Heartbreaking…

I’m midway through Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and even though the two have very little to do with each other in style or subject matter, it reminds me of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in an odd way (I haven’t read McCourt’s other memoirs).

I read Angela’s Ashes in high school, a little while before the movie came out. And I thought it was a beautiful, sad, funny book. Like most people who enjoyed it, I was looking forward to the movie. But I found that, because it lacked the charm and wit of the immediate narrative voice, the really tragic parts of the book became overwhelming. In other words, when it wasn’t McCourt telling us, the kind of life shown in the movie was just shitty without also being familiar and in some ways comforting.

And I think this is what Eggers’ book, turned into a movie, would be like. That it’s only the narrative voice which is keeping the story from being way too depressing (and I like me a depressing story…Steinbeck and Conrad are absolute all time favourites). Which is odd, because I’m also finding the narrator sort of annoying, as my friend suggested I might. I had just gotten to the point that I thought it was actually Eggers’ style I didn’t like when a passage reminded me of the space between the narrator and author, and I think now / again that I’m really enjoying it.

In a sad way, of course.

Catching Up

So, time to finally talk about all the things I’ve been up to since the move.

I had mentioned reading The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb.  It was pretty good.  Sometimes, thematically, maybe a bit heavy-handed, and it seemed overlong to me…like he just wasn’t sure where to end it and just kept on thinking of things to add. One reading friend has agreed with this assessment; another wrote me and started talking about chaos theory and all kinds of things that would imply it was intentional…I’ll have to think on it.

Then I read David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays. And Wallace really, really shines. I’ve been working off and on on Infinite Jest, and these essays have all of the things that make me so happy when I’m reading that book — great thought, great emotion, great humour, great writing. I can’t say enough. Unequivocal about its excellence. Read the footnotes, they’re the best part.

My husband got me hooked on Dexter, with Michael C. Hall, and naturally, I picked up the books.  Darkly Dreaming and Dearly Devoted Dexters were both quite enjoyable…the third one, Dexter in the Dark, went in a different direction than the rest of the series, and I don’t think it was successful. Dexter by Design, #4, came out in September, and the good old Dexter’s back, although Jeff Lindsay doesn’t ignore themes and issues introduced in Dexter in the Dark. It’s odd, because I’m not usually a genre fiction reader. But character is really my thing, and Dexter is one of the most original to be created in a long while.

World According to Garp. I was pretty sure I wasn’t big on Irving. I didn’t know much about him or his work, and a few years ago a friend insisted I read Prayer for Owen Meany. So disappointed by the ending being so…ending-y. So tidy. That’s not my thing. But another, newer friend insisted I read The World According to Garp, so I tried my best to give it a fair reading. And I liked it better. Still too tidy for me. But it’s sort of charming that Irving has a knack for coming up with bizarre situations that also ring true to life. I kept on finding myself thinking of elements of the story as though they were anecdotes I knew from…somewhere. Hasn’t changed my mind about him for my own taste, but I see a little better what’s appealing to all these other folks.

The same friend who loaned me Garp kept loaning me other books, and two were graphic novels. First, Maus. Very effective and affecting. As it’s based on a personal account,  I was struck by how deliberately the tension escalates…you simultaneously know what’s coming and hope it doesn’t.  What made me think the most, though, was the conclusion. It seemed so sudden. Not for me to talk about anyone’s relationship with his father, but it left me feeling more sad than the huge horrible tragedy…I could be thinking about it all wrong, but it made me wonder, is that all his father was to him? This story? Or was that all that was left of his father? I don’t know…still pondering.

Then, I was told to read A Short History of Violence. Because I’d like it better than the movie, which I thought chose the least interesting elements of its story to develop. And it’s true…while the basics of the story are the same, the book was a lot more interesting, if not really my kind of story.

Two on the Falls: a historical novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, and Catherine Gildiner’s second memoir , After the Falls.   Having been through a phase growing up when I loved reading about the Falls’ history, especially Red Hill, Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel was intriguing to me. But it’s definitely a first novel–uneven, especially in terms of pacing. While much of the book seemed (to me) slow and predictable, the conclusion (while also predictable) was quite rushed; and considering how much time is spent throughout the novel emphasizing everything that’s happening and all sorts of detail, I had to agree with my friend that it leaves a lot of (I think unintentionally) unanswered questions. (And P.S.: since I’m finding some reviewers don’t realize this,  the newspaper articles and photographs featured in the book…fictional).

I absolutely loved Catherine Gildiner’s first memoir, Too Close to the Falls, and the 2nd, After the Falls, was quite a bit different in tone but still just as good.

A non-fiction book about historic and discontinued candys called Candy Freak, by Steve Almond. Yes, Steve Almond.

Annie Proulx’s first novel, Postcards. Loved it. Love her work. (I know I’m speeding up, but I’ve been writing this for an hour and a half, now…)

Bill Maher’s New Rules. Funny as the show.

I was, finally, gifted Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Told the giver saw it and was reminded of me (and that he was fairly sure it was a compliment). Lots of fun as long as one doesn’t go in expecting a lot.

And now I’m working on Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Had heard very good things about What is the What, which I still haven’t read, and was even more impressed by the foreword he wrote to my pbk. ed. of Infinite Jest. I’m just finished with all the smart opening material,  ready to start the meat of the book, and very excited.

I’m singing in choir and solo, listening to the Beatles remasters, and will be up for nomination as a member of the board of the local Arts Council on Thursday. Happy.

Guilty post

I feel incredibly guilty for not having posted anything in a while. I’ve still been reading, and have lots to say, but it will have to continue to wait ;  the new house is still not unpacked. But I came across this tidbit today.

From a letter from Christopher Pratt’s mother to her son:

“Christopher,

…none of this being an artist will come easily for you. You take it all too seriously. Being an artist is no more important or special than being a businessman or a carpenter…a nurse, a doctor, or a fisherman. It’s just another thing that people do. Like everything, some do it better than others, and you will be one of them…but life is more important than art…always remember that. And don’t talk about ‘art’ all the time.”

So, I did it. I did exactly what one shouldn’t do three weeks before one is moving into one’s first, 700 sq. ft home, and bought another box of books. The discount book place in town was having a 50% off sale on all their (fairly) new fiction, so I spent $75 and cleared a lot off my to buy/read list. Probably 20 books or so, I lost track.

This weekend I’m opening the art gallery where I’ve worked in years past, which is a very difficult job that requires keys, a passcode, and 8 spare hours to…do whatever I want while the other staff actually run the place (that’s okay, for 4 years I was in the other position, so…).

Anyway, especially now that I find the wireless connection unavailable, my movies (the last episode of Top Gear, season 7, and Pan’s Labyrinth), blogging (here and at thephallus), and reading become much more significant.

I’ve decided to put away Infinite Jest for the last weeks of summer. I was 200 pages ahead at the start of Infinite Summer, and now am horribly, horribly behind. It will be a solitary, long-term endeavor; as much as I enjoyed it while reading, it’s a daunting prospect.

So I figured I’d leave all the old books away and read my new buys for these last 3 weeks. The first, 723 contemporary (and from my other postings, you should know that’s not usual for me) pages, is perfect for a couple days of reading: The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb. I hadn’t heard of him before, but this book came across my desk. The book looked interesting, so I read the first bit. That was good, so I added it to my to-read list. Then, there it was on the shelf at Book Depot.

I’m about 100 pages in, and it is very good. No complaints yet, other than the fact that whenever a writer creates an alter-ego in a book, it always seems to be an English teacher.

More later.

A Public Tragedy

A very good production, one of the best plays, and one of the worst audiences I’ve ever been in.

But even two phones ringing, people flashing lights, and lots of coughs and people coming and going couldn’t distract from Shakespeare’s excellent public tragedy, Julius Caesar.

A tragedy about the downfall of ambition and the horrors of the mob. But one that depends on personal relationships: Caesar and Calpurnia, Caesar and Brutus, Brutus and Portia (a strong character and strong actor, robbed by how few scenes she’s in and by the phone ringing throughout the main one), Brutus and Cassius.

And what a Brutus and Cassius! Ben Carlson and Tom Rooney (last year’s Hamlet and Horatio) broke my heart each time they spoke. Noble and troubled, lean and hungry. “You have done that you should be sorry for!”

The production was quite good, largely on the strength of the performances. It does seem, to a slight extent, that this year’s productions have traded emotional impact for visual impact; but very good nonetheless.

Plays read and seen

I’ve recently been thinking about the medium of theatre, and how some plays are more successful read than seen, or seen than read.

After a long interest in mid-century American drama, I finally bought Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is one of the hardest plays I’ve ever read (emotionally, I mean).  My edition has an introduction by Mr. Bloom, in which he says that O’Neill’s reputation for dialogue is undeserved – that the genius of the play is actually in the (long and detailed) stage directions, rather than the action or dialogue. And I think Harold’s got it right…there is so much going on in those stage directions, what’s left unsaid and undone, that it would take the most spectacular production to capture the essence of the play (I understand that there was one with Bill Hutt, Martha Henry, Martha Burns, Tom McCamus and Pete Donaldson that met this standard at Stratford in recent years). Better read than seen, in most circumstances, I would think.

Then I read Macbeth, because I hadn’t since highschool (since I learned how to read, and think, I think, which was 3rd year university).  And I was disappointed. It didn’t strike me as incomplete – I felt the motivations and movement / action in the play were all clear – but it seemed somehow…incohesive. Transitions between speeches and scenes were…strained. In talk with others we came up with some reasons: the theory that Middleton wrote some of it, or, more basically, that they were producing so many plays so fast that we can’t expect all of them to be great.

Which is why I was thrilled to see Stratford’s production (I know others have been less impressed, but I haven’t read any of the reviews yet). Macbeth is a play that was meant to be watched.  The abrupt / awkward transitions in the written play lent themselves to a performance that felt new and fast-paced.

Colm Feore was excellent as the lost soldier; some of our favourites from recent years at Stratford were also very strong (Timothy D. Stickney struck me both in Caesar and Cleopatra last year and as Banquo, here). Yanna McIntosh, whom I saw in Obsidian’s production of Colleen Wagner’s The Monument, was a fantastic Lady M. (I do wish that Stratford’s young men -  Lear’s Edgars, Hamlet’s Fortinbras’, Macbeth’s Malcolms – were stronger.)

As always, I found the production thoughtful and impressive. The introduction of 2 monitors in the 2nd half brought out the themes of surveillance and insecurity, the role of the media in modern war, and reminded the audience of the supernatural element in the play. The music and effects were movie-like (a strength or weakness, I suppose, depending on your perspective, but I found they strengthened the production); and the play concluded with an image as ominous as anything we had seen till then – the bringing in of the Union Jack.

Then a flash of Macbeth’s screaming face on the monitors and black-out. Shakespeare’s action movie, really well-done.

The Road

I borrowed Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from a friend a week or two ago, and it almost made me late a few times. Incredibly hard to put down.

Because my mind and heart are still so full with it, I just want to share the publisher’s description:

“A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don”t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food–and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.”

McCarthy’s style here is a bit unorthodox, but I loved it. Reminded me of Steinbeck in the way that it’s spare overall, yet, at times, descriptively rich.

And the ending is perfect. Not happy. Not hopeless. Just. Right.

Fine

I hadn’t heard of Don Coles till a week and a half ago, but I’m very very happy I did (which is often what happens to me with Canadian poets). His A Dropped Glove in Regent Street: An Autobiography by Other Means came across my desk, and I liked the looks of it. Luckily, having just bought a house, my local library had it, so I don’t have to buy it. Quite yet. I’m sure I’ll want a reread before too long, and then I will.

The word that comes to my mind about the book is “fine”. Finely detailed, finely crafted. And yet warm and rich.

It is an autobiography by other means…it includes memoir, but also includes some of his book reviews, and thoughts on literary biography and translations. Incredibly intelligent without being harshly ‘clever’ (I need earnest-ness in books, especially ones like this), Coles’ voice is conversational and thoughtful.

The book also shows his poet’s attention to the details of the language, both in what he notices in what he writes about, and in his own writing: “having arrived in this unpremeditated country” is just one example that struck me.

And his knowledge is encyclopedic, offering many wonderful literary quotations:

“The written word loses its power if it departs too far…from the ordinary world where two and two make four.”  George Orwell.

“When you are old you have to stay in the shade, however witty you are.” Italo Svevo (a friend of Joyce.)

“The poet is a metaphysician who actively engages with nature, who goes out of himself, who hunts down the otherness of being.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This, from Darwin, on his wife, Emma: “She has been my greatest blessing, and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I would rather had been unsaid. I do not believe she has ever missed an opportunity of doing a kind action to anyone near her.” (How wonderful!)

And one I’m particularly drawn to at the moment, having finished reorganizing my library and having bought a house. William Morris, the designer, “once asked himself the rhetorical question, what did he consider the thing most to be longed for. His immediate reply was ‘a beautiful House’, and he continued, ‘and if I were further asked to name the thing next to be longed for, I should answer, a beautiful Book.’”

Here’s what Coles says is his aim:

“What I mean to do…is this: I mean to show how an individual’s growth – whatever we call that myriad of felt, seldom-documented experiences that, beginning in earliest childhood, forms itself in him or her – can, if actively pursued and cultivated, lead to a relatively consistent series of attitudes and judgments, of values ‘aesthetic’ in nature but also operative politically, socially, in one’s public life as well as one’s kept-to-oneself thoughts.

“Well, no, that’s not what I mean to show. Really not. Too diffuse, too unhorizoned. That way lies madness, lies an endless and Byzantine discourse, lies Matthew Arnold. I have a more modest chase in view. Namely or chiefly: myself.”

I hope Coles found himself. He’s certainly there, in this book, for us to find, as well as all the writers and artists he writes of. It does my mind and my soul good to know that there are still people and ideas like this, where experience and language and thought are valued. To quote him, “my heart bends a little when I think of it.”

Stupid Boy Projects

If you haven’t yet read about Danny Wallace and his “stupid boy projects”, you should.

His book Yes Man, on which the recent Jim Carrey movie was (very very) loosely based, came across my desk the other day and I started reading little bits. Like this, from “About the Author”:

“Danny Wallace is a writer, producer, and cult leader…Yes Man is currently being adapted for film by Warner Bros., which must be strange for you, because you’ve not even read it yet. Danny is 28, and lives in an old match factory in the East End of London. He says hello.”

or, from the Prologue:

“I should just say thanks to all those people I’ve written about in the next few hundred pages. Their names are real, apart from those few cases where I’ve changed a name or detail to save anyone any obvious embarrassment, or – in one rather central and vital person’s case – just because they thought it would be cool, and so asked.”

So I ordered Yes Man, and the previous book, where Wallace describes how he became a cult leader (yes, it’s actually true, and, it turns out, mostly by accident), Join Me.

They’re laugh-out-loud funny. But they’re also touching. Because these “stupid boy projects” (as a girlfriend of Wallace calls them) are really about a twenty-something trying to find the best way to live his life. About a desire for connection, and making himself and others happy.

Cleverer and deeper than I expected from trade paperbacks I bought on a whim. Let Danny Wallace surprise you, too.

Great album, but…

This isn’t my kind of post. I’m not usually all up in arms about woman-y stuff. But a recently rediscovered (for me) album got me thinking.

I don’t think I ever listened to Weezer’s Blue Album, when it came out, all the way through. But it’s a really great record. The music’s catchy, the lyrics are interesting. I especially like “In The Garage”:

“I’ve got a Dungeon Master’s Guide
I’ve got a 12-sided die
I’ve got Kitty Pryde
And Nightcrawler too
Waiting there for me
Yes I do, I do

I’ve got posters on the wall
My favorite rock group KISS
I’ve got Ace Frehley
I’ve got Peter Criss
Waiting there for me
Yes I do, I do

I’ve got an electric guitar
I play my stupid songs
I write these stupid words
And I love every one
Waiting there for me
Yes I do, I do

In the garage
I feel safe
No one cares about my ways
In the garage
Where I belong
No one hears me sing this song
In the garage.”

But listening to the album again for the first time (if there is such a thing…it’s a literary crit. formulation, I guess, like “always already”), I was taken aback by a few of the lyrics, like this from “No One Else”:

“I want a girl who will laugh for no one else
When I’m away she puts her makeup on the shelf
When I’m away she never leaves the house
I want a girl who laughs for no one else.”

Really? I mean, this was starting to sound a little weird, to me.

Then came “Buddy Holly”. I’ve always had a soft spot for that song, ’cause I love Buddy Holly but also because a guy I had a mutual crush with in high school told me once that if we had gotten together, it would have been our song. And I used to think that was kind of cool, because his friends didn’t really get me and it would have been all romantic. Then, this time around, I listened more closely:

“What’s with these homies, dissing my girl?
Why do they gotta front?
What did we ever do to these guys
That made them so violent?
Woo-hoo, but you know I’m yours
Woo-hoo, and I know you’re mine
Woo-hoo, and that’s for all time

Oo-ee-oo I look just like Buddy Holly
Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore
I don’t care what they say about us anyway
I don’t care bout that

Don’t you ever fear, I’m always near
I know that you need help
Your tongue is twisted, your eyes are slit
You need a guardian
Woo-hoo, but you know I’m yours
Woo-hoo, and I know you’re mine
Woo-hoo, and that’s for all time.”

No wonder this guy’s friends pick on her…he thinks she’s weak and weird, himself. Nice. I’ve got a few questions for that guy from high school, now…

And don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying Weezer are misogynist, or anything, and it’s still a great, rockin’ album. I just wonder, a little bit.