Unsettled air yesterday at twilight, the western sky apocalyptic from the Royal Oak Skytrain platform, all black, massed thunderheads shot through with neon-pink veins, a sight no one would ever accept if submitted to judgement as a painting or photograph. Out drifting from cafe to cafe, 500 words in longhand in each. Earlier, through Mountain View Cemetery, rain threatening, crows circling and calling overhead, and red carnations bright against the long unmowed grass beside the graves. I was thinking -- still am, I guess -- of The Flooded Grave, and the way a skirt will crease, kneeling, and how that gesture pivots the body in space. The bus runs up Fraser Street, and I could hear the twang of the trolley wires as I walked. I imagined a young woman, maybe an office worker on Howe Street, buying flowers on her way home to her South Vancouver apartment, and stopping to place them on someone's grave. I don't know who that person is yet, or why her gesture's important, but it's an image I like, and I may try to do something with it.

The real surprise, though, was a long passage in Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone, opened completely at random in Chapters Metrotown (in a vain attempt to reconvince myself that Mr. M. was neither memorable nor important, and that I therefore didn't have to bother reading him), on the Pet Shop Boys' remake of the Village People's stomping disco anthem, Go West. I wish I could quote this whole remarkable 1500-word passage at length, but a sentence or two will have to do: "As you listen, you hear history tearing the song to pieces - but the song will not surrender its body. At five minutes it seems to go on forever."
- posted by cjb @ 9:11 AM