February 1st, 2011

Very important question

I found a pack of gum sitting on a subway seat. No one was nearby. The pack was still in its original cellophane seal, seemingly untampered-with. It is a good kind of gum.

Can I chew it? Or is probably poison gum, part of some elaborate trap for naive young transit-takers?

January 31st, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *An Abundance of Katherines* by John Green

I haven’t read a YA book in years, although I hear there’s been really interesting things going on in that category for fiction. However, whenever I go into that section of the bookstore, I find myself overwhelmed with vampires, pretty little liars, and gossipy girls, and I have to run away. Not that I am against the silly side; when I was myself a Young Adult, I read a lot of teen-geared garbage (for books that required thinking, I usually just read adult ones) and it never did me any harm. I’m just a bit too old for it now, I think.

I did, of course, read some good YA in my youth, too (Paul Danziger, Gordan Korman, a few great ones I can’t recall authors for) but I don’t think I ever came across anything like John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. This fast-moving goofball comedy was a gift from my dear friend AMT (er, in 2008–I don’t know how that happened! I’m so sorry, AMT! The To Be Read challenge is saving me from myself!) So I was happy to be guided back into the YA world after all these years.

*Katherines* is the story of Colin Singleton’s summer after graduation. His girlfriend Katherine dumps him on grad night, so he and his best/only friend Hassan decide to take a road trip to help distract Colin from the pain. On the second day, in rural Tennessee, they see a sign for a roadside attraction that contains the entombed body of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand–the dude whose assination started WWI–and they have to go figure out what that’s all about.

Not very much, as it turns out–just a historic body the town bought to bring in more tourists. But the tourguide and her mother promptly adopt Colin and Hassan, giving them a place to stay and jobs for the summer for no other reason than they seem charming, and the plot demands it.

Most of the large external events in this book make little sense, and the idea that the people of rural Tennessee are dying to house, feed, and heal the souls of tourists from the north isn’t even the worst of it–that’s at least a conceit we’ve seen before, in a 100 000 romance novels. There’s also the idea that Colin–who made his first friend at 14 and stopped at one–has somehow been able to attract 19 girlfriends in the course of his life; moreover, that they were all named Katherine. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows that it’s usually easier to make a friend than get a date, especially if one is socially moronic as Colin is. Most of the 19 Katherines aren’t described in the novel until the bitter end, at which point I though there is no way I believed it. Just silly plot frills.

But, yet…I really liked this book. How did that happen? The setups are so inane, yet the characters themselves are amazingly true-to-life, and affecting. The other thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that Colin is supposed to be a child prodigy, a kid who was supersmart at a young age and has been mainly schooled by private tutors. This bit of the plot, I believed, and I really enjoyed reading about how his mind worked–the wild tangents to history, medicine, physics, etc. This book has 87 footnotes, almost all of them interesting and amusing–I was always happy to turn the page and see a footnote. There’s also a long appendix in the back about math functions, which was concise and readable and (I am a former math nerd) fascinating.

Why the math appendix? Well, another of the way-too-many layers of plot is that Colin is trying to write an equation that summarizes who gets dumped at what point in a relationship. It’s a pretty shallow and silly way to see the world (as he eventually discovers) but some of the stuff he comes up with along the way is really interesting. The new friend he and Hassan make in the country is Lindsay Lee Wells, a paramedic-in-training with a jerky boyfriend, a sarcastic sense of humour, and a heart of gold. Mainly you know where that’s headed, but she also helps him with the formula, which I thought was the best part.

Colin’s a shallow, insecure leech–as he gets dumped by the 19th Katherine, she remarks, “You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.'” and she’s right. The nice thing about teen novels, as opposed to adult ones, is that it’s infinitely more forgivable to be self-obsessed when you are 18 than 28, and Colin truly does grow, mature, and learn to look for more than constant reassurance in his relationships. And it really made me happy as he did.

I feel it’s late in the review to mention this, but this book is, in addition to all of the above, hilarious! In the tradition of YA novels everywhere, the wacky best friend is a) fat and b) non-white, but Green takes Hassan to a couple different levels: Hassan is truly engaged with his Muslim faith, but to what extent is he hiding behind it to mask insecurities about his weight, social skills, etc.? I’ve never seen those questions in a YA novel, and it really works–Hassan isn’t just wacky, he’s a fully realized human character. He’s also wicked funny, and spends the book refering to himself as Daddy in the third person, demanding to watch Judge Judy and relentlessly mocking Colin in the kindest way possible. There’s also tonnes of slapstick (at one point, Colin and Hassan are chased by hornets), which you know I have a soft spot for.

Lindsay Lee Wells is also a pretty great character, which is interesting, because in my youth, YA novels were often for one gender or another, and the non-target gender was just short-handed as nice, mean, pretty, whatever. Lindsay Lee has some interesting issues, though I did feel her plotline wrapped up rather quickly at the end. I’m sure kids of any gender (and adults too) would enjoy this book.

Ok, I’m almost at 1000 words, and I haven’t covered anything about the extraneous plotlines in the town where Colin and Hassan stay–they are interesting, but go nowhere, and that’s interesting too (more like real life than wrapping everything up on page 299). And the Archduke thing you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I liked this book, is what I’m saying–maybe you would too?

This is my third review for the To Be Read challenge–9 to go!

January 25th, 2011

If you’re awesome, see here

My publisher, Biblioasis, is hiring–a real full-time gig with a real literary publisher. These are rare and special events.

You can read the posting at the link above, but allow me to add a few things: Dan’s really nice, and so are all the other Biblioasis associates I’ve ever met. I myself am of course charming, and if the incumbent ever has to email me about making some arrangement, I will always reply promptly and politely, and maybe even make a funny joke. Also, if you’ve not worked much in publishing before, allow me to point out that it’s really rare to get to learn and do so much different stuff in one job. I’ve only been to Windsor once, but it was far warmer there than here. And, of course, the books are amazing!

January 24th, 2011

Music recommendations

I got some new cds for Christmas, and they are the best. Well, currently, anyway, in my mind–the very best in the world. I do this with music, go through periods of intense infatuation where I can listen to a song 40 times on repeat. It never entirely goes away–I don’t start to hate the music or anything–but gradually other favourites move in. So basically what I’m saying is, you can trust the picks, but perhaps not the extreme intensity with which they’re offered.

One of these most-beloved albums is If I Don’t Come Home, You’ll Know I’m Gone by The Wooden Sky. Dangerous, to have an album title with a comma in it, but they totally pull it off. My current favourite, listen-to-ad-nauseum obsession is the track Something Hiding for Us in the Night, which has this wonderful powerful beat that’s just about my walking pace, so as I listen to it as I walk down the street, it’s like I’m in the Wooden Sky army. What do the lyrics mean? Not sure, but I think they’re beautiful, nonetheless: “Yeah, but you’ll keep a car running / outside of my bed/ So baby, don’t you worry now / it’s all in your head/ But I keep on repeating / all the last things you said / Oh, I know at first / you probably wanted me dead.” What? I don’t know, but something–definitely something.

Everybody knows about The Arcade Fire, they’ve been in the New Yorker, etc–but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t actually as good as the hype suggests–they are. I have loved every album so far, and I think The Suburbs might just be the best one yet. Some of the songs are little stories, and some, again, I can’t quite parse, but City with No Children is my favourite now, a gently rockin’ number about missing childhood as well as children and, a theme of the album, writing letters. Lovely, powerful, catchy–all the best stuff.

Truly, Katy Perry’s inane song Firework shouldn’t be included with the above complex music. Its only lyrical achievement is reminding us that the word fireworks has a singular. The rest is just synth’d up strings and inane high-school inspirationals, eg., “You don’t have to feel/like a waste of space / You’re original / Cannot be replaced.”

Even the video is mainly histrionics and CGI, but I can’t resist suggesting you watch it (link above) for the moment around 1:50 where a magician on the way home from a gig gets mugged. The muggers go through his pockets and get…long strings of silk scarves. And then they rip open his jacket and…doves burst free. It’s really beautiful, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that set-up before. Wonder who on the Katy Perry Brain Team came up with the idea??

January 23rd, 2011

24-hour vacation

This weekend Mark and I took a 24-hour vacation, and it was glorious! Nice hotel, fun pool, my favourite chain restaurants, cable television, hot tub, etc. (FYI, Niagara Falls hotels much cheaper when the whole city is covered in ice!) Allow me to share some highlights:

–en route, briefly lost, attempted to sneak down a “local traffic only” construction route to get back to the main drag, only to find that it was blocked off entirely after a certain point. After turn the car around and heading back, we discovered that the reverse side of the “local traffic only” sign had been spray-painted to read, “We told you so!”
–walking through the mallway under the Niagara Casino (no, we didn’t gamble; we went to buy candy!) I was telling an anecdote about the cashier at my grocery store: “So he sees my name on my credit card, and he’s all, ‘You’re Jewish? I’m Jewish!'” Guy walking past me says, “And I’m Jewish!”
–waitress at International House of Pancakes assures us that the IHOPs will soon be making their way to Toronto. I am thrilled, but completely od on pancakes (they gave me an extra by mistake) in case she’s wrong and I won’t see them for another year!!

Everyone should take a 24-hour vacation!!

January 21st, 2011

Rice Pudding

I have been thinking about gender lately, mainly because I’ve run into a number of books and movies that make some unfortunate generalizations. Then last night’s meeting of the ever-excellent Women’s Writing Salon touched on smallness in the context of domestic and quotidian detail, and are those things either trivialized or thought of as “women’s” in the public consciousness? And if so, do we care?

I left early for my three-bus trip home, but I believe we were arriving at “meh” (anyone who stayed later should correct me if I’m wrong): You have to write about what you care enough to write about, and it’s the skill and sensitivity of the writer that makes the text “big” or “small.”

Anyway, that’s about as far as I can get with the issue, and this blog is pink and I haven’t worn pants in public in 3 years, so if you were going to judge me for being too “feminine,” you probably already have (and stopped reading the blog??) So here’s a really good recipe for rice pudding:

Into a big, deep greased casserole dish, put
4 cups skim milk
3 tablespoons brown rice
1/3 cup brown sugar (or less)
1/2 teaspoon salt
nutmeg if you’re into nutmeg

Stir, then put into a 300 F oven. Stir every 20 minutes for the first hour, then every hour or so until you’ve either reached a total of 3.5 hours, or it looks about the consistency you’d like to eat. Then do so.

This is a great writer’s recipe, because it’s barely any work but it forces you to stay home and write for an entire afternoon, instead of say, getting bored and wandering off to the movies. Of course, there might be some people who leave the house with the oven on if they know they’ll be back before it’s done, but I always worry I’ll get hit by a bus and then not only will I be in the hospital but my building will burn down.

Anyway, you stay home, you stir occasionally, you get lots of work done, and then you are rewarded with the best rice pudding in the world. The only probably is that it boils down to only about 2 cups, so though the recipe says serves 4-6 (I’ve adapted this from Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook), only if most of those 6 don’t really like rice pudding. You get either four small lunch-sized portions, or two generous ones. Not that most people think that a romantic dinner-a-deux should be capped off with rice pudding–but I do. Actually, I’ve never suceeded in sharing my rice pudding with anyone; I always eat it all before anyone worthy shows up!

January 18th, 2011

Posterous success!

I have succeeded in making my first post to the new Literary Voyeurs blog, and in the process learned how to use Posterous! I am excited!

Rose-coloured reviews *Jenny and the Jaws of Life* by Jincy Willet

This book was loaned to me–rather forcefully–by my friend M, and the introduction by David Sedaris is about how the book is so hilarious that he also proselytizes for it and pushes others to read it, or simply reads bits aloud to them.

Strong praise indeed, for I consider Sedaris one the best and funniest…actually, I’ve never been able to pin down what he does. It is essayist? Memoirist? Well, he’s pretty much the funniest *writer*, of anything, I know of. For him to write an intro and blurb for a book–let alone a bout that came out in the 80s and was being re-released in England in 2006 (??) seemed like a pretty big deal. And really, my friend M is pretty sharp, too–she spotted this perfect-condition hardcover on the sidewalk in a box!

I did not find this book all that funny, but I liked it anyway. Isn’t that weird? Usually, if I find the marketing inaccurate, it’s because the book isn’t good and I just hate the whole thing, but this is a great weird disturbing book. I found it flawed at certain points, but really riveting, inventive, striking…and yes, some bits made me laugh.

My favourite story in the collection was probably the first, “Julie in the Funhouse.” It’s about a man whose sister is murdered by her teenage son and daughter. Hahaha, right? It is true that both the man and his sister are of an ironic turn of mind, and flashbacks of them together and some scenes of him by himself are mordantly funny, but just funny in the fabric of the story, which is very much like the fabric of life. I culled through looking for a “hilarious” passage in this story, but the laughs when they come are pretty modest, in keeping with the tragic subject of the story.

But enough about baffling marketing–it’s a brilliant, achingly sad story. I think Willet’s real gift is an ability to go towards melodrama asymptotically, closer and closer without ever touching. She’s able to pull of huge scary subjects, like the murder one above, or “Under the Bed,” which is probably the best story about rape I’ve read. And yes, that one has it’s small wry laughs–probably more than most rape stories, but that’s only because it’s more realistic than most rape stories. The humour is only in keeping with the ironies of life. Even “Justine Laughs at Death,” which is a sort of paranormal take on sexual violence winds up being affecting, even exciting, and quite witty. It’s about a guy who is the single concentrated personification of all sexual violence, and what happens when he encounters the single concentrated personification of all women. You couldn’t really find a “bigger” story to write, but she does it (I think; I can see folks disagreeing with me) with minimum porteneousness and maximum inventiveness–it’s a wild story.

And that may bea flaw of Willet’s–she’s incredible with wild situations, and she can make things work that you’d never think possible, but she does best in elevated or extreme moments; sometimes the more ordinary stuff rings false or if not false then too heavily stylized, conceptualized to be real. “The Haunting of the Lingards” is about a “perfect marriage,” in which the couple had one argument early in their relationship, 16 more years of perfection, then the argument resurfaces and destroys them. However, the pages of the story are almost entirely devoted to the first and second fights, and the subsequent fallout from the second. The other 16 years are described in a quick summary of neighbourly envy, which in the face of no other evidence seems untrue–it seems like the narrator has lied to us and the Lingards were *never* happy. But what would be the point of that lie–then the story makes no sense. The concept behind the story–spiritual belief can never be successfully debated or explained, even for love–is far stronger than the story itself. The characters feel like props made for the purpose of explaining an idea.

A few of the more quotidian ones do in fact work quite well, so maybe my thesis isn’t going to fly. “My Father at the Wheel” is a lovely emotional set of postcards from a girl growing into a woman, and all the times her father gave her a life somewhere. A very simple, no-fireworks story that is genuinely moving.

Willett is also an interesting author–she published this book, then mainly stopped writing to raise her son. When Sedaris pushed for the republish 16 years later, the publisher asked her to finish the novel she’d been plugging away at so she could publish that too, which got her back into the game. You can read a nice interview with her here–sharp lady. Apparently she’s got a new book out lately, which I think I’d probably like to check out.

This is the second review for my To Be Read reading challenge–10 more to go!

January 15th, 2011

Opportunity for Toronto Writers

If you are in Toronto, you can take advantage of the wonderful Toronto Public Library writer-in-residence program, this year with Elizabeth Ruth. I just found out about it now, so maybe you don’t know about it either–here’s the deets:

Elizabeth Ruth, Writer in Residence February – May 2011
Manuscript submissions: Writers of literary fiction are welcome to submit novel or short story manuscripts for feedback. Elizabeth Ruth with read your writing and meet with you to discuss what is working and what might need further development. Submitting a manuscript does not guarantee a meeting with the Writer in Residence. Meetings are by appointment only.

Manuscripts should meet the following criteria:
• Fiction excerpts of up to 10 double-spaced pages in length.
• Typed or word-processed on 1 side of each page (handwritten manuscripts will not be accepted).
• Use 12 point or larger Times New Roman typeface only.
• 1 inch margins all around.
• No email copies accepted.
• Please don’t send in originals.
Manuscripts will be accepted from December 15, 2010 to January 22, 2011. However, the Library reserves the right to limit the number of manuscripts accepted. Please include: your name, address, email address and telephone number on your cover page. There is a limit of one submission per person. Mail or bring to:
Writer in Residence Program
North York Central Library
Languages, Literature and Fine Arts Department,
Second Floor
5120 Yonge Street
Toronto, ON M2N 5N9
Questions: gkelner@torontopubliclibrary.ca
The Toronto Public Library is not responsible for returning manuscripts. Please submit a COPY of your work
Manuscripts will be accepted: December 15, 2010 – January 22, 2011.www.elizabethruth.com

PS from RR–The North York Public Library is *really* nice.

January 14th, 2011

New in Voyeurism

I’ve joined the literary-voyeurism army on Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading project, and I’ve got some wonderful company. I’m really thrilled that Seen Reading is back after its hiatus, and that I get to be a little part of it. So expect regular reports from me on my Scarborough beat. Also, I rather expect some fails. Even this week, in my first few attempts, I saw what can go wrong. Examples:

1) It is impossible to tell what someone is reading on Kobo unless you are practically on top of them.
2) Some people actually sew little coats for their books that stay on even while the book is open. I assume they are reading porn (why else hide it?) but have no proof.
3) If I am myself reading a very good book, I sometimes forget to look at other people.

More on the situation as it develops!