Land of the Giants

It's the middle of the night in Ottawa and we're too far from Washington to hear the inauguration celebrations. Canadians I know seem to have watched the historic ceremony at work and school and home. They're all asleep now (the ones I know.)

There's not much to see outside but I can still make out the dips in the snow on the balcony railing where a squirrel shimmied along it two days ago. That's the thing about snow, all sorts of things are frozen for weeks: dog pee, squirrel prints, rubbish. You leave water and cameras in the car, they freeze too.
The snow blankets and muffles as you'd expect. It wraps up sound and tucks it down for winter.

We are in a giant fairy tale. Really. Giant. Eggs come in one and a half dozens. I saw a blue jay today, it's so much bigger than I thought a blue jay would be. There was what looked like a child's fort in the trees and my nephew said it was an abandoned crows nest.

Squirrels are darker and more menacing when hopping through snow. When you run into a baby bear, look for the mother, you might need to start running again.

Snowflakes on your eyelids are enchanting. In your eye they hurt.

Cafe au lait and brioche for breakfast in a patisserie. If we'd only come for that it would have been enough.

Today's winter sports and their aftermath: my niece was on a ski-trip but a suspected broken leg from a fall saw her stretchered off the mountain (luckily it's just a double sprain), my brother-in-law was on an annual ski trip up Mont Tremblant and lost his car keys, my nephew skated on the school rink without mishap ( we have pools, they have rinks.)

We go ice skating on the canal on Thursday. I can't ice skate.

I am reading Alice Munro's stories after buying a lovely new Penguin (Canada) copy of Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage at Chapters Bookstore in Ottawa.

I found Rachael King's The Sound of Butterflies there too and felt very proud.

After Munro, I need to finish Auster's The Brooklyn Follies. Then I think I'll start Obama's Audacity of Hope. The book is in my suitcase. It begins: 'On most days, I enter the Capitol through the basement...'

Hallelujah.

Limber Tongue

Few of the stories one has it in one’s self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one’s head get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them; and even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor — loud, lilting and Irish, or soothing and French, liquid and Italian, sweet as the Spanish lisp — where is that second ear? No court commands our entertainments, requires our flattery, needs our loyal enlargements or memorialising lies.

Literature once held families together better than quarrelling. It carved a common ancestry from mere air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes feel in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or a fan. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.

William Gass

Couldn't resist this - it has been sent out just now in the regular newsletter from the International Institute of Modern Letters here in Wellington which is where I did my Creative Writing MA. Nice to be told literature is 'no small gift' when you're slogging away at home to get down two hundred words you're happy with by close of day.

William Gass's words are also apposite now with the United States waiting on the results of the polls with history ringing in its ears. Also ringing will be the stumbling words, the stories, the slippery language, the pleas, the assertions, and the oratory of politicians. One especially, Barack Obama: he of the 'limber' tongue.