s a pleasure to watch these two work. Apparently, bits of the show were improvised, and it’s pretty easy to tell which ones–the ones with funny voices, assumed characters, a measure of confidence completely out of keeping with the domestic schlubs these two are supposed to be.

On their dates, Claire and Phil play a game where they spy on people in the restaurant and try to guess what their life stories are. These stories are fairly funny, and supposed to convey, I suppose, Claire and Phil’s lifelong committment and intimacy. But that doesn’t work–Fey and Carrell don’t have that sort of chemistry (they don’t kiss until the very end of the movie, and that one is totally a joke). They do *have* chemistry, but it’s that of two professional comics who respect each other and are happy to riff off each others’ one-liners. The restaurant brain-storming sessions are funny because they’re the actors trying to top each other.

Who is supposed to be the target market for this movie? I’m worried it’s actually me–30somethings who want to cling to the delusion that, just because we haven’t bought minivans yet, we are still somehow cool. No, wait, maybe it’s 30somethings who want to be convinced that even thought they *have* bought minivans, they are still cool enough to solve crimes.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because once you are in your 30s, you aren’t cool unless you own a bomber jet, so we can all give it up to the next generation: my students who went to see *Kickass*. I almost went to see it too, but I heard the violence was gratuitous so I didn’t. Uncool!

But I was pretty excited to hear Tina Fey’s latest slang term for vagina. That counts as immature, right? Anyway, I was not disappointed.

RR

April 27th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Killarnoe* by Sonnet L’Abbé

I knew I wanted to read something by Sonnet L’Abbé because I’ve seen her do a few readings over the last year or so and they were amazing. I totally believe that the best way to sell a book is to have the person who likes it most (usually the author, one would imagine) read a little bit of it to you. A few distainful readers notwithstanding, this would be the ideal selling technique if only more people went to readings. I am one who does, and thus buy a lot of books, though in truth *Killarnoe* was a gift (a requested one!)

*Anyway*, I loved L’Abbé’s readings , and I was pretty sure I would love the poems on paper too. I was right. Killarnoe is a book rich in play, in sex, in sound, in self-deprecation, in jokes and juxtopositions and alliterations and *rhymes* (the rarer it gets, the more I like it). It is joyful, thought-provoking reading.

The poems I heard at the readings were, I think, largely from the second section in the book, “Instrumental.” Each is a meditation or exploration of a sound, which gives the poems titles like the thoughtful “Ah”, catchy “I” or the sexy “Ungh.” These pieces are full of life, though I suspect highly theorized at their base. Breaking language down to sound memes (AMT, am I using that word right?) is not a simple task, but the poet manages a light touch nonetheless: “noteworthy / the pure ooh / of boo /of moo // the poor ooh / of few / of zoo.”

I was surprised to find I didn’t much like a section of political poems called “Z: Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi.” In a reading, I had been quite astounded by the weird sad fear and humour of “My Osama bin Laden T-shirt” (which appears in the book in the section after Z). Upon rereading, that piece held up, but the other topical stuff left me cold.

One reason could be is that ghazals are a highly complex, very structured form with which I’m not really familiar. There’s a lot of repetition (a L’Abbé trademark, I’m told) and not much room for narrative. To put it more bluntly, I didn’t understand these. Then I found the notes in the back of the book and I *did* understand–at least who Zahra Kazemi is, and some of the other people mentioned in the work–but I still didn’t really “get” the poems. I couldn’t go inside them–they required me to bring with me a certain amount of info, or at least insight, that I don’t have.

That’s ok–some poetry is always going to shoot over someone’s head, and writing for the rather large subset of the population that reads th newspaper is not a crazy idea. Most of L’abbé’s work is so multilayered, so open and accessible that though I nearly always suspected there was more to it than I had understood, there was plenty for me to savour.

Like a poem towards the end of the book, “Third Breast,” which was decidedly creepy and bizarre and I really like it. But I have the strong impression there it obliquely references a tri-breasted creature somewhere in mythology that I’m forgetting about…do you know? I’m sure L’Abbé knows, and I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. I will think about that poem for a long time anyway, which really, is the point.

I once had a wonderful English prof–this might have even been in high school–who drew a diagram about layers of meaning. Literal, metaphor, allusion, symbol, allegory, etc. Then s/he (I actually have no idea who this was, sorry) said that a story poem that was only surface would be pretty simple and dull, but that work that only existed on the deeper levels would also be dreadful, because the reader would have no point of entry or reference, no simple enjoyment or identification before the heavier work began.

I think about this when I read a book like *Killarnoe*, which operates on so many levels and seems open to having the reader on any or all of them, or wherever you would like to go.

RR

April 2nd, 2010

Rose-coloured and Mark review Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy doing this series.

RR: Hello and welcome to the 3rd installment of Rose-coloured and Mark review bizarre candies that we find in our travels. Mark has been to America. Mark, would you like to tell us what you have brought back from America?

March 23rd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Mostly Harmless* by Douglas Adams

I have been working on reading all the Hitchhikers’ Guide books for a few months now, trying to give the new one a fair shake when I finally read it (it’s in the post right now). And then Mark proposed the Retro Reading Challenge, so I fudged my reading challenge into his.

I’m supposed to have read the book only once, and it’s possible I did, and at least 15 years ago, which seems about right. So this is my RRC review, then:

This book is hella disjointed. The first three books in the series were too–very very very episodic, and none-too-committed to causality–whatever good gag Adams could think up to put next, that’s what happened next, coherence, plot or character development, linear time be damned. The plot never really did come together in any of the books, but the characters, showing their stripes in reaction to whatever lunacy the universe/Adams threw at them, actually did resolve in reasonably consistent, fairly likeable, not especially deep folks. At least, I found them likeable.

Then, in the fourth book in the series, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, apparently someone told the author he needed more emotional resonance or some such, and so two of the four central characters (Zaphod and Trillian) get ditched entirely, Earth gets reinstated (it was destroyed in the first book) and Arthur, the bumbling everydweeb from earth who has spent the last three books stumbling around in terror (as well he should), gets to go home, sleep in his own bed, and fall in love with a pretty girl. Ford Prefect, Arthur’s sarcastic savior from the planet Betelgeuse gets to stick around, but mainly for drunken confusion.

I never really understood the parts of *Fish* that Ford was in, but Arthur’s love story with Fenchurch is just lovely, if only from a wish fulfillment perspective–there’s all manner of impossible concidence and heart-stopping joy and this really great love scene while flying… It does not, of course, make any sense with what came before–no one has experience a genuine emotion besides fear and hunger in the entire series up until now. What’s more, no on has said a dirty word, had sex or wanted to–you could safely give the first three books to children if you so desired (they wouldn’t understand, but they wouldn’t be Corrupted, either). So making the characters say “sh*t” and experience erotic desire in book #4–well, that’s changing the rules a bit.

Thus, we are preprared for book #5, wherein 1) earth is gone again, for reasons never made clear, 2) Fenchurch is gone (for good, it seems) due to an accident that is never explained. It’s basically as if book #4 didn’t happen. Trillian, the pretty earth girl who travelled around with president of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and “told him what she thought of him” (sex, or even Trillian’s attractiveness: never mentioned) is back, though, Zaphod does not make a reappearance after book 3 (unless you count the nothing-to-do-with-anything-and-not-even-very-funny short story, Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, which is stuck in the back of my omnibus of the first four books.

Anyway, sorry–long lead-in. Trillian’s back, although this is actually not really her but an alternative-universe version of Trillian that readers have not meant before. Before she met Zaphod and went into space, she was plain old Tricia McMillan (I think that’s clever) and she was an astrophysicist–now she’s so consumed with regret she’s left the profession, is working in television, and has very little enthusiasm for life. It’s surprisingly affecting. No, really, read:

“There was something roughly the size ofa large camper van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.

“It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.

“Something moved deep inside her.

“Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn’t notice the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by food, the craft came downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if probing and feeling it. They played over her.

“It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back?”

He hasn’t, but something else happens and for a while it seems like a female character has a plotline for the first time in HHG history…but then it fades out.

Ford has a very similar plotline to the one he had in 4–namely, hijinx–but it makes a good deal more sense and actually concerns the Hitch Hiker’s Guide and so, indirectly, the other characters and some of the things that have come before in the series. But mainly he’s just there for the hijinx. And it’s awfully fun:

“Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief’s office, tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave way, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the drinks trolly laden with some of the Galazy’s most potent and expensive beverages habitually stood, seized hold of the trolley and, using it to give himself cover, trundled it and himself across the main exposed part of the office floor to where the valuable and extremely rude statue of Led and theh Octobpus stood, and took shelter behind it.”

Bwa!

And Arthur, loveable Arthur who no reader would bother reading 5 books about if they did not adore? Well, he has…a series of (mis)adventures, now on all on his own, apparently searching for enlightenment and a place to call home. The adventures are funny, but they all resolve like jokes, with punchlines. And Arthur’s story in particular is heavily freighted by this idea of alternate universes, which here makes no sense whatsoever. In Adams’s highly imaginative (but perhaps not deeply imagined) universe, Earth is located in a plural sector (ZZ), thus making it unstable in the 5th dimension–depending on where you are on that axis, sometimes Earth is present, sometimes not.

For good or ill, the above explanation does make sense to me. But how does one go about moving in the 5th dimension? Arthur keeps arriving on a planet with Earth’s coordinates, realizing it is nothing like Earth and setting off for…the exact same physical coordinates again? How does that happen?

What bugs me about this is, Adams could totatally could have answered these questions; he just got lazy and/or bored with the thought process. If there’s one thing that reading 5 books of his in rapid succession has taught me, it’s that brother was a genius, yo. He totally understood the science (and philosophy) on which he based his constructions. But he had a short attention span.

Finally Arthur gets a gig making sandwiches on a primitive planet (they’d never seen sandwiches before) and Ford gets free of his scary adventure at the HHG, and Tricia McMillan gets forgotten about. Reappears, Trillian! With a daughter in tow, fathered by Arthur although without sexual participation (ah, the series returns to form) or even knowledge.

The part with Arthur and his daughter, Random (that’s her name) is really treacly, and thus in fact Random, because trying spark paternal love in this morass of puns, sight gags and interdimensional physics is a non-starter.

So, pretty much is the resolution of the novel. The gag around which the whole ending, which–to Adams’s credit–was set up two books ago is, in my humble opinion, pretty dumb. The lunacy that surrounds it, involving Tricia, Trillian, Random, Ford, and some neat repercussions from book 1–is cooler, but when it finally ends, the bang is a whimper.

The ending, it’s been noted in various places, is also really dark, and an attempt to be the be-all end-all of endings: no more books in this series, was it seemed the author’s message. Except he later regretted that, and it seems, mentioned that regret to his wife, who contact Eoin Colfer….

This seems like a negative review but it’s not–I still love this book! In response to Mark’s challenge, I should say the love that I held for it in 1994 was blind love. Back then, my tolerance for ambiguity allowed me to not understand any of the science and still enjoy the kooky tales and gags. And in 2010, I had lost patience with kook for kook’s sake, but some of the gags are pretty good, I like the characters and I get (some of) the science.

It’s a book with enough going on that two readings probably aren’t really enough, but the several pages of analysis above are probably too much. This book was written for, and with, pleasure, and should likely not be overthought–too late for that. I love it anyway, and Colfer’s book is going to have a tough act to follow (especially if he’s going to come up with an astrophysical logic for reinstating the earth).

I actually have The Salmon of Doubt on my shelf right now, the only DA book (that I know of) that I haven’t read. I am sort of uncomfortable with it, as the book consists of stuff recovered from the author’s hard-drive, which he never (necessarily) meant to publish, but I do love his writing, probably too much to neglect anything. And perhaps there are clues in there that will help me judge *And Another Thing* when I finally get around to reading it.

I meant to make this review really thorough, but I think it is just really long…

RR

February 22nd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *True Romance*

There are better movies in the world than True Romance, as written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott, but there are very few I like as much. And after close to a dozen viewings, I’m pretty sure that though TR is not the best movie ever, it is very very very good.

The film starts in Detroit where a lonely loser named Clarence tries to pick up a girl in a bar, failing when he suggests going to a triple feature of martial arts movies. He goes anyway, alone, and there succeeds in picking up another (much prettier girl). They have fun, have pie, have sex, and then have a poignant conversation on the billboard frame that adjoins Clarence’s bedroom window. In this conversation, the girl, named Alabama, admits that a) she is a call girl and b) she has fallen in love with Clarence.

One of the many reasons I love this movie (we’ll get to them) is that it combines real urban grit with the hyper-intensity of (Tarantino’s favourite) pulp romance. There’s so much realism in the portrayal of Detroit, of people’s speech and snacks and clothes–but it’s all just a bit more intense, dramatic, hyper.

February 17th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Lizard* by Michael Bryson

Do you miss The Danforth Review, that awesome online literary quarterly that published such a wide range of fiction, criticism and interviews? Yeah, I miss it too, but it’s cool to know that (one of) the reason(s) it is currently on hiatus is is in favour of founding publisher and editor Michael Bryson‘s “struggling attempts at creating literature.”

I just finished reading Bryson’s third book, a collection of short stories called The Lizard and I think it’s worth the struggle. This is a small spare book, 117 pages of generously leaded pages, and spare also in terms of details. One of the ways I think of the short story is as a bright spotlight, trained on the ground. A character approaches it in darkness, then when s/he enters it, is brilliantly illuminated for the time it takes to cross the spotlight, then returns to darkness. The shape of the story is how and where the author trains the spotlight; the character(s)’s actual actions and dialogue just life going forward.

I think the best stories in this collection are the ones that remind me of expertly focussed spotlights. From a man whose relationship is probably disintegrating while his father’s love life takes off (“May the Road Rise”–great title) to a guy who sees his childhood friend resorting to violence (maybe) (“Hit”), there aren’t a lot of resolutions here, or many answers.

If you are familiar with the term tolerance for ambiguity, you probably learned it in a psychology or education class, but a reader of my acquaintance uses it to describe a reading style. Readers with a high tolerance for ambiguity don’t mind not having much backstory in a piece of fiction, provided we have some sense that there is a logical one. In a good story, we’re fine with not knowing why things happened, nor what the outcome is–if the author can shape the piece so that it works without those things.

“Six Million Million Miles” was, to me, the perfect story for the ambiguously tolerant (like me), because Bryson counters the randomness of writing any story about a few moments in anyone’s life with how random anyone’s life actually is. This story is only a couple guys sitting around, talking. They’re both around forty, both in relationships that are uncertain, talking about a going into business together as soon as they can decide what that business should be. Then a house down the street explodes.

They worry about it, talk about it, watch the flames shooting into the sky. Then they go back inside because one of the guys’ sort of girlfriends has arrived. She has brought someone with her–a date? The evening progresses, the other guy’s girlfriend comes over too, there’s another explosion, they order some pizza.

What a terrible summary! But this is a beautiful story, so much more as a whole than as the sum of it’s parts–I noticed that, reading it over in bits and pieces just now to write this review. The story works because it feels random, just a bunch of stuff that happened over a few hours, but the end I was left with a powerful feeling of how anyone’s life is so much more than he or she can understand, let alone explain.

Not every story worked on me with this intensity, but I think that might have been partly my fault. *The Lizard* is an easy book to like, and I think I read it too fast, missing some of the bigger payoffs because I was enjoying the little ones: a toddler falling down in the park, the ins and outs of work in a pet store, a quiet reaction to 9/11.

This is why Rose-coloured reviews are not real reviews–if this were professional, I’d reread immediately and get it all worked out. But since I’m happily unprofessional me, I’m going to mull it over for a while, fill in some ambiguities in my own head, and look forward to when I eventually work my way back to this fascinating book.

RR

February 4th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews The Bagel House

Bagels are so often the default food of picky children, harried airport travellers, and breakfast-bar buffets, it’s hard to believe that 25 years ago my dad had to drive across Hamilton to Switzer’s so that my family could have them. And the kids at my tiny rural school, though not quite mocking, were fairly incredulous about my lunches of “bread doughnuts.”

Those were “New-York style” bagels–puffy with a moist crust, denser than bread, still a lot like bread. I don’t know if my New-York-born parents even realized there was another kind, and I don’t really know if, when I moved to Montreal, I realized I was eating a sweeter (they’re apparently boiled in honey water), less salty, denser smaller bagel–with a unique flavour that turned out to be smokiness from being baked in a wood oven. I knew they were a lot harder to cut for the toaster and that they had a wider hole, making it difficult to have a bagel sandwich or really any kind of tidy bagel topping. In the end, though, I also liked them better plain, untopped and untoasted, especially after I discovered Fairmont Bagels near the place I got my hair cut. There, you could buy just one bagel, just hot, and eat it as you walked across the mountain.

Montreal bagels are farther away from the dinner-roll pole, and closer to the soft street-vendor pretzel–I actually remember the Fairmont onion bagels having a bit of kosher salt mixed in with the onion bits–anyone else remember that?

*Anyway,* I’m not much of a bagel-eater on an everyday day–they’re more a special-occasion food for breakfast out in a deli (could also be a problem that I don’t have a toaster). But I searched out The Bagel House in pursuit of a treat for a bagel-loving comrade, and found it’s delightful. The Bayview location (there’s several, and I think they also stock a few grocery stores) is just a teeny store with a couple cramped tables, but you can watch a guy flipping bagels in and out of a huge wood-burning oven, the bagels are amazing and not *that* pricy, and you can get tonnes of Jewish pastries you don’t see anywhere else. Hamantast in winter is a bit dissonent, it’s good to know it’s any option.

The first time I went, it was a Saturday morning, unusual for a Jewish bakery even to be open, but this one was packed (note: every time I’ve been in, the counter staff was exclusively Asian, and the bagel baker African Canadian, but obviously *someone* in the background there is Jewish). There was a lot of quick in-and-out trade–people carrying coffee beans and buying half-dozens with a pot of cream cheese, obviously on the way to a bagel rendez-vous. The tables were all taken up, though, with people (often with kids) eating toasted bagels with a variety of toppings (from Hungarian salami to chopped chicken-liver to a wide variety of fancy-schmancy cream-cheeses.

Which is what the bagel-lover and I did last weekend. We went on a Sunday afternoon, when most people are already safely brunching (but the lady in line in front of us had a bag of Starbucks beans) but there was a still a nice small crowd. I got the most expensive thing on the menu, the classic cream-cheese-n-lox for $5.99, and I was seduced by the “healthy” multigrain bagel. No idea if it was healthy, but it sure was wonderful. Here, look:

(I had to get in that first bite before I bothered getting out the camera.)

January 26th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Bech at Bay* by John Updike

I first encountered Henry Bech in Updike’s first collection of stories about the fellow, Bech: a book, when I was about 10. I had pulled it off my parents’ shelves because the name was somewhat close to Becky and, likely, because I was very bored on some rainy day. I flipped around until I encountered the word “orgasm”–one of Bech’s mistresses could have one on the New York subway, but only certain lines–and I realized it was not a book I was up to. I put it back wishing I was a kid who went *towards* the dirty bits, rather than being alarmed by them and fleeing.

Imagine my surprise when, last winter, a fellow-writer enthused over Bech, and said I had to read it. Imagine my surprise when I loved it! Bech is such a slow, sleepy, dopey guy in this book, his life largely structure by the success of a book he wrote when he was so young he can’t relate to it, and by the baffling, aggressive, subway-orgasm-having women in his life. There’s tonnes of lit-gossip in the book–largely about fictional writers, but occasionally Roth or some similar mid century man will turn up. Bech can be a malicious gossip inside his own head, but terribly funny. The character is Jewish, and Updike isn’t, and I know some criticism has turned on whether this portrait is a caricature, but I find it too human, too intelligent and funny, for that. The Jewish thing does come up an awful lot, though. We keep get a few too many lines like, “It was hard to tell with Wasp males how old they were; they don’t stop being boys.” “Bech Presides”

I received the two sequels, Bech Is Back and Bech at Bay (that second link there has the book labelled “family saga”–what??) for my birthday, and read the first last fall and the second just now (I thought this would complete my Bech reading, but apparently there is one other story hiding in The Complete Henry Bech. They always do that with compilations of old work–how annoying! How am I going to get it??)

I really enjoyed *Bech Is Back.” It had all his usual staples, my favourite of which is baffled yet sardonic interior monologue while being on literary or “cultural” tours of foreign countries. And *Bech at Bay* promised more of the same, starting with, “Bech in Czech,” which is about what you’d expect (oh, that sentence rhymed!) Detractors of these Bech Abroad stories (there are perhaps half a dozen such stories; I’m not sure how many detractors) might claim that these seem to be too much simply Updike’s own observations on the book-tour life, thinly veiled in a Jew’d up, less-successful, more-venal form.

I don’t, usually, think that–Bech is a pretty well-fleshed, uniquely voiced character. And his work diverges pretty sharply with Updike’s (Bech is far less self-referential!) Occasionally, their sensibilities collide and you think either could be narrating, but that’s all right–all authors have at least a few things in common with all their characters. Also, then we get passages like this:

“The historical fullness of Prague, layer on layer, castles and bridges and that large vaulted hall with splintered floorboards where jousts and knightly elections used to be held; museums holding halls of icons and cases of bluish Bohemian glass and painted panoramas of the saga of the all-enduring Slavs; tilted streets of flaking plasterwork masked by acres of scaffolding; that clock in Old Town Square where with a barely audible whirring a puppet skeleton tolls the hour and the twelve apostles and that ultimate bogeyman Jesus Christ twitchily appear in two little windows above and, one by one, bestow baleful wooden stares upon the assembled tourists; the incredible visual patisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompe-l’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism–all this overstuffed Christian past afflicted Beck like a void, a chasm that he could float across in the dew-fresh mornings as he walked the otherwise untrod oval path but which, over the course of each day, like pain inflicted under anaesthesia, worked terror upon his subconscious.” “Bech in Czech”

Pretty good, huh?

People who know these books are often a bit surprised that I’m such a Bech fan–I mean, they get why I like the language and the structure and the jokes, but why do I like *Bech*? It’s the morality that gets a few, but I wasn’t troubled even when he cheated on his (very recent) wife at the end of *Bech Is Back*. In the third set of stories, Henry’s in his 60s and 70s, dallying with ever-younger women, who are quite susceptible to his charms. It’s unlovely behaviour, but he is as often seduced as seducer and I found I bought it–all the dalliances seemed in keeping with the character Updike created, and while a little yucky, I think one of the joys of fiction is finding empathy with people we would not care to resemble, or even know, in real life.

*However*, there was a story in *Bech at Bay* that broke all these rules, and I hated it. It’s the second-last in the collection–thus, in the series (except for that lost one in *The Complete*)–and it’s called “Bech Noir.” Straight from the title, the piece announces itself as a genre spoof, and though it hasn’t much to do with Dashell Hammett, it has only slightly more to do with Bech. The piece concerns the same guy we’ve been reading about straight along–smart but pretentious, shy but vain, lecherous, envious, easily swayed–only now he gives in to his worst instincts and deliberately shoves a critic who had panned his work off a subway platform.

!!!

Not only would the character of the last 2-and-2/3 books not have been capable of doing that, *no one* would have been capable of doing a lot of what comes next–this first success launches a murderous spree that, if not impossible, is at least preposterous. And silly, and totally out of keeping with the other stories in the series.

In truth, if I came upon “Bech Noir” printed alone somewhere and read it having never seen the characters, I would have enjoyed it mildly, as a piece of highly erudite showing-off–a literary author taking a kooky excursion into genre to see how well he does. And that probably *is* what this is–Updike doing an experiment with a character he knows and feels comfortable with.

Obviously, his editors didn’t find the disjoint too jarring to keep the piece in–but then again, it is Updike, so who would argue? But it doesn’t work, fictionally, to have most of the pieces be seriously realistic fiction, and then have one be a writing-workshop lark! I feel sort of maimed as a reader, as if I had a relationship with someone on the Internet whose photo turned out to be from the Sears catalogue. I invested in Bech as a multi-dimensional, nuanced character, and I feel like “Bech Noir” says, “ha, fooled ya–he’s not realistic at all!”

The thing is, you can’t even mentally excise it from the canon , because the final story in the collection, “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden” builds on certain events that took place in “Bech Noir.” What’s interesting here is that the latter story is a return to form–Bech baffled and passive and interacting with the world like human being instead of a plot device. “Sweden” is also very funny and wise, with an ending (thus, the ending of the book) that is just perfect–hopeful and funny and strange and true.

So, what then? A good book with one story I disliked, right–no problem? Except that one story casts doubt on my whole understanding of the fictional project the author was undertaking? Or the project of fiction, period? Or what? Mr. Updike, how could you do this to me?

On the whole, though, it was a pretty good book.
RR