July 23, 2010

To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew

“Parents didn’t have to read the New York Review of Books or James Joyce, and they didn’t have to make their kids read Treasure Island or Greek Myths. Parents simply had to read for themselves, and to make sure there were kids’ books in the house. Children had only to see that reading was something adults did for pleasure and, following this example, would begin to read on their own.

…What were her most important books? Nancy Drew mysteries, Gone With the Wind, and a hulking anthology, Twenty Five Tales of the Weird and Supernatural. Not Faulkner, not Proust, but Nancy Drew; the first rungs on the ladder are often the most daring. To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew. Or books about horses. Books by Kurt Vonnegut, or Ayn Rand, or A Wrinkle in Time, or On the Road, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Goosebumps. It’s entirely possible that some of tomorrow’s voracious readers will cite the Harry Potter novels as important, but just as many might cite a novel not found in every house on the planet.”–From The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

July 5, 2010

Reading like a pirate

Harriet has learned to point, so now she’s the master of her index finger, and this afternoon she mastered it directly into my left eye. Which means that I’m just now back from the walk-in clinic, after four hours of being last in the queue because everyone else was hemorrhaging. It was the longest uninterrupted stretch of reading I’ve had for as long as I can remember, even better than the two hours I spent waiting for a passport last summer. Someone reading a Nora Roberts novel kept trying to talk to me, but I was hardly going to waste such a precious opportunity on small talk, particularly not with someone reading a Nora Roberts novel. No wonder she was distracted, but I wasn’t, which was wonderful. To read for hours, without stopping, without the compulsion to check my email, lacking the means to do so. Seated in a comfortable chair just made for ophthalmology, never minding the fluorescent lights, or that I periodically had to cover up one eye and read my book like a pirate. I read the second half of Katha Pollitt’s book, and reread (for the fifth time) the first third of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I was actually disappointed when the doctor finally arrived, but not so much when he told me that I was fine. Just a tiny scrape on my cornea, and nothing a little over-the-counter wouldn’t fix, and then it was out of the air-conditioning and and into the heat, and onto the subway to read my way home.

June 28, 2010

Big Brothers

“Inside the bus, he sat several rows ahead of me and I settled behind a girl singing a pop ballad into her collar. Kids around snapped bubble gum and yelled out jokes, but Joseph held himself still, like everything was pelting him. My big brother. What I could see of his profile was classic: straight nose, high cheekbones, black lashes, light-brown waves of hair. Mom once called him handsome, which had startled me, because he could not be handsome, and yet when I looked at his face I could see how each feature was nicely shaped.” — from Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

And it occurs to me that everything I know about big brothers I know from fiction, because I never had a big brother myself. But I want one, because of Rose’s brother Joseph, and Sally J. Freedman’s brother Douglas, and Elaine Risley’s brother Stephen in Cat’s Eye, and Madeleine’s brother Mike in The Way the Crow Flies. Gawky boys in ill-fitting sweaters who collect things and understand physics. Who are not quite of the world as their sisters are, always just out of reach, whose attention is coveted, elusive. Their protection a kind of talisman. These mysterious boys with pimples and secret girlfriends, twelve-years old and there’s nobody wiser in the world.

June 22, 2010

Important Artifacts 2

I’ve been thinking more about “thingness” as narrative since reading Carin’s comment on my last post (and it was her review that brought me to read Important Artifacts and Personal Property… by the way). She remarked that the hipster aspect of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris’ life together was probably to emphasize its emptiness, that it all looked very slick but was without substance. That a couple can’t build a life together on vintage bathing suits alone. And so Shapton’s text was to be a counter-narrative to the thingness then, making clear what was going on beneath surface? I’m not totally convinced, but it’s an interesting idea to consider.

What I am convinced of, however, and what the book makes clear, is that these glimpses we’re given into other people’s lives (whether by auction catalogues, lit windows or Facebook data) is often so deceiving. Partly because what we glimpse is so contrived, (which is Shapton’s entire point), particularly since social media is such a performance. Because I’m all too aware of the view of my window from the sidewalk, because I’ve actually spent my whole life cultivating such a view, but you’re never really going to know what happens when I pull the blinds down, are you?

Motherhood is the best example of this, particularly its presentation via social media. I was devastated last year when my daughter was born, and I found my feelings in the days afterwards so far from the obligatory “Kerry is totally and utterly blissed out and in love with her gorgeous new daughter” status update. Everybody writes statuses like that, and I absolutely couldn’t, and at that point I didn’t know how many moms were just more capable of lying than I was (or of being “blissed out in love” in addition to having a pretty terrible time, but the terrible time itself they never cared to mention). All all of us have a “just given birth, baby on the chest” photo somewhere in our Facebook stash, but it so doesn’t begin to tell my story. We let it stand in for the story, because it’s more comfortable that way, but that doesn’t even begin to stand in for the real thing.

Of course, it’s not supposed to. Online anywhere is not the best place for private life anyway, and there is something to be said for keeping some things to yourself. But I must say that I was fooled by the Facebook motherhood narrative. The blissed out love, the dreamy photos, the quiet baby asleep in a bouncy chair– it did not convey the effort it took to get that baby to sleep. The effort it took to get that mom out of her pyjamas. I felt so incredibly inadequate for not being able to put myself back together as easily as my FB friends had, for being thoroughly miserable when I should have been blissed out in love. I had been expecting blissed out love because I’d perused so many of the pictures. And how could a picture lie?

But they do. They don’t just withhold– they totally lie.

There is no longer such thing as a candid shot, if there even ever was.

June 19, 2010

Important artifacts

I just finished reading Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton, the devourable if gimmicky story in the form of auction catalogue. And thought I do think it must have been exhausting for Doolan and Morris to be so insufferably hip at all times (did these people never buy anything at The Gap? did they ever tire of the kitchsy salt-and-pepper shakers and vintage everythings?), I loved the book a lot, though in the same way I like peering through strangers’ windows, looking through people’s bookshelves, and perusing Facebook albums of people I’ve never met.

If Shapton’s intention is to tell a story through physical objects, however, it’s worth remarking upon that she doesn’t succeed. Sure, the story is told, but it’s words as usual that do the job– lists stuck into paperbacks, exchanges scrawled on theatre programs, letters unsent and otherwise, emails, and postcards. In essence, Important Artifacts is an epistolary novel, the artifacts themselves serving as espistle storage devices.

Without the epistles, the objects lack in resonance (though they do add a postmodern layer of veracity to the narrative in the same way the family pictures in The Stone Diaries turned that book into something much fuller than a novel). The objects don’t tell the whole story though, just as a view through a window doesn’t, or a bookshelf, or any infinite number of Facebook albums– but why are these things so compelling all the same?

I wonder if– outside of fictional realms– such fragments come closer to a kind of truth than anything else can? And I wonder how much of the pleasure lies in making the connections by ourselves.

June 15, 2010

On "There, you see?" criticism

I do hope that the ridiculous parts of of Andre Alexis’ essay The Long Decline don’t undermine his valid points about Canadian literary criticism. I note in particular the statement about the critic who “…takes sentences or paragraphs that he considers examples of brilliant writing and then does the written equivalent of pointing and saying, “There, you see?”

Though just as often, the critic does the same thing with what he purports to be bad writing, supposing the evidence speaks for itself. The problem is, however, that the evidence rarely does. Mostly because there is no such thing as “brilliant writing”, or if there is, it’s only because it’s the writing one happens to like. (And if the evidence spoke for itself, really, what would be the need for critics?)

I want a critic to convince me, the way Steven Beattie did in his essay “Fuck Books“. Or perhaps what I mean is that I want a critic to make his case, because although I don’t agree with Beattie’s general assessment of Canadian Literature, the specific points within his essay are laid out and evidenced so clearly. He argues that Rebecca Rosenblum’s story “Fruit Factory” is “a far more effective – and affecting – portrait of blue-collar experience than anything in In the Skin of a Lion” and uses an excerpt. Instead of just pointing to that excerpt with a “There, you see?”, however, he goes on:

“Notice the way Rosenblum employs sparseness and repetition to capture the combined monotony and pressure of a labourer’s days… Rosenblum’s story is steeped in the rhythms of modern urban reality; the drumming beat of her sentences reflects her character’s lived experience. This is writing that sizzles and snaps, largely because it appears almost completely unadorned. In today’s CanLit, that in itself counts as an innovation.”

To be honest, “writing that sizzles and snaps” means precisely nothing, and it’s the kind of statement many critics use instead of “There, you see?” But with Beattie’s exceptionally close reading of the story and his concrete examples, I completely understand what he’s talking about. The work is almost revivified by his treatment of it.

Whereas, “There, you see?” criticism is dead on arrival, lazy, arrogant, a certain way to write one’s self into obsolesence, and I see this stuff all the time. So I do think Alexis makes a good point. Whether he makes his point well, however, is another matter…

June 12, 2010

Fiction on the way

I don’t read much on public transit anymore, because I’m usually carrying my daughter in the Baby Trekker and entertaining her by making faces at our reflection in the windows. But today I had a trip with two subway legs, then the streetcar, and by the end I’d had enough, lamenting that there is no Poetry on the Way these days, because I really was craving a little reading break. When I got on the subway to go home, however, I was pleased to board a car full of book ads, and one of these was a book excerpt. It was wonderful! I don’t care that it was an excerpt from Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl, which is certainly not a book after my heart, but it won it a bit today anyway. As I stood there hugging a pole, going through enough text to give me a taste of a story. It was the only remotely entertaining subway ad I’d encountered all day (and I’d encountered more than a few!). A wonderful idea, and I think more marketers should do this…

May 29, 2010

The Birthday Haul

We were inspired by Carrie Snyder and her gift-free birthday idea, because our apartment is small, the planet’s resources are limited, plastic lives forever, and Harriet already has a lot of stuff. And because we had every intention of spoiling her ourselves, of course, as did the rest of our families. But we wanted to celebrate Harriet’s first birthday with our friends as well, so when we invited them to the birthday party, we asked that lieu of gifts, they bring a board book for donation to The Children’s Book Bank.

I know that the Book Bank is in need of board books in particular, and now that I know Harriet, I understand why. Board books are basically edible, which doesn’t bode well for second-hand. And did our friends ever deliver– check out this stack of goods. How wonderful to spend a beautiful afternoon in such splendid company, and have this to show for it. It also gives us an excellent excuse to make a trip to the Book Bank ourselves, because it’s really a magical place.

May 24, 2010

On Shirley Jackson

I’ve not read anything by Shirley Jackson, but her book The Haunting of Hill House was on Sarah Waters’ Top Ten Ghost Stories. And now, my amazing new book club The Vicious Circle (and yes, if I wasn’t in this book club, I’d be jealous of anyone who was) will be reading her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And since I read this article yesterday, I’ve been itching to read her short fiction. I may be the only person ever who hasn’t read “The Lottery”. Life Among the Savages might also be right up my alley. So I’ve just got this feeling that I’m on the cusp of something– all of these books to be read/loved before me. And my love of anticipation is as such that I’d sort of like to have them before me forever. The only thing I might love more than anticipation is a good book, however, so I’ll be picking up some Shirley Jackson sometime soon. I think I am going to ask for a gift certificate for Ten Editions Books for my birthday.

May 18, 2010

Figurative Devouring Only

Today we received in the post the latest from Rebecca Rosenblum. Her chapbook Road Trips has just been published by Frog Hollow Press, and is so incredibly gorgeous. The pages are a joy to caress, the endpapers are thick, fibrous and lovely, and I love the images inside which remind me of lino-cuts. And then there are her stories– I’ve read one before (though I imagine it’s changed since then) and the other will be new. How wonderful! This is one book the baby will not be permitted to eat. Figurative devouring only.