I don't know how she does it

There are some tiny issues with my "Back to Bach."

I'm sure it's not my fault, it's certainly not the fault of the sainted Arietta. What then? Maybe God hates me. No matter how much and how furiously I practice it, the problems remain.

"Play each key right in the middle," Tiina instructs.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

"No, really -- right in the middle. Think about it while you're doing it. Go as slow as you need to."

I am outwardly compliant, inwardly "whatever." I play the offending passage suuuuper-slooooooowly, taking elaborate care to hit each key just exactly so, smack-dab in the middle. There -- now are you happy?

"Now just play it," Tiina says.

If accordions could roll their eyes like teenagers, mine would. But we humour her.

Oh. My. God.

"I don't know why it works," Tiina says, "but it does."

How does she do it?

Back to Bach ... and Guaraldi and maybe Handel too

One of the many consoling tips Tiina has suggested when I am breaking my head on some aspirational piece of music -- a piece that is a little beyond me but that I tie myself into knots trying to play anyway -- is to time travel.

Instead of remaining mired in "Back to Bach," I can go back instead to pieces from bygone accordion times. Like "Charlie the Chimp." Kidding! Not that far back.

The idea is that the magical ease with which I will now be able to play them will demonstrate my progress and fill me with cheer. 

Unfortunately my memory doesn't seem to operate the same way it once did. While there are piano pieces I learned as a teenager that are branded on my brain forever, some accordion pieces learned much more recently don't ring any bells at all.

I am fairly certain that if someone brings a keyboard to my deathbed, I will still be able to bang out the Chopin "Waltz in A-flat Major" before expiring.

But now the objects of my study just don't take hold in the same way.

This was proven to me just before Christmas when with great excitement I brought the music for Vince Guaraldi's "Christmas Time Is Here" to class.

Tiina pointed out that I had also played it last Christmas. 

It seems that even my mistakes were the same ones I made last year -- though I honestly don't know how she could claim to know that. If I have to ask my loved ones how old I am on my birthday, I don't see how Tiina can recall my problematic jump from the D flat to the F sharp D7 chord from the year before.

So this "go back to earlier music to see how far you have come" stuff is not a guaranteed pick-me-up. I'm just saying.

Tiina did however give me another excellent accordion tip to help me in my struggles with "Back to Bach" that I'll report on later.

Until then -- we have apparently survived the most depressing day of the year. Yippee!

I think I will just have a go at "Charlie the Chimp" now.

An encouraging word for the new year

So it's official: the world will not end in 2012 as previously suggested (by Hollywood, mostly). It's all an unfortunate misunderstanding arising from the unique method of ancient Mayan timekeeping which involved three different and concurrent systems for keeping track of the days. The confusion was amplified by their use of a base-20 number system, notated with a system of lines and dots that look as though the I Ching mated with the Morse code. It makes your head hurt just to think of it! Long story short, the whole apocalypse thing is just a big mistake. The world will not, I repeat, not, end in 2012. 

Unless it does, in which case it will end on my birthday.

This is just some of the useful information gleaned from the Royal Ontario Museum's current exhibit, Maya: Secrets of their Ancient World, which was a source of great happiness to me last week.

Other people might be captivated by the Mayan systems of farming, employing elaborate terraces to maximize use of agricultural land, or perhaps their incredible architecture. Teenaged boys will doubtless be drawn to accounts of human sacrifice to a blood-thirsty god.

Myself, I immediately gravitated towards the ear spools. These are massive and ornate objects worn like earrings, only so large that the earlobe had to be gradually expanded over the course of a lifetime to accommodate them. One of the lesser humiliations visited upon captured enemies was replacing their ear spools with strips of paper. The greater humiliations you maybe don't want to know about, unless you are the aforementioned teenaged boy. In which case -- why are you reading this?

One small quibble: the show has been mounted with way too much audio, all of it loud and not sequestered, so that when you walk though the exhibit there can be as many as three audible competing voices. Add the voice of a docent shouting over it all and you have what is in my universe a recipe for Mulled Hell. If this is an issue for you too, I suggest getting hold of some noise-cancelling headphones before viewing the ear spools of the ancient Maya.

The Mayan exhibit will run until April 9th, but ending tomorrow is the wonderful exhibit of David Hockney iPad drawings, Fresh Flowers, on the 4th floor of the ROM Crystal. I wish I had visited it earlier and frequently. It is totally amazing and can still be viewed on January 1st. 

Resolution for the new year: at least mention the accordion occasionally.

Happy New Year!

Delightful though undeniably disturbing

I hope you all had/are having a great holiday. Ours was lovely and opulently well-fed, and nobody forced me to go to a sing-along Messiah -- but I'm still glad to get back to a simpler lifestyle. 

For one thing, I can really only think about one thing at a time, so an extended period in which things are always falling out of my brain and off my mental to-do list really blows my circuits. 

For another, what I most want to do during the holidays is to read and take walks, and these are just the things that are so cruelly off the map during the mad gay social whirl. 

So today I was thrilled to be able to walk down to the allotment garden where I found these:

This might seem a feeble harvest but I assure you that on the 26th of December in Toronto it is quite exceptional.

The bad news of course is that on the 26th of December in Toronto we shouldn't be seeing anything like this. A few wizened root vegetables under a frozen crust of soil would be more like it.

Like everyone else here I can't quite bring myself to complain about not freezing to death but it does give one pause. It's the kind of weather that in Tom Perotta's book The Leftovers would have had people making nervous jokes: "How about that global warming?" Which turns out in the book to have been a luxury worry, given that the rapture happens instead and the "leftovers" are left with a whole different and unexpected set of issues, such as survivor guilt.

When I try to persuade people to read The Leftovers they start to look at me oddly and edge away, so let me state that this is not a religious book and I am not about to extend an invitation to a really friendly communal farm of the Martha Marcy May Marlene variety. It's about the religious impulse in its various manifestations, some of them creepier than others, and also about a lot of other things. I listened to an interview with the author in which he said he really meant to employ the rapture as a metaphor for death.

There, now you really want to read it, right? Does it help if I add that it's funny?

Well, here's a review by Stephen King in the New York Times that may do a better job of persuading you. Though where he finds the time I'm sure I don't know.

Because I’m still an only child, I have trouble thinking deeply enough about other people to be any good at figuring out what they would like for a gift.

-- Billy Collins, "Wandering the Bookstore"

Addicted to biography

One of my family's self-created Christmas traditions is that every year my mother gives me a hard-bound copy of the biography of my choice. (There used also to be a visit to the Nutcracker but, despite the considerable charms of the National Ballet’s James Kudelka version, enough is enough.)

So, biographies. This is how I came to own Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, and Robert McCrum’s Wodehouse: A Life. Obviously I lean towards biographies of writers, and this year I am in luck because not only is it a great year for writer biographies, but two of my favourites are by people I actually know. This is what happens if you live long enough: your friends begin to produce objects of desire. It is astonishing – though not, I imagine, as astonishing as when they go into politics and you one day open a newspaper to find them running the country.

The first is Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould by Maria Meindl. Mona Gould possessed the determination, talent and self-mythologizing tendencies necessary to survive as one of the first female broadcasters in Canada and a professional poet. Anyone who sees the words “professional” and “poet” juxtaposed is liable to emit a hollow laugh here, no one more so than actual professional poets. Because the word “professional” implies an “income,” does it not? And the word “income” allied with “poet” surely demands an extra set of air-quotes to underline the sarcasm.

It was somewhat different in Mona Gould’s time, when mainstream magazines regularly published poetry -- and paid for it. There existed a highly romanticized but viable template for the female poet (sorry, “poetess” sounds as icky as “heroine”). Maybe the idea of poetry as a profession was as illusory then as now (was it Dr. Zhivago who said that poetry was no more a profession than being happy?), but the example of Edna St. Vincent Millay made it seem possible. A poet could be a star, an illusion that doubtless ruined lives for decades to come.

That is just one of the layers of Outside the Box. It’s a memoir, and so the biographer’s voyage of discovery in coming to truly know her subject – a process that is always labour-intensive -- is also fraught with emotional danger when the subject is a family member. Hence the subtitle of the book: The Grandmother I Thought I Knew. Maria Meindl dissects the web of family ties so acutely that it feels like vivisection, without ever falling off the tightrope of memoir. How to balance the subject with one’s own history? How to position oneself in the story? I think she does it brilliantly and that it is one of the great accomplishments of this beautifully written book.

My other great biographical pleasure is Richard Greene’s Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius, the first biography in 30 years of the eccentric Sitwell, who was herself no stranger to self-mythology. It’s a satisfyingly hefty biography in the best sense: a book to sink into luxuriously, happy in the knowledge that no biographical stone will be left unturned and that each will be mortared perfectly into the structure of the whole.

It’s also clever, witty and irresistible. Chapter 17 begins: “Joseph Goebbels was the right opponent for Edith Sitwell.” How not to read on? Anybody who was anyone puts in an appearance: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Siegfried Sassoon, Noel Coward, T.S. Eliot. Evelyn Waugh is there; so is Alec Guinness. It’s like being able to attend a particularly glittering salon without the inconvenience of having to get dressed, or come up with things to say.

I should mention that Richard Greene, as well as being married to my friend Marianne, has written three books of poetry and is an English professor at the University of Toronto. His next biographical project is a life of Graham Greene (he is the editor of the excellent Graham Greene: A Life in Letters.)

But she didn't compliment her, because then she would stop -- when you compliment a Lutheran, it troubles them.

-- Garrison Keillor