15th Canadian Challenge - 9th Review - Porny Stories

I thought I would enjoy this book (Porny Stories by Eva Moran) more than I actually did.  While the book blurb called her a modern-day Woody Allen, I thought she was more in the Fran Lebowitz line. I think more than anything it felt a bit too repetitive; Donald Barthelme wrote up a few fake quizzes but it was only a small part of his oeuvre, whereas roughly half or more of these pieces are fake Cosmo-style quizzes.  And it just seems like Moran is shooting fish in a barrel again and again.  Cosmopolitan Magazine quizzes have been mocked for decades, and often the writers do dig into the self-loathing (on the part of single ladies) that enables them in the first place.  What is a bit different is just how sexually explicit many of the pieces are, but, in this day and age, nothing's shocking.

In truth, the only piece that I really liked (without reservations) was a very short story called "Julius Caesar: A Play Review."  It starts out with a high school student attending a "uber-pc" First Nations interpretation of Julius Caesar (perhaps like the Crows' Nest fake-out earlier in the season should have been).  She complains a bit that the author shouldn't have killed off the title character so early.  But she was really at the play to spy on Margaret Atwood, who she deeply admires.  She doesn't hesitate to say that "I definitely do not think she's 'old.'  I see her another way. ...  So beyond time and the age thing."

She then imagines a scenario where after death you arrive at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter asks you the last book you read.  "You answer with dignified dignity, 'Bear.' "  And presto, you're riding a chute to Hell.  "You barely have time to gasp, 'But it won the Governor's General Award!'"*  St. Peter calls after you, saying that you should have read The Handmaid's Tale.  (Given The Handmaid's Tale's clear attack on the misogynistic aspects of so many religions and their insistence on controlling women's reproductive lives, this does seem an unusual vote of confidence in the book...)

The narrator then follows Atwood around at the reception after the play where she takes one of everything from the buffet, then vanishes.  The narrator imagines she is in the washroom and imagines discovering her there and becoming bosom buddies with the Queen of CanLit.  (As one more amusing aside, the play is premiering at Buddies in Bad Times!)  

The review ends, "Yeah, Julius Caesar's good.  But Margaret Atwood, now she's cool."  Hard to argue with that.  I've seen her a few times in person, and it's always a bit of a thrill.

I wish Moran had written a lot more along these lines and included far fewer mocking Cosmo reader quiz pieces.  But then I guess her collection wouldn't have had such a hook, merited or not.

* And indeed, more than one blog has tackled the incongruity of that...  I also wrote about this in my review of Bear a while back.

15th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Mr. Blue

This was another book that was dropped off in my Little Free Library: Mr. Blue by Jacques Poulin.  Mr. Blue is actually the name of a cat owned (that is, if cats can be "owned") by a middle-aged writer who lives by himself on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.  He is still struggling to get over a break-up, and he also seems somewhat stuck in his latest writing project.  One day he finds someone has parked a boat nearby and appears to be living at least part-time in a natural cave.  He discovers a book (The Arabian Nights) and essentially dreams up an unknown woman ("Marika") that he falls for; she also becomes a bit of a muse for him, though it doesn't seem that he actually gets much further in his writing...  

SPOILERS AHEAD

Other people enter the picture, and while they claim to know Marika, it is just as likely that they are just humouring him in his delusions.  It is left unclear by the end of the novel whether Marika truly existed or was just a figment of his imagination, though my money is on her non-existence.  In a slightly strange twist, he more or less adopts a young woman, as a kind of surrogate daughter.  The writing (or at least the translation) is fairly flat and affectless, and the whole book is sort of infused with a melancholy air.  Here's a slightly longer take on Mr. Blue.

15th Canadian Challenge - 7th Review - Binge

I must have been reading the on-line review of Douglas Coupland's Binge, as when I went to put it on hold at the library the line ahead of me wasn't long at all (as it would be after the print version appeared).  Ironically, it took several days for the e-book version to become available, and I am sort of in the middle of the queue for that.  Why would I want the e-book version, after I have read the book in hard copy?  Well, the book's structure -- 60 very short stories of 4 pages with many shared characters -- makes it hard to keep track of how the characters are linked.  It would be much easier to do a search on "Julie" or "Leah" to see how often they cropped up in others' stories than to flip through the book over and over again.

In some ways, this feels like an even more extreme version of Altman's Short Cuts (where he combined characters from Carver stories that didn't actually overlap in the originals).  The stories aren't particularly chronological, and it doesn't seem as if this is supposed to cohere into some mega-novel (as Cortazar's Hopscotch does, sort of).  It's a bit more like looking a story about a mid-sized city on Wikipedia and then randomly clicking on some of the links to find out more about key characters.  Pretty much everybody gets their minute in the sun, but with only 4 pages we get only a glimpse, either into whatever is preoccupying them at the moment or, just as likely, some major (traumatic) incident from their past that brought them to that point in their lives.  It will make me sense if/when you read some of the stories on your own.

In some cases, two stories just show the inner thoughts of each character as they go through a meeting, such as "Dasani" and "Effexor."  We also have a cynical anti-O. Henry story in the paired stories "Unleaded" and "Lurking Account" where a man starts cheating on his dying wife, while, unbeknownst to him, she is having an affair with one of the hospice workers.  

If this were a novel in (many) pieces, then I think we would have found out more why Ned was recruiting Isaac (after a breakdown partially covered in the stories "Lego" and "Sharpies"), but this thread seems to have been dropped, unless I just missed the connection.

I'm not sure there is enough plot in Binge to really be SPOILED, but just in case, SPOILERS AHEAD.

In the 2nd half, Coupland's peeks into others people's lives gets progressively darker, and we meet up with a woman who has her husband knocked off, and then starts feeding fentanyl-laced drugs to her co-conspirator to cover her tracks ("Oxy") and a disturbing number of people that just happen to have bodies stashed away in their cargo carriers.  I'm still trying to work out why one man was attacked and stuffed into one of these carriers (still alive as the story ended though presumably not for much longer...).  This is where doing an electronic search would come in very handy, as I might be able to cross-reference something in one of the other stories.

Most the characters seem to be on the younger-side of Gen X or Millennials, though Coupland also delves into the lives of their children (Gen Zers), though not always as convincingly.  COVID crops up in a few of the stories, but not really that many.  There is a SARS survivor who can't quite believe he has to worry about yet another pandemic, and one which will almost certain kill him after the number SARS did on his lungs ("IKEA Ball Pit").  This is just as well, as I wouldn't want to read 60 stories about people dealing with COVID in various ways. There were a couple of stories that I could relate to, including getting too caught up in stock speculation and almost losing a bundle ("Risk Aversion"), which will happen to the GameStop investors and probably the BitCoin enthusiasts as well.  Anyway, it is quite easy to get in over one's head...  The other one was a throw-away line in the story "Thong" where the narrator comments on how many people lie about where they were on 9/11.  That is no doubt true, but it is equally true that I was working in Manhattan in Penn Plaza on 9/11.  I heard from some of the others that there was smoke coming from one of the Twin Towers and got to the window in time to see the second plane hit the 2nd tower. It will be something I remember forever, unless Alzheimer's gets me first.

Given the nature of the stories and the way they jump around, a lot of ground is covered in Binge, but it isn't going to be satisfying if you want to follow through on what happened next or even keep following a character that you found intriguing in four pages but then was dropped.  I didn't have time to read through the entire book in one sitting (binge-reading), but I don't think there was a time I stopped with just one either.

Edit (11/15): Having borrowed the e-book version, I can confirm that Coupland leaves the reader hanging in several cases.  We never find out what Ned has in mind for Isaac, and it remains a mystery why one man attacked another in one of the last stories in Binge.  C'est dommage.

15th Canadian Challenge - 6th Review - Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet is Douglas Coupland's 2nd novel.  I mentioned in my review of Generation X that I really didn't start reading Coupland until many years after he had been a major figure in CanLit.  In fact, I probably wouldn't have read him at all, except I was favourably impressed by his art exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  At any rate, I still don't really seek out his work (or written work at any rate), but Shampoo Planet landed in the Little Free Library out front, and I seized the opportunity to read it.

One positive aspect is that it isn't just a rehashing of the themes of Generation X.  While there are a few slacker-types in Tyler's circle, he himself is fairly ambitious, sort of a proto-yuppie, and wants to land a job at the Seattle-based Bechtol and escape Lancaster, the decaying Pacific Northwest city where he was raised.  The interesting twist is that his mother (and biological father) are hippies.  So this is a fairly straight riff off of Family Ties, though there is a moment in Shampoo Planet when Tyler's grandparents fall hard for a multi-level marketing scheme/scam selling KittyWhip Kat Food and even Tyler's mom, Jasmine, gets caught up in the excitement of making lots of money.  The other minor twist (away from Family Ties) is that he has a very abrasive step-father, Dan, who is separated from his mother.  Tyler only visits him a couple of times, though there is an amusing subplot where one of the French foreign exchange students falls for Dan before finding out what a phony he is.

I'll talk a bit about the plot, so SPOILERS ahead.

The plot, such as it is, involves the two students dropping in on Tyler, basically unannounced, leading to a break-up with his girlfriend, Anna-Louise.  After being humiliated by the episode with Dan, one of the student takes off back to France.  Tyler and the other student drive down to L.A., where she eventually gets into modelling (or at least tries to) and brushes Tyler off.  Meanwhile this relatively outrageous pitch* about getting people to take vacations at landfills (by rebranding them as HistoryWorld ouposts) that Tyler sends off to Bechtol gets him noticed by Bechtol's president, and Tyler is invited to fly to Seattle for a job interview.  (This seems almost lifted from another Michael J. Fox vehicle, The Secret of My Success.)  As the novel closes, Tyler has partially reconciled with Anna-Louise.  It does seem like he will escape Lancaster after all.  The Canadian content of the book is fairly low, though I believe there is a comment that Tyler was born in B.C. and he makes a trip to visit his biological father, who lives in a sort of commune in northern B.C.  Tyler is moderately engaging and not completely insufferable like full-blown Yuppies, but he might well become a full-blown jerk after a few years at Bechtol.  Anyway, this was a fairly quick read, and the book fortunately didn't take itself too seriously.

* The same type of out-of-left-field pitch surfaces in "Kirkland Products," one of the 60(!) short stories in Coupland's latest effort, Binge, which I'll be reviewing next.  I guess it is a plot device he likes.

15th Canadian Challenge - 5th Review - Rose

This review will be on the short side.  I only found out relatively recently that Tomson Highway had continued his cycle of plays set on and around the fictional Wasaychigan Hill reservation with Rose.  At one point he had been planning on doing 5 or 6, but his plans may have changed.  The first two are much better known of course (I review them here), though Dry Lips is infrequently staged.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Rose is so triggering that I really can't imagine it being staged again.  (It was done in a workshop at the University of Toronto in 1999.)  

TRIGGER WARNINGS

In addition to having a woman hung up like a slab of beef and tortured, one of the characters is castrated on stage!  And while it is only described, there is discussion on how Emily Dictionary was kicked in the stomach/womb by Gazelle Nataways (talked about but never seen in The Rez Sisters) and miscarried her daughter.

What is interesting is seeing how many of the characters from The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips actually interact, as they don't share the stage in the first two plays.  Pelajia Patchnose, now going by the name Big Rose, has become Chief, while the deposed chief constantly undermines her authority.  Big Joey is so caught up with the idea of taking over one of the community buildings and turning it into a casino that he ends up turning to the mob.  Pierre St. Pierre casts the deciding vote on council to open up the casino and things go downhill from there.  At times, Highway seems to be channeling Quentin Tarantino rather than writing a play that could actually be staged.  On top of everything else, there are numerous musical sequences!  Overall, I found it an interesting, overstuffed play that left me pretty depressed.  I'm sure I would go see if it is ever does return to the boards in Toronto, though I imagine the odds of that happening are pretty low.

Stress Eating

Perhaps ironically, I had gotten through the pandemic without too many breakdowns, perhaps helped by the fact that most of last year I could bike in to the office when I wanted to and most of this year after April or so.  That said, I wasn't really in great shape as this fall rolled around.  However, a combination of being unhappy at work and very stressed at home have led to very bad eating habits recently, and I haven't dared to get on the scale at the gym for a month or two.  I'm not sure if I have hit rock bottom or there is further to go...  

I am still going to gym pretty much every other day (though the last two weeks it has been closer to every third day).  I'm still biking a lot.  Though it is going to be harder to maintain as December is looming, and they say this will be a snowy winter.  Aside from the stress, I just find it quite hard to work while hungry, which is what happens to me when dieting or fasting.  I can ignore this when happy or at least semi-content at work, but when I'm not...  On the positive side, I have figured out how to book the swim lane at Matty Eckler (there are just never any slots at the Regent Park pool), so I'll try to start doing that next week.  And while I've vowed not to eat junk food before, the good intentions usually only last a month or so.  I think part of the problem is that I just don't see enough progress in any reasonable amount of time.

I guess I can start cutting out one thing at a time, starting with visits to the Danish Pastry House in Union Station!  And then after that cutting out chips and substituting popcorn without butter.  And then we'll see what I can do next.  (I actually was moderately good about not eating that much Halloween candy.)  The last time I lost significant weight I was cutting out breakfast as well, though I am not quite mentally ready for that.  

Martha Henry RIP

As noted previously, I try not to dwell on the passing of celebrities or semi-celebrities as there are just so many of them passing on these days.  I will make an exception for Martha Henry, who apparently had Michigan roots, but was so enchanted by the Stratford Festival that she moved to Canada and became an integral part of the company and Canadian theatre more broadly.

I actually saw her twice - once as Prospero in The Tempest on the main stage at Stratford (and I took my son to that) and then in a very intimate setting (the 50-60 seat Coal Mine Theatre) doing a play called Marjorie Prime.  I also saw one of her last directing efforts: Henry VIII at Stratford a few years back.  I briefly considered going to see her in Albee's Three Tall Women this summer, but it was hard enough to get out there for The Rez Sisters.  Also, I saw the Broadway production with Glenda Jackson and Laurie Metcalf, and I thought it would be awfully hard to top that.  That said, Stratford did film this production, and if it is ever released, I'm sure I'll watch it.  

What's so astonishing is that Henry really did go out with her boots on.  She was getting sicker throughout the run, ultimately requiring a wheelchair when she had started out with a walker.  And she died 12 days after the final curtain!  Definitely a life well-lived doing what she loved.

From time to time, I wish I managed to get to Toronto a bit earlier in 2014, as that seemed like quite a good year for local theatre, and I probably would have seen her acting in The Beaux' Stratagem and perhaps even her production of Brecht's Mother Courage at Stratford (along with some Soulpepper plays I missed out on), but I can take comfort in seeing her in very good productions towards the end of her career.