the 50 longest books

It's July 1, Canada, and we are halfway through Globe & Mail's 2008-long revelation of their 50 Greatest Books list, one title per week appearing in the Saturday books section. The latest, and possibly most questionable, choice yet, #25, is Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which comes recommended as deathbed reading for television's most pompous fictional character. At 802 pages in the Penguin edition, it is not a quick read.

In fact, it was obvious almost from the start (book #2: the 3000+ page In Search of Lost Time) that keeping up on a weekly basis was not going to be a possibility. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I had to quantify the problem. Using standard unabridged English editions of the books, and—not counting notes and other editorial additions to the texts—the first 25 of the Globe and Mail's 50 Greatest Books are each, on average, 702 pages.

In other words, to read through the Globe & Mail's canon at the pace at which the list is being published, you would have to read 100 pages a day, without fail.

I am truly curious to know whether there is anyone at the Globe & Mail that has actually read all 50 on the list.

The 25 selected so far break down this way for me: 15 that I've never read, 3 that I've read for the first time this year (The Iliad & The Odyssey, On the Origin of Species, and Ulysses), 4 that I've read previously in my adult years (Augustine's Confessions, The Great Gatsby, King Lear, and The Qur'an), and 3 that I read as a child and haven't read since (Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels).

Of the unread 15, for at least 10 or 11 I would frankly confess to guilt at never having cracked their venerated spines.

I'd like to mock the sheer impracticality of the list, but for whatever reason, I've bought in.

But at the rate that I'm reading, my present extrapolation/calculation is that it will take me almost exactly 6 years to make my way through.

summer in the Sham

I grabbed a microbus (minivan kitted out for packing in a max number of passengers) to a town called ad-Dumeir this morning. There's a Roman temple (or something) from the third century CE (probably) that's been substantially excavated and restored.

Finding it was a minor adventure. Yesterday's trip to Maalula was easier at the start because the Maalula minibuses (not to be confused with the microbuses) have their own "garage" (a bus "garage" in Damascus is basically a big confusing parking lot full of buses). This morning at the much, much larger Abbasseen garage I had the challenge of trying to find the proverbial needle. At one point I made the mistake of asking a soldier. They asked to see my passport. I found this level of hassle for a 35-cent bus ride annoying.

Eventually, I found a bus bound for ad-Dumeir and we got rolling. Just to be on the safe side I showed the friendly-but-quiet young man next to me the Arabic text for "ad-Dumeir" in my Lonely Planet; he nodded that this, indeed, was where we were going.

So far so good. But the Lonely Planet steered me wrong, slightly; it refers to the "microbus stop." The young man, whose English was very scant and who seemed too shy to try out Arabic on me, alerted me that we were, indeed, in ad-Dumeir; I couldn't communicate successfully about a "regular stop" or "normal stop". I quickly broke out my Ross Burns guide (glad that I thought to bring it) and realized from its more specific directions that I would need to double back. I got the attention of the driver and hopped off.

Well, what do you expect for 35 cents.

So I had about a 15-minute hike back down the main road, in the sun. Good thing I brought my dorky sunhat.

I found the temple, but there was nobody around to ask about the key to the site. I tried an older man reclining at the back of a produce shop; he was pretty grumpy about being disturbed, and not terribly helpful. It took a little kid to point out to me that the Arabic numerals posted up next to the locked entrance gate were, in fact, a phone number.

"Teeliphoon!"

Duh!

(Quick mention here: you likely realize this already, but the numerals we in the West use and refer to as "Arabic" are not, in fact, the numerals that are used in Arabic. Well, "1" and "9" are pretty similar.)

I had a brief moment of confusion about whether the number would work from my cell-phone-only area code before I realize that the sign's writer had helpfully included the leading zero and area code as well. Good. Now to test my memory of the Arabic numerals.

Got it right on the first guess. With a mix of English and Arabic I managed to indicate that I was at the "temple" and needed the mifteh ("key") for entry; the voice on the other end told me he could come in "five" (khamsa? yes, five) and sure enough, not too many minutes later a motorcycle pulled up and there were a couple more local youths who kept an eye on me while I made my way around the temple remains and shot a bunch of photos.

Regarding the temple itself: the exact origin and original purpose of the building are a bit in doubt. But at one end a Roman arch has been filled up with huge bricks; clearly a later Arab fortification of what was once probably a religious-functional building.

So after a few minutes of poking, prodding, and photographing I walked back to the main road. I tried flagging down a microbus even though it was empty. The driver offered me a direct ride back to town for 300SYP (roughly $6.75 Can); it seemed a bit ridiculous when I could ride the regular run for 15SYP, but the driver was persuasive and I liked the thought of stretching out in the front seat and heading straight back to the city with no stops, so I took him up on it. We were both satisfied with the deal and parted with a warm handshake.

Back here in the city it has cooled off today; down from high to low 30s. That is good because the heat yesterday was making people crazy. Some cases in point:

• When I walked into Bab Touma yesterday, the first thing I saw was a fistfight spilling out into the street, at least 4 men trading blows as a bunch of others tried to restrain them. It was rather awkward. Nobody seemed to be able to land a good punch. So this is the Christian quarter. It made me nostalgic for Spryfield.
• Heading back through the souq, I chose to ignore one of the merchants trying to get my attention, and he ramped up his attempts to get my attention in English the more that I ignored him and concentrated on my pistachio ice cream cone from Bekdach. "Hello... Excuse me!... EXCUSE ME!... IS THAT A NICE ICE CREAM?... IT HAS MOSQUITOES IN IT!"
• Another souq merchant tried to jerk my chain by pretending not to know where Bekdach is (it's on the main strip; at any given time hundreds of people are walking through the souq licking cones from there) and asking me for directions. One of his colleagues came to my rescue and I said "I know, I know he's fooling; it's hot, people get bored." He asked me where I was from, what city, and almost as a gesture of courtesy didn't try to drag me back to his shop. I guess he figured I'd been hassled enough.

People get crazy in traffic, too; I've been asked what that's like here. Basically, there are two rules of traffic here:

1. You watch where the f*!# you are going.
2. There are no other f*!#ing rules.

To put that in a slightly more refined way: any space that you can successfully move into, whether as a pedestrian or as a driver, is yours. Unless you've misjudged the inertia of any other object attempting to claim that space.

I've quickly become accustomed to walking through multiple lanes of moving traffic in order to cross streets. There are some traffic lights here, but there are instances where you have to travel some blocks to find them. So you don't. You cross. And you remember the rules.

The most amusing workaround that I've seen here for traffic jams is the one that the motorcycles use. They use the sidewalks. I'm not even kidding. This gets complicated when one motorcycle wants to pass another one.

Beep! Beep!

Hey buddy! Watch which part of the sidewalk you're driving that thing on!!

That's a rough translation from Arabic, but I think an accurate one.

"...as if Latin were still spoken in villages near Rome."

I remember reading in some newspaper or other, sometime before Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was released, about a little village in the hills outside Damascus where they still spoke Aramaic—the language that Jesus spoke.

It was said that Mel spent some time in this village to get the hang of Aramaic pronunciation for his movie.

Today I paid a 35-cent bus fare, and went and visited that village.

I didn't actually track down any Aramaic speakers. I'm not sure that it would have done me that much good if I'd tried. When I get to the point where I have a useful basic vocabulary in Arabic maybe I'll try on a second ancient Middle Eastern language.

I did meet some friendly Orthodox nuns at the convent, one of whom told me the story of St. Thecla, legendary student of St. Paul, for whom God miraculously split the mountain so she could escape... um, snakes? lions? her father? I forget what was besetting her at that precise moment, but following the picturesque little stream through the narrow rift in the mountain is pretty cool—kind of like a mini-Petra. Not for claustrophobes I should mention.

There is a real downturn in tourism in Syria in the past few years. Perhaps the most striking remains on the top of the cliffs over Maalula is the hotel, which I'm sure had a fresh gleam on it just a few years ago. It's strange to see a large, thoroughly modern hotel, in the midst of tourism season, with a grand total of two cars parked in front. It's too bad they had to ruin the view from the cliff with a hotel that was rendered spurious just a few years after it was built.

But perhaps the tourists will come back. Mel or no Mel.

Yesterday I walked the street where Christianity started.

It's not every day you get to say that, is it?

OK, we could quibble about exactly what the starting point of the faith was, but Paul's conversion sure is a handy one. Especially if you believe that famous story in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul, on the road to Damascus, is emphatically interpellated by Jesus, struck blind, and goes to the house of Ananias on Straight Street (now Sharia Medhat Pasha/Sharia Bab Sharqi) where he recovers his sight and joins the community that he will come to theologically define.

"Epiphany" thus becomes the essence of the Damascene brand (unless we're talking about swords or fabric).

For the record, I don't take the story literally at all; there's no corroboration for it. Except that Paul tells us firsthand in his own letter to the early Christians at Corinth that he saw Jesus. Feel free to fill in the details, he seems to imply. Decades later, somebody did. Et voila Acts.

But that's what history's like, right? So many layers and digging through them all won't definitely establish every link in the web of events. No one's ever done a sizable dig here, in the Old City. It's too busy to stop, too packed with life-happening for anyone to dream of putting it all on hold. What we know about the history of Dimashqi is a matter of textual record and the occasional accidental find. In the meantime, there's a Chapel of Ananias, and Chapel of St. Paul, because the intangible, at some point, wanted some tangibility.

Walking down Straight Street I'm not thinking about Paul's epiphany, mostly; I'm thinking about Kathmandu, the only reference point from my own experience for the dozens and hundreds of little stalls with their wares; handcrafts, fabrics, spices, fruits. The first time through, you have to just stroll through and take in the geist of it. More detailed exploration will come later. But, oh, the smells! It's a fricking smell-u-copia.

Yesterday was also the first official day of a new life chapter: "Divorced." Does that count as an epiphany? Northrop Frye said that the essence of the Gospel is that "you don't have to be what you were before." And if I did nothing else to mark the day, I guess a walk on Straight Street will have to do. I didn't buy any blades or cloth, but in this small way, Damascus is, for me, two thousand years laters, still delivering on its brand promise.

from the 902 to the 963.

DAM! I'm in Syria. Here in ash-Sham I'm having little adventures in Arabic several times a day. My total lack of a decent vocabulary continually trips me up, but that also means that every time I get something right it's like a little moral victory. This morning I rehearsed how to say "The Canadian Embassy" in decently colloquial fashion: es-safaara al-kanadiyye. My perfect pronunciation was something of a Pyrrhic victory: the cab driver was so convinced that he instantly unleashed a stream of Arabic none of which I understood. It eventually emerged that he didn't know where the embassy was, and took me on a drive to one of the embassy districts where he asked a Syrian officer for directions. After this side-excursion and eventual arrival which involved a spurious turn around the block, he had the nerve to ask for a tip and the further nerve not to make change; I ended up paying double fare as I wasn't in the mood to argue (in a cash-based culture, which entails a constant quest for small change, I experience a recurring minor guilt when I can't make exact payment). But being jacked for the equivalent of a dollar was nothing compared to being jacked for the equivalent of $50 by my own government for them to generate a letter authorizing me to study at Damascus University. But hey, I'm coming from a school that already acclimated me to paying pointless fees for purely bureaucratic reasons (oh snap!).

Just a brief bit about my visit yesterday to the National Museum; the most sublime object in their collection is a little 3" x 1" clay tablet that bears the Ugaritic alphabet, written left to right. It was for teaching aspiring scribes their letters, in scribe school 3400 years ago. That's right, I'm in the country where they invented the f**king alphabet. I got no comeback for that. In Canada we invented hockey and poutine.

I can't imagine any other place but Syria where I could feel so close to the ancient world. They've had time to figure out a thing or two around here. Except for solid net access.

the whole Megillah

Seems like every year Purim gives me blog material. Last evening I attended my first-ever synagogue service—kind of an odd choice, making my first visit on the rowdiest occasion of the Jewish liturgical calendar, but, hey, I like to rock. I was treated to a full read-through of the Megillah of Esther, which took me back to my Sunday School days—I always found the only book in the Bible to not mention God by name to be one of its most gripping stories. (As I read along, I noted that the explanatory glosses in my copy, like the Baptist interpretation of my youth, stress that the absence of God's name in the text only proves that God is in control even when we're not aware.)

Not only did the rattles throughout the congregation thunder away at every reading of the name of Haman, the story's villain, there was a Haman effigy at the front of the sanctuary on a mock gallows, and every so often one of the children of the congregation would enthusiastic string up the hapless doll. Those bits I don't remember from Sunday School.

I was pleased to discover, as I followed along with the Hebrew and English texts on facing pages, that I can still recall enough biblical Hebrew from my half-assed study of the language ten years ago to make out the names of all the people in the Hebrew text. And you know, I have been told that, if I can learn Arabic, Hebrew will be easy by comparison...

the road to Damascus

"A sudden conversion of thought or a change of heart or mind even in matters outside of a Christian context."

The old plan is once again the new plan. On May 19, I will arrive in Syria, and will have one week to get myself registered and prepared for an intensive 4-week Arabic course at Damascus University.

I plan to stay there until June 29, giving myself an extra week after the course concludes on the 21st to be a tourist.

Today I've bought my ticket to London. The wheels are in motion, though I'm not sure that wheels are the metaphorically appropriate mode of transport for this particular road.

eulogy: Helen Hill 1970-2007

Given at the Helen Hill Memorial Gathering, at the North End Church, January 13, 2007.

I went over to Lisa and Dan's place on Monday evening. The three of us watched a VHS tape that Helen had given to Lisa. When we watched her film "Mouseholes," the funeral scene moved me as it never had. Especially when the minister read from the New Testament, a verse that clearly meant something to Helen:

"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

I looked it up—in his letter to the early Christians in Corinth, Saint Paul is quoting the Hebrew prophet Isaiah there. I was reminded of that passage—and about things we're not ready for—when I met my friend Jane for lunch the next day. Jane has a fixation, shall we say, on the Hebrew scriptures. She also had an interesting thing to say about Helen.

People are saying that Helen was an angel, in a way, and that's so true. But Jane wanted to use a different word to describe Helen's spiritual presence. And that word is "prophet."

Not a prophet in the sense of prognosticating future events. Not either in the sense of wagging the finger of judgment at the people who just don't "get it." Real prophets, I agree with Jane, have something important to tell us about the way that things could be. They tell us about a world that we can't see yet. Maybe we can't see it yet because we're too satisfied or complacent about the way things are now. Or maybe we can't see it yet simply because it hasn't arrived. It's just around the corner. If only we knew. If only we were listening.

Some of those Hebrew prophets made their point not with great oratorical skills, perhaps, but by living differently. The way they lived was their critique of the social order of their day. They would make choices—openly and demonstratively—that other people wouldn't. Some of them would do some pretty loopy things to make their point—like Ezekiel, who publicly cooked a meal over a fire built on human dung.

I think veganism probably seems equally weird to a lot of people. And keeping a pot-bellied pig as a pet definitely strikes some people as strange. On that videotape we watched on Monday night were a couple of TV news reports about Helen and Paul and their pet. That news reporter was really amazed to see Helen walking a pig down Gottingen Street.

Lives like Helen's quietly demand our attention. They question the regular order of things. What if meals could always be free to everyone who needs them? How would things be different if we thought of animals not as raw material but as companions? How would the world change if pasttimes reserved for the elite—like, say, making films—were something that anyone could do?

Helen has been taken from us, that's true. And the way it happened was untimely, unfair, and inhuman. But what she gave to us was something that will always be with us—her life, a prophecy lived.

today words cannot express

Grey Cup weekend day 3: game day a.k.a. the inevitable anticlimax

I had a fun time at the 94th Grey Cup. Not sure if it was $279.35 worth of fun, but it was definitely fun, and no, my ass didn't freeze. Temperature was not bad—for Winnipeg—and it was my first non-exhibition pro football live experience, so that was thrilling in and of itself.

"The party was welcoming, raucous and fun. The game was utterly pedestrian." Yes, once again the Toronto Star's columnist Damien Cox (whom I spotted on our flight back to Toronto) has it nailed.

The whole day seemed a bit wrong-footed, starting with getting swindled by the Trailer Park Boys. We thought the "Trailer Park Breakfast" at the convention centre would be a fun little way to kick off Grey Cup Sunday... but our $20 admission ticket had a $5 Ticketmaster surcharge tacked on, and got us a (cold!) breakfast sandwich and some hash browns. Nothing else. They were charging extra for coffee and orange juice from pitchers! Oh, we also got 10 or 15 minutes of patter from "Mr. Lahey" and "Randy", followed by some really bad band from Winnipeg. I said to Dan, "let's consider ourselves ripped off and get out of here," and we did. Trailer Park Boys, you get the gasface! (Why does this seem like exactly the sort of situation that would make any of the characters on the show go ballistic?)

Later, "Bubbles" was sitting in our section in the stadium, but I couldn't be bothered to throw anything at him...


So, yeah, my Alouettes lost the Grey Cup, in mostly-uneventful fashion... although general manager-turned-coach Jim Popp seems to be getting a free pass in the English press for what seems like a rookie move—not challenging that supposed Robert Edwards fumble on the one-yard line. (What's the French-language press saying?)

But, as for my Grey Cup experience—no regrets!