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
November 1, 2007
Favourite short stories
Top ten short stories in The Guardian. I believe I’ve got ten of my own, in no particular order, because I’ve never met a list I didn’t like.
1) “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
2) “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
3) “Scenes” by Carol Shields
4) “Astonishing the Blind” by Jack Hodgins
5) “Wants” by Grace Paley (and everything by Grace Paley)
6) “True Trash” by Margaret Atwood
7) “Down At the Dinghy” by JD Salinger
8) “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” by Carol Shields
9) “Moral Disorder” by Margaret Atwood
10) “Feathers” by Raymond Carver
October 31, 2007
What they are
“My life unknits as I lie here. How many days? How many nights? My stories are my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s, my daughter’s. I did not plan any of them; they became what they became; they are what they are.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
October 21, 2007
A book's right time
“There is only one way to read which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag– and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is a part of a trend or a movement… Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” Doris Lessing, 1971. Preface to The Golden Notebook.
Which is a wonderful thought and entirely true. However, like all truths, I can poke holes in this.
On “dropping books which bore you”– a contentious point in reading circles. I rarely do it myself, can think of two or three books in the past year, and why don’t I drop books which bore me? The Golden Notebook is a case in point: last Tuesday afternoon I was pulling my shopping trolley through the Roxton Road parkette, dispairing that The Golden Notebook had ever been written. “I hate it,” I was wailing, as the trolley bumped along. “I’m 192 pages in, and I don’t think I can take 400 more.” Why not drop it, it was suggested to me? “But what a waste of those 192 pages,” I cried. (These are the problems, clearly, of the more fortunate people in the world). “What am I ever going to do?”
Indeed, the book was a slog. Structurally the problem is obvious: essentially broken up into four sections, the first one takes up half the book. The currency of the book was also a problem, as it was not so current nearly fifty years later. Its politics were obsolete, its structure made me wonder if I was being made fun of, I was bored bored bored, there on page 192.
But then I turned to page 193 when I got home, and the whole book changed. Suddenly it made sense to me, and from then on I was enjoying myself. Nothing dramatic had shifted, but the pieces now fit. I understood what Doris Lessing was trying to do with her fragmented, enormous novel. I understood what she was saying about men and women, idealism, writing, the point of art at all. But not completely– so much of this went over my head. I truly believe that Anna and Molly might have had a better time had they spent time with men who weren’t horrible. Indeed a lot of the book was still a bit tedious, but what The Golden Notebook is attempting to capture is life. Or life at a a time, and it does, I think. Not since Woolf have I ever read a text more Woolfian. “I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of…’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images”.
I try to read the books I “should” or “ought”, whose authors have just awarded Nobel prizes, because I am not as effective a self-educator as Doris Lessing. I need a bit of help every so often, to fill in my gaps, to fill out the world. And I tend not to drop the books which are boring me either, because so often page 193 is waiting just around the corner.
October 7, 2007
Style and me
Lately something strange has been happening between me and The Globe and Mail Style section. Once a source of inordinate wrath on my part, now Style is one of the parts of the Saturday paper that I enjoy most. Part of this could be down to the fact that I’ve become older, less poor, and less wrathful over the years. I’m still not really interested in fashion, skipping such features, but I do regularly read Style for the articles. Ha ha. But I do.
This also says a lot about Focus— namely that it’s disappointing usually. But Style seems to have become more substantial. And of course it’s no coincidence that Leah McLaren’s writing appears to have improved as my own knee-jerk bitterosity has decreased, but still some weeks McLaren’s articles are quite well-done. And nearly every week I find myself appreciating Karen von Hahn’s columns, this week in particular with “Why are women so angry? Pull up a chair”. I like Russell Smith’s column. I love the restaurant reviews. Even the gardening page, which pops up from time to time.
And okay, maybe I am becoming more interested in fashion (or at least less interested in perpetually resembling a hobo) because I took Leah McLaren’s advice a couple of weeks back and started wearing eyeliner daily, and I feel significantly more attractive as a result– and not just due to those who have informed me that I might be. This weekend Style celebrates my most favourite colour in the world, informing me that “red is the new neutral” and I feel as though my whole way of being has been validated. Today I even purchased the hat which Leanne Delap featured in her “Knock-off” column last weekend “Cloche Call”. (Which is a really tacky thing to do, now that I set it down in words, but it is truly a wonderful hat. See photo below).
So I have changed. It’s one of the best things about growing up, actually: you don’t have to so angry at everything. You also can afford to go shopping. And maybe all this constitutes selling out, but I am way less ugly these days, and Style is too. I don’t know if I’ve come down to their level, or they’ve come down to mine, but something is eerily synchronous. Which I’d worry about a whole lot more, if I weren’t so happy with my hat. 
October 4, 2007
More from Kate Grenville
“In the years after Lilian’s Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don’t wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me– one of my favourite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.” –Kate Grenville, from Search for the Secret River
October 4, 2007
So much history
“Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually? There weren’t enough glass cases to hold it all”. –Kate Grenville, Search for the Secret River
September 30, 2007
No Nuit Blanche
Here is a photo of Stuart and I experiencing our urban landscape. Alas, we did not get to Nuit Blanche. On the way home from a brilliant night at Rebecca Rosenblum’s (with such good company as Chapati Kid), I shared public transportation with people going to Nuit Blanche, and their company made me want to go home to read. I’m glad I did.
And now we’ve just arrived home from The Word on the Street, which was a brilliant afternoon. I should have paid more attention to the scheduling though, instead of showing up blind, as I’m sure there was a lot of good programming I missed. Such as Elizabeth Hay, whose novel I finished Friday night and was the best book I’ve read this year. I could have heard her read! She could have signed book! I lined up at the author’s signing tent anyway, and told her how much I’d enjoyed her book. Managing not to be too much of a blathering idiot, which is sweet relief. Afterwards I also met the lovely Kim Jernigan of The New Quarterly, which was exciting. And finally to the main event, as Patricia Storms presented and read from her new book 13 Ghosts of Halloween. It was delightful. She was absolutely entertaining, the presentation was fabulous, we got hear her sing!, and after she signed my book. Plus I got to meet her, which was nice. I am an ever-adoring fan.
So a good day, in daylight. I freaked out though, about the proximity of The Vic Book Sale to The Word on the Street Crowd, and wondered if they’d leave anything for the rest of us tomorrow. And then I came to the conclusion, all on my own, that even if they didn’t, I have eight billions books of my own still to read, some of which I bought at the book sale last year, and a whole host of others on reserve at the library. Which I thought was very mature, and I deserved a pat on the back for. Whenever I refrain from childishness, I always feel this proud.
Today I picked up The Beatles Blue Album, which made me fall in love with them years ago, and I want to again. Now reading Alice I Think by Susan Juby, which is out in its own grown-up edition, and, really, it positively should be.
September 28, 2007
Thinking back and forth
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air, which is to say I’m positively bewitched. 100 pages from the end, and expect a review sometime tomorrow. I am positively enveloped; I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. To have a story so gripping and writing so good is rare, really. And the book has been doing strange things to me. “After a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time of my life.”
That passage set me thinking about the most vivid time of my life, and last night around 10:30 I was digging through boxes to find my journal from September 16th 2001-May 31 2002. The exact dates were incidental, but that time was on fire. Anyone who was there would know that, and it seems I remember it very poorly upon rereading my journal. Stories and anecdotes I have no recollection of, which is strange. Though the writing is good– this surprised me. When I read my fiction from that period, I want to bury myself in my backyard, but the journal was really lovely in places. The stories it told were often sad too. Funny with vividness– I think it comes from the whole spectrum of emotions, confined to a small space. “My time there was the most crazy time of my life.” Vivid, yes, but I wasn’t happy. I remember those days epically, but they were tough to be in the thick of.
Whereas. Tonight, in my less vivid life, I arrived home with my husband, who takes the subway to my work every day so we can walk home together. “I need to read,” he said, when we got in the door. He is currently enthralled by Little Children. So we sat down on the couch together, books in hand, the kettle on for tea. A straight hour of nothing but books, tea, and biscuits, and perfect quiet. Elizabeth Hay has created something amazing. And the sweet bliss interrupted only to get up get the pumpkin risotto started.
