Serendipity
Topic: readings

Incidentally, I'm back from vacation (you'll note the gap; apologies, but I was on the East Coast.)

If I hadn't been having a picnic with Steve and Cathy Zytveld yesterday evening in the Park of the Provinces (below Christ Church Cathedral) we wouldn't have spotted rob mclennan biking up the Parkway. We wouldn't have yelled, "rob! get over here for some couscous and wine!" and he would not then have told us that jwcurry was going to be reading all of bpNichol's Martyrologies at the gazebo behind Parliament Hill. 

And we would have missed out on an exemplary moment of Ottawa's true oddness. Ottawa seems like such a vanilla place until you get to know it, and as we walked past the setup for the Sound and Light show on the Peace Tower, it seemed both pretty and totally conventional. Then we got to the gazebo. There was a gorgeous sunset going on over the Ottawa River, and a small group of people were milling around the gazebo. We signed a 'guest registry' (the back of a lined notebook) and grabbed a seat with what was left of our picnic, and around 8:00 jwcurry got up, pulled his shirt off, and started reading, after a short preamble about the possible breaks we might have to take for the Sound and Light show and where in the process he might, or might not, say something about the book. This is a seven-volume poem, and it's hypnotic when you get into it, with all kinds of sound changes being rung, themes cropping up again and again, a voice that roams across Canada and through decades - and it's almost as impressive to try to read the whole thing out loud and maintain enough energy. If anyone can do it though ... 

We had to take a break for the fireworks show over the Casino in Hull, and it was fun watching the confusion of the tourists coming up to the gazebo before we paused and trying to figure out what was going on. The sun went down, it got dark, but the gazebo is illuminated slightly, so the reading went on. Someone else had also brought some wine, and there might have been 14 or 15 people there at the most. Who comes out to hear a poet read a six-hour-long poem? A surprisingly diverse bunch, as it turns out. I had to leave at midnight, as we were getting to the end of Volume 3, and there were still about eight people gathered in a corner of the gazebo. As jwcurry said, "if it gets to be three in the morning and I'm still here reading to no one, that'll be. . . neat."

Charles Earl took this picture. Check out his site at www.charlesearl.com.

So very tired....
Topic: Writing

I'm just really tired. I don't know if I'll be able to finish the story, and at the moment I'm just slogging along wishing it was midnight.... but then I keep remembering that I have to at least try to finish it. Three and a quarter more hours...

... and the space around my computer looks like I've been living here for the last day and a half. Scary. 

(a little later)

Second wind? Maybe not. But a certain amount of desparation has gone out of this. I know I'm going to expand this a lot when I go back to it. And I know I might not get to what I'd consider an ending.

But I can start an ending.  And the point is not to write a good novel in three days.

Oh, and for Canada Day....
Topic: readings
Just thought I'd add this - poets will be on deck at the Swizzles Parking Lot Party on Canada Day. From 1:00 to 5:00, at half-hour intervals, spoken word poets will be up to take the mike in the coolest parking lot in Ottawa... between Elgin and Metcalfe, Albert and Slater. So far we have Ritallin, Oni the Haitian Sensation, Steve Sauve, and maybe DJ Morales and Jacquie Lawrence, up to alternate between karaoke craziness, beer and barbecue, and dancing. Dusty Owl will have a merch table there, of course, for books and buttons and t-shirts oh my. Come by and say hello!

The Slog
Now Playing: random music, threatening rain, coffee
Topic: Writing

This is going to be such a marathon. Halfway through, I think, or less, with a day to go, and I know that I've written probably a total of 8 hours in the last couple of days - actual time-on-task, that is - so I know that in the next 12 hours I _can_ write enough to fill out this novel. But I have to have the stamina to just sit here and type. For the rest of the day. God help me. 

The point is to write a novel in three days. Not to write a good novel in three days.  

And I have to say, I'm still curious to find out what will happen when I get into the writer's equivalent of runner's high... 

Day Two Down
Now Playing: the soundtrack to my 3 day novel - lots of Pearl Jam and Tea Party
Topic: Writing

The point of this exercise is to write a novel in three days. 

Not to write a good novel in three days. 

I keep having to tell myself that. And keep plowing on even though I know the plot is weak and sooner or later I'm going to have to accept that my vilain is, in fact, a fairly blank slate so far with no actual game plan or even motivation. And my premise is ludicrous. And I am less than a third of the way through, and two-thirds of the way through the allotted time. 

Everyone should try this. There's a real lesson in learning how to write badly. Usually, when I write fiction, it's because I have a cool idea, and it's pretty decent. Now, I'm writing because I have to, and it's forced and awkward in spots and illogical in others and will probably wind up choppily paced and anticlimactic.

Everyone should try this! 

Day one down....
Topic: Writing

Wow. Nothing points out your skills at procrastination like a deadline, and a totally self-imposed one at that. 

Day one of the three day novel, 11:30, and I've managed to write 10 pages, waste a lot of time on the bus, talking to people, working on publishing other people's stuff, going to a grant writing workshop (which was, admittedly, useful) and discovering that probably the best thing I can do at this point is go to the public library, (where rob mclennan kindly pointed me at the cubicles with electrical outlets,) plug my laptop in at one of them, snag some CDs from the first floor, and work there, because Oh My God is my apartment conducive to procrastination. 

rob pointed out that although it is the 100th anniversary of the Ottawa Public Library, there was nothing listed on Lycos (the catalogue system) including the word "Ottawa." Curiouser and curiouser. 

 Tomorrow I think I'll go to the library in the morning. I got more sustained writing done there than I did the whole rest of the day. Cable internet can be a bitch.  With any luck, I'll feel less . . . literarily flaccid . . . by the end of tomorrow. That feeling of having missed the boat shouldn't be kicking in this early in the game, should it?

My friend Sean has got his novel all plotted out. I feel so... haphazard. 

Oh, the grant writing workshop - fairly useful and inspirational. Run by the Trillium Foundation, and nicely attended.  

Here goes!
Topic: Writing

60 hours and 45 minutes left in which to write my three day novel. So far, I've got a page and a quarter written, which I started as soon as the clock struck midnight last night/this morning. This morning I've managed to make coffee and some toast, and check my email, and come waste time here. The feeling when I woke up was interesting, though - almost felt like the morning of a particularly tough exam.

Better get to work, I've got 40 000 words to write (or as close as I can get...)

Oh, and the review of Quebecite? Apparently the new interface this blog host has just put up (which I don't like much) won't let me cut and paste it in, and I'm not retyping it now, so it'll have to wait until I can post it as a web page (which I've been meaning to do) and link to it. Apologies. 

 

What in gods name am I getting myself into?
Come with me next week on a journey of epic foolhardiness!

You've heard of the 3 Day Novel Contest? Well, I'm not officially entering, as I'm jobless and can't pay 50 bucks to get in - but I am doing my own 3 Day Novel with a couple of friends on the 28th, 29th, and 30th of this month. The idea is that we're going to take those three days and, you guessed it, write a freaking novel. I think it's a psychic kick in the head for me, since I have a major problem with finishing things, and have got about eight unfinished novels kicking around (and countless others lost to the mists of old hard drives and rained-on notebooks. Oh, and there was the cheesy vampire novel I nearly finished in high school, which Nick Boles walked off with, and Nick if you're reading this, it's a blue plastic binder full of printouts, and I want it back!)

Anyway, at least two members of my writing circle - Sean Zio and Paula Belina - and I are going to do this. We agreed to it and are now honour-bound to at least try. I have absolutely no idea what I'm getting myself into . . . but I'll try and keep this site updated as the madness grows. Stay tuned, and watch me suffer! And hey, if you want in, let us know and join the insanity!

Stands to reason I'm not attending any lit events in those three days... but I will weigh in with a review of Quebecite, playing at Arts Court tonight, if I can.

Oh, and check out the spoken word my friend and co-conspirator Steve Curtis just posted on his myspace... He wrote quite a lot of it last weekend in my presence, which is an interesting thing to watch, especially for someone who isn't an aural writer.

If you wait long enough on the site, the poems should load and play on their own. Poke around while you're waiting. Say hi.

R.I.P Old Hard Drive
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 is pretty consistently of very high quality. Looks like Carleton is attracting and producing some really good poets.

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

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Democracy and judging poetry
Now Playing: absolutely nuthin
Topic: slam
So as you may likely already know, the Slam Team for this year was chosen last Friday at the Velvet Room, and I'm pretty happy with the results (although I might have issues with the judging.) I suppose that the format of slam necessitates the sort of judging you get.... but before I get into that whole discussion, here's the team roster:

Jim Thomas
Kevin Matthews
DJ Morales
Ritallin
and, because Jim's not going to be able to make it to Toronto for the Nationals:
Festrell

I like this team. I like the diversity of it and I like the personalities of the poets, and I'm glad they're representing Ottawa.

What we're bringing to TO (in my humble opinion):
- Kevin Matthews's fast and virtuoso wordplay, his love of play and nonsense combined with his painfully well-put political clarity;
- Ritallin's rhythm (ever powerful) and solid rap grounding, not to mention his stage presence and passion for the spoken word community;
- DJ Morales' rapid-fire, never-stumble flights of fancy and the way she literally dances her poems;
- Festrell's uniqueness: no one else that I've heard in spoken word is anything like her, and her passionate poems are capable of silencing a room to listen to her whisper.

And Jim: sorry he can't be in the nationals, because I decided I liked him as soon as I heard him: metaphor and language nicely married up in a really engaging performance - and that cool English accent doesn't hurt either. Catch him at "Britpoets" - seriously, don't miss this - on July 13th, 8:00 at the Gap of Dunloe.

That said... the judging. The way poetry's judged at a poetry slam is one of the things I'm pretty much of two minds about. One the one hand, I'm happy with the democracy of a poetry slam. I'm glad that it takes the appreciation of poetry off the pedestal your high school teacher put it on, back when you learned to hate it. It says, poetry talks to your guts, first and foremost. And poetry slams have allowed people who would normally have said, "You're going to a poetry show tonight? Wouldn't you rather have a nice root canal or spinal tap?" to suddenly say, "Wait, I get it! This is fun!"

The mantra I learned at the first Spoken WordLympics, when I discovered slam poetry, was "the points are not the point, the poetry is the point!" Which took me up entirely. I loved the energy in the room, the way a lecture theatre full of people could surge to their feet, screaming and cheering, for freakin' poetry. And I've heard many times that people think appreciating poetry is an acquired taste, something only for the specially privileged and properly educated, something for those who know the difference between iambic and trochaic meter. And I always rebelled against that. I thought, poetry should be accessible to people whether or not they've studied scansion. So part of the appeal of slams for me was watching all the people who'd never written poetry before, or even liked it, being granted access to this art form for the first time in their lives, and suddenly going from "I don't get poetry" to "I can write poetry."

Here's where it gets tricky though... when you choose five random judges from the audience, assign points, and then assign real values to those points, like a monthly Slam Champion cash prize, or the chance to go compete at the Nationals, it gets prickly. At the Slam semifinals, and again at the slam finals, I found myself frustrated by the judges. In the semifinals, I found them erratic and irrational, swinging from damningly low marks to incomprehensibly high marks from poem to poem - for the same poet. In the finals, I found them timid, marking everyone laughably high, regardless of the value of their performance. It reminded me a little of the Olympic example: after Nadja got the first perfect 10, suddenly everyone was scoring 10s. And when there is something as valuable as the Slam Championship and a chance to compete at the Nationals at stake, that becomes more than just an annoyance. It's a lot harder to say, "The points are not the point, the poetry is the point."

I guess I always want the poetry to be the point. And the fact stands that I'm very happy with the team chosen by the judges, even though at the time I was iffy about their criteria. Maybe it's just that I'm feeling the uneasy coexistence of art and competition, and that has always existed in some form or other. As it is, I am still happy with the fact that Capital Slam and other slam organizations are out there turning so many people on to poetry who might otherwise have thought it was all about memorizing what Frost might really have meant when he included that hemlock tree, or being able to recite "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud."