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    Friday, September 29, 2006

    building metaphors

    Our building is alive like a big ship. It creaks and moans and rumbles. It has this organic feel to it, because it is so old and scarred - there are ink stains on our floor from where people used to run printing presses, and the wooden pillars that hold up our ceiling are all banged up. There are arches in the walls where old doorways have been filled. It feels incredibly solid, but at the same time it is always moving, settling and shifting. Here at the top of it, I feel like I am safe in the belly of an ark; or safe like I am a small thing nested in the branches of a big tree.

    I like buildings that feel like they have intentions. Like the people who built them, and the people who contributed to them over the years, have invested something of themselves. This isn't to say I dislike modern buildings, because I really don't: I love exciting new design. But it has to be loved. It has to be something the person really felt and believed in.

    The process of building things has changed, so maybe we invest less. It just used to take more time to do everything, things weren't so ready-made, more had to be done by hand. And so maybe people couldn't help being a little more involved in what they made. Now, a building can be thrown up in a few months. The workers barely have time to stand back and look at what they've done before they're on to the next one. As a result, it is much more about the architect, about the concept of the building, about its relationship with its environment. With old buildings, there were so many craftsmen engaged, even the ugly buildings kind of take on this life in the details. But new buildings don't have details. Or they do, but they often feel sort of tacked-on.

    We engage with modern buildings as a whole unit, like we've condensed what used to be a complex verbal epic into a brief statement. And some new architecture pulls it off, and you get some perfect little haiku of a building, nestling gracefully into its surroundings (wildly mixing my metaphors, but who cares, nobody reads this anyway). And some new buildings are just empty words, thrown together - like one of those nonsense spam e-mails where they just throw a bunch of words randomly together in a parody of communication. They are unresponsive, blunt, clunking, inert.

    Thursday, September 28, 2006

    Damaged by the incursion of deconstruction

    From The New York Times Magazine, November 20, 2005:

    Deborah Solomon: Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.

    Jean Baudrillard: That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.


    * * *

    I read this, after struggling through three hours of French deconstruction theory. Gotta love Baudrillard. Well, actually, you can love or not love, it's all the same.

    Reminds me of an interview I once saw with Andy Warhol, where the hapless interviewer asked, "but don't you think your art is becoming rather repetitive?" and Andy responded with a little smile and his characteristic neutral demureness, "Oh, ye-es."


    * * *

    Lately I wonder if my education is a language I do not need. Or at least, a language which communicates only to a few. Like I am learning the language of the South Sea Islanders, without really knowing if I will ever go to the South Sea Islands, or if I will like it when I get there.

    I love to read philosophy, to be filled with fear and trembling instead of just the fear and loathing that I generally feel when I confront politics or popular culture. I love that when I read Nietzsche, my heart beats harder in my chest. I love the basic decency of Arendt, or Voegelin, or Camus, or even John freakin' Durham Peters for that matter.

    But I am so bad at talking about it. Like here I am, this fucking South Sea Island linguist, washed up on the shore of a South Sea Island after a perilous journey for which I laid everything on the line, and I struggle up the shore and into the nearest settlement, open my mouth...

    ...and find I am totally inarticulate. I speak, and no one understands. They stare blankly at me, and exchange frowns when they think I'm not looking. Because I learned everything I know from books, and books do not talk back.

    I tell myself I am learning ways in which to speak to other people about ideas, about the things that are important; the stuff that if you don't talk about it and think about it and feel something about it - then you aren't really alive at all.

    But in the end maybe all I am learning is how not to speak to people. How to alienate people. Or how to speak only to myself, in a bastard tongue indecipherable to anyone else, which I guess amounts to the same thing.

    'Survival of the fittest' is a theory for jerks

    "The mental space in which people dream and act is largely occupied today by Western imagery. The vast furrows of cultural monoculture left behind are, as in all monocultures, both barren and dangerous. They have eliminated the innumberable varieties of being human and have turned the world into a place deprived of adventure and surprise; the 'Other' has vanished with development. Moreover, the spreading monoculture has eroded viable alternatives to the industrial, growth-oriented society and dangerously crippled humankind's capacity to meet an increasingly different future with creative responses."

    Wolfgang Sachs

    Wednesday, September 27, 2006

    My friend keeps her phone in a tree.

    My lovely Katie is moving her entire house onto her neighbour's driveway, so that she can have her foundation fixed and a new basement dug. In order to move a house, you have to make certain preparations. You have to secure your shit. You have to make room in your yard (or neighbour's yard). And you have to disconnect the things that normally connect you and your house to the modern world. Like your pipes. And your power. And your phone.

    So Kate, loathe to disconnect herself, had the telephone repair man install her phone in a tree. Today when she called, there was a chipmunk watching her.

    Tuesday, September 26, 2006

    Here Be Monsters

    When I was little, I just assumed there were really undiscovered islands. I believed in pirates and Pippi Longstocking, and I thought that if I wanted to, I could forge a legitimate career as an explorer of uncharted territory. I had this moment of absolute horror one day when they announced on the news that clever scientists had finally managed to link up all the satellite images of Earth. Every square foot was now accounted for, they said, showing the planet glittering away like a débutante in her sequined gown. I clearly remember this as one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Not as bad as falling out of love for the first time, but pretty bad.

    Since then, I have come to appreciate that there are nevertheless many exciting and little-known places that have yet to be explored. But I have grown ambivalent about exploration itself as a concept - it so easily slips into exploitation. All those people who traipse around the world, transforming real places where people have authentic (now there is a word to conjure vomit with, but press on) cultural identities and communities into just so many tourist destinations. All that jet exhaust cascading in foul ribbons across the ether. All those feet to trample foot-paths into virgin forests. Maybe I am better staying in the city and dreaming dreams.

    I also have a problem with the idea of travel as a means of escape, because I imagine most of the time the darkest things travel with you.

    But still...I feel restless in Montreal. I am getting so close to finally finishing my degree, and I want to break out and make big changes. Sometimes I think I am too comfortable here, too used to my old shortcuts and hangouts and hiding places, and that the physical truth of that has metaphorical implications. But then when I think seriously about moving away I feel unsure and a little afraid. I am too old to feel so uncertain - it is babyish.



    I guess this is what life in your twenties is like. Trying to get a hold on your daydreams, sort out what is possible from what is merely fantasy, prioritize, understand what things you can let go of, and what things you need to hold onto - because I think that there are things I need to experience, ways of living, that if I don't try them out, I will shrink inside. And I don't want to shrink. I want to be in the thick of it, a part of the immensity of things.

    Monday, September 25, 2006

    Everything in Montreal is broken.

    On the first day of class, one of our profs asked those of us who weren't native to the city to give our impressions, and this is what one person said: everything in Montreal is broken.

    It has a certain ring to it, no?

    Certainly felt true today, with the loud construction, and the moody escalators, and the subway delays, and the sky all grey and almost granular with cold. Winter is coming, tra-la-la.

    I met a girl from Shanghai, once, who was living here in Montreal because she liked the "layering possibilities" our climate afforded. She had had the opportunity to go to university in California, Hawaii (!!) or here. And over the two places with the almost perfect climates, she went for nine months of cold, ice, knifelike wind and dark - punctuated by a brief spell of subtropical, sweltering, mind-numbing heat - because she liked the sartorial opportunities it gave her. This killed me. I made her explain it twice.

    Not that I don't love my home. I do. But I don't wear this weather well. It wears me.

    Wednesday, September 20, 2006

    My uncool streak

    Lately I have been behaving badly, and not in a good way. I don't know what to do with myself. I am so worried about this semester, and I feel stressed out, and poor, and frumpy - because I am poor, and cannot even afford a goddamn haircut right now. I keep cutting my own bangs, and I look like a 15-year-old who maybe likes the Ramones too much. But I try to squeeze all this down to a manageable size of closet monster, and I politely tell the monster to go fuck itself.

    Whatever.

    So on Saturday I went to the You Say Party! We Say Die! show. Or more accurately, the Controller Controller show, but really I went to see the opening act. They were wonderful. The gang of them were just so raucous and full of themselves and it was great. At one point, the lovely girl who is the main singer (and I think lyricist) informed the audience that she was really excited because her good friend was present who she hadn't seen in a while. As the next song started, she hopped down off the stage, and performed the song dancing face to face with this friend of hers, the two of them grinning and adorable.

    So now I was kind of in love with the lead singer.

    After her band had finished, I noticed her standing in front of M's and my table. I decided to offer to buy her a drink - a cool thing to do, I thought. So she accepted, and we went to the bar, and I bought her a g&t as requested. She introduced herself (Becky, adorable Becky; I love art girls). And then - I started to gush, to her growing bemusement: something about how her band reminded me of the B52s, but just to be clear, the early B52s, which is a favourable comparison, because even though a lot of people think they are a novelty act or cheesy or something, they are really just incredibly good and original and these amazing performers - I mean, especially if you ever see old footage of their performance of rock lobster on SNL...

    (Oh my god, what am I blathering on about, why am I still talking, oh my god how do I stop...)

    Then I ran away.

    THEN - it gets better - I went back after ten minutes, interrupted her conversation with her old friend, and APOLOGIZED, in case she was insulted by my comparison. Because comparisons are odious. And she sweetly patted my arm and reassured me the she loves the B52s.

    Why am I so deranged?

    I also had a horrid presentation to do for my class on Problems in African Development, or whatever it's called. The prof held up a paper warning 3 minutes left when I was just finishing the introduction and winding up for my first topic. So I blurted out as many of the salient points as I could in the time remaining, while classmates looked confused or bored. A stellar performance which ended with me dropping my burning face to the desk as people politely applauded. Quickly followed by the prof taking fifteen minutes to go over all the things I failed to discuss, or had explained too poorly for people to understand.

    I don't just look like I'm in highschool. I feel like it.


    --------------------
    Addendum: Actually, I think I felt cooler in highschool.

    In highschool I (a) went to parties - when was the last party I went to? besides boring wine and cheese type parties where people act old and sit around and discuss their sound equipment; (b) had a band - described by the Montreal Mirror as "Screaming accompanied by random musical notes"; (c) wore cool clothes (well, ok, weird-ass is a more accurate description, but I thought I looked cool, which is the other half of the battle); and (d) believed I was destined for greatness. Now I don't think I even know what greatness even looks like. I am so far from feeling destined for greatness, I just worry about not disappearing

    Sunday, September 17, 2006

    After the college shooting

    Last night I had bad dreams, the kind that are convoluted and weird and that leave you haunted with contextless emotions. The one I remember involved seeing the first person I ever really fell in love with, D. I felt so completely in love with him still. And when he put his arms around me, enfolded me (the man was huge), I felt he loved me like before, and I felt intense relief, but also worry, and sadness. It felt so natural to be loved by D again, to be clung to in the desperate way we used to hold each other. And then because it was a dream, D let go of me and became a long-limbed wolf, wild and strange and unlistening, and ran away across the grey hills.

    I saw a hateful man I had never seen come with a gun come and put D in his sights, and I tried to call out but I was dumb. The man with the gun fired his shot - and there was that beautiful pale wolf form, laid out in a bloody stain. It broke my heart.

    I woke with a start, rigid with grief and anger. M was beside me, and although he put his arms around me, it felt foreign, like I didn't completely know him. I was still stuck in my own past. I felt like my brain had been storing this chemical equation - a recipe for the exact cocktail of feelings that was loving D - and had somehow stirred this up and made me feel something I haven't felt in years. And later, I think understood what all of this was about.

    Because a violent and depressed young man recently walked into the college where D and I once met, where D and I once went to school, where we had classes and then saw each other, and smiled shyly at each other, and felt lust and wonder and love all caught up in each other so that it felt like anyone seeing us would be able to see it, too. And in that college where D and I fell in love with each other, the first time either of us had ever really fallen in love, this violent young man used a gun to fire bullets into students. Randomly. And now a girl is dead, and several more might still die, and we are already becoming bored with the news footage, and the speculation, and the sensation.

    And nothing lasts. I will never love M the way I loved D, because I will never be that young and open and naive. Because what happened to D and my love was not sudden like a gunshot. It was slow and creeping, like a disease, or like old age. It was a deadening and a loss of warmth. And I could stand right in front of him, press myself against him, feel his arms around me, feel him inside me... and there was nothing. And before it happened that way, I didn't think it could. I didn't think love could end that way - in estrangement and indifference.

    But with M, there is this. This love which is somehow very different. There are bad things, because I do not believe in love the way I used to: distrust, sometimes, and fear and dread. But there is also an opening up that comes with resigning yourself to the fact that love is painful, and you wouldn't really have it any other way. And M is so much more real than D ever was, in part because he is so strong and different and determined. He is brave enough, and smart enough, to try to see me as I really am. We will not meld together like D and I did. We will not be losing ourselves in one another. But we will be spending many more mornings together, waking up pressed against each other, comforting each other and telling silly jokes and smiling. If I have nightmares, if I feel that sliver of iron in my chest that is the knowledge that one day he might no longer care for me, or me for him, it is still the case that he is my best friend, who holds my hand against his heart and tells me not to be afraid.