Author: carin

thirty truths: 10

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Truth #10: I’d like to listen to more music than I do. But when??

Here’s the situation:

During the day, if I listen to anything, it’s CBC Radio One. In the car I either talk to myself, working out some irritating plot point, or it’s CBC again. Sometimes at night I’ll put on the jazz station if Peter and I are chatting, or we’ll listen to CDs while we make dinner, but if I’m reading I don’t want music. Also not if I’m writing. And if I’m ironing it’s probably a rainy Sunday afternoon, which means I’m listening to Eleanor Wachtel. If I have a project, say painting, I like to listen to a book on tape (I once did a whole fake brick motif wall—I know, I know, but it was cute at the time—while listening to a documentary on Bob Dylan). I sometimes listen to music in the bath, but mostly prefer silence in watery environments. Which of course rules out Mozart while swimming. I’ve often thought of hauling out a CD player when I work in the garden but I mutter too much and there’s all that moving around from one end to the other and I hate it when I can hear the neighbour’s Achy Breaky Hearty stuff so wouldn’t want to be like them, aka: one of those people who inflicts their idea of a good time on others. I suppose I could listen to an iPod or something, if I had one, while sitting on the patio on a summer evening—but I’m usually writing or reading again, or listening to birds, or rattling away on the phone. Or sometimes a train goes by, it’s a very nice sound…

Hmmmm. Spelling it all out like this I see it’s worse than I thought. Could be I need a serious action plan: finding ways to inject more music into my days…

Okay. I’m on it.

Suggestions welcome. Probably essential.

yoss please!

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Very happy to learn 2011 is the Year of the Short Story as I’ve been reading plenty of them and would have felt such a wally had I discovered it was the year of the scientific journal or the year of the haiku or, god forbid, the year of the encyclopedic entry—all of which I haven’t been reading nearly as much.

In celebration, I’ve created a new category—yoss please!—where I’ll post occasional ramblings on stories that have taken my fancy for whatever reason. It should be noted the category will be sub-titled: this is not a review. (I have too much respect for the formal review, done well, to even pretend to walk on that turf, but I absolutely agree that we could do with inviting more and larger discussions about individual stories, rather than limiting chat to the collection as a whole.)

So, in honour of bite-sized lit, and to kick things off, a tiny pleasant morsel of a site .

Bon Appetit—

mr. fish, you write good book

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“It is often said that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in a literal sense—the world is one thing, words another—but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders. Think about what you do when you revise a sentence: You add something, you delete something, you substitute one tense for another, you rearrange clauses and phrases; and with each change, the ‘reality’ offered to your readers changes. An attempt to delineate in words even the smallest moment—a greeting in the street, the drinking of a cup of coffee, the opening of a window—necessarily leaves out more than it includes, whether you write a sentence of twenty words or two thousand. There is always another detail or an alternative perspective or a different emphasis that might have been brought in and, by being brought in, altered the snapshot of reality you are presenting.”

—from How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish

thirty truths: 8

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Truth #8: I have officially fallen in love with a cheese.
And I don’t say this lightly. I’ve been around the les fromages block, have savoured plenty of equally local and goat varieties—some of similar firmness, even ones that sport that je ne sais quoi  ‘nutty’ quality that makes cheese such a pleasant companion—but this is different… this is the real thing.
This is love.

thirty truths: 7

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The truth is I’ve been feeling more than a little superior since becoming comfortable saying hors-d’oeuvre rather than hors-d’oeuvres after learning that regardless of how many are on the plate, it’s the hors that’s plural and never ever the oeuvre…

Smugness is so unattractive, n’est pas?

extreme de-clutter: the soundtrack

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The reno, the inspiration for this, The Year of the Big De-Clutter, has begun in earnest. In the basement, more precisely. Yesterday they ripped out walls. Today they’re cutting cement.

The sound of the saw—gasoline powered so there’s the added benefit of fragrance—has made Jake the Cat hide in the closet and howl. Not only that but the house is slowly filling up with dust causing a ceiling smoke alarm near the bedroom to go off for five to ten minutes at a time. I haul a dining room chair up the stairs. Stand on it with my ears six inches from the eeeeeep eeeeep eeeeeep eeeeeep eeeeep eeeeeep, trying to figure out how to turn it off but can’t see any switch so I run around the house thinking, thinking what to do, what to do??  I call Peter at work, leave a less than ladylike message inquiring if he might know how to shut the frigging thing off. Meanwhile the saw is apparently cutting the house in half, Jake watches from his hiding place, mewling, wide-eyed, fur on end, and now Cuddles is throwing out a few questions of her own from behind a closed door where she’s spending the day so Jake doesn’t blame her for all this and inadvertently kill her. I consider going downstairs to find the workmen, ask if anybody knows anything about smoke alarms but they’d never hear me and, anyway, I’m not sure I want to interrupt a guy with a saw that loud and that big.

The answer, I decide, is to smother the thing, I grab some garbage bags to tape over it but the only tape that’s handy is the green painters’ kind, which doesn’t stick to the stucco ceiling (another reason to hate stucco).

But it does stick to the alarm itself. I put layers and layers of it on the bastard.

And then it stops.

At least in the real world. I can still hear it inside my head, right behind my eyes, next to my headache.

Then it starts again.

But oh blessed miracle! I notice the saw has shut off for a moment so I run downstairs and in a probably too loud voice tell the guy to come upstairs with me. He looks concerned, unsure. Should I take my boots off? he says and I say, no, no, it’s okay, you can keep them on…

I let him stand on the dining room chair with his boots, which amazes him, makes him chuckle. He pulls the alarm off the ceiling, says it’s hardwired, that’s why I couldn’t find an Off switch. He disconnects it and I say thank you a few dozen times. Possibly still a titch too loud.

He advises I turn off the furnace to cut down on the dust circulating through the house.

All that’s left now is the sound of the saw ripping through cement, which I’m told should be done in about two hours.  This would have been depressing news pre-smoke alarm but fortunately my hearing still hasn’t returned to normal.

And I have plenty of coats.

thirty truths: 6

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Truth #6: Okay, it was me. I broke Mrs. Thingy-Next-Door’s perfume.

The expensive, exquisite bottle from France, or Spain or Norway. Somewhere far and fragrant was the point—or so my friend D explained as she whispered me into her parents’ bedroom to see the stuff for myself.

But you can’t smell it, she said, it’s too precious. It’ll evaporate if you open it, you can’t even touch the bottle, she said, then went to the kitchen to get us some Captain Crunch.

I touched it the moment she left. I turned it over in my hand, admired its tiny perfectness, such a contrast to Mrs. Thingy herself, whose hands, she’d once told us, had regularly wrung the necks of chickens on her grandfather’s farm. D had explained how one drop would do you for a whole night of dancing; so powerful was it you couldn’t sweat it off. I turned the miniature top to the right in exactly the way you might open a tube of toothpaste, except instead of a screw cap there was a little glass stopper and what I’d done was snap the neck right off.

Oh fudge. Or nine year old words to that effect.

I balanced the broken halves on the dresser as well as I could, then flew past D in the kitchen and out the back door, yelling something about forgotten homework. I calmed myself with logic, figured by the time Mrs. Thingy went anyplace special enough to use the perfume no one would even remember I’d been in the room. She’d think she broke it dusting.

Events after D and her mother arrived at our house  with those chicken killing hands are a bit of a blur. I remember D crying, her mother blaming her, D saying no, no, it was her, it was her, pointing at me. I have no memory of confessing or denying the crime. I can’t remember if D was punished or if I was or if we did hard time together. All memory will allow is that it was a very long, drawn out, noisy and unpleasant ‘situation’.

But for the record, yeah, it was me.
Sorry.

thirty truths: 5

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Truth #5: Sometimes all it takes is one potato. Maybe two.

Sliced thin and tossed with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and freshly ground pepper, merken, paprika or cayenne, and baked at 350 for 25 minutes (or til crispy).

This in itself can bring much simple-homemade-potato-chip-joy to an otherwise grey and headachy day. But if I add a spinach salad dressed with garlic, olive oil and lemon and sprinkle sea salt and turmeric and whatever other spices call to me then top with that bit of cold bbq’d salmon from the night before, I will have a lunch that takes the wind right out of grey and headachy’s stupid and annoying sails.

In other words, food is one of my favourite medicines—for which I make no apology.

maybe the turtle

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‘When Even The’  by Leonard Cohen

Your breasts are like.
Your thighs and your carriage.
I never thought.
Somewhere there must be.
It’s possible.
Summer has nothing.
Even Spring doesn’t.
Your feet are so.
It’s cruel to.
My defence is.
Summer certainly doesn’t.
Your.
And your.
If only.
Somewhere there must.

But the.
And the.
It’s enough to.
Soldiers don’t.
Maybe the turtle.
Maybe hieroglyphics.
Sand.
But in your cold.
If I could.
If once more.
Slip or liquid.
But the.
And the.

Sometimes when.
Even tho’.
Yes even tho’.
They say suffering.
They say.
Okay then let’s.
Let’s.
The sign is.
The seal is.
The guarantee.
Oh but.
O cruel.
O blouse with.
This is what.
And why it isn’t.

But what do they.
What do they.
When even.
When even the.
Years will.
Death will.
But they won’t
Even if.
Even if the.
They never will.

O deceiver.
O deceptive.
Turn your eyes.
Incline your.
To the one who.
Rotten as.
Who does not.
Who never will.

But now your.
And your.
And these arms.
Which is lawless.
Which is blind.
If you come
If you find.
Then I.

Like all.
Like every.
If only.
If when.
Even though.
Even if.
Not for.
Not for.
But only.
But every.

If I could.
When the.
Then I.
Even if.
Even when.
I would.