Edison's dandruff

In light of the phasing out of the incandescent light bulb and due to May Day poet Regan Taylor's re-iteration of the National Post's write-a-limerick-about-light-bulbs contest, I've been reading through the various fonts of information on Thomas Alva Edison on-line.

I came up with a found poem that attempted to parse the silences and sound of Morse Code, particularly knowing that Edison was mostly deaf, but have been compelled to learn more about Edison generally.

Part of what's catching and keeping my attention is how very odd Edison seems to have been...and so, I had to share this bit on the connection between literature and the body, from Edison's diary:

Menlo Park, N.J.
Sunday July 12 1885

Awakened at 8:15 am. Powerful itching of the head, lots of white dry dandruff – what is this d—mnable material. Perhaps it is the dust from the dry literary matter I’ve crowded into my noddle lately. It’s nomadic, gets all over my coat, must read about it in the Encyclopedia.

Smoking too much makes me nervous – much lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits – holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havanna curl.

Arose at 9 o’clock came down stairs expecting twas too late for breakfast – twasn’t. Couldn’t eat much, nerves of stomach too nicotinny.

The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan’s principal agent Dysepepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.

-It has just occurred to me that the brain may digest certain portions of food, say the ethereal part, as well as the stomach – perhaps dandruff is the excreta of the mind – the quantity of this material being directly proportional to the amount of reading one indulges in.

A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit.

Heh...

most amusing...

Since I haven't been busy enough on the business end of things of late, I was mortified, earlier this week, to find myself without a single submission out in the world.

So I spent a good chunk of tonight pawing through various web-based hoards of calls, contests, and markets.

I knew Greenboathouse Books, publishers of bee-oo-tiful limited-edition handmade chapbooks, wouldn't be accepting new submissions until June, but I thought maybe they'd have their Variant project going again...

No such luck, but this note made me chortle...and if it's good enough to make me laugh out loud, it's good enough for you, the faithful and yet faceless readers of this blog (all six of you):

Second important warning:

There used to be a nice note here warning authors of rhymed, centre-justified 'poetry' to steer clear, but it didn't seem to be doing any good, so let's take these gloves off, shall we?

If you've never published but are convinced you have "a unique voice," if you "love poetry" but don't read (contemporary Canadian) poetry, if your manuscript has anything to do with gods or goddesses of any kind, or any interest in the contemporary urban existential dilemma, or maybe it's a lovely exploration of your political perspective on the environment, or champions the simple honesty of the unemployed logger, if it has even a hint of empty, clichéd metaphors or nonsense about poetry being "a pursuit of truth," or if you're thinking of including a photograph of your children or pets — if your manuscript has even the slightest whiff of any of these odours, please don't send it to us.

Oh, and no "The This of That" titles, please, they're getting tired (The Subtlety of Butterflies, The Burden of Loneliness, The Groan of Precious Titles).

Some will read this rant and find it insulting, possibly offensive, and that will simply mean it's doing its job, but more likely it still won't be harsh enough.

in retreat

Nearly two years ago, I spent a month in Scotland 'in retreat' at Hawthornden Castle...except that every morning three or four of us would drive down to the village.

I bought a couple of lambswool sweaters at the second hand shop just off the main drag, surprised by the coolness of the mornings (and also of the early afternoons, even in June).

I bought cider at the grocery store across the street for the fridge in the lounge, where we gathered for pre-dinner drinks, for those days when I couldn't face drinking sherry again.

The others browsed for cigarettes, Red Bull (and Red Bull derivatives), and beer.

But mostly, we made the trip to Bonnyrigg for the six computers with internet access in the library, because none of us could afford (figuratively and financially) to let go of the world, even for a month.

It was at one of these computers that I learned that David Raphael Scott was commissioning a poem from me for his commissioned choral music piece.

I spent the next few months working on that poem, agonizing over the difference, to me, between lyrics and lines of poetry.

Scott had requested five stanzas of approximately four lines each. I wound up giving him a piece that sprawled across three pages but also the page - and told him he should take from it what he could.

The result was Tranquility and Order (listen to it here), which had its world premiere at the 2006 Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival.

I was able to attend several rehearsals of the piece, with Scott and alone, and sat in the third row for the performance.

And so, entering this piece, from the Guardian Unlimited (oh how I love the Guardian Unlimited!), was almost exactly like walking into that small village library with a Russian translator to one side and a Romanian poet to the other.

Here's an excerpt:

For a poet, nothing quite matches the complex feelings on hearing one's words set to music: delight or disappointment, furtive rage, swelling pride, open horror, a sense of being completely misunderstood or wildly undervalued - or perhaps some kaleidoscopic mix of all these elements.

rockhound

In an effort to name and number my various preoccupations - some of which leak into my overarching preoccupation, writing, some of which don't - I've recently gotten a membership with the Manitoba Naturalists Society.

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture on flowering parasitic plants, after a winter of noticing pine cone galls on the willows in Assiniboine Forest, those days it was nice enough to walk.

Next it'll be a workshop on identifying rocks and minerals.

After that, two more workshops on ferns.

And it goes without saying that the hours alone, where I'm taken up by the flickering slides (and even the earnest questions afterwards), are almost as valuable to me as the information...

imperfect knowledge

This snippet, from a Guardian Review reprint of a Susan Sontag essay written just before her death in 2004, seems to me to be exactly exactly right:

I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world."

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer's virtue.

For instance: "Be serious." By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn't preclude being funny.

[...]

A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.

But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days ... ) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge - albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.

slow pleasurable slog

My mother often introduces me to her cronies (and once, to my horror, to another writer) as a 'professional writer.'

By which I think she means 'a writer who is has been published AND paid for her work.'

Which is harmless enough, I suppose, but EVERY SINGLE TIME I have to remind myself not to scowl openly, as much from the (ick bad) maternal boasting as from the distinction she seems to be making.

Invariably, mid-introduction, my mother gives me the squinty look that says 'you're scowling openly.'

But whatever my status as a writer (intramural? midget league? semi-pro?), I do consider myself to be a good amateur reader - at least of fiction.

As such, my reading falls into several categories, a few of which I have decided to describe whilst my daughter bathes and is bathed in the other room.

There are the books I read at top speed, that I consume rather than read.

There is no noticing here, no at-a-distance observation of themes; this is quick and dirty reading, and it doesn't seem to matter whether or not the writing is high or low or somewhere in between.

That said, this type of book is usually brought into the house by my partner. He reads a wide swath of genre fiction, from mystery to thriller to crime to fantasy. He is also a niche market in and of himself, willing to purchase and read any number of books of non-fiction on China.

He also acts as a filter. When I hear him making noises of appreciation over a particular book or author, I pay attention...and pick up the books once he's thrown them over his shoulder, Friar Tuck-like (Rocket Robin Hood reference, anyone?).

As such, I blazed through (consuming and being consumed by) Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the first three Jasper Fforde books, and the first three of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.

These books made me gritty-eyed with fatigue (making me stay up late), they made me crabby in the face of banal conversation (when I could have been reading...), but most of all, they made me glad.

To be so completely possessed by a character, a setting, a story is to be reminded why I enjoy literature - the reading as well as the writing of it, both of which are capable of taking me up out of the tangle and dust of my day to day life.

In a similar vein, I often find myself returning to the comfort of much-loved books, though recently it's been much-loved authors.

The practice is much like re-upholstering a favorite chair. You need to paint and paper yourself with the particular arrangement of words and ideas that distinguishes each writer and to enter these books is akin to sitting at your table at your cafe - the landscape is familiar and still somehow different every time.

As such, I recently found myself re-reading all of Neil Gaiman's novels.

Though American novelist Jane Smiley is a recent discovery, I have found a similar space in her books and so have been taking them like tonics - most recently A Thousand Acres and At Paradise Gate.

A second category of reading includes books whose content is so episodic or so dense that it would be impossible to read them in one go or even in the course of several days.

On-going examples include Margaret Laurence-Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters (Selected Correspondence) and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle respectively.

These books need much gnawing at the ideas they contain, and are best suited for an hour in a chair pushed into the wash of late afternoon sunlight or the forty or so minutes when the bath is hottest.

Any attempts to read on, in my experience, is unsatisfying.

Sometimes I go too long between sessions with these types of books and they fall off my reading list but most often they just find their way into my hand when I am on the cusp of forgetting the where when hows.

Finally, there are the books I read because they've been assigned to me (lately, Jennifer McCartney's Afloat and also Jen Sookfong Lee's The End of East).

While I enjoy whatever is on offer in these books, I am also fiercely paying attention, busy with all the NOTICING and ANALYZING it takes for even the shortest review.

As such, I find that reading assigned books lacks the one confirmed pleasure of being bookish: completely and utterly losing the self.

I think is this is because those all caps actions are rooted in my writerly self and my personality and not that of the writer whose work I am reading.

The 'I' is silent but unavoidable: I NOTICE. I ANALYZE.

That is not to say that this type of reading is overly critical. Though it is more pleasurable to be completely subsumed in a book, it is more useful to me as a writer to read closely and carefully.

the creative process

From The Telegraph by way of Bookninja:

"I erase, I delete, I rant, I change things, I feel hounded and persecuted, I curse." - Georges Remi, on his creative process.

I spent many hours in the library-cum-cafeteria of my elementary school, reading French comics like Lucky Luc, Tin Tin, and Asterix and Obelix in the pursuit of fluency.

Luckily, I was oblivious to much of the racist and sexist subtext in said comics, and focused mostly on the bonking (and by bonking, I mean a menhir to the head, you dirty bird you...).

What I wouldn't give for a stack of French comics now and a drowsy afternoon in which to peruse them...instead, I spend much of my time erasing, deleting, ranting, changing things, feeling hounded and persecuted, and cursing.

(I'm especially good at feeling hounded and persecuted.)

because because because because because

Because generalisations about writers are sometimes enormously satisfying, this from today'sGuardian, by novellist William Leith:

"You write a book because what you have to say is, at the very least, long-winded, and possibly even nuanced or subtle. It takes you months or years. Most of that time you spend alone, cracking up at your desk or lying on the sofa feeling sick, with occasional moments of muted triumph."

(Thanks, Bookninja...)

fail better

After a period of indeterminate length where I was doubtful of my abilities as a writer, an editor, a reviewer of other writing, I find this passage (and indeed this entire essay) refreshing...

Fail better. What a strange business we are in, we writers, we critics, we readers! Writing failures, reading failures, studying failures, reviewing them. Imagine a science institute that spent its time on the inventions that never actually do what they say on the tin, like diet pills, or hair restorers or Icarus's wings. Yet it is literature in its imperfect aspect that I find most beautiful and most human. That writing and reading should be such difficult arts reminds us of how frequently our own subjectivity fails us. We do not know people as we think we know them. The world is not only as we say it is. "Without failure, no ethics," said Simone de Beauvoir. And I believe that.

I'm still doubtful, but I'm now reminded that so is everyone else, some of the goddamn time.

(This is me, flashing my white teeth.)

oooh...

I may have to get t-shirts printed up with this quote:

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me." - C.S. Lewis

The best book title...

...in recent memory:

Have Your Poo Rolled Away by Dung Beetles (And 99 Other Things to Do Before You Die).

- via New Scientist contributing editors via House of Anansi Press.

The best line...

...in a major motion picture in recent memory:

"Aren't you glad to know you're not a golem?"

- Jules Hilbert via Dustin Hoffman's lips via Zach Helm's words in Stranger Than Fiction.

four legs on the ground

In a kind of personal and poetic archaeology, I was rifling through my box of poems-in-progress when I unearthed this fragment, cut and pasted from an unknown on-line source:

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

And two days later, I can't stop returning to the idea that there's meaning in something as incidental as a pigeon-stained statue in the park, something as profound as the precise circumstances of a person's death.

Is there this kind of code in everything I see, I wonder? A layer that I've missed somehow?

I've been watching a lot of Antiques Roadshow of late and see a lot of these missed cues (people owning beautiful and rare objects that they relegate to their damp, 70s basements or use in relation to their dogs, who enjoy rolling in dead things above all else).

I watch the show to see what is possible, what can be crafted out of nothing, but I'm finding the vagueness and the banality of the people who own the objects harder and harder to take.

It's terribly snobbish of me, but there it is.

(Four legs good, two legs bad.)

Tamara Drewe...

...is back! Oh, how I missed her!

Dear Poet!

Where is the full-length manuscript
you promised us? Your check is waiting
The presses are ready
and the bookstores are clamoring for delivery

(From "Undelivered Mail" by Rhina P. Espaillat from Playing at Stillness. Truman State University Press.)

oooh

Most of the time, I rely on critics...or book reviewers...or booky people...for the perfect summation of a book, but in the case of Jane Smiley's Good Faith, which I finished recently, Smiley herself was able to sum up both the novel and novels in general in a recent interview:

"Some novelists are pictorial, some are musical. Pictorial novelists make sure that every word is right. Musical novelists go with the energy of the prose. I'm a musical novelist. The compensation for my imperfections is energy."

moral illumination by nightlight

Elizabeth Hardwick, who, according to the gracious and apparently very dramatic Mr. Keillor was one of the founders of The New York Times Review of Books, said:

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

summertime

The heat
the neglected ivy on the second floor windowsill, dropping leaves
the angry crows in the canopy of elms outside our bedroom window
the beads of sweat on my upper lip


Langside Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba. July 24, 2006.

The mouthful of sweating ice
the handful of mid-season cherries, just this side of ripe
the spurt of breastmilk that tattoos the baby's forehead
the heat

deadhead

Spent twenty minutes mucking around in the front garden yesterday. It was grey and piddling rain out and also the most time I'd spent outside in days, given the recent heat wave.

Over the past few weeks, I've taken to hoarding slurpees in my freezer, luridly coloured things that ice my teeth and tongue. I've also taken to the rather clinical sound of ice cubes breaking, to the insectoid hum of our newly acquired air conditioner, and to showers that get progressively colder as I get progressively braver.


(clockwise from top left - iris, chive flower, asiatic lillies, allium)

But yesterday, with the rain, I could tromp around the garden, getting dirty and swiping at various plants that had finished their run. Fun!

(It's beastly again today, of course. Wish I knew the names of all the hot desert winds that are blowing through so I could curse them properly...)

In the interest of another kind of deadheading, today I pulled out my box of poems-in-progress, the place where I store all the clipped bundles of the various drafts of recent poems.

In the box, May Day poems jostle Fall Back poems, Wrought Substance poems chafe against Guidelines poems, while the rabble, the one-off poems that don't quite fit anywhere, attempt to fold themselves into clumsy origami.

Sooo...we'll see what gets beheaded and what makes it into both my next batch of submissions (grossly overdue, I'm ashamed to say) and the manuscript that's been sending out shoots in my head these past few months.

poems in passing

It's been a good week for what I'll call texts-as-gifts.

First it was not one but two copies of Chicago-born Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), one from a family member, one from a writing mentor.

Silverstein's poems and drawings were some of the first poetry I was exposed to and its loopy vulgar humour probably informs my personality more than I'd like to admit...

Flipping through the pages, I came across the following poem that seems to suit both my present circumstances and that of writing poetry in general:

It's Dark in Here

I am writing these poems
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.
So please excuse the handwriting
Which may not be too clear.
But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
And I'm writing these lines
From inside a lion
And it's rather dark in here.

Then a fellow poet dropped by with the latest copy of the Whitby, Ontario lit mag Lichen.

Though perhaps I should have been more philosophically drawn to Allison Baggio's story Spilt Milk (sorry...couldn't resist at least one bad baby joke, now that Aa has arrived), I found myself highly engaged with Canadian poet Kathy Mac's poem Ghuts.

I'll take the liberty of reproducing the second part of the poem that again seemed particularly apt...

2. Tranquil Bull

Stop every time there's time
to watch Sea Cow Bay's
locomotive-sized bovine
sway daintily in the heat,

movement arising from
the slight impetus of cud
chewed. Swallowed. Brought
back, a vaguely green shadow

moving up and down
his massive, muscular throat

Thanks all, for all your kind words throughout this process - or is that a process within a process? - it's been much appreciated, even if I didn't always have the time or the wherewithal to thank you directly in something approaching a timely fashion.