If you happen to be a subscriber to the Calgary Herald, you can read this. If you happen not to be a subscriber, well, they don't want your sort reading about me and my poetry adventures. And you thought the internet was a democracy, or at least an anarchy. Ha.

You can take my word for it that it was pretty cool: I got a CanWest-owned newspaper to print random lines of Stein, Kroetsch, Mullen et al., including "Lapwing is, improbably, the name of a bird. Titmouse. Goatsucker." from Robert Kroetsch's Excerpts from the Real World. Unfortunately I discovered that speaking intelligently off the cuff about why I like particular books of poetry is not my forte. Oh well, at least I take a half decent picture on very little sleep, no breakfast, no time to prepare and not necessarily having even brushed my hair (pictures in print version only).

I re-read Postmodernism for Beginners every couple of years, just so I can try to remember some of the things that I think I ought to know. It's a fun book to read, although I'm skeptical about how accurate its explanations can be, considering how much material it covers. The few pages that deal with theorists I actually do know something about (de Saussure, Barthes) just confuse me, and that makes me wonder about the sections on modernism and post-modernism in visual art, which seem concise and condensed enough for me to grasp: a good sign that something important is being left out. Nevertheless, it's a great book to steamroll through, letting the names of artists, philosophers, theorists pile up and blur, ending up with a vague sense of discombobulation and awe. Also, there are pictures.

My fortune at lunch the other day: You have a charming way with words. Write a letter this week.

Speaking of herring, I'm not a very good law student. In first year, we had an assignment to write a memorandum, which is basically an opinion written for a client stating their legal position. The prof gave us a legal scenario, then we had to research cases that deal with similar issues and analyze the similarities and differences between the facts of the cases and the hypothetical situation, and then reach a conclusion about the likely outcome of the case if it were to go to trial. The scenario my class got dealt with a contract between two businesses that one wanted out of, and the question was whether it had a right to break the contractual obligation without paying damages to the other business. It was a fairly wide open question in a well hashed over area of the law, so there were a lot of different cases applicable to the issue. I tried to choose cases to discuss based on their relevance, but I kept getting distracted by odd facts or words. One case in particular I relied on just so that I could write this:

...a poor fishing season and difficulties with packers were not sufficient to frustrate a contract to supply a specific amount of herring. The court ruled that although supplying the herring was more difficult and less profitable in the circumstances than the defendant had anticipated, its obligation to supply the herring was not significantly altered...

Is it fun to write about herring? Of course! Was that the point of the assignment? Probably not. Maybe it shows a healthy disregard for the educational system and its pedestrian methods of evaluation; after all, I doubt I'd be as easily distracted writing a memo for a real client. On the other hand, maybe I'm not cut out for law. I mean, who cares if a company has to pay money to another company? I don't. I guess I care more about how to draft a contract to avoid conflict, but once the conflict begins, I want no part of it. I also care more about individual's rights, especially when they come in conflict with the government, but that's more a vague sense of justice than a palpable engagement with the details.

Collected thoughts:

1. IKEA should have grocery stores everywhere. Elderberry flower juice is awesome; so are salted licorice fish and ginger cookies. Next time I'm trying loganberry juice, and maybe something involving herring.

2. Yoga is a great way to calm down and get in touch with your body. Going to a yoga studio downtown that only offers classes during rush hour (for the exquisitely lululemon-ed after-work crowd) and is conveniently situated on the corner of two one-way streets is somewhat less calming. After looking for a parking space for ten minutes, attempting then abandoning a parallel park over my left shoulder, and crossing and recrossing adjacent avenues with interminable and yet uncoordinated red lights, repeatedly screaming FUCK so loud my vocal cords do this weird vibration thing that feels like shredding about to snap -- however cathartic that may be -- indicates that I probably need more help calming down than yoga can provide.

3. The Calgary Fringe Festival has some brilliant theatre on offer, for just a few more days. I highly recommend Do You Bite Your Thumb At Me, Sir?

4. Theatre people are still annoying.

5. I'm so glad So You Think You Can Dance is finally over and I can get on with my life.

6. New tires make car go fast!

7. There's a sheesha bar in Calgary, they serve Arabic coffee, I just had some and it's midnight and I ran up three flights of stairs and now I'm typing! Neat!

There's nothing I love more than a good story about punctuation derailing a legal document: Comma quirk irks Rogers. Especially when the title internally rhymes.

I know that chapter I wrote in my thesis about punctuation will come in handy if anyone ever hires me to do legal work, I just know it.

...lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I have a pretty neat job. I’m writing grant proposals for a charity that trains people to take care of senior citizens with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. It’s not a cause I know a lot about or have ever thought about at all, so it can be hard to write about persuasively. But I’m getting pretty good at it. I just wrote a long, involved letter about the frustration of patients who can’t communicate with their caregivers and the potential for abuse and how we have to be a voice for voiceless seniors and yadda yadda. I made it pretty bloody heart wrenching, and now I’m kind of depressed.

In other less distressing news, I’m organizing a used book sale to raise funds for the charity. I spent most of yesterday alphabetizing hundreds of paperbacks. They’re mostly fantasy, so blah. Definitely not my cup of tea, but if it’s yours, I can hook you up. The book sale will be August 19 in Sylvan Lake, right next to the beach (did you know there’s a beach in central Alberta? I totally didn’t). Should be pretty sweet. Let me know if you want to donate books, come to the book sale, come to my office to check out the books before the book sale, etc.

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.