December 4, 2008
A misreading
I felt sorry for the man beside us on the subway. He looked miserable, with one of those craggy Mordecai Richler faces molded out of clay. His bottom lip was stuck out low, and his eyes were cast out, seeing nothing. Though I wasn’t close enough to tell, I imagined he smelled, and his clothes were tatty, his shoes were cheap.
It was Thanksgiving, and were headed out to dinner at our friends’, balancing casserole dishes on our knees– we were bearing beans, sweet potato stuffing, freshly baked corn muffins. We would arrive to tall wine glasses, glorious roast turkey, heaven-sent potatoes, and a set table around which would be seated lovely friends.
Whereas the man beside us appeared to be moving, laden with every single of of his possessions stuffed into black garbage bags. Three or four bags, and he was holding them close, defensive. Like any of us would be interested in what he was carrying, but we supposed this was all he had. He turned his head to glance out the window, but his eyes still seemed unfocused. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started muttering something about nothing at any time.
And so we kept our distance, as much as it’s possible to do side-by-side on public transportation. But it is possible, you know that. It’s in the way you hold yourself, the subtlety with which you turn your body away. The deliberateness of not seeming deliberate, because deliberateness is acknowledgment, which was much closer than we wanted to get.
It wasn’t comfortable, of course. The disparity between us and him was just too jarring, because here it was a holiday Monday and we were the luckiest two in the world. Easier, really, to pretend not to notice this sad pathetic man moving on Thanksgiving, moving on the subway with his belongings in plastic bags. For how do you notice it, and then sit around a gorgeous table with friends? Does it mean anything to be thankful after that? And how do you draw the line between thankful and smug anyway? A toast to us, because we’re not him, and thank god for that. Cheers.
He got off one stop before we did. Gathering his bags, keeping them close, and then we noticed something peculiar as he stepped off the train. So much so that we had to turn and watch, as the train began to leave the station, and the man started walking towards the stairs. How all four of his bags began to rise up into the air without effort, and we realized they were stuffed with balloons. Helium. And now off the train, he didn’t need them so close, so he was letting them float where they’d bob along, high up above his head.
November 25, 2008
Shed Skins of a Snake
“It is interesting, but only in a sociological way, to see the sympathy two of my narrators have for men who have just lost their virginity. It is odd, but only to me, to read of the bitterness that exists between female friends, when my own girlfriends are so generous and important to me. These stories are not written by the person who has lived my life and made the best of it, but by people I might have been but decided against. They are written by women who take a different turn in the road. They are the shed skins of a snake.” –Anne Enright, “Introduction” to Yesterday’s Weather
November 5, 2008
The only character who really gets to talk
(Via The Pop Triad) Lionel Shriver on quotation marks and why their absence is off-putting: “The appearance of authorial self-involvement in much modern literary fiction puts off what might otherwise comprise a larger audience. By stifling the action of speech, by burying characters’ verbal conflicts within a blurred, all-encompassing über-voice, the author does not seem to believe in action — and many readers are already frustrated with literary fiction’s paucity of plot. When dialogue makes no sound, the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”
September 5, 2008
Eden Mills & Weekend
We’ve got a packed weekend here, with three (3!) social engagements tomorrow: out for brunch, friends for tea (with a baby!) and then a friend for dinner.
On Sunday I’m off for the day to the Eden Mills Writers Festival with Rebecca Rosenblum. I am looking forward to hearing Rebecca read (from her forthcoming book, out in over a week), and other writers too, including Shari Lapena, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Mariko Tamaki, Susan Juby and Leon Rooke. Looking forward also to the announcement of the winner of the 2008 Literary Contest, particularly as my short story “Still Born Friends” is on the shortlist!
August 15, 2008
Whatever I write reflects
“…But since I am neither a camera nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.” –Joan Didion, “A Preface” to Slouching Towards Bethlehem
August 8, 2008
No difference between stories and real life
“I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years– the things we say to each other, what has become of us– some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of the fact that will take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.” –Sharon Butala, “Postmodernism”
July 12, 2008
The house on Jupiter Ave.
The house on Jupiter Ave. had been Wellwood’s, where he’d lived as a boy. Where he’d lived all his life and where he died, in fact, in a terrible plummet from near the top of a gable. Though what he’d been doing on the roof, no one was sure; Wellwood certainly had never climbed a ladder in his life, nor even been inspired to do so.
Afterwards Gardenia had racked her brain trying to figure it out, could she have somehow been responsible? There was no other reason Wellwood might have climbed onto the roof but to satisfy her wishes, for he would have done anything she’d asked him to do– the very point of Wellwood. Could she have mentioned a loose shingle flapping in passing? Or gingerbread trim that needed painting, or the tall tree requiring trimming to stop its limbs slap-slapping the windows at night?
July 6, 2008
Reading stories is bad enough…
“It is extremely interesting,” Anne told Marilla. “Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we have to talk it over. We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants. We each write under a non-de-plume… All the girls go pretty well. Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much love-making into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts in any because she says it makes her feel too silly when she has to read it out loud. Jane’s stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn’t hard for I’ve millions of ideas.”
“I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet,” scoffed Marilla. “You’ll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put on your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”
“But we’re so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla,” explained Anne. “I insist upon that. All the good people are rewarded and the bad ones suitably punished. I’m sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the greatest thing. Mr. Allen says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allen and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in all her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died…” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
June 13, 2008
Their own body bags
Nathan Whitlock writes that requiring self-addressed stamped envelopes to accompany literary journal submissions is “kind of like making soldiers go into battle carrying their own body bags”.
May 16, 2008
The girl still can't dance
The girl still can’t dance. When she’s had too much to drink she still flails her arms, knocking drinks out of hands and poking tall people in the eye. Sometimes she abandons fluidity altogether, and jumps up and down on the spot instead— a terrible legacy of Kris Kross and Cypress Hill. When she’s dancing sometimes, people think she’s kidding but she’s not. Celtic is all the rage right now, but when the girl gets her knees up, someone always gets kicked.
