Beating Insomnia: Chapter One, the PNE

A memory: it is late at night for a child. Vancouver, B.C., end of summer. We are returning to the car after our annual family visit to the PNE: the Pacific National Exhibition. We have trekked around hangars full of agricultural produce, cornucopies of improbable tomatoes and hyperbolic squash, perfect carrots like the ones in my grandfather's garden only, if possible, better, glowing jars of jams and preserves, such as my mother would prepare every summer, sealing them with rounds of wax (the heft and texture still in my fingertips), adding labels with dates and names, and lining them up on papered shelves in a windowless cupboard down in the basement. Jams we will slowly consume during the long Canadian winters of my mother's Saskatchewan childhood. Somewhere in the back story are farms on Prince Edward Island and in Ontario, and dimly visible, subsistence farming in Scotland.

Store-bought jam? Unlikely. As unlikely as a store-bought cake. I had to live in France to discover that people bought pastries and that they were better than homemade ones, in France that is. And that it wasn't shameful to buy, rather than make, a dessert. Mind you, it's still better to make cakes from scratch in Canada and the US, because store-bought ones are dire, and this is a fact of life that no amount of positive thinking, even in upmarket Palo Alto with its sesame baguettes, has changed.

Meanwhile, back at the PNE...

we have had hotdogs and clouds of pink candy fluff ("barbe-à papa" in French). And we have been on the rides, best of all the shoot-the-chute. I haven't yet discovered that my father is scared of heights--that was much later on Coney Island when we made him take us on a parachute ride. Our feet are sore from walking through the fairground. I must be about 12. Am I cranky by now?

The car is far away, It's hard to find parking at the PNE. The people who live around the fairgrounds rent out their driveways and back yards. I see us trudging back to the car. I see a lot of fenders and shiny metal. And I hear mother tell me she thinks I am going to be the sort of person who needs a lot of sleep. An innocent remark...why has it stuck with me over all these years? It is this precise, singular remark that brings back all the generic fairground memories.

I can think about this till I'm blue in the face, but I'm never going to know.

There are a lot of things I'm never going to know, but I imagine I am stilll too young to realise this, too young to know this, increasingly, will be one of life's great sorrows.

It makes a good starting place for my sleeping problems.

(Next. How I ended up in "The Insomnia Group Treatment Program." There may be digressions, for example, into Riding the Paris Metro Covered With Electrodes. I may also discover I have better things to do than unpack my sleep problems.)

Keywords:

• insomnia
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• jam
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• PNE
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• sleep workshop

Risotto and killer whales

Late yesterday afternoon (I should explain that in French time, when people say "afternoon" they mean the hours between noon and eight p.m., dinnertime. "Evening"--la soirée--begins at eight and may include social activities. "Night"--la nuit--is when ordinary people are in bed. This can get one in trouble. For instance, once in northwestern Ireland we were to pick up a friend's house keys from a third person sometime during the afternoon. We arrived to pick them up about 5 pm, by which time it was already evening for the fisherman in question. Hard feelings all around.)

Late yesterday afternoon when I finished reading the Life of St Antony (don't ask) I decided to take a little walk across campus. I would drop my library books off at the library and go on to the wooded park with the Haida totem pole where I like to sit on the bench and figure out how a thunderbird becomes a raven becomes a medicine man becomes a killer whale turning into a wolf. It's the killer whale with flopped-over dog ears that gets me. 

Then I walked back, stopping off in the student vegetable garden, where I hadn't been in a while. I thought I might forage something to put in the risotto my husband was cooking. There were some peas, but I thought I should leave them for the students. The garden was lovely. Full of herbs (I helped myself to some rosemary and mint), nasturtiums, lettuce (going to seed), one big red strawberry, and a sunflower that was about ten feet tall. There was an adirondack chair painted funky colours, but I was shy to sit in it. I checked on the apple tree, the plum tree and the kumquat bush.

My husband had added asparagus to the risotto.

Keywords:

• risotto

No new news

Life is repetitive, and I like it that way. I sleep. But when I sit down to write, I think I've written that already (the strand of tinsel in the birch tree) and probably several times. Is it because I spend so much time with my nose in a book? My news is the book I'm reading...

So here I am, nose in a computer, books strewn round me on the spare bed, to my left a window, with a broken venetian blind (don't try to raise the blind we tell visitors), looking out past two birch trees and the carport roof and beyond that an oleander hedge, a street and a row of student houses. What most interests me is the rain falling into the puddles that collect where the flat roof sags. I like the random--well, they look random to me, but who knows?--circles the drops make in the puddles. It's one of those mesmerizing experiences, like wave-watching or fireplace-watching. Sometimes bubbles pop up on the surface of the puddle and float there  till a raindrop punctures them. I like the chains of droplets on the twiggy branches of the birch trees.

What I like most is the sound rain makes falling onto /into things. I heard the rain before I opened my eyes this morning. To make sure I wasn't dreaming--it's been weeks since any rain fell--I listened for the swish of tires.

Rain is soothing, but not if it goes on for weeks, the way it does in British Columbia where I grew up. There it can drizzle for days, weeks, months, years, twenty-two years. The sky is featureless grey. I couldn't wait to get away from it, first to Ghana for a two-year teaching stint where, when it rained it was a tropical downpour and then it stopped and we all came out and played tennis with the headmaster as usual at the end of the afternoon. The headmaster was very dapper in his tennis whites. It was a teacher training college. Every now and then during class hours someone would yell "snake!" somewhere in the grounds and then everyone rushed outside with machetes.

After Ghana I went to New York, then Montreal, where when it rained it snowed. Then Marseille where at last my hair stopped frizzing. Bliss.

Now I find I like rain, in small doses. I like clouds too. Plain blue gets monotonous.

Keywords:

• Ghana
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• Montreal

"He smiles a lot and then not. / Hauteur is the new hot."

To the library I went yesterday, or maybe the day before, to find a book, naturally, but right next to the one I was looking for was a row of books by Frederick Seidel, including Nice Weather (2012).How not to love a poet who has poems called "Cunnilingus," "The Terrible Earthquake in Haiti," and "Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright." Oh, and "Do Not Resuscitate" and "Rainy Day Kaboom." Appropriately, he has "Silvio" in a poem. In "Arnaut Daniel," pell mell: "Love cracks my sternum open / In order to operate... / A Caucasian male nine hundred yeard old / Is singing to an unattainable lady, fair beyond compare, / Far above his pay grade, in front of Barzini's on Broadway, /In Provençal...".

I keep turning to the author photograph on the jacket flap: the most incredible suit, dark, with a waistcoat. If I have ever seen such a beautifully tailored suit before it was lost on me. Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. I try to read the titles on the spines of the books on the shelves in the background.

"He smiles at the photographer but not/ the camera. He thinks cold is the look that's hot."

Keywords:

• Frederick Seidel

Braque's Shelf Paper

I always thought that if I could own two paintings, I would want a Braque and a Chardin, but perhaps if I had enormous walls and a billion [some currency] my ambitions would adjust to fit the new parameters.

There's a Braque retrospective in Paris right now, without--why?--the usual blockbuster lines. I got stuck at the beginning of Cubism, or rather the papiers collés or collages. The wall text explains how Braque went past a hardware store (une droguerie, what is this in English?) one day and noticed rolls of wallpaper, or maybe shelf paper, in the window, rolls with flowers and so forth, but one that imitated wood grain and even had faux mouldings round the edge. He bought a roll of the wood grain stuff.

Back home he cut squarish pieces from the roll and stuck the pieces on a sheet of white paper; then he took a piece of charcoal and filled the white space. He connected the squares of wallpaper with his own designs. He also wrote some letters and words, like BAR or RHUM. Braque said that the letters would confuse people about the space because letters don't exist in space the way things--guitars and so forth--do.

I've often wondered why contemporary artists incorporate writing in/on paintings--what magic words work--and this seemed to provide me with the start of a response. 

Keywords:

• Braque
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• Paris

Women Writers

Chasing down information on the (new) New Republic website, I was sidetracked by links to articles about the VIDA survey of women writers and their publication histories, links I want to reproduce below, because I found both pertinent follow-ups to what for women is a searing question: why do women writers continue to be underrepresented in major media? A year or so ago, after the first VIDA survey, there was also a good article in Slate, which, as I recall, asked the taboo question (of any underrepresented group): Aren't we as good?

The links: Ruth Franklin in a recent New Republic; Meg Wolitzer in a recent NYTimes Book Review; and from 2011, Meghan O'Rourke in Slate.

Aren't we as good? nags. But both 2012 articles raise the question of why men aren't interested in reading writing by women, the way women are / have learned to read and respect men's writing. Boys at a prep school may not find Dickinson and Austen on their reading lists; girls routinely read Mark Twain. And so on. I jump on such articles, when I come across them, in the Times, for instance; my husband jumps them.

Once I told husband and son it would take them 3000 years to learn to do the dishes properly; now they are both far more persnicketty than I am, with their hot and cold water rinsing systems. So how come, a hundred years after A Room of Her Own, there's still a problem with the writing? 

Aren't we as good?

Keywords:

• New Republic
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• NYTimes
•  
• Slate
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• VIDA
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• Women writers

My Olympics

were mostly watched in silent mode from an exercise bike in the gym, and only at the hours NBC deemed suitable; ie, marketable. They were interleaved with commercials, roughly a sheaf of them every 10 minutes, with garishly colored square pizzas at unbeatable prices and aging men with incredible sixpacks.

My London daughter, like every other British person I know, grumbled (the NYT taught us a new word for this, "whinged") in the months leading up to the games, swore she would leave town; but once they started kept sending me links to Youtubes I couldn't watch, because "this video is not available in your part of the world"; eg., the BBC version of the Queen being escorted to her chopper by James Bond. NBC had exclusivity on that.

By the end of Week One, my daughter, who is not British, though she has lived in London for a fair number of years, told me that for the first time in her life she found herself saying "we" and meaning "we British."

Me too, I almost felt British, though that goes back a few generations to some salt smuggling sabbath breakers in Scotland. Four years ago I wondered how London was ever going to put on an Opening Ceremony after the Beijing Extravaganza. Mais voilà! All you need is a sense of humor. Thanks, GB. 

(And now at the gym it's American football, which I don't begin to understand and baseball, which is not a spectator sport.)

Keywords:

• London
•  
• Olympics

Another Squirrel Story

This morning, standing on the balcony, trying to figure out which redwood tree I overheard the management talking about cutting down recently, I noticed a really rather plump squirrel with a good-sized, still green apple in its mouth rushing around the shredded bark mulch on the ground below me, dithering. It was looking for a place to bury it, for winter, I suppose, though really it's never winter here--perhaps it knows something I don't know. It tried, with its front paws, several spots: in the mulch under a couple of smallish camellias, both of which looked to me like good spots to bury an apple. Then it went through the fence into the next door neighbors' patio and tried their flower pots, eventually settling on a largish one with a geranium. 

Across the street, there's a small house with a couple who collect apple trees, including on the strip of ground between sidewalk and street. Ever since the August some kids picked an apple fight, they hang little homemade pieces of paper from strings in the trees at this time of year: "These apples aren't ripe yet, please don't pick them."