So I've actually had a Twitter account for quite some time, but no real interest in using it. An application called Tweetie launched yesterday that was interesting enough for me to revisit Twitter, and now I'm having great fun with it.

So if you're interested in reading my clever quips, quotations without attribution, and endless ability to complain about the minutiae of life, feel free to follow my Twitter feed. I might even mention books from time to time. Ah, so many things to keep me from reading and reviewing like I should be.

I have not fallen from the face of the earth, nor am I somehow stuck on Man's Search for Meaning. I've actually read four books since then, and am nearly finished with the fifth. I'm just having some trouble writing the review (and I've kind of started playing World of Warcraft). It will be up soon, I promise, along with the other belated reviews (and for the record, I'm currently reading The Taker, by Rubem Fonesca).

This post is just to let you know that I'm still alive and about as well as I ever am, and that I love sonnets, and have decide to write some. And they will be terrible. Don't worry, I won't inflict them on you. I was thinking about the books that I lost in the flood this summer. The one I miss the most isn't the Emily Dickinson or the China Miéville or even the back issues of The New Quarterly or Maisonneuve. It was a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets, one of the few volumes I haven't yet been able to replace. Every time I think of that book, I think of how simple and beautiful the sonnet is, and how alive and fresh it can be in skilled, passionate hands. So that's it, I guess, nothing really important to say.

Well, it's official: I've decided to relaunch Wooden Fish. All that's up right now is a placeholder until I figure out the specifics of how I'm going to organize it, how I'll accept submissions, the new look, and so on. Hopefully the more important bits will be figured out in the next week or two, though I think that it could be several months until it launches officially with its first issue. Any and all queries regarding Wooden Fish can and should be directed to august@woodenfish.ca. Thanks for your time, your input, and your support!

For three years I published and co-edited (as fiction editor) an online journal of literature. Lately I've been feeling uninvolved in the literary community, and I'm searching for ways to connect. I'm considering relaunching the journal. In the past we published fiction and poetry. If I did decide to relaunch it, I would publish only fiction.

My question is this: would you be interested in reading such a journal? Would you submit to such a journal (on the understanding that I couldn't pay you)? Would you be willing to post about such a journal on your blog? If yes to any of these, would you be willing to donate money (I'm thinking about micro-donations, a dollar here or there), with the understanding that any donations would go exclusively to the hosting bill? Why (or why not—this last question being an addendum to any and all of the above)? Please leave a comment below (and if you wish your answers to be more private, feel free to email me).

Thanks in advance for your time.

I'm inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It's called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I've wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren't many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don't fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I'm talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations and my thoughts on the process of trying to engage with such heavy reading material and how, or even if, the extended duration of that engagement might affect my thoughts and feelings about the material. If that sounded convoluted, I suppose you might just say that I'll be blogging about a big, difficult book alongside my regular reading list.

The first book I've chosen for The Long Read is Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. I've been interested in this book since taking a class in 1999 with Canadian author Eric McCormack (The Dutch Wife, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Mysterium, etc), in which he spoke extensively about writing his thesis on The Anatomy. I picked up the NYRB edition in 2001, and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since, glanced at but never opened seriously. With one or two exceptions, I've never been a fan of pre-Victorian prose, so I don't anticipate a smooth ride with Mr. Burton. I'm hoping that my natural affinity for the topic will sustain me. These lines from William H. Gass' introduction give me some hope:

The analytical outline should not daunt. Burton pays as much attention to his own schematisms as he pays to the syntax of his sentences. Imposing indeed are his interconnections, but it is rather as if a net had been flung down on top of fish who continue to roil and flop freely about beneath it.

So here's hoping this works out. I don't think I've ever been so intimidated by a book in all my life.

The problem with the comments has been fixed. Because I'm quick like that. If you've previously visited individual entry pages on vestige.org, it would be a could idea to do a refresh before you write your comments, as the problem was with a faulty template, the data for which might still be in your cache (and for some reason still affects the comments—wonders never cease).

It has come to my attention that there is yet another problem with the commenting system (MovableType seems to fail more or less at random, after working properly without issue for months or years at a stretch), and every single comment is now appearing on this entry, no matter what entry the poster actually intended to comment on. I won't have time until later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, but I hope to have it corrected quickly.

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It's kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I'll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you'd like me to review, get the skinny here. I'd love to hear from you.

It was brought to my attention earlier today that my RSS feed has been acting up. In the sense that it hasn't been working. It turns out that this is probably my fault; I reconfigured some things the last time I updated my MovableType installation (not recently, but I guess this has been going on for a while), and it looks like that broke the RSS feed. The old RSS feed was at http://www.vestige.org/index.rdf; this no longer works, and I can't figure out how to make it work. But it turns out that if you point your feed reader to http://www.vestige.org/index.xml, everything will work just fine (although I haven't done anything to the template, so it probably won't look very pretty in your reader—if that sort of thing is even an issue; I don't really know much about RSS, as I don't use it myself). Sorry about the mix up.