Hungry Slingshots (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2020)

Andy Warhol wanted to be a robot or a machine. Hito Steyerl "declares that, since subjectivity is colonized by capitalism, we might as well identify with objects" (quoted in Hal Foster's What Comes After Farce, 2020). This spring Louis Cabri published a poetry collection whose title suggests that objects indeed have agency and, in the case of weapons of minuscule destruction, are in constant need of re-loading.

Here is a brief passage from the (collapsed) opening of Cabri's "Tasty ... Tasty!" (31):

how come

hm ...

--- Hm!----------

Letters Home

In a 1978 letter, Bruce Chatwin writes to Elizabeth of his time in New York City:

"Dinner parties every night. Escorting Mrs Onassis to the opera next Thursday. Met her again with the John Russells, and my god she's fly. Far more subtle than any American I've ever met. A man called Charles Rosen, who has a reputation for being THE CLEVEREST MAN IN AMERICA, was pontificating on the poet Aretino, and since nobody reacted or contradicted him, turned his discourse into a lecture. He was halfway through when she turned to him with her puppy-like eyes, smiled and said: 'Yes, of course, you can see it all in the Titian portrait.'"

The Café-Concert (1878)

I was walking back from Save On last week when I noticed yet another public mural, this time in block-letters: M-A-N-E-T. As this wall is accessible to those without keys I assumed it was put there not by the building's landlord or its tenets but by someone looking for such a wall, some who had feelings for a French artist renowned for being among the first to paint what was once called "modern life". Which reminds me: I miss my local!

History Painting

I have seen this street preacher at work, usually in the Davie Village. He says he is doing the Lord's work, but what he really seems to be doing is imposing a literal reading of the Bible on those he has cast as infidels.

The picture above is a screen grab of a baptism the street preacher performed at nearby Sunset Beach last Monday.  Surrounding the preacher are police (there for his protection, apparently), members of the LGBTQ+ community and curious onlookers.

Painting on a Park Bench

For years Vancouverites pushed for memorial benches. Then one day, voila! -- benches with bronze plaques honouring past lives. One of my favourite walks is to read these plaques, then to sit down and take in the view.

Yesterday I heard the story of a memorial bench removed by the City because the partner of the person it is dedicated to had painted it. How sad, I thought. She meant no harm. But when asked if I thought the City was right to remove it, I agreed that it was -- regardless of what I thought of its painting.

The City of Vancouver's memorial benches are nicely designed structures well-situated in public space. For me, it is never the bench so much as the view it affords, what it feels like to lean into one, my back supported by its unvarnished wooden slats.

Vancouver's obsession with painting itself is often justified by the city's grey and rainy weather -- benches that look "dead and forgotten," according to the artist whose partner's bench was removed. I for one see nothing wrong with settling into that which is "dead" to watch a sunset. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen is a sunrise touching one of these benches -- and bringing it to life!

"Put out the fire with a blue hole."

"In December 1980," Nicholas Shakespeare writes, "Bruce [Chatwin] took Donald [Richards, his lover] to a dinner given for him by Freddy Eberstadt. Bruce had suggested the guests. His marriage [to Elizabeth] had put I'm in touch with high society in New York, but it was not the society that appealed to Elizabeth. That night they included ... Robert Wilson, Kynaston MacShine ... Keith Milow, Edward Albee, Jerzy Kosinski, Diana Vreeland and Gloria Vanderbilt. There was also Pam Bell [above], an Australian poet whom Bruce met in London. 'The people were so grand you weren't introduced,' she says ... 'You looked down the long line of tuberoses and there was Gloria Vanderbilt with diamonds literally from one tit to another. She looked like she robbed the burial mound at Ur.' Bell thought Bruce that night was at his most manic. 'He had on a dinner jacket and a bow-tie and jeans and high-heeled yellow boots. Every now and then he threw his knees up to his chin and collapsed in hyena laughter. His face was a Hallowe'en mask: ugly, hysterical, grotesque.'"

Bell presents a chilling image. After finishing Shakespeare's "New York" chapter I looked for Bell online and, with some difficulty, found three of her 1960s poems from Poetry: 1947-1989 (Toowoomba: Rowland, 1989) on a Facebook account:

Woman over Bahrain

Go ahead! Hijack me —
Time's inevitable fool.
The young men are more beautiful ...
Desire tomorrow may be met with casual pity.
Put out the fire with a blue hole.

To a young man

My dear, lie down and sleep.
There isn't time
To tap the age of waters dammed up in one scarred skin ...
And, oh the wells of love are dark and deep ... you'd drown.
It takes an age, an ancient water-course
To hold the rage of rivers,
But for you,
There will always be
Shaped by strange waters, timeless, secret,
Some mysterious pool,
Warm for your heart-break winters and midsummer cool.

Oxford Street

High, high
White cloud
And a blue sky cartwheeling down Oxford Street
In pewter puddles.
I love the crowd, the tired faces of the afternoon,
Preoccupied and inward,
Like sad buds waiting for rain.

Walden (1854)

"Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from that of some English locality -- Saffron Walden, for instance -- one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in Pond."                       -- from Walden, Henry David Thoreau