November 18th, 2008

Intra-blog Naval Gazing

I’ve had a site-metre thingy hooked up for a while for Rose-coloured, but I don’t get much use out of it. I don’t know if it’s a hard to intuit one or I’m just lazy (I suspect the latter, but it’s Google Analytics, so you can check it out and judge for yourself) but I find it hard to learn anything useful from it. Or maybe there’s nothing useful to learn from a site metre except for the number of people who look at this site every day. And GA *does* tell me that, with a helpful day-by-day line graph. I am pleased to note that in recent months there are more people reading this site than I have personally discussed the material with, which would be the point of having a blog in the first place. So we are moving in the right direction.

Hello new friends, anyway.

Sometimes, when I get ambitious (read: bored) I try the more advanced site tracking features, like the shaded map. From the varying shades of green, I now know that people in Sweden and Belgium have read this blog, which is puzzling, but hello to both of you anyway. I have also learned which sites link to mine, which I already knew, except for the one with “p*rn” in the title, which I refuse to click on to discover the connection. We shall let that remain a mystery.

And, after much skidding around the GA site, I figured out how to find out what people Google to get Rose-coloured (I have done this before, every six months or so, but then I forget how again). I know this is often very entertaining for bloggers, as people somehow wind up on lit-type blogs after searching “emo chicken gargoyle” or something equally inexplicable (and bound for disappointment on a lit-type blog). Less interestingly, but more profitably, readers of Rose-coloured generally search some combination of my name and the title of my book, or sometimes other authors that I have mentioned here. In fact, in the top 50 searches, there is only one that is funny, and that’s a sort of sad one:

infected ink pen puncture

because I made a joke about that once, and I am sure the person who wanted info on that subject was not kidding. I am sorry, whoever you are, that I was flip about something that would be a serious problem if it actually happened. I hope that it is not very badly infected.

If something needs to be changed/now is the time to change it
RR

July 25th, 2008

Blog stars

I wonder why everybody being extra-interesting on Wednesday? And yet they so were:

“It all comes down to the slippery definition of “friendship,” a definition that is rendered ambiguous by the Internet’s systemic blurring of the divide between the personal and the private. A person can be, in Niedzviecki’s definition, “disengaged” by virtue of a computer monitor, yet still feel a personal connection with an online figure, whether that person be someone met in a chat room, through the comments section of a blog, or via an online gaming community.”
–from With Friends Like These by Steven @ That Shakespeherian Rag

“I can be a morbid person. Especially around this grocery store, where people with canes but young bodies, and hunchbacks, and disappointed and wild eyes, inevitably attract my attention for reasons I’ve never been fully able to understand. So when I saw this bride, I was already on edge in a way. My first thought was, Oh my God, she is going to jump off the roof.”
–from “Bride on a Pawnshop Roof” by Lauren

“Poets, I’d supposed, knowing better than the rest of us the careful constructs upon which ideas are built, of “just words” after all, and how those words and those ideas can’t be bent and twisted into anything, and that anything is everything, and that nothing can be sure. The difference of a line break, a comma; how fragile is simply everything, including life itself.”
–from “Of Poetry and War Crimes” by Kerry @ Pickle Me This

Maybe Wednesdays are better than I thought!

What will become of us / oblivion
RR

July 6th, 2008

Onrush

So many lovely new blogs this summer. Shouldn’t everybody be out in the sunshine? Canadians are funny.

Ideal Tigers is the work of musician/scholar/example-to-us-all Ross Hawkins, and it contains examples of all his roles in society, such as this:

“What I want to know is, where have all the fools gone? Where are the jesting ne’er do wells? Where’s Puck? And most importantly, where’s the trickster? In another age, joking might have been a courtly, even stately practice; or it might have been a means of accessing the sacred. Could it really be that pranking now is mostly the business of morons on MTV, office zaniness, or kids beating people up and filming it on their mobile? I hope not, and that’s why I’d be very grateful to be the vicitm of a great divine prank.” (April 1, 2008)

The blog dwells especially on Ross’s one-man dream-factory/band, the Idle Tigers. You could, if you were inclined, see and hear those tigers, this Friday night at the Drake Hotel. It should be the best kind of bizarre.

David Whitton has a blog…website…thing with amusing anecdotes about music, cool/disturbing art (take a real close look at the kissing couple), and most importantly, links to a bunch of his stories. My favourite is “Robin”

“Everyone worked in financial services nowadays. My mom, my dad, my aunts, my uncles, my parents’ friends. Even the Goat worked in a bank when he wasn’t making art films. If you don’t fall off a balcony, you’ll end up in financial services eventually.”

But I’ll let you choose for yourself. I guess this is the other best kind of bizarre. I guess I shouldn’t hierarchize.

Alex Boyd has a new movie-review blog at Digital Popcorn. I can’t much speak to the accuracy of the film reviews, because I have seen exactly one of the dozens he’s reviewed so far (it was Sicko and I agreed with that review 100%). This is another proof of the already impressive thesis that I have crap taste in movies (if I had my life to live over again, I might not see both Harold and Kumar movies, but then again, I might.) But the reviews are a joy to read even if you don’t know the films, because Alex writes like this:

“Some men are cruel and some men are pretty darn OK and just play the harmonica or whatever. And, it’s a pretty darn sad world when the cruel ones get ahead. In the final ten minutes or so the enemy invades, and even our best stock footage doesn’t stop them.” (*From Here to Eternity,” review June 24, 2008)

Even better, he also wrote a beautiful book of poems called Making Bones Walk, which I spent the afternoon reading in the park:

“If I demand of the air that my head turns
back to look at a woman, the air holds my chin,
turns it like a lover.”
from “Shapes of the Air”

There will always be reasons to go out, and reasons to stay in.

I’ll cover you
RR

April 28th, 2008

Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere

Who knew that there was such a title, although it’s clear to me now that it’s an important role. I’m so delighted that there is such an election, because that means there’s lots of people blogging about poetry and the world in poetic terms, as there should be. But for me, there’s only one poetic blogger on my radar, and that’s rob mclennan. So no disparagement meant to the other nominees, who are probably also quite brilliant.

But if there’s someone who has got to speak for poets in the blogosphere, I hope it can be rob, because I’ve never seen a blog that creates such a sense of commitment and community, such wide-ranging and warm interest and encouragement. It speaks to the blog’s space of generosity that a fiction writer such as myself never feels out of place there. rob’s blog makes it feel like writing is worthwhile, whatever your form.

I’m sure these things don’t matter *that* much in the scheme of life, but it *is* national poetry month, so if you are so inclined, maybe vote?

I could kick your ass / yeah, you in the looking glass
RR

February 14th, 2008

Huh

Was the last post about how we should be nice to other people in order that they be nice to us, and therefore really all about self-interest? Hmmm…

Never ever ever ever
RR

October 8th, 2007

Meme answers

1. First car you drove and where you went.

Ford Taurus, and technically the first time I drove I went in a small circle in a parking lot at ignition speed. The first time I drove alone as a licenced driver, I went to the county line, because I could.

2. Favourite name for a boy.

Jacob

3. What are the basic components of lasagna, according to you?

Noodles, ricotta cheese, tomatoy-oniony sauce, spinach!!

4. What could make you move, this month, to another country?

Very very hard for me to imagine. Some sort of constellation of money and love, I guess: I’d have to be able to afford to do it, and I’d have to be going with someone I liked enough to know I wouldn’t hate the new place.

5. Farthest you’ve ever gone on foot?

From the Danforth to midtown.

6. I would never have a bird for a pet because a bird in the house is bad luck.

7. Favourite kind of gum / reason why you hate all gum.

Extra Bubblemint (that I know of–there are yet flavours undiscovered!)

8. Favourite name for a girl.

Emma? Sarah? Rebecca? I like “a” names.

9. Worst tv show you’ve ever liked (that you’ll admit to).

Pigsty? Ned and Stacy?

10. What’s your best party trick?

Shoulder stands, double-jointed toes, the subjunctive.

11. Gun to your head: get a non-ear piercing—where?

Nose. I’ve always thought those are cute, actually–I just worry about job intereviews. And snot.

12. What’s your strength you always brag about in job interviews?

Takes direction well. And enthusiasm!!!!

13. What song is in your head? Dead by My Chemical Romance

14. Why do you live in the place you live?

It was a very convenient commute two jobs ago, and then not so much for the last two years, and then good again for this one. Finally, inertia pays off.

15. Expensive useless item you’d be embarrassed to own, yet sorta wish you did?

Lululemon Groove apns

16. Last charity you gave to?

United Way.

17. After you take your laundry out of the drier, what do you do with it?

Throw it on the couch in wrinkle-minimizing formation until it starts to bother me, or someone comes over, or I wear everything.

18. What was the last conversation you had about?

Borges.

These last ones are oldies from past surveys, but I always want to know and, hey, we’re all evolving.
19. What’s the best thing you can cook?

Still egg curry. I guess I’m actually not evolving. (note to those who didn’t read previous memes: this egg curry has nothing to do with the real one that people eat in India, or anywhere other than my appartment. I invented it in 1999 when I read Jhumpra Lahiri’s “Third and Final Continent” and some of those characters ate egg curry. It was an amazing story, and egg curry sounded really delicious. I had no recipe, so I just thought really hard about it, and invented one. Later I got a recipe and I was very very wrong, but I can’t switch–too addicted to my wrongness.)

20. What are you wearing right now?

Um, this is bad, I just came from the gym: white sockettes, blue basketball shorts, purple t-shirt that I got in 1991, yellow terry headband that I got in 1989, glasses, earrings, braces. This is about as bad as i could possibly look without some sort of disease, I think.

I gave you blood blood / gallons of the stuff

October 3rd, 2007

Memery

Remember back in university, when every fall everyone sent around little questionnaires to all their friends with semi-inane, semi-entertaining queries for you to read their answers to and then answer yourself and forward to all *your* friends. And it was actually a sort of clever concept, except by Christmas exams you’d be getting sick of answering “bacon bits or croutons” and there’d be a million little forwarding arrows all over the emails, and so the thing would die out until the next fall, until graduation from undergrad, when it died out entirely.

Well, not at Rose-coloured it didn’t. I love these, but you’ve got to keep it interesting—I write a new one every year. Not that mine are necessarily fascinating, but at least they’re novel. And I really am very nosy—even if you aren’t thrilled, consider filling one of these out and either commenting it (below) or putting a link in my comment box to where you are posting it, just to entertain me! I really really want to know—to the extent that I won’t post my own answers for a while, so as not to colour the sample.

Let the inanity begin!

1. First car you drove and where you went.
2. Favourite name for a boy.
3. What are the basic components of lasagna, according to you?
4. What could make you move, this month, to another country?
5. Farthest you’ve ever gone on foot (in measurements or by landmark—ie from the Danforth to midtown).
6. I would never have a … for a pet because …
7. Favourite kind of gum / reason why you hate all gum.
8. Favourite name for a girl.
9. Worst tv show you’ve ever liked (that you’ll admit to).
10. What’s your best party trick?
11. Gun to your head: get a non-ear piercing—where?
12. What’s your strength you always brag about in job interviews?
13. What song is in your head?
14. Why do you live in the place you live?
15. Expensive useless item you’d be embarrassed to own, yet sorta wish you did?
16. Last charity you gave to?
17. After you take your laundry out of the drier, what do you do with it?
18. What was the last conversation you had about?
These last ones are oldies from past surveys, but I always want to know and, hey, we’re all evolving.
19. What’s the best thing you can cook?
20. What are you wearing right now?

October 1st, 2007

Thinking aloud

There is a sign up at my work, presumably leftover from a project wherein it would’ve made sense, that says, “Think aloud.” Which is a really useful strategy if you are trying to learn to solve algebraic equations involving who has more apples or when the train from Pittsburgh will crash into the one from Toledo, but probably the exact opposite of what I should be doing. I should *never* think aloud—I talk too much as it is, and though it seems impossible, I actually don’t say *quite* everything I think.

AMT, our lady of the great lack-of-internet-presence, coined the incredibly useful term “exterior monologue” to describe the series of loosely connected neural firings that purport to be “a story” but are in fact leading nowhere except to the point where the speaker runs out of breath. If you are as amusing as AMT, I think it is perfectly all right to tell “stories” that end “And then it was now.” But I studiously try (and thus far fail) to avoid it myself.

This is not some self-deprecating rant about how I think I’m uninteresting—gah, I’m fascinating, obviously. It just really really helps my interesting factor to have a point! A thesis, if you will—I’m wicked good at five-paragraph essays. This is probably part of the same internal mechanism that causes me to learn best in a classroom, work best in an office, perform best on a deadline. Excess freedom is a problem for me, I think.

Which is something of a challenge in blogging, wherein the inherent structure is nothing *but* freedom. Three pages of anti-transit ranting? One word obscenity posts? A list of the contents of your fridge? Sure, whatever. Whatever whatever.

Most of the better blogs impose some sort of structure on themselves, however loose—cultural criticism, reviews, chronicles of a given project, etc., etc. There are few bloggers that can remain fascinating on the “this is what I did today” topic with no larger theme at all. Which is something the team here at Rose-coloured is struggling with. Besides being a fun forum and a good way to let you know about the publications and performances of me and my friends, what is this blog *about*? Huh.

You know who *did* write a wonderful “what I did today” blog? Michael Winter. I won’t be adding this one to the links list, I guess, since it’s no longer being updated, but as it was completely non-topical, you could go read all the back-posts right now and it would be fine and fun. He was blogging in support of his last book, The Big Why, but the prose on the blog is always just the fine tiny details MW writes anywhere, lovely. His new novel, The Architects Are Here is launching this week, under what is one of the better titles I have ever heard, and I am excited. I have no idea what it’s about, though, so once again this post has rambled off. But yeah, Michael Winter=beautiful writer (also a nice human and shockingly tall; he was my teacher once and I was in awe.)

Strike a violent pose
RR

August 16th, 2007

This Linkable Life

I’ve realized that many of the blogs I admire have lots of lovely links embedded in the posts, which save me the trouble of Googling the books, music, events and information that they mention. Not that it’s not easy to Google, or that I really want to see a picture of *every* book cover or celebrity mentioned, but sometimes I do and it’s so *friendly* that someone’s bothered with the HTML to make my life just that much easier.

I’ve been really lazy with the links here, but that’s all about to change!!

As summer winds up, I’ve been a bit spinny with all that needs to get done, but many nice things are also afoot. I bought a couple new (to me, not to the world) cds to celebrate…well, to celebrate having money in my pocket, basically. I haven’t bought cds in ages, all part of my grad-school shopping embargo, so these are especially delightful. One is Get Behind Me Satan by the White Stripes, which is kickass, except I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. It’s not running music, it’s not writing music, it mainly seems to be sit-and-listen music, which I don’t have tonnes of time for. It used to be proofreading music, when I discovered the White Stripes on the shared drive at my old work (that’s so Canadianese, isn’t it? “my work” as a place?)

On the other hand, Blood on the Tracks is all-the-time music. There’s nothing on this album that isn’t intensely hummable, funny and bizarre. Possibly why it’s often referred to as one of the greatest albums ever! I’m sorry it took me my whole life to listen, but whatever, it’s good. Unfortunately, Mr. Dylan is not the *nicest* guy in the world, and his tendency to be snarky is not so soothing in my current state of high anxiety. Nevertheless, I have taken to listening to “Idiot Wind” every morning before I leave the house. That can’t be good.

More links soon, promise promise.

You better take that diamond ring / you better pawn it babe
RR

April 5th, 2007

Linkages

Hmm, so I’ve put up some links. So far the links are only to people I know and journals I’ve been published in. Is it just me who uses the internet primarily as an interactive medium? Really, except for friends’ sites, email, Google and Facebook, I read the occasional journal and that’s it. Ok, and sometimes Television Without Pity (yes, I read tv because I can’t watch it–sad sad sad). I know people who keep totally up on current events, film, music, whatever, but unless I know someone involved personally, I’m not likely to find out anything. How do people get so cyber-connected, and how do they find time? Hmmm…maybe this blog with somehow connect me to the secret internet universe of useful knowledge… I doubt it. Good thing my friends are so interesting.

And it’s not 9:07 am. I’ve really got to fix that.

It’s just the bullets
RR