A Musical Memoir

Right now I'm having my grade 12 students each write a memoir, taking an important memory/event from their lives and telling me about themselves through that memory. For exemplars, I wrote one about my tattoos and one about Jack Layton's funeral, to tell them about myself and to show two very different ways of writing memoir.  Tomorrow, though, I'm going to challenge them to go a bit further, and to tell me about themselves through three songs, so I thought I'd better first challenge myself with the same assignment.

To say who I am through three songs is no easy task. I know what my three favourite songs are right now quite easily: Prison Girls, by Neko Case; Rococo, by Arcade Fire; and Dog Days are Over, by Florence and the Machine. Yet, these songs have nothing to do with me, besides the fact that I love repetitive, unrelenting songs that make me want to sing along at the top of my lungs. So, what are my three songs?

As lame as it may be, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, by U2, has to be one of my choices. I have found a lot of things in my life - I've reached goals, I've explored the world, I have a full life - yet existentially I always feel as if there is more out there. An appropriate metaphor for my life would not be me walking down a path, but instead, me avidly, passionately, and sometimes frantically searching for something more, something greater, or maybe just something else.

For my second lame entry I'll choose All You Need is Love, by the Beatles. This is my motto, as simple and childish and black and white as it is, though I usually think of myself as a complex, mature, and gray-area person. I believe in love, compassion, agape above all else, and I hope that's what I'm trying to live. Sometimes it feels like no matter how much I keep learning and questioning and exploring, everything really boils down to love, whether it be "Jesus loves me, this I know," or "All you need is love."

I feel like to counter-balance these lame songs I should choose something darker, like Radiohead's Where I am and You begin, yet as much as that song seems to haunt my soul, it does not add to who I am. Neko Case, on the other hand, seems to not just visit my soul, but has perhaps moved in and taken residence within my being. I do not go a day without listening to her or singing her, and the song that speaks to me most is Vengeance is Sleeping, which includes the line "I'm not the man you thought I was." However tame I may have become on the outside over the last decade (and that just means tamer than before, and not tamer as compared to others), is not reflected on how passionately I feel things inside, including my feminism.

So that's me, I guess. At least for now.

Buffy / not Buffy

This week Sarah Michelle Gellar's new television show, The Ringer, previewed on the CW. In general I choose not to watch CW shows - I like to think of myself as too mature for all that ridiculous fluff - but I just couldn't ignore a show that stars Buffy, my friend.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon's beloved tv series, and not that disastrous movie) began when I was in grade 10, and I got hooked right away. Buffy, herself, was in grade 10, so throughout the years I began dating when she began dating, graduated when she graduated, started university when she started university, and saved the world from an apocalypse when she saved the world from an apocalypse. (That last part may just have been in my head...)  But Buffy was meant to be a metaphor for anything and everything that can and does happen to young people growing up in our world today. No matter how realistic, I have never connected with a character as much as I did with Buffy.

Although Sarah Michelle Gellar has aged and changed appropriately over the last eight years (crazy to realize that Buffy ended eight years ago!), she is still Buffy to me. I know how she walks and talks. I know how her hair moves, what her fingers look like, and how jeans look on her compared to slacks. There are 144 episodes of Buffy that I have seen at least four times each. I know her well.

Thus, the opening segment to The Ringer was incredibly exciting - I got to see my friend Buffy again! - but also incredibly jarring. This wasn't Buffy. This wasn't how Buffy was supposed to think, react, or act in this situation. Buffy is strong. Buffy faces struggles head on. Although Buffy may be afraid, she does not show fear in the face of danger. Buffy is my hero. The differences I see in Bridget (her new character) immediately feel like flaws, rather than just different characteristics. While Buffy was sometimes broken as well, it was not the kind of brokenness I saw in Bridget. That brokenness broke me a bit.

I think I'll give The Ringer a chance. Actually, I don't think I really have an option, since there's no way I could ignore Sarah Michelle Gellar if she's on my tv once a week. I just hope that as I get to know Bridget better, I won't forget Buffy, and all she was for me.

Atwood's Apocalypse

I had not read Margaret Atwood - besides her wonderfully quirky short stories - for many years, after feeling her arrogance roll off her books like The Robber Bride and The Handmaid's Tale. These were powerful books, yet there was such a strong sense that she knew how powerful they were, that she was saying, "Look how amazing I am." Recently, though, my camp book club chose Oryx and Crake for our summer novel, and I challenged myself to give Atwood another chance.

Oryx and Crake is a gut-wrenching, mind-blowing look at the future. Although it has many obvious connections to The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one main difference was that while McCarthy's father and son were on the periphery of whatever disaster had changed the world, Atwood's characters are at the heart of the apocalypse. I seldom read books where I am driven towards the climax in such an intense state of curiosity: with this one I couldn't stop devouring this book. I got a front row seat to the end of the world.

A novel that I was reminded of regularly as I read was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. In that story a talking gorilla is warning us about the state of world, and how we are driving it towards catastrophe. He explains it by saying that many, many years ago humanity jumped off a cliff, and since then has been assuming that we are flying, when in fact we are falling - we have been falling for a long time. Oryx and Crake shows us what it might look like when we hit the bottom, and it is a picture that I will not soon forget.

Within a week of finishing it, I bought The Year of the Flood - the sequel to Oryx and Crake - and I ate that up even faster than Part 1.

A Summer of Novels

For the first time since I've started keeping track of my reading, I hit the "20 novels" mark over the summer. It's certainly tempting to brag about this, until I look at my list and realize just how many books I read for school (1, 4, 18, 19) and how many shouldn't really count for their simplicity (5, 13):

1) The Battle of the Labyrinth - Rick Riordan
2) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
3) 39 Steps - John Buchanan
4) The Last Olympian - Rick Riordan
5) The Clocks - Agatha Christie
6) Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
7) The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
8) The Lady and the Unicorn - Tracy Chevalier
9) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
10) The Lyre of Orpheus - Robertson Davies
11) Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
12) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
13) A Year in the Scheisse - Roger Boyles
14) Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
15) The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
16) Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
17) Tender is the Night - F.Scott Fitzgerald
18) The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
19) Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson
20) The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

Looking back at this list, I guess I can say a few summarizing statements about my reading this summer:
- I fell in love with Margaret Atwood (more to come on that).
- I challenged myself with some classics I had long ignored (Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Fahrenheit 451, Cranford, and Tender is the Night), and while I enjoyed some, others I found overrated.
- I am quite a varied reader: girl books, boy books, old books, new books, plot books, character books - am I too malleable, or is this a good thing?
- I am lucky to be part of 2 excellent book clubs, since my book club books of the summer were Catch-22 and Oryx and Crake. Good stuff.

The End of Harry Potter

Yesterday I saw the final Harry Potter movie for the second time in a week. I find with movies such as Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings - where I am so completely invested in the story and the characters - it takes two watchings to really see the movie. The first time I am too busy feeling it all to be thinking, and then the second time I can analyze and synthesize what I'm seeing. For some I have even enjoyed it more the second time, as I can truly appreciate what the director did with this beloved text.

So Harry Potter is over, and though I do feel as though this is a time of mourning, I am mostly overjoyed with the ending provided. Since Peter Jackson left out the Scouring of the Shire from the final movie, thus hacking off a major Tolkien-Christian theme, I was worried that the HP writers and directors might do the same, either editing out the "heaven" scene with Dumbledore or the "19 years later" scene. I've heard some people argue that this final scene takes away from the story arch - that there is too much denoument beyond the triumphant climax - yet this scene is nearly as important as Tolkien's Scouring. After triumph - after resurrection and truth and light and love - real life continues, and we must continue within it, like Sam and like Harry, maybe even becoming adjusted and normal people, whatever that may mean. And so that is the challenge: real life continues, but have I changed because Harry Potter existed?

Catch-22 vs. Kurt Vonnegut

I made the mistake of following my reading of Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, with The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. I am usually quite conscious of the order in which I read my books - I like to follow heavy with light, fantasy with drama, character-focused with plot-driven - but this time I wasn't paying attention, and I followed a tongue-in-cheek war satire, with a tongue-in-cheek science fiction war satire, both about life and death and the men who control us along the way.
It took me a good while to really appreciate Catch-22. I loved the wit and the tone at the beginning, but only because I thought he would eventually settle into the story. When that just never happened, I got frustrated for a good chunk of it, and it wasn't until the last fifty pages or so that I could truly appreciate what he was trying to do with this novel. I was supposed to be that frustrated, and if that's the case, then I can see how this novel has become the success that so many say it is.
Unfortunately, my appreciation didn't last long, since within ten pages of the Vonnegut, he had made me think and feel almost everything it took Heller 450 pages to do (with over twice as many words per page!). Even when later in The Sirens of Titan Vonnegut borrowed material from one of his own short stories, I couldn't quite knock him for that, since he kept blowing my mind every few pages.
So, if you love M*A*S*H, and you want to read a novel version of it, go ahead and take the time to read Catch-22, but otherwise, go with The Sirens of Titan or Slaughter-House-Five. Vonnegut always wins.

My picnic table, & The Picture of Dorian Gray

Yesterday, in the hot afternoon sun, my dad and I demolished my rotten, round, six-seater picnic table. At first we could easily rip off sections: seats, planks, whole arms. The heart of the table, however, was screwed together with approximately 2000 rusty screws, so for that part of the demolition my dad ripped it apart with his axe, violently tearing away at the wood while I prayed that the axe would not go flying from his hand.

I have recently finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, and while we were working on my picnic table a scene from the story popped into my head: after Dorian has murdered Basil, he blackmails his friend Alan into disposing of the body. Alan, after only 5 hours using chemicals and a fire place, manages to get rid of any evidence that the body ever existed. There is literally nothing left of Basil. He was methodically and even scientifically demolished until he was nothing. Just like my picnic table. Where once a carefully put-together object existed, now there is nothing. (Though the remnants of my picnic table will receive a proper burial in the Altona dump, Basil never gets the obsequies he deserves.)

Altogether a powerfully pervasive connection, and now that scene haunts me even more.