Yesterday morning I woke up and thought, Fuck it, I'm going to read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. And finish it this time. But my resolve flagged quickly, and I ended up reading only the introduction, the first chapter and the conclusion. Oh well, I'm sure I got the gist. Anyway, I found this paragraph disturbing:

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

Gah! Ack! OK, I get what he's saying, and it is kind of disturbing to think about how specialized knowledge has become, so that no-one outside of a given field can really understand what the experts in that field are doing. But have philosphers really ever done anything other than analyze language? As in how you know that you know what you know?

I don't know. I guess it's important to learn as much as possible about how the universe works, but beyond a certain point it becomes too abstract and I can't imagine why it matters. As long as the earth keeps spinning, and gravity keeps on... keeping..on, then we can keep studying language, which is infinitely more interesting, and not a comedown at all. So there. Wait, am I still hungover?

There's a really good quote in a Paul Auster book I read recently but can't find now about how making art means always failing. I googled for it and found this quote instead, which doesn't say quite the same thing but I still like it:

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
-- Jasper Johns

It's interesting to think about art and failure and perfectionism. If the process of creating art is striving for an impossible ideal, constantly falling short, and thereby constantly failing, but creating the byproduct art, and if perfectionism is a paralyzing and somewhat delusional fear and abhorrence of failure, then wouldn't perfectionists who try to be an artists drive themselves slowly insane?

I think I'd be a better writer if I could just resign myself to failure, and then (because life is ironic like that) I wouldn't fail.

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
-- Gertrude Stein

Weird... apparently Alice B. Toklas was 4'11" and Gertrude Stein was 5'1". You'd think a woman who called herself Caesar would be taller than that. Then again, I can't imagine those Roman emperors were very tall either.

For your amusement, recent excerpts from my writing journal (not writing writing, just things I write in response to what I'm writing, or to motivate writing, or to avoid writing, oh god sometimes I hate writing):

I worry a lot about the naturalism of phrasing, the likelihood of flow. I’ve given up trying to flow, it never flows. Everything is a fake. Smoke and mirror show. All writing is fallacy.

The torture of theme is overtaking whatever momentum I might have had. It makes me sad. I really don’t want to give up this idea, I really want to explore it, but how? How do writers explore ideas? And if I can’t figure it out, does that make me not-a-writer?

I think the problem might be images – I’m trying to write from images when that’s not what I do; I write from sound.

Write from sound, write from sound, fuck theme, fuck image, write from sound write from sound.

The drudge continues. Steely resolution, but is that what writing requires? Sensitive adjustments also. I don’t know why or how or how well, I just know I want to.

I don’t know. I just don’t know what to write anymore, what to think about, how to approach anything. I’m starting to think starting blank works just as well.

Ahhhhhhhh! time. Of course there’s nothing worse than writing against time. Guaranteed to make the writing fall flat. Or start flat. Crawl flat along the ground. The page. Gah.

My computer thinks it’s yesterday. Damn know-it-all laptops. OK, getting all excited about the work, about design, about chapbooks etc. But, much much left to write still. Counting chickens, eggs, thing, whatevahs.

You can’t go home again. You cannot rest on your laurels, and you can’t repeat success. Try to know this.

Hmmm. Just noticing a Mullenesque quality to the phrasing. Hope it’s not derivativivive.

All the nostalgia and goodwill I've accumulated for Calgary over the past almost-two-years imploded into itty-bitty bits of bitterness when I was wrenched awake at 7:19 this morning by the blare of Alan Jackson and his ilk. Not to be pedantic, but when was Calgary ever a centre for ranching, or rodeo? It was a mountie fort and a railway stop, then it was an oil town. That's about it. Of course there are all kinds of ranching culture across Southern Alberta, but why do they have to rear their most ridiculous incarnations in front of my building, downtown, in what's supposed to be a city? Also in direct contravention of noise bylaws, I might point out, although not to the police, because it's Stampede! they don't care.

This morning wasn't all bad: they did play a couple of Johnny Cash songs. But that didn't last long, so I had to close the balcony doors and play the Smiths loud enough to drown it all out. After eating my breakfast quiche.

Man, I can never rant about the Stampede without making myself seem pathetic. Why is that?

Often I gather sentences to see if they'll organize themselves into some kind of poem, but these ones aren't cooperating, so I'm releasing them back into the wild...

Has your dad ever not got his crop off in the fall? *

How are my wife and I supposed to understand Elfish?

What would tourists think of a habitat of denuded trees with desperate, starving koalas roaming the damaged landscape?

What can't you do with a law degree?!

In BC, you can't deal with beavers like in Alberta.

You'd get laid if you were a rodeo clown.

Your aesthetics won't help you now.

* I love this sentence so much, especially given the context I heard it in: Picture the varnished wood and conservative artwork of a 26th-floor boardroom filled with drilling engineers discussing the effect of heavy rains on the soil in Saskatchewan... Seriously, poetry is everywhere.

!!Optimism!!

A manuscript must be really good if it takes over two years just to reject it!

Another trip through BC, another dead bear on the Transcanada, this time a cub. What the hell is going on? If I believed in, well, anything, I might think it was an omen of some kind. Or maybe there are just a lot of bears around, hungry bears, stupid bears.

Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.

So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.

It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.

I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?

His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.

I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.

Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?

And finally, this gem:

The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.

Which the reviewer justifies thusly:

As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.

I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.

If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.

My plan to take over the world is in motion. Walking to work two days a week (40 minutes each way, up and down a super-steep hill), pilates twice a week and yoga once a week. Soon, the cloning.

...when frog pond plop
is forged at my feet

a block and a half
from words to wet frog...

One day in Japan a few years ago, I was reading either bp nichol's versions of basho or maybe some of derek's poems that eventually went into frogments from the frag pool. In any case, I went out with frog pond plop in my head, for a walk along the narrow roads surrounded by rice fields. The rice was low, so the fields were like swamps, about two feet of warm, sludgy water. There were dozens of different types of frogs in all sizes that would jump in and out of the water and across the road. Each type of frog had a different tone of ribbit. Some were high and quick, while some were quite disturbingly low and loud. I'd walked about a block when there was a small movement at my feet. In the three seconds it took my brain to register what I was seeing, I saw a frog, I saw a pond, I saw a plop. I've never felt a more satisfying convergence of words and world.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?

If you want to feel attractive, attend a Canada Revenue Agency sponsored presentation on tax regulations for charities. I did, and I got all sorts of attention ranging from significant looks to awkward conversations of the "how you doing" variety punctuated with nervous laughter and self-conscious gestures. Who are these men? What grimy offices do they burrow out of and what is it in my demeanour that encourages them? I have to admit I really enjoyed learning about tax and charities, and I guess that spells geek. Most things I do spell geek. Still though, these charity geeks seem to be a notch or two below your cooler geeks, the indie rock geeks, the poetry geeks.

I finally had time to read all of Shift & Switch and: wow. It's such an exciting book. It's so much the opposite of what anthologies are usually: a sort of gathering up and condensing. Most anthologies present writing so definitively. All you need to know is there, summed up and distilled.

Shift & Switch, on the other hand, is all possibility. So much of the writing seems in process, in flight. Some of the poems may be finished, but I'm sure a lot of the selections will be revised into bigger projects, or smaller, or just different.

Writing is always changing, writing is always renewing.

I don't mean that the book reads like a draft, because it doesn't: it's well-edited, well-designed and well-written. The poems are good, but not perfected. They're present, and vital. That's why it's exciting: it's like a promise of more and more writing to come.

The conundrum: If I live another sixty years and if I stay able and if I read a book every two days, that's still only 10,000-odd books and that can’t be enough; how can I ever begin to know? And without knowing, how can I ever begin?

I've discovered a brilliant lunacy in the regulations that govern non-profit societies in Alberta:

10(1) The name of a society may contain only the following:
(a) letters of the alphabet of the English language;
(b) Arabic numerals;
(c) the following punctuation or other marks:
(i) !
(ii) “
(iii) #
(iv) $
(v) %
(vi) &
(vii) ‘
(viii) ( )
(ix) *
(x) +
(xi) ,
(xii) .
(xiii) -
(xiv) /
(xv) :
(xvi) ;
(xvii) >
(xviii) \
(xxii) Ç
(xxiii) ?
(xxiv) @

Each punctuation mark has its own sub-section! Brilliant. And I love how it takes five letters and two punctuation marks to point out that a name can indeed contain a question mark [(xxiii) ? ]. But don't interpret this expansive attitude toward punctuation too liberally.
(3) No society may have a name that consists primarily of a combination of punctuation marks or other marks.

Also no name may contain
(b) a number or word that might lead to the inference that the name is a number name, unless the name is a number name.
Is a frustrated poet drafting regulations for the Alberta legislature? I like to think so.

I have a tendency to focus on the negative. Over the past three days, I drank and packed and drove, and the only detail that stands out as worthy of recording is the dead bear I saw on the Transcanada. It was on the other side of the road, so we only caught a glimpse as we drove by, but it looked like a smallish probably not quite adult black bear. There was a guy standing next to it who looked like a park ranger or animal control type person, and another guy (the one who must have hit it) standing next to a camper.
I guess it's fortunate that a camper and not a smaller car hit the bear, or there might have been dead people too. I guess it's also better that the bear was actually dead rather than badly injured. But man, what a horrible thing. I've run into bears in the woods a couple of times, and that is a terrifying experience, but it's much, much better to see bears alive than roadkilled.

When I was writing my MA thesis, I remember thinking that it was the most difficult thing I would ever have to do, and if I could finish it, I could accomplish anything. Now I'm trying to write a 25-page research paper in two and a half days after writing three exams in the past week and a half, and I don't think anything could ever have been harder than this. If I were more organized and had any kind of time management skills, it probably wouldn't be so bad, but sadly I'm an imbecile and my decade in university has taught me nothing. Remember, kids, stay the fuck out of school. It's bad for your health.

You'd think that spending my time in two different cities would mean I get to attend twice the number of readings, or at least slightly more. Wrong. I get to miss all the readings. Everything is going down in Calgary between now and April 30. Everything is starting in Vancouver on April 30. Where will I be on April 30? Heading east on Highway 1.

I'm particularly upset about missing the Nod magazine launch, featuring derek beaulieu, jason christie, angela rawlings and jon paul fiorentino.