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BLOG ARCHIVE: Jan - Mar 2010 | Dec 2009 Autoreply: Going away for two weeks Monday July 12, 2010 so the blog will feature this post for a while. I should put up a crossword or a soduku or a really cryptic poem for you to figure out in the meantime. Maybe make some decision to improve your life. Tell me everything next time we meet. (I wish you could talk back.)
Status update: Ian Williams is leaving Facebook in a month Saturday July 10, 2010 but he still loves you. Don't worry. It's nothing personal at all. He made a decision to invest in the real, the valuable, which means it's time to drop Facebook like an underperforming stock. More on this in a few weeks. He'll resume speaking of himself in the first person tomorrow.
Constant Craving Friday July 9, 2010 Three times in three different stores, k.d. lang's song came on. Three very different stores, mind you: Future Shop, Walmart, and The Bay. When the k.d. lang comes on, you know you can't be anywhere else but Canada. It's practically the anthem. I made this point about obligatory Canadian artists on mall soundtracks in April when I came back to launch You Know Who You Are. "Constant Craving" has been stuck in our heads since 1992. Yet I never get tired of this song. It's really a fantastic choice to play as folks are shopping, especially the chorus when lang belts out the title and the backup singers echo her: "Co-o-on (Con-) stant (stant) cra (cra) aaa-ving / has always been."
Claudia Rankine's Plot Thursday July 8, 2010 I finished reading it recently. Think literal pregnancy meets artistic childbirth ŕ la sonnet 1 of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella meets high postmodern experimental poetics. Here's a joke from it:
I don't mind getting slapped around a bit as a reader, which explains why I like Atwood.
Posta Per Palazzo Rinaldi, distributed in North America as La Bella Donna Esamina il Libro Wednesday July 7, 2010 The latest reaction shot to You Know Who You Are is now up: Mail For Palazzo Rinaldi / Beautiful Woman Looks at Book. Filmed in beautiful Italy by beautiful Susanna, the beautiful film explores the preferred reading material of beautiful people living beautiful lives in the beautiful countryside.
July Thanksgiving: Chemo Tuesday July 6, 2010 Be thankful that you're not on it. You don't have burns on your hands from the first round. Your hair isn't falling out when you turn your head. You can keep your food down. Maybe we've got it wrong: people don't survive cancer; they survive chemo.
July Thanksgiving: Heat Monday July 5, 2010 Better hot than cold. Yes, even if the heat feels oppressive, feels like a weight on your shoulders. The weight is not the sun; it's your body, your history, or their intersection in your head. I'll take the heat, the heaviness, over the winter chill--trembling as if in persistent fear. (Again, it's not the wind chill, the ice, but your body, your past, the terror in your head.)
Canada Day Thursday July 1, 2010 Yay. (Wouldn't Canada be better if its name were a perfect palindrome [like yay, say]: Acanaca or Adanada or, for the brave, Adanananada, which reflects our insecurities at being nada in comparison to our US neighbours and also echoes the taunting na na nana na from more athletic, fashionable, historically-interesting countries. This is just one of several profound insights into the universe that I had while driving yesterday.)
Drive to Canada Wednesday June 30, 2010 Nine hours of perfect weather, rest stations, and road-music later, I'm in Canada. This country, ah. Hence the opening words of our anthem. Got some good thinking done on the way.
Reaction shot 5: Mother Has Much to Say About Book (a silent film) Tuesday June 29, 2010 Now up. Here are my comments on it, delivered in mime:
Pennsylvania 8: Things I've forgotten Sunday June 27, 2010 Because surely. My roommates, Kenyatta and Keith, were a lot like me on the inside, despite our surface differences. Tender on the inside. Rare meat. I drank about 21 bottles of water over the course of the week and kept the empty bottles stacked on my desk as some might beer bottles. At the end of my first year, Carl Phillips was the last CC person I saw at the Pittsburgh airport. We hugged. I remember his cheek against mine. This year, my last year, again, he was the last person. I had to tiptoe to hug him. His hugs have the satisfaction of a firm, full-body handshake. On the night of Michael Jackson's death, there was an all MJ dance party. Folks at CC can dance. Kelly met her husband at CC. I never tire of hearing that story. She was so clueless and the poor guy so hardworking. The cakes. The last night Ayo, soaked from dancing (yes, another dance party), and Darr get into a semi-drunken conversation about who has money. He's wrong about me. He's right about Darr. You don't know these people, but you know this feeling--the desire to preserve.
Pennsylvania 7: Graduation Saturday June 26, 2010 I'm a fellow now. Everyone is so beautiful here--beautiful in their own direction. Cacti and ferns and fiddleheads. Everyone's so intelligent too and honest, and all that shows up in their bodies, mouths, and writing.
Pennsylvania 6: Craft Talk Friday June 25, 2010 Sapphire and Brenda Cardenas were interviewed by Nicole Sealey as part of a craft talk. Notable:
Pennsylvania 5: Tonight's Lineup: Sapphire, Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine, Colleen McElroy Thursday June 24, 2010 Claudia Rankine read for fifteen to twenty minutes from a monologue she's writing in the voice of Mary Seacole, then at the end she looked up and gave us the last words, relevant inside and outside of the text: "How I suffer / talking to you."
Pennsylvania 4: The kinds of things people call you on at Cave Canem Wednesday June 23, 2010 How could you be so egocentric to think that no one could love or understand you?
Pennsylvania 3: Gong Tuesday June 22, 2010 Tonight was the first fellows' reading. These readings tend to be one of the highlights of Cave Canem. You get a taste of everyone's flow in four (pr. fo') minutes. It's like speed dating. If you don't respect the time limit else you'll be gonged and forced off the stage by a muscled man/woman. By the time the pre-gong goes off, no one's concentrating on the poem anymore. Folks are just rooting for you to get off before the poet bouncers lift the needle from your mouth. I was not gonged. I read "Hay" [aka the needle poem that's now out in Folio] and "Recalculating, Recalculating" [aka the GPS poem].
Pennsylvania 2: Group D Monday June 21, 2010 The first poem I write during the Cave Canem week tends to be overwritten because of a combination of nerves and rustiness and everyone-here-is-so-fierce-itis. The poets in my workshop, group D, are working out some serious future poetics, absorbing all sorts of traditions and making origami. Metta Sama probably writes the most conceptually difficult stuff of the group; Ekoko's like a ball of southern but urban, sweet but lipcurling, lush funk; Jonterri's the kind of poet you'd better be good to if you were married to her else you'd end up goat-footed in one of her poems; Bianca Spriggs is reworking the dramatic monologue and doing some wild performative stuff with black space (that's right, not white space); Mahogany (Mo) Browne has a knack for metaphor that makes your brain warp like The Persistence of Memory; r r Reece (whose name we've just abbreviated to a growl, rrrrrr) is working on poems of war and also (finally) starting to approach the difficulty of being a Korean-African-American; and Doug Brown is writing about/to/away from his father who recently passed away. Today, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Ed Roberson, and Brenda Cardenas read. I could wiki-link you to each of them, or you could copy and paste the names into a search engine yourself, you lazy... I introduced Cornelius. An honor. And he read his oft-quoted, "Gratitude":
I am a brick in a house
Pennsylvania 1: Circle Sunday June 20, 2010 My flight got cancelled so I rebooked and ended up, to my pleasure, sitting next to a pilot for US Airways. He answered every question I had about airport traffic rules (FYI: Southwest Airline pilots are notorious for speeding while taxiing). I'm going to assume you know the press information about Cave Canem: it's an organization for black poets; big presence in American poetry; prominent faculty members (this year: Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine, Colleen McElroy, Ed Roberson, and founders, Toi Derricotte, and Cornelius Eady); fellows meet for a week in June. This is that week in June. What do we do? We write a poem/day, give readings, attend readings, workshop poems with a different faculty member each day, stay up too late, laugh and/or cry each day, and practise love. CC begins with a circle on the Sunday night where folks simply say something about themselves. We feel so safe there--and I realize that this may sound mushy and that I can't express CC's particular magic--that we reveal unique and sometimes traumatic things about ourselves. This year, the circle lasted four hours--in fact, it's so difficult to explain this magic (I'm listening to myself as I type) that I should probably just stop right here--and we all listened attentively to each other, echoing our stories, admitting just how damaged we are.
Vermont 9: Done Thursday June 17, 2010 Yesterday was a lapse in equilibrium, but I've committed to being honest, so it stays. I have accomplished everything I set out to do here at VSC. All the stories are fixed. Let's see what Robyn thinks of them. I feel competent. I feel like a pro-athlete. Tomorrow I'll drive back to Massachusetts and get ready for Pennsylvania.
Vermont 8: Gihon river outside my studio Wednesday June 16, 2010 What keeps anyone from throwing himself in the river, late at night, when no one is watching? On what conditions does one desire eternity? Who does one love enough to remain conscious such a long time?
Vermont 7: residencies, in general Tuesday June 15, 2010 Career opportunism and libidinal excess and gossip and self-inflation are neither rampant nor wholly absent from Vermont Studio Center. On some level, one has to buy into the idea of this place being conducive to work--more conducive than one's apartment, say--so that at the very least one doesn't feel a fool for driving x hours to spend y weeks here. And there's also social reward for being a believer. But mostly, it's the cognitive consonance that drives one not to ask certain questions, which I will: 1) Is it irresponsible to think that one could escape one's obligations, particularly to others, in the real world by being here? 2) Could this utopia be sustained with the same body of residents or would it turn into Lord of the Flies? 3a) Who is the Lord of the Flies and what philosophy, class or belief structure undergirds the daily happenings here? 3b) If one were here long enough would appreciation cross over into worship? 4) What are the little ways in which we cede our healthy critical apparatus to participate in this fantasy? 5) Whose fantasy? And here's the biggie: What if one opts out of the fantasy, opts out of--even more courageously--the circus of professionalization that has plagued the arts for the last thirty years, and views this place not as organic and Romantic but as industrial, labour-intensive, and unnatural? I've been overworking, as usual, or let's call it extremely productive, so definitely I'm the wrong guy to argue against the value of residencies. But I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't give voice to some of those rumblings that creak in me late at night as I walk from my studio to my room.
Vermont 6: work update Sunday June 13, 2010 I'm going to continue to be tight-lipped about the details of the work. I'd prefer to sink that energy into the work itself. All you probably care to know is that the revisions are going well. It has helped to be away from these stories, the final trio, for such a long time. I read this evening with four other writers. Twelve minutes of words stabbed on a toothpick. Let us taste you.
Vermont 5: Vermonter Saturday June 12, 2010
All through lunch, he said about four sentences. His voice was an event. He ate every grain on his plate, as did all of the other Vermonters around us. Whatever he was thinking was more important than what he was doing.
Vermont 4: roadkill Friday June 11, 2010 I ran over a squirrel today. The last word of yesterday's blog turned out to be a prophecy. The squirrel was sitting on the side of the road, up on its hind legs in that prayer position its species assumes. It was thinking about running. I could see it, a little action in the spine. It didn't get far. The front passenger-side tire got it. The sensation isn't crunchy, like stepping on a beetle; it's more like stepping accidentally on a cat's ribs; there's some spring, some resistance. In the rearview mirror, I saw that I hadn't killed the squirrel completely. It ran for a little bit, a blur of brown and red, then I don't know, it must have collapsed unconscious on the other side. I'm hoping maybe I just took a leg clean off. Or maybe it would be better for the squirrel to be dead. Behind me, I could feel all the judgment and disapproval of the other cars. I wanted to wave at them apologetically. Sorry for destroying your wildlife. Me with my Mass plates. But I just sped up and tried to lose them. And what was I on the road to buy? For what did this squirrel lose its life? A keychain. Then I found myself buying all this other stuff at the Dollarmart so the squirrel's death would at least be profitable on a cosmic scale and for the local economy. So I walked out of the store with earphones (two pairs actually), a card holder, and a bag of caramel popcorn. Still not even. Over dinner, Andrew (Harrison, artist), who found this hilarious, said a chipmunk started visiting him in his studio, perhaps to get its hands on his dried fruit. So I'm thinking that maybe tomorrow I could go and leave this chipmunk a bag of nuts or something to make up for the loss. I know, it won't bring back the dead squirrel and the chipmunk may respond violently to my presumption, but it's still something, like a life insurance policy that will soften the loss.
Vermont 3: work Thursday June 10, 2010 A few fourteen-hour days later, I have finished revising the middle section, the trios, of Not Anyone's Anything. Next week (meaning tomorrow--I know myself), I'll turn to the stories in the final section. I've had a plan for all these revisions for months now, so all I've been doing is implementing that plan. Executing. I am the executive or executioner.
Vermont 2: locals Tuesday June 8, 2010 Vermont Studio Center in Johnson has people from everywhere, and a high percentage of folks who drove insane distances to be here, which is understandable since artists need to haul their paintbrushes and sketchpads and--wrong: sheets of metal, lumber, full-sized carousel horse. Vermont, on the other hand, mostly has people from Vermont. The true locals are serene and unimpressed by loud-state people. They wait for us to finish our linguistic gymnastic routine, then they reply quietly, unemotionally. They speak as if delivering facts, and every sentence seems to carry an implied you-can-take-it-or-leave-it ending. My sample size so far is two, well three, but one of those was just a smile-and-nod conversation. One woman at the farmer's market was selling pillowcase-sized sacks of wool for only five bucks, and I almost bought a sack, because I was cold, and the wool was thick and heavy like Absalom's hair, and I thought that it might be good for the self-esteem of the poor sheep at the farm to see their owners come back with all their wool sold. (That's what I mean about linguistic gymnastics; the Vermont woman, reading this, would disapprove.) This woman's children were there, stoic; the girls were sitting behind the counter with a look that could only be described as Icelandic and the boy was the picture of practicality in his galoshes and a jacket he'd grow into. I didn't buy the wool. She said, If you change your mind, I'm here, then went back to braiding a child's hair. The other conversation was with a fellow at lunch, a sculptor, whose appearance was like a well-thought-out monochromatic paint combination: perfectly matched hair to skin to eyes to clothing. He didn't rush through his mouthfuls to answer us, just smiled and used his hands or eyes, and when he was done eating, he spoke with spring-like temperatures and with the self-effacement of a good essay. You cannot impress people from Vermont. Not easily anyway. They've seen you before.
Vermont 1: the drive Sunday June 6, 2010 I drove to Vermont Studio Center today to start my residency. Except for blasts of rain, which had the force of a pressure washer, the drive was pleasant, full of bucolic scenes, the occasional horse, moody skies, that kind of thing. You get the sense that you're high up in the air, like you're riding in a cross between an airplane and a massive SUV. The clouds wrap themselves around mountains and you half expect to see a moose stroll majestically out into the road and frame its head in the sunset. There's something else about Vermont that you should know. I can't say it better than Cuff: The state of Vermont: Sponsored by Subaru.
Four weeks, four states/provinces Saturday June 5 2010 That's the writing plan for the next month: two weeks in Vermont, a quick pit stop in Massachusetts, then a week in Pennsylvania, another pit stop in Massachusetts, then home to Ontario. And I'm not counting states that I have to pass through to get to the destination state/province, else I'd have to add New Hampshire and New York. I'm also not factoring in potential trips, to Montreal, say, which is just a couple of hours from Johnson, VT. The goal is to go into lockdown mode and finish all revisions of Not Anyone's Anything.
Pomeranian Friday June 4, 2010 How odd for a dog to be more thoughtfully approached than a human. Fernando was in Market Basket while I was outside watching his (and Anna's) Pomeranian, Noah. Everyone was like, Ohhhhhh! and Is it a boy or a girl? and What's his name? and You're a good dog, aren't you? Yes you are, yes you are. Not once did anyone ask me my name or compliment me for being a good boy. Not. Once.
Chapter 9 of Watchmen Wednesday June 2, 2010 Laurie's having a breakdown on Mars, partly because her boyfriend and my favourite character, Doc Manhattan, is unconvinced that human life on earth is worth saving. Then, suddenly, he changes his mind. Here's his explanation, minus the cinematic zoom out: In each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. This is true of anybody in the world, Laurie reminds him. But that doesn't diminish the miracle for Doc Manhattan: But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Martha's Vineyard Faking Monday May 31, 2010 (Memorial Day weekend) from Wednesday June 2, 2010 I spent the last two days with Steve and Suzy at Martha's Vineyard. We hitched Steve's boat to his SUV and went a-sailing from White's Landing in East Falmouth to Oak Bluffs Marina on the island. The boat's navigation system was off, even though the coordinates I entered were correct, and Suzy had a brief moment of "we're going to run out of gas and die in the middle of the ocean," so--get this--we navigated with Steve's iPhone. We moored in the marina and took a dinghy to shore, did the tourist thing, had ice cream like good kids (as Suzy pointed out, What's a holiday without ice cream?), sailed back into the ocean to fish (nada), moored again, talked all through sunset into the night, identified whatever constellations we could (one), and went to sleep below deck to the rhythm of the waves. I've never done anything like this before. Our plan was to go camping, but this was much more... glamorous. I would look at Steve and Suzy, with the sunglasses and their slowly bronzing bodies, and feel like I was in a Ralph Lauren commercial: Privilege by Ralph Lauren. None of us three is. Let's not get into it too much, because the yachts and sailboats and some of the expressions on young, here-since-the-Mayflower-faces can't be dented by even the most scorching cynicism. And it's too easy to vilify people for being rich. That's straight-up jealousy and ignorance verging on prejudice. Maybe they're not miserable under all that money. Maybe they live fulfilling lives. Deal with it. Oh, I got to steer the boat. Who the man? (Well, Steve, since he steered 95% of the time, but the other 5%, divided between Suzy and me, was critical).
Reaction Project 4: Man Dines with Book Faking Saturday May 27, 2010 from Wednesday June 2, 2010 Here's an appropriate introduction: From: Ian Williams I think I'll do two or three more reaction shots, then call the project complete.
Recovered memory of Ravel Faking Friday May 28, 2010 from Wednesday June 2, 2010 The second movement of his Piano Concerto in G that I mentioned a couple of days ago is also special to me because it's one of those pieces I tracked down at the music library at the University of Toronto. That library is as hard to access as an Egyptian pyramid--secret stairs and a slow elevator--but I used to love going there, loved the hardcover binding on its scores, the smell, the mobile shelving with cranks, the archaic checkout system. I haven't thought about that library in years. So many places at U of T turn me nostalgic. Folks like Jim and Joseph and I, who did undergrad and graduate degrees there, walk around campus haunted.
Finished Alan Moore's Watchmen Faking Thursday May 27, 2010 from Wednesday June 2, 2010 Don't look if you haven't read it, but the opening frames of chapter 12 are eerily silent. Pictures are always silent, genius, you say. Yeah, but these frames are visually busy, a feature which usually corresponds to some mental hubbub, while seeming conspicuously and utterly inaudible. Not even a soundtrack. How does Dave Gibbons (the illustrator) achieve this? The scale of the images is obviously unlike anything so far in the novel. The more effective device is the tentacles which slash through the frames like the diagonal of a No Smoking sign, only the slashes curve ever so gently, mournfully like willow branches. Most of them lead the eye downward. Other frames from the day: Ian runs his fastest mile yet. Ian and Fernando break in the cello and viola (Fernando's the most natural and instinctive musician I've ever seen). Ian finally films Cuff's reaction to You Know Who You Are as he (Cuff) sits in generous, blonde light and Stevie Wonder.
The Jenga tower grows, solo edition Wednesday May 26, 2010 Couch. Watchmen. Full stomach. Ceiling fan. Only a smear of light left in the sky. Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major starts playing, the second movement, adagio assai, with the slow solo piano introduction, which is possibly the most accurate portrayal of the state of loneliness as experienced by one with significant inner resources. There's no single word in English to express that combination. I'm coming to a new understanding of happiness. It's not that giddy feeling; it's quieter and more peaceful and empty handed and crisp and both intimate (there's a moment where Ravel runs out of instrument; the right hand goes so high that the note he needs has to be supplied by the listener; he leaves just the silence for us) and distant, a full-bellied consciousness. I realize that nothing of the last week has been in and of itself cause for celebration. This feeling, this state, is not dependent on anyone or anything. If it were all taken away tonight, and I found myself destitute, I would still feel like a cello.
Almost at her house, Prokofiev Tuesday May 25, 2010 God is stacking a Jenga tower of happiness in my life these days. I get to Kate's house just as Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet is finishing. Prokofiev lifts you under the arm and swings you up into the air in wide arcs, as a father might a child. This part of R&J goes from sprightliness to molasses sorrow in minutes. Behind the music, I have the memory of Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev dead on stage. Her arm hangs down over the side of the crypt, her long neck too; it seems as if her life is dripping out of her fingertips and her head, dripping downward to Nureyev, who is stiff below her. In the recording, Fonteyn has to be in her 60s though she's convincing as young Juliet. I don't know how many times I watched that video. I'd be happy enough hearing Prokofiev in an evening. But the Jenga tower grows (how ominous). I arrive and Kate's little dog, Abe (the Babe), springs on me all excited, and seems to like me. You know, to like me for me. Not like all those other dogs that just want a piece of your life insurance policy, and secretly they're doling out their affections to every stranger. Abe is all buddy-buddy, climbs up on me while I'm sitting on Kate's porch, follows us everywhere. Then we get him on his leash and walk to the lake and eat salad with our fingers and talk and talk, while--I kid you not--twenty feet away, these two guys start playing tennis in my line of vision. Perhaps in three years we will recall it in short sentences and it will trigger the details, like Prokofiev's R&J did for me just now. Remember when we were at the lake. It must have been May. And Abe needed a bath and we ate salad with our fingers in the shade.
Cello arrives in a ginormous box, leading me to film Man Opens Box, the sequel Monday May 24, 2010 She is a she. She is slimmer than I thought. Right now she's lying in her open case, exhausted after travelling from California. She hasn't said anything yet. When I came home she was standing in a large box outside my door and I apologized for keeping her waiting, but I didn't know she planned to arrive today. I carried her inside, gently. When she saw me, saw her new home, she smiled a little and nodded a shy greeting.
The summer opens up like a, like a yawn. Excuse me. Sunday May 23, 2010 What to do? What to do? Good problem to have. I started reading Watchmen and it's engrossing. Doc Manhattan is my avatar in the story. Of course, if you know me, you'd guess that now I want to try my hand at a graphic text, if only to figure out the genre. But there are many other projects to work on before I can flirt with that idea: fiction revisions to complete, reaction videos to edit, some music to finish harmonizing, a couple of websites to redesign, tons of new writing to draft.
Best line of the day Saturday May 22, 2010 When I could hold a conversation again (i.e., after my second helping of Fernando's vegan peanut butter caramel ice cream), I said, It tastes like something from my childhood. And he replied, That's because I took your childhood and put it in the ice cream.
Hitchcock's Vertigo Thursday May 20, 2010 Here's the sentiment around which the entire movie orbits: JUDY: Couldn't you like me, just me, the way I am? [...] I'll wear the darned clothes... if you'll just-- just like me. [...] If-- I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me? SCOTTIE: Yes. Yes. JUDY: All right. All right, then I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me. That's the gravitational field of many relationships. I appreciate the baldness of Scottie's reply and Judy's involuntary mimicry. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. Reading this, we--I'm going to speak for both of us--believe ourselves impervious to being changed to please some man, some woman. We've seen the talk shows. Subject to love's gravity, though, we become Judy.
Of all days to forget Wednesday May 19, 2010 I didn't remember it was my birthday, Moon says from his hotel room in Germany. Thanks for reminding me. It's about 1:00 a.m. where he is, and he wants to smoke, and I know and I know what it's like to be in a hotel room alone. All the stations are in German, he says.
The story grows during the morning run and workout Sunday May 16, 2010 Maybe it's because my blood is circulating better and reaching hitherto unknown regions of my brain that this story is coming together while running. Note to self begins. The protagonist begins the activity that launches the story because of a discouragement (one of two that I'm deciding on). His response to discouragement, as should be ours, is to work harder. And this ambition is what leads to the seven ascending rings of zaniness, then the fall.
Reaction Project 3, Fermanbook, is now up Saturday May 15, 2010 In addition to his lesser talents of inspecting the back cover of my book and growing his hair, Fernando also makes completely vegan ice cream in exotic sounding flavours--double caramel G4 technology sunlight dappled window swirl and such.
An old idea for a story returns during this morning's run and workout Friday May 14, 2010 The idea had left me like a dream in the morning, though I knew there was something like a plum being stirred around in the sludge of my unconscious. Now several months later, it bubbles up. The story inclines upward through seven stages of zaniness, then there's a devastation where comic and tragic meet (I need to figure out where they cross) because of the protagonist's poor judgment. I won't give plot points except to say the story involves working out. This post is just a note-to-self.
Think of each cut as a stroke of punctuation, Thursday May 13, 2010 suggested a film student today. It's the best advice I've had regarding the problem of transitioning from one idea/moment/scene to another in film. His comment unblocked me. Content is not enough to sustain interest. When I look at the original footage that I have, mostly medium shots or loose close ups, I yawn mentally. Art happens in the arrangement. That's why editing is the most crucial part of any art. Let me say now that these Reaction Shots are by no means high art, but they're good experimental spaces (like flash fiction or piano studies) for working out issues. My challenge has been to render 180 seconds of footage into a compressed, visually interesting mini video. My solution is to introduce disjunctions. Every few seconds, I fade in and out from black, kind of like a blink, to refocus the viewer (see the Fernando video, for the most extreme version of this). Every art needs an intermediate unit that refocuses the audience (the line in poetry, the phrase in music, a shot in film). In each experience, the audience should have the sense of multiple beginnings. It's redemptive, subliminally good for the soul.
Last day of teaching: Whitman, bpNichol, Ellen Bass Wednesday May 12, 2010 All of them are cool and all, but the most inspiring encounter this week was with Dick Proenneke, the fellow from the oft-aired-on-PBS Alone in the Wilderness, not to be confused with Into the Wild, who moved to Alaska in 1968 after his retirement and lived there (see title) until 1999! The film is made up of Proenneke's own 60s footage of his first year in the wilderness. With hand tools, he cuts down trees and builds a cabin. In a sentence, it sounds easy to do. But there are amazing scenes where he fashions a spoon out of wood (he says it so casually in the film, as if it were perfectly natural to make whatever you notice you needed), a chair and a table with some leftover scraps, and a fully functioning lock--like a lock for your door--out of wood. This man has inspired me more than anything Thoreau writes in Walden.
Why spend hours playing violin or editing a clip? Tuesday May 11, 2010 I am convinced that working creatively in other genres refreshes one's main genre. Every time I have a sustained foray into music, blogging, film making, I return to my main genres a better writer. The skills of arrangement, discipline, analysis, expression, transformation are transferrable.
Haruki Murakami's After Dark Modnay May 10, 2010 I finished reading this novel a couple of weeks ago and flagged something that one of the main characters, Takahashi, says, because two words, side by side, struck me (guess which ones): It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort. (226)
The day, taken for what it is Saturday May 8, 2010 The day I described on Thursday was one kind of ideal day, glittering with amusement. Today is another: inward and genuine and breaking and clear-eyed. [241] I like a look of Agony
Recorded a radio interview on blogging Friday May 7, 2010 It turned out to be a provocative conversation that easily could have gone another half hour. I'll post the air dates as soon as I know; it'll air in two parts. At the interview I took some video of the three of us (Jonathan Blake, host; Russell Powell, blogger; and me) as we were talking. Layer on layer of technology and irony. As we were talking about blogging, I was thinking, I've got to blog about this. At lunch, Jonathan was arguing that all this social media and interactive technology will make us more lonely individuals. People start using their Blackberries or iWhatevers to avoid engaging the people around them. I'm chewing on what he said. Russell wasn't quite sold. My present take is that social media allow us to feed ourselves a certain affirming and self-governed narrative (an autonarrative--there's a new word) of who we are; i.e., I am popular, I am witty, people want to hear from me, I am connected to them even though they are not physically present. It's the absence of the other's (physical and possibly corrective) presence that allows us to manipulate our relationship into whatever illusion we need to keep going. Thus, we establish a tacit contract, via social media, to use each other in order to perpetuate a grand fantasy, a necessary fiction. <Gasp> Was that, was that a Wallace Stevens reference? I must be crossing over.
The last three days spliced together into what could be an ideal day Thursday May 6, 2010 Begin with Tuesday morning. Awash in sunlight, Fernando and I played violin with the windows open, barefoot, then had an unhealthy lunch down the street, the guilt from which was quickly mitigated by donating the leftovers to a pleasant and appreciative homeless lady. Attach Wednesday afternoon, the day I came from a set down to win a tennis match 4-6, 6-3, 6-3. My opponent was getting cute with the drop shot followed by the lob and has now learned his lesson. But I'm prepared to continue teaching the lesson of defeat, failure, and utter humiliation. He'll get so used to failure that his very DNA will adjust, his unborn children have already been held back a year. Add Thursday evening/night with great desultory Cuff conversations that go from pop psychoanalysis to the greeting card grind (it's worse than a chicken farm, the behind-the-scenes) to his knowing every song on every station plus complimentary random fact about James Taylor being institutionalized for depression. And, of course, Price is Right sound effects. Close with laughter. I practically went to sleep laughing--I mean convulsing into tears and abdominal strain--from a book he lent me (ah, too much to quote). Put them altogether, they spell MOTHER, a word that means the world to me. (Nobody else was forced to sing that in primary school?)
Reaction Shot 2: Man Finds Self in Book Song, A Korean Drama Monday May 3, 2010 Installment 2 of the Reaction Project is now up. The premise is simple: film people's reactions as they see You Know Who You Are for the first time. Joseph and I were at BBQues on Spadina when I showed him the book. Then I had some footage from us in Amsterdam that seemed preordained to be in this video. It's all edited into a Korean Drama, minus snow, and the woman with whom J would fall in love at first sight only to learn that she has lymphoma and is also carrying his baby which might not be his for one episode but his gangster arch-nemesis Eun-Ok's although it turns out that the baby really is his though not for long as mother and baby die beautifully in the snow as he is running toward them in slow motion to beg forgiveness for questioning her fidelity.
Bellwether Prize Sunday May 2, 2010 Naomi Benaron won the Bellwether Prize for her novel Running the Rift, which deals with the Rwandan genocide; I think it's written from the POV of a Rwandan boy. Naomi's a friend--just putting it out there so you know how I roll--a friend who is now $25 000 richer. The prize seems made for her. Eligible novels should address social justice, and Naomi's bread and water are stories of difficulty and trauma and real people set against nasty political backdrops. A long time ago--because we go back a long time, hundreds and hundreds of days at least--I emailed her about the weight of her stories, slightly worried that writing such difficult material might have an adverse personal effect. She writes from points of view outside of her race/gender with incredible persuasiveness. She's got another novel in the works, by the way. I know this only because we email each other using personal accounts, so, you know, we tight. We were supposed to meet at AWP, Naomi Benaron--the Bellwether Prize winner for 2010--and I, but stuff came up. Phone calls were made to the other's secret cell phone numbers, another pertinent fact to include in a sentence as final, irrefutable evidence of my brush with greatness.
Day maker Saturday May 1, 2010 A kid at church, the one who for the last four years has been asking me to teach him piano, came up to me and said, I read your book. And my dad read it too. Then his little brother piped in, Me too. I thought they were just messing around, blocking my exit with stories until the bucket of pig's blood was ready. But then the older one said, I like "Now's the wrong time," and his younger brother said, I like "Rapunzel" and "Give it up" (by which he meant "Give up" [let it slide]). All part of my master plan for the next generation: first we'll get them to read poetry, then we'll replace their gumballs with Brussels sprouts. Huck Finn is turning in his grave.
Worcester State College Reading Faking Thursday April 29, 2010 from Monday May 3, 2010 [Deep-voiced announcer:] Three poets. One room. Bottled water. Fierce! ierce! erce! rce! [Now sound-over of lion roaring.] The event went something like that. Jackie Morrill, Dan Lewis, and I had twenty(-five) minute sets. I did my high-tech jijutsu, then Jackie did her emotionally harrowing body slams, then Dan closed with some otherworldly kungfuesque poems (there was a moon in someone's pocket). Very different, all three of us from each other, yet we worked. How? I'm not sure if Jonathan (Blake, the WSC organizer and host) planned that or if it just happened. I was losing my voice at this reading, which made me sound much more damaged than I am. Sure, I've been talking a lot for the last three days, but I've never had a delicate-lily kind of voice. Part of the loss must have been psychosomatic--the pressure on language, on saying/not saying.
Southborough Library Reading or You're the poetry man, ya ya ya ya Faking Wednesday April 28, 2010 from Monday May 3, 2010 After the reading, Judy (Budz) hosted a little after party. Judy lives in a magazine--whole walls of windows, warm wood, pebbles, posh decor, a sense of old and new things in conversation. The very books looked smart, like they had agreed on some dress code among themselves. (The reading itself was full of intelligent faces and good, genuine conversation about poetry. We did some work at knocking down the damage of the Modernists. One woman said, Tonight, for the first time, I feel like I understand poetry.) The gathering afterward was intimate. I know people bandy that word around a lot, but the afterparty felt like there was a fire going and we were wearing our human bodies as opposed to our academic ones. Before actually going into the house and having cheesecake, Judy's husband, John, had something to show me in his studio. So he led me in and told me to sit and then he dropped the needle on a record (all literal, yes those still exist) and up starts Phoebe Snow's "Poetry Man." Whenever the line, "You're the poetry man," came around, John grinned and he pointed at me.
Ah, thinking about it now, I get that pre-crying feeling. Of course, now that song is forever associated with sitting on a stool in his dark studio and being the poetry man. It was like wearing a cone-shaped birthday hat. Talk to me some more.
You Know Who You Are Launch, Toronto Faking Monday April 26, 2010 from Monday May 3, 2010 The book's entrance into my life was like a baby's. You've seen the video, the preciousness, the delight. You haven't seen the tender stroking at late hours or the occasional peep into its makeshift crib. This launch event was like a wedding then. Except for the bride. Unless You Know Who You Are is both bride and baby, which is too Woody Allen for me. So no bride. By wedding I mean the sense of celebration from a core group of people I--eee--love. It was this weird crossing of various strands of life, from the faithfuls (parents and assorted Js) to family friends to high school best friend (Jen) to artistic soul mate (Irina) to a U of T prof to fellow poets (Steve McOrmond and Richard Lemm) to names I've heard but never met (Matthew Tierney). And everyone's so happy for you, with a genuine and completely selfless joy, that in turn makes you do odd things like hug people you don't normally hug. Somewhere the subject of the sentence turned from you to I. There's a distancing effect of so much focus and goodwill directed at you/I (youi?). Detach and observe instead of inhabit and live. I wish I could package all that--eee--love into little Prozac-sized capsules. Helps too that the light in the bookstore was like a Florentine sunset. Definitely, here's the grade-eight-essay-ending, this evening was one of the highlights of my life. Thank you. (Who?) C'mon, don't make me pun. (You know you want to.) It's cheesy. (Just say who that thank you was meant for.) You know who you are. (Atta boy!)
Sunday morning with the Toronto Star and 680 News Sunday April 25, 2010 The life. I've done this for so many years, without gratitude. Lesson: there's some tiny, faithful thing in our lives that we should celebrate before its absence.
Getting married, bought a condo, moving back to Ottawa, son is learning violin, going to Berlin for seven months Saturday April 24, 2010 Them's the updates from friends.
Reaction Shots Friday April 23, 2010 Because you can't always trust what people say, I've started recording the faces of folks as they see the collection for the first time. This is the best kind of review, the faces of an audience, of readers. I want access to that pure stimulus, unfiltered by language, and I'd like to preserve that here so you can see each reaction first hand. That way the work of interpretation is always yours. I got the reaction-shot idea from Kafka. There's a scene in part 1 of The Metamorphosis, where Gregor emerges from his room and understands, I argue, the true extent of his monstrosity by the reactions of his family and boss. Yesterday, Jared (Roberts, book designer) and I had lunch at a diner, and after holding him in suspense for much of the morning, I showed him the collection. And--well, here's the point, I don't have to tell you how he responded because you'll be able to see it for yourself. In a few days. When I get around to editing the video. Yes, I'm aware that I'm still manipulating the info you receive. But, this isn't forensics, yo.
Canada is my favourite (favoUrite) movie Faking Thursday April 22, 2010 from Friday April 23, 2010 I love so much about this country: the lighting in the morning, the set design of neatly constructed streets, the mandatory K.D. Lang "Miss Chatelaine" that's on the soundtrack in every supermarket, the French subtitled translations, the award-winning performances of Canadians. I'm in Canada for a few days. The Canadian launch of You Know Who You Are is at 7:00 p.m. on Monday in downtown Toronto. See you there? I thought too late of deceiving an American friend by getting him in my car with a story that we were going for lunch or something then kidnapping him and driving to the airport where I'd have a flight reservation ready for the both of us. That would be a good plot. Always the moment of beginning the descent into Toronto sets off endorphins. And the lower the plane gets, the higher the level. Things come into focus: the cluster of buildings in downtown Toronto or Mississauga, the 427 or 401 highways from the sky, the industrial area, the Air Canada tails on all the airplanes. Yes, and more than a little pathetically, I took video of everything from the plane window. In a few days, you'll see clouds and Boston from the air and Toronto by night and anything else that I in my nerdy excitement found interesting today (actually yesterday).
"Moctor" Faking Wednesday April 21, 2010 from Friday April 23, 2010 My Master's thesis student defended successfully her thesis on Kerouac's On the Road. One of my minor word projects is to provide folks with Master's degrees the dignity of a title. Moctor is my suggestion. The term is especially appropriate in the humanities where, before your degree can be conferred, you must demonstrate acceptable levels of cynicism and derision for anything in the "real" world. Those "quotations" are also "evidence" of 80s, 90s, or 00s graduate "training." Soon enough you put them around empty space, or " " to be more precise.
You Know Who You Are reading at Fitchburg State College Faking Tuesday April 20, 2010 from Friday April 23, 2010 Eve Rifkah and I had a joint release event for our books this afternoon in the best lit spot on campus. Because I'm faking the date of this post, I'm hardened now, but that reading was difficult(ish) for me. The emotional-difficulty level depends on what I choose to read, the length of the reading, and how much I invest emotionally. In 2008, for example, after the reading at the Center for Teaching and Learning at FSC, I crashed almost immediately on getting home and did not wake up until the next morning. Now I can dash off details in an offhand way. Good attendance. Attentive audience. Folks were moved. Courtney cried. Good light outside. I used images and text to compliment our readings. No tech problems. The slides were timed precisely. Cuff handled a lot of the details, such as book sales and probably some form of mind control over the audience to keep it looking interested. He also took video and photos (TBPosted). There are a couple of photos where I seem so far away, floating near the edge of the frame like a bamboo in a Japanese ink drawing.
Beethoven's Grosse Fugue Faking Monday April 19, 2010, Patriots' Day, from Friday April 23, 2010
Well that's one way to get folks to stop reading. Now here's some dirt. Actually, I really want to talk about the fugue. I discovered it recently and it's one of my new favourite things (Oprah moment there; let's scream and wave our hands in the air for Grosse Fugue). It's maddening and insistent and relentless. There's a long section where all the instruments are just screaming. Deaf Beethoven (he wrote it near the end of his life) just wants to hear something at this point. The fugue seems to mock him, yet he also exerts masterful authority over the music. On one hand, the music says you'll never hear this no matter how loud you write it (fff! triple forte! can you believe it?) and Beethoven says to (the) music, you'll never be able to understand yourself. When you watch quartets playing the fugue, you get the sense that it's still more complex than they think it is. Just on a purely sonic level, the music sounds so contemporary, not late Romantic, but like something out of the last century. It has that idiosyncrasy and slight randomness and noisiness of atonal music, but it's tonal. It seems the full expression of what music can do. Bach too was taken by fugues at the end of his life. Chopin's late compositions also have a kind of freedom, or sense of one glimpsing the afterworld of music. The middle of the Barcarolle, for instance, where the key changes from F# major to F# minor, that zone of harmonic stasis, is the rhythm of mortality. We come back to forms near the end of our artistic careers? We do our most successful expansions of forms after we've messed around? We all end up like the prodigal son, back in our father's house, repentant? Anyway, you've read this far. Good for you. Depending on your musical tastes, you're luckier than Cuff who had to sit through loop after loop of Grosse Fugue in the background while fixing a salad.
After some star watching, late thought Faking Friday April 16, 2010 from Friday April 23, 2010 What if one went one's entire life without ever being loved? Not the obligatory love of blood, but romantic love. Discuss.
You Know Who You Are now exists as a physical object Thursday April 15, 2010 My books arrived recently. I took video of myself opening the box. This is what lonely people do. The book is beauuuuu-ti-ful. I put a hat on its head and tiny socks on its feet then I put it next to other books as part of beauty contest. It rubbed cheeks with David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and now it's napping on top of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. Check out the cinematic masterpiece of a documentary, Man Opens Box, to witness the moment.
To say a deep and liquid thing Wednesday April 14, 2010 I'm back to considering the stars. A little bit each night, I'm learning a new language that has no words. It's not even like music. It seems dependent on silence and solitude. How then to put it into words?
6-0 Monday April 12, 2010 After a tennis demolition (more in a sec), I was driving home with my humiliated opponents (hang on), listening to the classical station and trying to figure out whose music was playing. It sounded sometimes like Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, then other times like Mozart. But it was Mendelssohn. Of course. I've never been able to identify his music. He's so--and maybe I haven't listened enough to appreciate his genius and I'm factoring out the child prodigy business--generic. Like an overly classical Romantic or a muddy classical composer. I was saying this in the car, and one of the guys put it better: So Mendelssohn is like the Nickelback of classical music. That's right. Tennis story. Two on one. A couple of twenty-two-year-olds on one side; I on the other. One of them I call the Tower of Power. See the score above? They got schooled with my rusty game, lots of trash talk, and once a Serena-Williams-style stare down after a love game won entirely on my service points. So I guess if I won and they lost--and I hope they're reading--that makes them losers, right? Like, scientifically, we could classify them as losers.
Denver afterthought Saturday April 10, 2010 Denver, you're all right. You're a little swirl of contemporaneity. Man, horse, and bus share the same street, like three points in time superimposed on each other. The simultaneity of lives on this planet overwhelms me. Happening now, happening now, billions of people are reverberating. There's a guy who's driving back from the Denver airport tonight, alone for the first time in the court-ordered ten days, now that his kids are flying back to their mother. That's just one. Consider all the harmonies that are happening now as people live and live, and the accumulated history of all that living. It's infinitely more difficult to follow than Bach counterpoint. (Yes, I'm revising a story that deals with this. It's in the middle section of next year's book.)
Denver, AWP Friday April 9, 2010 The best part of AWP is the book fair, and the best part of the book fair aren't the books, but the people. The mood of the conference is much more relaxed than MLA, so I hope search committees don't turn AWP into an interview zone. It'll damage the ecosystem. There is a touch of MLA, if I'm being perfectly honest, because, as a friend put it, "Look around. Everyone here has a manuscript. These people are your competition." In addition to the book fair, AWP has readings and panel sessions. The panel I hurried to this morning was on David Foster Wallace as a non-fiction writer. It was more academic (tonally) than I thought it would be, which is fine because that's my training and a good part of what I do, but lots of folks just walked out as the panelists were reading. Left turn: I respect DFW for his massive intelligence and his quirks, but mostly for his ability to find a form suited to the way his mind moves (i.e., to develop a voice), and so when people imitate him, they miss the point; his genius is not in the footnotes, the big words, or the long sentences, but in the perfect congruence between his thought and his language. That was my point during the Q&A when a guy asked who is DFW's successor. To get a sense of what the book fair is like, imagine that you were inside a Walmart where the shelves were replaced by tables full of books, and each nine-foot table held a different press, literary journal, or organization. As you make your way from one table to the next with a sack on your shoulder--everyone with the same sack that comes as part of the registration fee--people give you bookmarks and journals and brightly colored pieces of paper and chocolate and buttons, as if they were courting you. The literary journal editors aren't really sure why they're being so nice to people they usually reject by form letter, and we writers aren't really sure why we keep taking things and looking, but the structure seems pre-established, and we do what we do out of a mechanical sense of decorum. And so once I understood that, and grew dissatisfied with that, I found myself caring less about the product-pushing than about the product-pushers. People who work these booths get tired of their cages, and if you hit them at the right time in their simmering frustration (one fellow, for instance, had a different beer every time I went back to his booth), they're nearly dangerous to engage. Sometimes there's someone waiting for you, looking at you before you see him. And, arriving at his booth, you feel like you've already met each other. It's the kind of person who briefly allows you to sustain the fantasy that you are looking into a mirror.
Denver Thursday April 8, 2010 I got my French wish, thanks to Denver, so the city's A-OK in my books. I slept six inches under the sky this morning while a cute Asian kid, practicing her penmanship in the seat next to me, talked steadily to her mother. It was dark under my eyelids, but blastingly bright over flat middle America (like middle Earth), so the entire wish was satisfied, though not how I imagined. First time on Jet Blue. First time this far west. Unless you count the flights to Asia. We had the worst turbulence I've sat through since a terrifying night flight from Osaka to Incheon, where the flight attendant dropped to the ground and a whole slew of passengers assumed the death pose--hands crossed to opposite shoulders, chests on their thighs. Honestly, I don't mind turbulence. In fact, I usually hope for some, to shake things up a bit (har, knee slap). It's neat, right, figuring out a city, riding its public transit, sizing up its rough neighborhoods. After the volcanic ash of the past few days, finding a 711 and place for dinner unmolested is a triumph of Napoleonic scale. I got back to my hotel room (which I always look forward to--small things, like maybe the bathroom will have a curved shower rod so I'll have a few extra cubic inches of space in there) and did a cross between WWE victory-celebration, Elvis knee bend, and starting-chainsaw fist pump. When I went back out, this time to Office Depot, I asked the local Denverene/ite/onion employee what was interesting around here. He said I should go see the Lakers/Nuggets game tonight, gave me full directions to the Pepsi Center and everything, and I said to him, I was more thinking along the lines of pens? Where do you have good 0.7 mm liquid-ink pens? The Denverene did tell me about the Tattered Cover Bookstore and City Grill, "like the 7th best burger joint in America according to some ranking thing," and a kind of mall street that has free transit, so I'll check out one or more of those places tomorrow after reading at AWP. That's why I'm here, by the way. Sorry to make it seem incidental. Tomorrow's the big day.
Ce soir, je voudrais dormir six pouces sous le ciel Sunday April 4, 2010 avec un visage tourné ŕ moi et un voix constant qui parle dans le noir.
After two weeks of reading Thoreau and the soul-urgency of yesterday Saturday April 3, 2010 I found myself alone last night in a parking lot, looking up at the stars. The answer is yes.
Easter Friday April 2, 2010 Sometime around three o'clock, I was forced down into a nap, and just now I woke up with sun in my face, insistent sun, and the grave music of "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" tuning the mood of the evening. Workwise, I'm still writing the non-fiction piece about prison. Having lunch with a friend on a bench in the sun, I thought of the guys in prison, crossing the patchy courtyard in pairs. They have names, every one of them. They enjoy the sun on their foreheads as much as anyone. There it is again, the hymn, "O Sacred Head Now Wounded." |
