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Blind Dates Grow Up

My husband and I are both … hmm … how shall I put this? Let’s go with finely tuned and move on. We’re also products of different cultures. (I’ve often thought of charging admission to some of our entertaining conversations: the optimistic, anything-is-possible American (me) exchanging views with the pessimistic Cold-War-era German from West Berlin.) […]

Real Adventures with Imaginary Maps

Oh, maps … oops. Sorry, I had to stop and wipe the drool off my keyboard. If you want to hypnotize me or calm me down, just shove a map in front of my face. My eyes will glaze, I’ll acquire a foolish grin, and my hand will reach involuntarily toward the map. And if […]

Book | Pattern Recognition

William Gibson is well-known for his science fiction writing, which I love, but my favourite book of his is a non-science fiction novel. Pattern Recognition‘s heroine, Cayce Pollard, is highly sensitive, and that plus Gibson’s mentally chewy writing has made me a happy re-reader of this novel. Cayce Pollard is highly sensitive in a very […]

Books | Tim Moore’s Travel Writing

British writer Tim Moore has charmed me thoroughly. He writes irreverent, utterly hilarious travel memoirs with the twist that he’s frequently and unabashedly incompetent at what he sets out to do. My favourite Tim Moore adventure is told in French Revolutions, in which he hoists his unfit body onto a recently purchased bicycle and sets […]

The Power of Creativity

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” ~ Epictetus Life’s a lab. We experiment, starting with a question (curiosity). Creativity is about risking mistakes in search of satisfying answers. What we often mean when we say we’re not creative about something is that we’ve stopped trying. Even the most […]

Book | Kinship with All Life

When a friend recommended John Allen Boone’s Kinship with All Life to me fifteen years ago, I was intrigued enough to track it down. First published in 1954, this odd treasure was a revelation to read, not because Boone’s ideas about the ability of animals to communicate with us are new at the concept level, […]

Book | Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

An avid reader pal of mine, artist Donna Romero, had to do a lot of persuading to get me to read Gary Kinder’s Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. This non-fiction book tells the story of the wreck of the “Central America,” laden with gold from the California Gold Rush, and Tommy Thompson, […]