Did you remember to floss?
Avoidance and its affordances
Reminded by phone, I let the answering machine pick up; by email, I wisely haven’t given an address. I do like receiving a piece of postcard art that can grace the refrigerator door or perch in an appropriate spot to remind me to make the appointment.
Scaling and polishing — almost like a spa day.
And so for day 1422
04.11.2010
Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America: Flora, Fauna & Survival Skills (Pedlar Press, 2002)
It looks like a field guide: strong stock, rounded corners, right shape and size to fit into the pocket of cargo pants. In it, Ranger Shawna Dempsey and Ranger Lorri Millan treat the reader to layered prose full of double entendre and designed to cultivate a respect for nature and safeguard lesbian presence. They drop names of famous lesbians like Charlene Nero and Clare Lawlor — they appear alongside other similarly named rangers to dispense advice.
Three morsels of their divine humour. On what to pack for snacks (p. 41).
Also pack snacks and water to maintain your energy level. Chocolate, dried fruits and nuts provide high caloric value and are easy to carry. Other foodstuffs, such as cucumbers, zucchini and Chinese eggplant often come in handy.
On naturalism veering into a sociological bent (p. 97).
Few among us can resist the roly-poly antics of romping Bear cubs, the startling grace of Prairie Antelope or the sullen pose of nocturnal Bar Rats.
On root systems and the analogy to lesbian networks (p. 224).
Junior Ranger Megan Richards has no trouble envisioning this underground support system. She knows that her emotional well-being depends upon a complex tangle of relationships, to girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-girlfriends’ girlfriends, ex-girlfriends’ ex-girlfriends and girlfriends’s ex-girlfriends (not to mention their pets). Together, these women nourish and anchor J.R. Richards and are the basis of an often unacknowledged chosen-family “tree”. Likewise, the root structure of a stately Live Oak or gnarled Pitch Pine, though unseen, is an integral and essential component of its being.
The best of the in-jokes is the dedication to Anne Murray, Canada’s Songbird.
And so for day 1421
03.11.2010
July 27, 2006 Eye Weekly review
Fire of London. 1666. Samuel Pepys buries cheese in his garden. We don’t know the specifics of the quantity laid into the ground. Whatever the amount, the cheese (parmesan) was esteemed enough to take precautions.
September 4, 1666
Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.
We know that Pepys house did not go up in smoke. We do not know the fate of the parmesan. His diary is silent on that matter.
We do know the results of a Canadian experiment with underwater cheese.
Letting it sit 50 metres underwater was supposed to produce a cheese that would taste unique, but the company had major trouble finding its sunken cheese.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quebec-firm-abandons-lost-cheese-1.538773
I’d rather my cheese near a fire than drowned. Rather relish a bit of Welsh Rarebit.
And so for day 1420
02.11.2010
Parked in a car looking out on a body of water. A man and a woman think back. Well one of them thinks.
‘Remember,’ he says,
‘we’d walk by this lake
in the evenings,
when we were first married.’The woman thinks
of the mornings
before she married
when she would run on the sand,
pushing her anxious silence raw
and breathless, stop
cradled by sky,
alive.
Helen Humphreys. “The Dock” in Nuns Looking Anxious Listening to Radios.
And so for day 1419
01.11.2010
My paternal grandfather smoked a pipe. Perhaps this is why the empty bowl leaves a trace in my mind of a clear image of not only emptiness but coolness as well as the lingering aroma. We take the poem beyond its still smoking ending into our experience of the object mindful of a kind of imitative follow-through of the poem’s hints.
When I woke, everything seemed cut off.
I was pipe, still smoking,
Which daylight would knock empty once again.
Shinkichi Takahashi. Afterimages: Zen Poems translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.
And so for day 1418
31.10.2010
Concurrent reading makes certain passages glow more. Take for example Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (advertised on its cover as “The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer”) still fresh in mind when encountering these lines from Richard Howard “Colored Stones” in No Traveller.
(WISCASSET)
Braided black and white, the waves repeat
or imitate the rocks of Pemaquid;
these are the interferences of quartz
with granite, some archaic violence
garish as light on water. Stone to sand,
sea to sun, identical returns.
Identical in cycling but different in duration. In any event, the observation of the resemblance between the action of grit upon grit and the evaporation of water is neatly summarized in the motto: Stone to sand; sea to sun. Ah, now I see how the parallel is askew. Metonymy introduces a slippage. Sand and sun are not mere equivalents. This is not solely about the phenomena of erosion and evaporation. There is a turn of the cycle that is intimated but unstated: sedimentation. Sand turns to stone just as water returns. Long now indeed.
And so for day 1417
30.10.2010
Bless YouTube and Michael McKay. [Well for a time anyway – the video has been taken down]
The 1994 production of Brad Walton’s Baroque-style opera The Loves of Wayne Gretzky as performed and recorded on February 13, 1994 at Symptom Hall in Toronto is available for viewing. In it, Gretzky leaves his wife for Mario Lemieux. Lovely tongue-in-cheek warning on the site *WARNING: DEPICTIONS (ALBEIT CHASTE AND CAMPY) OF HOMOSEXUALITY. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED*
Kept the program as a keepsake.
I recall a spectacularly hilarious scene with David James as Mama Gretzky. As the program notes state: The role of Mama Gretzky was written with a special view to exploiting David’s peculiar talents.
[It was] Nice to be able to have access to a recording of a classic event.
And so for day 1416
29.10.2010
Forest for the trees.
Ilona Bell on gardening as reported in the Harvard Magazine:
She does have some advice, though, for those seeking a perennial philosophy. “If you want a garden to look good,” she says, “you have to pay more attention to the leaves than the flowers, as they are there all season long.” No matter the season, the endless project never loses its allure. “I like the imaginative complexity of the challenge it poses,” she says. “There are so many elements in play.”
http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/07/literary-gardening
Many elements in play, even in winter, there is attention to evergreens as well as the denuded branches. And seed heads. And the architectural features. And animal tracks in the snow.
And so for day 1415
28.10.2010
I
Anne Carson
Ode to Sleep
Decreation
The poem describes sleep as a “slab of outlaw time punctuating every pillow”.
II
John Keats
To Sleep
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
[…]
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
III
Emily Dickinson
Sleep is supposed to be
By souls of sanity
The shutting of the eye.
[…]
For a more prosaic albeit interactive take on sleep, see Le Centre des sciences de Montréal and its bilingual site on sleep http://www.lesommeil.ca where you can find more about Sleep from A to ZZZ.
And so for day 1414
27.10.2010
At first you have erotic flush, followed by lassitude but with a twist towards the celebration of the long-lived.
A Decade
When you came, you were like red wine
and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth
with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
I hardly taste you at all for I know your
savor,
But I am completely nourished.
Amy Lowell reprinted in The Imagist Poem edited by William Pratt and in which are found echoes of FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Dough enough and time…
And so for day 1413
26.10.2010
