Read opening bits of Manfacturing Consent, found handy-dandy as ever on the side of the road. Side of road is providing amply these days. After I read the first few paras was left with this daunting sense of Manfacturing Content and what have I manufactured myself… far too much attention on male writers!
It is a source of national shame that Helen Potrebenko’s Sometimes They Sang is out of print and remains so. It should also be a source of major feminist agitation! An agitation that would heave it back onto the page! Someday I will be in position I hope to do something about it. This slim novel must be back in palms. It’s unique in it’s rural -urban considering and the woman is looking for a job. We live in a province with a turbulent labour history and where is it on the page? People are exasperated this very minute searching for jobs and they’ll search even harder in their fiction to find someone engaged in such a task.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is another writer whose work I should have written about.
Betty Lambert’s novel Crossings is another novel that should be revisited and I’d like to do an event that would bring some women together to revisit it and consider it today.
One of the challenges of writing such pieces is where to place them. It is becoming particularly woeful in Canada to find outlets.
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I am excited to be collaborating with a visual artist on a performance piece for the autumn. Today we had our first meeting to discuss ideas and it was an inspired and buzzing exchange.
Back on Cortazar. More specifically how much we all love Glenda (?) collection, which just came into my life.
For a long time I was interested in the moment, then I discovered the moment within the episode, the episode and Cortazar brings me back to the paragraph and that rolling or undulating sentence. And I exist on his paragraph for days sometimes. Lately without my glasses I misread one word in an early sentence of that story and it literally threw me into a whole new graveyard.
How to visit an aunt…
M: We’ll come in the afternoon.
H: It’s too rushed.
M: The only other alternative is you come and meet us.
H: I don’t go to x.
M: So if you don’t like to go to x then we’ll come in the afternoon otherwise we won’t see you.
H: I won’t interfere with your plans. Go ahead and do whatever you’ve planned.
M: I have planned to come and visit you.
H: It’s too rushed.
M: We’ll catch the train.
H: There are no trains. The trains are awful.
M: Can you find out what time the first train is?
H:The trains are awful.
Repeat exchange x 2. Then despair.
I have found it! Enfin a gym with no TV’s in it that resembles what I imagine a prison gym might look like. V 1980’s, bit grimey. Not too much equipment but the critical bar you can actually reach and swing on. The rooms are separate, as they should be, so if what’s happening in one is insufferable you can seek respite in another. Plus swimming pool in the same building gives the two forks in the one picnic exercise opportunity.
Gyms are one of the most banal gathering spots on the planet and there’s very little to say about them. Unlike swimming pools which are one of the more fascinating. Gym’s have one great prospect and it’s anthropological and finally I have found one where there’s something to watch. A curious amalgamation of men, some who show up to exercise in jeans and drift in and out. Today one fella was training another fella furiously. The fella being trained was waving an overweight dumbell over his head lying down and groaning like he was undergoing some kind of surgical mapping procedure. The self appointed trainer was riding him. The fella looked like he had seconds to live. I stared astonished at the unsychronised flailing and waited for him to expire and noticed he had armpits that were related to the fringe of a Shetland Pony or a very long haired domestic cat and began to wonder about his particular concoction of hormones. Eventually the poor man staggered to his feet, minutes passed and the younger dudes were all encircled a heated debate rose up. I became excited — nothing like a sweaty heated debate — it looked like it might erupt into a great Gladiator moment of males and dumb bells, but no the mad trainer (who was not a specimen of health it must be said) was laying into the young fellas about his poor puffing pony admonishing them. This man sweats more than any of you he was shouting. Look at him, he sweats more than all of you put together …. he roared. The poor pony fella looked a bit shaken by this new respect, but relieved to be out of the mad armlocks the fella had hitherto forced him to endure and he moved his head dazed like he was trying to figure out if he still had ears.
Later I noticed they retired to smoke in the car park. You couldn’t make it up. Would made a great Michael Jackson video for a song called … Respect is due for the pony who sweats.
Spotted today two vans. One read European Janitorial Services, the other British Trade along with plumbing services. Are people nationalistic when fixing pipes? My pipe can only be touched properly by the paws of an English man! And what exactly is a Euro janitorial service? How does one clean the Jax in a European manner? A memory of endless hole in the ground toilets across France en route to Lourdes when I was young flashed back to me. If it were possible to upload the smell of the average Iarranrod Eireann train toilet I’d offer to….
Maigret
God Monsieur Maigret had a marvellous time. He looked, he thought, he smoked. He looked again. He took his hat off. He announced. Everyone paid attention and he returned back to the beginning again and solved all problems of Paris in between. Plus he often got to be in the vicinity of staircases and boats. Best of all he regularly consulted himself in tete a tetes. Not to be confused with teats a teats.
I much prefer blogging to social medja. At least if you shout into a cave the sound carries. It’s an odd preoccupation the idea of “collecting” people who selectively converse. It’s like sitting at a massive picnic and having to walk among people dotted between the trees and none of them have faces that look at you.
And yet it is almost a great leak for if you half know someone or don’t know them you can acquire some pertinent info from their tweets or facebookery about their daily life and by the time you next set eyes on them a ton of ground work has been covered. So in essence it can speed up the process of “knowing”.
But how much can you really know if you do not take the time to invest in actual conversation rather than selective conversation and the odd jibber when the subject takes a person. And the least engaging subjects seem to take people to the top of the hill!