My mother, a gardener, had a book in her library with a pleasantly old-fashioned title: Plants That Merit Attention.

Certain sentences merit attention, and over the life of this blog I’ve featured and talked about quite a few. These are sentences that rather leap out at you, little poems amid the prose.

Rereading, last night, the prose of Marjorie Williams, I found these two sentences. In the first, she’s describing her mother on her deathbed:

There she was in the hospital bed that had been brought in and set up in the corner of her bedroom, comatose some of the time and the rest of the time small and frail with an avian air of confusion.

In the other – I’ll give you two sentences for this one – she’s talking about the depression she and her husband felt as they tried living a normal life after Williams’ cancer diagnosis:

We don’t have to be actively thinking about the wild uncertainty of our future together to be pulled by its undertow. Sometimes, when either of us comes out of it and manages briefly to raise from the ocean floor the graceful wreck of our old, normal life, we can be happy for days or weeks or even a month.

Avian, yes? And the graceful wreck, yes? These are moments amid the prose when the eye stays on that part of page a bit longer, idles in the unexpected beauty of an image. An avian air. It’s not just that she found the bird metaphor, though that’s already spectacular, a way of making the rather abstract words that precede it (small, frail) suddenly take on physical specificity. It’s that an avian air is a poetic phrase, richly alliterative, delicate to the mind’s ear like a bird, landing with the mother’s frailty on the very end of the sentence.

And the word air! It breathes meanings, associations… Song, manner, atmosphere. When I first encountered this phrase, I heard a song I sing: The Lass With the Delicate Air. It played through my mind.

Graceful wreck of course is something of an oxymoron, the sort of phrase that lets us do the work we like to do when we read, lets us work out the ambiguities of an idea or argument or situation…

Or not so much work them out as recognize and accept them in their unworked essence. This prose doesn’t instruct. It makes nothing explicit. It gives voice to the almost-unutterable enigmas of life.

From an essay about writers and immortality, in the New York Times:

[I]n a new novel, “The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman, … one of his characters, an obituary writer, interviews an aging feminist intellectual, Gerda Erzberger, who is dying of cancer. In a room that “smells of strong tobacco and of hospital,” she tells him that the greatest force in the universe is ambition.

“Even from earliest childhood it dominated me,” she said. “I longed for achievements, to be influential — that, in particular. To sway people. This has been my religion: the belief that I deserve attention, that they are wrong not to listen, that those who dispute me are fools.”

… note the caption accompanying this photograph of model Naomi Campbell (currently in a bit of trouble over diamonds she got from Charles Taylor) on her way to her court-mandated community service stint a few years ago.

Tuli Kupferberg has died. I will never get the Fugs singing the Nothing song out of my mind. I never want to.

His Wikipedia page.

… a witty and – someone else used the word mordant today and I can’t improve on that – mordant novelist has died.

Melvyn Bragg, in the Telegraph, says a very beautiful thing about her: “Her private complexity alchemised into the clarity of her books.”

It’s a beautiful sentence in itself, with the lovely, unexpected, and exactly right word alchemised, and with its poetic repetition of K sounds: complexity alchemised clarity books.

But it’s a beautiful idea as well, applying, I think, to any successful writer — I mean, that ability to use your self, your past, your pain, the messy inchoate stuff of each person’s experiences… To transmute it somehow into the coherence and elegance of an achieved artform and thereby to a significant extent understand what it is, what you are, what happened, what it meant, what your patterns are, etc.

More than that, this process tends to be therapeutic, cathartic, and indeed Bainbridge always said as much. She always said that putting her horrible childhood into her early novels made most of the anger and bitterness go away.

It’s enviable, this ability to free yourself, somewhat, through aesthetic detachment and formal organization, from the otherwise unliftable weight of one’s particular story…

Of course, you don’t have to be a novelist to enter into this alchemic procedure by which you gain precious leverage over a threatening and depressing sense of contingency, over a complexity which seems hopelessly private and unassimilable. A serious literary, philosophical, historical education… a liberal arts education, let’s call it, can produce something similar in you.

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Anyway, I’ve scanned the obits. Here are the good parts.

A writer for the Guardian visited Bainbridge in 2001.

I noticed a misprint in her new novel, egg yoke for egg yolk, and when I pointed it out, she said, ‘Which word’s wrong? Egg?’

… Her apparently daffy manner, her apparently chaotic house, are all part of her continuing appeasement of the world. She believes that looking harmless is the best defence. Better to be dismissed as eccentric, silly, childlike, than to be attacked. She cannot bear any sort of argument or confrontation.

… [The father of her third child] showed up for Rudi’s birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back.

From an appreciation in the Telegraph:

… She fell in love with Austin Davies, a scene painter at the Playhouse. He didn’t believe in God, and was forever trying to rid himself of the enamoured actress. “I became a Catholic,” recalled Beryl Bainbridge, “to get away from Aussie. Then I could never marry anyone, I could live a life of purity and pray the whole time. I remember being terribly happy: that Lightness, the sin removed. I was a Catholic for about ten minutes.”

… [Her] garden … [is] full of plastic roses and daffodils. “There’s more to gardening than growing flowers,” Bainbridge would remark, to mystified green-fingered friends.

… At first she had to supplement her retainer and her royalties with various jobs, including a stint in a bottle factory. This inspired The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), in which two Englishwomen become embroiled in the lives of the Italian immigrants at the bottle factory where they both work. The outing of the title goes hideously wrong and ends with one of the women dead, her body popped into a wine barrel and dispatched across the sea.

Brenda, the surviving Englishwoman, is soulfully sanguine about her friend’s fate, concluding: “It was the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, if they were tall and they were grabbed in the bushes by a small man.”

Some intriguing thoughts about the essay and the blog post — from a panel of Stanford professors. Excerpts:

[The speakers all agreed that] the essay is undergoing metamorphosis. Its very definition is becoming blurred – with photographic essays, musical essays, documentary essays and even audio essays potentially diluting the term.

… [One noted that] Stanley Fish’s game-changing blog posts qualify as essays, allowing reader response and follow-up posts. For example, Fish’s New York Times blog post last August, “What Should Colleges Teach?” inspired 619 responses.

“That’s what makes the Internet exciting,” said [one participant]. In the past … the reader “could throw the book against the wall – but that was the limit of engagement.”

… Essays differ from academic writing, which relies on evidence, depending more on the power of language instead: “As an academic, you can get by on so-so language,” [a speaker] said, but not so with the essay. The essay can nevertheless be “much more influential than weighty tomes.”

“The identity of an author is just as important in persuading as the arguments,” said [one professor]. “Paul Krugman doesn’t need pie charts and tables to persuade us of the soundness of his arguments. He just has to sign his name.”

… “Without the heavy armature of footnotes,” [a participant] noted that the Internet offers new ways to incorporate evidence. The hyperlink, for example, “makes the citation part of the essay itself … without making a big fuss about it.”

[One speaker offered a definition of the essay:] “[A] condensed meditation on one topic with a personified voice.”

… derived from Kleist and Kafka, that fits snugly, in our time, to the dull needy nastiness of life under authoritarian regimes.

I’ve been reading, this morning, Herta Müller’s novel The Land of Green Plums (1993; English translation, 1996), and it’s just that sort of thing — a deadpan chronicle of psychic and physical degradation under the Ceausescus.   Excerpts:

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As she speaks, something gets stuck on her tongue. The child thinks, it can only be the truth sticking to her tongue like a cherrystone that refuses to go down. As long as her voice keeps rising to her ears, she will wait for the truth. But once her voice grows silent, thinks the child, everything will have turned out to be a lie, since the truth has gone tumbling down her throat.

***********************************

Father keeps the graveyards deep in his throat, between his collar and his chin, near his Adam’s apple. That way the graveyards can never pass his lips. His mouth drinks schnapps made from the darkest plums, and his songs for the Fuhrer are heavy and drunken.

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There were fleas in the closets because there were fleas in the beds, in the suitcases with the patent stockings, in the long corridor. And in the eating area as well, and in the shower room, and in the cafeteria, there were fleas. In the trams, in the shops, in the movie theater.

Everyone has to scratch as they pray, Lola writes in her notebook. She went to church every Sunday morning. The priest has to scratch himself as well. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, writes Lola, here the whole city is alive with fleas.

***********************************

The bodega, too, was a lie, with its tablecloths and plants, its bottles and the red-wine uniforms of its waiters. Here no one was a guest, they were all just refugees from a meaningless afternoon.

***********************************

You could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear.

***********************************

A mother takes the train into the city every week. The child is allowed to accompany her twice a year. Once at the beginning of summer, and once at the beginning of winter. The child feels ugly in town because she’s bundled up in so much thick clothing. The mother takes the child to the station at four in the morning. It’s cold, even in early summer it’s still cold at four in the morning. The mother wants to be in the city by eight, because that’s when the stores open.

***********************************

That last paragraph conveys the prose style I’m talking about.  Anonymous — the mother, the child. Dully, robotically redundant:  A mother.  The child.  The child.  The mother. The content details the humiliating, unnatural conditions of life under the regime, but everything really gets conveyed by the affectless, dead-on-the-page prose, as if to say This world is so beyond belief, so incredible in its injustice and its distortions of human life, that it has killed the souls of the people who live in it.  Dead prose for dead souls.

… Angela’s Ashes, has died of cancer.

He used the GI bill to enroll at New York University, talking his way into college even though he had never gone to high school. One of his professors asked a class to write about an object from childhood, and Mr. McCourt wrote about the bed he shared with his three brothers and countless fleas. He received an A-plus for his paper and began to think of being a writer.

… makes the same point I make at the beginning of my Teaching Company talk on how to write well. She headlines her post WE ARE ALL WRITERS NOW. Excerpts:

… [W]ith more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.

… My friends and I write more than we used to, often more than we talk. We correspond with each other and to colleagues, school teachers, utility companies. We send e-mails to our local newspaper reporters about their stories; we write to magazine editors to tell them what we think. And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms. Who would not welcome shorter, funnier prose?

… [T]he quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from many traditionally published works.

Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels…

I asked [the poet Frederick] Seidel if, looking back, he understood what was in the way of his getting back to poetry [during a seventeen-year absence from it]. Seidel didn’t hesitate:

“Cowardice.”

What was there to be afraid of?

“The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” He added: “Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you [-] that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it.”

This is from the New York Times magazine. Here’s a review of his collected poems, also in the New York Times.

Especially a negative restaurant review. How many really negative restaurant reviews have you read?

Here’s one. Let’s see how he does it.   We’re in Toronto, by the way.

“Walk of shame” usually refers to showing up at work in last night’s clothing. It means you got lucky. It also alludes to bed head, missing buttons and incriminating clothing stains.

Basically, looking and feeling like crap.

It also describes the strip of Bloor [Street] between Bathurst and Spadina.

The Annex is no stranger to bad restaurants. The neighbourhood nearly owns a patent on the concept.

Cheap sushi joints line the street, each as barely adequate as the last. The ‘hood’s most popular sushi restaurant was closed down in March for three days by health inspectors. This month, an investigative report by the Star found it was selling tilapia as snapper. [Nice, very precise details.  Sort of amusing.]

Pubs and coffee shops sit in the shadow of the Brunswick House, where a fist fight can be had for the price of a pint. All of it is fuelled by a steady supply of undergrads from University of Toronto’s student ghetto.

T cafe, a new tea and tapas spot, is unlikely to improve the neighbourhood’s reputation.  [SOS likes the way the writer sketches the restaurant’s low-life setting before reviewing the restaurant itself.  Gives the reader a sense of the larger reality in which the place sits.]

The site – the corner of Bloor and Borden – was the home of Dooney’s for more than 20 years. In the mid-’90s, the cafe scored a victory over coffee giant Starbucks. Locals and regulars rallied their support when the property’s owner leased it to the coffee giant. After a lot of bad press, Starbucks leased the property back to Dooney’s and quietly opened up shop down the block.  [Again, a little history is good — though SOS had some trouble understanding the sequence of events as written.]

Perhaps the food at T cafe would be better if it were a Starbucks. I would rather eat one of its prepackaged ham sandwiches than another meal here.

On each visit, it’s difficult to pass the intoxicating perfume of cumin wafting from Ghazale, a wonderful Middle Eastern place across the road.

There are a few pleasing bites at T Cafe. [It’s always a good idea to start an attack with whatever positive you can think of to say.  Makes you look less nasty, more fair.]  Onions, fried with a green-tea speckled batter, are not without their charm ($4.25). Rosti are freshly fried, topped with bits of goat cheese and green-tea smoked salmon ($6).

But that’s just an attempt to say something nice.  [Refreshing directness.] Most of the food has the sprightliness of leftover wedding hors d’oeuvres.

There are cold goops of roasted zucchini and peppers ($4.25) and overcooked lamb chops ($9.25) with mate tea honey mustard. Frico (thin, baked crisps of cheese) are served as “Asiago chips” ($6). Except they are nothing like a chip. They are thick and gummy like a tougher, cheese version of a fruit roll-up.  [Goops.  Gummy.  Excellent icky words.]

The “creamy salsa verde” with won ton chips ($5.25) is yogurt with chopped peppers. Sliders with pancetta ($7.50) are straight out of a caterer’s page #1 selection. That’s the page you flip back to after you see the page #3 prices and say, “People like mini-hamburgers. I guess sliders are good enough for our guests.”

This place even manages to FUBAR something as simple as a bowl of cold soba ($4.99).  [Hold on.  Gotta look up FUBAR.  Fuck Up…?  Ah.  Fuck Up Beyond All Repair. Who knew.]  I can’t imagine how it is even possible to get soba to the consistency of licorice. I’d rather not know.  [Instead of the windy I can’t imagine how it is even possible… maybe something more direct instead:  How do you get soba to the consistency of licorice?]

Nearly all the food has tea in it. Yet nothing tastes of tea. Except for the tea, which is quite nice ($4.50).

But if I were coming here just for tea, it would infuriate me that all the teapots drip.

It’s shocking because good restaurateurs put a lot of care into these things. [Shocking overstates things and risks making the writer sound like a snot.]  A friend who owns a coffee shop has gone through three milk jugs and three sugar bowls in search of the perfect paraphernalia.

When I visit, most guests are drinking tea – couples on laptops; a boy with a stack of textbooks; a woman reading a magazine article titled “Decluttering Your Sewing Room.” A teapot and its drips clutter every table.

The only menus are placed at ceiling level over the counter, in tiny type. A server brings our food, but not cutlery or napkins. “It’s over there,” she says, motioning with her head.  [Excellent bit here.  It’s the details that do the trick.]

Despite the window sign promising a “unique tapas menu,” this is no restaurant.

No one inquires about our half-eaten food. We have leftovers wrapped up to feed someone on the street. But the container leaks red oil on my pants and the stain does not come out (thanks a lot, Shout Triple-Action).

A restaurant is a business – a big investment. It’s hard to fathom the bank employee that would approve a loan for a restaurant, in any neighbourhood, serving tea-infused tapas dishes.

The Annex doesn’t needs [typo] this, period. There is already a tea shop across the street, All Things Tea. There is no shortage of options for chicken wings. A merging of the two (chai chicken wings with peach green tea plum sauce $8) is far less than the sum of its parts.

Despite being in possession of Dooney’s’ liquor licence, there is no alcohol. Maybe this is for people who love wings but hate beer.

I might feel guilty picking on T cafe, but there are plenty of people around town working their bums off to make the best food they can. There is no excuse for this.

Popcorn at the Bloor theatre is a better meal.

… is still  flying high with the book.

… account of a basketball game between Law Center professors and politicians.

R J O’Hara reminds UD of this essay by Key West inhabitant Annie Dillard on writing. Let’s see if she’s got something useful for us.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Quelle downer! I’d rather write as if I were living if you don’t mind. I mean, I take the point that I should aim for non-triviality (I guess – though I can think of plenty of essays about absurd teeny things that I’ve loved.), but must we be so grim? And it’s not the case that we’re all terminal patients. Terminal, to be sure, but I understand by patient someone hospitalized. And who says dying people become enraged at anything other than profundities? The classic scene of dying people shooing away well-meaning clergy should tell you something.

She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.

Absolutely. Writers have an intense and interminable relationship to other writers, always circling around and rereading inspirations. It’s important to choose well. You know UD‘s prose obsessions. Feel free to share them.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble… Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem … – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that.

Exactly what John Banville says here. One will always fail. And it’s partly because of this that Dillard goes on to make her strongest point:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Not to be trivial, but UD’d call this the Scrabble rule. Veteran players know not to hoard, hoping each turn for the G that will enable them to make a seven-letter word. Always go with your strongest hand, now.

Dillard’s right that this is true of writing too. Just do it.

This is easy to say, though. The problem of constraint – verbal and otherwise – lies very deep. UD has noticed that many smart and talented people over the years develop comprehensive internal brakes. She knows not why, but there are brilliant singers who do not sing, dancers who do not dance. She presumes this odd repression has to do with the complex balances needed to succeed in other things. Psychologically, you find yourself unable to pursue your brilliant corporate litigation career and play the guitar. Or maybe it’s a time thing. You just don’t have time. And maybe instead of the musical release, you take an easier chemical one — since, whatever you do, UD assumes you need your share of disinhibition…

“[T]he draftsman must aggress.” Yes. But notice how many drafts are about the failure or errancy of that energy. We may want the writer to “magnify and dramatize our days,” as Dillard claims, to “illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness,” but we shouldn’t be surprised when the writer gives us something smaller and sadder.

“Are you writing the great American novel?”

UD‘s server, a thin young man in a thin cotton shirt, asked her this as he set a spinach salad in front of her at a sunny corner table at Kelly’s. UD had been writing in her notebook.

“Nope. I’m writing about writing.”

“Writing’s hard!” he said. “I’ve been trying to write a novel based on my travels. But I don’t know how to start! How to start?”

“All kinds of ways. Some people just do a kind of automatic writing which somehow if they’re lucky begins to be what they want. Other people spend weeks outlining…”

“You have to know what you want to say…”

“But not entirely. A vague sense of the general point can work. What’s more important, I think, is some particular catalyst: A person you met along the way who moved you. The hats women at an outdoor market wore. Often you gain entry to your writing and thinking through small stuff.”

And often as you lie in bed a sentence comes to you. UD wrote a poem this morning that she likes a lot so far (Ask her again when she rereads it in a day or two.), and the first line came to her as she lay in bed thinking about its subject. Really just a pure sentence-visitation. Can’t rely on those, though.

“I spend half the year here, and half in Catalina. So my surroundings are certainly inspiring…”

“Well, the other thing you need is to read. A ton.”

“I do. You know who I love? Bill Bryson. I’ve read every word of his a bunch of times. He’s hilarious.”

“And a fine prose stylist. Good choice.” UD‘s phone rang. Mr UD, giving her information about his arrival in Key West at the end of the week. “Good luck with your writing.”

“Thanks. Enjoy your salad.”