For the past two and a half weeks J and I have poked about the backroads of Nova Scotia in a rented car, striking out towards the far extremities (aka Cape Breton) before allowing the gravitational well of Halifax to pull us slowly back. Our experience confirms that it is impossible to approach a large urban centre from one direction — Halifax from Truro, say, having watched the Fundy tidal bore complete its upstream pass on cue — hoping to deflect off the city’s periphery in a new direction — in our case: towards Lunenberg and Nova Scotia’s Southern Shore — without becoming completely lost in a maze of indistinguishable city streets (the confidence instilled by Google Maps is both false and cruel).

We have learned that:

• lobster is king in Nova Scotia; it is simultaneously the province’s official crustacean, its mascot, and the requisite souvenir (the airport duty-free sells it packed for travel, fresh or cooked). Every dish from chow mein to chowder has its lobster variant, and most towns offer some form of Community Lobster Supper (typically: a whole cooked lobster, accompanied by soft drink, coleslaw and potato salad, a roll with butter, and strawberry shortcake) where visitors are humiliated by being forced to wear silly plastic bibs which do absolutely nothing to pervent one’s being squirted by lobster viscera and other fishy liquids.
• every inhabitant of Cape Breton has mastered at least one of: the fiddle, the mandolin, the piano, the accordian, the guitar. At the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou we caught Eddie Cummings & Stephen Gillis one night, and Jerry Holland (flddle) & Marion Dewar (piano) the next (the pub offers excellent food to boot).
• pockets of the province persist in behaving as if the present still lay a century or more ahead. Visitors to the fortress at Louisbourg mingle with inhabitants dressed in period costume, who completely inhabit their characters: colonial French citizens about to be attacked by British forces later in this, the spring of 1745. As an alternative, Sherbrooke offers a complete village which carries on as if it were the late 1800s.

It was wonderful to get away from the responsibilities and routines of “normal” life for a while, and take the time to read:

• The Bookshop (Penelope Fitzgerald)
• Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
• The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
• Late Nights on Air (Elizabeth Hay)
• Lyubka the Cossack and other stories (Isaac Babel)

$86 profit isn’t bad when you consider that prices started at 25¢, with the average price hovering around 50¢ per item. J’s oatmeal chocolate chip and raisin cookies were a profit centre of their own at 25¢ each, and our day’s take would have been significantly higher if we hadn’t dipped into the cookie jar whenever business slowed. Which was pretty often, as things turned out; evidentally Sundays are not the best day to hold a yard sale. Or we could have blamed the weather: according to received wisdom, sunny days are not the best day for yard sales (although I should note that received wisdom is simultaneously of the opposite opinion: yard sales and rain do not mix well either).

The four of us (J and I and two friends) found ourselves on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited wisdom during our joint yard sale a week ago. Browsers seem to become unsettled with four pairs of eyes fixed intently between their shoulder blades (their every hesitation noted and extrapolated—willed!—towards a sale). They react to this intense attention by reflexively throwing off bits of unsolicited advice like the aluminum chaff deployed by military aircraft under fire. Whenever a fresh face appeared at the end of the driveway we began our silent yard sale voodoo: “Make us an offer, any offer”; and “Please, oh benevolent God: don’t make us pack this stuff back into boxes.”

The largest single sale was a pair of shoes (“Brand new,” J emphasizes as she turns the shoes to catch the light. “I’ve never worn them.”) — priced hopefully at $35 but knocked down to $25 after vigorous negotiations. From this windfall a vertiginous descent: the director’s chair at $8 (“A steal! Complete with a spare set of canvas!!”); via the clay garlic baker-oven (“It’s priced at $4 but you can have it for a toonie. Better yet: make that a dollar. It’s brand new!”); to rock bottom: a mind-numbing assortment of 25¢ bric-a-brac, displayed on a sheet of plywood, their every scratch, chip and nick exposed beneath the glare of a noontime sun.

What did we learn? We learned that we had to employ all possible means of fanning the faintest spark of interest into flame. Which is why exclamation marks are de rigeur on yard sale signage; ours sported a crop of exclamation marks as vigorous and ubiquitous as crabgrass. You must read your signage as is you were a potential buyer: unadorned, the word “Cheap” is lustreless and unappealing; the eye slides off it without feeling any need to bring it to the attention of the brain. “Cheap!!!”, on the other hand, instantly sparks the synapses into action; a reflexive reaching for the wallet follows nanoseconds later.

We learned that children are the weak link in any family’s armour; you can be virtually guaranteed to divest yourself of the most god-awful bit of kitsch — as long as you can point out its cuteness quotient to a child before the parent intervenes. “Have you ever seen such a cute little fuzzy bunny?!!” you might exclaim; or “Isn’t this the cutest papier maché box you’ve ever seen? Wouldn’t it make a perfect treasure chest / jewelry box?!”

We learned that a “Free!” box is indespensible. Ours was positioned at the head of the driveway with a notice on it in black felt pen: “Every sale — no matter how small!! — earns you the right to select one item from our “Free” box!!” At noon the phrase “earns you the right” was vigorously crossed out and replaced by “comes with an obligation.” One boy was thrilled to find a Lord of the Rings keychain in the “Free” box; this treasure caused his older brother to rummage desperately in search of something even better. I’d almost sold him on the merits of our vintage answering machine (starting price: $4; knocked down to $2 during the Great Noontime Discouragement; consigned to the “Free” box at 1:00): “I’m sure a young man-about-town such as yourself must receive a lot of calls” — but his mother vetoed the idea before his hope could properly take root; evidently she knows junk when she sees it.

In the bookcase beside our bed is a shelf of books particularly suited for morning browsing, a temptation difficult to resist on those days when a more leisurely start is possible. Such as today.

J and I had spent Saturday evening preparing the house for Sunday visitors. A cake had been baked and iced; plates, cutlery and napkins had been deployed; a fire had been laid in the fireplace and sat awaiting the invocation of a match — for spring here is still taking its own sweet time to ripen, with the first magnolia blossoms opening to an April which is still more lion-like than lamb.

J had chosen a morning swim as her reward for completing our advance preparations; my reward was to roll over and consider the bookshelf close at hand — from which I eventually selected the revised edition of The Letters of E. B. White.

I love to dip into a volume of collected letters, hoping to find one written on the same calendar day. I consider this a gentle form of bibliomancy, and the selected letter often resonates with the day to come. What, then, might my day have in common with that described by E. B. White in his letter dated the 6th of April, 1952?

Writing to James Thurber from his office at The New Yorker, White gives Thurber advice on what to do when attending the birth of a lamb (apparently one chops off the lamb’s tail with an ax) and shares news of a party which the Whites had given in honor of William Shawn’s being named editor of The New Yorker.

132 people! With “dancing of a sort” and a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere, […] the kind of goings on that made you feel that the door would presently open and in would walk Scott and Zelda.” J and I had planned a more modest gathering for our own Sunday afternoon, but maybe with the right kind of music a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere” was still within reach.

White’s letter closes with a lovely run of sentences which helped align his North Brooklin, Maine of 1952 with my own stormy Deep Cove day in 2008:

Spring is making litle sashays about coming to town, but it has been a fairly unconvincing demonstration so far. It’s what Maine people call “crow weather.” I still think Maine speech is about the most satisfactory.

“Crow weather” — a most satisfactory Maine term indeed; well suited for this stormy Deep Cove day with friends just beginning, which will end with us all sharing a Reine de Saba cake before a crackling fire.

1. none of the above
2. We’d worn out the nib of our Montblanc Marcel Proust fountain pen
3. Our accountant had assured us that the $719.56 in our RRSP would allow us to quit our day job and retire to the south of France
4. We were determined to set a new record for Sloth
5. No one told us that the writers’ strike had ended
6. Someone had to read all the stuff that the other bloggers have been writing
7. That “life” thing kept interfering; persistant and very annoying

Phantom Limb Theresa Kishkan Thistledown Press ISBN 1897235313 paper, 171 pages $16 (CDN)

I must confess that I suffer from a form of identity confusion when writing (sporadically! but we’ll get to that later) entries for this blog. Am I the collective noun referred to in these pages as “the t&p editorial collective”? Or am I a single member of that same august group? (because there are times when it is a royal pain to maintain the royal “we”). Or am I an anonymous flesh and blood figure lurking behind the scene, with a keen (and perhaps obsessive) interest in books and all aspects of the bookish world?

Confused or not, all of my identities agree that it is important to draw attention to the recently announced BC Book Prizes short lists for 2008. For weeks the teams of judges have been pouring over the — 300-plus! — submitted books to find the ones which they feel represent the best of this past year’s crop. An unenviable job, but the results are in, and you can review the shortlisted titles on the brand-spanking-new BC Book Prizes website.

The shortlist announcement got a bit of press — the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Straight — which I’m pleased about. And I hope to see more coverage when the awards themselves are presented at the annual Gala dinner (April 26 in Vancouver).

The new BC Book Prizes website is great by the way, thanks to the efforts of Monique Trottier and Work Industries (check out Monique’s blog at www.somisguided.com). In addition to the Book Prize shortlists you’ll find detailed information on BC Book Prizes on Tour, and on the annual BC Book Prizes Soirée event, which will take place Saturday, April 19 this year, between 7 and 9 pm at the Metropolitan Hotel. The Soirée is an excellent opportunity to mingle with some of the nominated authors; there will be music, as well as food by Diva at the Met. And it’s free!

To close this long-overdue entry I want to take a moment and indulge my own enthusiasms (because what else is a web log for if not self-indulgence?) by drawing your attention (upper left) to one of the five titles shortlisted for this year’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize: Theresa Kishkan’s Phantom Limb.

This is a lovely collection of personal essays, many of them rooted in BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, as Kishkan reads the stories that reside in her local landscape. My dear friend A has reviewed Phantom Limb on her own blog (to which I now direct you). There is a richness of feeling in Kishkan’s writing, a blend of clear-eyed observation and reflection which makes this book a pleasure, and a worthy companion to Red Laredo Boots, the essay collection which first brought this fine writer — poet, novelist, and essayist — to my attention.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it! Read!

Scene from The Lavender Hill Mob

“I had a ticket that I’d bought at a Vélib stand, which wasn’t working,” said Sylvia Whitman, manager of a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. “When I found a stand that was working, there was a queue of people waiting to buy their ticket, but no queue for those who already had one. Yet when I went to get a bike everyone started shouting at me, yelling that they’d been waiting for an hour. What are you supposed to do?”

— from a November 22 story on the Paris transit strike in the International Herald Tribune

J and I spent three days in Paris at the end of our summer trip to France, and tried out a pair of Vélib bikes for fun. They’re clunky things, but perfectly suited for trundling around Paris; and you can’t beat the price: for transients such as ourselves there’s a 1 € registration fee for a single day’s subscription. The first 30 minutes of any rental period are free; an hour’s ride will cost you a measly euro: peanuts! The majority of the bike stands (which hold a dozen bicycles or so) are located near the standard tourist draws: the Eiffel Tower; Notre Dame; the Place des Vosges etc. Rental instructions are straight-forward, and are available in several languages on the Vélib kiosk’s display screen. When you’ve finished your ride, you need to find an open slot at one of the stands, and your rental period ends as soon as you’ve clicked your bicycle back into place.

The problem, of course, is what to do if you can’t find an open slot, and when we were there there were rumors of perpetually empty Vélib stands — the ones atop Montmartre, for example — and others — those at the foot of Montmartre — perpetually full. The Vélib system allegedly makes allowances for this kind of usage pattern, with trailers of Vélib bicycles being towed from “have” to “have not” stations behind the scenes. But the usage pattern for summer tourism is quite different from the needs of Parisian commuters, which leads (predictably) to the kinds of confrontations reported on above.

J and I picked our Vélib bikes from a stand on the Rue André Mazet, a quiet side-street where we could get a feel for the clunkers before we braved the Latin Quarter crowds. We managed to execute a few trial runs without flattening any pedestrians, wheeling in a series of slow, tight ovals between the curbs, and then set out tentatively along the Rue Saint-André des Arts, crossing the busy Boul Mich and Rue Saint-Jacques towards our hotel in the Marais—with a brief, reverential pause before Shakespeare and Company, the “bookstore in the Latin Quarter” referred to by the Herald Tribune.

At one time—during those distant Shakespeare and Company days—I considered myself part of an exclusive set: a tumbleweed! practically a Paris resident!; tourists were “the other”, and I one of the fortunate few allowed to sit behind the shop counter, looking past them through the open doorway—my open doorway—across the Seine to Notre Dame. George Whitman will be 94 years old this December; his cycle-commuting daughter Sylvia is now at the bookstore’s helm, and my infrequent visits to the shop have a distinctly nostalgic air.

I noticed, during this most recent trip to France, that a change seems to have come over me; I appear to have crossed an invisible threshold to another stage in life: I no longer deliberately avoid the standard “Paris tourist” activities as in days gone by.

I spent quite some time on one of our September afternoons, browsing at the bouquiniste stalls along the Quai François Mitterand, with the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the skyline just downstream. It was not the books which drew me (although I did leaf through the antique postcards, translating fading messages with a voyeur’s eye); my main purpose was to examine the miniature models of the Eiffel Tower, offered in a wide range of sizes, materials and styles. These things, more than any other object, have for me always symbolized the cattle-like crowds of Paris tourists; I had avoided them—both tourists and Eiffel models—like the plague. This time, though, I found myself looking on the Eiffel miniatures quite fondly: was this an admission of defeat? capitulation? Or was it merely a new-found equanimity? I still don’t know…