these diaphanous continents, cumulus humilis,
are precisely the colour of canada according
to a national geographic map i once owned:
luncheon meat, an anonymous pink
frayed red around the edges,
freezer-burnt.

from the back door of the lower deck
bluster a cover band's clumsy standards,
as sunburnt bystanders
sway canadian flags to the words
of sweet home alabama, hotel california,
clink bottles and thank
god the shadows are getting longer.

from the steps of the marriott
i watch the crowd accumulate:
bare shoulders wash past
like larval barnacles, attaching themselves
to banisters, lampposts, motorcycles, boats.
couples clamp hands; parents fasten
stroller seatbelts, folding chairs, four-year-olds;
tourists circle and reluctantly settle,
secreting calciferous shells
of shopping bags, t-shirts, saltwater taffy,
slippers and oven mitts
shaped like lobsters.

sails as sharp,
as cautious as scalpels
obliviously vivisect
the harbour sky, which coldly fades
into an amputated blue
reminiscent of veins and
underwater mountain ranges

in the weakening light, in a restaurant window
candles glow on all the tables. a single waiter
replaces a tablecloth, folding the old one
like a flag, while outside
a woman folds her sunglasses
and puts them in her purse, as her companion
presses a paper cup against his cheek,
smudging a maple leaf

brings back the memories doesn't it
says someone behind me as the band breaks into
sweet caroline and a camera
can't help but flash

there is a flare of colour over dartmouth, too far off
to be the fireworks we are waiting for, but enough
to cause boats to slow, suture themselves
to a dock or a particular patch of water,
switch off deck lights

and for the next ten minutes
an anticipation is tangible
in the tightening of grips
on cigarettes, cups, stroller-handles, cameras,
as the crowd stands tight-lipped

heightening with the first brief puff
like an intake of breath
of a cannon in dartmouth

expending expanding
dandelion galaxies
and daisy-chain vapours

and we cheer and stare,
entranced by the chance
to stand on guard for something
grander than ourselves,

we ogle and augur,
intend to remember.

on a pale blue wall with thirty-two windows,
in capitals faintly painted over, a contingent of characters
clings to brick: a. m. bell & co. limited.
long since sold to another co., the ancient concrete
accepts its title like an epitaph, though the handpainted name
retains a certain resilient charm - one abdominous ampersand
brandishes a cherished serif, pipe-shaped,
in its open mouth; a stands smartly at attention,
moustache thin and trim in its philtrum, and b's bilious ass
suggests it is still digesting breakfast. on one end
of where signpainters' scaffolding must once have been,
c and o carry on a conversation
with the little letters in limited, while the sistered ls in bell
sit still beneath a windowsill, ankles hanging stiffly
over hollis below. only m seems uneasy, leaning clumsily
on its one strong leg, an ailment unfelt by the rest of the font
except for an equally wonky w
in another word wedged in the wall's widest column:
hardware.

in a similarly pale blue sky, awkwardly wallpapered
with altocumulus, a wanderlustrous sun has found
another w, a prong of weathervane, two blocks west.
shadowed below is the roof of the bell, with its single brick chimney
outnumbered long ago by a throng
of mushroomed ventilators, themselves numbered 39, 40, 41
in cracked black paint, in the kind of handwriting anyone would have
while shaking a spraycan on a slanted roof,
with only an eavestrough to underline
whatever would slip from your mouth if you slipped
or dropped the aerosol,
to plummet quiet as an exclamation point
past rows of windows like luminous tombstones, through the very same air
signpainters must have stood in, one imagines
on scaffolding, or ladders, there isn't really
any way to say.

barringtonstreetbusstop
barringtonstreetbusstop
barringtonstreetbusstop
barringtonstreebuststop
barringtonstrebusetstop
barringtonstrbuseetstop
barringtonsbustreetstop
barringtobusnstreetstop
barringbustonstreetstop
barribusngtonstreetstop
babusrringtonstreetstop
sbarringtonstreetstopbu
barringtonstreetstopbus
barringtonstreetstobusk
barringtonstreetstbuske
barringtonstreetsbusker
barringtonstreetbuskers

seaweed dries
in crumpled fistfuls
strewn across shorelines,

a scribbled calligraphy
filled with tongue-tied letters,
tangled ligatures.

i amass a small pile,
ply a dry patch of grass
with stilted lowercase,
slowly unsnarling
one letter at a time -

each gnarl snaps easily,
with the same brief pressure
as the tip of a pencil
or a camera's shutter,
gentle enough
to be accidental -

afterwards, forgetting the words
for the wind to find.

Strange that the more that is happening, the less I tend to write about what is happening. Here is a small update.

Earlier this year I took part in the MFA group exhibition Interrobang, at Anna Leonowens Gallery. I suggested the title and designed the invitation (right), and contributed a large inkjet print called index of first lines (32 months). The print consists of the first line of pixels from every photo taken with my previous digital camera (read more here).

I'm currently working on a blog version of index of first lines, as well as another blog project called queries. In the fall I'll be teaching a studio course called Blog Art: Artists' Blogs that will explore blogging as an art practice.

Also recently designed consumptuous.com for artist Shelley Miller.

index of first lines (32 months) at Anna Leonowens. On either side are artworks by Catherine Allen and Smriti Mehra. There are more photos of the show here.

I walk to downtown Halifax from my apartment on Summit Street nearly every day. On Cogswell just up from Gottingen, there is a window that catches my eye whenever I walk by - it's been curtained off from the inside of the house, and made into a kind of display case. Its contents have changed several times since I've lived here, and usually involve a kind of diorama assembled from various objects, sometimes with text. This week I noticed a new display: a faded globe and the words another world is possible spelled out with scrabble tiles. The idea that someone is regularly changing the window display intrigues me. I'm interested in self-publishing, particularly via the web, and this strikes me as a kind of real-world equivalent to blogging.

On another street I've often noticed a child's artwork taped up in a living-room window - crayon drawings on coloured paper, or awkwardly scissored snowflakes. Both window displays are arguably not very different than holiday decorations, lawn gnomes, garage-door murals, or other forms of domestic ornamentation. What makes the Cogswell window unusual is its serial content, and the intent behind the work - to project a message into a public space. I interpret the contents of the window as a personal response to the outside world. There is a similar intent behind graffiti, which often changes and can be decidedly political. But the Cogswell window is more subtle, quieter, less intrusive. If you don't know it's there, it's easy to walk by without noticing it. It seems less concerned with asserting possession of a space than with low-key broadcasting. Yet it is different than a promotional poster stapled to a telephone pole because its purpose is less obvious. It leaves itself open to interpretation.

There are also parallels with advertising, and this kind of temporary window display also reminds me of storefront windows with mannequins that change weekly, or soup-of-the-day chalkboards propped outside downtown cafes. There is a church near my apartment that maintains a billboard with motivational messages (my favourite so far has been "worry is a waste of the imagination"). But the Cogswell window inhabits a different space, somewhere between public and private. By closing it off from the room inside, the window's curators seem to distance themselves from the window display. Yet it remains intimately connected with whoever inhabits the house, and is essentially a vehicle for personal expression. The diorama is one-of-a-kind, and operates as an artwork in many ways.

Spotted on a sidewalk in Montreal last spring.

In a culture where we are bombarded constantly by advertising - it can be difficult to find a public place without a blaring radio or television, or a manufactured object without a logo of some kind - the Cogswell window is a refreshing attempt to broadcast back. I appreciate its capriciousness, its assertion of hope against newspaper and television reports that usually insist otherwise. Despite its global avowal, it is inherently local in scope and character. I see this kind of personal publication as an extension of web culture, which is increasingly participatory and user-driven. At a time when it seems every second person has started a blog, why not use a bedroom window as a kind of broadcasting medium?

Elsewhere in Halifax's north end, cultural enthusiasts have taken this concept to a whole other level. Gallery Deluxe Gallery is a miniature art gallery run in the attic of two Willow St. residents; it's open to the public and has hosted almost twenty exhibitions in its two years of existence. A few blocks away, the Anchor Archive serves as a public library for self-published material such as zines, as well as the livingroom of a little red house on Roberts Street. The ambitious archivists have even started an artist-in-residence program in their backyard shed. Like the Cogswell window, these steadfastly grassroots operations inhabit a curious space between public and private, embracing self-sufficiency and DIY culture, and demonstrating a sense of whimsy, confidence, and optimism that flies in the face of mainstream media.

From a third floor on Hollis Street overlooking the harbour you don't so much notice the clouds at first, just the way everyone's eyes tend to wander out of windows. Then a quiet shift in the light, then the sound of wind turning corners - then Oh the horizon is gone, quick as a radio signal under a bridge, mid-sentence.

Suddenly it is pouring snow. In the hallways everyone is saying a storm, saying the roads are going bad. Out of Yarmouth, someone reckons. Fifteen centimetres, warns the forecast. Four o'clock and as it gets dark the windows flicker black and white, like unintelligible television sets. Snow is a static, a stasis, a kind of interference.

Trucks shudder the streets, flinging salt like confetti. Bodies in the bus shelters shoulder to shoulder, faces huddling into the glow of cellphones. Flashing lights and sirens in the distance, and suddenly distance could mean anywhere, could mean across the street. A closeness in the air you weren't aware of before. Strangers stand closer together, especially as a bus draws near. Thick slush and the vehicle fishtails slightly, its movements vaguely aquatic.

Sidewalks are slick with melting footprints. Asphalt almost erased except for tire tracks, blank lines like a musical staff badly-drawn. Snow dampens sound as it dampens everything - hair, mittens, the colours of things. Outside you either shout or you whisper, every sound refracted six times by snowflakes, then six times squared, until words are as faceted as diamonds, and as rare. Your breath a chaff on the wind.

In inclement weather luck becomes a tangible thing. Crossing the street, the hood of your coat fills up with luck. Luck is packed into fists and flung across schoolyards, luck smacks you wetly in the back of the head, luck trickles down your spine. It is a kind of overlooked luck, treasured mostly by schoolkids, but it is still luck. Cold as a nickel plucked out of a snowbank, and worth as much. But it is still luck.

Nine years old, dared to lick the signpost at the bus stop. Your tongue like the needle on a record player, stuck.

Snow falls like sleep, its onset impossible to remember. Waking up to find the power has gone out during the night, the electronic displays all blinking, your alarm clock stuttering in its sleep. Snow on the radio. Looking out the window to find the storm still there, impertinent. Like a hundred cats ransacking your front yard.

Snow is silence, snow is a standing ovation. Something inside me is as unforeseen, as furiously joyous as a snowstorm. My body so warm and desirous that it steams at the touch of snow, melting it instantly, like an electrical wire. A sip of coffee shortcircuits my tongue.

6:15. A clear cold sky, the colour of shadows on snow, holds the moon like a half-buried stone. I am sitting on the front step, waiting for a friend. This early in the morning, more cats than cars prowl Summit Street. A calico from next door laps water from the furrows in our driveway. A black cat from two doors down watches me with its eyes askant, mewing. The stars are pins and needles on my ears. I have forgotten my hat, but decide not to go back inside so as not to accidentally wake my roommate. A streetlight flickers fitfully. Soon Matthew rounds the corner, camera in hand. We head down Windsor and North, to the bridge.

Scant traffic until we reach the bridge itself, which is bustling. The pedestrian walkway on the southeast side rises heavily above parked cars and sleeping ships, arching over the harbour. We walk quickly, anticipating sunrise, and watch the Halifax skyline slowly rotate into view. A tripod proves useless, as the pavement shakes constantly with the weight of passing vehicles, but it is light enough now that it is unnecessary anyway. Near the first trestle, the air is voluble with the warble of birds; they have a gathering place under the walkway. We spot a few perched on the side rails and decide they are starlings.

The bridge is not as long as it looks. We are halfway to Dartmouth when the sun brisks up, quick as a wink, lavish as a cat's eye caught in cameraflash. Tapetum lucidum.

As soon as the light hits the starlings let go, with the precision and propensity of acrobats. A troupe of them cascades over salt water, single-minded, synchonized, wings tinged pink by the ruddy sunlight. My fingers are cold and move too slowly. The starlings are a fast cloud, cirrus uncinus, flurried and ephemeral. Somewhere between my eye and the sun they splinter and are never seen again, suddenly invisible, like a handful of sand tossed in water. Like fireworks, or a meteor shower. Like stars or fireflies at first light, like a cheshire cat, like a soap bubble popped. Like pins and needles, like gooseflesh, like freckles only visible when you've been in the sun. Like light in your eyes or water in your ears. Like every sunrise you've ever slept through.

"I think perception is a strange thing, much stranger than we think. These swifts... they live five times faster than us. We must be like cold statues to them."
· Graham Dorrington, in Werner Herzog's The White Diamond

a seagull quill
dipped in tidepool

sips water easily,
doesn't drip, deposits
a clean, oblong line,
brief as breath,
on shoreline stone

saltwater letters vanish fast
in strong lateral sunlight -
traced this three times before it would linger
long enough to photograph,

not long after

It's the living that haunt the homes
of the dead, wanting something
from them we can't articulate,
something we can only gesture dumbly towards...
· Michael Crummey, Finnish Cemetery Revisited

I bought a Yashica-Mat LM. I found it in an antique store, across the street from NSCAD. It wasn't expensive. The proprietor said, The lady who brought that in said she'd still been using it until recently. He wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a plastic bag. It was surprisingly heavy.

It is a stout, serious camera, its twin lenses like thick spectacles, tilted sidelong. It lifts its lid as if tipping its hat. It is habitually quiet, at least it likes to think so; its hearing is not what it used to be. It is polite to the point of being reticent, and a bit of a pessimist. It believes since there is nothing good to say it is better to say nothing at all. It reads the newspaper every day. It is observant, but slightly farsighted, and keeps a minimum distance of 3.2 feet from the subject of its scrutiny. It prefers overcast days, and autumn. It likes books without pictures, or books with nothing but pictures, but not both at the same time.

I noticed the tombstone of Frederick Fishwick because someone had hung a pair of keys on it. People shortcut though Camp Hill Cemetery quite a bit. Probably someone had dropped their keys and someone else had put them up where they'd be seen; common folly, common courtesy. A few hours earlier in a bookstore nearby I'd found a book of essays about photography being all about loss - a way of pinning things to paper, a method of holding on to the dead. I didn't buy the book, but it was in my head as I walked through Camp Hill. In the past, finding myself in a graveyard with a camera in my hands, I've felt uncomfortable taking photos... it can come across as a kind of intrusion, a faux-pas, something like sneezing in church. With the Yashica-Mat, though, it feels appropriate - partly because the camera is old, and partly because it is quiet. It's a twin lens reflex, and lacks the familiar clack of a mirror flipping up. Just the flicker of the diaphragm shutter, almost inaudible, a sound like five leaves snapping from five branches simultaneously. One looks down into the camera, as if into water. The image swims. Because I never lift the lens to my eye, it is less intrusive. Innocuous, a little shy. A camera for downcast eyes.

I am baffled by this camera. Taking a photograph involves a lot of fussing and adjusting. It takes time. It fails to focus on anything closer than three feet away. The fresnel lens reverses things and becomes a kind of Rubik's cube to wrap my mind around. Things tend to fall out of the frame. And I'm not used to seeing in squares. But somehow all its little eccentricities become possibilities, and I am intrigued. This camera is a crystal ball cupped in my hands.

No one searches for lost objects in a cemetery. Everything in a cemetery was lost long ago, and everyone knows exactly where it is. The stones are our signposts. Perhaps the keys have been there for decades already, like the moss and the fallen cross. Time moves slowly in a cemetery. The trees grow tall here. Trees make good caretakers for the dead; they move at the same speed.

It's only when I'm standing still that I understand any of this. I write in my notebook,

with every click
of my camera, a gravestone leans
one sixtieth of a second
into eternity

What does Fishwick think? He winks, and says nothing. They are his keys now.

Maritime light is a fistful of dimes, clattering on wooden tables, bouncing silently off terrace umbrellas. The restaurant's panelled walls are full of photos steeped in sepia and overblown, boat-sails stark white, ocean strictly brown, horizon slightly diagonal as if the boats are weighing it down. No sky to speak of.

The umbrellas will fold when the light fades, as scheduled as flowers. Tourists sit in groups of two, four, six. They study laminated menus, squint, shield their eyes from the sunshine glinting off the harbour. A sign pleads Please Do Not Feed The Birds, but when departing diners leave behind unfinished baskets of fish and chips, the grackles and pigeons help themselves.

Standing on the waterfront, no one could convince me that water is colourless. The solid blue of salt water. Waves like veins just beneath the surface. I slip through a gate and walk on the lower part of the pier, the part that floats. Find my sea legs when a boat's wake washes by.

Seagulls' knees knotted like driftwood, like muscular ropes. Seabirds towing their shadows across water, across wood made gray and green by the sea. Birds reeling shadows in when they land, the strings invisible. Fishing line.

Invited to Bedford for supper, right at the end of the basin. Boats coast across the picture window, and a breeze rolls in from the balcony door. Oh listen, the loon is back! Go take a look. By the time I get to the window it has vanished. Did you know they can stay underwater for three, four minutes? says Roy. Sure enough it resurfaces eventually, closer to us than when it dove. Another appears, rounding a rock. I am handed binoculars and stand at the window entranced. Had forgotten how crystalballed the world becomes when telescoped. A sudden awareness of the sphericity of eyes. The loons sit distantly on the water like tiny soapstone carvings, white flecks chiselled into black plumage.

On the table a book by Michael Crummey; on the wall a print by David Blackwood. That one's a Lloyd Pretty, says Marilyn. Pickled beets with dinner, just like on occasion at home. My relatives, though long removed, are resolutely Newfoundlanders.

A long walk down Barrington with the shoreline on one side, stitched with smokestacks and cranes. Not raining really, except under trees when wind loosens it from leaves.

We glimpse blue sky, but only from the waterfront. The colours sliding across the surface of the water are richer than the unreflected world. Hard to find a horizon without a telephone pole, chimney, or mast jutting up in front of it. G. says, There are so many telephone wires that they spoil the view but not enough that they become interesting in themselves.

I left the house with a hand-drawn map but hardly needed it; unusually, here I am able to find my way intuitively. The water is an indisputable landmark. There are few distractions, and everything feels familiar. Halifax reminds me of Montreal and of St. John's at the same time. It is somewhere distinctly between.

My immediate connectedness is partly because I have family and friends here, and also because I am more willing to make connections. I feel myself slowly becoming someone who is easier to get to know. Less locked inside myself. Opening from the inside.

On my bedroom door here there is a small bolt that has been installed on the door instead of on the doorframe, so it does nothing. All my defences are the same way. Ceremonial, like a cannon in a public garden.

today i wanted to shout out loud HOW ARE YOU softly to myself
· bpNichol, talking about strawberries all of the time

A routine flight despite the apparent presence of John Stamos in the seat across the aisle from me, baseball cap pulled low. I am assured by a young businesswoman that it is him. We have a celebrity on board! she titters delightedly. In precisely the same tone, an authoritative prerecorded voice describes the aircraft's state-of-the-art safety features.

Oh yes, says Marilyn afterwards, they're filming three movies here, so that sounds right. She is driving cautiously through thick fog, "pea soup" as my uncle Roy puts it. He calls her Marny. I haven't seen either of them in years but they are driving me from the airport to Joyce's where I will stay. I recognized you right away, says Roy.

Goodness you look just like your father. Are you hungry? asks Joyce. Do you drink tea? When your father was here he drank a lot of tea. She makes us chicken sandwiches with tomato sliced thick, and lettuce and cucumber, on multigrain bread. I don't know how many grains the bread is, she says. It doesn't say.

Do you like partridgeberry muffins? You can get them here, but they call them foxberries. And of course bakeapples are cloudberries.

So here is the bathroom, she says, and here is your room where your father stayed. It is square and pleasantly sparse: a large bed in the center, a small closet, a mirrored dresser. A doily blossoms on the bedside table. These rooms look just like the rooms in nan and pop's townhouse in St. John's, I remark. Well yes, she says, it's an old house. Here's an empty drawer if you want to put in your clothes. See you in the morning.

In another drawer there is a tattered copy of The Treasury of Newfoundland Dishes, printed in 1958. I make note of some of the recipe titles: Grandmother's Apple Crow's Nest. Blueberry Roly-Poly. Marsh-berry Jelly. Never Fail Cake. Thrimble. Brawn. Baked Turr. Fishermen's Fish and Brewis. Bublem Squeak. Rhubarb Catsup. Bricks Without Straw. Kedgaree.

Its yellowing pages are sprinkled with bits of wisdom and etymology, colloquial sayings, and anecdotes.

Bakeapples: Yellow berries of delicious flavour, shaped like blackberries. They grow low down in bogs. In Scandinavian countries they are called cloudberries.

They are often confused by the stranger with baked apples, but, of course, they are not at all the same. It is said that when the French first landed on the shores of Newfoundland and found this unknown berry they said "what is this berry called?" or "Baie qu'appelle?"
· The Treasury of Newfoundland Dishes