nouspique.com

I dreamt I died and went to heaven. When I got there, they told me there was no such thing as print media. They said: books are physical things, but we, as incorporeal spirit beings, have no fingers to turn the pages. I asked if they had heard about digital media. They laughed at my naivety and reminded me that I would still need fingers to touch a touchscreen. What do we do for reading, then? They could tell I was distressed. Reading? We don’t read; we remember. So for a thousand years I lay on a beach remembering all the books I had read when I was alive. I was glad I had read many books, for my remembrances were rich and gave me pleasure. But when I began my second thousand years, I realized that I was weak when it came to poetry. I had read enough of it, but found it difficult to remember. They commiserated with me. Yeah, they said, it’s a bitch trying to memorize poetry—especially anything written after the 20^th century. So now I sit with sand up my crack, a little bit bored, cursing those bastards, those poets, for leaving none of their words lodged in my head.

A year and a half ago, Toronto-based Kobo launched a bare bones eReader to give its biggest competitor, Amazon, a run for its money. It was a decent offering supported by a decent library (2.2 million titles and counting) especially when you consider the behemoth it was battling. See my review here. Kobo followed up with wifi and a touch-screen version of the eReader. Now we have an Android-based tablet, the Kobo Vox for CDN $199, again aimed to provide a discount alternative to the behemoth. While the reviews have been luke-warm at best, empiricist that I am, I had to see for myself if the Kobo Vox is any good. I have set out my review below as a series of pros and cons, but first a general remark: I bought this device in a book store. I didn’t buy it at an Apple Store or Future Shop or Best Buy. It wasn’t sold to me as a tablet that I could incidentally use as an eReader; it was sold to me as an eReader with tablet-like functions. Right there on the box it says: “Kobo Vox eReader.” If you buy this device as a cheap way to get your hands on a tablet, then a) you’re not paying attention, and b) you will be disappointed.

No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive). My aim is to take this news story and embed a fictional adaptation of it into a larger novel I’m working on. The curious thing is that when I revisit the news reports, I discover that my brain’s faulty memory has already done the adapting for me. For example, I could have sworn that the victim was a prostitute. I could have sworn that the priest had reached out to her as part of some kind of pastoral program. I could have sworn that the murderer, the custodian, had been motivated either by a desire to protect the priest from the corrupting influence of a prostitute, or by jealousy springing from some homoerotic rage, or both. It turns out there is no way to come up with any of this from the facts. It turns out it all comes from my own sick brain.

This morning you may have heard the starting gun for NaNoWriMo or the erroneously named National Novel Writing Month. It really should be GloNoWriMo, substituting Global for National. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world try to write at least 1,666 words each day for 30 consecutive days at the end of which (theoretically) they will have completed a 50,000 word short novel. Since I’m in the middle of another writing project, my participation will be spotty. However, I intend to be a hanger-on, a leach, a general parasite. At the very least, I’ll be borrowing the discipline of writing every day, the accountability of posting my word count in a public place, and the energy of dabbling with a community of like-minded writers.

My wife is an active alumnus of a summer camp in Longford Mills on the north eastern shore of Lake Couchiching. Every fall, staff, alumni, and friends of the camp gather for a weekend of work and fun. The object is to close down the camp for the winter, taking in docks, storing boats and equipment, cleaning out cabins, clearing out dead wood and chopping it. One of my chores was to rake leaves. There are a lot of leaves in a forest, which means the raking takes a long time. It’s repetitive and, as happens with me and repetitive tasks, my mind starts to wander. I had been reading a book by Mircea Eliade the night before and that helped fuel my wandering mind. Actually, my mind never really wanders; it’s more like a NASCAR race with a pileup against a wall.

Note: Part way through writing this piece of flash fiction, I got my testicles caught in a band saw. Industrial accidents are a horrible thing. Always wear protective clothing.

Half-choked Blooms
I give my best to the morning
and the balance to the afternoon
in the half-choked blooms of the roses
and the thorny brambles of a dying quince.

I observed this sign on the wall beside the door at 457 Bathurst St., Toronto. The location looks to be abandoned or at least between tenant/owners. In that tautological Yogi Berra sort of way, these are words to live by. Now pay attention!

A question about the Occupy Movement: where is the Church? October 15^th was supposed to be a global day of action, and by all accounts, it was successful, drawing crowds in cities all around the world. But where was the Church in all of this? The question was posed in Religion Dispatches nearly two weeks ago in the context of the Occupy DC protest, but it seems to apply everywhere else too. The news reveals isolated instances of church involvement. St. Paul’s Cathedral has granted sanctuary to protesters in London. And I heard (but haven’t verified) that St. James Cathedral has extended the same courtesy to protesters in Toronto should the need arise. Scanning the crowd in Toronto, I recognized a couple clergy, but none there as representatives of the institutions they serve. And virtually nothing that could be construed as an official statement, an encouraging word, an expression of solidarity. Nothing. Not from any denomination.

So it begins. The Occupy Movement rolls into Toronto. I couldn’t get to the kick off in the financial district, but went to St. James Park in the early afternoon. Below are a few photos and comments. You can view more photos on my flickr space. Early on, I saw a sign I liked:  “Let the conversation begin.” No demands. No message. Just an invitation to converse.I found people who took this invitation seriously, like Roy and his friends shown below. When I took their photo, I asked what their schtick was, their point-of-view, their cause, whatever, but they didn’t say; they were just sitting on the grass having a chat and anyone was welcome to join them. So I did for a while.

Toronto had a dry run for the Occupy Movement. It was called the G20 Summit. There’s the same feel to things now as last year.  Frustration. Disbelief. Anger. Overwhelm. A confrontational rhetoric that threatens to explode. A painfully disengaged middle class more inclined to sidle up to power than trouble itself with issues or long-term consequences. For me, there is the same taste of disgust I swallowed last time around – disgust at the sheer pig-headedness of capital and the readiness of paramilitary types to fall into lockstep. More than anything, I am struck by what might best be described as a collective failure of historical imagination. We wouldn’t be engaging one another in this way if we remembered.

As the Occupy movement creeps ever closer to Toronto, we who support it brace ourselves for the inevitable backlash, not only from voices of power, but also from an eerily complacent middle class. Toronto had a foretaste of this more than a year ago when the G20 leaders came to town and those who spoke out against this presence and what it signifies were rounded up and thrown into holding pens. This week we hear the echo of criticisms that were leveled against protesters more than a year ago:

After being away for a month, I returned home to Toronto with a question burning on my lips: So how’s Rob Ford’s War on Graffiti going? On Friday, I went downtown to get some answers.  I can’t speak for the city at large because I sampled only a narrow sliver of streets downtown.  The reason I sampled only a narrow sliver is that there was so much to see.  I didn’t have time to go anywhere else.  I fell down the rabbit hole. The short answer is: not well; there’s graffiti everywhere. In fact, Rob Ford’s declaration of war may be the best thing that ever happened to Toronto’s graffiti scene.

I took this photo at the petting zoo in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. This is one ugly creature. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have cooked inside its own body cavity, worrying all the time that you’ve cooked it long enough to kill all the bacteria that would otherwise give you food poisoning. In popular usage, we use the word “turkey” to imply losers and failures. Yet we still delight in eating them. Is the ritual of devouring these ugly beasts a symbolic re-enactment of our colonial past? The way we respond to losers and failures? I’m a descendant of the Puritan settlers who invented this ritual; it’s kind of important to me that I think this one through. It eats at me.

When people go on holidays, they like to see the sights, or shop, or lie on a beach, or dine in nice restaurants. Me? I like to hunt for graffiti. While I was in Victoria, I did a lot of walking and found graffiti everywhere. Tags. Bombs. Walls. Stencils. Even dust on bus shelters. Some of it was commercial graffiti–commissioned by the owners of the walls. Some of it wasn’t. It’s usually easy to tell the difference. See my flickr account for a large selection of things I found, mostly in Victoria, except for the auto racks which I found in a marshaling yard in New Westminster. The HYPE piece featured here (click the image to download a larger version) is a composite of four photos I took in a parking lot off Fisgard Street in downtown Victoria. You can see a tag for the KWOTA crew which I also saw this morning on a wall in downtown Toronto. I guess they get around.One morning, while I was photographing along Esquimalt Road, a man said to me: “They should bring back the lash for graffiti artists.” I have difficulty understanding the hostility many people bear for people who decorate walls. The lash? For spray paint? There doesn’t seem to be any proportionality between the punishment and the crime. In Toronto, Rob Ford appealed to this general hostility during his mayoralty campaign by promising to clean up the streets. Now, months after Ford launched his war on graffiti, citizens and community organizations are scrabbling after a dwindling pot of city funding. The arts in Toronto are acutely vulnerable. I see a connection between Rob Ford’s hostility towards graffiti and what is quickly revealing itself as his rabid philistinism. He just doesn’t like art of any sort. And that’s the curious thing about the man who would bring back the lash for graffiti artists. He still called them artists.