K.I. Press's Blog, page 23

I got to meet Odetta a couple years before she died, when I was...

I got to meet Odetta a couple years before she died, when I was working for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. She gave one of the most memorable live performances I've attended (the other being Otis Taylor at the Yardbird in Edmonton circa 1998).

From my archives: excerpt from a really, really old unfinished essay about my dad

And then after his operation (around which time he also quit smoking, which he'd been doing since the age of ten) and my sister died, he started to talk. All the time. To this day he won't shut up. It's like he can't stand to have one moment wasted in silence. The rest of us get that silence isn't a waste, but he's got continuously to have a story on the go, and he's no natural storyteller, either, always hemming and hawing and forgetting where he is and who he's already told the story to, and they're often boring hunting stories or unsavory gossip about my mother's relatives. He's a great big caricature actually, when it comes to storytelling, especially seeing as he looks much older than he is given his health, so he really does seem like one of those crazy old men who lean forward on park benches telling crazy stories to unlucky passers by. And no one really knows for sure what else he does during the day when mom and my sister are at work and he's off puttering around looking for deals on stationery.

Coneflower from August.

Coneflower from August.

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered

"As for human lifeIt is a shadow, as I have long believed. And thisI say without hesitation: those..."

"As for human life

It is a shadow, as I have long believed. And this

I say without hesitation: those whom most would call

Intelligent, the propounders of wise theories—

Their folly is of all men's the most culpable."

- Euripides, Medea, trans. Philip Vellacott

From a description of my childhood home

In the middle of the house was the Pool Room. The reason for the name was obvious, since a pool table filled up most of the space. Two walls, however, were lined with glass-doored cabinets, and every attempt to actually play pool in the Pool Room was thwarted by the threat of pool cue crashing into glass. Mainly, the table was used for sewing and Barbies: its size and height made it perfect for cutting fabric or playing Barbie-sized football or golf games on soft green turf.

            And upstairs there were two rooms – Marie's Room and Lorraine's Room – where my older sisters had slept, before they moved away from home. Lorraine's Room now happily stored junk, and Marie's Room was my room, where I could finally stay up late, but found that when I did stay up late, I heard too many mice. But I still remember it as Marie's Room, covered in giant posters of Rolling Stones tongues and people in tight jeans. It was where one went to steal lipstick. And it was mine.

Music as soundtrack works a lot like "the image"...

Music as soundtrack works a lot like "the image" does in Lynda Barry's guide to writing, What it is. Lucinda Williams's famed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road album isn't merely a great album; it's the billons of times I played it, on repeat, at a certain time of my life. (Hard to believe in these days of constant shuffle, how I listened to albums on repeat, sometimes for days at a time.) It so happens it was not such a good time of my life: self-destructive relationship, flagging academics, and all that. But somehow it all works: songs are of heartache and memories.

"The cities were spacious and elegant, the fields well tilled and fertile. Merchant ships plied to..."

"The cities were spacious and elegant, the fields well tilled and fertile. Merchant ships plied to and fro on the blue oceans, and fishermen hauled in brimming nets of cod and tunny, bass and mullet; the forests ran with game, and no children went hungry. In the courts and squares of the great cities ambassadors from Brasil and Benin, from Eireland and Corea mingled with tabaco sellers, with commedia players from Bergamo, with dealers in fortune bonds. At night masked lovers met under the rose-hung colonnades or in the lamplit gardens, and the air stirred with the scent of jasmine and throbbed to the music of the wire-strung mandarone."

- Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

Pop music really IS the soundtrack of your life.

Pop music really IS the soundtrack of your life.

Shawna Lemay's photostream

Shawna Lemay's photostream:

Shawna's both an amazing poet and an amazing photographer.