Paris, 1911

Is it art? is not in this instance asked of the object, the gesture, the idea, but offered in response to the command: Name the most popular answer on the topic of what gives people pleasure.

 IS ... is the presence of the object, the gesture, the idea.

 

IT ... is the subject of what follows (it could be anything).

 

ART ... is the atmosphere -- the mood, the condition -- that imparts its terms.

 

*

 

The artist steps back from the easel and the sunshine reminds her of how good the Earth is. A day as warm and as light blue as this, the shrubs and flowers nourished from last night’s rain, a breeze descending, cooling our perspiration, pressing it against us.

 

On the easel a small square of rag paper, and on it a pastel impression of the view before it. From the bluff looking down, the darker blue oval of the bay, with its tan beaches and chalk cliffs, a dozen small white sailboats at its centre, their bows pointing this way and that.

 

*

 

Sometimes after work she stops at a corner café between the bank and her place. Thursday was not as warm as it was on Sunday, and for this reason she had already made up her mind to keep walking.

 

An arm rises from the crowded tables. Rising again with a familiar face, beckoning her. The excited face of the man she takes her sketches to.

 

A seat is cleared, she feels everything is moving quickly and by some predetermined force. Her body is gone, and that's fine because all that is required of her is what she thinks, what matters to her, and sometimes why. When she gets up to leave, everyone will agree that it ended well. 

some, C and periodicities

Last June I attended the launch of the inaugural issue of Rob Manery's some magazine at Vancouver's Kino Cafe, where I purchased a copy and its promise of a second issue, which arrived on my doorstep a couple days ago. I am sure had I attended the second some launch at the People's Co-op Bookstore on March 13 I would have received my copy there, in person, but by then the Covidian winds were blowing, and I stayed in.

The current some opens with an engaging piece by Alan Daves, entitled "How Writing Happens", and is followed by writings by Nicole Raziya Fong, Nora Collen Fulton, Mark Francis Johnson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Rob, Gustave Morin and Fred Wah. Rob's "As They Say" is dedicated to Peter Culley and features an appearance by his KSW associate, Dan Farrell.

Another magazine that arrived this week was my contributor's copy of C Magazine. I had mentioned David Garneau's piece in an earlier post, but there are many more worth reading, including Serena Lukas Bhandar's entry in a section that responds to art critic Amy Fung's unasked question about "legibility" with respect to the work of the exclusively non-white 2017 Sobey Art Award finalists who were gathered together for a public panel moderated by an "authoritative" figure whom Fung argues is representative of settler-colonialism ("I wanted to know if their work felt visible here, in this context, and what were their strategies and coping mechanisms?"). Bhandar's response is familiar to those who have read Samuel Beckett -- that a work of art must be considered on the terms it sets out for itself. For Bhandar, these terms are set in the cultural context of "storytelling."

One magazine that didn't arrive on my doorstep this week was rob mclennan's recently revived periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, which is online and added to daily. Unlike some, which is all poems, and C Magazine, which is all essays, periodicities features essays, online readings, reviews and poems. In the first issue, Klara du Plessis attempts a theorization of the non-individuated poetry reading (collage?), what she calls "Deep Curation," while in Saturday's supplement a number of writers remembered the life and work of Ken Belford, who passed away on February 19, 2020. My contribution appears in the Thursday supplement, and can be read here.