Books – Page 4 – Rant and Roll

Up in the clouds

We are currently in Exorcist central, out here on the west coast of BC.

The fog rolled in last Friday, and since then we’ve been completely socked in, up to our eyeballs in mysterious mist.

Every so often we are tantalized with a small sliver of blue sky, but before we have a chance to relish in its splendor, the fog rolls back in, engulfing us all.

Tonight M and I are wrapped in our comfiest clothes, sitting close the fire. He is doing work and I am reading one of the most brilliant, beautiful, and hilarious poignant pieces of YA I have ever read.

Please, please check out: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

You will not regret it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in gloom:

Dinner parties.

Nerd nights.

Roses.

Winter walks.

Cat.

What did each one of you get up to for the weekend?

I want to hear all about it, as I wait for this fog to lift.

Call me home and I will build you a throne

Hi kidlets.

Today my love and I are up on the Sunshine Coast, drinking dark, sugary coffee, sitting in front of the fire.

The bay sits cool, and calm, just outside our window; every so often a duck armada will sail past, marking a course for the next dock or rush.

They call out to one another, “Over here!”

Oh boy, do I really love ducks.

M and I are up here for an extra long weekend, relishing the opportunity to just sit back and breathe, and actually spend some time together.

We’ve both been running about with our hair set on fire, and looking forward, well, the next few months aren’t exactly going to be relaxation central.

So we’re going to revel in this beauty and eat, drink, run, read, laugh, and love.

In the meantime, Fry-up time!

This doesn’t actual seem “cosmopolitan”.

While standing in line at Safeway the other night, waiting to pay for my raspberries, eggs, mint chocolate ice cream bars, granny smith apples, and unsalted butter (aka THE STAPLES), I came across this:

Oh Cosmo.

Champion that it is of the high-brow (not to mention safe haven for intellectually rigorous prose), it never, ever fails to surprise me with the depths of depravity (and inanity) in which it is willing to sink.

And don’t even get me started on the people who buy this shite, because if I do I will spend the next half hour alternating between banging my head against the wall and falling to my knees shouting WHHHHHYYYYY?

Instead, let’s have some fun shall we?

For instance, what are some alternate answers to the question:

“So you ate a cupcake?”

Are you allergic to cupcakes?! If yes, you should probably go to the hospital!

Was it chocolate or vanilla? WAS IT MARBLED? Never trust a marbled cupcake.

Did it fall on the floor first? Remember the five second rule. Longer than five seconds and I’ll have to eat it.

How do you feel about being a cupcake murderer?

Is it weird that one of the first things that pops into my head when I hear cupcake is Katy Perry’s boobs?

I hate Katy Perry.

Cupcake in French is petit gâteaux, which in terms of a french word is lame as heck.

Would you like another one before we start the self-flagellation? Self-flagellation starts in five.

And finally: Who bloody very well cares? YEESH.

EAT ALL THE CUPCAKES.

GO FOR ALL THE RUNS.

But seriously, don’t beat yourself up over one stupid pastry.

It totally defeats the purpose, because after all, cupcakes are made from happiness.

They should make you happy.

p.s. My tips for hot late night sex? Sleep all day first.

Stripes and waves.

I bought a few pretty pretties this week:

The skirt is from H&M and the sweater is from Joe Fresh.

I am massively in love with the skirt because it looks like it is made up of little white-capped waves. I wore it to work yesterday with a black turtle next, grey tights and little black boots.

Basically, I was a superhero.

Also, I probably should have just bought one of these sweaters in each available colour because goodness knows I had a hard time deciding which one to purchase.

Stripes are always the best.

What can I saw, I love me some old-timey jail bird chic.

East meets west.

Seeing as though we’re away for a couple of days I thought it best to bring a back-up book just in case I finish the one I am currently working on.

I started Wolf Hall a lifetime ago, and although I really liked it, somehow it fell by the wayside and I didn’t make it past the half-way point.

Now I’m back, knee deep in Tudor gossip and intrigue.

If I do in fact finish this tome, I have brought some Dostoevsky to satisfy my literary urges.

I had my first real Russian love affair with Mr. Fyodor when I was in first-year of uni. Somehow I’ve managed to read most of his bibliography, save for this work, so I look forward to finally cracking it open.

There is something about his mastery of the macabre that just delights me to no end.

This could of course say more about my deranged psyche than his fantastical wordplay, but I’m one to stay positive.

(Unlike, of course, Mr. D.)

…

So there you have it folks.

I wish you a weekend filled with good books, delicious food, crackling fires, wind-swept walks, and all the laughs your abdominal muscles can take.

And have a cupcake or two – on me.

Here with you, skinny legs and all

I am typing on the world’s softest keyboard. It’s like having jello fingertips.

I was reading “Skinny Legs and All” again last night. It is such a good book.

I like its definition of art as something that you can see in your head, but you know doesn’t exist in reality, so you try to make it exist.

I think this is what Robert Bateman cannot understand.

Art as imitation? That is just flattery.

Painted fangs and paper coats, a canvas of timeless snow. To make beauty and life something to look at.

I disagree with it all.

Make randomness. Find splendour in it.

Paint the pattern of your mind in the fickle sand, and know that it will blow away.

To be or not to be timeless? Infinite? Or just human?

We err, we die, we hold stiff poses against the sky – a sky that never changes. And what we make and what we shape is beautiful because it eventually ceases to obey the order we have inflicted upon it and metamorphs into something we could not ever have imagined.

And I ask myself, over and over again: where would I be if I had never met you?

A tan, bland comment from a waiter at a tea party. And I would have outlasted the winter with my ice and arctic breath.

But you and I – our pulse, our heart, together: we are not meant for trivia and sullen conversation.

The outside rules are writing themselves in rigid lines of decline, delineating the passive guests – but we, we are undressed and dressed again, an unfolding nebula of muscle, blood, and mirth, and who dares to say us wrong.

Who dares to say but sorry and thank you – these well-wishers and critics.

I see you and I’m dazed understanding. I’m iron on fire.

I’m living, I’m burning; I have stunned the artifex of my life in the shower, and these eyes – mine eyes are dancing the jive with yours.

And I’ll be here.
(kissing your eyelids shut at night).

For extra credit:

O, my love.

Life in the fast lane

Yesterday I worked a thirteen hour day. Coming home, I was completely knackered.

This is what I thought about as I rode the metro back to my home:

Such a fantastagorical tale had never been known.

Such was the way of these things.

Reading a bit like a history of popular culture in the early 20th century, and a tiny bit like a teen trash comedy, the combination was meant to amuse and articulate. Perhaps, most terrifyingly of all, it was the clearest representation of the inner workings and thought processes of two individuals.

One of them had come to a realization that he was often too pessimistic for his own good; he sometimes sought humor in disappointment as some kind of weak balm.

This would have to change. And it did.

Genuine excitement should not have to be manufactured. Riding on a jetski at 60 mph – for example – really has a positive effect on this. You cannot help but feel exhilaration, your mouth open and cheeks flapping with the force of the wind as you carve your way up an arm of BC’s mightiest river.

Twisting and turning you see how far you can go before the mechanical power under you can, shuddering, hurls you into the wild, flowing water. You cannot feign emotion on such a contraption, taking those risks.

SO – how to make life more like that? How to seek out, in everything, a sudden charge of passion and fury. What triggers those flags in my mind to suddenly send me rushing headlong emotionally at something or for something. I don’t need a cause to believe in so much as I need a credible dialogue, a wild formulation, a mysterious agenda.

Just think, the first people who ever read the Principia by Newton or Galileo’s letters must have thought they were reading some Clive Cusslerian escapade of fantastic proportions… and yet we now know it to be real.

But does that make Cussler any less exciting than Newton? Or just more poorly written?

(Definitely the latter.)

Also, should belief be THE defining reason for goodness?

I don’t think the best stories are always the truest ones. I like the ones that hover at the very edge between what-might-have-been, the possible, and the barely possible.

In this space we stop our minds from only formulating those images that we can understand and see, and make things that have never been made and will never be made, except inside the limits and demarcations of our own fancies, the thrum of our birthing brains.

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage

Eggs? Check.

Bacon? Check.

Toast? Check.

Let’s get this Friday Fry-Up on the stove!

And so it begins anew.

The Canadian government has recently announced that a new research project has been commissioned to search for the ships of the ill-fated Franklin exhibition.

As you may or may not know, The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror set out from England in 1845 with the express intent of finding the ever elusive Northwest Passage. Instead, only one year later, Franklin and his men found themselves trapped in the ice. Some died, and some – in an aim to escape a similar fate – set out on foot to try and find a way out of that frozen, desolate Arctic hell.

Only the never made it out – alive or dead.

It was pretty much – poof!

And they were never heard from again.

Okay. I know this was a terrible thing to happen and everything – but what the dickens were they thinking naming their two ships The Terror and The Erebus!?

Talk about starting out on the wrong foot.

If you’re going to take on what is, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission, wouldn’t you want to bring some levity to the whole situation by naming your boat something like – oh I don’t know, The Unicorn? Or how about The Heat Wave?

It’s called the power of positive thinking here people.

I mean jeeze – Erebus literally represented the personification of DARKNESS. That is some bleak sauce, emo crap right there.

Anywho, one of the greatest things to come out of this (evidently enduring) tragedy is this amazing, song sung by Stan Rogers:

This man is a friggin’ Canadian legend, whose songs regularly move me to tears. There is something just so simple and yet resonating about his tunes – and I don’t know if I think this way because of my East Coast roots, but even M himself is quick to state that he thinks Stan is easily the voice of Canada.

If you don’t know this man CHECK HIM OUT. Also read The Terror by Dan Simmons. Neither of these works of art will disappoint, I promise.

You got to put one foot in front of the other.

I recently signed up to run the Surrey International Half-marathon, taking place at the end of September. This will be my first half of the year, but I’m feeling really great about it.

My goal is to complete the course in one hour, thirty minutes (or less). My currently personal best is 1:38, but I think I’m in much better shape now than when I ran that previous race.

CIMG8409 - Copy — After 1:38 – feeling pretty good!

At least I think I am in better shape. I could show up that Sunday and end up running a heck of a lot slower than I expect – but I really hope this doesn’t end up being the case. Eight minutes is quite a lot of time to shave off, but I’m certain it’s doable.

And if not, I’ll have a taxi cab at the ready.

I kid, I kid.

It’ll be a bus.

Also, this will be my first race without the use of headphones. This for some reason fills me with zero trepidation, and it is this lack of trepidation that is giving me trepidation.

I will update you on my progress the closer I get to the race.

And my trepidation.

I’m all booked up.

Of late I’ve been on a crazy reading tear – for the past couple of months I’ve been blowing through two (and sometimes more) books a week like some crazed literary fiend.

It’s like an insatiable hunger. I look forward to taking skytrain in the mornings and when I get off work; I can’t wait to get in from my runs, shower and curl up on the couch; I sneak moments in the morning when I’m getting ready for the day; every night I read until I can barely keep my eyelash tips up and book spines straight.

At the moment I’m finishing up Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (await a blog post on this series in probably the next week) and can’t wait to dive into the next story.

Do you beauty cats have any good recommendations? What are you up to for the weekend?

Let’s find the hand of Franklin

reaching for the Beaufort Sea;

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage

And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.