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.
September 28, 2007
Canoeists carried
“The canoes carried the canoeists and the canoeists carried the damselflies and everything seemed weightless. They were heading towards the first day of August, the street lights were noticeable again, and a few leaves were turning yellow, indicating in their minimal, elegant way an end to this long, warm summer and the beginning of a darker chapter.” –from Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air
September 27, 2007
Particularly telling
From The Guardian Review of When To Walk: “It’s a sign of how good a writer she is that you even forgive Ramble’s perusal of boxes of memorabilia – usually the sign of a book that deserves to be forgotten beneath the bed.”
Exactly.
September 22, 2007
I have to hope
~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk
September 18, 2007
Bay window
The very best thing I’ve read lately is R.M. Vaughan’s “Dominick’s Fish: The things we leave behind when we die” in the latest issue of Walrus, which uses an amazing story about aquarium fish to demonstrate that “the concept of disposibility is itself false, a convenient conceit.” And writers’ rooms continue at The Guardian, with two of my favourite writers: Sue Townsend and Margaret Drabble (photo borrowed here [and oh I wish I had a British bay window to call my own]). For more good reading, go here for Ben McNally, and then go to his new shop (which is just up the street from my husband’s building- as if he needed yet another place to be sent on errands to). Rona Maynard gets a great review, and a review of Cloud of Bone, the book I’m reading right now. Giller Prize Giller Prize Giller Prize. Hooray.
September 7, 2007
If memory were a colour
“Something of my grandmother was sealed here in ink: in her careful, controlled penmanship, in the choices she made over what to set down. She had preferred a fountain pen over a ballpoint; the evidence was here, in the flow of ink from a fountain pen, as she wrote this recipe on how to preserve a rose: Dip the whole blossom and stalk in melted wax, coating completely to seal from the action of air and the passage of time. If memory were a colour, it would be this blue, the colour of the ink my grandmother used to preserve her treasured memories from the wasting effects of time.” –Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Turtle Valley
September 3, 2007
Why Dickens
“People sometimes ask ‘Why Dickens?,” which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with a friend at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’ England. Now if that isn’t an act of magic I don’t know what is.” From Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip
August 28, 2007
A Word from Rosie Little
“I could get all writerly about it, and call it an ‘aqualine nose’, but to do so would be to confine its owner for all time to the pages of fiction, for how could I ever expect you to believe that he truly existed were I to plonk such a literary phenomenon squarely in the middle of his face? An actual nose– a nose of flesh and bone and cartilege– might in be be aqualine in profile, but it is a strange fact of life that it is almost never so described unless the describer has a pen in her hand or a keyboard beneath her fingertips”– Danielle Wood, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls
August 24, 2007
Yes
No one has ever made as much sense as Heather Mallick in her latest column Worshipping at the Alter of Cheap. “We should buy goods as sturdy as we can afford, but fewer of them. Instead, middle-class homes are packed with plastic toys made in China, brightly painted and without aesthetic charm, not that kids care. Kids are pulled around in wagons that look like plastic turquoise dugongs. Wooden wagons with red metal trim have real style. But they are more expensive. The fact that they are beautiful, will last longer and can be handed on to other children and to those sensible and praiseworthy secondhand toy shops does not matter. You chose the plastic blob. You worship the god of Cheap.”
August 15, 2007
In the underwater realm
“…though in the underwater realm nothing seems impossible, and some of the strangest things are true.” –Margaret Drabble in her acknowledgements to The Sea Lady
