August 24, 2011
Remarking
I note in Beckett’s Letters (Cambridge Univ Press) a remark by one Michael Roberts, an editor of poetry anthologies and an English writer, in a critique of Beckett’s Echo’s Bones sent to George Reavey
“Who is, or will be, his audience?” and later ” … what is the advantage of reading him?”
The answer, I can confirm, continues to have its own lengthy echo.
August 23, 2011
I am currently rereading Irene Baird’s 1939 BC novel Waste Heritage and marvelling at it all over again.
Such a resonant book that depicts ordinary people within its vibrant prose. I love how its specifics resonate with several places in the world during the past month. The universality of the ordinary, more writers should invest in it and cross pollinate that ordinary into more extraordinary or unusual literary forms. Baird is quite conservative in her style and form — a deliberate aesthetic choice I suspect at that time given everything else that was happening in literature — however now we need to be excited by what the novel can become rather than what we expect or already know of it.
Video gamers describe LAG when they’re playing and there’s a delay to some extent, literature too lags.
August 23, 2011
Three calls
After a strange and discombobulating day it was a beautiful evening. I went out for a short lap and called to a neighbour on spec. I was offered the lend of a book called Bataille’s Peak, which I gladly accepted and we traded news.
The grey and relentless day gave way to a peaceful night and right now there’s a bird streaking about out there with three long calls. Enough, enough, enough, he or she seems to say.
That sort of a day, widely felt I don’t doubt.
August 22, 2011
Jack Layton
Death is such a blinder. It’s why I wrote the novel I did. Jack, Our Man, has died at 61.
Outside it’s a soaker of a day, grey and depleting. The weather pitch perfect in grief.
The PM, far from a poet, offers a limp remembrance, the people will out-articulate him on this, as they have so much else (except yet at the ballot box)
Politically it’s such a depressing time in this country, that Jack Layton’s death is like losing the goal keeper. Perhaps all deaths are like this. This being a more collectively felt one.
August 22, 2011
What intrigued me in the eradication of Saloons (see post below) was what was concurrently eradicated along with them and what replaced them. (and continues to today and how that shaped socialization and especially working class socialization.) Some attention could be sensibly given as to whether this has contributed or contributes to the difficulty in finding work in Vancouver. (a dirty secret that the boosters never mention. It can be v v tough to find work here).
The twinning of prohibition and prostitution and in turn the twin entrances for each gender to bars as a solution to VD? I must read more to see what other conclusions they came up with!
August 22, 2011
In 1985 New Star published a book called Working Lives Vancouver 1886-1986. Working Lives was a 2 year project undertaken by a collective of nine researchers. I spent some time reading the book yesterday, which I’d describe as sectional. I found the section on the eradiction of Vancouver’s Saloons and the invention of the Liquor Board in 1921 particularly fascinating and amusing. Robert A Campbell who wrote the section in Working Lives has since published a whole book on the topic called Sit down and drink your beer: regulating Vancouver’s beer parlours, 1925-1954.
I intend to seek it out, but there’s only one copy in the Reference section of the library remaining. The other two have mysterious words like “in process” beside one and lost/damaged beside the other. The good news is someone was reading them and perhaps someone is still reading that same lost copy years later.
August 21, 2011
I enjoyed this radio program this morning with it’s combination of readings and music.
Taking his cue from Richard Church’s eponymous poem, Tom Robinson considers what’s required of us in ‘Learning To Wait’.
The poem’s paradoxical observation, ‘All that I have grasped at I have lost, All I relinquished won’, provokes Tom to explore the work of other writers who have reflected on wanting and waiting, including Milan Kundera, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence. With music by KD Lang, Shostakovich and Brian Eno.
August 21, 2011
The New York Times have a brief attempt at a blog on whether youtube has killed Performance Art?
What emerges in the comments section suggests intelligent discussion is certainly flailing. The words Performance Art rankle the commenters more than they appear to create any urgency of thought.
I am always surprised to hear people complaining about the normalcy of the kinds of thing depicted and recorded on social medja, when that is the point of social medja. Social medja affords the recording and documentation of what’s regarded (sometimes foolishly) as the banal. It’s a democracy of depiction.
Eventually future technology will focus on finding a path in, around and through it.
Performance Art isn’t dead, if anything it’s waking up from a nap, or needs waking up again.
August 21, 2011
Today I took my second terrific tumble in Vancouver. It was v odd, but not uninteresting. A peculiar lip arrangement between the pavement and maybe a grass gravel interlude, my ankle turned over and major WHAMBLE! Down I went. Boom. Flattened. Even more weirdly on my back. Left arm took the worst of it, but reliable Catholic bones continue to refuse to break, thank Christ. Swell they might. What a shock I received. And not just me, a loved up Lesbian couple were passing right at that moment and were terribly kind to this flattened shorty. My last tumble was in the eyeshot of a man walking a dog and would definitely recommend this particular couple of women over him. Sadly I am remembering this is my 3rd Vancouver tumble. As there was also the bicycle tumble.
In Dublin my tradition was not tumbling, but crashing into stationary objects. I had this tendency towards walking and reading and would omit to factor in lamp posts.
Today when I fell I was thinking about tattoos. I have decided to get one that will have 3 somethings in it. I’ve settled on a Japanese oak..