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

April 13, 2008

Dancing about Literature

My short essay “Dancing About Literature” appears in Descant 140: Improvisations, which is in stores now. The piece is about the joys of literary blogging, which I’m so pleased to experience here and elsewhere. The issue also contains work by such notables as P.K. Page, Alberto Manguel, and Anthony De Sa.

April 13, 2008

Metaphoric Cake

Yesterday we held a small engagement celebration for our friends Jennie and Deep, and I baked a cake for the occasion. But because I didn’t want to brag, or give the wrong impression of my domestic prowess, even before I baked the cake, I had an idea about how I wanted to approach this blog post.

I wanted to explain that though I do have a reputation for baking a lot, I am not very good at it (and you will soon see why). I wanted to explain that although I have improved since the infamous butterfly cake I baked at Kate Wilczak’s Midsummer Party in 2000, I am still very much an imperfect baker. That not being good at baking hasn’t stopped me from doing a lot of it, but that a lot of this comes down to how much I really like eating. I would have added to this proviso also that I am not especially good at decorating cakes, but I wasn’t actually aware of this fact until yesterday.

But it turns out that none of this explaining is necessary, the cake being yet another chapter in Cakes Gone Wrong, the epic tale I’ve been writing for years now. It did not go terribly wrong, as everybody finished their slice, and when I came downstairs this morning Stuart was eating another for breakfast; people don’t tend to go for seconds of outright disasters. But the cake was, I will say, a bit dense, solid. I was terribly disappointed, as there is nothing more embarrassing than serving up a cake with the consistency of cheese. And worst of all– it was all my fault.

You see, I recently inherited a Sunbeam Electric Mixer. And not just any Electric Mixer, but one that had previously belonged to Rona Maynard. It had even been a wedding present from her mother, so really I could have sold it on eBay, but of course I wouldn’t dream of it, owning too few Canadian writers’ small appliances as it is (I expect you have the same problem). I also love the mixer aesthetically– it looks terribly cool up on the shelf here in our new kitchen. And I do dream of being Nigella, so I wanted it for mixing reasons too, of course.

But I’ve never used an electric mixer before. Have you? Did you realize that when you did used one, that you don’t actually have to do anything? That the bowl just spins and spins and the batter mixes just like magic, and the effect is hypnotic, and fabulous is a 1950s housewife styly, and I was thrilled and taking photos, and the batter mixed and it mixed and it mixed?

(Did you realize that a cake batter doesn’t really have to be so mixed at all? That a quick swirl with a wooden spoon would have sufficed? I sort of did know that, but oh, it would not have been so much fun. But maybe then, my cake would have turned out something like fluffy. It seems one can love their electric mixer too much.)

I mixed my batter for ten minutes.

My dear mother-in-law once told me that anything that gets eaten cannot be deemed a failure. Under such a standard then, my cake gets a passing grade. It was most definitely not a success, though, except in terms of lessons learned: in baking logic and mixer restraint. To make me feel better, everybody at the table decided to pretend that the texture was intentional: strength and density as a metaphor for Deep and Jennie’s love.

April 13, 2008

The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala

A year ago, a young British woman teaching English in Japan was murdered– to say brutally so just seems redundant. The story was big in the British press, resonating with me in particular as she’d worked for the same company I’d worked for when I lived there. The articles noting places I knew, cultural references that had once been my every day, the woman’s whole life familiar, right up until its ending which was so foreign as to be otherworldly, and this was my fascination.

It was distant enough to stay a story, however. It might as well have been fiction, until a couple of months later when I learned that as big as the world is, a good friend of mine here in Toronto had actually known the deceased girl. In fact she had been there when the girl went missing, a strange coincidence, but of course, not my story to tell. It was jarring though– the otherworldly transgressing into my own universe. Yet, with that universe remaining the same as it ever was. The multitudinous threads connecting me to a story that had nothing to do with me, and what kind of a narrative is that?

I have marked up most of my copy of Sharon Butala’s memoir The Girl in Saskatoon. I’ve underlined passages, written notes in the margins, drawn diagrams on the endpapers to get a better grasp of Butala’s arguments. And, as you can see, I’ve started my review on a tangent, but it ties up, I promise. All of this, I think, an appropriate response to Butala’s book, which is a veritable literary hybrid. Thriller, novel, historical record, reminiscence, elegy, etc., all contained within one mesmerizingly readable package. Butala making her process transparent– her very act of containment the result of years of work. It only being natural that the pieces might spring back out again once the package is given to the reader. So do please pardon my tangle.

In 1962 in Saskatoon, the body of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, a twenty-three year old nurse and beauty queen, was discovered on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. She’d been missing for two weeks before her body was discovered, and it was determined she’d been raped and murdered; her killer was never found. Writer Sharon Butala, who’d been a classmate of Alex’s though not exactly a friend, has lived with this story quite central to her consciousness since then, as have many residents of Saskatoon. Butala approaches the story with questions in mind: what is its attraction and hold, what happens to the memory of it over time, how could something like this even happen? Moreover, “To a girl just like me, to someone I knew?”

The book begins with Butala revisiting the murder scene, observing no sign of what had happened. This disturbing in itself, but Butala extends this: if we don’t remember, then such a thing could happen to anybody, and become commonplace and unremarkable. The causality of this seeming backward to me as I read it– surely she means our not remembering makes it commonplace, and being commonplace, of course, it could happen to anyone? But I drew my diagrams, and I thought about it. Realizing that it’s not even the possibility of such an evil act in practical terms that so horrifies Butala, but the commonplaceness. If such a thing is commonplace, regardless of its occurrence, this means that evil is present where we are, altogether pervasive. And it’s coming to terms with this that is central to her narrative, as she struggles to “solve” the murder, to pin down the trouble to something specific. She can’t, such is the world, and this is one of the paramount lessons of her life.

We try to pin down cases like this not just out of curiosity, but to protect ourselves and our sense of security. Butala writes of reactions to Alex’s murder– if there is no killer upon which to place the blame, then surely Alex herself must be culpable. If the victim brought it upon herself, then we who play by the rules are not at risk. “The rules” being the strict and often contrary expectations placed upon women in the 1950s and early ’60s– that they must be sexual, but only so far, their limited choices for the future against the rest of the whole wide world.

There is a line we draw in our own consciousnesses, between what is possible and that which isn’t. Most often this barrier is quite literal– a movie screen– and our sense of order is disrupted when this line is violated. We try to maintain it all the same– “she was asking for it” being such a divide between us and her. Between us and the evil that Butala is trying to understand– forty years later she is horrified at the coldness with which she’d received the news of her classmate’s death, her lack of reaction: “…it would be quite a few years before I would teach myself that I had to tear that barrier down and allow myself to feel, no matter how painful, how horrible or sad– how very difficult it is to know the world as it is.”

And difficult to know in very practical terms also– initially Butala has a vision of gathering the pieces of this story, of putting them together as a writer does, and emerging with something complete, the mystery solved. She quickly realizes the process is much more convoluted: the pieces she gathers are mismatched, broken, contradictory, elusive. At one point she discovers that Alex had kept a diary, that that diary had bizarrely been written in code, that her sister had later burned it– these are the kinds of details she was working with. The official authorities putting up blocks in her investigation, withholding information. Eventually she realizes that “everybody had turf to protect, everybody had kept secrets; they had kept secrets from each other, and from me, and most of us, I was beginning to think, from themselves.”

The mystery is never solved, and even as readers we don’t get the whole picture. Throughout, Butala breezes past details of strange phone calls in the night, her phone being tapped, and “other scary incidents I haven’t put into this book”. This is quite a gap in the narrative, but not altogether out of place, being a narrative full of gaps and probably analogous to Butala’s own experience. She says herself at the end, that her book didn’t turn out to be about what she’d intended at the start: “I saw at last that there is truly no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle,a tidy satisfying end…. The story was, instead, about story”

And what story is about, instead of answers, is connections. However ultimately meaningless or incidental, for those people who create stories, connections are the hinges. Between Butala and Alexanda– their similar rural origins, they were in the drama club, that Butala had a summer job at the hospital where Alex would begin her nursing career. No, the two hadn’t been friends, hardly knew one another– just as I never known the murdered English teacher– but this very fact can make the connections all the more curious, significant.

Butala makes connections even more far-reaching– “that only months after [Alex’s] murder, Watson,Walter and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for their long work culminating in the determination of the molecular structure of DNA”, which might come to be important to the case. That the day after Alex’s disappearance, Marilyn Monroe would sing her infamous “Happy Birthday” to the US President. Butala writes, “By August, Marilyn, too, would be dead, the world offering certain undeniable benefits to pretty women, being also very hard on them.”

These connection
s are solid. The only thing incidental, I think, being that their connectivity is not their very point. And these threads are worked so thoroughly through the very fabric of our lives, so what isn’t significant then?

The story that Butala comes to write is that of two girls who, “although mere acquaintances and never close friends, had been linked by circumstance and history, and by memory.” An elegy for a disappearing world– I began to count the buildings Butala notes have been torn down, including the high school, movie theatre, the legion hall, the places where both she and Alex had lived. She is observing Saskatoon and having much the same reaction she had to the murder scene: how could anything have ever happened if there is no way to tell? This book being her testament.

Butala writes Alex as her parallel self, beautiful while she was plain, dead while she got to live. In their similar origins examining the possibilities of her own narrative, the story she has come to take for granted– but for a few details, the murdered girl could have been her. Butala acknowledges the strength she gains in creating this story, engaging with the world and feeling a part of it in a way she never supposed she could. But she invests Alex with just as much strength– the exchange is fair. Invests her with a voice, her story told however incomplete, and most of all with the fact of memory.

April 12, 2008

In lieu of a poem

Today, in lieu of a poem, I’ve written all about Poetic April over at the Descant Blog.