#41 in 2024
Mark my words, some day there will be a Shawn Micallef Parkette, a Shawn Micalleff Prize, or a statue of Shawn Micalleff, Our Saint of Public Washrooms. Shawn may not have walked every street in Toronto, but you feel like he has, PLUS he’s written about them, and with such brio.
Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto is an updated version of a slimmer book. Don’t trip on the word 'psychogeographic’. Treat Stroll like a small plates menu and select a few of the thirty-five walks at a time. This is a great way to find out about all the public art in the city; all the massive projects that were yanked at the last minute; where to go swimming; and a lot of random information that is really useful for quiz night, such as:
why did reverend Brent Hawkes wear a bullet-proof vest at a wedding?
what is the sound of a thousand cormorants pooping?
To feel truly isolated from the city today, sit on one of the benches in front of the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion and look directly north. It’s like being inside a primitive 1980s video game: two lanes of cyclists, eight lanes of Lake Shore Boulevard, six lines of the Gardiner Expressway, and, finally, the railway tracks. This is a more formidable barrier than the alligators and floating logs players dodged in Frogger.
The book is full of fetching illustrations by Marlena Zuber, including a colourful map. Shawn took many of his walks with his dog and now that he has a child, a stroller will join him. He is a champion of apartment dwellers, communities, the CNE, and more beautiful public washrooms now!
#42 in 2024
The Vagabond… She’s a woman of letters who’s gone to the dogs… She’s in her thirties and she’s left her husband, a painter… Colette is writing about herself after she divorced her husband, a writer… She performs in a music hall and anyone who knows what it means to tour a show will love this part… then the Big Ninny appears… her friends think he’s good for her… maybe she could marry again… … the book fills with so many ellipses that … just maybe… Colette co-wrote it….with Gwyneth Paltrow? …. the two of them could sell us some… balm…made of tears… for the soul?
I’ll never again love anyone, anyone, anyone!…
People ought to be hard on women who shout, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing any more!”
Yes, I lost my patience a tad. I loved all the bits about the theatre. I can imagine what it’s like to perform when your ex-husband’s ex-mistress is sitting in the front row. It didn’t help that the translation by Stanley Appelbaum felt clunky. Apparently there will be a new translation by Belinda Jack published by Penguin next year… attendez cela … even though the ellipses will remain…drowning in ellipses…
Is that really you there, all alone, beneath the ceiling that’s buzzing as it’s shaken by the dancers’ feet like the floor of a mill in operation.
What will Dancing Stéphane do when he’s down to his last shred of lung, when he can no longer dance, when he can no longer sleep with little broads for his cigars, ties, and drinks?…Oh, how sad it all is, and how unbearable the wretchedness of so many people is, after all! …
I’m caught up in the greatest of all follies, the incurable unhappiness of the rest of my life.
#43 in 2024
Amy Bloom, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss. Who isn’t writing about love and loss? I didn’t think I would read this book, and I was right because I listened to it instead, on a very long drive from Toronto to New Haven. Bloom read it herself and the tone of her voice was only too familiar, the sound of someone writing their way through grief. I listened to the whole thing. In print I might have found the quotidian details unbearable.
Read this memoir if you want to know how to spot Alzheimer’s, how to tell your husband he has it, what it’s like to assist his suicide in Zurich. (Sidebar: It turns out that they won’t do it for clinically depressed people, which wrecks the premise of Miriam Toews’s book All My Puny Sorrows.)
A book for people in their sixties, if they can take it.
#44 in 2024
“What exactly were you doing back there? Lurking? Brooding?”
“Lurking,” he said. “I do my brooding behind Yuk Yuk’s. The lighting’s better.”
Finally someone other than Shawn Micallef has put Toronto on a couch, gazed deeply into the city’s psyche and come up with a private investigator who tries to solve our urban problems: Dame Polara. Dame, that’s her name, and unless you have a gun in your pocket, don’t press the issue. Actually, she’s not that tough; she’s divorced and desperate to have a child and spends most of her days fighting to preserve heritage buildings until her landlord threatens to evict her. Bull’s eye, Greg Rhyno! Housing shortages exploited by greedy landlords make this a quintessential Toronto story — though soaring rentals are also a problem in (fill in the blank, just about anywhere).
Dame gets embroiled in some nasty city politics when she takes on a case on behalf of her father, an ailing gumshoe extraordinaire. Who By Fire is only the first of what promises to be a highly entertaining series. Who knows which Toronto headaches Rhyno will tackle in the next one — our transit system? the lack of public washrooms? Ontario Place? Whatever it is, Dame Polara will be there.
There wasn’t all that much to the Quick Draw Club. Near Bloor and Dufferin, the place was a black box of minimalist theatre. There was a foot-high stage (no curtains), a lot of folding chairs (you unfolded yourself), and a small bar at the back (thank God). … Lewis wandered off and found the other members of his improv class who welcomed him with hugs and back pats, like he was a fellow survivor of some obscure catastrophe.
#45 in 2024
To describe Stuart Ross’s the book of grief and hamburgers, I looked up the word ‘throes’. Note that there is never just one throe. The OED says ‘throes’ is a violent physical spasm or pang, esp. in the pain of childbirth or death. It’s also used to describe an intense or violent struggle preceding or accompanying the production or creation of something.
Not with a bang, but a hamburger.
This book was written by a poet in the throes of grief. Ross is grieving for a lot of people, starting with all the members of his immediate family, and then a bunch of Canadian poets, especially Dave McFadden and Nelson Ball. Even R.M. Vaughan is included. Ross has a winning way with absurdity which is how he avoids what really counts and that is exactly what he talks about in this book. In my writing, I have the habit of throwing in hamburgers when things get emotionally difficult.
I read it in one sitting.
As I write these words, I wonder when I will turn unflinchingly to my own grief in this book. That is the particular corner I am trying to paint myself into. But I worry that I may be too clever for myself. Or too weak.
Too frightened? Too flinchful?
This is also a Toronto book, though Ross lives in Cobourg. He used to sell his poetry on Yonge Street, not far from where the late Crad Kilodney sold his books, when there was still a giant Sam the Record Man and Yonge Street was kind of interesting. I think you have to be over forty to remember any of that.
**
I don’t necessarily recommend reading memoirs about grief back-to-back, yet it kind of worked. They were so different; one relieved the other.
I should mention that I have taught together with Shawn Micallef and I’ve joined him on walks and that’s how I know what a mensch he is and how stylish. Greg Rhyno was in my Creative Writing class and said words of support when I needed them; also he was very good at fixing my jokes. I heard early versions of Dame Polara in the classroom, and it’s great fun to meet her again.
Most bookish people like you and me love libraries and as a connoisseur I’ll report that the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale is extremely beautiful, and has amazingly comfortable couches, where I saw a man fast asleep with his mouth dropped open. He was in a room where they had installed the old card catalogues, and people could leave their own notes in them. In one it said: “Mora, I don’t know if you’ll ever see this because you might not go here, but if you do, I hope it’s everything you ever dreamed of. Love, your favorite little sister.”
Currently reading: Lao, She, Rickshaw Boy: a novel
Remaining List (eclectic batch):
Featured Author: Colette, The Vagabond (1910) (see above)
Reader Recommended: R. F. Kuang, Yellowface, 2023 (thank you, Maureen)
Oldest Title on the List: Lao, She, Rickshaw Boy: a novel, 1937 (important work of 20th century Chinese literature, see above)
The Random List:
Novalis, Hymns to the Night, 1800 (German poetry)
Marianne Wiggins, Properties of Thirst, 2022 (American novel)
Amy Bloom, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, 2022 (see above)
Stuart Ross, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, 2022 (see above)
Congenial Spirits: the selected letters of Virginia Woolf, 1989 (dear Virginia)
Five of the Best Soviet Plays of the 1970s (bring it on, comrades)
If you’re wondering how my list is put together, check out my system here