April 7, 2008
Sidewalk Sale
One of the best things about being settled in our new home is that we can start acquiring books again– particularly since we got rid of so many before we moved, because the new house has shelves built into every nook and cranny and we don’t plan to move again for sixty or seventy years. The memory of packing boxes upon boxes is beginning to fade already, and so today I was quite happy to buy new books from a sidewalk sale. Stuart picked up The Cider House Rules, as we both like John Irving and neither of us has read it yet. And I seemed to be on a British female novelist kick– I got The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, under the influence of one of my favourite book bloggers; Virgina Woolf’s Orlando (though if I’m not careful I’ll have all of her novels read, and then what will I do?); and In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill, who I’ve never read before.
I’m still reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Unaccustomed Earth, and loving it, though I wish I’d given it to a week that was not so manic. Also reading David McGimpsey’s Sitcom (it is Poetic April after all), which is something else but I’m not sure what (which is not to say that it isn’t good, oh no).
And next up I am going to be reading The World my Wilderness by Rose Macaulay, because it’s the one “Virago Modern Classic” I own, it’s still unread, and everybody’s talking about Virago lately. To those of you who were wondering why we need an Orange Prize, do read the piece by Rachel Cooke, and perhaps you’ll understand, for not that much ever changes in the course of 30 years
April 6, 2008
Chatelaine turns 80
I bought the May issue of Chatelaine, mainly because it was thick, on sale for 1.99, and I wanted to be part of the birthday fete. I don’t buy the magazine usually– women’s magazines tend to overwhelm me with “tips”and “solutions”, rendering me altogether hopeless. Though I do make a point of reading Chatelaine‘s books pages at the grocery store checkout. But I’m pleased I got this issue, and not just because of the fabulous vintage covers. No, I was most of all delighted by the “tea time” feature, with recipes for scones, tiny sandwiches, and ice teas. Accompanied by a gorgeous photo layout, and the obligatory Henry James quote. Will be clipped and kept for life.
April 6, 2008
Bad Habits
Picking my nails, staying up late,
compiling lists of things that I hate.
Bumping my head, stomping the floor,
opening the cupboard and not closing the door.
Rolling my eyes, playing with my hair,
hollering orders up or down stairs.
Shrugging, “Whatever”. Quoting with “like”.
Being too cheap to tune up my bike.
Teabags tossed in the sink, not fixing things when they break.
Coming up with any excuse to go out for some cake.
April 6, 2008
Have a seat
Welcome to our new living room. I apologize for not offering the sofa, but I had to sit on it to take this picture, as I wanted a shot of the fireplace, and our huge windows (there are three, which have blinds now! How exciting). We are officially unpacked, and have been entertaining friends all weekend– friends who’ve dropped by with flowers, baked goods, cupcakes, a strawberry slicer, and cheese. Clearly we are very lucky people. Real life has also returned, which is splendid. As has spring– unbelievable. People in this city don’t miss a beat with that spring thing– today people were out riding bikes, drinking on patios, smiling, walking, looking startled and pleased by their good fortune. We did our part tonight by having the first barbeque of the season, christening our new deck and paving the way for a marvelous summer ahead.
April 5, 2008
It is easy
It is easy to feel inadequate
at Home Depot, where ceilings stretch
so high, we might as well be crawling.
I want to carry two-by-fours out
hoisted on my shoulders too,
but I can’t– I have a backache.
April 4, 2008
On poetry, and Six Mats and One Year by Alison Smith
Kate Sutherland has put out the challenge— why don’t we talk about poetry this month? And since I’m celebrating with my own Poetic April, I thought I’d take part. First by answering, why don’t we talk about poetry? I know I don’t because I don’t have the confidence. I could talk about it casually as I do fiction, but I’d feel altogether vulnerable. Even accessible poetry– I lack the formal approach to it. But I will forget about that, if you promise to be patient and tolerate my pedestrian meanderings. If you promise to also tolerate my own little poems too, which I’m only writing for my very own self.
All of these provisos, basically because I suspect I’m quite poor at all of this, and it’s my nature to deprecate myself before you do. Though I have another reason for avoiding talk of poetry– a formal approach I say I lack, but I am not sure there is even one. I understand “novel” and I understand “story”, but “poem” seems as broad as days are long, as are ways to read one. I understand that this is true of stories and novels too, but it seems truest of poems most of all. When everything is so contained, absolutely nothing extraneous– including the reading experience– it seems impossible to find a poem the same way twice, rendering generalizations impossible. This becoming all the more evident as I begin to reread collections of poetry I own.
I reread Canadian poet Alison Smith’s book Six Mats and One Year today. Published in 2003 by Gaspereau Press, I must get away from the poetry for a moment to comment on this book’s design. The cover laid out like a Japanese tatami room, six mats of course, grooves in between them. The book is gorgeous. When I read it the first time, the poems were so tied to my own experience as I was living in Japan at the time. It was remarkable then to see the most quotidian details of my own life expressed with poetry– the ticking clock in an English conversation school, purikura shots, “counter girls heralding the public in a caffeinated chorus”, Hello Kitty, the yearning for home (“I left as we do our childhoods: rushing to escape, without souvenirs”) which I knew would soon be my own experience.
To find this book again four years later was quite different. No longer did it resonate so personally, and perhaps it was the schooling I’ve had since then or what a better reader I’ve become, but I read the poems more for themselves than for what of me I found it them– Smith was attempting more than just a scrapbook of my memories after all. I found an odd nostalgia, of course, but now I was able to achieve distance. Also to understand some structures and images that had seemed abstruse before.
Here is the problem– I can’t articulate much about the language. Perhaps with some practice I’ll get better and will revisit this book later in the month? Now I can just say that Smith uses accessible language, though some of it wrapping up strange and curious images. Other bits laid out in ultimate simplicity: “Me too, I realise, I do/ want to be happy.”
The poems are structured cyclically, the “one year” of its title with four sections. The first concerns teaching in an English conversation school, the second written about time spent living at a Buddhist monastery. Home creeps into the third section, as the novelty and exotic wears away. The final section is home again: “where you can finally read/the signs on the wall”.
In each poem and the collection as a whole, Smith blends the material and spiritual in an airy fashion. Accepting Japan’s incongruities, its seamless gaps (the priest’s second son in his Ghostbusters t-shirt), all contained within a perfect package. The literary embodiment of a gaijin‘s Japan.
April 4, 2008
New House
Three days is not enough
to make a home. Still tentative.
We have not yet fixed ourselves–
driven nails into our drywall
whose shadows still tell the stories
of other people’s things.
April 4, 2008
Welcome!
Welcome to my kitchen and the entrance to our new home. After perhaps a total of nine hours scrubbing and unpacking, this is the first room to be wholly presentable. It was also the room that made me fall in love with the apartment, which I still love even though now I know about the leaky sink. It is beginning to feel like home here, though the move has left me exhausted and disconnected from my entire life. And I’m not sure why, the move having been easy as pie, our movers lovely, friendly, helpful and strong, and the new house being an ten minute drive from the old one. This place was filthy though, which might be part of it. Previously inhabited by dirt moreso than people, but it’s clean now. We’re home now. Clothes must be unpacked still, wall hangings mounted, odds and ends purchased, but we’re nearly there.
Our new neighbourhood is technically called Sussex-Ulster, though you could also locate it as south of the Annex. And it’s been made clear to me how defined are Toronto’s neighbourhoods: I’ve lived in a walkable distance to here for a lot of the past decade, know the neighbourhood well, my old neighbourhood still so close by, but I feel as though I’ve moved to a whole other world ripe for discovery. Though of course living somewhere is always a wholly different experience than just passing through, but it’s strange to be somewhere you’ve passed through so many times and have it feel like new. To have it almost feel like home.
I like my new house because it doesn’t shake in the wind, because the cat next door comes to visit, because we’ve received post every day we’ve been here, because there are so many book shelves that Stuart said in all seriousness that we needed to get more to fill them, because our downstairs neighbours appear to be human, because it’s so big, because I get to sleep in an attic, because the washing machine operates coin free, because the sun comes in and the breeze comes in, and because here it has always been spring.
April 4, 2008
Springwatch 2008
Even if you’ve never wondered how I get so much reading done, I will go ahead and tell you part of how. That when I finished grad school and was forced into servitude, I decided to forsake lunches out with my colleagues and devote that hour a day to reading instead. By now my colleagues have gotten over being offended, and this hour is the anchor of my working day, and now it is entirely monumental for me to note that today for the first time since (I think?) October, I read my book outside. In my coat and scarf, and my fingers were cold, but the sunshine was glorious. I’ve written before about how much my reading is connected to the natural world, and so it was a pleasure to return to the elements.
