The Baldening

Readers, a confession: I AM BALDING. My friends and family insist that it's nothing but the product of my Woody Allen-esque levels of anxiety, but whatever.  What do they know? I've googled "female thinning hair," so I'm an expert. Clearly. But between the assurances of my family, and the fear mongering of the internet, it levels out into a sense of dread every time I look in a mirror. My hair used to be many things- mostly frizzy, unmanageable, occasionally achieving a state of curly perfection - but it was never thin. The bathtub was clogged within weeks when I moved to my last place, and I've broken off comb teeth in my hair.

Where did it all go? Let's say it was a combination of work stress and... lupus (thanks, Internet!), moving on to figuring out what to do when the final hair falls from my head. Comic books have taught me that an exciting career in super villainy is open to me. Perhaps Lex Luthor wasn't born bad, he just went bald. Though I guess Professor X is a positive role model. I'm trying to think of any bald female comic book characters, and I'm mostly thinking of aliens. In movies, there are plenty of bald ladies, but they're also sick bald ladies, destined to improve the lives of others before they pass on in a most videogenic way. I won't be one of them. I don't have a deadly disease, and even if I did, I would like to spend my final days drunkenly berating everyone who ever wronged me. Pop culture has left me adrift. What should I do, readers? Charge fifty cents a rub?

Domestic Thursday Returns

The yarn for this scarf - Elsbeth Lavold's Hempathy - cycled through two failed tank tops, before I realized it was never meant to be a garment. Now I'm churning out a version of Summer Flies. The hemp yarn, combined with the open pattern, should make the scarf light enough to wear three seasons of this year. Sadly, the beer I'm drinking right now will last only one - it's Beau's seasonal "Festivale" beer, which I bought at the end of its summer run. The style is altbier, and it is delicious, or at least almost as delicious as beginning to knit again, after a long absence from the needles.

Ring-a-ding-ding

I had originally scheduled a long, somewhat whiny post to explain a month full of weirdness on my part. But then my phone rang. 

And it was good. 

My great friend/other half of my brain is now engaged. Suddenly, things didn't seem so grim. Katie was happy. Martin was happy. And I was happy, because I like them both, and finally have an excuse to do "research" by watching Say Yes to the Dress.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Butterfly in the Typewriter

Biography covers can be so dull. They all use the same portraits of major subjects, whether painted or photographed, and use a tasteful serif typeface. So I appreciate something different. Here's a cheeky take on the profile photo for Cory MacLauchlin's Butterfly in the Typewriter (designer currently unknown.) Take an image of a famous author, and paste in cutouts of the accoutrements of his most notable character. John Kennedy Toole meets Ignatius Reilly's hat, mustache, and yes- hot dog. It highlights the autobiographical relation between text and author, while pointing out that they're not homogenous. They just relate through sticky bonds.

Take This Waltz, or the Mild Inconvenience of Indecision

It's been a few days since I caught Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz, and I finally figured out how to describe the plot. It's Twilight for CBC listeners! Seriously, Michelle Williams' Margot - Toronto cred proved by her Pages tote bag - is torn between nice guy werewolf cookbook writer Jacob Lou, and the dangerously sexy vampire rickshaw artist Edward Daniel. To be fair to Polley, Waltz does have moments of genuine emotional honesty where Twilight has troubling gender politics, but there was still a main character with problems she would prefer not to solve. So the slow motion and golden lighting started to feel a little much. As endearing as Michelle Williams can be, my sympathy to any character who will gain mournfully into an oven door while sweating buckets is minimal.

Fellow Torontonians might appreciate spotting beer bottles from local breweries, or triangulating the location of Margot and Lou's apartment using local cafés and cinemas for guidance. My guess is Little Portugal.

Book Pile for July 2

1. Current (Incredibly Depressing!) Non-Fiction Read: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, Anne Fadiman
2. Next Cancon Read: The Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro (this time I won't be trying to read the laundromat's copy between loads)
3. "I Picked This up Because the Guardian Gave it a Good Blurb and, Yes, I'm That Kind of Person" Novel: King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher
4. Crime Does Pay Book of the Month: The Heat's On, Chester Himes
5. Autobiographic Comic Option: French Milk, Lucy Knisley
6. Better Keep Sharp Knives and Army Camps Away From Me: Forbidden Colors, Yukio Mishima

History Lives... ish

Much like other things in my life - *cough* lady business *cough* - my reading is on a cycle. CanLit followed by a contemporary novel, then a classic, and finally some non-fiction before we're right back to Canadian again. My dedication to this system is irrational, and limiting, but I can't abandon it. I am, however, open to manipulating it. Books can be from both categories, which comes in handy if there's another I would really like to get on with.

Recently, I tried being strict about the categories, which meant I read Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues (Canadian) and Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Contemporary) close together. They're both historical novels with pedigrees. Blues won the Giller, and Bodies is the sequel to the Booker-winning Wolf Hall. It would have been hard not to compare them while reading - objectively. Or to avoid finding the comparison more flattering to one than the other - subjectively.

Because, in spite of this powerful one-two punch of historical fiction, it's a genre I typically avoid. Why? A writerly tic I call the research dump. Here's an example:  

"It was the beginning of the western offensive. The Krauts hurtled through Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg. Every hour the lines of the map was changing. Day after the Coup, Lilah reported to us that the British ain't got a government, that some damn joker named Churchill taken over. Then the Frogs sent their armies north, and the Limeys opened up a front against the Krauts." (Half Blood Blues)

I suspect writers do it either because they want to get back to their characters and out of historical context, or they just want to show that all that time with the microfiche really meant something. Whatever the cause, it tends to make the narrative hurtle off its path (and into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.) But there is another way, as Mantel shows in Bodies:

"8 January: the news arrives at court. It filters out from the king's rooms then runs riot up staircases to the rooms where the queen's maids are dressing, and through the cubby holes where kitchen boys huddle to doze, and along lanes and passages through the breweries and the cold rooms for keeping fish, and up again through the gardens to the galleries and bounces up to the carpeted chambers where Anne Boleyn sinks to her knees and says, 'At last God, not before time!' The musicians tune up for the celebrations."

It takes Mantel at least 30% more words to give less than 0% of the hard facts Edugyan provides. The point of this passage -  that Henry VIII's first wife has finally died - is not even explicitly stated. But it says plenty about the social makeup of Tudor England, and the crooked path of its gossip, as well as how Catherine's death will be something less than mourned. This is all more interesting than the data of her death. That difference is why we pick up an historical novel, and not an encyclopedia. And why I'll probably return to one of these books, before the other.

Frugal Living

I sometimes entertain notions of starting a Tumblr called "Lifestyle Tips for the Depressingly Frugal." It would feature your usual lifestyle blog photography (macro lens!) and tips for people who are comfortable admitting that even the simulacra of luxury - the how-to's of real lifestyle blogs -  are still out of their league. For example, my recent tip: when you can't afford the spa, or even the cheap nail bar down the street, you can always read descriptions of expensive spa services online, while rubbing your back as best you can. Unfortunately, my targeted readership probably can't afford weekly yoga classes (which are like $17 a pop), so they should probably prepare for the back rub by... reading descriptions of yoga classes online. Sadly, those are pretty much my only tips (except for my dissertation on the merits of various President's Choice products), so it would be a brief affair.

The Bus Reader

A few weeks ago, I started a new job in Mississauga. For those of you not versed in Toronto geography, picture a postcard with the CN tower. Roughly, that is the center of Toronto. Now, start going west until you fall off the edge of a postcard and into a strip mall. That is Mississauga. Next, go east, past the other edge and into a concrete parking lot. That would be where I live now. The journey from point A to point B requires a long subway ride and an even longer bus ride, each trip taking an hour and forty minutes. 

Fortunately, this gives me over three hours, total, of prime reading time a day. That's at least 100 pages, unless I'm reading Saul Bellow's Herzog. For reasons unknown, my Mississauga bus gets suddenly re-routed over the Khyber Pass before it shudders into Islington Station. It's hard to concentrate on beautifully-wrought sentences while your ride is clearing two metre wide craters, so I gave up. Yes, the ride would probably be smoother if I didn't insist on sitting in the accordion part of the bus, pretending it's the same thing as a free ticket to Canada's Wonderland, but maybe Bellow could have written shorter sentences. It's called compromise.

And there's an art to picking out the perfect bus book. Either it's respectable enough to read cover-art, or it's a paperback so you can curl the cover around. But don't be too pretentious - you don't want to be that person reading Kant on the bus, because then you're likely that asshole putting their bag on the empty seat too. Then there is the question of value vs. volume. I favour a hefty book, but not so thick that it won't fit in my side bag. Unfortunately, I've started to feel like I've already read nearly every book meeting those criteria, which means I'll soon start in on Fifty Shades of Grey, which can only end in the gutter. That is, Metro, the free daily newspaper, or more accurately, "Stock Photo Daily."

My Brilliant Retail Plan

Here's a thought: everyone, no matter how expansive their desk or comfy their chair, should have to work a week in retail for every two years that they are otherwise employed. Kind of like how the Swiss require military service, we should require customer service. Think of all the benefits. A humbler society, where few would loudly demand if YOU know who THEY ARE, or not tell you they are digging around for change until after you've closed the till. They would wait for you to finish stocking a shelf, or accept that sometimes a product runs out, and would keep their children in line. It's a glorious dream, isn't it? So why can't we make this happen, instead of pushing useless crime omnibus bills through? I think Stephen Harper is just squared of working at Arby's.