I'm an Immigrant in the Land of Dog

It appears I have a dog. How did this happen? It was a coup de foudre standing on the outside of a kennel looking in at 9 bouncing six week old puppies. They belonged to my neighbours in the country. He wanted to spay his Chocolate Lab and decided to let her have one litter before he did. I've seen 101 Dalmations, but really I was kind of shocked to think a fairly little dog would give birth to nine!!!! puppies.

This one looked right at me and jumped up against the side of the pen. I knew she wanted to jump into my arms. It was like she had searched her whole life for me and finally found me! How could I resist that call to action??? Can puppies hypnotize people? I think they can. I picked her up and she melted into my body, smelling like something not all that nice, Eau de Puppy Crate. Sawdust and remnants of whatever else. But I didn't care, she was so warm and just collapsed into me. After a couple of minutes of holding her my brain started working on its own saying crazy things like, "I want to have this puppy."

Finally we went back home, leaving with her littermates and mother. My son and I fantasized about what we would do with a puppy, what we would call her, what our lives would be like if we had her.
Julian instantly thought of a name, one which I thought was fairly appalling. Kubokan. I said, I don't think so. Too long.* But no other name popped into my head. We went for a walk in a conservation area, crossed a suspension bridge, and talked about the puppy thing. I said, look at that trail. If we had the dog, we could go walking down that trail, with her.

We went back to the city, 150 miles away from puppy temptation. We sort of forgot about the dog. But two weeks later I drove back out, and as I got in the car I suddenly thought, I wonder if I'll be coming back with a dog? My neighbour dropped by to talk about some stuff, he does maintenance for me at my place. I said, do you still have the puppies? I figured the one I liked, the smallest, the prettiest, the cutest, couldn't possibly still be there. He said there were three left. I arranged to come over and see them later that morning. Just to see them. Walked over and there she was. A little bigger, but still that same little face. Black, with butterscotch eyebrows. Too cute. She seemed to know who I was. Picked her up and it was game over.

That small rational piece of my brain did kick in slightly and I said, "I'd like to take her. But I don't know if it will work out at my place in the city. It's small. Real small. And I have the cats. I don't know how she'll manage with the cats. So, I can take her for a trial, as long as I can bring her back if it doesn't work out." My neighbour said, fine.

I'm still not totally sure how it's working out, but after almost 2 weeks of being a puppy owner I've had my heart melted, and my nerves fry repeatedly. Over and over and over again. One minute I think I can do it and the next minute it's, "No, what was I thinking? This is insane. She's gotta go back."

You see, I am an immigrant in the Land of Dog. Never had a dog. Never looked after a dog. Never really ever known a dog. Not well. I've always been a cat person. I've even been a little scared of dogs my whole life. Except for the ones that look like stuffed animals. Which is the kind of dog I'd been hankering after--off and on for the past few years. Just in an internet-browsing sort of fantasy way.

But I guess this is one of those Life Happens to You While You're Busy Making Other Plans kind of thing. I could still decide not to keep her, I guess. The bloom is off the rose for my son, definitely. He's wanting things to go back to the way it was, pre-dog. But as each day goes by, I'm getting a little better at learning this new dog language. I'm still on Ellis Island, and I'm waiting in line. Hoping for the best.

* Her name is now Isadora: Izzy.

Witty & Amazing: Nancy Mitford

A friend pressed this book into my hand earlier this year: Love in a Cold Climate. She told me that she loved the way the cousins and sisters in the book really appreciated the things the others did, and told them so. In the book, this ability is called "exclaiming" and it's a mixture of noticing, appreciation and yes, in some cases, gushing. New pair of drapes? New hat? An enterprising endeavour? Do they like it? Are they proud of you? How nice to have your friend tell you so, enthusiastically. Nowadays I guess it's called "positive feedback" but I rather like the word "exclaiming". A sincere bit of exclaiming in this world of disappointments and failures is something I wish there were a lot more of in the world.

But all that aside, which is only a small part of the book, reading Love in Cold Climate was a happy experience. I was thrilled to discover a writer this entertaining. Almost a cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen. Nancy Mitford, writing in the 1930s was funny and astute. In her life she was a privileged child, debutante, book store clerk, essayist and finally, succesful and famous writer, who spent most of her adult life in Paris. She was a good friend of Evelyn Waugh, and their letters have also been published - now on my list of things to read. (I've always been an Evelyn Waugh fan as well.)



Love in a Cold Climate and the Pursuit of Love (two short books packaged together) are very loosely inspired by her own experiences growing up-one sister of many-in an upper class family in the countryside in England. This was a time when girls still were not routinely sent to school, and mostly grew up in an atmosphere of benign neglect. Marriage was the main goal. Surprising that in 1930s England, not much had really changed since Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice.

A couple of gems from the book that I didn't want to forget:

On Mirrors
We then sallied forth into the street, looking at ourselves in every shop corner that we passed. (I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection and take furtive peeps into their hand looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as it is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.)

On marriage prospects of Linda, main character in the Pursuit of Love
I looked about hopefully for a possible life partner, but though I honestly tried to see the best in them, nothing remotely approximating to my requirements turned up.

Oh, Spy Magazine, how I miss you...

Every now and then, usually while web surfing, something reminds me of Spy Magazine and I'm thinking it may be time to drag out my old copies, saved from the 80s and early 90s.

Spy was a funny, very funny, scathingly brilliant publication with beautiful graphic design, edited by Graydon Carter, who is now the editor of Vanity Fair. (I think he's still there). It was the first to christen Donald Trump as a "short fingered vulgarian".

The title came in part from the society gossip magazine for which Jimmy Stewart’s character works in the suave 1940 movie The Philadelphia Story. With relatively little budget for design, however, Spy’s editors saw their best route forward in giving ambitious designers a free creative license. Doyle, who had recently quit M to form his new partnership, found his own inspiration for the prototype in the typographic density and variety of sixteenth-century Polyglot bibles and 1920s type-specimen books. He recalls a reverence in design circles at the time for art directors like Fabien Baron, who in the late 1980s gave Italian Vogue a spare elegance reminiscent of Alexey Brodovitch’s midcentury designs. “In the 1980s there was this annoying supposition that Baron had invented white space,” Doyle says. “This was our reaction against clean minimalism.”

Quote above is from a great article about Spy. Read more here. Some issues, one in particular (that I somehow lost), actually made me cry with laughter. It was an article that had something to do with made-up names, and the names themselves were the key to the unstoppable shrieking and guffawing.

I notice that a fellow Torontonian, Joe Clark, at Fawny.org is collecting Spy back issues. His site is called Ten Years Ago in Spy. Joe's own blog (linked above) is interesting as well. I enjoyed his critical review of Toronto's Jones Avenue the last time I was there.

Of course I can't remember the Spy issue or even the particular article that set off my marathon laughing fit, but I will be racking my brains trying to remember it. Off and on. When I remember.

Spy was also the venue of a monthly column about life by Ellis Weiner, who now writes on the Huffington Post and is very funny and brilliant. His columns were always one of my favourite things in Spy. It's great to find his writing again on the web. Here is his entertaining and informative deconstruction of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Ellis is also the author of a number of books: The Joy of Worry, the unjustly neglected but hilarious Drop Dead, My Lovely and The Big Boat to Bye-Bye, and Santa Lives! Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus.

He is co-author, with Barbara Davilman, of Yiddish With Dick and Jane and Yiddish With George and Laura, both published by Little, Brown.

More to add to my Amazon wish list.

Great List of Best Documentaries

I just realized that I'm not a fan of  the "must see before you die" gambit as a method of nudging people towards a valuable experience, because....well, how else are you going to experience anything? Presumably you will be alive while watching or doing anything on a "bucket" list.  I'd prefer to use the words: "see while you are alive", if anything. However,  with that bow to my peeve regarding the author's phraseology out of the way,  I'll simply say: Take a look at this excellent list of documentary films. (The list's author includes pictures and an illuminating recap of each film.) See a bunch of these films! After reading it today, many titles will be going on my zip.ca. 

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Ear Worms - The Theme from the Odd Couple: Get Out of my Brain!

Ear Worms: those songs that infect your brain and play over and over and over and over again in your head and you just want them to stop. Sometimes it's a song you hear on the elevator or the mall that gets lodged in there. A song comes on the radio. Or someone talks about a song they hate, and they hum a few bars, and then it gets instantly fixed in your brain cells, the ones that have full orchestras and bands.

I have a few that come upon me sometimes without notice. They usually arrive during a stressful day, when I'm performing some task that doesn't take a huge amount of brainpower. Usually some other problem is preying on me at the time, but I'm not consciously thinking of it. But that bloody song is there, in the forefront of my awareness.

My own private Ear Worms are completely nonsensical. There is no reason on earth that the soundtrack in my brain should so effortlessly default to these annoying and randomly selected tunes, but there you go. I'll be carrying myself about my day when suddenly I have the awareness that the Theme to The Odd Couple has been playing on a loop in my brain for the past 3 hours. Somehow the awareness that it is happening drives it even deeper into my brain. That's the insidious and evil nature of EarWorms.

The Odd Couple Theme is one of my very worst ones. Not that it's such a terrible tune. In fact, I liked the TV Show, and the opening of the show where the tune played was friendly and fun and made for a happy anticipation of 22 minutes of fairly benign entertainment. I can't blame Tony Randall for any of this or whoever composed the thing in good faith. It's simply that the difference between hearing it once in its proper place and hearing the cartoon-y Ear Worm version of it in your brain repeated 732, 576, 000 times in succession is quite vast.

Even just writing this post I am tempting fate. I'm listening out for tell tale notes now: that cheerful plinking intro, that — no I can't even describe it, it's too dangerous. Click on link at your peril.

I Supported the Bridge to Nowhere and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Yes, I, Sarah Palin, did support the bridge to Nowhere, (Ketchikan, zipcode: 99901) during my 2006 campaign for governor....All I got was this lousy t-shirt I had printed up for my campaign, and the millions of federal dollars of "bridge money" that I in fact kept to spend on other things in Alaska. So, yes, I was for the bridge before I was against it, meaning that once everyone in the US starting saying how stupid and wasteful it was, and with the accompanying heaps of scorn thrown at our state, I decided that the t-shirt would be much cuter on me. Don't tell anybody though!

Read more about Sarah Palin's lyin' ways here: Sarah Palin Exposed

This makes feel better about being the laziest woman in the world

After a particularly lazy, work-free, and daydreamy summer where I've been fighting off pangs of guilt for being so lazy and unproductive, I was quite happy today to read this interview in Defamer with filmmaker, and now opera impresario, David Cronenberg.

DEFAMER: I've heard you say that you are lazy, but you seem like such an obsessive guy. How is that possible?

CRONENBERG: I get other people to do work for me and then I take credit for it. I say it jokingly, but it's true. I have a desire to be creative, but that's not the same as obsession. I'm happy reading a book or riding my bike through the hills. I get up late, I stay up late. I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized. But left to my own devices, I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find. I nap all the time when I make movies. Often I give my cameraman a very difficult lighting set up so I can get a longer nap.

David Cronenberg is currently launching an opera based on his 1987 cult classic, The Fly.

Anyway, his comments about the importance of fallow time for creative people rang true to me, because I was just having this conversation with my sister about this the other day. Good to see this idea reinforced by super-famous, successful movie director.

Bring on the naps.

Read the David Cronenberg interview here.