January 25, 2008
My new quest
I had to go into a bookstore today to pick up a gift for a friend, and of course, while I was there, why not get something for myself? For this is how my mind works, and why bookstores– for me– require infinite will not to go broke in. But I got The Paris Review Interviews vol. II, which I think was most sensible. For they’re interviews with writers, of course, and good ones, and one of my favourite book bloggers has raved about it. So there is learning aplenty, but multitudinously, for this book shall also be the textbook of my new quest to learn to interview.
Interviews are the one written form I’m afraid to take on– I’d sooner write a play (which is not to say that I’d be good at that either). They’re an art-form, I think, and a difficult one done in dialogue. A dialogue in which you must be the guide… or do you follow? I just don’t know. Learning to interview will also challenge my tendency to break off into long-winded tangents about lies I told when I was seventeen, or my new favourite pop song, or whatnot. I also think it will make me a better storyteller, socializer, and writer in general. It will also be fun.
The plan is to post an interview monthly, once I’ve got some study under me belt. How exciting. Maybe I’ll even interview you!
January 8, 2008
On reading
“I enjoyed the reading classes, and the opportunity to function as a sort of cheerleader. I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously, I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the author might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.
No wonder my students found it so stressful to read! And possibly because of the harsh judgments they felt required to make about fictional characters and their creators, they didn’t seem to like reading, which also made me worry for them, and wonder why they wanted to become writers. I asked myself how they planned to learn to write, since I had always thought that others learned, as I had, from reading.” — Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
December 18, 2007
Words I don't know
A wonderful piece in the Guardian Review about (bothering to go about) looking up all those unknown words we encounter all the time. James Meek writes, “For some reason that I have never fully grasped, it is easy for those in the word business to admit any degree of innumeracy (“I’m hopeless with arithmetic”), or helplessness with the daily machinery of their trade (“I don’t know anything about computers”), but difficult to speak frankly about not knowing what a word means.” Though I suspect it’s for the same reason mathematicians don’t like to voice their frustrations with long division.
Oh, but there are so many words I don’t know. As I’ve written here before, I decided to collect unknown words once upon a time, to keep them and tame them. It was while I was living in Japan and devouring battered paperbacks by Margaret Drabble, whose vocabulary still far surpasses mine. Inspired by my ESL students, I started writing down new English words in a little black notebook and the list grew and grew. I was hoping for admission to graduate school within the year and my minuscule vocabulary (consisting too much of “fuck” and “cool”) seemed like it might be an impediment. So I learned: “sybaritic”, “quondam”, “recalcitrant”, “bathetic”, “avuncular”. These are words I know, and whenever I see them, I remember I didn’t always.
But I stopped collecting– I don’t remember why or when. Probably when we moved to Canada, for it is easier to collect English in a land where it is scarce. I think the why also had something to do with leaving our tiny apartment where pencils (and the walls for that matter) were never out of arm’s length–namely I am lazy. But this article by James Meek has inspired me to start again– really. I’m not anticipating grad school, but it’s behind me, which is as good a reason as any to take responsibility for my education now.
Meek writes, “For clarity, we need common, current words; but, used alone, these are commonplace, and as ephemeral as everyday talk. For distinction, we need words not heard every minute, unusual words, large words, foreign words, metaphors; but, used alone, these become bogs, vapours, or at worst, gibberish. What we need is a diction that weds the popular with the dignified, the clear current with the sedgy margins of language and thought.”
“Sedge. n. 1. any of various grasslike plants of the family Cyperaceae, esp of the genus Carex with triangular stems, usu. growing in wet areas. 2. an expanse of this plant.”– though actually I can’t fathom what he means in this context– anyone?
December 16, 2007
"The only way to escape this cul-de-sac is invention"
“I know I can’t discover the key to peace in Israel and Palestine. But I want to do justice of some kind, and to make– or find– something of value, of which I will not be unspeakably ashamed. I want to write, and I want the writing not to be a lie.” –Jonathan Garfinkel, Ambivalence
December 14, 2007
My almost-absolute failure
Lately it’s been very convenient having an award-winning writer for a friend, for upon the completion of my novel two weeks back, Rebecca was kind enough to read it. And indeed she has offered wonderful encouragement, good advice and insight. (Which I will apply to my manuscript over my Christmas Holiday! How fortunate to have the time when I most need it). The most fascinating of all her feedback though is a note of my almost-absolute failure to use subordinate conjunctions. And and and and and, which I suppose is to be expected from anyone who talks too much (and I’ve been accused of this since I learned to speak). What about the “buts” and “thens” though? Reading through another story this evening I realize my “problem” (which it isn’t, entirely) is completely out of control. Causality where art thou? Fascinating. I will explore this further throughout my revisions, then I will use this awareness to strengthen my work, but I will not cease my ands completely for ands are what I do (so it seems). There.
December 7, 2007
Freedom
I thought the essay “Caught Between Two Languages” by Jowita Bydlowska from today’s Globe & Mail was absolutely perfect. “I learned to love language again. I found that words like rustle, fruit, rain and beloved are as melodic in English as they are in Polish. I wrote again and it was freedom. But it wasn’t – and still isn’t – total freedom.”
December 5, 2007
Their glasses are lying
They’ve heard me coming and now they’re sitting on either end of the L-shaped couch. Watching The Weather Channel, but their glasses are lying on the coffee table, arms entwined. Both of them keep blinking.
November 16, 2007
Modernity murdered narrative
One hundred years ago people were concerned about modernity in fiction– I know this. That some considered lightbulbs and radios too plastic for literature, which was made for weightier things. I once read an essay by Woolf about writing and the automobile, and how riding in a car could alter one’s perspective, permanently. Dangerously? Modern life is rubbish, so they say, and so it always has been. But I maintain that it’s never been so rubbish as since the turn of this century, and I mean this narratively speaking.
It’s not modernity I fault, and I don’t even mind plastic; I like Douglas Coupland. I just feel that the last ten years have brought forth too many conveniences in real life which have taken all the fun out of fiction. I’ve written before of my aversion to cellphones and google searches as plot devices, but I can take this much further.
I’m now reading Love Falls by Esther Freud, which takes place in 1981: Lara and her father are taking the train to France. Now I took the train to France once, in 2003. We got on the Eurostar at Waterloo Station, countryside faded away as we disappeared underground, we played travel-scrabble until the pressure of the channel tunnel gave me a migraine, and I spent the rest of the journey staring out the window at nothing. We got to Paris and I took to my bed. Which actually is a marvelous sentence, isn’t it? Though I assure you the whole ordeal was really quite unromantic.
Whereas if we’d taken the train to Dover, taken a boat across the channel… isn’t the journey better already? Aren’t stories better when characters have to search for phone boxes (esp. when the first few they encounter are always out of order) rather than retrieving a mobile from their pocket? Would your rather discover a twist in a tale in a reference library or at an internet terminal? How do you ever get lost with a GPS in your car, and what kind of character never takes a wrong turn? Oh my, what if Lara and her father had made the trek on EasyJet– could you imagine anything worse?
Of course all these things exist, and so we’ll have to learn how to make stories with them. The trick, I think, is not to use them as shortcuts in narrative. But then not such an easy trick, is it, considering how much all these things shortcut our everyday lives.
UPDATE: On how modernity has rendered Jane Eyre impossible.
November 9, 2007
Cross-eyed
She blew this bubble and her whole face went cross-eyed, centred on her pursing lips. She sought the perfect tension in her embouchure, and the bubble began to grow, carefully, glistening with pink and green rainbows. Slick like oil on the driveway.
November 7, 2007
Work to do
“I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work… I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local cafe, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a brilliant hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner– what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.”– Carol Shields, Unless
