Civil rights come attached to civil responsibilities; one will be lost without the other.

If you cannot answer a man’s argument, all it not lost; you can still call him vile names.  ~Elbert Hubbard

My son’s birthday today.

While I was in the hospital my kids, knowing me rather well, brought me several books to read.  One of them, written by Charles Demers, is called Vancouver Special. It was a good choice since it is filled with really good black and white photographs and short essays that are themselves structured much like images. (For some reason I find images easier on the body than narrative.) The book is organized around different elements that make both a city and an image. For the city these are things like neighborhoods, people and what the author has called culture but is in fact the relationships that bind and make meaningful the first two.  For example, he has a essay on nature in the culture section that, while informative and dryly funny by itself, side-lights and connects the chapters on First Nations and Kitsilano.

Reading it is quite a bit like interacting with a Vasily Kandinsky painting. I was thinking of this one. The blue bits are the essays on people, the green and orange are neighborhoods, the lines and arcs that delineate and connect are the bits on culture.

To get the painting, you have to get the relationships between the elements, which, I suppose is true of all narrative, but with Demers’ book as with art like Kandinsky’s, the way in which those elements are displayed has much more to do with space than with time. And narrative arc is almost always about time. This is, in itself, something deeply “Vancouver.” If Demers did that on purpose, I not only like his book but deeply respect his ability as a writer.

The pictures in the book, black and white photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje, can be “read” right along beside the text. I mean, if you can imagine text structured as a complex image, then it shouldn’t be so hard to connect the pictures into meaningful series using the rules of narrative. But I’ll leave that up to you. You’d have to spend time with the book, with its elements and its arrangement.

This is not one of his but it (very vaguely) gives you the feel of the ‘graphs. If you want a better idea, you can click on this link and it will take you to his Flickr account. There are a number of black and white Vancouver shots there plus plenty of colour. One that caught my eye is here. I like it for a number of reasons but partly at least because I happen to occasionally catch the bus on that corner.

The book was published last year and opens by talking about the social, historical and political implications of the 1986 Expo and the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is not just a planar tourist book. It has depth: achieved by both political and historical knowledge and awareness. Vancouver, for all its wonders and beauty, suffers from the general North American dis-ease with its history and its past and, therefore, present choices. I was here during Expo and now the Olympics and the same battles for and with the homeless population have occurred both times, as an example. It’s a bit like a woman so obsessed with her aging face that she goes in for a lift and then there, as she turns grinning at herself in front of a mirror, on top of her completely ignored and clearly aging 50 year old neck and shoulders is the face that befits a 25 year old.

The thing about a person (or city) like that is that what this means has everything to do with the eyes of the beholder.  In this case Demers looks on with honesty, but also with love, more like compassion than pity or disrespect. Because of all these things, Vancouver Special really is a very good introduction to what it’s like to live here. If you’re interested.

I am the kind of reader that has many books on the go at the same time. Normally this isn’t a problem since I read almost entirely non-fiction. When I hit the end of a read-run then I’ll pick up some fiction. I take a break, then back to non-fiction. The world is orderly. When I intermix them, things get a little strange. And confusing.

I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).

So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.
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You should know I don’t do horror. I learned my lesson early in life with respect to the power of images and how they mess with my head, so now I am fairly careful about what I deliberately allow access to my senses. This little movie, however, made it past my self-imposed censor. It’s about the kind of humor it uses.

Litlove has a post called Reading Dangeroulsy that speaks to the question of a person’s choice about whether to continue reading a book that he or she finds disturbing. Some time ago I posted on my decision making process about whether to watch the new movie Precious; the two things are related for me.  I still haven’t decided whether to watch Precious or not, but I do know that I will not go to watch it in the theatres — way too traumatic having to react not only to what’s on the screen but to other people’s reactions as well.
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The assigned topic: David Souter’s resignation

From what I read the guy actually believed in justice. He became disillusioned at the start of bush jr’s time and as soon as the next liberal is in he retires having a good idea the kind of person that will come into power.

To me it seems one of the most profound choices a president gets to make is who they appoint to the supreme court. Everyone
focuses on who will be picked and what they have done but what I’ve never heard talked about is why a person picks when they pick to retire. Did he become ill or just get tired of it or did he wait until someone who he liked would make the pick to drop out of the game?

I don’t have much to say about this except to agree that the appointment of a Supreme Court Judge is a long-lasting and powerful choice a president gets to make. Ronald Reagan, for example, appointed Antonin Scalia in 1986 and by virtue of that, Reagan’s values are still influencing the U.S.

Of course there are surprises. The Republican president Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens in 1975. There is delightful irony there, because Stevens was appointed to replace William Douglas, who Ford had tried to have impeached from the bench. Douglas was a pretty strong advocate of individual rights as well as an environmentalist; Ford did not like him and Stevens was chosen, at least largely, because he was a Republican. I mean his Segal-Cover score is 0.250 – pretty deeply conservative. But there were surprises coming. In 1992, for example, he upheld Roe vs Wade in Planned Parenthood vs Casey. And then in 2007 he authored an opinion finding that the EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. Douglas would have been proud.
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Recently peardg had this idea that I should post little reflection essays on random topics. Since my son, guango, is an amazing random password generator, I thought I could get him to shift his talent sideways and shoot me a weekly random topic. I must warn you that his mind is quirky so some of the topics are likely to be quirky as well. Here’s the first:

Agnostics are not cowards. Atheists and theists are cowards because they are the people that are too fearful to live without knowing. So great is their fear that they ignore reason and simply fabricate reality to their liking.

My little reflection essay: Read the rest of this entry »