A Lofty Ambition

Today, after paying $5.00 worth of postage and International Reply Coupons, "Parasite: A Love Story" has been set adrift to wander through the twisting corridors of the Canadian Postal Service on the way to Hoboken, New Jersey, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I thought I'd aim high once again. I'm not planning of making F & SF my go-to magazine right away, but I got such praise for "Parasite: A Love Story," and I felt it was such a stylistic departure for me (and especially from "My Brother's Own Words," which was the last story I sent to F & SF) that I thought I'd give it another go.

I got rid of my "What I'm Reading" elements for now - because it turns out that the reading I'm going to be doing for this year is bizarre and sporadic, and I'm going to be reading several things at once in order to keep up. No real problem for me, but it would be annoying to have to update those "What I'm Reading" things every couple of hours for accuracy. Once I'm back to reading for fun, I'll put them back up.

Our city is in the middle of a blizzard now, by the way. A real blizzard. The kind that has everyone speculatively whispering, "Did you hear about the blizzard? Supposed to hit tonight?" "What? I heard tomorrow night," before it actually happens. Doesn't happen that often in Canada, because we're used to snow and all. I woke up this morning to find four centimetres of fresh powder on my driveway, and taking the bus an hour early to get to class did absolutely jack squat because the bus ended up being two hours slow and I was late to class anyway. On the plus side, I was able to finish reading Gerthe's Faust on the way there, the translation of which was surprisingly easier to read than the Christopher Marlowe version (which I also recently finished).

Now I'm onto the Journals of Captain James Cook, which has so many seafaring symbols for policies and coordinates and wind-direction that it's like trying to read 18th-century NetSpeak: January 10th: Lnded on island 4 food & stuff, gay-a$$ natives try 2 frag us, stole r metal!!1! They r teh suk. >:-( But w/ r guns we pwnd them all, LOLZ. :-D Consequently christened the place Pwnage Bay due to our glorious victory.

After that, I'm going to read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, who like JD Salinger is supposed to be a crazy recluse who is reported to send in his secretly-coded manuscripts using elaborate means in order to preserve his identity and privacy. Weird.