Thank you to those who attended my talk yesterday on the exhibition "to show, to give, to make it be there": Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver, 1954 to 1969. Thanks also to the Kootenay School of Writing for hosting the event, and to W2 for supplying the venue.

As is often the case with talks, things go missing, get left unsaid, some of which were pointed out to me, such as Carole Itter’s involvement in the interior composition of the Dollarton shack she and Al Neil have inhabited the past thirty years (though I mentioned Carole’s involvement in the hand-out essay). Also, a closer look at Judith Copithorne’s drawings, the interplay of text and line, how those lines, in shadowing their word shapes (Copithorne used a calligraphy nib), enter into new forms; not as reverberation lines but, after chevrons, ovoids -- the ovoid and the geodesic being our city’s two most enduring motifs.

Also pointed out was the emphasis on DIY production (Gestetners, Roneos) and collaboration. Though I began with Malcolm Lowry’s Through the Panama (1954), and Margery Lowry’s involvement in the text (both as stenographer and editor), I could have made more of bill bissett and Martina Clinton’s partnership in the production of blewointment magazine. Indeed, a whole new exhibition could be conceived based on covivant collaborations, perhaps the best known being the work of Ian and Ingrid Baxter, who for much of the 1960s and 70s went by the name of N.E. Thing Co.