The Point

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Another thought



"Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite - our hopes spill over its brim."

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Labels:

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

Saturday, December 22, 2007

While you're at it

A free idea today, to whoever'll take it and run with it (or maybe you've already gotten started on it). Every year up here in the sort of (but not permanently) frozen north, we complain until our faces turn blue about potholes. It's an absurd way to talk about city budget priorities, but it's true; frost heaves pull apart the road every single year, and every single year we spend an awful lot of money fixing them so nobody falls in, plunges over a cliff, trips, etc.

But if we were to look at the design requirements for a road, what would they be? A level surface. Something that grips. Easily lay-downable. Nothing in there about needing to use an impenetrable material that irreparably cracks and splits every time the ground freezes. Maybe irate writers to editorials all across this country are onto something. Why not look for other types of materials - surfaces that don't flood all the rainwater running over them into stormdrains, surfaces that don't break apart with the ice. There's a place for this beside the people working on crosswalks that light up along the ground when you've got the right of way.

Who's working on this?

Labels: ,

posted by Christopher at 11:30 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, December 21, 2007

B.S.F, Edition #1







Groooooss. Algae picture courtesy of the Lake Doctors Inc, apparently.

It seems like an appropriate moment to bring you the first edition of the B.S. Files on this blog. As an Albertan who was reluctantly-so for many years and has lived in a few different parts of our home on Native land (did I say that?), I try to have a generous heart when thinking about the things my fellow Canadians say and do. Sure, people from Toronto often seem incredulous to hear Edmonton's got a hip hop scene (or black people), but then again, we Edmontonians have a dim sense in general about things like, well, like the fact that in Toronto or Montreal, multiculturalism doesn't just mean having a black kid at the back of the class.

There must be something strange going on in Ontario since I've been away, though. A toxic bloom of algae on Lake Superior that went unnoticed for months, until it'd made some brains over there sufficiently addled to chuck reason or common sense completely off their mental bookshelves. How else to explain Harper's gushing, smirking, self-satisfied explanation in slow and small words to Peter Mansbridge last night that Canadians were going to be really, really upset when they started seeing that it was going to cost money in the short term to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? Was it just my imagination, or did Nicholas Stern really publish a report last year that outlined very clearly and specifically the billions of dollars more in costs we would incur in the decades to come if we chose not to act on climate change immediately? I was under the impression that this was a fairly definitive statement that yes, doing things now are going to cost a lot of money, but a hell of a lot less than waiting until 2020 to achieve insultingly inambitious almost-reductions. Pretty sure that was all cleared up. Why are we still talking about this?

Also on the algae file: the Halton Catholic School Board, and their absurd decision to ban Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from their libraries. As if it weren't humiliating enough that it took them about a decade to notice the books were on their shelves, one might imagine an organ of a body with such a long and storied history of banning and burning things like the Catholic Church might have realised by now that taking a book off your shelf won't make the ideas in it go away. The board said in its decision that the books are not in keeping with 'the Catholic values that we are trying to teach children.'

They're right, of course. Absolutely. The books quite definitively take aim against some of the most cherished and fundamental tenets of Christianity. But come on. Yes, it's an outrage that the school board has so little respect for the critical thinking skills of the kids in their schools that they seriously believe that students are a) incapable of making up their own minds about what's in the books and b) stupid enough to not realise the books exist or go find them if they're not on the shelf at school. But more outrageous is that the board is clinging to a belief that was long ago bludgeoned, bloodied, pepper-sprayed right in the eyes, and shattered into tiny pieces of intellectual shame: that hiding ideas makes them go away at all.

When really revolutionary thinkers go about challenging dangerous or deeply-held beliefs, they don't hide the old beliefs away or burn them, they come up with new and compelling ways of seeing things. To a small number of confused and terrified people's surprise, it works. Darwin didn't need to burn copies of the Torah to get people to believe our history stretches into unfathomable depths of time, times when our hairy little ancestors bore very little resemblance to Sun Yat-Sen or Shaq or Diana Ross at all. Apple didn't need to start locking up people's CD players to convince us that a pretty little mp3 player was a very, very useful thing. To really present a fierce challenge to an idea, you don't ban it. You argue about it, you refute it, you hold it up critically and show that what you're holding in the other hand is a whole lot better.

The failure to realise this is probably much better explained by Naomi Klein, of course, in The Shock Doctrine. But I haven't read enough of it to learn much more than the 8-minute Alfonso Cuaron movie they put out about it, so I'll come back another day to her thesis about modern capitalism's inability to seriously assert itself as a global ideology without banning or burning the ideas that oppose it - through state terror, international financial blackmail, you know. The usual.

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by Christopher at 4:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, December 14, 2007

Tight

I'm going to talk about two very different books today, which I read in short succession and which left me standing in very different places afterward.

I don't know how I feel about Haruki Murakami. On the one hand, I love his style (or, I guess, how I've received his style as effortlessly translated mostly by Jay Rubin). He's sort of incessantly readable - frustratingly so. Because I can read a book of his like, say, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and feel like crap the whole way through, right til the end, and even have to put it down more than once because I feel like I'm going to vomit or cry, but five minutes later I'll be restless if I don't pick it up again. That kind of author.

Norwegian Wood fits squarely in Murakami's self-made genre of loner-alienation-pop culture junkie-fiction, and it might have been, in isolation, a poor choice to read while trying to figure out the process of grief myself. I picked it up on the basis of remembering a handsome German man had recommended it to me, and that it was sort of a love story, but fittingly enough for me right then that sort-of-love-story is jigsawed in with the question of what two people do with the chasm of a suicide hanging between them, and how they stumble towards and away from each other around it.

I'm beginning to understand, I think, what he means in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when he's fixating on this deep dark abandoned well, on the idea of needing to find your deep dark place and go to the bottom of it. Murakami is definitely on to something in these explorations he keeps coming back to of the connection between physical darkness, loss, and the power of dreams and what comes out at night. Making contact with that immense well that only rarely surfaces from the subconscious for most of us is, I think, one of the great confrontations we city folk born under permanent orange-pink skies need to run amok with. But if you are trying to find your way out of that dark place yourself, I recommend that you do not read Norwegian Wood. In such case, I think you'll find it appeals to a nostalgia and an understanding of love that don't fall in the right space on the continuum for getting well and getting through.

Joan Didion, on the other hand, is an author I feel I know very well now after having read The Year of Magical Thinking, and I am glad for it. Oddly, I considered reading the book for this blog sometime last year, because it was on all those 2006 best ofs lists, but I couldn't be bothered until it occurred to me it might have something to say to me last month. Indeed, Didion's frank, direct account of getting through the first year after her husband John's death might have been the perfect book to stray across my path.

What struck me about the way she speaks about her own experience of the process of grief was that, as a woman who lives through writing, she found herself trying to research herself, research the last 100 years of widowhood in American culture, of public and private grief, of the slow process of accepting death as a sort of eventual marble stone with which to put a name to all these impulses suddenly turned inward when the one you love isn't there to bring them to. I love what she says about self-pity.
I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report: the deep summer green has faded overnight from the trees, the season is already changing. We need to make a plan for fall, I remember thinking. We need to decide where we want to be at Thanksgiving, Christmas, the end of the year.
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C S Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul-de-sacs."
The book, I found, to most embody this thought of Lewis' in Didion's probing exploration of herself, her own reactions to the prospect of a Christmas planned alone, to the concurrent illness of their daughter Quintana, her readjustments to her reflection in the mirror and in front of the computer or notepad. The book's unapologetically prosaic the whole way through, and I love her for it. Some trickle of W H Auden's plain, elegant talent for whipping miracles out of a simple sentence finds it way through here. I wonder, expect, it's characteristic of Didion's work as a journalist, but I haven't read anything else by her yet. I think I love how prosaic it is because she examines death as fact, as astonished but unbreaking truth, and that, my friends, is what I have to recommend to you today, and hold up The Year of Magical Thinking as a fine way to find yourself through it.

Labels: ,

posted by Christopher at 1:27 a.m. | link | 0 comments
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.