Clippings

Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I'm still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing's The Good Terrorist in the future.

I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail's "Focus" section last weekend-- this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that "it's in our nature... to return to the street". But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.

Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.

And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn't like them. "Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion." Isn't she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.

See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains...). A column she'd written in 2001 called "Craving life in the face of death" moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I've got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I've saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don't coincide, which is almost always.

But it's also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you'd think.