May 15, 2007
'Ave a cuppa tea
It’s Right Said Fred Day over here at Pickle Me This. Yes indeed, we’re back in the world of 9-5 and therefore online minutiae is taking over. It all starts with a cheesy sixties compilation we were listening to at work, which was more than a bit British and contained the novelty song “Right Said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins. No one had ever heard this song before, but I quickly fell in love with it. And so we wikipedia’d our way over to the Right Said Fred (the bad early 90s duo) page to see if there was any relation, and lo and behold there was. And that page brought all the memories back; who remembers the follow up hits? We find the videos: Deeply Dippy and Don’t Talk Just Kiss. How about Brian Orser skating to Deeply Dippy?! And while we were over at ye olde Youtube, we plug in Bernard Cribbins’ “Right Said Fred” to see what we come up with, and we get results. This video contains a recording of the song that started it all, and is three small and very adorable children acting the whole thing out. It’s very cute. And then what do you know? It was home time.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
May 14, 2007
Flying the Flag
Though there was something vaguely attractive about the melody, I thought that the UK’s entry for last year’s Eurovision was stunningly terrible. But then I heard this year’s. A new standard has been set for atrocious.
May 11, 2007
Friday morning
Zadie Smith has a short story in The New Yorker. They’re going on about novel first lines over at The Guardian Books Blog; I was pleased that my personal favourite was noted (“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”). And we’re away to Peterborough this weekend (the ultimate tourist destination). It’s a long weekend too, because we made it that way. Tra-la.
Oh, and log on now to Diggerland.com.
May 10, 2007
Stories in the Air
What a treat was mine this eve, as my fairy godmother had delivered me her ticket to the Kama Readings; she couldn’t attend. And so I went in her place, and saw/listened to Camilla Gibb, David Adams Richards, Thomas King and M.G. Vassanji. The readings were an absolute pleasure. Gibb read from Sweetness in the Belly (my favourite book of 2006); Richards read a beautiful passage from The Friends of Meager Fortune; King and Vassanji both read short stories from recent collections. I do like to sit and listen– it is a test for me, as anyone who has ever been interrupted by me would surely realize. It requires effort, but I always feel wonderful after– like I’ve been working a muscle. And I like the idea of readings, of stories in the air. The ones floating about were certainly wonderful tonight.
Now reading A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. The man in the elevator today examined my cover (quite forcefully), and said “You’ve got to love the Irish”. I really didn’t know what to tell him. Coming up: Poppy Shakespeare and then The Girls— both popular novels whose premises have kept me shying away, but I’m finally too curious. And I’m still reading Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of Aids of Africa which is amazingly captured, and I’m slowly working through.
David Adams Richards amused everyone tonight with his story of the time he set his hair on fire. Guffaws all around. Though some of you will remember why my laughter was very much in sympathy. He, however, did not set his aflame at karaoke.
May 9, 2007
The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer
I wanted to know that “beach read” and “literary” weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I wanted a book that spelled summer, but didn’t make my head go numb. And I was so pleased that Janice Kulyk Keefer’s new novel The Ladies’ Lending Library lived up to expectations, satisfied my impossible desires. Here is a summer book through and through, all the while substantial, well-written, and I would recommend that you pack it along this season, no matter where you’re going.
But particularly if you’re off to Cottage Country, which would be fitting. The Ladies’ Lending Library is the story of a group of Ukrainian-Canadian families who spend summers together up on Georgian Bay, and it explores the curious intimacies which emerge in this kind of community. Cottageness is captured vividly– waves pound the beach throughout the novel, whole days spent in the sunshine, fathers at the weekend, rotting wooden steps and slapdash suppers. The story takes place during the summer of 1963 (as does Ian McEwan’s new On Chesil Beach, and I look forward to seeing how these books relate). 1963– before the Beatles, before Kennedy was shot, when everybody called Baby “Baby” and it didn’t occur to her to mind. Such a cusp would be rife with stories, and Kalyna Beach is no exception. Dissatisfied mothers, wandering eyes, immigrant experiences which permeate the present, the perils of puberty, adolescent humiliation, sex, sex, and the contemplation of sex, trashy magazines, breasts, and the foxy sixteen year old in a bikini who is the object of everybody’s fascination.
My one criticism of this book would be its title, which is misleading. The lending library of which it speaks is an official-sounding excuse for the mothers of Kalyna Beach to meet weekly and exchange trashy novels, but is hardly at the forefront of this book. Though the ladies themselves are central to the plot, such a title undermines the Kulyk Keefer’s broad narrative range. The sweeping points of view throughout the novel are one of its most interesting elements, incorporating the daughters’ perspectives alongside their mothers’. Though the men in the story are given their say, female voices are much more present. And I enjoyed the seamlessness as one perspective worked its way into the next, and how the female characters, of such various ages and experiences, were thus linked.
I am grateful that a novel of “women’s concerns”, and with subject matter so beachy, could be so thoughtfully treated and well-written. These are stories which deserve to be told well. Kulyk Keefer writes such beautiful descriptions, sympathetic characters, and realistic situations (however heart-wrenching or amusing). Like any book you want for the beach, this one is a pleasure, but moreover you’re better for having read it. The ending is particularly perfect. “And she wants to shower them with rose petals, to rush down to the dock to wave them off on their reckless, needy journey into possiblity.” So did I.
I closed this book quite satisfied.
(Note that for a last minute Mother’s Day gift, this would be a fine pick! )
May 8, 2007
Hollaring Comrade
The girl walking across Queen’s Park shedding tears over the death of a man in a book? She would be me. And that book (84 Charing Cross Road) was absolutely lovely.
PS- Anyone know what “book post” is? It sounds like the most wonderful system in the whole world.
UPDATE: Someone has made an 84 Charing Cross Road website!
May 8, 2007
In my bag
Today 84 Charing Cross Road came in for me at the library (on Claire G’s recommendation). A bookish book! I am looking forward. I also brought home The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield to reread “At the Bay”, to which Janice Kulyk Keefer acknowledges her debt in The Ladies Lending Library. Stay tuned for a review tomorrow of that book, by the way. And I am now much intrigued to read Kulyk Keefer’s overtly Mansfieldian Thieves. Oh books books books. Thank heaven I plan to live for a long long time.
May 7, 2007
Final Shift
Tomorrow morning I will work my final shift at the library— five years after the last time I worked my final shift at the library. I think this time I mean it, however, as I don’t foresee myself returning to school anytime soon (or ever again), and it’s time I moved on from student assistantship. But I am going to miss it so. To be paid to walk up and down shelves and shelves of books. When I worked there as an undergraduate, I found “shelf-reading” quite tedious– reading call number after call number for about a half hour each shift to make sure the books were in their right places. But on my second run, I delighted in it. To run my thumb along the shelf and give a little attention to books no one has touched in years, the obscure volumes and authors Woolf’s essays taught me such an appreciation for, to return wayward books to where they belong, to blow the dust off. I loved shelving, and filling in the gaps. I never came up from the stacks without a stack of my own to take home. I liked working at circulation, where my duty was to be handed books (what a dream!). Checking books out, and imagining the connection between the book and its borrower. I revelled in Special Collections– I got to shelf the Woolf Collection when the library moved in 2001, and that I have touched these rare, beautiful volumes, books that SHE touched, is one of the penultimate features of my life. Today I held in my hands a book that had belonged to Coleridge and Wordsworth, and that was just an ordinary day.
I was not meant to be a librarian for innumerable reasons, but I do harbour dreams that the career ahead of me be bookish, however so, because then no day could ever truly be ordinary. There is no other object I’ve ever known that is invested with the magic of the book.
