NEWS

• January 18: To the Other Writing page, I added an essay entitled "My Albanian Journey," which I'd intended to be third in the Explorations in Folklore series. But when it grew to 6,700 words, I wrote it as an independent article instead. 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.
• January 17, 2010: To the Other Writing page, I added an article entitled "A Childhood in Brittany," second in the Explorations in Folklore series.
• November 28, 2009: I taught Albanian wedding dances (that is, dances done at wedding receptions) for an Ontario Folk Dance Association event 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.
      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 Flickr.) 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 Albanian Wedding album (CD-PIR2116), the Elveda Rumeli soundtrack (Kalan CD 455), Anthology of World Music: Music from Albania (Rounder CD 5151), and Songs and Dances from Albania (Tirana Folk Ensemble; EUCD 1601).
• October 21: To the Other Writing page, I added an article 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–Persian cross-cultural pollination. I also talk a bit about Turkish–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.
      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 have?", and it seems to be something people really want to know. (An estimate: Over 50 complete ones; portions of more.)
  
• September 29: In an effort to respond to a reader of my Fantastic Toronto 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 really 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 considerably plumper and more toothsome than they used to be.
• September 13: On the right is an addition to my rock collection: a Priday Blue Bed Thunderegg from Richardson's Ranch in Madras, Oregon. (If only its blues didn't utterly clash with those in my website banner. Dear, dear.)
• August 4: I added 16 novels and four short stories to the Fantastic Toronto survey as I created entries for Claudia Dey (Stunt), B.C. Holmes ("Glamour"), Claude Lalumière ("The Sea, at Bari"), Shari Lapeña (Things Go Flying), Rob Payne (How to be a Hero on Earth 5 and How to Save the Universe Again), Lynsay Sands (A Bite to Remember, A Quick Bite, The Accidental Vampire, Bite Me if You Can, The Immortal Hunter, Love Bites, The Rogue Hunter, Single White Vampire, Tall, Dark & Hungry, Vampire, Interrupted and Vampires Are Forever) and Rebecca M. Senese ("I Think, Therefore..." and "Cold War"), and expanded the entry for Stephanie Bedwell-Grime ("Family Secrets" and Witch Island). 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.
      I also changed the photograph on the Recent Changes to Survey 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.
• July 6: For the past five years, I've lavished TLC on the plant shown here without knowing exactly what 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—and if I could lug the thing; it weighs a ton now—I'd take it back to the office.)
      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!
      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 Alcantarea imperialis, 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 University of British Columbia Zoology Department webpage 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, Little Shop of Horrors ... If you stop hearing from me, you'll know why ...
• July 5: At lower right is a slab of Regency Rose Plume Agate from Oregon, recently added to my jasper and agate collection.
• July 4: I'd like to recommend Christopher Beha's memoir The Whole Five Feet (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.
      Here's something Beha says on p. 83 about the title character of Cervantes' Don Quixote:

  ...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:
  

  "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."

  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: Eothen. 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.

  Pasha—The Englishman is welcome; most blessed among hours is this, the hour of his coming.
  
  Dragoman—The Pasha pays you his compliments.
  
  Traveller—Give him my best compliments in return, and say I'm delighted to have the honour of meeting him.
  
  Dragoman (to the Pasha)—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—the Pasha of the everlasting Pashalik of Karagholookoldour.
  
  Traveller (to his Dragoman)—What on earth have you been saying about London? The Pasha will be taking me for a mere Cockney. Have not I told you always 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 do say anything about me, you'd tell the simple truth.
  
  Dragoman—[is silent].
  
  Pasha—What says the friendly Lord of London? Is there aught that I can grant him within the Pashalik of Karagholookoldour?
  
  Dragoman (growing sulky and literal)—This friendly Englishman—this branch of Mudcombe—this head-purveyor of Goldborough—this possible policeman of Bedfordshire is recounting his achievements and the number of his titles.
  
  [later, the Pasha having asseverated that "the English talk by wheels, and by steam"]
  
  Pasha—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!—whirr! whirr! all by wheels!—whiz! whiz! all by steam!
  
  Dragoman—The Pasha compliments the cutlery of England, and also the East India Company.

• June 10: 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, used to be a great deal greener; the climate began to dry around 3500 BCE.
• June 9: 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 The Uncommon Reader (Faber & Faber, 2008), by Alan Bennett (no relation), and the not-funny-at-all but beautiful and moving Astrid and Veronika (Penguin, 2007) by Linda Olsson; and, in the way of non-fiction, The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination (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. Here's a site with some info.) 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 The Ten Thousand, for example.
      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.
• June 7: I updated the About Me, and FAQs page, in part to incorporate a riff on a genuine question I was recently asked: "Are you related to the Bennets in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice?" (Since I interview myself on that page, psst! I made up some of the other questions.) The riff was also inspired by someone misspelling my family moniker when she thanked me in her blog for a favour.
• May 9: To the Other Writing page, I added an article 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.)
• March 18: 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 Fantastic Toronto survey.
      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.
• March 2: I read a couple of good books this past weekend: Patricia McKillip's fantasy The Bell at Sealey Head (Ace, 2008) and William Heaney's Memoirs of a Master Forger (Gollancz, 2008). The Heaney book was recommended by SF author and critic Adam Roberts in his blog Punkadiddle (which is separate from his site). "William Heaney" is the pseudonym of World Fantasy award-winning author Graham Joyce, who lives in Leicester, England. Joyce talks about Memoirs in an interview conducted in 2008 at the World Fantasy con in Calgary (Oct. 29–Nov. 2) and published in the April 2009 issue of Locus magazine. The title Memoirs of a Master Forger doesn't make sense until the second-last page of the book, as the narrator, one William Heaney (ahem), doesn't seem to be a master forger; another character does. (In 2009, Memoirs will be published in the U.S. under Joyce's own name.) 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.
• February 26: Added a rock to the bottom of Photo Gallery 3, 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, Agates with Inclusions, Arizona and Oregon are the best matches for my specimen. Cool, huh? Looks like a frozen meteor shower. I also added a recent photo (January 2009) of Spider and Jeanne Robinson to Spider's interview.
• February 23: Two days ago, I went to a launch and reading by R. Scott Bakker of his fantasy novel The Judging Eye, 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 The Darkness That Comes Before (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 (Warchild, Burndive, Cagebird). 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 Ad Astra at the end of March.
• February 12: Added (1) an Interview with SF writer Spider Robinson that I did in the fall of 2008, and (2) a recently-acquired specimen of Polka-Dot Agate, plus commentary, to the bottom of Photo Gallery 3. 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.)
• February 9, 2009: 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 Fantastic Toronto survey.
      One of the few books I was able to get through during the aforementioned six months (normally I read several books a week) was Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (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 About Me, and FAQs page), I urge you to get your hands on it. I can't remember when I last read such an illuminating—and painful—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.)
      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 more than once a year) 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.
      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 ethnic dances.
      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!)
      The Military Brats 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.)
      Oh, and by the way, get our people the hell out of Afghanistan!
• October 23, 2008: In the Fantastic Toronto survey, I've expanded the entries for Kelley Armstrong, Elizabeth Bear, John Charles Dent, Tanya Huff, Vincent Starrett and Andrew Weiner.
• July 13: By popular demand (okay, one person asked me), I've added four jasper and agate photos (plus commentary) to the Photo Gallery Main page, and 13 photos to Photo Gallery 3. To the right is one of the agates I added: Polka Dot, from Oregon. (Goofy image, huh?)
      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 Buffy and Angel 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—and they don't have to be authors—have to be enlisted to run the literary tracks at Ad Astra and Polaris before both writers and readers abandon these cons.
• July 12: 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 About Me, & FAQs 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 Fantastic Toronto photo, to (a) harmonize better with the new site header's font, and (b) add some depth to the image.
• July 3: In the Fantastic Toronto survey, 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! Cliché-Ridden Chick Lit!). In the survey pipeline is a lot of other stuff, including a hoot of a YA novel by Rob Payne entitled How to Be a Hero on Earth 5 (our Earth being Earth 4, y'see). I also expanded the Bob and Rob article.
      I finished Lavinia (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 Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, 2007), by Maryanne Wolf. Another Proust-inspired work (I really have to get around to reading the guy's actual books) is Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) by Jonah Lehrer, whose blog The Frontal Cortex I read every day. I'm also beavering away on some homework for Readercon 19, including Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeney's, 2008) and The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Praeger, 2004), edited by Martha Bartter. (I'm one of those weirdos who liked doing homework at school.)
• April 20: Attended EerieCon in Niagara Falls, NY, and had a wonderful time—perhaps the best I've ever 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.
      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 SF With Rocks In, and I do believe it was a hit. (A few of the rock specimens can be seen in the Photo Gallery on this site.) One audience member said I should collect even more 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...
• February 19: 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 André Alexis, Alison Baird, John Charles Dent ("who?"), Bernadette Gabay Dyer, Hugh Garner and Emily Schultz in the Fantastic Toronto survey.
• January 4, 2008: 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 2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec City by Samuel de Champlain. Félicitations! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
      Among the books I've been reading for fun is Nick Hornby's collection The Polysyllabic Spree (Believer Books, 2004), consisting of columns on books that he wrote for Believer 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, High Fidelity, 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 bright 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).
      Addendum a month later: I was much less charmed by Hornby's further collection of columns, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt (Believer Books, 2006): There were fewer laughs; I wished that just one, still-not-at-all-hefty, tome containing all the columns was available; and the author's whimsy (such as his ongoing schtick about the Believer editors) grew tedious.
• November 7, 2007: Added nine jaspers and agates to the Photo Gallery 3 page.
• October 29: Expanded Toronto survey entries for Elizabeth Bear (Toronto's gone again! 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 Skin Folk. I also added to the Photo Gallery in the "Pioneer Dreams" and "Sunset" series.
• October 24: Went to the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, downtown Toronto, to attend a "round-table discussion" by authors including Spider Robinson (whose novel Variable Star, written based on an outline by the late Robert A. Heinlein, was published in hardcover in 2006 by Tor). Talked to Jeanne (pronounced "Jee-nee") Robinson as well. Spider and Jeanne are such wonderful, warm, talented people. It did my heart good to meet them. (Keep an eye on Jeanne's blog for the progress of her Stardance movie.)
• September 12: 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 The Worm in Every Heart; added a paragraph re "recommended" and "not recommended" reading to the survey Intro; and expanded the Links and More Jaspers and Agates pages.
• June 19: Added a photo I took on a trip to the Toronto Islands on June 15 to the Recent Changes page; added two subsidiary pages to the Photo Gallery, one on sunsets and one on jaspers; added a photo to the Links page.
• June 13: (1) Finished reading Alison Lurie's mainstream novel Truth and Consequences (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.
  

  "'Well. It's in Ontario. Or was.'
  
  "'In Canada.'
  
  "'Uh-huh.'
  
  "'You're a Canadian.'
  
  "Henry sighed. 'The way you say that.'
  
  "'What?'
  
  "He laughed. 'Oh, it's not just you. Everyone down here says it that way. With a kind of bored, dying fall'" (p. 83).

  Turns out, Henry's from Toronto. And aside from the passage above, I found him boring. Huh. But hey, I supported the author by buying her novel in hardcover. 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.


(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 Birth of the Chess Queen, 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).

"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; it was a trade guild emblem). To quote Michael Quinion of World Wide Words:


"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."

According to Birth of the Chess Queen, 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 here.) The Cutlers' Company borrowed the original elephant shape for their guild emblem, to be borrowed in turn by pubs.
    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 Connections (the book made from the series was called The Day the Universe Changed), by James Burke. There was a sequel called Connections II.
• June 9: Attended the 2007 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, held at the Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College St., Toronto. SF author Peter Watts (Starfish, Maelstrom, Blindsight) 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. (Karina Sumner-Smith has already done it in her 2006 story "Safe Passage".) 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.)
• June 5: An article on Fantastic Toronto written by Amy Lavender Harris posted on Reading Toronto. (I'll bet you didn't know that I'm "Toronto's Mistress of the Fantastic"!)
• May 29: 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.


I've had some questions on the banner art for the Fantastic Toronto 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. (It was recently restored.) 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.

Upcoming appearances

• April 9–11: Ad Astra SF convention in Toronto.
• May 21–24: Ontario Folk Dance Cemp in Waterloo, Ontario. Teachers: Jaap Leegwater for Bulgarian dances and Fethi Karakeçili for Kurdish and Turkish.
• July 25–August 7: Stockton Folk Dance Camp in Stockton, California.