December 23, 2008
A sound economic prospect
Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written about why book buying for Christmas is a sound economic prospect.
December 23, 2008
Phoebe Gilman
Somehow it took me until yesterday to learn that Phoebe Gilman died in 2002. She was a really marvelous author and illustrator who had such an impact on me as a reader. I still remember her visit to my elementary school, and how exciting it was meet someone who’d created such a wondrous thing as a book. I can still recite most of Jillian Jiggs by heart. I also remember how Phoebe Gilman told us that she thought Jillian’s little sister was called Rebecca, although the character went unnamed in the story, and so I am excited to see Rebecca’s name was made official in subsequent Jillian tales. I am excited also to note that Gilman left such an extensive literary legacy that will bring her work to avid readers for generations to come. 
December 23, 2008
A Passion for Reading
The text of my presentation for the December 9 Art Matters Forum “A Passion for Reading” has been posted online. I addressed the ways in which literary blogs promote a passion for reading, and how, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.”
My co-panelists’ presentations can be found here and are well worth reading.
December 23, 2008
Crumbs
On “slummy mummy” writing: “[these] writers know these idiosyncrasies aren’t really faults but bargaining chips… The domestic preoccupation seems so much worse because the women are complaining about domesticity without moving beyond it.” Via Maud Newton, Laura Miller on rereading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe: “Narnia is a mongrel thing, and so is Christmas. As is often the case, this mongrelizing is the source of its strength.” Could Curtis Sittenfeld’s fictional reassessment of Laura Bush have been all too misleading? Macleans covers Rebecca Rosenblum’s marriage to Robert Downey Jr. The Edible Woman is Seen Reading (aside: last time I read this book, I thought it was dated and politically irrelevant, however brilliant. An essential literary artifact. And then it was sometime last year when I was restless, and everybody told me I should have a baby, and I started feeling a bit like a cake. And now I am having a baby, and of course I’m thrilled about it, but I’ve realized I was wrong about The Edible Woman).
December 23, 2008
Today's things to do list
- check the post
- go swimming
- pick up a book at the library
- pick up a parcel at the post office
- bake three apple pies
- write, read and knit
- be cooked my favourite dinner
- look into becoming a lady of leisure
December 23, 2008
Dessert Trends Bistro
In the past week, I’ve eaten at Dessert Trends Bistro three times, and I think I’m going back for lunch tomorrow. This making clear that I go out for meals far too often, and that I’m a creature of habit, but I really must emphasize how good the restaurant is.
The restaurant is also around the corner from my house, which is convenient in a snowstorm (as has often been the case of late). Light and airy on even the greyest day, the first sight that greets you when you walk in the door is a feast of desserts that will blow your mind. (Pictured here are Berry Box, and Raspberry Chocolate Tarts, which are two tried tested favourites). The array of desserts making clear why one might want to come four times a week, to leave no selection untasted. I’ve never chosen a dessert that wasn’t delicious.
But the main-course selections are truly exquisite. I had lamb-shank with couscous and rapini last weekend, grilled vegetable sandwich (with wild mushroom soup on the side) when I was in for lunch, and braised short ribs with pasta when I had dinner last. Each meal really was an eye-rolling delight. Dinners come with bread and three kind of dips– white bean, hummus and jalapeno– that are quickly devoured. Service isn’t always quick, but I’m never in a hurry. That food can be this good is a treat, and consistently so is a miracle.
December 23, 2008
Holidays
I’m now on my holidays, so expect to get plenty of reading done over the next two weeks. I just finished reading Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander, Jacaranda about her childhood in Egypt. More than a memoir, actually, it is an investigation into the dawning of consciousness ala Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. I enjoyed it immensely, and not only for its endpapers. Now just beginning Rainforest by Jenny Diski, and The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer. Now enjoying the lights on the zmas tree, one blizzard after another, and the ache of my muscles after this afternoon’s swim.
December 20, 2008
I prefer weak tea!
“Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still more perpelexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offences. ‘It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,’ she said, with her little tormenting manner.
‘I have offered you advice,’ Winterbourne rejoined.
‘I prefer weak tea!’ cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli.” –Henry James, Daisy Miller
December 18, 2008
On Nicola Barker's Darkmans
I set out to read Nicola Barker’s Darkmans for fun, not for review, because it came out a year ago after all, generating its own sufficient buzz with a Booker nomination (losing out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering). And while I’m very glad I never intended a review (for a review requires more of a grasp than I can confess to here after 838 pages of much befuddlement), I really can’t leave my response here at nothing, because Darkmans is a book the likes of which I’ve never encountered before.
Dovegreyreader says it is Dickensian, explaining, “Any reader who chances upon Darkmans in a hundred years time will read it much as we may read Dickens, for a fictional snapshot of a section of society living in a particular time and place under particular circumstances.”And indeed Darkmans is massive in that way English novels used to be (in the nineteenth century, as opposed to American novels and how they’re massive now). But its concerns are strictly modern, concerning class, mental illness, drug peddling, dodgy builders, Germans, chiropody and the Chunnel. And also modernity too– grocery stores in ancient forests, and misplaced motorways.
Of course, the novel is haunted by a five hundred year old evil jester. (Have you ever before encountered a haunted novel?) And in any book with a trickster at the helm, what is ever what it seems? Which is nothing. Plot isn’t really quite the right word to describe what’s going on, and I’d even use “romp” if it weren’t so unsinister. The reader thrown into the action without any explanation, and has no place but to follow where the writer leads. (Where the trickster leads?) To encounter birds that might not exist, duplicate cats hung with bells, an incontinent spaniel, a Kurdish asylum seeker with a mortal fear of salad, and Kelly Broad (one of those Broads, with the brother in prison, the other in a glue-sniffing coma, and don’t even start on her sister Linda). She is fabulous, in her mini-skirt and moon boots, and when she finds God, watch out. Though from my experience with Kelly Broads (I spent two years working for Social Services in the Midlands; I know of what I speak), they’re ever so much less frightening to encounter on paper, and we don’t get to do that nearly often enough.
The precocious child who builds an ancient town out of matchsticks, the man whose daughter has been decapitated in Sudan, the tree-collar clipping waitress, bereaved mother, and the enigmatic woman with the birthmark on her nose. Beede and Kane, father and son in their upstairs/downstairs flats, and how they don’t know one another, but they don’t know that at all. And of course everything is actually something quite different.
Which doesn’t take me any closer to explaining the point, or even to me getting the point, but perhaps it has intrigued you. I’m still a-wonder. Here is a book that will leave you feeling like you’ve been hit by the most marvelous train.
December 18, 2008
Family Literacy Day: January 27
Though our baby is still very small, and is also translucent, we’ve been reading to it regularly ever since it acquired working ears. (This is a very bookish baby– it acquired its first book while still an embryo). And while there are plenty of sound scientific reasons why reading to our baby is a very good thing, I’ll admit that I like reading stories for the sake of reading stories, and even more so, I appreciate being read to too. So while I’m not sure that the baby really knows what’s going on, being so busy beating its tiny heart and turning somersaults, even if it’s more for us, I think this is the best kind of selfish.
For all of you lucky, lucky people out there, however, whose children have already left the womb, I would like to turn your attention towards Family Literacy Day. Created by ABC Canada, the tenth Family Literacy Day will be held on January 27, and planned events include the setting of a Guinness World Record for “Most Children Reading with an Adult in Multiple Locations”. (The record to break was set in 2006, with 78,791 kids.) The chosen book is Munschworks 2.
Find out more here about how to get involved, whether at home with your family, or at a local event.
