we · drank · cachaca · and · smoked · the · green · cheroot

Had the satisfying experience of writing the novel's last scene. Have written what I thought was the last scene before, of course, but this time it's different. A bit like the illusion you're in love... one of these times you just know the thing has jolted to a new plane: you burst into tears, to the sound of Antony and the Johnsons singing Bird Girl for the hundredth time, since you have had that song on repeat while you wrote/trolled for love.

One writing tip that helps me get out of my tendency to be too subtle: write a big honking sign that says, "Take the bull by the horns" and post it on the wall over your keyboard.

Menu for this evening's labours: Sheep feta, rooibos tea with great big rock-hard Italian lemon biscuits dunked in it, fatoush salad, Haägen-Daazs green tea and honey vanilla ice cream... Dear One has left town for the night so of course this means stuffing oneself and writing until one goes blind.

Now that I have the writing and the first round of heavy structural editing done, am studying the memoirs of a 19th century French hermaphrodite to see if there might be erotic elements I have missed, or might want to weave in. The book is, Herculine Barbin - Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (Introduced by Michel Foucault).  This memoir travels a sexual narrative opposite to the one I write in Annabel (Herculine is brought up female while Annabel is raised as a male child in a hyper-male trapping and hunting culture in a remote Labrador village), and it will be interesting to read. 

Buying food for the Metcalf-Rooke story party Monday night at Drawn & Quarterly, 211 Bernard West. I will be reading with Amy Jones and Rebecca Rosenblum. zadcat  suggested chorizo from Jean-Talon Market, so will hoof it over there on the weekend to check out the chorizo situation, and to see whether those people with the divine sheep cheese are still there. Many market people were hammering away at new shelves for the big move indoors when I went there yesterday, and some vendors are seasonal. Dear One went on his bike today and came back with some Stilton, some Cambozola, and some very fancy crackers. Dan at Biblioasis has given me a nice little budget - must try to remember to include some green grapes with skins that crack and burst ice-cold juice, and maybe some crisp scarlet peppers.

One of our Fictionbitches, Alice Zorn, will read as part of Poetry Plus monthly series on Guy Fawkes Eve, Nov. 4, at the Arts Cafe, 201 Fairmount West, 8-11pm. Poetry Plus is an evening of poetry, prose, music and open mike. Here's what Rover Montreal says about Alice's stories:

"She speaks from the perspectives of both genders and various 'orientations', with the confused uncertainty of the young and the resigned wisdom of the aged. She depicts the assurance of the connected and the frailty of isolation not merely with empathy, but as if she had been each of these people. The result is like the performance of a musician who plays jazz and bluegrass and European folksongs, all in an identifiable and personal style … There is little in any of these stories that should be ignored or discarded; details come to us as they do in life, not strictly necessary to our understanding, but in some way enriching to it." 

Bless the night windows on Dante Street;

swooshing maples, August heat

Cricket persists his livewire buzz

deep in a cloy of dryer sheet

 

Three Sicilian men shake hands;

one melts chocolate on his tongue

Bless the spiraled escaliers,

home of the grey cat’s saraband

 

Behold a red-lit living room

where Jesus waits behind a broom

raising his plaster hand above

clocks and flowers and bookish gloom

 

Love we a thunderstorm vibrato

Love we this line-up for gelato

Nectar the night’s hot mouth around

stiletto libretto Geppetto staccato 

My Newfoundland house goes on the market today. 149k. Little piece of heaven. Burke Realty (Gladys Burke) (709)687-0215. Photo on my Facebook page www.facebook.com/kathleenwinter

Cleaning Butterpot house, shed, greenhouse, getting ready to sell our Newfoundland house, home of what my daughter calls my homesteading phase (making goat cheese for which I grew my own herbs; woodstove; old piano; birches; fire in a ring of stones in the garden; swimming hole; chickens).  Eating salmon, cod and mussels while I wash ceramic crocks, antique doorknobs, horseshoes and fishing poles that have lain in the shed all year while we ate croissants in Montreal.  Today I was happy to see P, one of my favourite people here, smartest young man in the town - the most live wire. Listening to the lost tapes of Agatha Christie on the radio, wondering what really happened in those days she disappeared.

www.escapeintolife.com/pages/poetry.php Delighted that Escape into Life Webzine has published some of my poems.

Madame Bottomly and I began to be friends one day last spring when the air felt like a holiday: sun sniffing at pigeons, heavenly steam from the bakery, glitter in the drains.  She is a person who always puts her green box out for recycling at least two hours before the men come, and same with the garbage.  I had noticed she always did this herself, as I do, though I was aware she had a husband lurking somewhere in the house, because she mentioned him in passing.  I would pass, for example, on my way to Binos for a carton of mango juice and a flirt with the young butcher, and she would nod and smile as she brought a box down her steps...

 

 I did not set out to stumble on a murder.  When I was young, a soothsayer in a New Mexico youth hostel predicted I would one day wind up reading murder mysteries all day long.  I thought this silly at the time. But after what has happened here on Rue de Bordeaux, I am forced to wonder if Tolly Beetrootburger, as we called him then, was not just a few degrees off in his prediction: he should have said I would become part of a murder mystery, not just read about one... 

The face I wish to present to the world, and, more importantly, to myself, has its own real beauty, dignity, fortitude and song.  By the time you finish reading my book, a guidebook written down by myself on the journey, you too will have this in your face, and not only your face, but your body; racked with pain though it might be; your spirit, your heart, and that centre of the belly that makes you a woman, the womb.  Even if you do not have a womb - if the medical people have taken it away in one of their enthusiastic attempts to make you blend in with their comfort zone that says the fewer Grande Dames in this world the better - this guide will put it back for you, because, let’s face it - the medical world is nowhere near figuring out the willpower of a true Grande Dame. 

Introduction and Warning:

 

            It is a long time since I sat on the harbour planks near the Russian ships and drank champagne out of my pink stiletto, but I have not forgotten.  So there was a rat on the planks - and there were sailors with a welding gun whose sparks singed my hat.  It was all part of the fun.  Now, we are older.  I am not talking here about the glorious silver paper crackly voiced state of ancienthood, but the less storied state of older middle age, which, if you are not becoming a Grande Dame, is an excruciating, slow death of the soul.  We are not going to go there.  We are going together, in this little tome, to the queendom of How to be a Grande Dame, instead of becoming the insignificant little old lady we sometimes fear becoming in the dead of night. 

Supper hog in Chinatown,

slit bananas and a green hour,

wall of limes against a box,

Branco, knitting on his head

 

 

Boarder in the grocer’s O, a

pigeon is a graphite dove.  A

hundred cheeses and the song,

the din the sirens love to know

 

 

A single Chinese instrument of

wooden, clog-like parts and string

bows what Bach implored the rain

to tell him, but the rain declined

suburban blight in

pink twilight

pitfalls of the stripmalls

outside Smith’s Falls where the strata

in Kanata has a big fight

with the starlight

on no account will a social

climber mount or count the cost

of the lost real diner

where the pie’s real & the skies feel,

booths like your dad’s old vinyl

recliner that’s la-z-boy

crazy boy things are getting hazy boy

where the ice cream & the

nice dream that you

were alive & not under the

impression you were meshing

with reality that has no lesson

no virgin cold first pressin

cause it’s less than a whisper

less than a vesper, getting real

desperate not to feel so

separate from anything real

that you’d give your kingdom,

sunset on the boulevard

put it on the Visa card

or the master of plaster

that dries ever faster

than tears on your fears

of forgetting the masters

Leonardo, Frida Kahlo,

Michelangelo & Pinocchio,

Juliet & Romeo, lost in

the afterglow of the

stripmalls and the pitfalls

in the distance, on a radio

I like to hear what Wordsworth ate:

suet, chops, potatoes – he was

never well but trod the miles

dejected while his sister baked

 

pies, bread, raisin cakes;

William walked in sleet and rain, from

violets and the mossy stone where

Coleridge lay, his bowels in knots.

 

Dorothy’s were wretched too:

flour, ham, beef, lard – how

Wordsworth wrote The Rainbow or The

Singing Bird with bowels that bad

 

I’ll never understand – I want the

romance of it, though:

pockets crammed with

mutton as they trudged for Letters or composed

 

The Leech-Gatherer or held a

melancholy talk beneath the wall.

Words, sheep, stones. Stars:

they named the largest Jupiter

 

no matter where it hung, and looked on

glow-worms, daisies, celandine; on ordinary

distances; as heroes come to cut them free

with swords of English light.

I have written to two of Canada's most knowledgeable literary experts to find out if Constance Beresford Howe (see previous entry) is alive.  One has given me an address which he says is old and may or may not be current.  The other has replied as follows:

"Beresford-Howe (whom I don't know) is not in my 2007 Who's Who in Canada.  If a person's entry disappears from that reference book, it means he or she has died.  However, there is no record I can find that she's died.  ...I suggest you write her anyway at the address you have and see what happens."

So that is what I have done.  I have written to Constance Beresford Howe, who has disappeared from Who's Who in Canada, and it has been two weeks now and my letter has not been returned.  Someone has it.  In my view, Constance Beresford Howe is one of the best writers Canada has produced.  Is she our female Norman Levine, virtually forgotten?