Dolly Wisdom

"Jolene" is one of my favourite writing songs. I have a whole list of them in a playlist on iTunes entitled, "The Western," that make me think about the story I'm working on, or the characters within, and so this quote by Dolly Parton made me chuckle. Who knew it was a true story?

A Post-Weekend Wordsmith Challenge

Clicking around, I found this challenge over at Words from a Wordsmith. Gosh, I love a good six-word memoir. Here's the one I came up with earlier in the summer:

"Girl almost dies tragically at nineteen."

Canada Reads 2008

I managed to remember to listen to Canada Reads this afternoon (thank goodness for time shifting, oh yeah!), and enjoyed the discussion. Especially considering that I really wasn't interested in any of the choices this year, I'm glad that the panelists are doing such an amazing job of pulling apart the books and making them relevant. So far, my vote's still with Icefields, and it's still alive...but I have a feeling Not Wanted on the Voyage will come out on top.

My favourite part of today's discussion? Dave Bidini and Lisa Moore going head to head (as much as possible) about the nature of why people read. Moore says it's to grow; Bidini says it's to have fun. My point? Does it have to be one or the other? I read to be inspired (like today, when I read this quote from Kundera: "She was too much at one with her body; that is why she always felt such anxiety about it.") but I'm also not embarrassed to admit that I absolutely pick up chicklit for one reason, and that's escapism.

My Interview With Beth Lisick

Is up on MSN today here. And if you don't feel like clicking through, my favourite question and answer:

DM: What are you working on now? And are you still taking banana jobs?

BL: Still taking banana jobs. I always feel the need to state that I really love my banana suit. I definitely don't do it because it's the only job out there. And my friend Tara and I are working on a stage show called "Getting In On The Ground Floor and Staying There." The title is in reference to the fact that we have been collaborating on comedy shows and films for the past 10 years, but have never "taken it to the next level." Or any level, really. There were a few meetings with some Hollywood people where we were promised things. We'll address those meetings in full detail in the show, as well as talk about things that make us laugh. Like the image of a bunch of helium balloons in a gazebo or those posters where a wet muscular man is holding a tiny newborn baby.

Creativity, in general, never ceases to amaze me.

The Fire

Perhaps it's the same morbid curiosity or gravitational pull to tragedy that seems to orbit my life in general, but I went down to Queen and Portland today to see the devastation from the fire. On my way down, one of the stores was blasting The Last Waltz, and I smiled, despite the cold. Good grief that's an appropriate record. The streets are all blocked off and there are no traffic sounds, which always amazes me in the middle of a city holding upwards of 4 million people at any given time.

I was standing there taking some pictures when a fire fighter smiled at me, and then came over for a chat. He said it was hard to believe there were huge buildings there just a week ago. That the fire kept them busy for longer than a while. That the investigation is still underway because they don't know yet whether or not there was criminality involved. Also, he mentioned that they still haven't accounted for all of the missing people (and that's when a very irate neighbourhood woman started shouting at him that she was one of said souls). I left to let her get out what she needed to get out, and moved down taking even more pictures. Even though I grew up in a house with a fire fighter father, I've never really seen this kind of devastation up close, and the writer in me was sad and curious.



And even though we haven't lived in the area for three years, and even then were up at College, over the course of my lifetime having spent so much time down there, whether it was with Amanda and the skinheads when we were seventeen, or during university when I was home for Christmas going to hear bands on the various different levels of the Big Bop, or returning a video with Zesty, or having brunch just north at Mimi's, it's hard not to realize that another part of the city just won't be the same ever again.

Babysitting + Nephew = Baby Love

Because we missed M & B via Skype. Much fun was had by all. Plenty of lego, lots of stories, a ball getting kicked here and there, and my favourite, Duck and Goose.

Props In Unlikely Places

Kate sent over this review in NY Magazine of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wide Web, a book that sets out to hand pick the best of the best in terms of the odd 80-million of us out there.

Most of Boxer’s [the author's] selections don’t read like a new species of writing [and are quite overdone in terms of media coverage; Smoking Gun anyone?], but like very close cousins of once-venerable print genres that have been forced out of public discourse by the shrinkage of major American media: passionate arts criticism, critical theory, colorful polemics, and, above all, the personal essay. Sometimes it seems like blogging is just the apotheosis of the personal essay, the logical heir to 500 years of work by proto-bloggers such as Montaigne, Charles Lamb, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Parker, and E. B. White. I see no reason for drawing an artificial line between screen and print.

But I have to admit that I love this thought, and it's one that I've been echoing for years in meetings, at seminars, and pretty much where anyone could possibly be listening. Hell, who wouldn't want to be compared to Dorothy Parker, that's quite a compliment for the peeps that made it into the book and onto the author's lists.

Denis Johnson - "Dirty Wedding"

This story knocked me flat this morning on the subway with these couple lines: "The last time I'd been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn't been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies."

Six pages of story that travel as fast as the El train the narrator rides, but so rich with the experience about being a messed up kid who couldn't handle much of life, let alone getting his girlfriend pregnant and then not having the baby. If I hadn't finished, I would have missed my stop just so I could read the end.

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, Eugenides rich collection of love stories, made my day even before 9 AM. And I'm having a real hard time with this ridiculous hip hurting as much as it has over the past few days. The pain is angry, constant and frustrating. I hate limping, it makes me feel awkward, ungainly, and really unattractive; and it's not as if I need any more pushing in that direction anyway, being in this kind of pain just amplifies all of the things I hate about myself and all of the things that have happened to my body as a result of the disease. It's like the ache just settles into my whole being and forces its way into every little crack of my existence.

While I know that it's probably got something to do with my shoes and the weather, I refuse to give in to either. Bitter cold and high heels, who knew they'd be the death of me?

Great Sentences As Dictated In An Email

Reasons why one should never arrive early to work:

Because that allows for the chance to run into a fellow named XXX, whom you haven't seen in over 10 years, the last time he tried to, ahem, get friendly.

Said fellow is quite surprised to see you, and is confused as per why you might be riding the elevator in his public policy building, and then asks the ridiculous question, "So, how are you?" As if you can sum up 12 years of your life in the elevator ride to the 15th floor.

Goodness, what foolish youth.

My favourite response: Early mornings are never good for negative nostalgia.

Today

I won the Oscar pool at work. $48.00 means I can actually eat lunch this week.

Oh yeah, baby!*

EDITED TO ADD: The song from the movie Once that won the Oscar had this beautiful line, "Words fall through me and always fool me."

I liked it so much I emailed it to myself so I could remind myself to put it up here today. Sort of a quote of the weekend.

Did it manage to defray the many hours of boredom punctuated here and there by a Jon Stewart funny. Um, no.**

EDITED TO ADD TO ADD: I saw the female peregrine falcon today. And no word of a lie, I ripped the headphones off my head, shouted: "WHO ARE YOU?" and almost threw myself out the window. Clearly, the whole bird-obsession thing has got to stop.

And my tragic hip is bothering me a great deal. Making my whole right leg hurt, which is kind of bumming me out.

Oh, And...

Peeing in a jug really farking sucks.

Down To Work

So, it seems I may have committed myself to a completely and utterly undoable goal of having a finished draft of the book (see, see how I'm actually calling it a book instead of a long story) finished by May 1st. Having successfully surrounded myself not only with books, but with other writers, we all seem to be egging each other on in all the good ways. I'm still not convinced that I'll ever finish, but it's nice to not be alone, if that makes any sense at all.

The candle is lit. The email is all caught up. There's t-minus a couple hours until the Oscars. My RRHB has done all the laundry. I had brunch with one of my oldest friends who has just become engaged. I've obsessed over a certain something. Repeated"The King of Carrot Flowers" about sixteen times. This lead to a little dancing around my writing room. And read two stories in My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, one of which contained this quote from Chekhov:

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people -- especially irresolute Muscovites, who are slow starters -- grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome.

Perhaps it's time to start?

What A Difference A Night Makes

Woke up after having a good night's sleep. Finished Jennifer Haigh's The Condition (#17). And managed to not only be on time for my appointment with Dr. Kidney today, but I was even fifteen minutes early, which gave me plenty of time to spend with Marianne and Elinor Dashwood.

I heart my kidney doctor, he's kind and gentle, and has always, always been on top of my care in terms of the disease. But today, today is a grand day: my tests (blood work) are better than they've been in 5 years. My creatinine level is 97 -- it hasn't been under 100 since 2003, well before the disease flared this time around.

On top of that, I've managed to lose 4 kilos!

So, things are moving in the right direction when it comes to my health. Maybe I should stop complaining about the medicine, because it's literally saved my life.

Oh What A Night

Let me first preface this entry by saying: I am an idiot who does not know how to drive a car.

Well, I have a license and I have never been in an accident, but I am not comfortable behind the wheel. In short, I have very little sense of myself in the world. Add to the mix a giant, hulking machine and I am stumped. If I bang into things all the time, imagine what happens when you put me behind the wheel.

Exactly.

So last night when I got home, I decided, oh so wrongly, to spare my RRHB the trouble of having to come out and drive the car up into the icy laneway to put it back in our garage. Oh yes, this was something I could totally do myself.

Or not.

As I made it halfway up the slight hill before the car slid back down and wedged itself into a snow bank kissing a concrete wall, and with ice all around, it wasn't moving.

We had to call a tow truck.

Which cost me $157.50.

And then the battery died.

Sigh.

Add to that the panic and upset I felt for a) inconveniencing us so much for b) spending money we really don't have right now and c) for pretty much ruining both of our evenings, and I didn't sleep very well.

"No biggie," I thought. "I'll just get up early and make my way to the hospital so Dr. Kidney has everything for my app't tomorrow."

Hear on the news: "There's a five alarm fire...all streetcars are going to be diverted."

Even so, I still managed to get to the hospital well before 9 AM. Only to NOT have my bloodwork ordered correctly and have to wait almost 1.5 hours to get poked. So, after fasting (hangry anyone? [tm Charidy]), not sleeping, waiting for hours, getting the car stuck, being frozen waiting for the tow truck angel to do his work, being late for my own work, falling behind, and feeling sorry for myself, I started to cry. IN THE BLOOD WORK CHAIR.

Annnnywaaay.

I'm here now. And am about to get cracking. But thankfully, I had Jennifer Haigh's upcoming novel The Condition, which is really quite riveting, to keep me company.

EDITED TO ADD: I just ate some soup for lunch and bit down (it was lentil, I like to chew), on a rock almost the size of my pinky finger.

It's just that kind of day.

#16 - After River

The family drama of Donna Milner's sweet, forgiving After River sweeps you away in its everyday life on a dairy farm in the beautiful East Kootenays. The story of the Wards, who come to accept a draft dodger named River into their lives, into their homes, until the book's fateful event tears them apart, rambles over thirty-five years through terrain well-told throughout Canadian literary history. Family novels told by Canadian women are a popular kind, and Milner has set herself up in line with no shortage of excellent company. The novel, with its strains of Crow Lake and Unless, feels familiar and unknown at the same time. A compelling tale that overcomes its stereotypical beginnings to crash into an uplifting end, After River came as a bit of surprise.

As Natalie Ward tells the story of how her life changed after River, the unbelievably handsome and utterly compelling young American came into it, she cannot do so without giving the reader the whole picture. River just didn't come into Natalie's life, he came into her whole family, and his presence changed everything. Like the water of his nickname, he slipped into their land and made himself as essential as the air or the cows themselves. For Natalie, and her eldest brother Boyer, River represents that instant when your childhood leaves forever, a burgeoning adulthood that comes with the cost of happiness, and how rich the price of forgiveness remains when conflict goes unresolved.

The setting swept me away as much as the story: a farm set on rich, fertile land, a town trapped in its own small mind and an even smaller belief structure, all trapped (or set free depending on how you look at it) by the mountains that tower above. A highly personal story, it's impossible not to feel empathetic with the events of Natalie's life, nor is it easy to watch her make the mistakes she's bound to make, or feel the weight of the guilt she carries away the moment she leaves the farm.

The prose isn't perfect, and there are first-novel moments all over the book, tired descriptions and worn out metaphors, but none of that matters by the end, when Natalie's life comes full circle, and the book comes to its pitch perfect end. Isn't it always the case that we end up so far from where we begin, only to come home in so many ways, whether literal or metaphorical, despite how strong the pull of life drags you in another direction.

READING CHALLENGES: I had chosen Stanley Park as my book for British Columbia, but I'm swapping in this book instead. I'll probably still read it, but I feel like this story and setting are just so evocative that I could see the mist rising up from the mountains in the dewy mornings and feel every inch of Natalie's pain, which means it's the right choice for The Canadian Book Challenge. It's such a Canadian novel, this After River.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: As I read a terribly practical but not entirely gorgeous ARC, I'm showing off the glorious cover. I know it might not be for everyone, but it perfectly suits the story, and the colours are just so lovely.

As with so many of my ARCS, here we go again...would anyone like me to pass this one along?

#15 - The Quiet American

Finishing up Graham Greene's exquisite little The Quiet American brings me up to speed now in terms of my 1001 Books club, and this post is a milestone in the blogging world too, as I've hit 1000 posts. Instead of writing the same things in two different places, I'm just going to copy and paste what I posted up on the boards:

What did you think of the book?

I appreciated the short, succinct nature of The Quiet American. I enjoyed the book's politics, its own powerful, yet stilted, observations about the conflict from Fowler's point of view, and the overwhelming drive for Pyle not only to save the country from itself, but to marry Phuong, to "save" her in a sense.

Had you read this author before?

No, but I had seen the movie (although I didn't remember all of it).

Would you read something by him again?

Absolutely.

What would you rank this book out of 10?

8.

Do you think it deserves to be included on the list of 1001 and why?

I do think it deserves to be on the 1001 Books list. Why is a much harder question. I think unlike books on the list like The Lambs of London (which absolutely do not belong on the list) or every single title that Ian McEwan has written (I think they were desperate to fill the pages by then; and not that many don't deserve to be, but every one?), The Quiet American has a fascinating sense of morality underlying its narrative: the line between good and evil isn't clear, not in war, not in life, and certainly not between men.

As a kind of conversation between neo-colonialism (of the quiet kind) and overwrought, more classic colonialism of the French and British, the novel puts the characters of Pyle and Fowler in impossible situations, if only to prove the utter uselessness of either side. Pyle can no more get over his innocence in terms of his believe in the justifiable reasons behind his cause than Fowler can actually return to his old life in London. Both are changed and immutable at the same time, much like the old ideals each side clings to during the war.

Any insightful literary critiques?

The edition that I found (it's a British Vintage, I think) has an introduction by Zadie Smith, who points out that Fowler's description of the war is never far behind a major plot point. That even though he states over and over again that he is neutral, whether that actually turns out to be true or not, not becoming involved is impossible. Narrative and politics become merged into one, as if the setting can't help but stretch itself into every single aspect of the story, which remains the reason why the novel succeeds.

And this line: "She put the needle down and sat back on her heels, looking at me. There was no scene, no tears, just thought -- the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life."

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I didn't like the cover of the one I have here so I just searched out one I preferred.

READING CHALLENGES: I'm on track now for the 2 per month 1001 Books challenge, and finishing this book brings my complete score to 151. I am enjoying these classics so much that I've already started Sense and Sensibility. I might not read anything written in this century for a while. However, I do have work reading and Canadian challenge to get back to too.

My Favourite Sentence Of The Weekend

"She began working on her autobiography at 102."

I wonder if there's even a slight thought at that age: "Maybe I will live forever." And did she manage to finish before her untimely death at 104?

At This Very Moment

My RRHB and his cousin are creating the plumbing in what will become our downstairs bathroom. The house smells like propane from a blowtorch. The sound of work boots stomping up and down the stairs is thrilling. And this week maybe we'll pick out the toilet and sink. RRHB seems to laugh at me when I get excited about things like drywall being on the walls, but the closer we get to using all of our house, the less I feel like taking said blowtorch to it entirely.

Where Two Worlds Collide

It's as if someone reached inside my living room and created a mash-up of two things that are constantly conflicted in my house: Jane Austen and Zombies (link via galleycat).

Maybe zombies are the missing element to my own book?

Too Old For Snow Angels?

There's a crazy pile of snow in front of our house right now that I wanted to jump into -- so I sort of half-crashed into it last night after getting home from work. It's hard to tell but the pile is actually bigger than I am.