March 19, 2006

Books Etc.

I’ve been reading and writing like a petit maniac! It’s that time of year. Now reading The Rules of Engagement by Catherine Bush, which is my favourite book by her. I am quite pleased to be enjoying so many young Canadian authors, as my years abroad had put me out of the CanLit habit. The book is hardly flawless, but she writes about England in a way that is so relevant to my own experience there (perpetually being asked “Are you all right?” for example) and I love that the narrator is a scholar of “war studies” and therefore I get to learn through the novel. This is the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction I think- you come away from the latter knowing something new. The former is more an affirmation of the familiar, which is fine but not the same. This of course is on my mind because I am writing an essay about Chick Lit for my Authors and Institutions course. This came about as a result of my consciously anti-chick lit phase, where I only wrote about lesbians, boys and circus freaks. I began to wonder how professional writers are influenced by the threat of the chick lit label, the ways they speak out and write against it. I read “Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction” yesterday and it was really interesting (and fun). I also read Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard. And still reading Grace Paley’s wonderful stories, one at at time.

Articles on ghostwriting. Naomi Wolf on trashy YA fiction. On re-marketing adult fiction for teens here. Douglas Coupland interviews Morrissey. On JamesBluntMania– currently sweeping America.

Today was exciting because I bought my bridesmaid’s dress for Katie’s wedding. Oh for the love of bridal shops. And I paid the bills last night. For about five minutes, we owed nobody nothing.

March 15, 2006

These books are full of our lives

For our creative writing assignment this week, we have been instructed to invent the prose glose. “Glose” is actually pronounced “glossa” but not spelt as such, because “glossa” means tongue, did you know that? I didn’t. And so I have decided to use a short story from Carol Shields’ Various Miracles. Oh, the history of our books. I bought this one last winter at the used book store in Kobe. I almost didn’t, probably because I had a whole stack in hand already, but after I’d paid for my purchases, I went back to the counter and got this one too. I read Various Miracles just over a year ago, on the train to Osaka, where we were going to chase penguins at the aquarium. I read most of the story “Scenes” while we were waiting to switch lines at Amagasaki Station, and was stunned by the similarities between this story and the conversation Stuart and I had been having earlier in the journey. The whole book was a bit familiar anyway, like someone else had written down my unarticulated ponderings. And now reading it today, I remember how that felt, and I miss that sunny spring. Just over a month after that spring day, the Amagasaki train crash and over a hundred people dead, and we left Japan two weeks after that, perhaps forever. And looking back, I cannot believe that that was ever my life, but I am so glad that once it was.

I left as we do our childhoods:/ rushing to escape, without souvenirs./ I collected no sake cups/no tsukemono plates./ All this time/ a core of miso grew. ~Alison Smith, “Under-Country” from Six Mats and One Year

March 14, 2006

Interesting things

Interesting things are that yesterday I told Stuart about an idea I had for a story, and he informed me that I had just described the plot to “Phenomenon” starring John Travolta. And that on a radio show about insomnia, the host described Canada as “a nation of tossers.”

March 11, 2006

Voices

Heather Mallick in good form on South Dakota’s step back into the dark ages. Lionel Shriver weighs in with “The abortion row in the US is not about babies. It’s about power-mad grown-ups who despise each other”.

We are going to a 905 party but we don’t have any 905-wear.

Update It was a very 519 party actually and we had so much fun!

March 10, 2006

Early Afternoon March

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 wrote that poem in 2001, and it’s perhaps the only thing I wrote then that remains true to this day. We’re crawling out from under cover. Today I caught a whiff of rotting garbage, which was music to my nose because rotting garbage is unfrozen garbage. And now I am sitting in front of an open window, accompanied by shining sun and a cool wind. I had forgotten how wonderful March in Canada is. (Wind is a bit torrential. Must close window.) Britain is springtime all the time, and I loved that- green in January. Spring in Japan, as we know, came suddenly and April there is meteorological perfection. But spring in Canada- can’t be counted on, more a promise than an actual delivery. But oh what a promise. It’s almost worth it.

Today has been a bit brilliant, based upon the meeting I had this morning with Camilla Gibb. She’s the Writer in Residence at Massey College and on top of having written one of the best books I’ve read in ages, she was lovely and I got a lot out of our conversation.

What else? I really enjoyed The International Women’s Day In Pictures in The Globe. Fun Milestones in Pop Feminism. And introducing The Blooker Prize, which I am doing a seminar on next week how exciting. A golden age of British women’s writing indeed. Ali Smith’s The Accidental was extraordinarily unlike anything I’ve read before. Amazing. I’m reading The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, and Voices from Iran which is interesting but terribly written. And rereading The Elements of Style.

To lunch.

March 7, 2006

Feminism just won't die

Leah McLaren ought to take a card from Margaret Wente if she really wants to start provoking debate. Today, Wente’s article How the feminists betrayed feminism appears, and though it’s bound to please those who hate women and Muslims, and to annoy the likes of me, I think it’s a very important piece. She writes that Western women have it better than they ever have, and they are avoiding speaking out for women who truly need liberation- those oppressed by “head scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female genital mutilation”. In a sense, she is absolutely right. Inevitably though, however…

First, look at the news- the latest woman murdered by her estranged husband or the abortion ban in South Dakota. All is not terribly well at home, so let’s not hang up our guns just yet.

Second, she is wrong to say that no one is watching out for women oppressed internationally. What about (off the top of my head) Sally Armstrong or Mavis Leno, both of whom have been speaking out about Afghan women since 1997- when the rest of the world was saying nothing about the brutal Taliban regime? Wente writes “Western values and institutions aren’t the problem. They’re the answer. We should be doing our best to spread them. Capitalism and globalization have done more to empower oppressed women of the world than all the NGOs on Earth. ” She is right, but it’s really easy to put these words in a column. Putting them into action is a different story. The US adventure is Iraq has proven that people don’t take too well to having values and institutions foisted upon them. Women don’t like being told that they are stupid, that their culture, rituals and traditions are archaic. Since reading Wente’s article, I’ve been thinking about “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, “Sweetness in the Belly” by Camilla Gibb and “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi. I think problems in this world would be more easily solved if people read more fiction. Fiction teaches empathy, understanding, context. From these books, I’ve learned that nothing is simple. Shock and awe doesn’t work. Bringing about positive change takes a long time, it’s about small steps. It comes through education. Though it’s hardly immediately satisfying, this the only route that really yields results. And it’s going on all the time.

March 7, 2006

Good China: One Day I'll make art from our pieces

I broke a plate on Friday night- the first such casualty of our marriage. It wasn’t a dinner plate or a bowl. I’d define it by what it was, but I don’t know the name for larger-than-sideplates plates. I didn’t throw it- it just sort of tumbled onto our ceramic tiles and then splintered into pieces that flew into the living room, down the stairs, and even inside the bedroom door. It was indeed a mighty crash. And I saved the pieces. One day when I am old and we have a wall, I’m going to make a mosaic out of everything we ever broke.

Now reading “The Accidental” by Ali Smith, which is written in a startlingly convincing precocious twelve year-old voice. This character likes to say “typical and ironically” and “substandard” but most of all she says “i.e”. As in, “I was going to the fridge i.e. I was hungry” or “He thinks he is so now i.e. he is completely embarrassing”. I thought it was an interesting figure of speech but then I told Stuart about it, and demonstrated it and now typically and ironically I can’t stop i.e. I am annoying. Mostly due to my substandard personality.

March 5, 2006

Weekend

Our weekend was fun, in that we spent Friday in the wonderful company of Natalie Bay (whose URL I entered incorrectly before), and then Saturday night with the Lui/Doerings and we got to see Walk The Line at the Varsity! It was wonderful, and I’ve spent the hours since lusting after Reese Witherspoon’s hair (not to mention Joaquin).

On cyberlibel. I find it odd how threatened people are by these “unsophisticated publishers”. A more sophisticated publisher urges us to boycott Google. He uses the old, “It’s the authors who will suffer most” line. Ha ha ha. An interview with Leah McLaren in The Star. She says that “she TRIES to provoke debate” which is “her job at a columnist. I fear she is confusing “debate” with “venomous wrath”. This article makes a case for literary imitation. On being a writer in Zimbabwe.

I am still absolutely adoring “Reading Lolita in Tehran” and plan to finish it in a hot bath this evening. I also baked an absolutely perfect lemon almond cake yesterday afternoon. From a different cookbook of course.

March 3, 2006

Oh.

I am far more disappointed than the preceding post would suggest. It is strange to so consciously do something wrong, and be surprised when it turns out badly.

March 3, 2006

The story of a batch of brownies

(or how to go terribly terribly wrong…)

It is always hard to tell where I go wrong when I am cooking or baking, mostly because there are so many opportunities for disaster to step in. First, I buy a UK edition of a cookbook because it’s the cheapest available online. I don’t think about what that means about measurements and temperatures. I don’t let that dissuade me from my project either. And then, on top of having to convert all my ingredients based on a probably very wrong estimation that 100 grams equals half a cup, I decide to break the recipe in half because a) it makes 48 brownies and b) my only cake tin is nowhere close to the size and proportions the recipe suggests. Another problem I just noticed is that I seem to think recipes “suggest” things rather than “demand” them. Anyway, after all the numbers madness, I decided to use the kind of sugar I have rather than caster sugar, to use chocolate chips rather than chocolate squares because they’re cheaper and poured in a tablespoon of salt rather than a teaspoon and had to scoop it out again. And picked up my flour cannister by its top and it nearly fell off, pouring flour behind my fridge. But I didn’t. And none of this is my attempt to become the Anti-Nigella, this crazed Bridget Jonesian wacky housewife (who is far too obsessed with archetypes from British popular culture). I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted to be a domestic goddess. Anyway, the brownies are in the oven. This should be interesting. Anyone want to do my washing up?