March 15, 2007
Uneasy
I am somewhat uneasy based on the fact that the story I’ve been working on for a year now must be put away for a week or two. Until I get some feedback on the whole thing, which might just lead me toward defenestration. And I just don’t know what to do with myself. Luckily I’m reading Lullabies for Little Criminals and it’s gripping and surprising.
I am also uneasy by the fact that it looked like spring, it wasn’t, I didn’t wear gloves, and now my hands won’t move properly.
March 15, 2007
Quite
I tend to overuse the word “quite”, which is probably apparent from this blog, but I’m not going to check to be sure because then I’ll just be embarrassed. And so I’ve just gone through my entire story and removed most instances of the dreaded Q word. It really is the most ineffectual word one can use. In its ability to either intensify or lighten meaning, it comes to mean nothing. It’s not so bad in speech I think, when tone can guide it, but in writing it just obscures the point. Or in my writing, at least.
Not so related, but thinking about this has made me remember the way students use to use “maybe” when we taught English conversation in Japan. “Maybe” preceded anything someone didn’t feel quite (! but I won’t backspace) comfortable saying.
“Why don’t you love your boyfriend Yumiko?”
“May-be [drawn out long] he is not so handsome.”
or
“Are you okay today Tadayuki?”
“Hmmmm. May-be, I am sleepy.”
And most effectively:
“Gosh, it feels cold in here today.”
“May-be there is hole in back of your trousers.”
Other words I overuse: suppose, perhaps, so, bit, sure, fast, etc I am sure.
March 14, 2007
Anywhere
In lieu of news about us going without jackets these days, check out a good old fashioned spring post over at Calhounsville. And I have been gobbling books like mad: just finished The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, which was like one big looong story out of her prize-winning collection. This is not a bad thing; it’s just not the most typically-structured novel (ie my thesis advisor would probably hate it). Does that woman wrench hearts though? Also, I’m realizing that final changes to my story are just about done, which is very odd. I’m sending it out to my helpful copy-editors this weekend. And now I’m about to fall into the tub with Ami McKay (haha- she has a cool website though).
March 13, 2007
On time
Alan Lightman won my heart with this article recommending books on “the mysterious nature of time”. He’s mixing up the fic and nonfic, suggesting Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity, and The Seven Day Circle by Eviatar Zerubavel. Apart from the good picks, I learned a whole lot about time from Lightman’s article itself.
March 12, 2007
Helpless by Barbara Gowdy
Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless shifts between a variety of points of view: Rachel, an uncommonly beautiful young girl who has been abducted; her mother Celia, desperate with worry; Ron, the appliance repairman conscious of his unhealthy urges, who is holding Rachel captive in his basement; and Ron’s girlfriend, Nancy, who struggles between her feelings for Ron and her own attachment to Rachel. These various points of view– each one convincing in its own right– enhance the structure of this suspenseful but relatively straightforward narrative, and the result is a multi-dimensional examination of empathy, understanding, and love.
Christie Blatchford is thanked by Gowdy in her acknowledgements, and I imagine her counsel helped to lend this book its verisimilitude– she’s written about so many of these missing children cases in her columns over the years. The near-journalistic quality of Gowdy’s depiction of the police investigation is one of the most compelling parts of this book.
Empathy is essential to the process of tracking down missing children, as investigators must try to get inside an abductor’s heads to know where the crime might go. Such attempts at understanding are also enacted by Celia, who herself suffers with being empathized with by those who really cannot possibly understand what she is going through (the absolute impossibility of true empathy, dealt with also in Afterwards). Gowdy portrays the resistance of empathy as well; speaking to a man who actually does understand her situation, Celia is “instantly on her guard. She doesn’t want her feelings to be feelings he knows. His child died.” Similarly, Nancy also struggles with and against her understanding of Ron’s intentions with Rachel, and links the girl’s plight with trauma from her own past.
These concurrent themes of empathy and the resistance of help the reader to negotiate their understanding of Ron, who, as Gowdy explains in this CBC interview isn’t likeable, but is real– as in complex, interesting and human. His motivation for the abduction is love, which is twisted where it lies, but stems from a long-ago place more understandable. And though this understanding verges on discomforting at times, Gowdy’s is a fascinating portrayal of an often-simplified type of character– also the case with Celia and Nancy, who are fleshed out well beyond the stock figures of “single mom” or “former addict”. Her child’s voice for Rachel is also very convincing.
Wonderfully located in a readable Toronto and secure of its time, Helpless considers the sxualization of young girls, the make-up of the modern family, maternal devotion, and rites of childhood. The tension present from the very start is upheld and deftly orchestrated by Gowdy throughout, and makes for a rich and readable book.
Note: Heather Mallick cites this novel in her latest column .
March 11, 2007
Round the Back of My Hotel
We just got The Fratelli’s CD “Costello Music” which we’re obsessed with.
We were also happy to find that they are our age. Stu went off The Arctic Monkeys when he found out they were still in their teens (though I actually don’t think they are anymore).
March 11, 2007
Other Springs
Late Morning March
The air through the open window is the same
as when you breathed for what you don’t believe in now
and such anachronistic miracles are dizzying
separating you from local time.
I remember every spring that came before this
linked in the smells the city makes.
The armature of scattered selves
fastening you to year-to-year.
I posted this poem last year, and wrote it many years before that. And while I don’t think it’s a particularly good poem, and I don’t even write poems anymore, it says everything I want to say about this time of year, so I feel no need to say it another way. Because there is something so evocative about spring time. I think one’s senses become primed after months of hibernation, and so walking around there is so much to see, notice and revel in. And it takes you back to other times you felt that way, other springs.
Yesterday we walked around as if in a time warp. The weather wasn’t even particularly good, but I wore a vest instead of a winter coat, and we could hold bare hands instead of gloves. And we stomped around places I used to know before I knew Stuart, and at the same time the weather and how we spent our time reminded us of passing Saturdays in Nottingham, and quite a few things happened that were exactly like in Japan. And so yesterday, which was a magical lucky day, we relived all our springs at once.
We got up early and I got three hours of work in, just so I would be happy for the rest of the day. We went up to Bloor and went out for lunch sets at Thai Basil, and then searched for treasures in the bargain basement at BMV Books. After that we went to Whole Foods, with a basket in tow so we wouldn’t look conspicuous, and went up and down the aisles eating free samples amongst the beautiful people. Our basket stayed empty. We went back to Bloor Street and looked at clothes after that, and got depressed because beige seems to the new black. (And we saw Pickle Me This reader Erica G. at the Gap. Hi Erica!). We went to The Cookbook Store next, and bought the three recipes books we don’t yet own by our beloved Jeanne Lemlin omnibussed in hardover and on sale for $13.00. What luck! I showed Stuart The Toronto Reference Library which he’d never seen before and he was quite impressed. And then he got new shoes, which he loves and they’re wonderful, and we got a box of cookies and a chocolate bar as a gift with the purchase. (?) We had tea/coffee at7 West after and looked at the paper. Walked home, and then had just about an hour to relax before going out again to the Jonker/Lev’s for dinner– but there was magic on the way, of course. The Bloor-Danforth Line had been diverted and we got to see Lower Bay Station! And then the rest of the night proceeded absolutely splendid, with good food and fine company.
Today is a little bit shorter, but yesterday stretched on so long, I am not bothered.
March 11, 2007
Chang chang chang
It has been a joy to return to shorter novels. I enjoyed Middlemarch, but it wasn’t constructed for a reader like me. Slipping back into the fiction of my time is like putting on something that fits me perfectly, and maybe that means I just don’t want to work so hard for my reading pleasure, but it’s always nice when it comes easy. Particularly with books as great as those I’ve been reading lately. I am now reading Helpless by Barbara Gowdy, which is the first book by her I’ve ever read. And you’d think I would have read The White Bones considering I’ve got a publically-acknowledged thing for elephants, but the premise of the book has always made me keep my distance. Perhaps this new novel will pave my way toward it?
Note: Afterwards and Radiance reviewed favourably in The Globe this week.
March 10, 2007
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert
Though a startlingly original novel, Rachel Seiffer’s Afterwards brought other works to mind, in the most flattering way. Seiffert’s sparing prose made me think of Jon McGregor’s in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, its consideration of grandparents is similar to Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young and In My Prime, and the beautifully-written portrayal an English working class ethos reminded me of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Which, again, is not to say that Seiffert’s novel is derivative, but rather there is so much going on within it, a review could take a wide variety of approaches.
I’ll keep my approach wide. Here we find prose as lovely as the story it tells. Seibbert’s omission of all unnecessary words and discription is so finely tuned that she matches the way our thoughts proceed, and reading along the page we miss nothing. She shows a particular mastery of providing the best example with which to illuminate an entire character, which is so difficult to do . But the story too– a love story, in which the love is not at the forefront. And each character comes into this story with their own backstory (as people tend to do) and it all ties up together in the end, with such a marvelous cohesion that even the unresolved ending is somehow satisfactory.
Here is the story of Alice, who meets Joseph. Her grandmother has recently died, and she is also taking care to visit regularly with her grandfather, David, a difficult man, and she is curious to know about his time in the British Imperial Army in Kenya in the 1950s. She is bothered by what he keeps from her, and she begins to see a similar reticence in her new boyfriend Joseph, who can identify with Alice’s grandfather’s situation through his experiences in the British army himself, having served in Northern Ireland. Not that the two men connect easily, by any means, and their commonalities eventually surface in an explosive and disturbing climax. And Alice stays outside of all of this. As readers, we are privy to the backstories, but Alice never gets to know, and her coming to terms with the impossibility of knowing is one of the intriguing themes of the story, and a neat twist on love. The flipside of that is how Joseph and David deal with their isolation, and whether or not telling is any release after all. What do you do with the past once it’s over?
No answers, of course, but Seiffert gives us pages and pages on which to ruminate.
March 9, 2007
The Joy of Things
My kitchen windowsill is one of my favourite corners of our apartment and it’s become even more pleasant with the addition of this little gerbera plant– a gift from Jennie who came to dinner last night. The flowers bloom and we had a delightful time. Also notable on the sill is my yellow dragonfly sugarbowl– at gift from Kate. Oh, the joy of things. In other notables, the letters which spell SLOAN have rubbed off my keyboard. M is on its way out too. I can’t see that I favour these letters particularly, and I wonder overused words of mine have hastened the erasure? Fruit and veg is getting cheaper at the grocery store, which indictates spring is coming. Weather forecasts above 0 for this weekend indicate much of the same, oh bliss. This short winter has been a long long time happening. And I am hankering after watermelonish festivities.
