An ode to editors

In temples in Asia, a figure called Wisdom guards the entrance. She — this figure is invariably female, like most editors today — holds in one hand a book, and in the other, a knife. The knife is for cutting off words.

Monkeys! Monkeys everywhere!

I really like this 12 Monkeys idea. But then, I love monkeys.

July monkey: Describe your first impression of Montreal.

Bridges. Lots of bridges. There was a bigness and bustle, a smirk and a twinkle, that made me fall in love with this city. Just like that. At first sight.

That image of bridges is indelible, though I've never been able to recapture that precise view, find the same frame, when our bus came rolling into town.

I first visited Montreal the summer I was 15.

(Years earlier we drove through on a class trip to Québec City and toured Olympic Stadium, but I don't remember much about it, except for the cyclists going round and round and round and round. I don't think that counts.)

I was staying with my big sister in Ottawa for a month or so, and she planned this little excursion for us. (I love my sister.) So we took the bus to Montreal for a few days, stayed with her brother-in-law in a very cool downtown apartment, took in the Picasso exhibit, and hung out. Croissants and café au lait for everyone!

It represented all that was romantic and cultured, French and exotic, free and far from home (but closer than Paris).

And, oh ya... We went to Foufounes and I had beer. (Maybe it allowed a tad of teeenage rebellion to play itself out too.)

I vowed to live there someday.

Life didn't quite work out as planned. My application to McGill was accepted, but my mom thought Montreal was too far away for a 17-year-old to be moving to, and in a flash it dawned on me that maybe I wasn't cut out to be a civil engineer (bridges!). Maybe I should be exploring metaphorical bridges instead. So I moved to Ottawa, a safe little town where I had family.

As it happened, many years later I fell in love with a man who heralded from Montreal. So we moved to Montreal and had a baby.

Voilà. (The bridges are now hyperlinks.)

Live and breathe the poetry

It's good for you, according to an article in the American Journal of Physiology — Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

The study investigated "the synchronization between low-frequency breathing patterns and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) of heart rate during guided recitation of poetry, i.e., recitation of hexameter verse from ancient Greek literature performed in a therapeutic setting," concluding, "recitation of hexameter verse exerts a strong influence on RSA by a prominent low-frequency component in the breathing pattern, generating a strong cardiorespiratory synchronization." (Via Ed.)

See, I'm not crazy — there's something to it when I talk about how a book "breathes." Science says so.

That's so sarcoplasmic, man

Word of the day:

sarcoplasm (sar·co·plasm) (sahr'ko-plaz"[schwa]m) [sarco- + -plasm] the interfibrillary matter of the striated muscles; the substance in which the fibrillae of the muscle fiber are embedded.

I just love the sound of it. Sarcoplasm.

Food! and it's magic!

Salon presents an article adapted from Philip Pullman's introduction to a recent reissue of Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding.

Lindsay argued that children liked to read about food rather than fairies, and The Magic Pudding was born.

Philip Pullman's been laughing for 50 years already. He's enthralled by every rhyme and drawing.

There's an exuberance, a gusto all through the book that's irresistible. You can feel Lindsay carried away on the wings of his own energy.

If I live to be a hundred, it will still be my favorite children's book. To quote Bill [the sailor], finally: "There's nothing this Puddin' enjoys more than offering slices of himself to strangers." And if you're a hearty eater, sit yourself down with Bunyip and Bill and Sam, and help yourself to a slice. "Hearty eaters," as Sam says, "are always welcome."

I'll take Pullman's word for it. Sounds like a fine addition to Helena's library.

Neuromarketing ethics

John Shirley asks that all-important ethical question: "Why is it okay to rip off stupid people?"

He also offers a very entertaining and paranoid resumé and critique of neuromarketing.

They'll use the principles they learned in the lab to manipulate you when you don't know you're being manipulated and on a level of exactitude never before experienced. They're learning how to push your buttons with mind-control efficiency. What happens when these methods are applied to campaign advertising, and speeches? They're learning how to hypnotize you better, my friends, and maybe it's time to snap out of your trance and realize that. They're tinkering in your fucking brain.

Oh it sounds like paranoid ranting now, but eventually these pricks are going to figure out how to beam this shit right in front of your mind's eye. You'll have to PAY EXTRA not to get movie trailers and political ads beamed into your skull, someday. "I can't afford a neuro insulator and man, the headaches..."

Reminds me of Minority Report, the movie, when Tom Cruise is just walking around and having products pitched directly to him.

John Underkoffler, a futurist who worked on the film as a science and technology advisor, actually singles this out as something to be feared.

I think the clearest warning comes in relation to the kind of Orwellian or Huxley-esque scenario, where your eyes are constantly being scanned, your identity is being assessed at every moment and your location known at all times. In the movie, of course, that's motivated by principally market concerns, commercial concerns. The idea is that if we can identify you at this place and time, then we can advertise very specific to you. "It's time for a Guinness, John Anderton."

That idea was integral from the very beginning in Steven and Alex's conception. The idea that your privacy was really a thing of the past, that the pure market forces had long since eroded everyone's intimate civil liberties to the point where only the wealthy could afford to not be bothered all the time. That was one of the benefits of extreme wealth, that you could afford to silence some states where stuff wouldn't be yammering at you constantly trying to sell you watches and beer.

Saramago's appreciation for kiddy lit

It's OK if I read childrens' books. Maybe it even makes me a better person.

José Saramago thinks it's a good idea:

Portuguese author José Saramago, a Nobel literature laureate, said he believed the world would be a better place if adults were forced to read children's books.

"They are moral fables that teach values which we consider indispensable like solidarity, respect for others and goodness."

Lucid thoughts indeed. (Essays on Lucidity was recently released but is not yet available in English.)

Antsy

Tomorrow's the day my life will change.

Tomorrow I re-enter the workforce, so to speak. I renew my effort to freelance full-time.

Tomorrow, Helena enters "daycare," as I've chosen to think about it. Though she is on waiting lists for many of the centres in the area, no one has called yet to offer her a space. But my mother-in-law is available.

So three days a week, I'll be glued to my desk, long workdays. I'll squeeze in a few more hours here and there, as I have over the last few months, during the other four days. We even pay a token fee for the child care. That's the plan anyway.

It'll take a couple weeks to work out the bugs in this arrangement — the logistics, the timing and the driving, on top of regaining the discipline of working from home in a serious kind of way and catching up to the schedule for the books I've already agreed to edit, while grappling with the sheer emotional and gut-wrenching experience of being separated from my daughter. How hard can it be?

This isn't a sudden decision — we've been giving this some thought for months. But already there are wrenches thrown into our plans. For example, the proposition that Helena stay the night. Somehow, it feels wrong, dreadfully wrong, that on top of devoting hours of my energies to paying work instead of to doting on my little one she should make her bed elsewhere. Like I'm deserting her.

Sigh. We'll figure it out. It's not like I'm the first mother ever to go back to work.

Helena's been doing weird and remarkable things. Like crafting "hats" for the plastic ducks at the wading pool out of various toy flotsam. "Apo!" (Chapeau.) Like having tea with her teddybears. Like growling back at the neighbour's dog (through the apartment door). Like filling her watering can with tiny Fisher Price people (the primitive kind I played with 30 years ago) — it's raining men.

And the dancing!

She must have about a hundred words that I can make out, though there's an awful lot of gibberish she seems really confident about. The only "sentences" she's uttered are "Papa gone," and "Papa come," though she doesn't always use them appropriately (as far as I can tell).

Mostly I'm going to miss Helena's bug watch. We have ants. Not too many, but enough to make me think, "Eeeww." The first time I squashed and disposed of one I even made sure Helena was otherwise occupied — I didn't think it wise to be drawing her attention to something which may intrigue her to the point she do something with them other than squash and dispose of them. She must've seen something. Now she points her little finger, tracking them, and very clearly articulates, "Bug."

The baby instruction manual

My baby did in fact come with a manual. From Tiny Tot to Toddler: A Practical Guide to Baby Care, published by the Institut national de santé publique de Québec (and translated into English poorly, but never mind), was handed to me before I left the hospital with Helena.

It didn't tell me much I couldn't figure out on my own, but it has actually provided me with a lot of reassurance over the last 20 months and continues to do so.

Similar instructions manuals are becoming popular in the United Kingdom — how to play with your children.

Parents will be issued with instruction manuals showing them how to teach traditional playground games such as hopscotch, skipping and hide-and-seek to their children in a new move to tackle soaring levels of obesity among young people.

"It's not rocket science, and a lot of it is things previous generations would have done without thinking. But while I don't want to sound demeaning to present-day parents, a lot of parents today haven't been taught particular games or nursery rhymes and so don't know how to pass those on to their children or do them with them," said David Maiden, the PE and youth sport manager with Fife Council.

The Play At Home manuals remind parents how to do everything from ring-a-ring-o'-roses to peek-a-boo to the hokey cokey.

I kind of wish I had one of those. Some days I think I haven't got a clue what to do with my baby. My book doesn't get into the specifics, but it does remind us that:

Interaction between a baby and his parents naturally promotes development. The best toys in the world cannot replace activities with mom and dad. Set aside time to play with your child.

This interaction will change as the child grows older. Do not tickle your baby to make him laugh without giving him time to catch his breath. Avoid shaking him too much.

Thanks for the tip.

The confusion of tongues and the language of God

An article in the current issue of Nature describes studies and experiments that yield conclusions with vast implications for our understanding of language acquisition.

Without linguistic support, an innate capability to make this distinction seems to vanish. So language learning seems to link linguistic forms to pre-existing representations of sound and meaning.

Jessica Lee Jernigan (discovered via Cup of Chicha) articulately summarizes the article (and makes a reference to Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language — a book and idea I'm obsessed with).

This conclusion has interesting — possibly vital — implications for competing theories about language acquisition. According to one theory, language grows as a child grows, and we develop abstract thoughts only when we have attained the means to express them. Other linguists claim that the learning of language doesn't build cognitive abilities so much as it winnows them. In one model, language plants seeds that blossom into abstract thinking; in the other, language prunes away at the wild brush of the infant mind until well-tended shapes emerge, shapes that have meaning within that language. Obviously, this study supports the latter way of thinking.

She notes, "In every creation myth, chaos precedes order."

Once upon a time, people believed in a perfect language — the language Adam and Eve spoke, the language before the Babel Tower fell, the language in which the thing corresponded perfectly to its sign. Once upon a time, people believed that a child raised without hearing the debased, fragmented tongue of his own time and place would speak that language. The search for that primal mind has produced legendarily tragic results. But what if it belongs to us all, what if each of us retains the latent, neglected potentiality to comprehend fullness? What if we all have ears big enough to hear the language of God?

She's right. It's already in us. We just don't listen.

Plea for a literati nation

Michael Dirda in Sunday's Washington Post presents yet another take on the NEA survey of reading in America.

The question, of course, is what are those one in six people reading. And a number of people have addressed that over the last week or so.

By "literary" reading, the NEA report means "novels, short stories, plays, or poetry." But novels is a category that embraces mysteries, chick lit, adventure novels, Westerns, fantasy and science fiction, spy thrillers, possibly even children's picture books (this isn't clear).

He does have some lovely things to say about the realtionship between reader and text:

Those who really care about literature nearly always sit down with a pencil in their hands, to underline, mark favorite passages, argue in the margins. The relationship between a book and reader may occasionally be likened to a love affair, but it's just as often a wrestling match.

He notes how passive readers have become.

Poetry is suffering most of all. Poets keep their language charged, they make severe demands on our attention, they cut us no slack. While most prose works the room like a smiling politician at a fundraiser, poetry stands quietly in the dusty street, as cool and self-contained as a lone gunfighter with his serape flapping in the wind. It's not glad-handing anybody.

Instead of reading Toqueville or Henry Adams, we just check out the latest blogs. In short, we turn toward the bright and shiny, the meretricious tinsel, the strings of eye-catching beads for which we exchange our intellectual birthright as for a mess of pottage. For modern Americans, only the unexamined life is worth living.

Stop blogging. Go read a book.

Make mine a double

In Sunday's Guardian, Adam Mars-Jones reviews José Saramago's latest novel to be available in English translation. (The Double is available in the UK next week, but customers on this side of the Atlantic will have to wait till October.)

How long before mock-pompous becomes plain pompous? About 500 words. Joyce was wise, in Ulysses, to restrict his boring narrator to a single section. Every now and then, a novel achieves greatness despite being narrated by someone obtuse and self-regarding (Doctor Faustus, Pale Fire). Many thousands more have been dragged straight to the bottom by the dead weight of a pompous narrator.

Umm, you know he's a Nobel laureate, right?

Mars-Jones admits:

You don't get to be a Nobel laureate simply by strewing obstacles in the path of your readers. Saramago has a distinctive imagination, characterised not by leaps or flights but by a sublime grinding, as anyone who has read his implacable fable, Blindness, can confirm. From a single premise, he can generate prodigies of grounded fantasy.

The thing is, Mars-Jones's main criticism is valid: the punctuation is weird and troublesome. I would be outraged (and my inner copyeditor is, at every turn of every phrase), were it not for that I happen, coincidentally, to breathe in precisely the same rhythm as Saramago writes.

Writers tend not to like being edited, particularly copyedited. Many toil over comma placement and argue vehemently for the naturalness and necessity of their pauses, eschewing all conventions of punctuation and even grammar (fortunately few break with those of spelling). Bah! We have rules for a reason. It puts everyone on the same page. It's what guides us, all individuals with highly varying speech patterns and emphases, in parsing another's written words.

Saramago is an exception. I will allow him his breach only because I like him so much, only because his punctuation happens to make it easy for me, though probably very few others.

(When does prose become poetry?)

As for the Mars-Jones's contention that Saramago sometimes says too much...

There are elusive truths which must be approached round three corners, but there is also such a thing as going all round the houses for no good reason.

...and sometimes too little...

One of the consequences of the soporific manner of the book is that it sometimes sneaks something past the reader which isn't as self-evident as it is made out to be ('Generally speaking, one does not notice what a bearded man is carrying...'), but if that is a literary effect, it's a perverse one.

...it is a matter of personal opinion. What is obvious to some is elusive to others. Again, I can relate to Saramago on his choices. (Interestingly, my own writing style and, it seems, thought processes, are remarkably similar to Saramago's. My essays in university were often marked down on similar grounds.)

It's an editor's job to recognize ideas and their value, which need fewer words and which need explication. It so happens that Saramago, Saramago's editor, and myself are in agreement.

The review disappoints me because all these points could be levelled against any one of Saramago's works. He reports just enough of The Double's plot to whet my appetite.

The depressing state of kids' books

In a New York Times article last weekend (quick, let me talk about this a minute before the links are archived and inaccessible), Barbara Feinberg takes a look at the summer reading lists distributed to kids these days — the books kids are subsequently tested on.

(I don't remember ever having been given a reading list, let alone being tested on what I did on my summer vacation.)

They depict children who must "come to terms," "cope with" and "work through" harsh realities.

Their suffering is generally caused by adults: a parent has died, or run off, or otherwise acted irresponsibly, drunkenly, selfishly, dissolutely. The children are left trying to put together the pieces. No magic swoops in to aid a resolution; no fantasy cushions the pain. As a group, these books are well written; they have some complex characters and subplots, and are rich in cultural description. But the angst and crash landings of the books is what sticks with you. A 10-year-old attending the creative arts program I run told me, "Those books give me a headache in my stomach."

Why, why, why do we do this to our children? Where do these books come from?

The rationale for exposing 10-year-olds to such potentially upsetting books is that children who read about situations different from their own gain a larger frame of reference for understanding human behavior and cultural diversity. Some educators believe that life is harder than it used to be; books shouldn't shield children from this. The argument is, as the head of the English department in a school here in Westchester County told parents, that anxiety is useful to children.

Bullshit.

At least Feinberg takes the approach that of this genre, the books best received by their audience are the ones where child characters are afforded some measure of protection by the adults in their world. "But what remains most loved, and most useful in helping children "face adversity," is the realm of fantasy."

This is why Harry Potter is such a success. Poor orphan boy escapes miserable life, comes to terms with his past, confronts his "demons" — it's real but it's not real. All the difficult, award-winning novels have been judged by adults, not children, as teaching valuable life lessons. Like the kid cares...

But should helping children face adversity be the main goal of children's literature? Why does facing adversity have to be understood as work, in adult terms? Don't children have their own ways of processing experience distinct from adults'?

We seem to have lost sight of what children can actually process, and more important, of their own innate capacities. Instead of our children being free to roam and dream and invent on their own timetable, and to read about children doing such things, we increasingly ask our children to be sober and hard-working at every turn, to take detailed notes on their required texts with Talmudic attention, to endure computer-generated tests. And the texts we require them to pore over have become all too often about guarded, world-weary, overburdened children, who are spending their childhoods trying to cope with the mess their parents left them.

(There. Have I quoted the entire article yet.)

This trend, this genre of — what do you call them? — young adult life's-a-bitch-and-full-of-misery-so-have-a-cry-and-deal-with-it books (Cup of Chicha offers a collection of titles and summaries that serve as examples) started in the 60s. I don't believe we as a society actually examined the life of our young ones and determined growing up was more difficult than ever before. This was a me generation of parents: life got hard for the whiny and spoiled whose expectations weren't met. They embraced the cult of therapy and self-help books. Naturally this spilled over onto their children, the books their children got to read, the books they wrote for their children. What makes you think your kid wants to read about how you got over your problems, you selfish, whiny, overanalyzed and misguided soul? Grow up.

Why, why, why do we insist our children grow up so fast? (Cuz we never did?)

Why do we not give kids any credit? You don't learn coping skills from a book. Set an example for them and they'll figure it out. They're smarter than you think they are, and they have a pretty good handle on what's good for them.

On a lighter note, there's plenty of kids' books that make fine reading for everyone.

What is so important about the crossover novel . . . is not what it says about adults, but what it says to children — that the stories which matter to them matter to us as well. If I think back to my high school reading assignments, novels like The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment, and The Grapes of Wrath come to mind — all books that examine adult issues and situations. How can we tell children that adult stories are worthy of their time and attention, but their stories are not worthy of ours?

More on Miéville

It seems I'm not alone in thinking Adam Lipkin's review of Iron Council was unnecessarily negative.

The Mumpsimus initiated a discussion of this and other reviews of Miéville, touching on how his writing might be improved as well as the strength of his media appeal. He is compared to Wolfe, his writing being unwieldy and needing an editor.

I'm reassured that others don't always feel plot is paramount

See Dark Establishment Blog for another opinion and s1ngularity.net in anticipation of another review.

Turn me on

While watching crap TV the other night, I saw a commercial for the Maytag Neptune Drying Center. And I can't get it out of my mind. It's so sexy. Not so much to look at it, but just think of what it does!

Why did no one think of this before? And why did they call it Neptune?

Hearing about the debate as to whether to open Hemingway's Idaho house to the public is enough to make my head explode. How morbid. Unless they make it a writing center.

Great. Just great. Now I've got that song in my head — it's going to be there all day. Remember that song?

Just like Hemingway,
he did it anyway.
You can be a hero all you have to know is what to say...
And if I want to die
just like Hemingway,
I'll put a pistol in my mouth and blow my head away.

Ah, the 80s.

I was reminded yesterday how much I love J-F. Home from work, he recounts his day and the unpleasant conversation he was having with a lawyer advising him on one of his cases while on some other level his mind was grappling with Fermi's paradox, and in an instant grokking it and feeling elation and dismay at once.

(The paradox can be summed up as follows: The commonly held belief that the universe has many technologically advanced civilizations combined with our observations that suggest otherwise, is paradoxical, suggesting that either our understanding or our observations are flawed or incomplete.)

So we had pizza and beer and discussed fascinating things all evening. (I won't bore you with details. What's that? Too late you say?) But I will note them here to remind me to keep thinking about them, in hopes that someday I may reach an epiphany:

How can one like science fiction and not care about the science of it?
Can someone read books and watch movies about ETs and absolutely not believe in (hope for) the possibility (however faint) of their existence?
Exactly how incompatible are science, or science fiction for that matter, and God?
Are science fiction readers churchgoers? Do they see the need to reconcile these worldviews?

Why in English do we not use the term "anticipation novel"? It's so evocative.

Here are a couple essays on French science fiction:
French Science Fiction: The Occluded Genre
The Fantastic Science Fiction of Maurice Renard

This morning Salon has an interview with Alan Moore in which he discusses pretty much everything, and more. I have only a passing familiarity with his work. I'm not convinced his status is deserved.

People's heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview. And I like to think that if my work is complex, it's because we live in a complex world. What I'm trying to do is give a bit of coherence to that complexity, to say that it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects.

Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I've found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they've referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.

I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from.

What I learned today

The main active metabolite of oxcarbazepine is a 10-monohydroxy derivative, 10,11-dihydro-10-hydroxy-5H-dibenzo (b,f) azepine-5-carboxamide.

Sometimes, work can suck. And I miss my baby.

Hawking apologizes to SF fans

From Space.com:

How can black holes destroy all traces of consumed matter and energy, as Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?

Hawking's answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came.

Previously, Hawking, 62, had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels through the black hole to a new parallel universe — the very stuff of most visionary science fiction.

"There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe," Hawking said in a copy of his speech distributed just before he appeared at the conference.

"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said. "If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."

He added, "It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for nearly 30 years, even though the answer is less exciting than the alternative I suggested."

Much less exciting. Now all that's left for SF to do is tell the mangled tales of returned space travellers' unrecognizable forms.

Sisyphean ducks

Helena had egg the other day, and she didn't throw up.

The girl certainly seems to know what she likes and to have a handle on what's good for her.

Last winter, after our offers of egg were hesitantly accepted and them regurgitated, we even had Helena tested for an allergy. Nothing. The doctor's best guess was that Helena had some trouble digesting egg. (Thanks for the professional medical opinion.) Or she didn't like it much. (I guess she'd have to really not like it, to think about it for an hour or two and then decide to vomit it all out of there.)

She's never had a problem with egg as an ingredient in other things — egg bread, for example.

Anyway, she's expressed interest in eating egg, with a decided preference for whites, and intends to digest it thoroughly.

She's a good egg, that girl.

Currently, for the second time in a week, she's staying with J-F's mom, so I can get some, ahem, work done.

Frankly, editing this 98-chapter text on neurological disorders in children is giving me a headache. It reinforces my suspicion that as a child I was severely neurologically disordered, and I continue to be so. The descriptions of migraine onset triggers are acting as triggers in themselves.

But I'd better just buckle down and do it. It's not like I have a real job to go to. Remember my interviews of the other week? Sigh. This makes three times now I've been declared overqualified for jobs in Montreal. What does that mean? When people say "overqualified," I always think "bullshit."

What this means is that people with more professional authority than I think I deserve more money, I deserve to work in a stimulating environment, I deserve far better things. So they say. Well, I don't care what I deserve anymore. I just want a regular paycheck, with regular work hours, so we can buy ourselves a regular condo and go on regular vacations to New York City and Paris, like regular people. I can't wait to show Helena Paris. So many carousels!

I also think Montreal is a little underqualifed for my standards of work. Just get over the bilingualism thing already. English copy deserves the attention of a specialist in English. Ditto French. A bilingual copy editor is generally not a good copy editor. Good enough, you seem to think. Ah, Montreal, you have so much to learn.

So here I sit, editing away on various freelance contracts. And the guilt is unbearable. I'm at home after all — you'd think I could attend to my toddler's needs while I whip out chapter after chapter. It's a tough sell, convincing "others" (all those strangers who pass me in the street and dare to judge me), but most especially convincing myself, that freelance work at home is still real work, like watching a toddler is a different kind of real work, and you just can't do both at the same time. And I can't live on 4 hours of sleep a night.

Yesterday we went to the playground for a couple hours in the morning. Took a jaunt over to Mont Royal to buy whatever vegetable we'd run out of and really needed. Dropped off some film, picked up some Swiffer cloths. Home for lunch, then off to the wading pool for an hour or so. Two loads of laundry, and only two chapters edited. I'm a little tired.

The wading pool is a lot of fun, though I'm still adjusting to the behaviour of children. What odd creatures. (They walk right up to me and try to take the watering can out of my hand. Imagine doing that as an adult...)

Helena decided to move a couple dozen of the communal plastic yellow ducks from the corner of the pool to a highly superior patch of water along one side. Very methodical, focused, two or three at a time. One little girl came to liberate a duck and Helena had the gall to give her some attitude (a brief shout and an outstreched hand). Oh well; only 26 ducks to manage now.

By the time Helena completed her transport efforts, most of the ducks had drifted back to within inches of their original positions. She didn't care.

We walked right across the middle of the pool. It's deeper than I imagined, creeping up on Helena's armpits. She showed a bit of hesitation, but plodded on through. Brave girl.

We were already getting ready to leave when a lifeguard blew his whistle. "Everybody out of the pool." Relative quiet as all the splashing stopped. The kids were out, the ducks stayed in. I looked up to see a young woman wearing the standard-issue "sauveur"-emblazoned white t-shirt standing in the middle of the pool. She was also wearing galoshes up to her knees, a rubber apron, and a gas mask while pouring in what I assume to be chlorine, stirring it up as she walked the perimeter.

We'd been splashing about while the water was at its "dirtiest." We know by the smell that the pool is kept highly chlorinated. I'd rather soak my feet in a bath of chlorine than baby pee. I think. I don't know how long the kids had to wait before going back in.

Cat heaven

Margaret Atwood gets cats. I mean, really understands them. My cats anyway.

Read her story in Brick.

My cats like this story. They'll be wanting me to read it to them every night.

I always suspected that if they were bigger, and I were smaller, they'd play with me till I died. In their younger days anyway. Now they only dream.

Picture his words

Alberto Manguel explores the relationship between words and images in the current issue of Geist.

Perhaps the strongest, clearest exposition of the relationship or conflict was given in the eighteenth century by the German scholar Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. . . For Lessing, words could (or should) fully describe and explore the emotions; images, however, required greater restraint and found the power of the emotions. Lessing pointed out that a poet can depict the emotions of a character at any given moment and allow the reader to follow his or her progress through the narrative; a painter or sculptor is bound to the instant and is therefore constrained to a single expression. For Lessing, one “reading” evolves in time, the other in space; both require the active participation of the audience.

In his lovely anecdotal way, Manguel's essay is an ode to the comic book. Words and images, time and space, serving imagination, politics, absurdity, all.