Flying duck flu lurgi flattens forecaster
Two significant weather events that I am unable to report on beyond the words extensive hailstones and a visit from Monsieur Soleil due to a bout of the lurgis that, well, hands up if you took tylanol into the double digits during the last 24 hours. We’re in this together.
Some kind of mutated flying duck flu with lungs that feel like two heavy sacks of coal. Misery. If you are well do a dance and down a double scotch for me. Your weather forecaster is indisposed.
Reviews
Scott Esposito has written a thoughtful, interrogative review of Malarky on his blog Conversational Reading.
I really appreciate this review because it is, as reviews should be, an engaging piece of writing in its own right. (Of course I might quarrel with his notion on ethos, preferring McGahern’s idea that the particular is the way to the general but that’s for another blog.) I was fascinated by his analysis of the prose and will give thought to his questions. Click on the quote below to read the entire review.
Thanks to Scott Esposito and Marcus Pactor for reading and writing these considerations of my work. Much appreciated.
Reviews
Some thoughtful and interrogative reviews/ blogs have been posted about Malarky.
Marcus Pactor wrote a mid-book review, which is a curious concept that I might join him in writing sometime. I like the continuum that a mid-book review gives to the act of reading. It establishes that it’s ongoing.
Some extracts from Pactor’s blog
“The personal becomes political” is worn, too. Schofield turns it around so that the political becomes personal. We’re very much in the post-9/11 world, but Our Woman’s mostly absorbed by her own life. She’s interested in Afghanistan mostly because that’s where her homosexual son Jimmy took off to. She’s interested in Syria because that’s where her latest lover’s from. When she and her husband watch the news and see riots on the West Bank, she comments: “’Well whether they’re nutters or not,’ I said, ‘they’re lovely looking people. Look at the great faces on those young men, see the elasticity in their skin and the beards make them look wise when they’re all but twenty.’” This personalization is not a reduction. New meanings and understandings of human value are assigned. They have little to do with neocons and their useless counterparts.
Sentence-wise, she’s also excellent. You can hear the Irish voice articulating lovely, inventive metaphors. “One of her fleeting Ballyhaunis Bacon moments has just scraped by her, when the pork of her husband’s action clouts her forcefully out of nowhere and she finds brief comfort in the thought of him, entering the factory to have his flesh separated from his bones for betraying her the way he has.”
Read the entire post here
Joe Strummer weather
Well the weather continues to be peculiar.
Today it appeared to be on brink of a Joe Strummer moment.
But the cooker turned up the overnight low for us to 5 degrees. (From the predicated 2 degrees)
The cherry blossoms aren’t too fussed by the cold, they’re out here and there.
Launch report
Thanks a million to everyone who came out yesterday and packed the People’s Co-op bookshop for the launch of my novel Malarky. I have been so touched by the warm response to my book by so many. Thank you all again.
Thanks especially to Grandma Suzu and Toni who made such beautiful food and very decent tea in lovely china cups and saucers no less. Our friends Scot and Leanne added Jameson’s to the shot glasses and coffee. The place was hopping.
Lovely music played by my son on the fiddle, Miss Otis Regrets sung richly by Lori Weidenhammer making her debut on Ukelele and the later hour duets with Cameron Wilson, esteemed violinist and composer and my son Cuan who played a rendition of Tom Anderson’s lament Da Slockit Light, Devils Dream and The Fishers Rant.
The People’s Co-op is a lovely spot for a book launch and a lovely spot to sell out of every book we had. We sold 51 books and could have sold another 10! It was a lively day on the Drive, a festival and protest was taking place down the street and the sun was out for us all.
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Saturday, the day before yesterday’s launch, I participated in the New Star Firebombing Benefit at the Western Front. It was again a super event: 15 readers and a hub of determined good will. I loved reading in a group that had George Stanley reading a poem called The Vacuum Cleaner in it. Fred Wah also read some intriguing stuff from his early 70’s poetry collection Tree, which i am now keen to read. To be honest the cross section of writers and audience reminded me of descriptions I’ve read or heard or perhaps imagined took place in Vancouver in the 1970’s or perhaps a bit earlier. As I read it struck me how influenced my novel Malarky is by what I have been exposed to here in literature and poetry and by the many writers who have supported me here. It was a reading which made me feel very much at home here. Maybe because of the collective and determined manner in which people had come together. Much of the material that was read also resonated with this.
Malarky in Georgia Straight
Lovely write up for Malarky in today’s Georgia Straight’s Best Spring Reads article. I was reassured to read the writer cottoned on to the political elements and the humour in the book.
Here’s a link to the piece, click on this quote from it below.
Incredible wind…
Incredible windstorm overnight. A man at the corner shop told me it was a Southerly storm and that may explain some of its peculiarities. It was ever so noisy! Roused me from my sleep. I leapt from the bed expecting to see a rerun of 2006’s ballet-back-bending trees. But the movement of the trees did not reflect the volume of howling.
My partner was in Richmond yesterday and returned with a report that the wind is way louder out there and that was during the day. Lord knows how anybody slept in Richmond last night after what blew in!
Today awoke to …
Today awoke to a rare enough combination: a perfect replication of high class November windstorm, complete with the roughage of rain. The noisy, clattering variety. In March. Precisely March 28th. Pop that in your curling Farmer’s Almanac and smoke it.
Next Tuesday the overnight low will be 2 degrees. Just noting. It may yet be revised, but next Tuesday it will be April.
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I am wondering if there would be any possible way to make the perfect cup of tea (and I know precisely its taste but not quite what determines it) last for seven days without interruption.
Lovely image sent to me by a reader this morning
I particularly appreciate the hot water bottle, as am a great worshipper of this essential invention.