Generation Kill vs. Stop-Loss

Before I start, let us pause for a moment on the fact that I just spent a half-hour making fake blood for work.

Ahem.

The RRHB and I have been watching Generation Kill, the 7-part miniseries by David Simon (the man responsible for The Wire, the best show ever produced for television) about the Iraq war. The series follows a group of highly trained Recon Marines as they follow the chain of command's increasingly stupid decisions and continue to come through their contact with the enemy fairly unscathed. It's also an uncensored look at the war from the point of view of Evan Wright, the Rolling Stone reporter embedded with First Recon who wrote a book about his experiences (with the same title as the show, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War).

To make war drama effective it needs to look and feel real. But Generation Kill takes that even a step further, sure they blow stuff up a la Saving Private Ryan and they talk the talk (everyone is "Oscar Mike" and all kinds of other sweet-ass sayings you get into your head the minute they're uttered on screen), but the actors are so committed to the roles that it's almost as if you're watching a documentary. So much of the current culture around creating art of the Iraq conflict fails for many of the same reasons: it's too austere, it's too bloated, or it's just plain bad. None of these problems plague Generation Kill. All of these problems plague Kimberly Peirce's abysmal Stop-Loss, which we watched this weekend.

Ryan Phillippe plays SSgt Brandon King, at a loss to protect his unit from an ambush, who arrives back in the US thinking he's about to get out a hero (with a Purple Heart for his troubles) when he discovers he's been "stop-lossed" and will need to report back to base to be sent over for yet another tour in Iraq. Finally sensing the futility of his position and of the war itself, he goes AWOL and is on the run for most of the film. Only in BK's world "on the run" means taking off with your best friend's girlfriend (played with a strange swagger by Abbie Cornish), hiding out in lame hotels, getting into fights, visiting A WAR HOSPITAL, attending the ARMY FUNERAL of a member of his unit and never get caught. And (SPOILERS AHEAD) after all of that, after watching one guy basically kill himself, after visiting the parents of another member of his squad that died on that fateful day, he decides to just go back anyway. What the fark? At least give Canada a chance buddy, it's not so bad up here and it'll take Stephen Harper at least a couple of years to extradite you. Yawn.

The whole film is preposterous. Nothing makes any sense, it's bloated, and while the performances aren't terrible, the dialogue is cringe-worthy enough to make you wonder why anyone agreed to make this film in the first place. In sharp contrast, the men in Generation Kill walk, talk, and act like soldiers. They're Recon Marines, as Brad "Iceman" Colbert (Alexander Skarsgård) says, they've had air training, dive training, survival training and they're being wasted on ridiculously silly missions in Iraq, to which someone responds, 'it's sure not Afghanistan,' and they all cheers to the memory of the conflict apparently fought in a way they can respect.

And it's not like Phillippe is a terrible actor, just the opposite, I think. He was wonderful in the under-appreciated gem, Breach, which was one of my favourite films of last year. But in this case, the material is so beneath him. In Generation Kill, the material is so good the men absolutely rise to the occasion, but Skarsgård and James Ransone are so good it's not even apparent they're acting, which you're always aware of when Phillippe and his co-star, Channing Tatum, are on screen. Even if war films aren't your thing, I'd give Generation Kill a try, if only because now that So You Think You Can Dance is over (woot! woot! Joshua woot!) there's really nothing else to watch and not much is happening over at Mad Men just yet. It always comes back to what I'm consistently saying about books -- if the writing is good, then the content is kind of irrelevant, the story will hold up regardless.

Harvest

I wish I could explain my melancholy mood these days. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with me, physically or mentally. If I had to wager a guess, I think it's because I miss the week or two that we usually spend up at the cottage full stop. The racing back and forth from weekend to weekday splits you in half, and it's not as if I don't appreciate the gift my grandparents gave me by hanging on to the cottage after all they went through, it's more that I feel out of myself when I don't spend enough time there.

You can never escape your childhood, I suppose. It lingers there in the back of your mind like a smoky room where cigarettes are now banned, hollowed out and aching in ways that make you wonder. There's also so very much going on right now: work, freelance, Classic Starts, reading challenges, writing, and it's all got to fit into one 24-hour day. The traffic jam of the modern everyday existence.

But behold, a little bit of a miracle in the backyard -- beans! Five delicious, crunchy, yummy yellow bush beans. We were out in the back where my RRHB was showing me our soon-to-be new front door (fabulous!) that he got today (to be installed tomorrow) and he said something about the beans needing stakes, that he didn't think they were growing well enough, and then he said, "Oh look, you've got beans!" Indeed, we did. We each ate one out in the garden and they were delicious. I pulled three more off, came upstairs, took their portraits, washed them off, and crunched them right before dinner. They made my day. I've been surviving on our cucumbers for snacks and now I'm glad I can add beans to the mix. But tell me, can I eat the purple ones too?

#48 - Runaway

When you finish reading an Alice Munro book of short stories, you honestly feel as if you've accomplished something. You feel as though you've put yourself in a long line of people that will be reading Alice Munro short stories from now until hundreds of years from now. They may be reading them in a slightly different world, one that's a little more polluted and with many more people, but they'll be reading the stories none the less. Why? Because there's no way to deny that they're great art -- wonderful glimpses into the lives of extraordinarily ordinary women who make mistakes -- and they're simply marvelous.

Runaway was in the very first package of books I ordered when I first started my job at Random House. The book, in its first hard cover edition, sat on my shelf for weeks, then months, then years. It summered up at the cottage. It wintered there as well. Until I finally committed it to the reading pile as a part of the latest Canadian Book Challenge (Runaway represents #2 in my For the Ladies Challenge) and actually managed to finish it.

Comprised of eight short stories, three of which are linked, the collection has a consistent theme: each of the female protagonists run away in some form or another. Perhaps it's in how they dress or how they act, in how they think or in a physical event that motivates them to make a change in their lives, but its escapism in its different forms. The three linked stories follow the life of Juliet, from when she's a young woman still studying who takes a train trip and meets a man, until she's an older woman, who lives three distinct lives in each of the stories. All three are ridiculously effective and utterly engrossing as Juliet's life takes a marked and unexpected turn that contains such sharp edges as only Munro can write them. But I think my favourite story among the eight would just have to be the penultimate one, "Tricks," for its climax actually made me pull the book to my chest and hug it tight, feeling every inch of the words as if they were a part of my own life, a pain I felt instead of the protagonist, Robin.

The towns are small, but nameless (for the most part), and the setting seems secondary to the inner life of each of the women. They are rich, rich, rich pieces of literature, so perfect in every way that I don't have a single constructive thing to say. For some reason, I always leave Munro on my shelves, I collect her books like they're pieces of china, bits and bobs to be admired in a long line of Can Lit adorning my bookshelves. And every time I actually pull one of the books off the shelf and spend some time with it, I chastise myself for never spending more time with them. They're not to be admired. They're to be enveloped and digested, and then put back on the shelf to age with you, for Runaway is a book never to be given away or loaned to a friend, it's just that good. Oh, sure, I'll recommend it, and then direct you all over to Amazon to get your own copy.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The first few lines of my favourite story, up close and personal.
READING CHALLENGES: As above, #2 in my Canadian Book Challenge for this year.
WHAT'S UP NEXT: Finishing Wally Lamb's mammoth (and ridiculously engrossing) novel on my Sony Reader for work.

The City On A Long Weekend

We're in the city for the long weekend and it's a very strange experience. Of course, the weather's perfect, absolutely gorgeous and bright. The lake would have been just glorious. In the end, it's probably for the best. Our tomatoes have the starting of what looks like blight, so I've got to deal with that today. There's a lavender pot that I haven't replanted yet that's so wilted I'm fearing for its life, and I need to weed like crazy.

I've been searching online for how to deal with my poor, sick plants. It seems that weather might be the cause, that or bad seeds, or just too many things planted in the garden (that's definitely my fault [although the tomato plants have loads of room]). Next year we'll need to make sure we put the tomatoes in a different place. Although right now it looks like only one or two plants are affected, and so I might just sacrifice those for the health of the rest. I'm afraid the tomatoes won't be great this year, but we've been so lucky with the quality of the zucchini and cucumbers, and the rest of the garden is growing so beautifully, that I'm not too worried. It's all good learning for next year, right?

What'll also be good about staying in the city is getting a long, laundry list of things done around the house: cleaning up the outside, clearing away some of the junk from the garage, tidying up, sweeping, all the stuff we never seem to have time to do. Add to that my 'work,': the next Classic Starts title, a freelance copy assignment, some leftover editing, the new story, and if I can cloister myself in my office for most of Monday, I should get a great start on all of it.

I'm also so behind in terms of my reading. Usually the summer is when I catch up, long days spent by the lake deep into some giant tome. But instead, I've been gardening up a storm, visiting, playing Scrabble, talking with my family, spending time with my nephew, and I feel a little out of sorts. I'm convinced it's because I can't actually concentrate on any book with any kind of depth. So, I forced myself out of my rut this morning and finished two stories by Alice Munro, and hopefully I'll finish Runaway by the end of the weekend. That'll put me back on track. Right?

Out Of Touch

Um, I haven't heard of a single book on the Booker longlist. Like, not one. I didn't even know Rushdie had a new novel out. Where have I been?

#47 - How To Be Single

Zesty and I went to Costco the other weekend and I bought a lot of stuff. Well, not a lot of stuff, but I was kind of like a kid in a candy store because I'm not a regular Costco shopper. So, for the bookish girl, seeing giant stacks of books incites a certain kind of glee, so of course I piled a bunch of 'off the list books' (ones that we don't publish or that I can't get reading copies for) into my cart. The first one I tackled was Liz Tuccillo's How to Be Single. (Yes, I'm still on the chicklit kick). What a disappointing book. It's stereotypical, bland, relatively plotless and utterly unbelievable.

The premise -- five single women in NYC in their mid-to-late 30s love, redemption and self-satisfaction -- falls short of actually driving the action of entire novel, so Tuccillo invents an entirely ridiculous 'adventure' for her main character, Julie Jenson. See, Julie's unhappy being a publicist at a publishing company so she decides, on a whim, to march into the publisher's office and pitch a book about "How to Be Single." Julie will travel the world and meet all kinds of single women from all kinds of different countries and then she'll write a book. It's Eat, Prey, Love in spades. Only it's not because what it means is that Julie, THE MAIN CHARACTER AND NARRATOR, introduces the action and her four best friends who only know one another through her, and then LEAVES THE CITY. But she still TELLS THE STORY.

So that means all the stories are told from Julie's point of view, even though she's not anywhere near the action of the other four characters: lawyer Alice (who left her job to be on permanent "man" hunt); Georgia (whose husband recently left her and the kids to take up with a samba teacher); Ruby (overweight and depressed about her dead cat); and Serena (a hippie cook who works for a famous family only to leave to try and become a swami). The whole book is full of situations that are completely and utterly unbelievable. Of course, Julie meets a wonderful man in Paris with only one hitch; he's married, but wait! It's an open relationship! Yawn.

And we could run through the bland things that happen to the other four women but it's not worth the energy it would take for my fingers to type it out. Not one aspect of the book (until we get to the VERY end) is about the women living happy and fulfilled single lives. They're hysterical, depressed, somewhat crazed, and on the hunt for the "right" man the entire time. Tuccillo doesn't break down a single cliche or take the story in any remotely original direction. And, I've got to say, it's honestly some of the worst dialogue I have ever read on paper. For the most part, I wasn't remotely interested in what happened to a single one of these women. Because they didn't feel real. They didn't feel passionate. They were stereotypes of women I see in sitcoms. They were Rachel and Monica, Miranda and Carrie, and with none of the quirks that make those characters endearing or original.

I have to say too, that the premise of the novel, when you first pick it up, is interesting, and I would have enjoyed it a lot of there was a whiff of these women embracing their single lives and actually growing from beginning to end. I've already given my copy away and I don't want it back.

Ranting And Raving

There are days where I wish I was back to being quite anonymous. That way I could say all the things that are swirling around in my mind right now about work, about life, about the glorious weekend we just had, without worrying who might read it or who might see it. It's not that I have to confess. I need to vent. I need to rant a little about how I'm tired of certain things (and, I'll admit, certain people in my workplace). But who doesn't go through the same stuff every now and again? The feeling annoying with people you work with, the feeling invisible at work, the frustration with the work. And it's not like it happens all the time or everyday. For the most part, I'm incredibly thankful to have such a great job, and to work with the people that I work with, but today is an exceptionally rough day and I'd much rather be at home watching Mad Men.

But really, would this job be any better? Perhaps not.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

An Alternate Title: The 18 Pound Challenge

The rain has been unceasing the past few days, which was actually a blessing considering I hadn't watered the garden for the couple of days leading up to the big storms over the weekend. Storms indeed. Stormy moods, stormy weather, stormy clouds in my head, but I managed to shake some of it off this evening after work. The elation of being of the medication has been followed by a period of a bit of panic. There's not a single part of my health that's unaffected by the disease, from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair (mainly grey; nicely covered), and it's tedious sometimes worrying about it all. The latest? My cholesterol remains sky high, despite having already lost some weight and not really eating anything that causes said heights. The result? The doctor has ordered me to lose a total of 18 pounds. It seems impossible. I've been fighting with my body for months, years even, and the pounds just stay stuck like tree sap to a window.

However, now that I'm off the drugs, I'm convinced that at least it's a goal I can achieve. Now that the methotrexate is no longer wreaking havoc on my system, hopefully my body will just rebalance itself. He's given me three months to lose the first five and if I can make that goal he won't put me on the medicine. That's a good motivator. I really need a break from medicine. Four years and then some is a long, long, long time.

Soooo, after a week I've already lost about three pounds. That's just from cutting out sugar and biking to work. And hummmmm, stopping the meds maybe? My Super-Fancy Disease Doctor will never admit that the meds are the sap in the tree-sap-to-window ratio, but it's something I honestly believe. We're also making a conscious effort to eat a little better and not snack as much. At least if I can make it to the 18 pounds, I can forgive the disease even for a little while and simply concentrate on living my life.

Annnywaaay, shaking off the glums was impossible yesterday so we bunkered down and watched a world of Law and Order repeats before falling asleep. I've started to read How to Be Single and it's simply okay. But more on that later once I'm actually done. But today, shaking off the glums was accomplished by hitting the garden out back. The weeds! The weeds! The weeds! But also, the growth, the growth, the growth. I've been re-reading chapters of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle tonight just so we can deal with the overload of zucchini (in pasta, grilled this weekend, in muffins, in cookies). And above? The massive zucchini I harvested today compared to the ones that you'd usually find in the grocery store. One of these things is not like the other, indeed.

What's growing? The beans (all three varieties), the squash, the cucumbers (I had two for dinner; they are delicious), the watermelon, the tomatoes, two teeny cherry tomato plants, the winter squash, the calendula (one lone plant, but still!), the rapini, and I think some of the basil (at long last). We're overgrown in the lettuce department but I'm eating it every morning for breakfast (cashew butter and lettuce on a bagel) so at least I'm making my way through it. And the tomatoes haven't even started to ripen and I'm already thinking about how I'm going to have to convince my RRHB that we'll need to can a bunch of sauce this fall (a whole bunch of photos on Flickr).

I had promised myself that I would grow out of hating gardening. And when I peeled back the heavy, prickly skin of my cucumbers and chopped them up so I could eat their cold, lemony goodness, I knew it was all worth it. The dirty nails. Pulling the weeds. Planting and replanting. Because it's so true, it just tastes so much better when it's grown in your own backyard.

The Moment When You Have Too Much Technology

Packing up my bag moments before Zesty picked me up for a trip to Costco (the first time I've been in many, many years), I through an electrical gadget in there beside my wallet thinking it was my blackberry. Indeed, it was my Sony Reader. Very helpful for lineups, not so great for phone calls. Very indicative of the fact that I have too much technology in my life. Isn't that grand?

TRH Movie - The Dark Knight

Our summer hours were a blessing yesterday as I managed to get home after getting my hair cut well before six, which meant we were at the movie theatre in time to buy tickets and then line up for decent seats for a 7 PM show of The Dark Knight. It's not something we normally do, and I felt a little like a teenager as my RRHB and his friend Nathan went off to pay video games and I held our place in line. (Don't worry, I had a book, on my Sony eReader, which is AWESOME!).

The film is long but doesn't feel that way, action-packed without being overwhelmingly violent (although it's not suitable for the 5-year-olds that were in the audience), and utterly satisfying on every level. There are unavoidable cliches, the romance-that-cannot-be, the stoic-good-guy-cop, the moral dilemmas of a superhero, that could have weighed the whole film down. But what The Dark Knight does that Spider-Man (despite how much I loved the second one) and Iron Man somewhat fail to do, is that it approaches the tedious, necessary plot and/or character developments with an unflinching sense of honesty and commitment that rises above the usual.

It's one hell of a good movie. The story is complex, riveting and engaging. The acting is superb. And the action is, well, really good without all kinds of CGI that sometimes turns other superhero films into cartoonish parodies of themselves. Christian Bale, as Jesse Wente said yesterday morning, might just be the best actor to ever have played Batman. But considering a) I never read the comics and b) I actually kind of enjoyed George Clooney, Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer each in their own ways, I think it's more than him being 'the best.'

He takes the role to a whole other place. He takes the character to a whole other place. He's just as believable as the playboy as he is the superhero. And there's a brilliant scene that I won't spoil between he and Gary Oldman (who I think is the undersung star of the film) toward the end that exemplifies both their skills. What's impossible, as well, is not knowing the tragic circumstances around this being Ledger's last role, and have that not be on your mind the entire time you're watching his tour de force performance. And man, is he absolutely frightening, entirely brilliant and not in the least bit hammy (Lords of Dogtown, that's all I'm going to say).

The movie picks up almost right where Batman Begins left off. With the caped crusader cleaning up the streets of Gotham, the citizens have never been so safe. Add to that the appearance of the new D.A., Harvey Dent (played to perfection, as well, by Aaron Eckhart), and crime might just be on its way to extinction. Enter the Joker (Ledger) whose particular brand of menace can't be understood. In short, he doesn't act like a regular criminal, but more like a terrorist. And he's holding all of Gotham hostage. Now the Batman, Dent and Gordon have more to contend with than an angry bunch of criminals -- they have one utterly unpredictable one who doesn't quite play by the rules. The battle between good and evil, right and wrong, sways all kinds of definitive lines, and the end result is a superhero film that's evolved to finally meet the times in which its playing.

That said, the only problem with so many of these movies is the tragically misused 'love' interest trope of a character. Rachel Dawes is no different. Sure, she's a lawyer and fighting for her own brand of justice, but like Gywneth in Iron Man and Liv in Incredible Hulk, their lives are there simply to be put in danger as impetus for the hero to either act or not act. Would it be that difficult to write a less contrived female character? What a waste of talent in all of those women to be playing such one-sided roles. It's almost as if the writers have worked so hard to update the male characters and bring them securely into this century and have simply left the women behind. Sure, they dress them up in pretty heels and give them jobs, but they're not really doing anything.

Regardless, The Dark Knight not only lives up to the promise of the first film, but utterly surpasses it. It could very well be the best film of the summer. I'm just sayin'...

#46 - Loose Girl

Kerry Cohen's Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity took me a little by surprise. It's not often a book manages to catch me off guard, but from the minute I read the first few sentences of this excerpt, I couldn't put it down. So, I took the whole book with me to the cottage and read it in an evening. I was reading when I should have been sleeping and the rain fell all over the cabin as passionately as rain tends to do in the summer. With my RRHB securely asleep beside me, Cohen's story couldn't help but remind me of all my mistaken times when I confused the wrong kind of attention for the right kind of intimacy.

Told in a writing style that's almost a form of literary short-hand, it's a swift memoir (just over 200 pages) that recounts Cohen's tumultuous tween, teen and young adult years. Conflicted about her parents's divorce, caught between her mother's ambition and need to better her own life, and left behind by friend and foe, she falls deeper into her life of promiscuity.

Navigating adolescence is never easy, and for young girls who grow up traumatized in any way, I'm guessing it gets even harder. No, I know it gets even harder, when there's no one you can really turn to for help. Wanting love is different from wanting any kind of male attention -- but that's a hard lesson for Cohen to learn, one that comes at a great cost to her burgeoning sense of self. She yearns for a boyfriend but never seems to find a boy who'll stick around after sex. And when the nameless, faceless, can't remember hims add up and add up, she needs to come to terms with the fact that all the sexual acts aren't remotely satisfying.

The book, however, is deeply satisfying. Cohen recounts her story with a clear and crisp voice, allows the reader to feel deeply empathetic for what she went through, and there are moments when it's impossible not to see or feel yourself in her shoes. The ending is a little abrupt, but it's not necessarily awkward. It's more that I was enjoying the story so much that I wanted to read on and on -- to see the resolution vs. just imagine it from her implications. Regardless, it's a seductive piece of work for all the right reasons.

Free At Last

This morning was a great bloody morning. I rode my bike to work. Now I know I'm late in doing this but I simply couldn't get my sh*t together before this morning. My timing, however, couldn't have been more perfect as I had totally forgotten I needed to see the Super Fancy Disease Doctor at 9:30. Which meant that I hopped back on my bike and pedaled myself over there just in time for my appointment with one minute to spare.

The good news?

I no longer have to take ANY disease medication!

None.

No needle.

No pills.

Nothing.

It's just for three months. If he sees any disease activity whatsoever they'll put me back on a low dose of prednisone or maybe even back on the needle, but for now, I'm disease and medication free.

The sun is certainly shining.

#45 - Away

The first book in my For the Ladies Canadian Book Challenge of 2008-2009 is Jane Urquhart's Away. The first few moments of this book truly captivated me. I started reading it and didn't want to stop, not for work, not for my favourite TV shows, not for my RRHB, anything. The multi-generational tale of Irish-Canadian settlers powers along like a captivating storm on a summer day. An important story needs to be told, from grandmother to granddaughter (which we find out cryptically that this is new knowledge; for a lot of life the granddaughter believes herself to be a grand-niece) about the history of the family.

The book's title refers to the matriarch, Mary, who becomes Moira one morning after she discovers a young man washed up on the shores of a small island off the coast of Northern Ireland. The experience of him, of his perfect shape and lovely form just before he dies, carries Mary "away." The man whispers, "Moira" to her just as his last breath leaves him, and she falls in love with him, in love with his voice of the sea, in love with this other person she becomes, in love with the water from which he comes. The rest of the first half of the novel concerns itself with the ways Mary comes back from being away. She marries and then has a child they call Liam. And then the famine hits. Her husband, Brian, a schoolteacher and farmer, agrees to let their landlords, two English quasi-fops, send them to Canada.

The pair has another child, a girl named Eileen, and she and Liam become the focus of the story once they're in Canada. The landscape has changed but the epic nature of the novel hasn't and the journey for Eileen and Liam to their new farm near Lake Ontario. There's so much mixed up in the novel that sometimes I think it gets a little lost in its own epic-ness. Characters get swept up in politics and then conflicts are completely forgotten, entire generations are skipped, whole backstories are simply lost, and main characters go off on long journeys and are never heard from again -- but somehow, the novel holds your interest.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book terribly, as my mother would say, warts and all. The mystical nature of being 'away' -- of being at once lost and found to your inner self, is an interesting theme around which to circle a novel. The dichotomy between the old world and the new, of Irish and English, of men and women, of right and wrong, all shift in Urquhart's book. In a way, that's what makes Away such a perfect product of Canadian literature. If I were well back in my M.A. and still studying post-colonial writing, I would probably write one hell of a paper about this book. But I'm not, I'm doing my Canadian Book Challenge and it's a pretty darn perfect title to include in said challenge.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I have a beautiful, collector's edition of the novel that McClelland & Stewart released for their 100th anniversary. While I'm not crazy about the dust jacket design, I do love the cloth treatment with its tender title stamp and pretty grey colour. (Blogger's giving me trouble uploading the photo, so I'll have to try again later -- the link above is to Flickr).

READING CHALLENGES: #1 for the Canadian Book Challenge. I'm already well ahead of last year.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: A review of Kerry Cohen's Loose Girl, and Runaway by Alice Munro.

THE SOUNDTRACK: Currently playing, "You Don't Understand Me" by The Raconteurs. Oddly fitting, I think. The recording of the song allows you to hear the cool, almost-squeaking like sound of fingers going up and down the neck of the guitar (I think?) to hit the different chords (I think?) which kind of reminds me of all the beautiful flaws in the book itself.

TRH Updates - Summer Hiatuses

Seems I can find less and less time to post here these days with the craziness of summer, and then we go up to the cottage for the weekend, which means even less time to post. However, I think I'm going to go back to my page-a-day challenge (I have a couple of projects in mind), and that should get me going here too. Here's a list, anyway, because I have a headache and feel life can only be in short form when one has a headache:

1. I've been reading Jane Urquhart's Away and absolutely loving it.

2. TomGreen.com kept me awake and alert this week at work. I wish they had TomGreen.com radio, too, and not just TV.

3. We are obsessed with So You Think You Can Dance. My RRHB more so than me. But yesterday when they had the Alvin Ailey troupe perform, I was gobsmacked. A major American dance troupe not relegated to PBS, Bravo or TVOntario. It's amazing and I hope it continues to spotlight dance in this way for the masses. Although I'm not 100% sold on the whole "contemporary" as a format -- I think I'd love to see them all have to perform a piece of classical modern choreography, something from Merce Cunningham or Martha Graham, something that can show the masses where contemporary comes from.

4. A very good friend of our family passed away this week, and the funeral was yesterday. Up until my mother had her accident, the two of them were thick as thieves. The same, but different, neighbours but also kindred spirits. Us kids grew up together. And even though much time has passed since I'd seen anyone in the family, it doesn't mean that I am not profoundly feeling the loss. A friend said that it's maybe a little bit of me losing yet another connection to my mother. And it is that, for sure, but it's also the loss of someone who had a powerful influence upon me when I was a child. It's also knowing what her daughter is going through right now, as I said in an email, all that empty space and unfinished sentences, where your mother used to be -- it's not something you get over.

5. Headaches suck more than any other kind of everyday ache.

My Two Favourite Things

Summer Movie Showdown

The TRH movie reviews have been lax as of late. I'm not reviewing any films for anyone professionally right now so I haven't had any screening passes. Are reviews still valuable when the films have already been out for weeks? Perhaps, because they'll still be coming out on DVD, right?

Wanted
We decided at the last minute yesterday not to go to the cottage because my RRHB didn't feel like driving, which was fine with me because I've been on the move a lot lately and, as much as I adore the cottage, it might be good to spend a weekend at home too. For some reason, we have no bedsheets. They've all simply disappeared. How does that happen? Annnywaaay, we went out for dinner yesterday afternoon and then drove out to the Queensway to see Wanted. It's a rare movie, one that both my RRHB and I want to see, and so he didn't need much convincing, as he kept telling our friends we met on the street, "It's got Angeline Jolie for me and James McAvoy for her; it's perfect."

But the movie was just okay. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but the plot and/or story was so utterly implausible (um, Loom of Fate anyone?) that it kind of made the good parts of the film, the first half, which was really funny feel kind of out of joint. James McAvoy stars as a dreary cubicle drone who hates his life, knows his girlfriend is cheating on him, and has massive panic attacks. So when Angeline Jolie shows up at the pharmacy to tear him out of a dangerous situation (his father, whom he hasn't seen since he was seven days old, which means, um, he's never really seen him) and gives him the chance to join a secret fraternity of assassins, well, he does so, and takes many, many wicked beatings in the process. See, silly, right? There's a lot of mumbo jumbo about who killed his father and is it his real father and who's lying to whom, but it's all just set up for some pretty spectacular special effects and the whole bullet bending thing. Both McAvoy and Jolie are excellent, and like I said, even though it has a goofy premise, there are some truly comedic parts to the film that had us both laughing, and the action, whew, my shoulders are still sore from clutching them up around my ears.

The Incredible Hulk
We went to see The Incredible Hulk when we were in New York with my RRILs. To be perfectly honest, it was much, much better than I expected it to be mainly because Ed Norton does such a great job as Bruce Banner. I might be one of the few people on earth who actually enjoyed the Ang Lee version, but I also appreciate how they took care of the heady stuff, how he becomes the Hulk, at the very beginning of the movie, which opens the picture up to the dealing with the consequences of his actions. When we first see Bruce Banner, he's hiding out in Brazil working a menial job in a menial pop factory. Of course, the military chases him; of course, he's got the whole love interest thing hanging of his head; and of course, there's that little trouble with controlling his temper. But Norton does such a nice job of playing the guy on the run, that man whose whole life is turned upside down, and the push-pull between him and the military, run by William Hurt (who employs a super soldier, a super-scary, Tim Roth, to track him down) is effective.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
I adore the Indiana Jones movies. My mom and dad would take my brother and I to see them at the old Runnymede theatre (where we also saw Raiders of the Lost Ark) when we were little and it wasn't a Chapters. So it's no wonder that my RRHB and did something we never do and went to go see a film on a week night (it was our only opportunity!) when we both had work the next day. I wasn't entirely disappointed, and it was great to see the characters again, but on the whole I felt as if the story needed a little bit more. Again with the implausibility, with that forced feeling when the filmmaker wants to go somewhere but has to get the characters there, and parts just didn't work for me (like Shia's whole "greaser" persona). That said, like Wanted, I still enjoyed the film immensely overall, but it's not my favourite of the series.

Sex and the City
Goodness, it took Sam and I about three times to find the one night we could see Sex and the City. By now, everyone's seen it at least twice (except me!) and all I'm going to say is that the trouble with the film is that it's an entire season of episodes crammed into one rather long movie. You can feel the half-hour bits as it progresses and the story doesn't flow as naturally as you'd expect if it were a film and not a film based on a television show. However, it's Sex and the City, and even if the movie was terrible, I'd probably still see it three or four times (by the time it gets to DVD) because I love the characters so much.

We also went to see Iron Man on opening weekend, but that was months ago, and I can barely remember what the movie was about, I just remember thinking that they couldn't find Gwyneth some shoes she could actually walk in?

So, we're barely into the beginning of summer and it feels like an pretty spectacular summer in terms of the overall quality of the movies out there (all solid Bs, I think). But what's missing is that dramatic Oscar-bait-type film, that counter-programming, that gives Entertainment Weekly something to talk about while reviewing all the popcorn-sellers. Oh, and we need more girlie movies Hollywood -- can't you see that? Women are going to see Sex and the City two and three times because there's nothing else out there for us. Nothing. What are you all going to see in the multiplexes this summer?

What's Growing Up!

My forays into gardening have been semi-documented here. Mainly it's been me saying over and over again how much I hate gardening. But then we went away for a few days, it rained like mad, and things have started to grow! Like: the beans, the squash and the pumpkin! I still haven't seen any trace of the rapini, the corn, the spinach or the basil, but I still have hope that they'll sprout soon. It's a wonder anything grew at all the way I just pushed the seeds into the ground and preyed.

The Canadian Book Challenge 2008

So, after much thought, I've decided that I'm going to read 13 books by Canadian women this year. I'm calling it "for the ladies." I've got 10 books at home on my shelves just waiting to be read and have chosen three more that I'd like to tackle all before this time next year. In no particular order, the books for my Canadian Book Challenge 2008 are:

1. Runaway by Alice Munro

2. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

3. The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele

4. Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

5. Away by Jane Urquhart

6. Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson

7. The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

8. The Sad Truth About Happiness by Anne Giardini

9. The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

10. Whetstone by Lorna Crozier

11. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

12. Quick by Anne Simpson

13. A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker

It's late so forgive me if I've spelled anything incorrectly. With our summer hours, who knows, maybe I'll tackle one this weekend and actually get a jump start on this year's challenge.

The Canadian Book Challenge (#42, #43, #44)

You'll just have to take my word for it that I finished on time (4 PM on June 30th) for this year's Canadian Book Challenge. I had one province (New Brunswick) and one territory (Nunavut) left and was pleased with exactly one of the two. Here we go:

#42 - The Lost Highway - David Adams Richards

I don't know why I do it to myself. Keep reading Adams Richards, that is. I know he's a lauded Canadian author who's won piles of prizes and even more acclaim, but his work is just not for me. This book was beyond hard to get through and I wouldn't have finished it had it not been for the challenge. The repetition contained within his writing style makes me crazy. It's as if he finds two or three key elements to each character and continually reminds the reader of them over and over again as the novel progresses. One part murder-mystery, one part typical East Coast depressing drama, and two parts nothingness jammed in to fill up the pages, The Lost Highway is about a warring rural New Brunswick family (there's a shock) living in a town that pretty much runs the length of, you got it, a road.

The patriarch, a misery of an old man named Jim Chapman, metes out punishment to all around him, including his bumbling, quasi-lost nephew, Alex. A former student of philosophy who can't seem to do anything right, Alex gravitates from hating his uncle to loving his uncle, from brash irresponsibility to regret, from whimsical romance to stalker, from bumbling fool to calculating criminal throughout the novel. And every five minutes, we get a lecture on what it means to be ethical from the "narrator" who makes a confusing appearance at the end of the novel. I found the setup to be preposterous, the writing tedious, and the story unbelievable. I was captivated for about fifty pages somewhere in the middle of the book where the action heats up, but for the rest of the time I plodded my way to the end trying to find any spare moment so I could just get through the damn book. I know I like to find good things in every book I read, and I just need to remind myself that it's not that Adams Richards isn't a good writer, it's just that his books are for another kind of audience (that doesn't include the likes of me).

Alas, but all pages do lead somewhere and so I cross New Brunswick off the list.

#43 - Unsettled - Zachariah Wells

Wells's undeniably charismatic and utterly engrossing book of poetry, unlike the above, held me tightly all through my reading of it. I spent most of Monday with my nephew, a gregarious, spirited little guy who kept me on my toes all day (and who refused to nap). And even though I was tired, I sat down and read the entire book in one sitting, and then went back and re-read a lot of the poems a second time because I liked the titles so much. Having never been to the North, I think the part of his poetry I enjoyed the most is the clash between how you imagine the landscape to be and the writer's human interaction within it. I also enjoyed the "freight" poems and could definitely see the Milton Acorn comp from the book's back blurbs. His talent feels raw but the words are obviously chosen very carefully, and that's my favourite kind of poetry, pieces that feel tossed off by the tips of ingenious fingers that read so easily but you know there were most likely draft upon draft before the author came to the final incarnation. All in all I can't say enough how powerful I felt the poems to be and if I hadn't left my copy at home I'd put in some quotes (to be added later).

Huge props to Kate S. for suggesting it and super kudos to Insomniac for sending it priority post so I could take care of Nunavut by the Canada Day deadline.

So that's it for this year! Now I have to do some thinking about next year's challenge, which is technically now this year's challenge because it's July 3rd today. So. Yeah. Thirteen more Canadian books by this time next year. What to do, what to do.

I do think I'm going to count Night Runner as my first (it's a YA novel we're publishing this fall that I read on Canada Day eve and Canada Day after finishing Unsettled) because it's a book I just adored from start to finish (#44). Anyway. An entire list tk.

Lame-Ass Updates

We're off to the cottage. I'll be up north until Canada Day. I'm closing in on my Canadian Book Challenge. I've been awake for about a bajillion hours. Today I went to the dentist (gross) and discovered that I've been brushing my teeth the wrong way my ENTIRE life. You think someone would have told me by now. Oh, and I need to floss. But who doesn't, right?

Annywaaay. Life doesn't seem to be slowing down and I have little time for anything these days, no posting, no reading, nothing except working and travelling, or so it seems. Maybe there will be wireless at the cottage at long last.

Then you guys will get sick of me.

Sleepless Night

It's almost 1 AM and I'm not necessarily wide awake but I sure am unable to sleep. Reading hasn't done the trick and so I'm making lists. Fingers crossed that works.

#41 - Chasing Harry Winston

My reading table has been heavy with chicklit these days because I'm working on a new project with Scarbie. And for reasons that probably have to do with too much bottled plane air and consistent movement, my concentration has been nil. Enter Chasing Harry Winston. The perfect book to read on the subway into work because you're too lazy to pump up your bike tires. The perfect book to read before bed because you don't really miss that much by only getting through 2.5 pages before falling utterly asleep. The perfect book to read without concentration, well, because it doesn't need any.

Lauren Weisberger has achieved a level of lit stardom few writers achieve. It's funny, that the US lit stars are all men writing serious fiction, the Jonathons, the Eggers, and the ladies who sell those kinds of numbers are all either British, Irish or Lauren Weisberger writing bland books of a certain genre that will probably never end up on the 1001 Books list. In the end, though, if someone enjoys the book, does any of that stuff even matter? I'll read anything by anyone, the popular stuff, chicklit, literary fiction, commercial fiction, because all that really matters to me is a good story. And right now, I'm really wondering if chicklit writers can come up with something original. To wit it seems that the purpose of books like Chasing Harry Winston is to make a movie about them two or three years after they're published. In a sense, couldn't they save the trees and just skip right to the cinematic version and save us all the trouble?

That said, Weisberger's latest novel attempts to pull itself up and out of the cliches of its cover (a furry spiked heel with three gorgeous rings stacked from tip to mid-inch). Considering the title is more Plum Sykes than what the actual book is about, and the characters more Sex and the City than anything else, it's an interesting bit of shoe not entirely fitting the foot, I'd say. Three characters, Emmy, Adriana and Leigh, navigate the final year of their thirties while living and working in New York. Only one of them, Emmy, is truly chasing the married with children dream; the other two look a little deeper in terms of self-satisfaction, Leigh in the form of where she'd like her career to go and Adriana simply needs to grow up. Bits and pieces of the story are told from each girl's perspective and the characters are well-drawn, quite engaging and utterly trapped by their circumstances at the moment. Weisberger plays the role well, they wear "the latest" Chloe shoes, are cognizant of trends and fashion, but you can feel her writing trying to pull away from the cliches as she attempts to be a little less "chick" and a bit more "lit."

There are conflicts, petty jealousies, and the reader wishes again and again for the book to delve a bit deeper into the idea of female friendship and less into silly "pacts" and false start-ups to plot. In the end, I can't say that I didn't enjoy the book, because I did, and I can't say that Weisberger isn't a talented writer, because she obviously is, I just hope that her next book abandons all pretense of Harry Winston and lets her spread her wings a little.

Bits And Pieces Of The Past

It's been a busy Saturday. I got up early with my RRHB as he went off to work for about the hundredth weekend in a row (save for the last one when we were in NYC), watched Swingtown, which I'm enjoying more each week, ate some yoghurt, and decided it was now or never in terms of the gardening.

Wait. Does everyone know how much I hate gardening?

K.

So it's me against the weeds that grow in between the gross patio stones on our front yard. The outside of the house will be the last to get fixed up and because I never see it when I'm inside and the renos are making me mental, I don't usually bother with it. Like, at all. But today I was out there pulling all the weeds out and sweeping. And then I tackled some of the back where our neighbour had planted some vegetables. Seeing as I want to eat the lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, I thought I had better do some weeding out there too. I lasted about an hour and a half, all tolled. By then I'd had enough.

Back inside to make some toast while I watched the bits of The Departed that I like. At which point I felt guilty for watching TV and started puttering.

Wait. Does everyone know that I love puttering?

I've been trying to search down some old writing to see if there's any value in trying to finish the two serious books I started before the one that's currently with my editor friend. But since I have only hard copies of everything, and they're spread from here to who knows where, I went through piles of old writing today. Here are some things I discovered:

1. The clinical "our plan" notes from my shrink when I was bonkers about 10 years ago. They are awesome. From basic things like: "try to eat 3x/ day" to "if feeling very depressed, out of control, suicidal, etc, come to Emergency Department." Can I just say that about 2 weeks later I took a whole pile of sleeping pills, not to kill myself, but simply because they had stopped working and I wanted nothing more than to sleep. It's the craziest the prednisone has ever made me. Coupled with my own inner-wackiness, I am lucky to a) have survived and b) to have had a doctor that was kind enough to give me this plan that pretty much saved my sh*t at the time.

2. A note from Deborah who used to run Chicklit.com that says: "I thought you'd toss off a couple of pages, not sweat blood onto paper." Aw. Oddly, I have no record of what I actually wrote to illicit such a reaction.

3. A really excellent map to my cottage.

4. A recipe for vegan banana blueberry muffins that I will give to Sam for Sadie.

5. "The Night, The Porch" by Mark Strand that contains these lines: "...why even now we seem to be waiting/For something whose appearance would be its vanishing..."

6. The photocopy of a print from Alciato's Book of Emblems that represents Hope and Nemesis that says the two "are together at the same time upon our altars, clearly that you may not hope for that which is not lawful."

7. A print-out of this article from the NY Times because it mentions my RRHB. I have to admit, I recycled this -- there's an online archive.

8. The "how to retire rich" article that our old VP from the Evil Empire photocopied and gave to everyone in the department before he set up a meeting with his insurance broker. He was an awesome boss. The article is full of things he's underlined and notated. I wish I were lying.

9. The YES checklist. A 12-step program for writers and other bits of wisdom for scribes. And a note that Peter Mansbridge was born in Churchill, Manitoba and this quote: "I'll never lie to you but don't think that means I'm telling you the truth." My take-home from a day-long writing seminar.

10. "Art," Ken Kesey said, "is a lie in the service of the truth." Don DeLillo: "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer knows when he finally gets there. On one level the truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and the poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language."

Mies, My Heart

My favourite photograph from NYC this past weekend.

#40 - The Book Of Negroes

There are few books these days that can honestly be called epic. Many that aspire to be so, and many writers who set out to be "epic" without really understanding that it's not just page count that matters when a book stands up and marks its place in time. Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes is epic and it surely marks its place in time.

Over the past weekend when we were in NYC with my RRHB's parents, he was the Author of the Year at the Libris Awards. That says a lot, it's an award decided upon by booksellers and not a jury. Last year, Ami McKay won for her haunting, beautiful, and uplifting The Birth House. The books that win please readers and booksellers alike, a little bit commercial, a lot literary, and with a story that seems endless in its scope and telling, I'm not surprised at all that The Book of Negroes, and Lawrence Hill, won this year.

The novel finds Aminata Diallo, a young African girl aged about eleven, growing up as many generations before her have grown up. She has a mother, a father, a religion (she's Muslim), a village, and is in training to follow her mother into midwifery. But everything changes the moment she's captured by traders and sold into slavery. Transported by ship to the southern colonies before they've become the United States, she barely survives the journey. After she arrives, she's branded, sold, and taken under the wing of a woman who ensures she comes back to health. And the story simply doesn't stop there, she's sold to a Jewish man who treats her well, but keeps her enslaved.

More skilled than many, especially other women, Meena, as she's known, can write and read. Skills that serve her well and help her to survive the many injustices life tosses her way as easily as paper carries on the wind. The second half of Meena's life finds her freed, a member of the new loyalist colony in Nova Scotia. Still unhappy at the crown's treatment, a group of Nova Scotians travel back to the motherland and settle in Freetown, on the coast of Sierra Leone.

I read this book to satisfy my Nova Scotia requirement of the Canadian Book Challenge. I had planned on reading a Lynn Coady novel, but once this novel won the Commonwealth Prize, I figured I should probably read it sooner rather than later. And wow, what an achievement for Hill, it's a wonderful and important book. The sadness of Aminata's story is tempered by her own words, her strength and her amazing sense of herself in the world. Despite the hardship, despite her children being taken away from her at different stages in the book, despite being bought and sold and then bought again, despite the aches in her bones, she tells her stories again and again, all in aid of ending the terrifying and awful trade in humans.

Honestly, I enjoyed every moment of this book, even if it did take me three weeks to read. Now, I've got two provinces/territories to go before July 1st and only one slight problem. Anyone have an idea about reading Nunavut?

#39 - The Importance Of Being Married

First, a confession. I adore Gemma Townley. Personally, I think she's one of the best writers working in chicklit these days. Her characters are never cliched beyond repair, her stories are always original while remaining within the bounds of the genre, and even if the girl always get the boy at the end (even if it's not the boy she thought she'd end up with), how she gets there is consistently original and charming.

Jess, the main character in Townley's latest novel, The Importance of Being Married, doesn't believe in marriage. But when a combination of pure goodness and luck leaves her with an inheritance neither expected nor necessarily appreciated (at least at that moment in time) considering it comes with a caveat. The lawyer handing over the property thinks she married. And why does he think Jess is married? Because she told the kindly old lady she'd be visiting in the home a very long, detailed story about how she married her gorgeous, successful and utterly charming boss. Oops.

So, Jess and her roommate quickly sum up a plan called operation marriage or something of the like, as if it's a project to be managed, and work on getting her married by the time the two-week deadline to inherit arrives. Hilarity ensues. As does a little old-fashioned honesty. It's a happy ending. I'm sure that's not a spoiler, it's chicklit after all, and I'd be curious to see what Townley would come up with if she wasn't sticking to a rigorous book-a-year publishing schedule and stepped outside the genre just a little. I'm sure we'd all be pleasantly surprised.

So...

We're still in NYC. Our flight was cancelled. Bad weather on both ends and bam, we're SOL in terms of getting home. A few panicked phone calls later and we've secured a hotel (with a shuttle service).

It's funny. I am beginning to think I might be cursed when it comes to getting home. Paris. Mexico re-routed. Now a cancelled flight.

Annnywaaay. We're in Long Island City New York. It has its charms, which includes a bird's eye view of the LIE and Harp on tap. Two pints and a hotel room for the 4 of us. Life is nothing but an adventure.

We spent the morning on Coney Island. When we arrived, the place was shuttered, iron grates on the doors and nothing opened. But soon, as the haze disappeared and people shed their layers, it opened up.

We walked through Central Park, rested, and then made our way to the airport. Now, it's 5 hours until we're back at the airport to try and get home.

Is It Monday Already?

We had a bit of a slower day yesterday. After brunch (only in New York can you ask for banana pancakes and get regular pancakes with six sliver-thin wafers of fruit on top). Then we walked down through the fair on 6th Ave, felt like we were in a bit of a time warp as the booths kept repeating themselves, and then ended up back at the halfprice ticket booth only to discover it was the Sunday of the Tonys so many of the shows were skipping their Sunday matinees and evening performances. In a stroke of luck, we decided to see "Gypsy" with Patti LuPone, which I enjoyed, but that almost killed my RRHB with boredom. Good thing too because she won the Tony for lead actress.

In between buying the tickets and seeing the play, we managed to make it over and see the Seagram building, and that made me quite happy.

Then my RRHB and I had dinner with some friends, parted as they headed back to Brooklyn, and we wandered into The Strand. A pile of books later and we're on the subway back uptown.

Today, we're headed for Coney Island. And then it's back to LaGuardia and home.

Saturday In The Big Apple

We're back at the hotel now after another busy day. My RR M-I-L wanted to see Times Square, so we had breakfast and made our way down there. Today was hot, humid and packed with tourists all crammed into the city block where everyone in the world should visit at least once in their lives.

From there we walked to Macy's (I had just a half-hour to shop) and then took the subway to the WTC site, which is still sobering, and ever-changing. Different each time we come here. Too hot and really exhausted we took a cab to Katz's Deli, had a traditional NY lunch, and the walked back over to Broadway through the Lower East Side and bits of Chinatown.

Then our RR in laws (parents) retired and we walked up to the Lincoln Centre to see "The Hulk." Honestly, I enjoyed it. The film is way, way better than I expected it to be.

We came out of the amazing-looking theatre to the rain. Oh, I forgot to say that we stood earlier through a crazy thunderstorm on Delancey Street. My RRHB wanted a slice so we stopped along the way. Greasy, hot, delicious. Kind of sums of my day.

Pardon my spelling. There are albatrosses on TV.

Friday In NYC

We've been up for hours, lots and lots of hours. Our plane left at 6:50 this morning so we were at Pearson by 5 AM. My RRHB's parents were already there. Zipped through customs, and the flight took less time (1 hour) than it did to taxi to the gate at LaGuardia.

The weather was extraordinary today. We walked from the hotel (the Hilton; there was a snafu with the room) along Park Avenue, stopped in at St. Patrick and St. Thomas cathedrals, and then ended up at my all-time favourite NYC destination: the NYPL building in midtown. The exhibits, always free, we saw were: Milton at 400 (very excellent old books), the portraits in the 3rd floor reading room, which includes the original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toys.

Then we walked down to the Empire State Building and stood in line forever and ever and ever. It was worth it and my RR in-laws were amazed and awestruck.

After hours spent being ideal NYC tourists we ended up having a snack at some swanky gastro-eatery place. Delicious, yes. Waste of time, yes. The bitchiest waitress I have ever encountered served us. She was 12 if she was a day and had more attitude than poundage.

Then it was on the 1 subway line to the Staten Island Ferry for a view of the lady and her islands. Quick turnaround and we're back on Manhattan making our way in rush hour traffic to the hotel. A fellow on the train kept directing pedestrian traffic by saying, "Come on people, let's fluctuate, fluctuate in here right now."

Yes, indeed, let's.

For dinner we cabbed it slightly south to Grand Cental and enjoyed the Oyster Bar. Is it ironic if noone had an oyster just delicious fishy courses. Now, I'm a little tipsy from our hotel nightcap and utterly exhausted.

Maybe tomorrow I'll squeeze in a little shopping.

(Pardon the spelling and grammar: I'm on the blackberry).

IMPAC Win

Quinn posted up a note this morning that Rawi Hage has won the IMPAC award. I only made it through three of the shortlisted books (too many challenges; too much travelling; very little reading) but DeNiro's Game was one that I read and loved. It's nice to see novels that were shortlisted for Canadian prizes, like the book I'm currently about 20 pages away from finishing, The Book of Negroes (which just won The Commonwealth Prize), go on to win international prizes. It's not as if I'm writing a "here's the trouble with the Giller" note or anything, but I'm glad that both DeNiro's Game and The Book of Negroes will go on to find larger audiences as a result of the attention.

Posting has been sparse, life seems to be overwhelmingly busy these days. And we're on the road again tomorrow, taking a family trip to NYC. Right now I feel like I've been travelling for months. And for those moments where I'm sitting behind my desk staring out the window thinking how nice it would be to have a job where I travelled even more, I'll need to remember this feeling. The one where I just want to be home with a good book, my two working hands, and some time to get caught up on my writing.

#38 - Gilead

Over the course of the 10 days I was away, I stopped and started a number of books. But Marilynne Robinson's Gilead was the only one out of the five or so paperbacks I brought with me to capture my exhausted attention and hold it tight in its hands.

The narrator, a Reverend John Ames, nears the end of his life and wants to leave a record behind for his only son, a seven-year-old boy. Told in epistolary format, the Reverend mixes scripture, sermons, stories and observations into the narrative of his life, loves words and their meanings, and takes the spirit of his life very seriously. He means to leave a legacy behind for his son; it's the only way, he'll not survive into his adulthood. Interwoven into his own history is that of his grandfather, his father (both reverends as well) and his neighbour, an aging Presbyterian minister, Boughton.

Novels that are technically brilliant, novels like this one, make one appreciate the sheer talent that a voice can bring to a book. Ames's remains loud, clear and unclouded throughout the entire novel. Robinson uses the form to her advantage, and you can hear the tenor reverberating throughout each sentence of the love letter to his son. There were so many passages that I wanted to soak up like clouds do mist and the book is so heartfelt that one can't help but feel that Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer was utterly and rightly deserved.

Here's a passage that I put up earlier this week on Savvy Reader:

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

Just, astonishing and awesome, as in its original meaning. Truly.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I read the bulk of this book in the Jardin des Tulieries in Paris after visiting the Musee D'Orsay after Sam went home on Friday. Also included is me in thoughtful repose, flaws, freckles, dirty hair and all.

#37 - High Crimes

If anyone's familiar with my reading habits, you know that I don't read a lot of nonfiction. But it seems the nonfiction that always grabs my interest are nightmare stories about Mount Everest. I read Into Thin Air in about 20 minutes, and my curiosity of the people who willingly put themselves through the grueling, punishing task on purpose always gets the best of me. I only wish my interview with Peter Hillary was still live on the National Geographic Canada web site so I could link to it -- we talked for two hours and it was, to date, the best interview I have ever done.

Annnywaaay. High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed. Michael Kodas's book has a point to prove, and it's quite compelling: How is it that crimes that take place at 8,000 metres are not considered so, when they'd be heavily punished back at sea level? Unskilled guides passing themselves off as "experts" leading unsuspecting tourists up a mountain to perish is doing damage to the very serious sport of mountaineering. It's ruining Everest. As is greed, human selfishness and the age-old challenge of tackling all of the biggest peaks in the world. His tale centres on two specific stories: the crumbling of his own expedition from ego, theft and a whole host of other problems; and the death of a doctor, left behind by a man who had a reputation for being not only a liar but one utterly unqualified to be a guide.

How can you just leave someone behind when he's your responsibility in the first place? When does summiting become so all-consuming (for its material benefits) when it costs the life of someone who trusted you to take them up and then back down? It's an impossible question. It's easy to know your own moral code, your values, until you're thousands of metres in the air, deprived of oxygen and the weather turns. But there's a difference between malicious intent and an accident, the feeling of getting yourself in over your head. Even experienced climbers get into trouble, but that's the point that Kodas, and many writers like him consistently make, Everest has become so commercial that people think they can just buy their way to the top.

On more than one page, I was utterly horrified by what I'd just read. Greed, mayhem, even murder in a place where people are supposed to be in awe of the sheer power of the Earth itself. And even while Kodas's writing tends to the sensational (it's very headliney, if that makes any sense), it's an easy book to read. Perfect for a plane ride to Paris, I'd say.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The ARC I got from work on my tiny plane tray.

The Events Leading To My Untimely Demise

Yesterday I was so tired that everything I looked at was blurry. My own face, my RRHB's face, the television, my life, work, everything. And after the hell on wheels experience of getting to the airport I almost melted after getting home. But first, let me relate via list and ensure you that it's a whole lot more entertaining when I tell the story in person.

The Day I Left Paris And Almost Lost My Mind

1. I woke up an hour early before the time I set my BB to because I was obsessed with the weight of my suitcase. Halfway through the night I'd had a brainwave about repacking. Yes. I know. But the way I had done it I couldn't fit everything in, and I didn't want to leave anything behind. So, 6 AM after a wedding is not recommended.

2. The guardian for the apartment was 15 minutes late showing up, but whatever. We got our deposit back. She was pleased with my cleaning.

3. I left 1 rue Jacques Coeur at 8:20 or so AM for a noon flight at Charles d. G. airport. It should have been enough time, right?

4. My luggage was heavy. Like 30 kgs. But I carried it down the Metro stairs, settled myself in, and got to Chatelet okay, and even found the RER entrance to take the train to the airport. Here's where the trouble started.

5. A ticket for the train costs $8.60 (Euros). I had eight. I needed sixty centimes. There were no attendents and nor was there a change machine. "No biggie," I thought, "I'll just take the Metro to L'Opera and take the Roissy bus." Gathered up my luggage and dragged my ass back down to the train levels and got on the pink line. And sat there. And sat there. And sat there.

6. An announcement bings and I sort of half-understand that there are problems at Pont Neuf, which means I can't get to L'Opera unless I go halfway around the city and that would take forever. Sigh. So, I gather up my luggage again and make my way back out to the myriad tunnels of Chatelet with the hope of discovering the one store I saw was open when I descended from the 1st line from Bastille. No such luck.

7. The clock is ticking.

8. Again, dragging my impossibly heavy luggage with me, I go back up to street level. When I reach the sunshined streets I am bawling.

9. There is NOTHING OPEN. Not a bakery, not McDonald's, nothing. So I wander around the area heaving and sobbing.

10. At least I spot a cafe opening up. I trudge inside and am so verclempt that I can't even barely get out the English version of needing change vs. the French. They refuse me. I ask, in French, to buy a bottle of water. They say no. But then the guy pours me a glass of water. Um, thanks. I offer to pay. He says no. I pull out ALL OF MY EUROS and half-scream, "I JUST NEED SOME CHANGE." They refuse me. I refuse to leave until I get my change. This goes on for about 10 minutes.

11. 5 fresh Euro coins in hand, I make my way back down to the RER platform (after using up 2 Metro tickets because my luggage got stuck before I could get through. I kicked it) and buy a ticket from the automatic machine. The entrance to the CDG section of the RER won't let me through even though the machine says my ticket is good to go. I cry some more.

12. I then go in a different entrance and find my way to the tracks. With terrible signage (it looks like I'm going to Orly, not CGG), I stand and wait for a train. The illumination board says it'll be 26 minutes until the next one comes. Um, it's now 9:30 and my flight's at noon.

13. Some random guy comes up to me and says, "Hey, are you from Canada." I do not have time for him. But he does reassure me I am in the right place. He makes awkward conversation. The train comes in 3 versus 26 minutes. I am saved.

14. The stop for Terminal 3 is the second-to-last, at least I didn't have to take a bus from the wrong place.

15. The lineup is huge. It's now well after 10.

16. Finally get up to the check-in and have discovered that you can take ZERO liquids on French flights. I furiously repack my girlie bits and am happy that my luggage is well under the weight restrictions. The check-in fellow was kind as it took me A WHILE to pull all the liquids out of everywhere and repack them in my bursting suitcase.

17. The funny security girl makes a witty remark about having to leave my tragic hip behind as I go through the metal detector.

18. The next security check rifles through the Louis. Contraband liquids? Of course! I'd forgotten a lip gloss. I hand her all my papers and go throw it out. The colour was awful anyway.

19. I return to collect my things and discover: SOMEONE HAS TAKEN MY BOARDING PASS.

20. Without shouting, I calmly say, "Um, where's my [totally wishing I could swear but I didn't] boarding pass?" A second security woman who had waved some sort of magic wand over my carry-on hands it back five minutes later. She gives me no explanation as per why she took it in the first place.

21. At last, the gate! I'm there at 11:15, exactly when boarding was supposed to start.

22. The plane was late.

Vendredi

It's hard to believe that even with the idea of the time difference, the days have flown by at lightning speed. It's 9 PM and I just ate dinner at a small bistro down the street from our rented apartment in the Bastille after the vegetarian restaurant AROUND THE CORNER FROM OUR HOUSE was also closed. Sam will understand. It's the, um, 4th or 5th (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly) vegetarian restaurant from the Lonely Planet that's a) closed or b) simply not there. Somehow, I think that perhaps the world is trying to tell me something. We hit a wall last night a about 8 PM, the third or fourth night in a row of not eating dinner before 10 PM, walking all that time, exploring all the time, shopping and seeing all that time, or rather, I hit a wall, and we had fish and chips at an Irish pub in the grossest area of Paris around Centre Pompidou. It was bliss.

Yesterday we took it easy. We looked to all the things we hadn't done: a few old, old churches we longed to see (the organ in St. Sulpice!), visited the yarn shop, had a pint (me) and a Coke (Sam), did more shopping in the rain, thought the architecture of Le Halles quite disruptive if not just a little bit intriguing. The morning was spent wandering the Islands and having delicious ice cream. Oh, and having crepes. I could live on crepes alone although it's not entirely healthy to have crepes and Berthillion for breakfast. Ah, when in Paris...

Only Sam and I could stumble upon a great building next to a church that surprised both of us (and as I'm here without the guide book the name of it shall have to be filled in later) next to a church that people lined up for hours to see. The most fascinating part for me was the women's prison gardens, the place where they drank, the table where they ate (that I mistakenly sat on) and the iron-gated space where they waited to be executed. There was a recreation of Marie Antoinette's cell that sent a shiver up my spine, even though it was filled with those strange waxy figured they always use in historical recreations. Okay, one waxy Marie and a bunch of other male prisoners, many of whom were very poor and living in cramed and truly gross quarters.

Afterwards, we ended up at the knitting store, which Sam will tell you about. I mainly contemplated making my RRHB a scarf made from bamboo by buying a metre of really pretty light grey yarn and then realising (upon talking it over with Sam) that I could probably get similar yarn at Romni at less the price.

Annnnywaay. It was raining, yet again, so we browsed the stores around St. Sulpice, and then made our way back to the Marais for gift shopping. I have some sweet presents for my RRHB and managed to finally find a pair of shoes that I actually liked enough to buy. This is all I'll say: they are made in France and have red polka dots on the bottoms. How cute!

Skip past our truly "french"-style fish and chips and we're in front of the Hotel de Ville, and all I kept thinking about was The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Place de Greves, because it sits on that historical site. Walking home I actually, for the first time in a week, knew the direction and felt a part of the city. Chatted, walked, chatted, and then dropped down on the bed for some restorative yoga before bed.

We woke up early this morning, wandered through the Place de Vosges (sp?) and then went into a FREE museum that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head. A bit more shopping and I finally found another pair of shoes worth buying. At this point I'm a little troubled about how it's all going to fit in my suitcase. Sigh.

Then it was off to l'Opera to find Sam the bus for the airport. I would have cried but I didn't. Then I went back to the mall and bought a cute jacket to go with my dress for the wedding, and then walked to ANOTHER UNOPEN vegetarian restaurant before deciding upon a cucombre sandwich and a good rest before attempting the Musee D'Orsay.

I wrote a poem about the above.

It's to come.

Then I ate out by myself which is something I never do, and the waiter was amazingly nice, said something about 'sur pleasure' after I mumbled my French. The food was delicious. Seven days and only one mediocre meal and it wasn't even remotely bad, just not what I wanted.

Okay, the internet place is closing down so I can get a little homesick and weepy for my RRHB and my real bed and his strong arms and grumpy demeanor and to be loved and to love in return and yes I've had two glasses of wine but that doesn't mean I don't want to be home.

Tired Feet, Taped Toes

We had another banner day yesterday: started with Sacre Coeur, then walked down through Monmartre, and found the Metro. Took it to St. Germain des Pres to see the oldest church in the city. Walked from there to a restaurant where Simone de Beauvoir and JP Sartre used to eat. Then more walking. The Rodin museum. More walking. Edith Wharton. Gertrude Stein's house. Sketchy almost-dinner at Le Select before we decided to have pizza. It was the right choice.

I have not read more than 10 pages of any book other than my guide book.