Books November
I am currently reading between four books.
Betty Lambert’s Crossings I am rereading slowly in preparation for the up and coming event at the Vancouver Public Library I am organizing. A group of us writers — Annabel Lyon, Juliane Okot Bitek, Claudia Casper, Renee Rodin and Lori Weidenhammer — are revisiting Crossings to see whether there are new readings to be had on the book. Lori, a performance artist will revisit a Lambert play)
Lambert’s Crossings is a book to be slowly digested and it is at times an immensely difficult but worthwhile digestion. The book possesses an unevenness — something that is necessary or fitting when you think about the uneven nature of the two main people it circulates around.
The other three books I am nesting with, in a remarkably different manner of reading, are three old Press Gang books:
1. Common Ground: Stories by Women
2. An Account To Settle The Story of the United Bank Workers (SORWUC).
3. Sometimes They Sang. Helen Potrebenko.
The first book I have read two or three of the stories and they made me think about space and the close confines in which the people live to each other and how people are invited into space. The second (non fiction) reads rather like an adventure (I’ve read much less successfully attempts at this in fiction!) and the third, I consider a vital novel (out of print naturally). All three contain strikes and picket lines in relation to women. I did not select them knowing this, in fact two of them I found on the side of the road. It’s curious what emerges when you open books in tandem or parallel.
Rhotic 3.6
I forgot 3.3.
The first time I forgot 2.6.
Once they’re forgot I can’t go back.
It’s not whittering, it’s transacting.
Rhotic 3.4
Is the 11 needing to be a 35 the actual truth?
Or where you happy to suggest the 11 – 35 was the reason you might be fairing so poorly?
Wasn’t the actual truth that after that one or two born again sequences
that you lost it again. You were the hesitant statue of agnosticism I think.
Remember how she said you had a great standing back handspring?
See standing.
That’s what statues do.
Statues don’t link, do they?
They don’t weave across the floor muttering sentences.
Rhotic 3.2
Actually there was a moment before it
Where I had a little chat with myself about what the doctor said about the 11 needing to be a 35.
Then I said even if the 11 didn’t need to be a 35
I still would have to lie down
I noted it was the back of my head this time that beat
From the back of my head the heat made its was round to my face
that was what I noted.
Rhotic 3.1
It’s true I lay down again.
But first I went to lay down and hesitated.
I returned.
When I lay down, well I really laid down.
Rhotic 3.0
We’re noting a conspicuous absence of movement off the floor. So you intend to leave it like that do you?
We know you went back.
We suspect you lay down again didn’t you?