January 29, 2008
Must
I’ve been reading bits and pieces lately, but some of it has been incredible. Last night was reading aloud from The New Quarterly 105 “Umbrella” and “Knife” by S. Isabel Burgess who, according to the internet, is also a Ph.D. student in nonlinear physics and pattern formation. Which isn’t all that surprising, actually, and her poems are amazing.
In terms of short fiction, from My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead I’ve fallen in love with “Some Other Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg, and now her collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a must must. (Today I told RR that some days it is my to-read list that keeps me from jumping out my office window).
Online: 12 or 20 Questions with Lynn Coady (whose Mean Boy you might remember how I loved.)
January 29, 2008
Young girls are coming to the canyon
Though I had a variety of things to get done tonight, none of them seemed to take precedence over compiling a San Francisco/California/USA Mixtape for our upcoming vacation. Actually a playlist, as follows:
1. We Built This City by Starship
2. Big Sur by The Thrills
3. America by Simon and Garfunkel
4. California Stars by Billy Bragg and Wilco
5. (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding
6. Surfin’ Safari by The Beach Boys
7. California by Joni Mitchell
8. Twelve Thirty by The Mamas and the Papas
9. Surfin USA by The Beach Boys
10. Long December by Counting Crows
11. America by Razorlight
12. California Girls by The Beach Boys
13. Drinking in LA by Bran Van 3000
14. California Dreaming by The Mamas and the Papas
15. Feel Flows by The Beach Boys
16. California by Phantom Planet
17. San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers in Your Hair) by Scott Mackenzie
18. Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys
Some selections sure to drive the purists mad, but alas. Dreams come true often have cheesy soundtracks.
January 27, 2008
Awake
I tend to take words seriously but I’d given all that up at Starbucks, where everything is called something ridiculous. Even the cookie I always get– chocolate chip to my tastes– is called Chunky Double Choco Mound, or something. Where small is Tall, and Grande doesn’t mean big. It has ceased to occur to me that anything at Starbucks means anything, which is why I choose my teas based on the colour of their packaging. Arbitrary, I know, but I like all teas, and some days some colours suit me better than others. Though, of course, red is usually best.
And so Thursday evening, as I lay in bed awake into the wee hours of morn, it occurs to me that maybe there are words at Starbucks that mean something. That red packet, of course, is called “Awake”– a word which I’d entirely divorced of its meaning within the Starbucks context and unconsciously too, which was sort of disturbing from my insomnious state of mind.
But what if all Starbucks teas are so literal? I look forward to discovering: Calm, Refresh, Joy, Zen, and (in particular) Passion.
January 27, 2008
Teach us to adapt
“I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or “deep” enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.” –James Wood, “A Life of Their Own”
January 25, 2008
Out of hand
This has gotten out of hand. Now reading Sister Crazy by Emma Richler, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides, Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, Bear With Me by Diane Flacks, The New Quarterly Issue 105, and The Paris Interviews Vol. II. So now I have to quit my job and never sleep again. Hurrah!
January 25, 2008
My new quest
I had to go into a bookstore today to pick up a gift for a friend, and of course, while I was there, why not get something for myself? For this is how my mind works, and why bookstores– for me– require infinite will not to go broke in. But I got The Paris Review Interviews vol. II, which I think was most sensible. For they’re interviews with writers, of course, and good ones, and one of my favourite book bloggers has raved about it. So there is learning aplenty, but multitudinously, for this book shall also be the textbook of my new quest to learn to interview.
Interviews are the one written form I’m afraid to take on– I’d sooner write a play (which is not to say that I’d be good at that either). They’re an art-form, I think, and a difficult one done in dialogue. A dialogue in which you must be the guide… or do you follow? I just don’t know. Learning to interview will also challenge my tendency to break off into long-winded tangents about lies I told when I was seventeen, or my new favourite pop song, or whatnot. I also think it will make me a better storyteller, socializer, and writer in general. It will also be fun.
The plan is to post an interview monthly, once I’ve got some study under me belt. How exciting. Maybe I’ll even interview you!
January 24, 2008
Always Carry a Book with You
“7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.
This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never have I had the time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.” –Emma Richler, Sister Crazy
January 24, 2008
Cleistogamous
New words I’m fond of are “jactitation”, “lintel”, “spoor”, and “cleistogamous”. Now reading Sister Crazy. Also quite pleased that the latest The New Quarterly has arrived in the mail. And it’s about time I read AL Kennedy, I think.
January 23, 2008
Four Letter Word by Knelman and Porter
Whatever it is that’s just a bit thrilling about despair, it’s the very reason “Long Long Time” has been running through my head for about fifteen years. Linda Ronstadt warbling the entire spectrum of human emotion, with no intention of cheering up anytime soon, and though it’s enough to make tears pool at the brim of your eye, you’re not going to cry. As another song goes, “It’s only love, and that is all… but it’s so hard…”
Only love. As wrong as the most empty conjunction I’ve ever read: “mere happiness.” How much its writer mustn’t know, for there is nothing “mere” about happiness. And there is also nothing “only” about love, but who wishes to be “mere” or “only” anyway? With just a simple injection of despair (“living in the memory of a love that never was”) love is elevated to the stuff of epic drama, or at the very least the stuff of cheesy seventies pop lyrics. Warble warble warble.
Which is not to say that Four Letter Word is the stuff of pop lyrics, warbled or otherwise. Rather than this book has set me thinking about love, what we make of it. And what happens to love when we set it down in letters, here letters in the fictional: an ingenious premise for an anthology. By some absolutely brilliant writers, including some of my favourites, and a dust jacket to die for (I wish you could see the spine and how it’s printed like a whole packet of different sized and coloured letters, all gathered by a ribbon thank you Kelly Hill).
These fictional love letters were collected by editors Rosalind Porter and Joshua Knelman in order to “resurrect [the] dying custom [of the love letter] and to remind us of how seductive words are.” Indeed, these letters manage to seduce us with entire stories, communicated in one voice with limited perspective, often with second-person narration, some in just mere paragraphs. What a literary feat, I think, for what results is not a gimmick, epistolary indulgence, but storied stories, with all the voice, character and plot one would look for in such a thing.
And that it’s not “only love” and very rarely “mere happiness” which run through these stories is unsurprising, considering their form. As romantic as love letter might be, they’re indeed a sign of something gone wrong, for shouldn’t lovers be together? Kept apart by distance, death or fate would bring inevitable despair. Peter Behrens’ soldier writing from the front, traumatized by France 1944. Nick Laid’s Ruth writing to her deceased father: “Do not come back to us. Do not come back.” Joseph Boyden’s husband looking for his wife in post-Katrina New Orleans: “I didn’t want to let go of your hand.”
Certainly there is darkness here, letters by vulnerable children with no idea of the burdens they bear. Letters which we, the readers, know will inevitably go unsent, unreceived or unread. But there is considerable humour too, even amongst the despair. From a lovelorn chimp to “Miss Primatologist Lady in the Bush Sometimes”. Lionel Shriver’s Alisha’s emails, increasingly erratic as she’s not responded to. Tessa Brown’s letters in which a lover scorned critiques her boyfriend’s phone messages are disturbingly amusing (with footnotes).
Interesting that the stories here which come closest to “mere happiness” are not written to people at all: James Robertson’s ode to hillwalking, Jan Morris’s song to her house. The always-impressive Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie does write a letter tinged by possibility rather than loss, and driven by an undercurrent of joy.
Four Letter Word is useful on a variety of levels: being definitely readable, time slipping by like the letters were true and addressed to you. Inspiring thoughts of what love means, today and for always. Providing exposure to a variety of contemporary writers from a variety of locales and even (!!) some in translation. And being completely unlike any anthology I’ve ever encountered before, a whimsical exercise resulting in a collection with literary solidity and truth.
