How can I top my last post? I can't. But this comes close:

filling Station / NoD launch

January 5th, 2007 7:30pm
Carpenters' Union Hall
310 10th St. NW, Calgary AB
cover $5 (or $10 for admission & 1 mag, $15 for admission and both mags!)

featuring readings by
JACQUELINE TURNER (launching her new book Seven into Even),
NATALIE SIMPSON (launching her new book Accrete or Crumble),
FRANCES KRUK (reading from her new work),
GARRY MORSE (launching his new book Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13),
REG JOHANSON (launching his new book Courage, my Love),
ROGER FARR (launching his new book Surplus),
and musical sensations HOTLITTLEROCKET!

accrete or crumble
LINEbooks 2006
$16.

email to order a copy

I’ve been reading far too much, even for a law student, and getting headachey and overcaffeinated and underfed, and these sorts of conditions tend to lead me to intense intellectual considerations that are actually neither intense nor intellectual, just manic.

Check out my new(ish) work in the latest issue of The Capilano Review. It's an excerpt from a longer piece called "camp set up done," and it's part of my series of oil and gas industry found language poems, which also include "making hole", published in West Coast Line #39 and "NEWS(and yet)", published in dANDelion a couple of years ago.

For anybody who will be in Vancouver next Friday...

LINEbooks invites you to join us for the launch of four new poetry titles:

Accrete or Crumble by Natalie Simpson

Surplus by Roger Farr

Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13 by Garry Morse

Courage, My Love by Reg Johanson

Friday, December 01 at 8pm at Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings Street Vancouver, BC

Special: pre-launch price box set of all four titles $50

Contact Michael Barnholden
Managing Editor, WCL
www.westcoastline.ca
email: wcl@sfu.ca

Why is it that the less you say the less you have to say? My standards for what is worth writing here have rise proportinately with the length of time since my last entry. Now nothing seems important enough to record.

Each entry, by coming into existence, removes itself from the possibility of the poem. -Robert Kroetsch
A writer is someone for whom writing is difficult. -Somebody

Art is all possibility. To be an artist is to strive and to fail. Inevitably. I was trying to figure out how I can be proud of my writing and ashamed of it at the same time. I think it's because it's painful, just incredibly painful, to confront a particular manifestation of foreclosed possibilities. And it's not that I think I've failed at anything, more that there's no standard of success or failure. It just is what it is, so it's not what it could be. But why does that matter?

Thinking about poetry and law and my sense of trying to operate in two vastly different worlds. While the people and to a certain extent the ideologies representative of each world tend to be quite divergent, I think there are overlaps.

I think postmodern poetics and law dovetail quite nicely in the sense that both are concerned primarily with language, not necessarily as subject but as medium, as the only medium within which they can operate.

And the crucial point about both poetry and law is that there is no certainty. Nothing is certain because language fails. Where they differ is in the effect of uncertainty.

Law strives for certainty regardless, or accepts a conditional sense of certainty recognizing the fiction as less than ideal but necessary. And practitioners of law don’t even have to recognize that much. Most law students and, I imagine, lawyers would claim that the law is certain and that any question of uncertainty is merely philosophical or academic. While I think it’s more accurate to say that uncertainty is an undeniable condition of law, as law is an enactment of language, and the sense of certainty with which practitioners arm themselves is a philosophical illusion.

Poetry can run into the same problems as law when poets strive to express in spite of uncertainty. But postmodern poetrics are more likely to thrive on uncertainty, to find its challenges in indeterminacies.

But economic choices are, in my view, for the citizen to make (provided that they are legally open to him or her) and, whether the citizen is negotiating for the purchase of a Van Gogh or a sexual encounter, s. 2(b) of the Charter protects that person's freedom to communicate with his or her vendor.

- Reference Re Criminal Code Sections 193 and 195.1(1)(c), Supreme Court of Canada 1990

I get kind of neurotic about book reviews. I’d like to write them, but I find it hard to articulate why I like a particular book, and even harder to explain why you should like it, too. So I can’t really tell you why, but you should read this connection of everyone with lungs by Juliana Spahr. You should go read it right now. Seriously. I finished reading it in bed the other night and I fell asleep holding it. I love this book.

Happiness is browsing your own records on the Library and Archives Canada website. I don't what my book will look like, or when it will be out, but I do know its Dewey Decimal number! So, so exciting. I'm such a dork.

Already I feel so divorced from my other identity, not necessarily my secret identity, because I think each one of my identities is a secret I'm trying to keep from the other. Is it leaving Calgary? Or is it coming to law school? I'm sure I could manage to feel like a poet in Vancouver, if I wasn't spending all my time trying to remember the details of contract law or understand the rules of evidence. As it is though, my writer self feels miles and miles away. Your aesthetics won't help you now, indeed.

My sense of disconnection is compounded by the problems I've had trying to hook up internet in my new (and exponentially better than last year's) apartment. I've decided I need to just get a new laptop: if throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it, then throwing the highest amount of money the problem could possibly require is the logical next step. I'm probably going to go for a Mac, although I'm slightly put off by Apple's whole identity campaign, which seems to imply that a Mac will turn me into the open-minded, laid back, creative person I've always wanted to be. We shall see. At the very least, my Mac might allow me to submit some poems to magazines or read some poems on the internets or write a blog post every now and then.

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?