Fog

continues to be fantastic. I feel like we are living in a lighthouse. I hope it keeps up each year and becomes a tradition. I wonder about the history of fog in the city. Perhaps someone can enlighten me in the comments?

Malarky WINS 2013 Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction: I buy chapstick

I went for a walk up a mountain in Banff with a very invigorating conversationalist Xiaolu Guo, when I came back down the mountain I learned I had WON the 2013 Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction. At high altitude and after eating 7 pieces of lamb this was rather delicious news to hear on a phone message in my left ear. I went to buy a chapstick to celebrate. Life at high altitude improved on account of both these scores. (I wonder how arctic wanderers deal with their dry lips)

Today the news was made public:

Click here to read the announcement. 

I look forward to meeting the other writers during the December podcast event. Thank you America. Thank you Late Night Library. Thank you Leslie Jamison. And now to the weather…

The weather in Banff was terrific. Blazing sun with only the hint of nippy cold at night. I came home to fantastic fog. Trees are no longer on the turn, they are reddened. Fog has its own distinct smell which out at the airport was a tad petrol-y.

Planes were troubled by the fog. Especially hard for them to leave Vancouver Island it appeared.

An Alberta report will be forthcoming. It was a great trip. Edmonton did not disappoint. I had some remarkable conversations with some 40 strength minds. All my prejudices about mathematicians were challenged as I travelled with one on a bus for two hours today who educated me on Representation Theory.

Phailin

Terrible weather news from India with the onslaught of  Cyclone Phailin. Crawford Kilian (here is his bird flu blog), my favourite person on Twitter, has done an exemplary job blogging the arrival of Phailin and updating the implications of this wicked storm. (click on his Phailin tag for other stories on the storm)

Half a million people are displaced, The Guardian says. 

The wind speeds were 235KM p/hr. God help everyone trying to shelter from this storm.

Here we go Edmonton! Wordfest! Banff!

Finally I shall be able to unveil my parka! The parka I purchased 2 years ago in anticipation of an invitation to read in Edmonton, which never arrived until now. Thanks to St Albert STARfest and Wordfest I am able to put my two clogs down in Tony Cashman land and convene with the former home of the Toonerville Trolley.

Fear not if the above makes no sense, it was a historical transit tram in the city of Edmonton that I read about in a lovely book I found on the side of the road called Edmonton’s Best Stories. I am planning to record an extract from the story, so will link to it when I find time to make a youtube rendition.

Here are a few media articles anticipating the festival and a DEADLY column written by author & columnist Michael Hingston (who took time out launching his own book to come and chat to me — gracias). This is the column where I propose the relocation of the capital city of Canada. In the same conversation I also proposed a move to subsidized parkas, to go along with my idea of 24 hours swimming pools for the sake of non swimmers and insomniacs.

First The Edmonton Journal Column is here

The St Albert Gazette piece featuring a number of festival writers and a summary of events is here

*

Last night I went to Jordan Abel’s launch for his poetry collection The Place of Scraps (Talon Books) at the Western Front. A poet prior to him nearly burst my ear drum but I had read with Jordan on Monday and was dead curious and engaged by his work. If you have the chance to see Jordan read from his work, do! He creates a fascinating soundscape that’s on a loop or is a loop. He loops in and out of his loops. Whatever the specifics may be the overall is most distinctive. He described his practice involving erasure poetry: reduction or removal or rearranging of a found text. I like the notion of rearranging the found or recycling it. Between this and his loops — there’s a strong sense of what was, what is and what can be, which I’m always partial to against say the single present moment that so much of contemporary publishing insists upon.

*

The weather report begins with the news they lopped the top of the tree outside my window. It certainly let the light in, but they only recently brutalized the poor tree in August, so I am not sure what this new schedule of barber up a ladder is about. This morning gave us a blast of bright blue. The leaves are now yellow to red to mild brown in some cases. They are on the turn but not completely bald yet. Weather scandal is presently in a lull.

Lambros/bit of beryl: Anne Carson

I am quacking out a bit of beryl … hamming up on the Greek word for brilliance (but shall spare you the few clicks of likely inaccurate Old Armenian) to introduce this profile of Anne Carson.

On a Carnival side note Anne was noted as wearing an impressive checkered shirt at her LRB Bookshop reading which gave her the air of having rode up on horseback to it. She has style on the page, off the page and around the side of the page. (In Red Doc her latest book she’s styling au centre of the page)

We should be encouraging our daughters and sons to grow up and become Anne Carson, rather than aspiring to freeze their nips off on X-Factor. (Sinead O’Conner gave a great soliloquy on the Late, Late Show last week in which she described the boyos behind the table of such shows as the murderers of music.)

But to Anne. She raises me up. She could raise the Titanic up. Lookit here:

“we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”

Lookit there:

“I’m really trying to make people’s minds move, you know, which is not something they’re naturally inclined to do,” she told me. “We have a kind of inertia, sitting and listening. But it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before. That happens partly because the material is mysterious or unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to word in a sentence. And it’s that that I’m more interested in doing, generally, than mystifying by having unexpected content or bizarre forms. It’s more like: Given whatever material we’re going to talk about, and we all know what it is, how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before, mentally? That seems like the most exciting thing to do with your head. I think it’s a weakness to fall back into merely mystifying the audience, which anybody can do. You know, throw in a bit of Hegel. Who knows what that means? But to actually take a piece of Hegel and move it around in a way that shows you something about Hegel is a satisfying challenge.”

There is hardly a pause before she added, in her usual deadpan, “So maybe I didn’t make any clear point there, but I was impassioned.”

Here’s the interview, reflection, contemplation and naked Icelander in bathtub, tea with Currie, Volcano-loving profile. 

The big one

Yesterday I took a several hour ramble in the city. In the course of my ramble, I spied a promised building with yet-another ridiculous name. The One. It was a tad Top of The Pops. Will there be a Number Two? or The Three? There’s already been a 42. In the photo promising the building there was a massive rooftop swimming pool. It occurred to me that we live on a major fault line (or three) so what precisely will be the outcome should The Big One strike on the residents of The One, who’ve competed so heartily to live there. They’ll have water potentially coming up to greet them from the neighbouring false inlet and down on top of them from the diving board above.

It’s up there with the building that declared itself The Highest Point on Main Street! Main Street not exactly being a mountain.

I carried on wandering, my brain was compressed by the bland shape(lessness) the city is taking. The new buildings are about as distinctive as upright freezer units in food stores. The urban wasteland/industrial playgrounds they have filled had more personality and surprises. I was about to be sunk by how predictable it all is when I crossed the street tempted by the sound of pretty bad drum-kit. Restored! There was some bam, bam, indie-guitar type band practising in a building I couldn’t locate and I remembered ha! yes there are still people bashing drum sets in the midst of this gentlifying–gentrifrying. The black pudding is still on the pan! It reminded me of the Elephant & Castle in the late 80’s/ early 90’s, another place I likely would not recognize these days.

At City Hall the clock face displayed two different times. One side declared it 7.40pm/ the other side declared it 9.40pm. I enjoyed that.

*

Yesterday’s weather was sun, with minimal breeze. Take your coat off weather. There was a woman wearing a tank top. This morning began with hard rain, but gave way to dull grey, now there’s a bit of last minute illuminating on the yellowing leaves.

Malarky on RTE The Works

Thanks a million to all at The Works and the brilliant Sinead Gleeson for the interview and readings featured on the television programme on Thursday evening just gone.

Here’s a link to the programme if you want to watch it. There’s a prize for whoever can identify the owner of that hairy belly that appears in one of the readings!

At the end of the show there’s a terrific singer from Cavan, so be sure to catch her singing. It’s just lovely. And includes a reference to trains.

Lovely reviews for Malarky in Financial Times / CARA (Aer Lingus inflight mag)/ Hot Press

A short review in The Financial Times for Malarky but short can be beautiful, concise and warm. David Evans said of Our Woman “She speaks like a modern Molly Bloom, her voice both lavish and earthy. She is warm, witty company.” and described the sections narrated by her as “beautifully done”. 

CARA Magazine (Aer Lingus inflight publication) included Malarky in their Best new Irish debuts  ” Constant shifts in time, location and voice keep this lively and unexpected. Assured, humorous and a surprising debut.” I truly appreciate readers that are willing to engage with the form of Malarky and what it interrogates (the experience of grief and the fluidity of sexuality) rather than remain outside the gate insisting it be what we already know the novel can be. (linear and formally less interrogative).

Hot Press ran a review of Malarky recently:

Here’s the text. Thanks immensely to Anne Sexton, the reviewer.

“You know you’re far from Maeve Binchy when a book opens with an Irish mammy telling her grief therapist that she is plagued by visions of homosexual orgies. Anakana Schofield’s Malarky is a wonderful, inventive darkly comic novel about a woman on the edge. Written as twenty feverish episodes, Malarky is the story of ‘Our Woman’, a farmer’s wife from Mayo. Her husband is three days dead when the novel opens and Our Woman confesses these intrusive thoughts to her counsellor, who recommends scrubbing the floor vigorously for distraction. Before his untimely demise Himself may have had a fancy woman in Ballina and her son has certainly being getting up to no good with a neighbour’s boy, so Our Woman sets out to learn more about these sexual shenanigans herself. Malarky is written in gorgeous technicolour prose and is in turns laugh out loud funny and deeply moving. Highly recommended.”

*

I have been so touched by the response in Ireland and the UK to Malarky. Immensely grateful as I was intrepid and irrationally anxious about how the novel would be taken on home soil … I do apologize to my mother for some of the more challenging content in it, but she’s been very supportive and loves the book.  As I said on RTE Arena, if a daughter of mine wrote a book like this, I’d probably disown her. That said I don’t have a daughter, I have a son, who provides a non-stop scathing critique on my work so we’re all balanced out. I am lucky to come from a long line of hardy-legged short farming women, all with very keen sense of humour. I do think there’s a great streak of humour in the West and Ireland generally that I miss in my daily interactions here sometimes. Humour is how people carry on, it’s how the poor survive what they survive. Anyway enough of my gabble.

*

Finally so desperately sad to hear about Gerry McCann. I so admired his partner Andrea (?) talking on the radio on Monday and how he’d reached out and gone to seek help in hospital. It is so difficult to deal with crippling anxiety and depression. We’ve got to do better with mental health support. I wish governments would redirect military financing towards mental health funding and that we could have a model that begins to alleviate some of this arresting distress on individuals and their families. My heart goes out to his family. We must do better for people with mental health crisis. Something has to shift on a daily basis, rather than a crisis basis because these are ongoing struggles. They aren’t remediated by 2 days and an injection. I also salute the people who are working hard on the ground and advocating in this area.

Hot water bottles MIA

I have managed to lose 3 red hot water bottles, identical in size, in 150-300 square feet of space and am wondering if it’s some kind of certifiable Guinness World record for quantity of lost hot-water bottles vs sq ft?

Fortunately, I still have the single blue hot water bottle (commandeered by one of my in house males) and the, only to be used if the earth quakes, 55 year-old-found-object hot water bottle that is, let’s say, mature in its obviously thinned skin.

I have caved in and turned on the heat. It answers my earlier query about whether winter would announce herself. Today she did it. I was frozen and shivering while wearing two cardigans and a parka, supposedly good up to -20 made of goose feathers, inside a shop in Chinatown. The women working there laughed at me as I protested the sudden onslaught of winter. She’s here. Landed. Winter reading rituals now commence.

Mushroom lines

After the rains of Saturday and the rains of Sunday, we have a testament to the mega-mm that fell. Today I glanced at the grass beside the pavement and thought I saw smashed up apple. A closer peek it was a line of mushrooms, a regiment of mushies popped up out of the trampoline damp. I must now take my eyes hence and try, at a less inconvenient hour, to understand more about the spontaneous cultivation of mushrooms. They are everywhere out there on the grass.