August 12th, 2008

Mayumi

So, yes, I did it: I bought a digital camera. It doesn’t usually take this much Sturm und Drang to buy a camera (or a house) but I have a tough time with electronics. Thanks to all who supported me in my invented problem, and thanks especially to the subject of my first digital photo, beautiful Afshan in the unbeautiful rain:

The other major event of the weekend was a haircut that reduced my attractively uninteresting (boringly benign?) shoulder length curls into the Emo-Boy Special–a jaw-length tangle that flips over my entire face the moment I nod. Leaning forward, I could be in My Chemical Romance. *You* try to guess the difference:

See, impossible to tell who’s who!!

Look forward to more amusing guessing games of this nature with the help of Mayumi. Mayumi is the camera–I name my appliances to make them seem less threatening, and this camera is of Japanese parentage.

My heart is far away / tell me what to say
RR

August 11th, 2008

Warnings

1) If you are taking a bubble bath, do *not* put your head under if you are easily upset by loud noises. Upon re-emerging, your ears will be filled with bubbles that will pop, creating the sound of a forest fire burning a path directly to your brain. Very upsetting.
2) $13 is enough to pay a hair-dresser to obtain a tidy, competent haircut, but it is NOT enough to pay a hair-dresser to try to dissaude you from your own bad ideas. If you say anxiously, “Do you think that would work for me?” a salon-type will say, “Sweetie, maybe you need to rethink this,” but a barber-shop type will say, “Please sit back in the chair.”
3) The air tastes like fall.

I think it’s coming and it comes so fast
RR

August 10th, 2008

A Week of Us

This week, everyone is talking about Canadian short stories–about writing them, reading them, liking and hating and utterly ignoring them, anthologizing and mythologizing them. If only it could be this way always!

If you’ve not already been reading Steven W. Beattie‘s amazing month of short stories for the past ten days, this week you can tune into 7 Canadian stories, with a bonus essay by me (though, it’s mainly on an American author’s [Donald Barthelme] story, sorry). Today you can read Alex Good take on the stories in the Toronto Star, you can pick up the new issues of Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly for some of the best of the story writers in the country, and you can hear an assortment of all these people Wednesday night at the Gladstone to talk about it all.

It’s fun to be immersed in the hot topic for once!

It could be fantasy / or maybe it’s because he needs me
RR

Cover Story

However long I wind up staying in this business of book-making, I am sure the anecdote of how *Once* got its cover will remain one of my favourites. And not even only because the book ended up looking exactly how I had dreamed it would. I really like how the cover came about from a bunch of different cool people being creative together. Most of the time, the actual writing of anything is pretty anecdote-free: “And then I worked constantly on the story for seven weeks, and it still turned out sort of incoherent, so then I rewrote it again”—not really an anecdote. Quite often I’m having a good time on my own (I wouldn’t do it otherwise) but there’s rarely anything to report other than when my computer crashes. It’s only when you are working with other people that things, in my opinion, get interesting.

So for a long time I had a quite distinct vision of the the cover image I wanted, but I didn’t say anything about it because the author doesn’t necessarily get to–it depends on everybody’s process at the publishing house, time, patience, etc. Actually, when Dan Wells from Biblioasis did ask me, at a launch for another book, what I wanted for the cover, I was so startled I said I didn’t know! Later, of course, I retracted this and said I wanted a photo of people sitting on a bus, each person alone and not making eye-contact with the camera, staring out windows or reading, muffled by winter clothes.

Sound familiar?

Dan said that sounded good (I was thrilled!) and promised to look for stock images for me. Later, I think it occurred to both of us that maybe lonely cold people on busses don’t so much like having their pictures taken, and that these images might turn out to be hard to find…

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I was spending the day writing with my friend Emily (a fine writer and artist, with no web presence, sadly). On the way home, we were sitting in the subway station and to pass the time she pulled out a stack of slightly imperfect linocut prints her artist-friend Marta Chudolinska had been on the verge of throwing out. Em and I were both rather stunned at what passes for imperfect with some people–they were all haunting lovely images of bedrooms and dreams and…people on a bus.

“That’s my cover!” I think I said rather loudly.. Emily was happy for me to have found something I wanted so much, even though she was sorry that I was taking away her picture (I did eventually return it). This was just a few days before the Panel in Peterborough, which is actually the only time I’ve been in the same room as both Dan and John Metcalf, who edited *Once*. I was *dying* to show them Marta’s image, sure it was perfect, yet *I* don’t make covers, so what do I know about finding the ideal image to start with. It’s a long way from linocut to finished cover layout, but Dan said he thought he could do it and both him and John the image was pretty damn good.

And then, a couple weeks later, I had this gorgeous cover, which I can’t show you right now because Blogger is being difficult. There’s a tiny version is over at right, if I haven’t already shown it to you 12 000 times. Which is a good indication of my level of involvement in this whole process. I have no idea how Marta took the idea into linocut form, or how Dan took the linocut into book-cover form, so this story is missing some key chunks. I just think it’s pretty amazing that I get to play on the team at all, and I wanted to share.

Set my body free
RR

August 8th, 2008

Help

Eating lunch with a big table of friends. L. sits between J. and S. Everybody talking. J. nudges L., points at S.: “Oh, she has something in her hair. Can you help her?” L. reaches over, removes small piece of pineapple from S.’s long shiny hair.

Now that we’re done / I’m so sorry
RR

August 6th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews *Avenue Q*

The musical Avenue Q has occasionally been compared to Jonathan Larson’s Rent except with puppets. Much as I enjoyed both musicals, I have to say this comparison is not apt; Avenue Q is a *parody* of Rent. Liking one is no guarantee of liking the other; in fact, if you are a terrifically intense fan of the dramatic, earnest change-the-world-one-block-at-a-time-ishness of Rent, it might really piss you off to see people and puppets waving their arms around and crooning, “Everyone’s a little bit racist!”

Not me (or at least not very much-the next line, “And that’s ok!” got me a little). The songs in Avenue Q are very very very funny, and often uncomfortably accurate. Like all the best parodies, Q loves its targets but doesn’t spare them, and that includes the audience. Songs like “Schadenfreude” and “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” (between love and wasting your time) make you cringe as you laugh, and that’s pretty impressive for puppets.

The other big comparison you hear for Avenue Q is with Jim Henson’s Muppets, and you definitely do see that in not only the fuzzy humanoid forms but also in the dexterity of the puppeteers. However, while Henson’s creations have at least a pretense of *not* being puppets, all I could think when the stage lights came up on Avenue Q is is “You can *see* the puppeteer!!!” It took me a while to adjust to seeing Kate Monster and Princeton, allegedly freely acting people, being trailed by actual people dressed in grey with their hands up the puppets’ shirts (none of the puppets have any legs). What’s amazing is how quickly my alarm disappeared. You really start seeing only one being in these units. It helps that the puppeteers are really actors, and give incredible performances with both their hands and their faces. When Kate Monster looks sadly down at the ground, so does her puppeteer, a concept that works amazingly well. I think all the puppeteers were moving their lips, but we had terrible seats (I could’ve stood on my seat and touched the ceiling [but I didn’t]) so this didn’t trouble me overmuch. The upside of seeing the people behind the puppets was more than worth it. The best moment of puppet-engineering is when the sexy bad-girl puppet leaves a room and, since the puppet has no lower body, the puppeteer swings her hips. Hilarious, and effective.

Great songs, great performers, cool puppets and stunts used to cool effect-what could be wrong? Well, in light of all that other stuff, it wasn’t *very* wrong, but, um, the story? Such as it was. Wondrous Fred recently called “Greatest Hits” musical storylines like *Mamma Mia* basically “song-delivery systems” and sadly so is the book for Q. The songs are pretty biting but also present the characters as semi-complex (well, it’s a musical) and confused. In dialogue, however, they are a seventh-grade guidance class on how to achieve maturity. The closeted gay guy has no motivation, the commitment-phobic guy has no motivation, the sloppy irresponsible guy has no motivation-eventually they just stop doing the self-destructive stuff they were doing. Oh, and the women just don’t have flaws to start with-except the slut.

This stuff wouldn’t be problematic, really (it’s a *musical*!) but towards the end of the second act, everyone starts squawking about how much they’ve “learned”. Couldn’t we have just left this as a cool entertainment with a few really insightful thoughts about social behaviour, without trying to crazy-glue a moral on it? Because, by my count, both major problem sets in the show were solved by money falling from the sky, and the last song (“For Now”, which is as brill as all the rest of the songs) is about making do with whatever you’ve got because it is what you’ve got.

Now, I’m totally recommending you see this show and I think you’ll love the whole thing, but really, *really* don’t try to learn too much from it. You might, actually, anyway, but that’s not much the point.

Back out on the car
RR

The Salon des Refuses

You may have heard that Penguin Canada recently put out a new anthology of Canadian Short Stories. You may also have heard that it doesn’t seem to contain a number of true innovators of the form–people like Clark Blaise, Mark Jarman and Heather Birrell. To make these omissions a bit more obvious–and perhaps a bit more appreciated, The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries have worked together to create The Salon des Refuses (I’m sorry, I can’t for the life of me get Blogger to do the accent). The summer issues of these two journals will showcase some of the best of what’s being done with short stories these days, and to talk about stories in general and in specific. I suspect there will be some word for the art of anthologizing, as well.

These two issues will be on newsstands this month, and if you subscribe to one I think the other one will just turn up, too (good deal!) There’s also going to be a This is Not a Reading Series event–a literary forum–on Wednesday August 13, at the Gladstone, from 8:30 to 10:30. I’m stoked.

Full disclosure: I have work in both these issues, too. There’s the Metcalf-Rooke Award feature–three stories plus an interview with Amy King–in TNQ, and a long profile with John on the writing life in CNQ. Getting to rub margins with the Salon authors is a huge honour, and it does inspire the imagination…maybe if I keep on going, keep writing and rewriting, keep learning and asking questions and leaving parties at 10:30 to go home and work, someday in the far off future, I too could be ignored by a prestigious anthology. In such company, it’s a pretty heady thought.

I love all the boys with the band
RR

August 4th, 2008

Studies Have Shown

Me: It’s not like your life is so much harder than everyone else’s.
B: Actually, it is.
Me: Really?
B: Other people have it much easier. Studies have shown.
Me: Really? What studies?
B: Studies that I have conducted.
Me: Describe.
B: Everyone I meet, I ask them how they are and they all say “Fine.”

If you really loved me you’d buy me a beautiful pearl
RR

Rose-coloured Reviews the July 21st New Yorker

I hear there’s been much anger over the cover of the July 21st New Yorker, which is a satire of the way certain right-wing American media elements caricature Barak and Michelle Obama as Muslim extremists. Yeah, I didn’t get it at first either—I didn’t even recognize who was being depicted, and didn’t much about it at all. After the joke was, at length explained to me, I didn’t think it was very funny, and certainly not interesting or incendiary enough to be worth the negative reaction it’s gotten (Fred agrees with me, which always makes me feel smart). But everybody has an off-day, judgement-wise, no one got hurt and, as Mr. Obama says, “that’s why we have the First Amendment.”

But I love the New Yorker a lot, so when they disappoint me I do feel sad. But really, when I’m sad, reading the New Yorker is a good distraction. So I read the issue as a distraction from the cover, and I was no longer disappointed.

In the most direct counterpoint to the cover is Ryan Lizza’s 18-page The Political Scene profile of Obama, “Making It: Where Barak Obama learned to be a pol.” There were some interesting anecdotes about his early years as a community organizer in Chicago, and his later-early years forming and breaking alliances in local and state politics. Obama doesn’t always come off looking like a saint, which apparently is a surprise to some people, but really, I sort of knew he wasn’t Marty McFly, tumbling into the race for the most powerful political office in the world by accident. And, well, I think that’s better if he’s going to *get* the most powerful office in the world and then do something effective and good with it.

“Making It,” I should say, was *wicked* boring: a clothes-line narrative strung with endless detail. I read it all–18 pages of city council meetings is not too much to ask for someone I’d vote for if I could—but really, not much effort was made as concision, or interest: didn’t the candidate ever tell a *joke*?

Much better: a fun and accessible Annals of Science piece on physics’s outsider artist Garrett Lisi, Patricia Marx on shopping in Shanghai, and Yoni Brenner’s “Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers” (“6. For a taste of the U.K., fry up mini-servings of fish-and-chips. Take it to the next evel by wrapping them in small pieces of newspaper, which, oddly enough, all seem to be printed with unfavorable reviews of Jeff’s novel”).

Best of all is the short-story “Yurt” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. This story, about an elementary-school teacher who leaves her teaching post for Yemen and returns a year later, refreshed and pregnant, is very funny and very wise in the ways of late twenties thinking which, deep though my love is for the New Yorker, is wisdom I’ve often longed for in it’s pages. I was very glad to learn that the narrator—and really central character—of this piece will have her own book come fall, *The Miss Hempel Chronicle*.

So we see, as usual, that you can’t judge anything by its cover though really, of course people do. And knowing that they do, we should still work pretty hard on those damn covers.

Anyone perfect must be lying
RR

August 2nd, 2008

Favourites

I’m forever maintaining that I don’t have a favourite book, that I love books as a concept too much to ever pick one above all others. But I do have a number that, when pressed, I can put into that top-tier slot–books that are good enough that I’ll love them forever and forever, even if from day to day, what is the absolute number one varies quite a bit.

For a number of years, since high school really, two of those have been Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block and Too Far to Go by John Updike.

Weetzie Bat, as you know if you clicked on the link or ever were a teenage girl, is very loosely a young adult novel, a fantasy, a fairy tale, and a damn good story. Every time I reread it, it’s worth it–Block’s language is as sweeping and funny and romantic as a heavy-headed peony bloom flopping to the grass, like a puppy leaping into your lap and trying to keep going up your body, like a metaphor and then a metaphor and then, just in case you didn’t get it, a few more images and then an example. Block has an absolute generosity of spirit for her characters–they can be as weird or sad or messed up as they want, and still be beautiful–that translates to a generosity of prose for her readers. If you don’t get it, don’t relate, don’t care; the author will come and get you on the return pass, and eventually just win you over with the sheer love she feels for what she is writing. Just one sentence: “Then they went into the clubs dressed to kill in sunglasses and leather, jewels and skeletons, rosaries and fur and silver.” Love it or don’t love it; there will always be more. I love it.

Though *Too Far to Go* is perhaps not such a standard of the linked short story form as *Weetzie* is of the young adult novel, Updike is one of the masters of that craft of short stories. This book is not a novel about a failing marriage, it’s a set of stories that take place within a marriage, and that marriage has it’s bad moments and eventually ends. The emotional punch is always powerful, but as with Block, it’s the sentences that will kill you. Updike performs the great trick of *seeming* laconic and spare and plain while actually being wildly intelligent and intelligently wild is his sentences, images, every word: “The taxis they hailed carried heads in the rear and did not stop. They crossed the Via dei Fori Imperiali and tried to work their way back, against the sideways tug of interweaving streets…”

Favourites! I’ve tried to say why I like these two books, but I think really the only explanation would be for you to read them. A perfect map of the world is the size of the world, after all. (This could be why I have such trouble writing book reviews.) There are reasons why these are both good, why I like them, but why I would rank them higher than other books (Block’s contemporary fairy tale above, say, Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, or Updike’s dreamy realism over something by Anne Tyler–a mystery. There too many good books in the world to start splitting hairs like that, especially when my love of these books is at least partially invested in where they came from and who gave them to me and how I was feeling open and excited when I read them first.

And could I ever rank one of these two above the other? Updike is the more accomplished writer; Weetzie Bat is the character closest to my own experience and my own heart. Favourites are great but they are arbitrary, fun only insofar as they give you an opportunity to show your love for something. And who can ever quantify love?

I feel old and tired
RR