It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, “The Twelve-Year-Old Poet.” On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.
A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle.
While still a young man, my uncle was mistaken for a husband by my mother’s sister, whom he married in order to have the experience of being tied down. He moved to California not long after and reappeared in midsummer in a purple VW van. My aunt kissed him and introduced him to his son. My uncle’s white blond hair was tangled and his arms and legs were too long, like a teenager’s.
Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.
Solnit’s book River of Shadows (Viking Penguin) is a brilliant account of Muybridge’s life and the “Age of the Technological Wild West”: Muybridge was a great inventor and tinkerer, one of the most original of the landscape photographers (his panorama of San Francisco has never been equalled), and a hobnobber with the celebrated and the far-too-rich, such as Leland Stanford, the robber baron of California.
Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reynolds, and Jewel Staite (from White Rock) played another series lead.
Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (Sceptre) looks like it could be this year’s Salt. But where Mark Kurlansky delivered a precise, fascinating account of the intersections of salt and history, Finlay offers only scattered and rambling anecdotes with occasional flashes of insight.
The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlines via email with a friend, and she sent me one from June 2002: Getting Mom onto Internet a Sisyphean Ordeal.
The day began with a comment from a colleague that working with a certain buggy database program made him feel like Sisyphus, and it ended with three pieces of reading. An hour or so after the colleague’s remark, I was trading favourite Onion headlines via email with a friend, and she sent me one from June 2002: Getting Mom onto Internet a Sisyphean Ordeal.
