“And then it struck Oleg that Shulubin was not delirious, that he’d recognized him and was reminding him of their last conversation before the operation. He had said, “Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There’s something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of this universal spirit. Don’t you feel that?”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
I read the majority of this book last week as I lay on the blindingly hot sands of Oahu’s Waikiki beach.
I feel almost ill at ease admitting this fact. As if my enjoyment of the book should be muted, having loved it in a land so starkly foreign from the places birthed in its pages.
But like so many great works, all it did was awake a thirst.
Until about the age of twenty-one, I would only read real books.
“Oh me?” I would snottily opine. I’m a real Dostoevsky, Dickens, Austen, and Grass kind of girl.”
I could never understand why my boyfriend – my brilliant, cerebral and completely badass boyfriend (who now happens to be my brilliant, cerebral and completely badass husband) – read so many graphic novels, and books with picture of trolls, and dwarfs, and dragons adorning their covers.
How could he be interested in such stuff?
And despite his best efforts, for the first three years of our courtship I staunchly refused to crack one open.
“Sorry,” I would say. “I’m just not into that stuff.”
“You really have no idea what you’re talking about,” he’d say. “But I’ll wear you down eventually.”
And wear me down he did.
My first “non-book” (oh how wrong was I!), was V for Vendetta by Alan Moore which blew my brain harder than anything that had come before it (and I seriously thought I could ever again undergo anything as soul-shaking as the time I first read Devils and Crime and Punishment.) Next came the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman which I inhaled in about a day and a half, and then Watchmen, and Preacher, and about every other comic series on which I could get my hands.
It took me a little longer still to get into “fantasy” and “science fiction” (oh how I now loathe our need to classify so much brilliant literature as such!), but I finally caved and picked up A Clash of Kings a few months after my twenty-second birthday.
And once again, I underwent a kind of mind-exploding madness.
How could George R. R. Martin write so seamlessly and brilliantly from one character to the next? How could he be so heartless and beautiful all at once? WHY WERE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE SO AWFUL?
After burning through the entire Ice and Fire series (in what was then it’s most current incarnation) it was GAME. ON. The floodgates were opened, and it was nothing but a steady, raucous and ever more passionate ride filled with Bradbury, and Asimov, and Heinlein, and Tolkein, and Guy Gavriel, Scott Card, and Neal Stevenson, and Susanna Clarke, and so many more (and more and more and more!)
And then, ladies and gentlemen, Marc introduced me to one of the most brilliant, gut-busting, world-creating satirists English literature has ever known.
He brought me the world of Terry Pratchett.
This man made me laugh, cry, think, pace, question, believe, and most of all read.
My goodness did I love to get lost in his worlds and read!
To this day, I always know when Marc is (re-)reading a Pratchett book because of the sonorous laughs that all but explode out of him.
He’ll then read the offending passage aloud and we’ll both cry-laugh together. More often than not, we’ll just end up reading entire sections of the book to one another.
These truly are some of my most treasured literary memories.
And so when I found out last Thursday that Mr. Pratchett had died (via Guardian update from my mobile phone) I immediately phoned Marc to tell him the news.
I couldn’t even finish my sentence before collapsing into my tears. I sobbed straight into the receiver, my whole body wracked by a terrible, melancholy palsy.
And then, in the most Pratchett-ian of fashions, I was immediately catapulted back to laughter.
Marc, speaking slowly into the receiver, said, “This – this makes me really, really sad babe. But – unfortunately I have to go. The arborists are here.”
Because, of course, we were having the dead cherry tree removed from our backyard, and yes, at 8:13am on a Thursday morning, the arborists had arrived to facilitate that removal.
I immediately burst out laughing, even though my tears kept streaming steadily down my face.
I cried for the better part of the entire day, and I really don’t think I’ll ever get over the loss of such a brilliant, kind, compassionate, passionate, and life-changing man.
But I know that I, like the world, am so much better off for opening my mind, heart, and soul to his beautiful works, and the zany, madcap brilliance of Ankh-Morpork.
And like Marc before me, I’ll continue to encourage people to read his works.
A very happy International Women’s Day to everyone!
This year’s UN Theme is: Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!
I encourage all of you – everyone reading at home, as well as those on transit (or in-transit!); everyone hunkered down, or waking up; everyone navigating this amazingly complicated conundrum of a world we call home – to picture all of the brilliant, powerful, and brave women in your lives.
How have they impacted the world? How have they changed your life?
How do they impact? What do they change?
What makes them extraordinary?
And how do you picture an empowered humanity? What can we all do to ensure that these visions are no longer just visions, but reality?
Here are some of the brilliant, beautiful, and brave women in my life.
My amazing mum Donna, who, as an arbitrator for the federal government, wrote and oversaw many ground breaking decisions in the early 1990s on pay equity and discriminatory labour practices across Canada.
My sisters: Jessi – newly minted red seal chef, business owner, and new mum-extraordinaire; Kate Woznow – dedicated activist, non-profit director, and triathlete.
My sister in-law Mel, who is so very incredibly strong (both on the inside and outside) and who is unflinching in her belief that we can all make impacting strides to better our world.
Her mother, Valerie, valiant and fearless feminist whose work continues to support and inspire academics the world over.
My formidable mother in-law Cheryl, who in light of the discrimination she faced as a teenager after her family immigrated to Vancouver from India in the 1960’s is now one of the greatest champions of multiculturalism I have ever met, and who in 1973 co-founded the The Door Is Open – a drop in centre on the Downtown Eastside, that is still open today at its present location at 255 Dunlevy Avenue, in the heart of East Vancouver.
I would be remiss not to touch on my great aunt in-law, Flo Curle, who was the first of my husband’s family to immigrate from India in the early sixties. A single woman, she moved to Vancouver and sponsored every single member of her family’s residency to Canada.
My sisters in-law Veronica and Vanessa: two women passionately dedicated to our environment and education, as well as the high-seas (Veronica) and circus silks (Vanessa).
My step-mother Susan, who as a conscientious and exasperated American does what she can to move her birth county in positive direction.
To my amazing colleagues at Big Sisters, who fight tooth and nail every day to ensure that young women all across the Lower Mainland have the opportunity to be matched with a life-changing friend and mentor.
My own Little Sister Melissa, with whom I have been matched for almost seven years. This young women has grown into a confident, excited, hard-working young women, who takes the world by storm each and every day.
To my outstanding, heart-bursting friends who transform and deconstruct; who build, breathe, and believe in a better today and even better tomorrow.
And finally, to all of you reading. To every woman who wakes up every day and makes change, kicks butt, loves herself, loves others, smiles brightly, laughs loudly, dances madly, cries freely, jumps blindly, catches discretely – for all who are unapologetically her, and her, and her.
II. If you read John Cleese’s book “So, Anyway…”, and are even a modest fan of the man and his works, you’ll have the pleasant bonus of finding yourself reading the entire thing in his voice. It’s like having Basil Fawlty as your personal narrator (although to be fair, I am more of an Archie Leech woman, myself.) I finished reading this book approximately twenty minutes ago and found it incredibly enjoyable. I laughed out loud on many, many occasions, and found myself giggling so hard on public transit that a women standing just off to my right turned to me, tapped my shoulder, and told me that I was an “absolute delight”, before confiding that she couldn’t wait to dive into her copy the minute she returned home.
I told her to piss off and mind her own business.
KIDDING.
I blushed like a mad thing and told her that I was just excited for her as she.
III. My masked self:
IV. Disclaimer: This next point will resonate solely with individuals who either live in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, or have spent enough time in Vancouver and its surrounding environs to know of which I write.
Chiefly, the utter madness that is Kingsway, and how lucky I feel whenever I manage to navigate this utterly insane stretch of road and emerge (relatively) unscathed – neither crumpled up inside my severely mangled automobile, nor having run over a rogue, clueless pedestrian (nay, pedestrians), nor having witnessed any sort of monumental crash-cum-pile-up due to another driver’s last minute decision to make a left turn on a red light an run ramrod straight into on-coming traffic.
That road is a bloody death trap.
And five hours later, my nerves are still shot.
V. Fashionable pantaloons:
I recently bought these sweet running pants from Mountain Equipment Co-op. I love them because they make me feel as though I am wearing a patchwork of old movie stills, even though the pattern is actually beautiful abstract black and white shapes.
For the uninitiated, MEC is the outdoor gear MECca (har har) of every pseudo-mountain person (and to be fair, every hardcore survivor man/woman) this town has to offer.
The place is basically Whole Foods for purveyors of hatchets, kayaks, and tents. Everything is fair trade and organic (including your rage when you realize that you could have purchased the exact same sleeping bag for thirty percent cheaper at one of the other stores just down the road had you exercised one iota of free will and not succumbed to the tractor beam pull of this ridiculous outdoor monolith. But I digress.)
The reason that I was able to purchase these amazing pants in the first place was because my sister and brother in-law bought me another sweet pair at Christmas that were very unfortunately too big and needed to be exchanged. With the store credit I was able to procure these cool duds and now I feel like a right superstar every time I put them on.
There are times in my life where I think to myself, “holy hell I was one weird kid.”
This happened a couple of days ago, as I sat in my office regaling one of my co-workers about the time in grade six when I wrote an award-winning speech on the life of Evita Peron. At the time I was unabashedly obsessed with the movie musical starring Madonna and Antonio Bandaras, and my presentation was written from the perspective of one of Evita’s childhood friends (played by me). In my zeal to create a compelling narrative, I fictionalized a series of letters that (I liked to imagine) the two women had sent back and forth between the time she moved to Buenos Aires in 1934 before her death in 1952. I even cried at the end, reminiscing about our lost childhood innocence.
It was pretty nuts.
(The reason that I was telling this tale in the first place was because I felt my work aesthetic that day to be very “Evita-esque” and had asked the same co-worker how she thought the two below photos compared):
“Hair needs less bangs, and more height,” she rightfully critiqued.
Then we laughed like drains.
After we regained our composure, I told her about my speech, and my ever-enduring love for the Evita musical.
She again started laughing, before shaking her head and asking the oft-repeated question: “how did you end up being this way?”
To which I answered, as always, “I have no friggin clue.”
I was just a weird kid who was into weird things.
But not only that – I really, really liked the things that I liked, and even though I desperately wanted to fit in, I could never truly let my desire for social approval and acceptance outweigh my desire to be strange as hell.
Case in point: every year my elementary school held a day totally dedicated to airbands (or lip synchs if you will.)
It was a huge thing. Kids had to audition in front of their class and the king of teachers himself – the formidable Mr. Bell – in order to get on the program.
The best outcome one could hope for was to be cast in the both the morning and afternoon shows, which meant you were out of classes for the entire day and were able to showcase your routine for multiple audiences on different shows.
It was the best.
In grade five I was a new student to the school and, despite loving to be on stage and wanting desperately to perform, I was too nervous to put anything together for the auditions.
I remember very clearly the only acts that tried out from our class were two groups of boys who literally performed “air bads” – with guitars, basses and drum sets – to “Lump” by the Presidents of the United States of America and “Basket Case” by Green Day.
I had never seen boys hop around on stage, pretending to play instruments before. It was totally bizarre.
(I had also never heard the latter song and quickly became obsessed. I would sit by my radio with my blank cassette at the ready, poised for the exact moment it would begin to play.)
The next year however, I was primed and ready. I had a solid group of friends – some of whom who had even agreed to act with me!
Together we put on “Hakuna Matata” and “RESPECT.”
Imagine, if you will, the tallest, skinniest, whitest twelve year-old, harnessing everything her bad-ass, budding feminist self has to offer, so that for approximately four minutes, she WAS Aretha Franklin.
It just may have been the finest performance of my life.
I distinctly remember all the teachers absolutely losing their minds.
Hakuna Matata too was a pretty good show. We had an absolute blast, dressed head to toe in tie-dye, pretending to be the animals, and really getting into the spoken word sections.
Nothing like a farting warthog to get us going!
However, because I wasn’t one to ever leave anything well enough alone, I decided that I wanted to do one last airband to round out that year’s revue.
At that time of my life I was also pretty obsessed with the Forrest Gump Soundtrack (being as it was that I was Benjamin Buttons, and reverse aging like a fiend, from eighty to eleven) and I especially like the song “I Don’t Know Why I Love You, But I Do” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry.
(Holy shit.)
I mean, to its credit, it’s a solid, nice song.
But what I could have possible been thinking when I chose THIS tune as my third airband is an enigma wrapped in a mystery folded inside of an ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME?
The one thing that sold the entire act was that I committed like crazy. I dressed up in a suit, wore a tie and bowler hat, and carried a cane. The whole thing was so earnest I was basically Charlie Chaplin in an after-school special.
Evidently Mr. Bell really dug the performance, because he cast me in the morning and afternoon shows.
I never for a moment even stopped to think that what I was doing was brave, or nerdy, or subversive, or strange.
I just liked the song and thought people might identify with the lyrics!
The reaction I received left me absolutely stupefied. People were impressed! And not necessarily by my performance, but by my bravery for going through with the performance in the first place.
I’ll never forget Carrie Knoll coming up to me after the morning’s show and just blurting out “That was one of the coolest, cutest things ever. I cannot believe you had the guts to do it.”
I thanked her profusely. Being one of the coolest girls in our grade, her words were more than just a compliment – they were an act of legitimization, of the acceptance that I really truly did crave.
I was just flabbergasted that they were born from (what was perceived to be) such an extremely nerdy public endeavor.
Which just goes to show, you totally can kill two birds with one song.
Rant and Roll 