Claudia Casper's Blog, page 4

A Small Story for Your Christmas Stocking

Discussed: 


Christmas,

White River,

Wawa,

Sault Ste. Marie

Here's the link to my story in the Globe and Mail newspaper:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/holiday-guide/holiday-survival-guide...

Not included were two tidbits. One - Bryan, unbeknownst to us, was suffering from a hyperactive thyroid and was never cold during this adventure, making me wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Two - Bryan and I had converted to Judaism the year before, so being turned away at the inn in White River had extra spice!

Teaser: An epic drive across Canada with few $ in winter

The Host

Discussed: 


submission,

appetite,

food chain

Betsy Warland read the following piece aloud at a literary dinner I attended recently. The room was struck dumb, a heretofore impossible achievement among this group of turbo-engaging writers. Writing has variously been described as an act of control and a letting go of the self, but I have never encountered Betsy's invocation of writing as an extreme act of submission. The truth of her piece caused a reality shift inside me. Here it is:

THE HOST

from The Memoir Project 2013

by Betsy Warland

It is a common assumption that we humans (and certainly, we writers) feed upon other forms of life around us; that these various forms of life are there for our use. As I sit here wondering what to write next, I look out the window at early-summer’s countless hues and shapes of leaves, watch strangers walk by, hear the protective caws of crows around their nests. It’s then I’m reminded that all of life – without cease – is voraciously feeding upon me. That I’m a host for all narrative life forms to have their eating frenzies upon. Am bombarded by their appetite for my attention; my submission.

Writing, in fact, is a desperate act. When I give way to this – I encounter these hungry ones with an inventiveness that moves me (and them) beyond sheer survival.

http://www.betsywarland.com/

NOTE ON COMMENTS: If you would like to comment on this piece, email me, and I will publish them below. I have closed comments because of spam.

The Host

Betsy Warland read the following piece aloud at a literary dinner I attended recently. The room was struck dumb, a heretofore impossible achievement among this group of turbo-engaging writers. Writing has variously been described as an act of control and a letting go of the self, but I have never encountered Betsy’s invocation of writing as an extreme act of submission. The truth of her piece caused a reality shift inside me. Here it is:

THE HOST
from The Memoir Project 2013
by Betsy Warland

It is a common assumption that we humans (and certainly, we writers) feed upon other forms of life around us; that these various forms of life are there for our use. As I sit here wondering what to write next, I look out the window at early-summer’s countless hues and shapes of leaves, watch strangers walk by, hear the protective caws of crows around their nests. It’s then I’m reminded that all of life – without cease – is voraciously feeding upon me. That I’m a host for all narrative life forms to have their eating frenzies upon. Am bombarded by their appetite for my attention; my submission.

Writing, in fact, is a desperate act. When I give way to this – I encounter these hungry ones with an inventiveness that moves me (and them) beyond sheer survival.

http://www.betsywarland.com/

NOTE ON COMMENTS: If you would like to comment on this piece, email me, and I will publish them below. I have closed comments because of spam.

Guest Writing for Betsy Warland's Oscar Salon

Discussed: 


camouflage,

imposter,

truth,

victim,

writing,

betrayal

Here's the link to our paired writings. http://ow.ly/mNdqG

I am just now trying to articulate the links between Betsy's piece and mine. Betsy's explores the tension between the collective and the individual, a tension which embodies the life-threatening question of membership in the group. Life-threatening because for our thin-skinned, small-toothed, unclawed species, survival depends on membership in the group. We die if we are alone. Betsy's exploration of the in-locus in-body experience of camouflage, the fluidity of being, infiltration and uncertain membership amid deeper kinships evoked deep fellow feeling in me.

The excerpt I chose shows my protagonist, Allen Quincy, wrestling with the defenselessness of the dead, and his deep discomfort with his ability to further assault the memory of their deaths by writing about it. This is the passage where he converts his intention to expose the memories publicly in order to release himself from their painful hold over him into protecting and guarding them in the intimate, private space of his brain. A conversion to love over survival. Both are about power and the psychological tension it elicits, about strategies to engage and subvert that power and about the human feeling of the individual butting up against it.

Thanks to Betsy Warland for inviting us to engage with her new work, Oscar of Between.

BetsyWarland.com

Guest Writing for Betsy Warland’s Oscar Salon

Here’s the link to our paired writings. http://ow.ly/mNdqG

I am just now trying to articulate the links between Betsy’s piece and mine. Betsy’s explores the tension between the collective and the individual, a tension which embodies the life-threatening question of membership in the group. Life-threatening because for our thin-skinned, small-toothed, unclawed species, survival depends on membership in the group. We die if we are alone. Betsy’s exploration of the in-locus in-body experience of camouflage, the fluidity of being, infiltration and uncertain membership amid deeper kinships evoked deep fellow feeling in me.

The excerpt I chose shows my protagonist, Allen Quincy, wrestling with the defenselessness of the dead, and his deep discomfort with his ability to further assault the memory of their deaths by writing about it. This is the passage where he converts his intention to expose the memories publicly in order to release himself from their painful hold over him into protecting and guarding them in the intimate, private space of his brain. A conversion to love over survival. Both are about power and the psychological tension it elicits, about strategies to engage and subvert that power and about the human feeling of the individual butting up against it.

Thanks to Betsy Warland for inviting us to engage with her new work, Oscar of Between.
BetsyWarland.com

Let's Go To Your Place

Discussed: 


Lene Lovich,

Home,

Disco-Punk,

Chimpanzees,

Vancouver Island

Driving up to Hornby Island, British Columbia past uniform forests created by the forest industries on the rolling hills of the east coast of Vancouver Island alone with the dog. My oldest son, Henry, was in Florida amid the angst of starting a professional golf career while plagued by yet another injury, my youngest son, George, was having hellafun at the Sasquatch music festival, and my husband, James, was cycling diagonally across France with long-time comrades. I scrolled through my tunes, glancing back and forth from tiny screen to asphalt, and clicked on a song rediscovered while compiling a playlist for The Writer’s Union of Canada’s recent AGM booze cruise – HOME by Lene Lovich.

Lovich was a quirky, gothic cabaret, disco-punk singer in the eighties, linked with Nina Hagen, the Deutche, hyper-camp performance artist prone to thrilling operatic outbursts. Their weltanshauung was both arch and laced with earnestness, their lyrics perhaps layered, perhaps ultimately thin. They wore a helluva lot of eye-liner, mugged the exaggerated facial expressions of eyelash-fluttering pre-talkie movie stars and used their voices like percussive instruments emitting squeaks, squeals, and guttural mutterings - Blondie if she were the slightly demonic, burlesque Berliner.

In her lyrics Lovich sets up home as: so remote; sticking in the throat; hard to swallow; like a rock; good clean living; suspicious; close control; so much fuss. She delivers the counterpoint with throaty, seductive, rebellious release: “Let’s go to your place.” The world expands. Air wooshes in through the open car window. Even uniform forests bring fresh air.

In Uganda recently, in the Bodongo Forest at the southern end of Murchison Falls National Park, I saw chimpanzees in the wild. On a par with my life’s all time greatest thrills: hearing the call start with one chimp and almost immediately erupt into a chorus that filled the forest. The sound of exuberance, exposure and total connection. Our knowledgeable researcher Evelyn told us that it is the females who leave their natal group in order to avoid inbreeding. They remember their mother and siblings and come home to visit, leaving their offspring behind so they aren’t murdered by males who know they’re not the father.

The social structure in Uganda, as in many traditional societies, is founded on women leaving their families of origin when they marry and moving to the husband’s family.

Now there is new research http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/unexcited-there-may-be-a-pill... showing that it is more often women who lose interest in monogamous sex, and who are more excited by the figure of a stranger.

What did I feel, my children grown up, the nest their father and I built empty, one parent in the grave, another grieving and housebound, listening to this song alone on the road? ‘Your place’ is not yet the believer’s metaphor for my final resting place, thank God, nor is it the man-cave of a new sexual interest, but it is a place not of my own making, and I have an urge to go there more than ever.

Teaser: Listening to Lene Lovich's disco punk while driving north

Let’s Go To Your Place

Driving up to Hornby Island, British Columbia past uniform forests created by the forest industries on the rolling hills of the east coast of Vancouver Island alone with the dog. My oldest son, Henry, was in Florida amid the angst of starting a professional golf career while plagued by yet another injury, my youngest son, George, was having hellafun at the Sasquatch music festival, and my husband, James, was cycling diagonally across France with long-time comrades. I scrolled through my tunes, glancing back and forth from tiny screen to asphalt, and clicked on a song rediscovered while compiling a playlist for The Writer’s Union of Canada’s recent AGM booze cruise – HOME by Lene Lovich.

Lovich was a quirky, gothic cabaret, disco-punk singer in the eighties, linked with Nina Hagen, the Deutche, hyper-camp performance artist prone to thrilling operatic outbursts. Their weltanshauung was both arch and laced with earnestness, their lyrics perhaps layered, perhaps ultimately thin. They wore a helluva lot of eye-liner, mugged the exaggerated facial expressions of eyelash-fluttering pre-talkie movie stars and used their voices like percussive instruments emitting squeaks, squeals, and guttural mutterings – Blondie if she were the slightly demonic, burlesque Berliner.

In her lyrics Lovich sets up home as: so remote; sticking in the throat; hard to swallow; like a rock; good clean living; suspicious; close control; so much fuss. She delivers the counterpoint with throaty, seductive, rebellious release: “Let’s go to your place.” The world expands. Air wooshes in through the open car window. Even uniform forests bring fresh air.

In Uganda recently, in the Bodongo Forest at the southern end of Murchison Falls National Park, I saw chimpanzees in the wild. On a par with my life’s all time greatest thrills: hearing the call start with one chimp and almost immediately erupt into a chorus that filled the forest. The sound of exuberance, exposure and total connection. Our knowledgeable researcher Evelyn told us that it is the females who leave their natal group in order to avoid inbreeding. They remember their mother and siblings and come home to visit, leaving their offspring behind so they aren’t murdered by males who know they’re not the father.

The social structure in Uganda, as in many traditional societies, is founded on women leaving their families of origin when they marry and moving to the husband’s family.

Now there is new research http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/unexcited-there-may-be-a-pill… showing that it is more often women who lose interest in monogamous sex, and who are more excited by the figure of a stranger.

What did I feel, my children grown up, the nest their father and I built empty, one parent in the grave, another grieving and housebound, listening to this song alone on the road? ‘Your place’ is not yet the believer’s metaphor for my final resting place, thank God, nor is it the man-cave of a new sexual interest, but it is a place not of my own making, and I have an urge to go there more than ever.

Writing Is Like Prospecting – For My Friend Nadine Schuurman

During an interview on CBC radio a geologist expressed that the hardest part of prospecting was maintaining the belief that what you were looking for was out there to be found. In the sleet and mud and cold, out on a limb, repeatedly coming up empty. In this way, writing is like prospecting.

My friend Nadine and I were hiking up the North Shore Mountains of Vancouver. I had said yes to the hike, though I usually don’t like to corner myself in any activity for more than an hour, because I knew I had to get out of my rut. Nadine is a great activator. We’d been hiking for about an hour, slowly gaining altitude, when I confessed how sidelined I felt from the economic life of the world and how useless it made me feel, particularly as a feminist and a woman of the second-wave generation, privileged to have a mother with feminist sensibilities, raised with a sense of being able to try for anything. Working in my personal economic backwater for years and years, I felt like I’d let the side down, sacrificed my economic independence and ceded social and political influence. Nadine is a tenured geography professor and I deeply respect the work she does, the struggles and effort that go with her work, and the gift of knowledge she passes on to students, as well as the research she advances through her intelligence and ingenuity.

The novel I had just finished, The Last Murder, has taken me six years of 5-6 days a week, 6 hours a day (albeit with the dicking around time I disguise as revving my mental engines). I have given it my all, I left nothing behind, I could not have produced a better novel, I worked as I imagine a medieval stone mason might, building a church that might take longer than his lifetime to finish, with patience, diligence, humility, undoing the mistakes I could perceive, but without the certain knowledge that at the end there would be a building that people could enter and worship.

What Nadine said next moved me to tears. She said that the world has reduced our sense of what has value to a purely economic model, that our culture is moving away from art and craftsmanship, that the looking glass through which people see themselves in our society is increasingly measured solely in money. She said my decision to dedicate my life to creating something irrespective of economic validity was heroic in her eyes.

When we tried to recreate the moment, Nadine wrote:

We live in an economic paradigm where the measure of worth is always the dollar. But this was not forever true. In the past, humans were dominated by other paradigms. Northrop Frye, one of Canada’s more erudite philosophers and literary critics, tells the story of another age in which the mystical was exalted. In the 13th century, there were 26 classifications of angels and none of geological strata. Today we are gripped by the insistence that all activities not defined as leisure must yield economic gain. An artifact of this is that society no longer supports art or artists. Public funding for culture in Canada/North America is shrivelling. Increasingly Art is mass produced and mass consumed. Cost benefit. Now only a few individuals are privileged to live and work as artists, to feed our souls. You have seized this opportunity. This was a courageous act in a world that values capacity to generate money rather than capture and render beauty and truth.

What she said to me was so kind, so generous in attention and understanding. She buttressed my tenuous, wobbley spirit with a shoulder-to-shoulder passion and intellect not found frequently in the world outside our individual inner worlds of doubt and worry. I cannot quite capture the poignancy and beauty of what she said, nor can she, perhaps because it was such a personal moment between two people who’ve known each other for most of our adult lives.

Nonetheless, I’m sharing my friend’s words for fellow strugglers out there. The hardest thing is believing what you are seeking exists. That day, what was going to be a 4 hour hike revealed itself as 7 hours of straight elevation gain, with extended periods of scrambling over 4 foot high boulders. When we got to what we thought was the top, and I was getting decidedly grumpy, tired, and light-headed and fantasizing about putting out a rescue call to be helicoptered out, we discovered that the path ahead was so steep chains had been installed for hikers to pull themselves up.

After pushing myself physically past what I was reasonably able to do, we finally reached the restaurant at the top and ordered drinks we’d fantasized about feverishly in the past few hours. Sipping a beer that could never taste better, I leaned back and looked at my friends and the blue sky around their heads and savoured the platonic ideal of the lean, mean fighting machine I’d written as it existed in my mind – the trimmed away fat and excised literary flourishes, the pared down voice, direct, intimate, and fierce, the plot fast and spare. All Jack Sprat, none of his wife.

Writing is also not like geology. After six years exploring in the mysterious, dark, muddy, exciting, lonely wilderness of creation, I found my gold, but it’s an element that can only be confirmed by alchemy, not chemistry.

The image that most captures writing for me right now is a robin in spring, head cocked, listening for the vibrations of a worm underground, ready to snatch and pull at the first available revelation.

Women Are Not Chimpanzees

The Globe and Mail

The Conflict

By: Elisabeth Badinter

From the halls of the École Polytechnique in Paris, in a country where women are still resolutely women first and mothers second, where breasts are a female sexual organ first and a mammalian gland for feeding newborns second, and where adult-oriented parenting goes hand in hand with one of the highest birth rates in Europe, comes the bold, adamantine voice of Elisabeth Badinter, a philosophy professor, author, mother of three and famous (even notorious) feminist essayist.

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which took Europe by storm, could just as easily have been called The Corrections. Badinter forcefully returns women’s gaze from making soft goo-goo eyes at their babies to the feminist prize: economic independence and the right to self-determination. With vivid prose that doesn’t shy away from the declarative sentence, she sounds the alarm against rising new orthodoxies in mothering protocol, which she argues are bad for women and bad for national birth rates.

In the 1970s and ’80s, second-wave feminists reacted to their shoulder-pad-wearing, briefcase-carrying, harried mothers, many of whom may have openly scorned stay-at-home moms, by putting motherhood back at the centre of women’s lives.

At the same time, environmental movements, the back-to-nature movement and new studies emerging from biology, psychology and anthropology all converged to suggest new mothers should breastfeed on demand, be responsive to the child’s feelings and every need, and put their own need to succeed, to socialize and have passionate sex lives a distant second to the needs of their children.

This new maternalism that eschews bottle-feeding, disposable diapers and early child care, Badinter argues, virtually precludes the possibility of mothers returning to work full-time after giving birth. The best they can hope for is to continue with part-time work until the children grow up.

Badinter also identifies the overwhelmingly intensive demands of this new mothering as the reason women are delaying having children, having fewer, or choosing to have none (though she champions the ethical responsibility and rationality of a woman’s choice to be child-free).

Badinter deconstructs the aggressive campaign started by the women of La Leche League (a bête noire she outs as originally at least having a Catholic conservative agenda) to encourage (and shame) women into breastfeeding exclusively for six months to a year and to delay weaning until children reach three to six years old. She scorns the notion that breastfeeding is necessary for emotional bonding between mother and infant, and offers counter-evidence to the “scientific” claims that breastfeeding enhances cognitive development, prevents allergies and asthma, and significantly boosts the child’s immune system. She concedes that in undeveloped countries, where clean water and modern medicine can be hard to come by, breastfeeding remains important.

Badinter also scorns the notion of a maternal instinct that governs women’s behaviour, arguing that women “are not chimpanzees” and are too complex and individual to be subject to biological determinism. She cites maternal indifference, cruelty, infanticide and the choice to be child-free as proof that such instincts do not rule. This may be flogging a dead horse, as evolutionary anthropology has long since moved to nature-and-nurture models and abandoned simplistically deterministic modes of inquiry.

Badinter briefly engages the work of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a U.S. anthropologist whose research and writing have gone a long way to fill in the missing female half of evolutionary theories. Hrdy’s books (most recently Mothers and Others) have demonstrated the enormous impact of mothering behaviour in our species’ evolution.

Badinter chooses a passage from Hrdy’s Mother Nature that waxes poetic about the interplay of hormones and experience during breastfeeding as evidence that Hrdy gives too much supremacy to maternal instinct and hormones in governing women’s behaviour. The French author settles for an extremely reductive interpretation of Hrdy’s rigorously scientific work, and reveals something of her own intellectual modus operandi. She likes to get the knife in quickly and move on even more quickly.

Badinter’s primary concern is with the rights of women to maintain financial independence and an identity separate from the all-consuming role of mother. She is a fierce sister-in-arms delivering necessary intellectual ammo to young women resisting the rising pressures of a newly repressive, inflexible code of maternal behaviour that hides behind the skirts of terms such as “natural” and “instinctual.”

Indeed, no one, male or female, can have failed to notice how ridiculously baby-centric our society has become. Celebrity rags obsess over celebrity pregnancies and children. Gag-inducing terms such as “yummy mummy” and MILF have infiltrated common usage.

The consumerism directed at child-rearing is off the charts, from designer togs, mountains of toys and fantasy bedrooms to all the unnecessary equipment crammed into mommymobiles built like tanks to keep precious offspring safe (God help pedestrians and cyclists).

And aren’t we all waiting for the research that will reveal that one glass of wine and a couple of puffs of a cigarette won’t irreversibly harm the fetus after all? Motherhood, the act of reproducing our species, has gone from being seriously undervalued to being equated with sacred ascension; each new human infant is practically the Second Coming.

Badinter is unafraid to give the sacred cow of maternalism an occasional swift kick in the shins. Her quote from a study of child-free couples, in which an interviewee likens motherhood to “spending all day in the exclusive company of an incontinent mental defective,” may elicit the odd subversive chuckle. On the other hand, while the emotional needs of children are certainly not the focus of this book, the French feminist does betray a certain insouciance toward that subject which may cause the reader to arch an eyebrow.

The translation is occasionally clunky, but never enough to diminish the crisp drama of Badinter’s statements in the original French. It is, however, disappointing when a book like this has no index.

As a woman who, while writing this review, scurried around washing sheets, cleaning the kitchen, buying daffodils and cooking a healthy lentil soup in honour of her first-born’s return home for a week of carousing with his friends, a woman whose extended family might justifiably accuse her of being excessively child-centric – I was intrigued and provoked by Badinter’s book.

The Conflict is not so much a philosophical or scientific work as a passionate polemic. It uses arguments, observations and research (cherry-picking, to be sure, on the way) to grind a new lens through which to view our culture. It is one of those rare books with the power to change the way we look at our world and change the choices we make.

Claudia Casper is the author of three novels and mother to two disgracefully adored sons.

Review of Controversial French Feminist Elizabeth Badinter’s The Conflict

Read my review of the book which took Europe by storm proclaiming that new ‘naturalist’ mothering protocols are bad for women and bad for birth rates:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-conflict-by-elisabeth…

Read an article by Slate author Katie Allison Granju about Badinter’s conflict of interest as part owner and Board Chairman of Publicis, advertising agency for Nestle and other baby formula manufacturers who stand to make a lot of money if women choose not to breastfeed. Perhaps Badinter should have at least given full disclosure if she was going to weigh in on the relative merits of breastfeeding.

http://slate.me/lrjCv

If you’re really interested, check out the comments section on Slate’s piece for a lively debate.