January 10, 2011
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A very engaging few hours conversation on research and ideas yesterday with one of my favourite thinker, artist and conversationalist’s. Saturday, ditto, a great collaborative exchange and brainstorm with Lori. Back to the good stuff! The weather changes when the elements are brighter.
January 10, 2011
Abandon
I was interested to read in an old NY Times article (2008) that Isabel Fonseca abandoned a non-fiction book about Uruguay and her family history there.
The piece explained Fonseca began to feel intimidated “because of how some of her family had reacted to a memoir included in the collection “Bruno Fonseca: the Secret Life of Painting,” published after her brother’s death from AIDS in 1994. “Some people didn’t like it,” she said. “There was a lot of ‘It wasn’t like this, it wasn’t like that.’ I thought I had been very straight, so it startled me and inhibited me tremendously.”
It piqued my interest because of Fonseca’s first book “Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey” and the research that book entailed. The abandoned family history book was beset then by a pre-emptative assumption of how it would fail to be authentic to what took place. Failure whether it’s confirmed by the writer or created by the general atmosphere around the writer can often be a new departure point for the writer in my experience.
But it also reminds me of another assumption where it’s quite the opposite: that of what is contained in a book and what that book must surely be and amount to, without having read the book. Read the book before you zip up the sleeping bag on it. Even a chunk of it.
Yesterday I returned to a novel for a sixth reading and was delighted to discover a particular strand that had floated over my head during the previous 5 readings.
January 8, 2011
Sam Selvon II
“Selvon spent some years living as a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency.”
(From Wikipedia)
Thanks a million to Sara for the tip.
Thanks to Sam Selvon for improving my Friday night.
January 8, 2011
The Lonely Londoners
What a treat at the end, of an otherwise, pain in the hole of a day, took the small male out book shopping and discovered an author who intrigues me: Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners. (Penguin Classic) The Lonely Londoners which I’ve just started is written in it’s own dialect with his up the hill and round the garden grammar. Gone are the fences of how words must sit beside each other dictated by an RP grammar. They sit how they wish and will and make me sit up and repeat them. You can hear vocal chords rubbing as you read. Selvon writes about the 1950’s London and people arriving there from the West Indies on the boat train.
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Today I experienced some sense of what it must be like to be in the army or to be a bullock and I conclude it’s very unpleasant.
“There are some people who are sent to try us,” my ma would say when I was younger and today I would tell her that yes I had a few of them in my ear this week.
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January 7, 2011
I have a read a couple of How to Make a Wooden Sign instructions, that were not divinely inspiring. I am curious as to how it will stand and stay upright and thinking of a brick’s assistance. Next I have to consider the proximity the sign will stand to the performance. I am looking forward to talking it all up with wunderbar Lori and am glad to be working with her again after this week’s praiseach.
We laughed so much during our collaboration Big Mamas Ridin’ High for Chaos at Open Space.
Today is Nollaig na mBan. I filled the teapot many times and thought about the labour of women.
January 7, 2011
We are collectively pining for Kauai. It doesn’t need to be spoken of. We just look at each other, sometimes we assess the present tense aloud and recognize we’ve returned to this present tense and then laugh out a lick of a look-back at our wonderful week. For me the quiet moments stay with me, my trots, the birds, the flowers while my boogie-boarding boys, who were as elevated as Tour de France cyclists over the afternoon waves, give rise to a smile.
I still have to comprehend the entirely original weather patterns witnessed there. Many times I woke in the night to the reassuring sound of the trade winds between the trees and in and out a window. Then there was the on-off switch of the rain and the built in mop up of the humidity.
During our last hour in Hanalei I examined Robin’s garden, she had told me something of the complexity of gardening — an insect or bug that attacked certain plants. I must read up and remind myself what it was since the height of everything suggested a robustness that anything planted would head skyward. I also didn’t see a single bee while there, but was assured they have massive bumble bees.
January 6, 2011
I have to make a wooden sign that is as high as I am tall by next Friday for a performance art event.
This should be fun. In my history of manufacturing I have only succeeded in a multitude of identical wooden shelves, an omelet of reasonable tongue, some cards, a knitted shawl, and an incredibly ropey arrangement above the kitchen sink, which would be impossible to classify beyond a disaster. And the bedraggled greenhouse, which I must sing a hopeful spring is coming, spring is coming to, in more forelorn noticings.
January 5, 2011
I forgot to mention what was in the text of Moravia’s novel Boredom as I walked and read it. It was where the male character is describing his mother’s fixation on her plants and gardening. That chapter. And the one that preceded it about how he’s feeling in the world. A contrast — those who know the work may agree.
January 5, 2011
There was an engaging story in today’s NY Times about the neuroscience of courage. Here is the link, I read it, appropriately, on an airplane.