'Carson is out’
Canada’s most celebrated, and elusive, poet returns with Float.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Cosimo Galluzzi

Origami Around

JVL

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
noise dept.
tumblr dot com
Peter Solarz
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blake kathryn
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

Kaledo Art

if i look back, i am lost
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dirt enthusiast
Misplaced Lens Cap
Today's Document
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

shark vs the universe
Three Goblin Art

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@thegoodshopper
'Carson is out’
Canada’s most celebrated, and elusive, poet returns with Float.
The Tyranny of Taste
Once a function of class, taste has become an exercise in randomness. But isn't there anything still unique about us?
Mark Her Words
Ellen Seligman had the status of a Merlin—a legendary enchanter who transformed manuscripts into masterpieces.
Sink or Swim
Twenty years from now, what will we have learned about sexual assault from the trial of Jian Ghomeshi?
one of Socality Barbie’s greatest accomplishments has been to draw attention to the fine line between the cult of “sharing” and commoditization of things that were once considered sacred
The demise of Socality Barbie was devastating, but mitigated by getting to write this tribute in the National Post.
The hierarchies of fashion show seating are well known, but York University’s Rebecca Halliday is probably the first person to write a PhD on them. My new story about her work appears in The Walrus’s January/February 2016 issue on vices.
Illustration by Studio Tipi
I am always hungry / & wanting to have / sex. This is a fact. / If you get right
September is a peanut butter month. Whole Foods, Loblaws, Metro — the stores have put out their brands prominently on the end aisles, along with “school safe” and other alternatives. It’s also been in the news. As soy-based peanut butter lookalikes such as Wowbutter come on and off the menu in school boards across the country, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that “high risk” babies be exposed to peanut butter in their first year — not kept away from it, as previously thought.
What is clear is how much we all apparently want to eat peanut butter, in spite of the increasingly loaded nature of this once-apparently innocuous food. Nine in 10 Canadian households have bought peanut butter in the past three months, according to the Canadian Peanut Council’s pleasingly named newsletter, In a Nutshell. We consume it at surprisingly disparate times of day; breakfast is dominant (72 per cent), but 12 per cent of households have peanut butter at dinner.
First published in the National Post (September 25, 2015).
Every year, my mother takes a day off to deal with my father’s socks; otherwise, they pile up in laundry baskets and closets all over the house, clean but unfolded. Once, she left me a message, in a voice thick with fatigue: “Big, thick woollies turned out to be twenty-nine pairs and sixteen odds. The whites were thirty-nine pairs, forty-four odds. I found eleven pairs with logo, nine straight up, some with grey soles. I haven’t done the greys, but that’s enough.”
First published as “What Was the Spinster?” at The Walrus (May 2015).
Curationism
David Balzer’s new book is about the rise of the celebrity curator in the art world and the turn of regular people to curating — whether that means programming a music festival or building a sock puppet collection. Block magazine is beautiful, limited-edition and a bit hard to find outside Toronto, so I've posted this roundtable interview with their permission.
DAVID BALZER: In the art world, everyone looks down their noses at people in popular culture who call themselves curators. My idea is that there’s more in common between those who call themselves Twitter curators and those who call themselves museum curators than you would initially think.
SOPHIE HACKETT: One of the most common questions I heard when I was hired at the AGO was, “What do you actually do?” Everyone knows what I’m doing when I’m working on an exhibition; it’s less clear in the months leading up to it and after.
First published as “Object Lessons” in Block (Spring 2015).
THE EDWARDIANS
One hot summer night, I was sitting in a dive bar with friends. The '80s-slash-'90s revival was at its peak, and a roundup of the recent trends was on parade: diaper shorts, pops of neon, feathered hair. When you work in fashion, you get used to its cycles: Hemlines go from short to long, conservatism and punk interplay, contemporaneity gives way to nostalgia. Yet the past 10 years' worth of in-your-face coloured jeans and "night for day" had begun to look homogeneous. To move forward seemed to require more than a new type of legging, jegging or jodhpegging; we needed a clean slate. It was starting to feel like the best way to be avant garde right now would be to go back 100 years.
I didn't come to this idea on my own. One evening at a party, I found myself talking to designer Jeremy Laing about Game of Thrones (in a word: cloaks!). At the time, the fashion world had also become enamoured with Ulyana Sergeenko, a Russian it-girl turned fashion designer whose beautifully crinolined skirts and parasols presented an ironically refreshing originality. What didn't occur to me, as a girl who grew up immersed in Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie, was that this somewhat fantastical period style might actually come round again.
First published in Flare (December 2013).
A vagina is a responsibility, a pleasure, and an enigma every woman is born with, but it comes with no official user's guide, let alone a decent app. This leaves the playing field wide open for feminist bestseller-maker Naomi Wolf and her latest book, Vagina: A New Biography. In terms of the Zeitgeist, it couldn't be arriving at a better time. The women's website xojane.com tweets about vibrator testing, The Vagina Monologues' author Eve Ensler just delivered a TED talk, the S&M novel Fifty Shades of Grey was the year's biggest publishing phenomenon and Lena Dunham named the abortion episode of Girls "Vagina Panic." But in the meantime, U.S. congresswoman Lisa Brown was silenced for responding to a vote to restrict abortion access with the words: "I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but no means no."
Despite our apparently desensitized culture, publicly and personally we're still surrounded by misinformation, confusion and shame about this essential part of our bodies. When you got your period, maybe you had an awkward talk with your mother about menstruation suggesting that she, in spite of her obvious qualifications on the subject, didn't necessarily have more of a handle on this stuff than you did. Or maybe she was wary of telling you too much, out of fear that, once given the keys to the car, you'd drive it like a Maserati, not a Volvo.
First published as “Anatomy Lessons” in Flare (October 2012).
The blood first announces itself with shocking boldness, unpredictably and erratically light or heavy, until it segues into something you accept, if never understand entirely. After 25(!) years, it's still a surprise when I get my period. The drama, the lack of choice about when and where it arrives, not to mention the ramifications about life and death: It all seems so unlikely, as much as it is a relief that everything still works.
No one talks about this stuff much in the open. At work, it's clear other women have vaginas (as evidenced by the rustling of wings in the next washroom cubicle), but whatever private hell or heaven each woman is experiencing while going about her day remains, for the most part, unacknowledged.
So social commentator Wolf's desire to take on the totality of this organ is laudable. Hers is a revisionist approach to a part of the body that has been alternately rejected (think of the "I don't feel fresh" Massengill douche ads), deemed unmentionable, or alternately (almost unnervingly) worshipped. But as she writes revealingly in the book's opening pages, Wolf's interest in the topic wasn't driven by a desire to tune into the hum of the culture waves but rather by a scary personal experience. Several years ago, when she was 46, Wolf lost orgasmic sensation from a back injury that pinched her pelvic neural network. Previously she had experienced what she describes as a transcendent combination of sensual and spiritual expansion through orgasms. The debilitating impact this diminishing pleasure had on her mental health — as well as body — led her way, way down into the dark continent's (as Freud called woman) darkest country.
As with The Beauty Myth, the book that made Wolf famous in the early '90s, this non-fiction narrative revolves around an original premise: that the vagina has a mind of its own (literally). She has this revelation, when, through fortuitous surgery, she regains her emotional and intellectual well-being along with the great sex.
Through her back surgeon she learns about the pathways that connect the vagina, clitoris and G spot to the central nervous system and up to the brain. From there — although it's intuitive, and, despite her best attempt to prove otherwise, still seems more personal than scientific — she makes a connection between the vagina and consciousness. "The well-treated vagina is a medium that releases, in the female brain, what can be called without exaggeration the chemical components of life itself," she writes.
It's a conclusion that will either resonate with you, in annoyance or appreciation, or it won't — but chances are you're repressing something if it doesn't hit some nerve, pelvic or otherwise. When she writes that the vagina "mediates female confidence, creativity and transcendence," I can't help thinking that most of my equivalent breakthroughs have occurred from drinking coffee. Then again, I haven't written eight books, two of them bestsellers (her liberal call to arms The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot also hit the New York Times list in 2007). Nor have I experienced the psychedelic episodes after intercourse that Wolf describes. Related? It's a stretch, but as an idea, not without intrigue.
Since The Beauty Myth made Wolf a regular voice on women's issues, with subsequent writings on promiscuity to pregnancy, she has emerged as an increasingly polarizing figure even among feminists (earlier this year, Katha Pollitt's column in The Nation was titled, "Naomi Wolf: Wrong Again on Rape"). I'm glad I was armed with some critical perspective before entering the Wolf fray because coming at this cold is a bit like reading about alien abduction: Sure, it sounds fine in theory, if you don't examine the details.
Wolf paints a picture of the vagina as an erratic, highly suggestible creature who can lay us low enough to ruin our actual sense of balance forever (a scientist shares groundbreaking studies of rape victims who have a kind of permanent vertigo), or define the heights we can travel creatively (she ascribes Edith Wharton's best work to her period of good orgasms with a lover).
Over 400 pages, Wolf travels from the eclectic, as in a section called "The Blues Vagina" — devoted to analysis of the lyrics of female blues singers from the 1920s to 1940s, including Bessie Smith ("I need a little sugar in my bowl") — to a Montreal researcher who stimulates rats with a tiny brush. She liberally sprinkles leading statistics to reach conclusive statements with inconclusive data — such as the fact that the average woman takes sixteen minutes to climax to the four minutes of the average man. (Would the sixteen minutes start from "when a nipple has been seen," the definition from Seinfeld? What about masturbation versus intercourse?) Several times a suspicious footnote led me to a citation for one of Wolf's previous books. The result seems less "biography" of the vagina than its flagged Wiki page.
After a certain point, I abandoned my usual reporting habits and simply started highlighting everything in pink that struck me as an interesting idea, and in yellow everything that seemed like crazy talk. To my surprise, they worked out to be almost exactly the same in weight. Here are some take-aways:
Neglect not your nipples. Whether you can achieve the legendary "nipple orgasm" or not, the nipple communicates with pleasure centres in the brain and in the vagina. This releases oxytocin, a hormone that bonds a woman to her baby and to her sexual partner. It can enhance sex with someone you love — but also intensify your attachment to someone you don't. "Women should be aware that if they want to have hot anonymous sex with some guy but don't want to fall in love with him - they should discourage him from interacting with their nipples," writes Wolf. As the anthropologist Helen Fisher has written, there is little that is truly "casual" about casual sex.
The vagina is a network, not a place. Part of the autonomic nerve system, or ANS, the region encompasses far more than a passage for a penis. Constructed in a somewhat different pattern from woman to woman (just as no two snowflakes are alike, neither are we), its tendrils reach to the clitoris, the G spot, the cervix and the anus. While Wolf can't solve the age-old dilemma about clitoral and vaginal orgasms, she presents findings that suggest more of a fluid (if you will) continuum. As Wolf explains it, most women can probably experience deeper waves of pleasure if sex is holistic, rather than targeted exclusively to clitoral stimulation or vaginal penetration - another argument for foreplay, although in her book "foreplay" begins to seem less and less like the appetizer to intercourse's entree, and more and more like one of many significant courses on an elaborate tasting menu.
As with so many things these days (food! sleep!), we are having intercourse too fast. Wolf argues that in spite of the acceptance of vibrators and the availability of online hookups, sex may have been better when we didn't have it as often, but had more time for it (I'd like to press Wolf on when this fictional time would have been when I think of my grandmother who had six children, made her own sourdough and had a reporting job for the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.) "Relaxing allows for female arousal," Wolf explains, filling in what many of us already know: that it's easier to have great sex on vacation and harder when your brain is consumed by more immediate tasks such as doing the laundry while emailing your boss. However you interpret the facts, stress and environmental conditions decrease genital blood flow, and may also convey to the body that it's just not a good time to mate. And for anyone who has spurned a lover's advances and felt guilty, it's not necessarily about "you" — and it doesn't mean you have a low sex drive.
Smell is important. We've all had variations on that discussion with friends about the highly suitable guy who's dying to marry you but just doesn't "smell right." And in the wake of studies indicating that birth control may block women's normal use of smell in the choice of a mate, these plaints might be more significant than mere feminine pickiness. Vagina follows up with research showing the function of smell in the ongoing chronicle of a relationship. The developed world's nine-to-five routines may keep partners away from each other, so we don't smell enough of each other, and thus have a diminished sex life. It may well be worth booking a standing lunch with your husband.
We may not be as biologically beholden to our male partners as we assume. One of the telling cautionary tales of modern life is that of the "great" girl (pretty, successful, emotionally stable) who, in her desire to have children, has settled for some slacker for his sperm alone. New evidence suggests that having the baby with the beta man may be a socially-imposed compromise, when what we, evolutionarily speaking, want is to have the baby (and sex!) with an alpha man, and keep the beta man around to care for it and us. We just don't get to do what we want without censure. The idea that women are naturally monogamous while men are inclined to spread around their genes seems to be more of a culturally convenient fiction than a biological reality.
Jane (Pratt) Addiction
In 1992, Richmond Hill, Ont. was not the cosmopolitan Toronto suburb it is today. If you were in high school, you hung out in the basement and bummed rides to the mall, where you shopped at Suzy Shier.
There was one bright spot, though. Once a month, you could walk to Shoppers Drug Mart to see if Sassy had arrived. The magazine, edited by Jane Pratt while she was still in her 20s, was a lifeline holding the promise of a better existence ahead – as well as a guide to surviving your current one. On its pages, a group of older, much cooler girls imparted such wisdom as how to cut out the crotch and feet from a pair of pantyhose and wear the results as a top; they also debated whether you needed armpit hair to be a feminist and seemed to be on a first name basis with musicians such as Courtney Love and Kim Gordon – whoever they were.
A cover story on Juliana Hatfield from September, 1992 perfectly illustrates the aesthetic of the magazine, if not the era itself. Hatfield’s famous guitar is raised across her body; she wears leggings, John Fluevogs and what appears to be a cardigan. Makeup, if there is any, is minimal, irrelevant. To girls like me everywhere, such iconography represented more than just big city life; it also suggested a world in which girls could be as politicized as adults and a desire to subvert the conventions of femininity as defined by publications such as Cosmopolitan.
First published as “Jane Addiction” in The Globe and Mail (May 3, 2013).
LEE VALLEY TOOLS
I used to work in an architecture magazine in downtown Toronto and when it got busy in production I'd slip quietly out of the mayhem and visit the near-secret Lee Valley store. It was quiet, and sometimes I'd be the only customer; a bit like visiting a church in the day. I'd stock up on their soft-leaded HB pencils or find some other tiny thing that made life seem, suddenly, well-outfitted and executable.
I first learned about Lee Valley from one of my oldest friends, who eventually became a carpenter. He used to pore through the catalogues and our household in Vancouver reaped the benefits in curlicues of wood shavings (from his hand-turned wooden spoons) and the company's now-famous microplane zester, which we used to make gimlets.
This Christmas I got my brother, a new father, a Lee Valley gift certificate and he just sent me this picture of his spoils. I don't know what our collective love for Lee Valley, which started as a family-owned woodworking and gardening company in 1978, really means. Maybe it lives up to the old-fashioned idea of a general store, in a world where it's rare for a customer to feel nurtured. In my day I befriended a female clerk, who over time made me feel equally taken care of and as if the two of us were part of a secret club in the industrial district where neither of us belonged. I still use the tiny pair of gardening scissors she recommended to me every day — most recently to open a bag of prunes.
Issues With Tissues
When I first came across a cheerful, fashion-inspired pinstriped tissue box design in 2004, I tracked down the designer and wrote a story about it. Now with a bad cold and trying to find a replacement for the recently discontinued box among the sand- and shell-themed prints out there, I realized how much we still have a tissue issue.
What with all the runny roses around right now, you would think people would be happy just to find a tissue when they need one. Not so, as I recently found when talking to some people about their Kleenex problems. Whether it’s a fetish, a phobia against kittens, or just a passion for design, people have issues with tissues.
Like my colleague, whose husband has bad allergies but who balks at buying him the hypo-allergenic tissue he requires because of the frolicking kittens on the high-end brand. Or my weeping friend, whose boyfriend recently banished Kleenex from their bedroom altogether as a decor conflict.
“Why isn’t there a white box?” she demands. “Where’s the Calvin Klein of Kleenex?”
First published as “The Tissue Issue” in The Globe and Mail (January 24, 2004).
The other night a friend asked what I’m reading and, the way that happens when you’re at a party, I couldn’t remember anything. When I got home I took this picture.
Red Doc> I love Anne Carson. When I was a younger editor I tried so hard to do a story on her, and she was so elusive (her voicemail message: “Carson is out.”). In the end, I had the idea of getting her together with Margaret Atwood for a discussion. Margaret Atwood’s idea was that they should go to a spa. In spite of my repeated entreaties Anne Carson never responded. Like her Autobiography of Red, this book is beautiful and lyrical, surprisingly impassioned and rhetorical.
Gloria I read this book by Keith Maillard about once a year. I also lend it to friends, i.e., if someone is having a baby and “needs a good book for the hospital”, this is what she gets. I think he’s one of the greatest living writers.
Korg
The other night my friend said that she had bought this for her 8-year-old to learn on. Another friend, who also happens to be a musician I admire, said that she had the same one. “It’s good," she said. In my head was an idea that I, too, should get a Korg.
Like many people, I played when I was growing up, but my mother was a pro and I was always conscious of never being the musician she was. When I left home, I didn’t live with a piano for 20 years. If someone asked me I would have said I didn’t know how to play any instruments. It was my sister who recently reminded me of my piano playing: “You would practise for hours when I was a kid." It was the first time in a long time I felt hope. One of the things I’ve realized lately is that you’re better than you think at a lot of stuff, even if you feel like an apprentice. The bar is lower than it is in your head for performance, musical and otherwise.