November 3, 2021
Gleanings
- Unvaccinated people didn’t just arrive in Toronto from Mars. They are products of a culture that over the last few generations has become increasingly individualistic, distrusting and focused on personal welfare over the larger community.
- It’s a very bizarre thing to find yourself squeeing in the middle of a gut-wrenching and upsettingly graphic story about the bubonic plague. And yet. Here we are.
- Last week we held a celebration of life for my mother and yesterday we hosted a baby shower for my oldest daughter.
- But somehow the days accumulated until yet another summer had passed, and I didn’t swim to the island.
- But why the maniacal drive for completeness? And what is completeness, anyway?
- So yes, I was today years old when I realised I was happy – definitely the best birthday present I could ask for.
- No bluegrass song has ever been written about freaking THROAT COAT TEA
- I think Beautiful World also offers a more affirmative response, though: that there is value in both love and art, that they are what can make the world beautiful, that they are worth believing in and standing up for, and that the novel (including this novel) is one way of doing that.
- (for the life of me i will never ever be able to keep a secret about myself. for others? til death. but myself? never ever. Is this a flaw? a strength? a quirk? idgaf. yes, that.)
- I think part of me thought it was too typical that a woman would write about food, and that I wanted to make my voice known on other topics. But somehow, I’m still hungry.
- But the history of kitchen cabinets and the appliances tucked in snugly between them is not pretty or seamless. It’s brimming with attempted liberation, deliberate oppression, Cold War marketing and feminist utopias founded on white supremacy. And it’s still stewing.
- Afterwards, when the street was quiet and the night was black, we blew out the candles in the pumpkin and brought him inside. I thought about how some things that we avoid actually turn out to be good.
- In his book, Williams uses the word whiplash to describe the sensation of going about one’s daily life until, without warning, one is confronted by a reminder of race and its implications
- So yes, I do aspire to be kinder, more generous. I aspire to give you what you want before you ever ask. But most deeply I aspire to be eccentric
- The coconut word triggered a few memories of instances when I felt misjudged or slightly vulnerable because of my skin colour.
- Asked what her first principle for detecting a good story was, Schoemperlen speaks in terms that echo Kennedy, albeit with fewer lethal connotations. “The stories to which I felt an immediate connection were the ones that just made me say, ‘Wow!’”
