July 25, 2010
What I expected
Harriet (aged 14 months) likes teacups, Miffy, and books, and so my job here is basically done. And though she’s changing all the time (starting to walk, starting to talk!), her recent engagement with books has been particularly fascinating. She’s started to make real connections between the books we read and the actual world, pointing out dogs within pages as she does on the sidewalk. When we pull out Hand Hand Finger Thumb, she goes to get her own drum off her shelf so she can play along with the monkeys. We’re rereading The House at Pooh Corner at the moment, and she points up at her mobile when she hears Pooh’s or Piglet’s name. When we read Kisses Kisses Baby-O by Sheree Fitch, and get to the “slurpy, burpy” page, she starts pointing to her breastfeeding pillow. When we read Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes, she shows us all the appropriate digits. Tonight when we read Goodnight Gorilla (on the occasion of a trip to the zoo) she went insane, but I think that was only because she was tired.
It’s all very exciting though, partly because there was once a time when Harriet was about as engaging as a wall. But mostly because I love books and she seems to like them too, and they’re such a wonderful thing for us to enjoy together. It’s the one of the few illusions I had pre-motherhood that has turned out exactly as I’d expected.
July 25, 2010
To pick just one
Last week, I offered up the chance to win my spare copy of CNQ to anyone who’d just tell me their favourite short story. Short stories, of course, being a most underappreciated form, but then what of the responses I received? Which were lists of short stories, because many couldn’t bear to pick just one. And magazines too, aren’t they supposed to be obsolete? But then everybody wants a copy of this one, perhaps for the keepsake inside, or its gorgeous redesign, or the wonderful articles and stories from cover to shining cover. One person emailed me the following a few days after entering: “Take me out of the CNQ draw. I bought the issue today. Couldn’t help myself. I’m hauling 100 lbs of books and magazines across the country, but I still needed to have this issue.”
The bad news: if you’re reading this and haven’t heard from me, you didn’t win.
The good news: CNQ is on sale at your local independent bookshop (and probably elsewhere too…). You won’t be sorry.
Also, favourite short stories include:
- Alice Munro’s “Red Dress”
- (can’t remember title but) from Hilary Sharper’s collection Dream Dresses
- L.M. Montgomery’s “The Quarantine”
- entirety of Olive Kitterage by Elizabeth Strout
- “My Husband’s Jump” by Jessica Grant
- “Coyote Columbus Story” by Thomas King
- Munro’s “Jack Randa Hotel”
- William Trevor’s “Three People”
- Michael Chabon’s “A Model World”
July 24, 2010
The extended lives of books
As I’ve previously complained, the worst part of being a fan of Barbara Pym is that her books are hard to come by. Most new bookstores don’t stock a big selection, and the used bookstores don’t either because Barbara Pym is not disposable and people who own her books usually have to die (or be put into a home) in order to be parted with them. Such a parting precisely the way I managed to add six of her novels my library this morning.
No, I didn’t have to murder any little old ladies, and the one in question is still alive, but she’s reached her “put into a home” years. The contents of her home for sale around the corner from my house, and her books! In alphabetical order! All the novelists that I like best (and then some). I picked up two more Elizabeth Bowen books too, Silent Spring (which I’ve read and loved), What Maisie Knew to reread and The Wings of the Dove for the very first time. And Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. All paperbacks, and therefore fifty cents each.
I’m currently reading The Yellow Lighted Bookshop and just finished the bit about the long, long lives of books, and how they’re recycled like almost no other object. I think that Mary Hackney would be pleased to know that her books (and the various scraps of paper she left within them) are going to another good home where they’re sure to be alphabetized.
I picked up The Complete Works of Shakespeare further down the street. It was sitting on the roof of a car. I know the etiquette for books in boxes on the sidewalk (though you do have to watch it– someone might be moving) but not for books sitting on the roofs of cars. So I made up my own rule, and it was “Yoink”. Which might be another case of bibliokleptomania.
Oh well.
July 23, 2010
To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew
“Parents didn’t have to read the New York Review of Books or James Joyce, and they didn’t have to make their kids read Treasure Island or Greek Myths. Parents simply had to read for themselves, and to make sure there were kids’ books in the house. Children had only to see that reading was something adults did for pleasure and, following this example, would begin to read on their own.
…What were her most important books? Nancy Drew mysteries, Gone With the Wind, and a hulking anthology, Twenty Five Tales of the Weird and Supernatural. Not Faulkner, not Proust, but Nancy Drew; the first rungs on the ladder are often the most daring. To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew. Or books about horses. Books by Kurt Vonnegut, or Ayn Rand, or A Wrinkle in Time, or On the Road, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Goosebumps. It’s entirely possible that some of tomorrow’s voracious readers will cite the Harry Potter novels as important, but just as many might cite a novel not found in every house on the planet.”–From The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
July 22, 2010
One more thing about Still Life…
At some point in Still Life With Woodpecker, someone pulls out that old chestnut of a statistic: 60% of all marriages end in divorce. And of course, there’s usual up side in the 40% of marriages that don’t. But I thought also of the fact that Still Life… was published in 1980, which means that 40% marital success rate has been holding steady for 30 years. Kind of amazing, and the opposite of everything we’ve been led to expect. Imagine if– giambrones notwithstanding– we’re not all going to hell in a handbasket after all?
July 20, 2010
People around in the daytime
Nobody works in San Francisco. I noticed this when we were there a few years ago, cafes packed for brunch on a Wednesday morning– “how do these people make a living?” I wondered (“and how can I get to do that too?”). It’s a different kind of culture here in Toronto, where on weekday mornings the sidewalks belong to old men in funny hats, crazy parkbench ladies, and disgruntled nannies pushing double strollers. Or maybe I just frequent the wrong neighbourhoods, but I do know of what I speak, having not only been a stay-at-home mom for the past year, but a graduate student back in not-too-distant history.
But lately, the days have felt a bit San Franciscan. I made two loaves of strawberry bread last week, because I had visitors due for a string of three afternoons, for a cup of tea or a glass of lemonade, depending on the temperature. Each of them people who are around in the daytime, each of them singularly wonderful (and bearing wonderful things).
On Friday my friend Ivor arrived, who I hadn’t seen properly in far too long, and what he brought with him was Ivor conversation. National newspapers pay him for it (and his twitter followers are legion) but I got the benefit of it directly from my couch, in all its fascinating hilariousness. He let Harriet paw at his iphone. Next up was a most excellent new friend called Kat (we met at the library!) and her fabulous baby boy Atlas, and she showed up with a freaking cheese tray. I think I’m in love with her. And today we had a visit from Julia, who is lovely and brilliant, and brought me At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman (who I realize now I’ve heard of from a reference on Nathalie’s blog).
Anyway, the point of this being that I’m not sure strawberry bread even begins to account for the riches I’ve recently received. And maybe I can finally stop lusting after San Francisco.
July 19, 2010
Want to get your hands on?
There is no way I can describe to you how much I was enjoying reading CNQ 79 this morning, sipping a splendid cup of tea with the morning breeze drifting in through the window. And not just because it’s the first day in recent memory that nobody local has been operating a sledgehammer or chainsaw outside, nope. It’s because the magazine reads as good as it looks. My favourite kind of writing– critics passionately advocating for the work they love best, and for the short story form in general and particular. Reading the pieces that opened the magazine, I felt so inspired, excited, and lucky to be reading in a time in which, however much the form is maligned, incredible short stories keep getting written. (And celebrated).
Due to clerical error, however, I have ended up with two copies of this magazine. If you live in Canada and would like me to mail you my spare, please email me at klclare AT gmail DOT com and tell me the title of your favourite short story. I’ll pick a response at random this weekend. Good luck!
July 18, 2010
Rereading Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
I’ll start with the fact that makes me want to die the least (honestly): I used to claim that all the wonderment of literature in general was contained within this one book, and if it was the only book left on earth, all the best things about literature would still remain. I am very glad I never was made to prove this.
And then that I used to have a framed pack of Camel cigarettes hanging on my wall. I believed that it contained all the secrets of the universe, and would inspire me to be the kind of person I wanted to be.
That my copy of this book bears a heartfelt message from a boy who says he loves me. Which is really sweet, unless you know that I encountered him in an internet chatroom one day when I was very bored in 1999, and that we never met. (Though we did used to have discussions about how to make love stay, both agreeing ardently that when the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. However, we never did address how exactly the mystery of connection applies to two people who’ve never met.)
I think I’m less embarrassed about all that, however, than I am about the numerous lines throughout the text that I underlined in purple ink, in particular, “Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, surprise, disorder, unlawfulness, bad taste, fun and things that go boom in the night.” Seriously, why did that speak to me? Because I only ever underlined things in purple ink if they resonated with my deepest being, but no one has ever stood for those things less than I do. Except bad taste. I think maybe it was aspirational…
So there are many ways to begin explaining just how much rereading Still Life With Woodpecker was an exercise in embarrassment. (And I reread this as part of Mark Sampson’s Retro Reading Challenge, I’ll have you know, of which embarrassment was sort of the point, but still, this must be unprecedented) I will explain that when I encountered this book, I was twenty years old and very bored, and that I was just contemplating turning my world upside down for the very first time. (The other line I fervently underlined during this period was from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia [which I still love] which is: “This is the best time possible to be alive. When everything you know is wrong”).
Still Life… is the story of Leigh-Cheri, an exiled princess/all-American girl (like Anne Hathaway, but with more of a tendency toward unwanted pregnancies) who falls in love with a terrorist (and this was back when terrorism was still homey, domestic and romantic). Bernard is an “outlaw”, outside the law in every sense, except that he gets thrown back in jail, the couple drifts apart, her Arab fiance builds her a pyramid, the couple is reunited, and owe everything to a stick of dynamite. Bernard teaches Leigh-Cheri how to really be free, that love is crazy barking at the moon, that the moon is everything (including birth control), that sometimes you’ve got to throw caution to the wind, and blow a bunch of shit up.
When I read this book the first time, it gave me license to imagine I could live the kind of life I’d imagined. It made me feel more confident about going boldly forth, and making mistakes, and blowing shit up, and breaking the rules, and though I never did any of these things terribly prolifically (apart from the second), I am glad I learned these lessons when I was twenty years old. My life could possibly have been different otherwise, but I am not so sure I owe it as much to the Camel pack as I thought I did.
Rereading this book at 31, I see how far I’ve come, and how my literary judgement has sharpened, because the book is terrible. My political judgement has sharpened also– the Woodpecker is an anti-feminist, libertarian, but I would have noticed neither of these details then. Robbins’ prose is an orgy of play, but his language means nothing beyond its frippery, and it’s not even that funny– the only time I laughed out loud was when somebody sat on a chihuahua. I was bored reading most of it, and so bored out of my head by the end that I was only skimming. The sex was awful and gross, and not remotely sexy. The vagina euphemisms were totally disgusting, and I’m not sure why that didn’t put me off first time through.
I’m glad I reread it though– there were sparks of how brilliant I used to think it was. I don’t know if I’d ever read anything that interesting before, and it might have liberated me as a reader in the same way it did in a more general sense. And I wasn’t wholly cynical about its message. Even now, the idea of having CHOICE guide one’s life is very important to me: “To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.” Rock on Tom!
Kind of inspiring, but not quite worth the 252 pages it took to get there.
July 14, 2010
The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
Catherine O’Flynn’s two books have been imperfect novels packed solid with goodness. The News Where You Are, like her first novel What Was Lost, chronicles contemporary life in the English Midlands, its bleak dose of “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” nicely countered with humour, pop culture references, and an underlying faith in the human spirit. Her characters are vividly realized, their dialogue sharp, and the settings evoked with perfect detail. The plots and subplots are absorbing, both novels a pleasure to read, and so in the end all is forgiven even when they don’t quite work as wholes.
At the centre of The News Where You Are is Frank Allcroft, who serves less as a character than as an anchor for the various strands O’Flynn is weaving here– anchor fittingly, because Frank is a local news anchor, O’Flynn depicting the details and minutiae of his job in fascinating detail, and also showing him reflecting on the changing media scene, questioning the place for folksy local in a fast-paced globalized world; Phil Smethway, his old friend and mentor has died six months previously in a mysterious hit and run; Frank is finally beginning to admit to himself how much his mother’s unhappiness has always affected him, and he is also trying to reconcile his feelings regarding his architect father, whose buildings have one-by-one been demolished since his death; Frank makes a point of attending funerals of those whose lonely deaths he reports, and then one of these people turns out to be connected to Phil…
(Frank’s frosty co-anchor, responding to one of his famous corny jokes, asks him, “What the hell am I supposed to do? If I laugh, I look as if I’m mentally ill. If I don’t laugh, I look as if I hate you.” I can’t find another place to fit this in, but I want to repeat it because it’s funny, because it’s a dynamic I’ve never considered, and though a lesser author would make the co-presenter simply hateful and hating, O’Flynn opts more for the more interesting angle. Her characters are always surprising).
It sounds like a hodgepodge, but it isn’t, and in the end the whole thing comes together more effectively than What Was Lost. Too much is going on for this to be a masterful novel, but its strands are all compelling and they comprise the stuff of this world in a way that’s both familiar and surprising. Also a bit shamelessly heartwarming–though its premise(s) are sad, O’Flynn injects enough humour, enough pointed observation about the absurdity of everyday life, and provides Frank with a wonderful family whose solidity is never questioned. Without overdoing it then, O’Flynn gets the bleakness of contemporary England, the centuries of histories underneath the feet, which makes the recent past almost seem disposable, and how “the future” is now something looked back upon with nostalgia. What was lost and what remains.
