I plan to use [an ereader] to read, alone, in public, and not to attract the kind of weirdo who, upon seeing me with it, thinks it’s okay to come over and ask to touch it, and how much I like it. I would never want that, and in fact, if I thought that was going to happen, I’d stick to print for public reading, even if it does my shoulder in. If this desire to read alone, to engage in something so inherently solitary in the presence of other humans is objectively uncool, and society is one big high school cafeteria…I guess I’m cool with that.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Beach Drive + Dallas Road
Gonzales Hill Regional Park (aka the Secret Lookout—it feels like you’re driving up a private driveway, but it is a park!)
At this point my brand new camera decided it wasn’t going to work anymore 😛 so no photos of the remainder of the drive.
Reading
By making books commodities, the modern market has stripped them of much of their romantic charm. I like the smell of a moldy book as much as the next bibliophile, but not as much as I once did. And while I’ve yet to purchase a Kindle or iPad, which make buying books in a store or online seem like hard work, I keep some titles on my netbook and iPod and can see myself making a fuller transition to e-books. And as I do, I’ll become even less romantic about books—just as I became progressively less romantic about music as my collection has shifted from vinyl to CDs to mp3s. Holding an LP cover or even a CD jacket used to anchor the listener to something corporeal. But not anymore. The same is happening to books. The ancient ceremony of reading by turning its pages being disrupted by the e-book’s clicks and swipes. In the process it distances us from the old magic conjured by books. Books are being replaced by reading.
UVic – Cunningham Building
The Cunningham, aka Biology, Building at UVic:
Opened by my friend’s grampa (six degrees & all that ;-)):
This was the BUGS (Biology Under Grad Society) “Lounge.” Yes, it’s a wide space in the hallway. It used to have couches and stuff, though. But the whole building appears to be undergoing renovation. It was pretty empty, except for a few scattered chairs and tables…
…and this:
I don’t know if this will survive the renovation, but it cracked me up to see that it was still there. I made that sign (if you can call it that) when I was BUGS Social Coordinator.
In 1990-91.
Yes, folks, my most enduring legacy in this world is a “sign” I whipped off one night while in my “all I draw is homages to Calvin & Hobbes” phase.
TV will break your heart
Once you’re committed [to a TV show], however, there is trouble on the horizon. There are two possible outcomes. The series keeps up its quality and maintains your loyalty and offers you years of enjoyment. Then it is canceled. This is outrageous. You have lost some friends. Alternatively, the series declines in quality, and this makes you unhappy. You may drift away. Either way, your devotion has been spit upon.
It’s true that there is a third possibility. You might die before the series ends. How comforting is that?
With film you’re in and you’re out and you go on with your life. TV is like a long relationship that ends abruptly or wistfully. One way or another, TV will break your heart.
UVic – Margaret Newton Hall
The bunnies really are everywhere.
This is where I lived in my first year at UVic:
Who was Margaret Newton? She was a plant pathologist. (Something I never knew when I lived there!)
Giggling with desolation
It’s all there in [Frank Kermode’s] early years, of course, or a lot of it—the mother with no parents, no family, no past, but with a rich sense of language, both Manx and English, along with a practiced, lively social style that was deferential to strangers yet easy with them, to whom Frank owed, as he put it, not only his “early training in politeness and motiveless civility” but also the “association of gaiety with terror, giggling with desolation.”
—Elisabeth Sifton
quoting Frank Kermode
Confetti Cake
I always have confetti cake on my birthday (which, yes, was a while ago, but I just got around to uploading photos).
The “frosting” is whipped cream folded with coconut and crushed pineapple.
Lately, it’s been hard to find actual confetti cake in a box. But fortunately, it’s easy to diy a confetti cake with plain angel food cake plus sprinkles.
Direct and … pleasant
I’ve noticed two things [are different since publishing my last book]. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a week and a half before they’re released to the rest of the world. I kind of vaguely knew before but didn’t think about. The other thing is the number of Twitter users asking me questions that I’m usually woefully unable to answer about formats and editions.
I am [experiencing a greater level of fan engagement]. It’s much more direct and much more pleasant than I would have expected it to be.
Familiar and unfamiliar
The rental house on Cape Cod where I’ve spent part of nearly every August since I was 9 years old has an amazing library. It’s one of the appeals of the place: the opportunity to dig around in all those books, familiar and unfamiliar at once. They’re not my books — and yet, after all this time, I know them so intimately that it almost feels as if they were.
…
I first read [Slaughterhouse Five], after all, in this very house, when I was 12 or 13. To return to it 36 years later was to confront viscerally the central point of the book, which is that time is not a continuum but a collection of simultaneous moments, that everything we have ever done and everything we will ever do co-exists within us all at once.
40 years going to the same vacation home? And the same books have been there the whole time? The continuity! I just can’t get over it. I wonder what it’s like to have a place like that…?
The Remainder Table 