December 15, 2009
Bits and pieces
I’ve got some good stuff in the works here, but I need a day or two for polishing before it’s posted, so please bear with a little list of links instead of actual content. Oh, and also know that Canada Reads: Independently will be unveiled in the coming days. And further, that I just finished reading The Killings at Badger’s Drift by Caroline Graham, which was the first Midsomer Murders book. I only read it to uncover Barnaby lore, but I enjoyed it. Realize I’m lazy at mysteries though, refraining from trying to put the pieces together myself. You know that chapter where the detective knows who did it, lays all the cards out on the table and his subordinate (and the reader) are expected to draw their own conclusions? I don’t even bother. Puzzles make my brain hurt. I read these books for the plotting, so I’m hardly going to stop and think when I can flip over to the next page. I also read An Education by Lynn Barber, which I highly recommend. Less sensational than I’d been led to believe, but a wonderful record of a somewhat unconventional career in journalism.
Today at the Advent Books Blog, I recommend Cynthia Flood’s The English Stories. I loved this list of Books my toddler loves for no good reason that I can work out. Canada Reads’ official blogger defends the books selected for this year. The TNQ Cover story. And in case you missed it, Rebecca Rosenblum announces her second book.
November 12, 2009
There is no excuse
There is no excuse for the accompanying photo, except that my baby is adorable. Alright then, bookishly. I thumbed through the new Pierre Trudeau biography the other day, and now I am afraid I’m the only woman in Canada who never slept with him. He didn’t even want me to live with him and have his child, like Liona Boyd (who is Liona Boyd?) on the cover of Hello. This may or may not be unfortunate. I just finished reading What Boys Like by Amy Jones (review forthcoming!) and have just started Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”. Patricia has directed my attention to what seems to be the worst picture book ever: The Mischievous Mom at the Art Gallery by “high-octane duo” Rebecca Eckler and Erica Ehm. A new level of narcissism— we have to be reflected in our kids’ books now? “Finally — a picture book for the Starbucks-armed, BlackBerry-checking, gym-going working mother.” Perhaps you’re meant to read it on the treadmill. Chapters/Indigo includes a “Green Matters” option on its online catalogue, narrowing searches to books printed on FSC/Recycled Content. On the best Sesame Street songs (in honour of the show’s fortieth birthday). They forgot ladybug picnic. Charlotte on The Children’s Storefront, a neighbourhood institution that was lost in a fire last week. Rona Maynard’s secrets to decades upon decades of marriage. I’ve been enjoying books/music site Sasquatch Radio. WriterGuy directed me towards the interesting “How Waterstones killed bookselling” (in light of my recent post about how Waterstones killed book buying, for me, at least). And I’m wondering if I’m the only one who starts carrying around my next book to be read once the current read is down to the last fifty pages or so. Indeed, if I don’t have something fabulous to read within arm’s length at all times, I do start to get a little nervous.
November 5, 2009
Exploring the Other Side
I gave up hating newspaper columnists ages ago, and I don’t want Margaret Wente to be fired. But her recent essay on her new book only made clear to me the fundamental problem with her approach. People call her on being deliberately provocative, to which she thumbs her nose: “Would it be better if I deliberately set out to be inoffensive?” As though there were only the two extremes, and perhaps Wente is satisfied with making people angry, with provoking that response, but I can’t help think a great writer can do better than that. If conventional wisdom is really so off base, if “exploring the other side” is so important, shouldn’t she do it more carefully? Shouldn’t she actually “explore” instead of committing columnly acts of mischief? Has a Margaret Wente column ever changed anyone’s mind?
Provocation doesn’t make people think, rather, it puts up walls. Which is one reason I’m not as frightened as I should be by American right-wing media (but that might just be because I don’t have cable).
October 7, 2009
Some links
DoveGreyReader reflects upon reflecting upon reading (after reading Susan Hill’s Howards’ End is on the Landing, which has joined my bookish wishlist and I will probably buy it when we go to England next week, along with all the other books I’ll probably buy when we go to England next week. Too bad everything is my weakness, huh?). At Inklings, the first interesting article in ages I’ve read about e-books. Salon de Refuses lives on in academia! The misadventures of The New Quarterly at Word on the Street. Dionne Brand is Toronto’s new poet laureate. Hilary Mantel on being a social worker.
August 28, 2009
RIPs
Must admit that fateful day that took Farrah and Michael had me rolling my eyes only, but it does seem a bit much that Wednesday saw the deaths of Ted Kennedy, Ellie Greenwich and Dominick Dunne, each of whom meant a lot to me. Kennedy by virtue of being a Kennedy alone, and there was a time in my life when I lapped up Kennedy bios like they were fiction (and they sort of were). I know Ted Kennedy was both a hero and a dastardly villain, but I’m most amazed by a story I once read alluding to about him having sex with a woman in a crowded restaurant. I could find no further details, but it’s the best story I’ve ever heard. As far as I know, Ellie Greenwich got up to no such thing, but her music has been part of the soundtrack to my life (“I met him at the candy store, he turned around and smiled at me. You get the picture?” “Yes, we see.”)
But since we’re talking literature here, let’s focus on Dominick Dunne. Which means we’re not talking literature with a capital L, but I loved his books. When we lived in Japan, we frequented Wantage Books, a used bookshop in Kobe. Wantage Books was an English bookshop, which was rare and wonderful, and we’d buy at least ten books per visit. (It’s odd to remember what a precious commodity readable books were then, and how easy it was to take them for granted again). It was at Wantage where I found Various Miracles, my favourite Carol Shields book, discovered Margaret Drabble, and bought up every Dominick Dunne novel in the store. Stuart and I were obsessed with them, and remember reading them on my train commutes to work, gripping mass-market paperbacks that fit perfectly into my purse. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and A Season in Purgatory (speaking of Kennedys), People Like Us, and besides, he was Joan Didion’s brother-in-law, so I felt better about the whole thing.
There was something about the foreigness of our every day surroundings that made Dunne’s novels like a tonic. American, and glamour, and scandal, and intrigue– we devoured it like the books were bad for us, and perhaps they were, but they satisfied. They were delicious. And then I remember, after a string of Dunne novels, reading something else finally and being confused when there was no fil*tio by page three. I’ve since adjusted back, but I’ll always remember how perfect his books were at the time.
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 3, 2009
Weed whacking?
From Alex Good’s piece on negative book reviews: “Critics in this country are often accused of enviously cutting down our tallest poppies. For the record, I don’t see a lot of this happening, but even if I did, I would be inclined to think it good horticulture rather than conduct motivated by one of the seven deadly sins. The tallest poppies are precisely the ones that need the attention of a critical weed whacker. They suck up all the oxygen and take the most nutrients from the soil, crowding out all of the up-and-coming green. Better to pull such plants out of the ground, shake the dirt from their roots and toss them on the weed pile.”
Inarguable. The problem, however, is that Good’s metaphor is all too apt, and “whackage” seems to all too often pass for literary criticism in Canada, all clumsiness, frantic motion and violence implied. Is a poppy always necessarily a weed either? All thoughtfulness and consideration go out the window, and we’re left with paragraphs such as the following (from here):
“For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“
I have chosen this one example (which, admittedly, comes not from a review, but from an essay about Canada’s critical climate) because it’s so typical. The writer engages not at all with said poppy’s work, but instead their reputation. One could get the sense from these generalities and such immediate dismissal that the writer has read very little Atwood, actually, or none at all, relying instead on quipsy barbs overheard at literary dinner parties. This sort of thing is boring, lacking substance, and also alienating to readers who will read it and, no doubt, regardless of where their sensibilities lie, will then “merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“
Whacking, no. Pruning, perhaps, which in lacking bombasticism will earn the reviewer far less attention, but might begin a literary conversation that actually takes us somewhere.
July 13, 2009
Bits and pieces
I am so excited to read the final volume of the Anne books— I wasn’t aware such a volume existed, and wonder if it’s actually finished, as its form sounds quite fragmentary. But no less, my favourite Anne books were the last bunch (House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, Anne of Ingleside and Rilla of Ingleside), precisely for their dealings with “serious” and “darker” themes this book supposedly contends with– I couldn’t help but think about Anne’s stillborn baby in light of Montgomery’s own experiences, Leslie Moore’s marriage, WW1, the pied piper and Walter’s death, when Anne fears Gilbert has ceased to love her, etc. Guardian blogger discusses the “dark side” of Green Gables. Bits of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book called Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside to mind, actually, and Dovegreyreader interviews Byatt here. Speaking of interviews, Rebecca Rosenblum answers 12 or 20 questions. And speaking of nothing at all, 30 Rock ripped off the Muppet Show, why our federal tax dollars should not fund jazz, and Russell Smith on baby slings (he says do avoid the polyester).
June 21, 2009
A different kind of swim lit
The story is tragic, and I don’t wish to undermine that, but I am so absolutely intrigued by this part: “As her family told The Globe in a lengthy letter responding to an interview request, ‘She even combined her two passions for reading and fitness by figuring out how to read a book while swimming laps.’” I can’t even begin to imagine how this could be accomplished. A book enclosed in plastic wrap? A page skimmed at the end of every lap? An audio book and a waterproof Sony sports walkman? Regardless, I am impressed.
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).
