Whirlwind trip thru YVR

Got a major block of writing done during my first week in banff, decided to reward myself with this whirly trip to vancouver & back. Tx to competitive airfares, got good deals leaving friday, returning today, sunday, so will be back in my banff bed in a few hrs. I joke with folks in van that i only come in for the parties, but it's only half a joke. Truth be told, the nature of my work makes socializing a critical function, and I'm not making light of this in any way! Over the past 42 hrs, then, I've been in social interactions (at 3 different events) for a good 16 hrs! Yes, might sound like party central and, in part, this is true. But during those 16 hrs, i must say the amnt of work going down is quite central. Making contact, for instance, with a group of photographers who will be part of cicac work; and discussing the i2i project with several participants, taking this research fwd, was also one of several social/work encounters over this time. And now, taxiing down the YVR runway, will bberry this log entry and next contact will be back at banff.
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Ashok Mathur
CRC in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry
Thompson Rivers University

Muscling through

Almost finished the Jamshed section -- that is, the first part of the three-generational story about this Parsi family. Interesting, borrowing freely from my late mother's journals, feels like quite a shared writing experience. I'm writing from the Crich studio in banff, a wonderful elongated space with lots of counter space, allowing me to spread out and put the various bits of research, well, all over the place. Hitting a rhythm, a pace, hoping to maintain this as I go through the rest of the story. I was planning to stay here in banff until xmas eve, but there are a few gathering-events in vancouver this wknd, and i found that a week before xmas, there are a ton of seatsales as the airlines try to fill planes, so i'm off to the coast for a day and a half on friday. Thinking, though, that I should be able to sustain the writing when i'm there, power into subsequent sections. A bit discombobulating in that i won't have any of my research/comfort around me, but think i can fly by the seat of my pants and my g4 powerbook. Will see.

Jamshed character

(view from my studio)

Spent the first day and a half reviewing the work I had done on the first part of the novel, the birth of Jamshed and his development. It's here where I introduce the fantastical elements, most specifically how the young Jamshed "goes right" and has lengthy conversations with what turns out to be his not-yet-born grandchild. It's interesting to review work that was written some time ago -- this novel has been in various stages and this is the first time I have had to give it a thorough readthrough. There are elementsi quite like and others that i have no idea where they are taking me! My plan, though, is to clean up the sections i have and continue the bildungsroman of sorts to the point where Jamshed marries and he and his wife Piroja have their first child. The crux of the novel, an exploration of free will and choice (critical to the Zarathustri world view), will be examined through Jamshed's choices, to become a dastur or a distillery manager. He ends up, in some fashion, doing both, but it is his work as a distillery manager that shapes his life (and those of his descendants) in so many ways. I quite like the relationship between Jamshed and his invisible grandchild, Sunny, and this is where i plan to put my energies into over the next few days. (Feels strange to be writing about writing in this processual way). Out for now...

Banff visitations

So here's the thing. Arrived at Banff today for a two-week stint to put together some serious work on my manuscript, "A Little Distillery in Nowgong." This is the project for which I received a SSHRC Research/Creation grant to develop the novel into an installation over a three-year period. I have the good fortune to be working with three fine students as research assistants -- undergrads Bill Greene and Rubeena Sandhu at Thompson Rivers University, and Sharanpal Ruprai, an MA student at the U of Calgary. They will be helping me formulate how this novel can inhabit an installation space, work with me on the material and aesthetic elements, as well as assisting me as i work with artists coming in to the Centre for Innovation in Art and Culture in Canada (CICAC) that i am developing at TRU as part of my Canada Research Chair. As i sit here at the Crich studio at the Banff Centre, an elongated space with windows on two walls and a darkroom attached, the same space i inhabited when i directed the Intranation Residency (www.intranation.net), I'm starting to think about how to pull this text along so that it becomes a full novel. My usual process in novel-writing is to work in binges, and this is no different; however, i first conceptualized this novel several years ago, started writing at the same time, but then left it as i moved onto/into other things. So this represents a great return of sorts, a movement past ambivalence into a type of direct action. But even as i inhabit the space of the novel, tracing three generations of a Zarathustri (Parsi) family that might echo my mother's lineage, i don't want to look too far forward to the installation. I see this as a resistance to a type of hyper-text of the early 90s, that is, a text written specifically for the internet so that various internal links could provide a non-linear screen reading. Rather, i want to develop a novel that will exist entirely on its own apart from any material/installation elements. The challenge will be then to take the novel into a physical space, to realize or reimagine a several-hundred page book as a work of non- or extra-textual art. Not before or during the writing, but after. So what i plan to do over the next little bit is to send excerpts of the novel to my RAs and see what they can come up with as we all proceed.

More banter as i proceed myself...