WORDS: How Readable Is Your Writing?

I'm floored with work today, including a segment I'm working on for Definitely Not the Opera, but I thought I'd pass along a nifty little tool, on the off chance that you've got a fraction more free time than I do.

According to the Juicy Readability Test, the writing on my site ranks somewhere between Reader's Digest and Newsweek. with a score of 9.75 on the Gunning-Fog index. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell that means, but in the meantime, here -- why not try it for yourself? (And it goes without saying that the Internet Code of Honour requires you to tell me your results.)

BOOKS, ETC: NaBloPoMo No Mo'

Well, I'm not sure how it happened. I have no excuse other than my usual state of temporal disorderliness, but I forgot to post yesterday, which puts me out of the running for NaBloPoMo -- and on the third-last day of the month, too. Oh well. On the upside, this may indicate that I actually have a life. Who knew?

A more burning question than the state of my life might be this one: was Jane Austen gay? More specifically, was she gay for her sister, as this article speculates right off the top? When you continue reading, you realize that the thrust of the article isn't about Austen's alleged homosexuality, but instead is about the celebrity-obsessed times in which we live, which create a climate in which we care less about the import of a writer's words and more about rampant gossip about the writer's personal life:

“Proposing that Jane Austen was a lesbian or Sophocles a cross-dresser,” writes the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “is one way for those who have nothing especially stunning to say about irony or tragic fate to muscle in on the literary scene. It is rather like being praised as an eminent geographer for finding your way to the bathroom.”

Eagleton loses me with his bathroom analogy, but otherwise I tend to agree with him. I've never been a proponent of the school of thought that dictates that you must know everything about an author's life to understand his or her work. To me, this approach breaks down once you realize that you can never, ever know everything about anyone else's life, and believing that you can harness an author this way is an exercise in academic arrogance. (There are some brilliant contemporary novels that explore this idea. If you haven't read them already, I urge you to pick up Swann by Carol Shields and Possession by A.S. Byatt. Please suggest others in the comments section!)

Obviously, some knowledge of a writer's life can help you read his or her work through a different lens. For example, as The Times article points out, knowing that George Eliot suffered censure for living in horrible, horrible sin with a married man can give you new insight into the examination of small-town morality that she writes about in some of her novels. But I can remember being completely enthralled by The Mill on the Floss -- and being so outraged at Maggie's treatment and fate that I was practically in tears -- without ever knowing anything about Eliot's relationship status.

As an English literature undergrad, I've done my share of researching authorial biographies. At one point in my budding academic career, I knew more about George Orwell than any one person ever needs to know. All I recall, though, is that knowing a few facts about Orwell's early career in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, and then his later experiences during the Spanish Civil War, may have given me some idea as to why his novels are so adamantly anti-totalitarianism -- but all this background information roiling around inside my noggin as I read Orwell's books also bled some of the life from them. I can't help believing that Orwell -- or any author worth the paper they're printed on -- would rather have had my passionate investment in his stories than my dry "insights."

And speaking of salacious literary gossip (and hypocritical bloggers), did Ian McEwan steal passages from a romance novel and use them in his bestseller Atonement? Oh my!

BOOKS: Bare-Naked Books

I've been using this space to talk about books and illustrations and cover art a fair bit lately, so I think it's awesome that all this talk has culminated in this concept:

According to consumer research, when we decide whether or not to buy a book, cover design is always the most important thing. Despite this, we'd like to introduce you to a new series of books called My Penguin.

We're throwing open six of our favourite Classics by publishing them with naked front covers and we'd really love for you to be involved - and to have as good a time coming up with covers as we've had in putting the series together.

These unadorned classics are available for sale starting this Thursday, November 30th,* and they include Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emma by Jane Austen, Magic Tales by the Brothers Grimm, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

If you get your hands on one of these books and design your own cover, send a copy of it via email to gallery@penguin.co.uk and it could be featured in their online gallery.

And speaking of the gallery, it already has a few images in it. I have some favourites:

*The bad news is that I think they're only for sale in the UK, unless one of you can confirm otherwise. No one's more bummed about this than I am.

[Thanks for the tip, Hannah and Meghan!]

BOOKS: What's in a Name?

You may have read somewhere that Valley of the Dolls was originally called They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen, or that Hitler wanted to call his book Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice instead of Mein Kampf. When it comes to titling a book, the only constant is change. And, as the following quiz suggests, the task of finding the right name only gets more difficult with each passing year.

There really is a multiple-choice quiz in this New York Times piece, though you're not expected to know any of the answers. My favourite question is probably this one:

6. Bret Easton Ellis’s mentor, Joe McGinniss, had two pieces of advice after reading the manuscript of Less Than Zero. One was that Ellis should not use his middle name ("You’ll sound like such a twit"). The other was, "And you should call your book..."

a. Home for the Holidays
b. Winter Vacation
c. Season’s Greetings
d. Kids Today: Who Can Figure Them?

I don't know if the correct answer is (d), but I want so badly for that to be the case that I'm not even checking, in case I'm wrong.

BOOKS: Four out of Five Dentists Agree...

...eye candy is better for your teeth than regular candy.

Since we here at 50 Books HQ are about nothing if not oral hygiene (we're also about nothing if not snickering at the use of the word "oral" in any context), here are a couple of gorgeous books-as-eye-candy sites for your perusal, both courtesy of one of my favourite people in all the land, The Fabulous Suzi.

UK artist Su Blackwell uses books -- from Alice in Wonderland to The Quiet American -- to create gorgeous three-dimensional cut-out sculptures.

Blackwell says:

These works can be seen as metaphors for language. Like language, that is ephemeral and powerful. While I'm dealing with dark subject matter, such as loss, loneliness and fragility, I am dealing with it in a light manner.

And I don't know about you, but I never get tired of looking at pictures of libraries. It's a good thing other people never get tired of taking them.

Gracious me, the vertigo!

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, Yankee comrades. I'm thankful that, in these crazy, mixed-up times in which we live, books can still surprise and delight us like a compliment from a stranger.

BOOKS: Tears in Hobbiton

It's been a tough week, culturally speaking. O.J. isn't going to come out with his book. Michael Richards may tone down his, er, comic stylings in the future. But I think we're all losing sight of the real creative loss we're in the midst of:

Peter Jackson will not be producing the film version of The Hobbit.

I actually am a bit sad about this. I'd already planned that The Hobbit was going to become our family's favourite movie, one that we'd watch over and over and over until we could recite all the dialogue and subsequently alienate all the normal families we know.

Back to Plan B: Joe Dirt.

ART: Haven't You Always Wanted a Monkey?

In my early twenties, I spent three years working in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in southeastern Ontario -- a town that is, believe it or not, even more twee than its name suggests. You can't throw a rock in Niagara-on-the-Lake without hitting some reference to the War of 1812, so it makes perfect sense that the town has -- in a spirit one can only describe as exhaustive -- decided to embrace history in all its permutations, even history that is not its own.

The town is chockablock (there's that word again!) with antiques and faux-historical bric-a-brac. If you were to go looking for that rock you were hurling around so cavalierly back in the first paragraph and then huck it again, you couldn't avoid hitting lots (and lots and lots) of 18th-century (or 18th-century-esque) scientific illustrations of plants and flowers and birds and butterflies. Pretty pictures, yes, but not the kind of stuff you want to hang on your own walls.

On the other hand, if those shops had stocked prints like THIS, I would have put them directly in touch with my decorator:


Look at that mug. Don't let those six-inch talons fool you. All this little buddy wants from you is a great big HUG.

There are many more of these kinds of engravings to be seen over at BibliOdyssey (including a mole-like creature who charms me more than a little), along with a more informed write-up than I can provide, including this little tidbit:

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.

Thankful, indeed. Check it out.

[via boingboing]

BOOKS: Use Your Grey Matter

From time to time, I get the nicest letters from people offering to send me books to read and review. Yesterday, though, was a first. I got an email from a "digital marketing agency" offering me the exclusive opportunity to promote one of their client's books on my site WITHOUT ME EVEN HAVING TO READ IT. How I managed to pass up on this chance to blindly give dozens of dollars in free publicity to a book about a bunch of gazillionaire rock stars who certainly couldn't afford to spare an actual COPY OF THEIR BOOK -- well, I don't know where I get my strength sometimes.

On the other hand, sometimes people just send me books out of the blue, with no strings attached. When these people go to heaven, not only will they sit at the right hand of God, it'll be on a really comfy leather recliner with a built-in massager. One such person is Maggie Mason, owner and proprietor of two of my daily internet stops, Mighty Girl and Mighty Goods.

I ordered one of these t-shirts (scroll down -- it's worth it) from Mighty Girl for a friend's birthday, and Maggie kindly threw in a copy of her new book, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. It's chockablock (that's right -- I said "chockablock") with nifty little idea-generators for those days when you have nothing to say, but you still desperately want to say something. Not that that's ever happened to me.

Still, in the spirit of... well, I don't know what... I decided to give one of the book's tips a whirl. In Idea #2, Maggie writes:

All readers need an occasional dose of schadenfreude, so fess up. How do you fail? Do you consistently kill plants? Keep getting fired? Always take the last cookie? That's the stuff, friends. To err is human, but to share? Divine.

So that's what you people want, huh? It's not enough that I tell you I've peed my pants or that I've read, and enjoyed, many pages of Nicole Richie's first novel?

You want schadenfreude, I'll give you schadenfreude. But first, maybe I'll just write schadenfreude a few more times, till it totally loses all meaning.

schadenfreude
schadenfreude
schadenfreude
schadenfreude
schadenfreude

Er, anyway. If you asked me to tell you the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me, I'd be hard-pressed to choose just one story. My life has been nothing if not a cornucopia of small humiliations. But one episode does leap to mind in front of the myriad others:

I used to read covertly in class all the time, and I was always catching shit for it. Which didn't make me stop, of course, but it did make me try harder not to get caught. Once, during my grade five science class, I was reading away -- Anne of Green Gables, if you're wondering -- when I heard the teacher ask the class a question: "Something-something-something green matter?" Now, two things you need to know:

1. We'd been studying photosynthesis, and our textbook description for chlorophyll was "something-something green matter something-something."
2. I was a terrible keener. I'm not proud of it, but there you go.

So, despite the fact that I'd only heard the tail end of the question, I thrust my hand into the air, thinking I could kill two birds with one stone: demonstrate to the teacher that I was ever so smart, and reinforce the fact that, NO MA'AM, I certainly wasn't surreptitiously reading. So the teacher calls on me, and I proudly chime out, "Chlorophyll."

Well, it turns out that the teacher had asked everyone if they knew what the term "GREY matter" meant. As you know -- and as I now also know -- grey matter does not have any role in the process by which plants convert sunlight into food. So you can imagine my consternation and humiliation when everyone, including the teacher, burst into uncontrollable laughter for about seven hours. They were right to do so, but it BURNED, I tell you.

Your turn, o wise children of the internet.

BOOKS: Well, Duh

This was a pretty good idea, doncha think?

BOOKS: And More Books

Some of you oldtimers who've been coming to this site for a while may remember the photos I posted of my bookshelves prior to the Great Unbookening of '05. A goodly portion of the books on those shelves came from a venerable used-book store called Hannelore Headley's, named for its owner and proprietor, a store which I had the great fortune to live around the corner from during my university years.

Rusty and I went back to this university town last week to visit his family, and I had an opportunity to visit Hannelore Headley's for the first time in ten years. It was like nothing had changed -- except the store has gotten even better!

Each of the many, many rooms on the shop's two floors is even fuller than I remember (those shelves of books? They're all DOUBLE-STACKED, dude!), there are even more loose piles of books creeping up from the floors to the ceilings, and the air is even more redolent with that rich, old-book smell. Mmmm-mmmm. (And does the above photo give you deja vu? Perhaps it reminds you of the used-book store aesthetic I courted in my pre-unbookening days.)

Headley's was the perfect store if you were a poor, book-loving student. It had EVERYTHING, and rarely did any book (except for the "old and fine books," which were obviously beyond my means and therefore didn't register on my radar) cost more than a fiver. Most were in the one- to two-dollar range, which meant that you could walk into the store with twenty bucks and walk out with a bulging, overflowing, book-filled grocery bag -- this being a fitting receptacle, what with the fact that you'd just spent your entire food budget for the week. But who cares! Hunger pangs come and go, but books last forever.

It came as no surprise, then, that I walked into Headley's intending to take a few photos and a brief nostalgic tour... and ended up walking out half an hour later with a bag full of books I'd later find myself struggling to force into my suitcase. On the plus side, I also got to eat dinner! Times have changed, mon frere.

ETC: Overheard in St. Catharines

"I'm thinking of opening up an S&M sex shop..."
"I see."
"...and calling it The Purple Nurple."

.....

"Look at the size of that yam!"
"..."
"I said, LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT YAM."

.....

"I just overheard some guy at the bar saying he just got drafted by the NHL."
"Wow."
"I hope the NHL doesn't draft me."
"Why not?"
"I don't know how to play hockey."

ETC: The Call of the Wild

Some people, they have an uncanny ability to communicate with horses. Others, dogs. Me? They call me... the Squirrel Whisperer.

Look at this little buddy. He has no idea what's happening to him. All he knows is that he's helplessly drawn to me by no force other than the power of the clicky-clicky noises I'm making with my tongue. He's seconds away from crawling right into my lap, as squirrels are sometimes wont to do, but instead I release him from my charms. I don't want to humiliate him in front of his friends.

ETC: It's Okay to Ask for Directions, Guys

SCENE: Interior of a pub in a small city. A rather good band is playing improvisational covers of some old standards. As they play, one of the band members loses his place in the music, resulting in the following exchange between him and one of his bandmates:

"I'm lost over here."
"Well, find your way back."
"I'm working at it, but it's like trying to Mapquest the G-spot."

BOOKS: Chain-Store Confessions

Picture a woman scuttling past an airport bookstore, with the full realization that (a) she's running late and doesn't have time to browse, and (b) even if she could, there'd be no point in buying a book because there's no way in hell she's going to get any reading done while flying with a toddler.

But she darts in anyway. She sees a display containing this book and this book -- one the debut novel of a pop-music princess, the other the first novel published in ten years by arguably one of the finest authors writing today. I'll leave you to guess which one she picks up and power-reads for several pages.

And, god help me, she enjoyed it.

ETC: On the Road

"If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important." ~Bertrand Russell

Well, it's not a holiday, nor would I say that I consider my work so heartstoppingly important, but I'm off for a few days to visit the in-laws in Ontari-ari-o. We'll see how well my NaBloPoMoEenyMeenyMineyMo resolution holds up on the road. Godspeed!

BOOKS: Chew on This

Okay, here's an exercise in group imagination. Let't all pretend that the article I'm about to talk about isn't almost three months old. Ready? Let's get started.

So, I was trolling the web today, looking at this and that, and I chanced upon this New York Times piece. It's the final entry in a blog series that the Times commissioned from Douglas Coupland, and if you haven't read it already, or even if you have, it's worth a look.

(Now, the problem with this piece is that you have to have signed up for the Times's subscription-only "Times Select" service to read it. The good news is that the paper is running a brief promotion allowing people a free two-week trial of the service. The bad news is that the sign-up process is a pain in the ass and involves having to provide your credit card information and then keep track of the time so you can renege on day thirteen. And here's the thing about that whole rigamarole: it's not that I even really mind jumping through a few extra hoops to get at some nifty content. It's the fact that the Times and I are forced to lie to each other throughout the process. I pretend that I'm actually considering taking out a paid subscription, which we both know I'm not, and they pretend that this isn't a borderline negative-optioning cash grab designed to get a few bucks out of people who forget to keep track of how quickly fourteen days can pass. Life is already duplicitous enough. Et tu, New York Times? Et tu?)

Be that as it may, it's a neat piece. Entitled "Insects," it contains Coupland's trademark ruminations -- both informative and irreverent -- on the subject of paper, from the paper shortage of the 1980s to the paper that wasps and other insects create to use their nests.

So back to pulp. Back to paper. My cousin in Ontario is an entomologist, and so I think about insects more than I might think about them otherwise. I got to thinking about how wasps and hornets make paper, too, and paper is, in its own way, just as vital to the survival of their species as it is for us. What if you could trick wasps into using human paper to make their own paper? What if you took a stack of Finnegan’s Wakes and pulped them with hot water and corn syrup and left the whole thing in a pasture and let wasps come and gather the cellulose to make nests? What if you added pigment to the chopped up paper, and tricked the wasps into making nests in designer pastel shades — in candy stripes or tie-dyed patterns?

...

Nests are beautiful objects — the inner combs in Koolhaasian layers, the striations of pulp that resemble avant garde Japanese fabrics. You can easily meditate on one for hours. (BTW, here’s another thing about nests: they can really stink after being in a shipping box for two weeks. Each day we learn something new.)

So after my nest meditations I took copies of my own novels and began pulping them myself, chew by chew, a slow, laborious process. Have you ever chewed a book? I doubt it. The first thing you need to know is that doing so really trashes your saliva ducts, and it takes about a week to get through one average-size book. The second thing to remember is to drink lots of water and spit regularly or your teeth will turn gray. Usually I’d chew while watching “Law & Order.” (I’m an addict.)

You get the gist. Over the course of four weeks, at the rate of one book a week, Coupland masticated several of his novels and used the pulp to create nest-type sculptures. The above is as much as I can copy and paste (from what is a very, very long piece, just so you know) in good conscience. Well, that and a couple of pictures.

“Generation X,” paper and magnolia branch, 2004.

“Generation X,” detail.

Oh, okay, one more brief excerpt:

To look at my own complete wasp nests raises odd issues in my head and, I hope, in the minds of observers. Is our bunkered mentality about the sanctity of books more genetic than cultural? Are we no different than wasps defending against intruders when we force students to read Henry James or Nadine Gordimer? What would wasps make of books? How do wasps think of their role within evolutionary time? Do wasps have any sense of culture? Why does it feel so strange to see a book removed from our own sense of history and culture and inserted into a non-cultural slot where art or music or any other art form don’t exist?

When you read this last bit, it's hard to get a sense of whether Coupland is serious or not, or whether this even matters. What's important is that here -- in the twenty-first century, in the western world -- a widely reknowned writer spent a month chewing a book and thinking about bugs. These are truly great times in which we live.

ETC: Pluggy McPlug*

Someone smack me in the head, please? I'm embarrassingly remiss in plugging the latest issue of Armada, published by none other than the great Dave McLean and his editorial posse, and available for my favourite price: Free. Reading doesn't get much better than this, unless they start paying you.

I haven't made my way through the entire issue yet, but let me tell you, the first short story, "Clearing Out" by Camille Osborne, is one of those tales you read and then find yourself still staring at the last page five minutes after you finish.

(Psst. Armada is now looking for submissions for its winter issue. Pass it on.)

*I'm bringing back the Something McSomething meme. I think it's time. Also, I couldn't think of a better title.

POETRY CORNER: Another Literary Mystery Laid to Rest

"There once was a man from Nantucket" is the opening line for many limericks and is among the most familiar opening lines in poetry. This literary trope can be attributed to the popularity of the limerick genre among the whalers who once lived on the island of Nantucket, whose name lends itself easily to humorous rhymes and puns.

Both obscene and chaste versions of the poem exist. In the countless vulgar versions, the mythopoeic protagonist is typically portrayed as a well-hung, hypersexualized persona.

One of the earliest known clean versions of the Man from Nantucket motif is this rendition from 1924:

There once was a man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man

And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

God bless Wikipedia. Which is where you're going to have to go to read the dirty version.

I don't know about you, but I have spent decades wondering how this limerick goes, without ever thinking to look it up. How this is possible when I've had ample time to look up the height and career aspirations of countless an America's Next Top Model contestant -- well, I don't know.

50books.com: Come to be entertained. Stay to be informed.

ETC: Conflicted About Conflict

It's Remembrance Day here in Canada, and as always, I feel conflicted about the poppy I've been wearing for the past few days -- and not just because that little exposed pin has left me covered in tiny puncture wounds.

I wish there were a way for my poppy to tell other people that, while I fully support and respect the people who've made enormous sacrifices so that the rest of us can live in safety, I don't support the idea of war in general, especially in recent years, when wars seem to be fought less and less for ideological reasons and more and more for the sake of transparent corporate interests. (I'm not naive, by the way. I know that financial gain has governed many a conflict, and that the idea of war as a battle between good and evil is largely an early-twentieth-century construct. It just seems that, in those days, people at least did a better job of pretending there were more altruistic reasons behind their decision to take up arms.)

On the other hand, I find it interesting -- if confusing -- when people say they don't believe in war. "Believe" in it? As if war were the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy? Or, more probably (and less facetiously), they mean they don't believe in its efficacy as a solution. This is an interesting position, largely in that it's pretty much gone untested. Because war IS the solution we collectively leap to -- a little too readily, it seems. Whether it ultimately solves the problem at hand is debatable, but hey, we haven't blown ourselves up yet, right? Does that count as success?

Someone once said that war is the failure of reason. That's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is: war means that some power-hungry asshole somewhere got a stupid idea, and the rest of us had to set aside whatever we were doing in order to deal with it.

These are my incoherent thoughts on the subject, and this is the point in my post where I should wrap things up with a grand summation. But I don't have one. If I did, it would be a solution to this messy, stupid, tragic failure of human nature. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

ETC: Perchance to Dream

I have a headache and my sinuses are killing me. It could be due to barometric changes (read: it's pissing buckets outside). It could be due to the whole milk I used to make my mocha this morning, because we were out of 2% so I had to sneak some of Sam's supply.

Either way, I'm heading off to lie down, perchance to nap. I was on the fence about this idea, but then I serendipitously came across this article:

To be an enthusiastic napper in 21st-century North America is to be out of step with your time and place. In most of the industrialized world, a nap is seen as a sign of weakness, either physical or moral. The very young and the very old nap. Sick people nap.

Bums nap. Healthy, productive adults do not nap.

We are a culture that celebrates action, doing, achieving, an attitude that leads to a disdain for sleep in general. We stay up late and get up early. We pull all-nighters. We'll sleep when we're dead, and in the meantime there's always a Starbucks on the corner.

It's a misguided attitude. A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.

A nap distils the sweetness of a whole night's sleep down to a few minutes. Ideally, it starts on a soft bed, in a dark room, with a warm blanket. At first your mind lingers on what you've done that day, and what you still need to do. Then your thoughts start to unravel a little, become less coherent, more dreamlike. You feel your breathing deepen, your body relax. You lose yourself; you're asleep. After a few minutes you gradually become aware again of the bed, the room. You open your eyes, gather your thoughts, throw off the blankets. You're a new person.

The article's author, one Kurt Kleiner, goes on to name the many important historical and literary personages (Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Edison, Samuel Pepys) who regularly indulged in naps. He also discusses the biological and cultural importance of sleeping in the afternoons.

So it seems that this "nap" business is something of a tradition, and I am, if nothing else, a traditional kind of gal. Later, comrades.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]

BOOKS: And Besides, I Don't Even HAVE a Coffee Table

I'll read pretty much any kind of coffee table book, and it's not just because the big pictures are easy on my tired old eyes. There's something about the fact that someone feels passionately enough about their own obscure, ephemeral, overly precise area of interest to create an elaborate, glossy, pictorial homage to it... well, it just warms my heart.

If you asked me which coffee table book I've lusted after in my heart (in a not entirely impure, but not entirely pure, way), it would have to be Hand to Earth by Andy Goldsworthy. Ever since I saw this book in a gallery bookstore several years ago, I haven't been able to get Goldsworthy's art out of my head.

Goldsworthy is an environmental installation artist. What this means is that he creates temporary pieces of art, usually in a natural setting and frequently on a grand scale, using only materials found in nature. The pieces are left to degrade and decompose of their own accord, and the only remaining record of the fact that the piece ever existed is the photograph Goldsworthy takes of it. Luckily for us, Goldsworthy's work has found enough of an audience that his photography has been compiled into several large, gorgeous (albeit expensive -- sigh) books.

When you look at Goldsworthy's installations, it's hard to believe that the only materials used were rocks or leaves or twigs. He uses no mortar, no dyes, no glue -- only his own painstakingly acquired ability to understand these materials intimately enough that he can coax them into taking on fantastic forms. This gift is coupled with a level of patience that astounds me.

(If you want to see this patience in evidence, rent the wonderful feature-length documentary Rivers and Tides, which follows Goldsworthy around the world as he creates several installations. There's a protracted scene in which he attempts to create an elaborate hanging sculpture of breathtaking delicacy, using nothing but fragile pieces of straw. He does this outdoors, at the mercy of every passing breeze. When I watched this movie in the theatre, you could actually HEAR the audience holding its breath, then exhaling en masse in frustration as the sculpture disintegrated over and over and over. And over. And over. I won't tell you how the scene ends.)

So there you go. I bet you thought all I cared about were books, hm? Look at me! I'm the Queen of Cultchah.

ETA: Oh, cripes. It just occurred to me that this post might be interpreted as a pathetic gift request, what with the holidays and all. It's not! I swear! You use your hard-earned money to shop for your loved ones, or better yet, get yourself something pretty. (Unless you're Rusty, in which case go for it, mon frere.)

BOOKS: Give Mama Some Sugar

Well, it looks like I just missed this eBay auction for a two-day writing workshop with my all-time favourite cartoonist/writer Lynda Barry. Goddamn.

I've had a girlcrush on Barry for years, which started with my love of her weekly Ernie Pook's Comeek and then reached embarrassing proportions after reading her anthologies (my favourite being her odd, funny, heartbreaking collection The Freddie Stories). Oh, and then there was that time I read Barry's novel, Cruddy, and she ripped my heart out of my chest and held it, still desperately thudding, in front of my face so I could study it for a while. She was really nice about it, though.

I like comics. More specifically, I like girl comics. As in, comics created by women for other women. (This is why Betty and Veronica comics don't count.) There aren't a lot of girl comics, or at least not too many that have crossed my narrow little path. Actually, the only other one I can think of that's earned my unswerving devotion has been Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Bitch series, which is sometimes almost too harsh for human consumption... possibly because it nails so many of life's small tragedies in such a dead-on, merciless way.

So, given the dearth of girl comics out there (and I hope you'll forgive my term if it doesn't site well with you), you can imagine how thrilled I was when Rebecca Kraatz's debut anthology, House of Sugar, came my way.

House of Sugar
by Rebecca Kraatz (#38)
Reading this collection, I was reminded of Lynda Barry's comics, particularly books like It's So Magic, which are told mostly from the perspective of Marlys's older, more romantic sister Maybonne. But I would never say that Kraatz's work is derivative, though she openly cites Barry's four-panel style as an influence.

Unlike Barry, with her small cast of amazingly realized characters, Kraatz writes and draws from what feels like a very real, first-person perspective. I found her comics charming, wistful, strange, melancholy, and possessing a humour that I would characterize as very Canadian.

Now, here's the thing about a certain brand of Canadian humour: It's subtle. So subtle you might not even know it's there if you didn't know how to spot it. You don't laugh out loud, and the teller doesn't smile. The joke goes mutually unacknowledged, but it's there. You find it in rural places, such as the prairie provinces or the east coast (both of which are places Kraatz has lived). Some might call it "dry," but to me dry implies a certain smug, self-congratulatory quality, which this type of humour definitely doesn't have. I've been led to believe that this kind of humour has a counterpart in New England, and I imagine in other semi-remote parts of the world.

However you describe it, and wherever you find it, it slays me.


You won't find this collection on Amazon (but wouldn't it be nice if someday you could?), but you can order it directly from the publisher, Tulip Tree Press.

ETA: It turns out you CAN pre-order it from Amazon.ca. Here's the link. And it'll be available in comic shops in February, so watch for it then or pre-order it any time after this month. (Thanks, Hope!)

And if you can recommend any other good girl comics, please do!

BOOKS: The 100 Best Books of the Year

Can you smell the holidays and the new year just around the corner? If you can't smell 'em, another solid clue is all the "best of the year" lists that are starting to crop up everywhere, including this one.

That's right, it's Publishers Weekly's 100 Best Books of the Year. Now, I know as well as anyone that it's nigh impossible to even hear about one of these lists without being bowled over by the need to tally one's own score. You should find me easy to beat, what with my resounding count of ONE BOOK and all. What the hell have I been doing all year? I thought I'd been reading good stuff, but it seems that all my fine books have transmogrified into Huey, Dewey and Louie comics, for all the credit they're doing me.

Fortunately, Sam has saved me from utter disgrace. If it weren't for him, I never would have read the one book that made PW's list. And while it was okay, to my mind it doesn't hold a candle to Owen's Marshmallow Chick. I like Lilly, but she's a bit bossy for my taste. Owen, on the other hand? He's a simple mouse with a taste for candy -- in other words, my kind of fella.

I visited PW's "Talkback" forum, hoping for a lively (and by "lively" I mean "opinionated and snarky") debate, and I was sadly disappointed. We're just going to have to do our best over here.

[via Bookslut]

WORDS: Less Is More? I Beg to Differ.

Anyone who's read enough of my posts knows I generally subscribe to the "always leave them wanting less" school of writing. Which is why I find Wired magazine's Very Short Stories contest -- in which the editors asked dozens of well-known sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers to contribute their own diminutive tales -- so confounding. Why write six words when you could write ever so many more?

But if you absolutely MUST curtail yourself, I guess you could do worse than my favourite submission from Margaret Atwood:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

I've been struggling to come up with my own six-word story, but this whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing is eluding me. I write shitty haikus, too.

Got a mini-masterpiece? Share. Sharing is nice.

ETC: Memories and Martinis

Hey, hey, weekenders. If you're interested, the "Best of DNTO" podcast is up here. The theme is "memories and memoirs" and, among other things, it features an interview with Bill Bryson, a segment analyzing the new film Borat, and -- what's this! -- an interview with me! Go figger.

ADDENDUM: I just realized that I've been remiss in posting Halloween pics of Sam. Bad blogger! Bad mom! It's okay, though. I've been needing to get a few more points toward earning my "Bad Parent" badge. That badge isn't going to earn itself.

At any rate, may I introduce you to our new houseboy?

He doesn't really speak the language, but he seems eager to please. He's still on probation, but if we can teach him to make a decent martini, we may just keep him.

BOOKS: Seen Blogging

So I thought it might be nice to use some of these extra weekend posts to talk about other people's sites. First, though, I'll give you a moment to recover from the reeling shock you must be feeling at discovering that there are book-related sites other than mine. I know. I was shocked, too.

First, Julie Wilson at Seen Reading does something pretty funny. She sees people reading in public, then she writes hilarious posts describing her take on the reader and including a passage from the book. What a fantastic idea, huh? (Link via Rusty via Bookninja, another site you should read, if you don't already)

Then, Matthew Baldwin at Defective Yeti is chronicling -- in great, funny detail -- his second attempt at reading Moby Dick. His goal: to plough through by the end of November. Each of his daily entries describe his progress and impressions:

Already I feel like I'm on a date with someone who does not share my interests. Yes, I have felt vibrations while sailing on ships, but they were more gastrointestinal than mystical. And I've never felt crazy to go to sea. Me, I'm a big fan of land, the sort of terrain you can ride a bike across and build a bagel store on. If empathizing with the narrator's hydrophilia is a prerequisite for enjoying this book, I may be in trouble.

At the bottom of each entry, Matthew also includes a list of the words he had to look up, along with their definitions. I now know what a "grapnel" is. Curse you, internet, for educating me when I only want to be entertained!

Am I the last person in the world to get on board with Shelfari? I'm deducing this based on the volume of emails I get recommending this site. I haven't signed up yet, because I always jump into these things with childlike enthusiasm, then I get bogged down in the fact that, to use the site, I have to type and stuff -- because hey, this is still the internet and so far no one has developed an interface that will allow me to control my computer with the sheer power of my mind -- and then I forget my password, and then I sort of forget to go back to the site, and then months later, as the volume of unread email from the site's administrators -- encouraging me to "Try our new features!" or "Connect with other members!" or "Test a trial for our new paid subscription service!" -- piles up in my inbox, I realize that this site and I aren't going to work out. But I'm still too lazy to cancel my membership and cancel my mailing list subscription, so eventually the proportion of mailing list email vastly outweighs the regular email, and I end up abandoning my email account entirely and starting a new one. It's the mailing-list-subscriber relocation program.

But hey, this Shelfari thing might work for you! It does look pretty cool. Good luck!

ETC: These Are... the Days of Our Lives

Man, Definitely Not the Opera really knows how to deliver. Tomorrow, host Sook-Yin Lee will be co-hosting with Bill Bryson, whose latest book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid I coincidentally just finished reading last night. It may be my favourite of all his books. (My entry about that will probably be written sometime in 2007 at my current posting speed.)

Oh, and by the way [whistles casually], I'll also be on the show sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 pm. If you've been wondering how to milk your life story and make gobs of money in books and the movies, I'll be talking with Sook-Yin about how to take the boring straw of our lives and spin it into memoir gold. (I may or may not talk about the time I was aggressively propositioned at a party by a naked girl wielding a pineapple. You'll just have to tune in to find out.)

That's on CBC Radio One. You know, just in case you were wondering.

BOOKS, ETC.: Dear God. What Have I Done?

Holy crap. I forgot till just now that, a couple weeks back -- probably in the drunken flush of having gotten a semi-decent night's sleep -- I signed myself up for this. It's National Blog Posting Month (aka NaBloPoMo, natch), and it means I'm on the hook for writing a new post every single day. Now, I already try to post every weekday, so what this means is super-happy-fun bonus weekend posts... which you're all welcome to read as soon as you get back to your desks on Monday.

I can't promise you much, but I can tell you this: if you're not heartily sick of me by November 30th, then I haven't done my job.

......

I was going to catch you up on my reading log (I'm at 42 and counting, not that you'd know it from reading this site), but instead I feel compelled to tell you about what I did last night, and not just because I go out so little that the mere act of leaving the house is a noteworthy event.

A few days ago, my friend, champion, and soon-to-be booking agent N.C. hooked me up with another friend of his, whose job it is to organize in-store events for every single Chapters store in western Canada -- a job that frightens me in its enormity, but N.C.'s friend handles it with aplomb. Anyway, she invited me to interview Mac Maharaj, a long-time friend of Nelson Mandela (they were political prisoners alongside each other, and later Maharaj served as a Minister in the African National Congress's Cabinet), who acted as editorial consultant on Mandela: The Authorized Portrait.

So, because I like to jump into water that goes way over my head, I said yes.

I know embarrassingly little about the political history of South Africa. I reassure myself that this is acceptable by reminding myself that I also know embarrassingly little about the political history of Canada. I do know that Laura Secord played an important role in the War of 1812, but would I know that if her face and name had not been appropriated by a well-known chocolatier? I suspect not. (This is the Canadian way: we take our heroes and we have them shill candy and doughnuts for us. Come on... doesn't this make you love us a little bit?)

Having spent a fair bit of time immersed in Mandela for the past few days, I still wouldn't call myself an expert on South African politics, but I don't feel as guilty about it. This is an incredible book. It interweaves Mandela's life with the politics of his country -- because, as one person notes, the two are inseparable -- but more than that, it reveals the enormous humanity of the man. This aspect of the book touches me deeply.

Most biographies are written in the voice of one person, and that person usually has a personal axe to grind. In the case of Mandela, the publishers commissioned more than sixty interviews with people who have come into contact with Mandela at different points in his life -- from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Bill Clinton to Bono -- and this approach gives you a unique 360-degree look at Mandela, who like all of us, was many things to many people.

To politicians such as Clinton and Tony Blair, Mandela was a model of forgiveness. Interestingly, they each note Mandela's ability to acknowledge his former hatred of his white captors in order to rise above it so that he could proceed to create a unified South Africa.

To people more intimately acquainted with Mandela, such as Maharaj and Archbishop Tutu, Mandela is a more complex figure. They speak of him with enormous affection and respect, but they don't demonstrate the almost fawning devotion that Mandela seems to elicit from the general public. Maharaj speaks wrily and humorously of the many times that Mandela has frustrated him personally, and Archbishop Tutu notes Mandela's weaknesses, including his unshakeable loyalty to his former comrades, which from time to time interferes with his judgment.

Last night, Maharaj and I touched on these subjects, but what I was most taken with for the twenty or so minutes that we talked was Maharaj himself. Here is a man who has lived not just through but right in the middle of some of the most important historical events of the past century. What does that do to a person?

[Here's where I have to break and warn you that, after all that build-up, this next part may seem rushed. Sam just woke up from his nap and wants to practise standing on chairs -- which, need I say, is not permitted in Casa Doppelganger unless one has also drank a pitcher of sangria and is about to impress the group with one's version of The Robot -- so I'm dividing my attention between that and this. But I wanted to get these impressions out before they fade any further.]

I won't act all cooler-than-thou here. I'll confess right now that I was more than a little awed and intimidated to be speaking to such a person, and this wasn't remedied by the crowd of 100-plus people who showed up to watch. But once we started talking, the crowd seemed to disappear and it felt, to me anyway, as if we were having a real conversation. Without sounding too fawning, though it may be too late for that, here are some of the things I learned:

• that you can be a great man and still be a man;
• that even knowing you're fighting a just cause, you can still have regrets about your choices; and
• that actions and effects always play out in two arenas: the personal and the political.

The most moving portion of the evening, for me, was when Maharaj, who is a warm and gracious and witty and cultured man, became visibly moved when he talked about his greatest regret. He talked about the horrible feeling of powerlessness he felt as a political prisoner, which he was from the time he was 29 until he was 41. He talked about being in his mid thirties and feeling as if he were at the height of his powers, and that it was all for nothing because he was confined to a seven-foot-by-seven-foot concrete cell with no connection to the outside world. And for a second I felt, as close as it's possible for me to feel without having experienced it myself, how that must feel -- to be young and strong and dynamic and filled with fire for your cause, and to have all that passion with no place to focus it, and to know that once you've passed this zenith of your strength, it will never come around again. He also spoke feelingly about the vast regret he feels for much pain his family has suffered because of his choices.

Despite all this, Maharaj seems not to harbour anger, which is amazing to me. He agrees with Mandela that true reconciliation is the only way to create a better world. And in these seemingly dark times in which we are all living, he still believes that a better world is possible.

Maharaj states in his book:

[Mandela] has truly become humankind's hope for the future at a time when politics has become a dirty word, stripped of all morality and Machiavellian to its roots... he remains the hope of this world.

THIS JUST IN: See Me Live

If you're in the Lower Mainland, you could do worse things than drop by Chapters on Robson Street at 7 pm tonight. I'll be doing an in-store interview -- in front of an audience and everything! -- with Mac Maharaj, editorial consultant of Mandela: The Authorized Portrait, before he signs books.

I love this book. It's a gorgeous monument to an incredible life -- much better and more satisfying than some old statue. I only wish that I'm remembered as fondly some day.

WORDS: Fun to Say

mellifluous
ransack
serendipitous
fork
calamity
jeepers
rickety
poop