June 26th, 2011
On reading and riots
Last week, a young woman who’d been photographed taking part in the Stanley Cup riots posted an online apology in which she first claimed to take responsibility for her actions, and then indignantly outlined the reasons why blame cast her way was disproportionate: mob mentality, that she’d only committed theft and not arson, the theft was for souvenir purposes, she’d been drunk–nice try, works for rapists– and besides, the whole thing was completely out of character. (I think she may have since had some PR consulting, however. The indignant bits of the post have been removed, and she now reads as genuinely sorry.)
As I read the post last week though, I thought about how much this young woman still had to learn about atonement. That perhaps she was victim of a culture that fools us into thinking public apology trumps being good in the first place. I thought of her remarkable sense of entitlement, how her fierce impression of who she was did not seem at all changed by what she had done. And if she was right, I thought, that her actions that night had indeed been completely out of character, then that was only because she didn’t have any character.
Character, according to Joan Didion (in “On Self-Respect”): “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.”
I thought about the mob mentality which the girl claimed had swept her right up, and I sort of understood it. Though you’ve got to wonder about the kind of person who gets swept up in a mob in the first place. These are the kinds of people who think being alive is a spectator sport.
And I thought about how much I dislike the part of church services where a minister speaks, and the congregation responds in unison. How even fans at a baseball game singing the national anthem makes me cringe a bit, because in circumstances like this, we’re speaking automatically, not thinking about anything we are saying. It’s a different kind of mob mentality, and one that is benign, but then I start thinking about the Nuremburg Rally, like it’s all a slippery slope. On the rare occasions when I happen to be in a church, I don’t respond when called on. I listen instead. And the droning sound of everyone’s voices is always a little bit terrifying.
Naturally, I am being melodramatic, but I was also thinking about reading. About how reading can be a communal experience, how it’s an exchange between writer and reader, but mostly how the latter retains his individuality. The power of the reader to regard the text with a discerning eye, and to re-read so the text changes as he does. I’m thinking about how reading is the opposite of mob mentality, and that armed with critical skills to apply to the world, a reader is unlikely to be swept away by any such thing.
There are arguments against this, of course. Someone will always mention Mao’s Little Red Book. But I’m still thinking that to read well is to learn to reside inside one’s own head, and I think there’s such tremendous value in that.
May 10th, 2011
Making progress
I am making no progress with my to-be-read shelf, mostly because I keep buying new books and getting others from the library. (For example, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, which I’m going to be reading shortly). While there are books on the shelf that have been sitting there for years, and that I have every intention of reading but just haven’t had the inclination to do so. (And please do not mention all the unread (to me) books that my husband has read, and have therefore left the shelf and blended into our collection, fooling me into think I have less unread than I really do).
So I have alphabetized these books, and will go through them one by one, so please do forgive me if my reading tastes seem a bit random and/or alphabetical in the coming weeks. It is my pleasure that Caroline Adderson’s Pleased to Meet You is at the front of the pack, mostly because I’ve been saving it anyway as a treat. And that Rachel Cusk’s latest novel follows not too far along. And if I stay on track, I may finally read Great Expectations and Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney, or else I’ll just give up on books entirely out of fear of being conquered by D.
May 9th, 2011
The connection between reading and real estate
“If there was anything wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library–no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage; no broken sets of Dostoevski and George Eliot; no Galsworthy, even; no Barrie and no Bennett. This was the chief concern of the Village Council during Marcie’s term. The library partisans were mostly newcomers to the village; the opposition whip was Mrs. Selfredge… She took the position that a library belonged in that category of public service that might make Shady Hill attractive to a development. This was not blind prejudice. Carsen Park, the next village, had let a development inside its boundaries, with disastrous results to the people already living there. Their taxes had been doubled, their schools had been ruined. That there was any connection between reading and real estate was disputed by the partisans of the library, until a horrible murder–three murders, in fact–took place in one of the cheese-box houses in the Carsen Park development, and the library project was buried with its victims.” –John Cheever, from “The Trouble with Marcie Flint”
April 28th, 2011
Royal Wedding Tea Caddy
My mom is nice because even though I refuse to lend her my books (and actually, I refuse to lend my books to anybody), she’d give me anything of hers that I wanted. On this weekend, the anything of hers I wanted was the Royal Wedding tea caddy that her friend had brought her back from England. I am not sure why I didn’t bring Royal Wedding tat back from England myself– I don’t think we ventured into shops that much except for bookshops, and if I’m not mistaken, the tat wasn’t out in full force two months ago anyway. But it did get to be a problem as the big day got closer and closer, and I found myself without a Royal Wedding commemorative anything. And all the Royal Wedding tea towels are are sold out. India Knight has reported bunting shortages all over London. This is terrible! I hardly need this, in addition to the stress of needing to learn to bake battenberg cake by Saturday afternoon, which is when my Royal Wedding Tea party begins (a bit after the fact, I know, but the wedding was never the point anyway. The cake was). So thank goodness for my mom, and for my Royal Wedding tea caddy. Which of course I will cherish now for all the rest of my days.
April 12th, 2011
How to woo a Barbara Pym heroine
I am exhausted from being constantly ridiculously overwrought, so here’s a fun diversion, totally stolen from 5 Dates for the Jane Austen Superfan (via Booksin140). How do you woo a Barbara Pym heroine? It’s no simple task, because spinsters are spinsters for having kept their standards high, and nobody is more romantic. The surefire way is to become a curate, of course, but here are five less dramatic suggestions.
1) Take her to church! High or low, mass or evensong. Going over to Rome and incense. I actually understand nothing about any of this, but that I’ve read and loved each of Barbara Pym’s books anyway is a testament to her wide appeal. At church, your heroine will encounter someone distasteful, either for being sluttish and ostentatious, or mousy and pious, and afterwards (over a nice hot drink) she will regale you with amusing stories about this woman. Someone will see the two of you in deep conversation, sparking inevitable rumours (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire!).
2) Accompany her to the jumble sale, and buy her a special piece of bric-a-brac, supporting foreign missionaries or distressed gentlewomen in the process. At the very least, you’ll get a cup of tea. And then at church in days ahead, you and she can talk about what dress the Vicar’s sister is sporting, and how she must have removed it from the jumble for her own personal use.
3) Arrive at her office (at the Society of Archaeologists) and take her out for lunch at a cafeteria. She will be slightly uncomfortable eating lunch from a tray, but she will try not to show it. She is nothing if not stoic. Listen to her talk of office politics, and who got fired for failure to make a proper cup of tea. Someone will be angry at her for having not sent around her tin of biscuits. And you will wonder how an Oxford grad with an endless capacity for quoted poetry works as an assistant in an office (however scholarly), and you’ll be pleased to liberate her from this life when you make an honest woman of her.
4) Take her to the library, and sit across the table in the reading room. Fall in love to the whispery din, to the scratch-scratch of pencils, and turn of ancient pages. In this atmosphere of restraint, emotions will become heated, and love will surely bloom.
5) Don’t say a word when you encounter the caterpillar in her cauliflower cheese. Ever-discreetly, set it aside, and proceed with your conversation.
March 17th, 2011
Irma Voth, and that is so not my colour
Bizarrely, during the summer of 2008, I realized that I had dresses that perfectly matched the covers of two Miriam Toews’ novels: here is my Flying Troutmans dress, and here I am suited up for Summer of My Amazing Luck. So I’ve been curious about the look of Toews’ upcoming novel Irma Voth, and just how it would fit into my wardrobe (which now is mostly jeans and black t-shirts, plus the two other dresses, as I’ve been too fat to wear them the last two years. I think they fit again, but I also think I need to go shopping).
And though I like the cover, the fact is that it really won’t look good on me– blue is so not my colour. I have a feeling that my string of Miriam Toews dresses may have finally come to an end.
March 8th, 2011
Now I’m dying to know what stroller she chose…
“Life with small children means you can’t be too picky or precious about how you read. I need solitude and silence to write but can read anywhere. My main concern, when buying a stroller, was finding one I could manoeuvre with one hand, so that I was able to push the sleeping baby and hold a book at the same time.” –Maggie O’Farrell, on mixing reading with domestic drudgery (which is the story of my happy life, incidentally).
February 15th, 2011
More on the motherhood narrative
Lately, reading Susan Olding’s book Pathologies (and in particular, her essays about infertility and her daughter’s adoption) and Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (as recommended by Alison Pick), I was struck by how various is the motherhood narrative. And yet the universality of these stories– these women, with their extraordinary experiences of motherhood, managed to articulate so much that I’ve only been gesturing toward since I became pregnant two and a half years ago. Partly because the writing here is so remarkable. This might also be because I’m self-absorbed, and project myself onto everything. But still, how these stories resonated, and also taught me new things about the motherhood experience, added the possibility of additional dimensions to my journey.
I also can’t help thinking about how I would critique Diehl’s memoir if it were a novel– during most of her daughter’s brief life in the NICU, Diehl was suffering from a variety of post-birth complications and hardly saw her before she died. In a stupid workshop, I would insist on moments of connections, on the impossibility of these parallel storylines (mother and baby both in physical trauma), it doesn’t unfold like a story (but then, from what I’ve heard, death rarely does). We have to bend life a certain way to make it work in fiction, but real life doesn’t bend, does it. And how Diehl makes something so beautiful of it still, the unbendingness of real life. There is such generosity in her story, such grace, and though I’ve sobbed off and on today as I’ve read her book, so often I’ve been crying because of the joy.
