Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus - Columbus Book

Recent Journal Entries

Waiting for Columbus, the movie...

May 3, 2012

This is the way I dream it. These would be my picks for the movie rendition of “Waiting for Columbus” — with Monica Bellucci playing Consuela, Sean Bean (most recently from “Game of Thrones”) playing Columbus, and Jean Reno playing Emile. This would be magic!

Waiting for Columbus actors

May 03, 2012 ~ Link ~ Commentary {6}

Edmonton Poetry Festival

April 27, 2012

Hello. Everything is fine. The snow won’t last and I kind of like it. It makes me feel like I live in the mountains. Can you imagine that? Hey, if you’re in Edmonton, have you been enjoying the Edmonton Poetry Festival???

Listen: I’m performing at Words on the Line – The Poetry Party – on April 28, (this Saturday night) at The Artery, 9535 Jasper Avenue, Edmonton, AB with The Raving Poets Band, Dionne Brand and Bob Holman. The show begins at 8 p.m. $10 at the door.
Words on the Line – The Poetry Party — There’s a lot on the line for our highlight event. Dionne Brand (recent winner of the prestigious Griffin Prize) brings her “luscious and ferocious lines.” She is joined by Bob Holman, founder and artistic director of New York’s Bowery Poetry Club, and Edmonton’s own Raving Poets band. There will be drop-in lines from the winners of the Edmonton Poetry Slam competition and the Edmonton Poetry Festival’s own “Words on the wire” contest. There will be flamenco guitar and line-ups at the bar. Be there!

April 27, 2012 ~ Link ~ Commentary {3}

Grenoble

April 16, 2012

Still trying to get the “comments” feature working on this site. I do not know what has gone wrong – only that I am incapable of fixing the problem. We have an emergency tech crew working overtime right now until the problem is solved. In the meantime, even though the comments section was not widely used, I am utterly alone – a solitary voice tucked into a small corner of the WEB.

Mountain at Field

Grenoble

The weather has been an ugly over-driven oven for the past three weeks. The train from Geneva was crowded with people coming back into France from the jazz festival in Montreaux. Your ticket was to Paris but you decided to remove yourself from the throng as soon as you crossed the border. You had work to do anyway. The two stories you wrote in Switzerland needed editing. Grenoble was as good a place as any. At the cafe under your hotel, you order a glass of beer. The waiter, who is not young and appears to take his work very seriously, does not look at all disturbed even though it is only ten in the morning. You do not feel awkward having this drink so early. It will not affect your writing. And besides, it’s only beer. The waiter’s name is Vasha. Earlier, you heard a small withered man call him that. Vasha twists the small hand-written bill on his tray and then places it on the table in front of you. This smooth, professional action impresses you. Once the bill has been presented, the waiter mentions the price. The amount is reinforced. The customer reads it, then hears it – no mistakes. You pay, tip on top of the omnipresent 15 per cent the French government includes in the price of everything. You over tip enough to impress but not so much to appear an idiot. You intend to come to this cafe often. Vasha behaves as if everything is exactly as it should be. A soldier, dressed in the drab olive color of the Swiss military, enters the cafe. With him, and already settled under the table, is a small chestnut-coloured dog. The soldier reaches down and gently pats the dog on its head. A dusty sparrow hops from table to table and then along the floor, pecking at crumbs. It performs the quick take-off and landing of sparrows to perch on the curtain rod. Sits blinking in the sifted sunlight. You breathe deeply; let the cool morning air of this place find a resting spot in your memory. Across the café, is a woman with short black, cropped hair. Her sudden beauty is a sharp contrast to the hazy quality of this café. You cannot help but watch her. Perched on her nose, perhaps too far down on her nose, are small, dark-rimmed eyeglasses. There is only a hint of the fullness of her breasts under a loose, gray sweater. There is a glass of red wine in front of her but slightly off to the side, an excuse perhaps, a prop that allows her to sit and drift. She lights a cigarette with an elegant lack of desperation. To avoid staring at the woman, you move to the other side of your table. Put your back to her. Line your spine up against the stiff wood of the chair. Then you apply yourself to your work. But the story you’re working on doesn’t move. It’s a story based on the Christmas you spent with the titian-haired woman. The woman who was back in Canada. The woman who laughed loudly but with a ruined hollowness somewhere inside. “Here was a family so torn apart, so fragmented, tenderness could not survive. Nothing of the Christmas of his youth, the beauty or magic could survive around these dead, hardened people. And she was part of it. She was woven into it. He only wanted to get up from the table and run out into the snow, without his boots, and without his coat. And especially without the girl…” It’s painful to think about these things in the morning. And of course, it’s not autobiography. The story must get at the essence of the truth, it must get away from the facts, in order to become fiction. You would rather write the woman, the beautiful woman across the cafe with the James Joyce glasses into the story but you know she doesn’t belong there. Though, she’s in there already. She’s already forced her way into your story. You place your pen down diagonally across the scribbled pages of your notebook. This is your problem with the women in your life. You’ve encouraged some women who don’t belong, to linger longer than they should, because you get lonely. You get lonely and there are necessary compromises to be made in the face of loneliness. You turn in your chair and catch Vasha’s eye, beckon him with a nod. You glance briefly at her. You are thinking you should perhaps go over and introduce yourself. Push your way into her drifting. You think about what you might say. The truth, you decide. Always start with the awkward truth. But you do not move. You push your beer slightly to the side. Sit with your back to her. Watch the street. An old woman with a blue bag, a couple, a steady stream of vehicles across the square, a woman in high heels, someone with a baguette, a tall man heading for the train. You haven’t written an acceptable amount this morning but there is always the afternoon. If you do not drink too much before noon, and it is not too hot, and if the black-haired woman across the café leaves, there will be time to get some words down.

April 16, 2012 ~ Link ~ Commentary {2}

Field, B.C. is awesome...

April 2, 2012

The church at Field, B.C., is one of my favourite buildings in this lovely town. The other is a stone building right along the railway tracks. Field remains my favourite of all the mountain towns. I could live there. Well, why aren’t you living there??? you might ask. I don’t know. Fear? My attachments? Ask me again in a year. Because I really should find a way…

church at Field

April 02, 2012 ~ Link

"Three small essays on technology"

March 28, 2012

Hello. I’ve dropped today’s “sorbet” offering into this webspace (see below). Not really essays but rather, the seeds of miniature essays on subjects that I’m intrigued by. Maybe, just maybe, this generation should be called “Generation Herd”. Because the young have embraced the idea of being part of a herd. Solitude is a foriegn, horrifying idea. Hmmmmm….

Notes on being bored: Three small essays on technology

Connected to nothing at all
I notice the technologies – the way they obscure humanity. When cell phones first arrived, I swore up and down that I was not important enough nor interesting enough to be constantly connected. Guys talking about buying bread on the way home from the movie on cell phones in movie theatres made my blood boil. And yet, I am on Facebook. I tweet. I have looked a porn. I have played Angry Birds. I carry a smart phone that talks to me like she’s real. But I have noticed the way we no longer look at each other in elevators. The way, we walk down certain streets and avenues looking at our smart phones instead of breathing the world. The way a cell phone can burn holes in a pocket at dinner – the false need to be constantly, irrevocably, connected to others who are relentlessly, concurrently, linked, to other junkies of nothing at all. Someday, a simple human conversation without the aid of the technologies will be a profound luxury.

Boredom
I am a huge fan of boredom. We are no longer bored and it is essential, I think, that humans be bored. Now, at the slightest hint of impending boredom, we reach for a smart phone, or a game, or a tablet, or we turn on a TV. We are swallowed by the stimulus of on-line, linked-to, jacked-in, and the not-so-real reality of the lives of others. It’s as if we have become afraid of boredom. But I have noticed that boredom can lead to many important things. When we are bored, we find ways to entertain ourselves – to motivate ourselves. And we turn inward – think, ponder, reflect, dance with our own imaginations. We engage in reverie. We problem solve. We dream. How can anybody dream when you are being constantly stimulated? We create. We find the creative default that is in all of us. The quiet enclave of boredom is essential to creativity.

The artists
The artists are letting us down. The artists need to arrive, well armed, at a street-fight with the geeks, programmers, and engineers and they need to pound the crap out of the them. The artists must show us how to disrespect the technologies. We need the artists to show us that the technologies are just tools. That Blackberries should be used as doorstops and drink coasters – and iPhones used only to record the sound of the wind, and as colourful necklaces – anything but phones and the Google-in-my-pocket mini-computers that they are. We need the artists to look at the technologies and ask the question: How can I make this thing do something it was not designed to do? And we need the artists to show us that the internet should contain nothing but lies and falsehoods and misinformation so that we can arrive at the truth. Because right now, there is no truth in the internet, there is only stimulation.

March 28, 2012 ~ Link ~ Commentary {4}

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