Stormin’ H

As promised, with patience, here is the storm from p33 of Bertrand Sinclair’s The Hidden Places. (1922)

“He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a lowering, slate-coloured mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation fo the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreadry, threantening night that fitted his mood. ”

The storm then gives way to more from our operatic male (common place in BC literature of this & later periods it seems)
“He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best that was in him, played the game faithfully., according to the rules. And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster.”

I must pause here and interrupt this programming to give you a 7 hour respite before we hear Hollister continue his aria into the verdant moss of his wife!

Impatience

I continue apace with Mr Parks prostate memoir (Teach Us to Sit Still) which is no longer the Lincoln Tunnel of urology. Indeed his pains are not the precise rattling trains he initially suspected they were, which is quite extraordinary given the operatic sounding scale of them. How and ever the body is perplexing and impatience apparently does you in. Hence I’ll have to now refer to the book as Mr Parks impatience memoir.

He has just turned left into a meditation retreat in Northern Italy and frankly reading about meditation retreats is as painful as sitting through them and I almost became derailed during the gong, lip, breath, cross legged nothingness until two people had a fight in the garden & took off and a blessed salve in the form of a reference to Robert Walser. We can carry on now Walser has been invoked.

Mrs Dalloway is currently on the embankment resting. She was interrupted by Bertrand W Sinclair’s hysterical prose from 1922. Tomorrow I shall unveil his description of a storm in False Creek in this novel I tripped upon today. Calm down laddie is where I’d file it. But since we are hovering on the theme of impatience. We shall be patient and anticipate telling Bertrand to calm it down there.

*

It’s 3 degrees outside, which seems v low. Tomorrow sunshine will return to us or so the headline promises. On va voir.

Où sont les femmes?

The VIDA stats are out. Naturlich they are grim. Here are the choices:

1) Boil your head and despair

2) Figure out who in The Atlantic precisely is so unable to locate more than 4 women reviewers & Harpers who can only locate 3 & have a whip round to get them a GPS.

or wonder whether readers should vote on the matter that this magazine refuses to afford women writers any critical authority on literature by, well, unsubscribing.

3) Remember that print is a dying medium, the stats are, I assume, based on print and pay no heed to the blogs this publications operate, where perhaps women prevail and are more prolific.

4) Question whether 3) is true and recognize my optimism about these publications blogs is likely blindingly delusional.

5) The obvious option is be ambitious, write more, but this is difficult to resolve in a year where I wrote a novel that was reviewed by NONE of those publications. (Obviously my novel had the company of a great deal of other novels in this regard).

6) Remind myself that the mainstream is the mainstream is the mainstream is the mainstream and unto the mainstream it shall remain. Also literary culture is conservative. But there’s plenty space outside the mainstream. Acres of space for all sorts of cross polination. It’s a matter of taking up some of it.

A moment of reckoning

Should I learn to speak International Art English (do I already speak it?) or make a sad trot back to my sad history of assaulting Egyptian Arabic in a classroom with a lovely teacher who burst out laughing at my hurdy gurdy pronounciations? Or continue my hola-ing at any Espanola, Mexicana or Coo-bana I meet? Yesterday three. And daily I meet and greet my 3 sets of Mexican neighbours with the same two phrases. Or up the robust effort to live en Francais? I can manage paragraphs en Francais and am fluent in Le Petit Nicolas. Or keep cracking away with my auditory lusting after mo chuid Gaeilge? Cad e do baruil h’Edel?

Or do the simple, most practical thing and learn to cook quinoa?

Pineapple Express busted

The Pineapple Express weather event had silenced me, but fear no more for the heat of the sun has rejoined us. We have a SUNNY break. That be a blast of sun that may disappear behind the trees (or condos) before I put a full stop on this sentence.

The promised rise in temperature on the third day of the Pineapple (Saturday) did not materialize and last night out at an event and a late night dinner I fair froze on exit. It was lepping cold! The previous evening my partner Jeremy and I were discussing the Pineapple and concluded the experience matched the sense of being “sub aquatic.”

*

Onward with Mr Tim Parks prostate memoir. What a complicated organ! What a disadvantage and complex matter it is to be embodied at times. So many organs, so many muscles, so much can go wrong. He has now moved into what may be the final four hundred metres lap/ furlong and is concluding his problems are myofascial pain. Am I right Mr P?

I was particularly taken with the line where the man running the mediation/relaxation class tells him Senor Parks I have never met a man so utterly unable to relax as you before. I’m a tad confused by his title, since sitting still may actually be what caused his problems to start with. But all shall be revealed during my final Ascot type reading of this text. Squeezed in between a stack of deadlines and pain complications.