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.
August 31, 2006
Eureka!
Taking a break in the sunshine reading my book, the ending of my thesis-project story –which has so far been elusive– hits me with a flash in full glorious orchestration, and I am so excited you don’t even know.
August 31, 2006
Spare Ribs
I have been quite busy lately, mainly trying to get the first draft of my thesis project completed by September 10. This goal is distinctly possible but requires maniacal devotion for the next week or so, and that is where I will be. But on top of that, we’re quite busy at work scrambling to finish our final project before the end of the summer, I am reading voraciously, there are final days of summer to be lived inside (though bad weather the last two weekends have scuppered some of those plans, and more of the same is promised for the long weekend), and Stuarts must be enjoyed. An end-o-summer night out with my co-workers yesterday, and Katie came over for an indoor picnic on Tuesday. She brought with her my bridesmaid dress, and it looked like I will have to have some ribs out if I ever intend to actually wear it.
The Great Summer Rereading Project ends today, with A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, which is an incredible novel. I reread The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion before that. It’s been wonderful to revisit these books, and I will do a rereading project every summer now, though only for one month from now on, as I’ll have less to catch up on. Stay tuned for more thoughts on the rereading experience, as I reflect upon them. And then I start my new Hilary Mantel tomorrow!
Terrible news times two regarding The Murdermobile. First, after a year of living in my neighbourhood, I had never seen anybody driving this most sinister vehicle. It seemed to move between parking spaces between murders on its own accord, and that was fine with me. That was a legend. And then last week, I walked past it and saw a woman inside. She was dressed all in pink, and she was strapping her baby into a child’s seat on the passenger side, and I was gut-wrenchingly disappointed. Neither pink woman nor baby appeared particularly murderous, and they sort of disproved my thesis that the Murdermobile is self-propelled. Moreover, the Murdermobile is for sale, for about $3500. It’s described as a “vintage delivery van”. I don’t know about that. In any case, the dream is over, or at least the nightmare.
(Oh, the my new Drabble is pre-ordered. Sweet anticipation!)
August 27, 2006
Private Universe
Our weekend has been full of little things. Reading and writing of course, and Little Miss Sunshine (which was brilliant), the orientation for my new volunteer endeavour at Culturelink, I got quite a haircut (and not by Stuart), a birthday dinner for Carolyn (which was hilarious), followed by a going-away party for Steve (which was well attended by some of my favourite people), The Big Chill on our way home, fun at Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington, and an entire watermelon (devoured).
I reread a number of books last week. In particular, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I first read this book in the early 1990s; my mom bought it for me once when I was sick in bed, and I have this pre-Pulitzer, small, hardcover edition that I am awfully fond of. It’s a great book- so prescient. It was 1993, and Shields was writing, “When we say a thing or event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honour it. But when a thing is made up- regardless of how true and just it seems- we turn up our noses. That’s the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts.” A bit eerie, when I think of now. I loved this book for its factualness, though, that such fact can come from fiction. For a similar reason that I loved Possession last week. These stories are so firmly planted, in place and time. The authors have created an entire universe to accommodate their people, and that universe is so very similar to mine. The Stone Diaries, with its lists, photographs, family tree and extensive documentation; it is uncanny in its reality. I bet it drives some people absolutely mad. I’m now reading The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble. Drabble also does some fine universe building. She has invented places and people that continually pop up throughout her body of work. Characters turn up, twenty years on from when we last met them, and they’ve changed accordingly. Her world is such a terribly intricate web, of incredible connections which are far too connected to be really plausible in fiction, and that’s what makes that world seem so very real.
On the L Woolf bio. Here for how to read a novel. New Can-Lit! I loved the Michael Ignatieff feature in The Globe, solely on the basis of it being a good story.
August 23, 2006
Mood
I’ve been trying to post photos of fun at the CNE for three days, but they won’t upload, and so you will have to wait in order to see the baby pigs, the butter scupltures and Stu at the Princes Gates. Otherwise, I’m home sick today and have been in a mood of late, which I intend to cast off presently. They’ll be tea drunk in the meantime.
