December 20, 2007
Spending days
I have a talent for spending days. I am also quite good at wasting them too, but I can make the choice now, which is something. Particularly since I am on Christmas vacation. Oh my job is a wee bit dull, but one can’t complain for the pay is good and I don’t need to return there until January 7th. And I spent yesterday so utterly stimulated, reading through my manuscript, reading the entirety of Claire Cameron’s The Line Painter, unable to put down Canadian Notes and Queries, and chatting with the mailman in my track pants. I met my Creative Writing allies in the eve. Today I just finished reading my own manuscript, I’m reading When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud whose books never fail to give me a whole world, and at 3:00 I’m going to get my hair cut. And some people might find such days mundane, but then they just don’t understand magic.
December 16, 2007
Life in a Northern Town
On this Sunday cars so insistent on not heeding weather warnings have become marooned, abandoned by their drivers, and now they’re buried up to their mirrors in drifts outside my house and I’ve got no place to be but here with my best company, good smoked cheddar cheese, and books and periodicals begging for reading.
December 13, 2007
Five years ago
It was five years ago today that I went out on the town with this lady, and met a boy who danced as badly as I do. And so much fun and adventure has ensued ever since then.
The moral of the story is that you might just meet your husband in a crowded bar.
December 10, 2007
Charred bottoms
We’ve had a perfectly marvelous weekend, though there was drama and disaster. But before that we had our friend Kim’s birthday part at the Danforth Bowl, which was fun beyond wildest bowling dreams. I didn’t even know I had wild bowling dreams. Another birthday party for our friend Andrea Saturday night, and though they hadn’t bowling, they had Guitar Hero, and it was pretty spectac. And tonight Erin came over to help supervise our tree decorating and have dinner with us. The house is terribly Christmassy now, and we’re happy to have had fabulous company all weekend. I’m on page 175 of Guns Germs and Steel and still going strong. And even the drama and disaster wasn’t that bad: I did my Christmas baking yesterday but was too lazy to actually start doing it until 5:30. I made gingerbread, which was vv good so that was fine, except we realized just as the dough finished that we didn’t actually have a gingerbread man cut-out, and so they’re all stars and trees, which is less fun. We’ll remember for next year. But I didn’t cry, or at least not until the sugar cookie dough failed to actually become dough and was just meal instead. The first batch was a double batch and I threw it all into the garbage. Second batch was just a batch but still didn’t work and I don’t know why, as I’ve used the same recipe the last two years. I was able to pat the cookies into shape and so they’re cookie shaped rather than Christmas-fun shaped, though they were delicious, though the sprinkles from the first batch (which I didn’t wash off the cookie sheet) had caught on fire by the last batch and the smoke alarm went off for a good twenty minutes straight, and the bottoms are charred but we’ll eat them anyway. Merry Christmas!
December 3, 2007
Too much totalitarianism
This weekend was Christmas parties and bridal showers, the wonderful Bite Noodles and Rice, snow falling outside, and then some rain. Christmas cards sent, decs up, The History Boys, corn muffins and wine. I am very distracted by a variety of things, and wish the days were longer.
Book trauma again– I have been way too immersed of late in totalitarian regimes. Now reading Villa Air Bel by Rosemary Sullivan, and I keep spouting totalitarian tidbits when I’m out in public, which is a good way to kill a mood (or at least a good one). My next non-fic pick is The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries, which, though it is about death, hopefully will be lighter? Villa Bel Air is really fascinating though, and look for a review maybe Tuesday.
November 29, 2007
Youth and Consequences
Non-fiction has taken over the household. Husband is currently reading The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass, and keeps proclaiming its greatness from the sofa. And I have begun my non-fiction commitment binge– I just finished Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential. I must admit that I am yet not suffering from lack of life as I thought I might have been. No, there was life aplenty in Wong’s book, and even if there hadn’t been, I am taking supplements of The Mitfords anyway. I don’t miss fiction yet. But there are five books still to go in my binge, and not all as narratively driven as Beijing Confidential either, so we shall see.
As a reader I will never cease to be fascinated by how unlikely books can inform one another by virtue of being read in close proximity. Though really it’s unsurprising to think about how much a book of letters between six infamous British aristocrats and a Canadian’s Maoist memoir/ travelogue might have in common– I just never considered. But both are in many ways concerned the political impressionability of youth– terrifyingly, really. How much power a young person can come to wield, unknowingly or otherwise. The predictability of it all as well: the twin yearnings for belonging and independence which are so often the root of political extremism. The ways in which consequences are so little considered reminded me of both India Knight’s recent column “The young’s invincibility illusion” and my recent reading of Esther Freud’s Love Falls. Anyway, more on this will be forthcoming in my reviews of both books.
November 23, 2007
Happiest
I love today for I get to celebrate my most beloved: Happiest of birthdays to Stuart, this particular birthday being special as the cake I’ve baked for you is baked through, edible, and didn’t explode in the oven. Congratulations on your year of so many wonderful adventures and successes, and may the next year be the best one yet. xo
~So now we’re here and now is fine/ So far away from there and there is time, time, time/ To plant new seeds and watch them grow/ So there’ll be flowers in the window when we go… ~
November 23, 2007
Hideousness
I just arrived home to find an ugly wreath on my door. It has a big dangly stuffed bear attached, plastic berries and it’s ghastly. How mysterious… And troublesome– I don’t want people (esp. the mailman whose respect I covet) to think I’m the type to put wreaths up in November. Or wreaths like that at all. But then the mailman might have even dropped it off; who knows? More likely it’s one of the neighbours though– the naked ones downstairs or the domestic disputes down in the basement (both sets are currently feuding by the way)– and the quality of the wreath is suggestive of either of their tastes. But couldn’t they have just hung the thing on their own doors? How embarrassing.
Somebody either likes us or hates us a lot.
November 19, 2007
Ephemera
I’ve been getting complaints about the magazine rack for ages, that it was full to capacity, and so I decided that today would be the day I got around to it. To tidying it up, I mean, which meant throwing away printed matter— a sacrilege. I would keep the magazines that were under a year old, I determined, but those that were older would be thrown in recycling.
A magazine’s disposability is its very nature, which is hard for some of us to understand. It’s what separates them from books, of course, but I have also learned that ephemera can have value ever-lasting. It is difficult to reconcile this with the finite size of both my house and my husband’s patience, and also with the minimal odds that I will ever need to reference the August 2006 Vanity Fair. Which I’ve thrown away by the way, will never re-remember the contents of, and will probably be none the worse for it.
I do clip though, and I’ve clipped for about ten years and across three continents. I am not sure when I’ll ever need to reference anything within my box o’ clips, but still they’re there, they’re tangible, and quite manageably stored within a small-sized cardboard box. Today before I threw away a stack of old The Walruses, I cut out a short-story by Helen Humphreys, whose context has become different since I read her book last week; “The American Gigantic” by Mark Kingwell, which will be relevant to something else I’m working on; Lisa Moore’s consideration of Newfoundland and Tasmania, among other things.
These articles, clipped and stapled, will join in the box such illustrious company as the Joan Didion “Proust Questionanaire” (Vanity Fair circa 2003), various Chandra Levy sensations, a whole bunch of stuff on apocalypse (from scientific sources– I have long wanted to write a story about a pregnant physicist forecasting the end of the world), profiles of Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller, Paula Yates memorials, three generations of Presley women in Vogue (August 2004, and somehow Priscilla looks youngest of all of them), Dominick Dunne’s tribute to his brother (VF, March 2004), Heather Mallick on Unless, etc (The Globe & Mail, May 18 2002), and my very favourite (from the National Post, July 8 2001) headlined “Elvis Presley’s cousin killed in shootout with fugitive”.
