May 7, 2009
Please bear
This would be a blog entry, but I am too fixated on cloth diaper brands and securing my next serving of ice cream. Plus everything I do these days seems to proceed in a most dilatory fashion. For example, I’ve been writing this for twenty minutes. Please bear with us, and thank you.
October 7, 2007
Happy Thanksgiving
Our very first turkey dinner: this is totally a milestone. Deliciousness intaken. Everybody is sleepy. Hooray hooray for harvest time. 
May 2, 2007
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
In the midst of Divisadero, when I was asked if it was a good book, I wasn’t sure how to answer. “It’s a good book,” I supposed, “because I’m not sure Michael Ondaatje is not in the habit of writing bad books.” But I was not convinced from where I stood. Which is not to say that reading Divisadero was not an absolute pleasure, but I couldn’t tell where the plot was going. Where the plot eventually went, I could never have foreseen. Even now, having finished the book, I’m still not sure what to make of it, but then my response to that is to want to read it all over again.
Divisadero has a plot– an unconventional family, their ties forever severed by an act of brutal violence. One sister is researching the life of a French writer whose own story becomes the focus of the latter half of the book. Between the siblings’ separate lives and the life of the writer, Ondaatje draws connections through parallelesque plot lines, recurring symbols, characters haunted by their counterparts. But these connections are not in symmetry– symmetry would be too easy. And nothing is easy here. These connections are only suggestions, some of the story was so inaccessible to me (mainly due to my lack of familiarity with matters as divergent as the work of Balzac and the rules of Texas Hold’em), time shifts, narrative shifts, as a reader you are led you know not where.
And yet I trusted this writer completely. Clearly, I felt, I was in competant hands. This was not based solely on the writer’s reputation either, but rather the strength of the prose, the beauty of the imagery, the structure of the novel which demanded my engagement, no matter what else conspired to shut me out of it. Ondaatje’s ending tied up ends, not neatly of course, but in a way that cast the whole novel in a new light, which is why I so want to read it again. That so much can be obscured but made satisfying is a testament to great work. Similarly, that a book can be an abstraction, and yet well and truly solid.
January 17, 2007
My Wedding Dress
My wedding dress came off the rack. It wasn’t even a wedding dress. I’d set out that day with the sole specification that my dress be the prettiest one I find, and it was only by chance that the one I found was white.
My friend Bronwyn and I went shopping for dresses on Oxford Street in London a month before my wedding. Bronwyn had seen one already that she thought might be right, and I liked it too. A strapless dress from Coast, with red flowers beaded and embroidered around one side. I appreciated that it was white enough to be bridey, and the red was perfect. Red is my favourite colour. But of course, I still wanted to look around a bit. I tried on bridal dresses in a few other high street shops, and other distinctly non-bridal dresses. I don’t remember any of them. I do remember that by lunch time we knew the Coast dress was right, and when we found it in Debenhams with 20% off, we knew the universe was in agreement. We found a matching wrap in the accessories section, a pair of sandals, and got the underthings from M&S. Everything except the hair accessory, which I ended up making myself out of beads and a headband. And so basically, I was outfitted in a day, at a discounted rate no less. This is no romantic tale, but the dress was perfect. Bronwyn has good taste. I had the most beautiful bouquet in the world to match, and the red and white became our wedding theme. It was such a lovely day.
And so of course, I’ve got to weave a metaphor out of all of this. Which would be that I bought my wedding dress off the rack, on sale. The dress was gorgeous no doubt, but absolutely ordinary. The odds are that I will wear it again. And that ordinariness is my point. Our love for each other is so ordinary and absolutely unremarkable (and I mean this in the most romantic way one can), and I would not have to put on a costume to proclaim that. On my wedding day, I was dressed as myself, which was all that I had to be for us to work. It wasn’t a fairy tale, but it was our real life, and one which is wonderful every day.
December 30, 2006
The Monkees – Randy Scouse Git
I heard this song yesterday on the CBC, and while I don’t know what that says about the CBC, I am sort of obsessed with it.
September 30, 2006
Please insert change
I knew that Every Day is Mother’s Day would cure all that ailed me. It was wonderful and horrifying; Hilary Mantel has such a gloriously sick mind. In this book, Colin is having an affair with Isabel, and, as it’s the mid 1970s, he frequently needs to come up with reasons to nip out to the phonebox and call her. And I couldn’t help thinking about cellphones as a plot device, a topic that has fascinated me, mainly in film actually. There are all kinds of movies, books and television shows that wouldn’t have been remotely plottable before cellphones came into use- CSI would struggle, 24, various ransom stories. However the phonebox is a plot device all its own- I’m thinking Rosemary’s Baby, Superman of course, and obviously Phone Booth. In addition, I can’t help but think of all the old storylines that could have been cleared up in just five minutes, if a cellphone had only fallen from the sky.
September 25, 2006
Monday
I just finished reading City of the Mind by Penelope Lively, who is one of my favourite authors, and every one of her books I like better than the last. City of the Mind is to place, what her Moon Tiger was to history. The city as a symbol, and the very specific history of London. Loved it. I especially love how Lively’s characters always have jobs. A job is vital to good characterization (for example Perowne the neurosurgeon in Saturday, or Reta Winters the writer in Unless) in contemporary work especially. “What do you do?” is so defining. The last Penelope Lively book I read was The Photograph, in which the main character was a garden designer, and in City of the Mind, the character was an architect, and a writer can show so much about a character by showing how he/she performs their job, engages with colleagues, and what led them to their field. It’s fascinating to learn too, about a profession as foreign as another language (neurosurgery anyone?). It just makes that character’s world so much more alive.
And I am back at my part time post at the library, which means I come home with more and more books every day. Today I took out Swing Low: A Life in order to learn a bit more about depression, as a character in my story suffers with it. And also got my hands on new books I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors and Creation by EO Wilson.
Beyond books, ah but not quite. Yesterday was spent at Word on the Street and it was a lot of fun. Echolocation was well-represented I thought and I gave a bookmark to the mayor.
Today’s highlight was an epistle from my epistolary-pal Bronwyn. She has asked me to be her matron of honour, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so honoured. I didn’t even dare to imagine such a thing would happen. I would have been happy just to be there. And now I will be there, but with a dress on. Whoever would have thought, when Bronwyn and I met during the summer of 2001 in Toronto that just a few years later we would be bridesmaiding for each other at our respective English weddings to a wonderful pair of Northern blokes. Life is funny. Hmmmm.
Am obsessed with The Weather Network’s School Days Pages. They tell you what to wear to and from school, which is a service I’ve been longing for forever. Don’t know how practical it really is though. This morning I should have worn snowboots, a parka and gloves, and then wellingtons and a slicker on my home. It’s the winter clothes again tomorrow morn, and then a light spring jacket in the afternoon. I don’t think I own that many clothes. And the winter boots are really quite premature, really. 8 degrees is hardly freezing.
September 22, 2006
The Queue
My admission of the day is that I like Stephanie Klein, the Carrie Bradshaw of the blogosphere. I encountered her while researching my seminar on blooks last spring, and learned about her six-figure deal with Reganbooks. And after checking out her blog, not even that extensively, I realized I really couldn’t hate her because she is so heartbreakingly earnest and sort of lovely. Anyway, the point is that I put her book on hold at the library today. I don’t think this means that I am a bad person. It does mean, however, that I will be reading it before Reading Like a Writer or Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I am 33rd in line for Klein’s book, 90th for Prose’s and 230th for the Popular Ms. Pessl.
September 21, 2006
Interesting
My character, who is speaking in 1970, probably would not have used the verb “upgrade”, and would definitely not have used the adjective “upgraded”. She could have used the noun “upgrade” when talking about a hill, but only if her vocabulary was a little archaic.
