September 11, 2005
Tomorrow
Really, say what you want about Russell Smith but I’ve enjoyed every one of his books that I’ve ever read. Currently in the final third of Muriella Pent and it’s wonderful. Otherwise, I made a fantastic spaghetti dinner Friday night and my future as a hostess is promising. And classes begin tomorrow.
September 7, 2005
Perks
Becky’s website is redesigned and you can see our Canadian wedding photos here! Today has been a marvelous day of schoolbook buying, as I managed to spend $50 of gift certificates I got as a wedding present, and get an out-of-print book used for $10. I also wrangled free cookies and juice, and Stuart and I had a little picnic at Hart House. To update the “Toronto is the best city to live in if you’re broke and looking for fun” file, we went to see the Fembots last night play a little free show at Soundscapes on College Street. They were ace, inevitable comparisons to the Jayhawks or Wilco but enough of their own. Their new CD is said to be excellent. A review of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”. She places her story in America, and I’m interested to see how she does that. I get a strong sense that (North) American writers really shouldn’t try to “write British”, and that the Brits themselves have more freedom to jump continents. My story takes place in England and I oft fear I don’t have the authority to carry it off altogether, though I did live there for nearly two years. There is a cultural gap however minute and it matters. Stuart keeps comparing everyone here to characters from an American Pie movie. Here, top ten books on Russia. Oh! Zadie is profiled, and discusses the novel as “an ethical enterprise”. I ran into a Professor today, and we talked about not only about the pain of so many books to be read, and the number that should be reread and how it’s never going to happen. Being a grad student has perks I never even imagined by the way.
September 6, 2005
Get back to where you once belonged
Nothing much changes on the UofT campus, and I have a part-time job at the library again. We had our “orientation” session this morning and classes start on Monday. The van finally did become available and we moved in Thursday night. Our apartment is absolutely gorgeous, and we really would be reluctant to leave it if the neighbourhood wasn’t so fantastic. All is really well.
August 31, 2005
A kind of holiday
We move tomorrow, and so who knows how long it will take before we have internet at home again. We are looking forward to going though, but there is plenty of organising to be done in the meantime. I am excited about opening boxes of stuff that’s been packed for over three years, and displaying things we have collected together over the last two years. Also excited about having closets and drawers, rare things when we lived in the Leo Palace. It’s going to be good.
Jonathan Freedman stretches things a bit with results worth reading. On the 8th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, he remembers the sweet dream of the 1990s, which, “viewed from today… look like a kind of holiday, a pause between two eras of anxiety and conflict. Just as Eric Hobsbawm defined the 19th century as stretching from 1789 to 1914, so we can take the same liberty: the 90s began with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and ended with the fall of the twin towers in 2001.”
August 29, 2005
The Wisdom of Jen Aniston
This is a blatant rip off of and not nearly as brilliant as “A Villanelle Composed Upon Jennifer Aniston’s Answers To Her May 2001 Vanity Fair Interview, With Catalina Island Glimmering In the Distance”, but something must be done about Aniston’s September 2005 Vanity Fair Interview. She has a tremendous ability to spew and suck drivel simultaneously, and she speaks like poems I wrote when I was twelve. So now, poetic excerpts of the 2005 interview for those of you who puked too soon and didn’t finish reading it. Believe me, it means nothing more in context.
****
i)
Seven very intense years together;
we taught each other a lot-
about healing, and about fun.
It was a beautiful, complicated relationship.
What we said was true-
as far as I knew.
We exited this relationship
as beautifully as we entered it.
ii)
The world was shocked
and I was shocked.
The sad thing, for me, is the way
it’s been reduced to a Hollywood cliche.
iii)
It was that thing about being a nurturer;
somewhere along the way
you sort of lose yourself.
You just don’t know when it happens.
It’s such an insidious thing,
you don’t really see where it started-
and where you ended.
There’s no one to blame
but yourself.
iv)
It’s sad
something coming to an end.
It cracks you open, in a way
it cracks you open to feeling.
When you try to avoid the pain
it creates greater pain.
I’m a human being
having a human experience.
I have to think there’s some reason
I have called this into my life.
I have to believe that-
otherwise it’s just cruel.
v)
I’m not a fortune teller;
I have no idea how it will play out. People say
“What are you going to do?”
I just don’t know.
I kind of love that
not knowing.
****
Read Lynn Crosbie’s take on the Interview, who believes Aniston “reveals what lies at the heart of women’s public demonstrations of personal grief. While public men tend to exhibit a panoply of vivid emotions when cuckolded, ranging from bleak despair to homicidal fury, with the exception of the prostrate Elizabeth Smart, women, hobbled by vanity and pride, are more given to follow the song-counsel of Melissa Manchester: “Don’t cry out loud/Just keep it inside, learn how to hide your feelings. . . .'”
August 28, 2005
Witness
I’ll admit to apprehension before my cousin’s wedding, due to some rather shameful wedding inadequacy issues. It’s not that my own wedding wasn’t brilliant in every way, and come on, I did have two. But it was no secret that their wedding would be far more elaborate and formal than ours had been, I knew how much work had been invested in it and I feared how my little homespun do would look in comparison. And wow, their wedding was incredible. They were married in a little white historic chapel in a conservation area near Jordan Ontario, in Niagara. Two enormous vases bursting with sunflowers stood at the alter, and the bride and groom were gorgeous as they walked down the aisle together to exchange their vows. The reception afterwards was held at the Inn on the Twenty, where we sipped (gulped) ice wine martinis and other fine beverages and feasted on delightful hors d’oeuvres. We entered the dining room for dinner, and were met with a view high atop the edge of a valley from windows which stretched along the entirety of one wall. Outside, black eyed susans grew into every shade of greenery, hills that rolled on and on and the vista was spread out before us like something absolutely magical. The meal was simply exquisite, and our table was marvelous company. After dinner and speeches, a band played fantastic music including an acoustic rendition of “You Shook Me All Night Long” and Stuart and I drank ourselves stupid and had to be driven home by my mother. We had a fabulous time with our cousins, and I was so pleased to be getting the best of family. There just aren’t enough happy occasions really. Not that there are so many sad ones, but there are too many ordinary days and I absolutely love weddings for bringing people together to celebrate nothing more than just love. And all stupid inadequacy was gone once I just started to enjoy myself, and appreciate how lucky I was to be there. Congratulations Alec and Jackie!
This summer I learned two things about being a wedding guest. First, what a great idea it is that everyone who attends a wedding does play a part in the ceremony, as a witness to the event, and therefore is obligated to support and nurture the couple’s relationship throughout their lives. I think a wedding is so much more meaningful when that is taken into account. Secondly, that as a guest your job throughout the wedding is to assure the bride that you and everyone you around is having enormous amounts of fun, because that’s probably all she really cares about.
August 26, 2005
Mini Break
Tra la la! I am off on a three day wedding mini-break extravaganza. And for once, the wedding is not my own.
August 25, 2005
American books are UGLY
Here we have the cover of the American edition of “We Need to Talk About Kevin”. It looks like a substandard diary of someone like Adrian Mole, and would fail to overly appeal to its target audience.
The UK edition is better, darker and more interesting.
The American edition of Brick Lane does have a beautiful cover, but it’s clutching too hard to the ethnic card (and trying to appeal to women in book groups such as the one illustrated in the below mentioned article who feel better about themselves when they read books about Asia)
…whilst in the UK, where Asia is not as foreign a theme, this simpler cover was put forth. Though I haven’t finished reading this book, so far I think it’s more reflective of the subject matter than the other.
August 25, 2005
Moon Tiger and other stories
We began the cycling life again today, after purchasing helmets and locks from Canadian Tire. I got a new basket for my bike too and I love it. Our bikes are beat up and ugly, and mine has rusty spokes from being left out in the rain for three months in 2002. Stuart’s came for $20 at a yard sale and nobody is ever going to steal either of them. Or if they do, they’re welcome to them for it must mean the thief is very desperate. We ran a couple of errands by bicycle today, which was thrilling. We rode bikes everywhere in Japan and we’ve missed them since April. None of our friends had cars there, and we’d ride across the city in packs and it felt like we were twelve again, with an alien in our bike baskets just seconds from jumping over the moon. The freedom and efficiency of a bike really cannot be equaled and the size of a city just shrinks once you’ve got one.
Oh my. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. (This is the first time I’ve used Google Print by the way. I like it!) My Aunt gave me this book, perhaps more than ten years ago. It sat on my shelf for all those years, first it seemed too stuffy for me to enjoy and then, because I’d received it so long ago and it looked like one, I had decided it was a children’t book and I wouldn’t be interested. It was almost sold in my booksale in July, and then I remembered that I’d seen it numerous times on lists of great books by women. So I kept it, and I read it. And it’s a masterpiece. I like it for the same reason I like books by Margaret Drabble. It tells the stories of twentieth century history, or the lives behind the history. I loved this book because it was so clever and educational, with so many new words, ideas and historical lessons. The story was heartbreaking but affirming of goodness. Books like “Moon Tiger” let me know I live in a time worthy of great literature, which in spite of all the danger, I do appreciate. It’s the story of a woman reflecting on her rich and winding life, whilst on her deathbed. She is a historian, and she reworks the history of the world so that she is in the centre of it. Lively explores how our personal histories are interpreted by others, and how they are connected to History with a capital H. A rich and brilliant book. Now reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali.
A marvellous line from “The Ice Age” by Margaret Drabble. “Something has gone wrong with the laws of chance.”
Here, an interesting article on the dynamics of book groups, exploring how the private act of reading goes public. On how fewer of us have novels in us than we think. The author expounds upon how perhaps the reason book deals prove so elusive to new writers is that many new writers are rubbish. Top Ten lesbian lit. Zoe Williams on why of how British MPs aren’t ashamed to admit their summer reading is either crap or a children’s book.
I got “Writing Away”, PEN Canada’s 1994 travel anthology for $5 at the airport on Monday. Yes, Monday. Though it was supposed to be Tuesday. Stuart’s mom came downstairs about 3:15 on Monday and informed us that the days had been mixed up and their plane was leaving in just over 4 hours. In remarkable time, they packed their bags and we were in the car, and off on a race to the airport. We got to the airport from Peterborough in 1 hour and 45 minutes, which I consider a miraculous feat. It was a rather abrupt and disappointing way to say goodbye, but at least they got their flight and we did have a pretty great two weeks together. And these are the dramas that make our holiday stories more amusing.
Things I’ve learned recently is that “cupidity” is greed (comes from the same root as “cupid”, both to do Latin “Cupidus” which means “desire”. Also that Curriculuam Vitae means “course of life” and that the word “rent” has an old meaning of split, or break apart.
Becky of Something Blue has sent along a couple of photos and there will be more on her site soon. I think this picture of Stuart is absolutely gorgeous, though perhaps I am biased because I adore him.
