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

A Plan for Preserving Birdsong

Is it true that tiny lawyers
.....Hatch in puddles in the spring?
I plan to capture orioles,
.....And teach them how to sing.

But if they can't, the lawyers,
.....Dressed in cunning feathered suits,
Will congregate in sheltered spots
.....And toot on tiny flutes.

- Dennis Lee, The Bard of the Universe

What blossoms did I know? Stinkweed and maybe the shooting star. Buffalo beans in the springtime. Wolf willow. Pin cherry. Foxtail. Does quack grass blossom? Does pigweed bloom?

- Robert Kroetsch, The Words of my Roaring

Feeling Overwhelmed, Stuck, or Burned Out? Personal Life &Work Life out of Balance? Having Trouble Saying No?

This is a workshop for lawyers that want to learn to:

· Work more effectively, yet also have more fun in their lives!

· Create healthy personal boundaries.

· Enhance all their relationships!

· Make life affirming decisions about balance!

· Make changes or complete ongoing changes.

· Maintain excellent mental health and manage stress!

I feel stressed! from all the exclamation marks! !

One of the most pleasing things is stamping DRAFT in big, red letters on legal documents. Stamping COPY comes a close second, but stamping DRAFT is more satisfying somehow.

Currently reading:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (on the bus on the way to work, because it fits in my purse);
• The Words of My Roaring by Robert Kroetsch (too quickly, because Kroetsch books are basically recreational drugs);
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals by Frans de Waal (partly for the pictures of apes and monkeys, partly because de Waal rocks);
• Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place (haltingly, because I'm too distracted to give it the attention it deserves);
• Chicago Review 53:4 & 54:1/2 (intermittently);
• Implexures by Karen Mac Cormack (barely, because I just started, but expectantly); and
• A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (again, because I need to refresh my memory).

OK, I google my own book too damn much, but look! you can buy it at Target! I would love to see my book in a bargain bin at Walmart or Costco or something, marked down to a super-low price, like 50 cents. That would be one definition of success.

And here's Audiatur, a neat site my book has popped up on (thanks to derek beaulieu). Not sure of its purpose, or its language, but it has a lot of poetry.

Do I (does my writing) have a wilting gaze? Really?