Author: carin

hypothetically speaking…

~ carin ~ 3 Comments

IF… and I’m not saying I have, I’m just saying if I had just finished reading a book that had been heralded as the next great literary thing, or words to that effect [the point being it was raved about excessively]… If such a book existed and I had just finished reading it and I found it, let’s say lacking to a great degree in literary greatness to the point where almost none was discernible [unless literary greatness translates into a few not entirely bad sentences and a few good ones]… if I’d just finished that book—in which the title character is essentially pointless, only occasionally and dismissively referred to, and who then dies and is referred to again down the road as a means of cueing the reader to recall the narrator’s bond with them and so trigger an emotional response [which doesn’t happen, BTW, because exactly zippity-do-dah in terms of a relationship has been developed between the two and frankly nobody cares that one of them is dead…]

…If I’d just read this book, in which, it should also be mentioned, that while written in first person, the narrator knows things inside people’s heads and other places she has not been—which annoys me more than this keyboard has letters to describe, given how hard I work and curse and revise to avoid just such sacrilege—and while we’re at it, the narrator’s dialogue is not consistent with her age, not to mention dull, not to mention one minute she’s an innocent and the next, though still the same age, she’s expounding on life in a way that suggests having spent the past century sitting cross-legged on a mountain-top in saffron robes…

…IF I had read such a book, a book that had been touted as a remarkable debut, in which not one shred of poetry exists, where even the imaginative is obvious [and just in case you still don’t get something, don’t worry, it’ll be spelled out in crayon somewhere down the road]; where countless unrelated events span decades haphazardly and pointlessly, leaving a nest of loose threads rather than any semblance of whole cloth; a book that reads like a bad movie in which darlings rule [we can only assume they amused the author too much to have them properly shot], where relationships are flat, and where—because apparently nobody stopped her—the author uses both ‘immediately’ and ‘suddenly’ in the same sentence…

…had I read such a book—I would have slammed it shut and asked that age-old question: wtf?

For the record… it’s not the author I blame. It’s a good draft. But where was the editor? And how does a reputable house publish this, in this… this very good draft condition?

But here’s the real sixty-four thousand dollar question: how in all that’s decent does it not only get good reviews, but buzz in high places…?

I mean, if there was such a book. And I had just read it.

advice i like

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

~ from The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

—Scooped from this very delightful article on slow reading…

three girls

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

So I walked to the library.

And inside, the first thing I see, a girl, maybe five or six, in a red dress with big black polka dots, skip, skip, skipping, towards the kiddie book section—arms overhead and long blonde pony tails bouncing and swinging from side to side, unbridled as her joy.

On the way home, a girl, maybe fifteen, in cutoff shorts and tiny tee-shirt. Long brown hair, tied back, exposing round, freckled face and big smile. An apple-cheeked, wholesome Daisy Duke. She delivers newspapers in a wooden wagon and as I walk past she says Hello! in this way that feels like she’s actually happy to see me. Some people can do that. Some people can be fifteen and beautiful and not know it, and make being a paper girl who hauls around an old wagon seem like a very enviable thing.

Around the corner, an old girl. Maybe eighty. Maybe more. Grey hair, wavy, cut in a bob, shoulders hunched forward like a parenthesis, as if it’s been a long time since her back was straight. Comes out of one of the swanky houses that abutt the ravine. She’s in smart trousers and a light khaki jacket with a Burberry collar, black patent leather flats. She walks toward the dead-end of the street; I assume she’s off to visit a neighbour for tea or a few hands of bridge. But no. She walks to the end, then pauses, turns back and walks home. All in perfectly polished patent leather pumps.

venus and mars (the rocket science version)

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

“She was an attractive French Canadian in her forties named Julie Payette, who had flown one shuttle mission and would fly another in July 2009. She was dressed in blue NASA coveralls, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. On the screens above us, in the briefing center, the space shuttle Discovery crouched, steaming, as the countdown progressed. Payette was too kind to laugh in my face when I asked her bout the silence of space, but she looked as if she wanted to.

“There is always noise in space,” she said. “When you don’t hear noise, it’s a problem, especially in a space suit. It means the interior ventilators are not working, not circulating air; the carbon dioxide [that humans breathe out] has a different density in zero gravity, it makes pockets around us.” She had intense brown eyes and a mouth that tried hard not to twist upward at my cluelessness. In order to sleep weightless, she continued, she had to find corners to wedge herself in, but “it’s hard to find comfortable places.” Her favorite nook was in the space-suit bay, jammed between two parked suits. “The helmets purr, ” she said, then repeated it happily, in French: “ils ronronnent.”

~from Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, by George Michelsen Foy (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

~

Here’s the thing: were the author speaking with Neil Armstrong, would he have noted Armstrong’s hair colour and how he wore it; would the intensity of his eyes, or lack thereof have warranted even one line of ink? (Not to mention the shape and/or tendencies of Armstrong’s mouth to turn up at the corners.)

Granted, he may have asked about sleeping arrangements on the shuttle, but I’m not convinced he’d have asked Neil to repeat anything in French…

Furthermore, I wonder: if a woman had interviewed Payette [or Armsrong for that matter] would attractiveness, hair, mouth and eyes have figured in a story about the quality of sound and silence in space?

first flutter-by of the season

~ carin ~ 10 Comments

Not sure I’ve seen one of these before. Certainly not in March. No idea what kind it is. Behavioural clues: tendency to flap about rather absent-mindedly, nearly crashing into my head before settling (indicates possible bad eyesight?)…narcissistic attention to improving tan…unable to find a comfortable resting pose; ADHD??
…Eventually fluttering right on by without so much as a nod to the other insects.

Note: In my effort to make an identification I googled “clumsy, vain, hyperactive, short-sighted, anti-social, black and yellow flutterby with blue dots” and got a seamstress in Winnipeg named Ted…

in the neighbourhood

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

A guy walking his dog doesn’t normally get my attention. I can’t say why this one does except that I’m pretty sure it’s the guy from around the corner who lives alone since his wife moved out, whose dog is always howling because it never gets walked, at least not on this street. And the way he’s walking. One foot in front of the other at a regular pace, sometimes looking up, sometimes not—all very ordinary. Yet. There’s something. It doesn’t feel like an ordinary walk, it feels like something has changed, or is is about to change, like he’s walking at this end of the street because he’s lived around the corner for ten years and is kind of sorry he’s never talked to anyone, or walked his poor howling dog more often. Like he wants to see what he’s been stupidly ignoring all this time. Maybe he’s decided to change his ways and this is the beginning of a new habit; maybe he’s looking for someone to say hello to.
But it doesn’t feel like a beginning.
It feels like a goodbye walk.
I forget about it for the rest of the day.
I go out.
And when I come home, as I turn the corner, I see a For Sale sign on his lawn.
Whatever the circumstance, whatever his deal, I can’t help feeling a little sorry I didn’t go out to say hello when he passed by…

*

Grandchildren visit next door and the grandma (a dear woman who feeds the neighbourhood stray and whose husband built it a beautiful shelter on their deck, complete with sheepskin blankets and insulation done to code) shouts her happiness across the front lawn. Later the youngest plays basketball on the driveway, bouncing the ball more than shooting, while a girl does cartwheels on the grass.

*

The lad across the road is all grown up now. Must be nearing thirty. He lives elsewhere but comes home often and today he and a few pals bring out the nets and sticks and play some ball hockey, just like they’ve been doing for the past twenty years. Just like no time at all has passed.

*

The new people next to the ball hockey crowd have kids so young they ride bikes with bright orange training wheels and in the morning the boy stands at the edge of his lawn, facing the street and chirps loudly like a blue-toqued, green-sneakered rare bird and I’m reminded again of the genius of kids. And wonder when we lose the impulse to greet the day with a song only the wildlife will understand.

the illusion of a forest…

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

“The natural disaster of a forest fire returns carbon to the soil, enriching it for the new forest to come. A clear-cut removes the trees that are the source of that carbon. To walk there is to see a landscape devastated as if by bombs. Reforestation? It seems that real care is taken only for the hills and mountains that border highways where tourists and people from the cities can see them. Those are the clear-cuts where the corporations put up signs to tell the passing cars when the forest was replanted and how well it is doing today.

“The corporations rarely harvest their trees right up to a highway. If you stop your car and walk 300 metres into a forest, you will often stumble across a clear-cut hidden from the cars that pass. The trees you see by the side of the road are the illusion of a forest left there to salve your conscience. Back out of sight, on the plateaus and hills and mountains, the forests are doing poorly. The variety of species is reduced to one of fir, pine, hemlock, spruce, tamarack, or whatever, depending on which of one or two species is likely to return the greatest profit.

“Diversity of species is anathema to the managers of the new forest. Monoculture is king. It is precisely what happened on the vast prairie, where rich and diverse grasslands were replaced with fields of grain. The landowner’s system of fallowing fields on alternate years allowed for massive evaporation from the bare earth. The moisture rising from the subsoils brought with it salts from the ancient seas that once covered the land, and when the moisture evaporated, it left the salt behind. Vast areas of the Great Plains are pocked with crystal deserts where nothing grows.”

~ excerpted from ‘The Forest’s Edge’, by Patrick Lane (The Walrus, May 2005)