March 10, 2013
Stormin’ H
As promised, with patience, here is the storm from p33 of Bertrand Sinclair’s The Hidden Places. (1922)
“He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a lowering, slate-coloured mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation fo the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreadry, threantening night that fitted his mood. ”
The storm then gives way to more from our operatic male (common place in BC literature of this & later periods it seems)
“He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best that was in him, played the game faithfully., according to the rules. And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster.”
I must pause here and interrupt this programming to give you a 7 hour respite before we hear Hollister continue his aria into the verdant moss of his wife!
March 8, 2013
Impatience
I continue apace with Mr Parks prostate memoir (Teach Us to Sit Still) which is no longer the Lincoln Tunnel of urology. Indeed his pains are not the precise rattling trains he initially suspected they were, which is quite extraordinary given the operatic sounding scale of them. How and ever the body is perplexing and impatience apparently does you in. Hence I’ll have to now refer to the book as Mr Parks impatience memoir.
He has just turned left into a meditation retreat in Northern Italy and frankly reading about meditation retreats is as painful as sitting through them and I almost became derailed during the gong, lip, breath, cross legged nothingness until two people had a fight in the garden & took off and a blessed salve in the form of a reference to Robert Walser. We can carry on now Walser has been invoked.
Mrs Dalloway is currently on the embankment resting. She was interrupted by Bertrand W Sinclair’s hysterical prose from 1922. Tomorrow I shall unveil his description of a storm in False Creek in this novel I tripped upon today. Calm down laddie is where I’d file it. But since we are hovering on the theme of impatience. We shall be patient and anticipate telling Bertrand to calm it down there.
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It’s 3 degrees outside, which seems v low. Tomorrow sunshine will return to us or so the headline promises. On va voir.
March 5, 2013
Où sont les femmes?
The VIDA stats are out. Naturlich they are grim. Here are the choices:
1) Boil your head and despair
2) Figure out who in The Atlantic precisely is so unable to locate more than 4 women reviewers & Harpers who can only locate 3 & have a whip round to get them a GPS.
or wonder whether readers should vote on the matter that this magazine refuses to afford women writers any critical authority on literature by, well, unsubscribing.
3) Remember that print is a dying medium, the stats are, I assume, based on print and pay no heed to the blogs this publications operate, where perhaps women prevail and are more prolific.
4) Question whether 3) is true and recognize my optimism about these publications blogs is likely blindingly delusional.
5) The obvious option is be ambitious, write more, but this is difficult to resolve in a year where I wrote a novel that was reviewed by NONE of those publications. (Obviously my novel had the company of a great deal of other novels in this regard).
6) Remind myself that the mainstream is the mainstream is the mainstream is the mainstream and unto the mainstream it shall remain. Also literary culture is conservative. But there’s plenty space outside the mainstream. Acres of space for all sorts of cross polination. It’s a matter of taking up some of it.
March 3, 2013
A moment of reckoning
Should I learn to speak International Art English (do I already speak it?) or make a sad trot back to my sad history of assaulting Egyptian Arabic in a classroom with a lovely teacher who burst out laughing at my hurdy gurdy pronounciations? Or continue my hola-ing at any Espanola, Mexicana or Coo-bana I meet? Yesterday three. And daily I meet and greet my 3 sets of Mexican neighbours with the same two phrases. Or up the robust effort to live en Francais? I can manage paragraphs en Francais and am fluent in Le Petit Nicolas. Or keep cracking away with my auditory lusting after mo chuid Gaeilge? Cad e do baruil h’Edel?
Or do the simple, most practical thing and learn to cook quinoa?
March 3, 2013
Pineapple Express busted
The Pineapple Express weather event had silenced me, but fear no more for the heat of the sun has rejoined us. We have a SUNNY break. That be a blast of sun that may disappear behind the trees (or condos) before I put a full stop on this sentence.
The promised rise in temperature on the third day of the Pineapple (Saturday) did not materialize and last night out at an event and a late night dinner I fair froze on exit. It was lepping cold! The previous evening my partner Jeremy and I were discussing the Pineapple and concluded the experience matched the sense of being “sub aquatic.”
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Onward with Mr Tim Parks prostate memoir. What a complicated organ! What a disadvantage and complex matter it is to be embodied at times. So many organs, so many muscles, so much can go wrong. He has now moved into what may be the final four hundred metres lap/ furlong and is concluding his problems are myofascial pain. Am I right Mr P?
I was particularly taken with the line where the man running the mediation/relaxation class tells him Senor Parks I have never met a man so utterly unable to relax as you before. I’m a tad confused by his title, since sitting still may actually be what caused his problems to start with. But all shall be revealed during my final Ascot type reading of this text. Squeezed in between a stack of deadlines and pain complications.
February 27, 2013
Woo-hoo! Malarky nominated for Amazon.ca First Novel Award
Hot off boiling the kettle here …Malarky has been nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. This just in from the Toronto Star report
“Amazon.ca announced the finalists for the 37th Annual First Novel Award Wednesday. This Canadian literary award recognizes the outstanding talent of Canadian novelists who have published their first novel in 2012.”
Click here to learn about all 5 titles nominated including the intriguing People Park by Pasha Malla.
Click here to read the offical news release put out by Amazon at the rising of the sun.
February 27, 2013
From a Malarky reader yesterday
I have been meaning to share some of the messages i receive from readers: the image of people discussing anything for hours is always boldly up lifting. This was most cheering to read. Thank you dear reader(s)
“My book club finally got around to reading Malarky and I must say we all loved it – what a wild ride! We talked about it for hours which doesn’t often happen when we get together – we forwent our usual gossip session to talk about your wonderful book. Our Woman was a delightful character and we all loved your dialogue and gift with language. Rarely has a book made me laugh so hard and feel so heartsick at the same time. Two of the group read it twice and recommended we all do the same. We can’t wait for the next one.”
February 27, 2013
First weather news: a Pineapple Express is on the way passing through Thurs & Friday — it is rumoured to be a light one, so may prove more pineapple crush than express. Do not go out in your bedroom slippers unless you are after soggy toes.
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Second: Tim Parks prostate memoir. Jeepers Mr Parks this memoir is the Lincoln Tunnel of urology! Fascinating ! It has pushed Mrs Dalloway aside so I returned to her and I am not sure if that is simply a talent of Mrs Dalloway but that book seems to constantly speak at or back to whatever is being read beside it.
Today Mrs Dalloway in reply to Mr Parks memoir:
“and all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs…”
Perhaps it would need to be remixed to “and shrill are the nerves in the thighs”
There is a moment of deciphering happening in Mrs Dalloway where the women are looking at the sky trying to figure out the letters the planes are making. It could be said that Mr Parks memoir is entirely laden with deciphering and uncovering.
Mr Parks and his wife Rita have just undertaken a walk that’s not going very well on account of his prostate. For thirty years they’ve been together they’ve walked — isn’t that a mighty thing to have done for thirty years? I think so. But I am a walker. My current pain dilemma is making walking both a challenge and an enticement in equal measure. Dickens. I recall, was also an obsessive walker who suffered with terrible physical pain.
February 26, 2013
Mr Parks Prostate
I am grateful to my fellow Little Star writer Tim Parks’ banjaxed prostate and his recording of such in his memoir Teach Us to Sit Still, which I have today added to the I Love Dick (Chris Kraus), Mrs Dalloway reading mix. The third party being Mr P’s prostate. What’s curious about his memoir is its, thus far, whole focus on urology! This a rare focus! Thus far it’s mainly him dithering over urology and living with astonishing discomfort. What possessed you Mr P to piss about for so long in such misery? It’s remarkable. Has the reader hopping leg to leg in some kind of Pavlovian retort. Anyhow he has finally gone to the clinic for tests at the chapter I have reached.
The first time I met a urologist I shudder to recall remarking to him that basically he’d pulled the short straw having to sit about puzzling out peoples piddle problems and wouldn’t he have been more excited by performing open heart surgery? He, a calm older dude, who reminded me of something out of The Godfather laughed warmly and explained how he gets to do kidney transplants and poking about with piddlers was only one part of urology. Now of course I hail him and all who work in urology, especially those who label test tubes and do the scans and the grunt work that delivers up the verdicts that urologists set about analyzing and fixing. But yes pain, it does rather do the head in, force one to stay still, drugged up while embracing three books and remembering all the many more days of flittering about, drinking too much tea in pain-free abandon.
February 25, 2013
Withering weather
There are up to 20 weather warnings today in our province. For our city, it is rain and for the Island wind warnings. It occurred to me that we haven’t had so many rainfall warnings this season, yet it never seems to cease raining.
Friday was a particularly abysmal day. Yesterday a beautiful blast of blue light, which now has given way to worse than Friday.
I think along with weather warnings forecasters could begin melancholy measuring alongside the warnings. This weather is likely to induce the following in people: then the challenge to find appropriate adjectives to match the weather. Writers could be hired. I find the language of weather forecasting has such potential.
How is your weather, wherever you are?