Tag: writing

  • My brutish love of poetry, part 3

    Another gift of Canada is exposure to French Canadian poetry. If you know even a little bit of french, you can poke around at the edges. I am a fan of Anne Hébert and of her cousin Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. His life was brief and his family posted his works here. Somehow poems in…

  • Viva le vélo

    I wrote a novel for twelve year olds that features bicycles. The novel is set in China in 1902, when the bicycle was a fairly new technology. Many key features of the modern bicycle were present in the 1902 bicycle. So, why bicycles? When I was in Africa for six months in 1991-1992, Chinese bicycles…

  • Chekhov’s Rabbits

    The first time I fell in love with Anton Chekhov was when I read “The Darling” and other short stories. The second time was when I saw Wallace Shawn play Uncle Vanya in a movie. And the third time was when, on a whim, I read some biographical notes about him. When he was young,…

  • To 80s Hong Kong Pop With Love

    In the 80s, in June, when I was in graduate school, a friend called me up and asked if I wanted to make an impromptu trip from Berkeley, California to Vancouver, BC. He wanted to drive up and see his father, who was ill, and could use help driving. I had family in Vancouver too.…

  • Boost profits, analyze metrics

    Once upon a time in math, I studied metric spaces, spaces for which there exists a way to measure distances between points. At first glance the non-mathematician might say: yuck, this is the genesis and justification of corporate bean counting and turning people into numbers, stay the heck away from me. But this is not…

  • says René Magritte

    I despise the past, my own and everyone else’s. I despise resignation, patience, heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. This is a favorite quote from the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. As the author of a novel set in the past, it puts me on my toes. The quote is a little outré, and I…

  • Girl Mechanic Review: asianmommy.com

    Yay, another blog review of the The Girl Mechanic of Wanzhou, at asianmommy.com Much appreciated!

  • Girl Mechanic Review: dontmesswithmama.com

    Great new year’s news: a review of The Girl Mechanic Of Wanzhou on Tracey Black’s wonderful blog, dontmesswithmama.com Check it out!

  • ‘Ockey Night du Canada

    When I was a child, ice hockey was the bane of my TV watching. It pre-empted everything, for hours. And I didn’t care for it. I knew nothing about it, which made me the worst sort of philistine. There were small parts of Hockey Night In Canada that I enjoyed. The opening theme music–who couldn’t…

  • Make fifty pots

    I don’t recall the exact reference for this story, so I’ll have to go by memory. A ceramics teacher did the following experiment, with two beginning classes. To the first class he said, “all you have to do to get an A in this class is make fifty pots.” To the second, he said, “all…