September 4th, 2012

1000 Things We Like, part 3 (10-year anniversary edition)–coming soon

Yes, oh my god, it’s true–we’ve been doing 1000 Things We Like for 10 years. I’ve been searching for the original introduction from the 2002 edition, but while I was doing so I found this–a description of a wedding I went to in October 2002.

“Then, oh god, then it was cocktail hour, actually slated for an hour and a half on my invite. They seemed to have some trouble getting drinks out, the hors d’oevres didn’t appear for about 45 minutes, there were no chairs, there was simply nothing for me to do but stand about and not be talked to. Which is what I did, the whole time. I started out leaning against this oversized mantlepiece, and eventually discovered if I slouched just a touch, I could fit under it, so I did that. Not quite as weird as it sounds, but almost. People kept looking at me curiously, so I’d smile thinking they were about to say “Hi” or “Beautiful ceremony, eh?” or “Poor you, all alone!” or something, but then they’d look away. I was wearing the same pale floral dress as I wore to M/D’s and M/L’s weddings. Apparently, for a fall, evening wedding, black is the norm these days. I think I was the palest person except for the bride. Honestly, it would have been impossible for me to have been more uncomfortable without being on fire.”

I can just about remember how miserable I was that night, but it seems *very* distant–like that girl is a friend I don’t know well. And if you told that girl that, 10 years hence, she would be at a wedding where she knew *everyone* and that it would be her own–well, I don’t think she could have processed that.

Kay, nuff nostalgia, I’ll find the actual intro very soon.

September 3rd, 2012

I don’t even have to write this

So it turns out Andrew Hood has a blog. Did you know that? I didn’t know that until this week, despite the fact that there seem to be posts on there going back a couple years. Why don’t people tell me stuff?

Anyway, as with most fiction writers I admire who bother to blog, Mr. Hood blogs pretty well. And he wrote this post that pretty much encapsulates everything that’s wrong with my life right now (except quiche-related issues, which he doesn’t cover). You’ll have to strike out most of the history, as I have never done most of the things Andrew has, and nearly all the swearing, but what remains is super-true. I advise reading the whole post, but here’s the crushingly accurate kicker:

“Failing’s the worst, but it’s the only result that I can ever count on. Every fucking day I sit down and fail fucking miserably. I did this in my basement years ago, with late night softcore on mute. And I failed big time in university, though never as bad as the fuckfaces who were convinced the drivel they’d managed was tops. And when I got a fulltime job, my failure was contained to the pockets of free time I managed. So I suppose writing’s always been easy, but it’s the failure that’s gotten difficult. Somehow I’ve found myself in a place where I say that writing’s what I do and is a thing I’m supposed to be good at. So when, out of sight, I spend a day producing plodding, trite dreck, the consequences of that failure feels more severe, intractable, fucking absolute.”

August 28th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Ruby Sparks*

I wanted to see Ruby Sparks because it looked like a sweet comedy and I have low standards for films: if I can laugh along with strangers in a darkened auditorium, I’m basically always in. Even better, this sweet comedy was about fiction writing–it practically counted as professional development. Super-in.

Surprise, surprise–Ruby Sparks is way *better* than I expected. While I’ll watch almost anything, this film actually has genuine emotions, and is a genuine reflection of not only writers but the whole messed-up romantic comedy genre. RS isn’t a work of genius or anything, but it’s a pretty great movie for a Friday afternoon.

Less of a surprise is that this film has tonnes in common with Stranger than Fiction from 2006. Both movies are about characters who are helpless pawns of an author who writes them any which way s/he pleases, despite the characters having fully developed personalities and desires of their own. In both films, the author/character conflict stands in the way of romance. In StF, the story was told from the character’s point of view–a buttoned down, grimacing Will Ferrel in my favourite of his performances. In RS, the story belongs to the writer in both senses–Paul Dano stars as Calvin, the hotshot young novelist who can’t his personal life together. Sound familiar? He’s no Emma Thompson, who played the neurotic writer in StF, but he does the job pretty well. His sensible sidekick is his brother, played by Chris Messina, and I really enjoyed the realistically funny depcition of their relationship. However, Messina, one hardly needs to add, is no Queen Latifah, who played Thompson’s sidekick/assistant in StF.

That’s about where the comparisons end, though. The character Calvin creates is not just the protagnoist in a book but the girl of his dreams–Ruby Sparks, as played by Zoe Kazan. Kazan also wrote the screenplay, which caused me to meditate a little on the personality type that would write a film about a dreamgirl, then cast herself. It works, but I still wondered.

So Calvin writes about a girl he would love to have, and then she materializes in his kitchen. After a brief and funny freakout, he gets on with his now-perfect life of love and meatloaf with lovely Ruby Sparks. Except…

Before this all went down, his brother read the novel draft and pronounced Ruby Sparks a fantasy, not a girl–created to fill a need of the mind, not to be real and weird and difficult the way actual women actually are. And this is the problem with most romantic comedies–people don’t have real flaws, they have “quirks” that make them adorable, and which they aren’t really responsible for anyway. Because they are so darn quirky!

I get it–I love this sort of fakey-fake romantic comedy too. Who wants to see Reese Witherspoon actually behaving badly, and actually having to deal with it. I mean, maybe you would, but that’d be a whole other category of movie.

Or maybe not. *Ruby Sparks* somehow allows the viewer to slowly and gently probe the depths of Calvin’s fucked-up-ness. A visit to his parents, played by Annette Benning and Antonio Banderas (*very* funny) starts out as your typical “wacky parents” schtick, but gradually we see that they’re basically nice people with a little surface wackiness, and Calvin treats them rather badly. There’s also a nice scene late in the film where the dynamic with Calvin’s “awful” ex-girlfriend is revealed to be rather more complex than first expected.

This is not to say that Calvin is cast as the villian, or even an unlikeable guy. It’s just that he has some real-person flaws, unlike the usual rom-com fake-flaws-that-are-actually-other-people’s-faults, like fear of committment and trouble discussing feelings. Calvin is a control freak and unwilling to explore other people’s lives or personalities outside of the narrow confines in which he has placed them. These are flaws that many writers have to struggle against–written characters stay so beautifully still and passive in a way that humans just *won’t*. It’s frustrating.

That’s why Calvin’s betrayal of Ruby towards the end of the film is so gut-wrenching. While every rom-com has some kind of betrayal to drive the lovers briefly apart and create a crisis in the narrative, most of them involve crazy misunderstandings, things done while drunk or upset that don’t really mean anything, or any of a number of other constructs designed to keep viewers from liking the characters any less.

Calvin’s betrayal of Ruby is genuine, and genuinely horrible–even though the scene is based on silly magic, the emotion in it made me cringe like when I overhear couples arguing in restaurants. Calvin’s actions aren’t a mistake and he can’t take them back–they arise out deep and genuine flaws in his personality. I hated him in the moment, but I also totally got his motivations.

It’s not all as dark as this–there’s a hopeful ending that actually doesn’t make too much sense even by the magical laws that governed the rest of the film but, eh, I liked the spirit of it and the movie was over then anyway. This movie was far funner and sweeter than I thought it would be, and more of both than anything else in the category I’ve seen in ages. And it gives you some insight into the ways writers are screwed up, if that interests you. Highly recommended!!

August 22nd, 2012

I dos done!

We did it–we got married. And once we had, we looked like this

This was a very good day. (photo courtesy of my friend Kimberly)

And then we went to Costa Rica on our honeymoon, where we did a whole lot of reading on the beach (4 books and assorted magazines!) and swimming in the ocean. And met this really nice cat

EDIT: You can see my wedding ring in this video (when I pet the cat)!!

And then came back and retrieved our own cat and did a bunch of laundry and went back to work and started planning a bridal shower for someone else (the cycle of life continues).

You see why I warned you there’d be no Rose-coloured in August?

But I’m back now and hoping to complete a bunch of posts on here soon, and maybe even kick off some new series. Thanks for your patience during this hectic–but very happy–time.

July 28th, 2012

Readings and Writing, Past and Future

I’m thinking it’s going to be a European summer on Rose-coloured–ie., nothing much will get accomplished in August. But here are some snaps from a reading that took place in July, and a small list below of things up coming once unproductive August is over.

Fred Addis, Leacock Festival organizer and warm-hearted host (and BBQ master) kicking off the Happy Hour.

Me, reading at the Leacock Festival’s Happy Hour last weekend.

The wonderful Ken Babstock, whose reading from *Methodist Hatchet* was genuinely as thoughtful as this photo looks.

Mark Kingwell, the guiding force behind Happy Hour, reading an essay about poetry and suicide that was far more inspiring than you might think.

The Happy Hour was a really great event, and I’m only sorry that we couldn’t have stayed longer to see more Leacock Festival readings. And Orillia–so gorgeous! I went in a lake!!

Ok, onwards–in the fall I’ll have a couple new stories out and do a couple fun readings, so here’s where to go if you miss me:

My story, “Everyone Likes a Little Guy” will be in the September issue of The Rusty Toque.

My story, “The House that Modern Art Built” will be in the fall issue of PRISM international.

I’ll be doing a reading or two at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival October 16-21 (exact dates and times to come)

I’ll be doing a reading and Q&A at the Carlingwood Library in Ottawa on Saturday November 24, 2-3 pm.

So there’s some stuff for me to look forward to, and hopefully some of you guys, too. And of course I’m open to adding to this slate, if opportunities come along!!

July 24th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Moon Deluxe* by Frederick Barthelme

The first story in Moon Deluxe by Frederick Barthelme is called “Box Step” and it’s narrated by Henry, who seems to be the boss at a small company. I never quite figured out what he did or what the company did. He banters with Ann, who seems to be his assistant, and assorted other employees. At one point Ann says she’s “…planning a giant party tonight at Henry’s.” Though this has not previously been discussed, they go ahead with it, though few people show up and almost exclusively folks from the office. The next evening, Henry and Ann go out to dinner and a movie, without it having been pre-arranged or discussed, without us ever getting a sense of whether their relationship is physical or even romantic. Henry buys some toys from the daughter of an employee, and later at the restaurant they run into all of the employees again.

It’s a very odd story–Henry seems to have no volition except to acquire toys, and Ann steers him along like a child with a toy herself. There is no interior monologue, so we never know the reasons Henry has for doing, or not doing, anything. But the dialogue is quick and sharp, and the details closely observed. I was intrigued by the story, though I wouldn’t have quite said I liked it.

I had been expecting to like everything from the blurbs on the cover–one from Raymond Carver and one from Margaret Atwood (how often do you see that combo?) When the book came out in 1983, 13 of the 17 stories had been previously published in the New Yorker. After reading all that bumpf, I could hardly believe I’d let this book sit on the shelf for so long. I was very excited.

The enthusiasm waned as the stories went forward. Though they vary in quality, all 17 of these stories are about male protagonists with very little will or desire, who are lusted after by beautiful women who don’t get them, or not really. But that’s ok, because the women require little from them other than that they go to many restaurants and hang out by the sides of pools. I became so annoyed by these recurrent premises that I stopped enjoying truly funny dialogue and excellent observations about restaurants (so many restaurants in this book!) There are also many cars, and many apartment buildings set around an interior courtyard with a pool in it–near as I can figure, the setup is halfway between Melrose Place and a seniors’ village. I think most of the characters were meant to be low-income but since (a) after the first story none of the male characters has a job nor seemed worried about acquiring one and (b) everyone has a pool, they seemed rich and dissipated to me.

The stories were set in the American south, where apparently pool access, car ownership, and presence of Shoney’s is taken for granted. Which was actually pretty interesting–this book offers a slice of life in a time and place I’ve never seen (I’ve been to the South a few times, but very briefly–though I do know you should eat Shoney’s if ever you get the chance). Never had I read a book that seemed so dated, though–Danskin leotards, carphones with cords, and going to the spa to lose weight. I don’t exactly know why this book seemed so aggressively alien to me–probably because so much work was put into capturing the moment that was, it doesn’t translate across the years.

Towards the end of the book, when I was coming up with the alternate title, “Chronicles of Impotent Unemployed Males,” I looked up Barthelme at the above Wikipedia link and found out he was a celebrated minimalist. So was Raymond Carver, apparently, but I remember Carver’s characters having, you know, feelings and desires, even if it was only the vague desire to be happy. But maybe I didn’t know what minimalism means, at least not in prose.

So I decided I needed to do better and I looked it up outside of the Wiki circles. This definition seemed pretty good, and actually mentions Barthelme. I see his points, and I particularly like the term “interpretative polyvalency”–I like the idea of readers being able to bring their thoughts to bear in creating a story.

The author of the above article, one Phil Greaney, goes on to make some other good points about the demandingness of minimalism, which I do get and appreciate. But I can’t help but feel it doesn’t excuse the unrelenting sameness of these stories. Any one of them I would’ve enjoyed, but over and over…here are some sample opening lines from this collection:

“Ann is pretty, divorced, a product model who didn’t go far because of her skin, which is very fair and freckled.”

“You watch the pretty salesgirl slide a box of Halston soap onto a low shelf, watch her braid slip off her shoulder, watch like an adolescent as the vent at the neck of her blouse opens slightly–she is twenty, maybe twenty-two, and greatly freckled…”

“Kathleen Sullivan is back on CNN, a guest on the call-in interview show. She’s supposed to be talking about the boom in news, but the callers, who are all men, only want to talk about her bangs, and the new drab-look clothes she wears on ABC.”

“Sally meets me in the driveway. “It’s great you’re back,” she says. She’s tall, willowy, tailored.”

So many women, very precisely and intriguingly described, but described a lot, and lasciviously you’re not going to believe me when I tell you there’s only one sexual encounter in this book, and it’s a fade-to-black. The rest of the women are just going to desperately and weirdly fawn over the narrators and never ever get laid, so all this lascivious description is for naught.

This is a long and fairly negative review, isn’t it? And I feel a bit that it’s unfair, but this was only Barthelme’s third book and he went on to write many more in the past 30 years. Possibly it’s not fair to judge him by this one. I mean, I did it with Mysteries of Pittsburgh but I had read the later, more excellent novels that Chabon wrote, so I was able to contextualize my dislike of the one at hand.

I couldn’t really do that here, having read nothing else of Barthelme’s, and while I wasn’t really tempted to, I was driven to be fair, so I read Driver in the Barcelona Review (it’s what I could find on line. This is from nearly 20 years after the stories in *Moon Deluxe*, and as I’d hoped it was much much better. Still not an ideal piece of fiction–I doubt Barthelme and I agree about what that would be–but an enjoyable developed fictional world with characters that seem to have real, human motivations, even if the reader can’t completely understand them. The female character is also recognizably human and surprising and intriguing. There’s also lots of interesting technical comments about cars–there’s actually stuff in the story other than vague desires and restaurants. And the end is a huge win–it changed my clinical nodding to a startled grin.

So what am I saying? Maybe I’m saying read Frederick Barthelme, just not this particular book.

This is my 8th/August (I’m ahead) book for the Off the Shelf Challenge. More to come!

July 18th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews Reading on a electronic reader

I sometimes say that I’m not against new technology, I’m just frightened of it. Some kind friends gave me a Kobo and gently talked me through how to read on it. There are some kinks to be worked out–now that I’ve finished reading my one book, I can’t seem to get anymore–but I did like the experience. And after one novel, of course I’m totally qualified to talk about it.

Pros

1. More than one book at once. Sometimes I’ll read two books at once–a “heavy” read for when I’m feeling strong, and a “light” read for when I’m too tired for the heavy one, but not tired enough to sleep. Sometimes I need to bring a second book because I know I’ll finish the first before I get home. Sometimes I wish I could check a fact from the first book in the series while reading the second. I can’t actually lug around all these books (though I do somewhat, in the second case) and the Kobo solves all these problems.

2. Surprisingly durable. I regularly bend back covers and break spines in my reading endeavours, and then I feel terribly guilty, though most books are of the same literary quality with and without a broken spine. The Kobo in it’s little leather cover does not get smushed in my bag and it lays perfectly flat on a table without me breaking anything.

3. Some things are available only in ebook format, like Found Press, the thing I tried to buy last night and was thwarted due to technological incompetence. But now, finally, I can dream of reading the estuff, somehow, someday…

Cons

1. Committment. The Kobo I have takes a few minutes to boot up, by which point the subway’s usually already arrived and I’ve wasted all my bench time staring into space. I probably read for 2 hours most days, but a lot of it is in tiny increments. That doesn’t work so well electronically. I like to read in long lines in stores, when my dining companion goes to the restaurant bathroom, all kinds of other little gaps in time. But the boot time makes that not really work. Ditto reading before bed, turning out the light for 5 minutes, realizing I’m not that sleepy, reading for 5 more minutes, then turning the light back off.

2. Fear. Even though I say above that the item is durable, I still get worried about this expensive piece of technology and put it back in its case every time I stand up. This is more my problem than the Kobo’s, but it did limit my reading time. I also can’t fathom how to read it in the bath. Sometimes I get my paper books a little damp, and then the pages are wrinkly, but oh well. I have the feeling the ramifications would be worse here.

3. Inferior quality ebooks. My one eread so far was Don DeLillo’s End Zone, a truly brilliant novel that came out in the 1970s. See where a problem might lie? I don’t know why, but apparently the Penguin folks, or whoever own the ebook rights, *scanned* a copy of the paper book and just made that into an ebook. I can’t explain any other way why there are NO hyphens in the entire book, and constant ligature problems (“Penn State” becomes “Perm State” and other hilarious examples). I regularly had to stop reading to think about what was actually supposed to be written there. I think this would only be a problem with older books, and probably there’s better QC on most, but this was a disappointing aspect of an otherwise wonderful experience.

***

In short, I am really really enamoured of my new reader, and despite a few flaws and things to get used to, I’m verily looking forward to reading more. As soon as I figure out how to get another book on it!!

July 15th, 2012

Rose-coloured reviews *Hamlet* by William Shakespeare, illustrated by Harold Copping

I won this book in a raffle two years, and was pleased, then put it on a shelf. Somewhere in the time the book spent on the shelf, I apparently decided it was a graphic novel of Hamlet, without ever bothering to check. I was excited to include it in the *Off the Shelf* challenge this year–wouldn’t a graphic novel of *Hamlet* be great?

Probably, but this isn’t one–it’s just the play with a few illustrations by Harold Copping, who according to the introduction was one of the most popular English illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th century. Probably, but I already have a pretty vivid mental image of how these characters looked, and as Copping’s image did not agree with mine, I really didn’t enjoy the illustrations.

I still read the play–it was part of my reading challenge for the year, and even on 5th or 6th read, there’s still plenty to be learned from the play (probably only 20th, too). I’m not going to bother to review it, though–if you don’t know that *Hamlet*’s pretty good, nothing I say is going to convince you.

I actually really hated the edition, not only because of the illustrations, which are probably appealing to those who haven’t already decided what they look like (Ethan Hawke ftw). But the book is 8.5 x 11 inches and hardback, which makes it very challenging to read on the bus or even put in my bag. I image this would be great for a school edition or some such. If anyone desires it more than I do, please message me at the “contact” button above, and if we can arrange a handoff it’s yours. Otherwise I’ll donate it to a charity bookdrive at the end of the year and return to my small, manageable, unillustrated paperback copy.

This is my 7th/July book for the To Be Read reading challenge. More to come!!

July 10th, 2012

Word I Irrationally Despise

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a grammar or usage rant here at Rose-coloured, the reasons being (a) people hate them and (b) I’ve calmed down. I think the calming was due in large part to my brief stint teaching in high schools a couple years back. There’s nothing like being exposed to young people on a regular basis to convince you you are not as smart as you think you are. Also, the youths do cool stuff with language, and I’ve grown to appreciate it more–just yesterday, I was expounding on how interesting it is when they drop the “m” in random and make it a noun–“That guy is such a rando!” Useful, no?

Also, on the part (a) front, those rants just made me sound bitchy and pedantic, and we could all do with a bit less of that, I think.

Well as I’m doing dissolving my prejudices against certain types of language, there are some things that are technically correct that I still CAN NOT DEAL WITH. Do you have those? Words or turns of phrase that you irrationally despise, though they actually do just fine at conveying what they are meant to convey? I had a colleague who loathed the word “amalogomate” because “it sounds like bugs having sex.” You can’t really argue with that.

My most loathed word is the seemingly innocuous “sip.” I think it sounds disgusting, I think people use it to be fey or sexy, and the alleged sexiness is in itself disgusting, or else because they don’t know how to conjugate the word “drink” (that’s another post, however, the sort of post I don’t write anymore, allegedly). Generally I think “sip” is the worst word in the world. Grr. Blech.

Let’s try to get to the root of the problem. What does “sip” actually mean, anyway–how is it different from “drink”? Well, Canadian Oxford says it meant “to drink in one or more small amounts.” Whereas drink just means any amount. But for practical purposes, in prose writing, is there really any difference between, “He nodded, sipped some coffee, and began to speak,” and “He nodded, drank some coffee, and began to speak”? Well, the first one sounds ickier, but otherwise I feel they are identical. No one is going to think he slammed down the whole cup without the nuance of “sip” are they?

I don’t think I ever liked this word, but I can pinpoint where it all fell apart completely–the use, in a romance novel, of the phrase “sipping kisses.” I believe this is supposed to imply a series of small kisses, but to me it sounds like drinking saliva or somehow liquifying the other’s face. It’s just the worst thing ever. WORST THING EVER.

So what’s your most loathed word?

July 3rd, 2012

What happens when you self-search

Guys, I’m ashamed to admit it, but sometimes I enter my own name into search engines and go in 8 or 10 pages, just to see what comes up. I do this for a couple reasons–mainly to kill time when I’m feeling simultaneously vain and bored. But also because I’ve discovered that Google Alerts (yes, of course I have one–that’s not even vanity, just efficient) is not all that–it misses a lot of stuff. And while the good stuff will eventually make its way to me, no one ever passes on a really negative review–unless I make some more sadistic friends, it’s up to me to find the scathing ones.

Sometimes, however, my sad little searches turn up fun stuff. Often, it’s stuff I already knew about, only in a shiny new package. Like, I always knew the time and date of my reading at the Leacock Festival, so no one thought to tell me that it’s now up on slick event page (scroll down). And though I’ve already talked SO MUCH about the film “How to Keep Your Day Job” it’s still pretty awesome to see it has a little web presence. And sometimes folks even forget to tell me about a really lovely review (scroll down again). Also, did you know that someone with almost the same name as me is Dr. Date?

Finally, somehow I failed to attach my proper full name to my YouTube channel, so you can’t find it by searching me–I don’t think that’s a huge loss to anyone but I’m going to try to work this out. In the meantime, in case you couldn’t fine it otherwise, I’ll leave you with my favourite kitty video creation so far, Evan versus Gunter Grass.