August 9, 2010
The rain was gone today and bright blue Cortes day replaced it.
Lots of laughter here, the girl cousins whom I love are joyful and radiant, their mad-lively-anthropologist father chases and tickles my son all day and he screams, pleads for mercy and then returns for more!
We did tee shirt making ensemble, tho’ I was gutting a fish, so did mine from the sidelines.
There are studio visits on the island at the moment, so people come by to visit the studio here and see and buy Grandma and Larry’s pottery.
Grandma and Larry have gone off in the canoe to the lake, the boys are playing badminton and we’re sitting on the deck nattering and reading.
August 9, 2010
Grandma Suzu taught me to gut a fish this morning. I gutted my first pink salmon and very much enjoyed it. I watched her gut his brother, then she handed me her father Ben’s fish scaler and let me do the second one.
At one point, it was a fairly bloody and Shakespearean affair, but I loved the solidity of the fish’s body and the feel of it. Getting the blood line, dark red bit out was the toughest part, but he was clean looking and handsome by the time I was done with him.
We’ll be eating him soon.
I am getting more and more useful.
August 8, 2010
Two small co-incidences today, a friend emails me and suggests I might like Jane Rule’s novel The Young in Another One’s Arms at precisely the moment I am reading p37 of said novel and liking it.
In Campbell River I ran into a visual artist who generously gave me a lift across Quadra, we missed the ferry, drank beer, had a lengthy exchange on art criticism, literature, rooftop gardening. As we were driving across Cortes I noticed he was reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land and told him that I’d learnt of Judt’s death last night. He was shocked at the news.
August 8, 2010
We are trying to identify an animal spotted by Quinsam River he’s about a foot and a half long, he has a pointy nose, dark brown, bit ferret like, nothing remarkable about his tail, but he swam in, grabbed a salmon bigger than him (estimated at 4 pounds by riverside salmon weighing spotter) in his mouth, ran along stream using rocks as his cover, he dragged fish with him, pulled it into a hole. Disappeared with giant fish.
Moment of great excitement as I declared him a musk-ox, except musk-ox are massive, four legged, woolly mammoth creatures. He is not a beaver, he’s not an otter, not a marmot (!), not a shrew, he’s not a musk-ox, he’s not a musk-rat, and he’s not a fish.
Help! What is he? Aside from a potential member of the TV show Chips.
August 7, 2010
Campbell River, eggs polleny @Java Shack, familiar landmarks. All the way up, a man regaled me with his poker tales and his wife who led him a song and dance with her gin habits. They all come to Campbell River it seems, halos intact, to recover from the bold wimmin. Sad tales though, but like all tales they have their interesting bumps agus bruises! The other fella beside us on his way to a wedding ….
August 7, 2010
The latest on the forest fire situation is that things are lookin’ dicey in the area of Meager Creek. This could be an impending something else (landslide in fact), in anycase 1500 people have been evacuated. My point in recording it here is to say we live in the same geographic area of the world as you and we should give a shite and have empathy and awareness of this displacement because one day the old smoke may billow up against this very window.
August 7, 2010
Tony Judt
Tony Judt has died. RIP. Brave, brave thinking man. I really enjoyed his memoir essays in the NYRB over the recent months and many of his other essays. That image of libraries in the midwest will forever be with me. It’s an image I haven’t seen, an image he painted for me. Also his comments on the night and length of it and the difficulty therein. Despite his ALS he seemed so vital it didn’t register with me that he would die. Even tho’ I am sure at some point he probably inferred it. I think that’s is what comes of such a lively mind. His was a mind well used. Here’s to lively minds. Cheers.
August 7, 2010
Just did some repatriating of bewks to the new nation of shelves. It’s astonishing what one discovers when you lift things up. All my Virago titles from my twenties like Insiders: Women’s Experience of Prison (!), Marion Milner book, Judy Chicago, and an intelligent array of weather forecasting books and even one full of forestry terms (Pied Piper moment?) or on and on.
Recent research showed that sadly Attic Press are no longer publishing fiction, and Virago is no longer what it once was, owned as it is by the big boyos. I was reading some old Press Gang catalogues and was reminded how much publishing was once intertwined with activism and ideas for change.