Before heading to the airport, I grabbed a few books, including Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (the pleasingly compact clear cut press edition). It wasn’t until halfway through my flight to Vancouver that I realized that the book is largely about Vancouver. Strange synergy. Then I noticed a boarding pass tucked near the back of the book, documenting another flight from Calgary to Vancouver, in 2005. It occurs to me that I’ve been reading this book, in transit, for years. There are passages I must have read many times, I don’t remember particulars, but the book has become luxuriously familiar, a constant, I can dip into it at any point, it continues. On this reading,

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs…”

called up Lyn Hejinian’s “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” But only briefly. It carries on:

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs are the components of landscape that conventionally provide primordial coverage. Structurally the shack is a thickening, a concentration, an opacity in the lucid landscape.”

Elucidation of surfaces, space, enclosures: shacks, and scaffolding:

“When an immobile building, inevitably bored of its environment, wants a new site, a scaffolding can be constructed around it. Scaffolding substitutes for a site. By compression or condensation it transforms an atmosphere to a condition of access which is also a screen. The idea is easily inflated towards the surreal or the homeopathic, but it is based on observation. When at night we hear the scaffolding rustle, then look up to watch it sway, we feel voyeuristic longing. In darkness the scaffolding is foliage. Sometimes swinging on special leafy scaffolds we feel compelled to loose our little slipper.”

– Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

We have floundered and basted. Our portions have multiplied. We are sated but repenting. We are lost to our innermost rhythm. Our senses are surfeit. Our form is buffeted.

A light pulse has led us sparing. We have not sought stability. Our uncertainty has charmed us. We are as a gluttonous lover. And yet we have been wrenched. We have contorted. We atone.

Flimsy surrenderings bait us. Stubborn thickets spring to our mercy. Sabotage entices our lean baselessness. We hover fearing.

Our signal is a study in calm. Loop upon loop has cocooned. We have endeared ourselves to our other selves. Our clamour subsides. We are burgeoning.

"The Calgary Arts Development authority could be eliminated as well. Allow individuals to fund that through their charitable donations," he said.

So Calgarians can choose between property tax hikes of 23% or whatever ridiculous number they're suggesting, or the sudden complete elimination of municipal support for the arts.

Nice.

Living in this city has been bothering me lately. It's so frustrating to live in the strongest economy in the country (assuming that's still true) with grotesquely overvalued real estate affecting everyone's access to accommodation, rented or owned, to drive on crumbling streets, to negotiate an overlooked and clearly inadequate transit system, to suffer extremely limited access to medical attention because no doctors are taking new patients, to watch gang activity flourish for lack of funding for the police, and to not even have an independent bookstore in the downtown core to frequent, not to mention a decent coffeeshop open later than ten in the evening. I feel as though we sacrifice so much here to the culture of oil and gas -- all this city's resources are directed towards making money from oil. Which is sad, but not likely to change. What I don't understand is why can't all that oil money at the very least alleviate some of the problems that could handle some money being thrown at them? Why can't they hire more police? Attract more doctors? Fix the goddamn roads? Buy a few more buses? Shouldn't all that revenue be able to shield us from massive cuts to the already underfunded arts authority, or from further inflation of our overinflated property values? Why is this city so hopelessly self-destructive?

Something defensible stands in the way. Clearly standing in the way. Clattering the way. It’s standard. It’s manifested in doubles. It tremors with solidity. With its sense of its solidity. It’s knowing itself to be right. It’s beyond questioning. It’s standing in the way. It’s a block. It’s a limit of acknowledgment. It’s the limits of lines. Dark heavy lines. Because they don’t bleed. Something is logical and true. It’s tracing its own trajectory. It knows how it got there. It could get back. It could move forward. It sees paths. It sees its own way. Something obvious is blocking the way. It’s too obvious. It’s surface and leap. It covers and smoothes. It doesn’t feel any contradictions. It doesn’t need to justify. Something implausible is coating the way. It varnishes everything. It’s easy to overlook. It’s impossible to see. It’s actually nothing out of the ordinary. It’s easy enough to choke on. It’s a fine dust. It shouldn’t even bother you. It’s not really in the way. Something overbearing obscuring the way. How do you know that’s the way? There’s no way of knowing the way. It’s taking the way. It’s not necessarily even that way. It could be any way. Do you even know there is a way? Something is taking the way.

Hey Alberta artists, why not fill out the Alberta Foundation for the Arts survey?

What I realized at yoga today: a huge part of the appeal of smoking is taking deep, slow breaths, holding until it almost hurts, then exhaling smoothly right to the bottom of your lungs. The nicotine is nice but not necessarily the whole point. Or am I remembering smoking wrong?

Moderate goals:
I would like to 1) read in Montreal 2) do a poetry workshop at Sage Hill 3) and maybe the Banff Centre 4) read in Vancouver again to an awesome audience like the incredibly awesome audience at the KSW last spring 5) read in Portland again because they were pretty awesome too 6) read in Ottawa 7) turn my current writing project into something complete and significant 8) make more chapbooks 9) write that book review I said I would write 10) go to more than one reading a month.

Fascinated lately with the idiocy and insensitivity of certain newspaper headlines. On cbc.ca the other day:

"Suncor to reign in oil sands' plans"

And in either the Sun or the Metro on Monday after somebody set several fires in Calgary over the weekend, causing a lot of damage and exhibiting a reckless disregard for the safety of others:

"Arsonist lights up weekend"

Looking for something to read? Read Taken by Daphne Marlatt. I just finished it and started Ana Historic, also by Daphne Marlatt. I read them both several years ago and was left with a lingering impression of Damn!She does prose well. And she really does:

And so there was the constraint of finishing tea, stiffly, passing the last of the Jaffa biscuits, wiping her mouth on the serviette before getting up to help Mother with the plates, the washing up she did herself now, and all the time wanting to rush out into the street, howling at the unfairness of it all. War. And what of those women who'd managed to get to Signapore and decided to stay there, stick it out to the end with their husbands? That kind of courage. What was Peggy doing now? Still meeting for coffee at Robinson's, displaying her baby over petit fours? Putting a brave face on it, playing mahjong with other wives holed up in The Raffles? And what if the hotel itself took a direct hit? Could she stand it? The game of keeping up morale, stacking your dragons and your winds in neat little walls, while the real walls were falling all around you -- surely they'd have a bomb shelter. But where? Under the dance floor, under the Palm Court where the waiters in their high-buttoned tunics would hardly be standing by? Panic, smoke, people rushing out to get the last food in the shops. No difference between mem sahib and servant.

-Marlatt, Taken

Spotted chump in escapades, espadrilles, expirate, solidify. Spot chump among the loverly, whippeting, cradled. Stop limbs. Stop lips. Stop drawn out thankfully. Spot me new language. I’ll spin. Lay new grooves, I’ll mitigate. I want to level. Want to phosphorate. I’m gamely and gaming. Salivating. Shuddered.

Why does some blog grab text from other blogs and translate them to some language and then imperfectly back into English? I have no idea. But it came up with some nifty sentences:

She's almost French Canadian and almost efficiently on French.

Its mA thesis busy sentences and its central situation of Gertrude Stein's in the letter.

She was poetry publisher and then handling publisher for gas station magazine, between 1999 and 2004.

And it describes my thesis about as well as I ever did.

I guess that's what can happen when you put your name out into the internets. I guess this can happen too. All kinds of poets are all up in arms over it, but I don't really see why. Anyone who reads poetry knows you didn't write the poem attributed to you there. And anyone who doesn't read poetry, well, doesn't read poetry. They don't care.

I love the comments that threaten legal action. Seriously, on what grounds? Defamation? Because they implied that you're a poet? Copyright infringement? Because you own your name? Litigousness is a disease. Use your common sense instead.

Every published poem is its own elegy. What poet is not astonished, reading the mere poem on the mere page? The mere transcription of that other poem onto paper is a calamity, a desecration. Every poem, one might say, is a failed translation, an accidental imposter manufractured by the incompetence of a weak-eyed translator sweating in the light of a lantern whose wick is badly in need of a trimming.

- Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

Performance takes interaction

or Performance is buoying

or Performance is echolocation, sonar, whale noise

or Performance needs sticky surfaces

or Energy / Tension / Static

or Blow this scene This scene is blown.

I spend most of my day working on the computer, then I come home and spend my spare time on the computer reading theonion and cuteoverload and gofugyourself or checking my credit card bill or my bank account or looking for cheap flights or lately playing typeracer of all things (I hate it!) and so, no blog, no chapbook making, no writing. Sigh. I'm on the wrong side of the pendulum swing, I guess. Sooner or later something'll have to give.

Currently reading:

• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (on the bus);
• What the Crow Said, Robert Kroetsch (before bed);
• Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, George Monbiot (actually only the first chapter so far; it may be too depressing to continue at the moment);
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal (still; I keep losing my place);
• far too many poetry books that I flit among and have yet to become absorbed in or give the necessary attention to: Fond by Kate Eichorn, Blissful Times by Sandra Alland, Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox, Broken World by Joseph Lease, The Iliad Book XXII by Lisa Jarnot, Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place;
• the stack of chapbooks and ephemera from the Blow-out Small Press Books and Arts Fair enticing and reproaching me (not currently, but soon);
• Hudson's English History: A Compendium, Roger Hudson (in snippets, because that's how it's written);
• The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault (not actually currently, because I already finished it, but yay! I finished it).

What used to qualify as a threat to national security: "...100 sweating, uncombed women standing around in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing." It's all either incredibly offensive or incredibly ridiculous.

I was all ho-hum about the Blowout this year, but after last night my faith has been restored. Congratulations to fS for finding such an incredible reading venue. But how uninformative for those who weren't there. Sorry. Maybe descriptions after the hangover is less.

In my head all day today:

Flawed logic

Pad crepuscular rays.

Gloaming.

The dimming reason. Fade in stray.

Patiently flaying. Seasons of discular moan.

The mournful mizzen.

The follicle scrim.

Open fire. Fall clearing. Mollifying dusk rim

opt. A civil trim. Assimilator.

Opulentor.

Home fizzing.

Load baring. Laymen foible

strop. Fob gobbling.

Homunculus. Opal.

Bundle.

Stow.

How can we take pleasure in a reported pleasure (boredom of all narratives of dreams, of parties)? How can we read criticism? Only one way: since I am here a second-degree reader, I must shift my position: instead of agreeing to be the confidant of this critical pleasure -- a sure way to miss it -- I can make myself its voyeur: I observe clandestinely the pleasure of others, I enter perversion; the commentary then becomes in my eyes a text, a fiction, a fissured envelope. The writer's perversity (his pleasure in writing is without function), the doubled, the trebled, the infinite perversity of the critic and of his reader.

- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text