Letter from Berlin: Secret Germany

It’s the dead of winter in Berlin. Or at least it was all the way into mid-February. Temperatures steadily in the minus-4 to minus-14 degree range ever since Christmas. Coldest winter in recent memory. Plenty of snow, icy sidewalks, frozen mud and slush, the very weather that the Winter Olympic Games organizers in Vancouver are presumably longing for, instead of the Gothic fog, rain, and premature spring that they’ve got. Here, public discourse has been reduced to earnest debates about the relation... 
[Read more...]

Robin Blaser, 1925-2009: Death’s Duty

The poet Robin Blaser died of a brain tumour on May 7, 2009, in Vancouver, at age 83. One of the first poems of Blaser’s to which I paid attention, published in editor Don Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-60 (1960), was an untitled sonnet-like work that begins, “And when I pay death’s duty / a few men will come to mind.” I was fascinated by the triple-pun-like meaning of the second line. In Blaser’s imagining of his own death, written at age 30 or so, in... 
[Read more...]

Intimate Sources

Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris (exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta, until May 18, 2009). 1. The first piece of “visual art” I saw, or perhaps the first that I actually looked at, upon arriving in Berlin, Germany in spring 1990 — at the apartment of Canadian artist Michael Morris — was a set of 20 Polaroid photos, placed in a single frame, of a nude young male, perhaps 19 or 20 years old, taken by Attila Richard Lukacs, a then 27-year-old... 
[Read more...]

WORD ALERT:

I was just settling down in front of the tube to watch some boxing on the guys’ channel. Chico and Pretty Boy were about to try to bash in each other’s brains. The announcers were giving bio on the pugilists–the usual hard-luck stories of juvenile crimes, impoverished neighbourhoods, family strains, "human interest" stuff, I think it’s called. One of the announcers pointed out that in the course of preparing for the bout, Chico had suffered some "distractions," and... 
[Read more...]

Mean Spirited, Small-minded Bishops

And the winner of this week’s award for Canada’s most mean-spirited, small-minded, venom-packed message: the Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops. Or should we call them the Heterosexual Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops? They’re the ones who sent a "strongly worded letter of complaint" to Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson last week. Conference president Bishop Gerald Wiesner of Prince George, B.C. chastised the G-G because her office’s software sent an automatic... 
[Read more...]