“Heartbreak has an English middle-class reticence when it comes to the deep exploration of feeling. There is a sense in which the novel rationalises this defect by taking refuge behind its stiff-upper-lipped characters. We are told that people are in love or despair, rather than seeing this in action.

“….The world of this novel is not a pleasant one. It is a sex-obsessed place full of beautiful, genetically faithless people who talk mostly about art and shagging when they’re not saying ‘fuck you’. Friendship in this hermetic sphere is ‘one friend betraying another friend to a third friend’. Happiness and self-fulfilment are for the most part outlandish fantasies. And, as Schopenhauer remarked, there is no altruism. It is a high-minded cliché of contemporary fiction that love is doomed, social hope bankrupt and virtue wet behind the ears. In this context, the most outrageously avant-garde novel would be one in which someone was happy for a change.”

Read this review over at the LRB and considered while reading it Terry Eagleton may well be onto something. Then began to imagine the people who inspired it and boiled the kettle.

small

3 beans.

How much a splinter hurts.

“He’s a very bright man so he talks in these half riddles.”

Only the Poor Die Young

Only the Poor Die Young.

Friday treat

Serious Friday treat, blast from me past, secret guilty pleasure!

Yup, it’s Gardeners Question Time … even has archive, so you can hear repeats.

I loved the man who wanted to grow an olive tree. Man after my own heart, here chez the second floor mad poly tunnel..

I had a Neil Armstrong moment this evening when we ate dinner with another family and four of my zuccinis which I grew in the garden formed a significant part of the dinner.

Also there are beans on my plants! Size clearly not the one and only indicator of a mighty bean.

Cabbagetown — some considering

As I said I am challenged reading Juan Butler’s Cabbagetown. Cabbagetown — a documentary attempts to be a novel that depicts a place.

The woman Terry, the newly acquired live-in girlfriend of Michael, the main narrator who is writing the diary, is straight out of the weakest Sears pattern. She would not survive a gust if the door blew open. A construction from a male fantasy via a microwave oven. Such a woman would not survive 13 mins in Cabbagetown. But Michael knows better than her everytime he blinks his eyelid, he’s taken her number, excepting her number is ridiculous even beyond the standards of the ridiculous. She’s meek, mousie, her solution to everything is to whimper and sob and all she wants is him, him, him. Except the dude is a complete loser. He’s not uninteresting within that, but certainly not alluring. She lives her life in terror that he’ll throw her out of this miniscule rooming house they share or have shared for, a matter of days or weeks.

Women are always afraid to be alone in such male constructions. Yet ten minutes earlier she was practically living on the street. I remain perplexed as to why the gritty urban male writer immediately vaporizes when his pen approaches a woman. I’ve noticed this in novels published here in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and wonder how can this be? Do/did they not know any women?

Given the entire novel is constructed around this dotty relationship through which we learn of place Cabbagetown this is trying on the nerves, but I muster on.

There’s several things that interest me about the book. The first is the depiction of people living on top of each other. The landlady lives above or in the same rooming house as the main narrator and he feels constantly watched by her and he constantly watches/remarks on her. This cramping of human space and lives into and inside lives is interesting.

There’s a section where Michael and Terry go to Bloor/Yonge Street. There’s this real sense they are visiting from Cabbagetown like a pair of aliens and this distance between the peoples in a city also interested me. That you can shift neighbourhood and feel like a visitor or a guest or be immediately displaced. Outside within per se.

Another aspect that works rather well is this character George who gives Michael books to read. One thing that’s noticeable in this book is the people are reading. George is some kind of earnest activist trying to plot an uprising in Cabbagetown of “direct action” intentions. He hands a manual on manufacturing terrorist materials to Michael to read and then asks his opinion on whether it would work in Cabbagetown. I like how he earnest but not of it, consults the man who is of the place on whether it would succeed. Again it’s within but not within. The other thing that works rather well are the reactions to George from the other residents of Cabbagetown. George also is the reason Michael writes the book since he encouraged him and told him he talked well and would write well. Michael, of course, needs permission from George to write. This is clear.

There’s also a rabid homophobia that the writer cleverly turns on its head. I have to go back to the book and add the parts here that I am talking about.

I wish publishers would stop telling us “it’s like nothing you’ve ever read.”

How do they know what I or for that matter anybody has read?

How many languages are there in the world to read in?

Thus unless you’ve read in all of them and everything ….

From 12 readers to 6 readers to 3 readers.

50 pages on in Cabbagetown, I am severely challenged!

Am reading a challenging book and concurrently faced my challenges on the tumble tramp ce soir.

There’s a very interesting dynamic and moment uniting two separate moves because as you’re doing them, your brain, if its too engaged, becomes aware that they are happening and throws them off. You can actually tell half way through, flying through the air what the outcome will be.  It’s entirely different if you compute it only through physical muscles. Then you’re astonished you arrived at all because there is no mid air analysis.

The brain is a dreaded interference in such matters. This is so much more noticeable in adults than children.

There are a number of misconceptions about gymnastics as an adult sport. That it is “girly” and unnatural. Not true. The women are incredibly strong, if anything built like hockey players. You need incredible strength in your shoulders to lift your body weight and hold it for prolonged periods of time. Also, legs, solid ones, aide matters. It’s a sport that demands serious physical power and pound. It becomes the most fascinating to watch someone who has never attempted the sport learn it as an adult from the beginning. It is there you observe the fundamental differences in male and female bodies. How difficult a move may be for the male body, whereas the women have no problem. Moves like a simple cartwheel cause trouble for men. They dive onto both hands, instead of a 1,2,3,4 placement and rotation is difficult in the hips. It’s a sport of exchange and inquiry and there’s incredible support between all the people who train together irregardless of your ability. Everything you achieve is charted and cheered by neighbouring eyes.  And it never ceases to remind me of sentences.