Divided Attention

Where'd I Go?

Over here for the most part.

The Worst Thing About Being Carless

Living without a car is easy. Avoiding being killed by a driver is hard.

Today I was nearly killed by a man on a motorcycle who was travelling about 20 miles an hour, ran a stop sign at a blind intersection, and came within six inches of killing me.

Looking Toward Friday

Over the last month, I've been making my way through a lot of non-fiction and since it's all coming from the library, I'm at least six months behind the cool kids.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma exploration of North American dependence on corn was far more interesting than I expected it to be and the descriptions of the miseries of industrial meat production were as depressing as always. This long excerpt at Mother Jones gives you a good sense of Pollan's exploration of the meaning and possibilities of Polyface, an organic farm with an intricate pattern of pasturing that keeps the animals out of feedlots and claustrophobic, crazy-making barns.

I'm not a big meat eater and reading books like Pollan's makes me more conscious of when I eat meat. Usually I turn to meat when I'm weary--when I'm tired it seems much easier than getting beans and rice and veggies on the table. The last couple of weeks, though, we've been getting deliveries of organic veggies from a local farmer. It feels a bit dear at times but the veggies are very good and we're getting to eat things we wouldn't normally buy.

Supporting local farming and adding more organics are both good things but the strongest motivation so far has been curiousity: What will be in the basket this week? How do you cook that? Do I like that? The arrival of the vegetable truck is now the highlight of my Friday.

Heat Waves: The Old-Fashioned Way

Finally the heat wave has broken and my brain is less mushy.

We're odd folk here. We're still sans central air conditioning--mostly on principle. We have a portable air condition but we rarely use it.

So how do you survive a heat wave when you have to work upstairs during standard business hours in a house built nearly a century ago.

1. Prepare to complain a lot. The more creative the complaint, the better.

2. Make sure you have a thermometer since it will introduce a note of reason into the complaints.

3. Refresh your memory about why you've decided to forgo central air-conditioning.

4. Open all windows and doors once the outside and inside are the same temperature. Try not to despair as this magic moment drifts later and later into the night.

5. Despite warning on box fan, stuff it in window and run it at tornado level. The gentle summer breeze level and the gale level will do nothing for you.

6. Run the fan until you go to sleep, cursing your inability to fall asleep with the fan running.

7. First thing in the morning, run the fan just until that moment that the fanned-in air starts to smell like the roof tiles, then close all windows and blinds.

8. Run the fan in the upstairs office to create the illusion of a cool breeze.

9. Complain. Especially about the dull selection of appropriate liquids.

10. When desperate run the portable air conditioner. Try to ignore its jet engine decibel levels.

11. Spring for movie tickets. Hide out in the library. Move slowly in the grocery store.

12. Wait. And complain. And remember why you're forgoing central air conditioning.

Some Sitting Around and Then Much To-ing and Fro-ing

We're back to sitting around but it's been busier than usual with short trips hither and yon.

In yon, there was much walking which resulted in a blister in a never-before-blistered place. Interesting sites were seen though no photographs were taken. Good food in surprising places. And pounds and pounds of books and music were hauled back. Let's see

• Picture Books: Bechdel's Fun Home, Abel's Perdita, a stack of Bone, and a book on Japanese baseball cards
• Music: Esther Phillips, three or four sets traditional Chinese music, Nick Cave, Mary Gautier, Finnish music that turns out to sound very much like Cape Breton fiddle tunes
• Nonfiction: Illustrated histories of women in WWII, a history of temperance banners, a book on top-whorl spinning
• Fiction: Morrall's Natural Flights, McClung's Zed, a omnibus Jane Bowles, Desai's Inheritance of Loss, Smith's first novel Like, Mantel's Beyond Black

After a short break, we headed out to hither for a family jaunt across the border for some baseball, pie, and decrepit miniature golf.

And now, home again where it's calm if soggy.

Ready to Wait

Early this morning, before the cloud disappeared and the shops opened, I walked up to the market to pick up this year's tomatoes and basil plants. The place was packed--everyone's pent-up gardening urges popped out this morning with the prediction of hot sunny weekend. More than the usual number of crazy drivers mixed in with people trying to decide about geranium colours and tomato varities. For 10$ I snagged a dozen tomato and a dozen basil bedding plants.

They're now stuck in soil that's been getting richer and richer each year with all the the kitchen vegetable waste being composted and turned in along with the occasional bag of manure. I've planted them in a different spot in the garden this year; it gets a bit less sun but also doesn't dry out as quickly. After the first week or so, the plants will be on their own water-wise so the added shade shouldn't be a huge deal.

In one of the dozens of garage sales popping up I should hunt out an extra bucket since the old pail that has disappeared and we need to make a batch of the foul smelling but very useful comfrey juice to feed the tomatoes. Free, effective fertilizer from a plant that will take over if you you let it.

In a couple of months we'll be eating tomatoes warm from the vine with shredded basil and goat cheese. All we have to do now is wait.

Another Long Silence: Random Bullets

No particular explanation for this round of radio silence. Day to day life trundles on.

• After seven or eight increasingly annoyed phone calls and emails and one short conversation with the paper carrier, I've gotten rid of the wodges of flyers that are delivered to the house each week. This means we should be able to put the paper recycle bin out once a month or less if the paper gets shredded into the compost. And the regular garbage will go out every two weeks. And the bottles, tin cans, and plastic, every two weeks. This means that we've reduced the already small amount of garbage we set out by about a half.

• It looks like it'll be warm enough to plant the vegetable garden this weekend--a late start given last week's near freezing temperatures. The plan is lots of tomatoes and basil, some peas and beans, and maybe some salad greens. I'd like to try to grow some sort of squash but the squirrels in the neighbourhood love the blossoms and all I'll get is lots and lots of leaves and vines.

• I've passed another prime number birthday, quietly as usual. Followed by a weekend full of relatives young, old, and middling. You can amuse some people with garden twine and chalk. Other people need beer or tea.

• And lastly I've started up the scholarly editing project I've been dragging around with me for years. I pecked away at it fairly steadily a year or more ago and set it aside. Working on it is always tough for all kinds of reasons but mostly because of my ambiguous status in relationship to the academic world the editing project fits into. I'm long past graduate school, the academic job market, and adjunct labour. And I'm not quite that near mythical creature: the "independent scholar". The project pulls me back from time to time when my drive to finish what I start is strong. And the project pushes me away from time to time when the task starts to seem enormous and the pleasure of figuring things our and making connections is pushed aside by old grief.

Oddity of Clarity

It's definitely an odd feeling. Odd but familar. I've been getting it since I was eight with my first pair of charmless, dorky black plastic glasses (you'd recognize them--their cousins are walking around on a lot of faces these days). I've been struggling with nausea and eyestrain for months. A month passed as I figured out the problem was my eyes. Another month before I could get into my eye doctor's. And it'll probably be another month by the time that my brand new progressives with their bizarre prescription arrive from Japan.

I never believe my eye doctor when she tells me it's not that odd to have one eye more than -4, and the other more than -10 not to mention the borderline weird optics needed to make the eyes focus together. Nope never believe her. I've seen the scrambling and mad catalogue flipping that happens when I go to buy the glasses and I've heard the apologetic totaling up of ferocious cost of the lens alone. And this time the oddness of the prescription was confirmed by the estimate that it would take at least three weeks to get the glasses.

I was unduly excited to get a call this afternoon to tell me that the glasses were in. I ducked out of work early. And was disappointed: my day to day glasses are still on the slow boat from Japan. My reading glasses (a totally self-indulgent luxury) were ready. I'm now officially one of those people who are always looking for a set of glasses. The new reading glasses, which work surprisingly well on my computer screen, are perched on my nose. And the ones I used to only take off in bed or in the shower are sitting around here somewhere. I'll find them in a minute; right now I just want to sit and admire the new clarity of print.

Rain's a Good Excuse, Right? Right?

On Friday afternoon I had formulated some ambitious weekend plans designed to boot some projects and my comfy-chair-loving self into action. Alas, it was raining when my lazy-brain first woke up and instead of getting up and dashing about the city, I went back to sleep, The rest of the day has followed much the same rain-fearing, sloth-loving pattern. Lots of cups of tea and coffee, some pie, lots of blog reading, and some thinking about a research project that is slowly resurrecting itself.

The problem with this research/editing project is that it is easily discouraged. I'll be happily working away at it for two or three hours, slogging through the editing or thinking about the work needed to pull together a decent introductory essay, and then, wham. My nastiest familiar pops up singing the "you're no longer an academic so any brainy plans you have are crap" song. I wish that thing would just shut up and go away. And once it starts singing its nasty song, all the other creeps hidden in my brain start to chirp in with their merry songs: "It was all your fault" ; "Just who do you think you are"; "Making ideas is for idiots. Where's the money in all this"; and most popular of all "Stop now before you make a fool of yourself." You'd think that I'd have learned how to evict those buggers by now.

What do with the rest of the weekend. I should be able sneak some research past the singing creeps. And maybe some editing. And if I'm particularly persistent maybe even draw up a reasonable research plan, even if I'll never be a full-time academic again.

Townie Bacchanals and Strong Tea: Mean Boy

Coady’s Mean Boy, as it deserves, is getting good reviews in the Canadian literary press. As most note it’s an academic satire in the tradition of Lucky Jim and Small World and its setting is a thinly disguised 1970s Mount Allison. Mt. A. is a liberal arts university set in a small town on the edge of the salt marshes of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia borderlands. You can get a sense of the shape and light of the Tantramar Marshes in these photos or in the earlier series published in Dykelands

Even if Coady hadn’t made the inspiration for the novel’s setting clear in her essay in March’s Quill and Quire, anyone who’s spent time in Sackville would recognize the setting. Mel’s Tea Room becomes Carl’s; the Marshlands Inn becomes the Crowfeather; the Fundy Beverage Room becomes the Mariner. And at the centre of it all are Lawrence Campbell, very much the sophomoric poet, and his idolized teacher Jim Arsenault, a chaotic poet modeled on John Thompson.

After several years of depression, heavy drinking and erratic behaviour, Thompson died as a result of combining alcohol and pills, I was a student at Mt. A a few years after his death and the beginnings of the legends that surround him were circulating. Thompson was both the subject of much student curiosity, and very much a mystery, like the troubled and troubling relatives in families everyone knows about but no one talks about. For years whenever I spotted his books in remainder bins, I bought them. And one cold winter night when our apartment was threatened by fire, I left with my birth control pills, our insurance papers, a battered childhood toy, and my battered copies of Thompson’s poetry.

My reading of Mean Boy is inevitably askew: I’ve lived in the places and times Coady describes; I’ve read and reread the poetry of the man she sets at the centre of her book; and I’ve been an academic. What interests me about the novel, though, is not just the way it intersects with my past. Rather it’s the way she explores the intersection of alcohol, poetry, masculinity, and the drive to escape the farm and rural life. She makes sense of both the desperate flailing and the folly of adulation. It’s these things—all the things that Lawrence doesn’t quite see–that take her book beyond it’s satiric portrait of English departments, creative writing students, poetry readings, and the competitive posturings of the Canadian literary scene.