I’ve been thinning out my books - I don’t want to grow into one of those old women who end up surrounded by stacks of books, cats, papers, and piles of “stuff” - and had to admit that there were a couple of books that I knew I probably wouldn’t read again but that I enjoyed immensely the first time around. A lot of the time, these books are picked up during my travels because I finished the book I took with me and needed something to read on the flight home, or because the topic was something I was curious about and a book came up on the topic, or because the title was just too good to walk by.
Here are a few of my faves:
Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods---My Mother’s, My Father’s, and Mine by Noelle Howey - An autobiography by a teen who goes through her adolescence (an awkward time at best) at the same time her father goes through his own form of style adolescence as he prepares for trans-gender surgery. Told with a wry sense of humour that lets you in on her adolescent angst without too much earnestness.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman - The first premise of the book is that someone will eventually ask him if he’ll now recant something he wrote years ago, that no woman could ever satisfy him, and he’s say, of course, because he’s now married. But of course, no one would ever know if he’s telling the truth because there is public pressure to say the right thing. The whole Emo angst (hmmm, there’s that word again) about fake love drew me in, and then the titles of various chapters made me curious. Lise Loeb and Ice Planet Hoth ... Toby over Moby - OK, I kind of knew who Moby was ... I felt I needed to get out of the middle-aged closet, at least a little bit. I now read way more blogs and watch a lot less TV.
Black Rubber Dress, by Lauren Henderson - A whodunnit set in London where the protagonist is a low-rent, edgy sculptor of gigantic mobiles. She’s a bit of an anti-hero, so has the usual accoutrements like a male nickname and, if I’m not mistaken, tattoos and promiscuity, not to mention recreational drug use - the better the contrast to be able to critique the well-heeled crowd that make up the rest of the crowd in the book. A refreshing airplane read.
Genderqueer, edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins - I picked up this book because it’s subtitled “beyond the sexual binary” and discusses transgendered and intersexed issues intelligently, as well as the usual gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even quirkyalone, in a way. I bought it in Baltimore, where I was speaking at a conference, and used the book to describe situations where we except binaries and are made to stretch our minds when presented with more options. I was surprised at how many feedback forms involved a comment about how the presenter talked about (gasp!) sex! Really ... the inability to relate concepts ... but I digress.
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson - I couldn’t put this book down. It’s been a couple of years now since I read it, but I still remember the characters vividly. For weeks afterwards, I would wonder what happened to Ivy, Cayce, and Parkaboy. I wanted a sequel. That reminds me to check out Gibson’s latest.
The other two boxes of books will go into the donation box without fanfare. Some are well-loved, like Ann Marie MacDonald’s books, that I hope will be equally enjoyed by their next owner, and others I hope will be better enjoyed by the new owners.
My hairdresser tells me that when her sister and brother-in-law used to come to visit from Winnipeg, she was reluctant to send them out into the neighborhood - Vancouver’s West End - because of her brother-in-law’s rampant homophobia. So when they arrived this weekend to stay, and she needed them to busy themselves for a couple of hours before she could entertain them, she hesitated. But her brother-in-law said not to worry, he was going to head up the street to the local Starbucks.
Well, four hours later, when she and her sister couldn’t find him, they went on the hunt and sure enough, there he was, in Starbucks, and didn’t want to leave. Seems he was in the process of listening in on a number of conversations of the surrounding patrons and wanted to know how their conversations would end. It seems that a middle-aged gay couple was in the process of breaking up ("It’s so sad!") and a lesbian couple was talking about their impending adoption ("They sound so excited; they’ll make great parents.") It seems that after discovering Will and Grace and the humanization of the urban gay, we’re not so scary, and neither is walking around a gay neighborhood. Who knew that a TV show had such influence? Gotta love it.
I was alone this weekend, and for the most part, I spent it catch up on office work. But as an indulgence, I decided to splurge on foreign films. I chose four, and the helpful woman behind the video store counter told me there was a special - 6 for $15, so I picked up 2 Hollywood films to round it out. So, two long days later, I found that I’d chosen 6 winners:
The Story of the Weeping Camel (National Geographic) - a lovely story. No sex, violence, “action” - just a straight-up story about how a camel that rejects its colt is brought round by a violin serenade. English subtitles.
Water (Deepa Mehta) - Marvellous film about the lives of widows in India in the 1930s, about the time Ghandi is released from prison. I watched the subtitled version before I realized that the second DVD had an English version - not dubbed, but filmed simultaneously in English. I think I preferred watching it in Hindi.
Talk to Her (Aldo Almodovar) - Twisted plot but presented, as Almodovar generally does, in a human and interesting way.
Free Zone (Amos Gitai) - Great film about an Israeli, a Jordanian, and a Jewish-American ... but wait, the Israeli is from Europe via Auschwitz, the Jordanian is a Palestinian Israeli, and the American comes to Israel to be told that she’s not really Jewish. And when they end up in the Free Zone to conduct some business, they seem compelled to play out an age-old dynamic. Excellent acting.
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch) - Of all the movies, I thought this one a big gimmicky - it could have been more. But I enjoyed it as a film to watch while multitasking - it was perfect to turn my attention to while waiting for content to upload a very slow website.
Proof (John Madden) - Excellent film. It was disconcerting, but that was the point, being taken on the same ride as the protagonist. It would have been even better if the ending hadn’t been quite so formulaic, but it is a Hollywood film, so I wasn’t expecting anything that deviated from the norm.
Seeing has how nothing has been on television for weeks, this has been a welcome treat. Now it’s nose to the grindstone again.
The first time I encountered Starbucks was when I moved to Vancouver in 1992, and Starbucks was a cool, little company in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t know the words “user experience” then, but even in 1992, realized then that it was a company that created an in-crowd feeling by using its own vocabulary and in-store culture. I was curious, then, to read The Starbucks Experience to see what the deal was. I’d lost a few feel-good points over Starbucks, but not because it had grown to be a large chain - I never got that “now that you’re successful, we have you” vibe. My beef was that Starbucks sued a little coffee shop inside a kids’ clothing store, in some remote B.C. town, that called itself Starducks or something similar. This from a company that has a name from a character in Battlestar Galactica? In the vein of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I didn’t shutting down a little puddleduck shop was a very good corporate move. Aside from that, however, I was impressed with what the book outlined as their five corporate principles for creating great user experiences. I wish all executives with retail operations would read this book and implement the principles throughout their organization.
Sometimes you’re in an airport, looking for a book to read, and a book cover just tickles your interest. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran, was that right book at the right time. It’s a fast read that puts the CIA into the perspective that we long-in-the-tooth office workers suspect exists everywhere: it’s a bunch of workers who worry about things like employee reviews and paper pushing, who get budgets for some things that seem really bizarre while other necessities are denied them, whose corporate cultures claim to be one thing to the outside world while employees experience something completely different. The big difference, of course, is that most of us leave our dysfunctional workplaces behind at the end of the day, whereas Moran describes a bunch of workers who carry a world of deception around with them, weaving a world of lies and, more often, avoiding entanglements that would eventually expose them. It’s funny, in that cynical sort of way - just my type of humour.
Whenever I go into Little Sister’s bookstore, I make a point of buying at least one book, and this time it was Monique Truong‘s The Book of Salt. The premise is that the protagonist is a Vietnamese cook hired by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. This fellow, Thinh Binh, is a gay lad, and so understands his employers, yet doesn’t, as they are a gender and two cultures away, as he filters their behaviour as Americans living in Europe. Truong counterpoints Binh’s experiences in Vietnam with those in Paris, in the French countryside, and en route. There are multiple worlds inside this book, and the travel is seamless. In fact, I’m planning to send this book to a friend of mine who loves language and would completely enjoy this book.
Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man, by Charles Barkley
I picked up Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man, by Charles Barkley, on a whim at a bookstore in Oregon. Not being a sports fan, I had no clue who Barkley was, but I’m always interested in understanding more about the current state of race relations in the US, so the subtitle drew me in: race, power, fame, identity, and why everyone should read my book. As I started reading the book, I actually liked who he interviewed, how he structured the interviews, and what they had to say. It was a little depressing - if these prominent people can’t make society move, even a little teeny bit - then how stuck is the US in its social rut when it comes to racial tensions? Yikes! The funniest line in the book is George Lopez recalling a telephone conversation with a restaurant hostess who, upon hearing his surname, declared, “oh, you don’t sound Latino.” At which point he said (or perhaps thought), “and you didn’t sound stupid - until you said that.”
Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, is a remarkable book. Larkin is a pseudonym, which you start to understand the necessity for as you read the book. She searches for George Orwell on three levels - first, searching for traces of Eric Arthur Blair, the police officer stationed in Burma before becoming George Orwell, the writer; second, searching for people who have read George Orwell’s works, and finding a virtual literary underground of readers who hide their libraries of western classics from destruction by the natural elements and the ever-present spies; and third, searching for the the truth about how the Myanmar society bears out the dynamics of George Orwell’s book 1984. This kind of look inside of a closed culture is invaluable to understanding the dynamics of the world better, as much as we can ever understand it. I highly recommend it.
Elie Wiesel’s Night was a hard book to read. I got the book for my birthday, but put off reading it for a few months because reading anything about the Holocaust tends to give me recurring nightmares, but that’s a whole other story. The book was an extremely powerful read - I read it sometime in March but couldn’t review it till now. The seemingly sparse style is actually quite packed with detail; a single sentence says as much as another author might say in an entire paragraph. So this slim volume of about 120 pages packs a huge emotional whollop. And yes, recurring nightmares ensued for about a month. But it was worth it.
There’s something about Bollywood movies that just draws me in. It’s something about the not-so-stereotypically Hollywood plot lines, the choreographed dance numbers, the refreshing lack of sex scenes. Lucky for me, our local multi-culti channel shows Bollywood movies on Sunday afternoons. I don’t watch them all that often - a lot of them are pretty B-list - but once in a while something catches my eye, and today I thoroughly enjoyed Chal Mere Bhai, a comedy-drama revolving around two brothers in love with the same woman. A perfect diversion for a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Somehow, I’ve never really gotten into the whole MySpace or Facebook thing. It’s one thing to have a blog; it’s another to fill out forms that require me to disclose personal information in a central place that could be used as a clearing house for identity theft. But a friend who keeps changing his email address invited me to be a Facebook contact, and reluctantly, I filled in the absolute minimum to sign up. And then another friend invited me, and another ... So now I am a reluctant community member, and find myself requesting my forgotten password on a regular basis to be able to link in. But I don’t want to “share” and “poke” (I know that as a euphemism for sex, so find it a rather smarmy phrase) and “write on walls”. It’s not that I’m technophobic - I’m in the technology business, after all - but it just doesn’t suit me. (I already find it annoying having to block provocative invitations from younger men in far-off countries who find me through skype - do I need to fend off more credit card theft types trying to convince me to become his fiancee for purposes of fencing stolen goods? I think not.)
Anyhow, I started doing some research on Facebook, and came up with a YouTube video (below) from a Hindi acapella group called Penn Masala. Aside from being an extremely witty video (and perceptively insightful, given the reported behaviour by the stalker/killer on the West Virginia campus) , the group’s regular music is great. It combines English and Hindi lyrics, and North American and Indian sounds, and it all comes together beautifully. I’ve always been an acapella fan, from a guy group popular in the 80s and 90s, whose name escapes me at the moment, to the Flirtations, to Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Canadian Four the Moment, and Bobby McFerrin when he does his voice-pure performances. Penn Masala is a wonderful addition to my admittedly eclectic musical collection. What a wonderful side-effect to my facebook experience!
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller
Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood is a book I picked up last year and read during a business trip. I remember that a couple of women came up to me to say that they’d just finished it and recommended it as a good read. I agree. I think my fascination with memoirs set in other countries, on other continents, has to do with an overexposure to North American coming-of-age narratives. It’s good to know what was happening in the rest of the world while I was growing up in my little corner of a Canadian province. Of course, the narrative reflects the sentiments of the day - the good and bad, the strong and feeble, the racist and ... what is the word for “not racist” or at least “understanding race dynamics” - and putting them into a context that gives us a look into the complexities of existence as a white farmer in an African country in the late 20th century. Read an interview with author, Alexandra Fuller, by an interviewer from Powell’s Books.
This was a book I picked up at the airport, or perhaps it was on a sale rack of a bookstore. A Conspiracy of Paper isn’t the sort of book I’d generally pick up, but I thought I’d move a little outside of my usual realm. What a great read. It’s a book about the history of London in the 18th century, and to illustrate the history, the author, David Liss, weaves a tale that has characters from various classes so we can get a cross-section view of the stratas of society.
The protagonist is a a Jewish ex-boxer who has become a combination private detective / debt collector for wealthy clients. As he interacts with aristocrats, merchants, streetwalkers, petty thieves, and dilitantes, the reader is given a look into the legal, economic, and social workings of England at various levels. The author is a historian, and his attention to historical accuracy makes this book a particularly interesting read.
For many years, I’ve counted Joyce Carol Oates among my favourite authors. In The Falls, a story set in Niagara Falls of the 1950s and 1960s, she reinforces all the reasons why I keep coming back to her work. In a pararaph, Oates can set the scene, create its context, and build enough of a character profile to draw you in. Her writing is rich, but doesn’t drawn you down. It’s smooth without being slick. She tells a story in a personal way that can yet have enough dispassionate narrative that you as reader become enraged on behalf of the characters. You want to write letters to the editor, but wait - you remember it’s fiction. Based on facts, yes, and that’s what flames the passion that is stoked by Oates. The story of The Falls is a story of a woman in love, a woman loved, a woman abandoned by betrayal and death, but also the story of a player played, a town corrupted, a population poisoned, and a price extracted at every opportunity for a toll.
Obasan, by Vancouver-born Joy Kogawa, is a book I’ve meant to read since somewhere in the 1990s when I first heard about it. But it wasn’t until I was at the Steveston Cannery to see a multimedia exhibit by artist Florence Debeugny this summer that I finally picked up a copy of the book in the gift shop. What a powerful story! I knew, intellectually, about this shameful chapter of Canada’s history (not that it’s Canada’s only shameful chpater, but that’s a whole other post) but Kogawa’s book really brought home the absolutely overwhelming grinding down of spirit and soul. The telling of the story from the perspective of the young protagonist, whose lack of information definitely affects her development, is reflected in the lives of the people around her, as well. It’s not often that I leave a book feeling so heavy that the story haunts me for months. This is one of those books.
Life is too short not to be the best you can be. Me? In no particular order: Woman. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Aunt. Friend. Business owner. Writer. Musician. Jew. Scrabbler. Traveller. Lesbian. Taxpayer. Volunteer. Blogger. Social critic. Voice of reason. PITA. Inspiration. Visionary. Advocate. Convert. Pet owner.