Perhaps one of the delights of a new Ondaatje book arriving is learning how others read his work, or first came upon it. I like reading the stories interviewers tell. The way he once took a Robert Frost quotation from his wallet and read it to a reporter, which I came upon in the … | Continue reading
Many years ago, I bought for myself a print of a Mickey Smith photograph. Her work still makes my heart sing. Of it, Louis Menand says, “One important thing about the images is their found-ness. The photographs are taken from life; they’re not made from props in a studio. The art … | Continue reading
Over the past several years I’ve from time to time met a writer who expresses being stuck or stymied or burned out, and I’ve pretty much always recommended that they try asemic writing as a warm-up exercise. It’s a practice that I often begin my day doing and I think is perhaps u … | Continue reading
I remind myself that there is melodrama in Sting’s lyrics for King of Pain so as to keep my comedic distance, these days. He sings,There's a little black spot on the sun today That's my soul up there It's the same old thing as yesterday That's my soul up thereand:I have stood her … | Continue reading
A couple of nights ago, Rob and I watched Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. You can watch the trailer here, and here: a review in the Guardian by Wendy Ide. Ide says, “It should be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – a Groundhog Day grind with added despair and urinal cakes. … | Continue reading
This week’s book stack has a photography theme. I know I’ve mentioned Tim Carpenter’s To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die before, but it’s probably one of my favourite books on the subject. I would say it has an appeal for writers, artists, and other creative folks as well. Anyo … | Continue reading
I’ve written and posted elsewhere about reading on holiday in Rome. In these photos I’m sitting in Colle Oppio and Terme di Traiano Park or Oppian Hill Park near our apartment which was near the Colosseum. Admittedly, I’m sort of “fake reading” for the photos here, but we actuall … | Continue reading
I keep writing a word down on a sticky note, and then I toss it out for one reason or another, and eventually write it down again. The word: conditions. Conditions. Conditions. What am I trying to remind myself of here? My screensaver on my computer all this last year has been a … | Continue reading
Last year, I declared it to be the year of “my All.” And while I wouldn’t take any of it back, it played out in really interesting ways. Most of them good but with a few unexpected moments thrown in for good measure — because health (mental and bodily), because spread too thin, b … | Continue reading
Is there anything more bookishly pleasurable than reading on holiday? And feeling that you brought along the exact correct books for your time away? I’ve read three books so far on my time in Rome this November and dipped into a few others. But the three that are just A+ chef’s k … | Continue reading
I’m really grateful to all those who are able to say things at times like these. I think I even used to be one of them. Right now though I feel like I’m sort of crawling to a bit of a finish line. My health is rubbish right now tbh, the insomnia has ramped up, the work I do in my … | Continue reading
I think a lot about being “right-sized,” and I think a lot about living in the multiple registers. I’ve been thinking and talking with other creatives about tall poppy syndrome. I’ve been thinking (ongoingly) about what it means to live the creative life. The how of it the why. I … | Continue reading
There are some thoughts/quotations that just get more and more true:“To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we still know so little.” That’s Rilke. … | Continue reading
I’m always reading something but I’m probably worse than ever at floating from book to book to book…and so on. This is not a bad method in so far as comparing ideas, and seeing how one mind sparks off another. It means it takes quite long to actually complete a book, though! The … | Continue reading
There is a poem in Adam Zagajewski’s last book of poems, Asymmetry. For a while I couldn’t read the book, and then it called, became as clear as a bell, inviting me in. Saying what I needed to hear at the exact right time. Which is what poems miraculously do! (When the humans in … | Continue reading
Lars Iyer’s My Weil opens “Monday Night.” It opens, “The postgraduate social.” And omg it opens, “Room-temperature prosecco.” Really that’s all you need for you to know whether you want to continue or not, right? And yes, I wanted to continue. I was reading the ARC (advanced read … | Continue reading
God I loved this book. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Maybe it’s a bit of a dumb comparison but the feeling of reading it was the same I had when I watched the ending of Picard. It just gave me everything I wanted right now. The first sentence is really modern day Jane Aus … | Continue reading
“You are dreaming for humanity,” is what Jean Valentine once said to Hafizah Geter in a Paris Review interview on poetry. If you’re a poet interested in line breaks, Valentine is the place to learn. Geter says of Valentine’s:“It makes you trust yourself to the gap. Using everythi … | Continue reading
I’m a fan of the work of Cindy Sherman, which is I suppose why once in a while I have to play around with movie characters. Fairly recently I wrote a post about Rear Window, a Hitchcock film, and today, I’m revisiting a Stanley Donen film, Indiscreet (1958). I have a particular f … | Continue reading
Anthony Wilson is one of those “unmet literary friends” that Carolyn Heilbrun talks about in an essay in a book I no longer own and wish I had back. I’ve read his blog for ages and he’s been such a tremendous supporter of mine. When his new book came out I ordered it immediately. … | Continue reading
It doesn’t take much to get me thinking about flowers, you know? Right now we are in that MOMENT of the peonies. Feel free to peruse my guy’s latest peony posts on Instagram. That is some NEWS. There’s always a lot of other news, but in my opinion, flowers are news too. When he w … | Continue reading
This is not the first time I’ve given the beautiful Peter Darbyshire a shoutout on TwB, and likely not the last. In his recent newsletter he mentioned a book that called to me immediately and which I read posthaste, titled The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. Honestly I usuall … | Continue reading
I’ve been sitting with the book The Unknown Craftsman: a Japanese Insight into Beauty for a while. now. I read it and then I return to an essay I love by Hélène Cixous titled, “Without End,” where she talks about wanting “the tornados in the atelier,” the moment of arrival, the “ … | Continue reading
I’ve mentioned Wayne Thiebaud in passing in this space a couple of times. I honestly thought I’d talked about him more! I also enjoy Morandi. A while back I bought the book Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi and it’s really great to see one artist interacting with another’s work. I … | Continue reading
It appears that I’m a creature of habit, or that my thought patterns are cyclical. About this time last year, I wrote a post also about marking occasions, about loss, on consolation. I suppose it’s because last week we, Rob and I, celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and I ce … | Continue reading
I’ve just finished Amina Cain’s novel, Indelicacy. I’ve referenced another work by her, A Horse at Night: On Writing, here. It came out within a year of my Everything Affects Everyone and this wasn’t the ideal time to release a novel into the world. I waited to read it though, be … | Continue reading
How many times have I said this in the last month: I feel more like myself, these days. I’m coming back to myself. And then inevitably, someone will either say, Oh! I don’t feel like myself, or, How did you get there, because I’m not feeling like myself, etc, with various permuta … | Continue reading
We are trying to live smart from within a painful history that in spite of all the information at our fingertips, or maybe because of the vast abundance of it, it’s impossible to know the best path to take at any juncture. The whole idea of “best path” is tricky; it’s fraught. Do … | Continue reading
I recently read The Ghost of You by Margarita Saona which is exactly the kind of book I love and am always hoping for. It’s published by Laberinto Press which is this wonderful new-ish press in Edmonton run by the force that is Luciana Erregue-Sacchi (who is also the translator i … | Continue reading
Honestly, could I not title all my posts ending in — comma, Now? But I’ve been thinking about Rear Window again, as one does when one’s house is full of Rear Window inspired paintings. We watched it last night for the umpteenth time, and it seemed all new and fresh again. It was … | Continue reading
The title of this post could be: Social Media for Mere Mortals, Mid-Listers, Small Press Writers, and Quiet Creatives. It’s not an advice post, or a “you should really….X” kind of post. I’m just going to throw some stuff out that I know about, that works for me, that I wish I did … | Continue reading
How do we think about things now? How to refresh our thinking? How to re-frame, retrain our brains, how to shift or jostle or shine up our thinking? For me, I’ve been wanting to reset my brain, freshen up my thoughts, reconvene on worn subjects. I want to see anew, think more cre … | Continue reading
Here’s a way to blog: you take a few things that are currently of interest to you, and then you start to ramble and see if they make sense together. Sometimes they really do! Sometimes it’s kind of a stretch….The first thing I’ve been thinking about is compassion and weariness an … | Continue reading
It was the book Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart that really helped me turn a corner in my brain at one point, and helped me re-frame and look at the everyday in a new way. And in the beautiful way that one book leads to another, I read Stewart’s co-authored book with Lauren … | Continue reading
I had taken these still life photographs at about the same time I learned about the death of Linda Pastan. I knew she had written a poem about still life, so I looked that up. I read her obit in The Washington Post, finding it interesting that she placed first in a contest in Mad … | Continue reading
“What you have to do, you do with play,” said Joseph Campbell. One of my most dog-eared books is A Joseph Campbell Companion. I think a lot of us read, at least some of our reading life is geared toward this, to find instructions on how to live. And if I’m looking for instruction … | Continue reading
Let’s begin with oranges and happiness and then we’ll talk about chaos, sure. Do you know the poem by Wendy Cope, The Orange? Here it is:The OrangeAt lunchtime I bought a huge orange—The size of it made us all laugh.I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—They got quarters … | Continue reading
This very beautifully weird thing often happens after you write a book: you read another book that feels like you read it while writing your own book, but didn’t. Or did you? It seems so strange to me that I did not read the compilation of interviews by Jonathan Cott — with the c … | Continue reading
Happy 2023 and heartfelt thanks for being here with me! Last year at this time, I wrote about tenderness in my 2022 New Year’s post. I wrote about contingency, and fighting optimism. I wrote about focusing more but also about daydreaming more! I wrote about being someone who woul … | Continue reading
This will be the last post I likely write for 2022. I’m planning to write my usual New Year’s day post, so please look out for that. And I’ll still be writing my weekly Beauty School posts on Patreon. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some newsletters I love. Social media has … | Continue reading
I’m still processing all that I experienced and learned as we stayed for a month in Rome this November. It’s going to take a hot minute to let it all filter down. I mean, it was a month, not a year, and I won’t be able to turn my one month into some kind of eatpraylove book. But … | Continue reading
Five years ago I wrote a post titled 20 Ways to Find an Inner Calm, and I’ve been wondering, if I were to write that post now, how would it be different? What things would overlap? What are the things that help us get through now? What is helpful now?I think we can acknowledge th … | Continue reading
“…you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle, and that’s your whole life.” That’s Pema Chödrön. Last week her quotation from No Time To Lose became my current mantra: “…marshal your intelligence, courage, and humour in order to turn the tide.” And that one is still r … | Continue reading
It’s not a new theme for me but I’ve been thinking a lot about taking the light into the dark. The last couple of years I feel like I have gone into some pretty dark corners of my psyche. But then the light! How bright it is afterwards. But it’s dizzying, too, going into and out … | Continue reading
If you’re a poet, you’ve likely taken a run at saying what poetry is. (I did myself in my book, Asking). W.H. Auden wrote: “Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.” When I’m in the presence of poetry, and this isn’t always through a proper poem per se, I feel as Rumi di … | Continue reading
I was re-reading one of my favourite books (longtime visitors to this site will remember me oft quoting from it), titled What’s the Story, by Anne Bogart, and what stood out for me this time was the passage where she’s talking to a marketing person about how to get the word out a … | Continue reading
When I started blogging — about three blogs ago now — and well, these were different times, but I had a rule for myself that I wouldn’t quote from anything that I hadn’t read in its entirety. This is a pretty sound practice in general, still though, right? I don’t stick to it one … | Continue reading
The typewriter is a recurring theme here and it seems that I’m overdue on sharing some poems about them, about the act of typing, and the music of typing. I love how Clarice Lispector and Annie Dillard and May Sarton wrote about typewriters and typing in their prose and I’ve shar … | Continue reading