Monday, July 25, 2016

"Sex and the single cartoonist"/ "No going gently for, thank you very much"

May 23, 2016 "Sex and the single cartoonist": I cut out this article by Brad Mackay in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011:

In the early 1990s, my girlfriend and I considered it our duty as self-righteous university undergrads to write to cartoonist Chester Brown concerning a story in his comic book Yummy Fur. If I remember correctly, the offensive storyline in question detailed in a non-judgmental - and almost clinical - way Brown's lifelong obsession with pornography.

I'll spare you the details of my politically correct proto-feminist bluster. Let's just say that as a devoted fan of his brilliant, groundbreaking alt-comic, I recall being genuinely distressed that he would threaten to throw it all away in favour of an examination of an issue as objectionable as (gasp) pornography.

To Brown's credit, he reprinted my letter without comment in a subsequent issue of Yummy Fur. As for me, I eventually graduated from university, grew out of my ideological training pants and quickly learned to appreciate Brown's fearless approach to his art.

Little did I know, he was just getting warmed up.

Given how I reacted two decades ago, I can only imagine how fans of Brown's recent work, 2003's bestseller Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, will react to his new graphic memoir, Paying for It. His first all-original graphic work, the book's subtitle - A Comic-strip Memoir About Being a John - does a nice job of summing up the plot. And on the surface, Paying for It is as advertised: an exposé of the prostitution industry from the first-person perspective of a repeat customer.

But it also somehow manages to be about more than just its author's journey into john-dom, wrangling with issues such as the nature of love and sexual attraction, all thanks to Brown's almost-fiendish command of the medium.

The book begins in 1996 as his relationship with CBC Radio personality and musician Sook Yin-Lee comes to an unexpected end. While most people would wallow in self-loathing, Brown takes the news as an opportunity to explore his feelings about romance in general. Witnessing his ex's new relationship bloom, then wither, girds him in his opinion that romantic relationships are inherently destructive.

Fast-forward a couple of years and Brown is resolved to try out prostitution as a means of satisfying his sexual desires. From there, he slowly and methodically lays out his progression through the foreign (to most of us) world of prostitution, chronicling his intimate experiences with more than two dozen prostitutes over a five-year period. Along the way, he presents his case for the decriminalization of the profession to his friends and family, which will seem self-serving to some readers.

But Brown is well aware of society's attitudes toward prostitution and has built this book with such care and precision that I'd be shocked if even my devout Catholic mother weren't sympathetic to his world view - at least a little.

This care is evident in the various levels that the book operates on. First and foremost, it's an exploration and justification of prostitution as a logical option between consenting adults. But it also plays out as a tricky tale of unromantic love: a heartfelt argument against the ingrained cultural trappings of romance, and a fierce defence of the often overlooked joys of other forms of love (such as platonic, filial, interpersonal).

And it's funny. As is the case in most of his other autobiographical comics, Brown sets himself up as the target of the jokes. Joe Matt, a good friend and recurring character in Brown's work, gets the lion's share of the yucks here. I especially liked Matt's reaction after he learns Brown has visited a prostitute: "This is disturbing, but it's also good gossip."

Of course, the art is as idiosyncratic as ever. Brown forgoes the six-panel grid and turns down the cross-hatching that he used in Louis Riel for a small, rectangular eight-panel layout inspired in part by the comics of Carl Barks. These oblong panels house some of the year's most effective cartooning, capable of lending dignity to even the most awkward sex scenes.

The book is not without its faults, though. Brown's decision to obscure the faces of the women he has sex with to protect their identities is bound to lead to criticism that he's objectifying them. And it's difficult not to feel that a female perspective is missing here, especially since all we see of them is their frequently naked bodies.

Then there are the copious appendices and notes, which Brown has reserved for his real axe-grinding. Though often amusing (especially the notes by his friend and fellow cartoonist Seth) and thought-provoking, they are at times reductive and didactic. Some read like something you might find tucked under your car's windshield wiper, like his comment that "any government scheme to license sex would be evil." Possibly, but in what world is this an actual concern? In the end, though, I expect most people will judge this book on the comics, not the commentary, and these are some of the best comics of Brown's career.

Simply told in a deceptively straightforward manner, Paying for It is a defiant work of truth-telling and a welcome return to autobiographical comics from one of the medium's incontrovertible masters.

Brad Mackay is an Ottawa-based writer who co-edited The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist, to which he also contributed a biographical essay.


"No going gently for, thank you very much": I cut out this article by Stephan Amidon in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011:


Emily, Alone is one of those rare books in which nothing particular happens and yet just about everything seems to be going on. Stewart O'Nan's 12th novel is a sequel of sorts to his well-regarded Wish You Were Here (2002), which dealt with the white, middle-class Maxwell clan as it tried to come to terms with the recent death of their patriarch, Henry. A decade later, Henry's widow Emily soldiers on, surviving in quiet suburban solitude in the too-big Pittsburgh home she refuses to vacate. Her life is a progression of difficult negotiations with both the past and an outside world which is leaving her further and further behind. Should she sell Henry's monstrous old Oldsmobile for a more practical car? What is to be done about her sister-in-law Arlene's smoking, which is clearly killing the woman? Should she put down the family dog as he grows increasingly decrepit?

The book opens with Arlene's terrifying collapse as the two women shuffle through the breakfast buffet at the Eat 'n' Park. It turns out to be nothing more than a transient "episode," though it nevertheless provides Emily with an intimation of her own mortality. Although she dreads becoming "one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar," the prospect of her demise proves impossible to ignore. It pervades everything, from a bout of strep throat, which casts her into a tenebrous netherworld, to Henry's old tools in the basement, "lined up by size on pegboard, having fulfilled their lifetime guarantees."

This is not to say that the novel is gloomy or morbid. It percolates with life, most immediately in the form of Emily's family, who descend on her for holidays like panic attacks. The first to visit is her daughter Margaret, a recovering alcoholic with a personality more befitting a troubled teenager than a 50-year-old mother of two. O'Nan's depiction of the mother-daughter minefield, in which the smallest of remarks can rapidly escalate into a full-scale donnybrook, is one of the novel's finest achievements. Rather less resonant is the Easter-time visit of her feckless son Kenneth and his lesbian daughter Ella, which proves to be one of the few moments in the book that feels perfunctory.

For the most part, however, O'Nan's storytelling is as patient and meticulous as his heroine. He illuminates the everyday with splendid precision. Readers who appreciate psychological nuance and fictional filigree will delight in Emily, Alone. O'Nan has the rare ability to take small moments - the writing of thank-you notes, for instance, or a visit to a flower show - and invest them with a mysterious power the source of which you can never quite identify. This precision is never more effective than in the rendering of Emily herself, with her affinities for Masterpiece Theatre, the plain-spoken decency of Bob Dole and the lesser works of Van Gogh, those that are too obscure to be reproduced on a postcard.

In perhaps the book's most poignant scene, Emily happens upon her grandson Justin, an astrophysics major in college, as he gazes at a website streaming images from the Hubble space telescope. "He leaned aside so she could see the screen. It was supposed to be a galaxy, but all she could make out was a white smudge in the night sky." It is typical of this fine book that, out of one fleeting moment, O'Nan can so wholly conjure his heroine's upcoming date with the heavens.

Stephen Amidon is the co-author, with his brother Dr. Thomas Amidon, of The Sublime Engine, a biography of the human heart.


"John Brown's bawdy": I cut out this article by James Adams in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 30, 2011.  I found it on Pressreader so I can't copy and paste it here.

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"A typical john"

Dec. 25, 2015 "A typical john": I cut out this article/ book review by Mark Medley in the National Post on Apr. 30, 2011.   It's about prostitution and it's insightful:


In a recent Toronto Life cover story entitled “The Secret Life of a Bay Street Hooker,” a veteran Toronto detective opined that “very few condos in the city would not have escorts working out of them.” The cartoonist Chester Brown can attest to that. Years ago, when he was still regularly frequenting prostitutes, an ad for a particular hooker caught his eye. He clicked on a map on the brothel’s website, which directed customers to a condo on King Street West.

“Looking at the map, I realized it’s my building,” Brown says, laughing. “I never did go. I think it would have felt funny. Although it would have been very handy …”

Unlike most johns, Chester Brown is unusually candid about his experiences in the Toronto sex industry, which he chronicles in a darkly humorous and painfully honest new graphic memoir, Paying For It. The 50-year-old is one of the world’s foremost cartoonists, and Paying For It is among the most anticipated comics of the year. For those only familiar with Louis Riel, his critically acclaimed comic-strip biography of the Métis revolutionary, which was published in 2003, Brown’s newest book may come as a shock. Readers will learn more about Brown — and see more of him — than they probably ever wanted.

Paying For It, however, is actually a return to the autobiographical musings that established Brown’s career. In some ways, this is the perfect companion piece to The Playboy, which came out in 1992. In that book, a young Brown grappled — both emotionally and physically — with his love of Hugh Hefner’s titillating magazine. Whereas the Chester Brown found in The Playboy was ashamed of his actions, in Paying For It, Brown is open — and somewhat proud, you could say — about his relationship with sex workers. The Playboy, he says, “kind of freed me up to be able to talk about that side of myself. To be open, not to be ashamed, about admitting to watching pornography or talking about my sex life.” Paying For It, in some ways, is a celebration of the world’s oldest profession.

In the summer of 1996, Brown and his long-time girlfriend, actress and radio personality Sook-Yin Lee, broke up. In the months that followed, Brown began to question the necessity of “romantic love” and the arguments, jealousy and effort that usually accompanies such relationships. After a prolonged period of celibacy, Brown decided to visit a prostitute. He paints a surprisingly endearing portrait of the process: Unable to find a streetwalker, he turns to the back pages of a local weekly; he’s worried about being arrested by police, or getting mugged, and unsure of the proper etiquette — does one pay the hooker before or after the act, for instance. “It takes guts to walk into a place like this,” says the young woman, “Carla.” (All names have been changed, and faces are never shown). After leaving the brothel, Brown writes that he felt “exhilarated and transformed” and that “a burden that I had been carrying since adolescence had disappeared.”

It has never come back.
“I just kind of felt like I’d been freed or something,” Brown says, during an interview at a coffee shop in his Toronto neighbourhood. “All these people walking around with their concerns about romantic love, and how do I find love, and how is my relationship going, and all that kind of stuff. And suddenly, I felt like I wasn’t involved in that world or that way of thinking anymore.”

It’s a world that exists just under the surface of our own, a world of (sometimes misleading) classified ads, online forums where johns post reviews, and changing identities; sometimes the woman Brown thought he was meeting was not the woman who opened the door. Paying For It documents visits with all 23 of the prostitutes Brown frequented over the course of five years; some he slept with once, some he saw several times. By the end of his odyssey, he’d learned that the old stereotypes — the hooker with the heart of gold, like Nancy in Oliver Twist, or the villainess, like Cathy Ames in East of Eden — are just that: stereotypes.

It’s not just prostitutes who are stereotyped, but johns as well. Brown says one of the motivations to write this book was to explain things from a john’s point of view, making Paying For It sort of a 21st-century version of the anonymous Victorian tell-all My Secret Life. That said, Brown calls himself “a typical john.”

“I do think I’m typical in that probably most johns are introverted, not the outgoing type, and probably don’t feel confident in being able to get women to go to bed with them without paying for it,” he says. But “in at least one significant way, I’m not typical, in that I’m very open and out about it. Probably most johns would be ashamed, and wouldn’t be telling their friends.”

Which Brown does, almost immediately after sleeping with a hooker for the first time. One of the most interesting moments in the book occurs when he recounts his visit to friends and fellow cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, who is blunt in his assessment: “You cheated.” This idea that sex is something one works for — almost a reward — is one Brown rejects.

“One of the things a man is supposed to do is he’s supposed to be able to get sex easily,” he says. “The more easy you can do it — convince women to go to bed with you — the more manly you’re seen as being. So if you don’t use your personality or your wit or your whatever to get women — if you’re just paying for it — you’re seen as cheating, somehow.” Brown didn’t care about “cheating” anymore. He’d had girlfriends in the past, and knew he could get another girlfriend if he wanted. It’s that he didn’t want to. “I just found myself not wanting that type of relationship anymore,” he explains. “It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to make the effort. It was I didn’t like being a boyfriend. I didn’t like how I felt when I was a boyfriend. So that left me with fewer options. If I wanted to have sex, it was going to have to be a different way.”

And while he admits there “definitely is a difference between what you might call girlfriend sex and prostitute sex, to me it was close enough to what I wanted. Yes, the most passionate sex I’ve had was with girlfriends as opposed to prostitutes. But, I don’t know, the best sex with prostitutes is still pretty close to the best sex I’ve had.”

Paying For It ends with a twist, one which I’ll now spoil: Brown falls in love with a prostitute. Although “Denise” no longer works as a call girl, Brown still sees her every two weeks; they’ve been together for eight years. He laughs when asked what to call her. He isn’t sure. Call girl? Escort? Girlfriend? Special friend? It’s a peculiar relationship, where money still changes hands, but each has feelings for the other.

“I don’t quite understand why she’s decided she prefers being in this relationship with me to being in a more conventional, romantic relationship when she could be in one,” he admits. “We kind of talk about it, and she says she likes our relationship. Whatever. I don’t want to try and talk her out of it — I like being in this relationship.”

So does that mean he’s changed his stance on romantic love?

“In our culture, we’re always having this discussion about what romantic love is. So I guess I leave it open for that reason. I don’t think anyone’s really sure what we mean by romantic love or love in general. We know it when we feel it.”

The back pages of Paying For It are filled with notes and appendices on a variety of topics, from human trafficking to the taxation of prostitution to sexual rights to violence against women — subjects he felt necessary to address. Brown supports the decriminalization of the trade, something that may happen thanks to last September’s ruling by Justice Susan Himel; the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down several laws relating to prostitution, such as operating a bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and living on “the avails of the trade.” The laws were to stay in place until April 29, awaiting the outcome of an appeal from the federal government. Surprisingly, Brown isn’t in favour of legalization, as that would likely mean regulation, and government involvement, and Brown is an ardent libertarian — in fact, he’s currently running for a second time against NDP incumbent Olivia Chow in the riding of Trinity-Spadina, which he lost in 2008.

Brown, who finished drawing Paying For It last July, hasn’t had any second-thoughts about publishing such a personal book. All his friends and family already know about this part of his life — many of them appear in the book — except for one person: his stepmother.

“I still haven’t really told her,” he says. When they were talking on the phone a few months ago, he described it to her as “another autobiographical book, but this one’s about my sex life.” She probably wouldn’t be interested in reading it, he said. “Then I was talking to her last month, or relatively recently. She said ‘What’s that new book about again?’ So I just repeated the same thing:

“‘It’s about my sex life.’”
• Paying For It by Chester Brown is published by Drawn & Quarterly ($24.95). He launches the book Sunday at 7 p.m. at Goodhandy’s (120 Church St., Toronto) and will appear at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, May 6-8.


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Monday, July 18, 2016

"Review: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm"/ "Cinderella and the power of kindness"

Dec. 23, 2015 "Review: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm": I cut out this article by Catherine Bush in the Globe and Mail on Nov. 17, 2012.  I really like the TV show Once Upon a Time.  Here's the whole article:  

Philip Pullman puts the Grimm back into fairy tales
Catherine Bush
Special to The Globe and Mail
Last updated Friday, Nov. 16 2012, 10:37 AM EST
Philip Pullman (Handout)
Title: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm A New English VersionAuthor: Philip Pullman
Genre: fiction
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 406
Price: $29.50

Why read fairy tales? We hardly need books any more to know the outlines of the most familiar ones. They are continually returned to us in new forms, often aimed at adults: a Red Riding Hood movie last year, two Snow White movies this year, not to mention Grimm, the TV series with a fairy-tale twist. Still, we think of fairy tales as reading for children, or we read them to children, even the often violent and bloodthirsty tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm in Children’s and Household Tales, first published 200 years ago this year.

These tales, with their origins in folk culture, weren’t originally intended just for children. They speak to appetites and fears that begin for us in childhood and never leave us, most powerfully the fear of what can happen to the body, the way bodies can be caught up, damaged and destroyed by forces utterly beyond our control: car accidents, superstorms, illness, death.

Terrible things happen to bodies in the Grimms’ tales. In The Juniper Tree, a stepmother lops off the head of her stepson, then serves him in a stew to his father. In The Robber Bridegroom, a girl, hidden behind a barrel in the house of her husband-to-be, watches as he and his followers drag in another girl, drug her, rip off her clothes, lay her on a table, chop her up and sprinkle her with salt. Nor does a kiss transform a frog into prince in the Grimms’ version of this tale: Instead, the princess, in anger, hurls the frog at a wall – only to have him turn into a young man.

The Grimms’ tales operate in a different register than the authored fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen or Oscar Wilde, whose stories allow us to enter the subjective space of character, and it’s their characters we remember. Like many, I was haunted as a child by Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, burning her matches one by one, then freezing to death anyway; there’s pathos here and a hint of realism. In Wilde’s tales, we’re in the realm of troubled and thwarted yearning: of the dwarf for the Infanta in The Birthday of the Infanta. The late English fabulist Angela Carter uses first-person female narrators to take charge of her complex psychological reimaginings of Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast. Contemporary writers continue to reinvigorate the form, as in the recent American anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

Philip Pullman, in his introduction to Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, published to coincide with their 200th anniversary, writes of the flat characters we encounter in the Grimms’ tales. But they’re not flat, any more than our bodies are. In a sense, these aren’t stories about characters at all; they’re stories about bodies, beautiful and deformed, and they return us as readers to the life of the body and life lived in a body. In The Boy Who Wanted to Feel the Shivers, a fearless and feckless young man desperate to be made to shiver survives nightmarish perils, marries a princess and finally shivers when she dumps a bucket of water and minnows over him in bed. When he shivers, we shiver at this weirdly potent gesture.

Pullman, who retells 50 of the 210 tales, is an apt match for the Grimms. He’s the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy for children, the first volume of which, The Golden Compass, has been adapted to film. The books combine fantastical elements with a narrative vitality and intelligence that reward adult reading. Pullman has given a lot of thought to how narrative works, and has lectured on its roots in gestures of the body. In his introduction, he states his desire to render versions of the tales that are “as clear as water” and that capture the tales’ vigour.

While the tales gathered by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have their roots in oral culture, they weren’t scribbling them down as they poured from the mouths of old peasant women. Most of their sources were middle-class acquaintances; Wilhelm Grimm even married one of them. Some stories, such as The Juniper Tree and The Fisherman and His Wife, came to them in written form, the work of a single author. Most of their tales, while rooted in German culture, have resemblances to folk tales from other cultures, and the Grimms drew on such written antecedents as Charles Perrault’s end-of-the-17th-century Mother Goose stories and his versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. In the Grimms’ first edition, some of the tales were overt in their sexual content; this was expurgated in later editions, while their violence was amplified, the revisions largely the work of Wilhelm Grimm.

Pullman picks through the Grimms’ various versions with an ear for what will compel contemporary readers. He restores the sexual innuendo of early Grimm while keeping the intensified violence of later editions. In his version of The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich, the frog-turned-prince, fresh from being tossed at the wall, falls back into the bed of the princess. Rapunzel reveals to the old witch who imprisons her in the tower that she has been entertaining a visitor by innocently declaring that her clothes are getting tight (she’s pregnant). When his name is discovered, Rumpelstiltskin rips himself in half.

Pullman’s sense of clarity is most keenly felt in his attention to narrative vividness: He’s ready to tweak the tales to tighten them or overcome gaps in logic so that at the end of Little Brother and Little Sister, the duped king no longer fails to notice for weeks that a one-eyed hag lies in his marital bed in place of his murdered wife.

Why choose Pullman’s over other versions of Grimm? There are translations of the complete stories by Ralph Manheim, also by noted fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes, not to mention the beautiful illustrated and annotated version of 40-odd tales retold by American fairy-tale expert Maria Tatar.

Pullman’s versions bear the mark of Pullman: His narrative deftness offsets a looseness of rhythm and diction. In his words: “My guiding question has been, ‘How would I tell this story myself if I’d heard it told by someone else and wanted to pass it on?’” He offers notes after each story, which allow readers to encounter the stories unencumbered, then learn of their relation to other tales, Pullman’s alterations and his sometimes opinionated responses. He calls The Girl with No Hands disgusting for its piety while admiring its narrative, and it’s hard to forget the moment when the girl, hands chopped off by her father, wanders by moonlight into an orchard and eats a pear with her mouth from a tree whose fruit the king has numbered so that no one will steal it.

We don’t need to understand fairy tales, we need to experience them and collaborate in their telling. Reading them, or speaking them aloud, we recreate them inside us and allow their wild aliveness to enter our bodies. They bear traces of their origins in oral culture, but, in the best of them, their speed and juxtaposition of strange events radiate the charged, associative energy of poetry. The Grimms’ tales, like the bodies within them, can be hacked at and dismembered and still come back to life. Their coiled vitality demands release in the form of retelling. And Pullman encourages readers to take possession of the stories by continuing to alter their details, as he has done: “You have a positive duty to make them your own.”


Dec. 28, 2015 "Cinderella and the power of kindness": I cut out this article in the Edmonton Journal on Mar. 20, 2015:


The Cinderella story has so often seemed ripe for feminist criticism and revisionism because of the ways in which the story’s advocacy of goodness and niceness can shade into passivity, even encouraging a woman to become the architect of her own subservience. As Stephen Sondheim’s Cinderella put it in the song “I Wish” from the musical “Into The Woods,” “Mother said be good, / Father said be nice, / That was always their advice. / So be nice, Cinderella, / Good, Cinderella, / Nice good good nice-…What’s the good of being good / If everyone is blind / And you’re always left behind? / Never mind, Cinderella, / Kind Cinderella- / Nice good nice kind good nice.”

Fetishizing these qualities can have nasty results, convincing the person who wants to embody them not to rebel against wildly unjust treatment for fear of jeopardizing a reward that always seems to be just over the horizon. Director Kenneth Branagh and writer Chris Weitz’s “Cinderella,” the latest in Disney’s efforts to move its brand forward with live action remakes of its animated classics, has a slightly different credo — “Have courage and be kind” — laid out by Cinderella’s dying mother (Hayley Atwell). And while the movie focuses more on kindness than on courage, the two ideas interact in interesting ways that the filmmakers might have used to greater advantage, especially given the revisionist Cinderellas who have come before this particular Ella (Lily James).

Ella’s efforts to be kind give her Stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and stepsisters (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger) an opening to begin treating her like a servant. And for much of the movie, Ella lacks the courage to insist that they share their hardships.

She volunteers to switch bedrooms with her stepsisters to give them more space, but doesn’t protest when her Stepmother responds to this offer by taking the outrageous step of banishing Ella to the unfurnished and unheated attic. Ella is quick to step in after what she assumes are accidents, but slow to pick up on deliberate provocations, like a moment when her Stepmother knocks a plate of cookies to the floor to test Ella’s willingness to do her cleaning.
Like in “Ever After,” a 1998 revisionist Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore as Danielle, “Cinderella” makes some effort to parse out the ways in which kindness to one person can be cruel to another. In “Ever After,” Danielle’s father Auguste (Jeroen Krabbé) dedicates his dying words to his daughter, slighting his new wife (Anjelica Huston). “Cinderella” takes a slightly different tack: Stepmother overhears her new husband (Ben Chapin) reassuring Ella just how much he loves her and loved her mother, and recognizes that her hopes for a happy second marriage will forever be haunted by a ghost.

“Cinderella” doesn’t really have the courage to explore Stepmother’s psyche, outside of a monologue detailing her disappointments, Blanchett delivers with exquisite coldness and control towards the end of the movie. The movie needs Ella’s father to be a saint, so Branagh and Weitz can’t broach the possibility that he married her stepmother out of self-interest, hoping to succeed her husband’s position or just to fill up his empty-seeming house, or even that he might have deluded himself about his affections for her. To do so would have made “Cinderella” a much more interesting movie, but a much more significant departure from Disney’s animated rendition.

Instead, after much gazing and sighing, we’re left with a rather more attenuated use of courage and kindness. When the Captain (“Game of Thrones” veteran Nonso Anozie) finally discovers Ella confined in the attic and offers her an opportunity to try on the shoe she left behind at the ball, Ella must defy Stepmother’s orders to stay hidden. After an hour and a half of self-abasement, Ella at least has the courage to firmly reject the idea that Stepmother was any sort of mother to her. And she shows a measure of kindness in offering Stepmother her forgiveness.
It’s all rather weak tea, compared to the more interesting emotions “Cinderella” might have explored.

In forgiving Stepmother, Ella isn’t really doing much to ease the older woman’s anguish about her debt and the more comfortable life that has finally slipped beyond her grasp. Instead, she’s liberating herself not merely from a dreadful situation, but from the need to feel any guilt or anxiety about the people she’s leaving behind or the way she conducted herself during her time with them. That’s one of the radical things about kindness: it can bind you from acting in your own self-defense, but it can also help you build up an unassailable moral high ground, leaving you with confidence and certainty, and the ability to move forward unencumbered.

And even more than that, kindness can leave you with an army of people who are ready to help you when you’re ready to make a decisive break. “Ever After,” with its more assertive Cinderella, made this point repeatedly: Danielle may not always have been good, but her basic decency wins her friends who are willing to free her from imprisonment, make her beautiful things and even risk the anger of their own families to repay her kindness and to live by her example.

Ella is, unfortunately, a more passive and isolated figure. There are animals who are willing to be transformed for her sake, and who open up a window at a fateful moment to help her. But this is a childish vision of the radical power of kindness, bound and circumscribed by the need for life to imitate animation.


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"Inspired by an exile from life life"/ "The genius as Jersey boy"

Dec. 23, 2015 "Inspired by an exile from life life": I cut out this article by John Barber in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 28, 2012:Inline image

Writers are made, not born, and the process is never easy. For proof, consider the case of Peter Hobbs, a healthy young Oxford graduate on the brink of a promising diplomatic career when a mysterious virus shattered his health, condemning him to a decade’s painful convalescence as multiple other disorders – “parasites, infections” – overran his damaged immune system.

“And it was because of that,” Hobbs says while visiting Toronto to launch the Canadian edition of his new book, “I became a writer.”

Slight and reserved, seeming both eager and embarrassed to be talking about himself, Hobbs is still fragile, dealing with continuing repercussions from the ordeal. “It took a lot from me,” he says. “It took the career I really wanted. It took my health.”

What the ordeal gave him in return was scant recompense. “I’d give anything not to have gone through that,” Hobbs says. “I would happily sacrifice my writing career if I could choose again.”

Happily for readers, he can’t.

Although it is hardly necessary to know Hobbs’s personal story to appreciate his latest novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows, the book would have been inconceivable without it.

Set in Pakistan, where Hobbs contracted his initial disease, the short, fable-like novel is narrated by a contemporary Pakistani villager thrown without trial into the worst imaginable prison for a victimless crime of passion and left to rot for more than a decade while periodically undergoing the most hideous tortures. Somehow he survives, the love that led him into darkness ultimately delivering him out of it.

Published earlier this year in Britain, In the Orchard, the Swallows was described by reviewers as “achingly moving,” “beautifully told” and “a perfectly cut jewel of a book.”

The story is not his, Hobbs insists. “However,” he adds, “I knew something about extended periods of suffering, of confinements and enclosure of a different kind than prison, and what happens to the mind when you have the normal habits of life taken away from you.

“I needed to use that in order to be able to write about a character who had been in prison,” he adds. “But I didn’t write about it as an allegory of my life.”

The effect of his own prison – what turned him into a writer – was the new ability to imagine lives as different from his own as that of his nameless villager. “The illness really forced me to look at the world in a different way, and everything looked new to me,” he says. “It was the first time I got the shock of being jolted out of my world and seeing things a different way. It was the first time I really understood that the world is real, but our lives are imaginary.”

The one part of his experience that remains beyond reach, according to Hobbs, was the depression it caused – “quite a rational depression” in view of the circumstances, he notes, “but no more pleasant for that.” It is there where the author’s unbidden ability to imagine other lives fails.

“Depression is one of those things that escapes imagination,” Hobbs says. “It’s inconceivable if you haven’t experienced what it is and what it does to you – the way you think and see things.”

As his health gradually improved, Hobbs suffered from a creative flurry, producing more than 40 short stories over two years and then a first novel in 2005, The Short Day Dying. “It was weird,” he says. “It was a tremendously inventive time.”

But as he recovered, the inspiration abated. “I felt like I didn’t need to write any more,” he says, explaining the long gap between his first novel and the second.

“For a very foolish second I regretted getting well,” he says. “I got over that fairly quickly.”

Made a writer in a furnace of suffering, Hobbs at first hesitated to embrace his fate. “It was the first time in years I had been able to choose,” he says. “It was the first time I had options. I could choose whether I wanted to write or not, and it took me a little while to work out that I probably did.”

Whether or not it really was his own decision, the world of letters is richer for it.


Inline image"The genius as Jersey boy": I cut out this article by Marsha Lederman in the Globe and Mail on Oct. 18, 2012:

Even if he speaks freely (and eloquently) of his own shortcomings – and his mother’s diappointment in his career choice – Junot Diaz, it can be said, is a genius. Not only is this apparent from reading his work – most recently, the National Book Award-nominated short-story collection This Is How You Lose Her – but it is an official bestowal with the awarding this month of a MacArthur Fellowship – the so-called Genius Grant – worth $500,000 (U.S.).

It is also evident in conversation. Diaz is captivating with his casual, expletive-laced brilliance, whether at a writers festival event, or over an early-morning coffee.

“The same way that one must scale buildings, one must scale the emotional dimensions of your make-believe characters, and you do so by taking soundings of your internal self,” Diaz said Wednesday in Vancouver, a city he is visiting for the first time but to which he has a connection: His girlfriend’s grandparents lived here, and she used to visit regularly.

The building-scaling answer follows a brief conversation about architecture, and comes in response to a query about how he mines his own experiences in the creation of his characters, in particular his alter-ego Yunior, the irrepressible Jersey boy who populates most of the stories of love and loss in the new collection.

“You know my own experience with pain, with heartbreak or rejection, with cowardice, my own betraying other people with my own desire for things that are not exactly good for you … all of those things help us to understand our characters when we decide to build them up.”

There is a casual abundance of intellect, as Diaz makes a lie of the common belief that using the f-word (or worse) in conversation makes you sound dumb. Granted, he also drops words such as “teleological” and “quotidian” into his arguments and anecdotes with ease. Yet he sees himself as a forever immigrant, and claims that speech remains a challenge.

“Every word I say in English, my mind is running fact checks on. I hear there are people who speak unconsciously; for me it is like this wonderful rumour,” he says, standing with his coffee (sitting is painful, due to back problems). “Every English word that comes out of my mouth is being scanned for errors.”

Diaz, 43, was born in Santo Domingo and moved with his family to New Jersey as a child. He is a self-described inveterate reader who became obsessive about it from the age of 7. He currently has three books on the go: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists (“a scholarly book which shows you how … nerdy I am”); Ruth Ozeki’s upcoming novel A Tale for the Time Being – read from the galley; and, on his iPhone for whenever he has a spare moment, Moby-Dick. He began writing in university (he completed his undergrad at Rutgers and his MFA at Cornell), publishing his first short-story collection, Drown, in 1996. His debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named Time’s No. 1 Fiction Book of 2007. Diaz, the immigrant, had arrived.

“It’s extraordinary how prizes are able to alter someone’s sort of artistic economy. Which is to say … regardless of my abilities, I was considered a writer who was playing small ball. I was writing about New Jersey, and I was writing about the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t until I got the [Pulitzer] Prize where I suddenly became a national writer,” he says. “That the majority of us are worthy of Pulitzers and are significant as artists is indisputable, but it’s only at moments like the granting of a prize that you suddenly see how much talent is out there that’s not being recognized. I think the only thing that’s interesting about me is how … through a bunch of random events, you’re given an award, you’re pulled out of the crowd. But the reality is, the crowd without question is just as worthy, if not more.”

Diaz was pulled out of the crowd again this year when he was named a MacArthur Fellow, which gives the recipient full freedom to do what they want with the money. Working out to about $62,000 a year after taxes for five years, Diaz calculates that it isn’t enough for him to give up his job teaching creative writing at MIT. But it does give him some creative freedom and lifts the financial pressure of life as an artist. It may mean he can buy a home, and still continue to pay his mother’s rent.

Diaz peppers his conversation with anecdotes (at least one unprintable) about his mother, an almost mythical maternal creature – again the result of confusion between Yunior and Diaz. But the lore of the reality can be just as delightful as the literary: how she stopped speaking to him for two years because he messed up his engagement to an ideal candidate for daughter-in-law; how his literary achievements do not register on her American Dream radar.

“It doesn’t mean anything to her, because it doesn’t translate. ‘Cultural acclaim’ doesn’t translate. Which is to say, my mom looks at something called the Pulitzer and she’s like, ‘[What’s] that?’ And then she hears that it was $10,000. She’s like, ‘$6,000 after taxes and it took you 11 years to write the book?’ She’s like, ‘You earned more on your paper route,’” he says. “In her mind, my sister’s a big lawyer, with a big car and a nice house, and that makes a lot of sense to my mom. I’m 43 and my mom is like, ‘You were so smart.’ It’s her lament.”

While it took Diaz 11 years to write his novel, it took him 16 to complete the new collection. He writes a lot (beginning in longhand and moving to computer) and he throws away a lot. He says it can take him 1,000 drafts before he’s satisfied. Not that there’s any valour or superiority in that, he stresses.

“Part of why I’m re-reading Moby-Dick is Moby-Dick was written in six months,” he says. “So anybody who [says] it takes longer to write good work, f--- that. There’s no relationship between how fast or how slow we work…. I have to remind people of that all the time. For me to say it took 16 years is not a badge of honour. It’s just the process.”

On U.S. politics
In January, 2010, Junot Diaz wrote in The New Yorker (he is a regular contributor) that he was an Obama man all the way; that he had voted for him in 2008 and would again in 2012, albeit with “far less enthusiasm.”

When asked about this on Wednesday, the morning after the second U.S. presidential debate (which Diaz did not see because he was reading at the Vancouver Writers Fest), Diaz said that sentiment stands. He says it’s obviously hard to be President, but he believes Barack Obama has made many “questionable” decisions.

“Obama’s a great disappointment. I mean, it’s funny, because it’s a great disappointment versus the devil, so it’s not as if the choices aren’t clear,” said Diaz.

“Our country is so ... deranged that it’s between a nightmare and a pain in the ass. That’s how limited our options have become.”



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