Remember me complaining here? Well, Abesha just got accepted to Sterling Magazine! I am so excited that my favourite story now has a home. Of course, I’ll post a link when it’s all set up so everyone can go see. Oooh, my baby has a home, so heartwarming.
Crocodilian, Tesfa’s new favourite animal order.
So let’s have some book confessions.
- I have never read anything by Jane Austen. The closest is that I did read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I’ve watched Bride and Prejudice (and I guess I’ve seen Clueless and read Bridget Jones), but to actually read books about people whose sole purpose is getting married and/or being pithily polite to one another leaves me cold.
- I took a year of Russian literature in university, which means I’ve read some Russian books. Okay, I’ve read a lot of Russian books (in translation as my knowledge of Russian involves me being able to introduce myself, identify myself as Canadian and a mathematician, tell people how much I love the Russian language, count to ten, then say I don’t understand). But what I haven’t read, not one word of, is Chekhov. Now my bookshelves are dotted with plays by Chekhov and short story collections by Chekhov and short story collections with a variety of authors including Chekhov. In fact, I often look at my bookshelves and think “I should really gather all the books that have some piece of Chekhov in them and get rid of any duplicates” but I don’t because then maybe I would read something by Chekhov and feel stupid that I’ve waited so long to do so.
- Every few months, Geoff and I have this conversation:
Geoff: You remember [insert scene from The Trial or The Castle or The Metamorphosis or something by Kafka]?
Me: I have never read Kafka.
Geoff: What? You’ve never read Kafka?
Me: Nope.
Geoff: How can you have not read Kafka? Here, I will find you some books by Kafka for you to read.
Usually he doesn’t actually bother so I still haven’t read Kafka. - I am a female Canadian who wants to write literary fiction. This does not mean that I have read The Handmaids Tale. All is not lost. I own it, which is the first step to reading it.
There are some other grievous book gaps in my knowledge, but on this cloudy Monday, these are the only ones I am willing to own up to.
In that I seem to have a bronchial infection.
I wonder a lot about my memory. Two weeks ago I was invited to a wedding of someone I’ve known for a long time. When I mean a long time, I mean since we were eight years old. The friendship has waxed and waned over the years and I guess it’s waxing right now, hence the invitation. So, obviously, I have to think of a present, and I’m sitting around thinking about some of the stuff we did in high school, like stupid poems we wrote to each other and thinking maybe I could recreate some of those, at least for the card, because that would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Then I realise that no, it wouldn’t be nice, because nobody remembers all the random bits and pieces I do.
I met someone recently. Technically, I re-met someone. We went to high school together and were in a few classes and in a few clubs together and she has no memory of me at all. Not one, while I remember her. I remember entire conversations we had together. But none of this clearly made its way into her long-term memory.
I’ve always been at the periphery of people’s lives. I get that. My personality is less of a personality than a flat-line of quiet and suspicion. Observation. I observe, which helps me as a writer. The memory helps too, remembering scenes and places and how people stood or looked or smiled in certain instances. So I can take my exact memory and put it to good use. Still, it sometimes hurts to be forgotten, even if I can use the forgotten bits in my writing.
And because I teased you all with the possibility of high school poetry, here is some of a poem that I wrote in high school for my wedding-friend. It is a nonsense poem, like most of the poems we wrote at the time. I can’t remember a lot of it (so much for my exact memory), only bits and pieces. I think the poem was about forty lines long, and I only have twelve lines that have stuck with me. The ending stanza, which I do remember, also has to do with remembering things for a long time, so I guess it’s apt for this post about memory. So I leave what I can recall here for you to peruse:
Ode to Michael Stipe and All the Other Bald Rock Stars
By me, circa 1995
The law had been my passion
With you upon the stand
I never thought you’d make it
While our son was at band
The moon shone very brightly
The penguin just as much
…
Q, R, S, and T, U
But I am oh so small
…
Remember this forever
If you remember this at all
I love you cause you’re clever
And Michael Stipe is bald
I read the following books:
- The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald
- The Greenway by Jane Adams: I read this book a long time ago, the last year of high school or first year of university. Then, three or four years later, I suddenly started thinking about it, although I couldn’t remember what it was called or who wrote it, which was annoying. The weekend after I was thinking about it, all alone because of a fight with Geoff, I went to the CFUW-KW booksale, and rifling through the boxes, there was The Greenway. If you’ve been to the booksale, you’ll know that going there is a rather Dirk Gently fundamentals of interconnectedness sort of organisation. One wanders, one sees books that are interesting, one does not go in search of specifics, especially a mystery novel that, at that time, was eight or nine years old and not very popular outside the UK. So I bought it and brought it home and it’s followed us around the last four provinces to here. I read it now and then, like I read it this month, March 2013.
- Cast The First Stone by Jane Adams: This is the sequel to the previous book.
- Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple
- Seriously Mum, What’s An Alpaca by Alan Parks
- HHhH by Laurent Binet
- Above All Things by Tanis Rideout
- The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
- When A Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin
- In One Person by John Irving: Can one classify a book as lesser Irving, because this book can best be described as exactly that. It has Irving’s fingerprints all over it, but I read it and think I wish I was reading A Prayer For Owen Meany or A Widow for a Year or Garp, and yes, Garp and I are on a first name basis. Also, where is my copy of Garp? Did I lend it out? Did the movers steal it? But back to In One Person, this book is a prime example of the lack of editing in modern fiction. Complete sentences are repeated, explanations happen more than once, etc. I guess no one edits anymore or maybe no one remembers all the repetitions the way I do.
- Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan: Well, you can tell that she’s a reporter in that every chapter is around eight hundred words long and presents one salient idea. The book is procedural in its ability just to stick to its form. Perhaps a more senior reporter would have been able to vary the form a little to make the book more interesting than it ended up being. Oh, and the privilege, please do not get me started on the privilege. For example, Susannah’s father puts a sign up saying that his daughter deserved the attention given to her by the nurses with the clear implication that there are other patients who do not deserve the same attention. The book starts to sour around there.
Best book: HHhH. I’d thought, since I’d read it, that The Kindly Ones was the modern fictional treatise of Nazism. Then, in one almost ignored sentence, Binet completely destroys The Kindly Ones as Houellebecq does Nazism, which is 100% the truth and how did I not see that myself? So now, folly destroyed, I put HHhH as the modern fictional treatise on Nazism. We’ll see what comes along to destroy this statement next.
I watched:
- (500) Days of Summer: If there was ever a movie about why nice guys are the worst, this is it. So Tom thinks Summer’s pretty and therefore that means that he gets what he wants, spends their time together making fun of things she likes, like her taste in music, and then gets confused when she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him? And, to start the movie off, the writer calls his ex-girlfriend a bitch in the opening title sequence. Wow. What a great movie written by such a great guy (end sarcasm). And, what’s super great, that link I have about why nice guys are the worst, just the first link that came up when I googled it, has a quote from Joseph Gordon-Levitt on why Tom isn’t even close to being the nice guy he thinks he is in his head.
- The Queen of Versailles
- TiMER
- The Imposter
- Alice in Wonderland: So frenetic. I think we’ll stick with Miyazaki movies for Tesfa for as long as we can.
- My Neighbour Totoro: Yes, again. We watch Totoro a lot around here.
- Dinosaur Train: It’s on American Netflix now and Tesfa is very happy about this development.
- The Wire: I was ready to give up after Season 4, not because it got bad, but because I can’t imagine anything good coming to those kids, except maybe Namond, in the fifth season and I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle stuff going bad for them.
- Parks and Recreation
- The IT Crowd: So why is it that I can accept stupidity in British shows but not American ones. It is hardly like the The IT Crowd is cerebral, although it has its moments, so what gives? Is it the accents? I do appreciate a good Irish accent. Do I somehow believe they are more self-aware than American shows, say the walking rape-culture embodiment that is Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother which is played straight, like rape-culture is supposed to be funny, versus some of the more cringe-inducing comments of Roy? I don’t know. But I watched all four series and laughed so that counts for something.
- Mad Men: It’s burning slow. I don’t know whether it’ll pay off though in the end.
I wrote: Finished typing Come From Away. Now that it is April, here comes the long, slogging haul of re-reading and re-writing. Also finished and entered Sarah Selecky‘s Little Bird contest.
And, one of my pieces was accepted at The Rusty Toque. I’ll post a link when the story is up and available on their website.
Burma: The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
Thoughts: Sometimes you read a book that is good and meaningful and important but it doesn’t do a single thing for you. This book, about a political prisoner in a Burmese jail was like that. Something held me back from really melting into the story, into the characters, into the time and the place. Again, like earlier this month, I can’t say a single thing that didn’t work if we attack this book from a technical standpoint. It’s just me and this book aren’t going to be friends.
Rating: 3/5
Even the word muffin sounds like how a muffin looks, all puffed up at the top.
I finished reading When A Crocodile Eats the Sun. Andrew Solomon has blurbed the back with what I put above: the unknowability of Africa. Seriously? Have we not moved past Heart of Darkness thinking of Africa yet? Moreover, it makes no sense while applied to his book written by an African about Africa in which he details stuff that happens in Africa to Africans. I am unclear as to how presenting data and stories about Africa contributes to unknowability; in my opinion, it contributes to the opposite, namely knowability.
I have been to Africa twice (Ethiopia and South Africa). Is it different than here? Yes. But I find everywhere is different than here. I even find parts of Canada different than here (Calgary is a lot different than the Maritimes, except for the large number of Maritimers out there working). Was it unknowable? Only in the sense that anything that isn’t your norm is unknowable for everyone. I’m sure if you took some of the people I met in Africa and dropped them here in New Brunswick, New Brunswick would be unknowable to them. Yet we don’t perpetuate the unknowability of Atlantic Canada around the world.
It also implies in the blurb that Philip Gourevitch also wrote about the unknowability of Africa, I am assuming in reference to We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, which is also a book where it discusses Africa, specifically the Rwandan Genocide, in a very non Heart of Darkness unknowability fashion.
Are people so blinded they expect Africa to be unknowable? The internet tells me there are over one billion people living in Africa. I bet each one of them knows something about the place they live. Can we stop pretending that Africa is just this impermeable mass when we talk about it? Completely othering and, as I’ve said, it didn’t even apply to this book. Maybe blurbers just skim through. I’ve never blurbed (or been blurbed) so I don’t know.
Two days ago, I got news that one of my stories has been accepted at The Rusty Toque. Today I submitted a story for Sarah Selecky‘s Little Bird Writing Contest. The pieces are dichotomic. The first, I wrote in a fit of pique while annoyed with feeling unwelcome in my own home. It’s short (funnily 666 words long). If I had to pick a word (other than bone-crushingly depressing, which is actually two words) to describe the first story, it would be spiky. Everything juts out and sticks into flesh and there is nothing internal about it.
The second, well, the second I workshopped alone to death and now I don’t even like it, but I submitted it anyway because I told myself I would. It’s like one of those rubber, bouncy super-balls. It’s almost glossy and the glossiness has rubbed away anything authentic. The piece isn’t bad in the way that some of the things I’ve read in my life are bad, it just seems over-workshopped, which is funny since I workshopped it by my lonesome. I shouldn’t complain about it because I’m sure in some internet/karmic way, complaining about my story will mean I won’t win (which, is likely I won’t anyways because there are lots of submissions and not all can win). But I feel like I made this story accessible, but I haven’t yet learned how to make my writing be my writing and accessible at the same time. It’s funny how I can accept awkwardness in my first piece, but the second piece leaves me uncomfortable and ready to disown it entirely.
So we’ll see. Spiky and awkward versus smooth but inauthentic. I’m putting myself out there. Following through. Accepting not always winning. All those sentences that should be on a motivational poster, I’m doing them. Maybe it’ll work out in the end.
And it is Friday – in three weeks, I will be in a big city which has Ethiopian restaurants. Oh, messer wot, I am coming for you soon.