February 23, 2008
Wunderspace
It’s a time of excitement and nerve-wrackage, and of general up-in-the-airness here on the Pickle Me This homefront.
First, having finished my first novel and now beginning the process of finding it a road to publication, I’ve started work on my second book. It’s been buzzing about in my head for a long while now and it’s exciting to finally get writing. How brilliant then, to have the possibilities still be infinite.
Second, and most nerve-wracking: the homefront is being relocated! After two and a half years here, we’ve outgrown our gorgeous apartment and are ready for a change. And though we’ve been thinking about buying for a while now, we’re opting instead to find another rental, save for another few years, thus enabling us to continue eating expensive cheese and going on vacations. Also so that when things break we will continue not to have to fix them. I further like the idea of renting because it still leaves open the possibility of me taking up cafe-sitting full-time, which would just not be possible with a mortgage.
So we’re now on the hunt for a perfect two bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, aboveground with a deck. And wherever this wunderspace happens to be, come April 1st we are going to live there.
February 22, 2008
When whole cities fit into books
I’ve recounted already how we spent our last vacation day scrambling around San Francisco in search of a used Tales of the City. The novel of San Francisco, according to our guidebook, and I just had to have it. A piece of San Francisco to take home with me.
I usually have little interest in reading about a place whilst I’m in it, but once I’m far away and homesick, novels and stories can be the next best thing to being there (which is why I now love Haruki Murakami). And I knew San Francisco homesickness would be long-lasting, so I wanted the remedy on-hand. I was also excited to purchase a book from the Gay Lit section (though such a label seems a bit reductive so far– is a book considered Gay Lit because there are gay people in it?) because it made me feel open-minded in that way gay people probably find inordinately irritating.
As a reward for accompanying me on my scramble, I let Stuart read the book first. He quickly forgave me for scramblage, loved the book, and said its lightness might be a nice way to follow The Poisonwood Bible. And now I’m halfway through, prepared to read the rest this evening in a hot bath (which is interesting because I’ve just learned from a wise source of a connection between this book and The Serial, which I read in another bathtub six years ago, but I digress).
The story is light indeed, and it’s a perfect book for a bathtub, but it’s delightfully entertaining and how brilliant that it establishes a map of the city in my mind.”Valencia Street, with its union halls and Mexican restaurants and motorcycle repair shops, was an oddly squalid setting for the gates of heaven.” Absolutely! Although for me heaven was bookshops, not steam baths, but alas. I’ve sat in Washington Square too, and I can see Coit Tower, and Marina, and the Castro, and even the Safeway on Market, where we bought rice-a-roni the San Francisco treat (not half bad, by the way). Polk and Hyde, The Mission, from the Tenderloin to Nob Hill.
That a whole city disappeared from my horizon can live on in my mind is really nothing short of a tremendous thing.
February 21, 2008
Good things I've read lately…
…include Rona Maynard’s gorgeous tribute to her friend, the writer Val Ross; yes indeed, The Poisonwood Bible; another celebration of letter writing. “12 or 20 Questions” with Zoe Whittall. And oh, lunar eclipse aside, February has never ever been more blah.
February 20, 2008
I'll give you a reason
“A novel can educate to some extent. But first, a novel has to entertain– that’s the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I’ll give you a reason to turn every page.” –Barbara Kingsolver
February 19, 2008
Accidentally Bookish
Read my Descant blog post about my trip to San Francisco, regarding my (mostly) purely accidental bookish adventures whilst travelling.
February 18, 2008
Zadie etc.
Another looong listing of reader comments at Bookninja. (See my post below). I find it interesting that these topics which have incited such debate are both in regards to women who other people think are much more successful than they deserve to be. Zadie Smith, in this case, who I personally believe is every bit as successful as she deserves to be for she is a legend. I heard her speak at Harbourfront two years ago, and I swear I would pay her anything to sit in my house and lecture me. She is fascinating, and oh so smart. Her books are some of the most exciting and inspiring I’ve ever encountered in literature, contemporary or otherwise. And yet there are those who’d see fit to knock her off her star.
Such as this commmenter: “… while I’ve picked up a couple of Smith’s novels to skim them, I’ve not read nor purchased one because I find them similarly lacking in quality, much less greatness.” He who could detect “greatness” in a skim? Perhaps he is the legend after all.
My friend K, who attended the Z. Smith Harbourfront reading with me, has recounted in her blog the horrible incident that took place in the Q&A. In which some jackass thought it be clever and/or polite to ask if Smith supposed she would have had the success she’s had were she not so physically attractive. It was mortifying. I mean, what this woman has to deal with. That after three novels, short stories, editing of anthologies, incredibly astute literary criticism, marvelous and generous work as a public figure, that it would all come down to her face. There is an underlying sense here that as a woman Smith is incapable of greatness on her own terms. The same sort of sense you get from a guy who’d dismiss the possibility of her greatness having not even done more than skim one of her books.
It makes me angry.
Margaret Atwood hating is exactly the same. It’s so stupidly easy, you know. Hating Margaret Atwood or Zadie Smith is not the express ticket to clever. Hating them without having read their books could possibly make you the least literary person ever, and the stupidity is only underlined by being in this position and even supposing you’ve got something to say.
February 18, 2008
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
I feel fortunate that I read Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park through the prism I did. I’m not sure I would have loved it quite so much had I not first read the cbc.ca article describing the book as, “If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007… what she would be writing.” So I was prepared for something Woolfian then, which in my experience has always required a different kind of reading. One in which you let the prose lead you where it may, but paying utmost attention. It’s a significant cerebral investment, and necessitates a period of adjustment upon returning to the real world once again.
From Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there…”.
Which is evident from the start, the main character of Arlington Park‘s first chapter being rainfall. As readers we must trust and follow it, from cloud to downpour, this “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”. As the rain falls over the sleepy suburb of Arlington Park. “The sound of uproarious applause.”
And then it is morning, “the life of Monday or Tuesday”, except being Friday. Here is an entire book of one single day, which is something easily misunderstood. For though Arlington Park is bleak and rainy, the fact that it is of one day only means that it’s difficult to generalize. “This is what women’s lives are”– decidedly Woolf— perhaps, but for these frustrated, angry, middle-class women of privilege, it could be hard to muster sympathy. But then is this lives in general really? Is it not just a Friday? For it is indeed possible to have it rain all day, particularly in England, and perhaps Saturday will be sunny, but this is not our consideration now.
Just one single day (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”). Though of course one day will always have implications of its own.
Juliet Randall, who wakes up from a bad dream that was also the night before, her husband having been inordinately insulting. Her husband, Benedict: “Murderer, she thought.” And though he isn’t, of course. He is not Mr. Ramsay, or even Charles Tansley, and he’d probably allow for a trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. But still, Benedict has been an asshole, and Juliet feels like her entire life has been severed from its legs.
Which is the general feeling of the characters we encounter in Arlington Park, on this particular Friday. Whether they intended to end up here or not, or if they did and it wasn’t what they’d expected, regardless, on this rainy Friday life feels most uninhabitable. And simultaneously inescapable– motherhood and wifehood each a prison. And though privileged middle-class all of these women might be, are they not still entitled to rainy days? For such days are certainly issued, even if they’re not the rule. And of course there are moments, even in the drizzle, where the pure light of life shines through. The innumerable atoms of a Friday are, naturally, quite various.
I could tell you more about these women, about this day, these myriad impressions and innumerable atoms, but they’re trivialized out of their context. Out of context the poignancy of Amanda Clapp’s disappointingly-remodeled kitchen is ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. About how Cusk constructs a whole world in which these women are but cogwheels: “In the children’s playground the women were buttoning coats, brushing down trousers, wiping noses. They strapped their children into their pushchairs, and one after another they let themselves out of the gate: out into the park, out into streets where everything moved, where time set everything whirring and churning and grinding again and you felt the agony of the turning wheels.”
And certainly there are days like this, there are.
February 18, 2008
On envy
All right, so when I was twenty-one years old and had a column on the back page of my school newspaper, I once wrote an article about a certain notorious Canadian newspaper columnist which was headlined, “I hate [said newspaper columnist]”. (Please forgive the vagueness; I have no wish to incur the wrath of Google). I didn’t write the headline, and nor in the column did I actually cite any hatred. But I did outline my numerous problems with the principle of this woman’s success, and it certainly wasn’t the worst thing I ever wrote, though I also doubt it was much above the abilities of said columnist either.
The point of this being that I have a particular position, I think, on the loooong thread of comments recently unfolded on Bookninja, in response to a post about columnist (who is still columning her way through life with gusto). My particular position being that of one who did once spend innumerable hours slinging vitriol her way (as many of the commenters do) and then having subsequently grown up.
I know I’ve grown up, not because I suddenly find her columns altogether inspiring, but because I don’t really get off on being vitriolic these days. (I’ve previously acknowledged that she might have grown up a bit too). Because I understand now that she’s paid to do something, and she seems to do it well, even if it irks me. And finally because I understand now that what I felt towards this woman more than anything when I was twenty-one years old was envy.
And of course it was! She was assured, high-profile, well-paid for writing, and I was penning a column on the back of a school newspaper. Of course I couched my envy in technical terms, but I really don’t think I would have directed such reproach towards, say, a celebrity biologist or a supermodel. She was a writer, I wanted to be a writer. She had what I wanted, and life is unfair.
This all comes up on the Bookninja comments– one particularly vitriolic is accused of the deadly sin. He asks, “Why whenever someone is called out for being a public asshole, some ditz invariably appears to accuse people of envy?” Well, I guess I’m the ditz here (and I was on the Zadie Smith post two weeks back too).
It’s because nothing else could make someone that angry about something so incidental. It’s because the people who are so angry are invariably writers themselves (albeit struggling ones). Non-writers don’t give a damn about who gets allotted what column space in the Saturday paper, or which novelist gets what advance. These are just not things that normal people ever care about.
Maybe I am totally wrong, but I doubt it. I know from personal experience what an easy swing envy is to fall into, how comfortable it is to be angry instead of sad. And even if envy is not at the root, still, is the anger doing any good?
I know that for me taking a concerted step away from such mean and greasy feeling was the healthiest thing I’ve ever done, and that the only real solution to any of this is just to write harder. Hating those who’ve got what you want certainly won’t make you any better. There are plenty of words to go around, stories to make your own, and stories to share too.
February 17, 2008
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters by Richard Greene (ed.)
In the last year I’ve grown fanatically fond of collected letters, though I ended up approaching Graham Greene: A Life in Letters quite differently than the other collections I’d read. A variety of factors could account for this: that though I like Greene’s books, I’ve not read many and knew very little about his life (whereas I am Mitford mad and adore Carol Shields, which just might explain why their letters were devoured so). I wonder if letters really are a good way to get to know a writer/ personality. Of course they’re indispensable to established fans, but for those just finding their feet, I wonder if letters might be overwhelming?
Though this feeling could also be due to the structure of this particular collection. For though it’s editor was clearing instrumental in its shaping (“The material available for this selection is vast– one selection alone fills seventeen linear files, and there are others nearly as large”), his impact is not so apparent in the reading. The book begins with a substantial introduction (biography, historiography), but thereafter editorial content is sparse. Though notes do accompany letters, I didn’t always find illumination quite where I wanted it.
Part of this could also have to do with the broad range of these letters (letters to his mother, wife, children, friends, other literary figures, one-off letters in response from those to fans). Though of course a life is narrative enough, this broadness gives a very liminal and limited impression of Greene. More focus, I suppose, wouldn’t have made “a life” so much, but his development would have been clearer. Of course it was fascinating to realize the consideration with which Greene addressed his letters to such a disparate group of figures, but many letters seemed to lack context. Which might be their point, of course. Perhaps this would be a very good point for me to read more of Greene himself, and seek out an actual biography?
I’ve been dipping in and out of this book for awhile now, which might be reason I’m left with this fragmented impression, but then the book itself was ideal for this kind of reading after all. Every time I picked it up, however, I did read something interesting. And perhaps a fragmented impression is more true-to-“life” than any other– particularly for a figure with Greene’s affiliations. And there was a progression, obviously, from boy to man. He was very much a man of his time, of his world, and particularly interesting are his experiences in “hotspots” which would come to underline his novels– Africa, Indochina, Mexico. A complicated man– letters to his wife and mistresses so full of affection, and his Catholicism, and leanings toward Communism.
My conclusion is that letters serve better as appendices than starting points when assembling a life– however important they are. And that a collection this brief (425 pages) is hardly going to constitute a life, particularly that of one so prolific. But that to Greene’s fans– even those to whom biography is incidental– these letters will shed light on the rest of his work, and bring sympathy to such a complicated character. And even to lesser fans such as myself, a taste of his voice leaves me wanting for more.
February 17, 2008
Lucky
We really didn’t want to leave. Yesterday we were right at our gate, crossing fingers that our flight was overbooked and we might stay another day. And we almost did get to stay, for somehow we missed our boarding call. The final call, and then they had to call us by name over the whole airport, all the while there we were right in front of them, oblivious to the whole cruel world and conniving to stay in San Francisco forever. With no such luck.
We had the most glorious week. The weather was gorgeous, the blossoms came out to bloom, we walked that whole city and we got to know it well. My theory is that you’ve never actually been any place unless you’ve been to it twice, and so we left our Friday free to go back for what we’d liked best. Which was the Mission, and Delores Park, and corner cafes, Valencia Street, streets called Lucky and Balmy, and that sunshine. For lunch we had burritos. It was perfect.
The whole week was perfect, so much of this to do with friends. In 2004, when we lived in Japan, Stuart and I were part of a Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip to Thailand. In our group of about 30, all were American save for Stuart, me, and our now-friend Carolyn, who lives in Toronto. And those who were American were the very best of America. No coincidence, I think, that most were San Franciscans. The end result of all this being that a) we came to love Americans and b) we’ll always have a place to stay in SF. We stayed the week with our friend Lynda and her adorable son Henry, and they were so impossibly good to us, perhaps the best part of our week. Further, on Friday we were treated to a Habitat Reunion at our group leaders’ amazing house, high up on a hill (naturally). It was such a delight to see everyone again, to know they’d come out because we were coming, to get their updates– because they’re all such fabulously interesting people. It was a lovely evening, filled with wine, good food and laughter, and we both felt so lucky.
Which was sort of the story of our entire week.
