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Books of the Day: Governor General's Awards (Canada)

FICTION
Kate Pullinger, London (originally from Cranbrook, B.C.), The Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Company)
POETRY
David Zieroth, North Vancouver, The Fly in Autumn (Harbour Publishing)
DRAMA
Kevin Loring, Vancouver, Where the Blood Mixes (Talonbooks)
NON-FICTION
M.G. Vassanji, Toronto, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Doubleday Canada)
CHILDREN’s LITERATURE (text)
Caroline Pignat, Ottawa, Greener Grass: The Famine Years (Red Deer Press)
CHILDREN’s LITERATURE (illustration)
Jirina Marton, Colborne, ON, Bella’s Tree (text by Janet Russell; (Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press)
TRANSLATION
Susan Ouriou, Calgary, Pieces of Me (English translation of La liberté? Connais pas by Charlotte Gingras; Kids Can Press)

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You make me feel like sitting on a pink incandescent block of cast glass

Have you gone to see the Roni Horn exhibit yet at the Whitney?   It makes me feel like I lost a wing in Arkansas.  It makes me want to own my own ant farm.  It makes me ache to read Emily Dickinson.  It makes me feel like sitting on a pink incandescent block of cast glass.  It makes me want to create my very own personal black hole.  It makes me want to tell Nancy Pelosi to get a new haircut.  It makes me think that Nature is in fact antique.  It makes me want to describe the colour of the river.  It makes me want to take pictures of your face and transpose them on pictures of other faces.  It makes me want to become instantaneously sepia.   

You better go see the Roni Horn.   

You better go to this as well:  

Special UDP Event: 6X6 PARTY

Thursday, November 19, 7:30pm
Celebrate issues #18 and #19
with readings by Maureen Thorson, Jules Cohen, Lee Norton, John Surowiecki, John High, and John Coletti.
Live music by Frank Hoier and Holy Spirits.

@ Shelton Walsmith's Studio
267 Douglass St., Brooklyn (map)
Free

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Book of the Day: Whatever Steven Karl is Reading

Yes, those are my favourite yellow sneakers with the laces that are forever coming undone.

Did I just leave my telephone in that apartment with the black cat, the bonsai trees and the hats strewn across the wall?  10:30 a.m. and bleary-eyed I showed up at J.'s apartment and left with these books:

Paradise by Donald Barthelme 
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Louise Varese)
The Bite of the Night, Howard Barker
Erotisme, George Bataille
Watchfiends & Rack Screams, Antonin Artaud

I have been leaving my phone in the most inopportune of places; yesterday I found it in the freezer.  On Friday I left it by the cash register in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art.  But alas, here it is beside me; the black cat did not keep it hostage.

***

I know of a reading, yes I do.

The Bushwick Reading Series
November 14th, 2009
Bushwick Library
Bushwick Avenue @ Siegel Street, 3-5 pm.

Martin Rock
Eve Bates
Jen Bartman
Steven Karl

Click on Steven's name to see what's on his reading list.  
He also has more reading recommendations  up at No Tell Motel

Shout!  Shout!

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Book of the Day, Quartet

Merteuil:  Valmont.  I believed your passion for me died.   Why this sudden fire again?   and with such youthful force.  However, it's too late.  You won't ignite my heart anymore.  Not once again.  Never more. (...) Don't take your hand away.  It's not that I am feeling anything for you.  It is my skin that remembers.  Or perhaps it doesn't matter to it--I am talking about my skin, Valmont...to what kind of animal the instrument of its lust is attached, hand or claw.

It is fitting that this evening J. put the photocopied papers in my hand, Quartet, written in 1981, before she was born most probably, that she should put those papers in my hand today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Written by Heiner Müller, formerly East German, we saw "Quartett" yesterday at BAM, directed by Robert Wilson, a phantasmal drama bereft of cloying sentimentality but which exudes all the nuances of passion.  Starring demigoddess Isabelle Huppert (my favourite actress by a landslide) and Ariel Garcia Valdès, this drama (based on Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”) will terrify and titillate.   Horror, violence and lust in the most intimate of human realms.  An act of defiance, this piece, such residue of love.

Residue only, which reeks.  Have you had a love affair like that?  All that is left is the stench of memory, a brutal pile of regrets.  Yes, you must remember.  At the beginning of the drama Isabelle Huppert struts out in her indigo dress, her body a monument of despair.  Do you sometimes think of death?  Body which is the lifeless vehicle of a tainted love, the grip of flesh.

 Merteuil:  You are going to pieces, Valmont, you're becoming sentimental.  Virtue is an infectious disease.  What is that thing, our soul.  A muscle or mucous membrane.  What I am afraid of is the night of the bodies...

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Question of the day: Have you ever been to Moose Jaw?

Last C.W. asked me, "Are you sure you're not from Moose Jaw?"  The question was so unexpected that I faltered, "Well, um, um, no." Pause.  "But I have been there." Have I ever really been to Moose Jaw?  It is likely, since we used to drive cross-Canada in a gargantuan box-shaped blue van, the kind they don't make anymore since the rise of Sport Utility Vehicles and minivans.   I have been to Regina, and Saskatoon, but Moose Jaw?  I have a vague recollection that I used to have a pen-pal in Moose Jaw that I met in summer camp in the Muskokas; Shannon was her name, it seems like every girl friend I had in the eighties was named Shannon.  Strange.  Was Shannon a popular girl's name in Canada during that decade?  And what does someone from Moose Jaw look like?  If I say, "I grew up in rural Ontario", does it follow that the next question would be "Are you sure you're not from Moose Jaw?"  Are there people who look like me in Moose Jaw?  I googled Moose Jaw people, and this is what Google gave me:

Is there a resemblance?  There is actually a Wikipedia page called "People from Moose Jaw".  Did you know that Brent Gilchrist is from Moose Jaw?  I don't know very many people on that list.

In any case, it was a fine evening.  Hila Ratzabi and I discussed her new book, her reading series and Samuel Menashe.  Sue wore an indigo dress, Nick wore dapper glasses, Steven Karl and Lila talked opera with me, R. and I went to B-sides where a man said to me, "You're wearing red shoes on a Monday night?  That's making a statement, GIRL!  That's saying you don't f-ing care what anyone says."  

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Book of the Day, Friedrich Hölderlin

I used to collect pictures of clouds.  Back when a photograph was something you could hold in the hand like a soda or a coin.  I have a photo album comprised of nothing but cloud photos, in fact.  A photo album of nothing but beds.  A photo album of nothing but one summer in Southern France.  A photo album of skating rinks.  A photo album full of clouds.

There was rare a cloud in the sky today.  A halcyon afternoon, one could call it.  K. and I and a pit bull and a rottweiler and a baby walking up and down the crooked avenues talking about what it would be like to own a brownstone.  I wanted one with tiny stained glass windows; K. liked the one with the modern statue in the window staring at the antique statue in the other window.  I don't know how we found the bookstore café with the beautiful lady in the head scarf who made fresh lemon pound cake and stocked her bookshelves only with non-American books by non-American authors.  Where in America would I ever find another bookstore like this one?    

I bought the book of the day there, Hyperion, doesn't that word make you think of Scriabin?  Hyperion, a satellite of Saturn, the sixteenth closest to the planet, discovered in 1848, Hyperion, a Titan of Greek mythology, Hyperion, by Friedrich Holderlin.  Once when I was foolish I spent an evening in Tübingen, where Hölderlin once lived in a tower overlooking the river, writing poems.

There are great hours in life.  We gaze up at them as at the colossal figures of the future and of antiquity, we fight a glorious battle with them, and if we persevere against them, they become like sisters and do not abandon us.

Hyperion to Bellarmin, Friedrich Hölderlin

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Triptych Readings: Charles Wright, Vijay Seshadri, Ana Božičević

Monday, November 9, 7:00pm. 11th St. Bar (510 East 11th Street, between Avenues A&B)

Join us to hear Charles Wright (author of nineteen book of poems and winner of Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize), Vijay Seshadri (author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow, winner of James Laughlin Prize), and Ana Božicevic. We are also celebrating Charles Wright's new book, Sestets, and Ana's just released first book, Stars of the Night Commute.

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I purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips

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Book of the Day, The Sorrow and The Fast of It

 I notice a boundary around breathing.  The dogs notice it first in the sag of a half-eaten espalier.  A garden grown down into an earth that rejects it.  I understand it as the place where the head detaches.  It doesn't hover so much as soar.  But this is inconsequential.  What matters more are the palpitations of the sleeping creatures for whom there is no atmosphere.  The green of the fabric on my arm is closest to sensuous.  Without the ploughed follicle of dirt nor the abruptness.  It was not the sea that parted but a plate of bone hafted to a screen of skin.  The water passed and the light with it and someone wrote it on paper thin.  The earth was framed and none could enter.

I am plying now the grimmest part of language.  A stern made foremost for bending for binding.  Tomes and tomes of liberty ill conceived.

 This sentence then.  How will you bear it?  

from "The Sorrow and the Fast of It", Nightboat Books 2007, by Nathalie Stephens.  

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