Other Clutter

Jenny Sampirisi has this great online publication/blog called Other Clutter filled with interesting visual work and some texts.

She emailed me a couple of days ago inviting me to contribute and mentioning a couple places where we'd met over the last couple of weeks. Thing was, I was never at the events she mentioned! Honest, officer. I have a airtight alibi. I was never there. I was in Kamloops in my derek beaulieu costume translating the work of rob maclennan into semaphore.

I wonder who it was she had met? And who are all those Gary Barwin imitators who are currently circulating around Toronto (Stuart Ross, I told you having Gary Clements as a doppleganger was enough!)? In any case, I look forward to meeting her -- and remembering it!

The above image is one of my contributions to Other Clutter. The source photographic image--and knowing this is not related at all to the success or failure of the piece--is a photograph of my grandmother and her brother and sister, and, I think, their nurse. It would have been taken in the Ukraine about 1910. My grandmother is the one on the left.

I remember helping my grandmother -- she was quite old and arthritic -- to move from the couch to the dinner table. The process took about 5 minutes. In that time, she explained to me when she stopped believing in God. As a young girl of about 16, she witnessed Stalinist executions at the end of the field near where she lived. She saw bodies piled on carts being pulled past her home. Then we sat down and had dinner.