Every now and then I like to drive by the four small houses just south of East Hastings Street, on the east side of Salsbury (not Salisbury) Drive, to see if they are still there. I lived in one of these houses for a few months in the mid-1980s after a spell in Los Angeles, where I lived on another "misspelled" street -- Wilshire (not Wiltshire) Boulevard. Sometimes there's parking out front, and when there is, I take it, as I did yesterday around 11:30 a.m.
Up the lane to Victoria, where I thought of visiting Attila's studio, but no, I kept walking east, eventually to Slocan where I like to peek in the window of the Slocan Restaurant and count how many people are eating pancakes.
Just before crossing the street I noticed an odd formation that I thought might frame nicely, and that is the picture atop this post, which carries evidence of the untamed land beneath where this building was built, and how attempts at preserving the curve of that land sometimes get "paved" over with slabs of concrete, thus providing a surface for graffiti and, for a time, its white-washed redaction.
On my return I stopped at the East Hasting's Value Village and found in its Books Section Michel Foucault's The Courage of Truth: the Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984. Unfamiliar with the book, I opened it and skimmed its "Foreword" (by editors Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana). Funny, Foucault's sabbatical year (1977) was the same year Roland Barthes led a lecture/seminar course there. Was he subbing for Foucault? Barthes the sessional?
This from an extended passage from journalist Gérard Petitjean:
"At 1915hr Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone."
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