The Point

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Changes

I had all these plans to write about how Penelope Cruz Explains Everything, complete with pictures and lively literary discussion... even some stuff about lightbulbs. Sadly, I'm gone.

See you soon.

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posted by Christopher at 4:01 a.m. | link | 4 comments

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Mailbag Beach

Canadianvic in Halifax, Nova Scotia writes
I love you. and I love your blog, it's amazing. it's what I show people when I try to explain that a fame-like high school actually can be deep. How long are you leaving for and will you send me a postcard? P133 forever!!!
I generally take the fact that I don't get any hate mail to be a positive sign, but this is kind of overly perky. Where's the critical analysis of my contextualisations of Latin American women's literature? Where's the commentary on my heart-pumping illustrations of emancipatory theatre-based pedagogy? Extra points for hometown references to the Parkallen 133, but I might reconsider writing the essay I was planning to mail you over the course of five months on the back of a collector's edition series of endangered seabirds.

Jen in Brisbane, Australia writes
Christopher! You are undoubtably the smartest person I know... and coincidentally, my mom, the other smartest person I know, said she would read any book you recommended without question. She also said she runs into you all the time at home. Deja jealous? Yes, yes I am. btw, I'm reading The Power of One [!]
Jen's mom is actually, genuinely, one of the most intelligent people you will ever know. She and I used to pass each other in the hall at the hospital, but whereas I was going to my office to get a stack of papers to shuffle in order to create the appearance of work, she was more likely to be headed towards a lab in which she researched how to make a new type of brain. I am not making this stuff up.

centavo of Córdoba, Argentina wrote in again and said
I was reading your blog today, and the contest entries were quite impressive. Since you were talking about musicians who sing in different languages, have you ever heard of Juana Molina? She's a little bit weird, but I think she's great, and not just because she is Argentinean. I can bring her most recent CD to book club so you can hear her. Y me interesaria leer las Cartas de Mixquiahuala... yo habia estado buscando algo en castellano para leer.
I have not heard of Juana Molina, but this book club has in fact already happened and the topic was mysteriously avoided. Conspiracy? I should apologise for not making it clear that The Mixquiahuala Letters was actually first published in English! I believe it's available in Spanish as well, though. Other people's research maybe more reliable than my own musings.

Every single high school student in the US writes
Can you please explain the themes, symbols, and literary allusions of The Kite Runner in small words and do all of my homework for me?
You wish. No, wait, I wish.

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posted by Christopher at 1:19 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

A good host


I want so badly to write eloquently about Carol Off's most recent book, Bitter Chocolate, but I just don't feel right doing it. Co-host of As It Happens on CBC Radio 1, she's one of the finest journalists in Canada today, and Bitter Chocolate is a surprisingly engrossing history of cocoa and the particular forms that exploitation in the cocoa trade have taken through the centuries. I haven't gotten a chance to finish it yet though - a friend borrowed it, and then a serious lack of free time intervened - so I've got the outrage from hearing her speak at the U of A last November, but not enough solid arguments or solutions to back it up. This has manifested itself in hilarious ways.

The other day, I was just getting off the phone with the second person who'd called in a matter of minutes when the doorbell rang. A sequence of events like this always seems like a coordinated effort to bewilder me, and I was appropriately confused to see a woman who looked extremely unfamiliar on the other side of the door when I opened it. She sort of half-smiled at me in a bewildered way, looking slightly passed my shoulder and said, 'How are you guys today?' I looked around, and sure enough, I was alone, so I said, 'I'm fine, thanks.' She didn't seem entirely satisfied with this answer, and before I'd taken a breath she asked, 'Wouldyouliketobuysomechocolate tosupport [organisation whose name fails me]?'

Personally, I've been struggling with this, but the pervasiveness of chocolate in our society does not give me great optimism for the impacts of an undirected personal boycott of it. There are places I just don't buy from because they make my neighbourhood smell like grease or I go crazy buying pants from them and can't stop thinking about how many little boys and girls went hungry because their 13-year old sister who stitched the logo on didn't make enough to buy food for everybody that week. But from what I know about the labyrinthine complexities of the international cocoa trade, deciding not to buy chocolate chips out of protest for the conditions under which the beans were grown will not only fail to provide any tangible benefits for the producers, it may end up drive down a few monolithic Swiss chocolate companies' profits just that tiiiiny bit that makes them decide to pay even less for the cocoa from the growers.

You see why I can't go shopping?

So as this poor woman is standing at my door (on an admittedly sunny, if brisk, morning) waiting to find out if she's going to make two bucks or if she should be moving onto the next house, these and several other, darker thoughts flip through my head, and I end up answering something along the lines of, 'Do you have any fair trade chocolate?' To which she replies, 'What's that?' and is summarily rewarded with a twenty-second briefing on international finance, commodity trading, and modern slavery.

She said, 'Oh. No, I don't have any of that.' And she left.

I'm telling you this to make sure you're not under any illusions that I would deign to even feign authority or unflappable certainty about the vast majority of issues. I rely heavily on tough journalists like Off and on impassioned speakers like Kevin Bales, who has been doing remarkable work with his organisation, Free the Slaves, to get some movement on this, to give me the greatest possible amount of information I can acquire about things like this, but I'm not going to lecture you about buying a Mars bar today. Quite honestly, I don't know enough about the way the industry works to say definitively one way or another whether your decision to buy or not buy Fry's Cocoa today will mean producers in Ivory Coast aren't enslaving the 12-year olds walking across the border from Mali and Burkina Faso to find work to make a profit when they sell the beans. I know the fair trade industry goes some way to addressing this.

But I believe strongly what Off said when she spoke in November. It's a wonderful luxury for us to be able to make a certain amount of political actions through what we buy, but we have much more power as citizens than as consumers.

Incidentally, when I related this story yesterday, it included the descriptors '24-ish' and 'shaped like a pear,' so I apologise if my description of the encounter seems sanitised, but I thought it better to avoid that whole conversation.

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posted by Christopher at 3:33 a.m. | link | 2 comments

Thursday, February 15, 2007

We have with us tonight

Friends, thank you.

It has been a pleasure having this long conversation with you, and next week I will be taking a long leave of absence. I have some more things up my sleeve before I go, but without further ado, the winner of the Where You Live photo contest. The challenge was to come up with the best photograph of why the place you live is great. And what amazing places they are.

 The winning picture, from Bryna Andressen. Hometown biases aside, this picture from Edmonton has charm, whimsy and melancholy. Bryna has won from the side, though; she writes:
This is a GORGEOUS picture of the clematis by the back gate at my house (see attached). It was taken by my housemate Jenanne, and I was watching, but I wasn't behind the camera. Anyway, it definitely shows exactly why living here is great. There are all sorts of interesting shadows in the yard and patterns in the frost on the kitchen windows and lots of other good things to photograph.
Clever young woman that she is, she noticed I failed to stipulate who the photographer must be. She also sent in a lovely written piece called Fridge Ephemera: Without leaving my house I know the whole universe. An excerpt:
The local garbage and recycling collection schedule for 2006 and 2007 says that this Wednesday is garbage day.

The contents of the fruit bowl are as jumbled and transient as the items on the fridge. Right now there are three pears, two limes, one banana and three avocados piled on top of each other in the bowl.

The other day, Jenanne and I noticed that the last nectarine in the fruit bowl was still mostly green. But it had been there all week, and it was getting soft.

She said, “it’s like when someone tells you about an event and the number of the date and the day of the week don’t match. Will it happen on the 3rd or will it happen on Thursday?”

“What?” I didn’t understand immediately.

“It’s like the nectarine. Do you judge ripeness based on colour or texture? How do you know when it’s ready to eat?”

That’s a difficult question.

A photo of the lilac tree that grows just outside the kitchen window. It’s a record of the exuberant flowers that blossomed at the end of May, just as we were moving in.

I only sing when I’m alone. It isn’t a conscious decision, but I never let a song slip out when I’m in the company of anyone else – even someone I trust. It’s a mysterious reflex. But today I can hear the echo of my voice in this room. The sound reminds me of the character of this space when it was empty, before my housemate and I moved in. Until we started to unpack the boxes labeled “kitchen stuff,” the room was spacious and blank. White cupboards with red handles. Two large windows on adjacent walls. A new fridge.

A distinctive household hum accompanies this subtle and familiar echo. This ambient hum is made up of sounds from the fridge and the furnace, traffic outside and voices coming from downstairs. Am I really alone with so much auditory companionship? These sounds are easily overheard without conscious listening.

Bryna will be the proud new owner of a novel of her choosing from this blog and a brand-new reading list. Because it was very very difficult to choose a winner, here are all of the excellent runners-up.


This picture of Hinton comes from fellow Ultimate afficionado Rob Barchard, who is working near the mountains these days. An admirable inukshuk, and a beautiful view.


An amazing panorama from Vancouver by Sarah Lemmon, a regular contributor to this blog and a dear friend of mine. You'll have to click the picture to see it in its full size, because it cannot be done justice in this little preview.
And wisdom from Edmonton by Lauren. I harassed her into sending something in from among her growing number of photographs documenting the wonderful madness of our hometown.

Every place is paradise. No place is paradise.

Great work, friends.

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posted by Christopher at 7:29 p.m. | link | 0 comments

The Heart is a Lamentable Hunter

I CAME TO A REALISATION/NON-REALISATION THE OTHER DAY about the music I listen to. For some reason, I am powerfully attracted to artists who are fascinated by the stories of where they come from. Lhasa, Tagaq, Amal Murkus... these women sing in languages I don't even know how to conjugate verbs in, but I can't stop listening.

I thought about that this evening at dinner with my grandma. Yes, I took my mom and my grandma out for Valentine's Day dinner. As horrible/adorable as that is, it was completely worth it for this moment right before we were about to put our coats on. It's generally hard to see any resemblance between them either physically or in personality, though they were both born back in Guyana. But just as we were about to head out, my mother turned to my grandmother and said, 'Are you wearing bifocals now?' To which she replied, 'Well, yeah, and?' And my mom put her face up close and said, 'So am I!' and showed her her brand new 'progressive lenses.' I asked if that meant they voted NDP and got a withering glare.

Ana Castillo seems like she's been consumed by the same questions for her whole life. One of the most renowned Chicana authors, her work straddles the intimacies and contradictions of lives straddling Mexican and American traditions, languages, and identities. Where Sandra Cisneros is a cold Chicago day though, Castillo's writing is more restless, more urgent, more hungry. Her 1986 book The Mixquiahuala Letters is a raw, candid series of snapshots in the vagrancies and heartaches of two women living through these questions of self and self-love and half-love.

The book is written as a series of correspondences from one woman, Teresa, to another, Alicia. Teresa is mestizo - chicana, hispanic, that sweet compromise between Indian and European (in the Latin American sense) - and Alicia is white as day (take that as you will), and both are helplessly drawn again and again back to Mexico, where they travel throughout the book not to meet anyone but themselves, not to lap up any beach but the landscape of their own bodies, their own capacities.

The words 'passionate' or 'fiery' come to mind when I think of Teresa, but neither is appropriate for her busty recklessness, her determination to become herself after she briefly entwines with man after man, her steely sense of never being able to be just one thing at one time. Imagine if Penelope Cruz in Volver met Malena, and they went drinking, and they started arguing, and they started shouting, and then this woman neither of them knows comes up, finishes their bottle of whiskey, and starts dancing with their boyfriends. This might approach Teresa.

The book is as much about the chasms between men and women as it is about their questions of being gringa or Indian, Mexican or Nuyorquina. Teresa and Alicia seem at best cynical about the prospects of genuine love. Most of the men that pass through their lives are sad, abrasive, or beautiful and heartless, which is not a completely inaccurate summary of our gender, but Teresa especially seems to chafe against the expectations of what being a man or being a woman means in these cultures.

'Alvaro Pérez Pérez,' she writes, 'was a self-proclaimed healer, an alcoholic, and in love.' One afternoon she waits for him to meet her in the main square of his hometown in Mexico to show her around. Sitting on a bench, she sits expectantly with all her bags for him to arrive, and when he does, he saunters casually over in dark sunglasses and sits down beside her without a word.

'We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch,' she says. 'When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles.'

In and out of fate, superstition, love and grief she and Alicia run, away and toward each other, not tourists but travellers, journeyers of the soul. But the journey they take, like so so so many, is back to themselves. I chew on this as I reflect on the most action I got on this Valentine's Day, and realise it was the Purity Test I took in The Gateway. I did shamefully well.

Ana Castillo photo credit: Steve Tienda. Photo contest results tomorrow.

A note: copies of The Mixquiahuala Letters are not easy to find above the 49th parallel. I ended up ordering mine used from Texas on Amazon (for about $2.00 Canadian, plus $8 postage). Worth it.

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posted by Christopher at 1:52 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Success is easy

Five hours left and no pictures in yet. You're going to make me invent another imaginary friend, aren't you? His name is Jaime, he reallllly likes books, and he's an excellent photographer...

Beat Jaime! Send in a picture of why you love the place you live, and win a copy of any one of the books I've reviewed/picked apart on this blog. Winning is easy!

UPDATE: Alright, since I have a strict policy of 'all deadlines are always unreasonable, no matter how long,' you have until Wednesday. You also now have stiff competition from two lady photogs. Shoo!

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posted by Christopher at 8:45 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, February 09, 2007

Sun Again

When we finally burst forward... maybe we'll sing it out like Kinnie.

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posted by Christopher at 2:59 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, February 08, 2007

There are no poor countries

Some notes from Avi Lewis speaking at Grant Mac:
Peace.

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posted by Christopher at 2:10 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Busson defends beleaguered officer

UPDATE (13 February 2007) If you are not from Alberta, please read these articles from the Calgary Sun and the Edmonton Journal. I have been told this post may have been a little too dark for the average reader.

Interim RCMP Commissioner Bev Busson defended a BC officer charged with torture at a press conference this morning.

Busson said the allegations against Const. Saxon Peters are serious, but she believes the charges are probably overblown. She added it would be unreasonable to expect Canada to meet its obligations to the UN Convention Against Torture at this time.

"Obviously this is a priority for us. We recognise that torture is a global challenge. But to reduce it back to 1987 levels? Nobody can deliver on it without hurting the RCMP to the point where we will lose services."

The UN Convention was ratified by Canada in 1987. It defines torture as an official -- such as a soldier or police officer -- intentionally inflicting "severe pain or suffering" on someone to obtain information or punish, intimidate or coerce them. Under Canada's Criminal Code, Const. Peters could be given a maximum penalty of 14 years in jail.

25-year old Glen Shuter, the alleged victim, says when Peters suspected him of stealing another officer's bicycle, he was severely beaten and left to walk 10 kilometres to seek medical attention.

Commissioner Busson said the RCMP was proud of how it was handling the issue internally, and that it cannot be subject to the international agreement, which explicitly bans torture, without seriously hampering its law-enforcement capabilities.

Instead, she said, she favours adopting "intensity-based targets." Under intensity-based torture targets, total incidences of torture could go up as long as the percentage per officer goes down.

"Everyone has their favoured solution to torture. This is ours," Busson said. "We would like to get started on adopting mandatory targets soon, but it's going to require a lot of tough negotiations with other players."

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posted by Christopher at 9:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Not a sin

Call me a nerd (no really, do it, it feels good), but I am a sucker for self-confident, sexy singers who know exactly who they are and where they come from. Which is why I'm wondering, how did I not know until Friday how amazing Kinnie Starr was? (That would be her at right)

I went down to see the International Week wrap-up concert, The Power of Silence they called it, and it was really incredible. Not just in a "we're a multicultural quilt of love" way, which I totally dig, but genuinely amazing music and dance. Firefly never ceases to entrance me.

And of course, the kicker was Kinnie Starr, born and bred in Cowtown no less, who completely won me over. She's smouldering, hilarious, insightful, gentle, and is 100% confident in her own skin. With the possible exception of Tagaq, I don't know of any other aboriginal singer in Canada with such a powerful sense of themself and of getting others up to that microphone of life with her. At one point she literally offered the mic to anyone in the crowd who wanted it, and no one moved. She said,

"Hello! Human beings!"

and someone ran up to sing.

I missed the girl from Vic singing the national anthem in Cree at the Flames/Canucks game on Saturday (admittedly, one of the only times I've turned on Hockey Night in Canada this year), but did anyone else read this article in the Journal today about Derek Powder? (apologies, it's only available online for subscribers.) An excerpt:
Derek Powder joined a gang because he was tired of being ridiculed and bullied at school.
Physically and sexually abused as a child in a family where drugs and violence were the norm, he didn't fit in at school and was only able to express his anger through violence.
He became a drug dealer and an addict, and an alcoholic, and spent time in jail - until four years ago, when he decided to change his life.
Now 25, Powder works with Native Counselling Services of Alberta, is a single parent raising a six-year old daughter, and spends a lot of time trying to persuade young people not to follow the path he took.
His message is that even if you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you still have control of your life.
"Maybe if there had been somebody out there for me I wouldn't have taken that path," Powder told a forum on youth and gang violence Sunday.
"But I have moved forward and I'm not a victim anymore.
"There's more to life than drugs, parties and alcohol, and my daughter won't see that stuff."
The forum at the west-end Boys and Girls Club was a first step in getting more youth involved in addressing the issue of violence, said Kyle Dube, Western Canada program manager for YOUCAN, which organized the event.
"We want to engage youth and give them a voice. We don't want to be a bunch of adults talking to youth; we want to empower them to deal with the issues themselves."
Now that's real democracy. In fact, all of this talk about sustainability is bullshit unless there are more of us like Derek Powder and Kinnie Starr going out and handing that mic over. Aboriginal, Somali, Desi, Belorussian... it all comes down to speaking up.

Alright, alright, I'll go back to writing about books! But wait, don't you guys want a free book?! Send me your picture already! I know you have one lurking around your hard-drive waiting to be shared with the world... or me... so do it! You have until Sunday.

Photo credit: David Wiewel

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posted by Christopher at 12:45 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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