December 17, 2007
Diamond sharp
The Globe books pages were exciting this weekend. Rebecca Rosenblum’s story in The Journey Stories 19 is called “diamond-sharp”. A great review of When To Walk which I enjoyed reading this Fall. And a review of a new by book by Andrea Barrett whose Servants of the Map I so adored.
Beyond books, Joanna Schneller should be lauded for her article “A Culture Saturated by Sexism”. Though one of Schneller’s most intriguing points was an aside. “In three popular films this year – Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno — women who find themselves accidentally pregnant dismiss the option of abortion almost immediately.” Which is a bit disturbing, but understandable really, and for a most assuring reason: abortion makes for such boring narrative. Or at least everyone I’ve ever known to have had one has just gone on happily with the rest of her life.
December 12, 2007
Education, Enlightenment and Delight
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was so urgent. Indeed I’m not sure how one could learn to be anything without a houseful of books (as insulation and inspiration), however metaphoric or otherwise.
She writes: “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
She raises the question, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
And it’s an interesting question. Lessing is right, though even if I didn’t think so, she knows better than I do. There is something to be said for listening to one’s elders. The world is where it’s at, and books are its closest cousin, but though I do suspect that a whole day passed on the internet would not be one most productive, so often does the internet manage to serve as a portal not only to literature, but also to the rest of the whole wide world.
Of course my perspective is probably skewed– I tend to stick to bookish blogs and websites anyway. But all the same, just look what I’ve found there lately: Lessing’s speech for starters, which was published in a newspaper halfway around the world; fascinatingly on “little people” in British literature; thoughts on readers within literature; on friendship and what poetry can do; a video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on African writing; some book recommendations.
This year internet sources have pointed me towards books as follows: here for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; here for anything by Kate Christensen; here for Lucky Jim; here for Penelope Fitzgerald (and how fitting! She’s blogged about her today) and Persephone books; I found Laurie Colwin here; and I could go on, but now, in fact, I am beginning to waste time. (See Ms. Lessing, I am listening).
Just as I believe there is no great disconnect between literature and the world, neither does the internet exist in a vacuum; these are worlds which can feed one another. Of course it’s possible to to waste time on the internet, as it’s possible to waste time anywhere, but if you’re discriminating and discerning enough, you can harness the medium. Look around and see that the internet can take you exactly where you want to go– not just towards amusement, but onwards to sources of education, enlightenment, and delight.
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.”
November 27, 2007
Board Games
It’s not bookish in the slightest, but I’ve certainly been doing a lot of reading since I started my job in May. Mostly proxy circulars from TSX composite which don’t tend be exciting, but today is exciting as the results of our research are published in the Globe & Mail‘s Board Games 2007. A must-link for all you who are passionate about corporate governance.
Which is, um, anyone?
Long live day jobs!
November 25, 2007
RR and Cake
My infinite list of favourite things about Rebecca Rosenblum includes the fact that we once decided our Serious Thursday writer meetings would involve cake in celebration of all our literary successes. A smart decision, I say now, considering the accomplishments of said Rosenblum and my love of cake. Congratulations to her on winning the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award for her brilliant collection of short stories.
November 20, 2007
Because you've brought it up, on timelessness
So last week Russell Smith responded to Ken McGoogan’s essay “Tilting at the Windmills for Literary Non-fiction” and he did so much more strongly than I did. (I can’t find Smith’s column on-line, but I very conveniently have it here in paper form, headlined “In defence of the novel, and the test of time”). Oh Russell Smith, who came of novelistic age with the marvelous Muriella Pent. Russell Smith who is a walking defence of the novel.
Smith underlines the illogic of McGoogan’s thesis: that he says fiction shouldn’t be promoted because not enough people read it. Says Smith, “He seemed to be contradicting himself: If [non-fiction is] the most popular, then it’s the most popular. What’s his problem?” He questions McGoogan’s assertion that non-fiction better stands the test of time, and doubts whether Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition is truly a book people will “still” be arguing about in one hundred years. “Say, Ken, you wouldn’t be thinking of the furiously held opinions among Arctic historians, would you?”
The lesson, says Smith (invoking tea!), “is partly that we all live in our own little teapots”. But then Ken McGoogan has responded from his. Oh, Ken, who should have quit whilst he was ahead. His stompy reply doesn’t read so well: “[Smith] writes that I think novels are stupid, when I have had three published!!!” (Okay, exclamation marks mine). “Margaret Atwood wrote the intro to Frozen in Time!!!” And finally, without any modification, “As to literary longevity, Mr. Smith writes: ‘It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?’/ A fairer question might be: Ken McGoogan or Russell Smith? On that one, I’ll take my chances.” Oh, he better hope his name appreciates…
Literary longevity is about as easy to predict as the weather. Read Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and among the variety of ways you will be enlightened, you will learn how threatened was Woolf by near-contemporaries “The Edwardians”: Mr’s Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. That their work and reputations so seemed to overpower her own within her lifetime. How astounding, Virginia Woolf– she of the song, the movie, the collections, the cult. That she wasn’t always in fashion? Nobody writes songs about Galsworthy after all.
The point being that nobody knows how it goes, and the canon is all about fashion. But also to show what happens to non-fiction, as opposed to fiction. I am sure that today Mrs. Dalloway reads more similarly to how it did 80 years ago than “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” does, and this, my friends, is timelessness. Not that I believe timelessness determines value, but with the subject brought up already, I will say that fiction fits the bill in a way that non-fic never will. (And I am speaking in very general terms).
The context of a novel is fixed, while that of non-fiction is much more in flux. For example, the best book I ever saw was Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance by Rose, 1958. Which is not to say that non-fiction loses its value over time; no, I would say that value is added, for all it tells us about the past, and in particular about what we thought of the past in the past. But in this process, the text becomes more object than book– a relic even. Moreover we tend to judge it based on how much it got wrong, which is usually most things. And this isn’t timelessness, but rather time magnified.
Teapots indeed. Now, to bed.
November 14, 2007
Stuck in traffic
I am now reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is quality from cover to so-far, and I am so pleased to be a part of it. Another fabulous feature they’ve got is “Who’s Reading What” at their website, where contributors recommend books worth reading. My own suggestion is more than a bit embarrassing though, as I chose a little-known novel called Late Nights on Air. You’ve probably never heard of it– a very underground sort of book for those of us in the know. Note please: I made my suggestion ages ago, before anyone had ever heard of a Giller.
In other bits, Steven W. Beattie on blurring the lines between content and advertising. (I’ve found the whole world a bit unnerving since I read it.) Heather Mallick on Jan Wong’s new book Beijng Confidential, which I can’t wait to read now. RR is fascinatingly preoccupied by readers inside books. Ira Levin, whose Rosemary’s Baby my household was obsessed with earlier this year, has died at 78. And on the LRB: “a junk-free journal”. May I say also that the December issue of The Walrus is excellent, and if you buy it you won’t be sorry.
November 8, 2007
Chunky battered cod
Toronto writer (and my good friend) Rebecca Rosenblum sings a love song to The New Yorker: “If you start early enough with any reading material, it will form it’s own ideal reader (this is true of just about anything, I suppose; it’s how you explain families).”
Rebecca Gowers (remember When to Walk?) guest-blogs for savvy readers: “It annoys me that “flighty”—a word, by the way, that Shakespeare used in Macbeth and which then meant speedy—has now declined into a resolute negative, stuck in a corner with “giddy” and “harebrained,” besides meaning, at a stretch, sexually undependable. The concept of flight is itself surely so marvelous to a naturally earth-bound creature that to limit the associations of “flighty” to the unpredictable whirligigging of a short-lived insect seems like an awful waste.”
And links for Elizabeth Hay (who, sadly for the sake of completion, is not called Rebecca): 12 or 20 Questions; interviewed at the CBC; and in The Guardian (even though Margaret Atwood owned the spotlight in a protest about doves).
Oh, and speaking of words: my new favourite is “mimsy“.
November 6, 2007
Narratives and Polemics
I begin by noting that I like the redesign of the Saturday Globe & Mail. Everything I like best is still there, and then there are additional surprises. I like that Books now starts on its front page; somehow the section reminds me just an ickle bit more of Guardian Review (though of course it’s still nowhere as good). The “Endpapers” essay is interesting too: this week’s was “Tilting at the windmills for literary non-fiction” by writer Ken McGoogan. An engaging piece, as he offended me terribly, but then he won me over by the end.
My offense stemmed from McGoogan’s initial dismissal of fiction, and stemmed for two reasons. One: that fiction is my religion (I am not being facetious) and so I’m bound to get a bit defensive. In my whole life I’ve never found anything closer to magic than fiction, and I’m sorry but non-fiction has never done that trick. I truly believe that slowly surely works of fiction can change the world, and in very different ways than either of these books did.
Second, I was troubled by McGoogan’s assertion that fiction readings were dull, that he “vastly prefer[s] an on-stage conversation or interview, or better still a no-holds barred panel discussion.” He gives the example of Edmonton’s Litfest at which “Audience members challenged speakers and presented arguments. By crikey, they had come to participate”. Yes, but. I personally feel that a book is best enjoyed in one’s own company, but what is wonderful about a public reading is the opportunity to listen. I don’t get that very often myself. No challenges, arguments, thinking of clever questions and retorts, but just listening: passivity is not always a bad thing and many more people should practice it. The world is not always ours to be attacked, or critiqued, but some meet it this way perpetually. With fiction, not so much, and I think this is only positive.
I will have more to say this week on appreciating non-fiction (in regards to Carol Shields), but for now I am not sure I agree with McGoogan that the genre is always the underdog. Indeed non-fiction receives less attention, but aren’t sales doing just fine? Aren’t non-fiction writers sought after by publishers, or at least much more so than fictioneers? Does good non-fiction really need the promotion McGoogan is suggesting it lacks? This I do not know for sure.
What I do know is that McGoogan’s synthesis is perfectly wonderful, as he calls for his revolution. “First step: We divide fact-based literature into two broad categories– narrative non-fiction and polemical non-fiction…. Second step: We abandon non-fiction… We cease to define countless literary works by what they are not”. He sees the necessity for these genres to stand up together with fiction, for each to complement one another. No longer the dichotomy : “Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three.” How positively healthy that sounds, how refreshing. I love that idea, and how fortunate that I read far enough past the disagreeableness to get to it: a patience I learned, perhaps, from my life in fiction?
