January 14, 2008
Sadness and Guilt
My weekend contained best friends at brunches and lunches, perfect chocolate cake, delightful cousins, new shelving units, knitting, reading, jobs done and a bath-to-come. This weekend’s Globe and Mail was terrific. Stephanie Nolen’s “An Inuit Adventure in Timbuktu” is the most amazing piece of journalism I’ve (ever?) come across. (“I wasn’t really intending to read this,” my husband said to me, “but once I started I just couldn’t stop”.) Well-written, beautiful, fascinating, and will make you think of things you’ve never considered before.
And then the books section– G&M Books, what’s happened to you? For you’re becoming sort of wonderful, it’s true. More than an assemblage of watered-down reviews by friends of friends, and paragraph-length excerpts. The 50 Greatest Books Series is terrific, and not just because the first week’s choice is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oh it’s been done before, I know, but don’t you find that great books can be discussed forever and ever?
And then the reviews themselves, epistolary goodness. Reviewing The Mitford Letters (which I loved), Graham Greene’s letters (which I’m reading), Eleanor Wachtel’s Carol Shields book (which is a treasure), Four Letter Word (which I can’t wait for). It was as though the Books Pages had tapped right into my heart.
I’ve also really enjoyed the latest Vanity Fair, whose lives of rich and famous feature such gems of phrase as, “Robin was an ongoing source of sadness and guilt to Lady Annabel after she allowed him to enter the tigress’s enclosure at Aspinall’s.” As they say, you really couldn’t make this up.
January 8, 2008
On reading
“I enjoyed the reading classes, and the opportunity to function as a sort of cheerleader. I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously, I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the author might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.
No wonder my students found it so stressful to read! And possibly because of the harsh judgments they felt required to make about fictional characters and their creators, they didn’t seem to like reading, which also made me worry for them, and wonder why they wanted to become writers. I asked myself how they planned to learn to write, since I had always thought that others learned, as I had, from reading.” — Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
January 2, 2008
The Best Way
“For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolation along with us on a bus.” –Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
December 29, 2007
A necessary enlargement
“For a long time, I’ve felt that reading novels is not escape; it’s a necessary enlargement of my life. I always think our lives are so sadly limited, even the most fortunate of us. We can only work at so many jobs, we can only live in so many places and experience so much. Through fiction we can undertake these journeys and yet remain at home and enormously expand our comprehension of the universe.” –Carol Shields, “Art is Making, from Random Illuminations
December 28, 2007
What she was finding also
“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.” –Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
December 27, 2007
I do have quite a bit of faith
“I do have quite a bit of faith in the endurance of love. We always hear about divorce statistics, for example; what we never hear about is the endurance statistics, which are also amazingly impressive. If we look at it the other way around, say, fifty percent of marriages survive. That seems an extraordinary achievement. None of that ever seems to find its way into fiction, the endurance of love. It sounds stunningly boring, of course, when you talk about the endurance of love– maybe there’s a better phrase– and no one pretends that an enduring love is uninterrupted. I think love has always been disrupted and renewed…” –Carol Shields, “Always a Book-Oriented Kid” from Eleanor Wachtel’s Random Illuminations
December 16, 2007
"The only way to escape this cul-de-sac is invention"
“I know I can’t discover the key to peace in Israel and Palestine. But I want to do justice of some kind, and to make– or find– something of value, of which I will not be unspeakably ashamed. I want to write, and I want the writing not to be a lie.” –Jonathan Garfinkel, Ambivalence
December 10, 2007
The letters
“Thinking it over, in my case it’s the letters that I miss mostly– why, obviously, comes from living so far away from most dead people I really adored. (Oh for the writing on the env[evelope]!) Much love, Henderson” –Jessica Mitford to her sister Deborah, 1994
December 7, 2007
Freedom
I thought the essay “Caught Between Two Languages” by Jowita Bydlowska from today’s Globe & Mail was absolutely perfect. “I learned to love language again. I found that words like rustle, fruit, rain and beloved are as melodic in English as they are in Polish. I wrote again and it was freedom. But it wasn’t – and still isn’t – total freedom.”
November 25, 2007
More teacups
“Posh people had more jokes just as they had more teacups, and when they sat down to write both were in evidence.” –Andrew O’Hagan, “Poor Hitler”, reviewing The Mifords: Letters between Six Sisters
