May 12, 2009

Magazine as Muse

My friend Rebecca Rosenblum (you know her, with a book just nominated for the Danuta Gleed Award, and she’s off to Japan this very day) has a wonderful piece in the current issue of The New Quarterly. “Stuff They Wrote” is part of TNQ’s “Magazine as Muse” feature, in which writers credit magazines that inspired them to start writing down words, and even sharing them. Rebecca has written an ode to edgy teen magazine Sassy, and its “staffers” in particular. She writes, “Sassy was like a novel in a fundamental way. It had characters. Sassy brought that always-lurking I-perspective of journalism to the centre. The writers didn’t take over the stories (usually) but they didn’t elide themselves, either.”

Sassy was a world in which Rebecca could imagine herself, the writers bridging that gap between her life and theirs, suggesting limitless possibilities for the kind of woman girls could grow up to be. And when Sassy became swallowed up by a corporate behemoth, and a strange zombie Sassy emerged, Rebecca knew enough to know the difference, and had confidence enough to put pen to letter-to-editor to say so. It wasn’t too long after that Rebecca had her first story published, and she wouldn’t dismiss the idea of some connection there.

Confession: I didn’t like Sassy. Sassy scared me. Their rules were too loose, they went too far, they used questionable language, and were touting something I found close to anarchy (ie SEX!). As a young teenager, I thought the wide world was generally terrifying, and was convinced that drugs, drinks and dyed hair were signs of slips towards hell. Beware of scruffy boys with cigarettes who might dare to sport an earring. (And tuck your shirt in, young man). Mine was a puritanism born of fear of the unknown, as most puritanisms usually are.

So I had a subscription to Seventeen. Writes Rebecca, “Seventeen was imperative-voiced: columns and service pieces about how often you should brush your hair and how you might get into a bad crowd if you didn’t listen to your real feelings. Seventeen wasn’t like a story; it was like a textbook, only there were Eye Makeup and French-Kissing classes instead of Math and Geography.”

Oh, but some of us were in dire need of schooling. In a world so incredibly chaotic (with dances, and lockers, and gym class– oh my!), a textbook offered some assurance, and I followed mine quite dutifully. Back to School must-haves, awesome locker organizers, lipstick colours, and the best kind of Caboodle. I learned that it was okay to like Evan Dando (which was something upon which Sassy and Seventeen concurred). Sassy preached that you could be whoever you wanted, but I didn’t know who that was yet. I preferred the message of Seventeen instead– play the game right, and I just might fit in.

Not that I did fit in. I had oily hair and pulled my pants up to my armpits, but one issue of Seventeen in particular suggested that I might have half a chance. It was the issue from April 1993, whose date I only remember because I had it with me on a family vacation to Florida when I was in grade eight. It was the one single issue that I even remember, as not so much a muse as a re-framing of my world view, or at least of my place in it.

This was a new re-formatted Seventeen. A significant departure– I’ve found a record of old covers on line, and March 1993 was neon-hued, Andrew Shue playing volleyball. And then came April, with its muted-toned Earth Day theme. Shouting, Save the Earth, Girl! Which was cool. I don’t remember noticing the model’s hideous eyebrows then, but I liked her funky rings and hat. Inside, I remember a feature on slam-poetry (though it might well have been slam-poetry-inspired Bohemian fashions, but alas…) headlined, “Poetry/ is such a thing now.” Groovy, man. I wanted a beret. Someone wrote a piece about how amazing were the Beatles lyrics (citing, “She’s the kind of girl you want so much she makes you sorry…”) in comparison with whatever hit of the day was out then, and it was the first time I’d ever seen The Beatles (to whom I was obsessively devoted, so much that I was forbidden to speak of them at the dinner table because I was so incredibly boring) noted in contemporary pop culture. Poetry too, which I fancied myself a writer of. Book recommendations included one called Mrs. Dalloway— something like “the cool story of a single day in the life of a woman getting ready for a party!” I tried to read it, didn’t get it, but began to have it fixed in my mind that one day I would.

I probably just should have read Sassy, but I wasn’t ready to leave my shelter. The granola-y “reuse, recycle, renew, respect” Seventeen, however, provided a glimpse of an alternative culture that might provide me some space within it. Books were cool, The Beatles were cool, and poetry was cool, all of which I’d known already, but now somebody else knew it too. It was 1993, and I was inspired. En route to Florida I bought a flannel shirt at a Kentucky outlet mall– this was counter-culture. Naturally, I tucked it into my tapered jeans that were still pulled up to my armpits, but it was something, nonetheless. I was on my way.

December 31, 2008

The pause before the scones

Before heading downstairs to bake the final scones of 2008, I pause to post some New Years wishes. For 2009, I make no resolutions, because things will be changing whether I will them to or not, and certainly, I am no longer (as) in control of it all. During 2008, we drove down some amazing highways, saw new places (California!), found a new home, I read 155 (some) extraordinary books, I’ve written and published an amount that satisfies me, had fun in all kinds of weather, and enjoyed myself much in the company of family and good friends. For 2009, I wish health and happiness to those around me, a fat kicky baby in my arms, to read some more extraordinary books, and at least two handfuls of truly good days.

November 28, 2008

Reading in Bed

I think that except for the obvious things, like eating, and sleeping, and breathing, etc., I haven’t been doing anything as long I’ve been reading in bed. Not continuously, of course (unfortunately, though I do give it a run for my money most every Saturday morning– am I ever not late for brunch? I don’t think so. Now you know why) but nearly every night for about twenty five years, I’ve propped my head up on two pillows and read by the light of a bedside lamp. These days I do so beside my husband, and such symmetry is all the domestic bliss I ever dreamed about as a girl. He usually turns off his light before I do mine, but he understands that no matter how late it is, no matter that I might get just a page or two read, that for me reading in bed in just as much a part of getting ready for bed as is flossing (though I remember to read in bed much more often).

I used to get in trouble for reading in bed. I used to go to school and tell my teachers that, so they’d feel sorry for me, and were usually uncomprehending about how any parent could be so cruel. No one understood, however, that without the “lights out” call, I would have never gone to sleep. So I used to have to resort to extremes in order to keep reading– under the covers with a flashlight, hiding in my closet with the light on, or demanding that the door be left open a crack and reading in the dimmest of light. (I used to get in trouble for this too, for reading in the dark. “You’ll need glasses,” my parents warned me, which was the wrong thing to say. Because I lusted after glasses, they were my very heart’s desire. I resolved to start reading in light that was only dimmer).

Reading in bed has gone on through a variety of living situations. My parents stopped with the lights out, eventually, and I used to fall asleep in my cereal instead. I see now that I was lucky that my roommate never complained about how the light shone on and on during my first year at university. When I traveled in Europe, I read in my bunk with a flashlight. During the three months I lived in a youth hostel in England, a cheap and tiny reading lamp that clipped to my bed stand was my most cherished possession. When we lived in Japan and slept in a loft that we could hardly sit up in, we read by a thin florescent light on the wall that buzzed on with the pull of a chain, and when we were finished went out with a pop. Recently I was reading and my lamp’s light bulb burnt out, without a spare in the house, and I was so distressed and would not rest until my husband gave me his. We were less symmetrical that night, but I felt better, and he got to go to sleep…

Reading in bed in the mornings is something different– more indulgent, less essential. It can never be just a page or two either, and time always stretches on for hours. Until so much light comes in through the window that I don’t need my bedside lamp at all, and then I start to see the point of getting out of bed. Eventually.

November 16, 2008

That vantage ground

Of the many fascinating stories within Mary Henley Rubio’s biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Gift of Wings, I was perhaps most interested to learn new things about Canadian literary history, and of William Arthur Deacon in particular. Henley Rubio writes of Deacon’s early ambition to establish himself as “Canada’s pre-eminent literary journalist”, at which he succeeded, as he would be book review editor of The Globe & Mail for over thirty years.

From A Gift of Wings: “Deacon was ‘infused with a sense of mission for the establishment of an entire, self-contained, dynamic Canadian cultural milieu– a Canadian authorship, a Canadian readership, a Canadian literature– and sometimes he called himself its prophet.'” “Deacon wanted to develop the literary consciousness of Canadian readers, educating the Canadian public into more ‘sophisticated tastes'”. “Deacon regarded hopelessly old-fashioned the readers who appealed only to ‘low-brow’ unsophisticates… He described these readers as a national embarrassment. In particular, he regarded [Montgomery’s] books as shallow sentimentalism and the ‘nadir’ of Canadian writing.”

Of course it struck me that literary arguments have gone much unchanged in the last eighty years. This point not unknown and particularly vexing to critics who still echo Deacon’s opinions today. One could be asking why Canadian literature refuses to evolve, to unfold, and yet to me, as a reader, it is also particularly telling about the ephemeral nature of criticism itself.

Deacon’s attacks on Montgomery (which were extensive, and went on for the latter part of her career) were intensely personal. On both accounts– that a writer whose work is so decidedly targeted becomes a target herself, and that Deacon’s approach was just as much about himself, his provocations an attempt to be noticed at the beginning of his career. And here I get as sentimental as they come– it was really mean. It was sexist, petty, small-minded, narcissistic, and self-serving, wreaking tremendous havoc on Montgomery’s mental health. One could argue that such is the way this literary game works, but nearly a century later– as the writers touted by Deacon are as unknown as he is, and Montgomery is still internationally read, now regarded as a writer whose work is worthy of serious academic pursuit– Deacon is scarcely a player. So what on earth was the point of him?

We need critics, of course, however wrong they might turn out to be. We need the kind of critics Virginia Woolf wrote about in her essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”, “the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold… [whose] mere fact of their existence had a centralizing influence.” But what kind of centralizing force would someone like Deacon have had, someone who made his career out of iconoclasm, out of destruction for its own sake? History shows now what a centralizing force was that.

There is a stupid confidence necessary to appoint oneself iconoclast– how can anyone be so sure? Seems to me the wisest critic would bear in mind the lesson Woolf put to writers in her essay “Modern Fiction”:

“We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving… but with a circular tendency, should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat in the crowd, half-blind with dust… It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert…”

November 6, 2008

We love the whole world

We’ve always loved America here at Pickle Me This, for such love was the religion upon which we were raised. But all the same, we have never been so proud to be your upstairs neighbour, never more inclined to break out in a round of I Love the World. We have never been more inspired to believe in change, to look with hope towards the future, and believe that anything is possible. That the whole wide world can be so much better than this, and your country is the reason why it will be. You’re the kind of city I’d like up on my hill, and I am so envious of the opportunity you all had to elect a person so deserving of victory. Congratulations. The road is still long, but because of yesterday, everything is different already.

Bookish Election links from The Guardian: PrezLit Quiz; do good writers make good leaders?; a new short story by Lorrie Moore; and a review of Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife.

August 22, 2008

Alternatively…

Alternatively, from a rather strange book called Great British Short Novels (circa 1970, which I bought for a quarter and from which I am currently rereading Heart of Darkness) we find this:

“Given its narrow confines, a short story cannot probe character beyond a few basic traits. It cannot allow for great scenic detail or elaborate plot to illuminate the conduct of its protagonist. Effective as a means for providing sudden insight or creating a powerful emotional impact, it cannot diffuse its focus to include anything beyond the immediately relevant.” –from “Introduction: The Art of the Novella” by Robert Donald Spector

August 17, 2008

An affinity for pie dough

I’ve been baking pie all summer, having decided it was a very good way to honour summer fruit (and keep some around for the dead of winter), and also because it has never once been so hot that turning on the oven has been ridiculous. (I was also inspired by watching Waitress.)

This summer I’ve made strawberry rhubarb pie, strawberry pie, raspberry pie, peach pie and blueberry pie. Each of these pies has also had its filling run into the bottom of my oven (which I never clean) and so a smoke-filled kitchen has become the usual. Each time the pastry has been delicious.

As you can see by the photo, when I bake I make a mess. I do clean it up afterwards, of course, but what you can also see by the photo is my grandmother’s rolling pin. I know very little about the origins of said rolling pin, and it is quite likely she picked it up at Zellers in 1998, so it is probably not a valuable heirloom. But I find that I like that it was hers, I like that I roll out my piecrust with it, the pin she would have rolled her own piecrust out with. Genetics aside, my grandmother and I never had a whole lot in common, and so I appreciate the connection that is this.

In my family, people like to take one another apart to figure out how we were constructed. My mania for pie-making, for instance, my mother wonders about, for she’s never had much of an instinct for pastry. I think she wonders if I was a changeling, and so it brings her some comfort to attribute it to an atavistic pie gene instead. To tie it back to my grandmother, but I resist this. Mostly because I am twenty nine years old and would like to believe that I am a singular creation, not the product of anything, nor susceptible. I am ME, and I bake pie because I do, and also because I really like to eat it.

My grandmother was good at all grandmotherly things, very dutiful and I’ve saved the notes she wrote me when I was younger, admonishments, some of them, to be a good girl. Never a demonstrative woman, it was through these gestures, like her pies and like her cookies, that my grandmother showed her love. And so it is unfortunate that I, in addition to pie-baking, have always had a talent for delightedly irritating people of my grandmother’s sensibility. For asking questions like, “So, if your name is Helen, then your nickname must be “Hell”, right?” You can see that I’ve always been adorable.

I took my grandmother’s rolling pin when we cleaned out her kitchen after she died, mostly because I didn’t have a nice one. I didn’t think much of it, pie after pie, for such a long time– that my hands, like her hands did, are rolling out the dough. That object, the rolling pin, had been in her cupboard and that it lives in mine now. I never suspected that we’d come to have this much in common, this affinity for pie dough, and it took me awhile to admit it was anything in common at all.

These things creep up on us, I think, the innumerable ways we can be wrong about ourselves, who we are, and the whole wide the world around us. The connections discovered, too late it seems, but maybe not. The bits and pieces we carry, how they can become invested with meaning, continuing life on and on.

August 1, 2008

On finding math in my book

It’s amazing, rereading, how it takes you back in time. Providing intimate encounters, so unexpected, with the yous you used to be. For example, yesterday I opened my copy of The Stone Angel for the first time since I read it in my grade twelve English class. First, on the first page is written in my (still) best friend’s hand: “I hate this book because I can’t read it because I am illiterate,” ascribed to me, which must have been funny once. (What is funny, of course, is that illiterate was spelled wrong.) And then how about the trigonometry on the inside cover?? At least I think it’s trigonometry, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s my handwriting! That once upon a time that gibberish meant anything at all to me, and I struggled over it, slaved over it, vandalized my very own paperbacks with it (and for naught, I think I see now considering I don’t even know what it is. Though did anybody even pretend that trigonometry was going to be useful?). What a strange life I must have lived then, and no wonder I sort of missed the point of the book, and we’ll just add this to the exponentially ever-growing list of reasons why I’m glad I get to be an adult now.

July 6, 2008

Rereading Anne of Green Gables

The first time I encountered Anne in print was in an abridged version of the story at the beginning of my Anne of Green Gables colouring book. I first read the novel when I saw seven or eight, my understanding of which was greatly influenced by the film. My Anne was always Megan Follows, Marilla Colleen Dewhurst, etc. Try as I might, these associations refuse to be shed. Which is not such a bad thing.

The last time I read Anne of Green Gables was seven or eight years ago, the first time as an adult, and I read my wonderful annotated edition. I remember finding the annotations interesting, though I can’t remember any of them now. I do remember being struck by the novel’s humour. As a child I’d taken it all as sincerely as Anne did, but now I could see that much of the book was really quite funny.

This time rereading Anne of Green Gables, I went back to my old novel. It has become quite a treasure, though the dust-jacket is gone (I hated dust-jackets when I was little, how they’d get torn and ratty, and I used to throw them away). I wish I could remember what the cover had looked like. My edition is a reprint of the very first edition, old style fonts and textual decos, illustrations by Hilton Hassell with a line of text underneath each on. On the inside cover is inscribed, “To Kerry Lea, From Grandma and Grandpa, Xmas 1986”. Note that from my grandparents, I would go on to receive hardback copies of Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island for my birthday and Christmas 1987. In 1988, the whole rest of the series arrives from them, albeit in paperback. Perhaps the most long-lasting gifts I’ll ever receive. What treasures now…

Kate Sutherland has been rereading Anne, celebrating her centennial (for indeed she turned 100 years in June). She’s been part of the group Blogging Anne of Green Gables, sharing rereadings and providing some fascinating insights.

Certainly Anne is a fine book for revisiting. Rereading is an absolute joy, and like any book worth a trip back to, it’s amazing how much the perspective changes. The mark of any good book, such richness, and multiple layers readers can reveal for themselves as time goes on. As most young readers do, I identified with Anne, in all earnestness I wanted to be her. Because of her triumphs, I think, in the face of all adversity. I think all awkward little girls (which is most little girls) want to believe that triumph is possible. They’re sold on Anne’s version of romance, of her poetry, of the wilds of her imagination, just as her schoolmates are at the Avonlea school. How she casts a spell on the whole world.

Now I see though, rereading, that though Anne is the impetus, her story is about how that very spell changes Marilla Cuthbert. How Marilla realizes her true self through this bewitching orphan girl. “It almost seemed to her that [her] secret, unmuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity.” How from the moment she encounters Anne, she is biting back smiles, swallowing her “reprehensible desire to laugh”. Until the end of the novel, when we find her in explosive fits of laughter, or when Matthew discovers her having a good cry. She learns to feel, to be, and to love. She is a wonderful, rich character, more than I’d ever thought to give her credit for.

I was also struck by the bookishness of Anne. Literary references scattered throughout the text, Anne’s quoting poetry, but it’s not just Anne. I’d always thought Diana Berry was a bit bland in comparison to her bosom friend, and so I was surprised to first encounter her as follows: “Diana was sitting on the sofa, reading a book which she dropped when the callers entered.” Her mother instructs her, “Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers. It will be better for you than straining your eyes over that book. She reads entirely too much… and I can’t prevent her… She’s always poring over a book. I’m glad she has the prospect of a playmate– perhaps it will take her more out of doors.”

The little girls of Avonlea read with fervour, exchange novels like I did stickers at their age. They’re all variable types, none of them quite like Anne, but the bookishness is a common denominator I found fascinating.

July 1, 2008

Canada Day

Though tomorrow is the big day, Canada’s 141st birthday, today means a bit more to me because it was three years ago that I moved to Canada. Moved back to Canada, I realize, but the return didn’t lessen the significance. That in addition to the luck of being born here, I had the great privilege of choosing it too– not everybody gets to do that. So to be home, doubly so, and this is a fine one, certainly.