Quite an extraordinary fog event is taking place outside. It is the strongest fog event so far this Autumn and in my particular 2m of it it is infused with a profuse smell of skunk.
Hitherto referred to as the skunky fog event.
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The precise patch where the woman exclaimed on the leaves the other day was being packed inside a dozen banana boxes when I passed it the next day. I found that terribly organized collecting leaves into boxes. I wonder if they’re being shipped somewhere!
The young man scooping them up even had a dolly for the boxes.
A new apparatus! The High Bar! I had to hunt for new pasture as I am becoming disheartened at gymnastics. I spied a man on there with his hands hooked inside these cotton straps and asked the woman coaching him to teach me.
It’s quite odd. You place your hands in backwards through the cotton circles that hang on the bar and you essentially now cannot get your hands out of them. You’re locked in! You put your hands on top of some material as wide as your hand that covers the bar and you hang down and start swinging.
The swing that she taught me on the high bar has three different positions that aren’t entirely natural reflexes and depend on where the body is in relation to the bar. Thus on the back swing you pike, toes down, just as you are under the bar you arch and finally on the far side of the bar you swing your feet up to the ceiling. I was confusing the middle arch with the feet to the ceiling and doing a peculiar arching gesticulation that had a bit of a last temptation of Christ vibe about it.
What the coach taught me on that high bar is a drill. So eventually once you are strong enough you can swing around the bar with your arms extended in what’s I think a giant circle. I found this high bar v exhilarating. You’re swinging away trying to think about your feet and after a while you are so puffed out and then it’s a desperate scrabble to get your feet onto the sideplatform so you can get your wrists out of the straps that you’re fastened into!
A woman stopped me in the street today to exclaim on the leaves. She was very taken with how they covered the ground.
I’ve never noticed them before today and they’re so beautiful, she exclaimed.
Together we examined the trees and I pointed out how some of them had begun to turn, some were on the turn and some had turned.
She urged that the leaves might stay on the ground, that she didn’t want people to remove them and did I think people might do that. Then we agreed that if further rain was due they’d become slippy. Tree’d consensus and off we trotted. Me East, her West. Lively leaved.
I think this may be our most middling Autumnal day. The leaves are droopy with despair.
They remain on the turn. They’re at the halfway point now so you can look at a long line of them and see the beginning, middle, and end of the leaves colour changes. I had never noticed before how the timing can differ between them.
Vancouver 125 Legacy Books
Thank you so much to everyone who came to the Vancouver 125 Legacy Books panel that I was fortunate to participate in yesterday at the Vancouver International Writers Festival. Your warm support and great questions were appreciated as were the lively, thoughtful engaging contributions of my fellow panelists Jean Barman, Daniel Francis, Stephen Osborne and our epic host Michael Turner.
I was very uplifted to hear people excited and engaged in their local literature. We have much work to do ensemble ! I hope the City of Vancouver will continue this initiative each year in some form and also fund a civic historian as Jean Barman so wisely suggested we need. Kudos to Brad Cran who pioneered and organized this initiative in association with BC Publishers Assoc. during his tenure as Poet-Laureate.
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One of the novels I mentioned was Taxi! by Helen Potrebenko — the book is available from Lazarapress.ca for a mere $10 for anyone interested in reading it. I would also love to hear your comments on your reading experience and add them to our Have You Read Taxi!? blog which could use some invigorating content added to it. It’s been in a slight slumber of late.
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125 Legacy Books
Fiction
Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser, Arsenal Pulp Press
A Credit to Your Race by Truman Green, Anvil Press
Crossings by Betty Lambert, Arsenal Pulp Press
The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair, Ronsdale Press
Poetry
Day and Night by Dorothy Livesay, Oolichan Books
Anhaga by Jon Furberg, Smoking Lung/Arsenal Pulp Press
Non-fiction
A Hard Man to Beat by Howie White, Harbour Publishing.
Along the No. 20 Line: Reminiscences of the Vancouver Waterfront by Rolf Knight, New Star Books
Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End edited by Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter, Harbour Publishing
Who Killed Janet Smith? By Edward Starkins, Anvil Press