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Soylent Green
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 427
Everywhere they're pitching this stuff, advertising, at the stores, it's all you can get, there's nothing else...
And I'm in a room trying to explain to a group of men - business men, from the looks of it, their age, their suits, don't they know what this stuff is? Did none of them ever see the movie with Charleton Heston? I mean, I never did but I know the gist of it...
They didn't, don't know, don't care....and I wonder if anyone will remember the taste of fresh fruit and vegetables...
***
Next dream, waiting on a ferry. Not the local ferry, one I've never been on, half hour crossing each way, I'm waiting both for my daughter and I have a date, prospects, not sure how this is going to work out, the pains of being a single father...
The Ferry arrives and I see someone on the shore, she's looking to the ferry as well although I suspect she's waiting for me, looking out, looking exactly as she did so long ago and she is not - not at all, who I was expecting...
****
Strange dreams, The second, the person - well, exactly that person, but why her? And no place in it I recognized, not home, not the ferry, strange dreams indeed...
The Library Book Sale
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 166
I had forgotten, then saw a handbill up advertising it and headed up...
Hope against hope, reading Cendrars and Bloch have given me a whole pile of other books and authors I want to read.
This, of course, doesn't happen, but the Library Book Sale, well, it has everything else. Books on self help, grieving, potboilers, divorce, best-sellers, sections on the Titanic (a legitimate topic if so much of it weren't inspired by that insipid movie), history, War, Governer-General Awards, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, the usual suspects, NY Times Recommendations, the Guardians Best Books, books of recipes, a veritable library of art books, covering every artist, style, technique, medium..., books on religion, spirituality, relationships, science fiction,
I really don't need more books, but at $2 each I can't resist. A handful to tide me over until the midnight order of Cendrars begins trickling in, another month before I break down and search out some more targeted reading...
November 14, 2024
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 130
Today, again rainy, foggy, wet, how many days now? My nose starts pouring from the moment I step outside. Morning, get groceries, then the bus-stop, to Balfour, to hunt arrowheads, all this rain must have turned up something new ...
Cash is there, the Mother-in-Law's brother from the last restaurant, holding his dog. It's a cute dog.
We're catching up, he likes rocks, knows a few things, has ideas, about rubies, sapphires, etc, that he's found, local, only - well, he's unfortunately a junkie. Which is not a slur but it does somewhat mean you got to put things into context a bit.
But we're talking and he's realizing the importance of getting off the junk, just got subsidized housing up lake, wants to make some changes, it doesn't get him high anymore, does nothing for him, and fuck, the amount he needs, his prescription, it'd kill 10 people...
I know what he's talking about. It takes me a mickey to get sober, pass for sober, fuck how well do I know.
SO we chat, bus comes, I confirm a bus will be returning (because damned if on this cold and rainy day I want to be trapped up lake for hours and hours on end).
I was right. The wash-out has grown, some large flakes/scrapers/micro-blades, and further up the shore a couple of scrapers, (maybe, hard to tell, odd bits of stone regardless), and a couple of rude arrowheads.
From loonie, left - a scraper, (I think, oddly shaved to a sharp edge from both sides, bilateral), above left, oddly shaped rock out of some sort of tourmalinated schist, oddly shaped and out of place on a washout. Above loonie, arrowhead, hard to see but to handle it becomes obvious, knapped both sides to a symmetrical point, otherwise mostly debitage, a couple of "micro-blades" (or debitage, again), and to the right, a carefully worked flint, dark grey, knapped both sides, almost as if it were an arrowhead that lost it's head, then got repurposed.
So, given the rain and chilly day, my nose draining me perpetually, no box of Kleenex could keep up, my bag filling with water, not at all unsuccessful, given my last day out there a positive victory, the rain, despite running off my nose, jacket, hands, despite freezing to death and getting soaked through and through, if you keep on looking you'll keep on finding.
Worth noting, while most of the rocks above would be invisible in any other setting, but the distinctive green/grey of the Kootenay Argillite does stand out in the fog and the rain. it's obvious, the paler examples especially. The scrapers on the left, well, that's just intuition, for once not discarded....
Blaise Cendrars - The Astonished Man
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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This, the last of those books ordered through Abebooks.com, and I have to say, the more I read Cendrars the more I like him. His writing style, rhythm, descriptions, all curiously in sympathy with mine own. A shame he's so hard to find (I'll be ordering a few more - fortunately he wrote a great deal).
Notes so far: his references to Gerard de Nerval (whom I can't seem to find in translation, although Umberto Eco referred to him in such glowing terms I'll have to keep up the search); his mentioning of 'thrashing' Rainer Maria Rilke, mentions of Restif de la Bretonne, (another novelist I'll have to track down, also abundantly mentioned by Bloch in his book on de Sade). And a few more authors - always it seems the more I read, the more ignorant I become, but time with Cendrars is time well spent...
"Well then, the gap continued to open in front of us, I led Léger through the market, then took a zigzagging path between the shacks, the yards, the chicken-coops, the tiny gardens, the waste lots of the zone-dwellers enclosed by bare walls topped with broken glass, fenced in by barbed-wire, stakes, old railway sleepers, and full of ferocious dogs, their collars bristling with nails, chained up but running the length of a strong piece of wire, or several meters of taut cable, which allowed them to hurl themselves like demons from one end to the other of their bare pens, bounding, barking, slavering with rage amongst the empty, battered petrol cans tumbled everywhere, the burst barrels, the ripped sheets of tin, the mattress springs that sprouted from the soil of the dung-heap, the broken crocks and pots, bashed-in tin cans, mounds of discarded kitchen utensils, broken-up vehicles, piles of disgorged filth, surrounded by thistles and measly clumps of lilac or dominated, Golgotha-like, by the skeleton of a tree, a stunted elder or a tortured acacia, a runt of a lime, with its amputated stumps poking through the handle of a chamber-pot, or its lopped-off upper branches crowned with an ancient motor-tyre; I crossed rue Blanqui and, on the other side, fortifications, at whose foot the 'Academy of the Little Charlie Chaplins' was installed; it consisted of five or six oblong sheds that served as a dormitory for the children and as dens for the bears that were being trained haphazardly in this sinister institution, which was, to boot, an all-night bistro and a thieves' kitchen for cut-throats and prowlers."
That a single sentence to open the chapter.
Or this, a sumptuous description of a meal:
"...my Don Quixote invited me to share with him the 'plat de Lucullus' in a pleasure-garden in Saint-Ouen, which he had just discovered, and this famous dish, invented and cooked by Lerouge, was nothing less than a salad-bowl filled of blackbirds' tongues cooked in white butter and perfumed with rose and violet, which we ate with croutons dipped in celery-liquor, and washed down with long draughts of Alicante, while the patron of that 'chigana', a Spanish gipsy, pattered round the dish in his espadrilles, excusing himself in a tone of complaint:
'They're only blackbirds' tongues, it's not the season for nightingales . . . .'
There were more than two thousand tongues; it must have cost good old LeRouge a fortune, and he was not exactly rolling in money."
Time to slow down on the reading and get some more books ordered...
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