Currently reading: My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt 📚. Well-told, great details, and he takes his time unfurling the discoveries and weaving them in with his memories. But God, what a harrowing childhood he and his siblings had. Told with a tone of rather tired remembrance; there’s love there, sometimes (for his friends, his siblings, his mother), but little joy.
These are not serious people, and their proud and weaponized indifference is another reflection of their hollow rottenness and their desire to inflict their flaws on all of us to do a tremendous amount of damage, quickly. These days, some of the stupidest things are often also the most frightening.
Source: Florida’s Commissioner of Education thinks Jane Austen was an American. ‹ Literary Hub
“Proud and weaponized indifference” – Yes, this.
Finished audiobook: I Must Say by Martin Short 📚 We’d started listening to this last year and I finished it solo last night. Audiobook is the best way to experience Short as he does the voices, the characters, the singing, and his timing is exquisite. The middle career years are a bit of a slog, though he tipped me to some movies of his I’d never heard of. But the book’s heart is his relationship with his wife of 30 years, Nancy; the book’s last long sections detailing her cancer treatments and death were hard, tender, and full of love. I was so moved by his last conversation with Nancy that closes the book, and how his relationship with her was neverending (the book was written four years after her death). Come for the great showbiz stories, yes, but stay for the heart and the person.
A local online news service staffed by Duke journalism students recently started using AI to identify and draft news stories of interest. The AI has surfaced strong local content, but the articles need vetting and editing. More: Early lessons from 10th Street - 9th Street Journal
Good Lord…
Local exposure to poor individuals reduces support for redistribution among the well-off. In other words, wealthy people are more likely to favor government programs helping the poor if they never see poor people. Source: Science and Technology links (May 25 2024) – Daniel Lemire’s blog
For my wife, the vacation starts when we’re on the way to the airport. For me, vacation starts after all the mechanics and problem-solving of travel are behind me – TSA check, rental car, unfamiliar highways, how does the shower work, etc. That first meal after all these problems are behind me is when vacation starts for me.
📚 Purchased in Annapolis Royal, NS
From Joann’s Chocolate Shop & Cafe: A charming little cafe where the owner makes her own chocolates and candies. And as if that weren’t enough, she has a goodly number of both used and new books.
Growing Pains by Emily Carr: this was our bedtime reading and a terrific description of long-ago places and times.
A Life Spent Listening by Hassan Khalili
This is still on my to-read shelf. I like self-help books, and was interested in this one as the author is an Iranian immigrant who practiced psychotherapy in Newfoundland for 40 years – interested in finding out how or if his Iranian culture influenced his work with Canadian patients and vice versa.
From Bainton’s Tannery Outlet/Mad Hatter Bookstore: Props to Google Maps for finding this store for me; Bing and Apple Maps found the Mad Hatter Wineshop next door, but did not identify these establishments – which are an odd couple on the face of it. The tannery and leather goods occupy one side of this rather snug store, with new books on the other side. What struck me about their book selection was its strong focus on local culture, specifically Annapolis Royal history and culture; many of the books were attractively designed objects ideal for holding in the hand.
It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time by Annabel Townsend : Not Nova Scotian at all, more Saskatchewan. I bought it thinking we could use it for bedtime reading; it was lightly amusing, but not for us.
Nymphalis Antiopa by Peter B. Wyman
A small book of seven literary short stories. By “literary,” I mean the stories contain elegant writing and description, not much plot, some modest narrative experimentation, and their temperature never rises high enough to lift them off the page. Still, a couple of stories stuck with me. “Broken Angel” follows the police chief as he patrols the blocks of town devastated by the “Great Fire” of 1921; as I read, I remembered street names and landmarks that are key reference points in the story. The last story, “Radio Silence,” follows the narrator as he takes a winter hike along a particularly treacherous stretch of woods lining the shore along the Bay of Fundy and discovers a World War II legacy gifted to him by the strait. It’s a story of time passing, of rhythms, and of resting places.
Note: I was unable to find where this book could be ordered online; searching on the book title yields page after page of butterfly pictures, surprise, surprise. It was likely privately printed. If you’re interested, the author includes his email address on the book as wymanpe@gmail.com
If grapes are nature’s candy, then dates are nature’s chocolate caramels.
To the dentist early on a dark, cold, rainy morning for a crown. They did a great job but lots of waiting. While sitting in the lobby as they fabricated the crown, I made good progress on reading Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. 📚 Working through the book’s exercises and posting my work online is one of this year’s goals. I could tell from just today’s experience of reading the book, that this cannot be a part-time project. Full attention, full heart, full mind, or don’t bother..
Finished audiobook of Running the Light by Sam Tallent 📚
Really enjoyed this story focused on a week in the life of a once-celebrated and now-degenerated, mostly forgotten standup comic slogging his guts out at two-bit one-night stands. Tallent excels at describing the experience of being on stage as Billy Ray Schafer smokes, cokes, drinks, connives, and somehow lurches himself into the only activity that makes him feel alive, while his paranoia and guilt make him self-destruct on his way to the next venue. He’s feeling the light about to go (the book never explains what “running the light” stands for; it’s when the on-stage comic ignores the blinking light signaling the end of his set yet refuses to leave the stage) (though the book’s ending lends another meaning) and it’s time to take care of loose ends.
I thought the story was gripping, with great set-pieces and some startling violence – Billy Ray’s anger at himself and God is always ready to explode at the least provocation.
But the telling … oy. The audiobook may gain a frisson of interest as individual chapters are narrated by various stand-up comics, but their readings are wildly different, some of them are not good at all, I could never tell who was who in a dialogue, and the indifferent, variable sound recording for each narrator made me yearn for a good studio-produced recording with an actor/comic who could have lent consistency to the story’s telling so that I didn’t keep falling out of the dream whenever a new narrator appeared.
Chapel Hill, NC
“Think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.” ~ Luc van Donkersgoed
Our local Little Waves Coffee Roasters used ChatGPT to help them brainstorm names for their new spring beverages. Whose titles were best – the Little Waves team members’ or ChatGPT’s? They include a link to the ChatGPT conversation log they used for this exercise. ☕️
Currently listening via Audible to Running the Light by Sam Tallent 📚 I like the way we’re in the character’s head from the get-go, and I’m loving the descriptions of a stand-up comic’s brutal road-life. But having different stand-up comics read aloud each chapter is disconcerting. A few are really good readers, but a few have lousy diction and no sense of rhythm or emotion. It jolts me out of the dream, and the recording quality varies for each one. Disappointing.
📚 Purchased from the Strange Adventures Comics & Curiosities shop in beautiful downtown Halifax, NS
Small History Nova Scotia: A Year of Historical News, Volume 2
The second in a series of three pamphlets compiled by Sara Spike, with Volume 2 published in 2020. As she says in her introduction, the series “shares real daily news from [over four dozen] historical newspapers across the province between the years 1880 and 1910.” It also includes illustrations of old advertisements and notices, which break up the grey and add a lot of nostalgic charm to the package. You can view a sample page from volume 2 on the Small History Nova Scotia site.
Spike started tweeting these news items from rural and small-town newspapers in 2014. Twitter turned out to be a perfect medium, as she explains:
Local news columns were frequently long lists of short bits of news. The tweets, like the daily entries here, are entire news items just as they appeared in the original newspapers.
Here are a few examples:
Spike acknowledges that these excerpts exclude lots of voices and descriptions, but I agree with her that they do capture the flavor and texture of a specifically, almost intensely, local way of life.
On a personal note, I loved reading this booklet because it reminded me of my first real job out of college at The Rocky Mount Evening & Sunday Telegram in Rocky Mount, NC. At that time – 1984 – the Linotype machines were only recently consigned to the backrooms and the “women’s and features” page regularly consisted of one-paragraph summaries of the local women’s, civic, and church groups. (Try writing meaningful headlines for these squibs beyond “Club Met on Sunday”). We also ran odd little endearing notices like Mr. and Mrs. Smith will be on a cruise or traveling to meet their new grandchildren in Lompock, or whatever. (Burglars, take note!)
Reading these hundred-year-old Nova Scotia news items just made me smile and sparked my imagination for living in that place and time, the same locales that Millie of the Maritimes would have lived in. And they also put me in mind of my own early days, where that tradition of newspapering remained intact, though not alive for much longer.
As a devotee of autobiographical comics, I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of Keilor Roberts before this trip. But we’ve liked Julia Wertz’s comics, and I thought Liz might also enjoy Roberts’ deadpan and Sahara-dry wit.
And we did. These were fun books to drop into and encouraged me to seek out interviews with Roberts and pursue copies of her other work. Highly recommended, especially for her interactions and dialogues with her daughter Xia, who looks at the world as brightly and eccentrically as her oftentimes less-happy mom.
Where does the phrase ‘cold turkey’ come from? | Merriam-Webster
It may be that the original cold turkey was a combination of cold (“straightforward, matter-of-fact”) and the earlier talk turkey, which dates back to the early 1800s and refers to speaking plainly. Regardless of its ultimate origins, the phrase manages to vividly capture the initial dread and discomfort that comes from immediately quitting something that’s addictive, from drugs to dating apps.
Signed up with a dietician to try to lose that last stubborn 20-30lbs. Spent a week keeping a food log and sleep log and now food is all I think about and my sleep has been terrible. What the …???
