Dark now at four thirty, late leaves wet and slippery on the sidewalk. Moist ghost-patterns of recently kicked leaves shining in the lamplight. K.'s betta thrashing last night in his bowl, the most active I'd ever seen him, thrusting his face up and again to break the water's skin. In the morning, the little horizontal corpse suspended among the bamboo's roots. Long magenta fins gathered in a soft heap. Out into the morning, Kingsway raked by rain. Hitting red light after red light. Edmonds cranes hammering new monoculture up into gunmetal sky, the portrait photographs on the new condos' hoardings like Ken Lum photographs drained of all irony, all "aesthetic efficacy," and flaunted for display. Water everywhere. Mist filming the Taurus' back windows and side mirrors. Wet footprints on the shop's front room carpet. A parade of the new people moving into the neighborhood, young affluent go-getters, all ready to describe to me with pride their latest crushes: Michael Ondaatje, Audrey Niffenegger, the Hundred Mile Diet, Douglas Coupland. There's something really peculiar, almost pathological, about the assumption that Douglas Coupland is a Major Undiscovered Talent. "I'm looking for this book? You probably won't have it. It's a cult novel! Generation X?" Two ways to take this, neither palatable: either the interrogator thinks I'm a total moron who's spent the last decade cut off from the CBC, Vancouver magazine, and the Globe's weekend books supplement, or, pricy hipster-chic to the contrary -- man-purse, tweed hunter's hat, stylish quilted jacket covered in enigmatic Japlish -- he isn't actually from Kitsilano or South Main at all, but from some tiny northern community where Coles clerks have never heard of the Poet Laureate of Yaletown.
- posted by cjb @ 6:51 PM