“I feel like we are in a giant car heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everyone in the car is arguing where they want to sit.”

Environmentalist David Suzuki to retire. My friend Brian and I are right now leading a 6 week workshop at our church on Suzuki's The Sacred Balance. The man has done a lot of great work — I'm going to miss his regular contributions to the public discourse.

Holy Sh*t!

This is pretty cute: lovely little notecards, lush calligraphy letterpress printed in metallic silver ink on luxury Italian paper . . . .

But what they say!

Hat tip to design*sponge.

Shameless

Stephen Colbert's Word on Rush Limbaugh.

Southern Ontario Gothic

Who knew? Alice Munro belongs to a whole sub-genre called Southern Ontario Gothic:

“Like the Southern Gothic of American writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, Southern Ontario Gothic analyzes and critiques social conditions such as race, gender, religion and politics, but in a Southern Ontario context. Southern Ontario Gothic is generally characterized by a stern realism set against the dour small-town Protestant morality stereotypical of the region, and often has underlying themes of moral hypocrisy. Actions and people that act against humanity, logic, and morality all are portrayed unfavorably, and one or more characters may be suffering from some form of mental illness.”

The View from Castle Rock

I look forward to reading this, Alice Munro’s latest, The View from Castle Rock, a memoir but not a memoir: “I was doing something closer to what a memoir does—exploring a life, my own life.” This appeals to me because she comes from the same neck of the woods as me, southern Ontario, and both our backgrounds are Calvinist, hers Scottish, mine Dutch. Slate glows:

“Critics have often marveled at the novellike density and sweep of Munro's short stories, at how she manages to create the impression that actions have ripened into consequences in the fullness of time. This, I think, is how she does it: by ending her tales in ways that could not have been anticipated yet feel so right we're forced to read each story again, scouring the text for hints. Munro doesn't drop many. Her style is classical, her presence remote. If we're going to find the solutions to her puzzles, we'll have to find them in the depths of what has happened, not in her rare moments of commentary.”

Destination: Vancouver

Salon has a new piece on Vancouver, part of a series they're running called “The Literary Guide to the World”:

“Vancouver is today among the select handful of world centers — think Geneva or Sydney — recognized solely by its livability: a happy accident of freeway-forbidding geography, Canadian social engineering and the best lessons of urban development.”

I just heard recently that the downtown neighbourhood of Yaletown is second only to Manhattan in residential density in North America.

Eduardo Recife

The inspiring collage work and type design of Eduardo Recife.

Ignoring global warming?

Should I stay or should I go Rx2008

Climate change = global depression?

“Failure to tackle the problem of climate change could trigger a worldwide economic slowdown along the same level as the Great Depression, warns a new report from a British economist.”

and here. And, of course, Tony Blair should have no trouble persuading George Bush to help lead the world in a global effort to prevent such a disaster from occurring.

Longing

“For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on ones’ hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

What does it mean?

“Through science, we human beings are able to grasp at least some of nature's secrets. We have cracked part of the cosmic code. Why this should be, just why Homo sapiens should carry the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma. We, who are children of the universe—animated startdust—can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules on which it runs. How we have become linked into this cosmic dimension is a mystery. Yet the linkage cannot be denied.

“What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such privilege? I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.”

Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning

The completed arbour with the "Verolite" roof

"There is no God and we are his prophets"

“There is no other path from the mystery of our being to the truth of our condition than metaphor.” — Robert Farrar Capon

Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest, The Road. The last McCarthy book I read was Suttree (a long time ago) which I found dense with its archaic vocabulary. The Road is much more spare in a Heming-way. Cormac has always tackled the grim stuff: the underbelly of society, the depths of depravity to which men will sink. And while the scenario of his latest is the grimmest of all, the sensations of hope, love and goodness are ironically most evident.

A father and 10-year-old son, who remain unnamed, are traveling southward across a postapocalyptic landscape where nothing has survived (Nuclear war? It’s never made clear). Nothing grows; all birds and animals have disappeared. Ash fills the sky and covers the earth. Survival is dependent upon finding old tins of food and avoiding cannibalistic marauders. Billions have died and the two don’t encounter others very often. Those they do encounter have mostly been reduced to the vilest of methods in order to survive and so staying out of sight is imperative. The man and boy try to stay fed and warm, dry and clean, but the odds are against them. They spend their days heading south, hoping for warmer temperatures.

My own inclination is dystopian. Most of us don’t take much time to look very carefully at population, resource depletion, climate change, etc., but a little reading makes it clear that a little recycling and some energy-efficient light bulbs are not going to change things much. So I am drawn to a book like this. What I found interesting was how the characters’ conversation was reduced to essentials: much of what we concern ourselves with is meaningless in a world such as this. The man and boy speak little and when they do it’s spare, often touching. Their love for each other is a beautiful thing to observe. A sense of purposefulness, justice, and hope permeates the two’s daily existence:

There are other good guys. You said so.
Yes.
So where are they?
They’re hiding.
Who are they hiding from?
From each other.
Are there lots of them?
We don’t know.
But some.
Some. Yes.
Is that true?
Yes. That’s true.
But it might not be true.
I think it’s true.
Okay.
You don’t believe me.
I believe you.
Okay.
I always believe you.
I don’t think so.
Yes I do. I have to.

19 March 1940 – 26 October 2003

Best discovery from Oxford American CD: "You You You You You"

From the aforementioned Oxford American music CD comes the quirkiest little song, "You You You You You" by the 6ths featuring Katherin Whalen (of Squirrel Nut Zippers fame). Naïve sounding and understated but completely intoxicating. Great, albeit corny, lyrics:

who who who who who
has made my dreams come true?
and turned my gray sky blue
why its you you you you you

Subway systems of the world

Subway systems from around the world, presented to scale. Below is London. Doesn't Vancouver look pathetic?

New Radiohead album in the works

Thom Yorke says recording sessions are "starting to get somewhere."

Also, Thom is supporting the Big Ask campaign.

The Last Drop

The current New Yorker has a great essay on the possibility (I'd say likelihood) of a global catastrophe:

“Philosophers and economists at least since Copernicus have noted that, although no substance is more valuable than water, none is more likely to be free. In “The Wealth of Nations,’’ Adam Smith called this the “diamond-water paradox”: although water is essential for life, and the value of diamonds is mostly aesthetic, the price of water has always been far lower than that of diamonds. Economists often argue that water should be considered a commodity, like housing or food. But water possesses an intangible, even mystical, quality that transcends the principles of economics; people simply don’t think about it in the way that they think about transportation or clothing—and they never have. Water is precious, but not like oil, which, once burned, is gone forever. While there is almost no human activity that doesn’t depend on water in some way, it never actually disappears: when water leaves one place, it simply goes somewhere else.

Water that dinosaurs drank is still consumed by humans, and the amount of freshwater on earth has not changed significantly for millions of years. But that doesn’t mean it’s available when or where it is needed. Nearly all of the earth’s water is in the ocean. Only three per cent is even theoretically available for humans to drink. Most of that is locked in polar ice caps and glaciers, or deeply embedded in layers of rock. If a large bucket were to represent all the seawater on the planet, and a coffee cup the amount of freshwater frozen in glaciers, only a teaspoon would remain for us to drink."

Röyksopp - Remind Me

Röyksopp uses information graphics to interesting effect in this music video. I'm stunned by how much work this must have been to produce.

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Spiegel Im Spiegel

Arvo Pärt's Spiegel Im Spiegel: saddest song ever? I think so.

Oxford American: The Music Issue

How much fun is that? I made a quick stop at the bookstore this evening and what do you know: the new Music Issue of Oxford American was in. With a free CD: Uncle Dave Macon, Sam Cooke, Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dorough's extraordinary "Three Is a Magic Number." Woo-hoo!

Studio 60 was better when it first came out

"Even by just watching the show in those early days, you felt like you were part of something special. It was truly the first of its kind — so revolutionary that it immediately spawned imitators like 30 Rock.

"In Studio 60's heyday, they would do this thing where Judd would come out before the opening credits and deliver this long, angry monologue about the current state of network television. I used to sit in front of the TV, just waiting for him to unleash his famous catchphrase, "It's not going to be a very good show tonight." But they haven't done that for a while."

Geneva Suggestions