Thursday, September 27, 2007

Dear Blog, hello.

I seem to have developed a cold. I'm tres grumpy right now, but I won't go into why. It is curious however that I'm generally grumpy. I wonder why that is? Perhaps one day I'll write something on the grump as an impetus for writing. But for now I have to blow my nose.

Jay

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Dear Blog, hello.

It is a fantiastically fall night, but I am tired. Not really. My internal sense of language makes me write things like that. I've been typesetting a White Porcupine all day and glowering at how the world conducts itself. As a distraction, after massive hamburgers, Cole and I read Mr Happy before bed, and a Frog and Toad story we'd never read before called The Garden. Toad is very anxious about his new garden and keeps annoying it by reading it stories and talking to it and singing is songs and reading it poems. How annoying! Then Toad finally falls asleep and while he's asleep the garden finally has a chance to actually grow. A wonderful story.

I had a dream last night that the DEMTENED POEMS 21-30 I finished yesterday are not only not finished, they are not part of DEMTENED POEMS at all! How odd to have spent all this time on them thinking they were one thing when really they are something else all together. Well, fine. Cudos to these poems for having the decency to speak up and put me straight. So I'm still working on them and when they are done they will be done. Meanwhile, all that's left of DEMTENED POEMS 21-30 is a sequence of titles. Maybe I'll write some poems under them some day.

Maybe I'll get a grant to finish them. For the time being, I'm feeling somewhat distracted.

Where'd ya go?

Oh. There you are.

Back to printing millions of copies of covers for The Sands of Dream for the US market, even though it's the first English edition of the first surrealist text ever published in Canada. Dumbass Canadians -- when you suddenly realize it's right there in front of your nose it'll be out of print.

I'm not sure what else to tell you at the moment. Reid is watching inappropriate crap on the internet. Hazel is out at work. It's a fairly quiet night.

Jay

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Dear Blog, hello.

Well, here we are in September. I'm having a somewhat awkward day, just kind of crummy. Mostly because people are often weird and annoying and there's nothing I can do about that. Mostly it has something to do with numbers. Aren't numbers awesome? Like how the whole world is about numbers, or that everything comes down to numbers? Love is about numbers, I'm sure of it. More ofthen than not, however, things (emotions?) are really about a lack of numbers. Perhaps I'm just stressed with the usual tensions in my life between writing and publishing and scholarly work, and work. Or lack of work. I mean numbers. There's lots of work. I work a lot. But few numbers.

I've been working typesetting books -- new BookThug books are on the horizon. And I'm happy with how they're coming along. And I'm generally ignoring everyone. Which is kind of fun, but annoying too, because the world of publishing poetry requires an excess amount of hype.

I'm working on the third sequence of DEMTENED presently -- an inter-linear translation of a poem by Stuart Ross. There are ten poems. Each one uses the poem before it to create the poem it is. Or rather I use the poem to generate a new poem. It's dreamy. When they are done perhaps I'll post them here. It isn't like anyone wants to publish them or anything.

I'm working listing Open Letters at the bookshoppe. What a funny journal that is! It starts out all playful and fun, lots of interaction and bizarre papers. There's even the All Incest Issue -- what a riot! It makes me think there was a lot of down to earth understanding about how stupid it was to be a poet or a writer with any inkling toward the avant-garde. Then at some point it gets totally serious, hardcore dense writing, hip happening theory with a capital T! A sudden shift in the wind -- or the minds of the younger generation -- the sort of thing that has some rippling effects through the land -- bitterness, anti-theoretical stances (a theoretical stance in and of itself) and so on. It sure is an important journal though.

And I've been working on my new book the small blue soon to be published with Snare Books in Montreal thanks to the good person Jon Paul Fiorentino (thanks Jon!). The book has changed a lot since I first wrote and published it myself through BookThug -- I'm looking forward to the "public" reaction to this public version. har har har.

And I'm just about to start school again, both teaching and learning. My workshop at George Brown College starts on Monday the 10th, as does my first class in Information Sciences at UofT. But I'll be in Woodstock giving poetry readings and workshops at College Avenue Seconday School that day, so I'll miss my first class. Auspiscious beginnings.

Well Blog, that's it for now. I'd better get back to work.