March 21st, 2011

A few random entertaining things

1) When I read a book, I read every word–the copyright page, the credits and acknowledgements, even a skim through the index to see how it’s done (professional interest; remember, I work in the word mines too). Sometimes I find cool stuff hiding in these odd spots, and feel it my duty to bring it to the attention of the non-obsessed. For instance, this, from the copyright page of Matthew J. Trafford’s The Divinity Gene, which has cool stuff on pretty much every other page, too:

“These stories are works of fiction and as such do not purport to be factual or representative of reality. Where stories use the names of ‘real’ corporate, media, political, or historical figures, they do so to denote figures, images, and the stuff of collective dreams. They do not denote, or pretend to provide information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise.”

The stuff of collective dreams–I love it!

2) Yesterday, driving in the car, Rebecca in the passenger seat, Mark driving. Please keep in mind that I’m still really sick, and pretty heavily drugged.

RR: What is a (reading with great difficulty of a billboard) “microcarbonated lager”?
MS: Microcarbonated lager? Search me.
RR: It was on the billboard.
(pause)
MS: Hey, what kind of beer did you buy?
RR: (struggling yet more with the pronounciation) Microcarbonated lager.
MS: No, you didn’t, because you just heard about it for the first time right now.
RR: Oh. (pause, then thoughtfully) I thought we were doing a little skit. (pause) You actually wanted to know what kind of beer I have in my fridge?
MS: Yes!
RR: (finally figures out what is going on, dissolves into laughter)
MS: And still I have no answer.

March 19th, 2011

My first kill fee

Nope, I haven’t become an assassin (I have a cough that can be heard through cement walls, so I’m not sneaking up on anyone these days). In the world of writing, a kill fee is the money you are paid when a magazine or journal accepts your writing for publication and then, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t follow through. This happens more with journalistic pieces that are topical and have a “horizon of interest” beyond which you can’t really sell them. If a periodical locks down your time, energy and research on a story of the day/week/month, then declines to publish it, you probably won’t have time to sell it elsewhere before the news gets stale. So they are obligated (usually contractually; always morally) to pay you for your time and trouble. This prevents caprice in editorial decisions of this nature, and also protects writers against acts of God (I’m imagining the folks who maybe were writing long thoughtful pieces about trade or educational policies the day of the earthquake in Japan, say).

The kill fee does not often come up in the literary world, so untopical are most poems, short stories, even reviews–typically if something goes wrong or the journal runs out of space, you can just scoot things to a later issue and everyone can enjoy it July instead of March. That has certainly happened to my work in the pass and while a little frustrating (I get so *excited* about seeing stuff in print), it’s not a big deal.

When a publication declines to publish something they’ve already accepted, it’s usually a sign of a bigger problem–say, the decision never to publish anything ever again. Thus, by the time word gets to the writers, the editors may not be in a position to take the writers’ emotions or finances into consideration (cough). On the other hand, sometimes the editors are completely on the ball and conscientious, just dealing with circumstances beyond their control, and they send you a thoughtful letter explaining things, and also a kill-fee cheque.

That latter situation is what happened to me this week, and you know what? I still feel sad. I’ve been published without being paid lots of times, and it’s still pretty fun–you get your contributor’s copy or go to the website and then there’s your very own words, formatted and in a novel font, smack up against other people’s words, and you read all the other stuff and then your own “in context,” and then you go around very casually mentioning that other people could read it too, if, like, they want. Which is exactly what I do with paid publications, except without the headache of having to go to the bank.

Getting paid without getting published was no fun at all–I just went to the bank and then it was over. Boo! I’m sure it’s no one fault, absolutely, but I’m still sad. If you offered me money or glory, I’d take glory any day.

Do you have any kill-fee thoughts or experiences to share? Maybe you can cheer me up!

March 17th, 2011

Sick Daze

I stayed home sick on Monday, but attempted to go to work Tuesday with poor results. So here I am at home again, yesterday and today, in my yoga pants, surrounded by wadded up tissues and corn chip crumbs, moving boxes and my taxes. I do not like. Such a boring lifestyle causes me to dwell unduly on the small events of my day and, since those events are all I have, I share them with you:

Excursion of the day was to drug store to pick up new kind of cough syrup (mucus control–who says I don’t know how to party?) After purchasing it, I was so happy to be out in the world with fellow humans and desperate not to go home that I went out into the mall that the drug store is part of and sat on a bench to read an article about Mo Ibrahim. It was an a pretty good article. Then an old lady asked me for a dollar. In shame-faced honesty, I have to admit that I don’t usually give when asked. I have a hard time finding anything in my bag, and things can go *really* badly if you say “sure” and then realize you don’t have any change on you. I have been yelled at and chased, and while I know that most panhandlers really just want a little help, I often get nervous and say no. However, this lady was teeny and gentle looking, so I found my wallet, and gave her the loony.

She thanked me and joined me on my bench. Then she asked me if I like tunafish, and I said yes (one of my favourite canned foods, actually), which was a mistake because she said she would give me some. I said, of course, that that wouldn’t be necessary, but she insisted on giving me two cans of tuna wrapped in a Canadian Tire flier. I think they were probably worth more than a dollar. She also told me a receipe for tuna salad that would be great if I liked olives. Then I started coughing again and she told me to drink some orange juice, patted me on the shoulder and left.

Also yesterday, and this is not a small event at all, YOSS went live. YOSS is the Year of the Short Story, and it’s going to be/already is great, as are the masterminds behind it (Sarah Selecky, Matthew Trafford, and Jessica Westhead, short-story wizards all). It’s a great time to read, reread, buy, order, talk about, review, celebrate and share short stories, and to remember why we love them. I am trying to celebrate by writing a new one, which hasn’t happened in a few weeks owing to various craziness, illness, the horrible horror that is moving (have you ever counted all your tank tops? yeah, no one should have to do that). Anyway, judging by the coherency level of this post, I probably have a fever and this story won’t go all that well, but let’s just see…for YOSS!

March 15th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *The Anxiety of Everyday Objects* by Aurelie Sheehan

I read Aurelie Sheehan’s novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects in just over a day, very rare for me. I had (and still have) a miserable cold, and wasn’t capable of concentrating on complicated material for very long, so this little book suited me just fine, and I read it compulsively as a distraction from my snot-drenched woe.

Even in this weakened state, I still didn’t think it was very good. But it was a little good. I really enjoyed the warm, gentle treatment of the day-to-day life of an office, and especially the workdays of the protagonist (let’s face it, heroine), Winona. She’s a secretary in a law firm, taking dictation and typing letters, organizing folders and answering the phone when the receptionist’s away. She doesn’t love it, but she finds it comforting and Zen-like to do the job well. At one point she describes it as like picking bits of grass out of a bucket of bolts, which I didn’t quite get, but the rest of Winona’s observations and emotions about her work are spot-on–I know exactly what she means, and in certain ways, I have never heard it expressed so well. Moreover, Sheehan sets most of the novel in this office, and lingers on the setting not as something to parody or scorn, but as lived experience. There is a lovely moment where Winona, carrying two cups of coffee to her boss’s office, finds the door closed and has to set both on the floor, knock, wait to be beckoned in, open the door, then pick up the cups and bring them inside to be served. Not a huge deal, but perfectly done, and quietly funny.

Unfortunately, though Winona is good at her job and wise in her assessment of it, in many other ways she is…a moron. Actually, she’s only a moron to serve the machinations of the plot–most of the truly stupid things Winona does seem out-of-character, but she does so many of them that it becomes difficult to keep track of what her character *is* exactly. Sheehan manufactures strange explanations for bits of a normal woman’s life that she can’t be bothered to write. Friends? Winona doesn’t have any, she announces with equanimity at one point. Family? She doesn’t speak to her parents because they live in Florida and are boring. She has a sister, who begs her to dogsit at several points in the novel, and is pretty funny–but basically a one-note joke. Education? Apparently Winona has an MFA in film from some unnamed NYC institution, but she never references anything she learned or did there. Her plans for putting her education to use involve imagining neat-o scenes in her head, and wandering around the city with a video camera.

Romantic history? This is the worst one. At one point, the 3rd person narrator actually proposes to explain Winona’s romantic history, but then begs off with “She had loved.” This seems unlikely; more likely, though Winona denies that she was “born yesterday” at one point, is exactly that. She seems to have no idea what happens in relationships, and to not even desire one so much as be curious about the concept. When an attractive guy at work takes her to dinner, she opens the meal with “Is it because you want to have sex?” And then, bafflingly, he doesn’t answer and thing proceed as if it hadn’t been said. As to whether she is actually *attracted* to this attractive guy, or anyone–who cares? Winona goes where she’s pushed by contrivances of plot. When a manically sexual ex comes into town (that they ever actually dated never seems probable, but whatever), he proposes they have a little no-strings-attached bondage and domination session. Winona, having never done that before and no further plans that evening, says sure. That goes about as well as you might expect.

Actually, it goes a little better than you might expect–he does indeed have nefarious intentions, but they are decidedly PG…because we’ve got to get back to the main plotline, I guess. The main plotline is about…well, it’s not even revealed what is really going on until the final quarter of the book, so for most of the time it is about a strange girl-crush Winona develops on a new lawyer at the firm, Sandy. Sandy is blond, well-dressed, stunning and blind, and seemingly auditioning for a role on Ally McBeal. She’s so gorgeous, so great at her job despite her lack of sight, and she even finds time to encourage Winona to be the best that she can be. She notes a few times that Winona is good at her job, then promotes her to office manager, demoting the woman currently in that position. The after-effects of that shuffle on office relations does feel realistic, but Winona’s cheerful acceptance of Sandy and everything she offers her–a day at the spa, a diamond watch, unorthodox and secretive work instructions feels just this side of absurd. Winona’s almost 30, but she doesn’t think there’s anything odd about photocopying she can’t tell her boss about?

Sigh. Then, obsessed with Sandy’s cryptic messages alternated with warm intimacy, Winona starts following her around town and filming her. Deranged behaviour for most of us, but Winona’s a filmmaker, so it’s ok. Now we see why Sheehan made Winona a filmmaker, instead of a poet or painter, despite a complete lack of film-references or vocabulary in the novel: the setup of for the big denouement requires a random moment caught on film! So, Winona is neither auteur nor psycho stalker; she’s just a plot element.

So then the big shakedown occurs (as on Scooby-Doo, the main villain turns out to be a character the reader doesn’t know, so we never had any hope of understanding what was going on–at least, I didn’t–until the author tells us). There are elements about the ending that are quiet and kind of interesting: the bad guys don’t get punished, and the good guys all wind up unemployed. They were at least able to quit their jobs valourously, but still, the book ends with a kiss and the implied promise that Winona will now make her movie. In a really good book, I feel like I turn the last page and the characters keep going; here, I felt sure that Winona neither made a movie nor did anything else. She just went back to sleep in the imagination of her author.

This is my fifth book on the To Be Read challenge. So far a literary novel, a collection of literary short stories, a YA novel, a long poem, and now (let’s face it) chick-lit. At least I get around!

March 12th, 2011

Variosky

A few random things I’ve been meaning to tell you:

–The Santa Fe Writers Project followed up that review of my book with an interview with Sheila Lamb which was lots of fun (for me, anyway).

–I’ll be reading at the first edition reading series in Perth, Ontario, on April 8. My fellow readers will be Tish Cohen and Mark Sampson

–I finally saw the And Also Sharks book trailer, which is hilarious and brilliant, and it makes the fact that I don’t own that book yet all the more distressing

–At 2am tonight, you need to spring your clocks forward an hour, which means you probably need to confirm your brunch plans for tomorrow

March 11th, 2011

Canada Reads Independently: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

I really admire Kerry Clare‘s Canada Reads Independently program, and this year I’ve read two out of the five books, which is actually pretty good for me. All the books on the list look fascinating, and I’ll probably try to track’em down eventually, but for now, I did the story collections. The other collection in the running, Lynn Coady’s *Play the Monster Blind* was fast and furious, while Gallant’s collection was huge and a bit slower moving, but I adored it too.

As Kerry mentions in her review the stories aren’t ideally presented in book form here. I agreed, the book was too long and overcrowded, but the way I got round that to read really slowly (according to my diary, it took nearly 2 weeks), in and around other things, so the stories stood in my head a bit more as *stories* and not bits of a book.

It’s funny how much I like this book considering how antithetical Gallant’s style is to the things I usually admire–there’s very little dialogue, even very little scene. In the Linnet Muir stories, the final section of the book and some ways its crowning glories, there are massive paragraphs, mainly written in the past imperfect–the general sense of the things were happening, could and would happen, during a certain period or in certain circumstances. She slides from the habitual to the individual in such stealthy increments you barely know she’s doing it. Sometimes it feels like a story is just a random collection of notes and memories, but you get to the end and the weight on your brain is, in fact, story-like. How does she do that?

The bit about the notes and memories applies only to the Linnet Muir materials–the other stories feel highly organized, though always organically so. My favourites are the long, fleshy ones about Canada folks meandering through Europe, trying to…what? They are lost souls, mainly, drowning in provincialism and the false confidence that their new-world births divorce them from history. Well, doesn’t that sound lofty! In truth, sometimes the Canadian/European dicotomy is laid on a bit thickly, but for the most part it’s shockingly subtle–the characters are so much themselves, you don’t wind up thinking that they are also part of a larger category…until the characters themselves think of that!

Mavis Gallant’s fabled parallel to Alice Munro is often described in differences–urban versus rural, Canadian versus global, etc. I think the big difference for me is that Gallant writes with a bit more distance from her characters. This is not to say that Munro is kinder, or doesn’t subtly judge her characters, but she stands inside their brains, it seems, and follows the machinations of even their worst impulses. Gallant leaves a certain privacy to the folks in her stories, the room for a grim or silly failure that adults are allowed.

Her best stories are, I think, third person narratives about these grim and silly folks and their failures where we know the general schema of their hears, but perhaps not their inner workings. An old favourite of mine, which I once wrote a grad-school paper on and have read now half a dozen times, is “The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street.” Here is a quotation to show a little of how it works. This is a long passage, but Gallant’s genius is a slow-burning kind:

At the wedding reception Peter lay down on the floor and said he was dead. He held a white azalea in a brass pot on his chest, and sang, “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” Sheilah bent over him and said, “Pete, darling, get up. Pete, listen, every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you’ll get up.”

“I do love you,” he said, ready to engage in a serious conversation. “She’s so beautiful,” he told a second face. “She’s nearly as tall as I am. She was a model in London. I met her over in London in the war. I met her there in the war.” He lay on his back with the azalea on his chest, explaining their history. A waiter took the brass pot away, and after Peter had been hauled to his feed he knocked the waiter down. Trudeau’s bride, who was freshly out of an Ursuline convent, became hysterical…

We don’t find out exactly why Peter wanted to lie on the floor and say he was dead; we can surmise he was drunk and wanting attention, but that is our surmise and not Gallant’s. She probably does in fact *know* though; Peter might not. We also never find out what Peter did in London during the war, other than fall in love.

What I mean is, Gallant is smarter than some of her characters, and she often makes gentle fun of them, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Sociology comes in for a particularly hard go, and though I must protest as one born into the House of Sociology, I also laughed at the jokes. On Sarah’s relationship with her father in “In the Tunnel”: “Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: That would show him who was subjective.” And Lottie, a sociology student on the loose, of a countryman encountered in Paris in “Virus X”: “…he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns.”

Ha! I find Mavis Gallant’s stories very very funny (despite my House of Sociology resentment), and often unspeakably sad. The sadness is that people are often less than they could be, weak or blinkered or selfish or some combination thereof. And there’s little fatalism, I feel–choices are made, often bad ones. And yet the humour is there, though it  can be hard to find if you’re not on her wavelength, and maybe that’s one reason the length of this collection can be an advantage–it gives you time to get into the Gallantian mindset. I certainly enjoyed spending 2 weeks with her.

March 8th, 2011

I’m excited about…

Going to The New Quarterly‘s Toronto reading at Tranzac (which I just learned right now stands for Toronto Australia New Zealand Club!) in the Annex, doors 7, musical entertainment 7:30, readings 8. Should be wonderful, and that venue (multicultural club) is outstanding. See you there?

This lovely review of Once, by Sheila Lamb at the Santa Fe Writers’ Project.

This fantastic grade 11 chemistry textbook. I know, this blog is not usually about stuff I do in my editorial world–that would really require a whole other blog, and who has *that* kind of time? But I just worked so hard on this book that I gradually got obsessed and now I think that as grade 11 chemistry textbooks, this is the best one in the universe. Seriously, everyone who worked on it was amazing and brilliant and not just because they were nice to me when I was very tired and stressed. My role in the project was actually quite minor compared to some, but that does not in any way diminish my love for it.

March 7th, 2011

Moving

I am moving at the end of March. Not moving blogs–we did that already–actually physically cleaning, evaluating, boxing, and lugging every stupid piece of capitalism I own and hauling it all across the city where I can repeat the process in reverse. It makes me want to weep a little bit. The fact that I will be very very happy in my new situation once the move is over cannot completely negate the fact that, before that, I won’t be.

One cheering thing is that I am moving in with someone who has nicer stuff than I do, which means that I get to get rid of some things with which my relationship has grown rather stale. And this could be cheerful for you, too, if you are in need of some furniture that, while not particularly exciting or new, is certainly serviceable, comfortable, and non-hideous.

I think most of this stuff is too non-new to charge money for, so basically if you have the means to transport it, the following is yours for a handshake:

–double bed, box spring, and metal bed frame (plus a couple pillows)
–eight-drawer bureau (blond wood, though the previous own [not me] wallpapered every other drawer with tasteful blue wallpaper–me, I like the effect]
–black sling chair
–tall bookcase (dark wood veneer)
–short white bookcase (this is the one piece that is actually ugly, because white furniture does not stay white very long, and I bought this piece used in 1998; but it does fulfill its role of holding books and the tv [on top] very well)
–hutch from a wood veneer desk, which I am using as a bookshelf
–cofffeemaker
–microwave

I could certainly supply photos, should you be interested, but I think the people who would actually like this furniture would be those for whom appearance is not an issue. Drop me a note if this is you: rebeccabooks@excite.com

We Can’t Help You If We Can’t Find You

I can’t believe I forgot to mention that my brother did the album art for the new Zacht Automaat album, We Can’t Help You If We Can’t Find You. Go have a look–and if you’re a fan of instrumental jazz minimalist pop prog psych rock, a listen.

March 4th, 2011

Fun with the Dictionary

Sometimes I just get these wonderful bolts of connection between words and concepts. I think it’s the upside of sometimes being a little obtuse about things that are obvious. Sometimes a whole series of little obviousnesses elude me for a while, and then build up into this revelation of connectedness–wow! I love how words in English have all these quirky little relationships that probably stem from slang in the 1930s or else migrating tribes in the 1200s, or maybe both. Like, everyone knows one meaning of “cycle” is “to move in circles” and “bi” means “a thing having two” but it’s still fun to think about how “bicycle” means a thing having to things moving in circles. Or maybe you have real hobbies, and don’t find that fun to think about at all.

Here are some more entertaining word connections I have found (all definitions courtesy of my best friend, Canadian Oxford Dictionary)–if you, you know, dig this sort of thing.

catharsis–“1 a release or relieving of emotions…3 Med. purgation
catheter—noun Med. a tube for insertion into a body cavity or blood ressel for introducing or removing fluid etc.
cathode ray—noun a beam of electrons emitted from the cathode of a high-vacuum tube (RR–the opposite of a cathode being an anode, which does not emit, but instead takes in)

So I looked at the Latin roots, which are all derived from the Greek (well, except “cathode ray,” which I guess is a modern construction), from slightly different roots, but *basically* what I get out of this is that in ancient Greek, the prefix “cath” meant “to get out or emit.” The dictionary isn’t backing me up as strongly as I thought it would, but even if I’m wrong, it’s still a good way to remember which is the cathode and which the anode–it’s the one that’s like catheter that gets things out. Or maybe this never comes up in your life?

Here’s another one:

impertative–1 urgent 2 obligatory 3 commanding, peremptatory
importune—transitive verb solicit (a person) pressingly; beg or demand insistantly
imperious—adjective 1 overbearing, domineering, exacting obedience. 2 urgent, imperative (I’ve actually not heard of that second definition before)

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

imperial—adjective 1 characteristic of an empire or comparable sovereign state. 2a of or characteristic of an emperor or empress b supreme in authority

Yes, that’s right, all forms of pushing people around derive (more or less–some of these come from Latin and others from French, so my theory’s slightly imperfect) from imperialism! Down with empire!

Ahem.

Interestingly, my name is in the CanOx, too, but it’s not that good–it just refers to some other Rebecca who is not me, not a general definition of what a Rebecca is:

Rebecca—Bible the wife of Isaac, mother of Esau and Jacob (Gen. 24-7)

The other spelling, which I’ve always considered a completely different name, is way better:

Rebekah—noun a member of a women’s social and charitable society allied with the Oddfellows

Now that would be cool!

Maybe in a future post, I can spend some time with my other best friend from America, Webster’s Collegiate.

I seriously don’t know what other people do with their time.