Up in Ontario

Latin Roots

Ben Schott, of Schott's Miscellany fame, sends me the weekly Friday miscellany entitled Latin Abbrevs.

I have posted before about Latin roots and usage in our culture and I keep tripping over references in everyday life to this lost language. I suppose this is our linguistic inheritance, akin to seeing a grandfather's nose reflected in his grandson. These are the building blocks of our words.

• ad lib. - ad libitum; as much as you like
  
• ibid. - ibidem; in the same source
  
• op. cit. - opere citato; in the work already mentioned
  
• pp - per pro; on behalf of
  
• sic - sic; thus, or literally
  
• viz - videlicet; that is to say, namely
  Posted by James Sherrett at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

Manitoba Literature Goes Global

The CBC picks up on Manitoba Book Week with a short article on the rising international profile of Manitoba books and writers. Or, as they headline the article, 'Manitoba' no longer kiss of death for books.

If only I knew that earlier. Maybe I could have titled my novel Down from Manitoba, instead of Up in Ontario. That might have been better for sales.

By the way, if you've ever wondered why I called the novel Up in Ontario, why not tell me what it means to you and I will tell you what it means to me. Please make your own guess. I'm always fascinated by how writing is interpreted, the many meanings and interpretations that readers create. I may not say too much about what the title Up in Ontario means to me, though you could listen to my interview with Paul Grant (MP3 file, 6.3 MB) to find some hints, for I am reluctant to tell you what things mean to me; what I say will inevitably be something that is different than what you thought, and the meaning comes as much from a reader as it does from a writer.

Grape Crushing Competition

Very little surpasses the Internet when it comes to passing on damn funny found materials. This one is a scene from Atlanta, where grape crushing can be harzardous to your health.

(This is a video. Let it load up nice and slow. Make sure your sounds is on and wait for it all to come through before kicking it off. You'll thank me when you see the look on the Ken doll's face.)

And if you think this is a weird competition, check out Belt Sander Drag Racing.

A Writing Life on the Brain

Courtesy of a link from the excellent writing and publishing blog BookNinja I came across an article called Writing on the Brain by Joseph Epstein from Commentary Magazine. I've read and enjoyed a few articles and books written by Epstein before and this article is in many ways superior to what I had already liked.

The article starts out as a review of The Midnight Disease by Dr. Alice W. Flaherty, a recently published book that approaches the human urge to write from a scientific perspective. But to call Writing on the Brain a book review is to represent it at a discount (based on the nine-parts summary, one-part analysis practice currently employed in book reviewing); it is akin to calling the Titanic a big boat that sunk. Epstein takes up reviewing The Midnight Disease with enthusiasm and engagement and churns out an essay rich in digressions, opinions and analysis, drawn from his life as a writer.

Some prime excerpts from Epstein are the following:

"Reading the New York Times Book Review every week," Dr. Flaherty notes, "was a major part of my literary education"—a statement akin to claiming that one has learned how to fly by reading Superman comics.

===

"Science," she suggests, "is the mouthpiece of determinism, and literature the last holdout of free will." Safe to say that neuroscience these days holds brain chemistry and anatomy to be more decisive for human behavior and the formation of character than free will, whereas every serious writer will be firmly on the other side. Of course, whether neuroscience acknowledges even the existence of free will is another question, and one that Flaherty explicitly declines to adjudicate on behalf of neuroscience. Writers, of course, must come down on the side of free will. What, you might say, choice have we? Without free will there would be no literature in the first place: no drama, no insights into human nature, little, really, but the drab playing-out of the hands we have been dealt, with the aid of pills to bolster our lagging spirits. Artists are the natural opponents of determinism—which is why, for example, so many of them have mocked the heavily deterministic doctrines of Sigmund Freud.

===

Once one has achieved a relative mastery over one’s craft, the pleasures of composition are like few others: certainly none that I have known. Constructing well-made sentences, in which words and thought appear to make a seamless fit, causing the small but intense light of insight to click on, can only be compared, I should imagine, to the delight of dancing faultlessly to one’s own choreography.

Available in HTML, PDF or plain text for printing, I recommend you print, read and save the essay. I read it on screen and found that some of the acute points of Epstein's writing were lost due to the tendency to skip words and phrases when reading pixels. Now I have printed it and will file it away with other keepers, to be revisited once someone makes a columnist out of me.

The Maple Leaf/The Maple Lure

An email arrived in my inbox this morning from MT. She wrote to a few choice email addresses:

So I had this craving for Tim Horton's Coffee this morning....I just had to go get one.

While standing in line with my friend Rich a guy in line whispers to us....."do you know who that is?" We quietly look around....."who do you mean?" "Wayne Gretzky," he says. Finally we clued in to the fact that we were standing right next to a table where Wayne, Janet and two of their children sat enjoying donuts and coffees. Wow. Very cool.

Very Canadian of him, don't you think? And the best part was that no
one was hounding them. They were left to enjoy their maple-dip donuts
in peace.

In a related observation, a Tim Horton's advertisement is currently playing in heavy rotation between the rodeo action of NHL playoff hockey. The ad features a Canadian ex-pat in the middle of giving a presentation in Chicago. "As you can see the blue piece is significantly larger," he says and points to a pie chart as the meeting attendees nod. An emergency call comes through to him from his friends back in Canada. "Buddy!" They shout into the phone. "You have to come home. Tim Horton's has brought out a whole line of maple products." The ex-pats lower lips trembles. "Maple..." he says. The next scene shows him gathering his charts and fleeing the meeting. "Gotta go," he says, his arms wrapped around the rolled up papers.

So what? Well, nothing really. Just connecting the dots of thematic convergence and offering one thought: you might think that this is all there is to Canadian culture, if you didn't know better, if you didn't know about the compromise and pain of moving away from home for work, if you didn't know that a game can be a culture, if you didn't know that people cry when they see their team skate out onto the ice to start the game, if you didn't know that everything goes better with maple.

Paris Hilton's Memoirs

If you're not intimately tied into the publishing community or the entertainment news cycle, you may not have heard that Paris Hilton has signed a contract to write her memoirs. Well, that's not exactly correct. She's signed a contract to have her memoirs published.

But just this morning I read a report that publication of the book had hit a snag:

I recently had dinner with a friend of mine, who is a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Her current project involves overseeing the production of the “memoirs” of Paris Hilton. The book is of course being ghost-written by someone else, not merely because Ms. Hilton can't write, but because she also can't read. She supposedly suffers from ADD. In keeping with their commitment to the disabled among the creative community, Simon & Schuster agreed as part of the deal to provide someone to read the final manuscript aloud to Ms. Hilton for her input and approval.

Several weeks ago my friend got a call from Ms. Hilton, who was distressed. It seems her affliction made it impossible for her to follow along with her life story as it was being read to her. My friend the editor asked what, if anything, would assist Paris in the job. Ms. Hilton then requested that the photo of herself that will be used on the cover of the book be overnighted to her, so that she could concentrate on it as her autobiography was cooed to her. This was done, and the mighty task of proofhearing was accomplished without another hitch.

One of the more insightful observations of the book is to be found in Ms. Hilton’s decision to forgo a full-time career as a fashion model. “I tried it a couple of times, but I didn't like it. The dressing area smelled too much like throw up.”

I asked why Ms. Hilton even bothers with such trivial money-making efforts, since by all accounts she is richer than Croesus. My friend replied with the straight face of one who had seen it all. “She likes to work.”

Paris Hilton may be the perfect foil of our time. Her life is satire. What parody is possible?

Palindromes

My weekly update from Schott's Miscellany tells me that Sotades of Maronea (c.275BC) is credited as one of the early inventors of the palindrome: words or phrases that read the same backwards as forwards. Some examples:

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama

Never odd or even

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

The Onion Follow Up

As a follow up to the post on The Onion being taken seriously by STOP, posted here two days ago: "it's not just detectives in small counties in Michigan who fall for Onion stories."

The Adrienne and Nantz 30th Birthday Bash

The invite arrived in the mail yesterday. The Duck handed it to me when I walked in the door. Now we've decided we're off to Toronto for The Adrienne and Nantz 30th Birthday Bash! The particulars of the trip to the big smoke, hogtown, T.O.:

Saturday, May 15, 2004 7 pm to close

Murphy's Law Irish Pub

Live music by
Her Craig, Peter Buck & friends

No gifts, please.
Just do the brantford girls proud
& help work off the bar tab!

If you're interested in finding out more about the party, please contact me, tell me 3 reasons you should get in to the Bash, and I'll see what I can do. The gig is invite only, space could be tight, and the line up onstage will clearly knock your socks off.

The Onion Spreads Gay

Every once in a while satire pays off in a big way. Today is one of those days.

Here is the original article from The Onion.

A group called Simply Truths Our Priority, or STOP, is reported in the London (Ontario) Free Press swallowing the bait:

Trustee seeks apology for spoof photo

Parents opposing a school program used a picture from a satirical newspaper on their pamphlets.

MARISSA NELSON,
Free Press Education Reporter
2004-04-08 03:15:19

A school board trustee is demanding an apology from a parents' group that used a fake photo from a satirical newspaper on its pamphlets opposing the expansion of a safe schools policy. Simply Truths Our Priority, or STOP, handed out pamphlets and computer discs with a 300-page book of Internet research outside a public meeting last week.

The session was a chance for the Thames Valley District school board to get input on its plan to expand the safe schools program -- a move to protect gay and lesbian students.

But STOP argues the board is changing the curriculum and will promote a homosexual lifestyle in schools.

"Satire is apparently lost on rigid individuals," said London trustee Peter Jaffe. "Taking something from a spoof newspaper and presenting it as reality crosses the line. (The photo) plays on people's worst fears. I would hope this group will make a full and public apology."

The photo shows a teacher at the front of a class with explicit sexual images and terms drawn on the board and is supposed to represent one of the "countless" classrooms where homosexuality is promoted.

The picture was copied from the Onion, a satirical newspaper from the United States. The headline of the 1998 story says, " '98 homosexual drive nearing goal."

The story, written out of San Francisco, goes on to say children are being successfully recruited into homosexuality because of the "gay lobby's infiltration of America's public schools."

Marilyn Ashworth of STOP said it's concerned the photo represents what will end up in this region's schools if the board goes ahead with its plan.

"We knew it was a gay paper and we hold that even as a joke, the gay community is proud of their advancements into the safe schools program in the U.S.," she said. "We don't think homosexuality in schools is a joke."

Asked whether she believed it was a real photo, Ashworth said the caption included the teacher's name, city, state and grade.

"We researched in depth and that was one of the things we found," she said, noting the group spent seven weeks accumulating research.

"We don't come by our findings lightly. . . . Whether it was meant to be a joke or not, it's not funny to parents who are trying to protect their children."

Other headlines on the archival page are: Antique dealer sick of appraising smurf collections and Orgy a logistical nightmare.

Sean Mills, president of the Onion, laughed when he heard the news.

"The motto the writers have is we're not going after the right or the left, we're just going after people who are dumb," Mills said.

"We're anti-dumb, we're not anti-anything else . . . They're proving our point. It's a ridiculous notion there'd be recruitment going on. That was the whole point."

Mills said the photo is fake, the Onion has nothing to do with STOP and isn't a gay paper.

"In some ways, if you're going to a satirical news source to prove a serious point . . . you're getting what you deserve."

Trustee Peggy Sattler said she wonders if STOP knew it was a fake photo.

Trustee Linda Stevenson said the photo calls into question the legitimacy of STOP's 300 pages.

"It's not worth the paper it's written on."

The Onion seems to be racking up a fine track record or satire so resonant people mistake it for news. Or, at least interest groups (usually devout, always earnest) mistake it for news. Remember the story of the group in South Carolina trying to get Harry Potter banned from schools and libraries who used an Onion article as evidence? God bless them.

As the Day is Long

Some expressions persist in our language as clean simple ways to express an idea. They are so apt in their description that a better means of expression is hard to find. In particular, I am interested in the similes that are peppered throughout our speech and express an idea better than any other way of saying something. Some examples have been collected below. Please add an others you can think of to the Comments section.

• Right as rain
• Dull as dishwater
• Tough as nails
• Big as a house
• Sick as a dog
• Sharp as a tack
• Quick as a bunny
• Clean as a whistle
• Clear as mud
• Smart as a whip
• Nice as pie
• Good as gold
• Hard as rock
• Sweet as candy
• Laughing like a drain
• Dumb as a post
• Dead as a doornail
• Hungry as a bear
• Hung like a horse
• Dark as night
• Bright as day
• Smooth as a baby's bottom
• Smooth as silk
• Black as the ace of spades
• Black as night
• Thick as thieves
• Wide as the ocean
• High as a kite
• Thin as a rail
• Cute as a button
• Cheap as chips
• Old as spit
• Old as methusela
• Drunk as a skunk
• Smooth as butter
• Free as a bird

With files from Alyson Munroe.

LD: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver

The Duck and I made our way to the Vancouver Museum last night for the launch of L.D.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver, a historical biography on Vancouver's longest-serving mayor. The book is written by Daniel Francis, a bright and lively historian who I always think of as Uncle Dan, since that is what he is called by his nephew, Chad Brealey, who I fish with and who is the executive director of the Haig-Brown Institute.

Uncle Dan wore a red tie, in honour of L.D., and read from the beginning and ending of his book. I bought a copy and had it signed and am looking forward to reading it since it provides a view of Vancouver not sanctioned by the board of trade and tourism. Last night I leafed through its pages and found many photos of Vancouver from the years of L.D.'s time, the 1910s through the 1930s. So much of the city has been remade in the years since those photos and they served to illustrate something I have felt since moving to Vancouver: the city erases its past at every opportunity.

So perhaps it is no coincidence that Dan Francis' other books include The Imaginary Indian and Imagining Ourselves. For Vancouver is nothing if not an imagined place, an oasis of a city where a city should not be, situated on a slip of unstable and reclaimed land, bordered by mountains and the ocean, cornered so that it can only expand to the southeast.

Hockey Eye Injuries

See photo below. My friend Todd James plays both forward and defence on our rec-league hockey team. A few days ago he was hit with a puck on the nose. The puck looked like an innocent shot from the slot. It did not deflect off anything or ricochet off the boards. Todd is 6'7" and wears just a helmet. And only pansies, Europeans and French guys wear visors.

See more of Todd's eye.

Religiousity in Office

Jack Beatty, the senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly magazine, writes in his monthly column, Politics and Prose, that:

You can question Bush's veracity, his grip on reality, and the rationality of his policies, but not his faith. Turning to Jesus to escape from drinking was the turning point in his life. Sincerity, unreservedly giving your heart to Jesus, is the fulcrum of life-altering faith, say people who have experienced it. Reason, skepticism, critical thought, irony, argument—all threaten this sustaining emotional purity. You owe your life to a miracle, and it will go away if doubt creeps in.

All lives have the kind of soul-trying trouble that nearly cost George W. Bush his marriage. Some people see psychiatrists; others take medication; many turn to faith. And for many of this last group, I suspect, Bush's sins against reason, his privileging of his heart over his head, make up no small part of his appeal. Religiosity—intensity of faith and frequency of church attendance—now vies with race as a partisan predictor. Just as 9 in 10 African-Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000, so nearly 9 in 10 "high-commitment evangelicals" voted for George W. Bush. Altogether, evangelicals and white Protestant fundamentalists constituted 40 percent of Bush's vote. When Pat Robertson resigned as president of the Christian Coalition, in late 2001, Gary Bauer, a spokesman for social conservatism, said he knew why: "I think he stepped down because the position has already been filled..." President Bush "is that leader right now."

Beatty really hits nail on the head in his identification of the simultaneous appeal and horror of George W Bush right. If you share his faith then anything he says or does can be forgiven. If you do not share his faith then you cannot comprehend his appeal.

So make your own judgement; read the full article, The Faith-Based Presidency.

Superman's Many Disguises

This week I came across two very different references to Superman: one capitalist and one communist.

Capitalist Superman appears in a series of short movie advertisements (Flash) with Jerry Seinfeld for American Express (plug in required). The ads are interesting and fun, so long as you don't know much about Superman and you like the commercial version of Seinfeld's humour.

Communist Superman appears in a comic series drawn and reinvented by Glasgow comic artist Mark Millar as a "weapon of mass destruction" for the Soviet Union.

"Superman: Red Son imagines what would have happened if the Earth had turned for 12 more hours and the baby Kal-El from the destroyed planet Krypton had landed not in the golden Smallville wheatfield but in a Ukrainian collective farm and was raised not by Ma and Pa Kent, but under Joseph Stalin."

I suppose that if you look at what Superman stands for - Truth, Justice and the American Way - Capitalist Superman aligns closer, but Superman never shilled for a credit card company when I bought his comics.