All that I remember from my dream last night is that I sat down before a large committee to hear their final decision, achieved after much deliberation, and during which I was in a state of hangnail-picking anxiety. The truth moment had come.

Dreamwise, this was all very Kafka, very regular.

But there it went crooked because when they handed down their judgment it was that I needed to read more Emily Dickinson.
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Against the Sartrean/Horatio Alger rantlet below, I give you this, from the annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard, read yesterday during my continuing explorations of The American Violent:

Deep assignments. I love that.
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Filipino Creation Myth, posted here for future reference.
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I suppose you get stuck with your eye color and height and the socioeconomic status you live in during your formative years. You get stuck with your parents and your siblings and your school and the town you grow up in. But it's easy to change most of those things, and some things change whether you ask them to or not. Think colored contact lenses and high-heeled shoes. Think father figures and surrogate mothers and hitting the road. Think about the town that you grew up in and how none of the stores where you bought bubble gum or got your hair cut exist any more.

But for the particular contingencies of my identity, I could be a punk or a metalhead or a nurse or car mechanic or a diva or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I could still be all these things, but who needs an identity anyway? There's a closing off of relationships that comes with "being someone" and being "who you are" -- there is no "finding out who you are" there is only "deciding who you are". Once you are someone, you will be identified as an outsider to many groups you may want to infiltrate, your particular job skills in food service or punk rock may actually be a liability in your role as CEO, CEOs may be identified as such when they're travelling incognito at Rancid shows. It's amazing that anyone ever picks one thing to "be" anyway, that people choose identities, that they are anyone at all.
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I was trolling through the Salon archives, looking for pages I'd designed, and I came upon this illustration, which was one I liked quite a lot, and this one.
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One of my favorite things to do on the web when the web was relatively new was to search for online syllabi. You could get yourself a whole university education for free, it seemed, if you could just find the right syllabi, find the books/articles, and read them all.

Tonight I found this Anthro course, which looks great:

The professor lists each book and article that is going to be covered in each class. It's one of the most thorough, well thought out syllabi I've found. And there's some great reading there.
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Stewart took a lot of pictures at Illuminares last night. My favorite lantern was the lotus flower one.

We just finished our Seven Sisters meeting here at our house. We're going to be reading at the Writer's Festival in the fall. Rachel and I are the newbies. Here's one of her poems, What we heard about the Japanese.
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It's amazing the news that you find when you dig around the internet -- or foray into any non-major news source. I have been researching contemporary witchcrazes, also known as femicide -- when large numbers of women are hunted, raped and killed. I've also been looking for instances in which groups of men representing the "church" the "state" or the "law" have handed down judgements or instituted laws which display brutality toward or hatred of women (like the Pakistani rape by tribal decree stories I linked to a couple weeks ago) or have otherwise treated women's causes with neglect or denial. Today found this mind-boggling story:

268 women have been found murdered and another 450 have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border town since 1993, many raped and mutilated. That I have not heard about this until now is astonishing to me. Here are some more links.
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Tonight is Illuminares, the Vancouver Lantern Festival. Ben and Stewart and Corey (up from Los Angeles) are making lanterns now, while I am writing here at home. It is very hard to decide sometimes when I am getting some really good writing done if I should go along to other projects and parties. There is also a birthday party tonight, and while I'm not feeling very social and am feeling very productive -- am in the right space as it were, for writing -- I should go.

It could be argued that I already spend too much time alone -- every day this week I've been working at my studio for around 5 hours a day, and have been reading perhaps more than is good for me. I have been spending all this time in my head, and sometimes one gets sick of oneself. I haven't gotten sick of me yet, and this kind of inward-looking is often quite good for creative productions of all varieties. I am also having a plethora of ideas, and this is always a good thing, scads of notes in the notebooks and lots of raw material. And last weekend was a tremendously social weekend... Introvert Caterina and Extrovert Caterina have been battling this way as long as I can remember. Swing on swingset alone and think quietly? or Play kickball with other kids, make jokes and scream when teammates make runs?
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After we laughed at the adjacent signs "Vietnamese Restaurant" in Helvetica, and "Food Store" in a Cooper Black squashed to within an inch of its life, Stewart found BEHIND THE TYPEFACE: Cooper Black.
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Making books is a bit like making sausage. If you knew how it was done...
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I still haven't unsubscribed from all the San Francisco lists I'm on. *snf*. I miss San Francisco.
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Go scribble on Eric's Scribble Thing.
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CONVERSATION ON A CHAIR LIFT

They are standing in the lift line. Thomas is exhilarated from a perfect day of sun and snow, but a bit tired.

Thomas: Single?
Woman in Blue Parka: Single.

They board the lift.

WIBP: How old are you?
Thomas: 32
WIBP: Kids?
Thomas: No, I'm not married.
WIBP: You're lucky you don't have kids. I've got five: two are his, two are mine and one is ours.

It sounds to Thomas as if she's said this line many times before.

WIBP: But we lost one.
Thomas: Lost?
WIBP: He was fourteen, and he was visiting his mother in Colorado. Riding a mountain bike. He hit a big white Ford Explorer, one of those SUV's, you know, with the big wheels and a roof rack and a cattle pusher, you know, one of those things.
Thomas: How terrible.
WIBP: Yeah, it was a really big truck.
Thomas:That must have been awful for your family.
WIBP: Oh no! we're doing just fine.
Thomas: How are the kids?
WIBP: They're OK, except for the youngest one. She's the only one who is related by blood to the whole family. She's having a hard time.

They prepare to get off the lift.

WIBP: There she is. She's ten.

Thomas sees a tiny, fragile child who looks like she's six -- tiny, and responsible for the whole family, the only one grieving for the boy who had died...
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Estee sends me the link to a fibromyalgia diary, which records six months of terrible pain, then stops. Funny experience reading it. Pain like a river, endlessly flowing.
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At the Vancouver Folk Festival Friday night, the last two acts were the vestigially folk Bitch and Animal and Horace X. Boy did we dance. Then off to hear a Latin band playing on Commercial -- a benefit to fund Danny's friend's wedding. More dancing. More fun. Today, brunch. Food. Conversation. Sunshine. More fun.

Then, more fun.
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The best "about" page ever is Juliet's funny fictional/factual bio in form of resume:

If it weren't for love songs, I don't think anyone would fall in love.

After writing this, it occurs to me that there is an excellent bit about this idea in the intro to Air Guitar by Dave Hickey. Here's the passage in its entirety. We find Hickey sitting in a plaza in Mexico with his vaguely criminal friend Brownie:

Stewart found a Borgesian list of animals on the street, exactly like this:

4. I swim ___ the beach.
5. An animal that flies
8. The king of animals.
9. An animal with black
11. A long animal with m
12. They ___ reading com
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There is this old fellow who lives in the building diagonal from this one who spends almost all of the day sitting on the wall in front of his apartment building trying to strike up conversations with anyone who passes by. He talks to me all the time when I'm out walking Dos Pesos, and even threw a plastic bag down through his window when he saw that Dos had pooped and I was without a piece of paper. He's a bit peculiar. Abrasive. Loud.

There is this other old fellow with a cherubic sunburned face who walks around with one of those little wheeled grocery carts, fossicking through the dumpsters. He smells awful, of urine and decay. He doesn't have a home, I suspect; I occasionally see him passed out on a bench clutching a bottle of fortified wine in a paper bag. Both of these guys seem really lonely, but some time in the past week these two have become friends, spending hours and hours with each other. They've been sitting and talking morning, noon and night, whenever I've gone out to walk the dog. If there were any two people doomed to friendlessness it was these guys, and they have found each other.
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From Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet:

One surefire way to scare the bejeezus out of yourself is to watch Mulholland Drive, try to sleep, fail to sleep, get up and continue reading Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives about solitary men who have rejected all human contact save congress with dead and mutilated bodies, reading with the windows wide open with occasional breezes rattling papers and windowpanes at odd intervals and suddenly, at, 4 am, hearing a shuffling tread outside in the street below the window, and... is that a face peering up in the darkness...? Is that a moan, or the wind? And not sleeping until the sky blues.

Next I think I'll read some...David Sedaris.
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Horrifying.

The air is clogged with water, but won't let it go. There are no breezes, only the turgid hanging, heavy, of air. The sky is fouled, but it won't come. Rain, rain!
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Arriving in the mail yesterday:

• Witchcraze: our legacy of violence against women by Anne Llewellyn Barstow
• City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London by Judith R. Walkowitz
• Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives by Robert K. Ressler
• Kilvert's Diary 1870-1879 Ed. by William Plomer.

One of these things is not like the others.

Read Lightning On The Sun by Robert Bingham last night. It was a well-plotted novel, but I was undelighted with it. Definitely not Graham Greene, to which it had been compared in the jacket copy.
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The talk went well, but I don't think I'm going to write out my whole presentation again. I haven't done that since...since fifth grade book reports, and it's really stultifying. If you think of a joke, you can't tell it because the sentences have all been concatenated in a certain way, and to throw in a joke screws up your sequence, you get lost and can't find your place again.

MeanwhileStewart is wandering around the house singing Special hero treasure precious angel doggity do! at Dos Pesos.

I'm tired and going to bed. 10:30 pm!!!
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Hi audience!!!!!
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I've been reading about DIY culture. Here are some good links.

BYOFL
Mister Ridiculous
DIY Revolution
DIY Trade
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Holy canoli, it's hot!
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The Compassion Project is looking for submissions -- the deadline is Friday! -- of your best photography:

Happy Birthday, me! I was woken up with tea poured from a chubby gourd teapot I'd often admired on Granville Island, and a book about Breugel (whose work suddenly seemed Andreas Gurskyish to me, what with its simultaneous vastness and minuteness ) and another book about Tom Friedman, whose show I saw with Sasha and Tim in San Francisco a couple years ago. (If you're not familiar with the artist who gave us Self Portrait Carved in Aspirin and Everything, by all means look around.) Happy day!
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From the Caterina.net Waste Management Department:One third of all municipal solid waste -- more than 200 million tons a year -- is from packaging. That's the waste of us, the consumers.

Noticed in The Wrecking Yard by Pinckney Benedict and Cruddy by Lynda Barry: "sticker bushes". We used to call these "pricker bushes" back in Pittsburgh, when I was little. Regionalism?
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We got Nathaniel into the Adventure Zone thing on Granville Island, four levels of heavily padded indoor jungle gym. Corey and I watched him bounce around, shreik with joy and get pummelled by some aggressive little orange-shirted bastard that had been set loose in there. Orange Clad Lad actually threw his head back and did the classic villain laugh, Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha. Terrifying! Kids are usually these sweet bouncy things full of laughter and curiosity, so when they turn into feral beasts as they occasionally do, it's a big surprise, like meeting the devil at the supermarket buying breakfast cereal.
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From yesterday's email, an announcement:

Vancouver Design Lecture Not to be Missed

Downtime. Alas, the AirPort is busted. And the D-Link is busted too. And so there is no internet access for me. Until such time as I get a long enough ethernet cable to reach from Judith's room to the kitchen, or get a new AirPort, or move my entire computer setup complete with 22" Sony Triniton screen to the kitchen and put it on the floor there.

So, if you were waiting for me to respond to an email, or comment, or any other kind of internet communication, please be patient.
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Happy sound of cheap drinking glasses breaking on the floor, tinkle tinkle, sound like the sound of a little kid, surprised.
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Happy Belated Canada Day Everyone!

On the way back from Granville Island (after sitting in the sun on The Mound watching Celso Machado perform again) we saw a dog that looked just like Dos Pesos. Turned out it was Dos Pesos' sister, now named Harley (we called her Tres Pesos when we saw her and *almost* got her instead of Dos), and she didn't seem to like Dos Pesos at all -- she growled at him -- but she looked a lot like him, though with longer hair and a more patchy coat, and her facial expressions and mannerisms were exactly the same. Funny, that. She lives in Kits.
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More repulsive hostility to the environment on the part of the repulsive Bush Administration. Will it ever end?
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In a book I'm reading Women Overseas: Memoirs of the Canadian Red Cross Corps there was a mention of a book containing the names of all the civilians killed during the London Blitz, which is housed in a glass case in Westminster Abbey, a page of which is turned every day. A lovely job, the page-turning job.

I pictured the page-turner three ways: first, as a sleepy old Anglican guy, with one of those big English noses and a bit of post-nasal drip, trudging about the cathedral at 5 am, coming upon the glass case, realizing he's forgotten his key, and trudging away without turning the page, muttering No one will notice, No one will notice to himself.

I pictured an overeager devilish-looking organist/bell-ringer/candle-snuffing all-purpose church guy lurching about Westminster Abbey in a manner suggesting impending disaster, squealing Must turn the page, must turn the page

I pictured Mr. Rogers, opening the door to the cathedral, going to the closet, hanging up his coat, putting on his cardigan sweater, turning the page, singing Would you be mine, could you be mine, won't you be my neighbor? all the while facing me, the audience. All I can remember now from The Mr. Rogers Show was that boring repetitive behavior, I hated the coat-hanging, sweater-putting-on ritual, it put my teeth on edge, swindled me out of precious sandbox time, delayed Zoom, my favorite program. The only other thing I remember about Mr. Rogers is my father conjecturing that Mr. Rogers was queer as a two-bob watch (The other expression from his generation was camp as a row of tents).

Where were we. Oh, lovely book, names of the dead, pages turned, yes yes.
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caterina: when i was a kid i used to like to eat elmer's glue.
caterina: i wonder what's in it.