May 21, 2010
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
Does Attica Locke ever do atmosphere in her first novel Black Water Rising. It’s the summer of 1981 in Houston, Texas, and the temperatures are soaring, along with the oil prices, the one tied to the other as lawyer Jay Porter tries not to overuse the air-con so as to conserve gasoline. His wife Bernadine is just weeks away from giving birth to their first child, and Porter is barely earning a living practicing law on his own, in an office in a strip mall. One night on a boat cruise along Buffalo Bayou, as the two are celebrating Bernie’s birthday, they hear a gunshot and a scream from somewhere on the shore.
Porter’s first instinct is to stay out of it– the FBI file left over from his student activist past in the civil rights movement has taught him as much. Urged on by his wife, however, Jay jumps into the bayou and finds himself inextricably embroiled in a crime that involves some of Houston’s most powerful forces.
Locke ties the strands of this narrative together with ease– how the mysterious white woman Jay rescues from the bayou is connected to the labour unrest over which Houston’s dockworkers are threatening to strike. How Houston’s controversial new female mayor is connected to Jay Porter’s radical past. How Jay’s troubled early life is affecting Jay as he awaits the birth of his first child. What all this has to do with the fact that he’s always packing a gun, terrified of what lies around the next corner. Though he’s been terrified for good reason lately– since he pulled the woman out of the water, other people have turned up dead, threats have been made on his own life and his wife’s, and someone seems desperate for him to keep his mouth shut about what he’s seen.
There is always music playing in the background, or the late night talk-radio going out over the airwaves as Jay drives around town. All of this adding to the heightened atmosphere, sense of impending something, the pulse of the city over those sweltering summer days and nights. Locke creates and sustains terrific suspense throughout her narrative, displaying her screenwriting background. Car chases, gunshots and fights down stair flights drive the narrative forward. Porter is a compelling and layered character, a driving force in his own right. For the last couple of years, I’ve been afflicted with a late-onset thing for crime-fiction, and Porter is everything a reader could want from such a book.
Black Water Rising has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, perhaps by its un-literary nature a longshot. But I can see why it was included, and how the list is better for it. Locke defies all convention about the kind of fiction women are supposed to write, about what crime fiction is supposed to be like. Her characterization is strong, her prose is punchy, her maneuvering of plot a most impressive feat. This is a really good book, unputdownable, the only Orange Prize shortlister I’ve ever called my Dad about to say, “You’ve got to read this!”. It’s a book that proves that commercial fiction can be amazing, and that in itself is really accomplishment enough.
May 21, 2010
The most beautiful thing I have ever created…
…is this pie, obviously. Whose butterfly cookie-cutter top (idea stolen from a pie at Madeleine’s) breaks my top pastry sheet into pieces, which is what always happens anyway, but at least in this case, I get to do it on purpose. The pie’s innards are Ontario rhubarb, non-Ontario strawberries, and plenty of the one thing that makes rhubarb so delicious– sugar! And the whole thing was so delicious. A fine way to start the Victoria Day long weekend, and just the thing after an afternoon in the sunshine.
May 19, 2010
I receive White Ink in the post
It has been an absolutely bumper week for books in the post. Today delivered my copy of White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood from Demeter Press. I bought this book for selfish reasons, of course, but it didn’t hurt that my purchase will help to keep Demeter Press afloat. And may I please mention other fine Demeter books Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog and Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts. As well as the gala event this Friday to raise funds for MIRCI and Demeter Press?
I imagine I’ll be dipping in and out of this beautiful book for some time. For Grace Paley, Sonnet L’Abbe, Rosemary Sullivan, Lorna Crozier, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Ray Hsu (with whom I used to work the Saturday midnight shift at the EJ Pratt Library, I’ll have you know), Leon Rooke, Laisha Rosnau, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, as well as many poets I have yet to discover.
There is also a Carol Potter. Do you think she is the Carol Potter,the most famous mother of all??
May 18, 2010
Deeper Withinness, and other thoughts on You Are Not a Gadget
Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget is incredibly provocative, and reviewers seem to be ripping it to pieces for sport. Not because it’s a bad book necessarily, or that Lanier’s ideas are particularly faulty, but because Lanier is critiqueing something the rest of us take for granted. And even if Lanier’s book was bad or his ideas were faulty, his book would still be worthwhile. It doesn’t necessarily have to be read as a polemic, as an assault on a whole way of life. Lanier could be 100% wrong the entire way through (and I’m certainly not one to determine whether he is or not) but I dare you to read this book and not learn something new. To not come away with questions you’d never considered before.
What I learned/considered: Lanier’s ties to the internet go back thirty years, and he takes great pains to point out that the internet could have developed any number of ways. That it developed the way it did because of decisions that people made for various reasons, some of them misguided, naive or ill-intentioned. That we overestimate the capabilities of computers and compromise ourselves in order to get along with them as closely as we do. That social media has much the same effect– in order to interact with Facebook, we reduce ourselves to catagories, keywords, standardized versions of ourselves. Twitter demands we communicate in short bursts of nothing. This is self-effacing, we’re playing into the hands of marketers. Content has become devalued by its treatment in the online world. Jonathan Coulton is an anomaly. Having finance in the hands of computer scientists as opposed to those who understand economics is a recipe for disaster. Remix culture sucks. With all the amazing advances in computer capability and open culture, all we have to show for it is LINUX and Wikipedia, both of which are just versions of things that came before.
Hive culture has come at a cost– we’ve killed journalism and music. Great art is not being made, rather we’re rehashing old art and doing it badly. We’re babbling about television recaps, writing blog entries without thought and posting idiotic movies on youtube. Lanier doesn’t reference literature. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate omission– could it be that books will fare better in this culture than other media? And I’m not talking about plagiarism– in most instances, I think there is a pretty clear distinction between plagiarism and “mixing” (and Opal Mehta is the former, FYI). But in the poetry I’ve read lately, by Michael Lista, PK Page and Julie Holbrook, I’ve seen some pretty beautiful things made out of recycle material. Perhaps poetry in particular lends itself to this? I’m not sure that a remixed novel wouldn’t totally suck. Or is the poetic trend towards this sort of thing a kind of omen? Is this what Lanier is talking about. The future as a place where originality goes to die?
And then there are literary blogs, or book blogs. Lanier doesn’t mention these either (perhaps he doesn’t read a lot of fiction? Though his interests are far-reaching. He is obsessed with cephalopods and ouds). I know I spend a lot of my time here rehashing other people’s ideas, or simply pasting them down as is. Is this pursuit any more worthwhile than episode recaps of So You Think You Can Dance?
The other day, Charlotte Ashley asked “Are bloggers/twitterers just unpaid publicity staff? What do we “get” out of this relationship?” So now what I’m thinking about has nothing to do with Jaron Lanier anymore, but it sort of does. I think this is the kind of question he’d want me to be thinking about. Why do I write a book blog? First, because it’s made me smarter. I am a much better reader than I was five years ago, and I have learned so much from the readers who’ve joined me in this conversation. Second, because although I am pushing goods here (books), those goods are culture, and there’s something a bit more noble about that than me pushing, say, lipstick (as long as I’m discerning, because, frankly, some books are lipstick). Because when I find a book that’s good, I can help nudge it farther out into the world. I get to be useful, and that’s a fine thing. And because even if nobody ever read this blog, it allows me to engage with the books I read (which is all too important when one reads too quickly like I do). Writing book reviews helps to figure out what I really read, and I really think about it. It makes reading a book a much deeper experience. Because books are worth talking about. Blogging about books, like talking about books, takes us deeper within them.
Deeper withinness being the whole point of virtual reality (which Jaron Lanier invented) so maybe he’d be on board afterall.
May 18, 2010
Figurative Devouring Only
Today we received in the post the latest from Rebecca Rosenblum. Her chapbook Road Trips has just been published by Frog Hollow Press, and is so incredibly gorgeous. The pages are a joy to caress, the endpapers are thick, fibrous and lovely, and I love the images inside which remind me of lino-cuts. And then there are her stories– I’ve read one before (though I imagine it’s changed since then) and the other will be new. How wonderful! This is one book the baby will not be permitted to eat. Figurative devouring only.
May 18, 2010
Literary Gala Raising Funds for Motherhood Research and Activism
With readings by Miriam Toews, Di Brandt, Margaret Christakos, Afua Cooper, Rishma Dunlop, Diane Flacks, Susan Glickman, Marni Jackson, M. Nourbese Philip, Althea Prince, Jane Satterfield, and Priscila Uppal
In support of the newly established Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI).
Friday, May 21, 2010
7 pm to 10:30 pm
Oakham House
Ryerson University
63 Gould Street
Toronto, Ontario
When Andrea O’Reilly founded The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), the world’s first feminist research association for the study of motherhood, she was amazed by the enthusiastic response she got. “We started in 1998 at York University, and over the years our association grew to have more than 500 members from two dozen countries, and ARM’s work included an academic journal and press,” says Dr. O’Reilly. “ARM recently moved out of the university and has been reborn as Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), an independent non-profit organization. Its focus remains feminist scholarship, activism, and community involvement concerning the issues of mothering and motherhood.”
Tickets are $65 per person and available at the website, or at the door.
May 17, 2010
Dispatches from another dimension
“Without question Tess was getting bigger and more complicated every day. But she was also growing her story. Growing a life that acquires its own description. Babies have only a handful of verbs. They eat, shit, cry, spit up, sleep, smile and wiggle. As a new parent, you live inside those few verbs with your child for the first year. In a sense, that’s part of the disorientation on top of sleep deprivation and all the other usual suspects. Some mornings I’d catch myself sitting with Tess and shaking the rattle, as I had the day before, and the day before that, or listening to her cry, or to her feed, and wonder where the hell all my verbs had gone. Could somebody open a window in there?
This might ultimately explain why parents are so punishing with their anecdotes. We are ecstatic, as if thawed from a long cryogenic sleep, with each rejuvenating action taken by our kids, no matter how banal. Like tourists with too many holiday slides, we prattle on to bored strangers, celebrating our return from new frontiers. ‘My god,” we say, ‘you should have seen the baby and the thing he did with the garden hose the other day! And this morning he made a brand new sound, sort of like he said, ‘multifaceted’ but, thing is, we don’t even use that word around the house, do we hon?’ Parents– all of us– send dispatches from another dimension where babies watching dogs, or futzing with garden hoses, is something blockbuster. And it is. Like, wow.
Or maybe you just had to be there.”
–from C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark by Ryan Knighton (and my review is here).
May 16, 2010
What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy
I’ve been devouring short story collections lately, one story after another without even a pause for breath in between. And then I read “What Becomes”, the first story in A.L. Kennedy’s new short story collection of the same name, and I had to put the book down for a while. The story, about a man who’s the only person in the audience at a small movie theatre, who’s been waiting for the film to start and then when it starts, it has no sound– the story was so brutally, heartbreakingly sad that I just needed a rest before I could handle another. Which was good intuition on my part, because the stories in Kennedy’s collection are unrelentingly bleak.
And yet, would it surprise you that the collection was also hysterically funny? In particular, the passage about gerbil installation: “You’ve had some right cowboys in here… Any chance of a cuppa once I’m done?” Kennedy’s characters are usually profoundly lonely, with a wry outlook, sharp intelligence and sense of humour that makes the loneliness even more tragic, because it’s clear how much they’re aware of their disconnect, that they’d probably make for fairly good company. So tragic yes, but still funny. Bleak plus hilarious does make for a vision that is quite singular.
In the title story, the man in the movie theatre has left a troubled marriage in which so much has gone unsaid, in which the right things have never been offered at quite the right time. “Edinburgh” is the story of a man who owns an organic fruit and veg shop (“Sell organic food and imitation bacon, and suddenly folk thought you’d tolerate anything.”). He falls for a customer, and their love story is a trick of tenses– perhaps a used-to-be, a could-have-been, a never-to-have-been, or the still purely hypothetical. Regardless, it doesn’t end happy. “Saturday Teatime” the story of a woman’s failed attempts to clear her mind in a flotation tank (which is more like a “Flotation Damp-Cupboard”). “Confectioner’s Gold” the story of a couple who’ve lost everything in the recent economic collapse. “Whole Family With Young Children Devastated” is about a character who peers too much into the heartbreak of others, when she can barely help herself. In “As God Made Us”, a group of young with various physical impairments are asked to leave a swimming pool because they’re upsetting nearby children. “Sympathy” is a graphic one-night-stand in a hotel room, delivered solely with dialogue.
There is not a story among these that doesn’t pack a solid punch. Kennedy’s atmosphere is so vivid, her characters’ interior voices so deeply authentic, and though her prose doesn’t call attention itself, it is as perfect as the voices are. Her stories are constructed of details, right down to the grouting between the tiles on the floor, and the things her characters know, trivia netted or wisdom earned– the characters become people by this. Kennedy’s first-person narrators are so convincing that they must be the voice of the author herself, and yet the voices are impossibly various, so of course they’re not. And this is truly the mark of a stunning fiction writer, that what’s imagined is made so vividly real.
May 16, 2010
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
To write about Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal in 350 words was one of the most demanding and complex writerly tasks I have ever undertaken, and my review of the novel appears on the April 2010 of Quill & Quire (available here online). The first novel by the precocious Catton, The Rehearsal is difficult, devourable, innovative, frustrating, and fascinating. I didn’t love it, but I don’t think it even wanted me to, and it’s a stunning novel in particular for being written in an time in which so many stories are the same. Truly, this is something different. And though the parallels are by no means straightforward, and I don’t think liking one is a recommendation for the other, The Rehearsal is more like The Westing Game than any other novel I’ve read as an adult. Trying to get it all straight, however– especially in 350 words– was completely exhausting, and my mind is shutting down now just considering it again.
So I’ll let others try. Stephany Aulenback recommends it at Crooked House. The Rehearsal is the May Book Club selection at Eye Weekly. And a rave review in The Toronto Star.
May 14, 2010
On BookCamp Toronto
I’m looking forward to being part of the Canada Reads session tomorrow at BookCamp Toronto at 2:00. Hope to see (and hear from!) some of you there to talk about the success of CBC’s Canada Reads program and the exciting possibilities for its future.
