Laura

Feeling Small

“Of course, it is in some situations harder to be willing to feel small or unimportant. It is harder to be willing to feel small in relation to family members than in relation to the universe and to eternity.  It is hard to feel small and still feel strong, and good. 

“You have to come full circle. You may start out in your life feeling small, and bad. Then you learn to feel larger, and good. Then you learn to feel smaller again, and still good.”

Ugly?

“I'm not sure if this lamp here in this shop is ugly. 

“It may be ugly, but it may simply be unusual, colorful and strange.  On the other hand, everything else in this shop is ugly. 

“So the lamp is probably ugly too.”

‰ЫПShort of examining the entire history of each individual participating; ‰Ы_ short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation?‰Ыќ

‰ЫПMy own unlucky boy, didn‰ЫЄt you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We‰ЫЄre older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different. Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and when ever you decide to come back after that.‰Ыќ

Like it says on the tin, these are 99 stories, all of them very short and easy to read. Many of them are about God, but the rest, well, if they are about God I couldn‰ЫЄt tell. I guess anything can be about God. Every story was well crafted, and every once in a while I came across a good one, but for the most part I hopped, skipped, and jumped my way through them with tiny twinges of feeling that I thought maybe were supposed to be stronger. My favourite stories were the goofy ones about the Lord, like ‰ЫПWet‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПParty‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПInoculum‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПDriveshaft‰Ыќ, and ‰ЫПA Little Prayer‰Ыќ, because such mild blasphemy makes me giggle nervously inside like I‰ЫЄm still a good little churchgoing girl.

Here‰ЫЄs where I‰ЫЄm at with my mindfulness practice: I read this book while I ate my lunch at work. I know the practical reasons why mindfulness is important and what the benefits are, but the reality of practicing it is hard. Regardless, this was a sweet little volume with cute illustrations and some excellent thoughts on being present and mindful when you eat, when you cook, when you wash the dishes, and when you spend time with others at a meal.

A sad and sickening but ultimately hopeful story. This novel takes turns seeing one New Year‰ЫЄs Eve in Australia through the eyes of each family member, showing the horror of a man broken by war and how that horror extends to his daughters, his wife, and his brother. The book ends on a New Year‰ЫЄs Eve years later, with a renewal. The language is beautiful and the characters and story are engaging.

I try to keep an open mind about what the young kids go on about these days, so I thought I would give this guy a chance and see what's what, what. But then I realized that Tao Lin is a year older than I am – I thought he was, I don't know, five years younger than me? which would help excuse him. But no. The story and the writing both reminded me of the diaries I kept late in grade school and early in high school (that is, the parts where I described social interactions, which weren't many). It also reminded me of this one guy on Diaryland I used to read who was depressed and self-sabotaging with a girlfriend and a pathetic mom and no money. Bobby or something? In any case, I was kind of depressed by the time I finished the novella, so I read some philosophy to restore my equilibrium.

‰ЫПThe death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day in the stairs or at the door to our loge, Lucien was a non-entity who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury or artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt.‰Ыќ

I picked this up for two key reasons: a) I just bought the latest collection, More Baths and Less Talking, and wanted to get to it but hadn't read any of the others except the first, and my sense of chronology demanded senselessly that I go through them in order; and b) I wanted to get to 100 books read this year and this book would very quickly add another in the ‘done' column. For some reason I didn‰ЫЄt really dig this one as much as his first, although there were plenty of good columns here. More books that I‰ЫЄve actually read than usual. And the preface is great.

I read some of these in the actual issues of The Believer but that was years ago. Sat down and read the whole thing in an afternoon. It's been a while since a book has made me laugh out loud.

Yeah, so I picked this up from the library around 7pm and finished reading it at 11:30pm. A much-needed break from this last stretch of schoolwork for the year. Poor Miss Pettigrew is yanked from one end of the (figurative) seesaw to the other a few too many times, but it was light and fun and sweet and warmhearted. (I do have to note the few moments of shame for comments that were socially acceptable at the time but are no longer.) And yes, now I can watch the movie.

Slowly made its way to the heart of what is difficult about writing (and making art) and eventually gave some practical tools and guidance to make it manageable. I am that jerk who doesn't appreciate Lynda Barry's drawing/collage style (too chaotic and overwhelming for me), but this book is great in spite of it. It was also unbalanced – I was thinking of giving up before the ‘two questions' section, and then with the writing exercises I totally gave in. Wonderful stuff.

The exercises connected with me especially because I recently started making lists and thinking about memories from my childhood. The revelation that the image is the thing (which I knew before but forget when people say that emotion is the thing or action is the thing or character is the thing) was illuminating for me. The idea that childhood is a neighbourhood is spot on – there are many different neighbourhoods in my head and in my memory. The images living in those neighbourhoods are what connects to emotions and action and character.

Her emphasis on play also meant a lot to me because I play with my nieces and nephews a lot, and the way they play is fascinating, but while I go along with what they're doing, I'm not as engaged with their point of view as I could be. I guess I am a little self-absorbed and always keep a foot in the grown-up door so I can switch into adult mode when I need to. But they and I would have more fun if I just gave in and tried to see what they were seeing, instead of playing on my own terms.

So that's me – but this book is great for those who are worrying about whether their work is any good and are looking for practical ways to get unstuck and are not afraid to explore the memories of things that might be painful or horrible or shameful.

A comic-strip biography of a figure in Canadian history. I was surprised to remember some of his story as depicted in history class in grade school.

This book is front-loaded with mostly 4-star stories and then there's a string of 2-star stories and then it ends with a couple of 3-stars. Throughout, the prose style and tone were a bit difficult for me. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of each story, but that probably comes with the genre and the form. Frequently my patience paid off. Some great themes and fascinating worlds and cultures, but Tiptree, Jr. did not breed further interest in stories like these.

I should have read this years ago – I would be enjoying it much more. Fun and enjoyable, but disappointing, because I was planning to love it.

—

‰ЫПThe best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don‰ЫЄt know how much they hide from us; how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential; how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm ‰ЫУ I don‰ЫЄt mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the dullness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth.‰Ыќ

—

“There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne‰ЫЄs death ‰ЫУ George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother‰ЫЄs hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten ‰ЫУ the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied.”

A wonderful study of the lack of solitude in our lives. A lot about how technology affects our ability to be alone (like, really alone, without the internet!) and how that is probably a bad thing but not absolutely. It changes us, though, and perhaps not always for the better.

I liked the earlier parts of the book best where Harris explores the uses of solitude and the benefits of daydreaming. The last section on ‰ЫПKnowing Others‰Ыќ (excepting the final chapter) doesn‰ЫЄt fit as neatly with the rest of the book as I expected, although it wasn‰ЫЄt out of place exactly.

An engaging and fascinating book with lots of tasty morsels for further contemplation.

This book was amazing, if only because it got me back into doing two hobbies that I had abandoned: knitting and writing. Scarlett Thomas encouraged me to believe that one day I'll be able to knit a pair of socks too, and also made me think about the kind of stories I create when I write, and that the storyless stories I like best are perfectly okay, if not actually exceptionally awesome. This book has stuck with me weeks after finishing it, and I'm thinking about going back to it soon.

There is clearly some level of meaning – allegory, metaphor, something – that I am missing because I know little to nothing about Korean culture. What I took as the core idea, the insanity or not of the wish to give up humanity and become a tree or plant, was intriguing, especially within the family contexts given (abuse, abuse, and more abuse), but I was looking for something beyond that which I did not find.

“Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again.”

“Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything. And the nights were getting cold now.”

& that whole thing between Denise and Don Armour.

“Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.”

Listened to this on my runs/walks in early prep for a 10k in March. It works because I can miss a lot over the audio cues from Runkeeper and trying to breathe properly and not run into people, and still not miss anything important.

“Hearing my voice making more or less pertinent professional comments was a shock to me, as it often is. How can my voice keep talking and my head keep operating when the rest of me is such a mass of unsorted emo-tion? I've never understood it. I think I would respect myself more if the woman could obliterate the professional once in a while. Why should a man love me if I'm that mechanical about things? On the other hand, I would hate to be the kind of woman who flings her emotion at the world until she has nothing left to fling.”

“Craft, not art. Art happens like love, but craft is loyalty, like marriage. To do it good is what's necessary, and that's all that's necessary. Maybe a few times in your life you get lucky and do it better than good, but that's irrelevant. Loyalty is what's necessary, if you want to get something good out of the union.”

Hahaha yeah. Useful perspective on working with people at different points along the thinker/feeler and introvert/extrovert spectrums, and adapting yourself to them rather than expecting them to adapt to you. Also lots of goofy humour.

I picked this up from one of the “New Books” stands at the public library and borrowed it on the strength of the blurb from Pynchon on the back and in spite of the American flag on the cover. Erickson writes the whole novel in a series of paragraph-bursts, much shorter than chapters, which seemed to be a clever way of trying to make the sometimes dense and difficult more palatable and engaging. The story is told in a sort of circular and self-referential way that was enjoyable and not pretentious – history repeating itself and fiction unknowingly reflecting real life, past and future, things reacting to each other and cancelling each other out versus creating something new. A number of (mostly) unnamed public figures were described in ways that made naming them apparently unnecessary, perhaps only for older American readers, but being a twenty-something Canadian I struggled a bit (I got Obama and Bowie easily enough of course but the others were more difficult), but not enough to distract me from enjoying the book. Parts of the story didn't make sense and probably weren't intended to make sense but nevertheless did distract me if only slightly from enjoying the book. I have to confess that it is strange for me to enjoy a book with politics and race as two of its major themes, but there you have it – I am still capable of surprising myself.

Sometimes I judge a book by the way it makes me feel when I'm reading it without bothering to examine where these feelings come from. This book made me feel aggravated and unhappy and I don't want to understand why. It was a fast read and not without spirit or a sense of humour or some level of identification or discovery but by the time I was finished I was too unsettled to want to think about it anymore. Although perhaps it was something I ate.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? was the best book I've read in a while, but it was difficult. Scott bought it several months ago and I've been meaning to read it ever since then. The topic is starting to get close to home, with aging relatives in both our families and the geographic, financial, psychological, and emotional issues that come along with that.

Being the person responsible for aging and difficult parents sounds terrifying. Maybe Roz Chast decided (or agreed) to present the narrative this way, but she seemed to have no support from her husband or family or friends. Her parents had enough money for the extensive care they needed, but even paid help 24 hours a day wasn‰ЫЄt enough to ease Roz's anxiety and guilt. Maybe she did have more help than she portrayed in the book. Maybe she didn't allow anyone to help her. Maybe your emotional health seems unimportant when you take responsibility for the people who raised you. I don't know.

(Originally published in my weekly newsletter, All This Reading, with some differences.)