There's No Accounting For Misleading Names

I know it is someone's name, and they are proud of it, but mis- is a prefix with connotations, and to trust your taxes with a company that might mis-file them, well, the Misfeldts are proud for a reason.

Yesterday Was a Travel Day

Yesterday was a travel day that had me up at 5am to catch a 7:45am flight to Kelowna to speak with Matt Rader's CRWR 381 poetry class at 12:30pm and to read at Milkcrate Records with dia kabunda the following day, before returning to Vancouver tomorrow.

I was assigned a window seat for the fight, which I didn't contest because it was a clear day and I like to sight-see.

The image above is a landscape with two clusters of tall buildings -- Metrotown to the left and the junction of Willingdon and the Lougheed Highway to the right. Between the two, a little closer to us, is Deer Lake Park. What I thought was fire smoke was probably fog.

Lots of new buildings on the UBCO campus since the last time I walked it. The greenhouse below is new:

These signs seem old though:

Ah, the perils of a research university.

FINA Gallery has an exhibition up of FCCS faculty and staff. Below is a suite of pieces by Eric the Red descendent Shauna Oddleifson:

Matt has eleven in his class. Most shared their work, all pitched in on the discussion. One of them, Dawn Petrin, is partial to that most miniature form of poetry known as the haiku, which she used to construct her ten stanza poem "about" what is now referred to as the "fire season" (formerly summer).

Here is the poem's fourth stanza:

We watched from afar

fancy house -- pool and all.

This place burned before.

Auto-obituary

A couple weeks ago the Globe ran a "First Person" piece entitled "Why everyone should write their own obituary" by Penny Lipsett. After reading the piece I thought of artist Ken Lum's recent obituary paintings, but also Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology (1915), and then a social media declaration heralding a new book of poems by Tess Liem called Obits. (2018).

For fun, I began my auto-obituary, but without the usual places, dates and times, and in the third-person, no less. This is how far I got:

On everyone's payroll, yet devoted to a life of poverty -- if he was not invented he would have to have been born. And he was, years ago -- long enough to have learned how to even think such a thing, grow into his subjection. As he once said. As he once wrote. As he carried on, carried, a carrier who cared.

Retropassive

Behind the fireplace in the lobby of the brand new UBC Alumni Building (see yesterday's post) is its library. On its shelves, not books but mid-century objet, arranged accordingly. Same could be said of Canadian Art's retro re-design of its magazine -- a time when white middle-class men ruled the roost. What is the message these two are sending? (Translation: a fetish.)

Days

A long walk with my old pal Lisa last Thursday. Down Commercial to Venables, west to the community gardens at Strathcona, returning via Charles. Lisa and Paolo have built something beautiful in the Echo Park Film Centre.

Another long walk on Friday, this time with Amy. Down Bute to Pacific, along the water to Second Beach, north to Lost Lagoon (where the above was taken), returning east on Haro.

More trees on Sunday, this time at UBC, where Esther Shalev-Gerz and the Belkin Art Gallery unveiled The Shadow (2018), a public artwork made of slightly darker bricks than those beside it.

Myths

Wil Aballe has re-opened WAAP at the 1100-block East Hastings. Outside, where one might find a business sign, another sign -- a diptych of Downes Point, Hornby Island resident Anne Ngan, as photographed by Evann Siebens.

The opening exhibition is entitled Myths. For more on the exhibition and its participating artists, see Lauren Fournier's exhibition text.

Veils of a Bog

Vanessa Brown's right-angle-based assemblages turn from the ceiling to the chirps and groans of Michelle Helene Mackenzie's Post Meridiem score.