Another thing I've noticed about Canada is just about every little coffee shop and over-the-counter restaurant has a little 'loyalty card' where you get stamped a certain number of times before you get the product free, and people actually use them. This appeals to my Yankee thriftiness. My wallet is now bulging with loyalty cards.
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If there were not these geniuses out there writing books of poems and such, I would not be staying up until 7:30 in the morning reading them. Autobiography of Red was marvellous. Just remarkable.
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MIscellanea from today: Luc Sante's review of Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, first published in 1973. (Higgy tells me that there is a film version of the book .) Did medieval towns really collectively go crazy from hallucinogenic ergot in the bread? Interested also in Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) which Sante calls a "monumental two volume poem" and "a devastating catalogue, compiled from court transcripts, of misery cruelty, debauchery, and insanity that should be read to anyone who uses the phrase 'traditional values' ". Today, as you can see, I am feeling very anti-Norman Rockwell's America, anti- Currier and Ives, anti-Hallmark. I am feeling very contrary.

I have also fallen in love with Anne Carson's poetry, right now reading Autobiography of Red which is just masterful, awe-inspiring stuff.
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We've all been pretty grumpy here in Vancouver in the past 24 hours. Seasonal Affective Disorder exacerbated by unrelenting rain?
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Last year I found someone's to-do list on the sidewalk in San Francisco. The list seemed to involve preparations for a party of some sort, listing visits to Andronico's, a high-end grocery store, Abbey Party Rentals, a florist. Something about the descenders in the handwriting made me think it was written by a woman. On the other side of the list the following was written:

- Don't harbor negatives its like lodging poison
- Be of good cheer
- When you own a Malabar Why live in the cellar
- accentuate the positive
- think of each day as Thanksgiving
- if You're truly grateful You simply can'T be negative

I've held onto this little scrap of paper for a year or so now, maybe because I've written many similar lists myself, maybe because it is so rare to see things written in another human hand that no one was intended to see, maybe because I got an unpleasant and lingering prickly feeling -- because reading these affirmations was a peculiarly hollow experience, when their object was to be exhortative, and bold and willfully happy! happy! cheerful! grateful! positive! and they left me feeling kind of hopeless and empty.

Perhaps this is some flaw on my part, and having done some reading on such matters, I can say I do support and believe in a modified and far-departed-from-B.F.Skinner kind of behaviorism, you know, the kind they practice at the University of Pennsylvania, I forget the names of the major players there, whereby one learns to recognize in oneself patterns of self-defeating thought, and think up refutations so that the proverbial angel that sits on one's shoulder learns to argue more eloquently than the proverbial devil, which yes, is what one would generally want -- a large grey area with room for contending ideas. Nevertheless, this particular list's impotence seems to lay in its negation of 'negativity' positing it as a thing to be completely avoided, as if moods of darkness and its attendant labors never bore fruit, as if any venturing in cellars or on the other sides of fences were akin to consorting with the devil in this very black-and-white cosmology.

For a while I was roommates with Margery McDoodle who was always bubbly and nice -- on the surface. She manifested a lot of icky girly-girl tendencies I deplored -- Laura Ashley dresses with enormous pink cabbage roses, screaming when someone said the word 'spider' -- but which I happily overlooked in less galling examples of girlhood. In real life, outside her special saccharine reality, she was one of the nastiest, puny-souled and misanthropic creatures I'd ever had the misfortune to encounter between four walls, much less share those four walls with. Everyone else in the dorm thought she was 'so sweet' and 'so lovely' and 'so nice' -- but I knew better. You could never point to something she actually said to explain what a spiteful, selfish and bitter person she was, because all her words were angelic and sweet and chafingly cheerful, but wow she was hateful. She liked to tell on people -- this was boarding school where you could be kicked out for the most minor infraction -- and she would go to the dean and report people she thought were up after lights out, or cutting class, or drinking, or whatever. By god, she was 'right'. She was always so infuriatingly 'right'. She carried around these little 'angel cards' and read them to herself over and over, mostly as a means of sneering at everyone else's ignorant and benighted condition. I say, give me straightforward, dark, moody unalloyed sons-of-bitches any day of the week rather than fatuous passive-aggressive and self-deluding prigs unable to be true to their ensmallened selves. I'd rather someone look me in the eye and tell me they hated me, than be smiled at loathingly. I still shudder when I think of her.

And even though I said it myself, I say 'Amen' to that.

I mean, give me genuinely nice, reasonable people instead. :-)
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And Stephanie sends me links to even more Canadianisms on the An American's Guide to Canada.
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Ty, a Desert Storm veteran with a brand new weblog has had some experience with those Meals Ready to Eat mentioned below:

As a former airman and Desert Shield/Storm veteran I have had many occasions to 'enjoy' an MRE. The secret is to be creative. Here's one popular recipe I have used many times - take to dehydrated meat patty and rehydrate it. Place it on a cracker, squeeze the pasteurized processed cheese-like product over it, add rehydrated ketchup and top with the other cracker. Voila! A hamburger! Another of my favorites was to take the dehydrated peaches, add water and 2 packets of powdered coffee creamer. Voila! Peaches and cream!

MRE's came in a case of 12. Some were actually kinda good if you heated them up, which was simple in the desert. Simply place the item on a sandbag for about 10 minutes. The dark green packaging absorbed the heat. In 10 minutes you have a piping hot entree. The spaghetti and meat sauce was good, the tuna noodle casserole was good as long as you had 4 packets of salt to add to it. Some of the MRE's you avoid like the plague. Some of these include the corned beef hash, omelet with ham, and chicken a la king. Most MRE's included some sort of dessert. The oatmeal bar was like a brick. You could construct a bomb-proof shelter if you collected enough of them. Some meals came with M&M's. Most packs had expired several years earlier.

Open Letter to the Media:

Could you please stop referring to the media as "the chattering classes"? Not only is it irritating; it is also getting old. Thank you.
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Ladies! Another reason to move to France. (via Arts & Letters Daily)
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Dan writes to note that it *used* to be called Kraft Dinner, but now due to FDA regulations a "Dinner" must be have some kind of meat product in it, so if you visit KraftDinner.com and look at the site info, it's a Canadian site.

In college I had a roommate who consumed gallons of this stuff, but the thing I remember is that he had some kind of Kraft Mac and Cheese that came with a packet full of orange ooze, really nasty, pudding-textured cheese stuff that enabled you to cook it without having to keep fresh milk and butter around. Which reminds me of the time my friend Sevilla and I blew out a tire 60 miles outside of Billings, Montana on a Friday night, and, unable to get a hotel room because an air show was in town, and tireless until Monday, ended up eating an MRE she had in her trunk -- that's a Meal Ready to Eat in military terms -- in the Motel 6 parking lot, washed down with dime store brandy. Gave me newfound respect for the men and women serving our country, let me tell you. It came in a virtually impenetrably thick brown plastic pack, and was clearly meant to withstand gunfire and grenades. There was meat in it -- whether it was rat or monkey I could not tell -- and a packet of gravy that was also suitable for stuccoing tropical P.O.W. camps and reattaching metal parts to broken Army vehicles. There was this apple crumble dessert, neon pink, that cause one to wax nostalgic for the grade school cafeteria, to finish it off. All in all, I'd've preferred mac and cheese, cooked stovetop from a box, even with the cheese pudding. And I've eaten some weird stuff. In the Philippines there're these purple eggs...
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I've unpacked most of my books, which are piled up in the dining area is five tall listing towers, and in unpacking them I had a sudden sense of how gaping the holes in my reading were. As such I resolved to read a bunch of things I'd managed not to, even as an English major: I've read a great deal of Modernism and Post-Modernism, but never read much else, save the Victorians. I've never read Tolstoy, for example, or Marlowe. Byron or Pope or Milton. I missed just about all of the Renaissance, save Shakespeare and Donne, if you count Donne. (When was Donne?)

This weekend I read both A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and Beowulf in its new translation by Seamus Heaney, both very striking, especially in contrast -- a feminist study of the practicalities of genius-creation vs. a (nearly all male cast) Germanic warrior-hero epic. Beowulf, which had a lot of boasting and sword-clashing, was sort of a yawn, I thought, until I realized that hours after reading it, images of monsters and mead-halls and chain-mail and armies and sparking swords and cold Nordic waters were piling up in my mind, so thoroughly had I been transported to that age. I reread the intro by Seamus Heaney which I'd read between sleep and wake, and it assumed a retrospective grandeur and I resolved to read it again.
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Canadianisms:

Garburetor: an in-sink garbage disposal appliance
Kraft Dinner: In an article in Wallpaper, Douglas Coupland, fellow Vancouverite, says that there is no meal more American than Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, "better known as Kraft Dinner". It's not called that in America though. It's called "Mac and Cheese".
Parkade: Parking lot.
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I got a joke email from my friend Adrian today (with a picture of a BMW illegally parked next to a fire hydrant, with the windows punched out and an industrial hose running out of the hydrant and through the car windows.) I realized I never get jokes via email anymore -- except from my former accountant who inexplicably added me to a list of joke-spamming people whose sense of humor was (is) radically divergent from my own. I used to get jokes every day, and depending on my relationship to the joke-sender, either laughed, or thought "Why the hell did this guy, after boring me for four hours talking about himself during one lame and interminable date, decide he was going to add me to his spam list and keep me there for five years, ignoring requests for removal from his list?" I myself stopped mailing jokes and NPR petitions years ago, but sometimes I've been known bark with joy when an unsuspecting internet newbie forwards me the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe in the year of our lord two thousand and one, little knowing the frisson of smug superiority their recipients are feeling.
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Wandering around people's houses when they're not home is something you don't get to do very often, but is something I've been doing a lot of lately in the company of a real estate agent. You are like a ghost visiting someone's future past, and someone's past present and your own possible future. You're permitted to open closets and medicine cabinets, and notice things and play a little game of "Why is this house being sold?"

The wig and the bottle of Dilaudin tell you that someone recently died of cancer. A picture of a family on a fridge, but with boxes of 'guy things' separated out and piled up in the garage screams "divorce!" A copy of Martha Stewart Bride, furniture catalogues and wallpaper swatches means they've decided to marry. The worn rug and the hospital bed in the dining room says someone was sick for years, and couldn't climb the stairs. Three kid's beds and a cradle in one room means they needed more room. A dog-eared and bestickied copy of "Infidelity: a survivor's guide" tells you with conviction that she left him for someone else and he is dreadfully sad. It's amazing the stories that you know from spending ten minutes in a stranger's house.
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Oboyoboyoboyoboyoboy!!! what a day!!! and what good news!!! but i can't talk about it yet, I don't want to jinx it.
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Animaris Ah, these beautiful beach animals, just lovely! Robotic self-replicating machine animals, that move by wind. These were created by Theo Jansen in Holland. Download the .mov file, it's worth the wait to see how beautifully they move. (thank you Dinka!)
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I like it when my friends remember my best lines. "The wedding yesterday was pretty brutal for me. Caterina's described similar situations as the Valley of The Shadow of the Ex-Girlfriends, and whew, it's a dark place, even when it's sunny and it's a day of wine and roses. " Eric should know, 'cause he was always my stunt date when I was going to parties where I knew an ex-boyfriend was going to be attending with his new girlfriend. He's willing to jump at commands like "OK. Right now I want you to lean across the table and look meaningfully into my eyes," and big enough to look like he could beat both the ex-boyfriend and the new girlfriend up, if necessary, but in real life, he's the kind of guy that jumps and screams when he sees a sock on the floor lit in Psycho-like chiaroscuro. (I'm exaggerating here for comic effect, Eric. I'll throw in some of your feats of strength later.)
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Pal and former Salonista Lori Liebovich launches Indiebride, a great site for those planning non-traditional weddings. "My hope is that Indiebride will fill a much-needed niche in the bridal media, that it will be a place for would-be brides who have more on their minds than planning a reception, women who never for a second believed in Prince Charming and who have not, despite all of the cultural cues, been breathlessly awaiting their wedding day for their whole life."

Read the essay by King Kaufman who threw a Vegas Costume Party for his wedding. "I always thought planning my wedding would be easy. Any woman who wouldn't marry me at the Chapel o' Elvis in Las Vegas was a woman I wouldn't marry."

Right now I'm working on a drawing for a tattoo for King and Jane: a high-heeled 40's style pump, to match the crown they both have tattooed on their arms.
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Saturday night I was sitting on the deck at Milestones on Denman watching the sunset, which is right where everyone goes at sunset on beautiful sunny Saturdays in the summer. Chaka Khan was on the restaurant stereo, and all these very beachy people who used a lot of beauty products were walking down the street, perfectly coiffed, and I felt like I was on Melrose. My dinner companion had gone off to answer his cell phone, and there were these two guys sitting at the next table. They were young, big, muscley guys, probably 18-19, late stage teenagers. They were very tough looking in that brash guy-guy way, you could tell they watched lots of sports on TV. One of the guys, the guy facing me, was telling the other guy about his breakup. Some girl had left him, I think, and he was clearly very upset about it, and was confiding in his friend. His friend, though, was looking off in the distance, checking out women walking by, basically paying no heed, because he was so embarrassed by the wussy show of emotion coming out of his friend. Being a tough guy, he had no idea what to tell the guy, who was so clearly and desperately and hopelessly broken-hearted, but not really articulate enough to say so in any meaningful way. "If she goes and does that fuckin' rebound thing, I'll fuckin' kill her, " he said doubtfully, all the time looking like he was going to burst into tears.

The friend shrugged and changed the subject, and this guy looked woefully down at his steak, now sensing he'd revealed too much, and that his friend thought he was a pussy. I wanted to go up to the guy and say, "Yo. Dude. Man. This guy, this friend here? Pitch him. You need better friends." Because the next time it happened, he'd learn from this, and clam right up and put on this false bravado, and say, "Fuck that shit. I don't care."

There's something so wounding about growing up a boy, especially a broken-hearted sensitive boy stuck in a tough-guy demographic with no fine words for his finer feelings. There was something about this scene that made my heart clutch because that guy was going to remember that moment when he tried to speak his heart, and was swiftly and utterly silenced.
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God I'm melodramatic! We now return to regularly scheduled programming. I'm fine, don't worry. Phew.
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Wow. Just when you think things can't get worse, they do.
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St. Francis vs. Lady Macbeth The problem with bunnies is that you can't cuddle them. Stew and Chowder, two superaloof lop-eared bunnies I watched while playing Monopoly last night with Craig and Meghan, don't like to be cuddled. Because, as Craig said, they're prey. It's infuriating to have two cute, cute!!, i mean, CUTE bunnies, that you can't hold in your lap, because I often get that hamster feeling, that slavering, 'i will love and protect all small helpless creatures' feeling when I see neotenic animals. Babies, those larval-stage humanoid beasties, perpetually pooping and burping and drooling, don't really do the same thing for me. I mean, ew! and what horrific manners! Maybe if they were covered in fur?
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Yesterday we rode our bikes all the way around Stanley Park while the sun was setting. I'm all full up with my year's quota of beauty now. I wish there were someway I could distribute it. Then on the way home, stopped off at Urban Fare, which is this tony foodie paradise where we got some Chocolate Banana sauce which we ate spoonfuls of. And one small container of tea called Shangri-La, from Golden Moon Tea.

Then today to Granville Market to get supplies for the party we're throwing tomorrow night. Paella and Sangria and Polenta. We've started chopping and cooking. The house smells like garlic.
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Woke up this morning dreaming of Tribeca, and of boarding school. Funny how when you're leaping ahead into the future, the past comes crowding around you. They were full of feeling, old forgotten fears, refreshed, remembering themselves to me. There is something about the past wants you to stay there with it, it gets child-needy when it sees you moving on.
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Yesterday:

• Sent off 20 things to Judith. I had originally planned on doing a bunch of miniature books, but the few that I did didn't quite work out. So I did 20 small paintings instead, in the old style of illustration I used to do at Salon. I'm really looking forward to getting the final package with all 20 piece of art in it.
• Had drinks with Ari and Jessica, nice folks, unfortunately moving out of town. Ari is headed off for six weeks at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. I'm green with envy. Then off to M.I.T. for a graduate program in urban planning.
• Bought The War Against Cliche Essays and Reviews by Martin Amis, because I was so entertained by Visiting Mrs. Nabokov. (Wow! doesn't appear to be out in the States yet. Another Canadian bonus!)
• Bought Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston, a local Vancouver writer. I have a whole shelf of Canadian writers to be read here. Right now I'm reading A History of Forgetting by Caroline Adderson, who will be running my Booming Ground workshop in July. There's a great lot of Canadian writers not available in the States, I'm finding. And if Chapters, the big Barnes and Noblish bookstore goes under, as it has apparently threatened to in the past Dean fears it will be the demise of Canadian publishing.

Zingerman's Wow! As they say, "Full-Flavored, traditionally made olive oil, vinegar, bread, cheese and pastries." We actually got a bottle of this balsamic vinegar from Stewart's parents, and it changed my life. I mean, really. We started crumbling a little bit of parmesan and dipping it in this vinegar, and it's enough to make tears start in your eyes, it's so good. Of course it was bottled when people were still wearing powdered wigs which is why it's so outrageously expensive, but if you're the kind of person that will forego a week of ho-hum comestibles for one thrilling taste sensation, then step right up, this is the stuff for you.
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Read this weekend the last interviews with Philip K. Dick., What if our world is their heaven? which is quite remarkable in that he describes the entire plot of his next book, the book he never wrote since he died suddenly two weeks after the interview. It was called The Owl in Daylight and talked about a world in which there was no sound, and creatures communicated by color and light and how our world is their heaven with all the sounds and music and audible methods of communication, whereas theirs, filled as it is with light, is ours. Based on the premise that almost all depictions of the afterworld that we have here on Earth mention light, going into the light, heaven as light-filled.

These interviews are slightly marred by the interviewer, who seems to interrupt Dick just as he's getting interesting, and then not understanding what he's saying. But it shows very clearly how he write his books, how he assembles his ideas, and how he gets them down -- each book written in 8-12 days, without eating or sleeping, barely a break. And how, eventually, the cost of writing books overcame the yield.
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Goings on in Plogland. Woohoo! FOJM is now The Mirror Project! Nicely done Heather and Aaron! Yay! And who's that in the Mirror Project bannerito, I ask you?

Dinner at the Brass Monkey and drinks with Dean Allen Señor Textism lui-même. Can we all just stop here and reflect on what a cool name "Dean" is? It's up there with "Ray". We gossiped and laughed and drank chianti and came back here and drew octothorps and talked about Bringhurstitude and watched flashing lightning and drank tequila. Stewart made minute adjustments to the lighting and coveted Dean's Marlboros. Stewart also woke up this morning with a mild hangover which he cured with a grease infusion in the form of a Sausage McMuffin, (disliking tomato juice, a reputed cure). Ew, I thought. But I have to admit an admiration for those flat oval Weetabix-shaped hash brown things, designed to be eaten in transit. Which we were, to meet Ewan at the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the show there, a survey of contemporary Vancouver artists. One great, some good, some bad, some indifferent. More on this when my critical faculties are back in working order. Right now everything seems O.K., which can't be the actual state of things. Or is it?
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Juliet says the quote below from Alamut reminds her of this Emily Dickinson poem:

They say that "Time
assuages"--
Time never did assuage--
An actual suffering
strengthens
As sinews do--with Age--

Time is a Test of
Trouble--
But not a Remedy--
If such it prove, it
prove too
There was no Malady--
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Kenny sends me the following link to a Bernhard article:Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under: An essay on the 10th anniverary of his death in SPIKE magazine. There is a link there to a photo gallery of Bernhard, and another excellent essay on Bernhard. Thanks Kenny!
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Folksises! (This woman I knew, Loreen, always pluralized words with "ses" or "ises" as in, "I have very small breastises" and "i have no more envelopesises", pronounced, "envelopes iss izz") Thus:

Folksises! Stop what you're doing! Now! Get thee to thy local bookstore! and buy Concrete, which is by this dead Austrian guy, Thomas Bernhard, and is a sad and neurotic and hilarious masterpiece. Crushing though, at the end.

Maybe it's not for everyone. Here. I give you the back cover blurb:

Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes, writ large, and profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction: his sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his 'really marvelous' house, which he hates; the illness he nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; finally his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else's very real horror story."

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Read this quote from Alamut today:

("Who said time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time the desired body will soon disappear. And if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other then what remains is a wound; disembodied."

-- attributed to a Japanese source in Marker's film Sans Soleil, 1982.)

Even though Deleuze-and-Guattari-type-locutions usually make my brain retire to a small corner in my skull and take up knitting, this quotelet remembered to me something said in Santa Fe along the same lines, i.e. things that hurt you when you are small, hurt you just as much when you are eighty -- we're trying here not to enter into the (similarly knitwear-creating) psychobabular language of 'inner children' -- though these hurts become weirdly decontextualized and thus general, recreating themselves in novel situations, as if we were just wound-making-machinery, though we can net it, and pin it with our pens, and write it. Fix it. Of course, we decided, it can never be netted and pinned and framed once and for all, like a Nabokovian butterfly, but it is nonetheless a fruitful thing to net over and over, and (to completely switch metaphors in mediis cogitatonis) is a deep well of subject matter for when you don't have any idea of what to write.
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From Summer 2000 Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it would be possible for a writer today to have the sort of success Dickens had? To be the popular entertainment of the day?

T. CORAGHESSEN BOYLE: The answer is self-evident: absolutely and categorically no. We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book or poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information? How can I sit down to open up an imaginative journey in words when I might be missing something out there on the Net or the tube or in the halls or clubs or restaurants? I find it amusing that Hemingway would bitch so about the rigors of writing and the heroic struggle he endured for each book. What of writers today? We are unread, unloved, unknown. At least he could go to Cuba and ignore the whole business of book production, but we have to tramp like trained dogs through the wasteland of Midwestern malls on our book tours, begging the consumer -- our fellow citizens!-- to admire us, to buy us. But we are like Kafka's Hunger Artist, performing astonishing feats for a nonexistent audience, an audience far more interested in life and vitality than in our antiquated and self-indulgent arts. And all right, maybe God had already died during Hemingway's day, but at least the world was still alive. We have no God, no audience, and the scientists tell us with solemn glee that the whole spinning circus is headed for obliteration. Fire and ice, indeed.

There was a short story by Boyle I read last year in The New Yorker which stunned and amazed me. I just went looking for it, and I have to finally say: the New Yorker site is so LAME. And it could be so GREAT. A couple years ago I was having dinner with a guy who worked at the New Yorker and I asked him why they didn't have a web site. He said the magazine had only been in digital format since 1985 or so, but whatever, it didn't matter, cause anyone could get any back issue just by writing the magazine. But there must be some issues they no longer have copies of, I countered. Nah, they've got loads of 'em. Anything you want. But....it was useless arguing with the guy. And now this! What a crushing disappointment.
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Psycho crow. There is this skinny psycho crow that's been screeching and flapping outside of my window all day, screeching flapping, screeching flapping. There were two crows this morning singing a kind of crow reveille, a truly awful way to wake up. I thought perhaps the crow was squawking because of a fallen nest and some vulnerable chicks. A very placid and sleepy-eyed black cat was loitering around the general area, and the crow seemed somewhat appeased by its departure. So, no squawks just-this-minute.

I've been quite good about this one hour a day on the internet thing. It's structured as 10 6-minutes visits rather than a full hour, and I'm falling terribly behind on current events (Nepali what?!) but it's had nothing but positive results. I'm almost finished with "V", for example. Which is a fat book full of fine print.

Most likely, I'll be attending the Booming Ground writing conference thing July 7-14 at University of B.C. Which aspires to be a writing community more than a conference, and which I need, being here in a new city. Heard from my friend Shamina who I met up at Banff last year; she's in another writing group, the Seven Sisters .Following the U.B.C. thing, I'll be up in Edmonton at another writing workshop with Eunice Scarfe which my sister Corey may also be attending, and then in August at the one up on the coast, the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts to hear another Banff friend, Cathy Gildiner, read. Funny how I've become such a joiner since I moved up here, oh, less than a week ago. I think it's because writing is such lonesome work, and writing conferences provide you with a semblance of co-workers and office mates.
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From this month's Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: How exactly are American novelists different from English novelists?

JULIAN BARNES: Language, primarily; also vernacular (as opposed to academic) form; democracy of personnel; nowness. On top of this, contemporary American literature can't not be affected (as was British Victorian literature) by coming from a world-dominant nation -- though also one noted for historical amnesia and where only a small percentage of citizens own passports. Its virtues and vices are inevitably linked. The best American fiction displays scope, audacity and linguistic vigor; the worst suffers from solipsism, parochiality and dull elephantiasis.
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Warning: I am going to post some really geeky stuff to this site later, sentences including words such as "polyptiton" "ploce" and "metalepsis". Foreshadowed by the sentence 'studying pynchon's very idiosyncratic style.'
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Judith informs me that it's her friend Ze who did the flash kaleidoscope I linked to yesterday, and points me to the hilarious instructions of Ze demonstrating how to dance. Indeed, his whole site is full of fun and funny things.
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The Opacity Project. Vancouver artist creating "art you will never see": writing "Aidez-moi" in water based ink, on seaside rocks at low tide, scrawling "Au Revoir" on blowing autumn leaves, writing the text of the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" of the Brothers Karamazov in chalk on railway ties.
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