February 4, 2006
Book in the post Alert
How exciting! A book in the post is due to arrive this week. It’s my first used book purchased online. I have bought The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, which the more attentive might recognised as being a book I already owned but left behind in Japan. I am writing my final paper for one of my courses on it, and I am quite interested to see how my perspective on it has changed since I last read it, as my attitude toward writing is quite different now. In other book news, I just read “Judgement Day” by Penelope Lively, and I think it my favourite book of hers that I have read. Also reading AN Wilson’s “After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World”, which is long long long but full of the most excellent stories.
Siri Hustvedt (of the wonderful “What I Loved”) is profiled. Her comment that with her essays and even her fiction, she believes in “rigorous honesty”. Take that jab Frey! February Poetry workshop in The Guardian. Ivor tells us how to love our cities online.
This weekend’s highlights include brunch with Fiona I et al, and then dress shopping with Miss Katie Doering Sunday afternoon. Have I mentioned that I am a bridesmaid?
Husband and I just had small altercation about me playing “When I See You Smile” by Bad English in the living room.
February 2, 2006
Unrequition
A break-up is always difficult, whatever the circumstances. The end of a marriage is devastating, being dumped is humiliating, dealing with the end of a common-law relationship is hard because there is no established paradigm as to how to do this. The end of love is doomed to be a messy business, but particularly so if there was only half a love involved. Getting over unrequited love is perhaps the hardest thing of all.
The divorcees don’t know how lucky they have it. They look around and see painful reminders, but I call it proof. Wedding photos, old cards and letters, souvenirs from vacation past. At least somebody liked you once upon a time. All I had was a photograph folded into three, to cut out my friend in the middle so it looked like he and I were standing side-by-side. And you can’t put that up on the mantel.
I remember the futility of shaving my legs almost daily, just in case, and it all coming to naught. I remember laying awake all night, terrified he had ordered call display and was going to find out that it was I who had called and hung up nineteen times while he was at work one day. Trying to interpret signals in such a way that him going out of his way to avoid my path somehow meant affection. “He is intimidated by you,” my friends said. “He’s afraid of me,” I declared, implying that he was afraid of someone like me, someone he couldn’t help but fall in love with, because it was a big step to take. Though of course, in fact, no. He was just really afraid of me. As anyone would be of one who called nineteen times and hung up while they were at work.
There is no vocabulary for it. You can’t refer to “my ex”. Instead, you just can’t talk about it at all and years of your life get wiped away. Which might be a good thing, considering how remembering those years make your writhe in agonizing embarrassment. But no one lets you mourn. Mainly because they’re tired of you, him, and the fact that you’ve been mourning since the day you met him. No one lets you mourn the death of hope, which is the saddest death of all.
The end of unrequited love is no less monumental than any other. Look at the great unrequited loves throughout history: Britney Spears and Prince William, Rosie O’Donnell and Tom Cruise, Scarlet O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes. It is a proud tradition. And there is always light at the end of the tunnel. Glowing beaming radiant light. Because in the end Brit found K-Fed. And as God as her witness, I am sure, she will never be hungry again.
January 31, 2006
There's a dog in the school
Do you remember what it was like when a dog got into your school? Stuart and I were discussing this today, the ensuing chaos, cheering children and a very confused canine. We went to very different schools on separate continents, so this may be an under-recognised universal phenomenon.
Must-read lists for children! It’s a fun article, except that Andrew Motion recommends Ulysses, that pretentious fecker. Anyway, I will make my own Kid Lit Must-Reads, as follows, in no particular order: Madeleine (Series) by Ludwig Bemelmans, Miffy (Series) by Dick Bruna, Dogger by Shirley Hughes, Olivia by Ian Falconer, Ramona (Series) by Beverley Quimby, Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer and A Wrinkle in Time (Series)- particularly A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle. For one who so distains Science Fiction/Fantasy (sorry), I am confused as to why almost all the YA Books I remember, love and recommend are about time travel.
On peddling words.
And I toted Woolf in Ceylon home from the library today!
January 29, 2006
The testicles of the west
Oh, in the news. Here, “spinster” is removed from the dictionary, which I think is sort of strange. More sensibly, it has now been removed from British Law and women who marry in that great kingdom no longer are classified as such on their marriage certificates. Fortunately I missed that change by a mere six months, and so I will be noted forever as a spinster in the annals of the Blackburn Lancashire Registry Office. Further, gorgeous, sophisticated, erudite and married to a British heartthrob. No silly, not me! It’s Gwyneth, profiled. I love her. James Frey aside, this article asks why “we” (by this “we” I do not include myself) are so enthralled by mems of other people’s misery. Obviously, it cites British agony mags like “Take a Break”, which I incidentally find to be one of the oddest periodicals ever to appeal. I saw one the other day with “My husband stapled me to our floor!!” on the front cover. A review of new Cold War texts (including one by Gaddis!) that serve to “cure Cold War nostalgia”.
It was a lovely weekend- out Friday night for Erin’s brilliant birthday karaoke. Saturday was the most gorgeous day ever, and we spent it basking in some Kensington Market sunshine. I wrote for two and a half hours today, and my story is growing growing in ways that absolutely fascinate me. I am learning about so much through this endeavour, about stuff I never even thought about before. Though I think Stuart is beginning to find it a bit dull that the story is the only thing I ever talk about.
Except Need for Speed on his Gamecube. Yesterday we started playing it together, but not competitively. When I drive into the wall and can’t turn around, Stu stops his car and waits for me to catch up. And sometimes he selects the Lincoln Navigator to race in, just so I can beat him fair and square.
January 27, 2006
Mrs. Harper
In recent photos, Stephen Harper is beginning to look more human. He also has cute children. So my heart warms. But I do find it very strange that his wife didn’t let it slip until this week that she is no longer known by her maiden name. I can understand why as a Prime Minister’s wife, she may find it simpler to share his name but it’s odd that she didn’t let anyone know about this change during her husband’s campaign. Perhaps I am just being paranoid, but I am worried this is just the first veil falling and we’re in the fast lane to Handmaid’s Tale.
January 26, 2006
Poem Exercise
*This was my exercise for class this week- a poem without an ‘e’.
What I know is a mountain
What I know is a mountain, high as a coin.
My liquid wisdom would not fill a cup.
This vastity, that unshrinking cupity-
sit back and watch it grow.
Sunk far-off lands’ topography.
Magic words forgot by history.
Ursa Major, Asia Minor-
a thousand stations I’ll not go.
Fossils, bugs and dragon wings.
Burnt, lost or abandon’d things.
Mud or flood or lava lost-
mislaid worlds I cannot know.
A show that’s shown, curtain down.
Unsung songs and pin drop sounds.
Hot air balloons and sailing ships-
an old wind’s worn out blow.
Untold truths and uncaught looks.
Oral myths and dirty books.
Wombs and tombs and pyramids-
and a mountain’s all I know.
January 25, 2006
Rapture
One really wonderful thing about book writing is inventing characters who are different from you, and then getting to learn about all the things that fascinate them. A character in my new story is a civil engineer, and a specialist in tall buildings and so I am having to learn all about that. And because my main character is a bored wife during the 1970s, I am going to learn macrame so that my character can learn how to do it too. Last night I spent far too long searching old Globe and Mails for references to the CN Tower during the 1970s, which has proved interesting for two reasons. First, the 1970s were terrible! As I have said a million times, as one who came of age in the 1990s, the 2000s has been a come-down. But the 70s was all car-bombs, all the time, and they exploded everywhere. Or at least that is the sense I got. The other interesting thing was how unanimously excited Torontonians seemed to be about a 553 metre tower appearing right in the middle of their city. I was expecting dissent and controversy, but maybe the 70s were different. And everyone I’ve spoken to remembers when Olga the Helicopter finally put the top on. Did you know that the CN Tower was five inches taller than it was supposed to be? Another very exciting thing is that we’re going to have to take a trip up the tower, expense or no expense. For research purposes you know.
Now reading a lot of poetry. How exciting. I got Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy out of the library yesterday. Also reading Minus Time by Catherine Bush. And soon I’ll be starting “After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World” by AN Wilson, which looks absolutely fascinating.
More thoughts about appropriation, upon finishing Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad”. First, it was a wonderful work and made the Greek world alive to me like nothing ever has before. And second, it was so much like The Red Queen, it was eerie and I think studying the two works together would be fascinating. But I wonder, if Drabble lacked the authority to write Princess Hong, can Atwood really write Penelope? Is the difference that there are no longer any Ancient Greeks to do so, and therefore nobody left to steal from? Is the difference racial or temporal? What is the difference between 200 years and 2000 though, really?
Politically, the only thing that I’m really bothered about is the smug look on the faces of those people who think that it all went downhill with Trudeau.
Interesting stories, Google firewalling China, and even though sometimes the lack of spice in Canadian scandals bores me, why sex scandals are a bad thing. Less interestingly, Leah McLaren’s book is ready and she’s on the publicity trail.
January 23, 2006
Why I Voted… at all
I don’t begrudge the apathetic this election because it was a lame, dirty, boring and badly played game. I can pretty much say that today my vote meant nothing. Tomorrow we’ll have the same disjointed government, an opposition so obsessed with winning power back they’re not willing to run this country, except into the ground perhaps. Yawn. It’s all theatrics and war games, and there is nothing exciting about it. And perhaps if my polling station had not been across the street from my house, I mightn’t have even bothered going. Really. But of course I went.
I vote in elections because less than a century ago, my sex was not thought fit to do so. I can’t take a right for granted when presented in those terms, or turn my back upon it when women before me fought so bravely. And so when I vote, I vote as a woman first and foremost. I voted Liberal today, pretty much solely because they value reproductive rights and have a small hope of winning. Not very inspiring I know, but they didn’t really give me much to go on.
