Yesterday I listened to Jack Layton get buried in French en route to and in the car park of a supermarket.

A woman sang Rise Up. I sat in a hot car surrounded by passing shopping trolleys.

It was desperately sad. Still it felt appropriate to be upset and mourn the loss of him amid getting on with the practicalities of the day.

Also, I recommend getting buried in French. Somehow it’s more satisfying.

*

This week I also had cause to attend the Prostate Clinic. I learnt there are 10,000 patients at that VGH clinic.

I sat between 2 old men and felt pretty special. The place reminded me of Heathrow Airport.

I like my doctor very much and we both agreed it’s good I do not have a prostate.

I asked him how can we feel hopeful if Jack Layton who has full access to healthcare and appeared a fit, healthy man (to my eye) and excellent advocate for himself cannot survive it.

What hope is there for the man who smokes 40 a day and drinks a six pack and doesn’t go to the doctor? Says I.

They do die, he replied, you just don’t hear about them.

*

There are so many more variations in the rain than the sun.  What’s up with that? I have only noted 2 distinctive weather moments in the sun and they usually involve other weather elements like the breeze or they are introductory moments/ notes of immediacy. (It’s bright, it’s blue, it’s beautiful, it’s hot, it’s hotter). Sunshine has its own melancholic note. “It won’t last,” people often lament if you remark it’s a beautiful day.

The rain therefore would keep me employed longer as a weather ruminator.

*

Today shopping for clothes with six people to assist me, still I resent each time I have to take my tee shirt off. Unless it’s a hardware shop, I find shopping tedious indeed.. I think I will maintain my autistic approach to fashion by continuing to wear the uniform of the Black Bloc Anarchist brigade and 1960’s cardigans.

Except coats, shopping for coats is an inspired pursuit.

Coats, hammers, saws & fir wood. Et les livres.

There’s a live stream on CBC of members of the public in Toronto paying tribute to Jack Layton, who died this week.

It’s extraordinary, no words, 4 at a time they come forward stand by his casket they bow, pray, despair, the odd salute, comfort each other, very powerful stuff.

The plain people mourn the best, their body language and moments of stillness say so much.

Deeply moving to witness this.

The evenings latterly have a lively breeze that it’s worth leaving the window open beside your head to experience while you sleep. It is also a great breeze to read a book within the line of.

Also, worth experiencing are the bunch of sweet peas a friend picked for me in her garden — the waft of them is intoxicating. So sweet and high. Delilah.

There’s so much happening in the world with the weather at the moment, including a painful sounding typhoon heading for China with wind speeds of 240KM per hr.

The track of Hurricane Irene I have been watching in relation to the Maritimes. It’s looking a little better for them, but not so good for the mid-Atlantic area. There’s mutterings of New York being in the path, which is probably why the typhoon in Asia is getting no noticing whatsoever. I was trying to imagine how you’d evacuate New York. You wouldn’t I guess. You’d just face whatever turned up.

Today I was recalling the Sinclair C5 when I noticed Clive Sinclair being interviewed on the news. It was released in 1985 and at that time there was a terrific buzz about how it would eradicate cars or revolutionize personal transportation or some such prediction.

I looked up the machines to remind myself of what they looked like. I think in 1985 I would have been 15 and I probably learned about the C5 from the radio thus my imagination had created much of what I thought the C5 was. It was funny to see it donkeys years later in reverse.  Admirably people are still fixing them up and selling them here and there (around 300 – 400 English pounds they cost) but it was the two handlebars type things inside them that surprised me as in my mind I’d created or remembered a machine that was much lower to the ground and covered over the head of the passenger.

I had conflated it with a strange tunnelly looking recumbent bicycle that the bike shop owner drives around the corner from here. My son is quite obsessed with cars and a firm devotee of Top Gear, thus he constantly remarks on usual cars he spots and discusses the general attributes of various motors with me. (His father it should be noted is a visual artist who uses small motors in his work). My days are often interspersed with remarkings on cars and stories about them. I am looking forward to introducing him to the C5 because I think he’ll consider it mighty peculiar but will examine why it did not become widely adopted based on the mechanics.

I’ve also never quite understood why the milk float didn’t get developed further into a neat, compact vehicle for one, low to no emissions and for those not in a hurry, who might enjoy frequent stops and wearing warm hats.

I was fortunate this evening to enjoy a walk home from gymnastics. The baseball match was on at the stadium so I took a lift up with my males who attended the match with Gpa. It was such a lovely evening, darker than I expected, as Autumn (fall) approaches. I knitted, while I walked which is something I love to do from time to time.

My shawl or cardigan, whichever it turns out to be, is a rainbow wool that is growing and becoming heavy on the needles.

As I wandered home knitting, I was thinking about the thunderstorms forecast on the other side of the country. The night was so still here.

*

Beckett’s letters have succeeded in doing what nine yoga classes failed to do for me. I read them mainly to discover what books he was reading and to read about his walks. He was a great man for walking.

Waste Heritage

“A cordon of police was drawn up in front of the smashed-in store fronts keeping the crowds back. Here and there a moronic souvenir hunter dived for a scrap of broken glass or any relic that had been missed by the early morning clean-up job. The people milled solid for five blocks. There was a line of seven street cars where the service had got dislocated. They snailed along striking their gongs. The shrill of the gongs, the honking of horns and the jamming-in of gears kept up all the time as the traffic crawled along in first. It was one of those freak turn-outs. A woman leant from a car yelling and waving a red flag. No one paid any attention to her. That was the kind of thing that was in the air all over town. Hysteria. Mob hysteria. All on account of a few hundred jobless evicted from a three weeks-old-sit-down.

The kinds of things people did that day were the kind they do in a market panic or just after war has been declared. …”

From Waste Heritage by Irene Baird (first published in 1939, this edition Univ of Ottawa Press 2007. Edited by Colin Hill)

Remarking

I note in Beckett’s Letters (Cambridge Univ Press) a remark by one Michael Roberts, an editor of poetry anthologies and an English writer, in a critique of Beckett’s Echo’s Bones sent to George Reavey

“Who is, or will be, his audience?” and later ” … what is the advantage of reading him?”

The answer, I can confirm, continues to have its own lengthy echo.

I am currently rereading Irene Baird’s 1939 BC novel Waste Heritage and marvelling at it all over again.

Such a resonant book that depicts ordinary people within its vibrant prose.  I love how its specifics resonate with several places in the world during the past month. The universality of the ordinary, more writers should invest in it and cross pollinate that ordinary into more extraordinary or unusual literary forms. Baird is quite conservative in her style and form — a deliberate aesthetic choice I suspect at that time given everything else that was happening in literature — however now we need to be excited by what the novel can become rather than what we expect or already know of it.

Video gamers describe LAG when they’re playing and there’s a delay to some extent, literature too lags.

Three calls

After a strange and discombobulating day it was a beautiful evening. I went out for a short lap and called to a neighbour on spec. I was offered the lend of a book called Bataille’s Peak, which I gladly accepted and we traded news.

The grey and relentless day gave way to a peaceful night and right now there’s a bird streaking about out there with three long calls.  Enough, enough, enough, he or she seems to say.

That sort of a day, widely felt I don’t doubt.