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Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom.
I can be emailed at caterina at caterina dot net
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2002
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2001 cont'd
2000
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Where I will be:
Mar. 22-27, San Francisco
Apr. 12-14, Maastricht:
Design Recast
Apr. 19-21, Paris: Numer
June 6, Vancouver: Speaking for Canada Wide Lecture Series
Sept. 12-18, San Francisco: Readymade
Oct. 27, Vancouver: Reading at Vancouver International Writers Festival
November 14-16, Amsterdam: Doors Conference
December 18-28, San Francisco
May 2, 2003, New York, Gel
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Evil cackle. Happy Halloween! People are setting off firecrackers, and there is a lot of hooting going on. We are donning our masks and going to the party at Our Community Bikes.
Here is an excellent haunted house, painted glossy black. Wow!
LINK |
7:42 PM |
I hated Lorna Crozier's poetry even before I read it, if only because she is called Canada's Most Beloved Poet. Doesn't that sound hateworthy, Hallmarky? She's also called a 'nature poet', and I tend to like my poets urban. I was so eager to hate poor Lorna Crozier that I even went to the library and checked out her latest book, What the Living Won't Let Go, to confirm my loathing. And there were many lines that I could either love or hate (
water from a well, a songbird's feather
something that's been mended twice.
) depending on whether I was feeling indisposed or generous at the time. I kept reading, teetering on the fence, liking it, resisting being taken in. But then the poems got less twee, less mist and shimmer, more darkly carnal, bloody, raw and desperate. The book is in two parts, the first about Crozier's own family, and there is too much easy beauty there. But the second half is about another family, a shadow family, caught in struggle and misery, and then the book comes alive, and how:
Our spaniel in heat,
Dad locked her in the shed.
He wanted purebred pups. He'd pay
a stud fee and make 200 bucks
a litter. In the middle of the night
the neighbor's lab
crashed through the window.
Head bloody, he humped our bitch.
Dad couldn't pull him off
without a risk to her. Months later
he drowned the mongrels in the creek.
I'd have shattered glass,
sliced my arms and chest on razor wire.
For hours as a kid I hid beneath her window,
came with every movement
behind the blind, her or her sister,
hard to tell.
A good man, a family man,
I'm still tinder to her touch.
When I'm inside her, she's not there.
That doesn't stop me, though little
pleasure's in it. Like going back
to the house where you grew up
and no one's home but sadness.
Too much red-eye and I'm rough.
I need to taste what's underneath her skin.
Midday when she walks by my store
and I'm waiting on a customer,
my wife beside me, making change,
I have to dig my elbows in my ribs
to keep from crying out. She wears
my hands beneath her skirt.
Nothing I do resembles a life
if she's not in it. Some nights,
my family sound asleep in the house
that holds them brick by brick,
I walk to the river and the river takes me in.
Like an older brother it drags me under
but will not let me drown.
LINK | 1:43 PM |
caterina is positioning itself to achieve a world
caterina is the best of the intimate five
caterina is a leopard ranger for hunter unit #16
caterina is 15 years old and lives in maputo
caterina is a female domestic robot
caterina is exactly what i expected from the hercules x titaina cross
stewart butterfield is one fine catch
(Thank you, Judith)
LINK |
6:39 PM |
Eek insisted that I acquire:
- The new Beck album
- The new Flaming Lips album
- The new Doug Martsch album (of Built to Spill fame)
- Two Neko Case albums
There are all these new bands on Matador, which I always kinda thought of as "my" record label, along with Kill Rock Stars and Elephant Six and Drag City -- cool, Edith Frost has a blog!
LINK |
1:12 PM |
In the New York Times article Two Writers Under One Roof comes this from a certain Faye Kellerman (putting "a certain" in front of someone's name is such an easy way to be snide!):
"Cogitate" is an awkward, repulsive word! Ew! What's wrong with the humble, meaningful, and unobtrusive "think"? "Consider" will also do,"ponder" and "meditate" are good choices, as well as the fancier "ruminate". I'm all for dictionary squeezing and I think it's important to keep English rich with nuance, but I find that "cogitate" calls too much attention to its puffed-up Latinate self. "Cogitation"and "cogitating" are somehow not as bad. Stewart hates "cogitate" too but Garner has nothing to say about it. Are we alone in finding it ooky?
LINK |
6:02 PM |
by Wislawa Szymborska
My sister does not write poems
and it's unlikely she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who did not write poems,
and after her father, who also did not write poems.
Under my sister's roof I feel safe:
nothing would move my sister's husband to write poems.
And though it sounds like a poem by Adam Macedonski,
none of my relatives is engaged in the writing of poems.
In my sister's desk there are no old poems
nor any new ones in her handbag.
And when my sister invites me to dinner,
I know she has no intention of reading me poems.
She makes superb soups without half trying,
and her coffee does not spill on manuscripts.
In many families no one writes poems,
but when they do, it's seldom just one person.
Sometimes poetry flows in cascades of generations,
which sets up fearsome eddies in family relations.
My sister cultivates a decent spoken prose,
her entire literary output is on vacation postcards
that promise the same thing every year:
that when she returns,
she'll tell us, everything,
everything,
everything.
LINK | 5:02 PM |
The reading went well; we read to what appeared to be a full house (maybe not? the stagelights were blinding), everybody read well, the audience laughed in the right places, Martha whooped when I came onstage, the first time, she said, that she'd played the role of whooper.
The other full house in town is ours. Eric is here, as well as Ben and Geegaw and Cory, though the latter two are lucky enough to be staying in a hotel. Is it true that chihuahuas were used in Mexico to irritate the bulls in bull fights by snapping at their ankles and/or testicles? Dos Pesos seems to have taken issue with Cory's pants, snarling and lunging at his cuffs.
LINK |
4:59 PM |
Congratulations Shana and Readymade for being on All Things Considered on NPR today.
LINK |
6:23 PM |
Today, all day Charrette.
LINK |
10:27 AM |
Yoohoo! Vancouverites!
Come hear me and my Seven Sisters reading at the Vancouver International Writer's Festival this coming Sunday, at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island, 2:00-3:30 pm -- Daylight Savings Time (remember to turn your clock back!) Here is the Festival Info. I will be reading from the Caterina Classic short story Genius without a Penis. I think.
LINK |
8:36 PM |
Woohoo! Estee tells me Arts and Letters Daily is back again, having been saved from bankruptcy by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
LINK |
12:58 PM |
A fun factoid from Merriam Webster's Word of the Day:
Some people say only thin lines separate poetry, prophecy, and madness. We don't know if that's generally true, but it is in the case of "vatic." The adjective derives directly from the Latin word "vates," meaning "seer" or "prophet." But that Latin root is in turn distantly related to an Old English word for "poetry," an Old High German word for "madness," and an Old Irish word for "seer" or "poet."
LINK | 12:50 PM |
Just back from seeing a bunch of art with Lisa starting at the CAG where there was an excellent show by Stan Douglas called Journey into Fear...you have to stay a while, and read the written material accompanying the show to get the most out of it. There are many layers of meaning -- film and its characteristic tropes (foreshadowing, repetition); film techniques such as dubbing and sync sound; filmic expectation and its undermining; the evolution between WWII and the 70s from world commerce to globalization; corporate crime, etc. It's up until November 3.
The Roy Arden show at the Belkin Satellite is good too, especially Hole (2000), and Juggernaut (2001). I was going to say the thing in the back was good too, and it was, but those were the only three pieces in the show, so it would have made me seem uncritically celebratory of Roy Arden, wouldn't it?
I then went to the Vancouver Writer's Festival opening night thing, ate noshlets and talked Nino Ricci. Only one drink ticket? At a writer's event?!
LINK |
3:57 PM |
Our buddies Julie and Marianne have built a lovely website for the Woodward's Squat. For those of you outside Vancouver, Woodwards is an empty department store building which was slated for conversion into social housing. It's an enormous building, occupying an entire city block, and sits on the edge of one of Canada's most poverty-stricken neighborhoods, the Downtown East Side. Under BC premier Gordon Campbell, many social programs have been eliminated or their budgets slashed, including health care, human rights, education and housing programs. Dozens of people have been squatting in and around the Woodward's building since September, protesting Campbell's regime, periodically getting kicked out by the cops, and then returning several hours later. Julie and Marianne's site permits the squatters themselves to tell their stories.
LINK |
11:30 PM |
My friend Scott writes:
I don't use the word much myself. It seems a bit archaic. Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, my usual reference in these matters, has this to say about "whilst":
I suspect some pretentizoidal activity may be occurring in and around the MIT Media Lab.
LINK |
4:42 PM |
Sometimes Monday is a fresh notebook and new pencils and sometimes Monday is the start of a battle that's been looming since Friday night.
LINK |
12:35 PM |
Writing is very difficult.
LINK |
1:55 PM |
Snagged from somewhere I remember not. (Bhikku? Bellona Times?)
- (Alan Brunton – publicity material for 1980 New Zealand tour by Red Mole.)
LINK | 12:00 PM |
Last night I read an astonishingly good story by Aleksandar Hemon, Fatherland in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review, and so I took the book Judith gave me last year, The Question of Bruno, off the shelf, and put it aside. I plan to start reading it presently.
I asked Stewart if he'd heard good things about Emergence by Steven Johnson, and while he said he'd never heard anything bad about it, he probably wasn't going to read it. He paused for a moment and then admitted that he was just really annoyed that Steven Johnson had written it and not him.
LINK |
11:01 PM |
Today I got one of these fine Koh-i-noor Rapidograph pens -- the 0.13 model, the very finest nib -- which has made me very happy for most of the day. I can write in unbelievably tiny script! Its tininess is very pleasing.
I am also chuffed to bits over my illustration for The Readerville Journal. The writing of the interview isn't going so well today, but the weather is fine, so who's complaining? Time for a sunset walk!
LINK |
6:11 PM |
Stewart said that Alan Lightman, the author of Einstein's Dreams (and professor of Astrophysics and Creative Writing at MIT) was being interviewed on the radio, and he said that in today's speeded up, televised and wired world, a whole generation is growing up without an inner life, without a private world and conjecturing what a world full of such people might be like. I wish I'd heard it (It doesn't seem to be in the CBC archives.)
What Stewart's brief description of it made me think of was Julian Jaynes' crackpot/majestic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which Jaynes postulates that before consciousness the instructions between the brain halves were construed as direct communications from the gods -- this is a permanent condition he's talking about prior to what we consider "consciousness"... but I will have to pursue this line of thought later, I have to run...
LINK |
6:48 PM |
Too much to do: Znaimer interview, buff and polish piece for Writer's Festival, write up blurb for Festival, do illustration for The Readerville Journal, write book review, pick up lucite at shop, finish larger sculpture, take slides, and it's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend, and we're going to Victoria...
LINK |
10:29 AM |
Yesterday we saw Blue Skies at the Vancouver Film Festival, which is a short by Ann Marie Fleming, our friend and neighbor. It was beautiful! It's not often that you get a chance to see shorts; television should really be showing more of these. You can see the first shot, of a man crying, here.
LINK |
11:32 AM |
Why do those little tusks appear on ice cubes?
LINK |
11:26 PM |
Tomoko Takahashi's Auditorium Piece looks wonderful.
More about Takahashi:
- She is the person who made Word Perhct
- On Art & Culture
- CALM: Campaign against living miserably
- A Sea Dirge
- Parklight
- BBC Arts
- anticool
- The Drawing Room
- Hales Gallery at art-online.org
- Neurotic Realism
I also love Lucy Orta's work.
LINK |
4:07 PM |
Halloween comes early this year! Boo!
LINK |
2:32 PM |
I've probably been snoozing or playing too much Game Neverending, but I had no idea that Arts and Letters Daily went offline (I didn't even know they were a subsidiary of Lingua Franca, magazine for brainiacs. I actually started dating a guy because when I was first talking to him he started sentences like this, "I was reading an essay on Wallace Stevens in Lingua Franca last month...". I once got involved with a guy because he was sitting in the back of a bar earnestly reading The Nation, and, wow! for some reason every boyfriend of mine could recite the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (and here is an audio version):
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
This wasn't a criterion or anything, this is not something you find out right away about people, but if you spend enough time with somebody who knows the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, it's bound to get recited. I'd also be interested to see how long you'd have to hang around with me to be subjected to the gallimaufry of verse and oratory that I've committed to memory, deliberately or otherwise, including such gems as:
and
and
and
Two Three years or so, I'm guessing, which is how long this weblog has been around. It's not the kind of thing that you can slip into a conversation without anyone noticing, but nonetheless you HAVE to show it off, because why else would your fourth grade teacher and college professor force you to memorize it, and why would it be taking up space in your brain if not for later deployment? Or to get you dates! I once managed to throw down the first four lines of Pale Fire upon meeting this cute guy. Smitten! He was smitten. So I'm talking to you out of experience here, junior. Forget those breast implants/penis enlargements! You want action, go memorize poetry! (I have no idea how I got on the subject of penis enlargements; this was supposed to be a brief parenthetical digression which got out of hand.))
And so it happens that we are depressed that both Lingua Franca and the Arts and Letters Daily have gone under, because they were our own personal musk; with them goes the seduction strategies of eggheads everywhere. "Dear Lingua Franca, thank you for helping us get laid..." Snf.
LINK |
2:04 PM |
This picture of father and son chameleons also makes me quite happy!
LINK |
2:56 AM |
I've been making red paper in one window (you'll know what this means if you've been playing Game Neverending) while reading through all of John Thackara's essays in the "In The Bubble" section of the Doors of Perception web site in the other window. Excellent stuff is all over that site, (though they haven't quite gotten the frequency of weblog posting thing down yet), for example, go read the odd-fab essay New York Gangsters and the future of design education.
(Best GNE moment of the day: an IM from an individual who said GNE online dating works!) Now we need to work up a new business plan...
LINK |
2:31 AM |
A scarf-making frenzy is sweeping the Pacific Northwestern Asian and half-Asian female population.
LINK |
2:03 AM |
By way of Anita, I found this charming list of nonce words, words invented for a specific occasion, and not in general usage otherwise, defined here:
A word occurring, invented, or used just for a particular occasion; for example, the word mileconsuming in “the wagon beginning to fall into its slow and mileconsuming clatter” (William Faulkner).
Much like the phrase "Hipdy wee" employed below. I do this all the time. One time I complimented someone on this weblog for having "the tommiest links" and about five people wrote asking for the definition of "tommiest" (Like maybe referring to Tommy Boy Records?.) This tends to be confusing for non-native speakers of English. I spend a lot of time while in other countries explaining myself. "What is this you mean, 'my flight was glitchless'?"
LINK |
2:48 PM |
I got an email from a stranger this morning, and what a delight! She, Shannon Holman, said she'd found my web site , saw that I was looking for Pinckney Benedict's Dogs of God and offered to send it to me. "I am not a maniac," she closed. Who could resist?
But the best treat of all was going to the URL appended to the bottom of her email, and discovering these wonderful poems, these paintchip poems and her resume of irrelevant experience.
These are great poems. I'm tempted to print them all out and make a chapbook of them.
LINK |
2:06 PM |
When things on this page seem most lackluster and ho-hum, it usually means great things are in the offing!
Hipdy wee!
LINK |
5:08 AM |
I can't get to sleep! I keep having great ideas!
LINK |
7:06 AM |
And now Datsun has a brother, named Baudelaire.
LINK |
5:52 AM |
After all the toil and trouble, I couldn't be more pleased by my latest wall sculpture, given as a present to Stewart and named "Datsun".
LINK |
2:59 AM |
The past two days have been spent dealing with stupid inanities -- the printer not working for no good reason, going down to GNE and borrowing Craig's printer. Craig's printer not working. Spending hours finding patches for OSX software. Going to Staples and buying clear page holders and report covers. Bringing them home to discover the page holders are wider than the report covers. Going down to Staples again. Printer inexplicably only printing cyan, magenta and yellow, and no black. Tinkering with the printer for a few hours. Going down to studio to find the only copy of a document that needs to be enclosed with the rest of the documents. Not finding it. Printer running out of magenta...going to London Drugs for another ink cartridge.....
And so on.
The best way of dealing with this is just to adopt a peaceful nothing is wrong here attitude and accept that things are the way they are and you can only do what you can do. The worst way of dealing with it is to become infuriated at every little setback, swear at the machinery, kick the machinery, boil with frustration and anger and so on. Any dope can see that the results for these two approaches are essentially the same, but of course I went with the latter strategy.
LINK |
12:31 PM |