May 29, 2010
The Birthday Haul
We were inspired by Carrie Snyder and her gift-free birthday idea, because our apartment is small, the planet’s resources are limited, plastic lives forever, and Harriet already has a lot of stuff. And because we had every intention of spoiling her ourselves, of course, as did the rest of our families. But we wanted to celebrate Harriet’s first birthday with our friends as well, so when we invited them to the birthday party, we asked that lieu of gifts, they bring a board book for donation to The Children’s Book Bank.
I know that the Book Bank is in need of board books in particular, and now that I know Harriet, I understand why. Board books are basically edible, which doesn’t bode well for second-hand. And did our friends ever deliver– check out this stack of goods. How wonderful to spend a beautiful afternoon in such splendid company, and have this to show for it. It also gives us an excellent excuse to make a trip to the Book Bank ourselves, because it’s really a magical place.
May 27, 2010
Dear Carrie Bradshaw
I never understood why it didn’t work out with Aidan. My sister has tried to explain it to me, how you and Aidan didn’t have *it*, and how apparently you found *it* with another man who was never very nice to you. This all reminds me a bit of that book that came out a few months back that implored women to “settle” and defined “settling” as marrying someone who is kind, stable, and good. Undermining the value of *it*, it seems. But in your case, didn’t *it* really come down to a closet?
I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw. When I was lonely and sad, I loved that you were a Katie Girl, and it gave me courage to be myself. I know it is pathetic to get courage from HBO, but it was the turn of the century and I was a bit shallow, and so were you, but that wasn’t the whole of it either, was it? I loved your friendships, and I loved your friends. I loved your voice overs, and your laptop screen. Neither of us could have been so entirely shallow, really, because I’ve never known a shoe that wasn’t orthopedic, but I liked you, Carrie Bradshaw, still.
I liked you, though you’ve done harm. You have! The number of women I know who don’t believe it’s love unless it’s tumultuous– that’s down to you, CB. Who believe that tumult=passion. Not to mention a predilection for really expensive shoes and bags, and really expansive debt. I’m not sure that before you, these things were considered normal.
I liked you though, but I don’t think I like you anymore. I’ll never really know, because I haven’t seen your latest movie and I don’t plan to, but I saw a preview and I’m disappointed. Unsurprised, but disappointed. Because in your new movie, you appear to take a look at your life (the not-so-nice, emotionally unavailable man you married, your closet) and determine that the problem is marriage. That marriage is boring, and passion gets stale, and then you run away to become the Sheik of Araby (and here, the preview lost me).
Though I am still a bit green when it comes to marriage, that I’ve been doing it for five years is nothing to scoff at. And I’ve been pretty good at marriage, actually, right from the get-go, when I made a decision to marry a man who wasn’t an asshole. It was him, actually, who took me away from a life in which courage was HBO. So yes, in a way, it seems I required a man to save me, but he saved me from you, Carrie Bradshaw, and your fashionable post-feminism. And I’ve been pretty happy ever since, having put away the angst, the drama, the tumult, and without that baggage, I’ve gotten a lot of really good things done. If he hadn’t come along, I really do fear that I might have whiled away my twenties wearing a necklace with my name on it, and I wouldn’t even have been you because you’re a fantasy. I would have been wearing orthopedic shoes and I would have still been sad.
Marriage is wonderful, Carrie Bradshaw. It is a fine institution, and of course, it’s what you make it. And it’s not for everybody, maybe even not for you, but I resent how you deride it. I resent that the same women who’ve spent their twenties thinking it’s not love unless somebody’s throwing things are going to think that marriage should be more of the same. And that when the throwing stops, that’s boring.
Carrie Bradshaw, you’re boring. You make adolescents look mature. If you were real, I’d throw something at you, and that’s not love.
Yours sincerely,
Kerry
May 26, 2010
On the occasion of Harriet's first birthday– A TNQ Giveaway!
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is nothing more boring than a mother marvelling that her child is actually one year older than she had been 365 days previous, I will sweeten the deal for you with a giveaway (see below). In the meantime, allow me to wish my favourite grass-grazing, scone-eating, bath-splashing, book-chewing, mommy-kissing, tea-pouring (imaginary), scream-uttering, world-charming, fast-crawling, quick-squirming, noodle-devouring, all-night-sleeping baby, Ms. Harriet (who is my prime distraction, main occupation, the one subject of which I will never, ever tire [though I will tire, oh yes I will, and I have]) a very happy first birthday. It has been a year that’s turned my pickled piglet into an honest-to-goodness person, albeit a still-quadrupedal one. It’s simply been an eternity, and it’s all disappeared in a flash.
There. Thank you. And for your patience, A TNQ Giveaway!
I have an one-year subscription to give away to my favourite magazine in the world, The New Quarterly. TNQ is fiction, poetry, features, art, profiles, creative non-fiction and more. TNQ is never the same, but always gorgeously produced, the work is always thoughtful and interesting, containing stories that have absolutely blown my mind. I read Alison Pick for the first time there, and Carrie Snyder, and Terry Griggs, and Amy Jones, and Zsuszi Gartner. I love the “Magazine as Muse” section. The Editor’s letters are always a pleasure to read, and full of treasures themselves. In short, four times a year, TNQ comes into my world and makes it a better place. And now you have the chance to make yours similarly enhanced. (Providing you’re a Canadian resident. So sorry, my international friends!)
To win a one-year subscription to The New Quarterly on the occasion of Harriet’s birthday, email me (klclare AT gmail com) and tell me who is your favourite literary baby. (You don’t have one? Come on…). Deadline is Saturday May 29th at midnight. Winner will be chosen randomly OR I will pick my very favourite, if one is so astounding.
And anyone who chooses Margaret Atwood’s “Hairball” is disqualified.
May 24, 2010
On Shirley Jackson
I’ve not read anything by Shirley Jackson, but her book The Haunting of Hill House was on Sarah Waters’ Top Ten Ghost Stories. And now, my amazing new book club The Vicious Circle (and yes, if I wasn’t in this book club, I’d be jealous of anyone who was) will be reading her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And since I read this article yesterday, I’ve been itching to read her short fiction. I may be the only person ever who hasn’t read “The Lottery”. Life Among the Savages might also be right up my alley. So I’ve just got this feeling that I’m on the cusp of something– all of these books to be read/loved before me. And my love of anticipation is as such that I’d sort of like to have them before me forever. The only thing I might love more than anticipation is a good book, however, so I’ll be picking up some Shirley Jackson sometime soon. I think I am going to ask for a gift certificate for Ten Editions Books for my birthday.
May 21, 2010
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
Does Attica Locke ever do atmosphere in her first novel Black Water Rising. It’s the summer of 1981 in Houston, Texas, and the temperatures are soaring, along with the oil prices, the one tied to the other as lawyer Jay Porter tries not to overuse the air-con so as to conserve gasoline. His wife Bernadine is just weeks away from giving birth to their first child, and Porter is barely earning a living practicing law on his own, in an office in a strip mall. One night on a boat cruise along Buffalo Bayou, as the two are celebrating Bernie’s birthday, they hear a gunshot and a scream from somewhere on the shore.
Porter’s first instinct is to stay out of it– the FBI file left over from his student activist past in the civil rights movement has taught him as much. Urged on by his wife, however, Jay jumps into the bayou and finds himself inextricably embroiled in a crime that involves some of Houston’s most powerful forces.
Locke ties the strands of this narrative together with ease– how the mysterious white woman Jay rescues from the bayou is connected to the labour unrest over which Houston’s dockworkers are threatening to strike. How Houston’s controversial new female mayor is connected to Jay Porter’s radical past. How Jay’s troubled early life is affecting Jay as he awaits the birth of his first child. What all this has to do with the fact that he’s always packing a gun, terrified of what lies around the next corner. Though he’s been terrified for good reason lately– since he pulled the woman out of the water, other people have turned up dead, threats have been made on his own life and his wife’s, and someone seems desperate for him to keep his mouth shut about what he’s seen.
There is always music playing in the background, or the late night talk-radio going out over the airwaves as Jay drives around town. All of this adding to the heightened atmosphere, sense of impending something, the pulse of the city over those sweltering summer days and nights. Locke creates and sustains terrific suspense throughout her narrative, displaying her screenwriting background. Car chases, gunshots and fights down stair flights drive the narrative forward. Porter is a compelling and layered character, a driving force in his own right. For the last couple of years, I’ve been afflicted with a late-onset thing for crime-fiction, and Porter is everything a reader could want from such a book.
Black Water Rising has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, perhaps by its un-literary nature a longshot. But I can see why it was included, and how the list is better for it. Locke defies all convention about the kind of fiction women are supposed to write, about what crime fiction is supposed to be like. Her characterization is strong, her prose is punchy, her maneuvering of plot a most impressive feat. This is a really good book, unputdownable, the only Orange Prize shortlister I’ve ever called my Dad about to say, “You’ve got to read this!”. It’s a book that proves that commercial fiction can be amazing, and that in itself is really accomplishment enough.
May 21, 2010
The most beautiful thing I have ever created…
…is this pie, obviously. Whose butterfly cookie-cutter top (idea stolen from a pie at Madeleine’s) breaks my top pastry sheet into pieces, which is what always happens anyway, but at least in this case, I get to do it on purpose. The pie’s innards are Ontario rhubarb, non-Ontario strawberries, and plenty of the one thing that makes rhubarb so delicious– sugar! And the whole thing was so delicious. A fine way to start the Victoria Day long weekend, and just the thing after an afternoon in the sunshine.
May 19, 2010
I receive White Ink in the post
It has been an absolutely bumper week for books in the post. Today delivered my copy of White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood from Demeter Press. I bought this book for selfish reasons, of course, but it didn’t hurt that my purchase will help to keep Demeter Press afloat. And may I please mention other fine Demeter books Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog and Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts. As well as the gala event this Friday to raise funds for MIRCI and Demeter Press?
I imagine I’ll be dipping in and out of this beautiful book for some time. For Grace Paley, Sonnet L’Abbe, Rosemary Sullivan, Lorna Crozier, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Ray Hsu (with whom I used to work the Saturday midnight shift at the EJ Pratt Library, I’ll have you know), Leon Rooke, Laisha Rosnau, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, as well as many poets I have yet to discover.
There is also a Carol Potter. Do you think she is the Carol Potter,the most famous mother of all??
May 18, 2010
Deeper Withinness, and other thoughts on You Are Not a Gadget
Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget is incredibly provocative, and reviewers seem to be ripping it to pieces for sport. Not because it’s a bad book necessarily, or that Lanier’s ideas are particularly faulty, but because Lanier is critiqueing something the rest of us take for granted. And even if Lanier’s book was bad or his ideas were faulty, his book would still be worthwhile. It doesn’t necessarily have to be read as a polemic, as an assault on a whole way of life. Lanier could be 100% wrong the entire way through (and I’m certainly not one to determine whether he is or not) but I dare you to read this book and not learn something new. To not come away with questions you’d never considered before.
What I learned/considered: Lanier’s ties to the internet go back thirty years, and he takes great pains to point out that the internet could have developed any number of ways. That it developed the way it did because of decisions that people made for various reasons, some of them misguided, naive or ill-intentioned. That we overestimate the capabilities of computers and compromise ourselves in order to get along with them as closely as we do. That social media has much the same effect– in order to interact with Facebook, we reduce ourselves to catagories, keywords, standardized versions of ourselves. Twitter demands we communicate in short bursts of nothing. This is self-effacing, we’re playing into the hands of marketers. Content has become devalued by its treatment in the online world. Jonathan Coulton is an anomaly. Having finance in the hands of computer scientists as opposed to those who understand economics is a recipe for disaster. Remix culture sucks. With all the amazing advances in computer capability and open culture, all we have to show for it is LINUX and Wikipedia, both of which are just versions of things that came before.
Hive culture has come at a cost– we’ve killed journalism and music. Great art is not being made, rather we’re rehashing old art and doing it badly. We’re babbling about television recaps, writing blog entries without thought and posting idiotic movies on youtube. Lanier doesn’t reference literature. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate omission– could it be that books will fare better in this culture than other media? And I’m not talking about plagiarism– in most instances, I think there is a pretty clear distinction between plagiarism and “mixing” (and Opal Mehta is the former, FYI). But in the poetry I’ve read lately, by Michael Lista, PK Page and Julie Holbrook, I’ve seen some pretty beautiful things made out of recycle material. Perhaps poetry in particular lends itself to this? I’m not sure that a remixed novel wouldn’t totally suck. Or is the poetic trend towards this sort of thing a kind of omen? Is this what Lanier is talking about. The future as a place where originality goes to die?
And then there are literary blogs, or book blogs. Lanier doesn’t mention these either (perhaps he doesn’t read a lot of fiction? Though his interests are far-reaching. He is obsessed with cephalopods and ouds). I know I spend a lot of my time here rehashing other people’s ideas, or simply pasting them down as is. Is this pursuit any more worthwhile than episode recaps of So You Think You Can Dance?
The other day, Charlotte Ashley asked “Are bloggers/twitterers just unpaid publicity staff? What do we “get” out of this relationship?” So now what I’m thinking about has nothing to do with Jaron Lanier anymore, but it sort of does. I think this is the kind of question he’d want me to be thinking about. Why do I write a book blog? First, because it’s made me smarter. I am a much better reader than I was five years ago, and I have learned so much from the readers who’ve joined me in this conversation. Second, because although I am pushing goods here (books), those goods are culture, and there’s something a bit more noble about that than me pushing, say, lipstick (as long as I’m discerning, because, frankly, some books are lipstick). Because when I find a book that’s good, I can help nudge it farther out into the world. I get to be useful, and that’s a fine thing. And because even if nobody ever read this blog, it allows me to engage with the books I read (which is all too important when one reads too quickly like I do). Writing book reviews helps to figure out what I really read, and I really think about it. It makes reading a book a much deeper experience. Because books are worth talking about. Blogging about books, like talking about books, takes us deeper within them.
Deeper withinness being the whole point of virtual reality (which Jaron Lanier invented) so maybe he’d be on board afterall.
May 18, 2010
Figurative Devouring Only
Today we received in the post the latest from Rebecca Rosenblum. Her chapbook Road Trips has just been published by Frog Hollow Press, and is so incredibly gorgeous. The pages are a joy to caress, the endpapers are thick, fibrous and lovely, and I love the images inside which remind me of lino-cuts. And then there are her stories– I’ve read one before (though I imagine it’s changed since then) and the other will be new. How wonderful! This is one book the baby will not be permitted to eat. Figurative devouring only.
