... Can I become treasury secretary of some country and take 700,000,000,000 dollars from the public to save the world economy from my terrible debt? It can be any country, really... Somewhere warm would be nice.
We went to see the brilliant and engaging anti-corporatist journalist and author Naomi Klein tonight, speaking about her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine, which just came out in paperback. I haven't finished reading it because the first chapter was so shocking and horrifying that I had to put it down for awhile, but she was brilliant and engaging, in an anti-corporatist way. So anyway, now I just wanted to remind everyone to get rid of this guy however they can [see post from January 27, 2006]. Even Elizabeth May today expressed a similar sentiment. Me, I'm considering voting Liberal. Any game grits out there with a Green hopeful in their riding?
- Andrew
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Finished It!
Huh. I don't think I really get the ending. May have to reread the whole thing. I'll get back to you in a few years.
- Andrew
- Andrew
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Only 10 Pages Left To Go
I can't figure out how he's gonna wrap this thing up. I did, however, notice a very strange character shift: up until now, whenever there is a narrator (which is not very often), it's seemed from context to be the character of Hal (who is otherwise written about in the third person, like everyone else). But I just passed a sentence in which a locker-room full of tennis students is referred to as "we" and is described noticing Hal doing something out of the ordinary. Very tricky. I think "I" may turn out to be a presence in Hal's head. I guess "we" shall see.
In the meantime, here's a transcript of a lately-much-posted speech David Foster Wallace gave to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. I just finished reading it. Might seem weird to recommend advice about how to live from a guy who killed himself, but the catch is that it's pretty dang good advice. Check it out.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue — it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home — you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks...
If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
- Andrew
In the meantime, here's a transcript of a lately-much-posted speech David Foster Wallace gave to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. I just finished reading it. Might seem weird to recommend advice about how to live from a guy who killed himself, but the catch is that it's pretty dang good advice. Check it out.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue — it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home — you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks...
If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
- Andrew
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Settling In and Running Out
Here's The Onion's tribute to David Foster Wallace. Very funny and fitting.
Back in Wolfville, things are coming along slowly but surely. I finally got the Acadia recruitment poster/brochure done that's been hanging over my head for weeks. Looks pretty good, too, I think. It'll be a bit of a defining piece for the look of a lot of the univeristy's materials, so I'm glad I was able to take the time to get it just right, even though it meant staying late a lot of nights. Now I can spend more time on the smaller pieces that always need taking care of. At least until we get started on the viewbook Tuesday morning.
We finally got some bookshelves in our place, so now we can unpack about half the boxes we moved here. I bought a set second-hand, which my coworker Sherri and her husband were kind enough to pick up with me in their SUV one evening. Not sure exactly where we're going to put them yet. I guess we should be just throwing stuff wherever and moving it if we don't like it. There never seems to be time to get this place together, and it just doesn't quite feel like a home yet. Even Buster seems to think so.
Maybe it's because of all the time we spend travelling back to Halifax. Alison's been in every day this week, and we both have been going in every weekend for one reason or another. This afternoon, I'll be catching the bus so that I can stay overnight at Meg's place so that we can be ready for softball at 8:30 tomorrow morning. There's a bunch of games being held all day for the few teams that are remaining in the league, at a diamond in Spryfield. The Halifax Commons are too ripped up from the Keith Urban show a couple of weeks ago to play the rest of the season there, even though that was where we were booked to play since before the summer started. Stupid country-music-loving, public-space-abusing city officials! Anyways, so now we've got to play the remaining two weekends' games all in one day, as that's the only time this other field is available. Which means a whole day of playing softball and waiting to play softball in Spryfield, home of the Spryfield Graffiti Tour and the world-famous House Which Looks Identical to the Houses on Either Side of It, and catching the late bus back to "Woofville".
And next weekend I'll be taking the bus in on Friday night to play a show with Al Tuck, opening for Garrett Mason. That one should be pretty fun, actually. I've never heard Garrett — son of Dutch Mason, "The Prime Minister of the Blues" — but I hear he's quite something on the old guitar.
In other music news, Alison and I went over to the semi-nearby house of Ken and Heidi, whom we don't really know but sort of do in a complicated and ancient way, to play some Gamelan music. Ken has a full set of Gamelan instruments(!) and invites people over semi-regularly to play some Javanese-style music on them. It was lots of fun and even sounded not too bad, I think. Their house is really nice and homey. Hope we can get ours feeling something like that. I guess I should get off this eletronic ego-box and get to work on it.
I'll show you some pictures soon. Promise.
- Andrew
Back in Wolfville, things are coming along slowly but surely. I finally got the Acadia recruitment poster/brochure done that's been hanging over my head for weeks. Looks pretty good, too, I think. It'll be a bit of a defining piece for the look of a lot of the univeristy's materials, so I'm glad I was able to take the time to get it just right, even though it meant staying late a lot of nights. Now I can spend more time on the smaller pieces that always need taking care of. At least until we get started on the viewbook Tuesday morning.
We finally got some bookshelves in our place, so now we can unpack about half the boxes we moved here. I bought a set second-hand, which my coworker Sherri and her husband were kind enough to pick up with me in their SUV one evening. Not sure exactly where we're going to put them yet. I guess we should be just throwing stuff wherever and moving it if we don't like it. There never seems to be time to get this place together, and it just doesn't quite feel like a home yet. Even Buster seems to think so.
Maybe it's because of all the time we spend travelling back to Halifax. Alison's been in every day this week, and we both have been going in every weekend for one reason or another. This afternoon, I'll be catching the bus so that I can stay overnight at Meg's place so that we can be ready for softball at 8:30 tomorrow morning. There's a bunch of games being held all day for the few teams that are remaining in the league, at a diamond in Spryfield. The Halifax Commons are too ripped up from the Keith Urban show a couple of weeks ago to play the rest of the season there, even though that was where we were booked to play since before the summer started. Stupid country-music-loving, public-space-abusing city officials! Anyways, so now we've got to play the remaining two weekends' games all in one day, as that's the only time this other field is available. Which means a whole day of playing softball and waiting to play softball in Spryfield, home of the Spryfield Graffiti Tour and the world-famous House Which Looks Identical to the Houses on Either Side of It, and catching the late bus back to "Woofville".
And next weekend I'll be taking the bus in on Friday night to play a show with Al Tuck, opening for Garrett Mason. That one should be pretty fun, actually. I've never heard Garrett — son of Dutch Mason, "The Prime Minister of the Blues" — but I hear he's quite something on the old guitar.
In other music news, Alison and I went over to the semi-nearby house of Ken and Heidi, whom we don't really know but sort of do in a complicated and ancient way, to play some Gamelan music. Ken has a full set of Gamelan instruments(!) and invites people over semi-regularly to play some Javanese-style music on them. It was lots of fun and even sounded not too bad, I think. Their house is really nice and homey. Hope we can get ours feeling something like that. I guess I should get off this eletronic ego-box and get to work on it.
I'll show you some pictures soon. Promise.
- Andrew
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
And I STILL haven't finished Infinite Jest!
Dang. I just found out today that my favourite living writer, David Foster Wallace, is no longer living. He killed himself last Friday. I guess he'd battled depression for a long time, and finally lost. I was quite stunned by the news and couldn't really get over it all day at work. It's really bumming me out because I believe, from his writing, that he was really onto what exactly the symptoms of human dysfunction in 21st century America are, in enough analytic, subjective detail that a solution seemed forthcoming. I've certainly modified and honed my own ideas on the subject a lot from reading Infinite Jest. Even though I haven't finished it (see above, and many other places on this blog, for instance here) — though now I'm more determined to than ever; I really only put it down because I was getting close to the end and didn't want it to be over — it's definitely the best novel I've ever read. Seriously. OK, I never finished Ulysses, to which it's often compared. OK, I never even got more than a third of the way through it, actually. But I can tell you IJ's a hell of a lot more entertaining than that admittedly beautiful and important opus. And even though it's hilarious and clever and post-modern, it's also tragic and brilliant and psychologically insightful.His collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is also highly recommended for the same types of reasons, and has as a bonus what I used to think was one of the funniest titles ever. But now it just seems really sad.
- Andrew
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Particles & Pomes
Not much to tell you about since the last time I posted. Things are still all like "work work work" around here and I'm still all like "OK, OK, gimme a break already." Last week we went to Montreal to attend my late grandfather's memorial service, which was very sad and beautiful and exactly what it should have been. We also went to see Hamlet 2, which was silly and weird and quite funny. And tonight we attended a lecture about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland around which they 
successfully sent a proton today. The beautiful Latvian nuclear physicist told us that today is the second most important day for science in the last 100 years (the first being the day they launched the Sputnik in 1957). It seems no one knows what kind of things are going to happen when they crash a few proton streams into each other at 99.9997% of the speed of light, so it's very exciting and also kind of scary.
So, yes, we're slowly settling into this funny little town, which means that we have to start behaving more like the fair-trade-coffee-drinking, terrible-colour-combination-wearing hippies that it knows we are in our heart of hearts. Which means that it's time to write some poetry. Actually, these are just a few forgotten short poems I came across in notebooks I was unpacking. I kind of like them, but don't ask me what the heck they mean.
I
I have seen celebrity faces
Whither, pucker, fade from view;
My own hair, slowly silvering
And brittle, falling. I have seen
The taut skin of the paper birch
Punctured by rodent teeth, its sweet
Molasses flesh exposed and left
To poke through fields of snow.
II
Oh children of the meadowlark,
Forever stabbing in the dark,
Deny us not your knives.
You can't begin to comprehend
The lands we seek, the time we spend
Rehearsing our own lives.
III
There was a time
When a sunrise lasted all day long.
Maybe some day, long after we're dead,
They'll notice our trash
And, when they let the wind blow through,
Perhaps remember us.
The earth knows what time it is
Even if the seeds don't,
But you and your family
Are poison to me.
- Andrew
successfully sent a proton today. The beautiful Latvian nuclear physicist told us that today is the second most important day for science in the last 100 years (the first being the day they launched the Sputnik in 1957). It seems no one knows what kind of things are going to happen when they crash a few proton streams into each other at 99.9997% of the speed of light, so it's very exciting and also kind of scary.So, yes, we're slowly settling into this funny little town, which means that we have to start behaving more like the fair-trade-coffee-drinking, terrible-colour-combination-wearing hippies that it knows we are in our heart of hearts. Which means that it's time to write some poetry. Actually, these are just a few forgotten short poems I came across in notebooks I was unpacking. I kind of like them, but don't ask me what the heck they mean.
I
I have seen celebrity faces
Whither, pucker, fade from view;
My own hair, slowly silvering
And brittle, falling. I have seen
The taut skin of the paper birch
Punctured by rodent teeth, its sweet
Molasses flesh exposed and left
To poke through fields of snow.
II
Oh children of the meadowlark,
Forever stabbing in the dark,
Deny us not your knives.
You can't begin to comprehend
The lands we seek, the time we spend
Rehearsing our own lives.
III
There was a time
When a sunrise lasted all day long.
Maybe some day, long after we're dead,
They'll notice our trash
And, when they let the wind blow through,
Perhaps remember us.
The earth knows what time it is
Even if the seeds don't,
But you and your family
Are poison to me.
- Andrew
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
The Good, the Bad, and the Good
We've got all our stuff moved into the new house now, thanks to Al, Krista, and Kasia, who drove up with us, and Keith, Meg, and Johanna, who helped us load at the Halifax end. Pretty great bunch of friends, and I'm just starting to realize how much I'm going to miss seeing them all the time. The place is coming together, but there's still an awful lot of stuff in boxes. Like books. Sure was nice having built-in bookshelves. I'm not sure where we're going to put all these dang things right now.
I guess it's been slightly chaotic over the past couple of weeks, which is why I haven't posted till now. There's been a lot of back and forth to Halifax on Alison's side, which I think is making her a little bit cuckoo. The buses are not exactly convenient, so she ends up having to stay overnight and come back the next day. And I've been working insane hours trying to get on top of all the design work that needs to be done right away at Acadia. I'm not used to dealing with "clients" so much. I spend a large portion of regular work hours answering emails and going to meetings to promise delivery of work to people, then I have to stay real late to actually do the work. But it's the beginning of the school year, so of course everyone has stuff they need done ASAP.
My grandfather in Montreal also died a few weeks ago, so that's been bumming me out somewhat. He was a really great guy whom everyone loved and looked up to, so it's quite a loss, even though he was very old and lived a full life and went out peacefully. I'll be taking a couple of days off work this week to go to the memorial service.
And really, that's all the bad news; everything else is going quite great, so I'm sorry to come off like such a downer. Wolfville is a beautiful town full of friendly people, everyone I work with is super nice, the campus I work on is gorgeous, we've found some great places to eat (NOT Joe's Food Emporium — sorry, K, K, & A for taking you there) and a good video store (I was worried about that one), there's a fantastic outdoor farmers' market every Saturday, the cycling around here is not difficult and very scenic, we get to take classes at the university for 50% of the usual price, I get a free membership to the gym facilities, and there are birds that all gather in one tree every evening and make the craziest, loudest bird racket you've ever heard. Even the weather here is generally pleasant, being in a valley.
Plus, I now have some radio to listen to every afternoon, as Rich Terfry (Buck 65) started hosting a daily, 3-hour radio show on CBC 2 today. Did anyone else listen to it? I thought it was pretty great. No surprise that he's a very entertaining host. He's filling Jurgen Gothe's former timeslot — serious business. I'll be checking it out a lot, I think.
By the way, Alison's got plenty of photos from the past couple of weeks, but I don't know where they are and she's in Halifax tonight. I'll have to put them up later.
Oh yeah, there was also a The Lodge show in there, at Baba's Lounge in Charlottetown, Friday night of the weekend that we moved all our belongings. It went great and was lots of fun, and we got to visit (very briefly) with our friends Joan and Jason, who recently moved there from Halifax. Alison came along with the band. I think the drives there and back were honestly the best parts of the trip. We listened to lots of heavy music and were entertained by Charles and Mike's rock talk and gossip. The band has gotten into the Halifax Pop Explosion this year, so I'm looking forward to that one in October. And also to finishing the recording we've been working on. So far it sounds mind-blowingly stupendous, if I may say so myself.
- Andrew
I guess it's been slightly chaotic over the past couple of weeks, which is why I haven't posted till now. There's been a lot of back and forth to Halifax on Alison's side, which I think is making her a little bit cuckoo. The buses are not exactly convenient, so she ends up having to stay overnight and come back the next day. And I've been working insane hours trying to get on top of all the design work that needs to be done right away at Acadia. I'm not used to dealing with "clients" so much. I spend a large portion of regular work hours answering emails and going to meetings to promise delivery of work to people, then I have to stay real late to actually do the work. But it's the beginning of the school year, so of course everyone has stuff they need done ASAP.
My grandfather in Montreal also died a few weeks ago, so that's been bumming me out somewhat. He was a really great guy whom everyone loved and looked up to, so it's quite a loss, even though he was very old and lived a full life and went out peacefully. I'll be taking a couple of days off work this week to go to the memorial service.
And really, that's all the bad news; everything else is going quite great, so I'm sorry to come off like such a downer. Wolfville is a beautiful town full of friendly people, everyone I work with is super nice, the campus I work on is gorgeous, we've found some great places to eat (NOT Joe's Food Emporium — sorry, K, K, & A for taking you there) and a good video store (I was worried about that one), there's a fantastic outdoor farmers' market every Saturday, the cycling around here is not difficult and very scenic, we get to take classes at the university for 50% of the usual price, I get a free membership to the gym facilities, and there are birds that all gather in one tree every evening and make the craziest, loudest bird racket you've ever heard. Even the weather here is generally pleasant, being in a valley.
Plus, I now have some radio to listen to every afternoon, as Rich Terfry (Buck 65) started hosting a daily, 3-hour radio show on CBC 2 today. Did anyone else listen to it? I thought it was pretty great. No surprise that he's a very entertaining host. He's filling Jurgen Gothe's former timeslot — serious business. I'll be checking it out a lot, I think.
By the way, Alison's got plenty of photos from the past couple of weeks, but I don't know where they are and she's in Halifax tonight. I'll have to put them up later.
Oh yeah, there was also a The Lodge show in there, at Baba's Lounge in Charlottetown, Friday night of the weekend that we moved all our belongings. It went great and was lots of fun, and we got to visit (very briefly) with our friends Joan and Jason, who recently moved there from Halifax. Alison came along with the band. I think the drives there and back were honestly the best parts of the trip. We listened to lots of heavy music and were entertained by Charles and Mike's rock talk and gossip. The band has gotten into the Halifax Pop Explosion this year, so I'm looking forward to that one in October. And also to finishing the recording we've been working on. So far it sounds mind-blowingly stupendous, if I may say so myself.
- Andrew
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