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.