March 17, 2010
Summer Summer Summer!
There are crocuses up in the garden across the street, and the sun was shining bright today. So bright so that I’ve got summer on the brain, even though it isn’t even spring until next weekend. But we’ve just booked our summer vacation, a cottage week away with a lovely lake almost at our doorstep, and I’m so excited for that.
I’m also excited about my summer rereading project. Every summer (except for last summer, during which a newborn was all the reading restriction I needed) I make a point of spending most of my time rereading all kinds of books, each for varying reasons. I’m already compiling this year’s stack– I want to revisit February by Lisa Moore (because of all the negative reviews I’ve read since, and I’m confused as to where they were coming from), Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner (to ensure it still stands up two years later), Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields (because because because), Anne of Windy Poplers by LM Montgomery (because of Kate), something early by Margaret Drabble (because I love her), Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (because I always do), and Still Life With Woodpecker (as part of the retro reading challenge).
March 16, 2010
Where have all the mass-market paperbacks gone?
All right, wouldn’t you know it? My twenty-five year old mass market paperback copy of The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital (which had a very unappealing cover and I found in a box on the sidewalk) turned out to be a wonderful novel. So much in common with Orpheus Lost, the other book I’d read by her though– literary allusions (though here they were Shakespearean instead of classical), musical references, bits of it taking place in her native Australia. Are all her books like this? Perhaps I’ll start combing the sidewalks and soon I’ll find out.
I found it interesting also that such a literary book would have come out in mass market paperback– does that still happen (unless you’re Margaret Atwood, whose mass market The Blind Assassin is fantastic)? Did they even have trade paperbacks in 1984? Because I never find those in sidewalk boxes.
Recently, when I read How the Heather Looks (published in the mid-sixties), I noted the passage where Joan Bodger recounts the university town her family had once resided in where they sold books at the supermarket, a necessary staple along with all the others– milk, cheese, etc. And she thought that was so brilliant. A funny perspective, since books in the supermarket are the worst thing that have ever happened to books in most places– because they’re sold at such a knock-down cost, of course, that publishers make no money, booksellers can’t compete, and all the books they sell there are crap anyway. So it’s too bad about that last point, or we could just about put a positive spin on the whole thing, but alas.
So, anyway: whither art thou, literary mass-market paperback? And where is the modern-day Allen Lane when we need him/her most?
March 15, 2010
We aren't born alone
Honestly, don’t google “We’re born alone, we die alone” to find out the various things 686,000 hits think we should do in between. And not just because the suggestions are more than a little saccherine, but because the adage itself is patently untrue. Though some of us may indeed die alone, I’m pretty sure that the second part is wrong: there were at least twelve people in that electric yellow room when Harriet was born, and though I don’t have the stats on my own birth, it’s fair to say that my mother must made it out for the event. So you’d think it would be fair to also say that no one has ever been born alone, ever, ever, ever. Which is why I find it very strange that motherhood is such a niche market.
In her beautiful book A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes “with the gloomy suspicion that a book about motherhood is of no real interest to anyone except other mothers.” Exactly why this is is a depressing tale for another day, but it’s also worth considering why that book on motherhood is of interest to the other mothers in the first place. How come, ever since I had a baby, I’ve been gravitating to books on maternal themes, in poetry, fiction and non-fiction? What is up with my insistance on seeing my own experience reflected in the books I read? Particularly an experience so incredibly banal– everybody has a mother, a lot of people end up being one. What is the big deal?
It has been a mysterious thing, though, becoming a mother. A year ago, I posted this excerpt from A Life’s Work, but I hadn’t understood it at all, and now I see that, and now I do: “Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn.”
Motherhood has changed my relationship with reading in two absolutely shocking ways: it’s had me running toward the self-help shelf, and actually it’s made me start reading for clues. I only realize the latter point now, that I am attracted to the literature of motherhood to make some sense of the mess I’m in. To find an expression of the feelings and experiences that are soconfusing, awful, lovely and strange that I cannot begin to articulate them. To see this experience as rendered by art– to celebrate it, to put my finger on it, to understand.
(It is also worth noting that I’ve been attracted to stories of motherhood for a long time, that my reading tastes have always leaned toward the domestic. That when Lisa Moore wrote a book one reviewer panned, describing how “The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, roiling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end”, I’d called it “a rare thing– a perfect book… one of the best books from anywhere.”
It is also worth noting that I might one day write an essay about the unfortunate proliferation of books in Canadian Literature about lonely people walking up and down city sidewalks, numbing their pain with illegal substances, and living in bachelor apartments with cats, all the while Canadian writers could be writing about leaking nipples, umbilical stumps, and croup.)
Now, I’m not sure how to bring all this around to my new favourite blog which is STFU Parents, in which people send in screenshots of parents’ really obnoxious and/or inane Facebook status updates. (STEPHANIE: Why must we loose an hour of sleep?? When your a parent, those hours matter!! TINA: Amen!!) I cannot get enough of this blog. They’ve introduced the notion of “mommyjacking” status updates, which is when someone posts about any arduous experience, and then a mother chimes in with, “Just try [arduous experience] with a two year old” and then Tina adds, “Amen!!” again. It totally kills me.
I must mention mommyblogs again, and how it’s dawned upon me that I do actually like them. Or rather, that some of my favourite bloggers are mothers and write about their mothering experiences, among many other passions: Crooked House, Meli-Mello, All Things Said & Done, Carrie Snyder, and Sam Lamb, for example. Even the ever-erudite Inklings. What unites the blogger/mothers that I do read and enjoy, for the most part, is how they engage with motherhood and with the wider world at the same time, creating a relationship between the two that is not such a binary at all.
This is what I’m looking for in books about motherhood as well, to understand how my experiences fit into a wider context. How I fit into the world now, while I’m toting around twenty pounds of screeching daughter. How motherhood can be addressed in literature so as not to alienate anyone who isn’t a mom. And to understand why mothers are so reviled, in real life, on the internet, in general. Because they are a bit, and that’s a funny thing. How many people might have found being born alone preferable.
March 12, 2010
Nikolski wins Canada Reads!
This is even better than that hockey game everyone was talking about a few weeks back. Because here at Pickle Me This, we love Nikolski. We’ve loved Nikolski for two years now, and we’ve given the book (in French and English) as gifts, and we’ve urged it upon friends and family, and never once has anyone who’s read it been sorry. And yes, perhaps it’s a book you have to work for (though that’s not what I remember about it), but it’s fun work, and altogether worth the trouble.
I would have taken a picture of Harriet posing with Nikolski and Century, but it is difficult enough to keep Harriet (who is totally dressed up as a boy today– check it out!) from ripping apart one book, let alone two. (And speaking of books and Harriet destroying them, she’s totally into “lift the flap” these days.)
Anyway, it’s a good day for Canada’s readers. Congratulations to Nicolas Dickner, whose wonderful book is going to get many more new ones, and to panelist Michel Vézina, who stole the show.
March 12, 2010
Ray Smith's Century tops Canada Reads: Independently!
Taking 35% of the popular vote, Ray Smith’s Century has won top spot in the Canada Reads: Independently picks. Thank you to everybody who took part, to everybody who voted, to Jian Ghomeshi for mentioning our humble little extravaganza on yesterday’s CBC Canada Reads broadcast, to Dan Wells for nominating Century (and for publishing it), and to Ray Smith for writing it.
Thanks also to the rest of our celebrity panel, for donating their time and for the wonderful books they introduced to us. The five Canada Reads: Independently selections made clear that Canadian Literature is multitudinous, rich, and full of surprises. Which makes it much like literature in general, and in particular too.
Now, why don’t you celebrate by buying the book?
March 11, 2010
Year of the tiger
I’m now reading The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital, which I picked out of cardboard box on the sidewalk about three years ago. (The only other book I’ve read by Hospital was Orpheus Lost in 2007.) This book has been sitting on my shelf for about three years because it’s a manky paperback with a dated cover design, because it’s something I feel I should read but have not really been compelled to do so. And between all the other books I’ve found on sidewalks, and other manky paperbacks I’ve picked up from second-hand booksales, these books are starting to add up. I would like to spend my summer mostly re-reading, and so I’m going to make a point of getting through these books before then. They should yield some surprises– Excellent Women was once one of these novels, and now I am head over heels in love with Barbara Pym.
March 11, 2010
House Beneath by Susan Telfer
On Monday, I read Susan Telfer’s first collection of poetry House Beneath over two nap times, delighting in its branches and its roots (and yes, its stunning cover design too). I would describe it as “a Carol Shields novel compressed into 78 pages”, which is high praise from me– that a book of poetry could have the breadth of a novel (a statement which makes me sound a bit ignorant about poetry and overly devoted to novels, both of which are true) and one by Shields at that.
In her collection, Telfer tells the story of a daughter who is losing her mother just as she’s becoming a mother herself, who has been let-down and betrayed by her father’s addictions, who is struggling to make sense of her parents’ history as she also faces forward to construct a family of her own. The book is explicitly maternal, breasts full and leaking, babies cradled, bodies aging and changing, and ovulating. It is the maternal that makes me think of Shields, of course, but also how photography is used, and the resonance of childhood, and its quiet feminism. Lines like, “On the tangerine trampoline, I/ levitated– all the new ideas/ of the world fell into my mind like/ shooting stars…
Telfer’s poetry is eclectic– “Mercy” is a glose; “Weaning Dance” is a gorgeous villanelle; “No Satisfaction” references The Rolling Stones, Betty Friedan, a family photograph and Dr. Spock. The collection is suffused with music– made-up songs a mother sings to he children, Helen Reddy on the record player, Depeche Mode a party soundtrack, poems are haunted by pianos, one is called “Mother Fugue”, another “Brahms’ Sonata in F Minor, 1853”. Some poems are songs, others dances, and a few are dirges too.
Some of these poem are rooted in pain, some in joy, and others come from a point of quiet solace. Their rootedness is important though– these are poems that are explicitly located, in dream-haunting houses, on the very edge of a continent, in places we don’t always want to go home to (but do).
(Read Susan Telfer’s poem “Staircase“)
March 11, 2010
Bunk
I haven’t seen An Education yet, but I read the book a few months ago. Which is really a different thing entirely– the movie is much fictionalized and based on just a chapter of Lynn Barber’s book, but the people in the movie are really beautiful and the book is absolutely fascinating, so I think all is as it should be. In particular, I’d recommend the book for its history of journalism– Barber got her start writing for Penthouse, then The Sunday Express, and has ended up quite renowned for her interviews in The Observer in particular. And yes, previous to that had had an affair with a conman (the movie using this as a springboard), which made for a good chapter, but the rest of the book is as worth reading.
But the book is also worthwhile for its history of a time, which I’m thinking about now that I’m all wrapped in Jenny Diski’s The Sixties (which is so good, by the way). How the two books are fine companions, two stories about the same thing as told by observers standing on different parts of the very same street.
I’m reading the Diski book having just finished reading The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, who probably wouldn’t love The Sixties, because although she acknowledges that, “it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects…, we ought not to forget the aspect of history which the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”” And I presume she means what really happened in addition to the fact that Jenny Diski had sex a lot.
In fact, there aren’t a lot of connections between MacMillan’s book and Diski’s, and they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Though Diski is neither using nor abusing history, which MacMillan would probably find heartening, and also that Diski has never used The Munich Agreement to justify invasion of a foreign nation. Further, Diski has learned from the past, though perhaps too much, “What the young don’t get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase that the old go through. It’s just as well, I suppose, that the young don’t see it that clearly. Best to leave the disappointment for later.”
The point of all this being that these three books are banging around in my head at the moment, because two of them relate and because I just happened to read the other two one after the other. Though all three of them are written with such fierce, formidable intelligence. So that if you really must read something that isn’t a novel, you’d be all right checking out any of these.
March 11, 2010
ARM Update
I’ve just received an email update through Friends of the Association for Research on Mothering (see my previous post). Apparently, the response has been incredible, media coverage considerable and Andrea O’Reilly writes, “…that this was accomplished by everyday women reveals that grassroots feminist activism is still very much alive in these so called post-feminist times.” Indeed.
She writes also that they’re determined to keep Demeter Press running, and you can show your support by buying one of their titles at the new Demeter website. May I suggest Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”, which the likes of me have called “the very best book on motherhood I have ever read”? It’s worth an entire parenting library, I promise you, for $34.95. (Read my review.)
And I think I am going to get White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood.
March 10, 2010
On the Hair Hat Man
I have never met Carrie Snyder, but I started reading her blog just before Patricia Storms recommended Hair Hat for Canada Reads: Independently. (Patricia doesn’t know Carrie either– I checked. Because Canada is a very small town.) So Carrie and I have corresponded by email a few times, and I broke one of my own personal rules to ask her about her Hair Hat Man.
But first, my rule. I will never, ever ask a writer where she gets her ideas. I don’t care. I don’t care if the work is autobiographical, divined by magic, or hatched from an egg. The answers to these questions are rarely illuminating about the works themselves as much as they tell us what we want to know about an author. And just because we want to know doesn’t mean that it does us any good to do so.
BUT. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat Man was so impossibly weird, and I just didn’t get him. Though I understood that my inability to grasp him, pin him down, was part of the power of the collection, that the culmination of the stories serve to make him “almost plausible”.
I love the fact that the Hair Hat Man has had the same effect on Snyder’s negative reviewers that he has on the other characters in her book– he makes us uneasy. People hate the Hair Hat Man, within the book and without it, but any character who provokes that reaction must have some substance behind him. Or rather, the criticism is often that he’s more a device than a character, but I think the same thing applies.
So I had to ask Carrie where he came from. Not that it changes anything at all, but as the answer to such questions often is, what she told me was worth repeating:
In answer to your Hair Hat question (and it’s definitely the most-asked question about the book!) … my inspiration came from actually seeing a man with a hair hat. At least, I think that’s what I saw. I was a grad student in Toronto, and often stopped at a coffee shop on my way to campus (at the corner of Bloor and St. Joseph Street, near Wellesley). One day, while walking past the shop, I thought I saw a man inside with his hair shaped into a hat. I don’t even think I did a double-take, but afterwards kind of kicked myself for not looking twice.
Somehow, the image worked its way into my imagination. He first appeared in a song I was writing. A year later, he made his way into the first hair hat story that I wrote–“Queenie, My Heart” (and that title actually arrived a few years before I’d even seen the hair hat man, scribbled in the margins of notes I was taking for fourth-year English class). But that story went unfinished. For about two years.
I’d just given birth to my first child when I wrote another hair hat story: the one in the voice of the lone male narrator in the book, which includes that coffee shop. After I wrote it, I said to my husband: is this just too weird? Because I want to write more hair hat stories. So I did. They just kind of poured out. At that point, I’d written a novel which had gotten me an agent; the novel didn’t sell, but she was able to sell these stories (which were written over the course of about a year) to Penguin. That happened just before I gave birth to my second child. And then, it was only at the editing stage that I found the ending to my Queenie story. And wrote the last story in the book, which surprised me entirely. I had no idea it was waiting to be written, but it felt like the perfect ending.
