January 10, 2008
The History of Love
And just when I was talking about the strange ways some books sort themselves, I get inspired by Steph at Crooked House to sort the books myself. (Her inspiration via The Sorted Books Project). I started out with near-haiku, but then things got out of hand. For it seems that with book titles, one can write the entire history of love (and is it ever epic).
January 9, 2008
We all prefer the magical explanation
Have been reading/catching up. Penelope’s Way by Blanche Howard. Am just about to start What is the What by Dave Eggers, which I’ve been putting off for too long. Put off by prospect of the headiness, perhaps. Though Dave Eggers has never let me down before, and certainly the book has been buzzed about by many people I respect. I suspect I will be incredibly impressed.
And speaking of fictional autobiographies, I’ve just finished reading The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion. “Speaking of…” I say, for Joan Didion’s fiction similarly seems to challenge the fic/non-fic divide. Now I am such a fan of Joan Didion, and partly because she’s a bit preposterous. I don’t enjoy preposterousity universally, but I adore any woman who can embody the trait and still come off as brilliant. (This caveat thus explaining why I don’t love that Coulter person). I love Didion’s migraines, and that she went to the supermarket in a bikini and wanted a baby, and cried in Chinese laundries. And if one more person tells me that although they like her non-fiction, her fiction is disappointing, I will yawn.
Not because they’re entirely wrong– I’m not sure about that. Certainly I’ve never read a Joan Didion novel that stirred in me anything like what I felt for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but that to me is beside the point. Which it might not be. It is distinctly possible instead that I am just feeling awfully protective of Didion, but still, I think, to dismiss her fiction is tiresome.
Whether or not her fiction is enjoyable (and it can be, but in a slightly uncomfortable way) something fascinating is going on with it. Joan Didion is the one writer who completely defies my theories of fiction’s truth having more bearing on reality than that of non-fiction. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it’s something in her coldness, her acuity. In her non-fiction Joan Didion assembles the world and lets it speak for itself and it’s in this speaking that the life creeps in. Whereas in her fiction when she attempts the very same thing (for this is what she does), the made-upness is pervasive. When she assembles these made-up things, whatever speaks is more an echo than a voice. An echo of what, I don’t know. All of which is really odd. And doesn’t necessarily mean that her fiction is unsuccessful; Didion is too smart for that. Rather I think of her as treating fiction as a project I’ve still not got my head around.
January 9, 2008
Mystified
Today I’m mystified about not only the very weird fact of B. Spears singing autobiographical songs, but moreover that other people write these songs for her.
January 9, 2008
In for the night
Apart from the inevitable phone bill (which was smaller than we thought) and two (2) rejections (which, though of course are nothing like acceptances, I try to tell myself are better than nothing [except in those rare circumstances in which no news is good news]), the post delivered me a cheque from Ye Olde Governmente, another cheque for writing (!!), AND a big fat London Review of Books, with Alan Bennett inside.
January 8, 2008
On reading
“I enjoyed the reading classes, and the opportunity to function as a sort of cheerleader. I liked my students, who were often so eager, bright, and enthusiastic that it took me years to notice how much trouble they had in reading a fairly simple short story. Almost simultaneously, I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the author might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.
No wonder my students found it so stressful to read! And possibly because of the harsh judgments they felt required to make about fictional characters and their creators, they didn’t seem to like reading, which also made me worry for them, and wonder why they wanted to become writers. I asked myself how they planned to learn to write, since I had always thought that others learned, as I had, from reading.” — Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
January 6, 2008
Reasons to be happy
Reasons to be happy– even if one’s holiday is rapidly drawing to a close– include cotton tights, sleep-filled nights, baths with bubbles, legs sans stubbles, magazines, movie screens, new bedclothes, h-nut cheerios, to-do lists done, friends and fun, books in the post, and he whom I like the very most. Plus California in thirty-four days. And….
…having just partaken in that “hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”, of which, under ALL circumstances, “there are few hours in life more agreeable than .”
January 6, 2008
Books out of doors
Up at the Descant Blog “Encounters with Books: In the Natural World” .
January 4, 2008
Abookaday
During my holiday, I’ve managed to read a book a day (though this was accomplished by reading books that were primarily quite short and/or excellent), which has been tremendously satisfying, fun, stimulating and rich. I’ve got a lot of my new books read, and my focus is now on the older books I’ve picked up at sales over the past year and which have been lingering on my shelf. Now reading Perfect Happiness by Penelope Lively (who I love). But I’ll also be starting the new collection Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. I’ve loved Graham Greene’s work for a long time, including The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American. Though it is Travels With My Aunt that stands out, actually. And I’ll be reading Brighton Rock shortly. It will be interesting though, as I know almost nothing about Graham Greene. Except for the Catholic stuff, which always gets a bit lost on me in his fiction (and I’ve had a similar problem with Muriel Spark). Perhaps this will help?
January 4, 2008
Where to go
Do you dare to use a one-sentence paragraph? Crooked House on “the ‘we’ point of view and E. Nesbit” (“We were the Bastables”). Heather Mallick’s year that was. CBC.ca/art’s 2007 in pop culture. And did Unity Mitford have Hitler’s baby? (I’m inclined to say no– though imagine finding out you were Hitler’s baby?). Check out “the manliest cookbook of all time”. Headline of the day is “Circus School Seeks Students”. Marchand’s year that was: on “grace” as the ultimate gift of Divisidero, “Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.”
I recently found reference in a book to pudding finger-painting, which has relieved me of a nagging fear that I’d been a paint-eating child. And though I’m despairing about returning to work on Monday, we’ve got planned in the meantime an afternoon tea at the Four Seasons as consolation.
January 4, 2008
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
Ultimately, Marie Phillips’s God Behaving Badly is a very silly novel. Which I do not mean as a dismissal, as, for two reasons in particular, it is also a very useful novel.
First, because silliness has its uses. Silly is not the same as stupid, nor stupid-making. What Phillips has set out to do in this, her first novel, she has accomplished with aplomb. Imagine the ancient gods and goddesses of Greece alive and, though not-so-well, living in modern-day London. Apollo, the god of the sun, turning into trees those women who won’t satisfy his sexual whims, and, with whatever is left of his dwindling powers, causing the sun to rise and set each day. Artemis is a dog-walker, Aphrodite a phone-sex worker, they’ve locked Zeus in the attic, and Demeter just tends her garden– though her clematis has died. No one can understands a word Athena says, and their house is absolutely filthy. Clearly the gods have come down in the world, and indeed, they’re behaving badly.
Silliness transpires, inevitably. When Apollo falls for their cleaner (thanks to a trick played by Eros, who incidentally is trying to be a Christian), cleaner ends up dead (struck by lightening), her sometime-boyfriend must go down to the Underworld (via Angel Tube Station) to bring her back. Premise is key here– there is no room for character development. Even plot is not the point (particularly in a world where characters can simply be “inexplicably drawn” towards their destiny, thanks to some kind of spell). But premise alone manages to be enough to sustain this novel, which is a snappy, funny, light read.
Gods Behaving Badly is useful for more didactic reasons however, though I know many classicists will pour scorn on my theory. But silliness aside, Marie Phillip’s project is enormously well-executed. Her story of these gods and their own stories is positively bursting with facts, details. However irreverently, she has made thousand-year-old stories relevant to modern-day readers. And I realize this book has got nothing on the texts from whence it sprang, but the thing is that I’ve never read those texts. There are massive gaps in my education, which is my own problem of course, but I didn’t really know about Artemis. Certainly not that she was Apollo’s twin, and I’d forgotten about Ares since I learned about him in my grade nine mythology unit.
Which means that the next book I read now in which these timeless tropes are used (albeit with subtlety) I will pick up on the allusion. I felt similarly when I read Orpheus Lost: grateful that a writer has seen fit to bring these stories (back) to life for me. And it means that the original stories (which for so long have seemed to me from so far back as to be arcane) are now accessible– so close I could actually pick one up and read it. And perhaps I just might.
