God save us … The Globe & Mail now have a feature called “send us a picture of the book you’re reading”, along with “where are you reading?”. Every time another step away from any actual reading! The number of reviews has been reduced since the section was collapsed. Engaging features chopped and gone. And the belly expands with old puff. Like an interview with Martin Amis. Has the world any need of such a thing? This one at least featured a cat, with a considerable amount of other old guff. His teeth are no longer compensation for it.

LRB: On thanatophobia and Vancouver

My first blog contribution to the London Review of Books Blog can be read here:

Things to Do in Vancouver When You’re Dead

A Saturday morning, the first in my 40th year, I’m at the Mountain View Cemetery for ‘The Final Disposition Forum: De-Mystifying Death, Funerals, Cemeteries and Ceremonies’. I’ve come to face my fear of being buried in Vancouver, where I’ve lived for the past decade. I arrive late, the film A Family Undertaking has already started. On screen a set of cold-looking turned-out feet. The acoustics are terrible. But the feet are a good set, the ubiquitous final set. I am reassured, when my moment comes, I too will have a set of absolutely dead feet.

Cortazar’s Hopscotch has to return to the library. This is a problem for the two of us. His Hopscotch is/was to become my scotch hop. My hopping has been scotched by the new/old couches and the fine tuners on the cello and the violin end biteen that threatened to break and the hip that didn’t break

and
and
and

A 1,3,7,5,9er.

BC Provincial Govt in its greatest hour has cut funding to children’s dental check ups and increased funding to treatment. So rather than prevent kids needing dental work with twice yearly checkups they are now going to pay for the cavities and root canals induced by the lack of check up and cleaning. Who exactly do these people consult when they come up with such mind boondadoodle ideas?

This impacts most the children who live in poverty, as their diets affect their dental health. It’s curious how little word and complaint there’s been about it. One piece in the Globe quoting the Strathcona Clinic.

It’s all very stupid because if you could actually get the children into the chair, which it appeared under that program you could … that in itself was a great achievement.

More profundity from hockey commentator — an auditory world I intermittently inhabit with my males — this time “the promised land” and I had “faith” invoked about whom? Indeed, yes, the fallen saviour Roberto Luongo.

I really miss that late night show from years back Art (?) who had all the alien/werewolf conspirators on. He was thrilling in comparison.

The quantity of these uninhabited ghost estates (I had noted them in rural Ireland gouging into the land and tacking themselves onto villages) and the matter that the bulldozer may now visit them … Jeeeesus. Squint left, squint right — how’d we end up here again? Really wish they’d uploaded the RTE documentary on this last night. Hearing about it, and grabbing bits of it here and there. Just plain batty. And yet we saw it. It was happening everywhere you looked. And yet? And yet if NAMA owns them, then they belong to the tax payer and should be streamlined into social housing projects. The strange thing about them was you’d look at them twice and wonder who’d want to live in them, but you’d never contemplate there wouldn’t be anyone to live in them.

I remember the original stab at affordable housing during the boom years produced only completely unaffordable housing.

Not so useful

The manner in which hockey commentators on radio 1040 resemble evangelical orators, except the quotes include spectacular insights such as … this is a team sport and other majowling nothingness. In hoover terms they are the bagless variety. Dust and apple pips whipping around in a cylinder.

Useful 0001

Spotted something v useful today: a set of three brushes to clean the spout of the teapot and teakettle (what is a tea kettle exactly?)

I come from a lineage of useful and physically able women. Farmers and fixers and get up on the scaffolding and pick up a hammer and chase a goat and bang a stake.   I often wish I could be more useful. I have the ambition to be useful. I can even imagine scenes where I am useful. I have dreams about fixing cars, and strangely flying like Superman (not a necessary trait for being useful). I constantly stop to admire people digging holes and inquire about what they are doing and ask again the next day and the next til the hole and digger is gone. And yet it never fully translates (yet?) into being useful or as useful as I aspire. I lack the logic to carry out the steps towards the useful task, so will randomly batter and fling away at stuff to an unsatisfactory outcome.

But the victory is tall and sweet when it occasionally adds up, like it did with the toilet plumbing dilemma at the weekend. Fixed! I suppose it is legit and useful to go around admiring useful people and people busy being useful are glad of a chat about how much use they are being.

Yesterday when I spent the evening with the new born boyo I was reminded of high octane human need and dependency. I was wondering how you could possibly begin to describe this “fight” that a baby makes to have his/her needs met religiously in these early weeks to someone who hasn’t lived it and hasn’t been so placed. I concluded it’s not possible to describe.  It could be glimpsed like frames in a slowed animation here and there, but unless you were present fulltime in that situation the scale of what it is ungraspable.

The mouth, the mouth, (little wonder Beckett gave it a stage of its own) Except it’s gulping at the air. Everything is driven by the mouth.

Perhaps it’s the same on exit. The mouth shuts down. I was fascinated to learn that the loss of appetite and thirst in a near death decline, rather than being entirely negative, can infact promote feelings of wellbeing in the palliative care patient. And how one role of a person present is to provide comfort to the mouth by keeping it moist. The same might be said of decline, that unless it is born witness to day after day, hour after hour, these minute, yet intensely significant moments cannot be described or understood or accumulated.