dear david bowie

The other night we went out to a club and did some dancing. Been a while. They were playing at nostalgia for a former club night that was long ago to some. Trading on its reputation history. The dance floor would sometimes have more people and sometimes have less people on it. We were goofing around. Play dancing. Then one of your songs came on: heroes. The dance floor flooded with people. Our minds were one. Our hearts were bursting. Kinship, love, remembrance, revived hope in nothing in particular. There you were, you and Eno and Fripp, all earnestness and sonic whimsy and joy turning it out. Sublime. And we were all full and as though knowing all each other.

t'was brillium.

movie reviews

I've been thinking about a different approach to writing reviews of movies - write about they way they make you think and feel and be, the way they drive your walk, the way they shape your own imagination, not about their narrative, not about the way that it succeeds or fails in meeting expectations, not about how good the technical achievements of it are, not about the way it lines up with your prejudice, or even your ideals, not about the way it reinforces policy, or even the philosophy that you prefer - but the inspiration it produces for you, how it is a generative thing - The occasion of some other thing ...that’s when it does get interesting to speak or write ...not “about” it, but “from” it in a manner of speaking ...in a manner of speaking saying writing and etc. ...on the occasion of this movie , I feel inspired or compelled or driven in whatever way to say the following ...but that preamble can stay silent or inferred perhaps only by the title of the iteration piece of writing dialogue or speech or whatever you might call it after all.

why i like chester brown

I just re-read I Never Liked You, by Chester Brown, and it got me thinking about his work and why and how I like it.

There are often times I read about or hear about the narratives that Chester Brown makes. Chester Brown is good at making narratives and so of course it does make sense that anyone would say that he is good at making narratives. I do say so too, but I would like to say more pointedly that what I really like and do enjoy and find to be remarkable about Chester Brown is his drawing.

The drawing is the thing for me even though the story is the thing for me as well, i.e., the narrative. The drawing has a space in it, a silence and a special kind of stillness to it, that I find to be remarkable because I find, I really find, I really do discover every time I look at it, at any of his drawing, that I find that stillness space is there in it, because I find that it is there in me, whenever I look at it.

What is reading anyway? What is looking reading anyway? What is looking anyway? And listening? All of these are me doing something similar, and it’s not entirely because of seeing with my eyes or because of hearing with my ears or because of thinking with my brain, because the mystery begins when the limit of machinery and process is apparent, because it all is only ever looked at, read, analyzed, or understood (when understanding is an action more than when it is an object).

What I like about, what I really like about Chester Brown is his drawing, and what I really like about his drawing is the way the silence and the stillness and the space of it finds itself in me, and how I find it there and look at it and notice it by feeling it and seeing looking at it reading it inside the panels of his drawing. There is such a holding still in it, in them, in him, in me, when I am reading looking seeing them it him. There is stillness there, and anyone can see it find it feel it there and correspond with it because it’s there in anyone, is anyone, differently perhaps and similar perhaps. That can be interesting, and that can be the way it is remarkable or not.

I say it is remarkable.

Tell It Slant - Beth Follet

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children ceased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
— emily dickinson (quoted in Tell It Slant)

I recently read Tell It Slant by Beth Follet, and I must say that I think it's very much beautiful and great - quite vivid - and it makes me miss Montreal. (I am often missing Montreal, and it happens a lot, it seems, when I am reading things ... I think I have some sort of fundamental association - a correspondence, if you will - with Montreal and writing). There is a triad of cities in the book that are settings for the writing that I can currently relate to: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver.

Where you come from means something, and of course where you are means something else. There is often a relationship between the two, but sometimes the places are where they are, meaning whatever it is that they mean, without referencing or figuring predominantly in relationship to one another.

Sometimes you move around to different places, and doing so is tantamount to moving around in different modes of being. And sometimes it is just you dealing with different environments. And choosing to be anywhere is about choosing the environment, which is like choosing the space-of-being to be in.

There is also always sometimes a place you would like to be where you are not. And you can hope to be there, plan to be there, long to be there, etc. -- and yet not be there. And that also is a way of being; like being out of being and wanting to be in being.

Places can make you be some way, can shape you into being some way, influence the way you are. And people can in this way also be like places. So, going to places can also be like going to people, and going to people can be like going to places -- and both can be like going towards what or who you are, can be, when you are there in them, with them.

And of course all of this is very much like time, because when-you-are is very much like where-you-are. And you can think about the way you were, and think about what happened, and remember when you were with whom, where, about what and how -- like as though you’re in a dream (or writing) about what you think you do remember, and what you think and feel about it all.

You are now and you are then and you are you, but different in each place. That is, when it is or was.

This is how it all becomes to me, thinking now about it, like it all is what a diary is like, without it being written like a diary in form. It is, in this respect, sort of like the heart of a diary. Or, like the art of letters, when the letters are disclosures, poetic, of the heart and soul, growing, grown, finding, losing, lost.

But you are there when while it is all happening, so it doesn’t have the comfy cosy feeling that a thing that’s already happened and now you’re being told about it all does have -- it has the current feeling of whatever it is that is happening right then. And yet even though you are there with it, going along as it is going, you are also not there but outside of it, and so it is still in its way comforting to read it all. It’s a confession that is literary in form, and that is why and how it can be both romantic and aesthetic.

The book makes me think about Roland Barthes: The Lover's Discourse, (one of the many books I loved by him, but that one in particular was very important); Camera Lucida, (its sense of the erotics of slight disclosure, and I note the main character in Tell It Slant is a photographer); and Barthes By Barthes ("read it as though it were a novel" he says at the start of his autobiography ... more literary confession, more romance, more aesthetic, etc.). All those books went a long way to shape my approach to writing theory/criticism/philosophy (... dare I just call it writing?). 

There is a peculiar kind of space in Beth Follet’s writing that I find very peaceful and languid; a sort of melancholy that is liberating in a particular sort of way. I love the way it is seamlessly fragmented - the shifting time frame - the slippage between the first personal singular and second personal singular - (I am fascinated with how saying "you" can be like saying "me"). It is writing that does not present itself as writing but as the shifting interconnectedness of stories/memories/impressions, of a seeming narrative making you become and be through unraveling it all, until there's nothing there but the everything that makes it possible ...  the silence, the stillness.  
Very nice.

Words the Dog Knows, J.R. Carpenter

I’ve always have enjoyed reading J.R’s writing when her writings were short pieces and not the longer sort of piece that is a book, and I was curious about the way that it would be when it would be a book. I knew that I would like it, because I like her writing, and after all her book would be her writing too. Just like her online writing and productions are examples of her writing, and I like them as well. I was curious of course about the way it might be different. Because I knew that it would be a thing, a different thing, for her, and maybe also thus for me. I read her book when it was being written and talked with her about it. This is was a special way to read a book. When you know the author and can do this, I think it is a very special thing and I am grateful for it. After it was done being written and was out for the general public reading, I read it again, and this was interesting in how it wasn’t quite the same. Of course the difference partly is a matter of orientation. But some would say that and then just get on with changing channels. I like to hover on such things because it says so much to me about what reading is, and thereby writing too. I think that it is very apropos in this case because J.R.’s book, and her writing in general, is very much about reading. It is a writing that is reading. And reading is very much a matter of orientation, and that is what the writing reveals, an orientation. And I am delighted by the prospects of reading anew by changing the circumstances of my reading.


J.R. Carpenter’s book, Words the Dog Knows is obliquely about how a reader becomes a writer. Or rather, it is about how a reader is revealed as a writer; or, how reading in its own way is a form of writing and writing in its own way is a form of reading; and how they lead to one another, which could be said to be a question that the world of the book is addressing, albeit obliquely, because although reading is referenced, writing - as in being a writer, that is, as in the character being a writer - is not.

Reading starts in this world as a silent solitude. Even where it should count - in school - it still brackets the character/reader (Simone). The peculiarity of her reading, is the peculiarity of her being, which does stand apart, reading everything, and doing it even then, right away as a way of also writing it. She is not marginalized by this. She is empowered by it. That is a significant difference.

She reads books and the environment outside. Then as she is moving, growing up and leaving where she comes from, she writes more and more the reading of both outside and inside environments.

When she is being more a writer than a reader and showing that she is a writer, you can tell because the reading changes in the way that it describes, and how it makes connections. It is less a story in that moment, and more a picture and a reckoning.

The procedure is mediated, predicated, by dogs, by one in particular. Writing is the reading that will come out, it must to show itself, reveal its reading, make its reading, be the reading and the telling and the picture and the reckoning. Then it is no longer silent and in solitude. The dog and its silent but evident recognition of a growing lexicon is an important reference and association to/with this process. Because it too has something inside that must come out, both symbolic and factual. And because it, the dog, occasions relationships. You can learn a lot from dogs, by way of dogs, because of dogs.

“I am I because my little dog knows me,” J.R. quotes Gertrude Stein. Yes, first the dog, then other people. But also the city. Specifically, Montreal.

All of this is great for me. I love Gertrude Stein. I love J.R.’s writing reading. I think dogs are quite intriguing. And I love Montreal.

It is noted that Montreal has a legacy. The character has read the city in a book before she moves to there and reads it living there. She does not compare the two, rather, she refers them to each other, makes references and associations. Who is the narrator? She is, Simone, the reader writer. She reads things first in books, or by way of stories that she hears from other people, then she reads them living them, ‘in person’ as it were (a city is like a person too - Montreal and Rome, for example), and then she reads them writing them. She does not compare - she refers, references, makes associations. This is better for to expand the greater reading, rather than exclude and narrow it.

I like the way it makes me be aware of living something reading it and how that is a writing that is making it all be connected to a lot of other things, which both expands the greater reading (book) and brings things together to make wondrous sense; but not as predetermined unfolding already as it has been written - rather as magic miracle the force of reckoning (the energetic intensity of making an account of something not to be underestimated). That way everything makes sense, but it’s serendipity, delightful, surprising, (i.e. that it does) because it is contingent upon so many things that just happen to fall into place - as if they were meant to - where it is critical to emphasize the “as if.” Since you don’t know, it is thus delightful to discover it, the trace of possibly maybe. And anyway it doesn’t matter if it was meant to be. The wonder and beauty is in the happenstance - and the ontological thrill is the prospect that the world you read you write is reading writing you as well. It is a relationship.

The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis

A little while ago I did a favour for my publisher and sold books at the launch for another one of her authors: Aaron Peck. It was a very interesting evening at Art Speak in Vancouver. I find it fascinating to be a witness at any sort of intimate event such as this. Particularly something so specific as a book launching. Having had my own book launches, I was curious about observing it from such a unique position. Of course I have been to other book launches by other authors, whom I either know or do not, but as a member of the audience, or a supportive friend. Here I was a book seller, supporting the press and a fellow colleague, whom I did not know. It was interesting to try and guess the various relationships different people at the event might have with the author. I found I could guess with some apparent accuracy by way of their countenance, their disposition, how close they were. There is a reverence in launches, palpable, not unlike a graduation, a coming out party, or a bar-mitzvah/bat-mitzvah. I liked Aaron immediately because I could tell that he was both thrilled and embarrassed by the attention, an ambivalence I can relate to. I grew more interested in the prospect of the book as I sussed out the atmosphere of the launch and of Aaron himself. There is much to be gleaned from atmosphere. I am always interested in Pedilar Press authors, partly because of vanity, I’ll warrant, but also because I know that Beth Follett has very exacting taste, and her choices, as far as I have sampled them, have not disappointed me yet. Her press is revered by many, as is the work of her designer Zab, whose work I was drawn to before I was even aware of the press. But there was something about this work that I was curious about in the same way that another Pedlar author, Lorenz Peter’s work immediately captivated me. In both cases, I felt in the presence of a kindred spirit. Sitting at the table with his books flying off of it, during lulls from people-watching and selling, I started to read the book: The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis. I thought, this is a writer after my own heart. I commend Aaron Peck for his reading that evening. After a fine introduction to his work, he nervously, yet charmingly read from what I now realise is a book that could be tricky to decide what to read from. And indeed, he prefaced his reading with an acknowledgement of some controversy between he and some others who apparently had weighed in on the consideration. I believe he choose wisely. He read well, albeit briefly, and then left the stage and vanished largely from my view and from the room at large. Later, he showed up around my table, after I had the benefit of having read perhaps the first 15 pages or so, and of course having heard him read some of the same pages aloud. By this point many of the people who had come to the launch had dispersed. I completely understood his inclination to stay away from the main room and harbour himself near to where the wine was being sold. I would have done the same. I have done the same. Once the coast was more or less clear, however, and he ventured out to meet me, we spoke amiably, and I in a congratulatory manner. We both agreed it was good to meet another Pedlar author, and wished to speak with one another again and further, which we did later in the week when more Pedlar authors launched and read more books, this time with Beth Follett in the house. I have more to say about that, and the books that came of it, as well as with regard to Beth’s fine novel Tell It Slant, from Coach House Press, later. For now, here are my reflections on Aaron Peck’s book.

There are some very nice sentences in the book. Like: In Yaletown the glass towers seem vulnerable. - And one of which, I thought went right to the heart of the writing itself; a line spoken by a character to Bernard Willis: Do you always tell stories that have no point? - It is meant, I think, to be a cutting question, but it is treated as a fair one, one to properly take into consideration, rather than responded to it as though it were ironic, like as though the question were really a directive that might have been heard as: Don’t tell stories that don’t have a point to them. - It might have well been the character’s point to have her question so received as such a directive, although with some humour. Regardless, the character receives it in two ways. One, yes, as her gesture, signifying an opinion characteristic of her disposition and challenging the parameters of the relationship between them, and thus calling into question his sense of his interest in her, and of hers in him; but also two, as a personal challenge to the value, quality, interest of stories, which is to say writing, without a point, or any obvious one in any case. This is a bracketed novel, and in many ways I believe that bracket, that contextual frame, is a faux placement of a point, answering to the challenge, appeasing the call for it, while at the same time annexing it, marginalizing it in a manner of speaking. The bracket, as I call it, is the set up for the manuscript, the said bewilderments, which are constituted as a found manuscript published posthumously by “the editors,” who are themselves clearly a fiction. It is not at all as if Aaron Peck wishes you to believe it. It is only a device. And by extension, I really like to think that it being clearly a device, is precisely the point about what you might call the point of the writing (perhaps any writing), or the point of the story. The point is a device, a lure. Is it writing, or is it a story? This is always an interesting question for me. I like writing and I like stories, and although stories of course must be written, I do see them as distinct practices, things, gestures, aesthetic operations, orientations, whatever. Sometimes something (a book, a piece, etc.) is both, at once or periodically throughout. Usually, actually, most books I do enjoy are both in some measure. There is a story, or stories, here in this book, and the frame, bracket, context, is a story with a point, but mostly the book, as far as I’m concerned, is writing, which needn’t have a point, because the point is in the writing itself, in the sense of: the point of the story is in the telling. This is very much writing that is reading. There is a way of writing where what you are doing is reading the world, the things, the relationships, or whatever around you, and that is what the Bewilderments of Bernard Willis is doing. I quite like the way it does it. It has a pastoral quality about it, which extends its interest in landscapes to those of both an exterior and interior nature. What is the relationship between the two? What associations are drawn between these landscapes, the objects, buildings, people and spacial arrangements within them and their perception, their perceiver? These are things to think about while reading the book. Who is the narrator? This is also interesting to wonder about. There are switches in the pronoun case, which makes the narrator slip from an inferred first person to third and even second person form. The narrator is ostensibly Bernard Willis, that is, in the Bewilderments manuscript, but it is not clearly always so, and why should it be, when he is a fiction anyway? This kind of slippage, which I like to perform myself, can have the effect of making a reader cognizant of the writing as writing, as in: the writer is doing something here to call attention to the writing itself, and to the devices, the tricks of the trade, used as conventions, and by revealing those conventions, it brings the reader a view into the creation itself, and to the reader’s role or relationship with/in it. The writing is like letter writing to me, which is to say that it has that quality of personal address, intimate, poetic, expressive, playful, sharing a confidence. This book is charming. Now, any book, or any thing, can remind you of another. This can be a thing to celebrate or not. I do celebrate it sometimes and not other times. This time I do celebrate the way that it reminds me of Jack Kerouac. This is not obvious. I do not expect that anybody else would necessarily share this observation, this association. It has simply stirred me in this way. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because it made me feel reflective in a similar way that the sketch writing in Kerouac’s brilliant Visions of Neal did. It made me quiet reflective observing. It made me nebulous in a pleasant way. Like idyl reading of papers, magazines on Sunday, while thinking perhaps of going for a stroll, and chatting now and then a little bit about the things you read the things you see whatever you happen to be thinking about in an idyl way. It’s the gesture that counts, the intimacy of the sharing. It’s the saying that is the mystery.

Haruki Murakami hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

I shouldn’t really bother trying to say anything about the writing here at the surface as language because I read the book in translation. I’m not saying that I believe in some pure iteration, but let’s face it, a translation is a second iteration, spoke on behalf of the author by somebody else, who despite all good intentions and respectful observance, is not the author, and so does not speak or write in the same way, and apart even from the issue of unavoidable if not deliberate intervention, the aura or shadow, of the translator and its consequence upon the writing, the languages (the source and the target) themselves have peculiarities that are expressed by those who speak them in idiosyncratic ways, and which, as Derrida wrote, harbour resistance to translation (a resistance that reverberates back and forth between the two iterations). So although I am tempted or inclined or have, really, to say it plainly, formed an opinion about the writing style, I realize that it is an improbable conviction, and so I can only state it in quotes, so to speak, (even more than usual). That being said, I could then say that the writing seems to be simple, but it could be doing things in Japanese that are not apparent in English. Regardless, the simplicity, even in English, is probably deceptive. It puts the story in the greater relief, the plot, that’s to say. But the story doesn’t really make much sense, and I like it fine that way. It’s not about the story, really, it’s about the telling of the story, of course, as usual, but not always, but usually for me, that’s the sort of story I am interested in reading, because as far as I’m concerned stories, plot lines, are largely predictable and unsatisfying in their conclusion. There are some remarkable exceptions, but this is not one of them. Still, I wouldn’t really say the story is predictable, but if there is a mystery within it, I had solved it about a quarter of the way through, so that didn’t matter much. There was a question regarding the final result, which was for me an experience like watching independent films, wherein you’re never quite sure if the protagonist is going to die or not (one of the salient features of a “non-hollywood” type movie), but also wherein you’re rather indifferent to the result in any case -- for the most part, anyway. So it was here. Well, maybe I was hoping for a few things here and there, which meant I had some expectations that were finally confounded. Some may find that entertaining. I do not. I don’t hate the fact of it, however, either.

I had heard that Murakami writes like as though it is jazz music. This might be true in his own language, but it wasn’t evident in translation.

Anyhow, it wasn’t about the writing, or the story plot lines, or the characters as such, although I did enjoy the characters, but mostly what it was I liked was the atmosphere of the piece and the associations. Since the time when Kerouac first wrote Visions of Cody and On the Road and many other things (since 1950), the practice of including cultural references has become rather common in contemporary writing, blurring border lines between fiction and non-fiction designates. The world of the novel and “our” world intersect. This is quite common now, but it still does register as something sort of funny when it happens. When in novels other novelists are mentioned, for instance. Or like in movies when a character will say this isn’t like some movie, you know, this is real life. It’s not unusual for these referential things to occur in all forms of story telling now a days. But it still is a thing that resonates, for me in any case, because it is a moment when the interiority of the story world is folded out into the world at large, and vice versa. We know it’s all just one big fiction anyway (with very real effects, however).

So anyway, I like the cultural allusions in the book. I find them playful and evocative, and it makes the writer, for me, register as kindred spirit, since I am rather inclined to do a lot of that sort of thing myself in my own book writing. I like the oblique short hand this provides for profiling the character and the writer and the book all at once. Those three entities blur and blend in ways that is agreeable to me.

But what I really like about the book is its atmosphere. It is very much like a movie, for me, in this regard, a certain sort of movie, that’s to say. Actually, it is like most movies really. But some sorts of movies are structured in such a way that their story gets less in the way of their atmosphere, and I do prefer those movies, but I like all kinds of movies anyway, and get the atmosphere from even those that have a story getting in the way of its atmosphere. Not just movies, everything, like music (which is more obvious, and being as it was my first love, my first form of expression that I was enthralled and captivated by, just slightly before writing, and anyway it is a form of writing in a sense, like everything that is expression really is, anyhow, seeing as it was my first love, a form of expression that most obviously conveys an atmosphere, the being of the atmosphere, the quality and meaning of an aura that infects and influences you, seeing then all that, it is not so strange that I would be tuned into that in general). Some movies can be awful in a lot of ways, but still convey an atmosphere that is great to me, and I come away from them completely satisfied and totally turned on. That’s what I’m open for.

So this book has a way about it, a spirit, an atmosphere, an aura, a personality (should that be “bookality”?) that I enjoyed and found infectious and an influence on me. It is like watching old Humphrey Bogart movies through a Bladerunner William Gibson Kurosawa Antonioni filter. What a filter. The odd thing is, I think it’s odd, is that it comes across as Japanese even though it is translated. I don’t know what that means exactly, other than to say that it is Japanese as mediated through certain film experiences, much as the character’s experience of Western culture is predicated (if not mediated) by exposure and indulgence in cultural icons of old American cinema, scotch, American beer, American cigarettes, and European & American literature. Which is to say that the atmosphere of the book reminds me a bit of the atmosphere in contemporary Japanese pop yakuza films of the 60s and 70s (Suzuki and Fukasaku), and as much as it does say the Japanese culture inspired books by William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), which are also big on atmosphere. It also reminds me a bit of the staid beat (as in beat writer and all of its intended permutations -- beatific, exhausted, etc.) ironic film atmospheric persona of Takeshi Kitano in Sonatine. Again not the storyline, not the being gangster, or being detective, but rather being the empty (like Meursault in Camus’s l’etranger’) and yet somehow also vaguely profound and tragic (like Rick in Casablanca) disaffected pointless genius special one for nothing in particular and no one in particular character shuffling through life seeking really only peace observing everything from over here and that is fine.

It made me want to be quiet, to observe without judgement, to eat a lot, to listen to music, read, and drink scotch.