March 27, 2006
Let the sunshine in
You might think that weather is all idle chatter, but if that’s the case, you’ve probably never come through a Canadian winter. It is entirely monumental that I let you know that today I wore a strappy top to school, and I rode here on a bicycle!
March 22, 2006
Libraries to go
Just finished my 40th book of the year. “It’s not a race!” you might say, to which I would argue that it most certainly is. I’m racing against my all too limited lifespan. But I’ve got libraries and libraries to go before I sleep.
March 21, 2006
Mardi Livre!
Today was really exciting because I received my first letter in The PenPal Project from Bronwyn. Post! I got a bunch of bookmarks from the London Library as well as London Library scrap paper (which is cut into bigger pieces than the scrap paper at my library). I will have to brainstorm a steller text-based treat to include in her next letter, and mail it all within the ten day window of course. Sugoi indeed.
Now reading On Writing by Stephen King, which is excellent and fun. I also read Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett, and it was beautiful.
The Guardian is seeking the best of CanLit. I’ve responded, and so has Heather Mallick, so join the fun! An lovely essay here on a former Canadian expat’s homecoming. The new Guardian Poetry Workshop here.
March 19, 2006
My mind has wings and I dun know to where it's flew
About two and a half years ago, on my way home from work in Nottingham one September evening, I was walking past the cemetery at the top of Mansfield Road. Separated from the pavement by a tall wrought-iron fence with deathly-pointy tips along the top, it was a lovely, sprawling weedy old graveyard with crumbling stones falling down its clines and I used to love to see the sun setting orange just beyond, atop the Goose Fair Grounds. A sign on the gates explicitly warned that said gates were locked each evening at a certain time whose specificity should not be compromised by the fact that I’ve forgotten it. But I never concerned myself much with those details; I’m not a real fancier of cemeteries. I was content to watch the place fly by each night behind its iron bars as I walked my way home, listening to shoddy BBC1 Europop on my crappy Panasonic Cassette Walkman.
This particular night I was in a hurry; I had a doctor’s appointment, which I was already late for. I was rushing down the back side of the hill on Mansfield Road beside the cemetery, when a girl about my age called out to me from inside it. I couldn’t hear her over “Fly on the Wings of Love” by XTM, so I turned the radio off.
“Pardon me?” I asked her.
“I said, I’m stuck in here,” she said. “What time do they close the gates?”
“At * o’ clock.”
“What time is it now?”
“Past * o’clock I guess.” I’ve never worn a watch.
“Could you help me?” she asked. She had chased me along the length of the graveyard and I was just about to slip out of her arm’s reach.
But as I said, I was in a hurry. “You could climb the fence,” I suggested. “Or call 999?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so,” she said. “What am I going to do?” She was strangely calm for one so needy.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Good luck though.” I hurried on to get my throat examined.
And I think about her often. I wonder if she’s still camped out ‘neath a tombstone.
March 19, 2006
Books Etc.
I’ve been reading and writing like a petit maniac! It’s that time of year. Now reading The Rules of Engagement by Catherine Bush, which is my favourite book by her. I am quite pleased to be enjoying so many young Canadian authors, as my years abroad had put me out of the CanLit habit. The book is hardly flawless, but she writes about England in a way that is so relevant to my own experience there (perpetually being asked “Are you all right?” for example) and I love that the narrator is a scholar of “war studies” and therefore I get to learn through the novel. This is the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction I think- you come away from the latter knowing something new. The former is more an affirmation of the familiar, which is fine but not the same. This of course is on my mind because I am writing an essay about Chick Lit for my Authors and Institutions course. This came about as a result of my consciously anti-chick lit phase, where I only wrote about lesbians, boys and circus freaks. I began to wonder how professional writers are influenced by the threat of the chick lit label, the ways they speak out and write against it. I read “Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction” yesterday and it was really interesting (and fun). I also read Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard. And still reading Grace Paley’s wonderful stories, one at at time.
Articles on ghostwriting. Naomi Wolf on trashy YA fiction. On re-marketing adult fiction for teens here. Douglas Coupland interviews Morrissey. On JamesBluntMania– currently sweeping America.
Today was exciting because I bought my bridesmaid’s dress for Katie’s wedding. Oh for the love of bridal shops. And I paid the bills last night. For about five minutes, we owed nobody nothing.
March 15, 2006
These books are full of our lives
For our creative writing assignment this week, we have been instructed to invent the prose glose. “Glose” is actually pronounced “glossa” but not spelt as such, because “glossa” means tongue, did you know that? I didn’t. And so I have decided to use a short story from Carol Shields’ Various Miracles. Oh, the history of our books. I bought this one last winter at the used book store in Kobe. I almost didn’t, probably because I had a whole stack in hand already, but after I’d paid for my purchases, I went back to the counter and got this one too. I read Various Miracles just over a year ago, on the train to Osaka, where we were going to chase penguins at the aquarium. I read most of the story “Scenes” while we were waiting to switch lines at Amagasaki Station, and was stunned by the similarities between this story and the conversation Stuart and I had been having earlier in the journey. The whole book was a bit familiar anyway, like someone else had written down my unarticulated ponderings. And now reading it today, I remember how that felt, and I miss that sunny spring. Just over a month after that spring day, the Amagasaki train crash and over a hundred people dead, and we left Japan two weeks after that, perhaps forever. And looking back, I cannot believe that that was ever my life, but I am so glad that once it was.
I left as we do our childhoods:/ rushing to escape, without souvenirs./ I collected no sake cups/no tsukemono plates./ All this time/ a core of miso grew. ~Alison Smith, “Under-Country” from Six Mats and One Year
March 14, 2006
Interesting things
Interesting things are that yesterday I told Stuart about an idea I had for a story, and he informed me that I had just described the plot to “Phenomenon” starring John Travolta. And that on a radio show about insomnia, the host described Canada as “a nation of tossers.”
March 11, 2006
Voices
Heather Mallick in good form on South Dakota’s step back into the dark ages. Lionel Shriver weighs in with “The abortion row in the US is not about babies. It’s about power-mad grown-ups who despise each other”.
We are going to a 905 party but we don’t have any 905-wear.
Update It was a very 519 party actually and we had so much fun!
March 10, 2006
Early Afternoon March
Late Morning March
The air through the open window is the same
as when you breathed for what you don’t believe in now
and such anachronistic miracles are dizzying
separating you from local time.
I remember every spring that came before this
linked in the smells the city makes.
The armature of scattered selves
fastening you to year-to-year.
I wrote that poem in 2001, and it’s perhaps the only thing I wrote then that remains true to this day. We’re crawling out from under cover. Today I caught a whiff of rotting garbage, which was music to my nose because rotting garbage is unfrozen garbage. And now I am sitting in front of an open window, accompanied by shining sun and a cool wind. I had forgotten how wonderful March in Canada is. (Wind is a bit torrential. Must close window.) Britain is springtime all the time, and I loved that- green in January. Spring in Japan, as we know, came suddenly and April there is meteorological perfection. But spring in Canada- can’t be counted on, more a promise than an actual delivery. But oh what a promise. It’s almost worth it.
Today has been a bit brilliant, based upon the meeting I had this morning with Camilla Gibb. She’s the Writer in Residence at Massey College and on top of having written one of the best books I’ve read in ages, she was lovely and I got a lot out of our conversation.
What else? I really enjoyed The International Women’s Day In Pictures in The Globe. Fun Milestones in Pop Feminism. And introducing The Blooker Prize, which I am doing a seminar on next week how exciting. A golden age of British women’s writing indeed. Ali Smith’s The Accidental was extraordinarily unlike anything I’ve read before. Amazing. I’m reading The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, and Voices from Iran which is interesting but terribly written. And rereading The Elements of Style.
To lunch.
