About the name of this Blog

Squatter's Scraps -- it's a phrase I've been carrying around for years. I've a song with it as a title, back from the days when I was doing lyrics for a local Montreal band. I have a series of poems called by the same name. But it is sort of one of those found phrases that describes how I feel about what I am in the 20th & now 21rst centuries: a squatter's scrap among squatters' scraps. Doesn't matter if I'm thinking of myself in relation to the world, to the fragmented historical, artistic & intellectual landscapes I've inherited, even to my concrete day to day existence, my apartment, my adoptive city, my mate, my pin money: I'm a squatter with rather blow away roots, with stakes in all sorts of things that I've laid claim to without being able to own, with patchwork & chipped belongings I've picked up along the way. I figure that the posts I'll be putting here will have the ambivalent quality of squatters' scraps too -- bits & pieces twistily ephemeral yet actually there for all that, from a description of my day, to a second or third or thousandth hand idea I've picked up somewhere, to the "new" lain out on the unknown past -- "the past is what the present is doing now" (Alan Jones). I don't think of this as depressing - more as the condition of our postmodern existence - hell - the human condition of the majority at any time.

A favourite scrap: Jeff Buckley singing Halleluiah...