échantillons positive

échantillons; india ink on math paper.

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Some people (I'm looking at you, Jeannette) have said, as of late, that I complain a lot, and that I'm overly negative. Surely this is a scorpion, it's-my-nature kind of thing. Still, as I was lying in bed last night, listening to one of the cats (the fat one) puke on the stairs, I had three thoughts:

1) I wish I was asleep right now.
2) Be careful of that puke when you get up in the morning.
3) I should try to be more positive.

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I mean, nice things *do* happen, almost randomly. For example, Megan Power just wrote a very nice review of my book in Arts East, an arts and culture ezine (a sharp-looking pdf they mail to you upon request) from Atlantic Canada. She said

Berger’s exceptional collection of strange, artful short stories offers the kind of instant gratification readers are hungry for in a time-starved world. Every school kid’s fantasy comes vividly true in ‘An Arsonist’s Guide to Physics’ - in a miraculous two and a half pages. Berger’s economy is his genius: he gets to the heart faster than a gamma ray. In ‘Free Rein’, a history professor and his mistress gamble the last of the children’s savings bonds with mixed success. ‘Red Horse Leader’ reads like a micro novel. ‘The Kingdom of Chicken’ is a surprisingly poignant portrait of the single girl’s dilemma and ‘Big Head’ is the literary equivalent of an episode of The Office, complete with email exchanges which make the reader cringe and grin, often in the same sentence.

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A while ago the talented Gillian Sze wrote to tell me that she was using one of my illustrations on her website as an example of work that she likes (it was used in her great magazine, Branch). And I said of course and thank you and I wrote it down to use on a rainy (or snowy, and virus-plagued) day like this one.

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And here is a wee review I wrote recently for the Advent Book Blog, for Carolyn Smart's Hooked. The Advent Book Blog is one of those great ideas where people who care about books just start something out of nothing and run with it. Which you have to do a lot of in this country.

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And speaking of books, an artist friend of mine just signed a deal for a book about a year of making art. I'll repeat that: a book about making art. And that's so gratifying, to see the right people get the things they were made for. It's all just in the planning stages now but I'll tell you more as it comes along.

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So there you go: positive. Positive! I'm more positive than Tony Robbins! Now if only I could be that shark-like.