I've got a 30-minute walk ahead of me and I really have not had dinner.

I got the email down to three. No phone calls made, and it is 8:49 PM.

The reading I did that I thought worth making a note of follows.

 Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov - JStor

Tim Hortons Is Brewing an Idea of Canada That No Longer Exists

Why I would like Disney+: Doctor Who Season 14's Opening Scene Is Hard To Watch If You're Already A Fan.

I checked out a couple of literary magazines: Blanket Gravity and The Wild Umbrella. Maybe, if could get the blog under control and get back to writing fiction. However, I want to point this out about Blanket Gravity:

Blanket Gravity: Free online magazine with art and literature for people in mental health crisis, having a hard day or season, looking to feel connected with themselves or something outside themselves for a moment.

From Public Orthodoxy: The Orthodox Church of Finland and the War in Ukraine 

A post I forgot from this past weekend: Doing My Time Saturday Afternoon - Paul Auster, César Aira

I skimmed Free Speech Is a Black-and-White Issue: The Millions Interviews Paul Auster, an archives release.

TM: When The Tortilla Curtain came out, some people attacked T.C. Boyle for appropriation, despite his sympathy and skill evoking the undocumented Mexican experience.

PA: Nobody owns the imagination. If we didn’t have the power to project ourselves into the minds and bodies of other people, people unlike us, I don’t think there would be such a thing as society. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. The whole idea of being a person is the fact that once you reach a certain level of mental and emotional maturity, you’re able to look at yourself from the outside. You’re able to see yourself as one person among many. Millions, in fact. Which then you take that one step further and you realize then you have to have the ability to project yourself onto others in order to try to understand them. Either sympathize with them, empathize with them, however you want to define it, but without that quality we wouldn’t be human beings. So, every time I hear someone get up and say: “You can only write novels about people exactly like yourself,” they’re saying that there is no such thing as the imagination. Which means people are not people [Laughs].

I can agree with imagination meaning human.

 César Aira must have a better memory than I have now, that was my first thought reading César Aira’s unreal magic: how the eccentric author took over Latin American literature.

...Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” he told me, casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

I should send this bit to KH who says he has no time for writing: 

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Speaking of time, I have now found another writer I do not have the time to read! 

I do not see how I can finish the email today. I am getting tired of reading this computer screen. If I hurry, I might catch the bus home.

3:19 PM 5/11

And here I leave you,

sch 5/13