January 6th, 2010

12 sentences

Another way people of the blogosphere (do I overuse that word?) are recapping the year is by posting the first sentences from the first post of each month in 2009 together, to see if they form a narrative. Mine don’t, but it was fun for me to cruise through all my old posts and remember all those good times. Also, to realize that I write really really long sentences; gotta work on that!

12 random bits of 2009:

These 365-day units do not necessarily break off at useful points–I’m having trouble encapsulating the past year or imagining the next one because I’m in the *middle* of so many things.

So you live in an apartment for ages, get used to all the tricks of the door locks and the shower faucet, keep your shorts available during the winter because you know the heat is unpredictable, realize there is a tiny bloodstain on a floortile here or there and don’t worry about it because it’s probably yours, tape things to every available surface, install splitters on the phone jack and a power bar on the electrical jack and generally just assume that the place is your domain and you know it cold.

Saturday February 28, 2009, dawned a bit watery, but the dawn did come before 7 am (only the third day of the year that we got light before 7!) and by the time sun was fully in the sky, the flimsy cloud cover had delicately burnt off or blown away, leaving us with a ravishing yellow and blue to breakfast by. In

As you might have been able to glean from the occasion dysphoric comment here at Rose-coloured, or my eye-rolls in person, my current manuscript is not coming together as well as I’d like.

I’m reading reading reading student stories this week, and they are *good*!

This is week is one with way too much fun in it, such that of the events below, I’m only actually able to attend a couple.

Colour vapour labour odour realize analyze vapourize glamour (but glamorous) jewellery ageing cheque judgment lasagna gonnorhea etc.

I started thinking about story (and poem) submissions to literary journals when a friend said she was going to start sending some out.

Joyland Stories will soon be a part of the daily dose of aweomse that is CellStories, a site that sends cell phone and Blackberry (etc.) users a new short story every day (you can also read the stories at the link above).

Mr. Turner is an important author for me (although really also for Canada) for various reasons, not least his was one of the first literary readings I ever saw, and at said reading, the very first pornographic film I ever saw.

Reminder that Amy Jones, Kathleen Winter and I are reading tomorrow at the Drawn & Quarterly store in Montreal, 211 rue Bernard West, at 7pm.

The Advent Books blog is up and running.

RR

January 2nd, 2010

Two thousand and what?

I was going to recap this past week of vacation at some point, but then I realized that I should also do a 2009-in-review post, and then people started going on about the end of the *decade* and now I am just utterly overwhelmed.

I’ve been reading other people’s lovely 2000s retrospectives instead, happy that some people can do this right. A lot of them are fairly personal, even if they are on blogs focussed on reading or writing or whatever (my interests are pretty narrow in scope). Which only makes sense–ten years is a huge meaningful block in anyone’s life, and it’s hard not to get emotional thinking of what’s been wrought in that time, even if a lot of good books got read in there, too.

December 15th, 2009

Happy Holidays–all of them

Some years I don’t feel a need to explain, some years I do. This year I do, so: I am a Jew who celebrates Christmas. No intermarriage in my family, just long-time residence in–and affection for–a very Christian community. There were no other Jews in my grade-school classes ever (my younger brother also went to the school, and there was a much older girl somewhere in the system who was also Jewis, so I wasn’t completely alone). It was either figure out how to draw a Star of David on my own, or draw a Christmas tree with everyone else. And the others were so happy drawing the tree.

I don’t think I would have been ostracized if I’d refused the tree. There were no other Jews, but there was a boy who was a Jehovah’s Witness in the class, and he went and stood in the hall not only during any sort of holiday festivity but also during the national anthem and Lord’s Prayer (it was a very small old-fashioned country school) every morning. No one ever teased him, and he was actually a well-liked kid, but it couldn’t have been easy to miss out on all the festive stuff.

Christmas has a lot of good things that go with it. This year I’ve been involved in a couple different charity drives, for children both in this community and overseas. I’ve been to beautiful parties and received cards covered with glitter and eaten delicious food, and am happy to think there’s more to come.

I am sad to think that anyone would ever feel I was being disrespectful to my Jewish identity by enjoying other people’s traditions. And I would be sad also to think that anyone would think I was disrespectful of Christianity because I take only bits and pieces from that tradition.

And I would also be upset to be held as an example for why the Christmas-observant don’t need to be sensitive to the non-observant. “Rebecca likes Christmas and she’s *Jewish*, so I don’t know why I need to say ‘Happy holidays’ or take down this giant public creche…”

I’m easygoing, fairly secular, and deeply festive–I am non-extrapolatable, though there may well be others like me. Every year I gear up for Christmas with a tiny bit of trepidation over these misunderstandings, but mainly joy that I’m going to hear Barenaked Ladies sing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and eat eggnog flavoured candy canes again. And put tinsel in my hair.

And of course I wish you whatever your heart desires this December, of whatever denomination your wishes fall into.

This picture is hard to make out, but that’s my little fourth-night menorah in the front, and my little overlit tree in the back. I guess it is appropriate that this pic, like so much of what is written above, is all blurry.

RR

December 8th, 2009

Not by any other: on names and naming

I have stolen a rose. It is in a glass water on my kitchen table, and I look at it as I eat breakfast. It’s pretty and I like looking at it, but I also feel a little guilty. I’m pretty sure no one misses it, but it was still not my rose to take.

Except there is a part of me that feels that all roses are mine. Because of my name, you see: when I see a rose, a tiny part of my brain says “mine” or, sometimes, “me.”

I identify very very strongly with my name. I have a strong interest in all the other Rosenblums in the world, of which there are not that many. There are more Rebeccas, and I always enquire after them if I hear the name mentioned–I want to make sure they are upstanding women and not doing anything under the aegis of Rebeccaness that might sully our reputations.

But I am willing to admit that their ways of being Rebecca, whatever they are, become the definition of Rebeccaness in their context. Names are tautological–whoever you are, that’s you! For that reason, as soon as I know a person slightly, I have no trouble keeping him/her straight from other people with the same name: the personality hooks into whatever the person is called (at one point I knew 13 Jasons). I have never met a person whose name didn’t seem to me to suit him or her; everyone simply becomes the embodiment of that name to me.

The only people whose names aren’t a simply tautology to me are, ironically, my parents, because I don’t know them by their names (although of course I know what they are). I have been known to obliviously introduce them as simply “my mom and dad,” and leave them to give their proper names themselves, which in fact sound strange to me, though I don’t honestly expect people to address my mom as “Rebecca’s Mom”–I just forget that that’s not actually her name.

I have known people who changed their names when they married, when they immigrated, when they broke away from their families, or when they began writing. They seem just fine with the change, learning to identify fully under the new rubric. I imagine that must be a huge transformation of self, a serious mental and emotional change. It’s enough for me to even remember to call them what they now want to be called.

So I am not one of those authors who takes great joy in researching names, keeping lists of cool names, or matching the meaning of the name with a character (my name means “bound”–not even close). To me that’s not how names work: the person inflates the name with his or her being, not the other way round. Because real people come to me with names in place, in my mind so do characters. I generally think of an appropriate name within the first few paragraphs of writing about someone, and then that’s it–it becomes who they are. I almost never alter the names of characters once I’ve been writing about them for a while, and though maybe I can fiddle with a minor character’s name if she’s only on the page briefly, the characters I know well would disturb me greatly by another name. It would be as if my mom suddenly demanded I call her Barbara.

So the fact that I now need to change a character’s name is making me bonkers. It’s a coincidental reality/fiction overlap, and since I have no wish to edit reality, it’s fiction that’s going to have to take the hit, so as to avoid confusion. I thought I would avoid upsetting myself by writing the story with the original name in place and then search’n’replace it right before submitting the piece for publication–I wouldn’t even have to see this alien name on the page for very long.

But my attempt to pull this clever trick on my own brain isn’t working: now that I know this guy isn’t keeping his name, he’s shifty on the page whenever I try to write about him. “Who are you?” seems to be my question for him, although I thought I already knew. It’s really slowing down the writing, as I stare at the paragraph where he drinks the soda and think, “As Paul took a sip of his soda,” “As Nick took a…” “As Dave took…” We can’t spend 20 minutes on the soda-drinking paragraph!! It’s only two lines long! This problem remains unsolved, and in progress.

I love my brain–it is a very interesting place to live, but sometimes I wish it were just a little more flexible. Even my father, who has been living under the Rosenblum rubric the longest, is baffled by my enthusiasm, and claims to “not really think about it.” He does sometimes give me roses, though.

RR

December 2nd, 2009

How tired are you?

I just washed my face, and when I went to wash the facial-cleanser bubbles off my hands, I picked up a(nother) bar of soap to wash them off.

I am very tired. Also, very clean.

RR

November 20th, 2009

Thanks again

So, um, er, I thought yesterday was American Thanksgiving. All day I walked around being thankful for stuff, and it turns out–that’s next week. Too late, I’m already thankful, and I’m doing the Thanksgiving post today. Of course, I was already grateful last month for Canadian Thanksgiving, so I’m going to limit this list to gratitude-worthy things that have happened since early October. Ok, go!

1) Medieval Times. I liked the dancing horses, the bright emblems, the evil green night and his worthy foes, but it was not so any one aspect of the spectacle that I loved so much as getting to go, at the age of 31, with a group of happy friends that wanted to cheer for the blue knight and eat enormous amounts of chicken just as much as I did. I have to admit, I was nervous about what happens when you grow up; I am so glad to find it is this.

2) Canada! In the past couple months, I’ve been in the following cities: Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener, Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, and Jasper. And everywhere has been fun and fascinating and full of friendly people and unimaginable discoveries. So *this* is why people travel. I’m starting to get it now.

3) Biblioasis! Obviously, I’m pretty grateful for Biblioasis publishing my book a year ago, and supporting so wonderfully. But right specifically now, I’m grateful for it being a year on and still getting to do readings for Bilblioasis, not to mention being driven to Montreal by Dan Wells. Again, I didn’t know what being a published author would be like, but I am so glad it turns out to involve parties and sushi and road trips.

4) Not getting swine flu (yet).

5) Mavis Gallant‘s short stories. SHE’S SO GOOD!! I always knew that, but now my head is bursting with it. More on this situation as it develops.

6) Making my holiday card list (yes, I do this in November; what?) and thinking about all the lovely people I know.

7) Hugs.

So, yeah, thanks for all that. And remember that this list is effective for the next week, until the actual American Thanksgiving has come and gone, after which, I suppose I’ll have to find some new things to be grateful for.
RR

October 30th, 2009

C’est l’Hallowe’en!!

Oh, I love this holiday. Perhaps most fictions writers are, as we are so dedicated to that which isn’t. There are not enough days on the calander when one is encouraged to go out in costume!

I love making costumes, though unlike with writing, I have little interest in audience for my costumes. Nobody every understands what I am, and the explanation required is often quite long. I am happy to explain, and also happy to remain a mystery for those who don’t care about the explanation. The best question I’ve been asked in a long time was the recent query, “So, Rebecca, what abstract concept are you being for Hallowe’en this year?”

So costume highlights from say 1996 onward (when I was a whippersnapper and costumed by my parents, I wore mainly standard superhero/witch/alien/hula girl costumes, which enevitably disappeared beneath a parka and sometimes snowpants. I did not, overall, fare terribly well during the years I was being dressed by my parents):

1)Bunch of grapes
2) Chalk outline
3) Carrot (something of a produce theme emerges)
4) The Universe
5) Fire
6) Evil Toothfairy (she takes teeth that aren’t even loose)
7) Dryad
8) Television test pattern

There were (gasp) a few years in there that I didn’t dress up, as well as a few in which I was my standard fallback costume, a butterfly.

But this year is going to be the best ever! Or I’m going to get ink poisoning!! Whatever, I don’t care, I love Hallowe’en so much and I’ve already had SO MUCH SUGAR!!

Whatever you are going as (and if you choose not to wear a costume, I choose to pretend you are going as a plain-clothes cop) I wish you a very happy Hallowe’en! Try not to egg any houses tonight!
RR

October 28th, 2009

Autobiographical Fiction and the Spectre of Mary Sue

Though my stories use plenty from the purportedly “real” world, I don’t write much autobiographical fiction. I know many authors use their lives on the page to brilliant effect, but the few times I’ve done it, the process made me miserable and took forever. It’s very very hard to transform oneself and people one cares about into characters, and the reason (for me) is that I can’t be as dispassionate, as clear-eyed and insightful about myself as I can about someone I made up, with whom I have no personal connection (because they are not a real person, and not available to form a connection).

Like um, this blog? In case you didn’t know? It’s really really biased. I avoid blogging anecdotes that make me look like (too much of) a moron, don’t discuss complicated moral decisions I made and later regretted, or other ways in which I might have let people down.

Those are shortcuts that aren’t available in fiction or at least not in the sort of fiction I (want to) write, I can’t blink at the characters’ flaws, let them get away with dubious actions, or valorize tepid behaviour. Even though the people aren’t real, they have real flaws and failings, and I care about writing those carefully, honestly.

I care about being honest about my own failings, too, but I find that incredibly difficult to do in public, with an audience. When I attempt to render something that happened to me in fiction, I often wimp out without realizing it, and wind up writing something that lets the “me” character off the hook or else pushes her forward in an unearned “hero” role. I have long-since learned that no matter how much an author likes her characters, you can’t have “favourites”–a really hard rule to enforce if a character is based on your brother, your beloved, or yourself.

A Mary Sue is a character in fiction that is (or the reader thinks is) a version of the author that is used a wish-fulfillment device in the story. It’s the dowdy girl who turns out to be the only one who can repair the engine in time to return to battle–and that’s when the sergeant notices her quiet yet tantalizing beauty. It’s the nerdy boy who just happens to be there when the head cheerleader falls in the lake–and the only one who bothered to learn mouth-to-mouth, and the possessor of surprisingly soft yet firm lips.

The term “Mary Sue” comes from the land of fan fiction, which is stories written about characters from TV shows, books and movies by their fans, for personal enjoyment and sharing with friends (not publication, cause that’s dubious copyright territory). But it applies in literary fiction too, I think–sometimes a fascinating event from real life doesn’t work in fiction because there are too many surrounding personalities and emotions and tensions that the author can’t manage on the page. Those things get edited out, and what we are left with a sublime perfect character who understands everything and everyone and never falls down in the parking lot.

I’m on this topic for a couple of reasons, not least the hysterical bit above from the Write Badly Well blog (thanks to AMT for the link). But more, it’s hearing Carrie Snyder read some really amazing autobiographical fiction, at the launch for the new issue of The New Quarterly, which features same.

Snyder’s story “Rat” is wonderful not only because it evokes the place and experience (a child emigrates with her family to Nicarauga) perfectly, but because the child’s POV is supplemented by a more omniscient third-person narrator. Thus, we do not end up with one of contemporary literature’s stock figures–the “wise beyond her years” “preternaturally intelligent” child-narrator. Sometimes this works beautifully, but often an author using remembered childhood incidents cannot help but load in adult insight and contextualizing, and we end up with an unrealisitically brilliant and insightful child–a character who knows more than all the others, and can do no wrong…a Mary Sue.

Snyder’s central character, Juliet, is smart but not insanely so–she understands more than the adults think she does, but she still misses a lot. The 3rd person narrator fills in the gaps in insight in a striking, sometimes shocking way. I’ve only heard a condensed version of this story read aloud, and I’m really looking forward to reading it at leisure when my issue of TNQ shows up (c’mon, Canada Post).

It’s always nice to reminded that although something is hard, it can be done extraordinarily well by an author with perspecitive and talent. Almost makes me want to try again myself…almost.

RR

October 21st, 2009

Games to Play on the TTC: Snark Projection

Regular readers of this blog will know that I spend a lot of time on the TTC and that I love it. It’s not a perfect system (I’m looking at you, big open U up north) but it functions admirably, and for $1200 a year, gets me everywhere I need to go, plus most places I want to go. I also love the openness to strangers and their lives that public transit gives me. When I stopped working in the service industry, I found I really missed the constant stream of new faces (although little else). Some days, the bus is my only chance to see any strangers at all.

The TTC is a fashion show, an easedropper’s paradise, a microcosm of etiquette puzzles (exactly how crowded does the bus have to be to make standing in front of the doors acceptable?), and chance for random acts of kindness. Of course, that last one is especially fun to watch: how many bookmarks, metropasses, gloves, and pieces of fruit have people rescued for me in transit? I see people lifting up the fronts of strollers, grabbing the arms of blind people, offering their streets to pregnant ladies, mentioning that someone’s tag is out almost every day.

But I also see a fair bit of bad behaviour. So, though you know it comes with (largely) love, this particular game is snarky. I have noticed a bad TTC tendancy has lately picked up force, and I don’t like it, and to comfort myself, I have been writing little storylets based on the bad behaviour.

On most of the newer TTC buses (since about 2006), the seats in the raised rear portion of the bus are in pairs beside the windows. I always sit at the back and have firmly internalized the bus-logic rule that if you are alone in a two-seat, you scootch over to the window if you want to zone out. It is permissable to remain in the aisle seat only if you are able to remain alert and immediately swing your knees out into the aisle if someone wants to set next to you (because there is zero leg room for someone to get by; the aisle person essentially blocks access to the internal seat).

BUT! Some people I’ve encountered lately have not only not been scooting over or putting their knees in the aisle as I angle for the seat, they have been meeting my gaze balefully, almost angrily, even when I ask if I might please sit there. They do actually let me–no one’s said no yet–but a lot of people have looked furious about the proceedings.

I don’t think the rules have changed since I moved to TO–but in order to not simply start hating everyone, I have been imagining the interior monologues of these people, trying to empathize with how they must somehow feel wronged by my desire to sit beside them.

Here’s what I’ve got, for only some of the encounters I have had.

1) I am in love! I am in love and texting my beloved! Texting is our bond! If I do not text him immediately, he might not know I love him! Textless, he might break up with me! Then I would be loveless, heartbroken, life would not be worth living. I might die. I see a shadow. There is someone standing over me, but I cannot stop texting “OMG, I <3<3<3 u!!!!!!" to see what this shadow wants. Clearly, it is less important than love. Even if the shadow is in love with me, I am spoken for. Probably. Unless the shadow is super-hot...maybe I should look up? 2) That young woman is clearly young and slender, while I am feeling fat and old today. My friends tell me that I am neither fat nor old but they are lying so that they won’t have to deal with my problems. I’m not going to squinch up in this narrow little molded plastic seat, I’m not going to let her make me feel fat. Alone, my thigh can perhaps inch a bit over the seat divider and no one cares, but if that little gym rat were sitting next to me, she’d shift awkwardly away and make me feel like a big fat cow. No way am I letting her insult me like that. She can stand on her gym-toned legs. 3) That young woman has a big ass. If she sat down next to me, I would have to squinch awkwardly into the aisle to accomodate her ass. After a hard day, I deserve to have full access to my complete molded plastic TTC seat. I am not responsible for her lack of willpower regarding molasses taffy. She should stand–it tones the glutteal muscles. 4) I am in a gang. Gang members get full control of the back seats on busses. How can you not know this, lady in the tights with flowers on them? Clearly, you are not in a gang, but you should still respect the entitlements of gang members. See this enormous cubic zirconium in my left ear? See this silver flip-phone with rhinstone bedazzling? This is bling, flower-lady. Where is your bling? Ok, you have bling, but it is in the form a butterfly broach. Are you in the butterfly gang? No, no you are not, because there is no such thing, and therefore you have no right to any seat in the back row. They are all mine. Go away, and come back when you’ve joined a gang. What do you think–am I close? I know this is sort of game is a poor substitute for accepting that people are a little rude sometimes, but I like my way better. Please, feel free to play along! RR

October 12th, 2009

Gratitude

Ok, so on Friday I went on about the historical meaning of Thanksgiving being tied to food, the action on the day being centred around food, and the fact that the holiday is really about food, full stop. But of course its cultural relevance today is tied up in gratitude, that it is a day of blessing-counting, appreciation, hugs, and acknowledgement. And still food. I’m going to try to put my money where my mouth is (ha!) and make this year’s list of thanks as food-oriented as possible.

I am grateful for:

1) The ability to bite and chew. About six years ago, I went to the dentist with a pain in my jaw that I thought was stress-related and found out that the bones in my jaw were totally out of whack (that’s what you get for not seeing a dentist for three years, and, er, going to really loser one as a kid). After retainers to braces and finally very scary surgery and a long recovery period, I could eat whatever I wanted without pain, and food almost never falls out of my mouth while I do (unless someone makes me laugh). It was weird to be, as an adult, forbidden certain foods, and the experience certainly makes me appreciate walking down the street eating an apple, as I did this afternoon.

2) Dining companions. Food is often the social glue, the ostensible cause for a gathering, but really it’s the cooks’ presence, much more than the food they offer, that makes the meal special. In recent weeks, I’ve been invited into people’s homes for paella, chili, two Thanksgiving dinners and an ice-cream social. On all occasions, the food was delicious but far more so was the warmth with which it was offered, and the conversation with which it was enjoyed.

3) The infinite variety of breakfast cereals. No matter how many I try, there will always be more on the shelves, and new ones every day. The upside of capitalism.

4) The ability to feed myself. I like using the economic crisis as an excuse for my inability to get my laundry folded or show up at the movies on time, but the fact is, things are not excellent in the world of employment right now (the downside of capitalism). The fact that I still have a job that keeps me in breakfast cereal and veggie burgers is no small victory and I am grateful for it. I am also grateful for the fact that I get to eat my (brown-bag, natch) work lunch with awesome humans everyday, even if they make fun of me for my addiction to canned tuna.

5) Books. Sorry, I couldn’t make this one fit (though J. M. Coetzee did profoundly warp my relationship with meat, a testament to the power of prose if there ever was one) but writing, reading, and thinking about books fills up all the time that I have that isn’t taken up by the above (or grocery shopping), and I feel lucky indeed to have that.

6) Hey, while I’m already off the theme, thanks for reading Rose-coloured. I really appreciate it.

RR