Are Substack writers selling their mailing lists to other creators? I’ve been getting a lot of Substack spam lately from writers I’ve never heard about.
Currently reading: Africa Risen by Sheree Renée Thomas 📚
Currently reading: The Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo 📚
This is actually my third time through this book. It’s been really difficult to focus on anything this week so it’s useful to get a refresher on Cirillo’s unique method.
Finished reading: Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf 📚
Queen - Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon
Perfect music for the laziest weekend of the entire year. 🎵
Back in Toronto after a 7am flight from Calgary. The flight landed early for a change. 🛬
The Vietnamese food here in Calgary is quite memorable. Here’s the grilled pork and spring roll vermicelli at Lemongrass West on 51st Street SW.
En route to Calgary, where there is a severe weather alert for smoke from the fires in BC.
Just an ordinary Friday night chilling with the Winnipeg crew.
Good morning!
Enjoying a simple lunch of borscht and a ham and cheese panini at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.
The view from my hotel room in Winnipeg this morning. The smoke seems to be getting worse from the fires up north. Air quality was bad yesterday and I doubt it will get any better today.
My office for the day, hearing exams at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.
Just landed in Winnipeg 🛬
Happy International Left Handers Day! 🖋️
Rereading Proust
Back in 1996 I read Proust’s A la recherche du temps passé ( translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time) and I did it in only 10 weeks. I understand that this might be a world record, and although it’s not one that I’m proud of, it was certainly a unique experience speed-running Proust.
Here’s how it happened.
In 1996 I was the pianist for Heather Pawsey when she won the Eckhardt-Grammate Competition in Brandon, Manitoba. As part of the prize, Heather was asked to give a 15-city tour across Canada and she asked me to be her pianist for the tour, which hit spots all over Canada including Sackville, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Brandon, Saskatoon, and all the way west to Vancouver.
This was back in the golden age of touring, when we only had one concert every 48 hours on average. 1996 was a time before the days of readily available internet, so although I had an email address, I rarely used it.
Heather and I had a lot of time on our hands on this concert tour.
Planning ahead, bought all three volumes of the Penguin edition of Proust (translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin) two weeks before the start of the tour and started Swann’s Way.
Once the tour started, there was a lot of downtime, whether in airports, on flights or buses, at concert venues, and especially holed up in hotels or B&Bs, frequently with frigid weather outside.
Over the course of these six weeks, I read much of Proust, just starting Time Regained as the tour ended. A few weeks later I finished the rest of the final book, much of it read on my SkyTrain commute every day from New West to downtown Vancouver.
As my reading practice deepened over the following years, I was glad that I had made it all the way through this beast of a novel, but disappointed that I had speedrun it rather than taking the time to enjoy the details.
Which is why I’m once again making a second run through Proust’s mega-novel. This time I’ll be taking it slow, reading only 2-4 pages per sitting and enjoying the endless flow of Proust’s narrative.
If I’m consistent, I estimate that this will take me between 3 to 5 years, perhaps longer. It’s feels like traveling on a sub-light spaceship to another solar system where the trip is planned in years and decades rather than days or weeks.
But this time around I aim to savour the small moments, page by page. 📚
I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy a notebook again. There was a sale in our area and I bought 23 Leuchtturms and 2 Moleskines. Does this qualify as an addiction? 🖋️
Anne-Laure le Cunff: Mindful context switching: multitasking for humans
There are many tips out there—the most common one being to focus on the most important task first—but few address the systemic complexities of managing your time and energy when you have a very long list of important and competing tasks as well as other people to take into account.
Ontario Greenbelt plan influenced by well-connected developers, AG says
A terrible loss of greenbelt area outside Toronto, all to enrich Doug Ford’s cronies.