May 29, 2008
Is it not too late to become a New Romantic?
My remarkable bookish encounters of late:
- With Once by Rebecca Rosenblum, upon seeing it now available for preorder at amazon.
- With Victory by Joseph Conrad, upon reading (in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers) that Joan Didion always rereads it before starting a new novel, and then says Shirley Hazzard, “[it] travels with me.” So I got it out of the library, and soon I shall read it soon.
- With Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which I just finished reading today, and isn’t it serendipitous that Baby Got Books has been interviewing said author? Part 1 today, and Part 2 follows tomorrow.
- With the unlikely trio of The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler by Ruth Warrick, 2001 Canadian Slavonic Papers, and Economics in a Canadian Setting by Mark Inman, piled and abandoned on a park bench outside Varsity Stadium.
May 25, 2008
Life in a Tree
It pleases me to no end that this is the view from my door. Made all the more significant by the fact that I live right in the middle of a very large and busy city, but out here on our deck, we could be anywhere. We bought a table and chairs yesterday, and this morning I was sitting out with a cup of tea and a paper, listening to birdsong and drinking up the sun. We’ve been barbequing regularly for the last month, but last evening was first when it was warm enough to be outside. The last two weekends have been full of friends, fun and potato salad, and luckily, it seems, time enough for everything.
May 13, 2008
Same jeans
Things are mad here. We would suggest that when you’re organizing your mother’s surprise 60th birthday party, you actually bring the bag filled with those party things you’ve spent weeks preparing to the party. This way you don’t leave them in your backyard, discover this after driving two hours to the party venue, and then have to drive all the way back to Toronto (and then back to the venue again) which means you’d drive about 600 km in one Saturday afternoon. This would probably also ensure that you’re not insane at said party, spearheading its descent into rampant debauchery. Who would ever have thought a 60th birthday party could get so out of control? It really truly did, my mother perfectly surprised, particularly to see my sister who lives on the other side of the country. A house full of bright lights, loud music and garish prints, and full of friends, and full of family, and we’re truly fortunate these last two are one and the same. (I would post pictures, but they’re unsightly).
May 5, 2008
It isn't Saturday
This weekend was one highlight after another. To meet my beloved Bronwyn, and realize we live in the same city again after more than five years– she and Alex came around Friday night and we went out for dinner and it was so nice to welcome them home. On Saturday we went to the ROM to see the dinosaurs, the early typewriter exhibit, and then the Darwin: The Evolution Revolution, which was absolutely extraordinary. So fascinating, inspiring, exciting, beautiful and educational– simultaneously. If you get the chance to go, you’d be crazy to miss it. Speaking of crazy, we spent last night watching EastEnders omnibuses my mum-in-law had sent to us– that Bianca! And also eating Dairy Milks she’d enclosed in the package. Also baked were tiny pies, whose We Help Mommy allusion was not considered until later. Today we went to the garden centre, and bought pots and pots of flowers and veg for our urban deck garden. And then Erin came for dinner, and we sat drinking wine as the sun went down. Commenting that the only problem with today was that it wasn’t Saturday.
May 1, 2008
Katie girls
My only shoes worth more than $100 are orthopedic and I haven’t had cable TV in a decade, but I’ve always enjoyed Sex and the City (in syndication, naturally). And not just because of the “Ex in the City/The Way We Were” episode, which brought me such comfort during those dark days when I was deranged and thought no one would ever love me (and these two factors may have been related). Remember, the simple girls and Katie girls? But writer Libby Brooks pins down the rest of it brilliantly as follows:
“…this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women’s experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be cleanup etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?
Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they’d been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were discussed. For my money, the enduring appeal of Sex and the City has nothing to do with guys or footwear. It’s about the uncomfortably accurate presentation of women’s relationships with each other. However the critics receive the new film, they ought to bear in mind that, for all the brunch chatter, this show has never been a story about men. Sex and the City was always, baseline, about us girls; about how women’s friendships can be complicated and bitchy, but also meaningful, supportive and lasting.”
April 23, 2008
Listenings
Tonight my friend Jennie and I had the great pleasure of going to see Jhumpa Lahiri at Harbourfront reading from her new book The Unaccustomed Earth (recently read). It was a great event, fascinating to see these masterful stories are made by such a young and slightly nervous person– for me, they’re a bit richer for that, of this earth. She was a wonderful reader, reading from her story “Hell/Heaven”, and having heard it in her voice, I do want to go back and read it again.
I’ve written before about my feelings towards readings– that I’ve long found it difficult just to listen, and they force me to use un-exercised muscles. Though being bad at listening is certainly no desirable trait, and I always striving to become better at this, and some readers and some stories definitely make it easy. Of course it’s not all about self-improvement– I do enjoy readings. I like the idea of bookish gatherings, and they do make me feel better about the world in general– a whole room full of people who’ve shown up to be read to. It all can’t be so bad after all…
I haven’t mentioned yet that Michael Ondaatje was also reading tonight. I mightn’t have mentioned at all– I was there for Lahiri. But his reading was stunning. I’ve read Divisidero and found it not unsatisfying but baffling, and all the baffling stuff ceased to matter tonight when I heard the story in his voice. Perhaps his stories are meant to be told more than read, where they are just dissected, may fall apart, his images failing to withstand much scrutiny. But it was such a marked difference when I was listening, the kind of difference I’ve never really experienced at a reading. When I couldn’t perform dissections, refering to previous paragraphs, underlining points and pencilling question marks. Instead it was forward momentum, unstoppable, and I could only go along for the ride. The niggly problems didn’t stand out then, the bits and pieces, but they culminated into something larger, washing over me to cast a spell under which the story was perfectly reasonable. His last line took my breath away, and I don’t even mean it figuratively.
April 22, 2008
Life is too short
That I’ve never read Eat Pray Love doesn’t mean I’m not amused by furious tirades against the book: lately, “Eat Pray Love Shut the Fuck Up” and “Eat Pray and look at me.” Stephanie Nolen’s blogpost: “one tiny source of levity amidst the heartbreak… the Zimbabwean flare for names.” Ivor Tossell’s, “They’re never gonna give you up Rick Astley” is brilliant. How your home library is a real estate selling point (via Stuart, though I’m not sure why he was reading The Telegraph‘s property section). Though at said paper, I came across this fascinating Doris Lessing interview. The work of the great Grace Paley surveyed (and I am excited, for I’ll be rereading her collected stories soon!): “”Art is too long, and life is too short… There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
April 13, 2008
Metaphoric Cake
Yesterday we held a small engagement celebration for our friends Jennie and Deep, and I baked a cake for the occasion. But because I didn’t want to brag, or give the wrong impression of my domestic prowess, even before I baked the cake, I had an idea about how I wanted to approach this blog post.
I wanted to explain that though I do have a reputation for baking a lot, I am not very good at it (and you will soon see why). I wanted to explain that although I have improved since the infamous butterfly cake I baked at Kate Wilczak’s Midsummer Party in 2000, I am still very much an imperfect baker. That not being good at baking hasn’t stopped me from doing a lot of it, but that a lot of this comes down to how much I really like eating. I would have added to this proviso also that I am not especially good at decorating cakes, but I wasn’t actually aware of this fact until yesterday.
But it turns out that none of this explaining is necessary, the cake being yet another chapter in Cakes Gone Wrong, the epic tale I’ve been writing for years now. It did not go terribly wrong, as everybody finished their slice, and when I came downstairs this morning Stuart was eating another for breakfast; people don’t tend to go for seconds of outright disasters. But the cake was, I will say, a bit dense, solid. I was terribly disappointed, as there is nothing more embarrassing than serving up a cake with the consistency of cheese. And worst of all– it was all my fault.
You see, I recently inherited a Sunbeam Electric Mixer. And not just any Electric Mixer, but one that had previously belonged to Rona Maynard. It had even been a wedding present from her mother, so really I could have sold it on eBay, but of course I wouldn’t dream of it, owning too few Canadian writers’ small appliances as it is (I expect you have the same problem). I also love the mixer aesthetically– it looks terribly cool up on the shelf here in our new kitchen. And I do dream of being Nigella, so I wanted it for mixing reasons too, of course.
But I’ve never used an electric mixer before. Have you? Did you realize that when you did used one, that you don’t actually have to do anything? That the bowl just spins and spins and the batter mixes just like magic, and the effect is hypnotic, and fabulous is a 1950s housewife styly, and I was thrilled and taking photos, and the batter mixed and it mixed and it mixed?
(Did you realize that a cake batter doesn’t really have to be so mixed at all? That a quick swirl with a wooden spoon would have sufficed? I sort of did know that, but oh, it would not have been so much fun. But maybe then, my cake would have turned out something like fluffy. It seems one can love their electric mixer too much.)
I mixed my batter for ten minutes.
My dear mother-in-law once told me that anything that gets eaten cannot be deemed a failure. Under such a standard then, my cake gets a passing grade. It was most definitely not a success, though, except in terms of lessons learned: in baking logic and mixer restraint. To make me feel better, everybody at the table decided to pretend that the texture was intentional: strength and density as a metaphor for Deep and Jennie’s love.
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
April 8, 2008
Sark: The World's Newest Democracy
Am I ever excited to pass along a link to Sark: The World’s Newest Democracy, a short documentary film by my friend Paul Kutasi. Partly because I take every opportunity to brag about my clever friends, but also because the film is fabulous. Sark is a small island in the English Channel, and the last feudal state in Europe– but not for long. Well done Paul.
