Writing from Gate C-50 at YVR, awaiting flight AC210 to Calgary. A 78 minute hop followed by a slightly longer shuttle bus to the Banff Centre, where I have been invited to participate in the Are Curators Unprofessional? conference.

Banff changes with every visit, especially the Centre’s dining hall, the ever decreasing ratio of artists to corporate employees, whose company’s have sent them there for conferences of their own. Did I read recently (e-Flux?) about a conference about conferences?

Sina Queryas has invited me to post on her Lemon Hound blog, so next week I will begin with a report on the catalogue writing panel I have been asked to moderate.

Catalogue writing is something Vancouver poets have always engaged in, writers such as Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen and Lisa Robertson. Not (only) for money, as Clint Burnham suggested at the Vancouver Art & Economies talks some years back, but because many of the country’s literary journals (Malahat Review, Prism International, Prairie Fire, Descant, the Fiddlehead, etc.) were not interested in the critical writing – on any topic – of poets for whom language itself is as ideologically saturated as the landscape Margaret Atwood charted in her 1972 book Survival: A Thematic Guide To Canadian Literature.