The sunset might prove to be key

...in pinpointing Homer's Ithaca. That and the sediment of a dried-up lake. This kind of research seems to be hot these days. Maybe I should start scanning Atwood's work. She must have a sunset in there somewhere.

Perhaps

...I should keep this link handy.

If I were famous

...I don't know if I'd like a sandwich named after me since I'm not all that fond of sandwiches, but cake, I could hang my name on a nice big slice of schmoo, minus the sauce of course. Maybe I'll change my name to Brenda Schmoo. A big thanks to Ariel and Polly for meeting my cake needs in Winnipeg.

Do not read

...The Kite Runner on a bus if you don't like people staring at your tear stained face. It's a good book. I got lots of reading done on the bus trip. I finally finished the Narby book. I read Karen Solie's new one, which I was lucky enough to win at the festival. I also won the David Seymour debut. I read that one yesterday. I won a Crozier book and a Tjia book as well, both of which I already owned.

It's a widening experience

...to read Catherine Hunter's introduction and Lorna Crozier's afterword in Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier (a 62 page book launched in Winnipeg while I was there; it's the first of a series of slim selected poetry collections which will include Don McKay in December, Christopher Dewdney and I can't remember who else later on) in conjunction with the introduction to Post-Prairie, especially Kroetsch's comments on Crozier and the surrounding text.

Fresh podcasts

...by GG winner Arthur Slade.

"There is an anxiety of geography

...at work in the post-prairie poem" says Jon Paul Fiorentino in the dialogue with Robert Kroetsch that opens Post-Prairie, the anthology of prairie poetry that they edited. Of course they say a great deal more about the post-prairie poem, but that was the sentence I mulled over during the final hours of my 11 1/2 hour trip home. Back to the periphery. I thought about the incredible poems I'd read in the anthology, an anthology that marks an important beginning I think. Indeed, the editors say it is "the first collection of twenty-first-century post-prairie poetry." Somewhere in the dark between The Pas and Flin Flon, I thought about Sunday's panel discussion, specifically the brief exchange between Fiorentino and Kroetsch about the city night, its sky, the hidden stars. All the while I watched the northern lights spilling out of the big dipper. All the while I saw stars.

The time in Winnipeg blew by

...whipping up the hems of my skirts. Ariel Gordon showed me around her city, though she did not lead me around as she claims on her blog. It was more of a steering, me the flat-out, tireless sled dog looking back at the musher, wondering what the hold up is. Seriously though, I'm grateful to Ariel for putting up with me for that long. She deserves a medal. So does M. We crammed an incredible amount of fun into my stay.

Some of the best moments I had at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival would draw a chorus of yah right's, so I'll just mention a couple of the more believable highlights of the festival.

Two blow-me-away, new-to-me voices:

Joel Hynes read from a new novel set to be released in January, a reading that drew caught-up sounds from the crowd, and surprisingly enough the same sound came from my throat as well. That's rare. In fact, I don't recall ever doing that before. On the strength of that reading, I bought Down to the Dirt, his first book, and I will definitely buy the next.

Sherwin Tjia not only read from The World is a Heartbreaker, his book of pseudohaikus, but revealed an intoxicating charm, intelligence and humour that left people smiling and murmuring in a satisfied way. What a wonderful presenter.

More later.

Tomorrow I'm heading down

...to check out the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. I'll be checking out the Assiniboine Forest as well.

Tomorrow I'll be in a garden

...listening to poems and the autumn leaves.

More on Monday.

I wouldn't mind

...finding this under the Christmas tree.

The very landscape

...that brought on The Scream has been located. Of course there's a biography involved.

The problem of reviewing poetry

...is discussed here and here.

A manuscript known

...as The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus is part of "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here's a peek at it.

The New York Academy of Medicine, who loaned the papyrus to the Met, is mounting a parallel exhibition called "Holes in the Head: Mending Head Injuries from Pericles to Bonaparte." The press release mentions a book by 17th century military surgeon John Browne titled A compleat discourse of wounds . . . whereunto are added the severall fractures of the skull. . . (London, 1678). That's almost a poem. Its full title is a poem. And for an entirely different poem, just place a "the" before "general."

Proust manuscript

...pages, including this beauty, are scattered throughout Marcel Proust: Writing and the Arts. (From wood s lot)

Me and the Moon

...is a painting by Arthur Dove. I've been staring at it for a while now. Here's another Dove.

The most gorgeous

...broadsheet announcement arrived in the mail today. I look forward to the chapbook.

I'd love to go to New York

...in the next few months. Today's New York Times carries a story on the exhibition of Russian art that will soon open at the Guggenheim. The exhibition has more than 250 works going back as far as the 13th century. The overview and highlights on the Guggenheim site are enough to make a person drool. And sure enough, the first version of Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, which I went on about earlier this week, is actually going to be there.

Translation

...is the focus of "Continental Shift," an article by Murray Bail in today's Guardian. In it Bail says "the distinctive voice is at the heart of all worthwhile art; to iron out the stray bumps, awkwardnesses, idiosyncrasies is to reduce the greatest writers to the ordinary, everyday. And for what? Here the impulse may have something to do with the sensible, ordered lives of the translators."

On the fine art of generalising Bail says a fair bit, including this: "The bold assertion coming in at an unexpected angle: it forces the reader to sit up, and either agree or not. It can be as jolting as a slap across the face." Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche and Pascal are some of the great generalisers he names. Here's a bit more Bail: "Actually the most glaring examples of "generalisation" are the deep structures of myth, archetypes and certain areas of psychoanalysis. And these planks in our civilisation, not easily dismissed, were realised and tested first in foreign languages, reaching us mostly in translation." Planks. I like that.

The challenges that face universities

...are discussed in "The brains business" by Adrian Wooldridge. On the topic of online education he says this: "The human touch is much more vital to higher education than is high technology. Education is not just about transmitting a body of facts, which the internet does pretty well. It is about learning to argue and reason, which is best done in a community of scholars." I wonder if that's still true. These days most of my arguing and reasoning takes place at a computer.

Closure

...is the aim in this treatment of unproduced work. Hmm.

Being a writer

...often feels like this. Today it feels more like this. (From Mute)

The Black Square

...paintings by Kazimir Malevich are the subject of this article on the Hermitage Museum site, the result of a search that came out of nowhere. Last night, after I was called a square for using the browser I use and after I said ha!, the Black Square popped into my head. I suppose it was a natural square to square leap.

Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism continue to be the focus of my attention this afternoon. The Black Square comes up in "Kazimir Malevich: Beyond Figuration, Beyond Abstraction," a review by Donald Goddard on the exhibition that ran till July at the Museo del Corso in Rome, Italy. In it Goddard says "it was not until later in his career that Malevich recognized the motif’s origin in the opera, where it signifies the pure, nonobjective future, replacing the rational world of the sun under which humankind, and art, had been fated to live before that."

In his Guardian article "Marxism on a Plate," Jonathan Jones says this about Kazimir Malevich's painting: "By reducing painting to a black square, he released a new art of geometric forms, dynamic yet serene, prosaic yet sublime. This was a poetic and introspective abstraction, rejecting the visible world to enter imaginary space where motion and time are redeemed."

Happy birthday

...to us.

Here is "The Poor Poet" by Czeslaw Milosz.

That's it till Tuesday.