August 19, 2007
Wonderful…
Now rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which I remember nothing about. I read it the first time, according to the inside cover, beginning October 8 2001, and finished that October 27 with a note on blank page at the back, “Wonderful…”. Let’s hope it lives up to my previous reception. And that I read it a bit quicker than I did the first time around, as there are so many books I’ve got scheduled to be read before summer is over. Also now reading the latest Walrus which is proving interesting, though The Future of Reading was less interesting than I wanted it to be.
Earlier today I was happy to be reading a little interview with Margaret Drabble (via Maud Newton). “The biggest fate of all is your marriage partner. It’s extraordinary that you should happen to be at such a party or such a university or even on such a bus ride and meet the man that you’re going to marry, for better or worse. I find these accidental conjunctions that turn the plot of your life fascinating.”
News on the homefront: we’ve just cut into our first homegrown watermelon, and we’ve got a Japanese houseguest arriving on Wednesday.
August 16, 2007
The Raw Shark Lady
An interview with Steven Hall up at Baby Got Books. And yes indeed it is funny to be reading Drabble’s The Sea Lady post The Raw Shark Texts. Two books with very little in common except fish and unconventional narrative structure, but how they inform each other just based on their proximity. I am rereading The Sea Lady because I read it too quickly the first time, so excited was I by a Drabble yet unread. I’m paying much more attention this time around, and loving it just as much.
August 15, 2007
In the underwater realm
“…though in the underwater realm nothing seems impossible, and some of the strangest things are true.” –Margaret Drabble in her acknowledgements to The Sea Lady
July 20, 2007
Babyish
Yesterday I became obsessed with the word “babyish” after it dawned on me that I hadn’t said it in about twenty years. When it used to carry real force, but now it floats like a bubble. I found it amusing that the dictionary says a synonym for “babyish” is “puerile”, just because someone who said “puerile” would probably manage to impress me with their vocab, and yet in essence they would just be pronouncing things “babyish”. Which, really, is quite immature.
The most lovely word I’ve learned all day (thanks to Drabble, my vocab instructor) is empyrean.
July 17, 2007
The best of what's around
Heather Mallick’s latest, in which she gets told off by Margaret Atwood (so you learn sans context). I learn that Margaret Drabble is reading Jules Verne this summer (thanks Leah). And that books win! (naturally– though I think there are even books written by people not named Jonathan and also people with xx chromosomes.) India Knight on why erasing history is a bad thing, and so let’s not censor Tintin. Oh! And on Shirley Hughes, who has written some of the books I’ve always loved– a wonderful piece, in which I find out that “Dogger” is real!
July 16, 2007
Workaday Worlds
A frequent complaint about about contemporary fiction, or at least stories which aspire to become contemporary fiction, is that characters don’t work. Whereas in the past, work might have dominated the narrative (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning comes to mind), modern characters’ lives take place after hours. Interesting to note that two exceptions I’ve just thought of are about doctors: Saturday and Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. I don’t know what that means, however these doctors’ idle contemporaries tend to be artists, academics, or documentary filmmakers, and their work is usually peripheral. Or so it’s been said, but when I think back to the last nineteenth century novel I read (The Portrait of a Ladylast week, of course) nobody there did anything either, save for Henrietta Stackpole. And granted Henrietta’s vocation did give her character particular appeal, and I realize James perhaps is a class thing, and these are all just thoughts to think about. Woolf’s working characters were not usually at the forefront of her novels (or if they were, only subtly so ala Lily Briscoe, though of course she was an artist, which brings us back to the beginning). Many characters in books I read, particularly classics, seem to be bankers, but this tends to entail nothing beyond leaving the house in the morning and coming home in the eve.
I have two things to say about all these unformed thoughts, the first being that though none of this is new, what might be new is how positively unremarkable most modern jobs actually are. I cannot imagine what sort of narrative would grow up around the job I’m doing these days, or many I’ve had in the past. Prosaic is not even the word for many jobs around– mind numbing, soul destroying, base and boring. I am fortunate that such is NOT my experience at the moment, but think of how many people must work in call centres. Think of all the stories that will never be written about call centres. I am not terribly convinced this is a bad thing.
The second thing is that Lionel Shriver, like my very favourite Margaret Drabble, always keeps her characters occupied. An anthropologist in The Female of the Species; pro-tennis players in Double Fault; illustrater, think-tankian, snooker player, variously in The Post-Birthday World; travel guide writer and advertising location scout in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Their occupations make Shriver’s characters whole, their worlds rich, and give their stories legs to stand on. Her details are so fascinating, and I can’t think of how much learning it must have taken to acquire them.
June 21, 2007
Antimacasser turpitude
I really enjoyed Ian Brown’s consideration of vocabulary in the paper this weekend. It was a great article, with points of view from those who see the benefit of a large vocabulary, and others who see large words as just pretension. I also liked the new words the article taught me, including “Struthious”, which means relating to ostriches and has been removed from the COE. Which is terrible, because it’s the best word I’ve ever heard.
My love of struthious might make clear that I tend toward logophilia. Though I have accepted that in order to be alive, language must grow and change, I relish in new words, terms obsolete. I like words that allow me precision of expression. But I am a very poor logophile too, as my vocabulary is not extraordinary. In most ways it is decidedly average, and too peppered with utterances of “brilliant” and “fuck.” But I make the effort to make mine grow. During the year before I started graduate school, convinced I was too stupid to actually go, I noted every new word in everything I read. Which I do much less now, regretfully, because I do so value that massive document on my computer now full of wonderful words I’d collected, like “xanthic”, “lugubrious” and “soporific”.
Teaching English had me thinking about language in a new, subjective kind of way. I learned the word “avarice” listening to “Astral Weeks”. But I mostly credit Margaret Drabble with expanding my vocabulary during that year– those battered second-hand penguins whilst we lived in Japan. Aware that I would never learn Japanese, I set myself instead the task of English, and I will never ever be done.
April 26, 2007
Cake or Death by Heather Mallick
My favourite thing is when irate readers respond to Heather Mallick’s column with accusations of hypocrisy or contradiction as though the world were so straightforward that consistency for the sake of itself was a virtue instead of a limit. Heather Mallick’s new book Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life is absolutely riddled with contradictions and Mallick is well aware of this. In her introduction she answers her titular proposal with cake and death– a somewhat morbid extension of having your cake and eating it too, but morbid is just the way Mallick is feeling these days. Justifiably so really, and why should it mean she remains cake-free? If you’ve got a cake, you might as well eat it. I mean, what kind of a moron wouldn’t?
Cake or Death is a wonderful book of essays. Not because I usually admire Mallick’s writing, and not because the book references Margaret Drabble at least twice, but because the reading was just a pleasure. Even with the death, because Mallick’s got the necessary humour (which the irate readers don’t seem to understand). I liked this book so much that I read it all the way home yesterday, and I was walking. I liked this book so much that I read four of the essays last night to my husband. He liked those four essays so much, he wants to read the rest of the book now. Heather Mallick is witty, and she is intelligent, bookish, critical, preposterous, unflinching and brave. If you take her too seriously she can be offensive in that way men are much more likely to get away with. Heather Mallick is a voice in a sometimes awful wilderness, and this book is a terrific accomplishment.
Heather Mallick knows the Woolfian essay. In an unfair review, the essays were criticized for “not having a point”, but if an essay can be summed up in a point, then why write it? Indeed the journey is the point, as Mallick’s digressions, seasoned with cultural references and details from her own life, take her readers where they need to go. And yes, along the journey Heather Mallick often contradicts herself, but I would suggest that your thought processes must be awfully limited if yours don’t. As Woolf does in her essays, Mallick follows the mind, the eye, wherever it goes. And this is interesting. It’s not easy, quick, or classifiable, but neither is life.
What is life are these trips: “Fear Festival”, which illuminates everything in the world which is liable to kill you; “How to Ignore Things” which uses Jackie O’s example as an alternative to therapy; “Born Ugly” which she concludes with “You are not beautiful. Almost no one is. We start with the race already halfway run and then we age to boot, so get used to it. Try to be interesting, and work on the content of your character, not the pallor of your skin”; “The People I Detest” subset “bookhaters”; her essay on Doris Lessing made me decide to take the plunge. I liked every single one of these.
There are so many bad books and here is a good one. And this is about all that I know that is so simple.
April 12, 2007
There she blows
Margaret Drabble writes with an omniscience that absolutely wows me. Rereading The Realms of Gold is like being strapped inside a rocket ship. Though the rocket permeates the depths of consciousness rather than outer space. It’s really quite a Woolfian book in many respects, which I didn’t notice when I read it first three years ago. It didn’t get a very good review in the NYTimes when it came out in 1975 though. Funny how much the criticism in that review is so similar to reviews of Drabble’s most recent book. Funny also that when I read bad reviews of Margaret Drabble’s work, I don’t ever necessarily disagree with them, but it never means I love her any less. In fact I think my love for Margaret Drabble may be unconditional. This, however, does not mean I intend to read her biography of Arnold Bennett ever.
Upcoming bookishness: Suite Francais, Kitchen, The Horseman’s Graves, and Open because The Calhoun says so.
Marking continues. 46 down. Yesterday’s treat was lunch with RR.
April 8, 2007
Woke up this morning feeling fine
Japan was in the news last week, mostly unfortunately through this murder which has been sensationalized by the red-tops in Britain. I appreciated measured responses to the hype here inThe Times. (Judging from reader comments, clearly not everyone appreciated the first article as much as I did. The venom it unleashed was sort of baffling, but then a lot of people don’t like to call racism by its name). More positively, Top Ten Books Set in Japan by Fiona Campbell who has just published Death of a Salaryman. (Incidentally, I’ve only read number 10 but plan to read Kitchen someday soon.)
Lionel Shriver happily reviews Nora Ephron. I want to read Julie Burchill’s book on Brighton. Rounding up responses to Didion on stage. This review makes me so excited to read the new McEwan. I love this: Sunday Morning Music.
Now rereading The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble, for kicks.
I’ve marked thirty essays, and as I’ve only done four and three today and yesterday, the weekend has contained some aspects of nice. Yesterday we partook in lattes over the paper in Kensington, and today we ate our delightful M&S Easter Treats from England. But otherwise, yes, not much has occurred. Life continues on hold. The notable event of the weekend continues to be that I brought a very large object into our home, oh and mustn’t forget the startling revelation (to the sound of Herman’s Hermits) that I dance like my dad.
