Y.S. Lee's Blog, page 24

A whole world of leisure

Hello, friends. I’m on holiday with my extended family again, this time in Whistler, B.C. It’s a glorious break from reality: brilliant sunshine, sublime mountain vistas, and every time I wish for a cup of coffee, my brother is already grinding beans. How could I possibly complain?

So this isn’t a complaint, but rather an observation: one of the stranger things about being in Whistler is being in a place built entirely around the idea of leisure and luxury. It’s a wilderness of luxury hotels, twee Disney architecture, and elaborately landscaped boulevards. The “villages” consist of expensive stores and restaurants with holiday condos atop them. And it’s full of people who’ve travelled here purely to have a good time. It’s oppressively, deliciously, entirely synthetic. And you know what it makes me think of?

Bath. As in the city of Bath, in Somerset, England. It became a fashionable holiday place during the eighteenth century, and Jane Austen is famous for disliking it. Even today, it’s a popular spot – especially for Austenphiles like me, who are torn between admiring the Georgian architecture and trying to imagine how such a setting might have dampened Austen’s ability to write.

I’m not sure I have a neat and tidy point to make this week, except possibly that if Whistler’s buildings survive another two hundred years (good luck – they’re made of wood and stucco!), it’s fun to imagine reverent visitors of the future trekking through here, checking out the haunts of famous people in history, and trying to imagine the chaotic, fleshy, posing multitudes who are making it so very popular this summer.

My favourite things

Hello friends! This week, I thought I’d share with you some of my favourite things about the English countryside:

1. Randomly occurring sheep.

2. Winding lanes.

3. Dry-stone walls. One day, I'm going to learn how to build them. Seriously.

4. The intense green-ness of it all. William Blake was precise when he wrote about "this green and pleasant land".

What are your favourite things about the countryside?

The Omnibus Edition

Hello, friends. We’re currently visiting family in Lancashire, England, and I have been lazy with the camera. That is, I’ve taken lots of photos of cousins and aunties and old friends, but not much that people outside the family would want to see. However, the other day we found ourselves at the Museum of Transport in Manchester.

I was expecting a bus or two, maybe a replica stagecoach, and some dioramas. Well. Was I ever mistaken. The museum is a former bus garage and it contains about seventy-five buses. Yes, they are very well parked, but still! Massive! The whole place reeks of diesel, there’s an open-topped fire engine that remained in service well into the 1960s, and most of the buses appear to be still running, since museum staff and volunteers take them out on a regular basis for shows and events.

And then I saw this:

It’s an omnibus from the 1890s. The plaque said it was drawn by 2 horses, or 3 up hills. (I love that. Can you picture them pulling over and harnessing a third horse before each hill?) Inside, it has 2 long bench seats running from front to back, and that precarious-looking staircase on the right leads to several rows of forward-facing seats on the open top. The ride must have been bumpy, as those are wooden wheels. And I’m fascinated by the advert for F. Robinson’s Light Bitter Ale. I tend to think of billboards as twentieth-century inventions, but this is a fantastic reminder that the nineteenth century was also a golden age of advertising.

What have you been up to, this week?

Cheesy Compendium of Travel Truisms

Hello, friends. Are you natural travellers, homebodies, or somewhere in between? While I love exploring new places and the perspective I gain just by leaving home, I also tend to resent being dislodged from my routine until the big journey actually happens. So today, while I’m visiting far-flung family, I have for you my five best travel tips. Some are truisms (“self-evident truths) in the strictest sense of the word, but they’re also so easy to lose sight of in the mayhem of prolonged travel. Let me know what you think, and what you’d add to the list.

1. Focus on the destination, not the odyssey. I tend to dread the duration, discomfort, and tedium of actually getting where I want to be. Keeping my thoughts on the positive really helps me avoid exaggerating the trip into a monster of inconvenience.

2. Conversely, remain curious and alert about the journey. We took a detour on Monday that could have been tricky – 3 hours of public transit in Toronto, on a public holiday – but made me see anew a city I know well, and triggered an interesting conversation about urban space.

3. Pack light. “Light”, of course, is a relative term – we have 2 little kids to keep clean, fed, rested, and diverted. But we try never to have more stuff than we can cart around while chasing a giddy toddler.

4. Tip well. We’re the ones lucky enough to have time off work and money to travel.

5. Clear enough mental space to see what’s passing before your eyes. I always remember the surprises, the unguarded moments, the happenstance, more than any planned activity.

What are your best travel tips?

On having it all

The best thing I read this past week was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, in The Atlantic. (Thank you, Stephanie Burgis, for linking to it on fb!) It’s a long, thoughtful, nuanced article that, despite its deliberately provocative title, is a powerful argument for fairer, more flexible working conditions for Americans.

Essentially: nobody who is tied to a rigid work schedule can hope to “have it all” – by which Slaughter means professional success and work-life balance. And while Slaughter is talking primarily about women like herself – affluent, powerful, highly educated mothers, the kind who most people see and marvel, “How does she do it all?” – it’s also applicable to men.

Are you up for a long read? If so, I’d love to discuss it with you. My main questions so far are:

- Slaughter is a seriously elite academic, talking about other super-high-powered women. What does her argument mean for average workers – for example, someone who works in retail and has to be in in the workplace in order to work?

- Why hasn’t Slaughter questioned the very idea of the mega-hour work week? Is it really an achievement to work from home if you’re still sending email at one a.m.?

What are your thoughts and questions?

 

Slumming

Hello, friends. The best thing about grad school, in my opinion? The really smart, interesting people I met, and how they’ve enriched my life and stretched my brain. One of my friends, Keri Walsh, recently blew my mind. (This has been an ongoing theme, recently. Other friends introduced me to Smiling Victorians and the Female Detective in past weeks, both of which are also completely awesome.) Keri posted on facebook about Seth Koven’s Slumming, an electrifying study of Victorian attitudes towards the poor. (Incidentally, you can tell when an academic book is especially juicy; they print a paperback version that, unlike the hardcover, costs less than $100.)

I knew that the nineteenth century was a time of major private philanthropy: serious-minded people worked hard to help the socially marginal, at a time when laissez-faire politics ruled supreme. What I didn’t know was that the term slumming was also coined at that time, to describe the fashion (yes, I said “fashion”) for touring slums to get a thrill from how the poor lived. Here’s a satirical example from Punch, which Koven discusses in his introduction:

The clergyman in the middle, with a well-dressed lady on either side of him, strolls through London’s East End as though it’s a zoo. The East Enders know why he’s there, of course, and stare right back at him, commenting on his hat. The cartoon is captioned “In Slummibus” because slum tourists often rented omnibuses in which to do their slumming. I guess they felt safer that way.

This is an extension, of course, of the English habit of visiting insane asylums as a form of entertainment. (The former premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein, revived this tradition in his own way in 2001 with a drunken visit to a shelter, where he shouted abuse at homeless men and threw pennies at them.) And many slum tourists had good intentions, as Koven points out. But it’s a new lens through which we can view the Victorians.

The Victorians are like us, in their urban chasm between rich and poor; in their desire to be daring, fashionable, and well-entertained; in their desire to do good; in the confusion, scandal, and constant one-upmanship of their media; and in the wild energy and tension with which they lived their lives.

On performance

Yesterday, my almost-four-year-old had a birthday celebration at his preschool, to which his whole family was invited. It was absolutely beautiful: thoughtful, focused, loving, and joyful. And yes, I wept. But I’m more interested in my son’s response, which was an intense blend of pride, excitement, the need to control his own surge of emotions, and stage fright. It’s all completely logical, and it would probably have been odd had his response been more straightforward. But it made me think about author appearances and public performance.

I was an extremely shy, introverted child. (Yes, this is Author Cliché No. 2, second only to “I always wanted to write”. But being a cliché doesn’t make it less true.) I preferred to play alone, or with one good friend. Changing schools – especially midway through the school year – made me dry-heave with anxiety. I consistently, seriously, contemplated breaking my hand, on purpose, before piano recitals. And let’s not even discuss public speaking.

Actually, yes, let’s. Because I detested it. I’d work hard researching a topic, writing a script and memorizing it, and practice delivering it to an empty room. And then, on the day itself, I’d go hot-and-cold-and-dizzy with nerves, and blast through the entire speech in 30 seconds of unintelligible, warp-speed muttering. What a complete waste of time.

Or was it? Because I now have an introvert’s dream job. And yet I regularly stand before small and large groups of people and read to them, talk to them, answer questions, and generally do what my husband calls “the Y. S. Lee Show”. And it’s fine. More than fine: it’s fun. Occasionally, it’s even inspiring.

I’m so far removed from the kid who, in Grade 1, hid in the cloakroom at recess because I was the new kid. And I don’t think it’s because I had an overnight personality change. I think it’s because of all the practice: public speaking assignments, changing schools several times, and working as a university professor. When you are forced to do something, over and over again, you adapt. Hone techniques. And rehearse a show of confidence that, eventually, becomes very real.

I’m still definitely an introvert. I love working at home. I don’t miss having colleagues (if I want chit-chat, there’s always Twitter!). And too much noise, for too long, makes me flee the scene. But I hadn’t thought about how much I’ve changed until I saw the blend of expressions on my little-big boy’s face yesterday.

How about you: are you an introvert, an extrovert, or that rare (and possibly mythical) balanced creature? How do you deal with author appearances or other public speaking gigs?

—

Interviews are a different kind of performance, and I had such a fun time with Trisha of the YA YA YAs when she interviewed me as part of her Summer Blog Blast Tour. Do you like night soil jokes? If so, you’ll love Trisha’s questions as much as I did!

Trisha’s also written a really lovely appreciation for the Agency novels that’s gone straight to my head. Obviously, I adore her taste in books!

Grit and pathos

Hello, friends. On Friday, I was over at Nineteenteen, blogging about the history of the London Foundling Hospital – essentially the first charity orphanage in a huge city rife with abandoned babies and homeless children. This is, at first glance, an eighteenth-century story: Thomas Coram, who fought to create the Foundling Hospital, did so in 1739. Its major patrons, composer George Frideric Handel and artist William Hogarth, were eighteenth-century figures. So what does this have to do with the Victorian era?

Dickens, of course. (Whenever in doubt, the answer is Dickens. Fact.) For a time, Dickens lived on Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the Foundling Hospital. We know that Dickens was a frenetic walker and a fervent student of London life, in all its grit and intensity. He would definitely have noticed the daily dramas of the Foundling Hospital, and some of this found its way into his novels. For example, in Little Dorrit, the Meagle family adopts their servant Tattycoram from the Hospital. She’s a fierce and frustrated girl, Tattycoram. And have you noticed her name? The “coram” part is borrowed from Captain Thomas Coram, of course, the founder of the Hospital. Tattycoram is right to be impatient, because she’ll always be identified with the Foundling Hospital. Her (lack of) social status is right there in her name.

There’s also the story of Oliver Twist, with Oliver’s childhood in a poorhouse – not the Foundling Hospital, but another kind of holding place for destitute children. (If you haven’t read Oliver Twist, you may still know the famous scene of Oliver asking for more gruel.) Inspired by his own experience of child labour, Dickens attacks his society’s treatment of the poor – especially poor children. The children of the Foundling Hospital would have been a daily reminder and a constant prodding of his own traumatic memories.

I think what’s interesting here is the way history bleeds untidily from period to period. Although we can think, “Foundling Hospital, Thomas Coram, Handel, Hogarth – yep, all eighteenth century”, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that institutions and problems endure. And the tragedies that Coram sought to prevent – the abandoned and homeless and dying children of London in the 1730s – continued through the Victoria era.

What do you think? Are there places or things you associate with one era which, in fact, belong to others as well?

Yes. THIS.

I have the most interesting, keen-eyed friends a girl could ask for. A few days ago, my fellow Master of Arts (that’s what they said at our convocation: “Rise, Master of Arts!”) Jo Valin sent me this link to some photos of Smiling Victorians.

The photos are all borrowed from a Flickr group called – you guessed it – The Smiling Victorian, but Retronaut does a great job of explaining why the Victorians are so commonly stereotyped as stuffy and solemn: when being photographed, “subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky. As a result, we have a tendency to see our Victorian ancestors as even more formal and stern than they might have been.”

You guys, I ADORE this cache of photos. Not only are they cheeky and vivid and candid and moving, but they absolutely SHRED our preconceptions about the Victorians. Check out the body language! Women put their arms around men, they lay down on beaches, they sat on their (sketchy-looking) boyfriends’ laps!

This is precisely the kind of Victorian England I try to evoke in the Agency novels: pungent, gritty, vigorous. The stuff missed by canonical novels and etiquette books. The parts you might never glimpse, if you buy into the stereotype.

And there’s more: I’ve raved about the Dictionary of Victorian London before, but its editor, Lee Jackson, actually made me cackle out loud this week with a blog post about Victorian prudery – or its antithesis. The writer quoted is Francis Wey, a French tourist, so we should make allowances for exaggeration and a desire to caricature the English. But if even half of what Wey reports is true, the prim-and-proper stereotype is about to collapse like the toilet tents Wey describes. As he says, “When English people are not icicles, they are apt to become shameless.”

Finally, this week I’m the feature author at Nineteenteen, a really cool blog about “being a teen in the nineteenth century”. Yesterday, blogger and YA author Marissa Doyle interviewed me – and of course, as a fellow novelist and history fanatic, she asked very interesting questions. Check it out!

Courage!

I went for a walk last night and saw this snail. It was 3 metres from the spot where I’d last seen it, about 10 hours earlier. I felt a flash of camaraderie for this snail, because I’ve been kind of bogged down lately. I’ve had sick kids, a sick partner, a wicked virus followed by a sinus infection, and a fair amount of unnecessary drama going on. And I looked at the snail and the 3 metres of sidewalk it had covered since noon and sighed and thought, hey! it’s me.

And then I reached the lake:

This is part of a waterfront path along Lake Ontario and it’s far more calming than a massage. Especially at dusk. I walked on, feeling less like a snail.

I went to check on the stone sculptures. For about a year, now, someone has been building with stones along the edge of the path. It’s not uncommon to see an inukshuk or two along the way, but the stone sculptor is different: her work tends to be abstract, and it’s generally very restrained. Her sculptures get tumbled by the wind, or fall back into the lake, and then a couple of weeks later she’s back. For a while, there were about 30 sculptures along the path, and part of going for a walk was the fun of seeing what she’d done. Also, people tend to leave the sculptures as they find them.

Tonight, however, I found this:

I’m in two minds about the whole thing. I think the original sculpture – the arch on the left, inside the circle of stones – was terrific on its own. The other stuff seems excessive, overdecorated, fussy. I definitely don’t think it’s by the same person. But all the same, it was inspiring to see someone interacting with the original work, trying to augment it, changing it. Because that’s what we all do, right?

Maybe I’m not a snail, after all.