November 16, 2007
Modernity murdered narrative
One hundred years ago people were concerned about modernity in fiction– I know this. That some considered lightbulbs and radios too plastic for literature, which was made for weightier things. I once read an essay by Woolf about writing and the automobile, and how riding in a car could alter one’s perspective, permanently. Dangerously? Modern life is rubbish, so they say, and so it always has been. But I maintain that it’s never been so rubbish as since the turn of this century, and I mean this narratively speaking.
It’s not modernity I fault, and I don’t even mind plastic; I like Douglas Coupland. I just feel that the last ten years have brought forth too many conveniences in real life which have taken all the fun out of fiction. I’ve written before of my aversion to cellphones and google searches as plot devices, but I can take this much further.
I’m now reading Love Falls by Esther Freud, which takes place in 1981: Lara and her father are taking the train to France. Now I took the train to France once, in 2003. We got on the Eurostar at Waterloo Station, countryside faded away as we disappeared underground, we played travel-scrabble until the pressure of the channel tunnel gave me a migraine, and I spent the rest of the journey staring out the window at nothing. We got to Paris and I took to my bed. Which actually is a marvelous sentence, isn’t it? Though I assure you the whole ordeal was really quite unromantic.
Whereas if we’d taken the train to Dover, taken a boat across the channel… isn’t the journey better already? Aren’t stories better when characters have to search for phone boxes (esp. when the first few they encounter are always out of order) rather than retrieving a mobile from their pocket? Would your rather discover a twist in a tale in a reference library or at an internet terminal? How do you ever get lost with a GPS in your car, and what kind of character never takes a wrong turn? Oh my, what if Lara and her father had made the trek on EasyJet– could you imagine anything worse?
Of course all these things exist, and so we’ll have to learn how to make stories with them. The trick, I think, is not to use them as shortcuts in narrative. But then not such an easy trick, is it, considering how much all these things shortcut our everyday lives.
UPDATE: On how modernity has rendered Jane Eyre impossible.
November 15, 2007
Forage
Though according to a sign I passed this morning “Capitalism Sucks: Let’s Get Rid it It”, I remain rather entranced by consumerism. Though I don’t love shopping as a rule, I like things and their acquisition. If I were at home now, I’d pull out Woolf’s “The Oxford Street Tide” from The London Scene so I could remember the list of things she was so fascinated that one could actually buy– a tortoise was one. She saw it pointful to set across London in search of a pencil after all; Woolf liked things too. Tonight I’ve got an errand to purchase underwear and a teapot shaped like an elephant. Doesn’t the world just hold the most marvelous stuff?
November 14, 2007
Stuck in traffic
I am now reading the latest issue of The New Quarterly, which is quality from cover to so-far, and I am so pleased to be a part of it. Another fabulous feature they’ve got is “Who’s Reading What” at their website, where contributors recommend books worth reading. My own suggestion is more than a bit embarrassing though, as I chose a little-known novel called Late Nights on Air. You’ve probably never heard of it– a very underground sort of book for those of us in the know. Note please: I made my suggestion ages ago, before anyone had ever heard of a Giller.
In other bits, Steven W. Beattie on blurring the lines between content and advertising. (I’ve found the whole world a bit unnerving since I read it.) Heather Mallick on Jan Wong’s new book Beijng Confidential, which I can’t wait to read now. RR is fascinatingly preoccupied by readers inside books. Ira Levin, whose Rosemary’s Baby my household was obsessed with earlier this year, has died at 78. And on the LRB: “a junk-free journal”. May I say also that the December issue of The Walrus is excellent, and if you buy it you won’t be sorry.
November 13, 2007
Thinking about Elizabeth Hay
I’ve been thinking a lot about Elizabeth Hay since Tuesday. How her novel came under such scrutiny in the days leading up to the prize. But first, two remarkable things about Hay. Did you remember that I quoted her here ages ago? Before I’d even heard of her, I picked her line “catching a ride on the coattails of literature” from her piece in Writing Life. I read the piece again tonight, and how it resonates. How I love her work, and can’t wait to get all caught up with it. Further, I love how Hay phrased an answer to one of her 12 or 2o Questions: “In my late twenties and early thirties, as the feminist I remain…” How perfect, the resoluteness of her position, and yet its mutability (which, of course, is only natural).
And then Late Nights on Air, which you might recall I read under a spell. I sang its praises loud and clear and proclaimed “a literary achievement” which I still believe, though I would concede the novel is imperfect. “Masterful” might be hyperbole, though what Hay did to convince me otherwise certainly was mastery of a sort. Do they give prizes for writers who are hypnotic?
Criticism towards Late Nights on Air tends to reference the relentless foreshadowing, which of course I noticed, but I bought it. Looking back upon the novel I see that the foreshadowing is an inevitable result of its nostalgic bent. Of course one reconstructing the past would underline all the signs they’ve missed, and this would also read strangely for a reader embarking upon the journey for the first time. Here, voice is much more significant than plot.
The “anti-climax” then? What culminates from all those signs of doom? About voice once again, I think. For what happens ultimately might be a let-down stylistically, but imagine having been there. Would that incident not resonate back and forth in time? Forever? Which is exactly what the voice is telling us it does.
And finally the ending, and its petering. (And how odd, by the way, is peter as a verb?) Though I do wonder if the novel could have been stronger had Hay left her characters alone back in time rather than bringing all of them up to date. But still, how could the novel not slow down as it does? How could anything that came after ever measure up to what went before? In the very first chapter it is stated that life was never more vivid than then. Surely Hay shows this?
There, I’ve finished my defending. Now I just can’t wait to read the novel once again.
November 13, 2007
Striptease
Lucky Jim, apart from being all it’s cracked up to be, has one scene containing an essential element missing from every other sex scene ever written: “Dixon twitched off his, then her, spectacles and put them down somewhere. He kissed her again, harder…” Oh, for lust in academia!
November 12, 2007
Red is best
Will shortly be now-reading Lucky Jim, upon the recommendation of Rona Maynard, and Kate Christensen. How exciting! Exciting also that today, albeit from a cardboard box on the sidewalk, I acquired the marvelous children’s book Red is Best. (When I was six, illustrator Robin Baird Lewis came to my school and I met her!) And finally today is the twentieth anniversary of my writing aspirations, which were born when I wrote a poem called “War” in grade three.
November 11, 2007
11/11
In memory of my grandfathers, both of whom passed away this year, I’ve decided to cease my inner-struggle with Remembrance Day. For this day only, I will set aside my ambivalence between honouring vets of “the last good war” and my utter rejection of values which perpetuate modern-day warfare. Even though my fervent belief is that the greatest honour we could bestow upon our war dead would be to not go to war anymore; didn’t anyone else get that message from the entire twentieth century?
But I’ve read Marion Murray’s article on losing her son in Afghanistan, Christopher Hitchens’ story on the death of a soldier in Iraq, and I’ve realized my own inner-struggle does nothing to undercut the sadness of these situations. That my inner-struggle is meaningless in the face of reality, which is something I expect both my grandfathers would have told me. And so today I will remember, without condition. Except perhaps the hope that one day we will have learned something from all of this.
Pictured here is my great-grandfather’s grave in Belgium. He was killed in action in 1916.
November 11, 2007
The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys
Walking past the Royal Ontario Museum on Thursday, it occurred to me how accustomed I have grown to the Lee-Chin Crystal. So accustomed that surely it has always stood there, but of course I know otherwise. On Thursday it was raining but I stopped a moment anyway and tried to reconstruct the museum I used to walk by daily when I lived in the neighbourhood nearly ten years ago– the Terrace Galleries, knocked down for the Crystal after just 25 years of service. Oh the solidity of the city is most deceptive. But even though the streetscape has changed and I’m a decade away from that girl I used to be, when I fix my mind just right I can go back there. And so the city’s fluidity is also most deceptive, isn’t it? In the midst of constant change, the same moments seem to happen over and over again.
Helen Humphreys considers this dichotomy in The Frozen Thames, a book which she terms as “a long meditation on the nature of ice”. And indeed there is no better image than ice to encapsulate such flux and fixity. The Thames freezing is a perfect example of an extraordinary moment in time, having occurred just forty times in its history and Humphreys links these moments together in this small beautiful book, which is distinguished both by content and design.
The Frozen Thames comprises forty “vignettes”, one for each time the river froze from 1142 to 1895. From a man struggling to persuade his oxen to cross the ice to the wife of a publican who wakes up to find her house collapsing, these stories tell of people and stories both ordinary and otherwise. Of the spell that is cast over a city when something extraordinary happens, of the river’s centrality to London life. Humphreys writes of The Frost Fairs which were held for hundreds of years, when those who relied upon the river for their livelihood would make use of the ice for money instead. The bonfires, fortune tellers, cannons, skating, and the pig roasts.
That the voice stays the same throughout the book serves a purpose: a constancy, analogous to the river itself, as the backdrop changes. Various plagues descend, Kings are beheaded, power shifts hands, and still the wonder of the ice remains. Humphreys allows her reader to engage in this wonderment, presenting small moments so vividly: I never supposed an oxen’s step could be this compelling. And that such an ending could be so devastating: “…the nature of the river had been changed by the destruction of the old London Bridge and the building, in 1831, of the new one…. The new bridge did not work as a dam, the way the old bridge had, and the Thames would never, will never, freeze solid in the heart of London again.”
November 11, 2007
Fashion in Books
Shocking! Over at the Descant Blog, I’ve written a piece about fashion. Well, about fashion in books. Which makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it? Read it here.
November 11, 2007
How do you measure a marriage?
Two and a half years ago we went to a barbeque and met a baby. The barbeque was our friend Carolyn’s housewarming, and the baby belonged to a school friend of hers. And the baby was little, just three weeks old at the time. Stuart and I had just gotten married, and the baby’s birthday had been the day after, and at the time I was amazed to meet a person younger than my marriage was.
Tonight we had the pleasure of attending a party for Carolyn and her fiance Steve (for indeed wonderful things have happened to our Carolyn in the two and a half years since we warmed her house), and we met her friend again. Who didn’t remember me, but I remembered her, though I scarcely recognized her baby. Who, I realized then, is the human embodiment of my marital life.
How are we doing then? Well, unfortunately the twos seem quite terrible. We cry an awful lot, and life on the whole is really miserable. On the upside we have a very cool toy train, though of course it does not console us.
