November 21, 2007

Spin

We’re all wound up like tops here at Pickle Me This of late, and since I sat down at my desk this morning I’ve made eleven (probably incomplete) lists of various things to do/ bake/ buy/ read/ download. I could do with a calmdown or a stiff drink, and thankfully this weekend promises plenty of the latter if not the former.

For a necessary diversion towards fun, via the marvellous Crooked House, try The Jackson Pollock Page.

November 20, 2007

Because you've brought it up, on timelessness

So last week Russell Smith responded to Ken McGoogan’s essay “Tilting at the Windmills for Literary Non-fiction” and he did so much more strongly than I did. (I can’t find Smith’s column on-line, but I very conveniently have it here in paper form, headlined “In defence of the novel, and the test of time”). Oh Russell Smith, who came of novelistic age with the marvelous Muriella Pent. Russell Smith who is a walking defence of the novel.

Smith underlines the illogic of McGoogan’s thesis: that he says fiction shouldn’t be promoted because not enough people read it. Says Smith, “He seemed to be contradicting himself: If [non-fiction is] the most popular, then it’s the most popular. What’s his problem?” He questions McGoogan’s assertion that non-fiction better stands the test of time, and doubts whether Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition is truly a book people will “still” be arguing about in one hundred years. “Say, Ken, you wouldn’t be thinking of the furiously held opinions among Arctic historians, would you?”

The lesson, says Smith (invoking tea!), “is partly that we all live in our own little teapots”. But then Ken McGoogan has responded from his. Oh, Ken, who should have quit whilst he was ahead. His stompy reply doesn’t read so well: “[Smith] writes that I think novels are stupid, when I have had three published!!!” (Okay, exclamation marks mine). “Margaret Atwood wrote the intro to Frozen in Time!!!” And finally, without any modification, “As to literary longevity, Mr. Smith writes: ‘It’s 100 years from now. Ken McGoogan or Alice Munro?’/ A fairer question might be: Ken McGoogan or Russell Smith? On that one, I’ll take my chances.” Oh, he better hope his name appreciates…

Literary longevity is about as easy to predict as the weather. Read Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and among the variety of ways you will be enlightened, you will learn how threatened was Woolf by near-contemporaries “The Edwardians”: Mr’s Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. That their work and reputations so seemed to overpower her own within her lifetime. How astounding, Virginia Woolf– she of the song, the movie, the collections, the cult. That she wasn’t always in fashion? Nobody writes songs about Galsworthy after all.

The point being that nobody knows how it goes, and the canon is all about fashion. But also to show what happens to non-fiction, as opposed to fiction. I am sure that today Mrs. Dalloway reads more similarly to how it did 80 years ago than “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” does, and this, my friends, is timelessness. Not that I believe timelessness determines value, but with the subject brought up already, I will say that fiction fits the bill in a way that non-fic never will. (And I am speaking in very general terms).

The context of a novel is fixed, while that of non-fiction is much more in flux. For example, the best book I ever saw was Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance by Rose, 1958. Which is not to say that non-fiction loses its value over time; no, I would say that value is added, for all it tells us about the past, and in particular about what we thought of the past in the past. But in this process, the text becomes more object than book– a relic even. Moreover we tend to judge it based on how much it got wrong, which is usually most things. And this isn’t timelessness, but rather time magnified.

Teapots indeed. Now, to bed.

November 19, 2007

Ephemera

I’ve been getting complaints about the magazine rack for ages, that it was full to capacity, and so I decided that today would be the day I got around to it. To tidying it up, I mean, which meant throwing away printed matter— a sacrilege. I would keep the magazines that were under a year old, I determined, but those that were older would be thrown in recycling.

A magazine’s disposability is its very nature, which is hard for some of us to understand. It’s what separates them from books, of course, but I have also learned that ephemera can have value ever-lasting. It is difficult to reconcile this with the finite size of both my house and my husband’s patience, and also with the minimal odds that I will ever need to reference the August 2006 Vanity Fair. Which I’ve thrown away by the way, will never re-remember the contents of, and will probably be none the worse for it.

I do clip though, and I’ve clipped for about ten years and across three continents. I am not sure when I’ll ever need to reference anything within my box o’ clips, but still they’re there, they’re tangible, and quite manageably stored within a small-sized cardboard box. Today before I threw away a stack of old The Walruses, I cut out a short-story by Helen Humphreys, whose context has become different since I read her book last week; “The American Gigantic” by Mark Kingwell, which will be relevant to something else I’m working on; Lisa Moore’s consideration of Newfoundland and Tasmania, among other things.

These articles, clipped and stapled, will join in the box such illustrious company as the Joan Didion “Proust Questionanaire” (Vanity Fair circa 2003), various Chandra Levy sensations, a whole bunch of stuff on apocalypse (from scientific sources– I have long wanted to write a story about a pregnant physicist forecasting the end of the world), profiles of Tina Brown and Bonnie Fuller, Paula Yates memorials, three generations of Presley women in Vogue (August 2004, and somehow Priscilla looks youngest of all of them), Dominick Dunne’s tribute to his brother (VF, March 2004), Heather Mallick on Unless, etc (The Globe & Mail, May 18 2002), and my very favourite (from the National Post, July 8 2001) headlined “Elvis Presley’s cousin killed in shootout with fugitive”.

November 19, 2007

Love Falls by Esther Freud

Though I have always enjoyed Esther Freud’s novels, I must admit that until her latest Love Falls I have never found them altogether satisfying. The writing is lovely, the description mesmerizing, the realism shockingly embedded in the romance, but for me the adolescent point of view of a book like Hideous Kinky left something to be desired. I love Freud’s Englishness, whether abroad or at home as in Peerless Flats or The Sea House, but the latter– her previous novel– faltered in its vividness.

Whereas with Love Falls, Freud appears to have assumed a brand new confidence. She is back in familiar territory– touches of travelogue, the young English girl abroad, this time in Tuscany– but in the creation of this particular girl, Freud has found her strength. Perhaps because Lara Riley is just old enough, but still not yet altogether. On a cusp: she looks into a wishing well, and dares to wish for her whole life.

During the summer of her seventeenth year, in 1981 as Britain is absorbed by the Royal Wedding, Lara embarks upon a journey to Italy with the father Lambert. As he had left her free-spirited mother when Lara was young and she has only even known him peripherally, Lara envisages the trip as a bonding experience, and she is disappointed when reality proves otherwise. Lambert, a writer, remains as consumed with his work as ever, and their host, his friend Caroline, Lara finds forbidding. She begins to take more of an interest in their neighbours the Willoughbys, impressed by their exoticism, wickedness and sophistication, and drawn in by her increasing attraction to Kip, their teenage son.

In the UK Love Falls was published this July, and how I wish it could have been a summer book here too– its heat is palpable. I adore the cover art, which seems a perfect depiction of the vividness Freud truly achieves. The stirring water too hints at dark undertones which she never shies away from. Lara’s coming of age is no cliche, and the novel’s disturbing climax fits perfectly within Freud’s context. Within the context of teenageness in general too: how much you get away with when you’re that young, if you’re lucky, and how far one can go without consequences (which is often frighteningly far).

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.