the academic romantic

the only good thing about this godawful student dormitory

2012-03-19T23:57:00.000-07:00

is the view of the university and its environs in the morning

Sad Mag interview with Michelle Reid

2012-03-14T05:09:00.001-07:00

What a lovely thing to wake up to...

....read on...

5 objets d'art: konstant constance

2012-03-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've been in Germany for a week already, and I'm beginning to carve out some Carmen-type spaces... the most important of which will be the perfect cafe in which to write. The pre-requisites for said cafe are 1) delicious coffee, 2) free Internet and, 3) sweets with lots of fillings. This will be a major theme in subsequent posts I'm sure. For now, here are some things I've seen and accomplished recently, with the help of mein neuer feste Freund, Konstant Constance.

(& also, before I forget, my first post as a NASSRgrad blogger is up! You should read it!)

1.

The colour of the sky in Konstanz in March vacillates between classic "Vancouver grey" (to keep me from getting too homesick) and bright sunny afternoons when I get to wear my cool girl sunnies.

2.

Austrian citizanship/ EU passport FINALLY, Carmen. Finally.

3.

Cappuccino mit Schokoladen Herz im die Vogelhaus Café und Kaufhaus on Münzgasse in die Altstadt.

Adorable, but not a contender for favourite coffee shop because the Internet was nonexistent. The sweets, however, I have yet to try...

4.

MY FAVOURITE GERMAN WORD: is Zweibel. It means onion. It sounds like an amazing mix between the effect of onions on my tear ducts (to zweibel? non?) and the family name of a cute-yet-grumpy garden gnome.

5.
And finally, in my hour of need yesterday, when I was feeling rather homesick and just I wished I could go to the gym and see my wonderful little gymnasts (they always make me smile) I found gymnastics in Konstanz...

Three German students, one strip of floor (which was actually pretty bouncy), a set of P-bars (!) and a metal low bar in the sports hall. Handstands are pretty much a cure-all, and after turning cartwheels for an hour my mood was restored. Thank you, strange universe, for these gifts.

Fiona Ackerman's "Heterotopia"

2012-03-09T06:06:00.001-08:00

Impermanence breeds intensity, I think, and as I was in just-about-to-leave-for-Germany-mode I had the most aesthetically-charged day/evening out on the town in Vancouver. Hugely important to me was attending the opening of Fiona Ackerman's new show at Winsor Gallery on South Granville, "Heterotopia." Fiona's work has been inspiring me in Vancouver since I arrived three years ago.

Fiona's new work accounts for the juxtaposed, very "Vancouver," sort of life that I know well: holding multiple jobs in wildly different fields, pursuing many interests at once, and trying to make enough money to do the things we love whilst living in expensive, expensive Vancouver. Fiona treats Michael Foucault's idea of heterotopia as a means to explore the compatibilities and incompatibilities of the different lives we lead, and asks whether, rather than taking away from one another, these various aspects come together to create something "absolutely different" from what they purport to be.

It would be in your best interest, gentle reader, to go and see this show. At Winsor Gallery until April 1st.

5 objets d'art: current happiness

2012-03-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

I'm in Germany, everyone! In a town on the Bodensee called Konstanz. As I was loving every minute of my transcontinental flight, I put together some favourite Vancouver things that have been inspiring me lately.

1.

Current happiness can be found in this (-->) bottom left corner of my big painting. Yes, my big painting, which is not only finished (!) but hanging above my bed.

If it's still up in six months, we'll know the stud-finder found at least a good bit of wall, if not an actual stud.

2.

Current happiness can also be found in modern breakfast...

3.

.....and modern dinner.

la carte?

Ahi tuna cured in fresh beet juice and vodka with horseradish whipped cream, golden beets, black caviar and chive oil

4.

This gorgeously twisted tree is infiltrating the rockface in Lighthouse Park

5.

And of course, current happiness can also be found in Vancouver...

The day we were at Lighthouse Park this insane cloud was moving through the city, starting in West Van and, by the afternoon, settling its thickness on top of downtown. This is the view from in front of the lighthouse, where it was clearly sunny and bright, filled with frolicking dolphins.

How I always miss you, Vancouver, whenever I trip and fall into another timezone.

A New Bloggy Endeavour

2012-02-21T10:27:00.002-08:00

I'm so chuffed to have been chosen to blog for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism's (NASSR) graduate caucus website.

There are eight of us new bloggers this year, representing academic institutions from all over North America. A diverse set of voices linked together by a keen interest in the study of Romanticism.

Look out for my monthly posts on the NASSR Grad Blog... starting in the middle of March!

5 objets d'art: curating colour

2012-02-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

1.

My article on Functionless Fashion is getting a new stab at life on wonderfully hip fashion site The Blind Hem.

Here's a taste...

"...My flatmate, Becca, said to me this morning, 'I went to a hipster party last night. It looked like Cariboo sponsored the event.'
I nodded knowingly.
'Oh, yeah, I was at this hipster party a couple weekends ago. Everyone had tattoos of owls'..."

This is a painting/collage called "Convergence" by Vancouver artist Andrew Young.

"His work currently focuses on lost and found adolescence" which, for me in this work, is evidenced by the irreverent and patchwork quality of this community of incidental, bicycle run-ins.

3.

Fiona Ackerman has new work expressing the artist's life- and work-space in an intimate-yet-abstracted kind of way. These trompe l'oeil sketches make me think of distilled mood-boards: uncluttered, anti-scrapbook, clean and meaningful meditations on shape.

Her new show, Heterotopia, opens at the Windsor Gallery on South Granville March 1st!

(& many thanks for her link to the academic romantic on her blog!)

4.

CHROMATIC TYPEWRITER!

(think about how that would work for a second)

and then visit Colossal Art and Design blog.

5.

& Finally, I always love visiting Tony Cribb's website, checking out his paintings, and having a read-through of the new adventures of Tin Man.

V125 PC: Joe Denham Interview, Part 2

2012-01-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

At the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, Joe Denham read on the ecopoetics panel on Wednesday October 19th, 2011. Joe is the author of poetry collections Flux (2003) and Windstorm (2009), as well as a novel, The Year of Broken Glass (2011). All are available from Nightwood Editions.

This is the second half of my interview with Joe. The first part of which can be found here.

***

Carmen: So…poets in previous eras have released poetry that has been radical--[poetry that] has been different--and [poetry that] has had more critical review. And these poets were known for the rerelease of such poems with theoretical material appended to it. So, for example, Wordsworth’s Preface, where he tells people how to read his own work. Have you ever considered doing something like that?

Joe: I’ve considered [laughs], I’ve considered doing that. I’m in the process right now of deeply considering it. Which means that—and I don’t think […] I would publish a book of poems with a big preface the way that he [Wordsworth] did—but what I think I might do, because, I’ll be totally honest here: When I wrote Flux, which was my first book, I was young, I was fairly impressionable and I was very, um, ambitious.

You know, I read an article (I don’t know where it was—in some big magazine, Walrus or the New Yorker or something) and it was writing about “If You Want to be a Published Author this is What You Need to Do,” and the first thing was “Read All Your Contemporaries and See What’s Selling and Do It.”

So: I kind of did that when I wrote Flux. You can see it in the writing; it’s pretty obvious, you know?

Carmen: You seem to have very good practical skills: knowing how to do things in order to get them done.

Joe: Yeah, and so I knew that I wanted to attention, for Flux, which, anyone who’s writing a book does, to some degree. And I saw that, you know, this kind of work was getting attention at that point and I could write that, so I wrote it, and I got attention.

Now, once Flux was over I felt kind of disappointed in myself because ultimately I didn’t feel a lot of the work was actually totally true. Now—a lot of the work, not all of it—I think that some of that book was really—that I’m really proud of.

And so, I took six years to write the next one [the book of poems entitled Windstorm (2009)], and I worked really hard to just listen to what was my voice, like, what did I want to do with poetry and what was that about, right?

Um…so…ah…the response [to Windstorm] has been lukewarm. And I think partially it’s because people don’t understand—and I’ve been told—that people don’t understand what I’m saying, they don’t understand why I’m saying it that way, they don’t quite get what’s behind this. So, maybe, I’ve been thinking about writing a book that explains that. Explicitly, you know?

It [would] explain what I did—that I didn’t go to those rooms where you learn that poetry is this or that—and I—I have to be careful here because it’s not, I’m not, trying to attack people in saying this. I’m not trying to say that there are bad writers or bad artists [or] any of that. Because that’s not the case: there’s fabulous artists and writers who come out of and live inside academia. Tons of them!

But, if I’ve done something different, then [there’s] a need to explain that and maybe learn from that as much as I can learn from them, because I have spent time in academia I have learned from them and I do learn from them ‘cause I read their work, right?

But, maybe it’s a little bit harder to trust my work if you don’t understand it.

Carmen: Do you feel that the reader should do just as much work as the writer does?

Joe: [long pause] No. I think that would be unfair of the writer to do that, and I think it would be unrealistic. Like you just said I have a pretty good idea, a pretty pragmatic idea of how to get things done [and] I think if you actually take it that far you are asking a lot of your reader and I think […] too much. Especially nowadays I mean people have a lot on their plate, they have a lot on their mind, and they have a lot of different voices coming at them.

You know, maybe Windstorm suffers ‘cause it asks the reader to work pretty hard with me, to go where I’m trying to go, without explaining it with a big huge preface like this is what I’m saying before I say it, here you go: and now you can access what I’m doing and where it’s coming from and then appreciate what I think is appreciable about this book.

So, you know, maybe I erred there, a little bit […] and maybe I need to rectify that by backpedaling and doing that: writing those words to explain to people what I’m doing.

Windstorms’s a triptych. So there’s two other poems that I’m building on top of that, which, you know, they’ll be two other books that [are going to be] just as sort of strange and difficult, to a certain degree, right?

(I actually don’t think it’s that difficult, but it’s me—you know? It’s easy for me to feel like I’m not difficult but, maybe it is difficult for certain people and they…)

So, yeah: It’s important for the writer to provide enough that the reader can—you know, people have to work hard enough as it is in life. I think it’s always important to engage art but I don’t think it should be so laborious that it’s like a chore.

[…]

Carmen: What about—what about, same question: should the critic work just as hard as the writer?

Joe: Absolutely, absolutely.

At this point, we are interrupted because the next panel was about to start. Thanks so much, Joe, for talking to me!

V125 PC: Joe Denham Interview, Part 1

2012-01-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

Photo credit Keith Shaw

Joe grew up on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, and has resided in Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto. In his 15-year career as a commercial fisherman, however, Joe has worked and lived up and down the Canadian west coast, from Howe Sound to the Taku River. For five years Joe lived off-grid on Lasqueti Island (a small, water-access-only island in the middle of the Georgia Strait). Currently, Joe lives with his wife and two children in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.

I found conducting this interview really intriguing because 1) it was the first live interview I carried out at the conference (and ever in my life, actually) and 2) the interview itself is completely untethered, unkempt, and, after my prompt, Joe goes on without pause for eleven minutes. That's a long time when you are transcribing an interview (as you can see). This is part 1, where Joe talks to me about the relationship between poetry and the academy.

What's so great about Joe's thought process is that it's what I've heard called "divergent thinking." Divergent thinking is the ability to see myriad possibilities stemming from any one problem or scenario. In fact, Sir Ken Robinson gives a really germane explication of this in his RSA animate talk, "Changing Education Paradigms." Joe's interview, then, is an exercise in possibilities and potentialities, as rich and diverse as any I could see or imagine.

Finally: don't let the length of this interview deter you, gentle reader! It's worth reading the whole way through.

***

Carmen: ...I’m here with Joe [Denham] talking about poetry and hopefully he’ll talk to me a little bit about academy, and his feelings on [the academy] because I thought that was really interesting [after he finished reading, his] bringing up not going the school-route, not going the “academic route,” and [his] finding freedom in [his] poetry that way.

So I guess my first question for you is: do you think the academy and poetry are in an inextricable relationship? And should they be?

Joe: What I think is—I’ve done three years towards a degree so I’ve spent three years in the “academy,” ([and] I don’t have anything against the academy; that’s really not what I was trying to say)—I think that, yes, more and more—see, I don’t know how long the academy and poetry have been so closely connected it could be hundreds of years I’m not really up on the history of that.

I know that the idea of creative writing programmes, creative writing schools, and degrees, is probably a couple generations old now. It’s a really big phenomenon: it’s huge.

You know, when people talk about poetry being dead it’s interesting because […] I know across the United States there’s tons of people studying poetry: at creative writing schools, for instance.

I think that [a creative writing school] serves a purpose; that it’s really good, [and] I think it’s a certain type of writing that it nurtures. There’s different schools of thought at different schools, right. But, ultimately the whole idea of what is—the whole premise of an academic sort of approach to writing is a certain premise—[as opposed to] the whole premise that I decided upon, which was to take the approach of going out into the world and learning from just living in the world.

Which isn’t to say that academics don’t live in the world ‘cause they do but to live outside the academic world in a different, you know, working class: fishing, building, stuff like that—it’s going to teach you different things just by nature of the fact that it’s different.

And there’s not a lot of artists and poets doing that anymore. Simply put, most people at this [conference] are going to be sessional or tenured professors. Which is fine. But what about all the artists…

Joe on his experience at Cap College

I actually got told by a creative writing instructor after my second year to “leave and go and get a job and keep writing poetry.” And it wasn’t because I was a bad writer or a bad poet at the time—I had straight A+’s yadadada, right—it was that particular teacher was wise enough to see who I was and what kind of artist I was and was needing to be and knew how to nurture it, which was to say, [this teacher knew that] these places—these rooms [*gestures to the convention center around us*] “are not going to nurture you [Joe] to be the artist you needed to be—”

Carmen: [interjects] You needed to launch.

Joe: “—you need to go and just do your thing.” And I was wise enough… as much as she was wise enough to tell me that, I was fortunately just wise enough to take the advice.

I was going into her office hours to say, “Where do I go?” because it was at Cap College and they [could] only take me for two years and then I had to go. So. I did that [followed her advice]. And I didn’t really look back. I went to UVic for a year when I was finishing my first book because I needed student loan money to actually keep working, writing, and finishing. Which, I never intended to finish a degree there, I just wanted to get the student loans, take the writing workshops and be able to keep working towards my first collection because it was really close at that point.

So, you know, the point that I learned is that…What happens—what happens to me if I didn’t get that advice, if I wasn’t fortunate to have that happen for me. What happens if she had’ve said, “Go to Concordia,” and then I went to Concordia and then as a young impressionable 20-year old person I was being pushed and constricted into Concordia’s definition of what a poem is, or the particular professor’s definition of what a poem [is], and I was to bring a poem into a workshop and I’ve seen this lots of times where the professor says, “Well that’s not a poem: that’s a rant, or that an overly sentimental or maudlin this or that” and it all depends on personal sensibility, let’s get honest here. No one knows what a poem is, ultimately, right?

So: if you end up in the wrong room you end up not being the poet or the artist that you could have been. That’s dangerous.

So: if you end up in the right room you get, you get it all. You get supported, you get the proper apprenticeship, you get a publishing thing really easy at the end of it, you get nominations for some short-list thing and then you get a prize and then you’re a poet.

That can happen just as easily as the other, for the different person that ends up, unfortunately, in the wrong room, in the wrong programme, in the wrong school, and ends up not writing for the rest of their life. Or finishes the programme but has been so squished into being an artist that they’re not; trying to write poetry as defined by that particular programme that all of a sudden, that person never—doesn’t—they’re, they’re just—and I’ve seen them it’s like they’re ripped raw it’s like their soul’s been torn out of them—the whole—the whole reason that they came to art when they were sixteen or eighteen or…four…whatever, [the whole reason] which was this imaginative, exciting, playful kind of engagement with the whole idea of being an artist and making art is gone, and they’re just kind of dead. And there’s nothing left, and it takes ten years, or, maybe never for that to come back. It’s really dangerous, I think.

And, you know, it’s not necessarily academic—the academy’s—fault. It’s people working within the academy that are maybe not stepping back and […] are maybe imposing their agenda (what they think poetry is or art is) as opposed to looking at each individual person in the room and going “well this person is doing this and that person…and that’s fine. I might not agree with as a definition of what poetry is, or whatever, but we all know that there’s as many definitions as there are writers.”

Life Update: Dissertation Prospectus

2012-01-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

This thing happened to me a couple months ago, and actually, I can recall the exact date: October 31st, 2011. Hallowe'en. That was the night I underwent a pumpkin-like transformation from recluse academic romantic to social creature.

Something to do with TAshipping, perhaps, made me feel like I was always at school working on stuff, and suddenly all "my" stuff (my prospectus, my research, my reading) became secondary, the thing to deal with after lesson plans, reading for class, student crises, and meeting after meeting with my darling students, on campus and off. When I got home from a long day of trouble-shooting other people's problems, instead of hunkering down for a night of Hölderlin and Jean-Luc Nancy, I began socializing with a never-before-seen (except maybe those first weeks at UToronto, before they squashed our little Master's Student souls) focus.

I mean, it has literally been months of dinner parties.

Not. Complaining.

But if you, kind reader, will recall, I actually had some goals related to timeline all worked out and made available to the Internets.

My final draft of my prospectus was meant to be complete by OCTOBER 15th. OMG. WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING FOR THE LAST THREE MONTHS (wait, wait, I know what I have been doing...but STILL).

Better embarrassingly late than never: I have just completed my prospectus, and it's a pretty tight draft if I do say so myself. I have sent it off to my supervisor, and will await her thoughts.

Raincity Chronicles January 2012 Edition

2012-01-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

I love cyclical things: bicycles, weather patterns, tautologies. Which is why I also love that Raincity Chronicles came full circle this last November, featuring Jill Barber at the Grandview Legion Hall for their Remembrance Day show, "Duty Calls," after she picked them as her "cultural secret" of Vancouver in September.

What goes around comes around, and after being slotted in as the "example" storyteller for CBC's coverage of Cultural Secrets, I then got to meet Jill at November's storytelling night. Such beauty, good fortune, and fame!

Photo credit Christine Mcavoy

Raincity Chronicles' next night of storytelling is January 27, 2012 in the beautiful, historic Salt Building!

The performer for the night will be the charming and talented Reid Jamieson and the storyteller line-up will be announced in just a few days.

The Salt Building
85 West 1st Ave
Vancouver, British Columbia
Doors at 6:30pm, show at 7:00pm

Tickets available here.

“Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply guilt”

2012-01-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

“[A]s a boy, so passionately fond of books, and dedicated to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection” (37).

DeQuincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)

V125 PC: Thoughts and Impressions from Bibiana Tomasic

2012-01-04T23:23:00.000-08:00

Photo thanks to Candice Albach

Bibiana Tomasic is a poet, but at the V125PC she was a listener, a thinker and a spectator too, attending the conference and soaking up all the language and rhythm around her. Tomasic was born in Croatia, and has lived in Germany before coming to Canada at the age of eleven. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her first book of poetry, So Large an Animal, was published in 2010 by independent Vancouver Island publisher, Leaf Press.

1. The V125PC brought together all sorts of poetry people, from the poets themselves to readers and critics. In which camp(s), as it were, do you see yourself, and with which camp did you identify during this conference in particular?

I am a poet. Have been writing poetry for over 10 years. My first book So Large an Animal was published last fall. I found it interesting that I often did not feel part of the poet camp, but seemed to sit somewhere on the edges, where the three circles of poet, reader and critic intersect.

2. Can you speak about the major issues you felt were addressed during the conference?

I should have answered these questions earlier. My impressions of the major issues addressed: poetry as a political vehicle; the wrangling (sometimes) of lyrical vs. language poetry, or at least vs. non-lyrical poetry; the future of poetry.

3. Are there any questions you felt should have been addressed but were not?

Yes – I feel like the major issue not addressed is how to take poetry out of the conference, out of the four walls that it is written in/read in to the outside world. How can poetry be part of a larger cultural experience. For example, why not have a poet at various special ceremonies and public occasions? Also, what can poetry do, how can it be more active in instigating change – environmental, economic, cultural...

4. Do you have an artistic practice yourself? If so, in what ways or to what extent are your artistic and everyday life distinct/contiguous?

Yes. I write pretty much every week day. It’s hard to break the two apart. Like you, light is often shed on my artistic practice when I’m melting olive oil or chopping onions. I do have a ‘place’ where I write, but it is part of my house and part of my family’s living space, too. The challenge is to maintain a certain kind of head space that allows the creative brain to be present. Inordinate amounts of stress certainly cut the two worlds into very distinct halves, the creative side always thwarted by the other.

5. To what extent do you think contemporary poets rely on the academy (universities, MFA programmes, institutionalized creative writing workshops), and vice versa? In other words, are the academic and the romantic inextricable?

I did an MFA in poetry and I think many poets depend on the academic experience to expose them to more thought, more analysis of their own work. I think for me, as a poet, I am particularly linked to the academic world when I am researching a subject for a poem. But I think that to say that the romantic and the academic are inextricably linked may be a stretch, at least for me. Perhaps one uses the other, and then....I guess that would mean the answer is yes.

6. Is there a special kind of attentiveness that poetry taps into? Is this a different kind of aesthetic stimulation than, say, the novel or the painting?

I have written a couple of novels, too, and still hoping a publisher will pick them up. Yes, for me, poetry requires a kind of precision, be it about voice or form or image/metaphor, that is different from what the novel requires. My experience is that poetry comes in with a lot of power, like a wave. When it crashes against the shore, the bubbly foam is what I want to write about. With a novel, the eye stays over the ocean, analysing the movement of the whole body of water, how each wave might influence the next, how the ocean influences land, etc.

fête/festivity

2012-01-04T09:38:00.000-08:00

"Special Days"

fête/festivity

The amorous subject experiences every meeting with the loved being as a festival

1. The Festivity is what is waited for, what is expected. What I expect of the promised presence is an unheard-of totality of pleasures, a banquet

[from Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, via Roland Barthes of course]

V125 PC: Kevin McNeilly Interview

2011-12-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

Photo thanks to Christina Sylka

Kevin McNeilly teaches cultural studies, critical theory and contemporary literatures in the Department of English at UBC, and I had the pleasure of taking one of his graduate seminars, entitled The Poetics of Listening, two years ago. It was great to have a chance to chat with Kevin again; interviewing him made me remember that "academic" thought hinges on passion and inspiration just as does "artistic" thought.

Kevin is interested in a wide range of literature, media, and music; he has written and published on such varied writers, thinkers and musicians, as John Zorn, Charles Mingus, Franz Boas, Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Zwicky, Tom Raworth, Steve Lacy, T. S. Eliot, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Robert Creeley, and Theodor Adorno, as well as on television programs including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is a member of the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research initiative. His book of poetry, Embouchure, is available from Nightwood Editions.

Kevin read two poems at the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, and he began his reading with quite a dense, theoretically-intensive, preface. In fact, time-wise there was more prefatory material than poetry...

Carmen: My theme recently has been attention and paratexts…I’m interested in the ways in which we focalize, or put blinders on, or try and make people pay attention to what we want them to pay attention to in our poetry. How does your poetic practice take that into account? Do you think it’s a subconscious thing? Do you do it consciously [at] any time?

Kevin: That’s a good question because obviously in what we just did, I mean, it’s full of paratexts: it’s full of commentary.

And, generally speaking, you know the old adage that poets or writers are some of the worst commentators [...] on their own work, but, generally those kind of commentaries are intended, as you said, to sort of lead response to [...] get people to see something in there.

I mean, I resisted, in fact, because I had written a lot of this paratext and in fact most what I—I just read two poems—and most [my introductory and concluding remarks were] talk about poety, right? But I had resisted the urge to try and explain it, I hope. You know? To try and say well this is what this means or this is where this comes from and that kind of thing.

Because it seems to me that—I mean again this is a bit of a cliché—but you have leave it open…You have to leave the work open.

But at the same time […] rather than leading people’s response through paratext, the way I think about it is sort of opening a text up to question in some way. I feel like—and this more paratext, right?—but I feel like in a way when I’m trying to write a piece like a poem or something like that, that I want it in one way or another to almost incorporate the kind of critical element, that kind of commentary-like voice, where the poem in some way opens itself up for me to a kind of scrutiny of attention itself and of the leading of attention.

So it’s not just a way to focus people’s attention—to draw your attention to something, to make you hear something in a new way or to make you see something in a new way—but actually to reflect on the process of doing that…

I mean literally a paratext is around a text, but for me a text is very permeable, it’s a kind of a weave, and it’s open at the edges, usually, rather than closed. I like the idea of texts that kind of unravel as they speak even if they feel quite raveled, if they feel quite tied up.

Carmen: That’s a really beautiful metaphor.

Kevin: Oh, good! *chuckles*

Carmen: So, related question, do you think that the reader should do as much work as the writer [when] engaging with poems.

Keven: That’s a loaded question, you must know. Because—I’m going to take apart your question a little bit and then I’ll answer it—because it seems to me it implies […] that there can be lazy readers.

And for me, the idea of a kind of lazy […] reader or audience member—lazy spectator—is kind of bound up in questions of mass culture and popular culture. [An idea that] we kind of get this stuff and we are kind of inundated and it’s a way of anesthetizing ourselves as opposed to the aesthetic.

So…I feel like, I’m very cautious about laying claim to any notion of mass culture because it feels to me as if it doesn’t credit a person, whoever they might be, with the capacity to think for themselves, right? Sort of gets rid of their thought. So I’m always suspicious of that.

But I know what you mean! Right, and it’s actually a really good question, so, that’s my picking apart thing and, with that in mind: it’s really a caution to myself.

I think that poems should do a kind of pleasurable work. Or offer you, [poems] can invite you—I don’t think they can force you or compel you—but they can invite you to do a kind of work. I mean, it’s not easy to read a poem and you have to spend time with it. Going back over the poem a couple times, reading it a few times, saying it out loud, slowing down—the fact is words are so compacted in a poetic text that they do slow you down. Like, you have to pause often and say ‘what was that?’ or ‘how does that work?’ or ‘I like the sound of that.’ That’s work. And it’s interpretative work and it’s complexity.

But there are kinds of complexities that can be really self-defeating for a reader. You just get tired and you think I don’t really want to keep pursuing whatever cryptic thing it is that this person is trying to say to me. So it feels to me like a kind of negotiation because on the one hand I want to give credit to a reader for having a kind of active mind, for being—wanting—for being willing to think about and to be provoked by the stuff but I want it to be pleasurable. I don’t want to have, you know, such a thorny kind of text that it would push people away and they would say, ‘eh… who cares, this is some professor guy spouting this stuff I don’t understand and why would I care?’ I don’t want that to happen. So, it feels like a kind of a balancing act and I don’t know if that’s the best way to think about it but it feels like a kind of a balancing act because you don’t want to evacuate your writing of meaning or density for the sake of an imaginary sort of ‘dumbed down’ audience, which like I said I don’t think that’s a good idea—

Carmen [background interjection]: Absolutely.

[without pause] Kevin: —but at the same time you don’t want to push that audience away so…it’s negotiable, I feel like. And I also feel like a poem can actually include that negotiation. Like, it’s not just doing it but it actually maybe in different ways might reflect it.

Carmen: Do you think that the critic should do as much work as the writer?

Kevin: I think a good critic should do—well it’s hard to say quantitatively but it feels like I want to say—a critic should do more.

I think they should do more.

Because, unlike, well… a critic is a kind of specialized reader and so they are kind of making a promise or a contract or something like that. They are making an agreement with whoever’s going to read them that they [the critics] are going to take the time to engage with whatever it is they are engaging with, the work of art.

So, I think [critics] should live up to their promise, in a certain sense, like fulfill their contract, and… this is not to say that a critic is necessarily a better reader than anyone else but they’ve kind of entered into that role with the intention of paying attention.

So I think they should do that. So more time, in a way: more work. But it’s good work again, I mean, I’m a critic myself right—it’s what I do professionally—and I like it. I mean, it’s work, I know this, but it’s always pleasurable and I like doing it so I think that in some way is what I try and tell students…don’t work on stuff you don’t like. Work on something you like and if anything you can do that work with a sense of uh…it’s aesthetic.

In the Greek word aesthesis means feeling—

Carmen: Right.

Kevin: —so it’s like sensation. You want to activate those sensations ultimately when you’re trying to help someone or foster someone to be a critic or work on your own.

Carmen: Awesome. Last question: in one word, what is your poetry about?

Kevin: Music.

2011-12-20T07:10:00.000-08:00

"At the lake of Como my mind ran thro a thousand dreams of happiness which might be enjoyed upon its banks, if heightened by conversation and the exercise of social affections...I have thought of you perpetually and never have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness but I have almost instantly wished that you could for a moment be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it."

William Wordsworth, to Dorothy. 1790.

V125 PC: Rachel Rose Interview

2011-12-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

Photo thanks to Ayelet Tsarbari

Rachel Rose exudes such warmth and compassionate intelligence that, having interviewed her, I immediately begin to try and make plans to be in her presence again. Rose runs the Cross-Border Reading Series in Vancouver, which brings together award-winning American and Canadian poets to launch new works, new thoughts, and new connections. I cannot wait to attend one.

Rose is the author of the poetry collections Giving My Body To Science (McGill/Queen's UP, 1999) and Notes on Arrival and Departure (McClelland & Stewart, 2005).

Carmen: I’m here speaking with Rachel Rose who just gave a talk on a panel that was about mentorship. She embedded in her readings two poems from other writers, and it was really interesting because those poems had influenced poems she’d written.

Bringing in [poems attesting to outside] mentorship is not something I’ve seen done before. Did you conceive of that before [this specific panel] began or is that something you always do?

Rachel: Actually that’s something that I learned from my mentor, Sam Green, who often starts his reading bringing a poem in—from often a poet that’s not well known, a younger poet, but sometimes a well-established poet—as a way to deepen the conversation and to make it a communal conversation.

It’s something I admire and wanted to emulate, so there’s mentoring on multiple levels happening there.

Carmen: When you do something like that—bring in an intertext or a paratext—do you find it changes your understanding of your own work?

Rachel: Maybe. I think, as I said, it’s part of this great ongoing conversation that goes beyond the grave as we discussed on the panel, you know where we’re talking with ghosts and with Keats, if you are. And [this] extends to the future. So yes I think that just making it explicit that this conversation goes beyond me. So I’m speaking with Whitman and I’m taking with my foremothers as well.

And, yeah, I like to share the stage a little bit, as much as I can, with the other wonderful writers out there so…it’s a way to bring their work close to mine. So it creates an intimacy between me and them even if they don’t know about it.

Carmen: That’s a really beautiful answer.

Rachel: Thank you.

Carmen: When you are writing are you writing for readers, are you writing for listeners, a little bit of both, or are you writing for yourself?

Rachel: Well, that answer has changed dramatically over time, I think. When I began to write, like probably many people I wrote for myself, or at least I would have said so, but you’re never outside the realm of influence.

And then, I didn’t write for readers but I wrote as part of the conversation: I wrote for other writers, for the poets that I’d read. Really, answering the questions that they’d raised or raising questions to their answers or just continuing the conversation with them.

And now as I’m doing more music—poetic music, right, because I’m not a musician but I write lyrics and libretto—and the audience has taken on a huge influence I think in the way that I think of the work because I know it will be performed in public and I’m just aware of how it will sound in a way that I’ve never… not that I’ve never cared about but [that] has not been a primary reason for me to write ever before.

Carmen: How much work do you want your reader or listener to have to do?

Rachel: Not much. Because I don’t want to… Well, ideally, my work will work on multiple levels so it can be as much as you want it to be but I would be disheartened if I were excluding people from the conversation because they didn’t have the sophisticated tools to analyze the work or find their way in. I want my work to let everybody find their way in, and then maybe those who have those tools can hopefully find other ways or other layers of meaning.

Carmen: I like the way you keep bringing up this idea of conversation, because it is so “both sided.” In the conversation, where is the critic for you?

Rachel: I hope in the bathroom; somewhere where I can’t see them *clears throat*

You mean the external critic, the person who’s writing about the work?

Carmen: Yeah, so we’ve sort of talked about where the reader is…who the reader is…your ideas of readership…and I think the critic plays a role in that conversation too.

Rachel: Yep, perhaps. You know I did a BA in English Literature at McGill and I really thought I would continue and do a PhD programme. I love—I loved parts of that world but it became clear to me that I am much more drawn to being an artist than an academic. And I suppose I have a bit of a fraught relationship with the way some criticism is practiced, um, where it tends to be much more about the personality of the critic then [about] trying to understand the art itself. That seems to be fashionable these days. You get a big critic who makes his name—and I say his deliberately—by how well and wittily he can tear other writers’ work apart and that seems…uh…parasitic. Something to avoid.

Carmen: My last question is a question I am asking everybody, which is: if you were to describe your work in one word what would it be…?

Rachel: Connecting. Connecting and yearning. That’s two words—you can’t make me do one! Connecting-and-yearning!

Carmen: Okay, wonderful; I’ll hyphenate.

Rachel: Thank you! Connecting-yearning. Yearning to connect.

V125 PC: Nikki Reimer Interview

2011-11-15T20:23:00.000-08:00

At the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference I had the pleasure of interviewing poet Nikki Reimer. Reimer read her poem, “as long as you’re not doing anything wrong,” which both brings together and breaks apart different accounts of the death of Robert Dziekanski at YVR on October 14^th 2007.

Listening back to the interview recording, I’m struck by Reimer’s voice: resonant, measured, and clear. This transcription does not do it justice.

***

Carmen: So we’re here on Oct 20^th, Thurdsay, 2011 at the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference. I’m interviewing Nikki Reimer. She’s just given a talk at the 9:15 panel, and she did a reading of a poem, which was called…

Nikki: “as long as you’re not doing anything wrong”

Carmen: Which was in three acts?

Nikki: Yes. Yeah, three versions.

Carmen: Three versions, and with some [content] which was redacted which I thought was really interesting.

So my first question for Nikki is to do with paratexts. Because [“as long as you’re not doing anything wrong”] is a poem where there is a lot of paratextual stuff that would aid us in knowing what’s going on in the poem but you chose not to précis it with anything. So you didn’t begin with an anecdote, you didn’t give us any tools for understanding other than the poem itself. Why?

Nikki: That’s a good question. I…and often I do—when I read I often do provide a lot of contextual information—it was for some reason important to me for this poem that the poem just speak for itself. And I think what I was trying to do in the poem…is point to and represent and recreate the failures of language.

Specifically, as was discussed yesterday—one of the panelists, they were talking about trauma, and how…you represent trauma in poetry—so my poem was talking about a traumatic event that occurred where a man died. But what I was doing with the language was messing it up, remixing it, rejigging it…

Yeah; a bit like language poetry, starting with language-as-language…

The first version is really quite language as language, the second version I had taken what the official report was of simply the facts of this event and remixed that so that still is language-as-language but you’re maybe getting a little bit closer to the event that I am trying to talk about. And then in the third version, that was my own writing, which I remixed and rejigged trying to look at nouns and verbs and how they’re operating but…I don’t know whether it matters in the end of it or not whether you know the story or not, I’m not sure.

Carmen: I think that’s an excellent point. I’m often struck by [the work of] poets who embed in their poetry or in their paratextual elements telling people how to read. So there’s more freedom when you don’t, I think.

But my second question for you is: how much work should the reader be expected to do?

Nikki: Right. That’s a good question, I’m not sure that I know the answer. I think that the work should have enough within it that it gives you something, right. I don’t think that readers should be lazy, on the other hand. The reader is perfectly knowlegable and educated and capable of looking up references if there are references that they don’t know. But I don’t necessarily think that you should need to have an essay next to the poem in order to understand the poem, right?

I think that essays after the poem can be quite interesting, it can be quite generative and fruitful and interesting to look at the work afterword but as side-by-side, as an explanation, I don’t think so.

Carmen: Related question: how much work should the critic be expected to do?

Nikki: Ah, I think the critic should be expected to do more work [laughs] than the reader, yeah. I think that the critic should educate themselves about the work of that particular writer so that they have some sense of what the writer is in effect trying to do, and can align that writer’s work with [that of] other writers, and compare and contrast and…yeah. Yep. The critic’s job is hard.

Carmen: My last question is if you could say in one word what your poetry is about?

Nikki: In one word?

Carmen: In one word.

Nikki: Failure.

***

Reimer is author of [sic] (Frontenac House 2010) and the chapbooks haute action material (Heavy Industries 2011), fist things first (Wrinkle Press 2009), with that stays news forthcoming from Nomados Press. She chronicles the East Van Cats and edits Van City Kitty on VancouverisAwesome.com. Reimer divides her time between East Vancouver, New Westminster and nikkireimer.com.

Five Things I Learned at the V125 Poetry Conference

2011-10-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

5. When conducting an interview, do not respond to the interviewee's responses as you would in a normal conversation with, "yeah...... uh huh...... yeah......" as evidenced by my first interview recording with Joe Denham, in which it is obvious that I am like, yeah, whoa, right, really enjoying our conversation, don'tchaknow.

4. Poets are people, too! as evidenced by Rachel Rose and Gillian Wigmore. Honestly, after their readings I just wanted to be their friend. Both poets exude such a compassionate warmth and curiosity about the world. Gillian's poem, "If You Falter And Stop Loving" has stayed with me--in such profound and sweet moments I keep recalling it--and Rachel Rose, who was kind enough to let me interview her, made me feel as though she had as much interest in my life and successes as would a close friend (whereas I thought I was the one interviewing her about her life and successes). I am keen to attend one of her Cross Border Pollination Reading Series events soon.

3. Poets don't know where all their source material comes from as evidenced by Jen Currin's talk of contagious ideas/sound/rhythms in response to a question about plagiarism. Of course, I am on board with her. Tonight, I happened upon, or so I thought, an interesting moment of convergence when I found a scholar I like and admire had written a couple paragraphs on exactly my topic of interest. Oh wow, I thought, apparently everything has already been done. Then, while melting onions and olive oil to make soup, I started to reflect that there is a very good chance that "my" idea actually came from those paragraphs... since I have read the book before. Sloppy note-taking? Academic integrity issue? Contagious source material?

2. Poets don't really know what their own poetic projects are all about as evidenced most effectively by Darren Wershler's response to Christian Bök: essentially, (not a direct quote, mind you) "Christian, I don't think that's what the Xenotext Experiment is about at all. The exceptionalism of the human spirit? I see it as an exploration of futility and the human condition." This is after Christian describes the terrific temporal reach of his endeavour to encode a bacterium with a DNA poem, which will preserve poetic evidence of humanity forever. (For those of you who have not heard about this already, I am NOT KIDDING HERE IS A VIDEO.)

To a lesser degree this was evident elsewhere, though Christian tends to be polemic and is therefore an easy example. But this is something that I am liable to forget, working as I am with poets that have been dead for hundreds of years. Poets can't control how their poems will be read. They can't know how their poems will be read. No matter how many paratextual and intertextual markers they lay down, readership and critical response will be surprising.

1. "Rigorous dialogue comes out of respect" --Brad Cran
Of course, yes. But I think Brad's point was that sometimes we as Canadian poets/academics/thinkers/creatures confuse respect with extreme politeness, and don't say what needs saying because we fear that outspokenness is akin to rudeness. Which is why it is important that we suspend our reticence and ask tougher questions; hold people to higher standards; and be more rigorous in our own discourse. There was a lot going on at the same time as the V125PC, from Occupy Vancouver (which is a kind of immediate and active force in the city right now) to the legacy of colonialism that the 125 Vancouver movement technically celebrates. Who better to put these issues under ethical pressure than poets? It is with respect for one another that we can ask such questions and receive answers that build solutions (and more questions, of course...).

Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference 2011: V125PC

2011-10-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

Day two begins, and unlike the brief antagonism over "craft" and "theory-mongering" that burst yesterday, today's 9:15 panel (Clint Burnham, Amy De'Ath, and Nikki Reimer in conversation with Cris Costa) takes on Vancouver's colonial past and present, the ability and inability of language to recognize subjects, and the capacity and incapacity of poetry to represent other people.

What I have found interesting so far, is the ways in which the poets conceive of not poetry but language itself; from those who believe in language as failure (Nikki Reimer) and the inherent slipperiness of language (Kevin McNeilly), to those that understand language as excess (Amy De'Ath), or as a both hypocritical and necessary form of recognition (Clint Burnham).

I have been doing "exit interviews" with poets whose work interests me. At first I was really nervous about approaching them (especially after they have given an incredibly powerful reading) but I had nothing to worry about. Everyone has been really open and super keen to chat. My iPhone 4 has actually been an extraordinary recorder; the sound quality is really great. I am going to type up the interviews and post them here in the next days.

If you are in Vancouver and haven't been to a session yet, come!

Vancouver Art Gallery: An Autobiography of Our Collection

2011-10-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

Is worth seeing, this show. Tuesday nights are by donation.

2011-10-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

"Therefore, the communal god is a wind in our hair, is a garland,

And our selfhood, each one's, melts, as a pearl does, in wine.

This the table betokens, the honoured, whenever, as bees do,

Round the oaktree we sit, singing and clustering there,

This the ringing of cups, and for this are the fierce souls of fighters

Brought into unison, fused by the common compulsion, the choir's"

--Friedrich Hölderlin

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, "The Peasant Wedding Feast" (1567)

Vancouver Poetry Conference 2011: V125PC

2011-10-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

I'm a roaming academic! Romantic and roaming, at the V125PC at Simon Fraser University Woodward's Campus.

In 1963 Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and "all the Americans came up here," according to current Vancouver poet laureate Brad Cran in this Globe and Mail article, for a poetry conference that inspired a generation of Vancouver poets. Now, upon Vancouver's 125 year anniversary, Vancouver will be hosting the next incarnation of so much poetic power.

Featuring some excellent Americans, Fanny Howe (On the Ground) and Martin Espada (The Republic of Poetry), but focusing on so many amazing Canadians, from Christian Bök (Eunoia) to Ken Babstock (Airstream Land Yacht) and our new Vancouver poet laureate Evelyn Lau (Oedipal Dreams--congrats Evelyn!), the V125PC will bring together established and aspiring poets, upon whose work we will eventually be able to look back on (in much the same way as the 1963 conference) and explore Vancouver's place at the heart this community.

A community that needs archives! And who better to create archives that academics? You can see our team here, and read my (silly) bio, if you care to. Mostly, though, you should all come to the readings and discussions:

The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference 2011 will be happening Wednesday, October 19 - Saturday, October 22. Click here for the schedule and to register!

When I'm At

2011-10-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

I'm behind schedule on my Academic Goals. I've been about a month behind since the summer, and in order to keep it at (only) a month, I need to complete a rough draft of my dissertation prospectus in the next five days.

This is totally possible, given that I finished a six-page DAAD scholarship application the week before last, and have become more and more clear about my project through that process.

Canadian Thanksgiving has taken my productivity and turned it into excess consumption, however, and I needed a little push to get back on track. Through the NASSR listserv, I found in my inbox today just the thing: Timothy Morton's "PhD Advice" (which is really dissertation-writing and -planning advice). Two excellent ideas to keep in mind: a dissertation is not a book, and a prospectus is not a book proposal. Also, the very first step to a good prospectus is getting a handle on what your "archives" (primary sources) will be. I think that's step #1 for me!

Visit Tim's blog: Ecology Without Nature

2011-10-04T22:23:00.000-07:00

"Skin is soft," she said. "We're easily cut and bruised. It's not like she looks beaten or anything. It's an ordinary little black-and-blue mark, but the way it's painted makes it stick out. It's like he loved doing it, like he wanted to make a little wound that would last forever" (6).

--Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved (2003)

Egon Schiele

FAMOUS! Jill Barber's Cultural Secret of Vancouver: Raincity Chronicles

2011-09-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

Oh man! And they even got Annika's name in there!!! Ah!!! I have never been so pleased!!!!!!

SQUEEEEEEZE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday Frustrations tempered by Exciting News

2011-09-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Caveat: all day yesterday, without moving from my bed, I was filling out scholarship applications. This list has evolved/exploded from 7am to... now. Friday morning.

Thursday:
# 1. 7:30 am Frustration: Scholarship applications that TIME OUT while you are making almond butter toast and then you have to start again with the whole entering of the important information that you can't remember (High School GPA, anyone?)

# 2. 8 am Frustration: In case you're curious: Alberta Education also has no idea what your High School GPA is. Nor do they know what GPA stands for.

# 3. 9:45 am Exciting News: My supervisor has given me her Skype name, thus facilitating me being needy all the way from Germany (when I go there on exchange in the Spring).

# 4. 10:30 am Exciting News: read some awesome blog thoughts on MillicentandCarlaFran (thanks Ish!) about Midnight In Paris, a movie I grinned like the Cheshire Cat all the way through.

"Anyway, I guess I’d say that Midnight in Paris is a experiment in exactly the kinds of crutches you’re talking about (crazy Zelda=crutch. Nutty Dali: crutch. Arrogant Picasso–crutch crutch crutch). It’s all about the nostalgic image with no real anchor to the referent (no non-whites in America, as you say! No poverty in Paris!).But that has its charm, I think?

I don’t know if Woody Allen can redeem the category for us. I asked my students what the definitive texts of their generation would be—who they’d want someone to read fifty years from now to see what it was like to live now. “Facebook,” one said, and laughed, sounding all kinds of bitter."

......photo credits thevoguevibes

# 5. 11:37 am Frustration: THE FUCKING DAAD APPLICATION TIMED OUT AGAIN AND IT'S GONE. ARGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

# 6. Noon: Exciting News: I love lunchtime.

# 7. 1pm: Frustration: Why haven't I figured out the short-cut for umlauts on my computer? Why is this such a struggle? Why? WHY.

# 8. Exciting News: FINISHED THE ONLINE APPLICATION AND SAVED IT BEFORE IT TIMED OUT OMFG.

# 9. 1:30pm Exciting News: Fell asleep and dreamt about Gwyneth Paltrow's face. Still stunned and newly hypochondiracal after watching Contagion last week. STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE.

# 10. 1:34pm Frustration: The Graduate Secretary (who I love so so so much) has just called me AT HOME to tell me one my documents is incomplete. Argh!

# 11. 2:12pm Frustration: I appear to have lost my letter confirming (expected) ABD status by the time of the scholarship.

# 12. 3pm Exciting News: There's Bailey's in my coffee. Who put it there? Oh, I did.

#13. 10pm Exciting News: Everything is done~ ! Now to print four copies of everything and collate it...

# 14. 10:30pm Frustration: OUT OF PRINTER PAPER!!!
# 15. 11pm Frustration: London Drugs = closed
Safeway = doesn't carry printer paper
Shoppers = ran out "I think like a month ago?" Yeah thanks.
Kinkos = I love Kinkos!

Friday: It's over!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(and Happy Birthday to my most devoted blog-reader, R, who is having all kinds of crazy successes lately and makes me smile whenever I have the pleasure of her company.)

a tiny bit famous: CBC's Cultural Secrets of Vancouver

2011-09-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm in this for like, a quarter of a second, doing my thing on the stage at Raincity Chronicles. Onomatopoeia gymnastics salut!

So excited to watch the programme on from a completely narcissistic angle... tune in Sept 29th!

what famous writers ate while working

2011-09-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

(this, saved on my iphoto, is awesome... but I don't know who the artist is. Thoughts?)

Ooops

2011-09-17T16:50:00.001-07:00

Lunch at Thierry's....yesterday.

5 objets d'art: mmmmmacarons

2011-09-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

1.
Thierry's is open!

Getting to work with this man was one of the (very few) redeeming features of my serving at a certain Italian restaurant in Vancouver two years ago. Thierry is not only a super gifted chef, he's the nicest.

Last night, to celebrate the birthdays of two of my favourite people, we ate many many Italian dishes, and finished the evening with home made gelato and THESE --> fabulous macarons from Thierry's.

2.
Blair would approve.

3.
Paris versus New York!
(PARIS PARIS PARIS)

4.
This is gratuitous: I had lunch at Thierry's last weekend. And I kind of want to have lunch there THIS weekend. Someone restrain me.

(Apple tatin, three kinds of macarons, pistachio and chocolate mousse cake)

5.
Yes yes yes.

2011-09-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Frida and Diego

"Our lives have meaning for us--we have a sense of ourselves--through the narratives that we prepare to tell others about our experience. Even if we do not tell our stories, we live our experience through the stories that we construct in order to 'tell ourselves' to another, a loved one. As we wander through our days, an event takes on a significance in the narrative we construct for an imaginary conversation with a loved one as we are living it"

--Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001)

Dissertation Prospectus: Round 1

2011-09-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

It's September again, and that means the "beginning of the year" has arrived. Time for new binders, new time-tables, new reading lists and new goals. Since I am planning on going to Germany in February for a six-month exchange, I have a time limit for reaching my goals, the biggest of which is to be ABD (all but dissertation) by January.

~~As I am waiting to find out about by comprehensive exam results~~, [I passed!!] I am trying to create some meaningful connections to structure the next step in the ol' Humanities PhD, which is the dissertation prospectus. One of my goals is to have a draft of my prospectus completed by Sept 15th. Throughout the comps-writing-proooooccccesssssse I have become quite attached to some main themes and ideas, but it's awfully difficult to create a cohesive thesis out of them.

Here are the main ideas I am interested in pursuing:

-The poorly-received or "pedestrian" (what Keats would call "smokeable") poetry of Keats, W. Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Barbauld. Especially poems that use gothic conventions, like "Isobel and the Pot of Basil," "The Witch of Atlas," "The Vail of Esthwait," or else ones that theorize non-standard aesthetic responses, like Barbauld's writings on the pleasure of terror.

-The relationships between the gothic (as a genre but mostly as a thematics/aesthetic), over-the-top aesthetic stimulation, and "bad" poetry-- because novels were often disparaged during the period for being entertainment rather than tools for the betterment of the human mind and spirit-- can gothically-influenced poetry stand between these frames of mind/intentions?

Of course, there are so many questions related to this...

-In the Romantic literary marketplace, do gothic novels do the work of increasing the reader's emotional load to the point where the limit is pushed out and increased (so the gothic becomes conventional--gothic conventions!), or else breaks and is thereby seen as a failure? Do the poets use gothic conventions in their works before or after they were conventional?

-What does this desire for intense and uncomfortable, but also thrilling and pleasurable, aesthetic stimulation tell us about Romantic self-fashioning or the Romantic imagination?

-Is there a historical connection to be made between context (political breakdown, revolution, economic uncertainty, war at a distance) and an aesthetics that shocks and tantalizes?

2011-08-31T15:01:00.000-07:00

"On we go, the blurring body and the cheated soul. Why did no one tell me to provide for it? Everything I have has been the outward show. Everything I have belongs to Time. Art? Don't be silly. The contemplative life? Where can I get one? What then for my soul as Time pulls me on. What then for my soul?"

--Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

intern academic: the final post!

2011-08-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

Early in 2011, I met Jessica Quillin via the NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) listserv. Jessica, with Romanticist credentials in tow, decided to pursue consulting rather than the ivory tower. Since I am interested in what alternative career paths might look like for people with PhDs in the humanities, I became her intern for eight months. During that time, I got to see what Quillin Consulting is all about; I learned lots about fashion, social media, the genre of the blog and information gathering on the interwebs. Plus, I got to write about my romantic-academic interests in a relaxed and bloggy tone, which has helped me work through some ideas in a non-pressured environment.

Below you will find my very last blog article as an intern. I am grateful for Jessica for the opportunity to publish on the QC Blog, and I really look forward to seeing QC grow and achieve in the future.

18th Century Fashion, Sentimental Fiction, and Morality

Posted on August 24th, 2011

Imagine a popular literary climate in which it was proper to cry—to really, truly, cry—while reading a novel. For late eighteenth-century readers of sentimental fiction this was, in some circles at least, a serious expectation. Henry MacKenzie’s sentimental novel The … Continue reading »

Painting on the Edge 2011

2011-08-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

Last night was the opening of the 2011 Painting on the Edge competition, put on by the Federation of Canadian Artists. I was lucky enough to have my painting "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg" chosen for the show.

It was held at Federation Gallery on Granville Island, which is this tiny, high-ceilinged space of white walls and windows. My painting, which looked huge at home in my flat, was a lil' baby next to all the big canvases!

This is the very first time I have ever submitted a piece for a show, and I am so chuffed about being accepted. There were over 400 entries from all over the world, and only 49 were chosen by a panel of three judges.

Lots of people were interested in what the name of the painting means, and I even had a husband and wife duo betting on "Kaddish" being something to do with Judaism (it is). A Kaddish usually refers to a Jewish prayer for the dead. My painting is from Alan Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish" in which Ginsberg explores his conflicted feelings over the death of his mother, his estrangement from her, and the decline of her mental health towards the end of her life. The poem begins like this:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud...

Ginsberg is always sonorously infectious, and so vivid.

But truly, the show was filled with such amazing work by so many amazing artists. This was the first piece that greeted us as we entered the gallery:

It's by Paris-born painter Alain Boullard. He explained to me that it was inspired by a man he met on East Hastings, whose non-verbal signifiers (the nose ring, the pins on his jacket, the skull logo) spoke louder than words. The painting is titled "Hand Signal" (oil on canvas). It's incredible.

If I had money, this next painting would be the one I would buy for my flat:

It's huge (48" x 72") and all the abstract components are really thick and tactile. It's called "The Awakening," as is by Frank Zeidler

Here is my very wonderful friend R's favourite painting:

Jutta Kaiser's "The Secret Door" (mixed media on canvas).

R was THE BEST DATE EVER to the event. She made me a card that had a picture of us on it from... five years ago? six years ago? Suffice to say that I had braces and was grinning away, and we both are looking round-cheeked and adorable.

I had a wonderful time, and now I can't wait to get my portfolio together so I can apply to be a member of the Federation : )

2011-08-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

"Nature is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle: art is forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse" --William Hazlitt, 1816.

new fiona ackerman work: berlin

2011-07-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

.....total infatuation

2011-07-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

“The emotions raised by great and by elevated objects,” says Lord Kames, “are clearly distinguishable...in their external expressions. …in describing a great object, [men] naturally expand themselves by drawing in air with all their force. An elevated object produces a different expression: it makes the spectator stretch upward, and stand a tip-toe.”

angry academic: "Introduction" Review

2011-07-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

I love reading the introductions to academic books. This is super nerdy, but I do: I love reading them. I love all the posturing, the outlining, and the "situating in its social and historical contexts." Since I've taken the good part of eight months to write these comps, I have forgotten or confused a couple of the books I started out reading so long ago, and upon returning to them, I always love re-reading the intros.

Last year, when I saw that Alexander Regier had written a book on the very subject in which I was interested, I thought: yesssssssssss. Amazing. The book is called Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism (2010) and it is part of the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series, which usually publishes really great stuff.

Usually.

I honestly must have skimmed it the first time, because recently (ahem, today) I have literally beat this book against my skull in public places-- Second Cup, the dentist's office, Phil & Sebastian-- in mad frustration at what is probably the worst introduction I have ever read. Some gems:

"It has been a classic contention that language plays a major role in Romanticism and the way we understand it" (8).

Okay.

"My study often complements literary analysis with a reading of theoretical sources of Romanticism" (9).

Well, I would certainly hope so. And honestly, what is a theoretical source of Romanticism? Is that like, Coleridge's criticism or is that like current scholarship like Jerome McGann?

"My overarching argument is that Romanticism is partly defined through its broken origins. Each chapter of this book illustrates one aspect of its brittle foundations" (13).

Period splice? Does each chapter of the book illustrate an aspect of the book's brittle foundations? CAUSE IT SEEMS TO ME THAT'S WHAT'S GOING ON HERE.

Here is a block of text where, I think, it is possible to become so frustrated with him for PRETENDING he is going to say something really important and then NOT ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING so that you are forced to beat the book against your skull:

But what, in the end, is my problem? It's Regier's first book; he needs time to season, maybe. I should be kinder. I think what is happening is that he reminds me of me, right now, where I am at in these comps. I have read so much, tried to incorporate so much, that it's difficult to come out and make an argument. I am taking on scholars that are too big for me. At the same time, I'm trying to prove myself. I am eager to please. I am unsteady.

Here's a cliche, that speaks the truth: confidence is key.

tiny painting: "25 & Whimsy"

2011-07-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

"25 & Whimsy"

In an attempt to deliver Lauren's birthday painting on time: creative drying station creation

intern academic: the power of music

2011-07-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

"Power of Music:" Recognizing What's Going to Get Stuck in My Head
Carmen Faye Mathes

When I hear my favourite song on the radio, it’s more special than when I hear it on my iPod. When I hear my favourite song at the gym, it perks me up and makes me run faster. But when I hear my favourite song in a supermarket, it is only special if that supermarket is in France... Continue Reading

2011-07-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

"I am not given to retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I have written with the same alacrity I forget bad movies-- although, as with bad movies, certain scenes and phrases return at times to embarrass and haunt me like a guilty conscience."
--Paul de Man

Come support my first (official) attempt at comic timing

2011-07-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

I am telling a story tonight at Rain City Chronicles!!! I promise to try to a) make a joke like a real comedian and b) talk about squeezing. You should come, Vancouver peeps!

But what is Rain City Chronicles?

From their website: Rain City Chronicles is a series of storytelling nights featuring a diverse roster of Vancouverites. From your favourite actress to the guy who sells you coffee, we believe everyone has a great personal story to tell. Our mission is to provide a community space for sharing these stories.

Our nights feature long stories, short stories, music and beverages, and we’d love to see you at the next one. If you’re interested in telling a story, know someone with a story to tell, or just want to lend a hand, please email us atraincitychronicles@gmail.com

NEXT SHOW: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger at the Museum of Vancouver July 15. Doors 6pm. Buy tickets here!

* All proceeds from ticket sales help us put on future shows. We don’t keep a cent! Thank you for your kind support.

The Underwear Affair: Lace Campaign

2011-07-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

There are two reasons I ran in the Underwear Affair this last weekend. Chronologically: first, the lovely Michelle Reid asked me to be on her team-- Michelle works with The Lace Campaign in Vancouver, which is a grassroots organization that promotes regular Pap testing. One of their coolest initiatives (I think) is the Pap test email reminder, because sometimes it's hard to remember if that last time was two years ago? three? My pocket calendar doesn't go back that far!

Michelle, Lizzy and I sported awesome Lace Campaign tanks the whole way, and everyone finished in under an hour. Our team raised, together, a total of $1705.00!! The total earnings of the entire Underwear Affair weekend? 1076 runners and walkers and $630 000.00!

The second significant event that occurred was the death from cancer of Harley Hotchkiss, a close family friend. Harley's life is an inspiration to me; his enormous kindness and his goal-oriented approach is, for me, the standard of excellence with which everyone should meet the world. Harley and I share a favourite poet.

In Calgary, at the celebration of Harley's life, his son read from Wordsworth's "Michael"...

There is a comfort in the strength of love;	450
’Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart:
I have conversed with more than one who well
Remember the old Man, and what he was
Years after he had heard this heavy news.	455
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength. Among the rocks
He went, and still looked up to sun and cloud,
And listened to the wind; and, as before,
Performed all kinds of labour for his sheep,	460
And for the land, his small inheritance. Harley's famously warm two-handed handshake and the timbre of his voice are as real to me now as they ever were. He is dearly missed.

Spotted: @ the Underwear Affair

2011-07-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

Ish: "You are going to run with me and keep me company, right?"

Me: "Um... I'm going to do the race in under an hour..."

TEAM-PLAYER FAIL.

(my time? 56:57!!!!)

Results: Underwear Affair SUCCESS!!

2011-07-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, everyone! Thank you so much for all your support!! We far exceeded my goal...and raised $1000.00 to fight cancers below the belt. I have been in a state of constant excitement since yesterday morning, when I had nutella on toast for breakfast...

Major thanks go to Bill & Brenda Demcoe! Mrs. Demcoe even spread the word on her Facebook page!!

To my grandfather, who held back his generosity until the last minute, which was a chore I'm sure.

To Jonny, who became my hero by giving the last $25 we needed to reach $1000.00 via his iPhone, whilst wandering lost through Stanley Park in search of Said the Whale.

And to Annika and her family. WHO WERE ACTUALLY ROADSIDE DURING THE RACE, cheering on all the runners and watching the spectacle unfold. Truly I spent the rest of the run meditating on how awesome of a family they are. Thank you.

I'll post pics SOOOOOOOON!

Spotted: @ the Cheaper Show

2011-07-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

That's me! Watch the race go down (and spot me and my jaunty-yet-utilitarian ponytail again) by clicking The Cheaper Show 2011 “The Race” Video Recap

big painting: update

2011-07-04T21:51:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of calling it "Do Not Pay Attention or Investigate; Leave Your Mind to its Own Sphere"

2011-07-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

"...the free usage of ordinary language is carried, like the child, by wild figuration which will make a mockery of the most authoritarian academy. We have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the names of one entity from the name of another; tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that"
-Paul de Man Epistemology of Metaphor

5 objets d'art: the Cheaper Show

2011-06-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

1.

So the Cheaper Show is not just for getting what you want (but I did, I did!). It is also for finding out about new artists and getting excited about living in such an art-centric city as Vancouver. So here are some of my personal favs from the event.

...But first, a french press of Phil & Sebastian (and a decision to ignore Norton for the next few minutes...)

2.

Brandy Masch is a Vancouverite and painter/illustrator. She is also adorable. The biography on her website starts out "since graduatig high school..."

Her stuff was in high demand at the show; the girl in front of me in line was after both this one (-->) and it's partner, but only managed to snag one of them. (This one).

3.

Vancouver artist Andy Dixon's pieces really caught my eye. His frenetic and colourful lines remind me that sport should be play. Here's his website.

4.

London-based, Canadian artist Andrew Salgado. This oil painting is called "Contra."

Listen to this: (from his artist's statement)

By drawing attention to the tangibility of the work, I introduce extra-diegetic readings, pulling the viewer from the sutures of the represented subject and inviting readings beyond the confines of the painted picture.

This man is my hero.

5.

And finally! My Fionas. On my wall. In my flat. Looking gorgeous.

The Cheaper Show; or, "anyone who's been here all day knows what they want"

2011-06-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's been to my flat lately has seen my half-finished big painting that dominates the living room. I last blogged about it here and here. The inspiration for this painting has been the work of my favourite Vancouver artist, Fiona Ackerman. As I am a PhD student/gymnastic coach (read: controlled perfectionist) I really admire the freedom in Fiona's paintings: the big movements, the courageous colours, the wild drippings and the willingness to paint over, again and and again.

I first saw Fiona's stuff at the Culture Crawl two years ago, with my then-flatmate J. That was when we saw our first David Robinson sculpture, too-- and promptly met a guy at the Wilder Snail who has Ronbinson's "Suspended Figure" in his kitchen window. Anyway, it was my introduction to the Vancouver art scene, and I still have Fiona's postcard pasted in my journal.

Look at me now: almost a two-year Vancouver resident! And in that time, all the art in my flat has been painted by... me... and I totally like my own work, and I like it when people ask me about it, of course, but I have been desiring to hang some art of my own that is not my own for a while. (My friend Bryan has me babysitting his Francoise Nielly, which I love, but shall have to return it to him at some point...). It is also important to me that if I spend money on art that it is original. And so, yesterday was the Cheaper Show.

The Cheaper Show is an annual Vancouver event where a ton of artists submit work and, no matter how famous or valuable the work is, it is priced at $200. (!!!!!!!!). 200 artists are represented in the sale, and around 400 works of art. One of the artists? Fiona Ackerman.

Game day: I get up at 7am; my now-flatmate B and I run (my very first) non-stop 10K along the seawall (in 1 hour and 36 seconds!). This is to focus my energies. Get home, shower, pack up computer, umbrella, and The Antiquary and get to Broadway and Kingsway (where the show starts at 6pm). By 9:30am, I am crouched on the pavement, the 19th person in line, with my umbrella over my computer as I try to take notes on Sir Walter Scott's hilarious and difficult novel. Then the downpour begins. The guy next to me hunkers down under his hoodie with his chunky, gray, first-generation gameboy.

Around 11am the organizers erect tents all around us. THANK YOU!! This is when the socializing begins, as everyone sits around drinking Palm Bay and chatting. People near the front of the line know what they want, but no one is saying. A couple well-known names are bandied about: Eric Olson and Andrew Salgado, but everyone knows that the people who camped out all night (setting up at 2am) are going to snap those up immediately. There is a lot of strategizing. Groups already have plans (you go left, I'll go right, let's meet in the payment line-up and make some decisions) and alliances are formed among strangers (if you see my piece, yell "Danger!" and I'll come!). Style- and art-bloggers move up and down the line-up interviewing people. I am interviewed by SubmiT Vancouver and by an unknown tv crew; "Tell us where you are and what you are doing here. What do you think the Cheaper Show offers to the Vancouver art scene?"

By 2pm I am freezing and regretting the fact that I twisted my still-wet hair into a bun before rushing out the door in the morning. I turn to my Gameboy-sporting compatriot, "hold my spot?" I hurry home and blow dry my hair, grab some lunch and return as quickly as possible with a blanket and a scarf. My place has been held for me in good faith.

The line is longer, but from about person #35 back, it's a different crowd. They are wearing clothes made from delicate fabrics, high heels, and expensive bags. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO RUN FOR YOUR ART PEOPLE? The answer is they are not. We are. We front-of-line people who trade in on the fact that we may not have money but we have time. We are tenacious and ready to sprint. My heart is pounding from about 4:45pm onwards. They feed us chocolate mousse cake and my sugar levels spike. I'm vibrating.

The thing is, no one knows where in the giant gallery space their particular painting is. You have to run in, find your piece, write down the number, and get in line to pay LIKE, IMMEDIATELY. Add to this the fact that the paintings shown on the Cheaper Show website are not necessarily the paintings that are at the show, and you have to be able to recognize your artist's style from across the bloody room in order to find the number in time to snap up the piece.

There is this digital bingo board display with all the numbers of the works on it, and as you stand there watching, your pieces start to disappear. Sold. Sold. Sold.

When they open the doors, we hand over our numbers, flash our wristbands, and sprint up the stairs. I see the Eric Olson as I run in, but I ignore it. I know I haven't got a chance, and I need to find Fiona. His pieces are gorgeous, though. I especially love the fretful tiger.

I RUN. I write down a couple numbers of things I think of as back ups, but I really shouldn't have bothered. As soon as I spy Fiona's works I know I am not buying anything if I am not buying hers.

Aren't they WONDERFUL?!?!?!?!!

There were actually three of her pieces (thank goodness) because as soon as I got in line (I was probably number 6 or 7) the first of her pieces sold. My little body was in such a state. I couldn't even stand still. The woman in front of me in the line looked familiar. "Do you have children in gymnastics?" I ask her. "No." I look at her closely, I grab her arm with such force that she jumps. "I live in your house!" I proclaim. She looks terrified. "In the Westend" I clarify. She relaxes. "Oh, Carmen! You look so different."

Having successfully terrorized this woman, I now cannot think of a thing to say to her because I am so distracted by the stupid bingo board. Numbers are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Neverthless.

I got them.

I GOT THEM!!

I threw my money at the girl at cash, looked right at the camera of some guy filming behind the counter and yelled "I got what I wanted!!"

That was the most fun ever. Thank you, Fiona, for giving a student art lover the opportunity to be involved in the art world in this way. I will treasure these pieces!!

Neat! (c/o the NASSR listserv)

2011-06-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

Carlyle started at Edinburgh at age 14
Byron started at Cambridge at 17
Shelley started at Oxford at 18
Wilson started at Glasgow at 12 but went on to Oxford at 18 (where he took a BA)
Lockhart started at Glasgow at 11 but went on to Oxford at 17
Patrick Brontë started at Cambridge at 25

In general, many of the poorer students looking for a career in the Church (Patrick Brontë) were older. Glasgow for Wilson and Lockhart was like Harrow and Eton for Byron and Shelley.

I would think that the average age of undergraduates and Oxford and Cambridge in the Regency was 17-21.

---David Latané

intern academic: hipster perversity

2011-06-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

“Functionless Fashion”: The Perverse Aesthetics of the Hipster
My flatmate, Becca, said to me this morning, “I went to a hipster party last night. It looked like Cariboo sponsored the event.” I nodded knowingly, “Oh, yeah I was at this hipster party a couple of weekends ago. Everyone … Continue reading »

LACE/OFF: The Underwear Affair 2011

2011-06-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

My love of nutella will pale in comparison to my love of running to fight cancer. Help the fight!

There are lots of things people don't like to talk about. Warts. Mutant body hairs. Bum pimples. (I don't even like writing that). The amount of nutella it is possible to consume in one sitting.*

Also, the cancers that afflict our nether-regions.

I am part of team LACE/OFF, and we are going to run 'round Vancouver in our undies, in order to raise awareness about ovarian, colon, and prostate cancers, among others.

SINCE I HAVE FINALLY SET UP MY 'PERSONAL PAGE', please help me raise money!!

*Note: I couldn't even be bothered to find a spoon, and am eating (will eat) the entire jar of chocolate hazelnut spread WITH THE SPATULA** FROM MY WAXING KIT.

**unused***

***i think

OMG. My painting is in a JURIED ART SHOW

2011-06-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

I got an email this morning saying my big painting "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg" HAS BEEN ACCEPTED for the 2011 Painting on the Edge competition. It is an international, juried show put on by the Federation of Canadian Artists. HOLY SHIT I'M SO EXCITED!!

just realized I put _Being and Time_ on my comps list

2011-06-16T15:55:00.001-07:00

WHY WHY WHY????????

all in a month's work

2011-06-15T15:17:00.000-07:00

It has been raining colourful philosophy in my life for the last month, pretty much since my post on May 14th when I promised myself I would get down to the business of writing my comps.

I am feeling pretty pleased with where they are at, though I am continually amazed at WHAT A SLOW WRITER I AM. It will take me another month (and a half? eek!!) to finish.

(Someone suggested I should earn side income writing copy for ad agencies... if that was my job I would actually starve.)

Tomorrow, I will begin the serious writing of Comp #2 (Fragments) while giving Comp #1 (Aesthetics) a little room to breath. Onwards and... inwards... it feels like, when you're trying to follow the conversations of long-dead philosophers.

My Various Residences

2011-05-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

Home Office Saturday Night Party

2011-05-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

Part of the PhD proooooooocccccceesssssssssssssse (that's a long, drawn-out process, with an extra "e" at the end for spice) is writing two comprehensive papers on two major topics that will be in your dissertation. I have been reading, leisurely, for the past month, and really kind of enjoying myself.

Last week, I was like, alright kids--Burke, Gilpin, Schiller, et al--it's time to start writing this sucker. Here we go. Oh yeah! Time to organize all my notes (all 14 800 words) into paragraphs. yessssssssssssssssssssse.

The result of this intention was that I started working out THREE HOURS PER DAY (run + yoga + gymnastics) and also getting to coaching really, really early in order to "set up."

It's been like aversion training for the writing of the actual dissertation: whenever you sit down to write, have a habitual thought about what time power yoga is, and then start organizing your yoga bag.

So for the last three days I have been in lockdown. My room looks like (see above). My first paper (aesthetics) looks like... HALF DONE. My second paper looks like... (8 000 words of filth) but I am on it, kids. I am getting 'er done. WATCH THIS SPACE. Moihahahahaha.

intern academic: narrative marketing v. the culture industry

2011-05-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

“Include Me!”: Participatory Narrative Marketing Techniques

The website says “Click Here!” and I do. My Facebook friends post “Watch This!” and I will. My fellow bloggers claim “This Is Hip” and what do I do? Re-post! Already I am so comfortable participating in and engaging with online content, that not engaging seems downright apathetic. Marketers know this about their Internet-savvy consumer base: if we are investing our time into their story, their product, their idea—then we expect as our reward entertainment, interesting diversions, or even a learning opportunity. Participatory marketing techniques aim to pique consumer interest by allowing us to engage with a story in an active way. We can click, we can Tweet, we can re-post, we might even tell our friends verbally (so antiquated!), and we can, finally, buy the product in order to continue to be part of its story.

new painting: in medias res

2011-05-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

5 objets d'art: Mother's Day

2011-05-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

1.

In honour of Mother's Day we had high tea at my grandma's house today.

We indulged in the tiniest sandwiches: egg salad on white, and smoked salmon on brown.

2.

Fresh fruit & cheese, and homemade pavlovas with (soon to be added) fresh berries.

(note our quick dispatch of the sandwiches...!)

3.

Because my Mom is in Calgary and I am in Vancouver, and because I didn't want to spend heaps on postage, my gift to her was something weighty but weightless: a donation to the Canadian Ovarian Cancer Society.

& honestly, there's no reason giving should have to wait for a special day.

Click here to give.

4.

I couldn't be with my Mom today, but I was thinking about another (the only other, actually) high tea I've ever had, which was with her in Toronto at the ROM.

5.

Here's to you, Mom! I love you!

2011-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

"The state of passion in itself, independently of the good or bad influence of its object on our morality, has something in it that charms us. We aspire to transport ourselves into that state, even if it costs us some sacrifices. You will find this instinct at the bottom of all our most habitual pleasures" (339).

--Frederick Schiller, Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays

the beginning: new painting

2011-04-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

This is a print that has been hanging in my flat for a while. It's Andre Picot's Boulevard Haussmann (my grandfather recognized it). I bought it at the Salvation Army Thrift Store for $30. I taped a red napkin to it, and took it home precariously hanging out the back of my tiny, tiny car.

In the beginning, it was important to slather on white paint. This is how everything in my life begins: in the state of fogginess.

Next step in the restoration is a little decopage, using originals taken from my sketchbook. The sketch is in charcoal, the paint is acrylic, and the compositing technique I am employing at the moment is called "electrical tape."

Inspiration: Vancouver artist Fiona Ackerman. Saw her last year at the Culture Crawl and have been obsessed ever since.

Fiona Ackerman, "A Harlequin Escapade." Acrylic on Canvas, 2008

....that's all for now....

Vancouver In Bloom: 5 objets d'art

2011-04-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

1.

Every other day the sun shines and green things greenify. Can you see that tiny dot of orange amongst the periwinkle? That is a tigerlily doing it's very best.

Every other day it rains and the weather gods frown upon us.

It's like 50% springtime in Vancouver! Take that, rest of Canada!

2.

My smart awesome gregarious hilarious and gorgeous friend, M, was here from T.O. for a lil' academic conference action the weekend before last.

We sat in the half-sun windyness of a non-raining Granville Island day, and ate these beautiful chocolates, whilst bemoaning the fact that they did not taste like their supposed flavours, which were, variously: green tea, pepper, wasabi, salted caramel and hazelnut.

Confectioners who market their blandest candies as intensely flavourful should be prescribed a diet of grapenuts.

3.

Zing! The most karmically charged night of my life. M, N, and I must have been steeped in luck and charisma.

Thank-you, random benefactors, for an amazing meal and quite a lot of beautiful wine at my very favourite place to dine in Vancouver...

4.

....Vij's !

5.

I am late on the uptake (since there is already a book, which is like, the ultimate in blog spin-offs), but PostSecret is terribly melancholy, funny and engaging.

intern academic: read my post!

2011-04-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

“I’m Sold on Tuscany!”: Contagious Ideas and the Romance of Narrative Marketing

by carmenmathes

Oh, the vivid fantasy life that I lead! Just yesterday I imagined a convoluted and complex scenario in which a man I know (who may or may not be a good idea) became a very good idea...

Click here to read my post on narrative marketing for Quillin Consulting's blog.

Stuck in Calgary: 5 objets d'art

2011-03-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

click for full deets on this non-turtle's predicament

I must introduce the blog of my dear and witty friend, pseudonym: Hidegaardvonbingen. I am actually quite sure she wants us all to know her name, because being famous is the goal of every self-respecting PhD student, but I will ask her before I refer to her by her true moniker. For now! First World Problems is hilarious. You should become an immediate and devoted fan.

And as an antidote to First World Problems, I would like to offer a First World solution, (which was stolen of dear Hildegaard's FB page): a tortoise with a wheel for a leg.

This blog is great too! (Can you tell I am convalescing?)

Like a street-style blog but instead of photographs, sketches!
What I Saw Today

3.

This is a picture from before I lost the use of my chompers (lament!)

Delicious bison bacon eggs benedict with squash and jerusalem artichokes at The River Cafe.

Also (because my grandfather and I got into a lukewarm argument about the wine we had last time) this time we had Burgundy. Chardonnay. Now it has been recorded for posterity!

4.

I called it. The shoes are famous. It must be because people are reading my post about Prada pumps and issues of taste on QC's blog.

I actually love this shot from The Sartorialist of all the street-style bloggers shooting the "totally candid and happenstance" style of this woman who is so obviously leaving a fashion show. Does that count as street style?

The Sartorialist writes,

I had a great laugh the other day in Paris. Garance had recently written a very tongue-in-cheek post about how to be shot by street style photographers. Well, when she broke out her new Prada shoes (the ones that everyone wants but very few have), she fell into her own trap. It seemed that her every step was snapped by at least three photographers. Don't get me wrong, they weren't interested in her....just the shoes.

The animal is improving in size, if not manners.

2011-03-23T21:48:00.000-07:00

via fashionpirate

The Elephant's Child

2011-03-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

Is who I feel especially empathetic towards today.

***

"Then the Elephant's Child sat down most hard and sudden, but first he was careful to say, 'Thank-you,' to the Bicoloured Python Rocksnake.

And next he was kind to his poor, pulled nose, and wrapped it all up in cool banana leaves, and hung it in the great, gray-green greasy, Limpopo, to cool.

'What are you doing that for?' said the Bicoloured Python Rocksnake.

'Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child, 'But, my nose is badly out of shape, and I'm waiting for it to shrink."

***

Except in my case, it's my entire bloody face.

Post Production

2011-03-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

1. At the gym on friday:

Scene: Carmen on the cross-trainer, sweating.

Mitch wanders over: "Hey! I feel like you're in Calgary more often than me, and I live here!"
Me: "Yeah..."
Mitch: "What are you here for?"
Me (totally guileless): "I'm getting implants."
Mitch (looks down, immediately looks up at my face, embarrassed): "Ah....huh...."
Me: "In my mouth! In my mouth!"
Mitch: "Ah...huh... OH."
Me: "Like, fake teeth."
Mitch (disappointed?): "Right, okay. Good luck! It was nice to see you!" RUNS FOR WEIGHT ROOM.

2. Monday: I will spare you the details of having two posts drilled into my jawbone.

Suffice to say, my sister says my face looks like I belong in Whoville.

3. Update on my love affair with my periodontist, this gentleman. He has been forgiven. He phoned me that night to check on me, and was wonderful and focused throughout the procedure.

Spring, or, A Quality of the Air: 5 objets d'art

2011-03-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

1.

On Sunday mornings, I can be found in West Van, walking in the non-rain (sometimes) and waiting for my tutoring boy to (most probably) text me that he has the flu (i.e. is hungover).

All this so that I can go for a walk along Ambleside Beach, out to this welcoming totem.

2.

The anatomy of dinner at L's:

-NZ sauvignon blanc (c/o me)
-hot sauce (L)
-olives STUFFED WITH CHEESE (L's mom)
-crackers and more cheese options (L)
-seaweed salad, sushi and sashimi (L)
-picnic blanket from Masi market (is that right, L?)

& I got serenaded!

3.

Okay so I found THIS --> in the laundry room in my building at the bottom of a stack of Bon Appetits.

BEST HEADLINE EVER:

"Life Really Can Be Like a Romance Novel!"

4.

Stop asking me about the weather in Vancouver.

You're just looking for a reason to gloat, people from all other places.

(image c/o FFFFOUND! where I spent way too much time clicking and clacking my heels)

5.

Went to grandma's for dinner. Was treated to a gorgeous and delicious evening, and a more cheerful table setting I have never encountered.

The Academic Romantic TAship Experiment

2011-03-08T22:38:00.000-08:00

I am getting frenzied emails from students about the upcoming Second Midterm. I want the students to be successful, of course, so I agree to meetings, to reading over their work, to providing extra assignments, and to generally making myself available for their panicked first-year selves to bounce ideas off of. I sign my emails, "stay strong!" (after B), and sometimes, "sunshine always!" (when I feel sassy).

But what they all really want to know is this: what are the actual questions on the exam going to be?

I won't tell. Not even to you, people-who-read-my-blog, but I've started instead a kind of passive aggressive firewall campaign utilizing the Internet resource most perused by first years: Wikipedia.

That's right. I CHANGED the Wikipedia page to reflect the themes PERTINENT TO ME (& by extension, THEM) so when they checked it out, they would be getting more of the stuff I want them to know, and less of the stuff usually floating around on a Wiki.

Genius? Perhaps.

But then I got bored of updating the stupid Wiki page. I mean, it's kind of a huge time commitment. So right now, if you go to Song of Solomon on Wikipedia like 70% of it is garbage writing and two measly paragraphs are awesome, written by me, and I bet you can figure out which two they are. Overall, however, it's a mess.

When suddenly, INSPIRATION STRUCK.

I will make the class do it for me. Aha! 22 young minds all bent on the task of improving public knowledge! I will ASSIGN them a writing assignment whereby they fix the wiki page. A pretty good way to enforce close reading, and they get to see their own words published, however briefly.

The big question: will all this attention actually improve the page? The whole wiki model pretty much banks on it. I'm betting yes. What do you all think? Is this a bad experiment, or a great way of illuminating the malleability of Internet (and all forms, really) of knowledge?

The assignment is due next Friday. So we shall know in due course.

(& if anyone re-writes my two paragraphs... you know it's on.)

Conundrum: 5 objets d'art

2011-03-04T00:09:00.001-08:00

The thrill of pleasure I get at seeing my bloggy words on Quillin Consulting LLC's site cannot be adequately explained. One must instead imagine me dancing around in my flat, singing Metric's "Gimme Sympathy" and doing handstands near breakable objects.

READ MY POST!

"It's like Shopping!" Fashion Blogs and the Market of Taste

Image of my life. Thanks for inspiring short stories from A. D., which I am savoring one at a time; for the surprisingly wise words of Leighton Meester in the Nylon I stole from the gym; & from Toni Morrisson who is always a genius but even more so in Song of Solomon, which is my new favourite novel.

& Gaga. On the cover of Vogue. Yes.

this guilty creature.

I found this antique window at a vintage shop on Granville and I adore it. The bright colours and the Ottoman details and the fact that it actually opens! I had to hang it using industrial strength everything and drilled too many major holes in my poor, delicate wall.

Finally this one's for R, the only person who checks my blog EVERY DAY and who is way too witty not to have a blog herself. She helped me polish off a bottle of Conundrum tonight, two kinds of freshly baked cookies, and managed to make the most intellectually-challenging, intoxicated conversation topics seem funny and light.

Much love to the girl and her crumb.

Urban Dictionary Definition: Romanticism

2011-03-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

(or, the academic romantic learns how to take screenshots.)

Snow Day: 5 objets d'art

2011-02-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

Last night is snowed in Vancouver. So that means that like, a tiny, tiny amount of frozen water made it to the ground and stayed there. Exhibit A) the view from my window at 3pm. Nevertheless, my ENTIRE DAY OF FUN THINGS was CANCELED. No tutoring, to coffee in WestVan, no gymnastics workshop. ...WTF Vancouver.

   2.

Exhibit B) a picture I found on google that represents a TRUE SNOW DAY.

   3.

But since I spent the entire day in my (786 square-foot) apartment, and my flatmate is in Maui (*jealous grimace*) I had to entertain myself in seclusion for like, eight hours. I almost lost my mind.

So I baked a lot of pumpkin spice cookies.

   4.

Then I read some Thomas Pfau. This went well until I reached word 28 ("psychohistorical") in the Introduction, and then proceeded to tear a hole in the cover with my cabin-feverish claws.

5.

Finally, I started trolling the Internet AS IF IT WERE A PHYSICAL PLACE THAT COULD SOMEHOW RELEASE ME FROM MY SNOWED-IN PRISON.

I watched this video of Margaret Atwood making semi-interesting claims about the publishing world, and I LAUGHED AT HER JOKES. All of them.

those sunnies!

2011-02-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

...the sartorialist.

Milestone: Topics and Bibs Approved!!

2011-02-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

(and I just spent $300 on amazon.ca to celebrate the beginning of The Reading)

Coveted Look: Winter Sunnies

2011-02-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

1.

The Sartorialist in NYC

2.

Karen Walker 2011 Eyewear Campaign via RagPony

3.

Still loving Ksubi 2009/10

Losing for Hearts: Tin Men/Women's Fashion

2011-02-21T14:43:00.000-08:00

I have this re-occurring fantasy where I print upon a huge, white, and violently-ornate framed canvas the words "If I Only Had a Brain." It's cute, right. (& also because of the way that tune makes the genius move of rhyming "thinkin" with "Lincoln" and it always gets stuck in my head.) The Scarecrow, however, has been overlooked again and again (on the runway) in favour of the Tin Man. As if fashion isn't heartless enough.

Saturday's Globe featured a full page of Issey Miyake oragami extravagance:

There's some riffing here, I believe, on Hussein Chayalan's curious mechanized dresses, although Miyake has already been playing with geometric designs:

I dug up this image from the Met's mode blog: Issey Miyake fall/winter 1994/5, "Staircase Pleats" dress.

& finally, and most recently, Bryce Aime at London Fashion Week 2011:

Jessica from QC writes, "a dress made out of these same synthetic geometric pieces, which seemed directly as if it was taken out of “The Wizard of Oz.” On his professional blog, it says that Bryce is "getting back to his roots," ...though I only see links to TWO previous collections, so if by "roots" they mean last year, then I guess I'll have to agree. Here's a shot of 2010's fall/winter:

Which I actually love way more than the Wizard of Oz look above (maybe it's the styling and photography). In the end, though, I don't know that there is anything exceptional going on here; I kind of feel like Miyake and Chayalan have been there done that.

Calgary: 5 objets d'art

2011-02-18T21:25:00.000-08:00

1.

frozen thing. The Glenmore Reservoir is an ice-field with the mountains in the background; sky so sharp with sunlight.

Walked with A and her baby boy in the red-nose-making cold.

2.

red lentil hummus at River Cafe. Yes.

I love it when I get to go for lunch with my grandfather. Everything is delightful.

3.

small bush dog confection.

4.

Elbow and I improved our standard of living with Crave cupcakes on 17th today. We also outsmarted the parking police we think maybe. We did this by not paying.

(see the Paris vs New York blog for more pop-arty match-ups between old world and new world)

5.

Elbow has declared on multiple occasions that she will start a blog, like, tomorrow.. and.. well, she's sitting next to me furiously typing into Mom's laptop and I think that a blogpost is taking shape but that could be a giant ruse. So click this link, and if there are no posts on her blog, it's not my fault because I actively try and force her to be productive constantly and it is exhausting. It would be cool, though, if she DID have a blog, right?

Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality Illustrations

2011-02-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

These are amazing. From the 1884 ed.

"There was a time when meadow grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore; --
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely as a Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare; ..."

Just in case, the caption below reads:

"Behold the child among his newborn blisses, /A six years' darling of a pigmy size!"

friday: 5 objets d'art

2011-02-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

   1.

This beautiful fabric has brightened my bedroom and actually fits in with the only aesthetic I know how to follow: turquoise and patterned.

It is a gift from Tanzania-traveled L, who warned me to wash it immediately and solitarily lest it leak dye everywhere. I remember a similar thing happening in Mackay with B, and that was a bright orange headscarf that almost ruined my new, delicately bamboo-coloured Gorman sweater.

   2.

Where is this picture from? I saved it on my desktop and now it's an orphan. Looks to me like it calls for an update on my current reading list:

-small bits and bites of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, by Gilles Deleueze, for academic and aesthetic inspiration

-& I'm still ravenous for Richard Holmes' biography of P. B. Shelley.

   3.

Look! My big painting is almost finished and I even bought a frame to entice me to dot on finishing touches.

I created this overweight/overwrought figure while in Andrew DuBois's fascinating American Poetry seminar "The Limits of Attention" at Toronto. We read Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish" for his mother, Naomi Ginsberg.

This is how it begins:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud...

4.

My pineapple damask from the paper shop on Granville Island.

I used it as a source for part of the big painting's background. I wanted Naomi's environment to be like heaps of competing and clashing patterns: the inside of your grandmother's house in the middle of a monsoon; that smell of velvet sofas and cabbage soup, mixed with bright floodwater. It's a reflection of her disassembling mind that everything around her starts to become a strange patchwork of uncontrollable and storm-clouded designs.

Now I think I will use it to wrap a present.

5.

Finally: the most excellent flowers, another gift from L.

sit at the table; make your partner a real partner; keep your hand up; don't leave before you leave

2011-02-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

unadulterated joy

2011-02-06T22:20:00.000-08:00

This is what all my days would look like if I had
a trampoline in my living room.

Perhaps some of you know that I tutor a young lad. This young man has, if this is even possible, honed academic passive aggressiveness to the point where he is able to get negative amounts of work done and still appear serene and well-spoken, polite and easy to talk to. I enjoy our Sunday mornings together. We chat about politics, literature and the existence of God. He has opinions on many things, and knows more about military history than I will ever seek to discover.

Sometimes I feel like a 17th century tutor, hand-feeding a baby bourgeois.

Ah, but this is the recent accomplishment: my petit bougeois pigeon ACTUALLY FINISHED SOMETHING, emailed it to me, and will-- God willing-- HAND IT IN ON TIME. I feel the joy of the ages reigning down on me. I feel the veil of tears lifting. I feel delivered. Hold me.

I read this today

2011-02-03T20:54:00.000-08:00

Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. It's just the most incredible little volume in that it does, I believe, exactly what it sets out to do: it shows us beautifully that beauty and justice can be co-conspirators. Or, in her words, "[f]olded into the uneven aesthetic surfaces of the world is a pressure towards social equality" (110).

It's a huge claim, but Scarry achieves it by tapping into a certain psychology of moral action, which (excitement!) is similar to what I have been thinking about (having just read Shaftesbury, Hume and Adam Smith). What this "moral psychology" is, is this: beauty prompts us to orient our consciousnesses outside ourselves (so we can "see ourselves seeing ourselves") and this allows us to sense the way towards right action because we are no longer caught up in the craziness of forward momentum. Beauty makes us stop. It makes us take a step back. It makes us re-orient our perceptions. And it is this reorientation that aids us in creating justice because it allows us to imagine the world from other perspectives.

This book is gorgeous. Highly recommended reading.

5 objets d'art

2011-02-01T22:31:00.000-08:00

1.

Today, my Vancity BFF, L, came home from her incredible adventures abroad; she came over to my flat and we drank homemade americanos and ate pumpkin spice cookies.

(We're on the phone in the morning and I'm like "I have cookies! You should come over!" and she's like "Okay!" and I'm like *stopping the cookie on it's way to my mouth* "I will save you... one.")

This turquoise demi tasse cup is from a charity garage sale I once helped at, with my Calgary BFF, A, and her mom. The set cost, I believe 5 cents per cup, and there are four in the set. I had them in my hope chest for years before finally bringing them to my flat in Vancouver. Look at the crema on that coffee! I have been honing my skills.

2.

I will finally reveal, after much excitement, that I have an internship! It's with Quillin Consulting, a luxury marketing and brand strategy firm. Jessica, the company's founder and managing director, is heading to London Fashion Week this week. Check out her post about the history of Fashion Week.

Part of my duties will be writing articles for QC's blog, so watch for updates!

3.

This picture of Giselle captures the kind of warm and yet spring-like vibe that Vancouver dressing is all about. A shrunken cable-knit sweater and pink, laced-up trousers. I think I might experiment with lightening my hair.

While we are on the topic of blonde ambition, I know I'm late discovering this blog, but cupcakes and cashmere is my new guilty treat. To be read in the afternoon, with something sweet.

*Sight* when the sun shines in Vancouver *in January* it brings an atmosphere of intense excitement and guarded relief.

4.

I just started Richard Holmes's Shelley: The Pursuit. Holmes was 29 when he finished writing this biography, the same age P.B. Shelley was when he died. Last winter, I read Holmes's Age of Wonder, and now I am a Holmes fan for life. He is an amazing writer, and this looks to be an amazing book.

5.

This is to attest to the fact that I *cannot wear red lipstick* but I do anyway. My lips are crooked, and when I rup them together, I get more lipstick on one side then the other. But I adore my perfect, red Chanel lipstick, and I wear it all the time. If you see me with a huge red slash across my mouth, just kindly let me know and I'll blot. ; )

Much love to my Elbow, whose hair colour in this photo I want to emulate.