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.
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.
