An Interview About Interviews. Partly.
From an interview with Noam Chomsky in the Observer:
I start tentatively enough with a question about a remark he made recently in the New York Times about the fact that he continued to live in America, because it was ‘the greatest country in the world’. In what sense did he believe this?
He starts, too, as [...]
Patrick Reinvents the World Again
Patrick Reynolds has updated his lovely site
New Paul Auster
Stacey D’Erasmo reviews Paul Auster’s latest in the Times:
“Oracle Night” is situated squarely on the Austerian matrix of narrative and reality — i.e., in a writer’s notebook. The writer is Sidney Orr (even his name puns on ambivalence), 34, semi-recovered from a never quite specified, nearly fatal illness, whose will to write has gone watery [...]
Lit Quiz
Here is The Globe and Mail’s annual Great Literary Challenge. If you win, you will receive gift certificates from Canada’s three crappy chain bookstores, Indigo, Chapters, and Coles. There’s a Chapters in Bayer’s Lake, about an hour away from us. It’s this ginormous warehouse full of books — and I have yet to go there [...]
Buy Nothing Day
Today is supposed to be the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States, isn’t it? I believe it is also the day designated as Buy Nothing Day by the Adbusters folks. Those Adbusters folks go straight for the jugular. I’d be tempted to find out the day most people get their maxed-out [...]
The Invisible Library
My own unwritten short stories reminded me of the Invisible Library:
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
There’s a very funny essay called [...]
Baby-Hater
Pia Z. Ehrhardt hates babies:
Anyone can be awakened by a scream, but by a tiny fingernail scratching the tightly covered mattress? It’s less of a sound than one bristle of a brush on a snare drum. It’s the only sound you need in an entire, noisy, dumb world, and this clarity is enough to make [...]
Another Epigraph
Well, it turns out that Aaron Burch of Seattle wasn’t on the internet much yesterday, either. Even his site Hobart (an online literary journal) was down yesterday. He did, however, send me an email late last night about his favourite epigraph, which is from Alex Garland’s The Tesseract:
“The larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference [...]
Titles of Stories I Have Not Yet Written
I have writer’s block. We’ve had a tough few months here in Nova Scotia. Our old cat died and one of the kittens we got to replace it died, my husband’s grandmother died and then his elderly aunt died, I had a miscarriage and then my mother got sick.* Recently, I’ve been blaming my writer’s [...]
A Bit More on Epigraphs
Roy Kesey, the other half of Half an Orange likes the epigraphs to Salinger’s Seymour:
“The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, [...]
More Epigraphs
Ed Page of Danger! Blog said he likes the epigraph for The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner:
“Wipe your glosses with what you know.” James Joyce.
And Pasha Malla of Montreal said “I don’t know if this qualifies as an epigraph or not, but on a blank page before the start of Subash Publishers’ Favourite [...]
Epigraphs
I was only kidding, Aaron. Maud would certainly not get mad if we strayed from all things literary. I happen to have it on very good authority, Aaron, that we can stray if we want to. Thing is, we both like literary things, don’t we, Aaron? Yes. Yes, we do.
A couple of days ago a [...]
Hello Aaron Burch!
Greetings Aaron Burch of Seattle! Happy American Thanksgiving! (I believe that Aaron Burch and I are the only two people in the whole wide world on the internet today.)
Well anyway, now that Maud’s gone we don’t have to be quite so literary around here. It’ll be all Michael Jackson, all the time! Except, of course, [...]
Aulenback saves the day
This morning my friend Stephany Aulenback bemoaned the “vast lonely wasteland” that is the Internet during American Thanksgiving.
“During these four or five days,” she said, “many people don’t update their sites, they don’t post. There’s no one to be found anywhere. It feels wrong.”
No doubt Ms. Aulenback is not alone in feeling this way, [...]
Recipe for a delightful holiday
Bruce McCall sets out some revised Thanksgiving rules in this week’s “Shouts & Murmurs.” Among them:
The mandatory minimum number of guests related by blood to the host/hostess is increased to sixteen.
Given that my own primary rule of Thanksgiving — that no blood relation other than my sister can be within five hundred miles of [...]