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My review of Michael Ondaatje's great new novel, The Cat's Table, is now online and will appear in print in The Gazette [Montreal] tomorrow, Saturday, September 3, 2011.

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Patterson Webster’s exhibition Land Marks – nicely translated as Pays sage – explores how people shape the natural world and are shaped by it. Intrigued when I attended the show and walked the trails, I asked Webster questions about her work, to which she responded by email.

Her work is exhibited in a gallery setting at the North Hatley Library (165 Main Street, North Hatley) and outdoors at Glen Villa Gardens (1000 chemin North Hatley, Sainte-Catherine–de-Hatley), where you can walk the Abenaki and In Transit trails daily, 1–5 p.m. Enter the property on the private drive marked with a flag. Follow signs for parking. See brochure and map. Duration of walk: 45 minutes (1.5 km) round trip.

These works fall to the force of nature every year and are rebuilt in new formations in late spring and summer when the river releases itself from winter’s grip. The rock remains, the art vanishes, only to reappear, because the artist is moved to do so, change and transformation being essential to his aesthetic. And that’s a rather exciting concept. Ceprano’s purpose is not to create a never changing artifact, but to celebrate the phenomenon of change itself

The site has been down, owing to server overload. Some of that is the traffic generated since the four pieces I posted yesterday, but most of it has nothing to do with this site but with another dealing with UFOs and nuclear weapons.

My webmaster suggests posting on UFOs and nuclear weapons as a way of increasing traffic. I guess it would be.

What interests me in these gardens is their design and imaginative daring, along with their thoughtful and often playful deconstruction of the garden into its constituent parts. As a writer, I am also intrigued by the power of the language used to describe them. Among the most provocative – perhaps especially for a writer -- is the Jardin de la connaissance, a “secret and strange library” of walls, benches and floors made up of used books exposed to wind and weather – and varieties of mushrooms cultivated within some of the books.

Here is a world première view of Louise Tanguay's new photograph of the controversial Jardin de la connaissance.

I was looking for something that stood out, and I found it. This French couple declared the food they had at the Auberge du Grand Fleuve (131, rue Principale, Métis-sur-Mer) the best they’d had in Quebec. Now that’s saying something.

Next stop is prompted by a glimpse of the extravagant spires of the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges church in Trois-Pistoles, where you think you might catch a glimpse of the redoubtable nationalist novelist and publisher Victor-Lévy Beaulieu (but of course you don’t). What you do hear, is English, a few words of spoken English.

Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Trois-Pistoles

It’s lunchtime, and the Café du clocher (88 av. Morel, Kamouraska), has a dozen or more tables in pretty tablecloths set out on the grass overlooking the St. Lawrence (there are tables indoors, as well). A gentleman has a basket of chanterelles he picked that morning in the woods nearby, and he’s selling them for $12 a pound. He has a guitar with him, and he sits down to play and sing as you sit down to an al fresco lunch of salad, smoked Kamouraska lamb and some of the local smoked fish.

                              Chanterelles in Kamouraska (Photo: Linda Leith)

Because one of the things that happens – and I cannot believe we do this as a society – is that there’s a decision: Is this a penis or a clitoris? If it’s decided it shouldn’t be a penis, then it’s removed. So, whatever it was, it could feel stuff, right? Whatever it was, it was the source of sexual ecstasy for that child’s future. And as part of our comfort level with being a society that wants to have no ambiguity, we don’t even think about that.

We’ll be hearing a lot more about Ken Scott. So see Starbuck. (Those of you able to attend TIFF can see it there.) And then see La Grande séduction.

                                               Patrick Huard in new film Starbuck