Up to Now and Now

I love running. It’s something I came to relatively late in life, not taking it seriously until I was 34, and after a childhood of believing I could do no such thing, as well as a teenagehood of always being the last one around the track during fitness week (and long after gym class was over). If someone had told me then that I’d become a runner, I would have handed them my large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos so that I could use both my hands to grab my sides as I doubled over.


I love running for many reasons, not the least of which is that during runs I solve a problem: most often a painting problem, sometimes a writing problem, and, when lucky, a nagging suspicion about myself that, if investigated, might shed light on the whys and wherefores of my current crisis (because I’m always in crisis, it seems. I think I might love crises more than I love running because, unlike running, it’s never too cold, or rainy, or I’m never too tired, or achy to indulge a crisis . . . but I digress).


A few days ago, during a long run, and at a time when I was relatively crisis free, and, therefore, casting about for some new problem to chew on, this thought bubbled to the surface: what’s the deal with the way I sprinkle my Jewishness all over my blog like so many salty chunks of feta crumbled over everything from toast to post, even when it’s totally unnecessary and maybe even overkill?


Why this need to trumpet my cultural heritage to which I have only the most tenuous thread of connection since my parents are effectively ignorant on the subject and so were never able to transmit anything useful to me, except to let me know I was, indeed, a Jew? In typical running-epiphany style, I realized it comes down to this: the old high school saw of needing an identity, and of needing to belong.


There were exactly two Jews in my high school (I mean real Jews, not may-as-well-be-Protestant Jews, like me). Both were girls and both were beautiful and thin and clad in polo-identified gear, which I believe facilitated their ascension into the great Pantheon of Perfect that ruled the school.


During Passover, however, they suddenly became out-in-the-open Jews, munching faux miserably on their faux sandwiches comprised of two matzoh crackers containing, simply, butter and raspberry jam, loudly complaining about how much they missed leavened bread. They really did say “leavened,” scratching a verbal chalk circle around their already shining heads. My own mistakenly-made-that-morning ham and cheese sandwich on leavened bread clearly designated on which side of the circle I belonged. (Since then, I have had a bad relationship with yeast.)


(BTW, if you have never tasted the surprisingly delectable combination of dry, unsalted motzoh crackers slathered in salty butter and topped with sweet and tart raspberry jam, you need to befriend a Jew this Passover and treat yourself. That, and chopped liver.)

The thing is, despite their coveted position within the Firmament of Fab – impossibly, enviably – the Passover production propelled these angels into an ever more rareified layer of social strata, garnering them– impossibly, enviably – an even higher position among the stars. They were like two princess sisters who had captured the love of their people but refused to live among them, insisting on their pointy castle where they remained adored but touchless.


Although I could legitimately claim Jewish blood on both sides of my family, I knew less about Jewish holidays, traditions, and Yiddish catch phrases than most of my gentile friends. But don’t misunderstand me. I was not surrounded by the Goyem either. I was a girl of maybe one or two friends, usually belonging to other groups, but who had stepped outside their pack to confide in me on the sly. I didn’t so much have a social circle as occupy each corner of a social square where individuals from the four main bloodlines –preppy, stoner, nerd, artsy – intersected with me for but a moment in social time in order to scratch some momentary itch.

Looking back, however, I can see that I did perform an essential service -- enabling each group to stay its course without, god forbid, intersecting -- but no one ever seemed to notice or thank me for my function (which may explain my attraction to the editing vocation, being used to the unfame behind the curtains). I did, however, get all the empty space inside the square, which became the repository for all my longing to belong, and which also efficiently imprisoned my soundless yawp.

But here's the thing: it’s not like I naively think that my Jewishness will put me in touch with like-minded people I will unconditionally adore (and vice versa) based on our shared culture.

Amongst my Jewish friends, some of us are staunch Zionists, which I am not. Some are atheists, which I am not. Some are Buddhists, which I aspire to. And we don’t all agree on all kinds of things. And yet. I wonder if I tend to elide differences because belonging matters more. When I was in Berlin last year, I felt so invited back by the Germans in my position as a displaced Jew. I suddenly had caché, kind of like the caché certain of my colleagues have in the art world thanks to the colour of their skin and their sexual orientation. Even they would agree. And I'm not trying to dismiss their talents. The only difference between them and me is that they actually do work that deserves the credit they have earned despite their caché. Me? I have done nothing to educate myself on being Jewish, or to support/express my culture. I’ve just claimed the title and hoped no one would check the deed.


Lest I paint a skewed picture, let me admit I did belong before high school. And how! I grew up in an exclusive community of expats in Manila, where my father worked for the Asian Development Bank. My friends were from all over the world, but what bound us together was our privilege. We got superiorily educated at an International School, we all belonged to clubs with pools, and despite the cliques that formed around stoners and soccer players, we all attended the same parties and we all got very drunk at a very, very, VERY young age. We just didn’t do it in basements as I saw it done here, to my great contempt, upon my return to Canada at the sophisticated age of 13. No, we drank Singapore slings poolside with people in uniforms serving us.


In those days, I knew who I was. I was a Canadian living overseas. I had freedom of movement (mostly because my parents were too busy at their jobs, or at the club playing tennis, to notice what I did after school). I travelled with my family to exotic locations every summer, and went “home” once a year to see the grandparents. I thought I owned the world and everyone in it.

At university, I belonged again. A late bloomer, I botched most of high school until I realized that if I did not get certain grades, I would be doomed to secretarial school, my mother's greatest aspiration for me, believing that every girl should be able to support herself. Her heart was in the right place. So, at the 11th hour in grade 13, I decided to study for once in my life, and that’s how I gained entrance into Queen’s, another bastion of privilege at which I felt at home. Yet it was not the privilege with which I identified. It was with those who were questioning everything. That was something I had been quietly doing since childhood, but had learned to keep quiet about it, or be ostracized. At uni, I focused on questioning the history and politics of womens' experiences ...


... and found articulation for all the things I had always felt were wrong but for which, up to then, I had not developed a vocabulary.

At university, I found my voice. And I let her rip.


In Manila, throughout our seven-year tenure, I had never stopped being affected by the purposefully maimed children who tapped at our car window, asking for money as we sat in a black cloud of traffic.


Someone had scratched out their eyes or broken their limbs to make them look more pathetic. As a child, I understood that their lives were catastrophic, even if their limbs had been whole, that their need was beyond desperate, and that in the face of their unforgivable condition, I was helpless. The adults taught me to keep my window rolled up and soothed my tears with words that never made sense, “we can't give them money every time they ask." I never understood why not. I still don’t.

Since my high school days, I’ve definitely found belonging in a variety of groups. For instance, my running group in Montreal made up of folks of all ages, from all walks of life, with all manner of experiences and history, all coming together around our one insane addiction.

And, recently, I landed what seems, so far, like a dream job and one that has instantly expanded my sense of identity and belonging.


I am the Outreach and Communications Coordinator of an organization called Gender at Work, a not-for-profit that rights the embedded wrongs of gender discrimination that leads to social, cultural, political, economic and you-name-it gender inequalities. G@W helps other organizations develop their own best practices for improving womens' lives in their own communities (most of the work is being done in India and Africa right now), with the goals of ending poverty and domestic violence, and placing women in key leadership roles in order to bring about deep-structure transformation of internalized discriminatory attitudes and values. My job, in a nutshell, is to collect and disseminate the stories that come out of the work being done, to bring attention to the actual condition of women around the world, and to inspire more positive action and change.


You heard right: my job is to help get stories told! Hello? Pinch me!

For me, the word “story” does not designate fiction, per se. Or, actually, it does, but the word “fiction” does not designate a lesser form than so-called fact. The two things are one, equally important, and not much different from each other (just ask a handful of French theorists). And both are vital for healing individuals, communities, cities, states, cultures, and the world. I deeply believe that stories are no less than lifeblood transmissions. And they require the only naturopathic ingredient that can truly remedy any ill: people and their good will.

Once hired, I received e-mails from everyone at G@W welcoming me into their fold with such warmth that I felt we were sitting in a comfy living room, real time. I will meet them all this week at a retreat in Antigonish. This mostly virtual org (since most of us live and work around the globe) will become a flesh-and-blood org for a week. But the thing is, I already feel as if I know these folks. I know that some people find virtual communities a lesser form of community, but, truthfully, that has not been my experience. In all my online living rooms and office spaces, I have felt connected to people I don’t know as much as to those I know. My friends and colleagues online (as well as my online friends and colleagues) are legion. And they have given me a sense of belonging in ways I could not have imagined.

Even if it's Hokey

Cliché, cliché, cliché. God, I love all three of them! That’s why I am writing a book in which cliché plays the leading role, a book I can’t seem to finish for a very clichéd reason: writer’s block.




Here's an excerpt:



This story is not new. And we all know how it ends. It ends. So why do we watch the same movie over and over again as if it might have a different ending? Because we love a good middle, and our only access to the middle is either by jumping back to the beginning again and starting over (again) until we hit the middle (again), or, retracing our steps backwards from the ending until we get to the middle (again). Back at the middle, we have this feeling of safety because we know what came before and we also know what happens next. But we also half hope it won’t happen, that the end will surprise us. We tether our ankles to the bedpost so we can lean out the window and pretend to fly. And it’s this mightness for which we hold our breath, in the meantime telling ourselves we are hearing this story for the first time. We want both things. We want the story to be predictable. And we want to begin again, and to change the ending.


But it’s the not-newness of a story that I find most comforting because if the story is known, it becomes like a familiar portrait I can either stand in front of, naming the person in the picture, or walk away from until the face becomes an unrecognizable speck in my mind’s eye.


I feel the same way about stories as I do about portrait paintings, and I feel the same way about stories and portrait paintings as I do about cliché. What underpins them all is basically the same thing: a grisaille over which we glaze layers of colour and shine.


To be honest, I experience an all-out erotic frisson when cliché’s deft hand scrapes back coats of subterfuge to reveal a naked structure we all share: not flesh tone. Grey scale.


Cliché is like portraiture because it is like a face; we know its structure well: eyes, nose, mouth – always the same three, yet each feature combines with each feature in a different way each time, and each assemblage delivers an unexpected gestalt of the never before seen. So while I suspect most of us share this feeling that the world is filled with limited, identifiable face types, we still only admit to resemblances, not to verisimilitude. Even in the case of twins.


Take cliché and metaphor, for instance. They are clearly related, yet beholders too often claim superior status for the latter as if metaphor possessed a more sophisticated beauty while cliché was the plain Jane of the family.


But cliché is not a one-trick pony to metaphor’s three-ring circus.


No, cliché’s hidden power shines right before our eyes.


Cliché is what bestows metaphor with her beauty. Or, put as a cliché, you can’t grow a pearl without sand in the oyster. Trite and true.

But, like a pregnant double agent, cliché’s condition is so obvious that people have stopped noticing. Sure, we can all see she’s hiding something under her skin, but since we can’t see what the hidden thing looks like, we tell ourselves we'll just deal with it when it finally emerges. But the truth is, we fear what cliché will do to our lives when it does reveal itself. And that’s because cliché is not just a shell. It is the shell that protects a kernel. And when the shell cracks – as it inevitably will – cliché’s kernel will pop out like a stripper jumping out of a cake. And those of us watching will find ourselves pulled from the sidelines, where we were safely clapping (bachelors all of us), now forced to participate in a spectacle that puts us face-to-face with our unbridled desires.


And it is because we don’t really know what cliché will become when it disrobes that we don’t really know what we will become in relation to cliché's nakeness.


That’s the real reason we fear cliché, and why we bully it into submission, calling it names as if it was a lower life form. We want our own voices to drown out the sound of the kernel popping.


But that’s how cliché gets the job done: by tricking us into thinking it’s the side show, lulling us into believing we are merely anonymous members of the peanut gallery while it matter-of-factly yanks off our cover ups to expose the main event -- us.


Take a portrait painting: the person in the picture seems like themselves, someone you might know, someone you might even love, but do we really know them? I return to the portrait like a soon-to-be-bride in an arranged marriage, scrutinizing my intended’s photograph for clues. In the absence of the person, this image is the only thing I have with which to build the story of the rest of my life. I stare and stare, even when I know that behind the photograph there is nothing but my own wall, or my coffee table, nothing but the world that frames the picture, and all my ideas about that person, but never the person actual.


With my own story, I draw upon both cliché and metaphor to get the telling done, seducing one or the other depending on my need. There’s no question about who will be loved. They both will. The only question is, when?

What to write when you can't write

I could not write this week. What I mean to say is, I could not write what I thought I wanted to write. I sat in front of my computer thinking I would craft the next chapter of my so-called book but nothing came. To help myself get going, I watched Elizabeth Gilbert give an inspired talk on TED about the nature of genius (she said it would be more productive for creative types to think as the Greek and Romans thought: i.e. that mortals are not responsible for genius, rather we are mere vessels through which the gods speak, kind of like TV transmitters). While at TED, I decided to watch another talk, this time by a microbiologist-turned-monk who, with his delightful French accent, made charming jokes about winter camping in the Himalayas before he proved, scientifically, that meditation can remap our neural pathways (mental note: perhaps if you meditated, Liz, you might be able to write!) . . . and still nothing. No inspiration moving through me like an Aeolian harp, no serving as a vessel for anything but popcorn, and no productive Buddhist nothingness, just a whole lot of garden-variety Liz nothingness.


I have been distracted. I have been distracted by my life. This week I am dog sitting an extraordinary creature. Fink. Rat Fink being his full name. He’s a hairless Chinese Crested Terrier and he’s more addictive than crack.


Let me be clear, I am definitely NOT one of those people who likes cutesy dogs. In fact, I think of them as vacuumable hairballs. And I’d do it in a heartbeat. But Fink is different.


Loving a Great Dane requires no effort because Danes are majestic, sweet natured and they plant their asses on the couch beside you, human like, which is great if you want a sympathetic listener who won’t interrupt. And it’s adorable. Which is why you don’t get points for thinking a Great Dane is great.

Whereas it takes very special folk to fall in love with a Chinese Crested Terrier.


My so-called ex life partner put it best when he said these are the underdog of dogs. Being an underdog lover, I opened my heart wide to the first CCT I ever met, and then, ten years later, to Fink. Fink is ugly. But compellingly so. Apart from the tuft of hair on his head, paws and tail, his congenitally hairless body feels like a shaved ball sack. There, I said it. And, if you’ve never felt one, believe me when I say there is no keeping your hands off of that.

Before Fink arrived, I told the other new male in my life that Fink was about to arrive and stay for a week. New Male responded with a diatribe about our consumer sickness for investing fortunes in pure breeds, and I think he added something about it being bourgeois and a few other criticisms I can’t remember but the tone was clear: Fink was Terrier non grata by virtue of his breeding.

NM must have been feeling sheepish about his outburst because later that night I got an e-mail from him with a paste job of the research he’d done all about Chinese Crested Terriers. His apology gesture clearly did not do the trick for him, however, because first thing the next morning he called to say, “I must see this dog. I’m on my way over.”

So, how did it go between Fink and NM? Let’s just say that within ten minutes of NM’s arrival, I came out of my kitchen after putting on the kettle for some civilized tea and conversation and found NM with his shirt pulled up and Fink’s shirt pulled off, and the former pressing the latter to the former’s belly. They both looked at me askance, but they were not asking the same question. NM’s said “am I busted?” while Fink’s look was inscrutable yet loaded with subtext, I just don’t know what.

“I don’t even know which agency I should call about this!” I yelled. Neither dog nor man seemed too fussed about their entanglement, however, and later that day when I confided the event to a girlfriend she told me she’d done the same thing with one of her friend’s dogs. My options were few. I realized that it was probably better to have this happen in my living room than, say, at the dog park. I felt like one of those parents who prefers her kids to do their drinking and drugs at home.

The day before I got Fink, I suggested to NM that his daughters might want to come over to meet the dog – a good ruse for them to also meet me. NM came up with some lame excuse about why that would not be a good idea. But after meeting Fink he was all, “would you and Fink like to come over for dinner so that the girls can meet him?” Of course I went over because I honestly thought Fink was subterfuge for getting me over. But no. It was definitely not about me. It was not even about the girls. They got about two seconds with Fink and then NM hogged Fink the rest of night, leaving me and the girls to snuggle up to Harry Potter while we tucked into some cuddle-replacement ice cream I’d brought to curry favour. Casting a somewhat worried glance to where NM and Fink were snoring together on the couch, I told myself the novelty would wear off soon enough.

I was right. Sort of. The next day NM sent me this very romantic e-mail:

Title of your next book: My lover ran off with my best friend's dog

It's because his skin feels like well-written prose. That's why I love Fink. That and he was designed by a committee chaired by Kafka and Foucault.

Appropriately hopeful, I wrote back a little subterfuge of my own.

Fink wrote you a piece of prose today:

Your everywhere hands, my belly yours, our becoming. My tail and your elephant memory salve my dry hinds. Your cold fingers seek to warm, but I am the one who does the warming and all the longing that hurts melts in your cradle arms, my sleepy snore.

Love, Fink

NM wrote back to say his book title sounded more like a country song. Because I’ll do any trick for a treat, I wrote a country song:

Three hearts, my love
All on the brink
One drowned in art
One drowned in drink
One stole the dog
His name was Fink
Crossed two state lines
His eyes all pink
What love will do
It makes you think
To lock it up
Inside the clink
Then walk the line
Far from love's stink

The next night, NM came over to my place with his girls. They said hi to Fink, drank tea and asked me why I’d put one of those veterinarian Victorian dog collars on my own head in one of my self-portraits (um, to stop me from licking my wounds?)


When the girls realized they would not get access to Fink, they disappeared up the ladder to carouse in my loft while NM and Fink communed on the couch. I sat opposite, stunned, trying to get a handle on what it was I was feeling. I have spent oodles of money in therapy trying to learn how to say what I want in a clean, direct way, but last night I realized I could have saved myself a whole lot of time and expense had I just befriended an eight year old.

NM’s eldest came down out of my loft finally and stood in front of NM, who was holding Fink, and said, “Daddy, I am feeling jealous of Fink. I want you to hold me.” And there it was. This sweet statement hung in the air as long as a zeppelin made of ice cream would. Not long. It made a soft landing on a melting heart. NM immediately put down the dog and picked up his daughter and held her close.

This little girl taught me in that moment something Fink was also trying to teach me. Love is not complicated. It’s simple. NM’S love for Fink is unconditional. To say NM loves Fink because he is ugly and cuddly is adding too much story. NM loves Fink because Fink just commands love, by simply existing. And NM’s daughters love NM and NM loves them for the same reason, or non reason. Just because.

Later that night, I sent NM and e-mail asking if he’d consider trading his girls for a box of Chinese Crested Terriers. Not surprisingly, he said not in this lifetime. But he did share this with me, a poem his eight-year-old daughter wrote to one of her eight-year-old friends:

What is life. Is it the universe trying to teach us about the world around us. Is it important that we know or does it not matter. These questions need no question marks but still remain unanswered.

I wonder if she’d let me pay her in ice cream to be my therapist.

From Teeth to Toes

Yesterday I lost a tooth. It was no surprise really. I was told twenty years ago that I had two baby teeth clinging against all odds to the cliff of my lower gum. Neither tooth possessed roots long enough to take root, nor were there ever any adult chops lying in wait.


Despite countless warnings from more than a mouthful of dentists, I not only continued to chomp down on popcorn over the years as if it were the source of life itself, but I did not have the good sense to stop at the kernels. Instead I lustily cracked them between my tender baby teeth like a woman lapping at a dirty pond located right beside the vast, clean and burbling source of France’s bottled water. I’m an idiot.


I got twenty extra years out my toddler teeth, for which I should be grateful. But I’m not. I wish I had twenty more. Especially after my dentist told me that the price of his implants are cheap at $3,000 a pop. In a desperate bid to change the outcome of my visit, I asked him, mournfully, rhetorically, how exactly toothlessness was going to enhance my new romance. I was hoping to elicit enough sympathy to spark a heroic tooth-saving effort. Not skipping a beat, my dentist offered his sage advice instead, like he’d been moonlighting as Dear Abby his whole professional life.


Dentist: “Your new man will take care of you, you’ll see. And if he doesn’t, then you’ll know he’s not right for you.”

“Except he won’t,” I said.

“Sure he will,” he said, encouragingly.

“No, actually, he won’t. He’s out west on a mountain. Skiing.”

He had no answer to that. But, later, he did try again, god bless him. He advised me to tell my new man not shove his tongue too deeply into the place where my tooth used to be. I think he was making a joke. But I was too busy thinking that my new guy’s tongue would not likely share a hotel lobby with me, never mind a mouth! There was really no other option. I’d have to dump him. Not the dentist, the new guy. The only thing worse than fearing you are liked for the wrong reasons – like because you have a pulse – is fearing you are liked out of duty! And worse than duty is obligation from someone you barely even know (except maybe carnally). You see, I can’t really call this guy a boyfriend quite yet. We are currently in that strange, not-yet-relationship phase of two people who knew each other as friends a decade ago, fell out of touch, reconnected recently and then decided to see if there could be more. That phase. That very, very, very fragile phase. So, although we feel familiar to each other, the truth is, we are effectively strangers (despite having made it past each others’ border guards).


As I sat on the streetcar with a wad of gauze the size of a pillow wedged into my very own Grand Canyon, mouth cranked open so wide that I could not deny I had become, for all intents and purposes to my streetcar mates, a mouth breather, I concocted a number of creative ways to let my beautiful new man go. I can't let him martyr himself on the alter of my new deficiency. He deserves better. He deserves teeth.

But I won't do it until he gets home. Just because I now have Mariana’s Trench in my mouth does not mean he should not enjoy topping a mountain. Why should my wee personal tragedy stop him from wrapping his ski-hill-toned thighs around the side of a mountain like she’s his bitch?


Yesterday morning I was going to write a post exploring the concept of “fashion backward.” But the dentist changed all that. When I got home I popped three blue Advil, downed some soft Ricotta cheese and went to sleep. This morning, however, I realize that writing might distract me, so I'm going to forge ahead as planned.

What is "fashion backward", you ask? It's that item in your closet that is not old enough to be considered retro but not new enough to be fashion forward. While shopping for an 80s ensemble at Value Village last Saturday to wear to an 80s party I’m attending this Saturday, I spotted a pair of red Steve Madden shoes so fracking cool I had no choice but to claim them as my own the way a mother, nose pressed to the maternity ward window, zones in on her baby without the aid of its identity bracelet.

I was so thrilled with my new shoes that I could barely contain myself when, the next day, K and P were gobbling up the food I’d made them for brunch, providing the perfect opportunity for me to prance around in my Wizard of Oz purchase. Look at me! Look at me!

Their reaction was twofold.

Number 1:

Number 2:


K confirmed later that day, when I could trust myself not to cry while inquiring if the problem was that the shoes were simply not old enough to be cool yet, that yes, that was the problem. By way of illustration, she informed me that she had had a similar pair of shoes three years ago. Hence, not long ago enough to command retro allure. Obviously, she no longer wears them. I remember a fellow artist saying something similar to me in my studio when I expressed a wish to paint something from the 1990s. He said that era was not far enough in the past to have retro caché. In other words, my shoes are not old-cool, they are simply uncool.

Although I get it, I don’t feel it. Because the truth is, I love these shoes. I love their bluey-red hue, their lace-upityness and their cute snub noses. I love their square jaw. And I love how they feel. It’s like this: I did not learn to love Led Zepplin until long after their hey day. But would a Led Zepplin lover fault me for loving Zep now? What difference does make when I learned to love them? Isn’t it only important that I love them?

I can’t keep up with fashion in anything – from shoes to painting to music. So I’ve stopped trying. In my little corner of the world, I am stubbornly clinging to my own brand of un-fashion the same way Superman spun the globe backwards to reverse time and the death of his true love. I was not able to reverse time to save my beloved tooth, but I’ve definitely stopped time at the place where my Steve Madden shoes are fashion-Liz, thus always "in". In my world, the only one that really matters, I call this style, "fashion present"!

Seriously Gobsmackingly Great Book

Some books hit you upside the head. Others split your sides right down the middle. This one does both. I'm not even half way through it and I want to buy a copy for every person I know. That's right, I'm extolling the virtues of a book I'm not even finished reading. That's how I-don't-even-have-an-emphatic-enough-word good it is. It has already delivered more hilarity, more poetry and more ass-kick writing than most of the books I've ever read. I can't buy you a copy, unfortunately, because I'm broke but I urge you to run out and buy your own. For those of you who can't read mirror images, the book is called A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz.

Like a poltergeist jonesing for a little play time with the living, this book threw me on the floor where I laughed myself silly, and then pinned me there with gut-wrenching tales of bizarre sports-loving-related crimes and more-crazy-than-your-own family dramas. It's told with such tenderness and wit-sharpened insight that I'm convinced the point at which the Jewish diaspora and the Criminal diaspora intersect at the bottom of the earth, where no one is really looking (i.e. Australia), is the point at which the right alchemical ingredients and conditions exist to yield what every book lover seeks: gold.

This book could not have come at a better time. I have been struggling to find something to blog about for the last two weeks. No matter what I did – even brunch with amazing French people


who know how to make the perfect brunch food (high-end baguette with pear and double-cream brie and some kind of dijon and honey sauce, all topped with pecans and then grilled) . . .


. . . and, of course, the perfect latte . . .


. . . and every item colour coordinated because the French are born speaking fluent Style . . .



– I still came up empty for a post. It seemed my mind had gone on vacation but forgot to tell me where it went and when it was coming back. Also, I’ve been sick. Also, I’ve been happy. Depression practically writes itself. But contentment would rather do other things, like eat out, watch Peep Show and stay in bed – with company.

As a so-called writer, however, it's my job to do my job regardless of how I feel, the same way actors and CEOs fake their way through their depressions and recessions in order to get the job done.

So, taking a page from Steve Toltz’s book, I will do as Toltz’s protagonist, Jasper, does and let someone else do the talking. Normally I would say this approach to posting screams cop out, but I know my instincts are right in this case because I simply cannot do the book justice. Toltz is too fucking smart.

Like the inexplicable but compelling stuffed bunny sitting on a shelf of the furnished apartment I am renting . . .

. . . I will let Toltz's unexpected and riveting story stand as its own illustration of the weirdly-hypnotic thing that it is.

A little context: Eight-year-old Jasper (who is eight in the same way I am internationally famous – his hilarious, world-weary storytelling belies his true age) hands a great deal of the storytelling over to his eccentric father, who tells Jasper a story about the coma Jasper's father was in for four years in early childhood. During this almost-dead state/time, Jasper’s father saw and heard things he could not possibly have seen and heard. By way of explanation he tells Jasper, “when there aren’t any waking hours . . . for months or even years . . . it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach . . . right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stories of things that were left there by previous generations.” Here’s some of what he saw:

I saw all the dawns come up too early and all the middays reminding you you’d better get a hurry on and all the dusks whisper “I don’t think you’re going to make it” and all the shrugging midnights say “Better luck tomorrow.” I saw all the hands that ever waved to a stranger thinking it was a friend . . . I saw all the men wipe down toilet seats before urinating but never after. I saw all the lonely men stare at department store mannequins and think “I’m attracted to a mannequin. This is getting sad.” I saw all the love triangles and a few love rectangles and one crazy love hexagon in the back room of a sweaty Parisian café. I saw all the condoms put on the wrong way. I saw all the ambulance drivers on their off hours caught in traffic wishing there was a dying man in the backset. . . . I saw all the Buddhists bitten by spiders they wouldn’t kill . . . . I saw all the broken dishes in all the Greek restaurants and all the Greeks thinking “Culture’s one thing, but this is getting expensive.” I saw all the lonely people scared by their own cats. . . . I saw all the funerals and all the acquaintances of the dead enjoying their afternoon off work. I saw all the astrology columns predicting that one twelfth of the population of earth will be visited by a relative who wants to borrow money. I saw all the forgeries of great paintings but no forgeries of great books. I saw all the signs forbidding entrance and exit but none forbidding arson or murder. I saw all the carpets with cigarette burns and all the kneecaps with carpet burns . . . I saw inside all the mouths and it’s really disgusting in there. I saw all the bird’s-eye views of all the birds who think humanity looks pretty active for a bunch of toilet heads . . .

Later in the book, Jasper's father describes Paris:

But Paris -- beautiful poor ugly opulent vast complex gray rainy & French. You see unbelievable women, umbrellas, beggars, tree-lined streets, bicycles, church spires, Africans, gloomy domes, balconies, broken flower pots, rudeness that will ring through eternity, aimless pedestrians, majestic gardens, black trees, bad teeth, ritzy stores, socialists moving their hands up the thighs of intellectuals, protesting artists, bad drivers, pay toilets, visible cheese smells, witty scarves, shadows of body odors in the metro, fashionable cemeteries, tasteful transvestites, filtered light, slums, grim, desire, artistic lamp posts, multicoloured phlegm of passive chimney smokers, demented cobblestone faces in terrace cafés, high collars, hot chocolates, flashy gargoyles, velvet berets, emaciated cats, pick pockets running away with glittering entrails of rich German tourists, & great phallic monuments in the squares & sex shops.

. . . but why is it that when I hear someone make a great philosophical argument I get the same feeling as when I see someone has put clothes on his dog?

Photo credit: My friend Philippe took the bunny photo.