Saturday morning I had been up to the lads in the garage to talk car and had to head below the garage to wait out the time for lads to fix car with a stack of work.

This impending (or is it upon us) winter season will be a reclusive one by my note in the change of it. And by the matter of a great mountain of reading I must undertake.

I had heard Eileen Myles was reading along with Lisa Robertson at Emily Carr that day and had heard of Eileen through someone — who, who, who, who are you? — was it Lora? last year telling me to read her essays with Iceland in the title. I’d tried and failed to find them in the leabharlann and here would be a certain chance to get them. When I arrived there, there the essays were but beside them — a novel — and up from them an even more curious single copy of an earlier novel. I had to leave the essays behind and take on the two novels once I’d gandered them.

Lisa Robertson read from her new book of poetry with the words R’s Boat in the title.  She’s much livelier and more engaging when she reads her poems than when talking on art and macademia. I spent some time last winter reading her books out in the library and for some reason I associate her work with mapping and walking and I may be wrong because I am forgetful these days. And the weather. And dress making! Because last year she did talk about sewing or cloth I thought or was that Maxine?

And then there was Eileen reading from the novel Inferno. Ritalin to our West Coast slumber ! But for me the physicalizing of the text into the voice and body and back. You can hear how it got on the page and she’s giving it right back at ya! This aint-no-abacus-bead-counting-calculation ! It’s auditory absoluting!

I suppose you could conclude I was at home in it. I’ve had enough of this restraint, and prose prune clipping, and middle management telling us what the reader can and cannot handle. We don’t live inside tupperware. I don’t want to read inside it.

Reading those Juan Butler books to which I must return  — I had to wonder Christ how or when did everything get turned down?

100 years later, the episodic prompts questions on pacing and narrative? Er? While we are at it let us straighten every horse track into lines and grids.