July 20, 2008
50 Bonus Points
Scrabble in the park is the perfect activity for a sunny Saturday afternoon, but when sun suddenly turns into downpour, nothing could be more perfect than Scrabble indoors. In air conditioning, no less, at the wonderful home of the even more wonderful K, and this game was legend. I have never ever been more on fire, or, alternatively, I’ve never had such luck of letters, and my victory was certainly fixed when I used them all to spell out “neutrons”.
July 20, 2008
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
That a book has pictures, in my opinion, makes it no less a book, particularly if that book’s language still matters. If the images are enhancement and not just a flashy stand-in for story, and in Skim, a graphic novel with words by Mariko Tamaki and pictures by Jillian Tamaki, images are certainly the former. The images so vivid in their own right that they stand alone effectively when necessary, in individual panels or full page spreads, so perfectly conveying a moment– with expression, posture, that single perfect object standing in for a whole scene. Otherwise the language and images integrated– words stamped out in the snow, chalked on blackboard– in a perfect synchronicity.
But the language still matters– I was part of an audience that heard Mariko Tamaki reading from Skim on Monday evening, and rushed to buy the book between the sets. I almost fought someone for what I thought was the last one, but luckily they had another box. Reading from a comic book— I didn’t even know this was possible. Part of this is that Tamaki is a spectac performer, she did her work true justice. And the structure too– the voice bubble dialogue being terrible funny to listen to, but so much of Skim is written in a diary format, meat and substance as you like.
Skim is the story of Kim, called Skim because she isn’t, and she attends a private girls’ high school and it’s 1993. Always somewhat of a misfit, her isolation from her peers is only exacerbated after a local suicide when classmates establish the Girls Celebrate Life Club (“Teenage Suicide– Don’t Do It”). Skim is disgusted by feigned concern from girls who’ve spent years as her tormentors, and now they’re relishing the drama, discussing her in hushed tones– she wears a lot of black, says she’s a Wiccan, she can’t think of anything that makes her happy. And they don’t even know that she’s in love with her English teacher, Ms. Archer.
Skim is marketed as a children’s book, and will serve this demographic well, I think, assuring other misfits (nearly everyone) that they aren’t alone. Holding great appeal to older readers too, and not only because they’ll have it confirmed how incredibly lucky they are to be grown up, but also for such an engaging story, told with a great deal of insight and dark humour. Further, the acuity of its characterization, of Skim– that a comic book character could be bestowed with such a voice. Even in her most desperate moments, this girl’s company is a delight.
July 19, 2008
Three Facts
- Slippery boys are hard to hold on to
- Indefatigable boys aren’t easily tired.
- Elusive boys are hard to find.
July 19, 2008
A return to order
Returning my books to their freshly painted shelves last evening was as satisfying as popping bubble wrap, or tweezing out an ingrown hair. I’d had to resist the urge to get it all done earlier, before the paint was surely dry, exercising my sorely underused sensibility muscle. Telling myself over and over, it is hot and humid, shelves could be sticky, books could get stuck= disaster. But it’s finished now, books are home. The room is fresh and bright, and the built-in shelves are no longer dingy grey. Though we do have a unique problem here of too many shelves, and the collection looks piddly. But still lovely, standing at attention and alphabetized for your pleasure…
July 18, 2008
Home by Marilynne Robinson
It seems strange now, having just quoted Marilynne Robinson on “show, don’t tell,” and then going on to read her new novel Home (out in September), which doesn’t contain a single bit of “tell” as I understand it, and perhaps contains lack of telling as its very essence. This makes more sense, however, upon focusing on a different part of the quotation: “People are to an incredible degree constituted of what they never say, perhaps never consciously think. Behaviour is conventionalized and circumstantial. In many cases, the behaviour that in fact would express what someone thinks or feels is frustrated, cannot occur.”
Home, Robinson’s third novel, appears to function as in exercise in fiction under these constraints, in which characters are constructed by what they do not, or cannot say. Glory Boughton, thirty-eight years old and the youngest of six has returned home to her ailing father, returned after a long and failed engagement in something of disgrace. She has just settled into life with her father, a retired minister, when her brother Jack comes home also, suddenly, the prodigal son. Jack, that black sheep, the subject of a great deal of family worry and shame, has been gone for twenty years and appears no less troubled than when he left, in fact worse, having not worn his experiences altogether well.
The story of these three characters living together is a quiet one, subtle. Made doubly obscure by their strangeness to one another coupled with the intimacy of family, meaning that even more than usual goes unsaid– the circumstances of Glory’s heartache, just where her brother has been. And just as Robinson doesn’t rely on characters “showing” the answers to these questions, neither does she tell in a cheap way. As readers we don’t get much access into characters’ heads, Jack and his father not at all, and little with Glory because she can’t bring herself to think so much.
And so the story is revealed by what the characters choose to tell one another, and by their silences, and by other words underlying everything they say. Our own lack of insight providing another kind, a certain objectivity illuminating how intentions can be misread, the limits of perspective, and a realistic experience of these characters as actual people without their details written on their sleeves. Their true natures requiring not so much decoding as careful reading, almost listening. This bringing forth an engagement with the novel that renders the quietness and subtlety absolutely no such thing, magnifying every single event.
Marilynne Robinson is a majestic writer. Of all the bits I underlined, my favourite remains, “They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they huing over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nub of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken.” Or when, after a lot of thought about dumplings good or bad, Glory concedes that perhaps the word dumplings is better than dumplings themselves.
Robinson’s new novel is a gorgeous story of homecoming, exploring the nature of home itself, our histories, and the stubborn nature of family love– the bond that just can’t help itself.
July 17, 2008
Everyday I violate some principles
So at the end of June, I vowed not to buy another book until September. (I haven’t announced this officially, hoping to avoid driving book stock further into the toilet). Because I have 27 books on my books unread shelf, I’m rereading all summer, and also because I feared that my book buying had become compulsive, and I wanted to prove that it wasn’t. I couldn’t. I already bought a book on Monday, and then I did it again today. But then how could I not have, for this is not just any book. Sigh, but when is it ever?
I’d never heard of Toronto: A Literary Guide until today, when it appeared in the window of a used bookshop calling my name. Published in 1999 by Greg Gatenby (of the International Festival of Authors), this sweet tome is a perfect catalogue of all the places writers have lived or visited, written or read, or congregated together in Toronto. Broken down by neighbourhood, written in a non-cataloguey convivial tone, with fabulous details, context, historical fact, dealing with writers working in a variety of genres, dating back to the nineteenth century. Page upon page of lives.
Let’s take my neighbourhood, “South Annex”, or a one-block radius of my house, to break it down more. Major Street has been home to writers M.T. Kelly, Janet Hamilton, Howard Engel, Albert E.S. Smythe, Aviva Layton, Leon and Constance Rooke, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding, Charles Tidler and Martyn Burke. Gwendolyn MacEwen lived around the corner on Robert. The marvelous house at 84 Sussex was home of the new press in the early ’70s. Greg Hollingshead and John Bemrose lived there as well. Brunswick Ave. has been home to Janice Kulyk Keefer, Olive Senior, Maggie Helwig, Adele Wiseman, David French, Erika Ritter, and Karen Mulhallen. Do note these details (whose prose is far more charming than I let on here) take up three pages of 622. Which means that my neighbourhood is fabulous, and this book is tremendously rich.
Indeed I am one of those curious (and ubiquitous) creatures partial to the literary pilgrimage. How fun to now have so many now right outside the door, and a whole new book full of fantastic things to know, new connections. Awakening me to the secret history of maps I know by heart.
July 16, 2008
Chaos Continues
Bibliochaos continues– the house is in shambles, and I’m covered in paint. Luckily so are the bookshelves (paint-covered, that is), and they’ll get a second coat tomorrow, and it’s not so unreasonable to assume things will be back to normal by Thursday. Meaning that I will be able to find time to post a rave review of Marilyn Robinson’s Home, among other things. I’ve just finished rereading Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays— I read it wrong the first time, and am glad I came back to find out just how wonderful it is.
July 16, 2008
Scream in High Park
Our trip last night to The Scream Literary Festival’s “Scream in High Park” Mainstage was quite well-documented. Off we went, waving good-bye, with a picnic full of carbs in tow. Took the subway to High Park Station and then walked deep deep into the woods, and claimed some prime seating at the venue.
The menu consisted of pasta salad, Rosenblum bread, avocado scones, cheese, and sweet snacks ala Enright. But if you can believe it, such a delicious spread wasn’t even the main event.
First up was the magnificent Mariko Tamaki, writer of Skim, which I’ve been lusting after for a while. (See Tamaki to the right). She opened her set with a poem comprising Facebook statuses of yore, read and excerpt from Skim, and then an essay about ephemerality that was well and truly lovely.
Another delight was seeing Claudia Dey read again from Stunt. As a reader she is as compelling as Tamaki, though in a different way, and I would have run right out and bought her book if I hadn’t done so already.
I also loved Sonnet L’Abbé, Wayde Compton with Jason de Coutu, Ray Robertson and Motion. I would have loved even more too, except I had to work in the morning and so we left before the final set. And it was too dark by then to take a photo of us waving goodbye.
Such a magical evening, assembled there with friends and strangers. Inside a forest in the midst of this big city, a summer night that grew cool as the sun went down. Fireflies stealing the show, those luminous acrobats– I could hardly keep my eyes off them.
And in terms of the human performers, I’m not sure who stole the show most, though the lineups at the booksale provided a very good indication…
July 16, 2008
With a brown cover
A google search that sounds like a long shot: i had a short story book when i was little im 23- with a brown cover- any ideas. They probably didn’t find it here.
July 14, 2008
Summer Fiction
One of my favourite events of summer: The Atlantic Fiction Issue is now out and about.
