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.

📚 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:

• The coast was enveloped in fog nearly all day. Yarmouth Jul 3 1893
• The picnic on Moose Island consisted of baked beans, canned salmon, cake of all kinds, pie of every description, hot tea and coffee. Five Islands Jul 8 1895
• Mr. Jon Vaughan has a cat that is rearing two young minks and a black kitten. Anyone passing may see the lithe forms racing about in a very happy mood with kitty as a frolicksome companion. Mr Vaughan has recently added a wood chuck to his menagerie. Gaspereau Jul 11 1890

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.

• My Begging Chart by Keilor Roberts
• The Joy of Quitting by Keilor Roberts

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.

📚 Purchased from a gift/souvenir shop in Chester, N.S. Sadly, I cannot recall the name and cannot find it in Apple Maps.

Of all the books I got in Nova Scotia, this was the most powerful. The Expulsion of the Acadians – also called the Great Deportation – which occurred from 1755-64, is one of the great scars of history on this beautiful place, perpetrated by the brutal British colonial government on a peaceful agrarian population whose crime was that they spoke French. The Expulsion echoes still in this region and its local culture.

There are a great number and variety of books on the topic of the Great Deportation; the Grand Pré Visitors Center had books covering all aspects of the event, ranging from academic histories to fictional retellings. Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline” exists in many different formats.

But this book felt different. Acadian Driftwood, despite its slim profile, is packed with thorough research and scholarship, imaginative storytelling using the known facts, and a deeply personal exploration by its author, Tyler Leblanc.

Leblanc did not even know his ancestors were Acadian until he traced his genealogy back to Joseph LeBlanc (his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather). The book tells the separate histories of Joseph and his 10 siblings who were expelled from their homes and lands and quite literally scattered to the four winds. Each chapter follows the trail of an individual sibling, where they ended up, and how they possibly fared. Some of them died at sea, others who made their way to France, England, Philadelphia, and yes, Louisiana, and even some who hid out and escaped the clutches of the British soldiers. The book describes the type of life and living conditions Leblanc’s ancestors would have found in these unsafe and openly hostile environments, so different from the green and peaceful Acadia they had known.

A short, powerful book that tells you what you need to know factually about the Great Deportation and what you should know emotionally, personally, about how that event played out in these individual lives. And then ponder how the world treats refugees today and ask yourself: is it any better? Is it any different?

Related links

Acadian Driftwood - The Band - YouTube

Acadian Driftwood - Wikipedia (background on The Band’s song)

How Tyler LeBlanc looked into his Nova Scotia roots and uncovered a connection to Acadian history | CBC Books

📚 Purchased from the Grand-Pré National Historic Site Visitors Center. The Center has lots of CDs of Acadian and traditional music, and many books on Acadian history and culture, with a focus on the British government’s deportation from 1755-62 of the Acadians from Grand-Pré. The Center also has lots and lots of versions and retellings of Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” which I really must get to one day.

These Good Hands by Carol Bruneau

From the bookflap: “Set in the early autumn of 1943, These Good Hands interweaves the biography of French sculptor Camille Claudel and the story of the nurse who cares for her during the final days of her thirty-year incarceration in France’s Montdevergues Asylum.”

Still on my to-read shelf. I bought this early in our trip thinking I’d get back into reading a real book (by which I mean, a good novel). Even though the novel does not have anything to do with Nova Scotian or Acadian culture, I loved the description of the book from its flap and that’s why I bought it.

Minnie of the Maritimes by Judith Tait

Also not a book with Acadian themes, but it sweeps from one end of Nova Scotia to another, and is a fine first novel. The author’s bio on the last page says this:

Investigating her ancestors led to the fictional life of a real person, Minnie Healy, born in 1864 outside the village of Port Williams in Kings Co., Nova Scotia. No other details of her life were recorded.

Set in the late 19th and early 20th century, the book follows young Minnie as she is cast out from her family’s home. Her pregnancy has cast shame on her family in the community and so she is sent to Montreal, where she delivers the child in a Catholic-run facility for unwed mothers – who are not allowed to keep their children. From there, she lives on Prince Edward Island with her aunt’s family, marries and moves to Halifax, and then ends her days in Wolfville.

It packs a lot of incident for a short book, and there are tinges of melodrama here and there. But the descriptions of those times – along with vintage photographs of the era that help inform the book’s atmosphere – are bracingly physical with great details. Minnie’s train ride to Montreal, the cold stoniness of the Catholic facility, the summers and winters of PEI as she grows to young womanhood – there are so many lovely episodes that the book is a joy to read.

But it’s not just nostalgia for a lost time. I’d heard about the Halifax Explosion but Tait’s description of its aftermath, as Minnie wanders through a neighborhood scorched and scraped bare, was unsettling. The book may appear to be a cozy, but its report has claws.

A small book, maybe a minor book, but a perfect little gift of a book for anyone who loves Nova Scotia and wants to know what life 100+ years ago felt like.

Finished reading: The Cursed Hermit by Kris Bertin (Writer), Alexander Forbes (Artist) 📚

A sequel to the duo’s previous The Case of the Missing Men though that isn’t strictly needed to appreciate this adventure. The story is not as bonkers as Missing Men but is still deranged and unhinged, with a deeper look at Pauline’s character. She showed hints in the previous book of second-sight, and she goes on a deep personal journey in Hermit.

Found myself going back to the beginning, going back to specific pages and sequences (that paint smudge over Pauline’s eye in the early pages! the kaleidoscope patterns!).

The art by Alexander Forbes is jaw-droppingly detailed and brilliant. I spent several minutes just studying the cross-hatching, shading, brushwork on the trees and cliff faces and rocky outcroppings. His landscapes and nature drawings have a solidly real look, while the fantasy images use that realism to unsettling effect. His character-acting is also great, especially during Pauline’s visions; the inhabitants of Hobtown all look dulled, dumpy, uncaring – and Bertin’s story explains why that is.

I don’t know how many hours and years it took them to create this book, but I will happily wait however long it takes for them to create another. This one really hit my sweet spot for comics, spookiness, character development (Pauline and Dana’s relationship felt real and caring).

I did a three-card reading using the World Spirit Tarot deck (1st edition). Instead of the usual “Past Present Future” layout, as I shuffled the cards I asked them to tell me something I needed to know about this year and to tell it as a story.

Here are the cards I drew.

The World Spirit Tarot site, maintained by Madame Onca, the deck’s artist, has these handy capsule descriptions of each card:

• SEVEN of SWORDS – “Strategy, stealth and wit are required to meet your goals. From tactful communication to outright manipulation, utilize the spectrum of strategy to obtain your objectives. Be honest about your motives and methods, as dishonesty can beget its own problems. Can you accomplish your ends without compromising your integrity? (Craftiness)”
• SAGE of CUPS – “Emotional maturity and a progressive nature allow the Sage to adapt to the changing times. Capable of great finesse and calculated communication, they lead well, and gaslight brutally. This empathetic personality struggles to maintain a most challenging balance between the rigors of worldly responsibility and a deeply emotional, artistic nature.”
• V THE HIEROPHANT – “Are you ready to expand your knowledge? Bringing together the worlds of inner spirit and outer learning, this card represents the laws and culture of religious and academic tradition. Study the collected wisdom of the ancestors with all its gifts and shortcomings, then find the truly Sacred in your own way.”

The Hierophant, by the way, is my Spirit Card, the Major Arcana card that aligns to certain numerological data associated to my name and birth date. Seeing that card turned over at the end made my eyes pop.

The swords are an air sign, symbolizing intellect, communications, and boundaries. The cups are a water sign, signifying emotions, intuition, love, dreams. The Hierophant, as a Major Arcana symbol, dominates the reading. If these cards tell a story – starting from the intellectual and moving to the emotional – then the Hierophant is a hell of a note to end on.

One of the things I note about the card’s figures: the Swords figure is facing left and down, bending over, picking up the swords in a freezing cold sea, while a ship is heading toward her in the distance. She has to work fast. She is also facing to the left while the Sage is facing right in contemplation. Opposites-ville. But both figures are in cold, blue settings with clouds stabbing diagonally across the sky. They’re telling different sides of the story but they’re swimming in the same sea.

The Swords card pretty accurately summarizes my head at the moment. I want to clear up various health issues this year, and I have a life-changing project simmering in the background that will come to fruition, I hope, later this year. I want to set lots of plates spinning on the tips of many swords, and am wondering how to coordinate it all.

Once those plates are spinning, though, time to be the Sage and contemplate where I am, how I’m feeling, and how I will negotiate the life-change transition that is headed my way. The Swords card is, I think, about planning the physical aspects of my life. The Sage reminds me not to forget the emotional side, which needs equal care and attention. The honest Sword turns away from the calculating, gaslighting, manipulative Sage. But that last sentence of the card description shows the Sage trying his best to bridge the needs of the world with the needs of the soul.

And how will the story end? The Hierophant. The Rules-Maker and Rules-Follower, the Lawgiver, who joins in one role the emotional (religious, yearning, soulful) and the academic (intellect, boundaries, order from chaos). The dark side of the Hierophant is a slavish devotion to the rules rather than balanced and knowing wisdom. The rather haughty pose in the card, and the supplicants, show for me a disposition to avoid, a haughtiness I do not want to emulate. But I do want to honor the Sacred in the card, the light of the torch, and – the mysteries. What lies behind that black curtain? The Hierophant represents a codified religious system, but that system’s purpose is to guide one to the mysteries that lie within.

I took this to be a very hopeful and beneficial reading. I will be working hard at the start of the year (Swords), by mid-year I’ll be assessing where I am and how I’m feeling about where I’m going (Cups), and – I hope – by the end of the year, I’ll be the writer of my own story, the master of my moment, enjoying the pleasures of the emotions and the intellect. And since the Hierophant is my Soul Card, perhaps the reading indicates that I will come into my own, be fully myself.

I had a productivity insight recently. Namely, that if my natural state is peace, and I’m the one whose thinking messes with that peace, then my natural state is focus and the only way I lose focus is when my thoughts distract me from it.

So I don’t need 12 steps to a distraction-free environment or the key understanding to controlling my attention. Instead, I just notice when my thoughts start to insist that I need a break. The insistence feels uncomfortable and that’s the cue to stand, stretch, breathe, make a cup of tea. Clear my head, in other words, rather than continue cluttering it with web-surfing or YouTube.

I’ve noticed my Self over the last few weeks unsubscribing from newsletters and podcasts, being more intentional about how I spend my attention energy, and deliberately opening up spaces in the evening where I don’t do anything, just sit, without consuming this intellectual snack food.

Anyway — a nice way to start the new year.

With the turnover of a new year, I did not want to carry the burden of imaginary work into 2024.

I looked at my Readwise Reader collection of saved web pages/PDFs/videos to process (~1,000 items). My YouTube Watch Later list totaled over 2,200 items. My default Amazon wishlist for Books has not been emptied in years.

I have always used my read-later, watch-later, and buy-later lists as “cooling off” platforms. When I returned to them later, I could assess whether an item captured in the heat of the moment retained its warmth. Most of the time, I’d think, “Why did I save this??” and thus saved myself the time and trouble of processing it.

It’s always interesting to me to scroll through the lists and see what captured my attention at specific periods of the year: plantar fasciitis remedies and exercises, note-taking, retirement planning, authors I was following, reviews of a specific book or movie I’d just read, breakfast prep videos, etc. Yes, if I had unlimited time and energy, I’d love to have read and viewed all these things.

But I don’t. No one has.

So, I decided to declare bankruptcy on all these lists and clear them out. If something really wants my attention, it’ll come back and then I’ll take action on it in the moment by reading it, viewing it, or buying it. Or capturing it in one of my cooling-off lists, which I’ll likely again have to clear out at the end of 2024.

How To - Readwise

Cleaning out the Readwise list was pretty easy; find the Bulk Actions command and Delete All.

I’ll still indiscriminately add web pages to Readwise for later reading in 2024. It’s a dumping ground for my current in-the-moment interests. If I want to keep something, Archive it.

How To - Amazon

Display the Books list, select More, then Manage List, scroll to the bottom, then Delete List. Repeat for all other specialty lists that are no longer needed.

In 2024, I’ll create specialty lists as I need them, and I’ll continue to use my new Books list as a cooling-off chamber for in-the-moment captures.

How To - Youtube

YouTube was the toughie. It’s not in Google’s best interests for users to delete all those yummy videos they’ve saved up. Fortunately, there are scripts you can enter into the browser Console to do the work for you. The scripts usually work in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

Searching YouTube for “how to delete YouTube watch later list” yields how-to videos going back years; find ones that are recent, within the last few months ideally. YouTube changes its interface frequently, which breaks these scripts.

The easiest way to clear the Watch Later list is to use the Chrome extension YT Watch Later Assist. If you have thousands of items in the list, start the deletion process and ensure the screen doesn’t go asleep.

If you have other YouTube playlists you want to clear out, check out the scripts that run in the Console. They usually enable you to change the list name from “Watch later” to the another list name.

If you have over the years subscribed to too many YouTube channels (I had over 150 in my list), use the Console to run a mass unsubscribe script. While I had trouble getting the Watch Later scripts to run, this unsubscribe script ran perfectly. It ran so quickly though that it skipped some items. Running it 3 or 4 times did the trick and I am now unsubscribed from all YouTube channels.

Finished reading: Old Christmas by Washington Irving 📚

A classic set of stories that invigorated the Christmas spirit in 1820s America, which saw the holiday as too-English (the war of 1812 was still fresh) and which banned celebrations in some locales. Irving synthesized his research into older English Christmas customs, games, and rituals into a fictional story of a grumpy outsider whose heart is warmed by the lightness and gaiety. He even includes a ghost story. Dickens was an Irving fan and drew from this book for his own “Christmas Carol”.

It took a while for me to get into the style and pace of the writing, though judicious skimming helped and I did love the rich details.

What leapt out at me were the rather lechy old Master Simon who enjoys the company and attention of the pretty younger girls, and the clear and rigid caste system of gentry and peasants, which the narrator endorses (no one has a word of thanks for the busy kitchen staff who cooked all the extravagant foodstuffs), though he is aware of the class divide: his narrator looks sternly at some of the “peasants” knowingly playing up to the guvner.

Other reading, if you’re interested:

• How Washington Irving Shaped Christmas in America | The National Endowment for the Humanities
• The Root of Our Old Christmas Customs: Washington Irving: A Yuletide Story in its Own Write - HOAGonSight
• HOW THE OLD CHRISTMAS CAME TO SLEEPY HOLLOW
• Old Christmas | The Impact of Washington Irving - House of Cadmus
• How Charles Dickens Stole Christmas - Visit Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown

📚 Purchased from Block Shop Books on a day-trip to Lunenberg, whose picture-postcard downtown area boasts a large number of restaurants, gift shops, and book stores.

I remember entering at the end of our day there, with the store about to close in 10 minutes. With no time to linger, I scanned for the graphic novels section and plucked out these three beauties.

Take the Long Way Home by Jon Claytor.

I love diary comics and comics memoirs but this book bounced right off me. I remember reading this book but cannot tell you much more about it. The author takes a cross-country road trip after the collapse of a relationship while also struggling to stay sober. Along the way, he meets up with friends, children, family, talks to the animals, makes new friends, and along the way tries making friends with himself too. The drawings and some watercolors (the book is B&W and grayscale, no color) are mostly all photo-referenced with, more often than not, one big drawing to each page. The episodic, meandering nature of his journey (both external and internal), and the visually uninteresting pictures and layouts, made this big slab of a book feel rather thin. I will give it another try later; maybe I was having an off week.

Nova Graphica: A Graphic Anthology of Nova Scotia History

A fantastic collection of short pieces on Nova Scotian history and culture, with a rich blend of personal Nova Scotian history and culture, as well. I loved seeing the variety of drawing styles, the different types of storytelling, and the panorama of topics: Black history, Indigenous history, LGBTQ, ghost stories, family stories, folklore – the gamut. For some reason, I remember the last story called “Five Sided House” by Colleen MacIsaac. It’s a fiction piece about two high school girls who take on as a school project an archeological study of the hundreds of years old foundation of what appears to be a five-sided house located in the hills above Halifax. A little Googling reveals that it’s a real historical conundrum with no clear explanation of the structure’s origin or purpose. What could have been a dry retelling of the scant facts instead becomes a lovely meditation of the past and the present, with imagination as the necessary bridge between the two.

The Case of the Missing Men by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes.

Bertin and Forbes contributed a spooky folk tale to Nova Graphica. In The Case of the Missing Men, they give themselves 300 pages to cut loose with their own brand of local legend, noir storytelling, dark mystery, and unsettling imagery. The first of the “Hobstown Mystery Stories” series, the book follows the investigation of a high school student’s missing father by the Teen Detective Club (a registered afterschool program!). Publishers Weekly nicely summed up the book as a cross between Scooby-Doo and David Lynch, though there are few shenanigans and high-jinks; instead, there are threatening law officers, a secret society, grotesque monster-men, deaths, bodies, chases, and just what is going on behind those kennel fences? The story is odd, compelling, weird, and the exquisitely etched line drawing, detailed cross-hatching, and frankly creepy images make the whole package delightful and re-readable.

The book appears to be out of print, sadly, hence my using the Amazon link. I plan on getting myself their second novel, The Cursed Hermit, as a Christmas present to myself.

By a wonderful coincidence, all of these books were published by Conundrum Press, an independent Canadian publisher of literary graphic novels. They have an extensive catalog of works that are locally, culturally, and artistically daring. I love the range of titles and styles they offer and look forward to reading more of their books.

Found myself today repeating the “brown M&Ms” story about Van Halen and thought to check its veracity. This article persuades me that it was less quality control, more image management.

In the late 1990s, though, the story shifted as additional context emerged. David Lee Roth, the band’s lead singer in those early years, published a 1997 autobiography titled Crazy From the Heat, in which he claimed the bowl of curated candy had an entirely functional purpose: It was a quick way to see if the venue had actually read the whole contract, line by line.

Source: Why Did Van Halen Demand Concert Venues Remove Brown M&M’s From the Menu? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

I participated in NaNoWriMo three times in the past, all before 2006, I think. I “won” the first and last times I entered, while the second round was a pretty unsatisfying experience.

I remember at the time Cal Newport and other nobs of the blogosphere decrying NaNoWriMo for various reasons: the world doesn’t need more bad novels, people should read more and write less, what value are you actually producing, etc. I attended a recent StoryGrid webinar where the same dismay for NaNoWriMo was trotted out to a new set of negatives: it’s a waste of your time, you won’t make actual progress, it’s too unfocused, you don’t actually learn to be a better writer, etc. And of course, StoryGrid has its own programs that they think are better to help you develop as a writer, and – I’ve not used them yet – they almost certainly are.

But the comment I always want to make to these nattering nabobs of negativism is: would you relax, please? Can’t people engage in an event like this simply for the fun of it? Is it a waste of energy to want to run like the wind when what you want to do is just run and not compete in a 400-meter sprint?

I know that some very good novels started out as NaNoWriMo competitions – I think The Night Circus is one – and I agree that nothing beautiful simply falls out after a month of drafting 50K words.

If you’re lucky, though, maybe the makings of a novel are there. The third NaNoWriMo I participated in was a somewhat picaresque story where a fellow down on his luck tries out numerous self-help and self-improvement techniques like better eating and exercise, cleansing his aura, going to a tarot reader, going to a men-only drumming circle in the woods, nutty stuff like that. I’d discovered in my previous experiences that having an open-ended somewhat plotless journey worked well for me, and I was aiming to make it humorous also, and so I simply had fun playing with the content, the techniques, seeing where the overarching story took me, etc.

The result was I had tremendous fun writing the thing and couldn’t wait to get back to it every night. I cleaned up some of those chapters for the writing group I was in at the time, and they went over pretty well. The lesson I learned from that year was to have fun with the process, just get the material out and shape it later. Follow the energy.

The dismal experience I had was because I was trying for something heavy and serious, that started out as a murder mystery but then I saw that I really didn’t like the material I was creating, and it stymied me for a bit. By the time I recovered and started writing a new story, it was too late to catch up to the 50K count.

My first NaNoWriMo experience was in the early 2000’s, and there was a great little network here in Durham, NC, that would meet at coffee shops or pubs or libraries to sit as a group and write. On the last day of November, a bunch of us congregated at what is now The Fruit but what was then a sort of jumble shop/bookstore. It was great to meet other people who were sort of giddy from the trip they’d been on.

The community aspect of NaNoWriMo is something the nay-sayers never comment on; the joy of so many people participating in a shared endeavor is surely one of the most life-giving things we can do for ourselves, almost regardless of the content of the activity itself. The art habit is hard to start, which is no doubt why there are so many timed artistic challenges all through the year.

Sure, there may be some people who participate and have an idea of what they’ll get out of NaNoWriMo and they end the month disappointed with what happened. But I consider that part of the trial and error of making art; this technique worked, this method didn’t. No failure, only feedback.

The only feedback needed during NaNoWriMo is asking “am I enjoying myself?” If yes, please keep writing.

#nanowrimo ✏️ 📝