My son is a stunning pie baker! This past week he baked two strawberry ones. Yesterday, en route to our dinner I carried one of them and enjoyed all the warm smiles that land when you carry a fresh cooked pie. The pie-baker was travelling by scooter, with his podcast in his ears.

Here is a link to the sceal of the pie once it hit the table.

His pie has been immortalized , precisely as it deserves. Bravo mon cher!

Rereading the Riot Act I

               Rereading the Riot Act I. A public action I curated during my Unit/Pitt Residency. At Woodwards, intervention in front of Stan Douglas mural Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971. Two readings by Michael Barnholden & Penny Goldsmith (Walking Slow Helen Potrebenko) & 3 readings of the Riot Act, April 23, 2011.  The second event, a Performance Art Cabaret, at The Waldorf took place the same night as the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. A publication will appear in Autumn for this project, published by Publication Studio.

Activity of sound/ soniferous sculpture

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y&w=425&h=240]

A beautiful day in the city, too beautiful to be stuck indoors editing, but there you have it. Aside from a quick foray to the strawberry patch, this head is down working away.

I am watching the evacuation situation in the Peace River region with interest and a degree of alarm — where’s all this rain coming from?

It fascinates me how the meteorology of this vast province can vary so incredibly. This isn’t the case in Ireland where if it’s raining in Mayo, it’s usually raining in Dublin, Sligo and uberalles.

Yesterday en route to a lovely treat of a dinner (Thanks L, P, U x) I was thinking as we walked past the gardens, how each tells its own story in a way that the houses (in these particular spots do not). In the gardens we also see so much progress and contrast. One held a wire-installation/contraption and had a sign saying it was a micro rope garden. Intriguement! A few houses over, a terrifically ugly gravel and brick combo double yet divided staircase was being built in a very jumbled arrangement. The most dominant change afoot is the number of houses that are switching lawn to vegetable boxes! Yes! Lawn is such a pointless carpet and water drain.

There was one detail on one of the houses that made me smile. An upstairs front door facing South right above the downstairs front door. I tried to tell if at one time it had a staircase or entrance up to it, but there was no sign of it. Maybe just an eccentric detail. Or a householder who had skybound ambition.

I realized as we walked how much I miss the row upon row of red brick houses and chimney pots that line my memory. But I never tire of the gardens and their varieties here. You can sometimes even see particular cultural traits within them. (The employment of spent brooms and mop handles nests with an affection for bulbs). One of the great losses in our neighbourhood was when three brothers sold their house and it’s eccentric garden, which had bathtubs, frying pans embedded in it and all kinds of “hatchy” looking touches. Now it’s razed and risen into another ostentatious looking lottery house with an overindulgence in gravel instead in the garden.

I can’t find the bag of potatoes I bought earlier at the shop. Please Retweet.

Yesterday evening I found a new range of mountains in the West of the city.

I am geographically dyslexic and can never find the mountains people insist are North.

For some reason yesterday they were West. How v odd. Enjoyably odd when whole mountain ranges move and accommodate me this way….

On Saltspring Island I managed to get superbly lost by deciding a road was misnamed and ploughed up several drives to farms looking for the farm I was staying at. I am sure the folks living in these spots must have been bemused at this short, hardy legged creature heading up their drives in her clogs. Not least since I went up one drive, twice, by accident.  Eventually I went down a drive and a man told me how to find my way home.

Was pleased to see a two part review in the New York Review of Books by Marcia Angell published in two issues of the journal. I like the expansion on ideas this double approach affords the writer and provides to the reader and you have time to consider inbetween or if you’re late to the read can zip straight into the second part.

In it (part one here and part two here) Ms Angell considers several recent titles that question the efficacy of psychiatric drugs, the frenzy with which they’re prescribed, the billowing DSM, the relationship between the pscychiatry and Big Pharma and more.

I’d be curious to hear Ms Angell’s position on the denial of surgery to smokers until they cease smoking in Sweden.

I was particularly intrigued by the debunking of chemical imbalance as the cause of depression and the shift to isolating and treating the brain since the 1970’s.

Insomnia offers opportunity to further convene with Monsanto commas in one’s text.

And the conversations that take place under the window

that are eventually drowned out by sirens.

I do not entirely comprehend why male writers output such jibbering rubbish in the midst of a woman’s body? Is there some kind of mental deficiency that takes over when invoking the female form?

Yesterday I had a page 160 or page 161 moment with Alberto Moravia and his Boredom, to which I have now returned to for a third attempted summit. He has redeemed himself mildly with an exchange about dying in the midst of a bathroom sink on p173, but this man’s Boredom is becoming tedious where it previously fascinated. Somehow he is too easily satisfied in his prose, Moravia that is, in what he decided for it and where else it might have peaked (piqued). I’m finding this man Dino’s obsessive neurosis and  jealousy combined with increasingly cardboard Cecelia (afforded at this point about as much complexity as a bunny with an itchy foot)  … well wearying. Somehow I want the unexpected and p’haps this is not the literary land in which to find it.

*

11.11 in the pm.

2 mispossessed apostrophes.

They must have flown in from the neighbouring field.

Neverending. GM commas and crowd-sourced punctuation that prevail in the turbines..

Seriously? Refusing to operate on smokers?! Doesn’t this contravene the basics ethics of medicine/providing medical care? (see debate here ) I wonder how far this could be taken refusing heart surgery to the (genetic) cardiac patient who’s deemed not to exercise enough, the bowel patient who does not eat sufficient whole grains, the diabetic who ingests a chocolate mousse and what are the implications of social class and poverty in chronic smokers? Will a similar stand be taken to eradicate the social stress that, for some, may give rise to smoking and dependence on smoking?

“…Other countries have gone further. Bhutan has completely outlawed smoking and Finland hopes to follow suit by 2040.

Swedish surgeons now refuse to operate on smokers until they give up, because of the deleterious effect smoking has on the healing process, Gudnason added….”