The Tragically Hip, 15th November 2012 at Clifton Park, NY – a review

I should probably start by saying that during the course of the hour and a half drive to the venue last night, I was alternately bawling and screaming.  It was that kind of a day.  I’m not going to go into why; I just want to set the scene.  I’d more or less worked out my issues by the time I arrived and I felt a lot better, but I was still raw.

This is hard for me to admit, but Tragically Hip fans are weird.  I don’t mean “Insane Clown Posse Juggalo” weird; I mean “How the hell do these people love the same band that I love?” weird.

I hate that I just used the word “Juggalo” in a post.  And now I’ve done it twice.  Damn.

It was a general admission standing show, and I got there early enough that I was pretty close to the stage, even after going to the bar for a pint.  I was about 4 rows back.  The trouble with being that close to the stage at a Tragically Hip show was that everyone around me was a Tragically Hip fan.  Gord Downie is pulling off an impressive slight of hand; he’s front man in a band that passes as bar rock.  But beneath the surface he packs his songs with more obscure literary references and unanswerable questions than you can shake a stick at.  Based on what I see at shows, I think most of the Hip’s fan base is there because they like bar rock.  On the other hand, I love the Hip mostly because of the lyrics.  Also, the rambling Gord does between and sometimes within songs is epic; major world religions have been based on far less than what he spews out off the cuff. I feel like I need an extra session with my therapist half the time after their shows.

Anyway, last night’s show.  I was way up close, sandwiched between a drunken bearded man who seemed to keep vacillating between either wanting to beat me up or wanting to make stinky Canadian hippie love to me (he eventually got escorted out for lighting up during “Ahead By A Century”), and a drunk young woman who kept trying to get me to finish her drink for her. I think she was trying to roofie me.  Or maybe she was just too polite, even when drunk, to just drop her drink on the floor as everyone else had done.  Which, you know, was kind of sweet of her.  My bearded associate, when he was not either:  1. Putting his arm around me and staring me dead in the eye while singing to me, 2. Grabbing my shirt in preparation for a fight, or 3. Telling all the women around us that I was hot for them – when not otherwise preoccupied with any of these noble tasks, my new bearded BFF/frenemy was himself hitting on every single woman within sight, including the woman who kept trying to give me the dregs of her gin and tonic.  She pulled me over at one point and slurred, “He’s a jerk!”  To which I replied, simply, “Yeah,” with a sympathetic nod and smile.  Because, really, what else was there to say?  But towards the end of the evening, I guess she’d put her grievances with him aside because they were grinding against each other, and I’d rather not picture what may have happened later.  Is this how Hip fans are made?  Gross.

The music – when I could focus on the music, when I wasn’t preoccupied with the fascinating antics of my fellow Hip fans – was, of course, delicious.  It really helped to pull me the rest of the way out of the funk I’d been in on the drive up.  Gord introduced “Gift Shop” by saying, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” which for me was the best intro he could give to that song because pretty much every time I hear it the water works start, and last night was no exception.  “Fireworks” was fun, and slipping “Nautical Disaster” into the middle of “New Orleans Is Sinking” worked really well (I think that’s how “Nautical Disaster” began, actually – as a ramble in the middle of “New Orleans Is Sinking”).

Wow.  I know a lot about the Hip.

The new material was very good, too, though I’m not as familiar with it.  I was a little disappointed not to hear “Goodnight Attawapiskat;” I kind of expected them to close with it.  Otherwise, it was a great show!  But I’m kind of glad that at least until the next time they tour, I can go back to enjoying the Hip on my own, without the peculiar ministrations of my fellow fans.

Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed – a review

I did not expect to enjoy this book.  I’ve been seeing it everywhere I turn for the past few months, in bookstores and on best seller lists, and that level of popularity usually gives me pause.  I assumed it was a “memoir” by some twenty-something trust fund kid who hiked the trail on a lark one summer.  Not sure why I assumed that, but I did.  I tend to assume the worst.  It’s not my best quality.  I remember picking up a copy of Wild at Chapters in Ottawa and wondering whether I should give it a try, before putting it back down again and walking out of the store.  The turning point for me was an interview that one of my friends did with the author.  I sensed depth and raw emotion beneath the surface that I didn’t expect, so I decided I’d give the book a chance.

And wow, am I glad that I did!  I could not have been further off-base with my assumptions.  I loved it; absolutely loved it.  Not at first, to be sure, but within the first fifty pages it started growing on me, and by the last fifty, I didn’t want it to end.  By the last ten or so, I REALLY didn’t want it to end.  There were several points at which I was so concerned about the author’s safety and well-being that it was difficult for me to continue reading, and impossible to stop.  Strayed’s writing is incredibly honest, without wallowing in melodrama or poor-me.  She doesn’t pull any punches; she doesn’t sugar coat (or overdramatize) what her life was like before the trail; she doesn’t make any attempt to hide her failures in preparing for the trail, or her near complete lack of understanding of how rigorous the trip would be.  Her descriptions of trail life are spot-on – the fetid odours arising from one’s own unwashed body, the soreness of muscles, blistering of feet, and the ravenous hunger that comes from hiking all day, every day, with a pack that weighs half one’s own weight.  Her writing made me want to do two things that writing about hiking almost never makes me want to do:  hike and write.  And so I have been doing both.

All this in contrast to other hiking narratives I’ve read, most notable Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods, about his time on the Appalachian Trail.  My recollection of this book (which I read ten or fifteen years ago) is that Bryson bent over backwards to be so affable, so goofy and chummy, that by the end of the book I kind of hated him and wished he would shut up.  Subsequent experiences with several of Bryson’s other books have not dampened this initial impression.  I experienced the opposite emotional progression, though, when I read Wild.  I did not like Strayed at first.  Despite her hardships, it was hard for me to feel sympathy for the questionable decisions she was making.  That, perhaps, says more about me than it does about her.  I kept thinking back to friends of mine who have made similar decisions in bad situations and who were not as fortunate; did not come out on top of the game, or even still in the game.  It made me resentful about the dubious connection between cause and effect, a connection which seems more and more tenuous as I get older.  Chance plays a horrifying large role in every outcome.  We can’t control everything.  But these are my issues, and have little to do (directly) with Strayed’s excellent writing.

I did not expect to enjoy this book; but I did, tremendously.  And although I don’t believe the author and I could have been friends at the start of her 1100 mile hike, by the end, I think we may have had some things to talk about.

One of my favourite passages:

…what mattered was utterly timeless.  It was the thing that had compelled them [the trail’s creators] to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days.  It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.  With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.  The experience was powerful and fundamental.  It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.  That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed.  And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew.  It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

page 207

Wild:  From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed.  Read it!

pet peeve

Why is it that certain people feel a need to give “the grand tour” to new house guests?  I don’t need to see the bathroom in your master bedroom suite.  “And here’s where I take a monster dump every morning.  Whoo-ee!  Man does it stink in here afterwards.  Okay, now on to the S&M dungeon.”

I know what a house looks like.  Not to brag, but I’ve seen a house or two in my day.  I’ll ask if I need to know where the bathroom is.  I don’t really care about the rest of it.

Unless, of course, you actually do have an S&M dungeon, in which case I definitely want to see that shit.  But then I will probably be totally creeped out and never visit you again.  So plan accordingly.

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje – a review

My review in short:  it stunk.  Lots of purple prose that had me rolling my eyes and thinking “Oh brother,” and a story that took forever to go anywhere.  This was the only Michael Ondaatje I’ve read, and I don’t understand why he’s regarded as a great writer.  Was The English Patient better?  Anil’s Ghost?  Maybe his editor just gave up on this one?  Figured he’d sell a bazillion copies regardless, so why bother trying to make the book readable?  The biggest question for me, of course, is whether I should bother delving further into Ondaatje’s canon.  Suggestions from the readers of this blog with respect to this question would be much appreciated.

The writing reminded me a lot of John Irving – overwrought, overly precious.  Come on, man.  Just let the story speak for itself.  If you need to dress it up this much, the material you’re working with probably stinks.  And this story could have been much better, but he blew it with his self-important writing style.

There was one section I really did enjoy, but I was fairly drunk when I read it, so my judgement is suspect.

I bought my copy at Indigo on Princess Street in Kingston, Ontario a few weeks ago.  I was looking for something fun to read during my brief vacation, so I limited my browsing to whatever was on the tables at the front of the store.  The Cat’s Table was emblazoned with a sticker declaring it “Heather’s Pick.”  Heather, I don’t know who you are, but my reading interests and yours don’t seem to share much ground.

Canadian travels

I made my annual pilgrimage to Canada earlier this week; I spent a few days in Bon Echo Provincial Park, followed by a few days in Ottawa.  I’d never been to Bon Echo before, but had heard it was beautiful, and it certainly was.  I did some hiking, some kayaking, and some swimming.  Hiking in Central Ontario in the summer is in some ways a test of endurance; the insect life is voracious.  I had, of course, forgotten to buy DEET for my trip, but I remembered that I had some non-DEET bug spray stashed in the glove box of my car, so I tried that.  It worked surprisingly well; shockingly well, actually.  The one down side was that it left an oily sheen on my skin, which of course became grimy with dirt and dust from the trail.  I was a filthy mess at the end of that hike!  I was really, really grateful for the camp showers afterwards.  Later that day, I rented a kayak and paddled along Bon Echo Rock in Upper Mazinaw Lake, checking out the climbers on the cliff face and the pictographs left by first nations’ people.  Living at the base of the Shawangunk ridge, I guess I have a natural affinity for climbers, even though I don’t climb myself.  I see people splayed out on a rock wall hundreds of feet above me attached to intricate rope systems and shouting things like “Off belay,” and it feels like home.

Also, Bon Echo rock on the east side of Upper Mazinaw Lake is amazingly beautiful, especially in the light of early evening.

The thing that made me happiest at Bon Echo, though, was the diversity of people there.  Not everyone was white!  This is not always the case in rural Ontario.  I was staying in a campground, and the vibe was sort of summer-camp-for-families.  This was a little uncomfortable for me, since I was there alone, and didn’t know anyone.  The first night, my campsite was surrounded on all sides by sites full of teenage girls, listening to terrible music, singing along badly, and gossiping loudly.  It was pretty great.  The entertainment value was tremendous, and it harkened back to my own youth.  I did kind of feel like the one Hank Williams figure in a sea of Taylor Swifts, though.  Or to use a more nationally appropriate reference, Leonard Cohen in a sea of Justin Biebers.

Bon Echo, a set on Flickr.

On to Ottawa.  This was my first trip to Ottawa solo, not to visit anyone, not with any specific agenda in mind, just to have a good time.  And so I did!  I stayed in the Jail Hostel, an old jail and the site, I believe, of Canada’s last hanging.  I stayed on the top floor, which was death row when the jail was in use.  So now I can tell people that I spent a few nights in the slammer on death row in Ottawa.  That should stop any conversation dead in its tracks.  Also, I bought a t-shirt at the hostel that says “A great place to hang!” with a picture of a noose.  Classy!  I’m looking forward to wearing it to yoga classes and scandalizing my fellow yoginis.  The thing I like best about staying in hostels is the fact that when interacting with other hostelers, the first task is always to figure out what, if any, language you have in common.  This does not happen in hotels.  I always feel stupider after a stay in a hotel.  There’s very little interaction with other people; the whole situation fosters isolation and anonymity.  Not so in hostels.  The situation fosters interaction.  And that rocks.

My first day in Ottawa, I took a long walk around Parliament Hill, across the river to Hull, past the Museum of Civilization, and back across the river to Ottawa again.  As in Bon Echo, I was happy to see the diversity of people and overhear a diversity of languages.  Unfortunately, not everyone shared my enthusiasm.  On the Alexandra Bridge on my way back to Ottawa, I heard an altercation behind me.  A pair of young women, apparently, had wandered into the bike lane on the bridge (which was not well marked), and a biker was directing an angry tirade at them.  Actually, it was beyond angry; he was rageful all out of proportion.  And he ended his lengthy, loud, and wholly unwarranted temper tantrum by calling them “Chinese fucks.”  So I don’t think his anger was about what they had done, but rather about who they were, or rather, who he believed they were.  Frightened and angry myself, I didn’t know what to do.  I’m still not sure what, if anything, I should have done.  He was much bigger than me, and clearly pissed, so confronting him probably would not have been a good idea.  Plus, I was wearing ladybug earrings in my ears and my hair was in pigtails.  A realistic appraisal of the chances of him treating me more respectfully than he’d treated the girls was not overwhelmingly promising.  I didn’t think it would help to run back and see if the girls were okay either, though maybe I should have.  I wanted to tell them that not all Canadians are like that, but who am I to tell them that?  I’m not Canadian.  And for all I knew, they may well have been Canadian.  On the chance that they weren’t, though, that they were just visiting, it saddens me that some bigoted jackass did his best to poison their trip and their opinion of Canada and Canadians.  Come on, Canada.  You can do better than that.

That was really the only dark spot marring my trip to Ottawa.  Monday night, I sat on the green in front of Parliament Hill and watched a multimedia presentation on the history and culture of Canada displayed on the front of the Centre Block building.  I loved it; I totally choked up whenever the strains of “O Canada” played.  Before the show began, I was wandering around behind Centre Block.  Saw a pair of young women, clearly in love, holding each other and gazing deeply into each other’s eyes.  That brightened my day a lot, and ameliorated much of the bitterness I still felt after witnessing the altercation on the bridge a few hours earlier.  Also, there were statues of Canada’s past prime ministers, and I noticed with great amusement that there was a stream of pigeon shit trickling straight down the face of Diefenbaker.  Even birds give him no respect!

Tuesday, I spent the morning in the National Gallery and the afternoon on a tour of Centre Block.  The National Gallery didn’t impress me much; I though the art museum in Montreal was much better.  There was a sculpture in the Inuit exhibit that made me smile, though; it was titled “The Aurora Borealis Decapitating A Young Man.”  And there were a handful of very good pieces in the permanent collection.  I was struck by how similar some of the early Canadian art was to the Hudson River school work from the 19th century; I wished my friend E were there with me, so that I could discuss it with her.  Unfortunately, I had the same problem in the National Gallery that I usually have in art museums.  The work progresses from older to newer, and at some point, usually around 1930, the production of art begins to strike me as an exercise in who can out-clever who.  I lose all emotional connection to what I’m looking at.  So I spent a good bit of time in the old part of the collection, but pretty much rushed through the newer work.

I really enjoyed the Parliament Hill tour.  The architecture and the ornate details of the building were stunning; especially the woodwork in the library.  Absolutely gorgeous.  And part of me, of course, was excited at now being able to visualize the place that Canadian legislation and policy are debated.

I returned to the states on Wednesday; as usual, I was remorseful that my trip had been so short, and I promised myself that it wouldn’t be so long before I returned.  Beyond my (obvious) love of Canada, simply stepping outside of my daily life for a few days altered my perspective.  A few years ago, when we were in Guatemala, I told my friend K that “The benefit of travel is seeing home differently.”  Walking around Ottawa, I thought about how profound the writing and performing that I’ve been involved in for the past few months has been; how that work has been pulling me out of a quagmire I didn’t even know I was in, and giving me direction.  “Profound” and “unfolding” were words that kept coming back to me in Ottawa.

This isn’t the best piece of writing I’ve ever produced, but I’m sick of editing it so I’ll just post it as is.

Ottawa, a set on Flickr.

Favourite sports movies

So, I haven’t posted in a while… sorry, sorry, blah blah blah.

A propos of nothing, here’s a list of my favourite sports films (a genre that I usually don’t enjoy much):

• Blue Crush (surfing)
• Men With Brooms (curling)
• Bend It Like Beckham (soccer)
• Saint Ralph (running)
• Stick It (gymnastics – “It’s not called gym-nice-stics!”)
• Whip It (roller derby)

short story

A few years ago, I walked into a restaurant during Hudson Valley Restaurant Week, and immediately discovered that I was slightly underdressed.  Uncomfortable with this realization, I told myself “Well, if they kick me out, I’m going to proclaim in a loud and haughty voice that I’ve been kicked out of nicer places than this.”

Then I remembered that actually, I had been kicked out of nicer places than that.

Lesson learned:  It’s a wonderful feeling when you realize that the person you pretend to be when you need to muster up your courage is, in fact, you.

The Science of Yoga by William J. Broad – a review

Hey, remember that book that caused all that ruckus in the yoga world a few months ago?  You know, before that other thing happened in the yoga world and caused that other big ruckus?  Well, I just read it.  And despite a few good chapters, most of it is pretty mediocre, with a few interesting forays into the bloody awful.  In more depth:

The good:

• The first three chapters are very interesting, and review both the modern history of yoga and research into the physiological effects of yoga.  For example, yoga is not an aerobic activity, despite popular beliefs to the contrary.  Yoga does not accelerate metabolism, it slows it down.  Also, yoga most certainly does not increase oxygenation of the blood, which is more or less constant in healthy individuals.  On the contrary, pranayam’s physiological effects are due to the changes it makes to blood levels of carbon dioxide.  Rapid breathing (kapala bhati, bhastrika) decrease blood levels of CO2, contracting arteries, and decreasing the absorption of O2 by the body and the brain.  Slow breathing (ujjayi) increases blood levels of CO2 (or rather, slows its rate of removal), thus dilating arteries and increasing the absorption of O2 by the body and brain.  This explains the exhilarating effects of kapala bhati and bhastrika, and the calming effects of ujjayi.
• Yoga shows great promise as an effective treatment for depression and anxiety by drastically increasing levels of the neurotransmitter GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) in the brain.
• The nicest thing I can say about the chapter on injuries is that the writing underscores the importance of paying attention to what you’re doing when you practice.
• In the chapter on healing, Broad makes the case that the lack of any sort of regulation or meaningful certification or licensing of yoga teachers and therapists is dangerous.  This is a good point, and definitely deserves further consideration by the yoga community.
• The research on women inducing orgasms without any physical stimulation whatsoever is fascinating, but seems tangential.  Yes, these women are yoginis, but this is not a traditional yoga practice.  Nonetheless, it raises interesting questions.  Maybe this reflects an evolution of yoga?  Is this a capacity that only exists in women?
• Page 218:  “If I have been hard on yoga commercialization [actually, he scarcely mentioned yoga commercialization, but I’ll let this slide], it is because the trend raises fundamental questions that seldom get addressed.  Today, as always, yoga has no social mechanism that sifts through the numerous claims to ascertain the truth, and the commercial blitz with its dynamic goals and competitive agenda seems to make that weakness all the more glaring.  Imagine if Big Pharma had no Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies looking over its shoulder.  The marketing of fake diseases and bogus cures – already a multibillion-dollar embarrassment despite all the bureaucratic scrutiny – would be much worse.”  I am inclined to agree.  There are a lot of charlatans in the yoga world, and a great deal of misrepresentation and outright lying that never gets challenged.

The bad:

• Broad reports that salamba sarvangasana creates a distinct danger of stroke, due to the flexion of the cervical vertebrae.  Apparently, this risk was first identified over 30 years ago.  If this threat is so pronounced, and was identified decades ago, why does Broad not report on any instances of it happening?  His explanation is that sometimes a blood clot is thrown hours or days after the precipitating event, thus obscuring the cause, but surely if sarvangasana produces such a dire risk, there would be some evidence of this actually occurring.  Right?  So I find the threat of stroke overblown.
• Most of the yoga injuries that Broad reports are the result of, for lack of a better phrase, practitioner stupidity.  If you fall asleep in paschimottonasana or sit in vajrasana for hours, the culpability for injury is your own, not yoga’s.  Where the injuries Broad reported were not due to practitioner stupidity, they were due to poor instruction or poor alignment/technique.  You should not be putting weight on your head in urdhva dhanurasana.  The cervical vertebrae should certainly not be pushing into the floor in salamba sarvangasana, the upper arms and shoulder blades should be carrying the weight.  And in sirsasana, the arms should be carrying the bulk of the weight, not the top of the head.  To quote one practitioner Broad interviewed (page 124), “I was doing it wrong, and I was pushing myself too hard.”  This seems to be the explanation of most, if not all, of the yoga injuries Broad describes.
• A handful of case studies of injuries sustained during yoga practice do not amount to a systematic problem with yoga; they amount to sensationalism.
• Yoga has exploded in popularity over the past ten years, yet most of the peer reviewed (ie, actual scientific) evidence of risk that Broad cites is decades old.  Where are the recent peer reviewed papers on risk?
• Broad makes a big deal about the increase of US emergency room admissions related to yoga from 2000 to 2002.  From 13 in 2000, to 20 in 2001, to 46 in 2002.  These numbers are miniscule.  While statistically significant, this increase is scarcely worth reporting.  (Also, I resent that I had to run the numbers myself in order to determine their statistical significance; Broad is a science reporter.  He should have known to calculate and report the chi-squared value himself.)
• Most of the risk/injuries chapter is anecdotal.  If there is a systemic problem with yoga instruction in terms of physical risk, Broad has done an incredibly poor job of reporting it.
• Sex!  Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex!  Wow.  Broad is obsessed.  Unfortunately, he gets a lot of it wrong.  “Tantra” is not Sanskrit for “yoga sex cult.”  Tantra is much more complex than that, and even so, does not represent all of yoga.  Not by a long shot.  Broad’s reading of yoga as a sexual practice says far more about him, or perhaps, more generously, about Western taboos, than it does about yoga.  Yes, yoga texts sometimes refer to the genitals, to stoking inner fire, to “pleasures, enjoyments, and ultimate bliss.”  But interpreting this solely in sexual terms is awfully reductionist.  Maybe this reflects my own bias, but I think that the parallels that Broad draws between yoga practice and sex research or heavy breathing are a bit forced.  Likewise, his reading of sex into the ancient yogic texts (Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Gheranda Samhita).
• The scientific studies he cites often lack control groups and have few subjects.
• In the chapter on creativity, Broad is again forcing the comparisons between yoga and sex.  His argument is essentially “Yoga lights up part of the right brain, and sex lights up similar portions of the right brain, therefore yoga must be sexual.”  Well… maybe.  But not necessarily.  On page 207, he states that “Yoga’s ability to promote a rightward shift [in neural activation] would seem to reinforce the idea that the discipline can act as a sexual tonic.”  Really, I think this is just evidence that Broad sees sex wherever he looks.
• Suggesting that kundalini practices bear a physiological resemblance to being struck by lightning, and therefore can be expected to produce similar results in terms of creativity to what one lightning victim experienced, is ludicrous (see page 208).  Kundalini may well increase one’s creativity, but the suggested similarity to a lightning strike is completely forced and unnecessary.
• Broad suggests that maybe in the future, yoga will be seen as a cure for “creative paralysis.  Creative blocks might go extinct…. Maybe world leaders would take up yoga as an aid to their deliberations.”  This strikes me as distinctly utopian.  I hope the reader will forgive my cynicism, but I think yoga – fundamental yoga, a method of calming one’s mental fluctuations – will always be a fringe activity, because it takes work, and we humans are lazy.

The ugly:

• The book unfortunately suffers from the usual pop-science failing of over simplification of the studies it presents, and unsupported conclusions and idle speculation on the part of the author.  I’ll not mince words; in many places, the journalism was shoddy.
• This may seem picayune, but I found the way he did the end notes terrible.  It was difficult to determine which citations referred to which portions of the text.  Also, not all of his statements reference the appropriate research, causing me to doubt much of what he claimed.
• The writing is mediocre; pretty much what you’d expect from a pop-science book (not my favourite genre).  He relied heavily on the formulation “X is by definition Y,” which smacks of laziness, and in some cases was confusing or misleading.

Still with me?  Good!  Here’s my summary:  The first three chapters were pretty good, but the rest of the book is not really worth your time.  Don’t be stupid when you’re practicing (or teaching), and you probably won’t hurt yourself (or your students).

Alone In The Classroom, by Elizabeth Hay – a (brief) review

Pretty good.  (Is that too brief?  I should say a bit more, maybe.)  I didn’t enjoy it quite so much as her other novels, A Student Of Weather and (especially) Late Nights On Air, but maybe I just wasn’t in the right space for it.  The writing was delicious, as her writing always is.  I did find it a little difficult to keep track of characters; the story spans several generations of women.  Rather than say much more about it, I think I’m just going to quote a few favourite passages.

p. 171-172:  What she had missed in Europe was what she had missed out West, a landscape full of swimming lakes and pine needles baking in the sun and rock you could walk across like banquet tables.  Jacob’s pillow wasn’t so hard to imagine here, how he might have rested his head on a stone and dreamt of a ladder rising up to heaven, and then years later met up with the brother he had wronged only to find himself forgiven.  Like Esau, this part of the world was a wild and generous place.

Elizabeth Hay is the only writer I know of who venerates the Eastern Ontario landscape as much as I do.  And she nails it, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere.  I can smell the pine needles and feel the scraggly pink granite under my bare feet when I read passages like this.  I like that she compares the land to a person, Esau; I am reminded of Neil Gaiman’s personification of Fiddler’s Green in the Sandman series.  (I’m pretty sure mine is the only review of Alone In The Classroom that will compare it, however briefly, to a graphic novel.)

p. 273:  My grandfather, her second child, would become the tenderest of fathers.  There are the stories my mother tells, that when she was small, she sat in her high chair beside him and held his hand while they ate their supper.

Something about that imagery is incredibly sweet to me.  Such a well chosen detail; it really illustrates the idea of tenderness.

little earthquakes

So, I’m back to blogging now, apparently.  I will, perhaps, write more about what I was doing in my absence at some point in the future; for now, let it suffice to say that I celebrated a victory – a tremendous victory – this past weekend.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.  I’m writing about two lousy situations, one from Saturday, one from a few hours ago.

#1.  Walking down Church Street with a friend on Saturday morning, we passed a trio of “adults” – two men and one woman.  With them was a child, probably 2 or 3 years old.  The kid was crying.  One of the “men” was screaming at him to “Shut up right now!” and pushing him along to keep him walking.  Unsurprisingly, this did not calm the child, who kept on crying.  The other two “adults” were not intervening in any way, they just kept walking along like nothing was going on.

Situations like these are hard for me to watch.  I think they are hard for anyone to watch, but they are really hard for me to watch.  I know what it’s like to be that kid, and it’s the scared, needy little kid inside of me who comes to the surface when I see anything like that happening, thus making it basically impossible to act or even to know what to do.  So I stood and watched, mouth agape, my rage rising without an outlet.  Eventually the “woman” (I put it in quotes because I find it hard to think of any of the three as adults) looked at me and said, “What?”  I didn’t know what to say, so I turned around and walked away.

When E and I got to the restaurant (right around the corner) I told her that I had to wait outside for a moment before we went in, to calm down.  So I stood against the wall and tried to calm myself, but I could still hear the “man” screaming at the little kid, all the way down the block, and I still didn’t know what the hell to do, and could not think straight, so we went inside.

I felt like a coward.  I spent most of the day angry at myself for not doing anything, and impotently fantasizing brutal retaliation against the “man” who was abusing the child.  I wondered if I’d misread the situation, if my own experiences had led me to view the situation as more dire than it was.  I don’t think that’s the case.  I know what an adult out of control looks like, and I know what a child in the middle of a meltdown looks like, and I know it’s a terrible combination, and I know which one has 100% of the responsibility to step back and figure out a better way to handle the situation.

Eventually, I realized that it was time to stop beating myself up for not doing anything, and time to sit down and figure out what the right thing to do would have been, so I’d know what to do the next time this happens.  The answer came to me quickly.  I should have called the police.  It wasn’t my situation to handle, and an intervention from a police officer may have been the wake up call that these three “adults” needed to stop abusing their kid.  So I put the phone number for the New Paltz police in my cell phone.  I hope I’m never again in a situation where I need to use it.

#2.  Less upsetting situation.  This afternoon, I pulled into a parking lot just as someone else was pulling out.  I stopped to let him out so that I could take his spot.  He took his time exiting the spot, did not seem to know how much space was around his car, or how much he needed, did not back up far enough, and just barely squeaked by my car.  He could have backed up further, or I could have backed up, but I really didn’t think I was crowding him, he’d just done a lousy job of leaving the parking spot.  As he passed, he rolled down his window and indicated for me to do the same, so I did.

Me:  “What’s up?”
Him:  “You couldn’t have backed up to let me out?”
Me:  “Your car doesn’t have reverse?”
Him:  “Fuck you!”
Me (loudly, as he drove away):  “Have a nice day!”

This interaction was not nearly as upsetting to me as Saturday morning’s, but it still was a little.  I always feel terrible after interactions in which someone is mad at me, legitimately or not.  The more space I get from this second interaction, though, with Monsieur Nissan, the less bad I feel about myself for it.  He did a lousy job of pulling out of his parking spot, and wanted to blame someone else.  Why the hell should I have been conciliatory?

My brother’s girlfriend and I made a pact to be more bad-ass this year.  Generally, I’ve approached this as trying to be more honest and hide my true feelings less, but it also involves letting people walk over me less.  So I’m adding a check mark to my bad-ass-ery counter.  I didn’t lose my cool with him, I just didn’t take his shit.

Also, when did it become okay to say “Fuck you” to random strangers whom you blame for minor inconveniences?  This man was probably in his sixties.  He should have known better.  I’m not opposed to vulgarity, in its place, but let’s save the f-bombs for when they’re really warranted, okay?  Let’s not cheapen the language by using the foulest bits at every possible opportunity.