January 2nd, 2009

Route 171

When a friend handed over this fascinating article on the TTC’s new route 171, it was with the raised-eyebrow warning, “You aren’t mentioned.”

No one gives a damn about her hair
RR

January 1st, 2009

2008, I liked you

These 365-day units do not necessarily break off at useful points–I’m having trouble encapsulating the past year or imagining the next one because I’m in the *middle* of so many things. I can’t find a period to put at the end of the sentence that was 2008, to make it seem like an event rather than just a space of time that included a lot of beginnings and a few endings. And there’s not really a capital letter for 2009, either. The year seems not a blank page but an unfinished manuscript–metaphorically and literarily. I will get around to resolving somethings later, but for now, I’m stuck in the past.

An ending, even an artificial one like December 31, does summon up all the sadness of what’s undone, who and what’s been lost, mistakes made…but even end-of-day regret cannot obscure the fact that I had a wonderful wonderful 2008. And today is really the day to celebrate all that, and remember all that outweighs regrets, which is so much.

2008:
Lucky pastries
Rock-climbing
Impromptu yoga
Getting better
Free bad movies
Hugs
My first car accident
Effortless poetry
Rivers I’d never heard of
Facebook
Books in the rain
Books in bookstores
Wedding music
Every day sunrise
So much gossip
Cats, kittens, dogs, fish
Long-distance phone calls
Singing songs in Spanish restaurants
Reading aloud
Reading in bed
Babies
Beautiful funeral
Mail
Pie
Affirmation and respect
Music videos
TTC
Barack Obama
Streetcorner kisses
New words
Never wanting to be “good enough”
Roses
This blog
Smoked salmon
Uncertainty
Friends
Friends
Friends

We’ve only got this moment and it’s good
RR

December 30th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews “Dead Girls” by Nancy Lee

It seems somewhat vulgar to summarize as delicate and precise and elliptical a story as Nancy Lee’s “Dead Girls,” from her 2003 collection of the same name. But such is the task of the reviewer, so:

We begin with a woman unhappily trying to come to grips with both the television news on a serial killer of prostitutes, and then the impending sale of her home. We learn first that the home must be sold due to the financial difficulties of the woman and her husband, then that it is her husband who is pushing for this solution. Only after these facts of their relationship are established is the character of their daughter introduced–they seem to have bankrupted themselves paying for rehabilitation treatment for her.

Gradually, it emerges that the girl, Clare, is not in the house, that the treatment has not worked, that her whereabouts are unknown. Gradually, it emerges that she is herself probably a prostitute, and that that is the central reason for her mother’s horror at the news reports on the unidentified bodies of prostitutes found in a mass grave. The mother watches the news compulsively, waiting to see if her daughter will be one of the dead. She struggles with the idea of packing up the girl’s clothes, books and stuffed animals before they move. She prowls the red-light district of her city, watching the prostitutes there offer their wares, always imaging each as Clare.

Yeah, see: vulgar, sensationalistic in summary, but tender and horrifying in full. I use terms like “gradually it emerges” because Lee does not trade in the shocking turn of events, the explicit reveal–instead she insert the reader in a life already going on, and leaves us the task of interpretting our surroundings. What the reader picks up on at what point depends on who that reader is, what sorts of details he or she is attuned to.

The writer seeks to immerse the reader as fully as possible in the story-scape: “Dead Girls” is written in the second person singular, the alway- imposing “you” is the protagonist, the one who navigates these tragedies and despairs. If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, or indeed, if you’ve ever read a bad second-person story, you know how dangerous it is for a writer to make this choice–the attempt to conscript the reader into the story, if it fails, usually takes the whole piece down with it. If the reader won’t go where she/he is being shoved, he or she is left sitting in his or her living room with a book in hand, and that’s all.

I don’t usually like to be shoved: I balked slightly as soon as I saw the first line, “You are addicted to television news,” although I was willing to try to get into it. Quickly, I got why this was going to work: this is a protagonist who wants desperately out of her own situation, and out of her own body. Much as you might try projecting onto a listener when trying to explain a badly chosen action–“You know when you just panic and yank the wheel into oncoming traffic?”–this “you” could easily be the “I” of self-abnegating first-person narrator.

Does that explanation make sense?

It did to me, and still there were problems on first reading. I read too fast and got confused, thought it was the husband that was in rehab, had to go back. Again, I wound up ok with this, the in medias rez opening on a scenario to which there *isn’t* a logical explanation necessitating a certain amount of dislocation for reader and characters alike. The writing is spare and sure, it pulled me in eventually, into the quotidian details of disaster like, “…your husband is in the driveway in gloves and a toque, washing his car in the freezing cold. He offers to wash yours” and “You felt a small stab in your chest as if someone had slid a safety pin through your heart.”

The story takes its time, things evolve as slow as real life. When the central character sets up a continuous-play stereo in Clare’s locked room, the music resounds in the house for days as “a surrogate heartbeat,” an illustration of the narrator’s clinging to illusion, the return of the daughter of the shining eighth-grade portrait, not the grim and damaged teenager she is now. The protagonist often mishears, or doesn’t hear at all, what her husband says to her, and she is content with that; she won’t try harder, turn down the volume, accept his growing acceptance of the loss.

(How do you feel about reviews that tell what happens in the second half? Even if the piece is not overtly “suspenseful”, I still find kinda weird about revealing how it ends up. Yet I also feel I can’t really talk about the story satisfactorily without covering all the events therein. Consider yourself warned.)

To me, I think the story comes to be about the husband and the wife, and whether they can salvage anything of their love and their shared life without the physical manifestation of that love, their offspring. And thus, it hinges to a great extent around sex. There’s a long paragraph early in the story about why the bereft parents have stopped having sex, referring to Clare’s fate as rooted in her conception, “…an unspeakable crime…the shrouded crapshoot of chromosomes. So much easier to believe it all went wrong back then…” This paragraph steadily gains weight as we move through story, absorbing the misery of the sex acts ministered and absorbed by the working girls, by Clare herself, as her mother well knows.

When we come back to the sexual relationship of the parents at the end of the story, it is terribly sad, but—again, this will depend on who is reading—I thought cathartic. The story seems to question whether love is love when its object is lost; if love unrequited metastisizes, or can it still be salvaged as something worthwhile. I think the ending offers at least the possibility of hope.

Even if I tip my head and reimagine the ending as despairing, I still think this story is compelling, gripping, and not unlovely portrayal of those eternal twins, love and loss.

Like me if you will
RR

December 29th, 2008

Hooray for real life

Ah, holidays are nice but so is real life–onward!

Pasha Malla defines love (via Fred).

The Ideal Tiger walks alone.

I read with Mike Smith and Kathleen Phillips at Strong Words at the Gladstone Hotel on January 19.

I been on the road too long to sympathize
RR

BIRT 2008 (review)

I had a little head-down-on-the-table moment a few weeks ago, when I realized that my 2008 Resolution tally came to about 15% achieved. Not very pretty. The wise council I received, once I pulled my face up from the wood-grain, was that actually, my 2008 resolutions were mainly stupid, so I shouldn’t feel bad about not achieving them, although possibly I should feel bad about making them in the first place.

So, fine, whatever, I’m not even linking to the 2008 resolutions–there were some “interesting” ideas in there. A few were actually ok, though: I succeeded on “attend more readings,” in the best way possible: I had much fun, heard much great poetry and prose and met many lovely folk. I am so addicted to hearing readings now that I don’t think that resolution needs to be repeated.

I came most of the way on “floss every day,” “eat healthily” and “buy non-corporate,” but not fully-completely, so those go back on the list. And then I failed utterly on “stop eating gelatin”, but in retrospect, I think the cosmos aligned to expose me to an abnormally huge amount of gelatin in January and February 2008, making it difficult to get any traction on that particular resolution. So I’m going to try it again, despite some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Ok, so that’s one resolution success, four resolutions to repeat, nine failures and six new resolutions to come up with before Thursday. Not a problem. Just let me rest my cheek here on the desk for a moment.

Tried it in my very own dreams
RR

December 27th, 2008

Admirable Words (III)

The truth is that like all great French generals and statesmen, I am a man of action by default. My real vocation was to be a writer but my early stories were rejected by corrupt monarchist editors who wished to suppress the truth about Corsica. Before they went to the blade, my poems were taped to their mouths. Now I feel most myself in the night silence of my tent, the candles sputtering, the white paper stretching out in creamy reams softer than the eyeball of an empress. My letters to Josephine, my diaries of war, but most of all the words unwritten, the vast armies that have sunk into the whiteness of paper like my troops into the snow of the endless Russian plains.

Lost, yes, because words cannot equal the splendour of these pre-dawn hours, the wonder of being alone in a tent near tomorrow’s battlefield. Outside my canvas the starry sky sparkles over the heads of my sleeping troops, four hundred thousand men lurching towards the dawn, toward the first light that will jerk them awake, full of fear and hunger and that wild chaos only I can harness, only I can turn into an orderly hurricane of violence that will send them flying into the enemy, hacking and being hacked until their skins split, their bones shatter, their blood masses in stinking pools slowly draining to dark patches on the earth so at the end of the day, as the sun sets on the dead and the dying, as the cries of the wounded rise above the surgeons’ saws and the hasty whispered prayers of my priests, I, Napoleon, repulsed, sated, sick at heart, fulfilled, I will mourn the great unconscious mass of men who sleep around me now; I will mourn their dead and crippled horses, their orphans, the rivers of wine they will never drink, the aging flesh their hands will never know. Monster, yes, that is the title with which history will reward me, but I am most at home in my lonely simple tent, doing the job that has been left to me, the manufacture of dreams and nightmares, sending my word-rich armies onto their pages of snow, letting them cancel and slaughter each other until all that remains is a brief and elegant poem, a few nostalgic blood-tinted lines limping towards eternity, yes, that’s how I want to be remembered, bleeding and limping in rags across the snow, or even forget the blood, the rags, the snow, the limp. Just me.

–Matt Cohen’s “Napoleon in Moscow,” from Getting Lucky

December 26th, 2008

Gifts

Of *course* Christmas is not really about pretty objects wrapped in pretty paper, much as I do like such things. I occasionally lose track of what Christmas *is* about, it not really being historically my family’s holiday, much as we do like it now. Mainly, it’s just a time of year when kindness as well as prettiness seems more apt to happen, and to be accompanied by friendliness and food and frolic. La! This year, a few of the gifts I received:

–orange scarf with *curly tassels*
–hugs
–glitter cards
–apple-flavoured KitKat
–baking support (because as soon as a ruler, a candy thermometer, “egg wash” or extreme patience is called for in the recipe, I can’t do it by myself)
–lunch at Allen’s
–Deborah Eisenberg’s *Twilight of Superheroes*
–thoughtful review in The Westmount Examiner
–out-of-town friends in town
–baby pictures
–Bill Murray in *Scrooged*
–Christmas carols on every station on FM radio (I listened for about 2 days, which is about right. I firmly believe that people who hate Christmas carols have just been over-exposed).
–new hoop earrings to replace the ones I wrecked 1.5 years ago and never got ’round to buying for myself
–somewhere in the depths of Canada Post right now, a mixed tape
–the happy realization I can finally get my foot above my head (though only if I am leaning on a wall/fridge/car)
–leisure time and naps
–fancy tea towels
–tidings of comfort and joy

I hope it was very similarly wonderful in your neck of the woods.

Star of wonder / star of night
RR

PS–What are we celebrating on Boxing Day?

December 24th, 2008

The Merriest

This has been my standard Christmas wish for some years, but it does still very much apply, and hell, it’s worked for June Christy since 1961.

I’d like to fix this bag of tricks
And hand’em out with a fleeting greeting:
Smiles for the frowners
Saluts to the uppers
Boosts for the downers
May the day be the bowl-of-cherriest,
And to all, the merriest.

Hope you swing during the season
Hope the days go great
Hope you find plenty of reasons
The whole year long to celebrate.
Sun for the mopers
A laugh for the criers
Luck for the hopers
To the strange and the ordinariest
Me to you, the merriest!

Thoughts for the musers
A cheer for the winners
Breaks for the losers
To the beats and the debonairiest
Greetings like the merriest!

Hope there’s oil under your rose vine
Hope you get that raise
Hope you hope everything goes fine
The next three hundred and some-odd days!

Friends for the loners
Songs for the singers
Grins for the groaners
Make the day nothing-can-compariest
At the most, the merriest!

RR

December 22nd, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews Balance Exercises on the Bosu Ball

I have terrible equilibrium, as I believe has come up in this space before, in relation to climbing things, crossing stages, and most especially, walking on ice.

But it’s not as if I’m just working my way through winter at a violently whining crawl. I’ve been working on this issue in various ways, most recently since June on the fun and dangerous Bosu Ball!

Wikipedia defines a Bosu Ball as:

an athletic training device consisting of an inflated rubber hemisphere attached to a rigid platform. It is also referred to as the “blue half-ball”, because it looks like a stability ball cut in half. The name is an acronym which stands for “Both Sides Utilized,” (although the BOSU official web site also says it means “Both Sides Up”) a reference to the myriad ways a BOSU ball can be used [1].

Click here to see a picture (yes, that is the best one I could find).

This is a branded product, Bosu, but as far as I can tell there is no generic term. I guess there’s a pretty limited market for half a rubber ball with a standing platform, and the Bosu people have covered it. Good on them, I say.

What do you do with a Bosu? Well, tonnes of stuff according to various websites, but for the amateurs among us, we basically move upper body exercises onto this really tippy platform, which adds an element of core strength (you improve your posture and tighten your abs in an attempt to stay vertical) and lower-body strength (you brace your feet and tighten your quads for similar reasons).

It takes awhile to just get to a comfortable point of standing still on a Bosu. Start out practicing near a wall. Put one hand on the wall and foot fartherest from the wall in the centre of the flat surface. Then put the other foot as close as possible and wiggle the first foot out until they are parallel. Wiggle a bit more until you are balanced, more or less. There. Now take your hand off the wall.

The easiest things to do on a Bosu involve standing still and moving only your arms, something like an Arnold Press. That is where you do a biceps curl with a dumbbell in each hand, and then flip the arms out into a shoulder press, then reverse back to start (see here for a cute little video. And yes, it was named after the Terminator.

Any sort of standing biceps/triceps/shoulder exercise will work on a the Bosu, and you can move on to doing squats, cable pulls, all kinds of strength training stuff.

If you’re me, you have to cut way down on the weight you’re lifting every time you put an exercise onto the Bosu, to compensate for the extreme distraction of potentially falling over and smashing your skull into the very wall you used to pull yourself upright. Every time you do the work-out, though, you gain confidence. It’s really *not* the safest thing in the world, but with a reasonable amount of care (about what you work out around, principally–mats are good, bench-press bars are bad) you can be reasonably assured of finishing the work-out in one piece.

Six month later, I do think I am marginally steadier on ice and land, though six months of indoor exercise cannot erase a life-time of falling phobia. I do appreciate the efficiency of these exercises, since they always hit the aforementioned abs and quads, no matter what you are doing. And Bosu exercises are a novel challenge, keeping me from getting bored with my work-out.

But really, a Bosu costs $45 to $60, is sort of terrifying and you could always just do a lot of Tree Pose. Only get involved if you can try out a ball for free somehow; lots of gyms have them. If you like this sort of possibly-concussion-inducing challenge, maybe then go ahead and spend the dough.

Me, I’m still scared, and I actually don’t try to do this stuff on days I’m feeling headachy or otherwise more off-balance than usual. But I have felt some small gains from it, and it is satisfying to me reasonably steady up there, though also something about it that’s like being a trained bear in a cirucs. And then there was the time I was doing standing cable rows and squats on my Bosu, concentrating *very* hard in order to keep from pitching forward into the weight stack and smashing out all my teeth. A woman strolled past, stopped aghast and exclaimed, “And you’re chewing *gum*!”

All you single ladies.
RR

December 21st, 2008

Bring in the light

This year, the first night of Hannukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, falls tonight, late enough in the calendar year to coincide with Winter Solstice, the day with the shortest period of sunlight in the year, celebrated by many as the “rebirth” of the year that ushers in the lengthening of light period of days.

Whether you’ll be celebrating either, both, or nothing in particular this evening, lightness and brightness to all.

They always did the best they could
RR