Category Archives: Writing

Expanse Of Poetry

We now have a new refrigerator. “New” in this case means “new to us”; it’s actually about eight to ten years old, possibly older. It’s huge! Being used to a five-foot high fridge with a single door that opens up to reveal a freezer unit inside, I was highly unprepared for the reality of a grown-up fridge. It has room to stand pop bottles and wine upright! And it has two freezer doors on the left – the upper one has six ice trays and boxes, the lower one has room for lots of ground beef and chicken and frozen juice. Best of all, though, is the fact that it has seperate temperature controls – I can turn the freezer temperature up high enough to keep ice cream solid while not freezing lettuce and celery in the crisper. Woo-hoo! We hosted our book club last night, and it even fit the drinks and food that guests brought over without having to take out things like salad dressings and jams (foods that don’t spoil during a single evening without refrigeration). It’s glorious!

So with this new expanse of fridge door, I’ve just spent half an hour moving around my magnetic poetry and discovering all sorts of potential hidden messages within the seemingly random mess. I adore magnetic poetry, but I think I miss the point most of the time: I see a couple of words and a whole line of poetry leaps to mind, so I search for the other words to make up the phrase and I don’t have them. I think other people use the words which are there to create unique sentences – sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with the English language. I have two poetry sets – the original set I got for my birthday last year, and an out-of-print Hallowe’en set that I found on eBay last fall. It glows in the dark. That’s a lot of words already, but I want one more – the Shakespearean set. Maybe the Cat set too, because it has words like “purr” and “whiskers”. Just think – I could have poems like “believe and summon arms / of sweet spring / call forsooth thy knavish gods / and purr o calico creature / in worship of raw steel”. Or something equally outlandish.

Interesting Fact

Interesting fact:

“It may be surprising to learn that the potato, a staple crop in many Celtic lands, does in fact come from a family of poisonous plants that includes henbane and deadly nightshade.” (pp.197, Celtic Folklore Cooking – Joanne Asala)

Well, you learn something new every day.

CURRENT READING:
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. Working in the cynical and asinine world of publishers and booksellers, I’m not quite sure how this got published. I think the editor must have come across the manuscript, started reading, scratched his head a bit, tried to figure out if this book was (a) a mystery, (b) a comedy, (c) a science fiction novel, (d) a historical, (e) literary criticism, (f) all of the above, or (g) none of the above. Then he probably read a while longer, and at last leapt to his feet and jumped around a bit, then drew up a contract to publish this debut novel of brilliance which defies classification. I recommend it to everyone, especially starving English M.A.s (like yours truly) who will get all the jokes and laugh a lot. It helps, although it isn’t necessary, to be familiar with Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, John Milton, the X-Files, the basics of temporal mechanics, and how a basic sense of humour functions. A knowledge of twentieth century history is actually a hindrance. If you like Connie Willis, you’ll enjoy Fforde too. (And if you don’t know if you like Connie Willis, go look up Passage, or The Doomsday Book, or any one of her numerous award-winning novellas and short stories. If you want the humourous taste of Fforde, though, check out Willis’ Bellwether or To Say Nothing of the Dog.)