I read Geist cover to cover and over, under, around and through. Friends who receive Geist as my Christmas gift have told me that they too wear out the ink.
In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.
I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.
Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.
The Complete New Yorker, just published on eight DVDs (labelled “for computer use only”), allows one to browse through 4,109 issues of The New Yorker published since February 12, 1925 (one exception: September 6, 1947, is missing): an astonishing experience for New Yorker readers whose living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms have been filling up over the decades at the rate of fifty issues a year. Until now, only when moving house might one hope to come across, say, Janet Flanner’s profile of Adolph Hitler from 1936 (the last sentence of which is: “Adolf Hitler still talks more than any other man in Europe”), or her hair-raising account (of, or as, “Mrs Jeffries”) of escaping Nazi Europe in 1943.
It takes most of a long weekend to watch the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys from Alliance Atlantis (on DVD), and there may be few better ways to squander one’s evenings. I have not yet lived in a trailer park, gone to jail, robbed a convenience store, run a grow-op in an Airstream trailer, collected ladybugs to protect my marijuana plants or lost a marijuana plant to squirrel piss.
The Germans have upped the ante on absurdity with the film Measures to Better the World (produced by Jörn Hintzer, Jakob Hüfner), which chronicles a series of invented social movements such as the Green Light Society and Rent-a-Brother. In the most chilling segment, a doctor introduces a new insurance scheme in which patients learn medical skills, and when his son falls ill he urges his star pupils to perform an emergency appendectomy.
Connelly’s travel memoir One Room in a Castle opens with an apt epigraph from Kenneth White: “The world is open before you. All you need to do—and want to do—is walk through it.” Across the Territories (Polygon), White’s most recent book of travels, describes eleven excursions that range through territories “from Orkney to Rangiroa.” These personal travel essays are not travelogue: they do not suggest an itinerary, nor do they recommend restaurants or hotels.
Bob Snider is a dishevelled man with a beard and longish hair who writes and sings simple songs that play with language and usually make people laugh. In the first part of On Songwriting (Gaspereau Press), he advises songwriters to use nouns and verbs, not adjectives, and to distrust their favourite lines and avoid ego—useful advice no matter what you’re writing—and states that songwriting relies on serendipity.
