Reading News

Last night was the reading at the Calgary Public Library, fun event and THANKS to everyone who turned out. Great to see so many faces and special Kudos are awarded to the Library staff (Donna Bagley and Ann Austin) who made my visit so pleasurable. Michael Boyce turned out too, he's the author of Monkey which I'll now have to add to my stack of reading. The reading was lively with great questions, lots of laughing. And just who was the mysterious woman who apparently collects books signed by authors?

I should mention, while on here, the writing is going well -- hard as hell, horrifically difficult, but I know that is what to expect. It's the balance of macro and micro simultaneously. The thrill combined with the trance.

I just finished Whitman's Leaves of Grass and have moved on to Jeanette Winterson's The Passion -- nice magic realist style combined with risk-taking and stream of consciousness. There are some interesting reviews on the net -- and I tend to agree, deft, virtuoso sentences quite frequently -- boy don't I love that stuff. Some critics say the characters are undeveloped. Maybe so. On the other hand, it's a fascinating post-modern work, dense, white lit Venice and the darkness that lies within hearts. I stumbled across a beating heart that lay within a little jar inside my own closet. You might too, and when the dream works, it is 100% REM. Quick read and one worth picking up for that beach chair. I've moved on to essays about Winterson's works, here we go, into the post-structuralism.

Were I to say "woo hoo" I might be proclaiming my own male identity as a position of power in a polysemous, plural, genderless society. Hey but I'm in Canada, this 1990's identity politic is all the rage! I'm going moose hunting now.