December 20, 2007
Compounded indulgence
“Mrs Simpson took a sharp knife from the drawer, slit the top of the envelope, stealthy as a spy, and withdrew the flimsy sheets. She paused before unfolding them to fetch a bar of chocolate from the fridge, then settled down to the compounded indulgence of devouring sweets and words at once”. –Claire Messud, When the World was Steady
December 20, 2007
Language: alive, dead or comatose
It is with such joy that I’ve been reading Issue 72 of Canadian Notes and Queries. This magazine is new to me and though we’ve only been going out for two days, I can already define it as follows: I can neither put it down, nor cease making notes in the margins. Notes in the margins of a magazine. My friend Rebecca defined it as a cousin of sorts to The New Quarterly, equally all-hit-no-miss in its content, and I concur. I have also learned the words “festschrift“, “afarensis”, and the Margaret Atwood interview led me to finally look up “abstruse”, which is sort of funny, though I don’t think she is abstruse at all. (On one trip through the dictionary I also thumbed past “aestival” which might be my new favourite word).
I have found each piece in CNQ provocative, thoughtful and compelling. And though I could probably talk aplenty in response to any of them, in particular I want to point to Charles Foran’s “Dumb as a Sack of Hammers” (from his forthcoming book Join the Revolution, Comrade).
Over drinks with an Irish journalist, he is forced to confront “the almost wilful linguistic dullness of most Canadian writers.” He acknowledges exceptions, of course, (my own suggestion being George Elliott Clark, who makes a point of it), with French Canadian writing in particular. But Foran finds, in general, that Canadian writing “displayed little or nil impulse to unbutton and dress down on the page. [The writers] were grammatically preservative and idiomatically conservative”. Perhaps, Foran posits, Canada is too new. Though his friend counters with Australia (“a linguistic free-for-all”), the Caribbean. And Foran takes grapples with these ideas throughout his piece– though you’ll have to find it and read it yourself to find out how.
The Australian point got me thinking though, about “linguistic free-for-alls”. The other example being Cockney rhyming slang, and I suppose fans of “playfulness” delight in this sort of stuff. But I don’t. There is a such a thing as trying too hard. You see playfulness’s fact of “play” defeats the purpose; it’s not real. People don’t actually speak this way (or at least most don’t), rather people publish gift book slang dictionaries of these “dialects”, and is anything less playful than that? A language with a gift book slang dictionary might as well be dead, and though any such Canadian slang dictionary would consist solely of the word “toque” I do not consider this a tragedy. No, not a tragedy at all.
Though of course I will concede the blandness of Canadian English in comparison to most other Englishes, but like Foran (“dumb as a sack of hammers”) I could find a few lively embellishments to celebrate. My family lived in the country outside Belleville early in my childhood, and in the twenty-five years since then we’ve many a time remarked upon our farming neighbours’ peculiar expressions, such as “He’s as handy as a pocket in a shirt”. I knew one man from there who used to say, “Holy doodle.” My grandmother used to express bewilderment and frustration with “For the love of Pete.” And my other grandma used to talk a lot about shitting through the eye of a needle, but then maybe that was just part of her unique charm. In fiction too– Flo in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? is exactly who I mean.
Though it’s telling, I suppose, that many of the examples I’ve given were uttered by people now dead, and the ones who are living probably over eighty. About this, then, there’s a whole lot more thinking necessary. Which seems to be the very point of Canadian Notes and Queries so far.
December 20, 2007
Spending days
I have a talent for spending days. I am also quite good at wasting them too, but I can make the choice now, which is something. Particularly since I am on Christmas vacation. Oh my job is a wee bit dull, but one can’t complain for the pay is good and I don’t need to return there until January 7th. And I spent yesterday so utterly stimulated, reading through my manuscript, reading the entirety of Claire Cameron’s The Line Painter, unable to put down Canadian Notes and Queries, and chatting with the mailman in my track pants. I met my Creative Writing allies in the eve. Today I just finished reading my own manuscript, I’m reading When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud whose books never fail to give me a whole world, and at 3:00 I’m going to get my hair cut. And some people might find such days mundane, but then they just don’t understand magic.
December 20, 2007
Various robins
We received another robin Christmas card today, from England of course, where robins are a winter bird. A harbinger of Santa rather than springtime, which it took me a long time to realize and I still forget sometimes (for only this morning did I finally realize why BBC Radio 1 had been playing “Rockin’ Robin” every day for the past week).
Transatlanticism is a dangerous gig, really. You take robins for granted, or at least Helen Humphreys did in her otherwise impeccable The Frozen Thames: “The Thames has frozen over. Birds have begun to freeze to death, particularly that small symbol of spring, the Robin Redbreast, and instead of allowing this happen, the people of England have taken the birds into their houses so that they may shelter there until spring returns.” But no, of course. “Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.” How was she supposed to know that robins could be such various things?
December 19, 2007
Nation sweeping
Though I spoke disparagingly of trivia etc. in a review yesterday, I wish to contradict myself today. (I try to contradict myself at least daily, in order that I never actually form such a dangerous thing as an “opinion”). I do find Wikipedia infinitely valuable in my day-to-day life, mainly whenever I am in search of pop-music miscellany (i.e. what is a hoople or whatever happened to Kris Kross). Triviality and pop-music do seem to suit one another, which is not to say that pop-music is trivial, but isn’t that sort of its very point?
Anyway, the moral of all this is that I love Britain. And what I love most about Britain is the way in which it can be swept. See, I’m from Canada, whose area is more than 9 million square kilometres, and nothing ever sweeps our nation. It’s hard to sweep six time zones, after all. So then to contemplate Britain whose national grid experiences power surges after pivotal episodes of Corrie or EastEnders, as everybody and his auntie puts the kettle on for a cup of tea. I don’t know; the UK can claim disunity, but all nationalism aside, its citizens are more together than they ever give themselves credit for (and someone Welsh will probably slug me for saying that, but…). 17.9 million people tuning in to find out who killed Phil? 17.9 million cups of tea? Though we’ve got at least 17.9 million people in Canada, I really doubt that all of them have ever even been awake at the same time.
But I digress. This time of year Britain is being swept by Christmas Number One fever. (People will tell you that they don’t care, and they won’t want to care, but fact is they do). The front runner is thought to be a terrible cover by the winner of a pop-idol type show whose winners have captured the Number One for the last two years, though competition is coming on strong by a grassroots effort called “We’re All Going to Die“, or a song by something called “Shaun the Sheep”, and (now that downloads count) old favourites “Fairy Tale of New York” and “All I Want For Christmas Is You“. I’m rooting for anyone but Souljah Boy. Complete list of UK Christmas Number Ones conveniently compiled here.
The fever rose today, however, as the nation became incensed about BBC Radio 1’s decision to censor the lyrics to The Pogues’ wonderful Fairy Tale of New York. The BBC received so many complaints about this, the decision was reversed early this evening. Rightly so, I think (and particularly if that ghastly Souljah Boy fellow gets to sing about doing repulsive things to “ho’s” in his gratingly forgettable track). And this little bit of publicity could well help “Fairy Tale of New York” get to number one– wouldn’t that be grand? Particularly, of course, as it only got to Number Two at Christmas 1987, when it was beat out by the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always On My Mind”.
December 18, 2007
Monumental Post
Ohh! Monumental post, thanks to a very generous friend: my first issue of Canadian Notes and Queries.
December 18, 2007
Words I don't know
A wonderful piece in the Guardian Review about (bothering to go about) looking up all those unknown words we encounter all the time. James Meek writes, “For some reason that I have never fully grasped, it is easy for those in the word business to admit any degree of innumeracy (“I’m hopeless with arithmetic”), or helplessness with the daily machinery of their trade (“I don’t know anything about computers”), but difficult to speak frankly about not knowing what a word means.” Though I suspect it’s for the same reason mathematicians don’t like to voice their frustrations with long division.
Oh, but there are so many words I don’t know. As I’ve written here before, I decided to collect unknown words once upon a time, to keep them and tame them. It was while I was living in Japan and devouring battered paperbacks by Margaret Drabble, whose vocabulary still far surpasses mine. Inspired by my ESL students, I started writing down new English words in a little black notebook and the list grew and grew. I was hoping for admission to graduate school within the year and my minuscule vocabulary (consisting too much of “fuck” and “cool”) seemed like it might be an impediment. So I learned: “sybaritic”, “quondam”, “recalcitrant”, “bathetic”, “avuncular”. These are words I know, and whenever I see them, I remember I didn’t always.
But I stopped collecting– I don’t remember why or when. Probably when we moved to Canada, for it is easier to collect English in a land where it is scarce. I think the why also had something to do with leaving our tiny apartment where pencils (and the walls for that matter) were never out of arm’s length–namely I am lazy. But this article by James Meek has inspired me to start again– really. I’m not anticipating grad school, but it’s behind me, which is as good a reason as any to take responsibility for my education now.
Meek writes, “For clarity, we need common, current words; but, used alone, these are commonplace, and as ephemeral as everyday talk. For distinction, we need words not heard every minute, unusual words, large words, foreign words, metaphors; but, used alone, these become bogs, vapours, or at worst, gibberish. What we need is a diction that weds the popular with the dignified, the clear current with the sedgy margins of language and thought.”
“Sedge. n. 1. any of various grasslike plants of the family Cyperaceae, esp of the genus Carex with triangular stems, usu. growing in wet areas. 2. an expanse of this plant.”– though actually I can’t fathom what he means in this context– anyone?
December 18, 2007
The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg
There are many marvelous things about Katherine Ashenburg’s new book The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, not least of all the brilliant design. Outside the book resembles a bar of soap, while the text inside is laid out beautifully, scattered with small graphics and quotations. The book is artful in style and content, the graphics ranging from Greek and Roman images of bathing to 2oth Century soap advertisements. That Ashenburg uses these images and literary evidence as her sources, as well as more traditional historical record, suggests a rich resource. Ashenburg’s prose is compelling and enjoyable to read, the subject matter fascinating and full of illumination, and here we have a book on a most unlikely subject which a wide range of readers is bound to appreciate.
Where I do find fault, though, I do unfairly. For it is unfair to fault a book for being exactly what it purports to be. Simply a history of cleanliness, focusing on the Western world, and arguing that a people’s view of cleanliness tells you much about who those people are. And there is so much stuff with which to work on this subject, as Ashenburg makes clear, but I couldn’t help wishing that she’d worked it a little more. Even the ubiquitous quotations and factoids suggest to me that so overwhelmed was she by the richness of her facts, she could neither harness them completely nor let any of them go. So we get a compendium of miscellanies instead of a book, the kind of trivia so fashionable these days, the kind which gets pulled out at parties whenever knowledge is called for. That changing one’s shirt was once all that was required by way of hygiene, how disgusting Europeans seemed to the rest of the world, and how clean must have been Odysseus considering that the Greeks bathed upon their departures and arrivals.
Have you heard about”Knol”– the the new Google version of Wikipedia? I think they made up “knol”, but the term is supposed to stand for the smaller bits that knowledge can be broken down into. The idea bothers me, for I don’t think that knowledge can really be broken down. Knowledge is the sum of its parts, synthesis being required for an assemblage of facts to mean anything, and such synthesis was what was missing as I read The Dirt on Clean.
But I am being doubly unfair, I realize. For I cannot claim to be so knowledgeable as much as merely “knolly” myself, and if Katherine Ashenburg had written a book called, for example, “An Academic Treatise on European Bathing Practices and Society in the 16th Century” and said book had not been designed to look like a bar of soap, I probably would never have even read it. Ashenburg’s book is undeniably charming, and though its facts left me with questions, I can seek the answers elsewhere. That the book raised questions at all makes it more useful than a “knol” and could well set me on a path toward knowledge after all. Being a popularization of history does not taint that history, and though I maintain that Ashenburg could have pressed her analysis further, that she has written such a good book with such wide appeal is probably healthy for everybody.
December 17, 2007
Diamond sharp
The Globe books pages were exciting this weekend. Rebecca Rosenblum’s story in The Journey Stories 19 is called “diamond-sharp”. A great review of When To Walk which I enjoyed reading this Fall. And a review of a new by book by Andrea Barrett whose Servants of the Map I so adored.
Beyond books, Joanna Schneller should be lauded for her article “A Culture Saturated by Sexism”. Though one of Schneller’s most intriguing points was an aside. “In three popular films this year – Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno — women who find themselves accidentally pregnant dismiss the option of abortion almost immediately.” Which is a bit disturbing, but understandable really, and for a most assuring reason: abortion makes for such boring narrative. Or at least everyone I’ve ever known to have had one has just gone on happily with the rest of her life.
December 16, 2007
"The only way to escape this cul-de-sac is invention"
“I know I can’t discover the key to peace in Israel and Palestine. But I want to do justice of some kind, and to make– or find– something of value, of which I will not be unspeakably ashamed. I want to write, and I want the writing not to be a lie.” –Jonathan Garfinkel, Ambivalence
