[lit-ideas] Re: Three Snips

  • From: Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:42:35 -0400

Keep it up, DR!!

My homely writing of the week has to do with spiders. My husband jeers at me about Jainism as I carefully capture and release wasps that have wandered (all unawares, I'm sure) into the house of He Who is Afraid. I've always treated spiders the same way, gently lifting them on damp paper towels and freeing them in the yard. But this year, we have so many in the kitchen and dining room that I have abandoned all pantheistic thoughts and want them gone by any means. They festoon the holiday pots above the cupboards. They climb nimbly around the light fixtures scouring the brightness for their next leghold. They descend from the ceiling while I have my hands in bread dough and try to build webs around my shoulders. They populate all the unreachable corners of my rooms, turning them into airy abbatoirs filled with the bodies of the innocent. I am afraid to reach under a lampshade to turn on the light for fear of getting caught myself. How thin our veneer of civilization is...
Ursula,
comtemplating unspeakable crimes in North Bay...


On 11-09-04 2:15 PM, David Ritchie wrote:
I read this week that someone "has a robust theoretical writing practice."  Not 
me, guv, I just write:

In a week we have gone from waiting for summer to arrive to that season when plants get throttled 
by the hardening clay and those unhardies which have been in the ground less than a year quickly 
shrivel and die.  From above, little brown bits--to use a technical term--seeds, possibly, are 
blown down and swirl into drifts here and there.  Then, as if often the case, nature overdoes 
things, ups the ante with wind and sticks.  "Bloody hell," one says to oneself, trying to 
go along with what stops just short of bullying, "steady on, nay-chah..., you could put 
someone's eye out."

We have an opening in the toast-making department.  Required skills include 
advanced bread selection, spatial visioning, time-based color competencies.

You take unto you an leafy bit.  And you take unto you an nother one.  And you 
wash them fair careful, removing slugs and ye little squiggly things.  And then 
you take an large casserole and some garlic and onions and carrots and wine and 
you set it aside to wait upon the appointed hour.  Meanwhile, you feed said 
greens to an rabbit.  Which you have kept handy.  When a sufficiency of minutes 
and months has elapsed...you eat the rabbit.

David Ritchie,
Portland, 
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