What resonated with me was rituals and repetition…So many of the things that I learned as a dishwasher you do as a cook. The idea of being efficient, being organized, the rituals of being a cook, the repetition…and of course the more you do something, the better you become. That’s why I became a good cook, because I enjoy the repetition, I wasn’t always trying to seek something new…You tend to always want to do something new in the kitchen, but there really isn’t anything new.
Category Archives: Quotes
A Framing Device
Memory is a dream machine. Nonfiction isn’t “true.” It’s a framing device to foreground contemplation, or at least it is in the nonfiction I love the most — nonfiction at the highest reaches of literary art. I want to redefine nonfiction upward — taking nonfiction’s limits and reframing them so that nonfiction can be a serious investigation of what’s “true,” what’s knowledge, what’s “fact,” what’s memory, what’s self, what’s other. I don’t want a nonfiction full of “lies.” I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
Suggest something unreal
For TV shows to work, they have to capture something real about home or work, but increasingly, in order to capture it, they have to suggest something unreal: far more face-to-face contact than most of us actually have. People text each other all the time in real life, but hardly ever on television. When they do, it’s just shorthand for a teenager’s distraction, not an important part of the plot. Texting doesn’t have the dramatic power of a confrontation that ends with an emotional resolution and a hug. E-mail chains don’t have the same resonance as sisters showing up in each other’s living rooms.
Even as we spend more and more time in front of screens every day, the screen we watch the most — the television — still depends on people, family and friends, who look into each other’s eyes with anger or love or desire. And however sophisticated technology gets, that can still only happen in person.
The fact-fiction divide
[Philip] Roth … said he would discuss only his writing and would answer no questions about his personal life. Fine. Yet in Roth’s case, this created a major hurdle, because … he is an exceptionally brazen alchemist of the personal into the fictional. For that matter, so is his chief fictional alter ego, the Roth-like novelist Nathan Zuckerman — though both writers are prone to arguing the point.
…
I was supposed to be talking with Roth about the recently-issued third volume of his collected works. That volume included his 1974 novel My Life as a Man, an act of imagination in which a writer named Peter Tarnopol — whose spectacularly failed first marriage looks a great deal like Roth’s own — struggles to exorcise it. In the process, Tarnopol creates a character named Nathan Zuckerman, who writes his own variations on the marital train wreck. How, exactly, were we supposed to discuss this without getting personal?I tried. It mostly didn’t work. Asked why he had used Tarnopol and Zuckerman to play with the fact-fiction divide, Roth objected to the question. “I’m not playing with it. I don’t care to play,” he said. “This man is trying to transform his experience into fiction. He imagines it once, he imagines it twice and says: ‘The hell with it, here’s the straight story.’ As simple as that.”
Not to me, unfortunately.
Everybody wants to be delighted
In my own experience having written a whole lot of different texts for academic audiences, the response to what I write is overwhelmingly more positive when I make it personal and accessible — chatty, even — than when I write a paper that more closely resembles the IMRAD tone and structure. I’ve also noticed that for academic lectures, not just ones I’ve given but ones I’ve attended, audience response is much more positive when a speaker tells stories along with presenting information and argument.
Everybody wants edutainment. They may deny it, but that is, in fact, exactly what they want, I used to think, with a bit of annoyance. But now I’ve come to the more charitable view that everybody wants to be delighted while they are instructed.
Without needing my approval
Yes [there is a difference between Facebook and a blog.] In sum: I can read anyone’s blog without needing their approval first, and anyone can read my blog without needing my approval first. I *like* not knowing who all is reading my blog. I intentionally *optimize* it so people I don’t know might find it. That’s how people get book deals, son.
But also, I think blogging is more about long-form writing than short-form sharing (Facebook).
Overwhelmed with Admiration
About a third of the way through [Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop], I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn. I was, as always, struggling with structure. … Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed with admiration for someone else’s work that I could barely stand to look at my own. … For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.
Extratextual Knowledge
That naming of a real intersection is a daring act and one that is controversial in Canadian publishing. Here is the issue: When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.
But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders.
Ok, here’s the thing, Russell. “Queen and Broadview,” “Yorkville,” and “College Street” don’t mean anything to me, either. So, you know, when you do that sort of thing, you’re not just alienating Americans who are “not interested in looking beyond their borders,” you’re alienating everyone who lives outside the COTU*, including about 85% of Canadians. It’s pretty obnoxious to be aware that it’s a “message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto” but to then to label all people-who-don’t-know-Toronto as foreigners (and subsequently all foreigners as Americans).
Unless you’re writing for a TO-centric publication, don’t do this. Especially don’t do this in fiction. Go ahead, name the street. But don’t rely on the name. Give it context.
(This is a good illustration of why BC and Ontario often feel like two different countries!)
*Center of the Universe
To Imagine a Time
It is hard for us, born so late, and living in this century, to imagine a time when a woman of social standing couldn’t just “get a job.” It is hard to think that women’s marriages were their livelihoods, just as we now think of careers in medicine or law. It feels ugly to think about, and hard to make light of.
With the Wider World
[S]ome of my favourite bloggers are mothers and write about their mothering experiences, among other things … And what unites the blogger/mothers that I do read and enjoy is, for the most part, how they engage with motherhood and with the wider world at the same time.
This is what I’m looking for in books about motherhood as well … How motherhood can be addressed in literature so as not to alienate anyone who isn’t a mom. And to understand why mothers are so reviled, in real life, on the internet, in general. Because they are a bit, and that’s a funny thing.
The Remainder Table 