6th Canadian Reading Challenge: The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

I didn't realize when I started reading The Language Instinct that Pinker is Canadian-born.  I should have picked up on it right away because he is so smart and so funny in that way that keeps the reader breathless and in his thrall.

No wonder the Korean professor in the English department at my former university came back to Korea after his sabbatical year at MIT dreamily murmuring about "Steven" and "Noam".  Professor Dude, I take back my derisive snort.  I snorted it back into my body (ouch!), never to be heard again.  Let's organize a dreamy murmuring party.  You do Nooooammmmmmmm and I'l do Steeeeeeeeeven, then after a while, we can switch or argue about turn-taking or get all sweet and hazy about morphemes.

Back to the book:  I had a little trouble keeping up with Pinker, because my heart just won't follow along with his pages and pages of diagrammed sentences, but mostly, I had fun.  I enjoyed reading about the experiments with babies to see just how early their instinct for spoken language kicks in.  It made me want to borrow someone of the diapered persuasion so I could do experiments of my own while disguising my intentions under the cloak of wannabe-granny warmth.

More good times ensued watching Pinker take down the so-called "language mavens" who are always weeping and wailing about how English grammar is being despoiled. They are talking of course about prescriptive grammar, and they are too anal or narrow-minded to understand the beauty of discussions about descriptive grammar. Pinker put them in their place with a withering comment somewhere along the lines of their concern for maintaining a rigid linguistic status quo "...has about as much to do with human language as judging cats at a cat show has to do with mammalian biology."

There's so much more.  Dreamily murmuring and manic typing aren't going together very well in this review, I'm afraid.  I can't forget about the monkey Nim Chimpsky.  I was very LOL (notice my use of descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar here) at the sight of Rod Stewart and Fred Flintstone as neighbors on Pinker's "bushy" reworking of Darwin's chain of being that we all had to study in biology class.

What else?  I liked how computers could find ambiguities in phrases that humans would consider to be extremely straightforward.  For example:

Time flies like an arrow.
(Fruit flies like a banana.)
Mary had a little lamb.
(With mint sauce.  The doctors were VERY surprised.  That tramp!)

The thing that made me want to fly with Pinker forever was his inclusion of this "fiendish string", created by one of his students, that is actually a possible -- grammatical -- sentence.  As Pinker carefully explains, to make sense of it, one just needs to remember that there is a city in upstate New York called Buffalo, American bison are known as buffalo, and the verb form of the word means to intimidate someone.  Now, imagine that  groups of upstate New York bison like to get together and intimidate each other:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

I'm so glad I read this book, but I'm all dissatisfied because now I only want to come up with fiendish grammar strings of my own and lay them at Steven Pinker's feet.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Oh, Steven.

6th Canadian Book Challenge: Canadian Inventions

The Canadians invented so many great things: the goalie mask, insulin, the robotic space arm, Standard time and poutine, not necessarily in that order.  They also invented some quirky things like a mechanical skirt lifter,  square bullets and Earth Paper, which is partially made of muskox poop. (Since muskox are herbivores, their  leavings are extremely fibrous.)

Canada was also a place to look to for inspiration.  In the years following World War I, a small black bear cub was rescued by a Canadian vet and brought to the London Zoo, where she became a popular exhibit.  Winnie (short for Winnipeg, the kindly vet's hometown) was especially loved by a little boy named Christopher Robin Milne.  Repeated trips to the zoo gave his writer dad an idea...

The invention that intrigued me most was salmon leather.  I'd love to see and feel some shoes or a handbag made from salmon skin.

Author Lisa Wojna wrote Canadian Inventions for younger readers, but it's fun and educational for everyone.

6th Canadian Book Challenge

Awww....what a face!  Just one look and there was no way in Halifax I could resist signing up for the 6th Canadian Book Challenge.  Actually, in my eagerness to complete my first book, I forgot to send John Mutford an email signifying my intentions, but he knows my heart. Just yesterday, I could have sworn that it was beating to the tune of O Canada.

My first book for the new challenge is Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler.  The title is a bit of a misnomer; the bulk of the book is about Wagler's struggle as a young adult to find his place as a devout and contributing member of his community.  Over the course of a decade, he left several times, feeling constricted by the laws of the religion, but when he was away, he felt restless, lost and on his way to damnation.

  Ira Wagler's search for spiritual peace makes for compelling reading, and his rough, unpolished style of writing serves him well in chronicling his anguish, although at times his tendency to hastily summarize often raised as many questions in my mind as it answered.  I would be interested in reading a second memoir of his post-Amish years.

So LOL Seollal Update: Getting All Canadian

Maybe it was the snow, but I woke up feeling all North NORTH American today, and before the little bit of white stuff had melted off good and proper, I had finished these two Canadian books:

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood.  Atwood has got dystopia down flat.  Readers who enjoyed 2003's Oryx and Crake had to wait several years for this companion novel, but it was worth the wait.  After the "Waterless Flood" (brought on by a mad scientist type in the first novel), two women, Ren and Toby, are in seclusion.  Ren has been locked into her workplace, a sex establishment called Scales n' Tails.  Toby, who has been hiding from her former rapist/kidnapper, is holed up in a beauty spa called ANooYoo.  While dealing with their current problems (imminent starvation, brutal escapees from Painball, genetically altered pigs with human brains) both of them flash back to their days in God's Gardeners, an eco-cult whose members dress in hemp and under the guidance of Adam One, tries to blend religion and science evenly.  They are portrayed both humorously and sympathetically.  This is the second book in a trilogy.  I hope we don't have to wait several years for the third book.

Something Good - Robert Munsch.  Tyya goes shopping with her father (who looks a lot like Mr. Munsch) and she tries to improve on her father's healthy (and boring) food choices.  Chaos ensues when the father tells Tyya to stand still and not move.  Tyya is mistaken as a doll and marked with a $29.95 price tag.  Judging by the dialogue, I have a feeling that Munsch wrote this book shortly after a viewing of Frankenstein (1931).  There's a fun version on YouTube with Munsch himself doing the hono(u)rs.

Page count for So LOL Seollal:  120

I'm not sure what's up with Teri.  She gave me a book today that I reallyreally want to read, (but can't until April *sob*) then she disappeared again.  She must be deep in the pages.

Edited to add:


Teri sez: 
 I finished Against All Odds (a thriller type of novel) and am 69% through Apothecary's Daughter.  That's a good read.  Enough for tonight!  I'm "Read out" for today. :)  Page count on Sunday: 261.  Monday: 361.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: The Sisters Brothers - Patrick deWitt

I'm in danger of burbling because I loved The Sisters Brothers so much.  I'll try to keep the squeeeeing! and the exclamation points to a minimum.  I love everything -- the cover, the title, the storytelling style, the story itself, the characters, the setting...I feel like I'm going to squeee! again.

Thanks so much to Jessica and Unruly Reader for bringing this book to my attention.  When Jessica said that it reminded her of O Brother, Where Art Thou? my interest was piqued, but then Unruly said the magic words:  True Grit.  And she was damn right.   It's like Patrick deWitt ate True Grit every day when he was growing up and it's in his cells.  I love when authors internalize a certain book and when they write their own it's so good and, as a bonus, you can see the other one shining up at you like a gift.  It's not copying or being derivative; it's all about creativity, and there's something higher and purer at work.  It's like Margaret Mitchell and Vanity Fair.  It's like that guy who wrote The Laments, George Hagen.  He seems to have slept with The World According to Garp under his pillow every night.

How to describe this delightful picaresque novel about two outlaw brothers so everyone will want to read it?   True Grit meets Pulp Fiction meets The Coen Brothers.   I'm so pleased that The Sisters Brothers has already received a lot of attention and awards.  If it were up to me, I'd hand Patrick deWitt the Pulitzer for fiction right here and now.  He's eligible, isn't he?  Someone say yes!

I want everyone to read this book.  Really, really, really, really.   I'll gladly forego the niceties of conversation from here on out.  This is what my sociolinguistics might sound like until I get what I want or until people start avoiding me: 

Person:  Hi, Susan.  How are you today?
Me:  Hi.  Fine.  Go read The Sisters Brothers.
Person:  OK...what have you been up to?
Me:  I just finished The Sisters Brothers.  It's shit-hot good. You should read it.
Person: Err, OK.  See you later.
Me: Call me after you've read The Sisters Brothers.

I'm guessing that there has already been interest in this novel as a movie project, and I can't wait.  In the meantime, I'm going to seek out Patrick deWitt's first novel, Ablutions.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Who Brought the Cat?

In early October, I was all about Margaret Atwood.  Wonderful Atwood and her dry, ironic tone.  You've probably read her, but have you ever heard her speak?  It's one of the true pleasures in a civilized world.  I could listen to her all day.

The first Atwood book for this month (my first ever was the 1976 novel Lady Oracle) was a 1991 short story collection called Wilderness Tips.  this has been on my TBR shelf for a couple of years.  There are some books, like this one, that I hoard like candy because I know I'm going to enjoy them thoroughly and I'm heightening my delight by delaying it.  Sometimes that doesn't always work out.  I'm thinking of Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill.  My fault, not Gaitskill's.  When a book sits on your TBR for 5+ years, your expectations can get wildly over-inflated.

Anyway, this was not the case with Wilderness Tips.  I knew I would enjoy it and I did.  First of all, it contains one of my very favorite short stories, "Hairball", which I first read when it was published in The New Yorker under the title "Kat".  Kat, an editor for a fashion magazine in Toronto with a reputation for her edgy style has been hospitalized with a large but benign ovarian cyst.  The cyst is removed, and the surgeon saves it for Kat as she requested.  While she's recuperating, her married lover whom she has transformed from provincial to cosmopolitan, maneuvers himself into Kat's job and maneuvers her out the door.  "Gerald couldn't edit the phone book," Kat thinks, upon hearing that "Ger" is her replacement.  I love that line; I can hear Atwood saying it!  The current-me loves "Hairball" as much as the much-younger-me did.  If you were to read only one story in this collection (but why stop there?) my vote is for this one.

After "Hairball", others I enjoyed were "True Trash", "The Bog Man" and "Death by Landscape".  "Weight" was vintage Atwood; a woman is raising money for a battered women's shelter in memory of her friend Molly who was murdered by her spouse.  The woman is having lunch with a rich company owner and she bitterly notices that he's viewing the whole thing as a prelude to a seduction.  "Isis in Darkness" is one of two stories from a male point of view about a would-be poet who develops a lifelong fascination with an enigmatic female contemporary who is much more gifted than he is.  The title story and the last story "Hack Wednesday" I didn't find very strong or interesting in comparison to the others.

My other Atwood read was the 2003 Oryx and Crake, a dystopian novel.  The book begins with Snowman who is sleeping in a tree, clad only in a sheet and starving to death.  The weather seems to be all messed up and he has to be on guard against threatening  and obviously genetically engineered animals like pigoons and wolvogs.  There seem to be no other people around except the very odd green-eyed herbivores that Snowman refers to as the Children of Crake, who treat him kind of like a monster and kind of like a prophet.  They have created a theology about Oryx and Crake, and always ask Snowman questions about them. Oryx was a a former sex slave who Jimmy and Crake both loved.

Snowman tries to make sense of his world by going back into his past when he was Jimmy, a young boy who grew up in the Compound, where extraordinary people lived (those gifted at science and technology).  At school, he becomes friends with Crake, a brilliant and strange newcomer.  During these recollections, Jimmy/Snowman makes an actual and treacherous journey back to Crake's top-secret lair, the ironically named Paradice Project.

In the early pages, Oryx and Crake feels a little bit like The Road, but during the passages detailing Jimmy and Crake's teenage years, Atwood's dry wit is apparent.  She writes adolescent males so well.  She even gets pretty silly with her names for animals and names of products and the video games and websites Jimmy and Crake play and visit, some of which seem creepily familiar.  I'm now reading The Year of the Flood, which was published several years later.  It is a companion piece to Oryx and Crake. Jimmy's in dire straits at the end of Oryx and Crake, so I hope that he'll turn up or some mention of him will be made in The Year of the Flood.

This huge dip into Margaret Atwood's work makes me sad that my TBR pile of her books is dwindling.  After I finish The Year of the Flood, all that will be left is The Tent.  It might be time to venture into the pleeblands for more Atwood.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Dance on the Earth - Margaret Laurence

This memoir feels particularly intimate because Margaret Laurence dictated the second draft of it during her last illness -- she became too weak to sit at her typewriter.  Readers can almost feel the pauses, the musing and the striving for clarification that thoughtful speakers go for in conversation.

As with most memoirs, Dance on the Earth's most compelling chapters are the ones that describe Laurence's childhood growing up in Neepawa, Manitoba.  The memoir's sections are built around the three women she calls her three mothers:  Her birth mother, who died when she was a small child, her mother's sister, who later on became her stepmother when she married Margaret's father as well as her only parent, because her father died when she was nine, and her mother-in-law, whom she seems to have regarded with great respect and warmth.

When Margaret goes away to college and during her married years, some of the immediacy seems to fade. Laurence and her husband lived in several different countries during their marriage, but she doesn't really refer to them much, except for the strangeness and inconvenience.  At the point in the memoir in which she leaves her husband, (they were amicably divorced after years of separation) takes the two children and settles in England, the reader feels drawn nearer again.  In fact, Laurence really lights up at the mention of all her subsequent homes and seems to relish the memory of these places.  It's touching to read about her joy when a place felt really right to her.

Another high point of Dance on the Earth is Laurence's insistence that birth stories should be told, (as she mentions bitterly, for so many years male writers sneered at this tendency in women writers) so she tells the stories of her children's births in loving detail.  She's also frank and forthright at expressing her puzzlement, hurt and frustration over her award-winning novel, The Diviners, being challenged and on the verge of being banned just a short time later. Unhappily, this incident took place in the very area of Canada in which she decided to live after years in England.  Dance on the Earth is also full of marvelous photos spanning nearly a century's worth of photographs of both family and friends.  I was really pleased to see a picture of Al Purdy with Laurence's daughter, Jocelyn. 

 My only problem with the book was the ending.  In the last pages of her memoir, Margaret acknowledges that she doesn't have long and bids the reader, and seemingly life a dignified and heartfelt farewell.  Then there's a final section that's a mixture of writings -- poems, letters, speeches -- that Laurence had composed over the years.  I believe that if Laurence had been in better health and had had more time to live, she would have worked those pieces into the body of her memoir.  It was sad, because it was as if Jocelyn, who edited her mother's final work posthumously, was too upset and overwhelmed by the material and didn't have the heart to edit it into the memoir, but also didn't have the heart to leave it out completely.  After I closed the book, I was left unsettled and feeling  a sense of loss but also a sense of unquenchable strength.

Canadian Book Challenge 5: Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood

I'm getting another late start but as Alanis Morrissette would put it, everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine.  I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is holding a copy of Margaret Atwood's short story collection, Moral Disorder.  This collection seems almost like a novel since all the stories revolve around the same character, Nell (according to the last story, apparently her mother named her after a favorite childhood horse). 

The stories covering Nell's growing-up years and her relationship with her 12-years-younger sister, Lizzie, are standouts.  One of my favorites was "My Last Duchess", in which Nell is tutoring her prematurely staid boyfriend Bill (as in a bill that must be paid?) for exams, and they end up fighting and breaking up over the characters in in Browning's poem.  Bill is aghast that Nell has decided that the Duke might deserve some sympathy because his last duchess was smarmy and stupid with her indiscriminate smiles.

When Nell is in her late 20s, she gets involved with a kooky couple called Oona and Tig (short for Gilbert).  She and Oona become friends, but oddly, Oona has handpicked Nell to be Tig's next wife.  I couldn't quite follow why Nell just went along with it; Tig remains a nonentity.  The two of them settle into a farmhouse in the title story and it felt like The Egg & I with Atwood's trademark unpleasant twinges when she's writing about relationships.

My other favorite was "The Labrador Fiasco".  Nell, now middle-aged, is visiting her parents, and her father, a recovering stroke victim is captivated with the ill-fated account of Hubbard and Wallace, two Americans who blithely decided to make their names exploring "the last unmapped Labrador wilds", along with a Native American guide, George.  As Nell's father, who was an adept outdoorsman in his younger days, compulsively follows the story again, he can point with assurance to the errors Hubbard and Wallace made.  Then, after suffering a second stroke, he falls under the impression that it is he who is lost in a forest.

"I never thought this would happen," he says.  He doesn't mean the stroke, because he doesn't know he's had one.  He means getting lost.
"We know what to do," I say.  "Anyway, we'll be fine."
"We'll be fine," he says, but he sounds dubious.  He doesn't trust me, and he is right.

It's been several years since I read any of Atwood's work (unless I count her brilliant introduction to Frozen In Time) and Moral Disorder has whetted my appetite for more.

Canadian Book Challenge 4: My Wussy American Self Falls Short Again

This challenge is almost at an end, and I'm not going to be able to complete it successfully.  If I had an airplane I still couldn't make it on time.  Eleven books.  Close, but no Canadian cigar.  No celebratory mug of Moosehead.  No congratulatory call from Alex Trebek -- but don't cry for me, Nova Scotia.  I'm smiling through my maple leaf-shaped tears, because I made some excellent reading discoveries this year and after all, there's always Canadian Book Challenge #5, eh?

Here's my list for the year:

1. Gone to an Aunt's:  Remembering Canada's Homes for Unwed Mothers - Anne Petrie.

2. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler.

3. The Diviners - Margaret Laurence.

4. Piling Blood - Al Purdy.

5. To Paris Never Again - Al Purdy.

6. Me Write Book:  It Bigfoot Memoir - Graham Roumieu.

7. The Cariboo Horses - Al Purdy.

8. The Tenderness of Wolves - Steph Penney.

9. Room - Emma Donoghue.

10. 50 Below Zero - Robert Munsch.

11. The Road Past Altamont - Gabrielle Roy.

Canadian Book Challenge 4: The Road Past Altamont - Gabrielle Roy

The Road Past Altamont is a slim volume of four stories about a young girl named Christine growing up on the prairies of Manitoba.  Roy's style is dreamlike and introspective, but it's infused with a luminous kind of energy.  In the first selection, "My Almighty Grandmother", Christine, who is six years old, goes to stay with her grandmother and feels quite bored and irritated until her grandmother creates a doll for her.  It's not so much having a new toy as the act of creation that mesmerizes Christine, who was staunchly convinced up to that point that dolls only came from stores.

Soon after that, the grandmother, who is steadily declining, comes to live with Christine and her family.  At the end of her life, she can no longer speak or move, and Christine's mother despairs of reaching her.  Christine gets the idea of retrieving the family album and calling out to her grandmother the names of everyone in the pictures.  "In this way, it seemed to me, Grandmother would be able to gather once more into her mind all those who belonged to her."  Christine's mother walking by the bedroom, catches Christine at her new pastime and  gives her

"a sad and very tender smile...But why did she look so pleased with me?  I was only playing, as she herself had taught me to do, as Memere also  had played with me one day...as we all play perhaps, throughout our lives, at trying to catch up with one another."

In the second story, "The Old Man and the Child", Christine is slightly older.  She strikes up a friendship with one of her neighbors, an old man named Monsieur St-Hilaire during the hot prairie summertime.  Each admires the other's imagination, and when the old gentleman finds out that Christine has never seen a large body of water, he arranges a trip to Lake Winnipeg for the two of them.  In one of the most arresting images in the book, they sit on the sand by the water, dressed up in their best clothing while people laugh and cavort all around them.  They just sit solemnly and look at the breakers and listen to "the deep song of the lake".

In "The Mover" Christine's mother (Maman) finds out what comes of having fed her daughter's imagination with stories of traveling from Quebec to Manitoba by covered wagon when she herself was a little girl.  Christine, who is now eleven years old, has always lived in the same home, and when she strikes up an acquaintance with the daughter of a man who moves furniture with his horse and cart to earn a little extra money, she is determined to accompany him on one of these moves so she can have a similar experience to her mother's.  Christine understands that moving ideally means going to something bigger and better, so she is disillusioned when the mover takes a family from one ugly shack in Winnipeg to an almost identical one on the other side of the city.  This is the least introspective of the four stories and the most entertaining.

The last story is the title story.  Christine is a young adult now and driving her mother to visit her relatives.  Maman is starting to pine for the hills she left behind in her childhood, and while traveling the back roads to take a shortcut to the highway, Christine gets lost and somehow ends up in the Pembina Mountains, which is the only mountain range in their part of Manitoba, which delights Maman.  Their only clue as to how they could possibly find their way back again is a post office sign for Altamont.  They go back again later and find some hills, but Maman is sure that they are not "their" hills, and that Christine has carelessly lost the way.  Furthermore, Christine has expressed a longing to leave Manitoba and go abroad to Europe, so Maman is feeling a double betrayal.

I've never read another writer that reminded me so much of Virginia Woolf -- that same strong combination of intelligence, empathy and elegance.  What a wonderful introduction to this author's work.  I want more.  The next book I'll be looking for by Gabrielle Roy is her 1945 novel The Tin Flute.

Canadian Book Challenge: 50 Below Zero - Robert Munsch

I read and enjoyed this picture book back when The Spawn was an elementary school student and very much attached to anything Robert Munsch wrote. This was my favorite.  I'm not sure which one The Spawn liked best.  I do remember the time Robert Munsch came to town, though.  I'd never seen a bookstore so full of people in my life.  Fans of all ages were lined up clear out the door and down the sidewalk.

I ordered 50 Below Zero a few months ago to beef up the children's section of the Bybee-ary and had every intention of reading it to my Children's Literature class. During the semester, I put a really strong emphasis on the importance of picture books and gave the class a list of all the ways that they are important to a child's development as a reader.  This approach worked very well for a class of 62 second language learners whose levels were all over the place.   I was sorry we didn't get to 50 Below Zero, but we ran out of time.

Instead, I ended up reading it to my Native English 1 class.  One of the units had a reading exercise about a woman who not only sleepwalked, she sleepdrove the car one night.  There  were also some discussion questions about the best way to handle sleepwalkers.  We had 10 minutes left at the end of class, so I decided to read 50 Below Zero to them.  They loved the silliness, the repetition and the hilarious illustrations by Michael Martchenko.  Determined to wring every bit of English out of them that I could, I asked the students to translate the title into Celsius. "-45.5555" just doesn't pack the same punch, eh?

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney

8 books down! I'm really starting to make some progress on this challenge. As Hank Snow would say, although in a different context, "I'm movin' on."

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My most recent read is The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. In this case, the author is not Canadian, but the setting is. In 1867 Canada, in the small settlement of Caulfield/Dove River, a French-Canadian trapper is found murdered. By coincidence, 17-year-old Francis Ross, his nearest neighbor, hasn't been seen in several days. The local magistrate is compelled to call in some men from the North American Company, who act as policemen on the frontier, and they begin tracking Francis. Soon after, his mother, with the help of another trapper, follows the Company men in hopes of clearing her son's name. Did I mention that this is Canada? Did I mention that winter is coming on?

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The Tenderness of Wolves is related through several points of view, but it's smoothly done and not in the least jarring. I felt close to several of the characters, and when new ones were introduced, I felt invested in them almost immediately. In style and spirit, this book reminded me of Lonesome Dove. It's very good in the way Lonesome Dove is very good (long, arduous journey, unforgettable characters --even the minor ones) although it is only a third of that novel's size. (Hmm...do you suppose "Dove River" is a nod to McMurtry?)

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Good on the Costa people for giving The Tenderness of Wolves their Best Book Award back in 2006. Now that I've finally read this (it sat on my TBR shelf for more than three years), it's my job to hector everyone into going out and finding it and reading it. Soon. Tomorrow would be OK. Meanwhile, I must hunt up more of Stef Penney's work.

Canadian Reading Challenge 4: The Cariboo Horses - Al Purdy

The Cariboo Horses (1965) was the book that, after 22 years of writing poetry, put Al Purdy (still styling himself as "Alfred" here) on the map -- he most deservedly won a Governor-General's Award for that collection. I feel so full of love for The Cariboo Horses and Purdy that I'm quite incoherent. I just want to type heart heart heart. Those are big ol' maple leafs dancing in my eyes.

Rather than read my burble, go here to the CBC archives and listen to an 11-minute 1967 interview. Happily, the questions are kept to a minimum and once he audibly settles into the studio chair with a little sigh, Purdy is let loose to perform three of his poems from The Cariboo Horses,"Thank God I'm Normal", the title poem and the hilarious "Homo Canadensis". The latter is a poem about a drunken stranger having some fun with patriotism at a watering-hole and demonstrates once again how Purdy could have been a contender for a short story writing crown as well.

I love Purdy's voice. He's Canada Wry and has an almost Jimmy Stewart twang. I can hear everything in his syllables and even the spaces between: Ontario, rough weather, smoke, wide open provinces, Kraft Dinner, homemade beer, hockey games. I must have more.

Canadian Reading Challenge: Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir

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This graphic novel? picture book? by Graham Roumieu is a delightfully and grubbily illustrated no-holds-barred memoir written in Biglish (Bigfoot English) is so much fun. Nasty, silly, profane, a gross-out fest, an encyclopedia of yuck -- I can't praise it highly enough.
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Bigfoot tries hard to get by in the world and be a "forest gentleman" but the world often makes him "angry like Henry Rollins". One of his few human friends, Chet, compares himself and Bigfoot to Han Solo and Chewbacca. Bad move, Chet:
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I wake up next day with Chet scalp in mouth. Seriously, I not Chewbacca. Dude.
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In Japan, he dons a mawashi and sumo wrestles wild animals:
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Not want to toot own horn or anything, but I really good. I Harlem Globe Trotter of Sumo. Tear head off puma, throw head in garbage can 50 feet away and pretend play rest of body like guitar...walk down street everybody whisper: 'Bigfroot! Bigfroot!'

He readily admits that his luck with women isn't too great: Most of them run away, a few haul out the pepper spray, but Worst is when they do silent scream and vomit trickle down chin like hot fudge on sundae.

Even on the bad days, Bigfoot can always take comfort and pride in being one of a kind:
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...me very proud of being on endangered species list because of all privalege of being in exclusive club. Some day, I just pick up phone, call Black Rhino and shoot the shit. I can even use the word rhino and shoot in same sentence and nobody think twice. Crazy! I get away with murder cause everyone think I fragile since I last of kind and so on.

Of course, the downside of being a rarity is that Bigfoot also attracts a lot of poachers. A safari hunter who had a yen for Bigfoot's organs stalked him and studied his habits. Learning of Bigfoot's love for Count Chocula cereal, he hid in the refrigerator, disguised as a carton of milk.
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Unfortunately, for the hunter, Bigfoot had just decided to go on a low-carb diet:
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...so no Chocula. Man freeze to death in fridge. Bigfoot also have cirrhosis at time so it convenient for me use him for liver transplant donor. Bigfoot enjoy irony.

Blame it on the compost smell or maybe that family of voles nesting in his armpit, but I find him pretty damn irresistable, and can't wait to read his follow-up memoir, Bigfoot: I Not Dead.

Canadian Reading Challenge: To Paris Never Again - Al Purdy

I don't know any good living poets. But there's this tough son-of-a-bitch up in Canada that walks the line.
-Charles Bukowski-

Apparently, the hard-bitten admiration was mutual, because the first poem in Al Purdy's last poetry collection published during his lifetime is "Lament for Bukowski" in which Purdy says, "You wrote like God with a toothache" and leaves even the most casual reader of Bukowski, or anyone who's ever seen Barfly with this spot-on image:

Pop Bukowski in his coffin
dead as hell
but reaching hard for a last beer
and just about making it

The second poem in the collection, "On Mexican Highways" is a disturbing memory of being able to see the final expressions of a family in a car in the last seconds before they plunged from the trecherous road and down the mountainside. He compared it to a photo. Spooky stuff, the seeds of future nightmares.

To Paris Never Again consists largely of memories of the past that seem to have been covered in his earlier volumes, but this is no shambling about in old age -- he's revisiting these scenes expertly, eloquently. There are also meditations on approaching death and coming to grips with the passage of time:

The Clever Device
Time is a thing you invented
for a point of reference
for yourself
--after three score years
and ten of your clever device
you point to yourself
in the mirror
and say POUF
you no longer exist
and laugh
or not be able to laugh

I'm a little sorry ("soar-e", as the Canadians would pronounce it) that Al Purdy wasn't more of a fiction writer. (He wrote one novel rather late in his career, A Splinter in the Heart.) He had an endearing gift for detail and setting a scene. In "Case History", he goes back to the 1950s and early 60s, hardscrabble years when he and his family were just barely getting by. They lived in an "A-frame house, half built" and he did a variety of odd jobs: "collecting scrap iron, picking tomatoes, selling apples door-to-door". When even the odd jobs became scarce, they subsisted on "Kraft Dinner [macaroni and cheese] and cooked road-killed rabbits."
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One day, Purdy discovered the garbage dump near the Mountainview RCAF base and found discarded food rations. He brought his family back and they scavenged cans as well as "boxes of quarter-inch plywood and cans of red and black paint." This "manna" meant that not only would they be able to eat better, he would be able to make progress on the A-frame:

With literary confidence
I didn't really feel
Stashed the worksheets of a poem
inside the house overhang
along with a note
directing future discoverers
to take the sheets to the English Dept.
of any Canadian university
and receive as reward
for this unknown masterpiece
one small case of beer
or more likely
an embarassing question
"Purdy -- who he?"

In another meditative poem, "Happiness", Purdy has a lovely image about writing that echoed exactly how I feel about reading his work and just about reading and books in general:

Happiness
the writing itself
the words exploring
all my veins and arteries

Then, there's that exquisite grappling again with life and time and what it all means:

--and by this time
it has become plain to me
that I'm not writing about happiness
at all but the puzzle of being alive

Purdy is also generous in making sure that people who helped him get credit. During the road-killed rabbit and Kraft Dinner days, there was an editor, Bob Weaver, who evidently saw promise in him and other struggling poets. "Do you need any money, Al?/Just send me some poems/I'll make sure you get the cheque fast." Purdy remarks, "Bob Weaver was Santa."

I don't know if he ever got any thanks
or for that matter wanted any
for making the connection
that these rather scruffy human beings
with all the faults of everyone else
were responsible (though very rarely)
for something that leaped up from the printed page
dazzled your brain
and fireflies whizzed in the cerebellum.

Another Carveresque short story masquerading as a poem, "Aphrodite At Her Bath" takes the reader back to Montreal, 1957 and relates an odd incident. Purdy's wife's cousin, a beautiful young woman is newly married and newly pregnant. She doesn't want the baby and has heard that the combination of beer and a hot bath would induce a miscarriage. Purdy's wife goes off to work and leaves the two there alone, the cousin sitting in the bath and Purdy fetching more and more of his home brew. They're both getting sloshed, then abruptly, Purdy flashes-foward. Aphrodite is sixty now, he tells us, with two kids:

And now the venue changes
from Montreal to Sidney BC
Anno Domoni 1995
near forty years later
where I sit writing
these words on paper
trying to avoid the eyes
of quite a large crowd
of pro-life denonstrators
gathered threateningly
around this poem.

One of the last poems in To Paris Never Again is about Marius Barbeau (1885-1969), a Canadian ethnologist and folklorist. Barbeau spent years during his career living among the Native American tribes. One evening, when Barbeau was older and largely retired from field work, Purdy asked him about Tsimsyan drumming dances. Instead of telling, Barbeau said he'd show him. Purdy writes that Barbeau really got into it and forgot everything, "focused on only the mountain at the end of the sky." Purdy admits that at the time "I was embarrassed for him/but now I'm embarrassed/that I was embarrassed/Barbeau was one of the ancient rememberers."

I first became acquainted with Al Purdy's work in his 1984 collection Piling Blood. I'm now reading 1965's The Cariboo Horses and meeting the younger Al(fred) Purdy, with smiles and shocks of recognition, a growing affection and that deepening sense of sadness readers get when they freshly discover someone who is long gone. I want to know all the incarnations of Purdy, all the way back to 1944 and his debut collection, The Enchanted Echo.

Purdy died in 2000, three years after To Paris Never Again was published. His stuff (I don't mean "stuff" trivially or dismissively. I mean it in the baseball sense, in which a pitcher is lauded for his "stuff" -- his talent and skills) makes me wish I could have met him and shared a glass of his home brew.

I'm really grateful to my Canadian friend, Jim Cooper, who is sharing his Al Purdy collection with me. I'm also glad that John Mutford continues to host the Canadian Book Challenge. Wish I could give my thanks in the shape of a poem, guys.

It's Raining Books, Hallelujah

This continues to be my lucky month. Last week, my co-worker Mike came back from Canada "with a shit-tonne of books". He immediately sent out an invitation to friends and neighbors to come over and grab the old books he'd culled from his shelves to make room for the new. Since Mike's collection (as well as his sub-collections) is fresh and winsome with beguiling whiffs of quirkiness, I headed over there with The Spawn, who came to visit for a few days.

Although culling is becoming more and more of an elusive concept for me to grasp, never let it be said that I don't help out my friends in their time of need. Here's what I brought back to the now dangerously bulging Bybee-ary:

1. Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese - Mike Nelson. Funny, funny guy. I already peeked into this 2000 collection and read his review of The Bridges of Madison County. It made me laugh in that embarrassing way that comes out all snortified.

2. Race Matters - Cornel West. I've heard a lot about this book and also read a couple of excerpts from it over the years.

3. Gang Leader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh. What began as a graduate school project turned into several years of friendship with a gang leader and an inside view of gritty life on the street.

4. How Right You Are, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse. My first Wodehouse book. Yes, that's a tear of joy.

5. Meridian - Alice Walker. I've only read her short stories and The Color Purple, so I'm eager to check out her early novels.

6. Music for Chameleons - Truman Capote. Except for In Cold Blood, I've never read any Capote. This looks like a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction in one volume.

7. King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard. Ever since reading The Lost City of Z, I've wanted to read some Rider Haggard.

8. Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir - Graham Roumieu. I thought this was a children's picture book at first, so I grabbed it for the Children's Lit class I'll be teaching in now less than a week (eeeee!). Ooops. Here's an excerpt from near the front of the book: Stink Yes, everyone know Bigfoot smell like shit. Please make effort not to point out every time you see Bigfoot. Thank you. Oh well. Still looks like fun, and there's a bonus I just discovered: I was hoping that since Mike is Canadian and Roumieu looks like a French name, that Graham Roumieu was Canadian. Yes, he is! Yay, another one for the Canadian Book Challenge! Maple Leaf me!!!

9. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark. A nice Penguin copy with a still from the movie on the cover.

10. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham. I already have a copy, but I love the Bantam Classic cover.

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11. Love Me: A Novel - Garrison Keillor. Not sure about this one, but Mike, that silver-tongued so-and-so, glibly persuaded me to take it. I have a big culture gap concerning Lake Wobegon and Keillor, but he's from Minnesota, my new favorite state, so yah, you betcha, gotta give it a go.

Good thing I brought The Spawn along. I only meant for him to experience Mike's collection firsthand (he was mesmerized by the graphic novel subcollection), but he proved to be effective as my beast of burden. After that, he rested up and went to Suwon the next day to meet a former exchange student from his alma mater for lunch. Somehow, they drifted into a bookstore. That's my boy. He came back a few hours later with a copy of The Mist by Stephen King for himself and a copy of Carrie for me! That's my boy!

Canadian Book Challenge 4: On My Way To 13

O, my Canadians! Once I put my mind to it, it didn't take long to get off to a good start. Here's what I've read so far for this challenge:

Gone To An Aunt's: Remembering Canada's Homes for Unwed Mothers - Anne Petrie. From the 1930s through the 1960s, unmarried Canadian girls who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant were whisked away from their homes and families under the most secret conditions and sent to serve out their pregnancies at homes designed for unwed mothers. When neighbors or friends remarked on the girls' absences, they were told vaguely by family members that they'd "gone to an aunt's."
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If the term "serve out" sounds a little prison-like, it's not accidental. Many of these institutions, especially the earlier ones, had strict rules about keeping these young women cloistered from society until their babies were born (for example, they could go out into the backyard, but never the front yard in some places or they could only venture out as a group after dark). In some instances, the girls had to assume false names to increase the probability that word wouldn't get out about the girl which could soil her family's reputation.
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Anne Petrie writes about how the girls including her own story, from the late 1960s) were often made to feel ashamed of themselves, hired out as servants to unsympathetic employers, pressured to give up their children for adoption (unless an unwed father could be brought to the altar) and if a girl wanted to keep her baby, she was met with a brick wall of the staunchest disapproval from everyone. Whether the homes were good or bad, sympathetic or strict, all the women interviewed for the book remembered with anger that their feelings and their wishes weren't taken into account -- weren't even considered a thing of importance.
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Much the same thing went on the United States, so I wasn't surprised by these stories. Recently, my mother told me about a relative who turned up unmarried and pregnant. The father of the child was willing to marry her, but the two sets of parents were vain and worried about what the neighbors would think, so without any input from the couple, they arranged for them to be married at a courthouse more than 100 miles away then collaborated on a bogus wedding announcement for the newspaper saying that the couple had eloped 6 months before and had only just revealed their marriage.

I feel as if I'm not so far from those days, either. When I was in high school, once a pregnant female student started to show, she disappeared from classes and finished out the term (hers or the school's, whichever came first) at Marie Detty, the local detention center. When I was a senior, one girl managed to fly under the radar since she was already stockily built and big shirts layered with scarves or vests were the fashion at that time. I remember feeling a flash of admiration that she put one over on the administration. It seemed wrong to me that these girls had to go where the really incorrigible kids went. After all, they hadn't destroyed property or harmed anyone.
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Anne Petrie did good and thorough research and her interviews were in-depth and poignant, but instead of telling each young woman's story in successive chapters, she chronicled their ordeals by the stages of pregnancy. This made it difficult to keep each person straight in my mind as I read. I recommend this book to readers from younger generations so they can compare how much society has changed -- and improved -- in this regard.
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler. Like most of the memorable characters in fiction, Duddy doesn't seem so much created as unleashed. The younger of two sons, (his father and uncle have pinned all their hopes on the older son, who's in medical school) he's always in trouble at school for pulling pranks, and in one example, goes too far and drives a teacher over the edge. A cross between Holden Caulfield and Sammy Glick, Duddy would probably be a totally unsympathetic character except that he's fiercely devoted to his family and has decided to make his grandfather's dream of owning land come true, so even before he's graduated from high school, he throws his intellect and creativity into moneymaking schemes. The novel is set in Montreal, and at times, the city seems almost a character in the story. Richler has a nice sense of pacing, an ear for dialogue that crackles and an indefinable gift for making the reader want to punch Duddy in the nose and hug him all at the same time. If you haven't read this book yet, you've got a treat in store. I'm going to try to find the 1974 movie starring Richard Dreyfuss.
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The Diviners - Margaret Laurence. If it isn't already, this should be THE Canadian novel. In the story of Morag Gunn, which spans a few decades, Laurence incorporates Canadian nature, history, a couple of provinces (Manitoba and British Columbia) and splendid Canadian vernacular. Written in 1974, this novel has that 70s kind of earnestness, and in lesser hands, could have been a mess. But it's not that at all, it's brilliant. I also read that it shows up on banned books lists, and, relating back to my first Canadian book in this post, Laurence and this novel have been held responsible by some absurd people for causing all the unwed/teenaged pregnancies in Canada! After I finished The Diviners, I went to Wikipedia and read about Laurence's life. I got a chill when I read about her suicide at 60, since there's an episode in The Diviners that seems eerily like foreshadowing.
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Piling Blood - Al Purdy. I bet Jim and Becka hate to see me coming, because the bookshelves in their living room are getting progressively balder after each visit. I'm not much into poetry, but the evocative images in the title poem made me want to keep reading:
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It was powdered blood
in heavy brown paper bags
supposed to be strong enough
to prevent the stuff from escaping
but didn't
...

I forgot to say
the blood was cattle blood
horses sheep and cows
to be used for fertilizer
the foreman said

It was a matter of some delicacy
to plop the bags down softly
as if you were piling dynamite
if you weren't gentle
the stuff would belly out
from bags in brown clouds
settle on your sweating face
cover hands and arms
enter ears and nose
seep inside pants and shirt
reverting back to liquid blood...
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Purdy's range is wide -- he writes about diverse topics such as relationships, Minnesota Fats and his wife, Menelaus and Helen of Troy, his trips to Mexico, the Galapagos Islands, Moscow and other places. I really like that because poetry often feels to me a little cramped up and claustrophobic -- practically airless. Purdy's sense of humor and his sense of wonder emerge in a poem about animals mating. "A Typical Day in Winnipeg" reads like some of the best of Raymond Carver. Purdy is obviously a D.H. Lawrence fan, because there are a couple of poems about him, and the animal-mating poem's title ("The Elephant is Slow to Mate") is from a Lawrence poem. "The Death of DHL" is so immediate, so sad but so beautiful. The last poem, "In The Early Cretaceous" imagines what flowers' first day on the planet was like and how the rest of nature responded to them:
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They came overnight
a hundred million years ago
the first flowers ever
a new thing under the sun
invented by plants
It must have been around 7 A.M.
when a shrew-like mammal stumbled
out of its dark burrow
and peered nearsightedly
at the first flower whiff
an expression close to amazement
and decided it wasn't dangerous
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Happily, I'll have the opportunity to read more of Purdy, because Becka and Jim loaned me another volume called To Paris Never Again, which I'll discuss in my next roundup of Can Lit.

Blame Canada?!

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My numbers were as putrid as ancient cheese curds for the last Canadian Book Challenge. Five books out of thirteen! I only made it to the Snowshoe level. Mortifying. I let my neighbo(u)rs to the north down badly. If Alex Trebek knew....? No. Some imagined scenarios just can't be borne.

So I thought to myself that I'd skip out on the challenge this year. Not so good, eh? But while I was home (and so much closer to Canada!) I watched Regis and Kelly visit Prince Edward Island. When Kelly dressed up like Anne of Green Gables and reenacted that first book, I started to get maple leaf pangs. Then I went to Minnesota and I was in a state that touches Canada. That did it. I knew I was good for another round.

Yep, I'll start my Canadian reading this month. I'll get caught up to where I need to be. Reading about a place notorious for its cool climate may save me from heatstroke.

That Olympic Feeling: The Canadian Reading Challenge

Although I've still got a long trek (snowshoes, where are my snowshoes?) I feel as if I'm finally making some progress with the Canadian Reading Challenge.

1. The Paper Bag Princess (children's picture book) - Robert Munsch. I'll love him forever.

2. The Cellist of Sarajevo (novel) - Steven Galloway. I was underwhelmed when I first read this novel and irritated that the title character was more of a symbol than an actual person that readers got to go, but now that the book has settled in my mind, it seems to keep improving and I found myself recommending it the other day. It's funny how some books will sneak up on you like that.

3. Divisadero (novel) - Michael Ondaatje. When Ondaatje abandoned the Anna/Claire/Coop story that begins this novel and started doing intricate and interlocking loops back into the past, I went along but not willingly. I love looking for meanings and patterns and repetition as much as the next reader, but I also want a fairly linear storyline and to see the characters I initially invested in through to some sort of conclusion, whether it be satisfying or unsatisfying. An irritating reading experience; I was left feeling like the most unsophisticated of readers.

4. A Boy Of Good Breeding (novel) - Miriam Toews. Toews relies too much on quirky charm but I'm still eager to read the whole of her canon.

5. Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (nonfiction) - Owen Beattie & John Geiger. This is far and away my favorite of the Canadian reads so far. In 1845, Sir John Franklin set out to find the Northwest Passage with his two ships the Erebus and the Terror and a crew of 129 men. (With ship names like that, wouldn't you have been tempted to turn back?)

When no one had heard or seen them by 1848, search parties were organized. The ships were never found, but there was evidence the whole party had perished. No one could understand why, since they'd shipped out with plenty of provisions, including thousands of pounds of that newfangled invention, canned food. (So new that the can opener hadn't yet been invented.) For years the question persisted: Was it blundering incompetence or something else?

Fast-forward to the early 1980s. Forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie took a team back to the Arctic and dug up and examined 3 of the victims, who were perfectly preserved in ice. Mystery solved -- cutting-edge technology was their undoing. The cans had been improperly sealed by the manufacturer and Franklin and his men died from lead poisoning.

First published in the late 1980s, Frozen In Time was updated and re-released in 2004 with a lively introduction by Margaret Atwood (I'd recommend saving it till the end of the book). The book is illustrated with photos and maps. Some of the graphic descriptions of the fate of Franklin's men aren't for those with a weak stomach. Incredibly engrossing; a perfect winter read.

It's Aboot Time! Complete Canadian Challenge Bookshelf

I've got all my Canadian books now and I'm ready to read. Actually, I got a little too enthusiastic and ended up with 14. Here's the complete list of what I'll be tackling from here to Canada Day:

Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood

Oryx & Crake - Margaret Atwood

The Tent - Margaret Atwood

Wilderness Tips - Margaret Atwood

A Mixture of Frailties - Robertson Davies

The Cellist of Sarajevo - Steven Galloway

The Diviners - Margaret Laurence

Among The Shadows - L.M. Montgomery

Emily Climbs - L.M. Montgomery

The Paper Bag Princess - Robert Munsch

Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaajte

Divisadero - Michael Ondaajte

The Tenderness of Wolves - Steph Penney

Gone To An Aunt's: Remembering Canada's Homes For Unwed Mothers - Anne Petrie