ÿþ<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Blog&nbsp;|&nbsp;Karen Bennett</TITLE> <META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR> <META content="Fantastic Toronto, speculative fiction Toronto, science fiction, fantasy, horror, Karen Bennett, folk dance, authors, writing, research, jaspers and agates, folklore, Turkish dance and costume, Kurdish dance and costume, Albania folk dance, flowering plants" name=Keywords> <META content="" name=Description></HEAD> <BODY bgcolor="#F8F8FF" link="blue" vlink="black"> <div align="center"> <center> <table bgcolor="#F8F8FF" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="2" width="800"> <tr><td colspan="5" width="100%" align="center"><img src="images/sitemainoceanjasperbluered.jpg"></td></tr> <tr><td valign="top" width="18%" colspan="1" height="100"><hr color="#B3B3B3" width="100%" align="left"><br><FONT face="arial, sans-serif" size="2"><B><A HREF="http://www.karenbennett.ca/index.html">HOME</A><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Blog.html">BLOG</a><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/OtherWriting.html">OTHER WRITING</A><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html">PHOTO GALLERY</A><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html">ABOUT ME&nbsp;/&nbsp;FAQs</A><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Contact.html">CONTACT</A><br><br><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Links.html">LINKS</A><br><br> </font><br><hr color="#B3B3B3" width="100%" align="left"></td> <A NAME="top"></A> <td width="62%" valign="top" colspan="1"><P><FONT color="black" face="Arial, Verdana, sans-serif" size="2"><br> <p><H1><B>BLOG</B></H1></p> <ul> <li><a name="Feb21"></a><b>February 21:</b>&ensp;Sorry for the entire week that has fallen between posts; I've been having a busy time. I'm the guest editor for the April issue of the Ontario <i>Folk Dancer</i> (which I often write for), so I've been occupied editing copy and checking facts and selecting photos and thinking about the editorial that's all I have to write for this issue (there being no room for anything else by me, which is just fine).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I was also occupied in preparing to be a guest teacher at the Hamilton international folk-dance group (Hamilton is about an hour away from me) last Friday (17 February). My session was such a success that they've invited me back this coming Friday (24 February) to review what I taught and do something new. And what did I do, you ask? I taught two tried-and-true winners I learned at last year's Stockton camp: a Greek dance called Syrtos Kitrinou and an American novelty/line dance called the Tokyo Polka. (The "Tokyo" angle comes in because Japanese music is employed for it. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECX6dLi99k">Here's the music on YouTube that I used; it's "sung" by a fan-made Vocaloid character called Akira Chi</a>, which I like better than the version by the "official" Megurine Luka character.) Although I'm not really into Japanese anime, I've been indulging in some guilty pleasure by watching anime videos on YouTube. Some of the characters, such as the aforementioned Megurine Luka, are so well animated that their dancing brings a smile to my face, even though I prefer Akira Chi's singing. (And what's Vocaloid, you ask? It's a singing synthesizer developed by the Yamaha Corp.) The Tokyo Polka tune is borrowed from a Finnish tune called Ievan Polkka (Eva's Polka), and the "words" in the Japanese version are gibberish copied from the gibberish sung by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4om1rQKPijI">the Finnish group Loituma in their 1996 a-cappella version of Ievan Polkka</a>. (I don't find the Finnish Ievan Polkka to be danceable, but boy, is the Japanese version a lot of fun.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The new dance I'll teach on Friday will be a two-count bourr&eacute;e (bourr&eacute;e &agrave; deux temps) from Bourbonnais, France. I developed a passion for two-count bourr&eacute;es as a result of a workshop I attended in Cornwall, Ontario in 1991; virtuoso hurdy-gurdy musician Patrick Bouffard was one of the large group playing, and in Hamilton I'll be using one of his post-1991 recordings. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=XVmSH5SWruc">Here's Patrick, with the other members of his own trio (an accordionist and a bagpiper), playing with Lise-Anne Foy in 2009</a>. Don't be put off by the background noise and "buzz" in the video; believe me, there's a wonderful two-count bourr&eacute;e in there, which <i>really</i> springs to life when Lise-Anne joins in. In 1999, I went to a French workshop in Mendocino, California where Patrick's trio was playing and Lise-Anne was teaching the dances (and playing hurdy-gurdy as well, though not at the same time; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGKPqLm0luw&feature=related">here's what it looks like when some other musicians have tried to dance at the same time</a>. Gah). The years 1991 and 1999 contained some of the highest points in my dancing life. And in browsing YouTube, I've just found a stupendous <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7edvWGAxtUI&feature=related"><i>improvised</i> two-count bourr&eacute;e done by four dancers (bourr&eacute;e &agrave; quatre)</a> in 2009 that shows what great dancers can do when they're simply having fun; plus <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQH0cTA1G4g&feature=related">a more usual two-count dance done at the 2011 Gennetines festival in France</a>. (I attended the 2004 festival.) Although most of the 2011 Gennetines video shows the musicians, who are absolutely rockin', some dancing is visible on occasion, and a number of the dancers have great style, although they're not always the ones closest to the camera.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Something I've been doing unrelated to folk dance is reading an essay collection by historian Barbara W. Tuchman (1912&#8211;89); she won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling <i>The Guns of August</i> (1962). The book is <i>Practicing History: Selected Essays</i> (1981; I have the 2008 edition). As I already know rather a lot about the lead-up to the First World War (which is the subject of Tuchman's <i>Guns</i> and also of <i>The Proud Tower</i> [1966]), next I might take a gander at Tuchman's 1978 book <i>Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century</i>, a period I'm a little less familiar with. I might also pick up the 1,250-page (*gulp*) biography of Tuchman by Margaret MacMillan, herself a notable historian (<i>Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World</i>), coming out in March.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;As well, I've read the YA science-fiction novel <i>Planesrunner</i> (Pyr, 2011) by Ian McDonald, and <i>loved it to bits</i>. (New and satisfying SF is <i>very</i> hard to find.) Coming&#8212;not soon enough for me&#8212;will be book two in what McDonald is calling the Everness series. (It's about parallel Earths, for starters.) I'm a great admirer of McDonald's work, which includes <i>Cyberabad Days</i> (2009), a set of stories set in the same future India of <i>River of Gods</i> (2004), and I've mentioned before that I put McDonald's <i>The Dervish House</i> (2011), set in a future Istanbul, on my 2012 Hugo nomination ballot. Next year, I'll be nominating <i>Planesrunner</i>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And finally: Wanna see something amazing? (That's if you've failed in amazement at anything above.) Here's <a href'<a href="http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi">"Insane art formed by carving books with surgical tools"</a> (and knives and tweezers) done by Brian Dettmer. <img src="images/Fluorite_Illinois.jpg" alt="Fluorite, from Hardin County, Illinois" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10">The tomes he uses are out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books and dictionaries. It really is art, and&#8212;since the books are no longer of use to anyone&#8212;not vandalism.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb14"></a><b>February 14:</b>&ensp;In a post possibly unrelated to Valentine's Day, which I've not celebrated since I was a kid exchanging cards (made of paper) with classmates, on display above right is a slice of fluorite (calcium fluoride), sometimes called "phantom fluorite" if phantoms can be discerned inside. It comes in a wide variety of colours. Many samples fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Mine doesn't. (I know this because I own a tiny UV flashlight.) This specimen, which I acquired in 2007, comes from Illinois, where fluorite is the state mineral.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb13"></a><b>February 13:</b>&ensp;Oh, the tyranny of feeling obligated to come up with a daily blog post (when every other day would be fine, surely). But then I took another look at the flower photo I rejected for yesterday's post in favour of Georgie, and said, "I happen to <i>like</i> this picture!" (And, I've got a touch of the kind of<img src="images/Tulips_and_asters_February_2012.jpg" alt="tulips and asters, February 2012" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> flu where everything aches and it feels like I'm going to shatter like glass; DVD-watching as well as blog-writing feats of stupefying brilliance are both out at the moment.) So: Here are some tulips and asters!</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb12"></a><B>February 12:</B>&ensp;I've finished a big update to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>. I added, to E.L. Chen's entry, her pre-apocalyptic SF story "Threes" (2010); to the entry on Robertson Davies, his novels <i>The Rebel Angels</i> (1982), <i>What's Bred in the Bone</i> (1985), <I>The Lyre of Orpheus</I> (1988), <I>Murther & Walking Spirits</I> (1991) and <I>The Cunning Man</I> (1995); to Cory Doctorow's entry, his steampunk story "Clockwork Fagin" (2011); and to Tanya Huff's entry, her fantasy stories "Shing Li-ung" (1992), "Symbols Are a Percussion Instrument" (1997), "The Vengeful Spirit of Lake Nepeakea" (1999) and "Songs Sung Red" (2011), and her fantasy novel <i>The Wild Ways</i> (2011). The next update will include stories by Dionne Brand and a novel by Mark Sedore.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;As I promised myself in the <a href="#Feb10">10 February post</a>, my reward for completing the latest labours on the survey was to watch some movies on DVD. <i>Sunshine Cleaning</i> (2008) was a low-budget comedy-drama (made for $8 million) that sported a good cast: Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin. Although the script was underwritten and lacked punch at the end, the cast, playing a family who'd never had much luck in their lives, was convincing and sympathetic.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;My second treat (the survey update was a dreadful slog, entirely because of the Robertson Davies novels) was <i>Friends with Benefits</i> (2011), a romantic comedy starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.<img src="images/Georgie2.jpg" alt="Georgie, February 2012" align="left" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> It was quite bearable (Timberlake and Kunis have good chemistry), if not outstanding, but best of all was the DVD commentary by Timberlake, Kunis and director Will Gluck: one of the most entertaining I've ever heard. I was sorry that Emma Stone, whose work I'd loved in the 2011 movie <i>Crazy, Stupid, Love</i> (the movie title is bizarrely punctuated, even to the point of having a period at the end; I've spared my readers what I can), had inadequate screen time in this movie as well as <i>Crazy</i>.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And, as a reward for my devoted readers, I present not "another rock" photo or even, despite my intent when I took out the camera, "another plant" picture, but "Here's a cat photo!" It's Georgie, who insisted on getting into the shot when I was trying to photograph the plants behind him, which included some new yellow tulips. But hey, everybody knows what tulips look like. And this is only the second photo of Georgie on <i>this entire website</i>; the other is on the Links page, and it was taken <i>eight whole years ago</i>. Georgie (a cross-eyed tabby/Siamese mix) looks serious and intelligent, but he's a bit of an airhead. A very dear one, though.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb11"></a><b>February 11:</b>&ensp;The news that singer Whitney Houston has died aged 48 was very shocking. I just re-watched <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPHCThqqt0s">the sequence of her singing "I Will Always Love You" in her 1992 movie <i>The Bodyguard</i></a>, and long before it was over, tears of grief were rolling down my face. Such a wondrous voice and talent. RIP, Ms. Houston. We will always love you.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb10"></a><b>February 10:</b>&ensp;Instead of finishing a big update to the Fantastic Toronto survey (the final thing to do: plough through a tedious novel by Robertson Davies), I took two evenings off to watch the second-season DVD of <i>Downton Abbey</i>. I'd read the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/series/downton-abbey-episode-by-episode">episode blogs on the <i>Guardian</i> site</a> so I knew in advance that season 2 was much inferior to season 1, but still wasn't prepared for its truly bad writing. Among the cringe-worthy plotlines were "Patrick, One of the Heirs Supposedly Drowned on the <i>Titanic</i>, Comes Back; No, It Apparently Isn't Patrick After All"; "The Formerly Upright Earl Has an Affair with a New Housemaid"; "A Different Housemaid Has an Illegitimate Baby, and Its Father and Grandfather Are Jerks"; and "Matthew Is Crippled for Life... No, He Isn't." Some new characters, such as Sir Richard Carlisle (Lady Mary's fianc&eacute;) and Vera Bates (John's wife), were one-dimensional baddies. Some old characters did inexplicable things. And Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess had too few funny lines to relieve the awfulness. <i>Downton Abbey</i> <b>is</b> a soap opera, but it shouldn't be a bad melodrama.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;All I can hope is that season 3 shows us writer Julian Fellowes back in first-season form and not simultaneously working on another project (such as the <i>Titanic</i> mini-series, airing in April). By the way, word is that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/30/downton-abbey-welcomes-shirley-maclaine">Shirley MacLaine will play Cora's mother in season 3</a>, which begins filming this month. Such a ratings success has the series been that there's even talk of a movie.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I have a number of DVD movies awaiting me that are reputed to be very enjoyable, such as <i>Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame</i> (2001), <i>Friends with Benefits</i> (2011), <i>Summer Wars</i> (2011) and <i>Sunshine Cleaning</i> (2008), but I'll use them as an incentive to finish the survey update: "No fun till you're done!"</li><br> <img src="images/Primroses_February_2012.jpg" alt="Primroses" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Feb8"></a><b>February 8:</b>&ensp;It's odd that although I've been coming across references to primroses in English novels for most of my reading life, I've never known what they <i>looked</i> like. Well, that shocking gap in my knowledge has now been filled. Here are some white and, barely visible in the upper right corner, purple primroses (<i>Primula vulgaris</i>)&#8212;grown, I need hardly say, in Canada. While both flowers and leaves are edible (the leaves can be used for salad greens and tea, and the young flowers for wine), my primroses will no doubt be relieved to learn that I'll not be chowing down on them or using them to induce a state of mild tipsiness.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The camera by which means I've been bringing you ineffable images of flowers is a Canon EOS Rebel T2i.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Feb6"></a><b>February 6:</b>&ensp;Further to my post of 2 February, Wired.com had a story today on how that composite photo of Earth, with the Western Hemisphere in view, was created: "<a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/secrets-high-res-earth/">How NASA Makes Those Incredible High-Res Images of Earth</a>." On 3 February, NASA produced a second image, showing Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, similar to the view in the iconic photo taken 40 years ago. Oceanographer Norman Kuring, who compiled both of the recent pictures, accounted for their enormous popularity (the Western Hemisphere photo was downloaded by three million people in one week) by saying, "My guess is that people know that this is the only place we have to live.<img src="images/BlueMarble2012.jpg" alt="Blue Marble 2012" align="right" width="227" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> When they see an image showing these beautiful blues and greens, it speaks to them. This is our home."</li><br> <br> <li><a name="Feb2"></a><b>February 2:</b>&ensp;This year is the 40th anniversary of the famed "Blue Marble" photograph of our one-and-only Earth taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972. At right is "Blue Marble 2012," a composite stitched together from pictures taken in January by the Earth-observing satellite <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/main/index.html">Suomi NPP (National Polar-orbiting Partnership)</a>, launched in October 2011. An extremely high-rez version of this (8,000 X 8,000 pixels) can be downloaded from <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/618486main_earth_full.jpg">this NASA page</a>. Visit <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/blue-planet/#more-93731">Wired.com</a> (where I picked up the story) to see the 1972 photograph as well.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan31"></a><b>January 31:</b>&ensp;I've just finished reading an urban fantasy anthology called <i>Naked City</i> (St. Martin's Griffin, 2011), edited by Ellen Datlow. Like the urban fantasy anthology <i>Down These Strange Streets: All New Stories of Urban Fantasy</i>, which I talked about on <a href="#Jan3">3 January</a>, the cover was emblazoned with the words "<i>New York Times</i> bestselling authors," as if being a <i>NYT</i> best-selling author were a guarantee of quality (Dan Brown, anyone? Or Stephenie Meyer?) rather than simply a mark of recognizability. I was not at all happy with the quality of <i>Streets</i>, so seeing that phrase on the cover of <i>Naked City</i> gave me a moment of "uh-oh." But the feeling of doom gradually passed, and when I reached Peter Beagle's story "Underbridge" (set in Seattle) and it was followed by another good (and funny) tale, Naomi Novik's "Priced to Sell" (set in New York), I knew I hadn't wasted my money. This is a very strong collection, and it goes out like gangbusters with three unforgettable stories: Lucius Shepard's "The Skinny Girl" (set in Mexico City), Caitlin R. Kiernan's "The Colliers' Venus (1893)" (an alternate-history Cherry Creek, Colorado [Cherry Creek is now part of Denver]) and Elizabeth Bear's "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree" (set in Las Vegas).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;No story took place in Toronto, but Ellen Datlow's introduction gave me pause when, in discussing the history of "urban fantasy" and its varying meanings over the years, she wrote that "[m]any of Charles de Lint's Newford stories and novels take place in a thinly disguised Toronto" (p. xi). I've heard people say this before, so I've read a few Newford titles as <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a> work, but I could catch no Toronto resonances in them&#8212;Ottawa, yes; and other readers have recognized Ottawa as well. Now I've decided to "get serious about de Lint," and I've ordered all the Newford titles I can find&#8212;three novels and three story collections&#8212;to try and settle this point to my satisfaction. At the very least, I'll be able to add a de Lint entry to the survey and say, "Some people think that the fictional city of Newford is really Toronto. Although I don't agree, here's a list of de Lint's Newford works..."</li><br> <img src="images/Aster_January_2012.jpg" align="right" width="161" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Jan30"></a><b>January 30:</b>&ensp;Lest my fanatical readers become wearied by my "Here's another rock" posts: Here's another flower post!<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;They're asters.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;SF writer John Scalzi's blog post today, "<a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/01/30/a-small-meditation-on-art-commerce-and-impermanence">A Small Meditation on Art, Commerce and Impermanence</a>," began with a list of books that were best-sellers in the States in 1912 but are now unknown. I'd heard of only one of the authors on the list&#8212;Anne Douglas Sedgwick&#8212;because <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_2_A_Childhood_in_Brittany.html">I found a 1919 book of hers, <i>A Childhood in Brittany Eighty Years Ago</i></a>. Scalzi's final paragraph can apply to ephemeral plant photography and blogging as well:<blockquote>"Will your work survive? Probably not, but so what? You won't survive, either. 100 years from now you're very likely to be dead. Even if your work survives, it won't do you much good. In the meantime that still leaves lots of people today to potentially read your stuff, argue about it, be inspired by it (or react against it) and generally make a lot of noise about it.... Focus on those people today, and on today's times. Enjoy it all now. Enjoy it while it lasts. Then when it's over, you can say you had fun at the time."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Scalzi has a degree in philosophy.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan29"></a><b>January 29:</b>&ensp;With March 11 being the deadline for submitting my Hugo Award nominating ballot (talked about in my <a href="#Jan4">4 January</a> post), I've been catching up on my spec-fic reading. For the Novel category, I read Ernest Cline's <i>Ready Player One</i> (Crown), and for that of Best Related Work I took a whack at Rudy Rucker's autobiography <i>Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker</i> (Tor). The tedium of <i>Nested Scrolls</i> was too much for me; I gave up a third of the way through and turned to <i>Ready Player One</i>, which I was able to finish. As a girl geek who never had any interest in computer gaming, I'm not <i>Player One</i>'s target audience. However, the shout-outs to Canada (Toronto, Vancouver) and Canadians (including Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, and rock band Rush, which was formed in Toronto) were much appreciated.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've joined <a href="https://chicon.org/">Chicon 7</a> (August 30&#8211;September 3) as a supporting member but am still wavering on attending World Fantasy 2012.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan28"></a><b>January 28:</b>&ensp;Some musicians whose work I love, in no particular order: pianist and composer <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/musical-interlude-young-artists-in-concert">Owen Maitzen</a> (who's still a teenager, and whose compositions move me profoundly); professional ukelele player <a href="http://jakeshimabukuro.com/home/">Jake Shimabukuro</a> (whose virtuosity makes my jaw drop to the floor); and ukelele player and singer <a href="http://mollylewis.bandcamp.com/">Molly Lewis</a> (check out her adorable "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mf7cQfhJSA&feature=related">Poker Face</a>"). Molly plays other instruments as well, including the piano. I found Owen because I read the blog of his mother, Dalhousie University English professor Rohan Maitzen, and I found Jake and Molly because I read the blog of SF writer John Scalzi (who plays ukelele for fun, as does his daughter).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The aforementioned John Scalzi wrote a post today entitled <a href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/01/28/writer-professional-good/">Writer, Professional, Good</a>" which served to remind me that I am not only a writer but a good one. I'm just not a <i>professional</i> writer. (A few weeks ago, a folk-dancing friend I hadn't seen for years phoned me out of the blue to say how much she enjoyed my <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Stockton_2011.html">Stockton camp article</a>.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;A few days ago, fantasy writer (and academic) Theodora Goss wrote a post about "<a href="http://theodoragoss.com/2012/01/26/having-a-genius/">Having a Genius</a>" (rather than <i>being</i> a genius), and embedded in the blog was a video talk on creativity by <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i> author Elizabeth Gilbert that I found very liberating. (I've read <i>Eat, Pray, Love</i> [2007] and its sequel <i>Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage</i> [2010], and I preferred the sequel.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Yet another anniversary, which Martin Connelly's essay "<a href="http://www.themorningnews.org/article/why-i-wont-be-screeching">Why I Won't Be Screeching</a>" (posted 21 December 2011 on <i>The Morning News</i> site) reminded me of: 2012 is the 20th anniversary of the "two-year" moratorium on commercial cod fishing imposed in 1992 by the Canadian government. The Newfoundland cod fishery, once the largest in the world,<img src="images/LagunaAgateMexico1.jpg" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> has still not recovered from overexploitation, and possibly never will; it appears that the local ecosystem has changed, and other species have replaced the cod.</li><br> <br> <li><a name="Jan27"></a><b>January 27:</b>&ensp;As I'm a bit squeezed for time today (work, then a long dental appointment, then an evening folk-dancing class), I've concocted a "Here's another rock" post.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Above right is a slice of Laguna Agate that depicts, I've always thought, a somewhat peevish angelfish. I've owned this specimen for many years.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Laguna Agate is mined in northern Mexico, about 241 kilometres (150 miles) south of the US-Mexican border.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan26"></a><b>January 26:</b>&ensp;Below is a just-purchased <i>Kalanchoe blossfeldiana</i>, from a genus of about 125 species of tropical flowering plants in the family Crassulaceae (which store water in their succulent leaves). <i>Kalanchoe</i> are mainly native to the Old World, but a few species are now growing wild in the New World.<img src="images/Kalanchoe_Jan_2012.jpg" align="left" width="188" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> They're commonly bought for Chinese New Year. Alas, I've gone past that date (which in 2012 was January 23), but a belated Happy Chinese New Year! We're now in the Year of the Dragon. (From the Department of Possibly Uninteresting Information comes the factoid that I was born in the Year of the Horse.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In place of the <i>Kalanchoe</i>, I'd planned to photograph some purple <i>Hyacinth orientalis</i>, whose scent I love. But I forgot, as I do every year at this time, that I was allergic to hyacinths, as mine is not an instant, violent reaction but one that builds up slowly (stuffed-up nose, thy owner is Karen).<img src="images/Tulips2_Jan_2012.jpg" align="right" width="100" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> So I had to give away the pot of hyacinths. But, since <i>another</i> picture I took of the <i>same red tulips</i> I displayed on <a href="#Jan24.5">24 January</a> is <i>really quite nice</i>, here that picture is <i>too</i>. (And, hey, I took it on <i>a different day</i>.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Returning to the date of 23 January: Author N.K. (Nora) Jemisin, who has a full-time job in addition to being a writer, posted "<a href="http://nkjemisin.com/2012/01/the-price-of-time/">The Price of Time</a>," about things to buy/do to free up time to <i>get the writing work done</i>. These things include, but are not restricted to: living alone (check); not watching "live" TV (check; I watch only DVDs, and use the time to get my sewing done); having groceries delivered (not justifiable, despite the state of my back and neck, because so many stores are nearby); using a dishwasher (one is built into my kitchen but I haven't used it for years; it's a waste of electricity and water); and acquiring the pricey cleaning robot known as a <a href="http://store.irobot.com/family/index.jsp?ab=CMS_IRBT_Storefront_062209_iwantroomba&categoryId=2501652&cp=2804605&s=A-ProductAge">Roomba</a>. I find the Roomba very unsettling. (Very sci-fi, too. It's a self-propelled, disc-shaped, programmable device that can clean when you're not home.) And I'd <i>still</i> have to keep my vacuum cleaner, because a Roomba can't get in everywhere that a vacuum nozzle can. So, owning two cleaning machines: not going to happen. But I would like to cut down on the heavy housework because of pain/lack of energy, and may eventually be forced to hire a cleaning person as I get even more decrepit with age. Although I'm not writing short stories/novels/proposals for novels as Nora is, I am composing blog posts every day or at least several times a week, as it makes me feel like I <i>accomplished something worthwhile</i> when not at my day job (and it keeps my writing and thinking skills honed). Every post, even the simple ones like "Here's another rock" (17 and 14 January), sucks up at least a couple of hours. And now that I've dismissed buying a Roomba, I can't do housework and write at the same time.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Back to the topic of living alone: (a) from the November/December 2011 issue of <i>Orion</i> magazine, an article about the highly intelligent and solo-living octopus, "<a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474">Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of the Octopus</a>"; and (b) from the February 2012 issue of <i>Smithsonian</i> magazine, "<a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Eric-Klinenberg-on-Going-Solo.html?c=y&page=1">Eric Klinenberg on Going Solo: The Surprising Benefits, to Oneself and to Society, of Living Alone</a>."</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan25"></a><b>January 25:</b>&ensp;The "year 2012" anniversaries and events mentioned in <a href="#Jan1">my 1 January post</a> included some deaths (more than 1,600, counting the people lost in the 15 April 1912 sinking of the <i>Titanic</i>) but no births, mainly in an effort to keep the list to a shortish length. Here's another anniversary: 2012 is the bicentennial of the birth of journalist and novelist Charles Dickens. (He came into this world on 7 February 1812.) One way to keep up with the "Dickens doings" this year is to bend an eye on the British <i>Telegraph</i> page "<A href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/charles-dickens/">All the Latest News on Charles Dickens, His Life, Work, and Adaptations of his Books</a>."<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Speaking of the <i>Titanic</i>, I note that the month of April will feature a four-chapter TV mini-series of the same name, written by current golden-boy Julian Fellowes, whose <i>Downton Abbey</i> series is a huge hit (the first season opened with the effect that the <i>Titanic</i> sinking had on the <i>Downton</i> characters; as an additional aside, the DVD of season 2 will be released in Canada on 7 February). A <i>Titanic</i> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQRcYJERzDs">trailer</a> has been available for a while. And, on April 6, James Cameron's 1997 movie will be re-released in "RealD 3D and IMAX® 3D"; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9ILag7mRA&feature=related">here's the official trailer</a>. The Fellowes mini-series will air in Britain (on ITV) first, of course; I don't know when we'll be able to see it on this side of the pond, but in any event, if I decide to give it my attention, I'll wait for the DVD, as I did for <i>Downton</i>. "Give it my attention": I know it's the centenary of the sinking, but <i>why</i> do we need a mini-series (apart from the fact that it will make pots of money, that is)? What suspense will there be? We know the ship sinks; we even know who'll live and who won't, as the names of who survived and who didn't are widely available; for example, they're in the 1955 book <i>A Night to Remember</i>, by Walter Lord (who was, I discovered, no relation to the infamous Captain Stanley Lord of the SS <i>Californian</i>, which sat nearby while the <i>Titanic</i> went down but ignored all its distress signals, including rockets).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;At least I can hope that Fellowes does a better job with the character of <i>Titanic</i> First Officer Murdoch than Cameron's film did. According to the Wikipedia page on the movie, "When Murdoch's nephew Scott saw the film, he objected to his uncle's portrayal as damaging to Murdoch's heroic reputation. A few months later, Fox vice-president Scott Neeson went to Dalbeattie, Scotland, where Murdoch lived, to deliver a personal apology, and also presented a £5000 donation to Dalbeattie High School to boost the school's William Murdoch Memorial Prize. Cameron apologized on the DVD commentary, but noted that there were officers who fired gunshots to follow the 'women and children first' policy." (Murdoch drowned, as did the captain.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Although these <i>Titanic</i> "viewings" will no doubt be profitable for their creators, they may not benefit the cruise industry, already impacted by the <i>Costa Concordia</i> disaster off the coast of Tuscany on 13 January. (Apart from a folk-dance cruise, which I'd consider if people such as Yves Moreau and Roberto Bagnoli led it, you couldn't get me on board a cruise ship, for various reasons I shan't go into, all of which reasons pre-date what happened to the <i>Costa Concordia</i>.<a name="Jan24.5"></a> However, I would've liked to cross the Atlantic on a ship like the SS <i>Normandie</i>, though I never had the chance; she was scrapped in 1946.) [Edited to add: In a spooky coincidence, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2088361/Costa-Concordia-Titanic-theme-tune-played-onboard-cruise-ship-started-sink.html">the granddaughter of a woman who survived the <i>Titanic</i> sinking was aboard the <i>Costa Concordia</i>; she survived too</a>.]<img src="images/Tulips_Jan_2012.jpg" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In Canada, 150 <i>Titanic</i> victims lie in three Halifax cemeteries&#8212;Fairview Lawn, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch. The Nova Scotia government maintains a "<a href="http://titanic.gov.ns.ca/connection.asp"><i>Titanic</i> in Nova Scotia</a>" site.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan24"></a><b>January 24:</b>&ensp;I took a break from blogging on 18 January, "Blackout Day," as my way of supporting the (ultimately victorious) protest against the SOPA/PIPA "anti-online piracy" legislation in the US. Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit and BoingBoing were among the estimated 115,000 websites that went dark. <a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/01/23/secret-history-of-the-sopapip.html">Cory Doctorow talked about the "Secret History of the SOPA/PIPA Fight" on BoingBoing in a post dated 23 January</a>. Blacking out my extremely small-potatoes personal site would have been of no help at all in the fight; and since I'm not American, I had no members of Congress to petition/lobby/deluge with tweets. Still, I did what I could, even if nobody noticed!<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And above, in celebration of the fact that (a) sometimes protests <i>succeed</i> and (b) spring is coming, are some tulips I just bought. They were grown in the <a href="http://www.springvalleygardens.ca/home.html">Spring Valley Gardens</a> nursery in St. Catharines, which is just down the road from Toronto (OK, it's about 110 kilometres down the road).</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan17"></a><b>January 17:</b>&ensp;Below right is a slab of Polka Dot Agate that has been in my rock collection since 2008. This very popular material is mined near Madras,<img src="images/PolkaDotAgate5.jpg" alt="Polka Dot Agate, Oregon" align="right" width="140" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> in central Oregon, only about 10 miles from where Priday Blue Bed Thunderegg agate is found (displayed in my <a href="#Dec31">31 December blog entry</a>). One can readily see how this agate got its moniker... I own a fair number of Polka Dot Agates (<a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html#Jasper">here's another</a>, and scroll down the same page a trifle to behold the "burping fir"), as it appeals to me in so many different ways.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan16"></a><b>January 16:</b>&ensp;At the 2010 <a href="http://www.folkdancecamp.org/index.html">Stockton Folk Dance Camp</a>, which I attended, Steve Kotansky taught the Albanian dance Vallja e Osman Takës (the Dance of Osman Taka) using <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bVK8jSD9aw&feature=related">the gorgeous Eli Fara song "Osman Taka</a>," but the song lyrics did not accompany the dance notes. Courtesy of my Albanian friend Dritan Seda, the lyrics and English translation of "Osman Taka" are now available, and I have <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_3_My_Albanian_Journey.html#Fara">added them to my 2010 essay "Explorations in Folklore 3: My Albanian Journey</a>." They have also been incorporated into the <a href="http://www.folkdancecamp.org/10syllabus/Vallja%20E%20Osman%20Takes%20%282010SFDC%29.pdf">Stockton dance notes</a> (pdf format).</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan15"></a><b>January 15:</b>&ensp;Writing about the book <i>Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East</i> (BBC Books, 2011) by Martin Sixsmith, reviewer Robin Milner-Gulland noted its many deficiencies and lack of nuance and, in closing, quoted Leningrad-born author Andrey Kurkov: "[E]ven a country that looks quite sad from the outside can be magical to the people living within it" ("Missing Magic," <i>Times Literary Supplement</i>, 6 January 2012, p. 10).<img src="images/Manitoulin_sunset_July29_2006.jpg"align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'd like to borrow that quote and rewrite it for Canada: "Even a country that looks quite cold and dull from the outside can be magical to the people living within it." As proof, I offer a photograph I took at sunset on 29 July 2006 in the town of Little Current on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, looking out over the water that separates the Island from the mainland. I've always found the Manitoulin to be supernaturally beautiful&#8212;in addition to its dearness to me because I have much-loved family there. (And I'm missing it a lot, since I haven't been back in a while.) This photo was taken a few minutes earlier than the third picture in the left-hand column on my <a href="PhotoGallery2.html">Photo Gallery 2</a> page ("More Sunsets"), and at the same time as the second picture in the right-hand column.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan14"></a><b>January 14:</b>&ensp;The highly-polished Willow Creek Jasper cabochon on display below right looks like a stone one might use as a luck piece or simply a smooth object to rub when feeling anxious, because it's a good size to slip into a pocket, being 70 mm (about 2.75 inches) long by 42 mm (1.65 inches)<img src="images/Willow_Creek_Jasper14.jpg" alt="Willow Creek Jasper, Idaho" align="right" width="140" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> wide by 6 mm (0.24 inches) thick. It weighs 138 carats. This material is mined on private land northwest of Boise, Idaho, and is known for its subtle pastel colours, streamer patterns, and egg or orb patterns, all of which are on display here.</li><br><br> <li><b>January 13:</b>&ensp;A co-worker recently lent me P.D. James's latest mystery novel, <i>Death Comes to Pemberley</i> (Knopf Canada, 2011). I was interested in reading it as I'm a lover of Jane Austen's <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, which <i>Death</i> was a species of sequel to, picking up six years after P&P ends.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;James, in an author's note at the beginning of <i>Death</i>, wrote, "I owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in a murder investigation," but I fear that James owes the shade of Jane Austen an apology for much more than that.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'd heard of the existence of <i>Death</i> as it has gained a lot of attention in the media (there's a link to a favourable review at the end of my blog entry for <a href="#Jan3">January 3</a>), but not all of the attention is admiring. One example is "Lizzy with a Candlestick," a review by Joanna Biggs in the 5 January 2012 issue of the <i>London Review of Books</i> (I can't link to it as it requires a subscription, but the URL is http://www.lrb.co.uk/<br>v34/n01/joanna-biggs/lizzy-with-the-candlestick). It is not laudatory. In the final paragraph of the review, Biggs writes,<blockquote>"In talking about detective novels as 'formula writing', James has described Austen's novels as 'Mills & Boon written by a genius'; she believes genre fiction offers a 'relief from the tensions and responsibilities of daily life'.... For James, Austen writes what ... the English ... might call 'entertainments'. And the thing about entertainments is that people read them. <i>Death Comes to Pemberley</i> should be read in the spirit of the advertising slogan that used to be wheeled out every year for a previous queen of crime: a Christie for Christmas" (p. 22).</blockquote>. &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;So, my expectations were pitched no higher than that <i>Death</i> might be an "entertainment" (I was never an admirer of Agatha Christie as a writer, so only read a few of her books, and none of them twice). But <i>Death</i> failed to hit even that low target. It was an exercise in tedium. Few were the moments when I was entertained at all&#8212;but one of them was Lady Catherine de Bourgh's very characteristic and very funny letter to Darcy after the murder (which was not of George Wickham, alas). Although James clearly knows her Austen, and even manages to work elements from <i>Emma</i> and <i>Persuasion</i> into the plot, she yet fails to grasp how incompatible Austen is with James's own style of writing. James is no genius. (But maybe I should cut her some slack because she's 91.) I don't recall reading anything by her before (although I've seen TV dramatizations of her work, so I was aware of her name), and I wasn't about to start picking up copies of her earlier novels for comparison. The prose in <i>Death</i> was banal and contained too few Austen-style "zingers" of social commentary and too little dialogue; the plot was a bore; the characters, even the much-loved Lizzy and Darcy, were not a whit interesting to spend time with. And I wasn't at all happy with how James altered the character of Colonel FitzWilliam, Darcy's cousin. Finally, not that I mean to <i>nitpick</i>, but the writing was <i>full</i> of comma splices!<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've already spent longer than I usually would talking about just one book. And I've noticed that writing that contains little but complaint engenders its own kind of tedium. So I'll finish with this: P.D. James has not done Jane Austen any kind of service by joining the burgeoning "Austen industry" in various genres (for example, from other authors, there's a <i>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i> series, and <i>Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters</i>). But my co-worker did me a minor service by lending me the book: She saved me from spending good money to buy a so-called "entertainment" that, after forcing myself to read till the end, I would've hurled into the recycle bin&#8212;albeit using only two fingers, as the paper stock that Knopf employed for the dust jacket was unpleasant to the touch.</li><br> <img src="images/Mom_daffodils_May_2007.jpg" alt="Mom's daffodils, May 2007" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Jan12"></a><b>January 12:</b>&ensp;To brighten up this gloomy month, here are some of my mother's flowers: yellow daffodils and blue forget-me-nots (although I'm not positive of the wee blue flowers' identity) that she planted in her garden on Manitoulin Island. My mother was a gifted gardener who took great comfort in, and spiritual refreshment from, her hobby.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I took this photograph in May 2007. (Mom died a few months later.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've added this photo, plus a closeup of the "forget-me-nots" and a picture taken in the early 1930s of my father's little sister, Shirley, to the "<a href="Letter_to_Evelyn.html">Letter to Evelyn</a>" story, posted 10 January.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan11"></a><b>January 11:</b>&ensp;Displayed below is a cabochon of Regency Rose Plume Agate from Oregon. It's a recent addition to my jasper and agate collection.<img src="images/Regency_Rose_Plume_Agate2.jpg" alt="Regency Rose Plume Agate, from Oregon" align="right" width="270" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> The last specimen of Regency Rose that I placed on my blog (on <a href="#Jul59">5 July 2009</a>) held not a trace of rose colour, so I was pleased to find something that lived up to its name&#8212;until I discovered that the name was a trifle misleading. According to Gene Mueller, owner of <a href="http://thegemshop.com/">The Gem Shop</a> in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, <blockquote>"The name 'Regency Rose' was given to the [Beverly Marie claim] area [near Homedale, Oregon] by Bill Tallman (deceased) from the TeePee Rock Shop in Mancing, Idaho. He used this name to refer to the variety of colors possible in the agate. However, when he was mining, he found an extremely unusually large pocket of pink plume agate. Ever since then the name Regency Rose, in many people's minds, refers to pink plume agate even though this was not the original intent of the name (from personal conversations with Bill Tallman)."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've bought a few things directly from The Gem Shop, although not the pictured cabochon.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan10"><b>January 10:</b>&ensp;"<a href="Letter_to_Evelyn.html">Letter to Evelyn</a>," a letter to the daughter I never had, was originally written in 2005 as an invited submission to an anthology of women's writing. It was not accepted (almost made it, though, I was told) and has been sitting idle on my computer ever since. Late last year, though, I did some revision (mainly to update it) and sent it to a faraway friend, and her reaction encouraged me to post it here so that more than two people (besides the anthology editor and my friend) could read it. And posting it is also more of the "doing what scares me" that I wrote about on <a href="#Jan6">6 January</a>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Many are the reasons for my not having children, and here are some links that further explain them, as I'm by no means alone in this position: <a href="http://www.kirkusreviews.com/blog/nonfiction/monsters-motherhood/#continue_reading_post">an interview about maternal ambivalence</a> (posted 13 December 2011) that Jessa Crispin did with Barbara Almond, author of <i>The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood</i> (University of California Press, 2010), and "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/8958903/Kate-Bolick-why-modern-women-dont-marry.html">Kate Bolick: Why Modern Women Don't Marry</a>" (posted 8 January 2012). <br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;A final reason for me to post the "Letter" comes from a quote from writer A.L. Kennedy's article "<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/09/putting-everything-into-writing-al-kennedy">Putting Everything into Writing</a>" (posted 9 January 2012): <blockquote>"There may be times when we end up just sticking our tongues out at reality and times when we can connect with the human condition as we never have before, maybe both. We may even have the unlooked-for pleasure of being useful to someone else who draws strength from what we've built."</blockquote></li><br> <li><a name="Jan9"></a><b>January 9:</b>&ensp;After rooting about in the depths of my rock collection, I emerged dusty but triumphant with this slab of Lahontanite Jasper,<img src="images/Lahontanite_Jasper_Nevada.jpg" alt="Lahontanite Jasper from Nevada" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> a.k.a. Lahontan Jasper. It's named after Lake Lahontan outside of Fallon, Nevada, where the material is found.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Lahontanite is a 7 on the Mohs scale of relative hardness, diamond being the hardest at 10. The Mohs scale was devised in 1812 by Friedrich Mohs (1773&#8211;1839), a German geologist and mineralogist. (Hey! Happy 200th birthday, Mohs scale!) Many things besides minerals can be measured on the Mohs scale: a fingernail is 2.5, a coin is just under 3, and glass is 5.5.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I spy the head of a bird in the top half of this specimen...</li><br> <br> <li><a name="Jan8"></a><b>January 8:</b>&ensp;In my <a href="#Jan2">2 January post</a>, pictured was a jacket from a traditional wedding costume for a<img src="images/Nese_in_Eskesehir_costume.jpg" alt="Traditional wedding costume from Eski_ehir, Turkey" align="right" width="150" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> bride from the city of Eski_ehir, Turkey. Below right is a photo of my friend Ne_e Bulduk (who was born in Turkey) delightedly posing in the same jacket with its accompanying trousers (<I>_alwar</I>), shoes and headdress (worn at a jaunty angle). The photo was taken hastily on her brother's camera phone when the two of them were at my place for a visit in December 2010 and so it is not of the best quality, but it gets an idea across of how gorgeous this ensemble is.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The headdress is a cheap one that came with the trousers; I'd replace it with a pillbox hat with genuine coins and with a better-quality scarf if it were worn "for real": by a bride at a wedding, on stage or in a fashion show. Missing are: the correct shirt; a gold belt, necklace and earrings; and a sash (such as the one in my <a href="#Apr27">blog entry of 27 April 2011</a>) that would hang down from the belt.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I have, of course, assured Ne_e that she can borrow this costume when or if she gets married, even though, strictly speaking, it's not one that a bride from her ethnic group (Kurdish) would have traditionally worn. However, nowadays most brides in Turkey (not to mention Canada) wear a white dress, so the question of <i>authenticity</i> isn't a useful one to ponder. That the bride be <i>happy</i> with what she's wearing is the most important consideration.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Any of my readers who are of a bookish persuasion may have noted that the (solid maple) bureau behind Ne_e is heaped with the bound leaves of dead trees&#8212;one of the many piles of To Be Read books that, um, <i>help to furnish</i> my place of abode.</li> <br><br> <li><a name="Jan7"></a><b>January 7:</b>&ensp;Below right is a slice of Montana Moss Agate, which has a "shades of brown" colour palette similar to that of other agates and jaspers whose pictures I've been posting lately: Mad River Dendritic Agate (5 January) and Polish Flint (3 January). I chose a photo of the agate slice<img src="images/MontanaMossAgate4.jpg" alt="Montana Moss Agate, from ... Montana!" align="right" width="240" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> when it was dry rather than wet as the "dry" photo emphasized the "fog" inside the "frame"&#8212;which seemed like a door you'd pass through to reach another world.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Speaking of another world, I finally went into the ginormous Loblaws store across the street, built on the ground floor of the repurposed Maple Leaf Gardens. It opened in early December. All my friends have been saying, "It's a great store! And it's so handy to you! Have you been?", and I've been answering "No," without much of an excuse except that I tend to avoid enormous stores and there are smaller ones in the neighbourhood that I'm loyal to. I went yesterday. All sorts of people were inside. It was like a city in there. But even so, despite the thousands of square feet of floor space and consequent huge selection of items, Loblaws was out of what I specifically wanted and rarely find anywhere&#8212;and a friend had <i>assured me</i> the store carried: cheese curds. <i>Well. I mean to say.</i></li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan6"></a><b>January 6:</b>&ensp;It's past time for me to discuss Elif Batuman's <I>The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them</I> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010),<img src="images/The_Possessed_cover_Batuman.jpg" alt="The Possessed, by Elif Batuman, published 2010" align="left" width="160" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> a collection of seven essays I've mentioned several times in this blog. Of the contents, my favourite (and, I think, everyone else's, going by the reviews) was the hilarious "Babel in California," about a conference on writer Isaac Babel at Stanford University (where Elif was pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature), but she also delves into the lives and personalities of such other Russians as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy; takes Uzbek lessons; and investigates an 18th-century ice palace being reconstructed on the Neva. The essays first appeared in shorter form in <i>n+1</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>Harper's Magazine</i> and the <i>London Review of Books</i>. Batuman's style is witty, engaging and unique, and except for the piece on Uzbekistan, which I found overlong and, in the end, sad, I came out of <i>The Possessed</i> feeling enriched and enchanted. There's nobody like Elif. (Her blog is <a href="http://www.elifbatuman.net/">here</a>, although she posts less frequently than I'd like.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Of Turkish-Armerican background, Elif is presently writer-in-residence at Koç University on the outskirts of Istanbul, but she revealed in a <a href="http://www.full-stop.net/2011/12/14/interviews/helen-stuhr-rommereim/elif-batuman/">14 December 2011 interview at Full Stop</a> that she'll be staying on in Istanbul after her residency ends and that she's now on contract at <i>The New Yorker</i>. Some interview excerpts:<br> <blockquote><b>Do you have any more concrete plans for the next book?</b><br><br> Well, I have been thinking about how a lot of the writers that I know are incredibly good email writers and a lot of the time I find their emails more compelling than the things they are writing at the time. It is connected to this thing that I quoted from Chekhov in <i>The Possessed</i>, about how everyone has two lives and one is the open one that is known to everyone and one is the unknown one, running its course in secret. The email is kind of the unknown life, and the published writings are the known life. This is something that I tried to do in <i>The Possessed</i>, especially in the "Ice Palace" piece. I tried to take the piece that I wrote for <i>The New Yorker</i> and fill out the human dimension that didn't make it into the <i>New Yorker</i> story. I want to go back to some of the stuff that I wrote, and fill in the personal story that contextualizes it.</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And... <blockquote><b>How has it been living in Istanbul? What have you been thinking about and writing about here?</b><br><br> I don t really feel like I'm living in Istanbul because I'm in this office all the time, and then I work here until late, and miss the bus that goes home, and then I walk home through this forest for 25 minutes. I feel more like I'm living in the country of squirrels than the country of Turkish people. I don't go downtown very much. When my residency ends I want to move downtown somewhere. I have a few friends and people who I know who are in the literary scene, and it seems like interesting stuff is happening. And even if interesting stuff isn't happening, people think interesting stuff is happening.</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And... <blockquote><b>Do you have any advice for someone who wants to be a writer?</b><br><br> For me, [writing] is about turning off the censor that says [that] you are writing something bad, so stop writing. It's like going to the gym. Once you go to the gym you never regret that you went to the gym. Once you sit down and write, even if you can tell that what you're writing is bad and isn't leading anywhere, the cognitive act of moving sentences around is making you a better writer. You just have to remember that and not censor yourself. And in writing non-fiction there were a lot of times that I was imagining the various annoying voices in my head of people who would be offended that I'd written that or annoyed that I'd written that. Learning to turn that off was useful in a broader sense. You have to make sure that it is just you and the computer screen and other people aren't going to come into it until later.<br><br> Then the flipside of that is that it is also really helpful to think of your writing as something you are telling to someone.</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Related to (a) Elif speaking of "turning off the censor" and that it's "really helpful to think of your writing as something you are telling to someone," and (b) my resolve to follow Theodora Goss's lead (<a href="#Jan4">see my 4 January entry</a>) and do what scares me, I have posted a piece of my non-SF fiction: "<a href="Directions.html">Directions</a>," a short story that sprang from my 2004 trip to France. Although the story never sold, I always liked the propulsive nature of the narrative, so I valued it despite its lack of what I persist in thinking of as "meaningful validation" (acceptance for publication <i>plus payment</i>). But a friend told me recently, on reading it, that it was well-written and had "parts that are disturbing to me&#8212;not because of what you write about, but how I react, how they resonate, what issues are brought up for me." Which is validation enough. The censor is turned off; the work is now <i>out there</i>.</p></li> <img src="images/Mad_River_Dendritic_Agate_Madagascar.jpg" alt="Mad River Dendritic Agate from Madagascar" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Jan5"></a><b>January 5:</b>&ensp;A recent addition to my rock collection is a slab of Mad River Dendritic Agate from Madagascar, a detail from which is visible to the right. (I wonder if "Mad River" is a translation from Malagasy, which, I'm informed, "is not related to nearby African languages, instead being the westernmost member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.")<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Anyone care to go climbing mountains? Or perhaps they're undersea... Are those whales in the upper left? Or perhaps tadpoles...</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jan4"></a><b>January 4:</b>&ensp;It seems I'm not the only person to show compassion to injured/dying birds</a> in my area of Toronto (see my <a href="#Dec30">post of 30 December</a>, last paragraph); <a href="http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=2619">so is SF writer Peter Watts</a>, whose work I buy and to whose <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html">legal defence fund</a> I donated in 2009. (Warning: The photos on Peter's blog of the pigeon's lacerated neck may distress some viewers.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The <a href="https://chicon.org/hugo/nominate.php">2012 Hugo Award nominating ballot is now up</a>, and as a supporting member of Renovation last year (and possible supporting member of Chicon 7 this year) I'm going to be submitting a ballot. I'll be nominating such work as Nalo Hopkinson's story "Ours Is the Prettiest," from the <i>Welcome to Bordertown</i> anthology; N.K. Jemisin's novel <i>The Kingdom of Gods</i>; Abigail Nussbaum's blog "<a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/">Asking the Wrong Questions</a>" (under the category of best fan blog); Genevieve Valentine's novel <I>Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti</I>; and Robert Charles Wilson's novel <i>Vortex</i>, the not-at-all-comforting conclusion of the trilogy that started with <i>Spin</i>&#8212;plus other stuff, of course, once I really apply myself to the task, but the "other stuff" will not include, to my regret, Lev Grossman's <i>The Magician King</i> (which I haven't read because I was so unengaged and unenchanted by the first book in the series, <i>The Magicians</i>) or John Scalzi's <i>Fuzzy Nation</i> (which I have read).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Although I'm a regular reader of author Neil Gaiman's blog (take a look at his 31 December entry, "<a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/12/my-new-year-wish.html">My New Year Wish</a>"), I don't usually visit the blog of his wife, singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer, so I'm grateful to Theodora Goss for pointing out <a href="http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/15120706154/the-wedding-blog">Ms. Palmer's post of 1 January about her marriage to Neil on January 1, 2011</a>. It's not a fast read, because it's a long entry and Amanda eschews using upper-case except for emphasis, but I found it very special.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'd also like to point out Dora Goss's <a href="http://theodoragoss.com/2012/01/01/two-resolutions/">post of 1 January entitled "Two Resolutions</a>." Her New Year's resolutions are "1. Do what scares you, and be willing to make mistakes," and "2. Create order and beauty." I'll be doing some of what scares me, as I'll be posting some of my (quite autobiographical) fiction writing (however, I'm sure I won't be getting married), and I'll continue to create order and beauty with this site (its photos, anyway, and its organization and design, if not always its prose).</li> <br><br> <li><a name="Jan3"></a><b>January 3:</b>&ensp;Below right is a slab of Polish Flint<img src="images/Polish_Flint.jpg" alt="Polish Flint, from ... Poland!" align="right" width="280" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="14"> (which comes, as you might intuit, from Poland) sporting a wonderful illusion. "Come into my parlour," said the oyster to the grit... no, something's wrong with my metaphor...<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Some of the reading I've been doing lately is research for my <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>, and while I've found nothing useful for <i>that</i>, I have discovered some good writing. The first work I want to discuss is <i>The Urban Fantasy Anthology</i> (Tachyon, 2011), edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale. The contents are apportioned among the themes "Mythic Fiction," "Paranormal Romance" and "Noir Fantasy," and I'd like to recommend three stories in each theme; in the first, "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" by Neil Gaiman; in the second (a subgenre I usually have a galloping allergy to), Patricia Briggs's "Seeing Eye"; and in the third, "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks" by Joe R. Lansdale. I tend to look askance at anthologies edited by people who pick their own work, but Beagle's and Lansdale's tales are well worthy of inclusion. And I was truly happy to have discovered Patricia Briggs; I resolved to look out for more of her writing.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<i>Down These Strange Streets: All New Stories of Urban Fantasy</i> (Ace, 2011), edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, was a much weaker anthology, with prose that was generally serviceable if not brilliant, with some glaring exceptions. One such was Glen Cook's "Shadow Thieves," a story that seemed an out-take from a novel, set in a universe he has written much on before but is unknown to me; the backstory was sorely needed and entirely missing, and the character development was nil. I wrote myself margin notes beside the entries in the Table of Contents, and far too many said "dreck," "meh," "ordinary" and "didn't finish" for me to feel I'd gotten anything like my money's worth by buying this book. Even Joe R. Lansdale's "The Bleeding Shadow" contained a worn-out concept, although his characters and prose were well-crafted. (I note that, once again, an anthology editor [Martin, in this case] chose one of his own works for inclusion.) However, I liked S.M. Stirling's "Pain and Suffering" very much, as well as, to my satisfaction, Patricia Briggs's "In Red, with Pearls."<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;About six months ago, I resolved to cease working on the Fantastic Toronto survey at the end of 2012, as that would mark 10 years I'd been at my labours, which was enough. The end-of-2012 goal also meant that I'd have an up-to-date survey ready for the <a href="http://www.wfc2012.org/">World Fantasy Convention being held in Toronto from November 1&#8211;4</a>. One of the con's themes is Urban Fantasy. I haven't yet decided if I'll attend (while noting that Patricia Briggs will be a special guest), but my survey might prove useful for someone doing research for panels.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I found lots of interesting content in the January 2012 issue of <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/">Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review</a>, including <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-desire-for-motion-tagores-three-voices/">"The Desire for Motion: Tagore's Three Voices" by Amardeep Singh</a>, about a new collection of works by Rabindranath Tagore</a> (1861&#8211;1941), a Bengali polymath; <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-quiet-one/">"The Quiet One" by Rohan Maitzen</a> (whose blog I follow), on Anne Bront&euml; [the aforementioned "quiet one") and her 1848 novel <i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i></a>; <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/on-reading-a-five-volume-biography-of-prince-albert/">"On Reading a Five-Volume Biography of Prince Albert"</a> by Steve Donoghue (I've been an admirer of Prince Albert's for a while now); and <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/its-a-mystery-let-other-pens-dwell-on-guilt-and-misery/">"It's a Mystery: 'Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,'</a> by Irma Heldman, a review of P.D. James's whodunnit <i>Death Comes to Pemberley</i> (verdict: well done).</li><br> <img src="images/Eskisehir_jacket.jpg" alt="Bride's jacket from city of Eski_ehir, Turkey" align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><br> <li><a name="Jan2"></a><B>January 2:</B>&ensp;A selection from my costume collection: At right is the jacket from a traditional wedding costume for a bride from the city of Eski_ehir (pronounced Es-KEE-sheh-heer), west of Ankara, Turkey. It's made of red velvet embroidered with gold. I'm especially fond of the tassels (but then, <I>I just like tassels, period</I>; can't explain it).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In my <a href="#Apr27">blog entry of 27 April 2011</a>, I displayed a sash that might be worn with this costume. The jacket is also accompanied by voluminous trousers called <I>_alwar</I> (SHALL-wahr), which are obliged to endure their existence unsupported by tassels. [Edited to add: See blog entry of <a href="#Jan8">8 January</a> to see the jacket plus trousers.]</li><br> <br> <li><a name="Jan1"></a><B>January 1, 2012:</B>&ensp;Happy New Year. Below is a specimen of Crazy Lace Agate from Mexico, containing tiny outbursts that could be taken to be of a celebratory nature. Crazy Lace Agate is a close relation, if I can put it that way, of Laguna Lace, pictured in my <a href="#Apr29">blog entry of 29 April 2011</a>.<img src="images/CrazyLaceAgate2.jpg" alt="Crazy Lace Agate, from Mexico" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> <br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;A few notes and anniversaries re the year 2012, some of them with a Canadian focus (especially the War of 1812, whose outcome may have been an official "draw" between Britain and the States but has always been counted as a victory by Canadians and in particular Ontarians&#8212;"Hell, yes, we won, and with the crucial help of our Native allies! And how do we know we won? Because the invaders went home and we're still here!"):<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1962</B>&#8212;July 5: Algeria becomes independent from France; August 5: Marilyn Monroe dies from an overdose of sleeping pills and chloral hydrate, officially ruled a "probable suicide"; September 27: Rachel Carson's book <I>Silent Spring</I> is released, giving rise to the modern environmentalist movement; September 29: The Canadian <I>Alouette 1</I>, the first satellite built outside the United States and the Soviet Union, is launched from Vandenberg AFB in California; October 14: The Cuban Missile Crisis begins (it ends November 20); November 3: The term "personal computer" is first mentioned by the media.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1952</B>&#8212;The accession of Elizabeth II. The Queen's Privy Council for Canada issued the first proclamation of the Queen's accession, doing so on February 6. Canada was first out of the gate in proclaiming the Queen's accession; in the UK, it was February 7.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1912</B>&#8212;February to March: The five members of the Scott expedition to reach the South Pole die of cold and starvation, Captain Oates becoming famous for his last words, when exiting a tent to walk into a blizzard: "I am just going outside and may be some time"; April 15: Sinking of RMS <I>Titanic</I>; April 16: Royal Ontario Museum established in Toronto.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1812</B>&#8212;June 18: War of 1812 begins (it ends February 18, 1815); June 24: Napoleon's Grande Armée invades Russia.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1712</B>&#8212;The first known working Newcomen steam engine is built by Thomas Newcomen with John Calley to pump water out of mines in England. It's the first practical device to harness the power of steam to produce mechanical work.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<B>1612</B>&#8212;In Jamestown, Virginia, John Rolfe exports the first crop of improved tobacco, using seeds from Trinidad; in England, Thomas Shelton's English translation of the first half of <I>Don Quixote</I> is published. It's the first translation of the Spanish novel into any language.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Misinterpretation of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar">Mesoamerican Long Count calendar</a>, which was used by several cultures (most notably the Maya), has led to a belief that a world-ending cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. (It won't.)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Dec31"></a><B>December 31, 2011:</B>&ensp;A recent addition to my rock collection is pictured below right: half of a Priday Blue Bed Thunderegg agate from <a href="http://richardsonrockranch.com/">Richardson's Ranch</a>, north of Madras, Oregon.<img src="images/PridayThunderegg3.jpg" alt="Priday Blue Bed Thunderegg from Richardson's Ranch, Madras, Oregon" align="right" width="260" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> The specimen is 7 cm (2.75 inches) wide by 8.9 cm (3.5 inches) high by 3.8 cm (1.5 inches) thick. These particular agate-filled mud balls, known by their Native American name of "Thundereggs," are found in layers of rhyolite lava flows dating to about 60 million years ago.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Dec30"></a><B>December 30:</B>&ensp;Some of the novels I've been reading lately include Lev Grossman's <I>The Magicians</I> (2009); Terry Pratchett's <I>Snuff</I> (2011); and Paul Torday's <I>Salmon Fishing on the Yemen</I> (2007).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;While, as I said in my blog entry of <a href="#Dec4">4 December</a>, I liked the first few chapters of Grossman's fantasy <I>The Magicians</I>, the rest of the novel proved to be a real slog to get through. I didn't find the privileged protagonist, through whose viewpoint the entire book was told, to be at all interesting, and the fact that he was "at school" (magic school) during most of the novel was another "fail" in terms of my personal taste. ("School" stories in general almost never work for me; <a href="#Oct8">see also my reaction to Donna Tartt's <I>The Secret History</I></a>, another "school" story.) I'll have to assign this book to the "I don't know what everybody was going on about" column. The fact that the sequel, <I>The Magician King</I> (2011), was also a <I>New York Times</I> bestseller leaves me unmoved; I won't be reading it. However, I'll continue to drop in on Grossman's <a href="http://levgrossman.com/blog/">blog</a>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Terry Pratchett's <I>Snuff</I> said to me that it's time Pratchett laid down his quill (or, in his case, stopped dictating); his Alzheimer's has progressed to the point that he's no longer a good, or even adequate, writer. And I say this with complete sympathy for his tragic situation rather than rancour. Pratchett has been one of my favourite writers for a very long time, and from what I've read by him and about him online, I like him as a human being as well. (Have I mentioned that I fully expect to get Alzheimer's too, as my mother and one of her sisters contracted it, although it became obvious at a more advanced age than Pratchett's did?) A year ago, I was a little disappointed with the final novel in Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series, <I>I Shall Wear Midnight</I> (2010), but I didn't say to myself, "He's lost it," as I did with <I>Snuff</I>. (In reply to some of the comments on Abigail Nussbaum's 19 November <a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/11/snuff-by-terry-pratchett.html">review of <I>Snuff</I></a>, she said she'd decided not to bring Pratchett's advancing dementia into play in discussing the novel's many weaknesses. The comments are insightful as well.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I bought Paul Torday's <I>Salmon Fishing on the Yemen</I> because of what the <a href="http://cornflower.typepad.com/">Cornflower</a> blogger said about it in her 12 December list of the 2011 Books of the Year (books she enjoyed reading the most, not necessarily books that were published in 2011): "[T]his novel hasn't had a post of its own (<a href="http://www.cornflowerbooks.co.uk/2011/12/cornflower-in-conversation-with-paul-torday.html">though its author has</a> [posted 7 December 2011]), but it's laugh-out-loud funny, very sad, most cleverly structured, and enormously entertaining." I liked it enough to recommend it here as well&#8212;and it has been made into a movie, starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Kristin Scott Thomas, that'll be coming to theatres in March 2012. I plan to take a look at Torday's other work, such as <I>The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages</I> (2008), entitled <I>Bordeaux</I> in the States; <I>The Girl on the Landing</I> (2009); <I>The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers</I> (2010); <I>More Than You Can Say</I> (2011); <I>Breakfast at the Hotel Déjà Vu</I> (2011); and <I>The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall</I> (2012), with <I>Light Shining in the Forest</I> forthcoming in 2013.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Finally, some remarks that have no relation to books. I have this inconvenient reaction to stray dogs and cats, and to wild birds and insects, that are in trouble: I want to help them, and it's not always easy to do that in a city. In October, I came across a lone Monarch butterfly sitting on the sidewalk, wings spread; this was on Wellesley Street West, as I was walking home from work. By that time of the year, Monarchs are supposed to have migrated to their winter quarters in Mexico. I put my right glove on, bent over and extended my hand, and the butterfly walked onto my fingers. (This was one of the few times I wished I owned a cellphone, so I could take a picture; I'd never handled a Monarch before.) It brought its wings together but didn't take off; this was one tired insect. I had the impulse to take it home and try to keep it alive till the weather warmed up again. But I didn't happen to have, in my capacious shoulder bag, a glass jar with pre-drilled holes in the lid; and for all I knew, this Monarch had only a short time left in its lifespan anyway. (I note from consulting Wikipedia during the composition of this entry that I was right: "By the end of October, the population east of the Rocky Mountains migrates to the sanctuaries of the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve within the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt pine-oak forests in the Mexican states of Michoacán and México....The length of these journeys exceeds the normal lifespan of most monarchs, which is less than two months for butterflies born in early summer.<img src="images/monarch_butterfly.jpg" alt="Monarch butterfly" align="left" width="140" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> The last generation of the summer enters into a non-reproductive phase known as <I>diapause</I> and may live seven months or more.")<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I carried the Monarch over to a low hedge and laid it gently down on a leaf so at least it wouldn't get run over or stepped on in the immediate future. And then I continued on my journey, <i>feeling upset that I'd abandoned a butterfly</I>. The next day, it was not where I'd left it.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Last night I stayed while a bird died. It was a female rock pigeon, and earlier in the day it had sat huddled on my balcony railing while snow fell on it, so I knew it was ailing. A few hours later, after night had fallen, it had moved to right outside my balcony door, close to the warmth of the building. I'm not one of those people who are afraid of birds or of catching bird-cooties&#8212;in fact, like one of my late aunts, I love birds&#8212;so I slid open the balcony door. The bird was alive and blinking at me, but it didn't struggle at all when I took it in my hands. (In my experience&#8212;and I've handled starlings as well as pigeons before&#8212;if wild birds allow you to pick them up, they're in bad shape. And let me hasten to add that I wouldn't dream of picking up predators such as hawks and falcons, which also populate Toronto.) This pigeon was dying. I carried it into my spare bathroom and placed it gently on some toilet paper on the floor, dribbled some birdseed in front of its beak, and then turned off the light and closed the door. (I have cats.) A little later, I checked on it; it hadn't moved and was inclined to go to sleep, so I left it alone again. But the next time I went in, I stayed. It was sleeping (although not yet in a coma, because it roused when I changed my handhold), but its feet had curled up into "dead-bird" claws and its head had drawn into its body. The respiration gradually changed; it began to breathe by opening its beak rather than through its nostrils, as formerly. I picked it up and cradled it in both hands as it slumped on its side, still breathing through its beak (and swallowing occasionally), and I must admit I was crying. I know that pigeons make a terrible mess with their droppings, but they lead such miserable lives in our cities and, God damn it, <I>they live here because of us</I>. So I tried to give this one a better death than most of its fellows in winter&#8212;out of the cold, with some empathetic company that stroked its feathers while it passed on.<br> <br> <li><img src="images/Willow_Creek_Jasper13.jpg" alt="Willow Creek Jasper from Idaho" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><a name="Dec25"></a><B>December 25:</B>&ensp;At right we have a slice of Willow Creek Jasper from Idaho, the essential "footishness" of whose shape I've emphasized by painting the background white.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I do believe this foot is in dire need of a podiatrist... The toes seem a trifle cramped...</li><br><br> <li><a name="Dec21"></a><B>December 21:</B>&ensp;On 17 December, six dancers from the Dilan Dance Company performed excerpts from the <I>Mem û Zin</I> show (written about on <a href="#Dec7">7 December</a>): Four women (Ba_ak Erdemir, ^afak Erdemir, Maral Salek and Yasmine Zemani) did traditional Kurdish dances, and Samantha Mehra and Falciony Patino Cruz did their contemporary duet as the happy lovers Siti and Tacdin. The occasion was "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalda">Yalda Night</a>," a Persian event celebrating the winter solstice, traditionally held on or around December 20th or 21st. This year, Yalda Night was on the Saturday preceding those dates. The event was held in the Common Room at Hart House, University of Toronto, and sponsored by IAUT, the <a href="http://www.iaut.org/">Iranian Association at the University of Toronto</a>. (Aside: The Kurdish and Persian languages are closely related, and the cultures also share the celebration of the spring solstice in March: Newroz.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I dressed Ba_ak, ^afak, Maral and Yasmine as well as myself (see photo below), although I wasn't dancing. I found that my garb added a certain authority when I had to insinuate myself into and out of the jam-packed room in order to supervise the running of the (canned) music. Dilan's artistic director, Fethi Karake&ccedil;ili, was present as well.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Other elements of Yalda Night included poem readings; a puppet show; musical numbers; and dances by the Persian dance company called Gisoo, many of whose members (including director Ida Meftahi) are also in the Dilan company. In short order, Gisoo dancers Maral and Yasmine had to tear off their Persian costumes and skin into their Kurdish ones,<img src="images/KB_seated_on_Yalda_Night_Dec_17_2011.jpg" alt="Karen Bennett in Kurdish costume from ^1rnak, Turkey, on Yalda Night, December 17, 2011, Toronto" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> as only a few numbers by a musician separated the two dance companies.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Yalda Night was a big success for IAUT (who are great to work with); it was evident to me that Yalda is an important part of Persian culture. And as for Dilan: (a) we enjoyed ourselves&#8212;and we love Hart House as a building; (b) we received many compliments; and (c) as an unexpected bonus, we recruited some new members.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Just as the beautiful costumes of Croatia were one of the enticements for me to join a Croatian ensemble a few decades ago, it's possible that Dilan's spiffy Kurdish costumes are an aid to recruitment now (plus, we in Dilan are also talented, hard-working, <I>nice</I> folk, which is another aid to recruitment; for me, there's no point to the enterprise without good people to work with, as prima donnas make me break out in hives). The costumes certainly impressed the audience, we were told.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Above right is a photo Fethi took of me in my spiffy costume from the southeastern Turkish region of ^1rnak (pronounced SHUR-nahk) while I was lounging in the dressing-room before the performance. (What I was thinking was, "Oh please let this be a not-too-horrible picture; I <I>know</I> I'm an impostor and that my non-Kurdish face gives me away, but at least the costume is an original one made by a Kurd, and the silver accessories are the real thing too!")<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<a href="#Dec7">In the photo below, taken during the full <I>Mem û Zin</I> show on October 2</a>, ^afak Erdemir and Yasmine Zemani can be seen in <I>their</I> spiffy costumes; ^afak is facing the camera (her sister Ba_ak wore this costume on 17 December), and Yasmine has her arms raised high. I'm going to have to do some alterations on Yasmine's costume, as she's swimming in it; she told me on 17 December that, while she was dancing, she had to surreptitiously keep twitching the jacket back onto her shoulders. (No wardrobe malfunctions in <I>my</I> company if I can help it.) I've already replaced her yellow trousers with shorter ones. I'm not a sempstress by profession or avocation, but I can do basic repairs and alterations&#8212;all by hand, as I no longer have a sewing machine. When I order the costumes, I try to get large sizes&#8212;I never know in advance who's going to be wearing what&#8212;and then take them in as necessary.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Speaking of the winter solstice, may I say how glad I am that the days will be getting longer from now on?<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Further on the topic of the <I>Mem û Zin</I> dance-drama, I'm going to be posting a detailed synopsis of the plot. The <I>Mem û Zin</I> story is well-known to Kurds (and to some Turks, as a movie version was released in Turkey in January 1992) but not to English-speakers, and there's nothing comprehensive available in English online. And, as with ballet and other forms of dance-drama, the narrative of <I>Mem û Zin</I> on stage can be difficult to follow absent familiarity with the story in advance. To capture the story, I'm going back to as close to the source as I can reach: an English translation (by a Kurd) of the original Kurdish poem from the 17th century.</li><br> <img src="images/Mem_u_Zin_scarves.jpg" alt="Girls' scarf dance from Mem u Zin performance, October 2, 2011, Toronto" align="right" width="290" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Dec7"></a><B>December 7:</B>&ensp;On Sunday 2 October, I acted as traditional-costume provider and women's dresser for the world premiere of a Kurdish dance-drama called <I>Mem û Zin</I> (Mem and Zin), choreographed and directed by Toronto's Fethi Karake&ccedil;ili and performed by Toronto's Dilan Dance Company in traditional and contemporary costume at the Isabel Bader Theatre on the University of Toronto St. George campus.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The dance-drama was inspired by a tragic romance poem published in 1692 by Kurdish poet, philosopher and Sunni Muslim cleric Ehmedê Xanî (his name is spelled many ways, including Ahmad Khani); he lived in Turkey from 1650 to 1707. Although Kurds often use the shorthand "<I>Romeo and Juliet</I>" to convey the "star-crossed lovers" aspect of the <I>Mem û Zin</I> story, Shakespeare's play carries no English nationalistic freight (and is set in Italy, besides), while <I>Mem û Zin</I> is set in a largely independent Kurdish principality and is considered the beginning of Kurdish nationalism. It's believed by some Kurds to be a true story (while others think it's a fairytale).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The photo at top depicts a traditional Kurdish girls' scarf dance, done in the first half of the show; 95% of the costumes are mine, and are from Turkey. At left front is a dancer wearing a red dress from the city and region of Hakkâri,<img src="images/Mem_u_Zin_Newroz.jpg" alt="leaping over the Newroz fire, from Mem u Zin performance, October 2, 2011, Toronto" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> and hidden behind her is another woman in Hakkâri garb; at middle front, the green-aproned costume hails from Diyarbak1r; at middle rear is a mixture of elements from eastern Turkey, but the yellow underdress is mine; at right front is a costume from Gaziantep; and at right rear is one from Mardin.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In the photo at right, men take turns hurdling a bonfire in various athletic ways during the traditional celebrations for Newroz, the Kurdish New Year (which is in March). In the story, two couples&#8212;Mem and Zin, who are to become the tragic lovers, and Siti and Tacdin, who will have a happier fate&#8212;no sooner set eyes on each other during Newroz than they fall in love. In this photo, the man above the fire and the man at right applauding him are dressed in my Mardin and Hakkâri costumes, respectively, while Fethi Karake&ccedil;ili (playing Bekr, the villain of the story), at rear, is wearing a blue Hakkâri costume that's his.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The third photo, below, depicts the pre-wedding "Henna Night" for Siti (played by Samantha Mehra), who is happily betrothed to Tacdin. Wearing my red dress from Hakkâri at right front is Ida Meftahi as Zin, Siti's sister.<img src="images/Mem_u_Zin_henna_ceremony.jpg" alt="Henna ceremony prceding wedding, from Mem u Zin performance, October 2, 2011, Toronto" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> At front left are two more of my costumes (the ones with dark overrobes), worn by dancers playing the older women in the community; the woman with the red headscarf is Junia Mason, playing Heyzebun, the sisters' nanny.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Although most of the dancers were Kurds born in Turkey, others sprang from such countries as Iran, Brazil, Colombia and Canada. The musicians were also multi-ethnic, and included Kurds, Turks, Iranians, a Bulgarian, and a Macedonian-Canadian. The singer of the death lament over the murdered Mem, Sena Dersimi, was a Kurd flown in from Germany especially to sing for us. (She was also the mother of one of the dancers.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In all, I dressed 20 people in traditional costumes, some of the women in several different ensembles. (They had to be <I>very</I> quick-change artists, as they had contemporary costumes to switch to as well.) Everything I lent to the show was from Turkey: Some outfits were reproductions newly made for me by a Turkish company in Ankara that furnishes costumes for performing groups, while others (such as those with dark overrobes, seen above) were originals, made <I>by</I> Kurds <I>for</I> Kurds and found for me by a Kurd from the southeastern town of Siirt who canvassed his family, friends and other contacts and discovered things that the Turkish company does not make.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;There are dozens upon dozens of traditional Kurdish costumes; I've just scratched the surface with my collection. (The costumes I have from Iraqi Kurdistan are similar to what Kurds in southeastern Turkey wear.) Some of this collection was first displayed in the fashion show I blogged about on <a href="#Sep1">1 September</a>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Other photos, not all in order of performance, can be found on the <a href="http://dilandance.blogspot.com/">Dilan Dance Company blog</a>, along with news articles and interviews published before the show, rehearsal photos and, near the bottom, photos taken in 2009 relating to a traditional dance medley that the "older folk" of the company</a> (all international folk dancers, including me) performed for Newroz in front of an audience of Toronto-area Kurds. (I wrote about it <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Newroz2009.html">here</a>.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;It wasn't possible for me to write a conventional review of <I>Mem û Zin</I> as (a) I had a conflict of interest and couldn't be objective, being a group sponsor, and (b) I didn't <I>see</I> the performance, being backstage working as a dresser. I saw much of the dress rehearsal, though, and I have to say, I thought it was wonderful; really something unique. I was impressed as hell, and I'm not easy to impress. Some things need to be tweaked for the next performance, but not many.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The company has been invited to take the show to Edmonton, Montreal, the States, Europe and Iraq, but no dates had been set as of time of writing.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Dec6"></a><img src="images/Willow_Creek_Jasper8.jpg" alt="Willow Creek Jasper, from Idaho" align="right" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>December 6:</B>&ensp;From my rock collection is the scene at right, courtesy of a Willow Creek Jasper slab from Idaho. I've had this specimen a few years.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Can this depict a tongue lolling beyond some exceptionally plaque-free teeth? An alien sky behind some very, very shiny hills? Made of ice? Whatever; it's just freaky, and its colouring pleases me greatly.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Dec4"></a><B>December 4:</B>&ensp;The work of U.S. author and journalist Lev Grossman having been recommended to me by divers sources, I've started reading <I>The Magicians</I> (Penguin, 2009), a coming-of-age fantasy novel that starts out in Brooklyn, NY. After only a few chapters, I'm hooked. (And I've already had to Google a few terms in the novel, such as, "What's a 'watch hat'? What was the Battle of Brooklyn?") But I expected to be delighted by Grossman's work; I read a wonderful, crackling-with wit-and-intelligence interview he did on 19 November <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/11/what-fantasy-does-best-lev-grossman-talks-with-peter-orullian">with Peter Orullian on Tor</a>, plus a <a href="http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2011/11/roundtable-genre-accessibility/all/1/"><I>Locus</I> roundtable about the accessibility of fantasy and SF</a> from Nov. 30th, with Grossman as a participant. His <a href="http://levgrossman.com/blog/">blog</a> is very rewarding as well, and not just because he revealed that <I>The Magicians</I> and its sequel, <I>The Magician King</I> (2011), have been optioned by Fox for a TV series (<a href="http://levgrossman.com/2011/10/so-that-happened-the-post-about-the-tv-deal/">here's the entertaining interview he did with himself on the subject</a>). He is at work on a third novel in the series, as is <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/18/bbc-hbo-wolf-hall-tv-drama?intcmp=239">Hilary Mantel with her series of historical novels on Thomas Cromwell</a> that began with the unexpected hit 2009 novel <I>Wolf Hall</I> (great book; I've read it) and will continue in 2012 with <I>Bring Up the Bodies</I> and has been picked up for a series by the BBC and HBO. (Aside: There's no fantasy content in Mantel's work.) I'm very pleased that such "literary" novelists as Grossman and Mantel have found such success in print that the broadcast industry is interested in them as well.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Oct15"></a><B>October 15:</B>&ensp;Writer Jessica Hagedorn said, during an <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2011_09_018072.php">interview by Terry Hong published on the Bookslut site</a> in September 2011:<blockquote> I was recently at Joe's Pub [at the Public Theater in New York] for a pre-book tour event. I read from [my 2011 novel] <I>Toxicology</I> as part of their Happy Ending Music and Reading Series. Writers get invited to read a short excerpt, then do one risky thing on stage, something a writer's always wanted to do in front of an audience, but maybe is too shy to ever try. You can tell a story, sing a song, play the piano... One writer, for example, cut someone's hair on stage! Wish I'd thought of that. You have exactly five minutes to do this risky bit of business.<br><br> I performed with composer Mark Bennett and his dog, a gorgeous, lovable playboy boxer named Cassius. I sang [Antonio Carlos] Jobim's "The Waters of March" to Cassius while Mark accompanied me on piano. Of course, the dog stole the show.<br><br> That was my "Hey, I could do this again!" moment.</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;What would I do for <I>my</I> risky business? Improv comedy. Of course, audiences at such series as the one above would applaud no matter what you did (I m sure they did for the writer who cut hair). So there d be no danger of  dying on stage&#8212;no real  risk involved. I've wanted to do improv comedy since I was a teenager. But then, at that age I also wanted to be a published author, and that hasn't happened either. (For anyone wondering what progress I made over the summer with my YA novel [mentioned in the June 20th blog entry], I made none to speak of.)</li><br> <img src="images/Chrysoprase_Australia.jpg" alt="Chrysoprase from Australia" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Oct14"><B>October 14:</B>&ensp;Another in the series of "yummy rocks" in my collection (see also the <a href="#Jun19.5">19 June</a> blog entry) is this outstanding cut of apple-green chrysoprase, from the chalcedony family of semi-precious quartzes. This specimen was dug in Australia; it can be found in Queensland and in Western Australia.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The word "chrysoprase" comes from the Greek ÇÁÅÃÌÂ, <I>chrysos</I>, meaning "gold," and ÀÁ¬Ã¹½¿½, <I>prasinon</I>, meaning "green." Unlike emerald, which owes its colour to the presence of chromium, chrysoprase's shade is beholden to trace amounts of nickel. "Crystal-healing fact": This variety has metaphysical properties for healing as well as being a stone to attract new love and abundance and prosperity! (I don't believe <I>that</I>; what I <I>do</I> believe is that this photo will irresistibly draw the eyes of my readers to it. And possibly make them hungry... for, um, jello pie?)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Oct9"></a><B>October 9:</B>&ensp;Something I've had in my rock collection for a few years is the specimen shown at lower right of&#8212;are you ready for the big reveal?&#8212;Mystery Agate! That's right; the seller didn't know what it was called or where it came from.<img src="images/Mystery_Agate.jpg" alt="Mystery Agate, U.S." align="right" width="180" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> (The States, somewhere, I believe.) I'm stumped as well. But, operating on the theory that it's <I>good</I> to have some mystery in your life, I offer it here for your wonder and puzzlement. I find it very pleasing, in colouring and design. (Well, "design": the lapidary chose how to cut it, but there was no "designer" of this agate as such.)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Oct8"></a><B>October 8:</B>&ensp;Three books I've been reading lately: <I>The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories</I> (2011) by Dr. Seuss, <I>Where's My Cow?</I> (2005) by Terry Pratchett, and <I>The Secret History</I> (1992) by Donna Tartt.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<I>The Bippolo Seed</I> consists of seven stories first published in magazines in 1950 and 1951 and recently collected, with their original illustrations, by Seuss scholar Charles Cohen. (Dr. Seuss&#8212;Theodor Seuss Geisel&#8212;died in 1991.) My favourite of the seven stories was "Steak for Supper," which ties into <I>And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street</I> (1937). After I had read all seven aloud to myself (my cats remaining unmoved by the brilliance of my rendition), I realized that, far from keeping this newly unearthed treasure to myself, I should give it to my best friend, also a Seuss fan, who would want to read the stories to her grade 2 classes. And whose birthday was coming up. So I did. Give it to her, I mean. (She's younger than I am&#8212;by exactly one month&#8212;and I feel it my duty, as an <I>older</I> woman, to offer her guidance.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'd bought the picture book <I>Where's My Cow?</I> with the <I>intention</I> of giving it as a present&#8212;as a baby-shower gift to a co-worker&#8212;but after skimming it, I kept it to myself and bought another because I considered it appropriate neither for reading aloud to children nor for reading <I>by</I> children. The story is based on the eponymous book, which is one of the plot drivers in Pratchett's 2005 Discworld novel <I>Thud!</I> because Watch Commander Sam Vimes has formed the deliberate habit of reading it to his beloved young son every day at 6 p.m. (so he has to <I>stop working</I>&#8212;and he's a workaholic&#8212;in order to get home by that time). I bought it expecting it to <I>be</I> the book that Vimes reads, but it's not, although some of <I>Where's My Cow?</I> is <I>in there</I> (lots of recursion in this tale, clearly); it's a spin-off story derived from a scene in <I>Thud!</I>, it's more of a nightmare than something suitable to read before bedtime, and it's not what I wanted. I especially did not want to see the character of Foul Ole Ron, who's both senile and foul-mouthed, show up, with his customary dialogue of "Bugrit! Millennium Hand and Shrimp!" (Pratchett has said he has no idea what "Millennium Hand and Shrimp" is supposed to mean, but there's no mistaking what "Bugger it" means.) Oh, and I also disliked the illustrations.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Donna Tartt's psychological thriller <I>The Secret History</I> clocks in at 559 pages in my 2004 Vintage edition, and there's no chance of confusing it with a child's book. I was alerted to its existence by the <a href="http://www.cornflowerbooks.co.uk/">Cornflower blog</a> (I've linked to the Books section of it, but not to the <I>Secret History</I> entry). Usually I avoid thrillers, for a number of reasons, including the fact that my nervous system needs relaxation, not stimulation, but such were the accolades heaped upon this novel ("modern classic"; "beautifully written," etc.) that I gave it a try. I had a number of reactions to it: yes, it is beautifully written, but it's about 200 pages too long; yes, I appreciated that it was a modern version of a Greek tragedy, in part impelled by the fact that its main characters <I>study</I> ancient Greek, but it <I>went on too long</I>, and most of the characters, as well as their actions, are opaque and unsympathetic. It took me the best part of a week to get through the book, which is unusual for speed-reading me. I was reminded of Barbara Vine's 1986 novel <I>A Dark-Adapted Eye</I>, also a dark psychological thriller: Although I knew where the novel was going because the author told me in the prologue, I stayed with it because of the story-telling skill on display. But I never wanted to read it again.</li><br> <img src="images/White_and_fuchsia_balcony_flowers_Sept_22_2011.jpg" alt="More September flowers on balcony, Toronto" align="right" width="260" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Sep23"></a><B>September 23:</B>&ensp;So as not to disappoint my flower-loving public, here is one more photo from my balcony garden (the last photo of the season, I'm thinking): white asters at the top; below, clusters of fuchsia-coloured Kalanchoe (<I>Kalanchoe blossfeldiana</I>, which, research informs me, is a "a glabrous branching herb native to Madagascar"); and, to the left, white and fuchsia blooms of <I>impatiens</I>. While not as splendiferously-coloured as the asters pictured in my September 20th blog entry, the flowers in this photo yet yield some quiet rewards.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Just finished reading a specfic novel that I believe is Hugo-nomination-worthy for next year's ballot: Genevieve Valentine's <I>Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti</I> (Prime Books, 2011), a dystopian steampunk fantasy novel. The author has <a href="http://www.genevievevalentine.com/2011/06/mechanique-review-round-up/">a round-up of reviews</a> on her site.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Some TV and video watching I've been doing:<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;(1) the abysmal 1947 movie <I>That Hagen Girl</I>, starring an utterly uncharismatic Shirley Temple (then 17 years old), an utterly unconvincing Ronald Reagan and an utterly vapid Lois Maxwell. I saw it (for the first time) while visiting a friend on Thursday. This collection of clich&eacute;s and phoned-in performances was aired as a "Turner Classic Movie," believe it or not. (The other movie Shirley Temple did in 1947, <I>The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer</I>, co-starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, was head and shoulders above the "Hagen" pap.); and<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;(2) the DVD of <I>Big Trouble in Little China</I>, which was just as much fun as when I saw it in first run in 1986. The DVD commentary (done in 2001) by star Kurt Russell and director John Carpenter was also a lot of fun because the two enjoyed each other's company and laughed so much. I would have appreciated more commentary <I>about the movie they were watching</I>&#8212;which, they themselves acknowledged near the end, they'd fallen down on&#8212;rather than about their shared working history (such as <I>Escape from New York</I> [1981] and <I>Escape from L.A.</I> [1996]), but I'm still grateful that I was reminded of this movie by <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/09/qif-were-not-back-by-dawn-call-the-presidentq-a-look-back-at-big-trouble-in-little-china">a Sept. 1st post at Tor.com</a> to mark the 25th anniversary of the film's release.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Next up on my DVD-watching list: <I>I Capture the Castle</I>, a 2003 film based on the delightful Dodie Smith novel of the same name (published in 1949; I've read it); and <I>Daniel Deronda</I>, a 2002 BBC production based on the 1876 novel by George Eliot (I haven't read it).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;My birthday was September 10, and it was one of the best birthdays I've ever had. Last year, nobody remembered; this year, even my hairdresser did. The day after, which was the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I deliberately did not check the news, and had a nice, relaxing day, enjoying the once-a-week peace and quiet that comes on Sundays when you live across the street from a never-ending construction project where work starts at 6 in the morning. [Edited to add: The project finally finished in December; the Loblaws is open.]</li><br> <img src="images/Balcony_Asters_Sept_20_2011.jpg" alt="September asters on balcony, Toronto" align="right" width="260" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Sep20"></a><B>September 20:</B>&ensp;To the right is a photo of some asters that I just took on my balcony. The aster is also known as "the September flower."<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I have a number of books on the go at the moment: in terms of non-fiction, it's <I>The Invention of Tradition</I> (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger; and, in terms of fiction, it's Mary Renault's <I>Fire from Heaven</I> (1970), which is first in her trilogy about Alexander the Great but the last one to reach my hands, as the others (<I>The Persian Boy</I> and <I>Funeral Games</I>) arrived in the mail long since. I'm liking it the best of all three, despite anachronisms such as references to "Venetian horses" (Venice wasn't founded until the 5th century A.D., unless there's another Venice or Veniti tribe I've never heard of) and to "gentlemen." In high school, I read a lot of Renault, and am just coming back to her now. (Did you know her real name was Eileen Mary Challans?) Although I don't specifically remember reading this series as a teenager, I must have, because as soon as I set eyes on Colin Farrell impersonating Alexander in the 2004 movie by Oliver Stone, I said, "Oh, no. He's not right at all. He's not even close."<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;How could I say this? Because I was comparing poor Farrell not only to Renault's Alexander but, I've just realized, to Peter O'Toole in <I>Lawrence of Arabia</I> (1962), as per <a href="http://myweb.unomaha.edu/~mreames/Beyond_Renault/review2.html">"Fire Bringer: Oliver Stone's <I>Alexander</I>"</a>, a detailed review by Dr. Jeanne Reames, an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. (Dr. Reames is also a Renault reader.) She says, "[If] I compared this movie to <I>Lawrence of Arabia</I>, it <B>isn't</B> <I>Lawrence of Arabia</I>, and Colin Farrell isn't Peter O'Toole. He's not in O'Toole's class. Of course, most actors <I>aren't</I>, yet that caliber of actor was what this film required. It is SO strongly focused on one person that the lead actor must have sufficient magnetism and breadth to carry the film alone." So it wasn't just Renault's romanticized rendition of Alexander that scuttled the 2004 movie for me; it was the memory of Peter O'Toole. (With, I'd have to say, Omar Sharif running O'Toole a close second.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The cataract operation on my left eye took place on September 12 and was a success; despite some problems with blurring and "fluttering" that my surgeon tells me are normal and to be expected until the eye heals completely, I already have 20/25 vision and am back in action as far as reading goes. (Phew!) There's at least one more operation to go on the right eye, but I no longer have to fear going blind.</li><br><img src="images/Fantasy_Plume_Agate_Oregon.jpg" alt="Fantasy Plume Agate, from Oregon" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Sep7"></a><B>September 7:</B>&ensp;To the right is a surpassingly lovely cabochon of Fantasy Plume Agate from Oregon, recently obtained from a new online acquaintance (also from Oregon), who is, for starters, a miner, a lapidary (person who cuts, polishes or engraves gems) and a nature photographer&#8212;amateur, but what photos they are! (Desert flowers! Barn owls! Horned owls! Scorpions! Er...) He found the jaspers and agates on my site and wrote me an e-mail, is how I made his acquaintance. I urge my readers to cast their eyes at his <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/blueowyheegems/">photostream on Flickr</a>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;My new friend has asked me to say that if my readers run across his website, blueowyheegems.com, it is not working any more and nothing is for sale, but he aims to get a redesigned site up as soon as he can. About this Fantasy Plume Agate cabochon, which he dubbed "The Cosmos Creation," he says: "If I did not know this was a natural agate, I would swear it was a picture from the Hubble Telescope of deep space." As would I.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In addition to the rocks on my site, I get a fair bit of feedback on the folklore items. The <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_3_My_Albanian_Journey.html">Albanian essay I wrote last year</a> and the video and photos of my workshop for the Ontario Folk Dance Association in November 2009 are still drawing much positive comment from Albanians, including an e-mail in August from an Albanian-Canadian living "next door"&#8212;in Mississauga, which is Toronto's western neighbour. And I've just been asked by a friend in the States when I expect to post my next costume article. (Several articles of some type or other&#8212;it's up to me&#8212;are needed for upcoming issues of the Ontario <I>Folk Dancer</I> magazine as well.) It's good to know that what I do purely for love is liked so much by others.</li><br><br> <li><B>September 6:</B>&ensp;Every year, <a href="http://strangehorizons.com/"><I>Strange Horizons</I></a>, a "magazine of and about speculative fiction and related nonfiction," holds a fund-raising drive, and it's in the midst of one now</a>. I've just donated a sum that will pay for one article (note that all the staff are volunteers), which is little enough&#8212;more of a token, really&#8212;and is not even tax-deductible in Canada. But it serves to express my gratitude and support for this entity, whose contents I read regularly (there's new, well-written stuff added every week), and I often link to it in this blog. Up <I>Strange Horizons</I>! (Edited to add: On December 1, I learned that I'd won a prize because my name, as someone who gave during the fund-raising drive, had been chosen from a draw for donated items. I picked out a story anthology as my reward.]<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I also donate to the online spec-fic magazine <a href="http://www.ideomancer.com/?page_id=33"><I>Ideomancer</I></a>.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Sep4"></a><B>September 4:</B>&ensp;In the Other Writing section is <a href="Stockton_2011.html">an article I wrote about attending Stockton Folk Dance Camp</a> in California from July 30 to August 6.<img src="images/Stockton_Karens_2011.jpg" align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> Below right is a photo (taken by Carol Feige) of me taking part in the <I>highly</I> original "Stockton Karens" act at the camp talent show on Saturday 6 August. From left are Karen Wilson-Bell, from Spokane, Washington; yours truly, from Toronto, Canada; and Karen Roseland, from Sacramento, California. We have just performed the song "We Are the Karens, the Stockton Karens" to the tune for "You Are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine," and I am in the process of reversing the sign hanging around my neck, which reads "#3 Karen," to the side that bears the legend "#1 Karen."<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;After that act, believe me, everybody at camp knew our names. (At the 2010 Stockton camp, there were <I>four</I> Karens: the above three plus Karen Sandler&#8212;who was not a singer, as it happens. Which is neither here nor there, of course.)<br><br> <li><a name="Sep1"></a><B>September 1:</B>&ensp;Occasionally, I need to refer to myself in the third person to inform people of my "recent doings." The following is excerpted from an item I submitted to the column entitled "The Back Page" in the October issue of the (Ontario) <I>Folk Dancer</I> magazine:<blockquote>"On Sunday August 28, Karen Bennett took part in the ninth annual Kurdish Cultural Festival, held in Toronto's Earlscourt Park at St. Clair and Caledonia Rd. Since the date for the festival changed several times over the summer, it wasn't possible to publicize it in advance outside the Kurdish community. Karen acted as announcer (and one of the models) for a Kurdish fashion show that included 16 of her women's and men's costumes from Turkey and Iraq plus costumes worn by people who asked to join in the fun once they knew what was coming up. Although the fashion show was a trifle more extemporaneous than expected, Karen was glad she'd volunteered to participate (and the kids in the show were <I>really</I> cute), as costumes from Iran rounded out the show and the audience found it not only interesting (because many of the costumes were new to their eyes) but meaningful; they were pleased and surprised that someone outside the community cared about their culture. Among those taking part in the dance component of the festival were performers from local Cuban, African, Georgian and Polish groups.... In other 'Karen' news, she will be undergoing more eye surgeries and procedures in the fall but hopes her sight will be much improved by March of 2012."</blockquote> [Edited to add: See the blog entries for <a href="#Dec7">December 7</a> and <a href="#Dec21">21</a> for more on my Kurdish costumes, including photos.]<br><br></li> <li><a name="Aug31"></a><B>August 31:</B>&ensp;Sorry for the big gap between blog entries. In late July, when some of what follows in this blog entry was almost ready to post, I decided to go to <a href="http://www.folkdancecamp.org/index.html">Stockton Folk Dance Camp</a> in California for eight days, and once I returned I had trouble settling back into the saddle. My report on Stockton will be up soon. [Edited to add: See blog entry for <a href="#Sep4">September 4</a>.]<img src="images/Orange_base_July20_2011.jpg" align="right" width="228" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="9"><br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;At right is the "base orange" composition from my balcony garden, as promised way back on July 16. (I call it a composition because I rearrange the plants, which are in pots, before I photograph them.) Since few of my flowering plants survived the vacation in Stockton I took subsequent to this photograph, this is very much a "historic" picture. However, the various <I>impatiens</I> plants are still going strong as of date of posting; I'll be sure to buy a lot of them next year, as I appreciate their stick-to-it-iveness.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In the rear of the picture are the orange blooms of an <I>Alcantarea imperialis</I>, which is native to Brazil. Some white hollyhocks (<I>Alcea rosea</I>) crowd the upper right of the photo, while marigolds (<I>Calendula officinalis</I>) hold down the lower left. In the centre are African or Gerbera daisies (<I>Gerbera jamesonii</I>), which are indigenous to South Africa. At lower right is a white <I>impatiens</I> flower, and above it a yellow <I>celosia</I> is reaching for the sky again, as it did in the second photo from July 5th. I took the photo on July 20th late in the day (around 7 p.m.), which accounts for the high contrast; I had to override the camera's insistence that the flash was needed (I let it flash on July 5, which is why those photos are so brightly front-lit and so lacking in depth).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Towards the end of July, in time for the voting deadline for the Hugo Awards, I submitted my ballot, having read all the short story, novella and novelette finalists. The novels, I'd read a while ago, as discussed on April 24th. The Hugo Awards ceremony (for SF genre works) took place on August 20th and I watched most of it live via Ustream. The winner in the "best novel" category (<I>Blackout/All Clear</I> by Connie Willis), while not <I>surprising</I>, was still very disappointing. Abigail Nussbaum has been more <a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/08/2011-hugo-awards-winners.html">eloquent in her thoughts </a> on the subject than I can. It was not much consolation to reflect that Willis will not be able to win a "best novel" Hugo for popularity rather than literary merit next year, as she has published/will publish no novel in 2011. However, I did reap some rewards from the Hugo ceremony: (1) discovery of the Pacific Northwest musical trio Tricky Pixie, who were presenters at the Hugos and whose 2009 album <I>Mythcreants</I>, including the captivating song <a href="http://music.trickypixie.com/track/taglio">"Taglio!"</a>, could be heard at the beginning of the streaming video; and (2) <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16783348">Robert Silverberg's painfully funny introduction to the "best novella" category</a> (jump ahead to timecheck 02:44:50 and listen till 02:49:00).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Further to my ruminations of July 10 on Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift series of urban fantasy novels: On July 22nd, Guria King of <I>Strange Horizons</I> <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2011/07/the_neon_court_.shtml">wrote a review of the third book, <I>The Neon Court</I></a>, and of the whole series, that I want to endorse. It's spot-on. In particular, I nodded at these remarks, excerpted from the review's fourth to seventh paragraphs:<blockquote>"There is an episodic, repetitive nature to the Matthew Swift series that has more in common with mystery books and TV serials than with most Western fantasy works. In particular, it seems to have a lot in common with <I>Doctor Who</I>. The threats faced are both terrifying and absurd; the series is more about sustained action sequences than plot and characterization; the dialogue, no matter who the speaker or what the situation, is full of flippant one-liners....<br><br> "Swift always begins the books uncertain and in peril, pitted against a threat that reveals itself to be overwhelming and nigh undefeatable, with not just his life at stake but invariably also those of millions of other Londoners. By the end of the book, he has, against all odds and with a high body count, managed to neutralize the threat, only to be plunged once again into another seemingly impossible life-or-death situation at the beginning of the next book. There isn't anything connecting the threats that Swift deals with from book to book, no Sauron or Voldemort, no great evil that must be defeated....<br><br> "There are two problems that make this approach feel somewhat manipulative. The first is the lack of downtime in which the narrator&#8212;and the reader&#8212;can catch their breath....<br><br> "The second is that nothing that happens, no matter how disastrous or horrific, seems to have a lasting effect on Matthew Swift."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Later in the review, King hits on one of the prime rewards that make me hang in there with Matthew, despite the faults of his creator in not allowing him to breathe and have some downtime; in not allowing him to ponder his situation ("Why do I have to live like this? This is killing me [again]! Bugger this for a game of cards! There must be a way I can resign as the Midnight Mayor without dying [again]!"); and in not allowing him to be changed by his experiences and to grow as a character:<blockquote> "It soon becomes obvious that London isn't just the setting; it is a character in itself. At the heart of this series lies a love story between Matthew Swift and the city, with magic serving as both an expression of this love and the means of (quite often delightfully bizarre) salvation. In Griffin's universe, urban magic, after all, is nothing more than a certain sense of perspective, the ability to see and fully experience the energies of the city. It is the joy that Matthew Swift takes in his city, how he perceives and embraces all its aspects, from the sublime to the ordinary to the odiferous, that makes him an urban sorcerer."</blockquote> </li> <li><a name="Jul16"></a><B>July 16:</B>&ensp;I've been making more discoveries about the species of plants on my balcony. The prodigiously bloomy red-and-white flowers I photographed in the "base red" group composition on July 5 are a variety of petunia called Million Bells in the vernacular and, in Latin, <I>Calibrachoa</I>.<img src="images/Million_Bells_July10_2011.jpg" alt="a 'Million Bells' hanging plant, July 10, 2011, Toronto" align="right" width="260" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="12"> Below is a close-up. This species comes in a riot of shades. I may stroll over to some neighbourhood plant emporia and acquire a few more hanging baskets of Million Bells and thereby feel simultaneously virtuous (I'm taking healthy exercise! patronizing local independent businesses! adding oxygen to the air via plant respiration!) and self-indulgent (I'm engaging in never-ending consumerism!).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Coming soon are photos of Clematis plus a "base orange" composition. (Really, I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger these days.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And, since I have to come indoors <I>sometime</I>, I've done <I>even more</I> work on the website by adding a story by Kelley Armstrong ("The List") to the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>.</li><br><br> <li><img src="images/White_carnation_July10_2011.jpg" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="9"><B>July 10:</B>&ensp;I took some close-up photos of my balcony garden. The white flowers I couldn't identify on July 5th are a variety of carnation, <I>Dianthus</I>, visible to the right.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I added a short story by Nalo Hopkinson ("Old Habits") to the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a> and a new photo to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/RecentChanges.html">Recent Changes<a> page.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I finished reading the Kate Griffin fantasies <I>The Midnight Mayor</I> and <I>The Neon Court</I>, books 2 and 3 of her series starring modern-day London sorcerer Matthew Swift, as mentioned in my June 20th blog entry. And I was happy to learn via <I>her</I> blog that there will be seven books in the series. Book 4, <I>The Minority Council</I> (formerly with the working title <I>A Fury of Dust</I>), will come out March 1, 2012. She's in the midst of writing book 5, and has already plotted book 6 of what she calls the Urban Magic series. An excerpt from her <a href="http://www.kategriffin.net/2011/06/30/moments-of-revelation/">blog entry of June 30th</a> on the various ways inspiration comes to her:<blockquote>  The plot for Urban Magic 3 occurred while cooking; the plot for Urban Magic 6 cropped to mind many, many months ago while having hot chocolate with a woman who I think we can call my muse, though she ll be insufferable when she reads that s what she is.... Annoyingly, though, I then had to re-jig the plot of Urban Magic 6 owing to complicated cunning reasonings that hadn't cropped up until I had a large Thai meal with a man from America, and was actually stumped. Honestly, really rather stumped.<br><br> "Until 8.37 on the London Overground passing through Finchley Road.<br><br> "Just clicked. No idea why. But it did. And there it is."</blockquote>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I actually don't mind waiting till next March for the further adventures of Matthew Swift, because I found the experience of reading the three books back-to-back a mite oppressive. Here's this decent guy who has been brought back to life without any say-so in the matter, and he spends every book on the run, exhausted and injured, trying to deal with an endless series of crises threatening his city. He has no home,<img src="images/Yellow_and_purple_July10_2011.jpg" align="left" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> and in every book, he loses one friend at the very least (and in book 1, he loses a former lover as well). It's like he's the Spirit of the Blitz incarnated (to borrow from Winston Churchill, "never give up, never surrender"). There is some comic relief (especially provided by his new apprentice in book 3 and by Dr. Seah, who patches him up in every book), but it's not enough to lift my sense that Matthew has been cursed&#8212;by his creator. All this is not to say that I don't recommend the series, since I do; I just seem to have too much empathy for Matthew and his impossible life. "Is he ever going to get laid again?" is one question I found myself asking. "He could sure use it."<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In the meantime, Matthew, here are some flowers from my balcony. You deserve them. (The yellow flowers at the back are black-eyed Susans, Latin name <I>Rudbeckia</I>.)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jul7"></a><img src="images/GreenImperialJasper.jpg" align="right" width="170" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="9"><B>July 7:</B>&ensp;Continuing the "green theme" of the most recent blog photos, pictured at right is a polished porcelain-like cabochon of Green Imperial Jasper that I purchased in 2007. It originated in Mexico. I've been trying ever since I bought it to imagine what the sinuous thing at the top is. A sleeping green cat? A scaleless snake still digesting a big meal? An iced birthday cake that turned out really, really badly? In any event, the colours work well together...</li><br><br> <li><B>July 6:</B>&ensp;Having just shifted the Brazilian bromeliad (see blog entry of 6 July 2009) around on my balcony to make room for the plants I wanted in the forefront of my photos from yesterday, I see that the bromeliad is preparing to bloom like billy-o. The flowers will be large, spectacular and orange. The bromeliad is a bit slow this year compared to last (when it flowered in June) because we've had a cold spring here and I didn't move it outside till we had some genuinely hot weather (which the bromeliad loves).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In between all this "blooming stuff," I have some "literary stuff" I'll be talking about. And maybe some "rock stuff."</li><br> <img src="images/purple_base_July5_2011.jpg" align="right" width="275" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Jul5"></a><B>July 5:</B>&ensp;As promised on 20 June, here are some photos from my balcony gardening project. At right is the composition I thought of as "base purple," as I chose plants starting with the large one at the back as the base colour. This photo is missing a number of the elements I was hoping for, such as the deep-purple-with-a-touch-of-red petunias that were supposed to anchor the bottom right. From one day to another, the blooms on many plants went from "looking great!" to "flwoomp; let's all fall off!" The blisteringly hot and dry weather had a lot to do with this, I must admit, despite what I believed to be adequate watering; I'm pretty sure my plants don't harbour active malice towards me ("Ha! She's going to take pictures tomorrow! Let's <I>wither</I>!").<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The red spear-like plant, which I stuck in the middle to add some vertical interest, is a <I>celosia</I>, in the shade "fresh look red." To its left, the plants with tiny yellow balls (aren't I a whiz at botanical description?) are <I>calceolaria</I>. Below them are dark purple heliotrope (don't know what the white blooms are). At bottom right are <I>ageratum</I> plants in the hue that the label says is "high tide blue," but any fool can see that the blooms are purple. (Calling it "high tide purple" wouldn't make any more sense&#8212;what has the tide to do with a hue, exactly?&#8212;but would at least be a touch more accurate.) When I was at the plant stores that had good selections&#8212;which happen to be on Parliament St., a fair hike away&#8212;I made choices without regard to what the species was called; indeed, on the last two trips I made, I was simply trying to replace, with a certain grim stubbornness, some colour values in my design that had vanished.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Gardening has not proven to be as therapeutic&#8212;relaxing, especially&#8212;as I had hoped, as it upsets me to lose living things under my care. But I do enjoy garden design, even on such a small scale as a balcony, and I'll do it again next year&#8212;while being faster to assemble the plants,<img src="images/red_base_July5_2011.jpg" align="left" width="300" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> hurry them home all at once via a friend with a car, and whip out the camera. And I know just the friend to dragoon into helping me with transport. (So what if she lives in Pickering? It's <I>worth</I> the drive to Toronto!)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;On the left is my "base red" photo, with dark-leaved morning glory just visible in the top right. A yellow <I>celosia</I> is leaning in from the left, atop some more <I>calceolaria</I>. But the deep-crimson blooms of what I had wanted to use as the anchor for the bottom of the photo fell off last night. For some reason, the loss of this plant distressed me more than any of the others. And I didn't even know its name.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun21"></a><img src="images/Ottoman_Coral_Silver_Bracelet.jpg" alt="Ottoman coral and silver bracelet; Turkey" align="right" width="134" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><B>June 21:</B>&ensp;To the right is another selection from my costume collection: an Ottoman bracelet made of coral and silver. Hidden under the buckles at both ends are hinges. The bracelet is fastened by means of a pin pushed through the hinges&#8212;the same way the hinges on a swinging door work.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun20"></a><B>June 20:</B>&ensp;Some fiction I've been reading lately:<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;(1) <I>The Love We Share Without Knowing</I>, by <a href="http://christopherbarzak.wordpress.com/">Christopher Barzak</a> (Bantam, 2008), a novel-in-stories (ghost stories) set in Japan. This is an extraordinary book, but it made me weepy, and I had to put it down partway through and go do some therapeutic gardening (on my balcony; photos to come). So good a writer did I consider Barzak that I looked up his first novel, <I>One for Sorrow</I> (2007), online, but when I saw that it was (a) YA and (b) described as "morbid," I decided to give it a miss and pursue his short fiction instead, as a treat-in-lieu. I already own <I>Welcome to Bordertown</I>, the 2011 anthology in which he has a story, "We Do Not Come in Peace," and I'll re-read his contribution to the 2007 anthology <I>Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing</I>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;(2) <I>A Madness of Angels</I> by <a href="http://www.kategriffin.net/">Kate Griffin</a> (Orbit, 2009) is a fantasy novel that was highly praised by Jo Walton on the Tor.com blog, and I'll be forever grateful for that recommendation. It was superb&#8212;interesting, original, funny: urban fantasy as I've always wanted to read it. "Kate Griffin" is the name under which YA author Catherine Webb writes fantasy novels for adults. Griffin does for the city of London what I wish someone would do for Toronto. (My city doesn't have almost 2,000 years of recorded history to work with as Griffin does, but it has enough; 'twill serve.) There's a scene early in <I>Angels</I> where the protagonist, Matthew Swift (who's a sorcerer, and no angel, but he's a good guy), uses a transit pass to foil an attempt on his life. It's priceless, that's all, and it was at that point in my reading that I started to bounce up and down on the sofa with excitement. And when I closed the book, I said to myself, "Ever since 2006, you've had an idea for a YA novel set in Toronto. It's a mixture of science fiction and fantasy&#8212;it's interstitial, in a number of ways. It's sitting on your computer, partially written. Why don't you finish the damn thing?" So I will&#8212;now that I'm no longer afraid of losing my vision. (I've had major problems with my eyes since 2008.) Kate Griffin has lit a fuse under me. I'm going to try to complete a first draft of what has the working title of "Petra" (the protagonist's name) by the end of August. The first three scenes are done, and so is the last one; it's the 60,000-or-so words in the middle that I have to work on.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;There are two more books in the Matthew Swift series: <I>The Midnight Mayor</I> (2010) and <I>The Neon Court</I> (2011), and I plan to shuffle on over to Toronto's own SF bookstore <a href="http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/">Bakka-Phoenix</a> to buy them. (It's not far; a couple of kilometres.<img src="images/Candy_Agate_Idaho.jpg" alt="Candy Agate, from Idaho" align="right" width="110" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> To <a name="Jun19.5"></a>save wear and tear on my sciatica-ridden back, I customarily use Amazon and the post office to convey most books to my domicile&#8212;but there being no mail in Canada at the moment, my back will have to grin and bear it.)</li> <br><br><li><a name="Jun19"></a><B>June 19:</B>&ensp;At right is a polished cabochon of Candy Agate, from Idaho. It got its monicker for obvious reasons. (See the chocolate-brown Bruneau Jasper cab about a third of the way down <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">my Photo Gallery 3 page</a> for another material that's absolutely yummy-looking.)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun18"></a><B>June 18:</B>&ensp;Watched the six-hour mini-series <I>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</I> (1996), based on the 1848 novel by Anne Bront&euml;. This is only the second time this novel has ever been filmed (the first was in 1968) and, aside from the faulty use of flashbacks, I was very pleased with the production. (I haven't read the novel so couldn't be outraged by any "liberties" with the story that filming always takes.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Next on my viewing schedule is the 2008 mini-series of <I>Sense and Sensibility</I>, which of course is not my beloved Emma Thompson version and also has Andrew Davies as screenwriter "sexing up the story," as he always does, but it will be good to see characters and scenes that perforce had to be left out of the 1995 Thompson film with its much shorter running time. (This is a book I <I>have</I> read.) The DVD extras on the Thompson film include the fabulous Emma herself on the commentary track, as well as director Ang Lee.</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun17"></a><img src="images/Black_Skin_Agate8_India.jpg" alt="Black Skin Agate, from India" align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><B>June 17:</B>&ensp;At right is a specimen of Black Skin Agate, from India. The length of the mossy tendrils is unusual for this kind of material, in my experience. My newly-liberated depth of vision sees a field of wild grass growing near the the shore of a large body of water, such as an ocean. (Don't ask me to explain why the sky is blue but the sea is black. My rock specimens have no oil spills in them.)</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun16"></a><B>June 16:</B>&ensp;Faithful readers! For those of you wondering how my cataract operation went on the 14th: It went fine. The post-op inflammation is rapidly subsiding and my vision is improving every day. My eye surgeon told me that the operating room staff (at Toronto East General Hospital) had never seen such a dense, brown cataract&#8212;not even in patients with 20 or 30 years on me. I gather there's no prize for this accomplishment, not even a gift of the excised cataract floating in a jar. But perhaps my cataract is astonishing some medical students even as I write; TEGH is a teaching hospital, after all. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Needless to say, I'm feeling much relieved.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I was able to do a bit of reading today, so plowed through some more of the contents of <I>The Collected Stories of Richard Yates</I> (Picador, 2002), which I had picked up because of a recommendation in the <I>New York Review of Books</I>, as I recall. I'm about four-fifths of the way through, but I'm done. There's too much disappointment, too many wasted lives, in every single tale. There are many excellent stories here&#8212;but for a high-school English or post-secondary creative writing course, in selective doses. It's impossible to read cover-to-cover. There's a biography of Richard Yates I might look for, but it might be for an unworthy motive: to find out why he had to write fiction filled with such failure. This may not be a useful question to ask. Some authors write what they have to, unless they're also looking for commercial success, in which case "what they have to" may not jibe with what sells. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I remember seeking out a biography of Daphne du Maurier, author of <I>Rebecca</I> (1938), <I>My Cousin Rachel</I> (1951), <I>The House on the Strand</I> (1969), etc., because of thinking, "Why do her novels have to be such God-damned tragedies?" (The book I found was of no help in my quest; it was called <I>Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir</I> [1989].) So, after reading perhaps four of her novels, I never read any more. But du Maurier's work remains popular worldwide, Wikipedia says. It also <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_du_Maurier">says</a>, "Du Maurier was often categorised as a 'romantic novelist' (a term she deplored), though most of her novels, with the notable exception of <I>Frenchman's Creek</I>, are quite different from the stereotypical format of a Georgette Heyer or a Barbara Cartland novel. Du Maurier's novels rarely have a happy ending, and her brand of romanticism is often at odds with the sinister overtones and shadows of the paranormal she so favoured. In this light, she has more in common with the 'sensation novels' of Wilkie Collins et al., which she admired." <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Richard Yates, on the other hand, "never sold well in life," writes Richard Russo in his introduction to <I>Collected Stories</I> (p. xix). Apparently Yates was also accused by critics of "reveling in the failures his characters must endure. There may be some truth to the charge," Russo adds (also p. xix).</li><br> <img src="images/Ottoman_Coral_Hatpin.jpg" alt="Ottoman coral hatpin" align="right" width="150" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"><br> <li><a name="Jun14"></a><B>June 14:</B>&ensp;Here's a nice pointy object: the sole example in my collection of an Ottoman hat/turban/scarf pin, made of coral and silver gilt. It's surprisingly large (the photo is just a bit smaller than "life-size"): The head of the pin is about 32 mm (1.5 inches) in diameter; the entire pin is 76 mm (3 inches) in length. It dates from the late 18th/early 19th century and would have been worn as a status/wealth marker. It could also have been used, if necessary, as a weapon, I'm thinking; it's that big. It looks simultaneously beautiful and lethal. D'you suppose that's why people collect hatpins and/or tiepins?</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun13"></a><B>June 13:</B>&ensp;Did some work on the <A href="FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a> by plumping up the entries for Margaret Atwood, Don Bassingthwaite and Nalo Hopkinson and by creating entries for Sara Heinonen ("Ultra"), Jude MacDonald ("It's a Keeper") and Kate Story (<I>Blasted</I>).</li><br><br> <li><a name="Jun09"></a><B>June 9:</B>&ensp;Below right is a superlative example of Cripple Creek Picture Jasper, which is mined in Idaho.<img src="images/Cripple_Creek_Picture_Jasper_Idaho.jpg" alt="Cripple Creek Picture Jasper, from Idaho" align="right" width="287" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> I bought this polished slab in the same transaction as I obtained the Carrasite Jasper mentioned on May 31st. (And, as in the Carrasite cabochon, it's not an Earth-like scene...)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Since I've brought a science-fiction setting into this blog entry (and a landscape that looks very dry indeed), let me also bring in <I>Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature</I> (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), by critic and academic Gary K. Wolfe. (He's a professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, Chicago.) Although I'm only a little more than half-way through the book, I've already rendered its pages pestilential with yellow sticky-notes. <I>Hot damn</I>, it's good. I'll have more to say anon.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'll also have more to say about Elif Batuman's <I>The Possessed</I>, which I've mentioned twice before in this blog. I'm still thinking about my reactions to it.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've been able to be productive in terms of the blog in early June because I'm taking some vacation days and spending them at home.<br><br></li> <li><a name="Jun08"></a><B>June 8:</B>&ensp;Some of the books I've been reading lately include two that are fiction&#8212;<I>The Collected Stories of Richard Yates</I> (Picador, 2002), and <I>The Towers of Trebizond</I> (New York Review Books, 2003; first published, 1956), by Rose Macaulay&#8212;and two that are not: <I>How Proust Can Change Your Life</I> (Vintage International, 1998), by Alain de Botton, and <I>The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them</I> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), by Elif Batuman.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;"Trebizond" was the Greek name for the city (and the last vestige of the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia) before the Turks conquered it in 1461 and renamed it "Trabzon." Here's an example of Macaulay's engaging style in her unorthodox novel, which was a great success when it came out, two years before its author died, and has become a classic:<blockquote>"At the present time, a great many writers are interested in seeing Turkey, and on account of this many of them are writing books about it, and this has to be put up with. Aunt Dot's Turkey book which I was illustrating and in which I was putting bits, would not be like any one else's really.... The trouble with countries is that, once people begin travelling in them, and people have always been travelling in Turkey, they are apt to get over-written, as Greece has, and all the better countries in Europe, such as Italy and France and Spain. England has not been over-written, at least not by foreigners, on account of its not being very attractive, what with the weather and the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel and the North Sea and the industrial towns and not having many antique ruins, but above all the weather, for no one from abroad can stand this for long, and actually we can't stand it for long ourselves, but we have to" (pp. 86&#8211;87, New York Review Books edition).</blockquote><img src="images/Burro_Creek_Plume_Agate_Arizona2.jpg" alt="Burro Creek Plume Agate, from Arizona" align="right" width="290" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="9"></li> <li><a name="Jun06"></a><B>June 6:</B>&ensp;I find this recently-acquired specimen of Burro Creek Plume Agate from Arizona highly pleasing. If this happened to be a watercolour, of ... something&#8212;"It Was a Dark and Purple-y Night"?&#8212;I'd <I>totally</I> hang it on my walls.</li><br><br> <li><B>May 31:</B>&ensp;This is my eighth straight day of blogging! I've broken my own record&#8212;the six days I did in April! (What can I say; I don't have a thrilling life.) I'm unlikely to manage a ninth day, as I'm on the late shift at work tomorrow, but I'll see.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And to reward <I>you</I> for <I>my</I> perseverance, below left is something to <I>really</I> excite your visual cortex:<img src="images/Carrasite_Jasper2_Idaho.jpg" alt="Carrasite Jasper, from Idaho" align="left" width="176" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> a freeform cabochon of Carrasite Jasper from the Owyhee Mountains, which straddle Oregon and Idaho. It measures 32 mm (about 1.5 inches) by 52 mm (just under 2.5 inches). Love the colour palette as well as the scene.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;This cab was crafted by the miner who hacked it out of his own mine. He lives in Idaho, and he has an excellent eye for colour and design; I have a fair bit of his work. Although I bought this particular item on eBay, I'd like to pass along the link to his website, <a href="http://www.silverstreams.com/home.html">Silver Streams Northwest</a>, for those of you wary about buying on eBay. (If you're wary about buying online, period, well, I can't help you there.) <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Last night, I watched the DVD of <I>The King's Speech</I>. (I never watch movies in theatres any more; too hard on the eyes, and the sound is cranked up too high.) The principals in the movie, Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-Carter, look nothing like the originals (George VI and Queen Elizabeth), but then, I'd never watch the <I>real</I> Windsors do <I>anything</I> (and that includes getting married), unless it was for very short bits&#8212;during documentaries, for example. (They can't act&#8212;most notably the current Queen&#8212;and they have no stage presence. Alas, Edward VIII had star quality, but he would have made a catastrophic king during WWII&#8212;even worse than the mess he made as Prince of Wales.) <I>The King's Speech</I> is a wonderful movie, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I knew that George VI stammered (and why), but not about the therapist who helped him. (I also finished the movie with a heightened appreciation of the King's heroism.) As orientation, I found it useful that I'd recently rewatched the excellent 2004 TV-movie <I>The Lost Prince</I>, starring Michael Gambon as Edward VII (he played Edward's son, George V, in <I>The King's Speech</I>), Tom Hollander as George V and Miranda Richardson as Queen Mary, so that I was already up to speed on the peculiar dynamics and neuroses of this family and I understood the reference to "Johnnie," George VI's youngest brother and the titular "Lost Prince," right away. The DVD extras for this movie are also very good&#8212;another reason why I prefer to wait for the DVD rather than see movies "live." Funny how annoyed I get when there are no DVD extras, or only extremely lame commentary tracks (the Astaire/Rogers films <I>Swing Time</I> and <I>Top Hat</I>, and the Hepburn/O'Toole movie <I>How to Steal a Million</I>, I'm looking at you). My expectations were <I>fatally</I> raised by the wealth of what went with <I>Finding Nemo</I>. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Awaiting me next weekend will be the DVD of the 1996 mini-series made of the 1848 novel <I>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</I>, by the least-known of the writing Bront&euml; sisters, Anne. (There were two Bront&euml; sisters who didn't write: Maria and Elizabeth, who died aged 11 and 10, respectively, within six weeks of each other.)</li> <br><br> <li><a name="May30"></a><B>May 30:</B>&ensp;Inserted an entry for Thomas King ("A Short History of Indians in Canada") into the <A href="FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>, and added to the entry for Gwendolyn MacEwen. Thomas King's story is from his collection of the same name, published in 2005, which I highly recommend. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I have five books left to process for the survey, and then I will be caught up (eight years of work!).</li><br> <br><img src="images/MarraMambaSlab6.jpg" alt="Marra Mamba Jasper, from Australia" align="right" width="280" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> <li><a name="May29"></a><B>May 29:</B>&ensp;To the right is a detail from a slab of Marra Mamba Jasper, which is mined in Australia. One interpretation of the scene: We're inside the caldera of a <I>very</I> active volcano.</li> <br><br> <li><a name="May28"></a><B>May 28:</B>&ensp;Added novels by James Bow (<I>The Young City</I>) and Scott Gardiner (<I>King John of Canada</I>) to the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I had a repeat of the experience I blogged about on May 24th re David Chariandy's book <I>Soucouyant</I>: reading a title that, from the back-jacket description, <I>sounded</I> like it should have belonged in the FanTor survey. This time, it was Bonnie Bowman's 2010 novel <I>Spaz</I> (Anvil Press). Here's my own version of the jacket copy: In this twist on the story of Cinderella, Walter Finch is a clumsy boy who survives his childhood in the Toronto suburb of Agincourt (in Scarborough) to make it as far as a local mall, where he becomes a shoe store manager with a grand ambition: to design the perfect women's shoe. Then he makes it as far as an independent shoe store in the Beaches, and he conceives an even grander ambition: to find the perfect foot. And one day his princess walks into his store, only to run out again, wearing a pair of red shoes she doesn't pay for. Can he find her again? <I>Should</I> he? What kind of fairytale is he <I>really</I> living in? <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;This is not a fantasy story. There's lots of fantasizing <I>in</I> it, and lots for a genre reader to enjoy, and I really wanted to put it in the survey. But I can't. The characters are wonderful, three-dimensional, and completely believable, and so is the Toronto they live in. This is a good book. And, full disclosure time: I know the author. She and I used to be colleagues. She's an original, just like her characters, and she knows her Toronto. All that's left for me to do is to put her book right here in my blog, with a strong recommendation.</li> <br><br> <li><a name="May27"></a><img src="images/Canakkale_Tahtaci_Alevi_headdress.jpg" alt="woman's headdress from the Tahtaci Turkoman tribe, western Turkey" align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>May 27:</B>&ensp;From my costume collection: Here we have a woman's headdress from the Tahtaci Turkoman tribe, who are Alevis (heterodox Muslims) and live in the region of Çanakkale, far western Turkey. I have several headdresses (all slightly different) from this region, as I find them really interesting. The "black silk hair" feature can also be found in headdresses, for women and men, elsewhere in Turkey, such as of the Kurds in eastern cities such as Diyarbakir, Mu_, Siirt and Van.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;A possibly unrelated note is that ancient Greek and less-ancient Mongol soldiers used to wear helmets embellished with horsetails.</li><br><br> <li><a name="May26"></a><B>May 26:</B>&ensp;In the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto ("FanTor") survey</a>, I inserted entries for Salvatore Difalco ("Ham and Eggs") and Maureen Garvie (<I>Amy by Any Other Name</I>), and to Nalo Hopkinson's entry I added her wonderful story "Ours Is the Prettiest" (published May 24, 2011 in the <I>Welcome to Bordertown</I> anthology).<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'm working hard on catching up with the backlog of FanTor survey material before I'm once again rendered <I>hors de combat</I>. I have about a dozen books left to get through. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I am also attempting to emulate, if not surpass, my feat of blogging for six days in a row, as I did in late April. My day job involves the mental processing (transcribing, editing, fact-checking, proofreading and sometimes desktopping) of thousands of words a day, so when I come home, I usually have little mental energy to spare for the site. (Plus, I'm wiped from trying to block out chronic pain and fatigue while I'm working.) But having an upcoming deadline&#8212;June 14 for the eye operation&#8212;has proven very motivating. I work well to deadlines, I've found.</li> <br><br> <li><a name="May25"></a><img src="images/Willow_Creek_Jasper12.jpg" alt="Willow Creek Jasper, Idaho" align="right" width="250" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>May 25:</B>&ensp;To the right is a slab of Willow Creek Jasper from Idaho. I find its <I>combination</I> of <I>colours</I> felicitous, but its hues just <I>do not</I> blend well with anything else on this <I>dodgasted</I> page, which is why, although I've <I>owned</I> this hunk of rock for <I>quite</I> some time, I haven't posted its photo here. I <I>do</I> trust that my <I>faithful readers</I> will appreciate the <I>sacrifice</I> of my <I>esthetic sense</I> in this instance. But, I have to say, I also admire the illusion of <I>foldiness</I> and <I>hilliness</I> that this flat slice projects. ("Foldiness"? "Hilliness"? Once sacrificed, my esthetic sense must have <I>eloped in a huff</I> with my <I>best vocabulary</I>.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Among women of the past whose epistolary and speaking style was marked by such emphases as deformed the preceding paragraph (with the addition of multiple <U>underlinings</U> and exclamation points!!!) were (1) Queen Victoria, whose 192nd birthday was yesterday, and (2) fictional character Alexandra Katherine Climpson, created by mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers. Miss Climpson is particularly prominent in Sayers' 1927 novel <I>Unnatural Death</I>&#8212;not one of my favourites, but I keep it on my shelves along with most of her other work because it's such a <I>relief</I> to have Sayers' accomplished writing to return to. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Speaking of "faithful readers" and "accomplished writing" reminds me of how much I delight in the work of <a href="http://www.elifbatuman.net/">writer and academic Elif Batuman</a>, one of whose endearing habits is to change up the modifiers in front of "readers" when she addresses her online audience. (Her blog illustrations are a hoot as well.) Her blog entry for May 3, 2011 begins "Disembodied readers!", and she goes on to say that she was happy to meet some of them at a recent event. The entry's title, "I Can Totally Read," becomes clear when she relates an encounter with the instructor of a Pilates class shortly after publication of an interview:<blockquote>"We began to discuss my writing career and plans for the future. At some point, she asked a question whose answer depended on my having read the interview, which I hadn't.<br><br> "'I'm not able to read interviews,' I explained.<br><br> "'You're ... not able to?' she repeated, with a look of shock. In this way I realized that the Pilates instructor thought I was confessing to <I>illiteracy</I>."</blockquote>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Elif meant that she had a policy of not reading her own reviews or interviews.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I was alerted to Elif's existence by her provocative essay on creative writing programs, "<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree">Get a Real Degree</a>," in the Sept. 23, 2010 issue of the <I>London Review of Books</I>. Ever since, I've had a policy of wolfing down everything she writes, so I'm greatly looking forward to getting my hands on her 2010 non-fiction book <I>The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them</I>, and not only so I can take a picture of the book with the CN Tower or some other "exotic" location in the background&#8212;<a href="http://www.elifbatuman.net/2011/05/16/curtains/">Toronto itself is an exotic location, apparently</a>&#8212;and send the photo to the author as evidence of how widely her book is circulating. (Did I mention that the author currently lives in Turkey?)</li> <br><br> <li><a name="May24011"></a><B>May 24:</B>&ensp;I've retitled this page "Blog"; please bookmark it, as the old "News" page has been deleted. Also retitled is "<a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_3_My_Albanian_Journey.html">My Albanian Journey</a>." <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I added two family photos to my blog entry of April 28, and expanded the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey by adding works by Timothy Carter (<I>Attack of the Intergalactic Soul Hunters</I>, <I>Epoch</I>, <I>Section K</I>, and <I>Section K: Kasefile 42&#8212;The Demon Subway of North York</I>), <img src="images/BobetAbovecover.jpeg" width="145" align="left" border="1" vspace="10" hspace="7"> Gemma Files ("The Jacaranda Smile" and "The Shrines"), Eugene Kachmarsky (<I>Let Slip the Dogs of Love: Suburban Legends of the Living and the Dead</I>) and Richard Scrimger (<I>Into the Ravine</I>). And I plumped up the entries for Kelley Armstrong; Leah Bobet (by adding info on her forthcoming book, whose beautiful cover reposes at left); Wayland Drew; Ursula Pflug; Michelle Rowen; and Lynsay Sands. (And I hereby declare an indefinite moratorium on reading, for survey purposes, formulaic paranormal romance, even if it <I>is</I> set in Toronto. I have Rowen and Sands in mind here.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I also made additions to (a) the survey's Introduction and (b) the footnote on Jonathan Lethem (just above the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html#acknow">Acknowledgements</a>).<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Something else that is interesting on Jonathan Lethem but is more suitably placed here is the following excerpt about Lethem's experience of being a writer, from the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/02/jonathan-lethem-.html"><I>Los Angeles Times</I> books blog called "Jacket Copy,"</a> dated February 13, 2011:<blockquote> "Jonathan Lethem: Look at This! What Is It?<br><br> "In Sunday's Arts & Books, Carolyn Kellogg talks to writer Jonathan Lethem about his move to Southern California. Lethem, known for his novels set in New York City&#8212;<I>Motherless Brooklyn</I>, <I>Fortress of Solitude</I>, <I>Chronic City</I>&#8212;has taken the position of Disney professor in creative writing at Pomona College. Here is some more of the conversation.<br><br> "<B>Jonathan Lethem:</B> The work I'm doing right this minute is trying to nail down this big crazy collection called <I>The Ecstasy of Influence</I>.... This is like me trying to do the equivalent&#8212;which can't be done, of course; it's a total non-sequitur to make this comparison&#8212;but I'm trying to do a Lethem equivalent of Norman Mailer's <I>Advertisements for Myself</I>. Where I just like am gathering up all the stuff that I did that isn't novel writing and saying, 'Look at this! I'm doing all this stuff! What is it?<br><br> "'It goes back to the very beginning of my writing&#8212;it has fiction and nonfiction, and even a poem, and then lots of new interstitial material. Some of it provocative, bragging, self-flagellating&#8212;this is going to be a very messy collection of stuff.<br><br> "'It's sort of confessions of a self-conscious writer. Some people, by definition, are affronted by that. There's this sort of need for artists of all kinds to be like magical creatures who can't account for their activities but just disgorge these beautiful objects.'<br><br> "<B>CK:</B> Writer as unicorn."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I can relate to Lethem's "collection of stuff" comment in particular; this entire website qualifies as such an entity, although I've been at pains to render it un-messy. And I've been trying to "account for my activities" as well, in part to de-mystify myself for a recently-made friend. (For more self-revelation, see my <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html">About Me, and FAQs</A> page, mostly written four years ago, when the site first went up, but tweaked since then to render more humorous and up to date.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've been writing so much in this blog lately because of the danger to my eyesight (see the bottom of the April 26th entry), and because, with a cataract operation coming up on June 14, I'll be out of action once again very soon. But I've also been writing so much because an old friend just sent me some unsolicited, heartening feedback, to wit: "I browsed thru your blog. I loved it. You have arranged it in an easy-to-find way, it is tasteful and I love the way you write. Truly impressed." And I'm truly grateful, V. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;For anyone who shares my <I>somewhat strange</I> interest in noting which works of specfic literature make Toronto go bye-bye, here's another instance: In <A href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2011/04/all_the_lives_h.shtml">Paul Kincaid's April 22, 2011 review on <I>Strange Horizons</I> of Frederik Pohl's <I>All the Lives He Led</I></a>, an SF thriller set in 2079, Kincaid writes, "The biggest terrorist of all was Brian Bossert, who had been killed in an attack that effectively wiped out Toronto; that was many years ago, but he is still talked about in hushed tones by security services around the globe." As the novel is panned by the review, none of the action apparently takes place in Toronto, and I'm not a fan of thrillers anyway, I won't be reading it. But I wanted to note, with a sigh, the passing of Toronto yet again. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Occasionally, I get a tip about happier fates for my city. Except for survey purposes, I have no interest in the sub-subgenre I call "North American alternate-history/military SF," in which writers such as Harry Turtledove and Dean Ing have published much work (Turtledove's 2000 novel <I>The Great War: Breakthroughs</I> is already in the survey). But I see that on May 8, 2011, Tor.com blog commenter James Davis Nicoll <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/05/hugo-nominees-1982#184970">wrote</a> about Ing's 1981 novel <I>Systemic Shock</I>, part one of the Ted Quantrill series: "This has the odd aspect that it is a sequel to someone else's work; it's set a few years after General Sir John Hackett's <I>The Third World War</I>." Nicoll also noted that in Ing's novel, after World War IV, Canada emerged as a significant power and "provided the northern third of the USA with a much-needed protectorate.... Canada, being ... uninhabitable save through applied technology, is a very urbanized culture whose population is even more vulnerable to one-second urban renewal than the US; a surprising fraction of our population can and could be found in Toronto and ... Montreal and Vancouver."<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Even by reproducing the preceding quote, I'm displaying my Canadian chauvinism. Ah, well. A fairly minor character flaw...<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;While looking into the work of writer Joe Fiorito, I found his non-fiction book <I>Union Station: Love, Madness, Sex and Survival on the Streets of the New Toronto</I> (McClelland & Stewart, 2006). The back cover said:<blockquote>"Toronto is the city that Canadians love to hate. But they don't know this city, says Joe Fiorito. Even Torontonians don't really know this city because it changes every day. It's not a finished thing; it's a work in progress. It's New York in 1900, arms open wide to welcome the huddling masses.<br><br> "<I>Union Station</I> is Fiorito's tour of his adopted city, from his own neighbourhood, Parkdale, through corner stores and local bars, to the suburban high rises that are home to new immigrants, and to the shelters that offer a tough bed to the many homeless. Fiorito's Toronto exists here, on the street, in places where diverse cultures jostle side by side and where mercy is free."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Sometimes I read a book that seems, from the description on the book jacket, like it belongs in the Fantastic Toronto survey: David Chariandy's 2007 novel <I>Soucouyant</I>, for example. Some of the plot: In a rundown old house near the Scarborough Bluffs, in an area that used to be known as Port Junction, lives a black woman suffering from dementia. Born in Trinidad, she had immigrated to Canada in the 1960s, as had the man she was later to marry, whom she met in Toronto's Kensington Market. In 1989, her son visits the house (where he had grown up) and finds a strange young woman living there, supposedly as a nurse for his mother. He remembers that in Caribbean folklore, as his mother used to tell him, a <I>soucouyant</I> is an evil female spirit that sucks your blood at night...<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In the hands of a writer such as Nalo Hopkinson, <I>Soucouyant</I> <I>would</I> have been spec-fic. But it's not; nothing supernatural is going on. The <I>soucouyant</I> is a metaphor for many things in this novel, including alienation and racism, but one of its most important ones is the erosion of memory, identity, self-respect and sanity. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Here's a passage from the novel:<blockquote>"For a long time, I never understood what ever could possess my parents to live here. This lonely cul-de-sac in the midst of 'a good neighbourhood,' this difficult place that none of our neighbours would ever have settled in. It could have been the great lake, of course. That mirage of steel and pastels stretching out to the very horizon of the world, that inland sea inspiring all sorts of reckless imaginings. My parents couldn't have been impressed by the house itself, its dilapidated and rotting frame, its peeling eggshell paint, its windows cloudy with cataracts or roughly boarded up, all blasted with sounds of passing trains. They couldn't have been inspired by the idea of long-term ownership, since any fool could see that the lake was slowly advancing, eroding inches of the backyard each year" (pp. 58&#8211;59).</blockquote><img src="images/LagunaLaceAgateMexico2a.jpg" alt="Laguna Lace Agate, Mexico" align="right" width="280" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="6"><a name="Apr29"></a></li> <li><B>April 29:</B>&ensp;To the right is a specimen of much-fortified Laguna Lace Agate whose colours are wonderfully warm and vivid. This agate comes from Mexico. (It doesn't have <I>layers</I>; it has <I>fortification banding</I>, y'see.)</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 28:</B>&ensp;The official publication date of the King James Version (hereinafter referred to as the "KJV") of the Bible was May 2, 1611, but I'm going to celebrate the 500th anniversary of this landmark work of English literature a few days early to avoid posting on May 2, 2011, the same day as a Canadian federal election&#8212;an event unlikely to bring forth any words of lasting value. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Some links to KJV articles that I found of interest: from the <I>Times Literary Supplement</I>, February 9, 2011: <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7171739.ece">"400 Years of the King James Bible"</a>; from the <I>Guardian</I>, February 19, 2011: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/18/king-james-bible-language">"The King James Bible's Language Lessons</a>: Jeanette Winterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Alexander McCall Smith, Michèle Roberts, David Crystal and Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Importance of the King James Version"; and an excerpt from a <I>Toronto Star</I> article of January 21, 2011, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/926022--400-years-later-king-james-bible-still-stands-up">"400 years later, King James Bible Still Stands Up"</a>:<blockquote>"'It certainly has taught us how to read and write beautifully,' said Pearce Carefoote of the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, which will exhibit some 90 historic English Bibles in a show marking the KJV's anniversary.<br><br> "Running from Feb. 7 to June 3, and six years in the planning, the exhibit will showcase a very rare 1611 King James Version and a host of other important English Bibles through history. The last time an original KJV was exhibited in Canada was 100 years ago."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;From <I>The King James Bible After 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences</I> (Cambridge University Press, 2010), edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, who prefer the acronym "KJB" (for Bible) to "KJV":<blockquote>"What we have seen over the last 400 years is not&#8212;as one might reasonably expect&#8212;a steadily growing gap between the already-conservative diction of the KJB and the colloquial English of successive centuries, but rather that the KJB has exerted a steady gravitational pull on the ordinary speech, not to mention poetry, of future English. Time and again we find quotations or references from the KJB being incorporated back into the language, preventing the ordinary speech from losing touch completely with Church English around which it orbits. Most of us have heard the story of the [New English Bible] translators who decided to find the modern equivalent of 'fatted calf' by enquiring at Smithfield (meat) Market in London&#8212;only to be told that the phrase was 'fatted calf' because it was in the Bible!" (p. 38).</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;More KJV phrases that have entered colloquial English are "giving up the ghost," "scapegoat," "salt of the earth," "filthy lucre" and a phrase that's a habit I have to guard against myself: being "holier than thou" (Isaiah 65:4&#8211;5). <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Other Bible-related books I have in addition to the Hamlin and Jones book I quoted above: <I>The Educated Imagination</I> (1963), <I>The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance</I> (1976), and <I>Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974&#8211;1988</I> (1990), all by Northrop Frye; <I>The Literary Guide to the Bible</I> (1987), edited by Robert Adler and Frank Kermode; <I>Testament: The Bible and History</I> (1988), by John Romer, based on the TV series of the same name; and <I>God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible</I> (2003), by Adam Nicolson.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<img src="images/GrampaHenry_GrandmaLeeson.jpg" alt="Henry Bennett and Emily Isadora Leeson Bennett, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, around 1925" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10">I own two versions of the KJV: a small one printed in the 1950s and a monster, lavishly-illustrated tome that belonged to one of my paternal great-grandmothers, Emily Isadora Leeson Bennett. She is shown at right with her husband, around 1925; she was to die, unexpectedly and to the great grief of everyone who knew her, in 1928. She wrote on the inside front cover "Mrs. Henry Bennett, South Bay Mouth [on Manitoulin Island, Ontario], Nov. 26th, 1911." (So, by this means, I'm also commemmorating another anniversary, albeit only a single-century one.) The first few pages of the book have been lost so I have no date of publication. On the inside back cover, Emily wrote, "Mrs. James Leeson, my mother, and my grandmother left Ireland Aug. 19th, 1864," and then she records that her mother married on Dec. 9th, 1865 and had five children: James, Mary, Margaret ("Bessie"), Frances ("Fanny") and Emily. The only one of the five siblings I knew was Frances&#8212;Aunt Fanny&#8212;who lived until 1962.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I don't believe there were many books in Grandmother Emily's house, as the family was not rich,<img src="images/Grampa1951.jpg" alt="Walter Bennett, Toronto, 1951" align="right" width="93" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> but Emily's children might have made use of the many addenda in the back of the Bible (assuming they were allowed to handle it), such as an index and concordance and this impressively-entitled item: "The Comprehensive Pronouncing Dictionary of the Bible, Comprising Its Antiquities, Biography, Geography and Natural History, Containing the Latest Facts and Discoveries of Recent Scholars and Travelers, and Nearly Every Important Scriptural Word and Subject... Illustrated with Nearly 700 Fine Engravings." I know that Emily's eldest son Walter, my grandfather (pictured at right, in Toronto, 1951; his grandchildren were to call him "Grampa"), liked to read and kept a diary in adult life, and I date my interest in English history from devouring his four-volume set of what was a work of literature in its own right: <I>A History of the English-Speaking Peoples</I>, published between 1956 and 1958 by Sir Winston Churchill. (For my 14th birthday, Grampa gave me his 1928 edition of Tennyson's <I>Idylls of the King</I>. And, entirely by the way, he kept a white cat called Toodles.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;My prose style is indebted to the KJV; for example, "And I'm here to tell you that stumblesome and numberless like unto stones on the shore are bad videos" in <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_3_My_Albanian_Journey.html">"My Albanian Journey"</a>, written in January 2010; "And lo, it began to bloom" from my blog entry for July 6, 2009 (scroll down this page); and "not only is English my first language, unlike his, but I read with promiscuous rapidity, and yea, I'm a friend in a million," from the blog entry dated July 4, 2009.</li> <br><br> <li><a name="Apr27"></a><B>April 27:</B>&ensp;Continuing my efforts to break up the grey of long blog entries with photos of my rock collection, I am pleased to offer, for your viewing delectation&#8212;oh, let's shake things up a little! Let's talk about a recent addition to my ethnic costume collection instead!<img src="images/Ottoman_uckur.jpg" alt="Ottoman sash" align="right" width="272" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Here's a very fine Ottoman sash (the Turkish term for this is <I>uçkur</I>) from western Turkey. (The ends have been folded over to display them better.) The main embroidery colours are burgundy, purple, blue, green and gold, and the motif is a variation of the "tree of life" pattern that is traditional for bridal clothing, symbolizing fertility. The sash is 38 cm (15 inches) wide by 178 cm (70 inches) long, and the embroidery is identical on both sides. Really amazing. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In times past, such hand-worked sashes hung on the front of brides' belts and were cut during the wedding ceremony, with one half staying with the bride and the other going to the groom. My sash is intact. My buying-agent in Turkey tells me that brides no longer wear such sashes with their white Western-style gowns; instead, the sashes are given as presents. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;This sash is going to adorn a traditional wedding costume from the city of Eski_ehir, west of Ankara. If I can persuade a young friend to be a model, I'll provide photos of the whole ensemble one of these days.</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 26:</B>&ensp;Some non-fiction books I've been reading lately, mostly biographies: <I>Emily Tennyson: The Poet's Wife</I> (Faber and Faber, 1996), by Ann Thwaite; <I>Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893&#8211;1932</I> (Oxford University Press, 1990), by Gretchen Gerzina; <I>Thackeray's Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality</I> (Faber and Faber, 1987), by Catherine Peters; <I>The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens</I> (Viking, 1990), by Claire Tomalin; and <I>Lady Mary Wortley Montagu</I> (Oxford University Press, 1999), by Isobel Grundy. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Reading the biography of Emily Sellwood, who married (and thereby saved the life and career of) the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was hard going for this feminist because it was much too long and painstaking for its subject, a woman whom I didn't find interesting in herself but whose "pathology," if I can call it that, I wanted to know more about. I found Emily's decades of self-sacrifice for her husband (whose genius she felt a romantic calling to nurture) to be exasperating, especially as Emily refused to even eat properly, busy as she was in keeping an anxious eye on Alfred's odd behaviour at meals. (I found it an intriguing coincidence that an uncle of Emily's was Sir John Franklin, whose final expedition to Canada's Arctic went so wrong...) I'm curious about people (usually women) who immolate their talents, careers, and sometimes even their lives in the service of others (as painter Dora Carrington did for writer Lytton Strachey, a gay man she fell hopelessly in love with; she shot herself after he died of cancer) or in the pursuit of goals, so I've been reading about these "hidden," or at least not well-known, lives to gain some understanding. I note that this kind of extreme self-sacrifice, whether by one person for another or by polar explorers, can be an aspect of romanticism&#8212;one of the curses of civilization, I'd say, especially when imbibed from books. I've observed and tried to curb such a tendency in myself. (Read Lytton Strachey's irreverent essay on the sainted Florence Nightingale in <I>Eminent Victorians</I> [1918] for the portrait of a woman who ruined other people's health and lives in doing service for her once she came back to England from the Crimean War and retired into full-time invalidism.) <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<img src="images/Thackeray.jpg" align="right" width="221" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> The Thackeray biography was not only good but, in this case, <I>not long enough</I>: It spurred me to search for a more detailed biography of that same William Makepeace Thackeray (author of the classic novel <I>Vanity Fair</I>, among others) because I wanted to know more about this likeable and complex man (and a disappointed romantic&#8212;as I am, by the bye). <I>Thackeray's Universe</I> included a generous selection of his drawings, which are always omitted from modern editions of his works, so I hadn't seen them before. He was a talented artist. See, for example, his self-portrait as an unmasked jester (above right), which he placed at the end of Chapter IX in <I>Vanity Fair</I>. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In Claire Tomalin's biography of Nelly Ternan, who was the secret mistress of Charles Dickens for almost 13 years, Nelly's self-sacrifice was of a different order. I saw nothing "romantic" in the Ternan-Dickens relationship, despite Dickens' white-hot passion for her. (We have no idea if any of the passion was reciprocated; nothing has come down to us that Nelly said about Dickens, except that she disliked the long, sordid liaison.) Nelly had her life taken over (she was a professional actress) by Dickens, whose overwhelming manic-depressive control-freak personality she had no power to resist. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Mary_Wortley_Montagu">Lady Mary Wortley Montagu</a> (1689&#8211;1762) was an original and brilliant woman not much given to self-sacrifice. Now that I've read her biography by Isobel Grundy, I'm waiting to get a full edition of her letters before I do an article on her for this site. Among other things, she was a writer, and she had a special interest in Turkey (where she lived for a few years) and in Turkish dress, which she promoted by wearing when she returned to England. To this day, she is remembered and esteemed by the Turks, although they continue to struggle with her name: In one of my Turkish costume books (published in 2010), she's referred to as "Lady Wortley Montagu" and "Lady Montagu." (Her correct title is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu&#8212;Lady Mary for short. She married a man whose last name was Wortley Montagu, a man of lower rank without a title; so, as the daughter of a duke, she kept her title.) <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;During this frustrating, anxiety-ridden period of waiting for a cataract operation on my blind right eye (a cataract that was exacerbated by the corneal transplant I had last November; I have no luck with my eyes, it seems, as I inherited the vision of my mother's side of the family rather than my father's), I've found some balance and mental perspective in works of philosophy such as <I>Status Anxiety</I> (2004) by Alain de Botton and <I>The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe</I> (2006), by Michael Frayn. The de Botton is a light, fast read; my edition is 293 pages, with no footnotes and with lots of white space and illustrations. The Frayn book is much more work: an idea-heavy writing style on 483 pages, including notes, and there are no illustrations. I've barely started it, but I can tell I'll get more out of it than the de Botton in the end. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;In the meantime, while waiting for the operation on my <I>right</I> eye, I'm also waiting for a cataract operation on my <I>left</I> eye, the vision in which is slowly deteriorating. For those of you who haven't seen much (or anything) of me lately, there's a good reason: I can't get around very well, and spending time in rooms with glaring fluorescent lights is agonizing. (But I can order books on my computer, for which much thanks; without something to read, I'd have gone out my mind with boredom, as watching television is too painful.) Up until this month, when the right eye finally became at least comfortable, if useless as an organ of sight, I couldn't spend much time on my home computer (backlit screens are also hard to tolerate), so my website has been neglected.<img src="images/MontanaMossAgate2.jpg" alt="Montana Moss Agate" align="right" width="305" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> But I'm trying to make up for that neglect now. ("Aack! Now we can't get her to shut up!")</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 25:</B>&ensp;To the right is a standout specimen of Montana Moss Agate, from... let me think... starts with M... which is a new acquisition for my rock collection.</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 24:</B>&ensp;Having just seen the list of Hugo Award nominees via John Scalzi's site "Whatever," and that N.K. (Nora) Jemisin's breakout novel <I>The 100,000 Kingdoms</I> was nominated, I immediately bought a supporting membership in <a href="http://www.renovationsf.org/">Renovation</a>, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention (August 17&#8211;21, 2011, in Reno, Nevada), not because I'll be able to attend but because I urgently need to vote for the Hugos this year. Last year, I didn't much care, but this year is different.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Of the five nominees for best novel, I've read four (with the exception of the zombie-apocalypse thriller <I>Feed</I>, by Mira Grant; when will this fad for zombies burn itself out?) and only two of the four even <I>deserve</I> to be nominated, the first being the Jemisin and the other being an SF novel set in Istanbul, <I>The Dervish House</I> by Ian McDonald (well done!). Of the two best-novel nominees I haven't mentioned, <I>Blackout/All Clear</I> by Connie Willis and <I>Cryoburn</I> by Lois McMaster Bujold, both were poorly-written failures that were far, far from the authors' best work (and Bujold's Vorkosigan series, of which <I>Cryoburn</I> forms a part, has been going downhill for some time). (For thoughtful reviews of the Willis and Bujold nominees, see Abigail Nussbaum <a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/01/2011-hugo-awards-appeal-to-hugo.html">here</a> and Nick Mamatas <a href="http://blastr.com/2010/03/connie-willis.php">here</a> on <I>Blackout/All Clear</I></a>, and <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2011/02/cryoburn_by_loi.shtml">Kelly Jennings at <I>Strange Horizons</I></a> for <I>Cryoburn</I>.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Jo Walton, in <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/01/religious-science-fiction">a post on Tor.com in January 2011 entitled "Religious Science Fiction,"</a> said, "There's the kind of SF where the writer is themselves a member of some religion and this imbues their writing&#8212;I think Connie Willis would be a good example of this. Look at the stories in <I>Miracle</I>, or her novel <I>Passage</I>." What bothered me most in Willis's time-travel books such as <I>The Doomsday Book</I>, <I>To Say Nothing of the Dog</I> and <I>Blackout/All Clear</I>&#8212;the implausible "sentient space-time continuum," as I termed it, before the light dawned via Jo Walton's post&#8212;was using God as a plot premise, something I can't stomach in an alleged work of science fiction, much as I enjoyed Willis's humour in <I>To Say Nothing</I>. (See the Nick Mamatas review for all the other things that didn't work or were downright infuriating in <I>Blackout/All Clear</I>.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;So, in the Hugo best-novel category on the ballot, I'll be putting the Jemisin as number 1, the McDonald as number 2, and nothing in the spaces for 3, 4 and 5.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Nora Jemisin also happens to write one of my must-visit blogs, <A href="http://nkjemisin.com/">Epiphany 2.0</a>. Theodora Goss, none of whose work was nominated this year, is another writer whose <a href="http://theodoragoss.com/blog/">blog</a> I find a must-visit. Oh, and <a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/">Abigail Nussbaum</a>, natch.</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/Red_Desert_Picture_Jasper_Oregon.jpg" alt="Red Desert Picture Jasper, Oregon" align="right" width="220" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>February 13:</B>&ensp;At right is a recent addition to my rock collection: a slab of Red Desert Picture Jasper. It hails from Oregon.</li> <br><br> <li><B>February 12:</B>&ensp;Some of my fiction reading lately has included Peter S. Beagle's fantasy collection <I>Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle</I>, ed. by Jonathan Strahan and published by Subterranean Press in 2010. Two of the stories, "The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French" and "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel," I've read before, but all the rest were new to me. I believe Beagle is best-known for his 1968 classic novel <I>The Last Unicorn</I>, which I've never read as unicorns in general don't interest me. But I <I>was</I> impressed by Beagle's unicorn stories in <I>Mirror Kingdoms</I> and by his prose style in general, so I plan to look up the rest of his work (Beagle has been very prolific in recent years)&#8212;except for his first novel, <I>A Fine and Private Place</I> (1960), which I read and was underwhelmed by in high school. My favourite stories in <I>Mirror Kingdoms</I> are "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros," "El Regalo," "Julie's Unicorn," "The Last Song of Sirit Byar," "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel," "Two Hearts" (the second unicorn story in the collection, and a novelette that won a Hugo and a Nebula Award) and "The Rabbi's Hobby." A peculiar omission from <I>Mirror Kingdoms</I> was a listing of prior publication data (such a page in reprint anthologies and collections is often entitled "Story Copyrights").</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/Priday_Thunderegg_Agate8.jpg" alt="Priday Thunderegg Agate, Oregon" align="right" width="260" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>January 16, 2011:</B>&ensp;At right is half of a recently-acquired Priday Thunderegg Agate nodule from Richardson's Ranch in Madras, Oregon. The specimen is about 7.62 cm. (three inches) wide and the same high.</li> <br><br> <li><B>September 10, 2010:</B>&ensp;To the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey, I added stories by Kelley Armstrong ("Beginnings" and "Learning Curve"), Jeff Cottrill ("How I Freaked Out the Spiderman Guy"), Timothy Findley ("About Effie"), Tanya Huff ("No Matter Where You Go" and "Quid Pro Quo"), S.E. Schlosser ("Where's My Liver?") and Karen Wehrstein ("O.R. 3") and novels by Andrew Kaufman (<I>The Waterproof Bible</I>), B.W. Powe (<I>Outage: A Journey into Electric City</I>) and Michelle Rowen (<I>The Demon in Me</I>).</li> <br><br> <li><B>September 6:</B>&ensp;To the Other Writing page, I've added the article <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_4_Two_Urban_Costumes.html">"Explorations in Folklore 4: Two Urban Costumes</a>," about (1) a style of women's ensemble that was a fashionable imitation of an ethnic Russian costume in the 19th century, and (2) a 20th-century costume of a rich Ottoman woman.</li> <br><br> <li><B>August 28:</B>&ensp;Expanded the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey by adding stories by Nalo Hopkinson ("Delicious Monster"), David Nickle ("The Bird Feeders") and Edo van Belkom ("Hey, Fairy!") and by expanding the entries for Kelley Armstrong, Philippa Dowding and Gemma Files.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I also lengthened my 2004 article <a href="Tour_de_France_2004.html">"Tour de France"</a> to add some notes of architectural interest.</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/Blue_Biggs_Jasper_2.jpg" alt="Blue Biggs Jasper, Oregon" align="right" width="230" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"><B>July 7:</B>&ensp;To the right is a recently-added item to my rock collection&#8212;a slice of Blue Biggs Jasper from Oregon, photographed while wet. (When dry, the material is mostly mud-brown, which ain't so interesting.)</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 4:</B>&ensp;In the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey, I expanded the entries for Emily Schultz (<I>Heaven Is Small</I>) and Douglas Smith (<I>Chimerascope</I>).</li> <br><br> <li><B>March 27:</B>&ensp;Expanded the entry for <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html#dowding">Philippa Dowding in the Fantastic Toronto survey</a>, partly in response to her e-mail after she found her 2009 children's book <I>The Gargoyle in My Yard</I> listed.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<img src="images/Old_City_Hall_gargoyle_1920.jpg" align="right" width="220" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10">Speaking of gargoyles, at below right is one from Toronto's Old City Hall (finished 1899), pictured in <a href="http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/01/22/stories-of-a-sandstone-giant/">an article on the site Spacing Toronto: Understanding the Urban Landscape</a>. The caption says, "Workers replacing Old City Hall's roof pose by a gargoyle overlooking Terauly St. (now Bay), 1920."<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I have a great collection of photos I took in 2004 from inside and out at Queen's Park (finished 1893), whose west wing was rebuilt in 1909 by the same architect (E.J. Lennox) as Old City Hall; lots of beasties there too. (The mosaic floor photos are already available <a href="Mosaics.html">here</a>; I'll look out some of the others.) And for readers interested in the subject of Toronto's gargoyles and related ilk, I recommend Terry Murray's book <I>Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto</I> (Anansi, 2006).<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<img src="images/Pioneer_Dreams_5.jpg" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10">Philippa Dowding also kindly commented on my photos on this site that were taken on Manitoulin Island, Northern Ontario, in particular <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html#Pioneer">the series on abandoned farm buildings</a> I call "Pioneer Dreams," one of whose elements is reproduced at right. Philippa said: "You and I share an interest in abandoned farms&#8212;I have photographed some of the same ghost buildings on Manitoulin that you have on your site. Those farms-that-once-were are really compelling, and I find them quite beautiful in a zen kind of way."</li> <br><br> <li><B>March 11:</B>&ensp;I added 11 stories and 11 novels and expanded the introduction to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey. I created entries for Cherie Dimaline ("Welcoming Ceremony"), Philippa Dowding (<I>The Gargoyle in My Yard</I>), Wayland Drew (<I>The Wabeno Feast</I>), S&#232;phera Giron ("Can You See the Real Me?"), Michael Kelly ("Different Skins"), Janet Lunn (<I>Twin Spell</I>), Ann-Marie MacDonald ("The Hanged Man"), Andrew Pyper ("When You Were Beautiful"), Geoff Ryman ("No Bad Thing"), Tasleem Thawar ("Her Hands") and Michelle Wan ("Here with Us"), and expanded the entries for Kelley Armstrong (<I>The Awakening</I> and <I>Frostbitten</I>), Emily Schultz (<I>Heaven Is Small</I>), Nalo Hopkinson ("Blushing"), Tanya Huff (<I>The Enchantment Emporium</I>), David Nickle ("The Radejastians"), Michelle Rowen (<I>Demon Princess: Reign or Shine</I>, <I>Stakes & Stilettos</I> and <I>Tall, Dark & Fangsome</I>), Lynsay Sands (<I>The Renegade Hunter</I>) and Edo van Belkom ("The Sypher").</li> <br><br> <li><B>January 18:</B>&ensp;To the Other Writing page, I added <A href="Explorations_in_Folklore_3_My_Albanian_Journey.html">"Explorations in Folklore 3: My Albanian Journey,"</a> an essay which topped out at 6,700 words. (Later, I chopped it in half so it could fit in the March 15, 2010 issue of the Ontario <I>Folk Dancer</I>.) It's the story of how I came to teach a workshop in Albanian dance in Toronto in November 2009, and all the wonderful things I learned on the journey. Despite the essay title, I travelled to Albania in spirit only. A short-and-sweet description of just the workshop can be found in my entry on this page for November 28th.</li> <br><br> <li><B>January 17, 2010:</B>&ensp;To the Other Writing page, I added <A href="Explorations_in_Folklore_2_A_Childhood_in_Brittany.html">an article</a> entitled "A Childhood in Brittany," second in the Explorations in Folklore series.</li> <br><br> <li><B>November 28, 2009:</B>&ensp;I taught Albanian wedding dances (that is, dances done at wedding receptions) for an <a href="http://www.ofda.ca/events.html">Ontario<img src="images/KB_at_Albanian_Night2.jpg" align="left" width="200" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="10"> Folk Dance Association event</a> in Toronto, on Albanian Independence Day (Albania declared independence from the Ottoman Empire on November 28, 1912). As it happened, no one in attendance (great turnout!) was Albanian, but I had no trouble persuading people to "release their inner Albanians" (dance solo in the middle of the room) during the Çifteteli part of the music. It was a great, high-energy evening, and I'm very glad I did it.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;At the left is me holding up the back of my Albanian pirpiri, a black wool sleeveless coat with gold embroidery. (Other photos are on <A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22966509@N05/sets/72157622786069265/">Flickr</a>.) I was wearing a costume from the Elbasan region, central Albania. Anyone curious about Albanian dances can find them on YouTube. I used music from numerous sources, including Fanfara Tirana's <I>Albanian Wedding</I> album (CD-PIR2116), the <I>Elveda Rumeli</I> soundtrack (Kalan CD 455), <I>Anthology of World Music: Music from Albania</I> (Rounder CD 5151), and <I>Songs and Dances from Albania</I> (Tirana Folk Ensemble; EUCD 1601).</li> <br><br> <li><B>October 21:</B>&ensp;To the Other Writing page, I added <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Explorations_in_Folklore_1_Persia_Indoors.html">an article</a> entitled "Persia Indoors," first in a series called Explorations in Folklore. (I call the country "Persia" as, in the time I'm writing about, the late 19th century, Europeans still called it by that name; "Iran" did not come into international use until 1935. And the article is, in part, about European&#8211;Persian cross-cultural pollination. I also talk a bit about Turkish&#8211;European cross-pollination.) The article came out of the research I talked about in the July 4th entry, below. I found masses of interesting stuff, and the amateur folklorist and scholar in me would like to pass some of it on.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Upcoming topics in the series are mentioned near the bottom of the article (above the engraving of Amelia Bloomer). Another article might address my folk costume collection in general. I've lost track of how often in the past year I've been asked,"How many costumes do you <I>have</I>?", and it seems to be something people really want to know. (An estimate: Over 50 complete ones; portions of more.)<br><br> <li><B>September 29:</B>&ensp;In an effort to respond to a reader of my <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey who asked if the city were much afflicted by cannibals, I re-read some of the "likely" works. Had I neglected to note any cannibals because they were of a non-zombie persuasion? (Occurrences of zombies are noted in the thematic index of the survey.) The answer: Toronto is unusually cannibal-free. If a Windigo spirit ever happened to wander by or a Donner Party <I>really</I> lost its way, I'd have a different story to tell. Toronto the Dull indeed. However, as a consequence of my re-reading, the entries for Timothy Findley, Nalo Hopkinson and Gwendolyn MacEwen are now <I>considerably</I> plumper and more toothsome than they used to be.</li> <br><br> <li><B>August 4:</B>&ensp;I added 16 novels and four short stories to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey as I created entries for Claudia Dey (<I>Stunt</I>), B.C. Holmes ("Glamour"), Claude Lalumière ("The Sea, at Bari"), Shari Lapeña (<I>Things Go Flying</I>), Rob Payne (<I>How to be a Hero on Earth 5</I> and <I>How to Save the Universe Again</I>), Lynsay Sands (<I>A Bite to Remember</I>, <I>A Quick Bite</I>, <I>The Accidental Vampire</I>, <I>Bite Me if You Can</I>, <I>The Immortal Hunter</I>, <I>Love Bites</I>, <I>The Rogue Hunter</I>, <I>Single White Vampire</I>, <I>Tall, Dark & Hungry</I>, <I>Vampire, Interrupted</I> and <I>Vampires Are Forever</I>) and Rebecca M. Senese ("I Think, Therefore..." and "Cold War"), and expanded the entry for Stephanie Bedwell-Grime ("Family Secrets" and <I>Witch Island</I>). Getting through all the vampire romance was a major slog, and I'm happy to report that there's some genuine literature in the survey pipeline.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I also changed the photograph on the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/RecentChanges.html">Recent Changes to Survey</a> page. It used to feature a swan family at Toronto Island; now there's an Art-Deco window on the south face of Maple Leaf Gardens. The swans have swum over to the Contact page.<img src="images/Alcantarea_imperialis_full_shot.jpg" align="right" width="140" border="1" hspace="10" vspace="8"></li> <br><br> <li><B>July 6:</B>&ensp;For the past five years, I've lavished TLC on the plant shown here without knowing exactly <I>what</I> it was besides a tropical plant. (It had been a rescue from the office during the move to much dimmer premises. If I didn't know I'd be condemning it to slow death from inadequate natural light&#8212;and if I could lug the thing; it weighs<img src="images/Alcantarea_imperialis_closeup3.jpg" alt="Alcantarea imperialis, Brazil" align="left" width="190" border="1" hspace="6" vspace="10"> a ton now&#8212;I'd take it back to the office.)<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Last month, the weather having finally warmed up sufficiently, I plopped the plant, with its varied-species mates, onto my (Toronto) balcony. And lo, it began to bloom, for the first time!<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Some Internet research allowed me to identify it. (The flowers may look like orange lilies, but the foliage is all wrong for a lily.) Behold the <I>Alcantarea imperialis</I>, a bromeliad from Brazil. In a spirit of spurious helpfulness, I'd like to impart to my readers that bromeliads are a neotropical family of largely terrestrial or epiphytic monocots. And these things can grow very, very large. Mine needs repotting for the third time, as the roots are bustin' out all over. And this <a href="http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~srivast/bromeliad/research.html">University of British Columbia Zoology Department webpage</a> is entitled "Bromeliad Larvae" (not in the text on the page; look at the top bar of the browser)! Hang on a sec; just what do I have on my balcony? I'm thinking, <I>Little Shop of Horrors</I> ... If you stop hearing from me, you'll know why ...</li> <br><br> <li><a name="Jul59"></a><B>July 5:</B><img src="images/Regency_Rose_Plume_Agate1.jpg" alt="Regency Rose Plume Agate, Oregon" align="right" width="150" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10">&ensp;At lower right is a slab of Regency Rose Plume Agate from Oregon, recently added to my jasper and agate collection.</li> <br><br> <li><B>July 4:</B>&ensp;I'd like to recommend Christopher Beha's memoir <I>The Whole Five Feet</I> (New York; Grove Press, 2009), which is about many things but whose starting-point was the ambition to read all 22,000 pages of the 1909 Harvard Classics of Western civilization in one year. So much did I like the book that I was disappointed when it ended; I wanted more than 258 pages bulked out by thick paper and an over-large font.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Here's something Beha says on p. 83 about the title character of Cervantes' <I>Don Quixote</I>:<blockquote>...I know from experience that once seated in his library with a stack of books a man of this sort is likely, by sheer force of inertia, to stay there. But Cervantes has faith in the power of books, for good or ill, to send us back into [the] world. What happens next is described so well by the author that one couldn't possibly resort to paraphrase:<BLOCKQUOTE>"In resolution, he plunged himself so deeply in his reading of these books, as he spent many times in the lecture of them whole days and nights; and, in the end, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgment."</BLOCKQUOTE></blockquote>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'm happy to report that my brains are still like unto a steaming wetland in the midst of helping a friend do research for his PhD thesis (mentioned below; not only is English my first language, unlike his, but I read with promiscuous rapidity, and yea, I'm a friend in a million), for the research has led me to quite wonderful authors: Alexander William Kinglake, for example, who wrote a classic of travel literature: <I>Eothen</I>. I have a print-on-demand reproduction of the 5th edition, published in 1847. On p. 8 Kinglake begins to retail a hilarious imaginary conversation between a Turkish Pasha and an English traveller in which much is lost and gained during translation by the Englishman's interpreter, the Dragoman.<BLOCKQUOTE><I>Pasha</I>&#8212;The Englishman is welcome; most blessed among hours is this, the hour of his coming.<br><br><I>Dragoman</I>&#8212;The Pasha pays you his compliments.<br><BR><I>Traveller</I>&#8212;Give him my best compliments in return, and say I'm delighted to have the honour of meeting him.<br><BR><I>Dragoman</I> (to the Pasha)&#8212;His Lordship, this Englishman, Lord of London, Scorner of Ireland, Suppressor of France, has quitted his governments, and left his enemies to breathe for a moment, and has crossed the broad waters in strict disguise, with a small but eternally faithful retinue of followers, in order that he might look upon the bright countenance of the Pasha among Pashas&#8212;the Pasha of the everlasting Pashalik of Karagholookoldour.<BR><BR><I>Traveller</I> (to his Dragoman)&#8212;What on earth have you been saying about London? The Pasha will be taking me for a mere Cockney. Have not I told you <I>always</I> to say that I am from a branch of the family of Mudcombe Park, and that I am to be a magistrate for the county of Bedfordshire, only I'm not qualified, and that I should have been a Deputy-Lieutenant, if it had not been for the extraordinary conduct of Lord Mountpromise, and that I was a candidate for Goldborough at the last election, and that I should have won easy if my committee had not been bought. I wish to heaven that if you <I>do</I> say anything about me, you'd tell the simple truth.<BR><BR><I>Dragoman</I>&#8212;[is silent].<BR><BR><I>Pasha</I>&#8212;What says the friendly Lord of London? Is there aught that I can grant him within the Pashalik of Karagholookoldour?<BR><BR><I>Dragoman</I> (growing sulky and literal)&#8212;This friendly Englishman&#8212;this branch of Mudcombe&#8212;this head-purveyor of Goldborough&#8212;this possible policeman of Bedfordshire is recounting his achievements and the number of his titles.<BR><BR>[later, the Pasha having asseverated that "the English talk by wheels, and by steam"]<BR><BR><I>Pasha</I>&#8212;The ships of the English swarm like flies; their printed calicoes cover the whole earth, and by the side of their swords the blades of Damascus are blades of glass. All India is but an item in the Ledger-Books of the Merchants whose lumber-rooms are filled with ancient thrones!&#8212;whirr! whirr! all by wheels!&#8212;whiz! whiz! all by steam!<BR><BR><I>Dragoman</I>&#8212;The Pasha compliments the cutlery of England, and also the East India Company.</BLOCKQUOTE> </li> <li><img src="images/GreenGoldJasper_source_unknown.jpg" alt="Green Gold Jasper" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10"><B>June 10:</B>&ensp;Allow me to present, as a change from the colour palette of the other jaspers on this page, what the (eBay) seller called simply "Green and Gold Jasper," without saying where it came from. (He'd been collecting for 45 years; maybe he didn't know any more.) The closest resemblance I can see is to Willow Creek Jasper, from Idaho. Like the agates in the June 9th entry, this isn't in my Photo Gallery, as I have yet to rustle up any funny commentary. (One of my readers checks for updates to the Photo Gallery purely for the amusing remarks, not the photos.) The pyramid on the left of the photo makes me think of Egypt, which, along with the rest of North Africa, <a href="http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch02.htm">used to be a great deal greener</a>; the climate began to dry around 3500 BCE.</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 9:</B>&ensp;I wanted to pass the word on some books I've been reading that I'd like to recommend. Fiction, none of it SF: the very funny <I>The Uncommon Reader</I> (Faber & Faber, 2008), by Alan Bennett (no relation), and the not-funny-at-all but beautiful and moving <I>Astrid and Veronika</I> (Penguin, 2007) by Linda Olsson;<img src="images/PaiuteAgatefrontlit.jpg" alt="Paiute Agate, Oregon" align="left" width="100" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10"> and, in the way of non-fiction, <I>The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination</I> (Duckworth Overlook, 2004), by Tim Rood. ("The shout of the who?" you say? They were an ancient Greek mercenary army who were stranded in Mesopotamia and had to get home the hard way. <a href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Ten_Thousand_(Greek)">Here's a site with some info.</a>) I was reading the book for fun but its references to other literature have proven to be serendipitous for a friend's PhD research. Cool. I do like to be useful. The journey of the Ten Thousand has also influenced spec-fic literature: Paul Kearney's 2008 fantasy novel <I>The Ten Thousand</I>, for example.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;<img src="images/PaiuteAgateOregon_backlit.jpg" align="right" width="100" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10">Although I'm not buying jaspers and agates as much as I used to (their place has been taken by folk costumes and books), some striking rock specimens are still making their way into my collection. Above left is a Paiute Agate slab from Oregon, lit from the front. On the right is what the same slab looked like when I held it up to the light.</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 7:</B>&ensp;I updated the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html">About Me, and FAQs page</a>, in part to incorporate a riff on a <I>genuine</I> question I was recently asked: "Are you related to the Bennets in Jane Austen's <I>Pride and Prejudice</I>?" (Since I interview myself on that page, psst! I <I>made up</I> some of the other questions.) The riff was also inspired by someone misspelling my family moniker when she <a href="http://www.jabberwock.co.uk/blog/">thanked me in her blog</a> for a favour.</li> <br><br> <li><B>May 9:</B>&ensp;To the Other Writing page, I added <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Newroz2009.html">an article</a> about a special one-off performance by a group of recreational folk dancers (of whom I was one) at the Kurdish New Year ("Newroz") celebration on March 21st in Toronto. The accompanying photographs are just gorgeous, and I can't take credit for anything but cropping them and writing the captions. (In one of the photographs I've assumed a "classical" pose, perhaps for a very pensive Greek statue. In Kurdish costume. Oh well. I wasn't aware of the photographer being on the loose at the time; normally I stay out of the way of cameras, since I'm rarely pleased with how I look, but a fellow dancer liked that photo, so, there you go, Elizabeth.)</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/Owyhee_Sunset_Picture_Jasper4.jpg" alt="Owyhee Sunset Picture Jasper, Oregon" align="right" width="220" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10"><B>March 18:</B>&ensp;Expanded the entries for Kelley Armstrong, E.L. (Elaine) Chen and Michelle Rowen (writing in this case under the pseudonym of Michelle Maddox) in the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;And, for your viewing pleasure, pictured at right is a recent addition to my rock collection. I call it the Happy Marshmallow Volcano. The material is Owyhee Sunset Picture Jasper, from Oregon.</li> <br><br> <li><B>March 2:</B>&ensp;I read a couple of good books this past weekend: Patricia McKillip's fantasy <I>The Bell at Sealey Head</I> (Ace, 2008) and William Heaney's <I>Memoirs of a Master Forger</I> (Gollancz, 2008). The Heaney book was <a href="http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/search?q=William+Heaney">recommended</a> by SF author and critic Adam Roberts in his blog Punkadiddle (which is separate from his <a href="http://www.adamroberts.com">site</a>). "William Heaney" is the pseudonym of World Fantasy award-winning author <a href="http://www.grahamjoyce.net/">Graham Joyce</a>, who lives in Leicester, England. Joyce talks about <I>Memoirs</I> in an interview conducted in 2008 at the World Fantasy con in Calgary (Oct. 29&#8211;Nov. 2) and published in the <a href="http://www.locusmag.com/2009/Issue04_Joyce.html">April 2009 issue of <I>Locus</I> magazine</a>. The title <I>Memoirs of a Master Forger</I> doesn't make sense until the second-last page of the book, as the narrator, one William Heaney (ahem), doesn't <I>seem</I> to be a master forger; another character does. [Edited to add: In February 2010, <I>Memoirs</I> was published in the U.S. by Night Shade Books under Joyce's own name and the title <I>How to Make Friends with Demons</I>.] The book is funny, poignant, original. Highly recommended. Go buy it. As for the McKillip, I was quite pleased with it, although certain aspects (such as the seagulls vs. the crows) could have been better developed. I read McKillip more for her lyrical language than her plots, anyway.</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/Agate_with_Sprays.jpg" align="right" width="200" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10"><B>February 26:</B>&ensp;Added a rock to the bottom of <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">Photo Gallery 3</a>, also to be admired to the right: a type of agate with needle-like inclusions that goes by various names, including sagenite agate and rutilated quartz. The seller I obtained it from didn't know the origin, but I believe it's from the western US. According to my research on a wonderful site called, by an amazing coincidence, <a href="http://www.agateswithinclusions.com/index.html">Agates with Inclusions</a>, Arizona and Oregon are the best matches for my specimen. Cool, huh? Looks like a frozen meteor shower.<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I also added a recent photo (January 2009) of Spider and Jeanne Robinson to <a href="Robinson08.html">Spider's interview</a>.</li> <br><br> <li><B>February 23:</B>&ensp;Two days ago, I went to a launch and reading by R. Scott Bakker of his fantasy novel <I>The Judging Eye</I>, Book One in the Aspect Emperor series. (Scott doesn't maintain a website I can link to.) Although I was unable to stick with his 2004 novel <I>The Darkness That Comes Before</I> (first in The Prince of Nothing series) and I have low tolerance for epic fantasy in general, Scott in person is exceptionally thought-provoking to listen to and interact with during a Q&A session and he's fun company and a great human being, so I do my best to support his career. (He's also a very talented writer, I have no hesitation in saying, even though I may not always want to spend time in the universes he creates.) Also at the launch was SF writer Karin Lowachee (<I>Warchild</I>, <I>Burndive</I>, <I>Cagebird</I>). Her first fantasy novel will be coming out next year. My comments about Scott apply to Karin as well (she has no current site I can link to either, but that's a meaningless coincidence. I think.). I'm really looking forward to hanging out with the two of them plus others in our gang, such as Caitlin Sweet, Lesley Livingston and Dena Taylor, at <a href="http://www.ad-astra.org/">Ad Astra</a> at the end of March.</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/PolkaDotAgate14a.jpg" alt="Polka Dot Agate, Idaho" align="right" width="150" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="10"><B>February 12:</B>&ensp;Added (1) an <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Robinson08.html">Interview with SF writer Spider Robinson</a> that I did in the fall of 2008, and (2) a recently-acquired specimen of Polka-Dot Agate, plus commentary, to the bottom of <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">Photo Gallery 3</a>. The agate is also visible, flopped horizontally to work better with this page, at right. It'll form part of the content in my slide show "More SF With Rocks In," which I'll be presenting at EerieCon Eleven in Niagara Falls, NY, on April 18th. (The vast majority of the slide show isn't available on this site yet.)</li> <br><br> <li><B>February 9, 2009:</B>&ensp;I'm ba-ack. The eye infection has finally gone (after six months of hell), and have I got a load of stuff to put on the site. For the nonce, I've expanded the entries for Elizabeth Bear, Douglas Smith and Robert Charles Wilson in the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;One of the few books I was able to get through during the aforementioned six months (normally I read several books <I>a week</I>) was <I>Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress</I> (Ballantine, 1991), by Mary Edwards Wertsch, herself a military brat (US Army). This book is out of print so I can't link to it, but for any of you out there who were raised in the military culture, as I was (albeit Canadian rather than American; see my <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html">About Me, and FAQs</A> page), I urge you to get your hands on it. I can't remember when I last read such an illuminating&#8212;and painful&#8212;book. I had repeated flashes of "There I am! And that's my dad! Oh, Dad. You poor guy. And that's my mom! Oh, Mom." (She was in the air force when she met my dad.) <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I can't summarize the book here, but I can share two traits that my being raised in that culture imparted to me: (1) Coping With Constant Change (caused by moving from one posting to another; some kids in the book, but not me, moved <I>more than once a year</I>) by becoming a social chameleon, able to fit into new environments with great speed because military brats learn how to mimic others; and (2) Putting Up With Things, because that's something we're taught: to be stoic, to hang tough, to stay the course without whining.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I'm one hell of a mimic without really being conscious of it. Not only can I do physical comedy in the best style of the silent greats like Charlie Chaplin, but if I start talking to somebody with an accent, soon I'm echoing the way they talk. This happened recently when I fell into conversation with a stranger who was Irish-born. By the end of our talk, she was convinced I'd been born there too. Another time, a Welshman demanded to know where I'd been born, so well did my cadences fit in with all the other Welsh people in the room after I'd spent a few hours there. This mimicking talent must also account for my ability to sing in languages (such as Croatian) that I speak only a little of and are not part of my ethnic heritage; I can do the same with <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Newroz2009.html">ethnic dances</a>.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;But back to the stoicism I mentioned earlier: This character trait, which I hadn't been aware I possessed until I read Wertsch's book, was what enabled me to get through the eye infection catastrophe. My best friend paid me a nice compliment when she said, towards the end, when I finally asked for help (her ear to listen and her accompaniment to the latest doctor's appointment, as I'd reached the end of my strength to undergo any more eye operations): "I don't know how you managed. It's like my mother, who lived through the London Blitz during WWII; I can't understand how she survived. I really admire both of you." My answer: "What else could I have done but endure?" I was honestly puzzled. I gather from other conversations that stoicism isn't the default position for most people. (There are other coping strategies that military families are prone to use, alcohol being one of them; I'm so pleased that I loathe the taste of the stuff, so that way of escaping misery isn't available to me!)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;The <I>Military Brats</I> book also said that military families, when the adults leave the Service or the kids grow up and look for careers, tend to gravitate towards public service. Yup. My dad's second job after he left the Canadian Forces was as a federal government inspector. My mom worked for a municipal government. And I work for the government of Ontario, and do a heck of a lot of volunteering for the public good. (My brother broke the pattern.)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Oh, and by the way, get our people the hell out of Afghanistan! [Edited to add: Canada s combat role in Afghanistan ended in July 2011; until March 2014, Canadian troops will train Afghan forces to take over their own security.]</li> <br><br> <li><B>October 23, 2008:</B>&ensp;In the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey, I've expanded the entries for Kelley Armstrong, Elizabeth Bear, John Charles Dent, Tanya Huff, Vincent Starrett and Andrew Weiner.</li> <br><br> <li><img src="images/PolkaDotAgate12.jpg" align="right" border="1" hspace="8" vspace="8"><B>July 13:</B>&ensp;By popular demand (okay, <I>one</I> person asked me), I've added four jasper and agate photos (plus commentary) to the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html">Photo Gallery</a> Main page, and 13 photos to <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">Photo Gallery 3</a>. To the right is one of the agates I added: Polka Dot, from Oregon. (Goofy image, huh?)<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I had the spare time to do the above work because the Polaris 22 convention was such a washout for me as a reader that I left early. Since <I>Buffy</I> and <I>Angel</I> ended, I haven't found any SF television to be watchable, so an almost entirely media-oriented con is a waste of my time and money. Even the Polaris dealers' room was a wasteland of toys and T-shirts. The Ad Astra convention last April had clearly gone downhill in terms of the literary track and how many authors attended, but Polaris has been worsening for years. (I was asked a few years ago to run the author track at Polaris, but had to decline. Hell. And I know I could have made a difference.) Some competent and creative people&#8212;and they don't have to be authors&#8212;have to be enlisted to run the literary tracks at Ad Astra and Polaris before both writers and readers abandon these cons.</li> <br><br> <li><B>July 12:</B>&ensp;I replaced the old site header with one that I find very pleasing and that appears three-dimensional, based on a slab of Malagasy Ocean Jasper from my rock collection; and added a photo of TeePee Canyon Agate (from South Dakota, near Custer's Last Stand) to the bottom of the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html#teepee">About Me, & FAQs</A> page. (Check out the TeePee Canyon Agate; it's a hoot.) I also replaced the font (which used to be Slant; it's now Viner Hand) on the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</A> photo, to (a) harmonize better with the new site header's font, and (b) add some depth to the image.</li> <br><br> <li><B>July 3:</B>&ensp;In the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto survey</a>, I've (a) enlarged the Introduction and the entries for Timothy Findley, Nancy Kilpatrick, Spider Robinson and Edo van Belkom, and (b) introduced an entry for Michelle Rowen (Warning! Clich&eacute;-Ridden Chick Lit!). In the survey pipeline is a lot of other stuff, including a YA novel by Rob Payne entitled <I>How to Be a Hero on Earth 5</I> (our Earth being Earth 4, y'see). I also expanded the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Bob_and_Rob.html">Bob and Rob</a> article.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I finished <I>Lavinia</I> (Harcourt, 2008) by Ursula K. LeGuin. Now that's literature. Remind me to nominate it for a Hugo next year. I started the non-fiction book <I>Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain</I> (HarperCollins, 2007), by Maryanne Wolf. Another Proust-inspired work (I really have to get around to reading the guy's actual <I>books</I>) is <I>Proust Was a Neuroscientist</I> (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) by Jonah Lehrer, whose blog <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/">The Frontal Cortex</a> I read every day. I'm also beavering away on some homework for Readercon 19, including Michael Chabon's <I>Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands</I> (McSweeney's, 2008) and <I>The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts</I> (Praeger, 2004), edited by Martha Bartter. (I'm one of those weirdos who <I>liked</I> doing homework at school.)</li> <br><br> <li><B>April 20:</B>&ensp;Attended <a href="http://www.eeriecon.org/">EerieCon</a> in Niagara Falls, NY, and had a wonderful time&#8212;perhaps the best I've <I>ever</I> had at a con. I made many new friends, among them some demon euchre-players (and very, very funny people). So now you know: Karen Bennett, Euchre Demon.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;What else did I do at the con? Lessee. I went to readings by James Alan Gardner and Nancy Kress and to a writers' workshop they taught; a filk concert by Mattie Brahen (another new friend) of Philadelphia; a slide show called "Mr. Myazaki's Wonderful Flying Machine" by Dr. David Stephenson (flying machines, real or not, interest me muchly; an introductory flying lesson I took in a Cessna 150 was a high I'll never forget); various writers' panels; a couple of auctions; a room party; and, oh yes, I showed my slide presentation <B>SF With Rocks In</B>, and I do believe it was a hit. (A few of the rock specimens can be seen in the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html">Photo Gallery</a> on this site.) One audience member said I should collect <I>even more</I> jaspers and agates so I can have an all-new show at the 2009 EerieCon (among whose guests will be, by the bye, writer Vernor Vinge). Another audience member wants me to produce wall posters and picture postcards and put them in next year's art show. Or I may think up something else with original content. I'll see. "Euchre With Rocks In"! "Flying Machines With Rocks In"! Er...</li> <br><br> <li><B>February 19:</B>&ensp;Enlarged the entries for Margaret Atwood, Douglas Cooper, Robertson Davies, Cory Doctorow, Tanya Huff, J. FitzGerald McCurdy, Ursula Pflug, Spider Robinson, Michael Skeet, Douglas Smith and Vincent Starrett, and introduced entries for Andr&#233; Alexis, Alison Baird, John Charles Dent ("who?"), Bernadette Gabay Dyer, Hugh Garner and Emily Schultz in the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> survey.</li> <br><br> <li><B>January 4, 2008:</B>&ensp;I left it a mite late to observe that 2007 marked the 140th anniversary of Canadian Confederation. But 140 years are mere chickenfeed compared to 400: The year <A href="http://www.quebec400.gc.ca/pc-ch-eng.cfm">2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Qu&#233;bec City by Samuel de Champlain</a>. F&#233;licitations! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Among the books I've been reading for fun is Nick Hornby's collection <I>The Polysyllabic Spree</I> (Believer Books, 2004), consisting of columns on books that he wrote for <I>Believer</I> magazine in Britain in 2003 and '04. At the beginning of his October 2003 column, he talks about watching a woman reading his first novel, <I>High Fidelity</I>, at a hotel swimming pool. With him were his sister and his brother-in-law (also a writer). His in-law was providing "a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. 'Look! Her lips are moving.' 'Ha! She's fallen asleep! Again!' 'I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a <I>bright</I> woman, I'm afraid.' At one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off. 'She's gone to put out her eyes!' my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly" (p. 22).<br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Addendum a month later: I was much less charmed by Hornby's further collection of columns, <I>Housekeeping vs. the Dirt</I> (Believer Books, 2006): There were fewer laughs; I wished that just one, still-not-at-all-hefty, tome containing <I>all</I> the columns was available; and the author's whimsy (such as his ongoing <I>schtick</I> about the <I>Believer</I> editors) grew tedious.</li> <br><br> <li><B>November 7, 2007:</B>&ensp;Added nine jaspers and agates to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">Photo Gallery 3 page</a>.</li> <br><br> <li><B>October 29:</B>&ensp;Expanded Toronto survey entries for Elizabeth Bear (Toronto's gone <I>again!</I> Was it something we said?), Gemma Files and Spider Robinson; added new entries for Peter Carey, Isabella Colalillo-Katz, Robert Howell, Stephen Humphrey, Emily Pohl-Weary and Joanna Sword; and filled out the entry for Nalo Hopkinson's collection <I>Skin Folk</I>. I also added to the Photo Gallery in the "Pioneer Dreams" and "Sunset" series.</li> <br><br> <li><B>October 24:</B>&ensp;Went to the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, downtown Toronto, to attend a "round-table discussion" by authors including <a href="http://www.spiderrobinson.com/">Spider Robinson</a> (whose novel <I>Variable Star</I>, written based on an outline by the late Robert A. Heinlein, was published in hardcover in 2006 by Tor). Talked to <a href="http://www.spiderrobinson.com/stardance/index.html">Jeanne (pronounced "Jee-nee") Robinson</a> as well. Spider and Jeanne are such wonderful, warm, talented people. It did my heart good to meet them. [Edited to add: <a href="http://stardancemovie.blogspot.com/2010/05/buchi-eihei-in-pacem.html">Jeanne died of cancer on May 30, 2010</a>.]</li> <br><br> <li><B>September 12:</B>&ensp;Added Toronto survey entries for a Robin Matchett novel, a Stepan Chapman story and a book chapter by Cory Doctorow; expanded the entry for Gemma Files's stories in <I>The Worm in Every Heart</I>; added a paragraph re "recommended" and "not recommended" reading to the survey Intro; and expanded the <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Links.html">Links</a> and <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">More Jaspers and Agates</a> pages.</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 19:</B>&ensp;Added a photo I took on a trip to the Toronto Islands on June 15 to the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/RecentChanges.html">Recent Changes</a> page; added two subsidiary pages to the Photo Gallery, one on <a href="PhotoGallery2.html">sunsets</a> and one on <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery3.html">jaspers</a>; added a photo to the Links page.</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 13:</B>&ensp;(1) Finished reading Alison Lurie's mainstream novel <I>Truth and Consequences</I> (Viking Penguin, 2005), and I wanted to share a passage that made me laugh. It's part of a scene at a farmer's market near a fictional university in upstate New York (the author's a professor at Cornell). The people talking are Jane, an administrative staff member at the university, and Henry, the husband of a visiting Fellow. "Where is home?" Jane has just asked.<br> <blockquote>"'Well. It's in Ontario. Or was.'<br> <br>"'In Canada.'<br> <br>"'Uh-huh.'<br> <br>"'You're a Canadian.'<br> <br>"Henry sighed. 'The way you say that.'<br> <br>"'What?'<br> <br>"He laughed. 'Oh, it's not just you. Everyone down here says it that way. With a kind of bored, dying fall'" (p. 83).</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;Turns out, Henry's from Toronto. And aside from the passage above, I found <I>him</I> boring. Huh. But hey, I supported the author by buying her novel in <I>hardcover</I>. There's no connection to SF except in the character of Henry's wife, who bears a resemblance to La Belle Dame Sans Merci (in Keats' poem of the same name) / a faerie queen, without overt magical powers.</li> <br><br> <img src="images/ElephantAndCastle.jpg" align="left" border="1" hspace="7" vspace="10">(2) Of no relation to SF but to some other of my interests (history, chess, feminism, Eleanor of Aquitaine) is a non-fiction book called <I>Birth of the Chess Queen</I>, by Marilyn Yalom (Perennial, 2005). One of the illustrations is of an early 16th-century German chess set with nine different pieces, one of which is the rook; in this set, it's an elephant carrying a castle-shaped howdah (pictured left).<br><br> "The Elephant and Castle!" sez I, thinking of pubs with that name. (Such a one graces the corner of Yonge and Gerrard in downtown Toronto.) I'd always thought that "Elephant and Castle" was a corruption of "Infanta of Castile" (wrongly, apparently</a>; it was a trade guild emblem). To quote <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ele1.htm">Michael Quinion of World Wide Words</a>:<br> <blockquote>"The [London] public house called the Elephant and Castle was converted about 1760 from a smithy that had had the same name and sign. This had connections with the Cutlers Company, a London craft guild founded in the 13th century which represented workers who made knives, scissors, surgical instruments and the like. The guild used the same emblem. The link here is the Indian elephant ivory used for knife handles, in which the Cutlers Company dealt."</blockquote> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;According to <I>Birth of the Chess Queen</I>, the "elephant" chess piece originated in India (where the game did) and was one of six pieces (king, general, rook, elephant, horse, pawn) carved in ivory. The elephant morphed into what's called in English the bishop. (The enormously varied names, shapes and powers of chess pieces are better explained <a href="http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Metro/9154/nap-pieces.htm">here</a>.) The Cutlers' Company borrowed the original elephant shape for their guild emblem, to be borrowed in turn by pubs.<br> &ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;There's a trivia question for you: "What's the connection between..." One of my all-time favourite TV series was made by the BBC in 1978 and called <I>Connections</I> (the book made from the series was called <I>The Day the Universe Changed</I>), by James Burke. There was a sequel called <I>Connections II</I>.</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 9:</B>&ensp;Attended the 2007 <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/accsff/">Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy</a>, held at the Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College St., Toronto. SF author Peter Watts (<I>Starfish</I>, <I>Maelstrom</I>, <I>Blindsight</I>) delivered a rousing and thought-provoking keynote address, while the academic guest speaker was Peter Fitting, Professor Emeritus, U of T. I was very pleased to meet two of the authors represented in my survey: Allan Weiss (conference organizer) and Cat Ashton (York U. grad student). Someone during the day wondered how long it would be before SF authors put The Crystal, the just-opened addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, into a story. Consensus: not long. (<a href="FantasticToronto.html#sumne">Karina Sumner-Smith has already done it in her 2006 story "Safe Passage"</a>.) I also got some research done upstairs at the Merril Collection during the lunch break. A well-worthwhile day, even for a non-academic like me. (The next conference is on June 6, 2009, with SF author Karl Schroeder delivering the Author Keynote Address and Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller giving the Scholar Keynote Address.)</li> <br><br> <li><B>June 5:</B>&ensp;An article on Fantastic Toronto written by Amy Lavender Harris posted on <a href="http://www.readingt.readingcities.com/index.php/toronto/comments/10652/">Reading Toronto</a>. (I'll bet you didn't know that I'm "Toronto's Mistress of the Fantastic"!)</li> <br><br> <li><B>May 29, 2007:</B>&ensp;The day after the site went up, I began receiving a lot of gratifying feedback, such as "lovely"; "what a lot of hard work"; "the survey is a cool idea; thanks"; and "fascinating." I'm grateful to all, and especially to Cory Doctorow, whose blog entry on Boing Boing reached a lot of people. <br>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;I've had some questions on the <B>banner art</B> for the <a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">Fantastic Toronto</a> page. I took the photo looking west from a fifth-floor window in Queen's Park (a.k.a. "the Pink Palace"). The neo-Gothic building in the foreground with many spires is 1 Spadina Circle, constructed in 1874 for Knox College and now belonging to the University of Toronto. <a href="http://facilities.utoronto.ca/general/fandsnews/tower.htm">(It was recently restored.)</a> The font I used to add "Fantastic Toronto" to the image was originally Slant, but in July of 2008 I replaced it with Viner Hand, which melded better with the newly redesigned website header/banner.</li></ul> </font></td> <td width="20%" colspan="1" valign="top" height="100"><hr color="#B3B3B3" width="100%" align="left"> <P><B><FONT face="arial, sans-serif" size="2" color="black"><A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">FANTASTIC TORONTO<br>SURVEY</A><br><br><a href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/RecentChanges.html">RECENT CHANGES<br>TO SURVEY</a></font><br><br><br><hr color="#B3B3B3" width="100%" align="left"></P> </td></TR> <tr><td align="center" valign="top" colspan="5" width="90%"><hr color="#B3B3B3" width="70%"><br><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif" size="-1" align="center"><B> <A HREF="http://www.karenbennett.ca/index.html">HOME</A>&nbsp;&nbsp;||&nbsp;&nbsp;<A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/FantasticToronto.html">FANTASTIC TORONTO SURVEY</A><br><br> <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/PhotoGallery.html">PHOTO GALLERY</A>&nbsp;&nbsp;||&nbsp;&nbsp;<A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/OtherWriting.html">OTHER WRITING</A><br><br> <A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Contact.html">CONTACT</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;||&nbsp;&nbsp;<A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/AboutMe_&_FAQ.html">ABOUT ME&nbsp;/&nbsp;FAQs</A>&nbsp;&nbsp;||&nbsp;&nbsp;<A href="http://www.karenbennett.ca/Links.html">LINKS</A> <BR> <P><FONT face="Arial, sans-serif" size="-2">Copyright © 2007-12, Karen E. 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