December 5th, 2007

More to like

A retro list from Kerry, circa 2003.

171 Cardigans
172 Red Shoes
173 My hair
174 Pop Music
175 Consumerism
176 Books
177 Oral sex
178 Canada
179 Peanut M&Ms
180 Ducks
181 The Spice Girls
182 Bob Geldof
183 Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
184 kitchens
185 Christmas
186 Eastenders
187 The Beatles
188 Snowglobes
189 Toronto
190 Films based on Nick Hornby novels
191 Duran Duran
192 Sleeping
193 Pineapple
194 Crowded House
195 Sheep
196 Telephones
197 Stew
198 The Saturday Guardian
199 The Sunday Times
200 The Observer
201 The Globe and Mail
202 Quilts
203 Knitting
204 Cher
205 Pizza Hut
206 Greek Salad
207 Vanity Fair
208 Kit Kat
209 Musical Theatre
210 Dar Williams
211 Sheffield
212 Adrian Mole
213 Summer
214 Dirty Dancing
215 Trains
216 The Seaside
217 Dinner parties
218 Mail
219 Free things
220 The Internet
221 Sweet and Sour Chicken Balls
222 Fruit Salad
223 Photo Albums
224 Babies
225 Airplanes
226 Swimming
227 The Movies
228 Cats
229 Bikes
230 Compilations
231 The Simpsons
232 Folk music
233 Grease
234 Banana bread
235 Cheese
236 Long weekends
237 Hungary
238 Summer cottages
239 Swings
240 Markets
241 Zebras
242 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
243 Books in brown paper bags
244 Public libraries
245 Terrace houses
246 Tomatoes
247 The Beer Store
248 Good pens
249 John Cusack
250 Miffy
251 Green Tea
252 Suitcases
253 Learning
254 Horizontal
255 Stationary
256 Lists
257 Flowers
258 Liquorice
259 Scrapbooks

December 4th, 2007

1000 Things in 2007

So here’s how it works–everything is valid, even if there is dissent–as long as someone likes it enough to contribute to the list, it counts. Except for sneaky negatives–no fair putting “people who don’t steal my parking space.”

The following are courtesy of my lovely colleagues over lunch, Penny and Ian over dinner, and myself at intervals. Read, enjoy, and *add*!!!

1) empathy
2) oranges
3) puppies
4) fur in general
5) oxygen
6) nitrogen
7) the moon
8) the game Apples to Apples
9) the police (civil servants)
10) The Police (band)
11) firemen and -women
12) good grammar
13) em-dashes
14) apple pie
15) pecan pie
16) the Loch Ness Monster
17) sharks
18) Shark Week on the Discovery Channel
19) cephalopods
20) cafeterias that don’t mind giving you a free fork
21) fresh-baked croissants
22) found money in last year’s coat
23) Winona Ryder
24) juice boxes
25) carrots
26) the Festive Special at Swiss Chalet
27) stockings
28) stalking (friendly)
29) Christmas
30) Bon Jovi
31) big movie popcorn sizes
32) the sun
33) Martha Stewart
34) crafts
35) yoghurt cake
36) non-bill mail
37) festive stamps
38) pennies
39) foreign mail
40) intercontinental travel
41) unlimited long-distance
42) extra bacon
43) pizza
44) when strangers share their umbrellas
45) lip balm
46) cake in general
47) snowflakes
48) the beach
49) ski chalets
50) sports
51) the Olympics
52) friends
53) teamwork
54) goldfish (cracker)
55) goldfish (pet)
56) cottages
57) pistachios
58) Scrabble
59) toasted marshmallows
60) recliners
61) finding something you want on sale
62) argyle
63) 4:45 in the afternoon
64) finding a subway token
65) running into friends
66) shoes
67) chocolate milk
68) popsicles
69) babies in hats
70) America’s Funniest Home Videos
71) cereal box prizes
72) typography/fonts
73) crunching through fresh snow
74) falling unexpectedly (w/o pain)
75) Coke Zero
76) Extra Bubblemint
77) Ice skating
78) snowboarding
79) getting your braces off
80) biting dental wax
81) picking glue off your hands
82) butter-pecan flavoured coffee
83) glitter
84) playing hooky
85) Tim Hortons
86) Smile Cookies
87) the universe
88) Across the Universe (film)
89) stars
90) needing a smaller size of clothes
91) freckles
92) glasses
93) shiny hair
94) socks
95) laughing until gasping
96) waking up before the alarm
97) playing fetch
98) the plough position (yoga)
99) little girl ballerinas
100) slippers (all varieties)
101) kisses (all varieties)
102) watching a penguin fall down
103) whale watching
104) dolphins
105) porpoises
106) home
107) redecorating
108) photographs
109) parasailing
110) paintball
111) big tails
112) free gift with purchase
113) napkin origami
114) maps
115) naps
116) sleeping in
117) Nintendo Wii
118) sailing
119) databases
120) shopping
121) leaving early
122) babies’ feet
123) call display
124) call waiting
125) iPods
126) scarves
127) grass
128) hide-n-seek
129) swings
130) sand
131) airports
132) Love Actually (film)
133) sticky flags
134) Ferris wheels
135) people with perfect pitch
136) cello
137) Douglas Adams
138) kittens
139) Secret Optimum Points Day
140) Red Lobster
141) birthdays
142) balloons
143) hockey
144) fireworks
145) Splenda
146) dinner theatre
147) dinner parties
148) concerts
149) good health
150) Visa Dividend
151) after dinner mints
152) crab legs
153) Clinique Bonus Time
154) crafting
155) Mom’s cooking
156) sweet potatoes
157) nieces and nephews
158) nanaimo bars
159) bear claw ice-cream
160) blackberries
161) picking blackberries
162) silk
163) cashmere
164) lying on the floor
165) bubble baths
166) pottery
167) getting jokes
168) visiting with friends
169) CBC3
170) Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan

1000 Things in 2002

If you read the comments here at Rose-coloured, you might have noticed a while back that Fred mentioned a doing a 5-year anniversary edition of 1000 Things We Like. This is clearly the best idea in the world, and though Fred is now somewhere on the European continent finding new things to like, I thought I’d get the ball rolling with some sentimental memories.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: in the summer of 2002, I read a novel which, while being otherwise rather good, was principally about adults, and the 12-year-old girls in the background were treated dismissively, especially when they started working on a list of 1000 things they liked. I *hate* it when adults are shown to be intrinsically more interesting than kids (which is why I hate The Gilmore Girls and I like positive endeavours and I wanted to make such a list with my friends, though we were adults.

Fred agreed with her characteristic enthusiasm, and so did countless others of our shared and separate circles. We began in late October and finished well before Christmas. Reading over the old list the past few days, I have been positively misty over the passage of time, the tenacity of friends and the no-end of goodness that there is in the world. I thought of putting the whole list up here, but that would probably break blogger, so below is just a random sampling, for inspiration. I’ll start the new list in the next post, and from then on, please feel free to add to it in the comments or by email. Even though we’re starting way later this time, perhaps we could still do it by Christmas??? Come back, Fred!!!!

All of New York City misses you
RR

585) kittens when they are so young their eyes are still blue
586) the Christmas displays at Pottery Barn
587) remembering an obscure tv programme with someone else who loved it once, too
588) the dreidel song
589) craisins
590) when you don’t understand and don’t understand and suddenly, like a flash, you do
591) how cheap long distance is these days
592) good complexion days
593) thick cotton tights
594) purging your closet down to only stuff you actually like
595) baking cookies for no reason other than enjoying the process of baking
596) very complicated notes to yourself that only you can understand
597) spearmint Trident
598) when the SNL cast loses concentration and giggles

You could say it’s my own damn fault

…for being cheap enough to buy the bottom-of-the-line coffeemaker, or being clumsy enough to smash the carafe by hitting it with a hot tray of corn muffins, or being weak enough to get addicted to caffeine, but I still think it’s stupid and unfair that Westinghouse doesn’t sell a replacement carafe for the cheapest coffeemaker on the market. Unfair to the cheap and clumsy and caffeine-addicted, I guess. Anyway, I now have a coffeemaker I could give you free of charge, never been used, as long as you can provide your own carafe. Hit me up, yo!

Who taught you to live like that?
RR

December 3rd, 2007

What I Don’t Know

A quick cruise of my favourite blogs indicates that it’s year-end best-book lists that are currently fascinating and irritating people (if people-I-know are reasonably representative sample of people-at-large, which they probably aren’t). Since I need to update my links list anyway, and there’s this copacetic (not a word? unsure) moment, let me introduce you to Thirsty: A Biblioasis Miscellany is a blog run by Daniel Wells for Biblioasis press, but occasionally guest-written by authors from the press. It’s about the books, obviously, but also about Canadian publishing, poetry, grants, reviews, translation and a host of other things that I know a lot about *in theory* and yet am contunually surprised by in real life. Thirsty is a great window into how (hard) you work to get books into the world, and it’s written with such consistent passion that it also reminds you why someone would.

Steven W. Beattie at That Shakespearian Rag is at the other end of the food chain, a consumate reader and reviewer of books. I have to admit that I have trouble keeping up when I read that blog, because not only have I not read most of the books under review, I have often not read that reference points to which they are compared, the reviews that Mr. Beattie is in dialogue with, or the awards he is in agreement or dispute with. Sometimes this blog makes me feel dumb, but it is also highly educational, and the writing is interesting and broad enough that you can learn starting from square one if you have to. It’s also sometimes pretty funny, and always well-written, and we both liked *Michael Clayton*.

Both these gentlemen have been commenting on year-end booklists, as I say, and so has my touchstone of the book-reviewing universe, Ms. Clare at Pickle Me This. I would encourage you to read all three and then, if you are like me, strongly consider but not actually get around to finding the actual list somewhere.

I wrote the thesis
RR

December 1st, 2007

December 1

Yes, I know Blogger will apply the date for me, but this is a date that requires a header, too! It’s the beginning of the silly season (I think New Yorkers apply that to an entirely different time of year, but oh well) when shopping is a serious pursuit and everyone’s always about to go to a party and no gets anything done at work because all the key people are away on vacation. I think enough Christmas carols, or nearly enough, have now been written that we might be able to get through the season without hearing any given one (or version of one) more than eleven times, but who cares if we do?

Things are shiny in Rose-coloured land. I got out the Hannukkah hand towels last night (it has gold embroidery floss on the candle flames!)

Two things to do today, being posted way too late, but no one’s really free today anyway. But if you were, you could go to:

Friday, November 30, 2007
CITY OF CRAFT ESSENTIALS
WHAT: City of Craft
WHO: 60+ craft vendors, community groups, installation artists & workshop leaders
WHEN: Saturday December 1, 2007, 11am-8pm
WHERE: The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen Street West at Dovercourt (enter in the blue doors on Dovercourt).

Possibly followed by a staged reading of
THE HOUSE OF MANY TONGUES by Jonathan Garfinkel
With Hrant Alianak, Maev Beaty, David Fox, Janick Hebert, Daniel Karasik, Julian Richings
A house in Jerusalem, 2003, is home to Israeli General Shimon, and his 16 year old son Alex, who’s busy trying to bring peace to the Middle East through improved sexual techniques. When Palestinian writer Abu Dalo returns to the house he left 40 years ago, pursued by his long-lost daughter, we realize somehow these four people are going to have to live together – if they don’t kill each other first.

Whatever you do, I hope it’s great day! Really, though, it could hardly miss.

A very shiny nose (like a lightbulb)
RR

November 30th, 2007

Tapping out

What’s really been bothering me lately is the expression “tapped out.” Where does it come from? I always assumed that it came from wrestling: when a man is pinned and gives up unpinning himself, he taps the other wrestler to indicate his surrender. But then, when you come to the end of a long grey day and realize that you haven’t the strength for even one more useful task, shouldn’t you say, “I’ve tapped out,” or “I’m tapping out,” as opposed to what one does say, which is “I’m tapped out.”

That grammar would indicate that the etymology (can you have etymology of a phrase?) is rooted in a beer keg. When you pour beer from a keg you tap it, and when it’s empty it’s tapped out, right? (obviously, I’m way out of my depth here) Then the conjugation makes sense, because when you say “I’m tapped out” you are just substituting yourself for the beer keg, you being empty of energy, not beer.

But three dictionaries neither confirm nor deny this hypothesis (including Canadian Oxford!) and the definition of an expression is distressingly hard to Google. Now I’m worried I’ve made the whole thing up, and in fact no one says “tap out” in any context, ever, except me!

You know, I think I am. Tapped out, I mean. It’s been a really long week. Perhaps I’ll leave this question for better minds than mine, and go do something fun.

Can you bring me back a cardinal from Kentucky?
RR

PS–My orthodonist unexpectedly announced this morning that I don’t have to wear my retainer during the day anymore. Unexpectedly because he’d said before that it would be maybe as much as six months before I’d have this luxury. I think he gave me the worst case scenario because he knows I don’t take disappointment too well, but I take unexpected good news very well. Despite my exhaustion, I am ebullient. I went right to the dep and bought gum, Raspberry Extra, which is repulsive, but which I am chewing right now for the lack of anything else. On my way to the fun, I’ll buy something better.

November 28th, 2007

Milk Subjectivity

My thwarted attempt at laziness last night was to skip the grocery store in favour of picking up expensive milk at the convenience store. Thwarted because I wound up going to *four* convenience stores looking for skim milk. Granted, I was looking for the four-litre size, due to my terror of osteoporosis, but that didn’t seem like *that* unreasonable of a request.

As I stomped about in the wind and snow (but who wears a thin jersey dress in November just because some part of her brain declared Tuesday “cute tights day”), I thought about how much I loathe milk with fat in it. Even diluted by coffee I can still feel the thickness catch in my throat. And, oh my goodness, we are embarking on the season of egg nog. It’s so…viscous. I like the *flavour* of nog–I’ll eat one of those yellow candy canes quite happily. But, ew, no, the “liquid” form is the consistency of…well. Thin milk 4-eva!

I have lived long enough to know that there is no “good” kind of milk–most people just like whatever they drank growing up and find everything else disgusting (which sucks especially for those who grew up on farms drinking unpasteurized milk, which is now illegal to sell in Ontario for reasons that…make no sense). Milk is totally subjective–and unless you drink table cream by the glass, I think it’s all pretty good for you. I think *all* the percentages should be available in stores, naturally, but I don’t really think there’s an argument available to be won.

My point, sorta, is about how I think I’m getting more mature, because I’m able to extend that sort of relativism (such a dirty word, but some things *are* relative) to things I used to be quite strident about. Fiction, for example–more and more I find myself able to recognize quality prose when I actually don’t personally enjoy it. And I’ll also *read* it, which is a big step for me. Not that I think it’s somehow virtuous of me to drag myself through tomes I hate, but there’s lots to be learned outside of the narrow spectrum of the tried and true. I get to the end and say, “Wow, that was an impressive thing to write, I could never write that. I would never want to write that, but I do wish I could do certain things that this author did.” But not out loud of course, because I’m usually reading on the bus.

Of course, there are things that are objectively bad–sour milk, prose by the light of the moon, those sorts of things. Not everything is relative.

November 27th, 2007

An open (love) letter to John K. Samson

It’s a funny thing: I also want to call requests through heating vents. I also sometimes find myself feeling like a float in a summer parade, or a girl in a Miss Somewhere sash. You seem to understand those things you shouldn’t miss. Also days that don’t like us, when all you want to do is drink and watch tv, though the sunlight demands action. You’ve got words for a lot of things I really feel have been needing words, like the 18 North Main and sinks full of bottles and cultery. I really think we could have a good conversation, if we were ever together in an all-night restaurant in a brand-new strip mall, killing time and communicating in questions. I’d like to ask you about the blinking snow in Winnipeg and whether wishing on the pop of a lightbulb actually works. I’d like to tell you that, if I believed in tears, I’d cry at hospital vespers. I think that you write music somebody could use. So, if we ever do meet, let the waitress put the chairs up, and we can talk about the weather, or how the weather used to be.

I’m so glad that you exist
RR

PS—John K. Samson is the lead singer and, more importantly, the lyricist for the wonderful Winnipeg band, The Weakerthans. Almost any song you could think of by that band, or Samson solo, will be an almost perfect poem or short story set to music. The above is a blender of some of my favourite lines—none of it’s mine except the pronouns and verb conjugations, in case there was any doubt.
PPS—It’s a purely *professional* love letter, of a striving writer to an admired one. John K. Samson is married to Christine Fellows who is actually a similarly brilliant lyricist, of lines like “A photo essay on a family in mourning / slightly perforated to better let the light in” “what’s good enough for chickens is plenty good enough for you and I”. Can you think of a better harmony?

November 25th, 2007

Famous

Rose-coloured excitement: My manuscript Once won the Metcalf/Rooke award at Biblioasis. I shall commence living up to this honour very very shortly–no, really. So far, I mainly dance in front of my bathroom mirror.

The announcement came as a grace note at the end of evening of stellar and thoughtful readings in celebration of Biblioasis’s translation series. The launch book is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s selected poems, I Wrote Stone. The translators are Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba: she a resonant alto anglophone, and he a mellow murmuring native-speaker of Polish. They gave double readings of each poem, in both languages, and the effect was almost musical. I don’t mean to over-aestheticize, the poems were disturbing and hopeful and thought-provoking, but it was something to just sit and listen. There were also readings in translation by Goran Simic and A. F. Moritz, and one about translation from Stephen Henighan. It was such an inspiring evening, but a girl does wind up feeling that she’s woefully under-read and needs to retire to the library immediately.

In case you thought some sort of delusion of grandeur caused me to apply subject line to myself, let me assure you I meant the readers mentioned above. I am quite easily star-struck, and have only recently realized that in Toronto it is quite acceptable to go and congratulate a reader after an admirable performance. I was told this ages ago, but I didn’t believe it–I mainly watch readings like movies, and scurry out as soon as they are over. When I first moved here, I met wonderfully talented and kind writer Michel Basilieres. He encouraged me to try to talk to other writers (at that point in my life, he was being pretty generous with that “other”) and learn from them. I said I wasn’t up to much. He assured me that Toronto writers don’t really live up to the stereotypes–most are collegial and friendly and eager to encourage a newcomer. I wasn’t buying it.

For the nervous among us, it’s pretty hard to absorb such information (witness the incident, around the same period, when I hid behind a pole when someone tried to introduce me to Douglas Coupland). But it’s really true that most writers I’ve ever chatted with has been more than forthcoming but I am usually too nervous to approach anyone. Anyway, after the formal part of the evening on Friday, I wandered a bit and talked to a number of people, including the readers, who seemed genuinely happy for my work and interested in it. It was lovely, but a little startling, like a character in a film turning to talk to you. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

It’s a heady thought, that someday I’ll be in the score of Canadian literature, perhaps as a grace note.

Look around around around
RR