MARM 2024 PLANS
Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 18)
Margaret Atwood’s 85th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)
Last summer, I finally watched “Crip Camp” on Netflix, inspired by the fact that both my mother and Mr. BIP’s youngest found work in summer camps like this: it’s the world in which “Training” is set too, in an era where several of the kids are “polio cases”.
As a kid, I loved the whole concept of summer camps, although I’m sure I would have been just as comfortable there as I would have been in boarding school (i.e. not at all).
Every summer I pounced on the weekly TV listings to see if this was the week that “Lil Darlings” would air, and I studied the old-fashioned stories about camps (like Carolyn Haywood’s story of two brothers who attended) and paperbacks like Yours Til Niagara Falls, Abby and Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood (by Jane O’Connor and Ellen Conford) like there’d be a test.
But in “Training”, nothing Rob knew about summer camp seems to fit with his experience working with these kids. The story opens as he’s assembling a jigsaw puzzle that pictures a pair of giraffes with Jordan, whom the physiotherapist described as one of the worst “cases” she’s ever seen.
“Cases” of what we’re not sure, but Jordan is in a wheelchair and communicates ‘yes’ with a gesture of one hand. Rob admits that what he imagines in her gaze might be misunderstood, even wholly imagined.
He is concerned with trying to authentically respond to her; he seems to be the genuine sort who wants to do a good job, but more specifically he wants Jordan to have a good experience at camp. When she gestures “yes” in response to his asking if she’s bored with the puzzle, he returns the jigsaw to the counsellor who signs-out the games like library books, and Rob sets up a game of checkers instead.
Rob “played red” last game, so it’s Jordan’s turn to play it this time. (The counsellor is surprised they’re not bored of the game, so clearly they’ve played often.)
Rob makes his play and then he points at each of Jordan’s tokens until she signals “yes”. When their Games session ends, he notes the tokens’ positions, to reset for their next session.
Atwood never inhabits Jordan’s perspective in this story; she leaves her to her own mind. The story’s focus from the start is Rob, but Atwood also affords the possibility that there is much to be said for Jordan—who for all that the rest of her body restricts her, has the capacity to strategise in this game—but Jordan’s perspective remains unarticulated.
Rob’s ideas about Jordan, what she might want and what she might not want, are one way to read this story. (He decides, for instance, that she would like the experience of being on the grass, which is why I’ve counted this story as my Bingo square for Green, because he also mentions surgical greens.)
But another way to read it is the focus on how Rob’s family has defined his capabilities, the restricted options available for his future. They want him to be a doctor, and that’s that.
Both parents disapprove of the elements of his personality that disincline him from medical school (he faints at the sight of blood). It’s clear that neither approves of his way of being in the world, but it’s his mother’s criticism that lodges most firmly in his psyche. She tells everyone he’s too “sensitive” and he recognises the broader, sweeping judgement therein.
“She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn’t trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn’t, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe.”
Jordan’s experience of camp (at least from what we observe) is not catastrophic, but there is occasion to wonder just what happens when someone else thinks that they know what will define someone else’s happiness. And how his parents’ refusal to allow Rob to simply be himself has coloured his whole experience of the world.
Readers see just how much is going on in Rob’s mind in this story, but it’s also possible to read it as a story about camp and one’s first job, about the difference between fumbling in the dark and the stories that get told about that fumbling (hints of “Lil Darlings” after all), and the denouement is unexpectedly moving. (Catch a hint of it here, if you aren’t spoiler-phobic, and there are plenty of similar and more-recent videos like it.)
P.S. This new MARM Bingo is for my own amusement, but feel free to play along, whether as-is or by adding your own fields. You should be able to copy the image and resize (even in Word).
Margaret Atwood
“Powerlessness and silence go together.”
I went to summer camp once when I was in grade 5. My friend was going and I really, really wanted to go with her. I finally convinced my parents to let me go for a week (my family didn’t ever do summer camps of any sort) and I hated it! I was miserable. Which they probably knew would happen all along. It was probably The Parent Trap that made me think it would be fun – I loved that movie!
Crip Camp looks really good!
The Bingo looks fun! I’m feeling a little behind, though. *looks sheepish*
Yay, see I know that younger-me would have hated it too. Along with boarding school, I bet! hee hee
Ohhh, it’s r-e-a-l-l-y good; I’m surprised that I didn’t recommend it to you when I finished. #justyourthing
At this point, it doesn’t look like I’ll make either a row or a column on my Bingo, but I’m having fun anyway.
I just watched the trailer for Crip Camp – very cool! You should add more mentions of movies you watch into your blog posts, it’s really interesting, and likely a way to discover stuff that doesn’t normally get much attention.
Maybe I will, I’ve been toying with the idea of sharing some different things that fit with books.
See that’s the fun of algorithms: I was sure that EVERYBODY would have seen this movie cuz it’s been on my banners for months. (I avoided it because I thought it might be, like so many documentaries, difficult to watch, but it’s actually really inspiring.)
I love how you look at this story, and explore the fact that we know nothing about Jordan from her own perspective. Is it also a subtle comment on the powerlessness of people like Jordan, that they are at the mercy of others though it’s clear that she’s capable of making her needs known, and that people like Rob can find that out?
Summer camps were not a thing in Australia. I would see them on American movies and TV shows, but never sought them in books. I did seek boarding school stories however, because I knew what they were, though I never went to one (much to my relief, I must say, so I’m sorry you did go and it wasn’t fun.)
Part of me wanted to invest some time in unravelling exactly that, because there are so many phrases and small details that are potentially meaningful. But I also think one could invest time in the idea that Jordan is not truly viewed as a complete person at all, only a cipher, used (exploited even?) as a catalyst for Rob’s real-and-important decisions. It actually could be very complicated after all. heh
I never got to go to summer camp, but I console myself with the idea that I probably would have been miserable there anyway!
It’s been so long since I read this and I’ve realised I don’t remember it even slightly – re-reads are clearly needed. Love your MARM Bingo!
I have read them before, technically, too, but I did not remember this story at all (maybe two or three felt familiar but sometimes I think what I “remembered” have been some autobiographical details that pop up, rather than the stories themselves). I’m curious to see which themes will remain elusive; and, I didn’t think “Green” would land!
MARM Bingo is good! I’ve not read this collection for a while so appreciated your review of this story!
I think you read it pre-MARM: sign of your enduring dedication!
I don’t think I am well read enough to attempt your bingo, but if I was going to reference just one word it would be ‘ravine’ which seems to have some significance for Atwood. Is Toronto full of ravines?
I don’t think Australia has camps in the American sense (I have been watching excerpts from The Parent Trap). As a country boy in primary school I went to a couple on the edges of Melbourne (Somers run by the Education Department and Portsea – the Lord Mayor’s camp for country children) with say half a dozen other kids from my year. But that’s different from being farmed out by your parents so they can enjoy the holidays.
For a moment, I thought I’d actually included that one: it does recur. I especially loved the ravines in Cat’s Eye but a car goes off a bridge into one at the beginning of The Blind Assassin too. Here’s a peek, via National Geographic.
The original story for The Parent Trap (by German author, Erich Kastner) was one of my favourites as a girl. Of course, when I was reading as a kid, I thought of camps only from the stories’ kids’ perspective-hijinks and fun, apart from adults, as the counsellors are all older kids-but now I see there’s another side too. Do they really not have them in Australia, or was it just not something your family participated in?!
Thanks for the link to NG. I see now why MA so casually mentions ravines – a word which connotes remoteness and danger – in Cats Eye, where it plays an important part, and now (for me) in Life Before Man, mentioned in passing.
No summer camps that I know of, nor that any of the five current generations of my family have participated in, but who can predict what ideas will take root here because ‘America does it’.
I like the NG article; I feel like it gives a good sense of the system. At the same time, those images don’t capture everything. I have spent time in them and felt like I could hang out with a book and read all day in the dappled sunshine, but I’ve also been there and felt wholly vulnerable and done that whole practically-running-looking-over-shoulder thing in an effort to get back to street-level. Just one turn in a trail…
So that also means, then, so summer-camp slasher films too, I guess. Hunh. The things you learn!
As I’ve just commented, I’m not aware of those summer camps here either BUT I did go to one country kids experience of t he coast one when I lived in Mt Isa. (I felt a bit of a fraud as I had lived, previously to that, for 6 years in a suburb on Moreton Bay) but it was a short, low-key holiday compared to those summer camps we see in North America.
I still have fond summer camp memories! I’ll have to see how many Bingo squares I can cross off between Life before Man (about 40 pp. in now) and Interlunar (about 1/3 through). Expect my contributions late on in the month, as is my wont.
In the TOC of Paper Boat, there’s a whole page from Interlunar, so I can read along with you there! I know how busy you are with novellas this month; I’d originally scheduled my novella post for last weekend but I’m still finishing two of them, so it might be later in the month for #NovNov for me too.
Enjoyed your write up of the story!
🙂