About my baby and other people's blogs

The silence. It's as if I have nothing to say.

All I have to say is that my baby has the most kissable cheeks ever.

Plenty of other people have stuff to say, though.

The guys at SFSignal are working on compiling a list of 10 essential sci-fi reads to lay the foundation for newbies to the genre. I'm taking notes.

Central European & Slavic Literature in Translation (a new blog right up my alley) led me to a piece in the Michigan Quarterly Review, "The Strange Afterlife of Bruno Schulz."

Forgotten rooms full of fecund weedy rot, culs-de-sac choked with rampant weeds and trash, "astral dough," unmade beds that are a kind of dough, bedclothes in which a character swells like dough or that suck him in as if he had fallen in dough — images like these, of a clandestine yet boundless (and finally uncontrollable and menacing) fertility, are everywhere in Schulz. Unseen space mushrooms, empty drawers pulled open one last time now have objects in them. It's in these freak limbs of time and space, in these forgotten but never finally vacant drawers, where Bruno Schulz operates, where his sly fantasy and profuse idiosyncrasy are at home. A small and hunched, guarded, depressive (he had reason to be depressed), solitary man, obedient to his small-town family duties and to the exigencies of making a living, eventually bearing the whole load of support of his sickly family, anxiously polite and much given to apologies in the letters through which he carried on his brief career, he nevertheless had to find space and time for the force and strange fertility of his imagination, and this he did, being the least confrontational of men, by interpolating liberties of space and time into unused, unseen angles of the conventional order of things. He filled invisible rifts in space and time with a richness — cheap and doughy, perhaps, frankly false, if you insist, but still, a richness — at once novel and somehow native to the real world that so lately had looked complete without it.

I'm torn between "wow!" and "huh?" Maybe I should read some Schulz.

Helena and I are having a lovely rainy day. She invites me for "tea" using the plastic dishes on the floor of her room. (Where did she learn to keep her pinky up?) We reconstruct the hanging gardens of Babylon in Lego. We brush our teeth. We read the book about the kitten. We nap.

I'm still feeling a little sorry for myself. I'm wrapping my head around coming to terms with reconciling myself to working a mere 30 billable hours a week. I'm building the steam to yell at J-F, for a bunch of reasons relating to pitching in around the house, but, to tell the truth, mostly cuz I feel like it. I'm trying to remember what exactly it is I hope to get out of life and searching for a source of strength to strive for it.

Helena's sleep-breath is a boundless stream of wisdom and peace.