January 5, 2009
Hear me read.
Today I’m the reader reading at Julie Wilson’s marvelous Seen Reading, and I’m reading from Rebecca Rosenblum‘s Once, from the story “The Words” which I’ve loved for years– this passage in particular. I am reading in a bathroom with a book launch crowd outside, and Julie Wilson had to teach me to say “ennui”, but the rest I knew already.
October 27, 2008
Last Night
Last night, after a good ten years of meaning to get around to it, I finally had dinner at Country Style Hungarian Restaurant on Bloor Street. Partly to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, of course, but also because I was hankering after an enormous plate of chicken paprikash and dumplings. Delicious. They serve schnitzel at that place that is bigger than your head. Also surprising: that we had to wait a good twenty minutes before we got a table. And we were the youngest people there, which is unusual for a downtown restaurant. It was full of the most normal middle-aged people I’d ever seen in my life– not a hipster in sight! I hope the decor continues to be never ever updated, because it was so perfect. The food was amazing, and since I want to try everything on the menu, we’ll be going back again.
August 10, 2008
You can't control it all
This weekend, I found myself in the ridiculous predicament of only having delightful things to have to do. Not counting the things I didn’t have to do, like go out for lunch with my husband, take a long long walk up to the Type Books location in Forest Hill. But that my to-do list contained the following: 1 Bake two blueberry pies; 2 Finish knitting cardigan (which has been on-going for ten months; 3 Finish rereading the brilliant The Girl in Saskatoon and work on interview questions for Sharon Butala; 4 Continue work upon my own story (which has just reached 25,000 words; 5 read the entire newspaper (sans any mention of the olympics, of course, which made the whole experience a lot shorter).
You can’t control it all, though. The list didn’t include being awakened at 3:55 am by a massive explosion that shook our house and turned the sky a fiery orange (and do note how far away we live from where the explosion occurred). A blast so powerful it made my husband roll over in his sleep (and this is remarkable, mind you). Nor did the list include me not going back to bed until past sunrise (after listening to the radio in my cold and darkened kitchen [it was thirteen degrees, news and weather together] searching the internet for more news and finding only a livejournal forum [which proved quite informative, actually]). Oh, it was frightening, it really was and we are so fortunate that devastation was remarkably contained and that so few people were hurt.
July 17, 2008
Everyday I violate some principles
So at the end of June, I vowed not to buy another book until September. (I haven’t announced this officially, hoping to avoid driving book stock further into the toilet). Because I have 27 books on my books unread shelf, I’m rereading all summer, and also because I feared that my book buying had become compulsive, and I wanted to prove that it wasn’t. I couldn’t. I already bought a book on Monday, and then I did it again today. But then how could I not have, for this is not just any book. Sigh, but when is it ever?
I’d never heard of Toronto: A Literary Guide until today, when it appeared in the window of a used bookshop calling my name. Published in 1999 by Greg Gatenby (of the International Festival of Authors), this sweet tome is a perfect catalogue of all the places writers have lived or visited, written or read, or congregated together in Toronto. Broken down by neighbourhood, written in a non-cataloguey convivial tone, with fabulous details, context, historical fact, dealing with writers working in a variety of genres, dating back to the nineteenth century. Page upon page of lives.
Let’s take my neighbourhood, “South Annex”, or a one-block radius of my house, to break it down more. Major Street has been home to writers M.T. Kelly, Janet Hamilton, Howard Engel, Albert E.S. Smythe, Aviva Layton, Leon and Constance Rooke, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding, Charles Tidler and Martyn Burke. Gwendolyn MacEwen lived around the corner on Robert. The marvelous house at 84 Sussex was home of the new press in the early ’70s. Greg Hollingshead and John Bemrose lived there as well. Brunswick Ave. has been home to Janice Kulyk Keefer, Olive Senior, Maggie Helwig, Adele Wiseman, David French, Erika Ritter, and Karen Mulhallen. Do note these details (whose prose is far more charming than I let on here) take up three pages of 622. Which means that my neighbourhood is fabulous, and this book is tremendously rich.
Indeed I am one of those curious (and ubiquitous) creatures partial to the literary pilgrimage. How fun to now have so many now right outside the door, and a whole new book full of fantastic things to know, new connections. Awakening me to the secret history of maps I know by heart.
July 6, 2008
Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
Having lived away from Toronto from 2002 to 2005, I found a very foreign city depicted within Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down. This city under siege, by paranoia underlined by strange happenings. The falling girls, the first one collapsing on a streetcar, and others follow, but no answers can be found. Authorities rule out poison– well, as much as they possibly can, which is not entirely. There are no significant abnormalities: “‘What does that mean…? What is an insignificant abnormality?'”
The first girl is the template, the precedent, for escalation. People whispering about bioterrorism becomes brown-skinned people beaten in the streets.
I do remember Toronto the morning of September 11th 2001. As Helwig writes, “Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.” The week I left the city, about nine months later, a garbage strike was just beginning. The SARS epidemic outbreak during the year that followed, and that massive blackout the year after that– I missed it all, the brink of chaos. My city has always functioned in an orderly fashion, as much as possible with so many people in one place. This is the land of reason, logical explanation, and everything has always happened elsewhere.
And so I would suspect Helwig’s Toronto would be more familiar to those who were here then. Here is a fiction steeped in reality, Helwig’s Toronto so actualized that it fooled me, made me disoriented, but the problem was mine. All the part of the city I’ve not paid attention to– references to The Cloud Gardens, for instance, which couldn’t possibly exist, but it’s just that I’ve never been there. To Bloor Supersave, which I thought might be standing in for Dominion, or the ManuLife Valu Mart, but of course it’s its own place, right at the top of my road.
Against the city backdrop, is Alex, to whom a chance meeting has brought the past back in the midst of this chaos. Reconnecting with Susie-Paul, who broke his heart more than a decade ago, and she’s got him all wound up (the way she always could do) in a quest to find her missing schizophrenic brother. She accompanies him on his nighttime rambles through the city, photographing the city’s dark side (this theme, albeit in a very different style, reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark).
The particulars of the story at this novel’s heart weren’t its strongest aspect. Connection and significance somewhat tenuous at times, but all this is strengthened in the context of the novel as a whole. The atmosphere that Helwig creates, and the greater connections between the people that live in this place. Moreover Helwig’s fascinating exploration of girls, “the things that girls do.” Their secret lives, never entirely uncovered, and their power, however unconscious, the novel’s true heart. With such far-reaching ripples, the implications immense.
June 11, 2008
Rosenblum Reading
It’s not quite fair, as I booked the day off three months ago and you’ll only get a few days notice, but I wanted to let you know about an excellent event this Friday. Rebecca Rosenblum will be reading this Friday at 12:30 pm at Toronto Public Library’s Northern District Branch as part of the Luminato Festival of the Short Story. David Whitton will also be reading, Lynn Coady moderating. I am terribly excited. Rebecca’s book comes out in September.
April 4, 2008
Welcome!
Welcome to my kitchen and the entrance to our new home. After perhaps a total of nine hours scrubbing and unpacking, this is the first room to be wholly presentable. It was also the room that made me fall in love with the apartment, which I still love even though now I know about the leaky sink. It is beginning to feel like home here, though the move has left me exhausted and disconnected from my entire life. And I’m not sure why, the move having been easy as pie, our movers lovely, friendly, helpful and strong, and the new house being an ten minute drive from the old one. This place was filthy though, which might be part of it. Previously inhabited by dirt moreso than people, but it’s clean now. We’re home now. Clothes must be unpacked still, wall hangings mounted, odds and ends purchased, but we’re nearly there.
Our new neighbourhood is technically called Sussex-Ulster, though you could also locate it as south of the Annex. And it’s been made clear to me how defined are Toronto’s neighbourhoods: I’ve lived in a walkable distance to here for a lot of the past decade, know the neighbourhood well, my old neighbourhood still so close by, but I feel as though I’ve moved to a whole other world ripe for discovery. Though of course living somewhere is always a wholly different experience than just passing through, but it’s strange to be somewhere you’ve passed through so many times and have it feel like new. To have it almost feel like home.
I like my new house because it doesn’t shake in the wind, because the cat next door comes to visit, because we’ve received post every day we’ve been here, because there are so many book shelves that Stuart said in all seriousness that we needed to get more to fill them, because our downstairs neighbours appear to be human, because it’s so big, because I get to sleep in an attic, because the washing machine operates coin free, because the sun comes in and the breeze comes in, and because here it has always been spring.
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 6, 2007
Parentbooks Contest
Though I’m not a parent, the Toronto bookshop Parentbooks still has much to offer. In addition to their specialty books, they’ve got a lovely little kids book section (Corduroy! Be still my heart!) and they’re running an Olivia promotion. Stop in (on Harbord, just west of Bathurst) to enter to win a marvelous basket of Olivia tricks. Contest closes December 14th.
