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.