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"Within the Context of No-Context" (1980)

Click here for the opening section of George W. S. Trow's "Within the Context of No-Context" as it first appeared in The New Yorker in November 17, 1980.

The Shape of Things That Came

The IBM PS/2 from 1987.

Boxed Venus (1967)

This year's recipient of the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts for Lifetime Achievement is Michael Morris.

The image above is of Michael's Boxed Venus, 1967, silkscreen on acetate 39.25" x 29.25".

Is it me or does this image not look like the personal computers that arrived on our desk tops some twenty years later?

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VIVA Awards

Tonight we celebrate the VIVA Awards.

This year I served on the Alvin Balkind Curator's Prize jury. The name we came up with is Cate Rimmer.

Cate is the founding director/curator of Artspeak. After that she was the director/curator of Truck Gallery, in Calgary, before taking a job at the Charles H. Scott Gallery at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she is today.

Behind the Sign is one of the exhibitions Cate curated at Artspeak. Among the collaborations between poets and visual artists is a project by Peter Culley and Sara Leydon.

Corked (2014)

I was hoping to hear Catriona read from her latest book, Corked (2014), after I read Ted Byrne's thoughtful review of it in the most recent issue of The Capilano Review, but I read too long (something I never do!), and Catriona only read from her latest project, "Reveries of a Solitary Biker" (a collaboration with composer Jacqueline Leggatt and clarinetist François Houle).

Ted's review brought to mind another book that "spoke" from the perspective of a domestic (slave) labourer: Alice Randall's response to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) -- The Wind Done Gone (2001).

Catriona did not have any copies of Corked with her, so after the reading I walked to Paper Hound and purchased one.

The bulk of Corked is made up of poems that begin "Dear Proust," but here is one from the opening section, a poem I read more than once on the bus ride home:


"16"

I'm so catty in green.
Will such hides express one
single shout of greening
rosemary? My hat's green
so green

Will's laugh zooms for lichen's
jagged wood, out-ditched hiding
and hugging (this hat's really
a gem), the wild jag I dance
heists my love's knot. My snazzy
hat's a jumping hide

Grabbed by some wanting,
decked much within green's
reasons -- my hat has grown
so going -- kind swarthy cruising,
kind bunting blooms, it all
rings green around here. My hat's
so damn green.