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off stage, we waited

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

“There was a sense of school, I suppose. An ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ sort of thing. We were young, only a very few even in their thirties, and we had never felt we belonged anywhere else. We came from religious backgrounds, mostly Jewish and Catholic, but we were not religious. We were sports fanatics who had never been successful in participation. We were television addicts. Virtually every one of us drank, smoked, and used drugs. We lived in small, dark, under-furnished apartments. For the most part, we were unmarried. We had tempers and psychological problems. We did not like to share. We had prodigious memories for facts large and small, particularly small. Many had lived nomadic lives. We loved the Beatles, Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, David Letterman. Very few grew up in poverty. We were resolutely middle-class. We had a few close friends and talked a lot about people we hated. We were incredibly insecure, champions of low self-esteem. We didn’t just like attention, we lusted after it, chased it until we were breathless. We lived onstage. Off stage, we waited. We stayed up all night and slept in all day. Instead of laughing we would say, “That’s funny.” We had no idea where our next meal was coming from. We were only as good as our next show.”

~ from When the Red Light Goes On, Get Off: A Life in Comedy, by John Wing (Black Moss Press, 2008)

Q&A, At Eleven, with John Wing

we had to make them beautiful

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

“For me, feminism is not a theory, but a way of living one’s day-to-day life, its origins made up of incidents and observations stitched together. Some of them remain such odd shapes it’s difficult to make them fit, these old scraps of cloth that I recognize, that I wore with shame or joy. Above my desk I’ve taped a quotation that circulated around women’s groups a decade ago. Attributed simply to ‘a pioneer woman’, it reads: “We had to make the quilts fast so the children wouldn’t freeze. We had to make them beautiful so our hearts wouldn’t break.””

—from ‘Piecing Together a Childhood’, by Lorna Crozier, in the anthology Click: Becoming Feminists, edited by Lynn Crosbie) (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 1997)

why didn’t anybody say…

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“In first grade, I came home crying because a boy at school had pulled my long, beloved braid so hard that my scalp still hurt. My mother laughed and said, “That’s how you can tell that boys like you.” The next time it happened, I turned around and punched my tormentor in the mouth, knocking out one of his teeth. I wound up in the principal’s office, and my mother cut off my hair. Oh no, I thought, something is very wrong here. Why didn’t anybody say… That’s how you can tell that girls like you”?”

—from ‘A Click is a Noise that a Woman Makes’, by Pat Califia, in the anthology Click: Becoming Feminists, edited by Lynn Crosbie (McFarlane Walter & Ross, 1997)

one of ‘those’ places…

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“It’s a different time and it’s one of those homes for girls, a place for pregnant girls to go away to and have their babies quietly, a convent-type thing where it is hoped that all the hushed holiness will keep the girls from heaving and grunting too loudly. One of those places. You know. You’ve seen the same movies I have. It’s a home for these pregnant unweds and an institution for children with Down’s syndrome, a kind of catch-all clubhouse for the lost and stigmatized, for all these wounds received during the passion. What difference does it make what the name of the place is? Something French. Sacre Coeur or Notre Dame de Grace or something. Somewhere in Quebec. Imagine the Plains of Abraham minus the canons and the general war aura. Then imagine that orphanage in Oliver. Now put that orphanage on the Plains of Abraham—lots of green and land stretching out, prop up a cow or two, a wire fence that always needs fixing, and a gardener named Jacques-Louis who likes to rub their pregnant stomachs with his rough, muddy hands, and maybe he’s just a little slow, a bit retarded, so the girls can fantasize that he is a violent monster, but when that calf gets caught under the wire fence and the Mother Superior wants to slaughter it, isn’t it Jacques-Louis who saves the animal and nurses it back to health? And maybe there’s a mangy German shepherd, half blind but steadfast loyal to the Mother Superior to the point where these girls in trouble, these girls with reputations, are starting rumours. The English girls give the place a Native name. They call it Shegoneaway. When they see a new face, bloated and tired, thick waterlogged wrists and ankles, they say: Hello, and welcome to Shegoneaway.”

~ from ‘A Well-Imagined Life’ and the collection Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?  by Elyse Gasco  (1999, McClelland & Stewart)

—

I found this story especially powerful as I recalled the recent installation Foundling, by Michele Karch-Ackerman, at the Art Gallery of Peterborough—an homage to the memory of young girls sent away to homes for unwed mothers. Karch-Ackerman used, among other items, long tables set only with teacups and saucers, and rows and rows of hanging baby pyjamas made from 1960’s style drapery fabric. Lovely write-up here. She has a retrospective coming up this year at Tom Thomson Gallery. Making a note…

Michele Karch-Ackerman, ‘Foundling’ (detail)

advice i like

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

~ from The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

—Scooped from this very delightful article on slow reading…

venus and mars (the rocket science version)

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

“She was an attractive French Canadian in her forties named Julie Payette, who had flown one shuttle mission and would fly another in July 2009. She was dressed in blue NASA coveralls, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. On the screens above us, in the briefing center, the space shuttle Discovery crouched, steaming, as the countdown progressed. Payette was too kind to laugh in my face when I asked her bout the silence of space, but she looked as if she wanted to.

“There is always noise in space,” she said. “When you don’t hear noise, it’s a problem, especially in a space suit. It means the interior ventilators are not working, not circulating air; the carbon dioxide [that humans breathe out] has a different density in zero gravity, it makes pockets around us.” She had intense brown eyes and a mouth that tried hard not to twist upward at my cluelessness. In order to sleep weightless, she continued, she had to find corners to wedge herself in, but “it’s hard to find comfortable places.” Her favorite nook was in the space-suit bay, jammed between two parked suits. “The helmets purr, ” she said, then repeated it happily, in French: “ils ronronnent.”

~from Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, by George Michelsen Foy (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

~

Here’s the thing: were the author speaking with Neil Armstrong, would he have noted Armstrong’s hair colour and how he wore it; would the intensity of his eyes, or lack thereof have warranted even one line of ink? (Not to mention the shape and/or tendencies of Armstrong’s mouth to turn up at the corners.)

Granted, he may have asked about sleeping arrangements on the shuttle, but I’m not convinced he’d have asked Neil to repeat anything in French…

Furthermore, I wonder: if a woman had interviewed Payette [or Armsrong for that matter] would attractiveness, hair, mouth and eyes have figured in a story about the quality of sound and silence in space?

the illusion of a forest…

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

“The natural disaster of a forest fire returns carbon to the soil, enriching it for the new forest to come. A clear-cut removes the trees that are the source of that carbon. To walk there is to see a landscape devastated as if by bombs. Reforestation? It seems that real care is taken only for the hills and mountains that border highways where tourists and people from the cities can see them. Those are the clear-cuts where the corporations put up signs to tell the passing cars when the forest was replanted and how well it is doing today.

“The corporations rarely harvest their trees right up to a highway. If you stop your car and walk 300 metres into a forest, you will often stumble across a clear-cut hidden from the cars that pass. The trees you see by the side of the road are the illusion of a forest left there to salve your conscience. Back out of sight, on the plateaus and hills and mountains, the forests are doing poorly. The variety of species is reduced to one of fir, pine, hemlock, spruce, tamarack, or whatever, depending on which of one or two species is likely to return the greatest profit.

“Diversity of species is anathema to the managers of the new forest. Monoculture is king. It is precisely what happened on the vast prairie, where rich and diverse grasslands were replaced with fields of grain. The landowner’s system of fallowing fields on alternate years allowed for massive evaporation from the bare earth. The moisture rising from the subsoils brought with it salts from the ancient seas that once covered the land, and when the moisture evaporated, it left the salt behind. Vast areas of the Great Plains are pocked with crystal deserts where nothing grows.”

~ excerpted from ‘The Forest’s Edge’, by Patrick Lane (The Walrus, May 2005)

a rough cove…

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“I heard me grandmother say that when the first of our family came here, the French settlement was abandoned. They said it was too rough a cove for fishing out of. It just suited our people….”

“Those old midwives that were here then, they were only trying to do the best they could, the best they knew how. Didn’t know very much, but they’d try to born the babies and do whatever they could. I often heard my mother telling about it. When the baby’d be born, you’d be put to bed for nine days; and what clothes you had on you when you went to bed, that’s what’d be on you when you’d get up. She said you’d be so sore you wouldn’t be able to walk; you’d be chafed to death with the clothes. That was their belief. If you took off the clothes you had on—all the warm clothes—you’d get cold then. Die then.”

— from Outport: The Soul of Newfoundland, by Candace Cochrane (Flanker Press, 2008)

from soup to nuts

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

And things to do with flowers.

♥

EEL SOUP

Take a big eel, clean and wash it two or three times in water, and then once in vinegar. Put it to boil in a saucepan together with two onions scorched on the fire, one or two bay leaves, a sliced carrot, a few pieces of celery and fennel, pepper and salt. Boil for about two hours, then rub liquid and all through a sieve, seeing theat the flesh of the fish passes well through. Put it on the fire, adding a piece of butter and a spoonful of tomato sauce. Serve hot with small pieces of toast.

PISTACHIO CREAM

Take out the kernels of half a pound of pistachio nuts, beat them in a mortar with a spoonful of brandy and put them into a tossing-pan with a pint of cream and the yolks of two eggs finely beaten. Stir it gently over a slow fire till it is thick, but do not let it boil. Put it into a soup plate, and when it is cold, stick some kernels—cut longways—all over it.

MARMALADE OF CARNATIONS

Half a pound of sugar, a cup of water and half a pound of fresh red carnations. Crush in a mortar the tops of the carnations, seeing that you use only the red part. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and boil to a syrup, add the crushed carnations and boil very slowly till they are in a pulp. Stir well and pour into little cups. (This compote is very useful for people of cold temperament.)

From Venus in the Kitchen, by Norman Douglas, 1952, Bloomsbury

what is

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I don’t use the word ‘holy’ often, if ever. I prefer ‘miracle’, ‘gift’, ‘magic’. It comes down to the same thing of course. It’s a position more than a word, really. Whatever. Point is, this morning, the day after my ‘magic day’,  I opened one of the chapbooks I recently received and the poem staring at me had the [I thought] unfortunate title of : ‘What is Holy’. I read it anyway. Turns out it contains two lines that changed my DNA slightly.

What poems do.

Also proves that ‘magic’ cannot be contained to single days.

What is Holy 

 The white pages of a book.

The many ways a hand can open
     and close.

The brief darkness
     of a plane in front of the sun,
lives suspended overhead.

The way plants eat light—
     that is holy.

The endless voice of the ocean.

The streets of early morning
     when love lights shine from the windows
of the elderly.

The eyes of someone who has lost love.

It is in the breath, and gathers into
     small sounds:
bread, home, yes.

When you bite into an apple and taste rain.
     That is.

— Rosemary Griebel (from  Yes, Frontenac House, 2011; and The Johnston House Literary Salon Series)