yr humble blogger, in Deep Thought in Deep Cove, one of 365 Sketches by Adam Harrison, the new issue of whose online magazine (co-edited with Aaron Peck) Doppelganger (which contains his fascinating conversation with photographer Evan Lee & a review by Chris Brayshaw) is out.

I will be away from the manse until around the 20th. If you're near the University of Maine in Orono, on the 17th I will be reading with David Perry.

 

& also in Vancouver, Meredith Quartermain takes the Macdonald and Knight (which both went past that park I think)--respectively the J & L trains of Vancouver buses--amongst a sheaf of Vancouver-mostly poets ed. by Jacqueline Turner in the new Stylus Poetry Journal--

"The word roars off over the Burrard Bridge, on a route of its own: Harry Knight, a BC photographer, preferred soft-focus pictorial moodiness; John Knight, Captain RN, got his name on the Kwakwakawakw inlet where thousands of first nations people fished for Eulachon (he'd served in the American Revolutionary War with Vancouver's right-hand man, Captain Broughton); The Knights of Labor in the 1880s elected Vancouver's second mayor, lobbied for a shorter work-day, tried to stop the import of low-paid Asian workers. The word roars on through the meccano-set girders of the bridge: a feudal tenant trained for mounted combat; a man devoted to the service of a woman; a horse-head chess-piece that moves in L-shaped leaps. By sea and land we prosper, says the city motto on the bridge house - a lumberjack and a seaman hold up the city coat of arms..."

Christopher Columbus as a bambino, in his old location under the Skytrain tracks at 5th and Clark, a little concrete park on a busy street, always deserted, where I used to like and stop for a smoke and sometimes a wee read while walking between Mount Pleasant and the Drive, now I learn he's in Hastings park, no one told me, from the City of Vancouver Public Art Registry. I had one of the great visions of my life sitting there: foggy, late fall but warm around maybe 3 in the morning, a Skytrain maintenance car, cladded, no windows, grinding the track with festoons of spark hissing into the fog, going back and forth like a floor polisher.



 

Jack Delano--
"Mrs. Viola Sievers, one of the wipers at the roundhouse giving a giant "H" class locomotive a bath of live steam, Clinton, Iowa, April 1943", from
Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 (Library of Congress Exhibition)
 

last night greatly enjoyed Canadian director Fletcher Markle's The Man with a Cloak (1951) with Louis Calhern as the dying roue, Leslie Caron as the ingenue, Barbara Stanwyck as the scheming servant, Jim Backus as the friendly barkeep, a raven named Villon & Joseph Cotten as (spoiler alert!) Edgar Allen Poe...