The Art of Compost

A day after the national and global Hands Off protests – we were maybe 300 in Toronto – all the honks & waves & shouts in support were especially gratifying – I got round to writing these love letters. Dear Meta, I am writing to inform you that I have revised my retirement plans to eliminate all Meta assets from my portfolio. I am also winding down my use of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp…

Sent this off the other day. I encourage my fellow Columbians to do likewise. Dear President Armstrong, I am writing to express my disappointment and anger that my alma mater has capitulated to the bullying and coercion of the Trump Administration. I understand how worrisome a threat to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding must be. I recognize how complex and contested issues of…

The book I started work on in November has become two! The first, Horsetail Rhizome, starts in Sumer & ends with Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second, Occam’s Aftershave – for which I just drafted the text below – picks up where Horsetail leaves off & reaches into a future of quantum-genomic computing long after the Singularity. I first met the polyvagal model of the autonomic nervous system (ANS)…

I am, as so many are, shocked, appalled, frightened, dismayed by the re-election this week of a convicted felon & rapist who views the Presidency of the United States as his own private fiefdom. I’ve also been grappling again with Pound & his legacy. This wrote itself last night, for a book of prose I’ve started to build, on the theme of fascism, & complicity, & refusal of same. Dove sta…

and read to their unsuspecting admirers. Because troubadours gotta trouve. I’m excited for this tour with Jim Johnstone & Klara du Plessis: Montreal QC ~ 7pm on 17 Oct. @ Drawn & Quarterly Halifax NS ~ 7pm on 19 Oct. @ Wilson Common Room, U. of King’s College LaHave NS ~ 4pm on 20 Oct. @ LaHave River Books Kentville NS ~ 7pm on 21 Oct. as part of the Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose Moncton NB ~…

Soon I begin teaching a course in the Book and Media Studies Program at Saint Michael’s College in Toronto called The History of Reading: Readers, Readerships, Reception. I am pumped. Here’s the course description – for your reading pleasure. Reading has never been only one thing. Consider some of the ways you read on any given day. You likely scan your social media feeds a number of times. You…

Though I don't believe AI will ever be truly I ...

This one is a prospective translation of a Sumerian myth that recounts the journey of the goddess Inanna to the underworld and back. It gives the role of hero to Apple’s voice-activated AI assistant, imagining she has crossed a singularity, become self-aware, & undertaken – her first act of sentience! – to tell how she came to be. Improbable? Consider that SIRI is just IRIS turned back on…

A visual poetry project I've gotten back to work on.

My father died in the summer of 2021 after a long decline that saw his mind fall away piece by piece. It was awful to be part of & also tender. His guarded philosopher heart lost some of its armour in those last months, and he was able, as his being came to a close, to say & show more brightly how he loved us, who loved him. I learned walking from my father. One of our weekends with him, I was…

Curator as author as curator

While on leave from my program at the University of Toronto, I’m taking a course at the Node Center called the International Curator Program. Enjoying it very much. The first assignment in our first module (Key Moments in the History of Curating): Choose an exhibition from your country (either birth or residence) that you consider expresses the notion of curator-as-author in the spirit of…

A Mostly Empty Interpretive Wonderland: Reading Robert Grenier’s Sentences

Adapted from a talk I gave in January 2021 at the graduate student colloquium of the Book History and Print Culture Colloquium (University of Toronto). The colloquium, held online, was called “The Book Out of Order: Structure, Inversion, Dissent.” Sources Web version of Robert Grenier’s Sentences (Whale Cloth Press). Images of the physical book (Granary Books). Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of…

A thing is the book of itself

A book offered to the eye alone is reduced to what it has in common with a painting. To meet a book on its own terms, you have to touch it, hold it, turn its pages. And yet the more a book is handled the faster it breaks down. That’s fine for a mass market paperback on your shelves, not so good for for old, fragile, or singular books your museum is tasked with preserving. It’s a general dilemma…