July 12th, 2010

Home Hightlights

Vacation is over and I am back in beloved, smoggy Toronto. I will be, in rose-coloured fashion, concetrating on the belovedness and not the smog, nor will I dwell on the lack of ocean breezes and fresh lobster. Instead, I will focus my attention on:

–big pile o’mail! Highlights include box of free samples of soaps and shampoos, several New Yorkers, the issue of Canadian Notes and Queries that contains my short story “Sweet” (no relation to Dani Couture’s fantastic poetry collection by the same name), baseball tickets, a thing from the government saying I don’t owe them any more taxes, a separate thing from the government saying nor will they be giving me any money, a cheque from the government, and even an actual personal letter!
–raspberry bush o’erflowing with raspberries
–worst fears not realized: apartment not on fire, work projects not disastrous, G20 not ongoing, only one plant dead.
–a couple delightful reading invitations, including one for my beloved Pivot at the Press Club on August 11 (8pm). I haven’t read from Road Trips anywhere yet, so I guess this will be a launch of sorts! Hope you can come!
–hilarious friends, who have spent their time without me going to mustache contests and discussing the merits of accidental death and dismemberment insurance.
–TTC–no, really, I’ve missed it!

July 9th, 2010

FYI (and FMI)

About me: I have a desk job during the day, and write short stories on my laptop at night. I am, ergo, always a stone’s throw from the interwebs, and take most of my breaks there. Thus, during an average day, I can keep reasonably on top of my Google-reader blog page, and most of the Facebook action among my friends, too (Twitter continues to thwart me, but I do try on that front, too). Even if I’m not commenting, or clicking on every link/video/possibly non-work-friendly image, rest assured, I’m usually paying attention. But–not the past two weeks. Every now and then I get an internet minute, but I am mainly using those for my own selfish purposes (ie, blog posts, photo uploads).

So, blogland, I don’t know what’s going on with you! I am sure you’ve been just fine without me, but I would like to mention anyway: if you’ve announced anything life-altering in a public forum, something like marriage, moving to Nunavut, new book out, bbq explosion, or something so incredible I can’t even imagine it–I don’t know this. To prevent awkwardness at parties, you can always drop me a little note and tell me…or let it be a big crazy surprise when I discover you’ve burned off your eyebrows. Totally your call.

July 6th, 2010

Halifax Highlights

I went to Halifax for just shy of 48 hours, so all impressions are non-representative and possibly erroneous, but I really did like it. For so short a stay, I managed to rack up a lot of delightful impressions. In no particular order:

—The Halifax Public Gardens are what they sound like–a big pretty park filled with elaborate flowerbeds and little rivlets, ponds, and lawns. So pretty, it smells really good, and I can’t think of a Toronto equivalent. Also, apparently where they filmed those sketches of the two old ladies walking and snarking on This Hour Has 22 Minutes back in the day.
–Fiddlers at the waterfront. I suppose is a Maritime stereotype, but it is awfully pleasant to listen to the music while you are strolling along eating your Cows ice cream (strictly a PEI product, but available in Halifax and equally enjoyable there).
–The waterfront! Giant blue wave/tongue sculpture, happy roaming crowds, scampering children, boats coming in and out, peanut-butter-company-sponsored person in bear costume (might not be a permanent fixture). Touristy? Hells yeah, but so delightful on a sunny Saturday afternoon after days of rain and chill.
–The nice crewpeople on the My Summer Bay deepsea fishing boat. I like boats, but was was scared of the ladder (it had a missing rung) and they were very patient with me.
–Little boy who staggered across the sand towards his beckoning mother at Point Pleasant Park, calling plaintively, “What kind of sandwich is it?”
—McNab Island is not strictly in Halifax but just visible from from the harbour. It is where the My Summer Bay took us, and it is also delightful (once you struggle up the ladder to the dock). About 3 hours of (admittedly lackadaisical) hiking barely scratched the surface of all the woods and beach there.
–Oatcakes!!! I had experienced something I thought was an oatcake in the past, and it tasted approximately like a limp whole-wheat dinner roll. A genuine Nova Scotia oatcake is like a chewy, not very sweet giant oatmeal cookie. Or maybe not always: I only had two from an ice-cream shack down by the water, and three more from Second Cup (shared; over the course of several days; ok, it was something of an oatcake binge). I have heard rumour of a crispy type of oatcake I would like to experience as well. And then I will try to find a recipe (any advice, blog readership?) and attempt to transport this wonderful phenomenon back to Ontario.
–The very sweet bartender at Pogue Fado who said there were no servers on and therefore no table service on Sunday night, then proceeded to serve all the tables all by herself. Thanks!
–Silky orange cat encountered in the parking lot of our inn, who wanted nothing more than his belly rubbed and wasn’t too proud to ask for it.

It was a really great time, and I’m not even counting the Peggy’s Cove excursion and the various nice meals and the conversations eavesdropped upon, and the unusually large seagulls. I hope to get back soon.

PS==I also was in Moncton for a night, and had an equally delightful time, but feel unqualified to comment upon the actual city. This is because all I did was attend a 12 hour house party, sleep, and then eat breakfast at Hynes Restaurant (which was very good and crowded at 11am on a Tuesday, which tells you something or other about Moncton). So, while I can say nothing about the city of Moncton as a whole, I can say that the people at that particular party were awesome, though they could’ve been a little gentler about my failings at croquet.

July 1st, 2010

Literary Pilgrimage

I think I might have written about visiting the house that inspired Anne of Green Gables in December, but that was all snow-covered and non-functional for the winter (though still splendid). In summertime, you can tour the house, which was actually originally just the house of some people LM Montgomery knew, that she transformed in her imagination to be the Cuthbert farm. But the descendents of that family donated the house to be an Anne sanctuary, and it has been redone as LM imagined it. And whoever did the decor did a pretty good job of making it coincide with how I pictured it during my approximately 20 readings of the original book. I thought Anne’s bedroom particularly accurate.

Anne's room at Green Gables.

But other spots were less so, and those I just admired but then dismissed. Seeing the house was really cool and interesting from a historical perspective, but as literature, the book remains separate for me. What happens between a reader and the page builds a world, and I found I really couldn’t add anything from some other world (even if it is the “real” one) into the one LM and I created as I read (and reread). I had a lovely time and would be curious to make other literary pilgrimages, but I think curiosity is the total of my feelings on these. Which is an interesting discovery, really.

I might feel differently if the book were nonfiction…if I read any nonfiction.

June 29th, 2010

Riviere-du-Loup and Charlottetown

Two days worth of driving brought one Toyota Corolla from Ontario to Riviere-du-Loup to Charlottetown. It was an extremely pretty drive. Two things to point out: the sunsets in Riviere-du-Loup are awesome:

Sunset view from the Days Inn, Riviere-du-Loup.

And the drivers in Quebec City are *so mean*. I have never been tailgated with such obvious intent to kill. Nuff said.

This post would be longer, but I am off to tour the Cows Ice Creamery. Ah, vacation!

June 25th, 2010

Laterz

I’m sitting here, waiting for my laundry to be done drying so I can trudge downstairs and retrieve it before someone removes it from the drier and tosses it about the dust-filled laundry room (ok, this has never happened, but it might). My fantasy right now is about a washer and a dryer just for me, in the privacy of my own home. If I had that, I could finally achieve laundry nirvana, which is (of course) to have every single article of clothing I own clean at the same time. And in order to do that, one has to work out a way to do laundry naked. This is my dream.

Clearly, I need a vacation. So–I’ll take one. And probably blog about it, but maybe not as frequently as my usual blogging rate, due to the freedom of the open road and the lack of wireless connections on said road.

If you get bored in my absense, or even if you are under the impression you are sufficiently entertained, you should really go check out The Scream in High Park litfest over the next couple weeks. It is a sizeable downside of this whole vacation project that I won’t get to be there. So you should go on my behalf, ok?

And if you are missing me/my prose terribly, you can check out my essay, No More Mr. Bad Guy in the new issue of Maisonneuve.

Whatever your plans are for late June and early July, I hope you see some fireworks on the first, eat something charred over a flame, and generally a stellar summery time.

June 23rd, 2010

Book clubbery

I know book clubs have a bad rap. The reason usual touted–that the clubsters like a certain sort of book and read in a certain way–doesn’t make tonnes of sense to me. Surely every reader has his or her quirks, and every banding together of readers is quirky in its own way. I have heard of men-only, women-only, and parents-only bookclub, bookclubs where only books about food or travel or by authors in translation or Canadians are read, bookclubs organized around preparation for a trip or understanding a polical movement, and bookclubs arranged so that old friends can keep in touch.

Of course, a cynical parry would be that such themes could lead to cutsyness, which would of course lead to making it more about the club than the book. Which is a danger with anything, I suppose, from a lit class to a bookstore section. But I like to think that most clubsters want–and maybe I’m biased because it’s what I want–good literary conversation.

I get lots of opportunities to talk books; I know tonnes of well-read people and almost everyone I ask, “So what are you reading?” has an interesting answer. The problem with those interesting answers is that often, they can’t go farther, because I haven’t read that book or sometimes even heard about it. My friend will talk eagerly (and usually, knowing my friends, articulately) about what s/he is reading, and all I’ll be able to respond with is, “I think I read a review of that” or “Another friend of mine liked that one, too.” I get lots of good recommendations this way, but it’s hardly a discussion.

What I want in a bookclub is a group of smart, articulate friends who have all read the *same* book, so we can engage both with the text and with each other, and hopefully come out of it knowing something more than just our own opinions. I also like the push to read outside of my usual choices–I do get lots of good recommendations, but unless there’s a pressing group engagement, I’ll often let the weirder (to me) stuff fall by the wayside.

I think that push to read widely, read quickly, or read at all, can be one big downside of a bookclub if that’s the major reason people join. I had a sad experience in a bookclub of what appeared to be non-readers. They were smart, funny, well-spoken, well-employed people who saw reading books as a sign of intellectual heavyweight status and wanted to achieve it. However, many of them didn’t actually enjoy reading, and were acutely embarrassed by this, so meetings turned into shame-filled stories about crazy work projects and moves across town. The last two books I read for the club, I was the only one to do so (I still like those people, but I am still a *teensy* bit annoyed that they shot down my choise as “too light” and then forced me to read Reading Lolita in Tehran when, as it turned out, no one else did. I don’t really regret it–Nafisi’s discussions of literature are lovely and insightful–but still…)

Anyway, my point (I do have one!) is that I am in a new book club and it is lovely and filled with nice people who read books for fun, even when there is no club around to make them, and brought lots of good food to our first meeting, last Saturday. The founder of the club is my friend Scott who was in my most successful bookclub in the past, which ended due to depression (a number of unfortunate book picks in a row made us too dispirited to continue–although I still recommend Disgrace by JM Coetzee [just brace yourself]).

This new club is the “250 pages or less” bookclub, so it’s a bit less pressure and also poses an interesting challenge to find books to meet the limit. So I get exposed to some new stuff, in addition to the interesting conversation, friendly people and steamed dumplings. Heartily recommend 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xialu Guo, if you are looking for something short and fascinating.

Anyway, bookclubs–not for everyone, but lots of fun if that is what you are into, and I am, so yay! Off to read John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

Saving This Ain’t

If you live in Toronto and like books, you’ve probably been to This Ain’t the Rosedale Library for a launch or a reading, because they had something in stock no one else had, or just to shop. They used to be on Church Street, in a sizeable space with a room on the second floor for events. Then rent got steep and they moved to a cheaper spot in Kennsington, where they are now. Of course, Kennsington is getting posher by the day, and rents are going up and the past few years (or so) have been tough on purveyors of the written word. So Charlie and Jesse Huisken, the father-son team who run cash register, stock the shelves, organize the events and chat with the customers, fell behind in their rent. And the landlord changed the locks.

That’s where it was announced that I’d won the Metcalf-Rooke Award, and I read there once before too (December 2008). I don’t know the Huiskens personally, but that makes their kindness all the more impressive–they are endlessly supportive of writers and the lit community because they love it. They are forever opening the store to events (remember the poetry vending machine? the Vagabond Trust readings?), donating raffle prizes, and coming out in support of readings in other venues.

A good bookstore is more than just well-stocked shelves–it is a literary community. As a citizen of that community, I’ve finally worked out the baffling mysteries of PayPal to send This Ain’t the Rosedale Library some cash. If you love the store, and can afford to give, please do so.

RR

Unrelated PS–You probably haven’t noticed the difference (I don’t think there’s much difference to notice) but this post is coming at you in WordPress 3.0 and the site is all updated now, safer from hacks and viruses and other scary things I don’t understand. Thanks, Stuart!

June 21st, 2010

Two nice things

Let’s start with the good stuff:

1) The New Quarterly’s poll to choose a cover image for their “On the Road” issue is now up. The pics are all splendid, so there is no need for me to stump for my favourite, though I very much have one.

2) Ian le Tourneau, whose work I have to admit I’m not familiar with, has started a neat new thing called The Second Book Project. The first one, linked here, is with the always fascinating Zachariah Wells and there is the promise of more to come. As an author knee-deep in the sophmore slog, I am very interested in following these interviews and trying to learn a little something for myself. FYI, the series is poets only, but I find that when it comes to process-and-publication topics like this, I there is still plenty to learn across the forms.

June 19th, 2010

Pretty Spam

Today I got a note that said:

“which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass for on the turbid current of his passion which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass”

That’s it–no advert for a designer watch or attachment of doomful virus. I mean, I don’t love the use of “turbid”, but it’s better than most!