0 Quick Takes

I'm tired and grumpy and busy, and I have a headache, so as far as tonight is concerned, nothing happened this week. Maybe it will change tomorrow. Sorry about that.

Global Warming

Right, so it's Blog Action Day and I'm supposed to talk to you about Global Warming.

Now, maybe one or two of you have been reading my blog for more than a year now, or have gone through my archives, or whatever, and are now saying, "But didn't you once try to poke holes in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth?" Well, yes, I suppose I did. But that was because his data wasn't conclusive--or even relevant--and his argumentation had gaps in it, not because I disagree with his cause. Some people will point it out if you have a hole in the seat of your pants; some people will point it out if you have a hole in your car door; I point it out (or want to) if you have a hole in your argument. That's all. I dislike blatant misinformation.

"But," you might say, "didn't you say in that same post that you don't believe that global warming actually has been proven beyond all doubt?"

Well, of course I said that. I'm even marginally informed and I try to be honest, which pretty much means that I don't believe that global warming has been proven beyond all doubt. Not only do I think that almost nothing is proven beyond all doubt (which is impossible in an empirical system of knowledge, fyi), but I recognise that there is some evidence which suggests that global warming either a) doesn't exist or b) isn't man-made. That's not the same as saying that it's proven beyond all doubt that it doesn't exist or that it is even unlikely to exist. All it means is that there is room for doubt, or interpretation of data, or disagreement, or what have you.

If you did read that article, you may remember that I said we ought to act as though global warming exists, whether it does or not. Firstly, I think that it may very well exist. I think there might even be a good chance that it exists. Secondly, even in the event that it doesn't exist, most of the means that I know of for trying to prevent/postpone global warming are good for the environment for other reasons, too. Fewer emission is better for the air (and all that breathes it). Decreased fuel consumption is not only better for human civilization in terms of long-term energy reliability, it might also help mitigate ecosystem destruction. And so on.

Except that I add a caveat to this: we ought to be careful about what we do to mitigate the damage. Consume less, by all means and any means. Of course. I mean we ought to be careful about assuming that our 'green' energy programs are actually greener. We must check that relying on wind power doesn't kill off the endangered Tibetan cuttlefish and Australian ground sloths and Chilean pushmi-pullyus. In our well-meant but hasty drive to prevent one disaster, we must be careful that we don't cause another.

I suppose what I mean is this: Let's all start by consuming less. Much less. That's a good one, and it doesn't require a whole lot of thought to get started. Don't drive when you don't have to, put your thermostat lower, wash clothes only when you have a full load, fly economy if you must fly, buy domestic, buy used, buy less, throw out less, eat less. (Keep your empty jam jars, because they make good cups. Read those red-neck repair jokes not for laughs but inspiration.) And then let's all think very carefully about what our next step is, and not let partisan biases and our fear of not sounding environmentalist enough get us headed the wrong way.

And let's not lose hope. Or, let's find where we put our hope. 'Cause on this issue and on all environmental issues, I'm not sure I've still got mine handy.

I know! Let's pray on this. And I mean this not in a pray-as-an-automatic-response way, like lots of Christian-type bloggers will, but in the way of modern media. In Battlestar Gallactica, one character is diagnosed with cancer. They talk about treatments, and the doctor half-jokes about trying prayer. But then, just as the doctor walks out of the room, he turns to her and says, "And for the record, I would seriously consider prayer." For some people, prayer really is a last resort, and I'm scared that that's where we are right now: on the edge of apocalypse. That by now it's out of our hands, and our only job is to try not to make things worse and just hope they get better. I'm really, really scared that this is the case.

But I'm sometimes struck by something. A person who has been shot three times in the torso can sometimes still walk to the hospital. Our bodies are frail enough that a little damage in the right place (well, wrong place, I guess) can kill us in seconds, and yet our bodies can also stumble on when damaged beyond recognition, and still even recover. I know a man who was hit full-on by a transport truck, and he was walking again within a year. Maybe, just maybe, even after all the abuse we put our world through, it (we) can still stumble on and then recover. But in order for that to happen we must stop the abuse, and I suppose that's what this whole Blog Action Day and every environmental awareness campaign is supposed to be about. I think the problem is that we need to stop being so big on 'awareness' and more about 'action plan' and 'hope.' 'Awareness' just seems to be code for 'fear-mongering,' and breeds either despair or resistance. Neither of these are any good at all. What we need is cooperation. And practicality. And cheerfulness.

I saw a This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes skit where the newscaster said that the Catholic Church was criticizing advertising companies for using sex and greed to sell products; they should do what the Church has always done and use guilt and fear. My first thought was, Isn't that more of an environmentalist or social activist thing than a Catholic thing? I recognize that elements in the Catholic Church have used guilt and fear a lot and I also recognize that many social activist groups are trying to get past that, but it does seem to me that there's little difference between hell-fire and gun-fire or forest-fires as far as public relations go.

One way or the other, I hope the global warming/environmental responsibility campaign will come around.

I probably did not write something in the spirit of the Blog Action Day proposal, did I? Well, I suppose this must do, because I have nothing else.

Good luck. Go read more useful Blog Action Day posts.

Additions to the 7

I forgot these two last night. I got up to seven a bit too soon.

8. It's snowing up here now. Apparently it does not usually stay on the ground for long, but a light dusting of snow has been here for a few days now. I have heard that the second last week of October or so usually gives us one more blast of warmth.

9. We had Turkey Day dinner on Thursday night. This is because my Dad works straight through this weekend, so Monday night's a no-go for us. We had a chicken and not a turkey, with taters and carrots and parsnips and stuffing and spinach.
Americans: in Canada, we celebrate our harvest festival at actual harvest time, not in early winter. (Okay, okay, I realize that November is harvest time in some of the US. Still not convinced it would have been for those pilgrims you always see eating the pumpkins, though.)
Non-Northern North Americans: Turkey Day is slang for Thanksgiving, which is a stat day in Canada and the US. If you watch American telly, I assume you know what Thanksgiving is.

7 Quick Takes (XIII)

1. I just saw this on MSN News: http://www.good.is/post/african-dynamo/?GT1=48001. So cool.

2. Saturday night, I went to volunteer and help set up for Run for the Cure. Not too much to say about that, really. It was at Keyano College, and was not really all that labour-intensive.

3. On Sunday, I made the interesting discovery that the special deadline for Queen's students for the OGS application (that's "Ontario Graduate Scholarship") had passed. This lead to stress and then to research, which led to more stress. On the one hand, I learned that a number of programs I want to apply to have deadlines in January, which is more than doable. On the other hand, I learned that one program--a nice one--has a deadline in early November. Yikes.

And later, I learned that the OGS deadline in fact has not passed. So all that work I haven't done on the application because I thought it was too late all of a sudden is looming in on me. I am now behind schedule. Fortunately, I have this weekend to get my act together and catch right up.

4. On Monday, I started to feel sick at work. On Tuesday, I went home sick within half an hour of arriving. I was off Tuesday through Thursday. Jon can attest to the fact that I have the tendency to try and, uh, ignore my symptoms and go to class anyway. He has lectured me about this in the past. Anyway, remembering what Jon said about rest and what my coworkers said about not spreading my sickness to them, I stayed home.

5. And started watching the first season of Battlestar Gallactica again. Yeah, yeah, nerdy or whatever.

Actually, this deserves a minute. Let's think on this. Is anybody in a position to tease anyone else about TV shows any more? Unless you don't watch TV at all, you likely have some guilty pleasure. It doesn't matter what you watch; nothing is above some sort of critique. Even the award-winners, like ER or CSI or Law and Order, can have assorted accusations leveled against them, from gore-mongering to predictability to being a soap opera. And at least the acting and scriptwriting in Battlestar are good, so you can't hit it with the standard attacks on sci-fi as being poorly-developed trash. If you don't watch TV at all, I'd really ask if you have a platform to stand on there, too: for one, if you haven't watched the show, where do you get your information by which you make these judgements?

Back to the bullet, though. I do quite want to watch the second season now. How long can I wait before I justify making another personal purchase? Sadly, after my holiday, I'd have to say I should wait until November, anyway.

6. I finished Stephen King's On Writing. Now I'm having worries over my writing career. King recommends spending 4-6 hours per day reading and writing. Some days I must make that, but others will be far from it. Lately writing anything other than this blog has been difficult. Granted, King takes that into account. He says that each person will produce at their own pace: James Joyce, for instance, reputedly worked at less than seven words a day. It was either Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf who spent an entire afternoon over a comma. Perhaps at some point I will make a post discussing some of King's advice and put it up under "Writer's Package." Some of it contradicts what I've put up there before, of course. Kay, I think, would like King's sense of spontaneous development.

But still, with a full-time job and assorted ways I like to waste my time, 4-6 hours a day is not a good thing to hear. Then again, I can spit in King's face (metaphorically) and do it my own way.

The question of course is, will that work?

7. I continue to struggle with the narrative styles of the sources I have to read in my research. This is at work. Some of the documents I'm reading are written by people whose prose style is less than aesthetic or literary. Sometimes it's endearing and funny, and other times it's frustrating. The grammatical sense of some of these writers frustrates me, but I suppose they haven't been educated as much as I have been in these sorts of things. (That still gets me though, because grammar is not THAT HARD!) (Sorry.) But their sense of flow is also odd. When I voiced my frustration, a coworker of mine--the one whose recent experiences have included the less-than-corporeal--said she found the one author difficult because she (the author) tended to go off on long digressions on how great religion is. Now, I've been catching hints of anti-religious sentiment in this coworker lately, so I'm wondering when I'm going to have to deal with that. I didn't find that all too problematic, considering that the writer is a nun, after all, and much of her thesis in these books (if she really has one) is the Sovereignty and Goodness of God. I'm here directly referencing the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, which tells the story of her capture, captivity, and ransom by New England aboriginal people, but by the title you can tell that one of her major concerns is how great God is and how this experience transformed and was transformed by her spiritual life. (Note: I've linked to Wikipedia here, but the article sucks, particularly in its dismissiveness towards "the Puritan mind." This page will give you enough information for my purposes, but if you're curious, I really suggest you look elsewhere than Wikipedia.) Similarly, while this book may be about the services rendered by the Grey Nuns of Montreal to the communities of northern Canada, it is also about the ways in which God works through the Grey Nuns to impact these northern communities. Of course I'm trapsing all over the Intentional Fallacy here (you can see where I stepped in it trod all over what I just wrote if you look carefully enough), but since the author does believe that God most specifically works through these women, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this idea was at least present in her mind when she wrote the book.

What irks me is the patchiness of the narrative and the almost casual way with which she deals with the gory and horrible. Infanticide is mentioned without squeamishness, though with explicit compassion. One sister mangled her hand in a laundry machine, but the author rendered this anecdote almost comically, along the lines of, "She obviously pulled her hand out immediately, but unfortunately left her ring and her finger behind." That's not to say that I wouldn't have perhaps delivered the same story in a similar way, but only to people I knew and who knew I felt compassion even though I was maybe employing dark humour along the way. Publication, though? I don't know.

Another thing that bothers me is her use of the phrases, "There is no need to emphasize that...", or, "Obviously...", or something similar.

Lastly and on a more positive note, these odd stylistic choices are sometimes amusing or endearing. For instance, in a memoir, we find the following (paraphrased): "There are lots more things I would like to discuss, especially concerning religion, but I keep losing my pencil, so can't write them down as they come to my mind." That might not be verbatim, but I think it captures the sense and the personality/diction of it. As much as similar things appear on this blog, I would never include something like that in a memoir. But that's just it, right? What I think of as my objectives in a memoir are likely not the same as this woman does; if they are, then my means of getting their certainly are not the same. Those traits that I think of as lending credibility or honesty or authority to my story are not the same as those traits this woman thinks of as lending etc. etc. etc. The hybridity of conversational and formal tone I use here, on my blog, is closer to something I think she's trying to acheive. I get the sense that she's thinking of this more as writing a letter than as writing a book. There's a familiarity to it, a consciousness of the physical and social space that she's writing in, that is utterly unlike what I think of as 'formal writing.'

In a sense, despite the irritation I feel as I try to pull information from rambling, anecdotal, grammatically incoherent (sometimes it really is impossible to figure out what the author meant thanks to typos or grammatical fumbles), and colloquial sources, I also realize the placedness of my own sense of "good writing"(don't worry, I'll explain what I mean by that). I've grown up and/or been educated with a number of assumptions of how to write so your reader will respect you, understand you, feel comfortable with what you've written, enjoy what you've written, and in the end believe you. However, all of these techniques or rules or objectives I've learned are particular to a limited number of audiences. Quite frankly, those audiences are far removed from the audiences that populate rural northern Canada, many of whom speak English as a second language and many of whom have not been educated in anything like the standards we expect in southern Ontario (for instance, a number likely didn't graduate from grade eleven). This may be a literate audience, but it's not a literary audience, that's for sure. It's an audience of trappers and farmers and industry workers who couldn't write like Louis L'Amour (or, if you want a more modern example, Dan Brown) if they spent years at it. I think of some of the people who went to my home church or went to my elementary school. The word "unsophisticated" comes to mind. And the style of these books, with all of their preoccupations and taboos and ethnic slurs and litanies of who was related to whom and who died when or how and what the family thought of that, is precisely the most meaningful, or at least entertaining and communicative, to this group of people.

I am not questioning my own literary modes or ambitions here. Not at all. I am getting, I think, the beginning of an insight. These books may not less difficult for me, but perhaps with this realization in mind they will be more bearable and more interesting.

And if you somehow sat through that jumbled mess of thought up there, I am both flattered because you thought it was worth it and proud that you managed to tie together my own digressions and preoccupations. And jargon. I wish there was an easier way to describe a "preoccupation".

And that, my friends, is 7.

I'd direct you, as usual, to the Quick Takes Queen, but she's going wireless for one week, so I wish her well in that (heehee, alliteration) and will not link.

Adieu.

Websites are like puppies...

INTERN says:

"A website is like a new puppy. Cute and fun, but, like your parents loved to say, "a big responsibility." If it's a blog, you need to feed it new content regularly or it will look abandoned. If it's a website written in some finnicky language, you'll need to know how to fix the code if something breaks (or call an expensive internet-veterinarian). And no matter what it is, you'll need to resist the urge to dress it up in those ridiculous sweaters."

7 Quick Takes (XII)

1. I managed, through what I think of as a terribly faulty keyboard effect, to delete my post. I am quite unhappy about this. I do not think that pressing a scroll key while your text is highlighted should delete it. That makes no sense. My entry #1 was quite long and I thought it was good, but now it's all gone. OK, re-try. Remember Buddhist sand pictures.

2. I may have previously made similar claims, but now it's more valid: It is autumn. I was going to go on about how much I love autumn, but Yolanda beat me to it. And not only did she beat me to it, but she also gets to experience seasonal changes in Burundi, not Fort McMurray. And despite the cold--which is bothering me far too much already for this coming winter to be healthy--I still love fall. I love the 'autumn'; those vowels and that silent 'n' just fascinate me, and the 'au' is the 'holy vowel' found in amen, salaam, and certain versions of ohm. What a euphonic sound. But of course the word is only the smallest fraction of it. The season itself is wonderful. In Ontario, autumn means sprawling pumpkin vines and chilly mornings and the beans turning scarlet or burgundy and the cornstalks whispering in their dry voices. In Fort McMurray, we don't have either of the latter two or much of the former two, but we do have many of the other trappings associated with this time of year: honking Vs of geese, chameleon trees, toadstools turning to black mush, frost on the grass. What is new is the degree to which I see these characteristics. Mainly, we are surrounded by hills here, especially in the downtown region. There are two banks of hills visible from my workplace, one in the north-north-west, roughly, and one in the south-south-west to south-south-east. These are tree-covered hills, so the colour change is very noticeable this time of year.
This morning was very foggy and frosty, both of which took a long time to burn off. I would like to be able to use the word "rime," but that requires salt water. Oh, well. Someday I will.

3. One of my co-workers claims to have seen a ghost in the Park. The facts of the case are thus: she was locking up one of our buildings, when she noticed a grey, glowing, robed figure go up the stairs. In this particular building, the stairs are blocked by a large display case (which was still in place), and then the landing is crowded with chipped, saintly statuary. Getting onto the stairs is all but impossible without moving at least the display case, and difficult without also moving the statues. Now, this co-worker has not believed any of the ghost stories told about our Park so far. The long-term staff does, and apparently doesn't share many of these claims with summer staff. I had heard a fair amount about George, our resident poltergeist, but I did not hear everything. Summer staff hear only about doors opening and closing and lights turning on and off. They do not hear about George's more, uh, destructive tendencies.
Anyway, the staff member who saw whatever it was does believe in the supernatural, but not in the stories about our Park. So this was an unlikely thing to hear from her. Also, I haven't heard anyone claim to have seen an apparition at the Park before. I've heard second-hand accounts of such things, but not first-hand.
All of which, I think, is very interesting. We'll see what the winter will bring. I have heard that the winter months are more active, supernaturally speaking.
The staff member does not seem worried or unnerved by whatever it is that she saw.

4. Our dear old dog is still dear, old, and more active than her body can handle. Case in point: as I was trying to type the previous entry, she was trying to beg a cookie out of me. Begging, that is, in the sense of a child tugging at a parent's clothes and jumping up and down and squealing until they buy the toy the kid wants. What our dear old dog was doing was this: prancing and breathing excitedly and putting her paw up on the arm of my chair and putting her nose into my stomach and on my arm while writhing her head around with a good deal of force. She wasn't quite using her nose to flip my hands off the keyboards--a trick she'll try on Mom pretty much daily--but she was close to it. Crazy dog. Now she'll off in the laundry room, cooling herself on the cement floor. As though it's not already cold in here. Crazy dog.

5. I am getting near the end of Anatomy of Criticism. I have discussed it already, so I'll leave it there. I am getting through Psalms, as ever. There is some seriously nice poetry in there. There's also a line that I kind of what to know the Hebrew for. The speakers wishes his enemies to be "consumed by wrath," and, in the context, there are three possible interpretations: 1) that God, wrathful, consumes them (ie. "God, in his anger/wrath, destroys the bad guys"); 2) that God consumes them with a physical manifestation of his anger (ie. "God manifests his wrath as fire and burns them"); and, my favourite, 3) they are consumed by their own wrath (ie. "they are wholly encompassed in their anger towards Israel, and their anger burns/devours/destroys them"). I want the Hebrew so I can tell if the last one is a valid translation. I like this idea: may your punishment for hating me be the hatred itself. The Dali Lama spoke of holding onto anger being like holding onto a hot coal: it hurts you before it hurts anyone else.

6. Through a Facebook conversation, I have been informed that deadlines for grant applications are creepy ever closer. As a result, last night I had a crisis about my future. See, in order to apply for a grant, you have to have tell them what, actually, you plan on researching. I had no idea whatsoever, and began to worry, in the sort of, "I have to decide my life in the next three days," "I am doomed to a life of misery," way. After a good hour of fretting and half-hearted, anxious, not-really-listening prayer (while washing the dishes), I brought it up with my Mom and we talked it over and she reminded me that I don't actually have to decide now which program I will go into (English Literature, Cultural Studies, Creative Writing), because I can actually apply for all three programs at different schools. So all I need to do now is find out which to tell OGS I am planning on doing (I'll have to call them about that), and try to figure out a thesis for each.
That last of which would not be easy, except in the shower last night I actually had a cluster-epiphany and came quite close to getting at least a direction after all. It's likely too scattered as it stands, but I can refine. The important thing is that I have a starting point. Briefly, without giving away too many ideas, I want to look at how a selection of texts deal with who we experience multiple identities within ourself or others, keeping a very close eye on the genre, media, and other formal considerations. I literally wrote down a few pages of possible sources and directions. The beautiful thing is, I can take this same list and refine it to be an English thesis or refine it to be a Culture Studies thesis. Whichever program I wind up taking (of those two, at any rate), I can still do the same basic thing. Possible texts include Sidney's sonnets, Donne's sonnets and other poems, Shakespeare's As You Like It (and, just possibly, 1 Henry IV), DC comics featuring Triplicate Girl (if I did this, though, I would actually have to start reading some comic books, something I really don't do, notwithstanding my general knowledge of superheroes), the computer game Half-Life 2, and The Real Inspector Hound (which is Theatre of the Absurd). Critical or 'source' literature I could draw on include Al Berger's Ways of Seeing, the works of Plato, of Freud, of Bakhtin, maybe of Foucault (esp. on hermaphrodism), the Pauline Epistles and assorted Christian theologians, and ... well, I think I'll keep the others a secret. Those ones are pretty common and expected in literary analysis, but I think I have a few ideas which are less predictable.
Oh, and this seems to be a rather arbitrary 'cap' to a lot of this disparate things I wrote on in my classes. Looking back, I seem to have focused on things like multiplicity or diversity or ambiguous/dual people. These all come into play here.
In the end, what this all means is that I have a fair amount of researching and filling in of applications to do in the immediate future, but also that I'm happier about where I'm going in the future thanks to a bit of distress on the same topic.

7. The folks at St. Thomas' tried to lassoo me into being part of the worship team. I tried to explain that I am not musically talented in the least. They asked if I could shake a ... one of those bean-filled shakie things. You know the ones. I suppose what they don't understand is that I can't even match clapping to a beat. My timing is awful. I remember on Rock Band I was failing horribly at a particular section: Jon and Phil pointed out that it was simply double the previous beat I seemed fine at, and I tried (and, I think, failed) to explain that doesn't help me at all because things like 'twice as fast' do not compute into anything workable in my brain. It's like dyslexia: it's impossible to discursively explain how I invert numbers. I just do. That part of my brain is broken. Same here. I played piano once upon a time, and I was quite mediocre. I can punch it out by rote, but I have little 'sense' of it. I don't clap during worship songs in which everyone else claps because I can't ever seem to clap at the same time as them. If you ever see me clapping on the back-beat, you can be sure it's not intentional.
Regardless, I now know the names of David, Laurie, and Kim, and they seem like nice people. Also, I will surely be asked to participate in worship service again soon. I do want to get involved somehow. Personally, I want to wear an alb. They likely won't offer that, though. Perhaps something I can do will come along, though. Music-related things are not among them.

Make sure you visit the Quick Takes Queen.