February 13, 2008
Fake Tales
Two thousand miles we roamed. The only bookish event was a sighting of Danielle Steele’s house. Tomorrow morning we’re picking up our car and hitting the road for two days. We’ve both come to look for America.
February 12, 2008
Monday Monday
Another wonderful day, and our faces are sun-kissed. Sea food, sea cruise, sea lions, sea air. City Lights was exceptional. We got Hobart (with a story by Stephany Aulenback), Twilight of the Superheroes, San Francisco Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Stuart got The Maltese Falcon for a bit more local flavour.
February 11, 2008
Bookish Updates
Very cool: Bang Crunch is a staff pick at the shop around the corner from here. (Read my review). And my favourite book of 2008 is out now: The Monsters of Templeton gets an absolutely stellar review in The Globe. Just finishing Arlington Park, which I’ve loved. And today I purchased Housekeeping Vs The Dirt.
February 11, 2008
California Notables
Fruit, the view from our friend’s living room, and the world’s strangest manga. California is beautiful, warm, and everyone who told us it would be rainy and cold was totally lying. Which means we have to go shopping. Today was Haight and Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, Japanese Tea Garden, Divisidero Street!, Alamo Square, Mission, 826 Valencia, world’s steepest hill to Castro. All on foot. Tomorrow is Alcatraz etc. Vacation– all I ever wanted.
February 7, 2008
If we can awaken
“If we can awaken sympathetic comprehension in our readers, not only for our most evil characters (that is easy: there is a cord there, fastened to all hearts that we can twitch at will), but of our smug, complacent, successful characters, we have surely succeeded…” –Graham Greene, London 1948 from A Life in Letters
February 7, 2008
Bang Crunch by Neil Smith
More than anything, I liked Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch for enacting a scene I’ve been dreaming about for ages: husband and wife get pranked in one of these terrible “comedy” candid camera set-ups they’re always showing on airplanes and/or Canadian television outside of prime time. Turns out the wheelchair rolling down the hill has a dummy inside, in an attempt to catch it wife has fallen down and scraped her knee. Man pops out with a camera, there’s a waiver to be signed, but husband beats the crap out of cameraman instead (tossing camera into a nearby gutter). Why doesn’t this happen more often? Never has violence been less senseless.
This is sort of the way it is with Neil Smith’s collection– it’s full of very cool stuff, good ideas, perfect premises. The final story had me breathing in so sharply I thought I’d swallow myself. The end of the first story did shocking so subtly, I scarcely noticed I’d been hit.
A few stand-out tracks: I loved “Funny Weird or Funny Ha ha?”, starring the woman who fell and scraped her knee. She stores her husband’s ashes in a hollowed out curling rock, which is sort of annoying, but it ceased to be the point of the story for me. Notable too, though perhaps it shouldn’t be, that Smith pitches this woman’s voice so perfectly. “Green Flourescent Protein” was a linked story, and managed the same beautiful sadness, cloaked in a sense of humour. Sympathy sympathy. Smith does it. I also liked “Isolettes”– unconventional drama in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The story made me terribly uncomfortable, but after I realized that there was its power.
Smith’s strengths are not always where he thinks they are. I thought he did pinpoint characters beautifully, wacky premises perfectly formed, but sometimes the writing itself was too conspicuous. The similes and metaphors are unconventional, which works sometimes– for example, “Not a blanket or a shroud of loneliness, but something thinner, tighter. A leotard of loneliness.” Which is awkward, and took me awhile to get my head around, but once I did I felt there was a payoff. Whereas, “A vein in his neck looked as swollen as a garden hose” really doesn’t work at all.
So though I enjoyed this work and would recommend it without reservation, I think it’s the work of a writer finding his feet. Which is to be expected of somebody’s very first book, and imperfect first books always make me hopeful, excited when they have that certain something. I’m pleased that publishers take chances on potential. And this book indeed has that “certain something”, with all the “stuff” packed inside it. Though of course “stuff” does not a short story make– I would lay bets on Smith as a novelist, the longer form forcing him to put away his toys and build up something of the substance that shows in glimmers here.
February 6, 2008
Inedible, Indelible Love
She was eating mouldy cheese at the table, and he was reading a book on the couch. Outside it was raining, and their telephone didn’t work when it was raining. They’d tried calling the telephone company about this a hundred times, but no one believed them, and of course by the time someone was sent over for repairs, the rain had stopped.
“Your phone’s just fine,” the repairman always would say, and when they explained the rain, he’d say “Impossible.” And present them with a bill for $76.00, and so they stopped worrying about it. The broken telephone became a fact of rainfall as much as getting wet was, and this was what life was. And life was fine.
February 6, 2008
Credible space flight
I’m on the tail end of a short story run– I finished Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien (whose Certainty was one of my favourite books of last year). Now reading Bang Crunch by Neil Smith, now out in paperback. And then back to novels come Saturday morning, as I’ll have airport waiting and flights to pass (dance dance dance). But lately I have found the short story quite delicious– perfect. Which is probably very fitting, as lately I’ve been writing quite a few of my own.
Fabulous things read lately include from Hilary Mantel’s review in the LRB, “Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods.” The Judy Blume profile that Kate was talking about. Boys don’t get it, do they? Bookninja thought the profile went on “a tad lengthily”. And I do wonder if it is girlishness that kept the Guardian Books blog’s celebration of Anne Shirley as one of the few pieces ever there whose comments didn’t descend rapidly into a churlish a*shole contest. Which is not to say that boys are as*holes, but the ones commenting over there usually seem to be. Or commenting most places, actually (but of course, dear readers, not here.)
Also, though I don’t agree with all she says here, I have fallen completely in love with Tabatha Southey. My love for columnist Doug Saunders is much older, but his piece this Saturday comparing today’s terrorists with those of the early ’70s was fascinating.
And also this stellar piece on the Munich air crash 50 years ago in which 8 Manchester United football players were killed, along with the crew members, team supporters, reporters and coaches: “On February 6, 1958, however, the news has only just begun to find the means of spreading itself at speed through the global village. An international network exists, although it is a primitive and unreliable mechanism compared with the digital world of the future.”
