As Seen from a Reading Chair

Back from the grocer, the compartments (fridge, cupboard) stocked, tea made, a book before me, a light behind. The window that is also a door frames the first flakes, wet and heavy, eventually putting the book down to pull on my boots and gloves and coat to go outside and shake the trees and shrubs.

Back in my chair, refreshed, the book in my lap not yet open, it's characters where I left them: Rhoda leading Hurtle outside, to see her garden ("my garden"), like Harris led Ann to the rock garden in the book before it, a make-out session that stayed with her all her life, lighting up her dying days.

Oh, the world. Its worlds. Shoes, socks, pants and shirts.

I like your ring.

Do you? Thank you. It was my mother's. Where'd you get your belt?

My belt? Nordstrom's I think. Or Winners. They're right across from each other.

Yes they are. Hard to keep things apart.

Some things, yes. But I know what you mean.

The Vivisector (1970)

With thrift stores supplying me with most of my reading material of late, I find myself lonely for bookshops and make a point of visiting them, often leaving with something I would never find elsewhere (I still don't buy books online). Paperhound is one such shop, Massy Books another, the People's Co-op another. Yet another is the Momma Bear of the under-60-run shops, and that is Pulp Fiction on Main Street. All four shops balance "new" and "used" titles.

Pulp Fiction is a grounding presence in my life. Like the former Granville Book Company, where Chris and Paperhound's Rodney learned their trade, the staff are very near the entrance and stand behind the counter like bartenders. Nothing fills me with excitement like walking into Pulp Fiction and seeing Chris and J.P. on duty, with Chris using lighter fluid to clean a book's cover and J.P. stealing a puff off his e-cig, if that's what he's doing when he brings his fist to his mouth like that.

Sometimes my excitement is out of control and, if no one is at the consumer side of the counter, I launch into commentary related to a book J.P. had recommended during a previous visit or an exhibition I had seen that made me think of Chris. Mine is cringeworthy behaviour for those who treat bookshops like monasteries, but I make no apologies, as cringing is the result of a conversation that exists entirely within the cringer. Plus at my present age I no longer care what people think of me, as I am no longer who I never was in the first place (at least not to me).

Last week I entered the store and there was J.P. alone with no one at the counter. I sipped from my excitement rather than douse him in it, offering a brief but smiled greeting and went to the STAFF PICKS shelf where I saw below J.P.'s name Patrick White's The Vivisector. Interesting, I thought. I'd always wanted to read something by Patrick White. But I'd also used the concept of vivisection in my spoof of Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), where I mined the many epigrams that set off her chapters as the basis for my 1997 twelve poem Survivial: A Strobic Guide chapbook I produced on my one-off CanLit Classics in Transition imprint.

"What was White's great book, J.P.?"

"Voss," he said into his fist.

"You enjoyed The Vivisector?"

"Yes, have you read it?"

I hadn't.

"It's about an abstract painter."

Sold.

Last night, just before turning off the light, I turned down the corner of Page 85, a few pages after the sale of the precocious six year old Hurtle to Alfreda and Harry Courtenay, who'd met him earlier (as the laundress's son) and found him charming. Their similarly aged humpback daughter Rhoda is charmed by him too, and at this moment the two are circling each other, filled with that mixture of attraction and disgust that makes desire what it is. But it is Hurtle and Harry's first meeting that produced the line that blew my mind and spoke directly to the book's title. Here it is (in bold), beginning with Mr Courtenay speaking to Hurtle, and Hurtle referring to himself (on occasion) in the second person:

"'Round about your age I remember going on a long drive. In the country. At night. With my father and Archdeacon Rutherford.' He broke up his sentence with short puffs at is cigar, his lips glossy and contented.

"It was strange, though comforting, to hear Mr Courtenay's voice mention his father's friend by name, as though taking it for granted that you too had known Archdeacon Rutherford.

"'I would have given anything to stop that buggy. But didn't know how. In front of the Archdeacon. He was a very thin old man. I used to picture his guts resting flat against his backbone.'" (57)

Call for Pitches: Gossip

Earlier this fall, C Magazine, one of Canada's last remaining visual art magazines, had a notice out for a new ED/Publisher and another for pitches to an upcoming issue on gossip. The invitation to pitch expired on November 2, but I archived it because I thought I might have something to say about it in a post. Turns out I don't. At least nothing fresh. But if pressed, I would say that I have always been curious about the word's origin. Here's what Merriam-Webster says about gossip:

Old English sibb, meaning “relative” or “kinsman,” came from the adjective sibb,“related by blood” (the ancestor of modern English sibling). Old English godsibbwas a person spiritually related to another, specifically by being a sponsor at baptism. Today we call such a person a godparent. Over the centuries, godsibb changed both in form and in meaning. Middle English gossib came to be used for a close friend or crony as well as for a godparent. From there it was only a short step to the gossip of today, a person no longer necessarily friend, relative, or sponsor, but someone filled with irresistible tidbits of rumour.

The last time I contributed to C Magazine was at the urging of guest editor Merray Gerges, who asked me to write about some gossip I'd gathered, collated and shared in a post about a local art collector and his war with the director of the city's largest art gallery. The post had consequences, and I guess that's what Merray was interested in hearing about -- the consequences of my post and I how I felt about them. The article, entitled "Pastoral Fail: Reflections On an Art World Call-Out", can be read here.

Here is C Magazine's call for pitches:

Call for Pitches GOSSIP C154­—Spring 2023 Accepted until: November 2, 2022 What’s your gossip? As unofficial murmurings, gossip speaks to a misaligned oral tradition. Associated with matriarchal and feminist passing of information—think of auntie types gathering across different cultures—gossip is history, unarchived. What is deemed worth noting down and what is to remain as gossip? Through which processes of confirmation do certain belief systems (e.g. the stock market) become legitimized over others as rational, and who decides this? Does some knowledge remain more useful as gossip, sneaking past dominant structures? How does gossip help us protect each other? How does it protect our labour in the contemporary art world? This issue invites engagements with gossip through artistic practices and creative criticism. Gossip may encompass wishful future-making in the vein of speculative fiction. It may blur what is considered low or high art-making through the spaces that it can inhabit, such as internet/meme culture and mass media. There are the dark sides of gossip, too, and its nebulous anxieties, when it’s wielded to maintain dominance in gendered, racialized, and classed ways. Possible engagements with gossip can include: oral and counter-histories; superstition; secret languages as survival; how information is circulated; parody and humour; art practices focused on sound and listening; privacy, risk, and surveillance. What can gossip tell us about power, and can either exist without the other? Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until November 2, 2022. We suggest pitching early to avoid disappointment. Review pitches, which are not required to be thematic, are accepted on a rolling basis. Send pitches to pitch@cmagazine.com, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and goes on to indicate the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example).  Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of your CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones written in a style similar to your pitched piece). Submitted work must be original; we do not publish reprints nor adaptations of any kind. Thank you for understanding that we are unable to reply to unsuccessful pitches. Please see our submission and writer’s guidelines for more information. Note: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.

Lost and Found

Khan Lee's Lost and Found exhibition opened at Equinox yesterday afternoon. A great turn out, with gallery artists and those much younger (some as young as forty!).

In 1998 Lee and a couple of fellow Emily Carr University students began a relational artist collective called Intermission, whose project in part was the inverse of the conceptual project that had arrived in Vancouver in the late-Sixties and later "posted-" itself to photography and, in some cases, sculpture. Instead of artists who thought up ideas and had others make the work, Intermission advertised itself as makers available to those willing to contribute ideas. At least that's how I interpret it.

Though Intermission was an early example of the more recent social practice that has come to characterize 21st century contemporary art (so far), Lee was always a formalist, and this bears out in his current exhibition (one work, entitled Intermission, 2022, is comprised of 144 4.5x8" water colour "backgrounds" derived from de-peopled Zoom grids). But the crowd pleaser -- the work that, in the words of The Big Lebowski's "The Dude", "really tied the room together" -- is Fifty Feet (2002/2022) -- a 50ft. stretch of super-8 reversal film placed before an LED light strip inset into the gallery's south wall.

Here are those first few feet:

Go Ask Alice B. Toklas

As the 20th century was drawing to a close, there was a lot of talk about the century's greatest contribution to visual art. Many were quick to say collage, while some felt it was the readymade. I slow down when it comes to the past -- I like to sleep on it, allow my dreams their say -- but eventually I too came around to collage, though for a time I was routing for its buttoned-down cousin: montage.

Montage is something that came not from filmmaking but painting. For me, Cubism is the antecedent, from Cézanne to Picasso, and then Eisenstein, Heartfield -- Jeff Wall is part of this lineage. Ah, but is montage not just collage with an idea in front of it? Hmmm. Okay, we can leave it at that. Surely there are more important things to dream about.

My reading of Susan Minot's Evening (1998) ended this week. One of Ann's last unpunctuated fever dreams (the critic Manhola Dargis likens these states to the soliloquies of Joyce's Molly Bloom) has her moving through the country on a train, where at one point "the Mississippi River had withdrawn and white farm houses sat like sugar cubes in the distance." (259) Why did that sound familiar?

A couple hours later, while tidying the books by my bed, I saw my copy of Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and remembered Toklas's early days in Paris, "based upon the rue de Fleures and the Saturday evenings and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning." (89)

Stein's Toklas tells us of the Picassos (Pablo and Fenande) who lived on that street and of their return to it after time spent in Spain. Pablo brought wth him some canvases he'd done, and Stein's Toklas says of them: 

"... the treatment of the houses was essentially spanish and therefore essentially Picasso. In those pictures he emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage of the guns and of the ships in war." (90)

And from there, the anecdote of seeing those guns moving through Paris en route to the front:

"C'est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified."

Whistler's Other

Meeka contacted me a couple weeks back to ask if I would review the "Skateboarding" show at the Audain Art Museum at Whistler, and I said yes. The due date for copy is February. the issue scheduled for early summer.

The exhibition will have been down six months by then, but reviews have a way of living on, showing up years later at art school studios after someone drops off a parent's old art magazines for students to flip through. When they're not on their phones, that is.

This might have been my first trip out of town in over year. A shameful feeling for me, though there is nothing about Whistler today that makes me think I've missed anything. How it went from an improvised community rooted in skiing to an expensive back alley stop for the international jet-set is a story that belongs as much to its present as it does to its past.

Palomar

It's been a few days now since the passing of Michael Morris. Curious to see if the art press has posted anything, I went looking and, near the bottom of the bowl, found mention of the Palomar exhibition Michael did at the now-defunct Satellite Gallery.

Palomar was a show organized by Presentation House Gallery and mounted in conjunction with the Belkin Art Gallery's Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry exhibition. Pictured above is one of the Palomar sculptures, as photographed by Stella Hsu. Amidst it, yours truly.

Bye Bye Love

Throughout All That Jazz (1979), director Bob Fosse's fictive stand-in   -- the weak-hearted pill-popping philandering workaholic Joe Gideon   -- converses with Angelique, whose name speaks for itself. Angelique is typically constructed: she is always there and awaits him at the end.

Anyone who has seen the film knows the amazing song-and-dance finale (a comp on "Bye Bye Love"), the spectacular death of the artist who appears on-stage in a hospital bed surrounded by staff and loved ones as his able-bodied self spins and twirls and kisses his audience goodbye.

His final passage is comforting, with Gideon moving along a cat walk high above the stage. A visually and sonically perfect shot-reverse-shot sequence. At the end of his "walk": Angelique.

Open Cage Feeder

Thirty-six days today since this picture was taken. Much has changed. Rains, for one. And frosts. The second day of frost slayed my begonias.

The chickadees still come a couple hours before sunset for their feeding, though more finches than chickadees of late. Finches mate for life and always come in pairs.

The Life Aquatic (2004)

Last month I picked up the DVD of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic. The clincher was the price ($5) relative to the distributer (Criterion).

Back in the early 2000s, I paid $70 for the Criterion edition of David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), so mine was an act of revenge. Like it was revenge for Captain Steve Zissou in his mission to destroy the Jaguar Shark who ate his first-mate, only Steve learns his lesson by film's end. With the Jaguar Shark located, he leaves it to its beauty, though Steve's work on the patriarchy continues (unconsciously).

I first saw Life Aquatic when it was in the theatres. On second viewing, I was shocked to learn how little I remembered of it. Seu Jorge singing Bowie songs in Portuguese was memorable, as was Willem Dafoe running with a spear gun and Owen Wilson's first scenes, which stand as a masterclass in understatement. Other than that, this children's tale for grown-ups was a new movie for me.

The picture up top is from the scene where Team Zissou attacks the pirate fort on Ping Island and recovers their stolen possessions, which includes Ned's inheritance, locked in Zissou's safe. Zissou declares Ned's inheritance saved, then, after a few turns of the lock, opens the door, where we see that the back of the safe has been torched out. You could drive a truck through that metaphor. A toy truck, of course.

The Websit Review

Dear K.O.,

Thank you for sending me your poems. Not sure where you heard websit (Websit?) is a literary review, but now that I think about it, I suppose I could thread one into it. 

Of the five poems you submitted, "Caulk" and "Bawl" from your "Home Reno Divorce" series show great promise. As for the three poems from your "BDSM" series, I want to feel more tortured by them, which is to say you could take them further -- by revealing less.

A writer you might be interested in, someone with whom you share stylistic tendencies, is Hamish Ballantyne, whose new book Blue Knight (Auric: Durham, N.C.) can be found in limited editions at Vancouver's People's Co-op Bookstore.

Sincerely,

M.T.

Where Bread Is Broken

T. lives in the neighbourhood with her parents, who moved here in 2001. She is the family's third and final child, born sixteen years ago last spring, a home-birth I was invited to, so I can say I have known T. since she was a moment old.

Yesterday, while raking leaves, I saw T. coming down the block, all bottom lip and kicking a pebble. 

"What's up T.?"

"They're gonna close the cafeteria."

"They?"

"The school," she said. "They fired two of the staff, including Ms. L. who everybody likes."

"I'm sorry to hear that. School cafeterias can be more than a place for soup and a sandwich. I learned a lot at my high school caf--"

"Yes, but the principal says she's fed up with bullying. But then D.'s mom said that's just an excuse to cut staff, so it's not about bullying; they're lying."

"So you never saw any bullying in the cafeteria?" 

"Well, I mean, there's mean people everywhere, right? So why should the cafeteria be singled out? It's not fair." 

And with that, T. held her gaze at me. As if for the first time. Hers were pleading eyes, glassy with tears. 

I felt my hands tighten on the rake. I did not want those tears to fall. "I'm sorry T."

"You have no idea how important that place is to us! And now they're gonna take it away! It's just not fair!" 

Michael Morris (1942-2022)

I am fortunate to have met most of the original Western Front founders. I was close to Kate Craig (1947-2002) in the years before her passing, and some of her plants continue to thrive in my garden. This morning I received news that Michael Morris passed away. He was 80.

This writing will not be an attempt at a remembrance or an obituary but an announcement of a day to be spent with Michael, someone I was happy to know, learn from and work with; someone who devoted his life to art, its concerns and relations.

The picture up top is a relatively small ink and gouache work I found on the Heffel site. The work is dated 1965 (likely done while Michael was at the Slade, UK) and is untitled.

Of the three sections, it is the middle passage that is closer to a style Michael would become known for, particularly his The Problem of Nothing (1966), an acrylic on canvas painting that Ray Johnson saw reproduced (in black-and-white) in Artforum. Johnson collaged the reproduction and sent it to Michael (c/o the VAG?) under the auspices of the New York Correspondence School. Michael replied, and the rest is art history.

The Art of Parking

I could have scooted around this truck as it was about to back into an entrance no more than a foot wider than itself, but no, my physics nerd was alerted and I stopped to watch. A five point turn as it turned out. Once aligned, down the ramp like a sinking ship.

Mother Earth

A pic I took of one of Jin-Me Yoon's videos at the VAG a couple weeks back. As this was my first visit to the exhibition, I swooped through it, gathering impressions first, details (like titles) on another visit.

Much has been made of holes in Jeff Wall's pictures, but with Yoon, the hole and its extracted medium (soil, earth) are given equal weight. Equal because they more or less share the picture's centre. 

We don't see the complete interior of Yoon's hole, only its extracted space. From this extraction (can we call it a mound, or does that sound too much like a pubis?) we infer the size of the hole's interior. 

Suddenly everything is gendered. Or maybe it is formal. The mound is, after all, pyramidal -- a triangle if you consider it two-dimensionally. (A half century ago, the adult pubis was pictured, if not clothed, with a triangulation of pubic hair. Not long after that, North American women began burning their bras; a decade later, they began extracting their pubic hair.)

Another video in the exhibition features people (an extended family?) digging on a beach. Here we don't see the hole or the mound so much as the labour, the relations.

I will see this show again, though from first impressions everything seemed to snap into place.

Death's Bouquet

The passage from garden door to back gate. South-north, north-south. The death shapes were getting to me -- the clump of lady ferns by the rear foot of the bench, the peony along the east fence, the Solomon's seal between the fence and the converted concrete washtubs. I put on my gloves, grabbed my clippers and there it was -- death's bouquet.

12th Avenue

Those familiar with 12th Avenue's east-west bi-section of Vancouver (from Boundary Road to the extraterritoriality of UBC) will have noticed the gauntlet of trees between Kingsway and Fraser, how they have grown so big that some of them are now over the curb and onto the road.

On Friday CoV engineers closed off the stretch between Kingsway and Fraser to remove a fallen tree, not as a result of high winds but because our dry summer and fall had weakened its base, making it even more susceptible to car and truck vibration. 

I happened upon this removal while walking back from the Kingsgate Mall on Friday afternoon. The fallen tree had already been cut up and loaded onto a truck, but the road remained closed because CoV workers were taking down another. I assumed it was a preventative measure, but asked why nonetheless.

"It's full metals. From all the sideswiping. That one's trunk is encrusted with mirror fragments."

What a beautiful image. 

"After a while the trees absorb the metals and get sick."

"Is that what felled the other tree? Sickness?"

"It's all related."

A Winter Hat Made of Letters and the Spaces Between Them

nothing

justifies a fallacy

more than anger

Tangible Ax

"We don’t demand that art change the world, only that it reflect it – or perhaps transcend it. Most of the work in this exhibition is a retort to colonialism and it may sway minds or provoke thoughts, but it is unlikely to result in tangible acts of decolonization. So why make it? These artists, so certain of their themes, seem uncertain of the answer." -- Kate Taylor, Globe & Mail, November 10, 2022

The Sobey Art Award has been with us for how long? Do I need to look it up, or has it been long enough? Let's just say it has -- and yet for the first time the Globe has reviewed its exhibition of the five shortlisted artists with a critical eye. Though I agree with the conclusion ("Finer form may yet blossom from a generation that has content all figured out"), it's how its critic arrived there that has me wanting.

Words like "reflect" (e.g. Realism)  and "transcend" (e.g. Minimalism) are quaint expectations, and their elevation only blurs art's ability to carry its own critique, resist its utility. Mirrors reflect; drugs and religion offer transcendent experiences. Art would have so much more going for it if its artists and critics weren't so beholden to terms set for them by that which they claim to be kicking against, where anything that threatens the status quo is given symbolic power, and only rarely political economic power (and even then in benign doses).

Replacing a museum's stolen treasure with a bag of sand, as one nominated artist, Divya Mehra, did, only maintains the relationship, adding value to that bag. Critiquing the museum is tolerated, if not rewarded by the museum and its public and private funders. As long as artists participate in the museum's powers of validation, they are in its service. Divya Mehra will be given the Sobey Art Award this year for reasons that will not have everything to do with her art and practice. The jury, made up of the curators who selected the artists, will consider their selection a tangible act of decolonization.

Khan Lee, Equinox Gallery, Nov. 26 - Dec. 24, 2022

The Equinox Gallery is on my trapline and sometimes while walking I devise a reason to pop in to see a show everyone knows I'm seeing for the fourth time. Fortunately the staff are well-trained, and for my neediness and the guilt that comes with it, punishment comes once indulged.

"What's up after Devon's show?" I ask, and Sophie tells me it's Khan Lee. "Great!" I follow her around the corner where Khan has installed an outsized wall bracket that turns the second floor of the gallery into a shelf, the gallery into a cupboard, and us -- into silverfish?

"There," Sophie points, and I see that instead of large screws fastening the bracket to the wall (and ceiling?) it is an expressive mess of "normal-sized" screws that returns us to the scale we've grown accustomed to.

Book Launch

Last night at Pyatt Hall Talonbooks launched six of its fall titles. Pictured above is Danielle LaFrance introducing #postdildo, an insertable word she uses to plug us from the predictability of our imaginations?

As she read, we listened. 

Copper Miner

The composer of this sculpture does not consider himself to be a composer or a sculptor but someone who, he tells me, has "a sixth sense for what's coming down," and when it does, "there's always good stuff to be found," like the copper he mined from a nearby demolition bin. 

"Twice people called the cops on me," he said, adjusting his haul to fit a second device (a more-recent version of the Radio Flyer wagon). "They thought I stole this container, but I didn't; it's the one that goes with my house. It's mine."

I asked if the police showed up, and he told me, "They did, but they just laughed." And he laughed too. 

The miner said it would take a couple hours for him to clean up the copper, and that he could get a couple hundred bucks for it. When I asked if his "sixth sense" applied to anything else, he thought for a moment, before shrugging, "No, not so far."

Free Musketeers 2

Thank you to those both pro and con who wrote to me about your relationship to/with Twitter.

To the cons, I hear you, and to a couple of you I hope you overcome your addiction. To those pro, I scrolled through one of your accounts and noted a thread on why it is important to leave an abusive relationship, ideally if you are the abuser. But isn't that what many are engaged in as participants in Twitter? An abusive relationship? And isn't that the modern villain's game (from the Joker to Hannibal Lecter)  -- pointing out our hypocrisies? 

I doubt I'm the first person to assume that Elon Musk has read enough Edgar Allen Poe to know a mean game when he sees one -- to say nothing of the one he is playing with his most recent acquisition. All these people tweeting their goodbyes to Twitter, only to follow them with "I am livid" vituperations against some celebrity or another. It saddens me that people will endure something if it's "free", as if a free service precludes adherence to the conditions that underlie and, of course, infect it.

Terry Southern's The Magic Christian (1959) and its 1968 film version showed us how far people will go for money (recall the swimming pool scene). Twitter has shown us how much people will put up with as long as they are not being seen to be paying for it. But now that they are required to pay? What can it mean to pay to stay on something when everything you've tweeted says otherwise? That you "contain multitudes"? This from the same poet: "Resist much, obey little. "

Skaters

Saturday's sun was irresistible. So I went out in it, walking east before making up my mind. A couple blocks in, a text from a friend: "If you're on one of your 'walks', stop by Britannia's tennis courts. My daughter's in a skateboard competition. Just girls."

Hard to call this a competition when everyone was bent-over-backwards supportive of each other, though I suppose you can have it both ways these days.

South of the courts were tables. Goods and good cheer. A boyfriend was selling his girlfriend's crocheted hats (she was competing). I saw one I liked, and was about to meet his price ($40), when I asked about the yarn, and he told me automatonically: "They're a hundred percent acrylic."

I thought of the wool and cotton hats my mother used to make for me, how quickly they lost their shape, only to be reminded by the young man's mother, who sensed my disappointment, that "Acrylic bounces back." She took the hat from my hands and played it like a concertina. "See?"

Free Musketeers?

Dr. Constantina Katsari is a "comparative historian" and entrepreneur currently living in Leicester, UK. On July 1, 2019 she posted an article on her Linkedin page called "How to monetize your Twitter account and get paid per tweet". In 2019 there were 139 million Twitter account holders; today there are approximately 450 million.

I came upon the article while Googling for evidence of a Twitter pay-per-tweet initiative, where Twitter account-holders pay for each tweet they post, rather than getting paid. I am interested in this in the same way I am interested in families who have a "swear jar" in their homes. For those unfamiliar with swear jars, every time you swear you owe the jar a twoonie.

Katsari tells us that Kim Kardashian is getting paid "significantly more than $10,000 per tweet." This after Katsari tells us that advertisers (in 2019) were willing to pay those with more than 20,000 followers between $2-70 per tweet.

Elon Musk's current $8 fee for Twitter Blue verification is his attempt to both clean up Twitter's "hellscape" (not likely) and monetize the platform for his own gain (more likely). If every current account holder were to pay $8, Musk would be within $100 million of breaking even on the $44B he paid for the company.

As for those who intend to stay-and-pay -- to tweet their grief and anger, to service their dopamine addiction, to promote books that fewer and fewer of us have time to read because we're too busy tweeting -- a per tweet fee (or a tweet plan, like we have with our phones) would most certainly have Musk cleaning up, put Twitter in the black. Hellscape be damned. 

Corydalis

The Corydalis is usually out in April and starts to fade by late-August. Only this year she returned in mid-September and is still present in my back garden's shadier corners.

Funny that I have so much luck with the lutea (yellow), but not with the flexuosa (blue), which is the variety I've attempted numerous times but could never establish. The opposite occurred with the lutea. I've seen colonies in alleys that came from my first plants as far as two blocks away.

Hail Fire

Walking down the 1200 block of Kingsway on the north side heading northwest. At the halfway point you can look right down the throat of East 21st. On Wednesday it beckoned. A fire in the belly. A campfire.

This was later in the afternoon, usually a busy time on the roads. A sudden lull on Kingsway said Yes, go for it! So I leapt onto the street, jumped the median and entered a cathedral.

From Inverness west to Glen. Walking until the houses blocked the sun, then a couple steps back to sun again. But only for a minute. Another step back, then another, until I could no longer stand to see the sun extinguished. 

Swinging Lumpen

The Vancouver Police Department, whose motto I learned recently is "Beyond the Call" (as in, "We're too busy to take yours"?), has released its down-to-business style digital poster that I'm sure those included on it will be emailing to a London Drugs Photolab to have blown up for framing so that they might hang it above their wide-screen TVs.

The poster refers to what the VPD are calling the "Breakout Riot Top 10" and, further down the site, includes video of its Top 10'ers engaged in various degrees of anti-social behaviour upon hearing word that a Breakout Festival headliner wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be performing. As a result, refrigerators were kicked, tents were collapsed and things were thrown.

One Top 10'er "assaulted a man," which we can assume doesn't mean a cop, otherwise the chances of getting a lead on him would be greatly diminished. 

October Art

Hallowe'en artistry was on display in my neighbourhood this week, with a pumpkin sculpture that looks as if it was carved in the spirit of Kader Attia's The Repair: From Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012) -- an installation that extends the notion of montage to repair, as opposed to a consequence of repair, which, in the case of wounded soldiers, can be disfigurement. Attia's installation was one of the more powerful works I saw at what will likely be the last Documenta I visit IRL.

A couple days before, I stopped by Equinox Gallery, where Devon Knowles stained glass-based works were on display. I say "-based" because on several occasions the artist extrapolated a stained glass work into a single monochromatic form or two, hanging them adjacent to their source or by themselves. Below is her diptych, Winter Butterfly (2022):

Like the photo-based light box artists (N.E. Thing Co., Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Dana "Fire Box" Claxton)), Knowles leaves a space of 4.5" between her glass surface and its rear steel support. Viewed head on, you see that glass surface, but also the projection of its image in behind.

I see the potential for more to be made of these two surfaces -- the assembled and the projected -- in relation to each other (as montage?), particularly as the viewer moves from one side to the other.

Evening (1998)

I worked with a student once who wrote instinctively, producing moments of dappled, denotative beauty, where nothing much happens, but when it does, resounds in line and form. These miniatures kept coming, and I encouraged them, suggesting sequences, thematics, and to read some Donald Bartheleme, some Lydia Davis; learn to understand your work in relation to its neighbours -- but stay true to your instincts!

Years later she sent me some of her more recent writing, and a note to say how a more recent teacher had turned her on to Susan Minot, whose writing (as it appeared to me through my former student's), was not so much a neighbour but an overbearing roommate. This recent teacher told her that her older work, the work I was dazzled by, lacked story. But most of all -- colour. Although disappointed at the loss of the earlier writer, I was happy for her as a person, and resolved to one day meet this roommate.

That day came twenty years later, as of last week, when I was looking through the bookshelves of the recently replenished East 12th Avenue Sally Anne, where I found a copy of Minot's Evening. Ah! We finally meet! So I purchased the book and cracked it that night.

Minot writes no more and no less than she needs to, which is a fair amount more than the earlier writings of my former student. She is observant of what lies around her, and the result is gorgeously rendered -- a sparkling sentence or clause that could be smeared on a slide, placed under a microscope and shown to students of one of Michael Ondaatje's informal cyto-prose master classes. Minot's writing asks little of its reader, apart from the ultimate compliment: the periodic gasping for air.

Here is how Minot (pronounced "Mine-it", in the American way) opens Evening:

A new lens passed over everything she saw, the shadows moved on the wall like skeletons handing things to each other. Her body was flung back over a thousand beds in a thousand other rooms. She was undergoing a revolution, she felt split open. In her mattress there beat the feather of a wild bird.

I remember reading an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, where he talks about the writing of Richard Brautigan, whose earlier works he edited. Brautigan had passed away by then, so Ferlinghetti felt free enough to express his frustration with Brautigan for never maturing to be the writer he wanted him to become.

This came as a shock to me and perhaps to the many who appreciate what have come to be referred to as "Brautigans", those little "stories" that their author had not so much perfected but left behind like crumbs that lead nowhere but up, to the same place that allows us to discover them, consider them, take them in our mouths and digest them.

Brautigan's is one kind of writing, Minot's another. My former student, now an English professor and expert on Coetzee, has been both.