April 27, 2007
Persephone Books
A recent reference by Maud Newton and another by dovergreyreader scribbles was enough to pique my interest in Persephone Books. Persephone Books are “revived” twentieth century novels, usually by women writers, and often now-forgotten texts. With their look they appear to be as branded as Penguins (a good thing), and absolutely lovely. And it perfectly breaks my heart that I don’t live in England, and nor will we be in London when we go in June so that I can pop into the shop and just pick up one, two, or ten. But then again I’ll get there someday, and it’s nice to know that such a lovely thing exists.
April 27, 2007
Never never never salt
Up here at the cottage there is no line between inside and out; the domestic is only barely tamed. We will wake up with windows dripping on the inside, and grit underfoot. Newspapers are kindling. Bat’s wings flap in the rafters while we sleep out under the stars. The old board games have missing pieces, mismatched dice, and mice have ravaged the Monopoly money, leaving their droppings behind. And the screen door is ripped, which is how the flies get in, but if the hole was patched, the bugs would only find another way.
Nothing much else happens. Which is the very point of being here, fortunately and unfortunately. I picture cottage days constructed of blocks, only the same shapes, patterns and colours. Once or twice we’ll go into town for a diversion, but diversions get in the way of hours spent hot and sunburnt, prune-skinned and water-logged. Evenings are warmed round the fire always, with marshmallows burning on the pointy ends of sticks, and warbly old songs everybody else knows the wrong words to.
Fish and chips and vinegar, never never never salt
April 26, 2007
Cake or Death by Heather Mallick
My favourite thing is when irate readers respond to Heather Mallick’s column with accusations of hypocrisy or contradiction as though the world were so straightforward that consistency for the sake of itself was a virtue instead of a limit. Heather Mallick’s new book Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life is absolutely riddled with contradictions and Mallick is well aware of this. In her introduction she answers her titular proposal with cake and death– a somewhat morbid extension of having your cake and eating it too, but morbid is just the way Mallick is feeling these days. Justifiably so really, and why should it mean she remains cake-free? If you’ve got a cake, you might as well eat it. I mean, what kind of a moron wouldn’t?
Cake or Death is a wonderful book of essays. Not because I usually admire Mallick’s writing, and not because the book references Margaret Drabble at least twice, but because the reading was just a pleasure. Even with the death, because Mallick’s got the necessary humour (which the irate readers don’t seem to understand). I liked this book so much that I read it all the way home yesterday, and I was walking. I liked this book so much that I read four of the essays last night to my husband. He liked those four essays so much, he wants to read the rest of the book now. Heather Mallick is witty, and she is intelligent, bookish, critical, preposterous, unflinching and brave. If you take her too seriously she can be offensive in that way men are much more likely to get away with. Heather Mallick is a voice in a sometimes awful wilderness, and this book is a terrific accomplishment.
Heather Mallick knows the Woolfian essay. In an unfair review, the essays were criticized for “not having a point”, but if an essay can be summed up in a point, then why write it? Indeed the journey is the point, as Mallick’s digressions, seasoned with cultural references and details from her own life, take her readers where they need to go. And yes, along the journey Heather Mallick often contradicts herself, but I would suggest that your thought processes must be awfully limited if yours don’t. As Woolf does in her essays, Mallick follows the mind, the eye, wherever it goes. And this is interesting. It’s not easy, quick, or classifiable, but neither is life.
What is life are these trips: “Fear Festival”, which illuminates everything in the world which is liable to kill you; “How to Ignore Things” which uses Jackie O’s example as an alternative to therapy; “Born Ugly” which she concludes with “You are not beautiful. Almost no one is. We start with the race already halfway run and then we age to boot, so get used to it. Try to be interesting, and work on the content of your character, not the pallor of your skin”; “The People I Detest” subset “bookhaters”; her essay on Doris Lessing made me decide to take the plunge. I liked every single one of these.
There are so many bad books and here is a good one. And this is about all that I know that is so simple.
April 26, 2007
Rainy Thursday
As I return to the world of work next week, I’ve spent my second-last free weekday properly. I was pleased that it was raining so I could do so. Reworking a short story of mine, and reading two little books. I loved The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, and After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. I loved watching the rain come down, sipping too many cups of tea to count, and being here to receive my first copy of the London Review of Books. I have such a crush on the postman. And am I ever going to miss this lovely life of mine.
Next up (and aren’t I lucky?): Divisadero, the brand new novel by Michael Ondaatje.
April 25, 2007
Encountering the great unread
“People shouldn’t worryabout disliking books widely accepted as great, or avoiding them for decades. They should wait for that stage when they are ready for the book, for it will come. I have read with such excess all my life that I could always use the excuse that I had another book on the go. I didn’t know this when I was young, but I would still have plenty of time to encounter the great unread.” -Heather Mallick, “Lessing is More”
April 25, 2007
Righting wrongs
Like it or not, books aren’t meant in general. Most people are predisposed to disliking some kind of book, which is to say nothing about the people or the books except that the world is large and people are varied. Happily you can always find something else to read. And so then I wonder why so many people don’t. Why do people persist in reading books they are predisposed to disliking? Further, why do people persist in reviewing books they are predisposed to disliking? This is not to say that genre is resolute, that horizons shant be broadened, but I just think that I would be the person least inclined to judge a fantasy novel, for example, or a computer science textbook to take it further. Similarly the writer of this review, who professes to being driven mad by columnists such as Heather Mallick, probably wasn’t the best choice to review Mallick’s new book Cake or Death. Heather Mallick is an altogether devisive character, and so wouldn’t it have been fair to assign her book to a writer who, I don’t know, doesn’t detest her?
(Though of course the G&M does have its axe to grind. How petty.)
I, however, am perfectly qualified to review Heather Mallick’s new book. I adore Heather Mallick, but yet I was objective enough to admit that her previous book had problems. But her new book is absolutely brilliant. I’m about 2/3 through and I just reread the Globe review and the unfairness of it made me so angry I had to stop (see? it’s easy). And so get ready for some great excerpts, and a review tonight or tomorrow. And then we can consider a blatant wrong just a little bit righted.
April 24, 2007
A Stock of Stories
“When they tell these stories to friends (as they sometimes do) Brenda never says to Jack, ‘Please don’t tell that old story again,’ and he never says to her, ‘We’ve all heard that one.’ They love their stories and tacitly think of them as their private hoard, their private stock, exquisitely flavoured by the retelling. The timing and phrasing have reached a state of near perfection; it’s taken them years to get them right. It seems to Brenda that all couples of long standing must have just such a stock of stories to draw upon”. -Carol Shields, Happenstance
April 24, 2007
It's hard to find good music
Indeed, I successfully defended my Masters Thesis yesterday, and came home to this beautiful bouquet sent by my family. Lucky I, and luckier still for this Saturday afternoon Stuart and I are going out to celebrate the end of school in the fashion I have chosen, and it is a very special fashion. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
Linkylink:
-Find an update over at my hobby blog Now Doing! Posted are pictures of the blanket I knit this winter, and my current patchwork project.
-I was thrilled to find out that the marvelous Saffrina Welch has started a blog. Saff is a friend of Stu’s from uni, and when she and her boyfriend Ivan came to stay with us in December, we had a brilliant time. So it will be fun to see what she gets up to online.
-Bookwise, I was happy to see that Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage has been nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers. As I expressed when I read it last March, The Lizard Cage is an extraordinary novel, and deserves so much recognition.
-I’ve never read Barbara Pym, but I feel like I ought to after having read this wonderful feature on the Barbara Pym Society Conference.
-And on an unrelated note: Kirsten Dunst is credited with saying: “I was brought up on Guns ‘N Roses, the Les Miserables soundtrack and anything my mother listened to. But it’s much harder to find great music these days.” Bless.
Still reading Happenstance very happily, though copy errors make my eyes bleed. I also picked up the new Hart House Review today and it’s absolutely beautiful. The ever-accomplished Rebecca Rosenblum took a top prize for fiction. Congratulations RR! Some poetry as well by other creative writing comrades. What a bunch.
April 23, 2007
Sassy
Banana Yoshimoto, according to the blurb on my 1994 copy of Kitchen, is “hotter than a steamin’ bowl of yaki soba” sez Sassy. Oh Sassy.
First, isn’t that vaguely offensive? Like saying, “James Joyce is more tuberlier than a potato”. Or “Virginia Woolf is more captivating than an Imperialist”. “Ali Smith is more down to earth than a turnip”. I could go on and on. Would a writer really want to be compared to a bowl of noodles?
I never really got Sassy. I was a bit too young, and way too uncool. References to orl sx and body piercing made me uncomfortable, and I was frightened of drugs and dyed hair (because we all know that one just leads to the other). I was so uncool in Sassy‘s heyday that I found out Kurt Cobain died just before symphonic band practice. We were at Britt’s house, and Jennie delivered the news. She thought his name was Kirk, and we weren’t sure that it wasn’t. I knew the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” because I’d read an article about it in my mom’s Chatelaine. And this was our youth. The very beginning of it, at least. Luckily I got more in touch, but by the time I did, Sassy was already dead.
April 22, 2007
April can be so uncruel
We stuck close to home this weekend, which is natural as close to our home is a wonderful place to be on a weekend like this. Lots of indulgences: first ice cream of 2007, first outdoor patio supper with the first pitcher of beer. Today we partook in chicken wings as the street went by. I’ve felt mellow enough to be boneless, which is so nice (and rare).
I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto this morn, and I loved it. My problem with Japanese fiction in the past has been its weirdness (I’m a realist to the core) but I rode with it, and I enjoyed it. It’s the first Japanese fiction I’ve read since we lived there, and it was nice to go back for an hour or two. Now reading Happenstance by Carol Shields, who I continue to be obsessed with. And then on to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald who I’ve never read before, but is much championed over at dovegreyreader scribbles. I’m curious.
Tonight we’re watching Notes on a Scandal (a bookish film!) in order that I can get through the evening without fretting to death about my thesis defense (!) tomorrow morning.
