Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.
Tilo Driessen was on his way to work when he saw the hammock strung up in a sculpture on the beach. “Luckily, the dude was sleeping,” he said, “so I had time to set up in these difficult light conditions. I was struck by the practical nonchalance of the arrangement, and its meaning: art should be inhabited.”
When I overhear my parents talk about the death of Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy playmate first discovered in a Vancouver Dairy Queen, I somehow confuse her with the woman who sold my family our tent trailer.
It’s about the fractured French in “Trouvé Mort,” the poem by Catherine Owen reprinted in the Findings section of No. 64. While aware that Geist and its staff are not responsible for the poem’s content, I’ve been teasing apart the levels of irony and offence in your choosing it for this issue.
When the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker hit the newsstand a few days ago, did you feel a familiar twinge when again you did not buy a copy, precisely because it is the summer fiction issue, and then did you fail to suppress the querulous flood, the peevish trickle of nagging familiar questions that one never speaks aloud in bookstores or libraries, or in the halls of the CBC?
Among the innumerable contributions of Geist to world culture, the Geist maps are not the least important. This noble genre that marries geography and the higher arts has, I have discovered, its particular ancestors, and can claim an aristocratic lineage that goes back to the days before the French Revolution.
All the coolest kids in my junior high school went across the street and sat on the steps of the church during lunch hour. On this spring day, they sat there long after the bell had rung for afternoon classes. I was not cool but was sitting in the crowd anyway because today the cool kids were having a protest, and if I joined in maybe I could be a cool kid, too.
As his father drives him to the dance, Leonard thinks that his father has a lot to worry about. God is probably going to have Leonard stabbed at a urinal tonight, which will probably lead to his whole family suffering from depression.
