The Sentimentalists

Fifty pages into Johanna Skibsrud debut novel The Sentimentalists (2009) and I find the narrator's family spread too thin to be anything more than writing, and I love writing. 

The second chapter ("Casablanca", 46-65) opens with an even more interior "voice". Closer to William Faulkner than to Marian Engel. 

This:

The birds on the top strand of the telephone wires whose notes, which had remained always, in previous days, a background melody that I had not heard, seemed suddenly to hit precisely the chords which resonated in my own stopped heart, (47)

I wonder who at D&M edited this book. There's some broken-shoelace sentences that might have warranted post-it notes. Is this the form trauma takes? Is The Sentimentalists "about" trauma and its inheritors.

This:

In reminder to myself that although it felt like it might there was no way that a two-day trip could last forever, I imagined the different ways I might recount its events even as they occurred. (29)

Touch the Donkey thirty-eight

The latest Touch the Donkey arrived last month. Issue number thirty-eight ("thirty-eight" written with letters, not numbers). Eight poets over 48 pages, with series founder rob mclennan at the helm.

This might be my favourite issue yet. Years ago I might have said most accomplished, but times have changed, and we are only encouraged to speak highly -- and unambiguously -- of what we "like", lest someone take issue with terms rooted in exclusion.

We live in one big room now. No more little rooms to retreat to for contemplation, quiet conversation. You can no longer appear indifferent to difference. It must be celebrated. It is a party you are expected to attend. Too bad if you tire at parties. 

Samuel Amadon gives us "Five Poems", all of them called "Divers". From the third "Divers":

I like the indifferences, like things
With a little twitch in their hip, prayers

From Amanda Earl's Twenty-Six, an expression of "The Nervous Energy":

moving and gyrating jumpy
elevator opens and chaise lounge
a hifi size arcade style ms
and shortbread for breakfast

The first two lines of Miranda Mellis's "Utopia":

Cinemas insinuate a situation
Reciprocal wits serrulate orgone

From the second of seven from R Kolewe:

A compulsion of flowers yet

to be named still

to be seen drawn or

take the world as a model

Also included, two prose blocks from Heather Cadsby; Monty Reid's unfortunately titled The Lockdown Elegies; six object-titled prose blocks from Meghan Kemp-Gee (have our reformatting phones done away with line breaks, our breathing?); and some Kama Sutra-inspired glyph clusters from Michael Betancourt?

The Back Alleys of Kerrisdale

Early for a dinner last night at Minerva's with another former Kerrisdaler who remembers the restaurant so we decided to meet there. Not sure what I was expecting, as Minerva's was never a place anyone I knew associated with great meals.

The CBC's Stephen Quinn raves about it; the actor Ryan Reynold's named it his "favourite restaurant in the world." Does that account for why the place is a zoo of families-with-grannys and middle-aged singles? And since when did it take over the Big Scoop beside it?

"When was the last time you were here?" asks our server.

"Forty years ago," I tell her. "Over garlic bread and a bottle of Mateus."

Like I said, I was early, so rather than walk up and down 41st in the blazing 5pm sun I opted for the shadier lane just south of it. From Larch to West Boulevard. Three blocks. I saw the backs of things I'd only known the front of.

Here is the back of one of the neighbourhood's oldest shops, the Kerrisdale Bootery:

Here is the back of Hager Books:

The back of the Masonic Hall (which, as I recall, does not have a front):

Petit Genres

The Taliban is closing beauty parlours. It's not about beauty. 

An El Camino (1964-1987) parked at White Spot. A fetish car -- a coupé utility muscle car -- that combines sporty styling and a place for hay and saddles.

Oregano gathered, bunched and hung to dry

Sinéad O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds" (1989)

Margareth Thatcher on TV
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders are given by her

I've said this before now
You said I was childish and you'll say it now
Remember what I told you
If they hated me they will hate you

England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving
I don't want him to be aware that there's
Any such thing as grieving

Young mother down at Smithfield
Five a.m., looking for food for her kids
In her arms she holds three cold babies
And the first word that they learned was please

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you

England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It's the home of police who kill blacks boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving
I don't want him to be aware that there's
Any such thing as grieving

Tomekichi Homma Elementary

The school is located in Steveston, at the mouth of the Fraser River. A recent effort was made to build a food garden, a teaching garden maybe, and though school is out for the summer, the tending continues. A staff member shared with me some of its potatoes; when I first visited the garden, I saw this sign outside one of the school's exterior doors.

Architecture & Design

An apartment in the lane between 13th and 14th Avenues, just west of Knight. A Tower of Babel -- but of fire escapes. 

The rear (north side) of my house, taken early one morning in early-July.

My barber Amir's shop. From the inside.

A Poem By Douglas Dunn (b. 1942)

Modern Love

It is summer, and we are in a house That is not ours, sitting at a table Enjoying minutes of a rented silence, The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull To sleep the under-tens and invalids, The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass, The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect. Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better Happiness than this, not much to show for love But how we are, and how this evening is, Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive In a domestic love, seemingly alone, All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight, Looking forward to a visit from the cat.

Art Rock Summer

Art Rock Summer (June 16 - August 12, 2023) is a performance series at ECU's Libby Leshgold Gallery, an acoustically sinister space that fares just as poorly when it comes to exhibiting visual art.

Curated by the Leshgold's Kay Higgins and artist Casey Wei, the gallery announces from the start that it is "taking a vacation from art and embracing Art Rock."

Nowhere is this vacation more apparent than in the gallery's indifference to its sonic shortcomings. Robert Dayton of Robert Dayton (and the Beach Boys), we are told, "will be utilizing his entire being," but a decent sound system would only allow that entirety to be heard beyond its mufflings. Some vacation. 

An Appointment at St Paul's

To St Paul's on Thursday for a yearly appointment. 9:30 a.m. is a reasonable time, since I am generally up at 6 a.m. on hot summer mornings like this one.

The six block walk to the #25 bus, then to King Ed Station, where I travelled three stops (north) to Yaletown Station and walked another six blocks up Davie to Burrard. It can happen in less that a half hour, but I give it an hour at least. You can't be late for these appointments.

If I make all my connections, the walk from Yaletown to St Paul's is a meander. Anything that catches my eye I stop for.

Granville is once again a scary street, scarier than it was before they took the cars off it in 1973, when they tore it up to give us a pedestrian "oasis" -- and one of Canada's largest malls.

Before 1973, Granville was old men in tie-less, crumpled dark blue suits and women in turbans and knee-length coats that hid their dirty hair and moth-bitten dresses. These people spent their days and nights sitting as best they could in tiny, decrepit hotel lobbies with smudged windows nipping at vanilla extract and Aqua Velva, chain-smoking, doing everything they could to not get kicked out. Many of the cheaper hotels where they lived were torn down to make way for retail shops and bars, places tourists like. Most of the people living "on" Granville today are without proper beds to sleep in or hotel lobbies to sit in. Everything now takes place on the street. 

Upon reaching Granville I decided not to cross it but walk along it. What I saw more than once were couples or families from Europe or Latin American standing terrified before a suddenly stumbled upon drug-taking cluster of tanned and skinny bodies, some of them completely naked in the scorching 9 a.m. sun. Again, it was not the bodies of those living on Granville that registered, but those of a travelling privileged class who had never seen anything like them. 

A Chapter Shared

Last week I was shown a chapter from a manuscript by the spouse of an acquaintance who left the world too early, though not before mostly completing something that so far feels important to someone who doesn't air out his life on the platforms either, who has, inadvertently or otherwise, fashioned restorative rituals of his own.

Tucked within this chapter, near the end of it (or was it near the end of my reply letter to the author's spouse?), is a quote from Rumi that I had never heard before but makes so much sense to me at this stage in my life:

"The desire to know your own soul will end all other desires.”

Not the knowing, of course, but what lies behind it, the impulse, the need. I feel so much better knowing that. A chapter from a book I look forward to.

Summer Reading

As in more recent summers, much of my time is spent under the butterfly bush reading. Last month I started Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1931), but the novel proved so slow that I started Lucia Berlin's selected stories A Manual For Cleaning Women (2016) as a respite. I am now in the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, in the head of Quentin -- the older and dead male Quentin, as opposed to the young girl Quentin I started with -- and what at first was a refreshing change from the voice of Benjy (played by Faulkner chomper James Franco in the 2015 film) is now its own overgrown jungle of plain text and italics, hidden secrets and handless watches.

There is an interesting play on binaries on pages 81-82, the most prominent being Southerners and Northerners and [B]lack people and white people. Some of what Faulkner has written would never be published today; not only his propositions, but the words he uses to construct them:

"I used to think that a Southerner had to always be conscious of [n-word]s. I thought that Northerners would expect him to. When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of them as coloured people not [n-word]s, and if it hadn't happened that I wasn't thrown with many of them, I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, [B]lack or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realized that a[n] [n-word] is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among. But I thought at first that I ought to miss having a lot of them around me because I thought that Northerners thought I did ..." (81-82)

The passage "... not a person so much as a form of behaviour" was a book I wrote and published in 2009, called 8x10. Another book that would never be published today, but for different reasons.

Capitol Gains

Monday's walk included the alley between E. 12th and E. 13th Avenues, immediately west of Knight. A couple of addresses in, a garage with a section of carpet pulled from it, unfurled, and two men, one in his late-60s, the other way older, conferring.

The carpet is from the lobby of Granville's Capitol Theatre. Not the Capitol 6 (built in 1973), but the single screen theatre that preceded it. The older man worked on the demo of the first Capitol and had stored the carpet in his garage all this time; the other showed me the seams and told me how he was going to cut them, get three runners for the hallways of his house.

Below is a part of the rug that was protected from the elements during its installation life, but also its life in storage. So pretty. Like what you see in Julie Christie's eye at the end of McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), which may or may not have been screened at the Capitol.

Some Like It Hot

People the world over are flocking to Death Valley, CA to have their pictures taken next to its thermometer. In considering this, I was reminded of T.S. Eliot's line about how the world will end: Not with a bang but a whimper. Now add to that: Not with a whimper but a travel itinerary.

What's the world coming to? Answer: It's coming to LAX to rent a Lincoln so that we might drive into the desert in comfort. And once there? Remind the powers that be that 129F is 53.8C -- not 59C! My God!

Archery Wars

As Ukrainian soldiers familiarize themselves with the latest in cluster bomb technology, a gentler weapons training is taking place here in Vancouver, where we have the privilege of working with more traditional, if not sustainable systems of hunting and killing.

The sign up top was planted at the southeast corner of Sunnyside Park, its picture taken on Saturday. I admit to not being happy about private businesses advertising in public space, yet I lacked the will to remove the sign, take it apart and assign it to my recycling box. Surely someone would ask me what I was doing, and I just didn't have it in me to explain myself, even though I felt in the right.

Prophecy

If you have any memory of your life before the age of three you will know that you dreamed your own death. Not the conditions that led to it, but what follows. For some, this includes the "walk" from the stopping of your heart and brain to the Induction Centre, while for others it is waking up at Burning Man.

Spanish Banks, 9:28 p.m. PDT

Last night was the fifth time I've seen Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), and again a revelation. Ce temps: A melancholic(?) young man more or less admits to an old love that he would be happier living in a novel while writing one, and she does what she can to help him. To the point of leaving him. Happily.

The woman is more than a muse, more than his construction. Or at least the auteur attempts to make her so. All of which was on my mind while walking towards last night's sunset at Spanish Banks; the two in the picture coming ashore, their voices carrying, in love with the water and how warm it is, oblivious to the dying of the light.

V0R 1Z0

After twelve years, a new computer, and a different world. Scrolling through the data transfer, strange photos. Context says this one was taken at Hornby Island. Doesn't matter when.

Lucia Berlin

The title story from A Manual For Cleaning Women is "A Manual For Cleaning Women". Not the same since stories are presented in quotation marks and books in italics. Some of you already know this. It's not important if you don't. All writing will be said to you soon enough. 

Lucia Berlin lived in many places (born in Alaska, raised in Chile, etc.) and had a variety of jobs over her adult life, from house cleaner (or cleaning woman, but not cleaning lady) to university professor. Her story "A Manual For ..." is not a traditional manual so much as a diary, with details on bus routes that include"42--PIEDMONT" and "43--SHATTUCK--BERKELEY."

Here's the entry for the "33--BERKELEY EXPRESS":

The 33 got lost! The driver overshot the turn at SEARS for the freeway. Everyone was ringing the bells as, blushing, he made a left on Twenty-seventh. We ended up stuck in a dead end. People came to their windows to see the bus. Four men got out to help him back out between the parked cars on the narrow street. Once on the freeway he drove about eighty. It was scary. We all talked together, pleased by the event.

For those aware that Cate Blanchett has signed on to play Berlin in a film version of A Manual For ... (and director Pedro Almadóvar, listed on IMDB as a co-writer with Blanchett, has signed off of), it's coming on three years since the deal was announced and yes, the titular story would provide a nice ground through which other stories could be threaded. This is the advantage of adapting stories to film, one of the better examples being Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's selected Short Cuts (1993).

"... like a Broadway star, but nice ..."

I have somewhere in the house Lucia Berlin's Where I Live Now: Stories, 1993-1998, published by Black Sparrow Press near the end of its 35 year run of 700 titles, all of them done on great paper, with covers that never did with pictures what words could do first.

At AA Furniture & Appliances a couple weeks ago I came upon Picador's 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women, a selection of 43 of Berlin's 70 stories, with a Foreword by Lydia Davis and an Introduction by editor Stephen Emerson. The copy had been exposed to water and now bears a hard ripple, with a weird weather pattern stain at the bottom end.

Prior to the Picador edition, my most recent Berlin sighting was in Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian's anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative, 1977-1997 (2017). The context was Small Press Traffic's retail outlet, where, in "new narrative" fashion, we learn that "[t]he great short story writer Lucia Berlin was sometimes spotted in the stacks, impossibly glamorous, like a Broadway star, but nice, and with that waitress slouch you knew had come from a lifetime of hard living," (x) but in "old narrative" fashion, more likely the result of a scoliosis that eventually punctured her lung, tethering her to an oxygen tank.

Here's a paragraph from Berlin's "Angel's Laundromat" (1981), the opening story in A Manual for Cleaning Women:

I have a lot of unfounded generalizations about people, like all blacks are bound to like Charlie Parker. Germans are horrible, all Indians have a weird sense of humour like my mother's. One favourite of hers is when a guy is bending down tying his shoe and another comes along and beats him up and says, "You're always tying your shoe!" The other one is when a waiter is serving and he spills beans in somebody's lap and says, "Oh, oh, I spilled the beans." Tony used to repeat these to me on slow days at the laundry. (7)

Shorelines

Every night after turning out my light the covers under my chin a stretch of beach to the north and a veil of trees behind it. Sometimes a tear in the veil and a grassy step up to a knoll big enough for a hut. A place to sleep or to sit inside and look out at the ocean.

Here is Jesus Maria, from Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935):

 

“I was sleeping on the beach two nights ago,” he said. “Out on the beach near Seaside. In the night the little waves washed a rowboat to the shore. Oh, a nice little rowboat, and the oars were there.  Got in and rowed it down to Monterey. It was easily worth twenty dollars, but trade was slow, and I only got seven.” (57)

 

And from there to Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2) (2005), but without description or photo.

 

--Why?

 

--You’ll just have to trust me.

 

--Why just?

 

--Because I’m being fair.

Urban Nursery

A Friday evening exhibition preview with twenty or so gathered and a bartender faced with that many drink orders at once. It was the gallerist's birthday, and because I know her well I brought gifts -- plural because I'd purchased gifts for her on past occasions but never got around to giving them to her, until Friday. 

Behind the gallery, up the stairs to the lane, is a nursery built from sick and discarded plants, most of them rescued, I was told, though some have been dropped off. Because not everyone can afford a car (nor want one, even if they can), there is a three car width of room for plants. 

I was walking about the nursery when a middle-aged woman came down the back steps and started dead-heading. I introduced myself, and she told me her name is Cammy, though I wasn't sure of the spelling. Later I heard that Cammy came to Canada from Vietnam, so it's more likely a French "C" Cammy than a Pol Pot "K". Pictured below if a rose cutting she gave me. I will do what I can to bring others like it to life.

The Art of Emily Carr

Doris Shabolt's 1979 monograph on the art and life of Victoria's Emily Carr (1871-1945), as it was reprinted eight years later, in 1987, a fact that might tell us about the author's failure to "provide ... a fuller appreciation of [Carr's] dimension as an artist than now exists." (11) Or could we say the time it took to reprint was based on factors other than a lack of public interest, if indeed that's how we measure pubic interest -- through sales?

Those familiar with the monograph will recall its "Epilogue", where Shadbolt compares and contrasts Carr's career with that other non-Group of Seven member, Tom Thomson, who waited until his mid-30s to pursue painting more seriously -- after years of working as a commercial artist. Carr, for her part, knew early on what she wanted, but as Shadbolt writes, "at the age of 41 [after her first exhibition of paintings, and earlier trips to Post-Impressionist France]... something was not mixing properly in the complex chemistry of hand, eye, head and heart, and for almost a decade and a half, her art, while kept alive, went nowhere." (195)

Doris Shadbolt was, lest we forget, a curator, first, but a critic second or and art historian? Does it matter? It doesn't. We no longer write as Doris did, because today everywhere is "nowhere," and there is no need. Nor does anyone paint (pictures of) totem poles anymore. I'm not even sure people photograph them, unless as documentation, as one would a sculpture.

Two Skies

We'll know sooner if we start paying more attention to clouds. Bird behaviour, dog but not necessarily cat behaviour, will follow.

Dogs are easier to read than cats, which tells us something about our (human) preferences (yes, it's possible to like both).

The clouds up top are Vancouver summer morning clouds I've never seen before (looking east, Main and 28th, 8:37 a.m yesterday). At bottom (looking northwest, Kingsway and Clark, 9:25 p.m. yesterday), clouds seven minutes after sunset.

Poem

Ugly Animals

after Melanie Safka

 

Ugly animals
I die outside a different void than you
And you’ll know it
To be me after tonight
Such pride in your silence

 

Ugly animals
They refuse different walls
But it’s wrong
They always part after 
And before
They had always parted once

 

Since you’ll be brave I’ll cry against you
You will walk but refuse my feet
You’ll disperse me always
If alone
You’ll collect secrets reading

 

Ugly animals
Before I’ll be crowded out
Never again alone
Against a different secret -- mine!
Discouragement outside the nothings I refuse

 

Ugly animals
I walk a different bike path
But you don’t, not tonight
I hear everything
They had nothing to share
You stop in ways that I don’t

I won’t look after you
Certainly you won’t look after me

 

Ugly animals
I do not resemble your enemies
But it’s not spatial
No one’s thought it there or then
You refuse to, never and in no way
You’d departed
Refuse no one I have yet to meet
You had gathered secrets from
Nobody left to hide

Ugly animals
Always in packs
There was never anyone
Against a different secret, like mine
Refused outside nothing I don’t
No one stands apart from me
No one as ugly an animal
But when I’ve abandoned anyone
Certainly you’ve abandoned me
But when I’ve abandoned anyone
Certainly you’ve abandoned me

On Set

We've now done over 25 interviews for the documentary. The picture above was taken in advance of the first one, back in March. Neither the interviewer nor the interviewee, just someone waiting for the next set-up. The history of cinema includes waiting to make pictures and waiting to see them.

Exhibiting Poets, Poetry

Maybe a way of working with poets in galleries and museums that breaks from text on walls, objects? Another way of saying, We hear you, your voice is important to us? I don't know.

Hidden in the cave we forge of one another is an installation project commissioned by Batalha Centro de Cinema and developed by artists Alice dos Reis and Isadora Pedro Neves Marques together with poet CAConrad.

The project includes a new film produced in New York in the summer of 2022, new poems presented as sculptural objects, and an eponymous book, published jointly by Livros do Pântano and Batalha Centro de Cinema.

The film, created on the invitation of Batalha, explores the unmistakable literary voice of CAConrad and, more broadly, their biography and some of their spiritual convictions: a passion for poetry, their ecological preoccupations and the legacy of the AIDS crisis.

The opening included a new performance with CAConrad and guests.

For media inquiries: Sandra Mesquita: sandramesquita@agoraporto.pt

Pronounsments

Remember when he stood for the figurative third-person subject? To wit, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" (Nietzsche).

When I was an undergrad (UVic), per achieved senate approval and none who used it were negatively sanctioned, while those who de-gendererd the default he for they were shown the red pen. 

Now there are those who self identify as they/them, making it difficult sometimes to know if it is the literal (plural) subject being referred to or the figurative relational subject. If I'm not mistaken, this confusion cost Jordan Peterson his teaching position. 

So, and if not to paraphrase: They who fight[x] with monsters might take care lest they become a monster? Is that right, then? that the second "s" in monsters falls away?

Live Music

The poster is enough for me. I'm going.

Modernism

I barely knew who Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was when I went with who knows who to see the premiere of Syberberg's 1982 film version of Wagner's 1882 opera Parsifal at Victoria's Oak Bay Theatre. The person I went with knew who he was, as did the 100 or so gathered; big personalities, young and old, pulling people towards them, as if the lobby were a trade show and anyone who didn't know anything of Wagner's importance was a customer.

I mentioned earlier what it kick it was to find Syberberg's once hard to find, not to mention very expensive DVD of Parsifal at a thrift store ($1). But looking at the cover recently, I thought, That shape looks like another holy grail, this one of a modernist art that left Europe for North America at the beginning of the 20th century -- Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Of course I didn't much about Duchamp either, short of X.J. Kennedy's poem.

Architectural Design

I'm aways struck by how may of us in the neighbourhood have a stained glass window in our house. Not just Edwardian era houses, but Arts and Crafts houses, "war" houses, post-war bungalows ...

The stained-glass window up top is in the living room, above the hearth. There is so much life in its red that when the sun shines on it, whatever is on the other side of that red is reddened.