May 16th, 2011
On the resistance: books, e-books and the future
Natalee Caple anticipates my reaction to her essay “Resisting borders”, noting that to be the e-book doubter that I am, I am therefore “an unforgivable elitist who really fears becoming antiquated and so losing [my] bragging rights”. And I’m not sure about that, putting my doubting more down to me being the kind of person who carried a Sony Sports Walkman until 2002, and only stopped buying VHS a couple of years ago. But yes, it’s also about my love of books, and while I am as concerned as Caple about current threats to literary culture, I remain unconvinced that e-books are the answer to our prayers and not just cause to say another one.
First, because if we’re going to talk about “elitist” (and let’s face it, I don’t want to. As soon as anyone uses the word “hegemonic”, I start tuning out. I didn’t do that well in grad school), I’m not sure books are the culprit. Sure, e-books are accessible to writers, but in order for somebody to read one, they have to spend a couple of hundred dollars on an electronic device (that has potential for bugs in hardware and software, is going to end up obsolete in a matter of months, then live forever more in a landfill, leaking toxins into the ground). A book, on the other hand, is accessible to anybody for has the good fortune of literacy and a couple of bucks. Plus, books can live long, long second-hand lives that the e-book will only ever dream about.
For writers, on the other hand, I am not entirely convinced I want publishing to be quite so accessible. In “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf wasn’t writing about publishing. She was writing about what a woman with the appropriate brains and talent requires to actually get down and write, and she certainly wasn’t prescribing the writing life for everyone. (You want an elitist? Introducing Virginia Woolf. I think she’d also fear being tarred as a supporter of “midlists” out of disdain for anything “mid.”) Yes, traditional publishing structures have kept diverse voices from telling their stories, and mechanisms have to be in place for this to keep changing, but I do value traditional structures for keeping truly terrible writing at home in the drawer where it belongs. My strong feelings in this area come from an experience I had which involved me having to read ten self-published novels which were so unbearably, unequivocally awful. And whose writers were so unbelievably arrogant that they believed they could publish a book even though they evidently had never read one, and certainly had no idea how to use the materials a book is constructed of (like plot, character, words, grammar, layout, etc.). This kind of access is good for nobody (and enables self-deluded would-be writers to waste extortionate amounts of money). Natalee Caple has a noble dream of re-inventing democracy, and that’s fair enough, but I wonder if she’d have a different point of view had she had to have read those ten books I did.
I am however (and so would be Virginia) fully on board with Natalee Caple’s plea for the midlists, that publishers’ drives for best-sellerdom does literature a disservice. That Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind is out of print, for example, is ridiculous and tragic, but at least I found a second-hand copy that will now live forevermore on my bookshelf. Would I have had such fortune if Play the Monster… had been an e-book, however? If Play the Monster… had been an e-book, wouldn’t it have been published in a format that no device would be able to read now? (I always find myself thinking of the laserdisc at times like these).
Natalee Caple is so right, right, right in her enthusiasm, in her hypothoses about technology breaking down borders, and in her faith in the future of books in general. It’s not all about us and them though, or this and that, or about throwing out babies or bathwater. (It also isn’t about how the average reader is on Twitter, because most people really aren’t on Twitter. Broadly speaking, this is a fact.) But it’s about treading ambitiously (as Natalee is doing), and carefully (as I am inclined to do), breaking down the right borders and ensuring that the way forward will only make our literature better.
March 6th, 2011
Below stairs
My Anglophilia is really curious when you consider that if I’d lived in England back when times were really merrie, I would have worked six days a week in a cotton mill and my husband would have been killed in a coalmine, because truly, this is the stock we descend from. If I was in a Barbara Pym novel, I would probably be the charwoman. Virgina Woolf would have kept me safely below-stairs. Class is such a funny thing, easy to overlook when we’re reading Rachel Cusk back home in Canada, but while reading her during the few days we spent in Windsor, I realized that I’m not the kind of woman Rachel Cusk writes about at all. I have never seen such well-dressed women as those I saw pushing expensive prams up and down Windsor’s cobblestone streets, whose accents were so cultivated I could scarcely understand them, which didn’t matter because they weren’t talking to me anyway. These women made me terribly ashamed of my shoes, perhaps for good reason.
Nevertheless, it is my great fortune to be a Canadian married to an Englishman, because it means my English indulgences also fulfill familial obligation, but moreover that said family puts us up in the spare-room and entertains the baby. It means that I get to call myself middle-class, and that Kate Middleton is also middle-class, even though her parents are millionaires and she has nice shoes. It means that I can go rural-England crazy again (too much Midsomer Murders) and start lusting after a floral-printed garden spade with matching Wellington boots. I start raiding farm shops for delectable sausage. It is a good thing we get to come home from England, because I’m so annoying when I’m there, and my husband would probably divorce me if we stayed too long.
Last week, I bought a gorgeous new string of bunting from a woman who has survived the 
recession by going into the bunting biz. It seems the English are stringing a lot of the stuff these days, while stiffening their upper lips, and it’s kind of admirable. So many empty store-fronts– it’s devastating, really, in a way we barely fathom over here. And maybe it’s just spring time, but things do seem to be beginning to make a turn for the better. The tulips are up, and there are buds on the trees. Here, there is just fresh snow.
We had the most wonderful trip. I bought all kinds of books, but managed to read almost all of them en route, so it’s like I didn’t buy any books at all (very frugal). Stay tuned for an upcoming post about our literary escapades. In fact, stay tuned for upcoming posts galore, but only about our trip, because I can’t think of anything else right now. Real life will come back quickly, I’m sure, but we’re still not finished our washing, I’m still not finished reading my new English books, and there is a bar of Dairy Milk still to be devoured (but not much longer).
December 20th, 2010
“A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf” by Bronwen Wallace
This started out as a simple poem
for Virginia Woolf you know the kind
we women writers write these days
in our own rooms
on our own time
a salute a gesture of friendship
a psychological debt
paid off
I wanted it simple
and perfect round
hard as an
egg I thought
only once I’d said egg
I thought of the smell
of bacon grease and dirty frying-pans
and whether there were enough for breakfast
I couldn’t help it
I wanted the poem to be carefree and easy
like children playing in the snow
I didn’t mean to mention
the price of snowsuits or
how even on the most expensive ones
the zippers always snag
just when you’re late for work
and trying to get the children
off to school on time
a straightforward poem
for Virginia Woolf that’s all
I wanted really
not something tangled in
domestic life the way
Jane Austen’s novels tangled
with her knitting her embroidery
whatever it was she hid them under
I didn’t mean to go into all that
didn’t intend to get confessional
and tell you how
every time I read a good poem
by a woman writer I’m always peeking
behind it trying to see
if she’s still married
or has a lover at least
wanted to know what she did
with her kids while she wrote it
or whether she had any
and if she didn’t if she’d chosen
not to or if she did did she
choose and why I didn’t mean
to bother with that
and I certainly wasn’t going
to tell you about the time
my best friend was sick in intensive care
and I went down to see her
but they wouldn’t let me in
because I wasn’t her husband
or her father her mother
I wasn’t family
I was just her friend
and the friendship of women
wasn’t mentioned
in hospital policy
or how I went out and kicked
a dent in the fender of my car
and sat there crying because
if she died I wouldn’t be able
to tell her how much I loved her
(though she didn’t and we laugh
about it now) but that’s what got me
started I suppose wanting to write
a gesture of friendship
for a woman for a woman writer
for Virginia Woolf
and thinking I could do it
easily separating the words
from the lives they come from
that’s what a good poem should do
after all and I wasn’t going to make excuses
for being a woman blaming years of silence
for leaving us
so much to say
This started out as a simple poem
for Virginia Woolf
it wasn’t going to mention history
or choices or women’s lives
the complexities of women’s friendships
or the countless gritty details
of an ordinary woman’s life
that never appear in poems at all
yet even as I write these words
those ordinary details intervene
between the poem I meant to write
and this one where the delicate faces
of my children faces of friends
of women I have never even seen
glow on the blank pages
and deeper than any silence
press around me
waiting their turn
by Bronwen Wallace
October 19th, 2010
Notables: Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf
May/June 2005 was certainly an exciting time in the history of the universe– Penguin Books had just turned 70, and I was about to get married. These two occasions colliding one day on Oxford Street in London where I happened to be shopping for a wedding dress, and had stopped into a Waterstones where Priscilla Presley was scheduled to be appearing. Though I was devastated to discover that we’d shown up for Priscilla precisely one day late, so I never got to see her promoting her new book. Instead, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting, a gorgeous little volume (for 1 pound fifty!) that had been published as part of Penguin’s birthday celebration.
So it’s not an especially rare book, or an old one, but it’s notable to me. It contains six examples of Woolf’s essays and short fiction, which blur the lines between the two particularly. And to be honest, I would have had an impossible time ever cracking this book and getting through its 56 page had I a month later not happened to sign up for a course in Woolf’s essays and short fiction at UofT where I was to begin graduate studies in September. Woolf’s essays and short fiction meaning nothing to me previously– I’d bought the book because I liked the idea of Woolf more than I really understood her work, and I’d signed up for the course because it was the only Woolf-course available.
My performance in the course was positively dismal, and if you never see me in graduate school again (which, I assure you, you won’t!), the challenges I faced in that course are all the reasons why. If by challenges, of course, you mean the brick wall I kept banging my head against in an attempt to understand academic theory, which, oddly enough, no one had ever mentioned to me during my undergraduate career, or just my efforts to get along in grad school life in general, which met with very poor results. Grad school taught me that I’m really not cut out for grad school, BUT, I learned so very much along the way. Like how to read Virginia Woolf, and that changed everything.
Because I found that her essays and short fiction really are the key to understanding her larger projects, and the foundations behind them. From reading her book reviews, and her Common Reader essays, and her short stories, I found myself positively immersed in her work, and my general academic stupidity aside, I became fluent in Woolf. I understand Woolfian arguments now, and how they turn and wobble, and the straight path was never her intention, so if you get confused reading Virginia Woolf, it’s because you’re supposed to.
And I couldn’t have learned any of this all on my own– if I’d taken a break from wedding planning during that day to read Street Haunting as I was swept along with the Oxford Street tide, I would have found myself baffled and disappointed. I would have read all that weirdness and thought the problem was me. I was sorely in need of a little guidance to illuminate just what was going on, and never mind that that guidance was just showing me the door out of academia, but en route, oh what I learned as I shuffled to the exit.
I learned to read Virginia Woolf– because there’s a knack to it, of course. It’s hard and weird, but infinitely rewarding, and the universe is a more mesmerizing place for it. I could pick up a copy of Street Haunting now and follow its meanderings for hours.
So I like this book because it’s a souvenir, and also because I learned to read Virginia Woolf is another way of saying I have lived.
August 23rd, 2010
A Room of One’s Own
In March, I spent $130 signing up for ten yoga classes, of which I’ve gone to two, and my pass expires this week. Which is good actually, because then I get to feel less bad about the money that’s gone to waste. I’m not typically a quitter, or one who doesn’t follow through, but when I signed up for yoga class, thinking it would give me a fine escape from the stay-at-home nature of stay-at-home-motherhood, I really had the wrong idea. After a long day alone with a pre-verbal midget, the last thing I need is to be silent in a room of levitating hipsters. It is also distinctly possible that I just picked the wrong yoga studio, but that is another story.
What the story is, however, is that it turned out I didn’t need that much push to get out of the house after all. Yes, indeed, I could probably do with more exercise, but I’ve also joined a fabulous book club, take part in an incredible writers group, and do some work for a charity’s board, and that takes care of quite a few evenings each month. And I enjoy these evenings out so completely, their social nature in particular, because it turns out what I need at the end of the day is company and conversation, but I didn’t know that in March.
Similarly, I have abandoned my garret. Tragic, I know, that the garret is forced to make do without me, and I find myself garret-less. And yes, the garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area, and now it’s packed to the sloped ceiling with newborn baby gear (which, yes, we haven’t gotten rid of. Though it won’t be put back into use for a very long time), but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.
But it turns out that after a day at home alone with a young child, spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects. I’ve contemplated moving back upstairs, but this arrangement seems to be working, and so my desk in the garret sits terribly empty, a magnet for layer upon layer of dust.
One of the best things I own is my A Room of One’s Own tea towel, which was a gift from my friend Paul. Due to its literary nature, it used to hang in our library, before the library became Harriet’s room. Since then, the tea towel has been homeless, and I’ve wondered where to put it, no longer actually having a room of my own (or rather, now that my room of my own is usually empty. Which would make hanging the tea towel there particularly sad).
Last night I finally hung it up in the living room, on the last bare spot left on our increasingly riotous walls. True, this room isn’t one of my own, but I’ve decided to regard Woolf’s idea as a metaphor. This idea underlined by Rachel Cusk’s suggestion that perhaps the greatness and distinction of women’s writing came from women not having rooms of their own, from their novels being composed amidst the hustle and bustle of family life.
Perhaps she’s right, or maybe that only works for some people, and I’ve no doubt my mind and my location will be changing one of these days, but having the tea towel up again, I feel that I’ve arrived somehow. Or that I’m home again, settled, and that it’s not so much a room of my own that I need as much as simply room.
*I guess this is my how NOT to be alone post. I never claimed to be consistant.
December 12th, 2009
A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women’s writing
Rachel Cusk’s “Shakespeare’s Daughters” is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women’s writing. I’ve just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I’ve also copied some excerpts below:
“The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present’s frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about “the feelings of women”. Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female “reality” is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation….
It may be, then, that the room of one’s own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of “masculine values”. The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of “property” that is at base unrelated to female nature….
Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an “instrument of mystification” precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and “mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.”
November 19th, 2009
On Longing: Bugs and the Victorians
After reading this review in the LRB, I am dying to read Bugs and the Victorians. My own interest in literary entomology (because believe it or not, I’ve got one!) arose via Virginia Woolf, who wrote about bugs a lot, and also wrote a wonderful fictionalized biographical sketch of Eleanor Ormerod in The First Common Reader. Ormerod was Britain’s foremost entomologist during the late 19th century, which was a very important kind of scientist to be at that time, and that she was a woman is only one of the many remarkable things about her. She’s mentioned in the LRB review, along with various surprising ways the study of insects influenced Victorian society.
Anyway, the book also happens to be $55, so I don’t imagine I’ll be reading it anytime soon.
January 21st, 2009
A terrifying prospect
Tonight, after I do five thousand other things, I will begin to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and I must admit to finding said prospect a little bit terrifying. Woolf is pretty intimidating at the best of times, and the premise of this book makes me particularly uneasy in its oddness. I’ve been assured by many, however, that Orlando is readable, accessible, and upon reading the Woolf’s preface, I’ve detected an ounce of humour. We shall see how this proceeds, but I’m crossing my digits that all goes well.
October 6th, 2006
The Creation
I suppose my interest in scientific literature had something to do with my husband’s B.Sc., but I mark the start of its development with the story “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf, from The Common Reader Vol. 1.. “Miss Ormerod” was 19th Century British entomologist Eleanor Ormerod and Woolf’s fictionalized biography demonstrated to me how well a passion for science translates into good literature. Fortuitously, I was signed up for a course called “Literature and the Environment” the next term, and I went on to read such works as Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Servants of the Map, and last summer I read The Selfish Gene and Silent Spring. Last night I finished reading The Creation* by Edward O Wilson and it’s my favourite piece of SciLit yet.
The Creation is written as a letter to Southern Baptist Preacher, pleading not for common ground, but for a common cause: The Stewardship of Creation. The situation is dire, Wilson admits in gorgeous prose, but it is not too late, and he goes on to state his case in chapters including “Ascending to Nature”, “Exploration of a Little-Known Planet”, “How to Learn Biology and How to Teach it”, “How to Raise a Naturalist” and finally, “An Alliance for Life”.
Like Ormerod, Wilson is an entomologist and magnifies the amazing world of insects, this “microwilderness”. All living ants (there may be 10 thousand trillion) weigh as much as the Earth’s population of human beings. That there are more bacteria cells in our bodies than our own cells, and by some perspectives we could be seen as solely their vessals. He writes, “Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behaviour, life cycle, and environmental role, and a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets. Nothing of that kind could be said for each proton or hydrogen atom. That, in a nutshell Pastor, is the compelling moral argument from science for saving Creation”. (123)
*Wilson is listed as “E Wilson” on the amazon listing, which means he is not linked to his myriad other works, which appear as authored by “Edward O Wilson”
October 19th, 2005
Woolfian
It may have become clear that I since I’ve started my masters, I have become obsessed with Virginia Woolf. This shows no sign of letting up and I keeping peppering every day conversation with, “Well, Virginia says…”. Because she said everything. She also wrote a wonderful essay in a collection called “Lives of the Obscure” in her First Common Reader called “Miss Ormerod”. I read it the other day, and really enjoyed it- a very sprightly, creative take on character-driven historical fiction. It reminded me of my new friend Lindsay’s “Sky- A Three Letter Prayer” novel-in-verse about Amerlia Earhart, and of what drove me to write my Mitford poem, and a poem I am currently writing based upon a woman in Margaret MacMillan’s “Women of the Raj.” Anyway, “Miss Ormerod” is a wonderful essay and Eleanor Ormerod is begging for an updated biography. You can learn about her here or thru Woolf’s bio. She was an foremost entomologist in Britain during the late 19th century, a lecturer who introduced entomology as a study, the first woman fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and the first woman to receive an Hon. LLB from the University of Edinburgh. In other Woolf news. I read her Craftsmanshipessay yesterday, and it was fascinating look at the power of words and the challenge of writing.
On Tristram Shandy and a new film. That book has been mentioned around me near daily for the past month or so, and I guess I should read it. (Virginia would agree). Zoe Williams talks art. Russell Smith on the arts. Maud Newton on marginalia.
