9th Canadian Challenge - 17th Review - Heading South

I wasn't entirely sure I was going to review Dany Laferrière's Heading South, since it has almost nothing to do at all with Canada.  All the stories and vignettes are set in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.  Even the tourists that occasionally turn up are from the United States or England or France.  However, there was something that was nagging at me, and it broke out in the story "A Small House on the Side of the Blue Mountain."  This combined with a similar annoyance with the play Disgraced, and I decided I would do a hybrid review of both.  It's also a bit of an attempt to get a lot of negativity out of my system, so it won't continue to fester.  (By the way, I don't think Heading South can be SPOILED, but Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced can be SPOILED, so don't read on if you hate SPOILERS.)

Going back to my review of How to Make Love to a Negro, I think the bottom line was I was largely bored with the book but I didn't actively dislike it.  I actively disliked Heading South.  It was truly a sordid piece of work.  Basically all interactions between people are rooted in sex, in Laferrière's vision, either directly or at most one step removed ("friends" hang out with each other because one young man can pull the ladies like crazy makes sure to give his friend sloppy seconds after he is done with the women and has discarded them).

In many ways, this book comes across as the literary equivalent of revenge porn.  Quite a few books and movies have covered sex tourism in the Caribbean (perhaps the most memorable is How Stella Got Her Groove Back) but in a fairly shallow way.  While still shallow in my view, Heading South flips the script and makes it clear that the Haitians are actually in control of these sexual dalliances with Americans or Europeans.  Those stories make up about 40-50% of the little vignettes.  In the other ones, it is class that plays the same role, with the upper class women falling madly in heat (not in love) with their sexual partners from the lower classes.  It is so absurdly reductive, and the book is really not particularly well written.

In one of the more reflective passages in the story "Skin," one of the women talks about how everyone seems to end up sleeping with everyone else, aka it is just a big circle.  (And if that wasn't enough one of the ritzier clubs is named the Bellevue Circle but always just referred to as "The Circle.")  But unlike the effect in Ophüls's La Ronde, which is probably what Laferrière was going for, we are not presented with a clever set of circumstances linking society.  It is just a claustophobic feeling with everybody entangled in everybody else's business.  One would never sense that Port-au-Prince has nearly 1 million people, since it is always the same 20 or so people that end up coupling with each other in various combinations, as one would find in a small village.  (I have a similar bone to pick with Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, though it is only a minor complaint lodged against a much richer and rewarding work than Heading South.)

I can certainly understand and perhaps even respect a character who feels that everything gets reduced to sex in the end (not that I agree everyone is actually so driven).  However, the author keeps egging the pudding and he is clearly indicating that yes, it is a fact that every character in this book (and by extension the world) is completely driven by sex.  In particular all women will drop their drawers when romanced in just the right way.  Or really barely any encouragement at all.  I still am shaking my head at "A Small House on the Side of the Blue Mountain" where this woman visits Haiti with her husband, meets some old farmer and immediately decides to abandon her husband (and children) and become the farmer's common law wife.  I just thought the whole worldview was so absurd and one-sided, and it angered me that he (Laferrière) was trying to rope me into his sordid view of life.  I guarantee you that this is the last book of his that I will read.

I wasn't quite as upset by Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, but it pulls a similar move at the end.  It takes a while to get there, and we spend a fair bit of time watching this self-hating Muslim apostate lawyer and his ultra liberal artist wife interact.  It's quite odd, since she is starting to appropriate Islamic art into her own work and is bending herself into knots to not be racist.  Eventually she says silly things like "We could learn a lot about submission from studying Islamic art" (or was it discipline) and she takes a very charitable interpretation of the Quran, which upsets her husband since he has thoroughly disavowed his culture.

Up to this point, there are actually quite a few parallels with Jewish writers, particularly Philip Roth, who showed their culture warts and all, and obviously upset a lot of fellow Jews, including his own family members.  Akhtar talks explicitly about this connection in an interview covering Disgraced, including the suspicion that some people have that he gets produced so much because he dwells on negative aspects of Islam.  It must be said that I liked the interview considerably more than the play itself.  It's not particularly hard to find reviewers who hate the play on these grounds, but I won't bother linking to them.

SPOILERS

As a side note, it appears that each production comes up with its own artwork, representing the wife's work.  While this piece from the Goodman production is certainly inspired by Islamic art, it is so incredibly insipid that I cannot believe a reputable art critic would be interested in it, even if it was a ploy to get into the artist's pants.

The second piece is the one in the Mirvish production that I saw a few weeks back in Toronto.  It matches the description in the play a bit better (there is some discussion of negative space) but it doesn't leap out and say it is inspired by Islamic art.  However, I could at least believe an art critic might at least give it a second glance.  In this sense, the producers have a much harder task than when they are putting on Red (which ends with a canvas primed with solid red paint) or Art (where they just need a blank white canvas).

There are two major turning points in the play, both of which are supposed to be quite disturbing.  One of which I could buy is when the lawyer beats his wife after he finds out about the affair.  I have to admit, I thought she was so brainwashed into accepting Islam and "submission" that she would accept this as a just punishment.  However, the abuse seems to snap her out of her fog and she realizes that cultural relativism can be taken too far, and that cozying up to Islam isn't just a game.  I grudgingly thought this was pretty well expressed.

What I basically didn't buy is that as the lawyer gets drunker at a dinner party, he keeps arguing about how people are really just tribal and how they will always revert to their own people when chips are down.  The art critic demurs, and eventually the lawyer says that he felt a flash of pride when 9/11 happened.  This sets off quite a few arguments, and basically everyone does get down and dirty and quite tribal.  Some spitting is involved.  So again, the author is putting out this theorem that cannot be denied within the play itself that everyone will revert to their ethnic tribe.  I resent this kind of manipulation.  A better approach would be to show that people are more varied and that some people cannot be reduced down with such a simplistic formula.  I also had a lot of trouble believing that someone who had spent his whole life rejecting Islam would suddenly be proud of the 9/11 hijackers.  It just doesn't compute in any meaningful way for me.  (I mean it wasn't hard to buy that the nephew would be secretly proud, as he was well on his way to radicalization anyway.)  So given all this, it isn't hard to understand why a fair number of Muslims hate this play (and it is playing everywhere, so it is pretty hard to avoid).

I probably won't actually get around to watching them, but it does sound as though I would like Akhtar's The Invisible Hand slightly more and perhaps The Who and the What a bit more than either of those.

Equilibrium?

I was actually going to write about how I had more or less recovered my equilibrium, though I was still feeling badly about missing the art fair.  After all, I had managed to send some good information on to the city planners and had finally managed to get a memo accepted with my policy recommendations intact.  Those are fairly major accomplishments.  Then I found out tonight that on one thing I care about quite a bit, I am being blocked by some very ignorant planners from another agency.  I simply don't have the time or resources to do anything about it at this point, so a whole planning cycle will be lost.  I'll just have to outlast them and outmaneuver them next time (and who knows, get them fired some day for gross incompetence), but it leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.  Obviously, I still care about these things a bit too much for my own good, and I still haven't figured out a reasonable way to blow off steam.

How should I relax?

This is perhaps more reflective than many of my posts.  Today was a very strange day, with a mix of good and bad elements, though when I got home I found that I had let down my daughter by not coming home in time to make it to the art show at her school.  I feel quite dreadful about this, but no one reminded me in the morning or put it on my calendar.  I'm particularly annoyed because I might have been late in any case, but I agreed to review a colleague's half-assed paper, and I could have just as easily done it from home.  So on the whole, this feels like a pretty shitty day, even though I did make a bit of progress in advancing/improving transportation policy in Toronto.  I mean that is why I am here after all.

I am not finding reading relaxing enough.  It is too rare to come across a book that really engages me and amuses me sufficiently.  I suppose I could go for a ringer, like rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  That's certainly not a bad idea.

While I find sewing sometimes rewarding, it can be incredibly frustrating during the actual sewing, esp. when sewing curtains, which is my current task.  I should just push on with this and get it over and then sew some easier things (at least with thinner material).

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who gets much of a positive chemical rush after exercising.  I push through because I feel I have to, and clearly I succeed the most when I make it part of my day that I can't avoid, i.e. I biked to work, so I have to bike home.  But I just hate exercise, and I always have.  I don't care much for gardening either.

What I would find relaxing is going to the hot tub or sauna after swimming.  I liked that quite a bit in Vancouver.  Unfortunately, the recreation centre near us is really sub par.  The lane swim times are far too constrained, and there is no sauna or hot tub at all.  It's so fricking depressing...

I have to admit, I am pretty much at a loss for what to do to relax.  But I have to figure out something.  Work is definitely going better on the whole, but I am still wound too tight both there and at home.  It's not a good feeling, that's for sure.

Missing cover

No, this is not about buying books without covers.  In New York in the mid 90s, I used to see sidewalk vendors with many paperbacks without their covers.  I usually restrained myself, but I probably did pick up one or two.  I do remember buying Les Miserables but never got around to reading it.  Anyway, this illicit activity probably still exists in some form, though I haven't seen it in a while.

As it happens, I was looking at upcoming art exhibitions in Minneapolis, and I saw that there is an on-going exhibition on modernism.*  This image caught my attention.

Louis Lozowick, New York, 59th Street Bridge, 1922

I am sure that this was turned into a book cover.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember whether it was a fiction book (something like Zamyatin's We or a J. G. Ballard novel) or an urban studies book.  I'm leaning towards a 1970s or 1980s paperback edition of some novel, and I probably have it in my collection somewhere.  Still, I am stumped for the moment.  If this rings any bells, please comment below.

Sometimes my admiration for a cover can impede my judgement.  I quite like this cover of V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.  Given that the novel mentions the de Chirico painting (of the same name) several times, it is quite appropriate to feature it so prominently in the book cover design.

I had heard that this was an odd book, mostly a deeply contemplative book on the life of a writer, drawn quite heavily on Naipaul's own life, though not strictly autobiographical.  However, I had no idea just how boring this book would be (the equivalent of reading about watching paint dry).  It comes to life briefly in the second section, The Journey, when Naipaul discusses the boat trip from New York to England, but it still pales in comparison to Ondaatje's The Cat's Table for instance.  I will probably wrap this up this weekend, but it has been really painful.  I'm almost reading it just to see if it gets any better towards the end, though I have no idea why it should.  All that said, I am tempted to keep the book merely for the cover, but that is really a silly idea, and I will just memorialize the cover here and donate this to the library, after I limp across the finish line.

Somewhat tangentially related, I didn't enjoy Dany Laferriere's Heading South either, though I will write about that in its own review, probably tomorrow.  While I was seeing what others had thought about it (I was relieved to find that I am not the only one that thought this was a bad book -- and that Laferriere is drastically over-rated by the Quebec literary community), I was tipped off to this book, set in Port of Spain, Trinidad (which Naipaul's narrator briefly visits as well): Edgar Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office.

I certainly like the cover, and the reviews have been quite positive.  It sounds a lot more to my taste than Laferriere's work, that's for sure.  It is also a short novel (just over 200 pages), so I may try to squeeze it in after I have read a bit more non-fiction (perhaps right after Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, although the parallels break down a bit, since Darwin saw many islands on his formative voyage, but they avoided the Caribbean entirely).

* Of course, now I want to go to Minneapolis in October or November before the modernism exhibit closes and while the Walker Art Center Highlights exhibit is on as well, though I think it would be a hard trip to pull off, especially as Porter still doesn't fly to Minneapolis.  My wife actually has some interest in going to Minneapolis, but would rather wait a few years until Prince's mansion becomes Graceland North...

Short vs. long works

I've mentioned already that I am turning a bit away from fiction and have read a couple of books on relativity (one made me feel smarter and the other had the opposite effect...).  Along those same lines, I am currently much more drawn to shorter works (for reading on the subway).  That doesn't mean that I won't eventually get to longer books, and I have Wallace's The Pale King, Murakami's 1Q84 and Thackeray's Vanity Fair tentatively lined up for the second half of 2016.

Shorter doesn't always mean better of course.  I wasn't particularly taken by Kundera's The Festival of Insignificance, which is indeed an insignificant trifle.  But it was nice to finish a book in two days.  On the other hand, I just cracked open Edna O'Brien's Night and am enjoying it quite a bit.  It is sort of a mid-career lark (I don't believe she normally wrote this way), where she is taking on the trappings of high modernism, particularly Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses but also some of the exuberance of Nightwood's Matthew O'Connor.  This also looks like a book I should be able to read in a day or two, though I might slow down just a bit to savor the language.

In contrast, I was poking around trying to track down a book cover, and ran across the listings for Balzac's La Comédie Humaine, which I had been aware of but a bit too awed to do anything about, and Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, of which I only knew about a couple of the books.  I had no idea it was a more or less completed cycle of 20 novels!  Both of these series dwarf anything currently on my list of long works (read or unread).

I'm pretty sure I won't ever read or even attempt to read all of Balzac, though I will try to get to the highlights (by 2020?).  I'd start with the NYRB volume of stories and novellas, which concludes with The Duchess of Langeais (1834).  Then Père Goriot (1835), Eugénie Grandet (1834), maybe Sarrasine (1830) as Roland Barthes paid so much attention to it, Cousin Bette (1846), Cousin Pons (1847) and wrapping up with Lost Illusions (1837-43).  I'm sure there are other worthy books in the cycle, but I think that would be a decent selection.

As far as Zola, it is harder to say.  The two that intrigue me the most are Pot Luck and The Ladies Paradise, but these fall mid-way through the series.  I suppose I will just start with The Fortune of the Rougons and see if I want to try to get through the whole series or just pick and choose.  It is true that I am far better versed in German and arguably even Spanish and Italian literature than I am in French literature, though at one point I had read most of the key French poets (at least post 1850).  Anyway, something to work on down the road...

Positives/negatives

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I received the Census in the mail.  After logging in, it became fairly clear that I was selected for the long form.  And it is fairly long with the most difficult questions being those about how much you paid for utilities and what are the property taxes on the house.  I was pretty excited that I could (legitimately) claim that I usually biked to work for the first week of May, since I biked in 3 times and took transit twice.  Given that most of my career I have used Census data heavily, it would be hypocritical to complain about filling in the Census (or to actually lie about any of the information), but it did feel quite long, and I ultimately did it in two chunks.  At least in my case, they didn't ask income, and I believe they probably have some deal with CRA to just go get the income directly from the tax man.  I could be wrong, though I would be surprised if they went to all that effort to get the mandatory Census back and then didn't ask income.  The one thing that I wish they would do (and I am kicking myself for not putting it in the comments) is to ask number of household vehicles.  I guess I'll just email this suggestion to them.

Anyway, I have been biking to work and generally getting in three days per week.  That's actually not bad, given that there has been a fair bit of rain (and this upcoming week is no different).  I haven't felt any more energy (indeed generally I am a bit more tired), and I haven't lost any weight yet, though it is still fairly early days.  What is of more concern is that my legs are very stiff.  I probably need to do some kind of stretching or yoga to try to loosen up.  Right now I feel I have the body of a 50 year old, which is depressing indeed.  What keeps me going is knowing that I should be feeling a bit more myself by the summer, when I may well be up to biking 4 days/week.  I think next winter, assuming I am in a better mental place than last winter (I certainly ought to be) I will have to commit more seriously to finding some way to keep active or I will be back in this same cycle.

I'm totally blanking on the second thing I was going to write about.  I may or may not come back and fill this in if I remember it.  It might well have been something about the clown show that is U.S. politics these days, though I feel completely disconnected from it.  I haven't completely made up my mind, but if things continue along their current trajectory, I will look into renouncing my U.S. citizenship.  But it is a bit early to completely give up hope (I guess).  The demographic trends certainly favor the Democrats, but there is so much gerrymandering and rural states have far too much power in the U.S. system that I don't see things ever turning around.

The last thing was even more depressing if you can believe it, but I suppose there are some glimpses of light.  I was talking with someone at work about sustainability and the ever increasing signs that global warming is out of hand.  He basically feels like a Cassandra.  In my case, trying to fight climate change is only a secondary or tertiary part of the job, though it is still in the job description to some extent.  Thus, I don't feel quite as personally responsible for the fact that we still draw up plans that ask far too much of human nature, i.e. if we provide marginally acceptable public transport, the general public will start taking transit in numbers large enough to make a difference (particularly in the suburbs).  This really isn't true, and most of us know and accept this to some degree.  (People are far more realistic if not to say fatalistic in Toronto, particularly when compared to Vancouver where most the planners are "true believers.")  Anyway, he feels humanity is basically screwed -- we've simply gone too far to reduce emissions to the point necessary to make a difference.  (And more to the point, the pain it will take to try to move to a reduced carbon economy guarantees that no hard decisions will ever be taken...)  I basically do feel this way as well, though one ray of hope is that China probably will be able to produce solar panels on a massive industrial scale within the next 5-10 years.  I often wonder just how bad the climate change refugee movement will be and whether there really will be resource wars, particularly over clean water.  I suspect so.  I also think most liberal institutions, particularly the EU and the UN, will simply fracture and wither away into irrelevance as the scope of the problems becomes clear, and average citizens will refuse to share with the have nots.  That will generally be a sad day, though I am so appalled at the smugness of liberal thinkers in extolling how great it is that human rights only ratchet one way up that I will take some satisfaction in watching these edifices crack.  (I've definitely fallen out of the camp of true progressives to something more akin to a pragmatist with some remaining traces of liberalism.)  I even do wonder if it was morally just bringing children into a world that will be a fairly dire place in 50 more years, but I take some comfort in knowing that pessimists have generally been proven wrong to some extent.  Also, of all the places in the world, Ontario is probably going to be a net beneficiary of climate change, even if Canada loses a war over extracting water from the Great Lakes (something along these lines will very likely occur some day).  I guess that is only positive from a personal point of view, since I expect things to get very bad for most African and Asian countries, but that's really all I have at the moment.  It is rare for me to hope that I am wrong, but I would gladly be wrong over the climate change issue if it meant less overall disruption to the world as a whole.

Shakespeare follow-up

This is just a quick follow-up to this post.  While it was a bit of a mad rush at the end to meet the Sing-for-your-supper deadline, I did start writing the piece that weekend.  I definitely think creating my own work was the most meaningful way of celebrating Shakespeare, rather than solely being a culture consumer.  I'm starting to feel that I will have the time to write several of these pieces (they have been incubating long enough!), and revise some of the other pieces.  I am particularly intrigued by Toronto Cold Reads and think I'll ship off a number of pieces to them, maybe even including Corporate Codes of Conduct to see if I can get the second Act to flow better from the first.

One trend that I don't care for in all this Shakespeare worship is rewriting the plays as novels mostly, since it just means even more oxygen taken out of the room by Shakespeare.  Or maybe what really grates at me is that they are commissioning these pieces from the most famous writers around: Atwood, Winterson, Anne Tyler, and Howard Jacobson, who is redoing The Merchant of Venice, which is one I will absolutely avoid (since I find Jacobson drastically overrated and dislike The Merchant of Venice with a passion).  I guess there is nothing terrible about these projects, which I consider safe bets, but it does seem to deflect attention from artists who could really use the attention.  I suppose I will be hypocritical in the extreme if I ever do finish my retelling of King Lear, though I am leaning against tackling that for a variety of reasons I'll eventually disclose.

I left it at the library in their Shakespeare display in case anyone else wanted it, but no one did, so I brought home Shakesqueer, which is pretty much what it says on the tin.  This is an edited volume of queer studies essays on Shakespeare.  A few look interesting, and the rest are kind of forgettable, which is pretty typical.

In the biggest stretch, I am thinking back to the Richard III that I saw this March, and pondering the incredible coincidence that Leicester City won the Premiere League (at 5000-to-1 odds) the year after Richard's bones were discovered and buried in a more proper tomb.  Actually, it was pretty stunning that they found the bones in the first place.  And this will be a year that no one will forget in UK football.

In any case, moving from UK sports back to the arts, BBC Radio 3 had a number of programs on April 22 and 23 that involved music and Shakespeare in one way or another.  They are generally still available for another 2 weeks.  I'll try to post if there are any I find particularly intriguing.  There are 5 new urban sonnets written in response to Shakespeare, and these are by much more obscure UK poets, so I am a little more receptive to this commission.  The programs (15 minutes each) should be archived here but will vanish in about 2 weeks.

Another interesting program is on Radio 4 where they are taking 20 objects from Shakespeare's era and using them to discuss Elizabethan England.  It's the same general idea as History of the World in 100 objects, which was such a huge hit.  It appears that the original 100 and 5 more Silk Road objects can still be downloaded directly as podcasts.  (There is no regional restriction if one is in Canada, though I haven't tested from the U.S.)  I presume that the Shakespeare ones will also remain available and not time out in time more weeks, but I would go ahead and download now just in case.  Here is episode 8, which focuses on urban strife in Shakespeare's day.

I know there are quite a few pop-up Shakespeare things, including some secret show at Red Sandcastle, but I can't recall the details, and if it is that hard to track down, I am not going.  I do see that in addition to Driftwood's production of The Taming of the Shrew coming to Withrow Park in July, Shakespeare in the Ruff will be doing Romeo and Juliet in Withrow in August.  I'll probably go this time around (I skipped Macbeth last season).  There will almost certainly be a few Shakespeare plays at Fringe this year, so I am not worried about not getting enough Shakespeare this year.

Now I should go outside before I waste the entire day.  {Exit chased by bear...}