November 4, 2010
So here’s something curious a Timeline of Events in today’s student protest in Dublin, from The Irish Times which protestors “clashed” with Gardai.
Note the Sherlock Holmes tone in the list. The …we must uncover the menace who are not officially angry about student fees but have somehow infiltrated and hijacked the protest. It’s an interesting literary technique that attempts to play down the matter that any anger is legitimate about anything. A coralling effect. Get in the correct line, with the correct line. I am surprised they do not suggest the protestors were corrupted by watching French telly channels.
I’d also point out the man who drove his cement mixer into the gates of Dail Eireann recently. Good thing he did it on his own, else they’d be insisting the SWP and the anarchists forced him into it over his teapot.
November 3, 2010
I was thinking the other day about the enormous amount of literature generated by the various Tribunals that have taken place in Ireland over the past 10 years. I had cause to go in search of a transcript because it concerned a place I had once worked briefly. Man were there hundreds and hundreds of witnesses and pages and pages of transcriptions to scroll through before I found the individual I sought.
The transcription I read went on and on in a similar manner: judge seemed to go through every line of a statement to which the witness responded very little other than “correct” at the end of a long paragraph read aloud. Then the barrister (I think) began cross examination. Again endless, endless repeating of long lines to very single word or single sentence replies.
The written and verbal equivalent of pigeon steps along a line of a never ending spool of thread. I was trying to imagine whether in a hundred years people would pour over these kinds of papers in bound books or be able to pull them up on a flatscreen on the fridge door and what would it tell them about today?
All I really learnt was a few tidbits about the person that could probably be gathered on a Facebook query. I don’t know what I thought I’d find, I think I was mostly interested in the performative recording, of how the individual responded and dealt with being queried on a time and place I could visualize, in front of a room of people and the six pm news.
I wonder if Tribunals would ever spawn board games or reality tv shows along the lines of So you think you can cross examine? Or where the contestant has to recall minutae of xmas day 25 years ago and their family are in the audience disputing the colour of the wrapping paper.
November 2, 2010
I still have no potato masher in my life. Each Tuesday comes and with it a hot pan of potatoes to mash and no masher. I have managed to cultivate two topics of key interest that do no elicit the same level of excitement in others my age: gymnastics and penguins. I begin to comprehend train spotters and people who collect those John Deere tractors.
I give you this. They’re so clever: go limp, rather than fight, then out of the jaws they bolt….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6wYy-YBkE0&fs=1&hl=en_US]
November 2, 2010
Dream Machine
In case you find yourself dissatisfied with your lighting arrangements: Brion Gysin had a nifty idea that should have made him rich. Iggy Pop swears by it.
Consult http://ubu.com/papers/Gysin-Brion_DreamMachine-Plans.pdf
November 2, 2010
Had the most ferocious dream last night about trying to buy a can of soda and a barbecue inside the equiv of the Titanic tearooms.
Some kind of antique wooden housing, like they housed fishermen in, that had fallen into ruin. You walked or rolled on some kind of trampoline material and it ended at a staircase where the sea began. Exactly the way that staircase ends in the Woodwards building. Beyond the trampoline fabric were the sinking and sunk houses/housing could be seen through the glass. The demarcation between inside and outside was vague.
The culprit clearly is the vending machine and the multitude of steps climbed and descended and the long hours spent reading on the 1930’s/ relief camps. What a combo. Pop meets the bunkhouse!
The other notable detail was the fact I could not hear anything in the dream.
Someone emailed me a message subject FYI this morn about some psycho analytic gathering Existential Pioneers in London. Wonderful. Telepathy. Bit of a commute tho’.
November 2, 2010
At 1.09am I made the first of several journeys to open the window and investigate the weather event. A rolling rain joined later by some rousing winds. The evidence they were rousing? They roused me to three further investigations. Scooby Doo has nothing on me. The great thing about said weather event was it put paid to the ear drum blasting that had been going on for the previous seven hours.
Today however the hungover Halloween bangers continued. Who, at 12.19pm, on an average Monday has time and inclination to throw bangers (fire crackers) for more than an hour? Yesterday it felt the birds were dropping them. They land near your ankle, BANG, you take a stroke, and there’s no set of arms anywhere to indicate who threw them.
On the subject of .. yes they’re back again The Penguins. I discovered I’d missed a whole page in the NYRB article on The Great Penguin Rescue. I realized I’d missed it because I was discussing it at dinner with someone who’d also read it and raising the question of penguin nips and whether the volunteers had been nipped. Yes he assured me they were nipped. I’d missed a whole page of the article! And boy were they nipped. The piece also said the African penguin population has declined 95 percent.
Frances Boldereff is good company for insomnia. I turned to her correspondance after the Penguins and during the continued weathering. What a generous woman she was. Did she have an extra kidney full of generousity beans? How did she sustain this enthusiasm for the distant and negligibly interesting, in these snippets, O. I was trying to imagine a male doing likewise for a woman writer — one or two came to mind, and then I abruptly hit a blank. A highway of a blank.
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November 1, 2010
The Razz!
Grandma Suzu rocks on the costume front again. Year 11! Ably assisted by Jer.
I was turning back flips during this production. My penance was guiding the Vending Machine or the Razz as I call him up and down the plethora of stairs Vancouver houses insist upon.
November 1, 2010
Plus two
Two more titles came my way this morning, care of a generous email correspondent and one who knows about such things:
Andrew Roddan wrote a book originally called God in the Jungles published in the 1930’s, recently republished as Vancouver’s Hobos (intro by Todd McCallum (Historian) who also I suspect had something to do with it being republished).
The man behind the box is Andrew Roddan in this photo (click to enlarge) from library and archives Canada
And Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, another fascinating sounding book that I shall be tunnelling through when I obtain a copy.
October 31, 2010
Relief publishing
The Campbell River Museum is one of my favourite museums, I have only visited about 3 museums in BC so it could yet be usurped! Plus it has some competition from The Museum of Country Life in Mayo (some of the exhibit contents are found without leaving my ma’s house) and the pinball machine museum in San Fran.
On the trail of Relief Camps during the 1930’s I harked on this on Campbell River Museum blog:
the “dirty thirties” resulted in vast numbers of homeless and unemployed and the FDP camps included accommodation and meals as well as work. One such camp (FDP Camp 5) was located at Elk Falls Park.
Elk Falls is a favoured spot by firstly my males who make annual pilgrimages there and latterly me who jumped on the bandwagon once and had a mighty time.
I’m particularly intrigued by the publishing of newsletters associated with the Forestry/Relief Camps during this time. Even today there continue to be newsletters published by various history societies such as Forestry and so on. They might be one of the few print venues that enthusiastically solicit anecdotes and stories from their readers. There’s a great appetite in them for Got a story — We want to hear it. A contrast to these official writerly outlets where we seem to spend far too much time being told why we don’t have a story. Or rather why the person reading it has decided it isn’t a story within their limited framework.
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On an interrelated note (a minum over a quaver) why hasn’t the fragment taken off in non fiction the way we have embraced it in blogging. I grow somewhat weary of the essay form at times. Especially when conceiving of generating it. It can become intoxicated by itself, we know where the walls are when we’re reading it and the writing often assures us, as we read, that this is how things should be written. A kind of “There will be a front door and a back door and four walls in this house so help me God.” I don’t find it ungratifying, I just fancy an element of surprise. Some indication of the “paragraphic” (yep made that up) nature of thinking. And the way the mind likes to dart and associate. Rather than competently sprawl because, because we (holy grail of writing) said it must.