Joni Mitchell: Survivor, Thriver, Jiver Detector (book review)

I landed in Canada at the age of 24, very disassociated after living in a hippie commune and travelling around Europe for over three years*. The most played singer on the radio was Joni Mitchell. Both Sides Now, You’re a Radio, Carrie, Big Yellow Taxi and Woodstock. Psychedelia and hippiedom were coming to an end, and Joni’s songs were all bittersweet swan songs to that part of my youth and life.

Then I mostly forgot about the hippie songstress unless Woodstock or one of her 70s hits came on a pop station. Browsing the Marmora Library a couple of weeks ago I made a closing time grab of her biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe. 

What a read, what a ride for over 400 pages! Joni has been turning out albums ever since, constantly changing and evolving more than David Bowie. More lovers, husbands and anecdotes of the music world elite than I can remember. 

Yaffe,a musician himself, held countless interviews with Joni and her cohorts. Joni doesn’t hold much back, and if you want to know what Leonard Cohen was really like (an early and influential lover), well, he taught her about Nietzsche and poetry but he couldn’t tune his guitar and his singing was a drone. Joni doesn’t filter anything.  

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Jon Mitchell

David Yaffe, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2017

420 pages  

*Eel Pie Island Dharma: a hippie memoir/haibun

Unfinished Monument Press 1990/Hidden Brook Press 2012   

If you loved "The Clan of the Cave Bear"

 You should read The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron. I suspect this wonderful story owes a large debt to Jean Auel’s 1980s series Earth' Children, which began with Clan. The book’s structure is interesting, with the modern day archeologist narrator imagining the story behind her find of a Neanderthal skeleton and a modern day human buried side by side. The burial looks intentional, and would help her prove the interrelationship between our early ancestors and ourselves. The archeologist’s reputation is also at stake regarding her find, and pardon the horrible pun, but proving her thesis will help make her professional bones. 

Maya Angelou’s quote “You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you have been” is very applicable. From the prologue:

They were kind and clever. They had hands with opposable thumbs and a light dusting of hair on their backs.They had hearts that throbbed in their chests when they saw certain people, and this happened more than you might expect.  Their brains were larger than ours by about 10 percent. Many of us have inherited up to 4 percent of their DNA, and now that both genomes have been sequenced, we we know that theirs differs from ours by only about 0.12 percent.     

Claire Cameron very successfully interweaves the experiences of a modern day woman and that of a woman of forty thousand years ago. This tale isn’t as over the top as Clan, so in some ways it's more believable and credible. The modern day dialogue is so accurate that for an extended time one late night I forgot I was reading fiction.

Penguin Random House/Anchor Canada, 2017
275 pages

2017 Finalist Rogers Writers’ Trust 
A National Post Best Book of the Year
Canadian bestseller

Dogs, Wolves and Quirky People with Wild Hearts

 
 

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys

HarperCollins, 2004

I took a year long break from reading books while recovering from a colon cancer operation and then a vicious dog attack. Not reading was a new experience after a lifetime of being a bookworm/writer//poet/librarian. A newly retired friend and I binge watched over a dozen TV series, and there are some great programs out there (some memorable favourites listed below). But now I'm catching up on reading books again, and eager to share discoveries.

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys is my recent one. It was a quick read, too quick and I binge read it in two nights. I told a close friend, also a retired librarian and dog lover, that she would enjoy it. I desperately wanted to tell her the roughest of outlines about the book, but she stopped me cold. She was right. This is a book by a poet, and it's too interwoven, too subtle and delicate to describe or paraphrase. Of course there is also a twist or two, and it would be a shame to do much more than recommend and leave it at that! As a book by an accomplished poet it's beautifully descriptive writing, but never once did I find it self-consciously "poetic", just addictive.

Now the list of binge watched series I remember most after several months of reflecting.

The Godfather of Harlem
Tegan and Sara's High School
Twisted Metal
1923
Poker Face  

The Last of Us 

A Great Read: Olivia Chow's autobiography "My Journey"

 

Last week I ventured into the Marmora Library for the first time in ages, thirsty for a good winter read. They didn't have any of Ian Hamilton's Ava Lee thrillers, so I lugged home Olivia Chow's 2014 autobio My Journey and Joe Fiorito's 2002 first novel,The Song Beneath the Ice. I decided to start with Olivia's book, as she's back in the news in a big way as the recently elected Mayor of our national city-state, Toronto.

I wasn't expecting much, maybe just a bit of political nostalgia from my days living in TO, from 1974 until I moved to the edge of the Kawarthas in 1989. I sure didn't expect a book I couldn't put down at night, and then held off reading the final four pages just so  I'd have an excuse to pick it up again. Yep, the book is a good read for anybody, and of course a great read for political junkies. It combines her insightful and exciting life story, including the fairy tale romance and marriage with Jack Layton, the man who should have been our Prime Minister. He almost was until cancer took its nasty toll at the last minute.

But it's many other stories - that of a Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong, born upper middle class (e.g. 'halfway up the mountain'). The family move to Canada wasn't the success her parents had imagined, and hard times followed. And it's the story of a talented artist (sculptor) who found her ultimate calling via the circultous ladder of progressive volunteerism and on into municipal politics. The book could definitely act as a step by step manual for wannabe politicos, and it's an historical tour guide of 1990s - 2000s Toronto and its cultural, political and progressive movements. There's feminism, LGBT+ rights, going back to the bath house raids my poet friend David Reed was swept up in. There are battles with the TO police union and surprisingly (to me) her creative assistance in organizing a giant rave in TO's Nathan Phillips City Square.

I recommended the book to my friend Sylvia, who lived in TO during most of Olivia and Jack's early decades of progressive organizing. She was reminded of sending her kids to Woodgreen Community Centre Daycare and when Jack Layton was her city councillor. Initially we both wondered how someone not known as a writer managed to write such an engaging and yet well organized book, and if she'd used a ghost writer. Well, Olivia followed the same template she's done all her life organizing. She put together a team who helped her organize the book and to give gentle guidance on what details to leave in, and what to omit. I wasn't surprised when I learned one of her helpers was journalist extraordinaire Victor Malarek. I remember reading his autobio, Hey Malarek!, when I first started working at the Main Street Library in east end Toronto.

Her book was published in 2014, but we know how the story continues, with Olivia Chow just elected the Mayor of Toronto (with strong powers - thanks Doug Ford). If you want to get some idea of where our national city-state is headed, My Journey will give the reader some great clues.


Harper Collins, 2014
328 pages
(great pic section as well)

                                                        ~    ~    ~

an afterthought: A brief haibun of mine was included in the artists' tribute to Jack Layton, Jack Layton: Art in Action, Penn Kemp, editor, Quattro Books, Inc.  2013. 

Wind Horses

Given how Jack championed wind power, it seems appropriate that prayer flags are called Wind Horses in Tibetan. Here is Chris Faiers's Prayer Flag Haibun for the occasion.

Regarding the vigil for Jack and hanging the prayer flags, I wanted to do something more uplifting (pun intended) than draw another chalk memorial on the concrete of Nathan Phillips. So  I bobbled around the fixtures of the skating rink, frantically trying to tie down the prayer flags in the downtown wind tunnel effect. An elderly couple stopped to encourage my efforts. They were possibly from India, and after I accomplished the hanging, they thanked me for displaying the prayer flags. They also  felt the flags were a most appropriate spiritual honour for Jack. 

city winds

carry our prayers

over Lake Ontario