If you're looking for information about my book, accrete or crumble by Natalie Simpson, please go here.

I'll be reading tomorrow night at the Railway Club as part of Memewar magazine's Short Line series. I've never been to a Memewar event, or to the Railway Club, but I've heard good things about both. Come hear me read if you're around.

On my travels yesterday I saw two billboards advertising, of all things, Saskatchewan! My favourite said "45 minute commutes? Not in Saskatchewan," and the other one showed a picture of a typical suburban house on sale for $178,000. Contrast that with ads on the train advertising vacation/retirement properties in the BC interior, no prices listed there, of course, because if you have to ask you can't afford them. There seems to be an east-west economic continuum in force: if you've made money in Calgary, you can go west to luxury, but if you can't hack it in Calgary, go back east where life is easier on a budget. That movement mirrors the economic division of a lot of cities, where richer neighbourhoods are on the west side and poorer neighbourhoods on the east.

Gertrude Stein should have been a lawyer

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it. - Form and Intelligibility

or a judge

The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand. - Q.E.D.

Just finished reading Lynn Coady’s latest book, mean boy. Set in 1975 New Brunswick, it follows a young poet through his second year of undergraduate drinking and professor-poet adulation. She really nails the undergrad creative writing workshop experience, so much so that I was squirming through certain scenes. Bad, bad memories of my naive and pompous ideas about poetry. Like all Coady's books, it’s brilliant and hilarious. She writes the kind of books I read way too fast and regret ending.

Wanna participate in a democratic process? Pretend your concerns matter to your elected representatives? Fight federal cuts to culture funding now!

For the first time in over a decade, I don't own a car. Although I've always avoided driving as much as possible, it's really inconvenient not to have the option. The other night I decided on my way home from school to buy a bottle of wine. There's one wine store in the ritzy neighbourhood where I live, but their cheapest bottle runs about 14 bucks, and I just refuse. So I went home and searched online for the nearest LDB stores (aw, government-contolled liquor sales -- so retro). There are two liquor stores that would take a good half-hour walk each way, and another wine store that's probably a 40-minute walk. I weighed how much I wanted a glass of wine against how much my self-image would suffer if I walked for over an hour in the dark and cold and rain just for a drink, and I decided to forego the booze. For now. If I had my car, I wouldn't face that dilemma. If I was still in Calgary, the problem wouldn't come up either way. I was trying to think of any place I've lived in Calgary or any place anyone I know has lived in Calgary that's more than a few blocks away from a liquor store. I can't think of any. Even in the suburbs, you never have to go further than the nearest strip mall. I'm not proud of Calgary and what it can represent: deregulation, excess, whiskey and steak dinners, retrogressive attitudes. But I'm not not proud of it, you know? Sometimes it's a tonic against the faux-enlightenment Vancouver prides itself on. Maybe my neck is redder than I'd like to think. Maybe I should stop making vapid political generalizations.

I should get danger pay for my part-time web editing job. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing descriptions of all the academic programs on offer at UBC for prospective students. And now I want to take them all. Everything you can learn about is so interesting. I love linguistics, I wish I had a degree in it. And how come I never took any psychology courses in my undergrad? Not to mention sociology, and economics. Freshwater science, biochemistry… why the hell not? I’m sure I could study science if I tried. Also there are a lot of languages I’d like to learn.

While a normal person would just read a bunch of books on all these subjects, or do some web research, my sickness compels me to want to take courses and enter degree programs. It’s kind of sad. And it’s not as though I’m even a very good student. I have terrible study skills, I procrastinate, I have major problems with authority figures, I get defensive and paranoid when anyone expects me to participate in class, I can’t handle any kind of competition, and I have no respect for the institution. I don’t really understand why some people work so hard to get a good grade. I either want to learn the material or I don’t; I respect the prof’s opinion or I don’t. It took me this long to realize that grade point average affects career opportunities. I swear when I was doing my undergrad, that never occurred to me.

The law of wills and estates is fascinating and ridiculous and fascinating again:

(Deliberating on whether a signature on a separate piece of paper can be considered part of the will so as to render it legally valid.) If an unattached paper is to be admitted at all, there is much to be said in favour of an envelope, which may reasonably be held to have a far closer relationship to a document which it encloses than a second and wholly disconnected piece of paper. Envelopes are, by their nature, designed to have what may be described as a dependent and secondary existence, rather than an independent and primary life of their own.

Re Mann (England, 1942)

"Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition; they have only a communal existence; and not only does the meaning of each interpenetrate the other, but all in their aggregate take their purport from the setting in which they are used of which the relation between the speaker and the hearer is the most important part." Judge Learned Hand, NLRB v. Federbush Co., 121 F.2d 954, 957 (2d Cir. 1941).

accretion, n. Growth by organic enlargement; growing of separate things into one, the resulting whole;

crumble, v.i. To fall into small fragments or particles; disintegrate.

Back when this blog was an anonymous experiment in posting snippets of execrably bad automatic writing, I wrote these lines, which I've subsequently tried to fit into a couple of different manuscripts as a sort of free-floating quotation or footnote or something that's not quite up to a poem, but which don't seem to fit anywhere:

Climates facilitate ennui.

Here and here and herer.

Which is a shame, because I really like these lines. My writing is often referred to as Steinian, and that's not always true, but I think these lines are definitely Steinian. There's some fascinating grammatical thing going on, that I don't want to explicate because that would be a step down the sad road of being one's own literary critic, and that can't lead anywhere comforting. But I wanted to at least re-post them, if only to validate the time I've spent staring at something I wrote four years ago as somehow productive.

For one day the other day, it was warm enough to smell the ocean, and it was quite a shock; once you've lived near the ocean for a while you stop noticing the smell of it, so it was nice to be aware of it again. Now we're back to the weather I moved here to get a break from. This old guy on the bus today said it was the worst winter he's seen in 25 years, and the guy he was talking to said he'd been here 57 years and it was the worst he'd ever seen. Not that it's really cold, mind you, and not that as an emigrant from the prairies I can legitimately complain about the amount of snow, it's just that I miss the wet, gray saltiness of winter in Vancouver. Bright and freezing just doesn't fit here.

If you were cruising around one of the richest, quietest, closest-to-the-university suburbs in Vancouver looking to shred someone’s ignition without actually stealing their car, would you target the unimposing 15-year-old sedan with the 4-foot tall stuffed monkey in the back seat, which has held up incredibly well and never needed any major repair (the car, not the monkey, although the monkey has held up pretty well too, and it’s closer to 30 years old)?

Yeah, I guess you would. So would I, but it seems so unfair.

Looking at things objectively, do you think the owner of that car can afford to get it repaired? Do you think she has the mental fortitude, or even the wherewithal, to deal with police reports and insurance people and mechanics and tow truck drivers, during the first week of the final semester of a degree that clearly isn’t taking her life anywhere she thought it might even though she never thought about it very clearly and just kind of came here on a whim? Don’t the Alberta license plates indicate to you that the owner of that particular car is probably not entirely in compliance with the idiotic BC insurance and registration regime, and might prefer to pass her time in this province without drawing any attention to the existence of her car?

And lastly, isn’t it obvious that she hardly ever drives, except to go shopping or to the legal aid clinic where she volunteers to help people who have legal problems, which could very well include being charged with attempted theft of a vehicle, and that she was on her way to the clinic when she discovered the evidence of your incompetent hacking? Do you really want to be the author of that kind of irony?