Just a quick one to say that 15,000 of you have stopped by Seen Reading since its inception. I’m pleased as punch.

Why is punch pleased? Do we know this? Anyone? Bueller?

*Bows to you and yours*

Caucasian male, early 20s, with bright red stubble, wearing a grey hoodie and jean jacket. His back pocket bulges under the weight of his wallet and a chain dangles from his waistband.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (Norton)

Page 72:

And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

He planted the last tree and wiped his hands on the front of his thighs. He cut through the field to where the stream narrows and found the bunch of them laughing, an open cooler filled with beer and cold cuts. She tore at the skin of a large olive with her teeth, rolling it over her fingers before popping it whole into her mouth. Bottles clinked, a quick Cheers to a hard day. She rubbed her lower back, trying to feel grateful for the pain if it meant she was still alive. She tapped tobacco onto a paper and licked the edge, laughing at the tail end of a joke she didn’t hear. Tomorrow she’d start treatment.

Caucasian woman, late 20s, with short, dark curly-q hair, wearing a black and white polka dotted dress with black nylons and black strapped heels.

songs for the dancing chicken, Emily Schultz (ECW Press)

Your cohort reading from page 10:

I am seeing a film.

I am seeing a film
and you are with me.

I am seeing a film
and you are far from me.

I am seeing a film
and the theatre is bathed
in blue light, but the insides
of my mind are crimson.

I had forgotten how much I loved those films, those Herzog moments of irrational and poetic insight. I had forgotten that a dwarf outrunning a truck could be at once so brutal and honest and funny, dancing chickens and bunnies, stirred into activity by shocks or a sudden rise in temperature, motivated to move against the grain of a turntable.

Caucasian woman, early 40s, wearing grey dress pants, black sweater and a purple headband.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka (Penguin)

Page 113:

Valentina relents. They will go to a different doctor instead. Valentina and Mrs. Zadchuk bundle my father into Crap car. They are in such a hurry to get to the surgery before he changes his mind that his coat is buttoned up out of kilter and his shoes are on the wrong feet.

Her mother was always good about picking us up. From the movies, a school dance, a Hallowe’en party. We typically waited a block from where we’d started, looking down the street for one headlight, followed by the sound of a knocking muffler. Her approach was slow enough that she didn’t need to stop, we could have stepped in without missing a beat. But stop she did, and hard, the tire farting a sharp squeak. We held our laughter and got in back. The station wagon smelled like urine, but it was a ride and we were polite, raised to be thankful for her efforts. We were buckled and ready. Half a minute later we finally lurched forward, rumbling home fifteen clicks below the speed limit. We cracked the window and held our noses to the night air, sending out a collective moan as we approached a stop light. It was green. We stopped. Cars piled up behind us and the honking began. We rolled up the window and sank down making more contact with the seats than we’d like. It was a green light and we were stopped. Because she knew it had to turn red sometime.

Caucasian woman, mid 40s, graying hair upswept by reading glasses, wearing a Gap trench coat and cashmere scarf.

Smoke, Elizabeth Ruth (Penguin)

Page 99:

The woods is a different place for a boy alone at night in winter. Sound is muffled and yet amplified–the creaking of icy branches, the sleepy movement of cardinals and owls, dry breath. Trees take on ominous shapes in the dark, larger deformed monsters. Giants of the underworld.

A group of them went in together and rented the cottage. Brenda was two years into her marriage, 1979, happy with Tom and finally talking about children. The couples spent the day on the dock taking turns on the inner tube, two at a time. Doug grabbed her hand, away from Lisa, and two beers from the cooler. Lisa couldn’t swim and this would give them time alone. He was going to ask Lisa to marry him. Brenda gripped the tube, her beer slipping into the lake, bobbing once, then piking to the bottom. That night, Doug slipped out for a quick butt in the forest away from the watchful eyes of his now intended. Brenda lifted Tom’s arm from around her shoulder and said she had to get something from the car. Tom had decided he liked Ben for a boy and Amy for a girl. Tom patted her ass as she rose from the couch, calling after her, “Benjamin Cole and Amy Ruth!” Outside, Brenda gingerly stepped through the fallen logs and cleared brush. Doug was leaning against a tree, looking at the moon.

“It’s done now. I don’t want anything. But I never told you,” she continued, “that I loved you too.”

Asian girl, eleven years old or so, wearing a black parka and brown boots, with mother along for the ride.

The Breadwinner, Deborah Ellis (Groundwood Books)

About page 107:

A few minutes later, Parvana unearthed a skull. “Hey, look at this!” She used the board to loosen the ground around it, then dug the rest of it up with her fingers so she wouldn’t break it. She held it up to Shauzia as though it were a trophy.

“It’s grinning.”

“Of course it’s grinning. He’s glad to be out in the sunshine after being in the dark ground for so long. Aren’t you glad, Mr. Skull?” She made the skull nod. “See? I told you.”

Her grandmother told her that there was no point in worrying. The doctors would give her something so she’d sleep through the surgery, waking up on the other side. She matter of factly concluded, “Besides, if something does go wrong, you’ll be none the wiser.” It gave her strange comfort and when she was wheeled into the operating room she didn’t need anyone to hold her hand. Such a brave young girl, they’d said. From that moment on, whether crossing a busy street or walking down a long alley, regardless if the subway came to a stop inside a tunnel or her mother overcompensated the wheel on an icy road, she became fearless. But reading this story she began to wonder if living a life of horrendous certainty was dramatically different for the children in Afghanistan, burdened to stand fearless while their fate rushed their tiny faces day in, day out. She wondered if living in her world, not seeing the enemy, not knowing the enemy, her land of none the wiser, had, in fact, become a privilege.

Caucasian woman, early 20s, with thick black hair and glasses, wearing a black vest and red fleece, carrying a black and orange computer bag, dripping umbrella hanging from the strap.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (New Directions)

Page 42:

He thought: “She has the touch of the blind who, because they see more with their fingers, forget more in their minds.” Her fingers would go forward, hesitate, tremble, as if they had found a face in the dark. When her hand finally came to rest, the palm closed; it was as if she had stopped a crying mouth. Her hand lay still and she would turn away. At such moments Felix experienced an unaccountable apprehension. The sensuality in her hands frightened him.

Alice pulled her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, the latticework of the bay’s ripples bouncing behind her eyelids. The breeze licked past her ears, playful and warm, tickling up and out of her summer shorts. She recognized the familiar swoop of hummingbirds in heat, the male chasing tail of the female along a perfect semi-circle, an arc so perfect it was as if they were strung on wire, pullied back and forth by an invisible hand.

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Caucasian male, mid 20s, with slicked back hair and petit goatee, wearing a black jacket and cupping a coffee thermos between his knees.

Zodiac, Robert Graysmith (Jove)

Page 321:

Secretive and guarded in his dealings with the world.
Very angry that police tells lies about him.
Zodiac is reasonably truthful in what he writes.

He doubles back around the block, always walking against one way streets. Up the stairs, quick, to check his mail, then back down, stopping short to acknowledge the old man in the stairwell, a chronic pot smoker, with eye contact and nothing more. He hates the four seconds it takes to clear the alley to his back landing, keys readied, his neck bare and vulnerable. There are no windows, no doors, but in those four seconds he knows what he could do two, maybe three, four, five times over if you didn’t know to look for him. He suppresses the panic. Just follow the motions. He has it down, the opening of the screen door, slipping the key into the lock he keeps greased for ease, a sly smile at the thought of it, and he’s inside, hand already on the screen to close in a sharp snap. If he’s feeling unusually agitated he’ll force himself to stand in the dark, back to the door, and count to five, ten, sometimes twenty, because he’s not good at stopping. At 35, 40, 45, he closes the door and leans heavy on the washing machine, his neighbour’s laundry day. The odour of dryer sheets calms him and he’s safe at home. He takes the bloodied hankerchief from his pocket and tosses it in the load, ready to end this, and glides down the stairs to his basement apartment.

I haven’t seen it yet in Toronto, but look out for the spring issue of Maisonneuve, “Controversy”. Apparently, it’s on stands in other cities. My short story “Fading” appears.

(And it makes me go, Weeeeeee!)