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September 2010

Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas

Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr

Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch

Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille

Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest

Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest

Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street

Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings

Of Strange Comfort

On Canada Day, many faces painted with maple leaves jouncing atop bodies wearing red and white can be seen strolling through Cates Park for a picnic, perhaps without happening upon the stone in memory of Malcolm Lowry. They walk along, unaware that across the water, the ‘S’ was once burnt out and that the sign ‘HELL OIL’ would blaze out of the verdant darkness.

Malcolm Lowry was a remittance man who turned up living in the Dollarton Flats on Vancouver’s North Shore. His existence was nomadic to the point that a number of countries have claimed him as their own, including Canada. It was in a squatter’s shack in the Dollarton Flats during the 40s and 50s where he completed his masterpiece Under the Volcano, apparently while limiting his drinking and standing upright. He was vocal about Vancouver, and his observations from the book are often quoted:

“it has a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet…”

His former haunt, the pub in the Dominion Hotel, is now lined wall to wall with blaring television screens. Go a couple of blocks towards the former Woodward’s building, now a cozy sconce for Nester’s, and you will find a more or less accurate variation upon Lowry’s poem:

Beneath the Malebolge lies Hastings street
The province of the pimp upon his beat
Where each in his little world of drugs or crime
Drifts hopelessly, or hopeful, begs a dime
Wherewith to purchase half-a-pint of piss
Although he will be cheated, even in this.

Just when it seems that the ghost of Lowry has been completely exorcised from Vancouver streets, outside of the new Living Shangri-La development on Georgia and Thurlow, there has arisen a sculptural installation by Ken Lum (until September 6th), which includes a reduced replica of Lowry’s shack. The exhibit is an ironic reminder that an edict by the City of Vancouver led to the destruction of these makeshift homes. It is not so much of a stretch to remind ourselves of the Downtown Eastside in the form of tent cities outside of high-end mod-connish properties intended for purchase by absentee owners.

One poignant memory is from the National Film Board’s eerily brilliant Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, in which a past letter to his publisher is read aloud, a request for enough money to mend his radio so Lowry and his wife can listen to a Canadian broadcast about his own genius as a novelist.

Strange Comfort is a collection of essays by Sherrill Grace about Malcolm Lowry that addresses these and other key issues of the 21st century in his writing.

• The Collected Books of Artie Gold Have Arrived!
• Jamie Reid reads from PREZ: Homage to Lester Young
• Vancouver Opera presents Lillian Alling
• The Remarkable Emily Carr
• Muthologos is here!
• Charles Olson reads 'The Librarian' (Mar 1966)
• Steve McCaffery reading from Carnival @ Instal 09, Glasgow
• On Healing Family
• The Book of Esther
• The Road Forward
• Tear the Curtain!
• Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest
• Des Walsh on Rocking the Cradle
• 8th Annual George Ryga Award Shortlist Announced
• Dramas Illumine Dark Matter
• For the Pleasure
• Trigger Premieres at TIFF
• Dear Betty,
• Charles Olson reads from The Maximus Poems
• 12 Hour Marathon Reading of George Bowering's Burning Water
• How High Is the City, 
How Deep Is Our Love
• A Good Sign for Faith Fraud & Minimum Wage
• B.C. Battle for the "Spirit" of the Arts
• 20th Anniversary of the Oka Crisis
• Hair-Tickling Tales of Torment and Teenagers
• Pantsing and Love in a Kitchen
• Of Strange Comfort
• Until The Unsung Sings
• Tomson Highway For Prime Minister?
• Our Summer Sale: 8 New Books of Poetry for $100
• True Story at the Jessies
• Fahrenheit 2010: The Steady Burn Out Of Independent Booksellers
• The Long Anti-lyrical Movement
• Halo Over Shanghai
• 1963 Poetry Conference (Recordings)
• Scream
• Breaking Down Decompositions
• Another Home Invasion Strikes Home
• The George Ryga Papers
• Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominations
• Got Proprioception?
• Video Clips From Talon’s 2010 Cross-Canada Poetry Tour: Vancouver
• Where Do You Stand On Canadian Writing?
• Jessie Richardson Nominations for Three Talonbooks Dramaturges
• Playwright Daniel MacIvor wins Siminovitch Prize
• Imperial Canada: Talon statement on "libel chill"
• Talon Spring Launch at the Edmonton Poetry Festival
• Talonbooks Spring Poetry Launch in Calgary
• Talon Spring Poetry Night in Vancouver
• Joan MacLeod Charms at Kogawa House
• Getting to Know Noh
• Prior to Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier was Louis Riel's North-west Rebellion
• Fred Wah could be Kazuo Ishiguro’s guide to understanding Poetry

If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:

He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”

> Go to story...

Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?

Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.

> Go to story...

Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman

Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox

> Go to story...

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...

For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, and Again

It is a rare thing to make a love letter both dramatic and moving. There are plenty of mothers on the stage who get their moment of love and recognition at the end – even Mama Rose gets hers – but only after two and a half hours of battle.

> Go to story...

George Bowering - from My Darling Nellie Grey

Those / flimsy shoes / would never get / anyone through hell

- from the month of August (According to Brueghel)

> Go to story...

A View of The Madonna Painter

In his introductory note, Michel Marc Bouchard, ably assisted by Linda Gaboriau’s translation, warns us that his play “is writ in scarlet pigments, in holy wine and haemoglobin, all the shades of red that flow through us, from our sex to our souls. It is a collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

> Go to story...

The Seminal Transmission of Orphic Ghosts: A Review of Garry Thomas Morse's After Jack

Before Morse was a mote, Spicer delivered a series of lectures in Vancouver (Morse’s stomping grounds) in which he revealed the poet as medium more than artist, and inferring a certain talent—nay, absolutism—to receptivity as priority over composition. Far too clever for its own good, After Jack is a large rabbit-eared radio, indeed.

> Go to story...

Looking Back at They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever

York’s voice is never far from anywhere in this text. She explains how these rock writings were the records of people who recorded the results of their spirit quests, dreams and visions on the rock walls of the Stein Valley, and how they could be read and interpreted by any one who was properly trained to “read” them.

> Go to story...

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...