July 9, 2007
Completely a fool
Reading a classic every month takes up so much reading time and reading effort, but oh the payoff. I adored The Portrait of a Lady, which I hardly remembered from my first reading seven years ago. Oh, the mastery. And that Henrietta Stackpole was redeemed in the end; it pleased me that my younger self was not completely a fool. It was interesting, by the way, to see how self-reflexively I used to read my books– the lines underlined. It was as though I used to read seeking myself (“Yes yes yes! That’s meeee!” my notes appear to shriek. “That’s just how it is!!”). Any line that summed up my experience, my struggles, my pain. I once read a book where a character had the same name as a boy I loved, and I underlined every single instance of that name. How ridiculous. And so we’ve come full circle, I suppose. It seems that my younger self was indeed completely a fool.
Now reading a new novel–Salt Rain (from Australia!) by Sarah Armstrong. And so the alternating rereading begins, and next I will get to We Need to Talk About Kevin.
July 9, 2007
Unsung Love Song
I want to sing a love song: I love the Gardiner Expressway. I decided it was necessary to start singing yesterday whilst browsing through the latest issue of Spacing (which looked quite good by the way). An article, albeit interesting, about the loss of “South Parkdale” to said expressway, and I realized I was so tired of Gardiner-bashing. It takes us nowhere, which, the Gardiner, my friends, decidedly doesn’t.
The facts are these and I know them: that in this day and age, we no longer build expressways right through neighbourhoods. That Jane Jacobs was right. That the expressway network into Toronto is decidedly rubbish, as anyone who’s ever tried to drive out of the city around five o’clock will realize. That the reason the expressway network is so crap is because it was never actually completed (thanks to the efforts of Jacobs et. al), which is a good thing. And yes, also a bad thing, if you happen to drive a car.
So a good thing and a bad thing: such is the story of the Gardiner Expressway. Indeed it’s very bad, and we all know why. It’s crumbly, ugly, creepy underneath in midafternoon let alone the dead of night, cuts the city off from the waterfront, encourages driving when public transport should be an object, it’s noisy, etc. But the flipside is there– the song I want to sing.
As a pedestrian, a cyclist and driver who owns two legs, a bike, but no car, I think I’ve got no bias. And to enter Toronto from driving east on the Gardiner provides one of my favourite views: cityscape against the sky, the CN Tower just off to the south. Whizzing along on an elevated road right out of a retro imagining of the space age. The Gardiner is a relic from a future that was never to be. No highway has ever made me feel more like Judy Jetson. I live in a city and here it is, glimmering in late-afternoon sunshine. A cousin to the CN Tower, built of the same sensibility. When the future didn’t always just mean an apocolypse.
The Gardiner might not have been built with the pedestrian or cyclist in mind, but then I wonder: how fantastic is an expressway that can be crossed this safely? Isn’t the Gardiner an amalgam of pedestrian and driver interests, no matter how skewed? Definitely it stands as a physical barrier between our city and the waterfront, but that barrier is also something of an illusion. The advantages of this sort of road have hardly been taken advantage of. The problem of access to the waterfront is not the Gardiner’s, but rather a confused plan of interests: industrial, port, rail, upscale-residential and parkland, none of which seem to complement each other. In terms of all the problems presenting by the unfortunate lack of planning in this area, the Gardiner seems to me one of our most advantageous.
I guess we could bury it, but wouldn’t years of construction represent a far more formidable barrier to the waterfront? It would also cost too much money, and, oh, never ever happen. And so, I say, the solution is to love the Gardiner instead. Sure we can mourn South Parkdale, and we can miss the history that was lost with the thoughtless planning of yore (through disregard for the past and too much zealotry toward the future), but it’s far more important to learn to live with what we’ve got. For the city to maintain the Gardiner so it continues to serve its optimum purpose. For plans for waterfront development to work with the expressway, rather than ignoring it. And for those with urban interests to stop knocking it; you are boring, and I know all you say already. It would be far more interesting, I think, to look for reasons to love the Gardiner instead. It’s a more sensible strategy, and if you look, the reasons are there.
(Oh yes, and I found that image here).
July 9, 2007
Canada's Greenest Shopping Bag
Currently in love with Canada’s Greenest Shopping Bag from President’s Choice. In which I do not tote my President’s Choice organic groceries at all, but instead it’s the perfect size to hold my lunch, a novel, obligatory odds and ends, as well as my baseball glove. And I really would buy one for everyone I know and love so they could share in the delight, but I don’t have to. They can buy one themselves. For my new favourite fashion accessory costs only 99 cents!
July 8, 2007
Store Bought Women
We shall save the island for next weekend then, as plans were thwarted. For some reason Saturday morning we didn’t wake up until eleven, and this morning we woke up to thunder. Fortunately there was plenty of other fun to be had. Friday night we had dinner at the Brown-Smiths (who become “the Smiths” full-stop come January how exciting!), and relished rooftop patio goodness and finally the CN Tower lit up. I hadn’t seen it before. Clearly I neither get out nor look up enough. Yesterday’s highlight was a swim in the pool at Christie Pitts– what a delight! Sweet relief from the humidity. Today was such a Sunday– I read The Portrait of a Lady (nearly done), worked on a new true story full of lies, and Stuart devoured The Raw Shark Texts in one sitting. This weekend we watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and adored it. You might remember that both of us read the book and loved it earlier this year. I love when a film can so well complement the book it came from. Two more days until the new Crowded House! And the big news? This weekend I successfully baked a chocolate cake. This has never happened before, as my cakes have variously exploded, disintegrated, failed to bake etc. But this cake is perfect, and easy. I shall not attempt a different recipe ever again. And tea of the week? Pomegranate Green. Yum zum.
July 6, 2007
Destination
My husband is a miracle. I was stomping around the house like a troll and instead of administering a good slap, he bought train tickets (!!!). Yes, come September we’ve got a Montreal mini-break planned, and I am absolutely thrilled. Plan to become a character out of a Hugh MacLennan novel for the occasion (though I am a girl and therefore that would involve inspidity, hmm). Further, in travel fun, British seaside towns gallery. I vote for Brighton, but where is Skegness? I am excited for the weekend. Travel still, albeit closer to home, we plan to take the ferry to Toronto Island.
July 5, 2007
The thing with academics
“‘I’ll tell you what my thing is with academics,’ she continued in a harder tone. ‘They take something that is complete, say a story, that is not material to work with– it’s complete; it is to the writer anyway– and they take it as crude ore that they’re taking out of the ground, to suit some purpose of their own, and I find this outrageous.'” -Mavis Gallant in this month’s Walrus.
July 5, 2007
Stackpole
Maud Newton has pointed me toward Marilynne Robinson’s review of The Maytrees. Katie Roiphe shows that a literary allusion can make self-reflexiveness much more interesting. Outsider top tens (though they missed the obvious choice).
Still reading Portrait of a Lady, and enjoying it, but then my twenty-first century sensibilities makes the nineteenth century read at a dilatory pace. But no, it’s a rich book. I like the American/English dynamic, which I believe would have gone over my head the first time. And Henrietta Stackpole is not so much an inspiration as absolutely absurd, but perhaps that was always the point.
July 3, 2007
ReReading BeGins
And so The ReReading Project Re-begins with The Portrait of a Lady, last read in August 2000 according to what I wrote on the title page. It was for an undergraduate English course. I was a burgeoning feminist then, and remember being entranced by Henrietta Stackpole who wouldn’t consider marriage: “Not til I’ve seen Europe”. Which became my mantra (not that anyone was dying to marry me anyway), and I did get to Europe (where I found a husband, so there you go). I’ve just glanced at the first page so far, but the first paragraph is far more meaningful now than it must have been back in 2000. Begins the book, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Yes yes yes!! I didn’t even like tea in 2000, I don’t think, but now I see that no other sentence has ever been so true.
July 2, 2007
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
One paragraph near the end of Annie Dillard’s new novel The Maytrees seems to embody Dillardness, in my opinion. “Lou wondered where his information would go when he died. Would filaments of learning plant patterns on earth? Would his brain train the sinking plankton to know their way around the seafloor from here to Stellwagen Bank? Her brain would deliquesce too, and with it all she had learned topside. Which was not much, she considered, nor anywhere near worked out. Bacteria would unhook her painstakingly linked neurons and fling them over their shoulders and carry them home to chew up for their horrific babies.”
There’s nothing missing, I tell you: vocabulary I’ve got to learn first (deliquesce means “to melt away or to disappear as if by melting”); syntax I have to twist my head to get around; an organic link between learned information (from books of course) and the natural world; grotesque images of fecundity; the very fact of wondering. Annie Dillard so plants her books in the world, and The Maytrees is no exception. Though this is the first novel I’ve read by her (and this is her second novel), it is impossible to disconnect it from her oeuvre.
In her book The Writing Life Annie Dillard writes the wisest thing I’ve ever read– that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. And so lives are spent in The Maytrees, by days. Toby and Lou Maytree live in Provincetown near the beach, prone to the elements, the sea, the storms, the dunes. Idyllic is their life: she paints, he writes, they have a son. “Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees.” And so goes their love story, except that Annie Dillard is not sentimental. As she saw the darkness of creation in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so too does she acknowledge the pain of love. After fourteen years of marriage, the Maytrees live apart for twenty years, to be reunited by tragic and complicated circumstances. So much of love is about forgiveness.
Like Martin Levin in this Saturday’s paper, my full disclosure necessitates acknowledging that I am a big fan of Annie Dillard. I am not sure that the average reader unaware of her work could pick up The Maytrees and understand it outside of the context of from whence it came. The erudition, bibliophilia, that her characters are people just as much as the dunes are. This is a difficult book, full of so innumerable references I didn’t understand, words I’ve yet to learn, sentences I had to read again and again to get their images in my head. Oh, but once I had. And that which is out of my grasp has me reaching, which I appreciate. There is so much beauty here.
Dillard is a challenging and exciting writer, and I am so pleased to see that The Maytrees is as good as that which came before.
July 2, 2007
When the sun shines
We went down to the new HTO Park down at the bottom of Spadina today, and loved it. Sitting underneath one of the fabulous yellow umbrellas, feet in the sand, reading away (Stuart is now reading Before I Wake and is stuck to it as much as I was). Boats were going by, planes overhead, and the expressway out behind us, and so clearly were we in the world– but what a perfect little part of it.
Such has been the whole weekend, really.
