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.
November 9, 2007
Cross-eyed
She blew this bubble and her whole face went cross-eyed, centred on her pursing lips. She sought the perfect tension in her embouchure, and the bubble began to grow, carefully, glistening with pink and green rainbows. Slick like oil on the driveway.
November 9, 2007
To hell with all that book stuff
There are some people, I realize, who visit Pickle Me This for reasons less than literary. In the emailed words of my Scottish friend Julie, “I just scroll down the blog for pictures. Haa! To hell with all that book stuff!” But lately, you see, nothing else but bookishness ever happens. Or almost nothing, except for my job, but trust me you’d rather hear about the books.
But for the sake of those patient readers who couldn’t care less about endpapers, I will tell you that we had Persian food Wednesday night. At Pomegranate, and how wonderful it was to taste flavours completely new. That we haven’t seen our naked downstairs neighbour since the night of the fiasco. I am obsessed with Kerry Katona and the Iceland adverts. I like Robyn. The cardigan I am knitting just seems a wee bit small. Stuart and I already have plans every weekend until Christmas. That I’ve not had enough to drink lately, and I’ve really got to do something about that. I watched Knocked Up recently, and absolutely loved it. I watched High Fidelity recently too, and can’t believe I ever found it charming. It apparently snowed in Toronto today, but I did not see evidence of it. I have a new little black dress from Jacob to see me through the holiday season, the loveliest thing I own, and it wasn’t even on sale. Bliss.
November 8, 2007
Chunky battered cod
Toronto writer (and my good friend) Rebecca Rosenblum sings a love song to The New Yorker: “If you start early enough with any reading material, it will form it’s own ideal reader (this is true of just about anything, I suppose; it’s how you explain families).”
Rebecca Gowers (remember When to Walk?) guest-blogs for savvy readers: “It annoys me that “flighty”—a word, by the way, that Shakespeare used in Macbeth and which then meant speedy—has now declined into a resolute negative, stuck in a corner with “giddy” and “harebrained,” besides meaning, at a stretch, sexually undependable. The concept of flight is itself surely so marvelous to a naturally earth-bound creature that to limit the associations of “flighty” to the unpredictable whirligigging of a short-lived insect seems like an awful waste.”
And links for Elizabeth Hay (who, sadly for the sake of completion, is not called Rebecca): 12 or 20 Questions; interviewed at the CBC; and in The Guardian (even though Margaret Atwood owned the spotlight in a protest about doves).
Oh, and speaking of words: my new favourite is “mimsy“.
November 7, 2007
Non-fiction commitment
I’ve decided to push myself to read more non-fiction. Not just because of what Ken McGoogan said (of course not, I am just as disagreeable as he is), but more because of Jared Diamond. Because my diet of constant fiction is like eating solely chocolate when there is ice cream in the world. When I say that Guns Germs and Steel has grown a layer of dust on my bedside, I wish I was employing a figure of speech. Let the facts stand: I am an atrocious housekeeper, and terribly neglectful of all things non-fic. As a purported book lover, I shouldn’t have the nerve to fall asleep at night.
Carol Shields read Guns Germs and Steel. I learned this from the essay her daughter Anne Giardini wrote about her in The Arts of a Writing Life. To me it reads quite obviously from her fiction that Carol Shields must have appreciated non-fiction, for though her imagination was potent enough to dream her into the head of characters so disparate as Larry Weller and Daisy Goodwill Flett, something more would have been required to fill in the worlds around them. And to read Shields is to be immersed in these worlds, their details: mazes, mermaids, quilts and stones, and late night radio. See the quote below, on characters and jobs– that gap between what the novelist knows and what characters do, I think, is best bridged by reading. And gaining an understanding of how the world works, of course, is important not only for writers.
November 7, 2007
Work to do
“I passionately believe a novelist must give her characters work to do. Fictional men and women tend, in my view, to collapse unless they’re observed doing their work… I’ve read novels about professors who never step into the classroom. They’re always on sabbatical or off to a conference in Hawaii. And artist-heroes who never pick up a paintbrush, they’re so busy at the local cafe, so occupied with their love life or their envy or their grief. Does the brilliant young botanist with the golden back-swept hair, one wisp loose at her neck, wander up a brilliant hillside and fill her pockets with rare species? No, we see her only after work or on weekends when she goes to parties and meets young novelistic lawyers who have no cases to work on, no files, no offices, no courtrooms in which to demonstrate their skills. That husky young construction worker does all his sexual coupling between shifts, and with a blonde-headed graduate of Mount Holyoke as his partner– what about that? Just once I’d like to see him with the pneumatic drill hammering against his body, shaking him stupid. But what if the novelist is a Yale grad, and his father before him? What would he know about how that drill kicks and jumps and transfers its nerves into the bones and belly of a human being? We might see the poor guy reach out for humanistic understanding, discovering Shakespeare-in-the-Park or French cinema, something like that, but chances are against seeing him work.”– Carol Shields, Unless
November 6, 2007
Tenterhooks
Ooooh, tenterhooks. The Giller Prize winner is announced tonight, and we’re still endorsing Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air.
UPDATE: Late Nights on Air takes the prize. Pickle Me This is dancing merrily.
November 6, 2007
Narratives and Polemics
I begin by noting that I like the redesign of the Saturday Globe & Mail. Everything I like best is still there, and then there are additional surprises. I like that Books now starts on its front page; somehow the section reminds me just an ickle bit more of Guardian Review (though of course it’s still nowhere as good). The “Endpapers” essay is interesting too: this week’s was “Tilting at the windmills for literary non-fiction” by writer Ken McGoogan. An engaging piece, as he offended me terribly, but then he won me over by the end.
My offense stemmed from McGoogan’s initial dismissal of fiction, and stemmed for two reasons. One: that fiction is my religion (I am not being facetious) and so I’m bound to get a bit defensive. In my whole life I’ve never found anything closer to magic than fiction, and I’m sorry but non-fiction has never done that trick. I truly believe that slowly surely works of fiction can change the world, and in very different ways than either of these books did.
Second, I was troubled by McGoogan’s assertion that fiction readings were dull, that he “vastly prefer[s] an on-stage conversation or interview, or better still a no-holds barred panel discussion.” He gives the example of Edmonton’s Litfest at which “Audience members challenged speakers and presented arguments. By crikey, they had come to participate”. Yes, but. I personally feel that a book is best enjoyed in one’s own company, but what is wonderful about a public reading is the opportunity to listen. I don’t get that very often myself. No challenges, arguments, thinking of clever questions and retorts, but just listening: passivity is not always a bad thing and many more people should practice it. The world is not always ours to be attacked, or critiqued, but some meet it this way perpetually. With fiction, not so much, and I think this is only positive.
I will have more to say this week on appreciating non-fiction (in regards to Carol Shields), but for now I am not sure I agree with McGoogan that the genre is always the underdog. Indeed non-fiction receives less attention, but aren’t sales doing just fine? Aren’t non-fiction writers sought after by publishers, or at least much more so than fictioneers? Does good non-fiction really need the promotion McGoogan is suggesting it lacks? This I do not know for sure.
What I do know is that McGoogan’s synthesis is perfectly wonderful, as he calls for his revolution. “First step: We divide fact-based literature into two broad categories– narrative non-fiction and polemical non-fiction…. Second step: We abandon non-fiction… We cease to define countless literary works by what they are not”. He sees the necessity for these genres to stand up together with fiction, for each to complement one another. No longer the dichotomy : “Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three.” How positively healthy that sounds, how refreshing. I love that idea, and how fortunate that I read far enough past the disagreeableness to get to it: a patience I learned, perhaps, from my life in fiction?
November 6, 2007
Expansion
They call it a “booktique” but I’m not frightened (yet); that Type Books is opening up a second location can only be seen as a good thing.
