Tag Archives: doris lessing

no ‘rithmetic

I’ve hit a bump in my reading. I’m trying to start the second Canopus book by Doris Lessing, but am completely not being sucked in yet. I have a bunch of books I’d kind of like to reread but can’t decide which one to follow. I’ve got a Rudy Rucker book on my phone I’m sort of getting into, but scifi makes me feel inadequate recently, because I can’t come up with those kinds of ideas. Those really interesting ones that don’t seem to have been done before. Maybe I’m more literature than sf in my writing than I’d have myself believe.

Also, you may not have noticed but I’m trying to put more content up here than I was doing in the last couple of months. Over in the right hand sidebar you can see how many posts I’ve done in any given month of this blog and I’d like to get that number consistently up in the couple of dozen range again.

Another thing I’m going to start paying attention to is this site Broowaha. It’s billing itself as a citizen journalism newspaper, and might end up a good place for me to do some writing of a less bloggish more journalistic sort. David Cohn (one of the Assignment Zero editors) is the editor there and he says they’re going to be trying some interesting experiments. I liked being part of AZ so I hope this’ll be interesting as well.

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acceptance speech

From Doris Lessing, this year’s Nobel Prize recipient I didn’t go “Come on guys” about: A hunger for books

This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls – Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. “I shall be a writer too,” they say, “because I’ve the same kind of house you were in.”

But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

Read the whole thing; it’s very good. I like how blase she was about getting the award. She didn’t go to the ceremony and had said she sort of expected the award. “They give it to people before they die, so I guess they figured they should get it done soon.” She’s in her upper 80s.

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… and thorough

Today wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It turns out Canadian homes are pretty well insulated. The electricians came this morning and the heat was out for most of the day while they installed … a new electrical box? Is that all they were doing? I guess there are some more outlets around the house too. Some of them may even be grounded.

Without the heat going all day in the -20ish weather (maybe -17C) I was sure I’d be chattering my teeth down to whatever you call the stuff under your enamel. It’s an old house, and drafty. So when the heat first went out I left to buy groceries, a somewhat foolish decision as I bought things that needed to be frozen and thence opened up the powerless freezer to dump the things in, allowing all the cold out. When I could have left the ice cream out on the porch instead. Smart boy this one.

At that point some of the house’s lights worked but the internet didn’t so I got some reading in. I wore an extra sweater but it was okay. Then all the power went out and I left to go buy socks. A cold day really drives home the fact that you own only three pairs that enclose your entire foot.

On my way back I had to stop for some filming for a sitcom that was happening on Ellice. The show’s going to be called “Make It Happen” and it’s about a family of driving instructors. The guy who stopped me from getting in the shot was telling me about it. Of course he compared it to Corner Gas.

And then I got home and the heat had been turned on and I parked in front of a vent and absorbed its emissions for an hour. Almost finished Shikasta, the Doris Lessing book I started reading after she won the Nobel Prize.

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