Do Something With Your Time

 

I’ve been inactive lately and its been driving me nuts. I am not a “Type A” personality, I know how to relax, I take great pride in the fact that I know how to spend time doing not much of anything — but I prefer to do it on my terms (very bossy) so when a lazy lifestyle is imposed on me, I can go a little stir crazy. So, in the name of using time wisely while doing very little, I’ve just been thinking, thinking, thinking. No conclusions yet, but not a bad use of time.

Last night on WireTap, an excerpt from David Eagleman’s “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives” got me thinking a little more about what I’m doing with my time. The piece suggests that in the afterlife we live our life again but in a different order, determined by how much time we spent doing something over our lifetime. Here are a few examples:

2 months driving in the street in front of your house

7 months of sex

13 straight years of sleep

5 months flipping through magazines while sitting on the toilet

You can listen to it for yourself here.

I’m thinking of assigning a few lifetime hours to reading Eagleman’s book.

(PS. The photo is a sculpture by Ron Mueck called “In Bed”. Great, isn’t it?)

Been there, read that

The official first reading at the Vancouver Writers Festival went off without a hitch, in front of a packed theatre of literary lovers (well, mostly friends and family at this point I think). It was a great experience. The house lights bright enough that I was able to look up from my pages without worrying about some stranger staring intently at me. Just a little otherworldly feeling only seeing the bright white light out there, beckoning.

I wonder if I’ll ever again have a chance to read my stuff in front of such a crowd? Two-hundred some-odd people. Crazy.

This picture of me at the event is courtesy of photographer Frank Lee:

Poetry

Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry – a poem by W.S. Merwin

 

Because they already know what it means

stopping and without stopping they know that

beyond stopping it will mean listening

listening without hearing and maybe

then hearing without hearing and what would

they hear then what good would it be to them

like some small animal crossing the road

suddenly there but not seeming to move

at night and they are late and may be on

the wrong road over the mountain with all

the others asleep and not hitting it

that time as though forgetting it again

Follow the blog chain to Sam Shepard/Shania Twain

 

 

Literary Rejections on Display (who I’ve mentioned before)

led me to a new-favourite: Lit Drift (read, read, read, my lovelies)

they ran an excerpt from Sam Shepard’s latest (from the Paris Review)

The jist: men can be made insane through repeated listening of Shania Twain. (ooh, poetry). Sam and Shania 4ever.

Enjoy.

Reading between the lines

Preparing for my first public reading. I selected the piece I want to read, timed it out, practiced reading it very-very-very slowly. Practiced reading it with a funny accent. Dreamed about reading it in a funny accent to a room full of naked people. All good practice, I suppose.

I read aloud a lot, but not usually into a microphone (dreams of feedback and popping “p’s” and “t’s” abound). But in the end it isn’t the time on stage I’m worried about — it’s the waiting beforehand. Hate waiting. Luckily, there will be some good reading going on before my tiny moment so I’ll be happily distracted.

Do people still imagine the audience in their underwear? Did they ever? I remember that hint from an episode of the Brady Bunch. It worked for Jan, didn’t it?

Lonely?

Writerly type dating advice available upon request. In the meantime, consider the personals:

Book Patrol

H.G. Wells and me

I spent the day re-reading The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s one of those books that stays with you and every now and then you have to revisit it. And as bad as the 1996 version of the movie was, there’s a lot to that flick that stays with you too. The source material keeps me coming back. And questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be animal, what it means to be both at once don’t go away either and are all part of what I’m trying to write about these days (if we must define it, and it seems we must). But enough about me and my WIP (love that acronym, thanks Twitter).

Turns out I’m not the only person with H.G. Wells on my mind. This week Google had a nifty little homage to the author in their “secret” Google illustrations and there’s a lot of other Wellsian things going on around now.

Wells was also a great writer of love letters. When I was sixteen I stumbled on a collection of his letters to Rebecca West — his darling Panther (Wells was the Jaguar in the relationship). Those letters, those damn letters — many a young man never had a chance with me after that. Not only did they have to be able to quote spaghetti westerns ( but that’s another story), they also had to have a way with the written word — and H.G. Wells is a hard man to beat.

Reading Roundup

Woefully behind in my reading these days. The new Powell purchases are stacked up behind a long line of other books I intend to read. Last Christmas I bought myself about eight short story collections and only finished one or two — the rest are piled next to the bed … waiting…

Of course, I’ve just picked up Alice Munro’s latest and now must read it before she comes to town in October.

But a lot of what used to be reading time is now writing time — and that’s okay, I’m okay with that imbalance (as long as I’m getting somewhere with the writing).

I read aloud to my husband every night. (A tradition we started almost from our first date. I love reading to him.) But bedtime stories are best when they are short and simple — so novels don’t make that reading list and neither to craft books (he’s not interested in “Moral Fiction” by Gardner) or anything too “literary” (where “nothing” happens — just too hard to follow when you’re sleepy). 

I used to read on the bus, now I walk home and listen to music. I used to read at lunch, now I hit facebook or twitter or Salon. I still read while taking a lazy Saturday bath but it can be hard to keep up the momentum.

Any suggestions on how to organize my reading time? How do you fit it in? Do you prioritize? Maybe I should just stop buying new books until I’ve made it through what I have…nah…that won’t help.

First Lines (Meme)

Following the lead of the beautiful and talented Sophie Playle and the aged and belligerent Bob Jacobs.  A little meme for a Thursday night.

The rules…

From the biggest bookcase you have, pick out one book whose author’s last name starts with each letter of your last name. If you have no books by an author whose last name starts with a particular letter, go to the next letter. If you have two of the same letter in your last name, get two separate authors, not two books by the same author.

Post the first sentence of each book, along with the author and title. Feel free to skip prefaces and such, especially if they’re by a different writer.

E: Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson

“When Lauren was a small girl, she would stand in the Kansan fields and call the cats.”

V: Meet Me in the Moon Room, stories by Ray Vukcevich. (first line comes from the story “By the Time We Get to Uranus”)

“Molly had come down with suit in the springtime.”

A: The Information by Martin Amis

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.”

N: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda (translated by Ben Belitt/First line from the poem “Dream Horse” without formatting — sorry)

“Needlessly, watching my looking-glass image,/with its passion for papers and cinemas, days of the week,/I pluck from my heart my hell’s captain/and order the clauses, equivocally sad.”

S: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.”

Wow. Stevenson knows how to throw around a sentence, doesn’t he? Love it.

Deadlicious

I should get to the gym. And I will, right after this:

I found the  Deadlicious blog while randomly searching the web this morning.

I think I’m in love.

The website is pretty cool too.

And I think they really do make pies. Do they really make pies? I’m giddy.