Shakespeare in the mud

One of the upsides to having the flu is that you can give yourself permission to stay home, lie on the couch and watch DVDs. Quite serendipitously, when I became sick towards the end of last week I happened to have a library copy of the second season of Deadwood at hand.
The title of this post [...]

More on non-reading

In an update to my previous post on non-reading, there was an interesting article in the The Chronicle Review this week arguing for a more inclusive interpretation of reading. Lennard J. Davis writes:
An all too predictable moralism surrounds the reading of books. There is a prescribed way of reading: one page at a time, starting [...]

Glimpsing Clarice Beckett

I’ve been thinking about the Australian modernist artist Clarice Beckett lately. She first came to my attention about eight years ago when a major retrospective exhibition of her work was held in Melbourne.
Clarice Beckett painted Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s, the period between the First and Second World Wars. Her simple landscapes of the city and the bayside [...]

Not baking

Our oven is being incredibly temperamental at the moment. Whenever I light the gas and shut the door, the oven turns off again. This makes me think of all the exciting things that I could be baking, if only the oven was working.
Right now I’d like to be baking:

the maple syrup scones featured on the port2port blog a couple [...]

I shop therefore I am

I read an article in the Guardian today about a new British survey which highlights the disconnect between owning a book and actually finishing reading it.
Among the top unfinished books were DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and James Joyce’s Ulysses (you can see a complete listing of [...]

Gothic tendencies

I’ve always had a predilection for creepy tales. As a child, I remember listening to scary stories told to me by my grandmother, such as the tale of the Mistletoe Bride, watching Alfred Hitchcock movies on the Golden Years of Hollywood on a Saturday night, and reading the atmospheric Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
Later, I ended up [...]