February 22, 2006
The reader becomes a maniac
I’ve been very into marathon reading this year (which is why I’ve read 27 books already this year!) because I love the idea of a book in a sitting. Unfortunately I read Fight Club in one sitting last night, and it had a terrible effect upon my personality. Now I am impressionable at the best of times: I can’t watch Law and Order without becoming terribly argumentative, upon CSI the whole world is a potential crime scene, I remember walking out after “Coyote Ugly” (that in itself embarrassing) and feeling quite sure that indeed I couldn’t “fight the moonlight”. And after Fight Club, which was a foray into darkness and the dark crept under my skin, I was reasonably sure I was harboring split personalities and me cannon got a bit loose if you know what I am saying. Once I put it all down to over-susceptibility, I felt a bit better but it was still a little bizarre. I think I need to read an Archie comic as an antidote.
Today is down to laundry, essay research, rewriting my Monica Lang poem, and baking a cake for dinner at our downstairs neighbours tonight. And still counting down to the mini-break.
February 22, 2006
Minibreak Countdown!
Bookishy, I enjoyed this article by a school librarian, about the importance of “Weeding, culling, planting and reaping” book collections, just like a garden. I definitely found that to be the case when I sold over 150 books at a sale this July, and gave away many more. My library seemed healthier as a result, and of course it cleared the way for new growth.
Leah McLaren’s latest feud continues with this apology in The Star for the pretty awful review they published of her new book. And a new Scandal in Bookland!! Apparently a lot of Zadie Smith’s fictional White Teeth was MADE UP OF LIES!
Today I read One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty. Now I am going to start Fight Club, which Stuart has been urging upon me for three and a half years. And I am very much enjoying Woolf in Ceylon, but it will be slow going because it’s too heavy to take out of the house. In other exciting news, Robbie Williams’ Greatest Hits have found their way into my possession!
And Thursday morn we’re off to Ottawa for three wonderful days. And though busses are a poor second to trains, I am very much looking forward to being en-route with Stuart. We journey well together, him and I, no matter where we’re going. And we’ve gone a bit mad with snax for the road and magazines (the Vanity Fair is SO boob-laden, it’s gross!) but you’ve got to pass ten hours somehow. And we’ll stay with my cousin and her boyfriend, and it will just be so nice to be somewhere new. And while we’re there, I am not going to think about school work at all!
February 19, 2006
reading week reading
How exciting! More books in the post. There is no better excuse than “I need it for my class, dear” to be able to buy a new book. Even if it’s a new used book. I am getting Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett and it looks intriguing. I have read Walden, The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, finished After the Victorians and am halfway through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I also started Woolf in Ceylon by Christopher Ondaatje. My reading will go all periodical come Thursday, when we’re off on a five hour bus journey to Ottawa. No better excuse than that to buy the new naked Vanity Fair.
February 18, 2006
Vegetable Love
Some part of me is surprised that I have never, in any book, encountered the sentence, “He was hung like a sweet potato”.
February 16, 2006
I'm thinking about my bookstand
I went shopping today with one mother of a gift certificate that’s been hanging around for a freezing-rainy day/clearance sale. And I finally got a book stand! I find there aren’t nearly enough book accessories out there (and book lights are so passe) so I was happy to indulge here. And so this means now I can read and knit at the same time! All I need is an electronic page turner.
I also got Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, The Accidental by Ali Smith, The Photograph by Penelope Lively, Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale for Stuart, the new UTNE and this from the bargain bin. And three dollars change.
In other book news, I am getting through “The Decline of Britain in the World” a chapter a day. And I am also reading Walden. There is a massive stack of non-fic beside my bed as well. Thank goodness it’s reading week is all I can say.
Lisa Moore’s Alligator was certainly “a new kind of fiction” as the tagline promised. I’ve never read anything like it before. Woolf talked of the mulitudinous impressions we take in of life around us, and how a challenge of modern fiction should be “recording the atoms as they fall”. Alligator comes closer to that than anything I’ve read lately. Moore talks about her writing style in this interview. She says, “I want to break the parameters of what the reader expects is coming. So, if we’re talking about any given sentence, I want the sentence to end in a way that the reader is not expecting. I want the paragraph to end and begin and be something the reader is not expecting. But also be inevitable. If there is a golden rule, that’s it. If the reader knows where you’re going, there’s no point in reading that sentence; they’ll just skip it. It’s not for the sake of being avant-garde that I want it to be unexpected. It’s because I think a real engagement with a book means that the reader has to chase after the story. Their imagination has to be working, and it’s the energy that’s expended by the imagination at work that is the pleasure of reading. If they know what’s happening, then there’s no pleasure.” I recommend this book very highly, even just as an example of innovative technique.
February 15, 2006
Let's go to the movies, Annie.
Today, in Weird Craft news, I found out how you can use old books and styrofoam to create your own faux books. I must confess to not getting it. How completely odd.
Also, Warren Clements clears up the “spinster” palaver. It seems it wasn’t taken out of the dictionary at all!
Margaret Atwood on her experience teaching a writing workshop to a group of Inuit women.
More McSweeney’s Pop Song correspondences, this time from somebody in retort to Carly Simon’s accusation of vanity.
And Stuart and I were excited to stumble upon free passes for Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. And so tonight we’re off to the movies!
February 15, 2006
Oh my!
Tonight was exciting because Mike came to visit, and I spent the evening laughing hysterically. Also because MIFFY IS IN THE GUARDIAN!!!!!. It’s an article with Dick Bruna and they cover everything- her Dutch origins, her dissimilarity to Hello Kitty, the philosophy behind her design, why she has entranced people the world over, etc. etc.
Today was also exciting because I received a wonderful homemade Valentine, which proclaimed a love even higher than the CN Tower. Lucky is I.
February 14, 2006
Stuff and such
Oh! They’ve got their gloves off down in CanLit land. Read all about Ryan Bigge vs. Leah McLaren here. Read John Barber’s Globe column here. I found it timely, as lately I have been all awash in 1970s Toronto where it was all building boom all the time. He writes: “Shall we argue about where the next subway line should go? Ha! Postwar Toronto built subway lines continuously. With more than twice the population and an economy several times larger, 21st-century Toronto cannot even afford to plan one. The most reliable gig in transportation planning today is making up the annual list of suggested service cuts.” Something to think on. The digested Jordan memoir lies (and probably puts out) here.
February 14, 2006
The Tom and Jerry Show
I know you’re all wondering why Pickle Me This, the nation’s source for current events coverage, has not published the infamous cartoons. Now we’re firm believers in freedom of the press, but we do not believe in publishing material that is as intentionally distasteful as these cartoons are. The papers that published them originally and sparked the furor should not have published them at all, for the sake of common decency- though they definitely had the right to do so.
We are not publishing the the cartoons, not to placate the rioting masses, but rather because we consider it wrong to desecrate the beliefs of others in this way. This does not guarantee that we will not publish hilarious cartoons of Jesus in the future, because the image of Jesus is not revered in the Christian faith as Mohammed is to Islam. They are not equivalents. Perhaps the Iranians are right, and a good example of what we hold sacred in our culture is the Holocaust. We will not be publishing cartoons about that either.
One cannot think just in terms of polarity in this situation. Publishing an offensive cartoon does not make your press free- it makes you petty and a bit of a bigot.
