Rereading the Riot Act & On: Top Canadian art book for fall

This was a bit of a thrill. Rereading the Riot Act & On the book I, in collaboration with Jeremy Isao Speier, published with Publication Studio Vancouver on Workers Day was selected by  Blouin Art Info as a top 6 Canadian art book this fall. 

What was great about this mention is it reminded me of our public actions during the project and of that night, the night we, (Leannej, Carol Sawyer, Lori Weidenhammer, My Name is Scot, Jeremy Isao Speier) reread the riot act at our performance art cabaret as the Riot Act was being read. You couldn’t make this up! And yet, strangely or not so strangely, the media was uninterested in the fact our event took place the same night of the Stanley Cup Riot. I did write a blog for the LRB who were interested.

It also reminded me of the months I spent going through archives and newspapers learning about the labour history events in 1935.

It was also amazing because approximately 5 people will have opened this book.

I want to do more interrogations into local labour history. Working class history seems to be somewhat erased, like many histories.

Thank you Blouin Art Info and to the mysterious writer/reader/critic who opened and read our paste-up book and the others on the list including Coach House one about Will Munro, “Frank Shebageget” from Univ of Winnipeg, “In Different Situations Different Behavior Will Produce Different Results: A Chapbook”  from Paper Pusher & two more.

(Just when you think no-one is reading … the miracle of a single reader)

Part 2: Footstep storm

Subsequent to the Horse Hoof Weather Event yesterday I was forced to declare the promised wind speeds a bust. We declared them a bust at 8.04pm. There were closer to 33 km/h than 90 km/h and we were not ungrateful for that. In anticipation of the big 9-0 I took my hoofs down to the community garden and chopped down all the forest-high fennel that would not have survived one gust at that speed. Alfie Cyril and his brother Darwin (cochons d’Inde/guinea pigs/cavy creatures) upstairs think it’s Christmas since they received an enormous amount of fennel for supper.  The garden was flooded and this was before the latter part of the storm.

Today a second system is scheduled to arrive with 100km/h winds. We can estimate they’ll be closer to 35 km/h based on yesterday. However this is the trouble with us, we then get battered by unsuspecting storm as we did back in 2006. I have revised this weather event to a more appropriate name than Horse Hoof, she’s now Footstep Weather Event. Will she, won’t she? The hesitant boxer?

Yesterday was a wonderful collective effort on the weather watching front, we had reports from Victoria and Nanaimo that gave us wind of what was on the way. I think the federal government should pop me in an out of commission lighthouse and I’ll podcast poetic interpretations on the weather to the nation. I would though want a postal service, which may not suit them.

What’s your weather doing?

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I have several reviews from the UK of Malarky to catch up on.  Am behind. But ahead of the storm! And the country always relies on its novelists and poets in the matter of weather. We have your back. (and ears)

Breaking news: Horse Hoof storm happening

We are having our first megawatty storm of the season. I have christened her the Horse Hoof weather event and have my provincial weather watchers reporting in on Facebook. (Our lovely Victoria-based friend Anu is ahead of us in the storm, so she tells us what is on the way) Horse Hoof just landed the most extraordinary rain: gutters filled and gutters spilled like I’ve never seen them. The sound was most percussive and final 100 yard furlong-esque.

At 6am she, Horse Hoof, was proffering only splashy asphalt rain and the very very odd single gust of wind.

Winds of 90 kph are promised this afternoon and evening. I will keep watching.

You can never say enough about the weather, says I. Happy Saturday to you all.

Add your weather reports in the comments sections.

Series of films on photos and fiction

Fascinating series of short films via the Irish Times which explore the cross-disciplinary blending of image and fiction.

More to come on this, just popping the link here. I particularly appreciated the first one Bruges La Morte

Marine cloud cover baby!

We have had two solid days of solid sunshine! It’s like a collective menopause. This is unusually warm for September. It’s very strange with the nights drawing in much earlier — darkness — and to concurrently have this heat.

Today I was alerted by a friend to “fog” to the West, which turned out, on inquiry, to be Marine Cloud Cover caused by fog and stratus that travelled up from California. (Thanks Johanna Wagstaffe CBC weather genius for educating me on this).

Pretty soon I am off on the road again to a few festivals, where the climate is bound to be much colder. I am curious to see whether this warm spell endures. Will we as usual need to turn the heat on in October?

What is happening with your weather? Are you also having a warm patch ? Report in the comments.

I’m off to find a humidifier.

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I was reading A Far Cry From Kensington in my Sparkist revisit. Muriel Spark reminds me of Beryl Bainbridge in her depiction of post-war Britain. I have to say I have cried off A Far Cry … because I didn’t understand why she took the narrative into publishing, publishing people, instead of staying with Wanda, the Polish seamstress. (*I did find her who gets a job part salient) However I find much to contemplate in her early depiction of Wanda and Millie. There’s something timeless about it. The struggle, landing up in a country, trying to find work, struggling, inventing and settling on work that may be far from what you did back home, but a survival nonetheless. This applies less to Wanda and more to some of the people I met on my recent trip to England and knew during my many years living there. Wanda has endured because Spark imbued her with anxiety and humility rather than just being a talking head to serve a plot line or a larger theme. My next stop on the Spark shelf will be The Comforters.

On the other line: I am reading Chris Kraus Summer of Hate. There’s an excellent paragraph where she sums up who reads her books (and perhaps acknowledges the dilutionists she has also spawned). I am glad to have read the book for that paragraph, however I may also be churning to a stop with it. I can’t get beyond the fact that Michele Bernstein was doing something similar 50 years ago and she was doing it in a more engaging literary manner. The prose in Summer of Hate is a tad leaden and plunky. Even though her meta-real estate dabbling is intriguing. Kraus is funny in a clipped way which I appreciate. For now we go on, mostly for the sake of thinking about the leaden line both on the page and the continuum of the line she’s treading. I want to consider how or whether any solid aesthetic has emerged since Bernstein with this work. (Bernstein’s second novel has only just been translated to English) I waver on whether it’s a “can’t be arsed” school of transcription we’ve come to now or has some anchor that I am swimming blindly past in my reading.

What matters is the thinking, more so than the conclusion, since conclusions can change and evolve.

Subsequent storm: The 1100

Last week we had a 6.2 earthquake off the coast of Bella Bella I believe it was. Several aftershocks. I was having my rib put back in because it had popped out again, hence I was getting relocated and did not have my usual earthquake nostrils available. They were facedown on the table.

The weather event known henceforth as The 1100.

On Thursday (was it?) there were 1100 lightning strikes in Vancouver. 5700 people lost power. That number may have been much higher. I boiled the kettle at 5700 and then drank tea frantically. It was splendid. Except we had to go to the dentist in the early part of it as my boy had to have two teeth pulled.

The two teeth had been growing in a direct East and a direct West out of the side of his gums. He had the mouth of Equine confusion. I’m v surprised he never complained since biting the inside of one’s mouth is common enough without having directly piercing the sides.

I think there was about 72 lightning strikes before the teeth left the gums. We witnessed the 1028 others either driving or inside the apt windows. I will say that the tea frantically drunk was that cup of tea, you know the one I’ve mentioned. That cup of tea with the particular taste that an unimpeded tongue chases.

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In honour of their being no limits or qualifications required, I am going to read Padgett Powell’s novel written in nothing but questions as soon as I can lay my pinks upon it.

I continue to find Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard remarkable and have decided to write on it in some way, shape or space whether it be here or there. I await Point and Line.

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Today on the radio the word unedifying was used 4 times by the same woman. Or I heard the same soundbite 4 times? Either way a barometer of the current state of things?

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Warm review for Malarky in The Guardian

Thanks to The Guardian for reviewing Malarky. Given how tight space is for reviews these days I am very grateful. Thank you v much to

Marina Lewycka who “greatly enjoyed this novel, and I admire Schofield’s ability to pull off something so difficult with charm and brio.”

Mrs Dalloway insulates

For anyone who failed to note it, there is a hot water bottle mentioned in Mrs Dalloway.

Gracias Aira

Gracias Cesar Aira for a solid few hours lepping along through The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira (New Directions) last night. Aira is the ultimate racehorse of a writer, nose forward, except he refuses to capitulate to the fences and ploughs into the watery troughs in enlightening ways. Were he an actual racehorse he’d be standing on said nose, wagon wheeling his legs and doing these kinds of equine circus tricks in a mash up of show jumping and racing on a dirt track road in front of a dentist’s office.

The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira seemed in its subtext to be a clinical depiction of the struggle to create narrative but told obviously through the fictional struggle to fix medical maladies.

On the last page, Aira (scribbler not fictional Dr) caved in and took the dia-morphine (sp?). This was a pity. He merely put the cap on the bottle, when all the way along it was a bottle of a book that called for no cap. And he was so intent on the unexpected. But perhaps that choice speaks to bailing out on miracles. Perhaps it is legitimate to bail out on miracles? More advisable to bail in on narrative in my opinion. I’ll be bailing in with Cesar Aira and will next read his Portrait of a Landscape Painter when I can get my fingertips on it.

Also, I have not encountered a miracle healer since Brian Friel’s play The Faith Healer which I saw at the Royal Court in London one rainy night so many, many years ago. It was the theatre that often staged Carol Churchill’s (why do I think I’ve spelt her first name wrong it needs a y in it I think?) and the remarkable one woman show by Emily Woof (What happened to Emily ?) who first introduced me to cross genre-blending with music, trapeze, literature and theatre. Back to The Faith Healer … Grace was played by Sinead Cusack  who bailed so far into that role, I can still see her face in it.