Turning Leaves, Turning Pages

Monday's fall book recommendations

A recently published study from the University of Maryland suggests that people are generally more happy if they spend their time reading or socializing, as opposed to parking themselves in front of a TV. Not that we have anything against television, but it’s a good motivator to pick up a book instead of the remote control as the days get dark and blustery. And given our ever-bulging bookshelf here at Monday HQ, we thought we’d throw out a few suggestions. Whether you are into graphic novels or book-prize finalists, there’s a little something for everyone here.

 

Miracle of Language
A master poet produces a masterwork

Here Come the Moonbathers
By Patricia Young
Biblioasis, 74 pages, $17.95

Here they come indeed, poems to understand life by. Patricia Young’s heart and eyes are wide open in this marvelous collection as she lays time, death and poetry itself bare. With her sure hand wielding the knife of understanding, Young cuts not just to the bone, but well beyond into realms that transcend the here, the now and the merely personal.

Everything is open for examination: secrets past, confusions present, questions future. In “Boyfriend, Long Dead,” an adult woman looks back to the teenage girl she was “just asking/ for it, begging to be shucked” and recalls with gratitude the boyfriend, “an ordinary kid, no feminist or saint,” who refused her drunken overtures because he didn’t want to do it “like this.”

“Boomerang” attempts to unravel the “quilt of life” in the setting of Ross Bay cemetery, where three drunks sit on a bench and “howl at what?” as the speaker, Hamlet-like, ponders the impossibility of existence: “Okay, okay. What’s Kant’s take on time and space?/ Which comes first: reality or experience?/ Is the bottle made to shape the fit of the wine?/ Are the moments goldfish leaping from our hands?”

The big question in this collection, though, is mortality and the “wrecking ball” of time that we all will face eventually: “Once, my sisters and I/ were the grasshoppers of August, our father/at the record player while we leapt/across the lawn. At the end our mother drags/ a bed into the living room, the doctor brings oxygen/ morphine floods our father’s brain.” Dark, yes, but also filled with the truth of recognition and the light of a poet’s eye.

Patricia Young has won just about every poetry award there is to win in Canada. She’s a master poet who has long been at the top of her game. Now, with the wisdom that years of life experience bring and all the skills of form and language that she owns, she invites us to “open the curtains” once more and see it all because “the light on the water has changed again.”

—Rick Gibbs

 

Through Others
Famed gay Canadian writer looks outward in his memoirs

Myself Through Others
by David Watmough
Dundrun Press, 200 pages, $24.99

The new book from Canadian icon David Watmough may be the shortest autobiography ever written, as its author chooses to focus on the individuals that made an imprint on his life rather than provide an unabridged personal history. In Myself Through Others, Watmough explains his revolution of the format by saying that too much of his life has been harvested for his fiction for a full account not to be redundant. Yet, through his brief descriptions of friends and acquaintances both famous and unfamiliar, Watmough’s portrait of his long life feels complete.

Interesting and intimate, Myself Through Others traverses an unusual and impressive life with humour and grace. Through his recollections of fellow writers, including Robin Skelton and Margaret Laurence, politicians such as Pierre Trudeau and artists, actresses and various cultural illuminati, Watmough sketches out overwhelming individuals. Though there are famous names throughout, what fascinates most is not the events described but what he garners from minute encounters and decades-long friendships. In his recollections, Watmough avoids painting his past in the rosy watercolour of nostalgia and succeeds in portraying easily embellished characters as the complex people they were.

In writing about his life, Watmough, perhaps unintentionally, also writes an outline of our literary history. As he covers his slow growth into a well-known novelist, he describes unseemly encounters with the publishing world, literary politics and the tenuous relationship between talent and fame. Watmough also documents the flourishing of the West Coast as a place for writers and its power as a region of Canada; he also touches on the hostilities and opportunities he met as an immigrant and gay man.

As much as it is a personal memoir, this book is also a look at the nature of fate, an examination of the simple yet significant moments that can determine a life in complex ways. As Watmough recalls his strange path over the last 80 years, he also calls our attention to people and eras in danger of being forgotten.

—E.G. Anderson

 

A Dark Collection
Long Story Short’s black humour rings true

Long Story Short
by Elyse Friedman
House of Anansi, 214 pages, $29.95

A novella and a scattering of sardonic stories filled with black humour and a desire to look lightly underneath the surface of things make up Long Story Short, this new collection by Toronto author Elyse Friedman. Friedman’s descriptive writing is confident with a strong voice and her dialogue unapologetically honest. She has a knack for pinning down some of the more awkward emotions and for uncovering the balance between what one says and does and what one thinks. The themes are decidedly offbeat and quirky (described in the Toronto Star as “part Kafka, part South Park”) and her characters are unsure, stressed, irresponsible. In short, Long Story is a melancholic balance between the odd, the ugly and the sublime.

“Truth” is a story about a first-date encounter in which all the spoken dialogue consists of the horrifyingly honest thoughts you might be thinking on such a date. For example: “‘Listen,’ said Martin, ‘my self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny. Why don’t we go to my place?’ Leslie mulled it over. ‘Why not? I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling destructive.’” It’s hilarious but painful at the same time. Friedman paints a picture of real people, caricatured by their thoughts. The humour is certainly dark: “Truth” openly and roughly deals with the realities of insincerity, lust and low self-esteem. But dark as it may be, it really is funny.

Later, she writes about a woman who was raised in a strangely sheltered world now forced to change her lifestyle after her mother dies. With a light touch, “Lost Kitten” adeptly unravels the story of this woman who lives the only life she has ever known and honours her mother’s memory by inhabiting the apartment they had always dreamed of living in together. The story is an interesting look at how the surface does not always tell the whole story and also that there are multiple ways to look at something. What can be thought of as tragic can also be thought of as beautiful; a sublime life is a life that was never allowed to be anything more.

The novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” is about a pair of teenage boys about to graduate who have a strange addiction to gathering lesser-celebrity memorabilia. Dave and Todd collect things like old shoes, signed posters and anything else they can con out of so-called sidekick celebs by any means necessary. Their bizarre habit spirals out of control when a has-been alcoholic actor latches onto Dave, thinking him to be a true fan. Friedman’s portrayal of the middle-aged, self-destructing man is sadly realistic. It’s a cringingly funny story in which the protagonist tiptoes through a mess of his own making. Also dealing with the usual coming-of-age issues, it could perhaps be a dark sequel to Superbad.

—Matt J. Simmons

Dry Spring Overflows
Chris Wood’s look at the coming water crisis is a must-read

Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America
by Chris Wood
Raincoast Books, 383 pages, $23.95

For a simple molecule, water is a very complex substance—one that we rely on in countless ways and one that is becoming less reliable, as Chris Wood explains in Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America. Climate change has already begun to take its toll—in dollars, in habitats and human lives—but we are just seeing the beginnings of its effects on the distribution of our most important resource.

“In fewer than 10 years, we will be standing on a different planet,” writes Wood, a claim he supports well. His research covers tremendous ground, spanning centuries and continents.

He visits Las Vegas, a lush city in a vast desert with innovative ways of recycling water, and travels to the first site of water conflict between Canada and the U.S. Dry Spring contains the voices of entrepreneurs, nature lovers, environmentalists, scientists and many others, in British Columbia, across North America and all over the world.

Wood also looks at every consequence of the changing weather, including losing our winter season, increasing forest fires and violent storms, more food shortages and even water wars.

What’s equally impressive as the information in Dry Spring is the writing itself: simple, smooth and remarkably rhetoric-free. What could have been an unbearable doomsday tome is an engaging, informative narrative. Wood’s examination is comprehensive and accessible as well as detailed and in-depth.

Wood begins with a journalistic look at both the history of our water and its present state before moving into possible solutions, his own conclusions and what the future might hold. Never simplifying, Wood introduces all sides of the issue and reveals just how complicated and difficult intervening in the way we treat our water can be.

Dry Spring is not so much a book about the state of water as it is a complete education on what may soon become the largest global issue—required reading for anyone remotely interested in the survival of our species and our planet.

—E.G. Anderson

 

The Third Way
Contemplations on Cascadian spirituality

Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia
edited by Douglas Todd
Ronsdale Press, 240 pages, $21.95

Our spiritual yearnings and social responsibility have certainly not been shelved in 2008, and with Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia, Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Douglas Todd, the implication is that the spiritual development of this region—defined loosely as coastal B.C., Oregon and Washington—will play a pivotal role in how we deal with the environmental challenges of our future. Todd is an award-winning author and columnist for the Vancouver Sun who has spent several years asking questions about who we are and where we’re going.

Todd establishes several goals in the introduction: explore the crucial role that spirituality plays in shaping public life, address the “third way” that Cascadians may find regional consensus on the basis of ecological values and highlight the different ways that Cascadians are trying to affect social change or transformation.

The four sections—Religion, Spirituality and Values; History; Nature; Culture—are somewhat arbitrary. In reality, none of the writers write about the headings, they write about the profound process by which Cascadian culture was and is created and the spiritual sustenance or poverty that hangs in its balance. Peter Drury, a Protestant minister and the development director at the regional sustainability think tank the Sightline Institute, presents one of the most compelling pieces by taking a comparative approach to analysing how we live here. How else to explain the role this lush coastal landscape has on our spiritual values and our concerns for the future health of our planet, if we don’t relate it to those who live outside it?

The essays that falter do so because they don’t stray from the theoretical or the familiar when it comes to talking about religion and spirituality. Another appeal of Cascadia is the acceptance of fluid boundaries and role-less lifestyles‚ qualities that makes comparing Cascadians with Christians or Jews—as does more than one contributor—unstable and sometimes problematic.

Paulo Lemos Horta’s essay looks at key literary figures of the region—such as Jack Hodgins, Bill Gaston and Gina Oschner—and how their use of magic realism creates a bridge between the spiritual and the religious in the collective Cascadian imagination. Bringing the divine into their perception of reality, these authors demonstrate the Cascadian “third way”—life lived perceiving divine mystery within reality. The addition of poetry by George Bowering to this book brings Horta’s analysis to life and is a commendable editorial choice on the part of Todd.

The most enjoyable and valuable way to read such a text is with a Rilkean mindset first introduced to me by Canadian poet and essayist Tim Lilburn. Read with a deep attention and try not to love the questions too much or cling too firmly to any answers. Read with a desire to find a resonant meaning for yourself, as the book’s biggest achievement is the multitude of opportunities to be stirred.

—Christine Matte

 

Feed Your Head
Two books examine the past, present and future role of psychedelics in medicine

Psychedelic Psychiatry: From Clinic to Campus
by Erika Dyck
Johns Hopkins University Press, 216 pages, $35

Psychedelic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments
edited by Michael J. Winkleman and Thomas B. Roberts
Praeger, 728 pages, $200

No class of drugs has been as misunderstood or maligned as the psychedelics. Magic mushrooms, peyote, MDMA (Ecstasy)—in the United States, such mind-bending substances are listed as Schedule 1 drugs, so dangerous that there are stricter controls upon them than on guns or uranium. According to current U.S. law, they cannot be used safely in any circumstances, even under medical supervision.

It wasn’t always this way, however. As two new books point out, such compounds were once regarded as valuable medical tools—and soon, they may be again.

Perhaps the most notorious psychedelic is LSD, commonly associated with CIA brainwashing and the hippie rebellions of the 1960s. But before all that, doctors used LSD for psychotherapy in (of all places!) Saskatchewan. In Psychedelic Psychiatry, University of Alberta history professor Erika Dyck describes how the socialist government of Tommy Douglas recruited a team of doctors in the 1950s to perform some of the largest LSD treatments in the world, including Dr. Abram Hoffer (who now resides in Victoria) and Dr. Humphry Osmond, who gave the mescaline to Aldous Huxley that inspired The Doors of Perception. Relying on archival research, Dyck documents how the doctors gradually learned to use LSD to treat alcoholism and neurosis by giving patients an overwhelmingly spiritual, life-affirming experience—and how underground labs, street use, and media panic whipped up by Timothy Leary convinced U.S. politicians to outlaw the drug in 1968.

While Dyck tells a terrific story—including new details about Al Hubbard, the shadowy “Johnny Appleseed of LSD” based at Vancouver’s Hollywood Hospital—she also spells out the near impossibility of making such drugs compatible with mainstream medicine at the time. Psychedelic therapy was a cathartic, accelerated version of Freudian or Jungian analysis and required a doctor’s complete patience and empathy to be truly effective. By the 1960s Freud was on the way out and the new medical-management ideals of efficiency and consistency were far more easily achieved with drugs that simply numbed patients and controlled their symptoms.

The lessons learned from the clinical use of such drugs were not forgotten, however. Several-hundred doctors around the world have bravely managed to continue such therapy, and the two-volume Psychedelic Medicine sums up the current state of their work. Practically every psychedelic-therapy research paper that has made recent news headlines is here, including investigations into using MDMA to help patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and studies at UCLA’s Medical Center with psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to help terminal cancer patients deal with anxiety about death.

Although Psychedelic Medicine is principally aimed at medical practitioners, general readers will also be interested in its essays on the ever-shifting laws regarding such drugs. Noted cognitive-liberty scholar Richard Glen Boire argues here, for example, that doctors and patients’ groups should be able to lobby for a general exemption to Schedule 1 to permit psychedelics for supervised medical use because it’s absurd to give police more control than doctors over the treatment options for suffering patients.

The medical arts continue to evolve, and with the growing interest in consciousness studies and neurology, there has come a greater appreciation of the need to heal mind and body together. This year, for first time in nearly a half-century, lawmakers have allowed medical LSD research in the United States. The long-padlocked doors of perception may finally be reopening.

—Jacqueline Cade

 

The Gentleman is a Scholar
Graphic novels, then and now

Gentleman Jim
by Raymond Briggs
Drawn and Quarterly, 32 pages, $14.95

Ojingogo
by Matthew Forsythe
Drawn and Quarterly,152 pages, $14.95

While graphic novels have morphed and adapted over the years to fit into mainstream culture (quick, how many big-screen offerings based on graphic novels can you name?), one thing about the format has remained constant: hunkering down into a favourite reading chair and cracking open one of these arty chapbooks is still a comforting and enriching experience, whether it’s one of the timeless classics of the genre or a new-school blend of anime and dreamscape diary.

Raymond Brigg’s Gentleman Jim, originally published in 1980, is widely regarded as one of the first English-language graphic novels. Briggs never got the credit he deserved in the graphic-novel world though, since a lot of his works (Father Christmas and The Snowman being his most popular) were delegated to the children’s section in bookstores.

But Gentleman Jim (and When the Wind Blows, published two years later) was aimed at a strictly adult audience and features a protagonist every dead-end-jobber can identify with. Jim Bloggs tries desperately to separate fantasy from reality as his waking hours are spent obsessing over where he is in life and where he would like to be. When he stumbles upon a story about the Highwayman in a dusty used bookstore, he begins to develop a thoroughly flawed but totally endearing plan of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. It starts with the purchase of a tired but affordable old donkey and spirals downward from there.

Gentleman Jim’s story is authentic and, truth be told, a bit of a tear-jerker, with subtle yet beautiful illustrations. We’ve all read The Snowman; now imagine the Office Space version.

While Brigg’s work is a perfect example of how the graphic novel began, works by artists like eastern Canadian Matthew Forsythe show the limitless boundaries of the genre. Ojingogo is a simple, open-ended collection of drawings that thrive on white space and quirky characters from the deep recesses of a child-genius’ mind. Except the child genius grew up, honed his skills and now has a razor-sharp arsenal of cute/disturbing characters.

The story of a young girl and her pet squid has hardly any dialogue, but the bizarro allies and villains she encounters amongst all the white space make up for her mostly muted tendencies. The drawings in Ojingogo take a while to decipher, but I’m pretty sure one of the characters is a big bar of soap with teeth. Another one is some amalgamated type of four-legged beast with a perpetual rain cloud over its head. Yep, some weird stuff.

Unlike Gentleman Jim, which is rich in dialogue and social message, Ojingogo is a simple journey full of whimsy and dark humor. It’s like an anime acid trip, but not a bad one.

Two very different looks at graphic novels, Gentelman Jim and Ojingogo prove the phenomenon isn’t going away anytime soon.

—Jason Schreurs

 

Secret Ireland
Booker finalist shines light on a country’s tumultuous recent past

The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
Viking, 304 pages, $24.95

Whenever I find my reservoir of books drying up and am despairing over new authors to explore, I go to the Man Booker Prize website. I know that any book listed there, whether a winner or a finalist, new or old, will be well worth the read. It was there I was introduced to Irish author Sebastian Barry and his haunting new novel, The Secret Scripture.

Roseanne McNulty is a longtime resident at a forgotten asylum in Ireland. Hovering around a century old, with the feeling of death fast approaching her, she embarks upon a secret record of her life, written on stolen paper and hidden in the floorboards of her room. The hospital’s psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, has been presiding over its wards for as long as Roseanne has been a patient. His poor hospital is as old and decrepit as many of its residents and has been condemned. He has been promised a brand-new facility that will be safer, nicer and cleaner—and much smaller. Dr. Grene is tasked with the horrible job of re-evaluating all of his patients and determining who needs to be relocated and who can be released. His inquiries bring up some questions regarding how Roseanne became a resident in the first place and whether she truly belongs among the mentally ill.

Drifting back and forth between Roseanne’s hidden memoir and Dr. Grene’s diary, The Secret Scripture pieces together a story of a lost girl trying to find a place within her fractured country. Growing up in Sligo (just south of the border that divides the Republic from the North), young Roseanne grows up surrounded by dissent. Her country is torn apart by civil war, which pushes her Presbyterian father farther away from the society of the mostly Catholic town. Though he remains a loving father and husband, he can’t get through to Roseanne’s mother, an exotic creature trapped by the poverty of her family and the desolate country, who slowly gives into madness. Left on her own at too young an age, Roseanne is swept down a path of secrets that leads her to Dr. Grene and his hospital.

Barry creates these wonderfully tragic characters that are easy to love through all their faults and tragedies. He has a poetic, almost musical prose that’s easy to get swept up in and hard to put down. Even the most horrible of events (the rats that Roseanne’s father catches and kills, the brutal fighting between the Irish boys made enemies by war, the burning of young girls trapped in their blazing orphanage) are tempered and almost made beautiful by Barry’s elegiac, soothing language.

The Secret Scripture is Barry’s second novel shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and I hope we will see many more contend for the award. He’s putting faces and feelings on Ireland’s tumultuous recent history—a history that shouldn’t be forgotten.

—Sarah Gignac