crooked house

More Pasha Malla

Pasha's first book, The Withdrawal Method, is getting the royal treatment up here in Canada. There's a favourable review in Quill & Quire and this profile in the National Post. The journalist from the National Post also made a video of Pasha reading something gory he wrote in the 8th grade. As Elizabeth Ellen said when she gave me the heads-up on these, "He's so cute!" He really is. And it's very  exciting to see all of this happening for him. Way back when, I predicted Pasha would make it big. Of course, when I was 10, I also predicted that my friend Corey would be Prime Minister one day and that still hasn't happened yet. I suppose there's time.

Fiction About Childhood for Adults

Image taken from an article about Britain's first playground for adults over sixty.

So my reading continues in an effort to compile the definitive list of books that best evoke the experience of childhood for adults. It started with The Fountain Overflows, a book I thought did just that and beautifully. I included A High Wind in Jamaica, the only other book I'd read in recent years that also had that rare quality. And then I added a number of other books that others suggested. I'm currently making my way through these. I'm only halfway through Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children (hailed as a very good but overlooked book by both Randall Jarrell and Jonathan Franzen) and I am not loving it. Unless something rather drastic happens in the second half, I'll be  dumping it unceremoniously from the list. To me, the mother and father seem caricatures rather than characters and the children, too, are little more than a collection of one or two prominent traits each. The eldest girl, the one I'm assumed was based on Stead herself, is treated badly but seems mostly oblivious in an unlikely way to it.  So far it's just an awful, tiresome slog -- both parents are prone to long-winded speeches and rants. I think that reading it with the list in mind has probably coloured my view -- the book is not really about childhood. It is, instead, an adult's very satirical examination, in hindsight, of her parents.  Randall Jarrell claimed that everyone he urged to read this book loved it. To that I say: hunh. Also, herm.

While I've never been a fan of his style, Henry James's What Maisie Knew certainly deserves a place on the list. Instead of saying "Bug off" Henry James would say "If you would please me, I beg you to take yourself off to flutter among the insects, which to a great degree you resemble, as they tremble foolishly on the edge of the breeze and whirl tiresomely through the branches of the trees in the garden, thank you and begone." I often find my thoughts have flung off the end of one of his interminable sentences and right out of the pages of the book. Picture one of those roundabouts at a playground. But Maisie is pitch-perfect as a neglected child desperate to please her parents, a pair of feuding philanderers, and then her step-parents, who also use her as a pawn. I found myself wondering what a modern version of this would be like -- Maisie's personality and plight are even more relevant today when divorce and "blended" families are common. And when divorced parents, in efforts to wound their exes, end by hurting their offspring more. Maybe they should hand out copies of this book with divorce decrees whenever children are involved.

More on these books and the list later. I've also finished The House in Paris (excellent for our purposes) and Loving Sabotage (while not a classic, it's also good).

Hendrik Kerstens's Photos of His Daughter Paula

Photographer Hendrik Kerstens often photographs his daughter Paula in the style of the Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Via Crafty People.

Weird Custom: Dropping Babies from a Tower

The Society for Fortuitous Events (a pretty neat promotional site for a new book about luck), features a link to this fright: a video of babies being thrown off a 50-foot tower onto a bed sheet held taut by a group of men below. A custom at a Muslim shrine in western India, it's supposed to bring good luck to the infants. Seems to me the babies are using up all their luck just by surviving unscathed.

Drum Roll Please

Melissa Wilkins of the blog Making Things Up is the winner of the draw for my copy of Practically Perfect in Every Way (and the shrinky dink elephant pendant). Thanks for entering, Melissa!

"What would you do if you were shipwrecked with four lively babies in the middle of the ocean? Mary and Jean aren't bothered a bit. Before long, they are all happily settled in a cozy hut on a tropical island. There's no problem these two babysitters can't seem to solve alone on their island...

"Alone? Then who made those huge footprints in the sand?"

One of my teachers must have had this as part of her classroom library -- I remember enjoying reading about the girls' lighthearted adventures alone with those four babies on that tropical island. Now, having had a baby of my own, it sounds much, much worse than "Survivor." I wouldn't do it if I were guaranteed a million dollars. The only thing worse than being alone with four babies on a deserted tropical island would be if there were five babies. And the only thing worse than five babies would be six. You get my drift. Whatever made those footprints has nothing on the scary babies.

This image is part of a neat flickr set featuring front and back covers from vintage Scholastic Book Club books. I recognize a lot of them. There's another set here.

Get London Reading

Check out this flickr set of Get London Reading installations. Quotes from various books set in London are printed -- on the street, on windows, on trash -- in the locations to which they refer. Above: Monica Ali's Brick Lane. I love the way this emphasizes the way a city is layered with literary meaning -- a project like this would be great in any number of cities. I'd love to see it in New York, Toronto, and Paris, too. Via [BB-Blog].

Chatelaine Magazine's Meat House

This meat house, made of layered sandwiches topped with cold cut shingles, was featured in the 1971 Christmas issue of Chatelaine magazine, the Canadian equivalent of Good Housekeeping. You can read "If You Must Wear Pants, Here's How" from the June 1943 issue and other articles from the magazine's  archives here. But you'll have to buy last month's anniversary issue to get a look at the first page of a 1966 article called "How LSD Ended My Alcoholism." Maybe the food editor was trying the LSD cure when she came up with that meat house idea.

Guess: Is It Flash Fiction or Liner Notes from the 60s?

Guess whether the following is a) a bad piece of flash fiction I found on a pseudo-literary erotica site or b) the text on the back of Nancy Sinatra's 1966 album Boots.

"How should I sing this?"
"Like a 16 year old girl who's been dating a 40 year old man, but it's all over now."

She looks good, dresses good, lives good, eats, drinks, loves, breathes, dances, sings, cries good. Five foot three and tiger-eyes. A mouth made for lollipops or kisses. Stingers or melting smiles. Ninety-five pounds of affection.

She's been there already. Barely in her twenties, she looks younger. That look, like Lolita Humbert, like Daisy Clover. The power to exalt, or to destroy, wanting only the former, but unafraid to invoke the latter if the time comes.

The eyes that see through, know more, look longer.

Unafraid to pull on the boots again, toss off a burnt out thing with a casual "So long, babe," and get.

A young fragile living thing, on its own in a wondrous-wicked-woundup-wasted-wild-worried-wisedup-
warmbodied world. On her own. Earning her daily crepes and Cokes by singing the facts of love. Her voice tells as much as her songs. No faked up grandeur, her voice is like it is: a little tired, a little put down, a lot loving.

No one is born sophisticated. It's a place you have to crawl to, crawling out of hayseed country, over miles of unsanded pavement, past Trouble, past corners and forks with no auto club signs to point you, till you get there and you wake up wiser.

She's arrived. She sings you about the long crawl. And makes you have to listen.

She's there.

If you guessed b, you're right. It's the work of Stan Cornyn, who was, apparently, considered the king of liner notes back in the 1960s. You can read other samples of his work here. Scroll down for the most entertaining ones.

We found the record yesterday at Grandpa's house. Luke enjoyed dancing to "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." David enjoyed reading the liner notes out loud in the voice of a Beat poet. I "enjoyed" taking two Advil and sticking my head under a sofa pillow for the duration. Although I think I might just have to embroider a tea-towel with the words: "No one is born sophisticated. It's a place you have to crawl to."

Hear and Now

If you get a chance to see Hear and Now (currently on HBO On Demand), do watch it. Filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky's 65-year-old deaf parents decide to get cochlear implants -- and the story is both moving and fascinating.