This from Don Leon, first published 1866. Attributed by some to George Lord Byron (1788–1824), by others to George Coleman, on the occasion of desire rising during his wife’s pregnancy:

I burn to press thee, but I fear to try.

And let the favoured few the back stairs use.

Gordon Sheppard, author of HA! A Self-Murder Mystery, an expanded investigation of the suicide of author, separatist Hubert Aquin (McGill-Queens 2003) died last Sunday, February 19 at the age of 68. My friend John W. MacDonald compares Ha! favourably with Joyce’s Ulysses and Dante’s Devine Comedy. I had planned to interview Gordon, and regret losing the opportunity to have met this fascinating man; to have captured and shared his thoughts with others. John took some photos at the reception after Gordon’s funeral service.

See them here.

Here is a review of Ha! by Robert Fulford, one of Canada’s best living literary critics, in my opinion.

I’m pretty certain that when my natural lifespan comes to an end, medical science will have figured out a way to transplant/replace every part of the human body…so that dying will be optional. To be or not to be will assume a whole new meaning.

Today I realize that many recent exercises in “deconstructive reading” read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody’s mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.

Umberto Eco
Italian philosopher & writer

One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work.

Voltaire
French poet, historian & satirist

I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Woody Allen
American comedian, actor & film director (born Allen Stewart Konigberg)

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Groucho Marx
American comedian & entertainer

The really cultured person reads the newest books in science and the oldest in literature. Anon

The true University of these days is a collection of books

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian.

I think descriptions of nature should be very short and always be � propos. Commonplaces like “The setting sun, sinking into the waves of the darkening sea, cast its purple gold rays, etc,” “Swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gaily” – eliminate such commonplaces. You have to choose small details in describing nature, grouping them in such a way that if you close your eyes after reading it you can picture the whole thing. For example, you’ll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled by like a ball, etc. . . . In the realm of psychology you also need details. God preserve you from commonplaces. Best of all, shun all descriptions of the characters’ spiritual state. You must try to have that state emerge clearly from their actions. Don’t try for too many characters. The center of gravity should reside in two: he and she.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Russian physician & writer

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven’t been brought to book.

Robert Frost
American poet, winner of Pulitzer prize in 1923, ’30, ’36, & ’42

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau ‘American author, development critic, naturalist, transcendentalist, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher’

Be regular and ordinary in your life, so you may be violent and original in your work
Gustave Flaubert.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse’s skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn’t know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt – "I’m alive, too, you know!" it seems to say. "Look, I know how to buzz, there’s nothing I can’t buzz about!" I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Russian physician & writer

Bookseller Richard Fitzpatrick is moving out of his store on Dalhousie this weekend over to Hintonberg….Spadina and Somerset…he needs empty boxes…and if anyone is interested in helping to lug full ones over to his new place he’d be grateful…

“I have been listening and really enjoy the show!! You have a wonderful style!!”

Jane Crosier, local Ottawa literary broadcaster/icon, award winning high school librarian

Further to our ongoing discussion of this serious topic, Leland de la Durantaye weighs in (December 20, 2005 Village Voice):

"Philosophers are supposed to see the world with clear eyes; with clear philosophical eyes, we can note that Sartre was a troll. He was five feet tall. Neither handsome nor dashing, nearly blind in one eye, and scornful of even the most basic conventions of bourgeois dental hygiene (mossy is a word that comes easily to mind). And yet he got girls like he was in the Beatles. As strange to the American mind as escargot is the French custom of beautiful young woman finding brilliant older men attractive merely for being brilliant and then sleeping with them!" See/listen to February 4/9 postings for more, serious commentary."