March 15th, 2010

It’s come to my attention…

That some young Canadian musicians took K’naan’s Waving Flag song, possibly the most perfect song to play on the radio in a good while, and made a slightly less good version to benefit victims of the earthquake in Haiti. I thought this idea was genius when I first heard about it, because it’s such a great song about personal empowerment and strength, but a little hazy on the details so it could conceivably work for lots of things (full disclosure: I don’t know what it was originally about). They added some specifics anyway (“out of the darkness / in came the carnage”–oh, dear) and a rap bridge (yikes) but it is kind of cool to hear all those voices rising together at the end. So I recommend you buy the less good version, because it’s a good cause and a song that you really can’t wreck. It’s sort of a superhero song, so maybe it can really do a lot of good for Haiti–look what it did for soccor.

That Rover Arts posted a nice review of the Journey Anthology 21.

That Bonjour Brioche in Leslieville is wonderful. Crowded on the weekends, but seriously, any carb in the place is probably gold. And waitress sometimes talk to each other in French.

RR

Brothers and Sisters

When I was a young whippersnapper student writer, somewhere in later undergrad years, I won a place in a one-day seminar with the novelist/short-story writer Audrey Thomas. It was a cool honour and an interesting day, but the organizers overbooked the workshop a little, and Ms. Thomas wasn’t really able to comment specifically on much of the student work. She may havesaid one or two other small things, but the meat of what she said about my story was how nicely unexpected it was that the close friends in the opening scenes eventually turn out to be brother and sister.

That stuck with me–not so much the compliment, although that was nice, but the pointing out that brother/sister relationships are not the most popular topic for stories, and that may well be because not everyone *has* an opposite-sex sibling, especially one that they are close to. It was a good reminder that I needed to check my work carefully for that sort of autobiographical creep–it may be that almost every one of my main characters in my earliest stories *did* have a close sibling. Maybe.

This goes back to that teenager centre-of-the-earth thing–I wasn’t entirely sure how people without such relationships functioned, and I suppose I suspected not very well, even though I know some people who didn’t, and did (something went wrong with that sentence). I’ve met a lot more people since then, only children, people estranged from their families, people perfectly polite with their sibs but just none-too-chatty, mainly all perfectly functional, and thus I’ve gotten over the urge to give every character a brother or a sister.

But I’m still immensely fond of my brother, and I guess I’d like to see our vibe represented in art a little more. I say this because the two of us just finished watching You Can Count on Me, a film that everyone in the world recommends as a great brother-sister films, and that we both loathed. I’m so disappointed, especially since every critic in the world (see the above link) loved it. Not sure what the misfire was there.

We loved The Savages and even Home for the Holidays was pretty good (I think I liked it more than B. did) but…are there others? Because I really can’t think of any, and would love some recommendations if anyone has any… (yes, I make a point of watching these sorts of things with B.–what, it’s the same as watching romantic movies with your SO, isn’t it?)

I’m probably just blanking out of panic, but I’m having the same trouble with books. Of course there’s Franny and Zooey, and I want to say Holden and Phoebe in Catcher, but that’s kids and I’d actually like adult relationships if possible (being as I’m adult and all). What else… Oh, dear. Maybe I’m having this problem because it’s late. I’ll try again tomorrow, but if you have ideas, please share!!

February 23rd, 2010

Groups and Challenges

In Writer Guy’s review of Century as part of Canada Reads Independently, he wonders if he’s right in calling CRI a “challenge.” I’m sure it’s fine to call it whatever one likes, but I much prefer a term I’ve learned from my bookfriends on GoodReads–a “group read.” To me, that implies better what I think these projects intend: to get people agreeing to read something as a group so they can then talk about it. So fun and friendly.

“So why aren’t you participating in any of these group reads, RR?” would be a reasonable question to ask, at least lately. It’s true–I love book conversations and though I’m not the fastest reader, I’m fast enough to read a book purely for the sake of participating in a conversation. I used to quite often. But I can’t quite get committed lately. Maybe it was the demanding, structured reading in grad school that’s put me off. Maybe it was a few book-club related incidents–a club-wide insistance on reading “challenging” books that weren’t “too easy” or “light”…which ended with me miserably hauling myself through a couple books that no one else liked, or indeed, bothered to read.

I think these sorts of group reads a project like Kerry’s, or in fact Canada Reads itself, seems very fun indeed–as warm an invitation to conversation as one could hope for. I love the idea of a group of people focusing their reading so they can share it. All I can say is I really hope to get it together for next year.

Meantime, I’m trying one of the less-structured options of group reads, one where participants don’t read the same book but engage in the same kind of reading and then share thoughts on that. One that appeals (because I was already sort of doing it privately) is a retro-reading challenge. Rereading has been a hot topic on The Literary Type lately, and now over at Free-range Reading, Mark suggests the Retro Reading Challenge. Ok, fine, it’s got the word “challenge” in it, but it still seems pretty fun and friendly to me:

“So here’s the idea, which I’m calling the Retro Reading Challenge, and I hope you all will play along. The idea is to pick a book that you read and adored years and years ago, then reread it now and write a review of it to capture your impressions. Did you still love it? Did you see flaws (or strengths) that you missed the first time? Did you have an “Oh God, what the hell was I thinking?” moment?”

I might not quite be able to comply with all the rules–the book needs to have been something I read only once, at least 15 years ago–but I *might* have Mostly Harmless only once, in my early teens–it wasn’t in the giant omnibus that I owned as a kid, since it didn’t come out until 1992. And it’s way darker than the others, so it’s conceivable it wasn’t on my reread list. And it fits in nicely with my don’t judge Eoin Kolfer too harshly project, which has been going on since fall (I’m halfway through *So Long and Thanks for All the Fish* right now, if you’re curious) and will end when I read *And Another Thing* and try not to hate it for not being written by Douglas Adams.

SO! Rambling aborted, I will read *Mostly Harmless* and review it as part of the Retro Reading project. Yes. This is my plan. Baby steps.

RR

February 20th, 2010

PSA on the PLR

Yesterday I received my first statement and cheque from the Public Lending Rights Commission. I was very excited, and not just because money had come in the mail–I love evidence that *Once* is out there in the world, doing it’s thing (getting read) totally independent from me. In this case, the PLR statement tells me that *Once* is in some libraries.

What the Public Lending Rights Commission does is survey a sampling of libraries and give writers whose books are found in that sample get a little payment for the use their work is getting. It’s a bit of a numbers game–even a semi-popular book might happen not to be in the several of the libraries sampled–but it’s the best way anyone’s found to pay authors for library usage, short of auditing all the libraries in the whole country.

Most published (with an ISBN) creative works and general-interest nonfiction is eligible for the survey, and thus for payment–if the author registers. If you go to that link above, it’ll start you on your way to completing the registration–you’ve got until May to do it this year.

The money’s not astronomical, but it’s always nice for it to just show up like that. Even better, though, I like the acknowledgement of myself as a writer and *Once* as a book. I don’t know about most writers (though I have my suspicions) but I myself am very insecure and prone to authorial existentialism–“Who am I fooling, calling myself a writer?” and so forth. Not that the PLR or any kind of money in the mail proves anything at all; I know plenty of talented writers who don’t have a book (yet). But I do like these professional forms to fill out with “Rebecca Rosenblum, author.” and I grab all that I can get, even if there’s no fame or fortune to be had. In this regard (and this regard only) I even like rejection letters: they address me as an writer, in some form or another.

So yeah, what I’m saying is, register for the PLR if you are eligible–it’s a good service for book-writers and a nice acknowledgment of your writerliness. And sometimes money comes in the mail.

RR

February 17th, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *The Lizard* by Michael Bryson

Do you miss The Danforth Review, that awesome online literary quarterly that published such a wide range of fiction, criticism and interviews? Yeah, I miss it too, but it’s cool to know that (one of) the reason(s) it is currently on hiatus is is in favour of founding publisher and editor Michael Bryson‘s “struggling attempts at creating literature.”

I just finished reading Bryson’s third book, a collection of short stories called The Lizard and I think it’s worth the struggle. This is a small spare book, 117 pages of generously leaded pages, and spare also in terms of details. One of the ways I think of the short story is as a bright spotlight, trained on the ground. A character approaches it in darkness, then when s/he enters it, is brilliantly illuminated for the time it takes to cross the spotlight, then returns to darkness. The shape of the story is how and where the author trains the spotlight; the character(s)’s actual actions and dialogue just life going forward.

I think the best stories in this collection are the ones that remind me of expertly focussed spotlights. From a man whose relationship is probably disintegrating while his father’s love life takes off (“May the Road Rise”–great title) to a guy who sees his childhood friend resorting to violence (maybe) (“Hit”), there aren’t a lot of resolutions here, or many answers.

If you are familiar with the term tolerance for ambiguity, you probably learned it in a psychology or education class, but a reader of my acquaintance uses it to describe a reading style. Readers with a high tolerance for ambiguity don’t mind not having much backstory in a piece of fiction, provided we have some sense that there is a logical one. In a good story, we’re fine with not knowing why things happened, nor what the outcome is–if the author can shape the piece so that it works without those things.

“Six Million Million Miles” was, to me, the perfect story for the ambiguously tolerant (like me), because Bryson counters the randomness of writing any story about a few moments in anyone’s life with how random anyone’s life actually is. This story is only a couple guys sitting around, talking. They’re both around forty, both in relationships that are uncertain, talking about a going into business together as soon as they can decide what that business should be. Then a house down the street explodes.

They worry about it, talk about it, watch the flames shooting into the sky. Then they go back inside because one of the guys’ sort of girlfriends has arrived. She has brought someone with her–a date? The evening progresses, the other guy’s girlfriend comes over too, there’s another explosion, they order some pizza.

What a terrible summary! But this is a beautiful story, so much more as a whole than as the sum of it’s parts–I noticed that, reading it over in bits and pieces just now to write this review. The story works because it feels random, just a bunch of stuff that happened over a few hours, but the end I was left with a powerful feeling of how anyone’s life is so much more than he or she can understand, let alone explain.

Not every story worked on me with this intensity, but I think that might have been partly my fault. *The Lizard* is an easy book to like, and I think I read it too fast, missing some of the bigger payoffs because I was enjoying the little ones: a toddler falling down in the park, the ins and outs of work in a pet store, a quiet reaction to 9/11.

This is why Rose-coloured reviews are not real reviews–if this were professional, I’d reread immediately and get it all worked out. But since I’m happily unprofessional me, I’m going to mull it over for a while, fill in some ambiguities in my own head, and look forward to when I eventually work my way back to this fascinating book.

RR

February 13th, 2010

The Olympics: Rebecca learns a valuable lesson

I was going to write a post about my feelings about the Olympics, but then I decided against it. If I had written it, it would have gone approximately like this:

“The 2010 Winter Olympics have begun, and once again I am not paying attention. I consider it impressive that I even knew ahead of time that they were beginning–I didn’t know about the Bejing games until a tv at the gym with a million drummers drumming caught my eye. The only Olympic event I can ever remember watching was the 2004 men’s hockey finals, and that day I volunteered to take the chair facing away from the tv, since I wouldn’t have paid attention anyway. It’s not like I hate the Olympics, I just am a very non-sporty person from a non-sporty background. I don’t know the names of any of the athletes, nor even the rules to most of the sports, and nor do I care to know. It just seems like a huge amount of energy and time and tonnes of money goes into this event for a tiny group of people to participate in, having nothing to do with life in this country as a whole, and I’m a bit uncomfortable with that.”

The reason I did not write that post is that another post occurred to me, one which I’d never write, but I better countless others have done variations on. It goes like this:

“I was walking through the bookstore on my way to the movies, not paying any attention to the books on the shelves. I consider it impressive that I even knew where the bookstore was–I only found it as a shortcut to the theatre. The only literary reading I can remember ever attending, I just stared answered emails on my Blackberry the whole time, since I wouldn’t have paid attention anyway. It’s not like I hate books, I’m just a very non-literary person from a non-literary background. I don’t know the names of any authors nor what a sonnet is, and nor do I care to know. It seems to me that a huge amount of energy and time and tonnes of money goes towards publishing these things for a tiny group of people to read, having nothing to do with life in this country as a whole, and I’m a bit uncomfortable with that.”

If the second post must be false–just because some people don’t care about literature doesn’t mean literature is a waste of time–then likely the first is, too. I remain unconverted, but more supportive, perhaps, of those who strive to be the best at something I don’t care about. It’s a good thing I’m not the arbiter of anything. To paraphrase Beatrice Hall a bit, “I am not interested in what the athletes are doing, but I will defend their right to do it” (maybe not until the death; also, did you know that the original line is not Voltaire).

This whole thought process has been illuminating. Who knows who I’ll empathize with tomorrow?
RR

February 12th, 2010

Rec Department

Indelible Acts by AL Kennedy is very intense, funny, tart, weird, and definitely sexy. The first couple stories are two of the weirdest (a man has an affair with a woman he meets in a cheese shop, and the sex is so brilliantly good that something cracks open in either his brain or the universe), so it wasn’t until I was well into the book that I started to experience a weird sense of vertigo…”This woman writes…like…me!”

I think Kennedy has all kinds of points on me, quality-wise (I’ve never seen anyone write about sex so grimly and unsentimentally), and we have different interests in many ways (no one in this book appears to have a real job), but we both write stories firmly rooted in character, and sometimes, if what’s true to the character is a lack of change or closure, then that’s how it wraps up. So I was pretty wrapped up in this book from a technically point of view– a “how is she going to deal with *that*” attitude–because while if I could just copy brilliant authors, I would, but most are doing such different things I can’t use their techniques. Hers, maybe, I can–I do feel like I learned a lot from this read. But, like I said, she’s amazing and I was able to enjoy this on a non-technical level and think you could, too!

Have you read the periodic table recently? Highly recommended–I think it’s changed since I was in high school–so much more stuff now! I was looking at one that described what people *do* with each element (not the one linked; sorry, I can’t find it on the web) and there are quite a few new elements marked “no use”, which I think is funny, although we’ll probably need’em someday, to fight the aliens or some new plague or something. My favourite is ununoctium, elemebet 118, which does nothing, but is the leader of the pack that starts at ununium and goes all the way up to 8. What *are* they, besides fascintating? Bonus: element 71, lutetium, is used for determining the age of meteorites. HOW DOES THIS WORK??

My short-story, “Do,” was published last fall in the Antigonish Review, and is now available as part of the new podcast (#8) of Words to Go. It’s a short, sweet, very interesting show, and I’m quite pleased to be a part of it.

RR

February 9th, 2010

Print Psychiatry

On the weekend, I dreamed that I was a verso page, madly in love with a recto. Is that weird? I mean, of course that’s weird, you’re weird for even understanding that, but…really weird?

There’s 1001 what-sort-of-bramble-bush quizzes on the Web, but this one Rosalynn at the Literary Type is pretty special (she has such good taste). It’s like a five-minute psychological/typographical analysis, and it’s very soothing. Except I turned out to be Courier, when I feel very strongly that my personality is Times New Roman.

Yours in lunacy,
RR

January 29th, 2010

Lit Bits

1) JD Salinger, literary hero of many youths (including this one) has died. I haven’t read a lot of the coverage, but I have seen a few references to the fellow as the author of “just one novel,” and while I loved The Catcher in the Rye as much as anyone (so much!), I am a bit miffed for Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories (one of my lifetime fave short-story collections), and even Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: an Intorduction, the first half of which I did truly enjoy (and the second…oh dear).

But I can’t feel quite as sad as I think I ought to about the passing of such a great author. Of course, I didn’t know him personally (though my cousin did meet him once in the library at Dartmouth, a fact I always try to seem unimpressed about, and fail). It’s more that I haven’t been reading straight along with him–he stopped publishing decades ago, and I haven’t read any Salinger for the first time since my teens. Unlike, say, Mr. Updike, we weren’t moving along together.

There is a bit of excitement going around that now all his output for the last many years will be revealed and published. I’m not sure that would happen, and anyway, though I greatly hope for something that can stun me like For Esme, with Love and Squalor, I fear a reprise of Hapworth 16, 1924, the last of his published work (in the New Yorker in 1965–that same cousin photocopied an old library copy). I hate that story, though in googling it just now I found some people like. Who knew? It is deeply boring to me. So I am worried that now lots of books will come out by Salinger and I will read them and not like them and be disappointed.

2) From a literary end to a literary beginning: I went with blogger and friend Kerry Clare and her daughter Harriet to Mables Fables in celebration of Family Literacy Week (which is, as it turns out, is not real–it is only Family Literacy Day except on Kerry’s blog. But I am still going to most my family-literacy post today or possibly tomorrow, in solidariy!

*Anyway,* our fieldtrip was wonderful, prefaced by cake and punctuated by the stroller blowing down the sidewalk past the store window. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in seeing photos of a bookstore (er, but why *not*?) you should click on Kerry’s link to see pictures of Harriet, a very lovely baby with great, if over-literal, taste in books!

RR

January 7th, 2010

Dark Materials

It wasn’t intentional, but as soon as the holidays were over I started reading and watching much darker stuff than in late December. Though it wasn’t the plan, but it’s worked out to kind of suit my mood–it’s freezing in my apartment (and outside of it), the war with UPS rages on, and I have way too much work. Also, I miss the days when everything was about tinsel instead of to-do lists–where are you, oh halcyon days of late December??

But of course, if something’s going to be sad, it helps a lot if it’s also darkly funny and searingly realistic. I went to see Up in the Air because it is being marketed as a snappy romantic comedy and (sue me) I like those. But though there are a few rom-com type scenes (a groom with cold feet, a cra-zay party where everyone gets drunk and lets their feelings show), those wind up looking strange and out of place in the midst of all the dark and searing.

This film is about a man named Ryan (played by George Clooney) who is hired for a day or a week by companies who want to fire some of their employees but management can’t a actually face doing it. Ryan describes losing a job as one of the worst days of most people’s lives–and in this film, you get to see that, over and over. Many of the dozens of newly fired folks are played by real people who actually *have* been recently let go. They improvise their lines, and the pain apparent made me want to look away, and unable to look away.

So the film is about how people relate to their jobs, how Ryan relates to his job, and to the women around him. He mainly *doesn’t* relate to people in non-business relationships, until he meets a sexy lady in a bar, and that relationship somehow lets him engage with people like his sisters, his vulnerable young colleague, etc. So you see how this could have been an inspiring little love story, but I have been running around begging people not to see it if that’s what they’re hoping for.

The gooey middle of the story ends soon enough and the ending is a one-two punch that left my companion and I sitting like blast victims as the credits rolled and everyone else left the theatre. *Up in the Air* is a very good movie, but brace yourself.

There certainly are flaws in that film, despite my love for it. On the other hand, though in many ways grim, Denis Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son is pretty pitch-perfect. Such immense clarity and respect he brings to even descriptions of suffering that I was really awed my the book, though again, I often wanted to look away. These are linked stories–they all have the same narrator, a young junkie of no fixed address with a string of unhappy girlfriends and a flexible relationship with violence.

The stories are likely what you’d imagine them to be, tales of deals gone wrong, confusion, suffering, gore, all with the hazy chronology and causality that comes from telling stories on chemicals. But there is an incredible beauty in these pieces, too, which comes partially from the narrator’s fractured viewpoint and partially from the circumstances he finds himself in, quite unlike what most of us will ever see. I saw the film version ages back (it was pretty good, I think) and the most memorable part involved Jack Black as a strung-out hospital orderly, and a patient with a switchblade in his eye. That incident is found here in the story “Emergency,” similarly striking but much quieter, much more ordinary in its strangeness and impossible beauty.

This is from the last piece in the book, “Beverly Home.” The 20 pages of the story feel epic as the narrator takes a job in a nursing home, dates a dwarf, goes to AA, struggles to live what he imagines a real drug-free life would be:

“One day, too, when I’d passed through the lot and was walking along behind a row of town houses on the way to the bus stop, I heard the sound of a woman singing in her shower. I thought of mermaids: the blurry music of falling water, the soft song from the wet chamber. The dusk was down, and the heat came off the hovering buildings. It was rush hour, but the desert sky has a way of absorbing the sounds of traffic and making them seem idel and small. Her voice was the clearest thing coming to my ears.”

So many people talk about how amazing this book is that I was daunted to read it–book almost never live up to that sort of hype. I am so glad this one did.

I’m, uh, gonna maybe do something cheerful now.

RR