Poet Shoes

Comment

2012-01-30T14:33:00.001-06:00

Shelley I'm wondering if you say tyuning or tooning? But sorry, I have to move on to the next post, which begins:
I read Don Kerr's poem called "the fart" in his Wind Thrashing Your Heart, published by Hagios last year. Hilarious, one of several poems working that way. One of my students said he thought the poem was about secrets. "I suppose farts are secret," I found myself saying, via class chat.
So far, no response.

Next Question

2012-01-27T17:06:00.002-06:00

What kind of music do you most want to make?

Into Thinking

2012-01-23T18:08:00.001-06:00

I'm going to
               claim Twilight has jazz as
                          speed a sprained ankle.

I'd like to write it better but
                      reading page 212 air
                                                yellows.

Listen to Stan Getz
                that Latin strings album
                                                call.

I shake my head sadly. Page 212
                              (taped opposite)
                                            all in the leading.

You never told me
            mind if we do
                       something different?

Idea

2012-01-18T17:57:00.002-06:00

Let's see if this works. I pass out pages ripped at random from a copy of Twilight found in my laundry room. Make something of this, I might say. I try the idea myself.
Page 163 begins "'No,' he said curtly, and his tone was livid."
Not very nuanced a characterization.
The spacing of words on the page itself cries out don't read me but I guess
lots of people do.
But on to the making of something. The poem scoops
a word or two (as much
as it can stomach) finds
grimace twice in three pages and gets
the hell away.

"On Being Ill"

2012-01-03T10:26:00.003-06:00

Writes Virginia Woolf:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his "rinse the mouth--rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us--when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."
Her essays are full of this sort of thing--wonders of brilliant sentences. I can't wait to run this one by my first-year students. Classes start Thursday.

Local

2011-12-26T10:18:00.000-06:00

The more I understand my own writing practice, the more I'm grateful for the first three words (after a colon) of W.C.Williams' Paterson: "a local pride". The closer we attend to the local--a landscape, a socio-political context, a history, an interior system--the wider our work will reach.
Lots of artists have worked out (of) their own local. In the case of Williams, it was the New Jersey city of Paterson, his lifelong local, which spreads behind his hilltop perch in the photo opposite the title page in my edition of |Paterson. In the case of Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog, it's "Granville Street from Granville Street", "CPR Pier & Marine Building", "Hastings at Columbia 2" and so on.
My son Tom's an artistic guy--an improviser, sketch comedy writer, performer and producer who in many ways digs the local in Vancouver. He and I caught a Herzog show in Vancouver last year, and I thought he'd like Fred Herzog Photographs for Christmas. The grit and colour aesthetics of it, the reading of an entire world in a pair of orange cars on Powell or a tableau of real estate ads. I ordered the book for him.
So there we were yesterday, Christmas morning. Tom handed me a present the size of a large box of chocolates, weight of a tray of drinks. I had no idea what it was until I got to the cover--a wide view of an Asian couple about to cross Alexander Street in Vancouver--of Fred Herzog Photographs.
A gorgeous book. Thanks, Tom!

I Case Anyone Asks Me About My Teachers

2011-12-19T11:27:00.000-06:00

I guess I go way back with teachers. Mrs. Campbell, in grade 1, drew a chalk circle an inch above my nose-height and made me stand there with my nose stuck in it. I forget what I'd done but could make something up, I suppose (I'd slugged Betsy Benny in the shoulder). I've told that story before, but no one has ever believed me. Not sure that I would myself.
Miss S. in grade 2 was a babe, no other way to put it (could again make something up: her first name was Rose). When we got to the classroom the night of the Christmas concert, we found a new phonics workbook on every desk, and the desks themselves renewed.
And so on through the grades. Skip ahead to grade 9 and Mrs. K, another babe, who lived in the same decade as her students, it seemed, which made her coolest by far.
I remember Mrs. Cohen at U of C music ed class, asking us to make noise and record it and compose with it. I reached back, don't know what made me do it, to the back panel of an electric piano, one of seven or eight in the row behind mine. I rubbed along, pulling a groan louder than the other noises. For her, that was a good thing. She was a serious creative spirit

"Steps to Writing a Fresh Expository Essay"

2011-12-15T17:04:00.001-06:00

Avoid excessive words and ideas.
This sentence is very long.
Make note of any rampant thoughts.

Take a seat and form these thoughts.
Do not hesitate to get into the simplest of things in a magnified manner.
Do not say, "Sally ran away."

Instead say, "Sally turned on her heels and bolted."
Nix the clutter.
Drug dependency is never good, even for a writer.

Your cat, dog, hampster, infantile sister or brother will do nicely as long as they cannot talk.
Be an artist.
Feeling ashamed while expressing our thoughts will turn into our fatal wound.

For someone to be a dipstick means that they were dipped in a pool of idiocy.
If you notice an impressive sentence, why not write one just like it?
Say as little as possible, while suggesting as much as possible.

Now the cart is groaning.
Pick up a pen or pencil, simple as that.
Take full advantage of your reader.

Results

2011-12-08T15:29:00.002-06:00

One of my students wrote sentence composure instead of sentence composition.

When thinking about how they read or write, some students don't know what words to use. But they don't mind the attempt.

Discoveries abound. For some students it doesn't take much, just an invitation.

Some students have realized that if they can't get beyond terms like deeper meaning and line-by-line they haven't thought hard enough.

Some students disclosed, in cautious tones, they might switch majors to English.

The more they learn to write, the fewer words they use.

Further Idea

2011-11-24T10:37:00.000-06:00

Seems a bit sappy the way I wrote it, that first one. (No need to comment to this post, confirming what I just said.) I think we all benefit from an opening of expectation maybe challenge. One student--it's becoming a running gag--will comment frankly on what she thinks of the assignment. Everyone will laugh, knowing what she means, but find themselves--this is my dream for you, I'll say, another running gag--embracing the task. Fun for me, at least, to see how deeply they commit to it.

Idea

2011-11-23T13:23:00.002-06:00

56 minutes ago, during a trip to the men's can, I got an idea for the class I was heading to. In the classroom, I asked about half the class to step outside. Be with you in a minute, I said. I asked those remaining to respond in writing to What have you done that's risky? while, I explained, their classmates would be watching them write.

I left the room to speak to the others. Instructions: observe the writers without interfering in what they're doing. What are they doing? What body language, what expression, what other behaviours, perhaps symptomatic of what internal processes? Then we all went inside and stood around the room, watching . After 5 minutes or so we switched, the former writers leaving the room while I told the former observors to address this question: What do men/women/boys/ girls/males/females [pick one] want? The new observors came in. This time, after 3 minutes or so, I signalled for them to move around among the writers (who, in this classroom, sit at one of 7 clusters of chairs and tables).

During discussion afterwards, someone asked why I had wanted to do this. To help you think about your last essay, I said. (The last assignment asks them to compose an informal essay reflecting on their own reading and writing practices.)

I don't know if it was a help or not, but I did like the discussion of how we create mini caves with our writing posture, curled over the page. And how we're voyeurs when we watch someone write. (I've always said watching a room of students writing is a beautiful thing. Tender, even. Like watching someone sleep.)

As for the reading side, we've already gone through the "difficult poem" notion and how it forces us to confront how we read. (See Charles Bernstein, for one, on this.)

Anyway, it's fun. Keeps the students guessing.

Business in Vancouver

2011-11-19T14:17:00.001-06:00

Not with Jane, my old team-mate, who wouldn't come down from her 22nd-floor apartment until she spotted me arriving at the U of A diamond with the bats and balls; or Bill, who drove his Suzuki bike off the road near Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, with me on the back; or Fred or Daphne, my teachers; or Miranda, who felt my broken foot at Emma Lake; or Natalie, a double for Christina Hendricks of Mad Men; or Donna and Al, bridge partners in Port Moresby long ago; or Calvin, co-leader of Hawaiian Howard and the Indoor Plants, Nelson, B.C., 1981-82; not CP locomotive 3009 in the Gastown yard, November 19, 2011, 9:11 a.m.--my business is with my son Tom. Birthday business, he's 25. Last night was the pub crawl through Gastown, today the shopping.

First I had to get down to the water.

Topicoptic

2011-11-14T18:24:00.003-06:00

Trying to think of topics for my students to write with. Don't care for the word, though, preferring to-pick, as in let's generate things to pick from. A new CBC Writes prompt, for instance. I know the topic is obvious but for my purposes that's the challenge: to write it fresh.

I've long wanted to do something with luck, what happened to me a while ago, rolling a pair of 6s to get out of a jam on the backgammon table. It brings out the worst in people, either that or the best. Humility's good for us, right? I had my first-year class writing on luck a month or so ago. I forget why, but one guy put up his hand to remind us of his name, Chance.

In another class, 16 of us (including me) will each contribute a photograph, and a page or two of prose to go with it, to a class anthology called (Catching a) Glimpse. Also obvious but, again, a useful challenge to get at in fresh ways. I'm thinking of the photo of two sisters and me on the back step in Herbert taken, no doubt, by the third sister, the oldest, who was often cursed with the privilege, as she tells it, of babysitting the rest of us. (The anthology title comes from the common insistence around the writing table that you can't glimpse without catching one, usually out of the corner of you-know-what.)

As for the third class, while I'm at it here--they're in the middle, I hope, of an essay that begins here/now, when and wherever that might be, and wanders off.

These ideas, so simple written down, aren't easy for some students.

Billy Collins' Paradelle

2011-11-01T14:51:00.001-06:00

Coming across Collins' "Paradelle for Susan" in the Penguin anthology I'm using in my first-year class, I grouped it with other poems in a love poem batch. It turned out to be a hilarious poem to read aloud. I insisted on sharing the pleasure; eventually five or six students read the poem after I did, and we laughed every time. In the love poem context, what we came up with was that the swings between logic and illogic in the poem were, I guess, like love itself. But personally I'm more interested in the laughs.

Just now I was looking for a recording of the poem. I couldn't find one. I did find surprise, however: the poem is a hoax Collins is playing, which doesn't surprise me, now that I've found out about it.

You can read about all this for yourself, and enjoy it I hope. Whatever you do, make sure you read it aloud, preferably in an intimate moment.

And I stand by what my class and I came up with.

New Business

2011-10-30T16:13:00.003-06:00

Or other. I'll show you a photograph later but for now a guy's working inside by natural light, late October.
It's Sunday.

Not that he wants a new sign.
He wants it to mean something new.

Today for once the second
movement not the choral
of Beethoven's 9th gets him.

The sign reads the same from both ways.

Rejection

2011-10-20T10:07:00.000-06:00

What a relief to find out that another publisher has rejected my Natural Cause: The Poems of Stan Still. Until then I'd been dreading the writing, as a post to this blog, of an open letter to Regina and area writers who did not show up for even an hour or two to the Saskatchewan Writers Guild conference in Regina last weekend. Even if the conference is expensive (I would have said); even if you have historical, unresolved grievances with the Guild; even if the sessions didn't seem that interesting--no matter, as an organization that has affected your writing career for the better, even if you're new to writing, it deserves your support, at least an hour or two of your time. My reasons for saying that are partly selfish (I would have gone on to say): I missed the pleasure of your company, the stimulation of your ideas.
Instead of such an entry, thank goodness, I have to deal with rejection. But there is no deal with rejection. It gets everything, I get nothing.
I guess that all belongs to yesterday, because today in the mail came word that one of Canada's loveliest chapbook publishers wants to do a chapbook of my Hillsdale material--a dozen or so of the streetpieces, as I call them, written on location in Hillsdale. I'm delighted.
But poor Stan.

Damn, the leaves were right again today.

2011-10-11T17:00:00.001-06:00

I handed back the writing they'd done from a leaf with a word on it.
I got an idea for a later assignment: reflect on the assignments, your approach to each one, whatever you came up with, and the grading of each one. Make that your essay.

Good one for me to write too.

Saturday Afternoon

2011-10-08T15:25:00.001-06:00

That thump was not west wind on the storm window it was my skull on my stained pine desk at the end of Keith Jarrett playing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on his La Scala disk. By the time he reaches that final plink I've spent a few years gone.

Those essays I was talking about (an entry or two ago) that began with a word on a leaf--so far I don't know what the hell the word was in each case but man, they went for it. The question is, how well. If that seems an inpertinent question, spare a kind thought for yours truly, who must come up with a grade.

Now I'm worried that readers of this entry--hello aunt Martha and uncle Mart--might wonder if I know what I'm doing, assigning that kind of work. (Keep reading!) It's just as easy or hard to grade as anything else. Some writing not only gets a fresh idea but finds a fresh way to say it. That's in the 80s at least (as always, depending on things like punctuation choices) With others it's one of the two, usually the first. 70s or 80s. It goes down from there.

It seems to be about challenging these skilled writers. Come up with an idea, get them to try it. See how well they do.

It's trying to get them to go to an open field.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackird

2011-10-06T08:54:00.001-06:00

I can't possibly add anything to the miles already written about this fabulous poem. But I'd capitalize the a in At. Makes the looking more pointed perhaps.
For me the easiest way into this poem over the years has been via the word imagination (and I'll try to cut down on the italics from now on). The sheer opening. Anything a sky can do, that poem can do.
I'll try to convey all that to my writing class this afternoon, before assigning them an essay made from the poem, or not from the poem exactly but the looking at the poem performs. Thirteen ways of looking at a lamp, maybe (the lamp by the window). I'd like to hold my students to 13, too, not just 5 or 6.
I can't spend much more time talking about this poem, except for a word--equipage--and the name of my favourite band--the Bawds of Euphony. And now that I think of it, maybe the upper-case Looking is enough; it's more open.

Specific Word

2011-10-01T16:01:00.001-06:00

One of my students, asked to find a suitable leaf and write on it a single specific word--stubbornly concrete and particular was how one of the essays in our text put it--wrote the word "time".

Another student, after drawing that leaf from a paper bag passed around the table, said "time", hm.

He grew silent. The next five or six classmates weren't keen either. About half way around, one tossed down the bag and said let's write new words. Which we did, quicker this time.

The words became objects, in other words, that would better serve as prompts for six or seven hundred words of prose.

I drew wooden spoon. So far my essay reads my teaching practice in the spoon. It could just as easily read the open 6th-floor lounge of Lloyd Hall at the Banff Centre, already three weeks past. Time has a way, all right.

Assignment

2011-09-23T17:05:00.000-06:00

The problem with an original assignment (which in this case I got from a book) is that its demands and effects become evident only after, sometimes, the writing is done. Some around the reading of it, not unconnected to the grading.

Students find this unfair, if grading standards are retrospective rather than prior in application, which I have to watch out for (or as Don Cherry would say, to the college grad hockey player at training camp who said "Coach Cherry, you can't end a sentence with a perposition": "Ok, 'which I have to watch out for' you asshole").

Students enjoyed writing the voice of a coach instructing and inspiring his/her players at half-time (but does Cranium have half-times?).

Trouble is, they wrote the voice and didn't speak it.

Geometry Sets

2011-09-04T08:41:00.000-06:00

(after comment by Hawksley Workman, 8:30 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 4, guest-hosting for Molly Johnson)

If you saw your friends with
the latest geometry set
you knew they'd talked
their parents into it

or something along those lines was the comment Workman made, and he's right. We needed those oblique accessories like a golfer needs the wider bag. Those mini pencils, size of a bullet. We needed fine muscles on the upper tenth of thumb and index finger on in my case the right hand. For running the compass. And of course with the protractor (or proto-tractor), properly deployed, you were at the one true center, where the shadow meets the wall, the yellow leaf the green.

Decisions Writers Make

2011-09-02T10:53:00.000-06:00

Already the topic is too small. I've claimed for several years now that every book I write becomes another hit of The Man from Saskatchewan. If it is, my current book-to-be (some publisher willing)becomes Book Five of The Man. What showed up at 8:45 this morning was the idea that current work will take up more than one book, perhaps requiring re-jigging of the numbering scheme. I'm sure you can imagine, dear readers (good morning Uncle Sal and Aunt Pete), that the sentence you just read was rather distasteful to write. Because none of this matters except at 8:45am, one day out of 21, 901.

Turning Sixty (plus 13 or so hours)

2011-08-29T13:18:00.000-06:00

First blunder after becoming this old:

Installing foot powder

where it easily falls down.

Turning Sixty

2011-08-29T08:37:00.000-06:00

So far--it's been only a couple of hours--I prefer 60 to 59. That teetering tower in the "one's column", as we used to call it, that goes by the name 9 felt more nervous than the beautiful 0 I've got there now. Over in the "ten's column", sure the 6 is a notch higher, but it's 6 decades, dear reader.
Here they are:
decade one I played under the big sky around Herbert (remember those readers with names like Open Skies or Open Roads?);
decade two I practiced every anxiety known to boy;
decade three was half clueless half motivated, start of my teaching career;
decade four was writing and marriage;
decade five was writing and separation;
decade six was writing arrival to young oldmanhood;
decade seven, at this point halfway through a bowl of cereal, will later today see a man about a map, a daughter about a new photograph for my website and on and on it goes.
Yes, give me sixty.

Why I Prefer Miles (One Night Driving Back from Glendive, Montana, Where I Intercepted My Son Half-way Through His 50-hour Drive on the U.S. Interstates from New York toward Victoria)

2011-08-24T07:55:00.001-06:00

They're longer, more open.
You put your lips together to say them, instead of cackling from the back of your mouth (as in kilometers).
How far from the border would you rather be?
We walked or biked to OneMile Crossing along the CPR mainline east of Herbert--my many sisters to neck with their boyfriends or smoke Black Cats, my pals and me to open packs of baseball cards. (All "one kilometer crossing" crossing would be good for is burning our little bums on the hot rails.)
It's automatic: Where's Herbert? 30 miles east of Swift Current. Another 85 to Moose Jaw.
Farms were two miles north, half-mile east, another half-mile north from town. (Any of you, my dear readers, who come from farm stock--that's you, Aunt Daisy and Uncle Fitzgerald--know that your quarter-section is a half-mile square.)
A sign can announce MILE
1
2
and mean it.
East of Glendive I crossed Thirteen Mile Creek. I'll claim no creek is named for a kilometer.
After a meal together, Tom and Devin (of Hip.Bang fame) would head west through Miles City (named, surely, after wide spaces, not some guy named Miles City).
Across the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, those are miles, man.
And you've gotta hand it to the miles and miles of stars, Montana night.

Listening to Court and Spark on August 22, 2011, 8:30 am, Highway 11 South From Saskatoon

2011-08-22T13:31:00.003-06:00

I prefer this spot to the Kenaston Rest Area with that sign which cannot be spoken here.

Not the crossing sign I walked by.

Joni Mitchell twice through in my head.

If I ever meet her she's in for a serious hug.

Further Home

2011-08-21T09:42:00.001-06:00

Because each of the words family and home implies the other, most of the time, little else needs saying.
My sisters claim to laugh at every wisecrack I offer but who wouldn't. My grandson, more and more into walking, expects to fall forward or arrive safely to where I sit, that look on his face.
Where I sit now--an area of Strathcona, joined in the 1890s to Edmonton across the North Sask (which my sisters and I ferried across last week at Wingard, Sask) but settled orginally by a rag-tag group of settlers including a Metis man, Laurent Garneau, who was thrown in jail in '85 as a Riel sympathizer, his Scottish wife Eleanor grinding Riel's letters to bits in her washbucket as the Fort Edm Home Guard paddled across to get Laurent--yes where I sit now, across from the blues bar on Whyte (next to the former hall where Garneau played fiddle as the settlement grew), I'm waiting for my breakfast, for a few hours to pass, for my daughter Lucy's last show at the Edmonton fringe--Bertha, a wise/sad/sweet half-mask clown/woman whose "bon voyage party" takes her--she hopes, she desperately and sweetly hopes--somewhere home.
Then I had back home myself.
I guess history's a home too--one we imagine, like all homes.

Sisters Road Trip, Home

2011-08-18T12:04:00.000-06:00

Home is a flag with many countries (other way around maybe).
One, a gravesite in Wynyard where a brother was buried. I wasn't born yet but two of my sisters were.
Two, a road, any of those back roads our relatives drove.
Three, a patch of smooth pavement after BROKEN SURFACE sign.
Four, one of my students in Cabri, scene in the hotel pub at the start of a Rider game.
Five, another gravesite, for a moment four sisters.
Six, that blue thing hanging in our eyes.
Anywhere else the car stops.
Even Regina where one sister was born, three lived, and I three different times moved.

Sisters Road Trip, Live From the Manitou Beach Golf Course Lounge

2011-08-16T18:00:00.001-06:00

The sisters are all down at the spa gift shop, buying the place out. I haven't got much time; they'll be along any moment and I'll have to buy beer in addition to the one I've already got, which I haven't much time to pour down.
This aft, driving back to our B and B from town past the golf course, we watched one golfer run across our path to retrieve his ball from the far ditch--at least 60 yards from the nearest in-bounds. I'd buy the man a beer if I had more time.
Before that, the power was out. I couldn't sleep.
Yesterday my youngest sister, referring to the fabled Manitou Lake, said Get down there and feel it and see it which I thought was pretty good advice for any writer.
But I haven't much time. With what's left of it, I'll overhear golfers, who with every shot have had to deal with the same stiff wind that kicked at our floating feet in the lake this aft. Well, before I finished that sentence they left. There they go down the cartpath.
So long, dear readers (that's you, Uncle Roy and Aunt Dale) from the clubhouse at Manitou Beach.

Sisters Road Trip, Ouzo

2011-08-14T21:30:00.002-06:00

One more Ouzo, a sister says. But I'm going to have mine inside and that's the last I'll see of her until the morning. After four of us in one suite in Riverhurst last night, we've fanned out in Rosthern tonight--one double and two singles.
We ran into a most un-communicative ferry operator on the Wingard ferry earlier. This is all the bugger deserves:

We had Ouzo on our minds.

Sisters Road Trip, a Morning

2011-08-13T09:55:00.000-06:00

List of what woke us:
hail adjusters
river next door (where next is
twenty miles north and door
is access road)
woman in raglan-sleeved Jets shirt
Rider loss
flipped hinge of a SportRack
Co-op opening
need for good coffee downtown
scent of home-made foot balm
two hands loaded with hearts
kicks of stones below the boardwalk below our rooms
and what finally gets us: birds we offer names
(which, if not the right ones, they can trade)

Sisters Road Trip, Soon

2011-08-12T05:29:00.001-06:00

The sisters have mustered near Edmonton, checking in within whatever rules re luggage size a birthday boy might impose.
The plastic container for a roll of toilet paper, however--so it won't crush, says a sister--will have to stay behind. Even recognizing that toilet paper issues differ between his sisters and himself, the birthday boy stands firm. A touch of crush won't hurt, he says.
The day is dark so far. In their overnight acreage just out of the city, the sisters will be gathering their scarves and leggings, their armloads of carry-on, their lunch. It's time to begin.

Title

2011-07-31T10:03:00.000-06:00

Ok, here's your chance to weigh in, my many readers (that's you Aunt Sarah and Uncle Huck).

I've just begun to consider Hill, a Geography as title of this manuscript I`ve been working on. Used to be imagined by a former name to do with Hillsdale, that part of the city.

I invite you to talk about this title or titles in general. Meanwhile, I`ll carry on.

Road Trip With My Sisters, Step One

2011-07-25T09:45:00.003-06:00

This happens soon, leaving from south of Sherwood Park in Alberta. Day One might look something like two or three new (to us) highways down to three ferries near Leader, Sask., maybe staying (staining?) the night in Eston or sneaking onto a certain farm near Luck lake to pitch our tent. (Except sisters #2 and #3 have said "no tent" so I'm pretty sure it's the Eston Inn--greetings my friend Brit!--on night One).

Maybe Outlook gets us for night Two, by the time we hit Riverhurst ferry north of Herbert where sister #1 and I were born, #2 got as far as grade 9, #3 graduated grade 12. (Yours truly, in grade one, carried her books. Remind me to take my revenge by kicking butt at the card table, where bridge or cribbage or Scrabble could break out.)

Day Three, well this is getting to be too many numbers but I think we meet aunts and uncles and cousins for lunch August 14 in Saskatoon (my initial idea was to have them dangle food bags along highway 11 so we grab them as we drove by, Tour de France style). Later we'll drive to sunset, might be the command, if get to make commands, which for sure I will, being the birthday boy.

I'll ending up telling you more.

The Gerald Hill Diet, Step Six

2011-07-21T20:35:00.001-06:00

I tell you, friends and family--stay away from liquor. Never mind the intrinsic caloric muscle of two pints of Palliser Porter after a workout, necessary to wash down the spicey chicken noodle dish and the green salad, blue cheese dressing, at Bushwakker. (A man gets thirsty after a hip mobility workout, my hips so far open I walked one way and imagined another.) The liquor wants more; a stop at the grocery store on the way home from the pub becomes the first purchase of a deck of Rip-L Chips since this diet began.

Can you tell I'm a third of the way through the first bag? I can. But I've already downed half of the follow-up Stella, so things are out of whack.

So, liquor. Sure the sunset over the court house looks fine, and the One Way sign (south) on Smith promises discovery by the movie crew shooting a block away. But it's not worth it. Rip-L #15 has lost snap. That half bottle of Stella looks a dirty-sweater green. This is no way to wait for the end of your diet, I tell you.

Live (by Digital Delay) from the Lone Eagle Motel in Herbert, Saskatchewan

2011-07-19T07:20:00.003-06:00

Only by driving through the hottest spot (Medicine Hat) at hottest point of the day (about six o’clock) and through the most wildlife-intensive spot (gap from Walsh to Maple Creek) at dusk did I make Herbert by sundown.
Followers of my Loco Log—that’s you Uncle Pete and Aunt Rose—would have enjoyed passing CP locomotives 3061 and 9713 eastbound just east of Swift Current then, after checking into the Lone Eagle, sitting down at the desk in #7 just as 3061 and 9713, hauling fifty-some cars, came rolling through, a mosquito-swat away.
I was born here, so I must have faced heat like today’s which, modulated by sunset and air-con and a sheen of mozzies, remains alive at seven past 10. The thermo touched +38 at The Hat (or vice versa).
I was more of a daytime kid. I didn’t get outside much after dark.

Help Wanted

2011-07-11T13:20:00.003-06:00

I walk Debbie north
into Hillsdale Sunday
I wonder how long to.

(this photo not related to
the three lines above)

Memorial

2011-06-29T07:15:00.000-06:00

Kroetsch would have enjoyed himself, except for having all the attention on him. The memorial event on Monday afternoon in Leduc brought writers/readers and his family together. Some difficult, tear-edged, moving tributes. Photos, music, a short film, some lovely "Uncle Bob" stories. A few beers at the Leduc Legion afterwards, with lots of good cheer amid the sorrow.

I drove over to my sister's place near Sherwood Park that evening, through the intersection where Kroetsch had died. It was my sister's birthday. Earlier that day, another sister had become a grandmother for the first time when her daughter gave birth in Edmonton.

Birth and death, beer and food, corners and turns, mosquitoes and stories and finally a late darkening--it all seemed to fit.

Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-22T10:43:00.004-06:00

Robert Kroetsch died yesterday, that longest day. In a traffic accident. Don't know any more details.

From the moment I imagined myself as a writer, 1981, and the moment I began post-graduate studies in English, 1988, Kroetsch showed the way. "This thesis has gone on long enough without mentioning Robert Kroetsch," I remember writing in my MA thesis, a collection of creative/critical essays on Virginia Woolf, Gail Scott, Ethel Wilson, Kristjana Gunnars and Kroetsch himself. I was able to claim both creative and critical status (however temporarily, as I learned from Kroetsch how to say) for my essays only because I'd read the Kroetsch novels poems and essays.

I saw him many times over the years. In September 2009 I was honoured to read Kroetsch's "Elegy for Wong Toy" to a Leighton studio full of Bob and others at Banff and tell everyone that Kroetsch was one of my fathers (to use a phrase from the poem).

The next summer I came up with this piece, set in my cabin at Emma Lake:

Robert Kroetsch, writer

White hair, white beard, Kroetsch
old as hockey legend Gordie Howe
and golf legend Arnie Palmer
worries about too much sun, he says,
sitting in my cabin with a beer.

Kroetsch is to blame for today's light,
which splinters and flares for his arrival
in his horsefly tractor, his bucking dock.
Twelve hours earlier, a football moon
scored behind a blade of sprucetop.
I’m writing poems, he says. I love it.

Half-way through his beer he recalls

with a laugh he’d seen a man swimming
in marsh-like conditions, wind
blowing in the swimmer's mouth.
Must have been a farm kid,
thinks he’s found the Riviera.

Lightly clouded day after solstice,

twenty degrees in wind and blue
and we’re indoors
far from the trembling,
with music on. No mosquitoes
in here, he says. It’s good to just
sit for a while.

Darke on the Longest Day

2011-06-21T21:57:00.003-06:00

The traveller walked here to here
to/from to McNiven
cupping between them Darke Park
vacant tonight for mosquitoes.

Hydrants guarded
each a dozen homes
no matter what your
reason for seeing.

Tonight only travellers wrote the hydrant
family of red bone, dark face, lawnmark.
Every few feet they seemed near.

On Darke re-committed to wild yard.

How long does a driveway?
Ruckus and splash?
If time does this to
driveways, think.

Later in the coffee shop
on Kramer, Darke Park
a stone's throw and a roll and
a kick away.

Stranger than later
the hill.

The GHD, Step Five

2011-06-20T12:04:00.000-06:00

Don't weigh yourself every week as planned. As my grade seven Manual Arts teacher used to say, If you measure, you might not like what you see.

Two years ago in Darke park:

Last week:

Looks change.

Entering Hillsdale

2011-06-15T17:10:00.026-06:00

Show your credentials to the duck.

Ok move along.

The people who moved to Hillsdale in '58

live here or if

you like liver.

Like stories, they sometimes escape.

This way.

Running under.

The Creek that Calls the ENE Boundary of Hillsdale

2011-05-25T15:33:00.005-06:00

Forty-five years ago we'd panic
at the sight of rain
how it made the tables rise
and who'd have to stay up how late
mop floors.

Today the creek where
it's called the lake warms
four-five birds at least.
We park our rusted
bikes and lie down.

We speak to the lake as we would
to passers-by who say
pardon? and walk on.

Doesn't take much sky just the one hill,
the rest pause of water
let's say.

The GHD, Step Four

2011-05-16T11:35:00.004-06:00

Move into an empty place and fill it (oops, can't say fill ). Dig emptiness. Wait before you haul up that futon you've been storing, that rocker, those tubs. Be pleased--you've figured out how to store your bed out of sight during daylight, you've ditched the ex-door that was your desktop, you've gone through your personal archive with a shredding eye (and donated the shreds to a furniture store on Broad for use as stuffing for the very storage ottoman you're thinking of buying--well done!). And look, you've lost 19 pounds.

When the space was empty you could stretch your body everywhere and not touch baseboard. Your mat became a slim boat in a windy sea, the nearest window miles away. Facing 80-year-old light fixtures from directly below, you saw future in furniture, budget permitting.

Anything in the store, said the guy at the high-end furniture store today, waving at two long racks of fabric samples, you can get in any of those.

The GHD, Step Three: If the bread and the onion are good enough, that's all you need.

2011-04-28T08:37:00.001-06:00

Imagine a sandwich. Any good bread + don't skimp on the butter + any good cheese + one of onion (with cucumber or baby dill) or radish + lettuce if you must + any good sausage (substitute leftover chicken, beef or turkey). Double the recipe. Add a glass of milk and a Blue Jays game (when the bats are working and the pitcher's hitting his spots).

Good, now this is where the diet part starts: Use multigrain rice cakes + cheddar but minimize the slabbage and don't pop a slab into your mouth while you're slicing + cucumber + as much baby dill as you want + slice of red onion why not + salt and pepper. Call it an open-face. Keep the Blue Jays part, no milk.

The Gerald Hill Diet, Step Two

2011-04-20T08:52:00.000-06:00

Embrace your inner skeleton, for where else would it be? Whose season of tissue would it carry about but yours?

I remember wall charts in grade six, first flowering of the word system in my young vocab, as in circulatory system and digestive system (and the lore-shrouded reproductive system). The skeleton was portrayed as a mere collection of sticks, a rack of hangers for the glamour-pusses: muscle, organ, blood, nerve, brain.

Recently I've been reduced to seeing myself as skeleton. With add-ons, for sure, but essentially a bone-character, rising to the surface.

The Gerald Hill Diet, Step One

2011-04-18T21:03:00.000-06:00

Lose the Rip-L chips. As everyone in my family knows--hello my sisters--that's tough to do. Any lunch, any picnic or summer meal, anytime hot dogs stack on a plate or a can of beans (Heinz, in tomato sauce only) heat in the saucepan, it's time to pull another deck of Rip-Ls from that lower cupboard where the double-pack boxes neatly stack. But at about 250 calories per 11 chips--11 chips! That's barely a mouthful--they just do not, I'm sorry, fit the GHD, Step One. Same goes, by the way, for the lime nachos.

When I say Rip-L, I refer only to the Old Dutch variety. And if I ever say major lifestyle adjustment, I refer to that crisis point, a couple of decades back, when Old Dutch ceased dispensing Rip-Ls in the little bags and we either stood bewildered in front of the junk food machine or settled for plain chips (second choice, Sour Cream and Onions; third, Bar-B-Q).

I've written to Old Dutch about this matter but do they listen?

What does your bridge look like?

2011-04-13T10:56:00.000-06:00

In her journal, one of my students wrote that question, having found it in a self-help book her mom had read over and over. I think I'll run that question by a certain group of poets I'm looking forward to working with.

For me, it's an abandoned hump-backed concrete job like the old Borden bridge, although the other day I was dazzled by that 30s-era bridge over the rail yard in Moose Jaw that set my Loco Log meter all a-whirl. But these are just first crossings. What my bridge looks like depends on what it's over, where it leads, what it sounds like under my wheels. Maybe that black iron bolt-and-girder beauty just down from the Stegner House in Eastend, where I perched and watched the beavers. Maybe that river between Kupiano and Moresby in Papua New Guinea, '79 or so, that we could drive through when it was low, get stuck in after a rain, have to spend hours waiting for when it was running too high--until they built a bridge there after I'd left.

So what does your bridge look like, my friends.

Robert J. Sawyer.

2011-04-03T09:44:00.001-06:00

I met him a few years ago at a Sask Writers Guild conference at which he was a guest speaker. He showed up at the annual open mic I've been hosting in recent years. "Has to be a three-minute piece," I told him. "I don't have anything that takes only three minutes," he said. "Sorry," I said. "No exceptions."

(Once I witnessed my friend Brenda Schmidt jump up and down, stamping her feet, when I cut her off after three minutes. Until then I hadn't realized stamping one's feet was actually possible.)

Sawyer disappeared upstairs to his hotel room, re-appearing a few minutes later with some sort of hand-held reader. "Ok, ready," he said. And he read from that.

The other night I heard his talk at a conference here. A spectacular performance: a thoughtful, energetic talk on the origins and future of consciousness, delivered without notes. Later, his answers to questions were likewise thoughtful, attentive to the heart of the question, and comprehensive.

He'd spoken of a time 40,000 years ago when homo sapiens became conscious of themselves. (Evidence: archeological findings of bodily adornment, the cave paintings at Lascaux, findings of "grave goods" buried with the dead.) Leaving aside Sawyer's reading of why and how this all happened--he says it's all in his novels--I cut to that first sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I'd just watched again on the plane to Montreal, in which a group of primates whose limited set of behaviours about, say, how to take or defend a watering hole, expanded dramatically and forever once they touched a black monolith that appeared in their midst. Which allows me to name one of my favourite moments in movie history: when the primate, having discovered how to use an animal bone as a weapon and thus achieving an evoloutionary leap for the rest of us primates, tosses it triumphantly into the air, where it spins in slow motion and becomes, at its apogee, a futuristic spacecraft.

Somehow I Think

2011-03-30T10:05:00.001-06:00

The older I get and the later in my teaching career, the happier I am to honour my teachers.

(Here I pause to note an idea for my class today: get my students to write about their favourite teachers, pre-university.)

(When I do that myself I come up with only fragments: the grade 2 teacher whose first name was Rose, the ex-trumpet playing wisecracker who taught grade7, the long-legged looker Miss Kehoe in grade 9, my typing teacher Miss Fawcett who showed us individual finger exercises. Somehow, I think, out of cowardice or willful resistance or being a teacher's kid myself, I didn't let my pre-uni teachers inspire me.)

Fred Wah was in town yesterday. I've said this before: I thank my lucky skies to have had Fred and Tom Wayman and Dave McFadden as my first creative writing teachers 30 years ago this fall at the late, great David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, B.C. About as different from one another as three writers could be, they hauled us in every direction, writing-wise. Everything I write comes from what those three got us doing.

Last night, at his reading, I introduced Fred to my creative writing students, proud to do so.

Literary Award

2011-03-27T11:23:00.000-06:00

I managed to score a 2nd in the 2010 CBC Literary Award, poetry category, second to some lovely work by Brian Brett.

As Brian and I noted, the poet winners are more or less 60, the nonfiction winners more or less 40, the short story winners more or less 24.

And I managed to pick up a stomach wog--could have been the chicken souvlaki at Pearson, about 10:30 Wednesday night, between delays 2 and 3 of the 5 I experienced on Air Canada that day, turning the Regina to Montreal flights into a 12-hour hassle I'm only today recovering from.

But the party in Montreal was swell. If CBC, Air Canada, and the Canada Council can't throw a party, who can. The writers were rather strangely peripheral, though. Our role in the soiree was limited to a 10-second walk across the stage to shake hands with Shelagh Rogers--and, oh yes, with the Canada Council person who handed over our cheques. We writers agreed that we were sufficiently pacified by the cheques to remain in the background the rest of the time, while the corporate sponsors enjoyed what was really their moment.

I do salute these sponsors for what, judging by the size of the cheque and the amount of media attention we've received, is a significant commitment to the literary arts. We were well taken care of in Montreal and it was fun to meet the other writers.

Loco Log

2011-03-23T10:08:00.000-06:00

Dedicated followers of this blog--hello Uncle Ritchie and Aunt Phyll--will want an update on my loco log, my haphazard listing of Canadian Pacific locomotives--where I saw them and what they were up to.

The other day at 3:42 pm I spotted 3083 and 3110, back to back, shuttling back and forth over the Albert street overpass in Regina. That makes 46 locomotives in the last four years, anywhere from here to Rogers Pass. Just the ones I've been close enough to, or my poor children have been close enough to, to read the locomotive number.

I'm going to keep at it, haphazardly, until I spot a locomotive for the second time, at which time I'll claim that at last I've found structure to my life: every _____ years I spot locomotive # _____.

I'd Give You My List (But You'd Know It's Mine)

2011-03-12T16:07:00.001-06:00

Talking about "creating character" in my creative writing class, I let out with the claim that given an anonymous list of ten specific items in any one person's bedroom (a person in this class, that is), I could identify the person. "We should do that," one of the students said. We swept over that--on with the task at hand of building character through details, not through generalizations of narration.

Fine, but a half hour after class I thought damn, we should have gone ahead with that bedroom thing. So I tacked that on, via our class message board, to the assignment for Tuesday. At the same time, I composed my own list.

All that's left in this story, apart from whatever results show up on Tuesday, is me wondering whether or not this is too personal a thing. Creepy, maybe. Offensive, illegal. Out of bounds.

So far, four lists have been posted.

After Talking Fresh

2011-03-07T09:51:00.002-06:00

I really enjoyed my students at Talking Fresh. New to the writing world, most of them, they caught four terrific writers in action:

Brenda Schmidt

Michael Trussler and Karen Solie (photo by Shelley Banks)

Daniel Scott Tysdal

These writers delivered ideas, laughs, good company, inspiration, books, various styles and discourses, and splendid appetites for wine, food and what we all had to say. I'm so happy my students could hear them.

His Daughter was a Student of Mine

2011-02-10T11:47:00.017-06:00

I see that Bobby Kuntz died. A lot of those old CFL stars have died recently--Ron Atchison, Cookie Gilchrist, Herb Gray.

Their obits featured the single stock photo that was always used in the sports pages and game-day programs of the time, '57-'64. The one of Atchison shows him in his lineman's squat, arms bent and elbows forward, set to repel some unseen foe. Gray's too, all crew-cut and shoulder pads, ready to take you on.

Photo day would be a day to pretend. The Atchison photo was shot in the old Rider practice field next to Campion in NW Hillsdale. Some phtog making the rounds, telling each player to strike a pose, imagine the game was on.

In the CFL at that time, the players didn't earn much and held other jobs. But they earned enough, some of them, to buy a new house in the newest suburb of Regina, say, where they hosted block parties and built swings for neighbour kids.

Or they ended up running an electroplating company in Kitchener, like Bobby Kuntz.

It Gets This Way Sometimes

2011-02-07T21:08:00.000-06:00

"Just sitting here with all your friends?" said Herb, the Maintenance guy, grinning, with a nod toward the table that was empty except for me.

"They're out writing," I told him, and changed the subject.

My students were scattered around Luther, writing from a line that opens Joan Didion's "Los Angeles Notebook"--There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension, a line I love.

I'd stayed at the table, reflecting in my own notebook on the air around my workplace this morning.

It was good to see Herb grin, anyone grin.

Weather Like This in Portugal Except for the Snow

2011-02-05T13:36:00.000-06:00

Just now I sat down with a tea and fired up my netbook in a cafe in downtown Regina. Everything's in the past.

I'd stood at the counter beside a guy I used to work with. He was buying his 2-year-old some banana bread.

A simple workout this morning: push-ups and a rowing machine. Now weak, I've fortified my tea.

Yesterday I had to pull some poems from one of my favourite litmags because by accident I'd submitted them somewhere else, which also wants them and pays more, like way more. Sent the mag a donation to appease my guilty conscience.

The day before, my creative writing students had rolled the dice to come up with a number of lines with which to write on a random topic assigned to them (taped to the bottom of their chairs, actually). Outstanding results.

Monday night I found I'd lost 1.8 pounds in a week.

A year and a day ago I found my old friend in Vigo, Spain. Received an email from her just now.

Them Write

2011-01-18T12:42:00.000-06:00

I've told my students many times how much I enjoy watching them write. I mean it: the calm, the beauty, knowing that for a moment maybe they're going someplace that belongs only to them. So in all my classes I ask them to keep journals, usually a series of entries following prompts I come up with. I'll do an entry at the same time, but I like to put my pen down and listen. It's a humbling kind of thing, this sense that for a moment we're at play on the fields of language, so to speak.

I also keep a blooper file. Here's the latest entry: Once dead, you have to gut and skin the animal. I'll run this by the class tomorrow, first saluting their (anonymous) classmate for beginning the sentence with a modifier instead of, as usual, the grammtical subject. Come to think of it, I might use this line in 20 minutes when I go into my creative writing class, saying, as a prompt, what else do you have to do once dead?

Registration

2011-01-06T12:48:00.000-06:00

My class was full, but when we realized her grandfather had delivered me, I let her in.

Poetry Island (2)

2010-12-01T18:37:00.000-06:00

Five more gone today, costing us these nuggets: "the priest and the doctor / in their long coats / Running over the fields" (P.Larkin, "Days"), and "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose" (R.Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"). The only unanimous castaway was Roethke's "Wish for a Young Wife" which begins "My lizard, my lively writher" (oops I thought it said "writer" there for a minute). That leaves a couple of war poems, a couple of love poems, and "The Sick Rose".

Poetry Island (1)

2010-11-29T14:06:00.000-06:00

Of the 21 poems we read in the first-year class, 11 were just voted off the island, including two of my favourites, "I Knew a Man" (unanimously) and "Anecdote of the Jar".

Among the casualties, innocent by-standers in banished poems, were "the sadness of pencils" ("Dolor", T.Roethke), "a moonless black, / Deep in the brain, far back" ("Night Crow", T.Roethke), "love's the burning boy" ("Casabianca", E.Bishop), "a boy is shot with England on his brain" ("Invasion Summer", L.Lee), "One-woman waterfall" ("Nude Descending a Staircase", X.J.Kennedy) and, one more time, "I placed a jar in Tennessee ("Anecdote of the Jar", W.Stevens).

How We Read (Again)

2010-11-24T18:03:00.001-06:00

I continue to torture my students by insisting on questions and resisting answers (as if I had many). The latest sticking point: "Anecdote of the Jar". Determined not to occupy the one-with-the-answers position, I said nothing at all about the poem before dictating it a line at a time, pausing after each line so students could annotate their reading. This resulted in much doodling, much "I don't get this" and "I hate this." That was Monday morning. By this morning, Wednesday, I'd resolved to continue saying nothing, although I was rather impatient with those kinds of responses and in fact did scold the class, for about 10 seconds, about their own readerly impatience. Then I read the poem aloud, handed out some blank paper, and asked them to draw the poem.

I've spent the last hour scanning 14 of these into a powerpoint thing to show them on Friday. Not sure what I'll do after that. Any suggestions?

First-Year Essay Assignment: "Mr. Gatsby's Neighbourhood"

2010-11-22T11:35:00.000-06:00

Pretend you are 100 years old, still sharp of mind, living in a wintry prairie city in the present day. Write a memoir of the summer of 1922, when as a 12-year-old you lived near the Jay Gatsby mansion and encountered the characters and events in The Great Gatsby. Your memoir will share what you remember of that summer and will reflect who and where you are right now, perhaps looking out the window of your room or turning the pages of a photo album.

You will have to invent the circumstances of your family’s life near New York in the 1920s. Perhaps they ran a flower shop, or a catering business hired for Gatsby’s parties, or a stable for Tom Buchanan’s horses. Perhaps your parents worked on the trains or as tradespeople. As that 12-year-old, you hung around the shop or area, observing the goings-on and listening to the stories. Your memoir will report on what you remember of those goings-on and stories.

What I’m looking for:
• writing that is deeply coloured by the world of The Great Gatsby,
• the details (details, details) of behaviour and personality an observant 12-year-old notices,
• personality in your speaker (who will be at least partly based, of course, on yourself) who passes judgement, speculates and interprets, expresses things in his/her own way,
• carefully formatted dialogue between yourself and at least one of the characters in the novel,
• the present-tense frame, which can be relatively brief,
• fresh language, varied sentences, paragraphs, and precise punctuation choices,
• about 4 pages, give or take a page—if you’re tempted to write more, don’t! If you can’t “do” the whole summer of ’22 in 4 pages, focus on a single scene.

A Nickname

2010-11-18T08:50:00.000-06:00

        The grade four teacher was making a seating plan on the first day of school. She started at the back of the left-hand row.
        "You," she said, pointing at my friend Larry. "What's your name?"
        "Gus!" Larry said. And he's been Gus ever since.

The Giller flap

2010-11-12T18:17:00.000-06:00

I just want to say I'm disgusted about the criticism of Gaspereau for producing only 1,000 copies a week of the Giller-winning book. What's the hurry--people will read that book soon enough. Relax! Meanwhile, if you've ever picked up a Gaspereau book, like Tim Bowling's Tim Bowling's The Annotated Bee and Me, you know you've got a gorgeous thing, a triumph of book-maker's craft and art.

And I was disgusted enough about Rabinovitch and his pompous Giller posturing already. Let me conclude with this: if I ever win the Giller, I'll leave it on J.R.'s table.

How We Read

2010-11-03T18:17:00.000-06:00

I got my first-year English students to read "I Know a Man" by Robert Creeley.

We got into a good-natured scrap. I resisted readings of "drunk driver" or "drug runners" or "fugitives"; they resisted my apparent refusal to go beyond the sense of dis-ease, confusion, meaninglessness of the speaker as conveyed by linebreaks and other elements. "Yes, but what is the reason for the meaninglessness," they said. This went on for a while.

Next class, having been dissatisfied with our discussion, I proposed two vessels, each containing poem. With the first, we attack with our analytical devices, closing in on the poem, pinning it down. I drew a lid of this vessel, with arrows pointing in. The second vessel remained lidless, a bunch of arrows spilling out, accompanied by question marks. With this vessel, I claimed, we tease the poem open and let it stay that way. So with "I Know a Man", I went on, let's settle for the questions, without stretching for the answers.

"But what kind of world is filled with confusion and questions," they said.

"Exactly!" I [may have bellowed]. "The world of the poem! The world "surrounded by darkness"! Sounds quite a bit like life to me."

"That's an interpretation!" they cried. "How come you can say that and we can't say it's a drug deal gone bad or a couple of drunks out for a joyride!"

We had smiles on our faces, most of us in the room. I mumbled something about, well, you're adults, you can do what you want, but on an essay or a final exam you'd better be able to make a case that your reading comes from THE LANGUAGE OF THE POEM and so on. "We will," they said. "No worries."

Then I got the best idea yet. "You know," I said, "I'd prefer a poem like this any day to some poem you can read once and understand forever. "Tell you what. Let's turn to the first the war poem listed on that essay assignment. Let's see which one you prefer." We read "Arms and the Boy".

Not a bad little poem, I said to myself, after we talked about it a while. An informal survey: Do you prefer this poem or the Creeley? Results: Inconclusive.

"

Laughs 4

2010-10-24T15:00:00.000-06:00

I said to them "Write what you mean when you say the word home."

"Sorry, was that home or poem," one of the guys named Michael said.

"Home." Maybe I should have said poem. Anyway, this wasn't a laugh, strictly speaking, but I think did come from a place of trust where laughs are heard.

Michael R. sits in a cluster of tables that also includes Michael P. It took me a month to figure out which is which. Of course, asking them for help was a good idea. "I'm Michael R. because I'm closest to the door where I can run away," he said. Michael P., I've learned, is the other one. He sits with his back to where I am most of the time. When he turns his neck to say something to me or the rest of the class, the look on his face says good humour and good sense both.

Michael K. sits one table over.

Laughs 3

2010-10-14T18:42:00.002-06:00

Today at the start of class I sat there and tried to say nothing. It soon became funny, the 14 students--one missing, had to finish a project for his Theatre class--expecting me to speak. Maybe it was nervous, not funny. But I laughed, they laughed, and we went outside.

I'd gone out two hours earlier to come up with a list of prompts. Of the ten I came up with, the only one that didn't for a moment catch on in someone's writing, the writers told me later, was Look back across to the university campus. What's going on over there?

While they were doing that, I worked on my Open Mic intros for tomorrow night in Saskatoon, using the same prompts.

Laughs 2

2010-10-04T21:57:00.002-06:00

I promised I'd find or create a laugh every class. Not sure if I laughed this morning, but just before class I got an idea: each person goes outside, collects two leaves, preferably leaves caught in mid-fall from the tree. Can't be crunchy ones, I told them. Back they came, with at least two leaves each.

Next: write one word on each leaf, a word not usually associated with leaves. What words are associated with leaves, someone asked. Not "boring" or "stupid activity" or "what is this BS" I said. I asked them to lay out all their leaves in the middle of each table (seven in the room, 38 students).

Now pretend you're a poet, I said, and put the words together somehow. Write the result in your journal. Which they did, a few groups offering their piece to the whole class. (I couldn't persuade the boys down in table 7 to share their piece, though. Should I COMMAND them to read theirs? I asked the class. Yes, command them, was the reply. I wouldn't do that, I said to the boys, their last chance to offer up their piece, which they didn't take.)

Now a journal entry, something about leaves or what we've been doing here or what you saw outside.

No laughs, then. But lots of good spirit and a gorgeous day, leaves ejecting all over the place.

Truck

2010-09-21T19:33:00.001-06:00

The essential difference among poultry, pottery, and poetry is that the first two get trucks. Little white panel truck with a chicken on the side, or that half-cart, half-truck Saramago's potter drives in The Cave.

Once I bought a truck from Barbara Klar. I was up to Riddell to work with her on a book (hers) in February, damn cold. Her Datsun truck, an '81 or so, was parked for the winter in deep snow. We had to haul it out with a tractor, which Barbara's partner drove.

Her Datsun was rusted out, like all Datsun trucks. But it ran great. A mechanic said, "Geez, you've kept this truck in good shape." "Thank you," I said.

I drove it for three or four years. My daughter Lucy, who was under 10 at the time, and Tom (about 12) climbed in and out of the front seat often, Lucy straddling the gear shift.

After a while it was time to buy an Oldsmobile. I took possession of an '89 Delta 88 on Valentine's Day, 2001, and drove it to St. Pete's. Wrote poems in there, motor running.

HILL CALLS IT QUITS

2010-09-13T08:07:00.003-06:00

     Defenceman/Forward Gerald Hill announced his retirement from organized hockey last night in Regina. "I gave away my equipment," he said. "It was time."

    A lingering knee injury in recent years made the decision easy. "I waited five or six years, but the knee didn't respond," Hill said.

     Playing parts of 34 seasons, in Calgary, Rocky Mountain House, Nelson, Edmonton and Regina, Hill amassed career totals of 11 goals, 26 assists, and six or seven hundred minutes in penalties. "That last number is sketchy," Hill said. "Half the time we had no clock and just guessed."

     But the numbers don't tell the whole story. Known as "Pylon," Hill made up in physical presence what he lacked in the skills of skating, shooting, and passing. "The 'new NHL' was the kiss of death for guys like me," Hill said. "It was all skating and puck movement, like the burger without the beef. No wonder the coaches stopped calling."

     [This blog entry has been formatted to fit your screen and edited for content, specifically testimonials from Hill's opponents: "Brutal. Couldn't play worth a shit. Thought every icetime was Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals" and "Not much of a skater but tough to budge in front of the net" and "With that long stick of his he could hack at you from 14 feet away" and "Took the poor guy half an hour to get his equipment on."]

     Probably most famous for crushing an 8-year-old into the boards of the old rink on the U of A campus, or for assisting on all three goals a one-eyed guy scored in Nelson, or for using the same stick for the last 16 years, Hill can also call upon a slim but potent bank of high points over his career.  Almost single-handedly he repelled a Kinsmen two-man advantage at a key juncture of game in Rocky in '77. And poor Phil P.--"don't use his full name," Hill told this reporter. "I don't want to embarrass the guy"--is still looking for Hill's laser-like forehand that beat him high to the glove side from close range out at the Sherwood Twin arena in Regina in '94.

     By the time his career wound down, Hill had put together just the right look out on the ice. "Modelled after Borje Salming, my favourite player," Hill said. "Long, blue, white, TWICE as good as anything else out there."

     Could he be coaxed out of retirement with the right offer? "Coaxed, hmmmm," Hill said.

Laughs 1

2010-09-10T14:10:00.005-06:00

What a course outline starts to say:

"American Classics" studies three famous American novels narrated by characters who, like the rest of us, want things, make choices, do things, suffer consequences, and figure their worlds out (more or less). Along the way, the novels offer us glimpses into the wonder of our own worlds. We’ll see what makes these novels “classics”—texts that have had enormous influence and popular staying power over the decades.

"The composition component of the course carries on from English 100. We will focus on selected elements of grammar and mechanics as required. Student writing will be our primary source for both problems and solutions.

"Formal assignments will consist of three essays of about 1000 words each. Other class activities will include lecture (although this will not be a lecture-based class), discussion, frequent journal writing, student presentations, group work, peer editing, informal assignments, and unscheduled quizzes. This is a language class in which plenty of listening, reading, talking and writing will occur, and in which all the elements of language in the worlds around us will be in play.

"Required Texts (buy them now while they’re in stock):
1. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
3. Kerouac, On the Road
4. a duotang journal"

Three people named Shelby, who didn't know each other, ended up sitting next to each other around the table. We all enjoyed friendly laughs about having three Shelbys in a row. The Shelbys laughed too. If they don't sit together on Tuesday, we might have to make them.

Two of them, it turned out, were named for car designer Carroll Shelby, whose website is titled "An American Classic".

Back to ________

2010-09-03T10:30:00.000-06:00

Warm, winded, bluer--like leaves I could see out the south window, in other words--is how I felt yesterday morning during a meeting. Sure, about to wither and fall, get walked on, finally swept up by a noisy machine. (Duchesa, if you're listening, you can hear the same noise when the gardiner trims grass below your place.)

But I know I'm enjoying myself back at ______ because I lay awake last night.with teaching ideas And just one chapter of Huck Finn fired me up. How wise the kid is, how innocent, how much he sees in other people. Knowing that most students won't have that text with them when my American Classics class opens next Wednesday night, I look forward to reading that first chapter, Huck already wobbling the nature/civilization line. Laughter shows up more easily in night classes, I think I've learned. Huck will make us laugh.

August 22

2010-08-22T10:16:00.004-06:00

Took a look outside the other day.

Wondered what haze meant.

East on the former 25th.

By now the smoke from Williams Lake had reached me.

Found the nearest house red,

old Broad street turning.

Further to Previous Post

2010-08-06T14:36:00.000-06:00

After this brief note I'll insert a photo of a post.

It's about smaller steps now.
Less content, more jump.

Less research, less unit of street.

Might even take a glance, shiver to think of it, south to Whitmore Park or some area with no name at

all.

Gathering Room

2010-08-03T10:53:00.000-06:00

Something about "new enhanced preview" on this blog machine. That's what Sage Hill did for me--what Daphne Marlatt and the group did.

I knew I hadn't arrived at the starting line, really, of my Hillsdale book until I'd finished the initial gathering of pieces (later this summer and fall, I'd hoped). What I mean by starting line is that moment when I begin to zap individual pieces, make them live a little. I knew, too, that like the folks on that cruiser the other day off Lumsden beach, I was having fun at the surface, not minding the depths. It was getting sort of automatic.

Daphne took one look at the 35 or so pages of sample pieces I'd sent her and pointed out, politely, that the language needs a good zapping--the tensions among pieces too--and that the deeper through-line, so to speak, is yet to show itself.

I told her a little story about the early days of my first creative writing class, with Fred Wah at DTUC in 1981. I'd handed in the 4th of a series of poems about a guy delivering ice in the Okanagan (my summer job in '81). Fred said, politely, "Well, it looks as if you've found a lyric voice" which, for Fred, was the faintest of praises indeed. That is, it was a useful enough achievement for a beginning writer, but he was looking for deeper explorations with language. I feel the same response from you now! I said to Daphne at Sage Hill.

Of course, that is why I wanted to work with Daphne Marlatt. Be a student again, tip myself and my work over, get new with my process, etc.

Gardiner Ave.

2010-07-14T18:06:00.000-06:00

I've been wondering what to do with words

in relation to photographs

in relation to seeing.

I thought writing on location

would be WRITING on location, not

shooting the puddles, the effects

of overnight rain. I got the idea

from re-reading Gardiner

as rain dreg and going there

to collect what the dregs

might be.

Houses of Haultain 7

2010-07-06T11:39:00.001-06:00

Houses of Haultain 7
Originally uploaded by TagHill

Not a great photo--crooked, the light too harsh and all, but I'm going with this blog entry directly from my Flickr site, home of 180 Hillsdale photos, including the seven Houses of Haultain.

What goes on in these houses includes:
Garbage day.
Woman walking by with one child strapped to her chest and at least one more in a stroller wide as the sidewalk.
The sidewalk itself split and lifted.
Just down from here a house for sale. L-shaped living room, a fireplace angled at the crotch of the L, kitchen on the other side of the walls, two bedrooms and a bathroom, basement steps leading down from the back door.
Rain earlier, bright clouds now.

So far I've chickened out, but sooner or later I'm going to use my little digital to compose a panorama, images linked, of this row of houses on Haultain.

But as I say, not when the light's so harsh.

Road Trip

2010-07-02T06:03:00.003-06:00

In June I drove to Edmonton to see my friends off to Europe.

And catch my son's act at the Edmonton Improv Festival.

He and I walked by our old apartment (top left).

A few days later I slept by my sister's pool in Kelowna.

Under the solstice sky, which had all the answers.

My three sisters and I spent 48 hours down the lake.

I tipped my cap to the sky.

Then I drove home.

Jose Saramago

2010-06-19T17:53:00.002-06:00

I dug reading Saramago in Portugal. Sitting below the statue in Lisbon so prominent in the Ricardo Reis book (the statue that's prominent, not me). Intepreting with him the Lisbon skies, the streets, the water. Enjoying the wryness of the voice in any page (any strange Saramago page). Trying to write like him for the fun of it: _________. Being cantankerous correctly (a sentence he would never write). I love his respect for Pessoa too.

Fans of fooling with history enjoy his The History of the Seige of Lisbon. In it a proofreader inserts the word not at a crucial point in a narrative of the Crusaders and the famous seige at the heart of national stories in Portugal. And falls in love--yes you fans of love, he doesn't forget about you.

The bulk of a Saramago book was a companion the many times I reached into or from my backpack, removing a piece or replacing one. If I think about what those days were like, five to six months ago already, I think of that fabulous writer.

So he died the other day, had been sick. It is said that his good-bye was placid and serene.

How I Damn Near Bought a Kayak Last Night

2010-06-10T18:09:00.000-06:00

Jubilee avenue was Lake Jubilee when the storm hit. A couple with my last name, but no relation, had been trying out kayaks during Product Demo nights and had taken one home.

It was a tandem model, perfect for paddling Lake Jubilee, about four feet deep. At first they kept to the street, that late afternoon, but after a while paddled right up to neighbours' front doors. "It was tippy," said Gladys later. "People handed us hot chocolate."

This went on until sundown when they swung the kayak around and tracked north over Langley then west for the last time.

Davey

2010-06-04T11:08:00.001-06:00

This little guy lives closer to hearbeat and breath than most of us.

Tomorrow, then. Straight to Jubilee.

2010-05-31T16:33:00.000-06:00

I've been wondering for several minutes how to get back to work. Deleting now about from between minutes and how is as far as I've gone. And turning up the volume on my random five cds.

Last week I attended my son's convocation in Vancouver. In breaking our joint two-week abstention from liquor of any kind--this was the night before--we wondered if arbitrary goals meant anything. Depends on the context in which the goals were set, is the sensible answer, isn't it? (The process of composing pieces of poetry might be one context for usefully arbitrary goals. If not, I'm screwed.)

On the way out to Vancouver on the plane, anticipating that conversation (which we'd begun on the phone), I read the June The Walrus cover to cover. About three quarters of the way through I came across commentary about Micah Lexier that began by quoting Igor Stravinsky. I didn't write it down--something about the generative and liberating powers of arbitrary goals--but I did clip it and pin it to his bulletin board when he wasn't looking. (Poor guy--he gave up his bedroom for me and slept on the couch. Then after work he was heading across the line to the Sasquatch music festival until today. He won't spot the clipping until tomorrow, I'm guessing.)

So, I know my Hillsdale work is not done until, among other things, I've written on location on every one of its streets. I'm working backwards alphabetically; a version of K, for Knowles, is my May 20 blog entry. What I particularly like about that idea is that it ends with Anderson, my boyhood home, where we moved in '61.

Crude Audio

2010-05-22T00:04:00.001-06:00

Four times I walked the path through the woods between the Emma Lake Art Camp and Fern's Grocery at Murray Point last June. For fun, I had my Sony mp3 recorder running. The result is four tracks averaging 11-12 minutes each--mainly footsteps and birdcalls.

In case you listen to these tracks, using the link to the right, you may want to know that the "Brando" talk refers to the last in a series of poems set in Stan Still's cabin at Emma Lake. Everyone at the party--one of my grandfathers, Virginia Woolf, Robert Kroetsch, Jack Kerouac, a monk from St. Peter's Abbey, Ella Fitzgerald and Marlon Brando--was alive at least between 1927 and 1930. On the day of the four walks I'm musing about how to make the Brando piece (which I'll record and add to the site later).

If you're a writer friend who likes birds, you'll hear your name mentioned during the third and fourth walks.

Fire Two

2010-05-20T13:31:00.008-06:00

The day the fire ban is announced, the traveller lights a fire--tricky enough to do in wind, mid-May--and places a cage over his pit. He burns scraps of cedar lattice and a Corn Flakes box. New leaves are about to touch from trees on either side of Knowles.

Some citizens, he reads, don't want fires. Enforcement will be funded, tickets issued, hours restricted.

For this, says the traveller, laying on three more foot-long strands of lattice. And this (looking around).

He adds elm bark, maple twigs--Hillsdale's finest. A robin leaps to the garage roof, hops along and heep heep heep disappears. This is "fire cage brass wind fence treeblow page sun behind a cloud" stuff, the traveller argues. Why would you want to legislate against the joys of May? Why not go straight to December?

But he's not going to push it. He does add one log. He'll orchestrate its demise and that'll be that. With no more fires he'll have to remember this one, a flame about the size of a flowerpot. In this sharp west wind, you'd have to be straight east to smell it. Or right beside it, your skin smokey and your fingers charred.

Result one: The Traveller speaks out against over-regulation in municipal government.

Result two: He's still sitting there, red bench beside the fire.

Result three: He stirs and pokes with a stick. His eyes-sting count is about six.

Result four: For two ants approaching the char, this is Mount or Moment Doom.

Fire One

2010-05-20T11:10:00.003-06:00

The Leader-Post reports Community and Protective Services Committee Chairman Mike O'Donnell observing that "now we can all go out and enjoy the summer, I hope." They're clamping down on firepits in the City of Regina.

Whose summer is that--his?

I'm going to a firepit I know and lighting a fire right now.

Coming Out of the Royal Bank

2010-05-17T13:25:00.000-06:00

I met Gord this morning, father of an old marching band mate. Gord and his son, who sold their farm just southeast of Regina three years ago, were two of my technical advisors for 14 Tractors. (It was Gord who told me he'd combined a skunk one harvest, among other tales.)

I've noticed that every time I read from that book, as I did the other night in Rosthern, people come up and tell me more tractor stories. If I ever write another tractor book, I say to them (not that I have any intention of doing so), that's the kind of stuff I'll use.

For sure I'd use some version of my conversation this morning with Gord. He showed the the cane he was using. I had a knee replaced, he said. Hurts like hell. You know what a sign on the wall of the doctor's office said? "EXPECT PAIN"! We talked a while about arthritis. Remembering that Gord was the one who'd told me that farmers tend to suffer more hearing loss in one ear than the other, I suggested that his knee deterioration might likewise be related to that certain repetitive twisting motion (see 14 Tractors, page 59). I think it's from 60 years of pushing in the clutch, Gord said.

At the Broadway Cafe

2010-05-16T09:24:00.001-06:00

It feels like travel, this wee trip to Rosthern and Saskatoon. Last night, opting for the country motel experience, I bought a room at the Parkland in Rosthern after the Sask. Book Awards roadshow group reading at the beautiful Station Arts Centre. At the end of a gorgeous day, the night was lovely—open, fresh, a slip of new moon.

The motel room, though, would have been a downer after a travel day in Portugal. The hot water worked, and the wireless connection. As for bed, pillows, thin walls, all-round smell—well, I was up and out of there by 6 this morning. Next stop, Saskatoon, where I’ll be leading a writing group workshop starting in an hour. That has given me plenty of time to drink tea in cafes and overhear conversations (of a bunch of Asian folks—the one word I understood was “Blackberry”) and watch pelicans.

And watch pelicans. Shiny white below the weir on the South Sask. this morning, diving in pairs but not catching much, as far as I could tell. Through my Eddie Bauer binocs, one of them looked like my landlord—that tuft of hair sticking out the back.

“If you give it all up, where will you go,” Dave Carpenter (part of the SBA roadshow) asked me after the reading last night. I’d told him a bit about my euro trip and how I haven’t done much since. “Don’t know. Somewhere with a more moderate climate” was how I answered him.

For now, I'm hanging at that Nutana hotspot, the Broadway Cafe, admiring the tea, the overheard conversations (“They don’t even want to talk to me” / “Well now that you’re working it’s more of an investment decision” / “I thought of all my old buddies but . . .”), the pelican, the six hours of poetry talk ahead. After that (as the Asian guy answers his Blackberry) I’ll catch the Habs on tv—last night one of the roadshow readers pulled a Habs jersey from her bag and put it on before beginning to read; Go Leafs, I hollered—watch the sun go down, get up tomorrow and go visit my grandson Davey (he’s turned me into a non-stop singer/hummer). Put a period at the end of one sentence, start another.

Ideas That Didn't Work (yet, anyway)

2010-05-06T10:34:00.003-06:00

1.
A "Regina By the Sea" thing, photos of every commercial operation here that begins with the word Sea--this after spotting the "Sea Breeze Laundry" on Dewdney.

(Pause here to remember the potato breeze of the Hawthornden kitchen where our clothes dried.)

But the Sea Breeze is the only one ("Seaboard Insurance" turning out to be a subsidiary of another business).

2.
Housework. Great for focussing attention on anything else, like this blog entry.

Tom's coming home this weekend and I'm hosting the family Mother's Day brunch. (Quiche Lorraine x 3, here we come--with bacon, pancackes, fruit and some kind of sweet cake Emmaline and Allen are bringing ("sweet cake" not code for Davey, their new son).)

3.
"Hockey" as the first word of the latest in a series of imaginary pubs ("Pub Scrawl") I started at Hawthornden. The Back Inn, this one might be called, as if it's got about getting back somehow. Hockey in every direction, for starters. Perhaps this leads to talk of service and Euro cafe/pub culture and, before too long, to something else.

4.
Something beginning with duck, as in

I spotted a duck
on the corner of Bryant
and Munro--a duck and an Old
Dutch bag and a grey squirrel.
The duck didn't mind a Ford turning right,
didn't mind me watching.
He sipped from a puddle, walked into
the lawn at 106 Munro.
Since then he's memory, that sure of himself.
[then something or other from the spot where
this is remembered] I recommend the duck,
the lone duck making afternoon
like pepper in a shaker made of glass.

A Line (I'd String If I Had Some)

2010-05-04T12:37:00.000-06:00

I like to say to writing students:

"Keep the line (which has movement)
from breaking down and becoming
a hole into which we sink
decoratively to rest" (W.C.Williams)

after which I've heard myself say:

If the poem doesn't have action in the lines
it doesn't have much.

[to the tune of the Sibelius 4th on CBC]

as if poems should have.

Weather

2010-05-02T21:32:00.001-06:00

Can you think of a less interesting title? +21 in Lisbon today, that warm in London the week I was there. Only +5 in Regina today. Snow would have fallen, but the season beat it back just enough to keep it at rain, and a light one at that.

Twenty to nine, light still haunted a night-time sky. I do believe we've beaten winter at last.

Tonight I'm wearing one of the shirts I bought in London. First I walked Notting Hill Road in shiny blue running shorts with a bright red running shirt. Not even my sexy Spanish sandals and my flat cap from Lisbon could save that get-up, which I was sure people gawked at from the top of the double-decker buses. Later that day I visited the nearest clothing store, a Gap, and bought three shirts and a pair of non-shiny shorts, which I was prepared to wear out of the store, forgetting about the security fitting clipped onto the right leg.

The shirt worked with my new grandson, who was fussy until I picked him up, wrapped him up tight, and left him no choice but to wave his eyes over the vaguely hallucinogenic pattern I was wearing. He dropped off soundly to sleep. (Not to give all the credit to my shirt--I was humming a down-tempo version of "Please Please Me" at the time.)

This baby doesn't know it yet but he's born into an uncivilized climate. Today I lead a Jane's Walk through it, talking about Hillsdale. And tomorrow I get to work after an unmotivated week at home after my travels, weather promising.

Hillsdale by the Sea

2010-04-28T21:11:00.000-06:00

If that's the title, a traveller remembers watching in any direction to the sea. Sometimes, as in the Guadiana at Vila Real de Santo Antonio or the Tagus at Lisbon, he watches a river, calling it sea, which it is within a mile or two. Everywhere he walked was toward the sea . . .

This remembering goes on overlooking a hotel parking lot at the west edge of Hillsdale (not counting, the traveller adds, the western sky, just now retired into dark). Wind blows in his open windows.

21 in Lisbon today, the same in Hillsdale. As he would have done at the bottom of Alfama, across from the Lisbon waterfront, the traveller today found a cafe for a cup of tea. He read the paper, which probably would have been a day old Guardian or Telegraph over there, by the sea.

In either place there was all sorts of remembering, broadly understood as a matter of invention, which might turn up in this paragraph once it's longer.

After that the traveller goes home, where he misses sea the most and, as if denying his sense of loss, watches hockey on tv.

Pigeon Update

2010-04-28T09:44:00.000-06:00

Many of you have asked for
a pigeon update. (As you may recall,
I called them "rock doves" until
my birder friend said "they're pigeons".)
(They were taking over. I rigged up lights,
electric prods, a track of nails. I sent away
for netting and fibreglass spurs meant to burst
to sharp pieces next to birds. But when it came
right down to it I had to wreck a home by
picking up an egg and chucking it, then fighting off
the mother for a while. I guess they were
discouraged after that.)

They didn't arrive this spring, at least into
Sector 25, where I've had to lay off night
staff, Perimeter Unit.

Makes for a dulll evening until
T. and L. and L. show up
and I try out Belen's paella
(with chicken, Duquesa) and regret
not buying saffron in Spain.

Getting There

2010-04-23T14:59:00.011-06:00

You’re a couple from far away, on a hot afternoon. You stare out the window of a hotel shuttle bus from Pearson airport in Toronto but don’t see much beyond the freeways of the place, its sky everywhere.

You hope that the bus is heading in the right direction and will stop at the right time, that you replied correctly to “You don’t have a ticket, correct?” (the bus driver offering this in a loud voice, smiling, one eye on the other passengers), that your hotel reservation holds, that the water is hot and the bathrooms clean (that you have a bathroom in the first place), that somehow you can get some food.

Arrival is easy when you know the place. In my case, the shift from the British Airways 767--pause to acknowledge that I showed up at Heathrow yesterday with an Air France reservation, which they’d cancelled on me--to my hotel room in Toronto with a slice of pizza in one hand, the first of two Blues in the other, and the Globe in the one after that was so smooth that I’m not sure it happened. (Except that just now, next morning, I phoned back to the hotel about what I’d left behind.)

Yes, and knowledge is easy when you know. We don’t label our street corners, our trains (oh right, we have no trains), in general our systems and procedures for everything from shopping for groceries to unlocking doors, for people who are new to them.

I feel for the young man I saw this morning check in at WestJet. He checked a mammoth hockey bag and a backpack the size of a barrel. That left him with a smaller suitcase on rollers, a smaller backpack, a camera bag, and his jacket. Approaching the counter, he had to walk backwards to manage it all.

If he’s by himself when he arrives, I hope he finds his way.

Now on to the Henry Moore Show at the Tate

2010-04-22T06:51:00.001-06:00

Just now I ate the hottest curry ever, the Thai Jumbo Chicken Curry at the Shannon on Portobello Road, London.

"Another napkin, please," I called out at one point. "Better make it two."

The barmaid gave me three. "Hot!"

"I like it that way, though," I said, slumping back to my table, eyes watered, nose running. I felt a bright red.

A pint of Guiness and a glass of water--absolutely essential for that curry enterprise. In fact, "Another Guiness," I said to the publican. "Have you tried that curry?"

"No, I've not tried it," he said.

"Make sure you've a Guiness in front of you when you do," I told him.

We made small talk about the red-cross-on-white flags I'd observed the barmaid tack up. "St. George's Day tomorrow," the publican said. "Like Aussie Day, St. Patrick's . . . ".

I tell you, that curry sent a flame through my systems. If I make it through this Guiness, I may need another.

One Afternoon in London

2010-04-21T07:08:00.001-06:00

Riding the top front of the red double-decker but up to Camden Town to look for the taxidermist shop used in The Man Who Knew Too Much—a Fellini-esque scene in which Jimmy Stewart, realizing he’s wrongly accused the proprietor of kidnapping, tries to escape the grasps of the shop workers, in the process inserting his right hand into the mouth of a stuffed lion—I damn near fried in the hot sun.

Just now, seated in one of a hundred sling-back lawnchairs under that same sun in Green Park:

Him: I need to charge for use of the chair, sir.
Me: Pardon?
Him: You have to pay to use the chair, sir.
Me: Are you serious?
Him: Yes I am, sir.
Me: Why?
Him: It’s not a free chair, sir.
Me: How much?
Him: One pound fifty.
Me: (smiling, handing over coins) It’s just a chair in the sun.
Him: (smiling, handing over receipt) Thank you, sir.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

2010-04-18T09:05:00.003-06:00

The black shine of a pistol barrel pokes out from behind red velvet curtains at the Royal Albert Hall. A visiting royal is to be shot at the precise moment a cymbal crashes during the performance of a Bernard Herman oratorio. The McKennas, played by James Stewart and Doris Day, have blundered onto the plan, trying to rescue their son from the would-be assassins.

Doris Day spots the gun barrel and sees its target. She screams a moment before the cymbal crash. Startled, the assassin misses, and is himself killed—he falls to his death—when the police rush into the box he’d occupied with his near-sighted accomplice who’d been following the score.

The other morning I was thrilled to visit the Albert Hall and see I saw where this all happened. Why not, I reckoned, look for the rest of the London locations for the Hitchcock film. First, the taxidermist shop said in the film to be at 61 Burdette Street. There is no Burdette Street, but an actual taxidermist shop at 61 College Street was used. I went there. Torn down, replaced by an apartment block. Next the Anglican church which in the film is located in Bayswater on Ambrose Street. No Ambrose Street, but an actual church was used. I went there--the church is in Brixton, not Bayswater. Torn down.

But this weekend I'll view an early Hitchcock film, The Lodger, outdoors near where much of it was shot in the 1930s.

Unless KLM puts me on a flight by then to replace the one they cancelled because of the ash.

What I’m Packin’

2010-04-15T02:56:00.002-06:00

I took a picture of my shoes just now. A silly thing, no doubt. As if the work of the day was done, the can of Tennent’s opened, the pantlegs rolled up.

I give myself a 95 for decisions on what to bring with me on this trip of a hundred days, a 98 for the footwear—the Blunnies and my dad’s old slippers, topped up with the sandals from Santander once the Euro winter backed off.

I added a sweater, two t-shirts, four or five pairs of socks, one pair of pants from the high-end nautical wear shop in Vigo, and a travel mouse for my netbook. 85 for all that. Longjohns, bathers, shorts—not worn often but handy at times, 89. Nylon rain jacket and three umbrellas lost, wrecked or left behind, call that 80. Plastic accordion document file (full), new netbook, Tupperware box of office supplies, 99. Camera, thera-band, clothesline and pegs, deck of cards, mink oil for the Blunnies, duct tape, jackknife (in case I need to start a tractor), pillowcase/laundry bag, two books (Paterson and The Given), th’underwear—also 99.

By now I’ve sent home three boxes of stuff, a hundred bucks in postage. When I pack Friday to leave Saturday morning, with four days to spend somewhere, I should be able to more or less toss it all in my bag and backpack, no worries.

Going shopping in Edinburgh tomorrow though.

Spring Healing

2010-04-12T03:13:00.001-06:00

I see the skin on the back of my left hand is healing.

Sometimes when you call a plumber it’s a couple of days before he/she can get out to the house, and in the meantime (“in between time’, as the popular song would say next) you leak, you stay split, you make a mess all over, you start to think maybe this is the way it’s going to be.

Same with the back of my hand after I spilt hot water on it. Red. A deeper red, almost a crimson bruise. A dried, weathered look, like some old fence I’d never get around to mending. I asked the Tassie woman who lives next door if she had anything for it. “Here,” she said, handing me a bottle of good scotch.

Only took an hour or two, the hand feels much better. Next: the knee.