May 6, 2008
Elaine Dundy
From Maud Newton’s blog, I discover that the writer Elaine Dundy has died. Except that I’ve never heard of Elaine Dundy before, but being currently afflicted with an obsession for the alligator pear, her novel The Dud Avocado caught my attention. Though I don’t know what the book has to do with avocados, but my obsession doesn’t really have much to do with them either (more their essence, naturally). And so I’m going to read this novel, which means I’m jumping onto a just-deceased author bandwagon again, however I feel less bad about it than usual. Elaine Dundy, who once wrote a book on Elvis, is quoted on the source of sources as saying, “I didn’t know that Elvis was alive until he died”.
May 5, 2008
It isn't Saturday
This weekend was one highlight after another. To meet my beloved Bronwyn, and realize we live in the same city again after more than five years– she and Alex came around Friday night and we went out for dinner and it was so nice to welcome them home. On Saturday we went to the ROM to see the dinosaurs, the early typewriter exhibit, and then the Darwin: The Evolution Revolution, which was absolutely extraordinary. So fascinating, inspiring, exciting, beautiful and educational– simultaneously. If you get the chance to go, you’d be crazy to miss it. Speaking of crazy, we spent last night watching EastEnders omnibuses my mum-in-law had sent to us– that Bianca! And also eating Dairy Milks she’d enclosed in the package. Also baked were tiny pies, whose We Help Mommy allusion was not considered until later. Today we went to the garden centre, and bought pots and pots of flowers and veg for our urban deck garden. And then Erin came for dinner, and we sat drinking wine as the sun went down. Commenting that the only problem with today was that it wasn’t Saturday.
May 4, 2008
Unmistakably hers
In the Paris Review Interviews, II, from Toni Morrison: “There is no black woman popular singer, jazz singer, blues singer who sounds like any other. Billie Holiday does not sound like Aretha, doesn’t sound like Nina, doesn’t sound like Sarah, doesn’t sound like any of them. They are really powerfully different. And they will tell you that they couldn’t possibly have made it as singers if they sounded like somebody else. If someone comes along sounding like Ella Fitzgerald, they will say, Oh we have one of those… It’s interesting to me how those women have this very distinct, unmistakable image. I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit into African-American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.”
Defining what to me are “the two kinds of books in the world”. How extraordinary it is as a reader to come across those “unmistakable” books. To be turning the pages and think, I’ve not read anything quite like this in my entire life. And how vastly different that is from “Oh we have one of those…” These derivative works have their own place of course, they are made to be read, but more easily forgotten.
There is a certain energy you get whilst reading something entirely new. A frisson of infinite possibility, of personal discovery. I felt that way as I read Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife. Here was something I could not explain away by anything I’d read before. This feeling only intensified as I went back and read her previous novels, and gained an understanding of that voice that was “unmistakably hers.”
It’s happened before– the first time I read Grace Paley or Laurie Colwin are two examples I can think of. Immediately afterwards, entire back catalogues have to be explored. And these explorations become journeys into whole worlds we’ve only glimpsed yet. My own literary universe expanding again.
May 4, 2008
Read it four times
Interviewer: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
Faulkner: Read it four times.
(From The Paris Review Interviews, II)
May 4, 2008
The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse
There is a lot going on in The House at Midnight. Too much? Is this a tale of friendship, a ghost story, academic-gothic ala Tartt? With classical allusions and the Bacchae– but really? Requisite clever trendy urbanites, Oxford grads the lot of them, and a healthy dose of zeitgeist. A group of friends and a house cut off from the world, and whatever unfolds. One might ask, Lucie Whitehouse, what are you doing?
And we would ask Whitehouse, the author, because her novel is so obviously constructed. Her hand is always right there, pushing the plot forward, making her people speak. There is nothing organic here, perhaps Whitehouse with her literary agent background knowing too well what it takes for a book to succeed. Leaving absolutely nothing to chance.
All this sounds like criticism, and it sort of is. Because Lucie Whitehouse is not untalented. What she has done here is create an immensely readable book that I devoured in a day. Narrated by Joanna, whose friend Lucas has just inherited a country house from his uncle. A perfect place, he feels, for their friends to gather on weekends, a break from London. They’ve all been friends for nearly a decade now, still close but branching out in separate ways. The house’s isolation serving heighten their bonds and widen their rifts. Joanna sensing something sinister pulsing within the house’s walls, and her fears turn out to not be unfounded.
So if Whitehouse set out to write a piece of decent popular fiction, she has definitely succeeded, “popular” overriding the other elements of the book I’ve already noted. The story light enough, a bit of smut, and though the shocking end is not quite all it wants to be, still a good book for a plane journey. My reservations however, because I get the feeling Whitehouse was striving for more, ticking boxes rather than writing good prose, to straddle “literary” and “marketable” at once– it’s all a bit obvious. The two categories are not mutually exclusive of course, but here they appear to be. Definitely falling on the side of marketability though, so you’ll probably find you like it anyway.
May 1, 2008
Woolf on book blogs?
“But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. 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. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagers for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and yet unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.” –1926, Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?”
May 1, 2008
Katie girls
My only shoes worth more than $100 are orthopedic and I haven’t had cable TV in a decade, but I’ve always enjoyed Sex and the City (in syndication, naturally). And not just because of the “Ex in the City/The Way We Were” episode, which brought me such comfort during those dark days when I was deranged and thought no one would ever love me (and these two factors may have been related). Remember, the simple girls and Katie girls? But writer Libby Brooks pins down the rest of it brilliantly as follows:
“…this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women’s experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be cleanup etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?
Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they’d been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were discussed. For my money, the enduring appeal of Sex and the City has nothing to do with guys or footwear. It’s about the uncomfortably accurate presentation of women’s relationships with each other. However the critics receive the new film, they ought to bear in mind that, for all the brunch chatter, this show has never been a story about men. Sex and the City was always, baseline, about us girls; about how women’s friendships can be complicated and bitchy, but also meaningful, supportive and lasting.”
April 30, 2008
A dozen more
Just when I’m down to just one book, I begin to read a dozen more. With great pleasure, I’m finished up The Picnic Virgin, an anthology of new New Zealand writing, edited by Emily Perkins. Also just began Volume 2 of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. And the new issue of Descant— last night I read R. Samuel Bongard’s “The Eye of the Beholder” and it was everything. I’m also rereading Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?”, for I am curious. I am going to be reading Gale Zoe Garnett’s novella Room Tone, rereading Novel About My Wife, and also starting The House at Midnight, which is said to cross Richard Curtis with Donna Tartt, so I am intrigued.
April 30, 2008
On Poetry, and Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time
So thank you to Poetic April, for I believe you had a firm hand in the leaves on the trees. Thank you for the books I’ve read, the books I’ve bought, authors discovered, poems devoured, the little ditties I wrote myself, and for the spirit of it all. Thank you for giving me the confidence to take on poetry, and come away not defeated. For the fun with words you inspired, and for providing a vehicle with which to convey avocado love.
The final book of poetry I’ve read this month is Carol Ann Duffy’s Mean Time. I’d read her before, much enjoying her collection Rapture which came out a couple of years back. Mean Time was a bit of a departure from the other books I’d read this month– not being new, being British, Duffy a more established poet. Her poems also tending to be less personal narratives or confessionals. Their purpose to tell whole stories, to fill whole rooms and entire scenes with meaning.
I love “Litany” and “Before You Were Mine”, but the whole book read itself. Such a pleasure. A great place to leave you, I think, Poetic April. I’ll be back in a year, and of course will drop by from time to time before then.
April 30, 2008
Anything at all
“‘What are you reading?’
‘A pile of things. Books on stuff, you know how there’s always a new one, on tomatoes or love songs or the secret history of buttonholes.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m waiting for the book on books on stuff to be published. Perhaps I should write it, I’ve read enough of them. Ask me anything you want to know about coriander. Anything at all.'”
–Emily Perkins, The New Girl
