THE (NOT SO) NICE ITALIAN GIRLS & FRIENDS
talk about our fascination with dolls
Thursday June 10th, 7pm
Lola’s Commissary, 634 Church Street
Featuring:
Diane Bracuk
Beatriz Hausner
Lian Medaglia
Giovanna Riccio
Michelle Alfano as emcee
and music by Tom Garrett
For more info: notsoniceitaliangirls.blogspot.com
Posted in Events, General, Michelle Alfano
And so external reality clashes with the internal realm as I am walking up Yonge St. north towards College St. …
I was wondering why I have developed into such a devoted Anglophile who admires and enjoys English writers and Anglo culture, particularly writers such as Virginia Woolf, when I have been raised so explicitly to dislike and avoid same (have I just answered my own question?). And as I am thinking this I look up and see Mrs. Dalloway’s Hot Dog Stand just a few feet before me on Yonge St. south of College. Mrs. Dalloway’s Hot Dog Stand? Okay, I will take this as a sign that I need to explore this further.
Then this Saturday (May 26, 2006), Brianna Goldberg wrote a brief article on the hot dog stand for the National Post which reminded me that this blog had been simmering in my mind for some time …
It is odd, inexplicable even. I think it may be a “forbidden fruit” scenario (my obsessive interest in this) although forbidden by who is still a question in my mind. Why revere Virgina Woolf, Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury group … Jane Austen’s heroines, William Thackeray’s Becky Sharp? What does it have to do with you? as my mother would have said (in Sicilian that is).
There is a framed photograph of Virginia Woolf above my writing desk. Young, beautiful, she appears almost unseeing and is half turned away from me in that famous b&w protrait as if to say What? I’m busy thinking! Get on with your work! and she is emblazoned on a special cup I bought many years ago. I have numerous bios on the Bloomsbury set (even the somewhat forgotten Leonard Woolf – come on that’s just weird even for me).
Even better, or odder, the various Anglophiles captivated by the British: the American Henry James and Jean Rhys (transplanted from the West Indies to live out her days in London). Do I even have to go back that far in literary history … what about my early infatuation with the African born Doris Lessing in the 1970s and my brief 1990s romantic interlude with Martin Amis which even pushed me into the arms, so to speak, of his father Kingsley Amis and some of his novels?
Okay enough of the bold type names … let’s figure this out. Where I grew up in a predominantly Anglo/Scottish/Irish working class neighborhood in the east end of Hamilton with a smattering of paesani and other Europeans, I remember that my parents had absolutely no sense of feeling inferior to the Inglese or anyone else. None whatsoever. Whatever we felt we excelled in as a culture: family, cuisine, art, opera, music, film, even the average cleanliness of the Italo-Canadian home … there was no way, seemed to be the going sentiment in my world, that we could be deemed inferior. Yes I saw all that, absorbed all that.
We were, I think, disdainful of the Anglos around us, even a bit fearful perhaps. As if we could be tainted by their ways, their unseemly habits and lax customs.
Perhaps then, as a young adult, settling in a new city like Toronto as a university student, away from family and friends and this sort of xenophobic sense of superiority I could finally venture out into a new world, primarily in books and film, and explore the lives of the Bennett sisters in the time of Napoleon or Mrs. Dalloway as she prepared for her party on the pages of Woolf’s book (one of my absolute favourites).
I could pursue unfettered interests that would have seemed odd at home and amongst my circle of girlfriends, all non-readers, mostly all Italo-Canadians, few destined for university.
Perhaps my isolation – I remember whole days returning from classes at university and never having even opened my mouth – forced me to inhabit new worlds, worlds I didn’t belong to, nor ever would.
A brief note on the origins of Mrs. Dalloway’s Hot Dog Stand according to Ms. Goldberg’s article: “the proud moniker isn’t an accident and, no, the surname of its proprietor isn’t Dalloway. ‘The name reflects my dedication, love and respect for English literature,’ says Yahya, the cart’s owner. ‘I actually wanted to name it after T.S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland,‘ he says, adding that he reconsidered after realizing the associations people might make between the cart’s name and contents of the hot dogs. With a degree in English literature, another in linguistics, a diploma to teach English and plans for a PhD on the horizon, Yahya says he sees learning as a lifelong experience. That means surrounding himself with the literary – even at the hot dog stand. Yahya says he was encouraged by other literary shout-outs in Toronto like the James Joyce pub and the defunct Shakespeare’s Cafe, both in the Annex.”
Posted in Authors, Fiction, Michelle Alfano
I recall in past writing groups or workshops reading the work of fellow classmates in which there was pretty disturbing material – fairly explicit depictions of rapes, torture or murders. Does it become a safety valve for certain writers? To commit the act on paper eliminates the need to commit the act? We, the primarily female readers of the work, all tiptoed around the writers in our critiques. In all instances the writers were male (I’m not making a comment on the male psyche here, that’s just how it happened to be in these particular instances). One writer was, I’m not making this up, a postal service employee and perceived to be quite strange.
And I always thought how odd, if a fellow female writer wrote an explicit story about disfiguring a male, or killing a male, or torturing a male, the rest of group would be very disturbed, quite anxious. Would we be more vocal in our critiques?
But why this propensity in Americans specifically? Violence is not particular to America only. Open a newspaper on any page or read the headline on any news website … But why do such specific, formulaic explosions of violence occur there specifically in a school setting? To perpetrate violent crimes against people who really have no bearing on how you have lived, or suffered, in your life? Americans are, indisputably, the most indulged, most privileged people on the plant earth with the highest, most unrealistic expectations of success, fame and wealth (even the transplanted “nationals” such as the Virginia Tech killer Cho). And with such an inflated sense of what they can, or should accomplish, when they fail in the most mediocre way as we all do, every day of our lives (we can’t find a girlfriend, we are not the best in class, we didn’t get the job we wanted, we have trouble making friends, we hate our roommates, our lives are boring), they seem to want to register their misery in the most graphic and explosive way possible. To ensure that when they go down they will go out in a blaze of glory.
Literally.
Posted in General, Michelle Alfano
And the dreams that you have, alone in an empty room, waiting for the door that will open, the thing that is bound to happen … Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
Jean Rhys (1890-1979), born in Dominica in the
West Indies, seems to have always existed on the periphery of literary greatness. Few seem to know her but those that do often love her work (I am one of those devotees – we are an ardent and devoted sect). I was reminded of her again when reading Heather O’Neill’s book Lullabies for Little Criminals as she cites Rhys as one of her influences. Her work has been described as “more or less autobiographical” and often dealt with the theme of a helpless female, an outsider, an alcoholic, who is “victimized by her dependence on an older man for support and protection”. More biographical info is available on the link above.
Lovely, troubled, and nomadic, she flitted restlessly throughout England and Europe. She moved to England at the age of sixteen and studied briefly at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Rather than return to Dominica when he father died she worked as a chorus girl in a touring musical company and then volunteered in a soldiers’ canteen during WWI. In 1920s Paris she was, for a time, under the patronage of the English writer Ford Madox Ford. Perhaps that is too gentle a euphemism but he did seem to be genuinely supportive of her both emotionally and financially for a time. Their relationship is immortalized in her 1939 novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (for his version of the affair see When the Wicked Man (1931)). If you look into the biblical phrase from which that title is derived you might have sense of his take on the whole relationship.
She was thoroughly modern in that she did not cloak the often mercenary nature of men and women at their worst in their pursuit of sex, money or status. Her writing reflected her immense sorrows and losses unflinchingly. In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha Jansen returns to post WWI Paris, the place where her marriage disintegrated, her husband (whose form of employment is ambigous and fretful) disappeared and her newborn child died. She forms no real attachments, make no real friends, and is viewed suspiciously and antagonistically because she is a woman alone with no visible means of financial support.
In an early scene in the novel, Sasha says in a long interior monologue, while she is being humiliated by a supervisor in the small shop where she works briefly, “You have the right to to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray … We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky … There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours.”
Earlier she cries, at the sight of an older balding woman, a prospective customer, fitting various pieces of costume jewellery, combs and feathers to the remains of her thinning hair, while the woman’s daughter impatiently urges her to leave, embarrassed by her vanity perhaps. Sasha bolts from the room and cries senselessly “for all the fools and all the defeated”.
Mistreated, rootless, victimized … these are often words used to describe Rhys’ life and that of her characters (often they appear interchangeable). One can’t help but see the scrawny, abused kitten that Sasha takes in in the novel Good Morning, Midnight as a metaphor for Sasha herself even as the kitten, shooed away by the exasperated Sasha eventually, is almost instantly killed by a taxi.
But Rhys is more than these adjectives. She is brave, wounded by, but unafraid of, society’s judgments, truly fearless. It’s fair to say that the plots and sentiments are disconcertingly similar and bear the stamp of bitter experience. The same lost women seem to haunt every novel and the short stories. Marya’s husband Stephan is imprisoned for fraudulent activities and she is taken under the wing of the well meaning Heidlers in Quartet (1929), a not so veiled nod to to what actually happened to Rhys when her French-Dutch husband was imprisoned in the 1920s. Her affair with Ford began then while he was married.
Julia Martin searches for love after her relationship with Mr. Mackenzie ends (again the lover is patterned on Ford Madox Ford) in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931). In Voyage in the Dark (1934), the book chronicles the misadventures of Anna Morgan, a West Indian born girl who comes to England and becomes a chorus girl. Tigers are Better Looking (1968), a collection of short stories, depict women living in despair, often recovering from failed romances and too much alcohol.
Only one character that I’ve come across in Rhys’ oeuvre, Antoinette Bertha Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) modeled on Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre, destroys the template by immolating herself while locked in Rochester’s house. And she almost succeeds in destroying Rochester himself. Perhaps this was fitting as this is the book that received the most acclaim for Rhys after a life of relative obscurity.
Rhys’ work remains dark, disturbing and true. Perhaps she suffered too much from what she described as: “The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and the thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.” ~ from the short story “Illusion”, The Left Bank (1927)
Posted in Fiction, General, Michelle Alfano
Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals has garnered a great deal of attention, particularly after it was selected as the 2007 winner of CBC’s Canada Reads.
The enormous hype aside and after enthusiastic praise about the book from my partner, there is a genuine frisson of shock in reading something that feels immediate, real, new. That’s what Montreal native O’Neill brings to the book. The misadventures of 12 year old Baby, the pre-teen protagonist being fitfully raised by her heroin junkie father in Montreal hits a nerve even in the reading of the most absurd and strange details of Baby’s life whether it is her time spent in foster homes, in the company of petty criminals on the street or with other children, like Theo, who seem permanently damaged by the lives they have lived.
Supposedly inspired by a similarly sporadic life spent with her father when O’Neill’s mother could no longer manage the care of her three children, she seems to capture life on the street, a life completely unfettered by rules or commonsense on the part of the adults in Baby’s life.
You read with a growing sense of unease as adults (mainly men and boys) notice that Baby is maturing. The casual violence of their language and gestures towards her is unsettling and utterly believable. It reminded me of how vulnerable girls are as the develop into women when even going outside seemed to be fraught with potential peril (or maybe that is more a product of my upbringing in my Hamilton neighborhood?).
It evokes in me the near misses and catastrophes of my own very young sojourns into downtown Hamilton. My mother had a job downtown, I usually accompanied her on Saturdays but often ventured out on my own (at nine! I can’t even imagine it now) and was left to my own devices. I met some unsavoury characters and just barely managed to avoid any real trouble. I had very little street sense but a deep suspicion of people in general which I think was a saving grace.
Although, I am only halfway through the book now, Baby’s gentle acceptance of the bizarre and violent, her seeming naivete is extremely disturbing. It is off putting, even maddening to read. You yearn for an appropriately angry response from her. But reading the “About the Author” section in the back of the book, learning about her real life experiences, hearing her voice as she reads passages from the book on the CBC website (scroll down for the slide show), even merely admiring her photo (she looks like a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait or the young Vanessa Bell, sister of Virgina Woolf) provided with her book – it all fits, seems genuine, naturally created.
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Posted in General, Michelle Alfano
Aren’t we usually perceived through the lens of our tragedies? Put another way, when someone looks at me do they not define me by the sadnesses of my life and/or how I overcame them? It is hard to escape such evaluations. Perhaps it is something that women are more prone to do. Or writers. Or both. I see my much admired writers in the same vein.
I know too much about F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was weak, a drunkard, he embarrassed his friends. He was insufferable and obnoxious, always broke or near broke, despite his many successes. It conflicts with my image of him: pure, beautiful, with Gatsbyesque vitality and passion. And Zelda, don’t even get me started on her.
Flaubert wrote with such tenderness about Emma Bovary. She is weak, sinful, and ultimately destroys her husband and child with her self-destructive ways. But he was so tender with his heroine; he helped me to understand the source of her unhappiness, the reasons why she behaved so wantonly. And yet he ruthlessly exploited his real life lover Flora Tristan and then discarded her … leaving only Emma’s infamous carriage ride to remember her by in Madame Bovary.
Jane Austen died without having found what seemed to be the source of a good deal of happiness for her heroines and for us, her readers. Lizzie Bennett found love. Emma Woodhouse found love. Even the sensible Eleanor and the passionate Marianne, after innumerable dramas, found their soul mates. Where is her Darcy?
Sylvia … I prefer to remember her as a revolutionary poet oppressed by a conformist age, by the need to be a good girl, to brilliantly succeed in 50s America, abandoned with two infants by her husband in the dead of winter. Why must the unhappy truth surface that she sometimes behaved like a 
controlling, manipulative bitch?
Tolstoy, died at 82 trying to “escape†his wife Sonya, running away, boarding a train, falling ill then dying, far from home. Had he forgotten how he transcribed his thoughts of love using only the first letters of certain words on a tablecloth with his finger? Only to have Sonya read his inner most thoughts? When did she stop being the Kitty to his Levin?
Tolstoy wrote, “I clearly realized that my biography, if it suppressed all the nastiness and criminality of my life – as they customarily write biographies – would be a lie, and that if one is going to write my biography, one must write the whole truth.â€
Posted in Fiction, Michelle Alfano
I have been gently sparring off line with someone who, rightfully, challenged my interpretation or description of a piece of performance art I witnessed a couple of weeks ago (see March 2nd, 2007 post). I was skeptical, dismissive and pretty condescending about what I had seen. I invite you to visit Steve Reinke’s website, the creator of which has provoked me to rethink some of these thoughts about that performance.
It got me wondering if something may be defined as art if the viewer does not comprehend the elements of the piece that are presented to them. Is there art without comprehension? Isn’t art predicated on successful communication to the spectator?
Two definitions of art are “the products of human creativity†and “the creation of beautiful or significant thingsâ€. Neither definition includes the precondition that it must be perceived by the viewer as such. It is a relatively modern idea that anything may be art. Do we all buy into the theory that “if an artist decides that an object is art and it’s placed in an art space, then that object is art.†Another related school of thought might be the more cynical Andy Warhol aphorism that “Art is what you get away with.â€
The Dadaist Marcel Duchamp famously submitted his work “Fountainâ€, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The work was rejected as art; Duchamp resigned from the society in protest. Duchamp acknowledged that, “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution [my emphasis] to the creative act.â€
What if I am neither able to decipher nor interpret … does that lessen or weaken the artistic nature of the work? I would suggest no with just a trifle hesitation. Many works that are initially seen as transgressive, avant garde and, perhaps, lacking in value, sometimes increase their ability to captivate, communicate and engage (such the Impressionist, Surrealist and Dadaist movements) with the passage of time.
In the mid 19th c., historical figures and scenes, religious themes, and portraits were considered objects worthy of artistic representation while landscape and still lifes were not. Colours were somber. The Impressionists of the 1860s defied the rules of academic painting using “short, broken brush strokes of pure and unmixed colorâ€. They took the physical process of painting out of the studio and into the outdoors with bright vivid colours and “unconventional” subjects. Impressionism, which was initially received in a hostile manner, may now be perceived as a gentle, universally revered, bourgeois art form of the 21st century.
Is it merely that progressive art + time = classic?
I readily admit that I may not be clever enough to recognize that a piece is a work of art yet I think will reserve the right to withhold that description for work merely because I am told it is.
Posted in General, Michelle Alfano
At times it alarms me that those fictional heroines that intrigue me most are the ones that seem to suffer, not just suffer, but suffer in great operatic bouts of melancholy, sometimes to persevere, to triumph, although not always. What can I say? I’m Sicilian. Melancholy is like mother’s milk to me (I think it was in my mother’s milk actually).
I blame a more cultured friend from university who took me to my first opera. It was, luckily, Verdi’s La Traviata. I was, and largely still am, an unschooled spectator, intimidated by the length, the recitative in Italian (there were no surtitles then to aid the audience) and the grandeur of the set as it was then staged at the old O’Keefe theatre.
Violetta, a beautiful courtesan, captivates, loves, and then seemingly “discards†her younger lover Alfredo for the sake of his standing in society. She endures a humiliating episode in public when he flings money in her face after she rejects him then dies a wheezing, sputtering death in impoverished circumstances of some unknown disease. Was it consumption? Tuberculosis? She dies in the knowledge that she has done the right thing by releasing Alfredo. He acknowledges her sacrifice at her death bed but it is too late.
Posted in Fiction, Michelle Alfano
I spoke briefly about Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, which speculates that it is “the struggle of the artist to find his or her own voice through an ambivalent, anxiety-ridden relation precisely with those precursors whom they most admire.†(February 7th, 2007 blog entry). But I’d also like to explore what it means to be writer who may be outside of the mainstream as a woman and as an ethnic person and the anxiety that that may produce in a writer.
This may perhaps be called the influence of anxiety on such a writer who does not see his or her experiences mirrored in the literature that they read. Now, I definitely don’t belong in the “banish the dead white male†camp (does anyone still work this tired politically correct notion?). Some of my favourite writers are DWMs: Tolstoy, Flaubert, Chekhov, Henry James, and in the category of a little less dead Fitzgerald and Hemingway …
It is sometimes unsettling how much they move me as a female reader. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, any of Chekhov’s heroines, James’ Isabel Archer or Kate Croy, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, are to me, utterly convincing, moving, emotional, living beings. I don’t question the authenticity of the characters or the right of the male authors to create them.
The problem for me lies in the dreams of the aspiring writer – oh let’s say a working class kid from Hamilton who was not exposed to the habits of reading or writing and whose career aspirations were being pushed towards bank telling as an excellent career for girls (truly!) by her family. It is on the receiving end of the aspiring writer that the trouble here lies.
The anxiety mounts, it percolates, it simmers, reaching a crescendo: How I do that? How do I become a writer? Do I have the right to even try? Imagine how preposterous it might be to say to one’s father or mother who may work in factory or in street maintenance for the city or as a seamstress: I want to be a writer.
Is that idea welcome? Is it seen as feasible? Does the person who blurts out that ambition seem rational from their perspective? Not so much. It seems utterly ridiculous. What could you have to say? They are genuinely bewildered by the notion.
Because it’s not just about innate talent and hard work; it’s about opportunity, confidence, networking, marketing oneself.
And so it helps a great deal to see the success and talent of a Nino Ricci or novelist and academic Caterina Edwards or the poet Mary Di Michele to aspire to, to admire. Their success, their visibility, seems to say: yes. Simply yes.
Posted in Fiction, Michelle Alfano
Many of us Descant volunteers were at the Rivoli on February 28th, 2007 to hear our fearless leader Karen Mulhallen read her poetry and show photographs from her trip to Sable Island at The Box Salon, a multi-media, multi-artist forum presented by the inimitable Louise Bak. Karen was preceded by two presenters. I came in just as the performance artist was plying her trade (I won’t name her, my intention is not to ridicule her here but merely to pose a number of questions).
The artist did a number of things including assuming vaguely marital poses with a fake sword, having her photograph taken repeatedly, screening a video of her climbing into bed with assorted friends and comrades and nimbly dancing around the stage. At one point, she wrapped a red scarf around her head covering her eyes, toddled off stage and groped her way to the seated audience. She held a bottle of some sort of coloured fluid in her hand, spritzed it on the hands of audience members and then (did I imagine this?) proceeded to lick it off their hands. All I could think of was … oh boy, wait till she hits Andrew Coyne’s table who, from my vantage point, at the back of the room was situated at a table slightly to my right (he acquitted himself admirably considering the circumstances). But that was not the pinnacle of the performance.
Perhaps I have already established myself here as an artistic Luddite, preferring too much the old to the new, the classic to the modern. Maybe I am the inevitable and unenviable product of innumerable generations of cynical Sicilian peasants but I was completely unmoved or intrigued by the view of the artist cutting her own pubic hair and sprinkling it on stage. Apparently with my slightly late arrival I also missed some similar activity involving ice cubes (luckily for me). It all seemed so Karen Findlay twenty years ago with Ms. Findlay relieving herself on stage in an impotent rage or covering herself in chocolate …
George Orwell had famously said “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.†He was speaking in a political context but it sometimes comes to mind when viewing unconventional forms of art.
I will be the first to admit that I resist what I don’t understand and am quick to dismiss it as such. I wasn’t shocked so much by the performance (okay perhaps mildly alarmed when I thought she was coming my way with that mysterious fluid). But I did feel annoyed. It was the mental equivalent of strutting around a gallery pointing to the modern art and saying in a huff “Huh, I could do that!†That sentiment has always disturbed me because I think it’s borne of ignorance and lack of insight.
I am not proud of my cynicism or my resistance to new ways of presenting “art†if that is what this is. But I also don’t think there can be appreciation or understanding without education of some sort – an education that I must take on myself in order to interpret what I see (and don’t see) in a work of art, annoying or otherwise.
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Posted in Events, Michelle Alfano
