April 20, 2010
I don't know how anyone ever came to respect cinema as an art form
Jenny Diski, from “Mother! Oh God! Mother!” LRB 32.1:
“‘This is where we came in’ is one of those idioms, like ‘dialling’ a phone number, which has long since become unhooked from its original practice, but lives on in speech habits like a ghost that has forgotten the why of its haunting duties. The phrase is used now to indicate a tiresome, repetitive argument, a rant, a bore. But throughout my childhood in the 1950s and into the 1970s, it retained its full meaning: it was time to leave the cinema – although, exceptionally, you might decide to stay and see the movie all over again – because you’d seen the whole programme through. It seems very extraordinary now, and I don’t know how anyone of my generation or older ever came to respect cinema as an art form, but back then almost everyone wandered into the movies whenever they happened to get there, or had finished their supper or lunch, and then left when they recognised the scene at which they’d arrived. Often, one person was more attentive than the other, and a nudge was involved: ‘This is where we came in.’ People popped up and down in their seats and shuffled along the rows, coming and going all though the B-movie, the advertisements, the newsreel and the main feature. No one dreamed of starting a novel on page 72, or dropping into the Old Vic mid-Hamlet (though perhaps music hall worked the same way; was that the origin of the movie habit?), and not even the smallest child would let anyone get away with starting their bedtime story halfway through, but the flicks were looped, both on the projector and in our minds. You went in, saw the end, and after you’d watched the beginning and a bit of the middle you figured out how and why it had happened that way. In the introduction to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson claims that postmodernism proper dates from the later 1960s, but let me tell you that the dismantling of narrative was rampant in cinemas up and down the country for decades before that. Maybe, after all, it was an interesting way of learning about story structure, but even so, how odd that no one thought it a strange way to proceed.”
April 14, 2010
The tea came from the East
“Mrs. Pigheights, without responding, raised the cup to her lips and was, as one sometimes is in moments of distress, delighted by the brief voyage along the inside of her throat. The tea came from the East and bore her away to the East, the East as it had been dreamed of and conquered by the British Empire, inlaid with saffron, sand, and multicoloured servants. The imagination holds in reserve a multitude of emergency exits. Always remember that, Lucie.” –from The Breakwater House by Pacale Quiviger, trans. Lazer Lederhandler
April 5, 2010
There were sorcerers for such things
“But when Zach typed an a, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father’s car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world , was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn’t involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of Zach’s life– and these days, machines didn’t sputter on you, develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked, or they stopped dead– the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn’t. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo– charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do what it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.” –from Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That
March 29, 2010
On Mothering and Mindfulness
“If feels ridiculous even to write about this, about Buddhism and yoga. I do not meditate, although I know I should and I have periodically tried. The voices in my head are as multitudinous and persistent as the lice that infest my children’s hair at the beginning of every school year. Moreover, I actually kind of hate the people who talk about things like mindfulness, or at least the ones I run into around here… Why is it that the most self-actualized people seem so often to be the most self-absorbed?
I’m no Buddhist, but still I wish I were a more mindful mother. A mindful mother would not get so knotted up about breast-feeding that she would forget that her job was simply to love her baby and keep him healthy, without torturing herself herself and him with that infernal pump. A mindful mother would not be so worried about her children being bipolar that she would be too afraid to laugh when her daughter reported hearing a voice in her head…
The thing to remember, in our quest to do right by our children and by ourselves, is that while we struggle to conform to an indeal or to achieve a goal, our life is happening around us, without our noticing. If we are too busy or too anxious to pay attention, it will all be gone before we have time to appreciate it.” –Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother
March 24, 2010
Women's writing is going to remake our literature
“We’re going to change what we think of as literature, to a certain extent, in order for women to be fully felt, I think, in our writing. We have wonderful woman writers… who are bringing us their experience. And their work is an oeuvre; it has a different shape to it, and it’s not going to fit with the old formula of novels. Women’s writing is going to remake our literature and make it whole, I think.” –Carol Shields, “Ideas of Goodness” (from Random Illuminations by Eleanor Wachtel).
March 9, 2010
"Staircase" by Susan Telfer
Staircase
I stand at the kitchen sink in my bare feet
that melting July morning as my mother was dying.
I hear the thumps start on the top steps
over my head. Know in that instant
that my baby has crawled up the staircase
for the first time and is now somersaulting down.
Turning from the sink and running through
the hall as I hear his soft body hit each step.
Reaching my hand out to catch his head
above the tiles. Scooping him up in my arms,
my heart bludgeoning through both of us.
Nursing him then as we breathe at last.
I caught him like when he was born in his sac,
that melting July morning as my mother was dying.
(from House Beneath by Susan Telfer)
March 7, 2010
Feeding the inward eye
“I suppose that an American’s approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children. Children’s literature is, in some ways, more important to us than it is to the English child. I contend that a child brought up on nursery rhymes and Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales can be better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the “inward eye” with the images in the books he reads when young, so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what “wuthering” meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.” –Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks
March 3, 2010
All winter long you wait for it
“All winter long you wait for it, knowing it’s coming, never really believing that it will.
Sticking your head out the door every morning from the first week of March on– nothing. Just one more scarf and gloves and plenty of Chapstick day. Shut the door tight, pull on an extra pair of socks and resign yourself to a lifetime of wet feet and cough drops.
Then it’s here, it’s really here, only when you’ve given up on it does it finally arrive, everywhere you look fellow spring-stoned zombies with their unzipped jackets flapping wide open in the warm afternoon breeze, sun-kissed perma-smiles on every stranger’s happily stunned face. “– from Moody Food by Ray Robertson
February 12, 2010
Why I love people…
“The idea grew as Morrison considered ways to make the cake pans fly better…”
From the obituary of Walter Morrison, who invented the frisbee.
February 10, 2010
As long as it's not dangerous
“The Cambridge History of English Literature was my constant companion, and it became infused with my cigarette smoke as I plodded through the pages. Almost all my women friends were smokers, some using cigarettes to affect a social ease and grace; others, more dependent upon them, becoming chain smokers. I myself was convinced that without a cigarette in my mouth I could neither study nor exercise any creativity. All unconscious of future revelations about nicotine, my mother would say to me, ‘Why not– as long as it’s not dangerous.’ And so I smoked my way through the Cambridge History of English Literature.” –from Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern (which is wonderful)
