As promised...

This is a picture, which I've stolen off the interwebs, of Charles Dickens and his sexy mustaches.

This is the face of the man that both Raych and I would go back in time to make out with. Not necessarily at the same time.

He looks mad, bad, and dangerous to know, doesn't he? HOT.

The cure for reader's block

Damn it, I've kind of been feeling a lot like not reading. I've been thinking of taking a break from reading, although what I would do instead I can't even conceive of.

I think it's a testament to the emotional and mental exhaustion associated with being at the very, very end of my PhD ordeal that I'm so tired as to be having trouble having fun with books. I've never felt this way in my life. NEVER. I find it disturbing in ways I can't begin to describe.

I recently began reading Russell Hoban's Pilgermann. It's short and it started off funny in a dark and Absurdist way, which I often enjoy (unless it's completely incomprehensible, like The Third Policeman). But it's quickly turned into a very earnest and kind of pretentious foray into mysticism and the disturbing unity of all things. Did I mention it's short? Well, I'm half way through and I think I might still abandon it. In any case, I've abandoned it for today in favour of the only Dickens novel available (that I haven't already read) at the Queen/Saulter branch of the de-gorgeous Toronto Public Library.

Dickens may seem like a strange choice to some of you but consider: all I want is good writing, a good story, and a complete lack of pretentiousness. Add some charm and a dash of hilarity, and that's Dickens' perfection pretty much summed up.

The only Dickens here for me has turned out to be A Tale of Two Cities and so far I'm quite enjoying it, which is a world of change from the torturous loathing (of self and book) that has been my experience so far with Pilgermann. (Pilgermann may be an excellent book but now is absolutely the wrongest of uber-wrong times for me to be reading it. Ugg.)

I have been preparing for my thesis defense today, which is why I'm not lolling about or painting the living room at home. I'm now officially at the less than 2 week mark and so have to get my preparation on. But damn, I have an attention span the size of a gnat and I feel like I'm reading a thesis written not just by someone else, but by someone I neither know nor have even heard of. It's really quite disorienting. I wish the lack of familiarity could make this thesis interesting to me but alas...

But Dickens! A plot! Good writing! No ego! I would have been a Dickens groupie back in the day, I know it. (I would like to include a pic of Dickens and his sexy mustaches here but this library computer is giving me grief. I'll do it from home later.)

One book crime atoned for

It really shouldn't have taken me 5 whole days to read a book that barely cracks the 300 page mark, but I've been sleeping in till 11 like my former teen-aged self used to do every second day, and then I've been doing the house-cleaning and other super-sexy things like that.

But my halcyon days of mental relaxation are about to come to an end for in a few days I must begin preparing for my thesis defense, which will take place in just over 2 weeks. Very soon after that, hubby and I will be embarking on the dangerous but compelling adventure of taking over the bookstore we recently bought.

I realize I haven't mentioned this whole bookstore thing before. I guess I felt that talking about it might jinx it or something. I won't be linking the bookstore to this blog in any way because I want to leave myself room here to be as cranky and unfair in my reviews as strikes my fancy. In the bookstore, however, I'll just smile and nod when people ask if we've got any Dan Brown or when they tell me how great Nora Roberts' books are.

So, about Barbara Trapido's Frankie & Stankie. I read this book because Vee suggested it a long time ago. She even lent it to me but I committed the heinous book crime of carrying it around for something like 18 months but not cracking it and then I returned it to her unread, with head bowed in shame. I saw the copy I just finished in a pile of super-cheap books and took that as a sign from the gawds that it was time for me to make bookly amends, so I bought it.

First of all, I want to say that I've never shared or even understood my sister's distaste for used books but I think I'm starting to get it. This copy of Frankie & Stankie is the graveyard of at least 10 different, and different kinds, of dead buglet. I'd just be reading along and I'd flip a page to find in the margin the dessicated corpse of what looks like a tiny dragon fly or an ant. I can't imagine under what circumstances these bugs became interred in this book but it made me somewhat squeamish. I found myself hiding the book while reading it on the subway out of a paranoid concern that people would see the buglets on the pages and move away from me in lower brain stem-induced fear.

As for the literary contents of the book, Frankie & Stankie was a good read. It wasn't, for me, a great or stunning or challenging or even very disturbing read - and given that it's set mostly in 1950s South Africa, it should be disturbing. It's told in the third person but it reads like a memoir of disturbing times seen now only through the softening haze of several decades' passage and the distance of thousands and thousands of miles. Also, the main characters are white South Africans who are not extremely (or at all) political and so they're in many ways sheltered from the horrifying realities of Apartheid.

The writing was good and the book was funny, as Vee promised, but it didn't blow my mind. It was good, but good in a "just fine, pleasant" kind of way rather than in a "I MUST read more Trapido, now!!!" kind of way. Not that I wouldn't read more of Trapido's stuff but that I probably won't make an effort to do so - unless Vee insists. Vee fed me for a year and taught me the joys of Arrested Development and Wii shport so I owe her a lot. At least 30 book recommendations' worth I'd say, as a low estimate.

Sport, pronounced "Shport"

For truth in reporting's sake, I have to tell you that my stomach and arms don't look anything like Brandi Chastain's. It's surprising, I know. Bloggers who like to sit in front of the computer all day reading other blogs and writing their own are usually unparalleled specimens of physical power.

It's unfortunate that the German spelling of the word featured in this post's title is the same as it is in English, for it just doesn't convey the different sound and therefore spirit (in my mind) from the English word. The German "sport" is pronounced, according to my husband, as "shport" with the "r" being quite softly expressed. It makes one think of very tall and solid-looking specimens of youth who aren't winded by going on 10-mile hikes after having played soccer for 3 hours.

What's shport got to do with this blog, you may ask? Well, I found a silly little site, Typelizer, whose only purpose is to tell you what your blog says about your personality.

According to this site, my blog and therefore I fall under this category (here's the connection to shport, in case you were getting worried):

"The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time."

Eh, what? I've just spent the past billion years inside, rotting in a chair by myself while writing my thesis. I am perhaps better at starting things than finishing them, though. But I can't imagine on what basis this site makes these assessments, and does it distinguish what I write from what my Reading Lamp interviewees write?

A silly but fun foray on a brain-dead Saturday morning into the myriad weirdnesses offered by that series of tubes known as the interwebs. Now I'm going to get back to focusing all my attention on my tea. I will offer you a proper blog post either later this afternoon or tomorrow.

The Reading Lamp: I'll read what he's reading, please

I want to read every single book David mentions below, including the made up one he hilariously assigns to the most unlikely literary duo he can imagine (which I won't spoil for you by dropping any hints about. Just keep reading).

I also want Children's Books Ireland to send me lots of free books but as I am neither Irish nor a writer of children's books, I'm guessing this, like my desire to become one of the WordGirl writers, is just another castle in the air...

Your name: David Maybury

What are you reading now? A whole lot of books published by Irish writers in the last 12 months for the Bisto Book of the Year Awards. And a few new ones out next year but not related to the awards, including Damsel by Susan Connolly and Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan.

Where are you reading them? Anywhere I can find a spare five minutes—buses, trains, tea breaks in work and occasionally under the duvet at 2 in the morning.

How did you discover these books? Children’s Books Ireland hands over a huge pile of books once a month. How nice is that!?

What would your ideal desert island book be? Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World—every time I read it there is something new there. Also, my brother brought my copy on tour through Asia with him so it’s filled with postcards and handy tips from each place he stayed.

What about a dessert book, a book you could read and then eat? There’s a series of cookbooks my Nan has from the sixties. They’re covered in splashes, dried up bits of pasta and cookie dough. If I had to eat a book it would be one of those. Tasty.

Who is your literary boyfriend or girlfriend? I have a bit of a man-crush on the illustrator Alan Clarke these days. The man may be a genius.

What's your favourite either unknown or underappreciated book? Two books that I haven’t seen/heard much talk about are Paul Muldoon’s The Noctuary of Narcissus Batt and The Last Thesaurus. Did they slip under the radar, or was it just me that missed them?

Favourite childhood book? One of the books that influenced me most was David Almond’s Skellig—I reread it earlier this year and it is still as great as I remembered.

Ideal literary collaboration that hasn’t happened? The childhood dream come-true would be me writing something with Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee.

The most nightmarish and/or hilarious literary collaboration you can imagine? Jamie Oliver and Dave McKean—I imagine something along the lines of Killer Asparagus Goes to Aerobic Class, with great illustrations.

Weirdest/creepiest/most awesome thing you've ever found inside a used book? I found one of my grandfather’s love letters to my Nan from 1946 in an encyclopedia. It was all of those things at once.

Favourite book-related website (besides bookphilia.com and davidmaybury.ie, of course)? Children's Books Ireland—these are the people who keep the cogs turning across Ireland.

Who do you talk to about books? A few good interested friends but mostly I bend the ear of my long-suffering girlfriend…

Do you prefer hardcover or softcover books? Why? Softcover. If I ever do get stuck on that desert island and have to eat a book I think a softcover would be easier…

Do get in touch with me at colleen at bookphilia dot com if you'd like to be interviewed for The Reading Lamp.

No love

WARNING: I have nothing good to say about Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, so if you love it and feel personally involved in how others feel about it, you probably want to stop reading now.

I haven't enjoyed Italo Calvino at all in the past, but I decided to give Invisible Cities a try for several reasons:

1) A few people I really like and whose reading tastes I respect recommended it highly.

2) I was trying to be open-minded because, after all, tastes change. I read Mr. Palomar and thought it was the most boring shit I'd ever read but that was 10 or more years ago; I thought that maybe I'd been too young to appreciate it and figured this would be a way to find out if my tastes had changed in favour of Calvino. (It's true that I've tried approximately 5 times to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and can't get past page 15, but I generally love Orhan Pamuk and yet can't get page 10 of The New Life, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.)

3) I liked the idea of this book, of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sitting together and discussing the cities of the world, all of which turn out to be Venice.

I must not have been thinking, for if I'd considered more seriously what the book's premise implied, I probably could have guessed that this novel would be too preciously post-modern for my tastes. I should have guessed that it would be exactly the kind of book that I hate. And hate Invisible Cities I did. It was only 165 pages long and yet it seemed interminable. It was just so earnest and "deep" and humourless that it made me want to tear Calvino's hair, and rend his cheeks, and make him gnash his teeth. (Yes, I know he is dead. Just go with what I'm trying to convey here.)

The only good thing that I can say about Invisible Cities is that it was so uninteresting that I won't be plagued by memories of its details; I found it to be so forgettable that I've already forgotten most of it and I finished it 20 minutes ago! Indeed, I forgot most of the chapters immediately after reading them which was sort of a blessing but also made continuing even more painful than it already was, for I knew with increasing certainty that the book wasn't going to all of sudden surprise me with some awesomeness.

So, I now have come completely to terms with the fact that no matter how many people I like love Calvino, and no matter how much I might like the ideas behind his books (as ill considered as that admiration may be), I can't stand the execution. Calvino and I just were not meant to be friends, which is okay - both of us have lots of other friends to keep us happy.

"The platonic ideal of bananas"

A few days ago, I expressed some concern that I would not pick the appropriate book to help me get over my mild case of reader's block; I suggested that I would have to choose very carefully a book that was heavy on story and light on characters, especially characters with complicated names.

Well, friends, I hit pay dirt when I chose Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. This was truly the most a propos book I could have read this week and because of the way it stimulated my reading cells, I'm almost ready to dip into my Henry James short stories again - almost, but not quite. Still, this is progress; I haven't been even close to almost ready to touch James in several months now.

Anansi Boys was an excellent yarn and so I was happy to sherpa it around in the cumbersome hardcover form in which we own it. The story is about Fat Charlie Nancy and the brother he didn't know he had, Spider, and their troubles with the gods who live at the beginning of the world - although the god who's given Fat Charlie the most trouble is their dad, Anansi, the spider god, who is obviously trouble for he wears a green fedora tilted at a rakish angle.

I have read a number of Gaiman's books now and except for Stardust, they were all very enjoyable and memorable but - BUT - Anansi Boys for me was the Gaiman book I'd been waiting for. I loved this book, absolutely loved it - there isn't one drop of qualification I can add to my gushiness about this novel. I really liked his other stuff, especially American Gods, but I feel that Anansi Boys reached all the potentials and pinnacles promised but maybe not quite achieved in the other Gaiman books I've read previously.

Anansi Boys is the perfect combination of fantasy, horror, and the mix-ups and hi jinx that characterize early Shakespearean Comedy, like Twelfth Night. It was funny and sometimes scary and always, always compelling. I could not put this book down and really, all I want in my reading life is to be engaged with books that I'm desperate not to put down for silly things like sleeping or making dinner.

If you're wondering what this blog post's title is all about, check out this interview with Gaiman, conducted recently by Irish writer David Maybury. In it, Gaiman discusses, among other things, the transcendental experience of eating bananas in Thailand. (I can corroborate Gaiman's claim that eating fruit in Thailand that was grown in Thailand is a spiritual act. Mmmmm, Thai pineapple...)

WordGirl!!!!

I was flipping channels sometime this afternoon and lamenting the lack of good things on TV (as I am not a fan of either soap operas or daytime talk shows) when I happened upon THE GREATEST CHILDREN'S TELEVISION PROGRAM EVER MADE.

No, it was not a classic like The Flintstones or Sesame Street, although the latter was pretty solid gold a lot of the time, at least when I was a sprog. No, this is a new show and I wish for two things: 1) that this show had been on when I was a kid and 2) that I could be one of its writers now.

In case you haven't heard, THE GREATEST CHILDREN'S TELEVISION PROGRAM EVER MADE is a PBS effort called WordGirl. It's about a 10 year old girl from the planet Lexicon who is stranded on Earth after her space ship crash lands.

Like all come-from-away super heroes, WordGirl has a human alter ego (in this case Becky) which allows her to fight evil in relative obscurity. WordGirl's main super power is her superior vocabulary.

The show is for 6-8 year olds and is designed to help them develop their vocabularies (because it assumes sprogs aren't dumb and aren't afraid of big new words, like "gloating" and "idolize" and "cumbersome"). And I can only assume that vocabulary development for youngins is desperately needed after they've spent too many years watching Teletubbies. (I think Teletubbies was some kind of conspiracy to send western civilization back to the sub-sub-basement of the Dark Ages by teaching kids that mumbling a lot and saying things like "Teletubbies go bye bye" make for good communication style.)

The episode of WordGirl I so fortuitously stumbled upon today featured the villain Dr. Two-Brains and his vocabulary-challenged stand-in Glen; it also featured WordGirl/Becky trying to get her hands on sufficient amounts of book-binding glue for her science fair project (oh the glorious nerdiness of it all!).

Dr. Two-Brains isn't the only villain WordGirl has to out-word, oh no; there's also Granny May, The Butcher, and Chuck the Evil Sandwich Making Guy. I don't know what agendas these evil-doers have but I suspect I'm going to find out.

If this show had been on when I was a kid, I would have been WordGirl for Halloween every year and maybe I wouldn't have gotten smacked down for reading books so much. Or maybe I would have been smacked down even more, but at least I could have imagined myself as a crime-fighting linguist (as opposed to a cunning linguist) just using my crossed eyes and thick glasses and ugly pants as cover for my true super hero identity. Ah well. At least there's hope for the sprogs of the 21st century...

Now with 15% more testosterone

It took me much too long to read Bernard Cornwell's second Saxon chronicle, The Pale Horseman. As indicated in my previous post, I wasn't really enjoying it at first, but once Cornwell got to telling of Uhtred's role in King Alfred's attempt to win back Wessex from the Danes, it became quite compelling.

I think I've also been suffering from a very rare but luckily quite mild case of reader's block. After submitting my thesis, I seemed to lose my desire to read much and that left me feeling isolated, confused, and generally quite modern, in the ennui-infused sense as opposed to the technologically advanced or fashionable senses.

I think I'm now starting to get over my reader's block but I also think my recovery therefrom may be rather tenuous, so I'll have to choose my next novel quite carefully. I need something fabulously light and mentally untaxing. Also, maybe something with very few characters and only 2-syllable character names.

The Pale Horseman picks up where The Last Kingdom left off and except for the weird Viking detour at the beginning of the book, was a good yarn. All of Cornwell's Saxon chronicles are based on true 9th-century English history and he sticks pretty closely to what's known while providing notes at the back about what he has played liberally with for the sake of good fiction. There was much more (if that's possible) male aggression in this second installment though, including against women; the "humping" he so often referred to in the previous book here became more obviously what it usually was - rape - and I think that may be more realistic as well. To make a play for understatement of the millennium award, war doesn't make for good behaviour, even in the face of Alfred's strenuous attempts to civilize and Christianize everyone.

This book is messy and testosterone-y and violent as hell; not really what I generally go for, but somehow still compelling, perhaps because I am too partial to anything related to early English history. Really though, I think I like the way Cornwell manages to show how disgusting and awful war is while still making it possible to empathize with a character like Uhtred; Uhtred defines himself by his battle success, even as battle alternately exhausts, terrifies, and compels him. In any case, my initial reservations about The Pale Horseman evaporated around page 90 so I think I'll see how book 3 of the Saxon chronicles stands up. But not right now. Right now, I need fabulously light.

Ellis Peters might be the other woman to my neglected books

It took me a surprisingly long time to finish reading Ellis Peters' Monk's Hood, another incomparable Brother Cadfael murder mystery. But I've been so exhausted this week that before today, I was finding it hard to read more than 20 pages at a time. And me not being able to comfortably read 100+ pages in a sitting is like saying Tom Cruise should be the head of the American Psychiatry Association - WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

I have been sick, but my fatigue is only partially the result of negative things; the other part of my fatigue comes from the fact that I submitted my thesis this week; Tuesday, to be precise. YES. (For non-academics, that just means I've officially handed it over to the grand inquisitors, I mean examiners, who will question me at my thesis defense, which has now been officially scheduled for early December.) I would "woot" now but I'm still too tired. Okay, maybe a little "woot."

So, the most prominent sign of my exhaustion, barring my inability to stay awake in the afternoons, read more than 20 pages in a sitting, and lack of desire to do pretty much anything? I've lost the ability to count for, scouring the shelves for a good yarn, I picked up the third Brother Cadfael medieval whodunnit without having read the second, One Corpse Too Many.

I was sure it was time for number 3, but when my memory returned several hours into the reading of Monk's Hood I recalled that I'd read a non-Cadfael Peters (Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart) precisely because I don't even own the second Cadfael yet. I began to despair for myself, thinking that being tube-fed and entertained with bright shiny objects dangled before my googly and unfocused eyes might not be too far in the future.

The Cadfael books don't appear to require being read in order but it offends my control freak sensibility not to read them in order. Monk's Hood was, of course, solid gold and Peters' mix of crime solving and historical description kept me completely engaged. I adore this woman and am so happy she was as prolific as your best Grub Street hack - I have at least 18 more Cadfael books to read before I run out, not to mention all her other non-Cadfael efforts. The coming reading years will be good ones, they will.

Now that I'm done Monk's Hood, however, which I just picked up as a little read on the side, I really need to get back to Bernard Cornwell. I will continue the relationship, for the kids, but I'm going to be totally honest and say that I'm not sure I love him anymore. It's sad but sometimes people just grow apart.

The Reading Lamp: and the prize for most atmospheric profile photo goes to...

...Yuri! Yuri sent me three pictures from which to choose for posting alongside his Reading Lamp interview and the one below won for me hands down.

I love the way the lights glow eerily in the background, the way everything but the lights are dark (Yuri's shirt, the sky lowering over the street, and especially the book itself), and the way it looks like some passerby just caught him, in the dead of night, on a dark street corner engrossed in a book that is about dark streets that both invite and warn against lingering. Perfect.

All you Haligonians, post- and present: quick, quick, at what intersection is Yuri standing in this photo??

Your name: Yuri van der Leest

What are you reading now? Jack Maggs, by Peter Carey

Where are you reading it? Primarily in Halifax coffee shops: Just Us on Spring Garden and the Trident Booksellers & Cafe.

How did you discover this book? I first read Peter Carey’s The Tax Inspector in an undergrad English course, and have been slowly savouring his other works ever since.

What do you think of it so far? I am really enjoying it. The London depicted in this novel makes me think that David Copperfield could just wander in and feel at home. I love the way that Carey sketches his city through the habits and haunts of manifold eccentric characters.

What would your ideal desert island book be? I have to say that I have fond memories of my Norton Anthology of Literature (since lost to younger siblings marching through first-year English classes of their own). While the brevity of attention given to any one author, period or even publication would surely become frustrating, I imagine that the wide variety of content and sheer volume of literary tidbits in this tome would keep me occupied whenever I wasn’t constructing tree house mansions and coconut radios…

What book would you like to put into a mine shaft and blow up? Why? During my MA, I was assigned Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist (shudder). Now all of her other novels could be masterpieces of early Canadiana, but I am not willing to take the risk involved in finding out. Let The Imperialist be blown to smithereens and then trampled by a horde of bison running amok!

Favourite childhood book? I was all about Rupert the Bear: the science fiction of jet packs, aeroplanes and autogiros; the adventure of Zeppelins flying to remote lakes in high mountain ranges; and the magic of flying carpets and enchanted princesses…

Do you buy books or borrow them from the library? Either way, what is your favourite place to get books and why? I buy my books for the most part. In Portland, Oregon, I was all about Powell’s Books (the world’s largest independent new and used bookstore) and so far in Halifax I have been haunting Trident Booksellers and Back Pages. Really I am happy with any used bookstore with a good selection that is well organized—digging through piles of books for literary treasure is a wonderfully romantic idea, but in reality such piles are dusty and ultimately defeat me.

How do you decide what to read next? If someone has not recommended a good book to me lately, I go back to a reliable and well-loved author and continue through his or her repertoire.

Favourite author? Why? Haruki Murakami. His imagined worlds are tinged with the sadness and isolation of modern existence, but show how the simplest and oddest little things can bring people together.

Favourite and/or least favourite literary time period? Why? Modern/post-modern literature grabbed hold of me during my undergrad and never let go. It was amazing to see the unvarnished essence of the world laid out before me in a way that I related to directly and understood instinctively—without a neat framework of religion or cultural norms to oversimplify it.

I made a few friends in this world early on, including Stephan Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Pat, Toby and Zoe in The Edge of the Alphabet; Mrs. Dalloway in the eponymous novel…

Who do you talk to about books? Kristin, my very cool sister living in Belgium; Colleen, the keeper of this tribute to the printed word; and my friend Scott “the law talking guy” here in Halifax.

Best movie adaptation of a book ever made? The movie version of The Outsiders was perfection—each character exactly as I had imagined them and the city as gritty as S.E. Hinton describes. High points also go to Out of Africa, which I feel captured the essence of the book despite the need to impose linearity on an essentially non-linear narrative and the bow to Hollywood by greatly exaggerating the role of the romantic relationship between Baroness Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton.

Lord, I am a bird

I really should be sleeping. I didn't sleep last night and then I wrote like mad today because I have to submit my thesis on Tuesday. And I'm sick, yo. But sleep will not come to me, in spite of the fact that it's the only thing in the world I entirely want and love right now.

But making pretty blog posts which glow invitingly from the computer screen in the depths of night is pretty good too. It's telling, I think, that as tired and in need of relaxation as I am, I'd still rather sit goggle-eyed in front of the computer than read Bernard Cornwell. The Pale Horseman is okay but I think I made a tactical error when I chose it. Douglas Adams, I think, might have been more apropos. But here's what I've recently closed the back cover on:

Five Women Who Loved Love by Ihara Saikaku. The cover of this tome invitingly reveals that this is a collection of "amorous tales from 17th-century Japan". I like Japan AND the seventeenth century AND Amor! (But who doesn't like Amor!?)

However, as with the last seventeenth-century proto-porn I read (Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister), Five Women was somewhat of a disappointment. It's not that it wasn't good (I think) but that it really wasn't what I thought I was getting - and dang nabbit, marketing does matter.

There were certainly Amors! in this book but except for the last story they always concluded with moral retribution being visited upon the titular desiring females. Plus, the stories weren't porny enough, if I may be crude. There was far too much of the literary equivalent of soft lighting going on here. Ah well.

I should have known this would be the case; I've read Saikaku's approach to the Floating World before and while his contemporaries apparently made said World sound like a rollicking good time, Saikaku tends to conflate it with Buddhist meditations on the meaninglessness of everything, especially wiggy.

I think that in another time and set of circumstances (i.e., not reading at 3 am because sleep is flipping me off and running away), I would have really enjoyed this book even though Saikaku was clearly a player hater.

Herrings Go About the Sea in Shawls "by" Alexander Abingdon. I have by in scare quotes here because Abingdon didn't write this book; he compiled it. And oh, what a compilation this is. Herrings comprises only terrible/funny/unbelievable/mind-boggling things found on students' papers, assignments, and tests throughout Abingdon's teaching career.

I've actually read this book many times before, but not recently. I bought it right before I left Halifax to move to the urban jungle that is Kingston, Ontario to pursue my PhD.

I read this book over and over and over again that horrible first year and it made me laugh hysterically over and over and over again. It helped me sleep. So it did not seem unreasonable to me that it could help me again in similar ways last night. And because I'm submitting my thesis next week, it also seemed a fitting farewell to the lovely Queen's U.

Well, dammit, I sure laughed. Familiarity only increased the hilarity and I think I may actually have caused myself harm in the stomach area with the way I was carrying on. Jeoffy-cat and Sophie-bunny were alarmed by my cackling (which I was trying to keep quiet because hubby was upstairs sleeping, but that just made it even funnier) while Gregory-bunny, old one-eyed Dread Pirate Gregory Bunn, was flopping onto his back in pure joy. That also made me laugh. (In answer to your question, no, I hadn't taken any narcotic painkillers recently.)

So yeah, I think to celebrate the imminent end of my time in graduate school, I will share some choice nuggets from Herrings Go About the Sea in Shawls (the choicest being, perhaps, that when it was first published in 1931 it was called Boners. Teehee.).

Literature and Language:
George Eliot left a wife and children to mourn his genii. (This goes out to Rohan Maitzen of the great blog Novel Readings!)

In conclusion we may say that Shylock was greedy, malicious, and indeed, entirely viscous.

There are some passages in Shakespeare's work, which are quite pretty, as "Spoil the rod, and bare the child," and lots of others.

Describing Tom Sawyer: He was a smart looking boy, very fond of fighting, and he was always sharp at this kind of job. His character was always good sometimes.

Write a sentence showing clearly the meaning of the word "asterisk": Last night my father got drunk and made an asterisk of himself.

An injection is a shout or scream raised by a person too surprised or frightened to make a sentence with his thoughts. It is not quite a human language. The lower animals say nothing but injections. Accordingly ill-natured and cross people by their injections come very near to beasts.

An interjection is a sudden explosion of mind.

Degrees of comparison of "Bad": Bad: very sick: dead.

Pax in bello: Freedom from indigestion.

Ave Domine: Lord, I am a bird.

Bible, Religions, Myth:
The Papal Bull was a mad bull kept by the Pope in the Inquisition to trample on Protestants.

Why was John the Baptist beheaded? For dancing too persistently with the daughter of Herodotus.

The greatest miracle in the Bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed him.

Who was sorry when the Prodigal Son returned? The fatted calf.

The saints are classified so that there be one for each kind of human traits, as shipwreck, child-birth, etc.

Abraham was the father of Lot and had ten wives. One was called Hismale, and the other Hagar. He kept one at home and the other he sent into the desert where she became a pillow of salt in the daytime and a pillow of fire by night.

Eliza came before the King wrapped in a camel's hair, and said: "Behold me, I am Eliza the Tit-bit."

Geography:
The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

The Esquimaux are God's frozen people.

The Eskimoes hardly have any wives at all.

The Arctic regions are neither hot nor cold, they abound in birds of beautiful plumage and of no song such as the elephant and the camel.

Science and Mathematics:
If anyone should faint in church put her head between the knees of the nearest medical man.

The principal parts of the eye are the pupil, the moat, and the beam.

A cat is a quadruped, the legs, as usual, being at the four corners.

When you stroke a cat by drawing your hand along its back it cocks its tail up like a ruler, so as you can't get no further.

The tides are a fight between the earth and the moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water in the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. Gravitation at the earth keeps the water rising all the way to the moon. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

Most bulls are harmless, but cows stare horribly.

History:
The Romans made their roads straight so that the Britons should not hide round the corners.

They gave William IV a lovely funeral. It took six men to carry the beer.

Drake was playing bowls when he was told the invisible armada was in sight.

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Oh, the good times this book has brought me. I tried, when I was teaching at Queen's, to begin compiling my own list of such errors. Unfortunately, I have lost the list but I do recall one student opening a paper with the following: "Geoffrey Chaucer was clearly influenced by the theories of John Locke." Ahhh yeah.