oughtful: poems, photographs, prose

born yesterday: field notes from second life

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST

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.

...

halifax, canada day

Sun, 1 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST

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.

...

a. m. bell & co. limited

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST

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.

...

field notes 2

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST

seaweed dries
in crumpled fistfuls
strewn across shorelines,

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

...

interrobang

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST

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

windowblogs and livingroom libraries

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST

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.....

eighteen hundred hours

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST

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....