reading – Jam and Idleness

Home

I feel too much the harmonious nearness of home to be able to brood over any sorrow. In the past I wept. I was so far away from my native country… (Robert Walser, Little Snow Landscape, trans. Tom Whalen) “Home” was a word that had no personal meaning for me for a very long time….

Insomnia reading redux

I spent a goodly portion of the latter half of my PhD staying up all night, every night storming through books fully unrelated to my dissertation. I’ve been dancing a weary turn with insomnia since 1986 or so, when TV ended every night at 1am and the internets were barely a gleam in William Gibson’s…

Read as I say, don’t read as I read

I saw something somewhere, pretty recently I think, about how COVID-19 has changed and will continue to change our lives a lot, and that all the things people have lost are making them grieve. (My thesis supervisor, if she ever reads this, will die 17 times in succession and then come back from the dead…

Working out in the time of cholera

I saw on the news this morning that Ontario provincial parks are closing because of COVID-19…and I didn’t freak out at all. I got all my hysterical adjusting done in my previous post; but I think this is a good time to point out how wrong Thoreau was when he claimed, “The mass of men…

Plaint

Plaint, n. 1.a., Oxford English Dictionary: “The action or an act of plaining; audible expression of sorrow; (also) such an expression in verse or song, a lament. Chiefly poet. after 17th cent.” Here beginneth the lament of a weak and whiny ladie who cannot fucking believe that she’s been laid low these last 3 weeks,…

Reading everywhere

Two things. First, this is not a polemic celebrating the extreme sport of reading and walking at the same time (a sport known also by its adherents simply as “reading”). I am, of course, at least theoretically in favour of this dangerous and endearing activity, having once been one of its greatest long distance athletes. But…