hover II
… what happened was the very opposite of what I’d intended. The text delivered itself sans any breath whatsoever. No need to breathe was a health theme for me on that day as my lung lining was inexplicably inflamed and breathing in caused bad chest pain and I was existing on a great deal less oxygen and a fun fair ride constant hangover. So it was delightful to find no need to breathe whatsoever in the reading…!
I love how you can approach a book through the left door and it will boot you out the right door. Return to it via the boot and find yourself riding on the bonnet.
hover I
We are at the age where chunks of rock songs get repeatedly sung 54 times a day. It’s a wonderful age. The content, in a new context, is v fun. When my child was small he enjoyed the Steve Miller Band (paternal influence) and it was rather curious to see a 4 year old singing about the trouble he was having finding a job or working real hard the whole day through and struggling to manage his temperamental women and so on.
Now, however, we’re in the stalled what I call hover land. (not to be confused with hovercraft, which would actually move someplace). The mind catches certain chunks of songs by it seems only ONE band and they exude out of his pores day and night.
I get to concentrate on the words in those 2 or 3 sentences. In public they are accompanied by a charming left handed air guitar. Our living space can’t accommodate too much air guitar or you’ll end up with a fractured wrist. So in public the words become even more vivid!
Unconnected p’haps but I am back thinking about single line reading of texts. A kind of fixated reading of the single lines, that would be slow and careful and you can feel each word digest through the six stomachs. It struck me reading Beckett’s How it is last month. Then a gap. A Sunday reread with even more determination and I shall have to tell you what happened. First though, a phone call, it is my ma’s birthday!
H-a-p-p-y B-i-r-t-h-d-a-y H-a-n-n-a-h (delores, cecelia etc)
I woke up this morning (and it was a night on fever duty) with the reminder that there is no country in the world likely where its citizens feel entirely chuffed with the state of critical culture. If you think it’s shite, basically you’ve one option and that is to contribute to it. And if it’s still shite contribute more to it. Despair. Contribute. Despair. Contribute. Repeat.
On critical males bellyaching
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised, since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word? What of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic is, and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word, what of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.
The Acorn squash has fallen to the slug.Lifespan 24 hours. So too have Marie’s entire bean planting in plot beside me. Marie is a master gardener who knows what she’s doing. I am a hapless gardener whose essentially completely hopeless at gardening, but Marie seems happy to be beside me because I have good jokes. This demon slug has mowed his way through the known and the not known and filled his belly with every bean I planted. Marie has the compensation of an incredible pea wall that’s so abundant it may topple and crush that blighter of a slug.
I am now in fresh pursuit of a Sooke rocket plant (arugula) from the same gardener who gave me the incredible Sellafield strawberry plant. My major red mission in the clay domain. Rocket was in every garden I saw in Ireland. The phrase oh my God your rocket is doing so well was regularly invoked and we ate tons of it. Beans are so yesterday. Rocket is where it’s at. I bet Iggy Pop eats Rocket.