For my study of an arcane book, I went to a second-hand book store and found this.
I think the schematics, are beautiful and I had insane difficulty trying to bring myself to dismember it for collage purposes. In the end, I couldn't do it. Not only was it beautiful all by itself, but what would I add to it? What to juxtapose?
It kind of reminded my of science diagrams of the brain. All the little parts labeled. As though psychologists could really figure out what each structure does. They have spent so much time studying it and still we have very little idea of what the consciousness is.
I went out for dinner with a man a few weeks ago and he was telling me about how when he was doing a his BSc they were still performing vivisection on white rats. Cutting open their little skulls to disable portions of the brain and see how the rat behavior changed.
I guess I feel too sentimental about the old schematics to ruin them, or make them into something different anyway. They are like something out of a different time. I am sure on some farm somewhere this could actually be put to use, but it certainly seems archaic now.
New Vintage Theatre, is currently doing a series of short plays called The New Vintage Soap Opera and in October I was lucky enough to go and see the Halloween edition.
The play was at the Black Box Theatre in downtown Kelowna. Part of the reason why I chose to see this particular play is because my roommate, Joe Welton , an actor and writer was in the cast. The play was a comedy that satirized soap opera's, with a large cast of ridiculous characters. The play was set at a hotel/bordello and involved a large cast of characters including the bordello's madam, a sinister and wealthy vintner (played by my roommate), his brother (a surfer dude), who in the play was supposed to have killed the vintners ex-wife so she couldn't come back to take his money and he would be free to marry the bordello owner for her wealth, the ex-wife, a snobby rich ditz who throws a Halloween party in this particular edition of the play serial, a journalist, who in the last episode gave birth to a random baby with a mustache, who stole the bordello owners fortune, and quite a few others.
The play was funny and partially improvised. It is always a good experience to get out and see a play. I am not sure how this is going to impact my writing, but it was a good experience all the same. I think that it is illustrative of how writing should be fun and collaborative.
I have had an interesting time in the past year with collaborations. Decidedly, I love them and think that they are one of the most important things to do as a writer, and as an artist.
My first collaborative project was for a class I did last year: Community writing, with Prof. Nancy Holmes. This class was a fantastic opportunity to do a project that would teach us real world creative writing skills, and how to be marketable, and many other things that writing students don't really seem to get in university. Naturally, as is my way I wanted to do a book of poetry. The community we were working on was Rutland so this was going to be a challenge. The thing was, there were two poets in the class who wanted to write a book of poetry, and the project only had room for one book of poetry. I was lucky enough that the other poet was the talented Sarah Megan Hunter, and together we wrote a book of poetry that I would never have been able to create on my own.
Working with another poet was one of the most challenging and fruitful experiences that I have had in university. It was a lesson in structure and compromise. We wrote poems together and separately, bringing them together through the execution of experiments on the poems. We blacked out each other's poetry, and wrote on the same topics. We cut them up and pasted them back together so that I can barely tell now looking back what is mine and what is hers, and ownership, on my end at least didn't matter because it was about the thing that we created together. It belongs to both of us like a kid, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
And this is how I ended up mostly naked on the internet.
Not so fast there, I wasn't completely naked or anything or should I say am not completely naked or anything. Last week a friend of mine approached me. She is a video student and wanted to do a video that featured one of my poems. Naturally, I thought this was awesome. I had modeled for another friend a week or two earlier for her end of term project, which mostly involved me jumping around in a toga in a dark room, doing poses, and pretending to be serious. Honestly, it was fun and kind of a boost to my ego to be asked to help.
I gave my friend a few poems to choose from and she picked one that we then projected on my mostly naked body while I did some vaguely yogic movements. The video ended up being beautiful.
Yes, you can see my breasts, but it is really very tasteful. The film plays with light and shadow, ideas of embodiment, and femininity. The thing I am struggling with is how much credit I want to take for it. I am comfortable with my body. I think we are all too hard on ourselves here in that department, and I think that the world is far too afraid of nakedness.
The question is, how afraid am I of being judged? What my friend created is a thing of beauty. She took a piece of poetry that I care deeply about and made it into something new and different. It was collaborative and something that I am shyly proud of. Giving over a piece of my art to create a whole between us is what collaboration is about. As a feminist why am I afraid? There is no sin in my body as an artwork, it's just a body.
In the Fine Arts gallery at UBCO this November there was an art show that was particularly interesting to me as both a writer and an artist. Brenda Feist, a UBCO MFA graduate, had her grad work featured in an art show entitled Keeper and the Zoo.
The exhibit utilized text elements and collage. In the center of the room hung a very large white cube wood frame. Behind this hung a mobile from the ceiling with wire and clear plastic clouds that cast translucent shadows on the wall behind. One wall was painted black and completely covered in chalk scribbles, this seemed to me to be a practice in mark making and worked to make me feel a bit like I was in a classroom. The other walls, had quotations written in marker on the white walls.
The room felt good to be in, and I think that the show was trying to say something about how we humans are trapped by our own language. The floating cube seemed to say something like think outside of the box, to me, but not so loudly as to be cliche.
Exhibits like this are important to me as a writer, as collage comes very close to what I want to do with poetry. Indeed, I think that collage is a kind of poetry and art, and it`s label as far as this goes is entirely dependent on presentation. The question is, is the work in a book or a gallery?
Poetry, I think, of all written art forms, comes the closest to visual art because of it's nature. Poetry, since Ezra Pound, has functioned strongly on the level of image. Show the reader what you want him or her to feel.
All in all, I enjoyed the show. It was disjunctive and deeply intellectual, touching on problems of semiotics and what it means to be human, or animal.
The public reading is one of those necessary evils in art. Like artist talks and gallery shows. There is something really vulnerable about the experience of doing one. Going to a reading is a bit like going somewhere to get high.
Oral tradition is a drug. It gets the listener into a particular brain state. It's something near meditation but different still. A public reading is a shared dream experience. It is an act of performance that hinges on the power of voice. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his book Poetry as Insurgent Art, advises the reader that one should never do a Q&A after a reading for exactly this reason: because it takes people out of the dream, it kills the high. I have had the pleasure of going to several readings over this past semester, and have been lucky enough to host a few as well, but this feeling of luck and gratitude is not the way so many writers view the reading experience, and I suppose this should not surprise me considering that the most common fear among humans is public speaking. And it's true, I said it earlier, it is a seriously vulnerable experience. But that's what makes it great.
Most recently, I went to a book launch for one of my professors, Matt Rader. Matt has been published widely as a poet, in such magazines as sub-Terrain, Grain, Event, Malahat Review, Prism International, Broken Pencil, Geist, Fiddlehead, New Quarterly, Paradigm, Stylus, Riddle Fence, Arc, Stylus, Another Lost Shark, and Memewar. He has also published three books of poetry, The Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Across the River Arno, Living things, and Miraculous Hours. His most recent book, the one for which I attended a reading, is called What I Want To Tell Goes Like This. Matt`s new book is a collection of short stories about labour activism on Vancouver Island, some focusing on the life of Albert Goodwin, and activist for unions who was eventually shot and killed.
The reading was set in the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in downtown Kelowna, (a space that I am very familiar with, as I have hosted my own readings in that gallery and have attended many more, as well as art shows and things). The current show up in the gallery is the Red Dot members show. The November members show at the Alternator, is an annual event that is intended to showcase and sell member art, with a portion of the sales going to the gallery as a fundraiser. The walls were lined with paintings, in seeming in-congruence. It was interesting for me, to see the juxtapositions of these paintings, some of which I recognized from other shows, fascinating that two things placed beside each other can make such a different statement from their meaning on their own. A friend of mine, talented artist and member at the gallery, Lucas Glenn, had a few of his collage pieces from an installation that he did at the end of last year called Goods for Men. The installation was an exploration of hegemonic masculinity. One of the pictures in question was that of a sailing ship with the word BRAVERY. The piece had a completely different feeling to it when placed next to a members gay rights activist piece, all rainbows and people holding hands. The patchwork feel of the installation made the reading feel a bit like being in someone's living room, homey, and the space was pack with people and chairs. The lighting was good, there was wine and beer, and two trays of sushi for everyone to enjoy.
Ashok Mathur, head of creative studies at UBCO, also read from a few of his books and introduced Matt. One of the things I love about these events is the feeling of the crowd, people drifting in and out of focus on the words, fidgeting and unsure of what to do with their hands. Matt got up and read two stories out of his new book, one about a boy who was killed, and then it was over, and people, myself included, were rushing to the book table to buy one of the writers books. He seemed relieved that it was over, and I think most writers are that way. For me, I am always relieved once it has started, because I become as entranced by the voice as anyone in the crowd. It's like the world melts away and there we all are, dreaming the same dream, and I think maybe there is some connection here in the solitude of other peoples minds. A reading as a communal act, filling a hole where religion has failed us. As for the open mics I go to on a monthly and bi-monthly basis. It seems to always be the same people that come out and the same people that read and the same people that go out afterwards, and I think these are the most important kinds of things, because you don't do it for yourself, you do it for everyone else. You do it for the community. If you are doing it for yourself, you're doing it wrong. The only way that we get anywhere is by being there and doing the thing and talking about our friends like the New York poets did because then you make a scene. You make a real scene and then people start paying attention when the scene is over and everyone wishes for those times to come back again and they become golden. I think Elizabeth Bachinsky in her book I Don't Feel so Good, said it best: sometimes the readers were great but most of the time they were our friends and most of us had books and that was fine we published each other in chapbooks and magazines and we thought no one was looking but that someday someone would look and then one day they did and it still didn't matter.
I went out for dinner with a man a few weeks ago and he was telling me about how when he was doing a his BSc they were still performing vivisection on white rats. Cutting open their little skulls to disable portions of the brain and see how the rat behavior changed.
