In the bookcase beside our bed is a shelf of books particularly suited for morning browsing, a temptation difficult to resist on those days when a more leisurely start is possible. Such as today.

J and I had spent Saturday evening preparing the house for Sunday visitors. A cake had been baked and iced; plates, cutlery and napkins had been deployed; a fire had been laid in the fireplace and sat awaiting the invocation of a match — for spring here is still taking its own sweet time to ripen, with the first magnolia blossoms opening to an April which is still more lion-like than lamb.

J had chosen a morning swim as her reward for completing our advance preparations; my reward was to roll over and consider the bookshelf close at hand — from which I eventually selected the revised edition of The Letters of E. B. White.

I love to dip into a volume of collected letters, hoping to find one written on the same calendar day. I consider this a gentle form of bibliomancy, and the selected letter often resonates with the day to come. What, then, might my day have in common with that described by E. B. White in his letter dated the 6th of April, 1952?

Writing to James Thurber from his office at The New Yorker, White gives Thurber advice on what to do when attending the birth of a lamb (apparently one chops off the lamb’s tail with an ax) and shares news of a party which the Whites had given in honor of William Shawn’s being named editor of The New Yorker.

132 people! With “dancing of a sort” and a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere, […] the kind of goings on that made you feel that the door would presently open and in would walk Scott and Zelda.” J and I had planned a more modest gathering for our own Sunday afternoon, but maybe with the right kind of music a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere” was still within reach.

White’s letter closes with a lovely run of sentences which helped align his North Brooklin, Maine of 1952 with my own stormy Deep Cove day in 2008:

Spring is making litle sashays about coming to town, but it has been a fairly unconvincing demonstration so far. It’s what Maine people call “crow weather.” I still think Maine speech is about the most satisfactory.

“Crow weather” — a most satisfactory Maine term indeed; well suited for this stormy Deep Cove day with friends just beginning, which will end with us all sharing a Reine de Saba cake before a crackling fire.

1. none of the above
2. We’d worn out the nib of our Montblanc Marcel Proust fountain pen
3. Our accountant had assured us that the $719.56 in our RRSP would allow us to quit our day job and retire to the south of France
4. We were determined to set a new record for Sloth
5. No one told us that the writers’ strike had ended
6. Someone had to read all the stuff that the other bloggers have been writing
7. That “life” thing kept interfering; persistant and very annoying

Phantom Limb Theresa Kishkan Thistledown Press ISBN 1897235313 paper, 171 pages $16 (CDN)

I must confess that I suffer from a form of identity confusion when writing (sporadically! but we’ll get to that later) entries for this blog. Am I the collective noun referred to in these pages as “the t&p editorial collective”? Or am I a single member of that same august group? (because there are times when it is a royal pain to maintain the royal “we”). Or am I an anonymous flesh and blood figure lurking behind the scene, with a keen (and perhaps obsessive) interest in books and all aspects of the bookish world?

Confused or not, all of my identities agree that it is important to draw attention to the recently announced BC Book Prizes short lists for 2008. For weeks the teams of judges have been pouring over the — 300-plus! — submitted books to find the ones which they feel represent the best of this past year’s crop. An unenviable job, but the results are in, and you can review the shortlisted titles on the brand-spanking-new BC Book Prizes website.

The shortlist announcement got a bit of press — the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Straight — which I’m pleased about. And I hope to see more coverage when the awards themselves are presented at the annual Gala dinner (April 26 in Vancouver).

The new BC Book Prizes website is great by the way, thanks to the efforts of Monique Trottier and Work Industries (check out Monique’s blog at www.somisguided.com). In addition to the Book Prize shortlists you’ll find detailed information on BC Book Prizes on Tour, and on the annual BC Book Prizes Soirée event, which will take place Saturday, April 19 this year, between 7 and 9 pm at the Metropolitan Hotel. The Soirée is an excellent opportunity to mingle with some of the nominated authors; there will be music, as well as food by Diva at the Met. And it’s free!

To close this long-overdue entry I want to take a moment and indulge my own enthusiasms (because what else is a web log for if not self-indulgence?) by drawing your attention (upper left) to one of the five titles shortlisted for this year’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize: Theresa Kishkan’s Phantom Limb.

This is a lovely collection of personal essays, many of them rooted in BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, as Kishkan reads the stories that reside in her local landscape. My dear friend A has reviewed Phantom Limb on her own blog (to which I now direct you). There is a richness of feeling in Kishkan’s writing, a blend of clear-eyed observation and reflection which makes this book a pleasure, and a worthy companion to Red Laredo Boots, the essay collection which first brought this fine writer — poet, novelist, and essayist — to my attention.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it! Read!

Scene from The Lavender Hill Mob

“I had a ticket that I’d bought at a Vélib stand, which wasn’t working,” said Sylvia Whitman, manager of a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. “When I found a stand that was working, there was a queue of people waiting to buy their ticket, but no queue for those who already had one. Yet when I went to get a bike everyone started shouting at me, yelling that they’d been waiting for an hour. What are you supposed to do?”

— from a November 22 story on the Paris transit strike in the International Herald Tribune

J and I spent three days in Paris at the end of our summer trip to France, and tried out a pair of Vélib bikes for fun. They’re clunky things, but perfectly suited for trundling around Paris; and you can’t beat the price: for transients such as ourselves there’s a 1 € registration fee for a single day’s subscription. The first 30 minutes of any rental period are free; an hour’s ride will cost you a measly euro: peanuts! The majority of the bike stands (which hold a dozen bicycles or so) are located near the standard tourist draws: the Eiffel Tower; Notre Dame; the Place des Vosges etc. Rental instructions are straight-forward, and are available in several languages on the Vélib kiosk’s display screen. When you’ve finished your ride, you need to find an open slot at one of the stands, and your rental period ends as soon as you’ve clicked your bicycle back into place.

The problem, of course, is what to do if you can’t find an open slot, and when we were there there were rumors of perpetually empty Vélib stands — the ones atop Montmartre, for example — and others — those at the foot of Montmartre — perpetually full. The Vélib system allegedly makes allowances for this kind of usage pattern, with trailers of Vélib bicycles being towed from “have” to “have not” stations behind the scenes. But the usage pattern for summer tourism is quite different from the needs of Parisian commuters, which leads (predictably) to the kinds of confrontations reported on above.

J and I picked our Vélib bikes from a stand on the Rue André Mazet, a quiet side-street where we could get a feel for the clunkers before we braved the Latin Quarter crowds. We managed to execute a few trial runs without flattening any pedestrians, wheeling in a series of slow, tight ovals between the curbs, and then set out tentatively along the Rue Saint-André des Arts, crossing the busy Boul Mich and Rue Saint-Jacques towards our hotel in the Marais—with a brief, reverential pause before Shakespeare and Company, the “bookstore in the Latin Quarter” referred to by the Herald Tribune.

At one time—during those distant Shakespeare and Company days—I considered myself part of an exclusive set: a tumbleweed! practically a Paris resident!; tourists were “the other”, and I one of the fortunate few allowed to sit behind the shop counter, looking past them through the open doorway—my open doorway—across the Seine to Notre Dame. George Whitman will be 94 years old this December; his cycle-commuting daughter Sylvia is now at the bookstore’s helm, and my infrequent visits to the shop have a distinctly nostalgic air.

I noticed, during this most recent trip to France, that a change seems to have come over me; I appear to have crossed an invisible threshold to another stage in life: I no longer deliberately avoid the standard “Paris tourist” activities as in days gone by.

I spent quite some time on one of our September afternoons, browsing at the bouquiniste stalls along the Quai François Mitterand, with the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the skyline just downstream. It was not the books which drew me (although I did leaf through the antique postcards, translating fading messages with a voyeur’s eye); my main purpose was to examine the miniature models of the Eiffel Tower, offered in a wide range of sizes, materials and styles. These things, more than any other object, have for me always symbolized the cattle-like crowds of Paris tourists; I had avoided them—both tourists and Eiffel models—like the plague. This time, though, I found myself looking on the Eiffel miniatures quite fondly: was this an admission of defeat? capitulation? Or was it merely a new-found equanimity? I still don’t know…

Walk The Blue Fields Claire Keegan Faber & Faber ISBN 978-0-571-23306-9 paper, 160 pages £11

One of those who caught my ear at the 2007 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival was Irish author Claire Keegan. Claire read at several Festival events including Grand Openings on October 17th. It was mesmerizing. She has a wonderful reading voice, but it was the prose itself which stood out: lovely language free of cliché and not a ounce of excess in her sentences, the story advanced with a confidence and skill that is all too rare. She read the opening section from “The Forester’s Daughter,” one of seven stories in Walk The Blue Fields, her second collection of short fiction. I bought the book and had her sign it after the reading; I can recommend it highly.

Here’s one excerpt from “The Forester’s Daughter” to illustrate. Martha has bought some roses from a salesman, “a big blade of a man with a thick moustache,” who’d stopped by the farmhouse while her husband Deegan was away. When Deegan learns what she’s spent his money on, he rages, calling her a fool. Watch how Keegan, in just over a paragraph, sweeps the narrative forward without a single false note, taking the reader with her:

That summer her roses bloomed scarlet but long before the wind could blow their heads asunder, Martha realised she had made a mistake. All she had was a husband who hardly spoke now that he’d married her, an empty house and no income of her own. She had married a man she did not love. What had she expected? She had expected it would grow and deepen into love. And now she craved intimacy and the type of conversation that would surpass misunderstanding. She thought of finding a job but it was too late: a child was near ready for the cradle.

The children Martha bore she reared casually, never threatening them with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. When her first-born was placed in her arms her laughter was like a pheasant rising out of the bushes. The boy, a shrill young fellow, grew tall but it soon became apparent that he had no grá for farming; […]

How wonderfully confident it feels! The roses blooming and blown asunder in a single sentence and there we have the summer summarized. At the end of the paragraph and the summer a child is anticipated, and two words into the subsequent paragraph the child is children; another pair of sentences and each child is distinct, with different genders and individual characteristics and then they are grown themselves.

The story is a compact marvel, and there are others in the collection that feel just as assured. The book is not without a few missteps: later in “The Forester’s Daughter” we are abruptly inside the thoughts of a dog who has been adopted by the family: it jars to have this sudden shift of point of view. But by and large these stories are among the best I’ve read in ages. A writer to watch—and read—with pleasure.

We almost forgot to mention that the Vancouver Memory Festival is having its launch party on Sunday, November 11th. For those who are immediately curious, asking only “Where?” and “When?”, here are the relevant details:

Remembrance Day
Sunday, November 11, 2007, 1 to 4 pm
Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street, Vancouver

“What is a Memory Festival?” we hear you ask. It’s “an ongoing inquiry into public and private memory” (to quote from the Memory Festival’s website). And rather than repeat and rephrase information which is already online we simply direct interested parties there (www.geist.com/memoryfestival) for a better answer.

But why not drop by the Listel Hotel at some point on Remembrance Day afternoon where you can find out more, and share your own ideas about memory and the Memory Festival. Admission is free, and you’ll have an opportunity to contribute to salubrious conversations about memory, while pondering a rich selection of readings, slide shows, photo & quilt exhibits. See you there; tell ‘em the t&p editorial collective sent you…