Faulknerian Psychedelia

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting," observes Benjy at the opening of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1951) -- and indeed for another 69 pages of his inventively structured novel.

Yet as much as I love this sentence, it does't make sense. What is "between the curling flowered spaces" are but wooden boards, which we can't see through (to see the golfers "hitting").

Is this more like it: "Through the fence, between the boards, I could see them hitting and the curling flowered spaces"? 

Autobiographies By Those Other Than Their Subject

Paul Radin's Autobiography of a Winnebego Indian (1926) is the story of Sam Blowsnake (aka Big Winnebago, aka Crashing Thunder), as solicited, transcribed and edited by the anthropologist Paul Radin.

I admired this book as an anthropology major at UVic in the early- to mid-1980s (Radin insists that the narrative is "authentic" because Blowsnake's words were "translated literally,"), but because I was taking electives in English and Political Science, where I was reading French post-structural theory (Derrida, Foucault, et al.), I came to question the authenticity of all narratives.

It was years later that I saw Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and zeroed-in on the fact that it, too, was written by someone other than its titular subject. How vain of Stein, I thought, as I stared at the 1961 Vintage cover of Stein's impatient face, looking off or in profile. Years after that, How accurate, because the book is not about Toklas but the conversation that is Stein and Toklas -- as written by Stein on behalf of someone who, she determined, would never get around to being her Boswell.

A couple summers ago I read Toklas from cover to cover after pecking at it in my bathroom for a year or so prior. A great history of Toklas's life prior to 1933 (she was born in 1877; Stein died in 1946), but also of a Paris scene where artists and writers didn't have children but ideas. In addition to that, political details about the First World War -- an account by two women who were, as they say, in the midst of it. Stuff like this:

"Then came the days of the invasion of Belgium and I can still hear Doctor Whitehead's gentle voice reading the papers out loud and then all of them talking about the destruction of Louvain and how they must help the brave little belgians. Gertrude Stein desparately unhappy said to me, where is Louvain. Don't you know, I said. No, she said, nor do I care, but where is it." (147)

Sex Positivity

U.S. American artist Marilyn Minter (b. 1948) is having a moment. Her current LGDR exhibition, Elder Sex, is a sex positive look at sex after seventy. Most of the pictures feature a steamy window between camera and subject(s)-- a "filter" that both blurs and drips with sweat, tears and Bartholin lubrication. In keeping with tradition, subjects come in multiple colours, genders and sexual persuasions. 

For those wanting more, check out this 2016 Time Out interview on the occasion of Minter's Brooklyn Museum retrospective, where the artist speaks on a range of topics, from buying TV ad time during the early days of Letterman ("it was only $1,800 for a 30-second spot on Letterman, while Artforum charged $5,000 for a full-page ad") to the ongoing fascination with laser hair removal:

"Many men under forty have never seen female pubic hair, so I want to make it beautiful enough to put in your living room. I also think young girls should stop lasering. You can trim your pubic hair into a question mark if you want. Just don't laser, because it won't grow back, and you'll be sorry!"

Image: Ginger (2016) 

April is Puppetry Month

JUST A BUNCH OF FUCKING DICKS

The system is capitalized. The System is

as it does, and because

we live like this, we have ideas

as we call them, but sadly

they're just opinions, informed

by the platforms

hot spots where Life gets talked about

The System. And. Who.

It. Serves. Has. Got. To. Go! Its critique 

is not limited to clap-shouted attitude

it includes actions. So it's okay to invade its halls

steal from its coffers, beat its police

because those upholding it are Just.

A. Bunch. Of. Fuck. -ing. Dicks!

Ludic Types

At Tim and Stephanie's for Game Four of the EDM/LA series, Tim presents me with a belated birthday gift: Al Neil's copy of Robin Blaser's Syntax (Talonbooks, 1983), with the author's inscription inside. Below Blaser's inscription is Tim's note to me.

I confess to never having seen a copy of Syntax before, though I am familiar with one of its poems, a short narrow piece Allan Safarik anthologized in Vancouver Poetry (Polestar, 1986) -- one of many provincial attempts to sum up Vancouver for visitors of Expo '86. The poem appears in the opening "Truth is Laughter" section and is untitled. For Safarik's anth, the poem is titled "Sparrows".

Blaser's book is comprised of "things seen"... "things heard or overheard" ... "things read" ... "all things that run interference on a poet's life," which is more than enough for me, particularly at a time when poetry books are becoming more and more singular in their focus, more and more "about" the confessing self.

Like Blaser, Michael Ondaatje is another ludic type, and an admirer of Blaser's poems. You can see why in a concrete poem like this one (the second piece in Syntax):

The janitor at the St. Roch National Historic
Site said: "When I was in Los Angeles, the O
from Hollywood rolled down the hill and cut
a station wagon in half."        "It would've been
better," he said, "if it'd been a Honda Civic.
Front wheel drive would let you go on driving." (13)

Last night, while caught in a loop that had me clicking on Carol Burnett's appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's show two weeks ago, Burnett (who turns 90 tomorrow) talks about growing up in Los Angeles and attending Hollywood High, across from the studio where Kimmel's show is taped. "As kids we used to climb the Hollywood sign," she says, then adds (to immediate laughter), "The Os were my favourite."

Time's Spaceship

I didn't know Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Contemporary British Poetry (1982) was a follow up to A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962), but the former mentioned it in their "Introduction," so there you go.

I purchased The New Poetry (substantially revised in 1966) in 1982, and have kept it with me ever since, wondering if this was the last British poetry anthology of its kind, only to find out forty years later that it wasn't; that the year I purchased The New Poetry was the year it was succeeded.

Always behind, in a history most of us step over to get to what's freshest, to what doesn't stick to our shoes.

Alvarez's anth notes the influence of Americans (it was Alvarez who first championed the poetry of Sylvia Plath), while in Morrison and Motion's anth, Northern Ireland is the hotspot (Seamus Heaney, et al.). Another noteworthy revelation is M & M's declaration of a "'Martian' school," after a poem I'd never heard of -- Craig Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). (For a less lyrical version of what this poem is and isn't, see Horace Miner's 1956 report "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema".)

This school and its exemplary poem allow the editors to speak of a postmodern turn in British Poetry. Our current turn has books left on shelves for what can be had quicker online. Here's a taste of "A Martian", the poem's last third:

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Member?

To believe too much in anything is to fail in places. To believe in nothing (but yourself) is no safer. 

Western Liberalism is not the bomb we feared in the 1950s through the 1980s, but a new kind of bomb, one whose force is implosive, not explosive. Conditions are created to encase us in this new bomb's ever-liberating structure, one loosened not by ideology, but by identity; not by consensus, but by relativism.

The U.S. has told Canada to increase its NATO contribution to a minimum 2% of our GDP. If we do that, it will come at the expense of our welfare state. If we don't, NATO will take it in real estate (the Arctic) or tariff increases (on soft woods).

The question arises: Would you rather live securely in a dictatorship, or under threat in a liberal democracy? A false dichotomy, because there is nothing secure or unthreatening about life in a dictatorship, even a benevolent one, like Cuba's. 

Neoliberalism's greatest achievement is having us think we are living in a liberal democracy when in fact we are bound by its contradictions -- birds who have made our nests not with organic fibres, like those linked to the foods we eat, but with polymers made from fossil fuels.

"Nostalgia," according to Mad Men's Don Draper, "is delicate and potent." More recently, nostalgia gave us Brexit, and for America's whitest and blithest: Donald Trump. Before that, South Park's Memberberries, and before that, Robert Mugabe, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini ... 

"It's not called the Wheel," adds Draper in the middle of his pitch to Kodak, nor the Wheel of Fortune, but something closer to an axle; something like the Rack.

Immigrant Song

Wednesday over Kingsway and Glen, looking west. The image was zoomed-in on after its original was captured: a retreat into the past, where telephone poles are crosses, light standards church bells, the sunset a village set ablaze by Vikings.

Canadiantireus sensitivicis

For sale at the Grandview Highway Canadian Tire store: plants known not by their Latin name but by their condition. Most of the plants are held in a large atrium to the west of the store, with indoor plants near its entrance. These Sensitive Plants are in a windowless alcove near a hallway marked STAFF.

"Dent quality"

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my attraction to Paris Adventure was its cover and the resemblance of its characters to Paris's Tarek and his cousin, Cori. But also the endorsement of the Times Literary Supplement, which I found unusual:

"Underlines the Dent quality in children's books."

The "Dent quality."Took me a moment to figure out that Dent is the publisher, and that "Dent quality" is not an oxymoron but a good thing. A common surname in England, "dent" is cognate with dinn or dind -- the Old Irish words for hill. A hill, too, is a good thing, if you are seen to be on top of one.

Also on the cover is Notre Dame Cathedral, which puts our characters across the Seine on the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, maybe even in front of Shakespeare & Co, where I read to people (and pigeons!) in the spring of 2002.

Four Recent Purchases

Media's cheap. Old media: books, CDs, DVDs. As McLuhan once said of old or "obsolete" media -- but we know the rest, right?

Four books, nine bucks. Three paperbacks at $1.99, the hardcover at $2.99. But why these four?

A Study in Thinking (1956) because in the same way Fear precedes Hate, Thinking does the same for Writing, and I'm a writer. Coming Through Slaughter (1976) because I have given up on getting back the copy I lent to Hortense. Paris Adventure (1954) because Tarek, who looks like the young man on the cover, lives in Paris, and his cousin Cori, who looks like the woman, visits him. And Contemporary British Poetry (1982) because of the date of publication -- a difficult time for the British people and the waning days of our use of the word "British".

A Wallet from Ottawa: "Embroidery of a curve/ away"

At what point does the letter become a parcel?

When it can no longer fit through the mail slot?

Before ATMs, bank building exteriors had built-in mail boxes. What couldn't fit through the mail slot could be entered through a portal below, marked WALLETS.

(But a wallet is what Dad carries in his pocket, and Mom would shush me.)

A rob mclennan wallet arrived yesterday. His latest Touch the Donkey and a chapbook consisting of seven legal-sized pages folded horizontally and bound mostly by a horizontally-folded letter-sized cover, with 1 3/8th" of those pages exposed. Assemblies like this ... irk me, though I can excuse them if they are in the service of the writing. 

The first poem in rob's The Alta Vista Improvements (Ottawa: above/ground press, 2023) is a four-parter called "Quartet for an end of landscape, with farm house." This landscape might be the defeatured referent to the poet's father's farm -- certainly his father's land, if the poet himself were a farmer. But the poet is not a farmer, nor is he Indigenous, so an artist's word, something more ... aestheticized. Like "landscape." Even if we are at the "end" of it.

The image on the cover is a defeatured map of a subdivision, what might become of the poet's father's land(scape), since the poet shows no sign of growing it, while his sister, by virtue of her gender, was never in the picture.

Here's the poem's second section:

2.

A farmer with no sons but one, who chose
a separate path. Embroidery of a curve

away. A daughter thus, invisible. These
tiny changes made to earth.

I have read only the first poem, but will get back to Alta Vista over the course of my ever-shortening life. In the meantime, the book's exposed section will continue its journey, gathering life's dust and spring's "sun-bleach[ed]" light and thus provide a visible difference when compared to what's inside. This difference between what is sheltered and what is exposed could be extrapolated to include a developer's profit margin, or another's depreciating investment. Same might be said of a book in your collection: you'll never know until you've passed. But by then you'll know everything, so what the hell.

From the middle of "4":

Upon his death, pandemic: house is slowly emptied, harvest; strata
of a life well-lived. Disassembled, scattered; donations

and inheritance alike. Is newly occupied

through rental agreements, the shake
of one good hand. Eight decades of tenure, my father's cremated remains;

Undecided? We Can Help

Not a great composition. Originally I liked how the rock looked on the paper (the right rock, the right paper), and added a scissors because the three are not unrelated. Often we make these shapes with our hands, but here they are in their original form, so to speak.

Stump Busting

The NW corner of 19th and Inverness. Every second year select Japanese Cherries are cut down and replaced with younger versions of themselves. This is a long process that begins with the fallen tree cut into rounds and left on the boulevard for a week or so, where they are usually scooped up by those with wooden fireplaces or stoves. Then, in the fall or spring, the arrival of that most violent of instruments: the stump grinder. 

Paint By Numbers PoMo Ha Ha

On the face of it, Paint (2023) looks like the inevitable Bob Ross biopic, right down to the I-didn't-known-Bob-smoked-a-pipe details. But it's not Bob Ross, as we find out in the first seconds, it's Carl Nargle, and the question of How will they deal with Bob's U.S. Airforce drill sergeant past? is replaced with What kinds of permissions were sought to keep the Ross estate from litigation?

As with most extended SNL skits (was this one of them?), there is no past, only a protracted cartoon present that has been around since postmodernism immemorial. As for the "future", that is now our IRL present, where identitarian issues are daily meeting topics -- from the office water cooler to the butcher's chopping block.

The disruption of Carl's world comes in the first ten minutes, after he is told by the station manager to extend his "popular" how-to-paint show from one hour to two. Carl waffles, and Ambrosia arrives to take the baton, switching the focus from Carl's mountain landscapes (always the same mountain) to her alien spaceships blasting forest stumps with blood.

Suddenly, the Cult of Carl is replaced by the Cult of Ambrosia. And because Ambrosia is Black and sleeps with women, an unimagined future becomes the white male privilege version of an equally sudden and dystopic present. This is brought home in surprisingly few words after Carl's station manager lands Carl a university teaching position, on the condition he resign from the show, which he does (not surprisingly, Carl is bought out by semester's end). A similar reckoning occurs when Carl visits the local art museum( Burlington, Vermont) to ask the bow-tied, sixty-something white male director why his paintings aren't in the collection.

As is typical of American film (from indies to blockbusters), the beleaguered subject rallies. Carl creates his masterpiece, but loses it just as quick in a studio fire. The show's producer, whose love he lost many years before (Carl cheated on her), and who still loves him, inexplicably takes him back. Not sure if Carl returns to his job at the PBS-affilate or not, but by then it doesn't mater. Carl gets whatever we deem is best for him, not that we ever believed he existed. Bob Ross, on the other hand, did exist, and I think the more relevant film would be the one that chronicles Bob's transformation from a maker of killing machines to amateur Zen master.

April is Poverty Mouth

How to Explain Minimalism to a Social Sculptor

if you could slow the world down fast enough

a sadness inconsolable, our lengths

squared, inert

 

boxes on horizons, for dogs to rush amongst

rounding (off) our corners, turning flesh

into stone, boulders

 

to move between, dogs gone, the wind

in their place now, the whistling and its wind

the only thing grown about us 

 

vast and limbless, domes of stone

not representations but manifestations, pylons

for what’s new with us

 

it’ll always besiege us, our blocks eroded

Blake’s beached eternal, ocean gyres and their plastic

participatory art, posthumous

Arbour Totems

The outer-most section of the grape arbor. The whole structure is crumbling, the vine decreasingly productive. Not sure what to do. Thirty-eight grapes last year. Not bunches -- grapes! The year before that, two bunches. These things don't live forever.

For a Loaf of Bread

Yesterday's sun showed up at my window, insistent. "C'mon, you need the walk!" A shame so little was open.

Monday was the opposite. A lot was open.

Because I needed bread, Tuesday's sun took me to Polania between 26th and 27th on Fraser, only to find it closed -- with new signage!

Polonia yesterday:

Polonia today:

I miss the old Polonia.

From Polonia to Batard at 24th and Fraser, but it was closed too. Ended up settling for a loaf of Matchstick's sourdough rye.

Two additional pictures from yesterday. The one that opens this post is of a sumac I saw in an alley I'd never explored before (marked NO EXIT) just south of King Ed on Ste Catherines. The one below, outside my door, was taken at 11:28AM.

Nightmares in Creative Writing

A radical gesture by today's standards: bringing Atwood into class.

Some of us have heard of Margaret Atwood?

The tide is out on the four-beat groan. Today, everything happens quickly. The eye-roll, the eyelash flutter. Blink and you will miss them.

Scholar, poet, novelist?

A junior faculty had referred to her a few years back as "That white bitch," and I keep checking to see if they're still on Twitter, if they've been promoted.

Her book of poems, Power Politics (1971)? In particular, her poem "They Are Hostile Nations"?

Rather than be asked why the poet and her book are relevant, I attempt an introduction.

A book about a heterosexual couple --

White people, a white person says to their phone. 

-- at the end their relationship rope --

Rope is a triggering metaphor!

Good point, remember that -- you might use it on the test.

There's no tests in Creative Writing.

There's no Creative Writing. I have asked the university to rename it Received Data.

Then we'll ask for our money back.

[applause]

Your parent's money, yes.

You can't talk to us that way! It's micro-aggressive!

There's nothing micro about it. We are hostile nations.

[a car backfires]

I've just emailed you the poem. Read it in light of what we talked about last week -- the poems of Danica Markovic in the context of the fall of Yugoslavia, when nationality replaced ideology, and today, with identity threatening to do the same for nationality.

Read the poem as much for what is there as what isn't, for each of you. There are insights in the Irigaray text, the belle hooks text, Butler and Spivak's "critical regionalism" text.

Ask yourself, if Atwood were to write "They Are Hostile Nations" today, would it look like this?

After that, read a little of your current favourite, and maybe with their voices, tell us what it is that makes your way ours to share. For in the words of Margaret Atwood:

We need each other's
breathing, warmth, survival
is the only war
we can afford

West Dyke, Easter Sunday

On the West Dyke (above), looking northwest at 6:40PM, then southwest (below).

Sixty-eight minutes later, somewhere in-between.

Yates is Poetry Month

J. Michael Yates was a writer's name when I started paying attention to living writers, then local ones. His work was here and there, in anthologies and "little magazines", and never seemed to add up to much. Just as well, writing's not arithmetic. For some writers the book is too limited. 

I spent about ten minutes flipping through the fictions of Fazes in Elsewhen (Intermedia, 1977), reading opening sentences, and couldn't get any traction. The constructions brought to mind Donald Barthelme, a lot of baroque 1970s science fiction, Renata Adler, marijuana -- and no music. On that particular day I needed some music, something heart-beaten. Everything in Fazes is inclement noise.

Here's the strategically underwhelming opening of "Water Rising":

"When I first noticed the damp traces behind me, I was surprised." (37)

I remember seeing Intermedia books here and there when researching my way through museum libraries. The books were unusual looking and resonated integrity; writing that differed from what the straight up publishers were doing, writing that can only be uneven.

Vancouver's Intermedia stopped being an artist collective for a book publisher (and maybe a software developer) around 1973. Not sure when its last book came off the press, but if I had to guess, I would say the late-1980s.

Prior to Elsewhen, the last thing I read by J. Michael Yates was a clean and bureaucratically-written grant application in the late-1990s (for a book of prose poems). One of the jury members kept saying "I don't know, I just love the writing" and there was no dissuading her.

April is Poetry Oath

I stuck to the topic but 

said a few wrong things.

Things that might have hurt a certain person's

feelings, the one referred to in the poem 

as "the travel agent."

                                    -- Sharon Thesen

The lines above are the opening lines from Sharon Thesen's three-page poem "The Front Yard". This poem is Thesen's contribution to the final instalment of The Capilano Review's three volume, alphabetically-ordered 50th anniversary anthology of mostly new writings and images, most of them poems, or about poems, like the poem concerning "the travel agent."

(In an effort to locate this conditionally hurtful poem I googled "Sharon Thesen" and "the travel agent," and all that came up was a link to New Star Books' 2017 Spring catalogue, which announced a re-issue of George Bowering's A Short Sad Book [1977], where hockey player Frank Mahovlich plays a "travel agent," and "Sharon Thesen"'s new book, The Receiver.)

Sharon has a knack for welcoming readers into her poems. At least that's how I feel when I read her. Renee Rodin has this too. As have others. Welcomed in this instance is not a rocker by the fire but a whiff of the uncanny, the one-quarter view's wry smile. All that needs to be said of sincerity is "I stuck to the topic." Even Stan Persky couldn't argue with that one.

Sticking to the topic, "wrong things" are wrong not because they "hurt a certain person's feelings" but because they "might have." Important distinction, writes Fawcett/says Fawcett, and if he were alive today he would tell us why, maybe why back in the day there was "only room for one poet in this household," and why today's apology can never, ever, ever hinge on the conditional.

The front yard is a staging ground, every house owner's little theatre. What happens there can be horrific. A lot of contemporary art is set there. Did Dan Graham make a work where what was being watched on TV inside a house was relayed to a TV on that house's front yard, or did he only think about making that a work?

Five lines later we find out that "the travel agent" is "Poetry," and I'm off on another "track," too tired to keep up, but I will finish reading this poem eventually.

Reading is not a race. Finish lines get "postponed." You can write on things you haven't finished reading. This post is not finished. I have added to it twice since its posting.

April is Poetry Moth

Kimon Friar edited and translated the "Greek" chapter in Bantam's useful Modern European Poetry (1966). Of particular note are his introductions to individual poets like Eléni Vakaló (1921-2001).

Friar has Vakaló in agreement with Archibald MacLeish (see the last two lines of his "Ars Poetica") and, in Friar's words, "the thing seen [after Marianne Moore], for she feels that the rhythms of life resides within objects, as in herself, until her rhythms become refined beyond harmony and become the tendons of the thing described, lean and muscular." (258)

Here are the last two lines of Vakaló's "Age of the Polyp":

The appropriation of spaces between joints

Is heard in poems quietly like a creaking

For those interested in reading more of Vakaló's poetry, I recommend the translations of Karen Emmerich.

April is Poetry Month

Oh, say, can you see

By the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hail'd
At the twilight's last gleaming?

 

Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watch'd
Were so gallantly streaming?

 

And the rocket's red glare
The bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there

 

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?

 

The lyrics to “Star Spangled Banner” (1814) were written as a poem by American lawyer and hostage negotiator Frances Scott Key, its music "borrowed" from the British drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven” (1778-1780). Key’s poem is four cantos long, though only the first canto is used in the American national anthem.

 

There are four light sources in “The Star Spangled Banner”. The first two -- “dawn” and “twilight” -- are God given, as in the morning sun and the evening sun. The second two  -- “rockets” and “bombs” -- were produced in laboratories and armaments factories. 

 

There is no mention of the moon in this song, which is a shame. The moon is not a direct light source but a reflector, an intermediary. Rockets don’t illuminate so much as provide “glare,” colouring that which is near it, creating a kind of monochromatic wrap.

 

“Star Spangled Banner” is the only national anthem with bombs in it.

The Philosophies of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim

"At the time [1963] I didn't realize that Jane already showed certain symptoms of a progressive form of America Puritanism. She had a deep need to justify her right to exist by influencing or deciding what was best for others for their own good. 'A life without a cause is a lost existence' could be her motto. It is a very noble philosophical attitude which I understand to a certain extent. But I can't reconcile myself to the idea of centring life on a 'cause.' I give the word 'life' a broader meaning, which excludes neither pleasure nor time spent (lost, Jane would say) enjoying the amusements that the Inventor of this beautiful planet called Earth placed at the disposition of intelligent creatures." (245)

Jane and Vadim Go To Moscow

After finishing Glenny's examination of the 1990-92 dissolution of Yugoslavia, I returned to Roger Vadim's Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda (1987). I left the book in the last pages of the Deneuve section, after it became apparent the two were drifting apart. Kinda like me and the book. 

Pictured up top is an Ilyusian IL-18V Turboprop, the plane Vadim and Jane Fonda took from Paris to Moscow in 1961.

"The Russians had just built a giant turboprop Ilyusian, able to fly from Moscow to Havana without stopping. We boarded this strange plane at Le Bourget Airport. First we walked through a sort of steamship cabin where twelve perfectly silent men were sitting, all dressed in the same blue suits. Then we walked through a long corridor where there was one compartment after another with sliding doors, rather like the Orient Express. After passing a bar and a kind of restaurant-canteen, we came to an area that reminded me we were actually on a plane: the passengers were crammed into narrow, uncomfortable seats. Finally, there was a section that resembled a luxurious Pullman car, with individual tables and large, very roomy and comfortable armchairs.

"'Don't tell me that this thing is going to fly,' said Jane in a rather worried tone.'" (234)

Time and Tide

Looking west, not quite up the gut of the Georgia Strait, the Salish Sea, but close.

The beach before the dyke is protected; there are signs saying something "natural" is happening. I like it that no one is telling us to keep off; we know better.

The "king" tide is the stylus behind this driftwood composition, the dyke its period or stopping line. It was humankind who named this highest of tides a king tide, just as it was humankind who made the dyke. 

I get why the artist Michael Drebert was drawn all those years ago to the West Dyke lands and Garry Point. I wonder what he was subtracting from when he took some of its driftwood to Hardscrabble Gallery for a campfire.

Carole Itter documented the removal, packaging and shipping of her west coast log to the east coast in the log's log (1972-73). I don't think Michael shares his documentation.

Visiting Gods

Richmond's West Dyke a few moments before sunset. Visiting gods, hauling their ship from the sea.

Craig

Craig Paterson passed away in January, aged 76, which is a good run for someone who lived life hard and rarely took "Yes" for answer. I was asked to speak at his Celebration of Life and I talked about a friend and neighbour whom I helped transition from law practice to artist practice. Below is the result of my attempt to help Craig write an Artist Statement, when all he wanted to do was make art of it.

Art

Bricolage

Collage

Decoupage

Expression 

Frame

Gallery