Lately I've been talking so much about "social media" -- spending so many hours "tweeting" and "blogging" and "Facebooking" -- that I find myself narrating everything.
"Trish hates the taste of chocolate milk gone bad."
"Trish worries about bicycle couriers when it's -40C."
Seriously. It's the grossest thing. And it starts as soon as I get up -- "Trish should learn to get up when her alarm rings, not hit the snooze button 17 times" -- and does not end until I go back to sleep at the end of the day -- "Trish got sucked into YouTube again. I heart you, Rick Mercer."
So. Is this technology's fault?
Not so much, I know. Technology is just a tool for me to be more self-centred. And I'm probably not the only one.
So I try to unplug (she says as she writes to an online audience of friends&family). And I try to turn off my brain. And I find a bizarre amount of relief in this excerpt from Happenstance*, which was written 30 years ago.
"He often wished he could shut them off, these buzzing thoughts -- why was it he could never do anything, never even think of doing something, without playing at doing it; there was something despicable in his small rehearsals and considered responses; was he the only one in the world who suffered these echoes?" (p. 155)
*BTW, TSS, I read the wife's story in Happenstance first, and am now nearly done the husband's. It looks like this was technically the wrong way to go, as the two novels were initially published separately. The Husband's Story came out in 1980 and A Fairly Conventional Woman in 1982.
Showing posts with label Happenstance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Happenstance. Show all posts
2009-01-15
2009-01-11
Slumdog Millionaire?
Wow.
Sorry, were you watching the Golden Globes Sunday night? Wow. Beautiful movie, but call me completely surprised. ("Hello, Completely Surprised. Nice to meet you." Boo.) I'm glad of the win, though -- I thought the film was so very full and colourful, and it made my heart swell.
Moving on.... I've been slowly making my way through Happenstance, while at the same time working my way through some really fascinating stuff. Like, Alberta's interim report on carbon capture. Also, the province's bill on the delivery of emergency medicine.
And you wonder how I manage to catch up on my sleep these days....
But I'm taking a break from Carol Shields' prize-winning work, even though it's such matters of the heart I enjoy reading most. I love examining the magic and heartbreak of private lives, the greater confusion and misunderstanding that lies within inner assumptions and monologues.
A new year -- I'll get to resolutions later -- brings with it new book club meetings. And so, I am struggling through George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.
I'm sorry to say that, 63 pages in, the book makes me cringe, and I find myself skimming even if the prose is all good and Orwellian. I know it's supposed to be good journalism, and more importantly it is good writing. However, that's hardly offset by the fact it sounds like the 1920s version of a punk 25-year-old who's just discovered his adventure on the dark side of society might be, well, dark.
(I'm a jerk, I know. I feel sorry saying all this particularly because we're all friends at book club, and I hate hating the selections. I feel bad offending people. So, I hide my identify and publish my hateful opinions on the internet like a good little 21st century-er.)
Example A:
"The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -- people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work." (p. 7)
Gah. I want to reach through the pages and shake the young, bourgeois, pretentious Orwell. "Give me a break!" I would cry, "Get on with writing Animal Farm!"
Example B:
"You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs." (p. 17)
Argh.
At least we'll all have something to talk about.
Like the fact I'm becoming a pirate in my protestations.
Sorry, were you watching the Golden Globes Sunday night? Wow. Beautiful movie, but call me completely surprised. ("Hello, Completely Surprised. Nice to meet you." Boo.) I'm glad of the win, though -- I thought the film was so very full and colourful, and it made my heart swell.
Moving on.... I've been slowly making my way through Happenstance, while at the same time working my way through some really fascinating stuff. Like, Alberta's interim report on carbon capture. Also, the province's bill on the delivery of emergency medicine.
And you wonder how I manage to catch up on my sleep these days....
But I'm taking a break from Carol Shields' prize-winning work, even though it's such matters of the heart I enjoy reading most. I love examining the magic and heartbreak of private lives, the greater confusion and misunderstanding that lies within inner assumptions and monologues.
A new year -- I'll get to resolutions later -- brings with it new book club meetings. And so, I am struggling through George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.
I'm sorry to say that, 63 pages in, the book makes me cringe, and I find myself skimming even if the prose is all good and Orwellian. I know it's supposed to be good journalism, and more importantly it is good writing. However, that's hardly offset by the fact it sounds like the 1920s version of a punk 25-year-old who's just discovered his adventure on the dark side of society might be, well, dark.
(I'm a jerk, I know. I feel sorry saying all this particularly because we're all friends at book club, and I hate hating the selections. I feel bad offending people. So, I hide my identify and publish my hateful opinions on the internet like a good little 21st century-er.)
Example A:
"The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -- people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work." (p. 7)
Gah. I want to reach through the pages and shake the young, bourgeois, pretentious Orwell. "Give me a break!" I would cry, "Get on with writing Animal Farm!"
Example B:
"You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs." (p. 17)
Argh.
At least we'll all have something to talk about.
Like the fact I'm becoming a pirate in my protestations.
2008-12-30
I (heart) Michael Ondaatje
Oddly, as I was reading this story, I actually thought, "Sounds like a character from Murakami's work." You know, since I read one single Murakami book, making me an expert.
Moving on from being totally pretentious.
I've had In the Skin of A Lion on my coffee table for at least two weeks now, waiting to be reviewed. Or whatever it is I do here, with the books.
Michael Ondaatje's writing is just so lyrical. Whimsical. The man is my new best friend -- if he, like, knew me. So I guess I mean to say we should really be friends. I'd be all, "Hey, Ondaatje, tell me a fairy tale!" And he'd say, "Trish, do you really need another fairy tale? Hasn't your collection of chick flicks on DVD fed you enough lies about unattainable romantic love?" And I'd whisper uncertainly, "No...."
Moving on.
"In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author's eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere." p. 143
And,
"Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.
"Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become." p. 146
I know these snippets tell you little about this book. I raced through the novel, sprinted through it in a single day at the airport (it was a long, long day, although I have nothing to complain about really).
The image that stayed with me, though, was that of a nun falling off a bridge, grabbed, then shedding her skin for another life. I don't want to ruin anything for you, but it's so, so good.
I fell a little bit in love with Patrick -- more so in his later, quieter days than his early eager ones. But there is this wistfulness in him, from childhood through fatherhood. And, at once, mourned him. I really have to re-read The English Patient at some point. (Thanks, S.)
In the meantime, however, I am finishing Happenstance, before starting a George Orwell book for book club. I am fascinated by the idea no two people can ever really know each other, can ever actually crawl into each other's minds and understand what's going on. And I can't get over the pent-up anger in Carol Shields's women. (Again, talking like an expert when this is only my second Shields novel. Sigh.)
I am also overwhelmed by the reality -- the absolute truth -- that a woman needs a room of her own. And that this was once a novel idea, an idea to hold your breath for or cross your fingers for or wish with your whole body that someone else would understand.
I've always been so curious about women my age who refuse to identify themselves as feminists. They shy away from seeming militant or scary. But I see that I, too, have just no idea.
Moving on from being totally pretentious.
I've had In the Skin of A Lion on my coffee table for at least two weeks now, waiting to be reviewed. Or whatever it is I do here, with the books.
Michael Ondaatje's writing is just so lyrical. Whimsical. The man is my new best friend -- if he, like, knew me. So I guess I mean to say we should really be friends. I'd be all, "Hey, Ondaatje, tell me a fairy tale!" And he'd say, "Trish, do you really need another fairy tale? Hasn't your collection of chick flicks on DVD fed you enough lies about unattainable romantic love?" And I'd whisper uncertainly, "No...."
Moving on.
"In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author's eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere." p. 143
And,
"Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.
"Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become." p. 146
I know these snippets tell you little about this book. I raced through the novel, sprinted through it in a single day at the airport (it was a long, long day, although I have nothing to complain about really).
The image that stayed with me, though, was that of a nun falling off a bridge, grabbed, then shedding her skin for another life. I don't want to ruin anything for you, but it's so, so good.
I fell a little bit in love with Patrick -- more so in his later, quieter days than his early eager ones. But there is this wistfulness in him, from childhood through fatherhood. And, at once, mourned him. I really have to re-read The English Patient at some point. (Thanks, S.)
In the meantime, however, I am finishing Happenstance, before starting a George Orwell book for book club. I am fascinated by the idea no two people can ever really know each other, can ever actually crawl into each other's minds and understand what's going on. And I can't get over the pent-up anger in Carol Shields's women. (Again, talking like an expert when this is only my second Shields novel. Sigh.)
I am also overwhelmed by the reality -- the absolute truth -- that a woman needs a room of her own. And that this was once a novel idea, an idea to hold your breath for or cross your fingers for or wish with your whole body that someone else would understand.
I've always been so curious about women my age who refuse to identify themselves as feminists. They shy away from seeming militant or scary. But I see that I, too, have just no idea.
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