April 21, 2010
Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller
K.D. Miller’s novel Brown Dwarf is a delicious secret. A slim volume, gorgeous to behold (and to hold! that cover. those thick pages. such an elegant typeface, perfect leading), it knows far more than it is telling. Rae Brand, a successful mystery novelist, turns to her own personal narrative in order to confront a pivotal event from her childhood. Though she’d been Brenda Bray then, lumpen outcast, daughter of a depressive, the character Rae Brand has been escaping ever since.
The novel alternates between Brenda’s story in third person, and Rae’s voice, addressing her childhood friend Jori. Though their relationship had not been a friendship exactly, the power dynamic far too unequal. Jori had been an outcast as much as Brenda, though for different reasons, and had seized onto the other girl, dominating her. Brenda had followed along with Jori’s scheme to catch an escaped serial killer hiding in the wilderness of the Niagara Escarpment, th0ugh what had gone on between the girls exactly is never entirely clear. Something sexual, other things even more complicated than that, and one day after Brenda leaves her in the woods, Jori is never seen again.
A brown dwarf, writes Rae Brand, is a character in crime fiction, the villain. Ugly, understated, far from the prime suspect because just too dull to be noticed, but this stigma is the brown dwarf’s ulterior motive. Particularly dangerous, because this character blends so well into the background, and Brenda Bray is such a character. Miller provides a particularly strong perspective of her personality but using the present-tense, second-person address, and showing us young Brenda in third person (this even more interesting when we understand that this is also filtered through Brenda/Rae’s point of view). The gap between these two presentations wide enough that Rae/Brenda still remains somewhat elusive, which is probably as intended.
Are we to trust Rae’s rendition of events? So much is going on between the lines here (and hence that leading, amazing!). Even the book’s main weakness could be deliberate– I didn’t find Jori altogether convincing as a character. She wasn’t meant to be authentic either, more of an Eddie Haskell type (and is there a more modern reference point than Eddie. Anyone?)– but Jori read like a substandard version of Cordelia from Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. But then mightn’t Brenda want us to see her that way? To block any light that Jori might have shone?
Brenda’s character turns out to be the real driver of the narrative, in a way that’s so subtle we don’t even notice until the climax. But is Rae Brand a better writer than we realize? Has she pulled the wool over our eyes altogether? Such gaps and ambiguity make Miller’s novel an engaging and absorbing read.
April 21, 2010
The Essential P.K. Page
I’ve been reading such beautifully-made books this last while, The Essential P.K. Page among them. The poems have been selected from the span of Page’s career and are here placed in alphabetical order, for (as the editors remark) “There is not a ‘young’ voice and a ‘mature’ voice. For [Page], time is not linear and she places little value on such distinctions”. The effect of this is fascinating, something like a catalogue, something vaguely like taxonomy. The structure of this collection and Page’s work itself called to mind what poet Michael Lista referred to as poetry that is “set within the strict—and ancient— clockwork of the world”.
In fact, Lista’s approach seems less original (or less unoriginal?) when viewed in light of Page’s oeuvre. In her work, she engages with works of art (unsurprising, as she was a painter), other works of literature– with her glosa poems in particular. She plays with language (and not only English) for the sake of itself. Some of the poems are challenging, because they refer to ideas outside my familiar realm (what is an arras?) but that is my problem, and not the poems’. Page’s approach seems to be to take the concrete stuff of the universe, and spin it into something golden. The breadth of her vision is truly amazing.
Read the incredible “soft travellers” here. “that there is worth/ in orthography and there is worth/ in geography as well — for words, that is/ words correctly spelled have, in truth, /destinations…”
“Stargazer”
The very stars are justified.
The galaxy
italicized.
I have proofread
and proofread
the beautiful script.
There are no
errors.
P.K. Page
April 20, 2010
I don't know how anyone ever came to respect cinema as an art form
Jenny Diski, from “Mother! Oh God! Mother!” LRB 32.1:
“‘This is where we came in’ is one of those idioms, like ‘dialling’ a phone number, which has long since become unhooked from its original practice, but lives on in speech habits like a ghost that has forgotten the why of its haunting duties. The phrase is used now to indicate a tiresome, repetitive argument, a rant, a bore. But throughout my childhood in the 1950s and into the 1970s, it retained its full meaning: it was time to leave the cinema – although, exceptionally, you might decide to stay and see the movie all over again – because you’d seen the whole programme through. It seems very extraordinary now, and I don’t know how anyone of my generation or older ever came to respect cinema as an art form, but back then almost everyone wandered into the movies whenever they happened to get there, or had finished their supper or lunch, and then left when they recognised the scene at which they’d arrived. Often, one person was more attentive than the other, and a nudge was involved: ‘This is where we came in.’ People popped up and down in their seats and shuffled along the rows, coming and going all though the B-movie, the advertisements, the newsreel and the main feature. No one dreamed of starting a novel on page 72, or dropping into the Old Vic mid-Hamlet (though perhaps music hall worked the same way; was that the origin of the movie habit?), and not even the smallest child would let anyone get away with starting their bedtime story halfway through, but the flicks were looped, both on the projector and in our minds. You went in, saw the end, and after you’d watched the beginning and a bit of the middle you figured out how and why it had happened that way. In the introduction to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson claims that postmodernism proper dates from the later 1960s, but let me tell you that the dismantling of narrative was rampant in cinemas up and down the country for decades before that. Maybe, after all, it was an interesting way of learning about story structure, but even so, how odd that no one thought it a strange way to proceed.”
April 20, 2010
My video pitch for Barbara Pym
Jen Knoch’s book club is not only Keepin’ It Real, but they’re Keepin’ Toronto Reading too. I did my part for their effort, making a video pitch for Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love. You can watch the video, and my series of bizarre facial expressions, here.
April 19, 2010
100 Books
Today I finished reading Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller (glowing review to follow!), which was the 100th book I’ve read since Harriet was born last May 26. The last book I read before she was born was The Children’s Book by AS Byatt, and the first one I read after was A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin (which was the best, best, best book ever to read after having a baby). Also, because my computer died last year in June on my birthday, I lost my cherished list of Books Read Since 2006, so the new list starts with the Laurie Colwin, and it seems like these are the only books I’ve read ever.
Naps are my precious, precious reading time, curled up in my slanket with a cup of tea. The naps tend to be forty minutes exactly, twice a day, but I make the most of them, and for those forty minutes twice a day, my entire life feels pretty indulgent. Back when Harriet napped exclusively on my chest (and when did this end? I can’t remember. The last 100 books have been a blur), I got a lot more reading done because I was immobile and she slept for up to two hours, but the freedom of her crib naps is definitely preferable.
I’ve been surprised to find that hardcovers are easier to read than paperbacks– mainly because I have to hold the paperbacks, and this annoys Harriet when she’s breastfeeding, but hardcovers can be laid down on the couch beside me and stay open, and Harriet is none the wiser. The problem with hardcovers occurs, however, when I’m breastfeeding lying down and I drop one on her head. Though I don’t really breastfeed all that much these days (and when did this happen? How can one thing fade into another so subtly?) so soon this will cease to matter. Though paperbacks will continue to be easier to stuff into the diaper bag…
I’ve been much harder on the books that I’ve read, perhaps because my time is more limited, or because I’m in a surly mood more often than I used to be. Or else, there has just been a proliferation of really shitty books published since May 26, but I’m not convinced that’s the case.
I miss reading in bed. Some Saturdays, you’d find me there until noon. I still read in bed in the evenings, but never for very long because I go to bed too late, trying to stuff an impossible number of things into my evenings. The odd time I get a good chunk of reading-in-bed in, however, I am really profoundly grateful.
Anyway, this is just a post to reassure my former self that everything is really going to be fine. A day can be stretched wide enough to accommodate many things, and books are as portable as babies are. Also, that the books discovered through and with babies open one’s eyes exponentially to the magic of reading, and how amazing it is when you start to see the baby falling in love with reading too.
April 19, 2010
"Dead Boyfriend Disco": A poem by Rebecca Rosenblum
My friend, the writer Rebecca Rosenblum, once wrote a poem just to see what would happen. When I read it first, I didn’t know her so well, and was sure it was based on true experience. “Imaginations run rampant,/ the romance of tragic”– I was afraid to become her friend because she was so wounded. I admired her bravery, her stoicism, and (as always) her way with character and story. When we were better friends, she told me she’d made the whole thing up. Apparently, it’s called fiction, and Rebecca is very, very good at it. This poem was previously published in echolocation and I appreciate her giving me permission to post it here.
***
Dead Boyfriend Disco
There are things that the dead don’t do—
desire, demand or debate—
but they dance if they feel it and
if you want you can watch,
if vicarious seems like your thing.
In teakettle steam and exhaust from the dryer and
fog on the windows they dance.
All these visuals that just barely are
bring the past for the partnerless waltz.
A little cigarette smoke and the
zydecco’s sliding for aunts who drank sherry out back.
Grandpas who disapproved,
constantly, always,
in rivermist foxtrot like they did in the old days.
And then there’s that best of the specters,
The one that I wait for in dreams:
The dead boyfriend who does disco while I shower, in steam.
The thing about dancing is that you do it in twos,
and the thing about dying is that you go it alone.
So these dead that are dancing, they dance all alone, but
they’re moving to music for me.
A snuffed candle smoking invites smooth
smooth jazz, and Uncle Edwin who used to teach math.
And the dust from a pillow-fluff is the swing of Sarah,
a neighbour from when I was small.
I can’t dance with the dead, no more than could die,
but they need me to see them and
I never ask why.
I’ve been staying home Saturdays to breath on the mirror,
wanting to see him appear.
Late for work Monday morning
because the steam from my coffee made possible
just one more encore.
Coerced to a party, I stay for three drinks, but
smoking weed in the garden brings disco and tears.
The left-girlfriend can leave, and
no one will stay me, it’s the right of all us bereaved.
I can run from a friend, knock over the cheese-dip, and
no one will ever say boo.
I can leave without speaking,
all runny-eyed, rude, but
I know in my absence
they’ll talk of my sadness, because
everyone knows about his absence too.
In my wake at the wake, or parties, or dinner,
this fleeing girl with a dead boyfriend casts spells.
Imaginations run rampant,
the romance of tragic,
and they wonder what I’m doing now.
Boys will imagine, bosses believe, that
tragedy breeds something deep.
They picture us powerful, all us widows-of-maybe,
knowing things that they can’t know unearned.
Who would think that his dying would earn me some secrets?
All that I had was all that I wanted,
and most that I wanted was him.
To ski fast and dangerous or crack up the car, or
get something stuck in the blood—such was the destiny
of that boy of my heart and mine
is to leave when the dance music starts.
Yet there are a few victories for those with our histories,
you can’t always be the one who does not.
There are ways to go wrong with it and ways to get over it and
I’ve given those ways some thought.
The rum and the smoke and the sex of it,
all those boys who breathe easily,
seem like they might have what I want.
Once you’ve stopped writing home about dead boyfriends and agony,
you can go out and see what they’ve got.
I can think about strangers and drink up the drinks and
if there’s no candles it feels like romance.
Yet sometimes when flirting, a moment of
hurting for boys who are now corpses or worse.
The skin sinking slowly and the soil surrounding and
those bugs that can bite into bone. In the restaurant
smiling, I’m giving the pitches and ordering chicken but
in the background I’m thinking
of maggots and lichen and
the ways that a grave isn’t home.
So I escape once again, to go haunting curbside,
away from the puddles that spray out the blues.
Leave parties, leave restaurants, leave school, work and friends,
there’s no end for the need to escape.
I run home for a tear, for a tear in the stockings, for
a moment that felt less than fine. Everyone indulges,
the bosses with bravado, saying take care of yourself,
take your time.
All this time given freely, for me to enjoy,
this time in the bathtub while dressed.
An afternoon off and I hide on the tile, wondering
if this makes me obsessed.
I could run the water but then there’s the steam
and Sinatra and all of it makes me feel caught.
The Lindy Hop’s cute but I’ve got things to do, and
sometimes I’m too tired to watch.
So I stay dry and stay dirty, I make it a motto
of all ladies who got left behind. We are a club of girlfriends
who laugh at disaster and get called brave or strong or
snow cool. All of that flattering, somewhat but laughable—
it’s only ourselves that we set out to fool.
We are a club of ladies
with no love for each other,
because it takes one to know one who lies.
Lying and hiding his tapes from the seventies,
I go out alone, but when two
girlfriends meet then we know
that dead boyfriends are haunting us all.
And still we get on with it, buy shoes on their birthdays,
spike heels we know they’d have liked.
Wearing those heels, in the bathtub bone dry, we can talk
on the phone and from the safety of home, admit
that top-forty songs make us cry.
In the funeral bouquet I got a burlesque,
a masque play of dating done by grieving instead.
Roses in lieu of the boy that I loved, white roses instead of his red,
In lieu of that boy who had something bad in his heart or his car or his head.
White roses like silk, in vases on tables, waiting to wilt but
they don’t.
I’m stuck with roses with stamina forever,
it’s always the wrong things that last.
Although, if a vase should fall after a table is kicked,
the pollen that rises might tingle of tangos and other things missed.
This rageful vagueness that takes me makes me
do things only now forgivable. In embraces of boys
still living with girls I feel soft and sweet for
the hard candy meanness in me.
The wrath of waking up wet for a boy
so long underground knows no bounds I can see.
In the club with my hand on a thigh, in
the fizz of the gin that he bought, in
the thump and slide of bass, I flinch
at a shadow of specter and the dream of the disco,
but the other boy’s real and there’s no synth and no mist
so I can dance and flirt and get kissed.
So he’s not all that cute—I’m not all that sober and
want not the best but a rest.
A piranha pariah, they say it’s made me so bitter,
they say it and they’ll say again.
Dead boyfriend’s no license, but what about my sense
that I’ll never get to feel it again.
Dead boyfriend’s a period to sentence not spoken, and
I can’t say if it would’ve got better or worse.
I was still really too young to know what I wanted,
to be a wife or not quite or alone. My head on his chest or
his tongue in my ear or jam eaten straight from the jar.
And here I am missing his toenails, his watch,
and the soundtracks sung loud in the car.
It wasn’t an epic, that’s what makes it so tragic,
just over six months since we’d met.
Whatever I wanted, whatever I’d get,
No one told me I’d never get to forget.
April 19, 2010
The fundamental need for narrative
My friend Alex pointed my attention toward Gene Weingarten’s article “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?”, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. It’s a brutal piece, and I’m not sure I’d “recommend” it, because these kinds of stories are traumatic even to read about. But it’s a stellar piece of journalism, and pinpointed an idea that fascinates me, that has so much to do with story:
“Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”
April 18, 2010
The Motherverse
One day last August, I reported the following: “Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now.)” And I’m happy to finally be able to report that it’s amazing. These days we’re on our third round of “Baby Time” at the library, I’m getting a reputation as “the mom who knows all the songs“, andI suspect that reputation might be way less awesome than I think it is.
I find it remarkable, the way that every mother claims she can’t identify with the mothers she encounters at Mommy/Baby groups. The way that every mother claims to be an outsider in this baby-centric maternity-leave no-males-in-the-daytime universe we all inhabit– can every single one of us really be all that unique?
Of course, I am that unique. My daughter never even had a Sophie, and I only made one friend at Baby & Me Yoga (and she was picked out of the crowd due to her pants’ lack of a lululemon insignia). My daughter is now old enough that when I hear new(er) moms’ conversation, I roll my eyes in boredom (and NO. Your child is not teething at three months. I don’t care what the book says. He just drools a lot). I am tired of learning your baby’s name (which is usually something like Jaydence), his age, but never, ever learning your name. (And I also hate you because Jaydence sleeps through the night, but that is another story).
Venturing out to the world of other-moms has been more like grade seven than any experience I’ve had since then. Everybody always seems to be friends already, better at applying make-up, they’re thinner than I am and they have better clothes. And that they’re not that interested in being my friend is usually due less to the fact that they’re mean and stuck up and has a great deal more to do with me being a loser. That I’m “the mom who knows all the songs”, and moreover, I’m proud of it. I’m the one totally rocking out to Skinnamarink– what can I possibly expect?
I love the songs though. I have become obsessed with nursery rhymes since Harriet was born, and recite them on command. I’m a regular fount of bouncing rhymes, and tickling games. Baby Time is one of the highlights of my week, so I can’t help but get a little enthusiastic. And it’s strange to now be one of the moms who chases her mobile child across the circle– the first time we went to Baby Time, Harriet was two months old, and she spent most of the program asleep in my arms. We have come a long, long way since then. (And I’ve actually met some very nice moms in the interim. How wonderful is it always, that spark, that moment of connection, when someone stands apart from the rest, and you’ve no doubt that you’ve just found a new friend?)
Harriet will be eleven months old next week, and she’s never been more amazing. The last few days we’ve gotten a great idea of how much she actually understands– if we say, “Please?” she’ll hand us an object. If we ask her to wave (without gesturing), she’ll oblige us. Perhaps because we don’t have a TV, she is obsessed with books in lieu of the usual television remote control, usually whatever one I’m reading and she’ll climb over anything to get her hands on. Once she gets her hands on it, she often doesn’t rip it. She has four teeth, so much hair, the most gorgeous smile I’ve ever seen, and a little poking-out belly. She thinks I’m hilarious, though her love for me is a bit much in the evenings when she cries if I leave the room. She loves swimming lessons. Her daddy can make her laugh like no one else can, hysterically, and it’s my favourite sound in the world. She loves the swings, though she cries when we take her out of them. She even likes Miffy! She’s amazed by mobiles, windchimes, and she loves to suck on the bottom of shoes. She continues to be an appalling sleeper, though we had two weeks off from that and it was blissful. I tried to tell her that I’m a way better Mommy when she sleeps well at night, but Harriet wasn’t having any of it. Harriet yields to no one.
I often hear women saying, “I love being a Mom,” which I’ve never been able to bring myself to say, and sometimes I feel bad about that. Though I think it would be a bit like saying, “I love having arms”, and really, what’s the point? What I do love is Harriet though, and having her in our family, and in her near-eleven-months old phase in particular, because she’s so much fun. She’s the whole reason I wanted to have a baby, and it’s been so brilliant these last few months to be reminded of what that reason was in the first place.
April 17, 2010
Short Cuts: Poetry by Dani Couture and Laisha Rosnau
If book design was the best thing about Dani Couture’s first collection Good Meat, this would still be a collection worth reading, and happily, the poetry is even better than it looks. Couture’s collection has an unabashedly carnivorous theme– butchers, hunters, pumping hearts, frying bacon, fleshy girls, beef on a platter, and an exploding whale. Gaping wounds, gutted fish, Taiwanese mystery meat and the powers of e. coli. Couture is working with concrete, fundamental matter that refers back to home, to nostalgia, to childhood and stories from the past, “lessons learned from the country”. Her work is not raw (which I use here not as a pun, but raw is a reflex when discussing gutsy work like this) as much as medium rare– these poems are sculpted, worked-on, crafted. The imagery is as sharp as the knives that flash through them. “my ordinary words fall/ around my feet like tired poets/ tumbling from open windows.” “she says good meat comes/ from the sky– pulled down with lead/ shot aimed just right”
****
Laisha Rosnau’s wonderful second collection Lousy Explorers takes as its epigraph the final stanza of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”: “But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper/ And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper/In an elementary world;/There is something down there and you want it told.” Her poems are about women who are sinking, who have left one place for another, who have embarked upon new journeys and new lives in ways that are subtle or otherwise. The 1970s suburban mother who “sent a few things flying in the kitchen”; the girl who leaves at eighteen, “foam mattress tied with rope, box of books”; girls on the frontiers of suburban childhood– creeks, the clotheslines, and hedgerows; the woman who loses her husband after sixty-years of marriage; women turning into wives, going from one place to another, and the things they take with them. Turning into mothers too, burgeoning life beneath the surface, and this is connected to nature as well in ways that are affirming and alarming (“Winter Driving, Third Trimester”). The places these women go to in their minds: “Lousy explorers, we make a mess/ of things, strip and exploit, squint blindly at stars”. And the amazing ways that they move forward all the same.
***
Dani Couture reads from her new collection Sweet at Seen Reading.
Laisha Rosnau’s Lousy Explorers shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
April 17, 2010
Poetic April Newsflash
Due to so much poetry, and the amazing constraints of April, Pickle Me This’ Poetic April Celebrations will be extending into May. Hooray!
