Drainers of the Mossed Lark

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is a non-stop action film that came out of nowhere in the summer of 1981 and left its impression because it evoked similarly styled Saturday matinee films of ere -- the kind that filmmakers George Lucas and Seven Spielberg saw as kids.

Pictured up top is the epiphanic moment, when the Nazis, now in possession of the ark and its magical contents (remnants of Moses's God-given "Commandment" tablets), open its lid.

What at first is a disappointment of sand quickly turns into clouds and fog. "It's beautiful!" cries the Nazi's French archaeologist, Belloch, who conducts the ceremony that allows the ark its second life. 

"Whatever you do, don't look!" our hero Indiana Jones tells Marion, his once and future girlfriend.  

Seventeen years later (or 64 in the film's years) Indiana and Marion are wheeled into Marion Goodman Gallery to see Jeff Wall's The Flooded Grave (1998/2000) and are re-traumatized, if there was such a thing back then.

Diego Harpitisto & the Chiaroscuro Players

The weather had been at 24C for a couple hours by the time I set out for my 6pm meeting. Some typically awful, high temperature driving going on, including the person who was not turning right onto Kingsway when that was possible because their head was down, their fingers texting. I honked, and it was like feathers exploding. Same thing thirty seconds later, when I honked again for the same reason. 

Eventually the driver entered onto Kingsway, and because it was more than safe to do so, I did the same, having to pass the driver because they'd suddenly slowed down, for whatever reason, which I'm guessing from the conversation at the next set of lights included taking my picture (to post on their platforms under the heading "RUDE"?).

My commute wasn't a total write-off. Mount Pleasant's Dude Chilling Park featured one of the finer one-chord jams I've heard of late. Distorted guitar, harp and vocals run through a small Pig Nose amp, and this clean-signaled bongo box warming up the underside. I'd say it made my day, if not erased the worst of it.

Approaching Clark at East 22nd

About 10pm last night when this cat came bounding out of nowhere to squeak at me.

Bonsoir, mon petit chat. Ca va?

Vraiment!

Kerrisdale Laneway

The lane just west of West Boulevard (Arbutus), linking West 41st to West 42nd. In the distance, the Kerrisdale Community Centre, more a place for seniors these days than for kids.

Years ago there was no retaining wall between the lane and the lawn of the apartment building the Greek family managed. Nor was there a hedge. Properties often bled into public space, and vice versa. Lines were hazy. Not every boulevard had a curb. Sometimes there'd be no sidewalk.

I'm interested in the wooden border atop the retaining wall. Is it simply decorative, or is it holding back the soil? And if so, more at the flat end than over the sloped part? I can see its author feeling there's something incomplete about having the wooden border at the flat end and not up the slope, where it can disappear politely into a bush.

An Evening Walk

Marvellous gardens on view in my Cedar Cottage/Mount Pleasant neighbourhood last night. Noticed more boulevard plantings than in past years. Above is a sign that stands at the foot of a boulevard planting. We learn the name of its creator ("Maria's raspberry patch"), her generosity ("Please enjoy a raspberry"), but also her conditions ("Don't be greedy"). 

A few houses west, a burning bush made from Pieris japonica. 

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said: "I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up." Exodus 3:1-14

Clearly the Lord has more in store for me than sniffing my nose at the righteous child. 

Garden Reading

About five summers ago I began training my butterfly bush into a canopy, something I could read under without catching on fire. It's worked out for the most part, except at 4pm I have to move to the west side of the yard, in the shadow of the laurel.

The canopy took shape in the summer of 2020. The following year, hummingbirds zoomed in and out, feeding on the bush's cone-shaped flowers. This summer it is chickadees, in particular, the chickadee chicks, who hide out above, thinking I'll scare off their predators. 

Current Events

As a sea craft, it is called a submersible: a steel tube battened down from the outside and lowered to the ocean floor. From there it putts about, allowing passengers a peek through a window roughly the size of the face pressed against it.

The submersible that visited the graveyard known as the Wreck of the Titanic was called the Titan, and it imploded last week, killing all five on board, some of whom paid $200K USD for its ten-hour tour. It took three days from losing contact for us to learn of this implosion. In the meantime, the news cycle fed on the Titan's absence, at one point giving us James Cameron, who made one of the highest grossing films ever, called The Titanic (1997). No one to my knowledge contacted Wes Anderson, whose The Life Aquatic (2004) was probably closer to the life of Titan founder and captain Stockton Rush than anything Cameron had to say that an ocean scientist couldn't say better.

Now the news cycle returns to Russia, where the non-Western media is reporting that betrayed Russian mercenaries are marching to Moscow to confront Russian President Putin, who allegedly fired on them because -- they weren't attacking Ukrainian-held positions? People in my nabe are cheering this, but I can't think of a worse outcome. Putin has been held in check -- or played -- by global forces, and is being  slowly worn down while the U.S. and China chart the next ten years. Mercenaries, on the other hand, fight for money, and presumably make peace for money, too. What do you pay someone who could, in a week or two, have access to the deployment of nuclear warheads?

Oceania Cruises

I receive two university alumni publications. I am convinced these publications exist only to justify the selling of their mailing lists to companies like Oceana Cruises, who send me their catalogue every three months hoping I might sign on with them to tour the Caribbean, pass through the Panama Canal, avoid viral outbreaks, or god knows -- pirates!  An opera was made from one such incident. Does anyone remember the 1985 Achille Lauro highjacking? John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer (1991)?

Pictured up top is the third of three pages detailing Oceania's "Suites & Stateroom" options. From most expensive to simply expensive, they are: "Vista," "Marina" and "Regatta, Insignia & Sirena." As you can see, I am including only the latter options, know most dramatically through their declining window space -- to the point where the window disappears completely (the viewless "Solo Oceanview Stateroom" and the "Inside Stateroom"). Prices are not included in the catalogue, but if a submersible tube can charge $200, 000 USD for a ten hour tour of the Titanic, one can only imagine what an Oceania cruise will set you back.

Garry Point, Steveston

For the solstice I travelled to Steveston's Garry Point for artist Amy-Claire Huestis's "reverent procession," part of her MOTHLIKE/silvery-blue exhibition at the RAG.

The scheduled time was 2000-2130hr (sunset), and I admit to being miffed about being on time and having to wait with others at the shadiest part of the park, on what was an otherwise warm and golden evening.

A young woman from Musqueam (of the Point and Campbell families) told us where we were in words and music. After that, our walk to the water's edge, stopping to form two circles: the first, a reading of the artist's children book, a song, then an Isadora Duncan-style dance of four; the second, in the face of a beach drinking couple blasting Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" (1959). Love that song, too.

A Collaborative Effort

Yesterday, while shopping at T&T, the two of them took a chance on a Japanese grapefruit drink (Gokuri) that turned out to be okay. 

The next morning (today), when one of them checked on the other (to make sure they wouldn't miss their flight), a real grapefruit was offered and, minutes later, was so thoroughly peeled you couldn't fill a thimble with what remained of its flesh.

"This is like -- art!"

"So make some art out of it."

And they did. A serial work of conceptual art. What they are calling Entonces (2023).

The Symbolism of the Kitchen Box Bed in Pre-WWII Anglo-American Cinema

Another kitchen scene with a box bed. The last one was The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), a British spy film adapted from John Buchan's novel featuring Robert Donat as an unsuspecting Canadian caught in a pre-WWII subterfuge and on the run in rural Scotland. This time the film is Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), where a Norwegian dock master (Paul Muni) is on the run for killing a Nazi colonel. The hearth is to our left, the bed to our right.

Donetsk, Don't Tell

I'd never heard of The Americans (2013-2018), but the premise looked interesting: Americans who are Russians acting like Americans -- more specifically, a pair of accentless KGB agents who have posed as a married couple in Washington, D.C. since the early 1960s.

Rare to get a view on anything set in the year 1981, but that's when we join the Jennings (now in their late-thirties) as they chase down and capture a Russian defector who, in the way these things are written, had raped the female agent during a training session back in Moscow, when he was her supervisor. 

Some odd things worth noting. The map above (a scene featuring KGB higher-ups) is supposed to be the Soviet Union, but it loses the plot as it moves west. Where is Ukraine, Moldovia and Belarus? Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are marked, but their placement and proportions are odd.

So if Ukraine is to be pictured as part of the Soviet Union, why is it that the baby born of the dead Russian agent and his unsuspecting Puerto Rican wife (killed after another Russian's agent's promise of re-settling her and the baby in Cuba) is sent to the dead Russian agents' parents in "Donetsk, Soviet Union"?

Down By the Seaside

To White Rock yesterday. A family visit. A walk on the beach, east of the busier part of Marine, the tide coming in.

The pier has been rebuilt. The scattered remains of crabs. Up top, a fossilized towel.

We are now among the longest days of the year. I can't get enough of them. 

Art For Sale

"Dame mit Fächer, it's for sale!" a friend called to tell me (I know -- called -- as in used a telephone).

He appeared frantic. At first I wasn't sure what he was saying. "Are you stroking?" I asked, looking around for my car keys.

"Klimt's Lady With a Fan is being auctioned off. It's estimated to be worth almost $110M!" 

I'd never seen the painting until I looked online (Ah, that Klimt), only to find that everything about it involved its auction, including what it last sold for in 1994 -- almost a tenth of what it expects to get later this month.

The Globe & Mail calls it a "late-life masterpiece," completed before the artist's death in 1918. Why it chose to place the article in its "Arts" section and not its "Business" section -- as all newspapers do when it comes to art and price tags -- does no one any good.

Happy Meridian

Tuesday's car errands had me between Granville and Burrard, heading west along a chronically unremarkable section of town that, because of Broadway Line construction, has passed from anonymity into witness protection. Only at Arbutus did things come into focus, namely Fletcher's Cleaners, and a couple of blocks west of it, Tanglewood Books, where I stopped to look through its very small but always rewarding DVD collection.

Tanglewood has two narrow 7'-high shelves at the ends of two fifty foot-long units that allow the store its three aisles. The shelves face the cashier's desk by the door and are marked RECENT, I believe, a sign I thought referred to RECENTly acquired used books but are in fact new books. I've always found the books on these shelves to be uncannily in tune with the times (as the times appear to me), and I said as much to the clerk who told me it is the owner who does the selecting, and he'll be happy to hear it.

I purchased two new books from these shelves, and as is my habit, begin reading both at once. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) I had first purchased at the Granville Book Company the year it came out, at the recommendation of one of its co-operators, Christopher Mooney, but never got past the judge's heckling of the evangelist, while Happy Hour (2020) by Marlowe Granados was published by my friend Martha Sharpe, the first book in her and Emily Keeler's Flying Books Publishing joint, though the copy in my hands is the Verso edition from the following year.

Separated by more than a third-of-a-century, these books are even further apart in form and content, a reading experience that allowed for a dream that had, for a fleeting moment, Cormac McCarthy dragged around a mid-2000s Brooklyn by Happy's Hour's we-know-better besties Gala and Isa, and Marlowe Granados dragged around an 1840s American southwest by Blood Meridian's The Kid. Although I didn't dream to the end of these scenarios, I didn't need to. We know it's never ending. It's just enough to think it so.

CFUN City

Long ago, before drag queens replaced clowns in the classroom, when Ronald McDonald ambiguity had as much right to our imaginations as RuPaul certainty does today, our teachers shared lessons in the democratic process using whatever was at hand. For my Grade Six self (1973-1974), it was debating the merits of one Top-40 AM music station versus another's.

CFUN was located at 1410 on the AM dial, CKLG at 730. CFUN was slightly softer than CKLG, though both played similar content -- similar enough that only the order of their Top-10s differed. Until a few years ago, if someone named me a song that was big in the mid-1970s, I could tell you if it was a CFUN song or a CKLG song. 10CC's "I'm Not in Love" (1975) is a CFUN song, Sweet's "The Ballroom Blitz" (1974) a CKLG song.

Yesterday I heard that Bell Media dropped both the 1410 and 1040 spots on the AM dial, along with a few thousand jobs across the country. It has been decades since CFUN's Top-40 format left the airwaves (just a couple days ago I drove by its old, now demolished building near 4th Avenue and Burrard), but that only makes it harder. A grave without a cairn. 

It Is Never a Question of When, But If

The northeast corner of the rear garden, an area I'm never sure of. A place for a jumble (pansies) and my attempt to bring a hydrangea back to life, a blue one, though these things are subject to change.

At the centre of the picture is a stump with a rock on it. The shadow cast from the rock is the rock's mouth, and I concentrate on it, awaiting a response.

It is never a question of when, but if.

"... expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations"

Last week I saw a copy of Anthony Powell's At Lady Molly's (1957) at Pulp Fiction Books and snatched it from the shelf -- guiltily, I might add, because although it is the follow up to the author's The Acceptance World (1955), which I read last month, I don't want to get addicted to its sugars, having read The Acceptance World only because I'd never read any Powell before, and thought I should ("the English Proust"), but really because my old London neighbourhood of Bayswater was mentioned in the second sentence, and I'm still trying to make sense of that time.

At Lady Molly's is the fourth in Powell's 24-volume "A Dance to the Music of Time" series, and picks up after its narrator has moved on from his past job and what I thought was his rather under-written, if not blasé, "romance" with Jean.

Here is a strangely predictive (social media>"journalism") sample from Molly's earliest pages:

"I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films. To be 'an author' was, of course, a recognized path of approach to this means of livelihood; so much so, indeed, at that period, that to serve a term as a script-writer was almost a routine stage of literary life. On the other hand, Lovell's arrival in the Studio had been more devious. His chief stock in trade, after an excellent personal appearance and plenty of cheek, was expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations. Much more interested in daily journalism than in writing scenarios, he coveted employment on the gossip column of a newspaper. I knew Sheldon slightly, one of the editorial staff of the evening paper at which Lovell aimed, and had promised to arrange, if possible, a meeting between them." (16)

Italian Days

Italian Days on Commercial Drive, the first since June 2019.  I was there on Sunday, a half-hour after it opened, and it was packed from Broadway to Venables. As in past years, I moved through about three thousand people, none of whom I recognized. 

The couple above are dancing a tarantella, and that was the Italian Days I remember from the 1980s, when the dine and dance clubs ruled, even though nobody went to them. Wazubee, like Monsoon on Main Street a few years later, marked a "changing of the shops" when it took over an old dine and dance outfit in the block north of 1st Avenue, switching from martinis and Salisbury steak to coffee and french fries. The couple below are a mother (left) and her daughter (right) seconds before the latter made her signing debut. Brava! Brava!

This was interesting:

Public Markets

Nigella damascena aka Love-in-a-Mist or Devil-in-the-Bush, from River and Sea Flower Farm at Delta's Westham Island. I purchased a bunch at yesterday's Trout Lake Market, along with an eccles cake, two salmon burgers, some salmons tips and tails for a bouillabase and a pint of local strawberries that I was told were not coming at the beginning of the season, which is usually around now, but at the end, which is the new now.

An Afternoon in Kits

Travelled to Kits to meet an editor I work with for an in-person conversation, as we do every year, but hadn't for the last three because of the pandemic. Left earlier than usual because I wanted to visit the Sally Anne on West Broadway, just east of Macdonald, only to find it closed for renovations. From there I wandered west, stopping at Step Back, where I purchased a couple of older French-language children's books for a friend who teaches French immersion and appreciates such things.

Our meeting was at Cafe Lokal at 4th and Trafalgar, a place new to me like most everything is new to me since Expo '86, when private development turned "heritage" into stasis, before reconciliation turned heritage into colonization -- so its always something, no matter what "side" you're on. Lokal is at the southwest corner, where you enter into a diamond-shaped room, with a long bar at the back with nothing hanging over it but a curved suspended ceiling. A sexy blend of rustic and moderne, hosted by a largely European cast that, by virtue of its clearly Serbian co-owner and a cascading display of eccentricities by the floor staff, reminded me at times of Makavejev's Montenegro (1981).

After our meeting I travelled back on Trafalgar, south to 13th where I'd parked. The rain had turned the green greener, in some instances weighing it down, providing a tunnelled jungle effect. Once in the car I checked my photos and noticed one I hadn't remembered taking. This must have been on 4th, somewhere just west of Macdonald, where Renee's R2B2 used to be, and Trent and Denise's Black Sheep Books after that. Do I share this disturbing pic now, after mentioning the names of these sweet people who did so much for readers and writers in the 80s and 90s, respectively? I'm sure they won't be bothered. A posting in the public's best interest.

Wednesday's Walk

The development application sign had been up for a while. Now that it's down, I can't remember what it was proposing, but it was something more than the two or three houses that covered what is now a large square patch at the NE corner of Knight and 15th Avenue.

The demolition was a month ago, and happened quickly, as is often the case when adult trees are involved. People rightly get nervous when trees are felled, even those planted in places incompatible with a tree's needs. I felt the discomfort of those trees every time I walked past them.

This picture was taken on my walk home from my dentist's on Wednesday, shortly after taking a picture of the new bookstore at 12th and Commercial (see yesterday's post), and a book from a cupboard-sized free book dispensary west of Commercial, on 13th.

The book is After the Plague (2001), a story collection by T.C. Boyle, and its first story, "Termination Dust", is Boyle at his masculine best. And by "best" here I am mean what Boyle does well, and that is criminal masculinity.

No coincidence that to make this masculinity plausible it needs to be set in a landscape where it is not uncommon. The masculinity that overtakes Boyle's Drop City (2003) communistas has them ending up in Alaska, where "Termination Dust" is set.

Could it be that "Termination Dust" began as an eddy in the Drop City manuscript? I'll read one more story before deciding whether to return the book to its dispensary. And if I do return it, maybe I'll take a better picture of that oddly walled-off portable, because I really do have something to say about it. 

Cross & Crows

The 2800-block south of East 12th, on the east side of Commercial Drive, is going through some changes. At the southern end of the block, a sudden hole where an automotive shop once stood, and a shop or two north of that, news of a new bookstore.

Once home I searched Cross & Crows and found its "bare-bones, temporary website," which opened with some books for sale, and under the "News" section, a Coast Salish land acknowledgement, then word from Nena, who has worked in indie bookstores since 1995 "and had the privilege of owning St. Johns Booksellers in Oregon for ten years."

Nena goes on to say that she is "queer, Lebanese-American, a parent, an editor, occasionally even a publisher," and has been living in Vancouver since 2016. Following that, mention of how her now adult children were always pointing out vacant storefronts as possible bookstore locations, and Nena's conditions: "I had promised myself and them that if there was ever a next time, it would be different."

It is now "next time," and this "different" store will soon be there for readers of books as well as those whose attention to language has them seeing the text in everything. For it is because of Nena's new store that we can begin to decorate her past stores with everything her new store might not be.

Concert Stop

The Rolling Stones kicked off their 1972 tour in Vancouver. Fairly certain this was the band's first tour since the expensively-priced 1969 tour that, as if to atone for its high ticket prices, was to end in a free concert at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, but ended instead at the Altamont Speedway, and we know what happened there.

The 1972 tour was also the one the band invited Robert Frank to document, which he did in a film the Stones took him to court over: Cocksucker Blues (1972). This is the final film in an inadvertent trilogy that included Gimme Shelter (1970) -- a document of the tour that concluded at Altamont -- and before that, Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1968), which, in its construction of the titular song, shone a light on the destruction of the band's colourist, Brian Jones (1942-1969). 

The picture up top shows police escorting two young men in matching "Mac" jackets beyond its frame. They say it was a riot -- the Rolling Stones Riot -- but they said the same of the police action that came to be known as the Gastown Riot ten months before it. But those jackets -- Mein Gott! They look like they were purchased that morning at Woodward's West Hastings.

What We Do Not Who We Are

I always stop for signs like this. To take it in fully, but also to peek inside its shop to see if its interior is in any way related. Most times no, and this time, no exception.

Powers of Observation

I am now six stories into Mary Gatskill's nine story debut collection Bad Behaviour (1988), and the question of when these stories were written, and in which New York City, is on my mind.

Unlike most collections (debut or otherwise), none of the stories in Bad Behaviour were published prior to the original Poseidon Press edition, making it difficult to associate them in time and space.

Oddly enough, the story of Susan returning to New York (after arriving there some ten years before, as a U. of Michigan grad, only to leave NYC for Chicago four years later), could put "Connection" in Lou Reed's 1973 as much as it could put it in Lydia Lunch's 1983. (I keep forgetting that Gaitskill was born in 1954, not more recently.)

"Connection" is a fine third-person story that plays its trick with great effect: the seemingly normal-to-neutral visitor returns to a city for "a gorgeous wallow in sentimentality," where she thinks (secretly wishes?) she sees her frenemy Leisha as a "young bag lady," and from there we learn that if anyone is capable of going off the rails, it is Susan -- the only difference being that one is extroverted (Leisha), the other introverted (Susan). Each is as the other accuses them to be, which is to say selfish. From the start we learn that they were, for a time, dating the same person. (Are they, too, the same person?)

"Secretary" is the seventh story in Bad Behaviour, the one that was "made into" the 2002 film. I remember seeng the film when it came out and falling for Maggie Gyllenhaal. That's about all I remember. Maybe reading the story will return me to what I forget about the film? (A film I learn after peeking at its synopsis that is billed as a comedy?) Maybe reading the story will re-enforce what I already know about Mary Gaitskill's pathological honesty, her extraordinary powers of observation. 

From Page 51 of Death in Venice

"Has it not been written that the sun beguiles our attention from things of the intellect to fix it on things of the senses?"

                                                       -- Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, 1912

"I love beauty. Is not my fault."

More than anyone in Matt Tyrnauer's Valentino: the Last Emperor (2007), it is Karl Lagerfeld whom Valentino most wants to impress. Not surprising, since the original Thunderbird was probably closest to what Valentino was at that point: the world's last couturier.

The only thing worse than being last (as in remaining) is not having anyone around who can relate to what that means.

Lagerfeld was born a year after Valentino in 1933, and passed away in 2019. But Valentino continues to remain, now sixteen years into retirement after selling what remained of the company he co-founded with Giancarlo Giammetti in 1959.

This is a great documentary that rewards on a number of levels. We certainly learn about capital F Fashion: how it was when the designer had the power, how it became when money (what Giammetti refers to as "a language all its own") turned an industry (a maker of objects) into a business (a maker of profits).

Some favourite scenes come nearer to the end as Valentino's people are preparing his 45-year retrospective, with his greatest dresses lined up on racks. Valentino pulls one out and announces: "The embroidery! You could not make this dress today without selling an Italian bank!" Another is Valentino's reunion with his seamstresses past and present, who enter his exhibition en masse, where they are greeted by a humbled Valentino.

Show Me the Canada

ShowCanada wrapped up yesterday with a dinner atop Grouse Mountain. Surprisingly, not much grousing at the conference's Westin Bayshore home base these past couple days, with delegates from Canada's movie theatres in holiday moods, gobbling up food and drink, winning door prize trips to Hollywood and feeling the importance that comes with seeing previews of films by studio and distribution sponsors.

Corinne Lea from the Rio tried to speak up at the closing panel, asking one of the Cineplex Robs to stop muscling distributors into allowing Cineplex exclusive access to first-run films, both for greater profit, of course, but more insidiously, to starve out the independent theatres who have to wait sometimes as much as six months after a film's release to get it for a second-run screening -- only to be told by the Movie Theatre Association of Canada moderator, "Corinne, this is not the place for this discussion." But if not there, then where?

Cineplex accounts for over 70% of the Canadian exhibitor market, a statistic that goes up less through the growth of the company than as a result of a rapidly shrinking independent theatre culture. If this were the U.S., Cineplex would be considered a combine, taken to court and, in the spirit of capitalism, ordered to sell off enough assets (at market price, of course) to be competitive (as opposed to monopolistic). But this being Canada, where we are told by those defending combines that our market is too small and spread out to be served by a bunch of little guys, a different set of rules apply -- different in this case because they favour those convenient combines.

I imagine things will look a lot different by the next ShowCanada conference, with Cineplex already having branched out into distribution with Lions Gate Pictures, as discussed in a January 2023 article by the Globe & Mail's Barry Herz (after becoming a distributor, will Cineplex get into streaming, too?). Interestingly, Herz was given an award at the conference for his industry coverage. He must have known of his award because when I asked the conference contact person Carrie Wolfe (of MTAC) for a media pass for a story I was commissioned to write for The Tyee, I was told "we do not accredit press for the conference." Will Barry Herz be filing a story on ShowCanada, or does his award preclude him from doing so?

"... how to reproduce the sensations of ordinary life while subverting the totalizing narrative that had stymied or withered our lives..."

Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (2017) is a book we knew about for so long that, by the time it was published, it was known only for that. It could have been called What Took You So Long, New Narrative?, where the distraction that has us wondering why no one is in a hurry to publish it is replaced by another distraction: the writer too busing loving too much to sign off on her proofs.

Edited by Dodie Bellamy & Kevin Killian, the book opens with an "Introduction" aware of 20th century American literary and perhaps interdisciplinary movements (Black Mountain?), with a focus on New York (School), San Francisco (Renaissance) and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as sites of critical interchange and innovation, with infusions of what we once and simply called "gay politics" and its post-Vietnam "Vietnam": HIV/AIDS.

The early angels of New Narrative are San Franciscans Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, with Glück's workshops a seminal force in the development of a local coterie. But it was Dodie and particularly Kevin who went to everything, the latter bringing glamour's bunting to whomever's room he stepped in or out of, to whomever's eyes he met and kissed.

Kevin carried an autograph book, but he was an autograph book. We leave impressions whether we are conscious of them or not, and Kevin is not so much "a part of all that I have met" (Tennyson), but a rememberer of that "all." There was a time when we were curious to know what Kevin thought of us. For about fifteen minutes it was something that all of us who were any of us simply had to know.