Tuesday, September 14, 2010

On The Art of Canadian Literature part II

I will never take the floor representing my nation as their pristine poet or their affirmed author. I will be their man, but I refuse to be their voice.

I am my own voice.

I love her though I would sooner move to some place more disturbed and more creative than the cold hallowed halls of the Canadian iceberg. To me it shall always be a place to rest my head and NOT feel the sting of the universe. But these days I crave more, and I wont get it in Canada for that is not what she is about.

Potatoes used to be so bored, they never had a damn thing to think about, nobody paid them much attention. Then they moved to Ireland, and they had a whole famine on their hands. A catastrophe of political and spiritual debates that were splish splashed with blood and holy water. The Potatoes never looked back.

Write yourself a folklore, about the first human man or woman who stepped out of their hut into the glory of the sunlight - saw the corrupt city skyline and said "I accept you."

Write a legend about a family that hitched their station wagon to the stars and left earth and never came back.

Scroll me out a parable where everyone forgot their national identity and had to sculpt a new one that had no borders or boundaries. That had no us and no them, simply a we.

Write me a script where all the actors stand up, fall down, and disappear, every last one of them. And as they rise up, they smile, hold hands, and repeat the one line "I have no home but right here and right now."


Write about what you are, not where you came from.





I suppose I agree that Canada doesn't have the history of violence and disruption that America has, or the antiqued worth of Europe that has become a living relic.... Its not that kind of country.

But I'm happy for I am a citizen of the world.





S. Sparling

On the art of Canadian literature part I

Once upon a time Canadians wrote about the distance between them and everyone else. They wrote about isolation, both physical and mental. They wrote about the poor noble savage - now the burden of the aboriginal problem. They remembered when they once won a war, or were a small but fierce faction of a battalion of fighting men in Europe.

What a waste of god damn time.

Canada is a nation of peoples, not people. Of ideas, not one idea. There could never be a pultzer prize for Canadian literature, because how do you properly represent the time and place that is Canada? Canadians don't all bend over and sniff each other's asses, we slap hands and smile and go our separate ways.
What folklore could there be when Canada's identity went from "that other british colony, you know, the one that didn't rebel" to, "that big ass country that's really nice and is the only bastion of forward thought and liberal social order between two entire continents!"

As they say, we are a mosaic. We are a mosaic and we spit upon the melting pot, though it might splash up and burn us every so often. In truth the glass pieces of the mosaic can cut us, but its better than being burned away until you are nothing but what is everybody else.

Canada is a space station, a harborage, a peaceful place in a maelstrom of disaster and hatred.

God damn it man, you don't write about Canada, YOU WRITE FOR HER! You write on her behalf.

You write about the world, and humanity, about people, and problems, and things. Spread out like a picnic blanket with a billion ants blitzkrieging across the checkered floor.

And most of all you write on your behalf.

Don't be a Canadian writer. Be a writer who is Canadian.





S. Sparling

Monday, September 13, 2010

Babes In Toyland


make more babies!


Monster Mash


Oh beautiful Australian maiden, your brain is a twisted mess of circuits and wires.




You fucking crazy bitch. 
I love you.



Lucy McRae your maddening images of the grotesque and beautiful suggest a new breed of archetypal human.




She is a body architect and a builder of human form. Is she playing god? 
I sure hope so.



here's a little montage for your lazy posterious.

ROJO®NOVA work in progress (02) from ROJO® on Vimeo.

a different kind of graffiti



Do you remember Katrina? Do you remember that bullshit? Now that Bush is gone it seems easy to forget a large portion of the travesties that fated administration was party to.




The graffiti you usually see smeared on city wall like shit is, in fact, pretty shitty. Its wasteful, meaningless, derogatory bullshit tattooed on the city by the ugly anonymous citizen. Normally I would never post graffiti in such a vein.





But, you know kids... after such a piece of shit event like Katrina... you have to be wondering what exactly is on the melon of the citizens of the dilapidated New Orleans.





Graffiti is the pulse of the city and when you see those markings on the wall you know your city is alive and has a voice. Of course your usual graffiti is crap, of course its cheap and ignorant and extremely pedestrian... but welcome to your city, welcome to every day life. The city of New Orleans is crying out with a bitter sense of humour and irony. Its people are hurting, they are afraid and angry.





Sometimes the city speaks the truth.

Child Of Mother Nature



IV [SECOND PART]

O this is the creature that does not exist.
They knew nothing and yet without a doubt
—his gait, his posture, his neck, down
to the silent light of his gaze—they had loved.

Indeed, it 
wasn't real. But because they loved,
it became a pure animal. Always, they gave it space.
And in that space, clear and spare
it raised lightly its head and needed scarcely

to be. They nourished it not with grain,
but with only the possibility that it truly was.
And this gave such strength to the animal

that it grew a horn from its brow. But one horn.
It passed in its whiteness a young maiden—
and appeared in the silver mirror, and in her.

R.M. Rilke






Music To Make Your Monday





Face Puddin'




The way I feel











Choose your weapon

It Doesn't Seem Real







to have and have it all


May I point you in the direction of Wes Lang?



He's this guy, you know.



Thinks he's an artist. I happen to as well.



Yes, I wonder as well...



Well, here he is

goodbye.