April 26, 2010
In which a poem is dispensed from a vending machine
Because we live in a wonderful city, the highlight of this afternoon was visiting the poetry vending machine at This Ain’t the Rosedale Public Library, as installed by the Toronto Poetry Vendors. 
Like all the best vending machines, this one jammed a little bit once I’d put in my twoonie and turned the crank, so I had to stick my hand up the chute to get my poem out, and (imagine if I’d gotten stuck? And they’d had to call the fire department? Because I’d gotten my hand stuck in a poetry vending machine? Now, there‘s a story, if only it weren’t fiction, because) my purchase slipped out easily. My luck of the draw was a poem called “Rhyme Scheme (for Condo Country)” by Jacob McArthur Mooney, and now it’s hanging on my fridge.
And, because I was in a bookstore, I picked up Joy Is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook, as pitched by Julie Wilson today for Keeping Toronto Reading. (Hear Susan read her collection at Seen Reading; I recommend the poem “Nursery” [second from the end] in particular, mainly because the world needs more breastfeeding lit. and the poem is joyous).
April 24, 2010
Major Quake Rocks Notts
After eight years, I finally went to get this framed. The woman at the framing store informed me that it was a bit beat up, and that framing wouldn’t fix it. I could have told her that the poster had spent two years taped to the back of a door in England, a few years packed in a box, and a few more years stuck inside the pages of a book, and so every crease and tear has been well-earned. I stole this from a newsagents during the autumn of 2002, and loved the boldness and simplicity of its overstatement. I remember the major quake too, and how it sounded like an overweight man was tumbling down the stairs. I was living in a backpackers’ hostel at the time, and we were sitting up late down in the kitchen, and after we heard the overweight man fall, we decided to go to bed. I probably found out about the earthquake on the radio the next morning, and remember seeing this poster and feeling excited to have been a part of something monumental. Living in England in general had that effect on me– something was always sweeping the nation in a way that isn’t possible in a country as large as Canada, and I loved being swept along with it. Even along with shifted tectonic plates. It was a very strange time, anyway, and I cherish it, and this stolen scrap from way back then makes an exciting addition to the wall in our hallway.
April 24, 2010
On literary cakes
Cake is one of my many weaknesses, actual cake and bookish ones. I’ve really never, ever met a cake I didn’t like (except carrot cake, which I hold passionate feelings about. The cake that should not be called cake. An insult to cakes. If you tell me you’re bringing cake and then you show up with carrot cake, you’ve not only let me down, but you’ve told a lie). I like to bake cakes, I like to eat cakes. I think my favourite is chocolate banana cake, or chocolate-anything cake, or vanilla in a pinch. Fillings can be cream, or fruity, but should probably be icing. Oh, icing. When I was little, I used to eat the icing and leave the cake. Since then I’ve learned (but not entirely).
I like cakes in books too, though they’re often markers of tragedy. The cake Rilla Blythe had to carry in Rilla of 
Ingleside, and how there was nothing more mortifying. Oh, god– the birthday cake in Raymond Carver’s story “A Small Good Thing”. Could it be the most unbearable cake in fiction? Marian McAlpin’s cannibal cake in The Edible Woman. Does Carol Shields have a cake?? There must be one, though I can’t think of it. So literary cakes, and there must be a couple more.
Cakeish books have had a way of getting my attention lately. I adored Heather Mallick’s essay collection Cake or Death when it came out a few years ago. I’ve been wanting to read Sloane Crosley’s collection I Was told There’d Be Cake for ages now. I can’t wait to read Sarah Selecky’s story collection This Cake is For the Party when it comes out next month. And just now, when I was searching for books on cake, I discovered that Aimee Bender has a novel coming out in June called The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (which could never approach the particular sadness of carrot cake, but I digress). I’ve never read Bender before but a proper cakeish book seems like a particularly good place to start.
And note that you’ve still got about a week to enter Sarah Selecky’s Win a Cake contest. I’ve already entered, and I won’t be sharing if I win.
April 20, 2010
I don't know how anyone ever came to respect cinema as an art form
Jenny Diski, from “Mother! Oh God! Mother!” LRB 32.1:
“‘This is where we came in’ is one of those idioms, like ‘dialling’ a phone number, which has long since become unhooked from its original practice, but lives on in speech habits like a ghost that has forgotten the why of its haunting duties. The phrase is used now to indicate a tiresome, repetitive argument, a rant, a bore. But throughout my childhood in the 1950s and into the 1970s, it retained its full meaning: it was time to leave the cinema – although, exceptionally, you might decide to stay and see the movie all over again – because you’d seen the whole programme through. It seems very extraordinary now, and I don’t know how anyone of my generation or older ever came to respect cinema as an art form, but back then almost everyone wandered into the movies whenever they happened to get there, or had finished their supper or lunch, and then left when they recognised the scene at which they’d arrived. Often, one person was more attentive than the other, and a nudge was involved: ‘This is where we came in.’ People popped up and down in their seats and shuffled along the rows, coming and going all though the B-movie, the advertisements, the newsreel and the main feature. No one dreamed of starting a novel on page 72, or dropping into the Old Vic mid-Hamlet (though perhaps music hall worked the same way; was that the origin of the movie habit?), and not even the smallest child would let anyone get away with starting their bedtime story halfway through, but the flicks were looped, both on the projector and in our minds. You went in, saw the end, and after you’d watched the beginning and a bit of the middle you figured out how and why it had happened that way. In the introduction to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson claims that postmodernism proper dates from the later 1960s, but let me tell you that the dismantling of narrative was rampant in cinemas up and down the country for decades before that. Maybe, after all, it was an interesting way of learning about story structure, but even so, how odd that no one thought it a strange way to proceed.”
April 19, 2010
The fundamental need for narrative
My friend Alex pointed my attention toward Gene Weingarten’s article “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?”, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. It’s a brutal piece, and I’m not sure I’d “recommend” it, because these kinds of stories are traumatic even to read about. But it’s a stellar piece of journalism, and pinpointed an idea that fascinates me, that has so much to do with story:
“Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”
March 23, 2010
Jumping in and out of portals
This afternoon I was reading The New Quarterly (and one thing I fear, by the way, is that I will never find the words to articulate just how much I love this magazaine), and I was enjoying Eric Ormsby’s article “Fine Incisions: The Art of Reviewing” when the following jumped out at me: “Mere opinion isn’t the same as reasoned judgment; opinions, the fodder of blogs and websites, are fine and dandy, and everyone’s entitled to them.”
And it took me way back to last week when a Canadian newspaper columnist wrote a ridiculous piece about how all bloggers are men, the reason being that “spitting out opinions on current events every twenty minutes” is just “a guy thing.” Oh, the furor that ensued! For me, however, the column’s most egregious misstep was its painting of all blogs as mere opinion-spit receptacles.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the columnist was writing about political blogs, which I don’t read, but I think most of them are written by men– am I wrong? (And of course, women do engage with politics in their blogging, but in the the blogs that I read [which are written by both men and women] this engagement occurs more pragmatically than that of bloggers for whom politicking is a passion and an end in itself.) Perhaps with political blogs, opinion spitting is indeed in order, but this is so far from the case for the blogs that I love best.
Everybody might be entitled to an opinion (though where is this written exactly??), but it doesn’t mean I have to hear it. There are many writers whose opinions I do respect, but, honestly, most of these tend to be published by major news outlets (whose reader comments I make a habit of ignoring). The blogs I love best aren’t those that call out, “Here’s what I think…”, but rather those that tell me, “Hey, take a look at this…”
I like a blogger who will tell me about a book she’s just read, or bring my attention to an article from somewhere else that they have a reason to respond to. I like blogs that profile interesting people, or track the minutiae of beautiful lives, or tell stories beautifully. Where intelligent people are enlisted to write to us. I like blogs that direct me to cool stuff. I like blogs where conversations take place and ideas are shared. I like blogs where writers meditate, even change their minds, which means they think about things. I like blogs where brilliant people send out dispatches. In short, I like blogs that take me somewhere new (particularly if it’s into other people’s houses).
Of course, these writers do have opinions, and most of these blogs are best when they incorporate elements of the personal, but when the personal is used as a springboard out into the wider world, it’s what I like best . This is the case as well with blogs about mothering, and books about mothering, and books about anything actually. And there is nothing exclusively female about this kind of blogging, either. Boyish blogs actually seem to have this market cornered, and I’m thinking of the blogs my husband reads, like Boing Boing, which (literally) takes us (to online) places in wonderful link-filled frenzies.
Anyway, back to to the columnist and Eric Ormsby: I don’t know if these poor people don’t know blogs, or perhaps they’re visiting the wrong ones? Regardless, I think it’s a shame that while the rest of us are all here jumping in and out of portals, they seem to be smashing their heads into virtual brick walls.
March 11, 2010
Bunk
I haven’t seen An Education yet, but I read the book a few months ago. Which is really a different thing entirely– the movie is much fictionalized and based on just a chapter of Lynn Barber’s book, but the people in the movie are really beautiful and the book is absolutely fascinating, so I think all is as it should be. In particular, I’d recommend the book for its history of journalism– Barber got her start writing for Penthouse, then The Sunday Express, and has ended up quite renowned for her interviews in The Observer in particular. And yes, previous to that had had an affair with a conman (the movie using this as a springboard), which made for a good chapter, but the rest of the book is as worth reading.
But the book is also worthwhile for its history of a time, which I’m thinking about now that I’m all wrapped in Jenny Diski’s The Sixties (which is so good, by the way). How the two books are fine companions, two stories about the same thing as told by observers standing on different parts of the very same street.
I’m reading the Diski book having just finished reading The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, who probably wouldn’t love The Sixties, because although she acknowledges that, “it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects…, we ought not to forget the aspect of history which the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”” And I presume she means what really happened in addition to the fact that Jenny Diski had sex a lot.
In fact, there aren’t a lot of connections between MacMillan’s book and Diski’s, and they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Though Diski is neither using nor abusing history, which MacMillan would probably find heartening, and also that Diski has never used The Munich Agreement to justify invasion of a foreign nation. Further, Diski has learned from the past, though perhaps too much, “What the young don’t get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase that the old go through. It’s just as well, I suppose, that the young don’t see it that clearly. Best to leave the disappointment for later.”
The point of all this being that these three books are banging around in my head at the moment, because two of them relate and because I just happened to read the other two one after the other. Though all three of them are written with such fierce, formidable intelligence. So that if you really must read something that isn’t a novel, you’d be all right checking out any of these.
March 10, 2010
On the Hair Hat Man
I have never met Carrie Snyder, but I started reading her blog just before Patricia Storms recommended Hair Hat for Canada Reads: Independently. (Patricia doesn’t know Carrie either– I checked. Because Canada is a very small town.) So Carrie and I have corresponded by email a few times, and I broke one of my own personal rules to ask her about her Hair Hat Man.
But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.
BUT. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man was so impossibly weird, and I just didn’t get him. Though I understood that my inability to grasp him, pin him down, was part of the power of the collection, that the culmination of the stories serve to make him “almost plausible”.
I love the fact that the Hair Hat Man has had the same effect on Snyder’s negative reviewers that he has on the other characters in her book– he makes us uneasy. People hate the Hair Hat Man, within the book and without it, but any character who provokes that reaction must have some substance behind him. Or rather, the criticism is often that he’s more a device than a character, but I think the same thing applies.
So I had to ask Carrie where he came from. Not that it changes anything at all, but as the answer to such questions often is, what she told me was worth repeating:
In answer to your Hair Hat question (and it’s definitely the most-asked question about the book!) … my inspiration came from actually seeing a man with a hair hat. At least, I think that’s what I saw. I was a grad student in Toronto, and often stopped at a coffee shop on my way to campus (at the corner of Bloor and St. Joseph Street, near Wellesley). One day, while walking past the shop, I thought I saw a man inside with his hair shaped into a hat. I don’t even think I did a double-take, but afterwards kind of kicked myself for not looking twice.
Somehow, the image worked its way into my imagination. He first appeared in a song I was writing. A year later, he made his way into the first hair hat story that I wrote–“Queenie, My Heart” (and that title actually arrived a few years before I’d even seen the hair hat man, scribbled in the margins of notes I was taking for fourth-year English class). But that story went unfinished. For about two years.
I’d just given birth to my first child when I wrote another hair hat story: the one in the voice of the lone male narrator in the book, which includes that coffee shop. After I wrote it, I said to my husband: is this just too weird? Because I want to write more hair hat stories. So I did. They just kind of poured out. At that point, I’d written a novel which had gotten me an agent; the novel didn’t sell, but she was able to sell these stories (which were written over the course of about a year) to Penguin. That happened just before I gave birth to my second child. And then, it was only at the editing stage that I found the ending to my Queenie story. And wrote the last story in the book, which surprised me entirely. I had no idea it was waiting to be written, but it felt like the perfect ending.
