Counterbalance

City vs. Country: Which is better for the writing soul?

After several days in the Sierra foothills, where all manner of bird was chirping and all manner of squirrel was scurrying about, returning to downtown Los Angeles was jarring. In a way I had not expected. I'm mid-story, mid-book, mid-review. I have a lot of writing to do - serious writing - and the "country" agreed with me. Yet I did not know this while I was in the country. It only became painfully obvious once I'd returned home. To the noise. To the streets without trees. To the grimy windows and doorways.

It was only upon returning that I realized how much I'd enjoyed - needed - the quiet of the country and its big open spaces to let my thoughts twirl about, get tangled, then untangled, then fluid and then down on the page.  Yet, I struggle with this concept - the very notion of it - because it is only after moving downtown and seeing so many different things, meeting so many different artists, that I began to take my writing quite seriously. That I began to have so many bits and pieces and moments to capture that I had to travel around with pen and paper.  With my recorder. To capture the moments and scenes and deep-buried ideas that came, somehow, bubbling up to my surface once I'd made downtown my home.

So right now, in this just-back-from-the-country moment, the city is making me nutty.  After reading Jeanette Winterson's June column, it seems I'm not the only one:

"Now I am sitting in my cottage in the Cotswolds, with the kitchen door open onto the garden, watching the rain pour down. I love to have the back door open - feel oppressed when I am shut in. I don't know how my friends with smart but shut-in London flats cope with life. My hens get more fresh air than they do.

I suppose there is a big psychological difference between the urban beast and the country animal. When I have to go to London for work things or to the theatre or the opera, that's fine, but when very occasionally I have to spend leisure-time there, I find myself going mad. What is there to do in the city unless you make a list of plans?

In the country there is always something to do - in the garden, walking, little jobs with the radio on, and then a quick dash in for a cup of coffee, or a quick dash out for a walk. I need to have ordinary contemplative life - it is easy to calm down digging a vegetable bed, or clearing out the shed or going for a walk whatever the weather, all things that can be done without spending money or being run over."

Extremes of any kind are always suspect to me and so I doubt I could ever wholly do one place or another - country OR city isn't an option for me. Yet, I wonder where that balance is - country AND city - and if achieving it is critical to my writing or if I'm just in a city slump.

Rewarding the Unread

Call me self-centered. Call me whatever. The universe seems, quite clearly, to be lambasting me for not yet reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.  Fresh off her Orange prize win, her book has just been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial prize.

She does, however, have some stiff competition:

• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Seven Lies by James Lasdun
• Electricity by Ray Robinson

I'm going to start my own brand of book prize in which the criteria will include the amount of time a book has remained untouched on my desk, the intense desire I have to read said book yet have not yet gotten to it despite intense internal and external pressure, and the amount of actual book prizes the unread book has received whilst still sitting, dusty, on my desk.  If such a prize were given out, here is what my shortlist might look like:

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• War Trash by Ha Jin

What would yours look like?

Lit Bits and a Bit About Literary Ireland

• The very busy week in bookish LA is up at LAist
• Between getting my rear-ended car sorted and my presentation for tomorrow finished, I'm hoping I'll be able to make my way to the Min Jin Lee reading tonight of her new book Free Food for Millionaires. I haven't even cracked it open yet, on account of another book I'm reading on deadline, and on account of the number of pages that seem to be contained within Lee's book - it's a bit daunting sitting there in the stack. But I'll get to it. I will.
• Just as Hollywood seems to be recycling film re-makes only to re-make them again (what does that make them? tri-makes?), I took a brief look at some novels that are making their way to the big screen and got some interesting responses...including some impossible casting ideas for Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.
• The ever-busy Dan Wickett has posted the sixth installment of the litblogger panel in which we offer our own silly answers.  When answering questions in a vacuum, you can't help but suspect you will come off sounding like a pratt when all the responses are combined.  I'm pleased to report that I only seem a bit prattish, not wholly so. I also worry that the maggot references will be obsolete in about two week's time if they aren't already. On the flip side, it's lovely to read the responses from others and get to know them a little better.
• I'm woefully aware that I owe some things: Ondaatje reading post, Pessl Roundtable Wrap-Up, other items that fail me as I type.
• As our honeymoon gets ever-closer and the idea of spending two weeks in Ireland becomes less a dream and more of a sure thing, I find that I'm sleuthing ways to carry hordes of books back from all the bookstores I'm finding in my travel-planning books. I'm organizing whole days around bookshops, book tours, author homes and poet pathways. I'm also feeling the pressure to finish up all the Irish reading I said I'd finish before I go. Once I get through the small pile on my desk...then...it will be all Ireland, all the time...really.  Probably.

Reader-Writer Moment #289

After several days of spending time with family and then not so lovely family - after having my moments charged with joy and relaxation and happiness, only to have them charged with terrible negativity and mean-spiritedness during the last 24 hours of vacation, I returned home to lick my wounds, read, heal.  Yet the memory of the words spoken and the awfulness of it all keeps ringing in my head. I can't make sense of it all, how things got so quickly off the mark with a few words...just a few...spoken to me in anger.

So it is that I marvel at the words of Jon McGregor in So Many Ways to Begin, read last night, and their salve-like quality:

"Lives were changed and moved by much smaller cues, chance meetings, over-heard conversations, the trips and stumbles which constantly alter and readjust the course of things, history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record."

Ah, so it is. And while the words of only some hours ago still linger, McGregor's are far more powerful, far more spot-on. Far more "me" than any awful thing that I heard this weekend.

I'm half-back today, fully-back tomorrow.  Cheers until then.

Reading & Wine-ing

The wine bit:

"The most famous, vibrant chenin blancs in the world come from the Loire Valley of France, specifically from the appellations Vouvray, Savennieres, Anjou and Saumur. In particular, the great Vouvrays and Savennieres are stunningly complex, long-lived wines with shimmering acidity."

A few lines later, the scrumptious book bit:

"If modern life allowed for such seemingly lost pleasures as sitting in a field of wildflowers and reading Madame Bovary or The Age of Innocence, chenin blanc would be the fitting wine to drink."

Both from The Wine Bible. Cheers to Karen MacNeil for writing a truly enjoyable book about wine that is both informative and lovely at once. A rare feat. Off to taste more wines.  Sadly, we are not in the Loire Valley, but in Calaveras County. Home of the jumping frog.  (I snicker here for several reasons, I'll leave those guesses to you.)

Lydia Davis Made Me Crash My Car -- Almost

Two absolute miracles occurred today while driving and listening to Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm:

• Silverblatt let the guest speak for most of the 30 minute show.
• That guest was Lydia Davis, reading from her new collection Varieties of Disturbance.  A miracle because the pieces she read were so lovely, so spare and painful and beautiful and, well, full. Pregnant with meaning, the said, the unsaid. All the bits in between.

Do yourself a favor on this late Thursday night/early Friday morning and take a moment to listen to Davis read several short stories from her new collection. I'm swooning. Over the moon and other planets' moons. Wishing I had it with me on this five day trip. So divine, I cannot tell you.  I've not yet read anything of hers and now I'm shamed. Embarassed. Bright red with disbelief. How could a writer as fine as this have missed my radar? Shame on me. I aim to set it right as soon as I return.

Other Davis books that I suspect are just as fine, just as worthy of a big, bold swoon:  Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Almost No Memory: Stories and The End of the Story.

Must. Acquire. Poste haste.

The Night of Many Readings

• The comprehensive list of weekly readings has been up at LAist since Monday (I know, I know, it's been a crazy week. Should have posted this before.)
• What you will realize quite quickly is that Thursday - today - is packed with great readings.
• Top picks if you're hankering for a reading this evening: Antoine Wilson at Book Soup, Armistead Maupin at Skylight Books, Mark Haskell Smith at Borders, Westwood. Their books, respectively: The Interloper, Michael Tolliver Lives and Salty. Go. Say hello. Wish them well and bask in the warmth of their talent. Seriously.  Not only can I not be in three places at once, I can't be in any of them because we leave tonight for our wine tasting (read: let's pretend the wedding isn't stressful) weekend.
• I've been reading two books distracto-style: Karen MacNeil's The Wine Bible (both for my own edification and for an upcoming series of posts for LAist in which I'll be the "wine novice") and Katherine Taylor's Rules for Saying Goodbye.  They are the perfect compliment to one another (to each other? I never know...) - Taylor's novel reads like a party and, well, what is a party without good wine?  More on both to come.

You See?!?! I Told You She Was Funny!

Finally! Someone "gets" A.M. Homes and doesn't deem her stone-cold with a stone-cold heart after reading The Mistress's Daughter.  Helen Rembelow's review for The Times is punchy and pithy and seems, finally, to truly understand and appreciate how A.M. Homes tells her story and how she reacts to the events of meeting her birth mother and father:

"THIS BOOK IS THE MOST amazing joke. I know the subject matter – adoption, abandonment, death – isn’t the usual stuff of rib-ticklers. I mean a joke of a more profound kind.

A. M. Homes knew from a young age that she was adopted. Like many children, adopted or not, she fantasised about her glamorous “other” parents. Her birth mother, she is sure, is the “Queen of all Queens”, a socialite or movie star. When she learns that her mother was young, single and beautiful when she was handed over, she imagines Audrey Hepburn.

Then, when Homes is 31, the punchline comes. Her mother gets in touch, and is slightly more real than Homes, succesful novelist and childhood fantasist, has bargained for. Her Queen of all Queens is an unemployed, alcoholic conwoman, a wreck of needy self-pity, emboldened to come forward by years of watching Oprah Winfrey on daytime television."

Yet, what seems to irk every reviewer is the last bit of the book - the research and the family tree bit:

"All this mirroring is worthy of the most ancient reunion stories, fairytales and Shakespearean plots, and makes a plot that would seem fantastical in a novel. But while I recommend wholeheartedly the utterly gripping first two thirds of the book, I wish that she had left it at that."

I kind of dug it. But then I think she's terribly funny & delightful, and few agree with me on that point.

When What You Claimed Never to Be True Becomes, much to your chagrin, True

What I vehemently denied would happen, what I guarded against at all costs, what I rolled my eyes at when I saw it in others -- has finally happened, I've seen it in myself.  Our impending nuptials are slowly taking over daily activities. Creeping their way into my daily work, distracting me while writing, veering me way, way off track when it comes to getting anything else done.  Families won't stay where they're meant to stay. Florists won't deliver for a reasonable fee. And the cake people have ruined my concept of cake forever. At this point, I'd rather make cupcakes myself, do the flowers on my own and say goodbye to the lot of them.  Sadly, this will only distract me further.

Worse still - I triple dog promised myself that I would never, NEVER, talk about wedding prep on a "lit blog" - but then the book Altared came out and it has some excellent writers in it and so, what the hell. This is the reality. This is me at this bizarre point in time. I've got bridal vertigo. Or something similar. This is, I believe, why people elope. 

But - I do see light at the end of the tulle-filled tunnel (there won't really be any tulle, who do you think I am?) and normalcy should return here sometime next week.  We're off to wine-tasting (just what every "will my dress fit me" bride should be doing, eh?) for a long weekend starting Friday. I'll be posting a bit up until then and will leave you with the yummy re-created Ondaatje post to enjoy over the weekend. 

Perhaps we'll just call this wine-tasting weekend "eloping" and get on with it...

Technical Smechnical

Events are conspiring against me. It seems from your emails that many of you cannot get to Counterbalance or are experiencing trouble accessing the site or some of the text is missing from posts or the images are askew, etc. In short - it seems the whole thing is a bit wonky. 

Sorting it out now...thanks for the heads up.