January 31, 2008
Bits and Pieces
My bits and pieces reading continues, and though all of it’s so good, I’m craving the solidity of a novel. So now reading Like Mother by Jenny Diski (whose blog I keep checking for updates), as well as My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead (which has just done me the great pleasure of introduction to Lorrie Moore).
I’ve been suffering from February in this mean mean wind, and it’s not even February yet. Consolation to be taken from a list of thoughtful artful stuff on the internet, 29 things to be happy about (via Leah), 100 books every child should read, and the teakettle whistle at the end of the Goldfrapp video.
January 29, 2008
Above all things
“I’ve been ringing up to your flat to see whether you were still in London &, if you were, to beg a cup of tea from you. I don’t like shop tea, & I can’t be bothered to make my own, & at the same time tea I love above all things.” — letter from Graham Greene, 14 September 1939 from A Life in Letters
January 27, 2008
Awake
I tend to take words seriously but I’d given all that up at Starbucks, where everything is called something ridiculous. Even the cookie I always get– chocolate chip to my tastes– is called Chunky Double Choco Mound, or something. Where small is Tall, and Grande doesn’t mean big. It has ceased to occur to me that anything at Starbucks means anything, which is why I choose my teas based on the colour of their packaging. Arbitrary, I know, but I like all teas, and some days some colours suit me better than others. Though, of course, red is usually best.
And so Thursday evening, as I lay in bed awake into the wee hours of morn, it occurs to me that maybe there are words at Starbucks that mean something. That red packet, of course, is called “Awake”– a word which I’d entirely divorced of its meaning within the Starbucks context and unconsciously too, which was sort of disturbing from my insomnious state of mind.
But what if all Starbucks teas are so literal? I look forward to discovering: Calm, Refresh, Joy, Zen, and (in particular) Passion.
January 6, 2008
Reasons to be happy
Reasons to be happy– even if one’s holiday is rapidly drawing to a close– include cotton tights, sleep-filled nights, baths with bubbles, legs sans stubbles, magazines, movie screens, new bedclothes, h-nut cheerios, to-do lists done, friends and fun, books in the post, and he whom I like the very most. Plus California in thirty-four days. And….
…having just partaken in that “hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”, of which, under ALL circumstances, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than .”
January 4, 2008
Where to go
Do you dare to use a one-sentence paragraph? Crooked House on “the ‘we’ point of view and E. Nesbit” (“We were the Bastables”). Heather Mallick’s year that was. CBC.ca/art’s 2007 in pop culture. And did Unity Mitford have Hitler’s baby? (I’m inclined to say no– though imagine finding out you were Hitler’s baby?). Check out “the manliest cookbook of all time”. Headline of the day is “Circus School Seeks Students”. Marchand’s year that was: on “grace” as the ultimate gift of Divisidero, “Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.”
I recently found reference in a book to pudding finger-painting, which has relieved me of a nagging fear that I’d been a paint-eating child. And though I’m despairing about returning to work on Monday, we’ve got planned in the meantime an afternoon tea at the Four Seasons as consolation.
December 28, 2007
Indulged
This Christmas my bookishness certainly benefited from my proximity to my husband. Or in particular, from my husband’s office’s close proximity to Ben McNally Books, which meant that by listening to me carefully, he was able to satisfy my heart’s desire with remarkable ease. Which was how I came to receive Kate Sutherland’s All In Together Girls and Eleanor Wachtel’s Random Illuminations this year. Stuart is also the reason I am finally going to get my mitts on a copy of The Gathering, as he needed to tack another book on his own online order-via-gift-cards to go postage-free– hurrah! Though I have my dear Bronwyn to thank for delivering me The Uncommon Reader, which is truly a book most extraordinary. From my parents I received George Street Stories, The Annex: Story of a Toronto Neighbourhood, and a gorgeous book of Czech Fairy Tales.
Though of course my heart’s desire can extend beyond books, and some know this very well. Which is how I received a Miffy calendar and Marks and Spencer’s things from my English family. And how I got an elephant tin of tea from the Banff Tea Co. (via my sister). Lots of other lovely things from my friends, family and husband. Oh–and the print by Michael Sowa of flying penguins that I’ve been long long longing for. Am I ever indulged?
Amidst the manic gift receiving, I did manage to give some too, and moreover to have a lovely couple of days with friends and family. I do hope that you experienced something very much the same.
December 6, 2007
Teacups with stories
“The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.” –Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat
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 20, 2007
Because you've brought it up, on timelessness
So last week Russell Smith responded to Ken McGoogan’s essay “Tilting at the Windmills for Literary Non-fiction” and he did so much more strongly than I did. (I can’t find Smith’s column on-line, but I very conveniently have it here in paper form, headlined “In defence of the novel, and the test of time”). Oh Russell Smith, who came of novelistic age with the marvelous Muriella Pent. Russell Smith who is a walking defence of the novel.
Smith underlines the illogic of McGoogan’s thesis: that he says fiction shouldn’t be promoted because not enough people read it. Says Smith, “He seemed to be contradicting himself: If [non-fiction is] the most popular, then it’s the most popular. What’s his problem?” He questions McGoogan’s assertion that non-fiction better stands the test of time, and doubts whether Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition is truly a book people will “still” be arguing about in one hundred years. “Say, Ken, you wouldn’t be thinking of the furiously held opinions among Arctic historians, would you?”
The lesson, says Smith (invoking tea!), “is partly that we all live in our own little teapots”. But then Ken McGoogan has responded from his. Oh, Ken, who should have quit whilst he was ahead. His stompy reply doesn’t read so well: “[Smith] writes that I think novels are stupid, when I have had three published!!!” (Okay, exclamation marks mine). “Margaret Atwood wrote the intro to Frozen in Time!!!” And finally, without any modification, “As to literary longevity, Mr. Smith writes: ‘It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?’/ A fairer question might be: Ken McGoogan or Russell Smith? On that one, I’ll take my chances.” Oh, he better hope his name appreciates…
Literary longevity is about as easy to predict as the weather. Read Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and among the variety of ways you will be enlightened, you will learn how threatened was Woolf by near-contemporaries “The Edwardians”: Mr’s Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. That their work and reputations so seemed to overpower her own within her lifetime. How astounding, Virginia Woolf– she of the song, the movie, the collections, the cult. That she wasn’t always in fashion? Nobody writes songs about Galsworthy after all.
The point being that nobody knows how it goes, and the canon is all about fashion. But also to show what happens to non-fiction, as opposed to fiction. I am sure that today Mrs. Dalloway reads more similarly to how it did 80 years ago than “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” does, and this, my friends, is timelessness. Not that I believe timelessness determines value, but with the subject brought up already, I will say that fiction fits the bill in a way that non-fic never will. (And I am speaking in very general terms).
The context of a novel is fixed, while that of non-fiction is much more in flux. For example, the best book I ever saw was Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance by Rose, 1958. Which is not to say that non-fiction loses its value over time; no, I would say that value is added, for all it tells us about the past, and in particular about what we thought of the past in the past. But in this process, the text becomes more object than book– a relic even. Moreover we tend to judge it based on how much it got wrong, which is usually most things. And this isn’t timelessness, but rather time magnified.
Teapots indeed. Now, to bed.
November 5, 2007
It's always tea-time
“‘And ever since that,’ the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, ‘he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve got no time to wash the things between whiles.’”
—Alice Adventures in Wonderland
