As someone who likes to linger in the nut butter aisle (you know you can make it at home, there are recipes!), and someone who appreciates the effort to honour MG in this her Centennial year, I want to tell you how much I love your diary dispatches. They are read as soon as they appear in my in-box, pure pleasure, not just the references to WF, where I shop almost every day, but all the other funny and creative and brilliant contents of your mind, most especially the homages to MG. You deserve the gilded city, she deserves the best party there could be. Isn't it enough to write about the human heart? When you think of it, what else is there?
Bill! Bill!!!!!! I feel so guilty that I haven't commented before. The reason? Here's the long answer: I read your diary entries on my phone, in bed, drinking tea brought to me by my lovely husband. Who then sits by me trying to read the news but gives up because I'm hooting with laughter and he wants to know why, so I read out parts to him and then he's laughing too. And then we are musing at your unique take on the world. (A great antidote to the news, by the way.) Each time I want to immediately respond to you, but I have awkward, untrained thumbs and I find writing on my phone really difficult. It's a lazy, stupid excuse. And I don't know why this hasn't occurred to me before, but I'm now up and sitting at my computer where I am able to type. So: Thank you for writing again, and finding a way to share your work despite the roadblocks. Thank you for introducing me to MG. Thank you for your unique, insightful, honest and hilarious voice. We need to hear it, so promise me that your missives will continue. Should I venture into the Substack isle???
Time to strap on the pith helmet and venture into the Substacks. Remember in the days of the Dewey Decimal Syatem and cards in a drawer, and that secret place in the basement of the library called The Stacks? Well below that famed place where broken books go to die, is the Substacks. I subscribe to many, but only read one religiously and it is your wonderful morning scribes to the most Gallant of all Mavis’s. I found a book once in the stacks, or rather in the card catalogue, and asked the librarian to “ bring it up”, as if coming up for air. It was The Human Use of Human Beings, which is such a great title, by the forgotten Norbert Weiner, father of Cybernetics. Science or Junk-science? I am not bright enough to say, although I was bright enough for my father to call me son.
My point, and as Ellen says so famously, I do have a point, is there is gold in the stacks, and now we pan for brilliance in the Substacks. I treasure the nuggets you polish off and congratulate you on your rigorous routine.
Only you are worth enduring my overzealously warning antivirus programme for, and responding to a few substack emails, and setting another password. Only you. I am embarrassed to have never read Mavis Gallant before, and now have a collection on my Cloud Library. So exciting. But hearing your lovely thoughts, and picturing you between the shelves - even better. Do you ever sing there? In any case, thank you, thank you, and keep those images of toboggans away for now!
I came late to your Oh MG diary but love the gift you are giving us. Have read every entry and think today’s summer Solstice entry is a paean of praise (style alert - cheap and redundant alliterative perfume) to the “hors de commerce” world. Pure and engaging. Many thanks.
As someone who likes to linger in the nut butter aisle (you know you can make it at home, there are recipes!), and someone who appreciates the effort to honour MG in this her Centennial year, I want to tell you how much I love your diary dispatches. They are read as soon as they appear in my in-box, pure pleasure, not just the references to WF, where I shop almost every day, but all the other funny and creative and brilliant contents of your mind, most especially the homages to MG. You deserve the gilded city, she deserves the best party there could be. Isn't it enough to write about the human heart? When you think of it, what else is there?
Bill! Bill!!!!!! I feel so guilty that I haven't commented before. The reason? Here's the long answer: I read your diary entries on my phone, in bed, drinking tea brought to me by my lovely husband. Who then sits by me trying to read the news but gives up because I'm hooting with laughter and he wants to know why, so I read out parts to him and then he's laughing too. And then we are musing at your unique take on the world. (A great antidote to the news, by the way.) Each time I want to immediately respond to you, but I have awkward, untrained thumbs and I find writing on my phone really difficult. It's a lazy, stupid excuse. And I don't know why this hasn't occurred to me before, but I'm now up and sitting at my computer where I am able to type. So: Thank you for writing again, and finding a way to share your work despite the roadblocks. Thank you for introducing me to MG. Thank you for your unique, insightful, honest and hilarious voice. We need to hear it, so promise me that your missives will continue. Should I venture into the Substack isle???
Time to strap on the pith helmet and venture into the Substacks. Remember in the days of the Dewey Decimal Syatem and cards in a drawer, and that secret place in the basement of the library called The Stacks? Well below that famed place where broken books go to die, is the Substacks. I subscribe to many, but only read one religiously and it is your wonderful morning scribes to the most Gallant of all Mavis’s. I found a book once in the stacks, or rather in the card catalogue, and asked the librarian to “ bring it up”, as if coming up for air. It was The Human Use of Human Beings, which is such a great title, by the forgotten Norbert Weiner, father of Cybernetics. Science or Junk-science? I am not bright enough to say, although I was bright enough for my father to call me son.
My point, and as Ellen says so famously, I do have a point, is there is gold in the stacks, and now we pan for brilliance in the Substacks. I treasure the nuggets you polish off and congratulate you on your rigorous routine.
Only you are worth enduring my overzealously warning antivirus programme for, and responding to a few substack emails, and setting another password. Only you. I am embarrassed to have never read Mavis Gallant before, and now have a collection on my Cloud Library. So exciting. But hearing your lovely thoughts, and picturing you between the shelves - even better. Do you ever sing there? In any case, thank you, thank you, and keep those images of toboggans away for now!
I came late to your Oh MG diary but love the gift you are giving us. Have read every entry and think today’s summer Solstice entry is a paean of praise (style alert - cheap and redundant alliterative perfume) to the “hors de commerce” world. Pure and engaging. Many thanks.
Yes, I've been dipping, and even double-dipping (some of your entries read twice!), for weeks.
Speaking of dipping--time for a First Day of Summer ice cream cone!