books about love

books about love; inks on paper, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, in the shop.

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Zazen

by Vanessa Veselka

Have you ever had one of those clever friends, those very clever friends who are intimate and aloof and charming and maddening at the same time? Your clever clever friend might even be a genius. Your clever clever friend might also have a mood disorder. Or at the very least live on some kind of emotional moonscape. A psychic blast area. Perhaps there's even a genuine mental illness, pooling beneath the surface. Also, your clever clever friend might not even be your friend. Because lies are the only truth that matters.

I read this book in the smallest, sharpest bits. The writing is smart and dense enough to make you feel the need to take many breaks for air. In fact, I kept putting it down not expecting to pick it up again. But then I did. Because I wanted to find out what happens to Della, the narrator. And I could not guess.

In many ways, Della is like the clever clever friend. But she also the victim of the clever clever friend, namely Tamara. And so the worm turns under the doom-y skies of semi-anarchy, principled but futile resistance, self-immolation, bombs, bomb threats, wars, impending bigger wars, a police state, consumerism, geophysics, hippies, veganism, and sex parties. There is a bit of a down-the-rabbit-hole feel to Della's wanderings, so unsure she is of her own footing in the world. And a kind of dog-eared sadness, too.

This is a wonderful book, which is why it pained me so much to find a littering of proofing errors around the three-quarters mark. A fault of the publisher, not the author, to be sure, but it did diminish from what otherwise is a wonderful kind of desolation.

the apartment

Uploaded two new files to my (slowly) growing Soundcloud. One is a stand-alone story called The Apartment. The other is the third part of a collaborative piece:

the first part is here
the second part is here
and the third part is here

and we'll just keep going and going.

* * * * *

My Father's Day was okay. I had a cold. I went to my studio. It rained on my walk home. I phoned my mom. I didn't have to make supper (the girls were at a party). I got to drink (most of) the last bottle of beer in the fridge. I went to bed early.

the summer of my parts

Decided to embrace summer today, despite the sky looking like a chain smoker sealed behind the tinted windows of a idling Camaro. Well, perhaps not 'embrace', exactly – never that – but at least I wore shorts, and even sandals, and almost appreciated the breeze coming off the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Whatever. I'm exhausted and slow moving and certainly rolling my shoulders. I did find ninety-five cents (three quarters, two nickels – one American – and a dime) on the sidewalk. I took my prize money to work and washed it at the sink, just like I used to do with my keys at the mental hospital.

burn-o a la bono

Last night, just a few days after drawing her (above), I had the strangest dream about Linda Darnell. And Bono(!). Linda and I were on holiday(?) – some kind of combined boat/helicopter excursion, a day-trip kind of business operated by Bono(!!). He sat at the back of the boat, louche and slouching, his arms spread like he was relaxing on a couch, looking out at the ocean from behind his outrageously expensive iridescent sunglasses. "Is that going to be a problem?" I asked, pointing to some rope that snaked out from the front of the boat and then back, dangerously close to the outboard motor. "I use the new Photoshop to insert myself into all sorts of world-historical photographs," Bono said, rather loudly, to make himself heard over the noise. "It's really great!" The engine choked and then quit and we began to drift through a dark green sea littered with floating televisions. "Is it my imagination, or am I too heavy for this boat?" I asked, looking down at the foot of water around my feet. "It's impossible for me to drown," Bono said, now too loud. "I just use Photoshop." We arrived at a very small island that seemed completey taken up by a white stucco house with a helicopter perched on its roof. Inside the house were all sorts of Spanish girls running around with no pants on, giggling like maniacs. "Put some damn pants on!" I yelled. "Bono doesn't want to see your little chicken bums." Bono put his hand on my shoulder. "Oh, I don't mind," he said. And then everyone was looking at Linda Darnell, standing at the top of the stairs, completely engulfed in flames, and smiling.

iain banks

Iain Banks, author of one of my favourite books – The Wasp Factory, has died of cancer at 59. An effacing interview subject, a very down-to-earth kind of writer, plain-speaking, a lover of whiskey, and a deep traveller into writing's dark frontiers.

study no. 98

Study no 98, from the garden - watercolor
by Annamaria Potamiti
a member of the famous NITE ART OWLS

house of cards

Not the Netflix version but the British original. A four-parter. After episode three, C and I tried to speculate as to how it would end. I based my answer on how almost everything ends in cinema … or rather how it never ends. Well, I won't say how, but I was absolutely wrong. Which makes this series not only notable, but completely entertaining. The main character is like Iago with reasons and pedigree. Recommend, recommend, recommend.

the keep-going part

I complain, in that dig-digging inside-out way, at least 2.5 times too much, and I understand that more fully when I see a post like this one from Bridgette Guerzon Mills, who -- despite being flooded out of house and studio(!) some seven weeks ago -- continues a thoughtful conversation with and about her work ... in one sense following it, and in another looking forward to it, to when she can realize it with her hands and dreams once again.

no deep assignments

 

Kingston has a poverty problem but it also has a proud-of-poverty problem. Which is confounding to me. Because whenever my own fortunes have been empty (and a mockery of that very word), whenever I've been forced to inhale poverty myself, my desires (I won't even glorify them as ambitions) were mostly about not taking it in too deeply, certainly not accepting it as normal, or as some sort of decision, as the settled state of affairs, and mostly hiding it, and wanting, desperately, to move away from it. Like a toxic cloud. To just be able to pay the rent, and bills, and buy groceries, and shoes, with some predictability -- that was the equivalent of being able to breathe. Properly. But what I see around me these days is a kind of poverty tribalism, where these guys who don't work (and won't work, and have some kind of story why they can't) all wear this borrowed gang/jail look, and put it out there, on the street, like they're proud of it. With a toddler-afflicted pregnant live-in trailing two steps behind, looking like a wet police sketch of wretchedness. I don't get it. Of course I *do* get all sorts of fuck-you's to the system, and have all kinds of sympathy for that, but these guys have landed at least a dozen levels below that. Squatting there. Not even looking up. I guess my final thought would be that yes, it *is* terrible to be poor, you needn't tell me, but I'll never understand why you'd get a tattoo on your face to celebrate that fact.

(And none of this is good for the rest of us, either.)

where have all the flowers gone?

More work for Ariel. The world is soaked through with ideas like arteries, and overgrown, but never because of too many poems.