Ladies and Gentlemen, Madame Hummingbird Feeder

A hummingbird feeder from the 1950s. This spring I will find a place for it in my garden. In the meantime, a visit from the future. Not what it is, but a (penlight) projection.

We Are Close

Close? We've always been close, Open. How many times do you have to be told?

Sorry I dropped the comma. I'll add it to today's sign.

The Quipping Post

The Irish Dream. A couple times every year I have what I call the Irish Dream. The locations are from my 1980 trip there, and are restricted to Dublin.

I am never alone in this dream, nor are the people I am alone with, for we are always swelling -- until I escape and am sucked in by another, who veers off into some new form of electric bullshit, similar to what I do with my fiction.

The main feature of the Irish Dream -- which begins when there are more than two of us and becomes the exclusive mode when we are four -- is quipping. Suddenly everyone is speaking in quips, and I leap from my chair like a man on fire, late for his job at the arsonist's. 

Hard Copy

Writing for hard copy journals can be taxing. Yesterday I completed a first draft of my review of the Audain Art Museum's Out of Control: the Concrete Art of Skateboarding exhibition and found it to be 100 words over. I took off the opening paragraph, and it fit. In fact, it was better without it. But what to do with that paragraph? I worked so hard to get it right!

Skateboarding, like surfing and alpine skiing, is both a recreational activity and a competitive sport. That it was invented by Californian and/or Hawaiian surfers in the 1950s, and de-wheeled three decades later (to become popularly known as snowboarding in the 1990s), places it in an evolutionary middle and invites comparison. All three spawned complex postwar subcultures, though skateboarding maintains a rockier relationship to its elements. Indeed, if surfing occurs smoothly over water, with the ocean’s force behind it, and alpine skiing/snowboarding gravitationally down water’s frozen form (snow), skateboarding is largely body-powered, its horizontal surfaces more often than not a mix of water, sand and cement (i.e. concrete).

In My Day (2022) 2

Above is a picture from the opening of Act Two of In My Day, Rick Waines's remarkable "verbatim drama" drawn from 118 interviews with those who survived the first fifteen years (1981-1996) of HIV/AIDS in Vancouver. My review is now up at the B.C. Review.

photo: Sarah Race

Hair Bar

As a teenager I received a weekly allowance of $5, but every month my mother gave me $10 for a haircut, thinking that was how much one cost. Economy Barbershop (now Kerrisdale Hair Bar) charged only $5 a cut, so of course I went there.

At the time, a gram of Red Lebanese hash cost $5. That's what I would spend the difference on -- chipping away at that gram until the next haircut. These were small chips, just enough for a single toke from a pipe made with a toilet paper tube, a piece of tin foil and a pin to poke holes in it.

There was nothing I liked better than to end the day sitting by my bedroom widow, reading Vonnegut, Hesse or Gide under the influence of Nick Gerwing's Red Leb hash. If you want to know how I got through high school, that's how. RIP Nick!

Get Into Dodge

I wrote, "If you sign up for my workshop, I'll carry your bags and help you pack and unpack them. You can decide where and when you want to stop, but I'll have some suggestions too."

You said your interest is in character, and after preliminary discussions it was decided that you would write portraits, not stories, and you happily accepted my loan of Gertrude Stein's Look At Me Now and Here I Am (1945) and George Bowering's Curious (1973) as examples.

At our next meeting you produced a copy of another Stein book -- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) -- published in the same year the Nazi's came to power, which for Stein might well have been as good a time as any to publish an autobiography.

"Here," you said pointing to the page. "I want to write a portrait of her. My own portrait."

Gertrude Stein having written The Portrait of Mabel Dodge [1912], Mabel Dodge immediately wanted it printed. She had three hundred copies struck off and bound in Florentine paper. Constance Fletcher corrected the proofs and we were all awfully pleased. Mabel Dodge immediately conceived the idea that Gertrude Stein should be invited from one country house to another and do portraits and then end up doing portraits of millionaires which would be a very exciting and lucrative career. Gertrude Stein laughed. A little later we went back to Paris. (132)

I asked if you had heard of Rachel Cusk's book Second Place (2021), which is inspired by Mabel Dodge's 1932 account of hosting D. H. Lawrence in Taos, and you surprised me when you said you'd read it and knew of its source.

"So you want to do what Stein's already done?" I asked, rhetorically.

"Ah, but Stein's is a fiction," you said; "I'm only interested in the truth."