Cuddly Kitties
As much as I’ve resisted it for years and years, I’m beginning to think that my lovely spouse might be right. It might be time to actually get a queen-sized bed. Usually in the summer, the cats spread out a bit. We might only get one at our feet and Wesker never gives up the pillow. But this year? Every single one of them gets on the bed. Maybe it was the construction. Maybe it was the chilly spring. Whatever the reason, I am full of aches and pains every morning and it definitely has a cat-based cause.
Yes, I could just move them off of the bed. But it’s impossible to look any of them in their cute, big eyes, and tell them they are destroying my back and must move.
Welcome to June
It’s June and this year I’ve decided to celebrate a bit with some selections for Pride Month. I’ve tried to go a bit off the beaten track, and ended up somewhere in the 1990s and AIDS literature by coincidence. But I thought I’d start with the one selection I read that doesn’t fall into this category — Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.
If this novel sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen Cabaret, the musical starring Liza Minelli, that was based on it. However, the book is so much more than what was immortalized in the film. The story of Sally Bowles, while being a sizable part of the book, isn’t the entire book and doesn’t even really form its backbone. Instead, Bowles is just one of the many facets of Berlin life that Isherwood encounters.
The Vibrancy of City Life
Goodbye to Berlin is truly about what the title says it is: Berlin. Isherwood paints the portrait of a city on the brink of change. Politics is becoming increasingly divisive and unstable as the Nazi party rises to power and begins to perpetrate acts of escalating violence. It starts leaking into conversations. It goes from being a background element to becoming the force that drives people away from the city or towards their own destruction. Isherwood describes the life of a struggling writer and poor lodger that goes to the nightclubs and deals with the issues of his fellow lodgers. One minute he describes a bartender, the next he’s detailing the moisture issues in his rented room. What emerges is a snapshot of what it means to be alive in an old-world city of dirty streets and glittering nightlife and what it means to be amongst the poor and the richest of the rich. Reading Isherwood brings you into a moment in history, and there’s something really powerful and rare about that.
Queer Life in the Margins
Isherwood is subtle when it comes to detailing queer experience. Goodbye to Berlin is not a book where it forms the major driving force. But Isherwood’s sexuality is present, and the way he writes about the queer cabarets and nightclubs in Berlin is more detailed than many other writers would have been comfortable being in 1939. He also talks about a friendship he had with a gay couple and how it dissolved.
Isherwood doesn’t hide who he is, but he also refuses to be defined by only one aspect of himself. Instead, he forces the reader to see him as a person, not just as a sexuality or false assumptions or a stereotype.
Speaking of stereotypes — while this book was perhaps ahead of its time in 1939, it no longer is. Be prepared for some content that is offensive for modern readers.
Baby Bunnies Grow Up
We are currently watching the wild baby bunnies in the yard grow up, and I am loving looking out the window each morning as they eat the out-of-control dandelions that have taken over the backyard this no-mow-May. But it’s not always easy. I worry about them constantly. What if one of the neighbourhood owls will get them? Or one of the hawks? The more we see them, the more I worry.
It’s hard to remind myself that these are not my pets, and I cannot take care of them as if they were and I am not responsible for them. It can be really hard to let go.
