Saturday, May 14, 2011
the George Stanley Issue will be launched at the Sylvia Hotel on Weds May 18th at 7pm! | The Capilano Review
join us for readings by George Stanley, George Bowering, Sharon Thesen, Peter Culley, Barry McKinnon, and Jamie Reid.
Sylvia Hotel
1154 Gilford St. and Beach Ave
Vancouver
Abner
'I'd trade places with him in a minute,'
said the young monk, of the chocolate-speckled
Catahoula hound rolling at his feet.
'You don't think much of being human,' said the old fox.
'No, I don't. You do, but you're an artist. Without art,
you're an animal.' And was out the door, dog at heels.
That hound is Abner. He lives at the monastery
with four other dogs, one a white, female Boxer pup
with a brown eyepatch, the other three bipeds - monks -
& Abner sniffs them all every morning
to know them - sometimes several times in one morning.
(It's not just recognition, there's more novelty in it -
as there is in the morning.)
Meanwhile the rain - the hail -
of information continues. The monks sit at the kitchen table,
reading The Globe & Mail. It tells them
how stupid they are not to understand
their true nature. 'Born to compete, boys.'
('Born to lose,' say the monks.) 'It's not just
the bondholders have you by the short hairs,
it's your attitude.'
If The Globe & Mail
could be translated into doggish, would Abner wonder,
'Compete? for food? for love? Abner fights
with Dess, the boxer, for chewtoys, tug-of-war
with the old mophead, but that's just play,
not dog eat dog.
The monks compete. They compete with monks
from other monasteries.
The dogs howl when they're gone -
howl with loneliness. They don't know what time it is.
Hours, days, months, centuries pass.
Then suddenly the door opens. Ecstatic,
the dogs leap up, try to climb the monks,
lick their faces. Abner is so happy he wags his tail
so hard there are blood spots the whole length of the hall,
Abner-height.
The young monk talks to him.
'If my arms were forelegs, if my hands were paws,
I'd drop to the ground & be a dog like you,
I'd sniff the world.'
(But whose world would it be?
the old fox thinks, emerging from his den.)
'But you'd just like to be up here, reading the paper,
eating your dinner with a knife & fork,
& talking away, like me.'
The fox thinks
it's not exactly the moment to defend
humanity, or the dog's dim desire
to escape eternity, such as it is,
when he himself has been drinking whiskey
& reading philosophy, to get down.Friday, May 13, 2011
The quaint and obsolete Nuremberg principles - Glenn Greenwald
The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks deserve to be held accountable for
those crimes. But it's been a bit difficult listening to a country that
continuously commits its own egregious crimes -- ones that constantly
cause civilian deaths -- righteously celebrating the bin Laden killing
as though it is applying universal principles of justice grounded in
unmitigated contempt for lawless aggression. It's hard to avoid the
conclusion that what has provoked such rage at bin Laden as a supreme
criminal isn't the unlawful killing of civilians, but rather the killing
of Americans on U.S. soil. The way we treat our own war criminals and
policies of mass civilian death from around the world -- and the way we
so brazenly repudiate and even scorn the Nuremberg Principles we said we
were establishing for the world -- leave little doubt about that.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Charanjit Singh on how he invented acid house ... by mistake
Much has been made of the album's astonishingly advanced sound palette, the high recording quality, and the unexpected use of a 303 on a record made in Mumbai so soon after the machine's official release in Japan at the end of 1981. These factors, coupled with the original record's astonishing rarity and extremely unlikely and enigmatic creator, have led many to believe the album was a hoax.
Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat
Monday, May 09, 2011
Seth reviews
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