How can I top my last post? I can't. But this comes close:

filling Station / NoD launch

January 5th, 2007 7:30pm
Carpenters' Union Hall
310 10th St. NW, Calgary AB
cover $5 (or $10 for admission & 1 mag, $15 for admission and both mags!)

featuring readings by
JACQUELINE TURNER (launching her new book Seven into Even),
NATALIE SIMPSON (launching her new book Accrete or Crumble),
FRANCES KRUK (reading from her new work),
GARRY MORSE (launching his new book Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13),
REG JOHANSON (launching his new book Courage, my Love),
ROGER FARR (launching his new book Surplus),
and musical sensations HOTLITTLEROCKET!

accrete or crumble
LINEbooks 2006
$16.

email to order a copy

I’ve been reading far too much, even for a law student, and getting headachey and overcaffeinated and underfed, and these sorts of conditions tend to lead me to intense intellectual considerations that are actually neither intense nor intellectual, just manic.

Check out my new(ish) work in the latest issue of The Capilano Review. It's an excerpt from a longer piece called "camp set up done," and it's part of my series of oil and gas industry found language poems, which also include "making hole", published in West Coast Line #39 and "NEWS(and yet)", published in dANDelion a couple of years ago.

For anybody who will be in Vancouver next Friday...

LINEbooks invites you to join us for the launch of four new poetry titles:

Accrete or Crumble by Natalie Simpson

Surplus by Roger Farr

Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13 by Garry Morse

Courage, My Love by Reg Johanson

Friday, December 01 at 8pm at Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings Street Vancouver, BC

Special: pre-launch price box set of all four titles $50

Contact Michael Barnholden
Managing Editor, WCL
www.westcoastline.ca
email: [email protected]

Why is it that the less you say the less you have to say? My standards for what is worth writing here have rise proportinately with the length of time since my last entry. Now nothing seems important enough to record.

Each entry, by coming into existence, removes itself from the possibility of the poem. -Robert Kroetsch
A writer is someone for whom writing is difficult. -Somebody

Art is all possibility. To be an artist is to strive and to fail. Inevitably. I was trying to figure out how I can be proud of my writing and ashamed of it at the same time. I think it's because it's painful, just incredibly painful, to confront a particular manifestation of foreclosed possibilities. And it's not that I think I've failed at anything, more that there's no standard of success or failure. It just is what it is, so it's not what it could be. But why does that matter?

Thinking about poetry and law and my sense of trying to operate in two vastly different worlds. While the people and to a certain extent the ideologies representative of each world tend to be quite divergent, I think there are overlaps.

I think postmodern poetics and law dovetail quite nicely in the sense that both are concerned primarily with language, not necessarily as subject but as medium, as the only medium within which they can operate.

And the crucial point about both poetry and law is that there is no certainty. Nothing is certain because language fails. Where they differ is in the effect of uncertainty.

Law strives for certainty regardless, or accepts a conditional sense of certainty recognizing the fiction as less than ideal but necessary. And practitioners of law don’t even have to recognize that much. Most law students and, I imagine, lawyers would claim that the law is certain and that any question of uncertainty is merely philosophical or academic. While I think it’s more accurate to say that uncertainty is an undeniable condition of law, as law is an enactment of language, and the sense of certainty with which practitioners arm themselves is a philosophical illusion.

Poetry can run into the same problems as law when poets strive to express in spite of uncertainty. But postmodern poetrics are more likely to thrive on uncertainty, to find its challenges in indeterminacies.

But economic choices are, in my view, for the citizen to make (provided that they are legally open to him or her) and, whether the citizen is negotiating for the purchase of a Van Gogh or a sexual encounter, s. 2(b) of the Charter protects that person's freedom to communicate with his or her vendor.

- Reference Re Criminal Code Sections 193 and 195.1(1)(c), Supreme Court of Canada 1990

I get kind of neurotic about book reviews. I’d like to write them, but I find it hard to articulate why I like a particular book, and even harder to explain why you should like it, too. So I can’t really tell you why, but you should read this connection of everyone with lungs by Juliana Spahr. You should go read it right now. Seriously. I finished reading it in bed the other night and I fell asleep holding it. I love this book.

Happiness is browsing your own records on the Library and Archives Canada website. I don't what my book will look like, or when it will be out, but I do know its Dewey Decimal number! So, so exciting. I'm such a dork.

Already I feel so divorced from my other identity, not necessarily my secret identity, because I think each one of my identities is a secret I'm trying to keep from the other. Is it leaving Calgary? Or is it coming to law school? I'm sure I could manage to feel like a poet in Vancouver, if I wasn't spending all my time trying to remember the details of contract law or understand the rules of evidence. As it is though, my writer self feels miles and miles away. Your aesthetics won't help you now, indeed.

My sense of disconnection is compounded by the problems I've had trying to hook up internet in my new (and exponentially better than last year's) apartment. I've decided I need to just get a new laptop: if throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it, then throwing the highest amount of money the problem could possibly require is the logical next step. I'm probably going to go for a Mac, although I'm slightly put off by Apple's whole identity campaign, which seems to imply that a Mac will turn me into the open-minded, laid back, creative person I've always wanted to be. We shall see. At the very least, my Mac might allow me to submit some poems to magazines or read some poems on the internets or write a blog post every now and then.

If you happen to be a subscriber to the Calgary Herald, you can read this. If you happen not to be a subscriber, well, they don't want your sort reading about me and my poetry adventures. And you thought the internet was a democracy, or at least an anarchy. Ha.

You can take my word for it that it was pretty cool: I got a CanWest-owned newspaper to print random lines of Stein, Kroetsch, Mullen et al., including "Lapwing is, improbably, the name of a bird. Titmouse. Goatsucker." from Robert Kroetsch's Excerpts from the Real World. Unfortunately I discovered that speaking intelligently off the cuff about why I like particular books of poetry is not my forte. Oh well, at least I take a half decent picture on very little sleep, no breakfast, no time to prepare and not necessarily having even brushed my hair (pictures in print version only).

I re-read Postmodernism for Beginners every couple of years, just so I can try to remember some of the things that I think I ought to know. It's a fun book to read, although I'm skeptical about how accurate its explanations can be, considering how much material it covers. The few pages that deal with theorists I actually do know something about (de Saussure, Barthes) just confuse me, and that makes me wonder about the sections on modernism and post-modernism in visual art, which seem concise and condensed enough for me to grasp: a good sign that something important is being left out. Nevertheless, it's a great book to steamroll through, letting the names of artists, philosophers, theorists pile up and blur, ending up with a vague sense of discombobulation and awe. Also, there are pictures.

My fortune at lunch the other day: You have a charming way with words. Write a letter this week.

Speaking of herring, I'm not a very good law student. In first year, we had an assignment to write a memorandum, which is basically an opinion written for a client stating their legal position. The prof gave us a legal scenario, then we had to research cases that deal with similar issues and analyze the similarities and differences between the facts of the cases and the hypothetical situation, and then reach a conclusion about the likely outcome of the case if it were to go to trial. The scenario my class got dealt with a contract between two businesses that one wanted out of, and the question was whether it had a right to break the contractual obligation without paying damages to the other business. It was a fairly wide open question in a well hashed over area of the law, so there were a lot of different cases applicable to the issue. I tried to choose cases to discuss based on their relevance, but I kept getting distracted by odd facts or words. One case in particular I relied on just so that I could write this:

...a poor fishing season and difficulties with packers were not sufficient to frustrate a contract to supply a specific amount of herring. The court ruled that although supplying the herring was more difficult and less profitable in the circumstances than the defendant had anticipated, its obligation to supply the herring was not significantly altered...

Is it fun to write about herring? Of course! Was that the point of the assignment? Probably not. Maybe it shows a healthy disregard for the educational system and its pedestrian methods of evaluation; after all, I doubt I'd be as easily distracted writing a memo for a real client. On the other hand, maybe I'm not cut out for law. I mean, who cares if a company has to pay money to another company? I don't. I guess I care more about how to draft a contract to avoid conflict, but once the conflict begins, I want no part of it. I also care more about individual's rights, especially when they come in conflict with the government, but that's more a vague sense of justice than a palpable engagement with the details.

Collected thoughts:

1. IKEA should have grocery stores everywhere. Elderberry flower juice is awesome; so are salted licorice fish and ginger cookies. Next time I'm trying loganberry juice, and maybe something involving herring.

2. Yoga is a great way to calm down and get in touch with your body. Going to a yoga studio downtown that only offers classes during rush hour (for the exquisitely lululemon-ed after-work crowd) and is conveniently situated on the corner of two one-way streets is somewhat less calming. After looking for a parking space for ten minutes, attempting then abandoning a parallel park over my left shoulder, and crossing and recrossing adjacent avenues with interminable and yet uncoordinated red lights, repeatedly screaming FUCK so loud my vocal cords do this weird vibration thing that feels like shredding about to snap -- however cathartic that may be -- indicates that I probably need more help calming down than yoga can provide.

3. The Calgary Fringe Festival has some brilliant theatre on offer, for just a few more days. I highly recommend Do You Bite Your Thumb At Me, Sir?

4. Theatre people are still annoying.

5. I'm so glad So You Think You Can Dance is finally over and I can get on with my life.

6. New tires make car go fast!

7. There's a sheesha bar in Calgary, they serve Arabic coffee, I just had some and it's midnight and I ran up three flights of stairs and now I'm typing! Neat!

There's nothing I love more than a good story about punctuation derailing a legal document: Comma quirk irks Rogers. Especially when the title internally rhymes.

I know that chapter I wrote in my thesis about punctuation will come in handy if anyone ever hires me to do legal work, I just know it.

...lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I have a pretty neat job. I’m writing grant proposals for a charity that trains people to take care of senior citizens with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. It’s not a cause I know a lot about or have ever thought about at all, so it can be hard to write about persuasively. But I’m getting pretty good at it. I just wrote a long, involved letter about the frustration of patients who can’t communicate with their caregivers and the potential for abuse and how we have to be a voice for voiceless seniors and yadda yadda. I made it pretty bloody heart wrenching, and now I’m kind of depressed.

In other less distressing news, I’m organizing a used book sale to raise funds for the charity. I spent most of yesterday alphabetizing hundreds of paperbacks. They’re mostly fantasy, so blah. Definitely not my cup of tea, but if it’s yours, I can hook you up. The book sale will be August 19 in Sylvan Lake, right next to the beach (did you know there’s a beach in central Alberta? I totally didn’t). Should be pretty sweet. Let me know if you want to donate books, come to the book sale, come to my office to check out the books before the book sale, etc.

Yesterday morning I woke up and thought, Fuck it, I'm going to read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. And finish it this time. But my resolve flagged quickly, and I ended up reading only the introduction, the first chapter and the conclusion. Oh well, I'm sure I got the gist. Anyway, I found this paragraph disturbing:

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

Gah! Ack! OK, I get what he's saying, and it is kind of disturbing to think about how specialized knowledge has become, so that no-one outside of a given field can really understand what the experts in that field are doing. But have philosphers really ever done anything other than analyze language? As in how you know that you know what you know?

I don't know. I guess it's important to learn as much as possible about how the universe works, but beyond a certain point it becomes too abstract and I can't imagine why it matters. As long as the earth keeps spinning, and gravity keeps on... keeping..on, then we can keep studying language, which is infinitely more interesting, and not a comedown at all. So there. Wait, am I still hungover?

There's a really good quote in a Paul Auster book I read recently but can't find now about how making art means always failing. I googled for it and found this quote instead, which doesn't say quite the same thing but I still like it:

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
-- Jasper Johns

It's interesting to think about art and failure and perfectionism. If the process of creating art is striving for an impossible ideal, constantly falling short, and thereby constantly failing, but creating the byproduct art, and if perfectionism is a paralyzing and somewhat delusional fear and abhorrence of failure, then wouldn't perfectionists who try to be an artists drive themselves slowly insane?

I think I'd be a better writer if I could just resign myself to failure, and then (because life is ironic like that) I wouldn't fail.

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
-- Gertrude Stein

Weird... apparently Alice B. Toklas was 4'11" and Gertrude Stein was 5'1". You'd think a woman who called herself Caesar would be taller than that. Then again, I can't imagine those Roman emperors were very tall either.

For your amusement, recent excerpts from my writing journal (not writing writing, just things I write in response to what I'm writing, or to motivate writing, or to avoid writing, oh god sometimes I hate writing):

I worry a lot about the naturalism of phrasing, the likelihood of flow. I’ve given up trying to flow, it never flows. Everything is a fake. Smoke and mirror show. All writing is fallacy.

The torture of theme is overtaking whatever momentum I might have had. It makes me sad. I really don’t want to give up this idea, I really want to explore it, but how? How do writers explore ideas? And if I can’t figure it out, does that make me not-a-writer?

I think the problem might be images – I’m trying to write from images when that’s not what I do; I write from sound.

Write from sound, write from sound, fuck theme, fuck image, write from sound write from sound.

The drudge continues. Steely resolution, but is that what writing requires? Sensitive adjustments also. I don’t know why or how or how well, I just know I want to.

I don’t know. I just don’t know what to write anymore, what to think about, how to approach anything. I’m starting to think starting blank works just as well.

Ahhhhhhhh! time. Of course there’s nothing worse than writing against time. Guaranteed to make the writing fall flat. Or start flat. Crawl flat along the ground. The page. Gah.

My computer thinks it’s yesterday. Damn know-it-all laptops. OK, getting all excited about the work, about design, about chapbooks etc. But, much much left to write still. Counting chickens, eggs, thing, whatevahs.

You can’t go home again. You cannot rest on your laurels, and you can’t repeat success. Try to know this.

Hmmm. Just noticing a Mullenesque quality to the phrasing. Hope it’s not derivativivive.

All the nostalgia and goodwill I've accumulated for Calgary over the past almost-two-years imploded into itty-bitty bits of bitterness when I was wrenched awake at 7:19 this morning by the blare of Alan Jackson and his ilk. Not to be pedantic, but when was Calgary ever a centre for ranching, or rodeo? It was a mountie fort and a railway stop, then it was an oil town. That's about it. Of course there are all kinds of ranching culture across Southern Alberta, but why do they have to rear their most ridiculous incarnations in front of my building, downtown, in what's supposed to be a city? Also in direct contravention of noise bylaws, I might point out, although not to the police, because it's Stampede! they don't care.

This morning wasn't all bad: they did play a couple of Johnny Cash songs. But that didn't last long, so I had to close the balcony doors and play the Smiths loud enough to drown it all out. After eating my breakfast quiche.

Man, I can never rant about the Stampede without making myself seem pathetic. Why is that?

Often I gather sentences to see if they'll organize themselves into some kind of poem, but these ones aren't cooperating, so I'm releasing them back into the wild...

Has your dad ever not got his crop off in the fall? *

How are my wife and I supposed to understand Elfish?

What would tourists think of a habitat of denuded trees with desperate, starving koalas roaming the damaged landscape?

What can't you do with a law degree?!

In BC, you can't deal with beavers like in Alberta.

You'd get laid if you were a rodeo clown.

Your aesthetics won't help you now.

* I love this sentence so much, especially given the context I heard it in: Picture the varnished wood and conservative artwork of a 26th-floor boardroom filled with drilling engineers discussing the effect of heavy rains on the soil in Saskatchewan... Seriously, poetry is everywhere.

!!Optimism!!

A manuscript must be really good if it takes over two years just to reject it!

Another trip through BC, another dead bear on the Transcanada, this time a cub. What the hell is going on? If I believed in, well, anything, I might think it was an omen of some kind. Or maybe there are just a lot of bears around, hungry bears, stupid bears.

Sometimes I feel as though there’s something insidious creeping into my aesthetics, bias influencing my reaction to poems more than reasonable evaluation. I want to resist choosing sides. If there is a compelling argument for why formalist, lyric poetry is still relevant, then I want to know what it is. I want to be convinced.

So I started off reading this review with an open mind. After a brief stroll through Starnino’s caustic introduction, and a minor remonstrance for the apparently forgivable sin of spell-check-induced typos, the reviewer sets out his criterion for a good poem: the “interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources.” Ok, I agree with that. But when the reviewer gives examples from the anthology, he starts to lose me.

It is almost painful
to touch, but you can’t help
yourself. It’s so familiar.
The dents. The twisted symmetry.
You can see how hard it has tried.

I have a lazy intellect, so I have to rely on writing workshop questions, like Why is this a poem? What do the line breaks do that the same words in a paragraph couldn’t do? Where is the prosody?

His body divorced him slowly,
like a flock of birds leaving
a wire, one set of wings at a time –
still in sight, but past retrieving.

I like this image, but why is the form so controlled? If the body is falling apart, why isn’t the language falling apart too? Why aren’t the words more birdlike, or winglike, or why don’t they sound… I don’t know, interesting?

Hovelled in darkness two nights then,

bent blindly to the sleet’s raw work,
bodies muffled close for shelter,
stepping in circles like blinkered mules.
The wind jerking like a halter.

Two similes in two lines? Is an interesting use of the language’s prosodic and rhetorical resources? Really?

And finally, this gem:

The bony babes in Gap who lazily
Stroll with Starbucks cups at U of T,
Photoshopped or bio-engineered,
See me dreamy-eyed and think I’m weird.

Which the reviewer justifies thusly:

As with Larkin, it’s the self-deprecation, and the wit, that keep the misogyny bearable in these poems, though no doubt more for some readers than for others.

I must be one of those other readers, because I don't think misogyny is ever bearable. Dear reviewer: Replace “misogyny” with “racism” or “homophobia” and maybe you’ll understand what an asshole sounds like.

If witty formalism and self-deprecating lyricism are meant to make misogyny palatable, that's a pretty strong argument against them. And I still haven't heard a compelling argument in their favour. So, I remain unconvinced.

My plan to take over the world is in motion. Walking to work two days a week (40 minutes each way, up and down a super-steep hill), pilates twice a week and yoga once a week. Soon, the cloning.

...when frog pond plop
is forged at my feet

a block and a half
from words to wet frog...

One day in Japan a few years ago, I was reading either bp nichol's versions of basho or maybe some of derek's poems that eventually went into frogments from the frag pool. In any case, I went out with frog pond plop in my head, for a walk along the narrow roads surrounded by rice fields. The rice was low, so the fields were like swamps, about two feet of warm, sludgy water. There were dozens of different types of frogs in all sizes that would jump in and out of the water and across the road. Each type of frog had a different tone of ribbit. Some were high and quick, while some were quite disturbingly low and loud. I'd walked about a block when there was a small movement at my feet. In the three seconds it took my brain to register what I was seeing, I saw a frog, I saw a pond, I saw a plop. I've never felt a more satisfying convergence of words and world.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful and fascinating book. It took over 70 years to complete the dictionary, and thousands of contributors. Many of the people involved were insane. It was like a Victorian rallying cause for the pedantic, the meticulous, the martyred; the British.

It's a charming narrative, only slightly marred by passages like this:

...the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.

So, ever look up the word "hubris"?

If you want to feel attractive, attend a Canada Revenue Agency sponsored presentation on tax regulations for charities. I did, and I got all sorts of attention ranging from significant looks to awkward conversations of the "how you doing" variety punctuated with nervous laughter and self-conscious gestures. Who are these men? What grimy offices do they burrow out of and what is it in my demeanour that encourages them? I have to admit I really enjoyed learning about tax and charities, and I guess that spells geek. Most things I do spell geek. Still though, these charity geeks seem to be a notch or two below your cooler geeks, the indie rock geeks, the poetry geeks.

I finally had time to read all of Shift & Switch and: wow. It's such an exciting book. It's so much the opposite of what anthologies are usually: a sort of gathering up and condensing. Most anthologies present writing so definitively. All you need to know is there, summed up and distilled.

Shift & Switch, on the other hand, is all possibility. So much of the writing seems in process, in flight. Some of the poems may be finished, but I'm sure a lot of the selections will be revised into bigger projects, or smaller, or just different.

Writing is always changing, writing is always renewing.

I don't mean that the book reads like a draft, because it doesn't: it's well-edited, well-designed and well-written. The poems are good, but not perfected. They're present, and vital. That's why it's exciting: it's like a promise of more and more writing to come.

The conundrum: If I live another sixty years and if I stay able and if I read a book every two days, that's still only 10,000-odd books and that can’t be enough; how can I ever begin to know? And without knowing, how can I ever begin?

I've discovered a brilliant lunacy in the regulations that govern non-profit societies in Alberta:

10(1) The name of a society may contain only the following:
(a) letters of the alphabet of the English language;
(b) Arabic numerals;
(c) the following punctuation or other marks:
(i) !
(ii) “
(iii) #
(iv) $
(v) %
(vi) &
(vii) ‘
(viii) ( )
(ix) *
(x) +
(xi) ,
(xii) .
(xiii) -
(xiv) /
(xv) :
(xvi) ;
(xvii) >
(xviii) \
(xxii) Ç
(xxiii) ?
(xxiv) @

Each punctuation mark has its own sub-section! Brilliant. And I love how it takes five letters and two punctuation marks to point out that a name can indeed contain a question mark [(xxiii) ? ]. But don't interpret this expansive attitude toward punctuation too liberally.
(3) No society may have a name that consists primarily of a combination of punctuation marks or other marks.

Also no name may contain
(b) a number or word that might lead to the inference that the name is a number name, unless the name is a number name.
Is a frustrated poet drafting regulations for the Alberta legislature? I like to think so.

I have a tendency to focus on the negative. Over the past three days, I drank and packed and drove, and the only detail that stands out as worthy of recording is the dead bear I saw on the Transcanada. It was on the other side of the road, so we only caught a glimpse as we drove by, but it looked like a smallish probably not quite adult black bear. There was a guy standing next to it who looked like a park ranger or animal control type person, and another guy (the one who must have hit it) standing next to a camper.
I guess it's fortunate that a camper and not a smaller car hit the bear, or there might have been dead people too. I guess it's also better that the bear was actually dead rather than badly injured. But man, what a horrible thing. I've run into bears in the woods a couple of times, and that is a terrifying experience, but it's much, much better to see bears alive than roadkilled.

When I was writing my MA thesis, I remember thinking that it was the most difficult thing I would ever have to do, and if I could finish it, I could accomplish anything. Now I'm trying to write a 25-page research paper in two and a half days after writing three exams in the past week and a half, and I don't think anything could ever have been harder than this. If I were more organized and had any kind of time management skills, it probably wouldn't be so bad, but sadly I'm an imbecile and my decade in university has taught me nothing. Remember, kids, stay the fuck out of school. It's bad for your health.

You'd think that spending my time in two different cities would mean I get to attend twice the number of readings, or at least slightly more. Wrong. I get to miss all the readings. Everything is going down in Calgary between now and April 30. Everything is starting in Vancouver on April 30. Where will I be on April 30? Heading east on Highway 1.

I'm particularly upset about missing the Nod magazine launch, featuring derek beaulieu, jason christie, angela rawlings and jon paul fiorentino.

As I was contemplating the irony of my plan to spend the summer in Calgary to save money depending on my having enough money to get to Calgary, which I don’t, my GST cheque arrived, bumping me up to flat-broke from in-the-hole. I love unanticipated government cheques. What I don’t love is relying on unanticipated government cheques at this stage in my life. Actually what I really don’t love is trying to distract myself from my inefficient studying habits by writing blog posts that end up not being witty, or even interesting. That and gerund-ridden sentences. Ugh.

Today I have read that the family is a crisis the justice system is failing that the federation is fragile but bound in doctrines that the dust kicked up is falling in fanciful curlicues across shafts of light. I would like to be wounded by words but itch more like touched nerves or sweat glands.

Today I have bathed in light only I haven't today I stood in spring rain to smoke today I have lazed and sternly scolded my habits and affected nothing. Today I have not resisted closure and not resisted angst. For these my art is not an art but typing "I don't understand this censure."

I like this provision. It's elegant, concise and confusing. Just what law should be.

2. (1) Subject to subsection (2), persons related by consanguinity, affinity or adoption are not prohibited from marrying each other by reason only of their relationship.
(2) No person shall marry another person if they are related (a) lineally by consanguinity or adoption; (b) as brother and sister by consanguinity, whether by the whole blood or by the half-blood; or (c) as brother and sister by adoption.
Marriage (Prohibited Degrees) Act, 1990, c. 46

Sometimes I wish judges wouldn't try so hard.

The friendly face of Caillou, with his round cheeks and expression of wide-eyed surprise, has delighted countless young children and won over their parents and grandparents. Today, this charming little character, a creation that sprang from the imagination and from the art of form and colour, is moving out of the world where he welcomes his new baby sister, or gets ready for kindergarten.

Unintentionally, no doubt, he is now making a contribution to the development of commercial arbitration law in the field of intellectual property. What has happened is that the people who consider themselves to be his mothers are engaged in battle for him. The respondent claims exclusive maternity. The appellants believe it was a joint effort. The manner in which their dispute is to be resolved has itself become the subject of a major disagreement, and this is what is now before this Court.
Desputeaux v. Editions Chouette (1987) Inc., Supreme Court of Canada

Dear Self: When you have to choose an article to summarize and present to your seminar class, don’t choose the one with “ontology” in the title just because it’s “weird” and “academic” and reinforces the vague image you have of yourself as intellectual and radical in some undefined but oh-so-slightly kinky way. You do not understand what ontology is. No matter how many times you google “ontology definition” and repeat to yourself “ah yes, being in the world, yes, being, of course” you cannot speak intelligently about ontology as it relates to conceptions of property. You have not read any of the philosophers the article references. In fact you can’t even read the article without becoming infuriated by its stylistic vagaries and imprecisions; perhaps you thought you were reading literary theory? You’re not. That’s how philosophers write. I hope you remember this next time you have to summarize an article, or you’ll end up at 2:00 in the morning cobbling together mangled bits of syntax oversaturated with abstract nouns that you don’t even understand, squinting through your tears and headache and wondering how the fuck you’re going to pull this presentation off… and it would be kind of pathetic to do that twice.

My reading for school hasn't turned up anything ridiculous or absurd lately. I can think of two explanations: either all my course material is thought-prokoving, stimulating and relevant; or I've been brainwashed into absorbing the law without contempt.

I think it's the former. Here's a neat quote from Copyright.

It is wise in any state to encourage letters, and the painful researches of learned men.
Millar v. Taylor, 1769

Introverts of the world, Unite!

Oh hell yeah!

I would totally start a revolution, but I don't want to have to like, talk to anybody about it, you know?

Maybe I'll write a paper about whether introversion is an analogous ground of discrimination under the s.15 Charter guarantee of equality. Although I probably won't. But I have definitely felt oppressed whenever I look at job listings that all require "an outgoing personality." As though talking a lot about nothing makes you a good employee. What-ever.

February has been a bust. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing about here. Nothing seems to lend itself to writing anywhere, nevermind reading. I've watched bad TV. My life has become a loop of coughing and making tea. I've had a cold so bad I quit drinking coffee. I expect these sentences to lay something bare that they don't. I wanted to read something funny, so I got two British novels from the library and I read them through one after the other and they weren't funny at all. Things aren't what they're supposed to be.

It raises an important question relating to the conduct of trials and, because of its importance, what I am about to say may undergo some substantial editing when I see what I have said, but my decision will not be different.
McEachern CJBC, Rahmatian v. HFH Video Biz Inc. BC 1991

Rain brings its own problems. Scratched windows and bent wipers make driving a blur. The road is always doubled, wet above and wet reflection below. Streetlights and tail-lights smear. Sudden dark figures menacing their vulnerability. I drive on faith. I drive with a hunch back and squinted eyes, looking for an angle of sure vision, past the high whine wiper blades. It’s always dark and it’s always wet. I’m always in leather shoes and a wool coat, everything is always being ruined, I always wear long jeans, they’re always soaked. I don’t understand why I can’t dress for the weather. I just can’t believe in inevitability.

I almost went mad this summer in Vancouver because it was sunny for two months straight. Every day I would wake up to the sun and every day I would drive to work in the bright, bright hot sun and every day I would rage at the traffic and the heat and the glare.

Calgary is much colder when it’s cold and much hotter when it’s hot and much windier and horrible in so many ways, but at least it’s unpredictable. In Calgary a hot summer is a two-week stretch, then a snowstorm. A bad winter is ten days of snow then five days of spring. I’m beginning to understand how much I’ve internalized these cycles of change. I need days that start off warm enough for t-shirts and end at 20 below. I need to see the change in the sky and smell it on the air and feel the pressure of the weather in my head.

Here the sky and the ocean are the same, we’re sandwiched, we’re sponged, the city is a lung, we’re all just breathing.

I’m appalled at how much I think about the weather.

Try to belie the imagination. Try to imagine a wrinkle, a bruise, a point of convergence.

Eliminate all memory. Proliferate scathing.
Engender sound.

Sound as though touched. Rake nerve for encumbrance. Rail against and in favour and inconsistent strain.

Last, at long last, as the long last light fades, a curtain raised, a half-mast circumstance.

Indeed the abstract flails and whimpers. Indeed the words are pocked.

To get at turn away. To touch here and touch there so slowly a vein awakes. In the long light somber and the glare light brutal, in the hazing day, tactile nuance forms a soft fog.

A soft fog is a fidgety slip into the limber touch, the tongue lisping through the typing.
Here the silence sounds blinking a grasp in tumult, slowly lapping so lapse.