February 24, 2020
Gleanings
- I gave him the two pages in which the painting is mentioned in the novel and based on those two pages, he did the painting in three days. It’s not a portrait of a real person. I bought the painting from him. It’s hanging in our den. I never get tired of it.
- Can you even bear to think about putting a half-read chunkster back on the shelf and ‘resting’ it for a few weeks…
- But the other thing about Tyler’s novels is that while her characters may stray, they almost always come home again.
- Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d use a rolling pin as often as I do.
- What even is real life?
- Dialogue tips from The Port Authority
- …in the end, life is just an ephemeral garden of memories, a paradise we create with missteps, a paradise created as we bring together the broken pieces…
- The Buxton Chronicles is Curtis’s masterwork. It transforms the Elgin settlement into a version of Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up: a setting of idyllic boyhoods, full of pranks and woodsy adventure, in which Curtis examines themes of slavery, race, and class from an unequivocally Black perspective.
- Why High-Achieving Women Pretend Their Lives Are in Shambles
- When I read that Marie Kondo now started an online store, I felt like I’d been had somehow and I haven’t done much de-cluttering since.
- It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.
- And the level of homesickness Ginzburg was feeling for her large family comes through strongly as she evokes them all while maintaining a personal privacy.
- Just after we turned out our reading lamps, the coyotes started singing.
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February 18, 2020
Gleanings
- I’m not at all against social media. But one wishes for more poetic investigation, more hospitality being offered in a conversation. We want to talk things through, to get to another side, but acknowledge the mess of things, and to still find some kind of meaning, however impermanent, in flux it might be.
- Discovering that, if it’s the right one, a romance novel is the best bookish friend imaginable–always there when you need it and sure to cheer you up–is the happiest result of my now decade-long romance reading adventure.
- If this font was a person, it would be the sort of friend who fits in wherever they go and who you trust with your secrets and who will never fail to tell you if you’ve got something stuck in your teeth.
- What I wanted to say in this essay is that I laugh about death because death is a lens through which I’ve seen the world for the past year and this way I laugh every day.
- Where is my corner in the room? In the world? There are so many sharp corners, at every turn.
- Why is protesting such an uncomfortable enterprise? It may be because a protest is a perfect storm of social awkwardness: It’s where the tidal waves of conformity and nonconformism smash into each other.
- Loving my discussions this week with friends about Valentine memories from their own childhood…
- You can learn a lot from attempting to photograph a can of sardines.
- The healing superpowers of learning new things
- But even the sight of my neighbour’s sheets, socks and undies bellowing in a Toronto breeze warms my heart.
- Sewing the chapbooks in sunlight, and this evening we’ll read from the Odyssey, that great poem about craft, textiles, cunning. And love.
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February 10, 2020
Gleanings
This is an extra-large serving of good things to read online. This is not my fault. It’s just that people have been creating so much goodness.
- the story of rebecca of sunnybrook farm begins with bingo
- I was able to be more expressive, somehow, on the page. Freer, funnier (or so I thought), both deeper and more frivolous than with anyone else.
- The future is no excuse. The present is no excuse. You cannot abdicate from loving the world. You cannot abdicate from loving your neighbour. Please sing your songs and paint your pictures and write your poems. Share them all. Have fun. We need art more than ever.
- joyspotting
- Parenting, especially single parenting, has taught me to ruthlessly set my sights on possibilities of flourishing
- I finally found a copy, used, of A Dictionary of Angels, so I can say my own personal angel library is in a happy place.
- Written so effectively that his horror becomes the reader’s, is the exact reason why I do not like to read books about diseases. But what do you do when your book club chooses the very title you’ve tried to avoid?
- Everything, and I mean every single element, can be manipulated, cropped, changed, added to, subtracted from, embellished—how are we to tell where reality begins or ends?
- Bye kids, come back when you’re hungry,” our parents said as we walked out the door for our adventures. “Don’t fall off a cliff!” Ah, what unimaginable liberty.
- The Terrifying Joy of Moving Beyond the Meadow of Lost Time
- That’s why I stayed huddled by my lantern in our dark and rapidly chilling living room until I knew how everything turned out. I call that an endorsement!
- I’ve been paying a little closer attention to the barren branches, grasses and dried seed heads in people’s gardens this winter.
- Baking a delicious cake for people you love is not hard; it’s very doable and lovely and even feels good. Baking a cake to feed an entire wedding reception is a whole other thing.
- car trip with kids telling stories
- What’s your tree history?
- dee nickerson’s lovely world
- The in-house vote was strongly in favour of Jonathan, probably because Brenda is not easy to deal with, frightens some people and is so relentless in her pursuit of her agenda about women
- The main thing to remember is to slice and freeze large loaves and take out only enough bread that you’ll use for a day or two.
- Most of us make the mistake of believing we have all the time in the world to right wrongs, speak up for our friends; in short demonstrate our love for them. Bottom line: The time has come.
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February 3, 2020
Gleanings
- As for me, I love being outdoors at this time of year. Without leaves on the trees and bushes, the world seems so much bigger, more wide open, expansive. Beautiful. Not to be missed.
- Five Minutes for the Planet
- Fiction is a necessary construction, and sometimes it becomes a mirror.
- But within a year, Mark was gone. So, too, the Chinatown brownstone, the pub, Honest Ed’s, and Zipperz. And in their places, cavernous pits, large cranes and empty storefronts. The markers of progress in a city with a red-hot real estate market, but also indicators of loss, of absence.
- This is the pleasure, the delight of the “wrong” solution, the solution unknown to the algorithm.
- But just now, the light in the corner.
- You can of course watch a sunrise any day that the sky is clear, but this is the time of year when it doesn’t happen at 4:30.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
January 27, 2020
Gleanings
- Gurus, language scolds and comma queens
- Always keep a pot pie in the freezer.
- But here she is, walking through the world with her stuff and her thoughts.
- Down With Resolutions. To-Do Lists Are #Forever.
- It was fifty years ago today, January 26th 1970, that Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel hit the record shops.
- Nicknames that bully, nicknames that tease, nicknames that coddle. They underline a particular, not always flattering trait, and reduce the whole of you to that.
- Because teachers, whether we adore them or not, seem, especially to our small selves, a little god-like, not only for the power they wield, though there’s that (though that’s less and less), but their influence on us, which I wonder how often we even realize the power of… then, and now.
- Ideally, someone will bring over KFC to your chips and whiskey (or pop or club soda) party but that sort of fancy showboating is clearly not necessary.
- Oh, we built the deck the spring Forrest turned 2 because we had his birthday party there and that was also the time I planted the montana clematis against the posts of the deck.
- Seventeen is the time of tiny moments of panic that soon your kid won’t LIVE WITH YOU anymore. Let us not, as they say, “go there” as I am already in a fragile state.
- What do you do with your son’s toothbrush when he’s no longer alive. It’s just too much to think about.
- But a kindness tool kit required some thought…
- I admire the sky at multiple times of day and in all seasons—it inspires and invigorates me
- No matter where you are on earth, the sun rises at dawn.
- Just perfect! An anchor, a color of constancy, one we can rely on that will remind us to be big sky thinkers. Precisely the color we need this year.
January 20, 2020
Gleanings
- “It is worthwhile to point to the absences, the silences, the erasures in stories. But the questions should be an invitation to creation, not an end to conversation.”
- The book feels like listening to a friend tell the story of living eight years in a place she was initially only curious about but came to deeply love… including, and maybe especially because of, the tough moments.
- Telling stories helps. As necessary as bread.
- The character got a spark from the person once, but at this point the two flames burn entirely separately.
- What happens if you decide to just embrace something you love? Be a champion for that thing?
- Another good reason to double up our meetings, when and if we can, is simply because we love them and they’re an excuse to help us through the winter.
- Maybe, like Greek philosophy, parenting, too, can offer one model for holding the difficulties of the present moment in mind, but differently.
- Don’t you just love it when that happens, when you think… rum, again?? And it all begins to feel like a kind of reading serendipity is happening.
- I love going out for dinner with a friend. French fries. A Cabernet. Three, four hours of uninterrupted, juicy conversation. Equally, I love not going out for dinner. And not talking.
- Rather, time alone in the woods created a personal, quiet space in which I have always been able to find composure, contentment and serene happiness.
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January 9, 2020
Gleanings
- The one benefit of not being able to follow in our parents’ footsteps is that we are forced to make our own.
- When I’m standing on the shores at Middle Cove Beach, about ten minutes’ drive from our house in St. John’s, I’m thinking of other shores and other waters: the mudbanks in Suriname, the white sands in Vlissingen, the wind and waves around the Cape of Good Hope—and the lives and stories of the enslaved and indentured.
- Don’t call my experience a patient “story”
- I’m grateful for all of it, even the uneven stitches, the courses of squares that won’t align properly, the stars that often need to be picked out and begun again (measure twice, cut once)…
- Sticky toffee pudding is usually made with dates and almost every person I’ve ever told that to who has had it but doesn’t peruse recipes for fun and entertainment (crazy!) has found that baffling
- Recommended, even with Katharine’s bookish preferences, which are completely antithetical to blogging…
- The rising of Grace Paley’s feminist consciousness—its fits and starts, fears and regrets— may be traced in her stories.
- Reading is not a competitive sport, but that doesn’t stop me from challenging myself…
- It’s the time of year I make my annual resolution to be weirder, more eccentric.
- In the fog of my fever, I could see the finished chapbooks and they were lovely.
- THAT SAID … I may write more about books in 2020.
- This is an experiment in how one book calls to another …
- To get us in the mood for all things Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Marmee and Laurie, I’m sharing two poems from the novel and a recipe from the new Little Women Cookbook by Wini Moranville
- Something in me relished the thought of going up to people and saying, “Listen to me, something terrible is about to happen, and I can save you.”
December 20, 2019
Gleanings
- The only legacy that feels right to leave them is a literary legacy. A shared love of books that we have read together. I like to think this would have happened even without a terminal diagnosis but with it the pressure is on to make every moment -—even moments spent reading—count.
- “Why is my stocking cold?” my mother asked nervously on Christmas morning in 1992.
- Create what you like, create what you want to eat (so to speak).
- Our urge to mark midwinter and celebrate the days growing longer precedes Christianity by thousands of years
- The magic of Christmas prevails regardless of such details. It’s in the anticipation.
- What Maeve and Danny are really contemplating when they park across the street from it all those times is their past, their family, their story, and in a way, isn’t that what we all do when we return, mentally or literally, to the places we used to live and the people we used to be?
- I’m simply just not good at Christmas.
- Did anything change when I learned it was actually a gun rack?
Happy Holidays! I am taking a holiday from the internet and will see you in the new year.
December 10, 2019
Gleanings
- What do you think? Shall we keep creating? Keep writing? Or is there another way you’d like to walk through the world?
- Winter has taught me to love what I am right now.
- Raving about the power and politics of translation inspired by Emily Wilson’s mind-blowingly less-misogynist translation of The Odyssey into English.
- I decide that I will not beg the trees to heal me. I believe they have enough to do.
- The only way I know to smooth out the knots of futility and despair, of doubt and uncertainty, of chaos, is to write.
December 2, 2019
Gleanings
- No one gets anywhere by scrolling, they get there by doing.
- Lake Superior just happens to be Linnea’s blank page.
- Community doesn’t just happen—we have to make it happen
- When women are killed because they are women, we have to acknowledge that, and not retreat in silence. Silence doesn’t honour the dead, and it doesn’t protect the living.
- Ten years into motherhood, and my children hang off my boughs much less than they used to.
- It has taken me no less than ten years to make the acquaintance of Olive Kitteridge.
- How ordinary we all really are. How meaningful it is, to be just that: ordinary.
- A book, especially one received as a present, is a thought made tangible–a gift from the past, a gift for the future, a way to touch those who have gone before and, if we’re lucky, those to come.
- This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Short Story Advent Calendar, one of the Christmas season’s most dependably enjoyable traditions.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
