April 11, 2008
A room of one's own
The New House tour continues, and now I take you to my garret. For yes, it is true– I have a garret. Actually the tail end of a very long strange half-gable off our bedroom, through a secret door in the wall. (What quirks have old houses with dubious renovations of yore!)
We use this long strange room as our closet, which contains two dressers, a long rack of hanging clothes, and a whole mess of things like Christmas lights and suitcases, things you’d expect to find in an attic. And in late February when we saw the apartment for ten minutes and decided to make our home here, I didn’t realize how big this room was. Didn’t consider that it could possibly accommodate my desk and a bookshelf, but it does.
My husband was a wee bit disconcerted at the idea of me setting up shop in the back of the closet, but this is not just any closet, and it has a window. And there wouldn’t have been room downstairs for the bookshelves and both our desks (for he requires a desk too, of course, being a brilliant graphic designer). It’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s mine, and really I’m just fond of saying “my garret.” I think I’ve wanted one forever without even knowing it.
(And if anyone’s asking, I’m now reading A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock, and The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder.)
April 11, 2008
Everybody's Birthday
It might as well be everybody’s birthday
today, passing people clutching
balloon strings in their fists. The air is ripe
for a a stampede of pogo-sticks.
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
April 10, 2008
I cannot
I cannot write a poem tonight,
it pains me now to say.
One could not have had a less inspiring
day than I’ve had today.
I could sit here and wrack my brain
and further ache my shoulders.
But I hope you don’t mind if ditch this for
a snack of yogurt and granola.
April 9, 2008
Rational Conscience
When a poet told me he knew suffering
because he suffered from ‘imposter syndrome,’
a psychoanalytic term assigned
to those who feel unworthy of any praise,
I never suggested to the poet
in his case, perhaps ‘imposter syndrome’
was better called ‘rational conscience.’
–from David McGimpsey’s “Irresistible”
April 9, 2008
Spring
There was never snow
here and I know naught
about all these scarves and hats.
Mittens stuffed into my pockets
must have been planted,
the coat too warm to be mine
anyway; where did it even come from?
April 8, 2008
On poetry, and Sitcom by David McGimpsey
Yesterday I read my husband “Summerland” and “Invitation” from David McGimpsey’s Sitcom, published in 2007 by Coach House Books. From the latter poem I was particularly fond of a reference to “the summer I said I would ‘concentrate/ on my portfolio’ and ended up/ taking extra shifts at a frozen-yogurt stand”. Or the last line of “Summerland”, “The future will be full of shiny new books/ and I promise to skim at least one of them.”
I read these poems aloud, and realized that such a reading made McGimpsey’s poetry come to life. That my voice could not help but take on new inflections, hang on certain tones, take up a rhythm that’s not altogether apparent on the page.
“That’s good,” said my husband when I was finished, and then he said, “but those sound like stories.” We thought about it for a moment. “What makes a poem anyway?” he asked. We were both quiet, and then I flipped through the book a bit. “Line breaks, I suppose,” I said in a small voice, but it was clear that I wasn’t sure.
What does make a poem anyway? The best I can get is that I’d know one if I saw it. And I certainly know that David McGimpsey’s work is poetry, but it’s why I’m not sure of. It must be something more than line breaks, though they were the most obvious clue. It was also something my voice took on when I read it, the rhythm. But his poems aren’t poetry as I’ve always known it– he’s short on rhyming couplets, his poems stretch on for pages and pages. And while his allusion are classical as one might expect, they’re coupled with just as many allusions to Mary Tyler Moore, Elvis, Hawaii Five-O, and Gilligan’s Island. Also to Suddenly Susan and Judging Amy, just so you don’t think he’s stuck in a ’70s rut.
I bought this book last fall after hearing about it on the radio, intrigued about whether or not pop culture was worth making art about. That was also about the same time I learned that Kimmy Gibbler had become an academic, and so I’d decided that anything was possible. Though now I realize that it’s only possible because David McGimpsey knows all the rules he is breaking– this made clear by his broad allusions, by his control of language. And while his collection is fun, is funny, it’s in no way frothy. Instead, underlined by a caustic bitterness and certain sadness which makes the humour all the more remarkable, actually. And that 60% of the jokes went over my head didn’t mean I wasn’t enjoying myself.
I would wonder about any culture one couldn’t make art of, but I wonder still if McGimpsey ever thinks he might have availed himself of tools lacking in richness. Is their lack of richness the point, or is McGimpsey to show that this stuff is rich after all? I could make an argument for either side. And what then of the nature of poetry anyway? Heady questions, all of these, which– even short of answers– must mean that Sitcom is doing something right.
April 8, 2008
Sark: The World's Newest Democracy
Am I ever excited to pass along a link to Sark: The World’s Newest Democracy, a short documentary film by my friend Paul Kutasi. Partly because I take every opportunity to brag about my clever friends, but also because the film is fabulous. Sark is a small island in the English Channel, and the last feudal state in Europe– but not for long. Well done Paul.
April 8, 2008
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
When I learned to write short stories by reading other short stories when I was younger, the general sense I got from my reading was that stories had to be strange. For how else but through quirks could you fit whole narratives into pages? Construction otherwise seemed impossible, which was why the earliest characters would always wake up and it was just a dream, or later there would be corpses in bed, characters who were soulless automatons, graveyard shifts, girls in attics, and/or sex with strangers in impossible places. Real life didn’t seem to happen here.
I figured that form dictated content, and I don’t have to tell you that my imitative efforts were terrible. I didn’t understand how stories could be organic instead, growing to determine their appropriate container. That there could be stories like those from Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection Unaccustomed Earth, which fit so comfortable in their containers they didn’t even need to proclaim themselves. Lahiri’s are stories for people who don’t even realize that they like short stories yet. Not that they don’t take full advantage of the form, but rather she writes with such choice details, clear focuses, sensible narratives and cadences that the reader comes away ultimately satisfied. Like reading a novel, but then it’s not a novel, and perhaps you might like stories after all.
Which is to say that as stories, these aren’t especially challenging, seemingly without blocks and wobbles, straightforwardly put. But of course they’re not simple either, their richness so incredibly subtle, and subtlety is definitely Lahiri’s forte. As well as her endings, which might be the ultimate reason her stories are so satisfying (and I wish I could take credit for that revelation, but actually I read it in this review, where Lahiri is called “a master of endings”). Which also is not to say that Lahiri’s stories are easy, because they’re not– the ending of her final story “Going Ashore” packs such a wallop, you’ll be closing the book a bit stunned; the climax of “Only Goodness” is so devastating, you’ve got to read it twice to make sure you’ve got it right; dynamics between certain characters (a young man and his new stepsisters, the awkward student infatuated with his roommate, a tired husband and wife) absolutely horrifying in their details.
The Unaccustomed Earth is an extension of Lahiri’s previous work in a way that is logical, if not quite predictable. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter of Maladies and her novel The Namesake considered Bengali immigrants and their early experiences in America. The characters’ focus was always their children, and here lies the extension as Lahiri makes these children the focus of her newest collection. Children whose parents had moved across the world and therefore have always been accustomed to rootlessness, coming into adulthood knowing no other way. Belonging everywhere, but also nowhere, disconnected by culture and geography from all that went before them.
I will say that I did not love Unaccustomed Earth as much as I did Interpreter of Maladies, but that is perhaps too high an expectation to put on any book. But I don’t mean that this is an inferior collection. Rather that it was an inherent optimism, the hope underlining the first collection that made me fall in love with its stories. Arrival in America, with all its hardships, was still its own happy ending, resolution. Whereas Unaccustomed Earth shows that few stories ever tie up so easily– loss is the rule here, whether it be through death, trouble, or relationships that never were for the gaps that lie between us. Many families in these stories move back to India eventually, for various reasons, the rootlessness only exacerbated then.
But though my heart was not warmed, it was certainly moved, this collection as stunning as one might expect. Lahiri is only getting better, still making stories out of the realist stuff of life, and a life so true that her forms are ultimately secondary.
April 8, 2008
Inspired by Kimmy Gibbler
I know of one poem
inspired by Kimmy Gibbler
and now here is another.
If there are two
there may be others.
Anthological opportunities
in multiple volumes,
or a doctoral thesis.
A wikipedia article
at the very least, because
here is a cultural phenomenon.
The girl next door,
whose side ponytail threw her
off-balance. She was familiar
but not with knocking.
