Blood: The Stuff of Life

Blood: The Stuff of Life
Lawrence Hill

As a surgeon, I have had a long and quite vivid experience with blood, not all of it pleasant. So I was drawn to Lawrence Hill’s Blood: The Stuff of Life. The latest in the prestigious CBC Massey Lectures is a comprehensive reflection on identity and its fallacious instantiation with the hemoglobin-containing bodily fluid that flows in and nurtures all vertebrates. The stuff of life indeed!  

Restricting his examination to the human animal, Hill documents the multifold “meaning” of blood in human history. The book’s scope is impressive: from human sacrifice to therapeutic blood transfusions; from blood as expiator of crime and sin to its transformation through disease into an existential threat to the body that produces it; from witches to vampires, with figures as diverse as William Harvey (who first discovered circulation), Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Louis Riel and Ben Johnson. Finally the book settles on blood as an instrument in demarcating Self and Other. Here, Hill, the son of white and black Americans who settled in Canada and author of the celebrated The Book of Negroes, is in very comfortable territory. 

The book is enlivened by Hill’s personal and familial experiences with blood, both real and metaphorical. While identity, specifically the African-American identity, and the ways society denigrates and dismisses certain of its members are clearly important to Hill, he affirms the humanist and scientifically accurate description that we are all part of the unfolding diversity of the human family.  Amen!

Brian Ostrow is a retired surgeon who volunteers internationally. He knew he wanted to be a surgeon the first time he cut into human flesh!

The Massey Lecture will be held at Lakeside Hope House, October 29th @ 7pm. Tickets are available in the bookstore.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Run!

There have been rumours of this for years, but a recent study in the journal Science certainly gives added gravitas to the notion that reading literary fiction enhances our empathy and emotional intelligence. To summarize the study plot, readers were given two to three dollars to read for just a few minutes. Some were given excerpts from Wendell Berry or Don Delillo while others were given passages from Gillian Flynn or Robert Heinlein. You can read more about the testing procedure here.  If the proof is in the pudding, yes, indeed you will become a more empathetic person by reading literary fiction.

But is there a downside to constant empathy? I have just finished my 18^th Lee Child, Never Go Back, in five years. I started reading him when my father died and found that I couldn’t concentrate. It provided much relief because at least it allowed me to read. Since then, I’ve discovered many other espionage and crime writers that have given me a lot of pleasure. When I start a story from this genre I don’t stop. My head is down for a couple of days and, for the most part, I’m able to crawl into a space that has nothing to do with me or the world around me. And I race read.

But now that my reading concentration has returned I usually have two books going—one in which I am chasing spies or drug barons, the other which allows me to amble and reflect.  I interchanged Never Go Back with Canadian short story writer Shaena Lambert’s Oh, My Darling. I couldn’t race read her. Often her writing shimmered so much that I re-read passages just for the pure wonder of how a human being can so perfectly capture a moment. At one point, some of the sorrows of the life of my own mother flooded into my consciousness in a way that I have never experienced them.  And this was because of just one sentence in Lambert’s writing.

I guess this is what you might call balance in reading. The adrenaline high from racing through a thriller can be wonderfully counterbalanced from the insights that you might experience in the literary world. Cheers to both!

- Barb

A Green Reef

A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change

By Stephen Henighan

Midway through his new book A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change, Stephen Henighan takes us back to late 1939, early 1940, when Canadian troops were deployed to Europe. They “expected to enter a growing conflagration, but when they reached their bases in the United Kingdom they found that the Allied and Axis sides, armed and mobilized, were at war in word but not in deed.” What followed was a period of calm known as the Phony War—or der Sitzkrieg, or The Bore War. “The knowledge that death and destruction were on the horizon did not prevent many people in Europe from continuing to live as they had before.”

How we’re living now (yes, we—I’m looking at you as much as I’m looking at anyone) in relation to simmering environmental disaster leads Henighan to suggest that “we are once again in a Phony War.”

Though slight (49 pages), A Green Reef is never pithy or lacking. Henighan does not claim to try and solve the issue—or, not issue; let’s call it a reality—but does unpack it and lay out all the components—from global to personal—for assessment. This is not a scientific consideration of climate change. Flick a cigarette butt and you’ll hit one of those. Here, Henighan is looking at environmental ass-over-teakettling from the perspective of humanities. 

 “Art is humanity in its concentrated essence,” Henighan writes. “However horrible the billions of deaths that await us may be, humanity’s most enduring loss in the long term may be that of its artistic heritage.” The value of human life and the value of art seem egrigously uneven when pitted against one another. On second blush, though, part of Henighan’s push in the book is to soberly explore a broader understanding of what encroaching anihilation would actually mean for our capital C Culture.  What happens to this “us” that we describe to ourselves when conditions either erase or condense us?

“Environment” is a tricky word. I had a friend castigate me once for referring to the Environment as though it were some Other, something separate. She explained that this is one of the biggest hurdles in inspiring any kind of change in people, to get them to stop looking at the Environment like a broken down car that needs to be fixed. A Green Reef is concerned about the whole, but is worried about the individual, and ultimately argues for the connectedness of the lot of it. The “most bracing challenge is that of reimagining outselves," Henighan writes, "our heaven, our source of meaning."

- Andrew

Stephen Henighan will be in the eBar Tuesday October 8th at 8pm to read from and discuss A Green Reef.

Playing Detective! (Standing in Another Man's Grave)

Standing in Another Man's Grave
Ian Rankin

Lovers of police procedurals and thrillers are very thorough and also easily addicted. The most common question when looking for a new author is “Which is the first in the series?”  They don’t want to miss any details and enjoy building their understanding of the detective, often an anti-hero who has no boundaries, is anti-establishment and misanthropic, and relishes jazz and processed meat sandwiches. 

But here’s the problem. There are often ten or twenty titles in the ongoing drama of any detective and some of them might be out of print. Publishers seem to have a problem putting the number in the series on the spine or cover of the book. Bookstores may not be able to stock all titles of all writers. Sometimes publishers even change the name of some of the books so people think that they are buying a new title, but really they’re not. Also, some authors have more than one living and breathing detective.

Last month I decided to take the plunge with Ian Rankin, one of our most popular writers. I’ve been meaning to read him for a long time so I went to the shelf and chose Standing in Another Man's Grave, which turned out to be the most recent book. Looked good to me, so I didn’t bother looking for the first. Rankin’s character Rebus is a prickly old guy who basically pisses off almost everyone he comes into contact with. But he’s obsessed with his job and, to the consternation of higher-ups, always gets his man.

It becomes pretty obvious as the story progresses that Rebus has a nemesis and his name is Cafferty. Cafferty is a gangster who has been causing havoc in Edinburgh for years. So now I’m pretty committed to going backwards and putting the pieces together in this very fraught relationship. It probably won’t be in backwards numerical order though. This just makes my detective work slightly more challenging!

- Barb

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The Bookshelf Open Writing Room (Mondays 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.)

It’s been a year since I’ve written anything, save a sloppy email, a saucy Facebook update. Nothing worth nothing. I’d had a writing practice once. I’ve romanticized it now, I know. I’m aching for it. Truly aching to write about something I care about. Maybe something you care about. But I never find the time to compose a thing. No matter the desire, it’s too easy for me to let myself down

A few months back, I dropped hours at my job to make space for writing. It was time I needed. A cut in pay to drive up the stakes. Not high enough. It was summer. There were fires to build, children to hose, lawn to lay on.

It’s come to the point where thinking about writing feels like the chest pangs, the stomach flutters you get in the presence of a crush. Something so desirable and so unattainable. Crushed hope.

The stakes need to be higher. That’s where you come in. I need your peer pressure.
Starting this writing room at the Bookshelf is strictly selfish. If I host three hours on a Monday morning where I make you sit and write and shush you if you start chatting, I better be writing, too.

Maybe you need the Writing Room?

Here’s how it works:

• It’s free and open to anyone who wants to write. No commitment except to yourself.
• Come up the front stairs to the Greenroom.
• You bring your tools (pencils sharpened, laptops charged, as there are only a few outlets--an extension cord would help us out).
• Show up any time you like between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. Mondays, except holidays.
• Please be quiet. Write first, chat later.
• We have wifi.
• I’ll make coffee and tea (please make a small donation when you can).
• At 11:30, anyone who wishes to share his or her work with others can move next door to the eBar

That’s it!

Thanks. You are already helping—I wrote my first blog.

- Dawn

Mary Swan Launches My Ghosts at The Bookshelf

It's a bonkers season for launches and readings here at the Bookshelf, and we really couldn't have gotten off on a better foot than we did with Mary Swan. Last night, the eBar was stuffed to the gills with family, friends, and fans who came out to celebrate Mary's new novel, My Ghosts. Seeing the space that full and alive is just about the best reminder of what we've been striving to do at The Bookshelf for the past forty years: celebrate the hell out of authors and artists (local or otherwise) and connect them with the community.

The fall is likewise a busy release season. There's an embarrassment of great new titles coming into the store on a daily basis. For me, My Ghosts really stands out. Mary's first book, the Scotiabank Giller-nominated The Boys in the Trees, used a community's worth of lives to digest a single, confounding crime. In My Ghosts Mary continues to challenge linear narrative, telling the story of family expansion over a decade while also exploring the meaning and implications of time, of heritage, of stories, and of how all three can shape a person. Mary's storytelling is subtle, complex, and always compelling. The book is like nothing else, but always feels familiar—familial, even.

The success of an individual in a community can't help but rub off on that community, and certainly everyone left last night's reading a little bit buffed by Mary's achievement.

- Andrew

 

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The October Bookshelf Non-Fiction Book Club Winner

The Bookshelf Non-Fiction Book Club has been running for over a year, and we've read some great books. We read about eight books a year and discuss them in the Greenroom over food and drinks. It's a terrific opportunity to engage with people who have been absorbing the same information from a different perspective.

Our book for the October book club was chosen via an online poll. The contenders included Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock, Chuck Klosterman's I Wear the Black Hat, Nelson Mandela's Conversations With Myself,  and Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian. The poll was open for a week, and it was a very tight race between Nelson Mandela, Douglas Rushkoff, and Guelph local Thomas King.

The eventual winner, by a hair's breadth, was The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King. King offers a very personal meditation on the history of Native people in North America and on his own experience of being an Aboriginal person in both the United States and Canada. The book club will be meeting on Thursday, October 10, at 7:00 pm in the Greenroom. If you're looking for an intriguing alternative to fiction book clubs, come out and talk politics, philosophy, and memoirs with us. Reality is far more interesting than reality TV!

- Ben

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