thirty truths: 13
Truth #13
Sometimes it’s enough just to wake up and look out the window.
thirty truths: 12
thirty truths: 11
Truth #11: there are [way too] many shades of grey.
thirty truths: 10
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.
yoss please!
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—
thirty truths: 9
The truth is it’s just too bloody gorgeous out today to be inside writing about truth.
mr. fish, you write good book
“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
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
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?
Matilda Magtree 
