April 16, 2010
New blogs…
Writer Mark Sampson (who is one half of the amazing Rosenblum/Sampson team, and one of the nicest people ever) has been blogging about his reading experiences at Free Range Reading. Mark is an incredibly generous, open-minded reader with plenty of smart insights. And I don’t just like his blog because he likes all the writers I like, but that might be part of it…
And then there’s Birds and Words, whose writer is fascinating– she’s a writer, an “almost-birder”, she knows more languages than I have fingers (and I’ve got the requisite number of those), and her blog is funny, strange, whimsical and well-crafted.
I’m also really enjoying Torontoist: Books, who could teach the major news outlets a thing or two. They could!
April 15, 2010
Unremarkable Underpants
“Your mommy hates housework, Your daddy hates housework, I hate housework too. And when you grow up, so will you. Because even if the soap or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach, That you use is the very best one, Housework is just no fun.” -Sheldon Harnick (from Free to Be, You and Me)
It has come to my attention that I’ve been mistaken about the label of domestic fiction. This came to my attention when I read Ian McEwen’s Solar, and noticed once again that he’s one of the few male authors whose fiction lives up to the standard set by woman writers (and I write that tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I mean it. My bias is showing.) He totally writes domestic fiction! When I emailed Steven W. Beattie with this outlandish statement, however, he politely set me straight– McEwen writes “psychological fiction” (and what that means exactly [if anything] is something to ponder for another day).
So this is what I’d always considered domestic fiction: stories about how people live and/or work together, the details of ordinary lives, how family members relate (or don’t), stories about parents and children, and what people eat for lunch, and sex for the 1500th time, and the birth of the third child, and what’s in the bedside drawer, and on the shelves in the pantry, and how you get to work, and whether the car is clean or dirty, and if there are balled up kleenexes in the pockets that keeping going through the wash, and who spills what at the breakfast table, and what kind of rug is on the living room floor, and the shower curtain pattern, and unremarkable underpants, what goes on in that room called “the study”, and who gets power of attorney? Sibling rivalry, all things Oedipal, they fuck you up your mom and dad, and marsha, marsha, marsha. And then some. Oh, and babies.
By my definition, Lionel Shriver writes domestic fiction. Carol Shields did it better than anyone. Alice Munro, and Margaret Drabble, and Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs. Jonathan Franzen. AS Byatt, most recently in The Children’s Book. Siri Hustvedt in What I Loved. Anne Enright. Everything I’ve ever read by Lisa Moore. John Updike (at least in the one book of his I’ve read, which was Too Far To Go. John Irving. Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. Rachel Cusk. Rebecca Rosenblum in her stories about Theo and Rae. Margaret Lawrence, particularly in my favourite of hers The Fire Dwellers. And Ian McEwen, at least in Solar, Saturday and A Child in Time.
Basically, if the book was like a peek through a golden window that hadn’t had its curtains drawn, I thought it was domestic fiction. But what if I was wrong? What if I’ve been broadcasting myself as a domestic fiction devotee all this time, but I’ve really meant something different? What if I’ve been mis-applying this label willy-nilly and now everyone thinks I’m an idiot who refuses to read anything not written by Bonnie Burnard. And yes, her The Good House was domestic fiction as I see it, but one might consider that book a very-lesser To the Lighthouse, no? By which I mean, it hardly sets the standard.
I worry that my very gendered approach to reading has also been influenced by this mis-labelling, that I see my domestic fiction as a woman’s domain and a writer like McEwen as the exception, but perhaps things aren’t as divided as I suppose? And how wonderful it would be to suppose such a thing as that. Perhaps it’s time for a re-evaluation (and maybe even not just on my part).
April 14, 2010
The tea came from the East
“Mrs. Pigheights, without responding, raised the cup to her lips and was, as one sometimes is in moments of distress, delighted by the brief voyage along the inside of her throat. The tea came from the East and bore her away to the East, the East as it had been dreamed of and conquered by the British Empire, inlaid with saffron, sand, and multicoloured servants. The imagination holds in reserve a multitude of emergency exits. Always remember that, Lucie.” –from The Breakwater House by Pacale Quiviger, trans. Lazer Lederhandler
April 14, 2010
When life gives you lemon juice
(the content of this post is taken from the bottle of ReaLemon ® Lemon Juice From Concentrate in my refrigerator door. It goes very well with the first barbeque of the season, which happens to be chicken burgers from the amazing Good Food For All cookbook).
3 1/4 cups of water, 1/2 cup of ReaLemon ®, 1/2 cup of sugar. Combine ingredients. Stir until sugar dissolves. Serve over ice.
April 13, 2010
The Laundromat Essay by Kyle Buckley
Does poetry have the same male/female divide that fiction may or may not have (and how you feel about this depends how you feel about ghettos)? Can I also confess here that I’ve not approached any male poets to take part in Poetic April because I’m afraid of male poets? In the blogosphere at least, male poets always seem to be having public feuds whose origins I can never decipher, but it’s usually something theoretical. And maybe it’s just the poets I gravitate to who, like most writers I gravitate to, are usually female, but their work is largely accessible in a way that Kyle Buckley’s (or Michael Lista’s too) is not. This is all just a sweeping generalization based upon a tiny sample group, but I will be expanding the sample group over the next few weeks and I’ll see how it goes. (I’m also going to be reading Erín Moure soon, which I expect will change my mind about everything).
Anyway, my way of access into Kyle Buckley’s The Laundromat Essay was by having heard him read last year as part of the Pivot series, and his work was so fresh, jarring, funny and absurd that I bought the book. Reading the book, however, did not come with the same ease that listening to it had. The work is still fresh, jarring, funny and absurd, but it’s hard. The key, I think, is to read as you would listen– pay attention to the sounds of the words, let the poems float over you, to let the atoms fall where they may. Like any poet, Buckley paints a picture, but his is abstract, its meaning subject to interpretation, and neither meaning nor interpretation is really quite the point (so perhaps I should stop trying to wrap my head around the idea of a book as “a blindfolded staircase”).
But in a way, wrapping my head aroud that idea is the point, that Buckley uses imagery and language in ways that challenge expectations. That the imagery and language aren’t more than the sum of their parts, or rather than they needn’t be. Here is a surface worth skimming for a long while before contemplating what’s going on underneath it, and in places (I think?) the surface might just be impenetrable. It put me in mind of John Ashbery meets Samuel Beckett.
The work itself is not impenetrable though. Buckley’s book is built around a narrative essay about a young man arguing for after-hours access to the laundromat to fetch his clothes. The laundromat owner is more interested in the whereabouts of his son, who is called Hoopy. Their conversation goes in circles, and the young man is recounting all of this to the person he is waiting for, the person he requires clothes for. His narrative is footnoted by references to poetic fragments that go some way toward illuminating his situation. “By this point, I very nearly love you. Which means that I love you with, I don’t know, all of the intensity of a thousand brilliant suburban porch lights.” And some times the fragmants don’t illuminate much at all, but the recurring words and ideas serve to drive the work forward, and I’m fasinated, however baffled.
And just writing all this here has been somewhat terrifying, because I don’t really understand what Buckley is up to, and I probably don’t understand many of the references that would explain it. It is intimidating to write about something that seems so beyond me, but I’ve written anyway (ever careful to profess no authority) because this is a book worth writing about (as it’s worth reading, and worthy of discussion). Poetry really does need to be brought into the wider world, which is from where (the reading) I found this book in the first place, and now that I’ve read it, I am very glad I did.
April 13, 2010
Lists
1) The New Quarterly 114 has a stunningly gorgeous cover
2) Issue is guest-edited by Diane Schoemperlan
3) On the theme of lists
4) (like Amy Jones’ blog!)
5) TNQ Blog The Literary Type has been doing list-inspired blogging lately
6) The issue has overflowed out of its covers into some “online exclusives”
7) Including my short story “Anna Lambert Lived and Died” which will go online next week
8) I’ll keep you posted.
April 13, 2010
Mini-Break fun.
Harriet was extremely wary of her first Muskoka Chair
Because we’re a family that thrives on extravagance, we’ve started a tradition wherein we book one single night at a very nice resort during the off-season and live it up for about twenty-four hours. (Check out the photo from last year’s mini-break to see what was sitting on the chair then instead of a baby). It was a little different this year with Harriet in tow– she couldn’t get enough of the swimming pool (because she is our child, after all), but dinner was take-out on the floor in our room rather than hours spent lingering over delicious food on plates with elaborate coulis designs. Once Harriet was stowed away asleep in the pack n’ play, however, Stuart and I were able to indulge in copious episodes of Mad Men season two (and have I mentioned here how much I love that show? Season One took a while to win me over to the show’s intelligence, though maybe the LRB review had made me prejudiced, but now I’m totally enthralled and intrigued…) And then reading in bed. Could a night be any more perfect? Capped off the next morning by brunch with a chocolate fountain– the stuff of dreams. It was a beautiful drive back to the city the next day, and it felt like we’d been gone for three weeks. .
April 12, 2010
Joan Bodger's The Crack in the Teacup
Oh, wow– I just finished reading The Crack in the Teacup, such a tremendous book. As I read it over the last four days or so, I kept clutching its bulk and thinking what an amazing device this is with such transporting properties. Joan Bodger’s life was never, ever boring, from the grandmother who was killed in a shipwreck, to her unconventional girlhood as the daughter of a sailor, her stint in the army working as in decoding, the terrible sadness of her family life, what she learned about story and its power to transform children’s lives (and what I learned about Where the Wild Things Are in reading about this), her fascinating work in early childhood education, the loveliness of her second marriage, her shamelessness (which is learned, and earned with age), her honestly, her passion, that she placed her husband’s ashes in the foundations of the Lillian H. Smith Library which was then under construction.
Anyway, it makes me wonder what came first. Does she tell stories this way because of the stories she’s lived through, or do they only seem to be stories because she tells them as such? Regardless, the rest of us are lucky for them.
Bodger wrote How the Heather Looks which I read last month, and I’m pleased to say that this memoir behind the memoir didn’t run the former for me. If anything, I’m so grateful for the paperback release of How the Heather… because I might not have encountered Joan Bodger otherwise.
