"Wayward, natural and unnatural silences"

 A fragment of Phyllis Webb's "Foreword" to Wilson's Bowl (1980):

My poems are born out of great struggles of silence. This book has been long in coming. Wayward, natural and unnatural silences, my desire for privacy, my critical hesitations, my critical wounds, my dissatisfaction with myself and the work have all contributed to a strange gestation. 
         

On Silence

"… and the silence, almost everywhere in the world now, is traffic."

"If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart, you'll see that they are always the same, but if you listen to traffic, you see it's always different."

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Sitting at my table, staring at this framed plastic light, I think of the rains, their music. Not just the notes that dot my asphalt roof, but the sharp splashes that begin with leaf-clogged eaves, and the longer, higher frequency swish from the tires of a passing car.

There are musicians who have left their designation and the instruments that carried them into music school for the larger palette that is Sound. Nothing new here, just another way to play it.

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Pulp Fiction Books

John Denniston describes himself as "a retired newspaper photographer who still has a compelling desire to take interesting photographs." The picture above was taken May 17, 2013.

Tonight, between the hours of 7-9pm, Pulp Fiction Books is hosting the re-launch of Kingsway. It will be wet and windy, but come in anyway.

A Day of Not Writing

On Monday I finished a 2,000 word feature for Canadian Art. It was a hard piece to write, for different reasons.

Tired of sitting, I decide to go downtown and see what's new in art and architecture. I walk past an entrance beside the Broadway and Commerical Drive Skytrain Station.

From the Stadium Station I walk to the Or Gallery to see Myfanwy MacLeod's exhibition, The Private Life of the Rabbit. The Or Gallery is an artist-run centre and its Director/Curator is at the New Art Dealers Alliance trade show in Miami trying to sell art objects to pay for his trip. But Jonah and Kate are there.

Myfanwy's father built a rabbit hutch once, so that gives her the right.

I am more comfortable at the back end of Myfanwy's show.

From the Or I walk to Richards Street, en route to Republic for Holly Ward's awkwardly-titled show. Holly is part of my Canadian Art feature, and if I didn't have to write about her, I would have attended her opening last Thursday.

Most of the work in Holly's The House of Light and Entropy was made at Heffley Creek, just north of Kamloops, where she and Kevin Schmidt are building a home/studio based on the geodesic dome she built for her 2011 Langara College residency.

I have yet to visit the VAG's Second Floor shows, so that's where I head next.

Curious to see the new Nordstrom's, I stop in and walk its floors. Like Berlin's KaDeWe, it serves alcohol.

Here is a bar I will never have a drink at.

The VAG has two shows on its Second Floor. To the right as you come up the stairs is a collection show entitled Between Object and Action: Transforming Media and the 1960s and 70s. Featured in this show are Kate Craig, Gathie Falk, Carole Itter, Gary Lee-Nova, Eric Metcalfe and Evelyn Roth.

Pictured below is the world's largest divorce suite.

Here I am at the Lee Bul show at the other end of the VAG's Second Floor.

Once outside I see that Heather Reisman has finally closed the book on Indigo/Chapter's Robson Street location. Back to the dollar stores for candles and picture-frames.

Walking home through Chinatown I stop outside the site of my previous Canadian Art feature, what was once the Apartment Gallery.

(Among 2015's most significant discoveries: incontrovertible evidence that art was invented by the rich to convince the poor that the former and the latter have something in common, and that the rich are interested.)

Another shop on its way out of business is the Multi Store at 1009 Kingsway, just a couple of blocks from my home. Everything -- including "smokeless camphor" -- is 30% off.

20th Anniversary Edition of Kingsway

This Thursday December 3 between 7-9pm Pulp Fiction Books at 2422 Main Street will host the launch of a "20th anniversary edition" of a book of poems I wrote called Kingsway. The book includes a new cover, new photos (the old ones were lost to shifting technologies and poor archiving), and an afterword that speaks of how I came to write the book and what has changed since it was first published.

There will be a short reading, followed by a conversation. Bookstore proprietor Christopher Brayshaw said he will participate in this conversation, and this pleases me because his review of Kingsway for the now-defunct Vancouver Review is one of the finer pieces written on what I thought I was writing.

All are welcome. Books will be available for sale, and for signing.