December 5th, 2010

Reverb Day 4

I’m still trying to catch up on Reverb. Here’s prompt 4–

Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (Author: Jeffrey Davis)

Uh, to be honest, this one’s a little crunchy for me. I mean, I always try hard to look for things to be happy about (hence the name of this blog) but that’s not specific to this year…

Oh, I know–I joined a women’s writing salon and a book club. Both these groups exposed me to wonder by exposing me to a wide range of smart, funny, engaged people who are not necessarily my close personal friends who care about the same things I do, without necessarily agreeing with me about how best to care. Sometimes, writing and reading alone in a garret, it is easy to believe that one is the last insightful being on the planet–or at least one and one’s personal friends are. It is wonderful to be reminded again and again that this isn’t so.

Reverb day 3

More from Reverb (yep, I’m behind now):

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
(Author: Ali Edwards)

Oh, I do *not* like superlatives. I remember being quite annoyed in grade 9 when I was assigned to write a paragraph about the “happiest day of my life” in English class. Who knows the answer to that–hopefully one has enough happy days and alive moments that it would be too complicated to classify them as “first best” “most alive” etc. For the record, for that assignment, I picked a lovely day when I was about 10 or so, and my great-aunt babysat my bro and I in Queens while my folks attended a conference in Manhattan. We went shopping at a small plaza, and ate some pizza. It was very sunny, and I really liked my great aunt–I stand my that choice.

And now, a moment when I felt *quite* alive in 2010:

I went to Montreal for my birthday (Montreal and my birthday being two of my favourite things), and this was the evening before it. I was walking up Union with my travelling companion, around 9 or so at night. We’d been out for a very nice dinner with cool Francophones (I lived in Montreal long enough to feel dramatically inferior to Francophones–whenever one is nice to me, I’m thrilled).

After dinner, I tried to figure out how to get some Bilboquet ice-cream, which is a Montreal-only delight. I had worked in an ice-cream place when I lived there, which has since gone under, and I knew of only one other place who sold it at that time, very far north. Our French friends new of more, but they were all way west, too far to walk at that hour. Though it was very tempting. Also, satisfying to learn that the Bilboquet brand was expanding.

So we were just walking up Union, on this dark warm pretty evening in Montreal, and I was feeling so happy to be back in the city and that it was almost summer and to be with Mark and that I was about to turn 2x2x2x2x2, and then on Sherbrooke, we passed a cafe with a little Bilboquet sign in the window.

It was like the universe saying, “I love you”–because I was already so happy and didn’t need the ice-cream, but what the hell, why not throw all the good stuff we can? I got raspberry and it was divine, and Mark got some chocolatey thing, and we went up to Prince Arthur and there were so many other happy people, and I felt I could have walked a hundred thousand miles.

December 2nd, 2010

Reverb 10 Day 2

Still doing the Reverb thing–thanks to those who shared their own words in the comments of my last post.

Here’s today’s prompt:

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

Hey, I didn’t even know this was a writing project–I feel so special! Uh, I suppose the thing I do is self-delude. I tell myself that *everything* I do contributes to my writing in some way. I need to go to parties and hang out with my friends, or I’ll be too sad to write. I need to play Facebook scramble and eat a lot of snacks as healthy breaks from writing. I need to get totally obsessed with page-formatting or editors will think I’m a slob.

Cough.

Probably not all those things are true, but I sure do enjoy them. In truth, I probably can’t entirely cut these things out, but I can cut down on the self-lies…a little. I do think it has to be ok with me that I’m not a terribly focussed person and maybe never will be; it has to be ok that I take breaks and slack off and make random phone calls instead of working sometimes. Because honestly, the biggest enemy of productivity seems to be guilt. The worse you feel about writing vs. not writing, the less you’ll actually accomplish (at least, in my opinion/experience).

What are your big non-contributors?

December 1st, 2010

Reverb 10

So there’s been a paucity of blog inspiration in my life of late–terrible, I know. So I thought Reverb 10, as suggested by the wonderous Book Madam, would be a good jumpstart for me. Actually, this is just a test run, becauseI feel like this is one of those things I get totally obsessed with or else ignore completely. We’ll see which one it turns out to be…when I either finish the month of posts or I don’t.

What Reverb is is taking the month of December to reflect on the past year and the one ahead, one prompt a day, to be answered in public, blog/tweet/photo format.

Here’s today’s prompt:

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

In 2010, from January 1 to now, I’ve been living in one place, working at one job, writing one book, and in love with one person. Unlike a few years of my life where nothing seemed to change and the word “stagnate” came to mind (2004, I’m looking at you), this year felt really strong and productive, as if I were laying foundations for all kinds of future good things. My word for 2010 is solid.

In 2011, I’ll probably move, and in doing so, move to a different phase of my life (I’ve lived at the Rose-coloured Ranch since May 2003). Also next year, *The Big Dream* will almost certainly be published, and people I didn’t handpick will be able to read it!! Even scarier, I’ll start work on a new book. I’d like to make my 2011 word adventure–to keep me from thinking of other, more cowardly words to cover all this new stuff!

What are your words?

November 30th, 2010

Writerly Snark

A few things that, while essentially un-rose-coloured in tone, are too amusing not to pass on:

1) Alex Boyd and Jacob Arthur Mooney wrote a Facebook Constitution for Writers, which is pretty funny, and full of good suggestions, though by far the best one (and the summation of the whole constitution is) “Facebook offers you innumerable opportunities to be a passive-aggressive wimp. Don’t overdo it.”

2) Scott sent me this video about crazy people who want to write novels just because they “can write and speak your native language.” Grim, but funny!

Or maybe you’d just like to watch Arcade Fire’s Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains) video? Ok, then.

November 28th, 2010

Teenage boy behind me on the bus, on cellphone

Hello.

(long silence)

Because it’s Sunday, retard.

(silence)

You thought it was Saturday? You’re kidding right? That’s so funny.

(mean cackling, followed by long silence)

So where did you go to the bathroom, then?
(silence)

The mall is closed but Zellers is open? That’s weird.

(silence)

The mall is closed because it’s Sunday night, remember?? Just wanted to mention to you, tomorrow is Monday, which will be followed by Tuesday…just tryin’ to help you out.

(silence)

You gotta stop eating paint chips, man.

(silence)

Wait, are you in the bathroom right now?

(silence)

That’s weird…(discussion of a hiphop concert that is boring and goes nowhere) Listen, why don’t you call me back when you get outta there? I just feel weird talkin’ to ya while you’re…yeah, ok, goodbye.

(sound of phone snapping shut, followed by more cackling)

November 25th, 2010

Reviews again

Before Once came out, I was pretty scared of reviews. To get over the fear, I gave myself several excellent peptalks about how it any serious attention to my work would be an honour, and I didn’t need everyone–or anyone–to like it, that I could learn from criticism and improve, etc., etc. I still pretty skittery, especially since reviews could jump at me from nowhere, in a journal or on a website I was reading, with no prior warning. It’s bad enough when someone blindsides me with a criticism of dayjob work, or my appearance, or the way I’ve arrayed my groceries on the conveyor belt (happens all the time; apparently, I can’t get that one right)–I try to be mature, especially if I sense they’ve got it correct. But the writing’s so important to me, I feel like I want to be alone in a quiet safe place when a stranger says something not 100% enthusiastic. Hence the utility of the self-Google–you decide when you’re ready, you lock the door, and then if you read something truly harsh (like the word “boring” several times), you can pace around your locked apartment in small circles until the urge to Facebook the reviewer with a lengthy rebuttal goes away. You take a lot of deep breaths, and decide you can’t please everyone. You eventually permit yourself to go outside.

I’m, er, a little sensitive, which is a pointless way to be when you are trying to publish work so that other people can read it–other people’s reactions to my work, and the fact that they differ from mine, is the whole point of publishing. Which is why I tried so hard to toughen up, and now can’t even remember the name of that reviewer who used the word “boring” so many times. Really!

But I’ve let my toughness muscles go a bit slack over the past year or so, after the reviews pretty much died down. So I was really startled when this week I ran into two reviews of my book, utterly unexpected. I was quite alarmed before reading–I hadn’t given myself a peptalk in ages!

Thank goodness the reviews were positive, insightful, and generous–no need for bracing! If you’d like to hear more about it, you can try the Canadian Literature website or the print edition of the current issue of The Fiddlehead.

And if you have advice on how to cope with reviews you disagree with, other than weeping or sending embarrassing rebuttals, let me know.

And a few notes:

1) I believe there are occasions when it is useful and wise for an author to respond to a review, and not at all cringe-worthy. I just can’t think of any right now.
2) Reading reviews by strangers is altogether different from receiving workshop or editorial feedback, or comments from readers–not sure why. Maybe it’s because I have the opportunity to engage and ask questions, or maybe it’s because, in the first two cases anyway, the criticism is offered for my own good, to try to help me improve the work…
3) I was totally going to do something clever with the title of this post–something rhyming or alliterative, or maybe both–but I couldn’t think of anything that made sense….

November 22nd, 2010

Rose-coloured reviews *He’s Just Not That into You* (book and film)

The premise behind the self-help book and romantic comedy film, He’s Just Not That Into You is that women are socialized to look frenetically for any shred of male affection, and to believe in it where none exists, and this is a formula for vulnerability, sadness, and occasional humiliation. It’s funnier than it sounds.

The first time I saw the movie, I thought it an above-average romantic comedy. It’s in the same vein (but not as charming/more realistic) as Love Actually, with a half-dozen loosely connected couples struggling to find happiness. Chronic romantic loser Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) is willing to do anything for love, but her desperate attempts at flirting always go awry. The only thing man-related thing she’s really good at is analyzing them with her office mates, Janine and Beth, both of whom have their own problems. Janine’s problems are with her home renovations and her husband, Ben; Beth’s are with her engaged sister and her unwilling-to-marry boyfriend. Then Ben strikes up a fliration with a girl named Anna, who was already involved in a weird sexless romance with real-estate agent Conor. Anna’s friend Mary works at a gay newspaper and the film’s only major point about her is that the homosexual guys in Anna’s office offer the same kind of very p0sitive but useless romantic advice that Gigi, Janine, and Beth offer each other.

It’s all very confusing, but you don’t have to know who is related to whom to understand that all the women are lying to themselves and each other when they pursue men: “He’s totally into you” “I know he’s going to call” “You just have to give him a little encouragement” “You just have to be patient” “You should give him a little space” etc., etc. Women–so sweet, so giving, so kind–so eager to believe in love that they’ll believe almost anything. My gender does not come off very well in this film, but most of the performances are surprisingly nuanced.

Gigi suffers a series of standups and humiliations, and during one she meets Alex, a male bartender with no interest in sugarcoating the truth–he tells her that if a guy likes her, he’ll show it; everything else is just delusion. This starts Gigi on the road to some dignity, but it’s a tough road, because she eventually develops the theory that it’s *Alex* that’s into her. It’s complicated, but she’s sweet, he’s sweet, they hook it up by the final frames. Hope I’m not spoiling too much for you–it is a romantic comedy after all.

The central Gigi-Alex relationships hews to that rom-com formula, but the others are more various, and a bit truer to the core of the very depressing book–which is that women put up with too much and ask for too little in the quest for love. I read the book after enjoying the film, hoping it’d be funny in the same vein, and it is…but it made me really sad too. The titular comment is followed by “if” statements–if he doesn’t call, doesn’t compromise, doesn’t care… The first few chapters were empathizable and at the same time wince-worthy: who hasn’t assumed she wrote her email address down wrong, or checked the phone for a dial tone? (for a great, cringey depiction of such behaviour, try Amy Jones’s new story, Atikokan Is for Lovers. But the book points out all kinds of other stuff women excuse in men: from calling her fat to flirting with others, it gets pretty painful in the text version JKMTiY, and I was sort of a wreck when I finished it. My poor sisters!

Ironically, I felt the movie did a better job than the book of showing why ladies feel the need to put up with anything to land a man. The social pressures that women feel to be in a relationship before they can have the home they want, or be accepted by their families, or just to get that big lavish wedding are experienced by various main and secondary characters, in ways that you sympathize with–or at least, I did. I am neither smart nor patient enough to get into all the various story tendrils, but to just cover one more, I thought Jennifer Connelly’s portrayl of Janine–the only married woman in the bunch–was the most touching in the film. Janine is basically a tight-assed home-renovation nut, who eggs poor Gigi to get herself married off though Janine is not particularly enjoying marriage herself–and her husband certainly isn’t. When Ben admits to Janine–in a big box home supply store–“I slept with someone,” Janine clenches with rage. However, she only gets to wield her anger for about 30 seconds, because when Ben announces that he’ll move out, the woman is back in the position of supplicant, pleading, “Don’t you want to…work it out?” Because he cares less than she does, Ben’s admission of guilt poses less threat to him than to her.

The best moment in the movie–or any rom-com I’ve seen in a while, come to that–is when Janine discovers another layer to Ben’s deception and finally loses it. She’s at home alone, and smashes a mirror in her perfect bedroom. Then she seems to go limp for a moment, walks out of the room, then returns with a broom and dustpan, to clean up the mess while she continues to weep.

The movie is of course limited by it’s genre–even if the rhetoric around finding love is broken, romantic love is still the one and only answer. No one seems to be at all interested in their jobs, let alone to have any interests outside of work, and though friends and family are supportive, what they are supportive of is the quest for love. When Gigi decides not to concentrate on hooking up on Saturday night, she spends it alone watching brat-pack movies. In rom-com world, no one but single men want anything to do with a single woman on Saturday night–and there aren’t even any decent movies at the rental place.

I would definitely say watch the movie if you like this genre–it’s lots of fun (and Ben Affleck has a boat!) I’m not sure I recommend the book unless you are a woman prone to getting jerked around by men and don’t know why. Even then, I’m not sure it would help–I’m not sure many women are as deluded as the ones depicted therein. But I worry I’m wrong, and I was basically reduced to a puddle of woe by the book, albeit with a sad little feminist fist in the air. But then I got to call my beloved to relate said woe, so I’m not in ideal position to judge.

November 21st, 2010

“You’re an asshole, Mittens.”

I think that is one of the most hilarious sentences ever spoken. It was so spoken by my father, when I was about 8 or 9. He had just rescued our cat, Mittens, from my clutches, removed the bonnet I had put on her, and sternly instructed me not to dress the cat in doll clothes any more. I remained blithe in my assurance that Mittens liked to wear clothes, and when I left the room, she hesitated only a moment before following me. “You’re an asshole, Mittens,” is what my father called after her–under his breath, obviously, due to young and tender ears. He just recounted the uncensored version for me yesterday–ha!

Note: I no longer put hats on cats, but sometimes I really want to.

November 18th, 2010

Bookish music

I think I’ve done a post like this in the past, but I don’t remember so it’s like it never happened–let’s start over! While Mark takes on the rock’n’roll novel, I’d like to  look at the literary song!

I’ve actually been meaning to do this for a while now, but literary songs are hard to spot–you really have to sit down and listen. The problem is–as usual–metaphors. People use the acts of reading and writing, and the physical objects of books, as metaphors for all kinds of “feelings” and “relationships”! You think you’ve got some lovely literary tune, and it turns out to be about love or something. Neither Elvis Costello’s Every Day I Write the Book nor the Magnetic Fields’ The Book of Love is about an actual book (though that Merit fellow is bloody clever in making you think so). Even less literary are songs about writing that isn’t a real book even in it’s literal form, like diaries, or even not a book at all, like letters.

In the above examples, even what writing there is is pure metaphor–I don’t get the feeling an actual pen was ever involved. You know what song always makes think of someone at a desk? Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen. Though a song (formerly a poem, I think) it has the exact pace and tone–even the rhythm–of the best things I get in the post (it’s good when Jennifer Warnes sings it, too).

My favourite litsy songs are actually literature–lyrics that are smart or funny or thoughtful or, even better, all three. Still, I wouldn’t want to listen to Loreena McKennit’s “Lady of Shalott” every day. More accessible, and yet stranger, are REM’s songs about stories and poems–they don’t sing them, they reimagine them, and sing their imaginings. Back to Mr. Cohen, REM explores his song/poem Suzanne, both the words and the tune, in their trippy wonderful song “Hope” (what? why can’t I find a link for that? also, I don’t know where the alligators come from). I also adore their investigation (no other word for it) of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery in the song “Falls to Climb,” which gets weirder and more interesting the more you listen to it. Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the REM version–all that’s on the web, it seems, are terrible covers I can’t be responsible for bringing into your life. But you should hear that one if you can. (And whoever the person was who explained that song to me–I think it was a blog reader–should remind me of his or her identity, since I remain grateful.)

Sometimes I think a song is about writing or reading, but I’m not sure. I guess that’s the nature of pop music. Like, these lyrics:

Now I’m hunched over a typewriter
I guess you’d call that paintin’ in a cave
And there’s a word I can’t remember
And a feeling I cannot escape
And now my ashtray’s overflowin’
I’m still starin’ at a clean white page
Oh and morning’s at my window
She is sending me to bed again

Now that’s as apt a description of the writing life as I’ve seen, but it’s from Bright Eyes’ Another Travelling Song, which is pretty much adamant in its title that it is not a writing song. The rest is about driving and cell phones and maybe child abuse? I’m not sure…it’s a really good song though.

And then there’s stuff where I *feel* like I relate, but I actually don’t have a clue. Like “Language City” by Wolf Parade sounds promising, but what is it actually about? “Language city is a bad old place / we all know / our eyeballs float in space / we all know / we were tired / we can’t sleep / it’s crowded here / others leave / Language City don’t mean a thing / to me.” Yep, not a clue–though the refrain, “All this work just to tear it down” does sound familiar.

This is my favour sort of puzzle–books, music, pointless theorizing–so if you’ve got some litsy music to recommend, please share!