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Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
My virtue is that I say what I think, my vice that what I think doesn't amount to much.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Learning To Move On

"I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late." 
-Beryl Markham (Author of West with the Night)

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Mimesis by Fady Joudah

My daughter

wouldn’t hurt a spider

That had nested

Between her bicycle handles

For two weeks

She waited

Until it left of its own accord



If you tear down the web I said

It will simply know

This isn’t a place to call home

And you’d get to go biking



She said that’s how others

Become refugees isn’t it?

Friday, March 01, 2024

A Letter from E.B.White



E. B. White
Letter to his editor, Eugene Saxton
1st March 1939

Herewith an unfinished MS of a book called Stuart Little. It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it. You said you wanted to look at this, so I am presenting it thus in its incomplete state. There are about ten or twelve thousand words so far, roughly.

You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse. This does not mean that I am either challenging or denying Mr. Disney’s genius. At the risk of seeming a very whimsical fellow indeed, I will have to break down and confess to you that Stuart Little appeared to me in dream, all complete, with his hat, his cane, and his brisk manner. Since he was the only fictional figure ever to honor and disturb my sleep, I was deeply touched, and felt that I was not free to change him into a grasshopper or a wallaby. Luckily he bears no resemblance, either physically or temperamentally, to Mickey. I guess that’s a break for all of us.


(From Letters of E. B. White)

Twelve Moons - Mary Oliver

1

In March the earth remembers its own name.

Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.

The rivers begin to sing. In the sky

the winter stars are sliding away; new stars

appear as, later, small blades of grain

will shine in the dark fields.


And the name of every place

is joyful.


2

The season of curiosity is everlasting

and the hour for adventure never ends,

but tonight

even the men who walked upon the moon

are lying content

by open windows

where the winds are sweeping over the fields,

over water,

over the naked earth,

into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities


3

because it is spring;

because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -

a love match that will bring forth fantastic children

who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run

    over the surface of earth;

who will believe, for years,

that everything is possible.


4

Born of clay,

how shall a man be holy;

born of water,

how shall a man visit the stars;

born of the seasons,

how shall a man live forever?


5

Soon

the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,

will enter his life from the tiny egg.

On his delicate legs

he will run through the valleys of moss

down to the leaf mold by the streams,

where lately white snow lay upon the earth

like a deep and lustrous blanket

of moon-fire,


6

and probably

everything

is possible.





Monday, February 26, 2024

Pete and Alice in Maine

This novel by Caitlin Shetterly takes place in the spring of 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic in New York City. The city was in lockdown with bodies literally piling up. Alice decides that she and her hedge fund manager husband Pete and their two young daughters, Sophie and Iris, would be safer at their vacation property in Maine. When they arrive they find the local population unwelcoming to people from New York who could be carrying the virus. Someone cuts down a couple of their trees to block their driveway and leaves a note telling them that they are unwelcome in the community. We discover that Pete and Alice are having marital problems, the children fight with each other constantly and snarl at their parents. The book provides flashbacks to the early days of Pete and Alice’s relationship when they were younger and very much in love. Then they had the kids and the younger child, Iris, was one of those babies that  hardly slept and cried all the time. I had one like that and I can tell you from experience that Shetterly captures the fatigue and frustration that parents of such children feel and the stress it can place on a marriage. Then we discover that there are other issues that are making Alice sad and angry. Pete is a jerk, Alice is a martyr, the kids are badly behaved. I read the book quickly. By the time I reached the end I was bored and tired of this privileged, self absorbed family and was relieved to put the book down.

The Wren, The Wren

 

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright is the second  inter-generational Irish novel I’ve read this year. The thread that ties three generations of women together is a drunken philandering poet, Phil McDaragh, who is the pride of his countrymen and adored  internationally. He abandoned his dying wife, who had been his muse, and his two young daughters, Imelda and Carmel, to seek fame and fortune in America. This desertion happened long before Carmel’s daughter, Nell, was born but has had a negative impact on her as well. Phil is dead but his legacy of emotional traumatization lives on. The story is told from the perspectives of Carmel and Nell with a brief, self-serving interjection from Phil. 

Carmel and Nell have a complicated relationship and their relationships with others are just as fraught. Carmel is a single parent by choice, to avoid her own mother’s fate. Carmel does not know how to express her deep love for her daughter and Nell becomes enmeshed in a masochistic relationship which only ends when the abuser abandons her. But in the end Nell appears to be on her way to escaping the chains of her history.

With this new novel Anne Enright cements her reputation as one of the great living writers.

Saturday, February 03, 2024

A Poem by Steve Bellin-Oka


Packing the Kitchen Utensils

How many years since we used
the potato masher, the apple peeler,
its stainless-steel blade and crank
tucked in the back of the bottom
kitchen drawer among the balled
clot of discarded rubber bands?
And the egg slicer, never touched,
its grille and clean wires taut
as the silver foil outlines
of the invitations we mailed out
years ago? We bought these
utensils ourselves: hardly anyone
came to a gay wedding back then.
Which of you is the bride? someone
scrawled beneath the box checked
“decline.” At least they answered,
you said. Husband, I lift two nesting
spoons from the cutlery drawer,
wrap them in a grocery circular.
Though their silver oval faces
are tarnished with wear, on the handles
you can still make out the brand,
the words Lifetime Guarantee.


by Steve Bellin-Oka
from Split This Rock 

Friday, February 02, 2024

A Plug For Frank Bruni’s Love Of Sentences

Frank Bruni is a contributing opinion editor at The New York Times and every Thursday my day is immediately made brighter when I receive his newsletter in my inbox. The Love Of Sentences portion of the column is always a special treat. Bruni invites readers to submit favourite lines which he shares with us. Like this one:

In his newsletter The Loaf, Tim Kreider rued the self-trivialization of onetime titans. “I saw Hunter S. Thompson — once an important writer to me — speak after he’d become a professional Hunter S. Thompson impersonator: He sat onstage holding boozily forth drinking Chivas Regal and whacking things with a rubber squeak-toy mallet,” he wrote. “It was like seeing an animal that once could’ve skwapped your head off with one paw dressed in a tutu and riding a unicycle.” (Barbara K. Lane, Kings Park, N.Y.)

You can sign up here.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

My Doggy Ate My Essay

My doggy ate my essay.
He picked up all my mail.
He cleaned my dirty closet
and dusted with his tail.

He straightened out my posters
and swept my wooden floor.
My parents almost fainted
when he fixed my bedroom door.

I did not try to stop him.
He made my windows shine.
My room looked like a palace,
and my dresser smelled like pine.

He fluffed up every pillow.
He folded all my clothes.
He even cleaned my fish tank
with a toothbrush and a hose.

I thought it was amazing
to see him use a broom.
I’m glad he ate my essay
on “How to Clean My Room.

– Darren Sardelli

via swissmiss 

Saturday, January 27, 2024

The Bee Sting

 

This novel by Paul Murray tells the story of a well to do family in a small town in Ireland who have fallen on rough times when the car dealership that has been their source of wealth starts losing money during the recession. The family consists of Dickie Barnes who runs the business, his beautiful wife Imelda, their daughter Cassie who is awaiting her acceptance to Trinity College and their 12-year-old son who is bewildered by the acrimony engulfing his family. It’s a long novel that takes an eternity to unfold with frequent flashbacks. None of the characters are what they initially appear to be and new characters are introduced at regular intervals to make things even more confusing. No one is happy. Everyone is scared. People do things they regret. The last part of the book builds slowly to what we are sure will be a conflagration. I enjoyed many parts of the story but, at 700 pages, The Bee Sting was too long and I found the ending to be unsatisfactory.

(This book was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize) 

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

via perfect for roquefort cheese

Bears Discover Fire - A Short Story By Terry Bisson


I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires.

But if you know how to mount and fix tires yourself, you can pick them up for almost nothing.

Since it was a left rear tire, I pulled over to the left, onto the median grass. The way my Caddy stumbled to a stop, I figured the tire was ruined. “I guess there’s no need asking if you have any of that FlatFix in the trunk,” said Wallace.

“Here, son, hold the light,” I said to Wallace Jr. He’s old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.

An old Caddy has a big trunk that tends to fill up like a shed. Mine’s a ’56. Wallace was wearing his Sunday shirt, so he didn’t offer to help while I pulled magazines, fishing tackle, a wooden tool box, some old clothes, a come-along wrapped in a grass sack, and a tobacco sprayer out of the way, looking for my jack. The spare looked a little soft.

The light went out. “Shake it, son,” I said.

It went back on. The bumper jack was long gone, but I carry a little 1/4-ton hydraulic. I found it under Mother’s old Southern Livings, 1978-1986. I had been meaning to drop them at the dump. If Wallace hadn’t been along, I’d have let Wallace Jr. position the jack under the axle, but I got on my knees and did it myself. There’s nothing wrong with a boy learning to change a tire. Even if you’re not going to fix and mount them, you’re still going to have to change a few in this life. The light went off again before I had the wheel off the ground. I was surprised at how dark the night was already. It was late October and beginning to get cool. “Shake it again, son,” I said.

It went back on but it was weak. Flickery.

“With radials you just don’t have flats,” Wallace explained in that voice he uses when he’s talking to a number of people at once; in this case, Wallace Jr. and myself. “And even when you do, you just squirt them with this stuff called FlatFix and you just drive on. $3.95 the can.”

“Uncle Bobby can fix a tire hisself,” said Wallace Jr., out of loyalty I presume.

“Himself,” I said from halfway under the car. If it was up to Wallace, the boy would talk like what Mother used to call “a helot from the gorges of the mountains.” But drive on radials.

“Shake that light again,” I said. It was about gone. I spun the lugs off into the hubcap and pulled the wheel. The tire had blown out along the sidewall. “Won’t be fixing this one,” I said. Not that I cared. I have a pile as tall as a man out by the barn.

The light went out again, then came back better than ever as I was fitting the spare over the lugs. “Much better,” I said. There was a flood of dim orange flickery light. But when I turned to find the lug nuts, I was surprised to see that the flashlight the boy was holding was dead. The light was coming from two bears at the edge of the trees, holding torches. They were big, three hundred pounders, standing about five feet tall. Wallace Jr. and his father had seen them and were standing perfectly still. It’s best not to alarm bears.

I fished the lug nuts out of the hubcap and spun them on. I usually like to put a little oil on them, but this time I let it go. I reached under the car and let the jack down and pulled it out. I was relieved to see that the spare was high enough to drive on. I put the jack and the lug wrench and the flat into the trunk. Instead of replacing the hubcap, I put it in there too. All this time, the bears never made a move. They just held the torches, whether out of curiosity or helpfulness, there was no way of knowing. It looked like there may have been more bears behind them, in the trees.

Opening three doors at once, we got into the car and drove off. Wallace was the first to speak. “Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said.

Read more:  Lightspeed Magazine 

© 1990 by Terry Bisson. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Letter written on this day


Snow means such special things to me. It means a fat soft plop, plop, as it is shovelled off the roofs and falls into the courtyard below. It means the strange melancholy halloo by which the deer are called to be fed, and which brings them bounding from all corners of the park. It means these things in an intimate way, like the ticking of the clock in one's own room means something; and is part of one.

Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Virginia Woolf
17th January 1926

(From The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf)