Crad Kilodney for President

The handwritten letter I receive from the legendary curmudgeon Crad Kilodney is bundled carefully with a bunch of logic puzzles and some maps of stocks I might care to invest in. The author of Blood-Sucking Monkeys From North Tonawanda and Simple Stories for Idiots among a whole lot of others, Kilodney is something of a cult figure for Toronto. Up until the mid-nineties, he was a permanent fixture on the streets, rain or shine, hawking his own books. Though he studied astronomy and earned a Bachelor of Science, he wanted to be a writer. So he did what few would-be writers do: he wrote. The man wrote over 30 books, and he hand-sold them personally on the streets. Oh, and once he lived in the same apartment building as Madonna when she was majoring in dance studies at the University of Michigan.

Kilodney’s public mythos is something of a cantankerous, angry, half-starved writer, and the titles of his self-published works only further that reputation. Works like Lightning Struck my Dick, Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards, and Terminal Ward make Bukowski and Hemingway look like cheerleaders. Though literati snobs point out that Kilodney published very little outside of his own press, Charnel House, do-it-yourselfers everywhere hail him as Lord of the Underdogs. Kilodney’s dour perspective on the Canadian small press’s waste of paper and supplication of government money is well known. Though he retired in 1995, he occasionally cracks his caustic whip in pieces for his own web site, Dead Man Talking, at www.cradkilodney.net. I asked him if giving up writing has made him less depressed.

“It wasn’t writing that depressed me,” Kilodney says. “It was this city full of awful people. Retiring has definitely improved my emotional state because I don’t have to go out on the street any more and deal with hostility and bullshit.” At least the man isn’t starving anymore. Investing in mining stocks has treated him to some easy money. “Girl, if only you knew…” he says when I ask how much.

.

“I came back to the earth plane to be a writer because I didn’t get to be one in my previous life. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, too bad. I’m going to tell it as I know it, even if I can’t prove it. I lived before, roughly from 1900 to the 1940s. I was a rich idler with vain literary pretensions. I loved books but never had the literary career I wanted. I died rather young, from some sort of accident. When my soul went to the spiritual plane…I was unhappy because I had not done anything in my life to be remembered by. So I asked to come back. The deal was that I would have a literary career that would be unique in human history, but for this privilege, I could expect to pay a high price. All of this has happened. Writing never made my miserable….In public, I’m afraid I am rather cantankerous. I feel that I’m constantly surrounded by idiots and freaks. No, I don’t see a chance at happiness. Not everyone gets to be happy.”

I know that writers are a funny breed- I’m intimately acquainted with the heady delusions that seem to follow us, the disappointment and frustration and the poverty that most writers experience at least for awhile. Perhaps Kilodney’s whole career was a kind of performance art about writers, a parody of the desperate interplay between the publishing industry and the jokers who write for it. He was something of a prankster, after all, pushing buttons no one else was brave enough to. I recall getting flack in university literature for failing to find any grandeur in a few of Irving Layton’s dirty old poems. Guess I wasn’t the only one.

“There were two hoaxes I did…the first one was aimed at the CBC Radio Literary Competition. I sent in stories by seven different famous dead authors, disguised as the work of unknown writers. All seven were screened out by the preliminary readers. The following year I sent a manuscript of poems by Irving Layton- disguised as the work of an ex-Ugandan army officer- to 26 different publishers, including McClelland and Stewart, Layton’s principal publisher. The only two who caught on were two of the smallest literary presses. Editors are stupid. There are no formal qualifications to be an editor. Look at J.K. Rowling’s experiences with Harry Potter. It was rejected by all the big London publishers.”

Kilodney also suffered the indignity of being issued a ticket for vending his own books without a permit. “This led to a protracted legal battle with Metro,” he says. “We were in the court of appeal, and Metro wanted to drop the whole thing and I wouldn’t drop it…I had no fear of those bastards, and I made sure they knew it. In the end, the case was moot because the law was scrapped by someone else’s case.”

Kilodney also “ran” for President of the United States in 2000. “What America needs is a President who is a mean son of a bitch, and I’m it. Therefore, I am asking American voters to write in the name ‘Crad Kilodney’ on their ballots in November.” He cited his perspectives on several pressing issues. “Immigration will be based on physical beauty. What’s the point of letting in a lot of short, brown, ugly people who look like toads when there are millions of hot Russian and East European babes eager to emigrate to the West?” was one example. As a candidate, he also had some stellar ideas on solving homelessness and poverty. Poverty is relative. “If you say the poverty line is $10,000 a year for one person, you have so many poor people. If you lower it to $1,000 a year, you have a lot less. Anyway, the fact that they’re still alive means they’re getting money from somewhere, so forget about it.”

There was also the stint at Rustler magazine, where Crad “would write crackpot letters and sign them with the names of real people.”

The guy will indeed go down in history as a bitter rabble-rouser, and maybe that’s just as it should be. Kilodney seems certain that he came to live his fate, and that that is what he did. I hope his work garners at least some of the attention that his persona has: now here is a man who never ran out of titles or out of wry observations about the weirdoes that surround him. The sheer tenacity to live your fate so fully only to do a 360, disappear from the streets, and show up in a suit and tie in the stock world, is something I can only admire.

I would say Crad’s got the last laugh, but in my final analysis, I ‘m not sure he was really laughing at anyone in particular at all, just doing his thing in the world. So I ask him if he thinks he is a good writer, if he feels he was successful.

“My writing is what is is, and my life is what it is. I came back to be a writer, and I had a literary career. Posterity passes judgement, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hey, I know who’s getting my vote in the next election!

www.cradkilodney.net

Try www.abebooks.com to source Crad’s books.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
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How to Adore Gore

Ariel Gore could write the cereal blurbs and leave us wide-mouthed, eager for her next words. Somehow she can take the big topics in life- say, stigmata, zine-making, teenage pregnancy- and make them zing with new life. Hilarity ensues, no matter how serious she gets. This is a woman who took life by the balls, and yanked. Now I want to read her every word on whatever topic she feels like.

No, seriously. If you haven’t discovered this girl who won’t be pigeonholed, then you must. I encountered her one afternoon at Pages Books, the Queen West alt-book shop where you can find small press prints, cool magazines, and tomes on gender-bending. I was hoping to become a famous writer, and so I stood atop a pile of books and yelled, “How can I become a famous writer before I’m dead?”

And there it was. How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights. (I’m fond of lengthy titles. Wait ‘til you guys see how long the title of my second book is! Check back in the spring to find out.) Oh, Ariel. Will you be that magic guide? There is no such guide, but this funny, feisty do-it-yourselfer is the bomb. If only I had a sliver of this woman’s originality and indomitable spirit and guts. Honestly, this is the first book you’re ever going to read in the how-to-write section that is different from all the other writer’s digest instructionals. Finally, information for the age we live in: not the beaten path, but the path that’s actually on its way there.

I’d recommend this book to anyone at all, even if you are a hippopotamus trainer or manufacturer of synthetic nipples, not a writer. Because it’s funny, engaging, and comes complete with neat snapshot interviews. Because you, too, may wonder if Ariel Gore is The One. For a hundred reasons. But in all honesty, it’s probably not relevant to the majority of readers who aren’t looking at the Writing Reference section. Her Hip Mama Survival Guide is just as fantastic, but I’m not a teen or twentysomething mother having trouble nursing with my pierced nipple. Those who are will not believe how useful this advice is. How very forward thinking it is for Ariel Gore to take a momentous occasion that small minds would see as scandalous- young pregnancy- and turn the event into an empire. Not Martha Stewart’s empire, mind you, but one with “real-life” tips that actually exist in real life.

Anyways, it’s great that this amazing writer can entertain even those to whom the work may be irrelevant. Good thing she’s also got a travel journey and a novel and a whole lot more. I’ll talk now about The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show. I will tell you up front that for all of its bells and whistles, it’s not Ariel’s best book. It has a few flaws, where the others have none. But get this- the book was drafted in three weeks. Three weeks. I can tell you that my Great Canadian Novel was started over three years ago and that I have fewer than 70 pages done, a bunch of charts and maps and a game plan that was crumpled in the bottom drawer a long time ago. Three weeks. Now, when I say it’s not her best book, don’t see that as a reason to leave it down. No, no, you can’t miss the traveling Catholic circus, the trademark twisted humour, the zip and the zeal and the colloquial saintmaking for the ordinary moments. There are more monks and orphans in Gore’s freak show than show up at my parties, so go ahead, wade in. You might end up walking on water, who knows, or understanding the secret hungers of the human heart.

Oh, if only there were such a thing, an Atlas of the Human Heart. Wait! I saved the best for last. The Atlas of the Human Heart- here is that rare book of journeys that reads as if new again. Here is a book that sees the heart with fresh eyes, lays it bare, finds it barren, weeps with unbearable emotion, runs into a bear…(crap, sorry, my wit’s not ALWAYS razor sharp!) If you were as curious as I was about The Writer, here’s her story. If you weren’t particularly curious about her, who cares- this is a classic regardless, and it could have been fiction. I don’t know why it didn’t win all those big shot awards, but I predict her work will do that, and soon.

Anyhooooo- I wasn’t brave enough in my own hippie days to head across the ocean, and I thought it was a big deal that I ran out of gas and was robbed and had to live on the streets of New Orleans. At least they spoke the same language. Here’s a 16-year old girl, leaves the establishment, heads to Hong Kong, to Italy, to Amsterdam, all the fuck over the place, gets knocked up in the vineyards of Italy and lives to tell the tale.

Gore is never self-conscious, and that lets the story unfold with a rare vitality, a heartbeat if you will, where other writers roam the earth and evidently see nothing or notice little out of the ordinary. Gore tears the veil from the ordinary and reveals it to be wondrous: she takes the bigger themes and scales them down to something we can all grasp.

“We begin with a setting.” Gore begins. “Somewhere to run from.” And how does it end? It doesn’t, not really. There’s even a bonus track.

www.arielgore.com

Mad in Canada: Adrian Fowler’s March Hare Anthology

The March Hare Anthology is the kind of book you leave casually atop your table while sipping a pint of Keith’s Red in hopes that someone will walk by, take note, and join you in pointing out favourite poems or newly discovered writers. There’re plenty of delicious tidbits to relish and dissect until the wee hours over a few shots of good liquor. Celebrating nearly 20 years of Atlantic Canada’s largest poetry festival, this keeper volume is edited by Adrian Fowler. You may or may not recognize Fowler for his now-vintage work with Al Pittman, who was one of the founders of the March Hare event.

I wish I were there to witness Agnes Walsh reading Homecoming to the End- but no matter: this poet laureate of St. John’s spins a story so vivid that I’m a part of it, right there in the boat with her and her daddy.

I told him I was going to marry a sailor
and go away. He said, “Go away?
To where you know no one?”
That stopped me, made me lonely
before I’d made the steady plans.
“It’s your life, and you can always change
your mind,” he said.
He made it difficult to rebel.
(170)

Further on, I can feel the poet rocking back and forth with an intense grief as the shock of losing her father’s world tears through her. But in the way he raised her, she lets that moment be a moment, and moves forward the way the living must.

In the morning, before dawn, a light touch on my head,
a blur of white mist in the room, the faraway words trailing off:
“Get up, now, and let me rest. Go on and help your mother, now.”
I threw back the blanket and stumbled into the grey light of day.
(172)

Grief finds us again in Susan Musgrave’s The Room Where They Found You, a room that “smelled of Madagascar vanilla” (248). Musgrave describes her attempt to recall the feeling of water on her hands after touching her husband for the last time: “it was like trying to remember/thirst when you are drowning” (248).  This poet really lets loose in No Hablo Ingles, where the anguish and confusion following her husband’s arrest for bank robbery and attempted murder flows rapidly from her heart. This poem is especially challenging- everyone knows kooky Suzie married in his prison a member of the illustrious, ingenious Stopwatch Gang, a crew of bank robbers known for their clever planning and total heist over $15 million. She mentored Stephen Reid’s writing, and they had two children together. Sadly, Reid’s earlier struggles with cocaine and heroin flared up in the late ‘90s and he was hospitalized again and later arrested. Here she laments “I must be/ some kind of case to stand by a man who steals/honest money from an ATM to make ends meet” (246). I’ve nothing against bank robbers personally, but I don’t think “making ends meet” was the motivation of this particular crook’s career- he’s also known for making brilliant escapes from prison. Regardless, I’m drawn to Musgrave’s peculiar insanities- a few of us poets have stories that’ll make your hair stand on end, and I like to hear them. It’s called poetic license for a reason.

It’s especially juicy that Stephen Reid, who writes for Maclean’s and more from behind bars, also has a terrific prose poem in the anthology. There are no Children’s Books in Prison (129) takes us into the bucket library. Taped to the door of that room is a folder with crossword puzzles to keep inmates sharp. “I don’t take one, but a friend of mine, an avid puzzler, wrote to tell me I was last week’s answer to ’17 Down’”, (129) Reid writes, revealing that at least part of him is still reveling in his scandalous notoriety. Later in the poem, I’m shoved off of my smug self-righteous platform when Reid writes “A friend sent me a book, ‘When Things Fall Apart’, written by a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron. Although Jesus and Buddha teach the same lesson- to learn to live compassion for all things, I am compelled toward the Buddhist approach” (131). This is the same book, thin and pale yellow, that I carefully selected, underlining the most important parts, for a man I loved while he was an inmate at Toronto’s Don Jail. Damn that Buddhist truth- we are all one.

Though these bits of historical soap opera-poetics glitter enticingly among all kinds of necessary Canadiana themes like our diverse landscape and more diverse peoples, with east coast sailors and Vancouver addicts, Bobby Orr, caribou, rolling wheat and salty shores, some of the most beautiful moments in the anthology are when Canadians look outside. Lorna Crozier imagines New Orleans native Louis Armstrong’s voyage to Chicago in Leaving Home (83), a stunning portrait of a man who “could blow his trumpet/ and be heard across state lines”(83). Crozier’s story here hinges on Armstrong’s trout sandwich – a small detail that makes the jazz great’s lonely voyage on the train north tangible to strangers like us. Michael Redhill reels at the staggering emptiness of a city in Viewing Detroit: “An entire downtown core, empty. Every day. Always.” (127) We head south from Detroit, past Armstrong’s New Orleans, right into Mexico with Pamela Ollerhead, with whom we share “sex above the sheets” (One November in Mexico, 232) and “the truth that always lay on the other side of town.” (232).

The collection might feel like a who’s who of Canadian poetry, and that’s what it essentially is, but there’s no sense of contrived arrangements, only a body of stellar work with lesser-known names supported by staples. The variety of topics and formats makes the book “much the most interesting,” (to quote Alice in Wonderland on the March Hare). Al Pittman, an integral part of Canadian poetry publishing, opens dutifully and segues into a bursting cornucopia with Patrick Lane, Michael Ondaatje, Lynn Coady, Wayne Johnston, Glen Sorestad and Alistair MacLeod, to name just a spattering. The best part is that the March Hare Anthology quietly reveals the madness that lurks so well disguised behind the staid and dour faces of Canadian poetry, wreaking havoc on Alice’s hopes that the Hare “won’t be raving mad.”

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Awaiting the Simpsons: the Movie

War rages, orphanages overflow, and the topic de jour is climate change and carbon emissions. A bright spot of hope and laughter hovers over the collective horizon, however, as the planet eagerly anticipates the long-awaited Simpsons movie. I can hardly contain myself, thinking of a few precious hours of laughter and the endless summer days of café talk that will follow, a summer where patios will buzz into the night with analysis and festive gossip over the world’s favourite family ties.

The special gift of The Simpsons is that it lets us see ourselves better. No other postmodernist work comes even close, and certainly nothing compares to Simpsons’ trademark comic wit. While my well-meaning family once banned my kid bro from over-saturating his mind with “that television brat”, both Rob and I believe that no education is complete without The Simpsons. Rob continued to watch the show until Dad came around after watching a few episodes, and like everyone else, saw himself plain as day, poked fun at with affection and accuracy. Rob was only a kid when he assured me he would continue to watch the program. “The only reason they don’t like The Simpsons,” he stated with a keen childish wisdom, “is ‘cause this is the kind of family they’re making fun of.”

I’m not the only one who has hauled a highlighter and Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson off the shelf. Getting ready for the big movie event consists of rolling a stock of fatties, penciling in the ubiquitous DVD and potluck celebrations post-gala, and, well, a bit of academic preparation. Never studied for the Simpsons before? Think about how much The Simpsons have studied you, then gather your textbooks together for the most fun you’ve ever had cramming.

Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation, a 400-plus-paged tome, was a runaway hit after its 2004 release. Our very own Canadian Chris Turner created his own masterpiece with this enthralling and witty analysis of culture through Springfield’s lens. Though Kevin Jackson of the UK’s Times Online criticized the oeuvre for being easy on the brain, (“his prose style is not much above the fanzine level” and “his range of cultural reference is at best parochial”) most (including self-important intellectuals like myself) will find Turner’s style refreshing and humourous. “ …In quest of snappiness, he peppers his sentences with cutesy words such as “anyhoo” and “craptacular”,” Jackson moans, but I’m partial to any textbook that infuses information with the homey lingo of Springfield. I’m proud of the fact that the best-ever analysis of our favourite Americans just happens to be Canadian. Besides, Turner won four National Magazine Awards, including the President’s Medal for General Excellence for his pop-culture and technology reporting before spying on Homer and Marge, and his knowledge of his subject is rigorous and thorough.

Seamlessly weaving our own cultural evolution alongside the history, trivia and characters that populate the best show ever, Turner tours our habits and impulses with the practicality of an anthropologist and the oft-neglected wisdom of the everyman. Sidebars highlight episode details even the most devoted watchers may have missed. The cast of writers has boasted a motley crew of academic hipsters, an impressive array of scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses and more. References are usually verifiably true, even easily ignored jokes about math or history can be researched and come up accurate. By unraveling the complex po-mo layers of the show’s myriad references to art, politics, religion, world events and mass culture, Turner succeeds at making The Simpsons even more enjoyable. There are few shows that get better and better the more you watch the rerun, and Turner cues you to the clues that make this happen.

Not all Simpsons exposés are as readable as Planet Simpson, but several are just as important. While Turner generalizes, other authors specialize, and you can go with them on excursions into Simpson psychology, science, philosophy and religion. There’s as much room for intellectual expansion and spiritual growth as there is for humour, and a few authors help us delve further into Simpsonic layers.

William Irwin et al got there first with The Simpsons and Philosophy: the D’oh! of Homer. This anthology of academic essays was part of a trendy stable of philosophic explorations of pop culture at the turn of the millennium (Seinfeld and Philosophy and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix were other staples in the stable). Essays like Homer and Aristotle, Thus Spoke Bart, and A Marxist in Springfield provide useful fodder for late-night cappuccino discussions, though the Snows piece on Simpsonian Sexual Politics regurgitates unfounded worries that Marge and Lisa aren’t equal to the boys- more refreshing insight could argue that men aren’t portrayed sympathetically enough.

Mark I. Pinsky studies The Gospel According to the Simpsons: the Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family. Wordy but thorough, this delightful volume examines the Catholics, the Jews, the Hindus, the hypocrisy of the church and the reality of faith in modern civilization. The Simpsons are represented as your average, faulty but well-meaning Christians who are bored to death by church but still strive to maintain ‘family values’. The best part is that Ned Flanders, my favourite character (recall that I said my Dad saw himself in Springfield when he watched!) gets plenty of pew-time from Pinsky’s pen.

More recently, Dr. Alan Brown with Chris Logan served got onto the Simpson couch with The Psychology of The Simpsons. It’s a wonderful examination of various themes throughout the show, from gambling addiction to Pavlovian conditioning, a suitable icebreaker for psych practitioners and their patients as well as those who are simply fascinated by what makes us- and the Simpson family- tick.

And finally, don’t miss out on Paul Halpern’s What’s Science Ever Done For Us: What the Simpsons Can Teach Us About Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe. It would be Lisa’s favourite of the bunch, providing a guide to science themes in our favourite show. It illuminates objective realities that get lost in our subjective cultural analyses and teaches us about genetics (is Homer dimwitted by genes?), nuclear power, and the colonization of Mars.

By now you’re ready to lecture alongside professors at university bookstore functions, but I suggest instead it’s time to spark some cannabis with Homer or Otto and spend the rest of the month in hysterics watching the Comedy Network. Before you know it, we’ll be dissecting the summer’s hottest film, languishing at Moe’s Tavern with our neighbours and awaiting another season of Sunday night potlucks.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Live Plucky: Adventuring With Nancy Drew

Once upon a time, there was a small girl with a big stack of books. She was barely five years old, but had torn through a zillion Golden Books and Disney fairy tales and was stuck at the cottage with nothing to read. Her folks took her to a used bookstore in Parry Sound, where she picked out about 30 yellow-spined Nancy Drew mystery stories. Within days, she was prowling the swamps behind the cottage for clues, making believe that nearby ghost town ruins were castles. With a notebook in one hand, and a flashlight in the other, the girl made relentless notes on the few characters that populated the lake and woods where she was staying. That little girl grew up to be a writer.

Nancy’s independent spirit and inquiring mind were early influences on my imagination. Her enthusiasm at solving puzzles in her world let me reason that I could do the same. Though I was not jet setting with my lawyer dad to exotic places, creeping up secret stairwells and hunting for treasures in gypsy camps, I lived as if I were. The world opened up for me when I began to investigate it. Nancy led the way into the great unknown and assured me that the world belonged to me. I learned early from her escapades that girls could be strong, smart and pretty.

By second grade, I was drawing up intricate games with maps, plots and charts for lunch hour adventures. With detailed descriptions of ghosts to bust, pirate treasure to excavate, and doorways to enter, I led my playmates through vivid and elaborate thrills. I was always Nancy, of course. One day another girl protested my assumed leadership, saying she was tired of being Nancy’s plump, meek sidekick, Bess. I hotly told her that when she began thinking for herself, designing the story and the maps, and doing things of her own initiative, she could be the leader. This was an early foreshadowing of a falling-out between us 20 years later: I was eventually unable to bear that this girl just couldn’t think on her own and patterned her every hobby, interest and thought after the paths I had forged from my own imagination. Ms Drew taught me that the world has room for many Nancies, but she must create herself and forge her own spunk and daring. Those without imaginative, passionate risk-taking would be left behind in River Heights while Nancy hobnobbed with lurking lake spirits, dancing puppets, and masked intruders.

Though each beloved tale was formulaic, the formula was a winning one- grab life by the horns, speak up for yourself, don’t be a wallflower, meet interesting characters, take risks but use your brain, and drive a blue convertible. Have a hot boyfriend, as well, but never let that be a reason to stay at home by the telephone. Be smart, be witty, be clever, and be curious. Live life fully. Live plucky.

I always wondered how Nancy could be so fearless in the face of adversary. Not one strawberry-blonde hair (or titian, in earlier renditions) was ever out of place even while Nancy confronted the darkest aspects of human nature and the deepest mysteries of the past. Thirty years later, having lived through a maelstrom of horrors and losses and terrors like early widowhood and clinical depression, I learned that beneath her flippant, fierce confidence Nancy was likely quaking in her boots, just like the rest of us, but went on to solve problems anyhow, not waiting for something or someone else to make sense of things for her.

The winning style of detective work here was simply investigation of the world around her. Sleuthing meant the requisite magnifying glass, it meant tunnels and spooks and ruins and secret rooms. But it also meant the library, travel, and lengthy talks with eccentric locals and yokels. It meant getting to the heart of the matter, learning from different people and places along the way. Every mystery involved exploring a different history from my own- or Nancy’s. The Mystery of the Ivory Charm transported us to India, where we learned something about elephant training in the circus. We clambered aboard the Bonny Scot and learned about figureheads and clipper ships in The Secret of the Wooden Lady. We added “cipher” to our vocabulary and learned about Incan ruins and Peruvian history in The Clue of the Crossword Cipher.  There’s voodoo, Morse codes, archeological digs in Mexico; we headed to Scotland for some bagpipes, tartan lore, and ancient Gaelic. The Mystery of the Fire Dragon took us to Hong Kong. We discovered rare books, the Cyclops, petroglyphs and geology, France, and larkspur cultivation.

Much has been made of our heroine Ms. Drew’s plucky, feisty charm and how it infused proper, delicate, meek little ladies with the adrenaline for adventure and imagination. Perhaps no other influence in history, including women’s accomplishments in science, spirituality, or art was quite as ferocious- Nancy was the preMadonna, the Yes I Can for so many generations of girls. Since 1930, Nancy’s indomitable, globetrotting spirit has captivated and catapulted young imaginations into greater realms. She taught us that you get right back up if you get knocked down.

The message wasn’t contrived or complicated: very simply, Nancy felt that a vibrant life meant a curious one, where education was important behind the scenes and on the field. In other words, living life meant getting off your ass.

Six of Swords in The Shipping News

Specific aspects of the Tarot come alive in E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. The theme of the journey illustrated in the text reflects the theme of the Six of Swords in Tarot mythology. This journey, which in Tarot is both actual and metaphysical, happens to Quoyle and to the aunt as their move to Newfoundland parallels their transitions from turbulence to inner peace.

The Tarot is a comprehensive system of symbolism that brings together mythology, psychology, spirituality, and art. It can appropriately be used to find depth in literature. The unequivocal purpose of the tarot is to provide an analytical perspective of an individual’s life.

Because the card system is made up of archetypes, we meet its characters and circumstances in the great works of literature, from The Bible to The Magus to Harriet the spy. The Tarot itself illustrates comprehensively the theme of the journey. In Jungian terms, the first card in the Tarot, the Fool, is the individual. In the last card of the major Arcana (or Greater Secrets) he is the individuated- The World.

Because the archetypes depicted in the Tarot system stem from what Jung called the collective unconscious, their surfacing in literature is seldom contrived. Proulx did not intend a connection between her work and the cards, but rather one can be drawn from the experiences that all humans can mirror.

Let’s examine briefly some of the important Tarot themes in the Shipping News before our main examination of the Six of Swords. In this way, the reader not acquainted with Tarot symbolism can get a feel for its imagery and scope.

Death is seen clearly throughout the text. It happens all around Quoyle: his parent’s suicide, his own near drowning, his discovery of a head in a suitcase while boating, his wife’s car accident. Death also symbolizes transition, and these deaths all brought with them a transition in Quoyle’s life.

The Hermit archetype suggests themes of alienation, retreat, isolation, study, wisdom, and eccentricity. We see Quoyle manifesting the hermit’s qualities emotionally. He keeps his heart safe by keeping it away. We also meet a literal hermit in the story, the Cousin who ties knots and lives alone in a sea of junk.

The Hanged Man is the baffling suspension of helplessness that Quoyle experiences for most of the novel. The Hanged Man is powerless, suspended between life and death. He cannot act. The only thing he can do is to examine his heart and the world around him. It is a kind of forced reflection. Until these things are realized, change cannot happen. As long as Quoyle refused to analyze his life or take responsibility for his emotions by confronting them, he could not achieve happiness.

The Five of Cups, loss and sadness, are apparent throughout the story. So many events take place to cause Quoyle disappointment. His erratic work at the Shipping News paper, his blundering, his unpleasant body, his wife bringing men home without thought for her husband’s soul.

We might also reflect on the Wheel of Fortune. Fate or destiny unpredictably brings good and bad in a constant cycle.

The Wheel always challenges the journeyman to take the reins, to seize some control over their destiny. But She reminds us that we have to accept some things that are not in our hands. An experience of finding a head in a suitcase, for example, is an event that Quoyle had no control over. He could not avoid it in any way, except by chance taking another route. Here it is only chance that can save one from the grisly challenges of the Wheel. Yet the mere knowledge that the Wheel will spin regardless allows the individuals to prepare themselves to seize each day, regardless of what it brings.

The overall theme of The Shipping News is seen in the Tarot’s Six of Swords. This card shows a man in a boat, moving away from the viewer. The water to the right of the boat is turbulent, to the left, calm. The figure has a passenger in his boat, a shrouded woman. She represents the burden of sadness that he carries with him. Yet his vessel is not weighted down by the sadness. It moves courageously through the waters.

The Six of Swords signifies the departure from rocky water into the unknown. It is not running away, but an act of courage to leave behind and give up parts of the self that are discouraging to new growth. The land in the background of the card represents the move toward balance and integration.

The suit of swords represents the element air. In Jungian terms, this is the thinking element, where conflicts and communications are born. The swords are about thoughts, realizations, conflicts, dialecticism, strife, and anguish. I best see the swords as battling illusions. They show a search for clarity and the strategy that goes with that. We use sharpness, perseverance, brilliance, introspection, cutting away, self-defense mechanisms, psychology, and competition as strategies to battle our demons and fears.

The sixes are the number that connects with The Lovers in the Major Arcana. The Lovers shows two figures embracing and a third figure in the sky. It is about compromise and risking the sharing of the soul with another. In the sky is a figure that represents fate. One is mysteriously called or matched with the persons one loves, often feeling no control over that union and its consequences. So, the sixes reflect both that mysterious calling and the desire to give.

In the Six of Wands, the sharing of fire and ideas indicates a teacher or the teaching of someone else. In the suit of cups, the six is about nurturing children and the needy. In the pentacles, it is about charity and philanthropy, giving one’s skills, time and money to the poor or poor in spirit. But in the swords, the giving is to the self. The swords cut away and give up something in the self, something rotten, so that a journey can be made away from the cycles of destruction. Moving on is sometimes the gift that the self requires.

In The Shipping News, Quoyle is born ugly, into a warped family, and he seeks out love in the only form it comes through, a trampy woman named Petal. She gives Quoyle two little girls but nothing else. She brings men into their house, then runs away and sells their children to a pervert, and ends up defeated by karma, dead in a car crash with the money from the sale in her car.

Before this tragedy, Quoyle suffered the loss of both parents when they committed suicide together.

Quoyle is not successful in friendships, mainly because he fears the outpouring of his own emotions. He does not trust others, and keeps himself from receiving their affections.

The Shipping News begins with this background and then moves from the States to Newfoundland. Here, Quoyle is taking his journey, and it is one that takes him home. The east coast is his ancestral home. The past continues to haunt him in the land of his family line. He meets a woman, Wavey, and they enjoy each other’s companionship. But Quoyle believes he cannot love her. “Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets from which one might choose more than once?” he asks.

For Quoyle, his journey to the safe centre of himself is frightening. He has spent so much of his time feeling like the victim of fate, rather than a man who possesses his own path. He is man with bad luck, no doubt about it, and largely innocent. But without knowing it, he shows great courage when he ups and leaves for Newfoundland with the aunt and his girls.

The aunt has her own Six of Swords. She has stayed far away from Newfoundland because her memories of life there are filled with darkness. She tells no one, but throughout the text, the men at the newspaper cover incest stories. Incest seems to be some dark curse on the coast there, and at the end, the aunt faces this well inside herself. Having spent her whole life running from this, making a journey in which she finally arrives at catharsis mirrors the changes in Quoyle, her nephew.

The girls, Quoyle, and the aunt are an unlikely family, yet Quoyle learns in his journey that family is something he finally allows himself. He is able to face not only the death of his wife, but the fact that she treated him terribly and that he must cut that away. It is the obstacle between himself and Wavey.

Wavey has her own issues, a son with special needs, and an ex-husband who spent his nights trolling just as Quoyle’s mate did. But in the end, they allow themselves affection. It isn’t about bright lights and flashing stars at all, it’s about happiness inside and sharing it with someone nice.

Quoyle’s progression to confidence is incredibly slow-paced, but the reader cannot fault him, given his bad luck. Initially, he is employed off and on, replaced at the paper by free or cheap students. At the Gammy Bird, his job was to cover car crashes, and photograph them for the front page. This job is a cruel spin of the Wheel of Fortune, given how his wife died. But he also covers the shipping news, the comings and goings of great vessels, what they bring, what they need. Ships are a symbol of transition- they can carry us away, bring us things we require, and they can get swallowed in the dark womb of the water.

At the end, Quoyle becomes responsible for the Gammy Bird paper, finally as an editor, and he attempts to run a quality paper, inventing new ideas to update it while still keeping it suitable for its audience. This shows the growth in his personal confidence, and his found knowledge that he can make decisions and cater to the needs of others.

Another part of Quoyle’s journey to fulfillment takes place in his acceptance of death. He told his daughters that Petal, their mother, was sleeping. It is Wavey who forces him to accept the truth by showing Bunny a dead bird. One must leave the dead and move into life.

Finally Quoyle sorts out his sadness and losses, the burden with him in the boat of the Six of Swords. He can at last carry his burdens without being drowned by them. He gives up illusions and blocks that he has held for years, and some of his notions he leaves behind so that he can become a better father and citizen.

We leave Quoyle as he begins a life with some happiness, moving towards more self-awareness. “Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire,” Proulx writes at the end. “And it may be that sometimes love occurs without pain or misery.”

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Monkeys on Crack: Exploring Dr. Siegel’s Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances

It’s no secret that I’ve always been fascinated by the spell of magic plants and potions, much to the chagrin of my more conservative family. I never viewed intoxication as a mindless, nihilist pursuit, though I respected its inherent dangers. I believed that the realm of the psychedelic was spiritual, not ungodly, and in days when I still possessed some impulsive bravado I had Free the Herb emblazoned on my right arm, complete with a marijuana leaf. I have to confess the damn tattoo is now a thorn in my side- while I still believe in anyone’s right to a plant that is absolutely medicinal, I don’t need to advertise it every time I want to wear something sleeveless. But there it is, a constant reminder of a belief system that I boldly assumed I’d always hold to. Certainly I reassessed my need for psychonautical exploration when things got out of hand, when some I loved lost their lives after an intense addiction to the cosmic pull of intoxication.

photo by Gonzalo Cardenas

Still, it was clear to me that millions of people use alcohol, marijuana, party drugs and unique shamanistic hallucinogens and seem to gain any number of insights, confidences, relaxations, or unforgettable experiences from their practice. I concluded that these substances are dangerous, but not illusory. We can get so wrapped up in a glimpse of Eden that we use it to drown real life rather than expand it. We can get addicted to something and not be able to leave it behind. There seemed to be right and wrong reasons to indulge an impulse, and it became true to me that clarity was precious and valuable. It’s clear that you can get lost along the way, and that balance is key. There’s also the fact that substances do not show you only heaven- I have seen heaven and hell, close up and extreme.

While I will always be furious that Marko seemingly chose spaced-out experience over a life with his family and friends, inwardly I knew it wasn’t that simple, and that if he had been able to change his mind, he would have left these things far behind. Regardless of his extremism, his drive to explore intoxication is no different from yours or mine. I was sure that humans had this drive, not for simplistic escape from reality, but for a deeper sense of reality. Glimpsing the divine must be part of our human nature, and getting too close might mean going all the way and not coming back. The divine is not always paradise, either, and looking for heaven might land you in hell.

Many sit in judgement of the addict or even the user, yet many users attribute their enjoyment of drugs to deep spiritual connection, not obliteration. How do we reconcile the obvious dangers of drugs with the equally obvious love that humans have for them? For we all do! It seems that alteration is a human experience we all clamour to take part in. Many cultures have religious intoxications, and they are correct in placing extreme caution and respect in these rituals. Responsible adults know a few drinks or something stronger can offer a wonderful intimate bond with others to mark special occasions. We instinctively use plants and fermented grains to relax or to combat illness. Legal drugs are under fire for their equally dangerous effects, but we call them medicine because many of them have extraordinarily healing properties, for the mind and body. Drugs are a part of human culture. I have always believed that our drive for them is God-given, but possible consequences are the temptation to lose sight of moderation and a refusal to accept a more ordinary or mundane time without them.

I was led to believe that the quest for drugs is natural and integral to our spiritual landscape because of the depth of the experiences. Sacred things must be handled with deep reverence or else they turn dangerous. I was also influenced to see them as natural because their use is not specific to humans, despite common sense that animals don’t smoke or take drugs.

They actually do. Everyone knows about catnip. Most of us know that koala bears eat eucalyptus to get high. We’ve all heard stories about birds who gorge on fermented fruit and fly around knocking into things. We’ve seen pets get into people stuff and seem to enjoy the fruits of their discovery. We’ve heard the legend that goats led man to coffee, a national favourite. After observing the happier, friskier behaviour of goats that ate coffee beans, man decided to try them for himself.

I was not aware that these were not exceptions but the rule. Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist and respected scientist who has spent his life observing humans and animals on drugs, found that every species of animals uses plants to get high, whenever intoxication is available to them! From insects to lizards to reindeer that love those red and white fairy tale mushrooms that may kill a human, Siegel found that animals love drugs as much as we do, and that like us, many overdose and die. He observed startling similarities in preferences- a specific plant may appease a small number of animals because it is local to them, but certain intoxicants are favourites across the board- guess which ones? Yep- alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, cocaine and opiates.

While animals who find themselves lucky enough to wander near some magic plants enjoy the intoxication, like humans, most will not get addicted or overdose (but some do). Over prolonged exposure, however, their behaviour will change and getting more of the drug becomes important to them. Eventually, it will be so important that they will neglect their responsibilities like childcare or undermine their health by choosing the drug over food and water. Synthesized or concentrated concoctions are the biggest problem, as is frequent access.

For example, no human or llama ever overdosed or lost his way chewing coca leaves- in fact, the small amount of the stimulant extracted in this method was beneficial to altitude sickness and highly nutritious. Llamas may have taught the Indians how to use the plant: natives mimicked the animals’ chewing patterns and found the backbone of South American tradition. But give animals cocaine- a universal favourite and highly addictive-and after repeated experiment, many animals and humans found it increasingly harder to live without, even as the initial effects of enjoyable stimulation turned into a nightmare of anxiety, mental anguish, and the discomfort of a racing heart, dry mouth, irritated nostrils, sleeplessness, irritability and violence. Animals will leave their babies and stop eating to continually get at cocaine. Rats are willing to push a reward lever 12 thousand times to get a single dose of the ‘reward’ and then they’ll do it again.

Siegel calls this natural inclination ‘the fourth drive’ and argues effectively in his marvelous tome Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind Altering Substances that food, water, sex and intoxication are natural, normal drives of all animals, including human ones. Even if this seems the stuff of fairy tales after everything we learned in health class and from Partnership for a Drug Free America ads on TV, his voluminous work is illuminating and indisputable. It’s not just one animal that has a peculiar penchant for drugs- any animal might like to get lucky and given the chance, will take it. For all our education we hear nothing about this. I believe that taking this information more seriously can better help us understand addiction, respect substances, and understand our drive toward them.

While his claims may seem outlandish, and I admit that I’ve read just about every book available about drugs and still found much of this news to me, you can’t dispute his studies even if you doubt his conclusions. Siegel observed animals like monkeys, ants, mongooses and reindeer in their natural habitats and also performed lengthy, elaborate laboratory experiments. Some of our history can be found here- to a great extent, we evolved by watching the trial and error of our animal friends and imitating them. We had to discover somewhere along the way which plants were poisonous and which were nutritious. Clearly, if an animal or human died after eating a plant, that was a sure sign to move onto another pasture. Intoxicating plants like coca, coffee, and fermenting fruits became a staple of cultures, part of their social, spiritual and economic history.

Siegel’s observations are extensive (and when I say extensive, I mean the scientist has logged thousands of hours of reading, world travel and first-hand observation, clinical experiments with humans, decades of hundreds of controlled animal experiments that were at turns fun and at turns torture or fatal for the animal, intimate observation of animals using drugs in natural settings around the world, and on and on. This is an enthusiastic specialist whose passion is to let us and our natural friends tell their stories about drugs, and document them.) All creatures have an innate instinct to alter the way they feel from time to time. Rather than this drive indicating an illness or weakness, this instinct is natural from insects to primates to human beings. It is not an aberration: it is the norm. It is also the norm to enjoy excursions in balance to life’s other pursuits and demands, but with unusual exposure and with unique chemical differences, our love of chemical soup can cause addiction and illness. The desire or use itself is not the illness. This pragmatic, earthy, well-documented perspective can only help us understand our own instincts and help people who have poisoned themselves. Because that’s what addiction and overdose is- the imbalanced chemistry we create by too much, different mixes, poorly calculated risks. Some plants are food, some are fun, some are both, and all have a threshold of safety. We are chemistry after all- the natural world is a pile of chemicals.

Siegel argues that much of history is humans versus plants- while nature lovers ramble on about the healing powers of vegetables and medicinal herbs, purporting plants to be miracles of nutrition and medicine, that’s only half the story, because the other half is poisonous. Nature is not always benevolent- though her dangers are equally integral to a full spirituality and remind us never to take anything for granted. For the gift of relief from everyday stresses, we must pay dearly with our liver or our loved ones. The only remedy is absolute respect. Most shamanic cultures treat intoxication as a rare, heavily contemplated ritual, for which they prepare at length with detoxifying plants, fortifying liquids, and they do not return to the ritual every night. Christ turned the water into wine: tellingly, it was his first miracle, and he believed there could be no real wedding celebration without wine. It’s doubtful he thought a nightly excursion to the bottle was of any spiritual benefit.

Impoverished workers found that chewing coca gave them both nutritional boosts and energy to toil, but modern respecters of the Mama Coca as they call her find it abhorrent that the strongest alkaloid has been raped from the plant and caused war and murder and suicide. This is where greed happens, and it also happens to the animals. Plants are chemicals, and we need chemicals, but balancing our chemical soup is exactly what mental and physical health is all about.

It’s reassuring for many of us, I’m sure, that use is the norm over abstinence or addiction. We can benefit from our newer understandings in many ways. This information can help us have compassion for loved ones who suffer the ravages of drugs. It provides comfort for anyone who has lost someone they loved to addiction- now we are better able to understand the mechanisms of our beloved’s descent. We are able to observe more objectively the ways we use various chemicals for our emotional needs, and how to better keep watch on what we are doing. A great deal of the “we’re all connected” sentiment that has commonly occurred in my personal experiments and recreations was confirmed loud and clear, but the more hellish struggles and experiences I no longer perceive as wasted time but as it’s own kind of natural time, one I may have more control over in the future because of my fresh understanding.

In a manner, these studies give some insight into how we can all step reverently and avoid catastrophe, use chemicals if we choose to rationally and minimally. Just knowing something of the lore of tobacco for example, its universal ancient use in religious ritual, and the animal kingdom’s affinity for it, made me understand why I spent years of my life chained to tobacco, a recurrent slavery. While this book is heavy handed science, I was able to derive an overwhelming sense of symbolism of this Fourth Drive and unlock a little bit the mysteries of my personal behaviour and the patterns of those I’ve loved (and lost).

As Siegel writes, “…We look at ourselves, and America itself, as the inheritors of this long natural tradition. The human pursuit of intoxication is motivated by a strong biological drive that pits individual needs against those of society. The struggle to satisfy our psychological and physical demand with drug supplies creates a neurochemical war within our brains…The lessons gleaned from the animals show how we can come to peace with this natural force through the education and technology that is our human distinction.”

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The Rise and Fall of Scarlett O’Hara

I was shocked when my friend casually said over a beer on the front porch that he thought Gone with the Wind was trash.

But I’d been shocked before, in academic reading and in university, to find legions of ‘thought’ dismissing Gone with the Wind as fluff, romance, women’s bathroom and bedroom reading or worse. The novel wasn’t on my Great Women Writers reading list, although I wasn’t dissatisfied by the selections of Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Most shocking was when my beloved Ray Bradbury, whom I consider a quiet prophet, dismissed the book as women’s trash, as easy reading. This despite the fact that Ray, who can’t hide his long-windedness behind short stories, as there are thousands of them, can get kind of boring and Mitchell doesn’t bore for a single of her thousand pages.

From the porch where I sat, outside of my crummy basement apartment, I overlooked the scene out front of the country’s largest men’s shelter. The din of homeless men drinking Listerine in the street floated up into the tree that barely shielded our home from view. It was a stretch, but if I used a little imagination, I could hear the rustling leaves and distant sound of hoof beats on Scarlett’s plantation. I could hear the giggle of girls in ridiculous gowns as they drank iced teas and the low laughter of handsome boys. The urban sun transformed into Georgia dusk. I was gone, with the wind.

Gone with the Wind’s story is as fascinating as the novel itself. Margaret Mitchell was a far cry from a fluffy romance writer- she was a brave, eccentric reporter in the early 1900s, in a time where women didn’t work as reporters. She was quite neurotic and worked on the gargantuan manuscript in disarray. The book was not submitted to publishers; it was found by an act of magic in fate, and it flew into the hunger of the American public in 1936. More than 36 million copies sold worldwide, and the book continues to sell steadily to this day to every new generation of readers.

In fact, Gone with the Wind got me into university, when my Why I Want to Be a Journalist entry essay turned into a tribute to Mitchell, one of the greatest writers of all time. Mitchell was a great reporter who insisted on experiencing things personally in order to convey them to the paper. Once she sat up at the top of a building, suspended, just so she could accurately depict the life of a sculptor who worked high above the ground. She did her research.

I have little patience for people who judge a book by its cover, literally or figuratively. Regardless of any publicity, stigma, or word of mouth, a creation can’t be judged until it is actually studied. How can I comment on a piece of art I have never seen?

For all of its beloved popularity, Gone with the Wind has a reputation of being light, romantic, insipid chick lit. Women’s fiction has frequently been put down as inconsequential, with some logic, as the women’s market is indeed flooded with forgettable escapism, romantic fantasy reading, the ‘bodice ripper.’ But since when is love, the greatest theme in all of literature, not enough?

Let me also mention that the characters of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara are among the most fascinating, fully developed ones in literary history. The world over feels they know the heroes of the story personally.

Intellectual environments criticize the fiction for racism, sexism, and fluffy overtones. Perhaps they have only seen the movie? No film can capture the depth of this book’s portrayal of the human heart in its most passionate, most twisted, most broken, most vicious, most creative, most desperate, states. You can’t erase history, and although Gone with the Wind is set with a complete cast of slaves, it isn’t promoting a way of thinking but breaking it down. Scarlett O’Hara is a spoiled plantation owner’s daughter with nothing on her mind but her own beauty. Vain, rich, unpredictable, she wants for nothing. But this woman is brought from her high horse to her knees in the dirt, equal to those she deemed beneath her. Her core beliefs are challenged as loss after loss humbles the queen of the south. What did it feel like to find yourself in the middle of a war, when suddenly your world is shaken, your closet of apple green dresses newly useless ammunition in reality? Scarlett was fat from too much rich eating one moment, and starving the next, pulling roots out of the ground to feed the babies.

I first read Gone with the Wind more than 20 years ago, when reading extremely long books seemed empowering to the lost, nerdy adolescent girl I was. I read the book several times as a teenager, swept away by the stories of the south. While a woman’s book is rarely considered important in matters of war, many male writers could learn from Mitchell that the best war coverage must take place through the soul of the characters. How the people react to war, their fears and survival tactics, speak volumes over propaganda that simply glorifies military strategy or body counts. Mitchell brings the south to life and makes the Civil War vivid in ways no other writer has managed to do. Scarlett O’Hara and her circle are all involved in hospital work, and the sights and smells of desperate soldiers, bodies without morphine, and the endless toil for “The Cause” are as clear as if they were happening today. After all, the wounds and rotting bandages are horrifying for young Scarlett, who would rather the soldiers were whole so that she could flirt with them. The death and decay is a nuisance when blood gets onto her favourite dresses, but by the end, our beloved bratty heroine is wearing carpet pieces for shoes and starving herself, birthing babies for women when no doctor is available, and picking cotton by herself when her slaves desert her.

Of course, racial tensions surrounding the novel are high, because the dashing confederates that populate the novel are not abolitionists, and the N word is thrown around the pages without apology. Thankfully, we don’t call African-Americans darkies anymore, and most of us don’t believe the southern baloney about ‘taking care of’ simple-minded, loyal servants that need to be tended like children. But we can’t erase history, and it would be dangerous to pretend this manner of thought never existed. Gone with the Wind explores through its fictional characters situations that were and are quite real, including the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and how seemingly ordinary, genteel people became involved in its creation.

War and racial politics are the backdrops for the detailed character evolution of the beloved players in this drama. It is interesting to view my own evolution in light of the story. When I was very young, I was deeply enamoured with the sensitive, poetic Ashley, whom Scarlett is madly in love with. Let it also be noted that Ashley thought the war in which he fought was not a glamourous cause but a useless waste of young men, Yankee and Confederate. While he wished to preserve the slow charm of the south, he believed in his heart that war belonged to men’s infuriating refusal to see change for what it must be, and foolishly threw away valuable lives when the whole matter should happen without bloodshed. His golden curls, his handsome demeanor, and his grey uniform transfixed Scarlett but Ashley was anything but proud of his army.

How in love with Ashley’s book-reading gentility I was as a teenager…so much so that when I was 14, and my nearly-40 mother became unexpectedly pregnant with my brother, I named him Ashley. Each family member named our beautiful gift, and he became Robert John Ashley Calvin Thiessen. I named him Ashley because I wanted him to be an artist. How naïve this was, given the incredible difficulty I have had as a woman and artist. Now that Robert John Ashley Calvin is 20, struggling to find his place in the world as a thinker not unlike his sister, I sometimes wish I had bent him away from poetry and paint and given his a sturdy plumber or welder’s name! And while Ashley still holds some charm for me, it amazes me that I could have missed the incredible masculine virility and common sense of Rhett Butler, the pirate and scoundrel who spends half his life fighting for the affections of Scarlett. Of course, she doesn’t recognize how suitable they are for one another, or his strength and honesty, and that is the tragedy on which Gone with the Wind is based. It is only after a decade or more of dead soldiers, poverty, pain and heartbreak that she realizes her love for Ashley never really existed, and that the man who was always there to help her and guide her and who accepted her as she was when polite society refused to receive her, Rhett, was her true love. I had to grow up to see that Rhett and not Ashley was the hero- in perfect keeping with Scarlett, who was after all a child of 16 when the war began. We both grew up.

Ashley, Rhett and a slew of other beaus and husbands keep the pages turning, but themes of friendship, family, grief and loss, cultural mores, war, class systems, racial politics, the fall of Atlanta, and more are given equal weight in this unforgettable saga. Mitchell’s greatest success is how seamlessly she tied every loose end, even small scenarios that the reader had long forgotten resurface when you least expect it to further enhance the depth and breadth of the dramas. No character is insignificant to the overall themes, and Mitchell’s perceptions and portrayals are truly cutting edge when you consider how unladylike it was in 1936 to discuss frankly the foibles of men and women. Even minor players like the town whore, Belle Watling, contribute to the rich tapestry of the southern communities and the upheavals that shake their plantations to the ground. Isn’t it time to dust off your copy and read it again?

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

Exploring Runes and Ruins with a Swedish Nutter

Whether your literary interests lie in Lord of the Rings or in Simon Winchester’s Meaning of Everything: the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, David King’s lively account of a livelier genius, Olof Rudbeck, can’t be missed. Finding Atlantis reveals this fascinating Swedish scholar, inventor, anatomist, explorer, and botanist who invented many things in his lifetime: he also found the lymphatic system and stratigraphy (the method for dating artifacts by soil strata, still used today). But his obsession was his 2400-paged Atlantica, a work that documented his search for Atlantis, a civilization he believed, along with Plato, was real.

This rollicking adventure through Sweden in the 1600s illuminates the eccentric Rudbeck’s tireless work and excavations of Norse temples, as the author acquaints us with his subject’s unusual theories. Met with suspicion from his colleagues and considered nuts, Rudbeck nevertheless believed he had proved that Atlantis was located right at home in Sweden, with detailed maps of landmarks described by Plato and other sources. Believing that classical mythology was the result of real life legends made divine, Rudbeck followed the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman myth and of Norse ‘fairytales’, with hands-on experimentation to see if the accounts of these stories could be plausibly executed. He believed runes made up a real language, possibly the oldest on earth, and that the Vikings, notorious for far-flung explorations (the Vikings were the first after the Native peoples to land in Canada) had marked culture as far as Brazil (the Amazons) and China.

While his academic colleagues thought he was a nutcracker, accusing him of stealing library books and falsifying documents, he did earn favour with kings and peasants. Believing that academia should leave the library and explore for itself its theories, testing them for plausibility, he conducted thousands of stratigraphic measurements to accurately ascertain the age of coins and weapons he found. He spent a great deal of time studying rune inscriptions, or heading northwards to observe the natural landmarks of his land, the ocean, and the length of daylight or darkness. He also spent time talking with the unlearned country people, as old as he could find them, about their memories, to see if he could find new channels for this theories or glimmers of the ancient civilization he had come to believe in so fiercely in the storytelling of the wise and dismissed.

Somehow, he also found time to work on a complete botanica, aiming to portray facts and illustration of every plant so far discovered. Sadly, 7000 woodcuts and most of the copies of the Atlantica tome were lost in a fire that claimed much of the area near the end of his life. In true Viking spirit, he set about rebuilding the school and persevering with his plans until the day he died.

I’d never thought much about Atlantis except in my youth, in the Niagara Falls Public Library where I also read briefly on the yeti and alien abductions. And I’m certainly not an expert on Norse mythology, but had always been a little fascinated by these tales, and that’s why this particular book caught my eye. While Rudbeck’s claims are extraordinary, King finds few reasons to doubt the massive compilation of evidence that Rudbeck painstakingly documented. The work was seen in its day as error-filled fable, but 300 years of further historical explorations have seemed to only solidify the possibilities that Rudbeck was onto something. And even if the theory isn’t flawless, it’s not all that outlandish to think that real civilizations disappeared- it happens all the time. Some history is lost, surviving only in legends, and it takes the passion of an explorer willing to risk everything to uncover forgotten secrets. Certainly, this driven detective who also brought us medical and botanical revelations delivered more than his personal experiences and opinions, and King tells us all about this unforgettable persona and the strange times in which he lived.

Finding Atlantis: True story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World
David King
Three Rivers Press, Random House, 2005

Ray Bradbury Saw the Future

Hailed as the greatest living science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury is the man who saw the millennium. He never called himself a prophet, as he quietly penned his weird and wild tales since the 1940s.

Bradbury’s legacy is thousands of short stories and several classic novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.

These works were particularly prophetic. Fahrenheit 451 describes a world where reading books is illegal, and people who keep them are considered insane. Instead of reading, families watch “parlour walls.”

In 1950, when the story was first written, TVs had not yet become a standard possession of the all-American family. Bradbury already saw how they would control the public. The “parlour walls” he describes think for the families who watch them. The book doesn’t even read like science fiction today- with the Internet, video games and TV, modern culture feels like Bradbury’s futuristic vision.

In one scene, a young woman from a family who doesn’t watch the walls tells a man who burns books that her family talks. “Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking,” she says.

And the fireman- that’s his job title- asks in surprise, “But what do you talk about?”

The girl asks, “Are you happy?” He doesn’t know what that means.

The Martian Chronicles is also pure prophecy. It’s the story of how humans have so polluted and destroyed the Earth that they must colonize mars in order to survive. On Mars, they treat the natives of the planet like shit, taking over the place in their greed. This story resonates with themes currently in vogue, including the politics of colonization and environmental issues.

In 1950, few were afraid of running out of fresh water. Industry had only just begun. Racial segregation was the norm. Bradbury saw in advance the consequences of his contemporaries’ philosophies. And his Martian story isn’t farfetched. Go today to the science section of any bookstore and you will find a dozen books on the possibilities of colonizing mars and the reasons why it’s necessary. Time and Newsweek have printed cover stories the past few years on whether going to Mars is plausible.

These two titles are prime examples of Bradbury’s prescience, but he was primarily a short story writer and there are visions in all of the tales. Stories like The Other Foot tackle race relations, 13 years before Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech. Others take on technology, conformity, greed, consumerism, mental health, and religion.

Kaleidoscope is one story that must chill even its author. It’s about a space crew falling through the atmosphere and contemplating the meaning of life, death and God while waiting for the oxygen to run out. One of the crew members is named Applegate. Today, we could change the title to Heaven’s Gate.

Bradbury was gifted with special sight- insight. It’s a rare and gorgeous thing, and probably lonely when you hope things might change because you have seen how they will end up. Then no one listens and your prophecies come true.

The questions of the salesman character in Something Wicked This Way Comes are especially poignant here. “What colour is lightning?” he asks. And “Where does thunder go when it dies?”

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