Sometimes I wish judges wouldn't try so hard.

The friendly face of Caillou, with his round cheeks and expression of wide-eyed surprise, has delighted countless young children and won over their parents and grandparents. Today, this charming little character, a creation that sprang from the imagination and from the art of form and colour, is moving out of the world where he welcomes his new baby sister, or gets ready for kindergarten.

Unintentionally, no doubt, he is now making a contribution to the development of commercial arbitration law in the field of intellectual property. What has happened is that the people who consider themselves to be his mothers are engaged in battle for him. The respondent claims exclusive maternity. The appellants believe it was a joint effort. The manner in which their dispute is to be resolved has itself become the subject of a major disagreement, and this is what is now before this Court.
Desputeaux v. Editions Chouette (1987) Inc., Supreme Court of Canada

Dear Self: When you have to choose an article to summarize and present to your seminar class, don’t choose the one with “ontology” in the title just because it’s “weird” and “academic” and reinforces the vague image you have of yourself as intellectual and radical in some undefined but oh-so-slightly kinky way. You do not understand what ontology is. No matter how many times you google “ontology definition” and repeat to yourself “ah yes, being in the world, yes, being, of course” you cannot speak intelligently about ontology as it relates to conceptions of property. You have not read any of the philosophers the article references. In fact you can’t even read the article without becoming infuriated by its stylistic vagaries and imprecisions; perhaps you thought you were reading literary theory? You’re not. That’s how philosophers write. I hope you remember this next time you have to summarize an article, or you’ll end up at 2:00 in the morning cobbling together mangled bits of syntax oversaturated with abstract nouns that you don’t even understand, squinting through your tears and headache and wondering how the fuck you’re going to pull this presentation off… and it would be kind of pathetic to do that twice.

My reading for school hasn't turned up anything ridiculous or absurd lately. I can think of two explanations: either all my course material is thought-prokoving, stimulating and relevant; or I've been brainwashed into absorbing the law without contempt.

I think it's the former. Here's a neat quote from Copyright.

It is wise in any state to encourage letters, and the painful researches of learned men.
Millar v. Taylor, 1769

Introverts of the world, Unite!

Oh hell yeah!

I would totally start a revolution, but I don't want to have to like, talk to anybody about it, you know?

Maybe I'll write a paper about whether introversion is an analogous ground of discrimination under the s.15 Charter guarantee of equality. Although I probably won't. But I have definitely felt oppressed whenever I look at job listings that all require "an outgoing personality." As though talking a lot about nothing makes you a good employee. What-ever.

February has been a bust. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing about here. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing anywhere, nevermind reading. I've watched bad TV. My life has become a loop of coughing and making tea. I've had a cold so bad I quit drinking coffee. I expect these sentences to lay something bare that they don't. I wanted to read something funny, so I got two British novels from the library and I read them through one after the other and they weren't funny at all. Things aren't what they're supposed to be.

It raises an important question relating to the conduct of trials and, because of its importance, what I am about to say may undergo some substantial editing when I see what I have said, but my decision will not be different.
McEachern CJBC, Rahmatian v. HFH Video Biz Inc. BC 1991

Rain brings its own problems. Scratched windows and bent wipers make driving a blur. The road is always doubled, wet above and wet reflection below. Streetlights and tail-lights smear. Sudden dark figures menacing their vulnerability. I drive on faith. I drive with a hunch back and squinted eyes, looking for an angle of sure vision, past the high whine wiper blades. It’s always dark and it’s always wet. I’m always in leather shoes and a wool coat, everything is always being ruined, I always wear long jeans, they’re always soaked. I don’t understand why I can’t dress for the weather. I just can’t believe in inevitability.

I almost went mad this summer in Vancouver because it was sunny for two months straight. Every day I would wake up to the sun and every day I would drive to work in the bright, bright hot sun and every day I would rage at the traffic and the heat and the glare.

Calgary is much colder when it’s cold and much hotter when it’s hot and much windier and horrible in so many ways, but at least it’s unpredictable. In Calgary a hot summer is a two-week stretch, then a snowstorm. A bad winter is ten days of snow then five days of spring. I’m beginning to understand how much I’ve internalized these cycles of change. I need days that start off warm enough for t-shirts and end at 20 below. I need to see the change in the sky and smell it on the air and feel the pressure of the weather in my head.

Here the sky and the ocean are the same, we’re sandwiched, we’re sponged, the city is a lung, we’re all just breathing.

I’m appalled at how much I think about the weather.

Try to belie the imagination. Try to imagine a wrinkle, a bruise, a point of convergence.

Eliminate all memory. Proliferate scathing.
Engender sound.

Sound as though touched. Rake nerve for encumbrance. Rail against and in favour and inconsistent strain.

Last, at long last, as the long last light fades, a curtain raised, a half-mast circumstance.

Indeed the abstract flails and whimpers. Indeed the words are pocked.

To get at turn away. To touch here and touch there so slowly a vein awakes. In the long light somber and the glare light brutal, in the hazing day, tactile nuance forms a soft fog.

A soft fog is a fidgety slip into the limber touch, the tongue lisping through the typing.
Here the silence sounds blinking a grasp in tumult, slowly lapping so lapse.

Birthday songs

Changes -- David Bowie
Birthday -- The Sugarcubes
Hold on Hope -- Guided by Voices
This Night Has Opened My Eyes -- The Smiths
Cosmic Dancer -- T. Rex
Milkshake N' Honey -- Sleater Kinney

and, of course,

Fairytale of New York -- The Pogues

A type of fly injects its eggs into a particular species of ant, and the eggs become maggots that burrow through the ant's flesh to its head and through eating tissue hollow out the head. The ant, meanwhile, lives. An ant carries on with a hollowed-out head. Innovation in art is a delicate refusal.

The English language is mine, and not mine. The English language is the shifting ground, the complex mess and soup and great wave over and around. The English language exists solely for my pleasure and my pleasure rests in its complexity. My pleasure grounds the English idioms. My pleasure starts with sound. My pleasure is all of a tongue. And words curling up my throat a growling purring hum. The English words work up through my body. And I take pleasure in resolve as well. A sharp snap in the sentence. A tight turn. Small details, small particular lettered sound. Pattern. Rhyme and rhythm and repeated phrases. Parcels.

The English language languid and honing. The more it bites the more it swallows the more it spits and curves. The English language is nothing if not expanding. Sopping up. All explicit and pinned. The English language has a scientific turn of mind, it pins all specimens right to the quiver, right in the heart. The English language takes aim. The English language is never fraudulent, the English language is always becoming, the English language is always at home. The English language flaunts its history. The English language is an arrogant slag.

check it out check it out check it out

West Coast Line kindly published some of my CHUMP poems in their brand new issue #46. It's not up on the website yet, so you'll have to go find it and look at it because the cover art is A-mazing!

Thanks, West Coast Line!

Here’s a new way to avoid studying. I’ve been updating my curriculum vitae and also my acknowledgments. Back when I was psyched about publishing my as yet unpublishable manuscript, I wrote an acknowledgments page, which was obviously a bit premature, but seemed like an important part of the process. Sucks that it’s not a matter of public record, but hey! I have a blog; anything can be public. So, if you were to read to the end of a book of Natalie Simpson poems, here’s what you would find:

I am indebted to the editors of the magazines that have published versions of some of these poems: West Coast Line, Queen Street Quarterly, dANDelion, filling Station, endnote, phu on line, (orange), in grave ink, sudden magazine; to derek beaulieu’s housepress, ryan fitzpatrick’s MODL press, rob mclennan’s above/ground press, and to No Press for publishing some of these poems as chapbooks; to Jon Paul Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch for publishing “Sentencing” in their Post Prairie anthology and to derek beaulieu, Jason Christie and Angela Rawlings for publishing several poems in their anthology Shift & Switch. I am also grateful to the many event organizers who have allowed me to read to enthusiastic audiences and with distinguished colleagues: the Markin-Flanagan Program, the Alley Alley Home Free Fred Wah symposium organizers, the Bodies and Texts Symposium committee, the 2001 Free Exchange commitee, Jason Christie’s YARD series, past and current editorial collectives of filling Station and dANDelion magazines, the Word on the Street, the Spoken Word Festival, and of course and always the phu collective.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge readings as well as publishings, because getting to do readings is kind of the point of being published. Also, publication can be a somewhat hollow accomplishment, but giving a good reading and seeing how the audience reacts to your work is the best thing in the world. I love that moment of connection, when you feel that you control the energy in the room through nothing more than your voice and your words; it’s a tremendous sense of power and of vulnerability.

Acknowledgments are actually pretty hard to write. I think the best acknowledgments page I’ve read was in Julia Williams’ The Sink House. She strikes the perfect balance between sincerity and dignity; it’s very sweet without gushing. Mine are accurate but somehow incomplete. I should add a thank to you to everyone in the Calgary writing community generally, and maybe more specific thank yous. Hmm, I’ll have to spend more time on this. Screw my civil litigation exam.

Discussing some minutiae involving the difference between a trust and a power:

A layman and, I suspect, also a logician would find it hard to understand what difference there is.
In Re Baden’s Deed Trusts, England, 1972

So that leaves a lawyer to understand the difference? Here’s the secret they don’t want you to know: law does not follow logic. Law does not follow common sense. Law employs its own method of reasoning to protect the status quo.

I guess that explains why I can get an incredibly high score on the LSAT (which measures logical and analytical ability and reading comprehension) but only average grades in law school. Either that or I procrastinate too much then do half-assed work. What’s the logical explanation? What’s the reasonable explanation?

I’m so glad someone found my blog through a search on Barthes and the sentence. Those are two of my favourite things. Sometimes I almost forget that I have a Master’s degree in English, because I rarely mention it, but I do, and my thesis was on the sentence as a unit of poetry in Gertrude Stein’s writing. I talked about Saussure, Jacobson, Barthes, Silliman, and a whole bunch of other linguists, theorists and poets. I still love thinking about sentences. Just the word is exciting. Not all my poetry is about sentences, but all my poetry is sentences. I know a lot of poets get down into words and their randomness or down into letters or even further down in specks and grunts, but I can’t get away from the sentence. I don’t think Barthes has the last word on sentences, but he does have a few things to say, mainly about the authority of the sentence. I think if the sentence is the system, I’d rather mess around inside it than turn away from it.

All of which is why I was so happy to get to write an essay about Saussure, Jacobson and Barthes for my philosophy of law class. I didn’t talk about sentences at all, only more abstractly about language, texts, thought, and law, but still it felt like a return to concerns I’d somewhat abandoned because of what? I don’t know. A sense of failure? Absurdity? Shame?

Least sexy allusion to sex ever:

... these decisions have sometimes turned upon narrow differences in wording, which seem to be the progeny by miscegenation of early technical rules relating to the form of the execution of deeds...

Also, wtf does it mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

Holy crap I'm in a bad mood. My email hasn't worked for the past couple of days, which really shouldn't be such a problem, but it makes me feel like I'm missing a limb. I have my first exam tomorrow, and while that should adrenalinalize me to study like crazy, instead it just bores me. I keep falling asleep.

Corporation is a fascinating concept: the bringing forth out of thin air an incorporeal person that acts only through its agents. Corporations enjoy the same legal personality as natural persons. In most modern jurisdictions, incorporation is granted by statute, but it used to be granted by Royal Charter. The oldest corporation in the world is, of course, The Bay, which was formed in 1670 by these words:

Now know yee that Wee being desirous to promote all Endeavours tending to the publique good of our people and to encourage the said undertaking have of our especiall grace certaine knowledge and meere mocion Given granted ratifyed and confirmed And by these Presentes for us our heires and Successors Doe give grant ratifie and confirme unto our said Cousin Prince Rupert Christopher Duke of Albemarle William Earle of Craven Henry Lord Arlington Anthony Lord Ashley Sir John Robinson Sir Robert Vyner Sir Peter Colleton Sir Edward Hungerford Sir Paul Neile Sir John Griffith and Sir Phillipp Carterett James Hayes John Kirke Francis Millington William Prettyman John Fenn and John Portman That they and such others as shall bee admitted into the said Society as is hereafter expressed shall bee one Body Corporate and Politique in deed and in name by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay and them by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay one Body Corporate and Politique in deede and in name really and fully for ever for us our heirs and successors doe make ordeyne constitute establish confirme and declare by these Presentes and that by the same name of Governor & Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay they shall have perpetuall succession etc. etc. (it actually goes on for twelve pages).

In return, all King Charles the Second asked for was the

Yeilding and paying yearley to us our heirs and Successors for the same two Elkes and two Black beavers whensoever and as often as Wee our heirs and successors shall happen to enter into the said Countryes Territoryes and Regions hereby granted

Not a bad deal. I think it’s sad that the Bay changed its name on the federal corporate registry from The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay AKA Hudson’s Bay in French Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson to Hudson’s Bay Company in December 2004.

Of course, none of this is on my Corporations exam, but if it were wouldn’t that make it a much more interesting course?

Crazy fog, bright sunny days, now snow – Vancouver is trying to turn itself into Calgary for me!

This has been such a horrible essay-writing month. First I had to do an essay on a topic that seemed so important I was too anxious to start working on it until the last minute. Now I’m trying to write an essay on a topic that's so dull I can’t stand it to think about it, even though it’s well past last minute.