May 27, 2007
Spins
While last weekend was splendidly slow, this one spun so fast that it is nearly finished just as soon as it began. Friday we spent devoted to gardening. The results as follows, so that we could have a backyard almost fit to sit in when Chris and Andrea came over for a bbq Saturday night. Big big burgers, super saladas, and a perfect peach pie. Fun was had, and continued right into today, as Britt, Jennie and Deep came for brunch. Delicacies included banana scones fresh from the oven, fresh fruit, pastries, and Stuart whipping up eggs and bacon on the grill. After we walked down to Trinity Bellwoods to let the dog play, and to snap obligatory photos of the three of us, an Abbey Road-inspired shot, and later Jennie checks out the Murdermobile, and lives to tell the tale. 
May 25, 2007
My Office Haiku
(Now up at Bookninja. Go here for more)
clock hands ticking round
slow and stilted second hand—
outside it is spring
May 24, 2007
Evening classes
Summer has arrived with a slap of heat which has drained me of all energy. Now reading The Children of Men, and really enjoying it. And today from the library I fetched The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and Thieves, which I must read in the next week. The former book will be a good preparation for our upcoming vaca, I think, though we’ll not being visiting London. But indeed in one week’s time we’ll be en-route to the airport. I’m very excited, as we haven’t been abroad in two years, with all our immigration madness and that year in which neither of us earned a living. I’ve still not decided what I am bringing to read on the plane, however– maybe my collected Grace Paley to reread? And I am a little disappointed that I’ll miss out on some good reading time as we’re driving and not taking the train. Nonetheless, I am thrilled that I will be able to hold next weekend’s The Guardian in me own two hands, and that sometime in the week I will pop into a Waterstones and steal some 3 for 2s. Oh England England, get ready to welcome us home (literally and otherwise, respectively).
May 24, 2007
Sense
Have you submitted your workplace haiku to Bookninja? I did today, inspired by the haiku they have posted (and by the workplace, of course). Read them here, including a few by my favourite poet Jennica Harper. And then submit your own!
Heather Mallick underlines why I perpetually sing her praises with her piece on challenging authority. Oh, when she writes, “I believe education is important for its own sake. It is the basis of civilization. I especially believe in the teaching of history./ I am an elitist. I want people to be well-read, to value books. Here’s my reasoning. Educated people are more likely to deny authority. People who don’t read don’t have an intellectual storehouse to help them think independently. They do what they’re told. They have an endless desire to please those in authority; they don’t know they don’t have to.” Has anybody in the whole world ever had more sense?
Maud Newton points me toward the following: the hierarchy of adjectives, which are rules you don’t even know you know; and a poem by Grace Paley. And it was my coworker (since we’re giving props here) who showed me this article on the evolution of phonebook catagories. No more shall you be able to look up a buttonhole maker, or carbon paper.
Today I met Erica G walking down Palmerston. I was on Harbord, reading and walking, and she pulled her own book out of her bag, which we discussed as we crossed the street, and then we said our farewells. I think it would be lovely if we all starting asking, “So what are you reading?” instead of “How are you?” when we met. The conversations might be better.
May 23, 2007
During the journey
During the journey Patrick didn’t know if Katrina was asleep, and he didn’t want to ask in case he woke her, and so he sat beside her quietly, looking past her and out the window. Her chest was rising and falling, so Patrick knew that she was still alive. Outside, the city began to fade, and soon he could see the sky again. The buildings got lower, and farther apart, and the road grew wider. The bus picked up speed. It really was a lovely day, warm with a breeze. The sight of the blue sky from his window that morning had given Patrick his first inclination that maybe things would work out fine with all this. Katrina had agreed to go with him after all, which had to mean something. And now with not a single cloud in the sky, at least one thing was going his way, and Patrick glanced down at Katrina’s knees. Any knee was really quite a miraculous construction really, but Katrina’s in particular. Emerging so effortlessly from her thigh, her tanned skin pulled taut with some blonde hairs skimming the surface.
At work Katrina’s skirts usually fell below her knees, or else she wore pants. Patrick had never even imagined Katrina’s knees, either of them, though he’d thought plenty about the rest of her. He was well acquainted with her face, her defined collarbone, the shape of her breasts beneath her blouses and sweaters. With his eyes shut, Patrick knew her narrow shoulders, her arms right down to her slim wrists. He knew her body curved into her hips, and the swell of her backside. Those strong calves, leading tidily to her ankles. Though her feet were as unknown to him as her knees were, but Katrina’s feet, he could see now, were uncharacteristically ordinary. Her knees, on the other hand, were lovely, and he might have found an excuse to touch them. But then Katrina was either asleep or awake, and each state would have called for a different approach, and Patrick didn’t know which to choose.
May 22, 2007
Worrying
I mentioned that I recently unearthed the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, and a big problem I am having with the novel I am reading at the moment is that it utilizes many of the same plot devices. And I was not a particularly prodigious eleven year old, no matter how hard I tried. Hmm.
May 21, 2007
Turkey Lurkey
We’ve had such a boring long weekend– splendidly boring! The sun shone every day and I finished reading two books, and read the newspaper, and magazines, wrote most of a story, and blogged-a-rama. I spent a lot of time supine, we let the house get filthy, the hours ticked by so slowly. Though I imagine we might have managed as much fun as this away at a cottage up north, at least we never had to sit in traffic. Wonderful Kensington shop on Saturday and empanadas for lunch. Yesterday we went shopping for shoes, purses, wraps, shirts and ties from Bronwyn’s wedding. I also spent $160 on make-up, which I think qualifies me as an officially grown-up woman, or at least a very stupid girl. A kind of strange indulgence, considering how often I wear make-up, but I suppose then it will last a long time. And I won’t ruin Bronwyn’s wedding photos with sallowness. Finally, today we went to Riverdale Farm with Jennie– our inaugural trip of the 2007 season. I do love that place, and we had a very lovely afternoon.
May 21, 2007
Interesting things included
Interesting things I read in newspapers this weekend included: a new anthology about fathers and daughters has this reviewer asking “Why do some writers treat the essay form like a therapy session instead of a piece of prose composed for a wider audience?” Which is the end too many anthologies have led me to, but then flipping through the original Dropped Threads the other day, I got the sense that the quality of essays contained there was much better. I could be wrong, didn’t read it so closely, but I wonder if that these essays were written before the craze of anthologies and creative-nonfiction means that they were less self-conscious, less prescribed. Now so many nonfiction essays appear to be based upon the same template, and so mediochre (remember the anthology that made me want to die?) Anyway.
I really loved Sheema Khan’s column this week, urging Muslim women to stand up against male domination. She closes with “Social injustices should be confronted head-on with spiritual conviction and the resolve to face stiff opposition. An echo from another era by a Canadian woman of faith, Nellie McClung, should inspire us: ‘Never retract, never explain, never apologize – get things done and let them howl.'”
A fascinating piece Post 9/11 Fiction. On gay lit, the biggest ghetto since “women’s fiction”. A blog entry on Zelda Fitzgerald (who I spent my late-teens absolutely obsessed with), but as always don’t bother with the comments (particularly the one in which the writer claims that F. Scott was not successful).
May 21, 2007
Today at College and Borden Streets
Normally I don’t condone graffiti, but I am a little bit sympathetic to the message being conveyed here.
May 21, 2007
Bang
I really should have known. The Girls came recommended by Patricia Storms, Richard and Judy, and everybody else in the whole wide world. If, like me, however, you were put off by all the hype, and by the prospect of a story about craniopagus twins, you really have been cheating yourself. Lori Lansens’ The Girls casts a perfect spell, expresses every lovely notion I’ve ever had about the world, and says so much about perspective, writing, and love. (Those of us who love Kate Atkinson will definitely find something to love here.)
I was under that perfect spell from the very start, probably due to Lansens’ dramatic beginning. A lot gets said about great opening lines, but what about great opening scenes? It’s actually the second chapter of The Girls: “A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born”. And Lansens’ describes the tornado with such energy, intricacy, and action, I could almost feel the wind. I was hooked from then on. It was the best story opening I’ve read since Arthur Seaton fell down a flight of stairs in the pub and puked all over a woman in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Since the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Sometimes it pays to start with a bang.
Bookwise, what’s ahead? Cease to Blush and then The Children of Men (upon the recommendation of my husband!).
