August 25th, 2008

Too Far to Go

I can be heard reading part of John Updike story today. I very rarely hear my own voice without the reverberation of my skull, so I find listening to this an odd experience. If you are more used to not living inside my skull, you might find this recording less troubling. It’s a beautiful passage, in any event.

Your boots frozen in the soil of Spain
RR

August 24th, 2008

On the weekend (an epic photo essay)

There was a journey to Rexdale.

Then Blogger freaked out and wouldn’t let me show the rest of the pictures. But trust me, it *was* epic. You wouldn’t believe how far you can go and still be in Toronto. That’s what I love about Toronto. You wouldn’t believe how thrilling imported sodas (Ting! Faygo!) can be! I tried on the world’s sluttiest dress, and leggings that came down over my toes. I bought a quarter pound of balloons! Good times, my friends, good times.

Don’t wanna see it on my windowsill
RR

August 22nd, 2008

While I’m at it…

I didn’t realize that the Canadian Notes and Queries online exclusive included me, but it it does. My profile and a short story, “The Words,” are both there, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Well, you don’t lie to me!
RR

True and amazing

1) Getting off a crowded bus today, I emerged into an equally crowded busstop, with a long thick line of humanity snaking into the distance. There was about a busful of people there waiting, give or take a few. I walked away along the line and in the thicket of it, I passed a boy of about twenty, engineer cap and diamond stud, but cheerful open blue eyes. He was supporting a red chrome low-rider bicycle with wide silver handlebars. I glance at the baleful crowd ahead of him and behind and thought, “How’s that going to work out?” Then I drew parallel to him and glanced again at his face, and he looked right into my eyes and shrugged.

2) Once got a starred review in the Quill and Quire this month. People have been telling me this all week, but I finally got a copy today and there it was.

It’s true, I swear.

Your hair twists / in miniature mobius strips
RR

August 21st, 2008

Doings

1) Today–A profile of me in the Canadian Jewish News by Ruth Mestechkin.

2) Monday August 25–Reading aloud on Julie Wilson’s weekly Readers Reading podcast–sixty seconds of me and Mr. Updike, to your ears by the miracle of digital recording! I am thrilled by the technology (and the text).

I didn’t ask you
RR

August 19th, 2008

The smartest thing I’ve ever said?

“The easiest thing is just the one you’re good at.”

Oh!

She’s fallin’ asleep at the bar
RR

August 18th, 2008

You might wanna

1) Attend the launch of the book in the preceeding post–this advertisement was supposed to come at the end of my *The Killing Circle* review, but in my excitement I forgot. See the link for full deets, but quickly, it’s tomorrow night at 8:30 at the Gladstone, and it’s gonna be awesome.

2) Donate school supplies to kids in need via the Salvation Army and Sleep Country. It’s always good to give, but this is especially fun because it enables the school-deprived to indulge in coloured pencils and theme binders, and to finally find a good home for the very expensive scientific calculators we were forced to buy in grade 11 (it’s official: logarithms are no longer relevant to my life).

We can reach the sea / they won’t follow me
RR

August 17th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

In this review, I *will* make an effort, but my feints at objectivity are probably going to be even lamer than usual. For something actually insightful, try The Walrus or Pickle Me This.

Though I’m not much of a reader of serial-killer thrillers, I did really love this book for craft of language, for plotting, definitely for voice. But if Mr. Pyper started experimenting in the former of toaster-oven instruction manuals, I’d probably take at least an interest in that, too. I’ve been a fan since I read his first book, a collection of short stories called Kiss Me (click on the link just to see the book cover, my favourite book cover ever), way back in 2000 (it came out in 1996–I’m always behind). In truth that collection of literary fiction remained my favourite of his for a long time, as the mystery/thrillers he wrote after, though very very good, never resonated with me as deeply. Until The Killing Circle came along and blew everything else out of the water.

Full disclosure: when I found that this novel centres on a writing group and their teacher, I was very very alarmed. I love writing about writing and about learning to write (ooh, Lynn Coady’s Mean Boy), but I also love *learning to write,* and to this end, once took a class *from* Andrew Pyper. He was a great great teacher, and my work came really far in those three months, but there were still a lot of moments in that class that could easily be parodied, if one were searching for material. I’ve stayed in a wonderful writing circle with three of my classmates, and we all thought, uh-oh.

Of course not. Although this book is about the profound ambiguity between story and life, it’s also about the trouble that lies in store for (or from) those who cannot tell the difference. The authors *in* the story lie to themselves and to others about the definition of fiction, but the author *of* the story has an amazingly assured hand.

Much has been made about this book being a roman a clef to media politics in this city and this country. The central character, Patrick Rush, works at *The National Star* and the leader of the writing circle is “Conrad White”–hee? I don’t know much about newspapering and I never did figure out who the snippily successful managing editor at the paper was, let alone Mr. White. Easier to enjoy were some of the broader jokes, about “The Quotidian Award…awarded to a the work of fiction that ‘best reflects the domestic heritage of Canadian family life’…A rainy-day parade of stolid farmers and fishermen’s widows,” as well as the endless reality programming about transforming your neighbours’ homes.

Those sort of jokes are quite fun, but parodies and veilings of reality are, in this book, far less interesting than the stuff that’s simply real: things about the city of Toronto, and how writing works. Pyper wrote a groovy article in the Star about city as character in this book, and it truly is one. The alleys that Patrick runs down away from shadowy figures are not just scary-novel devices but actually real alleyways I know and love, off Queen near Palmerston, others closer to the lake. The Rosedale subway station and the nearby ravine. Kensington. All these places are both instantly recognizable and suddenly terrifying as they make their transition from real-world to fictional-world.

And that’s the brilliant thing about the book–it’s actually about that process, how writers bring bits and pieces of reality to fiction and transform it into something not more or less but entirely different from the sum of its parts. Writing is a huge act of faith, I think it is and I guess you sort of have to in order to do it. Author Pyper gives the writer his or her due, but character Patrick gives the writer far more, something close to godlike incantatory powers–“Waiting for a way to tell the one true story that might bring back the dead.” And it is in this obsessive over-estimation of the lessons on writing that put the book into terror territory.

It’s wrenching, I gotta say. Gory, but also psychologically very very weird and disturbingly intimate. The central character is not violent, but he’s not a lovely person at all times, either, and the crimes for which he is culpable, and his justifications for them, give us weird insight into the mind of the murderer. And that freaked me the hell out. If the prose weren’t so good (and, just when you’re white-knuckling the spine, so funny) and the story so tightly plotted and surprising, I would not have made it to the dark dark ending. This isn’t “my kind” of novel, but the really good writing is beyond genre, and I think *The Killing Circle* qualifies.

I can’t talk much about the plot, because most everything is a twist or a turn that affects everything but you don’t see it coming. Or at least, I didn’t see *anything* coming; possibly if you are more familiar with serial-killer fiction (I hear there’s lots) you might not be so startled by everything. I can’t necessarily recommend this book to you; it’s creepy and sad and certainly does not redeem one’s faith in mankind. It’s gripping, though, and you could learn a good bit about writing by reading it.

Maybe try only reading it during the day.

Don’t wanna see it on my windowsill
RR

Peevish

A peevish post is inappropriate in a blog called Rose-coloured, I know, but there’s always the optimistic hope that by putting these negative theories out there, I’ll inspire someone to talk me out of them. Or, if not, I’ll try to keep the negativity to a minimum.

I hate it when people don’t listen to others when they talk, in all the myriad forms that takes. One form is someone offering, as if as a startling revelation of self, something that turns out to true of nearly everybody. Not only is this annoying because it’s hard to think of follow-up questions for such obvious positions (“So, is a pain thing for you at the dentist, or more of a gag-reflex thing?”) but because it is obvious that if the speaker had ever paid attention to what other people say, they would know their revelation is nearly universal. Some examples:

1) I am a wuss about the dentist.
2) I’m actually really shy at parties.
3) I have a weakness for chocolate.
4) Hospitals make me nervous.
5) I hate liars/phonies/rude people.
6) I sometimes forget people’s names and then feel bad about it.
7) I can’t really remember any of the math I learned in high school.

It’s not that there aren’t tonnes of exceptions to these (except maybe number 5–though I’m dying to meet one); it’s just that the exceptions are the interesting ones. I definitely want to know what there is to dislike about chocolate, how to have total recall of acquaintance names and trigonometry, and how to buck up at the dentist. And really, everybody is an exception about *somethings*; that’s what makes people interesting (I love hospitals). When people don’t don’t bother to be interesting, it is very annoying to me. I guess that is something of a universal truism, also. It is hard not to be hypocritical when being hypercritical!!

If you can’t talk me out of this polemic, at least tell me what general rule you are the exception to and/or add some more to my list. I think *you* being interesting would cheer me up, also!

Workin’ for the church
RR

August 13th, 2008

Today

It is rainy and cold in Toronto and I have something in my eye. On the upside:

–Today is the media launch for The Eden Mills Writers Festival. I am going to read a story (well, part of one) to the media. I hope I get whatever it is out from behind my contact lens by then.
–Today I have an essay on That Shakespeherian Rag.
–Today (well, tonight) is the Salon de Refuses launch for TNQ and CNQ, both of which I received in the mail yestereve, and they are so lovely to look at (I trust they’ll be lovely to read, too, but we’re not moving too fast around here, being now particularly blinky).

She’s too good to be true / to me
RR