September 5, 2008
Marvelous Blog Find
Marvelous blog-find of the day is poet Evie Christie’s Desk Spaces, a gallery of Canadian writers’ work spaces. Thanks to That Shakespeherian Rag for the discovery.
September 3, 2008
Links and more links
The best thing we read all weekend at our house was “Just Two Clicks: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle” in the LRB. Hilary Mantel’s “In the Waiting Room” (not avail. online) was similarly awful, but beautiful to read. Katherine Parrish thoughtfully raises the topic of gender and The Salon Des Refuses, which I didn’t mention, but it certainly occurred to me: “John Metcalf’s excoriating indictment of the Penguin Anthology accuses the publishers of “pulling a Binchy,” comparing their choice of a mere practitioner like Jane Urquhart to a hypothetical decision to ask Maeve Binchy to edit a comparable Irish anthology. Why not Frank McCourt, I wondered… Whimsical women with their stories. Serious men with their ideas. Ahhh. The good old days.” Rona Maynard’s “Dear Governor Palin” is powerful and smart. And Lynn Crosbie on the resurrection of Brenda Walsh. Now reading Hilary Mantel’s novel An Experiment in Love.
September 1, 2008
Readers Reading
I’m the reader reading today over at Julie Wilson’s marvelous Seen Reading. Click through to hear me reading from my favourite novel Unless, stumbling over the words only minimally with the sound of a waterfall in the background.
August 21, 2008
Eleveneses and Scone Rage
Another excuse to drink tea, and I never knew: from Lucky Beans I discover “Elevenses“. I’m totally taking it up, as long as I get to continue to have eightsies, twelvsies and twosies too. Wikipedia even says elevenses are literary: “For Elevenses, Winnie the Pooh preferred honey on bread with condensed milk. In Middle-earth it is a meal eaten by Hobbits in addition to second breakfast. Paddington Bear often took elevenses at the antique shop on Portobello Road run by his friend Mr Gruber and usually received some sound advice about his current thorny problem at the same time.”
In other tea-ish news (and from the same magnificent source), I am fascinated to learn that Liam Gallagher was charged with air rage and banned from Cathay Pacific after an altercation over a scone.
August 10, 2008
Let's Link
Let’s link, shall we? On the response to Penguin’s recent Canadian short story anthology, with Salon des Refusés upcoming (and me with CNQ and TNQ due in the mail). I am not certain of the politics myself, but I am just pleased that I’ll soon have plenty of stories to read. Steven Beattie has turned August into a short story celebration. And at Joyland.ca, a short story by Claudia Dey. But back to reality (ha ha), on “New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs”. Rona Maynard spreads the word: P. Hilton is funny! Lizzie Skurnick reads Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes. The Hart House Review goes online. Heather Mallick writes (wonderfully) on John McCain’s lack of internet savvy**. “Summertime” also grew on Sarah Liss. Anne Enright on how she names her characters. And Ten Reasons not to mind the rain.
**So just suppose I was one of those people who likes to go around hating the CBC, and thus finding their content and programming utterly irrelevant/offensive/a waste of tax payers’ money/a symbol of what is wrong with socialism today etc. So wouldn’t the fact that I am always commenting on the CBC’s webforums suggest otherwise? That even I, a fervid decrier of Liberal Media Bias, am wholly engaged with the content of our nation’s public broadcaster? That I in fact cannot get enough of it? Regardless of the tone of my comments, mightn’t I be contributing to a vast majority of the CBC’s online hits, thus ensuring their media domination into perpetuity? I just wonder…
July 22, 2008
So much can slip on by
I’m now rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I’ve visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion’s descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion’s consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I’ve also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.
Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing “One Two Three Four” on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson’s post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb’s struggles upon discovering she’d written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.
July 8, 2008
Good Links
Links of late include “The Cattle-Prod Election” from The LRB: “This endless raft of educated opinion needs to be kept afloat on some data indicating that it matters what informed people say about politics, because it helps the voters to decide which way to jump. If you keep the polling sample sizes small enough, you can create the impression of a public willing to be moved by what other people are saying. That’s why the comment industry pays for this rubbish.”
Rona Maynard writing brilliantly of “The Hillary I’ll Be Watching”: “She has become in defeat the woman she could not be while her victory seemed inevitable, or at least dimly conceivable—a woman freely and fully herself while stretching the bounds of possibility before the assembled cameras of the entire world.”
Luckybeans visits a tea estate. Rebecca Rosenblum encounters a roadside box of mugs. Celebrating The London Review Bookshop (whose success is partly down to cake). Dovegreyreader ponders Canadian Literature (and “A Case of You”) from her Devonshire perch. Fascinatingly, on why you’re probably wrong about probability. Lately I’ve been reading and enjoying Antonia Zerbisias’s Broadsides Blog, and today in particular, her links to comedian Sarah Haskins’s Target Women videos– “Yogurt” is my favourite. Justine Picardie on Henrietta Llewelyn Davies, “a psychic astrologer with a literary client list, and an Oxford degree in English literature” and blood ties to Daphne Du Maurier to boot.
Speaking of yogourt, I just bought three tubs of the stuff. As well as pudding, soups, banana smoothie ingredients, apple sauce, vegetable juice, and ice cream. I’ve got the day off work tomorrow. Any idea what I’ll be getting up to hmmmm?
June 26, 2008
Worthwhile
You’ll have to buy the magazine, but do check out Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Summertime When the Visigoths Go Pillaging” in the July/August issue of The Walrus. I’d quote the whole thing, it’s that lovely, but I’ll settle for, “…I suspect we all have inward links between some books and where we were when we escaped into them. Everyone knows the memory links to scents or the pop songs of teenage summers, but I suspect if we reach back and in, we’ll find many of the books of our lives to be vividly time and place specific too.” Indeed.
My friend Lauren Kirshner has started blogging, and her posts demonstrate her immense talents. (She’s got a book Where We Have to Go being published by McClelland and Stewart in the spring). Kate Sutherland’s post post on Anne of Green Gables at 100 (to the day) is fabulous, quoting from Montgomery’s journal entry the day her book came: “There in my hand lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existence—my first book!” Fine Lines (my favourite diversion) is going to become a book! And a profile of Jhumpa Lahiri.
I also went to the ROM this weekend. Their exhibit “Out from Under: Disability, History, and Things to Remember” is extraordinary (and on until July 13).
June 11, 2008
Links, and Maxime
A Wrinkle in Time revisited. “Geared Up” (from The Walrus, on urban cycling) is a stellar piece of journalism. Rona Maynard remembers a friend. Type Books in Toronto Life (thanks for that, Jennie). Lorrie Moore profiled.
In light of The Bernier Affair, three for thought on femmes fatales. Heather Mallick says that Julie Couillard’s fabulous breasts are not a crime. Though I’m not sure I’d go as far as as to say that Couillard is “involuntarily or just reluctantly in the public eye”. She’s faced harsh criticism, no doubt, but she isn’t a victim. Which is why I love her, why I love Maxime (I call him that), and why I love the whole affair. It’s a capital A Affair, it is, and miraculously, considering the Canadian government and the Conservative Party in particular, involves only fantastic looking people. Like American TV! Except that no wives were betrayed, no children had their very foundations broken, and even though National Security was breached (how exciting!), we all sort of know it wasn’t.
Corruption and intrigue, with everybody behaving as badly as everybody else, no one really gets hurt. Except Maxime, he of the gorgeously tailored suits, but I feel like he’ll recover. That’s what happens when Ladykiller meets the Maneater (and she’s even got a trail of dead behind her [and those still living have joined witness protection programs!]). She’ll recover too, and probably get a talk show. Maxime will find a new companion. The whole story is already beginning to end, but it was a wonderful one. A reprieve from the boring soundbites, soulless leadership, uninspiring, grating, patronizingly mind-numbing excuse we’ve got for governance in this country. Good governance, of course, would be nice, but I will settle for scandal in the meantime. Sadly, scandal is the very best our sorry lot can do towards making Canadian politics as fabulous as Julie Couillard’s breasts are.
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.
