Category: Uncategorized

So I’m going to do the dishes and order some pizza for dinner. Why? Because it’s what this Thursday demands. Feeling broken down and beat up because of my lungs, my bad cold, my broken heart, and I’m just not in the mood to talk. Okay?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (link via Bookslut), today is the 50th anniversary of the beat movement, or more specifically, the first performance of “Howl”. When a drunk Allen Ginsberg took to the stage and catapulted an entire generation into a frenzy with his lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked…

Imagine what it would have been like to be there, dressed in black, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hearing Kerouac egg him on, and then hitting on some wonderful blonde woman whose grooving and digging it and thinking about changing the world and loving them and wanting to go home with them and taking a trip, hopping a freight car, sleeping with Henry Miller in Big Sur and then collapsing from laughter after remembering it all only to start from the beginning again.

So, because my cough was much, much worse the past couple days, I hung my head in shame and called the doctor. I hate calling the doctor all the time, but when you’re taking immuno-suppressant medication, the smallest infection can turn into something huge, and my recent illness is no exception.

Sooo, it could be pneumonia, but it doesn’t sound like it per se when he listens to my lungs. But I’ve still got the same symptoms and judging from how it always TURNS into pneumonia, he’s going to treat it as if it actually is pneumonia. Clear as mud, eh?

I might be taking antibiotics (the super-serious kind, none of this easy-peasy sh*t) for me, but at least it saves me from yet another round of bloodwork and x-rays. Tests are so tiresome.

I started two new books, and found this wonderful quote in Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland:

Sometimes, at my office, when the phones aren’t ringing, and when I’ve completed by daily paperwork, and when The Dwarf To Whom I Report is still out for lunch, I sit in my chest-high sage green cubicle and take comfort in knowing that since I don’t remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?

It’s a very zen quote, no? I guess the trick will be whether or not I a) finish the book and b) decide whether or not the above linked review in Bookslut is on the money or not.

Or perhaps not so random.

1. We went to Elizabeth Ruth’s book launch last week. It was great fun. Does that count as a random author sighting? Perhaps not random, but certainly interesting to see someone so happy, glorious and celebrating the release of a wonderful, creative book. And my favourite part was hearing her say something along the lines, “The entire inspiration from the book came from one line in an article I read while researching.” Now that’s a testament to the creative process.

(Off topic – I had a similar experience lately when I was sitting at the deck at the cottage last, last weekend and a couple drove slowly up to our dock, looked around, waved and then floated away. I thought, “How neat would it be to write a thriller that started with a man floating up to a woman’s dock at a cottage in Ontario.” Pretty neat from my point of view. /Off topic).

2. After missing the Salman Rushdie reading because it was sold out, I was treated to the sight of him walking by in the hallway at work. He’s very small. Not demure at all, just short, much shorter than I imagined he would ever be, being such a giant of the literary world. But still, how cool is that to see Salman Rushdie walk by in the hall outside the office you’re camping out in? Totally cool.

How many movies is too many movies? I’d say close to 5 in one day might just be reaching saturation point. I was so sick on Saturday that I couldn’t even make it off the couch, and I watched: Casablanca (do men like Bogey exist today? do they need to? What happened to that kind of “man”?), The Wedding Date (don’t even say it, it’s bloody terrible, and when did assumptions ever equal a plot?), Garden State (ah, I heart Zach Braff), A Slipping-Down Life (it’s an independent film that’s almost as good as Tully, but not quite), and Sin City (stylized, flashy, graphic goodness). Then, by the time Sunday rolled around I couldn’t even see the television let along concentrate on watching any MORE movies, so I gave up and read. All. Day.

Fingers crossed I get over this ridiculous infection by the weekend. We’ve got hot stuff planned: it’s the eve of the RRBF’s biggest tour ever.

Smoke, Elizabeth Ruth’s second novel, tells the story of Brian “Buster” McFiddie, a young boy who suffers from terrible burns after falling asleep drunk, with a lit cigarette and an open bottle of liquor in bed. The one thing that saves Buster from both a terrible depression as a result of his injury and, well, death, are the kind words and tender hands of Doc John, who tells the boy stories of Detroit-area mobsters to take his attention off the burns.

The novel, set in the 1950s, in a small town in Ontario called Smoke, where the majority of the inhabitants are tobacco growers. It’s a rural town, but it’s not your typical “small town Canada” kind of novel. It’s a novel that explores outsiders in the purest sense, from Buster, now disfigured as a result of the accident, to Doc John himself, each hiding secrets as easily as they hide in the shadows of society (to an extent).

It’s a brash, bold, even brilliant second novel. And one that fit perfectly into my melancholy afternoon coughing, spluttering and generally feeling sorry for myself being sick for the second time in three weeks.

Oprah, o wise sage, picked James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces as her latest book club pick. A good friend in my office highly highly recommended the book to me, loving it so, so much that we launched into a fairly funny conversation about why we both enjoy reading addiction books. Maybe because it’s an experience that’s so richly human, the loss of total control in the face of something that utterly consumes them.

It’s a richly addictive memoir, which I think was Frey’s intent, to echo the feeling and rush of his experiences as an addict, and fully explore his time in rehab. The book is written in almost a pure form stream of consciousness, with little additional punctuation other than a basic periods and commas. It’s a swift read, and one that takes you right into the fever of the moment. From the instant that James wakes up on a plane missing his four front teeth, with two black eyes, a whole in his cheek and broken nose not knowing where he’s going or where he’s coming from, you get the feeling that it’s not your typical memoir. It’s an interesting choice from Oprah, who might be reeling from the lack of support her last choice failed to garner (Summer of Faulkner, wha?).

It’s funny how the books in your life start to create clusters, or patterns, as you read through them. I’ve read three solid books about addiction this year: The Hungry Years by William Leith, Dry by Augusten Burroughs, and now A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. All three by men, all three detailing a deep and private part of their lives that forced them to change, and come out extremely different on the other end. Surprisingly interesting books whose authors have next to nothing in common except their shared experience with some form of addiction (food for Leith, alcohol for Burroughs, and drugs and alcohol for Frey).

I would highly recommend all three books, but maybe not to read them in succession for fear of falling off the high cliff of very serious topics into a pit of despair over your own addictions, be they as slight as my own addiction to sugar or more serious. All three make you think, and more importantly, make you feel.

So I’m as pale as a cloud on a summer day. My head is foggy, my chest is thick and wet (yum!), and I’m coughing up lots of icky stuff. Hooray! I’m sick, AGAIN. So I spent yesterday morning trying to go to work, giving up by around noon, coming home and watching movies. For hours. I felt too bad to even read for that long.

I watched Things Behind the Sun, directed by Allison Anders. It’s a wonderful independent film about a woman who was gang raped (I know, sounds uplifting) when she was fourteen, and has never moved past the event in her life. She’s a musician, and when her record starts moving up the charts, a music magazine wants to interview her. Only the journalist is the brother of the ring leader of the boys who raped her.

The movie frankly deals with the broken nature of Sherry, and Owen, the journalist, has his own troubles sexually as a result of what happened when he was a kid. There are deep psychological implications, and they reverberate in everything the two have done since they were fourteen; the broken souls are intelligently and almost wistfully explored in the film. It stars Kim Dickens as Sherry and Gabriel Mann as Owen. Oh, and Don Cheadle, the most underrated actor in Hollywood (IMHO), plays Sherry’s manager / lover, and he’s excellent as well. I’ve been wanting to see the movie for ages, and I’m glad it was as good as I’d read it was.

Then I watched Maria Full of Grace, and it was okay, very disturbing, but good. By then I was almost dizzy from too much television and sort of blacked out until after dinner. Annnywaaay. I’m starting to use this crazy Zip.ca membership, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the money I’m paying for it. I’ll give it another couple of months and let you know.

An important anniversary passed last Friday that I forgot to note here: it was the 1 year ‘birthday’ of my bionic hip. I can’t believe that my tragic right hip (the body part, not the blog) is a year old already. And it’s one of those rare events that sort of give pause to how much has happened in the short twelve months since I was lying in the Toronto Western Hospital puking from the anaesthetic, worrying about my job because The Boss From Hell had made my exit less than pleasurable and fretting over my creatinine levels that kept rising.

So here’s a summary of what my tragic hip has endured over the last 12 months: a new house that needs serious renovations; getting fired on the first day back while still using a cane and essentially still recovering; getting a new job that’s a world different from the old miserable one; finishing two abridged books for Sterling; getting contracts for two more; having the disease come back and taking the meds; going to Ireland and surviving the walking; and having more grey hair than when I started it all.

It’s kind of crazy when you look at everything that happens in a year, and then reflect upon the fact that your bionic hip has managed to carry you through it all.

Happy Hip Day!