March 22, 2012

A splendid day

“Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards.”– Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Oh, we’ve had a good day. Sunshine , popsicles and a brilliant morning in the park with wonderful friends, after which Harriet went straight to nap without lunch (at her own request) and slept for 3 hours. And then we headed down to Queen Street West to Type Books where Kyo Maclear was launching Virginia Wolf and her novel Stray Love, which made it the perfect mother/daughter occasion. The event was great, with snacks (pocky!), music (Waterloo Sunset!), and company (my best friend, Jennie!, who took our picture). It was also nice to meet Kyo Maclear, whose work I’ve admired for a long time. And then Harriet and I took the streetcar home, which was fabulous because transit is Harriet’s favourite part of being alive, and the driver on the Bathurst Streetcar rang his bell for us! Also exciting, I thought, was that the entire Queen St. W. area smelled like farm, which was curious, yes, but mostly importantly, which Harriet recognized before I did, and how wonderful that my streetcar-riding city girl knows what just what a farm smells like.

March 22, 2012

On balancing the multitudes in Canadian Fiction

I’m excited that my essay “Embracing the Global, Celebrating the Local: On Balancing the Multitudes in Canadian Fiction” is now online at The Winnipeg Review as part of their feature on nationalism and Canadian literature.

March 21, 2012

Our Best Book from the Library Haul: The Red Carpet by Rex Parkin

Well, this blog feature is going to have a cramp in its style because our public library workers have gone on strike. The only bright spot in all this is that we got 20 books out of the library last week, and that most of them have turned out to be really good, and let’s hope I don’t have to feature them all one-by-one until our librarians are back at work and our haul can be replenished.

In the meantime, there is Rex Parkin’s The Red Carpet, first published in 1948. When the doorman at the Hotel Bellevue rolls out the carpet in preparation for a visit from the Duke of Sultana, something bizarre happens. Turns out that carpet’s length is infinite and it just keeps going and going in a whimsical tale of causality and chaos than puts me in mind of Curious George Gets a Medal and Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo (and illustrations with a touch of the wonderful Virginia Lee Burton).

We are slaves to rhyming couplets over here, which we never tire of reading over and over again, so this book suits our tendencies. Though I do delight in the story’s one week point, at which “Kobe” and “globe” are meant to rhyme, and I make a point of pronouncing “globe” as “glow-bay”.

March 20, 2012

Among Others by Jo Walton

Jo Walton’s Among Others begins with a story that is already over. Twin sisters in South Wales who can see and communicate with fairies were brought to battle with their mother who used magic for ill. One sister was killed and the other was injured, left with a maimed leg, the fragments of her life, and only the books she could carry. Readers are dropped into the story abruptly, right in the middle of a conversation between the surviving sister, Mor, and her aunts. Since the accident, we’re told, she’s run away, spent time in a children’s home, then was given up to the guardianship of her estranged father. And now she’s been enrolled in an English boarding school where her vow to cease practicing magic should be easy to keep as there is little magic there to come by.

Here is a story with its own mythology, though the background is not laid out for us. As the novel is structured as Mor’s diary, she feels no need to illuminate facts and details, and so much of what’s gone on is hazy, vague. There is also the question of Mor’s own reliability– approaching this book from a literary angle, the sense is that she is so steeped in the tradition of science fiction that she’s ceased to understand what is impossible in reality. Except then there come these moments where the magic is undeniable, and genres are blurred: science fiction and English boarding school lit (and of *course* Jo Walton has read Charlotte Sometimes), realism and fantasy, children’s stories and adult novels. The magic is undeniable, yes, but the story itself is also so absolutely rooted in the world that I was as hooked as everybody said I would be.

It is books that save Mor from her dismal life (and oh, how Walton illuminates this, the pain of what she’s lost), and also the friendships she discovers through books and reading. She is pleased to learn that her father is also a Sci-Fi fan and he lets her borrow from his library– this becomes the one connection between them. An outcast at school, she’s excluded from games due to her disability, and spends hours in the school library where she appreciates the warmth of the school librarian. She’s also asked to join a Sci-Fi book club at the bookshop in town, where she finds friendship, intellectual stimulation, and even love. The perfection of this happy ending is perhaps the most fantastic element of all, but it’s everything we hope for her.

The straightforwardness of this narrative is complicated by Mor’s own insistance that good things have only come her way because she’s conjured them, however. She notes that so much of her recent fortune is too good to be true and puts it down to a spell she’d cast when she was most lonely. Of course, this can be read as a typical teenage approach to reality– that the universe exists to serve you only, that there’s doubt that other people even exist except in terms of their relationship to you. Is her reality any less real though because she believes it’s magic? Does it really matter if the result is the same?

To Mor, lines are blurred between worlds real and imaginary, which is fitting for someone who quite literally lives in a book, I suppose. Tolkien’s universe is as real to her as her own is– she’s convinced he saw the fairies too– and so are countless other literary worlds referenced that I was less familiar with. To those who know these worlds well, Among Others will be a pleasure, and to those (like me) who are absorbed by books, are grateful for their company, or even for those who just appreciate a good story, the novel will also ring true.

(Also, my favourite line in the novel was, “They weren’t evil after all, they were just odd in a very English way.”)

March 19, 2012

It's time to reread The Children's Book

Harriet was scheduled to born on a Tuesday, and the Friday before, late in the evening, a copy of AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book turned up at my door. I spent my last days without her, my last days alone, scrambling to get this book read because I’d been waiting for it for so long already, and it was so massive I knew I’d never get to it after the baby’s birth due to matters of weight and time. I finished reading it on Monday at 5:00, and don’t remember so much of the book itself save for the scramble, a fantastic race to the finish, which was wholly symbolic of life at the time (with no imagining of what would come after). So I’ve been intending to reread it ever since, an intimidating prospect because it’s still a hulking book, but so much of my reading lately– Joan Bodger, Arcadia, Among Others— has been gesturing toward it, so it’s time now. I’m excited. Because I’ve no idea what it is to read The Children’s Book when one isn’t scheduled to give birth on Tuesday. To read this book now as a mother myself, and with such a richer appreciation of children’s stories than when I encountered this the first time. Not quite three years ago, but how it seems a whole other lifetime.

March 18, 2012

On books, "buzz" and magic

“You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was just because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.” —Among Others, Jo Walton

It’s like magic, the way good news of a book spreads. I’m currently reading Jo Walton’s Among Others because at our last book club meeting, Deanna couldn’t stop talking about it, and then Trish tweeted, “Dying to get on the streetcar so I can get back to reading Jo Walton’s Among Others“, and this is the kind of buzz I listen to. It’s real and you can’t buy it, but I trust it because it’s the sound of real people talking about a book that’s made a connection.

But it’s not magic, of course. It’s a chain of coincidence that begins with a writer creating a work that is really good, or sometimes a work that is not very good but happens to be exactly what readers are hungry for. And then the work drifts out into the world, and of course it helps to know a lot of people well-placed to help the drifting, to have a great cover design, be published by a press that newspaper editors pay attention to, to be photogenic and/or notorious (or fictional), to have a lot of time to twitter, and a knack for connecting with your audience. But then I’m thinking of a book like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin where almost none of that happened, and the book caught on fire. What happened with that book was the most amazing chain of coincidence, a force onto itself, and no one ever could have made that happen.

In less magical terms, I despair when I listen to men on the radio talking about an invasion of Iran or moving the economy forward as though anyone actually has any understanding of or control over how matters of war or economics transpire– these things take on unforeseen trajectories and are carried by their own momentum. You can’t plot these matters the way you plot a book, and nor can you plot a book’s reception either. I recently read a comment by an author stating that he appreciated the way that social media gives him control over what happens to his books once they’re published, but that control is an illusion. The magic is going to happen or it isn’t, and it’s unfair expectation on an author to make him think he can steer it either way, or that he’d feel responsible when magic fails to occur (except perhaps for having written a book that wasn’t extraordinary or even good. I come across a lot of terrible books in my travels. It is my opinion that more writers should be feeling such a burden these days).

Sometimes the magic should happen and it doesn’t. For example, it blows my mind (and in a bad way) that there are books on this that anybody hasn’t read yet. It’s unjust. Or that Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist didn’t win a major literary award last autumn (though magic did happen there. People loved that book). It kills me when the books I love don’t take, but it’s the way it goes, and it’s in nobody’s hands. But then I go declaring Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories as one of the best books of the year, the CBC concurs, and the book is getting rave reviews everywhere. This is what buzz is: a chain of coincidence that originates with a book that is awesome. (And now here, it’s your turn: buy it.)

Which is not to say that writers are powerless or that book marketers would be best sitting idle. Book marketing is a tool, and so is social media, and both are always going to aid the process. I recently purchased Emma Staub’s story collection Other People We Married because on one strange morning, she had turned up in every hyperlink I’d clicked on and somehow that managed not to be annoying. Now Straub is well-connected, which does help– I followed her on twitter after a recommendation by Maud Newton, who is a good person to know, I’d say. But mostly importantly, in none of the links I clicked on was Straub telling me how fantastic she or her book was. In one, she was using her experience as a bookseller to advise writers on “How to Be an Indie Booksellers Dream”. In another, she was included in Elissa Schappell’s “Books With Second” Lives feature. And then there was this. Such a chain of coincidence, I found, that obviously the universe was telling me to buy this book. And so I did.

So the writer is not powerless. But here it is, in two of these links, the magic had already happened– the book had connected with readers and they were telling me about it. In the other, Straub was putting her name and face out there, but doing so by participating in a wider community of readers and writers, giving them something other than a sales pitch.

Writers: stop tweeting the same links to your reviews over and over again (unless, perhaps, you’ve just been reviewed in the New York Times), stop spamming your followers, you don’t need to respond to every blogger’s review (and especially not if it’s a bad one), give your potential audience a reason to be interested in you besides the fact that you’ve written a book you want them to read. Social media is a conversation, and nobody likes anyone in a conversation who only talks about themselves.

But at a certain point, the writer has to take a step back and just let it happen. Magic can’t be orchestrated.

**
Speaking of magic, we high-fived over our pancakes this morning as The 49th Shelf received a shout-out on CBC’s The Sunday Edition in a discussion about the state of Canadian publishing. It was glorious.

March 15, 2012

Virginia Wolf by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault

Kyo Maclear is author of the beloved 2007 novel The Letter Opener and is, with illustrator Isabelle Arsenault, the force behind the acclaimed Spork. Her latest picture book with Arsenault is Virginia Wolf, a story loosely based on the Woolfian one of the similar name and her relationship with her sister Vanessa.

There is precedent for a literary rendering of the child Virginia– those of us steeped in Woolf lore know well the stories of Virginia, Vanessa and their brother Thoby of 22 Hyde Park, and their childhood family newspaper was published in book form in 2006. And it is those of us steeped in Woolf lore who will seize to these connections, though Maclear herself emphasizes the looseness of her basis. So what is its point then? The Woolf connection is not a necessary element of the text, but it provides the book with additional texture, literary and otherwise.

In this story of two sisters, one of them, Virginia, overcome by the doldrums, is captured by a wolfish mood. This mood has an effect on the whole household: “Up became down. Bright became dim. Glad became gloom.” The other sister, Vanessa, tries to cheer Virginia up, but nothing works. Finally, Vanessa lies in bed with her sad sister and listens to her describe the world she longs to escape to, called “Bloomsberry”. Virginia is freed from her wolfish mood after Vanessa creates a version of Bloomsberry on the bedroom walls, and by the story’s end, she’s well enough to go back into the world. Down is up again.

(Must point out connections between this and another wonderful book from KidsCanPress about painted gardens and their restorative effects– Andrew Larsen’s The Imaginary Garden is much adored at our house.)

Very young children (and their parents) will be delighted by the book’s illustrations– Harriet is particularly taken with Virginia’s transformation from wolf to girl on the book’s final pages. They will also come to understand the plot at its most basic level– that there are times when we all feel a bit wolfish. It’s a name to put to what happens on those tantrum-filled days, or when Mommy’s patience is particularly limited. Wolfish moods happen, there’s no real reason for them, and they pass. We feel better.

For older readers who’ve had family members suffering from depression, I imagine this book would be particularly valuable. Yes, it is a simplified depiction of the disease but that simplification is essential for a child to obtain any real understanding what’s going on around them. The reader will understand that nothing they have done has caused their loved one’s suffering, and also that there is little they can do to relieve it.What Vanessa does to help her sister is be near her, to listen to her talk, to lie in bed beside her and look out the window to see the world through her eyes.

Of everything Vanessa paints in Bloomsberry though, most essential  is the ladder, “so what was down could climb up”– a recognition that the journey will be Virginia’s alone to make. To her painting she adds also room for Virginia to wander, because wandering is what wolves like to do. And while Maclear has Virginia feeling much better the next morning, the ladder and the wandering space function on a metaphoric level to acknowledge the true complexity of her character’s experience.

The elephant in the room of course is Woolf’s own suicide, and that any child who comes to know the author through Virginia Wolf will discover a very different end to the story. Though I would argue this point by resisting the notion of reducing Woolf’s life and her legacy to her mental illness and the circumstances of her death. Yes, she suffered substantially through her life, but anyone who knows her work well will understand that she had a capacity for joy as great as she had for sorrow. There is so much more to Woolf than the stones in her pockets, and I love that this book celebrates that. She survived her bouts in the doldrums over and over again, and that she finally didn’t in no way undermines the achievement of her life, all 59 years of it. Further, rather than overlooking the circumstances of Woolf’s death, I think that Maclear is using it externally as a fitting counter to her book’s sunny ending. It doesn’t belong in the book, but the connection is there for the reader to make, and I think it is an important one.

March 14, 2012

From the reaches

Coach House fails to imPress the 3-and-under set or maybe they're just overwhelmed

From the reaches of the internet, I bring you Kyran Pittman on blogging and book-writing (“As we move away from our attachment to the vehicle, I’m noticing recently a subtle shift in the blog culture’s attitude toward publishing books”). Paper Tigers Blog reviews Joan Bodger’s Court and Castle. Behind the Mad Men twitter accounts (which I refuse to believe aren’t authentic). Lauren Groff’s Arcadia gets a rave review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories gets love from Quill & Quire. Snyder’s book is also called one of the best books you’ll read this year by CBC Books in this excellent list of Canadian women writers you need to read right now. And she blogs for The Afterword about why she loves her cover art. An interview with the fabulous Caitlin Moran that references wanking to Chevy Chase (and I am so excited that so many of you want to read her book now. But of course you do!). The VIDA 2012 Count and why it doesn’t matter how many women submit to literary magazines. DoveGreyReader finally reads Possession. The spring session of my blogging course at UofT begins in one month! You can register here. And check out Kyo Maclear’s Picture Books for Grown-Ups list— I absolutely adore it. Now reading Death Comes to Pemberley, which I’m probably enjoying more than the Austenites and now I want to read Pride and Prejudice again (and let’s just say I never thought anything would make me want to do such a thing). Finally, we bought a Sam Cooke hits CD recently which has revolutionized how good it is to be at our house. Everything is better when Sam Cooke is playing, and we’ve been doing a lot of dancing in the kitchen and drinking more wine. My favourite song of the moment is the wonderful Bring It On Home.

And yes, I’ve decided to bring back my links round-ups which is a bit 2007, but twitter is too ephemeral for some things. Plus I can post photos of Harriet as accompaniment.

March 13, 2012

Never Mind the Patriarchy: Three Books for International Women's Day

Renee Rodin’s Subject to Change was recommended to me via Anakana Schofield’s list of her favourite Vancouver books, and I fell in with with the cover, its light, those clothes. And though Rodin’s approach is very different (these are essays, not short stories), I was reminded of Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute all the way through, and not just due to similarities in title. Also of Madeline Sonik’s Afflictions and Departures, which more overtly links the personal and political in a collection of essays. Like Paley, Rodin writes about an eccentric, passionate, left-leaning single mother, who is dare-to-be-errant, who scrambles to balance motherhood with writing, and who sees motherhood as a role that comes with political responsibility, and knows a good neighbourhood like Jane Jacobs does. Rodin writes of her upbringing in Jewish Montreal, begins one essay with “…when I was a teenage beatnik”, recounts her experience as a bookstore owner in the ’80s and ’90s, accosts BC Premier Gordon Campbell in the street, serves on a jury, takes care of her father at the end of his life, watches the twin towers fall with her sons in New York City, becomes a grandmother, confronts grief and the unimaginable reality of violent death with the murder of her son’s fiancee– the irresolvable nature of such things, and writes, “It is hard to be consoled and it is hard to console.” These essays are familiar, engaging, and unforgettable, kitchen-sink feminism as written from the trenches. 

The best of Michele Landsberg’s Toronto Star columns have been collected as Writing the Revolution, which I heard about because when her launch took place around the corner from my house, lines of people stretched all the way down the street. To read these columns (from the 1970s to early 2000s) in our current climate is to encounter a bizarre sense of how far we’ve come coupled with being stuck in a time warp. It feels like a different country from one in which bookstores were being firebombed (also around the corner from my house, just a different corner), there was no such thing as maternity leave, and rapists went free due to a variety of reasons women were “asking for it”. But not too far south from us, they’re letting a lunatic who wants to outlaw birth control imagine he’s a serious contender for US presidency, women’s organizations in Canada are no longer publicly funded, and there was that charming police officer whose wardrobe advice inspired the Slut Walks. Landsberg writes, “Because our history is constantly overwritten and blanked out…., we are always reinventing the wheel when we fight for equality.” Landsberg’s passion for and hope for the future of feminism is inspiring and this book is essential reading, providing the kind of perspective that’s entirely necessary if feminists want to keep moving forward.

And then there’s Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which I discoverered here. Germaine Greer meets Adrian Mole in this book that had me literally howling with laughter, and reading entire chapters aloud to my husband in bed, which is difficult when one is howling. Howling and honking, even. Yes, here is the book I’ve been waiting my whole life for and which I’m going to buy a copy of so my daughter can read it herself as soon as she cares to. So she will know from the start that there’s one woman who dares to say that brazilian waxes are stupid, high heels are crippling, who asks why no one makes porn in which women are enjoying themselves, and points out that no man really cares what your underpants look like. Liberator of obsessively-masturbating teenage girls! Not remotely sorry for her abortion! Who wants to take back the strident in strident feminist! She writes, “So here is a quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. a) Do you have a vagina? b) Do you want to be in charge of it?”I want to read you entire chapters too, or maybe the whole book, but that will take too long, so why not just read it? You’ll howl too, and you’ll also be uplifted by the fact that the voice of reason is fucking hilarious.

Oh, to read three brilliant, engaging, non-academic feminist books in a row. It did something to me, though spring and sunshine might deserve some of the credit too, but by the end of Caitlin Moran, I felt amazing, unstoppable, and gorgeous without caveats. As radiant as Renee Rodin in the sunshine. Enormously proud to be carrying on the feminist tradition, and content to be as strident as they come.

March 12, 2012

Think more widely

“Progress has been made… yet the struggles continue, the passion and fury can erupt at any time, and many of feminism’s most cherished victories are continually menaced. The media constantly polarize the debates by pitting groups of women against each other, like stay-home moms versus daycare users, or pro-and anti-choice campaigners, or “pro-sex” women against those dried up prudes who want to spoil all the fun. The tactic isn’t new: First Wave suffragists were also derided and parodied as anti-sex killjoys and harridans. The trick to evading these binary traps is to think more widely. Who economic, sexual, class or political interests are being served by the female mouthpieces and role models provided by the media? The answers can be complex, but at least they’re more thought-productive than the simple-minded oppositions (home or career? breast or bottle?) so dear to the media.” –Michele Landsberg, Writing the Revolution