July 14, 2006
Mountain Top
It has been a week of high points. Because after twelve and a half months and a whole lot of trouble, my husband received his visa, and is therefore eligible to work in Canada. It’s just a temporary work permit until his permanent residency is completed (which might take another year) and he still can’t leave the country, but we won’t quibble. He is now looking for a job.
I was a bit disappointed with the anthology The Friend Who Got Away, but perhaps my problem is more with anthologies in general than this specific book. The high points first- there are a few absolutely wonderful essays here, writing by Katie Roiphe and Ann Hood was particularly good. A few essays made me extraordinarily uncomfortable, but perhaps they were supposed to. But in all, this book did not meet my expectations. I think the problem with a book such as this is that writers respond to the topic, rather than the topic responding to the writing, and consequently, some of the stories seemed forced. There is the problem, as in all anthologies of late (and anthologies are very much of late), of how boring it is to listen to privileged women whine. Further, each piece is so liminal, so brief. Perhaps each of these stories could be a book in itself, but as an essay, they seem to skim a surface; like an “It Happened To Me” section of a women’s magazine. I just didn’t feel like this book taught me anything, and didn’t really give me much to empathize with either.
July 12, 2006
You'd hide in a place that reminded you of hair?
On the obituary writers conference. Here for a library love story. On how technology tests our archives. I especially liked the 1986 BBC Archives contained on laser disc. And perhaps my favourite McSweeneys Pop Song Correspondences ever- Notes on “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” as Delivered to Axl Rose by His Editor. You won’t be sorry.
July 11, 2006
Book News
I reread Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the weekend, which I read right before The Radiant Way in 2004 and which similarly became one of my definitively favourite books. I read it on the bullet train to Hiroshima for a weekend break at the beginning of that July, and I fell in love with it. I’ve read it again since, and expect to read it again and again regularly in the future. Because it’s brilliant. The writing is just so purely good, and Didion can write about anything and make it mythic and when I have her cadences and rhythms stuck in my head, I am a better writer. I am not sure if that constitutes cheating, but it works. And so after I read this book, I decided to read Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, which I thought was the most brilliant book in the world when I read it fifteen years ago. It was sort of Didionesque subject matter if you really think about it, but the writing was so not Didion, and I got to the fourth or fifth page, and, nauseated by Pris’s burgeoning quivering sexuality in Junior High School, I just couldn’t go on. And so I shut the book, which I rarely do. I think if I ever read it again, it will have to be a day when I’m sick in bed and can’t be bothered to think. And so I moved on to The Bell Jar, which was brilliant. I hadn’t read it for years. The narrative voice is so authentic, and much like The Catcher in the Rye, when I read it the first time, I gave the narrator full credit for the story and took it as presented. It’s strange how willingly I did that once upon a time, and now that I am older, older than these characters especially, the books are entirely different. And following that, still riding an Americana wave (with a focus on neuroses), I took up Nine Stories by JD Salinger, and I am exquisitely happy with it.
July 10, 2006
News
The heights of today were insomnia well into the night and walking to work in a thunderstorm. Better things were to come along, however, in the form of the news that my story “A Big Enough Army” has won second place in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. The story will be published soon and I’ll link to it online when that happens.
July 10, 2006
A wide selection of cakes
We added another link to our chain of brilliant weekends. On Friday night, we went out for a patio dinner on College Street with Curtis, and capped the evening off with a trip to The Big Chill and a bit of porching. I woke up early Saturday to do some work, and after lunch we set out to see what we could see. And we saw the 25th Anniversary celebrations at The World’s Biggest Bookstore, where we got complimentary snowcones. We checked out the Yonge Street Festival after that, and then ventured over to Nathan Philips Square for the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. A particular highlight was wading in the fountain. And then we went to see The City of Beaver Exhibit at The Design Exchange, and we absolutely loved that. And then finally, we caught a showing of Superman, which was everything we wanted it to be. Today was spent in absolute contentment at a pool party with a wide selection of cakes. Perfect, as you might expect.
July 9, 2006
The Radiant Way
I first read The Radiant Way nearly two years ago while we were living in Japan and moving house and I should have been packing but wasn’t, I was so absorbed. I note from the inside cover that this book (a ratty paperback that required taping up upon rereading) cost me just one hundred yen from the English Used Book Shop in Kobe. (Technically, this was not my first book by Margaret Drabble, as I’d read The Millstone in 2001 but I had not really liked it at the time, and had forgotten about it by then.) I think I only bought this book because I knew Drabble was AS Byatt’s sister and I had liked Possession. I had no premonition that The Radiant Way would create a Drabble devotee of me.
In my opinion, MD was at her peak around the time of The Radiant Way. The Middle Ground, which I believe preceded it, was also pretty fantastic, as was the Realms of Gold. (Oh don’t get me started, I never met a Drabble I didn’t like). Her early works are very interesting, but perhaps too fashionable, as forty years later, they’re quite dated- perhaps the reason The Millstone didn’t grab me first time around. By the late-1970s, MD was no less concerned with current events and society, but these issues become contextualized in a way that remains relevant. Her later books (since the mid-1990s) are more focused and deliberate and they’re great, but I do particularly love the sprawling nature of The Radiant Way, and her other such books. When Margaret Drabble was trying to write the world. Here, there be England I think- another reason The Millstone mightn’t have so appealed to me. There is particular Englishness about her works that I wouldn’t have understood before I lived there- what it means to be “suffering from a case of the Midlands” for example, which I remember from a book I cannot remember which.
And so I finished reading The Radiant Way this morning before I got out of bed. It did not read so differently from the first time, as I read it only two years ago, though I have since read the rest of the trilogy and so I got to be all omnipotent and know how things turned out. And having since read all of Margaret Drabble’s novels, it’s interesting to see her peculiarities that I wouldn’t have noted first time around. The Radiant Way is a wonderful book about ideas and history, and I am particularly fond of the narrative style. That Margaret Drabble has, through her works, created an entire universe and the ease with which she maneuvers her people within it is amazing. I also like that as readers, we are privy to the author’s view in a way that characters are not. That two characters who are complete strangers pass one another in the street, and nobody else knows it but we do. That characters from her other books keep popping up surprisingly. That the narrator doesn’t profess to make or know the story, just to tell it. To read as a writer, such a narrative is deeply humbling. Through the progression of Drabble’s work, it is clear that it takes ages and ages to get this good, but the thing is so few people ever get this good.
July 7, 2006
Knot Physics
~One problem in tracing the history of knots is the belief by ancient civilizations that knots had magical powers. Tying any knot is an adventure in space-a single piece of cord or twine is used to create two of three dimensions. It is easy to see why they believed magic was needed~ Donna M. Lightbody in Let’s Knot: A Macrame Book
July 6, 2006
Put Your Boots On
This review delves into the short story. And I’ve been wanting to read This Friend Who Got Away for a while now, and ordered it from the public library (!) after finding this old article on it. And I love Heather Mallick. As always.
I also love Franz Ferdinand’s Eleanor, Put Your Boots On.
And Pickle Me This Press will be publishing a new book by summer’s end! How positively exciting.
