December 21, 2005
A little bit of proof that the world is a good place
Yesterday we received a Christmas card from Northern Ireland that our friend forgot to stamp!
December 16, 2005
Break out the good china
There is something a bit awful about being on vacation from a job you mostly hate. Every day spent brings you closer to returning there, you’re so exhausted from hating your job that you can’t be bothered to do anything. It’s like vacation is a small window in your prison wall, and they let you look out from it once in awhile. But when you’re on vacation from school, it’s another matter altogether. A brief reprieve from a life that’s usually remarkably pleasant, and then you throw yourself into high gear and vow to do all the things you’ve been putting off for months. Like spending whole days reading. And then you do your Christmas baking (because you’re a wife and you’re obligated), and you finish off the Christmas cards and you can relax and do what you like, knowing there is nothing else you should be doing. And the snow doesn’t signs of stopping, but you’ve got some corn for popping. And you’re entertaining nearly every day next week. Break out the good china. Or at least you would if you had good china. Today is party preparations- mainly consisting of floor scrubbing. My essay was handed in at two p.m. yesterday. Christmas vacation when you’re a student is a lot like standing on a mountaintop.
Another run of “Spring Comes Suddenly” is now available (or will be as soon as I bind them, which will be today). These have green covers but are equally lovely as the last, and are practically being given away for the low low price of $5.
Now reading “Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion. She is profiled in today’s Guardian. UK women of the year. I’m getting all my federal election coverage from the Conservative Youth Blog (link via Live Free Or Die) but they haven’t updated in days! There is however a photo of Stephen Harper wearing a hoodie. And no jacket! It can’t be. They must have just pasted his head upon someone else’s body.
December 13, 2005
The best 1095 days ever
To three years of Pickle Me This in love on three continents, through thick and thin (not to mention fat and thin), and with many more to come.
December 13, 2005
Knowledge Gaps
I was stunned yesterday by a woman in the bookstore who was perhaps ten years older than me and who, as I overheard, was not ashamed to admit that she didn’t know during which years the Second World War had been fought.
However I do not know if my Christmas tree is a spruce or a pine (though I am pretty sure it’s not a maple) and I don’t know if my own ignorance is any less troubling.
December 13, 2005
York is the new New York
Oh Toronto, Toronto. That sweet snow-coated city that so called me home is the centre of the universe. The literary universe at least. Vanity Fair says so.
December 11, 2005
Gleanings
More McSweeneys pop song correspondences, A LETTER TO ELTON JOHN FROM THE OFFICE OF THE NASA ADMINISTRATOR. A sample: ‘After demanding data from you for days, you were only able to offer this insight: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.” First off, if you did what? That doesn’t even make sense. Secondly, we did not send you up there to evaluate whether Mars is fit for human habitation or child rearing. Thirdly, your mission was not even going to Mars.'” On a lifetime spent with books. How Woolfian: how to read a book. And no federal election coverage, because it’s so damn boring!
Essay WordCount: 2300
December 7, 2005
I am a librartarian
I think the library is the closest I’ll ever get to undertanding what it must be like to be conservative in our time, to look about and see all the values you hold dear thrown by the wayside, moral decline in the name of progress. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.
Exams are nearly upon us at the University of Toronto, and consequently the libraries are teeming with scholarly hordes violating those sacred places. The carrels are cracking with candy wrappers and buzzing with cell-phones, the stacks are full of books people continue to write in, the computers are occupied with people on instant messenger, the student lounge echoes throughout the entire building, wireless access fails for five minutes and all hell breaks loose. In my job, when I inform students that they should not be eating in the library or speaking on their phones, never does anyone apologise and realise the error of their ways (unsurprisingly, as they are eating with “No Eating”/”No Cell Phones” signs staring them in the face), or even just apologise. Instead they tell me to fuck off, either with words or their facial expressions.
I believe passionately that libraries are sacred places, and in sacred places we don’t eat and drink, and our cell-phones don’t ring. We don’t talk above whispers, we don’t scratch our initials into furniture. I believe that people who keep overdue books are immoral and undermining the foundations of our society. When the librarian tells you to shush, you shush my friend. You are in a house of godliness.
But alas, no one else seems to think so. The old road is rapidly fading.
December 5, 2005
Hobby Time
I finished my first Christmas stocking tonight, and though far from perfect it resembles a Christmas stocking. Ya ta!
December 4, 2005
On the radio
I enjoyed Kate Taylor’s article on the CBC in The Globe this weekend. I must disclose that I’ve only been listening to the CBC since the strike ended this Fall, after reading so much about this invaluable national network that makes Canada Canada I thought it was time that I got in on the action. And I love it. I like Metro Morning, As It Happens, anything about books, The Current, Quirks and Quarks and Definitely Not the Opera is a splendid way to spend away my Saturday afternoon. We also like “The National Playlist”. A part of me regrets I’d been missing CBC Radio my whole life, whiling it away to crappy middle of the road station soundtracks. But it’s never too late. Further, as a result of continued exposure to CBC radio (after all he is unemployed), my English husband knows everything about Canadian politics and current events there is to know. So that is my background.
Now debate is currently centred around the new CBC Radio One afternoon show, Freestyle. I am home in the afternoon two or three days a week (I’m about as busy as my unemployed husband- we’re a household of go-getters you can see) and have listened to the show a number of times and my concensus is this. The format is potentially good. Problems lie in two places. 1) A stupid over-reliance on the internet and the weird wonderful world of the web. It’s very late 1990s and boring now. Perhaps a more thematic format would be too demanding for a daily show, but something must be done. 2) The hosts are unequivocally dorky, awkward and have no chemistry. Perhaps something will develop between them, but now listening to “Kelly and Cameron” makes me cringe.
The problem in no way lies with the music, or with CBC’s movement toward playing pop music. I am an unabashed pop lover, and it’s this movement that has made the CBC so accessible to new listeners like me. Playing popular music doesn’t relegate the CBC to the (low) status of commercial radio, but rather the music in amongst the other fare offered makes for a varied and interesting listening experience. This is the possibility of radio, which commerical stations fail to live up to. I discovered this for the first time when I lived in Britain, and listened to BBC Radio 1, and realised that a top forty station didn’t necessarily have to be Eagle Eye Cherry on repeat and commercials for “Sleep Country Canada”. Before the BBC, radio had been for me an irritating aural experience. Now BBC Radio 1 has its own problems, but it was a pleasure to come home to Canada and see that so much of what I had enjoyed about British radio was present here. By this I mean actual programming. Radio is an amazingly engaging medium, far more potent than television which is purely hypnotic. I don’t think that playing popular music undermines that. Yes, you can hear popular music on commerical radio but not in the context of actual programming, and the context is what matters.
Of course the debate is complicated. This site loves pop more abashedly than I do, and their problem lies with a lack of Canadian content as well. But in her article, Kate Taylor was decidedly wise. She said, “Personally, I think there should always be room for new Canadian music of any kind on CBC Radio One and Two. What I have never been able to figure out is what is distinctively Canadian about Bach and Beethoven. For years, Radio Two has played the music of dead Europeans. Why can’t Radio One now play the music of living Americans and Britons?” Exactly.
And the UK Christmas Number 1 race is off and running. North Americaners, be jealous you can’t be a part of the madness and learn about it here. It’s this tendency for the stupidest obsessions to sweep the UK that I miss here mega-regionalised land. I have fond memories of being swept along with the rest of the nation. The first year I lived in England, Girls Aloud beat out One True Voice (oh the hysteria). The next year, much to my chagrin, Mad World beat The Darkness. I was gutted. This year I am hoping the Pogues get it with their re-release of “Fairy Tale of New York”. But of course I can always get behind Robbie.
December 4, 2005
Pickle Me This Federal Election Coverage
Oh my god Stephen Harper! Stop wearing jackets over shirts that aren’t button-down!
