A small room above a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

There are two doors. Behind the narrow door is a closet. Below the top shelf, a pole running left to right with five coat hangers, none in use. The shelf is lined with newspaper, and at its centre, a dark green hat like the one at the beginning of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, what is for me the most memorable part of the book.

West writes:

"He left the car at Vine Street. As he walked along, he examined the evening crowd. A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court."

West's paragraph was written in 1938. In 1967 I made a similar observation while walking on Sunset with my grandmother. Only later, in my teens, did it occur to me that what I once identified as two things were, in fact, one, and why it is best for some things, like people, to be seen that way.

From the last paragraph:

"He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into the police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could."

On Thursday and Friday I took part in the 2nd Annual Writers Jamboree at the Carnegie Centre. Four one-on-one sessions, followed by a roundtable. Everyone I met with left an impression, though two stood out.

K and W are both middle-aged and have been writing for some time. K’s manuscript consisted of a series of film reviews written as former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, via Stephen Colbert. K alluded to how liberated he felt to be writing in the voice of someone with whom he had so little in common, and what can be gained from such a perspective. W’s manuscript was the opposite: a memoir focused on her experiences living in a farmer’s outbuilding during a bout of mental illness, where nothing much happens apart from her prose. Reading W’s work was like reading Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping – fluid, seamless, translucent.

There was not much I could say to writers as assured as these. To K, who is more interested in writing screenplays, I suggested his reviews become a blog. To W, who would like to see her story in book form, I put her in touch with my agent.

But the writer most on my mind after the second and final day was someone so eager for us to get at his work that he did not have time to tell me his name. This was someone of indeterminate age (he could have been thirty, he could have been fifty), someone who could not get beyond voice and description, two things he did incredibly well. As I waited for the light to change, I saw him leaning against the Carnegie’s wrought iron fence, his eyes, at least as far as I could tell, on nothing.

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After hearing word of a possible collaboration between filmmaker Michael Haneke and author Michael Houellebecq, the Globe and Mail’s Russell Smith has given us his review:

“It is true that the film Haneke and Houellebecq will come up with will undoubtedly be the saddest film ever made, and it will be hated and reviled by normal people, and yet it will end up being, like their respective oeuvres, incisive and enlightening, somehow inspiring.” (November 19, 2009)

Smith, who has long prided himself on his innate understanding of the new (while at the same time retaining a connoisseur’s love of the classics), has once again proven (“It is true…”) that the marriage of proper names (“undoubtedly”) makes for that which can only be described as “incisive,” “enlightening” and “inspiring.”

That the only other people who talk like that are monarchs (Prince Philip) and baseball team owners (George Steinbrenner) is not important to Smith. As ever, he remains at the edge of things, firm in his convictions and his got’em-in-London shoes.

Tonight will mark the third night in which drivers and pedestrians can experience David MacWilliam’s Kingsway Luminaires, a work of (public) art that has three poles installed on a median strip at Dumfries, three at Clark. Atop each pole is a glass blown form. Inside the form, a full-spectrum LED light capable of nine colours. Visitors should take their time -- unlike the traffic lights, the colours change slowly.

Bed In Summer
(Robert Louis Stevenson)

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

Reid Shier and I will be giving a talk tomorrow at 7PM on the art bar we will be operating during the 2010 Olympic Games. The talk is hosted by the Langara College Centre for Public Art, located at 100 West 49th Avenue, 3rd Floor, Library. Admission is free.