September 8th, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews Sherwood Anderson’s “The Egg”

Sherwood Anderson’s short story The Egg (1920) is the story of a poor farmhand slowly driven mad by his attempts to “get up in the world.” A few months ago, I read Anderson’s first collection, Winesburg, Ohio (that Wikipedia link freakishly calls the book a novel, apparently because there is a reoccuring character in most of the stories. Wikis can’t be perfect, I guess) That book is also about small-town and rural folks, mainly struggling with themselves and their lives within those contexts, and not often coming out very happy.

“Winesburg” is a wonderful book, with some rather penetrating insight into human beings, especially for 90-year-old insight. But that book takes itself very very seriously, and the moral intensity of it all sometimes becomes a bit grim, especially if a reader doesn’t quite buy into every situation and even finds a few a bit hackneyed (but oh goodness, not most–try the four-part “Godliness” for a little bit of deeply original and heartfelt misery).

“The Egg,” on the other hand, is from Anderson’s second collection, *The Triumph of the Egg* (the original title of this story). Though released only two years later, *The Egg* is different from anything in the prior book: it is wrist-slittingly funny.

The piece narrated by a young boy, but largely about his father. The father was as a bachelor a happy farmhand, but once he married and had his only son, his wife convinced him to try to “get up in the world,” for the sake of the boy.

Their first attempt at wealth is a chicken farm, in which they invest 10 years and untold toil and money, and which is a desparate failure. The sad spectacle of it is described with such perfect black humour that I’m actually worried for your sake that you won’t go follow the link and read the story. So I quote at length:

“Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgments of life. If disease does not kill them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon–to go squashed and dead back to their maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you.”

You see what I mean? Hilarious, but in the end, the humour is not distancing–this is a quite intimate story about the death of hope, even if the faultiness of that hope is often maligned. The son cares for the father’s suffering, and we feel both the care and the suffering.

After the farm, the mother (whom some might call the villain of this story) decides that they ought run a restaurant by the train depot, and that that restaurant ought stay open all night. It is in the late and lonely nights in the restaurant that the father’s ambition runs completely afield of reality. He has brought from the farm a selection of glass jars in which he has preserved deformed chicks from his flock. He displays them at the restaurant as a form of entertainment, and eventually ends up deciding to expand upon this by becoming part restauranteur, part entertainer, with repartee and some tricks related to…eggs.

The narrator does not see his father’s most dramatic unravelling, as it occurred in the middle of the night with only one customer present, with the son still a child, upstairs and asleep. And yet, “For some unexplainable reason I know the story as well as though I had been a witness to my father’s discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplainable things.” So this miserable scene is the relating of the one patron, of course, and also of town gossip in general, but also in part the narrator’s own creation, the logic and coherence he has given to his father’s breakdown.

I got this story recommendation from my online short story discussion group, the Fiction Files, and they are also mulling over what exactly the egg represents in the piece. Me, I wonder if the egg is the curse of possibilities–like the oyster that might be a pearl when opened, but most likely isn’t. In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator alludes to his father’s single days of good cheer and calm, and adds, “He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.” The narrator has made himself a story out of scraps and gossip, most likely not perfectly accurate and definitely distressing, but the story he has made is something he can live with. His father, unable to create things for himself, was reliant on fate and nature and other people to create things for him, and when none of those will cooperate, it wrecks him. I wonder if Anderson’s point has something to do with valuing life as it is or as we make it, and not putting too much stock in possibilities not yet hatched.

What are you thinking? I’ll give you 3 guesses
RR

September 7th, 2009

Writing books are delicious

For various reasons, mostly having to do with yestereve’s writing not going very well, I went to bed last night with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This morning I got up and did some chores and necessary writing, and then I read 50 more pages of the book and am now in quite a good mood.

Lamott’s book does what all the best writing books do, which is to remind me of how hard writing is and that my failures are common but there are ways back to the right track, and indeed, I already know how to do whatever I need to do. There’s even a chapter called “Shitty First Drafts”–hooray, I already write those. I read the chapter with cheered validation in my heart. Yes, I can, at some point, take this failing incoherent story where characters change names and there is a half page description of a parking lot, and turn it into a strong, affecting story that someone might not be angry at me if they had to read it!! Hooray!! Any minute now, I get right back to work on said story.

Ok, so the above was a little sarcastic, and Lamott’s book doesn’t deserve that–the first 50 pages anyway are very honest and bracing and encouraging, and also written by an extremely talented funny writer. But the position writing books hold in my life is a little like banana cake–a delicious dessert masquerading as a healthy snack. You have to consume both the books and the cake with discretion. If you have banana cake for breakfast instead of a bowl of oatmeal because, hey, it’s *fruit*! you are in trouble. Just like reading writing books instead of writing can get to be a big problem–they are so validating and encouraging, and so entertaining to read, it can get to be a habit that goes in the slot where actual work should go. If on the other hand, you eat banana cake for dessert instead of chocolate cake, you are very slightly ahead–hey, at least it’s fruit. I try to stick to reading writing-advice books when I’ve run out of steam on the writing, as a leisure activity in place of, say, playing internet Scrabble, napping, or baking a cake (although all these things have their places). It’s not writing, but it’s better *for* writing than something completely disconnected from the practice.

So, here, a few lovely writing books I recommend you read sometime when you want a treat with a little substance:

—Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. When I was first given this book, at 12, I thought it was silly, but I’ve probably read this book half a dozen times since and it gets smarter every time. Lots of very simple, *slightly* hippyish, Zen Buddhism flavoured advice on just writing writing writing–in restaurants, with friends, in notebooks, by yourself, while travelling–just shut off your inner editor (Goldberg calls it the “monkey mind,” not sure why) and do it.
—How Stories Mean, edited by John Metcalf and J. R. Struthers This is a collection of essays for both readers and writers of short stories, about both how writers do what they do and why. Worth the price of admission just for Clark Blaise’s twin pieces on how to write beginnings and how to write endings, but you could also cheerfully read this book without wanting to write a word, and come out the end a better reader of stories. That said, there’s no, “rah rah, you can do it” stuff–just lots of insight into process and product. To continue with the cake metaphor, this one wouldn’t have any frosting.
—Writers’ Gym, edited by Eliza Clark A much lighter version of the last book, a mix of writing exercises, tips, interviews and mini-essays on how stuff works. Lots of fun to read, and certainly in the right mode of writing practicality, but this one’s largely frosting.
—What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter This one is all exercises, but with extensive explanations and discussions of each one. I have done a few of these and they were the necessary combination of fun/interesting/useful, but mainly (is it bad to admit this?) I like to read about the exercises without doing them. Many in this book are quite specific, and often for writers in the early stages of a project, so to find the one that’s useful for me to do often takes a while. But it is interesting to read about the others, and be reminded of those skills they are trying to teach.

This is just a taste–I have half a dozen more on my shelf, and in the world they are legion. No substitute for anything–not writing fiction nor reading it–but a worthwhile indulgence nonetheless. I’m really looking forward to the rest of *Bird by Bird*, as well as getting on with this story…really soon.

Bon appetit!

I need a telescope not a telephone
RR

September 5th, 2009

A good friend

Me: It’s just down one floor, if you want to take a look.

(we descend on escalator, look around)

Me: Oh, no, sorry. I was wrong, it’s actually *up* one floor. Sorry.

P: No worries. At least we got an escalator ride out of it.

Crying crying all of the time
RR

September 3rd, 2009

Another excerpt for deletion

I actually forgot I wrote this scene–I had a plan but it got away from me and Akalena never appears again in the story. When I began rereading it, I was all “What the…oh, yeah. This.” and had to cut the whole scene. This is why it takes me so long to finish anything.

***

The breakfast special was a McMuffin derivative. Kate cut the egg rectangles out of the cookie sheets of egg baked the night before and folded them onto the muffin bottoms. A gorgeous Ukrainian girl, Akalena, was picking out the right slice or slices of peameal bacon for each sandwich, adding up to 2 ounces. She was so blindingly blond and silent, her clothing so wildly incorrect—high-waisted belted jeans and tucked in sleeveless blouses—that Kate and Sarah had assumed her fresh from immigration and bereft of language. But then it turned out later that Akalena had lived in Etobicoke all her life and her mom too, and she went to Martingrove and she just considered “ugly boring girls” like Sarah and Kate not worth talking to. Akalena put the bacon pieces on the egg slab, before Sarah slapped on the cheese and muffintop, and wrapped the whole disgusting mess in Saran.

Through and through and through
RR

The Reading Etiquette Question

This is one of those posts I always mean to do and then think, nah, that’s dumb, at the last minute. But tonight my defenses are low!

So–when is it polite to read? Like, in social life?

Some background: I don’t have enough time to read all that I want. Probably no one does. Since I am a public-transit passenger/reader, I always have a book with me, and if whatever I am doing has a lull in it, I am inclined not to waste the lull and thus I pull out the book. I read in line at the grocery store, lying on the table giving blood, in a blizzard waiting for the streetcar and, sometimes, also in social situations.

I’ve gotten some looks.

What do you think, fellow readers? Is it ok to read in a restaurant while your dining companion is in the bathroom? What about in someone’s home when the homeowner has gone to the bathroom or to take a call? If only with a certain duration of calls, what’s the trigger-minute? What about in a job interview and the interviewer leaves for an unmentioned length of time? What if you thought you were departing a party/office/theatre/whatever with someone, but then that person leaves you on the front steps to go back in to get something? What about in someone’s car if the driver is talking on a cellphone? What about at a meeting that hasn’t started yet when no one appears to want to talk to you? What if, after that meeting, you happen to fall into conversation with someone and get on the same bus together–are you then required to stare into space if the conversation dies, or can you say, “Great chatting with you” and pull out your book?

I’m a social person, I swear I would always pick the real conversation over the textual one, if there were one. But somehow, even when the person isn’t actually available to talk to me, I feel they are someone how hurt to me reading on their time. Is this me being paranoid?

I really wish someone would solve these issues for me. They aren’t a *large* source of stress, but…

Do you know your enemy?
RR

September 2nd, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews *Catch and Release*

The film Catch and Release was written by the Hollywood screenwriting hot commodity Susannah Grant (her most famous film was *Erin Brockovich*, but ok, fine, Grant is not a commodity to me). This film is listed as a romantic comedy-drama, which is a lot of bases to cover. Me, I was just hoping the film would keep us awake long enough to not be a bad babysitter (I cannot be dissauded from my position that a sleeping babysitter is irresponsible, despite many parents’ insistance that they themselves sleep from time to time).

So I stayed conscious, and *Catch* did have it’s bright spots, but this film was lacking some key ingredients of a comedy, while being way too ambitious about life-truths that, in the end, the conventions of the genre couldn’t follow through on. Romance, there was, and if by drama you mean relentless pounding sadness then, ok, that too.

This movie is about a woman whose fiance dies right before their wedding. Said woman is played by the beautiful and talented Jennifer Garner, who was such an amusing spectacle in 13 Going on 30. I haven’t seen most of the stuff that made her famous (I believe there was a sci-fi show on TV??) but I do like Garner, and there’s nothing not to like her performance in *Catch*–she puts her all into her scenes, and she has perfected a dozen different casts of misery: pathetic, defiant, ironic, rueful, resigned–the list goes on and on.

Death is not even the worst of it, it turns out, since after his passing, Grady’s (that’s the finance; Garner’s character’s name is Grey, and the combination is obnoxious) dirty little secrets start coming to light. He was not pillar of love and faithfulness that Grey thought, and he’s left her with an impossible mess to sort out. And his old friend Fritz (another obnoxious name!) seems not to care at all, has sex with a stranger at the funeral, and is the only one who knows the whole truth about Grady’s secret life.

This film is obviously lacking a few key ingredients of a comedy. Only two characters have any witty lines, and Grant spends most of her store of wit on the very worthy Kevin Smith. Smith plays the goofy slacker roommate of the dead guy, the sort of charming f*ckup in a bathrobe that every Judd Apatow movie has. And Smith revels in physical comedy with flyfishing gear, kitchen appliances, and small children. He gets almost every laugh in the picture, but such is the relentless downnote tone of the thing that even his character attempts suicide.

By that point, it was pretty clear that *Catch* is a “thesis” movie, and the thesis is that people are complicated, that they have more than one adjective, and that no matter how well we think we know someone, there are still details that will escape us. If the goofy guy with the ardent to make enormous sandwiches in the waffle iron also harbours deep pain and strong sense of responsibility, well, then, everyone must have a panopoly of characteristics.

A worthy premise. Except the movie is also struggling to be a romantic comedy where everyone pairs off and lives Happily Ever After, and the HEA ending precludes that kind of complexity. So instead of presenting Grady as a kind and loving fiance AND a guy who made some mistakes, the film shows us only the mistakes and has people occasionally mention, “He was a great guy.” Ditto Grey, who is just as kind and sweet and vulnerable and pretty as can be, lacking flaws, failures, or even a particularly sharp tongue in the face of incredible betrayal.

We need to have Grady be pretty entirely evil, and Grey be pretty entirely good, so that when Fritz changes his ways and is so kind to Gray that she falls in love with him a couple weeks after Grady’s death, she’s not doing a bad thing. And thus, even drunk and disorderly yet secretly kind and tender Fritz loses out on the chance to be a complex, conflicted individual. He’s just a good guy at heart, after all.

Grant’s screenplay never addresses what made Fritz behave badly, and we see no evidence that he ever even thinks about doing so again. Nor do we learn how Grey and Grady’s relationship worked around such enormous dishonesty, and how she’s changed as a result of her discoveries.

They’re just good people who made a few errors in judgment but, if the end of the film is any guide, they will never ever make any more. They embrace on a beach with a dog running around their ankles. They are Happy, and about to be so forever after.

I *hate* stories that apparently contain the only interesting thing that ever happened to the characters. I hate stories where you are supposed to feel like you know every single thing that happened after the final page, which is why the story doesn’t need to be any longer. Why invest so much energy in imagining characters and lives and dogs and everything if you’re just going to shut it down after 90 minutes and say, “Then everything was perfect”??

Obviously, I am questioning the very foundations of the rom-com genre, and the truth is, sometimes when I feel life is very difficult and I am tired, I find romantic comedy math comforting, ie., you just need these few ingredients (love, dog, house at the beach) and then you will be happy UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD.

But this film aimed at so much more and then so cheerfully didn’t achieve it, that it makes me feel bad. In the end, I felt that real complex Gray and Fritz were going to make a terrible couple and never acknowledge it, just like Gray and Grady had been. I felt like the ending was just faking. Which is of course a terrible way to feel about a movie that was supposed to be a comforting lark.

But Kevin Smith = awwwww, the big lug!!

So here’s another day / I’ll spend away from you
RR

September 1st, 2009

Chillin

I am a sucker for really clever, unexpected rhymes, and see the central disadvantage to being a prose writer is the inutility of rhymes in short stories (yeah, well, perspective is not mine; possibly it’s actually something to do with taxes).

Anyway, here’s a rhyme so clever I don’t understand it–I think Wale has some sort of beef with DC. If you have the time, it plays a lot better in context–video is here. Otherwise,

District of Columbia
You Bernie Mac funny
We ain’t scared of none of ya

You’re smiling, aren’t you? Even if you have no bloody clue what’s going on. I think I’m starting to love rap.

La la la la la hey hey hey goodbye
RR

The Haps

1) Joyland Stories will soon be a part of the daily dose of aweomse that is CellStories, a site that sends cell phone and Blackberry (etc.) users a new short story every day (you can also read the stories at the link above). Sounds like a great way to pass a commute, and is probably the second reason on my list of reasons to maybe possibly someday get a cellphone (the first being to receive amusing texts from AMT, and third being in case I am ever accidentally (or on purpose, I guess) locked in a closet.

2) The finalists for Journey Prize 21 will be announced at Ben McNally books on October 1, and I’ll be there to help make the presentation. I’m really looking forward to celebrating such great work.

3) A story of mine called “Dykadelic” will be in the yet-to-be-launched journal *The Milan Review* sometime this fall.

4) I’ll be reading at the Draft Reading Series on October 4 at the Blue Moon Pub. Only new drafty works are to be read there, so who knows what I’ll be presenting.

5) Finally, for those who said it couldn’t be done, I have made it through a week with a left hand mouse and, though I still hate it a lot, this morning when someone *moved my mouse* to the right side of the keyboard (oh, don’t even ask) I *moved it back*. New neural pathways, here I come!

You let me down easy / you let me down hard
RR

August 28th, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews T&T Supermarket

I was tired and overstimulated from an afternoon gathering featuring no fewer than 7 children under 3, but when my friend Z asked if I would mind stopping at a Chinese supermarket in Markham, I felt my energy returning.

Markham contains Chinatown North for Toronto, and Chinatown North contains wonders of new (to me) restaurants, groceries, and other things that I know nothing about that are not contained in the older, bigger, wonderful but different Toronto Chinatown south. And carless me does not get to go to Markham very often–this would only be my third trip, which is why I don’t know much about what’s on offer there.

I had never, for example, heard of our destination, T&T Supermarket, even though it apparently has some TTC-able branches, and is wonderful. WONDERFUL.

It’s a grocery store–big parking lot, buggies, checkout lanes, etc. But it’s also a market–various stands of prepared foods, pushing crowds and entire families shopping together, and the free samples are distributed far and wide by cheerful hawkers who yell at you (well, me) to come over to try some soy milk/dumplings/fried scallops. I was excited about the prepared food section because it reminded of Japan, with all the cute complete cheap dinners in plastic boxes. I think it was a pan-Asian market even though it was in a Chinese area, too, because I recognized some salmon teryaki and those triangular nori-wrapped rice cakes I forget the name of. Yum, everything.

Too bad I didn’t really need any of that stuff and was full of cake, but even the stuff I wasn’t buying was fun to look at: Chinese baked goods, aka, manna; giant rice-cakes that *popped* out of a rice-cake making machine (tragically, the picture didn’t turn out); kimchee in tetra paks, and all kinds of vegetables I don’t know how to cook with:

This would be intrepid M, with duriands. The sign, if you can’t read it, says, “Handle duriands carefully to avoid injury.”

Since I didn’t need so many things and was feeling somewhat restrained for once (could be all the cake), I didn’t buy much. But the Chinese eggplants I bought were excellent in stirfry, the lettuce was…well, standard lettuce, that apples were huge and tasty (though I dropped one on the floor and it got all bruised…we can’t really blame the apple, can we?); the dried mushrooms I haven’t tried yet and the sweet potato candy that I ripped into in the parking lot was…odd. But I eventually found someone who did like them to give the rest of the package to (I have another, unopened package–coming soon to a household near you!)

Also, all the little samples I tried were awesome, except the soy milk (I don’t like soy milk, but it’s so healthy that I keep trying). And the prices were super cheap and if you were more ambitious and organized like my shopping companion Z, you could get the makings of some truly fantastic food. And no one gave me a hard time for bouncing off people in the aisles, or clogging the produce section taking pictures, or not knowing which line to stand in. It was a friendly happy place full of delicious.

I later heard this place has been bought by Metro a chain that had a little cred in Quebec, but quickly spent it all in Ontario and now just annoys me (crunchy bitter raspberries the other day!!) So that can’t be good. I’m going to try to find the local one before all the awesome falls apart.

And if we’re lost together
RR

TTC Hand Stories

1) A middle-aged gentleman in a windbreaker in a corporate-branded windbreaker and earbuds sits down in the single seat ahead of me on the streetcar. I am facing forward, the way the seat goes, but he faces sideways, into the aisle. I am always startled by older people with earbuds, because my parents are my reference point for all older people, and they would no more stick appliances in their ears than in their noses. But I am reading, looking out the window, reading, not paying attention to this man…until he begins to take things out of a plastic bag. Then I have to look, in case he’s got a book and I need to read the spine, or a snack and I need to see if it looks appetizing, or…or…*anything interesting at all* (I don’t get out much; I am your streetcar worst nightmare). Whatever it is, there are several, each in an individual cellophane packet. I peer through the cello but can’t really understand what the items are–some sort of crumpled while loops of fabric. I look harder and harder until the man turns to meet my gaze and I turn back to the window, feeling like the giantest weirdo on the TTC for staring with such intensity at the poor man’s craft materials or whatever. I don’t look at him again until we get off the car, when I realize the man is gripping the pole with a hand cloaked in a thin tight white glove. His other hand is bare–yes, I looked–I don’t know what he did with the other gloves. He gets off without looking at me again, earbuds and windbreaker and Michael-Jackson glove. Another thing my parents would never do.

2) A beautiful young woman in a sleek black business suit sits on the Yonge line southbound, eating a bag of Cheetos. Look closer: it’s not *quite* a business suit. The blazer’s got a zipper that goes up to the throat, and her high spike heels are on bare feet rubbed popped-blister raw. Look closer: her hair is a tumble of beer-blond curls that have clearly required a heat-styling implement, but now they’ve started to unscrew, some rounder than others, some nearly perfectly vertical. And closer: not quite a young woman; behind her expensive narrow red glasses frames this is a university student with a posh summer job–maybe even a high-schooler. Her knees are knobby and crossed wide. She is eating the Cheetos at a great rate, as if someone will get on at a predetermined stop and take them from her. It is not a single-serving bag. Despite all of the above, as close as you can look, she is still beautiful. She eats the last cheese-twist and, with even more urgency, inserts her frost-pink manicured nails into her mouth, on at a time, and sucks the electric orange dust from the creases before she dares brush them against her cheap black suit. She finishes the tenth nail just as we arrive at Union and, crumpling the bag in her fist, she darts off.

Mutiny, I promise you
RR