Busting out bad joints all over the place
Did you ever have one of those days where despite how beautiful the outside world looks, with the sun shining, and the flowers about to bud, that you just can’t make it outside? One of those days where you’ve read nothing inspiring (Silverwing and Lipstick Jungle, #26, #27), saw an incredibly tragic film (The Wind That Shakes the Barley), and your iTunes keeps playing the saddest songs imaginable (“God Give Me Strength”, Elvis Costello)?
Ever have one of those days?
One of the items on my never-ending, life long to-do list is begin collecting art, and this might be a good painting to start with, if I had a spare $800k lying around.
I was off yesterday with a strange virus that has left me nauseous, achy and kind of dizzy. Gotta love the immuno-suppressant meds for allowing your body to pick up every strange bit of something that floats by in the ether. Funny how life just seems to go on without you:
Cormac McCarthy continues to cement his place as the all star in terms of the literary world this year by now winning a Pulitzer Prize, which means I need to bump that book way up on my TBR pile if Oprah, the establishment, and the lit blogging community are all in agreement. Isn’t that a prophetic ‘stars aligning’ kind of situation?
Yann Martel is seriously interested in learning what Stephen Harper is reading. An interesting project considering every single time Bush cracks a book it makes major media waves. (props to Jane at RHC for bringing this one to my attention; Pickle Me This also reported on the new blog)
The world receives a major publishing event in the form of a new Tolkien novel. Here’s another smile and nod-type author for me. I’ve never read a single Tolkien novel in my life even though I loved the movies. Honestly, I tried to read the first book in the trilogy but couldn’t get past all the hobbits singing.
CBC.ca/arts reports on all the crazy marketing behind The Raw Shark Texts. I have read this book and will be blogging about it in the upcoming days.
Fingers crossed we’re all back on our feet today.
There’s so much going on right now I feel like I haven’t had a chance just to sit back and take a deep breath. Tonight was my first Pilates Fusion class in two weeks (I missed last week because I was away) and it hurt. Pilates is a funny kind of exercise, during the class, when you’re lying on the mat, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing a lot, but don’t go for a week and then see how much it hurts the next day.
And I think it’s kind of metaphoric for everything that’s happening. Real life barrels on by and I’ve got so much to update: one author reading, two more books, band widow plans, our visit to the tax lady, writing work, work-work, but I feel like I can’t even spare the few minutes to share even the smallest insight into where my head is these days.
A couple of things:
1. It’s really annoying to get addicted to an awful show (ahem, The Black Donnellys) and have NBC cancel the show, air the final episodes online and then BLOCK you becauase you happen to live in the .ca.
2. Jennifer Lopez is on American Idol. Do you think she would have done that three years ago during the height of her so-called explosion?
3. It’s possible to be so busy during the day that you don’t even have time to go to the bathroom. It’s possible. But so not practical.
4. The tailbone? Still. Hurts.
5. How can a brand new work computer just stop sending out sound? It was like it just didn’t want to play that last track on Balanced on a Pin and decided to be mute. Perhaps it didn’t like the Helen Keller quip I had sent around on work email and wanted to teach me a lesson. I have quite come to depend on CBC Radio 2 to keep my mind quiet at work; it was very noisy today. As a result, I’m wildly panicked and feeling kind of overwhelmed.
6. It takes an old friend to point out the obvious. My RRHB had lunch with a friend who moved away and noted, “Ragdoll really likes her new job and you’re getting a lot done on the house. Sounds like things are going well for you guys.”
7. Life After Tomorrow is AWESOME.
8. Facebook has become my new sugar…
9. Is anyone else as tired as I am with the fact that the various Law & Orders keep cribbing storylines from one another (creepy religious guy, rap-world murder, shocking plot twists).
10. I miss the movies.
You are quite a contradiction: with your 7 For All Mankinds, your Louis Vuitton bag with its Dolce & Gabbana scarf tied so carelessly around the shoulder strap, as if to say, ‘it’s okay, I can afford if it gets ruined by the April snow,’ worrying, always about what people think…and then heading into Popeye’s Chicken on Yonge Street.
Enter Ragdoll dressed as well as can be expected for a chubby girl taking lots of disease medicine that’s making her very well indeed. I mean it may be keeping her alive but it’s certainly pulling her out of the pretty club faster than you can say Fat Actress.
She nervously stands looking shockingly out of place beside an empty table and sits down, joined by not one, but two very important men. What does she say to them? Oh, in no order of embarrassment she babbles on about cottages, work boyfriends, and her RRHB’s exploits in Saskatchewan where, apparently, the hottest women in Canada live.
In fact, she actually reenacted the scene from Austin Powers, it was the coup de gras: he’d say something about snow; I’d zip it and use the sassy hand move. “Sn–” [Sassy hand gesture} “Zip it!” Stop. Turn purple with embarrassment. Repeat. Are these not the stages of complete and utter corporate exposure. Has she turned into Bridget Jones (there were few embarrassing speeches and only one fellow who somewhat resembled Mark Darcy)?
Oh.
Look.
There’s snow in April.
She thinks the zip it was most certainly vindicated.
A-hem.
Earlier in the week, an author we’re publishing came to visit. I told him I was realy looking forward to reading his book (it’s a non-fiction title a topic close to my heart).
I said, “I can’t wait to read your book, my great-grandfather fought with the American company during that war, the one with William Faulkner.”
“Oh yes,” the author says, “it was such and such…”
And then someome piped up, “That would make a great novel.”
Yes, yes it would, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for about three years now. Anyone want to publish it? I promise it’ll be good. Will anyone remember that pitch in the beginning of the morning…probably not. But it’s cool.
Now that it’s over I have very few regrets. I work with lovely, lovely people, some of whom I think I’ll have a grand time with over the next few years on some really fantastic projects. All in all, despite my nerves, despite my utter feeling of awkwardness and geekiness. Despite feeling out of place and scared most of the time, it’s over, and it’s only going to get better from here. And for the first time in many, many, many years, I’m truly excited about going into to work every day.
I have one more thing to say. It’s to the very important person who sat beside me at dinner that night: thank you for not only making me feel lovely, but for saying so out loud. It really was fun. The best night of my conference.
But in spite of being nervous in front of very powerful people, and as someone very wise with whom I work said to me: “Relax, Ragdoll, This is just your life now.”
And I think I’m going to enjoy it.
Well, I’ll be away for a week at a work conference starting (very early) tomorrow morning with very limited access to the internet. Bummer. Hopefully I’ll have finally finished Out of Africa by the time I get home. Maybe not.
In lieu of an actual post that has, well, meaning, here are some random thoughts:
1. I will watch any movie that Leonardo DiCaprio stars in. Case in point: we just finished up Blood Diamond. I’ve now seen The Departed three times. I could watch that movie every day and not get sick of it.
2. It’s next to impossible to pack for an in-between season trip that’s all about work. What do you wear? Office clothes? Fun clothes? A combination of both?
3. We did a really cool project at work. We completed a wiki for a book coming out next month called The Raw Shark Texts. Full TRH Books report tk. But check it out when you’re bored at work. It’s been years since I actually felt the thrill of building, the crisp agony of having too much to do and not enough time to do it in, and the heartbeat of your fingers as they type the url over and over and over and over and over again. I’m going to have to pace myself though because the last thing I need is the stress that goes along with a busy job overtaking my life, revving up my system and having the disease holler, “hey! I’m back!”
4. The tailbone? Still hurts.
5. In about three weeks, I’ll be a band widow. Anyone free for a movie? I promise I can go see ones that Leo’s not in…
6. A new column will go up on Experience Toronto while I’m gone. It’s about Toronto as a literary landscape. I think In the Skin of a Lion and Cat’s Eye are my two favourite books set in the city I call home.
7. Sarah Silverman show: brilliant or silly? A combination of both? If it were a fight to the death, I don’t think I could decide.
EW‘s editors spill the beans about how many classics and/or bestsellers gather dust on their shelves.
I’ll confess that Atwood’s Oryx and Crake sits in not one but two different formats (hardcover and trade paperback) on the shelves in my writing room. Other unfinished and/or never-crackeds? All That Matters, History of Love and Naked.
Now you.
A pen-pal friend of mine has inquired about a go to list for Canadian fiction. If you were introducing someone that doesn’t live in Canada to our homegrown talents, which books would you feel absolutely needed to be in the top ten?
Of course, Atwood, Munro, Shields, and Ondaatje are givens, and in choosing their titles I’d probably pick Cat’s Eye, Runaway, Larry’s Party and In the Skin of the Lion, what who else should be on the list?
Margaret Laurence, of course, and I’d pick the utterly brilliant A Bird in the House and then The Diviners, as they are two of my all-time favourite books. We mustn’t forget Timothy Findley, especially his Not Wanted on the Voyage and The Wars. However, I’d also like to include books that have obviously evolved from those titles too, like Clara Callan (see A Bird in the House) by Richard Wright or the brilliant Three Day Road (see The Wars) by Joseph Boyden.
And then don’t forget Urquhart, whose The Stone Carvers brought tears to my eyes and gave me pause when I visited the church that she based the novel upon. I’d also like the list not to read like a version of a high school syllabus. But sometimes, that’s unavoidable, for example, should everyone read The Watch that Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennon? Maybe. But it’s a familiar book on Canadian Fiction 101 course calendars.
Plus, we can’t leave out classics in the making like The Colony of Unrequited Dreams or Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. How would you create the list? Or pare it down to just 10? It’s a loaded question: but what’s your quintessential go-to Can Lit book?
Like most mornings, I start my day off by reading various different newsletters. There’s an article in the Globe today about being a blogger, and it attempts to answer the standard five ‘good reporting’ questions about the topic. One thing caught my attention though, as it’s an article that’s pretty much for the people who have been, well, living in a virtual cave the last couple years, and that’s the idea that blogging isn’t so much the thing as it is the thing that allows you to do the thing.
So let’s say you’ve been reading all about blogs and blogging and bloggers, and now you’re interested in trying it yourself — despite how ridiculous you feel when you say the word “blog,” or when you try to imagine introducing yourself by saying: “I’m a blogger.”
Don’t feel bad. It is kind of a ridiculous word, when it gets right down to it. But it’s really just a tool, like a typewriter, or a computer. The word “blog” is just a term for what happens when you use a piece of software to publish your thoughts about a topic (or topics) on the Internet for others to read. Try telling friends “I’m a publisher,” and see how that feels.
For some reason, I had never thought of it as a tool, but as the end product, and this point of view sort of changes the philosophy of blogging in a way: it’s no longer about what you publish but about how you publish (ie, it’s the software you use, not what you’re writing about that defines you).
I had always been under the assumption that by blogging you are therefore a blogger (I blog therefore I am), and regardless of which software you choose to self-publish, it’s the content and the message that’s most important. The above kind of derails all of that, and moves thought about the internet back into pre-web 2.0 (and yes, I am loathe to use that terminology, but it fits dammit, it fits!) in the sense that stripping the content from the blog effectively reduces the software to yet another function of our digital world.
Not everyone who uses a typewriter is a writer, not everyone who uses a computer is a programmer, but everyone who blogs should be (if they are active) by definition a blogger. And why is it a ridiculous word? How is it any more ridiculous than ‘journalist’ other than the fact that the word’s etymology has had a few more hundred years to evolve.
Am I right? Or am I just being too sensitive on the morning after a time change when my brain is perhaps working in blogger overdrive. Or maybe it’s just another example of mainstream media trying to derail the whole concept of self-publishing by negating its very real ability to, ahem, make a point?