September 2, 2008
Rumbles
B.C. coast shaken by powerful earthquake so the headline last Thursday read… A 5.8 earthquake that shook the ocean floor.
I had to wonder how it could be described as powerful if no one except the marine life felt it. Followed by affront… no mention of it on google alerts earthquakes. The stories that landed that day included nothing about our powerful one. I had to find out about it from the CBC. What’s the point in Google alerts if they don’t alert you. Tho’ I think an earthquake tends to assert itself …
It got me thinking about earthquake kits and necessary inclusions: good chocolate, strong scotch. No point in having teabags if there’s no kettle. I pondered it further what exactly is edible with no heat nor water? Crackers, canned fish, cold beans. All most unappetising in the event of catastrophe.
Have to recommend the MEC Wound Repair Kit which I treated myself to for a xmas present, mostly because it had detailed instructions on how to repair a wound. Then not long afterwards I found a sling on sale. The Puffin unpacked it and now it will need to be retrieved from one of his teddy bears in the event of a rumble.
Always beneficial to be in calamity mode at least every three weeks.
Here are some charts to get you hyperventilating:
Our powerful one did make the US list of most powerful earthquakes in the world in the past week.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php
They have an earthquake notification service you can subscribe to.
Check out the epic number of quakes that have happened on the West Coast since Aug 29th. They’re more frequent than the bus service.
http://earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/recent_eq/maps/index_e.php
And finally preparez vous .. though I think the salt and pepper suggestion is a bit excessive. Why would you fuss about not having salt for your crackers, if your entire ceiling has caved in and you are sitting in a hole.
June 22, 2008
Round Table discussions
I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving. Given that this discussion took place after extracts from her journal had been published which surely gave some context on the complexities of her personality…
Perhaps I am too squeamish, but I kept thinking yes, she was a public intellectual, perhaps she could be vicious and critical, but she was also someone’s mother and it cannot be easy to have your mother turned over and pulled apart like a piece of toast. You can see why it was so necessary for her son to write his recent book, which though remarkably restrained, created a profound portrait of grief and its inherent complexities. It’s effect for the reader was what John McGahern would have described as the particular being the way to the general, which is perhaps when and how the particular can serve a purpose.
This roundtable discussion relied too much on the particular only as a means to the particular and sometimes felt like crows pecking the same patch of land to turn up the same version of the repeatedly pecked and bloodied worm.
Why are these dichotomies in her personality so surprising? Why the gasp and gush over her insecurity? I’m confused as to why this is so foreign. Are not most humans similarly flawed?
Nabakov’s position of “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal.” made certain sense as an aspiration in the aftermath of listening to it.
The roundtable discussions are here: http://philoctetes.org/past_programs/ They are varied and some are about the brain, and the weather, areas of particular interest to me. I also like that these discussions are hours long. We live in times of conversational brevity.
June 22, 2008
Middling
“He was greatly distressed in his head. All night the parrot had swung roosting from his palate…”
From Dream of Fair to Middling Women. A Novel. Samuel Beckett. (Arcade Publishing, New York, first Arcade paperback edition 2006)
May 12, 2008
Iraqi cultural books article
Here’s a link to an article I wrote about Iraqi cultural books…
Given that Iraq is so topical, it’s remarkable we hear so little about Iraqi writers or aspects of Iraqi life beyond dictator, war, and occupation. We are becoming increasingly fluent on Iraq only in sectarian language and ideas. Words like Shia, Sunni, Moqtada, IED, roll off our tongues but we know little of Iraq’s rivers, soccer players, musicians, visual artists or food.
For those who protested or opposed the invasion of Iraq, a logical follow up could be to support some ongoing cultural life amidst the mayhem that prevails in Iraq. One way to do this is to actively purchase Iraqi books and thus create more publishing opportunities for Iraqi writers.
Click here for the rest.
April 14, 2008
Hairy Relief
In these orchestra slashing (poor beleagured CBC radio orchestra), and writer shafting times, it’s rare enough to find a moment of advantage (once you don’t include obvious improvements in cholera, polio, public hanging etc) but today I chanced upon an advantaged moment to being a writer in this century, at this most inhospitable of writerly times …
“A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century…”
From Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man. (p92 Penguin).
I have been reading Tomalin’s very enjoyable biography of Hardy in tandem with an equally intriguing history of Iraqi football. Perhaps an unusual pairing, but I wonder of other such pairings, where folks read distinctly different books at that same time.
Post your pairings.
February 2, 2008
NYRB audio and Sontag
Some curious audio links of various writers (incl Susan Sontag, Joan Didion) reading from essays they wrote for the New York Review of Books down the years.
On Susan Sontag there’s also a review in the latest NYRB of her son’s memoir (Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. David Rieff) which piqued my interest in seeking out the book. I read the review while in the throws of pneumonia and was uplifted by her extraordinary determination in dealing with her numerous health battles and the way “Her unwillingness to accept her own mortality continued onto her deathbed…”
Forget antibiotics, stock up on Sontag.
January 9, 2008
Taking a stand link
Dr Saad Eskander, director of Iraq’s National Library, explains why he decided to return from exile in Britain in an attempt to preserve his country’s rich cultural heritage in the face of extremists and corruption. He describes what it is like to live with the threat of assassination in a city where sectarian gangs have killed thousands.
Listen to the interview here
December 24, 2007
George Eliot fogged in throat and head
In keeping with my curiosity for all things literary and meteorological here is George Eliot or Pollian as she signs the letter beleaguered by fog on 13 November 1852..
“O this hideous fog! Let me grumble for I have had headache the last three days and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney?…”
From a letter to The Brays. (Selections from George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon S Haight published by Yale Univ Press).
Meteorological-chondria perhaps. I had no idea fog could give a headache and choke you. All Dickensian induced romance on fog is henceforth abruptly dumped. Though Pollian might these days have benefitted from the lack of light according to the new thinking on the dangers of light pollution.
December 2, 2007
Richard Ford
Richard Ford in yesterday’s Graun:
“Writing doesn’t just come, it requires a lot of furrowing of my brow,” he says, which is one reason he has rarely written about some elements of his life – hunting and fishing, for example – that he would rather just do: “If I wrote about those things, I’d have to be thinking and thinking and thinking.”
He is dyslexic, which he believes may account for his need to concentrate, in his view, particularly hard. “I have to work at making the things that I hear, and also the things that I read, break into my thinking, otherwise they can go right by me in a blur…”
I’m familiar with that blur, it’s reassuring to have it articulated thus….since I assumed a lack of sleep was at the root of it.
October 15, 2007
Thankfully…
Amid all the nuclear hype and Cheney driven hysterics: Someone in Brighton is reaching out to Iran:
She has also given away £300,000 of the £1.5m from selling her Brighton house, before she bought her elegant flat, a block from the sea. “It gives me a high like a drug rush to write cheques,” though her accountant says she has to stop. Her first was for £1,500, to a man she read about in the local paper who couldn’t afford to get his dog out of a pound in Iran.
From The Independent: Julie Burchill interview