The law of wills and estates is fascinating and ridiculous and fascinating again:

(Deliberating on whether a signature on a separate piece of paper can be considered part of the will so as to render it legally valid.) If an unattached paper is to be admitted at all, there is much to be said in favour of an envelope, which may reasonably be held to have a far closer relationship to a document which it encloses than a second and wholly disconnected piece of paper. Envelopes are, by their nature, designed to have what may be described as a dependent and secondary existence, rather than an independent and primary life of their own.

Re Mann (England, 1942)

"Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition; they have only a communal existence; and not only does the meaning of each interpenetrate the other, but all in their aggregate take their purport from the setting in which they are used of which the relation between the speaker and the hearer is the most important part." Judge Learned Hand, NLRB v. Federbush Co., 121 F.2d 954, 957 (2d Cir. 1941).

accretion, n. Growth by organic enlargement; growing of separate things into one, the resulting whole;

crumble, v.i. To fall into small fragments or particles; disintegrate.

Back when this blog was an anonymous experiment in posting snippets of execrably bad automatic writing, I wrote these lines, which I've subsequently tried to fit into a couple of different manuscripts as a sort of free-floating quotation or footnote or something that's not quite up to a poem, but which don't seem to fit anywhere:

Climates facilitate ennui.

Here and here and herer.

Which is a shame, because I really like these lines. My writing is often referred to as Steinian, and that's not always true, but I think these lines are definitely Steinian. There's some fascinating grammatical thing going on, that I don't want to explicate because that would be a step down the sad road of being one's own literary critic, and that can't lead anywhere comforting. But I wanted to at least re-post them, if only to validate the time I've spent staring at something I wrote four years ago as somehow productive.

For one day the other day, it was warm enough to smell the ocean, and it was quite a shock; once you've lived near the ocean for a while you stop noticing the smell of it, so it was nice to be aware of it again. Now we're back to the weather I moved here to get a break from. This old guy on the bus today said it was the worst winter he's seen in 25 years, and the guy he was talking to said he'd been here 57 years and it was the worst he'd ever seen. Not that it's really cold, mind you, and not that as an emigrant from the prairies I can legitimately complain about the amount of snow, it's just that I miss the wet, gray saltiness of winter in Vancouver. Bright and freezing just doesn't fit here.

If you were cruising around one of the richest, quietest, closest-to-the-university suburbs in Vancouver looking to shred someone’s ignition without actually stealing their car, would you target the unimposing 15-year-old sedan with the 4-foot tall stuffed monkey in the back seat, which has held up incredibly well and never needed any major repair (the car, not the monkey, although the monkey has held up pretty well too, and it’s closer to 30 years old)?

Yeah, I guess you would. So would I, but it seems so unfair.

Looking at things objectively, do you think the owner of that car can afford to get it repaired? Do you think she has the mental fortitude, or even the wherewithal, to deal with police reports and insurance people and mechanics and tow truck drivers, during the first week of the final semester of a degree that clearly isn’t taking her life anywhere she thought it might even though she never thought about it very clearly and just kind of came here on a whim? Don’t the Alberta license plates indicate to you that the owner of that particular car is probably not entirely in compliance with the idiotic BC insurance and registration regime, and might prefer to pass her time in this province without drawing any attention to the existence of her car?

And lastly, isn’t it obvious that she hardly ever drives, except to go shopping or to the legal aid clinic where she volunteers to help people who have legal problems, which could very well include being charged with attempted theft of a vehicle, and that she was on her way to the clinic when she discovered the evidence of your incompetent hacking? Do you really want to be the author of that kind of irony?

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.