December 5, 2007
Links
What is it– this weird thing where one book leads to another. Would The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries be the same book had I not just finished Villa Air-Bel? Two books which, you would think, would not be so blatantly linked, but aren’t books surprising?
Villa Air-Bel opens with Lisa Fittko (who I’d never heard of before) guiding Walter Benjamin out of France, over the mountains into Spain. And then she turns up again in The Dead Beat page 50: “Douglas Martin’s vivid obit on Lisa Fittko, a World War II heroine who smuggled numerous people out of Europe, appeared nine days after her death because… “You can’t know all this stuff. That whole period is extremely vague. There are people who will tell you they did this, that, and the other thing, and Doug took days to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Chicago Tribune ran an obit that then had to be corrected extensively because it was all “ucked fup,” as they say in the business.” Though Fittko’s obit weaves together multiple stories and locations and mentions more than a dozen names, one peripheral name had to be correct the next day; an s had been mistakenly tacked onto a French surname.”
What are the odds, I wonder?
November 23, 2007
Hideousness
I just arrived home to find an ugly wreath on my door. It has a big dangly stuffed bear attached, plastic berries and it’s ghastly. How mysterious… And troublesome– I don’t want people (esp. the mailman whose respect I covet) to think I’m the type to put wreaths up in November. Or wreaths like that at all. But then the mailman might have even dropped it off; who knows? More likely it’s one of the neighbours though– the naked ones downstairs or the domestic disputes down in the basement (both sets are currently feuding by the way)– and the quality of the wreath is suggestive of either of their tastes. But couldn’t they have just hung the thing on their own doors? How embarrassing.
Somebody either likes us or hates us a lot.
November 22, 2007
Spouts
Now reading Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost, which comes with music and intrigue and has me caught in its grip. More to come on that, and then I’m reading The Great Man by Kate Christensen. Before I start off on my non-fiction binge; I’ve got planned Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong, Villa Air Bel by Rosemary Sullivan, The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg, and finally Guns Germs and Steel because it’s about bleeding time.
And just as I’m on about Kate Christensen, Maud Newton gives us her recipe for brussels sprouts. Naturally. (Did you know the most mortifying incident of my whole life involved brussels sprouts? And a dog. Naturally). She will be posting more recipes by writers to come. How exciting. They were celebrating the Gardiner Expressway in the paper this weekend. How refreshing, and as you might know, I concur. Guardian blogger rereading Bookers past. Costa Prize first novel shortlist includes Gifted (which I’ve read) and The Golden Age (still ahead).
November 19, 2007
Ephemera
I’ve been getting complaints about the magazine rack for ages, that it was full to capacity, and so I decided that today would be the day I got around to it. To tidying it up, I mean, which meant throwing away printed matter— a sacrilege. I would keep the magazines that were under a year old, I determined, but those that were older would be thrown in recycling.
A magazine’s disposability is its very nature, which is hard for some of us to understand. It’s what separates them from books, of course, but I have also learned that ephemera can have value ever-lasting. It is difficult to reconcile this with the finite size of both my house and my husband’s patience, and also with the minimal odds that I will ever need to reference the August 2006 Vanity Fair. Which I’ve thrown away by the way, will never re-remember the contents of, and will probably be none the worse for it.
I do clip though, and I’ve clipped for about ten years and across three continents. I am not sure when I’ll ever need to reference anything within my box o’ clips, but still they’re there, they’re tangible, and quite manageably stored within a small-sized cardboard box. Today before I threw away a stack of old The Walruses, I cut out a short-story by Helen Humphreys, whose context has become different since I read her book last week; “The American Gigantic” by Mark Kingwell, which will be relevant to something else I’m working on; Lisa Moore’s consideration of Newfoundland and Tasmania, among other things.
These articles, clipped and stapled, will join in the box such illustrious company as the Joan Didion “Proust Questionanaire” (Vanity Fair circa 2003), various Chandra Levy sensations, a whole bunch of stuff on apocalypse (from scientific sources– I have long wanted to write a story about a pregnant physicist forecasting the end of the world), profiles of Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller, Paula Yates memorials, three generations of Presley women in Vogue (August 2004, and somehow Priscilla looks youngest of all of them), Dominick Dunne’s tribute to his brother (VF, March 2004), Heather Mallick on Unless, etc (The Globe & Mail, May 18 2002), and my very favourite (from the National Post, July 8 2001) headlined “Elvis Presley’s cousin killed in shootout with fugitive”.
November 16, 2007
Modernity murdered narrative
One hundred years ago people were concerned about modernity in fiction– I know this. That some considered lightbulbs and radios too plastic for literature, which was made for weightier things. I once read an essay by Woolf about writing and the automobile, and how riding in a car could alter one’s perspective, permanently. Dangerously? Modern life is rubbish, so they say, and so it always has been. But I maintain that it’s never been so rubbish as since the turn of this century, and I mean this narratively speaking.
It’s not modernity I fault, and I don’t even mind plastic; I like Douglas Coupland. I just feel that the last ten years have brought forth too many conveniences in real life which have taken all the fun out of fiction. I’ve written before of my aversion to cellphones and google searches as plot devices, but I can take this much further.
I’m now reading Love Falls by Esther Freud, which takes place in 1981: Lara and her father are taking the train to France. Now I took the train to France once, in 2003. We got on the Eurostar at Waterloo Station, countryside faded away as we disappeared underground, we played travel-scrabble until the pressure of the channel tunnel gave me a migraine, and I spent the rest of the journey staring out the window at nothing. We got to Paris and I took to my bed. Which actually is a marvelous sentence, isn’t it? Though I assure you the whole ordeal was really quite unromantic.
Whereas if we’d taken the train to Dover, taken a boat across the channel… isn’t the journey better already? Aren’t stories better when characters have to search for phone boxes (esp. when the first few they encounter are always out of order) rather than retrieving a mobile from their pocket? Would your rather discover a twist in a tale in a reference library or at an internet terminal? How do you ever get lost with a GPS in your car, and what kind of character never takes a wrong turn? Oh my, what if Lara and her father had made the trek on EasyJet– could you imagine anything worse?
Of course all these things exist, and so we’ll have to learn how to make stories with them. The trick, I think, is not to use them as shortcuts in narrative. But then not such an easy trick, is it, considering how much all these things shortcut our everyday lives.
UPDATE: On how modernity has rendered Jane Eyre impossible.
November 15, 2007
Forage
Though according to a sign I passed this morning “Capitalism Sucks: Let’s Get Rid it It”, I remain rather entranced by consumerism. Though I don’t love shopping as a rule, I like things and their acquisition. If I were at home now, I’d pull out Woolf’s “The Oxford Street Tide” from The London Scene so I could remember the list of things she was so fascinated that one could actually buy– a tortoise was one. She saw it pointful to set across London in search of a pencil after all; Woolf liked things too. Tonight I’ve got an errand to purchase underwear and a teapot shaped like an elephant. Doesn’t the world just hold the most marvelous stuff?
November 13, 2007
Striptease
Lucky Jim, apart from being all it’s cracked up to be, has one scene containing an essential element missing from every other sex scene ever written: “Dixon twitched off his, then her, spectacles and put them down somewhere. He kissed her again, harder…” Oh, for lust in academia!
November 11, 2007
How do you measure a marriage?
Two and a half years ago we went to a barbeque and met a baby. The barbeque was our friend Carolyn’s housewarming, and the baby belonged to a school friend of hers. And the baby was little, just three weeks old at the time. Stuart and I had just gotten married, and the baby’s birthday had been the day after, and at the time I was amazed to meet a person younger than my marriage was.
Tonight we had the pleasure of attending a party for Carolyn and her fiance Steve (for indeed wonderful things have happened to our Carolyn in the two and a half years since we warmed her house), and we met her friend again. Who didn’t remember me, but I remembered her, though I scarcely recognized her baby. Who, I realized then, is the human embodiment of my marital life.
How are we doing then? Well, unfortunately the twos seem quite terrible. We cry an awful lot, and life on the whole is really miserable. On the upside we have a very cool toy train, though of course it does not console us.
November 8, 2007
Chunky battered cod
Toronto writer (and my good friend) Rebecca Rosenblum sings a love song to The New Yorker: “If you start early enough with any reading material, it will form it’s own ideal reader (this is true of just about anything, I suppose; it’s how you explain families).”
Rebecca Gowers (remember When to Walk?) guest-blogs for savvy readers: “It annoys me that “flighty”—a word, by the way, that Shakespeare used in Macbeth and which then meant speedy—has now declined into a resolute negative, stuck in a corner with “giddy” and “harebrained,” besides meaning, at a stretch, sexually undependable. The concept of flight is itself surely so marvelous to a naturally earth-bound creature that to limit the associations of “flighty” to the unpredictable whirligigging of a short-lived insect seems like an awful waste.”
And links for Elizabeth Hay (who, sadly for the sake of completion, is not called Rebecca): 12 or 20 Questions; interviewed at the CBC; and in The Guardian (even though Margaret Atwood owned the spotlight in a protest about doves).
Oh, and speaking of words: my new favourite is “mimsy“.
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
