Charlie LeDuff, particularly interested in his words about death, “I will see you through to the end” and the bit were he describes Michigan as the centre of the world: collapse of the empire. Plus I have that thin wrist mania.
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/vbs-meets/charlie-leduff
Charlie’s the bollix. Read his work book. Fine.
Jack MacGowan reading from Beckett’s Texts for nothing
Best accompanied by a live violin is playing something contrasting in your other ear.
abouts
An article in the G&M yesterday began with a line, In Vancouver these days, it’s all about winning….
My first reaction was in Vancouver these days it’s all about getting out of the way and queueing for pointless exploits. Then I began to reduce the sentence down til I had Vancouver is all about.
Vancouver is all about.
Vancouver is all about
Something round and round the garden about it.
This statement is akin to the wonder of whether there’s life on Mars.
Millions of abouts. Everytime someone blinks another “about”.
City of dreadful joy
My Olympic survival strategy by going underground to literature (and sometimes overground with said book in hand) is proving rewarding beyond what I had imagined initially it might take to deflect the elbow from this invasive behemoth. Much as I have been out and observing periodically, I’ve also enjoyed the deep peace of withdrawing and have alighted on the perfect text to contain my fermentation.
D.M. Fraser Ignorant Armies has provided rich enhancement to my ongoing preoccupation: the episodic. It’s wonderfully fractured. Yet his sentences are long and 40 strength. I have no desire for the fragments to add up in anyway. I am interested in the idea of them all being individuals or neighbours like a long line of bricks. It’s also interesting to see what happens when he elongates to longer fiction. His shorter fiction is trap tight. Pnematically drilled into itself. And in his longer fiction sentences are plank like, there’s a carpentry to his construction. Planks that manage to seesaw. Ignorant Armies was published posthomously, compiled from Fraser’s papers. So there is something of a randomness to its gathering up. The process is detailed in the back of the book and the descriptions of what was discovered are delightful.
I also read Ernest Hemmingway’s Cross Country Snow to the Small Man this evening, he, being compelled by the snow, and confident on his skis. I was delighted with how well it worked. A way to place some of the things happening outside the window in another spot that does not involve multinational corporations telling us all what to think. Lovely transitions in that story. And full of the technicals, which being likely one of the few people in history of ski-ing who qualified for a refund due to an indisputable incompatibility with every aspect of it, I am unable to ever provide. His ski-ing prowess and dippy swervy nervy whatever it looks like, are the results of his devoted father.
Outside the 11pm nightly firework rumble has begun. It has taken 9 nights for my heart rate to accept we are not under attack from cannonballs. That this is apparently desirous for someone, somewhere, with their eyes glued upwards, nose drenched by the rain.
RTE’s Frontline programme yesterday led on a discussion among young Irish people on high rates of unemployment they currently face. It was interesting how the discussion split into “roll up your sleeves and buck up” from another generation. It was suggested they were molly coddled with high expectations. What wasn’t acknowledged was that they grew up in a boom time. They also were saddled with the associated expenses of that time, some with extortionate mortgages (and concurrent negative equity) and so on. How will this play out? Will it result in another eighties exodus? (which has already begun) Or will that generation stay put and affect change? Previously the expectation was to have to leave, but this generation didn’t grow up with that, so in essence this is also the first generation who can articulate on the alternative.
I was intrigued by the “we went through it” and “you’ve had it easy” since it could be argued that older generations were trained for exit and send money home. This generation have been trained or conditioned toward success and stay put. There’s a pervasive sense of entitlement (in any other country I think it would be considered average confidence…) that irks the older generation and divides them ever further. It’s interesting that in the same sentences NAMA is not subject to the same short shrift. I s’ppose it’s easier condemn unemployed young folk than those who made a bollix of things, ie. the banks, property developers etc.
There was one feisty fellow at the front who summed things up along the lines of everything being sunk into over inflated real estate and hotels and now what are we left with. It’s not the only place in the world with over inflated property leading a boom — I am curious to see whether the same may play out in Vancouver, where the property bubble has yet to burst.
Johnny Giraardi came into town singing
“That’s how I choose to remember it; that’s how it ought to have been. I’ve never understood how people know where and when to begin their stories, or end them –how the imagination, that untrustworthy instrument can identify and preserve, for some dubious eternity, the precise instant after which , as vulgar romancers say, nothing could be the same again.”
Ignorant Armies: prelude and theme. D.M. Fraser (Pulp Press 1990)
Paul Robeson radio drama
Been waiting for this programme to go live because I want to listen to it and today’s the day. Here’s a link to I‘m Still The Same Paul a BBC radio drama about mysterious events surrounding Paul Robeson’s suicide bid in Moscow in 1961. Paul Robeson was a singer and political activist.
Here’s another link:
Paul Robeson in Canada: A Border Story about his peace arch concerts.
Rhotic 22
Ding,
Gabh mo leithscéal, caill mé ort. Is scéal bocht é ansin i Vancouver leis na Cluichí Oilimpeacha.
Daoine i ngach áit, fiú faoi do armpit má thógann tú do lámh, áiteanna faoi do teanga, idir do chluas, gan fear ná bean ba chóir go mbeadh.
Ceap mė ar Grá. Sin sceal Grá ach nil Pumps ansin anois. Is maith lei sneachta … an Gra no? Or is ach bean bád í?
Tá mé gan focail seo oíche.