25 Random Things

1. I have no intention of telling you 25 random things about myself. On the other hand. . .
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.