Blog

The online journal of Nico Mara-McKay.

Book Club: Too Much Happiness

I haven’t done well with updating the blog about the book club a friend and I started since the first meeting. A brief survey of what we’ve read since: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (we loved it), Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (excellent), Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (well liked, but I felt it over-rated), Kurt […]

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Bookish linkage and the Toronto Literary Salon

Ok, I’ve been linking to a lot of book-related stuff on Twitter, and rather than send a dozen tweets of linkage, why not consolidate the best into a single blog post? Why not, indeed. Here we go: ‘I just adore Dostoevsky…’ Books to impress the babes, Asylum.co.uk – Seriously, people still say “babes”? And they don’t get

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Stuff submitted, contest entered, and a possible course

Poetry submissions sent to Nova Scotia on Monday. One of them is kind of controversial, so who knows. On Saturday I entered the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, sponsored by The New Quarterly. ((Link above if you want to join my competition.))  This is the first contest I’ve ever entered, and reading over the past submissions (cleverly

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On writing crap

I write every spare moment and moments I set aside as spare. More than a dozen notebooks filled with scraps of poetry and prose, essays and blog posts, book reviews and idle thoughts, and countless files are stored on my computer. I write considerably more than I will ever publish. Writing is easy. Ideas are easy. This

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Nine years of blogging

It occurred  on the weekend that I’ve been blogging for nine years this April. Which is this month. April 16th to be exact. Which is today. I’m having a Keanu moment here. ((Whoa.)) Ancient History to me I first started blogging on April 16th, 2000. After a couple of friends joined LiveJournal, I did too. It was

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James Joyce on Treasure

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: –A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure

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