a new site

lovingly and brilliantly designed by Charles
to keep up with all my various shenanigans

www.amandaearl.com

Bywords Spring Reading

2pm
Sunday, April 19
Dusty Owl Reading Series, Swizzles Bar and Grill, 246-B Queen Street

launch of the spring issue of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, starting our 7th year.
With readings by
Heather McLeod,
Colin Morton and
Claudia Coutu Radmore
and music by John Carroll

followed by the Dusty Owl's Open Mic and Object of Desire Contest hosted by Steve Zytveld.

the cover art for the spring BQJ was created by Gatineau visual artist Hélène Girard.

A Farewell to Blog

after six years of blogging, i’ve decided to end my regular blogging activities. it may be that on occasion i put up an announcement, but that’s it. i’m not going to delete this blog or my other blogs.

thank you to all of you who’ve been following this blog. i’m looking forward to becoming just a reader of blogs. i’m sure i’ll pop up on line in various nooks and crannies. in the meantime i’m focussing on the study, reading, writing and publishing of poetry.

merci et bonne nuit, mes amis.

Scalawags & Rogues at the Owl

Yesterday the Dusty Owl Reading Series hosted Jim Christy, author of Scalawags: Rogues Roustabouts, Wags and Scamps—Brazen Ne’er Do-Wells Through the Ages (Anvil Press, 2008).

Jim punctuated his entertaining stories with entertaining poems reminiscent of the Beats. He read a story about encountering an eccentric Russian count, Count Navratillini, who he’d met when he was a runway 12-year old kid. He also read a brief paragraph from the book about le Comte de Waldeck:

“On the occasion of his one-hundredth birthday, Jean-Frédéric Maximilien, Comte de Waldeck, led an American journalist to his fifth-floor painting studio in Montmartre. The young woman was winded by the climb whereas the Count, over six feet tall, ramrod straight and breathing easily, apologized for not being as sprightly as he used to be. ‘I sleep well and eat like a wolf but my legs are lazy these days, due to an old rattlesnake bite.’ "

In the book there is a plethora of eccentric rule breakers, including one of my favourites, Kiki of Montparnasse, kiki being French argot for an eager and willing vagina. Naturally that caught my attention right away. The stories are succinct and entertaining, representing a bygone era and Christy was an interesting man in his own right; he’s described as a literary vagabond, has written about Bukowski, who said about Christy “You remind me of Malraux,” has written 24 books. He’s been called a dormant anarchist, troublesome and cranky… someone who probably has a lot of stories yet to be told. I hope he comes back.

I have to say that the Dusty Owl is the perfect place for reprobates of all description. Christy fit in very well.

And jwcurry made a rare appearance at the open mic, reading poems to do with trains, since he’d heard that Christy was someone who’d jumped trains. the poems Curry read were full of sound gymnastics and his performance of them was entertaining and compelling. this is what i like about open mics, the surprise of a really good quality reading and piece of work.

Coming up at the Owl on March 15 is Call Me Katie, the band formed by Monty Reid, Sarah Hill and Mike Rivoche with some poetry hopefully thrown in as well. I want to hear Luskville Mud again. Swizzles where the Owl is hosted is the kind of bar where you’d expect to experience an Elvis sighting. Maybe at Call Me Katie.

And then on March 29, the Owl celebrates its 5th anniversary at Swizzles. expect surprises. expect evil Steve with voices choreographed by Christopher Doyle of Dog and Pony Sound. His participation giving the Owl the best sound for readings in Ottawa. rest assured, there are more scalawags, reprobates and rogues coming to the Owl.

Urban Graffiti X: this is not your tea and crumpet CanLit

Urban Graffiti is published by Greensleeve Editions out of Edmonton. Volume X is a packed issue of great fiction, some cool photography and a bit of poetry too. Mark McCawley is the publisher/editor of the magazine. Mark says "Urban Graffiti is an irregularly published litzine of transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing concerned with the struggles of hard edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture - presented in their most raw and unpretentious form."

If this is volume X, i’m assuming there are 9 more and i’d like to get my hands on them. The stories in X (thankfully the issue is available on line) are what are keeping me up at 4am. They are gritty; each one is unique and each one presents an aspect of humanity that society is fucked up over.

In Philip Quinn’s story, Transformer, we have murder in the voice of a serial killer. It’s chilling and brilliant. It’s disturbing to me that i feel compassion for the main character. i love being messed with like that.

In Bart Plagenta’s Beer Mystic: a novel of inebriation and light, we have forbidden desire of a jaded yet romantic drunk in love with a sixteen year old girl.

In Bill Brown’s Green Liquid Soap. we have incest between brothers, sadistic abuse, the consequences of bullying, the possibilities for revenge.

In Neale McDewitt’s tale, Anger on the Outskirts of Arcadia, we have obesity, anger, degradation and fucked up desire.

The language is powerful, tight, lyrical yet unsentimental. These stories make me want to write fiction again. All of these stories will likely wake you up in some way; they will keep you awake at 4am. if a story can do that, in my opinion, it is highly successful. the fact that Urban Graffitti X has managed to do that all the way through its thirty something pages is not just a success, it’s a bloody miracle.

You can read this on line for free over at the Greensleeve Editions blog. And you should. Right now. I’m excited that there is another publication,that, like Front&Centre (published by Black Bile Press in Ottawa) takes up the challenge of publishing stories that are not sweet and pretty Canlit tea with grandma as the snow falls.

I’m still haunted by this from Philip Quinn,’s Transformer:

“One night I picked up this red head. I pulled my part out and she sucked it, moaning like she actually enjoyed it.

I put my hands around her neck and tried to twist her into something else.
She didn’t become something else. She just went stiff, resistant, made it very difficult to work with her. Then I had to stuff her into a green garbage bag to keep her out of the way.

I decided to plant her in the ground like a flower. Two weeks later, I saw a hand sticking out that an animal had gnawed at.”

Talented Tongues at the Elmdale Tavern tonight

7:30 pm, Elmdale House Tavern, 1084 Wellington Street

$6, featuring the charming and seductive Luna Allison

the tall, handsome and sexy Ritallin

and love anarchist Amanda Earl.

plus an open mic.

come join us in a post-valentine evening to celebrate sex, love, lust and debauchery.

[photo by Charles Earl, 2005]

The Factory Reading Series

last night at the Ottawa Art Gallery’s Firestone Gallery was formidable in the French sense, which means fantastic and not formidable in English as in intimidating. Three DC Books affiliated authors read, two coming from Montreal and one from Toronto.

Angela Szczepaniak started off the evening with excerpts from her wonderful book Unisex Love Poems (Punchy Poetry, DC Books, 2008). She read a recipe for a honey combed heart, some deranged antics from the heroine of the book, Butterfingers, a typeface comic, appealing to all us font geeks in the room and there were many font geeks in the audience, i assure you, and a suite of etiquette advice. i was thrilled by the inventiveness of her work and also thrilled that there is a publisher out there willing to take on such fun stuff in Canada. Punchy is off to a great start. I've already really enjoyed Stuart Ross's Dead Cars in Managua (2008), another in the series.

Eva Moran read next from her novel Porny Stories (Punchy Writers Series, DC Books, 2008). the excerpt was crazy, original stuff with quirky characters and a kind of satire of Harlequin and chick lit at the same time. Eva’s writing had panache, imagination and skill. i was again enthralled by the inventiveness and unique character of the work. i wish i’d had a chance to talk more to Eva who has said in an interview with the Danforth Review that sex is her favourite subject. Since it is mine too, we had that in common. And I rarely meet anyone else brazen enough to say that out loud.

Lastly Jason Camlot, the editor of the Punchy Poetry Series, came up to read from three of his poetry collections: Attention All Typewriters (DC Books, 2005), The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000) and The Debaucher (Insomniac Press, 2008) as well as a new poem about playing Charlie Brown in a high school play and getting drunk and stoned with Linus. i have to say i loved Camlot’s work. it was playful, silly, witty, sensuous and provocative. I always say I’m not a big fan of rhyme, but when it’s skilfully done and playful as is Jason’s in The Debaucher, it can be exquisite fun. As he says in his long poem from the book: (and i apologize for not being able to format the spacing correctly):

Rhyme makes poetry debauch.
It leads a line regrettably astray.
It jars us off into apposite thought.
With sound, rhyme makes things touch that shouldn’t touch.
Caresses move from hand to knee to crotch
O so quickly when rhyme’s allowed to have its way.
And then everything changes instantly.
Adjacent thoughts that had been friendly and pragmatic,
now set aflame by rhyme, become dramatic.
A rhyme can give a word radical new meaning
When Byron rhymes bottle with Aristotle,
it makes me want to drink metaphysics
ice cold, on a hot day, without a glass.
It makes me want to drink beer until I’m sick,
I mean really puking so it’s coming out of me like
liquefied petroleum gas,
like those undergrads up in Montreal for the weekend from U Mass
(those guys are friggin’ hilarious)
who drink until they pass out on the grass
next day wake up with shards of beer bottle glass
stuck in their ass

-----
you’ll have to buy the book to enjoy more…

i also really enjoyed the poem he read from the Animal Library, “Kit Schubert Meets Kitsch Man” It was so inventive and imaginative. I wanted to buy Attention All Typewriters too, but there weren’t any more copies, alas ;)

In his interview in Open Book Toronto, Jason says that the poems from the Debaucher "will appeal to readers who have been led astray, enticed into doing something stupid, at least once in their lives, and who look back at such moments with fondness." this describes me to a tee. we need more debauchers in Ottawa or at least regular visits.

In his Danforth Review interview from 2005, Jason says he hopes that readers will love a poem here or there the way he loved certain Beatles songs when he was twelve or certain Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Smiths songs when he was twenty-two. and i have to say, i’m there. i loved many of his poems when i heard them and i’m looking forward to a chance to read them at leisure. over and over again, just like i do with a Bob Dylan song, still, at 45. (my age and not the old 45 rpm singles)