Reading short stories at Edmonton Airport

You're waiting for a plane. You want to pass the time reading, but you've only got a minute or three. Edmonton International Airport has the answer. Press a button and out comes a short story: one, three or five minutes long. Your choice. The concept was first tried at the Lyon airport in France.

Skull Candy -- really?

Doesn't look that appealing to me. But what do I know about marketing?

Jane Eyre for the 21st century

Sample juicy lines Tracy Chevalier's edited collection:

"I was no more the Grace Poole who laid herself down on the narrow bed in the sunlit attic than I was Mr. R. himself. I rose up from childbed another woman." Helen Dunmore

We visit the synagogue, to satisfy our curiosity; boil eggs in the hot springs; go to the opera and smirk at the bad acting. I glimpse this woman as she could have been. Emma Donoghue

It turned out the sounds I heard...weren't the screams of Mr. Rochester's mad wife Bertha...it had been a parrot, screaming in the attic. The parrot had belonged to his wife. She'd got it in the islands, where she'd also contracted the tropical fever that killed her. Francine Prose

Grandma is the most pious person under our roof, yet the way she lives her faith is different from Baba's. I start telling her about Gerard, little by little, so urgent is the need to open up to someone.
"Don't bind your heart, my lamb," Grandma says.
"Because he is a Christian?"
"Because he is a migrating bird...Here today, gone tomorrow." Elif Shafak

I forget who it was warned me that "Royalty offers friendliness--but never friendship."
...
Everything was my fault, of course, everyone knew it, everyone blamed me. No one blamed him.
...
He abdicated the ultimate status. He abdicated Title. Country. Friends. Family. Respect. Reverence. Deference. Safety. Security.
Security.
And all for love. Think about that.
I do, every single day, though it has become easier. Susan Hill

Hooyo said it was my face--that I've got the kinda eyes and lips that make men think they got a chance--she even started chatting about a niqab and I was like, hold on, bruv, there ain't no way I'm covering my face...It wasn't anything about my face, anyway, it was those E-cups and the way my badhi strained against the cheap, nylon school trousers. Nadifa Mohamed

Already she was stuffing the book in her bag and picking up the map. "What's Jane Eyre about, then?" he asked, lobbing the question in her way to slow her down.
Jenn left a long pause so that he would know how deliberate her selection of words was. "A governess full of inner strength who marries a completely inappropriate man."
"Oh. Right."
They moved on, and Ed didn't ask where they were going. Tracy Chevalier

Filigree of frost on glass evokes childhood windows

This frost is traced only lightly on the glass. In the colder climates of my childhood, winter frost could be thick on the windows. When condensation froze and ice obscured the pane, we used our warm breath to open a view to the outdoors. Sometimes we melted peep holes with our fingers, switching hands when the cold became too much.

Sunshine assists puzzling efforts

This year's puzzle season opened with a flood of sunshine across the table. But that doesn't  mean we don't still need the goose neck lamps.

The field of California poppies was extremely challenging, but this puzzle is done now. It will rest another day, and then we begin again.

Oh, and after enjoying our family turkey dinner, we'll also be watching another two episodes of the new season of The Crown.

Just seen: the living ghost of Herb Woodley

Dagwood's neighbour Herb Woodley is on a mission to give his friend a gift when he meets his ghost self in mirror image. Or, for those who prefer a less esoteric explanation, folding the paper before the ink was dry reprinted Herb's image cartoon on the opposite page.

Merry Christmas to Blondie, Dagwood, and family, as well as to the neighbours. They've evolved with the times, making us laugh since 1930. Original cartoonist Chic Young's son took over the drawing from his dad.

Loving the solstice light

We of the northern countries love that solstice light. When we don't have the hoped-for eight hours of sun to counter- balance the 16-hour night, we have to rely on Christmas tree lights and candles to brighten up the midwinter days.

This December has brought many hours of sunshine, for which I'm very grateful.

How's that for a view from the office window? There's even a skiff of snow to mark the Christmas season.

Life lesson in the shower signals spiritual evolution

Every house has its peculiarities and ours is no exception. When someone is using the upstairs shower, nobody else had better turn on a tap elsewhere in the house. If they do, the water temp can change drastically -- so the bather gets boiled or frozen, or in some cases, the pressure is reduced to a trickle. This is definitely not good if you've just shampooed your hair.

Thus, we've evolved a habit of announcing to anyone else who is home, "I'm going to take a shower now." Translation: don't anyone else use water right now. On emerging, we call, "I'm out," meaning anyone who wants to turn on a tap or flush a toilet is now free to do so.

This system has worked for years and years, but the other day, it failed. I didn't get mad this time, or take it personally, as I used to. Years ago, when there were a lot more of us in the house, it happened on a regular basis and I would suspect people were doing it on purpose to annoy me.  This time, I calmly stepped out of the stream, adjusted the temperature and waited for the pressure to return to normal.

Noticing my calm reaction to this minor discomfort, I was pleased. It means I'm evolving. Now I realize nothing is personal, blame is futile, and I'm not the centre of other people's universes. Good to know.

Central City Mall decked out for Christmas

Winter river at Fort Langley

The magic of fog in the Fraser Valley

99 Nursery lit with late winter light

When I got out of the car to go in and buy poinsettias, the sky cleared and strong rays of sun slanted across the sky, lighting my favourite nursery with ethereal winter light.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

Don't be fooled by the potty mouth or the smart-ass title. There's a reason why thirty-five people are waiting for this book at my local library. Basic ideas: solving problems generates happiness and "failure is the way forward."

Mark Manson zeros in on the emptiness of the social value of "exceptionalism" fed to a passive public. He challenges readers to think and act independently, and accept that not everyone is destined to be great. Taking aim at victimism, an insidious form of exceptionalism, he invites blamers to quit whining and recover their personal power.

In an era of unprecedented self-pity by those who have the most money, education and stuff, this is refreshing advice. Admit your weaknesses. Make the effort to become a better person. Take responsibility for your life.

The author's idea about pursuing of happiness is simple: Don't. "The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience." He offers evidence for his ideas, drawing on respected sources back to Aristotle and Buddha.

He cites Alan Watts, who proposed "the 'backwards law' -- the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place." Adds Manson, "The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centred and shallow you become in trying to get there."

Scientific and psychological evidence refute deeply ingrained beliefs. Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski developed the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Studying people who'd survived horrific experiences during WWII, he was surprised to learn that after the war his subjects felt more confident and grateful. They were no longer fazed "by life's trivialities and petty annoyances." This was true even though many carried lifelong emotional scars.

Manson also reports fascinating stories from the lives of famous people who overcame failure and despair, then went on to make great social contributions. Psychologist and philosopher William James turned away from suicide by deciding to accept responsibility for everything in his life. Failed university professor Ernest Becker described the psychology of human "immortality projects." On his death bed, he wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called The Denial of Death.

To illustrate how misguided values cause us to suffer, Manson tells the fascinating story of Dave Mustaine. Evicted from a band called Metallica, he created another called Megadeth. Both became wildly successful. Yet even though Mustaine is "one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in the history of heavy-metal music," he considers himself a failure. Why? One, he's bitter over rejection by Metallica. Two, he's defined selling fewer albums than the other band as failure.

Happiness is a problem, and emotions, says Manson, are "overrated." We should therefore "make a habit of questioning them." This way we can get off the psychological "hedonic treadmill" and avoid the experience that despite "always working hard to change our life situation...we actually never feel very different."

The antidote to suffering is simple. Accept it. Adopt values that matter to us, then take responsibility for our own lives. Accept the uncertainty of life, and act in spite of incomplete information. Stop blaming others, and keep improving ourselves. Such choices provides us with enough challenges to last for a rewarding lifetime of happiness-inducing problem-solving.

And remember, "We are wired to become dissatisfied...this has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no -- our own pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution; they're a feature."

John MacLachlan Gray's novel inspired by dark Shaughnessy history

Image from cbc

The premise of John Gray's mystery novel is a real and unsolved 1924 Shaughnessy murder. While the fictional powers-that-be stonewall the police investigation into the shooting death of a young Scottish nanny, Gray introduces the fictional team who will fight racism and corruption to get to the bottom of the matter.

Hook is an honest policeman, Mildred is an educated British emigre with a job as a telephone operator in the Hotel Vancouver, Sparrow is a one-eyed WWI veteran and hearse driver, and McCurdy is a failed poet turned journalist. Gray's tale takes the reader on a tour of Vancouver as it was a century ago, with city landmarks both unchanged and dramatically altered.

This murder mystery highlights various aspects of the city's seamy social history, a time when the worst fear of the incompetent toadying police chief is "the danger of causing a scandal." As the tale unfolds, we are shown clairvoyant mediums, sasquatches and early brassieres.

We pass through the Hogan's Alley, a black neighbourhood with jazz clubs patronized by wealthy whites, and home to the Pullman Porters Club, and Vie's Fried Chicken. We enter movie theatres where Chinese patrons are seated in a separate section, and glimpse unemployed WWI veterans as they booze it up in shabby establishments like the Lumberman's Club and the Amputees' Club.

The tone of the book is deceptively light and jocular. Meanwhile, we're reminded of real and  uncomfortable history. Following on from the Head Tax era, (starting in 1885), the infamous Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 disallowed all Chinese except a few students and diplomats.

Gray shows readers he's done his research on the city of a century past. In Stanley Park, we see "cedar posts in the shape of what must have been the big house" and "the caved-in remains of tiny shanties whose inhabitants were chased away" when the land became a park. We witness demonstrations by a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, some of whose members don't bother keeping their identity secret.

We glimpse Centre Lawn, part of the mental institution at Essondale. As seen through the eyes of a jaded reporter, this "treatment facility for seriously ill men is not to inflict punishment," implying either that the punishment is accidental, or that punishing sufferers is the expected reaction to mental illness caused by war trauma. The jaded McCurdy's assessment is that the unit is there "to provide storage" and "to amuse the doctors in charge."

We view Chinatown's Shanghai Alley, a haven for illegal gambling as well as a studio space for practitioners of Chinese music and other arts. The novel also portrays how businessmen from Chinatown and Shaughnessy, affiliated with their respective Freemasons' societies, work together to make money from the illegal drug trade.

Other intriguing historical references mention the recent opening of an Egyptian tomb, the special trains that left Vancouver to cross Canada loaded with Chinese silk, the quasi respectable Balmoral Hotel of the time (still standing, no longer respectable). The narrator describes the post-prohibition city as "dependent on speakeasies as ever," and says "the Dry Squad are far more diligent defending government revenues than public morals."

Gray is at pains to tell the reader that the story is entirely made up. Even so, his novel reads like a sort of time capsule. Late in the story, the hearse driver and the journalist engage in a bit of philosophizing as they enjoy a drink together. The conversation reveals that the march of progress that was supposed to follow the war has not materialized. Money still talks and class carries the day. In a misguided sop to unemployed male war vets, intelligent and educated women like Mildred, a veteran of Whitehall communications, are downgraded and thrown out of work.

Veterans like Sparrow reflect back on their experience of war as a gong show. An essential skill was avoiding friendly fire, and as Constable Hook explains, in the army, "deniability" was an accepted part of "the chain of command." When Sparrow speaks of the coming revolution, McCurdy remains cynical, "Maybe it's called a revolution because you end up where you started."

A failed poet, McCurdy also deplores "the journalese he himself writes" as "sentences that fill the spaces between the advertisements the way concrete fills a hole." Another journalist, Shipley, when contacted by a dishonest spirit medium, sees himself as a writer "who doesn't find news; it comes to him." Unfortunately, this gardener must tend to "his expanding acreage of unverifiable sources," and "befriend people he would prefer not to know."

By the end of Gray's story, "A new level of cynicism has cast a pall over the city...the police can no longer be trusted, the press no longer delivers facts, the legal system is biased in favour of power and money, and the governing of the province is nothing but a charade."

Police Chief Quigley, one of the "chaps who are better at keeping their jobs than doing their jobs" reflects on which of his personal ambitions he can achieve, concluding that "Once facts become manufactured products, anything is possible."

Does this ring any bells today? Only the reader can decide.

The Book of Sands by Karim Alrawi

Karim Alrawi's novel is a book I decided to read when I heard the author speak at Southbank two summers ago.

Before teaching theatre in the US and then settling his family in Canada, Alrawi was dramaturge at the Royal Court Theatre in London and taught at the American University in Cairo. When Egypt's state censor banned his plays, he responded by working with the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. This led to his arrest and interrogation.

Set during the Arab Spring, the tale follows Tarek and his young daughter Neda, who must leave the pregnant Mona and flee to the desert to avoid arrest. A mathematician as well as a poet, Tarek expresses the mystery of his love for his wife as an equation.

In sharp contrast to the mild, loving, artistic and educated Tarek stands his dark antagonist Omar, who is also his brother-in-law. Omar is a self-righteous believer who makes a pilgrimage every year "to please the saint and gain credit with the Lord." Meanwhile, he consorts with arms dealers, sleeps with prostitutes and works for powerful men who take political prisoners and profit from the business of selling foreign women into sexual slavery.

Watching musical entertainers near the mosque disturbs Omar. Their "ungendered" freedom "both draws his attention and repels him." In an effort to quiet the internal dissonances of his contradictory ideas and actions, he smokes dope and keeps a cockroach in a shoebox under his bed. He focuses his mind on references to women in scripture and notes that even the enlightened poet Maulana (Mevlana or Rumi) considers men "a degree above women."

Yet over the course of the story, Omar attains some self-awareness, admitting that "in place of love I live by prohibitions, equate beauty with sin, ugliness with piety, defer all pleasures to an afterlife." He struggles "at the borderline of faith and doubt, redemption and despair."

A capsule history of a lost generation, this novel is filled with powerful and mysterious imagery. The reader experiences a drive through the desert through the eyes of ten-year-old Neda, who hears the tale of the Peacock Angel, and witnesses the storytelling of the Tibu grazers from the desert oases. We feel the kindness of desert people and shudder at the repressed secrets that lie hidden in the sands.

We learn of manners, "the customary insistence on polite refusal," and also about the insistence that a woman must marry a man who brings land and protection to her family. Readers are chilled to discover that "with marriage the risk of shame increased manyfold," and horrified to hear of the whisperings of "girls who disappeared...after rumours of secret trysts."

In a society based on fear, the law is "not about right or wrong, but a deterrent for the greater good," and stoning a girl is justified "so men can sleep peacefully at night."  How chilling to think that in certain societies, "a woman must guard against love, the enemy of honour that leads astray, that brings ruin in its wake." In many ways, the journey into the desert is like a mythological trip into the middle ages, even into antiquity.

The themes of this novel are many and complex. It deals with human pride and portrays entrenched cultural ideas about honour and shame. It exposes cultural pressures involving guilt and retribution, and shows the needs of the individual in sharp conflict with those of prevailing power groups who profess to religion as a means of social control. Chillingly, it reveals the self-delusion that permits people, both under duress and for pragmatic reasons, to behave in opposition to their natural morality.

There are no comfortable certitudes in this compelling story. The final indelible image of a woman in labour in an unexpected place is ambiguously memorable.