April 30th, 2010

Good/bad

Fred just reminded me of our every-five-years-or-so project, 1000 Things We Like (I guess since we’ve done it twice now, it’s thus far 2000 Things We Like and Counting). If you want in on the action, meet me back here in 2012, but in the meantime, this list reflects that today is a fairly well-balanced day, but I wish it were more 1000 Thingsy:

Good: Kashi Raspberry Chocolate Granola Bars

Bad: Realizing the fridge you’ve been storing your lunch in does not work, and is basically a well-sealed cupboard.

Good: Catsitting, and ensuing cheerfully one-sided conversations about weather, snacks, and people who are jerks.

Bad: Looking down during yoga class and realizing your black pants are covered in white kitty fur.

Good: Nice weather.

Bad: Short attention span.

Good: Gorgeous fountain pen in the mail.

Bad: Attempting to listen to instructions on how to fill fountain pen over the phone, shortly followed by realization that one is soon to be covered in ink and/or very embarrassed at a high-end stationers.

Good: K’s birthday.

Bad: K far away in England, unavailable for celebration/cake/hug. In fact, all of the most ardent supports of 1000 Things are unavailable for hugging or any close-at-hand celebrations.

Good: Literary Salon at the glammy-glam Spoke club on Tuesday night.

Bad: Being too old to go out during the week without being sad the next morning.

Good: The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Bad: Adams still dead.

Good: When I get home, cat will be there.

Bad: Now worry constantly when I am out that cat will eat plants and get sick.

Good: Internet for random useless but friendly and entertaining yammer.

Bad: Useless URLs.

Good: Well, it’d be better with a “b”, in my opinion…

RR

April 28th, 2010

Insane conversation in my hallway just now

From beyond my apartment door: incessant meowing

April 27th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *Killarnoe* by Sonnet L’Abbé

I knew I wanted to read something by Sonnet L’Abbé because I’ve seen her do a few readings over the last year or so and they were amazing. I totally believe that the best way to sell a book is to have the person who likes it most (usually the author, one would imagine) read a little bit of it to you. A few distainful readers notwithstanding, this would be the ideal selling technique if only more people went to readings. I am one who does, and thus buy a lot of books, though in truth *Killarnoe* was a gift (a requested one!)

*Anyway*, I loved L’Abbé’s readings , and I was pretty sure I would love the poems on paper too. I was right. Killarnoe is a book rich in play, in sex, in sound, in self-deprecation, in jokes and juxtopositions and alliterations and *rhymes* (the rarer it gets, the more I like it). It is joyful, thought-provoking reading.

The poems I heard at the readings were, I think, largely from the second section in the book, “Instrumental.” Each is a meditation or exploration of a sound, which gives the poems titles like the thoughtful “Ah”, catchy “I” or the sexy “Ungh.” These pieces are full of life, though I suspect highly theorized at their base. Breaking language down to sound memes (AMT, am I using that word right?) is not a simple task, but the poet manages a light touch nonetheless: “noteworthy / the pure ooh / of boo /of moo // the poor ooh / of few / of zoo.”

I was surprised to find I didn’t much like a section of political poems called “Z: Ghazals for Zahra Kazemi.” In a reading, I had been quite astounded by the weird sad fear and humour of “My Osama bin Laden T-shirt” (which appears in the book in the section after Z). Upon rereading, that piece held up, but the other topical stuff left me cold.

One reason could be is that ghazals are a highly complex, very structured form with which I’m not really familiar. There’s a lot of repetition (a L’Abbé trademark, I’m told) and not much room for narrative. To put it more bluntly, I didn’t understand these. Then I found the notes in the back of the book and I *did* understand–at least who Zahra Kazemi is, and some of the other people mentioned in the work–but I still didn’t really “get” the poems. I couldn’t go inside them–they required me to bring with me a certain amount of info, or at least insight, that I don’t have.

That’s ok–some poetry is always going to shoot over someone’s head, and writing for the rather large subset of the population that reads th newspaper is not a crazy idea. Most of L’abbé’s work is so multilayered, so open and accessible that though I nearly always suspected there was more to it than I had understood, there was plenty for me to savour.

Like a poem towards the end of the book, “Third Breast,” which was decidedly creepy and bizarre and I really like it. But I have the strong impression there it obliquely references a tri-breasted creature somewhere in mythology that I’m forgetting about…do you know? I’m sure L’Abbé knows, and I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. I will think about that poem for a long time anyway, which really, is the point.

I once had a wonderful English prof–this might have even been in high school–who drew a diagram about layers of meaning. Literal, metaphor, allusion, symbol, allegory, etc. Then s/he (I actually have no idea who this was, sorry) said that a story poem that was only surface would be pretty simple and dull, but that work that only existed on the deeper levels would also be dreadful, because the reader would have no point of entry or reference, no simple enjoyment or identification before the heavier work began.

I think about this when I read a book like *Killarnoe*, which operates on so many levels and seems open to having the reader on any or all of them, or wherever you would like to go.

RR

April 26th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews 4lbs of strawberries for $5 at Metro

I consider a good price for a one-pound (454 gram) clamshell of California strawberries to be $2.99–higher in the dead of winter. So when I saw two 907 gram clamshells for $5 at Metro, I was awed (I believe you could also replace one of the boxes with a honeydew melon, but I don’t own knives sharp enough to cut honeydew rind, so I stayed away from that).

My grocery-shopping escort declined a box, claiming he could not eat 2 pounds of strawberries before they went off. I scoffed at this, but quailed at the prospect of 4 pounds, so I just got the one. As it turned out, they still charged me the sale price even though I didn’t buy the sale amount (this is one of Metro’s usual, and nicer, policies)–so my 907 grams cost $2.50. Score!

Unlike much sale-priced produce, my berries aren’t underripe. They are nice and dark and, for imported berries, fairly soft. That’s still not *very* soft–Cali berries always have a bizarro crunch factor that is completely absent in lovely delicate local berries. But the local berries won’t be ready for, minimum, another month, and one of the stranger aspects of globalization is the taste it creates for out-of-season fruits. I want berries *always*, not just the six weeks you can pick them in southern Ontario. So Cali berries it is.

These are, I think, the best of their kind I’ve seen. They are nice and sweet (most of them, anyway) and very few off berries (just one in the box so far, and even that was likely edible). I am very impressed. And what’s more, it was not my box–I looked at the others stacked up and the Yonge & College Metro (can’t vouch for any others) and they looked uniformly dark red and healthy. Yum.

Running into this sale was fortitous for a Sunday when I skipped lunch in favour of a poetry vending machine launch and wound up eating a giant burrito at 4pm, because a big fistful of berries plus cereal made a really great supper around 8 that evening. Life is good…but I can’t wait for Ontario berries.

RR

April 25th, 2010

The Toronto Poetry Vendors

This is Toronto poet, and one of the Toronto Poetry Vendosr, Carey Toane (the other is Elisabeth de Mariaffi), giving me a sneak peak inside the city’s first (that I know of) poetry vending machine, now installed and activated inside This Ain’t the Rosedale Library.

Slip in a twoonie (wow, I never write that word–is that how you spell it?) and you’ll get a tiny brightly coloured broadside featuring a poem. The Toronto Poetry Vendors offer poems by 10 Toronto poets–here’s the gang, if you are curious:

Kevin Connolly
Dani Couture
Elisabeth de Mariaffi
Andrew Faulkner
Jacob McArthur Mooney
Stuart Ross
Jenny Sampirisi
Meaghan Strimas
Carey Toane
Paul Vermeersch

April 24th, 2010

On Nostalgia and Homogeniety

AMT wrote a wistful post on nostalgia, which fit in perfectly with the current theme of my days lately, which is trying to remember what it feels like to be a teenager.

I keep thinking I do–all eager and nervous and twitchy and stuff–and then I realize that’s me now. It is so hard to recall how you felt/acted/thought back when you were a different person, particularly if you don’t think that person was all that different than your present day self.

But we are–I am pretty sure, though hazy, on this: people change more than they realize, and the parts of themselves they forget tend to be the ones that differ the most from the present day. This impression comes from having talked to a wide variety of people over the years, none of whom can recall being on top in high school. Everyone was teased, persecuted, trod upon, lonely and alone. I have rarely met anyone who says they were more or less fine in high school, and never to having been the sort of jerk that is more than fine and makes others feel bad about it–or wings French fries at their heads. Apparently, that’s the sort of thing you rinse out of your consciousness when you hit your 20s.

So I’m going to come right and make this bold pronouncement, nearly damning for a writer: I was ok with high school. It was not the best 5 years of my life, but I had some fun, some good friends, some good teachers, learned some stuff. I vaguely recall being teased in grade 9 for wearing a ballet top I bought at the Bay (I still have it) and I certainly never got invited to the coolest parties, but…so? It would’ve been weird if kids I didn’t know invited me to their parties, and anyway, I lived way out in the country and my dad would never have driven me. I hung around with folks I liked, ate lunch with them in the hall by the auto shops, edited the yearbook, and was left largely alone by everyone else.

I seriously worry this makes me a less interesting person to some people, which in itself is such a high school thought.

I am trying to get these memories back because I want to be able to “get” what is going on with my students. One of the hardest things to remember is conformity. It has been a very long time since I worried seriously about the ways I deviate from the status quo. I am not much of a rebel–I think I’m naturally a lot like the status quo–but not entirely, and who cares?

One of the great perks of one’s twenties as that there are so many different things to do and ways to live that it’s very hard to even *find* a standard to try to conform to. I know people who stayed in school for a decade straight after graduating high school, people who found jobs first and went to school when they could afford it, who dropped out immediately and those who never studied formally again after high school grad. I know people who married immediately after high school, after college, after travelling through Europe, after 6 or 10 or 2 years of dating, or barely any time at all. I know people who are politically opposed to marriage, who were fervently delighted when Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and those for whom the whole institution seems irrelevant. Friends my own age have kids in school, kids in diapers, kids in utero, cats, dogs, houseplants and (only one) guinea pig. People are cheerfully devoted to their jobs, wrathfully alienated from their jobs, climbing the corporate ladder, unemployed, underemployed, fascinated by their work or terrified of it. I know homeowners, couchsurfers (ok, we’re getting a little old for that), rooming-housers, apartment dwellers, parental-home dwellers, and perpetual travellers. I know people who think of poverty as only one car, and people who think of wealth as ordering dessert.

How am I supposed to conform to that? I can’t, so I don’t worry about it (and feel happy I have such interesting friends). What makes conformity an issue in high school, I think, is that by nature of the age you have a certain amount of it. Almost everyone lives with their parents, has to be at school at a certain time, takes basically the same classes, and, due to how neighbourhoods tend to work, has basically the same amount of money. They are limited in who they meet beyond their families and classmates, and exposed to a tonne of marketing about music, movies, and fashion, not to mention fastfood, cosmetics, etc.

Even when I was a weird kid, I had basically the same sort of shoes as everyone else–not exactly, and believe me everyone knew it, but I did in fact like a lot of what everyone else liked. There was not much else available to like–not that I knew of, anyway–and those Birkenstocky sandals *were* very nice.

It is actually not that hard to recall that perfectly natural assimilatory instinct–I want clothes I see people wearing on the bus all the time. But it is harder to transer that into the classroom, where kids are reluctant to raise their hands, share their ideas, read their work, or even admit to liking something, if they do not already have pre-approval from their peers. In some ways, me being really impressed with a particular student’s work is no joy for them, because it singles them out. There’s nothing more depressing than realizing that your too-loud compliment is being met with a glare, and you might not be seeing any more of this student’s so-good work. Argh.

This does seem to fade with the older kids–they’re happier to talk about what makes them/their work unique. They’re closer to their twenties, and the point in your life where it is not only acceptable, but desirable (positively ravenously so, at certain university parties) to be a touch odd.

Another weird part of my nostalgia is wondering if the decade without a status quo is coming to an end. I wonder because this nostalgic thinking led me check the Facebook profiles of a bunch of people I knew in high school (oh, what did we do with our creepy stalker tendencies before Facebook?) It’s actually really hard to tell what people are up to with the standard privacy settings, but two things I can tell you are popular are getting married and having babies–almost everyone’s profile picture was a wedding shot/ultrasound/baby pic. Intense.

The difference between grown-upitude and high school, of course, is that people care less what others do–both because they are more tolerant and openminded, and because they don’t have a lot of time to invest in writing a mean little song about some other adult’s lack of real estate savvy or whatever. But I’m trying to experiment with feeling a little bad about the ways I’m weird anyway–I thought it might bring me closer to my students.

April 20th, 2010

Linkages

I am mainly recovered from last week’s slump, and have various good things to suggest, report, and share:

–If you missed Sunday afternoon’s lovely Draft Reading Series 5.2 Salon des Refuses(you poor thing), you can recapture some of the magic by reading Mark’s essay on rejection (from the Draft magazine) or looking at AJ’s pictures.

–If you are still in hot pursuit of poetic pleasures to celebrate Poetry Month, why not go see the Toronto Poetry Vendors launch their big bright green poetry machine (I have no idea if it’s actually green, but it’s called Spearmint…), this Sunday at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library.

–Another poetic option would be to read my one and only published poem, originally from echolocation, now reposted on Pickle Me This. I am pretty proud that Kerry considered this piece–called “Dead Boyfriend Disco”–worthy of inclusion in her Poetic April. I write perhaps three poems a year, mainly lame ones, so I’m pretty proud that DBD exists, period. Warning: it’s really long, probably because I wanted it to be a story.

And yes, I am still reading tomorrow evening, 7pm, at the Free Times Cafe with fine folks like Adrienne Gruber and Andrew Daley. I am looking forward to it because it’s going to be fun; you might be looking forward to it being over so I’ll stop mentioning it every day!

RR

April 19th, 2010

Workshop #7: Grammar

Workshop #7 was actually mainly about Images and Imagist poems, as I think I mentioned somewhere earlier, but we actually covered lots of other ground. Although it is really outside of my purview as the creative-writing person, I snuck in a grammar lesson. I really really want them to stop smudging stellar work with dumb grammar mistakes. I also want to put my foot down with the kids who say they are not “good” at grammar.

I think so many of these rules are like learning the multiplication tables or the provincial capitals–either you had a good teacher in grade 3 who made you memorize them, or you didn’t… The teacher I’m working with certainly does give some excellent grammar lessons, but the kids seem to have a deficit of years. You can get by in conversation a lot of the time–maybe always, depending on what career you choose–just by listening to how others talk and emmulating them, without knowing most of the rules of grammar. But it is much much harder to get written grammar in this way, especially for kids who don’t read except one forced. Lovely as it is to get self-righteous and say that reading for pleasure is a gift and parents just have to show kids blah blah blah, it doesn’t always happen. This is also an issue for kids who grow in homes where English is not the first language. They might hear tonnes of very erudite conversation, read books and watch high-end tv (or they might not), but if it’s not in English, it’s not helping them with their grammar.

So schools don’t teach grammar (I guess I can’t generalize, but mine certainly didn’t and I don’t know anyone else who learned English grammar in a systematic manner–do you?), and kids don’t always have the opportunity to pick it up elsewhere, and I end up with bright, engaged, insightful students who write things like, “She weared her prettiest dress,” and were genuinely startled to find out the past tense of “to lie down” is “to lay down.”

I am into good grammar, but I’m not fanatical about it–I roll my eyes when the grocer advertises “fresh” fish, but c’mon, do I know how to fillet a pickerel? He has his knowledge base and I have mine, and as long as we can understand each other, I don’t see myself as being in the position to make further demands. Chefs can’t make me stop putting barbeque sauce on my salad, and personal trainers can’t stop me from over-emphasizing cardio in my workouts, and fashion designers can’t make me stop wearing those turquoise fishnets I bought for $3 and which don’t fit…we can’t all be experts in everything, and sometimes, we don’t even want to be.

I am in favour of good grammar the way I am in favour of good etiquette–not as an end in itself, or as a stick to beat people with, but as a means of facilitating clear communication and conveying respect to the reader/person you are speaking to. Setting the table neatly shows care for your dinner guest’s ease and pleasure of dining. Yes, he could probably have gone and found a fork in the kitchen, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yes, you do know what I mean when I say “I teared it open”, but it’s just that much more confusing, difficult, and less fun.

In class last week, I told the kids, “No one ever won a Nobel Prize for grammar”: it’s just a tool to get your point across. But they really need to get the tool–it makes their (good) work so inaccessible when I have to puzzle over when it takes place because the tenses are inconsistent, or who did what because the pronouns don’t match. I told them also that grammar is *not* a smart/dumb issue–if you’ve had less exposure to it, you know less, and it’s annoying that you have to make up for that, but all they need to do is sit down and memorize this stuff. Unfortunately, if they don’t bother, they will *look* dumb–I hope it wasn’t inappropriate to use that phrase with my students. Grammatical errors, being mainly simple and easily avoided if you just memorize the rules, look like they are made by dumb people when, in fact, they are mainly made by lazy people.

And then we did a bunch of conjugations and they had to copy things down off the board and everything–it was way old school. I hope it helped. I really think that good grammar will make their lives a lot easier–on resumes and cover letters, on school papers, work emails–people respect good grammar, because reading it is a lot easier than reading garbled stuff, and clean writing conveys respect for the reader.

All that said, in my little heart, I love language rules and am always eager to learn a new one, and to discuss and debate their usefulness and implications. I could talk your ear off about transitive and intransitive verbs, a topic very few people know about and yet very few people get it wrong in everyday writings. I don’t get to be smug, despite my copyediting classes and fervent adherence to the Chicago Manual of Style–I make tonnes of sloppy mistakes on this blog (as you likely well know) and in many other scarier places. The trick is not to just know a lot of stuff about grammar, but to know enough grammar to make clear all the other stuff you know.

RR

April 17th, 2010

Evenements

I went to a wonderful performance last week, a world-renown Canadian artist with a huge and frantically loyal following. I myself am new to this talent, but I attended the event with a group of sincere enthusiasts, who see this fellow on every tour, and buy pretty much everything he puts out as soon as it’s available. We went over 40 minutes early, and already there was a sizeable group there, staking out the good seats. When we ran into another group of folks I know, they were even more enthusiastic, and everyone was instantly able to chat about complex details of this guy’s work. When he finally took the stage, there was uproarious applause from the standing-room-only crowd and even some hoots at his knowing, witty banter with the crowd.

It was last Thursday, at the Toronto reference library, the world-wide launch of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, which consisted of a reading and staged interview with Jared Bland.

It was a stellar reading and a fascinating interview, much like many I’ve seen in Toronto over the past few years. What was different was the massive, wildly enthused crowd–not like I’ve never seen one, but not to this degree. I don’t have much of a spatial eye, but I’m going to guess close to 300 people. Unlike me, most of those weren’t just there to see what all the fuss was about–most of these folks had read at least two or three of Kay’s 11 novels, which are mainly 400-500 epic tomes with a lot of complicated history, maps and family trees in the frontises, and three years of research behind them. I was pretty impressed at this well-read readership–who says they aren’t out there? How inspiring.

It just makes me really happy that such a crowd could gather at the library on a Wednesday for this sort of event, let alone be so incredible gleeful about it. Scott lent me Ysabel by way of GGK introduction, and I really hope that I like it so I count myself among that crowd. And even though it’s likely some Rose-coloured readers find that Kay’s work is not something you dig, I just thought the event itself was really cool and inspiring.

Some other events this week, which are likely to be equally fun and fascinating though a little less crowded and rowdy:

Tomorrow (aka Sunday) at 3pm, the Draft Reading series (pretty much the only series that I know of on Toronto’s lovely east side–can you think of any others?) presents Dani Couture, Michael Bryson, Mark Sampson, Ian Burgham and Ellen S. Jaffe.

Wednesday evening, 7pm–The Free Times Cafe (on college, just west of Bathurst)–the Hear Hear Reading Series presents Adrienne Gruber, Andrew Daley, Julia Tausch, and yours truly. People never hoot during my readings but it would actually probably throw me off a lot if they did.

April 14th, 2010

Stuff to be sad about

In case you didn’t take my point yesterday, my problems are totally lame and largely of my own making. Doesn’t really cheer *me* up to think that, but might cheer you, concerned friends, to know that I have not been stabbed, shot, hit by a car, infected with anything, fired, dumped, or insulted. I’m merely having a loserish week (and it’s only Wednesday). To whit, here are some things that, if you do not have enough problems, you may wish to be sad about with me:

1) Not yet having the new lists issue of The New Quarterly (for which this list is a poor substitute).
2) Combination skin.
3) Was working on a new story for several weeks, put it on hold to work on something else, and upon returning to the project, can no longer remember what the hell I was planning to do with it.
4) Dressing not on the side, as requested.
5) Amy moving away. Sadness not improved by opportunity to buy her stuff since I don’t need any stuff (but maybe you do?)
6) Still cannot find crystal lightning bolt earrings (has been six years, but every now and then I re-open the mourning).
7) Russell Smith launch on same night as Guy Gavriel Kay launch; RR not cloneable.
8) Hardcover books hurt my tiny mouse hands.
9) Weekend kitten visit apparently cancelled.
10) While catastrophic affects of doing large part of a project backwards have been averted (by frantically redoing all the work), am terrified someone is going to ask be why I did it backwards…and I won’t know the answer.
11) Now worried that listing bad things that have not happened to me (see above) will tempt fates.
12) Tax season.

To balance things out…good stuff:

1) TNQ will likely come soon.
2) Guy Gavriel Kay launch with Scott and co will be super-awesome (and perhaps afford an opportunity to eat in a food court, one of my favourite forms of dining).
3) Weekend bowling still on.
4) Finished 3rd draft of another story (the one that distracted me form #3, above) and sent it away.
5) People keep giving me free lipsticks. I counted this morning (what? you have your hobbies and I have mine) and discovered I have seven lipsticks, despite the fact that I have not paid money for one since the year 2000.
6) Have a blog to complain to.
7) Sparkly sunrise this morning.
8) Nice friends.
9) Mother some sort of tax genius.
10) Am wearing sockettes with gold trim, as purchased on my whirlwind trip last May.
11) Spring.