House of Dreams

Once upon a time, I had a comfort zone. It was a cramped tiny thing, tightly circumscribed by class, language, church, family and culture. I lived there; surrounded by other little white girls and their nuclear families in suburban detached homes, with no idea that some of them didn't go to church on Sundays.

It was a long time ago and I don't remember it very well anymore, as distant and unreal as any story beginning with "once upon a time." Once upon a time, I was a princess in a castle surrounded by a moat, only I didn't know it yet.

Nowadays I don't have a clue. Two years ago, I was a married mom living in the big detached suburban house, driving to a government job every day, who was sedentary, rarely wrote (though she wanted to), and felt constantly like everything was wrong somehow but she didn't know what. In a few months, I will be a divorced mom living in a rented townhouse-thingie on a subway line, taking classes at a nearby university, who works out nearly every day, rides her bike all over the place, has written almost a hundred thousand words towards a novel (but split that in two halves, so I'm not nearly done), living off savings, and wearing clothes a few sizes smaller than before. The daughter has remained the same, but not much else. Maybe nothing else.

And it's not the first time.

Once upon a time, I was a little fundamentalist girl who grew into a fundamentalist teenager. I believed in the rights of the unborn, the sanctity of the family, the resurrection of Christ, the coming Rapture, and that slang was a sin. I was, in short, a sanctimonious brat. Then one day, I found the meaning of the dream I'd been having regularly for five years. Hey, Andrea? You're a witch.

Ouch.

It took two whole years--that's 730 days plus or minus, depending on whether or not one of them was a leap year--to begin to entertain the thought that I might not be evil. I can still remember the shock of that moment, the sensation of walls falling away. The old comfort zone looked suddenly like a prison cell.

It's happened more than once. Actually, it's happened repeatedly, more often than I can recount. It was a very small box at the beginning and now if there is a box anymore it's pretty damned big. A lot of those moultings have been recorded here over the past several years (marriage and parenting and difference and, now, work), so you're either already aware of them or you could be with a bit of dedicated browsing. But here's one I have never shared before: The Story of Andrea's Critical Reading Skills.

Just before my last year of undergrad, a friend gave me a book for my birthday. They didn't know it, and neither did I, but it was a classic piece of brownlash literature*, arguing for the unimportance of acid rain, the temporality of the ozone layer depletion, the arrogance of global warming concerns and the mathematical silliness of worries over deforestation. The only valid environmental issue according to that author was extinction. Three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had left me utterly unprepared for these arguments. I was convinced.

The three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had, instead, taken the basic environmental arguments for granted and worked to transform students into effective environmental investigators and activists. Three years of undergraduate environmental education and it was the first time I had encountered the arguments of the skeptics. Three years of undergraduate environmental education: I did not know how to evaluate the skeptics' claims or evidence, or take apart their reasoning. We had been taught many things, but critical reading and reasoning skills were not among them.

I grew up very closed-minded but by then that legacy had been long gone. There was no defence or barrier I could muster to that one book.

I'm afraid that during my last year of undergraduate environmental education, I was a bit of a jerk. I wrote papers outlining the skeptics' arguments and challenged every claim my teachers made in class. Shockingly, my grades on those papers were not as high as they had been. I was one angry almost-graduate, convinced that nearly the entirety of the movement to which I'd already dedicated the rest of my life was bunk. (By then, I'd read a few more brownlash books, all making the same claims on the same evidence by talking to the same experts.)

I'd been very comfortable in that little green box, and when it was taken away from me, leaving me--I was convinced--exposed to the elements, I was furious. Why hadn't anyone told me? Were they hiding the truth from their students to program them into lives of servile obedience to the cause? How is it I could have learned this from a casual birthday present the term before my last year of university?

What I didn't know at the time was that I had simply hopped from one little green box to another little brown one, and that the boxes had more in common than not: Don't question the experts. Trust what you read. If it's in print, it must be true. Hate the other guys, they're morons who don't understand progress/science. I stayed in the little brown box for about two years until, gradually, a more complete picture of the evidence began to penetrate and I stepped out of that box into another green, but larger one. I've been roaming around in this one ever since and have as yet found no cause to leave it. It's changed size and shape now and again, but it's the same very, very big box.

The last shreds of my environmental skepticism evaporated on a business trip to a conference on adaptation to climate change, where I saw for myself the effects that climate change is already having in Canada's far north (too far away from the urban centres for our politicians or business leaders to care).

In between those two moments--reading the book, attending the conference--I had made important decisions that would affect the rest of my life. After years of thinking I'd like to go into academia or maybe work with non-profits or both, I decided to jettison that nonsense and get a good job that paid well in the corporate sector--which I did, and loathed. I met and decided to marry a guy who wanted a stable middle-class suburban life with all the fixings--and you all know how that worked out. I bought a big detached house in the suburbs with that guy and hated driving everywhere, hated the material excess of it, hated the emptiness of what I was doing. All because a friend gave me a book as a birthday present that I didn't really know how to read, and I assumed that the change of heart it wrought was permanent. But it was only as permanent as snow, which feels eternal in January and by May you can no longer remember it. That, my friends, is an expensive lesson.

No book gets in under the gates anymore. No matter its claims or the persuasiveness of its arguments, I check for footnotes and bibliographies. I check the studies they cite, to make sure they exist (you'd be surprised). I read the abstracts at least to make sure they actually support the arguments the book's author is making. I look for book reviews, see if anyone had substantive criticism of the arguments or evidence. I take a look at the opposing side. Do you have any idea how many times since then I've read a book or article that misquotes or misrepresents the work of another author or scientist? Many, many times.

The first moral of the story is: Don't Marry the Book. No matter how sweet the courtship is, don't marry it. A book can be a friend or lover; it can also be a trojan horse, and the only way to tell the difference is to take it apart before you let it in. If you don't have time to take it apart, let it sit outside the gate until you do.

The second moral of the story is: A small hinge can move a large story. I'm sure you all have your own examples of this principle.

The third moral of the story is: Comfort Zones are Not Homes. They are stories; they have less weight and substance than air, and you cannot depend on them for support of any kind. Don't sit on the furniture, hang pictures on the wall, or put food in the cabinets. Treat them as extended and delightful versions of playing house. It's fun, but it's not real; it's good for now, but by tomorrow you may need or want something else. The less attachment you have to that house of dreams, the easier the transition will be when it comes.

The only way a comfort zone gets to be permanent is if you refuse to learn or change ever again. That's worse than learning to let it go with grace. Just don't get too comfortable in your comfort zone; if you are always willing to lose it, and can learn to see through the walls, it won't be so hard the next time everything turns upside down.

~~~~~

(This was part of Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week, about comfort zones. There wasn't a spot to stick that in in the body of the post today--sorry, Julie.)

*Brownlash literature is the environmental equivalent of backlash literature in feminism, in case you are unfamiliar with the term.

Posted by Andrea at 9:16 AM | Comments (14)

Do as I say, not as I do

I've been reading a lot of books about happiness lately. It's a kick I'm on, what can I say, and who doesn't want to be happier? There's lots of good information and when there isn't it's still usually an interesting read that provides food for thought.

But there is something that is really starting to bug me.

"I dropped out of a promising science career to become a buddhist monk, and I've never been happier," says one. "What I learned along the way is that it's not the circumstances of your life that make you happy or sad, it's the way you think about them."

"I dropped out of a promising career to become an author, and I love it," says another. "And what I've learned is, happiness is a choice you make for yourself!"

"I've spent the past thirty years following my intellectual passions and indulging my curiosities," says a third. "You know what I figured out? It's not what you do, it's how you think about it!"

Geez Louise, talk about hypocrisy. Where's the book that goes, "I was miserable in this dead-end job that made lousy use of my talents and watched the clock tick by all week so I could put food on the table for my kids who, by the way, I didn't get to see enough; but thanks to some remarkable insights I made after they'd gone to bed one night, I discovered I can be happy with exactly what I have already! Now I love my job and don't miss my kids and sing to my clients and customers all week long!"

Is it just me?

Yes, I know, life circumstances accounts for only 10% of overall happiness, and 50% is genetic, and the rest of it is your approach to life. Got it. But for a group of people who, by and large, seem to have found remarkable success in altering their 10% to tell the rest of us that we don't need to seems ... well ... insulting. In fact, in the case of the book that the third example was based on, there was a substantial portion of the book devoted to how to think about your current job in such a way that it makes you happy no matter how rote it is, the example given being a hospital orderly who sees himself or herself as integral to the healing process by making positive hospital environments for patients. Which is admirable and lovely so far as it goes, but why is it illegitimate for someone to just decide to get a different job? And how exactly is an academic who has been able to pursue his intellectual interests for the past thirty years in any kind of position to tell a hospital orderly that he ought to be able to find meaning in his work as it is?

Besides, if changing circumstances is really so unimportant and makes such a paltry impact, then why bother with challenging institutionalized discrimination of any kind? Why try to alter racism or sexism? Why fight disablism or heterosexism? You'll only get yourself in a tizzy; you'll be happier if you can just learn how to relax and not be bothered by all these destructive emotions.

The more I think about it, the more I think that happiness (if defined as "feeling good all or most of the time") can't be the goal. Or it can't be the goal if the only way to achieve it is to follow the advice of the happiness gurus and not worry about changing circumstances, only attitudes. Why can't it be both?

Posted by Andrea at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)

If you didn't believe I was an addict before, you will now for sure

So on the weekend I bought myself a few books as an early birthday present (because the pile of books I haven't read so far was not quite big enough), and discovered, to my chagrin, that I already owned one of them. In hardcover. And hadn't read it yet.

(clearing throat)

So, I have two options:

1. Return it.

2. See if any of you would be interested in getting it:

Blindsight by Peter Watts, a Canadian science fiction author whose other novels I've really enjoyed (explaining why I bought this one twice): "Sf's best visionaries have played out the ever-popular theme of alien first contact in so many different ways that fresh variations are now in short supply. Yet Watts manages an entirely unique approach in this mind-bending novel. In 2082, with utopia waiting just down the electronic pipeline in a virtual domain called Heaven, Earth experiences the sudden shock of a baffling extraterrestrial visitation in the form of bright probes that surround the globe. Within days, the lights vanish, leaving only a faint signal of outbound communication near the Kuiper belt. Possessing few clues about the aliens' culture or intentions, scientists dispatch an unlikely exploration team that includes a linguist with multiple-personality syndrome, a cyborg biologist, and a spectral captain whose genetic code incorporates vampirism. Watts packs in enough tantalizing ideas for a score of novels while spinning new twists on every cutting-edge genre motif from virtual reality to extraterrestrial biology. Watts' fifth, finest, most-fascinating book."

He has a knack for exploring the limitations of both science and human nature in entirely believable ways. More Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek, though truthfully it's likely to be much stranger than either.

If you're interested, leave a comment.

Posted by Andrea at 9:39 PM | Comments (5)

Andrea + Books = True Love Forever, Also No Money (Or: the UnShopping Midway Update)

January I did ok. In January, this is what I bought:

A birthday present for one of Frances's friends.
Art supplies for an actual project that I am working on and having great fun with, sort of an art journal/book of shadows in a box.
Three magazines. That's where I slipped up. They were not essential and did not meet my criteria.

Still, for a month of no shopping, that's not bad.

First weekend of February, do you know what happened?

I bought four books. Yes, four.

One is Bub and Pie's fault. I saw a comment she left on another blog about The Highly Sensitive Person and decided to read it. There were no copies available in the library system (I checked) so Chapters it was.

Two is The Green Family's fault. I am trying to cook more meatless meals, and my current cookbooks aren't cutting it. Sure, they have pasta and dairy dishes, but almost all of them have meat. So I bought a vegetarian cookbook. This, I told myself, was a reasonable compromise that will allow me to make environmental contributions for years to come. I tried the potato-and-cheese frittata on Saturday and not only did I love it, but Frances liked it too. And it had onions in it! (Frances is not keen on the vegetables.)

Three is Fun on Friday's fault. I decided it would be Fun to teach myself how to cook indian food on Fridays. This is when I cook for myself, see, and make things I know Frances won't touch. So I bought an indian cookbook, and actually went straight to the grocery store afterwards to get fixings. Ground beef curry, green beans, potatoes and basmati rice later, and I was very happy.

Huh. It just occurs to me now that I'm going to blame the blog in one fashion or another for three of my book purchases.

Four is not only squarely my fault, but led to more shopping. It's a workout book. I have the elliptical, that's good; I have a few cardio dvds, that's good. I have weights and a few workouts torn out of magazines; I've had them for years and they are getting very boring, not to mention too easy. That's not so good. This one looked like it had enough variety to keep me going for a good long time and it wasn't wimpy. No offence, but I like it when it's hard to go upstairs the next day. That's my aim. And couldn't I have waited until March? Yes ... but no. I got it that same Friday.

This then led to the realization that the 15-lb weights I had been using and which were already too easy and had been for a while were going to be really too easy because these workouts use fewer reps and sets, and if you're not a weights person that won't mean anything, but I knew there wasn't going to be any point doing these with 15 lbs, and I tried it on Sunday and I was right. So I went to a used sports equipment store and got new weights--dumbbells that will get me up to 35 lbs and if that doesn't keep me for a while, I'm screwed.

But they were used! Does that count?

Lesson learned: I can do one month.

Second month is a bit tougher.

But I'll keep trying. And in the meantime I can make yummy indian and vegetarian meals while contemplating my innate sensitivity and then burn it all off by hurtling around a few chunks of heavy iron.

Posted by Andrea at 9:17 AM | Comments (12)

Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost

One could write an entire post or even an entire series of posts on everything that is wrong with Scooby Doo. Talking dog. Marijuana references. Preponderance of white characters and boys. Daphne's Damsel in Distress Syndrome, especially in the originals. Formulaic plots. Crappy writing. Pick any one of the above, and presto: blog fodder!

But Frances loves Scooby Doo. He's a big friendly talking dog, what's not to love? She loves the mysteries which are never too scary and always come out not scary at all in the end. She laughs at all the stupid jokes and the marijuana references go right over her head. So we read Scooby Doo books, and I keep the groaning and kvetching to myself until I have a sympathetic adult audience.

But not for this one, which came as part of a Scooby Doo hardcover storybook collection.

Ben saw Velma staring at the picture. 'Sarah was a Wiccan,' Ben explained, 'a kind of medicine woman, like a doctor.'

'I've read about them,' Velma said. 'Wiccans don't use ordinary medicine. They understand the forces of nature--herbs and plants--and use them for healing.'

Did you know I don't use ordinary medicine? That's right. My insulin is special.

Look, I'm already struggling with how to deal with this. It's not like I'm telling Frances I'm a buddhist or an atheist or a yogic flyer. There's a lot of baggage with the word "witch," and she's already bringing plenty of it home from school and daycare. "Witches can't pee," she tells me; or "witches don't have round heads." And if you think these statements are limited to Hallowe'en, you're mistaken. I don't need one of her favourite entertainment franchises further muddying the waters with stories about "good wiccans" who use herbs to heal people and "bad witches" who die and turn into ghosts and terrify villages.

Ben grabbed it. He grinned, but it was an evil grin that darkened his face. 'This isn't a journal,' he growled in a low, threatening voice. 'It's a spellbook. Sarah was a witch!'

I read that book to her the first time with a sinking feeling, stumbling through the words with my sweet girl snuggled on my lap gobbling it all up.

Isn't that bad enough already? Do you think it can get worse? Let's read the Amazon reviews:

"The book contains "real" ghosts and witchcraft. Several nasty-looking girls who practice Wicca are portrayed as good and cool. I don't want my four-year-old to think Wicca is just a cool and different, but acceptable, lifestyle."

Heaven forbid. How dare a children's entertainment franchise preach tolerance to youngsters! Don't they know that for hatred and fear to be properly inculcated you need to get them young and never let them forget that different is awful and evil and terrible and will eat you while you're sleeping?

"Second, the book is a PR effort for wicca, the religion of witchcraft. Even positive reviews conceed [sic] this point, and the debate has been on whether or not it is OK to preach the benefits of witchcraft to young children. Make up you own mind, but the consistent, overt and in-your-face praise of witchcraft as a path of life (even being encouraged by Scooby's gang) is incredibly inappropriate."

Horribly inappropriate. How dare we! In-your-face praise of a religion as a path of life is only appropriate when you're in a traditional, organized, monotheistic religion. Otherwise it's straight-up corruption of youth.

But the book of course is not PR because it doesn't even get it right. Not even the smallest, simplest detail of either wicca or witchcraft is properly explained. It would be like a children's book talking about how christians are good people who worship god and cause water to turn into non-alcoholic wine on a regular basis by praying over it, but protestants are evil holy-ghost worshiping people who will come after you when they're dead to poke you with a pitchfork.

Shaggy grabbed the witch's spellbook and threw it to Velma. She flipped through the pages, searching for a spell to imprison Sarah.

'Here!' she said to Thorn. 'You're a Wiccan. Read it!'

The witch was getting closer! Quickly Thorn read, 'Ancient evil get thee hence...'

Suddenly the book jumped out of Thorn's hand, glowing and crackling with energy.

Do you think, if I could do that kind of thing, that I wouldn't have done so a long, long time ago? I mean, by now, wouldn't I be a millionaire with a private island, and also a harem?

Normally I have a sense of humour about this stuff. I don't get bent out of shape over the witch costumes and decorations that abound on Hallowe'en. People use witch as a polite alternative slur for bitch, and I laugh. Organizations get all up in arms because Harry Potter is corrupting an entire generation by proselytizing for wicca, and I shake my head. But this. As a foundation for building a positive and meaningful dialogue about my spiritual beliefs and practices with my daughter, this leaves much to be desired.

You can imagine I was already cross, then, when I came across Stephanie Conover's story.

""Our board of directors has eliminated her as a judge as tarot card reading and reiki are the occult and is not acceptable by God, Jews, Muslims or Christians. Tarot card reading is witchcraft and is used by witches, spiritists and mediums to consult the dark world."

The letter went on to quote a couple of passages from the Bible, including one from the book of Leviticus that warns, "Do not turn to mediums or seek out spirits for you will be defiled by them."

"We hope that Stephanie Conover will turn from these belief systems and will repent from her practice of them," the letter reads."

Repent. Defiled!

I hope you all know you're defiling yourselves just by reading my blog.

""Some would call me a witch, yes. But we don't believe in the devil. There's no devil in Wicca. We believe whatever you send out, good or bad, comes back to you three times. Ninety per cent of those who practise witchcraft or Wicca do it for the betterment of themselves or others. It's a religion and we're trying to get it recognized by higher-ups in government."

Conover said she also promotes diversity and multiculturalism as her mother is black and her father is white. Murray insisted Conover is "trying to stir up trouble" by raising the issue in the press. "She's obviously a very vindictive person," she said.

A very vindictive person!

I give up on humans. I think I'll go have a nap.

Posted by Andrea at 6:45 AM | Comments (10)

It was almost brief.

I've written so much about volunteering and 'enough' and finding time and making babies lately that I'm afraid, if I do it again today, I'll only make you mad ("speaking of ENOUGH, Andrea..."); so I'll use them handy-dandy bullet things to say:

1. Jen and Mad are having their baby shower today. Go have some cake and stick a gift-ribbon on their hair, and see the tremendous pile of shower gifts they're sitting on.

2. I am undergoing Screening Processes, since my volunteering options are the kind where they Screen you, to make sure you aren't a criminal trying to get access to vulnerable populations. So, no details yet, but it's still going to be 24 hours this year. The plan is the Big Sisters--they have group programs for volunteers who can't commit to the full 8 hours a month (the prospect of which makes me faint) and I love kids, and it will be good to work with people instead of trees and dirt, which is more my normal thing.

3. I'm also going to be interviewed about it tonight by the lovely and talented Bon over at Chrib Chronicles, around 9 pm Ontario time, and you do the math elsewhere. The link will be here. Bon and Jen and Mad and I will all be talking about the social justice wedding stuff, or at least we will at the beginning.

See? That was short. I can do short.

~~~~~

OK, I can't do short.

Hey! It's a day to read!

And you're here. Oops. So am I. So I'm going to tell you, first of all, that turning off the computer to read something print-based is a lovely idea. And secondly, since Friday belongs to Frances around these parts, I'm going to blather a bit about books today.

I taught myself how to read when I was three, according to my mother; and I see no reason to disbelieve her since my only memory of kindergarten is of sitting in the cloakroom with a grade-five student who volunteered to show me flashcards of words like "telephone" and "dinosaur" while I heard my friends outside drilling the alphabet. Thus I have no memory of a time in which I did not understand what letters are, how they are put together into words and how they connect with each other to form sentences, how the sentences link to make stories. I have no memory of a life before books. This makes it strange to see Frances tottering slowly towards literacy herself as I try to make this process conscious and show her how it all works.

Books are magic. I am an addict, and I'll admit this clearly makes me biased, but books are magic. Each one is a potent little package of incremental transformation. It mixes our own mind with someone else's, and when we pull back again, neither one is quite the same for the experience. A book makes a reader, and a reader makes a book. That object you hold in your hands and for which the bookstore charges you (or the library swipes your card) is not, properly speaking, the real book. The real book is what happens in your mind while you read it. That physical object, all those pages with black marks on it, is just the means of transmission.

Every book you read is yours and yours alone; it exists for you and because of you. The particular experience you have in your mind while you read it will not be duplicated by anyone else. No one else will see Anne or Gatsby or Huck or Peter Pan the way you did (until they make a movie of it, anyway). The author wrote it and lots of other people worked to get it to where you could pick it up; but you closed that loop and made it a book by letting it into your mind.

The internet doesn't do this very well yet, I don't think, because it is difficult to make your mind as open and receptive as it needs to be when your monitor is giving you eyestrain, your mouse is giving you carpal tunnel syndrome and your uncomfortable chair is giving you a backache. It is difficult to resist the temptation to skim, to skip, to click away when it gets difficult or challenging. I don't know if I can think of even five instances where something I read on the internet connected with me in the same place as a really good story or novel does, that left me saying "yes," even though I wasn't quite sure what I was agreeing to, or with, only that in some way I couldn't explain what I had read was the truth, regardless of its lack of factuality. The right book in the hands of the right reader at the right time can do this. It's magic.

If I were to even try to list all of the books that have closed this hidden loop in me, while I am closing the loop of that book while reading it, it would take an entire blog's worth of posts, and you would get bored of it long before I would. They change, of course; if you and I never read the same book because the experience in our minds is not the same, then it is also true that you and I never read the same book twice, because the experience on re-reading will not be the same, either. Some books worsen, and some improve. (Some are like comfort food and we re-read them to get the same experience again but I wonder, actually, if that's an illusion and it changes more than we recognize.)

Books are teachers and friends, counselors and prophets, therapists and clairvoyants, healers and lovers, magicians and heretics. Nothing else can do what a good book does, because a reader is not a watcher or observer but a participant. The words of a book are an intricate lattice with far more space than substance; space which you, the reader, fill in. That's work, and that's what makes the book yours. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that no matter what it looks like, writing is a performance art; and she was right, and the audience, too, is up on stage, filling in the scenery, singing the chorus, and supplying the cast. That's what makes books special; and they are special, dammit. They're not just movies on a page.

Frances can't read yet. She knows her letters and understands that they make sounds and is beginning to understand that the sounds can be put together to make words. But she's not quite there. She certainly won't be reading "dinosaur" and "telephone" next year. But I don't care. I don't care how or when she learns to read (although I suspect that her teachers at a certain point might begin to hyperventilate). All I care about is that her current delight with books continues. All I want is for her to be able to pick up a new book with the same sense of anticipation and incipient pleasure that I do, looking forward to hours in one sense spent curled up under a blanket on the overstuffed armchair with a snack and drink to hand; and in another, equally real sense, spent in another life, another time, another place, another self.

Posted by Andrea at 12:00 PM | Comments (8)

Structure(d)

One of my favourite things about the alchemy of writing is how forcing something into a rigid shape makes it more itself, not less. The container allows the energy of the work to build; the stronger the shape, the stronger the energy. There is little in life more passionate than a sonnet, though the words it contains are nearly empty of emotion. Don't believe me? Consider:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

(Yes, I memorize poetry. Norman Doidge in The Brain that Changes Itself argues that memorizing poetry makes your brain stronger and improves IQ, which was a nice validation of a trait I previously considered to be something of an embarassing tic.)

Back to the poem:

The only word in that stanza which refers to an emotion is "love." The rest of it is an extended medical metaphor. As free verse, it would never work:

"I love you so much I feel like I'm sick, and I don't want to get well."

Doesn't have quite the same punch, does it?

The apparent formlessness of free verse is something of a trick, an illusion; the truth is that a really good free verse poem is highly structured, but the structure is unique to that poem, the poem dictates the structure that most suits it. Still, the best free verse rarely whips itself up to the frenzy of a really good sonnet. The form of a sonnet is a cast-iron pot that you can stick on the hottest fire, and keep the water boiling for hours. Most free verse is a plastic bag. Try boiling water in that.

(Note: I'm not arguing that all poetry should be this passionate, or that free verse is bad because it's not; only that the rigidity reinforces the passion, rather than killing it.)

This applies to blogging, too, I've noticed. My most successful posts (from the point of view of the quality of the writing) are very structured. The structures appear to be my own--or at least I'm not aware of anyone else blogging with them. (Bracketing experiences with quotes is one; I try to use one to set off the other, whether through reinforcement or contrast. It's fun, and it works. Many of the ones I get the most recognition for follow this structure. I'm experimenting with others but most of them are not as set yet.) This in fact is one of the main values of blogging for me right now; it's a chance to experiment and practice with different sorts of structures. What happens if I include five short scenes with consecutive quotes from a piece of popular fiction between them? What happens if I start at the beginning, go all the way to the end, and then back to the beginning again? It doesn't matter if I fall flat on my face here; if the pot isn't strong enough to contain the water and take the heat, it doesn't matter.

The same is true in fiction. Really good fiction is highly structured. There is the set-up, rising tension, climax, denouement; and the climax usually takes place about 90% of the way through the book. (Try it with your favourite novel.) There is a certain balance of scenes (where things happen) to exposition (where things are described), a balance between dialogue and action, inclusion of all five senses, a main character who wants something they can't have, and a sense of inevitability. If the author's idea can't be contained within that structure, regardless of the work's other merits, it will fall flat. It will be uninteresting. Authors who have flouted those rules (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc.) have been successful to the extent that they were able to replace elements of the traditional structure with a new structure. It may seem that they are free-forming their open and directionless emotions in a vast and undifferentiated soup all over the page. This is why they are geniuses: the works are highly, tightly structured. They are cast-iron pots. They only look like wickerware. (Making a cast-iron pot look like wickerware is much tougher than just using the cast-iron pot.)

That it is the structure that builds the emotion--the level of caring for the characters and their plight, the tension in seeing how it all turns out--and not the words themselves is evident in fiction's most basic rule: Show, Don't Tell. Don't tell us "he was mad." Tell us what his anger looked like, how it felt, whether he snapped or snarled or whined or slammed the door or only thought about it. Emotion without a container, in writing, is just water dripping all over the stove. Turn the heat up as high as you like. It won't boil.

And now, in the middle of drafting a novel, in the free-forming stage of flooding the page with soup, I'm beginning to grasp what the structure could be, or should be. It's going to take a lot of work to shove it into that shape when I'm done, but the book will be better for it. (Not necessarily publishable. Let's not go crazy.)

###

(Yesterday evening I got home from work and made Frances her dinner while she watched Dora Saves the Mermaids, again. She ate while I heated my soup, cut the bread and cheese for topping, and while it was under the broiler I moved the books from the couch to the bookcase and cleared a spot for drinks on the coffee table, cleared the papers off the kitchen table, returned Frances's toys to their appropriate containers. In between all this I checked emails and replied. The soup was done just before seven, and I ate it while Frances talked to her father on the phone.

Then it was Frances's bedtime. Upstairs we went; she took off her clothes while I packed her suitcase for the weekend, then we got on her pyjamas and brushed her teeth. Booktime. Tucked her into bed, and time for a Princess Frances story. Time for a kiss and a hug, then I changed into my workout clothes and went downstairs.

A brief respite for reading Julian the Magician, Gwendolyn MacEwen's first novel (I already know I love her poetry). Time for a workout. Oddly, it's energizing: my brain feels cleared and I know I will not be able to sleep for two hours yet at least.

Time for dishes, to scrub the kitchen counter. My weekend is fully bracketed already: guests tonight, writing workshop Saturday, Santa Claus Parade on Sunday. Somewhere in there, laundry, groceries, cooking, cleaning, exercising must be done. So this can't be let go.

Another few minutes to relax, then it's time to write. I'll get a thousand words done at least before turning in. By then I will be drained, boiled dry. Before bed, a few minutes to light a candle; I'm working on Water. But I can't stay up too late: Frances will wake at 6:30 whether I am ready or not, and there's work to go to, income to be earned.)

###

Characters are making friends and falling in love where I hadn't expected them to; it's braiding a few subplots together into a thicker, stronger material, itself suitable for braiding into the main plot. Other characters are falling apart to their own internal stresses, the structure of their lives insufficient to the tasks at hand. Meanwhile I am beginning to see how this scene can click in to that one, that dialogue can knit with that description, to make something seemingly seamless from the outside. Or that's the hope.

It still seems magical, though; or is it just me? That the very artificiality, the forcedness, the seeming falseness, makes the story more itself, allows it to build and become stronger. Invention permits truth. It makes no sense; but there it is. Focing something amorphous into a cast-iron pot makes it stronger, deeper, more authentic. It is magic--real magic, not TV magic--the spell or the ritual creates a container for the energy to build within, so that when it is directed at a task, it is equal to it.

Meanwhile, I know I said I would be writing here less while working on the novel. Strangely, the more I write my story at night, the more I can think of things to say here, during the day. Who'd have guessed?

Posted by Andrea at 12:36 PM | Comments (4)

Outsider/Insider

I finished this recently:

Because that's just how much fun I am. In it, Ms. Lipsitz-Bem (she of An Unconventional Family, one of my favourite parenting books of all time) proposes a psychological theory of how the culture imposes its lenses (or ways of seeing and structuring reality) on the individual, and how the individual then learns to become an active participant in seeing and structuring reality the same way; she also tries to account for how some people fail to become what she terms "cultural natives." She calls this learning to see the lens, instead of seeing through it.

Her description of how this happens is fuzzy. She proposes a biohistorical model of human difference--that while most people are born malleable enough into societies that demand something of them which is in enough accordance with their inborn temperaments that rebellion is unnecessary, some are born stubborn and different enough into societies that demand things of them that they are incapable of providing, and rebelling becomes the only way to maintain psychological integrity, or a sense of self. Beyond this she provides few details for what the mechanism specifically is: her one convincing example in the book is a description of the maturation process for non-heterosexual people. They try to conform; when it becomes apparent that conformance is impossible, that they are incapable of living happily in heterosexual relationships, they rebel; the rebellion is at first intensely distressful and upsetting, but as a community of like-minded souls is found, a new sense of self develops, and the person learns how to see the presumption of heterosexuality as a norm is false, is a lens, and not reality.

In my post about Collaborative Narratives, I concluded by saying that the problem arises when you can't fit yourself into the stories your society tells.

And now I'm going to suggest that combining these two theories--Lipsitz-Bem's about cultural lens transference and Bruner's about the narrative construction of reality--both highlights important flaws in each and constructs a tidy little theory of social change. (I'm so excited! You can go ahead and say it, BubandPie: I'm such an intj.)

Bruner's theory about how stories create social reality fills in the gap about how cultural lenses are created and transferred to the individual. The cultural reality we live in is, in Bruner's view, essentially a collection of stories, the weight of centuries or millennia of narrative accrual. I'm going to suggest that one of the ways, and perhaps the most important way, that cultural lenses are transferred to the individual is when the individual becomes aware of all the stories in the culture and attempts to locate themselves in those stories. According to Bruner, children at very young ages (3 or even 2) use narrative in this way innately, reflexively; use stories to talk about their lives, yes, but also to come to an agreement with someone else about what has just happened, to negotiate reality with other people. So at a very young age children must become aware of all of the relevant stories they hear about social and personal reality: This Is What Good Children Are Like. This is What Good Girls are Like. This is What Good Boys are Like. This is What Good Students Are Like. This is What Good Friends are Like. All composed of stories upon stories. And then children try to locate themselves within these stories, identify the most important components of Goodness as revealed in the stories we tell, and make themselves fit.

So Bruner's theory slots very neatly into the hole in Lipsitz-Bem's. But Bruner's theory itself has a hole, in that it presupposes that the social reality thus created by narrative is actually real instead of ideal or preferred. Lipsitz-Bem's arguments about cultural lenses makes clear that the stories so created are still just that, stories, and that there is actual objective biological reality outside of those social stories. The social reality so created is less of a social reality than a socially-negotiated agreement. We all agree to agree, for instance, on what constitutes a Good Friend. We do this by telling stories about particular friendships that, over time, add up to an image of the ideal.

I think that social change happens when a person or a group of people realizes that their inner stories about themselves and their own lives are fundamentally incompatible and irreconciliable with the dominant cultural stories about who they are supposed to be or what their lives are supposed to be like.

Take The Good Mother. Over millennia, we have told stories about mothers both good and bad that, glued together, present an idealized image of the Good Mother. She is self-sacrificing. She puts her children before herself. She does not want to be separated from her children. She loves her children more than her male partner. She puts her personal ambitions aside to serve her children's needs and desires. She is warm, physically affectionate, playful, and never bored. She revels in tiny hands and squeaky voices. She will not accept less than the best for her children, and will tirelessly work to provide it (within the home). She maintains a spotless environment for her children, provides her children with nutritious foods and somehow coaxes them down the gullet, and encourages them to reach their full potential. All of this gathered together from the stories told in religious texts, novels, stories, TV shows, movies, hallmark cards, magazines, newspaper articles, published studies, gossip, and even jokes.

Only a group of people (mothers) are vocally protesting that they cannot locate themselves within the social reality (The Good Mother) constructed by these narratives. Result: social change. Slow, but still. One of the ways in which that social change is happening is through the accrual of new narratives about what Good Mothers are actually like. A new vision of the Good Mother is being actively constructed through the exchange of stories told by the women who cannot locate themselves within the traditional narrative.

It also explains the insider/outsider phenomenon in a much more satisfying way (to me) than simply claiming that some people are biologically or inherently incapable of conforming with expectations. Those expectations are transmitted through the stories we tell (even when they don't look like stories--gossip, jokes, slurs, greeting cards and advertisements are also narratives in this sense). Some of us realize one day that we cannot fit ourselves into the socially constructed reality we live in, that the stories we hear reflect nothing about the lives we are living. At first (following Lipsitz-Bem's model) we probably reject our own stories, our own reality. Then we reject the culture's instead.

On a personal level, one becomes an outsider when one cannot live out the narrative script of a member of one's demographic group. When one is incapable of conforming to the expectations laid out in the social reality constructed by narrative, and constructs a new personal narrative to explain the gap between one's own actually lived life and the supposed or ideal life proposed by society.

On a societal level, when one person or a group of people creates a new narrative to explain the gap between perceived reality and the socially-agreed-upon narrative reality, and then tries to transpose that new narrative on to or over top of the existing cultural narrative, they become activists.

Posted by Andrea at 8:43 AM | Comments (11)

I'm stealing a book meme

Because I have neither the time nor the energy for an original thought today.

From Mom-NOS, via Bub and Pie:

Total number of books?

(Blank stare.)

OK. Well. There's the large bookcase in the living room that has, let's see, 25 cubes. Each has to contain about 20 books (double-stacked, remember). So that would be around 500. Then there's the double-stacked bookcase in my room. That has to be another hundred, so we're at 600. Then maybe another 30 scattered in other shelves, and ten or so in my night-table, and a largeish stack on the coffee table. Plus another hundred or so at my parents' house in boxes (still). Maybe a bit more. So ... 750? ish? Maybe a bit less?

It's a good thing I gave all those books away when I moved. Can you imagine?

Last book read?

The Lenses of Gender by Sandra Lipsitz-Bem. I'm working on a review, it was really good.

Last book bought?

(digs toe into carpet)

Here's the thing: I went to the Word on the Street festival on Sunday with Frances. They had books everywhere, and they were cheap, and so ....

There were five Scooby Doo books ($5 for the lot), 3 Clifford books ($5 again), two preschooler hardcovers for Frances. Then for me, I bought Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum, a memoir (I know her, sort of, from an old message board), Grassroots, Gwendolyn MacEwen's first novel (can't recall the title but I love her poetry and was very excited to see the novel, old as it may be), an anthology of Canadian poetry, an Ursula Franklin reader, a few hardcovers at $5 each (one of which was a novel that won the GG prize for fiction recently), and....

What? What are you shaking your heads for?

OK, yes. I went and bought so many books that I honestly cannot recall all of the titles or authors. Maybe about twenty? But books! Cheap books!

The scary thing is that I'd already had a stack of about twenty books in the to-be-read pile, four of which I am currently working my way through; and now I have so many books that I honestly have nowhere to put them. I can't put my new purchases away. There's nowhere for them to go.

Five meaningful books?

I'll refrain from being pedantic and pointing out that all books, technically, have meanings that are encoded in the little black marks made on the page (oops), and interpret the question as it was probably meant: five books that have special meaning to me.

A Christmas Carol, for believing that the worst of us can be better, that change is a constant potential in human nature.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for making me look in nooks and crannies for hidden kingdoms my entire childhood; for rewarding a belief in magic. Also, in the case of Alice, for being the only novel I know of that successfully used the "and then I woke up" ending.

Self (Yann Martel) for using Virginia Woolf's Orlando to explore doubleness, identities, and sex roles.

Not Wanted on the Voyage and Wicked for flipping the good and bad guys around, questioning the nature of good and evil, and letting the animals speak for themselves. Wicked gets bonus points for introducing Elphaba (the wicked witch of the west) as one of the most intelligent and interesting heroines of all time.

You'll notice that none of my "meaningful books" are realistic. It's not intentional. That's just the way my brain works.

Posted by Andrea at 7:55 AM | Comments (5)

Totality and Abandonment

You might think a total solar eclipse would have no colour.

I might.

The word "eclipse" comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, "a forsaking, quitting, abandonment." The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour.

There are times when you read just the right thing at just the right time and it hits your brain at just the right angle, and you see something in a new light that makes previously disparate and sharp-edged shards turn into a seamless whole. Then there are times when you think you might have read just the right thing at just the right time but it refuses to hit your brain at the right angle, instead sitting on the surface, knocking politely. Anne Carson's essay "Totality: The Colour of Eclipse" is one of the latter.

Drastic analogies abound in the literature of totality; also typical at this blasted moment, to turn to thoughts of kissing and marrying. Many mythological explanations of eclipse involve copulation or the hope of it.

I have never seen an eclipse, partial or total. These days I suppose the actual event is unnecessary, as one can experience something like it by googling pictures off the internet. But I doubt it would be the same. I wonder if it would make a difference to my comprehension of this essay, which otherwise appears to be making several contradictory statements. Such as: eclipses lack colour so intensely that the lack becomes a colour; eclipses equal abandonment by the sun; eclipses are marriage and coupling; spouses are colour. So: eclipses are both the absence and presence of a partner? Is the coupling referred to simply that initial moment of totality when all reason is obliterated? Is it that moment when you see someone and think, for a moment, "this one"? What happens when the eclipse passes and normal life, with colour and the sun, resumes?

And isn't it odd that something meaning abandonment should take on the overtones of a new presence, of a mating? In which case, who is abandoning, and who is being abandoned?

I wonder if third angles were in her [Virginia Woolf's] mind that day, as she wandered over Bardon Fell in both the company of her husband, Leonard, and her lover Vita Sackville-West. To judge from the observations in her diary (June 30), she was watching Vita all the day, watching Vita watch her husband, Harold Nicolson... watching how marriage was going with Vita....

Four people, three couplings. I wonder if Harold and Leonard knew. Do you think they did? Did they have their own affairs? Was it right or wrong? Does the question even apply?

It was 1930. Marriage was going well with the Sapphic Vita, marriage was going well with the virginal Virginia. Besides that, they were enjoying their affair, looking forward to spending the weekend after the eclipse together at Long Barn (Vita's ancestral estate). Still, totality is a phenomenon that can flip one's ratios inside out. I wonder if they paused to look at each other, these mated and unmated people, on the exposed plane of an ordinary moment of that curious, heavy, historic, wrong day. Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes. Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?

Is it even a fair question? Should any one person have the burden of keeping us alive? Is that why they should stay, to assume the task of our mortality?

No, scratch that; let's begin again: is human totality as rare as the solar? Do we all get our eclipse? Do we get more than one? If you get an eclipse, are you blessed or cursed?

totality is a phenomenon that can flip one's ratios inside out.

The inversion is what is initially most shocking. The inversion, the flip, of who you thought you were. The sight of your reflection in someone else, of what they see, of what you had never seen in you. An absence of colour so intense that it becomes a colour; the absence one's self, one's rules, one's expectations becomes, instead of an absence, an obliterating overarching presence.

Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes.

Which? The sight of the sun's absence, the presence of wrong colours, or the sight of the absence of the self and the wrong self that replaces it? The inverted, upside-down self, with all the rules gone, and the absence of rules the new compelling rule?

Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse, after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?

As it turns out. No.

Posted by Andrea at 12:10 PM | Comments (2)

Self-Help: A Review of Mindset by Carol Dweck

Last Sunday I was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. You might guess that this is not a rare sight in my house.

It had been two hours since lunch, at which I had consumed an entire Laura Secord easter egg--the big ones--without bolusing properly. I'd guessed the dose, then looked at the grams of carbs on the box, and saw that I'd underdosed myself by two units. If I'd been on the pump that weekend, I would have just bolused another two units immediately, but it's an entirely different proposition when you have to stick yourself again. So I didn't.

And there I sat, two hours later, reading a book called Mindset. The blood sugar meter was on the table by my right hand. I looked at it. Should I test? Or shouldn't I? I knew it would be high. I knew I would fail.

~~~~~

Do you remember that Po Bronson article about how to praise kids properly making the rounds of the parentosphere a few weeks back? Some thought it was great, some thought it sucked, some thought it was a mite unrealistic to tell parents not to tell their kids how great they are. And then there were the some (like me) who didn't write about it at all, or even comment on sites where it was written about. And some of you have no idea what I'm talking about, so I'll provide the key quote from the article to ground the discussion:

"When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. ... The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

"But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of 'smart' does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it."

I didn't write about it not because I thought it was unimportant, or untrue, or uninteresting. I didn't write about it because I think it's premature to talk about parenting before we talk about the parents.

I was labelled smart. Sure. It started before kindergarten, when (according to my parents) I taught myself how to read when I was three. In kindergarten, I was pressured to learn arithmetic so I could skip grade one (I refused). In grade 4, I was streamed into the "enhanced" class for smart kids, which necessitated a school change. I stayed in them until the end of highschool. And I've written about the detrimental impact of being told how smart you are on social integration (short version: being segregated sucks. Putting a bunch of kids in a room and telling everyone how SMART they are is a recipe for isolation and bullying). But I've never considered how the labelling affects the kids, or the adults we grew up to be. The intention was clearly to make us super-achievers who rule the world, instead of getting terminally bored and dropping out of school at fifteen.

Only it failed. On all counts. For one, we are not super-achievers in adulthood. We're very normal, very boring, mostly solid middle-class professional types. For another, while no one dropped out in highschool, so far as I know, several kids from my class flunked out--not dropped out, flunked out--of university. We're talking kids with IQs in the 140+ range. On the surface a textbook description of exactly the forces Bronson wrote about.

Penguin Unearthed wrote a post on this topic which links to a Stanford Magazine article that digs deeper into this research and its applicability in areas beyond parenting, and mentions her recent book: Mindset.

From the article: "...what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura ... and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. ... People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed."

I think if I'd been left alone, I would have ended up in the 'learning goals' camp. But I wasn't left alone; for ten years I was thoroughly tampered with in an educational system that made it its express mission to tell me every day how innately intelligent I was. No one ever taught us that we could be smarter if we worked at it: our intelligence was fixed. The point of our extra-special education was to enable us to reach the pinnacle of achievement pre-determined by our fixed level of innate intelligence. Umm...this didn't work.

But I'm a change junkie when it comes to personality. Every year I make an insane list of New Year's Resolutions, and every year I believe that if I work hard enough, I can do it. Every year I fail to work hard enough, but that doesn't stop me from trying, and I think if I didn't try then a lot of what I consider to be important about me today wouldn't exist.

Here's a graphical Dweck's model of the mindsets. I fall in both camps (you all know I can't ever pick one of anything).

Challenges? I LOVE challenges ... except in sports, and then I will avoid them at all costs. Persisting in the face of setbacks is my middle name when it comes to changes to my living situation, but when it comes to my career, it's time to pack it in and go home. Or how about seeing effort as the path to mastery? For writing? Absolutely. For art? Forget it; I have no talent.

"But what if you’re raised with a fixed mind-set about physics—or foreign languages or music? Not to worry: Dweck has shown that you can change the mind-set itself.

"The most dramatic proof comes from a recent study by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell of low-achieving seventh graders. All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise. Training students to adopt a growth mind-set about intelligence had a catalytic effect on motivation and math grades; students in the control group showed no improvement despite all the other interventions."

I was on page 62 of the book (quotes so far are all from the article) when I sat at the table and stared at the glucose meter and thought: a fixed mindset could take years off my life. If I see these tests as something that tells me whether I've been bad or good, succeeded or failed, deserve to live or die, then of course I won't test. The stakes are too high. But if I see it as something that will allow me to improve in the future, I will.

Has anyone ever told me that I'm a bad diabetic?

No. Quite the opposite. I've always been a "good" diabetic, a "well-controlled" diabetic, who passed her tests with flying colours. I've always received a smile and a virtual pat on the hand from the diabetes professionals I've dealt with. Yet somehow I still learned that everything was on the line at every test. This is exactly what Dweck found in her work on intelligence and achievement:

"We praised some of the students for their ability .... We praised others for their effort. ... Both groups were exactly equal to begin with. But right after the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students straight into the fixed mindset. When offered a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. ... In contrast, when students were praised for their effort, ninety percent of them wanted the challenging new task.... Then we gave students some hard new problems, which they didn't do so well on. The ability kids now thought they were not smart after all. ... After the experience with difficulty, the performance of the ability-praised students plummeted, even when we gave them some more of the easier problems. Losing faith in their ability, they were doing worse than when they started. The effort kids showed better and better performance...."

In other words, telling smart kids that they're smart makes them dumber. Telling them that they worked hard makes them smarter. So: telling a person with a chronic illness that they are a "good" sick person will make them a worse one--if you want them to learn good habits and improve, you have to praise their efforts. Which means saying, in essence, "Good for you! You tested!" And not interpreting the results as any sort of reflection on them or their effort--as all diabetics know, sometimes you can throw yourself into it heart and soul and not see good results.

Don't I wish more doctors knew this.

I was afraid, before I'd read it, that it would be one of those socially-blind, everyone-can-do-anything-if-they-put-their-mind-to-it books that ignores the realities of prejudice and bigotry and the very real impediments to achievement that these systems can place in our paths. It wasn't. She acknowledges that stereotyping creates real barriers that cannot be overcome with effort; but then details how people with a growth or learning mindset are not as affected by stereotyping as people with fixed or ability mindsets. And she acknowledges that natural talent is also important--that some people can achieve more with the same level of effort; but the point isn't that everyone can be number one. It's that any one person will do better in any one endeavour with a growth mindset than with a fixed one.

For instance, most of you will have much, much better blood sugar numbers than I do, without effort. That's because you have a pancreas. I don't. That's your 'natural ability'; the point isn't that effort will ever give me the equivalent of a perfectly functioning pancreas. It won't. The point is that if I believe that testing is to learn and improve then I will be healthier and have better sugar numbers than if I believe that testing measures my discipline, motivation, or worth.

I read Po Bronson's article. I read it, and I tried it on. For a few days I tried to praise Frances in process ways, telling her what she did well instead of how brilliant she was; and you know something? It felt like an affectation, because it was an affectation. I couldn't talk to Frances that way because I can't talk to myself that way. I need to learn to talk to myself that way first, or at least at the same time, or that smart kid of mine is going to see right through me and learn the lesson my actions preach while my words tell her something else.

But let's step outside the rarified world of privileged families and consider the work done on this subject elsewhere. In the chapter on education, she describes a number of teachers who were assigned classes full of children labelled bullies, emotionally handicapped, mentally disturbed, learning disabled and even retarded by other educators, and made them brilliant over-achievers in a few months. These were kids from bad neighbourhoods with few financial resources and poor familial support. And I think, too, about the revolution in attitudes towards Down syndrome over the last few decades--how babies who were thought to have no potential and no hope because of their fixed attributes were left in institutions to rot and die, and how now those very same children with those very same attributes are busting expectations right left and centre today because people who care about them are determined not to be limited by a diagnosis.

In the workshop chapter in the back (which admittedly I found a little skimpy--more on that in a minute), there is a section on fixing the mindset of a preschooler who believes that ability is innate. The very first sentences of the solution state:

"You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. At the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): 'What did you learn today?'"

The very first thing--fix you.

Or me. Whatever. You know.

Ninety per cent of the book summarizes research on mindsets in various fields (education, parenting, sports, coaching, business leadership, the arts). Only the last chapter is devoted to figuring out how to change one's own fixed mindsets; and the how-to is a little sparse. In that it doesn't exist. (A variety of scenarios with potential responses are listed and discussed.) But then, it can't. How can you present someone with a ten-step program for overcoming a fixed mindset when it can be present in so many endeavours? You can't.

I tested my blood sugar, by the way. The ideal is 3.7-6.5. It was 12.0.

Posted by Andrea at 6:43 AM | Comments (16)

Book Review: Cheating Destiny by James Hirsch

If you are alive and literate in North America in the 21st century, you know that type 2 or adult-onset diabetes is now an epidemic, and that our modern lifestyles are to blame. What you may not know is that type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder, is also on the rise--the incidence has increased at 3.2% per year for decades.

But I'll bet you've never read any passionate newspaper articles decrying this epidemic or what it will take to defeat it.

When I went to the bookstore yesterday (yes, yesterday) I intended to pick up two new releases: Mindset (more on that next week) and Ally (the only actual sci fi series featuring a wiccan protagonist who's not a flake that I've ever come across). Walking through, I saw Cheating Destiny: living with Diabetes, America's Biggest Epidemic by James Hirsch. I picked it up and read the prologue: this is that book I'd heard of last year, I thought; the one where the author's three-year-old son is diagnosed with type 1 while he writes it. The one where entire online diabetic communities eviscerated him for being so stupid as to reproduce while having diabetes.

I picked it up. I had to. I'm glad I did.

If there is one book to convey both type 1 and type 2 diabetes to a non-diabetic audience, this is the one.

It beautifully captures the emotional and psychological whipsaw of living with this chronic condition--the perpetual collision of anger and gratitude, grief and hope, acceptance and denial, terror and courage. Yes, if you are diabetic, you will find vindication in its pages; but if you are not, you might find understanding. And I hope you do. It is so difficult to convey the simultaneous thankfulness for insulin and blood sugar meters and the resentment for the burdens it places on you, the embrace of the promises for new therapies and treatments and the bitter laughter at the glossy photographs in the magazine ads, yet he's done it.

It also captures the doublespeak of the medical establishment with acute clarity--how type 1 diabetics are expected to adhere to the control goals of the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (which proved that near-normal blood sugar control would help delay or prevent complications), without being informed that even the group studied in that trial could not achieve the original goal of 6.0 for the A1C, and the revised goal of 7.0 was achieved only by providing each diabetic with a full team of diabetes specialists who would call them at home, support them in every way possible, and bribe them with theatre and sports tickets. (Has anyone ever offered you so much as a sugar-free lollipop for adhering to your diabetic regimen?) How, once the trial ended, the group's control eroded in the absence of those supports and average A1cs rose to 8.0; yet 6.0 is still presented as a reasonable goal to type 1 diabetics operating on their own with few resources and often without sufficient insurance or familial support.

I'm sure many of the diabetics in the audience have already read it; it's the non-diabetics I hope will pick it up. Those of you who don't know how it is to simultaneously feel blessed for having been given decades of life you would otherwise not have had, robbed by the knowledge that you are likely to lose decades off the other end regardless, and frustrated or angry at having to deal with the disease moment-to-moment in the meantime.

I'd lend you my copy; but I intend to forcefeed it to my parents two weeks from now.

Posted by Andrea at 8:16 AM | Comments (9)

In Defence of Science Fiction

"Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will. ...And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I didn't know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled 'science- fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station*." Kurt Vonnegut, 1965

Not just serious critics, Kurt: sadly, a large proportion of the reading public considers science fiction to be so much badly-made toilet paper. I'd tell you why, but I've never been able to understand it; how could a literature that gave us Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, the entire western mythological canon from Greco-Roman to Biblical (from which modern literary writers do not hesitate to steal themes, plots, characters and symbols), Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood and--of course--yourself, be considered inherently unserious? How is it that the same people who gobble up Harry Potter novels--which, besides being fantasy, are poorly-written fantasies for children--sneer and turn up their noses at the genre that gave birth to them? How is it that the same people who are trooping into theatres to watch Wicked--which at least has the merit of being good fantasy--have no idea that a fantasy is what they're paying to see?

What is it that they think the Narnia chronicles and Alice in Wonderland and Charlotte's Web and the Wizard of Oz are? How is that generations of people who have grown up steeped in speculative fiction treat it with such disdain and ignorance upon reaching adulthood? What is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind if not science fiction?

Kurt, would you mind if I told you something that really bugs me? It's about Battlestar Galactica. No, don't get me wrong, I love the show. And that's only partly because of the large number of very attractive men running around in skimpy uniforms (any chance we could impose on earth militaries to adopt them? No? Shame). I love that it's doing well, too, and attracting audiences who think they don't like sci fi. What bugs me is when these audiences say, "It's not science fiction because it's about people."

All good fiction is about people! Every science fiction novel I've ever read is about people. Sure, some of the human characters haven't been particularly well-drawn, but that's true of most historical and mainstream novels I've read, too. Science fiction doesn't have a lock on hackery. And whenever someone says that--"I love BSG but I don't like science fiction; BSG is different because it's about people"--I want to scream. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was about what--telephones? Airplanes? Puppies? Was The Handmaid's Tale about household appliances? It's as if the idea of science fiction as contaminating is so deeply entrenched in the culture that as soon as someone realizes that they like a story, a book or a movie with a machine in it they must immediately distance that work from the genre. "I like this, so it can't be sci fi, because sci fi is crap" instead of "I like this; hey, maybe sci fi isn't crap!"

And why is it that anything set in the past, whether by a few decades or a few centuries, becomes a "period piece" and acquires a veneer of respectability no matter how nonsensical the premise or characters, when anything set in the future, whether by a few decades or a few centuries, becomes the butt of a lot of jokes involving skinny adolescent boys and social misfits wearing Klingon costumes? I can't tell you how much it bugs me to watch or read something purporting to be "historical fiction" only to come across a female character so preposterously modern that, if she actually existed in the time and place specified, she would have been burned at the stake as a witch or clapped in an insane asylum (both of which fates regularly met unconventional women until about 75 years ago). I'm about as fond of that as I am of the male science fiction writers who can project a technological society ten million years into the future that is radically different from our own in every way except gender politics, because they can't imagine a world without free female domestic labour. However, while the number of diehard sex essentialists in the science fiction genre is shrinking all the time, it seems that the Athena Character (so named for the way in which these strong female characters seem to have sprung into adulthood fully formed, without having been meaningfully molded by their society in any way, as if they had never been children) is a staple of modern historical fiction.

Not that this is an easy position to take, as a woman and mother. You and I both know that there are plenty of intelligent, well-drawn, interesting female characters, including mothers, all over the science fiction genre; but try to convince anyone else of that. The sexism of the field is as deeply entrenched in the popular imagination now as it was in the 1950s, when the reputation was actually deserved, and the works of Octavia Butler, Ursula le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Sherri S. Tepper, Liz Williams and dozens of other feminist science fiction writers has not apparently done much to dispel it. How could anyone still be amazed that BSG has important female characters? If nothing else, Alien ought to have cemented the female kick-ass sci-fi protagonist in the culture. And it's almost thirty years old.

Apparently, what I'm supposed to like--as a woman and a mother--is a bright pink book with a black silhouette of a stylized woman either carrying shopping bags or pushing a stroller. And I don't. Maybe there's something wonderful between those revolting covers; but if there is, I doubt it's for me. I don't want novels that validate my experiences. I want novels that validate my interests and passions. Give me a novel of possibilities, of weighty ideas; give me a novel where an entire system is drawn out with all the detail of a spider's web, and the human characters are struggling with their lives in the context of this system, just as all people do, ourselves included, only we are so enmeshed in the system of our own times that we rarely have the chance to step back and see it, whole and clear. Give me the chance to separate myself from the seeming inevitabilities and inertias of the world I live in, give me a reason to believe that a pull here and a twist there and a whisper might shift it. I already know about shoe shopping and makeup and gossip and mean girl politics and the mind-fuck of the first year of motherhood and what modern life is like. And they're killing me, so give me something else. Give me hope.

Not that you deal much in hope, Kurt. Your work is amusing, but dystopian. Still, a happy ending's a happy ending, even if it is a race of seal-like human-descendents one million years in the future who have lost their overly-large and troublesome brains.

It's not that I don't love literary and mainstream fiction, too. But the literary and mainstream fiction I love tends distinctly towards speculative fiction themes--Oryx and Crake? Science fiction. Blind Assassin? Science fiction embedded within historical. Not Wanted on the Voyage? Fantasy. Wicked? Fantasy. Self? Fantasy. The exceptions are notable for being so rare--Unless. Austen. Dickens. (Though the latter two are clearly separated from my own time and place, and Dickens was not above fantasy, as his Christmas novels show.) Even Wuthering Heights has fantastical elements, and I prefer it to the other Bronte works. I loved L.M. Montgomery, but don't tell me she didn't dabble in fantasy, with all of her ghosts and eerie premonitions.

And it's not that I'm above casting a disparaging eye on certain genres in the privacy of my own library. I've never met a romance novel I could finish, or a western novel I could start. But I recognize that this isn't a lack in the genre or in myself; it is simply a difference in temperament. In order to critique any piece of art, you need to understand what the artist was trying to do. If you can't, you are not qualified to judge it. (There are exceptions: if, for instance, the spirit of the piece, its impulses and motivations, are inherently derogatory or hateful towards a particular group.) OK, I can't stand romance novels; but that doesn't translate into romance novels being inherently stupid. Yet there are a lot--a LOT--of critics and members of the general public who seem to think that every worthwhile work of art must be directed at an audience of people just like them. They don't see that if you can't understand what an artist was trying to do you are in no position to judge whether or not they were able to do it.

Maybe the need to construct and defend hierarchies is so deep within the human psyche that the world literally needs a literary pissing-ground. Depressing thought.

It's robots and spaceships, or dragons and princesses. Right? No. Wrong wrong wrong. Is Battlestar Galactica about robots and spaceships? No! It's about what makes us human, and how we determine right from wrong, and how we decide to do the right thing, and how when we think we're doing the right thing we're often not. Is Lord of the Rings about dragons and princesses? No! Tolkein wrote those books as an exploration of Catholocism. The themes of good and evil, predestination, and the importance of individuals are as strong in his work as they are in the work of any mainstream author.

But here I sit, wondering if maybe I should write myself out of the genre now. Learn how to write realism, though it bores me, simply because otherwise I'm going to end up stuck right beside you in that drawer. Not that I'm ever going to be world-famous; but that's not the point. Most of the world's six billion people will never get the faintest whiff of a clue that I'm there. But even if all I ever do is publish a handful of stories, I hate to think of them thought of as inherently trashy because other people think that serious literature has to contain volvos and condo towers. Can anything be further from the truth? Did you see the reaction of sci fi writers and the SF blogosphere when Kristine Kathryn Rusch published her piece about how science fiction needs to back away from literary writing and revert to the Star Wars model in order to be commercially successful? I could have heard the keys pounding if I were standing on the rings of Saturn.

How did it happen that you have, on the one hand, "serious critics" deciding that the entire genre is Star Wars in drag, and that's why it's trash; and on the other hand, other critics deciding that what we need is a little more Star Wars? Given that every novel, movie and TV show to break out of the genre ghetto and become a success and a classic with mainstream audiences, with the exception of Star Wars, was not Star Wars, I'd say they're both wrong. Bladerunner! Aliens! The Time Traveller's Wife is science fiction! How does anyone read The Time Traveller's Wife and decide they loved it, but still hate sci fi?

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about." Ray Bradbury

Ray's right--except that I'll put words in his mouth and extend it to readers, too. You know it, and I know it. In any event, I could no more stop myself from writing and reading science fiction and fantasy than I could make myself care about grey hairs or whatever Lindsay Lohan's latest public spectacle is supposed to have been. And I don't want to.

Screw it. Anyone who can't tell the difference between a drawer in a filing cabinet and a public urinal has no opinions worth paying mind to.

Posted by Andrea at 9:48 AM | Comments (16)

Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher & Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Quinn Patton

As the titles suggest, both these books are written for the would-be world-saver, who sees a problem and feels compelled to be involved in the solution. They are both also distinctly written from a left-leaning point of view, with examples and causes drawn from the environmental and social justice movements. Both are useful, interesting and potentially inspiring, but intended to be used in different ways.

Writing to Change the World was my first purchase, an Amazon order back in April when it was released. Believe it or not, I've been meaning to write about it ever since, but it never managed to float to the top of the blog to-do list.

Pipher's book is for those who believe that changing someone's perspective is changing the world, and that if a writer's words can alter even by a millimetre the way the world is seen, then that writer has changed the world. It's divided into three sections: What We Alone Can Say (how to find and connect with your own material and point of view), The Writing Process (the ins and outs of writing to argue a point and change the reader's mind), and Calls to Action (with a chapter each on letters, speeches, blogs and other particular forms of writing). The first two sections were the strongest; based on her own experiences as an author of books about various social issues and which methods and techniques were successful vs. which weren't, there were a number of useful insights and ideas. The third section was, unfortunately, weaker. Each chapter was too brief to contain enough useful detail on how to use particular writing methods to achieve particular aims. For instance, the chapter on blogging conveyed little beyond the standard pro-blogging the-internet-is-inherently-radical-and-democratic rhetoric that many of us know is untrue. There's little about how to use a blog to change people's minds, including the ever-pressing issue of finding and connecting with an audience who doesn't already agree with you, and while there are several examples of unusual points-of-view conveyed movingly on blogs, there are few examples of how those writers changed policy or voting patterns or news reporting or, indeed, anything concrete.

Still, the content of the first two sections is solid and unique enough to more than make up for the third.

Getting to Maybe is a more difficult book to characterize. The authors are three experts in the field of social innovation, which could be defined as the creation of a business model or organization or process that changes the underlying societal structures that perpetuate inequality or environmental destruction. For example, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh pioneered a new concept of credit which allowed them to lend money to high-risk, very poor women at much lower interest rates and still make a profit. The result was a new credit system that has allowed, in the thirty years this idea has spread globally, millions of women to escape the cycle of high-interest credit that kept them in poverty. If you are familiar with The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's book on how small ideas and seemingly inconsequential products can become overnight marketing sensations, this book is The Tipping Point of the Social Justice movement. How can one person, or a small group of people, change the world for the better?

However, their ideas are complicated and difficult to communicate. I don't mean this as a criticism; I think it's probably inevitable. Changing the world as one person isn't easy. If it were, we'd all be doing it already. They base their model on complexity theory, and this is where your head is starting to hurt, isn't it? I know, and I wish I could make that better, but to get it I really think you have to read the book. It's equally inspiring and frustrating. There are no ten easy steps, no checklists, no summary charts; there are dozens of stories of individuals and small groups who effected enormous societal change through a new idea at the right time.

For those of you not particularly interested in world-saving, or who like to make the world a better place through participating in someone else's bright ideas, these are probably not the right books for you. This isn't meant dismissively, but they are both directed towards leaders, whether leaders of opinion or leaders of actual organizations. Having written that it seems somehow ludicrous to count myself among the audience. But for those of you in whom the daily news creates a desperate need to do something that isn't already being done, either book will fill you with hope and good ideas, depending on how you like your activism.

Posted by Andrea at 7:15 AM | Comments (4)

Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood, by Karen Maezen Miller

A month or so ago, I got an email from someone named Karen which read, in part, "I know that even if you hate it, you'll read it."

Who can refuse an offer like that? I mean, she's right. Fortunately for her, I didn't hate it.

Momma Zen is a slim book that isn't quite a parenting manual, and isn't quite a momoir, but feels like something in between. Advice mostly consists of "you're doing better than you think" and "there's lots of ways to raise a kid," portrayed through her own experiences and Zen Buddhism (she is a priest).

The book it most closely reminded me of is Writing Down the Bones, and I found myself wondering if it's a Zen thing--if there's something about the training or perspective that lends itself to developing this pared-down, spare, poetic style. The language was lovely. The chapters were brief and combined humour with insight. There was a refreshing lack of judgement.

"What would happen if the nit-picking narration were absent? What happens when you watch a TV football game with the sound turned off? The players still scramble, they still fall, but they are saved from the injury of evaluation. The same would be true of your life. What is a mistake without the self-critical label? It is just what it is. It is always perfection in action--not perfect as in better than something else but perfect as in complete. Your actions need nothing--not analyzing, not punishment, not instant replay. It is impossible not to do your best, you just don't think it's your best."

That sums up the spirit and style of 99% of the book. But there's the one per cent--the chapter titled "Tending Garden: seasons of marriage," in which she advises people to stay married for the sake of the kids. And it's hard to square this with the rest of the book, where she writes about how hard it is to take care of yourself too and the importance of cutting yourself some slack. It isn't even that I disagree with her individual reasons for staying married to her husband through the upheavals of having a first child (my child adores my husband, and he adores her, and so on) but that I don't think this is a standard to be applied to every marriage. In the worst-case scenarios, of course it is better to have one parent than two if one of the two is abusive or negligent, and this is a situation that some of my friends have dealt with, so I'm sensitive to it.

While I was reading it, I found myself wondering who I would give it to, if I'd bought it as a gift. I think I would give it to a friend who is prone to self-doubt and self-criticism and who has a stable relationship. In fact, I can think of one such friend off the top of my head who might receive my review copy in the near future, though she hasn't any Buddhist tendencies that I know of.

It was lovely. If I might borrow the author's phrasing, I would say it is perfect, not in the sense of "better than everything else" but in the sense of "complete." I'm not aware of any other book quite like it.

Posted by Andrea at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)

Frontiers

One thing you don't ever want to do with me is go to a bookstore. Especially not the World's Biggest Bookstore, a two-level monstrosity in downtown Toronto which, if it doesn't earn its name, must come very close.

You don't want to do this because while most people spend a few minutes, maybe half an hour, or stretching it an hour or so, browsing the shelves and taking one or two things to the front ... I can spend a day in there. And I have (though not since Frances was born).

I've noticed that most people gravitate to the sections they've already developed some familiarity with: they're romance fans, so they go to the romance shelves; they like to read about art, so they check out the art books. I look at everything.

All right, it's a slight exaggeration: I look at almost everything. I look at the fiction, the classics, the sci-fi, the fantasy, the poetry, the literary criticism. I try to pick up a few things by people I've never heard of before. I look at the physics books, the biology books, the environment books. I look over the cultural studies shelves, the women's studies shelves, the native and black studies shelves; I'll browse through politics and history and memoir and biography. I have to look at the crafts books, which leads me to the cookbooks, the decorating books, and on to the journals and pens. Sometimes I'll check out the new business, finance, or fitness titles (but I rarely buy one). I wander through the religion section, then occult and new age. I'll tackle the philosophy section on the way to the magazines. I spare a glance for the women's glossies, then look at the cultural mags like Bitch and BUST, the little lit mags, the science mags, news mags, how-to-write mags, the craft mags, cooking mags, kid's mags, parenting mags.

Once I've done this, it's time to take the stack of books and magazines I've collected on my way through the store, find a spot on the floor to sit (the chairs are always taken), and read through the introduction of each to determine whether or not I think it's worth the money to bring home. If I simply paid for everything I'd picked up, it would easily cost $500 per visit, which I can't afford. The sorting is sometimes painful, and I have been on occasion reduced to scribbling lists of the things I can't afford on the back of a receipt from the bottom of my purse, to order online later on.

I've often joked that if I ever end up in the poorhouse, it won't be from drugs or clothes or shoes, it'll be books and magazines. I visit the little bookstore across the street from my office almost every day, and have been known to purchase updwards of five magazines a week.

As a result, I've amassed an eclectic collection of books on topics ranging from string theory and parallel universes to the themes in 1970s Canadian fiction, from well-known poets like Blake to the works of new poets writing about transgenderism and family, from wiccan cookery to christian apologetics, from Atwood and Shields to Liz Williams and Robert Charles Wilson, and so on.

This is clearly the result of privilege on my part, and such a collection is a luxury, perhaps an obscene luxury, in the world we live in. In my defence I can only say that I am an addict, and I don't mean that in a flippant way or to dismiss the pain of physical addiction. If you had ever seen me wandering the house when I run out of reading material, twitchy and jumpy and grouchy and distracted and almost desperate, you would know what I mean. It's not on the level of heroin addiction, but there are neurochemicals involved. At home, I am never without a book or magazine in my hands. Even if I'm not reading it, it's there.

Bub and Pie, in her post yesterday,* quoted a line from Shadowlands: We read to know we're not alone.

Except that I don't. Is it just me?

When I pick up a book about something unfamiliar, something new, it is a struggle. There are set patterns in my head that resist whatever I'm learning, and these set patterns refuse to see what the author is talking about. (This sounds odd, but stay with it.) X means X as I've understood it before, and Y means Y; and if the author is telling me that actually, X should be Xz, I shout at them in my head. But then there comes a moment when I feel an almost audible pop in my brain, and there is a whole new world in front of me. The same world I've lived in my entire life, but understood in such a radically different way that, for a moment my metaphorical jaw hangs open and I am awestruck.

Yes. Of course. Why didn't I see this before?

These are the books that become my favourites, the ones I force on family and friends, the ones I praise over and over again in posts and emails and conversations. Not because they tell me I'm not alone, not because I feel kinship with the author or their perspective--I may still radically disagree with them--but from the thrill of discovering a new frontier for myself. It's the endorphin rush of exploration, only without the mosquitoes and uncomfortable sleeping bags, and with a nice cup of tea to hand.

I read for validation too, but it's nowhere near as addictive.

I've written before about my extraordinarily painful and not quite voluntary conversion to Wicca, which centred in part around a recurring dream I had as a teenager. In part of that dream, I stood in a large single-room cabin with a thousand doors on every inch of the walls, doors of every description and variety. And they led everywhere--I found, on the other sides of those doors, the bottom of the sea, the inside of a star, a king's bedroom, a galaxy swirling in space. To me, reading to know you're not alone, from the definition most people seem to give that phrase which is reading about things with which we are already familiar, is like staying in that musty single-room log cabin when on the other side of the doors is the whole universe.**

And here's the thing, the extra kick on top of the endorphin rush that makes the whole enterprise even more worthwhile:

You will begin to find kin in the unlikeliest places.

Forget a universal human kinship, that's small potatoes (important, but small). No differences between two human beings can ever be so vast as the difference between myself and the computer I am using to type this, or the organisms living in the sulfur vents on the ocean floor, or whatever waits for us outside of the solar system, if anything does. Yet even those things--the computer, the worm, the potential alien--came from the same place and are made of the same stuff. At one point in the unimaginably distant past, we were all packed into the same singularity, made of the same undifferentiated matter.***

Mystical mumbo-jumbo? Maybe. But at least consider that the differences with other people that appear so immense today might not seem so if your universe was a little larger; and consider that what Lewis-as-represented-by-Hollywood might actually have meant is that by reading about everything, by opening your mind up to new experiences and perspectives, by coming to understand them, you never feel alone because everywhere you go, there's kin. The man wrote fantasy and science fiction; I hardly think he would have meant that we read only about other people like ourselves, or where would that have left his centaurs and gnomes and aliens? (Am I the only one who ever read his adult sci-fi? It wasn't very good, so if you didn't, I don't blame you.)

I'll add, too, that the friends I have who are the most consistently caring and loyal are rarely the ones with whom I have the most in common.

The tendency to find a tribe, whether in the bookstore or online, is strong. I won't deny the pull to locate yourself in a community where everyone is so much like you that you are rarely challenged or stretched, because being challenged and stretched can be immensely painful. Questioning deeply held assumptions and beliefs, throwing them over for something new, can be traumatic. It is easier to stay within our comfort zones; like throwing on a ten-year-old sweatshirt after work every day (which I do). But it's tragic, too, like limiting yourself not even just to one particular colour, but to one shade and hue of one particular colour, as one tiny speck on the colour wheel, so that you live your entire life as a light cerulean blue, completely unaware of the existence of indigo, never mind the entire continent of red.

~~~~~

To tie this into my post from a few days ago--of course, to get to the continent of red, you might have to wade through a lot of unfamiliar language, whether it be dialect, another tongue, spelling variations, usages, accents or jargon. Even math.

...This is a tangent that could easily get away from me, so I think I'll put it in another post.

~~~~~

*I want to be clear that I deeply appreciated her post on this subject, as it has become something near to my heart, and I'm gratified to see it ... travelling, so to speak.

**It's also a luxury, because if you live in a societally-defined margin, it will be nearly impossible to find books, magazines, blogs or whatever that uthinkingly reflect yourself back at you in an empowering and validating way. You will, to continue the analogy, live outside of that single-room log cabin by definition.

***Not that this will save your life if you are packed into a small space with someone who believes that a trivial difference between you justifies violence on their part.

Posted by Andrea at 11:05 AM | Comments (13)

Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood

I am one of the few (or I assume it's the few) who still buys hardcover books. Not always, not even frequently; but there are some authors for whom the year-long wait for the paperback is simply intolerable.

So: I saw Moral Disorders listed in Atwood's list of works in the paperback edition of The Penelopeliad that I picked up a few weeks ago; "A new book!" I thought. "I haven't seen it yet. It must be coming out soon."

I saw it the following week at the bookstore across the street from my office, and ... I bought it. Yes. That's right. I couldn't even wait long enough to go home and check the price on-line, then wait for it to come by mail.

None of you need me to tell you that Atwood is brilliant and her books are miracles of construction. I've already pestered some of you with my musings about The Blind Assassin, how much I admire her ability to do a book-within-a-book-within-a-book, and have them all inform each other, and to work a pulp science fiction novel into a literary masterpiece--every time I hear someone say (or write) that she didn't deserve to win the Booker for it, I want to hit them.

I just finished Moral Disorder, a collection of short stories that tells one woman's life, and it was gorgeous. It also made me want to cry, because how did she do it? The entire book is constructed with a flagrant disregard for one of the most-often-repeated pieces of advice for novel writers: end your chapters on a note of suspense. But in a book of short stories, you can't do that; each story needs to be complete on its own, resolve itself. And yet there is a thread of suspense that makes the whole thing hang together and pulls the reader through.

So I'm going to have to read it again to figure out what it was. How did she do it?

Posted by Andrea at 11:02 AM | Comments (5)

Book Review: LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice

First off, an unrelated complaint: Isn't there a law against having two colds in the summertime? Isn't there? If there isn't, shouldn't there be? How have our lawmakers lapsed so egregiously in their responsibilities? Surely we can put a measly little virus in its place: "Cold virus, you already own November to May; we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and we're drawing it here. Keep your paws off July and August, or we're sending you to itsy bitsy microbe jail. We mean it."

A few months ago I read LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Ah, I see you nodding your heads: 'yes, I see. Bioregionalism. Of course. Exactly.' Bioregionalism is a philosophy that argues that the natural scale of human organization is one based on the environment's patterns of self-organization--that is, that a human culture should logically be about the same size as the ecology its dependent on (but you already knew that). So that a culture based in the Great Lakes Bioregion should, ideally, not be larger than the Great Lakes Bioregion; and if the sizes managed to match up, you'd end up with a society that is small enough that some sort of actual democracy is possible and is knowledgeable enough about the environment its dependent on not to foul its own nest all the time. Personally, I think this is true; I also think that today's mega-countries aren't going anywhere in the near future, so the challenge of bioregionalism is how to encourage bioregional subcultures within today's nation states, and this is not at all related to the topic of today's post, but I wanted you to know what bioregionalism means before I go natter about this book I read that has the word "bioregional" in the title.

An easy introduction to the concept of bioregionalism this book is not; an interesting meditation on the practice of bioregionalism in one particular place and time it is. The book is broken down into several sections of different facets of bioregionalism practice, such as Grounding (figuring out where you are), Living (figuring out what that means for you), Reinhabiting (changing your lifestyle to be more in tune with the place you live in), Imagining (place-based art and culture), Trading (the economy), and Acting (personal actions).

It is not an exploration of traditional bioregionalism as I understand it, either; Robert Thayer's take is more pragmatic than the utopian and idealistic bioregionalism literature I found when I was doing my undergrad ten years ago. Whether this is good or bad is impossible to say. On the one hand, it's nice to see the concept moving beyond the fringe; on the other, it's sad to see that its focus has shifted away from the cultural-social-economic means to full sustainability it was intended to be towards a concept of ecological rehabilitation with only minor changes in human society. Undoubtedly this makes it more palatable, but it's less inspiring as well.

And you, my Dear Readers, are tapping your feet impatiently: "Home, Andrea. This is supposed to be about Home. Get to it. I have a million other things to do today." Right, yes, I'm getting to it.

Thayer grew up in Colorado, and moved to the Sacramento Valley for a job in his, I believe, late twenties; in the twenty-odd years he'd lived in Colorado, he'd never formed a bioregional practice. He'd never attached to it. It wasn't his home.

He lived there, I know. And I know that today "home" means for most people "the address I give people when they ask where they can mail something;" so why is it that that's not home for me?

I have a home in the traditional sense; or rather, I have a house. Actually, the bank has the house. I think we own about a hundred square feet of it. Anyway, the important thing is, I live there. All my stuff is in it. I sleep there at night, I eat most of my meals there; my computer's there, and you know that counts for something. But after living there for over a year, I still drive past it half the time when I'm coming home from work. Woops! Wrong driveway/street. Good job, Andrea.

I like the house. If you have to live in a house, and these days it's considered uncivilized to pitch a tent on the patch of land you call your own, it's a good house to live in. It's in decent shape, it's big, it's well taken care of, it has electricity and running water, and, you know, my computer's in it. But I don't think of it as my home. My home, as much as it exists where I'm living right now, is the patch out the back door. Erik wanted the house because it was new enough and clean enough and big enough; I wanted the trees.

In winter, when I couldn't go outside as much, I felt disconnected. I fantasized about living in a smaller, less expensive house. Is it so bad to buy a new house in a new subdivision where the trees can be mistaken for survey sticks? Can't I live happily without grass for a few more years if it means our household expenses go down?

Then spring comes. The trilliums and trout lilies bloom.

The trees bud. The squirrels scamper on to the deck and beg for peanuts at the back door. Spring turns into summer: I walk into the woods each week to see which new wildflowers are ready to bloom, if the coneflowers are out yet. I love the coneflowers, not just because of their colour and size but because of the gigantic bumblebees that swarm them.

Yes, I know that's not a bumblebee; I'll post that picture later.

We find rabbits on the lawn. We catch frogs in the back garden, and Frances makes a new friend. I sit out on the back deck with a cold drink in the afternoon or evening; the wind dances with the trees, monarchs fly over our heads, chickadees and goldfinches and purple finches and sparrows and doves and blue jays and cardinals and grackles and woodpeckers battle for the best bits of sunflower seeds. The house sitting on the land is almost incidental; it's the land itself that's home.

I can picture myself visiting new places, even for extended periods perhaps, a year or two; but I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I can't say how or why it happened, but the plants and animals of my childhood and young adulthood are as much friends and family as any person I know. When I walk into an ash-maple or pine forest, when I see the chickadees taking seeds from the birdfeeder for a friend on the branches, I am home. I belong. They're not human, but they are my kin. When I need to relax, I close my eyes and picture myself at my grandparents' cottage, lying on the sandy earth, the shallow tree roots rippling the ground, ants crawling over a leg or arm, pine needles thick beneath me, the pine trees they came from so shading the forest floor that nothing else takes root. The broad flat stones that lead to the creek banks are in the sun; I sit on the large one right by the edge, take off my shoes, and a hundred tiny minnows rush out to swarm around my feet. There are crayfish and frogs for catching and a thousand pinecones to toss in and send over the falls.

From waterfallsofontario.ca

There's no electricity, no running water, no neighbours. That's home. That's my home. Those trees, those minnows, that rushing water--those are my people.

How did this happen? I didn't go there more than a handful of times each year growing up; how is it that I can still close my eyes and picture it so clearly it becomes more real than the chair I'm sitting in? My childhood was not remarkable; my guess is that Thayer reaching adulthood in Colorado without ever feeling himself at home is much more common and we probably share most of our early experiences. I wish I knew what had happened, what the switch was. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone felt that the world around them was kin. That home wasn't the box you lived in, but the land the box stood on.

If I could live for a few years in New Zealand or the south of Italy, I would. I'm not xenophobic or provincial. I love travelling, I love new. But in no other place I've been could I stand outside in a wild spot and feel as if I were as rooted to the ground as the trees, as if I belonged there. In no other place can I hear, when I am alone, the steady pulse of the earth beneath me.

The building I live in is inconsequential. This place is my home--not the buildings, the people, the language, the customs, the insitutions or all that other frippery we pile on top of it, but the actual place.

Posted by Andrea at 10:06 AM | Comments (3)

Book Review: Affluenza

Usually, the book comes before the movie or the TV show; in this case, the TV show preceded the book, and it shows. Affluenza reads like a TV documentary: quick snappy scenes without much content, vast conjectures drawn from little evidence, and significant-seeming coincidences passed off as meaningful without much corroboration. For example, pp. 44-45: "...the experience of time famine intensifies, driven by longer, or at lesat more demanding, working hours, and the competing time requirements associated with the care and feeding of stuff. Something has got to give. For many Americans, it's sleep. Many doctors say more than half of all Americans get too little sleep--an average of an hour too little each night. We average 20 percent less sleep than we did in 1900." How many doctors? What's their evidence? What's the counter-argument? Is it really because of work and consumption, or is it television and computer games? It's impossible to say, because that paragraph is the sum total of the sleep argument. I will admit I was gratified to find another source validating my consumer/citizen pet peeve ("'We've mutated from citizens to consumers in the last sixty years,' says James Kuntsler..." p. 65).

But don't listen to me, I never watch television. The back of my head is telling me that if this is a new subject for you or if you enjoy watching TV, then you'll probably like the book. For those of us who have been certain now for a decade or more that we overconsume and not only is it terrible for the environment and for social justice but it also makes us deeply unhappy, the book will probably offer little that is new. Self-rated happiness plateaued in the 1950s, you say? We have more stuff than ever but rates of depression are rising? Ecosystems are being ploughed under for shopping malls, factories and highways? Most of us can't name five local wildflowers? Our demand for ever-increasing quantities of inexpensive merchandise is being off-shored to third-world countries where lax labour and environment laws allow them to externalize the tremendous costs of our lifestyles, culminating in the ultimate irony of five-year-olds in Disney sweatshops producing mountains of cheap plastic crap that they themselves will never be able to afford to buy even as they spend their lives making it?

Is this old news for you? Then don't read the book. Is it new? Then do. It's a good introduction, but if you're already committed to the values, ideas or solutions the book espouses, it is probably not worth your time. The main problem of the book is that the very people most likely to purchase and read it are those who least need to hear its message. Here's a quick test:

Did you know that in 1970, Americans spent four times as much time shopping as Europeans did?

Did you know that Kellogg's used t