Some of my study notes for Criminal Law. The idea is to condense a case into one sentence, so that all the details will come rushing back when I read it. These seemed very concise and pretty funny at the time. Now they're neither. Mostly they're morbid.

Criminal law is depressing. The degree of abstraction it takes to study it makes it either more bearable or more depressing. Or both. There are endless inferences.

Accused drove car onto policeman’s foot, either deliberately or accidentally, then refused to move car off foot.

Accused were present at biker gang-bang.

Fervent pro-French activists circulated satirical pamphlet that was interpreted as anti-French propaganda.

Accused shot two ducks near a pile of grain on the road.

Business man accused of raping real estate agent claims honest belief in consent.

Two men acquitted of attempted robbery for knocking on door of closed restaurant while carrying a gun and wearing balaclavas.

Ludicrously drunk accused had no memory of sexual assault on wife’s handicapped hairdresser.

Seeking safety from storm and repairs, ship full of marijuana moored and off-loaded cargo on Canadian shore.

Yugoslavian woman imported narcotics into Canada with false passport, under duress from mob-type character in Belgrade who threatened to kill her mother.

Shot friend of daughter’s druggie boyfriend when he lunged at her.

DJ threatened sound system repair guy, who pushed back, then DJ stabbed him.

Somewhere in Will Self’s Feeding Frenzy, a collection of essays and ludicrously funny restaurant reviews, he writes that nothing is lost in the economy of ideas. Or something to that effect. Sounds aphoristic, or like it comes from some classic source. Google won’t tell me anything. Anybody know?

Either way, I think it's a good philosophy. Whatever you read, watch, contemplate is useful in the end, or not useful, because what is utility in the world of ideas? Valuable, maybe. Is it similar to Steve McCaffrey's general economy of the text? Libidinal excess recuperated? I don't know, I don't think I ever really understood the general economy. Good thing I spent a chapter on it in my thesis.

I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not very good at it. I have five exams worth 100% of the course mark starting in less than a week. I’m thrilled that the procrastination that usually leads to excessive housecleaning is instead leading me to literature. Here I am, writing poem-ish things, blogging, and reading all manner of poetry, fiction, essays. Exactly the kind of life I’ve always wanted. I wish this could last forever. But no. Exams will begin, they’ll be agonizing, and then I’ll be left with nothing to do and doing nothing.

Futile as it may be to scold myself for not reading enough – for every book I have read, there are endless equally pressing books that I haven’t – I’m still very disappointed at how much I’ve overlooked Creeley. And it’s no excuse to say that I went to the library this week and tried to catch up. Luckily for me, I discovered his fascinating Day Book of a Virtual Poet, which collects emails he sent to an online writing program listserv between 1996 and 1998. The book captures the tension between the ephemeral nature of online communications and the much more solid thingness of publication. Or is it the other way around? I’ve read that data on computers is almost impossible to erase completely, while books are relatively easily lost or destroyed. If nothing else, the book shows how much avenues have opened for presenting and talking about poetry in electronic contexts. The tone of the emails suggests that at the time the listserv dedicated to poetry was a new and exciting concept; now it’s hard to imagine being involved in poetry without email, listservs, websites, online mags, blogs and on and on.

My favourite quote so far (only coincidentally the back-cover quote):
Possibly the most apt advice I ever heard from an elder poet to a younger person aspiring to be one was the very genuine advice, “If it isn’t something you have to do, don’t do it.” All the tendentious proposals as to “why write,” in Pound’s useful phrase, finally fade to the one point W.C. Williams made by saying, “Why don’t we just tell them it’s fun” Not just the authority of endless revisions, not just the lists of publications or prizes won, not just the company of poets of public record—just fun. Fun. Fun.

Damn, I must be doing it wrong.

Another wonderful Creeley book I found is His Idea, published by Coach House in 1973. I don’t have it here to quote from, but the poetry is just lovely. Equally lovely are the black and white photographs that illustrate every poem, and the chapbook design. It’s not very many pages, saddle-stitched, but with a cardstock jacket glued on the hide the staples. I love it when book design, illustration and writing converge into a perfect package.

Sometimes judges go on absurd flights of rhetoric. Witness:

“This is the last of the dispensing power.” Maitland could never have thought that in the year 1968, nearly three centuries after the Bill of Rights, a certain departmental official of Manitoba, acting in fact or in law under the authority of his Minister, would purport to grant a dispensation in favour of a certain group, exempting them from obedience to a particular law to which all others remain subject. That sorry episode must now be recounted.

Wow. All that blustering leads up to a decision that Aboriginal people cannot be exempt from a law that regulates hunting of migratory birds. Not only is the decision culturally insensitive and politically obtuse, the style of writing is completely anachronistic. If you were charged with deciding whether the executive branch of the provincial government can legally grant exemptions from federal statutes to a particular group, would you go on like that? The judgment affects real people, with real concerns, in Manitoba, in 1977. Why not state it plainly?

Objective or subjective intention is a very important distinction in the law. No one can be found guilty of a crime without subjectively intending to perform a criminal act. Private law, however, is concerned generally with objective intention. What the parties to a contract actually intended is less important than what it is reasonable that they would have intended. This is because, after the fact, people obviously lie (or they don’t lie, but they remember things wrong, or they delude themselves, etc.), so what they say they intended is never reliable. Also, it doesn’t really matter what they wanted to get out of the contract when they entered into the contract or how they wanted things to turn out. All that matters is what caused the dispute. The courts have to decide between two (or more) competing interests: this one wants one thing, this one wants the other. Those who judge construe reasonable intentions based on the material evidence and the circumstances. [What is “reasonable” and by whose standards is another problem, the essential problem with the whole thing, I think.]

But anyway, what about authorial intention? Should we readers look for subjective or objective intention? I don’t see how it could be anything but the latter. All we have is the text. Whatever the writer intended when they were writing the text is beyond us. We can look at circumstances, we can look for biographical details, we can scour author’s letters and notes for clues and meanings, but these all lead us to our constructions, not to any kind of truth. And we should never rely on what authors say after the fact, because, obviously, authors lie.

Writing may be a communal activity, in the sense that it connects people to one another and allows us access to one another’s perceptions and habits of language. But. All we ever have is the text, the material fact of the words in their order and form. How we understand the text is coloured of course by the circumstances of its writing and our reading, but the bare text can bear any number of reasonable (or unreasonable) interpretations. Writing is ultimately open. Reading determines.

Not that I think any of this is any kind of insight. It’s just interesting to reframe what I already know into new terms. Would it be trite to say that if reading is a hearing, writers are complainants?