imperfect offering

but i’m not done!!!

now I’m done!!!

I’m having one of those convergence moments- you know, when everything you read, see, talk about, dream connects in some serendipitous way? what’s truly exciting about this is that it means that my brain has been freed up to play a bit. it was rusty at first, but i’m warming up, baby! and god, it feels good.

that’s not to say i’ve got any grand announcements to make. just excited pointing gestures. like reading the interview on avant gaming iowa review web’s latest issue on “space and place in new media writing,”just before picking up darren o’ donnell’s (2 r’s, 2 n’s, 2 l’s) social acupuncture (1 c, 1 p), and then going out and watching beloved ex-rheo dave clark extend his improvised drum solo into and onto thesocial space of the audience. need to throw in lisa robertson’s value village essay into the mix, except I don’t have it. wasn’t able to get one at the launch, for reasons to tedious to explain here, and have struck out at 2 bookstores now. and coach house seems to have abandoned? restricted? their tip the author policy. no potlatch for you!

also finding a lot to think about in darren’s book re: the politics of discomfort. i’ve been circling around the pedagogy of discomfort for a while now, and after skooled, i’ve got a fresh perspective on it. jury’s still out, though.

saw a lot of very pretty books yesterday at art metropole. recorded a lot of “ooh and ahhh” sounds emanating from our excited selves. took home postcard reproductions of a work by heidi neilson, which was conceptually like this, but looks more like this, and reminds me of this, which I heard about from him.

what i’m up to these days

the flaming shitbag icon:

I didn’t go home from This Ain’t The Rosedale Library empty handed. I picked up The Language of Inquiry, a collection of meditations by Lyn Hejinian on potery and poetics, mostly previously published pieces. A LOT to digest here. A lot on and about and around and beside stein. And a lot of helpful stuff about issues that never seem to go away. Wish I’d read the piece called “Who’s speaking?” a few months ago, as it raises questions about the formation of communities, the power of speech and silence and silencing within those communities. The text is based on a talk she’d given at a panel in 1983; Johanna Drucker was one of the other participants. Some ideas that got me excited:

“To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capaqcity to acknowledge what others among them are doing.”

“The question ‘Who is speaking?’ implies, then, yet another question: ‘Who is listening?’ Consideration of how speaking is being heard and what is being heard in and of it involves another address ti power. Listening accords power to speech. It grants it its logic by discovering logic in it. In listening as in speaking, both meaningfulness and meaning are at stake. To trace the lines of reciprocity through which they are established is to map a social space, a community.”

fabulous chat with a.raw yesterday about podcast possibilities, made even more fabulous by sitting at Kalendar, lazily sipping a concoction dreamt up by one of their bartenders called, “the Jag.” The main ingredients were chartreuse and a mysterious entity known as “lemon myrtle,” which the interner tells me is a herb indigenous to australia, and which i predict will be the new lemon grass. We’re going to see this thing everywhere- tea, essential oils, soaps, shampoos, soups and salads. But trendspotting aside, this drink knocks the mojito out of the park for summer drinking pleasure. and as i meandered my way home with a pleasant, heady buzz, I reflected, for about the gazillionth time this summer, how much I miss life during the year, all the little incidental pleasures. Having a second drink when I go out (IF i go out) during the year is a calculated affair: “do I have work to do when I get home?” “do I have an early morning meeting?” etc. A third drink is a pricey transgression. But it’s not just having the freedom to kil a few brain cells now and then. Even my weekly day off during the year is parcelled out and portioned off, and planned to get the most out of it.

It’s been amazing to me how much time doing nothing takes. Since coming back from skooled, aside from the cottage adventure, I haven’t done much. And yet my days have been full. I can go to every reading/music show I want to see, and then sleep in the next day should I need to. I can actually read the book I buy at the reading- not just shelve it for some mythical day when I have time. I can read every post on every blog should i want to. I can reply to every e-mail. I can visit with friends. I can wash the floor. I can get things fixed. I can cook a great meal AND do the dishes afterwards. I can take a walk. I can read the paper. and that’s a day. I haven’t even had time to play video games.

is this just the cost of any professional life? or is it particular to teaching and other jobs that follow you home when you leave the office? i just about bit the head off a taxi driver yesterday who told me that I had THREE months off in the summer. This is the most relaxed I’ve been in years, and yet I still had a teacher dream last week. And I know august will bring more, and I’ll start my planning then. (though I have extended my self-imposed ban on planning to include the 1st week of august.)

I *have* scaled down my commitments for next year. There is a pressure towards martyrdom in the profession that’s easy to fall victim to, if you’re not careful. Maybe I’ll be able to live in a less frenetic way.

one of the highlights of skooled for me was rock school, where i got to strap on a bass for the first time and kick it old school. (best compliment ever: one of the crew said there were shades of iggy pop in my performance.) part of our transformation from teachers into rockers was accomplished by our lovely stylists, Ditsy and M*ily from Mittens. The picture of them at top right was taken at skooled, just after their own performance. Ditsy and M*ily were such a delight- pure, unabashed enthusiasm of the kind you can only find in a 16 year old girl. They reminded me of a line from a PK Page poem, “Nothing, not even the threate of punishment, can suppress the giggle of a girl.” They just bubbled over at everything. I was even more impressed when I came across this line in their bio on another page: “we are probably the girls you laugh at and make fun of, but we don’t give a sh*t. It just gives us more to write about.”

more girl rock last weekend at Metric’s Dog Day Afternoon, which was stinkin hot, so it was hard to truly relax and enjoy the earlier parts of the show. I’d definitely go to see land of talk and holy fuck again. but metric’s performance was worth the price of admission alone. They played a track from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” before appearing on stage, which set me up just right. Watching Emily Haines rock out, I felt eased out of twinge the regret I’d always felt after Sarah Harmer put Weeping Tile to bed in favour of the singer-songwriter mode of the solo female artist. Don’t get me wrong- nobody does it better. I just want a little less Lilith Fair. A little more Patti Smith. Got warm all over at the sight of a 12 year old girl in a sun-protective hat, stepping back and forth, completely out of time to the music, a quiet, almost meditative adoration of Haines, while her father ( i presume) stood a few protective rows back.

and then there’s girl’s rock summer camp.