December 1, 2008
Literature and Hotels
At the Descant Blog, I’ve written a post about literature and hotels.
November 30, 2008
Those Saturdays
Aren’t they the best, those Saturdays you have to be up early in time for the exterminator’s arrival? They certainly pave the way for the best lazy Sundays at least, because though today’s weather is les misérables, I don’t even have to go outside (or at least not much farther than one would venture for a paper). Because I was up so early yesterday that I’d finished reading a book and written 1200 words of fiction before it was time to go out for lunch. Lunch was delightful, yum roast vegetable sandwiches you never fail to satisfy. And then to Book City, to buy a stack of Christmas gifts, fully confident in the direction I was flinging my money. I also had occasion to pick out a jar of luscious jam at the grocery store, which is one of my favourite delights (along with the very fact of preserves in general).
It was coldish outside yesterday, but not really, and the sun was shining, so our walk down to the wool shop was perfectly delightful. I purchased the wool of my dreams for my baby’s blanket, that which we’ll reserve to be the first object to envelop it (save for our arms). The wool is greyish blueish and not babyish at all, which is what I wanted. The blanket will be beautiful and two rows in is (still) perfect.
We continued along Queen St., stopping in at Dufflet for a cake break. Chocolate banana mini-bundt cake did the trick, and then further onwards to Type where I bought another stack of books for other people (oh, book buying without compunction– such a delight!), and then we walked north through Trinity Bellwoods Park and down College Street, through our old hood. We stopped at She Said Boom and I was compelled to buy a copy of the Paris Review Interviews Vol. I, which was book buying with (only) some compunction. I am very excited to read it, and thought it wouldn’t be fair for me to be the only person yesterday for whom I did not buy a book.
We arrived home as the sun went down, and I was cooked my favourite meal for dinner (sweet potato and black bean quesidilla yum). And though I was zonked to death there was energy left for Alex and Bronwyn’s housewarming party, which was thoroughly unnecessary I thought, as their house was already the warmest place I knew. Turned out it got warmer, and the evening was wonderful, but I very did nearly require carrying up the subway stairs as we stumbled home towards bed.
And now an avocado is in my immediate future: fun never, ever ends.
November 28, 2008
Reading in Bed
I think that except for the obvious things, like eating, and sleeping, and breathing, etc., I haven’t been doing anything as long I’ve been reading in bed. Not continuously, of course (unfortunately, though I do give it a run for my money most every Saturday morning– am I ever not late for brunch? I don’t think so. Now you know why) but nearly every night for about twenty five years, I’ve propped my head up on two pillows and read by the light of a bedside lamp. These days I do so beside my husband, and such symmetry is all the domestic bliss I ever dreamed about as a girl. He usually turns off his light before I do mine, but he understands that no matter how late it is, no matter that I might get just a page or two read, that for me reading in bed in just as much a part of getting ready for bed as is flossing (though I remember to read in bed much more often).
I used to get in trouble for reading in bed. I used to go to school and tell my teachers that, so they’d feel sorry for me, and were usually uncomprehending about how any parent could be so cruel. No one understood, however, that without the “lights out” call, I would have never gone to sleep. So I used to have to resort to extremes in order to keep reading– under the covers with a flashlight, hiding in my closet with the light on, or demanding that the door be left open a crack and reading in the dimmest of light. (I used to get in trouble for this too, for reading in the dark. “You’ll need glasses,” my parents warned me, which was the wrong thing to say. Because I lusted after glasses, they were my very heart’s desire. I resolved to start reading in light that was only dimmer).
Reading in bed has gone on through a variety of living situations. My parents stopped with the lights out, eventually, and I used to fall asleep in my cereal instead. I see now that I was lucky that my roommate never complained about how the light shone on and on during my first year at university. When I traveled in Europe, I read in my bunk with a flashlight. During the three months I lived in a youth hostel in England, a cheap and tiny reading lamp that clipped to my bed stand was my most cherished possession. When we lived in Japan and slept in a loft that we could hardly sit up in, we read by a thin florescent light on the wall that buzzed on with the pull of a chain, and when we were finished went out with a pop. Recently I was reading and my lamp’s light bulb burnt out, without a spare in the house, and I was so distressed and would not rest until my husband gave me his. We were less symmetrical that night, but I felt better, and he got to go to sleep…
Reading in bed in the mornings is something different– more indulgent, less essential. It can never be just a page or two either, and time always stretches on for hours. Until so much light comes in through the window that I don’t need my bedside lamp at all, and then I start to see the point of getting out of bed. Eventually.
November 28, 2008
It's not Doris Lessing's fault
I am now reading The Diaries of Jane Somers, by Doris Lessing, and liking it completely. I’d always thought Margaret Atwood was the most all-over-the-shop writer ever, until I started reading Doris Lessing– range for the sake of range, it’s amazing. And so it’s not Doris Lessing’s fault that as soon as my orders came in at the library, I put her aside temporarily. It’s just that I’ve been reading quite a lot of weighty books of late, and they made The Big Rumpus by Ayun Halliday look pretty irresistible once I’d brought it home with me. I used to read Ayun Halliday in Bust when I was little (i.e. 20) and the book is contagiously energetic and as entertaining as her columns. I also like Ayun Halliday because it doesn’t occur to her it mightn’t be possible to have a baby but not a car.
November 28, 2008
The Children's Book Bank
This morning on the radio I heard about The Children’s Book Bank, an amazing initiative offering free books and literacy support in downtown Toronto. The Book Bank operates much like a bookshop, or a library, except that the books are free.
From their website: “A visit to The Children’s Book Bank is much like a visit to a familiar and well loved children’s book store. The space is safe, warm and inviting and is intended to create a wonderful oasis for the children; a place where they can relax and experience the magic of books and enjoy reading.”
Those of us who love books very much can certainly imagine the pride these children must take in owning their own libraries. For information on how to donate money or “gently used, high quality children’s books” to the Children’s Book Bank, click here.
November 27, 2008
What's going on?
“…what’s going on? I’ll tell you what: life is going on. You have an opinion. I have an opinion. Life don’t have no opinion.” –Grace Paley, “Zagrowsky Tells”
November 25, 2008
Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright
The first thing I ever read by Anne Enright was her LRB essay “Disliking the McCanns”, which happened to come out the week she won the Booker for The Gathering. The media hoopla meant her essay received far more interest than it otherwise would have, evidently by many people who did not know how to read.
Or at least by people who did not know how to read beyond the surface, beyond what the words line up literally say. Readers lacking an ear for tone, I suppose, and for nuance. So that they would not see that Anne Enright’s essay was an examination of her feelings rather than a statement or an affirmation of them. Nevertheless, from the essay I determined that Anne Enright is brave, forthright, a complicated writer, and honest to a fault.
I read The Gathering afterwards, enjoying its richness and its language, though I found it all a bit much to take in at once– probably due for a reread. Then I read Enright’s memoir Making Babies once I’d found out that I was pregnant, and I realized that it does take a novelist to write effectively about motherhood– to contain the beauty, the repugnance, the love and the loathing, and the fierceness and the fatigue all into one singular perfect moment. And now having explored Anne Enright in every other literary form, it was certainly time that I paid her short stories a visit.
Yesterday’s Weather contains all the stories published in the UK last year as Taking Pictures, in addition to stories from collections nearer to the beginning of her career. The stories here in reverse chronological order, Enright says, “…partly for comic effect… to see myself getting younger– shedding pounds and wrinkles, gaining in innocence and affectation– as the pages turn.” Which is effect as interesting as it is comic, to see the stories less precise, indeed more affected, and yet still containing some essential grain that makes clear Anne Enright wrote these.
As could be expected (and hoped for), her newest stories are her best, and it is remarkable what she does with minutiae, the domestic in particular. In “Caravan”, a mother forced to wash her family’s clothes by hand lives every moment of this. “She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again to knead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went: tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up in the shape of their clothes.” Enright writes of motherhood as precisely tangledly as she did in Making Babies, the devolution of these domestic themes in her work suggesting the experience of motherhood stamped her. (In her introduction to the collection, she remarks her younger self made the mistake of writing about women who had children and didn’t change.)
Her moments are perfectly composed, affording the reader short bursts of absolute illumination. At the end of “Yesterday’s Weather”, Hazel returning home from a miserable family gathering finds that her tulips have been blown down. Wondering how, so she could prevent it next time: “She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather.”
Enright writes stunningly of teenage girl dynamics in “Natalie” against a backdrop that could break your heart. “Shaft” is so close and devastating– about a heavily pregnant woman in an elevator with a stranger, the story beginning, “As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it.” “Little Sister” about the complexity of sibling loss and holes in families touches on some of the same subject matter as The Gathering. Her stories deal with love and marriage, the straightforwardness of adultery. Her characters spend a lot of time cleaning and cleaning up.
Structurally, these stories are challenging and perfectly formed, and the way Anne Enright writes about women and domesticity is both disturbing and surprising. Setting an example of new and interesting approaches to domestic fiction, challenging it to say remarkable things, and not just things that have long gone unsaid (which may not be remarkable at all), but also to make connections heretofore unmade, think thoughts unthought, and imagine stories wholly unconstructed before. In entirely new ways, to write without a template, which in domestic fiction is decidedly rare. Such innovation is as much of interest and importance to those who like the linoleum stuff, as to those who think they don’t, but who come bearing open minds.
November 25, 2008
Shed Skins of a Snake
“It is interesting, but only in a sociological way, to see the sympathy two of my narrators have for men who have just lost their virginity. It is odd, but only to me, to read of the bitterness that exists between female friends, when my own girlfriends are so generous and important to me. These stories are not written by the person who has lived my life and made the best of it, but by people I might have been but decided against. They are written by women who take a different turn in the road. They are the shed skins of a snake.” –Anne Enright, “Introduction” to Yesterday’s Weather
November 24, 2008
Birthday Love
I’ve spent the past three month in a pregnant napping stupor, standing up friends, missing out on events and generally ensuring I was in bed by nine every night. Also staying in bed as long as possible in the mornings and napping through my lunch. As I move into my second trimester, however, there begins to be some light. You’ll not have seen any evidence of it here though, as I’ve spent the last two weeks writing for deadlines and working very hard, in addition to my day job (where I work less hard, but it still takes up time). Going forward, I expect to have a little more time free and you can expect to see some content up here more than once in a while!
This past weekend’s excuse was a good one though, as I spent it celebrating my beloved Stuart’s birthday. Now I’m up for celebrating Stuart at any time, but a special weekend set aside for him couldn’t be more deserved. We had a house full of friends over last night who felt similarly, and it was a wonderful time– I stayed up until 1:00, which is now the beginning of the second middle of the night in my new life. Never mind I could hardly stand or talk, I was there till the end. It was fabulous, if just a little crowded. We’ve spent today eating the leftover dips and crackers and cheese (and cake!), as well as taking in some brunch and spending a couple of hours at the ROM this afternoon (we recommend the Unbuilt Toronto exhibition).
So happy birthday to Stuart, who is my every dream come true. My partner on all my best adventures and on the most exciting still to come. Every year I marvel as what you’ve accomplished for yourself and for us, and I always know how lucky I am.
November 21, 2008
Aspiring to be literature
Stuart Evers at The Guardian Books Blog on “The good side of bad books”: “I think it’s worth pointing out here that not all bad books are properly bad. I’m not talking about Jefferey Archer or Harold Robbins, Danielle Steel or Norah Roberts. Their books have a specific function, a specific readership and for the most part they deliver what their readers want and expect. For me, truly bad novels must want or aspire to be literature, rather than simply product. Take By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, for example…”
