I am interested in landscape and new media and spent some time exploring and researching Second Life for this paper, written for a graduate seminar class at NSCAD University.

I am falling. It's my second time in, and I ended my last session somewhere in the sky above Sandbox Newcomb, attempting to see how high I could fly. Thin clouds drift around my avatar, or virtual self, and the ground below grows gradually more visible through a haze of grey fog. It isn't so much a fall as a slow drift downward, and eventually I come to a gentle stop still some distance above the ground. My avatar hovers patiently in place, floating in midair. I press the Page Down key to land.

I am standing in what purports to be a desert, a mottled brown and green plane that looked a little more convincing from a distance. Up close it is blurry, as if the texture map that contains its colour data has been stretched to its limits. In the distances between splotches of colour, I can almost discern a pixel grid. It is perfectly flat more often than not, more floor than earth, though I see a small drop in elevation to the south. This area looks largely uninhabited, and it takes a few minutes of wandering on foot before I come across any buildings. Even when I find one — a large, empty cube with one open wall and a pink checkered floor — there is no one around.

Second Life feels like a game at first, but less so the longer I wander around. The three-dimensional landscape looks familiar, its generic green and brown colour scheme a video game cliché. But it is too wide open — there are no obstacles, no bottomless pits or brick walls, no enemies hurling deadly projectiles with devious precision. The user interface, too, feels tacked on from some first-person shooter, a mess of layered menu bars and windows, a small radar map in the top right corner. But there's nothing on my radar but more green and brown, and far from being charged with some desperate quest, I find myself alone in a landscape as empty as a sheet of paper.

Land in Second Life is divided into large areas called simulators, or sims. Within each sim, land is often subdivided into small lots, which like almost everything else in Second Life can be bought and sold, typically in parcels of 512 square meters. The currency of the virtual world is the Linden Dollar, named after Second Life's developers, San Francisco-based Linden Research Inc. — commonly known in-world as Linden Lab, or The Lindens. Users are called residents, and are encouraged to not only create virtual identities and form relationships with other residents, but to establish a semipermanent presence in the virtual world through the purchase of land.

Like so many others, my avatar takes its first steps on Orientation Island, a small training area scattered with featureless grey avatars — a sign that a resident is new, or perhaps that its avatar is still loading, or rezzing. We are clumsy together, walking at first in straight lines or in circles, sitting down and standing repeatedly, littering the conversation window with interjections aimed at no one in particular. These are our virtual bodies at their most primitive: though born fully grown, capable of full control of our considerable motor skills (flying, it turns out, is as easy as pressing Page Up), our movements are laboured and graceless. The small cluttered island, neatly quartered into four training areas, is like a crib to contain our floundering bodies and the simple objects we quickly learn to interact with, and to build. When we are ready, we move on.

As I later learn, most land in Second Life does not remain empty for long. The area I first find myself in, upon teleporting from Orientation Island to the larger continent, turns out to be a small unused corner of a vast sim called Sandbox Newcomb. Sandboxes in Second Life are testing areas, large open-air workshops where users can build and test objects without worrying about disrupting other residents. Different sandboxes tolerate different degrees of experimentation, as becomes obvious when I come across a large billboard:

Warning! Sandbox parcel will be cleaned regularly. NO selling / advertising / shooting or gambling allowed. Simple scripts only! NO WEAPONS.

The Sandbox itself is a junkyard of playthings, prototypes, and half-built structures, all constructed using prims or primitive objects, with the user interface's built-in 3D modeller. In my immediate vicinity, having found my way out of my vacant corner, I count three cars, a spaceship, two large buildings suspended in space, a Coke machine, an upside-down armchair, a small army of large immobile penguins, and a unicorn. Attempting to interact with several objects proves fruitless; a car refuses to drive, I can't climb inside the spaceship, and the Coke machine seems to be out of order. Right-clicking the unicorn reveals that it has a scripted action called Cuddle, but despite my advances it stares at me blankly, mane and tail sparkling in a digital wind. Perhaps the objects are unfinished, or perhaps I don't have permission to use them. Everything built in Second Life comes with built-in copy protection; an object's creator decides whether to allow other users to copy or interact with it. With this system, Linden Lab's virtual world has developed its own sizeable market economy, sustained by artists and virtual entrepreneurs who design, sell, and rent everything from waterfront resorts to functioning replicas of the Millennium Falcon to custom avatar costumes, tattoos, and animated gestures. Linden Dollars, which users can purchase in-world using any major credit card, are also exchangeable for real world cash, and the currency currently floats at about 250 Linden Dollars to the U.S. Dollar. A basic membership in Second Life requires only an e-mail address, but to own land requires a premium membership with a monthly payment; users without land are essentially homeless, perpetual tourists.

I am a tourist, and an ill-equipped one at that. Besides having a basic account and no Linden Dollars, my Dell's graphics card barely meets the minimum requirements to run the Second Life software, and to reduce lag and loading time I've adjusted the graphics options to as low as they can go. Even so, the world loads painfully slowly, particularly when I am near numerous large objects, and my PC buzzes like a single-engine plane in protest. Flying over a seemingly empty field, I spot a small table with a chessboard; I land nearby for a closer look, only to have an entire gazebo rez around me: tiled marble floor, glass roof, potted plants and all. It turns out to be one end of a much larger garden, and at the other end I discover more than a dozen people standing in a group, speaking Spanish. I wonder now how much of the seemingly vacant landscape I've flown over is actually developed. Large structures show up on the map, but smaller objects are easy to miss due to my digital nearsightedness.

Sight in Second Life is a strange thing. I view the world not from my avatar's eyes, but from a floating virtual camera that tags along a few metres behind its head. This too is a convention adopted from other 3D worlds. As opposed to the first-person perspective of some 3D games, it gives the player a wider view of their immediate surroundings, as well as a greater familiarity with their avatar's physical appearance. Left to its own devices the virtual camera follows doggedly behind my avatar, but I'm also able to take control, swinging around to close in on my avatar's face, zooming out to view more of my surroundings, or peering around as if through my avatar's eyes. This is called a dynamic camera system, and is particularly noticeable when, for example, I somehow end up with an obstacle between my floating 'eye' and my avatar, as inevitably happens in close quarters. One of the earliest examples of this kind of camera system is in Nintendo's Mario 64 (1996), where the player's floating viewpoint is personified as a small flying character holding a camera and following Mario around. No such explanation is necessary in Second Life, as the dynamic camera system has become common in certain types of 3D games over the past ten years. It is useful, but adds a certain distance to the roleplay; am I intended to imagine myself as my avatar, or is the character a kind of puppet who responds to my commands? The first scenario is implied by the title, Second Life, and has been reinforced for years in games such as Mario 64 (the player is thought of as Mario, not the character filming Mario). There is a particularly acute sense of disconnection, though, when my avatar slips out of sight, or for some reason won't do what I want to do. Or what I want it to do.

Being able to view one's avatar at all times suits Second Life particularly well; there is great enthusiasm in the virtual world for avatar customization, and much of the satisfaction of becoming a giant dragon or wearing a custom-designed animated outfit would be lost if it wasn't on view at all times. The four initial areas of tutorial on Orientation Island are labelled Movement, Search, Communicate, and Appearance, which indicates the primary importance placed on customizing one's avatar. The Second Life engine allows an incredible variety of possible avatars, and users take great pride in designing (or purchasing) bodies, clothes, and accessories for themselves. As usual, Shakespeare said it first: all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are, quite literally, players. The experience of spending time in Second Life is not unlike directing and acting out a television show starring yourself. I am encouraged to be whatever I imagine, to find or create desirable surroundings, and to make friends and form relationships (and increasingly do business) on whatever terms I desire. All along, the camera follows attentively. The emphasis on appearance and creating visually convincing virtual environments is a fundamental part of the Second Life world. I came across one block of run-down brick buildings complete with graffiti, rusted metal fences, and even a dumpster object in a back alley, filled with virtual trash. In another area, a large billboard advertising "Land For Sale" had been designed complete with an elaborate wooden structure propping it up; it could just as easily have been a two-dimensional rectangle floating in midair. At the same time, it is not uncommon to find buildings suspended in space or on floating platforms (which is not so odd when you consider that residents can fly). Most objects sold and traded in Second Life have no functional value; virtual shoes don't protect your virtual feet, and even working vehicles are basically useless when everyone can teleport. Indeed, Second Life's economy seems to consist largely of the creation and sale of stage props.

Advertisements, of course, are one type of virtual object which is perfectly functional, and Second Life is naturally full of billboards, flashing signs, and interactive exhibits advertising both real-world and virtual businesses. Of course, any sign can also act as a virtual vending machine. As there are no natural resources, land seems to be valued primarily as a salable commodity and increasingly as advertising space. Second Life has relatively few roads (since everyone can teleport and fly), and so without a clear direction to point at many ads take the form of large rotating blocks, or aim themselves in odd directions such as straight up, to attract the attention of avatars flying overhead (not that this is unheard of in real life).

Virtual reality remains a thin curtain, and it is easy to find places where even the surface illusion is transparent. Wandering to the edge of any continent reveals a perfectly vertical cliff, and at its edges the landscape reveals itself to be thinner than paper, two-dimensional. Here the fragile underbelly of the world can be seen, and it is as flat as a fallen house of cards. Trees, scattered illogically around otherwise empty landscapes, often consist of two sprites that intersect like a cardboard model, producing the barest illusion of three-dimensionality. It is possible to walk straight through most of them, as if they were merely projections. I had an interesting conversation with one of the first residents I spoke to in Second Life, a certain C. Helvetic. We were standing on the shore of Sandbox Newcomb, which doesn't usually have a shore; a large sim-sized lake stretched before us, perfectly square and as empty as an abandoned storefront window. "It's sad," he mused, "there's supposed to be another sim here, but it crashed." I mention I like the water, which beneath this stunning sky (I've just discovered the menu option World → Force Sun → Sunset) is admittedly scenic even to my low-res virtual eyes. "It's just what the software renders when there's nothing there," he explains. "But yes, it's pretty." I ask Helvetic if the map wraps around its edges, and he explains that the world is flat: "They'll keep building on the X and Y indefinitely." I ask about cities.

"You were born yesterday," he says suddenly. I've only been in Second Life for an hour, long enough to find my way off Orientation Island and to the edge of the sandbox. But I suppose the clock must have passed midnight as I wandered Sandbox Newcomb, and my profile indicates that I started yesterday.

"How does it feel to be born yesterday?"

I don't reply. I hold Page Up and my avatar sails straight up, until I can't see the sand or the water anymore. I zoom the camera out and my avatar grows smaller, a tiny dot, the only object on the screen. There are clouds between it and the camera. I click Quit. I pour a glass of water from the jug in the fridge.

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.

At Port aux Basques we are caught in bureaucracy. A man in an orange vest and matching moustache isn't sure he can let us board the ferry because one of our passengers doesn't have a reservation. He mumbles something about a waiting list. The parking lot is vast and vacant, and this seems ridiculous. Looking at the massive ferry looming in the windshield and thinking, waiting list. There is no one here and it must hold a thousand. The man in the safety vest goes to make a call and we watch the half-dozen vehicles ahead of us disappear into the gullet of the ship, incredulous. The next crossing is not for twelve hours.

Later I find out: The Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act stipulates the number of passengers that may be carried on restricted sailings based up on the type and quantity of the commodity to be transported on the vessel. Paint, turpentine, batteries, propane, toilet bowl cleaner, adhesives, fire extinguishers, oxygen for hospitals. "They're only taking fifty-nine passengers today." But they wave us on anyway.

MV Joseph and Clara Smallwood, along with her sister ship MV Caribou, is the largest icebreaking ferry in the world. Her capacity includes 1200 passengers and 370 automobiles or 77 tractor trailers. The vehicle deck is packed with eighteen-wheelers, but the passenger decks are empty. My travelling companions are napping and I have an entire section of empty seats to myself. On my right there are two model ships encased in plexiglass, on my left two vending machines. I have a notebook and a novel, Michael Crummey's The Wreckage.

This ship is a museum in many ways. Though commissioned in 1990 her decor is haunted by various decades, none of them later than the eighties. Overly-ornate carpets, a garish cafeteria, dimly-lit hallways lined with faded photos, outdated advertising. A black and white photo of Joey Smallwood lends a kind of saintly eccentricity to the man; a halo of smokestack hair, glasses as thick as ferry windows, spine leaning into sky. A small chalkboard near the steward's office announces our estimated time of arrival at North Sydney: 18:00. Eighteen hundred hours.

Travel is riddled with small delays, limbos, loopholes. The half-hour in the parking lot. Another half-hour or so after they let us board but before the ferry goes anywhere. And then there is the half-hour the ferry finds herself perpetually lost in, somewhere between Newfoundland and Atlantic Standard Time. She borrowed a half-hour when I crossed before Christmas and now on my way home to Halifax she is reluctant to give it back.

As I am writing the boat has started moving, so gradually I hadn't noticed, but rapidly now - I look up to find houses, streetlamps, long fences drifting past the windows, distorted eerily in the doubled glass. A few smaller outbuildings, a wiry guardrail, modestly mossy hills giving way to balding rock, then eventually a muted white which is just as much nothing as it is a sky. Cotton batting.

On the outside deck I watch the sun set behind clouds, as if from a window with the curtains closed. After dark the ferry's wide trail of wake slips quickly into oblivion, a darkness deeper than the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. I want to photograph the ferry at night, the glow of light on the smokestacks. I haven't brought a tripod but laying my camera on a guardrail works almost as well. Somewhere below me in the gut of the ship I can feel a constant shaking, as if every nut and bolt is nervous. I can see my breath. I shiver, and step back inside.

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

All you have to do is close your eyes, and the inward rhythm passes through your hand with greater purity. [...] The great artist of the Stone Age knew how to ride the thousand voices singing in him. [...] Dreaming taught me how to write, and it was only later, laboriously, that I learned to read. The hands grasp more quickly than the mind.
· Hans Arp, Ant's Harp

Language lives and evolves. In prehistory, language lived in the throats and gestures of animals. But this is before it could remember. Its earliest memory is the wall of a cave. The smell of ochre and charcoal. Lascaux. Cows.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
· James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It is a long time after that before the memories become clear. Clay tablets, and stone walls. Fingers full of dust and ink. The sound of a chisel against stone, clink clink clink clink. If you say a word over and over, it becomes sound. If you trace a picture over and over, it becomes symbol. Language drew that moocow so many times, it became something else.

Looking back now, Language can't remember the cow's name. But it can remember the smell.

Alphabet is the memory of language. The older language gets, the less alphabet has anything to do with what it meant to remember. Similarly, it forgets where it got most of its words. It flips through a dictionary with a certain detachment, as if looking at someone else's souvenirs. Some mornings it doesn't recognize itself in the mirror.

In the ancient world it was believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between words and their referents, even to the former giving rise to the latter. [...] In an essential fashion, words were what they represented.
· Constance Classen, Words of Sense, from Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History & Across Cultures

Language has aged. But its nose still works. And its ears and its eyes and its hands still work, and its tongue tastes even if it gets tangled sometimes. Its five senses receive the stimuli of the immediate universe as they always have. In the same way, alphabet is old but its vowels still work. Long ago it decided there were five: A, E, I, O, U. They do not always sound the same, but for simplicity's sake alphabet has made up its mind. The ear disagrees but the eye is satisfied.

A vowel is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract; an unconstriction of breath. The word vowel comes from the Latin vocalis, meaning "speaking." Vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables. Without these primordial sounds, words and speech would not be possible (see Wikipedia). Vowels are as essential to language as senses are to living experience. If language is a living thing, vowels are its senses.

In the spirit of Hans Arp's dream-writing, and in light of language's languished memory, I propose an arbitrary analogy: Once upon a time there were five vowels coming down along the road that met five nicens little senses; and a very good time it was.

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.
· Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences

A is for smell. At first this makes as much sense as a Surrealist poem, but the hands grasp more quickly than the mind: turn an A over and over in your hand, pass it from palm to palm. It is the shape of a nose. Its structure is that of an apple-ladder, or a campfire. The aroma of apple-blossoms and marshmallows. An A is a pair of lines pinching a line between them, like fingers raising something to the nose. A has the subtlety and snobbery of smell, a sense particularly associated with memory. A sighs, Ah!, and remembers. It is pointed, like a nose, and likes to lead the way.

E is an ear, its three prongs like the lobes that splay receptively into space, or perhaps like the tines of tuning forks. It is neatly compartmentalized, and its lines seem to yen to continue - the beginnings of a grid, or a musical staff? E is piano keys, or the frets of stringed instruments. The sound of wind over the mouth of a bottle. E says, Eh?, and asks you to repeat yourself, as it repeats itself with frenetic frequency, being the most commonly-encountered letter in the English language.

I equals eye. A closed eye, lying on its side? Or perhaps the iris of a cat, or the eye of a needle. Needlelike, I can be difficult to see at a distance. Is it a plinth, a podium, a pillar? Doric, Ionic, Corinthian? I has a certain Italianness in it, a rich vein of history. In italic, it might be Pisa's Leaning Tower. I elevates, lifts, rises. It has the dignity, simplicity, and quickness of sight. A plume of smoke on a windless day. I is solitary, stands alone, stares you down. I has a certain primacy: I equals 1.

O is the shape of a fingertip, a toe, or the ball of an elbow: something that pokes and prods, exploratory yet vulnerable. O is touch. O is something holdable in the palm of a hand, smooth and perhaps hollow: a tooth, an egg, a heart. O floats. O is skin stretched over a drum, rings on the surface of a pond, a mosquito bite raised like Braille. O can be an embrace or a fist, a womb or a bomb. Oh! It exclaims, in orgasm or pain, and always close at hand.

U is an untucked tongue, a rather rude gesture. Gustatory, guttural, U is taste. Its shape is a cup, concave and capable of carrying something to the mouth. U is crude, and unmannered: it scoops its food, droops and drools, and drops utensils under the table. U is uncouth, as useless as an upturned umbrella, and requires the supervision of Q at all times. The taste of a mouth washed out with soap. Uh! blurts U, usurper, who always wants to be someone else: you.

Crickets, as you know, have taste buds in their toes and ears in their front kneecaps. Typographers are equally bizarre. Their ears are in their eyes; their tongues are in their hands. It is their fingers more than their lips that constantly threaten to move as they read.
· Robert Bringhurst, The Typographic Mind

Drawing an A is a laboured construction, the start of an architecture: to reinforce and connect two leaning lines. Or, more haphazardly, an A can be "a slapdash arc and a backward zag" (from Christian Bök's Eunoia). Open on the bottom, with an enclosed space at the top, it suggests nostrils and a nasal cavity. To draw an E is to nail rungs to a ladder, to build shelves, or to measure off a scale - something abstractly musical. It is open on one side, like an ear. To write an I is to quickly indicate direction; almost an arrow, an I is a compass needle, due north. A line of sight. Another kind of compass traces an O, an enclosed space, like skin cocooning a body. It is circular, like the shape of lips saying: oooooo. To make a U is to quickly change directions, to protrude and retract on a vertical axis, like a tongue; a U-turn.

"I'm not meaning rude, really and truly," said Taffy. "It's part of my secret-surprise-think. Do say ah, Daddy, and keep your mouth open at the end, and lend me that tooth. I'm going to draw a carp-fish's mouth wide-open."
· Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet was Made

In Kipling's fable, the letter A came about when Taffimai Metallumai drew a carp's mouth with a feeler stretched across; similarly, it's believed to have evolved from the Phoenician grapheme of an ox's head (see Wikipedia). A dead fish, an ox's nose; in fiction and history, A has its roots in smelly animals. E, more cleanly, began as the Phoenician symbol for home or courtyard (see Allan Haley's The Letter E); the inner chamber of an ear? At I and O, my analogy falls apart; I is the Phoenician grapheme for arm or hand, and O for eye. Visually this makes sense: the circle of O resembles an eyeball, and I an arm or finger. For various reasons described above, though, I prefer my original pairings. And so I carry on with my finger in my eye. The character U originated along with F, V, W, and Y, and once resembled "a giant snake or dragon." A forked tongue? U has always been unruly, and uncooperative.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
· James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Five symbols are inadequate to convey the range of sounds that can be produced by pronouncing A, E, I, O, and U. Nevertheless, each vowel has a characteristic pitch. I and E are the highest, associated with whistles and shrieks; this corresponds to the distance associated with the senses of sight and hearing, which can experience things a long way off. A, a more moderate, nasal sound, correlates to smell which requires proximity, but not contact. O and U are more bass sounds, associated with low-pitched noises (think thud, plonk/plunk, honk, boom). This works well with the senses of touch and taste, which require direct contact to stimulate. A degree of intensity is also implied: I and E are sharp, quick, trill; A is more flat, banal; O and U are broader, blunt, somewhat slumberous (could it be because their graphemes have no sharp corners?).

Cross-cultural studies have shown that different vowel sounds are associated with different degrees of size and brightness. Thus one study of English and Chinese speakers in which the made-up words 'mal' and 'mil' were said to mean 'table,' both groups agreed that 'mal' suggested a larger table than 'mil.'
· Constance Classen, Words of Sense, from Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History & Across Cultures

Like vowels, the senses are useful individually but far more versatile when used together. A missing sense is usually experienced as either a disability or an inconvenience, depending on which sense, and there are names for each scenario: blindness (inability to see), deafness (hear), paresthesia (to feel pressure), anosmia (smell), and ageusia (taste). The full range of vocalic sounds involves combinations of vowels, or diphthongs ("a vowel sound that starts near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves toward the position for another"). Language and sensory experience are both enriched when we use vowels and sounds to their full extent; to experience text or the universe otherwise borders on the unnatural.

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks, which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib?
· Christian Bök, Eunoia

An excerpt from Christian Bök's Eunoia highlights the curious results that can come from constrained writing - in this case, writing using only one vowel. Living with just one sense is almost unimaginable, and might in some ways resemble the text of Eunoia: limited and difficult, inhibited, one-dimensional.

Y is sometimes used as a vowel. Is there a sixth sense? Sometimes equilibrioception is considered so; a sense of balance, of water in your ears. Y is mysterious, almost mythic; the next-to-last letter, comparable to the planet Pluto in its remoteness and demotion as a kind of lesser vowel. Visually, Y resembles nothing so much as a funnel. As an affix, it neatly makes words ambiguous, conveying a vague sense of their unfunneled selves: fish becomes fishy, water becomes watery, push becomes pushy. It makes nouns into adjectives, a kind of orthographic alchemy. Like a path of bird's footprints, Y is apt to abruptly trail off and disappear. Y is shifty, and one is advised not to trust it; like a dowsing rod, no one really knows whether or not to believe in its abilities. Wryly, Y asks the hardest question: Why?

whatever the dream of numbers means
whatever the slumber that is never broken
the spoken word & the written
together end the spell
· bpNichol, Zygal

Certainly the identity of a photographic image no longer has to do with its support or its chemical composition, or with its authorship, place of origin, or pictorial appearance. It instead comprises, as Müller-Pohle suggests, a pliable sequence of digital data and electronic impulses.
· Geoffrey Batchen, Da[r]ta, from Each Wild Idea

As opposed to an analog film negative, a digital image is essentially a stream of data, and can be represented as a string of ones and zeroes. With a bit of ingenuity, a digital image can be 'translated' into other forms of digital data, such as text. I'm interested in adapting digital photographic data into information systems usually associated with language and literature, such as an index of first lines.

An index of first lines, occasionally found in anthologies of poetry, eschews authorship, title and chronology and lists poems alphabetically according to each first line of text. The idea is that a reader might not always recall the title or author of a poem, but is likely to remember how it begins. I've always found indices of first lines amusing as Dadaist exercises in found poetry - reading the lines sequentially often results in a charmingly garbled, wandering diatribe, full of false starts. An example, from The Oxford Shakespeare:

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Against my love shall be, as I am now
Against that time, if ever that time come
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth
Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there
As a decrepit father takes delight
As an unperfect actor on the stage
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st
As it fell upon a day
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted...

index of first lines contains the first row of pixels from every digital photo I took from May 9 to July 17, 2004, during a summer spent studying art history in the U.K. and France. The lines of pixels are stratified in chronological order, with the earliest photo at the top. The resulting image contains 2048 x 1047 pixels - 2048 pixels being the width of the photos my digital camera took (3.2 megapixels), times 1047 photos.

It would have been quite time-consuming to assemble this using digital image editing software such as Photoshop. Instead, I wrote a PHP script to automatically copy and compile the images (PHP is a programming language designed for producing dynamic web pages, and can also be used to generate and manipulate digital images in a systematic way). index of first lines is a product not only of a digital camera, but of computer code - the very act of its creation is an act of reproduction. Thus it is an example of "the work of art designed for reproducibility" described by Walter Benjamin. It is similar to film in this way, and also in that it is composed of a series of sequential images that are never perceived individually. Its horizontal lines can be likened to the lines that jitter across the screen when one fast-forwards a video.

While it's impossible for me to identify individual photos, looking at this image does bring back memories. Its hazy horizontal sweep evokes a landscape seen from the window of a moving train, a suitable metaphor for the fleeting, mesmerizing summer I remember. The 'busiest' areas (with the most contrasting lines) represent hectic days wandering London or Paris, when no two photos were alike. Thicker bands of colour indicate slower times, when I snapped many photos with similar scenery - the greenery of The Gibberd Garden, or a clear blue sky over Brighton Pier. A certain band of white a third of the way down - near the end of the first month - is a trace of the overcast sky on the afternoon I first visited Stonehenge. In this way, index of first lines is an accurate cross-section of my memory, or at least my photographic habits. I read it in the same way I occasionally reread the journals I kept during that summer's travels: not top-to-bottom, but discursively, letting my eyes and mind wander. Nevertheless, examining it is an act of reading.

Robert Frank once said, "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." He might have said, "the way they do when they want to pause and rewind a film." index of first lines is full of these small instant replays, from near-identical rows of pixels which indicate a photo taken twice, to my reading of it as a kind of rewound / fast-forwarded version of my summer. Like an index of poems, its usefulness as a reference device depends on my memory. Taken out of context, it has a certain Dadaist quality.

"The still photographic image has circulated [...] predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word," writes Martin Lister in his Introduction to the Photographic Image in Digital Culture, and "with the emergence of digital technology this convergence is exponentially increasing." Though it can be approximated on paper, index of first lines is not intended for a gallery wall. I'm interested in the possibilities of web-based art and writing, and especially in self-published, ongoing projects such as blogs. It's with the intention of designing my blog that I began to learn PHP in the first place, and it seems fitting to situate index of first lines there, as part of a longer ongoing journal of photographs and writing.

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.

It's the last night of the Writers At Woody Point festival. I am in the van with mom, dad, Guy and Doreen. We detour first to Trout River for a feed at the Seaside and a long gawk on the beach. Stopping by the Tablelands on the way back to Woody Point, we pick our way over broken brown rocks and ridges, talking and taking pictures of tuckamore. One side of the road is lush bog, the other this strange landscape as if suddenly we have stumbled upon another world. The road must be built right on a faultline, says dad. How is it that we live so close and yet rarely visit here? The innards of the earth offered up on a vast platter. A geologist's immoveable feast.

Despite our dawdling we arrive at the Sea Breeze Lounge early enough for second-row seats and a good look around. It is a small, well-worn building, one room really, with a deck at the back overlooking Bonne Bay. Dartboards and video lottery terminals dot the walls. In one corner I find a poem by Al Pittman, typewritten and framed, and remember this was one of his haunts.

It's a warm overcast Bonne Bay afternoon.
There's a slight north-east breeze on the water.
Inside, Black Hat George is tending bar.
He, myself, and one other patron are the only
people here. The younger man has made his way
to the gambling machine with the aid of some
awkward machinery designed to keep him
upright. A truck ran over him in Toronto
and he's come home to learn to walk again.
· Al Pittman, The Sea Breeze Lounge

People trickle in, securing seats with a strategically-placed hat or spouse. In the dimly-lit bar, the rectangle of blue light on one end magnetizes our eyes, and everyone inevitably wanders out onto the deck. It is late evening; sunlight skips across low waves like a thrown stone, sailing towards Gros Morne. There are a dozen or so people on the deck, constellating into three or four conversations. Someone yells they see a whale but by the time our eyes follow their finger it is already gone. We watch the water's surface for a few minutes afterwards, hoping the animal will resurface. Someone comments on how nice the light is. It takes the promise of spectacle to cause us to pause and focus on the bay itself, its surface pocked and polished by wind and light. The depth, the weight of it. The bay is the shape of a bell, upside-down. Another word for bay is sound.

From the moment the music begins, we are transfixed. Pat and Joe Byrne wear twin beards as trim and round as their acoustic guitars. And Allan Byrne, the young one, Joe's son. And Linda Slade, Joe's wife. All four from Placentia Bay, all with bold loud voices and hands that grip guitars with firm familarity. Clyde Rose reads from Al's poems as they play The Merasheen Motif, then The Labrador Motif. Allan nails Free In The Harbour, "by a man who shoulda been a Newfoundlander." This's Placentia Bay music, said dad. Plenty of music coming out of there.

When Linda Slade sings The Pollution In Placentia Bay, dad recognizes all the names in the song, all fishermen from Little Harbour East where he grew up. He has never heard it before.

Songs strong and celebratory, yet cautionary, about people who were wronged or abandoned, but survived - or are at least resolutely remembered. Songs written on a boat, songs written on a bet. Songs that tell stories, or have accumulated introductory anecdotes over the years - hand-me-downs, passed on from parents to children like a quilt or a house or a parcel of land. Songs from an older world, taken on as our own.

We wrote these songs, said Pat, when everyone was moving from St. Leonard's to Arnold's Cove ("centralization" he calls it, not resettlement) - and now it seems everyone's moving from Arnold's Cove to Alberta or to God Knows Where, so we're still current.

This is a performance, and also a ceremony of sorts - the handing down of the old songs to Allan and others, the next generation. A chance to hear the names of the old communities recited again: long-abandoned outports like St. Leonard's, like Toslow. There are many others I don't know; I remember those two because of a song. It's easy to see the role songs play in remembering.

Joe Byrne, Pat Byrne, Clyde Rose.

There is a For Sale sign on the Sea Breeze Lounge. The problem with tourism here, says Guy, is you can only do it really five, maybe six months of the year. Sure this is beautiful beachfront property here now, but who'd want to come here in winter? That road up to Trout River is a hard old road in December. Downright treacherous. Most of these are summer homes. When the park closes and the restaurants and the gift shops close and the students go off to school, there really isn't much of a population left here, mostly seniors.

We drive slowly home in the dark, five pairs of eyes fixed on the side of the road ahead, watching for moose. It takes the possibility of a collision to cause us to pause and examine the roadside itself, its tufts and rushes and reeds. Look says Doreen, hoofprints. On the ride up I had been reading John Steffler's That Night We Were Ravenous:

She reminded us. She was the ocean wearing a fur suit.

She had never eaten from a dish.
She knew nothing of corners or doorways.

She was our deaths come briefly forward to say hello.

Despite all our amenities, this is yet a place where, travelling home on the freshly-paved highway (no lines painted on it yet), a ragged, rugged shadow with four knotted legs can crash up from the underbrush to meet us, almost instantaneously, and windshields and airbags and seatbelts and safety glass are statistically just no match

for the sideswiped weight
of all that wilderness.

We end up on the rooftop. The foldable chairs are already there. The alcohol is warmer than air; the moon floats up cold and yellow, an icecube dropped in a drink. Someone goes downstairs and comes up wrapped in a blanket. Clouds resemble pillows at first, then quilts. The longer I stare the more stars there are.

Three hundred and sixty degrees of city, measured in steeples and trees. There are so few tall buildings in this part of Montreal. We watch silhouettes gather on neighboring rooftops, lit cigarettes like shifting constellations. From balconies brimful with noise, low voices overflow and meld together like colours in a twilight sky. In a condominium by the mountain, windows light up one by one; by the time I finish my beer they begin flickering out again.

A calmness and a forbearance. The sun bides its time, the moon doesn't mind, and none of us have reason to complain, as we are not going anywhere.

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

Earlier today, Google posted one of their popular commemorative logos to mark the birthday of artist Joan Miró. However, according to the Mercury News (use BugMeNot to sign in and read the article):

Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google's logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site.

The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, had asked Google to remove the image early this morning.

"There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights," said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society.

In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

Google's logo allegedly incorporates images from Miró's The Escape Ladder (1940), Nocturne (1940), and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (1941).

This is ridiculous. I'm no expert, but I doubt that clearly imitative work is considered a copyright violation. Ironically, I checked out the Artists Rights Society website, and one of the random artworks that popped up was Botticelli's Venus, by Andy Warhol:

I guess it's okay with the ARS if Warhol does it. I wonder if he asked permission?

Google's created plenty of artist-inspired logos in the past, including plays on da Vinci, van Gogh, Escher, Warhol, and Picasso. As the article mentions, there was also a Dali logo which was removed due to a similar request by the ARS; you can find it here. I think the Miró logo is one of the best they've done, and it's a shame to see it taken down because of banal legal bickering.

Yesterday marked my first week as a mosaicist with Mosaïka, and I made a few photos before leaving the studio. Halfway home, I stopped by my favourite used bookstore to get out of the cold. I found Levertov's book on the poetry shelf, its cover rather poignant as I had just taken very similar pictures. Bought it on the spot. I love her Author's Note, a good epigraph for this blog:

These tesserae have no pretensions
To forming an entire mosaic.
They are merely fragments,
composed from time to time
between poems.

Simiarly, at used book sale at the Atwater library a little while back, I heard a lady say, Isn't this a lovely find, and I asked what book she was talking about. It was a book of Aesop's Fables illustrated by Alexander Calder, and she smiled and said, You can have it if you want it. Just the morning before I had been at the Old Port taking pictures, and remembered photographing Calder's monumental sculpture Man, across the river on Île Sainte-Hélène. So I bought the book; it was twenty cents and it is excellent. Calder draws his animals with unbroken lines, as if they were twisted out of a piece of wire.

...and to think that there are people who do not believe in
coincidences, when one is constantly discovering coincidences in the
world and is beginning to wonder if coincidences are not the very
logic of this world.
· José Saramago, from The Stone Raft

Sorry for your wait, says the hairdresser, sweeping hair into a dustpan. I am prepared to say sorry, he continues, because when I am behind ten minutes for you, it means I have been behind ten minutes for everyone. So I have been saying sorry all afternoon.

He clips my hair and tells me about scissors. Those, he says, pointing to a pair, are one thousand dollar scissors. They are expensive but you have them for five or six years and you make money with them. The best scissors, he says, come from the United States and Germany. Italy, they have famous scissors too but not all brands. China is starting to make good scissors.

These scissors my father sent me from Iran. They were made in Japan. They don't have these here but Europe is full of these scissors. They are not the most expensive scissors but I like to use them for men's hair. Men like the sound they make. He snips the scissors rapidly to demonstrate and they make a quick, sharp, staccato sound, like a typewriter at full speed. Not like these, he says, picking up a purple-handled pair. These are Canadian, they are cheaper scissors, seventy dollars. He works the scissors and the sound is dull and shapeless.

These scissors my father sent, he says, have broken three times and I always fix them. He shows me the handle, its translucent plastic fractured and melted in several places. I will always have these scissors.

The usual, he says. Student, or not a student. I am not a student right now, I say. Sixteen-fifty. The change jangles into my hand. Salut, have a nice weekend.

Montreal is full of puddles, yellow and swelling with sunlight. There is a strong wind, and I feel it through my hair. A car passes, barrelling up Guy, windows rolled down. A dog sticks its head out the back window, black eyes wide, face full of fast air, and I think, I know how that feels.

I awaken to a sunny sky, and am soon walking through the park again. Mont-Royal is noticeably untidy after recent messy weather, snowbanks sunk and crumpled with the weight of rain, trails littered with fallen branches and the last of the leaves. I take the long way to the lake, walking slowly, collecting little thoughts and phrases that I find curled between the shadows of trees, or poking out of snowbanks. I press these between the pages of a notebook, soon to be threaded through my ballpoint pen, sewn slowly into poems.

Near the lake, sunlight glints on a thin veneer of ice that clings to several rocks, needling my eye. I crouch with my camera, photographing closely (see quicksilver, above).

I always notice the lowness of the snow immediately ringing trees, and wonder if this is because roots soak up its moisture, or because trees cause a kind of shadow around themselves when wind distributes snow, or because they produce enough heat to melt it.

I think of Margaret Bowater park in Corner Brook, and how it is the inverse of this one. They have opposite heights and hearts, Margaret Bowater concavely surrounding (for the most part) a small pond, while Mont-Royal is convex, and spirals around the side of a hill.

I write most of this at a table in the grand chalet, water and salt melting off my boots, pooling under the table. The last of my hot chocolate goes cold while I read Thoreau. This is my epigraph lately:

Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and I spent them lavishly....
· Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I wake up absurdly early, e-mail several friends over breakfast, and decide to climb the mountain. I pack my pockets with a notebook, a ballpoint pen, and a book (Thoreau's Walden and Other Writings), and carry my camera case over my shoulder. An icy blue sky, sunlight pouring through the streets like melted snow. Smoke clings to chimneys like my breath to my mouth. I migrate up the mountain, an animal with a magnet in my head.

I'm writing this on Mont-Royal, from a table in the Grand Chalet, on a monday morning. I passed about three people on the walk up here, the fewest I've ever seen. For a few moments, mine were the only eyes observing the city from the Kondiaronk Belvedere. I'll have to come here early more often; this place is best when it's full of emptiness. Statues of genuflecting squirrels in the rafters lend the chalet the air of a sylvan temple, and columns of sunlight tilt in through tall windows. While I write, a puddle of sunlight floats onto my foot; I can feel the heat of it through my hiking boot.

High on the walls of the Grand Chalet are a series of paintings illustrating the history of Montreal. Some of them are reproductions of old maps, and Newfoundland is included in a few, its outline occasionally misshapen. I love maps from an era when there was still terra incognita, the offending emptiness of uncharted land sometimes embellished with fictitious mountain chains or a strategically-placed cartouche. A time when cartography still had space for imagination.

Fortunately there is still uncharted territory in the map of Mont-Royal I keep in my head; I can explore here. I turn a corner I haven't turned before and find myself on a narrow trail, ski tracks threading a silver river between trees. I've brought a small mirrored ball with me in my camera case, thinking I might photograph it outside somewhere - I like the distortion of the spherical mirror, like a fisheye lens. It is a chime ball, and if I listen while I am walking I can hear it distantly jangling. I don't take many photos on days like this, as bitter air bites my fingers whenever I take my mittens off, but I like having the mirrorball just in case. I sometimes imagine that certain pretty passers-by will hear the faint sound of bells as they pass me on the trail, and wonder if perhaps there is something charming about this person who makes bells chime in their heads.

I am attuned to sounds today: the creaking of ice-rusted trees, or of my boots on the snow. The scrick, scrick of cross-country skis as someone passes me on the trail. Later, in the chalet, the rumble of sun-loosened snow sliding off the roof. A radio plays faintly in the canteen behind me, interrupted by the whirr of a cappuccino machine. The rustle of winter jackets, and the yips and yaps of clasps and velcro as other folks come in from the cold and unfasten their coats. I imagine sunlight must have a sound too, a frequency so high or low we cannot hear it - a kind of humming, or else the blustery sound a fire makes when you blow on it. The sound of something falling at the speed of light.

The sunbeam has climbed up to my face while I've been writing; I am illuminated. Alone at a table with an empty cup of cappuccino and an open notebook. There are a few other people here now, and as much as I enjoy my solitude, I sometimes wish one of them would venture to ask me what I'm writing.

Thoreau lived alone in a cabin by a pond, went for long walks in the woods, and spent his life writing notebooks and journals. I browse Walden for a while, and find this:

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally.

When I return home I have four new e-mails; these are my walnut leaves. On the walk back I heard a knocking sound, and found a woodpecker with a red-feathered head - it let me get close and take photos, then eventually flew farther off. I spotted a cardinal, too, round and crimson, like a living Christmas ornament flitting from tree to tree. I photographed my hand holding a fallen leaf up to the sunlight, a latent map illuminated in its veins, its skin as pale as parchment.

My head feels clear, flush with fresh air. I come to the park to slow myself down, to walk and think, to collect thoughts and photographs, to listen to the sound of sunlight on snow. My brain, I think, is solar-powered.

The Montreal launch of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry happened last night. I read some poems, along with five other contributors to the anthology, four of whom had travelled bravely from Ontario despite messy weather. Editor Angela Rawlings introduced the book, then Max Middle started us off, followed by Jon Paul Fiorentino, Mark Truscott, me, Angela, and Rob Read. It had been proposed that we jointly host the event, each reader introducing the following one, which suited the spirit of the anthology, and worked well.

It was great fun. Café Esperanza was fairly crowded, in a cozy way, and the audience was warm and appreciative. The room was brimful with comfortable couches and chairs, and colourful lamps hung randomly around - plenty of ambience. Max remarked afterwards that it was quite a different setting from the Ottawa launch the night before, which had been in a bookstore.

It was wonderful to hear (and get to meet) the other contributors. Max was astonishing, from his charming opening poem dear jc to some startlingly guttural interpretations of his visual work. Jon Fiorentino cracked open the crowd with his sardonic wit - I loved his poem about "boring people holding hands." Mark Truscott was enthralling, flipping intently through his books and dispensing quick, subtle poems (and a "grammar joke"). I read four poems, and probably looked a bit nervous, but didn't feel it. I was glad to get to introduce Angela, who I'd heard once before, at Casual Jack's back in Corner Brook. She gave an equally engaging performance this time, with an acrobatic voice that leapt from one syllable to another, her poems from wide slumber for lepidopterists interspersed with gasps. Rob followed, reading some of his quirky Daily Treated Spams - his bellowing "O Amazon Dot Com!" was one of my favourite lines of the night.

I hadn't read my work publicly in quite a while and had forgotten how refreshing it can be to read aloud. It's something I should do more often. I love hearing laughter at a reading, and there was plenty last night. Audiences sometimes seem unsure whether it's appropriate to laugh at poetry, but this crowd showed no hesitation, and really warmed up the room. Overall the evening was immensely enjoyable and rewarding. I'd brought my camera but didn't take any photos, not wanting to interrupt anything. I know other people did, and if I am sent any (hint, hint) I shall try and put some up.

Added March 2, 2006: Here's one of Angela reading (thanks, Wanda!):

Here is one of the poems I read at the launch (the others were excerpts from answers, stewed heads, and midnight ode to typewriter).

South Brook Area No. 7 (found poem)

All that area of the Island of
Newfoundland beginning at the
Humber Canal Spillway Crossing;
thence following the south bank of
the Humber Canal to Main Dam;
thence following the northern shore
of Grand Lake; the railway bridge
over Main Brook (near Howley) and
the eastern shoreline of Grand Lake
to its southeastern extremity; thence
following the Camp 33 Road to the
TCH; thence following the TCH, in a
generally northerly direction to the
mouth of Humber River; thence
following the southeastern bank of
the Humber River and the
southeastern shoreline of Deer Lake
to the point of commencement.

I grew up in Newfoundland. I've never lived by the water, but nonetheless have always been conscious of being an islander. I imagine I would feel a little lost living somewhere that wasn't an island... the disorienting vastness of a house without walls, or a map without boundaries. There's a certain comfort and closeness to be found in a place surrounded and defined by water... islands naturally incubate culture. I feel lucky to have such a distinct idea of where I am from. I know the shape of home.

Now I live in Montreal, on an island in the St. Lawrence river. Most of the places that I would like to visit are also islands, or archipelagos: Japan, Ireland, Iceland, Saint-Pierre & Miquelon (which I've wanted to revisit since high school). I am drawn to the romanticism and isolation of islands, to their distance and mystery. To walk along a beach is to tread the edge of something deep and mysterious: the slow, merciless mechanism of the sea. I retrieve driftwood and beachglass the waves have churned up, like weathered relics from another world. I skip rocks, and ponder how long it will take them to wash back onto shore. I think about perimeter - if I walk along this coastline long enough, I will circle back to where I began.

Though Montreal doesn't offer easy access to the shore, I love the wide vistas of the Old Port, and the river's reminder that, though trussed with bridges, this is undeniably an island. I find similar solace in Parc Mont-Royal. Recently, I read:

Contrary to popular belief, Mount Royal is not an extinct volcano; however, it is the result of magma intrusion during the Cretaceous to Tertiary time. It is a site where magma was emplaced into the Earth's crust and crystallized into gabbro; subsequently, the surrounding earth was eroded, leaving the mountain behind.
· Wikipedia

I like that: the mountain is an island, too. An island in the middle of the city. Montreal is as rushed and busy as the St. Lawrence River, and Mont-Royal rises above it, quiet and isolated. No doubt that is why I feel so at home there, in the park. An island on an island, my home away from home.

As a child, and later as an adolescent, André enjoyed wandering on the mountain which rose like a camel's hump in the heart of Montreal.
· Mordecai Richler, The Acrobats

Making a lot of lists lately. Not just the ubiquitous to-do today lists and the unconquerable to-do eventually lists, but ambitious-yet-almost-useless lists like: every book I have ever read. Every movie I remember seeing. Every art exhibition. And so on.

My lists are open-ended, and compiled over time - I begin one in a flurry of memory, then append randomly as I remember. Starting a new list opens a floodgate in my head, then diminishes to drips as the easy memories are used up. I find myself mining my memory, occasionally digging up things I thought I'd forgotten about. The name of that fantasy book I'd read and reread as a kid, with the wolf on the cover (The Hero From Otherwhere, by Jay Williams). Or all those shows I helped install while working at the art gallery. I find them out, fill them in, feel satisfied afterwards. Pieces of a puzzle, or a scrapbook, or a map.

Chronological. A life broken down into nouns. Books, music, movies... games, too, and food (have tried / have enjoyed / should try). Recently I started people (everyone I have ever met). Why not? It's a lot, but it's a finite list. I might never remember them all, but each name jotted down is one less bit of data cluttering up my head, making the others easier to find. There's a certain release in writing everything down. Tidying my mind, making room for new things, and not having to worry about forgetting something once it's committed to paper (or a .txt file).

Amending on both ends, past and present - now when I finish a book, for instance, it's immediately added to the list. In this way, the sooner I start a list, the better. Making a list of every movie I have ever seen is easier now than it will be in 5 years, when there will be more movies to remember. The question becomes what to make lists of.

A list of lists (* = haven't started yet)

*possessions (everything i own or have owned)
*events (everything significant that has happened)
people (everyone i have met)
art (exhibitions i have seen / art i like / art to look into)
places (have visited / to visit / to revisit)
games (have played / have enjoyed / have finished)
food (have tried / have enjoyed / to try tasting / to try cooking)
movies (have seen / have enjoyed / to see)
music (have heard / have enjoyed / to hear)
books (have read / have enjoyed / to read)
things to do (today / tomorrow / ten years / twenty)

Blogging since 1988, baby.

errant solipsist
tencentsunset
nonpasserine (relating to or characteristic of birds that are not perching birds)
nonce
graycard
semicomma
soam srpis →
anomaly
speechballoon
maunder
transmissionline
aorta
oughta
oughtomatic
oughtful

I quit my job today. Open letter to friends:

Hey all,

I left today. Hoping I'll find more creative and captivating opportunities in this wonderful wintry city. I've been getting more and more frazzled at work in recent weeks and realized my brain just won't take any more incoming phone-ringing and misspelled scamfoolery right now. The visual artist and the web design geek and the (occasional) poet in me were all wanting out, out, out. I also need time to focus on my applications to grad school (I'll be applying to MFA programs at Concordia, NSCAD, and Guelph).

Sorry I didn't get a chance to say many goodbyes. It was a more or less spontaneous decision (though also inevitable in a way). For everyone still there, I'll miss you plenty, and e-mail is always welcome. For everyone who's left already, I hope you'll continue to keep in touch. I think one reason I hadn't left before now is because I kept meeting so many amazing people. That, and I was enjoying the reading time. But a year's been enough, and I need new horizons.

I realize that I am without contact info for many people I'd love to not lose track of. Feel free to forward this to anyone you think might notice I'm not there anymore. Not that there will be any empty chairs. ;)

Take care, and keep in touch,

Matthew

I wrote this more than a year ago, shortly after moving to Montreal. It was meant to be the seedling of a blog, but didn't take root. Though a lot has changed since then, it still makes a suitable starting point.

With all the whim and impulse that comes with moving to a new place, no job yet, and shiny new high-speed internet, what's an artist / addicted diarist / web designer to do? Why, start a blog!

So I've moved to Montreal. It's surreal to be here, no small adjustment from semi-rural Newfoundland. Accustomed to my cozy basement room, now I live on an eleventh floor; instead of trees ringing every horizon, a city clutters up the sky. Still, I adore the apartment so far, especially our balcony. One of my first moving-in purchases was a cheap fold-up camping chair, for writing outside in.

A balcony is a strange space, suspended amidst miles of city, yet sequestered from everything... flush with fresh air, and surprisingly isolated and quiet, it feels curiously like camping. Yesterday it rained, and the water pattering on the canopy reminded me of the sound of rain on tent fabric. On the eaves of the apartments opposite there are plastic owls, to keep pigeons away, and on the rooftop of a building to my distant right, there are evergreen trees. On a night when the city is particularly quiet, it wouldn't take much imagination to conjure up a lake, a cabin, even a campfire. Ambulances sound like loons.