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.
January 9, 2008
Mystified
Today I’m mystified about not only the very weird fact of B. Spears singing autobiographical songs, but moreover that other people write these songs for her.
January 4, 2008
Where to go
Do you dare to use a one-sentence paragraph? Crooked House on “the ‘we’ point of view and E. Nesbit” (“We were the Bastables”). Heather Mallick’s year that was. CBC.ca/art’s 2007 in pop culture. And did Unity Mitford have Hitler’s baby? (I’m inclined to say no– though imagine finding out you were Hitler’s baby?). Check out “the manliest cookbook of all time”. Headline of the day is “Circus School Seeks Students”. Marchand’s year that was: on “grace” as the ultimate gift of Divisidero, “Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.”
I recently found reference in a book to pudding finger-painting, which has relieved me of a nagging fear that I’d been a paint-eating child. And though I’m despairing about returning to work on Monday, we’ve got planned in the meantime an afternoon tea at the Four Seasons as consolation.
December 30, 2007
Paranormal
Though I’m not sure what kind of higher power I believe in, I know there is something peculiar about books. I know that the language in books can do things their authors never even considered, and that a relationship between one random book and another can transform both works into something entirely new. I know that books take on their own power, and so can libraries. Even a library filed alphabetically like mine can get a bit mystic, as I noticed the other day when I saw this little collection of eyes peering out at me. Creepy, really, these part-faces, and all hanging out together. Thankfully I’ve not noticed the eyes following me across the room.
December 27, 2007
When we're both in the same room
“I do like presents. No particular thing, just stuff for me you know. I think what I like best about gifts, letters, anything in the mail, really, is that it is evidence that someone thought about me when I wasn’t around. Something about the image of a loved one standing in a card shop, glaring at one of those Shoebox-silliness cards, thinking really hard–‘Would RR laugh at this?’ That just kills me.”– Rebecca Rosenblum
December 23, 2007
Seeing in the Dark
Evening rolls in early this time of year, and walking home down darkened streets I am attracted to light like a moth is. Or, more specifically, I’m fascinated by lit windows and the rooms I see behind them from my place out on the sidewalk. Windows during the day are blank spaces, reflections at best, but at night when the lights come on, they offer glimpses into a thousand different worlds.
Of course, I do keep my distance. I don’t linger or stare, and I walk by content with a glance on my way along to somewhere. I’m certainly not out to make trouble, but it’s so difficult to avert my attention altogether. Yellow windows tempt my eyes with their suggestions of home, of warmth, of stories.
It is never especially interesting to encounter actual people at home behind their windows anyway— you will realize this quickly. People too often tend to be watching television, the backs of their heads look like potatoes in the blue light, and no scene could be duller. If you must have people at all, action shots are preferable. Here is a family around a table, silent from where we stand, but we can see what can’t be audible: chatter as they pass the bowls and platters, arguments as somebody throws their hands into the air. Lights are burning brightly, and their togetherness builds a fortress.
Farther along the street, through an upstairs window: an old man in his undershirt is shaving before the mirror on his medicine cabinet. He’s got the window open to keep the mirror from steaming, I suppose, and he’s shaving under his chin now. He’s working carefully. In the room next door three small children are levitating, though they’re probably just bouncing on their beds. Across the street I catch a fortuitous glimpse of two people at the instant of embrace.
But sights like these are so hard to time right, and so my windows mostly tend to be still-lifes. I can only guess at those who might grace the scenes once I’ve passed by, though the guessing is what I like best about glowing windows. I love the allure of whole streets chock full of stories, and each house a private universe.
My head inevitably turns at the sight of a bookshelf rising up behind a glowing pane, whether that shelf be constructed of bricks and boards in a main-floor student flat, or flanking a stone fireplace in some grand living room. To me having books in a home is somehow a symbol of all being right with the world An element of order, of care amidst the chaos. I see books inside a window and I can purport to understand the people that live there.
Of course you can’t judge a person by their things, but on dark nights when I’m halfway home and hungry for company, I can hardly help it. I want to move into those houses whose giant staircases have careful arrangements of framed family photographs marching up and down the wall alongside. I like people with cats on their sills without even knowing them. At the sight of a grand piano, I imagine the woman who plays it, dressed in a floor-length black evening gown perpetually. Her fingers sweep the keys in the usual cliché, and I hear the music in my head. Marching me onward, towards where more bizarre displays abound.
An apartment I pass by daily has one wall stacked entirely with shoe boxes. One house I know has a perfect doll-sized replica of itself in the front window and it lights up at night. A linoleum basement living room furnished with hairdryer chairs from a salon. An illuminated Elvis bust in blue on an otherwise darkened windowsill. You can do with these details what you will.
I’ve taken stock of posters tacked to walls in teenage bedrooms, of knickknacks cluttering kitchen windowsills, and of ugly modern art hanging in ugly modern houses. Gaudy portraits of out-of-date fashion, mounted above the fireplace with their own lighting. Who lives here?
I’ve learned that I love rooms painted red or yellow, no matter what these rooms might hold. That the sight of a kitchen can be uplifting. Blazing fireplaces never fail to warm me as I trudge home through the snow, my breath visible in the air. In December, lit trees intended for display appear in windows and I find that I can stare without compunction.
The world is so wide with most of its stories kept elusive, and so I must be satisfied with clues, with suggestions. I gather my stories from these glances into yellow windows up and down dark avenues, now that winter is nearing and the city has gone indoors. And I assure you that I mean well, no matter how tempted you might be to go and close your curtains. I am drawn to lit windows on my way home, in search of a brief connection from one private universe to another. As a simple acknowledgment of quiet life abundant all around us.
December 21, 2007
Honestly
I have decided to start using “figuratively” in a literal sense.
“No, seriously, I was figuratively frozen on the spot.” Or, “I figuratively died.” “He really is figuratively eighteen feet tall.”
It just seems more honest.
December 20, 2007
Various robins
We received another robin Christmas card today, from England of course, where robins are a winter bird. A harbinger of Santa rather than springtime, which it took me a long time to realize and I still forget sometimes (for only this morning did I finally realize why BBC Radio 1 had been playing “Rockin’ Robin” every day for the past week).
Transatlanticism is a dangerous gig, really. You take robins for granted, or at least Helen Humphreys did in her otherwise impeccable The Frozen Thames: “The Thames has frozen over. Birds have begun to freeze to death, particularly that small symbol of spring, the Robin Redbreast, and instead of allowing this happen, the people of England have taken the birds into their houses so that they may shelter there until spring returns.” But no, of course. “Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.” How was she supposed to know that robins could be such various things?
December 19, 2007
Nation sweeping
Though I spoke disparagingly of trivia etc. in a review yesterday, I wish to contradict myself today. (I try to contradict myself at least daily, in order that I never actually form such a dangerous thing as an “opinion”). I do find Wikipedia infinitely valuable in my day-to-day life, mainly whenever I am in search of pop-music miscellany (i.e. what is a hoople or whatever happened to Kris Kross). Triviality and pop-music do seem to suit one another, which is not to say that pop-music is trivial, but isn’t that sort of its very point?
Anyway, the moral of all this is that I love Britain. And what I love most about Britain is the way in which it can be swept. See, I’m from Canada, whose area is more than 9 million square kilometres, and nothing ever sweeps our nation. It’s hard to sweep six time zones, after all. So then to contemplate Britain whose national grid experiences power surges after pivotal episodes of Corrie or EastEnders, as everybody and his auntie puts the kettle on for a cup of tea. I don’t know; the UK can claim disunity, but all nationalism aside, its citizens are more together than they ever give themselves credit for (and someone Welsh will probably slug me for saying that, but…). 17.9 million people tuning in to find out who killed Phil? 17.9 million cups of tea? Though we’ve got at least 17.9 million people in Canada, I really doubt that all of them have ever even been awake at the same time.
But I digress. This time of year Britain is being swept by Christmas Number One fever. (People will tell you that they don’t care, and they won’t want to care, but fact is they do). The front runner is thought to be a terrible cover by the winner of a pop-idol type show whose winners have captured the Number One for the last two years, though competition is coming on strong by a grassroots effort called “We’re All Going to Die“, or a song by something called “Shaun the Sheep”, and (now that downloads count) old favourites “Fairy Tale of New York” and “All I Want For Christmas Is You“. I’m rooting for anyone but Souljah Boy. Complete list of UK Christmas Number Ones conveniently compiled here.
The fever rose today, however, as the nation became incensed about BBC Radio 1’s decision to censor the lyrics to The Pogues’ wonderful Fairy Tale of New York. The BBC received so many complaints about this, the decision was reversed early this evening. Rightly so, I think (and particularly if that ghastly Souljah Boy fellow gets to sing about doing repulsive things to “ho’s” in his gratingly forgettable track). And this little bit of publicity could well help “Fairy Tale of New York” get to number one– wouldn’t that be grand? Particularly, of course, as it only got to Number Two at Christmas 1987, when it was beat out by the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always On My Mind”.
