October 12, 2007
Expedient
Oh, yes. One factual problem with Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief (and have you seen his youtube channel?). In the novel Bethany gets a passport in a week, and we can assume this took place in 2007, due to DC’s ulta-currency. But we all know that nobody in Canada got a passport in a week during 2007. But then maybe I’m just looking for holes. Maybe this is fiction, after all.
October 12, 2007
Books write the songs
Colin Murray devotes part of his Radio 1 show to songs referencing literature. (Track listing here). I would also add The Arctic Monkeys, sort of, who named their album Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not after a line from the best old book I discovered for myself this year, which was, of course, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (though they claim they were referencing the film, which was good too). And Courage by The Tragically Hip, of course, which took some lyrics from The Watch that Ends the Night. Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Love Over and Over references the Brontes. And I’m sure there’s many many more: what fun!
October 12, 2007
Links and Hijinks
Richard Wright is profiled. They’re going to let Claire Messud be a Canadian (which is v. v. exciting, I think). Doris Lessing’s Nobel win means that now I’ve got occasion to read my new copy of The Golden Notebook. I’m also intrigued by talk of her latest project here. Bookgadget devotee Kimbooktu has started up a new collection of library photos here (and I’m in the archives). Dovegreyreader reads Lucy Maud Montgomery.
October 11, 2007
Descant launch, with two strings of pearls
Quite unfashionably late we were tonight for the launch of Descant 138, we being myself, my dapper husband, and Rebecca Rosenblum in gorgeous splendour. The new issue is beautiful though, and features poetry by Pickle Me This school chum LZ-V. And our lateness was really unavoidable, as there was rain to be walked home in, votes to be cast, socks to be wrung, and butternut squash pasta to be eaten. And then had to get dressed up, as the theme of the eve was the same as the issue– fashion. RR and I wore pearls. We caught readings by Andrew Tibbets and Katherine Ashenberg, heard the strains of “Take on Me” in Spanish. Ian Brown was m.c., and yes he is a bit dreamy. So a lovely night, squash and all.
October 11, 2007
Descant Blog
And in exciting news, I’m thrilled to announce my new incarnation as a Descant Blogger. My first posting goes up this weekend, I believe. I’ll be writing about the remarkable intersections between reading and every day life, and I hope that you will join me in that conversation.
October 10, 2007
The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
A character in Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief remarks of another, “It’s hard to imagine her having much off an inner life.” Coupland’s very point is that everybody does. Even Roger, the forty-something Staples employee, so old he’s become invisible. He’s writing a book– a terrible book. It’s called Glove Pond, about a couple constructed of witty catfights and a barrel of scotch. When Roger’s menacing co-workers hijack the book, it’s pronounced “the worst book even written… [but] I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing.”
Glove Pond is a kaleidoscopic revision of Roger’s own life (as much as a dinner party could possibly be a kaleidoscope, but it has much to say about writing, writers, how they view each other against their own successes and failures). The Gum Thief comprises Glove Pond‘s pages, as well as epistolary exchanges between Roger and his co-worker Bethany the Goth (whose makeup, reflecting her scarlet Staples t-shirt, is far more pink than white). Both Roger and Bethany carry pasts which are minefields of loss and disappointment, and they don’t so much bond over shared experience as through one another assume an essential dyanamic missing from their lives: Roger gets to feel responsible for someone, and Bethany gets taken care of. The plot is fleshed out by letters by Roger’s ex-wife, Bethany’s mother, and the vapid Shawn who had distrusted Bethany’s inner life. Which reads as entirely unbelievable once that we’ve come to know Bethany from the inside.
A novel within a novel, and even a novel inside of that. And the rest of the novel being letters and notes, even memos and FED-EXs, but The Gum Thief still takes on a plot and momentum. Along the way, of course, are typically sweeping and profoundly mundane Couplandisms: “Halloween costumes are another disinhibiting device, like fortune-telling and talking to talks that belong to strangers.” Or, “You know the people I mean– the ones who stay fifty feet away so they don’t look like they’re trying to see your PIN number. Come on. I look at these people and think, Man, you must feel truly guilty about something to make you broadcast your sense of guilt to the world with your freakish lineup philosophy.”
This all culminates into something far more than pop-culture and platitudes. The Gum Thief affirms the inner lives of the invisible, demonstrating the power of the written word to establish connections. Of course the final installment of The Gum Thief letters– one from Roger’s creative writing teacher who has “written several books, one of which was published”– throws the entire text’s veracity into doubt, but the result of this would be a testament to fiction’s trajectory towards empathy. Also serving as a dig at Coupland’s own critics, reciting their lines before they can get to them: “I don’t need or want art that tells me about my daily life. I want art that tells me about somebody– anybody— else but me.”
October 9, 2007
Late Nights shortlisted…
Yes! Elizabeth Hay has made the Giller Shortlist for her exceptional novel Late Nights on Air. Let’s bring it on home now…
October 8, 2007
Thanks
Tropical Thanksgiving went on a brief hiatus yesterday, and we even got to put coats on. Took an autumn walk over to Riverdale Farm, because it’s never a holiday until you’ve talked to a goat. We even saw autumn leaves, which are scarce this year. And so a successful weekend, even if it was thirty five degrees today. Even if I got sprayed by the garden hose and it was nothing but a pleasure. We saw plenty of family inc. cousins, read books, reclined. Ate our leftovers, and even finished them tonight. There are two slices of apple pie left, and we intend to savour them.
October 8, 2007
Hating with a blanket
Cheers upon cheers for Zoe Whittall’s review of Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief. (And I would be cheering even if I weren’t voraciously devouring the novel at the moment.) No, Whittall has done something brave with her review. She writes:
Coupland is often criticized for being pop culturally literate, as though this somehow detracts from his work having true literary merit, as though it is somehow suspect to be too current. But he really did originate a type of contemporary literature that is not being afraid to engage with up-to-the-minute technology as it relates to our everyday emotional and cultural lives. I don’t shed a tear for his trillion-dollar advances. I’m just saying we could stand to be less hard on him for being so suspiciously popular.
With no fear whatsoever of undermining her cool indie cred, Whittall admits to liking a book, to liking an author. I’m not being facetious– a lot of critics never get this far. Which is not to say that all books and writers should be fawned over, but the flipside of this is active-hating which is something I find baffling. Not the hating so much: myself, I hate a lot of things, and though indeed “hate is a strong word”, so it should be. But it’s the activeness that is strange. The time and energy some people expend loathing things must eat up their lives, I wonder.
It’s also so easy to hate things: you don’t even have to read Douglas Coupland’s books to hate him. The same goes for Margaret Atwood, and I will quote my favourite-ever overheard conversation, first posted last year:
When I was at the Vic booksale on Monday, two undergraduate-appearing students were sorting through the CanLit table. One held up a copy of Survival to her friend, and said, “How about this one?” The other, sounding like she was repeating something she was very sure of, said, “Oh no, not Atwood. Can’t stand her novels. She just writes the same book over and over again.” Her friend said, “Survival isn’t a novel.” The anti-Atwoodian said “oh” and then rapidly changed the subject.
If you have read Atwood or Coupland, and you still don’t like their work, why not just not read it anymore? Though of course your caustic and bitter references to these figures will become less current, and you may have to talk about something else, but might that even do you some good?
Of course we need critics and criticism, absolutely, but hating mainstream with a blanket hardly constitutes criticism. And even if your criticism is legitimate, devoting your whole life to things you hate seems a bit sad to me. It is often more interesting listening to someone on what they do like rather than what they don’t anyway. Or rather the latter gets old soon and the former can be infectious.
October 7, 2007
Damage Done by the Storm by Jack Hodgins
Reading Jack Hodgins’ collection of short stories Damage Done by the Storm was something of a disorienting process. He writes stories about loggers, skewing my rather shoddily-constructed moral perspective through which loggers are regarded as evil-doers (and yet I cherish books as I do. Hmmm). Hodgins writes even of compulsive loggers, amusingly in “The Drover’s Wife” and so touchingly in “Inheritance”. Place is fundamental to most of these stories, usually Vancouver Island which I know so little of. And these stories go about in ordinary directions, until a sharp turn one way or the other, though so subtly written you mightn’t even know you’re off the path, and then you are, and here is a place you’ve never before.
The final three stories of this collection are connected, and together demonstrate the power of the short story form. “Promise”, “Inheritance”, and “Astonishing the Blind” tell the story of a family over forty years, from multiple perspectives. Each of these stories is brilliantly rich (though “Atonishing the Blind” in particular literally took my breath away), but together they manage to tell more about this family than even a triology of epic novels could. Moreover they tell us so much with such peculiar details, and we fill in the blanks ourselves– a brilliantly personal and engaging process which renders a book our own.
Short stories are unostentatious; they do what they do without calling attention. Of course I only saw the power of these three stories in particular because they were stuck right together, but all the stories in this collection have the very same force. What one incident can tell you about a lifetime: the woman who is waiting for a ferry to dock in “The Crossing”, the retired senator braving a snowstorm to get to his grandson in “Damage Done by the Storm”, the Faulkner scholar and her son travelling through Mississippi in “The Galleries”.
Hodgins also writes well about what it is to be getting old– not to be quite old yet, but to have those days just ahead, and he also writes of the strange predicament many people are experiencing now in still having their parents living at this time in their lives. I remember reading in Carol Shields’ and Blanche Howard’s letters that there weren’t enough old people in fiction, enough room for oldness (beyond, you know, “the grandmother” in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or something) and I feel Hodgins’ people in Damage Done by the Storm would satisfy what they were looking for. Which would be something like reality.
Short stories are tough because you can’t pick them up and put them down, but rather you have to make time: they’re not as portable as they seem. But they’re worth it. One story before bed went down very well, this collection perfectly complementing my recent bout of nonfiction, and altogether providing me with a satisfying reading week.
