Organ Donor's Transit Lounge

new website, for real

2008-06-06T16:35:00.002-06:00

I'm shifting operations over to www.larissalai.com. Come visit there!

Collaboration Issue of the Cap Review

2008-03-25T23:54:00.002-06:00

Poetry, Video, Music -- The Capilano Review launches its Collaboration
issue.

The Capilano Review announces the launch of the Collaborations Issue 3.4. Join us at the Western Front on March 28 at 7:30pm. Hear poets Ted Byrne, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong; see and hear an excerpt from the recording of Hadley+Maxwell and Stefan Smulovitz’s “(The Rest Is Missing)” with Turning Point Ensemble; and hear live performances of song room pieces “unselected works” by Viviane Houle, Stefan Smulovitz, Andrew Klobucar; “Occupying Army” by Vanessa Richards, John Korsrud, Chris Derksen; and more.

This issue of TCR represents a cross-disciplinary foray into video, poetry, and music - both composition and performance. Hadley+Maxwell’s video made in collaboration with composer Stefan Smulovitz and the Turning Point Ensemble is featured as a series of still shots. Collaboration is at the heart of the issue which opens with an extended interview with Tom Cone, Vancouver playwright, librettist, lecturer, impresario, curator and promoter of cultural hybrids, and nurturer of the avant-garde. Tom is co-founder of experimental arts projects such as song room - a salon for new song collaborations - and a co-producer for CABINET, Interdisciplinary Collaborations. The issue provides a selection from song room: the first six song room programs and a sample of texts plus a CD of selected archival-quality recordings. Finally, the issue includes poems that explore a variety of collaborative relationships.

Tickets: $5

March 28, 7:30pm
Western Front
303 8th Avenue East
Vancouver, BC V5T 1S1
(604) 876-9343

Inquiries:
The Capilano Review
604-984-1712
www.thecapilanoreview.ca

Shiny bits

2008-03-24T00:37:00.001-06:00

The big news of the weekend is that I've been selected as a Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Early Career Scholar. Yeesh, what a mouthful! But the cool thing is getting to work with young profs in other disciplines. The Peter Wall Institute focuses on interdisciplinarity. There will be retreats, talks, gatherings, and I'm hoping lots of cross-fertilization. I'll know two other people going in-- Eric Lagally from the Michael Smith Labs (with whom I'm hoping to develop a course on the science and writing of science-writing), and Jennifer Chun, from Sociology, who works on women and labour, and has become a friend over the course of the past year.

Also, I just got a note from Meredith Quartermain, that Nomados Press will publish my experimental prose poem "Eggs In the Basement" later this year. I'm excited about that. The poem began as a writing exercise done on virtual retreat with Monika Gagnon a few summers ago. I generated a pool of language through an automatic writing exercise, and then recycled it in two permutations of nouns and verbs, reusing them in the order in which they appeared in the exercise until they were all used up. Strangely, it ends up telling the story of Moses and Monotheism! Just in time for the Second Gulf War.

And, the Rachel poems are coming to life again in a class Alessandra Capperdoni is teaching at SFU. Mike Barnholden at LINE Books is reproducing the original chapbook in a very limited edition.

Garry Gottfriedson and Souvankham Thammavongsa gave a great reading last Tuesday for Play Chthonics. There was a very interesting contrast in approach between the two of them-- one articulate and verbose, the other minimalist and reserved. Both extraordinary presences.

Backlogged on papers, blurbs, accounting and grading though. Rita says it gets easier.

Reading Break

2008-02-22T13:46:00.002-07:00

"Reading Break" seems such a relaxing concept. I wonder if there ever was a time in the history of the academy when people holed up in a leisurely way to catch up on interesting developments in their fields. I did take a brief break to go to Saltspring Island last weekend. On Friday and Saturday, I did not touch a book. Well, ok, may be I touched one, but I didn't read it. Otherwise-- the rollercoaster. Read the backlog of poetry submissions for Canadian Literature, worked on talks for the upcoming conference Complicated Entanglements, and an invited lecture at Idaho State University in Pocatello. Finished a short essay for the 20th anniversary edition of XCP, about reimaginng the notion of the "cross-cultural" in the new political and economic configuration. Now I have to make sure both courses are on track and select poems for an upcoming issue of Canadian Literature themed "Women in Diaspora." Missed pirate girls Jill Hartman, Cara Hedley and Brea Burton at KSW on Wednesday, rats. Jason Christie and Ken Howe read for Play Chthonics this Tuesday, 7:30 at Thea's Lounge. Don't forget to come.

Beginning the Begin Again

2008-01-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

Back in the 'Couv and gearing up for another semester of teaching. Two courses: an undergrad Canadian Literature course in three parts, one on the politics of the anthology, one on recent contemporary poetry and fiction, and one on chapbooks and zines; and then a grad course called "The Subject of the Future."

I've just come back from holidays (and work, sigh!) in Toronto. Caught up with many old friends, though missed many as well. I'm not the only one married to the grindstone, it seems. In cool news, Emily Cheung and Gein Wong of Little Pear Garden want to make a multi-media theatre piece out of Salt Fish Girl. I met with them briefly, and they are lovely, and come from my planet.

The Play Chthonics blog is the Blogspot doghouse as suspected spam. Hopefully it will be unlocked soon. Come to our reading with David Chariandy and Anne Stone at the Green College Coach House at 7:30 pm, January 23.

testimony

2007-12-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

Went to a dim sum lunch for Grandma Liu Mian Huan, a "Comfort Woman" survivor from the Japanese occupation of China during WWII. There's an extraordinary movement afoot to demand restitution from the Japanese government. Heard much testimony-- from Grandma Liu herself, and on video, from both soldiers and victims. Today, thinking much about the use of testimony. Politically it makes sense. And psychically, for the individual in question? Psychoanalysis would say moves the subject out of repression, into mourning, or "working through." In relationship to the survivors-- the women-- that makes sense to me. But one of the testemonials was from a former solider, recounting what he and his compatriots did. When is the articulation a reproduction of the violence, and when is it "working through"? What if it is both?

In the evening, wonderful readings and discussion from both Wayde Compton and Lee Maracle for the Play Chthonics series. Wayde read from a short story about mixed-race conjoined twins attempting to understand their father's history. Lee read from Daughters. Lots of discussion about writing, the confluence of history, biomythography and a double-headed snake.

mourning

2007-12-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

... the passing of Jane Rule. There's a good obituary in the Globe.

Braved the snow to make the West Coast Line launch at 1067 Granville on Saturday, and afterwards went to Richards on Richards to see Les Savy Favs, and help my friend Sandra celebrate her birthday. Energetic art rock gets to the gut of masculinity.

Late night stroll home over the Granville Street bridge. There was a jeep, speeding and swimming all over the road. It lost control and went flying up onto the sidewalk. And then climbed back down on it's fat, indestructible wheels. Afterwards the bridge was so quiet. Granville Island below, covered in Xmas lights and snow-- still, pretty and muffled.

Come to the Coach House at Green College (UBC) tonight for Lee Maracle and Wayde Compton. 7:30.

new website

2007-11-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

I've been converted to the mac side...
I have a new website. I may change the host, but for now it's here.

research needs

2007-11-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

For those of you with research needs, I've just posted a biobliography page, as a separate blog.

catching up is hard to do

2007-11-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in ages. I'm just winding up my first semester of full-time teaching--holy rollercoaster! It's been a lot of work. All that expectant human presence inside a highly bureaucratic structure has been intense to say the least. I feel like I'm moving things, and making people think. I suppose student evaluations will tell.

There are a lot of smart interesting people out there on the Point-- writers, translators, critics, historians and scientists. And right now, a great deal of interest in and encouragement for interdisciplinarity. I'm excited by that. I'm still getting my sea legs. It feels like I'm always running, and yet the big things move very slowly.

Cool stuff I've participated in in the last bit: The Anniversaries of Change Project, TransCanada 2, the Play Chthonics reading series (come see Lee Maracle and Wayde Compton on December 3!) and a couple of issues of West Coast Line (one, guest-edited by Anne Stone and Amber Dean on the missing women of the Downtown Eastside, and one memorial issue for Nancy Shaw-- the Ham poems are in there if you're at all interested). Last week I went to a meeting at the Michael Smith Laboratories, where they are trying to set up a program to get school kids writing and thinking about science (and "truth" and method). Dave Ng from the Michael Smith Labs is organizing with members of the Creative Writing Department, including Rhea Trebegov, whom I've just met.

I'm diggin' the noon hour talks that occasionally happen at the Chan Centre. Early in the term, heard a very moving talk about surviving torture, and the logic of extraordinary rendition, from Maher Arar. And a couple of days ago heard Alisa Smith and James McKinnon talk about challenges and fruits (so to speak) of the 100-mile diet. It's pretty astonishing what they did, and also what a movement seems to be afoot.

So I'm swimming in the possibilities of this new life. Also pretty darn tired and overwhelmed. And not writing. See you on the next lungful.

historic dates and personal updates

2007-08-04T23:47:00.000-06:00

It's been a pretty action-packed weekend. I spent Thursday and Friday at a symposium called Redress Express, organized by Alice Jim for Centre A in Vancouver. It gets its title from the train trip surviving Head Tax payers took across the country earlier this year to hear Stephen Harper apologize for that nasty piece of racist legislation that forced Chinese immigrants to pay ever increasing amounts of money to enter the country between 1885 and 1923, before the government passed legislation that excluded us altogether. Redress Express, the symposium, is happening in conjunction with a range of activities dubbed Anniversaries of Change, which marks the 1907 Anti-Asiatic Riots in Vancouver, the 1947 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1967 Citizenship Act and the 1997 "return" of Hong Kong to China, which triggered a large wave of immigration to the West Coast of Canada.

The first panel was particularly inspiring. Chris Lee talked about the problems of linear history, the arbitrariness of the number seven, and the act of commemoration. Kirsten McAllister followed with a discussion of events such at the Komagata Maru incident as one among many other incidents not marked by 'o7' that contribute to histories of trauma and exclusion. Her discussion focussed the difficulties of embodied experience for the traumatized, and the tension between those kinds of history that are articulable and those that, precisely because of their traumatic nature, are not.

Henry Yu closed the panel by calling for a recognition that the "white Canada" McKenzie King was so desperate to "preserve" is a myth. He suggested that it was in fact late arriving whites who took the jobs of Asian and First Nations people who were already here on the West Coast, when Europeans arrived. (Much of the anti-Asian sentiment in the last century was driven by white labour movements who resented Asian labour and capitalized on the fact that racialized people couldn't vote.) The Chinese built the railroad because they were already here. And it was that work that enabled the European settlement of this coast.

There were many more great panels and discussions-- way more than I can tell you about on this blog. The symposium was attached to an exhibition at Centre A on Chinese Restaurants and the Head Tax Issue. Particularly compelling is Karen Tam's reproduction of a small town Chop Suey house, part of a series of restaurant reproductions she's been doing across the country for the last five years. Poster art from Gu Xiong, a fabulous rice crispie pagoda by Shelly Low, a recycling of Ho Tam's 1993 chapbook project The Yellow Pages, and a series of photographs of old Chinese Canadian restaurants along Hastings Street by Kira Wu.

Powell Street Festival today. I went to a talk at a location cryptically dubbed "The Chapel" (it's an old funeral home!) in which Kamala Todd, Cease Wyss, Grace Thompson and Wayde Compton talked about the histories of First Nations, Japanese Canadian and Black Canadian presence in the Downtown Eastside. There are so many parallels among the communities in the experience of repression and violence. It was a great coalition building moment to bring those voices together.

In other news, I'm noticing that my ancient website is getting a lot of hits, which tells me I need to update it soon. That material is very old, and I'm not sure why U of C continues to run it, because I took it down two years ago. They don't let me have my old email account anymore! I'll try to get a new one up soon. For those of you who don't know, I begin my tenure-track teaching position in Canadian Literature at UBC this fall. So that's a bio update. It also means I'm madly prepping and can't quite apply my head to a website yet. Trying to wrap up a few papers, turn my diss into the book, and steal a moment or two for creative projects languishing on the backburner. I've also just taken up the position of Poetry Editor for Canadian Literature. I'm looking for submissions, so check the CL website for guidelines and submit, please!

I'm missing my cousin's wedding in the States and am bummed about that. It's great to be in town this weekend though, for Redress Express, Powell Street Festival and Pride. Life in Vancouver is very nourishing these days, both for ideas and for the soul.

Kate Liu and Wenchi Lin speak today!

2007-07-17T10:13:00.000-06:00

Dr. Kate Liu and Dr. Wenchi Lin

Talks by two contemporary Taiwanese film scholars

2PM, Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Room 599
Buchanan Tower
397 – 1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia

Wenchi Lin. The Subtle Complexity of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Poetics

The emergent studies of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s poetics have mainly been cinematography oriented, just as most of the earlier formalist approaches to his films. The aspects of sound and editing are unfortunately neglected and no satisfactory argument of what David Bordwell calls “the poetics of the overarching form” of Hou’s films has been presented yet. This article contends that Zhu Tien-wen’s notion of “subtle complexity” (Miwei) may be a good term to describe the governing principle of the overarching form of Hou’s films: a consistent attempt to simultaneously provide multiple layers of meaning in his films, including the personal, the social/historical/national/urban, the existential, and the (self-reflexively) cinematic. The exemplary use of sound in Boys from Fenguei and Café Lumière as well as the editing of A Time to Live and A Time to Die, Dust of Wind, and City of Sadness is discussed to demonstrate their significant functions in Hou’s poetics. A careful examination of the many symbolic meanings of “puppet” in The Puppetmaster provides a closer look into the subtle complexity of Hou’s poetics.

Kate Liu. Construction of Identity and Home in the Space of Flows in Three Recent Taipei City Films

With three recent Taiwanese films-- Love Go Go [1997], The Personals [1998], and Bird Land [2000]—as examples, I will analyze how recent Taipei films (as part of the so-called New New Taiwanese cinema) try to capture and respond to Taipei’s ever-increasing speed of flows in comic, self-reflexive and collage styles. In some comic but poignant manners, the three films show urban migrants either isolated in their small apartments, or drifting in transitory and segmental relations in various urban spaces of flows—e.g. the commercial spaces of beauty salon, bakery and tea house, city traffic and highway, and the information network of mass media. Alienation, transitory relations and even dangers in the space of flows, however, are not the cause for despair; I will analyze the three strategies the films use to seize the flows and make it home, or to make meaningful communication possible in chance encounter: 1. mediated communication; 2. flâneurial looks; 3. self-reflexive use of signs.

justice matters

2007-06-17T11:25:00.000-06:00

Rita has been working on a campaign to urge the Japanese government to apologize to the Korean, Chinese, Filipina, Burmese, Indonesian and Dutch women and children who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army during WWII. Women and children as young as twelve were held at "comfort stations," raped and tortured and forced to have sex with up to 40 Japanese soldiers a day. The Japanese government does not acknowledge or take responsibility for these horrors. Canada and the US, along with 46 allied countries signed a peace agreement in 1951 absolving Japan of having to pay reparations for the war. This agreement is used now as a way for the Japanese government and courts to avoid responsibility for the abuse of the "comfort women." China and Korea were not signatories of that treaty. ie. Our silence is a kind of complicity.

Olivia Chow has recently tabled a motion for the Canadian government to urge the Japanese government to apologize to the survivors. You can do something by encouraging your MP to vote for Motion 291.

The motion itself and more details here:
http://www.alpha-canada.org/

Wah Symposium: Writing Public Selves

2007-05-29T01:41:00.001-06:00

The Writer-in-Residence Program
at Simon Fraser University presents

Count Me In:
Writing Public Selves

SFU, Harbour Centre
Thursday, May 31, 2007

A colloquium exploring “the turn to language” as
medium and limit in current writing practices.

What are the social and creative conditions of this turn? How do writers deal with the uneven effects of power relations, representation, and the politics of identity? How can creative forms take on public visibility as a critical force in our social and cultural interactions?

Join the writers who will address these and related questions in an afternoon session of provocative talks, followed by an evening reading by writers who have consulted with Writer-in-Residence Fred Wah.

Afternoon Session: Room HC 1315
2 - 3:15 pm:
Welcome Remarks: Sophie McCall
Fred Wah, “Me Too (Two): A Poetics Talk”
Jeff Derksen, "Space Agent Wah"

3:30 - 5:00 pm:
“Languaging the ‘I’: Writing in Shifty Contexts”
Moderator: Clint Burnham
Panelists: David Chariandy, Larissa Lai, and Roy Miki

•
7 pm, Evening Reading: Room HC 1700
Mercedes Eng, Jef Clarke, Emmanuel Raymundo, Neda Abkari, Peter Quartermain, Meg Walker, Tony Power, Joy Russell, Emily Fedoruk, Andrew Lee

With Thanks
Sponsored by the Writer-in-Residence Program with funding assistance from the Canada Council, the Office of the President, and the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University

Tectonic Plague

2007-05-14T10:50:00.000-06:00

Come help kick off an exciting new reading series!

THURSDAY, MAY 17
*Play Chthonics* Spring Reading

: Fred Booker
: Hiromi Goto
: Dorothy Trujillo Lusk
: Meredith Quartermain

READING 7:30 pm
RECEPTION 9:00 pm

Room: COACH HOUSE
GREEN COLLEGE, 6201 CECIL GREEN PARK ROAD, UBC

(Green College is located at the north end of the UBC campus, across the street (north) from the Chan Center for the Performing Arts, east of the Museum of Anthropology. Parking available adjacent to Green College.)

Organized by graduate students and faculty in the English Department and the Program in Comparative Literature at UBC, *Play Chthonics* is a 2007/2008 Writers Reading Series that focuses on innovative poetry, narrative, and cross-genre experimentation.

Author biographies:

Fred Booker has been writing in Canada since 1966. His first book, a collection of short stories titled Adventures in Debt Collection, was published September 2006 by Commodore Books in Vancouver. Stories from the collection have appeared in Event, Windsor Review, Whetstone and West Coast Line and have been read on Peter Norman's show HEARSAY. He lives and writes in Burnaby.

Hiromi Goto has published short stories and critical writing in, among others, Ms magazine and the Oxford University Press anthology, Making A Difference. Her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, was the 1995 recipient of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book Canada and Caribbean Region and the co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her second novel, The Kappa Child, was the 2001 winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Best Book Award. Her most recent book, Hopeful Monsters, (Arsenal) is a collection of short stories.

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a Vancouver poet and the author of Oral Tragedy (Tsunami, 1988), Redactive (Talon, 1993), Sleek Vinyl Drill (Thuja, 2000), Ogress Oblige (Krupskaya, 2001) and the forthcoming collection Decorum. Lusk is a longtime member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective. She was awarded The Small Press Traffic Book Award for Ogresse Oblige in 2001.

Meredith Quartermain won a BC Book Award in 2006, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, for her most recent book: Vancouver Walking (NeWest). Other books and chapbooks include Terms of Sale (1996), A Thousand Mornings (2002) and The Eye-Shift of Surface (2003). Wanders (2002) contains her poem answers to 19 poems by Robin Blaser. Her work has also appeared in Canadian Literature, Prism International, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Raddle Moon, Ecopoetics, Chain, Sulfur, Tinfish and other magazines. She runs, with husband Peter Quartermain, Nomados Literary Publishers, in Vancouver, BC.

identity returned

2007-05-12T22:20:00.000-06:00

home now. after granada, i passed briefly through frankfurt again, and had a lovely visit with katja sarkowski and her partner alex. breakfast with astrid franke, and afterwards delicious ice cream from what katja and alex assured me was the best in best shop in frankfurt. debriefed the conference a bit. learned much as well about the structure of the german academy. apparently it's common for people to wait years after a job interview to find out if they got the job or not!
next day, on to cyprus, and two nights of chill out with the inimitable frances kruk in larnaca before heading to nicosia for performing identity. the conference took place in a beautiful gothic hall, the last remnant of a castle that had once stood over it. lots of interesting talks, great performances from david khang, anne holloway, david bateman and hiromi goto. ashok mathur and david bateman, who organized, set up a very productive format. papers were posted beforehand, so that the sessions could be used primarily for discussion. nightly crossings through the u.n. green zone into the turkish-controlled north. green zone a mess of razor wire, abandoned buildings, an old hotel turned into a u.n. compound, anti-turkish propanda on weather-worn billboards. the north itself dingy, but beautiful, untouched by the tentacles of global capital. all over both sides of the fence we met migrant workers in the service industry who long to come to canada. stories of dreams and scams abound.
after the conference we split into smaller groups to explore the island a bit. david khang, frances kruk and i went to paphos (touristy yucky-- avoid the poseidon restaurant at all costs, unless you like boiled vegetables, minute rice and pulpy octopus) and then up to polis and latsi (beautiful) with a brief detour down to the temple of aphrodite near kouklia village. it's very ruined. somehow, for me, this made it the most poignant and beautiful place of the trip, in spite of my having witnessed extraordinary architecture elsewhere. (who worshipped here? how? how might we live differently devoted to more than one deity?) in latsi, we snuck /stumbled into a very deluxe resort compound, drank their drinks and napped on the pretty poolside beds. bad mice having a good time. finally, bus and service taxi back to larnaca, where we ate every meal at kapos allios, a charming home-style restaurant that serves the most delicious broad beans (with cucumber, tomato, mystery green leaves and crushed mint), eggplant, cauliflower and sardines.

the red fort

2007-04-29T09:13:00.000-06:00

spent the morning at the al hambra. nasrid palaces beautiful-- carved plaster work, reflecting pools in central courtyards, arch after arch. evidence of the reconquista everywhere-- huge architectural differences between the moorish kings (modest and interior) and the christian conquerors (all about external pride).

beyond the walls granada, picturesque cluster of white houses on a hill. hard to escape the romance! very interesting to see the way the exoticism plays out in tourist venues and every day life. (what´s the difference?) the albacin in particular an interesting blend of postmodern surface and lived depth. why do we romanticize and reproduce the craft practices of those we fear, or think we´ve defeated? to what extent is the other a part of us? hah! go ask your analyst!

olive groves all over the hillsides.

i found a great little cafe bar in the more modern part of the city, where families admire babies, young african men sell pirated cds, and a boy bebel gilberto serendaded the drinkers of beer and tinto de verrano. the waitress was friendly, and patient with my minimal spanish. fed me gazpacho, sardines, octopus and sangria. delicious.

fox ambassador

2007-04-26T17:02:00.000-06:00

late night in seville. highlight of the german conference was reading experimental poetry to social and political scientists.
talks in huelva and vigo about race, feminism, globalization and the two novels. both sfg and fox are being taught and written about down here, which is very cool.
vigo looks strangely like st. john´s, especially down at the docks. great to meet belen martin at last. she has a long-standing calgary connection. hi, hiromi!
seville-- sunny and beautiful. loved the al cazar-- all the play with sun and shade, water and tile. pilar cuder dominguez from the university of huelva, and her partner juan antonio prieto pablos take great care of me and introduce me to spanish ham. great interview with dr. sonia villegas lopez, mostly about fox. the past cycles back.

sprechen sie fisch?

2007-04-19T02:00:00.000-06:00

sitting out in the balcony of the beautiful liepig hotel in frankfurt. life feels slower, everything i've seen or touched since landinghas been so aesthetically pleasing. olive bread, soft round wine, the double doors to my hotel room, the breakfast table with two tulips and an anthurium, the safe inside my closet, the tiles in the bathroom. why do we north americans scramble so hard? for what?
prepping a talk and reading. i've been hanging out with daniel drache and ingrid markus, both of whom i've just met, and both of whom are political science people from york and brock respectively. lots of common concerns and disciplinary differences. i'm always searching for another english. another fishspeak.

holy moly

2007-04-16T17:35:00.000-06:00

i was just checking my mailbox at school. garry morse mentioned awhile ago that he was making a package for me, which i thought was nice, but then didn't think about it again. well, i just got the package. there are seventeen-- count 'em-- seventeen chapbooks-- in it!! i'm not impressed by production for the sake of production, but from the flipping i've done so far, they all look interesting and good. holy crowsfeet with the crows attached!

also in my box a nice card from hui-ling lin, who heard me read poetry at serial accomodations a few weeks ago. i should check my mail more often.

in others news, pending canada council funding, we've got our cash for play chthonics. the english department and canadian studies both offered money this week. fingers crossed. this is gonna be a cool series.

off to frankfurt tomorrow. excited about the trip, annoyed at having to chase down small chores, like the returning of recalled library books, and a parking pass for my new, crazy busy street. i'm determined to be able to pack as light as smaro kamboureli, who goes on great journeys with the smallest of suitcases.

european travels and local projects

2007-04-14T23:08:00.000-06:00

So I'm more or less in my new place now. It'll be great to get those last boxes cleared away.
Much travel coming up-- to Frankfurt for a conference called "Negotiating Diversity", then to Spain for talks in Huelva and Vigo. I'll detour to Cordoba and Granada while I'm in the south-- have had a longstanding fascination with the Alhambra. Then to Cyprus for Performing Identity/Crossing Borders. My paper's still not done, which I don't like so much. Down to the wire is not my scene.
I've been working with a few grad students on a reading series at UBC, we've dubbed "Play Chthonics." Shaping up nicely. There will be a local writers pre-series reading on May 17, with Meredith Quartermain, Dorothy Trujillo-Lusk, Hiromi Goto and Fred Booker. It'll be really great to have more of a contemporary writing presence at UBC. Hope we get our funding for the rest of the series.
Feeling a bit tired and overwhelmed, but good things are happening. Mike Barnholden has asked for the Ham poems for the next West Coast Line.

really

2007-04-02T19:16:00.000-06:00

watching paint dry is like watching paint dry

toronto in spring

2007-04-01T17:44:00.000-06:00

Just back from Toronto, where I received star treatment from Gail Vanstone and her students at York. Talked about Salt Fish Girl, read a little Ham. It's a very cool course they have there, that invites a different Canadian writer to speak every other week. On the weeks without a visitor, the prof lectures about the next visitor's work. Wouldn't it be cool to have something like that at UBC? Hmmmm....

Stayed an extra day to take Susanda to dinner. She has a very big birthday this week. I'm missing the bash, though, boohoo. Got to see her new office, right on Spadina. She has this idea for making acupuncture more accessible to lower income people-- by setting up group clinics. Long talks about who ends up in helping professions and for what reasons.

Apologies for not calling many much admired friends... I contemplated staying longer, but work and my new apartment are just a bit too demanding. Today-- priming the walls of my office. Does anybody have a good method for getting paint off skin?

barrage

2007-03-28T14:20:00.000-06:00

There's been a lot going on lately, precisely the stuff I like to blog. The paradox of time... when there's something to say, there's no time to say it.

Refracting Pacific Canada dense and interesting. Highlights-- Shu-Mei Shih's preconference colloquium on the end of diaspora, an interesting talk by Moon-Ho Jung on the relationship between the end of slavery and the beginning of anti-Asiatic exclusion acts in the Americas. And of course the reading I organized with David Chariandy, Garry Morse, Rita Wong and Phinder Dulai. Caught a little bit of Solitudes and Globalization, organized by Fine Arts at UBC that same weekend. Great talk by Monika Kin Gagnon on a film of her late father, Charles Gagnon. Some odd responses to a remarkable performance/talk on aboriginality, representation, trauma, violence and specific/local experience by Marcia Crosby. She repeated the performace this weekend in Regina at an amazing and provocative symposium called TransPOSE organized by the Sakewewak collective this past weekend. I played conference respondent. Holy active listening. More on that one shortly, I hope. One of the most inspiring events I've attended in awhile.

In between, a reading with me and Maged Zaher at KSW. Read my Ham suite for the first time. It's about the chimpanzee, also known as Chop Chop Chang, whom NASA sent into space in the Mercury Redstone missions of the 60s. They were testing what human bodies might be able to withstand.

If you're in Toronto tomorrow, I'm reading at 7pm at York University, and would love to see you.

technique tectonic

2007-03-14T23:26:00.000-06:00

Sina Queyras and Daphne Marlatt are reading at the Kootenay School of Writing this Saturday, March 17 at Spartacus Books, 319 West Hastings, at 7:30 pm.
Lots of good KSW stuff coming up the next bit. Christine Stewart is doing a talk the next day about Vico, excess and Lisa Robertson's Debbie: an Epic.
Christine, myself and three really great grad students, Brooke Houglum, Travis Mason, and Meliz Ergin are trying to start a new reading series at UBC. After much brainstorming we dubbed it "Play Chthonics." A whole roster of interesting readers lined up for the fall and winter of next year. Now all we need is for funding to fall into place.

feed your head

2007-03-13T12:29:00.000-06:00

A couple of good conferences at UBC this weekend:

Refracting Pacific Canada: New Directions in Race, Citizenship and Migration
http://www.instrcc.ubc.ca/refracting/

SOLITUDES and GLOBALIZATION: Post-World War II Art and Culture Across the Americas
http://www.ahva.ubc.ca/eventsDetails.cfm?EventID=263&EventTypeNumID=6

Don't forget to come to the reading for Refracting Pacific Canada. It's at the UBC Asian Centre at 7:30 on Thursday, May 15. Featured writers: Rita Wong, David Chariandy, Garry Morse and Phinder Dulai

shining hopeful people

2007-03-13T00:59:00.000-06:00

Lots of discussion at Serial Accomodations this weekend about the problem of writing diasporic Asian women's experience, and about the placement, circulation and understanding of that work inside institutions. No escape from language, or from master narratives. There is still feeling and meaning-- in text or in excess of it? Are feeling and meaning desirable things? It was great to reconnect with old friends and colleagues (especially Kirsten McAllister, Shani Mootoo and Mridula Chakraborty) and meet new ones (especially J. S. Jayasree and Medha Samarasinghe). I was also really happy to see some activist friends in the audience-- Benita Bunjun and Dorothy Christianson in particular. Benita gave me a flyer for Realities of Race Week at UBC: http://www.ams.ubc.ca/ror/. Wow, wish there had been something like that when I was an undergrad here. I'm going to do my best to make it to the Saturday night reading and fundraiser for Vancouver Status of Women.

Today I heard Vandana Shiva speak at the Chan Centre. Rita showed me Biopiracy almost a decade ago, and now that I think about it, alot of the impulse for Salt Fish Girl comes from our discussions about that book. So it was really great to hear VS speak today about food democracy, seed freedom and the evils of Monsanto and the WTO! Scott has been teaching a course about food at Concordia, and Monika has been writing about gardens. I like seeing how so many of the folks who were do work around race and racialization a decade ago are extending their practices into thinking about earth, sustainability, the interconnection of life forms.

Re-engaging Race

2007-03-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

OK. I've done it. I've re-entered the zone of Writing Thru Race and have been writing thru race... again. It was the big gap in my dissertation, avoided largely because of a certain horror I felt about re-engaging what I experienced in 1994 as a very abject moment. Abject, but important-- in some ways a key moment in the community work that gave birth to many incredible, liberatory works of art, literary or otherwise. I'm going to give this paper at Serial Accomodations: Diasporic Asian Women's Writing, a symposium at UBC that Sneja Gunew is organizing to coincide with International Women's Day. If you're interested, please come. I'd especially like to see people who were involved in cultural organizing the the 90s, and even more especially, people who were on the original organizing committee of WTR. Kirsten McAllister and Medha Samarasinghe are speaking on the same panel. It happens at 2:30 on March 10th in the Choi Building at UBC. I'll be doing a literary reading afterwards-- probably some new poetry and may be a bit from Salt Fish Girl, as I think it's being studied up there right now.

In other news, I've organized a reading for the conference Refracting Pacific Canada, which commemorates the 1907 Vancouver Riots, the 1947 Citizenship Act, the 1967 Immigration Act and the 1997 "return" of Hong Kong to China. Readers featured: Rita Wong, Garry Morse, David Chariandy and Phinder Dulai. That's at the Asian Centre Atrium at UBC, 7:30, Thursday, March 15.

On Friday March 23 at the Kootenay School of Writing/Spartacus Books, I'm reading new poetry with Maged Zaher, a poet from San Francisco. Check out some of his work on Exquisite Corpse: http://corpse.org/issue_9/poesy/zaher.htm

On March 24, I'm off to Regina to act as a respondent for a very cool symposium called transPOSE, that brings together artists, curators, academics, and theorists from both Aboriginal and culturally diverse communities talking about histories of oppression, community and coalition building, art production and non-western canons.

Then to Toronto on March 29 for a reading at York University.

Things are getting busy! There will be some talks in Europe in April, but I'll tell you about those in another post.

It'd be great to see you at whatever you can make it to!

pix miami to montreal

2007-03-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

good water, crappy air kafkanada

2007-03-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

stranded in montreal. it'll have taken 3 days to get back to vancouver from miami, courtesy of our national airline. flight pass? don't believe the hype. the seat is more important than the body that fills it.
still, great to see monika and scott, and a very grown-up and beautiful olivia.
and had a fab time in miami with rita, walter and ashok. cuban roasted pork, pwason neg, south beach, lincoln ave art studios, snorkelling the reef at key largo, kayaking mangroves, fruit and spice park, mojitos in coconut grove. good class visit at u miami, talking about politics and poetry. sunlight and palm trees, lots and lots, to warm the vancouver damp and dark out of my heart.
one thing about spending a whole heck of a lot of time at the airport-- i get work done. diss to book pretty much there, and i think sybil unrest, the collaborative pome with rita is in the bag. prepped my paper for sneja gunew's conference on asian canadian women at ubc next week, and am organizing a reading for chris lee and the conference "refracting pacific canada" for later this month. also looks like i'll be in germany and spain later in april for a few talks and readings. cool. burning up all cash i was paid for my archive though. have i mentioned that? sfu special collections is collecting my papers. i feel real.

san fran's disco

2007-02-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

La dolce vita in San Francisco, 'puter on back. 76-speaker sound experience at the Audium, all egg-like and dark. Chris says it's so passe, but I dug the immersion. Coit Tower, Columbus plus labour-inspired murals-- strange combo of ideologies. Fishy Farralon, big dollars. Karaoke screams the spirits out. Cafe hopping, revising diss, reading Mark Leyner aloud and David C's soon-to-be-published Soucouyant quietly. Red Victorian themes rooms, butterflies for peace, peacocks for vanity. Ashok and David B pop up periodically, in restaurants, beside Jack Kerouac, or at mic. Winter blues washing downstream.

mind travel

2007-02-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Lots of travels and projects on the go. Interesting stuff in the next bit:

Serial Accomodations: Diasporic Asian Women's Writing, a symposium at the Choi Bldg, UBC, March 9-10

2007: Anniversaries of Change, conference to mark (among other things) the centennary of 1907 anti-Asian Vancouver Riots, March 15-17

I'm on to San Francisco this weekend just to catch little sun and visit my sound-singer friend, Chris Tonelli. The following weekend, off to Miami to do a class visit and see Rita Wong, who is teaching there for the year.

A nice invitation recently to a conference in Frankfurt this April called Negotiating Diversity: Transatlantic Exchanges Between Canada and Europe.

I've been house hunting a little. I need more light! I need sun, coffee shops, people. The housing market in this city is so depressing. Let me know if you hear of anything.

Why We Write

2007-02-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

Just received from TSAR:

TSAR Publications Presents

Why we Write:
Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists

A Discussion Panel with interviewer H Nigel Thomas

FeaturingWayde Compton (Author, 49th Parellel Psalm)
Karina Vernon (Journalist)
David Chariandy (Professor, Simon Fraser University)

Tuesday, February 20, 2007
6:30pm – 9:30pm@Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings2nd Floor
Vancouver, British Columbia

The panelists will discuss the issues and challenges facing African Canadian writers.

The Book: In this volume, African Canadian creative writers discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists; i.e., they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology, and adhere to the notion that their books must delight and instruct. These interviews, therefore, are valuable additions to the creative process of the individual writers.Apart from identifying how the writers’ geographical and social origins have influenced their work, the questions deliberately avoid autobiography. Instead, these writers respond to the exigencies of craft, the manipulations of publishers, the criticism of readers, and the absence of a clearly identifiable market for their works.

ISBN1-894770-34-X
Price: $24.95Paperback For More Information, visit: www.tsarbooks.com www.sfu.ca www.spartacusbooks.org www.commodorebooks.com

chilly philly

2007-02-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

Actually, it wasn't that cold, though it did snow. Had a great week visiting with Janet Neigh, her two lovely and generous roommates James and Jennifer and the wonder-chihuahuas Popsicle and Nina. Getting there was a hassle-- it took Air Canada four tries and three passes through US Customs to get me, and two newfound friends out of Toronto. They did put us up in the most bizarre party palace hotel out on the snowy 401. I was trailed for a few hours by a strange stalker boy who wanted to know about Nietzsche. The weirdest moment of the trip, though, was after the third cancelled flight, when they sent us to a dark empty hall in the bowels of an almost-abandoned Terminal Two (just a short and several times repeated shuttle ride from the trailer Terminal E) where we were to rebook the fourth (and lucky) flight. There was a row of dark, unmanned kiosks as the back, and on the opposite wall, a row of six phones that 60 stranded passengers were supposed to use to call ticket agents in Montreal, or may be Delhi... Welcome to Air Kafka.

So what a shock to finally land in Philly and discover it is indeed a real place! Janet and her roomies have a great three-storey house near the Italian market some of you might be familiar with from Rocky. (Not me. OK, gotta watch it.) We did tons of yoga. I went to my first Kundalini class ever. Tried to visit the Eastern State Penitentiary, which is the original panopticon that Bentham writes about, but it was closed for the winter. Went to the very grand Philedelphia Museum of Art, though, and admired the 20th century rooms-- some faves, Rothko, Brancusi. There was even a concert in the atrium-- a good one-- a band called Box Five playing with the Arts in Motion String Quartet. They were a bit Morcheeba-like-- sad girl songs with cool computer/synth background sound, and some lovely live violin.

Man, the class/race divide in Philly is a shocker though. Much sadness, anger and poverty on certain blocks, lots of boarded up buildings. I know it's no different here...

Found myself a copy of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station at a groovy bookstore across from the panopticon. Ate a crazy pork and greens sandwich in the Italian market with James. Saw Judith Butler speak at UPenn on the instrumentalization of queer freedoms for racist purposes (interesting, smart and upsetting). Read a huge chunk of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas at a sweet neighbourhood coffee shop called Chapterhouse. And did a bunch of thinking and writing on Writing Thru Race. Adventures are good.

ghosts, posters, poetic fact

2007-01-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

Big weekend with the elders. Shirley Bear's 30-year retrospective opened at the Burnaby Art Gallery on Saturday, and she had launch for her poetry book, Virgin Bones, the next day. I went with Roy. We were especially astounded by the way ghosts seemed to emerge from a particular dry ink process she was using in 2003. When I asked her about it later, it was interesting to hear how she, at first, just let the dry ink fall where it wanted, but later, would loosely guide the process, while (necessarily) allowing for a great degree of randomness. From the randomness came white patches and swirls of colour that suggest other presences, or a kind of creativity that is not individual in the deliberate kind of way that her brush work is. Amazing show, nicely varied selection of work-- opened me to thinking of the many different ways creativity can work. Cool being there with Roy, who always gets a person thinking. He's pondering project in which he talks to artists and writers about their creative practices. Show's only downer was the crappy poster. Her name wasn't even on it, except for as a painting credit. What was the gallery thinking?!

Same day as Shirley's book launch, Peter Quartermain did a talk at the Kootenay School of Writing about Zukofsky and the "poetic fact." Very interesting discussion using examples from medieval herbals, inquiring into the nature of "fact" and its distance from experienced "reality." Peter considers Pound's forward slashes and Williams's "space periods" as poetic facts, the referents of which are as open and particular as any reader's experience of them.

Later, visit with my friend Trish Kelly, and her friend Kim Kinakin, who does graphic design and web work for Nettwerk records, and is moving to LA. I checked out his West End apartment with an eye to buying. Yikes!

hmmmmm..... errrrrrrrrrr.....

2006-12-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

i really don't know how to feel about this:

army green

environmentally clean, may be, but ideologically dirty dirty dirty....

separated at birth

2006-12-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

Nikki's mother, Joanne, swears she had only one, but I don't know...

These pics come from the very exciting launch of Line Books at Spartacus last week. Congratulations Roger, Natalie, Reg, and Garry! And big big kudos to Mike Barnholden and Glen Lowry. This is a big deal for West Coast potes.

a nod to global nodes

2006-12-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

There is some cool stuff happening in Oz. Here's a performance artist/writer from Down Under who does some really interesting racegender twisty stuff. I especially like the story about suitmation:
Tom Cho

Found out about him from Deborah Madsen, a Switzerland-based Canadianist who has written a very thoughtful entry on my work for the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Writers. (I'm not sure how I feel about the way we racialized Canucks become American overseas, but it seems to be standard practice.)

Enjoying these global connections. Thinking through a piece now on the newly privileged (but also reified) mobility of certain kinds of racialization and the exceptional abuse of kindred kinds.

LINE launch tomorrow

2006-11-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Very exciting! Don't miss out!

LINEbooks (of West Coast Line)
invites you to join us for the launch of four new poetry titles:

accrete or crumble by Natalie Simpson
Surplus by Roger Farr
Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13 by Garry Morse
Courage, My Love by Reg Johanson

Friday, December 01, 8pm
at Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings Street

Special: pre launch price box set of all four titles $50
Contact Michael Barnholden
See also www.kswnet.org, "News column, to view a pdf of the book titles & descriptions

so purty, so cold

2006-11-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, it's just snow. But this is Vancouver, folks, not Calgary, not St. John's. Actually, as long as you don't have to drive, it's kinda fun. Went for a stomp through my neighbourhood yesterday, met some very nice nabeyaki udon and a friendly chocolate mousse cake. Upscale neighbourhoods have their perks.

Writing is stalled out. Need brain food. Reading Rei Terada on affect, and Donna Haraway's Primate Visions. On the burner: the nameless novel, a critical essay about clones and kidneys, Sybil Unrest (The Return of the Jedi) and (may be) a sequel to Salt Fish Girl. You'd think one of them would roll. It's too cold and I've run out of fish crunchies.

adventures in wonderland

2006-11-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

Now that Rita is not around to socially co-ordinate me, I have to do it myself. Oh, the trials and tribulations!
Cools gigs in the next bit:
Roy Miki launches There at SFU Special Collections tomorrow at 12:30. Congratulations, Roy!
Lisa Robertson reads at Thea's Lounge on the UBC campus at 8:30 pm tomorrow. It's also Sophie McCall's birthday-- friends, colleagues and admirers will be found later that evening at the Alibi Room. Peddlar Press is also doing a book launch that night, I believe.
Jeff Derksen reads with Nicholas Perrin on Saturday, Nov. 25 at KSW/Spartacus Books, 319 Hastings at 8pm. And the No Luck Club play the Media Club (695 Cambie) that evening as well.
So pretend it's not raining and go out already. (And I'll pretend my writing isn't stalled...)

The Ethics of Longing

2006-11-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

Reading Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

A panel session / open discussion
for English 841: “Future Thinking: The Ethics of Reading ‘Asian Canadian’ Literature”

Guest Speakers, Larissa Lai (UBC) and David Chariandy (SFU)

November 21, 2005
4:30 – 7:00 pm

Segal School of Business
500 Granville Street (at Pender)
4600 Policy Room

Calgary's Last Hurrah

2006-11-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a few pics from my visit to Calgary, to really stick a fork in it. I'm officially an official Doctor. I didn't think I'd enjoy the ceremony, but actually it felt really great to do the ritual. Aruna Srivastava and Mary Polito were there as part of the officiating party, and Adrienne Kertzer held the role of announcer (are there official titles for these things?) who declared the names of the PhDs as they crossed the stage.

Wish I had my camera with me the day I went to visit Jay and Carmen and my now very chatty 18-month-old godson, Lochlan. Between Lochie and my three-year-old friend Maya, I am re-learning the joy of indoor tents.

Jason Christie, hiding out from Andrea, with mustard for some reason...

Ghostly Chris, potent potion. The KP is a special place.

Paul and Jill-- Sweet party, thanks you two!

creepy Travis, spooked-out Sandy-- some things never change

Natalee Caple and Jeremy Leipert had twins this year! Here's Dr. Me, with Master Jeremy and the twins, Imogen and Cassius, right after convocation.

solids and liquids

2006-11-10T18:12:00.000-07:00

Supper with Roy and Slav last night, then off to the Freddy Wood Theatre to hear Arjun Appadurai's talk "Solids and Liquids: Notes on the Materialities of Terror," which is part of larger series of talks on terror at UBC this fall. Interesting read on how the materials of everyday life, from toothpaste to shave cream, have become objects of anxiety.

Afterwards, downtown to the Brick House for the launch of the first Commodore book, Fred Booker's Adventures in Debt Collection. Exciting to see a slice of Black Western Canadian history come to life.

Destination Convocation

2006-11-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

Coming to Calgary next week to convocate! Yahoo! Would love to see you what remains of the Cowtown crew, if you guys are still reading this. Monday night at the KP?

all saints, lost souls

2006-11-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a few pics from The Parade of Lost Souls, the Oddballs Dance at the WISE Hall, and a dinner at Monsoon after the Arif Dirlik book launch last week. Friends, comrades and partners in crime: Ken Singer, Melina Baum-Singer, David Chariandy and Sophie McCall.

Adventures in Debt Collection

2006-11-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

Unless you're there right now, unfortunately, you've missed the Christian Bok reading at KSW this afternoon. Sorry Christian! I'm there in spirit...

Just recovering from a very compelling grad student conference at SFU, called Sexing the Text. Some highlights for me: the Friday evening creative panel, especially readings by Kim Minkus, Maya Seuss and Sharanpal Ruprai; a Betsy Warland object poem about states of emergency that seven of us performed together(impromptu); a paper by Rahul Golia about the politics of cross-dressing Jackie Kay's 1988 novel Trumpet; a paper by Sarah Bull on the gendering of murderous women in 1930's pulp fiction; and Ashok Mathur's multimedia keynote performance "Transnational Border Shopping: What We All Long For When We Long to Cross Over." Parties afterwards-- one at Deanna Kreisel and Scott McKenzie's and one at Ashok's. Man, I am wrecked today.

But excited about going to visit Peter Dickinson's class tomorrow morning to talk about Salt Fish Girl and the gothic.

It seems a lot of people don't know where the Commodore launch of Fred Booker's Adventures in Debt Collection is going to be. So here's the PSA I got from West Coast Line:

Join us in launching and celebrating Fred Booker's Adventures in Debt
Collection, the inaugural edition from Commodore Books. Books will be
available for sale and the author will read and sign copies.

Thursday 9 November 2006
The Brickhouse
730 Main Street (@ Union Street)
Vancouver
8PM

Access to a secure parking lot is available on Georgia Street; when you
arrive, ask the hostess for the lot code. Free street parking is available
on Union Street after 8PM.

The introduction of Commodore Books marks a historical turn in black
cultural production in Western Canada. While Canada has had black-owned book
publishers before -- most significantly, Williams-Wallace and SisterVision
-- there has never existed a publishing house operating under the control of
a black editorial collective west of Ontario -- until now.

Our name recalls the paddle steamer The Commodore, which transported
thirty-five black migrants from San Francisco to Victoria in 1858, during
the Gold Rush. This small pioneer committee became the nucleus of British
Columbia's first black community.

Why stop now?

2006-11-03T11:24:00.000-07:00

In other recent adventures:

A trip to Victoria, Mom in tow, to do a talk for the Provost's office at UVic on race, gender, community work and writing. Performed with Ashok Mathur. We seem to be a regular dog and pony show these days. There is a small, but very attentive community of writers and thinkers there who really care about this stuff.

The next day, off to Toronto with David Chariandy for a conference on Dionne Brand. Wish I could parse some of the marvellous thinking I heard-- shoulda blogged it sooner. What was really great was to see so many committed thinkers, writers, activists and artists in the room some of whom I haven't seen in a decade. The way Dionne's work-- from the poetry to the NFB films to the novels-- have moved and shaped people's lives, is amazing, and it was really inspiring to see these many things taken up from so many quarters.

Last week, back in Vancouver, helped Brett Josef Grubisic celebrate the launch of his first novel The Age of Cities, which is the story of manuscript found in a hollowed out home economics textbook from the 1950s, concerning a young librarian's discovery of gay subculture in the city.

This Wednesday, went to the Freddy Wood Theatre at UBC to hear Slavoj Zizek speaking about fear, terror, biotechnology, the troubling universality of capital and action/inaction in the current political moment. He ended on an odd note, suggesting that sometimes we need to do nothing as a way of resisting capital and war. That these things depend on our constant reaction. Much disgruntlement from the crowd on this-- some due to misunderstanding. He wasn't saying: don't ever act; but rather, just stop and think. (Quoted Lenin: learn, learn, learn.) There was something oddly zen about the move. I'm all about thinking, choosing one's battles, and judicious timing, but it seemed a strange place to end. Mulling still.

Other cool stuff in the past bit: A KSW reading by Hun Q. Tu and Reg Johanssen, The Parade of Lost Souls, and the Oddballs Hallowe'en Dance at the Wise Hall, where a very disturbing ghost of Jon Benet won the prize for creepiest costume.

This afternoon, I'm off to speak with Betsy Warland at a roundtable for the SFU Grad Conference, Sexing the Text.

Don't forget, next Wednesday Arjun Appadurai is speaking at UBC. Also, that's the night of the launch for the first Commodore book, Fred Booker's Adventures in Debt Collection.

Future 'Couv

2006-11-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

The interview with Eric Rankin for the Think Vancouver series on CBC was lots of fun. Got to give my whimsical conjecture on the future of the city. They did lots of fun graphic inserts of a future Vancouver in which Bladerunner/Metropolis-esque flying vehicles swoop in and through the skyscrapers.

Here's a snip of my vision:

May be it will be like Sao Paolo, where the rich never touch the ground but fly from rooftop to rooftop (thanks Sabine, for that one!)-- while on the ground, there is nothing but squalor. People will continue to fight for safe injection sites, but those with power will never have to see it. They'll go to their own private clinics to avoid the madness and road rage, and get fresh organs from the countless traffic accidents and not-so-accidents happening in the pumped up, drugged up streets below Those who can't afford housing will, as in Timothy Taylor's vision, move into Stanley Park, and foment revolution in the old growth. While all the undocumented labourers who can't get in, will band their rusty ships together in a Neal Stephenson-esque Raft. A drug will be invented that allows the Stanley Park people and the Raft people to communicate, and to change their outer landscapes instead of their inner ones...

watch "canada now" now

2006-10-16T18:33:00.000-06:00

i'm on it! if you're in bc, that is. i'm supposed be on today sometime after the 6 o'clock news, talking about the future of vancouver. (cbc, channel 3) hopefully i don't say anything too dumb, so i don't live to regret this post.

lots of adventures lately, more soon.

lamaspamarama

2006-10-04T12:11:00.000-06:00

my friend glen lowry, who has just moved over from coquitlam college to emily carr institute of art and design (yay, glen!) and is doing many great things there, recently turned me on to the work of brian lamb:
abject learning
surfing that site, i found this:
futurenatural

there is cool stuff out there!

while i'm on the subject of one of the great movers and shakers (glen lowry) at west coast line, i should mention that i ran into another-- michael barnholden-- at the thakore event two nights ago. mike told me that west coast line books has just sent its first four books, from four important vancouver writers-- reg johansson, roger farr, natalie simpson and garry morse-- to press.

also recently released is the first commodore book, a book of short fiction by fred booker called adventures in debt collection. (how many books can you fit in a single sentence?) commodore is a project of three quiet but brilliant people-- wayde compton, karina vernon and david chariandy-- who are deeply committed to black history in the western canada. congratulations you guys! i'm buying you each a megaphone.

and now for a complete non-sequitur: has anybody out there noticed how terrible peaches are this year? you buy them, they look good, and then they are all pulpy inside. i have a thing about pulpy fruit-- it brings on total puke reflex, worse than rotten meat, or rodents or any number of unpleasant things i could name. how do they get like that? why do i find it so repellant? there must be a good psychoanalytic explanation.

war and peace

2006-10-03T12:56:00.000-06:00

Went to Ghandi birthday celebrations last night at SFU, sponsored by the Institute of the Humanities, SFU; the Thakore Charitable Foundation; and India Club, Vancouver on the invite of Roy Miki, who is this year's recipient of the Thakore Peace Award. Congratulations, Roy! Wow, the accolades are piling up. Your friends and colleauges are very proud of you. There was lots of action-- dances, speeches, an array of hosts and MCs from across the generations. Roy spoke beautifully on his work with the Japanese Canadian Redress movement, and showed a few photos including a hilarious (but touching) one of him and his family posing with John Turner when Turner passed through their riding during his 1984 election campaign. Roy saw the campaign bus go through and ran to the street with family and camera to lobby Turner to support Redress.

It seems unbloggish to give a a blow by blow of the talk, but for me, the really chewable kernal was a remark to the effect of: Obstacles can intensify the power of a movement. May be Roy will publish the whole text. It was great to see his wife Slavia, who so seldom comes to events.

In other news, there was a shooting near Rita's apartment in Miami this week. She sent a newspaper article that sounds like an episode of CSI.

I just dropped off a form in the English Department offices with my teaching preferences for next fall. Already! Interested parties, I'll keep you posted.

lama spama

2006-09-27T12:09:00.000-06:00

my friend susanda just sent a quite lovely mantra that is supposed to have originated with the dalai lama. it's a sort of general guidelines for life that made sense to me in a gentle sort of way. so i passed it on to a few people i care about, not even kinda-sorta everyone, but just the ones who i was fairly sure would like it, or be amused by it. i'm not in the habit of mass email (well, except for that big change-of-address one i did the day before yesterday which was most protestantly pragmatic.) anyway, i felt weird about it afterwards because it's still spam. not that i haven't been appreciating those very thrilling body enhancement ones from the likes guevera p. revolution (poor che, how you've been used.) what do you think? do you believe in mass email? under what circumstances? i used to, for instance, always sign and pass on petitions, but now i find them so annoying. and it seems others do too, because i've seen fewer of them.

this moment in life has given me much opportunity to visit both my angels and my demons (holy! it seems i haven't escaped a judeo-christian upbringing in spite of all my parents' best efforts!) if you can use spam to help yourself and others, shouldn't you?

the controversial roy miki

2006-09-26T12:10:00.000-06:00

Wow, some great things are happening for my peeps these days! Roy Miki has just been awarded the Sterling Prize for Controversy. Congratulations, Roy!

There's a celebratory event on October 11, details below:

The Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of
CONTROVERSY

In 1993 Nora and Ted Sterling established a prize at Simon Fraser University to honor "work which challenges complacency and that provokes controversy or contributes to its understanding."

Please join us for presentation of the 2006
Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy
to

Roy Miki

Recognizing his long pursuit of justice and fairness in seeking redress for the wrongs inflicted upon Canadians of Japanese descent during the Second World War. A professor of English at Simon Fraser University and winner of the 2002 Governor-General's award for poetry, Dr. Miki will read from, and discuss, his work.

Transformations: The language of redress

Wednesday, October 11, 7 pm
Reception follows
SFU Vancouver
Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
580 West Hastings Street (enter from Seymour St. courtyard)

Sponsored by the Vice-president, Academic.
Information: www.sfu.ca/sterlingprize.
This event is free but reservations are required:
call 604.291.5100 or email cs_hc@sfu.ca.

new sfu writer-in-residence

2006-09-26T11:18:00.000-06:00

Fred Wah comes in this month as the new writer-in-residence at SFU. Congratulations, Fred! He'll be available weekly for consultations.

There's a special reception for him on Wednesday:

Special Reception for Fred Wah - September 27th

The reception will feature a welcome by President Michael Stevenson, followed by a reading by Fred Wah. It is open to all members of the Simon Fraser University community as well as the Vancouver arts community.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Harbour Centre, Simon Fraser University
515 West Hastings Street at Seymour
7:30 - 9:30 pm
Please RSVP by September 25 at:
E: cs_hc@sfu.ca

More info:
SFU Writer-in-Residence

unboxing shadows

2006-09-26T10:26:00.000-06:00

My friend, the extraordinarily talented artist Cindy Mochizuki, has just finished her MFA from the Fine Arts Department at SFU. Her graduation project is called Kanashibari Shadow Archive. It includes little snippets of interviews with family members who were interned by the Canadian Government during WWII, racist cartoons, evidence of the confiscation of property and the artist's own quirky animated responses. This website is part of a larger installation that can currently be viewed at

Bartlett Exhibition and Performance Space
611 Alexander Street, Third Floor
Vancouver
September 21-26, 2006
11am -5pm

Check out the online part here:
kanashibari shadow archive

travelling the interior

2006-09-23T12:07:00.000-06:00

Just back from a working road trip through the interior with Roy Miki, Ashok Mathur and Ashok's dad, Parshottam Mathur. Roy and I were the very first readers ever at CiCACs-- Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada, which is Ashok's major project for the Canada Research Chair he currently holds at Thompson Rivers University (aka TRU, which for some reason I always want to call TRL...) Small but very engaged audience. Long, interesting conversation aboutt he politics of form. (Much slagging of the novel-- poor novel, I still love you, in spite of your fascist tendencies.) I had a chat afterwards with a bright student called Natasha, who was just finishing her BA, and trying to decide whether to pursue graduate work or to go into Education and teach elementary school for awhile. Her heart was so clearly with the work with young people that the answer seemed obvious. But it is a struggle, and one I remember as quite agonizing. But now it seems to clear to me. Feed the heart or you will lose it and become a robot like Jason Christie... ;-)

Drove through the old TB Sanitorium (which looked strangely like private school grounds and made me think of Hailsham in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go), then dropped Roy at the teeny tiny Kamloops Airport.

Next morning, breakfast at Hello Toast! and a visit to the Kamloops Art Gallery to view the extraordinary work of a young ceramist (Ashok insists it is "ceramist" and not "ceramicist"-- still sounds strange to me-- I think I need to poll a few practitioners and see what they prefer) called Brendan Tang. Photos included here.

Then on to the exciting metropolitan centre of Kelowna. Lovely dinner and some nice Okanagan wine with hosts Nancy Holmes and Anne Fleming. Afterwards, Ashok and I read at UBC-O. Nancy gave a very thoughtful intro, borrowing from my "Political Animals" essay in the Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose. Ashok and I decided, at the last minute, to experiment with reading form, and went up together, reading snippets from our work in a sort of pass-the-hot-potato kind of way. It was fun to do. We've known each other so long, and been engaged in parallel communities for so long, that somehow in between the banter a sort of history got articulated.

Next morning Ashok, Parshottam and I paid a visit to the ornate, faux-Italianate vinyard Mission Hill, where we had a little breakfast tasting, and bought a few bottles. Here's a pic from that. Happy Birthday, Ashoky.

butterfly dreaming

2006-09-17T11:15:00.000-06:00

Went to see David Khang’s performance “Mediamorphosis” at The Western Front last night. Publicity materials talk about the transformation of experience through mediatization. (Hello Blogger!) The artist performs under a mosquito net, behind a screen with an array of monitors positioned in front of it. There is a camera in the mosquito net room so we can “see” what he is doing. He is wrapped in a swath of white cloth, looking monk-like, tending to a case of monarch chysalides and butterflies. At different moments the monitors and screen display both real time and pre-recorded video of the artist piercing his tongue with a needle, binding an enormous tongue (beef?-- probably its origin isn't nearly as important as its size and fleshiness. yum! uh...) that hangs out of his mouth to the rest of his body, a brushstroke circle at the moment of closure, live monarch butterflies discovered inside a hole in a book and tethered to the inside of the book by long black threads, human teeth embedded in flesh (tongue) that pulsates as though there are lungs beneath it, breathing. In another video segment, the artist slits the giant tongue open, inserts a calligraphy brush into the slit and sutures it shut. With the ink-soaked tongue he paints/writes on a giant piece of paper spread across the floor.

Mediatized yes, but there is so much more going on than that. There is a visceral recognition of the violence in closing the gap between media and experience—the brush in the tongue suggests a kind of hope for closing the gap between speech and writing, but the horror of such an act is palpable. There is a strange visual equation of the chrysalides (32 butterflies) with teeth (32 in a normal mouth). What if our teeth held pupae that could transform into something winged and lively? At the end of the performance, Khang wraps himself completely with the white cloth, and is strung up by his feet—a chrysalis containing a man (dreaming he is a butterfly?) The poetic circle is completed—- perhaps our teeth contain little homuncular versions of ourselves, sleeping, waiting to emerge.

In other news, here’s details on the talk Ashok Mathur and I are doing in Kelowna:

September 21, 7:30 pm
Art 103
UBC Okanagan
3333 University Way
Kelowna

We’ll read a little, and talk about our practices and concerns. The event is sponsored by the Canada Council and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC-O as part of a series called The Lake.

Tobogganing the Okanagan

2006-09-15T14:38:00.000-06:00

Or speaking there at least. Wednesday September 20 at the Centre for Innovation in Cultural and the Arts at Thompson Rivers University, with Roy Miki, and on September 21 at UBC-O in Kelowna, with Ashok Mathur.

Ashok hosts Roy and I at TRU and sends these details:

Renovations at the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada (CiCAC) are now complete, and to mark this occasion we are hosting two writers on Wednesday, Sept. 20th. Larissa Lai and Roy Miki are both poets, novelists, and critical theorists, and they will be reading from their recent work at this unofficial inaugural CiCAC event. We will have an official launch of the Centre later in the year.

The event is free and open to everyone.

3:30 pm
Wednesday, Sept 20
@ the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada (CiCAC)
Old Main 1487, TRU

Readings by Larissa Lai and Roy Miki

fruit chips, electronic blips

2006-09-15T13:42:00.000-06:00

There was an interview on CBC Radio this morning with the infamous impresario Malcolm McLaren who manufactured one of Britain's earliest boy bands, The Sex Pistols. (I guess you could argue that The Beatles were a manufactured boy band... May be it goes back even further than that. Rock geeks out there?) His latest project is a Beijing-based girl band called the Wild Strawberries, who premiered in Florence last month performing a punked-out version of Hendrix's Foxy Lady, with sounds borrowed from old Gameboys and other early electronic games, an addition which McLaren claims has spawned a new genre called "chip music." Much talk about the innocence and naivite of Chinese punk culture, as a pale imitation of a much hipper late 70s early 80s British version. Grrr. What if it is just different? Then again, may be that's just a handy, irritating spin in true McLaren style. In a recent interview with The Guardian, he said he preferred working with people to working with inert materials, like Damien Hirst's dead shark. "The only problem is that people don't like being used." Well, that's right. And in the meantime, what about the members of Wild Strawberries? May be they are robots. But robots have feelings too.
Hey, do you remember that moment in the seventies when Hostess put out a range of fruit flavoured potato chips? I remember grape, lime and orange. Was there strawberry too?

Turning Points

2006-09-13T11:28:00.000-06:00

It's my birthday today, and man, do I feel old. Definitely too old to tell you how old. I think I'll go buy myself a copy of Ron Sexsmith's newish album Time Being as a gift to self-- what a great title, given my recent (rather retro) interest in ontology and the multiplicity of time.

Two items arrived in the mail yesterday: a parcel pick-up notice which I'm pretty sure is for the electric toothbrush I bought on E-bay to keep my long teeth clean, and my contributor's copy of Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literatures in English, edited by Smaro Kamboureli. It's put out by Oxford. Does this make me canonical? Ack! What can that mean? I'll spend the day walking on the beach, I think, and pondering my entry into the corridors of power. I guess I'd rather wander the corridors of power than the prison house of language.

Authentic Happiness

2006-09-09T11:06:00.000-06:00

What is authentic happiness? I'm passing up the opportunity to see the Dalai Lama this afternoon, who is in town to open the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. One dear friend of mine, currently visiting from Miami, was suspicious about the claim to authenticity, and in fact, I notice that the PR people have changed some of the original publicity for the talk from "Authentic Happiness" to "Cultivating Happiness." Another friend, while cheerfully mixing a mid-afternoon strawberry daiquiri, said all you need is to be in the presence of the Dalai Lama, and you feel happy. Where does happiness belong? In the head? The body? The heart? Or like the name "Montague" not in any part belonging to a man (or woman)... More at www.dalailama.com.

I think instead I'll go to hear Sabine Bitter and Adriana Kuiper speak as part of the show Architecture and Disaster, now on in the gallery at the Western Front. The show looks at the fetishization of fear and disaster through the built environment.

You see the dilemma though? What if critical practice leads altogether in the wrong direction? Not because it is incorrect, illogical or unethical, but because it engages the wrong parts of the person? Or the wrong conception of how the person is organized? (What if it isn't discrete?)

In other news, a few publications have appeared in the last bit: My short story "I Love Liver: A Romance" just came in The Year's Best Science Fiction. A little slice of "Sybil Unrest" (from the section Rita Wong and I have affectionately, though temporarily, been dubbing "The Empire Strikes Back" or "The Two Towers") came out in The Golden Handcuffs Review, in a poetry section edited by Jacqueline Turner, and in the company of such luminaries as Meredith Quartermain, Peter Quartermain, Jeff Derksen and Steve Collis. Finally, it seems the New York Review of Science Fiction has published a review of When Fox Is a Thousand, which I have yet to see, having let my subscription lapse over the course of the summer's mayhem. Jennifer Stevenson is kindly sending me her copy.

elfin lakes

2006-08-29T12:31:00.000-06:00

up through lush forest, across a red heather meadow, up a mountainside then across a bluff, glaciers and snowcapped mountains all around, howe sound down below. had a splash in the lake, checked out elfin shelter and campground for next time. wow. so beautiful.

david bateman's round number birthday

2006-08-25T18:39:00.000-06:00

the number is very round. ashok hosts cheesy dinner cruise in beautiful english bay. martinis move from mango to dirty, wayne newton croons, betty and wilma are unspeakable. castaways, in order of appearance: ashok mathur, david bateman, hiromi goto, susanda yee, larissa lai

Cheakamus Lake

2006-08-23T21:34:00.000-06:00

Went camping up at Cheakamus Lake last week. Peaceful old growth, icy glacial lake, chatty chipmunks, still quiet night with brilliant stars. And the occasional airplane roaring overhead. Is there any such thing as away?

explosions, beautiful and hideous

2006-08-06T12:33:00.000-06:00

Rita sends this link:

http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/

This war is a horror show. But the idea that ordinary people can use the blog to communicate what is really happening, beyond all the TV and radio bullshit is great.

It's Powell Street Festival and Pride this weekend in Vancouver. All the freaky children are out on the world, connecting, talking, dancing, making art. A few of us had dinner last night at Hapa Izakaya, to celebrate Roy's OOC and to spend time with Monika Gagnon and Scott McFarlane who are in town for a few days at the end of a research trip and teaching stint for the First Nations Studies program at UBC Okanagan. At the end of the night we went up to Ashok's roof to watch the last of the fireworks. Weird how related technologies can be used for such different purposes. We celebrated the festive moment, but we thought of Beirut at the same time.

Big birthday dinner with my grandma tonight. Lots of extended family in town.

Medicins Sans Frontieres

2006-07-30T11:19:00.000-06:00

My sister Wendy has joined MSF and is on her way to the Congo shortly. I'm proud of her! (And just a leeetle worried...)

sir roy

2006-07-30T11:04:00.000-06:00

My good friend Roy Miki has just been appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. Congratulations Roy! You rock!

illuminares

2006-07-30T10:33:00.000-06:00

some pics from my favourite street festival of the year-- community-based, low-tech, magical!

New Vancouver Voices

2006-07-20T13:51:00.000-06:00

New Vancouver Voices:
Simon Fraser Writer-in-Residence Consultees Reading

Come join outgoing Writer-in-Residence Larissa Lai for an inspiring and entertaining evening of readings by a few of the writers who have taken part in the Simon Fraser Writer-in-Residence program this year. Some extraordinary work has crossed her desk. Hear how the city speaks.

The event takes place at SFU Harbour Centre Room 1700 at 7PM, Wednesday, July 26, 2006.

Featuring:
Kit Wong
James Lewis
Colin Stewart
Myka Tucker-Abrams
Naava Smolash
Scott Drake
Christine Lyons
Neale Barnholden
Andrea Actis
Charles Pace
Laura Cardoso
Catherine McNeil

Decolonizing Affect Theory

2006-07-02T13:28:00.000-06:00

Attended Is Affect Multicultural? Decolonizing Affect Theory, a colloquium organized by Sneja Gunew and the Decolonizing Affect Theory Reading Group through the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at UBC last week. A few thoughts in the aftermath: I think it's absolutely necessary that thinking on affect theory be attached to a decolonizing project, as Gunew has done. Otherwise there's a real risk of a return to a kind of apolitical humanism in ways that reinforce all the power structures anti-oppression work of the last few decades has been trying to undo. It strikes me that much of this work tends to focus on the self, and on interpersonal communication. Work like Sara Ahmed's and Jackie Stacey's is important because it opens up the question of the subject and forces us to (continue to) query its construction. I think there is something particularly productive in explorations around mimesis, firstly, yes, because it asks those questions about subject construction, but secondly-- and this is something that needs to be addressed further-- it opens up the opportunity to interrogate mimicry that happens at a collective level. I'd wanted to jump in after Anna Gibbs's discussion of Wong Kar Wai’s film In the Mood for Love, because I think there was room there to talk about a kind of "national love" or a kind of longing for national subjectivity that was still possible in 1962 (the moment the film was set) and that has since been quashed. I'm talking, of course, about the longing for democracy in Hong Kong, a longing that I think comes from complicated interactions between the "local" (Chinese) and the British colonials (who held democracy up as an ideal even as they refused to open that possibility for the (HK) subjects of that empire.) (Of course, the local in HK is not local at all-- most of the Chinese people there are there as a consequence of historical forces that drew them to that region from other parts of China.) Any kind of "national love" in Hong Kong would have to spring from an acceptance of colonial occupation, and an idealization of those nation states to which HK has/had to look to understand itself-- Britain and China. And any mimesis of those collectivities would necessarily have to be troubled and imperfect. It would be really interesting to read the “mood for love” of the Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung characters in relation to a kind of thwarted love for nationhood and democracy. (And a horror of these crass things at the same time, if one were to read the cheating spouses of the film as direct metaphors.) It would be more interesting still to read this love in relation to the mimetic love of the Japanese boyfriend for the robot on the train to the future in Wong’s follow-up film 2046. Hm… there’s a paper… or a chapbook…

Earth: World Urban Festival

2006-06-29T12:57:00.000-06:00

In spite of the madness, I did manage to take in a bit of the World Urban Festival last week, happening in conjunction with the UN World Urban Forum. Lots of great local and international art, all of it political. Info booths on recycling (there's a good one for properly disposing of old electronics: www.TechnoTrashRecycling.com)as well as organics delivery companies, and a display on green roof technology. There were shipping containers converted into mini-galleries. There were concerts and dance performances. We saw the Judith Marcuse company do a very cool piece on race, culture and the environment called Earth=home. We saw the Coup do a fabulous outdoor concert. Particularly liked a video project piece by Margot Butler about bees and the murdered women at the Pickton pig farm; and a piece by Haruko Okano made entirely of found organic materials. Part of the point of this piece is that it will eventually decompose. I'm sure it gives conventional art galleries, with all their assumptions about the eternity of art, a heart attack. There was also a little food fair with much delicious earth-friendly food.

i wish...

2006-06-29T12:53:00.000-06:00

i'm addicted to my car. and i really can't stand driving, especially in this city, which continues to get more and more congested. i know, i know, money where your mouth is...

I'd like to teach the world to sing...

2006-06-29T12:49:00.000-06:00

A piece by the artist Sonny Assu, right at the Earth Festival exit. A pointed reminder, especially having just come back from the Uts'am program last week, where we saw what False Creek was like 150 years ago (all old growth forest.)

Henry Tsang

2006-06-29T12:47:00.000-06:00

Ran into my old friend Henry Tsang, who I used to do cultural organizing stuff with in the early 90s. He was showing part of his project Chinook Jargon at the Earth Festival.

coyotes against capitalism

2006-06-29T12:42:00.000-06:00

These coyote pennants were everywhere. If you found a blank one, you could decorate it and hang it. I think they are part of a project called Co-Existing with Coyotes, aimed at reducing conflict among people, pets and coyotes in the Lower Mainland. Here's a website: www.stanleyparkecology.ca

Uts'am/Witness

2006-06-18T23:27:00.000-06:00

For the last ten years, the Squamish Nation has been organizing a project called Uts'am/Witness through the Roundhouse Community Centre in downtown Vancouver. They bring people up to the old growth forest at Sims Creek and the Elaho Valley to witness the extraordinary spirit and energy of the land here as it has existed for thousands of years. When the logging companies wanted to log it a few years ago, saying no one would notice because no one cared about the land, the Squamish called back all the people who had taken part in the Witness Program up 'til that point, to testify. They called a meeting and invited the logging company. The testemonials went on for hours. Now, the forest has been saved, which is why this is the last year of the project. Rita Wong, Lily Shinde and I went up this weekend. It was an extraordinary experience to be able to take part, for which I am inexpressibly grateful. I thank the Squamish Nation, the Roundhouse organizers, Chief Telalsemkin/Bill Williams and the beautiful land itself for this amazing opportunity.

rita and lily at the base of the twin firs

2006-06-18T23:21:00.000-06:00

on the first day, we hiked up a very steep bit of mountainside to these enormous twin fir trees. our guides told us they were around 500-600 years old. the energy in this place is extraordinary. it's pristine old growth, a full functioning ancient ecosystem. one of the most spiritual places i've ever been to. the squamish nation has recently secured its preservation.

rita and lily picnicking

2006-06-18T23:12:00.000-06:00

omg, did we every eat a lot-- satays and fried wontons leftover from the colloquium reception, cheese, bread, soup, green salad, pasta salad, watermelon, sausages, cashews, chips, pineapple, avocado, kim bap, korean salads (daikon, beansprout, spinach, chocolate, millet flakes, granola, raisins, apricots, hemp seed, flax seed, cucumber. everyone envied our food. other major consumable-- insect repellant. yes, there were lots of mosquitoes. very upsetting to the wong.

family life

2006-06-18T23:07:00.000-06:00

we ended up camping next to a family consisting of three couples and nine kids. so much energy, so much hope-- a real reminder of what it is important to preserve this environment for. yes, they were cute. yes, they were noisy. i loved the energy and i occasionally wished we'd camped a little further down the riverbank.

rick

2006-06-18T23:03:00.000-06:00

it's amazing how the people who do this work glow. rick is one of the volunteers who organizes the uts'am/witness program through the roundhouse. he is also the second man i've met this year who has slept in a tree to prevent a forest from being logged.

the wong and i

2006-06-18T22:58:00.000-06:00

at the threshold of the place of transformation. rick says one must not enter this place without undergoing the proper initiations and ceremonies.

peaches falls

2006-06-18T22:53:00.000-06:00

i can't quite believe this is a real place. it is. rita, lily and i were there.

me and audrey

2006-06-18T22:48:00.000-06:00

i met the most magical little girl. she can climb a mountain faster and more efficiently than any adult i have ever met, and besides that exudes an energy and a joyfulness that i hope to be able to achieve some time before my 80th birthday. (sorry to/about the dude in the background. but this photo is important.)

waterfall

2006-06-18T22:45:00.000-06:00

one extraordinary moment among many

2006-06-18T22:26:00.000-06:00

marie annharte baker laughing mischievously. she was talking about the murders of downtown eastside women. i'm amazed by her ability to laugh in the face of the most horrific events and situations. it's laughter that draws us in, forces us to see, doesn't let us off the hook, pushes us to do something. it is a joyful refusal of the horror and a seeing and condemning of the horror at the same time.
heartfelt thanks to roy miki, sophie mccall, steve collis, david chariandy and jeff derksen for organizing the colloquium and the whole sfu writer-in-residence program. it's been an amazing experience meeting writers, students and member of the public through a variety of events-- classroom visits, public talks and one-on-one meetings. there is amazing work happening here and i'm happy and grateful to have had a chance to take part.

little bite

2006-06-18T22:03:00.000-06:00

the last few days have felt a bit like riding a horse i can barely control, galloping at full speed. the colloquium went well, i think. a bit hard to judge my own performance, but i thoroughly enjoyed the talks and readings afterwards. fiona jeffries speaking on the politics of fear and women's resistence in guatamala was inspiring for its down-in-the-trenches materiality and for extraordinary stories of bravery and commitment. jeff derksen-- great for his confidence that neoliberalism is fading and that we have every reason to be optimistic that it can't sustain itself. i'm really sad that shirley bear and her partner peter are moving back to new brunswick. shirley began her talk in maliseet, and then spoke about the importance of language, particularly how shameful it is that so few us of speak the any of the native languages of this land. it was a shake-up to recognize the pressure we put on the learning of english and french, but not that of the first peoples. or our own mother tongues, for those of us (and we are many) who have had them squished out of us). she also brought to the table stories from the 1993 cultural gathering it's a cultural thing and the subsequent collapse of ANNPAC, which was great to hear because it brought back that important cultural moment, that in many ways has never been resolved. it was also really fantastic to hear candice hopkins talking about the the lubicon lake cree protests against the 1988 glenbow museuam exhibit the spirit sings to demand a recognition of living native cultures and not just their artefactual history, as though those cultures were already gone. lots of engaged discussion afterwards. and in the evening, amazing readings by rita wong, weyman chan, marie annharte baker and wayde compton. may be glen lowry will put up podcasts.

June 16 Colloquium: The Crisis of the Political

2006-06-14T11:13:00.000-06:00

The Crisis of the Political: Movements, Culture, Agency
A Colloquium in Celebration of
Larissa Lai’s Writer in Residency at Simon Fraser University

Friday June 16th, SFU Harbour Centre, room 1700

1-4pm: Presentations and panel discussion with:

LARISSA LAI, RITA WONG, FIONA JEFFRIES, JEFF DERKSEN,
SHIRLEY BEAR & CANDICE HOPKINS
moderated by GLEN LOWRY

7:30-9:30pm: Readings by:

WAYDE COMPTON, RITA WONG, WEYMAN CHAN & MARIE
ANNHARTE BAKER

The purpose of this colloquium is to trace the connections, linear or
otherwise, from the late 80s and early 90s oppositional/anti-racist
movements to the current moment. Racism still exists; control
and surveillance of human, animal, vegetable and mineral bodies
have intensified. The nation state has shifted, capital has intensified
and the power of militaries has increased while the justifications for
war have become increasingly absurd. How is it possible to produce
culture in such conditions? How should cultural workers respond? How
can we generate resistance in excess of mere response? How can we
shape our refusals? What do we do with our complicities? Is it still
possible for us to say “I”? What can community mean?

Reception to follow the evening readings, 9:45-midnight
Snacks and no host bar
The Wild Ginger Restaurant
88 Pender St West (at Abbott)
Second floor of Tinseltown Mall (unit 2015).
Space is limited to 50 guests,. Please RSVP to Simon Fraser University,
Harbour Centre, at cs_hc@sfu.ca or phone 604-291-5100
(fax 604-291-5098) by June 14.

doctor larissa

2006-06-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

so i crossed the bridge. passed the oral defense last week and now you have to call me doctor. there were two rounds of questions from five examiners over two hours. lots of good stuff on the table-- the extra-legal subject, exceptional killings, derridean hauntology, diaspora, homeland, humanism, carnival, modernity, revolution, subalterity, capital, difference, history, liberation, linearity, reception, the Middle Passage, eyes, class, autobiography, pedagogy. wow. i was wrecked by the end. it was great being greeted in the grad lounge by many calgary friends, waiting patiently, beer in hand, for the best possible outcome. much champagne. afterwards, a party at the pink house on 12th st. sorry i fell asleep before midnight. the pumpkin carriage arrived early.

seeing i2i

2006-05-25T14:10:00.000-06:00

i'm at the banff centre. i have a beautiful studio in the middle of the forest, with windows all around. it's so peaceful and quiet. friends and colleagues-- sita rajkummar, melina baum singer, ken singer, and lily cho-- are here for an installment of i2i, a project ashok mathur is running through his crc at thompson rivers university in kamploops. trying to write poetry, which is not a luxury, though it sometimes feels like it.

my friend leila sujir is also here working on this amazing 3D video installation about venice, trade routes, and globalization. i've just come from a studio visit. it's amazing on so many levels-- where the technology is at and how she is thinking about space, motion, and politics. baco ohama is here too, but i haven't caught up with her yet.

madcap drive across the rockies yesterday. i had sfu residency stuff on tuesday, so had only one day to do the roadtrip. i started at 6 am. sick! wildlife spotted by the side of the road: 1 coyote, 2 deer, 3 mountain goats, a young elk. stopped in the middle somewhere for walk beside a still, peaceful lake.

feeling more open again, finally. soaking up ideas, energies. nice to be in this, especially after the panic on tuesday of my committee's copies of the diss going missing somewhere in the university of calgary internal mail system.

read! participate!

2006-05-20T15:23:00.000-06:00

So one of the really cool things I get to do as part of my Writer-in-Residency at SFU is see some of the newest work getting produced in my beautiful city. Those of you have come to see me: Thank-you for sharing your work. I'm amazed by much of the stuff I've seen, and it's really great seeing work grow and change, and know I've had a hand in it.

I'm organizing a reading to celebrate this work. It will be on the evening of June 29, 2006, location TBA. Unfortunately, I don't have everyone's email. So, if you've come to see me for feedback anytime since I started, and would like to read on that evening, please do drop me a note, or leave a message for me through Linda Elliot in the English Department main office. Participate! It will be fun. Or for those of you who respond better to guilt: You owe it to your communities.

coming up for air

2006-05-19T23:29:00.000-06:00

thanks for the well wishes folks. but it's not over yet-- still have to defend!

it's been a deep sea adventure. didn't realize i was drowning. that's what you get for being part fish. but now i've had a few days to breathe air, which is sometimes good and sometimes confusing.

cool moments in the past week or so:
chris ewart's book launch at ubc robson square bookstore, with adrian kelly. lots of friends and family were there and chris sold all his books. congratulations mr. e! hope he is enjoying his giant bubble maker and electric pigeon. there were many calgary folk. drinks afterwards had this distinctly grad lounge-ish feeling.

cousin visiting from boston/hk. wow, i have all these cousins here. it is wonderful, and strange. didn't really grow up with cousins. we went to stanley park, bridges for dinner, a little sunset walk at sunset beach, a stroll down robson.

today-- ikea run. the apartment is still a shambles, but getting better. this afternoon, interesting talks at the _decolonizing affect theory_ group meetings organized by sneja gunew at ubc. jackie stacey talked about the re-biologization of the body in michael winterbottom's _code 46_. kirsten mcallister talked about the ethics of applying theory from colonial/imperialist centres to local experience, specifically japanese canadian internment. it was good to think about other people's work for a change.

next week, i'm off to the banff centre to take part in _babel, babble, rabble_. or a bit of it anyway. the residency is all about language as art object. at least as far as i can tell from where i'm sitting. i think i might try to work on a second installment of _nascent fashion_. still looking forward to seeing the chapbook ryan fitzpatrick did, with travis murphy's cover. i'm awake now! presents please! after the residency, i'll be in cowtown, quietly freaking out until the day of the defense.

nalo hopkinson just sent her new book _the new moon's arms_ off to her publisher. congratulations nalo!

off to see the wizard

2006-05-16T00:15:00.000-06:00

singing *ding dong the diss is done, the evil diss is done!* just back from kinko's, where i made copies for all my examiners. can't quite believe it, someone smack me.

sea stars, anemones

2006-05-06T15:27:00.000-06:00

time makes a rocky island. all the tide things live there, washed by salt water, mist, occasional sun. the island changes us. we aren't the creatures we were when we arrived. the water outside calls to the water inside: move, don't stop. water doesn't stop until the moon does. take the leap. keep leaping until flight feels more familiar than walking.

primal states

2006-05-02T15:20:00.000-06:00

Wow. I now have a new address in a swanky neighbourhood on Vancouver's West Side. I feel like I've moved to a different city. I believe, I believe. I believe all chaos can be resolved.

The house that lack built

2006-04-18T15:49:00.000-06:00

Thanks for all the well wishes, folks! I am excited, even if it's hard to remember that in this time of too-much-to-do.

Good news in the kingdom-- Chris Ewart just celebrated the launch of _Miss Lamp_ in Toronto! A couple more parties to go, I believe. And Jordan Scott has been nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award! Pretty cool, what?

Waiting for the second mover's quote to come in. Man, all this shuffling around of one's person and belongings is stressful. The house in the back is nearly finished and so am I.

Mostly I've been working and fretting, but there have been a few pleasant adventures in the last couple of weeks. A Seder with my roommates and a couple of friends, dinner at Showcase (a fancy restaurant where Kevin's girlfriend Evangelene works), Easter dinners with Ashok, Rita and Hiromi on two consecutive nights.

Eleanor Ty and Christl Verdun have accepted a paper of mine, "Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects and Marketing the Nation," for their book _Beyond Autoethnography_. I'm pretty thrilled about that.

Rereading my Foucault (The History of Sexuality)to ground the intro to my diss.

the lacuna in the lagoon

2006-04-07T14:26:00.000-06:00

There's a few reasons for all the holes in this blog lately. It's not because the blog is cheese. (Although it may well be cheese. May be it wants to be cheese, like Jason Christie's Cheese Blog.)
I have news: I got a job. As a Canadian Literature prof in the English Department at UBC. That's right, folks, my itinerant days appear to be over. This situation has done for me what arranged marriages used to do for women in feudal China... Tied me down and committed me to a house. I have a one-year postdoc first,at the same institution, and then in July 2007 I'll start teaching. Really looking forward to sharing thinking and resources with all those who come my way, but especially you contemporary poetics, fantastic fiction, anti-racist, queer, trans, feminist, theoryhead and/or anti-globalization folk, if you care to come looking for me.
More news: I'm moving again, next month, to the West side. Talk about class mobility. I'm also trying to finish up my dissertation and defend it in short order because that needs to happen yesterday for all of this to work.
So needless to say, I am also one very busy, stressed out bunny. If I owe you an email, a coffee, a paper or a phone call, I beg your kind patience. I am in a strange kind of survival mode where all action must necessarily be pared down to the basics. Except in those catatonic moments when even basic motion is not possible. Diving down again. See you when this breath runs out.

Dub Poets Collective Reading

2006-03-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

Toronto friends-- if any of you are free this Friday, I'm reading for the Dub Poets Collective Reading Series. Super excited about it. And I owe apologies pretty much across the board for not telling anyone about this trip or making plans to visit you. What a jerk I am. I miss my Toronto friends! But the rollercoaster these last couple of months has been seriously serious.

Here's the blurb:

Dub Poets Collective Reading Series: Culture Dubbing
presents

Larissa Lai
Larissa Lai was born in 1967 in California, grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, and has lived in Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a B.A. (hon.) in sociology in 1990. In 2001 she completed an M.A. in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in many literary journals. She is also an accomplished editor and curator. Lai is currently working on a Ph.D. in English at the University of Calgary. Published works include When Fox is a Thousand (1995) and Salt Fish Girl (2002).

Sandra Alland
Sandra Alland is a poet on the rise frequently seen on stage at a wide variety of Toronto events. Her poetry has appeared in the anthologies The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War (three squares press), Resist! (Fernwood), Fifteen Minutes (13th Tiger Press), Aware in This (Flow Sundays), Primitive Bubble And (Proper Tales Press) and The Big-Eyed Love Child of the Instant Anthology.

Leviathan
L.E.V.I.A.T.H.A.N. is born and raised in Toronto and is politically, socially and emotionally motivated.
His first CD entitled (Enlightening with Lightening), was nominated for a UMAC Award for Spoken Word Recording of 2005.
L.E.V.I.A.T.H.A.N. is currently working on his Runnin':- The Survival Series Double Album. He is also planning a tour in the United States, Europe, and is penning a science fiction novel.

Where: Dub Poets Collective, 805 St. Clair Ave W, 2nd Floor, Toronto
(between Arlington and Winona)
When: Friday March 24, 2006 at 6:30 p.m.
Door: Suggested $5.00

Contact: Klyde Broox, 416.598.4932 or info@dubpoetscollective.com

Supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council

gratitude

2006-03-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

Big huge thank-yous to Roy Miki, David Chariandy and Sophie McCall for making Friday's reading such a great experience. Your tireless commitment to the residency and to the community are amazing. And I am so grateful for your faith in me. Thanks also to Glen Lowry for his smart and insightful interview questions. And to Eileen Kage for her seamless, competent tech work, and to Laura McDonald for running the front of house. Sometimes I am utterly awed by my own good fortune, to be in the company and community of so many amazing people. There were many thinkers and makers in the audience as well, some of whom I've known and respected for years, and other whose young, bright energy and intelligence really makes me excited about the future. Enjoyed sharing my work. It was strange though, to talk about oneself for such a long time. I'd like to organize something soon that is a gathering of people among whose work there are conversations with my work and with one another's work. I am still amazed by what the city has become in the years that I've been away. How some, though sadly not all, of the (good)dreams of the anti-racist movements are coming true.

you're invited

2006-03-09T16:58:00.000-07:00

For those of you who did not receive this six hundred times in your inbox, here's the details on tomorrow's gig. Do come! I'm going to make an attempt to trace the trajectory of my writing practice from the in-your-face early 90s, through the two novels, to the chapbook sewing, crazy collaborating present. I'm hoping it will also read as a history of (some) Vancouver/Calgary/international cultural communities. This is as autobiographical as it gets before I jump off the spaceship and become a fully artificial life form.

Here's the goods:

A Public Reading

Larissa Lai

Writer in Residence

English Department, SFU

Friday March 10, 7 pm

The Western Front

303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver

Free Admission

The evening will feature a reading by Larissa Lai and
interview with Glen Lowry, editor of West Coast Line

Reception to follow

About Larissa Lai
Larissa Lai's first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, was
short-listed for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel
Award, and has recently been republished by Arsenal Pulp
Press. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl, about an ageless
female character who shifts shape and form through time and
place, was shortlisted for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell
Book Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and The Sunburst
Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She has also
published short stories, critical articles, and poetry. She
is an accomplished editor and curator, and she is currently
completing a doctorate in literature at the University of
Calgary. In 2005, Lai's work was the subject of a special
issue of West Coast Line, an established periodical on
literature and art. For Writers Larissa Lai will be
available for consultation at Simon Fraser University from
January to June, 2006. To contact her call the Department of
English at
604-291-3136. For information on the Writer-in-Residence
Program, please consult the Department of English website.

Sponsored by the Writer-in-Residence Program with funding
assistance from the Office of the President and the Dean of
Arts, Simon Fraser University.