April 30, 2006
Hi Curtis. Let's have dinner soon!
The latest Guardian Poetry Workshop Exercise is up. Writers on pictures of women reading here. Here for the places in Toronto that mattered to Jane Jacobs. An excellent piece here on the necessity of The Orange Prize. On a sidenote, I’ve given up being bothered by men not reading books written by women, because quite frankly, I haven’t read a single novel written by a man this year (unless it was prescribed by school). This has not been done deliberately, and I do have David Gilmour’s A Perfect Night to Go to China on hold at the library in order to begin rectifying this deficiency on my part. But there are just so many brilliant books being published by women writers lately that I am thoroughly engaged reading them, and I figure the women can’t be doing all bad because it’s a known fact that women buy more books than men, so perhaps they’re selling more books than men too? Which doesn’t mean the Orange doesn’t matter of course. I’m just sort of starting to prefer the ghetto all around.
April 30, 2006
Can't beat the real thing
Now streaming the BBC Radio 1 Chart Show, which has rendered me a bit nostalgic for the England days, even in its poorness. Now reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which is brilliant reading. It’s interesting what a great companion to Grace Paley’s stories Jacobs’s book makes. Born out of the same place and time, I suppose. I like the patterns that develop out of the books we just happen to read around the same time, and unlikely links that are forged. Now obsessed with salad, on account of summer sun. I bought The No Cook Cookbook for a fiver at Bindigo, and can’t wait to jump into the oven-free life. Tonight I am going to see Booky Makes Her Mark at the Sprockets Film Fest for Children, based on the Booky books (everyone’s favourite Canadian depression-era plucky heroine) which I loved as a petit fille.
(Oh my god! Thank goodness for my access to Radio 1 and its Europo(o)piness. How else would I know that someone has remixed a version of “The First Time” from the 1980s Coke commercial to eurobeats? They don’t play this stuff on the CBC. [UPDATE: View the video for the original “The First Time” here sans eurobeats of course, but the video is so bad it’s awful. Like all great 80s videos, features people inside photographs coming to life. A delight])
Friday night, me husband and me got right dressed up and hit The Library Bar at The Royal York. It was suitably bookish and we drank our martinis and had an absolutely wonderful time getting drunk, and picked up a hot dog for the road. Brilliant.
April 28, 2006
Luck
I’m now reading Luck by Joan Barfoot, which is absolutely good and I recommend it. The narrative voice is quite an extraordinary achievement, the most sarcastic and amusing fly on the wall that I’ve ever come across. And this is significant, because I heard Joan Barfoot read from this book in January. She started with the first chapter, and so of course when I started the book, her voice came back to me. And throughout the book, this marvelous narrator has been speaking in that voice and it’s sort of eerie to hear it in my head. And so anyway, I’ve been pondering lately the attraction of readings at all. I do believe that reading is an ideally solitary pursuit and that public readings are part of a recent drive to institutionalize reading. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but is admittedly strange. But then again you get an author whispering in your ear after the fact, and there’s something a bit delicious about that.
April 26, 2006
We need to talk about…
Yea! My essay is finished and will be printed tonight and handed in tomorrow. And then there will be four homework free months ahead, to read, and write, and hang out with Stuart. We are celebrating by going to the Library Bar at the Royal York Friday for posh martinis. I am looking forward to this weekend. What else, lots of Toronto fun, food and adventure on account of Stuart’s mum visit. We went to the zoo on Friday and it was wonderful. I liked the butterfly house, and a gorilla who climbed right up to the viewing window, sat down and stared right into my eyes. It was an incredibly moment, and a bit frightening, but quite profound. And then the gorilla defecated, which sort of put a stop to all that but still. I also liked the flamingos.
I am now reading The Female of the Species by Lionel Shriver, who wrote We Need to Talk About Kevin, which you might know was the best book I read in 2005. The Female of the Species is Shriver’s first book (I think) and like all her books before Kevin, not altogether successful. It started slow, and I resisted it for a chapter or two. But now I am enveloped and can’t wait to get to the end. I also read For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, which exists more to be read than to be explained. But what she does with form is really quite incredible, and it’s chock-a-block with stuff that should be known. The Jewish mysticism threw me a little bit, but then again it usually does.
My friend Sarah is off on her Siberian Adventure. The website hasn’t been updated for a few days, and according to it, they haven’t left yet. How does one update a blog from the Trans-Siberian Railroad? They are travelling by land from Japan to London, and I can’t wait to travel along as a vicariate. In other news, as you probably know, Jane Jacobs has died, which means it’s about time I read The Death and Life of America’s Great Cities– and so I will. Camilla Gibb takes the Trillium Prize for Sweetness in the Belly, which just might be my favourite book of 2006. The Spears/Federlines are pregnant again, well according to US, but it will be exciting for them to have another child around the house to neglect. Curtis Sittenfeld didn’t make the Orange Prize shortlist, thank goodness. I’m awfully fond of The Accidental by Ali Smith, but I like Hilary Mantel and Zadie S. too. Exciting!
Am disturbed by Flight 93. I saw the preview in the theatre a few weeks back, and it was so profoundly upsetting. I can’t imagine sitting through the whole film. And I disagree with the woman whose daughter died on the flight that “The public needs to know, they need to remember and know what the families have gone through”. I am sorry, but I don’t think they do. To many people this film might exist as a memorial of sorts, celluloid proof the people they loved died for a reason, but there is something terribly self-indulgent about that. A film like this exploits our society’s preoccupation with outward acts of mourning and our yearning for communal experience and connection. But it is such a shallow connection. And no amount of reenactment will really allow us to comprehend what happened that day; only distance can possibly provide for that, and some perspective.
April 24, 2006
Soon..
I will be finished writing papers. And then I will think again. Until then, then.
April 19, 2006
Am I part of The Cure, or am I part of The Police?
Today I have devoted to essay writing. Which means that I have written four sentences, eaten all my mini-chocolates in my Cadbury Heroes Eggs, investigated Gail Porter’s hairloss online, stared longingly out the window, brewed a pot of tea, eaten more chocolate, felt fat, turned on the radio and turned it off, brewed more tea, read four pages of a book, had lunch, read Heat Magazine, scoured the internet re Tom Cruise and Katie’s Holmes’s “Suri”, checked blogs for updates, laid on my bed, gotten up, contemplated bulimia, decided against it, and went to check if the post had come. It had.
Today I received my second installment of the Kerry and Bronwyn Postal Exchange. Bronwyn broke the rules with the text-based treat. It’s hardly letter sized, and indeed was sent as a package. Bronwyn sent me a book called Lancashire: Where Women Die of Love, which is so wonderfully odd, though I can assure you that it wasn’t love that killed me during the time that I lived there.
I am so bored. If I stamp my feet and shout, maybe Stuart will come home. He’s at the top of the CN Tower right now. Do you think he will hear me?
April 19, 2006
Prep Afterwords
I read Prep, in a day and a bit because times a wasting. It’s not chick lit. But it’s not really lit either. If anything, it’s really boring and goes on for 400 pages as such. I guess if one has literary aspirations, I would encourage them not to write from a fourteen year old’s point of view. Because otherwise, they feel the need to overcompensate by having the narrator’s adult-self confusingly just start to commentate out of the blue, or have much of the story take place in English classes so several literary themes could be checked. I thought maybe it was just me, because I’m not a fan of YA fiction anymore, but according to amazon reviews, the kids don’t like Prep much either. Perhaps Prep’s biggest letdown was the inconsistency of the narrative voice; was she an adult reflecting on her youth, was she an unreliable narrator who thought she knew it all, was she a young wise cracking Holden Caulfield, was she wise beyond her years? I felt like perhaps SIttenfeld wasn’t sure, because Lee Fiora was a bit of all of that, which was a bit confusing. Also, there was no plot. Things happen, but not for motivating purposes. I sort of wanted her to drop out after sophomore year, just so the book would be over. There was no revelation at the end. And I didn’t come away from the book having learned anything new. Perhaps it’s because it’s centred on high school students- I don’t actually consider high school that defining. It’s formative, but in high school everybody is sort of an idiot, everybody is melodramatic. Its what happens next that really matters. There were some wonderful bits in Prep. Some of the writing was really excellent, but got lost on the density of the text. Lee’s relationship with her parents was poignantly illustrated, and really heartbreaking at times. I was intrigued by some of the stories of the adult secondary characters in Prep, who were more interesting than the teenagers, I thought. And some of the themes were fascinating but there were just too many of them. And perhaps my assessment of Sittenfeld’s book is a bit harsh, but her review of Melissa Bank’s book was so incredibly scathing, and having read Prep I’m not sure exactly where Sittenfeld got off doing that.
April 17, 2006
Prep
Today Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld arrived at the library. I’m excited to read it. Sittenfeld’s provocative review of Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot incited a bit of controversy last year. In the review, Sittenfeld posited that “To suggest that another woman’s ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut”, but of course she did it anyway. Writer Jennifer Weiner suggested that perhaps Sittenfeld’s insecurities about the reception of her own novel were the motivation behind her name calling. And indeed, Curtis Sittenfeld did seem to be kicking and screaming about the “chick lit” label. In every interview I read, every review of the book, Sittenfeld was commenting upon Prep’s “darkness”, that it was “not a beach read”, “too dark for chick lit”, in spite of the pink-accessory-adorned cover. I do understand Sittenfeld’s pain of course; that pink belt must have come on like a punch in the gut. But it seemed like that lady did protest a bit too much. And so now I’ve got the book in hand and will determine for myself whether it’s “chick lit” or not. All for the sake of scholarship. I’ve got one paper down and one more to go. Now reading The Photograph by the ever-wonderful Penelope Lively. Oh, and good news in tax return land. So we’re off to England in September! Moreover, we’ve got a little England heading our way tomorrow in the form of Stuart’s mum!
April 16, 2006
Clockal Embellishments
Pleasant things I saw tonight as I bicycled to the library: the children next door having an Easter Egg hunt, two little girls in dresses wearing rabbit ears, daffodils, and a couple on a tandem bike. Oh, and the sunshine.
Muriel Spark has died. Like Maud Newton, I’ve only read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Finishing School, but will be taking up The Comforters upon recommendation.
Now reading An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark. It’s pretty wonderful. And my 51st book of the year.
