Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 111

Reassuring Places

This is a cross-post from the Wyrdsmiths blog. One of the commenters there asked:

I was reading a writing magazine the other day and they did a feature asking writers if they had any "essentials" they kept in their writing spaces and/or any pre-writing rituals that helped encourage them to get down to business. For example, one man kept a little aquarium on his desk that he said helped him feel so tranquil, he could just shut off the rest of the world for awhile in order to write. If anyone...

Allocation of Resources

One thing we need to remember is how badly this society allocates resources. The country's infrastructure -- roads, bridges, water mains, sewers, buildings -- is old and breaking down. It all needs to be replaced.

If we are going to reduce coal and oil and gas use -- which we really need to do, this is a survival question -- we need to insulate old buildings, build new energy efficient buildings, greatly expand mass transit, install a lot of solar power cells on roofs, create wind farms...

We n...

Education

United Way in the Twin Cities is putting a lot of money into early education, as are the Bush and McKnight Foundations. As a result, there is very little money for other problems, such as the problem which interests Patrick, homelessness. Pat's comment was:

So this kid is pre-school or early school, and one of her parents is among the 20% of workers who are unemployed or underemployed. Maybe both parents are out of work. The family house has been foreclosed, and the family is living in a...

The Other Book

I hope you noticed the baseball cap is the Detroit Tigers. This is a chapbook: one long short story, an essay and an interview. Previous books in this series are by Terry Bisson and Kim Stanley Robinson, so I am in good company.

Book

I finished going over the typeset version of Tomb of the Fathers. It's an odd novel. Right now, I don't feel especially good about it, but that is typical of me when I finish a project. There is some good writing. The cover (by Jeanne Gomoll) is delightful, and I like the book design (by Kath Wilham) a lot.

Manuscripts

I finished going over the typeset version of Tomb of the Fathers. It's an odd novel. Right now, I don't feel especially good about it, but that is typical of me when I finish a project. There is some good writing. The cover is delightful, and I like the book design a lot.

Deer Island Town Meeting

A neat article from Common Dreams.

Deer Isle Town Meeting Day, March 1, 2010. It was an event for which to be proud and it ought not go uncelebrated. Two thirds of those at the Deer Isle Town Hall on this picturesque island of 2400 lobstermen, artists, tradesmen, and "from-awayers" took their stand. Effectively saying, "No more", the substantial majority voted to approve an article on the town warrant calling on Congressman Mike Michaud not to fund the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan ...

Another Grey Day

I am about to dive into Tomb.

Diane Krall is on the Bose again, her homage to the Nat King Cole Trio. It's raining outside. I'm drinking flavored black tea (cranberry-orange) with sugar.

Update

I applied for another job yesterday: part time bookkeeping on a contract basis. We shall see.

Patrick and I went to the Mall of America to mall walk. We did all three floors. The dark side of mall walking is the shops. Pat bought two baseball caps, and I got a pen, a very lovely brown Visconti van Gogh on sale.

On the way back home, Patrick was trying to show me where he had seen a flock of wild turkeys a few days ago.

He finally saw the spot and pointed it out to me, a field by the side of Hig...

Iceland

And this is from an essay on economic policy by Marshall Auerback and Rob Parentaeu:

...As the voices of fiscal retrenchment intensify, a future (for the US) not unlike Latvia, Greece and Argentina could await. It has taken the people of Iceland to make the first stand against this growing neo-liberal madness. In a historic referendum, over 90 per cent of the population has rejected a proposal for the repayment of billions of pounds lent by Britain and Holland to compensate depositors in a...