August 9, 2011
Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Carolyn Black
Until I read The Odious Child, Carolyn Black existed foremost in my mind as being the woman who looks exactly like a girl I worked with at McDonalds when I was seventeen, and then I read the book and discovered she was also brilliant. I’ve met her twice, we have several mutual friends, and I’ve never met anyone as well-talked-about behind her back as Carolyn. For good reason, as I discovered when she was kind enough to conduct the following interview with me over a week last month via email.
Carolyn Black’s stories have appeared in literary journals across Canada. “Serial Love” was published in the prestigious Journey Prize anthology, and “At World’s End, Falling Off” won Honourable Mention at the National Magazine Awards. The Odious Child (Nightwood Editions, 2011) is her first collection of short stories.
I: I will begin rereading The Odious Child today, and have been looking forward to it. And I want to begin our interview by asking you the question that has been perplexing me since reading your book for the first time– where did you come from? (As a writer, I mean.) None of the standard equation “Author A meets Author X” lazy reviewer staples quite fits with your style. What writers do you regard as your influences?
CB: Writers I enjoyed reading while writing the collection, who seemed to enter below the ribcage, were Kazuo Ishiguro, AM Homes, and Sheila Heti. I read Muriel Spark throughout high school, and later Nathanael West, Eudora Welty, and Angela Carter. Sexuality, satire, and the surreal are the common elements. I read Miranda July and found her hilarious, but then had a reaction against her, so the first story in The Odious Child is almost a parody of her style, a musing about what would happen if I put a Miranda July character into a story about various degradations … would the childlike language be able to support the story? I am still waiting to have my grand passion, when it comes to influence, to tear out my hair at night because I cannot be a particular writer. I’d really like to have this, an influence whom I wanted to marry and kill, but it hasn’t happened yet although there have been some close calls. I remain optimistic, however, for I am a romantic.
I: See, this is why you’re tricky, Carolyn Black. I’ve never read Miranda July (I had a reaction against her too after seeing her movie, and decided I’d had enough Miranda July for one lifetime) so I missed the joke. I understood what you were up to though—your story is generous enough to contain its own “key” so to speak, as your narrator explains the work she does labelling exhibits at a museum:
“I pile the simple words on top of each other—like beads on a string or pennies in a roll of fetishes hoarded in a cabinet [!]—and connect them with a series of coordinating conjunctions.. The logic must surge forward, as it does when a child tells a story.”
Sometimes it’s not so much that logic surges forward when a child tells a story than the listener indulges the child in listening to a story without surges. There is reward to this of course, as there is with the spare prose of Ishiguro, Sheila Heti, and also you. But do you think that a bit of indulgence is also required on the part of a reader in order to appreciate writing like this? In addition to the usual close reading required of any literary fiction? Or do you think that all literary writers need to be indulged a little bit sometimes?
CB: Are your indulgent readers those readers whose patience is being tried in some way but, still, they persevere? I think this is what you mean. It is curious you would group writers as different as Ishiguro and Heti together, sharing a “spareness” that tried the patience. What would that shared spareness be? Inexplicability? Their works do contain dark matter. Even though Ishiguro writes from inside his characters’ heads, their perceptions of the outer world, to which we do not have direct access, are distorted. The author conceals. And Sheila Heti is not, perhaps, merely concealing, but writing a world where a hidden world does not exist. I remember reading The Middle Stories for the first time, trying to figure out what objects represented. What did the rubber doll mean? What did the flyaway curls mean? Why was a story told about a miserable dumpling that had fallen to the floor? What did it all mean? Why was the author not helping us! The writing was a big fuck you to the reader, which surprised me and made me laugh. I am so used to having everything, every motivation, explained while the plot grinds to a halt. For me, now, writing that explains everything requires a good deal of patience, if only because I’ve read so much of it; writing that resists explication seems beautiful and true. (more…)
August 8, 2011
Every little bit of the story is true
I’m sure I’m not the only person who is watching the riots unfolding in London, and thinking about Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (but not the part about the pigeon). Also about the riots in Vancouver, and how books are the opposite of mob mentality. That these things are just as much about people being idiots (and how) as they are about a profound level of broadbased spiritual poverty and systemic discrimination– every little bit of the story is true. I think that it’s by reading fiction that I’ve learned to process events in the world with reactions that aren’t totally knee-jerk.
August 8, 2011
Going Home Again
“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience or returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.” –Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
I don’t get home very often, hardly ever. I’ve never lived in either of the houses where my parents live now, my grandparents’ houses were sold and gutted long ago, the woods behind the house I lived in until I was nine are now so grown-up that you can’t see the house from the road, and I rarely find myself on that road anyway. Wallace Stegner was right. Like Joan Didion, my parents may have wanted to promise me that I would “grow up with a sense of [my] cousins and of rivers and over my great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to [have pledged me] a picnic on a river with fried chicken and [my] hair uncombed, would like to [have given me] home for [my] birthday, but we live differently now.” Which I don’t think is an inconsolable loss, but it’s a loss still, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve been awash is nostalgia this last while. I keep wanting to write essays about how I spent the night of September 11 2001 in Kos at College and Bathurst eating fries with my friends. This comes on because that night was ten years ago, a nice round number, and because I’ve been listening to Dar William’s The Honesty Room, which I bought around the same time. I keep wanting to write essays about riding our bikes in Japan, and our house in England with its dirty lace curtains and the park across the street, and these wouldn’t be essays, really. They would be diary entries, which, according to Sarah Leavitt, are differentiated from memoirs in that in memoirs, the role of the self is to serve the story. In my story, the role of the self would only be to serve the self, pure indulgence. Basically, I’d like to go home again. Which is as impossible as: Basically, I want a time machine.
I try. Sometimes I walk down Dundas Street between Bathurst and Manning, where I lived for a pivotal year at the turn of the century, except that the Chinese herb shop we lived over is now a store where you can buy a $2400 ottoman, and the restaurant at the end of our block burned down last summer. Sometimes I walk through the university campus where I lived when I thought that a push-up bra and blue eyeshadow were key accessories and where the snow fell so high once that the army came and shovelled us out, but it’s too altogether the same and different. We’ve been replaced by new students who sleep in our beds and imagine themselves to be the centre of the universe.
My family has a thing for nostalgia. A favourite pass-time has always been the Driving By Where We Used to Live game, or the Driving by Where We Lived Before You Were Born game. I sometimes still play this, except we don’t have a car, and so we settle for Pushing Your Stroller Past the Old Apartment whenever we’re in Little Italy. My husband thinks this is weird. Partly because he has lived in none of these locations save for one, and so the game to him is a little bit boring. I keep trying to take him home to places he’s never seen in his life which are inhabited by strangers who have painted the garage door and redone the siding. Besides, he grew up in a land so steeped in its history that he was eager to shed the concept entirely with his new life in Canada. He’s had enough of trodding on Roman ruins. He also thinks it’s funny that any Canadian building one hundred years old is worthy of a plaque.
Anyway, the point is that the cottage we’ve stayed at the last two summers is also where the summers of my childhood were spent. Or not the entire summers, but a few weeks of every one, which, interestingly, have gone all metonymic and become the only bits of those summers I remember. So that last week I did get to go home again, to a place so utterly unchanged, but then I am so changed that it’s a new place altogether and I am happy with that, because I certainly don’t want our summer vacation to be one of those drive-by games that makes Stuart exasperated. I want the cottage to be a place for Harriet to discover for herself, just like I did, and she doesn’t need to know that the dock used to be broken and sinking, so slippery that you couldn’t run, where our fort was, and that the beach was wider once upon a time, but the minnows are the same, and so are the leopard frogs. It is easier to walk barefoot on gravel than it used to be, or maybe it’s just that the soles of my feet are just hard.
No one needs to know about the two salient selves I remember from there. The seven year old girl with a side-ponytail performing a choreographed routine to the theme from Jem and the Holograms on top of a picnic table, and the other one even more awkward, if you can believe it. She’s sitting on a swing dreamily, listening to “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” on the yellow Sony Sports Walkman tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her baja jacket. She’s staring at the sunset sparkling on the lake, and she’s thinking of profound things, like boyfriends, and breasts, and one day being so far away that she’ll be able to refer to herself in the third person.
August 6, 2011
When I was a compulsive parenting expert…
Over at my friend Nathalie‘s parenting blog 4 Mothers, I’ve written a guest post about my career as a compulsive parenting expert:
‘I told them, “And be prepared to feel like a cow. Be prepared to cry, and cry. It’s going to be awful, I’m not going to lie to you. But you’re going to get through it, I promise. I sit here feeding my screaming infant and lecturing you as living-proof that one day everything is going to be okay. Oh, and by the way, I’ve gone through your registry and crossed off all the stuff you don’t need, and made a note about everything you’ve missed.”
It was a compulsion, I will admit, the way I insisted on hunting down women in their third trimesters of pregnancy, and horrifying them with stories of how terrible their lives were about to become. But really, I wasn’t responsible for my behaviour in their presence. The very sight of their burgeoning bellies, their innocent bliss, how they kept talking about looking forward to getting the baby out so they could finally get a good night’s sleep again—it would fill me with overwhelming dread, and I’d start displaying symptoms of PTSD.’
You can read the rest here.
August 6, 2011
What else is there to do in Paradise?
“…because what is there to do/ in Paradise but loaf beneath a tree,/and dream of other worlds?” –Bruce Taylor, “Little Animals” (from QuArc).
We had the most delightful vacation, mainly because we spent most of it reading, reading, reading. Also because Harriet got to roam free like a storybook child, the weather was wonderful, we ate pie almost every day, no laundry was done for a week, the lake was warm and gorgeous, the company was fun, Harriet fell back in love with her summer friend from last year, and because the beer was always cold. We’re not unhappy to be home, however, because here we can drink from the tap, there isn’t sand in the bed, we can go walking not along the side of a highway, and we might end up eating something for dinner that isn’t a frozen burger. It was a perfect week, and isn’t doing seven days of nothing exhausting? So we’re going to need another day or two to recover, and will probably have to go out for dinner tonight because no one is yet up to cooking. Not even a frozen burger.
We weren’t as stranded book-wise as last year, because we’d brought lots of books to read. I started with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I polished off in a day and then urged into the hands of my husband who read it as happily. I was grateful for all the hype it had got, because I probably wouldn’t have read it otherwise, and the read was splendid. I’ll be definitely reading her back catalogue. Then I moved onto Gertrude Bell’s biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, which has been sitting on my shelf for ages, and I’ve wanted to read to learn more about Bell and the history of the Middle East. Bell was your standard mountain-climbing, desert-mapping, Sheikh charming Victorian lady. I can’t say that biography itself was exceptional (I think I’ve been spoiled from having read Victoria Glendinning so recently) but Bell was so exceptional, it would be impossible for her story not to be interesting.
And then I read Anne Perdue’s I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, which blew me away and merits its own book review even though I 
read it on vacation. I’ve met Anne a few times (and I loved her guest post at Canadian Bookshelf), but I wasn’t prepared for how amazing this book was. I’d like to describe it as Jessica Westhead meets John Cheever, and also, what to read after Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting. One of the very best books I’ve read this year, and I’m so thrilled to have encountered it, and to be able to recommend it to you.
I also read through my giant stack of periodicals, which had arrived after the mail strike. The stand-out piece of the bunch was Kathleen Jamie’s “In the West Highlands..” (subscription required) about nature writing via the book Ring of Bright Water (which I know from Alissa York’s Fauna). About how stories of a pet seal living in one’s bathtub lost their appeal with what readers learned from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which didn’t necessarily take on the seal-living-in-bathtub phenomenon, but taught us that we are not nature’s masters after all. “To care about animals now, we must do it from afar.”
Which was a nice way to transition to the absolutely superb QuArc Issue, a joint venture by The New Quarterly and Arc Poetry, which celebrates the intersections of literature and science. And has Rachel Carson poems! Margaret Atwood juvenalia. An interview with Alice Munro! I’m halfway through the Arc side, and I’m finding it very difficult to put down. A bit unbelievable to have so much good stuff inside one (gorgeous) package.
Transition also to Wallce Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I bought at Bob Burns’ Books in Fenelon Falls (a visit to which I’ve been 
looking forward to for a year). I’m reading this book now and aren’t in love yet, but I am firmly in love with Stegner and I like that it’s the second Pulitzer Prize-winner I’ve read this week. Also at Bob’s, Harriet got Wacky Wednesday, and Stuart got Terry Prachett and Ian Rankin.
The other bookish thing that’s gone on is that I made a cottage library over the past year. Made out of review copies I didn’t have room to keep, and also books I’ve scavaged from boxes on curbs. Usually I scavenge less, and donate my extra books to the library or a booksale, but I enjoyed putting the cottage library together instead, which includes some great books and also some trashy ones, which any cottage library requires. I took a picture of one of the shelves, which is only a bit overwhelmed by the mounted fish above it.
July 29, 2011
Cottagier climes
Pickle Me This is on vacation for the next week or so. We’re escaping to cottagier climes, and looking forward to hitting the Foodland tomorrow, as well as the beer store. I am taking A Visit from the Goon Squad, I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore and the rather hefty biography Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.
July 29, 2011
Best Book from this week's library haul: If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and Heather Solomon
Our best book this week was If I Were a Lion by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Heather M. Solomon. It’s the story of a little girl (who look like a kewpie doll. Some people find such illustrations creepy, but I love their weirdness) who has been making some trouble. She never owns up to exactly what kind of trouble, but there is evidence of scribbling on the wall and cereal poured all over the kitchen floor. Her mother has just called her wild, and banished her to the Time-Out chair, and though the girl will admit that the Time-Out is probably necessary, she takes serious offence to “wild” slur. Because she doesn’t roar, she doesn’t have scales or feathers, she doesn’t swing through the trees etc. etc. And she proceeds to go through a catalogue of amazing wildness and imagines the animals she speaks of wreaking havoc on the house. She’s not ferocious, she says, just precocious. When her mother finally calms down she’ll see, “that the opposite of wild is me.”
Naturally, it’s written in verse. Most of our Best Books are. It also taught Harriet the word “opposite”, which is the most abstract term she’s comprehended yet, and I’m glad she’s smart enough to understand the opposite of coffee is tea.
July 28, 2011
The Astral by Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen’s Trouble was the first novel I reviewed on my blog after Harriet was born, and the novel was disappointing. (Less disappointing was the review I wrote–I can’t quite believe how lucid it reads. Perhaps I secretly paid someone to write it while I was busy lying on the carpet sobbing.) Being a novel by Kate Christensen, however, Trouble was still well worth the read and better than most of the other books out there. So you can imagine how much it thrills me to declare that Christensen’s latest, The Astral, is her best book yet, and the finest book I’ve read in ages.
The Astral is the story of a man at the end of his marriage: Luz, Harry Quirk’s wife of thirty years, has just thrown them out of their home in The Astral, an apartment (which actually exists!) in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighbourhood. She’s come across his latest manuscript of poems, love sonnets, and she’s convinced he’s written them for another woman. Refusing to indulge his insistance that the poems are the product of his imagination only, she destroys the manuscript and banishes Harry from their marital home. Harry finds refuge with his good friend Marion, a recent widow, which only serves to anger Luz further because she’s convinced he’s been sleeping with Marion for years. Though he hasn’t been, not for years or for ever. Harry had had one indiscretion twelve years ago, but other than that, he’s been an pointedly loyal husband.
The Astral follows the months after Harry’s banishment, its effect on his children, and he and Luz’s wider group of friends. As with most of Christensen’s work, the narrative is fixed solidly within the perspective of an unlikeable protagonist, though she invests Harry with a certain charm– I think she tends to go easier on her men than her women. Charm meaning that he’s convincing though, almost, but there are certain moments when it becomes clear that he’s wholely devoid of self-knowledge. A line like, “I’d never had a drivers’ license myself, but I knew bad driving when I see it.” But he brings you around, Harry, and it’s not such a bad place, being in his head. Everything he does is usually justifiable, he knows everybody else’s problems. and then there’s the incredible scene when he storms his wife’s therapist’s office and threatens to maim her, then she proceeds to reduce him to a psychological pulp using his own tricks (but better). Suddenly, it’s not clear what is what anymore.
And what is what is never quite resolved. Like Lionel Shriver at her best, Christensen writes a veritable keleidoscope of relative perspectives, and the effect is as unsure and perilous as reality. Like Shriver too, Christensen is hilarious, though her caustic is far less caustic and her work is more palatable. The two writers are similar also in that their novels are driven more by ideas than characters (or even plot) so that we can see the seams sometimes, the work of an author trying too hard to make her people go where she wants them to go. We also get some woodenness, some terrible dialogue– Harry answers a question regarding his son’s wellbeing with, “Karina and I were just out there. He’s immersed in this cult, he’s marrying the leader, and they think he’s the Messiah.” But there is a self-awareness there, one gets the sense that Christensen is winking. At one point during a too-earnest conversation, somebody asks, “Who’s writing this dialogue?”
And the answer is Kate Christensen, who clings to metaphor as much her protagonist does. Marriage is poetry: “I believe in rhyme and rhythm. But my adherence to form is loony. I make it much harder for myself than it has to be. I follow arcane rules that went out of business a hundred years ago.” Marriage is also a kind of cult like the one that has sucked in Harry’s son, and though this plotline has the air of the ridiculous, it’s never exploited and works within the bigger picture. Everything in the book is really working for a higher purpose, which makes the pay-off worthwhile because you get this book in the end. A story of the disparate selves within one man and within one marriage, and the reconciliation of the former that comes when the marriage is finally dissolved.
(If you’re thinking you might be interested in this book, read Kate Christensen’s Book Notes at Largehearted Boy, and then there will be no doubt left in your mind.)
July 27, 2011
On library romance
In the past two days, it has occurred to me that it’s not uncommon for women to imagine library jobs as gateways to romance. Julia did, and so did I, though neither of us got exactly what we were looking for. Particularly since what I’d been looking for exactly was Love Story‘s Oliver Barrett IV (who, incidentally, didn’t look like Ryan O’Neal, since I’d read the book before seeing the movie. He also didn’t look like Al Gore). I wanted the son of a millionaire, the Harvard jock with a sports car who’d see past my glasses and my Italian working class origins, even though I didn’t have either.
Needless to say, I didn’t meet him, though I did eventually get glasses, which I hoped would help, but they didn’t. Which was not to say that my career was not romantic– plenty of nights perched at the circulation desk, I’d await the arrival through the library’s revolving door of whoever it was I was happened to be in love with at the time. I remember many flirtatatious chats to the steady rhythm of the date-stamp. There really were two incidents during which I was kissing boys in the stacks when I should have been shelving, which is the nerdy girl’s erotic fantasy. And if none of this sounds particularly romantic to you, I assure you that it was, or at least it was romantic as my life ever got around the turn of the century.
You can forgive me for being deluded though. I understand the world through literature, and books tend to present libraries as most romantic places. In Love Story, it’s the Radcliffe Library where Jenny Cavilleri first encounters her unlikely future-husband Oliver Barrett IV (“I’m not talking legality, Preppie, I’m talking ethics. You guys have five million books. We have a few lousy thousand.”) and he invites her out for coffee, purportedly to get his book. In Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report, Miriam meets Janko Prijatelj in the park on her lunch break from the Allan Gardens Library, but it is through the language and structure of library bureaucracy that we become privy to the details of their romance.
And then there’s the erotic novel Overdue For Pleasure, about a simple librarian who discovers her wild side . What about Rose in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? who is molested in the stacks during her library job, and saved by the man who will become her husband? (Though admittedly, this plot line is less than romantic.) AS Byatt’s Possession unfolds in a library, the English kind, which are the very best. And then there’s every Barbara Pym book ever written (except the ones that are tales of village life) in which dusty love is encountered across hushed study tables between individuals the rest of the world has forgotten.
Update: Amy Lavender Harris’ excellent blog post informs me about “Rosemary Aubert’s Harlequin romance Firebrand (1985) in which a City Hall librarian has a torrid affair with the City’s charismatic, handsome, left-leaning mayor. It need not be said, of course, that Aubert’s Mayor does not close any branches.”
July 26, 2011
Wild Libraries I have known: The John Hay Library
The lovely Julia Zarankin goes looking for love in the stacks of Brown University’s John Hay Library, and finds it!
I walked into the John Hay Library without knowing anything about it. I was a freshman in college, desperately searching for a part time job and convinced that a library job would increase my likelihood of finding a boyfriend (which high school had not afforded). I imagined scenarios where the elusive boy and I would meet at the circulation desk, debate philosophical problems and run off into the stacks together to kiss passionately (preferably next to collected works by Flaubert, on whom I had a slight, inexplicable crush). And finally, life would be worth living.
I ended up getting a job at Brown University’s Rare Book library – the John Hay Library – where I was one of three female work-study students and worked with a group of middle-aged female librarians. The boyfriend I had imagined meeting was nowhere to be found.
Instead, I discovered books and fell in love with their smell, their feel, their inscriptions, and their histories. I had always been a reader, but before working at the Hay, I never stopped to consider the book as a physical and historical object. Books had merely been containers of information; now they were transforming into living beings. (I did end up meeting that elusive boyfriend, but it didn’t happen in a library, and in the end he didn’t really make life worth living, not to mention that our philosophical discussions never quite got off the ground; the whole thing was slightly underwhelming, but I never would have believed that as an 18-year-old.)
I worked at the reception desk at the John Hay Library for seven hours every Monday and Friday of my freshman year. My job should have been boring and repetitive, but wasn’t: patrons arrived, I helped them fill out request forms, escorted them into the (locked!) reading room, ensured that they had nothing but a pencil and notebook in their possession, entered the request form information into a meticulous log, asked permission to search for the requested book in the stacks, returned with said book, delivered it to the patron and repeated the process.
Sometimes, patrons came to me with research questions and I loved the job for the random conversations and chance encounters. Once, I helped a patron amass bibliographical citations for an art project about vomit in 18th century medical literature. She was a RISD student (the art school down the street) and wore a green boa wrapped around her neck. She returned months later, to thank me for my help, but I never did see her art project. The library also housed a remarkable American literature collection, a medical history collection (hence the vomit-book quest), a military collection replete with toy soldiers, an occult collection, along with all sorts of magician-paraphernalia from the ages, and a Playboy collection, among other things.
I fell in love with the library mainly for the magic I discovered in the stacks. My favorite task was emptying the returns cart and replacing all the books in their proper place. This involved taking a service elevator down into the depths of the library (most of the floors were below ground, and several degrees colder); the floors were dark, with a musty smell I quickly developed affection for, and I would walk through the stacks, turning the lights on one by one. It was there, in the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays that I found first editions of Arthur Miller, H.D., e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens. I would linger an extra ten minutes among the stacks whose layout I had memorized, opening volumes of poetry, reading inscriptions, learning the cardinal points of a literary map I was only beginning to put together in my own mind.
The Hay plunged me into a world where books mattered; every detail of their existence, health and well-being was of utmost importance. Books at the Hay were alive, and I was intoxicated.
