Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean

No, this wasn't technically on the list. But that's only because I didn't think to read it until I saw it sitting there on the shelf at the library, and their copy of "Walden" was out anyway.

I know I have mentioned to many of you before why I love short stories. It's kind of like having snacks when you're not hungry or watching 5 20-minute television shows when you don't have time for a movie. They don't take effort or fill you up full, short stories are just little diversions (unless you're John Steinbeck, in which case piss off, stop ruining my life).

Long live Stuart McLean! These little stories that I usually hear on the radio on Sunday afternoons are always just the right thing to make me laugh aloud on the train home at the end of a very mediocre day at work or the thing to make me tear up when I thought I was too grouchy to feel sympathetic to something.

Their main strength is that they are told in plain Canadian. It's not the same as plain English. Plain Canadian is a speech that assumes you know what the worst is. It assumes that you don't need to be told all the grisly bits, you can tell them from the look on the storyteller's face. That, and Stuart is the unparalleled MASTER of dramatic irony. I believe this appeals to our national sense of patriotism. We don't rally to calls about hope and freedom and whichever that amendment is that lets people carry guns. We tend more to just look over everyone's shoulder and say "Told you it wouldn't work".

I would say the most loveable thing about the Vinyl Cafe is that it makes me feel like I have a lot of good friends around when I'm reading it or listening on the radio. It's disheartening to be out of the hosue for 12 hours in a day and realize you haven't talked to a single person that you truly like. And then along comes Dave and Morley and everything is okay again.


Up next: The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

White Fang by Jack London

I read this one on the not-technically-a-recommendation of Tasha, who usually has a much different taste in books than I do. Fortunately, we both like crazy old Jack London.

White Fang is the story of a wolf-dog who is raised through the many different stages of human interaction. He is born in the wild, but before he is a year old his mother takes him to live in an Indian camp. When he has become a full-grown dog, he is sold to a man who owns a dog-fighting ring. After he is nearly killed in a fight, he is rescued by a man who takes him to live domestically in California. It's kind of an anti-call-of-the-wild thing.

What I enjoyed particularly in this book was that it was kind of an observed progression through the evolution of human society. Rising from the wild to the hunter to the semi-barbaric to the comfort of civilization, White Fang's observations of humanity at each stage throw light on old Jack's perception of how humans got from fighting wolves off their backs to having wolves beg for tidbits under the table. It is a story about a wolf, but is also a story about the domination of humans, and what that might mean to an outside observer.

It is not a long book, and it as lots of lovely bits about the North and the Wild (which are proper nouns to Jack). The style of the writing always generates the ominous feeling of the Wild being very near by. It is a happy but threatening thing, and it makes me all tingly. I imagine all those freeze-dried explorers felt the same before they got lost went crazy or became lunch or all three.

Here's a song that I imagine Jack would have liked. Now I have to go watch the 90's film version of White Fang, which I'm sure Jack would not have liked at all.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

This little play took me all of ninety pages to read. It's only 94 pages long, including stage notes and that, so I must be losing my edge.

This play was adapted very slightly to create the screenplay for My Fair Lady, the film featuring the splendid Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. It has given me endless joy over the years.

To be honest I thought the play would be more different from the film. The main difference is that in the film the main characters are reunited, and in the play their separation is final.

What is it about? It's about the chains that money and class wrap around us. It's about the dignity and feeling that carries a person through life with their chin up. It's about panache.

I am reminded of another play that is infused with a similarly witty eloquence. Cyrano de Bergerac, my all-time favourite romantic hero, could be considered an anti-Higgins - or rather Higgins is the anti-Cyrano. Cyrano is the great poet and lover, treating even a common flower-girl (who is disguised in his play as an orange-seller) as though she were a duchess. Higgins is condescending and rude almost without exception, and I laugh at his surprise when his desires are met with condescension and scorn.

To be honest, there is much more of Higgins' heart than of Cyrano's in me. It makes me unhappy in a way. Wouldn't we all love to say these magnificent lines in honesty:

I carry my adornments on my soul.
I do not dress up like a popinjay;
But inwardly, I keep my daintiness.
I do not bear with me, by any chance,
An insult not yet washed away – a conscience
Yellow with unpurged bile – an honor frayed
To rags, a set of scruples.
I go caparisoned in gems unseen,
Trailing white plumes of freedom, garlanded
With my good name – no figure of a man,
But a soul clothed in shining armor, hung
With deeds for decorations, twirling – thus –
A bristling wit, and swinging at my side
Courage, and on the stones of this old town
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs!

 Rather I find myself acting out the dreary Henry Higgins charade:

If you can't stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don't you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate.

 Making someone writhe until they come around to do what you want them to has its own jolly merits, but I think on the whole I'd rather be Cyrano.

I'm sorry if that didn't really have much to do with the play. I love it dearly, and I grinned like a fool on the GO train while I read it. Higgins is a marvellous worm, really, and I am happy that Eliza storms off with her very own Christian de Neuvillette (a cute, empty-headed boytoy, just like in Cyrano).

Vengeance by George Jonas

Reading this book was partially necessary because Peter lent it to me, and partially because my dad is a nutso Zionist, and I disagree with him on that political stance.

If you haven't googled it already, this is a probably true story of an Israeli counter-terrorist agent who worked in Europe for several years during the 1970's. At the time, counter-terrorism was just becoming a recognized military discipline. The protagonist and his team are given a list of eleven men to kill. The targets were allegedly responsible for planning or carrying out the murder of Israeli athletes during the 1970 Olympics.

This book was compiled as a memoir of one of the agents and has been independently verified in several ways, although obviously not every detail is verifiable.

Since its publication in 1984, very little seems to have changed in the way the Arab-Israeli conflict is fought, and the public knows just as little (or wrongly thinks they know as much) as they did in the 70's.

What I thought was most engaging about this book was its very conversational and unembellished style. It was like someone telling me a story in a bar and it was a heck of a story. It was kind of a Bourne Trilogy thing, but with a protagonist who could have been named Steve Martin, he's so average.

So where does the Zionist thing come in? The author and the protagonist question at several points during the book whether counter-terrorism tactics employed then (and now) by the Israeli government are actually effective at stopping or even decreasing terror. They seem to doubt whether the method of sending a group of hitmen after the hitmen who are chasing hitmen is really anything but vengeance.

My dad seems to think that Israel is justified in doing whatever it takes to protect itself from the forces which would try to destroy it. This seems okay, but not ideal, in theory. Self-preservation is not the highest of moral standings we can take, but when it applies to an entire nation it is logical. The question then is where the line is drawn between self- preservation and continued provocation of a long-standing grudge. So maybe there is justice in hunting down a single human who coordinated and funded an attack killing a dozen civilians. Maybe there is justice in taking out someone whose functional political stance is to destroy Israel and all its inhabitants. The wall I seem to be running into with the modern issue comes down to this: if we're saying it's an eye for an eye, then why, in the most recent events, has the casualty count been Palestine: 213 and Israel: 1? You don't get to claim self-defense on odds like that. Yes, one side has made the first move, but I feel that the proportions of this conflict can not be reconciled with a claim of self-preservation. Every human death is a tragedy, and using civilians as retaliatory targets, whether in response to provocation or not, is neither politically nor morally acceptable.

There's my little political rant. I'm not going to sit here and preach at you about a subject that I have no real-world experience of. I simply would like everyone to take note that this book, thrilling adventure though it is, has a very valid point to make about how terrorism is handled in the global political theatre.

Up next: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. I'm really excited for this one, because I've never read Shaw before and he's a big deal, apparently.

The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis

You thought I'd forgotten this, didn't you?
Wrong! I was just working through a scholarly book that required some serious reflection and contemplation.

"The Allegory of Love" is a critical journey through the poetry of the Middle Ages, tracing a common theme of something called courtly love. This seems like a very dry thing for a summer reading list. I have deeply enjoyed this book, though, because it's by C. S. Lewis. There are a few of you who are about to say "You would have thought it was lame if the name on the cover was different". I contend that I would not have thought it was lame for the very simple reason that I would not have attempted it at all if the name on the cover was different.

Allow me to digress briefly into why C. S. Lewis is the best writer of all time (to me). He writes with a clear, candid style that has a natural rhythm and freshness which suits the novel and the scholarly treatise equally well. He has an ability to make a thought take solid form and once it is out in front of me on the page, I always wonder how I didn't think of it quite like that before. He also has an immense knowledge of this particular subject and just burbles out quotations from obscure sources (all properly cited, of course, and all is right in the world). And somehow he takes what would easily be a topic for a very dull upper-year literature course and makes it seem as important as a train schedule and as interesting as The Matrix was the first time you saw it.
The digression is complete.

Courtly love, that is, the idea that happiness is accessible through successful romantic attachment, came about quite unexpectedly in the early 11th century. To our generation, it seems to have been the topic of all really interesting written and musical art since time immemorial. Lewis traces the germination and evolution of this idea through the poets of the Middle Ages. He shows how the feudal relationship of master and peasant created a mould for romantic feelings to be shaped into a feudal servitude. He shows later how the art of allegory (using a literal story to tell an inner, imaginitive one) was used by poets who lacked the imaginative vocabulary to speak their hearts. Lewis writes, of these early sentimental writers

We are apt to take it for granted that a poet has at his command, besides the actual world and the world of his own religion, a third world of myth and fancy... Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. London and Warwick, Heaven and Hell, Fairyland and Prospero's island. But the triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it.

 The poets, therefore, used the deities of a long-deceased culture to express their emotional experiences and fantasies, as Lewis writes

The old gods, when they ceased to be gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils... only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its third world of romantic imagining.

This new system of using allegories and references to the Greek and Roman pantheons allows the poets to explore and express this new sentiment, romantic love, outside the confines of the morality of their own religious beliefs. Even though these two concepts of love had been spawned and nurtured independently, the interaction and conflict between the courtly love and the divine love continue to colour many great literary works throughout the era. As poets build off the works of others, the form for expressing the inner world changes and allegories become obsolete, but not before giving us the great works of Chaucer and Mallory, and much later the allegorical method was changed into the practice of symbolism (they are definitely different things). And just like that, the modern human has the words and means of expressing their inner life every bit as clearly as they express their literal, physical one.

It is silly of me to try and give you a short-form of this book, which is already itself a condensation of the largest literary experiment ever undertaken. What I will say is that Lewis works indefatigably to give due credit to the poets who had "the power which welds raw masses of experience into a whole", although they may have been overlooked by modern readers. His respect for the poet as a species is infectious, and catches me up in an inherited awe for the skills of those artists. His respect is not given undeservedly, though, as is evident from his discussion on the poet Alanus ab Insulis, who had a style Lewis disliked

Those who have read [the poem] to the end - a small company - and those only, can understand how speedily amused contempt turns into contempt without amusement, and how even contempt at last settles into something not far removed from a rankling personal hatred of the author.

All told, I'd say this is far and away the best literary criticism I've ever read, and is a far sight better than a few of the novels I have already attempted this summer. I'll leave you with one final quote from the book, because it is so quotable. This is in reference to Geoffry Chaucer's great love poem, "Trolius"

The end of Trolius is the great example in our literature of pathos pure and unrelieved. All is to be endured and nothing is to be done. The species of suffering is one familiar to us all, as the sufferings of Lear and Oedipus are not. All men have waited with ever-decreasing hope, day after day, for someone or something that does not come, and would willingly forget the experience... We turn, for relief, to the titanic passions and heroic deaths of tragedy, because they are sublime and remote, and hence endurable...

Up next: Vengeance by George Jonas