Research

Flora's Fountain bookstalls. Photo by Damitar Mazanov.

I got these three old guidebooks through Abebooks. I like to imagine they came from one of the bookstalls near Flora's Fountain in Bombay. The One and Unique Pocket Guide to Bombay was published in 1966, but has 1967 stamped over that date, so I guess we're to assume it was updated, by the stamp if nothing else. It's organized by itineraries. The first says: "So you are in Bombay. Let us go exploring this City. May be, you are a stranger to the city; may be you have friends or relatives to take you round. Be warned, these well-meaning folks may be of no help to you to know about the places and things in their historical context." But I'm in good hands, redolent of old basement and damp cardboard or maybe monsoon mildew. We begin at Churchgate Railway Station.

The Fodor's Guide to India has underlinings in red ink and smells just like the Bombay guide. Through the underlinings, I'm following the curiosity of some other traveller, back in 1969, when Ravi Shankar and the Beatles helped make India the place to visit. This one has maps. I love the blue of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. The guide calls Bombay, a "city that belongs to itself."

I'm glad that some people can't bear to throw away a book.

Annie Dillard's website

Annie's Dillard's Summer 1936

I remember reading Annie Dillard's The Writing Life a long time ago. "The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend." She's a master craftsperson. Each sentence is a perfect object. Not surprising that she is also a painter. I remember being impatient with the book. I wanted practical advice. It felt overwrought to me. It felt like it broke its own "rules." But I go back to it now and admire each of her carefully wrought sentences. It rings true.

She writes about the disappointment inherent in writing. She quotes Thoreau: "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them." And Henry James: "Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to keep?"

Searching the web for something the other day, I came upon her strangely refreshing website. Crotchety, private, and scolding, about The Writing Life she says, "The Writing Life" (1989) is an embarrassing nonfiction narrative fixed somewhat and republished by Harper Perennial 1998

The self-critic

A manuscript page from James Joyce's Ulysses.

I once talked to a writer who told me that she read her novel over from the start on each day before she began writing again. If I did this, I would never write another word. When I think of my approach to writing, the word "headlong" comes to mind. I pitch forward, trying not to look back until I come to what I think is the end. Then I begin re-writing. I have an obsession with completing things. The doubt that would overtake me if I had to re-read my early drafts would be paralyzing. Here's a good article from The Guardian about the self-critic.

Daphne du Maurier

From Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: "The moss smelt rich and deep, and the bluebells were earthy, bitter. I lay down in the long grass beside the bluebells with my hands behind my head....I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say, 'By the way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She's married, with two children.' And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim."

I just finished reading The Scapegoat by du Maurier, too. The plot seemed implausible (two identical-looking men switch lives) and at first I didn't think I was going to like it. But her details are so rich and the characters so convincing that I was borne along and ended up loving it, and believing it. I didn't realize that she also wrote the short story, The Birds, that was made into the Hitchcock film. To me, she has the introspection of someone like Virginia Woolf, but she also has this compelling sense of suspense that sweeps me through her books and makes me want to to re-read them, more slowly.

Singing at the top of her lungs

Everything we learn about good writing says not to use cliches. I agree with that for the most part, although sometimes a writer goes to such lengths to avoid cliche that the writing calls too much attention to itself. Here are a couple of examples from Shantaram, a novel I've been trying to read:

Prabaker took the money and slipped it into his pocket with a movement as swift and fluid as the tentacle-grab of a squid.

Maybe if I was more familiar with the tentacles of squid, I'd get that.

I tried once more to find the words for the foliant blaze of her green eyes. I thought of leaves and opals and the warm shallows of islands seas.

From this, I get green. More importantly, I get a 936 page novel that's trying my patience as a reader. But certainly I've committed my own share of simile sins and metaphor mishaps.

My point is that once in a while, a cliche fits. Especially for a first person narrator, who sometimes thinks in cliche, like we all do. A cliche is also shorthand. It can stand for something. Or it can be so hackneyed that it's meaningless. This one, "singing at the top of her lungs," still works for me. To me, it evokes a fierceness, a bit of recklessness maybe. I associate it with singing in the car, letting loose. That's what my character does anyway, flying along the road, gravel scattering. Her singing, though, speaks for itself in the scene, I hope. I don't have to say she's trying not to let the bastards get her down, or that she's trying to keep her head above water.

There will be no blogging

There will be no blogging where I'm heading today. After driving up through the scorching dry heat of the valley, the water will be a cold shock at first. I'll swim out till I can't see the bottom. Stay there till everything stops. 

The loons will be on the lake, not lifting off the water until the canoe is just a few feet away. Fish will be jumping, but I won't catch any, because I never catch any. When the stars come out, so do the owls. In the woods at the end of the beach, they send their messages back and forth through the night. 

Early early morning, the birdsong is so loud and wild, I think my tent has been picked up and dropped into a jungle. Then the crows start up. Forget about sleeping.

Summer reading

From Rattlesnake Island on Okanagan Lake

There are certain books I can open and find sand between the slightly wrinkled pages. Books I've read on beaches. Opening them instantly evokes memories of summer, lying in the sun lost in the story, occasionally looking up when someone runs by spraying water, moving the towel every now and then to follow the sun or find some shade, getting up to go for a swim, coming back to the towel and the book and the spots of water dripping from wet hair onto the pages.

When I look for a book to read on the beach, I open it up and read the first few sentences. As a writer, I feel a little guilty doing this. I know that there are many books worth reading that take a little patience. But in the summer, I don't have that patience. I want to drop immediately into another world. The setting is important. I like a sense of place that's stirring, maybe a bit disturbing. That desire must come from my history with Nancy Drew mysteries, which gave me some of my fondest, earliest memories of summer reading, on a lawn chair under the trees in the backyard in Winnipeg, thunderheads building after days of relentless heat.

I found The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott a few days ago in the amazing secondhand bookstore in Penticton. The first sentence is a whopper: Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south. Novels don't begin with sentences like that anymore. When I read it, I didn't even completely make sense of it. I just knew that I was there and wanted to stay (for 518 pages!).

Other great books I've read in the summer: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood; Lord of the Flies by William Golding; Fools Crow by James Welch; The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston; House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momoday: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I went on a du Maurier jag and read several others. I loved Jamaica Inn too. And will read these two beauties this summer: The Scapegoat and The Flight of the Falcon. The bookstore had these lovely old copies for $4 each. I love the Nancy Drew-esque cover on The Scapegoat.