The Point

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Podcast #1


Alright guys, here it is. The first episode of The Point's podcast, The Subject Tonight, at this lovely url for your listening pleasure.

This episode is essentially a conversation between myself and my friend and housemate Meaghan about a book very near and dear to my heart, One Hundred Years of Solitude. She had a lot of interesting things to say about it, and I hope you enjoy listening to what we tried to draw out. Given that some people had asked to make this thing to be downloadable outside of iTunes, I've put it in an mp3 file for your listening pleasure (and it is also subscribeable via Apple's delicious devil machinery the iTunes subscription hasn't been working yet, sorry).

The music for this edition:
00:00 Make You Feel That Way - Blackalicious
03:26 I Feel It All - Feist
25:53 Gimme Some Lovin' - Spencer Davis Group
43:09 Come March - Takagi Masakatsu
46:21 House Music - Cadence Weapon

Let me know what you think. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated, as always! And by the way, it can hardly be coincidence that this week marked the release of the audio reproduction of the first ever recorded sound.

PS The musician Meaghan and I keep talking about near the end is Eugene Hutz, and the song she samples is called Kids, by MGMT.



Photo credit: cinocino (published under a Creative Commons license)

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posted by Christopher at 4:54 a.m. | link | 4 comments

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

A great star winks out

Although Maya Arulpragasam might take the cake for Sri Lanka's hottest star in North America these days, today marks the passing of a great man who lived in the capital city of Colombo for most of the latter half of his 90 years, a man who I respected immensely and whose ideas hum through all of my curiosity about science, about space, and about past and future both. Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, among a litany of other brilliant novels, has died.

I was thinking about him just today, in fact, as my friend and I speculated on whether recent discoveries of extra-solar planets made it any more credible that in this vast, lonely universe intelligent life - if it exists anywhere else, as it seems it must, somewhere - would ever have any chance of reaching out to us. I was musing that the Cassini-Huygens probe's exploration around the moons of Saturn these days might reveal more hope for life elsewhere within our own solar system than even Clarke, who wrote so vividly about the possibilities out there, might have ever dreamed.

When I was a kid I ravenously devoured the entire 'Rama' series and all four of the 'Odyssey' books - yeah, that's right, 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001. The first book in the latter series actually takes place in orbit around Saturn (versus Jupiter, in the movies), and although he wrote the rest of the series with the movie continuity in mind, he may have been onto something with his speculations about life around the big-ringed sixth planet out. Along with visiting big kid Titan and its liquid methane lakes, the Cassini-Huygens mission has been collecting frozen water samples from geysers on another of Saturn's moons, Enceladus. Apparently the tidal flexing forces that are theorised to give Jupiter's moon Europa a sub-surface layer of liquid water might also be at play on Enceladus. It's nuts. Tidal flexing. Along with being credited for the idea for satellites, Clarke was perhaps best known for his fantastical stories about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe, including right in our own solar system. It's fascinating to see more and more that he might have been right about this too.

While my costume to last weekend's Childhood Hero party might have been Phil Currie, it's no exaggeration to say Arthur C Clarke was one of my biggest influences when I was younger in getting interested in science. He understood the majesty and the wonder of the universe, its neverending possibilities, and the power of our near-magical interaction with technology. He's a big reason why I've been following the Cassini-Huygens probe's explorations with such avid interest, and I regret that I only satisfied my idle curiosity about how he and his family fared when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2005 today.

I miss him already.
posted by Christopher at 12:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Apropos d'Afrique

So. There's this thing going around. That I heard about over on Ugandan Insomniac. Apparently a bunch if people are doing an Africa Reading Challenge this year to read at least 6 books about or by authors from the continent. Since I've got about 4 on my list this year already, I figured what the hell? The suggestion, from siphoning off a few thoughts where it all began, is to read books a number of different genres, such as:
  1. Fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, drama)
  2. Memoir / autobiography
  3. History and current events
And also from at least 3 different countries. Without further ado, my list:

Tandia - Bryce Courtenay

This novel's predecessor, The Power of One, changed my life. Keeps echoing. I've been avoiding the sequel - also set in South Africa and co-starring Peekay - for some reason, but now that I have a copy of Tandia at home and have been implored to read it by someone whose reading list I admire greatly, I have no excuse.

28: Stories of Aids in Africa - Stephanie Nolen

I really love Nolen's work as the roaming Africa correspondent for the Globe and Mail, and I've heard a lot of good things about this book. She somehow managed to get a blurb from Stephen Lewis for this non-fiction collection of honest, humanising stories, which is all the endorsement I need.

Searching - Nawal el Saadawi

When we read another one of this Egyptian author's books (Woman at Point Zero) in high school, I admit I was pretty sure I'd never read another one of her books again. Too dark, too heavy. A good friend of mine and the host of Put 'Er in D for Dangle on Tuesdays on CJSR back at home gave this novel to me recently though, and I think I'm ready to give her another try. Don't know anything about it, but I'm ready to explore.

The Search - Naguib Mahfouz

Another muy famoso Egyptian writer. I've had a bookmark in this short novel for a while, but haven't picked it up in about a year. I do remember it takes place in Alexandria sometime in the early (?) 20th century and had a sort of disorienting tone to it. See any themes emerging in how I've been picking these yet?

The Anti-Politics Machine - James Ferguson

This study of development experiences in Botswana about the tendency for the development field to depoliticise (and perhaps ahistoricise?) inherently political issues is required reading for a class I've got to take next year and sounds pretty interesting, so I figure I'll try to get a head start. Because I'm a keener like that.

Sozaboy - Ken Saro-Wiwa

Kenule's life story has also had a deep, reverberating impact on me. This 'novel in rotten in English' is one I've had my eye on for a while.



So there we go! Wish me luck. I encourage you to jump in on the challenge. What have you got to lose?

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posted by Christopher at 9:55 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, March 03, 2008

It's all happening

Feedback on the podcast idea has been pretty positive, so I'm working on it this week and will have a first show up to download soon. Haha - up, to down... anyway. At least one reader has mentioned wanting to be able to listen to it without iTunes, so I'm trying to figure out how to upload it as an mp3 and playing around with mixing it and all. It's kind of fun, actually!

Also, for those of yous in Alberta, a gentle reminder that today is, of course, election day. Go out and have your say! Did you know that even if you have to work you're entitled to up to three hours off - paid leave - to vote? My grandpa and I ruminated today on why it is Alberta has such exciting people and such boring political leaders. I don't have the answer for you. Maybe your ballot will. Now shoo!

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posted by Christopher at 12:36 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Saturday, March 01, 2008

100%

Two Acholi children in Gulu, northern Uganda (Samantha Casolari)

We watched a movie about international coffee trade in my human geography class yesterday. It was filmed in about 1989, and besides the distracting continual visual references to stock traders in the World Trade Center, the only thing really notable about the movie was its feeling of gloom. Like so many documentaries of this stripe, I think it left most of us shuffling out of the lecture hall with a sense that humans are a flawed, hopelessly cruel species.

A friend came up to me afterwards as I sat by a windowsill to open up my laptop and said she wanted to talk about what she was going through thinking about her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Ghana last summer and her plans to return to western Africa this summer again. She was having a really difficult time figuring out what to do with a sense of guilt about the potential of her trips to contribute to dependencies in those communities on Westerners coming in (almost on a whim) to volunteer for a while to get funding from the NGOs they arrive with for schools and HIV/Aids clinics.

I think a lot of people in our generation are struggling with this. We receive messages from mostly well-intentioned people fighting for social justice and environmental sustainability that we need to reduce our carbon footprints, feel a sense of shame at the pesticides children are exposed to to get us our beautiful perfect bananas. Which is not to say we shouldn't have these things in mind. But the weight of all this guilt feels counterproductive to me. For myself, I know I often have to fight a feeling of paralysis about things I feel outraged about, ashamed of -- if I go to buy groceries with the mindset that I'm basically choosing between varying degrees of suffering that allowed them to be brought to me cheaply and fresh, how can I act? How can I move?

It's had me thinking a lot about the ceasefire announced last week in Uganda between Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army. After twenty years of war in northern Uganda, the two sides are now through the final stages of negotiating a peace deal! The Monitor reports that the final documents were just signed in Juba on Friday, with a proposed date of March 6th to begin the permanent ceasefire. I think that's pretty incredible. Hearing about what people from Uganda think about the reconciliation process to come after this has turned some of my thinking about healing upside down.

I was walking beside a woman from Kampala during the Guluwalk in Edmonton last year, and we were discussing this idea that although there are still warrants out for Joseph Kony - the LRA leader - and a number of other LRA figures for crimes against humanity, a lot of people in the country seem like they would prefer to see the conflict end than get caught up waiting for the International Criminal Court to drop the warrants, which for a long time looked like the only way the LRA were going to agree to a ceasefire (and might still be the last big sticking point - again, the Monitor article has more).

She said she could see some sense to this. In Rwanda, the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal's trials after the genocide have been extremely slow - the main way people are trying to achieve justice is through small, community-based courts called gacacas. I used to be very certain that some international body needed to try leaders accused of crimes like these. It humbled me to wonder why I felt I had a say in how people in either of those countries determine what justice means.

But I think about it this week and also wonder why we're always looking for silver bullets, for the one simple solution to a problem that will make everything better.
If everyone just...
All we need to do is...

My friend Hayley posed an interesting question to me the other day - if we recognise that the past isn't just one thing, that history is a contested field, why do so many of us think we are bravely pushing towards just one common future? If there are so many stories behind us, how could there be only one ahead?

I don't know if any of this seems to relate to you. But as a perfectionist myself, I think I can see parallels.

Thanks to Samantha Casolari for the amazing photograph you see above from Gulu. You can read more about the kids in the picture and find her flickr account here.

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posted by Christopher at 12:41 a.m. | link | 0 comments
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