In an interesting bit of synchronicity, I wrapped up Barbara Comyns' Our Spoons Came from Woolworths just after reading Denise Duhamel's Blowout. Both deal with relationships, indeed marriages, going south. There are also interesting parallels as well as contrasts between Blowout and Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, but I think those will have to wait for another day. (In a nutshell, the biggest difference between Duhamel and Olds is that Olds is going over the breakdown of a very long marriage and Duhamel is middle aged when the breakup occurs, though she and her husband had been together for about 16 years.)
There will be minor spoilers going forward, but I don't think the Comyns book is really spoiled by knowing some of these details. It certainly comes across as quite autobiographical, though if Comyns really did have an illegal abortion back in her youth, she was quite brave to write about it even fictionally and risk investigation. Also, readers may be relieved to know that in real life her second child survived (and did not succumb to scarlet fever). Basically, the novel is about two completely unprepared and feckless artistic types who get married and then basically live in squalor. This wouldn't matter so much until they have a child, and social services essentially did not exist at the time, so they come to rely on private charity (though not as often as they should, turning down a free milk allowance out of misplaced pride). The (surviving) son is often shunted around to relatives who begrudgingly take him in for a while until the mother has an emotional break down and tries to reclaim him. She describes herself as being so poor she couldn't afford a stamp and had to make it look as if it had fallen off in order to post a letter! She was also going to walk 100 miles (with an infant) rather than borrow 15 shillings (again, what crazy priorities!). And yet, she gets pregnant three times, which seems completely irresponsible. She says that it is clear only wealthy families can have children, but then doesn't make an effort to stop putting herself in this position. She really comes across as one of these powerless and fairly ignorant women in Africa one keeps reading about that can't say no to their husbands and then end up pregnant and with AIDS. It's a bit of a shock to read it happening to a young Briton (obviously not the AIDS).
However, she points to other examples of her relatives who are careful not to have children they can't afford (even in an era when birth control was scarce or unreliable or perhaps even illegal (in Ireland presumably)). Her sister seems to have a better head on her shoulders as well (and indeed, Comyns herself turned out to be a bit of a hustler and a survivor at least until the Depression hit when she did find herself forced to take a job as a cook, as does the narrator.) Thus, this is more of an individual failing and an extreme fecklessness on her part than a general statement about the role of women in Britain at that time.
I guess one can understand how someone with an irregular childhood wouldn't be that capable or competent, but she just doesn't seem to learn from her mistakes nor does she seek out mentors that could help her improve her lot. Life just happens to her and she sits back and lets it roll over her.
Still, her husband is even worse -- a totally failed artist who won't make any
effort to support his growing family. He basically does force her into the first abortion and then ultimately abandons the family, which comes as no surprise to the narrator. She actually welcomes it. Still, I can't relate to such people and honestly found myself fairly annoyed with the book. I can't quite process the fairy tale ending. It seems so improbable, and yet it did happen to Comyns!
Anyway, turning to Duhamel, things are little better for artists (in this case poets) in the U.S. 75 or so years later. While the safety net is better established in the UK (no thanks to the Tories who are dismantling it), it is definitely pretty thin for Americans who want to be full-time artists and just can't really make a go of it. There were never that many examples of artistic couples in the 1950-70s, though Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner do come to mind. In virtually all other cases I can think of up until the 1980s, female artistic drive always got shunted off and the woman had to make a living and let the man get on with his art. In some rare cases, female writers actually were the bread-winners, but this generally only worked for fiction writers and essayists, not for poets.
There's something to be said for two people from the same background getting together -- an understanding of the importance of art (or whatever) and a willingness to sacrifice to live in a big city, generally New York, while hustling and waiting for breaks. However, it also means a lot of additional strain when nobody gets paid for their art -- and sometimes even more problems when only one artist is successful (and can't pull the other one along). That last situation probably ends more relationships than just being broke together.
Money was often on Denise Duhamel's mind and she has an entire book about money (Ka-Ching). She also wrote a fair bit about her husband, Nick. You find out in Two and Two (one of her later collections) that he is also a bit of a writer/artist. While she still seems a bit taken with him, one can (with hindsight) see some warning signs in one of these poems about his privileged upbringing and the fact that he seems a bit narcissistic. There is also a bit about Duhamel still scrambling a bit, even after landing a teaching gig at a university in Florida (about the best one can do nowadays as a poet) with worries about insurance and so forth. Two and Two also contains "Egg Rolls" -- probably my favorite poem by Duhamel -- where she describes how important it was to her to be an artist/writer in NYC and she took all these jobs and some days had to choose between train fare and food (not so different from Comyns actually). "Egg Rolls" describes a day when she chose the food. I've certainly never been that strapped, though there was a short period where I had to go two weeks on $20 (but I had a meal plan at university). I always migrated to a stabler life than being an artist, though I may well regret someday how I invested my time if not my money.
Well, Nick was a bit of a deadbeat, who became a big deadbeat, and things just got worse from there. In fact, after their divorce he emptied their bank account and kept going into overdraft mode ("Tina and the Bruised Hearts"). He also tried to get alimony from her (getting alimony from a poet really does seem as profitable as squeezing blood from a stone...). All this is laid out in the first section of Blowout where she is trying to process this loss, though she already seems to feel she will be better off without him and his freeloading ways. (From the way he is portrayed, Nick seems like the failed artist in the Comyns who just can't seem to grow up and take responsibility, let alone figure out a way to make a living.) Duhamel's biggest regret out of all this: that she can't tear up all the love poems she wrote him over the years, since they are all published in her earlier collections. That is definitely an occupational hazard of being a poet, particularly one who is a confessional poet (that is what Duhamel is at heart, even when she dressed up her poems with pomo tricks). She ends Blowout with a poem (homage or rip-off of Frank O'Hara depending on one's forbearance) about a new love interest: "Having a Diet Coke with You." One can only hope things work out a bit better this time around, but she hasn't really learned her lesson and is trying to shack up with another artistic type, though a novelist this time.
Though "Having a Diet Coke" is too long and flabby to really work as a poem, it does have some good lines. I liked this stanza:
I also know I said I wanted us to be discovered
spinning on our stools in a Woolworth's that no longer exists
drinking our Diet Cokes out of frosted glass tumblers loaded with ice
but I think what I really meant is that I want us
to discover each other
(Again, an interesting linkage to the Comyns book where the title is a reference to her disappointment in having to get all their silverware at Woolworth's instead of a better store, not knowing that in the future anything nice they own will go into hock at the pawnshop. I suppose if we didn't have blind optimism about the future, almost no one would do anything new...)
In recent years, there have been some artistic couples that have made it work, though it seems to work slightly better for writers than visual artists. Constance Urdang-Donald Finkel and Jane Kenyon-Donald Hall do appear to have been successful artistic marriages, though it is hard to tell what would have happened had nobody involved had their lives cut short by illness. If one is just playing the odds, then I would expect that the a pairing of a visual artist and a writer would work better than either two painters or two poets. My old poetry professor, Ken Mikolowski and his late wife Ann, seemed to make it work. Still, who likes worrying about the odds when one is young and in love with that fascinating artist who seems to understand just what you are going through...
Bonne chance, young lovers.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Monday, October 7, 2013
The Night Market
I'm not sure how many of my readers are familiar with the Night Market.
So the concept of the Night Bus (or Knight Bus) is fairly well known, and there is the lesser-known Night Bookmobile. A Night Market is pretty much how it sounds, a marketplace that opens up in the evening. Apparently the concept was imported from Asia, particularly Taiwan, and they are generally found in North American cities with large Asian populations. There are actually three competing Night Markets in Vancouver/Richmond, and one or two in Toronto. I assume there is one in New York, and one just opened up in Chicago (near Argyle) in 2013. They generally only run in the late spring to early fall, at least in Vancouver/Richmond.
They have certain elements of the street fair, mostly a lot of fried food that requires a fairly strong stomach. Some people have no problem with food from street vendors (I fall into this category but it definitely helps when one avoids meat) and others struggle with it. I've heard that in the past the quality of the merchandise was higher, but now it is mostly a lot of low-quality plastic stuff (who knew there were so many cell phone covers!), socks and stuffed toys of all descriptions.
I went last year and was a bit underwhelmed. I didn't really give much thought to it until I realized that the one in Richmond was running for two more weekends. I thought my kids would get a kick out of it, and we don't live that far away. Also it wasn't raining, so we went yesterday (it helps that it opens at 6 on Sundays rather than 7 pm). It was still pre-dusk when we arrived.
This year was Year of the Duck apparently (just joking). I don't know why the duck became so widespread in Chinatowns and Asian markets this year, but it was a cute touch. This market actually had two large ducks. You can also see the train to YVR. One thing this market has going for it is that it is walking distance from the Canada Line, which makes it particularly attractive relative to the other markets (for me).
The other duck.
It did not take long for dusk to arrive, maybe 30 minutes after we turned up. It the summer, it definitely takes longer for it to feel like a true Night Market, whereas this time it got dark quickly. Here are some of the merchandise tents. I did waver a bit and got my daughter a Hello Kitty blanket and my son a Pokemon toy. However, I was resolute and did not let him try out any of the swords on display...
Some of the finer fried foods on display.
The dining area (with electric trees).
On the whole, it was deemed a successful excursion. I probably did enjoy it a bit more, experiencing it a bit through their eyes than through my more jaded ones. My son asked if we could go again next year; I said it was possible but contingent on many factors (ok, not in those exact words, but he knew what I meant).
So the concept of the Night Bus (or Knight Bus) is fairly well known, and there is the lesser-known Night Bookmobile. A Night Market is pretty much how it sounds, a marketplace that opens up in the evening. Apparently the concept was imported from Asia, particularly Taiwan, and they are generally found in North American cities with large Asian populations. There are actually three competing Night Markets in Vancouver/Richmond, and one or two in Toronto. I assume there is one in New York, and one just opened up in Chicago (near Argyle) in 2013. They generally only run in the late spring to early fall, at least in Vancouver/Richmond.
They have certain elements of the street fair, mostly a lot of fried food that requires a fairly strong stomach. Some people have no problem with food from street vendors (I fall into this category but it definitely helps when one avoids meat) and others struggle with it. I've heard that in the past the quality of the merchandise was higher, but now it is mostly a lot of low-quality plastic stuff (who knew there were so many cell phone covers!), socks and stuffed toys of all descriptions.
I went last year and was a bit underwhelmed. I didn't really give much thought to it until I realized that the one in Richmond was running for two more weekends. I thought my kids would get a kick out of it, and we don't live that far away. Also it wasn't raining, so we went yesterday (it helps that it opens at 6 on Sundays rather than 7 pm). It was still pre-dusk when we arrived.
This year was Year of the Duck apparently (just joking). I don't know why the duck became so widespread in Chinatowns and Asian markets this year, but it was a cute touch. This market actually had two large ducks. You can also see the train to YVR. One thing this market has going for it is that it is walking distance from the Canada Line, which makes it particularly attractive relative to the other markets (for me).
The other duck.
It did not take long for dusk to arrive, maybe 30 minutes after we turned up. It the summer, it definitely takes longer for it to feel like a true Night Market, whereas this time it got dark quickly. Here are some of the merchandise tents. I did waver a bit and got my daughter a Hello Kitty blanket and my son a Pokemon toy. However, I was resolute and did not let him try out any of the swords on display...
Some of the finer fried foods on display.
We actually had coconut juice, which was tastier than I imagined, plus a kind of waffle with custard filling pressed into the shape of a fish (above). The custard fish was actually quite good, and I almost went back to get more, but will just have to live with my memories. I'm not going to get a special waffle press this year, but maybe down the line...
On the whole, it was deemed a successful excursion. I probably did enjoy it a bit more, experiencing it a bit through their eyes than through my more jaded ones. My son asked if we could go again next year; I said it was possible but contingent on many factors (ok, not in those exact words, but he knew what I meant).
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Memory (Proust)
Preliminary thoughts on Proust
I think I have indicated that I have been struggling a lot with Proust (getting through only 200 pages in a month). This stems from two things, both of which I find off-putting, so the combination of the two is really deadly. First, an emphasis on style in the extreme. I suppose pretty much everyone knows there isn't all that much "plot" in Remembrance of Things Past and that one is instead invited to chart the responses of a loose confederation of acquaintances as they navigate different social milieu. I honestly can't remember if Bourdieu references Proust in his book Distinction (all about how upper classes maintain distinction from lower classes) but he certainly should have. The lengths these folks go to shun -- and more frequently pre-shun others (so that they don't open themselves up to being shunned) -- those that have slightly fallen (or risen) out of their class is astounding. Also, a vast amount of energy is expended in not being caught out by others in their social circle. And this is a bit interesting, but not at 3000+ pages. I vaguely recall there was some essay in Umberto Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon that summed up some philosopher well (probably Foucault or even Bourdieu himself -- though not remembering the details certainly undermines the usefulness of this example). Maybe I really should just skim Distinction again (instead of Proust) and be done with it. As we move further into the 21st Century, the acid bath of capitalism in the U.S. (and to a slightly lesser extent Canada) has stripped away social classes and their conventions (though not the distinction between the wealthy and everyone else!) so this emphasis on social distinctions just feels more and more alien to me.
Second, the memory thing. I consider myself to have a decent memory, though I have overtaxed my memory with the plots of far too many novels and mediocre TV sitcoms. But I would be hard-pressed to say that I could recall enough of what happened (in my childhood!) to cover 3000+ pages with really fine-grained detail of what my parents and their friends were up to (often when I had apparently left the room!). And the most famous bit of all (Swann in Love) happened long before the Narrator was born! So he is retelling Swann's story in a style that is essentially identical to his own story, with the same fine attention to social details. This strikes me as unlikely that two people would have such similar styles and interests, esp. when the Narrator does separate himself a bit from Swann and his (formerly) caddish ways, to say nothing of both being such mental giants to remember these details. Does the Narrator just make up material to fill in the gaps (I am particularly thinking of the many times that Swann and Odette go to the salon at the Verdurins' house)? Did he press Swann for the details that would make this account so similar in style to the opening of Swann's Way? I just can't really get over this. I can't suspend belief sufficiently to get into the book, and then even when I do, there is so little real plot... This ultimately ruined Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters for me, and I ultimately gave up on that.
I think I will stick with Proust, but this is definitely a one-time thing, which is fast turning into an endurance test. I'll probably actually give the books away after reading them through. Now here is a case where Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody captures the flavour of this amazing feat of memory but sort of parodies it at the same time (ultimately the famed and feared food critic is retreating to simple tastes from his childhood) and does it in about 150 pages. But shorter still is even better: Borges' "Funes the Memorious" is the most tolerable account of a man cursed with a prodigious memory, and I would urge everyone to go off and read it.
(I can't guarantee how long the link will last, but the story itself is only 7 pages.)
I think I have indicated that I have been struggling a lot with Proust (getting through only 200 pages in a month). This stems from two things, both of which I find off-putting, so the combination of the two is really deadly. First, an emphasis on style in the extreme. I suppose pretty much everyone knows there isn't all that much "plot" in Remembrance of Things Past and that one is instead invited to chart the responses of a loose confederation of acquaintances as they navigate different social milieu. I honestly can't remember if Bourdieu references Proust in his book Distinction (all about how upper classes maintain distinction from lower classes) but he certainly should have. The lengths these folks go to shun -- and more frequently pre-shun others (so that they don't open themselves up to being shunned) -- those that have slightly fallen (or risen) out of their class is astounding. Also, a vast amount of energy is expended in not being caught out by others in their social circle. And this is a bit interesting, but not at 3000+ pages. I vaguely recall there was some essay in Umberto Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon that summed up some philosopher well (probably Foucault or even Bourdieu himself -- though not remembering the details certainly undermines the usefulness of this example). Maybe I really should just skim Distinction again (instead of Proust) and be done with it. As we move further into the 21st Century, the acid bath of capitalism in the U.S. (and to a slightly lesser extent Canada) has stripped away social classes and their conventions (though not the distinction between the wealthy and everyone else!) so this emphasis on social distinctions just feels more and more alien to me.
Second, the memory thing. I consider myself to have a decent memory, though I have overtaxed my memory with the plots of far too many novels and mediocre TV sitcoms. But I would be hard-pressed to say that I could recall enough of what happened (in my childhood!) to cover 3000+ pages with really fine-grained detail of what my parents and their friends were up to (often when I had apparently left the room!). And the most famous bit of all (Swann in Love) happened long before the Narrator was born! So he is retelling Swann's story in a style that is essentially identical to his own story, with the same fine attention to social details. This strikes me as unlikely that two people would have such similar styles and interests, esp. when the Narrator does separate himself a bit from Swann and his (formerly) caddish ways, to say nothing of both being such mental giants to remember these details. Does the Narrator just make up material to fill in the gaps (I am particularly thinking of the many times that Swann and Odette go to the salon at the Verdurins' house)? Did he press Swann for the details that would make this account so similar in style to the opening of Swann's Way? I just can't really get over this. I can't suspend belief sufficiently to get into the book, and then even when I do, there is so little real plot... This ultimately ruined Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters for me, and I ultimately gave up on that.
I think I will stick with Proust, but this is definitely a one-time thing, which is fast turning into an endurance test. I'll probably actually give the books away after reading them through. Now here is a case where Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody captures the flavour of this amazing feat of memory but sort of parodies it at the same time (ultimately the famed and feared food critic is retreating to simple tastes from his childhood) and does it in about 150 pages. But shorter still is even better: Borges' "Funes the Memorious" is the most tolerable account of a man cursed with a prodigious memory, and I would urge everyone to go off and read it.
(I can't guarantee how long the link will last, but the story itself is only 7 pages.)
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
More thoughts on Bowering
I do sort of come at Bowering slant-wise. Unlike a lot of B.C.-based writers, I don't feel particularly indebted to him. I notice that both he and George Stanley seem pretty taken with the long poem (or long poems built from series of shorter poems). I generally don't have the patience for long poems and prefer my series to wrap at about 10 or fewer poems. Yet I think I should at least try to read through the bulk of his work (and Stanley too -- I admit I was pretty taken with Stanley's Vancouver: A Poem, which I ordered and then reviewed here). It is true that Bowering seems to play the crotchety poet card more and more in his recent work, but then he sort of winks at the reader, indicating that it is mostly just a pose (that he has earned).
What I will do for the moment is to lay out the best way (in my mind) to approach Bowering, though I have certainly violated the order already.
Selected Poems: 1961-92
(This is actually quite a good collection, generally available used for very little cash, and most importantly it contains the entire sequences "At War With the U.S.", "Allophanes" and "Kerrisdale Elegies." If Bowering hadn't written anything other than Kerrisdale Elegies, he probably would still have made a name for himself in poetry circles. It is sort of a response to Rilke's Duino Elegies. Kerrisdale Elegies was recently reprinted but with seemingly minor edits. I think one can safely read the version in Selected Poems. If one only reads a single book of poetry by Bowering, it ought to be this one.)
Urban Snow (1992)
(A relatively small number of poems from this collection are in the Selected but most are omitted, so it is worth peeking through this. A lot of poems about baseball fields are in the series "Yards," which might be of more interest to baseball fans who do try to travel to see games around the country. They didn't do that much for me.)
Blonds on Bikes (1997)
(I didn't enjoy the main sequence "Blonds on Bikes" as much as I thought I would, but I will read it again before returning it to the library.)
His Life: a Poem (2000)
(A bit of an autobiography in poetry. I haven't cracked this.)
Changing on the Fly (2004)
(Another selected poems, but one that focuses on relatively shorter lyric poems across his entire career. Possibly useful to catch early poems left out of the main Selected Poems and well as the "best" of His Life.)
Vermeer’s Light: Poems 1996-2006
(This is sort of an anthology that takes up where the Selected leaves off, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't contain any of the Blonds on Bikes poems. I could be wrong of course. A lot of the titles grabbed me, and I've put this book on hold at the library so should be able go through it soon.)
My Darling Nellie Grey (2010)
(A self-contained book of his daily poems written in 2010. I already reviewed this here.)
Teeth: Poems 2006-2011
(I presume this doesn't contain anything from MDNG, but I could be wrong. I should be able to get this from the library in the next month or so.)
This is not an exhaustive list, though it is still a fairly long list of books. (I have enough of a head start, that I should be able to get through them by the spring.) If one adds in the fiction and the literary criticism that Bowering has written, it truly becomes overwhelming.
What I will do for the moment is to lay out the best way (in my mind) to approach Bowering, though I have certainly violated the order already.
Selected Poems: 1961-92
(This is actually quite a good collection, generally available used for very little cash, and most importantly it contains the entire sequences "At War With the U.S.", "Allophanes" and "Kerrisdale Elegies." If Bowering hadn't written anything other than Kerrisdale Elegies, he probably would still have made a name for himself in poetry circles. It is sort of a response to Rilke's Duino Elegies. Kerrisdale Elegies was recently reprinted but with seemingly minor edits. I think one can safely read the version in Selected Poems. If one only reads a single book of poetry by Bowering, it ought to be this one.)
Urban Snow (1992)
(A relatively small number of poems from this collection are in the Selected but most are omitted, so it is worth peeking through this. A lot of poems about baseball fields are in the series "Yards," which might be of more interest to baseball fans who do try to travel to see games around the country. They didn't do that much for me.)
Blonds on Bikes (1997)
(I didn't enjoy the main sequence "Blonds on Bikes" as much as I thought I would, but I will read it again before returning it to the library.)
His Life: a Poem (2000)
(A bit of an autobiography in poetry. I haven't cracked this.)
Changing on the Fly (2004)
(Another selected poems, but one that focuses on relatively shorter lyric poems across his entire career. Possibly useful to catch early poems left out of the main Selected Poems and well as the "best" of His Life.)
Vermeer’s Light: Poems 1996-2006
(This is sort of an anthology that takes up where the Selected leaves off, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't contain any of the Blonds on Bikes poems. I could be wrong of course. A lot of the titles grabbed me, and I've put this book on hold at the library so should be able go through it soon.)
My Darling Nellie Grey (2010)
(A self-contained book of his daily poems written in 2010. I already reviewed this here.)
Teeth: Poems 2006-2011
(I presume this doesn't contain anything from MDNG, but I could be wrong. I should be able to get this from the library in the next month or so.)
This is not an exhaustive list, though it is still a fairly long list of books. (I have enough of a head start, that I should be able to get through them by the spring.) If one adds in the fiction and the literary criticism that Bowering has written, it truly becomes overwhelming.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
7th Challenge - 3rd review - Tamarind Mem
This book (Tamarind Mem by Anita Rau Badami) fell into my hands fairly randomly. It was a somewhat water-damaged book that was in the Burnaby Library book sale. The summary on the back cover made it seem like there would be a lot of back and forth, shifting perspectives from the daughter (now in grad school in Calgary) and the mother, still in India. That sort of happens, but in fact the book is broken in two parts. The first half, the daughter reaches back into her memory and recalls a lot of things that happened to her growing up, i.e. long before Calgary. Her life was a bit unsettled because her father was a big-shot engineer for the railways and they kept having to move every two or three years. The second half is her mother's recollection of those times (and sometimes the same events). Thus, there is probably less than 10 pages of content about the daughter's life in Canada (just flashes as she waits for another postcard from her mother, who is now travelling through India on the railroads her husband helped build). While it qualifies for the challenge (Anita Badami did move to Calgary in 1991 for grad school,* later lived in Vancouver and has apparently settled in Montreal), the amount of Canadian content is very, very low. Her later novels, Can You Hear The Nightbird Call, and Tell it to the Trees, have more in the way of looking at Indian migrants to Canada, including how they adapt and to a lesser extent how they change the communities they move to. From the very brief blurbs I have read, it sounds like I might enjoy Nightbird, but I probably should give Trees a pass.
Anyway, I read this book on the plane back from Chicago. I thought the sections from the daughter's perspective were pretty good, but it just never was satisfactorily explained why the mother had such a difficult ("tart") disposition. Some people are just born that way I guess,** though her frustration at not being able to develop a career certainly contributed. Also, she {the mother of the novel} had a grandmother who was also fairly strong and/or difficult and bucked convention, and she was apparently the only female in her family who looked up to this grandmother! There is one sad moment where the mother is still a recent bride, just trying to understand her much older and fairly distant husband. He makes one attempt at bridging the gap, and she totally shuts him down, even realizing at the time that she shouldn't be doing this, but not being able to stop herself. No question, she didn't seem like somebody I would want to be around... Curiously, the father is portrayed (even by the mother) as a good, even doting father, but an indifferent husband. This is perhaps more surprising given that he and the mother only had two daughters and no sons.
Not really sure what else to say about the book. Not all that much happens in it really (well, aside from two deaths). It kind of revolves around how stunted women's choices were in India in the 1940s and 50s (and beyond), along with a fairly detailed portrait of their superstitious nanny (mostly from the daughter's remembrances). The daughter barely grasps how different things are for her (and her sister -- though her sister seems to have no ambition at all beyond being a wife). I didn't like it as much as Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, which has a more epic scope (apparently Can You Hear The Nightbird Call does have this broader scope). Tonally, this novel has some things in common with Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, and if you liked one, you would probably like the other, though for me personally I thought Lahiri's The Namesake was head and shoulders above either (and haven't gotten around to her Unaccustomed Earth). This review is a bit more positive and may help guide you if you are considering picking Tamarind Mem up.
* It does seem large sections of the book are autobiographical, though perhaps Badami split herself into both sisters. She did move to Calgary for grad. school but had already married, while the older daughter was single.
** I certainly go out of my way to see the downside of most situations (a deep pessimist), even though I had a relatively happy and certainly secure childhood.
Anyway, I read this book on the plane back from Chicago. I thought the sections from the daughter's perspective were pretty good, but it just never was satisfactorily explained why the mother had such a difficult ("tart") disposition. Some people are just born that way I guess,** though her frustration at not being able to develop a career certainly contributed. Also, she {the mother of the novel} had a grandmother who was also fairly strong and/or difficult and bucked convention, and she was apparently the only female in her family who looked up to this grandmother! There is one sad moment where the mother is still a recent bride, just trying to understand her much older and fairly distant husband. He makes one attempt at bridging the gap, and she totally shuts him down, even realizing at the time that she shouldn't be doing this, but not being able to stop herself. No question, she didn't seem like somebody I would want to be around... Curiously, the father is portrayed (even by the mother) as a good, even doting father, but an indifferent husband. This is perhaps more surprising given that he and the mother only had two daughters and no sons.
Not really sure what else to say about the book. Not all that much happens in it really (well, aside from two deaths). It kind of revolves around how stunted women's choices were in India in the 1940s and 50s (and beyond), along with a fairly detailed portrait of their superstitious nanny (mostly from the daughter's remembrances). The daughter barely grasps how different things are for her (and her sister -- though her sister seems to have no ambition at all beyond being a wife). I didn't like it as much as Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, which has a more epic scope (apparently Can You Hear The Nightbird Call does have this broader scope). Tonally, this novel has some things in common with Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, and if you liked one, you would probably like the other, though for me personally I thought Lahiri's The Namesake was head and shoulders above either (and haven't gotten around to her Unaccustomed Earth). This review is a bit more positive and may help guide you if you are considering picking Tamarind Mem up.
* It does seem large sections of the book are autobiographical, though perhaps Badami split herself into both sisters. She did move to Calgary for grad. school but had already married, while the older daughter was single.
** I certainly go out of my way to see the downside of most situations (a deep pessimist), even though I had a relatively happy and certainly secure childhood.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
7th Challenge - 2st review - George Bowering
Not entirely sure how this happened, but I have taken a bit of a detour (putting Proust on hold) back into Canadian poetry. I've gotten into the works of George Stanley (an American who migrated to Vancouver in 1971)* and George Bowering, who is one of the best-known Vancouver literary figures. I was familiar with Bowering through his Selected Poems 1961-92, i.e. even before I moved here, though I wasn't aware of how much he had written post-1992. Now that I have been clued in, I have Blondes on Bikes on hold at the library. I even read Bowering's Burning Water, but that was ages ago. I'll try to reread it before I leave the region for good. Today I will be reviewing a fairly massive volume called My Darling
Nellie Grey (and will review some of the Stanley books, most likely in
Oct.).
It is hard to really review My Darling Nellie Grey, as it is actually 12 books in one (and initially all 12 were published as stand-alone chapbooks, so one way of looking at it is that you get an amazing bargain by getting them all in one place in this volume). As Bowering approached his 70th birthday, he decided he needed a challenge to keep him writing.** Eventually he settled on the idea of writing a poem each day for a year, but above and beyond that, he would set different rules for each month and he also self-consciously would repeat ideas/themes/words between the poems for each month.
For example, for February, he concentrated on short poems of short lines, apparently keeping them all to two stanzas of 4 or 5 lines each. March was a whole series of poems that begin "I remember" and then generally continue on with some memories of his parents and his childhood.
April is dedicated to sonnets (or "sonnets" in the Ted Berrigan sense of 14 lines of free verse) with large sections coming from found sources, particularly sources that indirectly attack U.S. policy -- or show Americans at their most stupid and racist. Here I guess I am guess a hypocrite. I think most people would consider me anti-American (or certainly anti-Red State) but I have a bit of a problem stomaching it from outsiders. So I wasn't too keen on this month, and I liked the Sept. sequence "Fulgencio" even less where Bowering rants about U.S. policy towards Cuba and particularly how we supported Fulgencio Batista long after he showed his true colours. I wasn't quite sure he was going to go there, but indeed in the last poem of the sequence, Bowering basically declares Cuba a socialist paradise. It was very hard after that point to take him seriously. I think one can be anti-capitalist without actually considering Cuba a particularly good place to live, but that is (perhaps) a theme for another post. I'll just say I wasn't too crazy about these two months and leave it at that.
June was kind of interesting as he pulled questions out of reasonably famous poems by other poems, then riffed a response. I think my favourite was from an Emily Dickinson poem: "For what are Stars but Asterisks / To point a human life?" Bowering continues: "Many are huge balls of burning gas / that care for no person / except Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thinks / the universe the externization of the soul ..." I do think Bowering loses a few points for not randomly capitalizing nouns such as Universe and Soul. For a quick segue from art to science (and perhaps back), many people are aware of They Might Be Giants' song Why Does the Sun Shine; that is still pretty good, but they returned to the topic with a more scientifically accurate song (and a better hook in my opinion).
Interestingly, Bowering leaves out one of the most famous poetic questions of all time, i.e. Shakespeare's Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? He makes up for it by titling the July chapbook: Shall I Compare. As far as I can tell, all the poems are three stanzas long, each stanza is three lines long, and each line is three words. They are all love poems to a woman he was courting, whom, he mentions in the introduction, he married mid-way through July.
August is dedicated to poems that start from a specific painting and either describe the painting in detail or use some aspect of the painting to venture into different topics. This would probably work better as an illustrated chapbook (perhaps it was) or a blog where one can provide a thumbnail so the readers have some idea what is being referenced.
October has a funny premise where Bowering finds oddball headlines in the paper (generally ones with double meanings) and then deliberately confuses matters. For instance, "Mountie Probed in Sex Assault Case": "A taste, said the presiding magistrate / of your own medicine." I didn't like these as much as I had hoped or imagined. It is certainly possible that simply knowing he was working through some rough shit (his step-daughter died in a car crash early in the month) colours my impression of the poems, or perhaps the poems become objectively darker than when the series started. Still, I certainly sympathize with Bowering and have some understanding of how keeping "creative" can be helpful in dark times.
Bowering visited Lorine Niedecker's writing cabin and, for November, was inspired to write short poems in a small autograph book (or like a visitor's log at a museum) following the same themes that Niedecker mined. These seem to all be five line poems and are reproduced in hand-writing (presumably Bowering's). Finally, December brings us to a series of travel poems, set in various cities that Bowering has visited. I liked a few of these.
By far, my favourite month of poems was May, which also revolved around the theme of travel. He seemed to be retracing a vacation in Europe (in 1966, long before the introduction of the Euro). He more or less flies from Calgary to Germany (Dusseldorf), then heads westward to France and England. Then they head southeast to Italy, Greece and apparently Turkey. I don't think (at the moment) I will single out any specific poems, but the grouping as a whole works pretty well. The chapbook was published as Montenegro, 1966. For me, these are the poems that I could see returning to again and again to the point it might actually be better to track that chapbook down rather than buying My Darling Nellie Grey, though honestly I would only pick it up if I stumbled across it in some (very upscale) used book store; however, it turns out it was an ultra limited edition (40 copies!), so that's pretty unlikely. Taken in its entirety, My Darling Nellie Grey is solid collection, but one that only spoke to me sporadically.
Anyway, here is one other review of MDNG where the reviewer was a bit more taken by the collection as as a whole, and here's a curious tag-team review. And with that, I think I will check out for now -- and perhaps take a nap (it has been a very exhausting week!).
* I've also been reading a bit of Ken Norris, another American who moved up (though to Montreal this time) but then he moved on to Asia for a large part of his career. Not sure he is Canadian "enough" to count, though I guess he became a Canadian citizen in 1985. I enjoyed some of the poems in his fairly recent collection Going Home (2007), but I'll wait until I read Hotel Montreal to see if there is enough Canadian content to review his work. There really wasn't in Going Home.
** It does kind of made me feel worse about myself, since I couldn't get around to writing my 40 sestinas in a reasonable timeframe. Well, I have been pretty busy, but it is not an abandoned project by any means.
It is hard to really review My Darling Nellie Grey, as it is actually 12 books in one (and initially all 12 were published as stand-alone chapbooks, so one way of looking at it is that you get an amazing bargain by getting them all in one place in this volume). As Bowering approached his 70th birthday, he decided he needed a challenge to keep him writing.** Eventually he settled on the idea of writing a poem each day for a year, but above and beyond that, he would set different rules for each month and he also self-consciously would repeat ideas/themes/words between the poems for each month.
For example, for February, he concentrated on short poems of short lines, apparently keeping them all to two stanzas of 4 or 5 lines each. March was a whole series of poems that begin "I remember" and then generally continue on with some memories of his parents and his childhood.
April is dedicated to sonnets (or "sonnets" in the Ted Berrigan sense of 14 lines of free verse) with large sections coming from found sources, particularly sources that indirectly attack U.S. policy -- or show Americans at their most stupid and racist. Here I guess I am guess a hypocrite. I think most people would consider me anti-American (or certainly anti-Red State) but I have a bit of a problem stomaching it from outsiders. So I wasn't too keen on this month, and I liked the Sept. sequence "Fulgencio" even less where Bowering rants about U.S. policy towards Cuba and particularly how we supported Fulgencio Batista long after he showed his true colours. I wasn't quite sure he was going to go there, but indeed in the last poem of the sequence, Bowering basically declares Cuba a socialist paradise. It was very hard after that point to take him seriously. I think one can be anti-capitalist without actually considering Cuba a particularly good place to live, but that is (perhaps) a theme for another post. I'll just say I wasn't too crazy about these two months and leave it at that.
June was kind of interesting as he pulled questions out of reasonably famous poems by other poems, then riffed a response. I think my favourite was from an Emily Dickinson poem: "For what are Stars but Asterisks / To point a human life?" Bowering continues: "Many are huge balls of burning gas / that care for no person / except Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thinks / the universe the externization of the soul ..." I do think Bowering loses a few points for not randomly capitalizing nouns such as Universe and Soul. For a quick segue from art to science (and perhaps back), many people are aware of They Might Be Giants' song Why Does the Sun Shine; that is still pretty good, but they returned to the topic with a more scientifically accurate song (and a better hook in my opinion).
Interestingly, Bowering leaves out one of the most famous poetic questions of all time, i.e. Shakespeare's Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? He makes up for it by titling the July chapbook: Shall I Compare. As far as I can tell, all the poems are three stanzas long, each stanza is three lines long, and each line is three words. They are all love poems to a woman he was courting, whom, he mentions in the introduction, he married mid-way through July.
August is dedicated to poems that start from a specific painting and either describe the painting in detail or use some aspect of the painting to venture into different topics. This would probably work better as an illustrated chapbook (perhaps it was) or a blog where one can provide a thumbnail so the readers have some idea what is being referenced.
October has a funny premise where Bowering finds oddball headlines in the paper (generally ones with double meanings) and then deliberately confuses matters. For instance, "Mountie Probed in Sex Assault Case": "A taste, said the presiding magistrate / of your own medicine." I didn't like these as much as I had hoped or imagined. It is certainly possible that simply knowing he was working through some rough shit (his step-daughter died in a car crash early in the month) colours my impression of the poems, or perhaps the poems become objectively darker than when the series started. Still, I certainly sympathize with Bowering and have some understanding of how keeping "creative" can be helpful in dark times.
Bowering visited Lorine Niedecker's writing cabin and, for November, was inspired to write short poems in a small autograph book (or like a visitor's log at a museum) following the same themes that Niedecker mined. These seem to all be five line poems and are reproduced in hand-writing (presumably Bowering's). Finally, December brings us to a series of travel poems, set in various cities that Bowering has visited. I liked a few of these.
By far, my favourite month of poems was May, which also revolved around the theme of travel. He seemed to be retracing a vacation in Europe (in 1966, long before the introduction of the Euro). He more or less flies from Calgary to Germany (Dusseldorf), then heads westward to France and England. Then they head southeast to Italy, Greece and apparently Turkey. I don't think (at the moment) I will single out any specific poems, but the grouping as a whole works pretty well. The chapbook was published as Montenegro, 1966. For me, these are the poems that I could see returning to again and again to the point it might actually be better to track that chapbook down rather than buying My Darling Nellie Grey, though honestly I would only pick it up if I stumbled across it in some (very upscale) used book store; however, it turns out it was an ultra limited edition (40 copies!), so that's pretty unlikely. Taken in its entirety, My Darling Nellie Grey is solid collection, but one that only spoke to me sporadically.
Anyway, here is one other review of MDNG where the reviewer was a bit more taken by the collection as as a whole, and here's a curious tag-team review. And with that, I think I will check out for now -- and perhaps take a nap (it has been a very exhausting week!).
* I've also been reading a bit of Ken Norris, another American who moved up (though to Montreal this time) but then he moved on to Asia for a large part of his career. Not sure he is Canadian "enough" to count, though I guess he became a Canadian citizen in 1985. I enjoyed some of the poems in his fairly recent collection Going Home (2007), but I'll wait until I read Hotel Montreal to see if there is enough Canadian content to review his work. There really wasn't in Going Home.
** It does kind of made me feel worse about myself, since I couldn't get around to writing my 40 sestinas in a reasonable timeframe. Well, I have been pretty busy, but it is not an abandoned project by any means.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Updates - Sept. 2013
I am back from a business trip to Chicago with a side trip to Davenport, IA to visit relatives (and the Figge Museum!).
I am too bushed to give a complete description of everything I did, but highlights include seeing Miguel Zenon at the Jazz Showcase (playing material off of his live album, Oye) and seeing the University of Iowa holdings at the Figge. It is a little disappointing that the Jackson Pollack was returned to the university, though actually I would have been even more interested in seeing their Matisse (and the 2 other Guston's in their collection). However, I primarily went to see the Max Beckmann triptych Carnival, and fortunately that was on display. (The actual core museum collection is quite eclectic and not really that great.)
Beckmann's Carnival is quite an interesting painting. One thing that you can kind of see in the thumbnails but see much better in person is that, in the center panel, the woman's head is turned nearly completely around (past the point of what a body can actually do without wrenching the back and shoulders). And her eyes go off even further to the left, so she is essentially looking completely behind herself. It is kind of eerie. The dwarf bellboy in the right panel also stands out a bit more in person. Anyway, with this visit I am fairly sure I have viewed 8 of the 9 triptychs that Beckmann completed, though I am only 100% certain about 6 of 9. I am 100% sure I have not seen The Temptation of St. Anthony in person. Do I sense another road trip or two?
I bailed on one book during this trip (Chatterton Square by E. H. Young) and completed two: Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection and Anita Badami's Tamarind Mem. I have to agree with the reviewers of The Manual of Detection that it starts strong but then degenerates into something very akin to the movie Inception (even though it was published before the movie came out). There are also strong links to Dark City and, on more literary grounds, Jorge Luis Borges and possibly even Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (indeed Borges copped to being an admirer of Chesterton). I'll try to get around to reviewing Tamarind Mem in the next couple of days.
That's really all I think I can get to tonight, since I am fairly weary.
I am too bushed to give a complete description of everything I did, but highlights include seeing Miguel Zenon at the Jazz Showcase (playing material off of his live album, Oye) and seeing the University of Iowa holdings at the Figge. It is a little disappointing that the Jackson Pollack was returned to the university, though actually I would have been even more interested in seeing their Matisse (and the 2 other Guston's in their collection). However, I primarily went to see the Max Beckmann triptych Carnival, and fortunately that was on display. (The actual core museum collection is quite eclectic and not really that great.)
Beckmann's Carnival is quite an interesting painting. One thing that you can kind of see in the thumbnails but see much better in person is that, in the center panel, the woman's head is turned nearly completely around (past the point of what a body can actually do without wrenching the back and shoulders). And her eyes go off even further to the left, so she is essentially looking completely behind herself. It is kind of eerie. The dwarf bellboy in the right panel also stands out a bit more in person. Anyway, with this visit I am fairly sure I have viewed 8 of the 9 triptychs that Beckmann completed, though I am only 100% certain about 6 of 9. I am 100% sure I have not seen The Temptation of St. Anthony in person. Do I sense another road trip or two?
I bailed on one book during this trip (Chatterton Square by E. H. Young) and completed two: Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection and Anita Badami's Tamarind Mem. I have to agree with the reviewers of The Manual of Detection that it starts strong but then degenerates into something very akin to the movie Inception (even though it was published before the movie came out). There are also strong links to Dark City and, on more literary grounds, Jorge Luis Borges and possibly even Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (indeed Borges copped to being an admirer of Chesterton). I'll try to get around to reviewing Tamarind Mem in the next couple of days.
That's really all I think I can get to tonight, since I am fairly weary.
Anita Rau Badami
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