Now Playing: Gogol Bordello (yay, Gypsy punk!)
I'm in the process of trying to restore all the programs I had on my computer after a hard drive crash this weekend right after the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. Hence, I haven't been able to say much about it. But I do have a new drive installed (hooray) and can get on line now. (Too bad all my data is still trapped inside the old drive which I can't access yet. All in good time...)
The summer edition of the Ottawa Small Press Fair was, at least as far as I'm concerned, a success - a lot more full tables than there were at last year's Fall edition, and a lot of really good small presses and publishers, including a couple of really cool comics publishers. We lucked out in that there was a garage sale going on in the park across from the Jack Purcell Centre, too, so I went over with a friend to hand out flyers and we got a couple of walk-ins that way. Business was pretty brisk, too.
I really regret that I never bring enough money to these things to pick up everything I want. I didn't even get all the way around to where I could have picked up a copy of Lockpick Pornography, and to my regret, the computer surgery I had to do this weekend prevented me from getting to the reading by the author, Joey Comeau, at Venus Envy Sunday night. Dammit. But I did get some cool stuff, including a couple of back editions of In/Words, the Carleton U literary journal. I feel a sort of kinship with this journal, since in my days at Carleton I edited the English Lit Journal Box 77. And I have to say, the work I've been seeing in
And then there are the posters and events you might not have known about; like the Ottawa Comic Jam on the last Tuesday night of the month (the 27th this month) at the Avant Garde Pub. "Come create comics and art on the spot!" the poster says. I'm intrigued, I may have to check it out.
I also picked up a lovely little zine with a handprinted cover done on low-weight paper (the sort of thing you might use to wrap dishes in for transport) called Fun is Free (Association) off the Streeteaters table. Paula Belina, from Streeteaters in Montreal, has been at the last two Ottawa Small Press Fairs, and she's an impressively creative person with a really admirable level of energy and passion. Toward the end of the fair my friend Steve (the one who had the launch in Peterborough a while back) got up and challenged her to do some poetry, sparking off a little flurry of spoken poems at our end of the tables. Fun Is Free (Association) is a collection of ideas and games to play with in order to open up your mind and get words flowing. From Dadaist poetry creation to "automatic talking" to the "descriptive callout" - a game which you can play while talking with friends. For example, if you're talking about something that happened yesterday, anyone can suddenly call out that you describe every detail about the first five minutes after you woke up. Drives you to remember in detail, to find ways to describe otherwise 'ordinary' events, and helps you get to know the other people you're with!
Seemed to be a pretty substantial representation for surrealism and absurdism at this season's fair, too...
So the fair was good and the traditional retiring to the James Street Feed Company for drinks afterwards was satsfyingly sun- and conversation-drenched.
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 4:00 PM EDT
