January 2nd, 2010
So pure
Hey, the Puritan’s back! For those who didn’t know it well enough to know it had gone away, *The Puritan* that paused in publishing 16 months ago was an originally Ottawa-based print journal, and as of today is a Toronto-based online journal. A new online space for awesome stories, poetry, and interviews–hooray!
Thanks to the staff there for putting this (back) together, as well as publishing my little story, If This.
RR
Two thousand and what?
I was going to recap this past week of vacation at some point, but then I realized that I should also do a 2009-in-review post, and then people started going on about the end of the *decade* and now I am just utterly overwhelmed.
I’ve been reading other people’s lovely 2000s retrospectives instead, happy that some people can do this right. A lot of them are fairly personal, even if they are on blogs focussed on reading or writing or whatever (my interests are pretty narrow in scope). Which only makes sense–ten years is a huge meaningful block in anyone’s life, and it’s hard not to get emotional thinking of what’s been wrought in that time, even if a lot of good books got read in there, too.
This was driven home to me last night when the party discussion turned to where we spent Y2K New Year’s. I spent mine at the City of Hamilton’s outdoor celebration, because the band featured wasHoneymoon Suite, which was a (semi-ironic) favourite band of mine and my friends. I was visiting my parents outside of Hamilton on break from my third year of university.
If present Rebecca could somehow go meet me in the past, my younger self would probably only say, “How did you get your hair like that?”
I had no idea then how my life would go, and no idea how I *wanted* it to go, so I really don’t think I would have known how to ask a pertinent question. But I would have been really impressed with future self for getting my hair (mainly) under control.
And looking back, I still can’t form a meaningful narrative looking at the decade as a whole. Having this blog, and doing some interviews and profiles when *Once* came out last year, really put this in perspective for me. I can make certain events and relationships seem to cohere into a logical arc by extracting them from the long silly series of events that is my life and putting them only in the context of each other.
December 30th, 2009
En vacances
I thought that I might not have the time or internet connection to blog during vacation, but here I am with both of those. What I lack is anything to blog in regard to. It is funny to get through a day without writing or editing or talking to people about writing, or even eavesdropping on people on the bus (somehow, I consider that part of my work). As it turns out, this vacation thing is very pleasant. There is currently a blizzard going on where I am (Charlottetown, if you are curious), which limits activities to reading, eating, talking, and playing cards. Also, napping, which is not really an activity but does fill gaps in the day quite nicely.
Lulled on sleep and sugar, I am unable to come up with much that’s interesting to say. I have learned that PEIslanders are very friendly and call Gin Rummy “Queens” but it’s still fun, that I probably have some kind of chronic sinus issue that I need a professional to look into and if possible destroy, that I like lobster as much as I suspected I would, and that the innovators issue of the New Yorker is pretty good but they still shouldn’t have done away with the winter fiction issue.
I swear to you, that’s all I’ve got. I…uh…I’m gonna go work on a story now. And then maybe commute to nowhere, just feel a bit more like myself. Either that or take a nice midmorning nap.
RR
December 27th, 2009
Still festive, mainly
I had an awesome Christmas, and I hope anyone else celebrating did likewise. I was given a new watch to replace the one that broke a month ago, so everyone I normally hang out with will now stop being plagued by me reaching for their wrists every (approximately) five minutes. I also got a zillion awesome books, peanut-butter bonbons, pickled carrots, a scratch-n-win Bingo that won me $3 (which I immediately blew on a second card, which won me nothing), slippers, a cloche hat (just like Virginia Woolf!), a tiny table, and dozens of hugs.
I also got another sinus infection!! This was not a gift but rather, I suppose, just payback for so much awesomeness. I still resent that I spent most of *Sherlock Holmes* yesterday a) sleeping or b) trying not to vomit (I didn’t–win!), and thus have no idea what happened. But I still think it was a very good movie anyway. And the more I consider it, the more I actually think that this incident was the result of my over-the-counter sinus medication, because as soon as I stopped taking it the desire to puke and lose consciousness went away. So now I’m medication-free and largely functional, and if I can just get on a plane and travel across the country, I am pretty much guaranteed more hugs, plus naniamo bars. So that is today’s goal.
So I gotta go pack, instead of writing a year’s end list of best somethings or worst somethings, but I was likely not going to get around to doing that anyway. Thank goodness Maisonneuve did one of books and let me contribute.
I hope you guys have a great fake-boxing day tomorrow, and who knows–if I have a little downtime in my travels, I may yet get you a list of best/worst somethings, or possibly a picture of me in a cloche hat.
RR
December 23rd, 2009
Festive farewell
I just wanted to send a quick Merry Everything to y’all out there in blog land. I’m mainly dependent on the kindness of others for internet this holiday season (I am currently stealing wireless from somewhere to write this post) so likely there won’t be much action on Rose-coloured for the next week or so, although I can never really keep away from the interwebs entirely. But certainly, I wanted to wish all who care to celebrate a merry Christmas tomorrow, and to those who don’t, a very nice day!
I don’t know if any of you would have run into this, but my short story, “Christmas with My Mother” just got released as an audio download from Rattling Books Earlit Shorts 4. It was very weird to hear my work in another’s voice–brilliant, because Janet Russell gives the story a gentle and nuanced interpretation–but very strange since the only place I’d heard those words before was inside my own head. Add to that the fact that I wrote the story over a year ago and hadn’t even looked at in six months and the whole thing was something of a shock. I actually squirmed at the awkward moments in the story as I listened and once laughed aloud at a funny part (immodest? sure, but I also think that writers who don’t find their own funny parts funny should stop writing them.
That story is also included in this year’s Best Canadian Short Stories, which also came in the mail yesterday–merry Christmas to me! So there’s two ways to get that story, should you care to. I would like to point out that, despite the title seeming to perfectly coincide with the season, this is very much not a Christmas story, and might not be ideal reading for those of you cuddling down to read in the glow of treelights (or it might be exactly appropriate–depends on how you like your glow). But just FYI.
Other than that, there is very little literary going on around here, but lots that is good–family, old friends, a cake made almost entirely out of pudding, that ornament of a stocking I made in grade 2, 90s nostalgia music, and many hugs. That’s how I like my glow–I hope yours is however you want it to be.
Merrily,
RR
December 22nd, 2009
Rose-coloured and Mark review Milk Coffee Pocky
December 21st, 2009
Public Service Announcements
In case, you know, you need to know:
…how to cope with UPS. When you call UPS, there is no option in any menu to speak to an agent, but if you decline to press any buttons, even for English or French or to enter your tracking number (interesting: if you don’t choose a language, you get English) they will eventually tell you that you can’t speak to anyone unless you have tracking number, so call back when you’ve got one. Then a long pause that sounds like it might be permanent, then the weary voice of the autoprompt, asking “So do you still want to speak to an agent?” Say “yes” and the voice recognition software will direct you to an actual competent and (somewhat) sympathetic human. Man, that was tricky–but worth it.*
…what to give for a holiday gift. There’s great recommendations (and little bios of their sources so you can check for cred [they all have cred]> at The Advent Book Blog. I recommended a book last week, and now that the person I was giving that gift to has received it, I can link to my recommendation.
…how do something nice. Could you be persuaded to give blood? I know many people can’t because of low iron or certain prescriptions in their systems or other health problems, but if you can I think Canadian Blood Services could really use it this holiday season. I base this guess on the fact that last week, the gentleman donating in the chair next to mine experienced the briefest of dizzy spells, and *five* nurses were all over him like a bad suit–cold compresses, elevated legs, fans, cookies, ecetera! They were really really nice, but you just got the feeling they were a little underworked. A few more donators would keep the nurse/donator ratio a bit more even. I know nobody likes needles, and I personally loathe the whole process, but I feel SO GOOD afterwards, knowing I did something for someone (3 someones!), plus awesome karma for the day. I mean, just a few short hours after making this donation, I found a tambourine on the sidewalk!!!! Karmically amazing.
…describe people that are just too hyper. When someone described a potential project (going to see Sherlock Holmes on Boxing Day) as likely to be pandemonium, I said approximately, “Don’t worry, we’ll deal with the pandemaniacs.”** He responded, “That’s not a word,” but I think it is now, and it’s a pretty good one. I give it to you.
Hope that helps!
RR
* I just received the package, so I guess this is a win. But it took a week, four delivery attempts, one formal complaint, plus me saying morosely after I’d registered the complaint, “Can you write on it that I’m very sad?” (no, they can’t), so I am not feeling very victor-like.
** What I actually said was dumber than the above, but the neologism was the same, and this is my blog and I’m allowed to edit the past if I choose…right?
December 18th, 2009
Rose-coloured Reviews *The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy* by Douglas Adams
I am rereading my old Hitchhikers’ omnibus partly in response to Rosalynn and Catherine’s dialogue on rereading. I used to reread like crazy–there are books on this earth that I have read close to 20 times–but as I age, more and more I feel the cold hand of mortality on my shoulder as I read, and I fear I won’t get to read all the books I want even once in my life, and this stops me from doing much rereading.
Thus, a lot of books are frozen in my mind the way I read them and thought about them when I was a whippersnapper–I say something’s “brilliant” but don’t take into account that my 15-year-old mind may have been easier to impress than it is now.
I loved the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series with all my tiny geeky heart when I was a teenager. So when I found out that, after Adams’s death, some totally other person was writing a sixth book in the series, I was incensed. I could say, “Those books are perfect, Adams was unique, and this is a terrible idea.” But I hadn’t read those books in at least a decade, so what did I know?
So the other reason for rereading is to have some context by the time Eoin Colfer‘s book, titled *And Another Thing*, comes out in paperback. I want to read it, certainly, and give it a fair shake–not wrapped up in nostalgia.
I first came upon these books because I picked up the fourth title in the series (it was originally a trilogy that overspilled its limits). I read it because it was called So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and in those days I picked up any book with a funny title and read almost everything I picked up. (Other hits from that period include Elvis Jesus Coca Cola, Lady Slings the Booze, and The Paper Grail).
Of all those “funny title” reads, I loved *Fish* the most, and so went back to the beginning and read the whole series, and then the scripts for the radio show on which it was based (those made little sense to me; too much British humour, perhaps?), all the other books Adams wrote. And I watched the old film based on the book/show (the new one makes a lot more sense, by the way) and tried to get the old BBC tv show based on same, though I think by that point even my adolescent geek enthusiasm tapped out.
So it was in at least one sense very very nice to go back once more and read the old omnibus introduction, which endeavours to set the record “firmly crooked” in explaining the books’ path to creation. I probably could have read it more objectively if parts of the intro hadn’t been my grade 11 drama monologue, which I had (and apparently still have) memorized.
Then into the story–you know that story. Arthur Dent being sleepy and baffled, Ford Prefect being suave and fatalistic, saving Arthur while the rest of the earth is destroyed by a race called Vogons from a distant plant because they are creating a hyperspace expressway.
And their adventures therewith: cruising the galaxy, they run into Ford’s semi-cousin, Zaphod Beeblebrox, erstwhile president of the galaxy, and the pretty lil thing he picked up on earth, Tricia McMillan (whose name he has condensed, naturally, to Trillian). And their impossibly weird spaceship, the Heart of Gold, and Marvin the Paranoid Android, their robot. And the contented doors, and…oh, it’s all so funny and silly and great.
I love all these characters so much that the nostalgia followed me into the present reading–it took me a while to start reading like my 31-year-old self. The first clue that I could be critical was when I noticed that Ford Prefect’s name was explained twice (he’s an alien seeking to blend in on earth, and chose a name that seemed to him common among dominant lifeform, but turned out to be the name of a British subcompact car). A little editorial drop that has survived 20 years of re-issues…or maybe Adams worried readers wouldn’t catch the joke.
Whatevs. Adams is *such* an imaginative thinker that it’s totally natural, no matter what your age, to fall under his spell. The flights of fancy are thrilling, like a ship that runs on an Infinite Improbability drive: in can do anything, provided it is told exactly how improbable that thing is. The book, *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* exists in this fictional world to calm and instruct the characters, but it is also a pretty top-heavy expositional device. Every time Adams wants to insert some new crazy planet/lifeform/foodstuff he just makes up, he has one of the characters read about it in the guide and the narrative reproduces the whole page of info. It’s really funny, so one is often distracted from the fact that that’s bit sloppy storytelling, doncha think?
Although this is a book by, for, and about adults, there is a ring of adolescent idyllicness and naivete here that I don’t think I am importing. Everyone is always moments away from death, but no one (besides a sperm whale) dies onstage. Of course, all of earth and its inhabitants are destroyed, but this is treated as a rather larky bad moment rather than a soul-destroying tragedy for the two remaining Earthlings.
People occasionally make fun of me for taking *So Long…* as my favourite Hitchhikers’ book. They dismiss it as the “romantic one”, but the fact is it is the only book in the series in which man-woman relationships make even a touch of sense (this is not a critique, but just a note: everyone in this version of the galaxy appears to be heterosexual). In this first book (the one that I am ostensibly reviewing here, in case you forgot), Trillian is the woman who travels around with Zaphod and “tells him what she thinks of him.” The relationship is left at that, but she did leave her home planet to be with him. I wonder if they’re snogging?
But I am being pennyante–this isn’t photorealist stuff, it’s semi-satire. Not satire of science-fiction but using the form of sci-fi to satirize real-life (I think). It’s sharp and believeable, within it’s own parameters, with a few (not all) well-drawn characters. The only other complaint I could possibly level against the book is that because this first book was based on several in a series of radio plays, it doesn’t quite have the structure of a self-contained book. The five books perhaps somewhat have a single structure, but not quite that either–they basically all blur into one hilarious episodic adventure.
I’ve already started reading the second book in the series, *The Restaurant at the End of the Universe* (always with the good titles, Adams–my favourite books of his are actually the Dirk Gently books: *Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency* and *The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul* [possible the best title in the history of books]). I’m finding as I try to write this review, I’m finding that bits of *Restaurant* are getting mixed up with the first book in my mind and I’ve got to be careful to reference the right book.
For example, I wanted to tell you that possible my favourite conversation-quashing line was in this book, but it’s actually in *Restaurant*–I’ll share it anway:
“Don’t try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
Nuff said.
RR
December 16th, 2009
Randolinquent
Written on the back of a bus seat in Wite-Out pen:
“F*ck the free world!”
But not the dictatorships?
RR
Kill your darlings
This scene has no real point, except that I like it. So it’s getting cut (mainly) from the story, just as soon as I can stomach it. Thank goodness for blogs–you guys take care of my darlings for me.
Her sons were in the front room, music and the tv and their two loud voices all at once. She hollered her greetings, and then meant to go put the groceries away. But she went into the front room instead, carrying the bags.
The boys looked her quizzically, searchingly, researchingly.
“What are you watching?”
Hal said, “We’re done our homework.”
Avery said, “There’s no basketball practice tonight.”
Hal said, “So we’re allowed our tv hour, right?”
Their mother said, “Yes. But that’s not what I asked. I asked what you are watching.”
Avery said, “It’s not violent, and there’s not swears.”
Hal said, “Much.”
She said, “I don’t care.” And then she “pursued the question independently” as her supervisor used to put it, back when she had a supervisor. She sat down on the couch between her sons, bags in her lap, and looked at the screen.
A granite-coloured word swirled on a pink and orange backdrop. She pursed her lips, longed for her notepad. “Mod as in modern?”
“What?” Hal pursed his lips, a mirror of her. Though the boys were identical, somehow he seemed to resemble her more.
Avery arched his eyebrow. “Oh, no, it stands for something, issa, whatcha—the first letters spell a word—”
“Acronym,” she said, her hand hovering above his knee.
“Yeah, that.”
She waited. Finally a negligeed woman with no two strands of blond hair cut the same length staggered onto the screen and began to exhort them all to dance. Hal and Avery looked immediately away from her gyrations, at each other then their mother. “It’s Much on Demand,” said Avery.
“Demand for what?”
Hal dropped his faux-hawked head into his hands. “Mom,” he said, facing the floor. “Much is MuchMusic, a tv station.”
She pointed at the translucent logo at the bottom of the screen.
Avery smiled gently. “Yes, Mom. And they do a request show, like people write in to ask for videos they want to see. They demand them. So it’s Much on Demand. See?”
She thought for a second. “They write in? No phone calls?’
Avery was watching raptly as the woman onscreen danced with her arms over her head. “I dunno. It might be phonecalls sometimes. We doan watch the part with the request. That’s boring.”
“Do you boys write in? And request songs?”
“Nah.” Avery turned to her and thought for a moment. “It’s like, we like what everybody likes. So even if we don’t say nothing, we still get what we want.”
Hal was crumpling some pieces of notebook paper and throwing them into the fireplace, but he nodded and smiled at her encouragingly, as if she had almost solved the math problem. “Yeah, we got real good taste. It’s only people who like weird sh—stuff that gotta call in.”
“But…if only people who liked weird shit called in, wouldn’t only weird shit get played?”
They were both looking at her now, but less encouraging, more special-ed. “It’s only the ones who like weird stuff,” said Avery, “who gotta call in. But lots of people who like good music like to call.”
Hal bounced a paper ball of his brother’s head. “Namely, girls.”
They snickered.
“Ah.” She nodded and stood up. “Thank you for answering my questions. This has been most beneficial.