new blog address!

i've moved this blog onto my newly-revamped website at www.lisapasold.com, so please do drag your reading chair on over to the new locale...

Millard's Rat

a wonderful coincidence to end the year: I had no idea when I named my lead character Millard that there is an actual rodent named for her. The Millard's Rat, Dacnomys millardi, lives in Asia and is part of the rodent family Muridae. Like most rats, it is not currently endangered, but it is fairly rare to see one. All in all, highly appropriate for my Millard in Rats of Las Vegas.

Happy New Year...from all us rats!

(this rat is a detail from an art piece by Anthony Lister)

Marching bands

horns and drums coming down the street - a specifically New Orleans feeling

for a reminder of what these schools have gone through, to march again, read this

(the Christmas parade down Canal street last weekend)

Confederacy of Dunces

i must reread the classic New Orleans novel by John Kennedy O'Toole. i even know where my copy is...in France, beside a yellow sofa. meanwhile, i will have to toast O'Toole and Ignatius by eating a hotdog at one of the ubiquitous Lucky stands.

Message to the Muse

biking along Prytania thinking of a poem i heard last week at the Gold Mine's 17 Poets!

...nine muses,

all in all,

and four alone

are just for poetry.

The gods were telling us

it would be hard.

Or were they telling us

it would be hopeless?

from Daniel Reinhold's MESSAGE TO THE MUSE

Who to trust in New Orleans

the tour guides are often looking in the wrong direction, reciting facts that tend more to creativity than history. i have more confidence in the mules, who seem to know what they're doing.

evening, New Orleans

rain and horseshoes on the wet pavement, trains and long long boat horns, shouts for the Saints game and sirens, always sirens, a passing car with bounce blaring, and a calliope disappearing against the wind.

Algiers bonfire - FLOODWALL

as the fire took hold last night of the cathartic bonfire installation by Jana Napoli - a structure of drawers retrieved from Katrina-decimated homes

New Orleans vs the cockroach

winter or summer, the occasional bastard-bug pauses to adjust its top-hat and continue along a French Quarter sidewalk.

postcard by lee kyle

Cafe du Monde

after the beignets have disappeared - the tell-tale icing sugar trails out of the Cafe du Monde and into the night

Cafe du Monde, after the beignets

Frenchmen Street

washboard percussion played with thimbles on all fingers - heading out into the cold night i couldn't resist taking a last photo

Wednesday night at The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans

November New Orleans

Only hours after I moved into this apartment on the edge of Tremé, a 'Second Line' marching band went past my door, taking flowers to the cemetery for All Saints' Day.

I feel a bit like Colette in her Palais Royal apartment--she called the place "the tunnel" because of its shotgun layout. I spread books and various cooking ingredients around the kitchen & work there, because the kitchen door gives onto a sunny courtyard.

The tattoo parlor down the street has its air conditioner running. Four entirely black feral kittens peer out from under the fence, tropical flowers are blooming, and the palm trees rattle in the wind.

I woke up to the roving fruit vendor who drives past every morning around 9am. Her megaphone makes her sound like a muezzin, except her call to prayer is "I have pine-apples, I have cante-lope, I have sat-sumas..."

Last week, the mayor finally reopened Louis Armstrong Park, with the Tremé Brass Band playing, Congo drumming, dancing, sacred smudging and Mardi Gras Indians in blindingly-bright embroidery & feathers.

Now, to cycle across town, avoiding the worst of the earthquake-fissures that linger six years after Katrina. Collecting details, trying to understand a little bit about this city so thoroughly inhabited and worn by its past but also determined to be present. I'm more awake here than in so many other cities where life is definitely easier (what a misnomer, 'the Big Easy') but less alive.

LAS VEGAS PATKANYAI

RATS OF LAS VEGAS now exists in Hungarian, in real & virtual/e-book form. i wish i could read Hungarian, but maybe that's the mysterious beauty of the translator's art...the author will never know exactly what the book means in the new language. honestly, sometimes i think the author is the last person to understand what the book means, even in the original language.

so the Hungarian edition is now out in the world, with a cover that makes me feel like a Raymond Chandler-era pulp fiction writer...a great honour, as Chandler is one of my literary heroes.

at first, the Hungarian publishers considered a cover that seems closer to the Canadian concept for the book. the back image on this proposal delights me--the car, the flamingo neck--

but in the end, the Hungarian editors went with a more visceral look. and i admit, if i ever get a tattoo, it will probably be the upside-down Ace of Spades at the bottom of the current cover.

dare your next mistake

i saw this at Mark Folse's blog Toulouse Street. some days, it's nice to know Ira's on your side... i also think this 'phase' happens every time I start a new project & i always need to fight my way through it.

a moment in Calgary

drove into Calgary for an excellent meeting with my editor extraordinaire, Rose Scollard, at Frontenac House, and wrapped up the day over BBQ, discussing the new Poet Laureate position that the City of Calgary has created.

how interesting: while Toronto's mayor is attacking libraries & literary culture, good ole' redneck Cowtown is funding a new literary position with pride.

The Mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, says "I think that these things actually really do matter...It helps us think of better ways to tell our story. And telling our story has value in and of itself." A very articulate retort to the Fords' recent blathering.

am looking forward to hearing who becomes Calgary's official poet--the city has a surfeit of excellent contenders.

"Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to the house, and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring a the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying"Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends--just a lot of cursing..." -Nick Hornby, in his collection of reviews & essays, THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE.

Initially, I'm distracted less by the house-break-in & more by the idea that any artist would love a bottle shaped like bunch of grapes. But probably I'm a snob about grape-shaped bottles.

I'm reading this book in my friend Mari-Lou's fantastic garden, over various meals while I'm in Saskatoon. I'm going back to doing book reviews, and Nick Horby's musings about books are just right--cool and slightly fizzy, like really nice not-too-strong ginger beer on a summer afternoon. So I'm hoping he gets me into the right headspace to write intelligent book reviews.

the medium, the message, the McLuhan

100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth. the man who essentially invented the field of Communications grew up in Winnipeg. today i went by & photographed his very nice childhood home with my cellphone--seems a most appropriate anniversary nod to the man who said:

"When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body." - Marshall McLuhan

Which makes us all the more disembodied today.

To tell you the truth... (the writer's equivalent of stage fright)

"To tell you the truth, though, I still haven't made up my mind whether I shall publish [Utopia] at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one's efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them."

wrote Sir Thomas More in 1515 (translated by Paul Turner & quoted by Fay Weldon in her novel, Letters to Alice.)

Richler gazebo

SO impressed with Florence Richler's comments about the gazebo in Parc Mont Royal which is to be spruced up & dedicated to her late husband, Montreal's best-beloved literary curmudgeon, Mordecai Richler.

"Were the graffiti to be left, I think somehow that would have delighted Mordecai because...it would be critical and that was his nature." - Florence Richler

true, his critical nature didn't make this founder of the "Impure Wool Society" particularly popular with Quebec's powers-that-be. and some other powers-that-be feel the gazebo is simply too small a gesture for such an important writer. but i like the idea.

as soon as i'm back in Montreal, i'm taking myself over there with a small appropriate bottle & a copy of Solomon Gursky Was Here (my fave of his novels). the gazebo makes such a toast feasible...if they named a street after Richler, one would get run over.

Strangers in Paris

am so pleased to be part of a new Paris anthology, edited by Megan Fernandes & the illustrious, frequently top-hatted David Barnes.

Strangers in Paris is a museum of experience and objects that is anything but iconic; the collection establishes a new hunt for language worthy of a changing city. It is possible to find Paris in these pages, but it is just as possible to find everything else.

Launches have been happening in Canada & Paris & New York, and i've somehow managed to be in the wrong city at the wrong time to miss each & every one of them so far...but hey, it's amazing technology, this book thing, possible to experience even if one misses the launch.

in the official blurb about the anthology, Tightrope says: The stunning variety of writing in this volume addresses the city of Paris in all its complexity, while challenging the mythology of expatriate Parisian literature. The anthology contains entries as diverse and disparate as an excerpt from John Berger’s novel, Here is Where We Meet; Suzanne Allen’s ekphrastic poetry, a tongue-in-cheek take on the nineteenth-century novel by Helen Cusack O’Keeffe; Canadian writer Lisa Pasold’s story of a forced extended stay in Paris; and an interview with the celebrated American poet Alice Notley.

i'm so pleased to be part of the book...and i'm particularly sorry i missed the KGB event, as it was one of my favourite literary booze locations when i lived in New York back in the dark ages (ie. the Giuliani years). i wonder if KGB (above) still has the series of Stalin's official photographs--where Stalin's colleagues were mysteriously air-brushed out over the years, very creepily.

order info for the book here...or find it at Shakespeare & Co in Paris.