September 18, 2010

Dear Graphic Designers

Dear Graphic Designers,

If you would like to buy your product solely based upon its packaging, please create a package that looks like the Clipper Tea tea box. I will buy it. I don’t care what you are selling, but I will buy it. And then I will bid you a “Well done” for creating a cardboard box that makes me feel like a better person for simply possessing it.

Love, Kerry

September 17, 2010

See you at Eden Mills!

I will see you all at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival this weekend. Not quite sure when we’ll be arriving, as we’re still working out napping logistics, but I hope to catch Patricia Storms, Dionne Brand, Stephen Heighton, the Leon Rooke interview, Marthe Jocelyn and Karen Connelly. I also hope to buy a few books. I will be reading on the second Fringe Stage (3:30-4:30 at “Cottage”– I’m last up). Come say hi, please, and I will give you a pumpkin scone* from our picnic!

*While supplies last.

September 16, 2010

Sandra Beck by John Lavery

I could say that I’ve never before read a book like Sandra Beck by John Lavery, but then I would be lying, if only because I once read the book Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.  These two books are only alike in the strangest ways, both being oddly fragmented novels that aren’t quite novels. Both being about a woman who is never entirely present, who is never ever seen from the same perspective twice. Both novels even end with similarly strange conclusions at customs desks, though Sandra Beck in general, I think, is a less perplexing shade of weird.

It is true, however, that I’ve never read prose quite like John Lavery’s. His sentences are acrobats, flinging from trapezes with no sign of a net. His narrative goes backwards and forwards, overlapping and backing up again on itself. His writing manages to be gritty, ribald, and really beautiful, though it’s also challenging and takes a while to get a sense of the way it flows. The book eventually establishes a momentum, even dipping in and out of time as it does, but then just when you think you know what it’s doing, you realize you know nothing at all. Sandra Beck is the kind of book you could read thirteen times in a row, and it would be a different novel every time.

The book’s first section is from the perspective of Josee, daughter of Sandra Beck, who is everything to her daughter, and also at the same time, never enough. Who manages to be at the periphery of Josee’s life, but also at its centre. Sandra Beck walks with crutches, is perpetually busy as manager of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, is married to Montreal police chief Paul-Francois Basterache, and though Josee refers to her mother as “my happiness”, she also makes her daughter miserable. Josee is in the midst of adolescence, has the voice of a child but is conducting a bizarre affair with a clarinetist’s birth-mark. Witnessing her mother from a distance at the section’s climax, Josee has the revelation that she has never known Sandra Beck at all.

The second section takes some years after the first, as Josee is now grown-up and self-sufficient, allegedy teaching theatre to children in Bogota. Almost 200 pages of a drive from Lennoxville to Montreal, the reader is an invisble passenger in the backseat of Paul-Francois’ LeSabre, and he’s addressing us directly. P-F, so I’ve been told, has appeared before as a character in Lavery’s short stories, and I can see how the writer can’t quite get enough the guy. He’s the police-chief, and a television personality (on the local crime show C’est le loi/It’s the Law, an ardent husband, impatient father, and a wonderful meandering storyteller who does not fear contradiction, the complicated nature of life. He is bilingual, and so duality is his thing. P-F makes the journey fly by, recounting his relationship with the elusive Sandra Beck. The difference in their mother tongues standing in for the differences between any two people, and that inevitable failure to communicate exactly what one means. “When you love someone, you often understand perfectly what they’re going to say before they say it. It’s when they say it that you find yourself struggling to grasp what they’re attempting to tell you.”

I’ll admit that it took me a long time to understand where the story was going, and that even once I was swept up in the momentum of P-F’s story, I sometimes still had a hard time trying to grasp what he was telling me. That I found Josee’s section a bit tedious at times. But when I got to the end of the story (and it hit me with a brutal wallop), there was no doubt that I’d just experienced something quite extraordinary. And yes, this is a novel that begs to be encountered for a second time, to bring the pieces all together, but even disassembled, this puzzle is oh so worth the read.

September 16, 2010

9 Tips for the Book Blogger in your life

I’m going to feign me some authority now, because this October marks ten years since I started blogging, and also because CBC Books so kindly just included me in their list of “Book Blogs We Appreciate”. This on the occasion of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, because apparently it’s been 52 weeks since the last one, and I thought that since I appreciate book bloggers too, I might impart a little bit of what I’ve learned in my career as a world-famous, would-be pickler. Feel free to chime in and let me know any I got wrong, or any you think I missed.

1) Book bloggers are not unpaid substitutes for publicity people or literary critics (and see here for an interesting piece on book blogging as unpaid labour). We are readers, and this is the best thing about us (and see here for a talk I once gave on this very subject, and Virginia Woolf’s quote about the responsibilities of the common reader: “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work”).

You do have a responsibility– take it seriously. But also, don’t take yourself too seriously.

2) In line with the first point, our obligation to the publishers that send us free books is to be the best and most honest readers we can be. This can be difficult– initially, I found making contacts with publishing people a bit overwhelming, and this was all happening as I was still finding my feet as a reader. I think some of my early reviews were too generous, though perhaps hindsight will always have that effect. But it took me a while to get confidence in my own opinions, to understand that while publicists are just as concerned as I am with fostering a strong literary culture, they’ve also got a product to sell. Our priorities are not always exactly the same, but that is okay. You’ve just got to know what your own are.

3) We have to buy books. Lots of books. Free books aside, if we don’t buy books, who will? Buy new books, and used books. Shop at Chapters if it’s the only show in your town, but if it isn’t, shop somewhere else. Buy books from small presses, buy poetry. Buy translations. I once read a quote by Annie Dillard regarding karma, and the obligation to buy new hardcovers if you ever hope to make money from the writing life yourself, and I think she’s right. If fostering a strong literary culture is what you’re after, buy lots of books (at full price!). If you are broke, then buy just one.

4) Accept free books with discrimination. It is expensive for publishers to ship books to us, so we’re doing not them a favour by receiving a book we have no intention of reading. Also, accept free books with discrimination because your time is valuable, and why read something that you’re not interested in? And because one person’s house can only hold so many books, and eventually, your postman will hate you.

5) Original content!! Don’t copy text from the publisher’s website– write about the book in your own words. Don’t merely recap literary gossip– what is your own particular take? And if you don’t have a take, the world won’t end because it’s lacking your two cents. You don’t have to write about what everybody else is writing about. What interests you? Write well, and write long (but not too long). And aim to be a better writer all the time.

6) Read an author or a book first before you agree to take part in promotions. Don’t be afraid to say no if the author or book is not your thing, or is not in keeping with your blog’s focus. We should aspire to mean everything we write on our blogs.

7) We should all blog like nobody is looking, if only because very often, nobody will be. We should write only to satisfy ourselves, so that the writing is inherently worth the trouble, and also because that kind of writing has a passion that shows.

8) Avoid taking the link bait! Very often, desperate newspapers will write terrible articles that insult us and ours in an effort to enrage us. They don’t actually mean what they’re saying– they just want hits from the links you post, but don’t lower yourself. Only link to awesome.

9) And along those lines, make your blog a portal rather than a virtual brick wall.

September 15, 2010

The Vicious Circle reads: The Comforters by Muriel Spark

Seriously, this book club just gets better and better. We all headed out to the west end this month to read Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters. The brilliant new edition by Virago (which, actually, we don’t think should be available in Canada, but a bunch of us managed to pick copies quite discounted) has an absolutely perfect cover. As with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the book reads as up-t0-date as the day it was published, and so a stylish modern cover is not trying too hard.

Also much appreciated was Ali Smith’s introduction, which you can read in abridged form here. An amazing example of a book intro– no spoilers, she doesn’t have her own agenda, and she helpfully places the book in its contexts, which were (somewhat incongruously) the realist, angry young men of the 1950s; Spark’s own biographical experiences, her conversion to Catholicism in particular; and allusions to The Book of Job (and yes, one of us discovered that his name should rhyme with “lobe”, and not “lob”, though that wasn’t even remotely embarrassing compared to having shown up one hour early by mistake, but alas…).

Immediate response to The Comforters was a few notches above “meh”. A couple of us liked it, but most of us found it hard to get absorbed. We could understand how the novel was so clever– a character becomes aware that she’s a character in the story, can hear the typewriter clacking and the narrator’s voice, meanwhile her sort-of boyfriend is caught up in his own plot involving his grandmother being a diamond smuggler. We loved the dialogue, we loved Spark’s meta-workings, the prose is amazing, but it was hard to really get invested.

It was suggested that this may have been the point. That Spark was playing with our expectations of what a novel is supposed to do to us, using the novel’s conventions to show these are conventions. “I just couldn’t get lost in it,” a reader might complain, and Muriel Spark might have answered, “It’s a book. Not a cityscape.” That the book’s weaker points (flimsy/no plot, relience on coincidence and connections) were quite deliberate, to make us question how much about novels we actually take for granted. Amazing, we all thought, that this was first novel, and it shows very much that Spark had been a critic who’d considered the novel very carefully. Amazing also that she was a Catholic convert (like Graham Greene, whose Travels With My Aunt we thought was akin to this book), and yet she mocked the process of conversion here, she writes about the occult, she makes fun of Catholics. Also, that Laurence and Caroline had a sexual relationship and were unmarried, which was more than a little risque for 1956.

It was suggested that Caroline’s experience with the voices in her head were analogous to any writer whose hard at work, and struggling not to get lost in her story, to retain herself in the flow of narrative and not be swept away. And this led to a comment about the story as an analogy of Spark’s own experience as a Catholic, the struggle to define her spirituality within and without the confines of organized religion.

We loved Georgina Hogg. Loved, loved loved her. Though we weren’t unhappy about her eventual fate, because she was scratching off poor Caroline’s face (and I just thought of this now– was she trying to rub her out??) and trying to drown her, and it wasn’t like she had an inner life anyway. We loved everything about the enormity of her bosom (and I mean that word the way it is intended). Louisa Jepp was also appreciated, and we commented on the women in the novel having all the strength. Oh, and how the books deals with homosexuality, matter-of-fact, amazing, once again in particular for the ‘fifties. Laurence was sort of sweet, but a bit dumb, though quite patient to put up with Caroline who no longer had sex with him. We also loved the distinction between Eleanor and the Baron’s relationship, with no love lost, versus Caroline’s and Laurence’s, who had love left.

With all of our experiences of the book being suitably enhanced, it was now time to talk about other things, and eat lemon cake, and eat more cheese, and yes, some pumpkin scones too. We talked about babies, and perverts, and how married people have secrets too, and we talked underrated and overrated, books we loved and books we hated, and some of us said Fuck too much, and we laughed a lot, and talked about most other things, and probably at some point, we even mentioned you.

Meeting adjourned. Amazing.

September 14, 2010

Live and Learn

Though Chatelaine and I are still on the outs (really, Chatelaine? an excerpt from Mini-Shopaholic? Do you know me at all?), from the feature “Live and Learn” in the October 2010 issue, I got a inkling of what the magazine might be like were it actually good. Jan Wong on losing her job, depression and having her world turned upside down in her 50s, and what that experience taught her; Catherine Gildiner on her 60s (“I realized life should not have to be proved, but lived”); wise words from Lauren Kirshner from her 20s (“be a messy work-in-progress”), and then Lisa Moore’s piece, oh my. I am going to cut it out and hang it on the refrigerator that will become the rest of my life. A tidbit, though you really have to go read the whole thing: “Trust everyone. Everyone behaves better when they feel trusted. Nobody wins a fight; the trick is to behave decently no matter what. The trick is to make love a lot. And think of it as making love.”

September 12, 2010

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

I suspect that if I’d ever read the Russians, I’d have a good understanding as to why Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom had to end up being so bloated. It would make sense of why a novel one might describe as bloated has received glowing reviews across the board, which had raised my expectations so much that the bloat came as a bit of a disappointment. But for me, the Russian illiterate, the bloat was just bloat, but alas, there was still a lot to love about this novel.

Freedom is the story of the Berglund family, who are introduced in the novel’s first section through a cacophony of hearsay and neighbourhood gossip. We see the family from without– Patty, pushing her stroller up and down the street before the neighbourhood was even fashionable, her well-meaning husband Walter, their growing family of son Joey and daughter Jessica. Patty is unflappable, never says a bad word about anyone, won’t tolerate gossip about her neighbour Carol, single-mother of daughter Connie, until Connie starts sleeping with Joey, and Patty just snaps. They could never prove it, of course, but somebody slashed the tires on Carol’s boyfriend’s car, and that somebody was probably Patty, and then Joey ends up moving in with Carol and Connie, too many bottles start showing up in the Berglund’s recycling bin, and eventually the Berglunds move away to Washington, Joey becomes a Republican, and somehow the conservationist Walter ends up embroiled in a scandal involving his relationship to coal companies.

The rest of the novel gets close to the Berglunds, and shows us how they got from there to here. The various sections are told from the point of view of Patty (who has written her autobiography in third person), Walter, Joey, and Walter’s best friend, musician Richard Katz, who has always complicated the relationship between Walter and Patty. Like Franzen’s previous novel The Corrections, Freedom is an unflinching depiction of contemporary family life, of its peculiar dynamics, and– like Lionel Shriver’s recent So Much For All That, which I thought was a finer specimen of a novel– the book also is a statement about American society in general. This point gets hammered home through various treatments of the concept of freedom– to define ourselves apart from our families, freedom to defend our country after September 11, 2001, how the term is hijacked by the left and right, freedom as an export, freedom to be you and me, and then these diatribes about environmentalism and overpopulation, and soon I really wasn’t sure of the point being hammered home as much as I was just sure of the hammer.

The characters didn’t convince me. The Patty Berglund we saw from the outside was an intriguing character in all her quirky ordinariness, but her autobiographical section didn’t feel authentic. Moreover her character didn’t either– others described her amazing laugh, which was nothing more than “Ha ha ha” on the page; she was a woman who’d made little of herself, but I was never sure why everyone was so sure of how smart she actually was, down deep; I didn’t get the dynamics of the marriage either. It was all very confusing and eventually I just didn’t really care who did what or why, because no one needs to make life that hard. Life is hard enough all on its lonesome. And I guess I felt that way about everyone populating this book, this family.

Patty only became vivid to me again in the novel’s final section, which is the mirror image of the opening, once again, the Berglunds from the outside. Part of the relief was that the characters had finally quit doing idiotic things, but they all somehow just seemed much less like nonentities from the outside. I cared about them from the outside, they clicked with the world from the outside, they all just made a bit more sense than from that scrambled place inside their heads. Part of this was also that Franzen was allowing the story to tell itself, rather than painstakingly laying it out for us, piece by piece, and piece by piece by piece.

It’s a smart trick though, framing a novel with bits that are so wonderful, that when you finish the book, you put it down and say, “What a brilliant book. What a perfect ending”, even though about two hundred pages before, you’d wanted to leave the whole thing on the bus. Such framing makes the slog seem worthwhile, especially since the slog itself was rife with good writing, intriguing set-ups, humour, and good questions about our assumptions of every day life. So I’m glad I read Freedom, I definitely am, but I also am terribly relieved that I’m not reading it anymore.

September 9, 2010

Style, substance, and that something: on the Mad Men conundrum

When I began watching Mad Men earlier this year, my assessment was similar to Karen Von Hahn’s of the show being “all style, no substance”. This was partly because I’d been biased already by the review of Mad Men Season 1 in the London Review of Books,  in which the show’s chief attraction was summed up as our own superiority at watching pregnant women smoke while their children played with dry cleaner bags. Mad Men is good, because at least we get to feel like we’ve come along why, which undermines the fact that we most certainly haven’t.

I enjoyed the first few episodes of season 1, though not as much as I’d anticipated– I wondered if my expectations had been made too high. Soon I’d decided that I’d finish watching the first season, but probably not pursue it beyond that. And I’m not sure what the turning point was, but somewhere along the line not pursuing the rest of Mad Men was not remotely a possibility.

I’m now just about at the end of Season Three. I’m in no hurry to get to Season Four. Though of course I am, but you understand how tragic it would be to one day have no more Mad Men before me. Because I love Mad Men, I do. I love its style, I love when it shocks me (the lawnmower, Betty and the shotgun), I love how I am desperate to find sympathy for these characters who do nothing to deserve it, that I have so much invested in the disaster that is Don and Betty, but mostly I just really love Don Draper. In a way I have never loved anybody, except for Dylan McKay and my high school math teacher. Impossible, lustful, agonizing loves, where you’re fortunate to run into them once in a while in early morning dreams.

It’s not just that he’s good looking– Jon Hamm on 30 Rock really didn’t do it for me, which was sort of the point of that endeavour, but I don’t think we can write it all down to Hamm being such a great actor. It could very well be the suits and the haircut. Or what I’m after might be the elusive Don Draper something that makes him such a magnet on the show. How he’s unpindownable. And when he’s good, he’s not even that good, but I cling to straws– “at least he’s a better parent than Betty”, which isn’t even technically true and wouldn’t be an achievement even if it were. But when he defended Bobby, and when he cooked for Sally in the middle of the night, and when he bought Betty the necklace, and when he demanded that guy remove his hat in the elevator. That he kept Sal’s secret. Fundamentally, he’s a man of integrity.

And when he goes and does something abhorrent, which is usually, somehow I’m convinced that he’s just not himself. That perhaps what he’s really lacking, what he’s calling out for in the dark, is someone to love him properly and that someone would be me. I sometimes wonder what Don Draper could do to have me finally not forgive him. More than he’s cultivated his own self, have I merely cultivated a self for him? Is that what everybody around him has done as well?  Is he the projection of our fantasies (and mine happens to be a good dad, and a kind husband)? Is the point of Don Draper that we want to believe in beautiful people? That we fling our sympathy upon them? Does his charisma come from him being fundamentally empty, and therefore a vessel for anything? Is he all style and no substance, and the entire show is this self-aware?

It’s curious though, the inconsistencies of his character. Of everybody’s character on that show, and it was one of my problems with it when I first started watching. The characters were different people in each episode, not just in a mildly interesting way, but in a way that made me wonder if the show had too many writers. I get the whole “Don Draper is an enigma” thing, but it has crossed my mind from time to time that that hole who is he might just be a clever way of badly constructing a character. And that the other characters who weren’t hatched out of nothing have no such excuse for being wildly fluctuating from one thing to another. Except Pete Campbell. I have determined he’s a psychopath.

I experience Mad Men the way I experience novels, by which I mean that there are often whole passages I don’t understand. And I love this about the show, that there’s more going on than I’m ever supposing, but sometimes I wonder if the problem is not so much that I’ve missed something as much as that that something just doesn’t make any sense. Mad Men is either brilliant or terrible, and I’m really not sure which, but it’s brilliant certainly in that I don’t care regardless.

September 8, 2010

Books in Motion #7

I refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, mostly because I ride public transport with riders who live to refute such an assessment of the state of literary things. And now I doubly refuse to be lugubrious about reading’s great decline, because riders are reading poetry, even. So nothing is so bad. Said rider was a strange-faced, gorgeous woman of about twenty three, whose fashion savvy stirred my envy. That high waisted, ruffly look whose origins I’ve never been able to trace– people just woke up one morning and started dressing like that, but how did they know?? High heels with short shorts, if you know what I mean. Her hair gathered messily into into the kind of scarf I would have once thought hideous, but now sort of love. She was travelling east on the Bloor-Danforth line, and reading Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski, and maybe the whole thing was a set-up. Desperate to impress, she wanted everyone to think that she was awesome, but whether or not her intentions were pure, she had certainly succeeded.

September 8, 2010

I Still Don't Even Know You by Michelle Berry

From my Quill & Quire review of Michelle Berry’s new short story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You:

“Though the best stories in Michelle Berry’s collection I Still Don’t Even Know You begin with predictable set-ups, they go well past the point of familiarity and push the boundaries of a reader’s comfort. Readers become privy to moments of improbable connection and agonizing intimacy. These captivating stories hinge on scenes that are painful to read, yet impossible to look away from.”

You can read the rest here.