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?
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
November 2, 2007
Remarkable Things
So many remarkable things have come to pass in the last day. That I was shat on via avis for the second time in my life, and as the luck that arrived after the first time was epic, I’ve got high hopes for the hours ahead. (Though perhaps my luck was that I was hit on my hand, which was wearing a mitten, which I was able to remove then, and continue on my way.) That I joined Facebook and then unjoined six hours later, without even adding a friend, for it was altogether clear that Facebook would have destroyed my life. That today I purchased The Journey Prize Stories 19— a real book, from a real bookstore, which contains a story by my ridiculously exceptional friend Rebecca Rosenblum. And lastest, but certainly not lamest, that we are going to California!! Yes indeed, tickets bought. I’ve always wanted to go to California, for I love Joan Didion and the Beach Boys, who are worlds apart, but have been telling me its stories for years now. For me, California is the most mythical place in the whole universe, but the fact of it is about to prove me otherwise, I suppose, when I set foot there. In San Francisco, to be specific, come February, and I am terribly excited, for that is the way one tends to be when lifelong dreams come true.
October 25, 2007
Point Form
Anansi‘s 40th Birthday is amusingly recapped at the Descant blog.
A new Mitford book is out today– a collection of letters between the sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosely, which I can’t wait for. Remember how much I loved Decca’s? On here for how “no one will ever write letters like this again”.
Kate Christensen, whose first novel I enjoyed last month upon introduction by Maud Newton, is interviewed by said Newton. Of the bits I loved best: “In my late teens and early 20s, when I was developing my idea of how I wanted to write, I glutted myself on twentieth-century English novelists. It seemed to me that, en masse, Drabble, Pym, Spark, Mantel, and Wesley, as well as quite a few equally brilliant Englishmen, had signed a British-Writer Pact agreeing to foreswear heavy-handedness, egotistical earnestness, and didacticism and to embrace instead black humor, deft social insights, wit, lightness, and a float-like-a butterfly sting-like-a-bee verbal dexterity. I wanted to sign that pact, join their gang and live in London and drink in their pub.”
I used to enjoy Maud Newton’s Friday Blogger Stephany Aulenback, and so I was happy to find out she was blogging again. And even happier when I saw she’d published an interview with Sara O’Leary. She is the author of When You Were Small, which is one of the most beautiful children’s books I’ve ever seen.
October 23, 2007
Cancel intellectualism
Now devouring The Abstinence Teacher by Joe Perrotta (who wrote Election). Oh, I wish I could take a holiday from the rest of my life, and crawl under a duvet with a flashlight to finish it.
I am very looking forward to reading Eleanor Wachtel’s new book Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields.
Today I was flattered to read that The London Review of Books is “an esteemed, small-circulation literary periodical read mainly by academics and bookish intellectuals.” See, we get it at our house. But then I suppose any bookish intellectualism may well be cancelled out by Spice Mania.
I thought Anne Enright’s piece was fair, thoughtful, and honest, by the way. And I am also looking forward to reading The Gathering.
October 18, 2007
Fiction is all right.
I thought Philip Marchand’s article “Why novelists are nervous” was sort of strange, the nervous novelists being John Updike and Philip Roth. Apparently Updike wrote a novel seven years ago that sold poorly and Philip Roth has remarked, somewhat self-deprecatingly, I thought, “The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.”
Oh Philip, fear not! Ben McNally and Book City’s J. Frans Donker are not worried about the status of literature in the slightest. Neither is anybody I know, most of whom devour fiction like it’s pie.
Marchand’s hysteria is the result of the International Festival of Authors now featuring nonfiction writers, Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe in particular. Which is interesting, I think. One of these writers, Gray, is prolific, acclaimed and, though I’ve not read her work, seems to write nonfiction about as literary as it gets. And then that the other three “nonfictioneers” are novelists first and foremost, which Marchand doesn’t even refer to. Granted we could make something terrible of the fact that market forces have pushed these writers to turn to nonfiction, and the hysteria could continue unabated. But I’d rather take the angle that perhaps nonfiction writers are those who should be nervous. Watch out Margaret MacMillan! The novelists are passing into your ranks. They’re injecting fact with fancy and, I would be willing to bet, the writing has never been so good.
October 17, 2007
Clippings
Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I’m still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing’s The Good Terrorist in the future.
I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail‘s “Focus” section last weekend– this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that “it’s in our nature… to return to the street”. But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.
Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.
And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn’t like them. “Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion.” Isn’t she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.
See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains…). A column she’d written in 2001 called “Craving life in the face of death” moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I’ve got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I’ve saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don’t coincide, which is almost always.
But it’s also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you’d think.
October 12, 2007
Links and Hijinks
Richard Wright is profiled. They’re going to let Claire Messud be a Canadian (which is v. v. exciting, I think). Doris Lessing’s Nobel win means that now I’ve got occasion to read my new copy of The Golden Notebook. I’m also intrigued by talk of her latest project here. Bookgadget devotee Kimbooktu has started up a new collection of library photos here (and I’m in the archives). Dovegreyreader reads Lucy Maud Montgomery.
October 11, 2007
Descant Blog
And in exciting news, I’m thrilled to announce my new incarnation as a Descant Blogger. My first posting goes up this weekend, I believe. I’ll be writing about the remarkable intersections between reading and every day life, and I hope that you will join me in that conversation.
