December 14, 2007
My almost-absolute failure
Lately it’s been very convenient having an award-winning writer for a friend, for upon the completion of my novel two weeks back, Rebecca was kind enough to read it. And indeed she has offered wonderful encouragement, good advice and insight. (Which I will apply to my manuscript over my Christmas Holiday! How fortunate to have the time when I most need it). The most fascinating of all her feedback though is a note of my almost-absolute failure to use subordinate conjunctions. And and and and and, which I suppose is to be expected from anyone who talks too much (and I’ve been accused of this since I learned to speak). What about the “buts” and “thens” though? Reading through another story this evening I realize my “problem” (which it isn’t, entirely) is completely out of control. Causality where art thou? Fascinating. I will explore this further throughout my revisions, then I will use this awareness to strengthen my work, but I will not cease my ands completely for ands are what I do (so it seems). There.
December 7, 2007
Now reading finally
I’ve been a bit deranged lately, and Stuart says I’m missing fiction. He keeps trying to foist novels upon me because I’m annoying to live with, but I am bloody minded and as I resolved to read six non-fiction books in a row, surely I will. I am not really convinced the derangement has to do with the non-fic anyway– more instead with Seasonal Mania (which I do seem to come down with every single season).
Anyway, finally, after ages and ages, I am reading Guns Germs and Steel. It has been sitting on my bedside for ages– for so long in fact that the person who lent it to me (Curtis) moved away months ago. 56 pages in, I am enthralled and learning so very much about things I can’t believe I don’t know or never thought to ask. Today as I read it on my lunch break, two strangers stopped me to tell me what a great book it was. Which was strange, really, because the only other time that has ever happened to me was way back when I was reading The Selfish Gene and nobody would leave me alone with it. Strange because you wouldn’t think these unliterary books would be the ones to inspire such bookish enthusiasm. What to make of that?
I am wary though, as both people who stopped to rave about Guns Germs and Steel admitted they hadn’t been able to get all the way through it. And both Curtis and Stuart said pretty much the same, though they enjoyed it still a great deal. Doesn’t bode well though, does it? What if nobody has ever finished this book ever? And as I’m so bloody-minded, what if I end up reading it for the rest of my life?
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.
