October 29, 2010

Mariella Bertelli performs The Frog

We’re lucky enough to have Spadina Road as our closest Toronto Public Library branch, where Mariella runs the children’s programming. Since Harriet was eight weeks old, Mariella has been delighting our whole family with her storytelling, her games and songs. And now she’s on Youtube– Mariella for everyone! Here is Mariella performing The Frog.

October 28, 2010

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women has been declared a novel, and certainly it functions with a similar narrative arc, but it’s a novel comprising 15 distinct sections, some of which have been previously published as short stories. The book spans over one hundred years, and four generations of one family, and though there are echoes of her predecessors in each woman’s experience, it is the disconnects between the women that are in some ways more significant. Each woman even disconnected from her own time and place– minds wander back into the past and turn the same pages over and over, all the while the present is overwhelmingly present, but never seems to be the point. The point never the point either– Walbert’s prose is slippery, no sentence or paragraph ever taking you where think that it will go.

If this were a more straightforward book, I’d tell you first that it’s about Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who attended Cambridge University at the turn of the century, but had to get permission to attend lectures with male students (with the promise that she wouldn’t speak), and couldn’t earn a degree, but a worthless certificate instead. She falls in with an Anarchist, but that all falls apart when he quits anarchy to rejoin his class, then fast-forward to fifteen years later when the whole world has fallen in with war. Desperate to give voice to the suffragette cause, which has lost support as the nation turns to the war effort instead, Dorothy goes on a hunger strike, relentlessly, and eventually loses her life.

The heartbreaking postscript to this story being the rest of the story, which is that Dorothy has two children, and they’ve already lost their father. Her son Thomas is sent to live with relatives in America, while her daughter Evelyn makes her own way, surviving WW1 in the wilds of Yorkshire, and then earning a scholarship to study mathematics at Bernard College in New York City. The invisible underscore to the rest of her life being her mother’s sacrifice, which had been her sacrifice as well, but not a willing one. She lives a life that is rich in its own peculiar way, but is also sadly stilted. Her own sacrifice was that she could only ever have one thing or another, and her story ends with a glimpse of a life that could have been more whole than that.

Evelyn never reconnects with her brother or his family, and years later his daughter Dorothy (who grew up estranged from Thomas) is surprised to discover her extraordinary family history. Throughout the book, we see her make conventional choices of marriage and children, and even flirt with second-wave feminism in the most suburban sense, but her awakening doesn’t come until later in life, until after forty years of marriage when she realizes she’s never been who she’s meant to be. Like her grandmother before her, this realization come with its own sacrifices, but there is a freedom with her age, and a world with mechanisms to support her.

Less supportive are her daughters Liz and Caroline, each different from the other but connected by disdain for their mother’s behaviour. Caroline is discovering that her efforts have not culminated in the life she was expecting, Liz is overwhelmed by quotidian demands, and both of their lives are dominated by fear. Both see promise, however, in their daughters– the possibility of hope. But perhaps there is something inevitable, as Caroline writes:

“I find it is the dark of night when you least expect it… regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You’ve done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly. You’ve lost the forest for the trees.”

A Short History of Women is a demanding book, in which the reader has to create her own space, take some time to find her feet. However, once accessed, the story opens wide with avenues to consider, new questions, connections made. The women’s experiences resemble one another, but not in ways predictable or parallel, and a reader who comes away with conclusions (if she manages to at all) will have had to wholeheartedly engage with the story in the process, with questions of how far these characters have actually come, and where there’s left to travel.

October 27, 2010

Do the Grandpa

Stuart was excited to discover the 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World, in particular “Iktsuarpok”, which is an Inuit word meaning, “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” Iktsuarpok actually is translatable, at least into our family shorthand, in which “to go outside [or to the window] to check if anyone is coming” is to “Do the Grandpa”. Both of us remember pulling up to our grandparents’ as children, and seeing Grandpa appearing at the window because he’d been listening for our car. Which is to say that both our Grandfathers had either keen ears, or rather empty days, or maybe they had both sometimes, or traded one for another as their lives got longer. Or maybe it’s to say nothing in particular at all, because both of us from time to time find ourselves Doing the Grandpa too.

October 27, 2010

That's what I call bad novels.

“To make a long story short, let’s imagine something called “industrial literature.” It’s job is to reproduce, ad infinitum, the same types of stories, to grind out assembly-line stereotypes, to retail noble sentiments and trembling emotions, to seize every opportunity to turn current events into docu-dramas, to conduct market studies in order to manufacture, according to demographic profile, products designed to tease the imaginations of specific categories of consumers.

That’s what I call bad novels.

Why? Because they’re not creations. Because they reproduce pre-established forms. Their enterprise is one of simplification (lies, in other words), whereas the novel is the art of truth (complexity, in other words). Because by provoking knee-jerk reactions, they lull our curiosity. Because the author is absent, and so is the reality he or she claims to describe.” –Daniel Pennac, Better Than Life

October 25, 2010

10 Reasons to be Happy

1) The odds of an amazing book winning The Giller Prize is remarkly high

2) I heard on the radio (via the Inuit) that polar bear populations are rising, not falling. They’ve just gotten better at hiding from scientists.

3) I know two awesome babies born in the past two weeks, and two more are still abrewing. Odds of at least one of them changing the world for the better is quite high.

4) Unfit, angry people without karma on their side are at greater risk than the rest of us of dropping dead at any time

5) America elected Obama president

6) Those Chilean miners, remember?

7) Dairy Milks in the post, and leftover pumpkin pie

8) Message to My Girl by Split Enz

9) The Sunday after next has 25 hours in it

10) Drawing close is Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, and I’ve chosen to regard this as a harbinger of spring.

BONUS: My next door neighbour just brought a huge box of fresh fruit to my door– 3 pints of strawberries, melon and grapes.

October 25, 2010

El Anatsui and Margaret Drabble, via Heather Mallick

Photo courtesy blog.rom.on.ca

When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, the retrospective of Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui now on at the Royal Ontario Museum, was one of the most exciting, beautiful and powerful exhibitions I’ve ever seen. So you can imagine my delight upon reading Heather Mallick’s column last weekend, as she draws a parallel between the show and Margaret Drabble’s ideas as expressed in her latest book The Pattern in the Carpet. Marvelous worlds colliding!

Mallick writes of the exhibit:

I visited this weekend for the second time, for the pleasure of being shocked by beautiful acreage. The possible meanings leap out at me, what El Anatsui is saying about the way we live now.

I like to tell fellow ROM visitors (strange how they back away from me) about my theory, borrowed from the novelist Margaret Drabble, about why people are so angry and unhappy now. Suffering from the illness known as “affluenza”, they are told to view life as an economic ladder, a vertical clamber to success. But people are falling off the ladder now, or are stalled mid-rung, and it hurts.

Drabble says life is not a ladder but a jigsaw. It moves sideways and around, no one event knocking you into the abyss. Suddenly a job loss or a sick child or a bad divorce is just another piece in the broad jigsaw, part of a pattern in the carpet. No section of the jigsaw is more important than any other. This is a comfort when the wheels come off.

That’s what El Anatsui’s metal curtains say. The bigger ones do look like Canada, well-assembled and prosperous, with random wrinkles representing our national miseries.

October 24, 2010

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan

I am sure I could get to the bottom of whether Marilyn Monroe’s dog (a gift from Frank Sinatra) really had been previously owned by Vanessa Bell, but maybe the joke would be on me then. Or it would just demonstrate that I’d missed the joke altogether, the punchline to a question like, “How do you write a novel about a dog that belongs to Marilyn Monroe, and make it implausibly literary?” If if were to tell you a joke right now, it would probably be something about how I wasn’t quite smart enough for the book about Marilyn’s dog, which is The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan.

Most remarkable about this book (and how I could start any number of different sentences this way) is not its pop-culture references, or its grip on Mad Men era current events, but its doggishness. Which is unsurprising for a novel written from the perspective of a dog, but then how many novels have been narrated from the perspective of a dog? Well, quite a few, actually, including Virginia Woolf’s Flush, which is referenced on Page 5, and so here is a novel quite aware of itself and its tongue-in-cheek literary tradition.

“A dog’s biggest talent,” so says Maf, “is for absorbing everything of interest– we absorb the best of what is known to our owners and we retain the thoughts of those we meet. We are rentative enough and we have none of that fatal human weakness for making large distinctions between what is real and what is imagined.” A narrator who borders on omniscience then, which makes Maf the Dog… not such a jarring departure as novels go, dog or no dog, but then this is no “no dog” and O’Hagan never falters with his dog’s eye view, of shoes and pantlegs, and whatnot. The dog stays in the picture– a visit to Marilyn’s analyst raises Freud’s dog Jo-Fi, Maf references other literary dogs including Flush, and Steinbeck’s Charley, from Civil Rights we go to Abe Lincoln’s dog Fido who “gave the future president his love of the untethered”,  and so on, and so on. The novel is peppered with footnotes containing such fascinating facts, one of these notes beginning, “A dog is bound to like footnotes. We spend our lives down here…” On page 164, Maf finds part of a journey boring, and so devotes his energy to compiling a list of the Top Ten Dogs of All Time. (Greyfriars Bobby, Lassie, Snoopy, Laika…)

After leaving his home in England with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Maf travelled to Los Angeles and Frank Sinatra via Natalie Wood’s eccentric mother. Kennedy had just won the presidency, and spirits were high– Sinatra presents the dog to Monroe was a gift, she christens him “Mafia Honey”, and they spend the rest of her life together. Monroe had just come off the tail-end of her breakup with Arthur Miller, had become determined to prove herself as an actress and as a person, carried a thick Russian novel around in her bag, and insisted on trying to read it. She’s studying Method Acting with Lee Strasberg (and O’Hagan’s scene of Marilyn reading from “Anna Christie” is incredible, deep and affecting– a seamless weaving of her lines and her conjuring from her own experience to underline them). She has lunch with Carson McCullers, goes to parties with Lionel Trilling (who notes how “[w]hen Henry James was old and tired… he could be seen moving down the High Street in Rye with his dog Maximilian trotting behind him”), meets President Kennedy (and it’s much less sensational than you’d think– “A lot of depressing shoes at the party,” reports Maf. “I mean Mules.”)

Oh, and Mafia Honey is a Trotskyist, and delivers line about how some people think being themselves is a fine alibi for not being something better, and considers Montaigne “my personal friend”, and pees in Frank Sinatra’s backseat. The Marilyn Monroe he presents to us is a complex character, fascinatingly and lovingly rendered, and more interesting than I’ve seen her in any other tribute. The novel is original, surprising, intelligent, full of brilliant insights, and shows that O’Hagan is a novelist with plenty of tricks up his sleeve.

October 24, 2010

My Secret Summer Reading Project (which is no longer a secret)

It’s all out in the open now, what I spent my summer reading (in addition to everything I’ve already told you about). This summer my own rereading project was waylaid because at the beginning of June, I began my duties as one of three jurors for the Quebec Writer’s Federation First Book Prize. I had twenty-five books to get through, a stack that did seem quite daunting, but also exciting to consider– some of the books were so incredibly beautiful, others looked fun, and others fascinating.

And their diversity is the first thing I want to talk about– what it was like to evaluate novels, short story collections, memoirs, current-event nonfiction, history books and poetry against one another. Every book had been written with its own singular intention, and it was my place to deem how successfully these intentions had been realized. It had me considering the works far more broadly than I would have otherwise. And what joy it was to read so many of these, breaking me out of my own stiff reading habits. A pleasure indeed (and an honour too).

What was even more  a pleasure, however, was to spend my summer visiting Montreal. Which, of course, I only did through the books I encountered, but it was enough. Amazing. I’ve actually spent very little time in Montreal myself, and have always known it best through books (like I do most places), but these books had me so steeped this summer in the city’s culture, history, and geography that I feel I know it almost well now. And from where I sit, it’s one of the most vibrant, beautiful cities in the world, and I do look forward to visiting again.

Anyway, I had a marvelous time. Too bad you weren’t there! And congratulations to the stellar shortlist.

October 21, 2010

We read The Dalhousie Review

In The Dalhousie Review Summer 2010 issue, editor Anthony Stewart writes that the magazine has started a return to its roots: the print issue design has been streamlined to fit with the magazine’s online presence (though I have to admit the blah minimalism seemed lacking to me, but alas); digital archives will soon be available back to 1921 when the magazine was born (fabulous); and though they continue to publish high quality prose and poetry, there has been a shift in their non-fiction from academic to more general-interest, which had been the intention of the magazine’s first editor 90 years ago.

Though they’re still mid-shift, I suppose. Jason Holt’s “Partworks” begins with promise– a list of great works of art, “all deservedly famous, all provocatively unfinished.” He then attempts to find a place for these works within aesthetic theory, but I confess that I didn’t understand anything in the entire piece. I think I became officially lost at, “If trying to preserve an intuitive view of partworks as occupying a middle-ground between non-artworks of the quotidian kind and bona fide artworks has such drastic theoretical consequences*…, then this might be taken as a reductio of the intuitive view.” (*I love the idea of “drastic theoretical consequences” though– what might they be? Getting your Adorno in a knot?)

Philip Beidler’s “History and Memory in the Great War Paintings of John Singer Sargent”, on the other hand, is accessible, fascinating, and accompanied by colour prints(!) of three of the paintings. Beidler takes into account the different nature of Sargent’s commissions, who they came from (British vs. American), and when in his career they came in order to understand the diversity of his WW1 portrayals. This is exactly the kind of stuff the Dalhousie Review should be after– devourable to those of us who didn’t know John Singer Sargent from a sewing machine, but after we’ve read it, we do.

Many of the stories in this issue take on “History and Memory”, as Beidler does. Julia Zarankin’s “The Fabric of Nostalgia” ruminates on language, letter writing, and how we assemble ourselves and others from words written on a page. (Full disclosure: Julia is my friend. I thought she was brilliant before she became my friend, however, so my bias means less than one might think.) Lynda Archer’s “A Heart in Saskatoon” takes what could be saccharine premise (a woman going to meet a man who long ago received her dead brother’s heart), and enlivens it with a dose of suspense and an interesting treatment of heart imagery. Andrea Bennett’s “The Falls” is also a reflection on the past, and though the story lacks depth where we’d like more, Bennett skirts cliche in all the right places and her ending is absolutely perfect. Alexis Lachaine’s “Gas” is situated in the present, but a present that is decidedly fixed and sepia-toned, backward looking (though less so than it supposes– something is going to happen, but this is not the point), and featuring some of the strongest writing of the bunch. Patrick Hick’s “Buster” was a small town hockey story that reminded me of Finnie Walsh.

Two other stories in the magazine were “Napoleon’s Eyes” by Vanessa Farnsworth, and “Dress Up” by Drew McDowell, both unconventional domestic comedy/tragedies. In the former, a wife watches her husband desperately try to insurance payout, putting their lives and home at risk in the process. McDowell’s story is about a husband who follows his wife too far into drugs and risque sexuality, and features two truly stunningly powerful moments, but lacks a satisfying ending.

(The poetry didn’t do it for me. I must say that I didn’t work very hard to make it do it for me, so the fault is probably my own rather than the poetry’s)

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of postings on literary magazines, as I venture outside of my comfortable subscription list for a single issue of something that’s new. I’m pleased to picked this one up, and to glimpse a magazine in transition, in the hands of an editor whose vision and passion underlies the entire issue.

October 20, 2010

Bunting!

Clipper Tea marketers, you’ve done it again! I was compelled to buy your tea solely on the basis of its gorgeous packaging, and then you went and made this television advert complete with bunting. Bunting! It even falls down, like the bunting in my kitchen, because masking tape can only ever be so sticky. And I am raising this point now because I want to post a photo of the bunting in my kitchen, which was an idea I stole from my friend Bronwyn, but we both thought it was a good one because India Knight has bunting in her kitchen too. I made my bunting out of origami paper, and it has made the kitchen one of my favourite rooms in our house (rivalled only by the living room, the hallway, Harriet’s room, and my attic loft). Other fantastic objects in this photo include my breadbox, the Blackpool tea towel, a wind chime made out of buckets and watering cans, and the first two of a row of five photos of a British supermarket cereal aisle. In unrelated news, my horrid craft blog has been updated. Click here to answer the question that’s been obsessing everyone: what has Kerry been knitting lately?