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Writing fiction: better than psychedelics
False Bay mandelbrots into a scalloping of smaller bays, and one of these, just around the corner from where we are living, is Fish Hoek. The swimming beach at Fish Hoek has a lot to recommend it -- it's protected from south-easters, a wind that adds chewing sandpaper to an afternoon's swim at the other east side beaches. It has a shark net, and as ( Read more... ) -
How far is long enough?
I've been wanting to write you for a long, long time, so long, in fact, that I am afraid I've forgotten how to write. And then I think I should recap for you. And find it impossible to know where to start. But my longing to speak to you has now become more powerful than my fear of landing on my ass with bad metaphor all over my face. And so ( Read more... ) -
on grieving
A friend of mine died of cancer this week. Paul was a buddy from Clarion, a well-loved writer and friend.
Others have paid tribute to him eloquently. I can't do better.
The small things that were just us, as friends, I'm still holding to myself.
So instead let me speak to you of some things I know about grieving. It's where I am right now.
One: ( Read more... ) -
There's one on every corner
In Copenhagen, it seemed like there was a bike shop on every corner. In Sydney, real estate agencies pop up like mushrooms. In Paris, it's a dry heat between the boulangerie and the pharmacy. In almost every big city I've lived in, there will be a type of store whose ubiquity surpasses function, a store whose omnipresence somehow captures some ( Read more... ) -
writing and midlife, or, Perimenopause, coming soon to a keyboard near you
Over the last ten years, as I've entered midlife, I have acquired difficulties with cognition and language use common for those in perimenopause and menopause. As this covers women roughly from the ages of 35 to 60 and onwards, you'd think someone somewhere in the blogosphere might have had something to say specifically about how the semantic and ( Read more... ) -
Organic: Box #1
I'm experimenting with an organic food source called FoodConnect, which provides city slickers with organic food from locally sourced organic growers. I've opted for an initial four week offering of a small box, but with fortnightly instead of weekly pick-ups. Entries entitled Organic will just be me nattering on to myself about the food I get ( Read more... ) -
Not another reading list...
I'm not very good at keeping track of what I've read during a year. Nevertheless, I comb other people's lists for suggestions, and it struck me as selfish that I wasn't contributing to the general festschrift celebrating the year 2009. So here are a dozen or so books I read this year (although not published in 2009, sorry), that, months later, ( Read more... ) -
Wasn't that the sky falling?
Just now, heading down to the shore for an evening walk, out over the water, I saw the arc and burn of a meteor, but much clearer and closer than I've ever seen before. It's one of the things I love about living in Australia, seeing meteors on a regular basis. I don't know whether it's because I'm outside at night more than I would have been in ( Read more... ) -
Le Guin on Atwood's new novel The Year of the Flood
It seems fitting that I should bookend a long lacuna with a post on swine flu on one end, and on the other, this excellent review by Ursula Le Guin of Atwood's new science fiction novel The Year of the Flood in which much of the world's population has been done in by some mysterious disease. What I like about the review is the intelligent way Le ( Read more... )