January 2012
8 posts
Marjorie Hakala Gives You 7 Reasons to Read A... →
millionsmillions:
Reason #1: They are unique.
Reason #2: They’re playfully, livably literary
Reason #3: Do you like England? These books are completely, uniquely, and ineluctably English.
Reason #4: They are wonderfully funny.
Reason #5: There is a judicious amount of world history.
Reason #6: Widmerpool.
Reason #7: The books are both discreet and entertainingly frank.
Seriously, some of...
I was sitting at a table at the mall downtown looking through my library books while waiting to meet up with Scott before heading out for dinner. A woman tried to give me a ‘loot bag’ in exchange for enough personal information to steal my identity. The only memorable thing about this encounter was her opening line: “I see you’re reading a book, you must like reading, I...
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Wearing socks to bed gave her insomnia, but she didn’t realize it until many nights had passed in staring at the ceiling examining the sensation of her erratic heartbeat or trying to discern the translucent object of her anxiety or rearranging herself within the bed again and then again and then again, trying not to think.
She only ever wore socks to bed on especially cold nights after...
A vague chill fog
ampersunder:
We were still a little drunk on New Year’s morning while preparing for our next assignment, so the schematics were a more accurate reflection of the bottles we had emptied and the glasses we had broken over the holidays than of the route by which we planned to carry out our task.
We arrived at the wrong end of the industrial complex, where centuries of air pollution had created a...
Sometimes words make a nice sound splashing together in a glass and the colours complement each other in interesting ways and the light reflects off the surface in pleasing patterns but still I hesitate to take a sip.
Last night I spent a few hours rereading This Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas instead of sleeping. In spite of its flaws I love it at lot, probably mostly for the part where the narrator learns to knit socks from a book in a rented cottage on the seaside and then goes to the pub next door to drink beer while she knits and the bartender offers her free firewood and beer in exchange for a pair of...
Beyoncé’s “Countdown” was kinda...
December 2011
6 posts
Farewell and goodnight to two-thousand-eleven. /... →
Christmas was different this year. For one thing, we celebrated it in two family occasions where we usually had one. The first was on Friday, a sit-down turkey dinner at my parents’ house with my immediate family and maternal grandparents, which amounted to twenty-one people, six of whom were children. The second was a soup-and-buns buffet-style lunch with the extended family, also at my...
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Yesterday I handed in my last assignment — a 10-page short story — for the creative writing class I took this past term. The story evolved throughout the course by means of various assignments — a plot summary, then a first page, then the first draft for workshop, and then a final version. For me, each of these things (except the first page) were completely different stories. So...
kfan replied to your video: “Don’t Fence Me In” with ukuleleanecdotal evidence supports questioning whether Scott did ANY of the driving Scientific inquiry would find that I only drive when Scott is a) not in the car, b) intoxicated, c) too tired to keep his eyes open, or d) playing the ukulele. I was happy to display my driving chops finally on camera this year, except that the steering wheel...
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November 2011
4 posts
The air smelled like a beach today. It still felt like late autumn and it still looked like a chilly weakly-sunny day and it still sounded like the city, but it smelled like a beach. It probably had to do with the slight tinge of fog that I wasn’t convinced was really there until I was sure my glasses weren’t smudged. The morning had been nothing but grey clouds and now the sun was...
October 2011
6 posts
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“‘…But I’ll have to get a decent frock if there is such a thing in...”
– Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers
(P.S. The actual line from Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx” has “nénuphar” rather than “menuphar”. I didn’t want to perpetuate an error, but it’s actually in my edition. Typo or more intentional?)
The 36 Plots →
Supplication - Persecutor, Suppliant, a Power in Authority Deliverance - Unfortunates, Threatener, Rescuer Revenge - Avenger, Criminal Vengeance by Family upon Family - Avenging Kinsman, Guilty Kinsman, Relative Pursuit - Fugitive from Punishment, Pursuer Victim of Cruelty or Misfortune - Unfortunates, Master or Unlucky Person Disaster - Vanquished Power, Victorious Power or Messenger Revolt -...
booksinthekitchen replied to your post: Perhaps I didn’t celebrate so much as take…
GRAVITY’S RAINBOW gave you less trouble than EMMA? Never heard that one before.
Ah, that list was not chronological but sorted by strength-of-memory. If we want to be chronological about it: I failed to read Emma in 1996 but managed it in 2001,...
Perhaps I didn’t celebrate so much as take advantage of the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Independent’s Day. We visited two different independent booksellers this afternoon and came home with a large stack of books, only one of which I had actually planned to buy: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (a signed copy!). The stack also included Northrop Frye, Patricia...
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September 2011
6 posts
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There is a sonnet half-written in Word that is kicking my ass. Writing used to feel like magic, words falling out and settling themselves happily in the right places without needing me to try too hard. This morning I covered a page with promising drafts and ended up with a stack of satisfying lines, but tonight, trying to fill in the gaps, there doesn’t seem to be a way to finish it....
I have a two-page story due next Thursday. The first line must be: “How came it that God had not struck him dead?” and the last line must be: “I would have followed him, but he said no.” Both are lines taken randomly from a short stack of books the professor brought to class with him; the first is from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the second...
I made a friend at the library today. A little girl, maybe four years old, said hi to me when I came into the corner where one picks up holds and browses DVDs, and told me that she was eating a banana, which was true. I put on the strange high voice I use for little kids and, as I often do when I’m not sure how to respond or what this child’s parents will think of me, simply said,...
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“She knew that her efforts would be recognised. One night, soon, someone senior...”
– marginal gloss
August 2011
16 posts
“It is all very well, saying one will write notes, but writing is a very...”
– Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Saturday, May 13th, 1933
“… I was unable to concentrate on it for more than an hour at a time. As a...”
– What We Do to Books by Geoff Dyer
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is...”
– Jack Layton’s last letter to Canadians
I didn’t intend to start reading two books in diary form — I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf — in the same week I started writing a diary again myself, but so it happened. I didn’t know the former was written as a diary until I started it, and I thought of the latter as a record of the process of literary reading and writing,...
“I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have...”
– Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Monday, January 20th, 1919
Ultimate frisbee playoffs have begun. We had to wait out a thunderstorm before we could start the game, but in spite of the rain and the humidity (the fields were literally steaming) and the lack of my standard pre-game energy bar, I played a solid game and felt buoyantly confident and had more fun than usual. I haven’t felt good about my game for a couple of weeks now, but today in addition...
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“Eventually the man comes to see that he has a mind, and that his mind is like a...”
– Ben Loory, “The TV”
I am excited about Loory’s book Stories For Nighttime And Some For The Day which will soon be on its way to me through the mail. I like this bit from his interview in The New Yorker: “I don’t balance anything; I never think about allegory. I never think...
“The Line makes itself felt, — thro’ some Energy unknown, ever are we...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
My sister, seven months pregnant with twins, has been in the hospital for observation after some unexpected test results, but she’s been cleared and will be home early this week. I visited her after work on Friday. She’s at the hospital across the street from our last apartment, so walking there after work felt like walking home two years ago. She’s feeling more or less normal,...
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I went to the allergist this afternoon, in consequence of several episodes of swelling that occurred around last Christmas. My hypothesis was that these uncomfortable but not serious events were allergic reactions to the raw egg whites in my seasonal homemade eggnog concoctions, since my (memory-driven) food and health diary suggested that each reaction started within a few days of ingestion of...
July 2011
8 posts
“I always thought that I had to be in a certain frame of mind to write, that the...”
– On Writing, with Jeffery Donaldson | Open Book: Ontario
The temperatures for tomorrow are set to reach as high as they ever can this far north, and we’ve been warned to keep the lights low and not to hog all the air-conditioning. It will be the kind of summer day that I used to spend reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. The heat and humidity in my upstairs bedroom would be suffocating, had I been paying attention, but I would be...
