February 29, 2008
Home
The first house that was ours had been “mine” previously, and we shared it with a roommate. It was a two-up-two-down terrace house in the Midlands, with hideous wallpaper and a carpet that melted when you sat a cup of tea upon it. The door blew open with the wind. And the situation was only meant to be temporary, so we slept on an inflatable mattress, but then temporary turned into six months, the mattress exploded, we had to buy another, and that one had a hole so we were always on the floor by morning. We didn’t even own a kettle and we boiled water for tea in a pot.
Our next house was company accommodation in Japan, barely furnished, but big enough and beautiful. Our bedroom had tatami floors and sliding walls, and still there were no beds for us because we slept on futons. We had a gorgeous balcony with a cherry blossom view, and we could see the mountains and we lived on top of a sushi shop, but then we had to move because the rent was extortionate.
Our next house was a small box. A galley kitchen held a bar fridge and a hot plate, we had one cupboard and a washing machine in the corner. The bathroom had a sliding door and was about the size of a bathroom on an airplane. The main room was sunny, about seven feet wide and five feet long. We had a view of a pachinko parlour The ceiling was high, which was fortunate because we slept on a wood platform just below it. To reach our bed every night we had to climb up a ladder. We were lucky we could sit up on our futons and read without bumping our heads.
We’ve lived in our current apartment since we moved to Canada in 2005. We were attracted to its straight angles, neutral colours, to its gorgeous touches and its lack of quirks. I was coveting drawers and storage closets. It was clean, bright, beautiful, and we didn’t even have to look for it as I’d inherited it from my cousin. It was home, because we’d never really had a home before. We were able to unpack things that had been packed up for years. To live in a place with the intention of staying awhile, to live through multiple sets of seasons, to know our neighbours, grow food in the garden, to become best friends with the guy downstairs, to learn to cook, to write a novel, to have dinner parties and tea parties, watch the struggling tree outside the window hold onto itself for dear life.
But it’s time to go– we’ve known it for a while. The house seems to expand to accommodate each new piece of furniture we stuff inside, but we fear that it may reach capacity sometime soon. And so just a few days ago we set off on a hunt for a new home, which we spotted as soon as it was in sight. The only place we looked at, in truth, but then we also knew exactly what we wanted. We found it, and tonight we learned it’s to be ours come April 1st. A wonderful, weird and beautiful place, the top two floors of a house in the Annex, with two balconies, built in shelves, a second bedroom/office, gorgeous light, and in-house laundry– the latter I’ve not had the pleasure of since I lived with my mom and dad. The apartment has charm, beauty, and seems ready to hold us and our abundance of stuff. And I think we’ve been waiting for each other.
February 28, 2008
Reading without gravity
I was fascinated to read Astronaut Steve MacLean’s blog post on reading in space (from Canada Reads). The wonderfully inspiring Rebecca Rosenblum has written a wonderfully inspiring post on being short-shortlisted for The Journey Prize. I am excited to now start reading Belong To Me, particularly after Deanna’s endorsement. (And not because the cover is of Wellington Boots, which are a few of my favourite things.) A wonderful post at The Pop Triad about the music we find in films.
February 28, 2008
And then I wrote to Jean
“The letter was from me. When I wrote it I was on a train with Gwenny on my way to Paris… Outside there was nothing but rocks and dust. A man with stormy edges was telling me the story of his life. He was only six when I interrupted him.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I must write a letter. Do you have any paper?’
‘And he turned out to be a paper merchant with suitcases filled with paper, papyrus, root paper, paper made from crushed beetles, moist paper, blotting, thin parchment, petal notelets, envelopes made from industrial waste, fried and boiled paper. He displayed his wares on the train seat and I picked a strange mottled shade of handmade parchment which was the most expensive of the range.
And then I wrote to Jean…” –Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup
February 26, 2008
I danced with a girl
“The room was wooden, like a ship, and once in it we were trapped and couldn’t escape. I danced with a girl who had no fingers. Her hand kept slipping out of my grasp.” –Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup.
This happened to me, during a short-lived career as a ballerina during late 1984. It was the sole remarkable feature of this experience, and I can’t quite believe I’m not the only one. Fictional or otherwise. Books are so amazing.
February 25, 2008
No no no
Highlights of this weekend included brunch with Erin and Ivor, diets managing not to start even tomorrow and not cleaning our house. This afternoon I played Scrabble in support of Frontier College with Stuart and Rebecca, and learned how much is too much sushi. Yes, two thirds of us are writers and though Rebecca did beat me, our game was won by the graphic designer with a Bachelor of Science, but ah well. The event put was put on by the Toronto JETAA (and my friend Natalie Bay) and it was tremendous fun. Fun continued into tonight, as we attended an Oscar Party at our friends’ Katie and Alan’s. It was a grand evening, although having seen only one film last year which was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I wasn’t so interested in the show, and really just hijacked the whole event to (rather inappropriately) fulfill my lifelong desire to dress up like Amy Winehouse. Which was perfect because then I won the prize for most creative costume which was the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But the very best part of this weekend was the sunshine, and the fact it felt like spring.
February 24, 2008
Julia Darling
I first learned about the poet/novelist Julia Darling in early 2005, when she was instructing a Guardian Poetry Workshop, and something about her voice, even the prose in her instruction was so compelling, that I became interested in her work. Only a few months later Darling died of breast cancer at the age of 48, and the remembrances on her personal website (as well as her own blog) are a testament to her spirit, to the power of her writing.
I’m now reading her novel Crocodile Soup, which I picked up in a booksale ages ago. Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Hard and funny, reminiscent of Kate Atkinson– always a good thing. I’m just getting into it, but I expect to be recommending it wholeheartedly very soon.
February 24, 2008
Falling by Anne Simpson
Unsurprisingly the emphasis of Anne Simpson’s novel Falling arrives in unexpected places. Unsurprising, as one might say that Simpson is a poet first and foremost– she has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, she has been shortlisted for a Pushcart– but perhaps that is too easy. And Falling is Simpson’s second novel after all. However I will still assert she is a poet, for poetry is absolutely Falling‘s greatest strength. The usual bones of noveldom– plot and character– to some extent jettisoned for the sake of poetics instead.
And with these poetics, instead of a novel Simpson has assembled a series of moments. Moments so singularly perfect, absolutely realized right down to every atom, that the novel works: the girl Lisa drowned in a stream, the water moving over her fingertips; Ingrid, her distraught mother at the funeral being comforted by her ex-husband, and the hole in the toe of her panty-hose; her brother Damian, unconvinced that there was nothing he could have done, forgetting his mother’s car and arriving home in the morning, and though his sister is dead, he’s fallen in love with a girl.
This is a world constructed not by verisimilitude, but by language. The characters themselves not so much people as a reason for the words, the images, for the moments. And because the language is so remarkable, this is enough to build a world upon. Ordinary images rendered extraordinary– pictures of a brother and a sister joined by a hinge, the thick heat of summer, the imprint of Lisa’s toe inside a shoe. The falls, and that rushing water, which becomes more the guiding force of the novel than a plot is.
Some sections of the book do demonstrate that Simpson is capable of more plot-driven writing. Following an odd but lovely sequence of chapters, which are otherwise unnumbered throughout the book but here counted down from ten– liftoff instead of falling, as Damian finally confronts the force of his grief– causality is apparent, tension is resonant. One thing leads to another, as novels have taught us to expect, and maybe I would have liked more of this, but then perhaps this isn’t the sort of novel Simpson was writing.
She is writing something quieter than this, something subtler. The rushing river and falls a metaphor for life, but also for the state of life in grief. And so the characters will not be so clearly outlined, merely being swept along. Which is only a bit unsatisfying in the case of Lisa, who is just thought of, and yet the reason for the story. Here is a novel constructed around an absence, but one that remains undefined, which is tricky– I would have liked to know her better. But the metaphor works for the other characters, inside their state of grief and amidst the thickness of their atmosphere. The noise, the rush, unceasing.
So perhaps as readers we too must give in to the current, letting us carry us where it may. Here we will find spots of absolutely illumination, and of beauty. And just as it does for the grieving, maybe even for the dead, surely the current will take us someplace new. Follow that poem, momentum enough– towards the river “opened up, opened wide.”
February 23, 2008
Wunderspace
It’s a time of excitement and nerve-wrackage, and of general up-in-the-airness here on the Pickle Me This homefront.
First, having finished my first novel and now beginning the process of finding it a road to publication, I’ve started work on my second book. It’s been buzzing about in my head for a long while now and it’s exciting to finally get writing. How brilliant then, to have the possibilities still be infinite.
Second, and most nerve-wracking: the homefront is being relocated! After two and a half years here, we’ve outgrown our gorgeous apartment and are ready for a change. And though we’ve been thinking about buying for a while now, we’re opting instead to find another rental, save for another few years, thus enabling us to continue eating expensive cheese and going on vacations. Also so that when things break we will continue not to have to fix them. I further like the idea of renting because it still leaves open the possibility of me taking up cafe-sitting full-time, which would just not be possible with a mortgage.
So we’re now on the hunt for a perfect two bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, aboveground with a deck. And wherever this wunderspace happens to be, come April 1st we are going to live there.
February 22, 2008
When whole cities fit into books
I’ve recounted already how we spent our last vacation day scrambling around San Francisco in search of a used Tales of the City. The novel of San Francisco, according to our guidebook, and I just had to have it. A piece of San Francisco to take home with me.
I usually have little interest in reading about a place whilst I’m in it, but once I’m far away and homesick, novels and stories can be the next best thing to being there (which is why I now love Haruki Murakami). And I knew San Francisco homesickness would be long-lasting, so I wanted the remedy on-hand. I was also excited to purchase a book from the Gay Lit section (though such a label seems a bit reductive so far– is a book considered Gay Lit because there are gay people in it?) because it made me feel open-minded in that way gay people probably find inordinately irritating.
As a reward for accompanying me on my scramble, I let Stuart read the book first. He quickly forgave me for scramblage, loved the book, and said its lightness might be a nice way to follow The Poisonwood Bible. And now I’m halfway through, prepared to read the rest this evening in a hot bath (which is interesting because I’ve just learned from a wise source of a connection between this book and The Serial, which I read in another bathtub six years ago, but I digress).
The story is light indeed, and it’s a perfect book for a bathtub, but it’s delightfully entertaining and how brilliant that it establishes a map of the city in my mind.”Valencia Street, with its union halls and Mexican restaurants and motorcycle repair shops, was an oddly squalid setting for the gates of heaven.” Absolutely! Although for me heaven was bookshops, not steam baths, but alas. I’ve sat in Washington Square too, and I can see Coit Tower, and Marina, and the Castro, and even the Safeway on Market, where we bought rice-a-roni the San Francisco treat (not half bad, by the way). Polk and Hyde, The Mission, from the Tenderloin to Nob Hill.
That a whole city disappeared from my horizon can live on in my mind is really nothing short of a tremendous thing.
February 21, 2008
Good things I've read lately…
…include Rona Maynard’s gorgeous tribute to her friend, the writer Val Ross; yes indeed, The Poisonwood Bible; another celebration of letter writing. “12 or 20 Questions” with Zoe Whittall. And oh, lunar eclipse aside, February has never ever been more blah.
