May 24, 2006
Ah now; what now?
Sitting here with a cup of tea bigger than my head. There’s an article in The Guardian today, in defense of Nottingham by Jon McGregor. It’s a good piece, and Nottingham is a good place. The crime capital of England it might be, and it’s an outhouse compared to London, but I lived there for almost two years some moons ago, and that city was good to me. I arrived there completely deranged for a variety of reasons, and the time I spent getting over it was so fundamental. I had my first full time job there, and my little terrace house; I made wonderful friends and spent some brilliant days, and heard the songs, read the books, watched the films; passions began, for Mitfords, Miffy, EastEnders, weekend papers, bad europop and tea. And chips and cheese. (I also got really fat there). Where Stuart and I fell in love, and we rode double decker busses for kicks. That spring day three years ago, when as a surprise, Stu bought me the wonderfulIf Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor, Nottingham’s defender. McGregor has a new book coming out this year, and I can’t wait to read it, just to see how far we’ve come.
The latest installment of The Penpal Project arrived yesterday from Bronwyn. I received a postcard of The Queen and a map of Hay-on-Wye, as well as a lovely epistle. Having a penpal is the most wonderful thing. The lack of immediacy provides a real different dimension to communication from what I’m accustomed to. Writing to her last month, not knowing whether she had got her new job, but knowing that she would know by the time she read the letter. There are things you write in that situation that you wouldn’t otherwise. (And she did get the job, by the way). I will have her letter in the post within one week.
And a note of thanks to everyone who has been so wonderful and supportive about immigration. Our fax got a reply and there does appear to be light at the end of the long long tunnel. We’re resubmitting our application tomorrow and it will be bumped to the top of the queue. Oh, and there was “catch” at lunch today, so all is really really well. Especially since The Blue Jays won last night. And we were there, way up in the 500s. It was my first baseball game in years and Stuart’s first ever, and it is indeed a very strange sport. But we had fun, and we had an excellent time with Jennie and Deep, who live across the street from the Skydome.
Now reading Two Solitudes by Hugh McLennan. He’s terribly outdated, but I am a fan. The Watch That Ends the Night has been a favourite of mine for years. First, I love the way writers like McLennan wrote about Canada before we all got cool and accustomed to the idea of our nationhood (ha ha). It’s a good story though; alright, the characters are a wee bit wooden, the men are chauvinists and McLennan is entirely too obsessed with breasts and drippy females. But it’s Canadiana and we people like to eat it with a spoon.
May 21, 2006
Book Kismet
Immigration hits the all time crap low. Application is confirmed lost. We receive a phone message which we must reply to by fax, as you do. But at least we know which end is up (even if its the wrong one) and all of this will be ok eventually. Which is certainly not to say that I’ve got a positive attitude, but we’re just trying not to think about it.
Friday night was spent delightfully at Revival, where the fabulous KC Roberts and the Raw Blue were performing, with a new friend and co-worker of mine on bass. They were amazing and we had a lot of fun. And yesterday was pretty much passed on the porch with Curtis, the front porch until it got too cold and then out back where the sun still shone, and we had a bbq. Lately I have been craving hotdogs like they’re lifeblood. Miraculously, this weekend stretches out long and we’ve still got two days left. A trip to High Park is planned, although probably not today because the sky is black.
Picador Shots, a wonderful new way to market the short story. On why the fabulous Lionel Shriver is planning to bequeath her estate to the Belfast Libraries. Camilla Gibb in The Globe. The CBC reports on Eurovision. (Daz Sampson came 19th, for all you curious).
I just finished reading The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty, and it was pretty wonderful. But most amazingly, my comrade in bookishness o’er London way, Ms. Bronwyn, happened to be reading it at the exact same time. Which is odd, because the book was published sixty years ago, so it’s not like we’re both reading the latest bestseller. And we’ve never mentioned Eudora Welty, or The Golden Apples, in my recollection. Of all the millions of books we could have been reading, that was it. Shivers delightedly. I just plucked Sarah Bastard’s Notebook by Marian Engel off my shelf, apparently the first unabashedly feminist Canadian Novel. I loved Engel’s The Lunatic Villas. I have never read Bear and I never, ever, want to.
May 19, 2006
Daz Sampson
Eurovision is SO weird. Check out the UK entry here. The video is chavicious.
May 18, 2006
Wave Riding
Have removed my histrionic entry, as it was a bit much. With no goat references. Things remain decidedly crappy on the immi front but we’ll ride out that wave, and count our blessings in the meantime that we have all the support we do. Perpetual rainfall and constant fretting do an exhausted girl make. I read Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, and now I am reading The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty. The Great Summer Re-Reading project is just around the corner, so I am reading up the unread corners of my bookshelf in the meantime.
Zoe Williams on the you never saw it coming McCartney split. On the best books about music. Stuart is existentially traumatised about recent developments in the world of lactic acid.
May 15, 2006
Umbrella Update
Oh, and for all of you who were curious. It was Virginia Woolf who lost her umbrella, and in real life no less. In Volume 5 of The Diary of, which happened to be on Monday March 22 1937. “And I left my umbrella apparently in a bus.” Indeed.
May 15, 2006
The No-Goat Zone
I’ve been reading the news a lot lately, but have been too tired to post anything that’s not goat-related. Understandably, but now. Kevin Chong writes a feature at Bookninja. On the world in a grain of sand. Canadian sorta-celebrity’s book-to-be entitled My Husband Left Me for Tori Spelling. A good review for Douglas Coupland’s JPod. We’re big Coupland fans in our household; admittedly DC slipped up a few years back, but his last three books (Eleanor Rigby, Hey Nostradamus and All Families Are Psychotic) were absolute pleasures to read. Jade Goody’s Autobiography is the new digested read. At McSweeneys, David Caruso scolds his cat.
Oh, and yesterday was the first watermelon of the season!
May 15, 2006
Down on the farm
We are awfully good at weekends. That’s the one good thing about working full time. We get to exercise our talent again. And so this morning we took the streetcar out to Cabbagetown, where we walked about and then we went to the Riverdale Farm (which is no longer a zoo). The gardens were so gorgeous, the animals were wonderful and we had a great time (best of all, it’s free!). Highlights included the pond where I felt like Annie Dillard, multitudinous tulips, a cow that has made me second-guess my carnivourous habits, and the sheep!! (And goats). We walked home, however, so we’re tired. Tonight my mom came for Mother’s Day Dinner and we had a very nice time.
In reading news, I finished Democracy by Joan Didion, which I like best of her novels that I’ve read. It was wonderful. And I am now reading something particularly interesting, Lovingly, Myra; Hinman Family Letters 1920-1926, which was edited and self-published by my Auntie a few years ago. “Myra” was my great-grandmother, and these are letters she wrote to her sisters, particularly her sister Susannah, who was a missionary in India. My great-grandmother died in 1926, at the age of 36, and so of course I never knew her. I appreciate these letters very much, especially the glimpse they give me of my grandmother as a child. And they are quite amusing.
May 14, 2006
And I do believe I love you…
Friday night began with a visit from an ice cream truck, and we rushed outside for a sweet treat. Then a call from friends to meet for drinks, and we partook in that just as happily. Saturday morn was a grocery shop and the purchase of a new teapot (the old one was disintegrating into our cups of tea, which we didn’t figure was healthy). And then Curtis made us brunch and we got it in our heads to clean up the porch, so we did, and then we sat our and drank beer, all Portuguese like. Nothing is quite as entertaining as watching the world go by, really. Life is a walking reality TV show. And then we went to Kensington for fruit and veg, and they played “That’s What Friends Are For” by Dionne Warwick in some place we walked past, and I’ve been humming it since. Tonight I finished Giving Up the Ghost (stunning) and started Democracy by Joan Didion, which I like so far.
And now, for either your educational pleasure or an opportunity to scoff at my stupidity, here are words I’ve written down from the last few books I read, because I did not know their definitions:
Putative: reputed, supposed
Molybdenum: a silver white brittle metallic transition element occurring naturally in molybdenite and used in steel to give strength and resistance to corrosion.
Fatuous: silly, purposeless
Exculpatory: freeing from blame
Lacunae: something missing or left out
Compunction: Uneasy conscience or feeling of remorse
Etiolate: to make a plant lose colour, to render something lost of vigour or substance
Intransigence: stubborness, the quality of being uncompromising
Persiflage: banter
Exhort: to urge or advise strongly
Maurice Vellacott: Idiot.
May 12, 2006
I suppose my umbrella
In Howard’s End, Leonard Bast loses his umbrella and just cannot get over it. My favourite line in the book is him thinking, “I suppose my umbrella wil be all right… I don’t really mind about it. I will think about the music instead. I suppose my umbrella will be all right”. And I do so understand, having a similarly one-tracked mind, and a special attachment to my umbrella. My umbrella is wonderful and oft-complimented, and if you were as bereft of style as I am, you would be happy to own at least one thing that invites admiration (I am fortunate to also have many pairs of red shoes). My umbrella is a Totes Novelty Supermini Umbrella that is black with ducks round its border and the phrase “Lovely weather for ducks” printed among them. I bought it at the John Lewis in Nottingham in 2003, where it cost about 15 quid, which was too much for an umbrella, and such an extragence- a department store extravagence no less- which was monumental in those days (and these, come to think of it). And to prove just how responsible, and deserving of a posh umbrella, I am, I have kept it close to me for three years, keeping it out of strong winds, dashing just in time back into restaurants where it has been forgotten and never once leaving it on the train. The duck umbrella has lasted me through English rain and Japanese typhoons, and now I pull it out for a rainy Canadian day, and I find there is a small hole in it. Wear and tear, no doubt. And it’s not yet retireable. There’s still some life in her yet, but it’s just painfully sad to contemplate the future without her.
*Along the lines of Leonard Bast-ian preoccupation, there was another book I read in the past few months in which an umbrella is misplaced to great distress. I cannot remember for the life of me which it was. Does anyone else? This is driving me a bit mad.
May 12, 2006
Solutions
What with working and all, I don’t have time enough for reading (all I want to read). It’s troubling and I want to petition to extend the day to thirty hours. It’s especially crucial, and I have started to read newspapers and magazines again after swearing them off this winter to do my homework. My Walrus arrived today, which was exciting, and I just started Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel, which is as wonderful as everything Hilary Mantel writes (oh my British lady writers- how I do love you!) Oh, and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was absolutely beautiful and fascinating, and so much like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, even though the two books are so fundamentally different. Anyway, my supper dishes need washing and my book needs reading, and I just don’t know which option is going to win in the end.
Things I have been thinking about include how wonderful the trees are in this city, in my neighbourhood in particular. I’d forgotten they came in so many colours. And the blossoms! Saturday morning I was reading a book on my front step, and every few seconds a blossom of every variety would fall into my open pages. I’ve recently fallen in love with the idea of books as objects embedded in the natural environment, so you can see how that was cool. Another thing I have been thinking about is the overuse of the word “solutions”. It’s ubiquitous in all those lifestyle magazines like Real Simple and Martha Stewart Living that a) make you feel like a bad person and b) make you feel like you could be a good person with just the right shelving unit. I think I recently saw a magazine entitled “Solutions”. And what bothers me about all of this is the implication that life itself is a problem.
Speaking of problems, in exciting news, our doorknob fell off and if we shut the door we can’t get out. All residing in our household look forward to seeing how this pans out, and what solutions are in store.
And tomorrow is Friday, the third weekend of my summer. The first Weekend Summer Adventure was the Library Bar Experience, last weekend was the Drunken BBQ and this weekend we’ve got the Great Cabbagetown Adventure in store- if it stops raining. Yea, Riverdale Zoo! Yea, Goats!
