Rhotic 14
Ding,
Nuair a labhairt le daoine i ngnáthnós poiblí an fáth a bhfuil sé sin deacair ar roinnt chun éisteacht le guthanna a, chun iad a éisteacht a fháil.
Uaireanta smaoineamh mé faoi sin.
Rhotic 13
Ding
Mé leithscéal, a bhí ag labhairt liom féin agus ag caint maith agus an lá a bhí ar siúl amach le liom.
Conas T?
Aris, amárach, beidh mé iarracht tú.
Tá sneachta ag teacht go creidim.
We were listening to this Nicholas Wade interview en voiture on the radio. Puffin so engrossed in Mr Wade’s thesis we had to sit in the dark and listen til it ended. On entering the home he was wrestling with the concept of religious belief. “I don’t believe Jesus was the son of God,” he said. “I think he just said that.” Some unlacing of shoes and pontification later he became impassioned announcing there are huge gaps. For example he says for all we know he wasn’t born on the 25th at all. He could very well have been born on the 27th, another shoe off rising to resounding declaration and horror “he might even have been born in November”.
I loved how November was the biggest affront over any other troubling aspect of the existence of God.
Rob Kovitz’s Pig City Model Farm was one of my reading moments of 2009. Found on the library booksale trolley. Like a cadaver, once sliced full of organs and explanation. Before I sliced it, I had no understanding what it was and figured it was a handbook on pig farming that would be very useful someday in the way I scoop virology textbooks from the pavement. Lookit I said to the library woman, no one will want this pig farming manual and I only had fifty cents and I would love this pig farming manual. In praise of confusion and poverty!
Ice fishing in Gimli — a new nation to frolick in. Or perhaps more appropriately ice core drill into.
Here, as promised, are some paragraphs and snips from DM Fraser’s work that I spent my Sunday night enjoying.
This para is from his story Eschatology.
Friday evening downtown: the place should have been packed with husbands killing the pain while their wives were out looting department stores: but now husbands retreat instead to lectures on Fiscal Responsibility, Chinese Architecture Through the Ages, Aggressive Childcare. The wives, bankrupt, meet in covens for belly-dancing therapy at six, paragynecology at eight, Kung Fu at ten. After that it’s too late for mere amusement. Couples night at the Eschatology Centre begins at dawn, and someone has got to get up early to feed the Dobermans. Dobermen?
It was the opening line that struck me in that para. How Fraser creates place without referring to any physical description or dropping road names or lavish layering of trees and buildings. I’ve constantly been trying to resolve the construction of place or setting in prose as a reader and a writer. Writers display for us his/her potent ability to paint a scene. Paintbrush over paint. Ostentatiousness over bricks agus mortar. I’m quite interested as a reader in seeing place manifest through the behaviour of the people in it since lives are lived within places, they are not lived “at” or “toward” places so the external construction of place in parallel to people seems odd.
I recently took part in a poetry salon which was both stimulating and vexing in equal amounts. At times the language in the room would become dominated or hijacked by academic terms: the assumption being that everyone present spoke that language. The reality being several of us in the room did not. Tho’ when I requested meanings generally people were obliging.
The main activity involved a reading by a poet, a response to that poet’s work by another poet, in the form of a written piece and then discussion followed by responses, written or whatever from the participants. So there was a great deal of writing out from or back to a particular work. In the course of these exchanges I realized I am not particularly compelled by this act of writing to and from. I found aspects of this corresponding engaging as a listener. But as a writer I find myself compelled to write into the piece I am writing. That the piece would actually write further and further into itself. I can see several disadvantages to this because the piece can only engage with it’s own internal dynamic and rhythm and it’s a much more singular and lonelier approach.
There was a camaraderie around “response” that is impossible when you’re in a tunnel. You’re only hope maybe the odd sandhog who pops a head up along the way and says how’re ya doing there, it’s shite but on you go now.
Curiously though in discovering and reading Fraser’s work I find the stories I’ve read follow this. They just unwind and unwind on their own internal turf.
Tryin to figure out if I’ve fractured me arm.
Note arm not injured reading Bataille. Nor Fraser. Arm injured in dramatic airborne pursuits.
My bones never break. That’s a lifelong rule. They can’t start this messy business at this late stage. But arm won’t turn. And protests from elbow to the wrist. Plus fizzy fingers and thumb.
Hmmm.
Post note: I have not fractured my arm. Yippee. The lifelong rule is uncontested.