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.
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.
