coast to coast

+ the question is whether i will remember what i don't write down. science fiction about the future of crime and law enforcement is taking me out of life at the moment. the 'digital millennium' of 2047, when an extra 1 or 0 will have to be added to create the next year. the sheer capacity of electronic media to screen the world. each citizen is required to be exposed to a quota of advertising messages every day. and again, what do we, can we remember of our own volition. how much of our entire system of understanding is based on memory, and we effectively just make it up all the time.

+ and on memory, falling man is wonderful. how we deal with the extraordinary, how we really are just a set of routines, ways of getting through the day, codes and protocol, and what is routine, anyway, when your neighbourhood gets blown up. books by important authors on the important events of our times should be heavy and ponderous, perilous, but falling man floats.

+ and i read science fiction, but we have powdered egg today, reconstituted egg, and meals in plastic bags, ready to be boiled into life. we do these things already. i spend time reading about irradiation, nuclear power, advances in slaughterhouse technology. we may not even be aware of the fantastic world we inhabit.

from an old draft posts, but worthwhile, + i was 18? 19? at the blinding light watching not the wizard of oz to pink floyd, but the matrix to the collected work of radiohead. it was packed out. another night, i brought my 25 minute 1986 VHS from the old "science and tech 11" course in to show at BYO8 night. a crazy dystopian no-narrative educational video from and old BC high school curriculum that had long ago been deleted. it went on forever but everyone loved it. i still have the tape, too, and if i had the machine hooked up i'd watch it.

and, + one of the wonderful surrealities about modern american politics is watching senators try to wrap their old american mouths around arabic language. on one hand they're condemning the mujaheddin, whatever that means, and the next they're celebrating their faith in and friendship with completely unpronounceable afghani politicians. guys like saxby chambliss, max baucus, christopher 'kit' bond. guys named chuck. picking sides in something called "iraq". what the hell is iraq anyway. in a sense, we DID just make it up. it was a british idea. now senator jim inhofe, R-oklahoma, has to give speeches on the senate floor talking about a dead marine who was serving... where?

i guess we did this before, talking about vietnam. but really.

i like the senate speeches when they refer to each other by first names, or even affectionates. like 'kit.' the inside jokes.

garden city

+ what i write about now is books. what this means when what i meant to write about, two years ago, was music, i'm not quite sure. i have less to say about music, and a lot more to explain, or rather document, about books.

today i finished upstream, which is the first of sharon butala's novels i've read which did not feel forced or awkward at some point. each of luna, fourth archangel, and gates of the sun felt flawed in some way, but upstream, felt far stronger, as though she'd aimed lower and scored.

i've pulled myself together to read delillo's falling man now. there is a unique and unexplainable terror about reading a new novel my my favourite author. it says a lot about me, or anyone, to have a favourite author, and any addition to that author - i.e. a new novel - has the chance to irrevocably change my relation to that author - which is of course only through their books - for better or worse. if some measure of who i understand myself to be is based on my favourite author, well, what then. well, it's also just a book. but after 29 pages it's a really good book.

+ but i have a midterm due for tuesday, and i haven't written anything for it yet. but i know what to say, vaguely. 1)international organisations do a poor job of fulfilling the traditional roles of the nation state - the creation of behavioural norms and the ensuing socialisation - at the international level. and 2)i agree that the impact of globalisation in the area of culture has been one of both fragmentation and consolidation, by virtue of at once strengthening bonds across nation-states with regards to diverse identities and at the same time weakening traditional ties to land and country. sure.

+ we went to richmond yesterday, me and amanda. we took the skytrain to 22nd street station and rode our bikes across the queensborough bridge, heading along the north arm of the fraser, looping south under sea island and then across it, then back across lulu island along westminster highway to the skytrain. 6 hours. exhausting and really beautiful.

+ it doesn't get more lazily nostalgic than reading record store 'weekly updates' archived from 2000/2001. i used to read these in surrey and want to hear it all, understand. i'm much more comfortable now. well, obviously, but this is another example for myself of growth and change. but there are gems here: saint etienne is 'the elevation of the mundane into art'. and isn't that what all art should be? or, isn't that what the mundane always should be? why worry about it?

+ this time last year i had class downtown, and was using what money i had to de-stress from school et al by buying lots of records after class at a & b. burritos from taco del mar on granville, not because they were good but because they were there. writing my peak columns from the harbour centre computer lab all afternoon. i remember writing one column from amanda's dorm room and doing laundry while she was grocery shopping with her mother.

global corporate power

+ still reading. finished alice munro, open secrets, from 1994. also finished journey into russia. it got trite and strange, and probably made more sense in the 1960s. i appreciate having read it, though. now i'm consciously reading two books, which i rarely ever do. first, fourth planet from the sun, a collection of mars stories, from the 1950s to now, including ray bradbury's wonderful the wilderness, which sets the exploration of mars in a direct path with the expansion of the american west. i took a break from it on saturday and started sharon butala's upstream, from 1991. i'm past 1/2 through now, it's about a woman in a lousy marriage who finds her family and history. i mean, it's about saskatchewan and french canada, and personal history and national histories, and who you are vs. where you understand yourself to be.

i wonder if i collect sharon butala because of the sheer thrill, the collector's imperative, or if i really do revel in what she writes. but i remember reading real life and feeling that she knows, she gets it, she knows exactly what she's doing.

watching gary burns' radiant city documentary yesterday was wonderful, because it's right in the line of sharon butala, george melnyk, gary burns' old film the suburbanators. what is the west, what is the prairie? and in the suburbs, just where in the hell are we anyway? and it isn't smug at all. no preening, no satisfaction: yes the suburbs suck but if we stop there then we've gone nowhere at all. vancouver interests me, but only in the context of its suburbs.

+ i'm scared of the delillo books that i have waiting, unread. falling man and running dog. i have a delillo reader that i'll use alongside running dog and everything. it's called the physics of language. literary criticism.

+ i'll be giving my last class presentation on turkey and the EU. i haven't read the article, but i know what i want to discuss. turkey and the EU is the legacy of the eastern question: who gets the balkans when the ottomans die off? to deal with turkey, thye EU has to deal with the spectre of the ottomans. the silk road. mongol hordes, sweeping out of asia. delillo talks about that, in the names: 'sweeping out of asia.' i want to discuss europe not as a continent or as an "economic community" but as a state of mind. europe: if you lived here, you'd be home right now. believe it, live europe, and there you are.

further, i want to write about global corporate power, american empire, in the context of the frontier thesis. rather, in the context of the discrediting of the frontier thesis.

+ and tonight on the skytrain i saw a route map that didn't have maple ridge/pitt meadows on it. as in, the west coast express just kept going, but everything north of the fraser/east of port coquitlam was water. as if it was a great lake, or the atlantic. richmond/new westminster as north american dardanelles. i wish i'd taken it down to put up at home. pitt meadows/maple ridge, just not there.

+ i found a stack of CDs that i made to archive a lot of downloaded music in 2004 - things that i wanted to save, but didn't listen to enough to justify filling up my hard drive at the time. crazy.

i am spending a lot of time listening to, well, a lot. i put "top rated" on shuffle and sit back. songs called finisterre: i have three of them, by the lilac time, saint etienne, and blueboy. 'finisterre' means the end of the earth. finis terre.

+ it was a dry day, so we swept. i swept. after buying a new broom up the drive while on a trip to get a burrito. that was my day.