Current psychological latitude: gratitudinal.

(Current linguistic attitude: I will fuck with you with love in my heart, language, baby. Now and forever.)

So many boats in my dreams, this last while. Boats and boats and then again boats. I like boats, always have (particularly those powered by muscle not motor), maybe as the result of having for a father a man who in his youth was a sailor or maybe as the result of my Piscean nature.

So yes, I’m making a beautiful bookthing. It’s that wondermental thing known as: a labour of love.

What I’m doing right now is I’m writing a thing, a beautiful thing, a bookstory thing. It’s hard going — oh god, it is — and for all the wild-ride moments of outpour, there are many many — many! — ice ages of brainfreeze. When you write a thing as a pen-for-hire, you push through the brainfreeze, because money and somebody else’s deadline are great motivators. But when you make something with joy in your heart and when it’s a collaborative effort to boot — I’m making this thing with James Cook, whose delicious photographs will join up with the words I write — you let the going be slow because you’re waiting for a strange kind of knowledge — epiphany, I guess you’d call it — waiting to see in a way you’ve never seen before, waiting to understand, waiting to make connections.

I love Milton Glaser.

Dave Kinsey at Fecalface has a treat for you, me, and the lamppost:

Oh. My. Goodness.

You know what I love? I love “yes”. I love “yes” so much, and so hard, and  also its more boisterous adjutants “hell yes” and “fuck yes”.

A couple of days ago when I was stopped at a street corner waiting for the light to change, a man walked up from behind me, stood beside me, looked at me, smiled, and said, “Nice legs, librarian.” Now, I’m really not a woman who enjoys strangers making commentary on her appearance but he didn’t have the stink of testosterone poisoning about him so I didn’t just default to my “Fuck you, you fucking fucker” setting. Plus? He called me “librarian”. And oh good lord, I do love me a librarian, so very very much I do, and am always so happy to meet a fellow member of that tribe, which obviously that man was.

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

Often I think of the poetry of objects
about the way a seam is resolved
or the way a spine grows
about the things we make with our bodies
and the bones from out of our bodies

The world spins on its axis, on and on and on, no matter who comes here or leaves here, no matter how happy or sad you are, no matter, no matter.

Imagine if we could remove the mortar that holds all the disparate elements of our selves together. Remove it and fiddle the bricks of character around a bit and repoint, so that we could be remade. Or maybe that’s too drastic (altho’ I am a woman who likes the grand gesture) — it’s not a complete rebuild that interests me but the jimjummery of a rejig.

And again I love the internets with mighty might because here I am unrulying away in Toronto and all the way over in the Czech Republic Akile Nazli Kaya is making films and sending me nifty pics of her studio space at the Film School Zlín.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

It is such a miracle, this ridiculous Internet thing. Just a few days ago, I was sitting bundled in sweaters in an old farmhouse in Quebec, looking out the kitchen window at the blazing colours of autumn while simultaneously peeking into the studio of artist Ghadah Alkandari; the thing about Ghadah’s studio is that it’s located in Kuwait, half a world away from me. But with a click of the Send button on her Mac, she was able to show me a little piece of her reality and that is an eventuality I like very much. And oh my, how I like publishing these images so that you too can step into Ghadah’s world for a moment or two.

I am interested in the connection between the physical and the mental, in the connection between a crisis of the body and the germination of an idea.

And here we are, arrived at the day on which Canadians give thanks. Truth be told, I did my Tgiving dinner yesterday and it featured poulet not dinde, but this is the official holiday so I will honour it and break my illness-induced silence by typing some words for you all.

Making an art is hard work. That is what I know. Maybe hard in a happy way or maybe hard in a tearing-you-limb-from-limb way, but no matter how you slice it, hard. And of course when you have hard work to do you need a good place to do it and of course because I am a curious woman, I want to know all about your workspace, whatever you’re willing to show me or tell me or show-and-tell me.

I don’t know why I always want to know “why” but I do. Even when the answer to “why?” is “because” or “dunno” or “what’s it to ya, mofo?” Even then, I still wanna know. Why, I wonder. Why am I like that? Dunno, really. Because, I guess. What’s it to ya anyway, mofo?

You know, I could get all screechy here and give you an earful about the harditudes of womanhood, lay a big screed on you about having