December 8th, 2009

Not by any other: on names and naming

I have stolen a rose. It is in a glass water on my kitchen table, and I look at it as I eat breakfast. It’s pretty and I like looking at it, but I also feel a little guilty. I’m pretty sure no one misses it, but it was still not my rose to take.

Except there is a part of me that feels that all roses are mine. Because of my name, you see: when I see a rose, a tiny part of my brain says “mine” or, sometimes, “me.”

I identify very very strongly with my name. I have a strong interest in all the other Rosenblums in the world, of which there are not that many. There are more Rebeccas, and I always enquire after them if I hear the name mentioned–I want to make sure they are upstanding women and not doing anything under the aegis of Rebeccaness that might sully our reputations.

But I am willing to admit that their ways of being Rebecca, whatever they are, become the definition of Rebeccaness in their context. Names are tautological–whoever you are, that’s you! For that reason, as soon as I know a person slightly, I have no trouble keeping him/her straight from other people with the same name: the personality hooks into whatever the person is called (at one point I knew 13 Jasons). I have never met a person whose name didn’t seem to me to suit him or her; everyone simply becomes the embodiment of that name to me.

The only people whose names aren’t a simply tautology to me are, ironically, my parents, because I don’t know them by their names (although of course I know what they are). I have been known to obliviously introduce them as simply “my mom and dad,” and leave them to give their proper names themselves, which in fact sound strange to me, though I don’t honestly expect people to address my mom as “Rebecca’s Mom”–I just forget that that’s not actually her name.

I have known people who changed their names when they married, when they immigrated, when they broke away from their families, or when they began writing. They seem just fine with the change, learning to identify fully under the new rubric. I imagine that must be a huge transformation of self, a serious mental and emotional change. It’s enough for me to even remember to call them what they now want to be called.

So I am not one of those authors who takes great joy in researching names, keeping lists of cool names, or matching the meaning of the name with a character (my name means “bound”–not even close). To me that’s not how names work: the person inflates the name with his or her being, not the other way round. Because real people come to me with names in place, in my mind so do characters. I generally think of an appropriate name within the first few paragraphs of writing about someone, and then that’s it–it becomes who they are. I almost never alter the names of characters once I’ve been writing about them for a while, and though maybe I can fiddle with a minor character’s name if she’s only on the page briefly, the characters I know well would disturb me greatly by another name. It would be as if my mom suddenly demanded I call her Barbara.

So the fact that I now need to change a character’s name is making me bonkers. It’s a coincidental reality/fiction overlap, and since I have no wish to edit reality, it’s fiction that’s going to have to take the hit, so as to avoid confusion. I thought I would avoid upsetting myself by writing the story with the original name in place and then search’n'replace it right before submitting the piece for publication–I wouldn’t even have to see this alien name on the page for very long.

But my attempt to pull this clever trick on my own brain isn’t working: now that I know this guy isn’t keeping his name, he’s shifty on the page whenever I try to write about him. “Who are you?” seems to be my question for him, although I thought I already knew. It’s really slowing down the writing, as I stare at the paragraph where he drinks the soda and think, “As Paul took a sip of his soda,” “As Nick took a…” “As Dave took…” We can’t spend 20 minutes on the soda-drinking paragraph!! It’s only two lines long! This problem remains unsolved, and in progress.

I love my brain–it is a very interesting place to live, but sometimes I wish it were just a little more flexible. Even my father, who has been living under the Rosenblum rubric the longest, is baffled by my enthusiasm, and claims to “not really think about it.” He does sometimes give me roses, though.

RR

June 19th, 2009

Incommunicado

Until my late teens, almost everyone I knew had not only the same area code but the same first three digits in their phone numbers. It was a very small town, but as far as I was concerned it contained everyone it needed to. Sure my extended family and parents’ old friends lived in the faraway U.S., but so they always had, and it was hard to miss people whom one rarely saw in two consecutive years.

Nevertheless, I delighted in post from such farflung correspondants, and a few made an effort to write to my young self on a regular basis. I was a far more ardent correspondant than any one recipient could handle, however, so whenever the elementary school penpal program circulated, I signed up again, winding up with a worldwide network of fascinating penpals, all of whom I would exhaust into silence within a year or two. I also wrote a family newspaper for distribution within my household, with articles on such topics as whose birthday it was that week, and what we needed from the hardware store (oh, this blog was so clearly presaged). I was also likely the only kid in the world who didn’t have to be nagged to write thank you notes for gifts.

I went away for the summer I was 17, made no friends, and used up half a dozen books of stamps. I went away the summer I was 18, wrote only slightly fewer letters but did finally actually make genuine friends who didn’t live in my township. They were older than I, already in university and conversant in the ways of university email addresses. I had no idea about any of this, but when I returned home, I tried to figure it out.

We’d had a computer in the house since the end of the eighties, which my brother and I used to play endless video games of steadily evolving complexity, and occasionally to do schoolwork. I had no idea what my folks were doing with it, or with the shrieky dialup “internet”; work of some sort, it seemed.

So the fall of my last year of high school, my dad taught me about email. I don’t know if freemail accounts hadn’t appeared on the scene yet or I just didn’t know about them, but my father generously shared his work email account with me, leading to a whole new form of household nagging (“Did you email Amanda back yet? That note’s been in my inbox all week? You really should…”) Everyone was sad when I moved away for university, but at least I got my own damn email account. By then I was hooked.

Far away from my area code and all the relevant people it contained, I started emailing my friends and family constantly–minutia about school and new friends and food and weather and clothes and health…and people *emailed back*. Letters had become old-school and boring: you had to buy stamps and envelopes and remember to walk past a mailbox, so I very rarely got post, but email still had the gloss of novelty to it, and I was thrilled to get email every day.

More than a decade and several technological revolutions later, I’m still pretty excited to see that Inbox (1) bar pop up! Letters have largely gone dormant for most people, though I can’t resist that heart-leap hope when I unlock my mailbox that today will be a day that one of the six people on earth who still use post will have sent me something.

In truth, I think the bloom is off the rose a bit with email, too. Most people’s jobs require them to send and receive dozens per day, and most of those are of the “Please reconfigure the pages completely and within the hour” variety that rarely causes heart-leaping, even in me. I’m sure I know a lot of people who, off the clock, would like their computers firmly silent and email-less.

Not me. I’ve never gotten over my childhood desire to hear from those distant, and much as I love to talk, I still feel my best self-expression–most coherent, most thoughtful, most amusing–is in writing. I like to think over a letter/email/story, rewrite a line or two, delete (some of the) extraneous stuff. I think I have a career as a writer that I could never have had as an “extemporizer,” and I think you’ll agree if you’ve ever gotten voicemail from me.

So I’m an email junkie. I send and receive dozens a day in a professional context, and although fewer in personal context, I’m still ever-emailing. I do get that not everyone wants to write long discussions of life, the universe and everything in their off-hours. Actually, I’m sort of amazed that some people (other than myself) do, and that I can be the recipient if only I continue to respond in kind.

All this email-relection has been brought on by the fact that I’m headed out of town this weekend to a cottage, on an island…with no internet. This has never happened to me before, really–not since that critical turning point back in the late nineties. I think it’ll be good for me, although challenging. I think the lake water, sunshine, friends, tofudogs, boardgames, actual dog, boat, bonfire, and coleslaw will help.

But I’ll still miss you, interent, and all my lovely far-flung friends that live inside you!

You just can’t do that again
RR

June 15th, 2009

On free will

Mom: And the cheese has been in the freezer since January, so we’re all set.
Rebecca: I don’t think you can freeze cheese.
Mom (indignant): You can freeze *anything you want*. It’s whether it will survive the process that’s the question.

Reachin’ for the stars
RR

May 15th, 2009

Shocking News: I’m in Tokyo

I am sure I’m the only one who had doubts that this would happen, especially after I paid for the ticket and renewed my passport. But I suffer from a certain lack of faith in the future and when the wheels touched Tokyo tarmac, I was genuinely agog, and couldn’t have been prouder if I had piloted the plane myself. I turned to my charming Korean teenage seatmate, with whom I had exchanged no words in 13 hours, and I beamed and beamed. “Isn’t this amazing?” I would have said, had we shared a language. (on the mutant interantional dateline day that was Tuesday-Wednesday for me, I said almost nothing other than, “Excuse me,” and “Do I stand in this line?” and “I don’t eat beef.” It was a very very hard day for me.)

Even more amazing: after a horrendous half-hour on the tarmac being checked for swine-flu (apparently I don’t have it), they *let us off the plane* and into the rest of Japan. Which turned out to be significantly better than the plane. I guess I have only been here for 36ish hours, but I have seen so much so far. Including:

–dozens of beautiful women wearing smocks. Smocks are all the rage in Japan. It’s sort of a good look, actually.
–teeny little hole-in-wall bars on labyrinthine side-streets that are over a hundred years old. Drinking and hanging out here seems an almost mystical art.
–hundreds of Poe-style crows, cawing and skulking about and being generally terrifying. There are crows everywhere, and they seem to want to eat you. One of my brother’s roommates said there is a rumour that 5 or 6 ganged up and killed a cat.
–My brother!!! Tokyo’s great and all, but I would have visited Ben in Kentucky. With who else could I have a conversation like this:
(peering over the side of a bridge into a river at a bunch of carp)

Me (pointing): Those two are in love!!
Ben: Ah, all fish are male.

–giant Uni-Qlo (I’m sorry, this computer’s crap so I can’t deal with doing links; google to see the wonder that is Uni-Qlo and you won’t be sorry). I bought a smock.

Much more to do after I take a shower and my bro comes back from his run (I wussed out early to post this missive) and we head for Yokahama, where there is a beach and trees and a Ferris wheel from which you can see far away.

I’ll try to report back, although due to computer issues I’m not too sure about posting pictures. Very important: unlike every other time ever, I am not up on anything like other people’s blogs, Facebook minifeed, the general Toronto news, etc. But I am reading email. If something important happens to you, be it fame and fortune, crow attack, or giving birth, you know I wanna know.

Oh, and they put shredded potato on pizza here. It’s shockingly good.

I’ve been meaning to call you
RR

March 25th, 2009

Goodness

As anyone who has ever gotten involved with Mr. Popsicle Pete knows, many things we want ardently in life turn out to be sadly disappointing. And yet some are better than we could ever have imagined. When I was but a naif last summer, I sure knew I was excited to have *Once* be published, but there are amazing things about the life of a book author that I would never have seen coming. Sometimes books get transcribed into Braille editions by the CNIB. Sometimes, you send your parents on a search for your first ever hometown review and they wind up meeting the staff of the H Mag. Sometimes children ask you if you know J.K. Rowling. And sometimes you get interviewed by a puppet.

I keep waiting to be blindsided by the converse downside of it all, but really, nothing thus far.

You came into my town / you came and you fell down
RR

February 13th, 2009

Niceness

So, my “Family Day is Fascist” position is not winning many supporters (Family Day, right up there with eyebrows and butter on popcorn on the list of things everyone else finds benign but Rebecca despises). Which is fine, really, I probably need less arm-waving rants in my life, anyway. And since Family Day weekend coincides with Valentine’s Day weekend this year, and last year I finally came up with a suitable position on V-Day, I have extrapolated that to include Family Day, another day of dictated affection!

And the position is, of course, for many of us, families and romantic others are amazing presences and deserving of whatever they desire on any given holiday and also every other day of the year. And for some, that is not the case, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason. Which might be fine with them, or not at all fine with them, but is certainly none of the government’s business! Sorry. Arm-waving.

*Anyway*, I think there a lot of important people in everyone’s life that don’t have a formal title like mother, sister, partner, second-cousin. I think that people who we interact with in small ways–the colleague that checks the printer and finds your lost invoices, the supermarket cashier with the really long fingernails who is still superfast, the woman who helped me scramble out of a snowbank a couple weeks ago–are also deserving of a good deal of niceness. Maybe we won’t be cooking dinner for them Saturday night (man, that cashier would be surprised), but maybe this weekend could just be a weekend of niceness to everyone.

I guess I don’t like the restrictions of these “days”–this is who you should be kind to, *exclusively*. But there’s nothing stopping me, someone pointed out, from expanding the definition of “family” to include everyone I like. Which I think the OED people would have something to say about, but in the interests of limited arm-waving, I’ll try it. And then I’m going to try expanding the day into the rest of the year.

I promise not to cook dinner for you unless you want me to.

I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours
RR

January 11th, 2009

Credit

In the entry YouTube Revolution, I neglected to give credit to my brother, Ben, who introduced me to all the wonders that YouTube has to offer. He’s the one on the right:

Just live your life
RR

October 13th, 2008

Thanksgiving

It would baffling and onerous to try to make a list of all those things for which I am thankful–this is the burden of good things, I suppose, insufficient time in which to list them. But really, though Canadian Thanksgiving was originally conceived as a harvest holiday and it is supposed to have vague connotations for being appreciative of all good things, I believe most stereotypical images of Thanksgiving feature mainly a) family and b) nice things to eat. And I certainly am grateful for both, and will now attempt to encapsulate that emotion in the following transcription of a conversation held earlier today:

(my father and I rummaging through the coffin-sized deep-freeze in my parents’ basement)

Me: Green beans, green beans, oh, pizza! Green beans, green beans…

Dad: Beets, do you like beets? Do you want these?

Me: Sure. Thanks. Green beans, Broccolli…

Dad: Yellow beans, green beans…you know, I don’t really like vegetables anymore.

Me: What? You like vegetables. You’ve always liked vegetables.

Dad: Some of the thrill is gone, I think. I don’t even know what the hell this is.

Me: (peering intently at frozen green blog in his hand) Is it broccoli? It could be broccoli.

Dad: (speaking to the green lump like Hamlet spoke to the skull of Yorrick) That may be. That may well be.

RR

September 18th, 2008

Rumours of Asia

I have always had a pair of brass sculptures of Thai dancers. These are young women with high pointed headdresses and sinuously flailing arms. The arms are brassed in mid-motion pushing through the air–on each body, one hand high, one low. When you arrange them with the lowered hands touching, as I always do, they form a wave with their arms. Their faces are impassive, more impassive even than you’d imagine for being formed from metal. Their arrangement is also impassive to me, though you could put them together another way or even just have each on it’s own. But why would you, when you could the wave.

I have no idea how I ended up with these; their presence in my life predates memory. Almost certainly, they were given to me, as I was not shopping for objets d’art, or anything, in nursery school. Of course, a heavy pointed metal objet seems a spectacularly inappropriate gift for a nursery scholar, but it never occured to me to play with them in a way that could result in me or anyone getting hurt. I have always just kept them on shelves or tables, in the hands-touching arrangement. Until:

B (picking one up): This is an unusually weapon-like hat, isn’t it?

Me: Put it down.

B: You could kill some with this, probably. (gesturing Macbeth-like at me) Stab stab.

Me: Put it down put it down.

B: Fine (puts it down the wrong way, so that the wave is flawed)

Me: It goes on the other side of the first one.

B: (moving it) And do you want me to flick the lights on and off 25 times?

Me: With their hands touching!!!

B: That’s a complicated way of saying yes.

Me: ARGH!

B: (nudges them so that they are again perfectly arranged) You’re gonna miss me.

B. is in fact my brother, whose presence in my life also predates memory, and whom I will indeed miss when, tomorrow, he moves to Tokyo. For someone who likes things consistently arranged, it’s hard when a loved one flies off to the antipodes. But there is a bright side to this, of course (in addition to B. having a wonderful year abroad): watch this space in Spring 2009, when Rose-coloured reviews the Tokyo transit system. I can’t wait, can you?

I can barely stop
RR

September 5th, 2008

Love

Last night I sent out the following email to almost everyone I know. In the interests of overkill, I’ll put it here, too:

Dear Everybody,

This is just to say, in case I somehow didn’t mention it to you, or send you a Facebook invitation or an airmail letter about it, or show you the event listing, or grab you by your shirt and yell, “My book is launching on September 15!!!!!”

well, it is.

Here’s the official details for the launch of *Once*, my first
collection of short stories:

Time and Place: Monday, September 15, 2008 at 7:30pm (Doors at 7pm.)
Location: Gladstone Hotel, 2nd Floor Gallery (1214 Queen Street West)

To launch her first short story collection, “Once,” Rebecca Rosenblum will share the stage with John Metcalf and Leon Rooke. “Once,” a collection of stories, is the winner of the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award and the work of one of Canada’s most promising new writers. This event is part of Pages Books’ This Is Not A Reading Series.

The unofficial details are that the evening may consist at least partly of me twisting a wad of crumpled notes in my hands, failing to operate the microphone, and maybe tripping over something…but mainly I think it will be lots of fun, and there will be drinking afterwards. I’d love to see you there if you feel like it, are free
on Monday September 15, and, you know, dig that sort of thing.

No need to RSVP, unless you like RSVPing, in which case, please do!

Bestest,
Rebecca

Lots of people did in fact RSVP and send me nice notes, which is always lovely. This is my favourite so far, though:

Dear Becky:

We’ll be there! (Are you kidding?)

Love, Dad

I wanna talk to you
RR