Owner: Magnificent Octopus URL:http://magnificentoctopus.blogspot.com Join Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:30:52 -0500 Rating:1 Site Description: I love books. I write about my life and literature (mostly contemporary, but classics too), and how they feed each other. It's about responding to literature rather than analyzing it. I'm a freelance copyeditor (of nonfiction) raising a bilingual toddler. Site statistics:Click here
Afraid 2008-03-29 17:04:00 Yesterday Helena brought home a fabulously weird drawing: her papa battling a vampire, blood on its lips, Helena watching, terrified, from the corner of the page. Detail below:Here's Helena in a state of terror fleeing some prehistoric scorpion at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, a couple weeks ago:To my eyes, the resemblance is striking.
The divine diktat 2008-03-29 10:37:00 I've just finished reading Seeing, by José Saramago. It starts off as a sharp political commentary, and is not heavy-handed at all, though I'd expected it to be and for this reason even stayed clear of it till now.I started to falter — life distracting me — just as the tone of the book changed. And it helped remind me: the key to reading Saramago is in your breathing. Really. And I breathed lighter and easier, and I found that the book was not just clever and witty, but really, really funny. If you breathe the sentences right.It was a pleasant, very sunny morning, which shows yet again that the punishments of which the sky was such a prodigal source in the past, have, with the passing of the centuries, lost their force, those were good and just times, when any failure to obey the divi
Bestowing a robe of honour 2008-03-31 22:18:00 Being the 1st-quarter progress report as it regards my attempt to meet the reading challenge I signed on for.The book: The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, by Ghalive Lahnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami.The beginning.A favourite sentence: "The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths."An extended excerpt.Where I'm at: page 250, more than a quarter of the way through and nearing the end of Book One. I hadn't read from this tome in weeks, if not longer, till this weekend. Its physical size has a lot to do with this: I wouldn't dream of carrying this book with me on my daily commute, and the rest follows. Simply: I pick up, and then read to finish, much smaller books instead.Intent to fini Read more:honour
The witness of evil 2008-03-30 14:21:00 This book is extraordinary: The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.(It's been more than 2 months now since I read the book, and almost as long since I gave any thought to commenting on it here. The bones of what appears below was written weeks ago — most of it really; I don't even know how to flesh it out, now.)(This book was released in early January. I'm a big fan of Pérez-Reverte, and was lucky enough to have received a review copy. I was surprised not to have heard anything about it, and reserved the task of digging up other reviews till after I'd read it and formulated an opinion. It turns out that it had received some press, during the week of Christmas — no wonder I missed it (I was too busy eating and drinking).I've been putting off writing about it because I felt I
There is water at the bottom of the ocean. 2008-04-04 22:59:00 And sometimes I need to be reminded of it."There is water
at the bottom of the ocean."This is one of the very first songs I loaded onto my recently acquired MP3 player. If there's a song I should have at the disposal of my auditory apparatus, yielding to the control exerted by my little finger, available to me at all times and forever, this is it.Having come to the end Chapter 11 of Great Expectations, being all that I'd foreseen to load, I find myself waiting for a train and having to listen to — gasp! — music. (The audiobook listening on my daily commute is immensely enjoyable, by the way. I will continue with this book, and I will find others. But this is "reading" to be entertained and distracted. I will not expect an audiobook to change my life, nor that I remember it for very lon
Blue, again, in a literary way 2008-04-08 19:26:00 The 10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival takes place April 30 - May 4, 2008. This year's theme: on the road (and I take this coincidence as some auspicious planetary conjunction):They may walk or run, cycle, row, sail, fly, blast off — or use any one of hundreds of other possible vehicles. Or they may sit quietly, day after day, in a room. Because they write about the places they have been — whether in memory or in their imagination, they allow the rest of us a way of traveling too, guiding us through regions, galaxies, eras, cultures and states of mind, strange or familiar or some combination of the two. The 2008 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is being awarded to French writer Daniel Pennac, who writes both for children and for adults.The fe
Enchanted 2008-04-11 21:51:00 This book is gorgeous. The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, casts quite a spell.I've never read a novel of Rushdie's before (though his editorials are of great interest and I greatly admired his performance in Bridget Jones' Diary), nor have I ever felt particularly inclined to. Something about this book, though, drew me to it.It's been a long time since I was excited about a book's glorious physicality. It's a completely subjective experience, and my impression is one I'm entirely unable to explain, but I think this book as physical object is beautiful, and I want to fondle it, turn it over and over and over.The dust jacket is yellow and orange-red, the colour of spice, and it makes me hungry. Its design is a weird mix of Florentine flourish and orientalist illumination.The mos Read more:Enchanted
Love her 2008-04-15 21:42:00 Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and said in a whisper:"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?""Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?"Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces — and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper — love her, love her, love her!"Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck, swel
An unearthly whiteness 2008-04-25 14:17:00 I've wanted to read Ice, by Anna Kavan, ever since I read about that troubled writer in Doris Lessing's collection of essays, Time Bites. It's been a hard book to find, but it's suddenly available here and there (get your copy now), having been recently (2006) reissued (three cheers for independent publishers, but I do wish they'd invest in a proofreader — on the spine the author's name is spelled "Ann" without the final "a").I'm not altogether sure what to make of it, but it is weirdly beautiful.The unaccustomed cold made my head ache as I stared out, straining my eyes in the effort of trying to avoid icy patches, where the car skidded out of control. When the headlights fled over the roadside ruins from time to time, the brief glimpse always surprised me, and vanished before I was sure
There was Neruda 2008-05-02 22:11:00 Then I heard a faint sound, as if someone were crawling over the terrace. My curiosity piqued, I opened the French doors and went out. The air was even colder than before, and there was no one on the terrace, but in the garden I could make out an oblong-shaped shadow like a coffin, heading towards a sort of pergola, a Greek folly built to Farewell's orders, next to a strange equestrian statue, about forty centimetres high, made of bronze, and perched on a porphyry pedestal in such a way that it seemed to be eternally emerging from the pergola. The moon stood out clearly against a cloudless sky. My cassock fluttered in the wind. Boldly I advanced towards the place where the shadowy figure had hidden. There he was, next to Farewell's equestrian fantasy. His back was turned. He was wearing a
The things of which things consist 2008-05-01 22:28:00 The city wakes in a foul mood most mornings, being in direct relation to the hockey score of the night before.Cognitive dissonance, last week: It's 21 degrees outside and I'm staring at a patch of snow in the courtyard. (It's gone, finally.)Coginitive dissonance, this week: It's bloody cold. Head hunched down, I watch commuters collect on the metro platform. Winter boots side by side with flip-flops. I'm mildly disgusted that so many would bare their ugly toes (let alone so early, so suddenly) in a city I'd always considered well-shod.I'm having occasional bouts of spring-cleaning fever, and the closets are being attacked, in a (conceptually) systematic, if not exactly (physically) orderly, fashion. There's a coat in the closet, on J-F's side. He asks what I intend to do with it. I stare a Read more:things
On the mailing of bees 2008-05-08 20:47:00 Today my work led me into the bowels of United States Postal Office documentation. A fascinating place, that.9.3.7 BeesBees are acceptable in the continental surface mail when shipped under federal and state regulations to ensure that they are free of disease. Packages of honeybees must bear special handling postage, except those sent at a First-Class Mail rate. Only queen honeybees may be shipped via air transportation. Each queen honeybee shipped via air transportation may be accompanied by up to eight attendant honeybees.Were I a queen travelling by air, I'm not sure eight attendants would suffice.
When you watch Doctor Who with a 5-year-old 2008-05-09 21:43:00 The Sontarans are a warrior culture. They reproduce by cloning."What's a clone?"I can handle this question.They prepare for battle. Sontar-ha! Sontar-ha!"Why are they chanting?""Mommy, what's war?""Why is there war?""Why are you crying, Mommy?" Read more:watch
, Doctor
This is my brain on This Is Your Brain on Music 2008-05-11 20:22:00 Another year of Blue Metropolis has come and gone. While this year I had the time to go, there was little inclination.The only attraction for me was "local" boy Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain
on Music
, and it was a last-minute decision to trek downtown at the end of the afternoon last weekend. The show was sold out, but I benefited from one of a few cancellations.Levitin briefly revi
The Master's Voice Project: Reading Lem 2008-05-13 07:16:00 Holy crap!Have you read Lem?!Thus far, I've read 18 pages of His Master
's Voice
, by Stanislaw Lem, written in 1968, consisting of Editor's Note and Preface, and I'm blown away. This front matter is in fact part of Lem's novel proper, written by a fictitious editor (the note) and compiled from unfinished scraps (preface) by the genius mathematician diarist whose quasi-scholarly chronicle of an inve Read more:Project
, Reading
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