I leave the party to return to my machine. It remembers everything I’ve forgotten. It warns me of the future. It reminds me of the past. It brings me old friends from childhood. It schedules my day. It sings to me. It tells the time. It surprises me with unexpected visitors and fascinating projects. It…

Reading Bakhtin on carnival. I can’t decide if it is politically useful or not. What he calls “the material bodily principle” in the form of the grotesque seems so full of subversive possibility, but it is also about renewing and reviving. Holiday from the status quo, a moment to release all that one has repressed…

Maddie at Dairy Lane 

Fellow contortionists: Christine, Jeff and Aaron 

It is a city after all. When I first came, I thought it wouldn’t be, that I would just park myself for a few years and accomplish. Lay groundwork for a future elsewhere. But the future is now, and elsewhere is here, and I am surprised to find myself alive and amazed. Not because I’ve…

Natalee Caple, Melanie Little, and Larissa Lai at the Auburn after the recent Markin-Flanagan Arrival and Departure reading 

Recently received an email from an old Newfoundland friend of mine. When I left I was running away. I was sixteen, and sad. I kept in touch with a few people for awhile, but they all drifted off after a few years. The internet is a strange thing. It changes our geographies. It also changes…

Went to see Chad Van Gaalen at Truck last night. Liked in particular a series of drawings he did with school children, having them draw for a certain period of time, and then pass on incomplete drawings to the next child to add to for a few rounds, kind of like the Surrealist game Exquisite…