I've been doing this blog for six months now. Persistence furthers, says the I Ching. Here's a Viktor Shklovsky quote I found online:
"You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.”
“If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed."
And here's a Steve Dodson languagehat.com post to make one feel uneasy about the validity of English translations of Shklovsky. While it's too late to see Shklovsky lecture at St. Petersburg's Stray Dog cabaret, you might make it to tonight's InsideStorytime at San Francisco's Cafe Royale, 6.30-8.30 pm. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog, and we waive the customary $3 and up sliding scale cover charge. Tonight's readers are --
Kathryn Ma, author of All That Work and Still no Boys, apparently the first work by an Asian-American author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award
Irete Lazo, author of The Accidental Santera, the story of an agnostic SFSU professor who becomes a priestess in a Caribbean religion
L. E. Leone, author of a fine short story collection called Big Bend, who also writes the food column “Cheap Eats” and plays steel drums under the name of “Sister Exister”
Roger Pinnell, whose short story “Shave” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007, and who is also the former lead singer of Piglatin
Olga Zilberbourg, author of КофеInn, published in St. Petersburg in 2006. If you're not familiar with the St. Petersburg literary scene, you may know Olga as the person who comments on my blog as “the other Olga.” She's thinking of starting her own blog about narrative theory.