August 21, 2008
Eleveneses and Scone Rage
Another excuse to drink tea, and I never knew: from Lucky Beans I discover “Elevenses“. I’m totally taking it up, as long as I get to continue to have eightsies, twelvsies and twosies too. Wikipedia even says elevenses are literary: “For Elevenses, Winnie the Pooh preferred honey on bread with condensed milk. In Middle-earth it is a meal eaten by Hobbits in addition to second breakfast. Paddington Bear often took elevenses at the antique shop on Portobello Road run by his friend Mr Gruber and usually received some sound advice about his current thorny problem at the same time.”
In other tea-ish news (and from the same magnificent source), I am fascinated to learn that Liam Gallagher was charged with air rage and banned from Cathay Pacific after an altercation over a scone.
August 1, 2008
On finding math in my book
It’s amazing, rereading, how it takes you back in time. Providing intimate encounters, so unexpected, with the yous you used to be. For example, yesterday I opened my copy of The Stone Angel for the first time since I read it in my grade twelve English class. First, on the first page is written in my (still) best friend’s hand: “I hate this book because I can’t read it because I am illiterate,” ascribed to me, which must have been funny once. (What is funny, of course, is that illiterate was spelled wrong.) And then how about the trigonometry on the inside cover?? At least I think it’s trigonometry, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s my handwriting! That once upon a time that gibberish meant anything at all to me, and I struggled over it, slaved over it, vandalized my very own paperbacks with it (and for naught, I think I see now considering I don’t even know what it is. Though did anybody even pretend that trigonometry was going to be useful?). What a strange life I must have lived then, and no wonder I sort of missed the point of the book, and we’ll just add this to the exponentially ever-growing list of reasons why I’m glad I get to be an adult now.
July 24, 2008
Of poetry and war crimes
What I’ve found fascinating about recently-captured Serbian war-criminal Radovan Karadžić was not his hair (which, incidentally, is quite remarkable both before and after) but rather the fact that, in addition to being guilty of crimes of genocide, he is a poet. That he is a poet surprised me, because I’d always supposed that literature in general and poetry in most particular would act as some sort of inoculating force against the decisiveness, the arrogance, narrow vision, and lack of empathy necessary for such a crime.
But perhaps I am naive, and you-know-who was a painter, etc., and surely there have been plenty of evil writers. Yes, definitely there have been some evil writers, by which I mean writers who thought, said, wrote some evil things, but unlike the poet/war-criminal, this doesn’t surprise me at all. For surely it is the writer’s role to think himself into places others can’t even fathom, and it’s natural that some might choose to stay there. But I do see a mild distinction between thinking and doing, the former abhorrent and the latter inexcusable.
It still surprises me that poet could do, a poet. Poets, I’d supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of “just words” after all, and how those words and those ideas can’t be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself.
But perhaps I’ve overestimating this man, and all evidence suggests as much– the poems are terrible. I read the excerpts and reasoned that they must have been put through an online translator, or translated by a drunk illiterate baboon, but they are said to be as “bad in the original as they sound in the English version.” The lesson being that bad poets are prone to war crimes? But then I’m not so sure, because that kind of assumption is bound to tarnish the reputations of a lot of us.
July 19, 2008
Three Facts
- Slippery boys are hard to hold on to
- Indefatigable boys aren’t easily tired.
- Elusive boys are hard to find.
July 16, 2008
With a brown cover
A google search that sounds like a long shot: i had a short story book when i was little im 23- with a brown cover- any ideas. They probably didn’t find it here.
July 8, 2008
Fits and starts
It’s been a strange day, and I’ve got stitches in my mouth. I’m also a bit doped up, and all of it has been sort of fascinating, however awful. That I’ve been bored, all afternoon. And I am never bored. I firmly believe that boredom is the jurisdiction of the lazy (or of those who forget to carry at book at all times). But this afternoon I’ve not been able to concentrate on very much, save the daring feats of squirrels outside my window, crossing and crisscrossing the street via tightrope power lines. That I’ve been unable to read very much at all, can you believe it. I was reading Marilynne Robinson before, but she requires more attention and care from her readers than I have energy to offer her now. I did listen to the podcast of Lorrie Moore reading her story “Paper Losses”, which is sort of wonderful, actually, as I can’t think of any other day in which I would have cleared the space. In fits and starts, I’ve been rereading Justine Picardie’s If the Spirit Moves You, which is just the ticket, I think, for my current state of mind. I also read another story today, which I hated– the danger of linking books and experience– mainly because I was taking out upon it my “mild discomfort”. But I’m also sure it sort of sucked. And the story will therefore remind me of excruciating pain as I long as I shall live.
I am turning my evening over to the benevolent force of the DVD.
July 8, 2008
Good Links
Links of late include “The Cattle-Prod Election” from The LRB: “This endless raft of educated opinion needs to be kept afloat on some data indicating that it matters what informed people say about politics, because it helps the voters to decide which way to jump. If you keep the polling sample sizes small enough, you can create the impression of a public willing to be moved by what other people are saying. That’s why the comment industry pays for this rubbish.”
Rona Maynard writing brilliantly of “The Hillary I’ll Be Watching”: “She has become in defeat the woman she could not be while her victory seemed inevitable, or at least dimly conceivable—a woman freely and fully herself while stretching the bounds of possibility before the assembled cameras of the entire world.”
Luckybeans visits a tea estate. Rebecca Rosenblum encounters a roadside box of mugs. Celebrating The London Review Bookshop (whose success is partly down to cake). Dovegreyreader ponders Canadian Literature (and “A Case of You”) from her Devonshire perch. Fascinatingly, on why you’re probably wrong about probability. Lately I’ve been reading and enjoying Antonia Zerbisias’s Broadsides Blog, and today in particular, her links to comedian Sarah Haskins’s Target Women videos– “Yogurt” is my favourite. Justine Picardie on Henrietta Llewelyn Davies, “a psychic astrologer with a literary client list, and an Oxford degree in English literature” and blood ties to Daphne Du Maurier to boot.
Speaking of yogourt, I just bought three tubs of the stuff. As well as pudding, soups, banana smoothie ingredients, apple sauce, vegetable juice, and ice cream. I’ve got the day off work tomorrow. Any idea what I’ll be getting up to hmmmm?
July 6, 2008
New Word
Discovered last night during Scrabble, in my ten year-old dictionary: “Internaut: slang. One who uses the internet.” Perhaps it still has to catch on… PS best word of the game was “Eunoia”, many thanks to Christian Bok.
June 30, 2008
Seen Reading Within Readings
Seen Reading Within Readings: Spotted on Page 75 of Maggie Hellwig’s Girls Fall Down, on the Yonge subway line south of Davisville, “someone reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, everybody pretending not to notice the man in the mask”.
June 26, 2008
A Perfect Match
We don’t talk fashion much, here at Pickle Me This, except when its bookish. But then how bookish is this, to find myself today wearing a dress that was perfectly coordinated with my reading material? I don’t think even cool people have started doing this yet. Or perhaps that they haven’t is the fact that makes them cool…
