Knitting was the last thing my mother knew how to do. I miss her — especially at this time of year.
Quotebook
December 18, 2010
“Human nature is the great constant. How we think and feel in the East and the West, in the 16th century or the 21st, it doesn’t change.”
Salman Rushdie
Failure is not for the faint of heart (a holiday replay)
December 16, 2010
I got quite a few emails about this post when I first published it last August. Some people said it made them feel hopeful — even brave. For better or for worse, this time of year makes us take stock of our lives.
I hope these portraits provide you with some extra courage to take into 2011.
The ability to focus and commit to something through thick and thin is a quality I admire. Writer and comedian Craig Ferguson describes his route to success, saying, “I kept failing until I didn’t.”
But the ability to court failure after experiencing success fascinates me even more. Here are a few examples of established successes who pushed themselves in unexpected directions and put experimentation ahead of standing ovations. For many, confidence didn’t pull them through, feeling lost did. It fueled them to find a new focus in life.
Nicole de Vesian: At 69 she spiraled into a deep depression after the death of her husband. Her friends were scared for her. After a stellar career as a designer at Hermés, de Vesian lost her passion for living and loving, and abandoned the projects piled up on her desk. She left Paris and retreated to Provence, finding solace in the sunlight and flowers of this mythical corner of France. 
De Vesian never went back. She changed her focus from luxury textiles to designing gardens and made communing with nature her new life and career. She collected and hauled rocks like some women collect gems, and spent the autumn of her life feeling more alive than she ever had.
Pablo Picasso: He copied the drawings of Leonardo and Raphael with astonishing skill. Everyone cooed he had the makings of a successful society portrait artist. But Picasso struggled. How could he keep exploring naturalism when the world around him looked so ripped and torn to shreds? It was 1914 and Picasso was living in Paris and was too physically weak to join the army. 
For a man who prided himself on his machismo and physicality, it was an embarrassing blow. Feeling isolated from his family and friends, overwhelmed by the war and bitter and angry over the declining health of a girlfriend, Picasso poured every ruthless emotion he had onto his canvases, turning his fractured sense of self into a new style: cubism.
Shaquille O’Neal: At 38, basketball great Shaquille O’Neal is preparing to duck under the TD Garden exit sign for good. 
From what I’ve heard, he has no plans to open a sports-themed restaurant with a 7-foot wax replica of himself at the host stand and signed photos of his game-winning layups over the banquettes. Nor does he plan to become a real estate agent, coach, GM, sports announcer or Shopping Channel pitchman. Nuh uh. “I want to do something bigger,” he told The New York Times Magazine,” last weekend. By the time this MBA (yes, an NBA-er with an MBA) says goodbye, he plans to have defended his Ph.D. thesis from Barry University in Miami, Florida. “My topic is ‘How Leaders Utilize Humor or Aggression in Leadership Styles.'” O’Neal is determined to turn what, for most athletes, is the most depressing time of their life into a period of huge possibilities. Oh, and after he leaves the court, it’s no more “Shaq.” “I’m done with the nicknames,” says Professor O’Neal. Class dismissed.
Michael Kinsley: He quit CNN for what? They’re calling it, “the Information Superhighway.” This was back in 1996, and after 10 years co-hosting CNN’s Crossfire, Kinsley left behind the studio lights and pancake makeup to become the editor in chief of Slate, a journal that couldn’t be bought on the newsstand or bound in volumes at the library; it was only available online. Now why would a Harvard grad, a Rhodes Scholar and a former editor at The Washington Post and The Economist willingly post himself in “Siberia” (that’s what the Worldwide Web was called back then)? Kinsley did it because he trusted his instincts about the internet’s potential, because he knew talent will travel, and because he has the guts to try new things.
Renée Fleming: She’s opera royalty. Last summer, however, Fleming released “Dark Hope,” her first “rock” album. It’s a collection of covers, from Peter Gabriel to Mars Volta. “[I thought it would be] an interesting adventure,” she told the LA Times. 
“At this stage of my career, I’m facing a kind of maintenance program. I’ve been on this plateau, where there’s no place to go, other than to stretch myself artistically. And this seemed to fit.” Decide for yourself if you like her sound. Either way, you have to admire her courage to sing outside her comfort zone.
Shopping break
December 13, 2010
This is an update about Full of Beans, my favourite coffee shop on Dundas St. West. I wrote about FoB back in September when it first opened (here’s the post).
Image by Dennis Marciniak, courtesy of BlogTo.com
As of last week, Lori Nytko, FoB’s delightful owner and operator, has collected enough furniture from antique stores and hotel sales to unveil the back half of the store, a secret space previously hidden behind a wall of bookshelves.
Now you can put down your groceries and Christmas packages and sit in a plush arm chair …
Image courtesy of Lori Nytko
… or perch on a wrought iron café chair while you sip through the steam of one of her many speciality coffees. And, unlike the library, you can eat pastries and read the books. Just remember when you’re finished to stand the book upright and tap three times until you see a pile of crumbs on the table. Blow them away for good luck!
Image courtesy of Lori Nytko
This shot was taken before the rest of the furniture arrived. It gives you a good idea of the warmth and charm of the space.
Lift your head (Take that, SmartPhones!) and look around. Smell the coffee, peruse the books on FoB’s shelves, read the newspaper from front to back, or just enjoy the person sitting across the table from you.
Sunday best
December 12, 2010
It’s Sunday and we all want to read lovely things on this day of rest, so here you go:
The JD Salinger I Knew
By Lillian Ross
The two greatest American writers of my time are Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger. Both have crossed from the 20th century into the 21st with their originality, substance and staying power intact. As a reporter and a friend – privileged to dabble in their area – it has been thrilling for me to watch, at first hand, the unique genius in both writers revealed more and more sharply over the years.
Both writers had a sense of humour all their own – surprising, inimitable, in conversation, in letters, as well as in their work. Salinger could keep me on the phone for hours, laughing into exhaustion, covering everything and everybody around us. He loved to read and he loved to write. Hemingway would say he loved the writing part, “but not what came afterwards”. What came afterwards for him was years of inexplicable censure for his having the courage and genius to give us lasting reading pleasure and enlightenment.
I have never understood the “afterwards” part, regarding both Hemingway and Salinger. We have seen dismaying efforts to bring Salinger down, too. Salinger loved the people he created and was protective of them until the day he died. He gave us Holden Caulfield. He gave us the Glass family. So why would some “literary” critics take such a censorious tone about Salinger’s personal life?
He was a delight to know, as a friend and a colleague since 1950, just before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. He figured out his personal life, winding up with a nearly 30-year-long marriage, children, and grandchildren. He lived quietly in New Hampshire, enjoyed church suppers, never bothered anybody, and wanted to be left alone with his work. He was the smartest writer I had ever met and the most generous.
He shared with me a copy of the “Dear Jerry” letter Hemingway wrote to him when they were both serving in the second world war – a handwritten letter commenting on unpublished stories Salinger, who was then an unknown young beginner, sent him. “First you have a marvellous ear and you write tenderly and lovingly without getting wet,” Hemingway wrote. He added that he hoped he “didn’t sound like an easy praiser” and “how happy it makes me to read the stories and what a god damned fine writer I think you are”.
In 1966, Salinger told me he had come across “the rotten Muggeridge article on Hemingway in the current Esquire” and said “I feel I’d like to do something about the Muggeridge piece in particular and all the Hemingway ghouls in general, and I’m pretty sure you would, too…” Four years before that, Salinger told me that the critic Leslie Fiedler “had a go at Hemingway in the last Partisan Review”. He added: “What Fiedler needs more than anything else is to be wormed every six months or so. He’s a wretch, and he’ll never be happy till he thinks he’s proved himself better and more talented than the people he criticises.”
To me Salinger was always helpful. He told me early on, referring to my writing: “You’re yourself whether you’re writing fiction or fact. It’s very moving. I mean more than that, but that’s my first thought.” I’ve never had a better comment. When Salinger first met my son Erik, who was then a few months old, he sent me a letter, starting out:
Notes on your son.
1) Is an incomparably fine and lovable person.
2) Has beautiful eyes.
3) Sleeps in a very good position.
4) Has courtly manners.
5) Is a very very sweet little boy.
He was always giving you something with love, and it outlasted his lifetime. He shared with me his huge range of interests, all the way from wonderful stories and sayings by the 6BC philosopher Lao Tse, to detailed instructions about selecting, cooking, and refrigerating bean sprouts.
So why would people, especially the self-appointed authorities on literature, always want him to be someone other than himself? It didn’t take long, after the historic acclaim for The Catcher in the Rye and his stories, for a lot of negative psychoprattle about his creations to surface – along with unwelcome intrusions into his private life. He was being chided for loving the characters he had created too well, and readers were chided for loving them, too. Today, millions of readers all over the world continue to experience the joy of discovering and being charmed by his characters. They know, as Hemingway said, that JD Salinger wrote “tenderly and lovingly”, and was “a god damned fine writer”.
From The Observer, Sunday, December 12, 2010 (thanks to David Hayes for pointing this out)
Goo Goo Gjoob
December 7, 2010
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
November 24, 2010
Few things amaze me more than the range women’s lives have taken on in the last 100 years. It’s a real A to Z trajectory. When you think that only a century ago women were confined to corsets, shut out of universities and streamlined up the aisle. Now we’re police chiefs and bus drivers and engineers and film makers and bartenders and mothers, with or without a ring on our finger.
Few things amaze me more than the lack of range men’s lives have shown over the last 100 years. To quote Dorothy Parker, it’s a real A to B trajectory. Sorry guys, you know I’m rooting for you, but, let’s face it, you’ve been flat-lining it for centuries. Inertia is to the male nature what change is to the female.
While women were coming together and exploding social norms, you were remarkably consistent and insistent about what you expected and wanted out of life. And you got it, for a very long time. But now as more and more women go at it alone, you’re still hoping your dinner will appear in front of you at the appointed hour. And it does, only now it’s placed there by your server, not your wife.
Today the pressure is on because the gig is up. It’s your turn to upend your expectations. I know you can feel it. There are millions of female eyes boring into you. (It’s the only time we take charge of “the gaze”). “Well?” we blink? A sign of another first: for the first time in history women are defining the terms and conditions for entering into relationships. Paychecks will do that. Meanwhile, the demographics tilt even further towards singledom.
If women are unhappy about this, it’s because we’re tired. Life calls for a lot of heavy lifting, emotionally and physically. Doing it alone is hard. If men are unhappy about this, it’s because they want and need women far more than they want or know how to express it.
Few writers have described this moment in time in the male/female dance better than Brendan Tapley. His crunchy insights explain what it really means to “man up.”
Here’s an excerpt from his most recent article in the Dec/Jan issue of Bust, my favourite women’s magazine.
The most dispiriting thing I’ve observed about modern male/female relationships is the profound lack of faith women have in our ability to love them, lighten their loads, and be true partners. What’s worse: I understand why.
As women have become breadwinners, started families solo, and grown to expect their best connections to come from other women, modern masculinity has responded by narrowing itself. We men now more extremely and crudely embody masculinity’s negative traits as a way to distinguish ourselves as men. Macho overcompensation can be seen everywhere, including in our economy (self-interest on steroids), our politics (talk radio) and our sexuality (American men spend more on pornography every year than they do on movie tickets and the performing arts combined). As for being husbands and fathers, which should be noble callings, sitcoms have made buffoonery and cluelessness their hallmarks. Indeed, judging by the many (many) surveys in women’s magazines, today’s men come across as medieval. Which is why we should return to those times for a modern lesson.
Chivalry may no longer be a word that folks of our era, male and female, use. That it has become a loaded term, tarnished as chauvinistic and demeaning, is tragic. Not merely because women often lament the ways men no longer show them courtesy but because chivalry was never about women needing assistance from men; it was about men needing the awareness chivalry demands.
Chivalry emerged in medieval times because the period was coarse and the first knights were rapacious thugs. Originally a code meant to guide men on spiritual matters, one of which detailed how to honor women, chivalry aimed to change male behavior by inspiring fraternity around a higher calling, the central principle being service. Chivalry’s authors knew that the virtue of service plays a nifty trick on men: raised to believe our fulfillment is front and center, service tempers our egocentrism by actually fulfilling it. A man committing to a cause greater than himself elevates the cause and the man. (this is true whether you’re a Big Brother volunteer or Nelson Mandela).
So, my fellow men, I ask you: what better cause is there for us than women? While holding a door or standing up when being introduced may not make for epic poetry, as symbols these gestures are manifestations of a solicitude men are accused of no longer possessing. Because it is a system based on serving others, what chivalry would return to men is a discipline of conscientiousness.
Tapley is currently immersed in writing a book about masculinity. I can’t wait to read it!
What will your legacy be?
November 8, 2010
*9:00 am: This post is dedicated to my friend, Monica Scrivener. She died on Saturday. I found out ten minutes ago on Facebook. In high school, Mon and I used to sit beside each other in art class and make smartass comments. I’m heartbroken.
When I’m dead and all physical reminders of the life I built have disappeared under the pile-up of stuff from future generations, I’ll live on, for a while, in the minds of my family, friends and ex-boyfriends. But they’ll die too and take their memories of my voice, my bent and signature scent with them. The biggest cache of information will go down with my parents and my brothers. Then where will I be?
I suppose my name will linger on for a little while longer inside my high school, on the gym walls that show I played for this team and won that award. And, of course, I’ll live on in cyberspace, endorsing a lip balm (good grief), interviewing an expert, cheering on a friend and calling out to my lost mother.
My blog will just stop. But it will never suffer the fate of print, curling at the edges or turning yellow with age. Like a fresh sheet of paper, it will be as crisp and clean as the day I launched it.
At first, people will think I’m too busy to post and my page views will drop to zero. The odd person might check back in to see if I’ve cobbled together a new entry. And if they’re really committed to this site (or me), they’ll do a Google search of my name, stumble upon my obit and go … “Oh.”
Elsewhere in cyberspace, my face and name will pop up in the “People You May Know” columns in LinkedIn and Facebook. Requests will go out, but my silence will hurt my future job and social prospects. Meanwhile, the lineup of guys in my eHarmony account will be several miles long and administrators will shut down my page for “lack of activity.” The question, “Who does she think she is?” will shoot through at least one male heart because I didn’t even try to strike up a conversation with him.
But, half a moment! I still have some more time to make hay in my personal and professional lives. So, IF I’m lucky enough to reach old lady status, here’s what I hope my legacy will be after I collapse in a heap for the last time.
… agj …
She lived an unconventional life for someone with some pretty traditional values.
She was afraid of dying which made her unafraid of living.
She hated interruptions when she was in The Zone.
Loud noises irked her too.
She had the courage to say “No” to marriage until, one day, she had the courage to say “Yes.”
But, even then, she still lived through herself.
She let her hair show its first lashings of grey and opened to the idea of becoming a Silver Belle
Keeping in mind, Nature always prevailed.
At 80, she was at her most liberal (and, no, it wasn’t too late)
She spent the money she saved on dye jobs and bought books, presents, fresh flowers, and paid her property taxes.
She found plenty of ways to mother young people without ever seeing her feet disappear behind her belly.
She cried when her friends described their losses and left behind Kleenex balls for them to pick up.
She lived a highly engaged life and negotiated the “me time” it took to achieve that with mixed results.
She negotiated her “us time” with equally mixed results.
She was a sponge for love, and she’ll miss you.
A lot.
This post is part of a blog series on BrazenCareerist.com being sponsored by Entrustet. Ryan Paugh sent out emails to Brazen members asking us to answer the question, What do you want your legacy to be?
You can’t say that
October 27, 2010
Art depicts all we fear, all we love and all that we are. But this wasn’t always true.
Back when I was an art history major, and sitting through hundreds of slide presentations, I came to the conclusion that European painting and sculpture only really came alive, emotionally speaking, after the Church stopped being the primary patron of the arts.
This is Lea Michele playing me in the 1980s
“Good,” I thought, as we moved from the Medieval and Renaissance periods into the Dutch Golden Age, “We’re finally done with the ‘Madonners.’” That’s what my friends and I called that endless stream of portraits showing Mary of the Tilted Head and Jesus of the Never Poops or Squawks (look down: there they are). She smiles beatifically as he points with his wee index finger to a Biblical passage we best review. Incidentally, we rolled our eyes that the only women deemed worthy of painting in those days were all virgins: virgin mothers, virgin queens … Outside of class, my friend, Kelly, invented a silly walk — knees bolted together — that made light of all this.
Obviously we understood that in earlier centuries devotional objects acted as social cues to the illiterate masses. The same was true of those writhing figures in the “Last Judgment” reliefs placed strategically above the exits of so many Catholic churches. They served as a final reminder to parishioners to go home with their own wives, not their neighbour’s. But religious art felt abstract and lifeless, somehow. That’s because part of the job of religion is to heavily edit human nature.
When patronage and publishing were opened up to the merchant classes in the seventeenth century (or thereabouts) this was, in my opinion, an even bigger deal than the Renaissance rediscovery of three dimensions, when, physically speaking, we sprung to life on walls and canvases across Europe. (Trompe l’oeil on palace ceilings blows me away every time I see it. “That’s flat? No way!” I saw a lot of it in Austria this summer. But I digress… )
When clerics lost control over the definition of the meaning of life (because the rest of us could finally afford to write and paint and process our experiences), human nature, in all its beauty and lavish weirdness, got its first public airing. The Church couldn’t and wouldn’t explore this territory; it’s job was to direct human actions, not explore and explain them.
Take the Ten Commandments, the Bible’s Top 10 list of worsts in human nature. It’s a “Don’t List,” not a run down of all the whys and hows we cheat, murder, dishonour our relatives, swear like sailors and shop on Sundays. We need artists to examine our methods and motivations. Sometimes they do it better than modern-day psychologists.
[pullquote]The Ten Commandments are the Bible’s Top 10 list of worsts in human nature.[/pullquote]
Leave it to Rembrandt, for example, to describe mortality; Neruda and Rodin to capture love; J.D. Salinger to get us talking about suicide and Alice Sebold to touch rape. And while we’re at it, hats off to Harper Lee for getting us talking and thinking hard about bigotry and to Elvis for opening up society to the rhythms of sex, a
nd Chaucer for covering it all! (see below) In almost every one of these cases, the Church pushed back against the truths being unearthed (Burn that book! Get him off the television!).
Is it any wonder, then, that the church would become the very last bastion of unexamined truths in our society? For decades the Catholic Church harbored secrets of widespread sexual abuse — sadly, an entrenched part of human nature — which have only truly come to light in the last two years. As an institution, it will be forever changed by this.
"The Kiss," (1889) by Auguste Rodin
It’s taken us centuries to unpack all of our truths. In 2010, I’d say we’re almost fully unpacked now that sex, inequality, bigotry, suicide, incest and homosexuality are all on the table. I can’t think of any taboo we haven’t smoked out of its hole and examined up close through art, books, music, movies, TV and the Internet? Can you?
[pullquote]”The God I believe in would not be the God of the priests.” — Coco Chanel[/pullquote]
Writer Paul Morand called Coco Chanel "the exterminating angel of 19th century style."
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is bawdy and naturalistic, a seething mass of human nature told in riding rhymes. It was written during the Great Schism when the Catholic Church was distracted by its own corruption.
