March 28, 2012
Julie Wilson and Seen Reading: The Book
Five years ago, I linked to a new books site called Seen Reading whose premise was entrancing, and the site was the way I first heard of Julie Wilson, the way that so many of us did. Connecting the wondrous delights of reading and public transit, Julie was peering between your covers on the subway, and then imagining what you’d next get up to. The blog was fascinating, to have it affirmed that the book was indeed much alive, and also so celebrated, and, yes, of course, to find out what everybody was reading. And I kept hoping that one day Julie Wilson would see me.
When she did, however, it was not on the subway, but at The Scream in High Park in 2008, and I offered her an avocado scone from my picnic basket. I liked her immediately. And naturally, because she’s Julie Wilson, what she’d been talking about that night was new projects she was up to, and not long after that, I emailed her to see if I could be a part of it.
Here is the most important thing about Julie Wilson: she said YES! What Julie does better than anybody else is give you this sense that there’s something going on, and that you want to join in. And that she wants you to join in too, even if you’re a curious little person with a rash on her neck whose email began, “Hey, remember me? I gave you a scone once?” (Note: the rash cleared up not long after.)
At the time, she was beginning to record readers reading for her Seen Reading site, and we met one afternoon at the Toronto Reference Library, its fountains splashing in the background as I read a passage from Carol Shields’ Unless. I encountered her next at the launch for Rebecca Rosenblum’s short story collection Once, and she recorded me reading a passage from that book in an echoey bathroom, both us perched on the edge of a tub. She had to show me how to say “ennui”.
And I tell you all this not necessarily to name-drop and emphasize my closeness with Julie (because if I was going to do that, I’d probably tell you that in the years since, Julie has eaten bacon in my kitchen, had my daughter fall in love with her, that we’re in the same Book Club, and that we’re partners in crime at 49thShelf. We’ve come a long, long way since my rash cleared up), but rather to make that point that so many of us have had our Julie Wilson moments. She fosters connection, her enthuasiasm is contagious, she wants you to be part of whatever game she’s playing, and she (and her projects) have sold so many books. It is a privilege to know her.
And now this Madam of all things bookish online has a book of her own, and it’s gorgeous. Imagine the force of Julie Wilson meets KissCut Design and Freehand Books indeed, and in fact you don’t even have to imagine: this is a book you can hold in your hand. Julie has gone back to her roots to translate the original Seen Reading into print, bookish transit sightings coupled with her microfictional riffs. And because this is Julie, she couldn’t leave it at that. Her revamped website includes links to a reading guide, events, an online community of literary voyeurs, and more.
“This space will change often because Julie can’t make up her minds” is a line from her site, and thank goodness. The literary world is richer for it.
March 28, 2012
Funny reread
Funny reread of Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and I’m convinced that furious consumption was how it meant to be read, in fact, and that I got it right the first time. When I read 600+ pages in just three days because my life depended on it. This time, I picked it up again and I’ve been so busy the last week or so that I could only manage it in small amounts, amounts too small for me to get caught up in the story before I had to put it down again. And all that picking up and putting down was hard work for a book that was so enormous. I found myself skimming the surface of the narrative instead of getting lost inside it, and the surface of this novel is so many-sided that it was disorienting. I would much rather get lost in a wood than slide down a polyhedron. Also surprised to find the novel so much less “about” the things I’d thought it was about– fairy tales, childhood, families, Edwardian England, history etc– than embodying the things themselves. The effect is overwhelming. It’s a truly brilliant novel but I will have to re-reread it again when I’ve cleared enough space in my head to totally devote to it.
Anyway, I also have to read the biography of E. Nesbit now as per here, which I probably should have just done instead of rereading The Children’s Book. More insight into Byatt’s influences for the novel here.
March 26, 2012
Here and there
Tomorrow night, UofT’s MA Creative Writing program is celebrated at a gala at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library featuring readings by Anne Michaels, AF Moritz, and program students. Find out more here. Charlotte Ashley gives us 5 things to do with your kids while the library is on strike. What can librarians learn from DIY libraries (hint: it’s not about the digital). Heather Birrell reads Carrie Snyder’s The Juliet Stories. And her wonderful post at 49thShelf, “Reading My Way Through Motherhood“. Justine Picardie on writing the end of a marriage. Billeh Nickerson on what’s so funny about the Titanic: “What many folks fail to realize is the sensitivity that it takes to realize the happier parts of our psyches, is often the same sensitivity it takes to fully get the sadness.” A celebration of Judy Blume’s girls. Leah Bobet: “cities are machines for story”. Rohan Maitzen’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Digital”. The Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest has its deadline on Wednesday. And Anne Fleming has a new collection forthcoming!
March 25, 2012
Impact by Billeh Nickerson
I started reading Billeh Nickerson’s latest book Impact: The Titanic Poems last week in preparation for a feature next month on 49thShelf. I’d picked up the book before I went to bed, and certainly hadn’t planned on what happened next: that I wouldn’t be able to turn out my light until I’d read the book entire, and that the book would make me cry. I had figured that my capacity for crying about the Titanic had been exhausted in 1998 with my teenage melodrama, and also Kate, Leo and Celine. As though by its gigantic cinematic rendering, the tragedy of the Titanic had ceased to be real or have meaning, but it turns out that one hundred years later, poetry was what was required– the opposite of gigantic– to re-instill the story with solidity.
Though what is solid is surprising. The ship itself is a ghost from the start, with rumours of a worker lost in its construction, and in “The Clothesline” the Titanic is an absence, the great ship launched and a Belfast housewife noting the space where it had been, how she’d grown it accustomed to watching it as she hung out her laundry. In four different poems, however, Nickerson describes the riveting process,the rivets themselves,and the teams of men required and their particular skills that put the ship together.
The book’s sections follow the ship from “Construction” to “Maiden Voyage”, in which we learn that the Titanic had 40,000 eggs in her provisions, 800 bundles of asparagus, that the ship’s iconic fourth smokestack functioned solely as ventilation from the First Class smoking room. Nickerson’s poems originate from photographs, official record, anecdotes. He is as much curator as poet, his items unadorned, which seemingly mask the craft at work behind them, but such subtlety is an art itself, the way he lets his items speak. The asparagus stands for itself, for instance, and Captain Smith’s beard, and the photograph of the boy with the spinning top.
And with the next section, “Impact”, it’s the people who speak, the woman being lowered into the lifeboat, the man who must deliver news to the captain of the damage below, the piano player whose instrument couldn’t be carried on deck and whose fingers imagine ghostly keys as the rest of the band played on. With “Voices”, a series of eyewitness accounts from survivors. And then “Impact” again, but this time emotional. Nickerson’s poem “Carpathia” tells of the ship that happened to receive the Titanic’s distress signals and rushed to the rescue to discover the shock of the same emptiness first glimpsed by the housewife in Belfast. The mother recounting her sons being torn away from her body, the carver who’d handcrafted the First Class staircases, various explanations for a dead man’s watch being stopped ten minutes after all the others, and the piece of wood found floating amidst the wreckage which sanded down to become a rolling pin, solidity’s essence.
And then finally, “Discovery”, the ship found and explored in the 1980s, the legacy of its Halifax cemetery, and poem called “The Last Survivor”. In which Nickerson writes, “how strange that the last survivor/ is the Titanic herself.”
March 25, 2012
Ice cream
The ice cream shop at the top of our road has opened for the season! They remarked upon how enormous Harriet has grown, and they were kind enough to refrain from mentioning that she was also very filthy (and do note, she has since been bathed). In other local news, yesterday I went to the movies for the first time in nearly three years. We saw Friends With Kids, and I really liked it (its portrayal of breastfeeding in particular, which goes a long, long way). We also bought tickets for a train journey to Ottawa, served clafoutis to friends at brunch yesterday, started reading Tales from Moominvalley, finished watching Downton Abbey Season 1, and are having to wait for Mad Men Season 5 to come out on DVD because we do not have a TV. Which is sad, but also nice to know that my dream of continually having Mad Men before me is forever coming true.
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.
