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?
October 28, 2007
City Limits
I was born to a woman with a casserole reflex. Kicking in upon funerals, births, or any general time of need, and so it has always been my inclination to be neighbourly. I was raised on television which prized neighbourliness as the surest way to heaven, and I don’t know any other way to be, but recent events have tested my limits.
Or even not-so-recent– this has been coming on for a long time. When we lived in England my neighbourliness was conspicuous in a nation full of people who try to mind their own business. In my row of terrace houses, neighbourliness comprised mainly of twitching lace curtains. Sure we could hear our neighbours making love or peeing, but one didn’t say hello. My husband-the-native tried to warn me the day I decided to help the new neighbours move in: they were unloading their truck and it was raining, and I thought two more bodies would get the job done faster. I didn’t listen and dragged him over with me, offered to help, the offer was accepted and in we carried their van full of crap. But no one spoke to us, or even introduced themselves; when the truck was empty, I said, “Well, I guess we’ll be going” and someone answered, “Off with you then,” and that was the last I ever saw of those people.
Upon our return to Canada, things haven’t gone much better. You might remember that I recently made muffins for the family of my dead neighbour who hadn’t actually died. Well last night something happened that was even more awkward. We have new neighbours down below us– a middle-aged Spanish couple. They have control of our thermostat, so I thought it would be best if we made friends with them. We bought them a plant, and knocked on their door. It took awhile for the man of the house to answer, and once he had it was clear that he was naked. Completely naked, and very very old. He also spoke little English. “Welcome,” we said, and held out the plant. To receive the plant while continuing to hide his naked self behind the door was a difficult maneuver, but he just about managed. At the very least he was smiling. He took the plant, said thank you, and shut the door back up again.
So I’ve had it, really. It’s not so much the lack of reciprocation that bothers me, but rather the social awkwardness that has inevitably ensued from these gestures. Neighbourliness shouldn’t make you want to die, and mine perpetually does, and so I’m through with it. I’m through with the undead nakedness, and I’m not going to take it anymore.
October 22, 2007
Umm, yes
Umm, yes, Pickle Me This is going to see the Spice Girls. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
October 17, 2007
Sitcom
Just purchased Sitcom by David McGimpsey. I heard about it on the radio this morning. I am interested in it because I’ve lately had some thoughts about The Facts of Life that might be brewing into something special. Further, because I recently learned that Kimmy Gibbler in real life went on into academia.
October 17, 2007
Overheard
“They’re all so creative, and I’m just in psych. I don’t know. I can’t create anything, but I guess I can tell you how fucked up you are.”
October 17, 2007
Clippings
Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I’m still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing’s The Good Terrorist in the future.
I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail‘s “Focus” section last weekend– this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that “it’s in our nature… to return to the street”. But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.
Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.
And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn’t like them. “Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion.” Isn’t she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.
See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains…). A column she’d written in 2001 called “Craving life in the face of death” moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I’ve got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I’ve saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don’t coincide, which is almost always.
But it’s also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you’d think.
October 16, 2007
The pageness of the page
I’ve been thinking about this conversation from Baby Got Books, regarding the effect of the internet and computers upon the art we create, and the ideas we generate. And I’ve realized that for me the computer is not so much a new medium, but simply an extension of a pen and paper. That though my computer is infinitely valuable for revisions and alterations, when it comes time to begin a new draft, I always make a brand new document. Retyping out my previous work is more time-consuming, but the new page’s blankness allows for so much more possibility. Also, that when I write, I keep my document small, at nearly 100% so I can see my whole document on the screen. I need my page to look like a page, as it would were it stuck inside a typewriter, so that I can see where I am at. For me, the pageness of the page remains essential, and still has yet to be replaced.
October 12, 2007
Expedient
Oh, yes. One factual problem with Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief (and have you seen his youtube channel?). In the novel Bethany gets a passport in a week, and we can assume this took place in 2007, due to DC’s ulta-currency. But we all know that nobody in Canada got a passport in a week during 2007. But then maybe I’m just looking for holes. Maybe this is fiction, after all.
October 8, 2007
Hating with a blanket
Cheers upon cheers for Zoe Whittall’s review of Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief. (And I would be cheering even if I weren’t voraciously devouring the novel at the moment.) No, Whittall has done something brave with her review. She writes:
Coupland is often criticized for being pop culturally literate, as though this somehow detracts from his work having true literary merit, as though it is somehow suspect to be too current. But he really did originate a type of contemporary literature that is not being afraid to engage with up-to-the-minute technology as it relates to our everyday emotional and cultural lives. I don’t shed a tear for his trillion-dollar advances. I’m just saying we could stand to be less hard on him for being so suspiciously popular.
With no fear whatsoever of undermining her cool indie cred, Whittall admits to liking a book, to liking an author. I’m not being facetious– a lot of critics never get this far. Which is not to say that all books and writers should be fawned over, but the flipside of this is active-hating which is something I find baffling. Not the hating so much: myself, I hate a lot of things, and though indeed “hate is a strong word”, so it should be. But it’s the activeness that is strange. The time and energy some people expend loathing things must eat up their lives, I wonder.
It’s also so easy to hate things: you don’t even have to read Douglas Coupland’s books to hate him. The same goes for Margaret Atwood, and I will quote my favourite-ever overheard conversation, first posted last year:
When I was at the Vic booksale on Monday, two undergraduate-appearing students were sorting through the CanLit table. One held up a copy of Survival to her friend, and said, “How about this one?” The other, sounding like she was repeating something she was very sure of, said, “Oh no, not Atwood. Can’t stand her novels. She just writes the same book over and over again.” Her friend said, “Survival isn’t a novel.” The anti-Atwoodian said “oh” and then rapidly changed the subject.
If you have read Atwood or Coupland, and you still don’t like their work, why not just not read it anymore? Though of course your caustic and bitter references to these figures will become less current, and you may have to talk about something else, but might that even do you some good?
Of course we need critics and criticism, absolutely, but hating mainstream with a blanket hardly constitutes criticism. And even if your criticism is legitimate, devoting your whole life to things you hate seems a bit sad to me. It is often more interesting listening to someone on what they do like rather than what they don’t anyway. Or rather the latter gets old soon and the former can be infectious.
