March 30, 2006
That's all there is to the coastline craze…
The sun is pouring inside and the temperature is in the double digits (and I don’t mean minus). Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf and I sit on the very edge of World War Two and I need to finish her diary before her own neuroses are impressed upon me permanently. What a read though. I finished Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, and found them ever surprising, and gut-wrenching in the most imaginative ways. I am also reading Hologram by PK Page. Tonight we are going to see Michael Geist at the Hart House Lecture.
Here on pseudonyms. Great poetry persists and Ken Babstock is on the cover of Eye Weekly here. Russell Smith on how bloggers lower the tone. I think he makes a fair argument. There is nothing wrong with blogging per se, except when bloggers cloak their self-absorption in delusions of self-importance. Blogging can be but is usually not a part of any real discourse, and if you’re straight with that you’re probably not a blog-wanker and don’t care what Russell Smith thinks about you anyway. Hereon the wonderful M. Drabble’s honorary degree from Cambridge (and just six months till her new book is out! It will be my first Drabble in hardcover. I fell in love with her late in the game). Check out the pro-life Brit Spears birthing statue. Just when you thought “pro-life” couldn’t be made any more offensive!
Mmmmm. My husband is roasting eggplant!
February 8, 2006
Relics
For the past few years, my reading has consisted primarily of British women writers. The writers who do not focus on urban themes (and even some who do) share such a preoccupation with history and archeology. Relics are dug up in nearly every book, and characters are obsessed with the thousand years of history that came before them. Rarely do books not contain references to buried civilizations (Esther Freud’s The Sea House is no exception). I am fascinated by this, what the implications must be for all British people (not just the fictional ones) living on top of ancient worlds, and how this manifests itself. This is why I was particularly excited with my postcard from Margaret Drabble, which came from a museum in France and had a photo of some ancient pottery unearthed. Anyway, it’s such a vastly different thematic concern from Canadian literature, which still seems to be making sense of our physical geography. It’s an interesting contrast.
I got up early this morning to finish my seminar, which I am presenting tomorrow. I worked hard on it but don’t know how cohesive my vision is. It is on literary acknowledgments, and upon completion I learned that I have been spelling acknowledgments incorrectly my whole life. No “e”. I am quite busy with school work at the mo, and writing stuff stuff stuff.
The new Vanity Fair cover is creepy. Zadie Smith wins the regional Commonwealth Prize, and will now go to battle with Canadian Lisa Moore’s Alligator, which is the next book on my bedside waiting list (thank heaven for libraries). On how booklearning leaves us with questionable pronunciation skills. Jeanette Winterson says that not all books need to be books. And hilariously, from McSweeneys, The Elements of Spam Style.
January 25, 2006
Rapture
One really wonderful thing about book writing is inventing characters who are different from you, and then getting to learn about all the things that fascinate them. A character in my new story is a civil engineer, and a specialist in tall buildings and so I am having to learn all about that. And because my main character is a bored wife during the 1970s, I am going to learn macrame so that my character can learn how to do it too. Last night I spent far too long searching old Globe and Mails for references to the CN Tower during the 1970s, which has proved interesting for two reasons. First, the 1970s were terrible! As I have said a million times, as one who came of age in the 1990s, the 2000s has been a come-down. But the 70s was all car-bombs, all the time, and they exploded everywhere. Or at least that is the sense I got. The other interesting thing was how unanimously excited Torontonians seemed to be about a 553 metre tower appearing right in the middle of their city. I was expecting dissent and controversy, but maybe the 70s were different. And everyone I’ve spoken to remembers when Olga the Helicopter finally put the top on. Did you know that the CN Tower was five inches taller than it was supposed to be? Another very exciting thing is that we’re going to have to take a trip up the tower, expense or no expense. For research purposes you know.
Now reading a lot of poetry. How exciting. I got Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy out of the library yesterday. Also reading Minus Time by Catherine Bush. And soon I’ll be starting “After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World” by AN Wilson, which looks absolutely fascinating.
More thoughts about appropriation, upon finishing Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad”. First, it was a wonderful work and made the Greek world alive to me like nothing ever has before. And second, it was so much like The Red Queen, it was eerie and I think studying the two works together would be fascinating. But I wonder, if Drabble lacked the authority to write Princess Hong, can Atwood really write Penelope? Is the difference that there are no longer any Ancient Greeks to do so, and therefore nobody left to steal from? Is the difference racial or temporal? What is the difference between 200 years and 2000 though, really?
Politically, the only thing that I’m really bothered about is the smug look on the faces of those people who think that it all went downhill with Trudeau.
Interesting stories, Google firewalling China, and even though sometimes the lack of spice in Canadian scandals bores me, why sex scandals are a bad thing. Less interestingly, Leah McLaren’s book is ready and she’s on the publicity trail.
January 20, 2006
A treasure
Today was sunny days and red wellington boots. Carolyn to dins last night, lunch with Britt and Jennie tomorrow, and dinner with my mom tomorrow night. Tonight I get to stay home. Oh such joy, because for me staying home means hanging out with Stuart. I had breakfast out with Rebecca and Erin this morning, wrote wrote wrote, and got a postcard from Margaret Drabble. It’s true! When I finished reading The Red Queen, just a couple of weeks ago, I had to send her a note just to tell her how much she meant to me. That Drabbling is now a verb, thanks to her. And one of my favourite thing to do. And isn’t she an efficient Margaret Drabble, because her postcard flew back across the ocean at a rapid rate and I’m absolutely in love with it. A treasure.
January 15, 2006
A brief note on cultural appropriation
This article by Margaret Drabble says some really excellent things about appropriation in relation to “The Red Queen”, not all of which are entirely politically correct. This concept is a fairly new one for me, and I’m still grappling with what I think, but one less controversial aspect of appropriation is factual correctness and how a failure to achieve this can disturb the spell fiction casts.
I read “White Teeth” a few years ago, and really enjoyed it. Now I know nothing about Bengali culture, and really at the time I knew nothing of British culture either, so I didn’t read it with an altogether critical eye. But I know other people did, and Zadie Smith received a lot of negative feedback from her protrayal of Bengali characters specifically. I went to see Smith speak in October, before I read “On Beauty”, and I was curious to know whether she found bridging the American/British culture gap more/less/as difficult as gaps in her previous books. Her response, with trademark self-confidence, was that it was a story, fiction. It didn’t all have to be true, and she wasn’t bovvered if others picked it to pieces. I respected her gumption. But.
I read “On Beauty” recently (and I loved it). But there were bits that were like hooks, that cut into me and pulled me out of my reading experience. Why were the American Belsey family travelling in a “people-carrier”? There were other examples of this. And I wasn’t trying to read this and “pick it to pieces”. Similarly I read the wonderful “Case Histories” by Kate Atkinson this summer. It took place in East Anglia, but there was a character whose daughter had moved to Canada. She lived in the suburbs, but like most Torontians had a cottage on the shores of Lake Ontario, where they hiked through the ancient forests and canoed on the rapids. Torontians, Torontonians and Ontarians alike will see the problem I had with this passage, and “bovvering” about it ruined the book a little bit for me. Maybe this was my fault, but I didn’t want it to happen.
This is important to me, because I have written a novel about English people that takes place in London, and I want it to resonate with truth. As a writer, am I even capable of that? My next big project involves a family living in Iran during the 1979 Revolution, where I’ve never been, when I was barely born. Is it possible? I don’t want to be limited to only writing about brown haired girls called Kerry who are twenty-six and live in Toronto. How do you use facts in fiction? Where does the fault lie when facts let you down- with the reader, the writer, or -perchance- the editor?
January 4, 2006
Relish
Yesterday at lunch time, upon reading the final page of Margaret Drabble’s “The Red Queen”, I completed every work of fiction Margaret Drabble had ever written. It felt like there was a hole in soul, even though The Red Queen satisfied in so many ways. I love her works. I love seeing how they have developed over time, the social issues she has dabbled in, the birth of her international interests, the change in her narrative voices, the shapes of her novels. Her early works were best received but I like the later ones better, where it’s clear the novel is beginning to bore her and she is playing with it. Anyway, I was very happy to find out she has a new book due out in March 2006!
In other monumental book news, I am at a point in one’s reading experience that you just want to roll around in forever. I am in the midst of a good Zadie Smith book. Relish.
December 30, 2005
Pickles at Pickle Me This!
Today was an exciting day at Pickle Me This. My friend Laura came to visit- and she brought pickles! She worked on a farm this last while and from it she brought pickled cucumbers, pickled beans, as well as tomatoes and tomato sauce. Who ever would have thought we’d have pickling news here at Pickle Me This? She also bought us pizza. We’re big fans of Laura, even if her pickles rival ours.
In less exciting news, our dear propriatress is sick with a strangely annoying symptoms, including sore eyes and sore skin. She is feeling better today than yesterday however.
And it was a Merry Christmas. This old world was quite generous to Stuart and I. We received some money, and a DVD player, a spice rack, and gift certificates, hats, a million books, socks and Miffy got a brownie uniform! Stuart gave me “I’m a Mountain” by Sarah Harmer which is the best CD I’ve heard in ever, and “The Red Queen” by Margaret Drabble. He also got me a beautiful pair of earrings. I also received “The Witch of Exmoor” (now reading) by Ms. Drabble, which completes my Drabble Fiction collection! Who would have thought what that innocent purchase of “The Radiant Way” in Kobe one and half years ago would start? Oh and we just got a million and one things, and feel very lucky and it is nice to have such lovely families and friends caring for us. However I think I can live with a little less Christmas for the next 300 or so days.
November 30, 2005
My Summer Reading Project
I have decided to devote my summer vacation, and indeed I am in long term forecast mode for it is not yet December but, to re-reading novels. Far too many of my books have not been experienced to their full potential, and I want to read them again. So far my reading list includes: White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Howard’s End by EM Forster, Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, Headhunter by Timothy Findlay, The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble, Possession by AS Byatt, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, The Fire Dwellers by Margaret Laurence, Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro, Unless by Carol Shields, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and The Hours by Michael Cunningham. All of these are books I have really enjoyed, but I read some in high school and would like to revisit them, or I read them in university classes and would like to try them without training wheels, or I loved them so much I devoured them without pondering them as much as I should have. As well as rereading novels, I want to read letters and diaries of writers, which I’ve never done enough of.
September 15, 2005
A Personal Debt
In 1972, Margaret Drabble who I love wrote a book called “Virginia Woolf: A Personal Debt” which was limited to 110 copies. And tomorrow, I get to read copy 80 in the Woolf Collection at the EJ Pratt Library! No one can tell you that life isn’t exciting. And do the Guardian poetry workshop!
August 25, 2005
Moon Tiger and other stories
We began the cycling life again today, after purchasing helmets and locks from Canadian Tire. I got a new basket for my bike too and I love it. Our bikes are beat up and ugly, and mine has rusty spokes from being left out in the rain for three months in 2002. Stuart’s came for $20 at a yard sale and nobody is ever going to steal either of them. Or if they do, they’re welcome to them for it must mean the thief is very desperate. We ran a couple of errands by bicycle today, which was thrilling. We rode bikes everywhere in Japan and we’ve missed them since April. None of our friends had cars there, and we’d ride across the city in packs and it felt like we were twelve again, with an alien in our bike baskets just seconds from jumping over the moon. The freedom and efficiency of a bike really cannot be equaled and the size of a city just shrinks once you’ve got one.
Oh my. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. (This is the first time I’ve used Google Print by the way. I like it!) My Aunt gave me this book, perhaps more than ten years ago. It sat on my shelf for all those years, first it seemed too stuffy for me to enjoy and then, because I’d received it so long ago and it looked like one, I had decided it was a children’t book and I wouldn’t be interested. It was almost sold in my booksale in July, and then I remembered that I’d seen it numerous times on lists of great books by women. So I kept it, and I read it. And it’s a masterpiece. I like it for the same reason I like books by Margaret Drabble. It tells the stories of twentieth century history, or the lives behind the history. I loved this book because it was so clever and educational, with so many new words, ideas and historical lessons. The story was heartbreaking but affirming of goodness. Books like “Moon Tiger” let me know I live in a time worthy of great literature, which in spite of all the danger, I do appreciate. It’s the story of a woman reflecting on her rich and winding life, whilst on her deathbed. She is a historian, and she reworks the history of the world so that she is in the centre of it. Lively explores how our personal histories are interpreted by others, and how they are connected to History with a capital H. A rich and brilliant book. Now reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali.
A marvellous line from “The Ice Age” by Margaret Drabble. “Something has gone wrong with the laws of chance.”
Here, an interesting article on the dynamics of book groups, exploring how the private act of reading goes public. On how fewer of us have novels in us than we think. The author expounds upon how perhaps the reason book deals prove so elusive to new writers is that many new writers are rubbish. Top Ten lesbian lit. Zoe Williams on why of how British MPs aren’t ashamed to admit their summer reading is either crap or a children’s book.
I got “Writing Away”, PEN Canada’s 1994 travel anthology for $5 at the airport on Monday. Yes, Monday. Though it was supposed to be Tuesday. Stuart’s mom came downstairs about 3:15 on Monday and informed us that the days had been mixed up and their plane was leaving in just over 4 hours. In remarkable time, they packed their bags and we were in the car, and off on a race to the airport. We got to the airport from Peterborough in 1 hour and 45 minutes, which I consider a miraculous feat. It was a rather abrupt and disappointing way to say goodbye, but at least they got their flight and we did have a pretty great two weeks together. And these are the dramas that make our holiday stories more amusing.
Things I’ve learned recently is that “cupidity” is greed (comes from the same root as “cupid”, both to do Latin “Cupidus” which means “desire”. Also that Curriculuam Vitae means “course of life” and that the word “rent” has an old meaning of split, or break apart.
Becky of Something Blue has sent along a couple of photos and there will be more on her site soon. I think this picture of Stuart is absolutely gorgeous, though perhaps I am biased because I adore him.
