The annual exploration of visual art, edge-pushing expression around the “art of risk”, experiment-o issue 3, is now online. “experiment-o will consider interviews, reviews, visual art, visual poetry, concrete poetry, poetry, prose, manifestos, maps, rants, blog entries, translations and other digital miscellany.”
Art, poetry, visual poetry and short fiction by: Henry Avignon, Michael Basinski, derek beaulieu, Bill Brown, Satu Kaikkonen, John Lavery, Kevin Matthews, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley and Chris Turnbull. Hard to describe. Easy to open and explore. If you download the pdf of issue 3 you can resize the 46 pages and get started.

The corpus callosum between Western Canada and Central Canada seems pretty active.
Saskachewan Book Awards announced their final list. Of the 14 spots, Ottawa Writers Festival has the Sage Hill person, Sandra Birdsell this year. Her Waiting for Joe (Random House Canada) won for fiction.
Regina Book Award went to Dianne Warren for her multi-voiced narrative Cool Water (HarperCollins Publishers) which was also up for ggs so she did signings in Ottawa this week.
The Award for Poetry went to Dave Margoshes, Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss Press) who at Tree (in the last post).
The Award for Publishing went to Hagios Press, Fallout, Sandra Ridley, of Ottawa who has been a facilitator for Tree workshops, teaches at Carleton U and was also on stage at the last Writers Festival.
The First Book Award went to Amy Jo Ehman for Prairie Feast: a writer’s journey home for dinner (Coteau Books). She was up for a Canadain Weblog Award and I read her foodie blog Home for Dinner. What crossing geography doesn’t do for tying a nation, the internet cinches.

Wish I could get to more but one does what one can.

Claudia Coutu Radmore launches a moment or two/ without remembering (Two Cultures Press, 2010) at Mother Tongue Books (1067 Bank St. Ottawa) Nov 25, 2010. Mother Tongue shares its space with a few workshop groups where writers can hone their manuscripts.
The collection (with lovely translucent dust jacket, metallic embossed signature from archived marriage certificate, and a family tree map under the back flap) is comprised of poems of stories from the Coutu family of the 1600s-1700s New France. Fascinating little glimpses into Quebec history.
Launch nibbles at the food blog.

I got there a little late. A couple authors were all ready gone but here are a few of the English gg winners: Richard Greene (Boxing the Compass), Linda Gaboriau (Forests) and Robert Chafe (Afterimage) at Nicholas Hoare, Ottawa Nov 25

Allan Casey signing a copy of his Lakeland at Nicholas Hoare, Ottawa.
Tight sharp writing. I really should read far more non-fiction. I don’t know if he writes fiction but it seems to illustrate what you can do sticking to facts. An anecdote of meeting a fellow boat-builder was could take you right there. And his comparison of “the 1970s was the 1960s recut in polyester”.
It was like seeing the difference when someone draws a portrait from out of their head (the lines being thick and cartoonish) then see the same person doing a portrait from someone sitting in front of them (and the accuracy and skill being excellent).

Roger Nash one of the contributors to Pith & Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener Press, 2010) at Tree Nov 23, 2010. There was a flash-reading round of dozens of contributors with about 3 minutes each to share a short poem or part of a poem.

Some of the break time chats (above, below)

At Tree last Tuesday.

Dave Margoshes who was one of the features at Tree, the invited reader of Colin Morton, as well as in the anthology.
Dave impressed audience (a little ripple of attention going thru) as he walked to the podium, put papers down and left it, walking up and down the middle aisle reciting and performing a poem from his most recent book Dimensions of an Orchard (Black Moss, 2010) (Why should that technique be so uncommon?)
I like better than the poem at that link his revisit of Eden where paradise is conceived of as a metaphor for love grown cold and both partners culpable and putting blame elsewhere. He returned to the podium, read a few more poems and then walked out with another poem he had memorized from his other recent poetry collection, The Horse Knows the Way (Buschek, 2009).
Being free of the paper and fully in the oral words makes for a more compelling performance.

Vote for up to 3 covers at Salty Ink’s Judge a Book by its cover competition until Dec 10 [via Q&Q blog]
You didn’t miss the comments section?
> Are you aware you have a typo on this cover competition page?
> Salty Ink: Susan, yes. It think it’s important to have one typo per article, to snag reader attention as it wanes.
Also, Quill & Quire looks at the 5 most notable covers of the year.

I can think of two cases where there are competing models of top down vs. participatory, for the relationship between the artist and the public. The two settings come to mind: performance art and anthologies. Going to thrash around in the notion of assumptions of power dynamics and latitudes of freedoms assumed in each case.
An Xiao pointed to Marc Horowitz who as performance art is crowdsourcing his life in November to The Advice of Strangers thru polls. What shirt should he wear? Which activity should he do that morning? What should the sound track be? Anywhere from a few dozen to a thousand add their opinion.
An asks if this sort of thing could mark a pivot. After an emphasis on art as proprietary-protected, ground-breaking, creative individual product, “could it be that the next step in art is to be open to influence? To shape the work at its outset but allow not just artists but anyone watching to influence its ultimate outcome?”
If the public shapes the work as if blowing watercolor paint with straws, what role is then left for the artist to claim as still the artist’s? A puppet with muscles to sometimes tug back? Or an ideas person and detail person with the middle part of direction left to volunteers who are interested? It’s a cooperative model. Buskers who freeze unless you throw money in the hat to buy their animation are playing the same game.
What about this project is distinct? The platform of equal handedness thru internet strangers is different. Is the new part the label or the publicness of being told what to do? Unlike Improv Anywhere where strangers convene to obey same gag, strangers make up the game. Or do they? There are set confines. Set options.
Is it a more engaged version of a make-your-own mystery novel? Is it really participation or just interaction so people have invested a personal stake of making a decision in the outcomes like adopting a whale?
People are participating and it isn’t a case of an artist presenting a polished finished to consume but invite people to play in the creation. This is a flatter model. Is it collaboration? Without participants there is no project. If you lay a hierarchical grid over that, is the artist controlling the range of options, or the indulgence of interest of the public the deal-breaker? In performance art, the art is the doing rather than the having a final thing. You get a transitory experience.
Is this significantly different than a printed text where the take-away of what it means relies on the interest of the reader? Once the text disappears there is only the transitory experience of how it made you feel, what ideas it pushed forward in you. Does this make a canon of texts a collaborative thing if we opt into it as we by agreeing or refusing play a role in the creation of its social weight.
The model of top-down rule is something of a temporary holding pattern. There’s a social contract that says so long as the ones who are figureheads don’t mess up they can stay in their roles facilitating the big picture so we can get on with our small pictures uninterrupted. Individually we can’t micromanage everything so leave some things to be done for us. Decorative arts, furniture design, food growing, storytelling, observing and thinking for us about global things or local things, our tool-building. So long as we trust our sources that we outsourced to, it all runs ticketty-boo.
We can’t afford to use the participatory model for everything or there is no time left. It is efficient to have people specialize. We get an appreciation for the skill of specialists by dabbling and investing some attention. How large can the gap between generalist and specialist be?
We get the advantage of a competitive marketplace and oversupply of immaterial ideas-goods and physical goods. We can then become armchair specialists except we don’t necessarily appreciate what quality is, not understanding as an expert what is difficult. We may be swayed by simple or doodads or some one aspect that is not key. Are we informed consumers of ideas and things? If from the group of less-informed, one becomes the gatekeeper, and we lose some wheat with the chaff, do we know any better? If the gatekeeper is excellent, do we know how lucky we are? Unless you are consuming many collections, you don’t know how one collection compares to another.
The process of voting for best use of a performance artist day or open poll voting for a poem, is different in that anyone untrained in the concepts of art can be involved. Does this make the people who click in the role of a studio of assistants?
The press has been that art, performance art or writing descend from the individual (an essentialism descending from the notion of there being a true monolithic one constant self to be found like a sculpture waiting inside a stone).
The story went that in the tight box of self, invention and innovation assigned a higher prestige than imitation. But is that expanding out to include a new era?
Our culture has been moving for decades from the sense of monoculture, dominant culture to fracture from sub-cultures and multicultural to something that is more than a stew or melting pot but some new hybrid of blends of diversity. Nationally we are somewhat contained but with the lingua franca of text we can smooth out the differences between Indian English and British English and the English of outports and metropolises. With a population with a certain percentage being on the move internationally and another portion interacting internationally, the old purist model of one common point of reference is under a lot of strain. We have no one authority. We have to work out among outselves local pecking orders which encourages use of the more kludgy and time-consuming participatory model of people who care getting a say in what gets spread.
We are in transition. We’ve always been in transition but for years there’s been talk of the shift from a consumption culture to a re-mix culture to a culture of ideas, mashups and cooperation. Mirko Zardini, Director of the CCA spoke of his view — how critical discourse is entering the age when it is conversation among peers not a hierarchical authority disseminating information. We are post-futurists.
How does this flattening of access and speed of broad access, if its happening impact the idea of a canon as authority? What does it do to the sense of role of artist who organize clusters of art, curating art shows, reporting on theatre, making collections and selections to teach to others? Each act of reading or passing over on reading something is something of a personal curating.
When we think of an anthology, there’s a debate of whether the curator should be included among the curated. There’s the quality of the pieces but there’s also the underlying assumptions of what the act of gathering things together is.
What is appropriate depends on the unspoken assumed model of people’s relationships to each other. Are we each artists vying to be top dog, unique and branded for individual unit sales, or are we each co-explorers?
If we are to be hierarchical powers where one artist by whatever means self-elects to lead because of qualifications, or is nominated to lead, there are two classes of people in a project. If we assume a hierarchical model, the person who curates is criticized if they include their own work with that which is curated because the leader should be a higher vantage point and not be down with equals.
If we are a community with a project of shared interest, the importance of who leads doesn’t matter. Everyone does something and who does what is not loaded the same. It is understood that we all collaborate, crowdsource in a sense, to push forward some aesthetic.
If we assume a participatory model where there is a gathering of like-minded equals to explore together, why wouldn’t a person who also curates cooperate, rather than stand back. If the curator started the idea of project or was brought in by someone else, they are a part of the process not a person apart from the process. If one is keen enough to take on a project, one would think one would want to be part of the conversation itself, beyond selecting.