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)

Labels: literature, music, podcasting

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

Fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, drama)
Memoir / autobiography
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?

Labels: africa, books, literature

posted by Christopher at 9:55 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: algae, bsf, environment, ideas, literature, schools

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

Friday, October 26, 2007

That Thing

Hee hee. I saw a magician last week.

If you`ve never had a chance to sit and be enchanted by Final Fantasy, I`d say it`s time you begun. Owen Pallett`s Polaris Prize-winning one-man act can only be described as pure and simple wizardry. The man is capable of spinning the most elaborate, heartbreaking, absurd, funny music out of thin air, right before your very eyes. He stands there with a violin, some equipment to loop his playing and his voice, and a piano. Behind him, his friend Steph makes wondrous pictures dance on a screen projector, of all things. And it works.

But the magic is that it`s all happening right in front of you. You can see all the elements before they`re struck. A bow, some strings. A microphone. And somehow he pulls out his golden needles and weaves it so densely, so delicately, you don`t even realise it before you`re wrapped up in a dirty little technicolour quilt. Oh yes, these are songs about massive genitals. And mistakes. And death by burning, and hope.

I thought about that evening a lot this weekend with the whole J K Rowling kerfluffle about announcing she`d always conceived of Dumbledore as a gay character. I read it, and I do not say a word of a lie, I just said `bullshit` for the next sixty seconds, over and over and over. And then I said it again. Did you say this? Tell me you said this.

It made me cringe to hear Wayson Choy gush in the Globe and Mail about how brave it was for her to 'out' him, about how wonderfully encouraging it would be for every child who ever picked up the books to see the world really is made of a wonderful rainbow of many colours. Bullshit. I read the seventh book. I got my hands on it in Yunnan, and in a city that probably has fewer English speakers than that book has pages. I read it cover to cover in a day, doing my best to shut out noisy intrusions like corn porridge, lychee vendors, and ancient Buddhist temples. There is not a whiff of homosexuality in Dumbledore's story there, fan fiction be damned. Of course fan fiction predicted this. It's a question of infinite, horny monkeys.

Rowling's coy, somewhat self-congratulating announcement of this little tidbit, months after the release of the last book, is completely disingenuous. If she really wanted to show kids that it doesn't matter if you're hetero, homo, poly, bi or house elf to be a great person, she should have put it in the bloody book. Subtext is great for a novel about disappointment, and growing up in Winnipeg and settling for an acceptable husband. Dim, obscure references to a young wizard's possible almost unspoken love do not, however, fall into the category of empowering literature for young readers. If the bloody thing was so important to understanding him, why not put it in the books? If it was better left out and interpreted on our own, then don't announce it three months later at Carnegie Hall. Honestly.

I'm reminded of Final Fantasy when I think of all this because of how casually and comfortably Owen Pallett talks about his own sexuality in his music. A love for boys doesn't automatically mean he has to wear purple disco pants and put pink flags all over everything. Sometimes it's okay just to talk about how all boys you've loved have been digital.

Real bravery this month? Alvaro Orozco. Dedicated The Point reader centavo mentioned him in an earlier post about a woman in a similar situation, Pegah Emambakhsh. Like Embakhsh, Orozco is facing deportation back to a country where he will face certain discrimination, fear, and the threat of violence for his sexuality. Unlike Emambakhsh, the country rejecting his application for refugee status isn't the UK government, it's our own.

The Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board has refused to grant him asylum on the grounds that it cannot be proved he will face discrimination if he is deported to his home country of Nicaragua, because... wait for it... they don't believe he's provided sufficient evidence that he's gay. Among their top beefs? A mysterious lack of sexual promiscuity whilst fleeing across the continent to seek asylum in Canada. Jesus. If you've got to have sex to define your sexuality now, where will that leave our dear Dumbledore?

He's not the only one recently rejected by the Immigration and Refugee Board, as gay rag Xtra reports surprisingly authoritatively here. I think the whole nature/nurture issue of being gay is a moot point. You don't have to be born a Christian to have the inherent human right to freedom from religious persecution. And you don't have to stick your tongue in every orifice that presents itself to have the right to freedom from persecution on the basis of your sexuality.

Typically, I'm going to link you to a petition to allow Orozco to stay in Canada. His deferred deportation date was supposed to be October 4th, but like Emambakhsh, he's currently in immigration limbo. Help him out, friends.

Labels: human rights, literature, music, queer stuff, sexuality

posted by Christopher at 4:05 a.m. | link | 1 comments

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The colors correspond

What are the odds that Orhan Pamuk would win the Nobel Prize for Literature the very same day the Lower House of Parliament in France passed a bill criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide?

You've got to hand it to the Nobel Committee for once again picking a general rabble-rouser and disturber of the peace. Pamuk should fit nicely alongside Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Harold Pinter on that front.

I guess I have to read My Name is Red now.

Labels: genocide, literature, shit-disturbers

posted by Christopher at 9:01 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Life seems swell

I CAN'T SAY WHY, BUT SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIDE OF LIFE SEEMS TO SUGGEST THINGS are on the up, so I'm going to take a step back this week from keeping you abreast of my musings on serious events things and let you in on what I have been somewhat more abstractly contemplating lately. Not to say you shouldn't keep up on certain happenings in the world today. This might turn out to something of a preview of books you'll see more about on here later.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Edmonton, about home, about where the borders and edges of this place are, and I'm very interested in a new book by the Edmonton Journal's own Todd Babiak that seems it might be going some way to exploring these things. We're a new city, you see, our historical narrative is not quite deep enough to swim in at the moment, and stories about ourselves are, when written, either seen as humdrum (especially in light of Canada's more glamorous, glitzy metropoli) or not worth reading at all. So The Garneau Block, a book first serialised last year in the Journal, comes as something of a welcome sign to me that we finally be ready to tell our own stories.

I haven't read a page of it yet, though, except for a few snippets I caught last fall, so I'm pretty excited to rip into what's been described as a fairly engrossing novel about a neighbourhood not too far from where I live. I've spent the last few months rediscovering my city, figuring out my own interpretations of our particular mythologies, and trying to seek out the stories here. There are a lot to be told. This books looks fresh, funny, and Todd is also a really compassionate and interesting person, so I am thoroughly looking forward to this read.

At the moment, I'm reading a book called What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand. Brand won the Governor General's award a few years ago for a book of poetry called Land to Light On, and What We All Long For reads like poetry, in a way only really well-written novels can, and it has its stumblings, but I'm interested to see where it lands. It's a book about a city, really, as much as about the characters it follows; we talk a lot about multiculturalism in Canada, but if you're looking for a city where cultures really collide in this country, Brand's Toronto is one place you'll really smell its curried, peppered, shapka-wearing, cab-driving, briefcase-carrying, djambe-playing shapes in all their strange beauty, and her characters breathe this city's hopes and contradictions out of every pore of their bodies, melting into the streetcar tracks and 7-Eleven grunge of College and Spadina. It's keeping me up at night.

What really catches me about this book is the way Tuyen and Jackie and Carly and Oku's histories are shaken up, scratched out, to reveal who they're becoming. Brand is a secretive mistress, and sometimes I feel like her desire to let us sketch out our own mysteries is unnecessarily difficult, but she has a great way of catching you up in their fallacies and graces. The story follows these four young friend's lives as they accelerate forward, and backward, and into and between one another, and there's a subtle sense of pain here in their voices that pulls you into them. It's also about Quy, Tuyen's brother, who was lost in the mad rush of refugee boats on a shore decades before the story happens, as their parents fled Vietnam -- for safety? for democracy? out of selfishness? Brand makes it intentionally difficult to place anyone's motives on firm ground, and challenges your assumptions about choices and dreams her characters move through. She has an inconspicuous but deft hand, and I recommend exploring it.

This last book is one I've had recommended to me through routes that seem to suggest the universe is trying to tell me something. In the past little while, I've read more than a few books, purely by coincidence, that seem to be exploring the same ideas of weight and lightness and questions of the soul, and what path it takes. Have you ever heard of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? (Well, if you read this regularly, maybe you have). It's a book about a question, really, of whether our lives repeat, or whether they only happen once, whether when we are dreaming we are really seeing our lives ahead or behind us, already being lived. Purely by accident, I happened to read One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately after, and I was somewhat taken aback to see Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most prominent Colombian authors, has been plumbing some of the same depths as Kundera, a Franco-Czech writer whose connections to Márquez, if they exist at all, I have been unable to find. There's something to this question of alchemy, something I don't quite understand yet, that I will have to get back to you on.

Anyway. If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italian author Italo Calvino, seems set to be the next novel in this vein I stumble into. That's all I can tell you for the moment, and I apologise if you were looking for something more politically satisfying this week. Who can write about the state of the world today, when Naguib Mahfouz has met his end? Ah, life looks intriguing these days, my friends. Write me and tell me what you think about it.

Labels: literature, optimism

posted by Christopher at 10:40 p.m. | link | 0 comments

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