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Slow espresso | 13 June 2009

Coffee on the stove-top, milk on the stove-top, frothed with a questionable battery-operated device named “Handy Creamer”. Sugar dissolved in the warming milk. The result ended up somewhere between a latte and cappuccino, and tasty. The process required about twenty minutes at the stove — so much heat that we had to turn on the air-conditioning while I waited for it to cool enough to drink.

Dog-eared | 9 June 2009

We went to San Francisco, walked obscene miles, and came home with a lot of books. We visited so many great places with all sorts of interesting things I could and couldn’t take home — obviously the antique/vintage/curiosity shops are much better stocked there — and mostly we just bought books.

The night before we left, one of my sisters articulated some ideas that I had been thinking about but shoving away, and they stuck to the philosophical cobwebs in my brain and made me think twice as I fondled and ogled and sighed. So much to want, so little to need — but somehow books are exempt.

I read more on this trip than I have in weeks — a whole play, a whole novel, and the start of another novel. The last is Pnin, by Nabokov, for whom I have a respectful fondness, so collected (collecting) several of his books but not quite attempted to read them — but Pnin, now, is a delight. I had no idea. Why is it so easy to forget that literature can truly be fun.

Pleasure and tedium | 10 May 2009

Existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and … almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; … nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

— Anthony Powell, A Buyer’s Market

Endeavour | 4 May 2009

A new camera for every day, which I can carry with me wherever I go and hardly even remember that I have with me. Somehow this always ends up a self-defeating endeavour, trying to take more photos — emphasized by the similarity between this photo and the one just below.

Tomorrow I start a new class, on Shakespeare. It will last all summer, until we spend a week at a cottage with family. In about a month we visit San Francisco. Weekend before last, I was in Rome for a few days, my first trip overseas, and in spite of my intentions I only ever saw the airport, a hotel, and a restaurant. There was, ahem, a passport problem, which I will never encounter again. I have a new pile of lives to look over. I haven’t played ultimate frisbee in weeks. I am starting to respect my feet more. I have been attempting to condense days and thoughts into a limited number of words, which has thus far been something of a healthy exercise. But I take plenty of unhealthy exercise too, so it all balances out.

Take a lighter | 18 March 2009

One month — this has probably been the longest stretch of not reading books-for-pleasure since I don’t know when. The moratorium on extracurricular cerebral pleasures will end some time in April, after exams. More consumerist pleasures have taken the forefront, mostly because such things involve much less effort (and doesn’t always lead to actual spending, although we are doing our part In This Economy). Canada Post has redeemed itself by delivering all my online orders so far in a timely fashion: fancy soaps, sachets of dried lavender, chunky-knit winter accessories, clothing of mysterious origin, Kevin Fanning’s The Location Scout *. Today, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions by Jill Heydt-Stevenson (oh yes I did; the libraries around here don’t carry it and I need it for my latest paper) and the little plastic lens with which I took the photo above.

A Holga lens for the Nikon D80. I had wanted to buy a Holga back when I was still trying to be all photographically alternative with my pinholes and homemade cameras, but then the guy selling the kind of Holga I wanted went offline for months, and in the end I thought I’d just try the lens*. On a proper body, the lens seems to lose some of that supposed charm, but maybe I’ll take a lighter or some clear nail polish to it.

Four | 22 February 2009

Dead roses from Valentine’s Day; the baby’s breath still kicking; new shoes for the office; new old hand-painted vase.

Sunlight | 17 February 2009

A failed rearrangement of the right side of the mantle (I like the left side as it is) over the long weekend, but this morning’s sunlight was too good to ignore. I’d been using the drab weather and the fact that it’s February — long established as the worst month of the year — as an excuse for a certain shall we say lack of enthusiasm for life, but I can’t anymore.

Weather! | 28 January 2009

Okay, seriously. Patience is now rolled out in a very thin layer upon the bed of my nerves, and the pink wiggly parts are about to start showing through and raising hell. What is with all this snow? I thought last winter that it snowed a lot, and I thought last summer that it rained a lot, but this! This is a simply unneccessarily relentless barrage of precipitation. Where is it all coming from? What regions are suffering drought now, having given up and sent all their water and clouds and pressure systems up our way? What butterfly on the other side of the earth keeps flapping its wings, sending us these snowfalls again and again? There are new snowbanks on top of the old dirty snowbanks now to climb. Old salt and new salt combine, both buried uselessly under the drifts on the sidewalks. I can never stomp hard enough to clear the treads of my boots.

I received a text message this morning from someone whom I didn’t even know had my cell number, and all it said was: “Weather!!!!!”

Glee | 25 January 2009

On Saturday afternoon, after another agonizing session with Judith Butler and more Eve Sedgwick, I discovered that I had been reading the course syllabus incorrectly and was a week and a half ahead on the readings for my gender/sexuality theory class. In spite of the next essay being “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”, I dropped the courseware, gleefully took hold of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore that had been sitting mostly untouched since I read the first few chapters before the term started, and promptly read the next three hundred pages with barely a breath drawn until I more or less fell asleep nose-first in the book. I started reading it again soon after waking and finished it today in between other obligations (consisting of ultimate frisbee and eating). I was so delighted to be at liberty to read something for fun again. I plan to gorge myself on more shortly, tomorrow’s lecture be damned.

Mirage | 21 January 2009

From the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: “Western man has become a confessing animal. Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of ‘trials’ of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage.”

Exploding | 19 January 2009

In one of my classes this term, we’re reading Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler in the first two weeks. My brain is exploding. Here are some bits from Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic” that I actually understood (actually offered, helpfully, as bullet points in the text):

Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some people, a small share of others’.
Some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little.
Many people have their richest mental or emotional involvement with sexual acts they don’t do, or even don’t want to do.
For some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others it doesn’t occur that they might be.
For some people, the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough that their lives are strongly marked by its avoidance; for others, it isn’t.
Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable.

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