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Author: Rochelle Mazar

Email, MOO, and the Lost Protocols

Email, MOO, and the Lost Protocols

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I am not particularly fond of email. From the very beginning I didn’t like it. I got my first email account in 1993 and promptly abandoned it. No one else I knew had one, except for my roommate and the girls across the hall, so what could I do with it? And on top of that, it was so slow. Not that sending a message was slow, but it was exactly like sending a letter. I write something out, send it, and wait and wait for a reply. It could take days.

Instead I opted for the various synchronous chat environments I had at my disposal in those days. At the top of my list was MOO. (See also the lost library of MOO, which is not only an interesting slice of what’s been lost on the internet in the last 10 years, but also happens to credit my dear friend Jason). MOO is an old telnet protocol. Man, I don’t even know how to describe MOO anymore. I used to access it with raw terminal telnet, which means command line input, no backspace, and no local echo until you turned it on. (Local echo is when you can see what you type.)

MOOs were so much cooler than email. First, there were hundreds of people on them. There weren’t many people using the internet at the time, but lots of the students who were were logging into MUDs, MUSHes, MUSEs, and MOOs. These systems allowed for hundreds of independent users at once who could create spaces and interact with each other and code stuff. It was real time, there was lots going on, and you could meet people from all over the world. Of course this was before Netscape and even Mosaic, and www was competing with gopher and telnet. I used to work with a black screen and orange type.

But MOOs used to be so busy and so fast that you would log into one and people were talking up your screen before you could blink. I failed typing in high school. I learned how to type by wanting to get in on the conversation.

For the record, it’s because of my MOO experience that I understand SQL and PHP. In case you’re curious.

After MOOs on my list of best communication methods was a little program called Talk. It was connected to the email system, but it was better than email. It worked via Pine (and Elm) and would let you ping someone who was online at another university and talk to them real time. Like, you could see what the other person was typing as they typed it. That was just mind-blowing to me. I loved the talk option, but I really only knew a couple of people outside of my own university who had it by the time I found it, so I didn’t get to use it much.

Today I only email people when I absolutely have to, or it’s clear that that’s their preferred method of communication. The vast majority of my friends close by and abroad communicate with me via instant messaging systems. These are more like the old pine talk and less like MOO, but it works. I’m talking to people real time and if they don’t really want to talk with me I know that right away. Email always feels like you’re taking a chance. Sure, they don’t need to respond right away, but that means they don’t respond right away. I’m used to synchonicity. I have no patience. I want to hear back from you NOW, not next week. Not next month. This is a conversation, not something you can hit the pause button on.

See, I’m a demanding soul.

So this is why I don’t use email as much as some people do. I tend to imagine that it’s more of a conversation, when really what it is is a memo slipped under someone’s door. It’s easy for them to step on it, ignore it or just not answer it. Email doesn’t demand an answer.

Email is a post it note on your mirror that reminds you to do something, or tells you something nice. “You look beautiful today.” “Buy milk.” Email is nice, but it’s not the most efficient means of communication.

Though it’s a dead/dying medium, MOO is the best form of online communication I’ve ever encountered.

In MOO, everything is an object. It’s make believe; when you log on, you are animating a character that you have defined. When you log in, you are seen to “wake up”. Your offline life happens like a dream for this character. In MOO, you walk around from place to place, you can touch people, you can hug them and give them things. You can pick up objects and put them in your pocket, and then when you look down at your “body” you will see what you’re carrying. People can pin things to your shirt.

In MOO you can express a world of emotion without expressing a statement, without actually moving your virtual lips. MOO provided the online self with body language, something IM (instant messaging) systems lack. IM is talk. MOO is heart, body, and soul.

MOO is a present-tense narrative, with dialogue, description, and punctuation that encapulates your speeh and movement. MOO is the sense of place in a sea of ones and zeroes.

The richness of that environment, though increasingly lost, makes me feel the deadness of email.

I don’t write email. I write blog posts to an audience of one.

You Reap what you Sow

You Reap what you Sow

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Well, this is certainly interesting.

In sum: Michael Gorman, ALA president elect, jumped up and told us that blogs are dumb and bloggers are dumber. Blogosphere goes balistic, most nod their heads and say, yeah, we knew librarians were stodgy and on their way to extinction. Blogging librarians everywhere have a heartsore day. Next up: Blaise Cronin writes BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish. Most bloggers, recognizing a troll when they see one, ignore him. Some others respond, understandably miffed and personally affronted.

Blaise Cronin today, reacting to the blog backlash he stirred up:

In the long run, the net effect of such mean-spiritedness will be to chill public debate, deter people from blogging and depress free trade in ideas. Personally, I would much rather face another, even angrier fusillade of blogs than be cowed into silence. And I would expect no less of graduates, past and future, of this school. For now, though, I leave you with the cautionary words of Samuel Johnson: ‘When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.’

I can’t believe he’s arguing that the response he got from being rude to a very, very large group of people is indicative of some kind of PC big chill. On one hand he wants his voice to never be silenced, but he disapproves of the tools that exist to make sure the voices of the rest of us have the same priviledge. On one hand we’re spilling out of control with our blogs and our endless nonsense; on the other hand, that massive growth is in danger because of our inability to sense anything valid in his petty little derivative screed. You can’t really have it both ways. Too much feedback isn’t likely to kill a genre, generally speaking. When you have a truly democratic space, things sometimes get ugly and loud.

Never have so many tongues wagged so waspishly and wittily in warp time…Old rules and constraints have fallen away…On the Net, every voice is equal.’

And this is his great lament, and a very telling part of his response. First, that he expects his voice to be more weighty than that of anyone else, and expects us to naturally believe that this is the proper order of things. Second, he believes that every voice is in fact equal on the internet. At this point it becomes painfully obvious that Blaise Cronin is yet another old school academic who has not come to terms with the socially vibrant and dynamic world that is the internet. Not every voice is equal here. But every voice gets a chance to be.

But his Samuel Johnson quotation stands. When he opted to troll the blogging community with his clearly insulting and offensive musings, the first shot of incivility was fired.

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism?

We’re wondering the same thing about you, Blaise. There was nothing classy about this op-ed. How could you possibly expect a classy response?

Textbooks

Textbooks

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Today I learned that the Western libraries don’t collect textbooks.

I’ve been looking at the reference section and thinking about what it’s for. I know that it’s not like reference is an LC class; the individual libraries and librarians make the decisions about what should be in reference and what doesn’t need to be there. It’s about what is useful for them, not necessarily a certain kind of book. Also, there is an emphasis on availability and access; one of the lines I’ve been hearing a lot is “if this were in the stacks, it would be gone.” Not stolen or anything, just always out. So putting something in the reference collection means that the librarians can access them to answer specific questions, and it ensures that students will have access to the source.

In my mind, textbooks are a reference source. This is probably because so much of my background is in history, but a textbook is normally where I start my searches. A good textbook that’s fairly recent has a series of useful parts; a table of contents divided in a useful way for the subject, short essays on all the elements of that topic, and a usually sizeable bibliography of further sources. A recent textbook will cover all the important works on that subject. I think just about every paper I’ve ever written has started in the bibliography of one particular textbook.

So the reference section as it is is an add-on to LCSH. It’s a small version of the library for quick use, it’s a summation of particular useful sources. So my first thought was, how useful would it be to have another section just for textbooks? Like, extrareference. A few ranges of just textbooks on all the LCSH areas. So you could sort of browse through for textbooks on particular areas, get more in-depth stuff, that sort of thing. Sort of a dumb idea, but my God I had no idea they didn’t even collect textbooks here.

And why not? Well, they should buy those, damn those undergrads.

So. Just to sum up. We will buy sources that someone might someday use, because we sure would want to fill that information need, but goddamn it if we know you’re going to need it, buy it yourself.

Do you sense a note of snobbery? First, that textbooks are purely adjunct to classrooms, not useful in and of themselves; that undergrads are just going to come in and photocopy the whole damn thing instead of supporting an academic publisher; that textbooks are not worthy sources. That everyone already has them. (Doesn’t everyone also have access to, for instance, the London Free Press, the Toronto Star, and, concievably, the New York Times?)

I’m not criticizing anyone here, by the way. No one working here made this decision. I just think it’s interesting. Clearly I’ve been spoiled by the last two schools I went to, both of whom collected pretty much everything. Finding textbooks in the stacks was just a given. But apparently other, smaller libraries don’t have these things (Western and Windsor, for instance.)

Interesting, that’s all. See, while a lot of indexes and so forth are promptly digitized, there’s no way they’re going to start digitizing textbooks. Those things are really useful. And they only get updated every five years or so, it’s not like they’re completely out of date immediately. It will tell you in a snapshot who the big writers in a field are, you can take that information and go search for articles they’ve written more recently. Chances are they’re stilll writing in the same general topic area.

This job is just epiphany after epiphany.

SQL is MOO

SQL is MOO

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First things first: I don’t think London Transit is being very fair when they have so many buses with 3 in their digits coming to the same stop. I got on the 33 when I thought it was the 13. That was pretty dumb. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were wearing the skirt with a slit in the back, but I wasn’t so I had to waddle back like a duck. And then there was a detour, and the 4 didn’t come, so I got on a 15, which was just fine. But it took forever and a day to get home.

Okay, so here’s my revelation: I think I do understand SQL. I mean, I’m just reading chapter one in my book, SQL: Clearly Explained, but I discovered something interesting. SQL is an object oriented language.

This isn’t going to make sense to anyone in the normal way, so I’ll be very metaphorical about it, because object oriented languages are metaphorical away. With an object oriented language, you pretend you are actually producing objects. It’s make-believe. You say, I will make this thing, and this thing will have kids, and those kids will have the same qualities as the parent. And then I will take those kids and modify them, and then make them parents, and their kids will have the qualities of two sets of objects, the original object and its own parent. And so forth. And then they all get modified and have kids and those get modified in different ways, and they all branch off, like evolution. Some things go off to become certain kinds of dedicated objects, and others become totally other things. But you can trace them all back to a parent object. Like the missing link.

Reading the installation instructions is like a flashback: in the beginning there was nothing, and we called it #0. And then we created #1, the object that would be the parent of all objects, the object that really doesn’t do anything except bind the rest of the functional world together. #1 is the creator and the created, the beginning of all things and the end of the path of parenthood for everything that will be created from here on in. #1 is God.

And then you type into your little terminal window and get God to create users, and objects, and things. And It was good.

See? It’s not really so complicated. SQL is created by a bunch of nerds who miss ye olde telnet days, that’s all. I too remember the telnet days, and I know an if statement when I see one.

World? Yeah, I can conquer you. You sit back and relax. I’ll be right over.

The Reference Collection and the Internet

The Reference Collection and the Internet

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My argument has always been that technology has not really so much changed things has it has added to things. Libraries, for instance, are not being replaced by the internet. Not really. People still have the same needs they had before, and if anything they may just be more certain that what they need doesn’t exist. One of the things I’ve learned since being at library school is that while google is an amazing tool, most people haven’t got a clue how to use it. It’s way more powerful than most people can even comprehend, let alone use.

And in the end, public libraries exist to provide light fiction, and academic libraries exist to provide scholarship and subscriptions to scholarly journals. Outside of, of course, the building itself, the hardware, the software, and the people. You see where I’m going. I don’t think the internet threatens libraries at all, and I’ve been flogging that half-dead horse for some time.

But going through the reference collection shows me where in the internet has actually changed things and made parts of it obsolete.

The thing about reference, really, is that the layman doesn’t really understand what it is. I’m sure I’m not the only person to scoff at the concept of an encyclopedia (what, you’re too dumb to go straight to an actual book?!), but that’s just the beginning of it. Even as a Ph.D student I had no idea how much organization had gone into information, I didn’t realize there were ways to find things I needed outside the library catalogue. I think generally people don’t know what reference sources really are and how much they can do for you.

But it’s amazing how many reference sources are being superceded by the internet. As Liz tells us, there used to be a time when sources would be gold to the librarian because there was no where else to find lists of films produced in a certain year, or indexes of first and last lines, and so forth. There are whole chunks of the reference section that could be safely replaced by a nice google input box.

Pictures, for instance. “I want a picture of,” questions. Why would anyone ask a reference librarian for a picture of, say, the Andrea Doria, when you can just go here?

There’s a sense of being on the brink while walking through reference. Not because of the librarians, not by any means. I don’t think there’s any danger of reference librarians going extinct. It’s the sources. The print indexes of things, this sort of desperate attempt to impose some order on the orderless. So much of that has been superceded, if not by google, than by digital versions, more or less complete.

I’m not being nostalgic about it, really. But there’s definitely a skill that’s disappearing in all this, or maybe just an instinct. Liz has these instincts about where to look on the shelves, which sources might answer which question, how to flip to the index and what to train her eye on. It’s these sorts of things that are disappearing, the coping mechanisms librarians developed in order to cope with the print reference sources. Like once the learning curve was incredibly great, and now it’s lessened, leaving them with a tendency to flip through books in a particular way, or to see the universe of knowledge in LC terms rather than database queries.

Sort of interesting, that’s all.

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny

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Reading through the reference stacks yields an interesting narrative. I wish those people who try to argue with me about the purity of the catalogue and how fundamental changes to it alter the inherent credibility of the librarian would try this; where there is some logic to the LC organization, it often borders on colonialist, racist, or just plain ignorant.

Where do you think would be the best place for a source called Dictionary of Medieval Europe? How about right between man-man catastrophes and world war II! They were the “dark” ages, after all. The American Dictionary of National Biography and the American Who’s Who are held in an entirely other range than the African American Who’s Who. The process of moving from “general” to “specific” feels like manifest destiny; we move inexorably from east to west, through the colonies and the eager little satelite nations, from most to least important to American interests.

Why they opted to pick up LC instead of Dewey I’ll never entirely understand. At least Dewey is a conceptual model, I don’t know what LC is really trying to do.

At the same time, another one of the reference librarians keeps telling us that browsing is bad. He says that the library is too big and the sources that are useful to the student are held in entirely other LC ranges, so browsing should happen via the catalogue, not in the stacks.

That made me really sad.

I enjoyed Joyce’s explanation of the budget, which I got to hear this morning. When we walked into the classroom Joyce lit up. Walter walked us over, and Joyce turned to him and said, “Isn’t it exciting to see the next generation of librarians?”

Walter said, “Hey, I was at her Harvard graduation!” Walter’s son is a Harvard grad, and he was there for a reunion the day I graduated. The speaker was Allan Greenspan, hard to forget that. Though, to be honest with you, I didn’t go hear him speak. I was busy graduating and being festive over at the Div school. So anyway, Walter was telling Joyce about all this. Being at Harvard the day I graduated, Allan Greenspan speaking, and so forth.

Joyce turned to me and said, “You went to Harvard?”

I just don’t know how to respond to that. I mean, yes, yes I did. I have the diploma on my wall, in case you want to check. But people are way more impressed by that than I think they really should be. So I said it was a master’s in theological studies, not, like, med school or something.

“People say they went to Harvard when they were just there for the day,” Joyce said.

The weirdest thing about that is that I was sure she knew that already. The fact that she was recommending me without knowing that I’m a Harvard grad is certainly nice. Because, come on, I’m mostly all hype, let’s be honest.

Anyway, the briefing was good. I’m not spilling any Western library budget secrets here, all the documents are public. Apparently they got most of their requests from the senate, and as usual no cuts to the acquisition budget, and increases for the operational budget. Of course Joyce had to stop and ask me if I had any comments. You know, in front of a room full of library staff. I didn’t have any comments, not even one.

Man, she must be the only person on this campus who has managed to actually embarass me so completely.

That doesn’t make me love her any less, of course. I just love her more.

Reference Training

Reference Training

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Before I collapse into bed, I wanted to record one last thing about being trained for the reference desk. I was hesitating about posting this, since it’s probably inappropriate. Now, granted, this is a 2 week process (at least), and I’ve only really had one day of training. So I’m not expert on what this process is all about.

That said, I think it’s all at once completely understandable and completely frustrating that they train us as if we have never been to library school.

Not that I have any problem with the people training me. Everyone is very nice and very understanding, I enjoy my time with them very much. And there are points where they acknowledge that, yes indeed, we have taken the reference class. Also, cataloguing. We are being introduced to some basic cataloguing concepts (LCSH), which is great and all, but yo. Eight months of cataloguing over here. Not that I’m an expert or anything, but you’d think they could rely on our backgrounds a teensy bit. Just a smidgen.

On the other hand, I realize they have to make sure we know a base level of stuff. They know we’ve taken these courses, but they can’t be sure we got the right things out of them, can they. It’s like 505, we had to take the computer class and learn that there these things called “browsers” and “RAM”. Sure, we know that already, but they can’t be certain we know it properly. So they teach it to us anyway. Reference training feels like that so far. Sometimes I feel like the instruction has that sort of “I-know-you-already-know-this” feel to it, but other times it feels shockingly basic and unironic.

Here’s five hours of information you already know better than you ever wanted to! Have you got it all? Are you confused? Still with me?

There were points during the training when I thought that I really didn’t need the program to do this job. They were going to teach it all to me again anyway. Granted, that was during the afternoon when I really needed my nap. I get a bit groggy at about 2pm, so my reflections should probably not be trusted.

I’m enjoying the trek through the print sources, though. We’re getting upclose and personal with every source in that collection. That really will take weeks at the rate we’re going, and that’s okay with me. It’s pretty fun looking at them individually. The woman who’s training us has a degree in history, so we ooh and ahh over the same sources.

My mother told me to stay quiet and I’m not doing that very well. It’s really hard for me. I can’t help it. There’s just always some quip coming out of me and I should probably put a stop to that. There’s a little quip monster living deep down inside me who just has to have her say.

Resolution: blog more, talk less.

Tomorrow we’re going to a briefing for the staff by the infamous University Librarian. I can’t wait! I think we’re being asked along for the experience, since it’s about things that have nothing to do with us. But it’s all about library planning and budgeting, which I’ve gotten a little bit close to through strategic planning, so I’m pretty interested to hear how this goes down. Communication plan indeed; now I get to see it happen.

I’ll keep quiet like a little sponge and keep you posted.

Monster

Monster

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I saw Monster two weeks ago and I’m still reeling from it. It bothers me on some level that I can’t easily sponge off.

First off, I’m not saying it’s a bad movie or I’m sorry I saw it or they should have done something different. It’s a great movie. Charlize Theron did an amazing job and deserves every accolade she gets for it. That said, Monster really hits me where it hurts. I realize it’s a true story, but the film leaves me with a feeling that it’s not the world we can blame for the murders of those men, but the love of a not-so-good woman.

The film opens with Lee preparing to kill herself under the bridge by the highway. She’s got nothing, nowhere to go; the world has completely screwed her over. Her father was a bastard, her siblings tossed her out after she gave up her life to save them, men are jerks and no one gave a shit about what happened to her. But she would have just killed herself had it not been for the introduction of a hapless young lesbian.

The film implies that no man has ever shown any potential in Lee’s eyes. That Selby is the first person to…what, call her beautiful? Talk with her as if she’s a human being? Selby is kind to her at first. Is this the first kindness in Lee’s life? Here we have a critical moment in Lee’s life where she goes from wanting to die to wanting to give everything’s she’s got to Selby. Why? What makes an ostensibly straight highway blow job girl hand it all over to a lesbian? In the film, Selby is a kind of aid worker, the first person to take an interest in Lee’s life and give her some sense of hope and worth.

So now Lee is hooking with a purpose; she’s going to get money and spend time with Selby. She has something to look forward to. And then some asshole knocks her out, ties her up and rapes her.

She could have just died right then. The day before she wanted to die; now she wants to live so desperately that she finds the strength to beat off her attacker and shoot him until he dies. So we love Selby in this moment, because it’s her who gives Lee the desire to fight back. The love of a bad woman has some advantages.

And Selby really is a bad woman. (Note the emphasis.) She doesn’t want to work, she wants someone to take care of her. She doesn’t want to face her father, so she expects Lee to give her an option other than going home. So she accepts that Lee is a hooker and then expects Lee to keep at it in order to keep Selby in beer and acid-wash jeans.

What was more disturbing about the qualities of a typical witch in the 16th century witchcraze was their close approximation to the ideal woman; a woman nurtures and feeds babies, a witch nurtures and feeds demon-babies. Worship is good; worship of the wrong entity is evil. The same “natural” feelings directed at the wrong object means trouble, and that’s the feeling I get from Monster as well.

Selby is a traditional woman. She wants to be taken care of by someone with an established “career”, so to speak. The excuse in the film for her not working is her cast, but she seems otherwise completely helpless. She wants to be seen as helpless because it keeps her from having to do anything. She’s the wife who sits at home eating bons bons while her husband is off slaving away in a cubicle. Didn’t we strike down this stereotype at some point? Angel in the house? The double-edged sword of glorified womanhood? In real life, “Selby” worked as a motel maid to help support herself and Lee. In the film, her manipulation is demonstrated by letting the character fall into the position of ultimately traditional womanhood; the husband is the breadwinner, and Lee is Selby’s husband.

If the two things a woman is typically able to pull off is saint or whore, Lee is trying the forbidden tack of looking outside her gender options altogether. That, of course, is the point when everything goes to hell. Lee is acting as man, doing whatever he has to to support his woman. Since being a woman (ie, sexual object for men) for years didn’t turn out so well, why not try something different? This isn’t about breaking the molds, it’s about trying on someone else’s. Of course, Lee’s attempts at being a man are monstrous and horrific. She lives outside the law, megalomaniacal and drunk on power. If a Selby is powerless in such a false way, Lee the man has the power to dole out life and death, also falsely. Selby is manipulative and unfair as the supported wife; she may provide for Lee’s basic needs, but she has no sense of decency or justice. There is nothing right about these lovers; they are inverted, their desires are going the wrong way and result in crimes punishable by death.

When the credits of this film started to roll and I was wiping the tears off my face, Em turns to me and says, “Don’t worry. I won’t let you turn into a serial killer.” That made me laugh, but also got to the heart of what disturbed me most about this film; it feels like a condemnation of something more than a cruel world or a bad lover. Somewhere in there it felt like someone was (probably unintentionally) pointing at finger at love between women. Unnatural combinations and their horrific results. Only the tremendous power of lesbian love could push a woman to these lengths, it vaguely implies. This is an old idea and I feel like it got replayed in Monster.

Good film though. No, seriously.

Bibliographic Level

Bibliographic Level

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Today in cataloguing we got a test run of OCLC, which was interesting. I’ve been hoping to see how cataloguing works on the ground running for some time; I wanted to see interfaces. So that was great.

As a bit of a sidebar my professor also told us about a little something we sort of already knew, but this gave it a name. Bibliographic level. At what level are you cataloguing? The standard is monograph, of course. We’re not cataloguing, as he said, chapters, or concepts. Just the item as a whole.

For a second I got a little chill in class. Concepts. Can you imagine cataloguing concepts? I mean, what a pain in the ass, but can you imagine what a cool search tool that would create? I mean, we used to catalogue by article in serials, which I think is probably better done at this point by proquest or jstor, really. But still, we were doing it. Not by concept, though. That would be incredibly difficult, I would think.

And then I saw this on the Library Link of the day:

As Internet users become accustomed to enhanced content on other Web sites, they will expect libraries to provide similar enhancements in the OPAC. Librarians maintaining existing automation systems will need to keep up with their vendors’ newest products and to visit the Web sites of the vendors’ other customers to get ideas for enhancements that could be useful. Those looking for new automation systems will need to evaluate each product’s enhancement and integration capabilities.
Google and amazon.com can do it. Can libraries do it to? I can feel the revolution, my friends.

Back to the Future

Back to the Future

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“It’s written in the history of the future.”

Gotta love the Quebecois Separatists with their extremely logical language. They still have Separatistis, apparently, in spite of the fact that we haven’t heard much about it in the last few years. They want to have another ‘dum. You know, another referendum. I am very sympathetic to the Quebecois, I really am. Distinct society? Yes. I voted ‘yes’ on that ‘dum. I’m a bilingual girl from Ontario, I’m a French immersion grad. I’m all about the French being special and lovely. I even know that you can’t turn right on a red light in Quebec, and that’s knowledge I garnered as a non-driver living in Ottawa, clearly I am pro-Quebec.

But the separatists still make me laugh. Hey, we couldn’t get a majority the last time, well, best two out of three. No? Well, now that we have some war going on, now that the ridiculously (Quebecois) Prime Minister is about to step down, maybe we can get some anti-Canada sentiment up, we can get a sexy-looking leader…okay, maybe not…we can talk about ’embracing the ethnics’, we can point out how ‘a lot of them feel as though they are one of us’, which I find very heart-warming, myself.

Let’s move the separatists to Alberta, where they can make that province the fifty-first state. Suddenly four million Alberta cowboys would have spontaneous orgasms and erect American flags on the front of their houses, there would be dancing in the streets and lots of bookburning. They would dance the dance of death on their public health care system and exile their welfare recipients to British Columbia. Oh wait! They already do that! Edmonton would be a Canadian city state stuck in the middle and there would be a bloody border war, wherein the Alberta separatists would insist that Canada pay to move Alberta farther away from pinko Saskatchewan and godless British Columbia.

I love my country, I really do.

91582134

91582134

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Check out Protest records
Okay, this is just one cool concept. If you’re like me (and like free mp3s, w000t!) you’ll be keeping an eye on this bad boy: protest records. This is a Sonic Youth venture, and I know this because, well, all the stuff is on the Sonic Youth server. (I’m smart like that.) They’re collecting protest songs and giving them away on the website. The tagline: use’em for yrself. give’em to friends. just don’t sell’em.

Some personal favourites:
In a World Gone Mad, Beastie Boys
Go Down, Congress, Steven Taylor
Peace In the World, Nancy Lancy
Pictures of Adolf, Jim O’Rourke and Glenn Kotche
two minutes and fifty seconds of silence, credited to George W. Bush and Matt Rogalsky. This is perhaps the strangest track I’ve ever heard, and unless I’m much mistaken, what I think he’s done is taken all the pauses in Bush’s sentences and combined them to make a new ‘speech’. Actually, me just telling you that that’s what I think it is might be enough, you probably don’t have to actually download it. But what a weird, weird track. Cool, though.

Politics and Good Radio

Politics and Good Radio

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This American Life: The Balloon Goes Up

Act One. Bombs over Baghdad. Issam Shukri is an Iraqi man, living in Canada. He lived in Baghdad when it was bombed during the first gulf war. He talks about how scary it was when the ground started shaking, and how hard it was to explain to his three year old son.
Act Two.Tice Ridley, a first lieutenant in the army, has been sending regular emails from Kuwait City where he’s stationed about what it’s like to wait for the war to begin, and what it’s like to fight it.
Act Three. What’s French for French Fries? David Sedaris reports on French/US relations.
Act Four. Sarah Vowell tells the story about the first time the US attacked a country that hadn’t attacked us first. It was also the first time the US went to a foreign country to force a regime change. The country in question is still not doing too well a hundred years later.
Act Five. What Peacetime forgets about Wartime.
Act Six. Lessons from Ancient Wars. The story of a preventive act of war commited 3200 years ago, in the lank that’s now Turkey. Seneca’s The Trojan Woman takes place at the end of the Trojan war.

I swear to you, my own life would be so much poorer without This American Life.

New Brunswick Couple Can’t Leave Their Property

New Brunswick Couple Can’t Leave Their Property

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Nope, sorry, Lady. You can’t cross the road.
New Brunswick couple can’t leave their property. The Pedersen’s have lived on their potato farm for 53 years. The property skims the international border with their driveway in Canada, and the road, centimetres away, in the United States.

An American customs agent even threatened to arrest Marion Pedersen for illegal border-jumping on Jan. 31, 2003.

“It was out here when they stopped me,” Marion says. ” And he said `I’m going to take you in.’ ‘In where?’ I said. And boy he meant it. He wasn’t fooling. And I said, `Well what’s wrong?’ He said `You jumped the border.’ And I said `Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but if I have, I’ve done it for 53 years.'”

Marion escaped prosecution, and eventually got special dispensation for herself and her husband Nickolaj to cross the street without getting into trouble with the law. But there’s no such permission for anyone else who might come to the farm, not even her eight children who like to visit, or delivery or service people.

“He said `Mrs. Pedersen, you’re alright, but you’re not allowed to have anybody else here. No family.’ I said `What about family?’ `No. No friends.’ `I said what happens tonight if say the water stops? And I have to call a plumber?’ `Nope, not unless them come around by Andover and report.’ I said, `Well, how can they get back in here? This is Canada.’ Well that was going to be the way.'” [Rather funny audio link about this story here.] Thanks to Brin for the link.

Where Have All the Muslims Gone?

Where Have All the Muslims Gone?

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Where Have All The Muslims Gone?
Remember Ali, the Iraqi student I wrote about a few weeks before leaving for Italy when telling about going to the antiwar rally?

He’s gone. Disappeared.

His parents’ phone number is disconnected.

His mother cannot be reached at work.

His father disappeared first… and now, one of our babies is gone!

His counselor said to me this afternoon: “Either the parents have been called in by the government for questioning, or else they’ve all fled.”

Oh, my God.

More Multi-Media

More Multi-Media

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The Foundation Restaurant is not afraid of expressiong an opinion about the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. In fact, the walls of this unassuming cafe are currently papered in anti-war sentiment.

It’s part of an exhibition entitled No War: Reasons and Photos by Melissa Campell. She asked 105 ordinary Canadians to explain their reasons for opposing war. She then paired the answers submitted with a portrait she took of each person.

Mark Thomson is part owner of the Vancouver restaurant. He says, “We put them up because the reasons against the war just don’t seem to be getting much coverage. Everyone who comes in here is opposed to it but all you hear on the news is why we need to go.”

See the Exhibit as a flash movie here.

Sodom Of Eye-Rack

Sodom Of Eye-Rack

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Free Speech?

Free Speech?

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You Can’t Criticize American Politicians in Canada
TORONTO – The U.S. ambassador to Canada let fly at the Canadian government Tuesday, complaining about its lack of support for the Iraq war and its failure to discipline Liberals who criticize the U.S.

Paul Cellucci said “a lot of people in Washington are upset” with Canada for not backing the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

And he said Ottawa “could do a better job” at controlling Liberals, like Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal, who said last week that U.S. President George Bush lacks statesmanlike qualities.

I’m sure there’s a Geneva convention about criticising world leaders who declare illegal wars on middle eastern (read: muslim) countries. Respect must be paid, dammit. What is this ‘freedom of speech’ of which the Americans speak? What is this ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ the American government keep going on about? My my.

Brian Mulroney and the Great Big Snit

Brian Mulroney and the Great Big Snit

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I saw Brian Mulroney on television today, doing an interview. Well, to be honest, I didn’t actually see him. I just heard him, because I couldn’t be bothered to sit in front of the tv for that. So I just read the online news and ate my breakfast while listening in.

I was appalled.

Well, I shouldn’t be. Brian always did have one hand in the Bush, so to speak.

So he’s upset that the Chretien government isn’t backing this war. He says waiting for UN approval is “letting foreigners set Canadian foreign policy.”

“You know who it is?” he says. “It’s a few guys from Chad and Mongolia. Sure, they’re smart guys, but they’re still foreigners.”

Of course, it doesn’t strike him as at all hypocritical to then suggest that we base our foreign policy on whatever the Bush administration dictates. Right, cause that’s not foreign. As foreign hopping over to your neighbour’s backyard for a barbeque, isn’t it Brian? Yeah, you don’t need a passport to do that, either.

He criticizes the Chretien government for making the ‘popular’ choice, not the ‘right’ choice. Sure, two thirds of the Canadian populace support the Chretien government in this decision; the entire cabinet and the entire government (even the Liberal Chretien opponents) support this decision. This is what Mulroney calls governing by ‘popularity polls’. What we need to do, they tell us, over and over and over, is go into Iraq and fight for freedom and democracy. What Tony Blair is doing, going to war in spite of the fact that his country is against the idea, is brave and right. It’s all in the spirit of democracy, the wonderful gift we will bring to the people of Iraq.

I’m so glad they hold democratic ideals so close to their cold, tin little hearts.

The Theatre of War

The Theatre of War

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Theatre is an apt word for it, from our perspective. This is something we watch, we are an audience for these things. We turn the war on in the evenings when we switch on our tvs. We listen to it on the radio and read it on the internet, unfolding with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Inverted checkmark; the build up, the climax, the denouement. And even if the war doesn’t have these parts the media will create them for us.

The last time we did this, we were very involved. Twelve years ago we were devoting money and people and emotion to the American conquest. But it was clearer then, or it felt clearer. An invasion, our economic interests, atrocities. The murder of the Kurds, a modern-day Hilter. Ethnic purging. This time everything is different for us. We’re not commited to this war, we’re not sending people, we’re not giving them any money. The symbolic response of the Canadian government impresses me, to be honest. Jean Chretien is at home with his wife. He’s not answering questions, there is no press secretary up on a podium answering questions. There is no one on parliment hill; just a few reporters standing around idly. The Prime Minister is refusing to make this a big deal. He will sit at home and deal with whatever fallout he has to in the morning, at a reasonable time.

For a moment I thought, “but shouldn’t he address us, at least? The people, the population of Canada?” And then I realized, no. No, he doesn’t need to. This isn’t our war. This isn’t our conflict. There’s nothing that needs to be said, really. We’re not going in, we just need to hunker down and then maybe offer to help clean up the mess afterward.

But who knows. Who knows what our non-participation will mean for our relationship with the US and the UK. It’s a theatre of war, after all. All we can do is sit still and watch.

Thoughts on my Vancouver

Thoughts on my Vancouver

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If he had known unstructured
space is a deluge
and stocked his log house-
boat with all the animals
even the wolves,

he might have floated.

But obstinate he
stated, The land is solid
and stamped,

watching his foot sink
down through stone
up to the knee.
–Margaret Atwood, Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer

Vancouver is, indeed, very wet. See, I can say that and it sounds simple. If you’re from the east, or from central North America, or anywhere else except possibly Norway, you won’t understand what this means. You really won’t.

First, it rains a lot. They tell you this isn’t true, but don’t believe them. British Columbians are immune to their own weather. It’s like living in northern Ontario during the black fly and mosquito season; eventually the damn things leave you alone and you become completely oblivious to the fact that they’re still there, attacking the fresh-smelling city folk in droves and driving them mad.

So don’t let the locals fool you. It rains 70% of the time in Vancouver. It rained hard every single day I was there (in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island), except on the first couple of days when it snowed. And it’s not like rain here in Ontario. It doesn’t rain and then clear up, it doesn’t rain and then break out all sunny and blue and clear. You wake up in the morning and the roads are wet and slick. For the first time in years I heard that weird buzz the car makes when you’re hydroplaning. It rains like the world is ending out there, it rains thick primordial soup that changes the landscape. It rains oil that doesn’t wash off, ever. Everything in British Columbia is in biblical proportions; they say ‘everything is bigger in Texas’, but they don’t even know what they’re talking about. British Columbia is big water, big mountains, big trees, and out-proportioned weather.

When it does occaisonally clear up in Vancouver it feels like the aftermath of a flood. Puddles everywhere, fog rising out of the trees on the mountains. It feels like a lull in a war zone. My sister and I kept looking around through the rain and wondering why everything (and everyone) looked so normal; you’d think all that downpour would make everything somehow marked. We expect to see big plexiglass shelters for the elderly, extra-large gutters on the houses, big holes in the ground carved out by ridiculous amounts of water. Like Hogsback in Ottawa, like the Grand Canyon; you expect to see the etching of the water into the earth, the hard fingers of it that pull mountains down and tunnel through them. The acid oil that leaves everything five shades darker than it is at home.

But it’s not just the rain. It’s the damp. I mean, this is what happens when you set up shop in the middle of a rain forest, isn’t it. The damp gets under your skin and laps at your innards. If you’re from anywhere east, you will go to BC thinking you’re going to be enjoying a nice spring. High temperatures, pleasant weather. Hell, a little rain isn’t so bad, it’s not a tough price to pay for temperatures above the freezing mark, right? Well, think again.

It’s the damp. If you’re from a drier climate and you show up in BC, you’re going freeze your ass off. Why? Because you can never dry off. The dampness gets into your bones, you’re cold from the inside out. You wake up and your sheets are a little dampish, you can feel it in your elbows and your ribs and your knees. You need to pile on the sweaters just to allow your body to feel warm in spite of being, as it were, dumped in the middle of a tepid body of water.

It’s true, the place is a rainforest. There are ridiculously tall trees, beautiful stretches of forest that make me think of Narnia. You know, at the beginning of the world, when you could drop pennies on the ground and get a penny tree, because everything is just that fertile. Driving from Victoria to Duncan is almost an exercise is running from the fertility of the place; if you stop for any length of time it will start to grow on you too. It will pull you into its wet green self and devour you.

And I’m not even kidding; there is moss everywhere. We drove through forests with massive trees entirely covered in the stuff; it grows on the sidewalks, the roofs, in the gardens. If you stand still too long you might find it creeping up onto your scalp. It’s like they beat back the forest as much as they can, but it’s a losing battle. Eventually the forest will take over and will just make mossy mounds of human civilization. Not that this is tragic, really. It reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s forest; In the darkness the fields / defend themselves with fences / in vain: / everything / is getting in.

The people of British Columbia are on the true frontier. They are on an eternal crusade against a wall of moisture that falls from the sky and inches in from the coast, a wet invader that is replenished daily. They are the warriors who hold back the tide that could envelop us all. Praise them.

Vancouver

Vancouver

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I am very proud of me. Ridiculously proud. I have just returned from Vancouver, where I did something I have never done before. I wandered around aimlessly in Vancouver and did not get lost. I repeat, I did not get lost. So here’s what I did. Bear with me, because my pride is very very great.

Okay, so I left my friend Xandria’s place, where I was staying in vancouver, and picked a direction. I’ve never walked much further east than I am, and I drove in with my brother-in-law from the west, so I decided to walk west. I knew there were some streets there. Looked to me from the car that there might be something happening that way. And if all else failed I knew Stanley Park was that way because we drove through it. So off I went.

I remembered my friend Xandria telling me to stay away from a street called ‘East Hastings’, but on the map it looked big and important, so I thought if I walked along it I will get somewhere, well, big and important. So I gravitated that way. I walked and walked and walked. It started to rain. What a shock. Not a lot of rain, just a little. I was wearing jeans and a hoodie, I had no umbrella. Because I am stupid and from Ontario. They put something in the water there that makes us all really dense and slow.

So I walked and walked and I realized that I was not in the best end of town. I was suddenly a bit worried that possibly I was in the industrial end and walking further and further into the industrial end, but I was enjoying the walk so I didn’t so much care. Hey, I could always just turn around and walk back, right? I left my trail of bread crumbs.

Finally I realized that I was getting rather damp by that point, because it was really seriously raining. So I popped into a shop that claimed to sell lots of things determined buy an umbrella. The shop was actually a chinese medicine shop, which was cool. Racks on the walls filled with dried…things. I have studied Chinese medicine a few times during my master’s degree and have a lot of respect for it, so I was hip to all that. I could even walk into the place, though; there was stuff piled everywhere and an entire family standing in the aisle in front of me. I looked around for something that might look like an umbrella.

A tiny Chinese woman looked up at me and said, “Can I help you?” The what are you doing here, big white woman? is not said but is naturally implied, in the nicest possible way.

“Do you have umbrellas?” I asked.

“Umbrellas! Yes!” Everyone tittered. She pointed behind me to a small holder with about eight umbrellas in it. I pulled one out and notice that it is entirely covered with dust. Hey, no problem.

“Nine nine,” the woman said.

“Ninety nine cents,” another woman said.

“Ninety nine dollars,” another woman corrected.

“Nine ninety,” the first woman said. I gave her a ten dollar bill. She gave me my dime and I go out into the rain with my very very dusty black umbrella. Normally I would not buy things in black, but who was I to be picky at that point, it was pissing like an eight year old halfway through Dances with Wolves. My umbrella has a tag on it that tells me it was made in Shanghai.

I kept walking. I had absolutely no clue where I was going. I passed by all kinds of tasty things; a big line up next to a detox centre which I presume is for methadone; a 10:30am crowd having a nice mid-morning weed break. I passed by a few rundown hotels advertising cheap rates and good security. I still had no clue if I was walking into or out of downtown Vancouver, but my ever-optimistic presumption was that there is something interesting on the other side of this.

Finally I turned left and walk up a street. This looks more or less the same, but slightly less gritty. I found a diner advertizing breakfast (always a good way to flag me down) and dropped in for a bite. I was just under the wire for the 11am cut off. I read my book while I ate. All memory is revisionist, all stories are apocryphal, all photographs hang suspended in the present tense. Diane Schoemperlen is a genius. As I was reading I noticed that the buses passing me said ‘downtown’ on them, and went a block south and then turned right. I decided to follow them and hope I end up somewhere interesting. I was already proud of myself; I seemed to be heading in the right direction and I could still concievably make it back to Xan’s place without having to call for directions. Off I went.

The first thing I saw is that I had hit Granville street. This is the only street in Vancouver I have ever actually heard of, so I was ridiculously pleased. I stop[ed in at a drug store and get some vanilla-flavoured lip gloss and more sparkly lip gloss, since my other sparkly lip gloss is in the care of my friend Cassie in New York City. I saw a girl with a starbucks cup and resisted asking her where the nearest starbucks was. I walked out the door and noticed that there was a starbucks next to the drug store. Also across the street from the drug store. I got a coffee and sat down to read more.

A nice man sat behind me and we talk about the weather.

“Do you think it will clear up?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.”

“I’m not from around here,” I said.

“Oh, where are you from, the Okanagan?” I have no idea why he thought I look like I might be from the Okanagan. I wonder if it’s my raspberry deodorant making people think I smell fresh and fruity.

“No, Toronto.”

“Oh! Really not from around here.” He then told me all about his aunt from Willowdale and how his parents are from Barrie. I responded in kind and tell him that my parents are from Vancouver Island, and we discussed the strange provincal zoning laws. Also the politics, and the fact that British Columbia is constantly in a state of pre-election; a state that only occurs in Ontario prior to an election, while the people of British Columbia are constantly poised to overthrow their own government. He also told me it’s best to walk northward toward the waterfront rather than southward.

“It’s dumpy down there,” he says. I told him which way I walked in. He said that was pretty dumpy too. Nice man.

I wandered out again and found a book store to fuss around in. Very quickly I find the Canadian literature wall and about 15 books I want really really badly. I wanted Carol Shield’s Unless, but it’s still in hardback. I want Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and a new copy of Margaret Atwood’s Good Bones, but I settle for Alice Munro’s Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage.

I called Xan. I told her where I was and how I got there. She is terrified and appalled. “You walked through the worst neighbourhood in Vancouver,” she said. “They kill people here, you know. They send you to the pig farm.” I am doubly pleased with myself. “I can’t believe I didn’t give you my ‘where not to go in Vancouver’ lecture”, she says. “I give everyone that lecture.” I realized she’s worried because she has seen me in my flannel nightie and realizes that I have an innate innocence like a five year old girl. She told me how to take the bus home and forbids me to walk back. I was not too tempted to disobey her, because it was raining even harder by then.

I found a bus stop as directed and sat down to wait.

“Bus fare is two dollars, right?” I asked the guy next to me.

“Depends on which zone you’re going to,” he said.

“Zone?” I asked, confused. A girl across from us giggled.

“Oh, you’re not from here, are you,” she said.

“No, not really. I’m from Ontario.”

“Ah…well, at least there’s no snow here,” she said. I shake my head and laugh. They tell me how to take the bus.

I almost made it home without getting lost or confused, but I overshot by a block and had to circle back to get to Xan’s place. But I think overall I did pretty damn well.

Commitment of the Day

Commitment of the Day

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I’m applying to graduate school. Again. *facepalms* No really, it’s a good thing. It is. I’m even marginally excited about it in a way I wasn’t three days ago. I think it might even be fun. Let’s just hope I get in…

Oh come on. Graduate school is the one thing I’m actually qualified for. *weeps*