Personal

Beat Your Fists Through the Static and the Noise

August Leave a Comment

Cliff Burns made a name for himself by publicly venting his spleen after years of rejection letters. A former editor recently mused at The Guardian about both the writing and receiving of rejection letters, because apparently there will soon be an entire book of them. There’s even a quite clever blog devoted to literary rejection. It seems that writers and publishers like nothing better than to discuss their rejection experiences in the harsh halogen glare that is the public eye. Allow me, then, to add my voice to theirs; I got another rejection letter today (well, rejection email, I guess, since I asked to be informed that way, to save on stamps). I had sent my story to a newish publication, not entirely certain it was right for them, but hoping that they would accept it anyway—after all, they might still be struggling to define their vision. They did not… Continue Reading →

Things I Remember

August Leave a Comment

I’ve been re-reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen this weekend, in anticpation of Zack Snyder’s upcoming film (warning: link re-sizes your browser). Ironically, the sense of nostalgia the work tries to elicit—for the supposedly more innocent comics (and times) of the 1940s and 1950s—is not the nostalgia I experience. I’m simply too young. I instead experience a nostalgia for the period when Watchmen takes place, 1985. The fear of nuclear annihilation was never something I felt palpably. I was thankfully too young for that as well. I could sense the fear, and sometimes the outright paranoia, in the world and some of the people around me. That paranoia dribbles and oozes through the the pages of Watchmen, coating the characters and distorting everything. There is so little hope in this book, and so much despair. How sad is it that these are my “simpler times”? In the book we… Continue Reading →

Overheard On My Lunch Break

August Leave a Comment

I was wandering through the BMV on Bloor St. during my lunch break this evening, and in the CanLit section I overheard a young lady with an English (I think it was English) accent say the following to her blond Canadian friend: “Everybody thinks Oedipus was so weird, but it wasn’t his fault.” Things like that bring a smile to my face.

Building My Stack

August 1 Comment

In a recent blog post, first-time author and and long(ish)-time blogger Rebecca Rosenblum asked her readers (and I guess I count as one of those) to list the books they are reading and talk about the hows and whys of their reading choices. I refer to the books I own but have yet to read as “my stack,” with books I plan to read soon on the top, and books I plan to read much later at the bottom. My personal library of unread books was at one point an actual stack, but over the years it has grown large enough to render that description purely metaphorical. Anyway, I love to talk about this sort of thing, so behold! the great and mighty post about how I choose my reading material. Right now the only book I’m reading is Elyse Friedman’s Long Story Short, which I chose because it caught… Continue Reading →

Prime Minister Sweater Vest

August Leave a Comment

Canada, you disappoint me. Sure, he’s not as bad as Mulrooney, but he’s quite clearly not good for this country. His party’s environmental policies are counter-productive, as are his economic policies (although I will admit, it actually takes some examination to realize this, and most voters are some combination of lazy and apathetic). He’s been caught lying in a civil suit, and his disrespect for the arts as an industry and artists as members of the larger Canadian community appalls me. He delivers his message well, and I can understand that his confidence, which borders on—and sometimes even surpasses—arrogance, can be comforting in these troubled times. But if the experiences of our cousins to the South have taught us anything, it should be that we should not, indeed we must not, accept short-term palliatives for serious issues like the dismantling of our manufacturing and forestry industries, the crushing debts faced… Continue Reading →

Sweet Relief

August Leave a Comment

The flood damage is nearly all cleaned up now (my parents gave me a dehumidifier as an early birthday present, and it now ranks as probably the second best birthday gift I’ve ever received) and several of my lost books have been replaced, so posting should resume regularly in the next day or so. The good news, I guess, is that I’m only two books behind, so it shouldn’t be too much work to catch up. I’m not generally “that sort of reader”, but I am kind of disappointed that I will now have a crisp, new copy of Ulysses on my bookshelf instead of the well-used and much loved copy I had before. The old copy was as much a kind of trophy as it was a book that I read an enjoyed. Happily I don’t fall into the books-as-trophies category too often (the only other two examples I… Continue Reading →

Waiting For Hell (High Water’s Already Here)

August 1 Comment

There was a tremendous rain storm earlier tonight, and my apartment flooded. This happens every time it rains, and normally it’s just a half-gallon or a gallon of water near the outside door. Tonight several other leaks appeared while I was at work, and three rooms were soaked. Including the living room. Which is also the library. I haven’t finished a complete tally of the damages (that may take a day or so; my apartment is quite crowded, and finding dry places to put things while I try to assess the damage is not the easiest task in the world), but I can already see that I’ve lost close to two dozen books, quite a few journals and magazines, at least two CDs and one DVD (The Princess Bride). In any event, things will be a mess here for a few days at the very least, and updates may not… Continue Reading →

My Friend Nick is Missing

August Leave a Comment

If any of you folks are in the Seattle area (hell, even if you aren’t) please look at this: http://community.livejournal.com/seattle/5056342.html My friend Nick is missing. He’s got a wife and kids and another little one on the way. Please, if you have any information at all, contact the authorities. At the very least I hope you’ll all join me in wishing for his safe return and sending prayers/good thoughts or whatever sort of fellowship you can in the direction of him and his family. This site has also been set up to make more information available. Please keep your eyes and ears open.

Some Good Luck

August Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago I went with my friend Russian Dan to a cool little café called Moody Blues. They have great food, a cool vibe, and above all else, they sell books. Good books, actually. I picked up Julian Barnes’ Cross Channel, a 1960s hardcover reprint of Tropic of Cancer, an old Penguin Pocket Books copy of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (which is what I’m reading now, actually; great little book), and a cheap hardcover reprint of The Reivers, also by William Faulkner. I paid five bucks Canadian for each book. Except, the cheap hardcover reprint of The Reivers wasn’t a cheap hardcover reprint. It was a first edition in amazing shape worth about $125 US dollars. I am quite pleased by this find. I would be interested in hearing your stories of unexpected finds.