September 14, 2006
Currently fascinated by…
The Shell Oil Tower (aka Bulova Tower) at the CNE, 1955-1986.
September 13, 2006
Long List
Upsetting revelations have included that I recently became the sort of person who stows tissue on their person and then forgets about it. Does that make sense? It was devastating. It was definitely a one-off, and I promise not to do it again. Otherwise, it’s all back to school and I am reading and learning, and I finished my summer job today so that I could do that absolutely properly. I recently read A Perfect Night to Go to China and I didn’t like it much, which is significant, because you don’t often hear me say that about a book. I also read Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, which was very Nancy Mitford. Now reading (for school) The Double Hook by Sheila Watson, which is intriguing. Next up (for fun) is A Big Storm Knocked it Over by Laurie Colwin. And I got my TA reading list today, which means a dream has finally come true and someone is paying me to read books. Oh yes, and The Giller Long List here. Plus, sign up for your copy of I wish my enemies were Russians, the new release from Pickle Me This Press. Copies should be bound this weekend and on sale next week for $5 each.
September 10, 2006
Finished. For now. Until tomorrow when I start again.
I’ve been wary of taking too much satisfaction from sheer volume, ever since the teacher librarian at my elementary school informed me that it was “Quality, not quantity” that was important when evaluating one’s grade three report on cats. But when “just getting the thing done” has been the whole object, I can’t help but be satisifed with 143501 words, and 400 pages, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The rest, I can take care of later. A draft this summer was my goal, and school starts tomorrow. Otherwise, this all means the weekend sort of fell by the wayside. I knit a lot, and read the newspaper, but mostly I just wrote. This afternoon, I went to the now-annual CW bbq, and was reunited with many familiar faces, and found some new ones. After days shut away, slogging away at this tale of mine, the stimulation was a bit much, but I really enjoyed myself and I am so in that fall-jacket, bonfire, back to school mood.
I loved the headline for the Margaret Atwood article in The Globe yesterday: The Priorities: first writing, then the laundry, as I sit here on the cusp of my temporary new incarnation as student/housewife. I also cannot wait for Atwood’s new book. Also excellent, Rex Murphy on satire, and everything I never knew about the Bloor Street Swiss Chalet. Stephanie Klein in The Guardian. Ian Rankin on surprising parallels between fact and fiction. A tribute to Roald Dahl. Calvin Trillin in The Globe (and his Alice Off The Page is going to become a book).
September 9, 2006
Papa's bank book wasn't big enough
What transpired yesterday was an absolute miracle. Shockingly so. Yesterday afternoon we completed our Christmas Shopping for the British Family, as last December I vowed we would while we traipsed around nightmarish shopping malls seeking that perfect something for Stuart’s dad, and then spent a small fortune sending it all by air. Best of all, all the gifts are excellent, and they’re going to be wrapped and packed this week and sent by sea with plenty of time. And it was an altogether pleasant afternoon, in the uncrowded shopping mall. A bit of a waste of a sunny day, but worth it. It was a combination Christmas/Back to School shopping venture, and we got a whole mess of new clothes. Last Fall, we were too poor to buy clothes and the year before that we lived in the land of the pygmy peoples, and as a result, we’re even more raggedy than can be expected from people with our lack of fashion sense. No longer however. New jeans, and a replacement hoodie for the one I bought in August 2002, and best of all a wonderful autumn jacket of my dreams, brown with a green cordoroy collar and I have started a matching scarf already. Stuart also got some new clothes, and when we got home we overhauled the closets and Stuart threw away anything he wore in first-year university, as that was in a previous century. And we also cleaned up my desk area for back to school, and now everything is tidy and orderly and there is a choreless weekend straight ahead.
September 7, 2006
Boogie with a suitcase
The story I’ll come to tell about the morning my front brake snapped will be much more dramatic than this rather soporific truth. I wasn’t going very fast, and I stopped well in time, and more than any escape from certain death, I am left with a broken brake I’ve got to pay to get repaired. Yawn. And such is Thursday.
Bookishly, I’ve read Liar by Lynn Crosbie this week, which reminded me of The Year of Magical Thinking in surprising ways. Also read As I Lay Dying, and now reading Heave by Christy Ann Conlin, which I’ve wanted to read for awhile. I’m not quite into it yet, but I think I’ll like it.
Otherwise, Germaine Greer’s take on the crocodile hunter. Ali Smith’s common ground. Dionne Brand wins The Toronto Book Award. And in news so exciting I can hardly sit in my chair, Paul Burrell has written a second book about buttling Diana, this one entitled “The Way We Were”.
September 5, 2006
When I was young and in my prime
Poetry and prose don’t easily mix, and the combination is so often done badly. My biggest problem with the poetry collection/novel hybrid is that there so often seems little occasion for the poetry. And so in the case of When I Was Young and In my Prime by Alayna Munce, I must say stress first that it works, and that it works so well. The narrator is a poet, and the plot involves the decline of her grandparents in their old age, and also the dynamics of her own marriage. Munce is a wonderful writer, and she tells a story that isn’t stock. It was an unbelievably fresh narrative, and I particularly enjoyed its geography. The end was powerful, and though it made me cry, it didn’t leave me sad. Significantly, I would recommend this book to someone who didn’t read poetry at all, and I think they would come away a little swayed by the form.
September 5, 2006
Lazy Sundays
The laziest long weekend on record, and Stu and I were quite lucky because people fed us throughout most of it, so there was no wasting away. Friday, Curtis bought us dinner at Vivoli; Saturday BBQ at Curtis’, though we did make the salads; we went to Jennie and Deep’s Sunday night for a splendid dinner, except that I had a glass of wine and all hell broke loose. Otherwise, we reclined around the house disparaging the rain, and we visited the Italian Festival on College Street and went to Chinatown to buy a tea strainer so we could drink the tea this brilliant someone brought us back from India.
There were also baking disasters. We baked a peach pie for dinner on Sunday and it turned out excellently actually. I might just stick with pies, because my cake baking is really crap. I baked a chocolate cake yesterday for Curtis’s half-birthday (as you do), and I guess recipes are written for a reason, because if you ignore them your cake comes to resemble a bog, and must be cut into squares and the uncooked bits thrown away, and heaped onto a plate like the brownies like in my Nigella cookbook, but not quite as sexually. I persevered though. Several times throughout the process, Stuart came in and advised me to toss the lot into the bin but I kept on, I iced the bog, and though a bit unsightly, the cake squares were good and Curtis’s half-birthday was a success.
And after a lazy weekend, we kicked into high gear, and plenty of things are now doing. We weeded the garden last night, me in me wellies, and though I think we lack the ability to ever grow anything in the garden, pulling the weeds was sort of fun. I started knitting a scarf this weekend too, to get back in the habit before I start my big winter project. And Stu and I got a lot of work done on our latest Pickle Me This Press publication, the book of poetry I Wish My Enemies Were Russians. Which will be available to you in just a week or two!
September 3, 2006
Remember September
And so September, happy new year. A time for reflection of course, to remember those who enjoy doubting others’ impossible plans, and then to laugh at their lack of imagination, because we’re okay here, after a long time in limbo. The last year has proven that two people can live on nearly nothing, that there is a light at the end of the immigration tunnel (as long as one is patient), and that things do work out somehow, as long as it is happiness you’re aiming for. Which leads me back a few Septembers further, because it was four years ago this week that I ran away to England to seek my fortune (ie sanity). The most impossible plan of all, because I’d just endured a bit of a trauma, was completely depressed/deranged, I had no job prospects, nowhere to live and very little money. For three months I inhabited a gungy sx-infested backpackers hostel in the East Midlands, ran out of money and lived off Tesco value tuna, got into the data entry industry, and it sounds horribly sordid, but it was thrilling, and even more thrilling, I built a life there. It was in December of that year that I moved out of the hostel into a two-up-two-down terrace with a good friend, got promoted to a job that, I believe, is the foundation of any talent I possess as a writer, and then best of all, I met a wonderful British boy who saved my life, and who I married. I realize how incredibly lucky I have always been, but not all of this is luck. I will always love best the bits of life I made myself, on the backs of impossible plans.
~How could one stumble dully through its streets, or waste time sitting in a heap, staring at the wall? When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation, all its shabby grime lost in perspective, imperceptible from this dizzy height, its connections clear, its pathways revealed. The city, the Kingdom. The aerial view~ Margaret Drabble, The Middle Ground
I am lucky that when bad things happen, I forget them after. I was reading journals recently that make that altogether evident, and I wondered exactly who had ever penned them? I get nostalgic, you know. I miss England often, as much as Stuart does. In order to supplant my homesickness, I’ve become obsessed with the blog transatlanticism, by a wonderful writer who also ran away to change her life and proved that it works, it really does. If all plans were possible, we’d stop ever being pleased.
I love India Knight. On what novels can teach us. Oooh! Controversy in Punctuation Land. The CanLit Atlas reviewed. On recurring characters. Must highlight a NYTimes wedding profile which features the line “The survival of the fish was a metaphor for the whole relationship.” Please note, said fish is now dead.
I just finished Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. It was weird but really excellent, and I think I appreciated it a bit more having read Giving Up the Ghost. Now beginningWhen I Was Young and In My Prime, which I bought because it was pretty.
