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
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 7, 2007
Work to do
“I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work… I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local cafe, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a brilliant hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner– what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.”– Carol Shields, Unless
November 2, 2007
And throughout all this time
“And throughout all of this time, each event flew down like a separate pattern threading itself through a bolt of cloth. Each moment hummed with energy, shifted and settled until assured its own space and shape. And then, some unseen hand darted a needle into the entire bolt and drew it together so that all of the patterns merged and no single image could be unravelled or pried off.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
