via Plep these Painted Houses of Borovsk

more on Roberto Bolano & The Savage Detectives--

"Madero’s narration comes in the form of clipped, kinetic diary entries: “Depressed all day, but writing and reading like a steam engine”; “I’m reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.” Not since Rimbaud has the world of verse seemed so criminally seductive. Madero’s entrance into the poetry underground resembles the heady initiation of Ray Liotta’s fledgling mobster in “GoodFellas.” The visceral realists not only shoplift (Madero boasts that, in his “tenement room, a little library has already begun to grow from my thefts and visits to bookstores”); they fund a magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, by trafficking in Acapulco Gold marijuana. Yet the purpose of this illicit activity couldn’t be purer. “We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed,” Madero proclaims..."

good long review quoting Roberto Bolano's great novel The Savage Detectives--

"Automatic writing, exquisite corpse, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-handed writing, three-handed writing, masturbatory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls ("This is It," "Laura, my love," etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, Brazilian concrete poetry (written in Portuguese cribbed from the dictionary), poems in hard-boiled prose (detective stories told with great economy, the last verse revealing the solution or not), parables, fables, theater of the absurd, pop art, haikus, epigrams (actually imitations of or variations on Catullus, almost all by Moctezuma Rodríguez), desperado poetry (Western ballads), Georgian poetry, poetry of experience, beat poetry, apocryphal poems by bpNichol, John Giorno, John Cage. . . . We even put out a magazine . . . We kept moving . . . We kept moving . . . We did what we could . . . But nothing turned out right..."

Spring trees

a happy second birthday to the strapping and rejuvenated Value Village Is Booby-Trapped!!--

"We're at a stable point,
and more importantly, the
dissension that has hovered around
us like a rope of black licorice
has dissipated, and I will start
writing because I need to create.
Screenwriting seminars,
Palestinian play reading,
Tea Biscuit Flash Fiction competitions:
let them be pulled from the roots
out of the garden and thrown onto
the grill because this is their season!!"

another Nanaimo triumph!BC AAA Boys Championship - Dover Bay Dolphins Provincial Champions! (link contains a good play-by-play of the final)

Nanaimo trees