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A History of My Brief Body
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
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On taking a risk:
I love these two. Sara Sidle and Gil Grissom. Jorja Fox and William Petersen. I love them both. I love them all. (If you’re following this blog, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you.)
I love these two moments. I love these moments for Sara Sidle and Gil Grissom. I love these performances by Jorja Fox and William Petersen.
In discussing the new song for which she co-wrote the lyrics, Jorja Fox said (slightly cleaned up by me), “It’s worth taking a risk to get to love someone and be loved.” In “Girls Gone Wilder,” (CSI, 15x05), Sara Sidle says, “I mean, to be with somebody who really gets you, who loves you for who you are—I don’t know. I think it’s worth the risk.” In A History of My Brief Body, Billy Ray-Belcourt (a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation) writes, “To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.”
And I love these two moments because, to me, they both really show that risk—the risk of devastation, of being devastated by someone.
Based on what we see in the first scene, I’ve always believed Sara didn’t know Grissom was coming to the rainforest for her. Maybe after his initial non-answer answer he believed she deserved such a sweeping gesture; maybe he believed she’d be less likely to reject him in person. But he goes after her. During his trek through the rainforest, he’s eager to find her. Then finally he does, and, in that moment when he stands there, before she turns around, I think there is anticipation but also clear awareness of that risk.
For years he feared he might put everything that was comfortable in his life at risk for Sara only to have her ultimately reject him. It’s a risk that, in “Butterflied” (CSI, 04x12), he initially described himself as having been unable to take. But now, here, he’s really done it: he has given up his job and everything comfortable and safe, and he still risks Sara’s rejection. But now he knows—he knows that the risk is worthwhile—it’s a risk he is willing to take, because he knows what it is to love and to be loved by Sara.
In the second scene, I also think Grissom does not know that Sara is coming after him. She looks a bit worried when she gets out of the cab and scans the marina for him, she hurries down the ramp, but then she looks pretty calm as she’s walking down the dock to him. He has, after all, just declared (albeit not directly to her) his love for her, that she’s been his best friend, that she’s restored his faith in the human being, that he’ll miss her for the rest of his life. So our girl should be pretty confident in her endeavour. But, then again, the man did divorce her, and she’s just 100% given up her new job (if you use the deleted scenes as your headcanon, which JF would have to have been doing at the time) to come after him.
So she looks pretty calm heading down the dock, but then there’s that moment where she’s standing in front of him, waiting for him to do something—your move, buddy. And she does this little intake of breath at the end, and I feel like that’s the moment where you really feel how much she is putting her heart out there; she is risking everything, like he has done before. It’s that little intake of breath that seems to jar him into movement. But it’s in that moment that I really feel how much she is willing to put herself at risk for this man, how she is willing to risk her heart—but, of course, this is Sara, so I think she has always been willing to risk everything for this man.
At different times in the series (Sara in “Girls Gone Wilder” and Grissom in “Immortality”), both Sara and Grissom speak of love and their relationship with the other in a manner that shows they both thought their relationship was worth the risk even when they thought it didn’t have a happy ending. (Cue the tears.)
@addictedtostorytelling has some relatively short meta on that subject, and you should probably go read it if you want to feel weepy for a bit.
In chapter 13 of my current fic, I let the characters themselves discuss the same. (I’ll probably leave you less weepy. I just went back to look at that chapter, and honestly I made myself a little weepy. I’m pretty much non-stop tears and anxiety, though, so you probably shouldn’t let me be your gauge.)
The events that necessitated the events of “Immortality” should never have happened; they were a complete betrayal, and I will never think otherwise. But I do love the parallels that were created in the end: both characters giving up what had become a very comfortable existence for a chance—a chance—at happiness—a chance (no guarantee, still the risk of rejection) to go off on an adventure with the one they love. They are both willing to risk that utter devastation, and I love it, and I love them.
So, yes, I love these two and their story, and I love these performances.
Also, GSR Day is tomorrow (except it’s actually today—February 9—because I always end up posting things after midnight). Since this is nothing but the first of my completely made-up GSR holidays, I will probably do nothing but reblog my first GSR Day post and post a completely unrelated GIF-set and maybe re-read my “how they met” fic. Actually, now that I think about that last one, I’m kind of excited for it. So happy almost-GSR Day. Did I mention I love these two? 😉
(I have to add that, according to Zuiker, they did not have much time or money to shoot “Immortality,” and it definitely shows in the lighting on Jorja Fox’s face in parts of that final scene. So, for the second gif: it’s not me doing odd things; it’s the source material.)
#gsr#otp: gsr#sara sidle#gil grissom#sara x grissom#grissom x sara#💛: survivors in the night#my thoughts and feelings on the two lovely science nerds
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I'm putting together recommended reading lists as part of a project I'm doing for work, and since it's March 20th, I figured I'd make a post with some of the books on the list! (also as a reminder to myself to finish reading them)
March 20th is Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA+ Celebration & Awareness Day! This annual event recognizes and celebrates the diverse sexualities and gender expressions that exist within Indigenous communities.
To acknowledge and support this day, here are some author highlights and book suggestions:
Arielle Twist is a writer and sex educator from George Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan, now based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a Nehiyaw, Two-Spirit, trans femme supernova writing to reclaim and harness ancestral magic and memories. (Arsenal Pulp Press)
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Disintegrate/Dissociate, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness. (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. (billy-raybelcourt.com)
Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir, A History of My Brief Body, opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile Cree Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward … A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us. (billy-raybelcourt.com)
Ma-Nee Chacaby is an Ojibwe–Cree writer, artist and activist from Canada. (ma-nee.art)
cw: discussion of physical and sexual abuse.
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery. (ma-nee.art)
Joshua Whitehead is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary where he studies Indigenous literatures and cultures with a focus on gender and sexuality. (joshuawhitehead.ca)
Whitehead’s debut novel, Jonny Appleseed, is about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man, reckoning with his past as he returns home to his reserve. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez"--and his former life--to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. (Arsenal Pulp Press)
#book recs#Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA+ Celebration & Awareness Day#Arielle Twist#Billy-Ray Belcourt#Ma-Nee Chacaby#Joshua Whitehead#two-spirit#indigenous lgbtqia+#authors
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Billy-Ray Belcourt
Gender: Male
Sexuality: Queer
DOB: N/A
Ethnicity: First Nation - Driftpile
Occupation: Poet, scholar, writer, activist
#Billy Ray Belcourt#lgbt#lgbtq#lgbt people#queer people#male#queer#native#first nation#Driftpile#poc#writer#poet#activist#scholar
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‘Another Fraudulent Band Election?’
‘Another Fraudulent Band Election?’
“…Members of the Driftpile Cree ‘Nation’ {a ‘nation’ of 2,974 people}, a ‘First Nation’ {Aboriginal community} on the southern shore of Lesser Slave Lake {Alberta}, are seeking a re-do of the December 20th election for their Chief and members of Council.
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In honor of Native American Heritage Month, and due to the requests I've received over the years, I've compiled a list of great books written by indigenous authors from all over the Americas.
Part 1, North America:
Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Magical Realism/Mythology/Dystopia:
“Elatsoe” by Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache)
“Moon of the Crusted Snow” by Waubgeshig Rice (Anishinaabe)
"The Marrow Thieves" by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis)
"Son of a Trickster" by Eden Robinson (Haisla and Heiltsuk)
“The Removed” by Brandon Hobson (Cherokee)
Nonfiction/Memoir/Essays:
“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)
"A History of My Brief Body" by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree)
“A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” by Alicia Elliott (Haudenosaunee)
"An American Sunrise" by Joy Harjo (Muscogee)
“Dog Flowers: A Memoir” by Danielle Geller
"Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City" by Tanya Talaga (Anishinaabe)
"The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth" by The Red Nation
“Heart Berries” by Terese Marie Mailhot (Nlaka'pamux)
Contemporary/Fiction/Historical Fiction:
“Indian Horse” and “Medicine Walk” by Richard Wagamese (Ojibwe)
“Jonny Appleseed” by Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree, Peguis First Nation)
“There There” by Tommy Orange (Cheyanne and Arapho)
“The Break” by Katherena Vermette (Red River Métis)
“Five Little Indians” by Michelle Good (Red Pheasant Cree Nation)
“The Seed Keeper” by Diane Wilson (Mdewakanton Oyate, Rosebud Sioux)
“Birdie” by Tracey Lindberg (Cree-Métis, As'in'i'wa'chi Ni'yaw Nation Rocky Mountain Cree)
Mystery/Thriller/Horror/Paranormal:
“The Only Good Indians” by Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet)
“Winter Counts” by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Sicangu Lakota)
“Firekeeper’s Daughter” by Angeline Boulley (Chippewa)
"Empire of Wild" by Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay Métis Nation)
Poetry Collections:
"Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories and Songs" and "This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg)
"Split Tooth" by Tanya Tagaq (Inuk)
“Postcolonial Love Poem” by Natalie Díaz (Akimel O'odham)
"Nature Poem" by Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay, Viejas Group of Capitan Grande Band of Mission Indians)
"Disintegrate/Dissociate" by Arielle Twist (Cree, George Gordon First Nation)
Anthologies:
“Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction”, contributed to by Joshua Whitehead, David Alexander Robertson, Darcie Little Badger, Nathan Adler, Gwen Benaway, Nazbah Tom, Gabriel Castilloux Calderón, and Kai Minosh Pyle
"This Place: 150 Years Retold" (comic, nonfiction), contributed to by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Chelsea Vowel, Katherena Vermette, Jen Storm, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, David Alexander Robertson, Richard Van Camp, Brandon Mitchell, Sonny Assu, Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley, Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Alicia Elliott, and illustrated by G.M.B. Chomichuk, Scott B. Henderson, Tara Audibert, Natasha Donovan, Kyle Charles, Scott A. Ford, Donovan Yaciuk, Andrew Lodwick, Ryan Howe
“Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, Volume 1”, contributed to by Hope Nicholson, Michael Sheyahshe, David W. Mack, David Alexander Robertson, Haiwei Hou, Dayton Edmonds, Micah Farritor, Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley, Menton3, Arigon Starr, David Cutler, Elizabeth LaPensée, G.M.B. Chomichuk, George Freeman, Tony Romito, Jeremy D. Mohler, Ian Ross, Lovern Kindzierski, Adam Gorham, Richard Van Camp, Nicholas Burns, Todd Houseman, Ben Shannon, Jay Odjick, Joel Odjick, Claude St. Aubin, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Andy Stanleigh
More:
New books that I haven't read/heard enough about to recommend yet
Part 2: Central & South America
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Goodbye Astral Harvest. It was a wonderful 5 years in you!!
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Recent Reading
Helen Macdonald - Vesper Flights
This is a beautiful collection of essays that made me want to feel more present in my life and more aware of the life surrounding me.
Carly Finlay (Ed.) - Growing Up Disabled in Australia
I have dipped in and out of some of the other titles in this ‘Growing Up ____ in Australia’ series previously, all of which I have enjoyed reading and consider to be invaluable resources for teaching and learning, but this one might be my personal favourite so far. The intersectional nature of disability creates space for a really diverse selection of authors, stories, and narrative forms here, and I look forward to continually returning to these short works of memoir in the future.
Billy-Ray Belcourt - A History of My Brief Body
Where to start? The British punk band IDLES’ 2018 album title, Joy as an Act of Resistance, perhaps works somewhat as a shorthand, distilled and decontextualised, summary representation of Belcourt’s perspective throughout this memoir, which reads just as much as manifesto than it does memoir: “My thesis statement: Joy is an at once minimalist and momentous facet of NDN life that widens the spaces of living thinned by structures of unfreedom.”
Belcourt is a First Nations, Driftpile Cree, queer scholar and poet, and this collection of lyric essays is largely concerned with a metaphysics of joy: “In this book, I track that un-Canadian and otherworldly activity, that desire to love at all costs, by way of a theoretical site that is my personal history and the world as it presents itself to me with bloodied hands. To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”
Wiradjuri writer, poet, teacher, and academic Jeanine Leane has written about Belcourt’s book, published in Australia by UQ Press, for the Sydney Review of Books, much better than I can hope to speak to the text here, and she offers the following understanding of Belcourt’s representation of joy: “Joy... is internal consistency – a personal and purposeful choice to refuse to be either silent or erased by the nation state.”
I have developed an annotation system where, in addition to underlining passages, I’ll place an ‘X’ in the bottom corner of pages that contain particularly significant pages for quick reference; there are too many pages of this book which I’ve felt compelled to mark with multiple ‘X’s to the point where to quote them all here would feel like a definite copyright infringement. Nonetheless, here is just one more of the passages that I want to hold on to: “To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to do this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin: ‘the fact of being touched by what we touch.’ Care denotes that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance.” I am really grateful to have read this book, and feel that I am still only beginning my process of reflection.
In the meantime, hopefully without the risk of atrophying that process for myself, I’ll finish by quoting the ending of Leane’s own review: “...the overwhelming message, to NDNs for whom he writes first and foremost, and to First Nations peoples on stolen lands never ceded, comes from his essay, ‘Please keep Loving’:
‘NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn’t to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn’t only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the rote of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.’”
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I am so glad that I read this book, which, surprisingly, makes for an excellent companion piece with bell hooks’ All Above Love: New Visions. After reading Winteron’s autobiographically-inspired first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, last year, I felt urgently, though somewhat sheepishly and self-consciously, drawn to Winterson’s writing. There are simply too many passages that I underlined for me to share them all here; this is much more than autobiography. Here are a few of the passages that I want to remember:
“There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that they things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. [...] When we tell a story, we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. [...] When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of the silence that can be spoken.”
“All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get out language back through the language of others. We can turn the poem. We can open the book. Someone has been there for us and mined the words.”
“Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, the the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.”
“The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I don’t have to fight for everything. I don’t have to fight everything. I don’t have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.”
“All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar.”
Graham Swift - Waterland
After reading Richard Norman’s analysis in On Humanism last year, I was eager to experience reading this novel for myself. The premise is simple, in the sense that there’s an instigating incident early in the story that invites and explanation of cause and effect. However, Swift zooms way out beyond the immediate scope of the subject matter into history, attempting to complicate any simple answer to questions of causation or resolution: “...shall we go back to the beginning? But where’s that? How far back is that?” The constant shifts in time, as Norman has identified, wonderfully captures the phantasmagoria of phenomenon that characterises when we call experience and history, and which can only be seen to explain, as Swift’s narrator says, “a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.” I loved reading this book, and the feeling it gave my mind of being disassembled, dissected, and suspended in various positions that possessed their own coherence through a unifying incoherence.
The narrator’s view of his brother’s intellectual disability is unsettling, and feels perhaps more disturbing in a moral sense than the author intended. Here I am, though, guessing at a complete stranger’s intentions. It’s not exactly like the narrator is presented as a paragon of virtue. I guess I’m just feeling particularly aware of certain ableist patterns of perception and representation that exist throughout literature at the moment, for the first time, and am starting to feel weary and wary already.
Linsday Ellis - Axiom’s End
This is a light’n’breezy YA-adjacent sci-fi novel that I enjoyed. Superficially, it is about falling in love with an alien. There is also some business to do with language and communication - but themes are for eight-grade book reports, so never mind about that. Nothing to see here; focus on the aliens! They’re totally not metaphors! I am unsure if I will read the forthcoming sequel, though I suspect I would enjoy watching a film adaptation because, once again: aliens!
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
This novel was more generic - in the sense of possessing and adhering to established genre patterns - than I had expected from Vonnegut, though I didn’t realise it was one of his earlier works when I first picked it up. I remember enjoying the story well enough, despite the relative lack of depth and complexity if compared to Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. However, I was particularly moved by one line of dialogue, late in the novel, which reads like a humanistic interpretation of the proximity principle, and has since stayed with me:
“It took us this long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
As a side note: by contrast, a certain Ben Folds and Nicky Hornby song, which came out when I was finishing high school, has been coming to mind lately as an example of perhaps what I feel is one of the silliest, and perhaps most insidious, perspectives on love that I have (shamefully - and I mean that genuinely, as I believe the framing around the idea, in this instance, inevitably invites some pretty toxic patterns of thinking and behaviour) previously entertained. It is a bop, though, so plug your ears, lest ye too be tempted to indulge in problematic, harmful, self-destructive, adolescent fantasies!
Alan Dean Foster - Alien: Covenant
I hadn’t read a novelisation before, but I wanted to revisit the story of Alien: Covenant ahead of the recent Blank Check podcast episode without actually having to rewatch the film, so I read the novelisation instead. I was thinking it might further develop some of the film’s themes, but I was mostly just looking forward to taking my mind off work as my holidays began. I had not read a novelisation before. Unfortunately, the experience felt not dissimilar to the moment in an episode of Arrested Development when Michael Bluth opens a brown paper bag stored in the fridge with the label on that says ‘DEAD DOVE, do not eat!’ and then looks in it anyway, before sighing and saying, ‘I don’t know what expected’. From what I could remember, the novel was almost exactly the same as the film in both subject matter and structure, with Foster even ‘cutting’ between the points of view of various characters at roughly the same times. I gained a clearer understanding of the plot, maybe, but not much more of an appreciation of any of the ideas the film contains. The writing style is competent and unadorned. However, it did successfully take my mind off of things as the holidays began.
N. K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate
N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky
I was scrolling through the list of Hugo Award winners from previous years, and it was hard not to notice the three-year winning streak that Jemisin holds from 2016-2018 for her science fantasy Broken Earth trilogy. Reading the three post-apocalyptic novels over a fortnight was emotionally draining to the point of numbness at times - somewhat of a ‘what came first, the music or the misery’ situation, though. (I’m writing this in the midst of another lockdown.) Genre fiction seems to do this to me, but the structural ambition of the first novel sustained me through this initial period of uncertainty.
The tragedy of the first book felt stunningly orchestrated, but reading the second novel afterwards felt particularly bleak and harrowing - probably because I thought that such a narrative coup d'état wouldn’t seem possible twice, and probably also because I missed the humour of one of the characters focalised in the first novel. This is, I suspect, by design; finishing the series, the weight of the suffering represented in the middle section doesn’t feel overshadowed or diminished by the ending.
Unlike the unfinished Game of Thrones saga, which is the only other fantasy series I’ve read in recent years, this story does possess resolution. (Is calling it a ‘shattering’ conclusion too on-the-nose, considering that the instigating event within the novels is called The Shattering?) Subsequently, I am glad that I saw the series through, especially as I don’t think I would have appreciated otherwise the full extent of the metaphor(s) at its heart, or had the chance to enjoy the catharsis of the profoundly hopeful resolution.
George R. R. Martin - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Every now and then I accidentally get to wishfully thinking about The Winds of Winter. In its ongoing absence, I try to fill the void with other ASOIAF-related narratives of varying degrees of quality. I enjoyed the first novella of the three that are collected under this title, and the third one, too. I don’t remember Egg having much to do in the second one, though, which felt somewhat staid; Dunk is a character who, without a witty foil like Egg hanging around and stirring up commotion, leaves much to be desired. Speaking of eggs, and chickens, and which of them came first, I’m yet to decide whether I turn to Martin’s work when I’m feeling depressed, or whether his work affects me that way. I just feel kind of numb while reading his work, sometimes...
Madeline Miller - Song of Achilles
By contrast, Miller’s work feels full of life. Her writing is sensory and naturalistic, and sensual, too. I am taking a circuitous passage through the Greek myths, starting with the contemporary revisions and working my way back to the earlier texts; I will read Homer and Ovid soon, possibly. I think I was once the kind of person who, without having read any of it, would have been sceptical of Miller’s work, considering it derivative and watered-down - vulgar, in some sense. It is nice not being that person anymore, and I am glad I read this book. I was moved by it, and I believe that I will enjoy it even more once I gain further understanding of the ways in which it adheres to and departs from the classics.
David Malouf - Ransom
What a delight. This was the perfect book to read after Song of Achilles, as it begins with that novel’s concluding events. Mostly, it is the story of Priam, King of Troy, seeking back the body of his slain son, Hector, from the Greeks. However, it is equally a story about humility, reconciliation, and the joys of dipping one’s feet into cold streams of water. It’s a such a short and giving book that I feel like I will read it again many times in the future.
Madeline Miller - Circe
For a long time, my favourite songs were all about trying to do things. “But I try, I try,” sings David Bowie. “I try and I try and I try and I try,” sings Mick Jagger. “I’ve been trying,” Curtis Mayfield sings. It’s a more specific concept than perseverance, because that word, to my thinking, anticipates success. Trying, on the other hand, is indefinite. It’s for now, possibly forever, and holds no promise. It’s a state of vulnerability, and it’s a choice. It’s the commitment to imagining Sisyphus as happy. And in the words of Circe, ruminating on something Prometheus says to her about the nature of mortal life early in this novel: “We bear it as best we can.”
Needless to say, I really enjoyed reading this book. It’s of the kind that I feel somewhat melancholy while reading because I realise that, at some point soon, I will be finished reading it - and cannot read it again for the first time. Perhaps having a bad memory is a blessing in this respect; it will be new again soon enough.
Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad
Reading The Penelopiad felt like I was traveling down the surface of a horizontal cylindrical shape, and Atwood was periodically rotating the ground beneath me, swivelling my point of view between the characters in a way that worked towards achieving a remarkably holistic sense of narrative. I liked it! It made my brain smile! Atwood is such a dexterous writer.
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
I wanted to read something that had a reputation for being really, really well-written at a sentence level. In that respect, the novel did not disappoint! This passage, for instance, took my breath away:
“There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slating away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of the receding world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulations.”
There’s an annotated edition, published by Penguin, floating around that I assume provides some insightful analysis of this linguistic wizardry.
What I didn’t expect, naively, was for this to be a novel about language, and the ways in which language can obscure reality - or, even more broadly, as Craig Raine writes in the afterword, “the discrepancy between the dizzy desire and the dingy truth”.
Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I was interested in reading Neverwhere, or Good Omens, as my next Gaiman novel, but I borrowed this book from a friend at work after I saw that the previous person they’d lent it to had left sticky-noted annotations throughout it; the thought of reading the story and someone’s thoughts about the story at the same time was too good to refuse. Here are a few of my own thoughts, sans sticky notes:
- About halfway through the book, the villain says, “Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easy. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.” (somewhat confused about villain’s nature and/or motivations - seemed to set up a similar thematic focus to Coraline at first?)
- Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says, “A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.” How true is this? This does not feel true to me. How is not changing not simply a form of change? The dichotomising of stasis and change at the heart of this statement does not seem to take into account the significance of context, or the experiences of continuance, prolongation, and liminality. I am unsure as to whether this passage is intended didactically, or whether it is actually intended to be more ambiguous in nature. I suspect the latter, and appreciate the way it functions as a provocation, regardless of whether or not this idea is explored within the narrative.
- I like that the identity of the person who’s funeral the narrator has been attending before the prologue and epilogue is never explicitly revealed - it lends the narrative the feeling of incompletion in a way that feels true to the experience of being alive.
- Gaiman and/or his publishers are very fastidious and consistent with the use of commas within his sentences. Many excerpts seem like they would make for instructive exemplars for writing and grammar courses.
Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain
I was curious to see how a short story can contain the potential for a feature-length film adaptation; I don’t think I’d ever read a short story that a film was based upon before. The jumps forward in time are all here, and they feel just as seamless as they do within the film. The only scene that I could remember being in the film that isn't alluded to in this short story is the one where Ennis is out with his family when he gets into a fight with two men as fireworks explore behind him - a wonderfully cinematic moment. I really enjoyed Proulx’s writing, and I look forward to reading more of her fiction soon.
(Also, god bless Michelle Williams for doing her best to deliver the impossible line, “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty.” Not since Paul Thomas Anderson made Melora Walters say that line from an Aimee Mann song in Magnolia, “Now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” has an acting professional been so unnecessarily tortured by a director’s insistence upon adhering to the source text.)
Briony Stewart - Kukimo and the Dragon
This is a delightful children’s book - the kind where the antagonistic force turns out to be a new friend. It possesses tension, but is wonderfully free of conflict. The back cover says it’s recommended for readers over the age of seven, and the book is published by the University of Queensland Press.
Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse
This books is full of lovely illustrations accompanied by generalised, platitudinous assertions that make me feel anxious. “You are loved,” the author insists. But by who, how, to what extent, and why? These are perhaps unfair question to expect a children’s book to answer. They are important questions, though, and I think people (especially little ones) deserve a clearer, more self-aware and critically-informed presentation of a framework by which to understand this phenomenon. bell hooks has much more interesting things to say about love and self-respect, so I’m curious to read some of her children’s literature in the future.
Kae Tempest - Brand New Ancients
“It’s like Howl, I guess?” - my unfair response to too, too many works of poetry.
Qin Xiaoyu - Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry
If it weren’t for Rhian Saseen, an editor at The Paris Review, mentioning this one in their list of favourite books of 2020 (“required reading for anyone who owns an Apple product or a fast-fashion clothing item”), I don’t think I would ever have stumbled across this collection, translated into English by Eleanor Goodman. There are many great poems in this collection. However, there is one poem in particular, ‘Meaning’, by Chen Nianxi, that I think about often. It describes the author’s experience as a demolitions worker in a coal-mine. Without wanting to fetishise the work, it is one of the bleakest poems imaginable.
Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A Graphic History (Vol. 1 & 2)
Sometimes, we need some pictures to help us eat our vegetables. Sapiens was was the kind of book that I knew I wasn’t going to read myself, and was waiting for a podcast to summarise. The artwork within this graphic version looks great, and, subsequently, I feel like I genuinely remember more ideas from this book than I would have from reading the original.
Brian K. Vaughan - Y: The Last Man (Vol. 4 & 5)
I grew weary waiting for the next instalment of Saga and decided to finish reading one of Vaughan’s completed stories - I had tried previously, but the library didn’t have copies at the time, and, from what I can remember, there was trouble ordering one in because it was, at least temporary, unavailable from distributors. Anyway, I’ve left writing this reflection too long after finishing the series other than to say: I liked it! And that I tried to watch the television adaptation a few nights ago, and thought it was not very good.
Julie Doucet - My Most Secret Desire
It took me a while to pick up this one again after I first purchased it a few years ago; I didn’t give it much of a go the first time I attempted to read it, and felt disappointed by the brevity and absurdity of the some of Dulcet’s earlier comic strips. I was hoping for a more long-form autobiographical work, I guess. Anyway, my expectations were all wrong. I really enjoyed diving back in to this book recently. It reminded me at times of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? in the way that it treats dreams, and the subconscious, as subject matter worth exploring. The strips towards the end of the book, from the mid-nineties, were my favourites. In particular, there’s a recollection of a dream about a Nick Cave concert that then is interrupted by a leap forwards in time, with Doucet reflecting on it years later, in the present - it’s more of a traditional memoir work, I guess, which is less perhaps radical and innovative, but it is nonetheless very satisfying. I’m looking forward to reading Dirty Plotte and some of her more recent work as soon as possible.
Alison Bechdel - The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Like the Winterson autobiography, this one felt cosmically-targeted towards my current state. I think there’s a word for this? I can’t remember the word, or term. Something that involves the prefix ‘sync-’, perhaps. Synchronicity? I thought there was something even more specific. Nonetheless, I loved reading this graphic memoir, and this passage knocked me out of my head:
“I see now that my yearning for self-transcendence is in some ways an attempt to avoid the strain of relating to other people. If you can manage to see past everyday reality, where subject and object hold sway to the view where it’s all one thing, unified and absolute, there’s nothing to relate to. ‘Self’ and ‘other’ might very well be illusions. But I was still going to have to grapple with them.”
Adam Nayman - The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together
Not much to say about this one other than I thought it was very good and that I look forward to borrowing out Nayman’s subsequent book on Paul Thomas Anderson’s films whenever it, too, hits the shelves of the local council libraries around here. Actually, here’s something: this book finally gave me the much-needed motivation to watch Blood Simple for the first time, which I enjoyed immensely. That film has maybe one of my favourite ever cuts to credits: “It’s the same old song / but with a different feeling since you’ve been gone...”
Richard Ayoade - Ayoade On Top: A Voyage (through a Film) in a Book (about a Journey)
In the least-hubristic way possible, this felt like the kind of absurd and ridiculous monograph I might aspire to write someday. Needless to say, it tickled me endlessly. I enjoyed the autobiographical sidebars the most. Here’s a short excerpt that felt like a personal attack:
“...to be fair...we all bifurcate ourselves. When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I’ll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven’t read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.”
*******************************************************************************
And I have currently started reading, all the same time (I know, it’s a terribly slow, hazardous, and unfocused approach) the following:
John Armstrong - Conditions of Love
Tony Birch - Dark as Last Night
Lesley Chow - You’re History
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Stan Grant - Australia Day
Joan Lindsay - Picnic at Hanging Rock
Jonathan Rayner - The Cinema of Michael Mann
Tobin Siebers - Disability Aesthetics
Slavoj Zizek - Violence
#Reading#Billy-Ray Belcourt#Helen Macdonald#Jeanette Winterson#Graham Swift#Linsday Ellis#Kurt Vonnegut#Alan Dean Foster#N. K. Jemisin#George R. R. Martin#Madeline Miller#David Malouf#Margaret Atwood#Neil Gaiman#Vladimir Nabokov#Annie Proulx#Briony Stewart#Charlie Mackesy#Kae Tempest#Yuval Noah Harari#Brian K. Vaughan#Julie Doucet#Alison Bechdel#Adam Nayman#Richard Ayoade#Carly Finlay
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Astral Harvest
🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘
This was our first festival of the season. Not many photos were taken because we wanted to focus on the experience.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We got the news we would be on the post-show team of another festival and decided we had enough time to journey from Ontario up to northern Alberta. Driftpile was the farthest north we travelled. That time of year the sun only set for a few hours before it would be light again. It is nice to be at a family friendly camping festival it creates the dynamic of one large family. At a festival you can be your true self, freedom of expression and that is important to bring up the young ones with those values and to let them have open minds. This was an exciting time to see other vanlifers and converted vehicles and meet new people. We had no idea the people we would meet here we would continue to see across other parts of the country at other festivals. The colourful bus parked beside us drew our attention and we grew to learn about Skye, who has created with the help of friends an amazing converted bus, they build a geodesic dome at each festival they attend creating a safe space for all. Someone began talking with us because our vans looked similar, we got discussing about vehicles he then introduced us to a whole crew of amazing people which we were blessed to have met on our festival journey some of them were performers in the industry themselves. Kali Yuga & The Genesa Project performed a kickass show of electronic music and live guitar. We developed a little crew to hang out with that we got to visit with at the other festivals throughout the year. 🌎 Would like to give thanks to Driftpile Nation and recognize the land this was held on.
✌🏻💜
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Ainu Health
The profile for someone with gallstones is female, overweight, and over 40. I started getting gallstones at age 15, but I didn’t know what they were or had them treated (ish) until I was 26. I’m not svelte, but not obese, either. The conclusion was a shrug and that I’m just atypical.
A few weeks ago I was listening to episode six of the All My Relations podcast, Indigiqueer, and 26 minutes in they start talking about gallstones. Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes how he was diagnosed with gallstones at 21, and started getting flare ups around 19. You can imagine how my ears perked up. He said according to one study he read, upwards of 80% of Native folks experience gallstones, and how in some areas of the US, particularly New Mexico, almost all Native women have gallstones. He orated a Ted Talk on the subject in 2016 (the same year I was diagnosed. I wish I’d seen it then).
Ainu share a lot in common with the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, and unfortunately gallstones might be one of them. There’s no English literature on Ainu health issues, and I doubt there are any in Japanese or Russian either. As we all know, the study of female health, particularly for women of colour has been all but ignored, and doctors aren’t the health detectives you see on tv. I think one of the most important steps in filling the gaps in our own healthcare is just talking to each other, and discussing our experiences. A doctor might tell you you’re an outlier, but that’s probably bullshit.
Part of this is just a PSA to say Indigenous folks get gallstones young, so get that shit checked, regardless of gender, weight, or age.
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14. Favourite book* you've read this year. * or poem, lyric, fic etc.
Oh god, there are too many (and don’t even talk to me about fic, we’ll be here all night.)
I really really really loved Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. It’s about the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong but also about music and beauty and love. And stories. And more love. And more music. It’s heartbreaking and horrifying and perfect.
Fuck’s sake, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous is still rolling around in my head, and probably will be for several years to come. I’m not over this book, I don’t know if I ever will be.
And then I’ll just... gently add some poetry. Because this year had a lot of poetry in it.
I’ve been generally obsessed with Billy-Ray Belcourt (furious queer legend and poet from the Driftpile Cree Nation) and This Wound is a World:
even though i know i am too queer to be sacred anymore, i dance that
broken circle dance because i am still waiting for hands that want to hold
mine too. (“Sacred”)
or how about:
I am one of those hopeless romantics that wants every blow job
to be transformative (”Sexual History”)
One more and then I’ll stop, I swear. This probably doesn’t need saying but I’ll say it; @drawlight‘s Ghost Stories belongs on this list and so many others. An absolute marvel of love poetry and language.
It had been dry once and I had known you
when it did not matter and loved you when it did not matter and
tell me this is you, tell me that you watch me, my tallow-pale hair,
my nervous swallow, this open mouth. Tell me that you know me,
that you knew me once, that you recognize the spit of me
from a desert thousands of years ago. Tell me,
that you have an umbrella to share
for all this rain (“Studies in Ancient History”)
More end-of-year asks are here. Thanks for asking. ❤️
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Old Tour Stories
The Always A Bridesmaid Tour (June 7th - June 22nd 2006)
The Pictures
The Mission:
Take up to 15 people (10 to start... 5 people would not be joining us until June 15th) to the North Country Fair in Driftpile, Alberta... then go and attend/play/best man at John Guliak and Christine Ferguson's wedding in Edmonton. Between the 15 people, we could create at least 6 full bands...
Carolyn Mark and Her New Best Friends, Hank & Lily, Amy Honey, Clay George, Hearse and The Dave Lang Band
The Cast:
Vehicle #1 "Gwyneth Paltrow" (a 1980 Dodge Ram Van) - transportation for Tolan McNeil, Hoff, The Goose and Clay George.
Vehicle # 2 "Freedom" (1990 Dodge Caravan) - transportation for Hank Pine, Lily Fawn and Emma Crow
Vehicle #3 "The Hong Kong Lady" (1992 Toyota Camry) - Transportation for Amy Honey, Carolyn Mark and Andrew
June 7 Vancouver - Osoyoos
10-4 Good Buddy, We've Got Walkie-Talkies
Things look good. It's a sunny day. Most of the Victoria contingent (everybody but me and Amy) arrived in Vancouver early. We've bought some walkie-talkies for communication reasons (only Tolan has a cell phone)... and The Goose's Dad reaffixed the front license plate to the Hong Kong Lady. In fact, everything went smoothly until it was time to leave. Tolan and crew are going to be late... the free van he got for the tour has some paperwork issues that were not apparent until the last moment. He has to spend the afternoon running all over Victoria getting shit signed. Consequently, although the first two vehicles hit the road by 2:00, Gwyneth won't even be getting on the ferry to Vancouver until 5:00. Anyway, the big plan is to stay in touch via the walkie-talkies (we have radio check times and nasty handles... Carolyn is "Bouncy C-Word", fr'instance, and Hank is "Fuckyou Killjoy"), and hook up for some camping in Osoyoos. We hit the road and try our radio check... nothing. In fact, except in one case, for the whole trip, the walkie-talkies would do nothing except eat batteries.
The drive was mostly uneventful; the only excitement was that near Princeton, we were stopped by some police at a roadblock who were looking for an escaped murderer. Also, around this time it started to rain. Every day of the tour (except for one) it would end up raining, everything from scotch mist to full on thunder and lightning storms.
Upon arrival in Osoyoos (approximately 8:00) we scoped out the camping spots in town. It looked like trouble... all the camp grounds were full of the elderly, golf shirt, sandals and socks crowd and/or the younger, screaming kids, golf shirt, sandals and socks crowd. It didn't look as though they would take kindly to 10 rowdy drunks disturbing their vacation... and we were sure as hell not going to want listen to their whining (nor deal with the inevitable cops). Hell, those are the people you get out of town to get away from. After checking out all the available possibilities (which, by the way, came across like suburban neighbourhoods where you can actually see and hear your neighbours), we (Amy, Carolyn and I) decided to tee up a hotel room instead. Up to this point we had had no contact with the other two vehicles. Phoning Tolan, we found that his new van had overheated in Chilliwack, and they had not yet managed to leave the Lower Mainland. Their ETA in Osoyoos is around 2:00 AM. Radio check for the Hank and Lilymobile turned up nothing until suddenly we started getting very garbled messages. Apparently they were also in town, looking for us. We pulled into the parking lot of a likely hotel called The Spanish Fiesta (or Spastic Fiasco), and suddenly Hank and Lily came in crystal clear... they were parked about 50 ft. away.
Things worked out pretty good, and it seemed as though we had the hotel to ourselves, so we retired to the beach for wine and beer and smoking. Later in the evening Carolyn broke my car key off in the door of the car. No worries, as we had a spare. Always have a failsafe, that's what I say.
June 8 Osoyoos - Nelson
Plastic Gardening Clogs R Us (Well... Them, Actually)
In the morning we found that Gwyneth had managed to make it all the way to Osoyoos, and her crew had slept in the van in the hotel parking lot. We all made some informal wagers at that point as to which if any of the tour vehicles would make it all the way home without a major breakdown. They all had issues... Gwyneth's were readily apparent by that point, but Freedom was also desperately in need of a new fan belt, and was gouting out huge clouds of exhaust whenever it was started. The Hong Kong Lady, we had recently heard from our mechanic, could happily use two or three grand worth of mechanical repairs. But what's life without adventure? That's the question we decided to ask ourselves instead of dealing with our shit.
Upon arrival in Nelson, we immediately sought out the thrift stores (for Amy and Carolyn), and the excellent coffee store (Cafe Oso), for me. There was something very odd about Nelson, a fashion thing, that cut across all sectors of society... men and women... geezers and whelps... squareheads and fleabags... the brightly coloured plastic gardening clog. Perhaps the ugliest piece of footwear outside of putting plastic bags on your feet when it rains. Even pretty girls can't rock them. In Nelson they are everywhere. I wanted to ask some of the people who look like (clogs aside) they should have a clue; what the Hell was going on, but in the end I figured that I really didn't want to know the answer.
Since I'm mentioning fashion... let me talk for a moment about The Goose's white derby hat. It was one of his prized possessions, and an essential part of his on stage garb... part of his shock and awe... and it really tied his whole look together. Looking somewhat like an egg, The Goose usually treated as if he were a mother hen (or a Mother Goose, heh). This morning he had broken with tradition and let Lily Fawn play with it. Once we got to Nelson, Goose (and Lily) had the sickening realization that it was still in Osoyoos. Fortunately Lily, being so small and cute, was about the only person on the tour who could get away with losing it. Soon enough, we hooked up with our "friend in town", Laoh, a Victoria expatriate, who was going to be able to put some of us up for the evening. Laoh had only been living in Nelson for 6 months, but already seemed to know everyone there. I knew Nelson was a smaller town, but even still, knowing everyone there would be a bit of work. Laoh is just one of those guys who can do that. Hell, I had never met him before, and after ten minutes, we were yakkin' along like old buds. The show, at the Royal, was a ton of fun. A lot of people showed up, and regardless of their age, they seemed to like their Rock... or to be a bit more accurate, their Cowpunk. Amy had one of her best shows of the whole tour. Tolan was on fire on guitar... and Hank and Lily were really fucking amazing. Hank and Lily added a really interesting element to all the shows. Carolyn Mark and Clay George could most certainly be described as Country (of various speeds), and Amy can be anything from Country to Metal, but with a definite populist edge that opens a lot of doors. Hank and Lily are much more of a travelling freak show, with costumes, personas, smoke machines and quasi-nightmarish songs about things that lurk in the dark; yet everywhere they went, they didn't seem to weird anyone out, even in the most taxidermy encrusted small town farmer bars. In fact, they often got the loudest applause, and the most audience participation. Just goes to show you that no matter where you go, people just like a good show.
I don't remember much of the rest of the evening, but I ended up losing my glasses at Laoh's house. No worries, as I still had my contact lenses. Always have a failsafe, that's what I say.
June 9 Nelson - Slocan Valley
This Bug Spray Doesn't Work For Shit
Tried to get a new key cut for the car, but found that my replacement key had apparently been made by "someone who was drunk or stupid, or both" and copies made from it were nonfunctional. I hate not having a failsafe.
Today we would be heading up to an isolated Eco Lodge in the Slocan valley, run by "hippies", but "not the annoying kind, you know". There would be a BBQ and the bands would play in the living room / concert hall. Laoh knew the best butcher in Nelson, and he set me up with some specially marinated Buffalo steaks. Things were looking good.
After a long drive up a dirt road we found the Lodge, and in the beautiful sun it looked like the best place in the world. Outside of the guy who operated the place and an eccentric mystic lady from Buckinghamshire, a nice lady from Quebec and a sinewy traveling cyclist from who knows where, the place was deserted. I asked Carolyn who the bands would be playing to. She said it was a really weird thing... every time she had played there before, the parking lot would be empty, but people would "just come out of the woods". At the end of the evening, they would return to the woods. We had some time on our hands before the show, though, so we amused ourselves by playing badminton, flying kites and in Hank's case, going swimming. On our way to the river we ran into a very pale Hank returning from his swim. Apparently there were leeches in the water and he ended up with one on his scrotum. We decided not to go swimming. Around this time we figured we were running seriously low on beer, and Tolan and I volunteered to take the Hong Kong Lady into town to get more. We cranked the CCR and drove like the Dukes of Hazard. We came very, very close to hitting a deer, and the gravel road did some serious damage to the muffler. For the rest of the trip, at city speeds, the Hong Kong Lady would sound like she was gargling Drano. We made it back just in time for dinner, and The Goose showed another one of his many talents by BBQ-ing the Buffalo steak to perfection. It was one of the best meals I had ever had, but only the second best one of the trip.
It was around this time that we all collectively realized that the bug spray that we had been using was of little to no use. Mosquitoes were eating us alive. Hoff, Hank, Lily and Carolyn were all particular favourites of the little monsters, and after a short while, they all appeared to have contracted chicken pox. Just as Carolyn had said, after dinner, people started "coming out of the woods". Even more to my surprise, I actually recognized a couple of them. They were two brothers who used to play in a Vancouver band, The Way Out. They were attending some Eco-camp "over there" (with that statement they waved vaguely in the direction of the woods). Soon enough there was around 50 people there, and the show commenced. The Lodge had a decent stage and a good sound system, and the show was great. All the people there were very attentive, and Clay George especially seemed to have a good show. The right music for the right people in the right place. He even sold a few CD's. Here is as probably as good a place as any to mention... Clay was actually the only person on the tour who had his shit together enough to bring any CD's with him.
June 10 Slocan Valley - Nanton
R.I.P. Lolita
We all left the Lodge at different times, but somehow we all managed to arrive at the retro thrift store in Creston at nearly the same time. Unfortunately there had been a tragedy. Hoff had received a phone call from her roommate informing her that here Chihuahua, Lolita, had passed away. She had been ailing a bit, but it still came as a nasty surprise. The Goose said it well (at least from my point of view) when he stated that "Lolita was the only little dog that didn't annoy the shit out of me". Apparently, Lolita's remains were then kept in the freezer for Hoff to deal with when she got home. Seriously.
It was a pretty long drive today, and probably the most dangerous one, as we had to go through the Crow's Nest Pass, and near dusk, around the town of Elkville, suddenly there were elk all over the place... including the road. We had to drive very slowly, but we still got a number of scares. Dark brown does not show up too well against a gray and black background.
The cool moment of the drive was passing the Frank Slide, which buried the town of Frank, Alberta in 1903. 103 years later and it's still pretty impressive. As the drive continued we began to become concerned that our host, Ali, was going to be inconvenienced. We had initially informed here that we would be arriving around 7:00, but it appeared that we wouldn't be getting there until midnight. Ali lived on a farm half way between Nanton, Alberta and Vulcan, Alberta. A place that could quite easily qualify as "the middle of nowhere". The driving instructions we had included the final missive... "pull up the driveway, and don't run over the puppy". Upon our late night arrival, we were immediately greeted by the puppy, a three-month-old blue heeler / border collie mix named Cash (after Johnny, of course) owned by Ali's neighbour, Wayne. He was kind of bitey... but cute. Wayne and Ali, we found in Ali's kitchen, very drunk (they've been drinking in expectation of our imminent arrival since 5:00), and surrounded by the mostly eaten appetizers Ali had prepared for us hours ago. After making our apologies for the late arrival, we thought it polite to get as drunk as our hosts as quickly as possible.
Once again we are eaten alive by bugs, but Amy seems to have come up with a repellent that actually seems to work, Ungava. Once I started using this, I hardly got any bites.
June 11 Nanton
The Big Gun Fight
Today we were faced by a tough decision.
In one direction lay the town of Vulcan, who were celebrating "Spock Days", an annual event honouring all things Star Trek. Vulcan really riffs off its vague association to the show. It even has a statue of the starship Enterprise downtown, as well as a Star Trek themed science centre. Some years, for Spock Days, they even get someone from the show (one time it was Councilor Troi) to come and preside over the festivities.
In the other direction lay the town of Nanton, where the bands would be playing that evening, which featured an excellent vintage store (Buffalo Gals) that was also about to close, so everything in it was for sale at discounts ranging from 80 - 100%. Needless to say, the ladies of the expedition had no interest in going to Vulcan. I always like to suck up to the ladies, so I volunteered to drive them to Nanton, while the rest of the gang went to Spock Days. From their later report it sounded like an anticlimactic visit to Spock Days. All the cool stuff had happened yesterday, so all they got to see were the pancake breakfast and a home run hitting contest. Now, I like shopping as much as the next guy... well, probably slightly more than the next guy... which means that I have a tolerance for it that lasts somewhere between 15 minutes to an hour (depending upon the store). Buffalo Gals turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, though. There was a lot of really cool men's Western gear, as well as an interesting selection of generally cool knickknacks. The prize find in my books was an antique, 1940's Hungarian made, crack action pellet gun. Amy was unimpressed... very unimpressed and showed visible relief when I was told that the gun was not for sale today, because it might be included in a bulk sale to a theatre company. But I could put in an offer and pick it up the next day it the theatre people didn't want it. I was crestfallen, but Dreanne, the lovely lady who ran the place, seeing my distress, asked me if I liked "things that go bang". Upon my sullen affirmation, she handed me over a big box of vintage Hand's fireworks from the 1970's... which included the Burning Schoolhouse. Free. It was about the best thing ever.
Between all the thrifting we had all been doing, plus all of our regular luggage and the musical equipment we were carrying, space in all three vehicles had become very, very cramped. Our car was so full, that in order to fit Carolyn in, we pretty much had to grease her up and take a running start.
The show at The Auditorium that evening was great. The bar was really old school with taxidermy all over the place, and one of the local farmers, Lance, joined the bands on stage with his pedal steel guitar. Lance apparently plays in a lot of bands, but only when they travel through town. He's an amazing player, in fact of the best I've ever seen, and the coolest thing was when he played with Hank and Lily. Despite the fact that he had never seen or heard them before... and despite the fact that they play a kind of music that is, in my opinion, not a type that I would immediately associate with pedal steel... Lance fucking smoked! I don't think I've heard a pedal steel played like that before, and I stood in awe.
June 12 Nanton
The Best Steak in the World
It was a day off. We were all feeling kind of bad at what we had done to Ali's house. When we arrived, everything was as neat as a pin. Minimalist. Spartan even. Now ten people worth of stuff had been dumped all over her living room and ten people worth of empties had clogged up her kitchen. It seemed good we would be leaving tomorrow, as we had definitely imposed ourselves sufficiently upon Ali's hospitality. Fortunately, she was gracious enough to take it all in stride.
After some grocery shopping in Vulcan (which, as a town, kinda sucks actually... I way prefer Nanton), we came back to Ali's. We played with the puppy, did some Hula Hooping, and prepared for a big BBQ.
Someone, who shall remain nameless to avoid Amy's wrath, took a trip into Nanton, and much to my surprise/elation, came back with the pellet gun for me.
Lance, and his wife and daughter came out to the festivities, and brought with them some steaks from Lance's sister's farm. These were the best steaks I have ever had in my life. Hands down. It was akin to smoking the cigars cigar makers smoke, or drinking the whisky the distillery owner drinks. It was just that good.
June 13 Nanton - Calgary
Grid, My Ass
Ali joined us for the trip to Calgary... probably she just couldn't stand the mess we had made of her house. Calgary, I used to like... but she has become such a boomtown that on this visit it was hard to see the things that had initially attracted me to it. It was like seeing an old girlfriend who used to be all wholesome and winsome and girl-next-door suddenly all dressed up like a creepy real estate agent wearing too much makeup.
Not having any personal connections in Calgary, Amy and I had decided that we would get a hotel tonight. It was not to be. We searched all over town, but were told (often smugly) that there was not a room to be had. A big oil and gas expo was happening in town ("the biggest one in North America"), and at one place we were told that the nearest available hotel room was in Red Deer. Maybe. Fortunately, Carolyn's friend Diane (who was also going to be playing bass for some of the bands that night) proved amenable to taking on a few more guests. Despite the fact that Calgary was all supposed to be laid out on a grid with everything being easy to find, it took us a real long time to find her place. Consequently, half of us ended up arriving kind of late for the show.
The bar that the bands would play at was a new one, The Palomino, and it seemed pretty decent. The main floor was a Western styled Bar bar, and downstairs was another bar, where the live music happened. Calgary has some strange smoking laws. You are able to smoke inside a bar, but you cannot smoke on the patio. It was very reminiscent of the good ol' / bad ol' days of rampant smoke everywhere. Even as a smoker myself, I found it somewhat overwhelming. Calgary fans have historically enjoyed a good rockin' show, and Amy managed to wow them with her tribute to Black Sabbath song, Sabbath! Hank and Lily, as always, impressed, and Carolyn played the fastest paced set I had ever seen her perform. Lance even showed up to play some speed pedal steel guitar.
After the show, it was raining again, but a local good ol' rockabilly boy offered to give us all a ride home in his gigantic pickup truck. He managed to transport thirteen of us, although about six people had to ride in the rain in the back. They seemed to enjoy it.
June 14 Calgary - Edmonton
Goilers!
We headed to Edmonton where we picked up another five people (who together comprised two more bands). Dave Lang (Regina) and Garth Johnson (Toronto) who are the main components of The Dave Lang Band, and J. McLaughlin and Grayson Walker who form the excellent Victoria band, Hearse. Dave's lovely partner Laura and another of our Vancouver Island friends, Sylvia, also came along for the ride.
There was mayhem in the air when we arrived in town. It was game 5 of the NHL playoffs, and the Oilers were on the brink of elimination. When we drove down Whyte Avenue, there were so many cops it looked like martial law. The show was to be at one of the all time great live venues, The Black Dog. The only drawbacks were that a) the Black Dog was on Whyte Avenue, and therefore would be super packed with people... b) they would be showing the game on televisions there, and the show would not be able to go on until the game was over... and if it went into overtime, it could conceivably last for hours... c) if the Oilers lost, the crowd might get ugly.
Fortunately, although the game did actually go into overtime, it ended fairly quickly, and the Oilers won. Whyte Avenue exploded into revelry. I decided to take a walk along the street to see just what was up. I don't know exactly what had happened after other games (apparently some broken window, bonfires in the street and other assorted drunken hooliganry), but the cops were taking no chances. They seemed to be everywhere, herding people along the sidewalk, pushing people off the actual street, and giving everyone the hairy eyeball. In my short walk, I saw them arrest one guy who wanted to debate whether on not he was allowed walk in the street (he's wasn't) and I had about a million people shout "Goilers!!!" in my face. I saw lots of people driving around honking their horns and yelling... often, if they had a pickup truck, they had a giant tinfoil Stanley Cup in the back. I was also required to give out lots of high fives, which I did until I came across the guy who gave me such an enthusiastic high five that he nearly took my arm off. After that I walked down the alley instead.
The Black Dog was packed to the point of insanity which made for some difficulty in moving around and, more importantly, buying beers, but the place is blessed with some of the greatest bar staff this side of the Railway Club. By the time I was lining up to buy my second beer of the evening, the bartender already recognized me, and would have my beer of preference open and ready for me by the time I got to the front of the line. Which was a good thing, especially because the place was so damn noisy that even screaming at the top of my lungs, it was hard for anyone to hear me. Once again, it was a really good show... jam-packed, elated, drunk Edmontonians really know how to have a good time. And as an added bonus, we ran into Jerf, one time drummer for Red Cat Records label stalwarts, The Doers. For those who know him, and miss him, he asked me to tell you all that he's doing great, playing in a band called Field and Stream, and has no intention of moving back to Vancouver.
June 15 Edmonton - Driftpile
Attack of the 6 Ft. Kimonoman
The goal on this day was to drive 4 hours North of Edmonton to attend/play the North Country Fair. It's held just outside the township of Driftpile, Alberta, (near Lesser Slave Lake) and was a 3-day Solstice celebration. We were warned that there would be rain and hippies. We were arriving a day early so that the bands could play a special show for the volunteers. Needless to say, these events are usually chaos during the actual event... to arrive a day early ensured that things were really upside-down-town. Hell, they were still constructing a road to where people could park. The Hong Kong Lady took even more undercarriage abuse as a result, but we took solace in what was to become the tour mantra (at least as far as the vehicles were concern), "ahh fuck it, it'll be fine." Amy, Dave, Laura, Garth and I pitched our tents in the performers' campground, "Shady Hollow". It's always tempting when camping to start drinking before you set up your tent, but Amy and I had discipline (and, as I said, we had been seriously warned about rain), so we quickly cobbled together something that looked like it would probably "do", and then set out to find where the others had camped. Tolan had taken Gwyneth to the farthest end of the campground, far away from other campers, but close to the stage were tonight's show was to take place. His camping posse included Hoff, Carolyn, Clay, Sylvia, and Goose, and they had opened up Gwyneth's side door, and strung up a tarp that extended out from there to cover a seating area and a (against Fair rules) fire pit. The beers were cracked, and Black Sabbath was cranked. With one of my last lucid thoughts of the day, I started second guessing the rainworthiness of our camp ground, but when I went back to check it out, I found that Garth and Dave (who love doing shit like this), had taken down our crappy tarp set up, and instead constructed a sturdy tarp-opolis that covered all three of our tents. We then all sojourned back to Gwyneth to continue drinking and camping and awaiting someone to come by and tell us when the show was to go on. Here is an important fact that escaped all of us. Driftpile is pretty fucking far North (compared to, say, Vancouver), and around the Solstice the sun does not set until well after midnight. Consequently we drank and smoked and hung around in the assurance that, somehow, it was perpetually around 9:00. This illusion was somewhat dispelled by a shaggy, intense, old hippie guy in a kimono who appeared at our campsite. Apparently he was the stage manager of the stage that the bands were supposed to be playing at. He was upset that it was well after midnight and no one had played yet. We informed him that no one had told us anything, and anyway, we had no idea where half of our musicians had wandered off to. This didn't mollify him in the least, and he proceeded to inform us that some "professional musicians" were impatiently waiting for us to get going... apparently they were a "smoking blues band from the city". We said, that since we didn't know where everybody was, "the smoking blues band" might was well take the stage whenever they wanted. Then we returned to drinking. I won't go into the gruesome details, but after hearing some garbled comments from the stage about "professionalism" and "courtesy" and "smoking blues"; we were treated to some of the most pedestrian, wanky, bullshit blues you could ever imagine being subjected to. If you have seen the movie Ghost World, conjure up image of the band Blues Hammer. Blues Hammer would have been preferable to the craptacular display that was M64. Fortunately Gwyneth's sound-system could mostly drown them out. Eventually it actually got dark, but I have no idea what time the bands finally took the stage (late, late, late, that's for sure)... it was by far the drunkest show of the entire tour, kind of a trainwreck in places, but no one seemed to mind and the bands didn't stop playing until it was light again.
June 16 Driftpile
Shore Is Muddy
While we were sleeping, it rained. Hard. Dave and Garth's tarp-opolis worked wonders, and we all stayed dry. Amy and I were woken to the sound of Garth shouting that we should all get out of bed, and that we were lazy bastards, and the kitchen was cooking up breakfast and there were "big bowls of bacon", but we'd have to hurry because breakfast was nearly over. We dragged our sorry asses over to the performer's kitchen area were there was a big spread laid out, but there were no (and there never was to be) any "big bowls of bacon". The rain (which continued off and on all day) turned everything to mud. I was okay, as I had thought to bring a straw cowboy hat, at big military trench coat (which Amy hated, but easily held six beers in it's pockets) and gum boots. Some of the other were not so fortunate. Clay for instance started drinking before he set up his tent, consequently he had not set up a tarp to protect his tent... he also neglected to bring a sleeping bag (he had to use his dirty laundry as a blanket)... and he left his regular shoes and his gumboots outside his tent, so they filled up with water. He cut a miserable hungover figure when he finally emerged for the day. Hank Pine had been more forward thinking with his camping arrangements, but his major malfunction was that he had neglected to use enough bug spray. Whenever it wasn't raining, there were tons of giant mosquitoes and no see 'ums. At one point he lifted up his shirt to show a ring around his torso about thee inches wide that was composed of around 50 bug bites of various sorts. The visible parts of his body were almost as badly off.
Today was the official start of the festival, and as the day continued, tons of people started arriving. Considering the weather, it was quite impressive. Unfortunately, when it came time for Carolyn to take to the main stage and kick off the Fair, it was discovered that 1) the soundboard had gotten soaked overnight 2) it was also missing a major component that it needed to be functional. Soooo... while they dried out the board, someone had to be contacted in Edmonton to drive up the missing part.
Things finally got started 4 hours late. Once it began, it was a great evening of music, and we were even treated to the reunion of Carolyn Mark and Her Roommates (Carolyn, Tolan and Garth). Carolyn and Hoff especially deserve kudos for rocking the "long evening dress with six inches of mud around the hem" look all evening.
June 17 Driftpile - Edmonton
The Shabbiest Wedding Guests Evar
We really tried to get going early. I just wanted to say that for the record. Hank, Lily and Clay were staying at the Fair, but the rest of us had to attend the wedding of John Guliak and Christine Ferguson. I had to get to Edmonton especially early (3:00) because I was the best man. With this in mind, we did our best to hit the road by 10:00 (counting on a four-hour drive and then an hour to clean up and make ourselves presentable). Didn't happen. We got going around 11:30, and even though I matted it, we didn't actually arrive in Edmonton until 3:00. When we arrived, we were a mess. It's amazing how quickly one can degenerate from (vaguely) civilized to a smelly, dirty, bearded caveman... covered head to toe in mud. Amy was not much better. After what amounted to a quick hosing down, we tore off the wedding, which took place in the Guliak/Ferguson backyard. I will state for the record here, and for all time, I was a terrible, terrible best man. John, if you ever read this... I'm terribly sorry. When I arrived at the lovely family event, I was wearing a badly wrinkled suit... a mud and blood stained shirt... muddy, scuffed combat boots... I had a patch of beard the size of a toonie on my chin that I had missed when I shaved... and I had bumped my head on the trunk of my car, and there was blood trickling down my face. On top of this I was hungover, burned out, stupid and had a hacking cough from all the cigarettes and campfire I had inhaled at the Fair. Amy was not quite the freakshow I was, but later in the evening she finally realized that one of her shoes was a significantly different colour than the other.
The reception featured a table full of Edmontonians glued to the Oilers Stanley Cup game on a portable TV. They did a pretty good job of not yelling and swearing too loud while the speeches were going on. The Oilers won, and once again Edmonton exploded. Even though we were well away from Whyte Avenue on this occasion, you could still hear all the horn honking and general brouhaha. The reception also featured the long awaited reunion of The Fixin's, a band that John had been in with Carolyn, Dave and Garth back in the olden days.
At the end of the evening, I got chewed out by Christine's mother for not having had the courtesy to introduce myself. She was right to do so, most best men can do better than that.
June 18 Edmonton - Edson
At Least It's Not Raining
I was very pleased to find out, when I woke up, that I was now sick. Yesterday's cough was not entirely attributable to smoking my face off; it was actually a precursor to a foul illness. At least we are on our way home now, and although it will be a long drive, we were all promised a couple of evenings in a luxury ski chalet near Kamloops with a hot tub. Our plans, as you might have guessed, were of the pipe variety. About two hours out of Edmonton, in the middle of nowhere, we blew a tire. No biggie... we pulled over, and I set about getting out the spare tire (which was a real spare tire and not one of those stupid tiny ones). Unfortunately, at this point Amy and Carolyn noticed that there was a lot of steam coming out from under our hood. A quick inspection revealed that simultaneously to blowing our tire, our radiator had developed a large crack. We (well, the ladies, actually) were soon able to flag down a guy with a cell phone and we were able to get BCAA to send out a tow truck. Don, the tow truck driver informed us that we would need to go to Edson, the nearest town. He also informed us that as "basic BCAA" members the first 5 kilometers of towing was free. It was approximately 80 kilometers to Edson. Although expensive, Don's company on the tow was pretty cool. He was widower who just drove a tow truck all day long, and when he wasn't driving the truck he tried to "drink Canada dry". He told us stories about hunting foxes in Virginia ("the poor hounds would come back from the hunt just covered in ticks"). He also told us how, when he was younger and was doing some farming in Alberta, he killed two (or perhaps three) birds with one stone by running a big water hose into the gopher holes on his land and thereby irrigated his field at the same time as he drowned the gophers. Those that didn't drown were easy to shoot.
We got into Edson (Home of the Giant Squirrel), dropped off the car at a repair shop (which was closed for the day) and left a note telling them what we required. We found a hotel, The Odyssey (We Sell Sleep), and fortunately got the last room, although we were informed that no rooms would be available tomorrow (big oil patch convention, or something). With nothing else to do, we bought booze and watched TV. As we lounged around, we did our best to look on the bright side of things. In this case, the bright side was that, for the first time on the entire tour, it didn't rain a drop all day long. Still, there is the nagging suspicion we should be in a hot tub. Gwyneth's crew is.
June 19 Edson - Hinton
Gimme A One Way Ticket To Hinton
We got the call first thing in the morning. The repair shop wouldn't be able to fix our car for a couple of days. Apparently they needed to order a new radiator from Edmonton. It would also cost around $600. Considering we wouldn't be able to get a hotel room in Edson tonight... combined with the fact that we sure as hell didn't want to stay in Edson for two more days, we decided to call all the places in town. A bunch of brain dead yokels basically told us the same thing... 2 days, lotsa $$$, and really they had better things to do. Carolyn, on a whim, started checking a bit more afield. In Hinton, the next town down the road, there was a guy who specialized in radiators. He figured that if we could get the radiator out of our car, and bring it to him... he could fix it, and for significantly less money. When we told him that getting the radiator out of the car was beyond our abilities at the moment, he said that, in our case, he could probably take the radiator out himself. All we'd have to do is get the car to Hinton. Once again, BCAA was called. I tried signing up for a Premium Membership, which would have entitled us to 100 kilometers of towing, but they're smart, upgrades don't apply to preexisting conditions. So it was a 100 kilometer tow (first 5 free) and the tow truck driver wouldn't take all three of us. Carolyn and Amy went with him, and I hung around town until I could catch a Greyhound bus to Hinton. I've been a lot of places in my life, but they don't get much worse than the Greyhound bus station in Edson, Alberta.
When I finally got to Hinton, I found a note stuck to the door of the Greyhound bus station there informing me that Larry (the radiator guy) would not be able to repair our radiator (stupid plastic radiators), but he would be able to replace it... he could have it done before noon tomorrow... and it would be about half as expensive as any other quote we had gotten. The note also said that Amy and Carolyn were holed up with some beer and wine at a hotel not too far away. We spent the evening drinking and watching the Oilers lose the Stanley Cup on TV. We should be in a hot tub... Hank and Lily are in the promised hot tub tonight.
June 20 Hinton - Sun Peaks
Finally, The Hot Tub
Larry was a man of his word, and at 11:00 AM; the Hong Kong Lady was once again ready to hit the road. After a couple of days of enforced inertia, it was really good to get back on the road again. We were going to take the Yellowhead to the ski chalet, because at this point we were damned if we weren't going to get at least one night of sitting in a hot tub. The Yellowhead is a great drive. The mountains were beautiful, and we saw lots of wildlife, including two bears (one a Grizzly) and an escaped bull that was just walkin' down the highway (he also had the largest balls any of us had ever seen on a living creature). We arrived at the chalet, for which we can thank Bob, the local golf pro, who has connections everywhere. For instance, he helped scare us up a show tomorrow that Carolyn and Amy could snake their way onto. Luther Wright and his buddies, The Shiftless Rounders, were to be playing the opening show for the volunteers at the Salmon River Roots and Blues Festival (ever wonder whatever happened to Ten Years After?... they're playing at the Salmon Arm Roots and Blues Festival). Then we hot tubbed, and it was good.
June 21 Sun Peaks - Salmon Arm
The Best Connected Golf Pro In The Valley
Another good drive through the Shuswap, and when we arrived in Salmon Arm, we found that Bob (who is amazing) has teed us up rooms at the best hotel in Salmon Arm (don't laugh, it was fucking amazing). Our room overlooked a bird sanctuary; we looked right down on an Osprey's nest. Pretty damn cool. Amy, Carolyn and I were getting kind of worn out, and we made a beginner's mistake... we forgot to eat, but we didn't forget to drink. Still, it was a fun evening, and it was cool seeing The Shiftless Rounders for the first time. Good ol' hobo bluegrass.
June 22 Salmon Arm - Vancouver
Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die
It has been a long and tiring couple of weeks. Personally, I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed. It was a pretty subdued drive back to town. We managed to drop Carolyn off at the Ferry Terminal in time for the last sailing, and then headed home to die.
#Old Tour Stories#2006#Driftpile#Alberta#nostalgia#vans#Carolyn Mark#Amy Honey#Clay George#Hank & Lily#Dave Lang
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All finished! This piece was an entry for @northcountryfairforever but turned into a celebration of the fair. I've included wild roses, rose hips and blue asters which are all local flora to the area. I've included feathers with beads in the colours red, orange and yellow to celebrate Driftpile Cree Nation and the Driftpile Valley where the fair is celebrated. The background is based off of the beautiful infamous rainbow sunset that occured in the valley a few years ago that I feel blessed to have witnessed. And at center we have the river 🖤 We've been in High Prairie for 6 years and we have gone to the fair all 6 years. In a few weeks we will be attending for our last time 😥 my husband and I are moving and attending the fair won't be so easy but we are going to miss our yearly tradition. Unfortunately IG made me crop the artwork but the full picture will be on my Facebook page. . . . @carijohnstonart #carijohnstonart #worldofartists #art #artwork #painting #drawing #highprairie #alberta #canadianart #canadianartist #charcoal #sculpture #artcollective #sharingart #worldofartists #instaart #daily_artistiq #artcomplex #dailyarts #sketch_daily #artspotlight #artshelp #artistsdrop #featuringart #artisticanada #artwork_in_studio #ncf #northcountryfair (at Alberta) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxP1qYvBYZd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=12jal94zw2ft0
#carijohnstonart#worldofartists#art#artwork#painting#drawing#highprairie#alberta#canadianart#canadianartist#charcoal#sculpture#artcollective#sharingart#instaart#daily_artistiq#artcomplex#dailyarts#sketch_daily#artspotlight#artshelp#artistsdrop#featuringart#artisticanada#artwork_in_studio#ncf#northcountryfair
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Penguin Canada supervisor David Ross has dispatched Billy-Ray Belcourt, the most youthful ever champ of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for a book of papers. Drawing on close to home understanding, A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY is a reflection on distress, happiness, love, and sex at the crossing point of indigeneity and strangeness. It will be distributed under the Hamish Hamilton engrave and is right now planned for a May 2020 discharge.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. understudy and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His first book, This Wound is a World, won the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. It was additionally named the best "Canadian verse" gathering of 2017 by CBC Books.
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[Storia del mio breve corpo][Billy-Ray Belcourt]
Con il memoir in frammenti “Storia del mio breve corpo” Billy-Ray Belcourt traccia la propria storia personale nel tentativo di riconciliarsi con la realtà in cui è venuto al mondo.
Con questo memoir in frammenti Belcourt traccia la propria storia personale nel tentativo di riconciliarsi con la realtà in cui è venuto al mondo. Inaugurate da una lettera a nôhkom, la nonna con cui l’autore è cresciuto nella riserva della Driftpile Cree Nation, in Canada, queste meditazioni ci invitano a esplorare la realtà di un’esistenza queer e il mondo spezzato in cui le popolazioni…
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#2021#A History of My Brief Body#autobiografia#Billy-Ray Belcourt#Canada#Edizioni Black Coffee#letteratura gay#LGBT#LGBTQ#memoir#queer#Sara Reggiani#Storia del mio breve corpo
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A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Canada, a lauded poet, and an academic. His work is about being indigenous and gay. He uses the term NDN for "Indian" and this beautifully written memoir/meditation describes the challenges of his life and his identity. He brings both the poetic and academic into his analysis of his own life and sexuality. At times, it is very difficult to read as he pulls no punches, but this is an important, intimate portrait. Highly recommended.
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