March 2nd, 2009

Echoes of Awesomeness

That Shakespeherian Rag guy Steven W. Beattie gets charmingly interviewed by Winston the penguin at the Pages Books website. Featuring shocking revelations about martial arts, authors being polite, and Martha Wainwright.

Seen Reading lady Julie Wilson writes a wonderful piece of fairground fiction, Instamatic on Joyland. Featuring nostalgic glimpses of Wack-a-mole, summer sunburn, requests for Queen and sad awkwardness.

And of course, tomorrow night, I’m reading with the Vagabonds at Gallery 1313:

He’s got a date / and I don’t care
RR

January 29th, 2009

The Midcentury Men

Sometimes it seems no book will ever again lodge in my psyche the way the books I read in my teens did. Of those, a disproprotionate number seem to be by white male Americans writing in the middle of the last century. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), John Cheever (1912-1982), J. D. Salinger (b. 1919) and John Updike (1932-2009) were mixed in with plenty of writers who weren’t male, 20th century, American or very good, but I certainly did acquire a lot of my writing-by-imitation lessons from those 4. Even now, I still think about them all the time, despite their differences from each other, and from me.

Of those guys, it’s Updike that I feel most ardently. Maybe because he’s the only one who’s been creatively active in my lifetime (I don’t expect Salinger to publish anything further, other than perhaps a Unibomber-style manifesto, at this point, though when I was 14, I was sure he would). And maybe I’ve so admired Updike’s stories just because he wrote the most like I wanted to write–though I do think most writers come to the page because *no one* writes exactly what we want to read, and we write to fill our own gaps.

What I think Updike had that I want is that penatrating gaze beyond the glaze of the everyday, that ability to full characterize the third person and give a tiny breathing space even in first. Those *voices*, that self-consciousness of characters who, even if they are don’t know they are in a story, know that people are always on view in the world, visible and audible. Updike’s characters can’t stop talking, at least to themselves, especially to themselves. They can’t stop thinking and I can’t stop thinking about them.

All this is by way of saying that I am upset–to a rather surprising extent–that Mr. Updike passed away Monday. I’m sure I’m not old enough to say who my greatest writing influences are–the best idea is likely to not worry about this until I’m dead, and then if anyone’s still interested, they’ll have my collected works to study. Nevertheless, I *feel* like Updike’s with me a lot when I write, although I don’t know that it shows…yet. I can think of specific places in *Once* where there’s that inside-outside doubling voice, but there aren’t very many. Someday, I’m going to finish the book that really does show the influence…not soon, though.

Perhaps Updike is a strange heritage for me to claim, given his somewhat masculine worldview, and his often rarefied settings. Maybe he represented an age, if not a place, that my parents come from, and he felt a paternal figure to me as a writer. I imagine a lot of people felt that way, although maybe not of 30-year-old women who write mainly about people in cities with lousy jobs.

Maybe all I’ll leave all this to whoever still interested after I’m dead, and just concentrate on the many books of Mr. Updike’s I haven’t even read yet. It’s not like I’ll miss hanging out with him, and books are eternal. But I don’t get to scan the table of contents in the New Yorker hoping he’ll be in this week, or hope he’ll somehow get the Nobel eventually, or I dunno, just feel good about all his stories yet to come.

For lack of a better ending, rest in peace.
RR

January 13th, 2009

Rose-coloured Reviews “The Limner” by Julian Barnes

I like to think I’m an astute enough reader to recognize a good story even if it is one that doesn’t appeal to me personally. I’m sure there are flaws in my judgement, things I judge to be objectively bad when in fact it’s just my subjective taste talking, but I do try on that front. Conversely, I try not to let personal pleasure in a story ellide it’s objective flaws. For some reason, the latter task feels tougher than the former.

Julian Barnes’s short story, The Limner, in last week’s New Yorker was delightful reading. It is a Victorian period piece about a travelling artisan, an self-trained portrait painter (that’s what a limner is). It’s lovely, detailed in the specifics of the back and front of house relations and authentic in how only the most “Christian” of clients would treat a travelling artisan as a guest in their homes rather than a servant.

There’s also lots of subtle visual description in this story, doubly emphasized because the protagonist is both a painter and deaf. We get the intricacy of the claw-foot piano and the customs officer’s waistcoat button as Wadsworth works to portray them on the canvas, the limner’s mare “shook her tail against the flies, or impatiently raised her neck.” Barnes does an admirable job of making these elements not just visual beauties but technical challenges of the painter. Barnes is also does much detailed work on facial expressions, because this is principally how Wadsworth understands human communication. Deaf since 5, he has never learned to lip-read or speak, so he relies on notebook to both send and receive communication.

But really, with most people, Wadsworth can “could silently perceive their meaning”: he observes the attitudes of their faces and bodies and divines their hearts, their true values.

Sounds a bit fairy-tale-ish, or at least morality-tale-ish doesn’t it? This isn’t *exactly* relevant, but if you have worked with recent grade-school-level pedagogical materials, you’ll know it’s considered unhelpful for young students to read stories like this, stories that imply a disability in one area confers a perhaps semi-supernatural gift in another. The stereotype of the moral-superhero parapalegic is just damaging and silly as the stereotype of the dumb blond or viscious jock.

The stereotypes and stock characters are pretty thick on the ground in Barnes’s story, though: in addition to the moral and perceptive deaf artist, there is Mr. Tuttle, the customs officer who poses for his portrait. He’s a customs officer and ungenerous, argumentative, undignified, self-important–shock! And a garden boy who is simple and sweet, “an elf with eyes of burnt umber.”

The resolution of the story is nearly contained in the fourth paragraph. We know in the first that the customs officer is awful, Wadsworth deaf, devout and humble. Then, we learn “And then there had been that incident on the third evening, against which he had failed—or felt unable—to protest. It had made him sleep uneasily. It had wounded him, too, if the truth were known.” An action against the child by the customs officer, we learn straightaways too, and what to be done about it?

I won’t, I guess, reveal what exactly, but suffice to say that no character goes against type or expectation, and that the end is quite satisfying in a fairy-tale way. It was very pleasant reading both because I like Victorian fiction (yes, yes, me, your high-school English teacher and your great-aunt Elsbeth) and because I like fairness. And the level of detail and colour was high and lovely.

But really, I think that’s all there was–nothing surprising or challenging or at all beyond the level of pleasant. Which is really hardly what I’d expect from a *New Yorker* short story. A momentary pleasure, quickly forgotten. How shocking.

I did my best to make it / when the call came down the line
RR

January 2nd, 2009

I win!

Yes! I have read The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories in its entirety: all the introductory materials, biographical and copyright notes, and every word of every story. Ask me anything; I’m full to bursting with Canadian short stories!

My relationship with this book is *intense*–I read it pretty steadily, if not quickly, for over a month, sprawling by a day into a second calendar year. The relationship is pretty physical, too; since my reading is done in myriad locales and often in transit, I’ve been carrying this book on my person quite a bit. Once it’s on you, you don’t forget about the PBCSS, for though the kitchen scale says it weights only two pounds, I suspect strongly that my kitchen scale is broken and it weighs six or seven.

Oh, it’s been epic, the affair of PBCSS and I: I ordered the first copy from the library, got curry on the pages, took it on a Via train, a Greyhound bus, several Go trains and busses, and more TTC subways, streetcards and busses than you can imagine. Then the library recalled the book, I ordered a new copy, got chocolate on the pages, got back on the trains and busses. To impress a writer I admire, I carried the anthology (and many other things) down 22 flights of stairs and across town. I read it in a bar, in bed and at my desk; I told everyone I was reading it (and no one cared). I used it to flatten wrinkles when I was to lazy to iron, to start a conversation and to end one.

And now I win, because I’ve read it all and I can STOP CARRYING IT AROUND.

Actually, I won by reading. I have no regrets–the PBCSS is not pure pleasure, but the vast majority of the stories contained therein *are* pleasures, and I really enjoyed reading them, even when my wrists were throbbing from holding the damn thing upright.

It’s not that I disagree with my comrades at the Salon des Refuses: it is deeply dismaying that so many brilliant story artists have been left out of the collection, and that they are so many of them stylistic innovators speaks of unhelpful blinkering. It was in fact only my reading of the Salon issues of *The New Quarterly* and *Canadian Notes and Queries* that made me want to read the PBCSS. Reading 20 brilliant and wildly different stories back to back, with appreciations and background notes was such a joyful education that I thought maybe I should think more about anthologies (which I hadn’t really thought about at all outside of school).

I read (I think) everything that was published about the Salon, almost always agreed with the agitators without anything interesting to add, got interviewed more than once without anything interesting to say (someday those tapes will surface), and finally I read the damn PBCSS. When I did, I was thrilled by the stories, but my feelings were truly hurt, and hurt on behalf of my heroes and mentors in the world of short stories, by some of the editorial comments. That this anthology was trying to “open up and make more interesting the definition of the short story” by calling memoir and novel fragments into the fold, rather than by paying homage to the artistry and innovation of people were actually working in the form made my hair puff up. But that’s already been discussed, many times in many places.

I did come up with some criticisms of my own that no one else mentioned, maybe because they are not interesting. Nevertheless, I’ll share them:
–who decided not to date the stories? and to put the bio notes at the end, in story order, *separate from* the copyright notes, which are then in alphabetical order? Call me crazy, but I care who the people are wrote these stories, when and where they were writing, and at what point in their careers these pieces were published! The bio notes also seemed not to have been proofread (the main text of the book was fine)–a weird oversight–there were actually a couple lines missing at the bottom of pages.
–why is there more than one piece by several authors? no explanation is offered, and while with Alice Munro none is needed, the others are…really random.
–how, I wonder, do Munro, Mavis Gallant and Merna Summers feel about being the only three of our “literary mothers and fathers” in the book’s last section who aren’t dead?
–alarming that the anthologist would suggest that short story writers are “singing in pure voice simply because they feel there is a need for music, a need for song.” You show me a writer of *anything* who doesn’t feel he or she has something to say, and I’ll show you someone who should get out of the business.
–Only *one* section of the book is introduced as containing stories that leave readers with “[o]ur view of the world altered, darkened or enlarged; certain faiths have been strengthened, others have been shaken loose…[and feeling that] something else, equally arresting and believable, is more than likely going to happen very soon.” What, one wonders, are all the other stories trying to do?

These are, I think, real issues, yet they won’t really matter to the average college English student, book-group member, auto-didact storyphile, who will look at the stories that have been recommended or assigned, read and delight, and then maybe read the next story and delight in that also.

Because, despite some questionable curation and a few duds, the vast majority of these stories are very very good!! Many I’d read before, but it’d been too long and I was thrilled to see “Gypsy Art” and “Joe in the Afterlife” and “The Lonely Goatherd” again, and so very many others. And there were so many to me *new* stories in this collection, “Vision” and “The Friend” and “Catechism.” It was such a joy to go from strength to strength like this, to find the stories lighting each other up. “And the Children Shall Rise”!! “Horses of the Night”!!

The reason, I think, that it’s so shocking that certain stories are included in the PBCSS for reasons of PCness or quirkyness and not quality is that *most* of them *were* chosen for quality, and the juxtoposition is jarring. Adrienne Poy’s “Ring Around October” is tepid, but hardly appalling, until you place it next to Caroline Adderson’s brilliant “And the Children Shall Rise.” Then you see a problem.

Despite its many flaws, despite the fact that I’m upset by some of the suppositions that the editorial notes make, I feel that most of the stories themselves succeed in what should have been the book’s goal: the glorification of innovative, intelligent, artful, heartful, tightly controlled and deeply resonant short story writing in Canada. I’m happy to be a tiny part of that project, and I look forward to the next, better, more comprehensive and respectful anthology that will come next from Canada’s wealth of talent. I hope the bruise on my hip from carrying this one in my bag will have healed by that point.

The starmaker says it’s not so bad
RR

December 30th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews “Dead Girls” by Nancy Lee

It seems somewhat vulgar to summarize as delicate and precise and elliptical a story as Nancy Lee’s “Dead Girls,” from her 2003 collection of the same name. But such is the task of the reviewer, so:

We begin with a woman unhappily trying to come to grips with both the television news on a serial killer of prostitutes, and then the impending sale of her home. We learn first that the home must be sold due to the financial difficulties of the woman and her husband, then that it is her husband who is pushing for this solution. Only after these facts of their relationship are established is the character of their daughter introduced–they seem to have bankrupted themselves paying for rehabilitation treatment for her.

Gradually, it emerges that the girl, Clare, is not in the house, that the treatment has not worked, that her whereabouts are unknown. Gradually, it emerges that she is herself probably a prostitute, and that that is the central reason for her mother’s horror at the news reports on the unidentified bodies of prostitutes found in a mass grave. The mother watches the news compulsively, waiting to see if her daughter will be one of the dead. She struggles with the idea of packing up the girl’s clothes, books and stuffed animals before they move. She prowls the red-light district of her city, watching the prostitutes there offer their wares, always imaging each as Clare.

Yeah, see: vulgar, sensationalistic in summary, but tender and horrifying in full. I use terms like “gradually it emerges” because Lee does not trade in the shocking turn of events, the explicit reveal–instead she insert the reader in a life already going on, and leaves us the task of interpretting our surroundings. What the reader picks up on at what point depends on who that reader is, what sorts of details he or she is attuned to.

The writer seeks to immerse the reader as fully as possible in the story-scape: “Dead Girls” is written in the second person singular, the alway- imposing “you” is the protagonist, the one who navigates these tragedies and despairs. If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, or indeed, if you’ve ever read a bad second-person story, you know how dangerous it is for a writer to make this choice–the attempt to conscript the reader into the story, if it fails, usually takes the whole piece down with it. If the reader won’t go where she/he is being shoved, he or she is left sitting in his or her living room with a book in hand, and that’s all.

I don’t usually like to be shoved: I balked slightly as soon as I saw the first line, “You are addicted to television news,” although I was willing to try to get into it. Quickly, I got why this was going to work: this is a protagonist who wants desperately out of her own situation, and out of her own body. Much as you might try projecting onto a listener when trying to explain a badly chosen action–“You know when you just panic and yank the wheel into oncoming traffic?”–this “you” could easily be the “I” of self-abnegating first-person narrator.

Does that explanation make sense?

It did to me, and still there were problems on first reading. I read too fast and got confused, thought it was the husband that was in rehab, had to go back. Again, I wound up ok with this, the in medias rez opening on a scenario to which there *isn’t* a logical explanation necessitating a certain amount of dislocation for reader and characters alike. The writing is spare and sure, it pulled me in eventually, into the quotidian details of disaster like, “…your husband is in the driveway in gloves and a toque, washing his car in the freezing cold. He offers to wash yours” and “You felt a small stab in your chest as if someone had slid a safety pin through your heart.”

The story takes its time, things evolve as slow as real life. When the central character sets up a continuous-play stereo in Clare’s locked room, the music resounds in the house for days as “a surrogate heartbeat,” an illustration of the narrator’s clinging to illusion, the return of the daughter of the shining eighth-grade portrait, not the grim and damaged teenager she is now. The protagonist often mishears, or doesn’t hear at all, what her husband says to her, and she is content with that; she won’t try harder, turn down the volume, accept his growing acceptance of the loss.

(How do you feel about reviews that tell what happens in the second half? Even if the piece is not overtly “suspenseful”, I still find kinda weird about revealing how it ends up. Yet I also feel I can’t really talk about the story satisfactorily without covering all the events therein. Consider yourself warned.)

To me, I think the story comes to be about the husband and the wife, and whether they can salvage anything of their love and their shared life without the physical manifestation of that love, their offspring. And thus, it hinges to a great extent around sex. There’s a long paragraph early in the story about why the bereft parents have stopped having sex, referring to Clare’s fate as rooted in her conception, “…an unspeakable crime…the shrouded crapshoot of chromosomes. So much easier to believe it all went wrong back then…” This paragraph steadily gains weight as we move through story, absorbing the misery of the sex acts ministered and absorbed by the working girls, by Clare herself, as her mother well knows.

When we come back to the sexual relationship of the parents at the end of the story, it is terribly sad, but—again, this will depend on who is reading—I thought cathartic. The story seems to question whether love is love when its object is lost; if love unrequited metastisizes, or can it still be salvaged as something worthwhile. I think the ending offers at least the possibility of hope.

Even if I tip my head and reimagine the ending as despairing, I still think this story is compelling, gripping, and not unlovely portrayal of those eternal twins, love and loss.

Like me if you will
RR

December 27th, 2008

Admirable Words (III)

The truth is that like all great French generals and statesmen, I am a man of action by default. My real vocation was to be a writer but my early stories were rejected by corrupt monarchist editors who wished to suppress the truth about Corsica. Before they went to the blade, my poems were taped to their mouths. Now I feel most myself in the night silence of my tent, the candles sputtering, the white paper stretching out in creamy reams softer than the eyeball of an empress. My letters to Josephine, my diaries of war, but most of all the words unwritten, the vast armies that have sunk into the whiteness of paper like my troops into the snow of the endless Russian plains.

Lost, yes, because words cannot equal the splendour of these pre-dawn hours, the wonder of being alone in a tent near tomorrow’s battlefield. Outside my canvas the starry sky sparkles over the heads of my sleeping troops, four hundred thousand men lurching towards the dawn, toward the first light that will jerk them awake, full of fear and hunger and that wild chaos only I can harness, only I can turn into an orderly hurricane of violence that will send them flying into the enemy, hacking and being hacked until their skins split, their bones shatter, their blood masses in stinking pools slowly draining to dark patches on the earth so at the end of the day, as the sun sets on the dead and the dying, as the cries of the wounded rise above the surgeons’ saws and the hasty whispered prayers of my priests, I, Napoleon, repulsed, sated, sick at heart, fulfilled, I will mourn the great unconscious mass of men who sleep around me now; I will mourn their dead and crippled horses, their orphans, the rivers of wine they will never drink, the aging flesh their hands will never know. Monster, yes, that is the title with which history will reward me, but I am most at home in my lonely simple tent, doing the job that has been left to me, the manufacture of dreams and nightmares, sending my word-rich armies onto their pages of snow, letting them cancel and slaughter each other until all that remains is a brief and elegant poem, a few nostalgic blood-tinted lines limping towards eternity, yes, that’s how I want to be remembered, bleeding and limping in rags across the snow, or even forget the blood, the rags, the snow, the limp. Just me.

–Matt Cohen’s “Napoleon in Moscow,” from Getting Lucky

December 6th, 2008

The Gang

Last night in my mailbox: Diane Schoemperlen, K.D. Miller, Mark Anthony Jarman, Cynthia Flood and many more (including me–amazing) in Best Canadian Stories 08. So much awesome, all in one place!

Let me know if your heart’s still beating
RR

December 5th, 2008

Rose-coloured Reviews “Bookkeeping” by Harold Brodkey

This story is glittering, minute, precisely accurate, and very amusingly devastating. Can you say words like “amusing” and “glittering” about a story that concerns the psychological scars and ethnic alienation wrought by the legacy of World War II? Probably; in 2008, you can say most anything.

In 1968, when Harold Brodkey fisrt published this story in The New Yorker it might have been harder to have been so damn funny about anti-Semitism and LSD, not to mention terror-bombing. But then again, those things would also have been closer, more intimately relatable issues than in our own time; the story feels both dated and shocking in it’s head-on address of “drugs, Jews, and Germans”–the three search terms the *New Yorker* uses for it in it’s archive.

So let us lay out the Germans, the Jews and the drug-users: Avram is having his old, rich and generous friend, Louise, over for cocktails in order to meet her new husband, Ulrich. Avram is Jewish, Ulrich is German, Louise is midwestern and huffy. Early in the evening, another friend of Avram’s (unknown to the other two) named Annetje, calls: she is having a bad LSD trip, scared she will throw herself out a window, and Dutch. She wants Avram to come over and comfort her, but Avram is afraid Louise will feel “slighted” (this word comes up over and over) if he leaves her. He compromises by inviting Annetje to join the party and, when she balks, offering to walk the two blocks to her place and escort her back.

“Bookkeeping” is the third story in Brokey’s massive midcareer collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. The first two are also about Americans who are perilously over-weighted with European history, but unlike the first two, this one isn’t set there, and thus there is (in my opinion) less paralysis, more action, and more relatability for a modern reader who finds herself curiously *un*freighted by European history.

Annetje endured terrible suffering in the Netherlands and then Italy during the Second World War, and since her post-war immigration, been a “temperamental coward,” at least in Avram’s eyes. Terribly beautiful, she can capture any man’s attention, but she wants only someone who will make her feel save and taken care of, without any risk.

The irony of the story is the “bookkeeping” of the title, the system of ethical deposits and withdrawals that Avram keeps with the universe: will he debit compassion or gratitude, choose Annetje’s terrible vulnerability or Louise’s polite tunnel-vision? Does Avram the American owe Annetje his time because she suffered in Europe, or does he owe Louise because she has leant him money? How immoral is it for him to try to have his cake and eat it too, to bring both women together for the benefit of (mainly) only himself?

We all do this in weak moments (at least, I hope we do): calculate who we can afford not to talk, to pay attention to, to be kind to. But Annetje’s suffering has both a social aspect, since she speaks out of bounds in this firmly repressed environment, and a historical one, since her Dutch suffering points up Ulrich’s German complicity and Louise’s American isolation…and Avram’s Jewish guilt.

Or does it? The story’s brilliance lies not in one-to-one correspondences of metaphor, but it complicated and disrupted metaphors, paradigms of national identity that may prove to be faulty, or ridiculous. Does the fact that Ulrich is an officious jerk have anything to do with his being German? Wouldn’t Louise still be alcholic and judgemental if she were born in Paraguay? Or do their environments strengthen the inborn characteristics? Or what?

Big questions, the lot of them, and a lot of ground covered for 20something pages (which qualifies for “long short-story” status, but is by no means one of Brodkey’s longer works). It’s an intense piece, but not a heavy one because, unlike the others mentioned here, there’s tonnes of dialogue, rapier-thin and rapier-sharp, to aerate all the soul-searching. I’ve actually never seen anything like this:

….[Avram] pointed his finger savagely. “What are you afraid of? Why are you jealous of Annetje experimenting with self-illumination?”

“I am not jealous.”

“Oh, you do not want this experience,” Annetje said vaguely. “It is terrible. My teeth burn like little fires.”

“I am not jealous or defensive. I am protesting this trampling on what it means to be a responsible human being.”

“Except when drunk,” Avram said, slyly relentless.

“Except what when drunk, please?” Ulrich asked. Annetje was staring into space.

“Responsible, darling,” Louise said to him.

“Yes, I believe in that,” Ulrich said.

“Even for crimes during the war?” Avram demanded, turning on him.

“And what of Vietnam?” Ulrich replied instantly.

“You can compare Vietname, deplorable as it is, to the camps?”

“The camps?” said Annetje, terrified.

“I am sick of the camps,” Lousie said.

“Bad conscience,” Avram said. “If I had any backbone, I would refuse to speak to you ever.”

“You do not look Jewish,” Ulrich said.

What a really inglorious evening, Avram thought. He said, “Isn’t that wonderful? But you can tell I’m Jewish because I’m so brilliant.”

“Oh, yes,” Ulrich said agreeably.

!!

There are four people in this room and everyone’s talking, everyone’s alive and miserable and full of their own personal histories and hates. It’s wretched and it’s funny, and the way these characters only believe in the realities they can cope with makes me wonder about the nature of human morality.

Which every story doesn’t accomplish, I don’t think.

This story is dated, certainly, but because the emotional sleight-of-hand is so carefully nuanced, and the dialogue so sharp, both still ring true. And with those paths into the story, we can begin to understand these characters and their milieu, to learn both how far we’ve come since then, and how far we haven’t.

Yeah you gotta help me out / don’t you put me on the back burner
RR

December 2nd, 2008

The Short Story’s Moment of Mystic Expansion

“The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself.

–From Steven Millhauser’s *NYT Book Review* essay, The Ambition of the Short Story

This essay was part of Bruce Johnstone’s presentation at the Waterloo reading last week, and it was joyful news indeed. The writing little high flown at times (takes a few swipes at the novel, a perfectly respectable form of prose) but it also reminds a story reader and/or writer of the possibilities and responsibilities of this beautiful form. I don’t understand the picture of the cow, actually. Do you?

When Johnny saw the numbers he lied
RR

November 6th, 2008

Everyone is awesome today

1) Today Fred reminds us all that she predicted Tuesday’s historic victory for Obama in July 2004. Today *I* would like to remind you all that I have been saying since the 90s that Fred is a genius, so really, reflected glory ought be mine. I predict further that somehow (from behind the scenes, most like) Fred also will do great things for government. Check back in 4.

2) Evie Christie‘s Desk Space is always awesome for literary voyeurism, but Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer‘s entry is bonus good because it not only talks about what she’s working on, it features a clip!

3) The new issue of The New Quarterly arrived last night, packed with goodness, including the much anticipated “On a Picnic” by the amazing Kerry Clare.

I am well pleased with our universe at the moment, what with all of the above, plus a democratic president-elect, plus 15-degree weather in November, plus…oh, maybe I’ll have some pudding now!

You’re in then you’re out
RR