Twice now I’ve sat down to read something from Isak Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales
, and twice when pawing through for a good story, I’ve ended up spending hours re-reading the stories in here, to the point of distracted negligence, but to the point of great self-satisfaction nevertheless.

One day I’ll just relent and read them all to you, but that’d be a big project, and if you’re anything like me, you’re already running on the fumes of big projects. …

Boy, I sure am all kinds of flushed with the Scandinavs these days. Maybe it’s my compassion for others plying their way through long cold winters, or maybe it’s my assertion that gravlaks is a flawless food, or maybe it’s just what they’re willing to pay for a beer is a most resonant sacrifice. Or maybe they’re just loaded with great writers. But if you had to lay a fresh twenty on what countries would sit atop Miette’s Trove of Literary Masters (and god knows you should let me in on such a bet were you to place one) you’d win big by betting all on Nordic.

So it’s summer right now, if you’re with me hemispherically. Although if you were to zoom in a little closer you’d see that in some places, we’re tying up that chapter, it’s cooling down, and that means it’s time to read you some Tove Jansson.
Now, I was going to read you something [...]

We all have those odd things that happen to us more often than we might owe to nature or coincidence. Some people find themselves on their fourth marriage to a fourth guy named Mario*; it happens. For me, that thing is the ceilings. In my apartments. That seem to have a difficult time staying above my head.

Nothing says Eve of The Second Coming of Christ like a longish existential short story by a forgotten Swedish Nobel winner (repeat: not nepotism) about a delusional old urchin who lives and preaches as the saviour of man.

I don’t know where you can find this in print– Jesus knows, I’ll bet. I have it in a tattered dimestore paperback anthology called The Existential Mind, Documents and Fictions,