November 5, 2007
It's always tea-time
“‘And ever since that,’ the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, ‘he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve got no time to wash the things between whiles.’”
—Alice Adventures in Wonderland
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
November 2, 2007
A literary map more than a person
From The Globe & Mail on Helen Oyeyemi: ‘Two books into the sport of novel writing, Oyeyemi still doesn’t think of herself as a writer because “I don’t write every day and isn’t that what a real writer is supposed to do?” Instead, she “would just as soon be called a reader because that is something I do every day.” She laughed. “I’ve gradually built my identity around books. I’m almost a literary map more than a person.”‘
November 1, 2007
Books before me
My friend Bronwyn once wrote me in an email, “I haven’t read Mrs. Dalloway because then I will have read it and I won’t be able to look forward to reading it.” I understand entirely. Me, I get a frisson of sheer joy every time I remember that I’ve still got unread Carol Shields before me. How I hate that the list is so finite (and ever depleting) but I still haven’t read Larry’s Party, A Celibate Season or her short story collections (except Various Miracles which is one of the most perfect collections I’ve ever read). I’ve been avoiding it all on purpose– what will I ever do when I am through? Read them all again, I suppose, as my annual reread of Unless has never failed to hold new discoveries. But still. Books before me, books which I’m sure to love– is there any greater joy? And Larry’s Party starts tomorrow…
November 1, 2007
Favourite short stories
Top ten short stories in The Guardian. I believe I’ve got ten of my own, in no particular order, because I’ve never met a list I didn’t like.
1) “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
2) “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
3) “Scenes” by Carol Shields
4) “Astonishing the Blind” by Jack Hodgins
5) “Wants” by Grace Paley (and everything by Grace Paley)
6) “True Trash” by Margaret Atwood
7) “Down At the Dinghy” by JD Salinger
8) “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” by Carol Shields
9) “Moral Disorder” by Margaret Atwood
10) “Feathers” by Raymond Carver
October 25, 2007
Point Form
Anansi‘s 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.
A new Mitford book is out today– a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can’t wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca’s? On here for how “no one will ever write letters like this again”.
Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: “In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub.”
I used to enjoy Maud Newton’s Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she’d published an interview with Sara O’Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children’s books I’ve ever seen.
October 23, 2007
Cancel intellectualism
Now devouring The Abstinence Teacher by Joe Perrotta (who wrote Election). Oh, I wish I could take a holiday from the rest of my life, and crawl under a duvet with a flashlight to finish it.
I am very looking forward to reading Eleanor Wachtel’s new book Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields.
Today I was flattered to read that The London Review of Books is “an esteemed, small-circulation literary periodical read mainly by academics and bookish intellectuals.” See, we get it at our house. But then I suppose any bookish intellectualism may well be cancelled out by Spice Mania.
I thought Anne Enright’s piece was fair, thoughtful, and honest, by the way. And I am also looking forward to reading The Gathering.
October 21, 2007
A book's right time
“There is only one way to read which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag– and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement… Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” Doris Lessing, 1971. Preface to The Golden Notebook.
Which is a wonderful thought and entirely true. However, like all truths, I can poke holes in this.
On “dropping books which bore you”– a contentious point in reading circles. I rarely do it myself, can think of two or three books in the past year, and why don’t I drop books which bore me? The Golden Notebook is a case in point: last Tuesday afternoon I was pulling my shopping trolley through the Roxton Road parkette, dispairing that The Golden Notebook had ever been written. “I hate it,” I was wailing, as the trolley bumped along. “I’m 192 pages in, and I don’t think I can take 400 more.” Why not drop it, it was suggested to me? “But what a waste of those 192 pages,” I cried. (These are the problems, clearly, of the more fortunate people in the world). “What am I ever going to do?”
Indeed, the book was a slog. Structurally the problem is obvious: essentially broken up into four sections, the first one takes up half the book. The currency of the book was also a problem, as it was not so current nearly fifty years later. Its politics were obsolete, its structure made me wonder if I was being made fun of, I was bored bored bored, there on page 192.
But then I turned to page 193 when I got home, and the whole book changed. Suddenly it made sense to me, and from then on I was enjoying myself. Nothing dramatic had shifted, but the pieces now fit. I understood what Doris Lessing was trying to do with her fragmented, enormous novel. I understood what she was saying about men and women, idealism, writing, the point of art at all. But not completely– so much of this went over my head. I truly believe that Anna and Molly might have had a better time had they spent time with men who weren’t horrible. Indeed a lot of the book was still a bit tedious, but what The Golden Notebook is attempting to capture is life. Or life at a a time, and it does, I think. Not since Woolf have I ever read a text more Woolfian. “I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images”.
I try to read the books I “should” or “ought”, whose authors have just awarded Nobel prizes, because I am not as effective a self-educator as Doris Lessing. I need a bit of help every so often, to fill in my gaps, to fill out the world. And I tend not to drop the books which are boring me either, because so often page 193 is waiting just around the corner.
October 18, 2007
Fiction is all right.
I thought Philip Marchand’s article “Why novelists are nervous” was sort of strange, the nervous novelists being John Updike and Philip Roth. Apparently Updike wrote a novel seven years ago that sold poorly and Philip Roth has remarked, somewhat self-deprecatingly, I thought, “The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.”
Oh Philip, fear not! Ben McNally and Book City’s J. Frans Donker are not worried about the status of literature in the slightest. Neither is anybody I know, most of whom devour fiction like it’s pie.
Marchand’s hysteria is the result of the International Festival of Authors now featuring nonfiction writers, Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe in particular. Which is interesting, I think. One of these writers, Gray, is prolific, acclaimed and, though I’ve not read her work, seems to write nonfiction about as literary as it gets. And then that the other three “nonfictioneers” are novelists first and foremost, which Marchand doesn’t even refer to. Granted we could make something terrible of the fact that market forces have pushed these writers to turn to nonfiction, and the hysteria could continue unabated. But I’d rather take the angle that perhaps nonfiction writers are those who should be nervous. Watch out Margaret MacMillan! The novelists are passing into your ranks. They’re injecting fact with fancy and, I would be willing to bet, the writing has never been so good.
October 17, 2007
Sitcom
Just purchased Sitcom by David McGimpsey. I heard about it on the radio this morning. I am interested in it because I’ve lately had some thoughts about The Facts of Life that might be brewing into something special. Further, because I recently learned that Kimmy Gibbler in real life went on into academia.
