This is the account of a trip we took to Montreal over Thanksgiving weekend and some of things we saw, heard, ate or read along the way. 

Thanksgiving was actually spent in New York, or Brooklyn rather, at a friends. It was hard to beat the hot x-rated turkey action of last year’s thanksgiving, but this year all we had to worry about was the stuffing. This is the recipe we followed.

Recipe for (Jalapeñoless) Jalapeño Cornbread Stuffing (Unstuffed):

1. Our friend's roommate left a package for us with the bartender at his place of employment (Suba on Ludlow street). He wasn't there initially so went down the street to the Motor City Bar for 2 drinks (happy hour) and a game of Ms. Pacman. Then we finally got the drop-off. Inside the the brown paper bag was an even smaller brown bag of pine nuts, a smaller bag of thawing Hatch green chiles (mild-medium heat, roasted, in need of peeling) and a couple of super hot Chimayo green chiles that another friend of our friend's brought in from Santa Fe the night before.

2. We rehydrated the Chimayo chiles and reconstituted them in with the Hatch green chiles once they were thawed and peeled. This concoction we used in lieu of jalapeños to make jalapeño cornbread stuffing (which then was not jalapeño cornbread stuffing). But I am getting ahead of myself. 

3. Before you can make jalapeño cornbread stuffing (regardless of whether it has jalapeños), you must first make jalapeño cornbread. I won’t belabor you with the recipe as we just stole it from the NY Times. At least that’s what we loosely followed—some improvisation was involved, and our chiles were used instead of jalapeños.  

4. Once we went through the trouble of making jalapeño cornbread, we left it out overnight, uncovered to reenact the natural process of going stale. The next morning, after sleeping, we pretended the jalapeño cornbread was stale and leftover and crumbled it up to turn into jalapeño cornbread stuffing. Again, I won’t belabor you with the recipe as we also got this from the NY Times, and again, improvisation is key to good stuffing.

5. The stuffing never actually got stuffed into the bird, so I guess technically it wasn't stuffing either. 

Whatever it was, we brought it along with a bottle or two of wine to our friend's in Brooklyn. There's some pictures of that event here. 

Onward. Early next morning we caught a train at Penn Station. The best part about going to Montreal was getting there. As we trudged along the Hudson, I listened to Cat Power and read Sentence 3.  

Sentence : A Journal of Prose Poetics is a literary journal edited by Brian Clements that is dedicated to the art of prose in its poetic manifestations. Issue 3 proves that the form is alive and well, from the experimental streaming text of Radu Andriescu (conjuring Celine with its ellipsis ... denoting breaks in the thought packets... well-suited for reading on trains: "... the native glyph, the allogeneic glyph... ciric lake... breaking up on the bridge... breaking up on the island... from concept to discept...") to the minimal, enumerated and concise paragraphs of Janet Kaplan's Applicants: "The letter D applied but I had already packed my things." Or "The letter W would like to apply. A wilderness, it says, is uncontrollable." As applied to my personal situation—isn't that the natural tendency? Stealing glances out the train window at the stark landscape fresh with ice and snow, between pages, between paragraphs, between sentences. Reading the moving landscape like reading a stream of words. 

Some other memorable passages from Sentence 3, relevant to my current mobile state... from Leonard Schwartz' The Eden Exhibit:

A man brings a bicycle aboard the A train. You point it out. I concede that a bicycle on a subway car is incongruous, though I've seen it many times before: the shiny metal, the motionless spokes, the silenced horn. This will be a short ride. We are going our separate ways. 

From 030405 by Rachel Levitsky:

Stillness perhaps doesn't capture what I mean as sameness. The man standing in the empty train depot below the elevated subway, far below the window from which I see him, the train window out of which I always look. 

From there is nothing more real than real real by kari edwards:

so, I decided to move; truthfully I just didn't like sharing my toilet seat and I wanted my own call button. and even though humans are just duplicate purchasing machines...nothing deserves to be a hernia probability reduced to a sentence or less. so, I ask you, wouldn't you pull up the stakes and undo the bolts?

Interesting in light of kari edwards recent bio in Shampoo 24, where she claims, evidently, to up and left us ("amerika") for the ganja-green pastures of Auroville in Southern India. 

Sentence 3 also has a feature on the prose poem form in Great Britain, of which the piece by Alan Halsey from Memory Screen [Dated 15.11.03] was most remarkable, though more skirting the text/image boundary, and interestingly self-referential. In a piece by Rupert M. Loydell, Towards a Definition, he even comes out and gives his interesting (and in my opinion, also accurate) definition of the prose-poetry: "It is a key to a house with no doors, to a library full of books you want to read but must use to stoke the fire—".

(my thoughts on collections)

(my thoughts on prose vs. poem)

Eye against Eye

VIDEO MONTAGE OF TRAIN RIDE

Jess, Reflecting