contradiction
Today close to Main Street in Vancouver I noticed an obese white SUV 2010 Olympics car parked on one side of the road while opposite a wide and long line of people queueing for the food bank curled right around the community centre and down the alley.
One cancelling out the other.
The line moved eventually while the car did not.
The line had spirit, the car did not.
You cannot take a bite out of a car, but it can take a bite out of you. Curious that.
Today I need to be fired out of a canon like Hunter. If I begin to balloolalaloola on the Olympic siege and all that I witnessed today that had me cross-eyed with the scale of this lugh-nacy I would have to enter the canon. It is not easy to find a canon in the street I live on. Just like it’s not so easy to find a post box these days.
Instead I turn my attenton to sharing that I read Raymond Queneau’s essay The Technique of the novel today and I read it as I passed through some of the lugh-nacy. I like his circular, pause, calculations, removal from those calculations and how he sets up rhythm within them. (“Removed the scaffolding and syncopated the rhythm”).
So much is currently being imposed on us here in Vancouver that we must hope somehow to figure out a way to remain intact within all that has been calculated on our behalfs. I am tired of being “instructed”. Our public spaces have been invaded. I’ve yet to witness anything that relates to sports whatsoever. (Indeed my weekly gymnastics training is actually closed for a month! ) The thrust seems to be a non stop proclamation to the world on security. An advertorial. Today I watched a man be told he could not rummage in a bin. “Not here, you can’t do that here.” A young buck of a guard told him.
Remove the scaffolding and syncopate the rhythm.
Natter
Great talk On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a 24/7 World by Art Historian Jonathan Crary at UBC on Friday about the erosion of sleep, sort of.
What was remarkable about his talk was its solidity and thus when it came to questions he stuck to it and did not waver to pick up and lace it into every ping-ponged idea diverted at him. When you listen to someone who has thought things through, inevitably many in the room become fired up with 5 new or related ideas each and the urge to postulate them up to the fluorescent tubes is hard to resist.
They’re all valid ideas, but they’re not cured so rapidly and given time they may be interesting in their own right, rather than ping ponged back at what emerged. A less solid thinker would extend and try to pick up every dropped thread and bring them onto his needle.
Not Monsieur Crary. I liked that, or maybe I liked that he made a great deal of sense and he didn’t decorate up his language in academic terms to prove he knows things. Intelligent, articulate folk don’t need to constantly prove they know things because they have a relaxed, inclusive confidence. In contrast spouters tend to announce themselves every five words, are tedious on the ears and love giving grandiose titles to the most rudimentary information.
For my biteen of ping-pong. A few things struck me during his talk on sleep (sort of) I say sort of because as he said himself he’s interested in the limits of human nature. (correct me if I am wrong ?)
Crary (who primarily talked about events since 2001) cited the example of sleep deprivation as/and torture in extraordinary rendition.
I was reminded
1. Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours of sleep. Amongst results of her handiwork: the Hungerstrikers in the Maze Prison, internment in the North and the destruction of the mines, the unions, privatisation of the railways etc in England ..the list goes on.
2. The low tech crude nature of available drugs to put people to sleep versus keeping them awake, which are much more effective.
3. Michael Jackson, one of the richest men in the world, died trying to fall asleep. He could have had anything and the thing he needed most was (maybe) sleep.
4. I cannot fall asleep these days unless I have the lights on. Historically I had a strange habit of listening to the radio all night long.
At the end of the talk a man told me a story of a dream he had about flying that potentially had put paid to any further Superman dreams I may have. That night I dreamt about insomnia and experienced it live intermittantly.
Another air pocket: been reading chunks of Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which I found my way to courtesy of RLS essay on him in familiar studies of men and books, a palm sized red book (cosmopolitan magazine New York, a medallion edition, whatever that means) which I picked up by chance in a charity shop last week for a quarter. I collect palm sized books because I find them very comfortable to read while I am walking. I am a small person, so my hands aren’t terribly big by any standard, but I find these old books very agreeable visually as well. I have no idea why. This one has very few paragraphs indented in it, if any.
Others I have are from the Modern Library I think. I’ll have to examine them.
I enjoy “reading out” from writers, I also enjoy the maze and circuitous route by which some books or even parts of books arrive in our lives. Often in the last year I have found books discarded on the side of the road! And sometimes it will be a title someone has mentioned in passing and eh voila there it is looking up from the pavement at me. P’haps that’s why I tend to look down a great deal these days.
Chanced upon books via writers or other books or mentions or because you tripped over it on the bus or found it cover less at a jumble sale. Post your tales in comments …..
When George Bataille lost his funding for Documents, (just after Breton launched his attacks) he embarked on a number of projects including that he wanted to publish a weekly magazine on universal history. I read this in Stuart Kendall’s red book about Bataille that I must buy. I borrowed it from the library who demanded its return. It is the red book that has raised me up the most in all the red books I recall reading.
I surrendered it without noting the exact quote.
I love that Bataille tasked himself, in the midst of a depressing and difficult time for him, with .. er.. universal history.
Rhotic 18: tinn
Ding,
Go raibh mile a cailin is deasa ar fud na tír.
Deacair na seachtaine, ach rudaí níos fearr a fháil. Merci drugaí agus dochtúirí agus amigas.
Tommy bás. go brónach. Sílim go mbeidh sé deacair ar mo mháthair.
Na Cluichí Oilimpeacha ag déanamh demented dom.
labhairt go luath…x
Driving down the hill (road) on Boundary in the 5 blocks before you cross Hastings there are the most staggering pylons. They remind me of the big auld Tripods. They could nearly lift up their legs and tramp down the hill. It’s funny I never noticed the source of power so much in the city til I saw them today. I always observe power sources in rural locations because I am inevitably curious to see who is off the grid.
It’s odd because if you say walk across a bridge in the dark in the city, inevitably the ditty-dotty lights on the North Shore (she says trying to rem can you see the N Shore from bridges?) … however you see them, those ditty dotty lights all up the North Shore til the rock star stream on Grouse grab your attention.
I once had a very funny experience with a spotlight when on tour with my play. I arrived at this tiny venue to discover they’d rented a single light that U2 might have needed for Wembley… but that I had to plead with them to turn off. The conversation went “but we rented it, but I am the volunteer lighting man,” to which I could only respond politely “but I am completely blinded by it and can see nothing and will end up in the lap of the audience.” The play on this occasion was being performed at lunchtime in a non theatre venue and that light could have literally guided the Sealink ferry safely into Dun Laoghaire from inside said building 45 miles away. Touching tho’ that anyone would rent anything in my honour whatever the wattage.
OK so one of the air pockets I intend to retreat to and I have had an interest in it previously (dotted across this blog since 2006) is good old neuro science and neuro-surgery.
Yesterday I peeled potatoes and made a reasonable lamb shepherds pie while watching a film about brain surgery performed under local anaesthetic. I credit that film with vastly improving my cookery.
Plus it reminded me of the significance of vacuum in removing tumours and have to confess have always gotten great comfort from hoovering, except my one hoover calamity at age 5 that resulted in a split lip.