April 7, 2006
Because you asked
I have decided not to seek the Liberal leadership. Frankly, I could have run a very competitive campaign. I had a chance of winning, but for me, the end game is not about winning but about strengthening the party. I can best serve that purpose by remaining simply a knitting/bookish blogging graduate student with a passion for Margaret Drabble, a role that allows me to be more open in expressing my views. It is not because of my French, or because I do not belong to the Liberal Party. Mon francais etait le plus bonne que tu pense et mon Francais est un prioritee pour moi. And I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going away.
Thank you.
April 6, 2006
Selfish Jeans
I’ve got things to say about “The Selfish Gene”. First, no book I’ve read has ever provoked such a reaction from strangers who spy the cover. Yesterday someone said, “Don’t you love it?” I wouldn’t go that far. Dawkins assumes a foundation of knowledge I’m far from having attained. I didn’t know what a chromosome was, what DNA was (in spite of my extensive CSI background- I know- crazy!), how genes factored into chromosomes etc. etc. Now with this sort-of grasped, thanks to my fine biologist husband, I am enjoying the book. I’m not used to having to follow a text so carefully to understand, and sometimes that’s a bit frustrating. And I’m still waiting on character development.
It’s strange to realise just how much I don’t know, a realisation encourged by reading Annie Dillard, who knows everything. But at the same time, really, how wonderful it is that we can never run out of things to learn. And it all comes together. So much of what Stuart and I have been discussing about genetics, and what it means to give credit to microscopic things, was quite relevant to my class today and I enjoyed that perspective upon it. In fact I quite loved school today in general. Though I was so close to hit by a car on my way home. Apparently I am invisible to people driving through stop signs. I yelped like a wounded bird as the car drove toward me, which caused a group of high school boys to imitate my cry. This was altogether less humilating, of course, than when I fell off my bike in 2001, and a group of high school boys yelled “Whoa! Wipe out”.
I’m now reading “Six Words You Never Knew Had to do with Pigs”, which is a bit too “gift book” for my liking. And I got a book of Grace Paley’s nonfiction out of the library yesterday, so when I’m through with Dawkins I might go there. Bad news. Men still don’t like books by women. The winner of the Blooker.
I just baked a cake! Must go and add the topping.
April 6, 2006
Listening Fun
I love the BBC. Over the last day I’ve been able to pop it up with Sara Cox on Radio 1, and to glory in words with an address by Virginia Woolf over at BBC 4.
April 5, 2006
The Soundtrack: a small story
The Soundtrack
Darren was driving his mother’s car. His girlfriend Erica was looking for tapes in the glove compartment. She had just realized she had forgotten about the soundtrack, which might have spoiled everything. Darren’s mother’s cassette collection was limited to 1960s Rock and Roll compilations she’d gotten free from gas stations and Erica hadn’t envisioned losing her virginity to the strains of Gene Pitney. She suspected they had good reason now to turn the car around and abandon the whole thing altogether, but Darren would never agree to this. They were already more than halfway to the point, and besides they’d been planning tonight for ages.
Gene Pitney 1941-2006
Music legend and a fine form of birth control.
April 2, 2006
Worth Knowing
Now reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, partly upon Stuart’s urging but also due to this article on literary science writing. A wonderful article by Jane Smiley on her own literary marathon. She says of it, “It’s worth knowing that serious thoughts are being thought, and also that serious fun is being made of fools everywhere. It’s also worth knowing, in dangerous times, that dangers have come and gone and we still have these books.” And good good news: the end of the age of ironing.
March 31, 2006
God did it.
Mrs. Woolf is dead and my chances of ever working in a place where walls reach the ceiling are remarkably slim. I am afraid that I will end up selling flaming pants in a kiosk. I dread kiosks as much as call centres- perhaps moreso for I was once attacked by a kiosk, in a Budapest shopping mall. A kiosk fell on me and the kiosk attendant (who was understandably disgruntled being Hungarian and a kiosk attendant) apologized by way of saying “God did it.” As of yet, I have never been attacked by a call centre, though of course it remains a possibility.
March 30, 2006
That's all there is to the coastline craze…
The sun is pouring inside and the temperature is in the double digits (and I don’t mean minus). Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf and I sit on the very edge of World War Two and I need to finish her diary before her own neuroses are impressed upon me permanently. What a read though. I finished Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, and found them ever surprising, and gut-wrenching in the most imaginative ways. I am also reading Hologram by PK Page. Tonight we are going to see Michael Geist at the Hart House Lecture.
Here on pseudonyms. Great poetry persists and Ken Babstock is on the cover of Eye Weekly here. Russell Smith on how bloggers lower the tone. I think he makes a fair argument. There is nothing wrong with blogging per se, except when bloggers cloak their self-absorption in delusions of self-importance. Blogging can be but is usually not a part of any real discourse, and if you’re straight with that you’re probably not a blog-wanker and don’t care what Russell Smith thinks about you anyway. Hereon the wonderful M. Drabble’s honorary degree from Cambridge (and just six months till her new book is out! It will be my first Drabble in hardcover. I fell in love with her late in the game). Check out the pro-life Brit Spears birthing statue. Just when you thought “pro-life” couldn’t be made any more offensive!
Mmmmm. My husband is roasting eggplant!
March 28, 2006
Waking from Walford
Dreams are fundamentally uninteresting, but I think that it’s worth mentioning that I often dream EastEnders episodes. It’s never restful, but I am usually sorry to wake.
In the press, what’s missing from the shelves of the British Library. Apple vs. Apple. I’m excited about the new book Mean Boy.
And I am far too tired to do anything but knit my sock.
