When I set out to print this Milton Acorn passage that I typeset yesterday, something felt off, and I realized that although it wasn’t a poem, it was kind of a poem, and deserved to be set such that the words found their rhythm, so I pulled apart the forme and rearranged the lines. I love it so much more.

Here’s the content for the passage (emphasis mine)

In this book, JACKPINE SONNETS, will appear a strange word — realisant. Don’t look for it in the dictionary because it’s not there. It’s a word coined in one of those discussions with Purdy. It means romantic in the real old sense… that of the original Romantic poets… not of those in the trough of the wave who fatally changed the meaning of the word ‘romantic’ as applied to poetry. Think of it as meaning ‘realistic’ but not fanatic about it — ‘flexible’. It is a combination of the Anglo-French word ‘real’ and a diminutive from some other language whose identity my friends dispute.

The Jackpine is realisant. It has a basic form, yes, but grows to any shape that suits the light, suits the winds, suits itself.

Again to those apostates’ lyingly naming their stuff ‘free verse’. Your cowardice will get you, not as you hope, nowhere; but somewhere bad. In battle it is the brave man pressing forward who is most likely to survive. It’s those who fiddle around pre-occupied with fear who most often fall. They’re thinking only of themselves — not paying attention. So, when the Yankee torturemen come, your mute betrayal of poetry won’t save you. Meanwhile it’s just possible I shall be in ambush at some secret spot dealing fearful blows.

Thus the Jackpine Sonnet came out of its cover.

Milton Acorn
May Day 1977

Craig Mod writes about hearing Matthew Dicks speak about storytelling:

The other takeaway from Matthew’s talk was people tend to “report” stories rather than tell them. So they report what happened and what was said, but they leave out what they a) thought, and b) felt. Add those two in and you’re doing better than most.

If there’s single thing I think I could do to improve my own writing it would be that.

Listen to this interview on The Knowledge Project to hear more about Dicks’ approach to story.

It was a year ago yesterday that I had my right radial head replaced with a titanium upgrade, the result of an unfortunate fall off a box in the gym.

All things considered, my recovery over the last 366 days has gone well: three weeks post-op I started physiotherapy, just over a month post-op I went back to the gym, and, slow and steady, I’ve regained strength and range of motion. Not all of either, but most of both, to the point where many days I’ve reached full “hey, I didn’t think about my arm at all today” status.

Until a week ago last Friday.

After a month of driving all over Nova Scotia, and a day of bumpy cycling from Wolfville to Horton Landing and back, something tweaked: I felt pain in the end of my elbow when I leaned on it, my extension range of motion decreased by about 10%, I noticed numbness and “pins and needles” in a few of my fingers, and my arm went back into “I think about it all the time” mode (accompanied by grumpiness over a plight I thought I’d out-plighted).

On return to the Island a few days later things improved somewhat, but things continued to feel off, so I emailed my orthopaedic surgeon’s office to see if I could get in to see him. The reply, alas, was:

Unfortunately you will need a new referral with updated X-rays in order to be seen again.

On Thursday, after a few days of trying, I got through to my family doctor’s office, and was able to book a consult for yesterday to see about getting the needed referral. The locum who saw me gave me a brief once-over, reviewed my history, and agreed that a consult with the surgeon was in order; on the way out the door she handed me a requisition for an X-ray. When I got home I went online to book an appointment, only to find… no appointments available at all at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I phoned the diagnostic imaging booking line at the hospital, and got through to a voicemail that said the same thing, encouraging me to look to other hospitals farther afield.

This is how I ended up at Souris Hospital this morning at 9:45 a.m. for an X-ray of my elbow.

I love Souris Hospital!

In contrast to the melée that often greets one at morning admitting at the QEH in Charlottetown, in Souris you just walk right in and the person at the front desk does it all, immediately. After checking in, I walked 30 paces to the left to the X-ray department, the very friendly X-ray technologist took my requisition form, and five minutes later I was at the table contorting my arm into all manner of challenging positions. I was out in the lobby 10 minutes before my appointment time.

That was easy.

I also love Souris Hospital for this warning sign near the entrance, which could be described as a “Warning: Fundamental Design Flaw” sign:

I also love this sign in the front vestibule, because I can imagine the “we’ve had a dramatic uptake in visitors holding us responsible for removed clothing and footwear” report at a meeting, with this sign seen by the assembled group to be the appropriate response:

Lisa generously accompanied me to Souris, and rather than rushing back home we decided to make a morning of things.

Our first stop: Evergreen Café on Main Street for morning coffee. They were slammed, and so it took us the better part of an hour to get a table, get menus, place our order, and receive a black coffee, an iced latte, and a cinnamon roll. All were tasty, though, and we bided our time by writing a letter to young L., off at summer camp and behind a no-SIM, no-wifi iron curtain, and thus reachable only by the post.

While enjoying our coffee and pastry, we made happenstance plans to join our friends Valerie and Lars for lunch at Tipsy Farmers across the street.

While waiting for them to arrive in town we headed across the street to the Souris Post Office, where we bought a stamp, and an SASE to let L. write back, from the friendly postmistress.

With still more time to kill, we walked around the block and found, to our surprise, that the front door to Souris Show Hall was open. 

I hadn’t been inside the building for 33 years, since the days it was still Souris Cinema and Catherine and I drove up to see Made in America, starring Whoopie Goldberg and Ted Danson, in 1993, for the sheer novelty of it. 

In the years since, the building has been heavily renovated and has become a vital part of the community, hosting movies, music, and theatre. We got a quick tour from the friendly summer student at the helm.

We continued down Church Avenue to the curious St. Albans Anglican Church around the corner. Its front door was open too, and so we gave ourselves a self-guided tour. With just 5 rows of pews, it’s essentially “minimum viable church,” but it has all the things you need: a baptismal font, a pulpit, an organ, a furnace, and a beautifully typeset copy of the Book of Common Prayer.

After our church tour we joined Lars and Valerie at Tipsy Farmers: solid burger, excellent salad, bustling atmosphere, lively conversation. They also sell a full range of to-go products, so if you are ever in Souris in need of a jug of butternut squash soup, head there.

Before we left town, we stopped in at MacPhee’s, née IGA, the biggest grocery store in town, a store I knew heretofore only as “where my improv friend Doris works when she’s not working her other jobs.”  What a delight! This is no small-town grocery store with limited tinned-peas-and-the-like selection: it’s the equal or better of any big city grocery store, with anything and everything you’d ever want, from pickled asparagus to stuffed Dumbo-the-Elephant toys.

We stocked up the pantry, and headed back to the shore. I was happy for the opportunity to dive deeper into a town I thought I knew, grateful to have a partner willing to parlay an X-ray mission into a day of curious exploration.

From Phyllis Bottome by William Denton:

This all got me to checking Phyllis Bottome in Wikipedia, and I was amazed. She and her husband (apparently a spy) studied under and took analysis from Alfred Adler (whose biography she wrote, at his request), they started a school in Austria that had Ian Fleming and Cyril Connolly among its students, and she wrote dozens of books, among which is the 1937 anti-Nazi novel The Mortal Storm. What a life!

From These days by rebecca toh:

I like to lie on my bed and let my life, all that I’ve done and said, all that I’ve taken and given, fall upon me like a giant blanket, and feel the joy and weight of being alive. This is it, I tell myself. This, right now, this impeccable, perfect moment of nowness, is packed with atom upon atom upon atom of unfiltered joy. But this joy is rich, like a really good cup of coffee. It has depth, bitterness, flavor notes so subtle if I didn’t pay attention I would not notice them at all. And this joy I drink, allowing it to consume me. It tastes so fucking good. But there was a time when I didn’t understand the depth, when I didn’t understand the bitterness.

Fred Hyndman died a few days ago, news I was sad to receive, as I had great admiration for him as a businessman, philanthropist, and raconteur.

Back in the summer of 2019 I was invited to join John Robinson, Fred Hyndman, Alan Holman and Keith Piggott one week for coffee at Casa Mia, a special guest star, of sorts, at the weekly meeting of group of esteemed men that I had no business among. I wrote to a friend at the time:

It certainly did result in a kind of cross-cultural dialog (inasmuch as me, a neo-capitalist white man, having coffee with a bunch of solidly-capitalist white men, could be considered to be cross-cultural).

Regardless of it being a club meeting for the connected and powerful, or perhaps because of that, it was thrilling: the collective wisdom, kindness, and connections of those four was a rare thing to be invited to sit among. I’m happy for the memory.

Through Hyndman & Company, the company founded in 1872 that he inherited and expanded, Fred was my insurance broker for almost 30 years, but I saw him most often at parties at Catherine Hennessey’s, where he and his wife Shirley were frequent guests. (We also shared a habit of grocery shopping at Sobeys on Saturday nights.)

My enduring memory of Fred, though, came during my time as Executive Director of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. The Trust was fundraising in support of the preservation of a significant piece of land on New London Bay; Fred contributed $50,000 to the cause. I was so bowled over by his donation that I sent him a personal letter of thanks, revealing that I’d been shopping the market for a better deal on car insurance, but that I had decided, due his generosity, to stick with Hyndman’s. 

“For the rest of my life,” is how I believe I worded my commitment.

Fred replied with good humour, suggesting my duty would only extend to the end of his life.

I’m happy to have fulfilled the terms; saddened by the circumstances that brought us there.

Green Meadows Bake House, just south of Morell, is open on Saturday mornings and sells a selection of breads, desserts, jams, and eggs. Watch their Facebook page for highlights of the week and for the signal that they’re open for business (here’s an RSS feed if you’d like to avoid Facebook). Payment is cash in an honour box or Interac e-transfer. Delicious.

I mentioned here that, over the years, I’ve linked to 133 places on OpenStreetMap from the space.

I set out to find a way to see those all on a map together.

I started by pulled out the OpenStreetMap IDs from my blog posts, with a MySQL query:

SELECT DISTINCT
 REGEXP_SUBSTR(field_body_value, '(?<=openstreetmap\.org/node/)[0-9]+') AS node_id
FROM node__field_body
WHERE field_body_value LIKE '%openstreetmap.org/node/%';

I then took that list of IDs and fed it to to Overpass Turbo as a query:

[out:json][timeout:25];
// Query all specified OpenStreetMap node IDs
node(id:
 3635784842, 3685963653, 3993674129, 4035609636, 4219153895, 3964961857,
 4354449846, 4368123936, 4486042006, 4212707889, 4602261458, 3693372328,
 3968667591, 3958645088, 773014435, 3980190956, 4013819799, 5011996054,
 3969063933, 4038653569, 3158817668, 3964875104, 3969441406, 5169624992,
 3801233358, 4593194200, 3969441407, 3982594975, 4010401866, 5832876155,
 1708994432, 1309334554, 1036621453, 3969441408, 5838493293, 4426845996,
 1748034323, 6240463094, 3964847306, 6459062029, 4604411453, 6424079068,
 4944710421, 4782985721, 6573258632, 6568896351, 3933036111, 2147027795,
 2615087430, 6605643321, 6652045815, 2182448223, 2186517765, 6688182495,
 6605321137, 6764407623, 6605651269, 3980513109, 6835691382, 6685552004,
 10858023, 6927460722, 7033960414, 3980513108, 7049488908, 2186488338,
 7727257681, 6573258634, 7751869034, 7840152104, 7951258371, 8014027214,
 8032817159, 8040803229, 4038653574, 6918920793, 8873060974, 8934216741,
 8951491829, 8980628803, 9315988227, 3980228660, 3964958255, 284006122,
 5268968932, 10973805204, 11218571610, 3969063907, 2361760932, 5863968654,
 11954599648, 12007408941, 12073479082, 12302232891, 12606957600, 6388479600,
 8542055290, 12765929228, 10025847334, 292984586, 4059855982, 13131503728,
 13356191552, 6672707890, 13877687747, 13951901855, 2622719611, 2467594779,
 4267855005, 3283009692
);
// Output full feature metadata (coordinates & tags)
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

(You can copy and paste that query into Overpass Turbo yourself, or just click here to load it.)

I exported the result as a GPX file, which gives me the geolocation — the latitude and longitude — of every place I’ve linked to.

I then imported that into gpx.studio to let me see all the places on a map. Here are some screen shots at various zoom levels:

The next logical step would be to create a map interface for browsing my blog posts — a way to look through the other end of the telescope, so to speak.

I am a very linky blogger: if I can hyperlink a noun in something I’m writing, I generally will. As evidence: there are 32,250 links in the 11,096 posts here. I consider this not only a service to the reading public, but also a part of what being a blogger is about, helping to weave connections, pathways through the infinite ether.

The question on my mind, often, is what to link to. There are categories of nouns that I wish there was a more generally-accepted canonical destination for on the web.

Books

Books, for example. Whistler, by Ann Patchett, was just released (I’m 4/5 of the way through; it’s very good). If I want to link to it, do I link to:

• The book’s page on her website?
• The book’s page on her US publisher’s website?
• The book’s Wikipedia page?
• The book’s WorldCat page?
• The book’s Open Library page?
• The book’s page at ISBN.nu?
• The book’s page on Bookshop.org?
• The book’s page at Bookmark, my local bookstore?
• The book’s page in my local library catalogue?

Open Library has always been my preference, and it’s the clear emotional choice: it’s run by the Internet Archive, its mission is “one web page for every book ever published,” and it was founded by Aaron Swartz. But its software seems trapped in 1995 and it never seems to have gained traction on a Wikipedia-like way (it seldom shows up in web search results when looking for a book). I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to Open Library book pages 34 times.

Places

Places are perhaps the category of nouns that I link to most often, and I’ve settled on OpenStreetMap as my canonical destination for these links. The upside is that OpenStreetMap is open, so it can be enhanced and kept up to date by the commons, it’s free from advertising, and it’s the map service that’s increasingly my go-to for accurate routing. 

The downside is that linking to an OpenStreetMap page, like this one for the Weird Harbour coffee shop, for example, seems like linking to the source code for something, rather than a human-focused actually useful destination. I remain unsure.

I’ve linked to OpenStreetMap places 133 times.

People

It used to be that the way you linked to someone was to link to their blog. Easy. But of course not everyone has a blog, and not everyone’s blog will be around forever. 

People have Instagram pages and Facebook pages, but it always seems wrong to link to those, and I feel icky all over when I do.

Some people have Wikipedia pages, and some people have a Wikidata record (here’s mine), and I’ll generally link to those absent any other compelling destination, but that’s a small slice of people too. There’s ORCID for researchers (here’s mine), and VIAF for authors (here’s mine), but those are also a small slice.

At one point I solved this problem by maintaining the Rukapedia, which had a list of people in it that I tried, fruitlessly, to keep up to date and current. And then I gave up.

I remain unsure.

I have no idea how many people I’ve linked to, because I’ve never had a standard method.

The Semantic Web

Part of the reason I think about this to the (unusual?) extent that I do is that in addition to the 11,000+ posts I’ve written here over 26 years being a corpus, those posts also contain a treasure house of information books, people, places and other things. Because this treasure house remains just text, it lacks the structure that would allow me to treat it as a resource that I could explore by navigating its hidden network (“what books have I written about?”, “what are the places I’ve visited in Berlin?”, and so on).

There is a longstanding vision for this vision of a “semantic web,” a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web itself:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A “Semantic Web”, which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

That was written in 1999, when “intelligent agents” was still at the “people have touted for ages” point; now we are there, and I wonder how the utility of what Berners-Lee imagined back then might have evolved as a result.

What are your linkable nouns on the web?