towards the end of summer vacation

I have not written here in so long that trying to start again is excruciating, but finally the time has changed such that I have open space -- not without work to do, but a different sort of work than the constantly shifting delights of being in relationship to my children. A long and winding way of saying that this week they are in camp together and my time is more free, although I must also begin preparing for the school year which begins next week.

But excruciating, after silence, to begin to talk again, the sense of vigilance about the words and how they might be taken amiss and inadvertently cause harm is so large. There is nothing to do but to do it, as with so many things in my life.

It has been such a good summer, I am not ready for it to be over -- as of course it will not be in many ways, but with the beginning of school my mind shifts to autumn, even though here it will likely be hot and dry until November. I dreamt fire last night, not nearby but in the hills, which is a reminder that I should buy those masks for the children in case we again have a bad fire season and there is smoke everywhere.

In this good summer my daughter has continued to discover the delights of Shakespeare; we saw a youth Shakespeare group perform Henry IV Part 1 together a few days back and while she did not love it as she did Midsummer, she loved it enough she wishes to see if she may join the group and be involved in their next play. She is determined about the stage, my shy child, she introduced herself to the director and spoke with him despite her fears, and now she is back to quoting Midsummer at all hours. The camp she does this week is circus arts, very challenging physically, and she is both frustrated by it and also telling me how, perhaps, she might use what she is learning to better play Puck, which is now one of her large dreams. I love watching all this growth in her and how it condenses into a new solidity, more confidence and understanding of herself, and the belief that she can do the things she dreams, rather than just dream it. It comes out in fascinating ways -- for instance, she saw a craft on YouTube and decided to make it and has now done a few iterations of it and wants to do more, and of course each time she reaches and tries she can be proud of her doing afterwards, even if the result is far from her ideal. I love seeing her learn and also I feel I am learning myself, about what it can be like to grow in these ways and how I must push myself to keep doing rather than just thinking.

My son, too, has had a good summer, he has tried some new things and ended up liking best of all a gymnastics camp so that he went back week after week and built his skills dramatically, he can now do flips which just a month or so ago were far out of his reach. He grew also in his relating to the staff, making connections in a way that is new to him. His sister went too, one week, and enjoyed it enough that they will be going to this particular gym for classes once school starts; I do not know if the magic of it will last when it is the regular routine instead of summer, but I have hopes.

Along with all the newness there have been many summer favourites; trips to the water park, swimming with friends, a family trip to Korean BBQ with Taiwanese snow ice for desert, shopping for clothes, many new invented games and some old ones, playing the Nintendo together in turns as a family... yes, I am not really ready for it to end, although of course it is not so much ending as changing, to have them gone a good part of each day and to be busy myself with the various volunteer tasks. And even in all that enjoyment, some impatience in myself for quiet time where I may go at my own pace -- everything is always both, I love the time with my children and seeing them growing and knowing them deeper and doing everything with them, and then at the same time that thread of desire for being able to do what I do now, sit here on my bed with the laptop and type my thoughts, sip my delicious cold coffee, know that I may pick up a book and read some pages of it without the door opening and a child climbing onto the bed to say that they missed me or to ask if they may watch a YouTube video or to suggest that food is needed. I am not resigned to the bothness of things, or the passage of time, or the knowledge that things end, despite living in this world where all these things continue to be true.

So many words, and so much more to say, well, it may be a flood of entries today, making up for the lost time.

thoughts about books and stories and narrative styles

Lately I have been thinking about the different styles (families?) of realistic novels -- it might be subgenres but it is not in the content, it is in the style of the prose. Many of the ones I encounter that are current are what I think of as the MFA-influenced well-made novel, and I often do not like them very much; they have beautiful prose, quite pristine and admirable in itself, but the plot fits together all perfect gears and angles and it all clicks to a clockwork end, there is never any surprise in it and it does not feel human as a whole -- characters, yes, and scenes, yes, but not the entirety of it, it does not feel like a story, whatever it is I mean by that. I do not dislike all of them; Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi was really quite good in many ways, and yet it is just not my favourite way for a novel to be made.

One of my favourite ways, I think, is perhaps a slightly older one -- I find it in Shirley Hazzard (Transit of Venus) and Penelope Lively (Moon Tiger) and I suspect Timothy Findley (although I am not yet done with his Famous Last Words so I might change my mind). I am just now reading another Penelope Lively, According to Mark, and that is what has brought all of this to mind, because it is just so -- good, but not only good, so satisfying, I feel as though I am being fed when I read it, and I wish I could figure out just why and put it into words.

Here is a quote from According to Mark

In the tube, these thoughts gave way to others. The others, in fact, had been there all the time, lurking in the background like a toothache. Now, they surfaced with full force and he sat glumly in the Picadilly Line, confronting them. There was no evading it; self-deception got you nowhere; he knew what had happened to him.

Now, why is that prose exactly to my taste? Part of it is Jo Walton's spearpoint theory I think -- that is not a big dramatic event spearpoint, but the reader has been seeing Mark, who is a biographer, battling with the self-deception of another character (who is a source for the biography he is writing) for most of the chapter, so it has a weight when he sits there on the train discarding his own. But some of it is that also I feel the story in it, the sense that I am being told this for a reason... hmn, perhaps something I am teasing out here is that the modern novels feel more like the camera view, even when I am inside Selasi's characters it has a coldness to it, an illusion of objectivity, that there is nothing between me and the characters, whereas Lively is telling me something, I feel her choosing and there is something pleasurable in that for itself.

It seems odd that I can only come up with four novelists thus far who group together for me this way; perhaps I will look on my Goodreads and see if I can find any more. But first I should eat something.

Shakespeare meme

Mentioned by cmcmck and taken from oursin -- and well timed, with all the Shakespeare in my life right now!

Italics = film or tv, bold = seen on stage:

All's Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Hamlet (only once on stage but many films)
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
Julius Caesar
King John
King Lear
Love's Labour's Lost
Macbeth (and hopefully a new production this month!)
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream (I was in it as a teen, and have seen at least 8-10 different productions since)
Much Ado about Nothing
Othello
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Richard II
Richard III (once on stage & many many watchings of the Ian McKellan film)
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest (my first Shakespeare, I saw it at 12 and fell head-over-heels for it)
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night (so many stage productions plus at least one film)
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter's Tale


There are a few I feel like I might have seen on stage but not quite remembered -- I went to a lot of live theatre in my 20s and I will pretty much go to see any production of any Shakespeare play that I can reasonably get to. (I would do the same for Beaumont and Fletcher but thus far I have had no luck finding them performed.)