May 7, 2007
Park Life
It is hard to reconcile the inherent rubbishness of the world with weekends like this one. Oh weekends, you are the one thing that makes me pleased to be back in the workaday life. Though as a student/housewife every day was the weekend, that sort of took away the very point of it. And this weekend was extremely pointful. We went out for sushi and ice cream Friday night with Erica and Alex, which was splendid. Saturday we did our Kensington shop, which was a sweet summer dream. Saturday afternoon was a bike ride to High Park where we sprawled on our blanket all afternoon, ate strawberries, read books, and later I climbed a tree. The park was fullsville but the wonderful thing about parks is that we all share that wonderful space. It really was splendid, and nice to get the bikes out of the garage for the first time all season. Today Stuart was doing boyish things with other boyish types, and I was writing writing. The marvelous Natalie Bay came for supper, which was great. She’s just come back from Japan and brought us omiyage– pnis shaped cookies. I’d post a picture, but this is not that sort of blog.
I’m adjusting to my new life, and so reading/blogging have been slow of late. Though I’m working on two books at the moment: 28 Stories of Aids in Africa by Stephanie Nolen, and The Ladies Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (and there ain’t a better book for a summer’s day).
May 3, 2007
Orwell's Eleven Golden Rules of Tea
Today I was directed toward George Orwell’s essay A Nice Cup of Tea. This is serious business. He begins, “When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden.” I was intrigued by his assertion that drinking Indian tea makes one feel “wiser, braver and optimistic.” Interestingly, apparently Chinese tea doesn’t have the same effect.
May 2, 2007
Catch
Where I Was From by Joan Didion is the best book by Joan Didion I have ever read. This is no small praise. Yes, The Year of Magical Thinking came with a sentimentality creeping in which humanized Didion and I appreciated that, but reading Where I Was From I realize that she is at her very best when cold and watching. It’s the connections she draws which make her work so powerful, and I love the way she leaves us to do with them what we will. Or at least the way she seems to let us do what we will, for her words are so calculated, her logic so exact, that even when I disagree with what she is saying, I cannot help but see her point of view.
I am now reading The Fifth Child on the advice of Heather Mallick. Intriguing, apparently not typical Lessing, and much akin to We Need To Talk About Kevin, which was my best book of 2005 (and which I’ll be rereading this summer).
Last night I cried upon realizing that my days have suddenly become much shorter, which is the power of an eight hour workday. This was devastating to contemplate, as there I was aiming to finish Where I Was From, write the end to a stubborn short story, post an entry on Divisadero, and bake cupcakes all before bedtime. How I will miss my grad student/housewife days, where all of that was possible, and hours and hours more were open wide, and I was still free to cavort with the postman every morning, and read and write all day long. But then I got to work this morning and remembered that I’ve got a pretty lovely gig for the next few months, my coworkers are wonderful, I can ride my bike to get there, the work is (sometimes) interesting. More good things were underlined as we went outside to play catch at lunch time.
And so all is well, and time enough there will be. I suppose also that eight hours a day of wages will make evenings and weekends a delight.
May 2, 2007
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
In the midst of Divisadero, when I was asked if it was a good book, I wasn’t sure how to answer. “It’s a good book,” I supposed, “because I’m not sure Michael Ondaatje is not in the habit of writing bad books.” But I was not convinced from where I stood. Which is not to say that reading Divisadero was not an absolute pleasure, but I couldn’t tell where the plot was going. Where the plot eventually went, I could never have foreseen. Even now, having finished the book, I’m still not sure what to make of it, but then my response to that is to want to read it all over again.
Divisadero has a plot– an unconventional family, their ties forever severed by an act of brutal violence. One sister is researching the life of a French writer whose own story becomes the focus of the latter half of the book. Between the siblings’ separate lives and the life of the writer, Ondaatje draws connections through parallelesque plot lines, recurring symbols, characters haunted by their counterparts. But these connections are not in symmetry– symmetry would be too easy. And nothing is easy here. These connections are only suggestions, some of the story was so inaccessible to me (mainly due to my lack of familiarity with matters as divergent as the work of Balzac and the rules of Texas Hold’em), time shifts, narrative shifts, as a reader you are led you know not where.
And yet I trusted this writer completely. Clearly, I felt, I was in competant hands. This was not based solely on the writer’s reputation either, but rather the strength of the prose, the beauty of the imagery, the structure of the novel which demanded my engagement, no matter what else conspired to shut me out of it. Ondaatje’s ending tied up ends, not neatly of course, but in a way that cast the whole novel in a new light, which is why I so want to read it again. That so much can be obscured but made satisfying is a testament to great work. Similarly, that a book can be an abstraction, and yet well and truly solid.
