July 30, 2009
Bookish books in the post
I only just noticed that the two books I received in the post today both have books on their covers. On the left, we have The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, a library-set novel. I’d actually requested it from the library, which was fitting, I thought, but when I found I was 146 on the holds list, I decided to buy the book instead. I discovered this book via Melanie’s review— it’s structured as a collection of incident reports logged by employees at a public library. As a former library employee myself, I can vouch that these might be as bizarre as you like, and wonder if the fiction will be as wild as fact is. The other book is Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick, whose Fine Lines column I absolutely adore. As she does in the column, Skurnick rereads “teen classics” in this new book (with guests columnists including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner). The reviews are hilarious, insightful and bring back long misplaced memories.
I think that both of these books are going to prove delightful in their own particular ways.
July 29, 2009
Two months
On Sunday we celebrated two months of Harriet being born, of me being a mom, and of ours being a family of three. And even a month ago, I could not have forecast how full and rich life would become again, so I’m so proud of how well we’re all doing. Of course, chaos reigns, but it’s at a level I can live with comfortably. One qualm being that I am not managing to read nearly as much as I’d like to be, and yet I keep buying books/requesting books at the library at much the same pace as ever, and it’s a little overwhelming. Unless board books count– my favourite is On The Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier. “On the day you were born/ gravity’s strong pull/ held you to the Earth/ with a promise that you/ would never float away…”
July 25, 2009
Where We Have to Go
I’ve just finished reading Where We Have to Go, a novel by my former classmate Lauren Kirshner. It’s the coming-of-age story of Lucy Bloom, a cat lover and an ALF lover with far too many odds against her. Featuring a truly great first line, “The night before my eleventh birthday, I dreamt I was five feet off the ground and flying through the No Frill grocery store on a royal blue Schwinn.”
Zoe Whittall in the Globe & Mail wrote, “Kirshner tempers any potential for melodrama with an expert eye for specific detail and the curt, cruel dialogue of teen girls hell-bent on destroying each other despite their abject loneliness. She is also adept at writing perfect pop-cultural detail: the emotional resonance of Alf, a hamster named Charlie Sheen, lite-brite pegs in Lucy’s pockets, all situating the story in a particular moment in recent Toronto history.”
Check out more praise and information about the book at Lauren’s website. This month she’s also been writer in residence at Open Book Toronto.
July 25, 2009
Going to get a quart of mik with William Blake
“Part of the Romantic sensibility, a part we inevitably share at least a little, was to grieve over the loss of this childlike clarity and its replacement by the more mundane duties and obligations of adult life. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; the things which we have seen, we now can see no more. It may seem that the Romantic view we are articulating sees ordinary adulthood as a loss, a falling off, only briefly stemmed by a few adult geniuses.
But that neglects the other half of the equation, the part that is our uniquely adult gift. In particular, when we take on the adult obligation of caring for children, we don’t give up the Romantic project, we participate in it. We participate simply by watching children. Think of some completely ordinary, boring, everyday walk, the couple of blocks to the local 7-Eleven store. Taking that same walk with a two-year old is like going to get a quart of milk with William Blake. The mundane street becomes a sort of circus. There are gates, gates that open one way and not another and that will swing back and forth if you push them just the right way. There are small walls you can walk on, very carefully. There are sewer lids that have fascinatingly regular patterns and scraps of brightly coloured pizza-delivery flyers. There are intriguing strangers to examine carefully from behind a protective parental leg. There is a veritable zoo of creatures, from tiny pill bugs and earthworms to the enormous excitement, or terror, of a real barking dog. The trip to 7-Eleven becomes a hundred times more interesting, even though, of course, it does take ten times as long. Watching children awakens our own continuing capacities for wonder and knowledge.”– from The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl
July 23, 2009
Weird Books I've Loved
I like to say that I love books of all kinds, though that’s not strictly true. There was a time, however, when it almost was, when I was little and covetted the most bizarre volumes. Books I’d snobbishly deem unworthy of capital-B Bookishness if I was consulted now. But then, oh. My library contained numerous books such as Mysteries of the Unexplained (“How ordinary men and weomen have experienced the Strange, the Uncanny and the Incredible”). I was obsessed with these books, and they always had photos of “ghosts” on staircases, and even kind of looked like ghosts if you just squint your eyes a bit (and otherwise they looked like a white glare). Also stories of children as reincarnated witches, and green children discovered living alone in the countryside.
I also had a book that explained the meaning of one’s dreams. I’d covetted this, hoping that the underlying theme of all my dreams would turn out to be, “You’re going to have a boyfriend one day”. I think my book was a Dream Dictionary, alphabetical, of course. With entries like, “Dreams of unicorns symbolize a longing for an idyllic age”, or perhaps something that makes even less sense, like “Unicorn dreams mean you’re worried about rain.” Trouble was, I never dreamed of unicorns, or anything else that could be alphabetized. And I never really needed a dictionary to decode the fact that perpetually dreaming of being chased by outsized dogs might mean acute anxiety.
I also had a baby name book. This was long before babies were a remote possibility (though don’t think I didn’t go through the entire volume to figure out the perfect first and second names for each of my four (!) future children. I think that was around the time I wanted to name my kids Bianca). I really did read the whole thing multiple times, and I’m still not sure what the attraction was. How helpful was it really to know that Margaret meant “pearl”? Name meanings are about as helpful as dream analysis. But I might only think this because my name is a kind of terrier.
July 21, 2009
On women's fiction or women in fiction, again
“Lisa Moore gets better and better,” I wrote last month under “Recently Discovered” whilst reading her latest novel February. And then an esteemed acquaintance of mine emailed me asking, “When?” For he was reading February himself at that moment, and wasn’t getting into it at all. “A fairly conventional historical romance” was his initial assessment, disappointingly, because he’d enjoyed Moore’s previous work, and he wondered when he’d discover the brilliant bits of February that had so appealed to me.
I probably shouldn’t have told you that. What I really want you all to do is go out and read February, and to love it just as much as I did. In fact, I really thought that love would come with no trouble, that my feelings towards the book were so straightforward as to be universal. “It’s a rare thing,” I’d written, “a perfect book”, and I really thought that much was obvious. (And reviewer Caroline Adderson certainly thought so too.)
So I was surprised to find that another fine reader had found the book so unappealing. “When does the book get good?” he asked, of this book that had won me over with its very first sentence, “Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener.” Here was a book very much in the present, very much in the physical world, and I’d never read a novel that started as such, and so I wanted to read on.
Perhaps it was lazy to just figure the differences in our opinions had to do with gender. “Maybe this is a women’s book?” I suggested, and he replied a bit put-off by both my suggestion and also by a writer who would write a book that would shut male readers out. Turns out reviewer Alex Good had made an assertion similar to mine in his Toronto Star review: “This is a deeply maternal universe. Time and again, sympathy, solicitude and kindness for strangers are evoked. There are “geysers of love” and motherly feeling for vagrants, gas station attendants and of course the unborn. There is no sense of evil, aside from nature’s rage in the sinking of the oil rig, and hence no conflict. The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, roiling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end.”
Exactly! Good has encapsulated what I loved about the novel exactly: the pervasive good, the ruminating narrative, the sense of gestation resulting in such a satisfying conclusion. Except, of course, he means none of this in a good way. And I wonder about this, and reviewing in general– about how a description such as his is shorthand for “this book is bad/not literature”. And about how “this book is bad/not literature” gets to be a shorthand for simply, “It didn’t grab me.”
Is a novel bad because it’s a “women’s novel” or a “man’s novel”? As a woman, I don’t find Hemingway bad, even with all the bullfighting. Of course, there are novels that don’t fall into gendered catagories, and though universality is to be desired, I think that my very favourite novel Unless by Carol Shields (which is a maternal universe, if ever you’ve read one) is actually better for its specificity. I can understand how Unless might not be immediately appealing to a lot of men, but surely they could overlook that to see its literary merit.
But then, what is “literary merit”, right? Someone will inevitably argue “aesthetics”, but no one has ever been able to explain to me how “aesthetics” is not just a fancy way to explain away books one doesn’t like. In his review, Alex Good faults February for lacking conflict and a “fast-paced, forward moving” plot. So, in essence, he faults the book for not being a different book altogether, for not being the kind of book that would appeal to him, and I’m not sure that’s altogether fair.
I write this not as an attack on Alex Good’s review (which was actually far more interesting than most reviews I read) but to expand upon the ideas the review prompted for me. To remark upon my surprise that February did not appeal to everyone, and to ponder what “gendered” writing is all about. Good says the gendered nature of the book is not what bothered him, but rather “that those [gendered] parts of it are so transparently the stuff of commercial fiction.” But what does that mean? Rings, to me, like that common dismissal of women’s writing in general being un-literary and merely the stuff of commerical fiction. (Strange that Good suggests a fast-paced, forward-moving plot would have saved the material from being commercial fiction, for isn’t plot what commerical fic is made of?)
Has Lisa Moore let her readers down by writing a “women’s novel”? This very question, I think, is dismissive and sexist. But irrelevant, then, if there’s no such thing as a “women’s novel” at all. And is it dismissive and sexist to say that there is?
July 21, 2009
Links
New (to me) blogs on the horizon! Such as The Literary Type, the official blog of The New Quarterly. TNQ is always good, and I’m sure we’ll see the same quality of work online. Check out the first post, “On Joining the Conversation”, about how online is where literary people are talking these days. I’m also obsessed with the blog Making It Lovely, which is sort of strange because it’s about interior design, but also about design on a broader scale and its creator is brilliant. And join our Facebook group, [re]use your mug. As some of you can’t help but know, our city is in the midst of a garbage strike, and trash has piled up in the streets. We’ve posted pictures of the mess in our gallery— note how much of it is cups, yes? A grand opportunity (in disguise) for us to realize how much less garbage we’d produce if we cut the disposible cups out of our lives. I, for one, had taken the pledge.
July 19, 2009
Something Amazing
Something amazing happened during these last couple of weeks, as our baby girl began a transformation from rage incarnate into an actual person. What is even more amazing, however, is the way in which her parents have actually begun to figure out how she works, what she needs, how to respond to her, and keep her happy for as long as possible (which is sometimes up to an hour or two). And watching her explore to the world now is absolutely one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve ever had, and I really can’t get enough of it. Baby can get enough of it, however, and at this moment, due to having been horribly overtired to the point of hysteria, Harriet is comfortably asleep in her swing. For now…
And so today is a good time for me to start reading The Scientist in the Crib (as recommended by Steph at Crooked House). I am looking forward to a book about babies that does not purport to be a “guide”, except perhaps one to understanding. And, of course, because man cannot subsist on non-fiction alone, I’m also reading my former classmate Lauren Kirshner‘s novel Where We Have to Go, which fits in well with all the rest if I regard it as a parenting anti-guide.
The best news is that I own a computer again, and so this week’s project is a little life here at Pickle Me This. Though I really can’t be held to anything these days at all.
July 16, 2009
Good Text
From the Descant blog, Katie Franklin on her feminist erotic bookclub and desire for books: “In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes insists, “the text is a fetish object, and the fetish desires me” (Barthes 27). As a librarian I see how the public forms relationships with their books. Patrons come in exacerbated if the paperback they’ve put on hold hasn’t come in yet: “What do you mean my book hasn’t come in? I need it now!” Such outbursts of desire, which may seem more natural in the bedroom, are often common expressions at the circulation desk of the library. However, I don’t blame them for their yearnings. Everyone is entitled to some good text.”
