October 15, 2009

Justification

Well, I have limited myself to purchasing only one book a month. But. We’re off to England on Friday, and therefore it only makes sense to order Howards End is On The Landing and Wolf Hall from there, as they’ll be either more widely available and/or a wee bit cheaper. And by the time I get back, What Boys Like will be out, and as I’ve been planning to buy that for ages, it doesn’t quite seem like my monthly allotment (which should be more spontaneous, you know). And that copy of Birds of America that arrived last week doesn’t count either, because I only bought it to get free postage on an amazon.ca order of CDs. So basically, we’re halfway into October and I haven’t even bought one book yet. I am very proud of my restraint.

All of this is a little less ridiculous, because I’ve been reading like a madwoman lately. Harriet’s naps have turned out to be much longer when taken on me, which means that I can read a lot and nap as well. So that’s what we’ve been up to lately, which leads to a Mommy who is better-read and less exhausted.

Now reading nothing! Or rather little bits of lots of things– I’ve been rereading Jennica Harper’s poetry, the LRB (I’m caught up to late July now), and the ROM magazine. Because I’m saving Birds of America for my holiday, and am too superstitious to start it before it’s time.

October 1, 2009

Why I love the LRB

As a person who loves driving but hates cars, I found Andrew O’Hagan’s “A Car of One’s Own” the very best thing I read today. From the London Review of Books, 11 June 2009. Read the whole thing. Excerpt as follows:

“I could easily say I loved my car – I missed it when I went to bed at night. On that first long drive from London to Wales and thence to Inverness – which took 14 hours – I believe I discovered my autonomy. As with all illusions, I didn’t care that others found the enchantment funny: the feeling was new, and its newness is something that millions of people express rarely but understand fully. In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo. That is the beauty of learning to drive late and learning to drive often: it gives you a sense that life turned out to be freer than it was in your childhood, that time agrees with you, that your own sensitivities found their domain in the end, and that deep in the shell of your inexpensive car you came to know your subjectivity. Of course, one may find these things in the marriage bed or in a gentleman’s club, but those places have rules and your car is your own bed, your own club. Music? Yes. Tears? Yes. Singing? Yes. Stopping under the stars? OK, if you must. And here is Tintern Abbey. And there is Hadrian’s Wall. And should I stop in Glasgow for a drink? If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most husbands, wives, parents, most believers – will know the rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways as the road performs its magic, pulling you back by degrees to some forgotten individualism that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one’s own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within. Though most of those men aren’t listening to Virginia Woolf – they’re listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.”

September 23, 2009

Eden Mills in the Sunshine

If you ever want to appreciate being out in the world, do have a baby. Though this means being out in the world requires a remarkable amount of luggage, but no matter. We had a wonderful time at Eden Mills on Sunday on such a gorgeous sunny day. The drive was beautiful, with splendid autumn colours (already!). We saw our good friends the Rosenblum/ Sampsons, which was splendid (though we really only saw them in passing– our readings schedules were quite different). On Publishers’ Way, we checked out The New Quarterly, where I bought a t-shirt that might fit once I stop breastfeeding, and Biblioasis next door, where I bought The English Stories by Cynthia Flood and said hello to the excellent Dan Wells. We listened to readings by Marina Endicott, Ian Brown (who was amazing– pictured here) and Miram Toews (who we knew would be amazing already. She was the reason we were there and she did not disappoint). And then Terry Griggs, and Julie Wilson, and I enjoyed it all thoroughly. Also enjoyed was the organic ice cream, cones of which we each had two. Perfect all around, until we got stuck in traffic out by the airport and the baby screamed until home, but alas. These are the chances we take.

August 25, 2009

Thinking is not a performance

I’ve just started reading The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens, whose novel The Girls I loved so very much a while back. And I’m starting Amy Jones’ fiction in The New Quarterly, which makes me look forward to her forthcoming book What Boys Like. Online, Lawrence Hill discusses his problem with the overuse of To Kill a Mockingbird in schools. Writer Laurel Snyder on overcoming her Twitter addiction: ” It’s the idea that thinking is not a performance, hard as that can be for someone like me to accept.”

August 19, 2009

Breaking up is never easy, I know.

Now reading Swimming by Nicola Keegan, which wasn’t at all what I expected, which is probably a fine thing. I’m also reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is more than I expected, which is an amazing thing. Its contents are so diverse, surprising, current and consistently excellent. I’m not sure if it’s wrong of me to say it’s more “magazine” than “journal”. And not because it’s less high-brow, but just because it’s interesting. I also just broke up with a trashy novel I was expecting to love and tell you all about, but it was crap, or at least its first 124 pages were, and life is just too short to find out if the rest of it is better.

June 22, 2009

CNQ

Canadian Notes & Queries is one of my favourite magazines, and now you can check out their brilliant new website. In particular, may I refer you to my review of Libby Creelman’s novel The Darren Effect which I enjoyed very much.

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.

April 22, 2009

Further excitement

My new issue of The New Quarterly has finally arrived! Honestly, never has there ever been an issue of a lit. journal I’ve so wanted to devour– Elizabeth Hay interviewed, Rebecca Rosenblum on Sassy, even Kim Jernigan’s Editor’s Letter is delightful. And speaking of Rosenblums, this particular one has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for her story “Linh Lai” (published in TNQ). I was also excited to see my favourite poet Jennica Harper up for a poetry award. Further excitement: Margaret Atwood’s Adopt a Word to Create a Story story has been revealed. It’s called “Persiflage in the Library” and it’s very cute (read it here).

March 8, 2009

Small magazine. Big roar.

Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written about the importance of small literary magazines in Canada. This in the wake of federal budget cuts that would eliminate Heritage Canada funding to magazines with a subscription base under 5000. Which, in the words of Bookninja, “is essentially every lit mag out there.” Read my piece, and be sure to join The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazines. At the bottom of the link, find addresses to which you should address your carefully worded letters of protest and support.

Thanks to Stuart Lawler for the image.

March 1, 2009

Women's bylines

One measly sentence in a massive article, but… “At the same time, Ambrose hopes to see more women’s bylines.” Which reads conspicuously on its own– I do wonder what kind of discussion surrounded this point. I wonder too why she thinks it’s a matter of mere wishful thinking. Still, as one who hopes to see more women’s bylines too, I’ll interpret this as a positive sign.