wordcurrents has been hacked. For the time being, I can neither post nor edit anything in the blog. If you try to post a comment, you will see an error message that says you can fix the error. Please do not try this procedure, as it will probably create more problems.
I shall post a note here when the error has been corrected.
A group of us went to the virtually sold out 2300 seat Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada's capital, last night. The three hour performanceof Pina Bausch's Les with a cast of ten men and ten women was mesmerizing. The setting was a bare black-box stage with a shallow depression where a pool of water formed, ostensibly from drips above. The piece comes to us from Tanztheater Wuppertal in Istanbul, and had many Turkish musical, costume and movement themes. The variety and thematic unity of the piece was wonderful to behold. For more information, photographs and reviews, just Google Pina Bausch. She is a world renowned choreographer whose inventiveness is legendary. If you have a chance to see this, I advise you to go—this is advice from a theatre person who seldom goes to dance performances.
Here is a link to my poem for November 24, "to Pina Bausch"
A note about sites for Pina Bausch: this site, Istanbul Theater Festival, is very interesting, as it links to photographs of the piece we saw, Nefes, as performed in 2003 with the same dancers.
I used to call my wife and her sisters the Four Sisters of the Apocalypse. A joke, of course. Sure they were four very definite women of Scottish-Irish descent—that tells you a lot. That gave their four husbands a kind of collegiality in my mind.
Now, just as there are only three sisters of the Apocalypse, so also are there only three husbands: Ed has left. He didn't exactly want to go, and certainly none of us wanted him to go; but a certain cancer took to partying in his innards, and sent him packing. It doesn't seem right that some of us can entertain the cancer party and still hang around, but that's the way it is.
"thinking about ed" is a little bit of my story with ed.
Yesterday, because Flora was curling, I was alone as I drove down to Lancaster for my haircut. The day was pretty wet, with dark but distinct heavy clouds hanging low over the river. The road hugs the river quite picturesquely for most of the half-hour trip, making the drive a pretty Zen experience.
I like to drive with the radio off, mainly for the sake of absorbing the experience. I don't know why people are so afraid to be alone with themselves that they have to keep a radio blaring. I like the solitude. I guess that is a writer thing, part of the habit of being a contemplative.
Oh, yes: this is about "rainy river road", yesterday's poem of the day in wordcurrents
I have just finished a gig as "Poet in Residence" for October at youngpoets.ca.
The site is run by The League of Canadian Poets for students and their teachers. My job for October was to comment on poems posted in two parts of the forum: the General Forum, for young poets who are sensitive about criticism, and the Advanced Forum, for young poets who can take and give serious constructive criticism.
I enjoyed the month, and commented on about fifty poems.
The final problem, keeping anyone including search engines form finding wordcurrents, was that Google Analytics was preventing pages from loading. I removed it, and everything is A-okay. What a relief!
True horror story: The past week, I have been working desperately to overcome a disastrous database problem in wordcurrents. Two fields in the database totally disappeared, making linking from page to page impossible. All six hundred-plus posts were there, but there was no way to read anything but parts of the front page. Search engines could not find me, and my readership dropped dramatically. I tried several approaches to resolve the problem, but the ultimate solution was to delete the whole database and install a backup copy of the database I made a couple of weeks ago.
Am I glad I believe in backups! I have altered my back up procedure to have the system back itself up automatically on a regular schedule.
I am almost back to normal: I have just a dozen and a half posts to restore, in order to fill in the gap left between September 27 and October 18. The saving grace here is a program called Clipbook that came with WordPerfect. Clipbook saves a permanent copy of anything you save to the clipboard. So, when I knew that I was going to have to replace those items, I went into the database and saved them all in Clipbook, so I could restore them, even the drafts I have not yet posted, like my unfinished review of the production of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.
My thanks to Fei-Jan, who called my attention to the problem.
