February 25, 2008
No no no
Highlights of this weekend included brunch with Erin and Ivor, diets managing not to start even tomorrow and not cleaning our house. This afternoon I played Scrabble in support of Frontier College with Stuart and Rebecca, and learned how much is too much sushi. Yes, two thirds of us are writers and though Rebecca did beat me, our game was won by the graphic designer with a Bachelor of Science, but ah well. The event put was put on by the Toronto JETAA (and my friend Natalie Bay) and it was tremendous fun. Fun continued into tonight, as we attended an Oscar Party at our friends’ Katie and Alan’s. It was a grand evening, although having seen only one film last year which was Alvin and the Chipmunks, I wasn’t so interested in the show, and really just hijacked the whole event to (rather inappropriately) fulfill my lifelong desire to dress up like Amy Winehouse. Which was perfect because then I won the prize for most creative costume which was the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But the very best part of this weekend was the sunshine, and the fact it felt like spring.
February 18, 2008
On envy
All right, so when I was twenty-one years old and had a column on the back page of my school newspaper, I once wrote an article about a certain notorious Canadian newspaper columnist which was headlined, “I hate [said newspaper columnist]”. (Please forgive the vagueness; I have no wish to incur the wrath of Google). I didn’t write the headline, and nor in the column did I actually cite any hatred. But I did outline my numerous problems with the principle of this woman’s success, and it certainly wasn’t the worst thing I ever wrote, though I also doubt it was much above the abilities of said columnist either.
The point of this being that I have a particular position, I think, on the loooong thread of comments recently unfolded on Bookninja, in response to a post about columnist (who is still columning her way through life with gusto). My particular position being that of one who did once spend innumerable hours slinging vitriol her way (as many of the commenters do) and then having subsequently grown up.
I know I’ve grown up, not because I suddenly find her columns altogether inspiring, but because I don’t really get off on being vitriolic these days. (I’ve previously acknowledged that she might have grown up a bit too). Because I understand now that she’s paid to do something, and she seems to do it well, even if it irks me. And finally because I understand now that what I felt towards this woman more than anything when I was twenty-one years old was envy.
And of course it was! She was assured, high-profile, well-paid for writing, and I was penning a column on the back of a school newspaper. Of course I couched my envy in technical terms, but I really don’t think I would have directed such reproach towards, say, a celebrity biologist or a supermodel. She was a writer, I wanted to be a writer. She had what I wanted, and life is unfair.
This all comes up on the Bookninja comments– one particularly vitriolic is accused of the deadly sin. He asks, “Why whenever someone is called out for being a public asshole, some ditz invariably appears to accuse people of envy?” Well, I guess I’m the ditz here (and I was on the Zadie Smith post two weeks back too).
It’s because nothing else could make someone that angry about something so incidental. It’s because the people who are so angry are invariably writers themselves (albeit struggling ones). Non-writers don’t give a damn about who gets allotted what column space in the Saturday paper, or which novelist gets what advance. These are just not things that normal people ever care about.
Maybe I am totally wrong, but I doubt it. I know from personal experience what an easy swing envy is to fall into, how comfortable it is to be angry instead of sad. And even if envy is not at the root, still, is the anger doing any good?
I know that for me taking a concerted step away from such mean and greasy feeling was the healthiest thing I’ve ever done, and that the only real solution to any of this is just to write harder. Hating those who’ve got what you want certainly won’t make you any better. There are plenty of words to go around, stories to make your own, and stories to share too.
February 6, 2008
Credible space flight
I’m on the tail end of a short story run– I finished Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien (whose Certainty was one of my favourite books of last year). Now reading Bang Crunch by Neil Smith, now out in paperback. And then back to novels come Saturday morning, as I’ll have airport waiting and flights to pass (dance dance dance). But lately I have found the short story quite delicious– perfect. Which is probably very fitting, as lately I’ve been writing quite a few of my own.
Fabulous things read lately include from Hilary Mantel’s review in the LRB, “Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods.” The Judy Blume profile that Kate was talking about. Boys don’t get it, do they? Bookninja thought the profile went on “a tad lengthily”. And I do wonder if it is girlishness that kept the Guardian Books blog’s celebration of Anne Shirley as one of the few pieces ever there whose comments didn’t descend rapidly into a churlish a*shole contest. Which is not to say that boys are as*holes, but the ones commenting over there usually seem to be. Or commenting most places, actually (but of course, dear readers, not here.)
Also, though I don’t agree with all she says here, I have fallen completely in love with Tabatha Southey. My love for columnist Doug Saunders is much older, but his piece this Saturday comparing today’s terrorists with those of the early ’70s was fascinating.
And also this stellar piece on the Munich air crash 50 years ago in which 8 Manchester United football players were killed, along with the crew members, team supporters, reporters and coaches: “On February 6, 1958, however, the news has only just begun to find the means of spreading itself at speed through the global village. An international network exists, although it is a primitive and unreliable mechanism compared with the digital world of the future.”
February 3, 2008
Mad steed
To determine the strangest item in The Joy of Cooking would just take too long, I think (though Page 515 would be high on the list, what with the line “If possible, trap ‘possum and feed it on milk and cereals for 10 days before killing”, and other recipes for porcupine or raccoon). But the “Birthday Bread Horse” is especially weird, if in an understated way:
“As our children have always demanded a piece of their birthday cake for breakfast, we concocted a bread horse to be supplemented later in the day by the candlighted cake of richer content… You will need a well-rounded loaf of bread…. Use the loaf for the body. Mount it on four of the candy sticks. Break off about a third or less of the fifth candy stick. Use it for the neck. Stick it into one end of the loaf at an angle. Put the oval rolls on the other end for the head. Use the braided rolls for the mane and tail, the raisins for eyes, the almonds for ears, and the piece of cherry for the lips. Bed the horse on leaves or grass. Add a ribbon bridle to keep this mad steed under some sort of control.”
January 27, 2008
Awake
I tend to take words seriously but I’d given all that up at Starbucks, where everything is called something ridiculous. Even the cookie I always get– chocolate chip to my tastes– is called Chunky Double Choco Mound, or something. Where small is Tall, and Grande doesn’t mean big. It has ceased to occur to me that anything at Starbucks means anything, which is why I choose my teas based on the colour of their packaging. Arbitrary, I know, but I like all teas, and some days some colours suit me better than others. Though, of course, red is usually best.
And so Thursday evening, as I lay in bed awake into the wee hours of morn, it occurs to me that maybe there are words at Starbucks that mean something. That red packet, of course, is called “Awake”– a word which I’d entirely divorced of its meaning within the Starbucks context and unconsciously too, which was sort of disturbing from my insomnious state of mind.
But what if all Starbucks teas are so literal? I look forward to discovering: Calm, Refresh, Joy, Zen, and (in particular) Passion.
January 17, 2008
The kitchen sink
Deanna mentioned that axiom about every woman needing a window above her kitchen sink. She can’t remember where it came from, and neither can I. Something CanLit, I have a feeling. I remember discussing it in a class, how the character received the advice from her mother, but then proceeded to reject kitchen sinks altogether in favour of the world outside that window. Or so I think. Any chance of enlightenment?
January 14, 2008
Sadness and Guilt
My weekend contained best friends at brunches and lunches, perfect chocolate cake, delightful cousins, new shelving units, knitting, reading, jobs done and a bath-to-come. This weekend’s Globe and Mail was terrific. Stephanie Nolen’s “An Inuit Adventure in Timbuktu” is the most amazing piece of journalism I’ve (ever?) come across. (“I wasn’t really intending to read this,” my husband said to me, “but once I started I just couldn’t stop”.) Well-written, beautiful, fascinating, and will make you think of things you’ve never considered before.
And then the books section– G&M Books, what’s happened to you? For you’re becoming sort of wonderful, it’s true. More than an assemblage of watered-down reviews by friends of friends, and paragraph-length excerpts. The 50 Greatest Books Series is terrific, and not just because the first week’s choice is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oh it’s been done before, I know, but don’t you find that great books can be discussed forever and ever?
And then the reviews themselves, epistolary goodness. Reviewing The Mitford Letters (which I loved), Graham Greene’s letters (which I’m reading), Eleanor Wachtel’s Carol Shields book (which is a treasure), Four Letter Word (which I can’t wait for). It was as though the Books Pages had tapped right into my heart.
I’ve also really enjoyed the latest Vanity Fair, whose lives of rich and famous feature such gems of phrase as, “Robin was an ongoing source of sadness and guilt to Lady Annabel after she allowed him to enter the tigress’s enclosure at Aspinall’s.” As they say, you really couldn’t make this up.
January 9, 2008
We all prefer the magical explanation
Have been reading/catching up. Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. Am just about to start What is the What by Dave Eggers, which I’ve been putting off for too long. Put off by prospect of the headiness, perhaps. Though Dave Eggers has never let me down before, and certainly the book has been buzzed about by many people I respect. I suspect I will be incredibly impressed.
And speaking of fictional autobiographies, I’ve just finished reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion. “Speaking of…” I say, for Joan Didion’s fiction similarly seems to challenge the fic/non-fic divide. Now I am such a fan of Joan Didion, and partly because she’s a bit preposterous. I don’t enjoy preposterousity universally, but I adore any woman who can embody the trait and still come off as brilliant. (This caveat thus explaining why I don’t love that Coulter person). I love Didion’s migraines, and that she went to the supermarket in a bikini and wanted a baby, and cried in Chinese laundries. And if one more person tells me that although they like her non-fiction, her fiction is disappointing, I will yawn.
Not because they’re entirely wrong– I’m not sure about that. Certainly I’ve never read a Joan Didion novel that stirred in me anything like what I felt for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but that to me is beside the point. Which it might not be. It is distinctly possible instead that I am just feeling awfully protective of Didion, but still, I think, to dismiss her fiction is tiresome.
Whether or not her fiction is enjoyable (and it can be, but in a slightly uncomfortable way) something fascinating is going on with it. Joan Didion is the one writer who completely defies my theories of fiction’s truth having more bearing on reality than that of non-fiction. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it’s something in her coldness, her acuity. In her non-fiction Joan Didion assembles the world and lets it speak for itself and it’s in this speaking that the life creeps in. Whereas in her fiction when she attempts the very same thing (for this is what she does), the made-upness is pervasive. When she assembles these made-up things, whatever speaks is more an echo than a voice. An echo of what, I don’t know. All of which is really odd. And doesn’t necessarily mean that her fiction is unsuccessful; Didion is too smart for that. Rather I think of her as treating fiction as a project I’ve still not got my head around.
