June 7, 2010
In accidentally boiling the exquisite cashmere jumper I found on the side of the road I discovered it is also a cardigan and within that flexible arrangement the jumper/cardigan forgave me for the boiling and has not shrunk too much.
In another pairing the precise rhythm of Beckett’s prose in Comment C’est, when read aloud, matches the gentle bobbing that my hockey stick leg muscles will agree only to stretch to. Mr Beckett’s implementation of this rhythm is a great service to short legged, who loathe prolonged anything. He took walks often and the terrain he walked on can be an ankle twisting bumpetty carry on that demands rhythm. I know someone who buried a dog where he used to walk. Between the dog and all other co-incidences he singularly intended to provide for me with this text, which, of course, contains a slug.
June 7, 2010
I am thinking of renaming my community garden plot The Chipper. This is my 3rd or 4th year in this plot and I am still removing rubble constantly from it. It’s a heart breaker!
The slugs have mown the two budding leaves off my cucumber plant in it’s less than 12 hour lifespan. Meanwhile the Manhattan high potato plant right beside it that could afford a bit of a trim they turned their sniffer up at. I went around pressing the earth round my poor beleagured beans today, hoping some kind of pressure point tactic might have a chat to the old roots down there to charge skyward before the slugs are reborn.
I put two wee containers of beer in to drown the blighters, but my slugs are a very intellectual variety who may also be yeast proof. They are destroying my dreams of having one good year in this plot. Picture the scene all around me are thriving garden plots, year after year.
But in the only bit of uplifting news the alpine strawberry plant that is the very essence of a miracle, because it has thrived in this concrete Chipper, had strawberries on it today. Edible ones. Yum. So the rain fell, I pressed the earth pointlessly, pleaded with the non appearing lettuces, grieved the gone cucumber and snaffled the berries, decided the rain was insufficient, lugged galloons of water across the road, left, not long after the rain absolutely lashed it down.
I am looking forward to greeting my ma’s vegetable tunnel in rural Ireland. I have these illusions I am going to be helpful in it. It’s a great thing delusion …
**
In a non gardening astonishing achievement today I managed to crash the car into a static dumpster. (Lest readers may think it was chasing me) and it is showing dent and abrasion. The combination of going backwards when there’s things beside me is not a sequence to be repeated. It’s over for me and car parks. It’s over for me and dumpsters too. But I’ve good potential for driving that buggy thing that bounces on Mars.
The only good thing was as soon as I crashed into the dumpster three cars in the area took off rapidly and i had a nice bit of space to carry on….
June 7, 2010
As the time has come for the Small Male to have his own key to our home I was thinking lightheartedly wa-hey it’s time to have another baby! Some hours later after my epic new gym/chin up/swim routine I was at the shop and spied a very small baby in a large set of male arms. The baby was about the size of one of the man’s biceps and had that little froggy huddle shape they barely unroll from at that 2 week age.
It was pouring rain, so I sat to eat some snacks and watch the pavement activity when lo agus behold male appears with baby, followed by woman I recognize, male pops baby in car, woman I recognize says bonjour, she does not pass car, she is going into car that baby just went into. That’s your baby I shrieked… you had a baby? How/when could you have had a baby?
The woman lives in the apartment practically underneath me. I see her several times a week minimum and never saw a hint that was pregnant. Though she has the most wonderful glossy head of hair. I was thrilled! I was thrilled! I was thrilled! This new baby will live in our building!
Eh voila there’s a new baby. Co-incidently she also has son almost finished high school. A fine fella he is, with lovely manners.
June 6, 2010
In this documentary about Charles Olson, about whom I know absolutely nowt, there are some interesting doorways, including a back door. It lost me around part 4, but the doorways stay with me.
June 6, 2010
The orthognathic/maxillo facial dilemma appears to be caused by impact exercise which is a darn, great, mighty pity. Not sure how this one will or could resolve. If it is the site of the original now fifteen year old pins, I think only surgery would remove them. But they’d be difficult to isolate at this point? I recall waking up after the third surgery, my surgeon, approaching the bed to explain to my eyes as swollen as two melons that, well, one of the facial plates they’d removed was stubborn as all hell and how he’d had to use major brute force to remove it.
But I ain’t defecting on the tumbling ambitions. The back handspring was even admired by the janitor at the gymnastics facility the other night. He was standing above and I was below on the trampoline working with the coach and he called down his admiration, which was generous of him and appreciated. There’s nothing like having someone bear witness appreciatively to a physical feat or any kind of effort.
There was another woman who has magnificent strength who was doing a handstand where she lifts each arm singularly while she remains in that handstand position to touch each shoulder. It’s horse like. In order to do this, she requires extraordinary shoulder strength and she does this again and again entirely composed. Last week, an older man, whose recently started training was so flabbergasted by her ability he exclaimed how hard it is for him to merely attain the handstand position and that he couldn’t imagine how she could manage it. The physical body can testify in its own language that I enjoy. No smarty pants quips, no amount of disrespectful indignation or snide dismissal or insisting you know things you do not know can overwhelm the matter of whether of not you can stand on your hands!
June 6, 2010
Read opening bits of Manfacturing Consent, found handy-dandy as ever on the side of the road. Side of road is providing amply these days. After I read the first few paras was left with this daunting sense of Manfacturing Content and what have I manufactured myself… far too much attention on male writers!
It is a source of national shame that Helen Potrebenko’s Sometimes They Sang is out of print and remains so. It should also be a source of major feminist agitation! An agitation that would heave it back onto the page! Someday I will be in position I hope to do something about it. This slim novel must be back in palms. It’s unique in it’s rural -urban considering and the woman is looking for a job. We live in a province with a turbulent labour history and where is it on the page? People are exasperated this very minute searching for jobs and they’ll search even harder in their fiction to find someone engaged in such a task.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is another writer whose work I should have written about.
Betty Lambert’s novel Crossings is another novel that should be revisited and I’d like to do an event that would bring some women together to revisit it and consider it today.
One of the challenges of writing such pieces is where to place them. It is becoming particularly woeful in Canada to find outlets.
**
I am excited to be collaborating with a visual artist on a performance piece for the autumn. Today we had our first meeting to discuss ideas and it was an inspired and buzzing exchange.
June 5, 2010
Back on Cortazar. More specifically how much we all love Glenda (?) collection, which just came into my life.
For a long time I was interested in the moment, then I discovered the moment within the episode, the episode and Cortazar brings me back to the paragraph and that rolling or undulating sentence. And I exist on his paragraph for days sometimes. Lately without my glasses I misread one word in an early sentence of that story and it literally threw me into a whole new graveyard.