…are almost as weird as their mother. And almost as cool. (If that’s still the right word.)
The Musician Who Attends University
The Artist Who Skateboards
My favourite of Henry’s songs: The Human Experience.
Matthew’s film trailer for a school project (camera, editing, music)
Somehow, they managed to grow and prosper–despite having a mother who writes.
photo by H. Lee
It was one of those blue and lavender nights when the luminous colour seems to have been blown over the scene with an air brush. Even the darkest shadows held some purple.
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (New Directions)
He wore his darkest pants, so the night swallowed up his legs and his white shirt floated above the lawn. He said nothing to the woman walking next to him. He was such a cad. The woman was close enough to smell. She could see his legs. Even in the dark pants. A cloud had covered the moon. There was no light out where they walked. The woman said something. It was meant to be funny. He tried to laugh. He tried so hard. He didn’t hear what she said. But he tried to laugh anyway. He knew from the woman’s tone it was supposed to be funny, so he tried to laugh.
Book, Ken Sparling (Pedlar Press)
The world smelled like flowers and rain. The world smelled like bark and mud and grass. The world smelled like pine trees and maple leaves and soaking wet sleeping bags. The world was exhaling and I had my whole life ahead of me, unformed and wavering. And who could guess what was going to happen?
“Break and Enter,” from The Reverse Cowgirl (stories), David Whitton (Freehand Books)
My notebooks: some full and some still empty.
In the tradition of revered writers like Harriet The Spy and Hemingway, I keep a notebook in my purse/bag/pocket for jotting down whatever springs to mind. Unless I write something down pronto, those interesting observed details, overheard phrases, and ideas for whatever I’m working on quickly evaporate. I tend to use a notebook only when out of the house and around the endless inspiration of strangers and unfamiliar environments. Or in familiar environments where unfamiliar moments occasionally occur: like that time in the squish of a rush hour subway car when the young Asian man beside me, head-to-toe in black, let a small yellow bird crawl freely up his lapel. (A pet, I gathered, since he fed it seeds from his pocket. This being Toronto the Reserved, nobody acknowledged awareness, myself included.) At home I usually can’t be bothered to go fetch my notebook from my purse/bag/pocket and instead make use of various scraps of paper or sticky notes. Which results in a hellish (for this Virgo, at least) array of random papers.
I was prompted to start keeping a notebook during a course I took with Michael Winter seven years ago through U of T’s School of Continuing Studies. He recommended buying a pocket-sized one so there’d be no excuse not to bring it along wherever you go. He also recommended—insisted, actually—that it be inexpensive since a precious Moleskine might inhibit the urge to record any ole thing—which is what you should do—it’s a notebook, for heaven’s sake, not a manuscript. Each week of the course we shared something we’d written: just a sentence or two. Making the effort to find the right descriptive words proved a challenging and rewarding exercise.
Though I have always had a notebook on the go since, I haven’t used it consistently. I have lost many fabulously pithy thoughts forever because my notebook was in another purse at home. Or I’ll have it with me constantly and forget to use it because nothing seems interesting enough to record (such high standards!) or else I use it indiscriminately for dull to-do lists. But when I do make the effort to record something I’ve seen, I’m always amazed by how satisfying it is to get it down in writing. Ah, the beauty of words. More satisfying still is going back to old notebooks and finding details that I would never have remembered otherwise and realizing that recording overheard dialogue is a good way of understanding how people really talk. From my notebooks:
observation: I have never seen a bug in a North American hotel room.
overheard: “So she decides to cook fish at 10 at night—I don’t know why—and she falls, knocks the pan. Almost sets the place on fire. So they moved her to Leisure World. And she says ‘It took all my life to be this happy.’”
Materialistic fetishes vary from person to person: mine is notebooks. And books. (Cheaper than shoes and handbags, right?)
Now for the hellish aspects of notebooks. First: I have a strong affection for stationary. (Let’s not call it a fetish.) Notebooks in particular are so fetching: cute little books that are blank, asking for a story—and, in recent years, crazily abundant in stores. In so many colours and sizes! (Okay, it’s a fetish.) This brings me to Moleskines. As soon as Michael Winter cautioned against these pricey little puppies, my inner rebel-seeking-a-cause resolved to buy one. Besides, they are too yummy to resist: the quality and feel of the cover and paper, their perfect weight and dimensions. Their appeal was dangerous enough when the selection was basic black (black itself being very appealing). So when Moleskine brought out those two-tone colour packs, I was sunk. It takes me ages to fill two slim ones and I already have a small pile of various other empty notebooks awaiting use so I must force myself to look away from Moleskine displays in stores. If I succumb, I justify the purchase as a gift—and sometimes actually follow through with the giving.
The second, and most significant, problem is: what is the writer to do with all those scribbled notes? The ideal scenario goes like this: back in your airless, sensory-deprived writing room, alone with your desiccated imagination, you take out the notebook, find a sparkling description of the way someone looked as they crossed an intersection or a snippet of true-to-life dialogue and find that it fits perfectly into the story you’re working on. Which isn’t how it usually works for me. The reality is I don’t use many of the notebook gems unless I’ve been smart and made some kind of note at the top of the page to indicate a possible connection to a specific story or character. After many attempts to find a great system for mining my notebooks, I’ve decided to just randomly open them now and again and see if something clicks. With any luck, at least some of my notebook gems will find their way out of the rubble and into my prose where they are certain to shine amongst the comparatively crappy descriptions I manage, with great effort, to invent.
There's some sh*t you simply can't make up.
The night sky in 1Q84. Or was this last night in 2Q12?
Spring is approaching and I’m feeling lighter: I finished the three monster books I intended to read over the winter (see: Holiday Weigh-In). Actually, technically-speaking, I only read two: Moby Dick (which I did enjoy, though not with whale-like enormity) and then, yesterday, I finished 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
A book that's not afraid of faces
1Q84 is full of startling coincidences and a lunar obsession that particularly resonated with this reader. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that in the course of the novel, Aomame, one of the main characters, happens to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—the third weighty book on my list. Since I’m not feeling very motivated to read Proust in this throw-open-the-windows-and-feel-happy weather, I’ve decided to look at it this way: Aomame read it for me.
And though she didn’t finish it, I’ll forgive her. At least she chatted about it with a friend. Only in Murakami’s fictional world would a personal fitness instructor (Aomame) and a bodyguard (Tamaru) casually discuss Proust, and during a particularly stressful time, no less. Here Aomame tries to explain why she’s having trouble progressing through the super-long book:
“… it’s like reading a detailed report from a small planet light-years away from this world I’m living in. I can picture all the scenes described and understand them. It’s described very vividly, minutely, even. But I can’t connect the scenes in that book with where I am now. We are physically too far apart. I’ll be reading it, and I find myself having to go back and reread the same passage over again.”
Aomame searched for the next words. Tamaru waited as she did.
“It’s not boring, though,” she said. “It’s so detailed and beautifully written, and I feel like I can grasp the structure of that lonely little planet. But I can’t seem to go forward. It’s like I’m in a boat, paddling upstream. I row for a while, but then when I take a rest and am thinking about something, I find myself back where I started. Maybe that way of reading suits me now, rather than the kind of reading where you forge ahead to find out what happens. I don’t know how to put it exactly, but there is a sense of time wavering irregularly when you try to forge ahead. If what is in front is behind, and what is behind is in front, it doesn’t really matter, does it. Either way is fine.”
Aomame searched for a more precise way of expressing herself.
“It feels like I’m experiencing someone else’s dream. Like we’re simultaneously sharing feelings. But I can’t really grasp what it means to be simultaneous. Our feelings seem extremely close, but in reality there’s a considerable gap between us.”
“I wonder if Proust was aiming for that sort of sensation.”
Aomame had no idea.
“Still, on the other hand,” Tamaru said, “time in this real world goes ever onward. It never stands still, and never reverses course.”
“Of course. In the real world time goes forward.”
As she said this Aomame glanced at the glass door. But was it really true? That time was always flowing forward?
“The seasons have changed, and we are getting close to the end of 1984,” Tamaru said.
“I doubt I’ll finish In Search of Lost Time by the end of the year.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tamaru said. “Take your time. It was written over fifty years ago. It’s not like it’s crammed with hot-off-the-press information or anything.”
In this genre-bending literary novel, Murakami surprised me yet again with another of his delightful and bizarre versions of the world. 1Q84 also left me at times confounded and irritated (mostly it was those air chrysalis things which bring to mind the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) but always I was entertained and enthralled. Murakami gave me the memorable Aomame and the charming Tengo and never bored me in 925 pages, despite an awful lot of looking at the same two moons from many points of view. I’m left scratching my head not so much about the Little People but about Murakami’s ability to cast such a powerful storytelling spell. What is it with this guy? And what will he come up with next?
Meanwhile, though I’m all the poorer for not experiencing Proust firsthand (tant pis, as I believe they say in Paris), at least I’m feeling lighter. No more weighty books for a while. That volume of War and Peace I keep meaning to read? Spine turned inward on the shelf. Poof. It’s gone from my consciousness. Just like Murakami’s second moon when you’re back in the real world of 2012.
How much can we glean about someone if we can’t see their face?
In social gatherings, in meetings, and at all stages of love and courtship and trouble, we usually look closely at the faces that we encounter. Everything of importance is to be found there. When you are in a strange location where the people are unknown to you, you are likely to go back to early habits of reading faces, expressions, gestures, in the hope of discovering both character and social subtexts, simply so that you can get by. The face is where you start from. Sometimes that is where you stay.
From The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter (Graywolf Press).
I’m guilty of avoiding one of the greatest challenges of writing: describing a character’s face—or is it something to feel guilty about? Is the face so terribly important? Does the reader really need a picture of the eyes, nose, mouth or expression of a character to fully understand her?
I’ve been wondering about this since reading Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. This excellent book (part of an equally excellent series on writing craft well worth checking out) examines “those elements that propel readers beyond the plot of a novel or short story into the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” The final chapter, “Loss of Face,” was inspired by an experience Baxter had with a creative writing student. Baxter suggested adding a description of facial expression in a scene where a character receives bad news and the student refused. “It’s too hard,” the student said. “Besides, no one does that anymore.” And it’s true: a lot of contemporary fiction is faceless. The blunt truth of his student’s statement provoked Baxter to explore why writers have all but given up.
“Loss of Face” covers a lot of territory: beauty, the limitations of physiognomy in revealing character, the mask-like quality of faces when you consider that so many iconic faces are those of performers, the overload of faces via mass media, and also the reality that writers have to tread carefully with physical description to avoid racial or social stereotyping. So it’s not surprising that many writers leave the face blank.
Of course, not all writers have opted out. Baxter cites Saul Bellow, never one to skimp on description, as a good example:
Bellow’s good and bad characters are always revealed by their faces; the shrewd observer watches them closely enough to observe the mask falling away each time. There’s a predatory gaze in Bellow, a feeling of the necessity of watching others.
Any writer who adopts that predatory gaze takes a risk, writes Baxter:
The character or narrator who makes these assessments is often shrewd and unpleasant. You cannot be a nice person and also judge people’s characters based on their faces. That requires a kind of cruelty, an ability to say what no one else is willing to say. That is a form of bravery, and Bellow’s fiction is always brave in this manner.
Part of the difficulty is how to get past the obvious and hackneyed observations of facial features and expressions to reveal something unique about the person behind the face or mask. It’s so much easier to leave it blank and move on, say, to the clothing. Just put some tartan pants and suspenders on a middle-aged female character and the reader sits up and takes notice.
But to understand character, the reader doesn’t need a detailed portrait. A quick skim through some Mavis Gallant stories reveals that she includes random but salient details: could be hair, face, body, clothes, but also the impression the details make. Richard Ford often ignores the face in favour of a scan of the overall physique. When he does add facial detail, it is rich with subtext. From his devastatingly excellent novella, Abyss (in A Multitude of Sins):
She was spunky and had snapping blue eyes, an attractively mannish little blond haircut and a barely noticeable overbite that displayed the bottoms of her incisors. She was the only daughter of a Polish widower from Bridgeport, had performed the balance beam in high school, and was as hard as a little brickbat.
These concise and selective details give the reader plenty to chew on: eyes that snap (she suffers no fools), no-nonsense hair (suggesting confidence), slightly flawed teeth (so she’s not a super-model—and might even bite). Then onto her family background (maybe she was lavished with attention, but saddled, too, with expectations), and a random athletic detail that leads right to an amusing and erotically-charged assessment of her physique. After all, we are seeing her from the point of view of the man who will soon be involved with her.
Apologies to whoever this is. You’re lovely, though possibly sweaty. Please don’t sue me.
Too often, I struggle to visualize what my characters look like. Indistinct in my mind beyond a general dress or suit size (always size 8 women or 40 men—why?), they await my assignment of beauty or lack thereof. Or ordinariness, heaven help them. It’s discouraging. Occasionally, I come across an image of someone who becomes the perfect muse for a specific character, like the gentleman in the photo here who partially inspired the humourless Hyperhydrosis-suffering architect in my story, “The Chairs in Bjorn’s Living Room” (Grain Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 3). His confident and direct stare intrigued me. For obvious reasons I try to avoid modeling characters on the people in my life. People I’ve lost touch with? Fair game. Good reason to stay in touch. Or watch your back—er, face.
The human face, whether a mask or window to the soul (whoa—did I actually just write that?), is never a straightforward read and even more difficult to capture with words. But if a face can reveal deeper meaning in a story, it’s certainly worth a try. I guess I’m ready now to face it.
Given a face (or a trout mask) at least something is revealed: someone’s a fan of Captain Beefheart.
Recently I sorted through a lot of old letters from friends and family. They make for pretty entertaining reading, filled as they are with references to events and concerns I’d forgotten all about. In those pre-internet days, staying in touch during periods of geographic separation required putting pen to paper in an attempt to summarize what you were up to and maybe even to philosophize a bit about it. Letter writing is different in a lot of ways from tapping out a quick email or a tweet or chatting on Skype. Maybe the most significant difference is the result: a permanent record on paper that people tend to actually keep.
A lot of the correspondence I have is from when I lived briefly in Hong Kong in the late 1980s and the only affordable method of staying in touch was by post, often with weeks between exchanges. Among my letters are many from my mother, Audrey, who died last winter. Reading her descriptions of my parents’ quiet days is like hearing her voice again. Or, more honestly, really hearing my mother, at age fifty-something, for the first time. After all, she wrote those letters when I was immersed in the excitement of my own burgeoning adult life and not paying a whole lot of attention to hers. But then, that’s usually the way things go between parent and child for at least the first few decades.
Audrey giving her attention to her youngest --and most petulant-- child, the future writer (photo: John Heinonen)
My mother’s letters served to bring news from the home front: the progress of my dad’s renovation of the house, the various doings of my sister, my brother in Vancouver with the two young grandchildren, etc. They also detail the stress of coping with her own mother’s dementia–which involved frequent visits to check in on my grandma, then having to place her in a long-term care facility, followed by a new array of concerns.
Audrey in her final year
Her descriptions of guilt and relief and frustration during that difficult time are all too familiar to me now. In recent years our family went through a similar experience with her. There are no letters during the period of my mother’s long decline from Alzheimer’s, just a painfully sad note she wrote to herself in an attempt to feel anchored by whatever words she could still remember.
By the time my first story was published she had lost the ability to read or even to share my dad’s delight at seeing my name in print. But that was alright, because by then the focus had finally shifted from daughter to mother.
Now I delight in remembering her through these handwritten letters, shaking my head over her apologies for their mundane content. I’m so grateful she left our family her thoughtful observations of what seemed like just ordinary days. Gone now, they are extraordinary. Like she was to us.
(photo: John Heinonen)
Audrey
July 23, 1931 to February 14, 2011
I guess I’ve run out of things to say, so—so long for now. Write soon. We miss you.
Love, mom
We cannot avoid it and now we’ve arrived and are in its grasp. It being February. As an antidote, consider seeking out these four excellent stories, sure to amuse and therefore to lift the spirits. These stories are witty and gripping but there is a catch. They are dark. Dark and a little mean, a little wicked even. But that’s another great thing about short fiction: if it’s tough to take, at least it’s over with fast. Like a shot of something potent. So here then are four short shots. Not to be taken in all at once, mind you: one at a time during each sobering week in February.
“Issues I Dealt With in Therapy” by Matthew Klam (from Sam the Cat and Other Stories)
A very funny story densely packed with decadent details, political correctness, envy, disgust, and utter fatigue. An overwhelmed and under-achieving guy attending his too-successful friend’s over-the-top island wedding leads us through the weekend’s hype, steering us drunkenly towards the toast he has been asked to make and is in no shape to deliver. Will he pull himself together and come through for the groom we have come to loathe along with him? Do we want him to? Not in February we don’t. We want him to mess things up real bad and we want to stick around to watch.
“Adults Alone” by A. M. Homes (from The Safety of Objects)
A couple enjoys a holiday at home alone while their children are out-of-state at grandma’s. Luxuriating in their temporary freedom from obligations, they soon cross the line into all manners of debauchery. A cautionary/liberating tale for parents by a master satirist.
“The Dinner Party” by Joshua Ferris (from The New Yorker)
A man dreads the evening in front of him: his wife’s best friend and husband are expected for dinner. As she cooks, he drinks and complains about how predictably dull the evening will be. He’s loaded and the guests haven’t yet arrived and the evening gets complicated in ways he would never have expected. A fresh and amazingly well-written story.
“Truth” by Elyse Friedman (from Long Story Short)
What would happen if a man and a woman on a blind date said exactly what they were thinking about each other: the absolute truth? Friedman knows and writes a bang-on account of their evening as we alternately howl and cringe. At the end at least someone is satisfied between the sheets: the reader. Lucky us!
