365 grateful project (count=192)

image from ideasinfood.com

• Denise introduce me to preserved lemon peel in uni and I have been in love ever since; retrieved new batch from t&t
• Steven lent me his old kindle; Walter Isaacson is highly addictive
• great looking fire extinguisher; stay calm extinguish on?

The Remains of the Day

Every time I feel like I’m about to have an existential crisis, I pick up Ishiguro.

Mr. Ishiguro said in a telephone interview from his home outside London that he tended to focus on elderly characters out of his own concern about how members of his generation would account for themselves in the years to come.

”I’m still a relatively young writer,” said Mr. Ishiguro, who was born in 1954, ”and I tend to write out of a projected fear of what would happen. To combat complacency, I suppose I’m always trying to remind myself in my writing that while we may be very pleased with ourselves, we may look back with a different perspective, and see we may have acted out of cowardice and failure of vision.

”What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret,” Mr. Ishiguro said. ”I’m interested in how they come to terms with it. On the one hand there is a need for honesty, on the other hand a need to deceive themselves – to preserve a sense of dignity, some sort of self-respect. What I want to suggest is that some sort of dignity and self-respect does come from that sort of honesty.”

When I put down the book, I remember what matters most.

INTERVIEWER: In that book, and in so many of your novels, the main character seems tragically to miss his or her chance at love by seconds.

ISHIGURO: I don’t know if they miss it by seconds. In a way they’ve missed it by miles. They might look back and think, There was this moment when it could have all been different. It’s tempting for them to think, Oh, it was just a little twist of fate. But in fact, there are colossal things that make them miss not just love but something essential in life.

365 grateful project (count=100)

• Carl brought a bottle of Yellow Tail Bubbles to brunch; semillion + traminer + viognier + trebbiano = partying in a citrus grove
• Sharon made angel food cake; unusually delicious density
• Wei brought daffodils

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

the more i change

eight years ago i wrote

Coffee is a tier of my food pyramid, the tier beneath grains. Coffee is what life should be, a complete sensual experience: from the first whiff, the sound of pouring, the light reflected in the dark pool, the warmth, till the last sip. Good coffee has body as complex as feelings, bitter-sweet-velvety. Good coffee revives memories of coffee shops and characters in them. I had a taste when I was six years old and couldn’t let go ever since. Coffee is my first love.

If I had the habit of chewing paper, as opposed to chewing finger nails, books would also be a tier of my food pyramid. I appreciate all kinds but a certain lyricism blows me away. Whisper realismo magico. Souse in Love in the Time of Cholera. I sigh at pretty words the way some girls sigh at pretty boys. I sigh at pretty boys too, if they are purely fictional. Real people weigh too heavily by nature of existence. Books are my best friends.

Although I enjoy sipping Gin & Vodka while moving to Rhythm & Blues, I am most definitely not a party girl. A typical free night involves long walks and movies. Before Paul Thomas Anderson, before Magnolia, there was a time when I truly really believed that I am the only person who feels disconnected. I watched Forces of Nature and realized that everything happens for a reason, if only you allow yourself to perceive it. I watched Sliding Doors and hoped that the events of my life will echo, that somewhere it turned out perfect.

memories of the future

Side trip to Moscow

p68: A city knows nothing of separations–that never dispersing crowd, music without pauses–the people in it are too close together to be close to one another. The narrow streets along which you and I are now wandering, Sonata, are forever knocking into each other for want of space, physical or otherwise // The person who doesn’t want this soup rattles his spoon and pushes the plate away; but people with no appetite for each other tend to rattle on and on, unable to push away what is unnecessary

p67: I recognized the restrained sorrow of the first movement, Les Adieux // but then Stuart Mill was right: to understand is to transgress // unable to take my leave of the sonata of leave-takings // so I invited the sonata, as it alighted from the keys, to walk with me along the muddy cobles in the lanes across the river. In exchange for the emotion the music had given me, I offered to help it finish what it had begun. Happiness, I argued, doesn’t like to oblige people because people don’t give it (happiness) any holidays. If people knew how to live like the sonata, in three movements, interspersing meetings with partings, allowing happiness to go off for short spells, for a few bars at least, they mightn’t be so unhappy

side trip to irreality

p100: Pascal was the first to separate the world of reality from the world of dreams. ‘Reality,’ he asserted, ‘is constant, whereas dreams are flimsy and variable; if a man always dreamed the same dream, and if he woke up every day among new people and new surroundings, then reality would seem to him a dream, while his dream would have all the qualities of reality.’ // reality since Pascal’s time has lost much of its constancy and invariability // nearly every day the morning papers give waking up a new reality, whereas dreams … haven’t we managed to unify dreams?

side trip to resignation

p109: Resignation to one’s fate takes practice. Like any art. Or so citizen Shushashin maintains. He begins every day–after putting on his shoes and washing his face, before throwing on his jacket–with an exercise. Again, the expression is his. This exercise works like this: he walks over to the wall, puts his back up against it and stands there in an attitude of utter resignation. For a minute or two. And that’s all. The exercise is over. He can begin to live.

pico iyer on ondaatje

Quotes from picoiyerjourneys.com

as if to say that the losses and divisions of the present can begin to be healed by looking at a completely different story in the past

The best way to see what Ondaatje is attempting in every novel he writes is to look at the occupations he highlights. // In Divisadero, the two main characters are a historical researcher and a gambler. And this is no stray detail, I think, because the book takes a great gamble itself by attempting to do things with narrative that have seldom been done before (leaving two major stories up in the air, in the hope that they can be imaginatively tied together by a third).

Claire links the main characters to a “three-paneled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others”; the word “adjacent” comes up at least three times, as if to suggest how, in bringing two of the characters together, we are implicitly evoking a third.

we are reminded that Ondaatje has always put his faith, more than anything, in the imagination, and the way we have to step away from the world to make it whole again.

365 grateful project (count=91)

• Brunch inspired by petitekitchenesse. Yes, romantic morning of self.
• Preceded by ravine walk with Tanya.
• Followed by hotpot with Haina, Steven and Albert. Sesame tofu ice cream versus Häagen-Dazs.
• The Double. Exactly how I imagined Dostoevsky’s funny. First time at the studio, which is more intimate than the main stage. Love love Factory Theatre.
• Preceded by Sense Appeal Americano to go. Last timehe got Americano and I got Cappuccino.
• oxford comma

How to imagine St Petersburg in Toronto

Image from other-st-petersburg.ru

Steven and Haina decided to visit St Petersburg this year.

I decided to find the best guide to St Petersburg.

“Why this site is so disorienting // Most websites and city guides try to make things easy for their users. This one does not. // In fact, it deliberately sets out to lead its visitors astray, to tempt them down unknown paths, to plunge them into the thick of the St Petersburg fog. In short, to get them well and truly lost.”

It is not hard to name a film that leaves too little to the imagination. Can the same be said of traveling? Maybe the only thing better than visiting St Petersburg is not visiting St Petersburg.

How to imagine St Petersburg in Toronto
+The Double (play & film)
+Russian Revolution Reenactment
+25 dollar tickets to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905“
+Does throwing a shot of vodka into an Americano make it a Russo?

divisadero

One reason I read Ondaatje is that I’m never sure I get it. Because I keep rereading what I have read, I’m only half way through Divisadero. But maybe I already understand. Because it’s a villanelle?

When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist. And I will say Paris, the week Colette died // She was a writer who remarked that her only virtue was self-doubt. // They are the sudden possibility every time I pick up the telephone when it rings some late hour after midnight, and I wait for his voice, or the deep breath before Claire will announce herself.

9: Those who risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras.

139: I once read an essay by a writer who was asked to imagine an ideal career, and he replied that he would like to be responsible for just a brief stretch, perhaps two hundred yards or so, of a river.

136: It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. // We live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. Probably the most famous villanelle. And my favorite.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.