August 19, 2010
Sometimes just laziness
Hmm. I’ve written before about how much I love recurring secondary characters throughout an author’s works, which creates the sense of a self-contained universe with millions of tiny whirling lives that I’m privy to glimpses of– in books by Margaret Drabble, and Barbara Pym. But how interesting then to read in a letter from Pym to Philip Larkin: “With me it’s sometimes just laziness– if I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book. Perhaps really one should take such a very minor character that only the author recognises it, like a kind of superstition or a charm.”
August 16, 2010
On Literary Maps
Some books I’ve finished lately (Galore anybody?), I put down and think, “My god, if only the text had come with an accompanying map.” Now granted, an author should set the scene so vividly that the map is drawn with words, but for me, there is something so mesmerizing about actual maps in books. As a child, I would actually play with them, imagining characters’ ways along rivers and roads. As an adult reader, I just find them beautiful, and appreciate the extra layer of experience they add to the book. I am also a bit obsessed with fiction with appendices, as a postmodern quirk.
I perused my library tonight to select some books with maps inside. The House at Pooh Corner was an obvious choice, with the “100 Aker Wood” map, which includes (of course), “the place where the wozzle wasn’t”. This was one of the fictional maps that Joan Bodger and family attempted locate in reality in How the Heather Looks, along with the map from Swallows and Amazons.
My lovely Snowbooks edition of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene has a charming map of London in the front endpapers, with drawings of all the landmarks noted by Woolf in her essays. The back endpapers is London on a different scale, with Woolf’s own residences noted (22 Hyde Park Gate!).
Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues has a somewhat unremarkable map on Japan just inside the cover, but without it we wouldn’t quite get the weight of the fact that Ferguson travelled the country from tip-to-tip. I bought this book just before we moved in Japan in 2004, to the city of Himeji, which made the sub-map on page 148 very remarkable, because the map shows that Ferguson made Himeji a stop along his way. “At Himeji Castle, the flowers were in full bloom and everywhere there was activity and laughter.”
Hobart 8 wears its map on its cover. I bought it at City Lights Books in 2008 because it was beautiful and contained a story by 
Stephany Aulenback, and I have a vivid memory of reading the whole thing on the green grass of Dolores Park (in February!). The southernmost half of the issue is American writers, North is Canadian whose lineup was pretty much unknown to me at the time but they’re writers who’ve been pretty much everywhere since– Heather Birrell, Craig Davidson, Zsuzsi Gartner, Lee Henderson, and Mark Anthony Jarman. I saw them here first. Map is by Robert Waters.
Patricia Storms’ The Pirate and the Penguin is delightful all over, but my favourite corners are the maps on her endpapers. “Map of the really boring (and cold!) South Pole” on the first endpapers, with such landmarks as Chilly Cove and Yawny Yogaland. “Map of the hot and itchy Caribbean” is on the back, with “Drives Me Coconuts Island” and a chest of “Boring Treasure”. Love it.
Though the first literary map I gave my heart to was in The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh. A map of Water Mill, where Harriet Welch is spending the summer with Beth Ellen, I was totally obsessed with this one, and I’m sure why because it’s pretty sparsely detailed, but I suspect the particular hand of Fitzhugh herself may have something to do with it.
My copy of Andrea Barrett’s story collection Servants of the Map is chock-full of images, and it’s unsurprising that a map would be one of them (along with gorgeous drawings of wildlife and taxonomic classifications). The title story is illustrated with “Sketch Map to accompany the Geological Notice of Kashmir”.
A map in a poetry collection! I was thrilled to find a vintage guide map to Los Alamos in Michael Lista’s Bloom.
And finally, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood has for its endpapers “Pittsburgh about 1800”, even though Dillard’s book is about Pittsburgh in the mid-twentieth century, but Annie Dillard is always tricky, isn’t she?
Though I can’t finish without a mention of the map in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies’ Lending Library. Which doesn’t even exist, but I was convinced it did, and leafed through the book about five times tonight looking for it. And that I haven’t read the story for a few years, but its managed to leave a map emblazoned upon my mind is really quite a testament to Kulyk Keefer’s depiction of place.
July 28, 2010
You've got to court delight
You’ve got to court delight, I think. By which I mean that things don’t just turn up in the post. You’ve got to send small gifts across the country to get a thank-you note in return, and subscribe to literary journals and magazines, and have a friend who lives in Antarctica who sends a postcard from time to time. Or rather, you have to go out of your way to buy a red teapot so that you can be a person who has a red teapot (unless you’re a particular fortunate person for whom red teapots arrive in the post).
Anyway, the point is that I received two letters in the post today upon whose envelopes my name was inscribed by hand. (And it wasn’t even that deceptively handwriting-like font that Bell Canada puts on all their envelopes when they send missives begging for the return of my custom.) Two handwritten envelopes is practically unheard of! I tore them open in a hurry and was not the least bit disappointed by what I found inside.
But let me backtrack. I joined The Barbara Pym Society earlier this year, because it seemed a strange, funny and Pymian thing to do. (I was inspired by this article.) And I also made friends with a brilliant writer/almost birdwatcher, and had her over for tea last week. As a result of these two things, I today received a lovely letter from a fellow Pym Society member who is looking for a Canadian meet-up*, and an absolutely beautiful thank you note from my birder-writer friend (who is truly as master of the form). Both of which made me exquisitely happy.
So you do have to court delight, I think. Though there’s also the point that if you wish to be perpetually delighted, just look for the pleasure of tiny, wonderful things. (Or perhaps I need to get out more…)
*Fascinatingly enough, the Pym Society member had sent me this letter unknowing that we’d corresponded in the past! Three years ago, she published a beautiful essay in The Globe, and sent me a note after I’d mentioned it on my blog. And now we find ourselves two of the very small population of Canadian Barbara Pym Society members! How marvelously tiny the world truly is…
July 27, 2010
Grains of salt
Sometimes, when I really want to die a little bit inside, I sit back and take stock of all the bad advice that I’ve given out in creative writing workshops. Like when someone referred to a “bird of paradise” in a story, and I wrote: “Be more specific. What KIND of bird? How is it paradiscial? SHOW ME!”. When I told the (now published, very successful) poet who knew exactly what it was she did, “You’ve sort of written yourself into a rut. Why not try something different? PROSE???” Every time I thought that me not understanding a term or concept was a reason the writer should think about changing it.
The very first story Rebecca Rosenblum workshopped in our Masters program had a reference to a baby “squalling.” Never having heard this term beyond the snowstorm variety, I wrote, “Wrong word. Do you mean ‘wailing’?” Rebecca is now my dear friend, and we’ve never talked about this, mostly because I’m still absolutely embarrassed.
It’s amazing, the kind of authority I’ve assumed in these sorts of situations. And all the things, and words, I never knew, and never even knew I was missing. There certainly is a reason why a grain of salt or two should go with everything, in particular if that everything is a bit of advice from me.
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?
