December 20, 2007
Spending days
I have a talent for spending days. I am also quite good at wasting them too, but I can make the choice now, which is something. Particularly since I am on Christmas vacation. Oh my job is a wee bit dull, but one can’t complain for the pay is good and I don’t need to return there until January 7th. And I spent yesterday so utterly stimulated, reading through my manuscript, reading the entirety of Claire Cameron’s The Line Painter, unable to put down Canadian Notes and Queries, and chatting with the mailman in my track pants. I met my Creative Writing allies in the eve. Today I just finished reading my own manuscript, I’m reading When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud whose books never fail to give me a whole world, and at 3:00 I’m going to get my hair cut. And some people might find such days mundane, but then they just don’t understand magic.
December 20, 2007
Various robins
We received another robin Christmas card today, from England of course, where robins are a winter bird. A harbinger of Santa rather than springtime, which it took me a long time to realize and I still forget sometimes (for only this morning did I finally realize why BBC Radio 1 had been playing “Rockin’ Robin” every day for the past week).
Transatlanticism is a dangerous gig, really. You take robins for granted, or at least Helen Humphreys did in her otherwise impeccable The Frozen Thames: “The Thames has frozen over. Birds have begun to freeze to death, particularly that small symbol of spring, the Robin Redbreast, and instead of allowing this happen, the people of England have taken the birds into their houses so that they may shelter there until spring returns.” But no, of course. “Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.” How was she supposed to know that robins could be such various things?
December 18, 2007
Monumental Post
Ohh! Monumental post, thanks to a very generous friend: my first issue of Canadian Notes and Queries.
December 12, 2007
Post on my mind
Steph with more to say about post has reminded me of my own Ultimate Post Office Story from when we lived in Japan two and a half years ago– do have a read. And I will shut up about post soon, but these days as I read 800 pages of letters, visit my local PO weekly and anticipate red envelopes in my mailbox every day (and they’re beginning to trickle in) the whole thing is very very much on my mind. With pleasure.
December 10, 2007
The letters
“Thinking it over, in my case it’s the letters that I miss mostly– why, obviously, comes from living so far away from most dead people I really adored. (Oh for the writing on the env[evelope]!) Much love, Henderson” –Jessica Mitford to her sister Deborah, 1994
December 6, 2007
Post in books
My love of post is so unabashed, and I’ve still got that tremendous crush on our mailman, even though I am sure it’s unrequited because during my previous incarnation as student/ housewife I used to meet him at our door each morning wearing track pants. But I don’t care much– I get excited at Canada Post vans, I covet pen pals, I subscribe to far too many periodicals, I make out with postboxes in airports, I’ve got an in the post label here on my blog.
On Sunday I sent out my Christmas cards– 43 of them, and at least one to every continent except Africa (where unfortunately I don’t know anybody), and when I say every continent I really mean it. What a treat indeed to post a letter to The South Pole. Doesn’t post make the world so delightfully small and in a way not even the internet could ever manage?
At Crooked House Stephany Aulenback has been celebrating postalness lately, in particular the very best thing since “books in the post” which is, of course, “post in the books.” I’d never made the connection before, between my love of mail and how much I enjoy reading collections of letters (which I’ve only really discovered in the past year actually with Decca and A Memoir of Friendship. ) But there clearly is a link, and Stephany has made me think back far to the postal books I’ve been loving for a long time. The Jolly Postman, of course, but also Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw which I read over and over again when I was little. When I first moved to England I found a book called Dear Exile in my hostel (and stole it, I think) and loved this story of friends separated by continents. I am very much looking forward to reading A Celibate Season, the epistolary novel by Blanche Howard and Carol Shields. “For Esme– with Love and Squalor”. Stephany mentions the wonderous 84 Charing Cross Road.
It’s not really such a stretch, is it? That those of us who love books and love letters might be the same people in the end?
~She is always delighted by the arrival of the post, though it ought to be routine by now because the postman comes each day at three. But no, she anticipates the tip tap of his shoes, the thunk in through the letterbox and the footsteps’ retreat. A bundle of ephemera waiting on the floor. There is always something, a stack of something.~
November 27, 2007
Charming lunacy
I do hope that India Knight and Andrew O’Hagan are still friends, even though they’re no longer an item. Only because O’Hagan’s piece in the LRB and Knight’s latest column are so complementary– and particularly timely as I’ve just started reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.
In his review of the book O’Hagan gets Mitfordness just right: “Never… have sentences appeared so rhythmically in tune with a sense of the ridiculous, or so ready to snigger at the disaster of common beliefs. In that the sense the book is a masterpiece– it contains the DNA of a national style– and in the future people will read it to understand both the charming lunacy of English manners and how a singular mode of self-hood could shape the language.”
And India Knight bemoans the end of letters, writing: “This is a plea for a return to pen and paper. Admittedly I am almost fetishistic in my love of stationery but there is nevertheless a real pleasure to be had in writing someone a proper letter and in taking care over it. And it’s likely to end up, well-thumbed and cherished, in some cache of effects for your grandchildren to find – as opposed to expiring when your computer does, lost for ever, disposable and ultimately meaningless.”
October 30, 2007
Peppermint Twist
It was with real pleasure that I received the latest issue of The New Quarterly in the post today, containing my very own story “The New Peppermint”. Should you wish to purchase a copy of the magazine yourself, here for where it can be found on the newsstands. It’s a beautiful issue, redesigned and so rewardingly. Also contains a piece by Elizabeth Hay, and you can imagine that for me to be published alongside her is a tremendous honour considering the way I feel about her latest novel Late Nights on Air. So obviously I am pleased as a writer, and as a reader I can’t wait to get down to reading the whole issue through.
September 21, 2007
Friends
Ah, friends– the sugar on my berry. I received an envelope in the post today from one of my oldest friends (“since we were girls” I am nearly old enough to say), inscribed with the same symbolism we used to affix to notes passed in grade nine math. Indeed, I am a great appreciator of history. But then also of new friends: what kind of a miracle are they? Is it not enough that I met brilliant people when I was twelve and was smart enough to discern they’d be good to know, but that I continue to meet brilliant people to this day? How could such a miserable bloody world manage to be so brilliantly peopled, and bloody all the same? That I do not know, but I do know that I came home tonight from an evening with a new friend, quite hysterical with joy. My new friend. All right, I’ve known my new friend for two years now, but for me most friendships require a while to bud. And in the last few months this one has bloomed, positively. La la la my new friend. Our conversations set the world on fire.
August 2, 2007
Precision
“‘It’s odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one’s letters,’ said Mr. Bankes.
What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate…” -from To the Lighthouse
