Death of a Salesman’s Wife- Revolutionary Road a Bleak and Bitter Bore

I’m at a loss for why there are so many rave reviews for the Revolutionary Road debacle. Sam Mendes’ attempt at a different kind of American Beauty pales miserably after the deadpan humour and sly cinematics of his Oscar sweeping masterpiece. But Variety’s Anne Thompson called Revolutionary Road  “powerful and beautifully written and filmed” and “a modern classic.” Was she watching the same movie? She puts this adaptation of Richard Yates’ book on Oscar watch. Ummm, why?

Well, because all the parts are here- actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, with cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Thomas Newman, nominated for Oscars 3,5,7, and 8 times respectively, plus Oscar winner Kathy Bates. The story is universal fodder for uncertain times- man’s search for meaning, in suburban hell. The real story is an important one that is not told often enough, – woman’s search for meaning in her role as wife, mother, and person. Though Leonardo questions his stifling, ludicrous job and the identity he forms there, his wife is told to see a shrink for feeling lifeless among the walking dead. It’s the post-war 1950s, and though hubby is tinkering around with the girls in the office and wifey is at home bored suicidal, to ask for an interesting life or to refuse to bear more children makes you a nutcase. When during an argument, Leo becomes violent and enraged and tells her how sick she makes him carrying his unborn child, the desperate wife looks into the abortion option. Polite society is no longer so polite.

Leo plays this guy again!

With a few million dollars and a bunch of Oscar-able actors, you’d think this could be made into a movie that isn’t so …boring. There were about eight amazing lines, and the rest of the writing was unbelievably forced. While I appreciate subtle unfolding in a film more than I do flashing lights and car chases, this had neither. It was an hour of sitting there wondering why Leo always plays the same guy. I respect Leo’s cool work buying limbs for landmine victims in Africa, and also his acting talent. Sometimes. Here, it looked like they were filming a theatre rehearsal. Leo was absolutely wooden. Where was the chemistry between Rose and Jack, albeit marred and used up, as marriage is wont to do?

Kate’s performance was subtle and strong, but not dazzling enough to make up for the monotony and some of the ridiculous lines she had to deliver. And for all the talk about the awesome cinematography, there wasn’t much to look at, and nothing arty in its absence.

Here and there some blood was pumped into the film, not enough to rescue it by any stretch, but enough to keep me from leaving my seat, just barely. When the toodle-looing neighbour, Kathy Bates, comes over and suggests Kate and Leo entertain her son, recently released from the funny farm, Kate welcomes the diversion. The couple finds their nut bar neighbour easy to talk to, and open their souls to him about suffering suburbia. Kate doesn’t feel he is crazy at all- he is tormented, truthful, and genuine, and he encourages them to get away from the hopeless emptiness Leo observes. Later, he comes for dinner and one of two scenes with an event occurs. Turns out Mr. Wacky Job is a bigger and better man than poser salesman Leo. Which leads to the big fight between husband and wife, the unsatisfying climax, and the still less satisfying denouement.

curl up with the book instead.

What went wrong? It would be easy to conclude that the subtext of feminist examination needed a feminine touch, but we had Kate’s very satisfactory one and it didn’t go far enough. Yes, the film is supposed to be bleak. Bleak, not boring. A bit of humour or colour beyond the nattering neighbours could have gone a long way. The script would need a total overhaul by another writer. Someone not so horribly heavy-handed. Remember what they told us in writing class: show, don’t tell.

Once Ann Landers did a secret study, asking people to anonymously report whether, if given the choice, they would go back and have children all over again. Fully seventy percent wrote back and said no way, no way, no way. It was earth shattering to the kind of social circles and societal pretensions portrayed in this film. It’s still earth shattering today. Because it’s still considered unnatural, crazy, and selfish for a woman to not want more children, or not want them at all. But really, we have  a population and environmental emergency where it’s actually most selfish and crazy to keep having kids- come on, what if all six billion of us have children? We’re already living that nightmare end.  For these reasons, any art reflecting on this topic is urgent viewing.

Otherwise, this would have been a one-word review: tedious.

Visit Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Next Year’s Reading List

Well, I got to two of the titles on last year’s reading list, and a couple hundred books that weren’t. One was the brilliant Wind Up Bird Chronicle by H. Murakami. The next was not as fun, but even more eerie. I’m glad I made the effort to stick with a Cormac McCarthy. It wasn’t the one I’d meant to read- All the Pretty Horses, but one called Outer Dark. This was a dark masterpiece in every way. Few ever write about those people who are the lowest common denominator of society- it’s definitely an ‘ism’ of some kind to say what I just said. Cormac’s theme may seem salacious to some who pick it up for the incest taboo, but salacious it is not. This brother and sister couple are not exactly Hot and Ready. They have limited teeth, fewer reading skills, even fewer yet showers, and inbreeding has given them little in suitable reasoning skills. Deep in the Appalachians, where there are no birth certificates, these lowest echelon of humans don’t officially exist. McCarthy recreates Elliot’s Wasteland, in a sense, weaving themes of blindness, bleakness, sickness, namelessness, and isolation throughout. The many subtle and overt references to Biblical themes or stories in outer dark were not intended to show God’s presence here, but his absence.

I admit Cormac’s strange style both intrigued me and frightened me away. He is known for dense and endless sentences, for not using quotation marks, for bleak themes, and for language that demands you read with a dictionary nearby. Because the subject matter tended towards the far spectrum of masculine, I didn’t make that effort until now, though I grew more and more curious about the master literary stylist. It takes a bit of patience initially to find the difficult rhythm, and then it takes you. McCarthy is Hemingway’s heir, and a thousand times better a writer.

Leading my special list for next year’s must-reads is another book with an incest theme, but Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex promises to much more cheery. It won the Pulitzer Prize winner in 2003, and I’ve been meaning to read it ever since. I was intrigued- there are not many books where the narrator is a hermaphrodite, but apparently it’s not as rare as we think. They walk among us. They may even be us: apparently, a convincing apparatus does not guarantee that nothing else is going on with our indoor plumbing. Anyhow, so many colleagues have mentioned how funny and brilliant this one is that my first read of 2009 is definitely going to be a walk on the wild side.

Hermaphrodite, Paris by Rolando Cervantes Gómez

I’ve decided the theme for 2009’s list is going to be filled with ‘shoulds.’ Only the most devoted of my readers will recall that a few years ago I wrote a lament to reading, a rarity in my usual praise of literature. In it, I let go of the stress associated with the impossibility of reading everything good, and I removed all shoulds from my list. I opened myself up to read anything or nothing, to pick up pulpy detective stories or soft porn. It’s been wonderful and lovely and the variety has been delightful. But I’m determined next year to kick my gossip mag habit once and for all. And that will take a little discipline. Now, I’m not against the importance of the Braddy Bunch. I’ve written at length on how celebrity is a surrogate mythology, a modern pantheon. We need our Medusas and our Ulysses and our sirens and our Furies and our Narcissi. But enough is enough, and I don’t want to be standing guard, wondering if Any Winehouse is still alive, when I could be reading Giller after Giller instead.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is the largest cash prize for literature in Canada, fifty grand given annually to the best fiction, either novel or short story collection. The annual black tie gala announcing the prize is the kind of literati/glitterati function I revile, but I understand that the pretensions of society life have nothing to do with authors. I’m also grateful to that same circle of Canada’s upper echelon for the trickle down effect they have on reading literature, for bringing bucks and publicity to any writer. Though it does seem that the winner is always predictably Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, or Margaret Atwood, this is only true half the time. This year, the winner is Joseph Boyden, for Through Black Spruce. I love a book that has unexpected twists and turns, and a sucker for ‘looking for identity’ plots. Boyden has Metis heritage, and writes about aboriginal characters. He studied creative writing at the University of New Orleans, and lives between the north and south- Northern Ontario, and Louisiana. Those are two of my favourite places, and I’m hoping the book reflects something of this idiosyncrasy.

Year after year, Life of Pi shows up on my reading list, and it’s not exempt yet, as a Man Booker winner. Why can’t I seem to get into this book, heralded as an innovative, unusual and thrilling story? I’ve had this book on my shelf now for years, and it’s getting lonely. I take it out on one date, then put it back. Yet every one who has read it is incredibly enthusiastic. We’ll give it another whirl.

Forms of Devotion by Diane Schoemperlen is a 1998 winner of the Governor General’s Prize. Fifteen years in the book industry and somehow I never heard of it. Setting up those prize tables sifted all kinds of titles and names into my unconscious, but not this one. A quick look through my GG options and I leapt for this one. It’s an anthology of illustrated short stories, by an author I don’t know. I’m sorry that the list of prizewinners through the last three decades yields little that piques my curiousity, though I’ve read many and remember few. The Diviners, of course, Margaret Laurence’s outstanding piece of Canadiana, changed my life. But too many on this list are the predictably tedious efforts of writers who have made it, trying way too hard. So shoot me for this sacrilege.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is another that’s been on ‘the list’ for awhile, even though the list had been technically abolished. The Pulitzer winner in fiction for 2004, this is a story about a former slave and a powerful white man in Virginia. It’s only fair to read this year’s Pulitzer as well, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here, Junot Diaz has managed to feature a sympathetic character in Oscar, a fat nerd. Weaving Dominican- American history with a family curse and some love, it promises to be something new for a change, and not those GG borefests I referred to above.

Six- that’s it. I’m making a reasonable list, so that I attend to it instead of tossing it. Besides, I have to save room for all the poetry I review, and Wally Lamb’s long awaited 700 page The Hour I First Believed. I am determined to throw in a few classics next year also, it’s been a while since I devoted any time to books on the academic’s lists. And I’ll need at least a few sneak peaks at the Who Wore What pages.

What Posh Really Looks Like

David Foster Wallace- 1962-2008

Following the series of recent reflections on writers and depression, and on the tough time I’m having coping with the suicide of a dear friend last Thanksgiving, the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide slapped me across the face. His father said he had battled depression for several decades. Wallace, author of Oblivion and Infinite Jest and much, much more, was that rare breed who has a genius for both math and words. He had a dark humour and a deep wisdom within his human confusion. I’m so very sorry that he couldn’t take it anymore.

When I was a little girl who decided I was going to be a writer, it might have been worthwhile for someone to tell me, “Writers end up killing themselves.” No way, no way, no way. It is true that Wallace joins an unbelievably long lineage of writers who committed suicide: Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, John Kennedy Toole, Gertrude Bell, Anne Sexton, and so on. I wish David Foster Wallace, and everyone else who suffers from depression, total peace. If you just couldn’t take it anymore, I understand and wish you rest. The lingering question, though, is what we’ve lost and cannot know. There are those who come back from the brink and go on to do the most important, world-changing work of their lives. Johnny Cash comes to mind- he crawled out of the cave he went into to die, and comforted the rest of the lost world until he was an old man. Rev. Troy Perry slit his wrists and crawled into the tub to float into oblivion, but failed at his quest. He went on to lead the world in establishing freedom and equal rights for gay and lesbian people, and created a progressive, love-based faith where people could learn to love themselves and others instead of practicing hate. Your contribution may not be so huge, but is no less important: your friends, your children, your work mates may need your kind of wit or sarcasm or kindness. You do not know.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

for David Foster Wallace

It’s hell to lose another teacher to despair,
and trite to say his memory will live on, though that it will.
Cliche to say that this cruel world just isn’t fair
but some of us won’t make it up and over yonder hill.
In my own tawdry gloomy struggles with God and man
with a knack, perhaps; no genius, but still a fan,
I wrestle, too, with the cosmic joke, Divine Comedy, the Infinite Jest
and I hope that you have found relief and rest.

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net

In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

In Which the Author Reads Some Poetry: Daughters of Men by Brenda Leifso

The gods infuse everything, from history to popular culture, but the last thing anybody wants is yet another book of quasi-intellectual mythology-based poems. Or, like the blurb warns, another book of ‘unflinching honesty’ where the ‘mundane becomes mythic…the ordinary, extraordinary.’ And while the editor slash professor circles may wonder what a plebian like myself could know of scholarly poetry, I stand firmly half ‘of the people’ and half well-read, adequately educated poet, knowing my voice actually counts for a great deal more than the dusty, dismal, dismissed volumes of poetry no one ever read. Or ever will.

For all these reasons, I cringe when picking up Daughters of Men, by Brenda Leifso, a Calgary poet who worked as executive editor of PRISM international. The titles promise me the kind of convoluted mythology I’m hoping to avoid: Dionysus’ Seduces Pentheus and Sends Him in the Guise of a Woman to Hunt Agave. But flipping through, as the words begin to reach through my defenses, I begin softening. What other language but the stories of the gods can we use to talk about incest? How else but through the imagery of other women silenced can a soul unveil the broken wings that it is made of?

I found some of the language stunning: “a dark panic of wings,” “summer ochre in his hair.” I found some of the revelations astute: “I’m getting tired of blaming my mother./It seems I can’t write a poem without lying.” Then there’s the symbolic invention of Silenae, a character in Leifso’s interpretative The Theban Women, a long poem central to Daughters of Men. I’m connecting the name of this character, who did not officially occur in Euripides’ The Bacchae, to the word “silence,” interpreting it as a character for the silenced ones. Leifso writes that in early Greek society, baby daughters were carried into the hills to die. She envisions Silenae this way: “What might happen to one, a wild creature, who managed to live?”

This brings vivid life to girls and women who have suffered incredible atrocities, those who have not been able to speak. Wives, sisters, and daughters of men. I recall a heartbreaking conversation, years ago, with a woman who had been sexually abused by her stepfather. She said that while her childhood was traumatic, she couldn’t really dwell on it, that sexual abuse was so commonplace that it was practically a ‘rite of passage for girls.’ Indeed, it seems far more taboo to speak about it than to do it, as if we should protect the perpetrators and shroud them in secrecy. Then we act as if the victim, too, has something to hide.

Here, Leifso, who has a few poetry awards under her belt, including the Bliss Carman Banff Centre Award For Poetry, refuses this silence. Leifso writes eloquently on behalf of daughters of men, yesterday and today, who have suffered in silence. I found that at times the poetry sounded forced and self-conscious, like it was trying too hard. But the poems also ignite the imagination and recover for daughters everywhere a small sliver of lost light.

Daughters of Men
Brenda Leifso
Brick Books, 2008

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Lorette is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Her work has appeared in White Wall Review, Quarry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Rattle, Modern Poetry, Book Slut, and more.

Sheri Benning’s Thin Moon Psalm

“The trick of May is to believe with empty hands,” Sheri Benning writes in Thin Moon Psalm. It is these perfectly pure phrases that make her prairie psalm a special gift. This poetry volume is that rare moment of silence in a bustling world, taking us back to the enchantment of the open sky, the moon, the things of magic and wonder that could once soothe even the most broken of hearts or skinned of elbows. “…always, after we fail at faith, small-fires of crocus or bluebell snag the eye.”

Thin Moon Psalm is Benning’s second book, following up Earth After Rain. The manuscript won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her first book won two awards, also, and she won the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for achievement in the arts.

That may all validate the $18 you should spend on this book, but the real reason? these small snags of bluebell:

“You make tea for a man who was your lover./Where once there was desire, now a  palm-sized heartbeat,/ pleasant to hold.”

“Night moved across you like a glacier and you woke here, bone-broken, far from where you thought you would be. If you could tie a string to your what-ifs, this is what you would weave- a hydra-nest of jackpine.”

“Listening has made your heart a bruise, a dark pearl of gravity.”

In each selection, the thin moon illuminates outlines, suggests the meanings, leaves secrets dancing in shadows. These thoughts, unsent letters, dreams, private despairs, give depth to shared experiences that we may gloss over as ordinary. Love and loss will always be the dominating themes of literature, from mythology to the Bible to Canadian poets. They are the deepest, darkest and most beautiful themes in the human experience.

Thin Moon Psalm
Sheri Benning,
Brick Books, London
2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her poetry book is available through her site, or through indigo.ca.

Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres

There’s nothing more fascinating than madness. Once, I wondered how a mind could come unhinged: now, with a bit of firsthand experience and a few decades’ observations, I know everybody’s crazy.

Nadine McInnis shares this fascination, and reveals her own melancholic illness in Two Hemispheres, an exquisite collection of poems from Brick Books.

That artists write poetry about their depression is nothing new: the hurt heart is all of literature. But the elegant and insightful way the poet weaves her own experience of despair into deeply intuitive conjecture of others’ madness is nothing short of brilliant.

Irrevocably moved by mid-1800s portraits of madwomen of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, but left with meagre or nonexistent accounts of their cases, McInnis delves into the recesses of her own imagination to respond to the photographs. Reprinted here, the sepia images and accompanying imagination of their conditions resurrect from erasure these asylum ghosts.

The poet eloquently fuses her journey with the forgotten ones, showing the mind’s depth and vigor as equal to its fragility. The dusty halls of history come alive: be transported from the threshold of your own insanity into another era, one where lunatics wander asylum gardens. Recognize your own circle within these madhouse walls- one woman fancies herself royalty, with blood “cool/ and untroubled and blue, blue as heaven.” Another is terrified of damnation; one refuses to eat; another thinks they’re trying to poison her. These patients, “rescued from indigence,” mirror something of my day-to-day life, despite the Victorian dresses.

There’s nothing clear in our still-relevant muddle to understand the human mind and its connection to reality, whatever that is. Ages of pharmacology, of religious charity, of the sex-obsessed dream analysis of cocaine-addled Dr. Freud; the shamanistic mythologies of primeval and remote peoples, the terrifying devices and restraints, the hazy restful dreams of convalescence or abusive therapists, the deciphering of the voices of angels, the casting out of demons; the equally persuasive evidences that addiction is organic and spiritual in nature- and still we have nothing but a few helpless maps of dendrites and synapses, as if this could help us connect the dots between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Miasma, mania, catalepsy, electrodes- McInnis peers for us through the disconcerting lens of mental illness’s language, and languishes there, finding a place for herself and her Victorian lunatic friends that does not cover nor cower. We glimpse revelations of her own struggle through darkness, and into dawn.

Way back when the Titanic stormed back into popularity, the supremely saccharine qualities of the film were redeemed when Rose muttered dramatically this truth: “a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.”
Perhaps mysteries are not always meant to be solved- but instead to be revealed in small increments worthy of contemplation. These crazy ladies seem to revel in their brief moment of sepia stardom: their eyes, at turns hopeless, at turns defiant, at turns feisty or ribald, challenge the absence of factual case histories or dry statistics. Something of their deep ocean is revealed here. McInnis’s uncanny ability to disappear and let these other voices through is, ironically, what makes her own stories more compelling. Whether the secrets imagined are true or not is irrelevant- Salmond Rushdie recently said that what sets humans apart from other animals is our curious habit of telling stories to make meaning out of our lives.

Crazy people make stuff up, but isn’t mythology all about the universality of mystery? “True or false” may have no more merit than those ubiquitous but inanimate statistics we sadly live by. Thankfully, McInnis masterfully shows us that the meaning of life just might be the flickering dark/light interior of our imagination. That very same place inside may be the source of our disconnection and our illness, but it is also the source of our healing and recovery.

Two Hemispheres
Nadine McInnis
Brick Books, 2007

If you would like Lorette C. Luzajic to write for your publication, or would simply like more great stuff to read, visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Alchemical Woman: A Handbook for Everyday Soulwork by Catherine W. Davidson and Ramona P. Rubio

No doubt the general population will cringe at the barrage of goddesses, gemstones, symbolisms, and other new age/old age themes that ooze out of this slim little volume. The homemade feeling of the book and the clumsy collages, mixed with illustrations of various archaic deities, gives the book a craft-circle presentation that may not help make it a bestseller.

That said, I’m a big fan of alchemy, long dismissed by rationalists as crackpot superstition. The thing is, none of those staid scientists understand the transforming power of imagination. While I don’t recommend anyone stir elixirs for hours, study formulas and charts, and hope to change lead into gold, the symbolic value of making treasure from raw materials shouldn’t be underestimated.

We spend so much facing reality that most of us run from it, perhaps hopping from one unfulfilling relationship to another, perhaps by numbing our souls with drugs or alcohol or shrink-sanctioned pills. What harm could a little mythic transformation do? Those who enjoy rituals and dream or writing explorations may find something here that unveils a bit of mystery. Magic can give depth or shimmer to the humdrum agony of everyday life. Filled with poems, reflections, stories, and exercises, Catherine W. Davidson and Ramona P. Rubio, both Ph.Ds, put you to work.

I spent too much time in the 90s with healing crystals and feng shui and the goddesses inside me, so this manual feels a little retro and outdated. Still, though none of my eager herbal concoctions, spirit paintings, or chants granted me the fortune, love, or fame I thought I wished for, I did access my deep spiritual reserves and power during those times. And though I am reluctant to ever utter the words ‘spiritual journey’ again, any religiosity that is tinged with femininity is still a resplendent change from, oh, most of religious history. Plus, we read fiction and watch movies and don’t call it alchemy, but it is. The narratives of family and friends and strangers and the fantasies let us experience something new, something else. For women who have been through great darkness, these rituals can help you see light. Indeed, the authors say the book’s stages prepare us to deal with the shadow and light of the psyche.

Still, given the breadth of knowledge Davidson and Rubio must have gleaned from their in-depth studies of mythology and psychology, I was expecting something a little more polished. And though the website claims of health, wealth, and happiness feel like snake oil vitamins, the work is enthusiastic and generous. But I can’t help thinking there are enough ‘beginner’s’ manuals for magical therapy stuff (and more than enough indecipherable yackety-yak for Rosicrucian or Golden Dawn initiates.) Something in the middle would be nice for a change- Thomas Moore’s work always comes to mind for the thinking (hu)man’s spiritual psychology.

What would be nice, simply, is something that isn’t so gosh-darn cheesy.

Visit www.culturaltapestries.com to order, or for more information.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Rushdie and Me

There are few I would consider marrying, but I’ve long been certain that Kramer could be the next one. We would be giant, over the top, demi-intellectual goofballs together. The sheer amount of merriment that would ensue sure beats the melancholy underworld I’ve been living in most of my life. Kramer could meet me halfway. Little Miss Chatterbox and Cosmo. Kramer’s oddball beauty just might be everything I’m looking for in a man. He could make New York fun. And I suspect that his depth is considerable, despite a surface veneer. He hides his true genius and creativity, and yet, what you get is what you see. The key to Kramer is in not trying to figure him out. The joy of him is that you look back and realize that everything he says is true, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time you first heard it.

Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that Seinfeld’s kooky neighbour does not actually exist, and that’s a big relief because I’m in no hurry to get married again. And much as I’d hoped for it in adolescence, I want nothing less in life than to move to Manhattan. Fictional or not, Kramer and I spend a lot of time together through these newfangled, magical wonder boxes- turn on; dispense laughter. And Kramer never loses the ability to surprise me. One day he comes home from the sauna and tells Jerr- Bear he saw Salmond Rushdie, of all people, taking a steam.

Now, a conversation with Kramer might be exactly what Rushdie needs in life. The man, though wryly funny, could use more belly laughs. It can’t have been easy, becoming the poster child for offending Allah, just by writing a book. I sure hope that if any of my blustery words weren’t always as reverent as they ought to be, God could handle my outburst. I’m pretty sure we are supposed to study and learn and question our world, not just reach for what we’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need armies on earth to censor our explorations if they veer from the truth- then every single one of us must be taken down. The cosmic world is a little more flexible than some adherents of faith think.

But that bit of fuzzy logic didn’t occur to the Ayatollah of Iran, who certainly drew attention to a newly successful author, an ordinary looking guy named Rushdie. He put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. It’s ludicrously arrogant to think that no one should ‘insult or malign Muslims’ and that anyone has the right to kill for doing so. How can we seek truth if we cannot discuss it, and in discussing it, may offend some players? The book that caused this furor was, of course, The Satanic Verses, and the poor writer, now a popular award winner, went into hiding, fearing for his life. I guess by this principle I will also be executed, then, for portraying a pic of Georgie Bush with a lump of white paint by his nose and the caption, “I inhaled.”

I had a hard time myself, having read hundreds of books that defamed my childhood faith of Christianity, seeing what was so offensive here. I’ll give anyone’s faith its due, but true faith means having ethics, and the beginning and ending of ethics is always ‘thou shalt not kill.’ But here’s what caused the world of terrorism to erupt- the title, for starters. It allegedly implied that the Holy Koran’s verses were the work of the devil. (What was so devilish was that these verses, which in historical allegory were withdrawn after their first transcription, encouraged intercessory prayer to three pagan goddesses of the Middle East. The crescent moon, strangely, may still evoke the namesake of Allah, in Allat, the moon goddess….) Additionally, the prophet Mohammed’s wives appeared here in a brothel and the name of a Mecca-like place translated to something like ‘ignorance,’ which was deep sacrilege to the faithful. The list goes on, but surely by these standards, Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb, about Christ’s adventures with Bif and Maggie and a zealous evangelist, had better head indoors.

Indeed, there were endless death threats and multiple bombings of bookstores, assassination attempts on publishers, and more. I thought the prophet Jesus warned us that we would be persecuted in his name and would have to stand up to all kinds of offense, including Moore’s very funny novel. We were instructed to turn the other cheek, however, not to bomb and murder wherever we didn’t like something.

Rushdie’s prolific career started in 1981, pretty much after he threw in the towel. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, his first work was a sci-fi experiment. He says he wrote three other novels that “mercifully weren’t published.” He was also working in advertising and questioned whether he should just move on from writing. “Maybe I’m just pretending to be a novelist,” he told a mesmerized audience last night (June 9, 2008) at the Danforth Music Hall. He said this following a reading from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Sitting there, all I could think was, wow, must be nice to be out! Indeed, Rushdie got tired of staying in, and eventually the fatwa was lifted, but fresh upheaval and new threats haven’t driven him back in.

Thankfully, after tossing up understandable concerns about becoming a writer, Rushdie promised himself that he would never give up. Midnight’s Children came out 6 years after Grimus, and it blew everyone away. Rushdie won the first lot of more than 25 of the most prestigious literary awards in history. A few years later, the uproar over Satanic Verses meant a career of death threats and chaos. But Rushdie doesn’t talk about all that, even when an audience member asks him about Islamic terrorism today. Instead he tells fledglings like me frankly “there are enough books.” If we are wondering why we want to be writers, then don’t be writers. The only excuse, he says, for becoming a writer, “is that you can’t avoid it.”

Now you’d have to be pretty imaginative to come up with any possible commonalities between an unknown pop culture and vitamin writer like myself, and the recently knighted Mr. Rushdie. I’m not even a fan, really, though I intend no disrespect in saying so. The lavish plots and painstaking historical details, the majestic span of human endeavours and dilemmas, the depth of the characters are all astounding things, and so, Rushdie is my teacher. But I confess to finding the going difficult and convoluted, and I find that his ‘magical realism’ lacks the kind of resonance and natural flow I find in Allende or Marquez. I suspect two things here: one, I’m just not smart enough to really absorb the reading and its contexts, by one who is generally regarded as a genius. And two, just plain old personal taste.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we nonetheless had a few things in common. Sal’s dry humour, which I think underlies a great deal more of his writings than is perceived, reigned clear. While there is certainly an inflated aspect and also something of a defeated one showing in Rushdie’s persona, there is absolutely an earthier charm, a faint silliness, and a sure grip on how comical the absurdities of the world are. There’s even something vividly gracious about a man who doesn’t scoff for what must be the 2144th time he is asked “how did you become a writer?” and “what are your favourite books?” I appreciate humour, more and more, as one of the most important ways of bearing life’s bullshit. I think Rushdie would agree.

Second, I’ve always thought Rushdie’s work a little wordy, and to be frank, most of those who know me find me rather wordy as well. I admit I go on and on. I edit quite a bit out, trust me, and I’m still left with an extraordinarily verbose verbiage. I cannot say in ten words what I might say in four thousand.

I decided to embrace my wordy weakness and named my other blog Little Miss Chatterbox. Minimalism may be the trend for distracted modern audiences, but a quick overview of literature assured me I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, now these are not exactly the most terse writers I’ve ever read. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rushdie, me- well, we all tend to digress a lot.

“Stories are what define us,” Rushdie says, in defense of humans prone to loquacity. “We are the only creatures in the world who have developed the curious habit of telling each other stories.” This, he says, is an amazing way we have of making sense of ourselves. Certainly, it’s a technique he uses. “I go forward by going sideways.”

The real question here is what the million-dollar man was doing with Kramer in the sauna when there was a price like that on his head. When Kramer asked his name, the writer in the towel said “Sal Bass.” Jerry wasn’t so sure it could have been Rushdie, but Kramer knew that the ‘sal’ part was too much to be a coincidence, and that the ‘bass’ part alluded to fish- you know, to Salmond! Foolish hilarity ensued.

See, the uber-elite literati pooh-pooh television, but I think we take great joy in TV shows and in movies for the same reason we give importance to literature. Rushdie himself enjoys the occasional acting foray (though it was actually Sal Bass and not Rushdie who played Sal Bass/not Rushdie in the Seinfeld episode.) These are our stories. I’m not the only one who views life as Seinfeldian. The meaning of life is, quite literally, the reason of the show. It’s a show about nothing, and so, it is about everything.

Now, Rushdie’s a remarkable man, and while I was honoured to learn from his passion and experience during this terrific reading and interview, it still holds true that I wouldn’t care to run into him in a steam room. He may be smarter and have a better job than Kramer, but he’s a bit formidable, blustering, just through with his fourth wife, and well, not all that good looking. Kramer, on the other hand, has an offbeat quirkiness that makes him look hot with a cigar in an old-fashioned jalopy, despite the pompadour and trademark leggy clumsiness. I’m also pretty sure that Rushdie would find my work and my life too breezy, too girly, too soap operatic, with too many talismanic trinkets lying about. Despite his penchant for writing magic, he doesn’t believe in it, and I do.

But I digress.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

By visiting chapters.indigo.ca
through this link and purchasing a book I’ve mentioned, my book The Astronaut’s Wife, or any book at all, you help support my blog. Thank you!

In which the author enjoys Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon

Forget about pretending to wade through pretentious literary smut from the old boy’s club, boring tomes by Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Boys will be boys, and we aren’t boys. Chick lit is booming, and signs and banners loudly and proudly summon the pink brigade to overflowing tables and shelves.

I confess I resisted the lady-lite trend in reading for years…while the name never offended me as it did some, I boldly declared that ‘chick lit’ was everything in the world a girl might read, from Shakespeare to the giantesses like Isabel Allende and Margaret Atwood. I’ve just never had a thing for what they used to call the ‘sex and shopping’ stories.

But that was before we all got caught reading Bridget Jones’ Diary, an infectious romp through feminine insecurity that reminded me of my childhood favourite, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters. While neither books would change the world, both showcased the self-conscious human spirit with a bit of verve and a million truly funny and totally familiar moments. Easy to digest, to be sure, but genuinely funny. Still, I was a bit of an art snob when the Shopaholic craze began. I worked in the bookstore, and we barely sold any other titles. But my roommate then was The Professor, an Egyptian radical who spoke six languages and boasted nearly as many university degrees. He was teaching and researching theology, and he wanted to talk about Coptic Christianity or the modernization of Jewish art. I would have been embarrassed to drop brand names, so I read Karen Armstrong’s sweeping and brilliant religious histories, for which I am not sorry.

Still, I had a secret penchant for Lucky: the Magazine About Shopping- and I still do. Who wouldn’t wile away the hours, circling their favourite objects, reading small blurbs about what eye shadows would make blue peepers pop this spring? My paparazzi would seldom find me in a mall- I’m a Goodwill girl at heart (well, now that I’m thirtysomething, it’s a mix of Goodwill and Winners!) But the Sophie Kinsella series, Confessions of a Shopaholic, did worm its way eventually into my curious hands. Like everyone else on the planet, I was immediately hooked. The formula was pure pop, and a winning one. Going shopping with Rebecca Bloomwood was far more fun than real-life shopping. I didn’t run into any crowds, I didn’t have to look at my sausage thighs in badly lit mirrors; I didn’t have to choose wisely. Even better, the appealing heroine never ran out of damn good one-liners, was clever and funny, and always getting into ridiculous escapades. And what girl doesn’t love an escapade?

It had been awhile since I’d devoured any escapadist fiction- and after a stretch of acceptably pompous prize winners and a whole heap of nonfiction as per usual, I picked up Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon. Unlike Entertainment Weekly, I would hardly declare this a ‘gritty look at the madness of never knowing exactly what you want.’ I doubt that in six months I’ll recall even having read it. But no matter: not every book must shatter the earth, and this indulgent and often funny story looks at what to do after your dreams land in your lap and you don’t want it anymore.

Every girl can relate to the splintering revelation of her man’s humanity- yes, boys, first you are gods, exactly where you want to be. If you want to stay that way in our eyes, it’s pretty simple: don’t lie and cheat, don’t patronize, and don’t leave your mess all over our apartment. These things erode the mystery far too quickly, and then you complain that we no longer want sex. For me that math is easy- the fewer six-month socks I find on my floor, and the fewer farts and belches I hear, the friskier you will find me. Men don’t always see what their other girlfriends or drinking out of the milk carton have to do with sex, but if they’d like more of it, it would be wise to catch on soon.

That said, even though Matthew is a serial cheater who tends to tomcat during a wife’s pregnancy, there are moments I genuinely feel sorry for him. Women’s oceanic moods are not always predictable, and no matter how hot your secretary is, moving in with her may not be the dreamy steamy lifestyle you were anticipating. Even the hottest, curviest, horniest babes in the world get periods and babies, and though men can handle the carcasses of war, they have a hard time with a tampon or a stretch mark. So while Matthew indeed deserves everything that his wife and his girlfriend have coming to him, at times I can’t help cringing in embarrassment for the poor aging sod. Still, he made his bed; he’ll have to lie in it.

But Getting Rid of Matthew is not really about man-hating. It’s about the inherent comedy in our gender foibles. Helen is nearly forty, and has been Matthew’s other woman for four years. Living in a tiny basement in London, working as a secretary, and being childless, with nothing but another woman’s man to show for her life, she understandably feels she has achieved none of the status or accomplishment a woman is supposed to have by now. But in the end, she sees how amazing her life is after all. There is much to be said for coming home to your own flat, pouring a few glasses of wine all by your lonesome, and doing whatever the hell you want. Such freedom has indeed been rare for women throughout history.

And so, although the book itself was rather mediocre, I closed it with a brand new relish for the life I’ve made in my humble abode- my cats, my books, and me. Now this is living.

Getting Rid of Matthew by Jane Fallon, Harper Collins, New York, 2007

Visit Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, is available through Indigo or Amazon. Check it out.