The Point

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Oh mama

Our present lunacies compound themselves.


Even as the World Glacier monitoring service reports that the speed of global glacier melt is accelerating, even as Canada's major political parties seemed to finally have woken up to the clear and present dangers of anthropogenic climate change, they have fallen smack into the same crass political gesturing as always.

Olaf at The Prairie Blogger never fails to disappoint, and brings us this article from Preston Manning on why 'politicians have to start shunning extreme characterizations of opponents positions on the environment, and start working collectively towards rational debate and collaboration, if progress is to be realized.' I couldn't have said it better myself (so I won't).

Manning makes the analogy of the protracted debate parties have been fighting for decades over health care in Canada. He points out:

Not only did this produce little progress on health-care reform, but increasing numbers of Canadians have become convinced that their No. 1 public-policy concern cannot be resolved by political processes and institutions, and that politics is part of the health-care problem, not part of the solution.

If the political debate over Canadian environmental concerns now proceeds along the same well-trodden path, the net effects will be even worse: no progress on the issue itself, and a further dangerous deepening of the disillusionment of Canadians with politicians, parties, political debate, elections, Parliament, and democracy itself.(...)

Olaf's analysis is well worth reading, but I hesitate to endorse appointing Manning a new Environment Minister, as one of his readers has suggested. Weren't we just talking about disillusionment with democracy?

The cynicism of the Conservative Party with these Superbowl attack ads on Stephane Dion's record as environment minister baffles me. What happened to the excitement of just a few weeks ago that real, collaborative political action was finally on its way? Surely public attention hasn't plumetted so far over one weekend.

Photo credit: hwy777 on flickr.

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posted by Christopher at 3:03 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, January 29, 2007

Contest this!

I am officially announcing the first-ever photo contest here on The Point. In less than a month I will be taking a hiatus for a while, so this is my little way of saying thank you for reading.

The rules are: send in a picture that shows why the place you live is great. I will be selecting on the basis of charm, bravado, hilarity, and/or (for good measure) poignancy. This does not mean you have to send in a picture of a sign that says 'City of Champs.' Be brave. Be tremendous. Send in as many entries as you like.

The winner will (obviously) get their picture featured on this blog as well as a copy of any book I have talked about here (except Worldchanging, I do not intend to spend my entire tuition on postage) and a personalised handy-dandy reading list that will be good for your soul. You get to pick the book. Reading this blog every day over your granola is not required to enter.

The contest ends Sunday, February 11th at 11.59 Mountain Standard Time. Send your pictures to . If there are a lot of really good ones, maybe I'll do a retrospective or something.

Can't remember all the books? Click here.

UPDATE: Deadline extended to 11.59 pm on Wednesday, February 14th. Because we are lovers.

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posted by Christopher at 12:51 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, January 28, 2007

What gets said

While doing some soul-searching about this business of journalism tonight, I came across two interesting things - interesting not so much in themselves, though they're both worth considering, but in their confluence. First, some background.

The BBC has been heavily covering the World Economic Forum in Davos and all of the gilted handshakes going around there since it started earlier this month. Today there was a triumphant headline about Tony Blair's optimism that Germany's upcoming G8 presidency will mean good prospects for a much broader international agreement on post-Kyoto Accord action on anthropogenic climate change. In the article, he says, 'I believe we are potentially on the verge of a breakthrough.'

Potentially. On the verge. He believes.

What struck me is that this conference continues to monopolise the mainstream media, even as a massive counter-gathering went on in Nairobi with some 60 000 attendees. Every year, while presidents and finance ministers shake hands in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, an alternative conference is held in the South: the World Social Forum. It's meant to be a venue for critical discussion of key issues of global inequality, it's closely associated with the anti-globalisation movement, and there are a massive number of attendees going to this thing presenting genuinely well-thought out critiques of the global hegemonies being agreed on up in Davos.

Surprisingly, unsurprisingly, the BBC has given almost no coverage whatsoever to the World Social Forum except a brief, almost sneering story about local kids taking food from the venues. A lot of food in a city where thousands can't afford to feed their families, and some of it was stolen?
Shocking!

The interesting thing, though: I did find an article on Christian Today about something Archbishop Desmond Tutu said at the conference about terrorism:
The war on terror will "never" be won "as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate," like dehumanising poverty, disease and ignorance, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu told ecumenical participants at the start of the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. [...]
Tutu emphasised that the "fundamental law of our being" is that "we are bound to one another". Because of that, "the only way we can make it is together, all of us". Only together can we be free, safe and secure.
And then, five minutes later, I was looking through videos of Robert Fisk on YouTube. He is, you may recall, the author of the 1136-page The Great War for Civilization, and one of the foremost Western journalists in the Middle East. And to my amazement, he said almost the exact same thing. Not a defense of terrorism, nor of violence. Simply the posing of the question: why do people commit these horrific, barbaric attacks?

What responsibility do we have to address those grievances at the heart of the violence?

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posted by Christopher at 2:13 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, January 26, 2007

The sweet and the bitters

Someone on YouTube has written that Patrick Wolf is a 'unique guy who wears both a belt and suspenders,' and another has described him as 'a ginger bloke sitting at a piano.' He also plays the theramin and the harpsicord. I like to think of him (along with Owen Pallett) as one of the leaders of a brilliant new genre: Wastrel. And so for you I present the video for his newest single, 'Bluebells,' from imminent drop The Magic Position.

As sweet as Patrick Wolf's voice is though, there is trouble in the henhouse. Thomas, who helps run the Padmanadi estaurant down on 97th Street and is one of the kindest, sweetest people in Edmonton, is about to be deported. The story is longer and more sordid than you'd expect for someone who always makes sure to ask how you are when he comes to each and every table to pour the chrysanthemum tea. Read Ross Moroz's article about it in Vue here.

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posted by Christopher at 2:14 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Let's meet

Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín

Here is a really cool example of how poetry can be an integral, positive part of a local culture:
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín started as a protest against the political violence and hatred prevailing in Colombia and especially in Medellín. In the early 1990s, Medellín was ruled by fear, political terror and fighting between criminal groups. Some 100 people could be murdered on a weekend. After 6 pm, the city was usually dead due to a curfew imposed by the paramilitary.

Initiator Fernando Rendón says: "It seems a difficult task to find flourishing and tranquil decades in our country in the last 150 years, but the decade of the nineties was particularly sombre and mournful. (...) The festival arose from a proposal to overthrow the wall of terror and fear imposed by the internal feuds of our country." It was an attempt "to create through poetry an atmosphere that without ignoring the spiral of death and the inertial strength of hate could put a little light in this sombre scene."

The idea was simple: By organising poetry readings in the streets, the Festival initiators helped people to re-establish a cultural life and reclaim their city. More and more listeners overcame their own fear and attended the poetry readings.

In 2006, the festival won the Right Livelihood award for its role in creating a vibrant, raucous venue for contemplation and beauty amidst an atmosphere of authoritarianism and intolerance.
Says Fernando Rendón: "The Festival has the conviction that culture must and has to play a fundamental role in any process of development. It has the certainty that arts and poetry will contribute decisively to the up-surging of a new humanity, a new human society."
"The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has maintained and will maintain its efforts, as a way of opposition to barbarism and of looking into alternative routes of democratic and peaceful resistance to the extreme violence that strikes our country, seeking the strengthening and defence of the fundamental rights of the Colombian people: the right to live, the right to have liberty of expression, the right of meeting and the right to create."

The motto of the Festival is "Por una paz más activa que todas las guerras." – "For a peace which is more active than all wars."

You can read more about it here.

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posted by Christopher at 3:16 p.m. | link | 0 comments

The mindful museum

'The fact is that poetry is not the books in a library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. '
-Jorge Luis Borges

When was the last time you read a bunch of Lord Byron sonnets for fun? Tell me honestly. When was the last time you actually sat down with Shakespeare outside of a classroom or a Hallmark store?

There is something wrong (okay, a number of things wrong) with the way we conventionally teach, discuss and dismember poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with dismemberment. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought everyone should love poetry, whether it's even something everyone is capable of connecting to. My answer, of course, was a long, drawn-out Yes in such a way that she almost fell asleep while we were walking. I think that Yes is worth sharing, though. You are allowed to fall asleep.

When I read Rabindranath Tagore or Rumi or Yeats, I don't just see their writing as an interesting piece of history, difficult to analyse but worth dissecting for the sake of understanding the quaint ways of the past. They speak to me directly and immediately, of my own life and of the moment I am reading them in. There's a certain amount of thinking sideways involved, a semi-fluency you have to pick up to know how to interpret metaphors about Irish independence into nectar to pour into your own soul, but it's not so different from the multiple levels you have to think on to read an article or watch a documentary.

Almost all of us intuitively know what to draw from those types of media, what to exclude, and how to apply it to the way we live and the choices we make. The difference, I think, is that our culture surrounds us with chances to develop those drawing/ excluding/ applying skills almost every day, and a thousand different ways to do it. Poetry lacks almost all of this support in our everyday lives, so when we are confronted with it we're usually a little bit baffled, bored, and embarassed by the encounter. Understandably.

The ROM reimagines itself (Gavan Watson)

How do we actually read poetry? Well, I started thinking about all this tonight listening to the very-functionally literate Adam Gopnik talk about the changing roles of museums. The great museums of a hundred, two hundred years ago, he says, were essentially mausoleums: institutions that presented artifacts and totems of the past as facts, as headstones of what was in a context that made it very easy to see them, to digest them.

As the 20th-century started winding down, Gopnik says, this role mutated into the one our generation is probably more familiar with. For those of us who are young enough to have tender memories of the Bug Room at the Provincial Museum, the museum's role was that of the educator. The audio tape. The walking tour. The informative interpretive brochure telling you what you should know about these Greek marbles, and why.

Today though, the role of the museum is changing again. From a place to learn, it's changing into a place to have a discussion, to argue, to teach and be taught. Gopnik says that's the process that places like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are part of now, transforming themselves into places where it's not just okay to talk, your talking is actually part of the experience of the museum. You are part of the exhibit. That sounds a little bit creepy, actually.

Gopnik says it's partly because our museums are becoming places to engage with artifacts, sculptures, and memorabilia as a way of interpreting, discussing, and dismembering ourselves. What he calls the Mindful Museum is less of a monologue and more of a conversation. Instead of walking through a curator's 'clandestine bid for power' by being forced to interpret objects from their perspective, he says the 21st-century's museums are going to draw you into the discussion. But, you know, probably shush you if you go on for too long. You get the idea.

This is how poetry should be taught. This is how poetry should be loved.

Who cares what Harold Bloom thought about anything? To frame different ways to approach poetry, great, let's spend five minutes talking about his opinion on Elizabeth Bishop. But it's the rest of the day spent tearing her poems apart, gushing over them with your friend, whispering them to your lover, that count.

Poetry means nothing before it leaves the shelf.

Another interesting thing Adam Gopnik brought up is the what an amazing tool chronology is for telling a story. It's immediate, it's universal, it's easy to understand. Things start at one place and end in another, and you can interpret what happens in between because we think in terms of time. It made me wonder what the arc of this blog has been so far. Where do you guys think the story is going?

More to the point, what can I do to bring you into the discussion?

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posted by Christopher at 12:46 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Canon

On the topic of sexy poetry, a sample of cantos of the non-sensical by educated educator emerson, a fantastic series of poems she's written as multiple riffs on a salacious idea:
And control will be lost entirely
Hands will caress
And lips will greet each other ravenously
A personal exploration of our personal paradoxes laid aside
In a silence we’ve been looking forward to for a long time
A secret we’ve been wanting to share
Only between us
Never to be uttered
Like we will never utter a word in each other’s presence
Unless it is by a kiss
Sliding hands on bodies
Legs flowing into one another
Inhibitions pushed aside by emergent urgency
Dishes pushed aside by surging emergencies
An increase in warmth flowing to hot meeting hotly
Meeting liquid insides and moist tongues
Personal paradoxes aside
As one of us will be inevitably be pushed up against something
Not even noticing
Drowning in the presence of the power in the other
Maybe that is what attracts us
Power to power
Paradox to paradox
Loner to lone wolf
**
Two other blogs worth reading from the 780 (we've got to stick together here up in Hometown brown):
deletia (migrating soon?), with a healthy dose of hilarity and fascination by books and other things which consume me by my erstwhile online buddy prolix and
Pete's Picks, a cunning selection of reading done and to be done by a man who must surely be one of St Albert's most exciting librarians.

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posted by Christopher at 10:20 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Drown me

Quand je suis dans tes bras...

Romanticism is a form of cowardice. I realised this this week when I caught the first hour of the delicious, slightly dangerous, erotic but still ever-so-slightly-self-absorbed Blood Ink night down at Teddy's on Jasper. If you haven't read anything from this unnerving and fascinating poetry collective, I highly recommend it. Last Monday they had a jam-packed evening of readings and it was spectacular.

What I most took from it as I ran out at the first intermission, though (I had a previous engagement, alright?), was that all of the sexy, diabolical poems I'd been lapping up should have been ringing bells all through my head, asking Why aren't I writing those poems? The answer is, of course, that I like to nurture a small-r and big-R sense of romanticism about love and longing, and that involves making a lot of pasta for one in the hopes of fairy-tale romances arriving at the door while you're grating the romano and surprise! you must have accidentally made too much, because there's just enough pasta for two...

The long and the short of this all is that I apologise for not giving you anything handsome to read lately. I really have been out there on the wintery brown streets soaking up things worth writing about. Watch this space in the not-too-distant future for a small series I have planned to explain the literary sewage canals that are running beneath all the rambling you've been patient enough to read. I realised there are some books I consider so fundamental to understandings of the soul that I've been taking it for granted you've already read them when I write about obscure Chinese sustainable development projects and making cheese. Okay, there hasn't been anything about cheese so far, but everything is connected, right? Right?

May I also add that I find it extremely gratifying that you guys are using this blog primarily to cheat on English homework. I cannot imagine a better home for all my renegade rousings and speculations.

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posted by Christopher at 1:41 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Meet me in the Red Room

.
I'm off to Toronto for the weekend. Will we galavant?


posted by Christopher at 2:37 a.m. | link | 1 comments

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Persuasion

I just picked up the stellar (but almost star-like in weight) WorldChanging book, a print offshoot of the brilliant Worldchanging.org website and pretty much a compendium of some of the ideas that excite me most about the world we are wandering into these days. I hadn't planned on picking it up, actually, but Audrey's tempted me with their cursed 30% Off 30 Books propaganda and I couldn't resist.

Essentially it's a very pretty encylopedia of 'world-changing' ideas circulating in our world today. The Al Gore foreword is an interesting addition, although a direct connection to the buzz about An Inconvenient Truth is a little tenuous. While it deals a lot with practical, cool solutions being tried out around the world to address climate change, it is as much about participatory change, about becoming the revolutionary, as it is about icecaps and lightbulbs. (Incidentally [especially to my North American and European readers], if you're not using compact fluorescent lightbulbs yet, why not? MisEntropy comments here.)

Ideas range from pay-before-boarding bus stations in Curitiba (to make taking their amazing high-speed bus system easier and more convenient) to culturally appropriate and portable LED light sources for Huichol tribes in Mexico. There's lots of delicious eye-candy for design junkies, including pictures of a LEED-certified skyscraper (the highest international standard at the moment for environmentally sustainable and smart design) in Singapore, which I pored over for ages. It even talks about Huangbaiyu, as well as other villages in China 'green' building ideas are being tested out in.


As a compendium of ideas, it does tend to gloss over drawbacks in some of the projects it describes. About the hyper-cool Dongtan district being built in Shanghai to be walk/bike/bus-able, energy self-sufficient and almost completely independent in food production, for example, it ignores the likely impossibility of any of Shanghai's ample population of poor and migrant workers to afford housing in the area. I don't believe in any capacity that sustainability is the exclusive domain of the rich; it's a contradiction in terms.

As well, it talks a lot about cradle-to-cradle design, which made my heart all aflutter, but has some contradictions in how it talks about those ideas. In some sections it ramps up how groundbreaking and obvious designing things beyond a single lifetime is, but in others it unduly celebrates a culture of reducing, of efficiency, and of minimising bad instead of fostering a brand new (and brand old) good.

These things are easily overlooked, in my opinion, given the sheer volume of fascinating ideas. Not a cheap tome, but the thoughts within are a bargain. Keep in mind I'm trying to read this at the same time as Margaret Somerville's The Ethical Imagination, Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, and make a dent in M G Vassanji's The In-between World of Vikram Lall. And learn Chinese.

It excites me because a year ago, a 'big' conversation in our society about changing the way we live would have been... not unthinkable but probably laughable. Something tells me change is in the air, and I want to get in on it.

A note: In my last post, I falsely implied a direct link between Novartis' lawsuit regarding one of its drugs, Glivec, and access to HIV/Aids drugs in India and throughout the Global South. In truth, Glivec is primarily a cancer-fighting drug, but Oxfam gives an analysis here of the probable impact of a successful lawsuit on Novartis' part on production of other generic drugs in India's booming industry. New patent laws there have created quite a bit of controversy, apparently. Read up.

Photo credit: Kit Seeborg (see, Amazon is good for some things) and Edward Burtynsky

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posted by Christopher at 1:36 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

I am not a fish

I hate using Google Video because it seems way too complicated, not as fun, it pauses more often for no reason, and I don't understand why it still exists since they now own YouTube anyway. But I am exploiting their generously offered service to post for your enjoyment a clip of the most brilliant finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-zeitgeist guy I've found on the internet: Seth Godin. Read his blog, follow his links, and watch things magically cascade into place all around you.

This is Seth at the Gel Conference 2006 on Things That Are Broken.

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posted by Christopher at 3:10 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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