April 8, 2019
Gleanings
- If you’ve heard me talk about the library, you’ll know that I value the photocopier as one of the unsung heroes of human exchange.
- 17 Strategies of a Born-Again Reader
- It’s time for the men to listen and to record and to stay quiet.
- You get what you get, when you get a child.
- Choose Kindness! Kids Books that Explore This Crucial Value
- But where it comes to that question – the one of whether or not to bring new life onto the planet, by way of my body – I and my presently fertile peers have chronologies to consider beyond our own.
- When I was first diagnosed I turned to Jilly Cooper…
- How an Email to an Astrophysicist Changed My (Book’s) Life
- Think about how things like desolation, sadness, an imbalance in the universe, even, have a way of sharpening us, too
- …we’ve allowed our friendship to steep and stew, to mature; gathering dust at times, shining brightly at others. Never discarded. Complex, still vital, preserved and cherished.
- The water and its glorious buoyancy makes all of us athletes.
- Lord Peter Wimsey, from the beginning
- Although I was often warned about getting Blasenguitar and I understood from the way she said it that it was painful and I would be sorry, she never explained what it was.
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April 1, 2019
Gleanings
- I am rereading Emily of New Moon because of Russian Doll.
- It only took 50 very nice, polite people, including several kids, to…disrupt his agenda.
- To rescue even one child with learning problems or special needs from humiliation in the classroom and at home and from lifelong feelings of low self-esteem, is exhilarating.
- Consider how different our public policy outcomes would be if lobbyists, government-relations professionals, and former political staffers did not dominate the newspaper columns or the evening punditry panels.
- I was opening a tin of mushroom soup for lunch today when this warm wave of recollection washed over me.
- A woman’s wisdom comes, in part, from the great juggle of her life.
- I lose the thread, I miss the connection, I falter, I am lost. What just happened?
- When I wake in the night, I have the sense that everything I know is connected, that I need to find way to stitch it all together like a useful and beautiful length of tapestry.
- But sometimes, I just need them to be game. Sometimes, I just need it to to be easy.
- and the best unexpected gift of all this is how the organization of it makes me feel like I suddenly live in my very own bookshop…
- I feel like this book is so tightly bound to the bookstore, and to your understanding that readers needed a book about a life crisis that didn’t result in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.
- Paradox: How to be proud of and show off one’s work without being offensive. Not an easy task, not by a long shot!
- Being funny is, in a number of key respects, incompatible with conventional femininity.
- I’ve given up that mythical “trying to strike a balance in life” thing, and now I really just strive to not be shattered into a million pieces.
March 25, 2019
Gleanings
- ‘Well, Miriam, it’s a good thing we’re Mennonites. At least you won’t get shot.’ ”
- Dealing with criticism
- White privilege is thinking you’re an oppressed minority because you can’t wear a racist symbol without being called a racist.
- Canada Reads and the gender gap.
- Antiracism is a process. Decolonial love is a process. Our love is a process. I never want it to end.
- It’s about figuring out how to be open and capacious and to let everything in and see what happens.
- Liking Books is Not a Personality [ed: this is bad news]
- Grace comes in many forms.
- Jansson is always an astonishment.
- My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair.*
- I don’t travel with my fountain pen because it’s magic and I’m terrified of losing it.
- There’s something new and insidious about confessional-commercialism, which preys particularly on young women through the language of solidarity.*
- …how a life unfolds from what a pencil projects.
- The women who get me and get my taste are the women I follow on Instagram.*
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*Credit for these items goes to Jessica Stanley, who publishes her own gleanings at Read.Look.Think.
March 18, 2019
Gleanings
- It’s why I love swimming. When I’m swimming, swimming is the only thing I can do.
- What if writing helps you understand the world and the people in it today just a little better than you did yesterday?
- I think I kind of love uncertainty, if I’m being honest.
- Collectively, we have a role to play against the spread of hate.
- Maybe what we need is not more explorations of how meaningless everything is, but a radical reassertion of that meaning, the kind of hope that kept Woolf alive.
- Ardern’s leadership not only impressed the world, but also sadly reminded us what’s missing in most leaders.
- “We’ve got a pact,” Ziegler said. “You have permission to read for an hour, with no other interruptions.”
- On unknowingly reading a Christian novel.
- …a lot of stuff has been written at my kitchen table. I’ve daydreamed there. I’ve been happy in my kitchen.
- I find it moving to imagine Welty reading To the Lighthouse when Woolf was still alive, just as Welty was alive when I first found that story.
- That’s precisely the way a “grab”-heavy text reads to me after a while.
- I have to admit that every time I seal up a letter or finish a postcard, I stand back and admire it with a feeling of warmth and accomplishment.
- Thanks mostly to all my farmer friends who have ever so patiently(?) educated me, I have a grander appreciation for winter.
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March 12, 2019
Gleanings
- Why can’t we have parent-friendly Parliaments?
- My mother, you see, was an avid recycler from way back.
- David Tennant does a podcast with…
- “Darling, I love you goddamn, goddamn, goddamn much.”
- I feel like cancer has made me give up enough in this life.
- “Just a humble, decent dude”
- Someone called this blur an ordinary loneliness.
- But more so I’m here to iron things out. There is a decision I need to make and neither choice is ideal or easy.
- Here’s another definition of irony: It’s when the woman who writes the story of her life feels she has to prove that the story is hers.
- It’s not hard to understand why some people take such issue with us being able exercise the most complex and significant power there is.
- I am so grateful for this conversation and the chance to stumble through these thoughts and try to get closer to what I think and figure it out. I don’t know about this idea that we’re all supposed to know everything all the time…
- Stop telling women they need to be different or learn different things and start building an organization where they are themselves.
- Something that I think I cannot examine and re-examine and remember often enough.
- The woman I am today is an amalgam of a great many snapshots…
- I’ve only discovered the Moomins as an adult…
- I logged it all here like a dutiful aughts-era blogger with no larger agenda for what it would become, because how could I have known?
- Does the place where one was a child imprint more deeply than anywhere?
- It’s always a little adventure, to delve into a handbag I haven’t used in months, years.
- She is seeking not so much escape as neutrality: reading is a form of withdrawal, a way of refusing or rejecting the whole otherwise intractable situation around her.
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March 4, 2019
Gleanings
- I read like a buzz saw cuts wood.
- But I think I’m often my best self in hotels.
- I’m at the point in my years when, looking back, I can see that my life has been an accumulation.
- There is maybe no better time, then, to invest some effort in happiness, in making good for ourselves and others.
- Despite my reproductive difficulties, I’d forgotten that the simplest things are often the hardest to make.
- “There is a sense of the established power being threatened by women gaining respect,” she said.
- And those words became a sentence and the sentence became a paragraph…
- “The idea of male experience being representative of general experience, and female experience being women’s experience only,” she says, “is depressing.”
- It is simply one of the saddest songs about unrequited love I’ve ever heard, and I think about it almost constantly..
- Because the word character has two relevant and related meanings.
- How do we turn the situation around so that people are more willing to share some of the abundance they may have generated?
- If there are more like Russian Doll on the horizon, this might not be the darkest timeline after all.
- You might already do this, but I’ve found subscribing to newsletters is also a bit of an antidote to the whole potential glargishness of the internet.
- What Happens When a Book’s Character Comes to Life.
- That’s the thing about wrinkles, on someone else’s face they’re endearing, quirky –– life’s map lines.
- Winter is long in this climate/ and spring—a matter of a few days
- How effectively a piece is able to instantly make me feel something is a good gauge of its worth.
- Toronto Letter Writers Society
- So I took pics of dogs who weren’t so fussy about their privacy–and you know what? Dogs show you a lot about the world they live in.
- And since winter isn’t over just yet, hot chocolate and homemade sugared marshmallows are the way to go here.
- But compared to my early mommy writings on this blog the old adage “things will get easier” is so true.
- …may I remind myself that I used to be the banana queen of the Don Valley Parkway.
- And the only primroses are in memory, the drifts of them in the hedgerows near the island where I lived for a time in Ireland and used to pass on my way to the nearest town for groceries.
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February 26, 2019
Gleanings
- She’s spent a lot of her career thinking about the province she calls home, but her stories aren’t usually warm and nostalgic.
- On not centring menstruation around fertility.
- Irises really are a grand and whimsical bloom.
- I love how much these children want stories. A book is a spell.
- Many of my dreams are semi-nightmares but this one sort of snuck up on me and I don’t like it, even though I’m all for the experiment with narrative form.
- Definitely a great discovery, this is prickly strange reading.
- Looking for midwinter inspiration, I took Rob to our favourite flower store…
- The Starship Enterprise Editing Technique.
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February 19, 2019
Gleanings
- I’ve had my fill of faux community consultations.
- I want to constantly renew my creativity in attempts, and tries, and blunders, and anonymity.
- …how often it’s the entire atmosphere of reading — current circumstances, personal life stage, other voices bumping alongside — that makes a particular book memorable.
- That’s really the richness and beauty of anthologies. There are debates going on, and some readers take sides.
- How much more robust would my education have been had I read more women, especially ones who were still alive?
- Little girls with mothers who are teachers-of-life grow up to be women who observe, taste, admire, explore, and appreciate.
- …and once I’m in the water, I wonder who that person was who had hesitated, so happy am I to be swimming back and forth and back again.
- There is something so satisfying in perusing other people’s bookshelves.
- They say one shouldn’t do a thing if one’s heart isn’t in it–but one probably also shouldn’t do it if the heart is too much in it.
- I realize that by using the term “chit-chat”, I’ve possibly belittled what this group has come to mean to me.
- How certain gestures, features, remain over time, in the intricate mathematics of inheritance.
- I do still adore The Stone Diaries and recently pressed it upon a student, and I can certainly see its imprint on this book.
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February 12, 2019
Gleanings
- By-gone letters pull us intimately into the moment of their writing and thus seem truer than memories.
- I like to believe that leaning is love.
- Literature strengthens our imagination. If we all have the tools to try to imagine a better world, we’re already halfway there.
- I like the smell of coffee percolating, the way tulips nod their heads when brought inside, handwritten notes and letters, walking barefoot in the sand…
- As a writer, what I’ve done is not as important as what I’m going to be doing.
- And I noticed it because I was looking.
- This morning I went out to see if the small dark animal that jumped into the bush beyond my study window left tracks in the snow.
- Who needs a canvas when you’ve got walls!
- Undoing crochet still leaves you with all the yarn, after all: you just have to make something else out of it.
- It’s a stance, bewilderment. It’s a way of entering the day, and of thinking differently, even in times that seem to call for its opposite.
- I recognize that this sadness is the cost of loving my daughter and I wouldn’t change that for anything.
- But it is not true that identity politics are necessarily divisive. Difference is a fact of life, to which divisiveness is only one response. Inclusiveness is another: not just tolerating but celebrating difference, fighting for the rights of all, not just the few.
- My Year of Slow.
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February 4, 2019
Gleanings
- I have never had something I dreamt of so fully come into reality as blogs.
- What a rutabaga does better than anything else
- I may not want to shovel, but I want to be a shoveller
- While I’d previously treated my favourite shows as a way to tune out, I began treating books as a way to step into a place far from where I was
- But the nude beach urged me to imagine my body as mere flesh on frame, neither symbol nor cyborg.
- Boys are told that they have a say in what a woman does with her body and girls are told that they don’t over their own.
- Generally, I’m attracted to -ish. The ambiguity, the grey area—fiction’s territory.
- Instead of letting an unjust culture flow through us, we can interrupt it — and we can make a new one.
- Lying in bed in our cozy room, all night I could hear the muffled sounds of the crashing waves.
- Just when you thought you’d hit the parenting jackpot, things get even better
- To end the day by staring at a technicolor Kestrel is nothing short of magic.
- Examined with an analytic eye and a diagnostic ear, sexist language reveals an underlying social disease — contempt for and fury at women.
- “putting pressure, even just a form of social peer pressure, on individuals to share their mental health problems as the HIGHEST GOOD is a bit of an issue for me.”
- So it happens again. Courtship, mating, birth, nurture. It’s all in the song
- It’s like I invented Bruce Springsteen.
