Portraits

At 5:05PM Saturday I left the house near Kingsway and Knight and walked to 5th and Burrard for the 6:30PM screening of My Cousin Rachel (2017).

The walk itself took just under and hour, with a ten minute break outside the Cancer Control Agency, where I bumped into Lisa Prentice, and a 30 second break two blocks west, where I stopped to take a picture of VHG/UBC poster boy George Bowering.

The link for George is to a Western Front reading he did in 1974. The book he reads from is one of my favourites -- Curious (1973) -- "a book of meditations," he says, or a "picture book" and/or a "portrait book," as Ed Dorn told him.

One of George's literary heroes is Gertrude Stein, who wrote portraits of her fellow artists (Matisse, Picasso). Like Stein's portraits, George's are not only affirmative complimentary, but also critical complimentary and entertainingly ambiguous.

More recently Andrew Berardini has taken up portrait writing.

I have nothing positive to say about the current film adaption of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, where we are encouraged to feel aghast at "Philip"'s immaturity, while "Rachel"'s complexity is left flapping.