Melanie Janisse's Blog, page 3

Borders.

The river fractures a city grid. Calls them two countries. I have this river running under my ground - a wet map strung through every story I tell. It comes to the surface when watched, when prodded. It ventures out when called upon like a tilting ship, forking my tongue. Otherwise it just rests along the strings of my personal codes like a nesting bird.

I pay the toll and drive into the tunnel. Tunnel long and lights punctuate the enamel of the subway tile lined up like teeth. Me, a child peering out of one of the many gleaming white American sedans that belonged to the funeral fleet – my father the helmsman in any one of these borrowed cars. Cars borrowed from my father's legacy. I peer out one window and my brother out the other side, waiting in anticipation to see the sign with the two flags on it indicating a precise shift of countries that occurs under ground, under river, the very place where our heritage confuses itself and fractures our family's one world into two. Here is the line that allows and disallows entry to half of what makes me. The blood in my body knows that there was a time that my ancestors walked freely on either side of this river, no countries, and irritates me like a burr under my saddle. I wind my way through the tunnel, confronting the usual panic in the back of my throat as I near towards the exit. American Customs.



One can draw and trace a conceptual line through America's political transformation if they listen to the way in which this border crossing has changed through my lifetime. I remember my father getting the old tunnel tiles when they replaced them with new, glossy ones. Each tile told the story of car after car driving through this place, yellowing them like the ceiling of a lifetime smoker. My fathers was yellowed and rusted as if it sat under a joist that held up the structure under the river, but slowly leaked over time leaving a tiny trace of the river, the metal and a trace of time across object.

Latest Open Book: Toronto Musings.

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/mfa_culture_creative_writing_and_zolfs_tolerance_project

Some thoughts on MFA's and creative writing.

Gigi and I visiting Christian Aldo, Flannery's apartment a while ago.

Memories of Windsor.

As my writing and research take me back to Windsor and Detroit more frequently, I remember. All of the reasons I love the people that make my memories of these places. Here are some. There are so many more.

Vintage collection (re) visited.

Vintage 1940's car jacket in black and metallic. Brass and turquoise grecian necklace.
Vintage silk kimono.

Views from here.

Strange hair and Mercy.

The other day I woke up and cut my hair this way.

Coat by Mercy circa 2002 bought at Georgie Bolesworth when it was around. Whole line made from a bolt of vintage Harris tweed.

Cigarette Smoke.

I stared at the old, painted walls of the bar that he took me to first. I wondered how many cigarettes it would have took to patina them to this piss colored yellow. He drew a map of Brussels in my moleskine, his own personal map of make believe - of a place but also not a place that I could ever locate. Later I found myself walking through Muslim thick streets trying to find the canal. It seemed to keep slipping out from under my feet and I wondered if I was even still in Brussels. I stopped and watched two teenage boys play basketball for a few minutes, hoping the canal would catch up to me if I stopped rushing around after it. Eventually I did find it, along with a service road offering me gas stations, garages, furniture shops. It took me an entire hour to double back to the trendy bistro I was aiming for. As I circled back I thought his map, offered to me as a christening of my arrival, was appropriate to the shifting plane of this city of his. Later on, in his old home near the Basilica we tried to map each other along his low bed. His garden exploding out the giant windows beside us. That too proved to be erratic.


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Dreams of other cities.

A meal, simple, green. Different eyeglasses looking at each other. Long woolen ensconced bodies, lean and moving. I had just read about theories of walking, which indicated that walking was a way to find unmitigated places. Locations unwatched by those who surveil, map, create geographies and metrics. As pedestrians we suddenly leave the street, try on hats, smoke a cigarette in the doorway, eat salads. Our feet can suddenly change black-booted direction. I met him for the first time in the lobby of the Carleton Arms hotel. He was smaller than I had thought, but also more beautiful. We sat on the stairs and watched Sammy the lobby dweller become vaudevillian, before playing Buck Hunter in Gramercy like teenagers. Before I knew how dirty he could be in the bedroom.

Spring Launches, Pelee Island, Sunburst mirrors.

This month's Open Book: Toronto foray into things booklaunch, things reflective.
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/articl...