Cultural isolation in the age of Rob Ford

I avoid Gawker Media and its affiliated sites as much as humanly possible, so What Would Phoebe Do? ended up being the blog that pointed me to this “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz, which apparently measures how culturally isolated you are — “culturally isolated” being code for liberal Democrat ivory tower elite, I take it.

Of course, I don’t live in America, but I was curious to see how much of this translates into the Canadian political context. Much ado has been made over the fact that the 2010 Rob Ford victory mapped almost perfectly onto pre-amalgamation Toronto. (My knee-jerk fuck you, Mike Harris! reaction required me to conveniently forget that only three months before, I’d been living in Scarborough. And that I’d actually voted in Scarborough, since I hadn’t bothered to change my address yet.) How the “urban/suburban divide” narrative tends to go is that the liberal downtown elites voted for the gay candidate, and white-bread Etobicoke voted for the football coach.

Of course, this really doesn’t take Scarborough into account, which is possibly the most racially diverse area of Canada as a whole. Nearly 90% of the population in my old Scarborough-Rouge River riding is a visible minority, and it has traditionally gone liberal in federal elections. But in the 2011 federal election, held only six months after Ward 41 voted in Mr. Ford, they voted in the NDP. (This surprising result was probably a combination of the Liberals being bad at politics, long-term incumbent Derek Lee’s retirement, and the fact that the NDP candidate was named Rathika Sitsabaiesan — while the Conservative candidate was Marlene Gallyot.)

I could easily just talk about Scarborough forever, but the divide gets much, much wider outside of GTA city limits. Immediately, you get Whitby-Oshawa-Pickering, which, in my less generous moments, I have been known to sneer at as the “holy trinity of white flight.” (Markham, like Scarborough, is somewhat of a liminal space.) Ontario gets more conservative as you head north, and has far more in common with Western Canada than it might like to own up to.

Even more so than in America, the essence of Canadian-ness is tied to nature and being authentically rural, as evidenced by our coins, our flag, and this beer commercial, featuring Canada’s version of Joe the Plumber. (Notice that being authentically Canadian precludes being Native — “I don’t live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dogsled.” Good on you, Joe!) And while I’m not 100% sure how people in the American Midwest feel about New York, everyone hates Toronto.

So: quiz time! Will my Scarborough roots land me square in Ford Nation, or will I be drinking Orange Crush at Gay Pride?

1) Have you ever worked on a factory floor? 

It probably says something that when I think factory, I think Oshawa GM Plant. Of all the places I’ve been, “The Shwa” is probably most analogous to the lifestyle this quiz is championing. Interesting also that the factory is chosen as the site of authentic work. Is this a romanticized Fordism thing? Is it because assembly line-style work doesn’t necessarily require a great deal of skilled labour?  Where do mechanics, carpenters, and plumbers fit in? In any case, I’ve never worked in a factory, nor have I worked in a trade.

2) Have you ever held a job that caused a part of your body to hurt at the end of the day?

Yes. When I worked at Starbucks, I occasionally pulled 12 hour shifts. By the end of the day, my feet and back could be quite sore. But I think the fact that I worked at Starbucks, symbol of all that is wrong with urban centres, would probably disqualify me from answering yes to this question in the eyes of the quiz creator.

3) Have you seen last year’s mega-hit movie, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”? 

No. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even been to a movie theatre in over a year — and in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve seen two productions of Shakespeare within the last six months. However, in 2010, I did reluctantly sit through The A-Team and Resident Evil: Retribution, so I feel like I deserve major points for those miserable experiences.

4) Can you name this NASCAR champion?

Not a chance, but I don’t think NASCAR holds the same appeal in Canada, anyway. Hockey is probably the closest parallel, and it doesn’t carry quite such heavy class implications. My “managerial” father certainly enjoys watching The Leafs.

5) In the past five years, have you been fishing or hunting? 

Hunting, no. And I’m aghast at Harper’s sheer audaciousness in abolishing the long-gun registry! But five years ago, I was 16 and spent the whole summer at the family cottage, so I’m going to have to say “probably yes” to the fishing question.

 6) Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? 

I suffered through 15 years of Catholic  school, but that’s a no on the evangelical front.

7) During the past year, have you stocked your own fridge with domestic beer? 

I only ever drink after succumbing to peer pressure, so I have no alcohol in my fridge. This is an interesting question, though, because I recently was having a chat with a friend about the implications of one’s drink choice on personal presentation, and the association between butch and beer. My favourite thing about a certain kind of (stereotypical?) butch presentation with its plaid and denim is how it plays with notions of rural authenticity and masculinity, and in some ways would totally undermine everything this quiz is going for.

8) Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong and wide-ranging political disagreements? 

This question assumes I have friends. Seriously, though, my Catholic background means that I have a number of friends who disagree with me on the issue of abortion. But for obvious reasons, I’m not close with anyone who is even slightly anti-gay. I guess what settles this question is the fact that I’m not close friends with anyone who voted for either Harper or Ford. Another no. (This question is also badly phrased, since it could apply just as easily to the other side: what about insular evangelicals who would never be friends with a person who voted for Obama?)

9) Have you eaten at an Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, or Outback Steakhouse in the past year? 

I don’t know enough about these restaurants to come up with perfect Canadian equivalents (everyone buys Tim Hortons, so certainly that doesn’t count). Jack Astor’s? Montana’s? Where does Casey’s fit on this spectrum? When I dine in, it’s usually at Tapps, which used to be a strip club and is very Scarborough. Still, I’m getting the feeling that my answer to this question should probably be no.

10) Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?

Please. I don’t drive, I take transit. But given the state of our economy, who even buys cars anymore? And what are the figures on Canadian v. American pickup truck ownership? My guess is that the spectre of The Car is not quite as embedded in the Canadian consciousness.

11) Have you ever attended a Kiwanis or Rotary Club meeting, or a gathering at a union local?

Uh, no. The implications of this question are totally lost on me. Aren’t unions the Big Bad these days?

12) Have you ever participated in a parade that did not involve global warming, gay rights, or a war protest? 

Unionville Parade, 2000. I did cartwheels. Winstonettes Gymnastics Team, represent.

13) Since leaving school, have you worn a uniform as part of your job? 

This is technically a no, since I’m still in school. I was wearing a uniform at this time last year, but again, I don’t think Starbucks is really what this question is looking for.

14) Have you ever ridden on a Greyhound or Trailways bus? 

Sure! All the way from Union Station to Waterloo University.

15) Did you ever watch an “Oprah” show all the way through?

I agree with Phoebe, this is a ridiculous question, even in Canada. Besides, I preferred Dr. Phil for my after school TV viewing. This is going to be a changing day in my life.

16) Did you or your spouse ever serve in the armed forces?

Next.

17) Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or high-prestige occupation (defined as dentist, physician, architect, attorney, engineer, scientist, or college professor)? 

My mom’s a teacher (how middle-class!), but my dad’s been in a “managerial position” for as long as I can remember. I do enjoy the narrow range of high-prestige occupations here. What, NYT journalist doesn’t count?

18) Have you ever lived for at least a year as an adult in an American neighbourhood in which the majority of your nearest 50 neighbours probably did not have college degrees?

Do I lose in advance because I’m not down-home enough to have ever really known my neighbours, except for the ones who lived on either side of us? This is really hard to answer. The neighbourhood I lived in for the first 20 years of my life was primarily composed of first-gen immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. I think I’m going to have to go with a no on this one.

19) Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard?  

Given the “alternative” nature of my high school, all of my closest friends failed at least one course in high school. I failed a grand total of four! I also graduated with a 94% average. This question is too complicated to sort out. Basically I think the whole alternative high school thing lands me firmly in the urban half of the divide, despite the fact that the high school was actually located in the suburbs. Another no.

20) During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes? 

Hi, Franckie! Actually, it’s well-known that LGBTQ communities have disproportionately high rates of tobacco use. I don’t think cigarettes necessarily imply what this quiz wants them to.

My results:

On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 5 and 8.In other words, you can see through your bubble, but you need to get out more.

Well, that’s shocking. I re-did the quiz and answered yes to every question, curious as to what message would come up if I got a perfect score. As it turns out? “You’re so embedded in mainstream America that you need to visit the bubble once in a while.” I suppose it’s better than a generic congratulatory message about real America, but this does position the ”bubble” as an exclusively elitist phenomenon. (Is this because bubbles reflect rainbows, and are thus totally gay?)

Would a quiz like this have come out in the pre-Obama years? The transparent goal of the quiz is to allow the dominant (white) culture to claim a marginalized status. Given that the whims of mainstream America recently resulted in the ban of ethnic studies in Arizona (and the pearl-clutching reaction that inevitably focused on The Tempest), colour me unconvinced.

In Canada, there is at least an official embrace of diversity, even if in practice, we now force immigrants to remove niqabs and burkas when swearing the citizenship oath. Our authenticity narrative isn’t as cemented as the American narrative is. But in some ways, the fact that “mainstream Canada” is not as open about its goals is actually more detrimental than flag-waving patriotism. Joe claims that we “believe in peacekeeping, not policing, diversity, not assimilation.” Sure, that’s what we say. But that’s bullshit, Joe, and both you and I know it.

Conversations

We’ve been reading Lacan in class.

My professor described an experience of the Real as being “traumatic”. One girl raised her hand and asked what that meant. The professor replied to her question in gibberish, a sort of speaking in tongues. The whole class laughed.  She laughed, too, briefly, but then said that laughter was a sort of defence mechanism against the Real, a way to bring the Real back into the realm of the Symbolic: She hasn’t gone mad, she’s just proving a point.

After the lecture, I drove back into Scarborough with Mon, and we got stuck in traffic. He said that desire was an experience of the Real, the strange moment when you first look at someone, and all of a sudden you’re knocked off balance.

Immediately afterwards, you can contextualize it, fit it into whatever set of symbols of “desire” or “longing” or “lust” that you subscribe to, but that initial moment is just [...]

***

The ellipsis is how Alexandre Leupin represents Lacan’s Real. He writes:

S (the Symbolic agency) = There is difference

I (the Imaginary agency) = There is similarity

R (the Real) = There is . . .

Lacan’s concept of the Real is, essentially, that which cannot be expressed through language. According to Leupin:

It is “what escapes any formalization and any representation.”

It is “a set whose contents are unknown.”

“It is because we could not say what it is that we have given it the name of [it].”

***

My response to Mon was that in my experience, desire (at least for another person) has always felt like a decision. It has never caught me by surprise. Desire is prefigured by I could desire. I can always see desire coming before it hits me, like a slow motion train wreck. I recognize that I’m going to trip long before I actually fall for a person.

I identified as asexual for a long time in high school, and demisexual for a while after that. Physical attraction has always been somewhat of a mysterious concept. You can put this down to any number of things: Catholic repression, misplaced superiority, a conversation I had with a friend when I was 10 years old that became the ordering principle of my life for years afterwards, late-onset puberty, or just the simple, uncomplicated fact that sexual attraction is not something that everyone experiences.

However, at 21, I can say that I’ve felt a genuine attraction to three (maybe four) people in my life. The only thing they all have in common is that they are (or were) unattainable.

As late as 2010, I maintained that I would never (could never) be in a relationship with anybody.

***

In Snow Song, John Darnielle sings:

I’d just as soon make you disappear as look at you
But I draw you close to me
How do you feel about that?
How do you feel about that?

When I was 16, I quoted that verse in my LiveJournal User Profile, which shows the great weight I ascribed to it. I also identified quite closely with Kipling’s Cat from Just-So Stories and E. K. Hornbeck from Inherit the Wind.

***

Before I went to office hours on Wednesday, I had run over a number of possible questions I could ask: good, specific questions that made me appear at least somewhat thoughtful.

But when I got there, what I actually blurted out was something along the lines of: “I just really, generally, can’t grasp psychoanalysis.” I can’t remember the exact sentence now, but I know I used the word generally. I think it’s almost always a useless qualifier, and so it naturally tends to pop out when I’m nervous.

I claimed that I thought psychoanalysis was dated, and that I was always annoyed when assigned to read Freud because he’s so misogynistic (how original, Lisa). I said I hated therapy.

What I really meant is that pyschoanalysis makes me feel like I’m forever grasping at straws, that I can understand bits of it when they are assigned to me as readings, but it never seems to fit into any kind of grander, cohesive structure. I can’t figure out where it’s all going and what it is I’m supposed to be taking away from it.

My professor replied that while Foucault is concerned with systems of power, psychoanalysis is the only framework that examines how desire acts as a structuring force.

It makes sense that I couldn’t manage to see that on my own. I understand power. The operations of knowledge and power are intuitive, “the institution” is intuitive, the panopticon is intuitive. I went to daycare. I went to Catholic school. I live in a nation. The Family is still omnipresent.

Desire, though? Desire remains elusive.

***

Talking to Mon again later that week, I said that I never seem to have any real sense of what I want. I find it difficult to like anything — people in particular. If my motivations for the majority of my actions were made transparent, I think they would have a lot to do with ensuring that I’m always standing directly beneath at least one Sword of Damocles at any given moment.

(The moral of that story, according to Cicero, is that “there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms.”)

***

Addressing my reservations about therapy, she said that psychoanalysis was not about conforming to dominant notions of normalcy, but recognizing that “normal life” itself is a form of psychosis.

***

I suppose that I’m really only writing this because I’ve recently fallen rather hard for someone who is as unattainable as ever (an authority figure, how surprising) and that for the first time ever it feels healthy and good and like maybe I’m going to be okay.

Why SF Never Gets The Present Right

My father first introduced me to Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and John Wyndham when I was still in elementary school, and I’ve been hooked on sci-fi ever since. But when people find out that I can recite the Litany Against Fear from Dune or that I’m obsessed with Battlestar Galactica, they often act surprised. Perhaps this means I’ve finally learned how to fake being well-adjusted, even though I’ve never really stopped being the kid who read books at recess.

Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more aware of the problems inherent in quite a lot of science fiction. This isn’t simply because the authors are predominately white males (I mean, one of the first sentences of Octavia E. Butler’s Wikipedia page describes her as “an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field”). It’s also because, naturally, these white male writers replicate colonialist, racist, and sexist structures in the books themselves.

Recently, Michael Flynn wrote a blog post for Tor/Forge, a major publisher of science fiction and fantasy novels, entitled, “Why The Future Never Gets the SF Right“. The post itself is actually only nominally about how it’s impossible to accurately envision the future. About halfway through, it veers off into a strange meditation on Western exceptionalism:

“Science and technology need not go hand in hand.  China achieved a high technology without developing natural science.  And scattered individuals in ancient Hellas and medieval Islam pursued a personal interest in natural philosophy without applying it to “base mechanics.”  Only in the Latin West did a passion for technological innovation develop alongside an institutionalized interest in investigating Nature.

Flynn also provides an enlightening explanation for why the Chinese were just so damned backward: “Nothing like this happened in China, thought Joseph Needham, because the Chinese lacked a concept of the universe as a created artifact, and therefore had no expectation of a rational order waiting to be discovered.” His main thesis is that a philosophy of eternal recurrence (probably best known today through Nietzsche) is a cornerstone of Chinese philosophy, and that it is also one that proves “fatal” to science. Overwhelmingly, the impression one gets from the post is that the Western path to science is the correct one, and had other cultures managed to get their heads in the game, they would have got there, too.

A commenter by the name of David Elliott takes issue with his stance, correctly pointing out that the Scientific Revolution owes more to capitalism than any particular philosophy, and that most of Christian history was characterized by “backwards, unscientific feudalism.”

Still, the fetishization of Western progress is the major theme in almost all science fiction. So far, I’ve seen it most explicitly in Orson Scott Card, who is also on record as homophobic and is supportive of the American imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the afterword of Ender in Exile. Even the dystopian stuff can’t escape it. In a hilarious post by nuditea, ey writes about how damned white male-centric Farenheit 451 is:

“it’s sort of the bookpocalypse and all the books are being destroyed so main dude finds a bunch of other white dudes who have memorized some literature by still more white dudes because that’s the only literature that deserves to live past the apocalypse OF COURSE!!”

Of course, Western progress (and science in particular) has been characterized by genocide, slavery, scientific racism, eugenics, environmental degradation, and like, basically every other horrible thing that exists in the world today. Much of it is explicitly and unapologetically colonialist. I sometimes wonder if people will look back at science fiction in 100 years and just be shocked at how oppressive it is. Maybe the giants of the genre will be studied in academic contexts along with other racist books like Heart of Darkness. …Oh wait, that one’s still considered a classic, isn’t it?

However, Flynn’s rather trite point about how we can’t predict the future did make me think about the kinds of futures we collectively can and can’t imagine. I’m less interested in whether or not sci-fi gets the technology side of things right, and more interested in how it portrays the social dynamics of the “future”. Hovercraft and rocket boots aren’t really much of an imaginative stretch. Most imagined technology is just a basic Humean complex idea, the combination of two already existing phenomena, like rocket + boots.

More interesting would be an author who radically and totally re-imagined how society operates through a progressive lens. But frankly, I’d settle for sci-fi that just made some effort to  reflect contemporary demographics. Like: are there gay characters? Are there trans characters? Are all the main characters white? Is everyone in monogamous relationships? Are there fully-realized disabled characters whose disabilities aren’t used as metaphor?

When my dad got me started on this whole SF kick, he also bought me Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which I just couldn’t get into. I’ve been meaning to read it for years, but that book is going to stay on the shelf for a little longer yet. I haven’t made enough of an effort to seek out non-white SF, so 2012 is going to be the year where I finally read some Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany (and not just his queer theory). Heinlein is just gonna have to wait.

 

2011 Capsule Book Reviews

It is now 13 days past the New Year, so I suppose it’s just about time for me to make a 2011 round-up post. I have spent today catching up on content from my favourite blogs, almost all of which posted some sort of list of the books they read in 2011. This exercise strikes me as super self-indulgent and exactly the kind of thing blogs exist for.

I read 26 new books in 2011, and I reread a number of books which I didn’t bother cataloguing over at GoodReads, so damned if I can remember them now. Twenty-six seems low, but 2011 was a ridiculous, stressful year, and most of my reading time was sucked up by academic papers. Here’s hoping 2012 will give me a little more leisure time, and that I will be able to extricate myself from Dragon Age: Origins long enough to sit down and read a book.

1. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
I wish I’d read this when I was 12 instead of 20. Even at 20, I thought this book was amazing. But it’s worth noting that I read it before doing a Google background check on Mr. Card, at which point everything was ruined forever (see numbers 23 and 24 on this list).

2. Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood - A. S. Neill
Anyone who knows me even slightly is familiar with my borderline obsession with self-directed learning. Neill was one of the first Western educators to make a serious attempt at transforming the Victorian-style education model. The notion that children are people that can make their own decisions is still pretty radical. (I first picked up this book because Summerhill is supposedly the book Rosemary is reading on the couch in Rosemary’s Baby. I think my belief that SDL is for everyone is possibly not true in the case of the spawn of Satan.)

3. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis - Will Self
Picked this one up on a whim at a used bookstore on Spadina. I was drawn to it because I remembered a great lecture Self gave on how consciousness is depicted in fiction. And damn, I hated this book so much. I’d say it was easily the worst thing I read in 2011, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Hugo Schywer grossness went viral at the end of the year.

4. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks – E. Lockhart
A book about a girl who goes to boarding school and ends up running the place and totally undermining the group of popular boys and their secret society. This has pretty explicitly feminist underpinnings, right down to the fact that the protagonist is a white, middle/upper-class girl. As far as I can recall, there wasn’t a single person of colour in the entire book.

5. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category – David Valentine
For a book about trans people written by a cis dude, this was pretty impressive stuff.

6. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – Amy Chua
Like everyone else on the planet, I read The Washington Post article. What was missing in the subsequent uproar (which I have to say, seemed pretty racist from where I’m sitting) was how funny and tongue-in-cheek the book is. A+. And I’m totally following Sophia Chau-Rubenfeld’s blog now.

7. The Eye in The Pyramid – Robert Shea
I mostly remember this book as being fascinating but completely exhausting.

8. Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip – Book One
This was incredible. Sweet, funny, and just a little heartbreaking. I really want to read more of these collections.

9. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography – Lorraine Hansberry
This is an extremely well curated “autobiography” of a formidable Black, lesbian writer. I’m pretty sure I first heard of this book from a Tiger Beatdown post, and when I finally got around to reading it, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this woman before.

10. Bossypants – Tina Fey
I was pretty unimpressed, and I didn’t actually finish this book. She didn’t handle race well, and as I wrote in a comment on GoodReads: “She gets to make her gay jokes and ALSO gets the self-righteous, good liberal points from her lecture on not using gay people as props.”

11. The Thief of Always: A Fable – Clive Barker
Before reading this one, I’d only ever read Barker’s novel Sacrament (which was also great), and this blew me away. It was lovely. It had actually been on my to-read list ever since I saw it profiled on Prisoners of Gravity.

12. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Atwood is always so hit or miss with me. Loved Oryx and Crake, hated The Handmaid’s Tale. I managed to get through high school without having to read Cat’s Eye – which I regret, because this is now one of my favourite novels that she’s written. Atwood has an incredible eye for the intricacies and horrors of girlhood and female friendships. I do remember being displeased with some of the main character’s observations on feminism, but I can’t remember my objections now.

13. Best Lesbian Erotica: 2004 – Ed. Michelle Tea 
I was assigned Patrick Califia’s The Surprise Party in my first-ever SDS course. When assigning it, the professor noted that in order to hold an anti-censorship position, one should be familiar with what one is defending. (And having been inadvertently exposed to some of Lord Horror’s writing last year when writing an essay on De Sade, I have to say that I don’t know how anti-censorship I still am.) Patrick Califia’s writing hurt me, challenged me, and ultimately kind of changed my life. All this is just a long-winded way of saying that Best Lesbian Erotica fell totally flat. Erotica is probably the most difficult genre to write for, and quite a few of these stories felt like self-parody. I guess that’s what happens when you immediately compare everything to Macho Sluts.

14. All Roads Lead to Calvary – Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome is kind of out of favour in literary circles, but if you watch for it, his name pops up quite often in a lot of early 20th century books. This was a funny little story about religion, politics, and adultery. It had some very good moments.

15. Valencia – Michelle Tea
Loved it and hated it simultaneously. Her writing isn’t my favourite, but I really enjoyed the self-examination at the beginning of the book on what it means to get famous for writing an autobiography in your twenties, and then still have to deal with all of the people you’ve written about for the rest of your life. Embarrassingly, this might have been the first time I’d ever heard of using latex gloves as a safer-sex method.

16. Brida – Paulo Coelho
Ugh. No thanks. From my GoodReads review: “In short: clunky prose, completely uninspired use of Roman Catholicism & quantum mechanics as heavy-handed metaphors, self-help platitudes sprinkled liberally throughout.”

17. Behold The Man – Michael Moorcock
Another Prisoners of Gravity-inspired read. I’d been looking for a copy of this for ages, and then randomly found it while being nosy browsing a friend’s bookshelves. My initial review of it was pretty harsh (“I was pretty perturbed by the description of disability in this book, the way language and situation were used to curate and heighten a feeling of disgust towards a dehumanized disabled body”), but in hindsight, I remember quite liking the experience of it.

18. Tick Tock – Dean Koontz
Awful. I mean, I’d heard from a few people that Koontz is a cheap Stephen King knockoff, but I’d read Velocity and really liked it. Not so with this book.

19. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson
If I start writing too much about this, I’m going to start weeping like a baby. This book was difficult and incredible.

20. The Symposium – Plato
I managed to get to 21 without having read this in full. I’m glad I finally got through it, although I am left with the impression that Socrates was an early version of an annoying, quirky Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Watch for the exciting hiccup action midway through.

21. Carrie – Stephen King
I still am surprised this book was written by a man. It wasn’t exactly scary, at least not in the way that his short stories are. Another book to read through a critical disability studies lens, maybe? Especially re: characterization of the mother figure.

22. Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer – Cecily von Ziegesar
The author’s postmodern rewriting of her own novel owes much to the deconstructionist tradition. It was also heavily influenced by the modern masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Seriously, though, this book was hilarious and terrible. The best part was how little actually had to be changed. As the author herself wrote: “I took the original text of the first book and whenever I saw an opportunity, I layered in this story of Serena coming back from boarding school as this coldblooded psychopath, which to me makes total sense. She’s sort of like the Ryan Gosling of Gossip Girl world. She has that deadpan style, doesn’t seem to have much personality and she’s really gorgeous, but then underneath she has this kind of scary ability to kill people.”

23. Ender’s Shadow – Orson Scott Card
Not as good as Ender’s Game, but good enough that I ended up reading Ender in Exile, which was such a bad move. (See below)

24. Ender in Exile – Orson Scott Card
In this book, we learn that Card definitively hates women. He has the characters in the book put on an UNIRONIC version of The Taming Of The Shrew, Shakespeare’s famously controversial play about domestic abuse. And afterwards, Card’s major female character, the bright and talented Valentine Wiggin, muses about whether women really all want to be dominated! Noooooooooo. At this point, I looked up Card himself, and found his history of writing homophobic essays. Ugh. Everything clicked into place: the lack of girls in battle school (explained by women having centuries of evolution working against them, despite the fact that battle school is about intelligence and not physical strength), lack of any gay characters, and his over the top insistence on heterosexual monogamy/women-as-breeders. I regret buying a single one of his books, and wish I hadn’t contributed a single penny to his royalty cheques.

25. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs – Gilles Deleuze/Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Deleuze is generally a pretty difficult read, and I resent him for making me read Philosophy in the Bedroom (which I refuse to include on this list), but this really wasn’t too bad. It was almost easy to follow, once you got a handle on his main argument. It gave me a totally different perspective on modern SM practice. And Venus in Furs was all kinds of great, hilarious and uncomfortable.

26. The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt
Rounding out the year with some actual literary fiction. I didn’t love this book (more historical fiction about white men? Yawn) but the writing was impeccable, and the characters deWitt created were fascinating. I’m excited to see where his next books take him.

John Darnielle, Jeff Mangum, and a post about things I miss

There’s a live Mountain Goats cover of Two-Headed Boy that John Darnielle introduces like this: “I’ll do my best on this one, because I’m so anxious to cover it that I haven’t really properly learned all the lyrics. So, in the event that I ruin them — and there’s at least one of you out here who probably is living and dying with this wonderful song — I apologize. Please don’t hurt me. It’s by Jeff Magnum — Mangum.”

It’s that intro that really gets me, far more than the cover itself, which is actually quite heart-wrenching in that very specific Darnielle way. The phrase “living and dying with” has lodged itself in my head for years, and I’ve thought of it every time I come across a piece of art that punches me in the gut.

Sidebar: Like many Neutral Milk Hotel devotees, I also made the same transposition error dozens of times when saying Mangum’s name. Below is a handy way to tell Magnum from Mangum based on their personal stylistic preferences.

       

[Image description: The first image is of the television character Magnum PI wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. The second image is of Jeff Mangum wearing the sweater your grandmother gave you for Christmas.]

I used to be really into music. More accurately, I used to be really into mp3 blogs. The ones that would post full-length mp3s along with adjective-dense descriptions of how fucking great this or that new track was. Not Pitchfork, though. By the time I arrived into the mp3 blogging scene, Pitchfork was already considered uncool. Besides, I never really forgave them for their original weird review of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Jerks. (The rating was later changed from an 8.7 to a 10.)  

But now, if I’m not the third person in the world to hear the new Penguin Prison song, life goes on. This is called ‘growing up’. Or less charitably, ‘getting old’. Or even less charitably, ‘selling out’.

I was thinking recently that there haven’t been a lot of things lately that I’ve been “living and dying with,” at least not in terms of the art I consume. I don’t listen to music or read the way that I used to, and my passions are a little bit more disposable. Right now, my main obsessions are Season 2 of Work of Art and the Enderverse. The latter is more interesting, because it’s something I would have loved in a much deeper way had I encountered it at 11 instead of 21. I wonder if getting further into academia starts to erode  your capacity to become fully immersed in a piece of art or literature, and whether it’s possible (or desirable?) to turn off the critical lens for awhile.

Or perhaps it’s less complicated than that. Maybe it’s simply that I’ve had to build up enough personal armour in the last few years that it’s difficult to discard it long enough to have a genuine emotional connection with anything.

So, I listen to the things that I loved when I was 15, and I manage to catch glimpses of how I felt about them back then. It’s all just shadows, though.

Occupy Fear and Trembling

I noted with some amusement that one of people whose letter to the editor was published in the latest NOW Magazine stylized themself as Johannes Di Silentio (fifth letter from the top).

Given that the writer is an Occupy Toronto protestor, I can understand (just barely) the need for pseudonymity. But is it really so ungenerous of me to think that the person who penned the sentence “It’s like this society is becoming a serious joke” probably shouldn’t be comparing himself to Kierkegaard? Or to point out that it’s actually spelled Johannes de Silentio?

Of course, there is the extremely slim possibility that the writer’s parents gave him a name that practically doomed him to a future as an undergraduate philosopher: “Going to university, studying hard and getting good grades landed me here, unemployed and honestly quite upset with this corrupt system.” Perhaps I’m reading too much into the choice of pseudonym, but I’m slightly concerned by what this person believed their prospects would be straight out of university.

This is not to say that people with BAs in Philosophy (or, say, Sexual Diversity Studies) don’t get to be upset about the state of the economy and our “corrupt system”, but this particular letter rubs me the wrong way, because it echoes a theme I’ve seen in a lot of writing about the protests. The Occupy movement shouldn’t just be about disgruntled recent graduates who feel their newly acquired degrees entitle them to economic prosperity. Ideally, the protests should be inclusive, anti-capitalist, and relevant to all members of our society — and that includes custodians, Walmart greeters, hotel workers, waiters and waitresses, and all kinds of people who never had the chance to go to university or college and get a degree.

Also, I’ve just about had it up to here with the “Harper won a majority with only 40%!!!” contextless nonsense I keep hearing. So what? In 1997, Jean Chretien won a majority with only 38% of the popular vote.  That’s how our system works. Yes, it’s ridiculously screwed up, but you should be critiquing the system ALL the time, not just when the Conservatives are in power.

The tenth anniversary of the goat that ate everything

They’d pulled some poor sap out of retirement to teach my Grade 6 Gifted class. Techologically illiterate himself, he spent the whole school year never quite learning how to handle a group of bright kids in the latter part of the Computer Age. He tried to teach us all Grade 10 Algebra, not realizing that ‘Gifted’ was not synonymous with “actually understanding the basic tenets of mathematics”. After that failed, we managed to convince him that playing gory computer games was a learning experience. What I remember best about that class was watching this play on every computer screen. I loved that rat.

That year, the first day of Gifted fell on September the 11th, 2001. Around 9:30 AM, a teacher that none of us knew stuck her head in the classroom and yelled, “They’re bombing the Pentagon!” She removed her head, closed the door, and walked off. I don’t know if she was doing that with every single classroom, or why — even in all the confusion of that day — any educational professional would think it was a remotely good idea.

Our teacher just stood there at the front of the room, staring into space. We waited in perfect silence for something to happen. It’s possible that there were people in that room that had no idea what the Pentagon was, since 10 and 11-year-old Canadians don’t necessarily absorb that information in the course of their education.

My clearest memory of that day was the indecision on the face of the man who was charged with taking care of us. Later, I saw the same expression on George W. Bush’s face while listening to ‘The Pet Goat’.

A relevant sidenote here: according to Wikipedia, “The Pet Goat” was about a little girl’s goat that ate everything in its path, but redeemed itself by headbutting a car thief. As far as I can tell, America has been eating everything in its path for the last ten years (and the last ten decades and beyond), and it still thinks it can redeem itself by simply taking out the bad guys. Maybe these are not lessons we should be teaching our children.

We spent the rest of the day watching the news coverage unfold on a tiny black and white television with poor reception. It’s odd to think that, ten years ago, this was the only way we could have gotten any information at the time. No iPhones, no Twitter, no wireless Internet.

Because the television’s reception was so bad, I remember being even more confused about what was going on than I would have been otherwise, although we all eventually learned that “they” did not bomb the Pentagon. Later, that useless television set felt like a metaphor for the next decade. I felt like I was trying to understand the political climate through a snowy noise pattern. I didn’t understand the Bush years, I didn’t understand how he could get reelected. Hell, half the time I didn’t understand the words coming out of Bush’s mouth. I didn’t understand Afghanistan or Iraq or the massive symbolic importance of Osama bin Laden. And, being on this side of the 49th parallel, I never understood what it was like to be an American on that day.

Everyone has these stories — the “where I was when I heard” stories. For those who were alive at the respective times, there was the Challenger explosion, John Lennon’s murder, Columbine. In this part of Canada, some people even tell the same kinds of stories about the August blackout.

I don’t know what the purpose of these stories is. It always strikes me as a little narcissistic, the centring of yourself in a story that isn’t necessarily about you (at least in my case). But I guess part of the point is cutting an event of such great magnitude into a terminable size, turning it into something that can be processed.

It doesn’t really work, but reading and writing these stories is the best I can do sometimes.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, bin Laden in Abbottabad

On Sunday night, I found myself completely unable to formulate a response to the sudden announcement of the death of bin Laden. I resolved to pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Then I went back to work Monday morning, life went on, and I clean forgot about Arendt. But tonight I was reading To Be Young, Gifted and Black on the subway, and I came across Lorraine Hansberry’s take on the Eichmann trial, which I will reproduce in full at the end of this post.

A Google search for “bin Laden” and “Eichmann” shows that my impulse to seek insight into bin Laden’s death by examining the case of Adolf Eichmann is far from original. Given the circumstances, perhaps a comparison between the two is inevitable. But I think it’s important to emphasize that September 11th was not the Holocaust.

Without diminishing the tragedy of the events of 9/11, the motivations of the people who carried out the attacks simply cannot be assessed without also carefully considering the history of American imperialism. In her response to the Eichmann case, Lorraine Hansberry wrote, “Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred millions of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.” America doesn’t have the right to portray itself as an innocent victim, and the fingerprints of America’s crimes against humanity are all over bin Laden’s death. Even the code name for bin Laden, ‘Geronimo’, is a reminder of Native genocide.

Eichmann and bin Laden were two men who both, by all accounts, orchestrated atrocities. Both were icons. One was tried before a civilian court. One was killed in a firefight without due process.

Over the past few days, I’ve heard a lot of people argue that bin Laden’s death was unjust precisely because he never had the chance to stand trial. But over at The Huffington Post, Thane Rosenbaum questions where there is much difference between the way Eichmann, Hussein, and bin Laden were killed:

“Did Eichmann and Hussein receive true justice by appearing in courts of law and sentenced to death under the rule of law? Was Osama bin Laden notably and unceremoniously treated to a revenge killing for his crimes on 9/11 (and Gaddafi for his act of terrorism against Pan Am Flight 103 from Lockerbie), by meeting a violent and summary end without ever receiving his day in court? Four murderous men with an incalculable and un-washable amount of blood on their hands, and yet two received conventional justice, while bin Laden (and perhaps Gaddafi), met his fate from a swifter and more wrathful style of biblical vengeance. In the end, however, all are (or will be) dead.

But are these methods of final punishment really so different? In the moral universe, justice and vengeance are mirror images of one another. There can be no justice unless victims feel avenged, and revenge is never just unless it is proportionate. In cases of mass murder, retaliating “measure for measure,” an “eye for and eye,” “tit for tat,” is admittedly more difficult, but retaliation is still mandated, even when the math is imprecise, regardless of what form it takes.

In the popular imagination, justice is inextricably tied up with the idea of juries and courtrooms. But of course the courts don’t necessarily mete out justice. How could they? Courts are made up of people, and most of us — perhaps all of us — have a very tenuous grasp on what justice is. While I agree with Rosenbaum that Eichmann’s execution was not necessarily “more fair” than bin Laden’s death, I take serious issue with the direction in which she chooses to take this argument.  She ultimately concludes that bin Laden’s death was just because there is a moral imperative to avenge the deaths of the people who died on 9/11 by killing the perpetrator. That is where we part ways.

Both the deaths of Eichmann and the deaths of bin Laden are symbols. Eichmann symbolized the atrocities of the Holocaust, and he was the first and last person in the history of modern Israel to be sentenced to execution under the death penalty. Bin Laden was the face of America’s ‘War on Terror’, and the cheering crowds down at Ground Zero are a sober reminder of the  importance of America’s so-called “psychological victory”.

Hansberry endorsed the symbolism that Eichmann’s trial represented, in the hope that it would serve as a reminder of how oppression is manifested: ‘what was done — and by whom’. I don’t think bin Laden’s death can be framed in such terms, and I don’t know if there is a lesson to be taken away from how he was killed. If Lorraine Hansberry were alive today, I don’t know what she’d make of it.

I think the central question in the entire matter boils down to this: does justice truly require revenge?

And if it does, when exactly is America’s courtdate?

*   *   *

Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, pp. 187-188:

“The people of Israel, at this writing, are trying Adolf Eichmann. It is, I think, a great if painful moment in the history of the human race. I know that among the Israeli people themselves there is some dispute; natural questions have arisen: Is it right to stir up the hideous memories afresh?  Should the descendants and kinsmen of the victims of the Nazi butcher spend such vast sums of money to “try” one whom the whole world already believes guilty? Nothing will bring back the men and women and little children kneeling at the edge of ditches as they were shot in the heads by SS troopers.

These are understandable considerations to have arisen. But I feel deeply that the Israeli government is entirely correct to proceed with this deliberate and carefully planned reminder of what was done — and by whom. Confusion on the matter should be alien to oppressed peoples anywhere in the world — including American Negroes; something will in fact be achieved if black men and women everywhere begin to lose their universal tendency to think “racially” as regards the oppression of people. As is perfectly clear, the Jews, the Poles, the Czechs, the Russians, are white people. But the hardly comprehensible determination of the Nazis to destroy them as “inferior peoples” is anything but conjectural.

Thus we need not sympathize with Ben-Gurion’s ambitious insistence that Israel ipso facto represents Jews “everywhere.” It may be more reasonable to observe that Israel represents itself. That is enough. Its “right” to try a Nazi war criminal lies in the fact that it does exist … that by its existence it assumes itself as guardian of what is done “to a people”.

For me, there is a strong and powerful current of justice in the fact: a representative figure of Nazism tried on Jewish soil. Under Jewish justice. By Jewish judges. I am moved by the thought of it.

It is about time.

Footnote: Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred millions of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.

But then — history has not been concluded either, has it? “

Guidance, care, and a bit of rowing before I die.

I work on legal transcripts for a living. I really like my job. Sometimes I have to stop myself from going on about how much I like my job, because I like my friends, too, and I don’t want to lose them.

Last night, after work, I went out for dinner with the boy and another friend of ours.  After I monopolized the conversation by droning on about my Grand Theory of High School English Class (short version: less Joseph Conrad, more Gossip Girl and comic books), my friend asked if I could still go home and read for fun after spending eight hours a day sitting and proofreading great swathes of text.

I said yes, because transcripts are full of bad prose. Likes, ums, uhs, you knows, rights, okays. Semantic satiation is a daily reality. Yesterday, I had to do a “find” on the word ‘So’ to check the consistency of my comma placement. By the time I got through the 179 appearances it made, looking at those two letters made me feel disoriented and slightly nauseous. What does ‘so’ mean, anyways?

But upon further reflection, it isn’t the bad prose that makes me want to go home and curl up in the fetal position with The Wonderful World of Og. The minutiae of what goes on in the legal world is petty, dull, and sad. There are fights over undertakings. There are the sore necks, the 6s on a pain scale of ten, the sexual frustration, the slip and falls. Perhaps worst of all, there are the seemingly endless losses of guidance, care, and companionship.

In Ontario, the “loss of guidance, care, and companionship” is defined by the Family Law Act. It is what it sounds like.  It may come into play in wrongful death cases, in workplace injury cases, in car accident cases, etc.  Essentially, it puts a monetary value on life’s intangibles.

However, some intangibles are worth more than others. There’s an article up on the Risk Management Counsel of Canada website that discusses the six-figure award for a loss of guidance, care, and companionship granted in the case of To v. Toronto Board of Education. The monetary award was given after a family’s first-born son died because of injuries sustained by an equipment malfunction in his high school gym class.

“Before To, awards for loss of guidance, care, and companionship of a child or sibling varied within a range, with the pendulum swinging towards one end or the other from time to time. Through the late 1990s, awards for loss of a child still living at home usually fell in the $20,000.00 to $40,000.00 range, with the occasional greater award in exceptional cases….

Then along came the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in To where the Court declined to roll back the jury’s award of $100,000.00 for each of the parents for loss of guidance, care, and companionship, and $50,000.00 for the sibling.”

(For the purposes of covering my bases, I should mention here that I have never worked on a transcript relating to this case, and the facts of the cases are a matter of public record.)

The author of this article  says that the new figure doesn’t represent a “new baseline”, because the child was “exceptional”. S/he describes the son’s devotion and closeness to his family, his goals and academic achievement, and the cultural standards that Chinese families have for first-born males. “Clearly, Binh was somewhat of a dream child. The average teenager would not fit the description of Binh. Binh did not display the selfish, rebellious, and disrespectful behaviour that parents of other teenagers may note from time to time. “

After establishing the facts of the case, s/he writes about realistic defence strategies that will help insurance companies ensure that they don’t have to pay out sums that large:

“An effort must be made to establish that the deceased children of future claimants were not exceptional (if that is in fact the case). Understandably, following the death of a child, surviving parents and siblings may not have a realistic memory of the deceased child or their relationship with him or her. Through gentle, empathetic questioning, a realistic picture may be obtained at examinations for discovery. It may also be necessary to go to other sources such as teachers, school records, and coaches for a more accurate description.

… The decision in Rintoul [another legal precedent] may be relied upon as a more judicious starting point for exceptional cases and counsel may suggest that the court should move down from there when dealing with the loss of a child who could not be described as ‘exceptional’.”

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know much about how these things work. But I know that I was not an “exceptional” teenager, at least not by the standards in this case. I took five years to get through high school. I failed grade 11 French. I showed up late for school consistently, fought with my sister a lot, returned library books late, and whined about going to church.

“Exceptional”, as this writer defines it, seems to mean following the rules very, very well. And nothing is more valuable in law than following the rules and being able to back up your rule-following with documents in triplicate.

I recently bought volume one of Tove Jaansen’s comic strip Moomin.  Moomin’s story is about many of the wonderful and horrible things that happen when you don’t follow the rules. Perhaps to an even greater extent, Moomin’s story is one of a loss of guidance, care, and companionship. Throughout the course of this all-too-short collection, he mourns the loss of his beloved Moomin Mama and Moomin Papa, his girlfriend, and the life he loves.

But Moomin’s world changes quickly.  Nothing stays bad for too long, and just when all seems lost, he once again finds care, guidance, and companionship in the most unexpected places. There’s always a boat just around the corner.

When I’m at work, I only hear about tragedy. I transcribe pages of human misery, and only rarely — if ever — do I hear stories about human resilience. The tape ends, and as far as I know, the deponent stays trapped in that misery forever. The lesson of Moomin’s world is that misery may be inevitable in this life, but it is also transient. Sorrow fades, and the pain gets displaced by  trips to Hollywood, underground caves, and pirate treasure.

I’ve never been good with unfinished stories. When I go home at the end of a day of work, I read so that I can believe that there is meaning in this life, and that it is possible to “live in peace, plant potatoes, and dream,” the way Moomin does.

All we can ask for is a bit of rowing before we die.

I just want a bit part in my life

Academically, the phenomenon of YouTube communities and collaborations is one of my strongest research interests. I recently finished a term paper about the way FTM trans communities subvert the autobiographical imperative. A little earlier in the term, I wrote a paper that, in part, examined the viral Sesame Street/Whip My Hair mash-up. Before I graduate, I have another paper in mind about creative works composed and performed by two or more YouTube musicians that have never met face-to-face.

When I was between the ages of 16 and 18, I spent a lot of time immersed in a particular subsection of the YouTube atheist community. I was only ever an observer, though. I never got up the nerve to participate. I watched thousands of videos, and never posted a single one of my own. I rarely even got involved in the comment section brawls.

The majority of my viewing time was devoted to a group of users who called themselves “The Knighted Owls”. Through these YouTube videos, I got my first introduction to Wittgenstein, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, abiogenesis, and dozens of other topics that our small-minded Ontario curriculum shies away from. (Un)fortunately, the users in this group were some of the first in the community to seriously critique the constructed atheist identity. Almost simultaneously, they all gave up the proverbial ghost and branched out into different topics (although I think meridianfrost still does Christian pwnage videos on occasion). It was the intellectual quickness of these users and their rejection of complacency that attracted me to this community in the first place, but it still hurt to watch it slowly dissolve.

The videos started being posted less and less often. As soon as the atheist banner was lowered, it seemed that this section of the community was no longer interested in making videos.  It was disappointing, but around this time, I discovered that there was a thriving social justice community on Tumblr. I started spending more and more time reading instead of viewing.

Every so often, I return to YouTube and find myself mildly shocked that the atheist community has managed to soldier on in my absence.

Tonight, I caught up on a dozen or so videos made by hairyreasoner, also known as Earl. I found this one particularly affecting.

I like the delivery and the thoughtfulness, but mostly I admire Earl for simply picking up the phone and asking his question. For involving himself in his world.

Speaking of being involved, what I didn’t do tonight was go out for drinks with students from a class I really enjoyed last semester. I stayed home and watched YouTube videos and a Yale Open Lecture on game theory. I am still an observer. I am still working up the nerve to participate.