April 20, 2008
Indie Cred
Last December I dared to request National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation from my local independent video store, and the clerk asked me if I was serious. This was his version of customer service, it happened all the time, and maybe he thought he was helping me. He probably thought he worked “in film” too, but he reminded me of Dawson’s Creek. One day in February, I asked him if he’d caught Alvin and the Chipmunks yet, just to be annoying, and he practically threw up on me. Everything I rented, he might have laughed at, but being too ironic for laughter, he’d scoff instead. Each time we came out of there, we vowed a boycott, but we always returned, since Blockbuster has had nothing in stock ever since they cut out late fees.
We’ve moved, and our new house has a branch of the same independent video store just around the corner. The difference between the two locations is astounding, in that every video we’ve been after has been in stock (incl. new releases) and that the staff aren’t mean. We’re just not used to the latter. Today we returned Juno, and as we walked away from the counter, the clerk began making strange noises. We turned around, prepared for whatever was coming, which was potentially being spat on.
“What,” we said, bracing ourselves.
“Juno,” said the clerk, in mock-dramatic tones.
“I liked it,” I said, pleading. “It was a good movie.”
The clerk cackled in an evil fashion (instead of the unevil fashion).
“Come on, what is it?” said Stuart.
“No, just everyone’s been wanting this and it’s the first one back. Thanks for bringing it back guys! And have a great day!”
Our gratitude at not being abused was almost sad.
April 18, 2008
Born that way
Have you ever know such a flare
for trousers? That girl could put out
bright lights with her eyeteeth.
But then some people are just born that way.
They come out sucking on spoons.
April 17, 2008
Kama Readings
Tonight I had the great pleasure of attending the Kama Reading Series by World Literacy Canada.
The low point of the evening was on the way there when my necklace fell off and down my dress, and my choices were to shimmy madly on the sidewalk or reach up under my skirt, both of which involved pearls emerging from between my legs, and so I went with a combination of both, imagining everyone behind me didn’t exist.
But the high point of the evening was everything else, the readers featuring three whose books I’ve enjoyed so much during the past year: Richard B. Wright (of October), Frances Itani (of Remembering the Bones) and Janice Kulyk Keefer (whose The Ladies’ Lending Library was the start of my summer last year, and led me to “At the Bay”, and then Thieves, and then to reread Bliss).
It was completely nice to listen to authors reading stories I know well. I also like hearing new stories, of course, and the jarring recognition once I finally sit down to read them myself, but this was easier, like I was hearing old yarns but in new voices. The readers all were impressive, their passages engaging, and for the first time in my life, I thoroughly enjoyed the Q&A. Mostly because no one got up, and prefaced something stupid with, “As a writer myself, I…” or some such thing. I got to ask Kulyk Keefer a question about the multiple points of view in her book. And I appreciated the writers’ responses to a request to define what to them is success; from all of them I got the sense that such a thing is elusive and that it’s always the next book ahead.
April 16, 2008
Things that happen
Things that happen creep
with silent feet, urging
time with its machine parts.
Forward lurches, forward spins.
April 16, 2008
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder
When I say that Laurel Snyder’s collection The Myth of the Simple Machines is accessible, I mean that I read the collection and encountered actual pathways down deep into the heart of the message: sometimes literal (as in the line from “Glass”, “Like it or not, this is for you/ so pay attention”) or else constructed from my own experience, my personal connection (“I Covet Everything I Own”). These poems do not put up blocks; the language is ordinary, the images familiar, and I felt comfortable enough to venture inside them. Their simplicity lulling, assuring, but then look– simple is a myth after all. One probably should have known.
That these simple machines would do much more than they appear to. The ordinary language is arranged in extraordinary ways, syntax twisted to catch on, wordplay belying horror, images arranged with every element in its place and things are not what they seem, nor will they stay that way. The seesaw illustration on the cover absolutely fitting, tilting back and forth with every line– hanging on “only”, “despite”, “but”, “and then…” and even when these conjunctions are not present, we sense the same weighing effect.
I got a real sense of narrative as the collection progressed, a coming of age. In the beginning we have “The Girl” and she is small, and she is figuring out how the world works, stumbling and falling. But she’s a clever girl, we’re told– she is both everywhere and elusive, and she is figuring out, using her “simplest solutions”. Enough to have her own voice, her own “I”, examining herself in relation to the rest of the world, conscious of her constructions. Soon pulling away from herself to see the world as it is, in all its complexities and configurations. She has wised up, lessons learned– she keeps her “Triptych(s) of Useful Rules” and she’ll pass them along. But she hasn’t stopped dreaming. The Girl slips like a fish, and I choose to believe that she is happy she is happy she is happy. In sugar or otherwise.
From “Triptych of Useful Rules (Words)”:
Intimacy-
1) You’ll know it when you see it. 2) Anything that lasts longer than it needs to, sentence, look, hand on shoulder. 3) I mean to say, it lingers. I mean both things.
April 16, 2008
Notable things I've encountered
I’ve just finished reading Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb, and am now thrilled to be starting The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Also catching up on periodicals, just finishing LRB and due to read Exile and Walrus.
Notable things I’ve encountered of late as follows: a short story by Hilary Mantel, “Offenses Against the Person”; celebrating postcards (sending and collecting– you might remember that I’m fond of such things); Jhumpa Lahiri in The Star; Justine Picardie on Virago Modern Classics; Orange Prize shortlist; Erica Jong on the sorry state of things, Polly Toynbee’s response (reader commenters: why are you all so angry?) and from the Guardian Blog: “Women don’t secretly hate each other. But they rightfully hate a society that limits them as workers, as writers, as thinkers. Any fight that looks to really change that, count me in.”
April 15, 2008
Crossward, downword
a cop-out,
could it be? but it
requires double the effort
owing to verticalness and horizontality.
surely, you can see
the beauty in the form, or
is it destined, just– perpetual
crap?
April 15, 2008
A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock
Nathan Whitlock’s first novel A Week of This: a novel in seven days opens on a Wednesday. Such a midweek start suggesting we’ll find the characters in the thick of it, “it” being the titular “this”. A week of ordinary life in an ordinary town, all of this subverting notions of “ordinary”. Subverting notions of narrative trajectory as well, beyond the Wednesday start. Before the novel even begins, its epigram indicates stasis: from Howard’s End, “Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere.”
Whitlock successfully demonstrates that “nowhere” is somewhere after all, or at least a place worth writing stories about. The atmosphere he creates for the small town of Dunbridge analogous to the effect of this novel’s beautiful cover illustration: infinitely bleak and yet striking, the sky an unending grey. If his characters ever had any will, the bleakness surrounding them only crushes it, and yet they live here all the same– by which I mean both that they reside and they exist.
Indeed these people do exist, though you mightn’t know it to read Canadian Literature. I can think of some exceptions– Alice Munro has dealt with places like this, but usually in retrospect, long after her characters have wised up and moved to Toronto and Vancouver. But what about those who are left behind? Those for whom, for various reasons, getting away just hasn’t been an option.
It’s not like Whitlock’s Manda doesn’t want to get out of Dunbridge. She’s not even from there, having arrived in town as a teenager with her father and her brother, to escape their crazy mother. Her outsider status allowing her to view the place more objectively than those around her, but somehow she’s stayed, somehow she’s now she’s lived there half her life. She’s married to Patrick, whose entire mind is occupied by keeping his sports store afloat, except for the part of it desperate to have a baby, and Manda isn’t interested. She also has to contend with her troubled brothers, the fallout from various past traumas, and her wreck of a house. Houses being, I believe, perfect metaphors for their inhabitants’ very selves, how the world surrounds them, and Manda hates hers. It had been her in-laws’, and now there’s a hole in the roof, and the rooms are of full of decades of detritus that weighs her down.
Manda is a great character, altogether realized. She’s mean, which I appreciate– I don’t find nearly enough mean and sarcastic heroines in books who we’re still meant to like. During her week of this, we get a sense of what she has to contend with and her impossible powerlessness against her fate. She is powerless for no reason except that she’s tired, this is the way she’s been going for years now, and that hole in her ceiling will never be fixed. Similarly, we see the people around her– her husband, her brothers– as passive, even willing victims of circumstance. There are no moments of illumination, and even the bad news doesn’t change much.
A Week of This is a good story, an assertive, strong and a readable novel (though at times its structure necessitated too much explaining), which, in spite of its deliberate directionlessnesss, has momentum and characters worth caring about. Where the novel faltered, I found, is when it tried to be more than that. When Whitlock’s attempt at “nowhere” became more of a statement than a story, and it was clear his approach wasn’t necessarily for the sake of story itself.
Manda gets a book from the library that is clearly Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. A book which is definitely not my favourite, I assure you. Manda trying and failing to get into it, finding it boring. Finally, she decides that the book is not only boring: “This book wasn’t simply too smart for her, it was condescending, and for that there was no forgiveness.” A fair assessment maybe, but it was out of place in the novel and not sufficiently pursued for such a strong statement. Moreover it opens A Week of This up to criticisms, comparisons that would have been irrelevant otherwise, even unfair.
All I could think of as I read this was Michael Ondaatje’s treatment of the working class– his romanticizing of these men in their terrible jobs that often killed them, and how he rendered them poetry, but this undermining the reality of their lives. Fair enough. But I’m not sure Nathan Whitlock treats his “working class” any better. Like Ondaatje he uses them to make a statement, about the kinds of people we should be writing about, reading about, the kinds of lives that are worthwhile. I say “uses”, because I don’t believe Whitlock pursues the realities of their lives altogether, their jobs and whole lives at times functioning as props.
For example, Manda works in a call centre, but we never see her actually working–conspicuous in a novel so focused on minutiae. We only find out in one paragraph what her calls entail, but there is no indication of what her work is really like. We see her get up, go to work, have a coffee, time passes, and then it’s the end of the day. Home she goes. Similarly, Patrick’s days in his failing shop are glossed over, the hours themselves. And I realize that work is not always central to one’s identity, and I can definitely empathize with having a job so crap, you leave it behind when you leave the office, but these workaday hours are still the major portion of these characters’ days, the root of a lot of their despair. The fact of these hours could have been pushed harder– perhaps they should have been.
I liked this book– otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about it. But Whitlock is being so provocative, I could not help but respond. In a novel with so much going on, my criticism would have been a minor point had the argument against Ondaatje not been made so strongly, making me consider the various ways it might connect to the rest of the story. I’m not even convinced it really did connect, actually, and I know the argument detracted from a novel that was clearly substantial enough without it. A novel that might say the very same things but in practice instead, which is a much more of a compelling argument.
April 14, 2008
Insouciant teabag: a missyllabic haiku
Insouciant teabag,
its string slung over the rim of the cup,
awaits the kettle’s boiling
