updates

Further to my posts about the lack of remuneration in my business, I'd like to tell you about the end-of-the-year royalty statement I just received my from Syracuse University Press, my publisher. I don't think the taxes will be too devastating on last year's royalty payout, which amounted to 74 dollars and eight cents.

American.

Good thing the book only took me twenty plus years, not more.

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Went last night with my friend Anne-Marie, who worked previously with Development and Peace and is now with the Jesuit Forum, to an event full of good people doing work on social justice issues, like her. We ate an enormous potluck feast, and then an activist priest nicknamed Hobo reported on a recent trip to Cairo with a group of Canadians, to an event organised by an American feminist action group called Code Pink. In Cairo they met up with activists from around the world, determined to march through Gaza to demand peace and freedom for the area and its people. He showed slides and talked about the trip, which didn't get out of Cairo - only a few were permitted by the Egyptian government to get as far as Gaza. So they demonstrated and made speeches about freedom for the Palestinians in the Egyptian capital. Hobo spoke with admiration of the Jews who were part of the campaign, including a rabbi called Lynn who did much of the organising.

I understand and support their concern, 100%. Terrible injustice is taking place, Israel is behaving like a vicious bully, and I am grateful, as a human being and a half-Jew, for those who are trying to bring light to the issues and demand justice for the oppressed and dispossessed. But when they passed around flyers asking for support for "Israeli Apartheid Week," demanding that Israel be sanctioned and isolated as was South Africa during apartheid, I felt defensive and angry. Apartheid was hideously unjust and many aspects of Israeli behaviour are similarly indefensible, but the black population of South Africa was not supported and supplied with tonnes of weapons by wealthy Arab states, was not sworn to obliterate the white population, did not deny its right to exist. There is a vast difference in the cases.

Another man began to talk about how some Jews have claimed the word "genocide" for themselves and try to prevent Armenians or Ukrainians from using the term. What an irrational and foolish statement. What a complex issue, where to criticise a nation's behaviour is also to sound as if you're attacking a people who have been attacked enough. Insoluble, I think.

Enough already. Obama did really well in his State of the Union address. That's my boy. Stephen Harper's poll numbers are down. That's my Canada.

P.S. JUST FOUND MY EARRING! What are the chances of that? The tiny diamond stud could have fallen out of my ear anywhere, on the street, at the Y, on the streetcar. Instead, I just bent down to feed the cat and there is was, without its butterfly backing, beside the cat dish. It must have dropped out when I bent to feed her the other day.

Once again, thank you, universe. To celebrate, I'm going out to buy daffodils.

O lucky day

Just got home and found a message from one of the lawyers handling the rights claims. The deadline has been extended two months.

Thank you, universe. I promise to start paying attention. I will fill in those forms today and read all business mail assiduously from now on. Because I am a grown-up and can understand big words.

Perhaps my diamond stud is lying on the floor somewhere, or stuck in my beret. I'm going to keep my eyes peeled. But a silly earring doesn't matter, O vanity thy name is woman. It does matter to be recompensed for this work I love so much, that recompenses so poorly.

The neighbour who called the tow truck is still a jerk.

terrible horrible very bad day

Annals of moronic stupidity, heartsick department: Wayson asked me yesterday if I'd made sure to sign up for the Writer's Union payout for magazine and newspaper rights to written work. There had been a lengthy court case, I knew, that writers had won, something about being paid for rights, something like that, what do I know, I'm just a writer. I had received notices from the Writer's Union of which I'm a member, but they were COMPLICATED, you know, you had to READ them and figure them out and so I paid no attention. I was away, too, strolling the Champs Elysees rather than sorting through email from the Writer's Union of Canada.

I woke up at last at Wayson's urging, logged on, found out that I am eligible for compension for over forty articles for the Globe and other papers and magazines. And that the deadline for the applications for compensation was last week.

Wayson said the payouts might be in the thousands.

There is a slight possibility of an extension of the deadline, for @#$%^&* morons like me. I have written to the Union asking if I may boost that possibility by falling to my knees and begging. No response.

No sympathy for this cretin. It simply did not occur to me that I had written enough to make a difference. I'm so used to assuming there's no money in this business that I ignore any possibility that might lead in that direction. Unbelievable. Beyond stupid.

Then, later yesterday, I reached up to my right earlobe and discovered that one of my little diamond stud earrings was missing. They were a Christmas gift from my mother years ago and I almost never take them off. One has gone. And then after my home class last night, one of my students came back to the house, frantic - her car was missing. She had parked it slightly jutting out into the very wide driveway of the condos next door and, we discovered on phoning the police, one of my neighbours had called a towing company and had her towed. She's in her eighties and it was minus sixteen last night.

I battled rage at myself, at my neighbours and at the universe, but only briefly. Another student in class read a piece about a mutual friend of ours, a talented writer younger than we are who is losing the fight with a virulent cancer. I remembered what matters and put my miniscule woes to rest. A waste of valuable time and energy to fret about money and things - earrings, a blue Honda Civic that was reclaimed, a neighbour's intolerance.

Lesson learned, however. From now on, you may be sure that I will be reading business emails with a great deal of care. If you see someone on her knees, praying in some public place, it will be me.

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One of my most feverish Grade 13 essays is still stored in a box, somewhere around here. It's about J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. That year, 1965-66, was my big Salinger year. Was there an intense artistic kid anywhere in those days, busy defining him or herself as a sensitive outsider battered by the System, by the Man, parents, school, the crazy capitalist phoney goddamn world for Chrissakes, was there a poor crazy screwed-up teenager anywhere in North America who did not absorb Salinger's opus at one gulp and live Holden Caulfield for months or even years? I loved that book so much I wrote a very long handwritten essay about it, then moved on to all his other books, some of which I did not understand. I did not understand why Seymour was so goddamn sensitive he had to shoot himself because his wife was so crass. How did suicide help anyone? The Glasses were so perfect and the rest of the world so ugly. Where did that put me, intense, sensitive 15-year old Beth Kaplan in Grade 13 at Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa? Living with my crazy parents who did not understand me in a world that wanted to bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age?

It may be a cliché to call Salinger the voice of a generation. But he was.

Best of Born to Blog?

My friend Margaret in Vancouver echoed the other day what friend Ellen had previously suggested - that I turn excerpts of this blog into a book. "Best of Born to Blog," said Margaret. At first I dismissed the idea - who would want to pay money, even not very much money, to buy a book of these ramblings? At least the writer of Julie and Julia had a goal that readers could get behind and cheer - what is the goal of these posts? To get through life with a bit of grace, humour and fellowship, I suppose.

Well, I thought, perhaps that's enough of a goal. So I'm going to take a look at what's there and see if it's worth putting it on paper as well as on the shining screen. I believe in books. After the apocalypse, when Canada has reinstated the death penalty and the streets of Toronto are desolate with savage gangs, the wealthy driving by huddled in tanks, when the tsunamis of global warming hit even here, where will our computers be then? Useless bits of junk. What will still be useful? Low-tech paper, pens, pencils. Books.

Oh oh getting apocalyptic again. Bad days for us lefties - Harper does whatever he wants and only a small band of concerned citizens notices or cares, and poor Obama is getting smashed on all sides. Very depressing.

On a cheerier note - PLEASE! A cheerier note! - I made a wonderful discovery yesterday. Rooting in my shelves for memoir material, I came across the baby book I'd forgotten my mother giving me years ago. Luckily for me, she is a hoarder, and what I found was a treasure trove of my own past. The bill for my birth, for example, at the New York Polyclinic on West 50th - only blocks from Sak's Fifth Avenue, I'm proud to note, and a few more to Time's Square. My parents paid $1.00 for the baby bracelet and $1 a day - $7 for a seven day stay - for a "Flat rate maternity hospitalisation without caesarean section." $55.15 in all. What a deal! For $55 they got me! Does it get better than that!

A list in my father's handwriting of names considered: Nadia (his mother's name), Wendy, Elizabeth, Julia, Madeleine, Nina, and Cynthia, and for a boy, Neil, Gregor, Terence, Eric, Michael (his father's name and the one they chose nearly 4 years later for my brother). Among the names crossed out, thankfully, are Cornelia and Astrid, Hector and Denis. Hector! Dad named all our pets after Greek heroes or gods. I'm sure we had a cat named Hector, at one point. My cat was officially named Ariadne, but I called her Wussoo.

My mother has kept her notes both before and after my birth: "August 1st, 1950. It's now 7 a.m. - we just arrived from Great Neck and it seems like the day! I can't really tell how often I'm getting pains now, but I think about every 10 minutes. G. was magnificent driving in, altho' we overshot a turn or two." My father arrives with some things for her - undoubtedly a cup of tea. "We should have got notepaper too," she writes on the back of a Packard Motor Car Company service manual. And a mere twelve hours later, there I was, though she was out cold and didn't see me till the next day.

Most thrillingly, she has written down and counted my first words - nine at 13 months, including, "NO!", 56 at 16 months, 103 at 18 months and at 22 months, I have mastered the useful sentences, "Gone office in car," "Duck open the mouth," "No like it," and "Leave me alone Mummy." You can get far with those.

What a gift. Many thanks, my mother. I have been the same kind of hoarder and obsessive note-taker for my own children, but as far as I can see, they are not writers, so all that stuff is just amusing and mildly interesting to them. But for me, this is rich, invaluable material. On this bleak, snowy morning, I am on the trail, nose to the ground, sniffing for clues.

say it ain't so, Canada

A gloomy, dark, rainy Monday, and I confess to feeling a bit gloomy and dark myself. This was the headline in an article in the Saturday Globe: "Canadians take fresh look at capital punishment." 62% of Canadians, apparently, at least according to this poll, support a return of the death penalty.

To say that this news makes me sick at heart would be a major understatement. You know, I don't believe it, not a word of it, but what I do believe is that poisonous messages coming from the thugs in Ottawa are working. Simple answers to complex issues: frightened by international terrorism and local gangs? Just "get tough on crime" and build more prisons. Lock 'em up, no, better yet, kill them, that'll solve the problem! Look at how well it has worked in those peaceful, crime-free United States.

We're watching Canada change before our eyes.

Okay, time to stop before I get apocalyptic. The article did make me envision a Mad Max scenario for Canada - a vicious dog-eat-dog world, you against me, the laws of selfishness, greed and violence prevailing, and a Harper majority government to start it off. Who ARE those people out there supporting Harper and death? I realise again what a marvellous bubble I live in, surrounded by the "liberal elite" in downtown Toronto. Though there is even a risk right here and now - the right-wing mayoral candidate, who opposes limits to development and hates - get this - bicycle lanes, is apparently gaining force. Down with those lawless bicycle lanes!

No no time to stop. It's the lack of light outside, that's what it is. Instead, I turn to this short email I just got from my dearest friend:

Lunch felt so good, seeing your smile and the light criss-crossing across those winter branches waiting for spring. x0x0 Wayson

Even if we elect a mayor who stomps out our bicycle lanes, friends will get us through. But if Canada reinstates the death penalty, I will have to move. And take Wayson and the rest of you with me.