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
August 9, 2007
The non-presence of friends
“I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious or self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention– there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.” –Carol Shields, Unless
August 7, 2007
August
“Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstilll; nothing withers, and autumn is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the lamp is hung up on its peg beside the door.” –Tove Jansson, “The Summer Book”
August 3, 2007
An island can be dreadful
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.” –Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
