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There’s a thread runs through everything
and a seamstress with a camel the size
of a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eye
that worries me, but the other end,
a steel point that runs me through
like the pin the entomologists use
to fix their bugs to the mounting board.
The Fates don’t clip the thread, you know.
Whoever said that was prevaricating.
What they do is jam us flush
to the other beads they’ve sown in place
so we can’t see our comrades strung
out way down the line. Except when
it gets late and they fold the cloth
and they stuff it in the linen closet.
There, we huddle, afraid in the dark,
rubbing up against those with whom
we feel so connected it makes us retch.
With their breath on our faces, and
their stink and their sweat and the
strangeness of their strange tongues
worming wet willies into our ears,
we complain that it was better when
the cloth was laid out flat and
we could hold our pattern true,
lines neat, all the while bragging:
There’s a thread runs through everything.

I recognize this wall from a visit to Victoria last September. At the end of the video, the camera pans the wall and you can see a face by the KWOTA crew on the side of the building. That tipped me off that it’s near Douglas and Bay St. There used to be circus themed murals on the wall: Masters of Mayhem.

Friends who know about my intolerance to gluten (and my love of irony) brought over a box of gluten free Farm Animals Rice & Corn Vegetable Pasta which is a vegan product. But is it really vegan? Once you cook it up and put it in a bowl, aren’t you eating animals? And how do vegan Catholics reconcile their food ethics to the fact that the Eucharist is the body of Christ? Or did God make Jesus out of rice pasta?

The vacuum cleaner wasn’t working. After three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the upholstery, nothing happened. The vacuum cleaner roared the way vacuum cleaners are supposed to roar, but all the suck was gone out of it. Harlan turned off the machine and, popping it open, saw that the bag was full. He went inside where he found Lisa pulling things from the medicine cabinet and dumping them into the sink.

I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era. To my chagrin, I discovered that Iyer’s is not a new voice; he has been publishing books for more than twenty-five years. How had I overlooked him? Months later, I stumbled across Iyer’s The Global Soul in a used bookstore on Johnson St. in Victoria, a locale that is emphatically not emblematic of the global era. Now that the world seems all abuzz with Pico Iyer—essays in the New York Times and a new book released this month—I think it’s worth visiting his earlier work.

Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer. The novel starts as a straight-up realistic account of a woman named Jean Serjeant born in the 1920′s, conventional parents, an eccentric Uncle Leslie of whom she is very fond, a flyer named Tommy Prosser who is grounded and billeted at the Serjeant house during the war, a stale marriage to a policeman named Michael, a timid son named Gregory. As the novel progresses, it promises a poignant reflection on life, mortality and the miracle of the ordinary … until we reach the final section and discover that Jean is now a hundred years old, which means that the novel’s present is sometime after 2020. From a 1987 point of view, the world enjoys as yet undreamt-of developments, including something that sounds a lot like Google.

While walking my dog, I passed a box of books by the curbside. As is my habit, I paused to scan the titles and three caught my attention, not because I want to read them, but because my heart goes out to anyone who needs to. All three concern bereavement for the death of an infant. I looked up from the box to the solid brick face of the house behind the box. As is typical in suburbia, I don’t know the occupants of this house and can’t remember ever having seen them. I looked down the street, past a hundred other houses just like this one, and I wondered at all the private pain and grief these brick walls must hide. Then I wondered: What does it mean that these books have been discarded? Have the parents “gotten past” the grieving and no longer need the books? Or have the books have given them no support? Or maybe they’ve moved on to a whole new list of titles.

Early last year, I had posted a photo of a neighbour’s lawn done with astro turf. The grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence, even in winter. However, he has put out a real Christmas tree for the chipper this year. I would have thought a man who has an astro turf lawn would use a fake tree for Christmas. For people who like labels, I offer this as an example of situational irony.

Thanks a shitload, Karen Armstrong.
I mean, I’m happy for your diagnosis
and all. I mean, not knowing is worse
than floating in medical limbo.

During the Christmas holidays, I had my comeuppance. I had to face my family and confess that I had lost my iPhone. Two weeks earlier, while moving my daughter home from university for the holidays, she lost her Blackberry. She hadn’t even owned it for a month and it vanished in the parking lot of a Tim Horton’s. Oh the lectures I gave! The haranguing I did! I told her, we might as well burn hundred dollar bills for fun. I told her, we might as well treat the telcos as registered charities and give them our money. And then, in one of those karmic twists that makes my life look a late-night reality TV rerun, I found myself standing before my daughter, head bowed, hearing my own words chimed back at me. To be fair, my daughter felt badly for me. She knew that, as hard as I had been on her, I was ten times as hard on myself.

Almost two years ago, The Guardian published 10 Rules of Writing from Elmore Leonard. Leonard is famous for his allergy to adverbs and his advice in The Guardian includes the usual harangue. But Leonard goes further and issues a fatwa against the word “suddenly” and against adverbs that specifically modify dialogue words like “said”.

and by “Like” I mean “Like” as in feel great affection or affinity for, as opposed to “Like” as in click an up-turned thumb on a Facebook page.

Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darkling which they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records. The libretto draws upon a book-length poem of the same name which Rabinowitz published ten years ago, which in turn is built (as an acrostic) upon the poem by Thomas Hardy, A Darkling Thrush.

I bookended 2011 with two large novels. In January, I read Witz, by Joshua Cohen, a sprawling brilliant novel which I would set on my shelf beside the likes of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. In December, I read 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, also a sprawling novel which at least one critic has likened to War and Peace and Infinite Jest. I had decided to read it on the strength of another review in The Millions, a rave of a review if ever there was one, by Kevin Hartnett, which concludes with: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape. Oh great, I said to myself, I’ll sit myself down with this behemoth of a novel and submit to a transformative experience.

Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful. In the U.S., for example, the Duke Law School’s Centre for Study of the Public Domain wryly notes: “Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1^st.” Thanks to the efforts of poor and starving artists like Sonny Bono, nothing new will pass into the U.S. Public Domain until 2019. I’m glad he smashed into a tree. He couldn’t sing anyways.