June 24, 2008
Club Hand
I’ve been over-indulging in all my favourite pleasures of late (i.e. train travel, strawberries and sugar), but then I’ve got a birthday upcoming. So it was for this reason then that Stuart and I partook in Afternoon Tea at the Four Seasons this Sunday– which is my absolute favourite thing in the entire world. Accompanied by Bronwyn and her husband Alex, and it was perfect from start to finish, the weather complementing the sun-dresses we’d planned to wear all along. The tiny sandwiches delicious, tiny cakes delectable, the scones brilliantly fresh and sided with copious jam and cream, and yeah, the tea was good too. Overwhelming always to be in the midst of my favourite thing in the world, but I survived. It was absolutely wonderful.
Disturbing, however, was the revelation that my pinkie finger doesn’t work. As I don’t do most things properly (even those I love best), I’d never made a point of holding my teacup like the Queen does (or her friends), but I was devastated to realize that I physically can’t. My pinkie doesn’t go that way, and it doesn’t even when I’m not holding my cup, and then everybody started calling me “Club Hand”. They said I had fingers that were toes. Which is better than some people I know who’ve got toes that are actually fingers, but I’m not naming names…
June 18, 2008
Books at Bedtime
I love England. They’re all in a furor over something called “Books at Bedtime”. (Can you imagine getting worked up over something called that? It would be like throwing eggs at the Teddy Bear’s picnic.) Listeners are upset about a radio broadcast of Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless, because the broadcast gave some of them nightmares. ‘”Helpless is inappropriate for any time of day, least of all at bedtime,” said Helen Thompson. “The subject is tasteless and given the society in which we live totally inappropriate.”‘ Apparently the BBC has been inundated with complaints about this, most on the basis that the broadcast was “frightening”. Though perhaps they just read the book in a really spooky voice? And can we complain whenever anything is frightening now? Further, how on earth do these people know who to call? I wonder if they’ve got a number on speed-dial.
June 17, 2008
Moth Love
How strange are bookish connections, aren’t they? Of course, when I was reading Sharon Butala’s Fever last week, I could sense how it would relate to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which was coming up next. Similar themes of nature, landscape, agriculture, small towns, and the weather. I am two thirds through Prodigal Summer now, and on my knees to Kingsolver, who everybody else already knew was extraordinary, but it just took me awhile to find out. How wonderful to be reading this novel now, with the world around me so blooming, tonight out on my back deck with a cup of tea, and the trees all around, and the birdsong. I disappeared into my head, and into Kingsolver’s amazing imagination.
Anyway, the unexpected connection being the next book I’ve got to read, which is The Sister by Poppy Adams. I’ve got an advanced reader’s copy which betrays nothing of its content, and so was I ever surprised to see that it’s UK title is The Behaviour of Moths. But I would have picked up that title without delay (precedent for good things with moths in their title includes The Peppered Moth and “The Death of the Moth”)! I discover now it’s about an entomologist– and I’ve been obsessed with entomology lit ever since I read “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf. Anyway, I am excited. Particularly as a third of Prodigal Summer is entitled “Moth Love”, and so I am very excited to see how else these books link up. And then after we celebrate the world some more with Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning.
June 13, 2008
Their own body bags
Nathan Whitlock writes that requiring self-addressed stamped envelopes to accompany literary journal submissions is “kind of like making soldiers go into battle carrying their own body bags”.
May 30, 2008
Police on my back
As you know, here at Pickle Me This I make a point of writing responses to my reading, celebrating any little bit of fun I might get up to, as well as tracking incidents of the po-lice busting down my door in the middle of the night. Well, in this specific circumstance, when I say “busting down”, I mean “knocking at” but it was forceful, unrelenting. In a dozy stupid, I got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was going on, and was quite terrified to see two men standing by my door. As my door is around the back of the house and upstairs, you have to crawl under a fence and shimmy up a drain pipe to get there, we don’t get a lot of passer-bys, particularly whilst we’re sleeping.
I felt a little bit relieved when I made out that the two men were officers in uniform though, which only shows how dozy I was, because police in the middle of the night is rarely good news. Except (thankfully) in this specific circumstance, of course, because it just so happened that the police were there with an arrest warrant for Will Smith. Will Smith! How exciting. Unfortunately, however, Will Smith doesn’t live in my apartment, nor the neighbours’ down below, and so the poor police were going to all that trouble for nothing. They were quite nice about it though, polite and everything, and they didn’t even make fun of my hair.
When I got back to bed however (and my husband had been roused by this point, I must mention), the implications of what could have been weighed in heavily, and I was more awake than I’d been the whole day before, pounding heart and staring at the ceiling for ages.
But yes, it really was good news, the police busting down my door on a warrant. Because I’ve now had the experience of having the police busting down/knocking on my door on a warrant. How cool is that? I feel sort of like Lethal Bizzle, back when he had to hide in that shed. Or like Alison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous, and I’m just sorry I didn’t think to utter her wonderful line: “Oh Christ, are we on COPS again?”
May 29, 2008
Is it not too late to become a New Romantic?
My remarkable bookish encounters of late:
- With Once by Rebecca Rosenblum, upon seeing it now available for preorder at amazon.
- With Victory by Joseph Conrad, upon reading (in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers) that Joan Didion always rereads it before starting a new novel, and then says Shirley Hazzard, “[it] travels with me.” So I got it out of the library, and soon I shall read it soon.
- With Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which I just finished reading today, and isn’t it serendipitous that Baby Got Books has been interviewing said author? Part 1 today, and Part 2 follows tomorrow.
- With the unlikely trio of The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler by Ruth Warrick, 2001 Canadian Slavonic Papers, and Economics in a Canadian Setting by Mark Inman, piled and abandoned on a park bench outside Varsity Stadium.
May 24, 2008
Epizoodic
From Bryson’s Diction for Writers and Editors:
Epidemic. Strictly speaking, only people can suffer an epidemic (the word means “in or among people”). An outbreak of disease among animals is epizootic.
May 21, 2008
Free to Be…
I went to see Free To Be You… And Me this weekend, performed by kids at The Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts. I’d never seen the show live before, I don’t think, though I’d watched the movie plenty of times in elementary school, and I think there was a book, and I had the record too. But of course there was much that I’d forgotten, and it surprised me too how relevant the material still is– which is nice, that it can still be enjoyed, but too bad too, that the message is more necessary than it’s ever been. Of course it’s simplified– I see now that simply giving William a doll and feeding tender sweet young things to the tigers was never going to change the world. The show is a product of a different way of thinking, but still, it lays down a terribly substantial foundation. I’ve always adored it, and was thrilled to discover most of the movie is available online. Check out Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack singing “When We Grow Up” (a video that is only the smallest bit creepy). And Marlo Thomas driving a taxi in “Parents Are People” was always my favourite.
May 17, 2008
Always being taken for a librarian
“I had always assumed that a certain sense of identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking that after all this was a very good thing for an actress. But it was depressing, anyway. Not so much the thing of looking like a prostitute. I mean, except for the inconvenience of the moment, I found that rather thrilling, but the whole episode was forcing me to remember something that I’m always trying to forget and that is, that in a library as well, I’m always being taken for a librarian. No kidding. My last Christmas in New York, I had an English paper to write over the vacation, and there was this public library I used to go to, and no matter where I sat, people were always coming up to me and asking me where such and such a book was. They were furious too, when I didn’t know. It was eerie I began to feel that I actually was a librarian. The wood growing into my soul and stuff. I suppose I am rather an intellectual.” –Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
May 14, 2008
Unless
This past weekend has ruined me, and I remain in a coma. Or perhaps I just can’t stop reading Rebecca long enough to focus on anything else. And I have a stack of books-to-be-read up to my elbows, so thankfully this weekend is a long one and I can fill it well.
Last evening I attended the Fiery First Fiction event, and it did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed hearing Nathan Whitlock read from A Week of This (which I read last month), Shari Lapeña read from her book (which I’ve got upcoming), and then there was Claudia Dey who must have sold her book a thousand times. Personally I’m not sure how I’d live long without it– her reading was unbelievable. Coach House is publishing wonderful books these days; remember Pulpy and Midge? And I also want to read Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig.
Read Claudia Dey profiled in The Toronto Star. Watch “the list of books that make the best use of their type” at Baby Got Books. Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories reviewed. Margaret Drabble is characteristically excellent in “The beginning of life should not be a subject for a crude polemic”.
Today whilst reading The Danforth Review on A Week of This, I was surprised to see my own review referenced. Bryson’s points are interesting, and I found quite illuminating his assertion that novels “are fictional inventions of imagined worlds. They are performances of language, and the references they make to each other– explicitly or implicitly– are of greater interest than a novel’s photo realism.” True enough, perhaps, but then isn’t the novel quite a multitudinous thing? And don’t we all approach it differently?
And like Heather Mallick, I’ve noticed this month’s issue of The Walrus is decidedly short on women writers. “Apparently you can’t have a good magazine unless women are writing it,” writes one of Mallick’s avid readers. But you sort of can’t, actually, in this day and age. Not if you’re writing a general interest/current events magazine, and women are writing practically none of it– is this really surprising? The only pieces written by women are two of four “field notes”, one of four book reviews, a poem by P.K. Page, and one of nine letters to the editor. (Perhaps the whole issue is the answer to Austin Clarke’s story title, “Where Are the Men?”) What all this signifies exactly, I cannot venture to say. But then to me the facts appear as such, I don’t actually need to say anything.
In related news, I’m looking forward to reading Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers. Check out coverage at The Savvy Reader.
