Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg

an article/interview regarding Clive Holden's recent film cycle, Trains of Winnipeg: 14 film poems

Conservatism in its purest form

from CBC:

"five per cent [of the people who voted Conservative] didn't know why they were voting Conservative or did not answer the question"

okay, back to work.

by the way...

you should be listening to KYUSS right now.

Mark Z. Danielewski

I am embarking on a massive quest, that of reading Mark Z. Danielewski's 700+ page novel House of Leaves. Wish me luck. I have a novel idea (a second-novel idea) that I hear is similar in some respects to this book, so I need to read it to see where possibilities lie and what not to do. Found a fun interview with Danielewski, here's a great quote for you all.

TBR: Why did it take ten years to write?

MZD: I'm an extremely fast writer.

Bush, President-for-Life?

this is a recent speech by Al Gore

it contains, among other interesting things, the following horrific quote. with this kind of increasing totalitarian thinking, i think that it is a very real threat that Bush will refuse to step down in the next election.


"the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

"The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

"At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

"Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

..... The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

Call for Papers

i'm chairing a panel at the FreeExchange conference at the University of Calgary (March 18 & 19), so submit some papers to me. the call for my panel is below. visit the conference web site here.


Making Media: The Social Responsibility of Experimental Art

Marshall McLuhan wrote that “in experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritants or technology” (Understanding Media 71). The social responsibility that McLuhan places upon the experimental artist has been taken up by practitioners in various disciplines, evident in the production of experimental work highlighting the process and circumstances of its construction. Despite the volume and depth of such work, experimental art has been largely ignored by mainstream culture. Increasingly, all media is subsumed into the overarching superstructure of the Internet, the social effects of which are only beginning to be understood.

Paper proposals are being accepted for a panel concerning the social responsibility of experimental art, with a focus on the relationship between art and technology. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

-the role of experimental art in advancing understanding of new media and its social effects
-public resistance to experimental art
-the avant-garde in relation to technology
-the possibilities the Internet offers in the production or distribution of art
-the responsibility of the experimental artist to predict, examine, and insulate the public against the “coming violence” of new technology

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25 January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada.

LUZMAG

my poem WOLVES (REVE(A)LED) is the first publication by the online blog/magazine LUZMAG. check it out:

http://luzmag.blogspot.com/

don't be afraid just because it's poetry.

i am back from Ontario, now in Saskatchewan visiting with Mandy. will be back in Calgary on the 9th if you are a Calgary peep reading this. right now i'm trying to unpack/clean and get a few of my affairs in order. with a new term comes new responsibilities and a new schedule, and i've got to figure a few things out and map out my next four months. also need to get back to work on my novel Kanada (or Suzette will have my head).

for my Winnipeg peeps, i should be in Winnipeg early in Feb. i am curating a showing of "Apocalyptic Canadian Cinema" and will be around to introduce films and run a discussion panel etc. keep your eye on the Cinemateque listings for more information.

the new year should bring a few more new things, for one, i'm going to work to get my main site (www.jonathanball.com) out of purgatory and back into the realm of the online living. also going to be back to work publishing those chapbooks. look for books by rob mclennan, Kimmy Beach, and Lars Palm. i've still got books by Aaron Mauro, Norah Bowman, and derek beaulieu if you want to get your hands on some fine Martian Press chapbooks.