April 2nd, 2019
Throwback: April 27, 2009: “Baseball” in Japanese and baseball in Japan
The Japanese word for “baseball” is yakyū, combining the characters for field and ball. My current guesstimate on pronunciation is “YAK-yoo”…anybody know?
Baseball is a big deal in Japan, and a genuine part of the culture, for close to 150 years. The games sell out, players become celebrities, and, I like to imagine, nobody leaves in the 7th inning the way lame and silly people do at Jays games (not that I don’t love Jays games with all my heart. It’s for that reason, actually, that my heart breaks a little when people abandon their team before the game ends in order to “beat traffic”! Ahhh! You could really triumph over traffic by never leaving home, people!!)
It is, I am discovering, extremely complicated to order tickets to Japanese ballgames. But I shall persevere, somehow, to eat lovely snacks in the Big Egg and join in the happy cheering! I’m going to figure this out…somewise. [Note from the future: I did get to go to a game in Tokyo, though someone else had to buy the tickets for me in the end, and it was fantastic! As I recall, I did not get any snacks, but still, fantastic.] But just to be safe, I’ll also be ordering Jays tickets sometime soon, because really, they aren’t exotic, sometimes the fans are lame, and the snack food is terrible at the Stadium Whose Name We Don’t Say, but otherwise, they are the best team in the world. [Note from the future: now that Jays tickets are much more expensive and two of the people I used to go to games with have moved away, I rarely go–no games at all last season. this is a sad future note.]
I don’t mean to care about material things
RR
March 29th, 2019
Rage! (about money and assumptions)
Last night, I was honoured to participate in the graduation gala for the University of Toronto Master in English in the Field of Creative Writing. I was delighted by the range and talent of the 7 students about the graduate from the program–I am mentoring one of them, so I know all about her fantastic work, but this was my first time hearing from the other 6. What a treat–so much richness and humour and joy in their words. I’m so excited for them to publish (publish more, in some cases) so the world can see what they have going on. I was also delighted to read for them, and to hear Leanne Shapton read from Adam Penn Gilders work in the presentation of the scholarship bearing his name. All in all, a wonderful evening.
Which made it a little easier to bear that today I’m using a precious vacation day to a) take an unpleasant medical test and b) do my taxes. I’m simply swamped these days and there wasn’t any other time for these things. And the day is going ok–it’s sunny and going to the medical place meant I wasn’t indoors all day, I bought myself a nice takeout lunch, and I’m still riding the high from last night.
Anyway, and then someone said something mean to me and I interrupted eating my nice sushi to fly into a rage I still haven’t fully come down from. I probably won’t ever fully rebut the individual who said it to me–it’s not worth it–but since I was planning a gentler post about money and writers and reality versus assumptions, here is the amped up rage version:
I AM MY OWN PATRON!! By which I mean, the way I write what I write is that I work a full-time job in order to feed and house myself, and from within the comfort of that lifestyle, afforded to me by me, I write my books. I recognize the incredible privilege of my position–that I have the health and skills and sheer good fortune to be able to do it this way, and I also recognize that it may not go on forever. I could find myself unable to earn the salary I currently do any longer and need to work more hours to keep myself housed and fed, squeezing out the writing, or my health could worsen or other responsibilities could amp up, making the two careers I balance now unsustainable.
Also, no shade on other forms of patronage–if there were anyone else who could sustainably support me while I write, I would be happy to go with that. When I see other folks who have such a system in their lives, I’m mainly legit happy for them, and only a little envious. There are so many ways to make it work, and I honestly don’t think any of them are all that easy–even when it looks easy to me, I assume there’s a lot I don’t know. I try to be incredibly respectful of anyone who is finding a way to get words on the page and be alive at the same time. It’s naive, maybe, but I would like the same respect back in return.
I am grateful for every penny I’ve ever earned from my writing, which is not to say I feel undeserving–I DID earn those pennies, and I think I deserved them very much. I like having them. And I do earn money from writing, and I love having and it makes a difference to me both financially and emotionally–as I do my taxes and fill out the self-employment part, it’s important to me that this writing thing is a business to me and I’m tidily toting up my income and deductions. I like it.
However, it’s just not that much–these aren’t life-sustaining pennies. There is no city in Canada where I could live on what I make as a writer–not even close. If I ceased to be my own patron, and no one else stepped up to take the gig I would…die of exposure or starvation, I guess. Which seems like an odd thing to do for someone who is perfectly capable of putting a roof over her own head through her own labour.
This is not because someone took something away from me or I’ve been ill-treated or deprived, at least not that I know of. It’s also not, insofar as I know, because I have made bad choices or been fiscally unsavvy or have not marketed myself appropriately… I mean, anyone’s welcome to send me suggestions and I will take them under advisement but I can only ever write the books I’m able to write. I do it to the best of my ability and the market pays what it’s going to pay. Mainly I’m grateful I get to write and have readers at all.
SO IT IS ENRAGING when people imply or SAY STRAIGHT OUT that I am greedy or lazy or not doing it right for not devoting myself to writing in some sort of purer way. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY THAT, PEOPLE!! (Ahem, you know who you are, person who is definitely not reading this blog.) I have made a lot of sacrifices to make writing central to my life but I’m not actually willing to get rid of my cats and get a worse apartment and never take an actual non-tax-doing vacation again so someone can respect me more for not caring about money.
Oh my god.
I know, I know–my life is not that hard. But it’s also not that easy and I’m tired and I’m not really sure why anyone’s gunning for me to “not think about the money” when there’s so little money even available for me to not think about.
I like books. I think of those constantly. I’ll write another one eventually. It would be exactly the same book no matter what–or whether–anyone paid me.
Dammit.
March 25th, 2019
Copyediting for writers
I got so into writing about copyediting in my post from last summer about when you shouldn’t do it (basically anytime you’re not asked)–which not everyone agreed with, but I enjoyed talking about it. So much so that I wanted to do another post on this topic, a less inflammatory one about what level of copyediting writers should attempt with their own work if they do in fact wish to share it with others (thus an exception from the “nobody asked you” rule–you can always ask yourself, but when should you bother?)
For the purposes of this post–and reality in general–I’m taking copyediting to mean reading text through thoroughly to spot errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, as well as inconsistencies in both style and content (colour versus color but also her eyes were blue and now they’re green) and infelicities like awkward phrasing. People often say proofreading when they talk about a straight read for errors, but that term has a very specific meaning in publishing so better to avoid.
I find writers get fed a couple untruths at two extremes–either they get told they don’t need to worry about copyediting their own work because that’s what workshop groups/editors/publishers–so it’s basically everyone else’s problem and we don’t need to try! Or they get told they need to make sure their manuscript is copyedited on a professional level and they make themselves hysterical about every period, because one tiny typo spells doom. Neither of these are true. Here’s a rough guideline to what level of copyediting your work might need when you submit it to a publisher or agent….
First off, every submission we send out should be subject to the same two steps we should be doing with every fragment and email we inflict on other humans–spell checker, careful read through. This should be a read for sentence-level errors only–as soon as you start making substantive changes, you can introduce other errors and the copyediting pass basically needs to start over. Do ALL your major edits, reassure yourself that the manuscript is basically solid, then come back once more and look for typos, bad grammar, repeated words or phrases, parts where you started editing the sentence but didn’t finish (mismatched tenses or pronouns come up all the time in edited work), wrong words/homonyms (assess vs asses, anyone?), and things on that level. it’s also fine that a writer is a not a professional copyeditor and if you don’t know exactly what a split infinitive is but this sentence makes sense for the characters, that’s cool. Think about how a reader will encounter the text and try to make it easy for them–don’t worry about perfection, because there is indeed someone else whose job it is to do that.
On one level this read should be easy, because you’re done writing the book now, and you’re only fixing stuff you know to be wrong, really cutting down on stressful judgement calls. On the other hand, you may know the material so well that it can be hard to see errors–you know what it should say that your eye just glides right over missing and wonky bits. If you know yourself to be a messy writer who often gets a tonne of copyediting level markup in workshop but you aren’t finding much, you may need to call in backup.
Yes, after all those writing teachers and workshoppers, you may need yet another helpful outsider to do an additional read. By the point you’ve written a full manuscript, you know yourself well as a writer–are you error-prone and do you spot your own errors easily? If yes and no, you really should borrow a set of eyes just so the manuscript doesn’t come across as messy or sloppy. If you are good at finding errors, you might be able to do it on your own. This is really a “know thyself” question.
If you have a fellow writer you can trade projects with, you can barter your services; OR you may have someone in your life who is good at this work (of course professional editors are good, but also teachers, often lawyers, and also many people who have unrelated careers and just love to nitpick) and who loves you enough to read a whole manuscript for free. Otherwise, if you don’t have anyone you can swap with and you are very worried about your inability to find problems in the ms, you might need to pay someone. I would say that’s really a last resort for copyediting though.
To be clear, the rumour going around that if a submitted manuscript contains even one teeny typo it will be immediately disqualified is false, but the ms should be quite clean–errors right at the beginning before the reader is immersed in the story, lots of errors, huge distracting errors, and especially errors that actually render meaning unclear are all going to cause problems. Basically, you never want the person who is supposed to love your book to stop reading and furrow their brow. So, if you forgot a comma somewhere, oh well, but if a character’s name keeps changing or there’s a word missing and now the sentence doesn’t make sense, you’re going to want someone to catch that.
Stuff not to worry about: Please don’t try to find out an individual publisher’s style rules and follow them–not only is that hard to do, you’ll have to re-edit the book for every submission. I would go so far as to say as anything that ressembles publisher’s style–like which numbers to spell out or whether is jewellery vs jewelry–is stuff you don’t need to worry about. If your ms is a little inconsistent on these fronts, no meaning is going to be obscured and whatever house that picks it up is definitely going to want to fix that stuff their own way.
And another thing: cover letters and query letters, résumés, proposals, marketing plans. These are brief professional documents designed to secure maximum attention and thus should be nearly perfect. Sorry. If there’s a tiny typo on your one-page summary, some editors/agents are going to be “well, we’re all only human” but others will get distracted or annoyed so better just assume the latter. Also, all of the materials I listed here are things most readers are just itching to discard–there’s always going to be more agent queries than opportunities for representation, more proposals than grants–so don’t give anyone a reason to discount you. Read it over closely, sleep on it, read it again. And these items are easy to ask someone to read for you, since they are so short. But still, buy them dinner in gratitude.
March 11th, 2019
Throwback: April 26, 2009: This weekend
This weekend feels like it’s been going on for weeks, and there’s still two hours left! There was hot sun and mild sun, thunder-and-lightning rain and gentle plink-plink rain. There was a giant chocolate cake, an eggplant curry, several chocolate cookies and a lot of salsa. There were a lot of really cool people and one really long walk on which I obtained a tiny sunburn and a mop! There was also not much in the way of sleep, which might account for the seeming spaciousness of time.
There was a road trip to the new McNally Robinson in Don Mills, a place I’d encourage you all to visit [Note from the future: you can’t now, it’s closed–it’s very sad]. The store is, while not perfect, is a lovely lovely shop filled with natural light and realistic-looking trees, and books! Not yet quite so many book as you’d think in this big shiny space, but I’d imagine more are on the way and the selection is already pretty good. I would urge you to make the long trip to Don Mills even if that’s not your usual ‘hood just to see this place and buy a book or two. The reason I want to press you to do that is because I asked the cashier if there would soon be lots of more convenient McNally Robinson’s in the heart of Toronto, and her response was that head office will see how *this* branch does before deciding. So if you want more diversity of bookstores in our city, vote with your wallet and your metro pass (the #25 from Pape station will take you there), and head northeast!
I learned two new games this weekend and have already forgotten the rules to both, and I also enjoyed without understanding the movie Duplicity (if you saw it and understood, please email me!) [Note from the future: I went and read the IMDB at that link, and I have NO MEMORY of that movie, at all.] This weekend was, as my students say, obviously pretty bomb.
[Another note from the future: one of the reasons I wanted to save the posts that were lost from the first half of 2009 is that that this the spring I met and fell in love with Mark. Even though I never talked about our relationship on the blog (or anywhere) until it was pretty well established, reading these posts reminds me of how I FELT when I wrote them. And I was SO HAPPY when I wrote this one.]
Because the drugs never work
RRPosted by Rebecca Rosenblumat 9:47 PM
1 comment:
Kate S. said…
I’m predisposed to like the new McNally Robinson on account of my attachment to the one in Saskatoon, but I feared it might not be readily accessible, so I appreciate the transit tip! Some day soon I will hop on the #25 and check it out.April 27, 2009 at 12:05 AM
March 5th, 2019
Readings in March
I can’t honestly think of the last time I did a reading. I mean, it can’t of been that long ago–the most recent I can recall was the Trilliums in May…it can’t have been 9 months, can it? I did a classroom visit with a little reading component or two in the fall… Huh, I dunno. ANYWAY, I’m excited to have a few coming up–I might even read some new material if I can get my act together!
On March 26 from 5:15 to 7pm at Deer Park Library, I’ll be reading at the Wonderful Women’s Reading Series with Katherine Ashenburg, Glynis Guevara, and Grace O’Connell, hosted by Nora Gold.
And then on March 28 I’ll be reading at the graduation gala for the masters in creative writing program at University of Toronto, aka my alma mater.
And BONUS, on March 14 Mark is hosting and curating an evening at the Tartan Turban Reading series with Randy Boyagoda, Pratap Reddy and Bänoo Zan. It’s a hectic month for the whole household!
I also have a guest teaching thing in April plus my student will hopefully be defending her thesis in April as well–all in all, in about a 4 week period, that should be all my public appearances for the year. Very excited about all of them, and then to all a good night!
February 25th, 2019
Emily Goebbels
I dream largely in narrative, and moreover in specific narrative formats. I’ve had text-only dreams in the form of a New Yorker article, but those are sort of rare–mainly my dreams are little movies, with a plot and characters. I am quite rarely in my dreams, nor is anyone I know. I dreams stories, mainly fictional ones.
On Friday night I dreamed an episode of the radio program The Ongoing History of New Music with Alan Cross, a show I like a lot and am familiar with the format, hence my ability to dream it–so this was my first dream that was audio-only. Cool. It was about the singer-songwriter Emily Goebbels, who has made some beautiful music but is a pretty troubled figure even for the music scene and periodically drops out of sight. It turns out she comes by her drama honestly–she’s actually the great-great granddaughter of one of the worst criminals of the 20th century, Joseph Goebbels.
If you don’t already know, as Mark did instantly upon waking up Saturday morning when I started telling him about my dream (I’m a joy to live with), there is no such person as Emily Goebbels nor could there ever possibly have been because Joseph and his wife murdered their children and then committed suicide at the end of World War II. So there is no possibility of a descendant becoming a slightly goth indie-rocker.
I’m not as well-informed as Mark, so I have been reading Wikipedia articles about Joseph and Magda Goebbels, who apparently murdered the children not out of fear of a worse death for them at the hands of the Red Army (as I had innocently hoped) but instead of allowing them to be taken out of Berlin by the Red Cross because Magda was worried about the children knowing their father’s true reputation as a monster.
Jesus. So this turns out to be a really dark dream even though I didn’t entirely realize it at first. Many of my dreams are semi-nightmares but this one sort of snuck up on me and I don’t like it, even though I’m all for the experiment with narrative form. I also read a bit about the children who sound like sweethearts but honestly the oldest was 12 so who wouldn’t be a sweetheart? There is a play and some books written about them I don’t know if I’ll be up for reading those–I don’t have a lot of heart for getting really into this, I don’t think. I wish Emily Goebbels was a real person.
What format do you dream in?
EDIT: After posting this Sunday evening and thinking so much about dream formats, on Sunday night I dreamt an encyclopedia entry about the plague and the various ways it killed people that was extremely graphic and disturbing… It sounds funny that the dream somehow included the cast of Murphy Brown, but honestly that did not make it any less alarming. Unconscious brain, what is going on with you? I do not like this.
February 22nd, 2019
Yahrzeit
I think we all know I’m not much of an observant Jew, or at all really. I am like many goyim in the way that I don’t follow my ancestral religion, but I do enjoy some secular interpretations of certain holidays and traditions that I find personally meaningful. The tradition of yahrzeit, the Yiddish word meaning “death anniversary” is a good one. I never celebrated it before last year, as I had never lost anyone that close to me who was Jewish before 2017. Last year was the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death and tomorrow is two years.
What you do for yahrzeit is light yahrzeit candles, which you can get for a buck and half at certain supermarkets, which are nice and are supposed to burn for the whole day but we’ll see. You can also visit the person’s grave and leave stones, which is another Jewish thing to do, though I don’t know if it’s exactly codified anywhere. Anyway, I got my dad some nice stones in Poland–where his own father was from–so I will bring them to his grave tomorrow.
Also, you can of course think about the person, though I think about my dad more often than on his death-aversary. In fact, I have made a list (incomplete) of the times I have been thinking about him, below.
You will note that this is the first time in two years since his death I’ve really written about him here, or anywhere. This is partly due to being sad and not having much to say, and partly due to my father being extremely private and not liking to be talked about–it’s not like I wrote about him so much when he was alive either. But two years later I feel like he has moved on from these earthly concerns, and anyway, this list is far more about me than him.
Times when I think about my dead father:
1) While driving: I’m actually not that bad of a driver–I’ve never hit so much as a parking barrier and my only ticket was 20 years ago–but I never got good enough for most of the actions required to become automatic. Thus, as I drive, my brain plays a constant stream of instructions on what to do next and how to do it, which is I think why I find driving so exhausting and stressful. And the instructions are in the voices of those who taught me to do those things–some professional teachers, some helpful friends, but mainly my dad, who was in his prime the best driver I knew. He also loathed me being behind the wheel–I suppose many parents feel that way–but always pushed me to practice and keep trying to get my license, even after I failed the test and felt I was doomed.
2) At ballet class: I have excellent turnout, despite being terrible at almost every other aspect of ballet. It’s the only thing I ever get compliments on in class, and it’s a great relief to have one thing I don’t have to worry about. Once I was stretching at the barre and someone commented “Wow, you’re very flexible” and I felt compelled to respond, “This is genetic, I didn’t earn it. My brother can do it too.” We all can–I’ve checked with cousins. My dad died at 80 and up until a year or so before his death he was sitting comfortably in the half-lotus, as I usually do when at rest. All Rosenblums, it seems, have very flexible hips.
3) When the time on two clocks or watches doesn’t agree, something that my father hated. He set all time pieces by the beeps on the BBC World Report, and was deeply upset when he became too ill to do so.
4) Whenever I see an unusually large housecat. My dad liked all cats and indeed all animals, but he especially liked big domestic cats like Maine Coons. We adopted all our family cats as kittens from barns and he always hoped one would grow really big, but all Rosenblum cats have been on the small side.
5) Whenever I see a show with one of the disparate group of actors he liked. Mainly my dad liked actors you’d think of for his age and station–Marlon Brando, Paul Newman. But he watched and liked a wide range of movies and TV shows and he had some oddballs in his list of favourites. He really liked Cyndi Lauper as an actress (I tried buying him a cd of her music once, but it was a no go) and he’d see anything with Hugh Grant in it.
6) When I am chiding myself about some small thing, I often use phrases my dad used to me when I was a kid. At the time, they were just things my dad said, but as an adult I have figured out mainly where they came from. “Say good night, Gracie,” was something George Burns said to Gracie Allen at the end of their comedy routines, and my dad said to me at bedtime. “Straighten up and fly right” is a line from and title of a Nat King Cole song, and admonishment to young Rebecca to stop misbehaving. “Put your shoes on, Lucy” was to a busload of sleepy passengers in the middle of the night Los Angeles in mid-1960s by a Greyhound driver–if it has a longer history I don’t know it–and to me when it was time to go outside. As far as I recall, my dad stop saying this stuff to me at the end of the 80s, but I still say it to myself. Oh and this one is from later, when I went away to university–“Keep those cards and letters coming.” I believe that’s Johnny Carson. My dad liked me to write him letters, at least until I got a decent phone plan, and he was a good correspondent.
7) Whenever I smell tomato vines (the pungent odor you smell in a garden growing tomatoes but not when you eat the actual fruit? That’s the vines), to which he was allergic, although he grew dozens of tomato plants every year. He developed the allergy later in life and started having to work on the garden with caution around the vines, which he found deeply annoying.
8) When I run into someone I know unexpectedly. My father hated that.
9) When I eat or have the opportunity to eat foods he liked. Probably if anyone lives in a home with someone for any length of time, you’ll develop a shared commentary on food–I have this for a number of people. Even if I don’t like the food in question (tamales, gefilte fish, anything extremely spicy) I always have this kind of secondary opinion rising up underneath my own that it’s excellent and I should buy and eat it immediately.
10) When I try to explain some bit of social or economic theory to anyone. My dad (and mom) taught me a bunch of stuff at the dinner table and I can parrot those explanations fairly effectively but it’s always obvious when I haven’t done my own reading because the well runs dry after 2 or 3 follow-up questions–and then I feel I’ve embarrassed the family. Nevertheless, I’ve impressed a lot of people (myself included) with how much I got to learn at suppertime.
11) When someone complains about having a bad father, because I didn’t.
February 20th, 2019
Throwback: April 24, 2009: Charmed or Scammed?
The Cabbage Patch craze of the 1980s was far-reaching enough to even hit the tiny town I’m from, and oh, how Small Rebecca wanted one. This was not going to happen, however, as my parents refused to buy me an expensive cloth-bodied doll when, not knowing me very well (we’d only met 5 years prior, and hadn’t spoken much the first couple), they assumed I’d just drop it in the dirt or get juice on it.
They did, however, agree to front me a dollar so that I could enter a Cabbage Patch Kid raffle at the local fair (told you it’s a small town). “I’m going to win that doll,” I told my mother, and my mother, with adult logic, explained that that’s not how raffles work. You don’t win because you decide to, you just put your ticket in and see what happens, and mainly you don’t win.
But I did, and I named that doll Caroline Jane and I never ever got dirt on her because I loved her too much.
This, of course, taught me a terrible lesson about how raffles work.
Or, it would have if I didn’t continue to win raffles. I mean, not always, of course, but often. I’ve never won more than $7 in the lottery, or anything at Bingo or at a casino, but raffles are a sport at which I excel (I know it’s not a sport). Throughout my career (I know it’s not a career), I have received from the raffle gods:
–assorted Gund animals
–a My-Little-Pony salon
–trucker caps (more than one; not all at the same time)
–fish and chips
–gift certificate to online bookstore (I bought this)
–gift certificate to actual bookstore (I bought this, among other things)
–several dinners in fancy (and not so fancy) restaurants
–floral arrangements
—that poem on Tuesday
–a used Mac 8600
I have come to accept that one of the many good things in my life is that I win a lot of raffles. What a strange little blessing! But anyway, this makes me oddly vulnerable to scams, as when the gentleman allegedly from [redacted reputable hotel chain] calls me at eight in the morning to ask if I remember entering the hotel’s raffle over the winter holidays? Because, well, he reassurred me that I might not it was a long time ago (I don’t), but it turns out I’ve won one of five great prizes (then follows detailed and confusing description of trips and appliances it would, admittedly, be nice to receive).
All I have to do is journey to Woodbridge to “draw by my own hand” (sounds ominous) which one of the prizes I will receive.
My ostensible reason for not doing this is because the TTC doesn’t go to Woodbridge, and therefore neither do I. The fellow on the phone was incredulous that I would pass up such an opportunity for logistical reasons–surely I could take a cab or find an automotive friend–but I held firm. In truth, I have a taxi phobia (what was I just saying about the TMI posts? oh well) and I try to never ask anyone for a ride, as I am saving all my potential vehicular favours for the day I finally trip and break something while running for the bus and have to be driven everywhere for six weeks.
The other reason I said no is because it sounded like a giant scam, one that could possibly lead to me never returning from Woodbridge.
But is it? A little part of my wonders if I really did just miss an all-expensives-paid trip to South Carolina for myself and a “partner”… It’s too late to take anything back, but do you think any of this could be possible? Because really, I am a person who wins a lot of raffles. [Note from the future: wow, was 2009 Rebecca ever gullible! Or maybe phone scams were less evolved back then? I don’t consider myself wildly street smart *now,* but I was rolling my eyes so hard at my own self in this one.] [Other note from the future: I have since stopped winning raffles. Dammit.]
And the eyes were / a colour I can’t remember
RR
Posted by Rebecca Rosenblumat 8:02 AM
1 comment:
Kerry said…
Such a scam. But I can’t believe your parents wouldn’t buy you a cabbage patch doll! Thank goodness you won, or the CAS might have taken you away. My cabbage patch dolls got positively covered with dirt and juice, but oh, how they were adored. I am glad Caroline Jane got similar treatment (sans dirt).April 24, 2009 at 11:35 AM
February 15th, 2019
Big dumb books
When I was first becoming a published writer, I did a bit of reviewing. I was bad at it–in that I found it hard and painful to produce any kind of thoughtful and coherent book reviews–but I did it because I thought it was important. Still, present day, once in a while I still write a review or some other form of critical article or essay (stay tuned!), despite having improved very little in the past decade and a half. The kids these days are calling my efforts “literary citizenship”–work for the good of the literary community, giving back.
But I’ve largely given up reviewing–it’s too miserable for me, and with every bit of fiction I publish, more miserable. I like to think I contribute to the literary community in other ways–the community can be the judge of that–but I can very rarely muster the stomach to review. As a writer who deeply over-invests in reviews of my own work, I struggle to say anything critical about most books when I can see how much effort, strain, and love has gone into them, even when I truly think those efforts have failed. To bring up and immediately dismiss a very tired argument, it’s not that I don’t think honest criticism has a place in book-reviewing–it’s just that I don’t think I’m the best one to deliver it. When I sit down to articulate how a writer went wrong with published work that can no longer be reworked or improved, I think of the frantic and fragile hours alone with the words, the bus-stop dreaming that never transfers onto the page exactly the way it seemed in my head, the sheer love that it takes to write a whole damn book, and I’m right there with the writer of the book I’m trying to review, on their side, cheering for them, even if I think the book is very very bad.
They say one shouldn’t do a thing if one’s heart isn’t in it–but one probably also shouldn’t do it if the heart is too much in it.
There are occasional exceptions to this fear of mine, and that is what I call Big Dumb Books. These are Big not in size but in stature–they loom in the mind of even non-readers as Very Good Books. Their authors are big deals with lots of money and fame and clout or they are dead or both, and knowing all this frees something up in my brain when combined with Dumb, which is just that I think the book is dumb. Because of the Big, I can articulate the Dumb freely, at length, and without fear or heartache, because I know that the author doesn’t care what I think, isn’t worried about reviews or wondering whether the next Goodreads post will be a poison arrow to their heart (especially if they are dead). That really calms me down.
Such was the special pleasure of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, a book with close to 100 000 ratings on GoodReads and a 4.28/5 star average rating. Almost everyone who reads this book loves it and a lot of people, many of them who otherwise wouldn’t be drawn to a novel, have read it. The fact that I hated this novel–and I did–can’t hurt Mr. Aciman, make him feel bad or damage sales or piss him off. He’s not going go Google himself and read this and click the “contact” button to write me a sad angry email explaining how I got it all wrong–something that has happened to me even my extremely limited experience of reviewing. Knowing this won’t happen is very freeing.
I have been snarking about this book all week, along with Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, a novelist who is both globally venerated and dead. It’s been great–no one cares what I think. Kingsley is definitely not going to google himself from beyond the grave, and I don’t think he cared what women or people of my class or Canadians thought, which is part of the problem with his novel but also sort of lets me off the hook.
If you are curious, what is wrong with Aciman’s book is that it’s a novel about a 17-year-old boy’s first love affair, which is with a 24-year-old man, and it’s written from the perspective of that boy all grown up and longing for a lost past as if that experience was great and sexy and not sort of predatory. Already in that sentence you can tell what my problem is–and the great thing about not being a real reviewer is I don’t need to discuss the age of consent in Italy in the 80s (when/where the book is set) or how the teenager is the instigator of the affair and whether that makes it fine or anything else. I just get to say “I am not ok with this,” and leave it. Hooray!
Also the first-person narration dreamy and largely written in retrospective monologue–few scenes or dialogue. It’s often impossible to place the narrator in time or place, or even order the events of That Summer in chronology because they are such a jumble of Wistful Sexy memory. I don’t think that’s a terrible way to write a novel, but I found CMBYN extremely hard to follow (although much better than the film by the same name, which is entirely incoherent–although, also something no one else thinks but me!). There’s all kinds of weird logistical stuff going wrong, from how anyone could get to be a post-doc at 24 to why the young man has to give up his bedroom to a houseguest when the villa where they live has a guest-house??? Some of the sexual logistics seemed unlikely too, and there’s a lot of weight placed on the sexy bits.
It’s not a terrible book but it’s not great and it creeped me out, especially SPOILER when you get to the end and you realize the 17-year-old NEVER GETS OVER the allegedly very healthy and normal relationship he had with an adult man while he was himself still in high school. 15 years later he’s still sad and longing and isolated and obsessing and that’s not damage that’s romance???? Okkkkkkk….
Ew.
As for Lucky Jim, it is fairly funny in spots, and its criticism of precarious academic employment is terrifyingly spot-on SEVENTY YEARS LATER so basically everything is terrible forever. But there’s just so much griping about how poor Jim is forced to deal with an unattractive woman and unattractive women are just doomed to be neurotic and crazy and horrible and at one point “nasty.” There is ENDLESS explanation and really defensiveness about how no one should have to be nice to an unattractive woman ever because it just doesn’t “do any good” so most of the humour of the book is really lost after a while and I wound up hating it, although as I say, it had good bits. I shall try to remember those good bits when I discuss this book in book club as it was my pick. Sorry, friends.
You know what? Hating these books has been fun–it’s something I do quite rarely. I didn’t empathize with Aciman or Amis in the slightest and thus didn’t feel bad about my hate. It’s of course because they are old and famous and rich (and dead, in one case) and just very hard for me to relate to, and also because I’m so sure they don’t care what I think.
I fear in Canada there is a bit of a scarcity model when it comes to reviews or even opinions–there are so many books and often so few readers, sometimes a book will be published to deafening silence. If your book is only going to get a handful of Goodreads reviews, and maybe only 1-2 media ones, it is CRUSHING if they are negative. Whereas if there were lots, the negative ones would be diluted a bit. So the less known a book is, the more hesitant I am to say anything harsh about it, as that comment will have such undue weight for want of anything else being said.
I think my hesitation is well-founded–I don’t at all think I need to get over myself and start writing my true very mean feelings about tiny little small press books that I don’t like and no one else is even talking about. What on earth purpose would that serve? As I say above, I don’t have a great gift for creating insightful criticism, so if I just snark in a couple of sentences about how your novel didn’t do it for me, what are you going to get out of that other than sadness? What is anyone going to get out of it?
I also want to say here that this post, taken in isolation, makes it sound like I hate a lot of books, big and small–I don’t, actually. Most books, like most things, are personal choices, and I choose carefully to find the ones are the mixture best suited to my temperament–thus, I am mainly reading books I enjoy and am delighted to inarticulately but joyfully chat about, with occasional missteps. The fact that I made two missteps in a row with Call Me and Lucky Jim, and the additional fact that I didn’t feel bad about either of them, is the usual aspect of this situation that seemed worthy of comment, and a blog post.
February 11th, 2019
Throwback April 22, 2009: Rose-coloured reviews the Al Purdy Tribute
[Note from the future: Back in the day, I was attempting to learn how to write reviews and doing this series called Rose-coloured reviews, which was very much NOT the name of the blog but really just sunny rosy reviews of things I liked. I never became much of a reviewer.] [Other note from the future, some of these links are not going to work, and I’ve pulled out most of the photos–I think it might weird people out for a 10-year-old photo taken by an acquaintance to suddenly reappear on the web.]
Are there lovelier people anywhere than Toronto lit-folk? (and those in search of a grim and serious review surf away) Last night at the Dora Keogh, Paul Vermeersch hosted an incredible night of readings in honour of the ninth anniversary of the death of Al Purdy and as a benefit for the project of saving the house he built and wrote in, to be turned into a writing centre.
I attended despite not being a mad Purdy devotee–I loved Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets but hadn’t really gone farther [Note: still haven’t]. I thought, perhaps I should. It couldn’t really miss being a fun night, with such great readers on the bill, like Elyse Friedman,
and many more. And of course the Purdy poems, the lovely space of the Dora, and the stellar line-up drew even more lit-folk into the audience, like
Ok, I’m trying to make this a review and not just a name-drop–starting right now! What was awesome about the evening? First, the vast range of talented and diverse readers. Dani Couture and David McFadden are very different poets who gave very different, lovely and heartfelt readings. Every poet did and there were *twelve* by my count!! They even brought in an out-of-town ringer to replace a couple absentees, and we got a lovely off-the-cuff reading from
Overall, it was quite a raft of readings, but another thing that was great about the evening was that every reading was short and sweet. When a reader reads just enough, the words hang in the air instead of getting buried or blurred, and with everybody doing just one or two poems, we got that effect time and time again last night.
Also, the evening moved along smoothly due to Mr. Vermeersch’s “belief that there should be enough breaks to allow people to purchase drinks and go to the bathroom.” Indeed, especially considering the facilities at the Dora are *behind the stage.* Awkward!
Ok, and another good thing was there were two fundraising activities added onto the evening, both a silent auction with a poetry broadside, litfestival tickets, and a homemade quilt; and a raffle for another broadside. And these are objectively good things, not just good because I won the raffle (as part of a complicated raffle-ticket-buying collective, exact disposition of prize yet to be determined). I was very worried about tripping over one of the petit barstools, a shopping bag or a friend’s limb on the way to the stage to claim my (our) prize as the MC said, “Congrats, Rebecca Rosenblum.” I had just about made it when the always on the ball Julie Wilson called, “And congratulations on being nominated for a National Magazine Award, too!” Then I stumbled, but survived to turn in the ticket and go ask Julie, really?
Yes, apparently, really.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Of course the best thing about the evening is that Al Purdy’s poems are *meant* to be read aloud, practically demand it. Much poetry is, of course, but not everything is
May 23, 1980 [Note: May 23 is my birthday]
I’d been driving all day
arrived home around 6 p.m.
got something to eat and slept an hour
then I went outside
and you know
–the whole world smells of lilacs
the whole damn world
I have grown old making lists of things I wanted
to do and other lists
of words I wanted to say
and laughed because of the lists
and forgot most of them
–but there was a time
and there was this girl
this girl with violet eyes
and a lot of other people too
because it was some kind of party
–but I couldn’t think of a way
some immediate plan or method
to bathe in that violet glow
with a feeling of being there too
at the first morning of the world
So I jostled her elbow a little
spilled her drink all over
did it again a couple of times
and you know it worked
it got so she winced every time she saw me coming
but I did get to talk to her
and she smiled reluctantly
a little cautious because
on the basis of observed behaviour I might be mad
and then she smiled
–altho I’ve forgotten her name
it’s on one of those lists
I have grown old
but these words remain
tell her for me
because it’s very important
tell her for me
there will come one May night
of every year that she’s alive
when the whole world smells of lilacs
That wasn’t even one of the pieces read last night but somebody mentioned it and reminded me that it was once a favourite of mine (and no, not for the reason you are thinking).
Great great evening.
Because you sleep with a gun
RRPosted by Rebecca Rosenblumat 8:30 PM
Labels: Friends, poetry, Reading
3 comments:
andrew m. said…
props on the national magazine awards nod. ill be cheering for you and craig davidson. possibly see you on the morrow!
Buy the book: