Another List of Books from the World's Most Infrequent Blogger

“Even you…may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.” – Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

The Books I Loved Best in 2015

The Country of Ice-Cream Star by Sandra Newman. A linguistically inventive and completely immersive novel set in a shattered future. “Then I remember ice cream been a food I never taste. I wonder what my mama dream to name me for this food, as if she name me Something Lost.” 

The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber. A Christian missionary travels to another planet while his own civilization crumbles. At first, the Oasans (the “aliens”) seem painfully boring. Then we find out why. Strange and new and beautiful and affecting. “Let’s not go there.” “That’s what people say about places where they already are.”

Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. One of those unforgettable books you press on everyone (have you read this? you must read this! here, read this, read this, read this). Ignore the James Wood quote on the cover of My Brilliant Friend: it is not “amiably peopled.” It is vividly-viciously-truthfully-brutally-gratingly-graspingly-ferociously-searchingly-beautifully-wickedly-stridently-strivingly peopled. There's barely an amiable person in the whole series.

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis. One of those novels I immediately declared my intention of not reading because “I don’t like novels where the main characters are animals.” Then I remembered the last time I said this and was proven wrong (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski) and the time before that (Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone). Apparently I do like novels where the main characters are animals and the writing is profound and contains multitudes. 

After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor. Another utterly clear exploration of what it means to be a Buddhist without "beliefs." "Dharma practice exposes the limits of human thought and language when confronted with the puzzle of why we are here at all." 

Book Awards, 2014

1. Funniest (Because Truest) Book of the Year: How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran. Should be required reading for all young people. Also old people who were lost as young people and searching the map for the you-are-here-but-you-will-get-out-of-here arrow.
2. How Have I Not Read This Writer Before Prize: Edna O’Brien for her memoir Country Girl, followed by Edna O’Brien for her novel Country Girls. Utterly beautiful sentences. (Plus, second half of memoir has some juicy literary-celebrity tales.)
3. This year's Gary Shteyngart, Will You Marry Me, Oh Wait, I Forgot, You’re Already Married Award goes to Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart. 
4. Best Novel About What It Means to Be a Member of the Human Race: Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. A novel about the end of the world, and more importantly, what happens after.
5. Most Beautiful and Heartbreaking Book of the Year: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews.
6. Small and Perfect: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. A novel that takes you into its confidence. The fragmentary (but never confusing) form means you don’t have to read sentences like “In the fall we discussed the possibility of moving to the country. I called a real estate agent and began studying listings.”
7. Novel I Hated: The Circle by Dave Eggers. Not very convincing thesis disguised, not very well, as novel. (Last year the award went to The Dinner by Herman Koch for the exact same reason.) 
8. Novel I Loved: Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers. A strange, surprising, funny, tragic, provocative novel with yes, a thesis, but also, a compelling voice. Also: Best Title of the Year.
9. Novel I Wanted to Love But Couldn't, Quite: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. I couldn't get over the wizards decloaking. Normally I don’t have a problem with cloaking devices or wizards or oceans at the end of the lane. Too much supernatural technology, maybe, made the fiction feel unworkable here.
10. Read It and Get Schooled Award: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass. I read this so that I could teach it. It teaches itself. 

Reading List 2013: Eight I Loved

1. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. You will read into the night, miss your subway stop, forget to eat. Near the end, you will read in small draughts. Finishing will be a bereavement.   
2. Tenth of December by George Saunders. Saunders will break your heart. Every story. Every time. 
3. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. Meticulous, judicious, painstakingly documented. Still leaves you (what the) stunned and slack-jawed (hell?).
4. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. How to make sense of war, torture, guns, bombs, refugees, orphans, human trafficking, betrayal, exile, despair. Goodness. Kindness. Hope.      
5. Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska. How to make sense of addiction. (Begin with the truth, as Bydlowska does here.)
6. Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel.  Remote mother, lost father, theories of attachment, the making of art, and other lifelong puzzles. Graphic memoir, brilliantly and beautifully done.
7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaimon. Small book yet spacious enough to contain the Big Bang, the history of myth, and one particular childhood.
8. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Smart, skillful novel tracing the many possible lives of the heroine, born in 1911, and her many possible deaths.       

Drink from Water Everywhere

The central Sierras of Argentina are dry, naturally dry because it is a semi-arid region (and it is August, the heart of winter), and unnaturally dry because – well, I can’t follow the conversations in Spanish, but my sister says the topic ruins more dinner parties than politics, religion or soccer, so I assume the unnatural reasons include climate change and other forms of human stupidity.

During the day we walk up into the hills, through scrub and thorny bushes, and I realize I am unconsciously listening for trickling water, which I associate with walking in the wild, but there is only the wind in dry branches, and our feet slipping on red rock, and other Waste Landic sounds.

In the city, it is easy to forget the earth. Cities are in fact built on rivers of forgetfulness. Out here, you see how long a vine holds on before it withers, how the husk remains after the roots are dead. How dependent we are on the water that runs beneath the earth.

I am not the only one missing this sound. My sister’s landlord has built a fountain near his studio that endlessly recycles its water, and one of her students shows me a falling rain app on his iPad.

At night, the south wind tries to dismantle the house. It is the loudest wind I have ever heard, and I worry it will pull down the trees. My sister says any tree standing can withstand the wind: its roots are deep in the earth looking for water. I think of a scrap of another poem, copied out in my journal in Bhutan, a translation of Rilke: these days / which seem dry and entirely fruitless to you / have roots between the stones and drink from water everywhere.

Still, I am nervous walking back to my place in the dark, expecting to be struck at any moment by flying roof tiles or logs or the whirling cab of a small truck. But even in my anxiety, I have to stop and gaze at the night sky.

It is the most beautiful sky I have ever seen, first because there is no light pollution, and secondly, because it is glitters with far more stars than the northern sky, in constellations I do not recognize, with the luminous arc of Milky Way stretching all the way across. After several nights of Googling, I can easily find the Southern Cross, and the bright spots of the Magellanic Clouds, but am too dazzled to recognize anything else.

One night I hear the sound of water trickling through the flagstones outside. In the morning, I cannot see any sign of rain. Everything is so parched that water disappears almost instantly into the earth. But then I notice: there is a sharpness around the edges of things, and the dirt path is firmer beneath my feet.

Tribes of Liars

This time in June always reminds me of those long days in grade school just before summer vacation, when we were kept occupied by Twenty Questions and the same riddles year after year involving matches, ice, goldfish, and some kid whose mom was a doctor.

The riddle that really intrigued me involved a guy, a Tribe of Liars, and a question.

The guy is lost in a jungle occupied by two tribes: the Tribe that Always Tells the Truth, and the Tribe that Always Lies. After many days, he comes across a tribesperson at a fork in the path. He needs to know which fork leads out of the jungle, but he can’t tell if he's facing a truth-teller or a liar, and he can only ask one question. What can he ask to ensure that he gets the right answer?

For me, the real riddle was why he only got one question. Was one of the tribes also the Tribe that Would Kill You If You Asked More than One Question? I could suspend disbelief for a Tribe of Truth-Tellers and a Tribe of Liars, but this other condition was just inexplicable.

Listening to Mayor Ford’s evasions and equivocations about the crack video this past month, I felt like the guy in the jungle. What one question, I started wondering, could we ask that would ensure a truthful answer? And then I realized it wouldn't matter how carefully we worded the question, because there is no rule in place to compel the Mayor to answer honestly, or at all. Our powerlessness in this situation is the real riddle. 

When people want to speak honestly, they tell the simple truth. When they believe they can lie with impunity, they flat-out lie. When they want to lie but are afraid of being caught out, they equivocate. Equivocations are easy to spot because there is something off about the language; it ducks and dodges and veers away. An equivocation might be partially true, or technically true, or true if you squint one eye and shut the other, but it arises out of the same intention as the flat-out lie: the intention to deceive.

In these last days before summer vacation, I believe we know the answer to our question, but we’re still baffled by the conditions that surround the asking and the answering, and the fact that when elected officials deceive us, we can't do anything about it. 

Well, except vote.

Cowboys and aliens and spies

Spent the weekend on the couch reading Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, a fluidly-written, extensively-researched masterpiece of synthesis and even-handedness. But there is just so much weirdness and wrongness to process that half-way through, I realized I was developing an odd immunity. Sailing to Italy to find treasures buried in former lifetimes? Uh huh. Universe four quadrillion years old? Uh huh. Writing so revelatory it will cause the uninitiated to jump out windows or die of pneumonia? Sure, why not.

The Church of Scientology infiltrated government offices around the world? Uh huh. Harassed the IRS into granting it tax-exempt status? OK. Woman with legal complaint against the Church found with slit wrists, two suicide notes, three bullets in chest and one in head, and it’s still not declared a homicide? Hmm. Next?

Defections and disappearances and secret bases? Cowboys and aliens and spies? Yeah. Uh huh. All of it.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality, T.S. Eliot wrote. And some humankind, it would seem, can’t bear any at all.

This book is not for sale in Canada or the U.K. Apparently we have libel laws that would only make it easier for the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology to win a lawsuit against the publisher. But I am full of admiration for Lawrence Wright for having the courage and the skillfulness (in the ordinary and the Buddhist sense) to take this on. I hope he gets another Pulitzer. (And makes a gazillion dollars, in case he has to fight lawyers on billion-year retainers.)

Frankennovels

Yesterday I finished reading a Frankennovel.  An award-winning Frankennovel, no less.

A Frankennovel is stitched together out of good and bad parts and brought to lurching life by an artificial external energy source (usually a jolt called Publication). The good parts are shapely and in working order, the flawed parts uneven or mismatched or bolted together.

But flaws are not the problem; readers will overlook or forgive or forget the flaws of living novels.

Frankennovels feel to me like exercises in novels. Like the author wanted to Write a Novel, and so assembled the parts, and pieced them together with skill. But the story started off dead, and remains dead at heart. 

Then I thought about the award, and wondered if it’s the reader’s job to bring the beating heart. Maybe the failing was mine. While contemplating the question, I came across this line in Peter Schjeldahl's review of an exhibition of abstract art at MOMA:

“The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it’s something that a person needed to do and which wakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.”*

Not every novelist can write in the fever dream that Garcia Marquez says produced One Hundred Years of Solitude.  But that compulsion is necessary for lesser novels as well. What Schjeldahl calls a ”comprehensive emotional necessity” never arises from the desire for publication or from the idea of Writing a Novel (or Being a Writer). It’s a love affair with the story. That is the beating heart. 

* Schjeldahl, Peter. "Shapes of Things." The New Yorker: 7 Jan. 2013: 68

Old New Year's Eves and Days

Notes from Old Journals. (With Status Updates.)

December 31, 1985: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Home for the holidays from university. My dad has given his sister a fat, smiling “Buddha of Happiness” statue and I rub the round belly for luck. (Later, in Bhutan, I will see hundreds of depictions of dozens of Buddhas, but never this one; I will learn this is not the Buddha at all, and the Buddhist way to happiness has nothing to do with luck, but with karma.)

January 1, 1991: Sudbury, Ontario

Home for the holidays after two years of teaching in Bhutan. I am miserable, disoriented, homesick for the mountains. “Time is moving so slowly, at times I feel stuck in one hour forever. If I were home for good, how long would this take? To pass, I mean.” (See Answer, January 1999.)

January 1, 1994: Gomtu, Bhutan 

Visiting my in-laws with my husband, Tshewang, and our son, Pema. “Pema wakes in the morning and escapes the mosquito net. There are the usual necessities – diapers, juice.” (I do not write about the other necessity: a feeling of belonging in this country that I love, that I have married into. I do not know it is necessary. I don’t even know it is missing.)

December 31, 1995: Thimphu, Bhutan 

We have just moved from a tiny, cramped, two-bedroom Bhutanese-style cottage into a spacious three-bedroom Western-style bungalow. I love the house and feel at home. Tshewang does not love the house, he does not feel at home. Our marriage is unravelling and I don't know how to knit it back up. Instead I write. My friend Susan has been pestering me to submit something to some CBC contest I've never heard of, so I begin an essay (that will win a $10,000 award and become a book).

December 31, 1997: Thimphu, Bhutan

Champagne and Auld Lang Syne with friends. Tshewang and I have split up. I have decided to leave Bhutan. I wake up on January 1 and write, “I don’t want to go.” Why am I leaving? Whenever anyone asks, I always have a good five or six reasons on hand, but none of them really answers the question.

January 1, 1999: Lanark, Ontario

With Pema and my best friend, Susan. I have been in Canada for six months. I have left Bhutan, I have left Tshewang, my life story does not make sense to me. I think I am going to feel this grief forever. Susan assures me I will not. I am afraid that I have burned through all my allotted luck and happiness. Susan assures me I have not. But how long will this take to pass? (Answer: a long, long time.)

December 31, 1999: Toronto, Ontario

With Pema and Tshewang, down by Lake Ontario, star-struck equally by fireworks and by the thousands and thousands of people gathered peacefully to watch the skies and celebrate the biggest New Year’s Eve in a thousand years. No planes fall out of the sky; the grid stays up. The only sign of disorder we see is a couple of teenagers throwing a newspaper into the street. A police officer tells them to pick it up. They do. Our eyes go back to the chandeliers in the sky. Tshewang says, “I feel proud to be a human being.”

December 31, 2002: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

Visiting family. I make a list of accomplishments for the year: went to teacher’s college, got a Canada Council grant for a novel about a broken-up family, got shortlisted for a CBC Canadian Literary Award (what?? I don’t even remember what story I sent in), filed three years of late income tax returns. I have been in therapy for two years. I am lucky. I am starting to feel happy.

January 1, 2004: Toronto

Listen to Billie Holliday, eat leftover shrimp risotto, wish for a full-time teaching job. (Note: Wish comes true later that year. Luck? Karma? The fruits of therapy? All of the above? It is a job that gives me great happiness.) 

December 31, 2008: Toronto

I finish my first novel about a broken-up family, two hours before midnight. I mean, "finish." (It's never finished. Even after it is published, to my great delight, in 2011.)

January 1, 2012: Toronto

I go to the gym and am tricked by the sight of the sun into walking home with wet hair. While my scalp thaws, I leaf through old journals and think about luck and karma and happiness. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a great majority of the European words for 'happy' at first meant 'lucky.' An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant 'wise'." In Buddhism, there are several words for happiness, but that is a topic for another day. According to the Bhutanese, whatever you do on the first day of the new year sets the pattern for the rest of the year, so I have to work on my second novel.

Bugs in the Brain

Instead of writing, I've been wandering around online. A Simpsons website led to a clip of The Pathological Liar, Jon Lovitz's SNL character (“Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket”), which led to the investigation of the following ailments, none of which, alas, has any place in the novel I am (not) writing.

Pseudologia Fantastica: Uncontrollable lying. Also known as mythomania.  

The afflicted tell fantastical tales signifying their uniqueness, worth and courage (friendship with celebrities, kinship with royalty, gratitude of maidens rescued from railway tracks). They are not seeking any obvious material gain from the listener, so this is not a case of sociopathic manipulation, and they are not otherwise deluded or psychotic (although some experts consider the stories a form of “wish psychosis”).

Is it a case of damage to the membrane that normally keeps daydreams and fantasies inside their heads? A coding problem? Poorly executed fiction, and in the wrong medium to boot? At some level the afflicted know their stories are not true, unlike people suffering from

Morgellons Disorder: Syndrome in which sufferers experience symptoms of a mysterious skin disorder.

The afflicted experience burning, crawling or itching sensations (formication) and skin lesions, and claim that red, black and blue fibres erupt from their skin. Sufferers have identified a range of potential causes, from genetically modified foods and environmental pollutants to aliens. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control have determined that Morgellons is a form of

Delusional Parasitosis: Mistaken belief that one is suffering from parasites such as lice, scabies or worms.

The afflicted experience formication and often present proof of infestation in the form of skin scrapings, lint or other particles, usually carried in a small container  (the “matchbox sign”), but lab tests show no parasites. My sister and I have both suffered this affliction on our travels (she gets delusional scabies, I get delusional lice); our delusions arose after we contracted and treated the real thing. The difference? With the real thing, you know you have it, and that is the end of it. The delusional one doesn't feel like a cold, incontrovertible fact; it is a kind of brain fever. You are convinced you have it, and that is just the beginning.

Having spent two hours on fictional bugs, I now pledge to spend an equal amount of time on fiction. Cold, incontrovertible fact: writing fiction is hard work. A little brain fever would help.

Twelve of '12 in Twelve or Less

Twelve books I loved in 2012, in the order that I read them, and why I loved them in twelve words or less:

1. The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje. The old story-telling Ondaatje returns.  
2. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Every time I thought I knew where it was going, I didn’t.
3. Galore by Michael Crummey. One Hundred Years of Solitude in Newfoundland.
4. Just Kids by Patti Smith. Love, create, lose, create, love. Repeat.
5. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeannette Winterson. How literature can save your life.
6. Open City by Teju Cole. Long walks with unusually perceptive but ultimately unreliable narrator unnerve reader.
7. Ninety Days by Bill Clegg. Memoir of relapse and recovery, and what makes the difference.
8. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Waters. You'll need a Do Not Disturb sign: “I’m readin’ here.”
9. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. This is how you win a MacArthur Genius Grant.
10. The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg. A different kind of addiction: can a person eat themselves to death?
11. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Marie Semple. "I'm still readin' here."
12. Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt. Great antidote to all the nonsense about world's demise on 21/12/2012.

Elsewhere

As a child I was always scheming to leave home. I read constantly (the first escape), and fantasized frequently about living elsewhere. The where didn’t matter, only the else (else, from the Old English elles: other, otherwise, different).

I even begged to be sent to boarding school, imagining a long journey by train, an old stone residence, cold rain falling against narrow windows lit against the coming dark.

In our fantasies of away, even the rainfall is otherwise. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

But my grandparents were not keen ( “I’ll ‘boarding school’ you in a minute”), and so I began to lobby for the next best thing, and at last, at age 11, I was finally allowed to leave home. It was only an hour and a half to Camp McDougall in Thessalon, but it was away, it was elsewhere (other, otherwise, different).

Eventually my idea of away began to assume the shape of a big city. Cities had bookstores, literary festivals, publishers. Cities were where stories got told. You moved to a city and you found your community and it was different (other, elsewhere), and this was how (I thought) you became otherwise (a writer).

I left Northern Ontario almost thirty years ago, and have lived away ever since. But I went back to Thessalon last weekend as part of Stories in the North Literary Festival and when we passed the entrance to the summer camp, I felt a surge of excitement, not at the idea of leaving home, but at the idea of returning. The northern landscape, after so many years in a city, now seems like elsewhere: the long lines of hills, old stones emerging out of cold water, narrow farms, white pines against a dark sky.

Stories in the North was created four or five years ago by serious writers and readers.  A serious writer is someone who writes. These people write. They meet to share what they've written; they reach out to writing groups in other communities; they publish and host open mike nights. Their schedule for National Novel Writing Month is full (go to the cafe, the funeral home, the library, write for three hours, six hours, twelve hours). And of course, they created this literary festival, and found funding (through the Ontario Arts Council), and it runs smoothly and beautifully.

Writers with a connection to the north are invited (and paid) to lead workshops and to read, and the writer who accepts this invitation is rewarded by serious enthusiasm (along with music and home baking). This is a place where stories get told. Disappearing lakewater, pioneer grandparents, a woman on fire, a ghost sheep in the middle of the road. Stories that light up the windows against the coming dark.

Yes, you can leave home and seek out a community of writers elsewhere, or you can make one where you are. Elsewhere, like home, is a state of mind. The physical journey is not necessary. But community? Writers write to be read. Community is essential. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

Moving Out

I am in the hall by the elevator, surrounded by boxes, a hockey bag, one of those pull-up bars that hasn't fit in the doorway of any of the places we've ever lived.

My son is moving out. His friends are waiting downstairs with the truck. The elevator door opens and I hand him the last box. “Thanks,” he says. “I’ll call you. Bye Mom.”

"We didn't even take a picture to document this," I say. My son is moving out! The whole process took less than twenty minutes. And nineteen years. "I should have taken a picture."

"It was too fast," he says. The elevator door closes.

Yes, it was. 

Grief Does Strange Things to People

Grief does strange things to people. Death, the idea of death, the approach of death, the finality. Families fall apart when they should pull together. They plot and weep and accuse when they should weep and forgive and breathe. They can’t see the big picture. The big picture is a solar eclipse that can only be viewed through a slit. The eye sees pieces and slivers and thus the smallest matter becomes the whole. Battles are fought over coins and clocks and ugly dishes. Things are broken and go missing. People are cut off and left out.

Death does strange things to the living. They plug their grief into books and houses, slippers and silver, a tobacco tin of money and the pearls Nanna promised, and these objects light up, they blaze in the dimness, they burn with a brightness that seems death-defying. In the dark, the grief-stricken are confused: Look, they cry, there it is! There is my love who is going, who is gone, you can tell by the light! There is my love, it is all I have left, I must not let go.

Love is all they have left. They cannot let go. 

Home

At least I have pictures of paradise: the chateau, the sycamore tree, and my desk (now someone else's).

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Last Post

Morning walk through the vineyards, past the ponies in the meadow, along the winding village street. In the chateau, the sounds of leaving: the zip and thud of suitcases, the car in the courtyard.

Writing is its own place: you have to go inside (yourself) and stay there. As long as it is quiet enough, I think I could write anywhere.  But I will miss the physical joys and material pleasures of Lavigny, its rolling fields and rose gardens, the view to the lake and the Alps, the silk-canopied beds and deeply quiet rooms. I will miss my writing desk in front of a window completely filled with the cool green leaves of a sycamore tree. I will miss getting up from this desk in the late afternoon and going down to Lake Geneva to swim. I will miss the magpies and the starlings and the lavender sky at dusk. 

I will miss having breakfast with poets. 

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Six

Sunday morning walk through quiet fields and orchards. A crow, a cat, a silent cyclist. We climb a hill and at the top, the Alps soar up. A church steeple stands above the sharply pitched village roofs. Paths invite us off the road, to find other fields and views, but we head back to the chateau to write. It is our last day.

I do not want to leave.

I want to "wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing, and what could be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease." 
-- Don Quixote, the Edith Grossman translation, which I am reading because it is here

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Five

Revised from morning until it was time to go for a swim in the very blue waters of Lake Geneva. Revising still feels like making it worse. Swimming in Lake Geneva makes it better. What will I do when I get back to Toronto? I suppose I could take the TTC down to Lake Ontario after a day of revising, but this seems untenable. Also, when I get home, I'll have to bother with bothersome things like getting groceries, and cooking, and cleaning. Here, we drift downstairs at breakfast and fetch freshly baked bread from the hook on the back door. We drift downstairs again at dinner and are served a three-course meal. Someone comes in once a week and cleans our rooms. No phones ring. No sirens shriek. No garbage trucks clatter and grind. When we need to get up for just a minute or two, we can stand at the windows and look at the tip of Mont Blanc.

It's a little like leaving Bhutan. Yes, you take it with you, but what you really want is to stay.

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Four

A break from writing in our rooms and wandering through the vineyards to visit CERN, where they are slamming protons together deep under the earth to find the answers to such questions as 

What gives particles mass? (It is all the work of the Higgs-Boson, apparently.)

Why can't quarks be pried apart? (The quark-gluon plasma that existed just after the Big Bang was a soup so hot the quarks wouldn't stick together. It cooled. They stuck. So far they haven't been unstuck.)

Why is there something rather than nothing? (If matter and anti-matter immediately annihilate each other, why is the universe made mostly of matter? Where has all the anti-matter gone?)


The equipment -- tunnels, magnets, pipes, coils -- is ugly. The graphs are incomprehensible. But the names are often poetry.

Quark is from Finnegan's Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark."

Quarks have flavours. The names of their flavours are up, down, strange, charm, truth and beauty.

Truth and beauty quarks are now more commonly known as top and bottom quarks. This was a bad marketing decision.

"Strong interactions conserve all flavours."

Gluon: not beautiful, but at least its function is clear.

Cold Dark Matter: perhaps the most beautiful name of all.

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Three

Revising the first draft.

I feel like I'm making it worse. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," my grandparents used to say. About everything. 

I hope they were right.

Outside the sun is pouring down. It's too hot to walk in the vineyards, but I walk anyway. Under a walnut tree I meet a woman from the neighbourhood, Phyllida, walking her two small dogs. She tells me the shade of the walnut is said to be deadly on very hot days. "They say it affects your lungs," she says. "The cool air can give you an awful cold."

Save-This Sirens are going off in my head. Who in my novel can be killed off by the cool shade of the walnut tree? Must discuss with my friend Google.

Google says that walnut trees emit something called juglone, which suppresses respiratory functions...in certain plants.

Damn! None of my characters are plants.

Still. I am going to use this. I'm in Switzerland! There are Jungians everywhere! It's synchronicity! (Or else I'm making it worse.)

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Two

Three of the other writers here at Lavigny are poets. I almost never write poetry, but listening to them read their work I often feel a longing for the economy of their genre, the perfection of their lines.

Novels are full of clutter: closets, curtains, cupboards. Calendars. Clocks. Novelists are always worried about the clock: what day is it? how much time has passed? is it winter yet? Poems don't need clocks.

Novelists are hoarders. They never want to throw anything out in case they need it later. Poets throw most everything out. If the plastic iced tea jug with sunflowers from 1974 requires matching glasses and a backstory, they expect you to bring your own.  

Novelists are liars. They want to tell you things but they don't want to tell you why they are telling you because that would spoil the trick, the scene, the light, so they create elaborate deceptions and then hide behind the curtain. Poets just point. 

Novelists mostly add. Poets mostly subtract.

Novelists can afford to be reckless. Poets can afford to be brief.