In on my day off to straighten the front room in the aftermath of Clint Burnham and Stuart Ross' big reading, pack away the unsold beer, and vacuum the floor, a task begun yesterday morning and promptly aborted as the machine swallowed a yard and a half of unravelled carpet, overheated, and caught on fire. "This place smells," said yesterday's first customer, stalking out. Well no shit. Burning machine-woven plastic stinks. I stood out on the street with the still-smoldering vacuum turned upside down, hacking away at the blackened threads wrapped around the brushes. Snip, snip, went the shears, as if gently extracating someone from bondage gone awry. Just cut the ties, don't nick the $500 custom corset or the wedding dress. . . .As if on cue, the vacuum exhaled a stinky fog of dirt, pet fur, and blackened carpet into my face. A new low in an ongoing series of lows, the kind of experience that only an owner-operated small business provides. That said, the staff got fully-paid extended medical and dental coverage this month, so things are slowly looking up, despite the daily gong show of crises here at Main and Broadway.

"She slept against him with her young secrets and her senses doubled by substances that constantly waved their arms, so he could not look at what was behind them." A line from Ondaatje's Divisadero, emblematic of the contradictory styles at the heart of this maddening and deeply flawed book. On one hand: the nebulous bullshit of "her young secrets." I don't know what this phrase means, and doubt that Ondaatje does, either. The words just float along in the air, as pleasant and meaningless as Zamfir's flute. And they have lots of equally vacuous friends: "the truth of her life," "this man's life seemed innocent," "he had been able to witness her more clearly," & etc. On the other hand: the second half of the sentence, written as if by another man, the Ondaatje who wrote Billy The Kid, Elimination Dance, and the amazing introduction to Paterson Ewen's AGO retrospective catalog: heroin and coke personified as Gustonesque caricatures, the phrase's nervy energy capturing both the addict's hyped-up personality, and also a sense of black amusement at something that is definitely unfunny. A sensibility akin to that of Ken Lum's early text-and-image diptychs: realism tempered by detached black humor.
- posted by cjb @ 8:34 AM