trumpetting my peeps... words words words

It's yet another Canadian literary talent: Sheila Heti. Am halfway through her gem of a book, The Middle Stories. Each story is around 2-5 pages long and seething with wry-bleak insight that's candy coated in her Hans Christian Anderson style. A female Brautigan for our times.

Stories I liked:
The Girl who was Blind all the time
Story of a blind girl who starts a one woman parade and lives the 3 most interesting days of life, followed by the rest of her life.

The Favourite Monkey
My favourite. Man falls in love with monkey. Monkey leaves to tell mother. Lover despairs. Lover in love with the histrionics of love.

The Woman who lived in a Shoe
A woman who gets tired of living in a shoe. On the importance of difference.

Mermaid in the Jar
A girl who is cold to her complaining mermaid in the jar.

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While working, I have come across the incredible essays of Andrey Bely. Mystical, magical, his essay on words is nothing short of poetry.

The word connects the speechless, invisible world swarming in the subconscious depths of my individual consciousness with the speechless, senseless world swarming outside my individual ego. The word creates a new, third world: a world of sound symbols by means of which both the secrets of a world located outside me and those imprisoned in a world inside me come to light. . . . In the word and onlyin the word dio I recreate for myself what surrounds me from within and from without, for I am the word and only the word.
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The process of naming spatial and temporal phenomena with words is a process of invocation. Every word is a charm. By charming a given phenomenon I am in essence subjugating it. Thus connections between words, grammatical forms, and figures of speech are in essence charms.

-- Andrey Bely, "The Magic of Words."