Singled Out

My mother was the youngest of a family of ten siblings. Two of her sisters were my maiden aunts, Auntie Ollie and Auntie Doris. I had never thought much about why they never married until a few weeks ago when I read Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson's social study of the 2 million women left unmarried in Britain by the slaughter of their husbands and potential husbands in the Great War of 1914-1918. It's a sad book, sad like unrequited love. I don't think it is nearly as good as Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us, her subsequent book about the women who went to work to fill gaps left in the labour force when men departed to fight again in the second world war in 1939-45. Nicholson's sources were mostly still alive and available for interview when she wrote about their roles in the war of 1939-45, but most of the women left single by the slaughter of the Great War were dead or too old to be interviewed, so although she tries her best, Singled Out lacks much of the intimacy of Millions Like Us. She has to write about unfulfilled sexual desire mostly by inference and guesswork, compensating a little perhaps by excessive emphasis on flamboyant lesbians like Radclyffe Hall. It's a good book, worth reading, but it would have been better if it had been written 30 or 40 years sooner, and if the sad and lonely women she writes about had been free of inhibitions and able to speak and write frankly about their plight.
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Now I am reading the second draft of Cloud Messenger, Karen Trollope Kumar's excellent memoir of the years that she and her husband Pradeep Kumar lived and worked in the Himalayan foothills, in 1985 to 1997, eleven years altogether because she came back to Canada for the birth of her second child. Karen writes beautifully. This is a fascinating blend of lyrical travel writing, perceptive social and cultural insights, intimate glimpses of family life in India, medical care under conditions much less lavish than customary in Canada, and crises that tested her fortitude to the utmost. One more draft, perhaps, and this book will be ready to send into production.

Housework

My cleaning lady, Sue Ng, has had to take time off to help her sister in Toronto care for their aged father (he's nearly 100, and objects to being put in a 'home' for the elderly). As I'm going out tomorrow evening, I decided not only to do the weekly washing today as usual, but also to stuff and roast the chicken I got at the supermarket yesterday. On the whole I coped with the double load of housework on the same day, and there's enough left over for me to have cold chicken and stuffing for several more meals over the next few days. However, the stuffing wasn't up to its usual delicious best, and when David Skype-phoned me this evening, he explained why: Wendy would have bought the spices before she fell ill, so they are probably over 3 years old. I noticed an absence of aroma when I added the spices to the breadcrumbs, chopped onion, etc, and that explains why my stuffing tasted so bland. Ah well... I've been reading more of Wendy's diaries lately, and although remarks about what she regarded as culinary disasters occur less often then they did in earlier years, she occasionally still found grounds for self criticism even when we had been married over 25 years - but I'm happy to report that she more often had reason to be gratified with her successes. No matter how hard I try I'll never achieve her excellence, but it's good to try from time to time, and it makes a pleasant change from prepared meals zapped in the microwave, and from grilled steak or chops, which are about my usual level of culinary artistry.

Canada writes

I have just submitted my second entry in this year's Canada Writes literary competition. Both are entries in this year's short story competition. The conditions are procrustean: the story must be no more than 1500 words and no less than 1100 words. Part of me can understand why these rather peculiar restrictions on length have been set; but they would automatically disqualify almost every one of Alice Munro's stories, and almost all of the stories by all other great and distinguished short story writers living and dead. The other conditions are understandable. The story must not have been published previously or posted on a website or blog. Both the stories I have submitted were first written in modified, more primitive, form more than 65 years ago. I don't think I have broken or even bent the rules. And I won't post these stories on my blog, even though I know they don't stand a remote chance of winning a prize. I may have a better chance in the literary non-fiction competition which opens in December. I have entered one of Wendy's stories as well, her memoir, "The Smile" in the short story competition after editing it down from 1900 to just under 1500 words; I was rather perplexed about this, because it's true story that would fit equally well in the non-fiction category. But it reads like a short story. Maybe I'll enter it also in the literary non-fiction category as well, when this opens in December. I've got several of my essays lined up waiting to enter as soon as the competition opens. Wish me luck! The prizes are large enough - first prize is $6000.00 - to attract professional writers, so I don' think I have a chance. But you never know. It's worth a try.

Sex and Samosas

Last Sunday afternoon, Sachiko Okuda took me to Jasmine Aziz's book launch. It was held in the East India Company, an elegant and excellent Indian restaurant, attended by about 100 of Jasmine's friends and family members. Sachiko and Jasmine were two of the participants at the Writers' Workshop in Pembroke a few months ago. Here they are with me at the book launch.
Now I've read the book, Sex and Samosas, from cover to cover, which beats reading excerpts on Jasmine's blog. I think it is a very good, well written book. It describes a young woman's journey from miserable overweight and low self-esteem to self-confident athletic fitness, and a most appropriate happy ending. It begins and ends with two sex parties, parties where women can buy sexy underwear, perfumed and flavoured oils and unguents, lubricants and sex toys, learn something about their own bodies, and have a lot of fun while getting a little loosened up by liquor. There are some raunchy, lurid sex scenes but it's worth reading for other reasons as well. It provides a poignant victim's perspective of ways that school girls can be cruel to a classmate whose skin pigment, hair, dress, and diet differ from the mainstream in that school. This is not emphasized but sketched lightly in the background. Also sketched are accounts of some ways in which cohesive Indian extended families are cohering, yet mixing and blending into the multicultural mosaic that makes Canada such a wonderful, exciting country to live in and belong to. In many places, including several of the raunchiest sex scenes it's laugh-out-loud funny. Good descriptions of the unique ecstasy of sexual pleasures are very rare in literature and fiction. This book contains one of the best descriptions of what an orgasm feels like, that I've ever read. I hope all those who read my blog will read Sex and Samosas too, and recommend it to all their friends. You can get a copy at amazon.com
(The photo at the top of this post was taken at the annual Ottawa Book and Craft Fair a few weeks later. I wanted to put it at the end of this post but the software program put it at the top and I'm not savvy enough to know how to shift it).

How long should we live?

Today would have been Wendy's 86th birthday.

A theoretical physicist was talking on the radio about the future: the future of computing, use of quantum computers, the future of nanotechnology, the concept of parallel universes (which are theoretically possible and might exist for all we know); and the future of human life spans. That’s when I wrote him off as a crackpot, because he asserted that theoretically humans could live forever. Whether he meant selected humans or all humans wasn’t clear, but either concept flies in the face of biological, not to mention demographic, realities as I understand them. We all die, some early in life, some after many decades – all in accord with the biological reality of death and renewal. Ideally, our decomposed bodies recycle in the biosphere into other living creatures, although inventive and sometimes misguided or perverse people have developed many ways to preserve (as opposed to commemorating) the dead. We can have ourselves preserved – or our bodies anyway – by various forms of embalming. Jeremy Bentham and Lenin come to mind; we can be encased in bronze, as in a bizarre and intermittently funny film by the Dutch-Australian film maker Paul Cox. There are limitless variations in styles of monuments to the dead, many like the pyramids and the ornate cemeteries in Rome, Milan, Malta, Havana implying or making explicit a belief in life after death; others like funerary urns are probably more often intended to be decorative ornaments that gratify the living than commemorate the dead. What about eternal life? The idea shrivels my marrow. At age 85, I look back on a wholly satisfying life that has been immensely pleasurable; the 55 of these years that I shared with Wendy were much more than merely pleasurable. But even if Wendy had not departed this life eleven months ago, I’ve had just about enough. She and I talked about life expectancy a few times; we both felt we had already lived as long as we could have wished when we last talked about this, driving home from the clinic where the neurologist Pierre Bourque had given us her diagnosis of ALS, or motor neuron disease. We were both then just short of 85, and were reassured by what Pierre told us about how her disease would probably progress in the coming months. It did indeed evolve much as he said it would, with progressively more pronounced weakness, longer and longer periods of sleep, but no pain and no deterioration of her mind. Now that Wendy has gone and I’m on my own, I no longer feel that I have much incentive to go on indefinitely. Like many others who reach this age, I’ve seen many others die who were my friends, acquaintances and about my age or younger, and as my father once said to me when he was about the age I am now, it’s easy to get very lonely as friends and colleagues die off all around me. I’ve always been inclined to be a ‘loner’ so being alone for a greater portion of my life than formerly doesn’t trouble me much. I find plenty of ways to keep myself busy and amused. My apartment is full of books to read, and to reread – mostly to reread: I get more pleasure from rereading familiar and much loved books than from starting something new. But I often do start something new, though I confess that I start many more than I finish. And I’ve got quite a lot of writing to do, 3 chapters to write in Public Health and Ecology, the reincarnation of Public Health and Human Ecology, this time with two co-authors rather than all on my own as before. Then I want to finish off as well as polish my memoirs, submit a few pieces for the CBC’s annual literary contests, and if I’m still going strong after all that, assemble, edit, and publish some of the stuff I wrote over the 30-odd years that I edited various medical and public health journals. All that should be enough to keep me off the streets and out of mischief for a few years.

Thanksgiving 2011

It wasn't easy to find suitable autumn colours to illustrate this post, but just below my balcony the late afternoon sun caught the golden leaves of a little maple tree. The hot sunny weather felt more like high summer than well into the autumn, and the leaves are slow to turn this October for the same reason. In past years I've often photographed the brilliant colours in our neighbourhood from our balcony and from ground level, always around this date. This year the combination of mild days and frosty nights hasn't happened; the day temperature dipped briefly a week ago, but so far this year we haven't had a frost; and this Thanksgiving weekend we have had a virtual heatwave. Yesterday Rebecca and Richard held a delightful family feast for David and Desre and Jonathan and me. It was warm enough for us to eat this out on their patio at dusk, and all around us others in that neighbourhood were having their feast out doors on their patios too. We exchanged greetings with Rebecca's next door neighbours; it was all very cosy and collegial, a small but delightful Thanksgiving feast. Today has been another hot day of blazing sunshine, and conditions have been similar all over the northern hemisphere. Last week temperatures in the southern half of England were in the low 30s and thousands of people went swimming in the sea. It's just another harbinger of the relentless advance of climate change or global warming, and by rights it should make us all tremble. But I think instead most people will feel as I did strolling in our little park, grateful for small mercies.

statistics don't lie, or not often anyway

It was a pleasant surprise to find the University of Ottawa ranked among the top 200 universities in the world in the latest Times Higher Education Supplement. The U of O, a former religious college of the Oblate order, became a public secular university after the 1939-45 world war, in order to attract government funds then being disbursed to universities. I was attracted here in 1969 by the opportunity to build a new department of epidemiology in a university that was then mediocre (if even that) and was then still sufficiently dominated or haunted by its religious catholic origins to have men of the cloth occupying all but about 2 or 3 of the top managerial positions. It had nowhere else to go but up. The faculty of medicine in 1969 ranked last among the 16 medical schools in Canada on objective criteria such as research funds awarded in competitions and performance of its graduates in national qualifying exams. At a faculty "retreat" in 1976 one after another of my fellow heads of department lamented our lowly status. When my turn came to speak,I pointed out to my colleagues that we had some real advantages: we were a small medical school in the nation's capital, rich in governmental and non-governmental resources including many that are relevant to medical research, in a city large enough to offer our small classes very rich clinical experience; class sizes were small enough so everyone knew everyone else; we were (and are) a bilingual school. Our downtown campus is less than a kilometer from Parliament Hill. (This helped to attract me to Ottawa but as the faculty of medicine expanded, the new Health Sciences Centre had to move to new Health Sciences Campus, 4 Km south). I said "retreat" was the wrong word to apply to our brainstorming session: we should have called it "advance" - we had nowhere else to go but up. I've seen the U of O go up steadily and increasingly rapidly during the years I have been here. Now we rank about 3rd or 4th nationally on objective criteria such as research funds attracted, 1st or 2nd in national qualifying medical exams, we are moving steadily upward in global rankings like the Times Higher Education Supplement, we have a downtown campus of handsome, although rather crowded buildings.
Looking over the league table of world universities, it's clear to me that like isn't always being compared to like. Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) is in top place although it is not a "full-service" university; I know the London School of Economics is not; Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, all are "full-service", the Ecole Normale Superior in Paris probably is not. The criteria on which the rankings are based include output of original research (based on original articles in top quality peer reviewed journals, original monographs, research facilities and funding) staff-student ratio, facilities such as libraries, etc. Probably I need to study the criteria used in the rankings a little more fully, but on the face of it, they seem valid, and I know they are taken seriously by people like university presidents. So as a long-time staff member (over 41 years and counting) I'm pleased and proud.

Steve Jobs

It's as though he had been a head of state,or a crowned monarch. The death a few days ago of the co-founder of the Apple empire has generated more comment and commemorative paragraphs of poor prose than any other death since Princess Di's untimely and messy departure from this life. How many of the innovative products of Apple Macintosh were actually his brain-children is not clear to me. I came late to the world of Macintosh, Apple computers, iPhone, iPad, i-this, i-that; indeed the only Apple product I possess is the MacBook Pro laptop on which I'm pecking out this post. But I do love this elegant little laptop, which is far superior to the PC products I've stuck to for the past quarter century or more. It's actually a sensual pleasure to use it, whereas there was always an adversarial relationship between me and the succession of PCs I worked with - or against. Another thing I'm aware of is the elegant design of the Mac, the pleasurable way it does what I want it to do (most of the time anyway; it's my own fault, not the laptop's, that I have trouble operating the track pad occasionally). It's so elegant! Consider the way the power cord attaches when I need to recharge batteries. A magnet! Why didn't IBM or Microsoft think of that? I understand the magnet, like the aesthetically pleasing appearance of all the Apple products, was Steve Jobs' idea. Yet he was a software designer by profession, a dropout withal, but a genius nonetheless. I suppose he merits the many accolades he's attracted, perhaps even the "stop the presses" actions of Time magazine, which pulled its current cover and many inside pages in production to replace these with a fulsome eulogy. But I'm sure we will see his like again. Probably Apple has a dozen clones of Steve Jobs already on board.

Occupy Wall Street

A nascent movement that hasn't been getting much attention up here in Canada is the interesting development that began in Lower Manhattan and has spread to other US cities - Chicago, San Francisco and several more so far. A small but increasing number of people have been camping in a park close to Wall Street, peacefully and quietly demonstrating against the dishonesty and financial excesses of dealers, brokers and high rollers both in Wall Street and in the big banks. The blatant arrogance and greed of these folk has begun to outrage more and more of their victims. I've heard two thoughtful commentators compare this movement to the riots that scarred London and several provincial cities in England last summer - social scientists who have studied the rioters have discerned a common thread running through the motivation of the predominantly youthful mobs, disillusion with the prevailing economic system and hopelessness and helplessness about their predicament - the rioters were 'have-nots,' expressing their anger against the 'haves,' who over recent years have systematically devised schemes to enrich themselves and impoverish everyone else. The 'Occupy Wall Street' movement is more gentle, more polite, entirely non-violent, entirely law-abiding. This hasn't stopped the police from harassing and arresting large numbers, nor from applying (illegally) some harsh enforcement methods such as use of pepper spray against non-violent resistors. I think the police may come to regret this gratuitous use of force: they may have misjudged the depth of anger and resentment of the many millions whose good jobs have been exported to Mexico, China, Bangladesh, etc, and whose homes have been and are still being foreclosed. Labor unions in the USA are weak and mostly ineffectual, but Occupy Wall Street has the support of at least one union so far, largely symbolic perhaps but it's a start. It seems pretty certain now that the recession will deepen, more jobs, more homes will be lost; and in the grip of another bout of the USA's periodic madness fomented by the Tea Party supporters they elected, the US Congress and state legislatures will not enact legislation to raise taxes to pay for urgently needed infrastructure repair and maintenance, apparently preferring to maintain high unemployment rates. These right wing legislators don't use the word of course but they are behaving in ways that have created a kleptocracy, replacing the failed democracy of the USA. Lobbyists tell elected congress how to vote, electors are ignored, so there is widespread cynicism, fewer and fewer even bother to vote. I am so thankful that Wendy and I rejected the USA as a place to settle permanently! I hope our children and grandchildren are grateful for our decision!