Yesterday was a day full of technological glitches and general discombobulation. I got locked in the Learning Commons at school. Actually there were side doors I could I have gotten out of, but I didn’t notice. Fixated on going out the front door and very frustrated to find I couldn’t. There’s a lesson in lateral thinking…
Worked out an interactive talk on a the female characters in my work, and my own wide-open feminist practice, as requested, for that talk in France. I think it’ll work.
Afterwards ate sushi and watched Werner Herzog’s new film Grizzly Man with my friend Jay. Odd film– very self-reflexive– much more about human egos and the practice of filmmaking than about bears. Although there was some amazing footage of the bears. Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man of the title, was an interesting character– sweet, naive, self-absorbed, but truly in love with the bears.
I should have gone home and gone to sleep afterwards, but was lured out by boys with guitars.

Good Larissa would be at the the poetry bash for Wordfest tonight. Bad Larissa is at home drinking wine staring into space. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was working on my lesson plan for the Instructional Skills Workshop tomorrow. It was good to do. In one of the French venues they want me to talk about the construction of female characters in my work, in feminist terms. But straight ahead is not my way of working. So I’m puzzling out how to speak in layers in a way that doesn’t lose or frighten people.
Went to hear four younger writers — Craig Davidson, Jenny Erpernbeck, Sheila Heti and Melanie Little read at Wordfest this afternoon. Got into an argument with Rudy Wiebe about appropriation, an argument I could probably have done without. Had lunch with my lovely, sweet and very encouraging editor Patrick Crean afterwards.
Had my hair cut. It makes a big difference having a haircutter I like. Chilling out in a world of easy middle class female pleasure. Why are these things so comforting? OMG I’m sounding legally blonde…

feast 

The air has grown cool and sharp, and the trees have all turned. The sun is bright though, remembering summer. I’m listening to Tom Waits’s Black Rider as I work on job applications and my talks for Europe and Asia. He’s perfect for a day like this– macabre, funny, carnivalesque.

“So come on in
it ain’t no sin
take off your skin
and dance around in your bones…”

I’m restless, but I can’t go out because I’m waiting for a last-chance-before-it’s-returned-to-sender parcel from my publisher. Just as well. I’ve got work out this paper. The hard part is figuring degree of context people already have for your work.

I feel trapped by the dialectic– race radical vs. whitewashed liberal. Let me out!

“That’s the way the stomach rumbles
That’s the way the bee bumbles
That’s the way the needle pricks
That’s the way the glue sticks
That’s the way the potato mashes
That’s the way the pan flashes
That’s the way the market crashes
That’s the way the whip lashes
That’s the way the teeth gnashes
That’s the way the gravy stains
That’s the way the moon wanes”

There are days when the impending change is altogether too much, and I can’t quite breathe. I don’t want to work for fear of making the change happen faster. But not to change is to stagnate, and that’s worse.
So I read. I finish Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation. She cares about a lot of the stuff I do– corporate incursions into our bodies and food supply, right down to the level of DNA, farming practices, race, gender, resistance. It’s a lovely book. A bit too straight to really turn my crank, but informative and well-crafted.
Recently discovered Tim Buckley, and listen to that while I read. All the tragic, honey-voiced boys…
Feist, btw, was awesome. So was dinner. Afterwards, hanging out with my more musical friends, listening to them play, I turn my spinning brain down to much fewer rpms, and close my eyes. Rest is good.

A gesture of affection from the ever-charming Miss SP Ruprai 

I thought SP had erased all the photos on my camera, leaving only one– a picture of her flipping me the bird. I was livid. Called her and, since she wasn’t there, blasted her answering machine. Why are we so attached to photographs? You can never have the experience back. We are fascinated by them the way we are fascinated by mirrors. Narcissistically believing they tell us something about ourselves. Perhaps they do. They allow us to gaze eternally at that which flies by in an instant. We hold fractions of seconds in our hands.
As for me, I’m so transient, no one holds my memories for me, however subjectively. The camera is my prosthetic mind, eye, mind’s eye. It reminds me where the time went, who was there, what I cared about in that fraction of a second.

May be I’m already dead, like the protagonist of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World. The farther she drifts from the land of the living, the more she loses her grip on the names of things. The wandering spirit talks about her (dead) body:

“I left her there, in her sleep, unravelling each of the letters of our shared name and throwing away the little coloured threads that made it no one else’s name in the world.
I want to ask her the name for the things we see with. I wanted to ask her the name for heated-up bread.
I have already forgotten it again, the name for the lift for dishes. It has tired me out telling you her story, all you pavement-pressing see-hearing people passing so blandly back and fore in front of the front door of the hotel. I lose the words; like so many chips of granite tapped out of a stone to make the shape of a name, they litter the ground.”

Yes, on your show at the Little Gallery, the reception of which took place this afternoon. Michael, Sandra, Myron and I made at two hours after it ended, at 8 pm. You rock, even if there’s a hole where your heart was…
Also missed today, because I am out in space, the launch of Adrian Kelly’s new novel, Down Sterling Road, at Pages in Kensington.

Myron and Michael at the KP