November 5, 2007
It's always tea-time
“‘And ever since that,’ the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, ‘he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.’
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve got no time to wash the things between whiles.’”
—Alice Adventures in Wonderland
November 5, 2007
Tone lowering
Today is my favourite day of the year– the day with twenty five hours in it. Happy birthday to my sister! Just about to finish Larry’s Party (in the bath), which has been everything I wanted it to be. Next up is Alice Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. I’m ‘xausted now after a busy weekend, but I’ve got lots of blog posts budding my head. Until tomorrow, I suppose, and the days that follow. In the meantime, Tom Perotta profiled at the CBC. More on favourite short stories (and have you read the lists of Rebecca and Steven?). Here for Giller commentary. On literary non-fiction (and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow). And, um, in sharing a link to Canada’s Cutest Trick-or-Treaters, I have lowered the tone of this blog, but how else can I convey my obsession with very small children dressed up like kangaroos?
November 2, 2007
A literary map more than a person
From The Globe & Mail on Helen Oyeyemi: ‘Two books into the sport of novel writing, Oyeyemi still doesn’t think of herself as a writer because “I don’t write every day and isn’t that what a real writer is supposed to do?” Instead, she “would just as soon be called a reader because that is something I do every day.” She laughed. “I’ve gradually built my identity around books. I’m almost a literary map more than a person.”‘
November 2, 2007
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
My husband can be very astute at times. Whilst reading Frances Itani’s Remembering the Bones I was raving about the book and he said, “So you like it the same way you like obituaries then?” Exactly. Nothing to do with death at all, but rather for such a celebration of life. It’s The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.
The book begins with Georgina Danforth Witley, 80 years old and on her way to meet the Queen. She has won a contest open to all of those in the Commonwealth who share Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and this is an unlikely event in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman. Seemingly, of course: if we’ve learned anything from obits it’s that nobody is ordinary. Georgie with her 103 year old mother still living, with the memory of her eccentric salt-of-the-earth grandmother Grand Dan, with her ability to name all the bones in the human body, memorized from her late Grandfather’s Gray’s Anatomy. She has talked to Queen Elizabeth like a friend for all her life. Georgie had a “polio honeymoon”, she understands why people laugh at funerals. Once she witnessed her husband in an act of love and fell in love with him for all time.
All this she remembers while she is supposed to be lunching with the Queen. On her way to the airport, not even far from her own driveway, Georgie loses control of her car and crashes down into a ravine. Broken in the wreckage, unable to move or shout and with nobody coming to find her, Georgie tells the story of her life, from childhood to widowhood. Putting the pieces together, struggling to keep her brain active. Struggling to “remember the bones” she once knew so well, to name them and thus reconstruct herself, and her story. The story of her most extraordinary ordinary life, and my heart was wrung by the joy and the sadness alike.
What happens to Georgie in the end then? Definitely a talking point, with some interesting ambiguity, but I would argue that the ending is the least important thing about all of this. Though I devoured this book rather greedily, it was for the journey all the while. For Georgie’s voice, and Itani’s prose. For this narrative so constructed that the pages fly by like those on a cinematic calendar, whizzing past faster than days go, until you’re at the end, and you’re finished, but what you’re left with is a life.
November 2, 2007
Remarkable Things
So many remarkable things have come to pass in the last day. That I was shat on via avis for the second time in my life, and as the luck that arrived after the first time was epic, I’ve got high hopes for the hours ahead. (Though perhaps my luck was that I was hit on my hand, which was wearing a mitten, which I was able to remove then, and continue on my way.) That I joined Facebook and then unjoined six hours later, without even adding a friend, for it was altogether clear that Facebook would have destroyed my life. That today I purchased The Journey Prize Stories 19— a real book, from a real bookstore, which contains a story by my ridiculously exceptional friend Rebecca Rosenblum. And lastest, but certainly not lamest, that we are going to California!! Yes indeed, tickets bought. I’ve always wanted to go to California, for I love Joan Didion and the Beach Boys, who are worlds apart, but have been telling me its stories for years now. For me, California is the most mythical place in the whole universe, but the fact of it is about to prove me otherwise, I suppose, when I set foot there. In San Francisco, to be specific, come February, and I am terribly excited, for that is the way one tends to be when lifelong dreams come true.
November 2, 2007
And throughout all this time
“And throughout all of this time, each event flew down like a separate pattern threading itself through a bolt of cloth. Each moment hummed with energy, shifted and settled until assured its own space and shape. And then, some unseen hand darted a needle into the entire bolt and drew it together so that all of the patterns merged and no single image could be unravelled or pried off.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
November 1, 2007
Books before me
My friend Bronwyn once wrote me in an email, “I haven’t read Mrs. Dalloway because then I will have read it and I won’t be able to look forward to reading it.” I understand entirely. Me, I get a frisson of sheer joy every time I remember that I’ve still got unread Carol Shields before me. How I hate that the list is so finite (and ever depleting) but I still haven’t read Larry’s Party, A Celibate Season or her short story collections (except Various Miracles which is one of the most perfect collections I’ve ever read). I’ve been avoiding it all on purpose– what will I ever do when I am through? Read them all again, I suppose, as my annual reread of Unless has never failed to hold new discoveries. But still. Books before me, books which I’m sure to love– is there any greater joy? And Larry’s Party starts tomorrow…
November 1, 2007
Favourite short stories
Top ten short stories in The Guardian. I believe I’ve got ten of my own, in no particular order, because I’ve never met a list I didn’t like.
1) “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri
2) “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
3) “Scenes” by Carol Shields
4) “Astonishing the Blind” by Jack Hodgins
5) “Wants” by Grace Paley (and everything by Grace Paley)
6) “True Trash” by Margaret Atwood
7) “Down At the Dinghy” by JD Salinger
8) “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” by Carol Shields
9) “Moral Disorder” by Margaret Atwood
10) “Feathers” by Raymond Carver
October 31, 2007
What they are
“My life unknits as I lie here. How many days? How many nights? My stories are my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s, my daughter’s. I did not plan any of them; they became what they became; they are what they are.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
