April 22nd, 2012

Me, around

So it’s getting to be a post a week, these days–which is sad, but at least I’m busy with cool stuff. Well, some cool stuff–I also spent a good part of last week and the week before having a mental breakdown over my non-functional printer. This goes back over a year, when I accidentally mailed the power cord to my perfectly functional printer to Bell along with my modem when I stopped using it. Then my beloved bought me a new printer, which was not compatible with my operating system. Then I traded him for his printer, which was compatible, but promptly broke. Then the manufacturer offered to mail me a replacement printer as part of the warrenttee. That one was also broken. So was the replacement replacement printer. Here is pretty much where the breakdown happened. The third printer to arrive in the mail works, at least a little bit. My standards are pretty low at this point, I my advice is not to buy Kodak printers.

But I digress!! There’s way better stuff to talk about…like

–a nice review of The Big Dream in The Uptown. If you click on the link, you will see a headline of Don DiLillo’s *The Angel Esmerelda*, but if you scroll down the second half is the TBD review (which also draws on an interview I did out in Winnipeg last fall). Besides, DiLillo’s book really deserves 100% of the headline, anyway–if you haven’t read it, very recommended, by both the reviewer and me!

–Shawn Syms published an interesting article in *The Toronto Review* on fiction and social media, which referenced work by Zoe Whittal, Jessica Westhead and yours truly, among others. I’m in such good company these days.

–I’ll be taking a trip to Waterloo on Tuesday to speak to some high-school students about writing from real life (yeah, as if I know how!) and getting (I hope) to hear about what they are up to.

So yeah, RR 3, Printer 1. Well, that’s how I choose to score it.