Book-lined rooms were part of our shared domestic landscape. To walk into a house with books was an unspoken promise of conversation that would jump beyond the events of the day. Brightly colored book jackets, waving for attention, were also good companions, a linear museum of handsome typography and graphic design through the decades.
Category Archives: Life
The Birds
So there are these two giant birds down at the Olympic Village:
Apparently they’re sparrows.I don’t think these photos do them justice. They are very large.
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.
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
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…?
Up a creek
The average woman has about six friends. The average man has one, a wife or girlfriend, and if he loses her, he’s up a creek.
Out there by herself
The problem is that doubles is played by partners. Two people simply should not stand on the same side of the net. Part of the reason tennis is so compelling is that a player has to confront the fact that she’s out there by herself. A doubles player does not. Consider the Bryan brothers, the best doubles team playing, one of the best teams ever. One is left handed, one right; one is Bob and one is Mike. Otherwise, they pretty much share a life. The zygote did not fully split. They always have each other. They are never, ever alone.
(I have no explanation for the sudden quoting of tennis commentary. I don’t even watch tennis.)
Life can be disappointing
Tennis is aspirational, like certain other distractions in life, and most people who play it recreationally, and who may have started as kids, in their dreams always dreamed about becoming great singles players, not great doubles players. In their dreams they held up the singles trophy on Centre Court. Doubles reminds them that they’re no longer young, that life can be disappointing, that not all dreams come true, and that not anything is possible.
Making Stuff
All those years ago, I didn’t think it unusual to spend so much time making stuff. This had a lot to do with my grandmother, a woman who, when she was not preserving produce, was ceaselessly creating other kinds of goods. She spent her evenings at her handwork: The needlepoint and cross-stitch samplers she’d frame and hang on walls; she hooked rugs and sewed the odd quilt, made Christmas ornaments and wine cozies and doorstop covers. As a little kid, I followed her lead, pulling thick yarn through big-holed plastic patterns of butterflies and strawberries, later graduating to friendship bracelets, some small needlepoint and, briefly, origami.
The Remainder Table 