July 22, 2010
One more thing about Still Life…
At some point in Still Life With Woodpecker, someone pulls out that old chestnut of a statistic: 60% of all marriages end in divorce. And of course, there’s usual up side in the 40% of marriages that don’t. But I thought also of the fact that Still Life… was published in 1980, which means that 40% marital success rate has been holding steady for 30 years. Kind of amazing, and the opposite of everything we’ve been led to expect. Imagine if– giambrones notwithstanding– we’re not all going to hell in a handbasket after all?
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 27, 2010
Unsad Lemon Cake
This is a slice of the lemon chocolate cake I baked after reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake last week. I think I may have a new compulsion to bake every fictional cake that I encounter, or maybe it’s just any fictional cake I encounter as written by Aimee Bender, who writes about food and eating in such a concrete, tangible way, rendering the ordinary extraordinary. Whose description simultaneously blows your mind and has you going, “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean…” Anyway, the cake was good, and devoid of sadness. I wonder what kind of fictional cake I’ll encounter next?
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 21, 2010
Harriet gardening
You probably shouldn’t let your baby dig in soil with a spoon. Because while spoons are good digging implements, they’re also good for delivering items to the mouth, and though Harriet’s spoon/mouth coordination is not always right on track, it certainly was the time she ate a giant spoonful of soil… So it was kind of a milestone, times two if eating dirt is also a milestone. Is it?
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 14, 2010
I am having an affair
…with this yardsale-purchased breadbox. We have decided to move in together.
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…
June 11, 2010
Words that Harriet can respond to
1) Teacup
2) Miffy
3) Book (which is always whatever book I am reading, not any of her own)
4) Tea Party
5) Eeyore
6) Nose
7) Harriet
8) Mommy and Daddy
9) Hat
10) Monkey
11) Blocks
12) Big Dog and Little Dog
13) Elephant
14) Hairbrush
15) Please
16) Bellybutton
