there was the biggest raccoon ever sitting by the steps to my house when i got home tonight. it eyed me suspiciously, daring me to pass. i was quite daunted. i crept around the house and went in the back door. can a raccoon be a sign? of what? it’s presence was insistent and otherworldly. once inside, i watched it from the living room window for awhile. then i went upstairs. when i came down several minutes later to get something from the kitchen the raccoon was gone, though there was an indent in the grass to prove it had been there.

yesterday slogged through edits on the no-name novel-in-progress. had a fun evening with the housemates. all three of us went to the gym together, and made supper afterwards. drank wine and explored the not-really-all-that-coincidental coincidences in our lives. i’m liking living with people.

today– reading kevin chong’s _baroque-a-nova_. did a little shopping. had supper with ashok and hiromi before they bomb off to kamloops tomorrow. and rita, who called this afternoon wanting to know, with some urgency, what marx meant by “socially productive forces.” thank goodnesss i have a sociology degree… ashok has set up a series of mini-residencies in the loops for a bunch of writers. hiromi will be the first.

after supper, we ran into my friend nadine chambers, for the second time in two days. nadine is a talented writer/performer i’ve known since we were young things. she has a friday night ritual of dinner and cake at two local establishments i also frequent. she and ashok had a long chat about trinidad, where he is headed shortly, and where she spent a couple of years in high school. it’s always interesting to see who the universe places in your path, and at what moment. nadine’s presence makes sense. but what about that raccoon?

lots of intervention from the classical world these past months. first it was achilles. now it’s spartacus. there was the bookstore on saturday, where steve collis read. it has a new very beautiful space just doors down from the old location, which burned. (nero anywhere in sight?)

i got a call yesterday from herb at spartacus, and i was wondering what in dog’s name he could be calling for, until i realized it was herb dasilva from spartacus gym, across the park, where i signed up about a week ago. i’d asked for him because he is the one trainer there who specializes in rehab. so i had a session with him tonight, to help me get back in shape after these patient months as the one-hoof wonder of the west. everything is tight and weak. let’s not discuss it and pretend we did. but herb was great. very supportive and also really good at explaining technique, sometimes repeatedly, until i got it.

so what do an anarchist bookstore and an eastside gym have in common that they should adopt the same name? (i wonder how many of the same people they attract?)turns out spartacus was a thracian soldier captured by the romans and sold as a gladiator. he escaped, raised an army of rebel slaves and defeated two roman legions before a third roman army got him. those were the days of crucifixtion. apparently 6000 slaves were crucified and put on display as a warning against slave rebellion. there was a movie in the 70s, starring kirk douglas and directed by stanley kubrick.it’s all coming together— hollywood, body-building, political rebellion. i wonder if spartacus would have gone to spartacus the gym, spartacus the bookstore, both, or neither? once, of course, he escaped the romans a second time and joined the banale herd of the thracian middle class. the romance of the mind or the romance of the body? apparently i need both. but come the revolution…

more rain. i’m ready to start killing kittens.

cool events of the past week:

the opening of cindy mochizuki’s “wake” at video in on thursday. it’s a video installation piece about a murder at the pool on the pne grounds in vancouver, where japanese canadians were held during the war, in preparation for internment. there’s a detective searching for the truth, and a witness who insists on the importance of memory, however fragmented, broken and inconsistent. very interesting in relation to recent psychoanalytic work on trauma and memory. also in terms of local history. it’s a new take on internment history from a smart, sensitive young artist. worth checking out.

the launch of steve collis’s _anarchive_ at the new spartacus books on saturday. engages the history of the spanish civil war, the anarchist revolution that erupted in the middle of it, and much of the experimentation in art at poetry at that moment.

it’s great to be back in an environment where people are actively confronting the hard parts of history. i’ll survive the rain.

after steve’s reading, sophie, david, rita and i went to check out a potential venue for my writer-in-res reception early next month. then– more fabulous late night snacks,this time at zakkushi on denman.

The sun is out. I wasn’t sure it was still there, so this is a great relief. We are one day short of having experienced the most rainy days in a row on record for Vancouver. The construction workers next door have laid the concrete foundation for the house. There’s just one guy out there today. His hood is off. He looks happy.

Went to hear Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, and N. Katherine Hayles at UBC yesterday. Enjoyed the Krokers for a wide open riff on the problem of post-human subjectivity. Discussion on police/state surveillance of performance artists such as Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz (who was arrested under the Patriot Act while in the midst of work on a project interrogating new uses of the biological) and Steve Mann, the Toronto professor and cyborg whose electronic implants were forceably removed by Canadian airport security at the St. John’s International Airport. Fun discussion about second-order postmodernism, marked by the emergence of the “remixed body,” in which the nervous system is externalized– ie technologized and social. They closed with a discussion of the biometric state, with all its intricate invasions of the body in its quest for perfect control. Lots of stuff, a bit hard to hold onto given the rate at which it was delivered. What made it productive for me was the juxtaposition of a wide range of arenas– from conceptual art to the war on terror to popular music to medicine to computer science to feminism to Babylonian mythology, and the attempt to pull them together into a theory of subjectivity.

N. Katherine Hayles spoke very differently. Arguments laid out in Powerpoint and meticulously constructed and communicated. (I’m thinking very much in terms of pedagogical strategy these days. In my mind, both methods work. One generates excitement around the range at which it is possible to think, the other demonstrates how logic works.) Hayles illustrated the ways in digital and print culture in our contemporary moment are interconnected, and specifically how contemporary print is influenced by the digital. She sees books, in fact, as part of digital culture– a particular form of output.

Afterwards, off to the Koerner Library (since we were up there) with Rita, to scope journals and new books. And then another marvellous culinary discovery– the Modern Cafe on Dunbar. It’s an okonomiyaki restaurant. Delicious. Though my robot leg did not like the slippery floor.

it’s been raining for 24 days straight. it’s unpleasant enough inside, but do i ever feel for these guys, who are hard at work every weekday outside my window. i hear them yell to one another in cantonese as they hammer away in the rain and mud.

hung out with nikki reimer at a cozy supper club on the drive last night. it’s called “rime.” trio ochs, an experimental group featuring saxophone, cello and dulcimer was playing. we ate turkish food. i was curious about a dish purported to come from an ottoman empire cookbook. the dish is made with grape molasses, orange zest, green apple and lamb. did not try it. ate kebabs made with pistachios. next time.

it’s been a decadent eating adventure this week. went to my favorite vancouver restaurant, gyoza king, the night before with my friend lenny. his last night in the rain. gyoza king is a sort of snowboarder children’s japanese nouveau cuisine place. i live for the tuna tataki. and salt grilled mackerel. have i ever missed the food here!

thank goodness i’ve also been productive so i needn’t feel so guilty about my indulgences. i’m working away on the no name novel. can’t come up with a title to save my life, but thanks to the comments of the diligent frances kruk, the gaps are slowly getting filled in.

i also had to move offices yesterday. not sure what happened there. but i now have a corner office that i share with my friend david chariandy, who is not teaching this semester. (david has what sounds like a very interesting novel in the works, and is on his way to trinidad to do research. go david!)

my physio has given me the go ahead to do yoga and go to the gym. so yesterday i went to my first ashtanga-based class (they call it power yoga here) at the gym across the park. it felt so great to practice. one more week in the aircast, aka my robot leg. almost human.

why are people disgusted when they find a hair in their food? is it actually germs they fear, or the body of the cook? today i found a hair in the box of a prefab ikea drawer unit. i don’t want to eat the unit. but who made all these uniform pieces? what happens to bodies paid to enact the movements of machines? or to repetitively operate machines, and have to move in accordance with the idiosyncracies of the machine? the individuality of the third world worker is constantly erased so that we can have uniform goods. there’s a benjamin article about this somewhere.

my friend louise, who lives in england, has the same shelf as one i just bought last week. neal stephenson’s burbclaves are real.

who counted all the screws and bolts in the plastic bag that came in my prefab package? they left a trace– “60″ or “09″. was it satisfying to know that there was exactly the right number of each kind of wooden peg?

rita and tamotsu assembling gyoza. many friends and children participated in the making of these dumplings. there were a lot. after all was done, hiromi made a round of elvis onigiri (onigiri grilled in butter). i was too full to even have a bite, which says a lot because i love those things. we watched the hockey game (vancouver vs. calgary) as we ate. it was hard to know who to root for, though i admit my loyalties fell to calgary. afterwards we went to the opening of a show by an artist called liam wake at a venue called “blim”, run by lenny’s friend yuriko iga. quick stop for a drink (or rather, some tea) at a new place at main and 10th called “habit.” it reminded me distinctly of husky house with its orange seats, 70s nouveau-retro post-soviet chic tiles and forest scene wallpaper. where were the pancakes with bad strawberry sauce and whipped butter? afterwards the die-hards went dancing. i went home to bed.

first dinner of the year at the goto/tongu house. i ate so much i had to lie down afterwards and make curmudgeon the rat-puppet do darth vader impressions.

that will be the genre descriptor for my new novel, which i can’t seem to name. i wore two normal shoes yesterday, shopping on main street with rita. afterwards we drove back to my place (in the dark vancouver wet) and made spaghetti with putanesca sauce. (oh the trade off– rain for food). played exquisite corpse with my room mate kevin, and my friend lenny who is here shooting a documentary called “tailor made” about an old chinatown tailorshop and the two elderly men who run it.

the day before, roy took me up to sfu to meet people, get paper work in motion, and set me up in my office. i have a lovely view of indian arm and the snowy mountains behind.

i am learning the city again. everything is in a different order.