The city that does not work*

Meanwhile, this story on Toronto's half-hearted venture into legalizing street food sums up everything that's wrong with this city. (Accurate headline: "So you want to cook bhajias or fajitas? Do we have a slate of rules for you".) Well, maybe not everything, but enough: red tape, indifference to the point of the policies under consideration, and, basically, stupid stupid people (both elected and administrative) in charge of city policy. That for decades we had a system designed to legally prevent the sale of anything other than semi-toxic hot dogs is a total embarrassment; that now, instead of just adopting whatever New York or Singapore or Bangkok does -- you know, doing what works -- we are slowly custom-designing a regime so snarled up in red tape that no one you would want in the street-food business would be willing to go into it -- that's beyond embarrassing and into infuriating. And it's really hard not to see it as a sign of general indifference and dysfunction -- remind me again why everyone was so excited about David Miller?

* I wonder how many of you even remember when Toronto used to be called 'the city that works'. A phrase that has gone the way of 'Harvard of the North', and for much the same reasons.

The book club for men

As for the content of the new Books subsection, there's an interesting piece about an all-male book club: I didn't know there were such things. They read books about wars, Genghis Khan, Conrad Black, and hardly any fiction. (Just a Ken Follett [!] and a hit literary novel about Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.) The group has been around for 30 years, which is pretty impressive, and includes a wide range of vaguely upper-middle class anglo Montrealers. What struck me was this bit:

...the insinuation that the male of the literary-club species will always choose blood-and-guts reality ahead of polished fiction from the pens of great writers. This is, er, correct, as I realized one evening as I left the house happily cradling my copy of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. My wife's book club was reading Proust.

Now I rarely feel in need of gender reassignment, and still hope to get around to Proust one day, but I had a real surge of fellow-feeling here. To see why, just look further down page F9 to the blurb for the new 'Ask the Author' on-line feature, whose first author is Giller-winning Joseph Boyden. Here's the book he's talking about:

The novel follows Suzanne Bird, a native Canadian from Northern Ontario whose sister, a fashion model, goes missing in New York City. Suzanne leaves behind her troubled uncle Will, whose life also unfolds in the book.

The Giller judges said Boyden's novel "takes us on two journeys. Suzanne's sister Annie retraces her sister's steps, from the Native poverty below the Gardiner Expressway to the extravagant fast lanes of New York. Will, their uncle, follows a very different path as he deals with the demons of memory, revenge, and darkest loss."

See, this is the kind of stuff women read. And I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I can't count the times I've gone into Book City and flipped over the intriguing-looking new novels only to see every single one described as a haunting luminous meditation on family, memory and loss, interweaving multiple resonant narrative journeys in a dazzlingly lyrical deeply personal poetic etc. etc. causing me to flee in horror.

I love fiction. I will read any amount of Evelyn Waugh and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have some substantial chunks of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble more or less committed to memory. So why is it so hard now, or socially unacceptable, to write a novel with a simple but compelling story in a style which gets to the fucking point? And why have women been gulled into thinking they like this... other stuff? Maybe they really do like it? But I can't help thinking of contemporary fiction as the literary equivalent of fashion nobody looks good in and microwaveable food that tastes like nothing: something you sell to women because women can be bullied into anything.

The end of an underwhelming era

But enough of the belles-lettres, you say: bring on the snark! Well, today's paper [ed. note -- and for once I really do mean 'today', Saturday] confirms what I've long inferred from the Globe combination of generally good reporting with dodgy editorial judgement. Namely that the No. 1 problem with the paper is the No. 1 editor, one Edward Greenspon. Today he has an ex cathedra piece in the front section which includes the following near-gibberish:

Authoritative coverage of authors and their renderings has always been a hallmark of The Globe and Mail. Today, we rededicate ourselves to the subject with a new package that traverses the print-digital divide and opens up a world of new possibilities while securing the old world order.

Coverage of their renderings? Traversing the divide with a package to secure the old world order? Is he Doctor Who? To me this reads like a stoned intern's spoof, which nobody caught because the preceding paras. were already so pompous and opaque. If this is what Slow Eddie's own prose is like, it's astounding the paper is as strong as it is.

But wait, you say, what is this divide-traveling package? What does it all mean? It means that the Globe, which used to boast endlessly about having Canada's only free-standing Books section, no longer has a free-standing Books section. Books are now a subsection at the back of the Focus section. A pretty big subsection, this week at least; but the point is surely to cut back coverage significantly in the long run (the sad trajectory of the once-great National Post book section, where by 'once-great' I mean that in its heyday it used to commission, and pay handsomely for, free-form stuff from me.) Meanwhile they are bumping up coverage of books on the website: they are also adding this amazing new thing called a 'comments' feature to the reviews there, and including some web-only content, in the hope that poor Slow Eddie can spin the killing of the Books section (vivi-section?) as a fabulous new-media breakthrough. Well, good luck to them. Personally I think I'm a lot more likely to read about books in print, over my breakfast coffee, rather than during a bout of web-surfing later in the day: but my guess would be that they don't have much choice here. (Dr. B's grasp of these matters is hazy, but it seems that newspapers expect their on-line ventures to lose money, though how long that can last is anybody's guess).

Of course, given my usual whingeing about the quality of the Books section, any complaints about the quantity are going to sound like that joke about the two old ladies in the Catskills.*

Oh, and in totally unrelated and coincidental news, the Globe is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce.


*Who moan about the resort food, endlessly and in great detail, with the punch line: 'And the portions are so small!'

The rutabagas of politics

Yes, I know posting has been light lately, it's that tricky 'work' business slowing me down. You are always on my mind, dear readers, but by the time I've snatched a moment to compose my thoughts about some news item -- and I do have views, for instance, about those entitled gits who insisted on going out of bounds at the ski resort in BC and had to be rescued by the ski patrol (ah but was that, on the other hand, perhaps unnecessary nanny-stateism?) -- the world has moved on.

So, clearly, I should be working on a post about Gaza, since it seems perfectly likely that Israel will still be pounding the crap out of it as I enter my retirement years. Any other suggestions for stories that, like turnips or rutabagas, will keep reliably in storage throughout the winter months, even if the thought of them turns the stomach?

Yuppie scum

Am I still allowed to be annoyed at the gentrification of my supermarket if my shopping bags say Leslieville Cheese Shop, Riverdale Farmer's Market, Le Boulanger Francais [Ottawa] and London Review of Books?

I do buy a lot of the old-lady stuff -- innards and passata and nasty Portuguese snacks -- but I fear that's not enough for street cred nowadays.

A thankful new year

For academics, the real New Year comes in September, and by January all good resolutions have been scattered to the four winds. So this time of year, with the cheeriness of Christmas on one side and the really-not-so-horrible horrors of the term to come on the other, always puts me in more of a Thanksgiving mood. The past few days I've been utterly absorbed in a book of letters among members of quite an affluent family of a few generations ago (more on this later, no doubt), and I'm feeling thankful for a few things which have really substantially improved our lot just in the short time since -- say, since 1950. So -- without retracting any of my usual grumbling about our wretched and potentially apocalyptic era -- here are some things I'm feeling thankful for:

1. Central heating. Almost everybody used to be cold and uncomfortable all the time until really quite recently. Thank god we don't have to be. (Now how did you guess this book is about English people?)

2. Respectful and sometimes even effective treatments for cancer. Better pain treatment too. There's still a ton of unnecessary suffering, but my god it used to be worse. And as late as the 1970s patients were being systematically kept in the dark. (When exactly did all that change, I wonder, and how?)

3. Effective cheap instant communications: cheap long-distance, cell phones, e-mail. This one is trickier. I do think that the death of the letter is a terrible loss: not just our lives, but our actual selves are less interesting than those of the people who used to sit down and pour out their thoughts and experiences, with some reflection and in detail, on a regular basis to their far-flung friends. Serious letter-writing is like the Mediterranean diet (I mean the real one, that used to make Cretan peasants live to one hundred): incredibly good for you, but not quite attractive enough for people to stick with when there are cushier alternatives. And that's really too bad. Still: think of the enormous amount of anguish and heartbreak, the terrible mistakes and misunderstandings and missed opportunities caused by letters delayed or gone astray, or garbled telegrams, back in the day. Thank god that's basically over.

4. Parenting taken seriously. Yes, I know it's gone too far, we're creating a monster race of overentitled overprotected zombies, but do admit. The level of parental neglect, selfishness, unfairness and outright cruelty that was socially acceptable just a few generations ago is quite something.

What else should go on the list? And for bonus points, what family have I been reading about? All the clues are there...

UPDATE: Two more indisputable recent contributions to human happiness:

1. Quick no-fault divorce. Surely the main cause of long-term declines in murder rates?
2. The photocopier. Remember the Gestetner? I literally cannot imagine trying to function as a teacher without the ability to create and revise handouts almost instantly.

On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia

The tree is down and the ornaments packed away. The leftovers have been eaten and the hangovers hung. The cats have almost stopped pooping tinsel. It's really over.

Time to put our Bob Cratchit mittens back on and get back up on the stool, rubbing our hands in anticipation as we open the first newspaper of 2009 we can bother to read. Incidentally, does anyone else think that the very lowest ebb of journalism is all those endless lists of Best of/Worst of Whatever that the papers use as vapid filler at the fag-end of every year? It was worth spending part of the holidays at a work-related convention in Philadelphia to avoid all that.

So, what have we in the paper today? [ed. note -- meaning as so often the day before yesterday] Just this from David Eddie:

I come from a family of nerdy number-crunchers; I also went to an egghead high school where about half the population were calculator-toting dorks who spoke in robotic voices and had weird little peach-fuzz mustaches, high-waisted flood pants and tinted glasses.

Hem hem now -- surely no more than one-third or so?

Uncle Dave's advice also seems off in this column: if the writer of the letter can't or won't explain why the in-laws 'deeply dislike' her, isn't that the first thing to get clear about, even if they are physicists? We dorks are usually pacific, even genial folk.