Busting out bad joints all over the place
I know the title infers there may be more, but for now, let’s begin with Dennis Hopper’s key to good acting:
“You need to relax — that way you can access your imagination. If you’re not relaxed, you only have access to your intelligence.”
And my teacher said that awesome needs to be ripped from our language forever. I, for one, do not agree because what other word to describe the above?
Seriously awesome?
Does adding an adverb help?
Jim Bryson’s new CD: Where the Bungalows Roam. “Pissing on Everything.” Makes me sway in that happy way, back and forth, waving and smiling, as he says. But in a good way.
If one can be ‘in love’ with a virtual place, I might just have to confess my utter adoration of the new Reading Room in the NY Times Books section. I mean, of course, the first book they choose to discuss is War and Peace, which I’ve never read because I have a hard time with the Russians, but just the idea of paying that much attention to the greatness of a book is enough to do it for me.
Truly, the blogging community is one virtual reading room where we have brilliant (if I do say so myself) and opinionated discussions about books everyday, but there’s something just so classy and towering about this new feature that makes me want to dust off my shelves and pull out my RRHB’s beat up copy of War and Peace just so I can see what all the fuss is still about.
So when I posted my opinions a few days back about Eye‘s Fall Book Guide, David Barker from 33 1/3 reached out and asked if I’d like to read the first two chapters of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love. Always willing to eat my words, of course, I said yes.
Now let me digress for a moment. First off, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but when I do I like it to act like fiction, which means I read a lot of popular, bestselling authors like Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, with a little Simon Winchester thrown in for good measure. So maybe I wasn’t the best person to be critical of Eye‘s choices in the first place because I don’t read a lot books that aren’t make believe. Secondly, while I enjoy music, I would not consider myself in the slightest to be an aficionado in any way shape or form. Without my RRHB, I wouldn’t have heard of half of the music that I listen to on a regular basis.
So keeping those two faults decidedly in mind, I also want to make note of a scene in The Departed, which I’ve now seen about a dozen times. Not for its music (even though the soundtrack is quite exceptional), but for its intent. Matt Damn and Vera Farmiga are having dinner, it’s their first date, and he’s ribbing her about head-shrinking a bunch of “Mick cops” who keep all their feelings bottled up inside, knowing, as he does, what Freud says about the Irish. He laughs, and I’m paraphrasing, of course, and says something like, ‘They’re impervious to therapy.’ When he asks her with a grin on his face why she counsels them, she replies, ‘Because some people do get better.’ And at that moment all the kidding stops and he says something along the lines of being unable to make fun of something that truthful.
There’s a point in here, I promise.
So, about Carl Wilson’s book, I said something along the lines of the whole project making me want to roll my eyes and feeling like it’s a giant F U to pop music lovers everywhere. But that’s not the case at all. And now remember, I’ve only read the first two chapters, but so far it’s an intelligent, well-written, deeply thoughtful book easily on par in tone with any of those nonfiction superstars I’ve noted above. And, for me, the Colin Sullivan (Damon’s character) moment came within the first few pages. The book starts off recounting the 1998 Academy Awards when Titanic blew its giant steam over the box office, the world, the universe, and you couldn’t take a step outside your house without hearing the weeping strains of that damn theme song by Dion.
But what I didn’t realize, having only started watching the Oscars over the last few years, was that Elliott Smith performed that year too. Nominated for Best Song for Good Will Hunting, Wilson explains that this moment was when his necessary dislike of Dion turned, in his words, “personal.” Even beyond Smith’s obvious discomfort with the show, his reluctance to perform, and his odd attire, Wilson notes that one of the hardest parts about the night to understand was Smith’s own feelings towards Dion, how he defended her regularly and always described her as a ‘really nice person.’
It’s within this framework that Wilson himself sets out to explore the record he despised moments ago with an open mind. I can’t find any fault with this, my own reverence for Elliot Smith making any further criticism, however warranted or not, impossible. In short, I can’t tease him any longer. And there’s an ease to his writing that finds the strains of this odd coupling and threads them through any number of discourses, from music criticism to pop culture itself, to try and truly understand what it is about the human condition that creates an Oprah-defended, chest-thumping, French Canadian superstar.
In short, I’m more than willing to admit how very wrong I was to be so flippant about the book in the first place. If only for Elliott Smith.
We’re back from another weekend at the cottage, which starts off an incredibly busy span of time for me: I leave on Wednesday for NYC for work and I’m not back until Sunday night where I’ll be visiting friends, doing other fun stuff like shopping, and hopefully seeing a Broadway show…oh, and attending some meetings too. Then it’s Word on the Street the following weekend, then Thanksgiving, then I think we’re home before going up north again to close up the cottage. It doesn’t leave time for a lot of reading, does it?
Regardless, there’s an incredibly solid Giller longlist that’s just been announced this morning here. This year, compared to most, I’ve actually read 4 of the books on the list so far: October, Effigy, Helpless, and Divisadero. And it’s always exciting to see who actually makes the shortlist.
Anyone pick their front runner just yet?
And while we’re on the subject of prizes, there’s a really interesting article in The Guardian about the ‘tussle’ behind the scenes over the Booker shortlist here. I’m certainly not as prepared to offer an opinion on that literary giant of a prize as I’ve only read one of the books listed, and that’s On Chesil Beach, by McEwan.
It’s such an exciting time of year for books, lots of events, plenty of big tomes hitting the stores, and loads of prize announcements to keep people talking.
Okay, so I have a confession to make. My mother loved to read Harlequin romances. We often made trips to the mall with her to peruse the romance section of the local Coles so she could pick up one of her books. I couldn’t tell you what the attraction was for her as I was still a teenager when the car accident happened and never got to ask, but I do know that I sure as heck read a lot of them over her shoulder growing up.
I mean what pre-teen girl didn’t read Sweet Valley High and its equivalents? And if was I was feeling particularly brave, I’d dig out the one I half wrote in Grade Eight while I should have been doing math. It’s hilarious. Seriously. And then I got all snotty and stuff, did two fancy pants degrees, discovered all kinds of different books in my adolescence and never really looked back.
So when a friend of a friend kindly put forth my name for freelancers to write some marketing copy for one of the 1200+ books they put out during the year, I sort of jumped at the chance. I mean, my mother would be so proud of me, and sort of tickled pink, I think. And I’ve handed in my first assignment, which went okay. I’m working on my second right now and I know that a third is on the way. Fingers crossed I can balance out the throbbing loins with the love of their lives enough to entice people back into the fold. All in all, it’s the most fun I’ve had writing for pay in ages. I enjoyed the heck out of it even if I’m still sort of stretching my fingers in terms of getting the right tone and quality of copy.
Come on, confess, you’ve read at least one in your lifetime, right?
The weather today is absolutely brilliant, sunny, warm but not overwhelming with a hint of fall in the air. Zesty and I had brunch and then made the decision to head over to the Farmer’s Market at Liberty Village. So, before sitting down and getting back to work on my book that’s due in a couple of weeks, and spending the day at the computer again, punctuated by a couple of breaks spent fighting with the vacuum and doing some laundry, I had to share this:
So, at the Farmer’s Market, I decided I wanted to buy some fruit, and found the perfect stall for me: peaches, pears, plums, you name it, this farmer had it, some of which had just been picked that morning. I’m not lying when I say I got very excited by the rock hard pears he had on offer.
Now, I love rock hard fruit. I know it’s not normal, but I like to eat peaches and pears when they’re as hard as apples. I’m not kidding when I say I enjoy the crunch. The farmer had already packaged up the pears for me, and even threw in some sugar pears, which he said needed to be eaten when they are green, so right away. Cool. I’m planning on making fruit salad anyway.
So now that we’re trying to eat things in season, I was tickled pink to see that he also had locally grown nectarines, which are, to this day, my favourite fruit. He adds those to my bags as well.
While he’s putting everything in for me he says, “Some of them [the nectarines] are ready to eat but some might need to sit for a day or two out of the fridge.”
“Well, I like to eat them hard,” I say, “so these are actually perfect.”
Dead silence ensues.
Then he looks at me like I’m absolutely nuts and hands me a semi-squishy nectarine, and says, “Eat it when they feel like this, not like an Indian rubber ball, okay?”
(But the okay is more like he’s telling me to do it this way, and that not only is eating hard nectarines wrong, it’s just plain stupid.)
And then he proceeds to give me some intimate advice about the freshness of the fruit. “Okay!” I say with a winning smile even though I’m thinking ‘oh my god I can’t wait to get home and crunch away at these half-ripe nectarines.’
I mean, I see his point, and they do smell wonderful when they are riper, but I can’t get away from the crunch. I am addicted to the crunch. So I’m sure I’ll be doing a disservice to the farmer when I bite into the nectarines and keep them in the fridge so they stay harder longer, but a girl likes what a girl likes, you know?
Annnnywaaay. The best part is that an entire bag of fruit, we’re talking more than a dozen single pieces, came to a whopping $8.00. That’s right. Less than the cost of a movie, almost less than a movie rental. And I got a lesson in fruit management too, for free.
PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Said fruit in a bowl. Keep in mind I had given a bunch to Zesty too, isn’t that crazy?
Good grief I love the farmer’s market.
Something’s up with the soil in our backyard being made radio active by all the household construction waste or something because we’re growing GIANT tomatoes.
See? SEE!
That’s an old-school rotary phone people, my paternal grandmother’s from when she worked at the Ontario courts many, many years ago, and they are almost THE SAME SIZE. I swear to you there is no trickery involved: I simply placed the tomato next to the phone so you could honestly see that it’s HUGE.
Thanks to Kailana who kindly gave me a thoughtful blogger award this week, ironic, yes, on a day where I did some serious thinking about good, evil and books from around the world.
Not knowing how this is supposed to work, I’m going to send out my own props to the thoughtful blogs that I read on a regular basis, they are in no particular order: Sam‘s, Tim‘s, Melanie‘s, Kerry‘s and Munro‘s.
How could I possibly have missed this? Shelf Awareness pointed me to a NY Times article that celebrates two very different yet bestselling books of 1957: Peyton Place, which I haven’t read, and On the Road, which I have read at least half a dozen times. Iconic, culturally for so many reasons, it’s important to me, not just as my go-to ‘favourite’ book, but for what it represents: reading at different stages.
I have my battered stolen school library copy of On the Road that I’ve carried to university and back, through young adulthood and into my, ahem, golden years. I’ve got the copy I bought in university when I had to do a shared project with a fellow in my class that I ended up having a giant crush on. I’ve got the copy I read when I finished school, and together the RRHB and I had 4 or 5 copies of the book when we merged households almost 9 years ago.
It’s a book that I don’t care to study. A book that I don’t care to analyze. It’s a book that causes me comfort just knowing that it’s on the shelf. It’s not something I can explain, this love for Jack Kerouac, but I’ve avoided reading so many of his books just because I know there are a limited amount, and I always want something new. I realized my mistake when I discovered Henry Miller when I turned 19. I read everything he ever wrote and then some and soon realized that it’s like eating all your Hallowe’en candy, too much of a good thing and all that.
When we took our trip to California a few years ago, I read Big Sur, the copy of which we had picked up visiting City Lights in San Francisco. I read Dharma Bums when I felt like I needed it in between university and grad school, when I was still considering getting an advanced degree. And that’s kind of what Kerouac is for me, a representation of art at its most meaningful, when it jumps over the line from entertainment to ethos, when it bleeds into ever little bit of your being and when it forces me to change the way I think about all things. Now, I roll down the window while the car speeds along, stereo on, wind knotting my hair, and never stop imagining that perfect trip that never ends.