Month: February 2015

this month I ...

February 2015

By on Saturday, February 28, 2015

I read:

Thoughts:

  • Suee and the Shadow Volumes 1 and 2 by Ginger Ly: Reviewed earlier this month.

  • Queen Sugar by Natalie Bazilie: Reviewed earlier this month.

  • Count on Yourself by Alison Griffiths: I never thought I’d invest my own money. Then I read this book. I now invest my own money and am moving over my mutual-fund RRSPs to manage them myself as well. Now, if I only had some more money (come on book advance for any of my half-formed books).

  • McSweeney’s Thirty-Two edited by Dave Eggers: Read for my short-story-a-day-in-February. I continue to dislike compilations with multiple authors.

  • Logic Lotty: The Fortune Teller’s Spoon by Paige Peterson: Reviewed earlier this month.

  • Us Conductors by Sean Michaels: It made me want a Theremin.

    Reading parts of the book, I was like “This is exactly like Gulag” or “This is exactly like The First Circle“, only to get the end and see Michaels listed them as sources. So I felt clever. I enjoy feeling clever.

  • The School for Good and Evil: A World Without Princes by Soman Chainani: Wonderful in world building, but failing in everything else. The book is just mindblowing reductive in terms of gender roles. Did you know that girls relying on themselves equates to getting rid of boys with the goal of making them slaves? Did you know that boys, without the civilizing effect of girls or adults, turn into rampant, disgusting pigs who feel the need to pee on everything? Did you know that feminism isn’t a dismantling of patriarchal structures that trap both men and women, but rather women who despise, ridicule, and exploit men? Did you know that, no matter what, doing something like a girl is an insult? Did you know that you can’t have both friends and romantic interests – only one or the other? What a shitty messages to put in a book geared towards pre-teens. There are parts of this book that read like they came straight from a MRA forum.

    I am angry I wasted my time on this. I am angry that pretty much on every page I had to rewrite what was happening so I could read it to my six year old. This book had so much potential and squandered it all so we could have a standard tale of damsels in distress, feminazis, and needing men to save the day.

  • Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis: Reviewed earlier this month.

  • Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: I can’t ever really love Sarah Waters. I find her stories too long. I understand they are supposed to be rich and decadent, like French cooking, but I don’t like French cooking since the sauces are usually cream based and make me sick, and I just want to cut about 150 pages out of every Sarah Waters book I read

  • Tita by Marie Houzelle: Reviewed earlier this month.



Favourite book of the month:

Now I don’t know whether I want Leslie Knope or Amy Poehler to be my best friend. Maybe both? How can I get Amy Poehler to be my best friend without me becoming a super-creepy stalker?



Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

So I put it on my wishlist, and then bought it with a gift card I had for Chapters (but I bought it for the kobo). I think that counts as most promising, that I actually went out and got it.



I watched:

Thoughts:

  • Darknet: I watched about fifteen minutes of Darknet while washing dishes on a Thursday. Then it got dropped, just like Steins:Gate got dropped last month.

    I guess they were worried, in Darknet, that people would not realize they were in Toronto, since they mentioned it at least twelve times during the fifteen minutes I watched. This is why Toronto will never be a world-class city, OMG how needy.



I wrote:

Nothing. At least not anything new. I am focusing on editing what I have. It is tedious and most days I want to claw my eyes out and every day I get myself all pumped to sit in front of the text on my screen and make changes to comma placement and adverbs there is a snow day and Tesfa is home and nothing gets done. For March, I am, regardless of weather co-operation and the fact that the first week of March is Tesfa’s March break and she feels that if I am at the computer that means I want her to loudly and repeatedly ask me questions about things that I have no control over (Why can’t you make the colours rhyme with the animals? What does that even mean?), going to do twenty pages a day until I am done. One file (called big file because naming is totally my thing).

Then I really have to do the same big overhaul for faerie story.

I’m glad I printed out faerie story and big file before my printer ran out of ink. Possibly my printer ran out of ink because of.

Then, once that is done, I can get back to new stories. My story about a devil and my story about wolves and who knows what. A big breath out, aaaaaaahhhhh.

Continue Reading
0
short month short stories

Week Four

By on Saturday, February 28, 2015

Link to Week One.

Link to Week Two.

Link to Week Three.

Still reading from Great American Short Stories. You know in high school when your English teacher made you read short stories and you decided you hated short stories because of it because of all the SYMBOLISM and SERIOUSNESS and IMPORTANT TOPICS THAT NEED TO BE CONSIDERED: this book is entirely like being forced to read dull short stories in stuffy classrooms with poster board on the walls. Perhaps this is a consequence of the book being compiled in the 1950s. Still, I hope my short stories have a bit more life to them than most of these.

In any case, I’m done. I wish I could remember exactly my reasoning for deciding to read a short story per day. Likely just for something to do.

Number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK FOUR:

  1. He by Katherine Anne Porter: It was a hard winter.

  2. Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken: For the secret world must, at all costs, be preserved.

  3. The Man Who Saw through Heaven by Wilbur Daniel Steele: They’ve hardly started yet — a mere twenty centuries on their way — leaving them something like eight hundred and thirty centuries yet to come before they reach the earth.

  4. Unlighted Lamps by Sherwood Anderson: The truth is I may die at any moment. I would not tell you but for one reason — I will leave little money and you must be making plans for the future.

  5. The Open Boat by Stephen Crane: This fact was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears.

  6. Roman Fever by Edith Wharton: And I was wondering ever so respectfully, you understand … wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horce had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.

  7. A Municipal Report by O. Henry: It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow-ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.
Continue Reading
0
artisanal mathematics

artisanal mathematics

By on Friday, February 27, 2015

Yesterday someone asked if I talked about artisanal mathematics here, since I did write artisanal mathematics on my business card. Having never talked about artisanal mathematics, I suppose I should. But then, not knowing what to say, I’ll just take Eric Sparling‘s suggestion to me, so feel free to print out any of the below PDFs and put them in a frame, for your very own piece of artisanal mathematics. Yay for decoration!

All pieces were typed up by me at some point when I was in graduate school. You could even frame a piece of my PhD. You can also ask me for different stuff if you’d like, if you want a one-of-a-kind piece (I’ll just pull another random page from my thousands of pages of typed math).

Bonus: the sheets might even contain mistakes! So you could be learning math while enjoying what could questionably be called art.

artisanal commutative

artisanal complex

artisanal galois

artisanal jcf

artisanal math category theory

artisanal math discrete random structures

artisanal math functional analysis

artisanal math phd

artisanal measure

Continue Reading
0
books

Review of Tita by Marie Houzelle

By on Thursday, February 26, 2015

So, what do we have?

We have a chic French roman about a precocious little girl named Tita/Lakme/Euphémie and a few months spent with her in a small village near the Pyrenées. It could be called a fable, if there was a moral at the end. It could be called a coming-of-age story, if there was any character development on the part of Tita. It could be called a story, if it was more than just a series of vignettes about growing up in the south of France in the 1950s.

The good: I may not be Charlie, but I’m pretty sure I am Tita. Or I was. Not that I was reading Proust at seven (I barely got through one book of Proust at thirty-three), but I was about as proto-nihilism as she was when I was about seven too:

I’m not sure I have a heart. There is no “deep down” in me. I wonder if I even exist.

Tita just wants to read and learn and be left alone by meddling teachers. I was that kid. I love Tita. I loved every little thing about her. I love how she looks up phrases in the grammar dictionary to correct her teacher (which is a good review of French grammar for me). I love how she sneaks grown-up books away and reads them secretly (as I did with Stephen King and John Irving novels). I love how she writes plays and stories on the typewriter in her father’s office (like I did, although it was my mother’s typewriter and I wrote in her closet). I love her little bons mots sprinkled throughout the text. In short, j’adore Tita. Her little adventures and misadventures and thoughts and schemes. Everything Tita. Je t’adore.

The bad: But nothing happens. Nothing happens and then the book ends. The last forty pages are a glossary of French terms and an interview with Houzelle. I was left with a “Well, that’s sudden” feeling that still hasn’t gone away by the next morning. Okay, so we build up this character, her back story, some proto-conflict (yes, I’m using proto again. It’s the prefix I’m stuck on today) regarding her parents’ financial situation and the fallout from the school choice, and then final stop end, here’s some French (which after many years of French immersion, I didn’t need anyway). I could compile a list as long as the book with unresolved issues:

  1. Why have the father be divorced once and with children from the first marriage when they play so little a role in the story, especially the brothers Etienne and Maxime?
  2. Tita has three names, her birth name Lakme, her baptismal name Euphémie, and what everyone calls her, Tita. Was that really necessary?
  3. The timeline with Tita’s birth and her father’s divorce and her parents’ marriage is never one hundred percent resolved. Or that issue with what Tita’s last name was when she was born.
  4. Her father’s business is failing. Maybe that should be addressed?
  5. There seems to be a class difference between Tita’s mother and Tita’s father. Not a huge one, but it’s never really developed.

I’ll stop, but I could keep going. Why put such a clever character into a muddle of a story? Tita, I love you, jump free of my kobo and put yourself in a story where you will thrive.

Also, every time I read books about French parenting, I’m always struck by how utilitarian and cold it is. It seems like there are rules for everything and the parents seem so haughty. Sometimes I think all Tita needed was a hug. I’d give her a hug if I were her mother.

I was going to comment on the translation, and even wrote little notes about the translation in my kobo, only to get to the end and realize that the book was written in English originally. So oops on my part. It’s a bit random whether French used in the text is immediately translated or not. Sometimes it is, other times non-French speakers have to look it up in the Appendix. I like consistency. I would have rather an all-or-nothing in terms of translated words in the text.

If it weren’t for Tita, I think I would have despised this book. But my love for Tita knows no bounds. Oh Tita. I could feel the Mediterranean sun on my cheeks as I read about you. It warmed me to the very core.

Tita by Marie Houzelle went on sale September 15, 2014.

I received a copy free in a librarything giveway in exchange for an honest review.

Continue Reading
0
Uncategorized

completely not related to writing in any way

By on Thursday, February 26, 2015

I bought a two piece bathing suit today that shows my stomach.

Is my stomach flat? No.

Is my stomach toned? No.

Have I magically gotten rid of my thigh cellulite? No.

Has my fat stopped jiggling a bit while I walk? No.

Fuck it. My whole life other people told me I’d look shitty in a bikini. You know what? I don’t fucking care what other people think anymore.

(source: Huffington post)

Continue Reading
0
Uncategorized

in one of my less intelligent moments

By on Tuesday, February 24, 2015

I am trying to grow more potatoes from a potato. I’m at the point where my potato plant is in the pot, with dirt, and green leaves growing up above the dirt. Watering it yesterday, I decided to smell it (don’t know why – just did). It smelled like a potato and I was all excited to tell Geoff, but then, I realised, what else should a potato plant smell like? Chocolate? Things that grow potatoes likely smell like potatoes.

So then I just felt dumb.

Continue Reading
2
short month short stories

week three

By on Saturday, February 21, 2015

Link to Week One.

Link to Week Two.

Number $$\iff$$ date.

WEEK THREE:

  1. Mrs Ripley’s Trip by Hamlin Garland: “Ho! Ho! har! Sho! be y’, now? I want to know if y’ be.”.

  2. A Village Singer by Mary Wilkins Freeman: She felt faint; the woman next her slipped a peppermint into her hand.

  3. The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce: I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.

  4. The Real Thing by Henry James: “It’s very awkard, but we absolutely must do something,” her husband went on.

  5. Tennessee’s Partner by Bret Harte: How he met it, how cool he was, how he refused to say anything, how perfect were the arrangements of the committee, were all duly reported, with the addition of a warning moral and example to all future evil doers, in the Red Dog Clarion, by its editor, who was present, and to whose vigorous English I cheerfully refer the reader.

  6. Baker’s Bluejay Yarn by Mark Twain: Animals talk to each other, of course.

  7. Barleby the Scrivner by Herman Melville: Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
Continue Reading
0