Post by rockefeller on Feb 16, 2023 17:28:59 GMT
Here we have a collaborative work by siblings, sisters, one a "retired newspaper feature writer" and the other a "retired English teacher." Their cover letter, though very well written, and not un-compelling, struck me as beginner-ish for its literary vanity. E.g., "Your readers with an interest in literature will find this especially appealing." This is exactly how I felt, and actually do still feel, about my own body of writing. But, unlike when I was a beginner, I no longer project this feeling, this great love for and faith in my writing, onto others. I have long learned not to expect others to love my muses' work as I do.
I have an "interest in literature." E.g., but for the day after David Wallace hanged himself, I have not cried in 30 years. And I even like romance, and regularly read the back covers' synopses of lower-shelved Harlequin romance novels in Zehrs. And I (seriously) love relationship studies. I even love writing that examines writing. Wallace did a lot of that, like in his Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way where there's a poet who uses only punctuation. I also like competent prose, which this cap, a few grammaticals aside (e.g., "Bennett had already organized diner [sic] with other conference attendees...") that just pasting into a gmail would catch, demonstrates.
And yet... and yet... I did not like “Such an Alluring Thought.” It doesn't follow the standard romantic arc where the hero and heroine initially clash. But that's fine. Molds were made to be broken. That I disagree with almost everything its characters expound on the art of writing was subjectively a little irksome. Like, “If you’re compelled to write, that should tell you that writing is what you’re to do” is belied by my observation and experience. (But then I hate NaNoWriMo.) I'm more a, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” kind of guy. Also, every public (i.e., promotional) reading I've ever attended mostly sucked. But the real stumbling block on this "Alluring" cap for me was a seemingly complete want of conflict or plot. It's mostly just erudite, occasionally droll, chit-chat that comes and goes nowhere. Also, though it's possible I missed it after I began to skim, there's no sex scene. Again, okay. Forgivable. Maybe even redeemable. Unless you're Updike, good sex scenes are difficult and risky ventures. Still, aside from the 1st person female narrator's superficial obsession with looks and attire, to me it felt almost completely platonic. So, no.
The following is an old essay that only loosely addresses my admittedly biased thoughts and concerns on the above portholed submission's literary gist and themes. You will not like it nearly as much as I do, if you even read it, as I probably would not.
In Which I Attend a Private Reading by Sandra Birdsell
"WRITER n pl. –S one that writes" — The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary Third Edition
Attended a private reading by Canadian author, Sandra Birdsell, yesterday. I didn’t know it was a private reading though. I thought it was a public reading. But apparently she’d given an open lecture the night before, and yesterday’s reading was a “faculty reading” for Conrad Grebel College staff only. I learned about it through an email from my dad who probably also didn’t realize that, technically, I wasn’t invited.
A nurse friend who thinks she might have Alzheimer’s gave me Jeffrey Moore’s very excellent The Memory Artists for my birthday last year. Somewhere in it, through a character who became a famous writer when his parody of a romance novel became a popular romance novel and whose advice to “aspiring writers” is “don’t become one,” Moore says (and possibly I paraphrase): “Never read your work in public. One has only to listen to Margaret Atwood to understand this.”
At 12:20 pm, ten minutes early, I plopped down into one of the plush, high-backed swivel chairs around the conference room’s large oval table. The room was empty. Then, as others began to show, and the room filled, it became increasingly obvious I didn’t belong. For one thing, I was the only one not wearing any underwear. Of this I am almost certain. I was also the only Jesus look-alike and the only one not adhering to any sort of external dress code whatsoever either to say the least. But mainly I was the only one not on Conrad Grebel’s faculty. My brother-in-law, Lowell, an international lawyer who teaches Peace and Conflict Studies, showed up and sat beside me. We were both surprised: me, because I hadn’t known he was into literature, and him, because, like I said, I’m not on faculty (although I did reside there for a few semesters thirty-some years ago and was twice their ping-pong champion).
I was also the only one in the room who had not read any of Birdsell’s work. Although I am less certain of this than that I was the only one going commando. After her introduction, she read a half hour excerpt from her most recent novel. Personally, I found the pace slow, the point of view wandering, the descriptions and ideas banal to cliché and the humor predictable. Some of this could have to do with the fact that I read differently than she speaks. I am not used to having prose doled out word by word. It was like drinking through a pipette. It was like studying a painting from up close through a toilette roll.
In her excerpt, a Matis Indian man and his German Mennonite bride screw on the floor of their antique marital home. We are told she has very large breasts for her short stature. After first asking her husband in both German and English (for readers who don’t speak German I guess) if he loves her, and his affirmation, she begins to undo her buttons lest he tear them off and scatter them about (audience chuckling here). Then, I almost groaned aloud when, in the very next sentence, they’re lying on the floor spent—finis—engaged in post-coital pillow talk. I mean I almost raised my hand and asked her to reread the last couple paragraphs, afraid I’d dozed off or something. At one point during their sated cuddle, the wife whose large breasts we were told but never shown says, “snug as a bug in a rug,” to her husband’s idiomatic confusion (and more audience chuckling).
But, as much as I didn’t care all that much for her writing (what little I heard), I really, really agreed and identified with her as a writer. She said she dislikes being cast as a “Mennonite writer”—that as soon as you become a Christian writer or a Matis writer or a women’s writer, or any kind of writer, you become less. She described a scene at her family's dinner table in which they pass a Bible around her while taking turns reading from it; them telling her that they don’t read her work because they want to love her. She said (with a frown) that her mother was never the same after finding salvation in a tent revival meeting; that she finds the notion, “because you are a Christian, God wants the very best for you,” repugnant, and that she’s begun to question other religious precepts of her youth—that she does this through her writing.
After she finished, the audience was invited to ask questions. The guy to my left's incomprehensible three-minute long one incorporated the word “redemptive” at least six times. And to which I think she answered, “Yes” and maybe, “Thank-you.” Most were only erudite praises of her work disguised as questions. Mine was the only one that seemed to piss her off. I asked her if her decision to use an omniscient, as in head-hopping, 3rd person narrator was in any way related to her expressed religious ambivalence. Then I stood corrected.
Afterwards, in the atrium, Lowell approached where I was engaged in speculating to a colleague of his on the challenges a writer like David Foster Wallace might face in reading his work aloud, and asked me to come to his office. For a second I thought I was in trouble. But Lowell just wanted to show me where he worked and all the renovations the college has undergone in the last few decades—which was good, because I was lost and had no clue where the parking lot I’d left my car in was, and would’ve headed off in the exact opposite direction. When I told him so, he laughed and said I’m just like my sister in that regard.