Oh Jesus the Patron Saint of hangovers is Bibiana. How bout that for some imbibing b’s? Another gloriously uplifting mad house, flogged to death inspiring tale. Gulp.
Quick quiz, this is better than scrabble nearly…
Who is the Patron Saint of Nettle Rash?
Yup.
You got it.
Benedict.
***
For a bonus five points who is the Patron Saint of fistula? (More to the point what the heck is fistula? But if you’ve got it you’ll know it and need the saint)
Yup
Indeed.
You’re right.
It’s Fiacre.
You knew it, tip of your tongue….!
Who knew? It’s Saint Barbara. She’s the patron saint of fortifications and mine collapse, that pretty much covers the poly tunnel/Greenhouse needs.
Babs do what you can me would you? Especially the big dip in the middle of the poly there….
You can read all about her here: it’s pretty gruesome
Poly saints
What a remarkably complicated day in the area of car tires.
First they were doomed, double doomed at Kingsway and 11th.
Then they were not doomed, 2 man spoke them not in the slightest doomed at Fraser and Kingsway.
Then I had to dance all the way back down Kingsway to celebrate with 3 pieces of toast and a cup of coffee with Jane to recover from all the diagnosing and misdiagnosing.
I am a short person with a Greenhouse needing reconstruction. I do not have time for such rubber excitement. I am down and too far gone with the Poly.
And all this in the quest for the road to Campbell River followed by a detour into the museum of miners. I wonder if there is a patron saint of poly tunnels, the way there is a patron saint for just about everything.
After pulling the mighty spuds yesterday I woke with the crazed idea I wanted to construct a greenhouse on my balcony. As per usual with me getting notions, I couldn’t let them away so sped off to the hardware shop and engaged the knowledge of approx 10 different individuals and emerged with what I thought were the necessary ingredients to construct my greenhouse in the manner in which I imagined it.
Inbetween I went to a meeting with Lori Wiedenhammer at Vandusen to discuss our upcoming Fall performance art collaboration Chaos. Lori has the greatest ideas and fueled undoubtably by their potency and the sight of two trillion floating lilypads I threw myself into building the greenhouse in a very cramped work space on my return.
Quelle Disastre! At one point I was rolling in poly (4mm if you’re wondering, I went cheap) the poles were collapsing in on me, I was entombed in plastic and bricks were not co-operating. Then I got a call from “loveliest of trees the cherry now” Ms Ita Kane and how tempted was I to hop out this mess and see her and the wee man. I have to keep going, I said. You have to keep going, she replied.
I returned to the hardware shop I engaged the knowledge of 4 further men there, who all said the same thing, you’re trying to build the thing without doing any affixing. We discussed cement, concrete, filler, expander. Every one of them had a different idea on how I could do it. Some of them were Spanish which given the outcome of the match gave them good cheer and patience with this dementing small person insisting there must be a way to do it with the minimum of hassle.
Inbetween a fella decided to rob a very pricey table saw and there was a bit of distraction as they chased him across the car park to retrieve it. He looked like he was participating in an insurance advert — the robber — so thoroughly composed was he throughout, swinging it as though it really belonged to him. Alarms clanging. I was amazed at the number of random customers who gave chase (biblical chase?). Everyone wanted in on the action except me who just wanted an explanation on packaged filler versus the pot stuff.
Out the back, finally, I alighted on them. Precisely the holey bricks I needed to make my poles co-operate. Unfortunately they were very heavy, but it had to be done. The Greenhouse dream must live on. I hoicked them home to the distress of my lower back. It took 12 journeys to get 4 bricks upstairs. I now have 4 excess red bricks.
But remarkably I do have a greenhouse. It’s not the world’s most official looking greenhouse, but that’s grand. And I built it. And I feel very useful.
In celebration I went to my garden plot and a second victory … I found them lying in state on the chard plant. The four slugs who’ve been visiting after nightfall and making polkadot of the chard. They had a salty night alright.
What a botanically victorious day it was. Alas there’s a bit of a breeze so I hope I still have a greenhouse by tomorrow.
Next Post
Random generation (Possibly Related Posts) is pretty funny. An old post on this blog, a review of an art installation during the Olympics that I took a fairly dim view on now pops up as a “you might like this” alongside an explicit description of a young woman’s sexual exploits as she rides her way across random males in London. My original post is about as sexy as a stale baguette, so Lord knows exactly how they have randomly achieved relevance.
In any case the diary of the gal getting it on is a way better read (if at times disturbing. I also wonder if it is not actually written by a male). Strangely though it hasn’t generated a link in reverse, so you cannot get to it from my post.
I can imagine the disappointed fringes in high elevated state after reading Story of (London) Eye type blog, then clicking on my review and shaking their bangs in dismay.
Sunday questions
1. What has been the role in the explosion of writer as teacher and creative writing industry in reducing the amount of literary criticism (and such considering) generated?
2. And the question of academia. It seems to me that academics are able to generate critical writings because they have a pay check. Is this the only model by which such writing can be achieved? Is it fair to make a distinction between an academic and a working writer (someone who doesn’t have a pay check from a teaching job) and for whom the writing generates the food source? Or is that entirely irrelevant?
3. How can I build an improvised greenhouse on my petite balcony? (low budget masking tape and pole style)
This morning at 9.36 I experienced pangs of homesickness, which is odd since I am technically at home. As the hour carried on they became stronger and defeating like a big old bag of sigh. Two hours later I realized I was not homesick for place but for people, particular people. The ease, the natter, the what, what the and stories. The oxygen of a tale. The endless tales about sometimes very little that mean so much in the course of a day. The endless stop and interruption for a tale. You’ve to work so much harder in Vancouver to find a tale. They’re there alright, but require a bit of dig or budge. There’s a lack of ease in this constant need for extraction and tempting.
I turned to reading for relief.
I continue to read Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us and find that for a book so specifically about one text (Joyce’s Ulysses) it propels me not so much into or inside Ulysses but rather out, out, out into the possibilities for literature.
“Oh rocks, she moans, tell us in plain words” (p77)
***
Early in the book Kiberd cites the loss of common culture, he describes how
“because of the rise of specialists prepared to devote years to the study of its secret codes — parallax, indeterminacy, consciousness-time being among the buzz words. Such specialists often tend to work in teams. Many of them reject the notion of a national culture, assuming that to be cultured nowadays is to be international, even global, in consciousness. In doing this they have often removed Joyce from the Irish context which gave so much of its work meaning and value….
…The middle decades of the twentieth century were the years in which the idea of a common culture was abandoned — yet Ulysses depends on that very notion. “
I have been engaged in a nonsensical debate with myself whether common culture could be reeclaimed or recreated through fictional creation of common culture(s) in the novel. Then it struck me that the very exoticization of place in literature (certainly prevelant in Canadian fiction of the last 20 years. At times it seems an “anywhere but here” took over the novel, sometimes triptych in its approach. Three places: none here) has perhaps done that. What seemed promising on first consideration suddenly disappated to having perhaps had the opposite effect, that of being a plugger up rather than an opener outer. And then the thinking mitt snapped shut on it.