Now that I've spent a little time monkeying around with Flickr.com, the photo sharing site that all the cool kids are into, I've added a little badge on the left side that shows all the latest photos of our photostream - all the photos we upload and set as public.
Watch the photos zoom in and out, they're all our photos, click on one if you're interested in it and you can see a larger size of the same image with title and caption that goes with it - its framing narrative. If you just want to check out the latest photos or the homepage for access to all the photos, click on the top link, which will take you to me and the Duck's photos homepage.
Right now you'll find photos of our Great Pumpkin Carving Contest, Charlie Brown!
Patrick Brealey his own bad self writes to let me know of the show he's playing next Saturday, November 5th, at the Railway Club in Vancouver.
I know I've gone on quite a bit about PB & the Ks, but shit, just listen for yourself to some of their songs (try Escaper [MP3, 3:51] or Laughing on the Inside [MP3, 2:52] on for size) and I believe you'll know from whence my enthusiasm comes. And since PB his own bad self writes real good, I've pasted the whole shebang of this email below. See you there!
Well, hi there. You know, just when you thought 2005 couldn’t get any better…WHAM!… Patrick Brealey & the Knives have their first headlining show and you are one of the special people we want to share this illustrious event with. I, for one, am excited at the prospect of a Saturday night at Vancouver’s best place to spend all your money on hot nuts, the Railway Club. In order to have a good time, here is what you need to know:Saturday, November 5, 2005
The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir)
Patrick Brealey & the Knives
The Yoko Casionos
Ken Beattie & Jonathan Anderson (of Radiogram)
Doors 8:30pm
Cover $10I mean, come on! Check out that lineup! Totally rad!
Now remember, Patrick Brealey & the Knives care about you and that’s why I keep you on the cutting edge of all things Knive. For those who don’t know, we began recording at the end of September and plan to have the full-length album out by spring 2006. That may seem like a long time to wait but I plan to keep you updated via a brand spankin’ new website. That’s right, www.patrickbrealey.com is soon to be more than a pithy splash page and will become a true, bonafide dot com. Take a look. Sure, it’s still a splash page right now, but it’s a new one and wow, what a splash! I want to thank Erin Nicholson and everyone at Boompa for helping to get this site up.
So I would love to see you on Saturday, November 5th. If you make it, I promise I will try to do my best. If you don’t make it, then I will still try to do my best and man, that’ll suck when you miss the best.
Stay sharp,
Patrick
This summer as my brother and I passed through Calgary returning from a triathlon in Manitoba, an aunt and uncle of mine told us about the great time they had last fall doing a pumpkin carving contest with friends. The Duck and I thought that was a great idea, so now we're holding our own. This Friday night, October 28th, at our place.
So do you want to come?
It'll be BYOTs (Bring Your Own Tools - knives, spoons, candles, newspaper and bowls). We'll provide the pumpkins on a draft system once everyone arrives. That way we'll all be starting from the same place in our designs. Judging will be done sometime toward the end of the night. Currying favour with the judges may be encouraged, depending on who the judges end up being.
Please let me know by email whether you're coming or not, and if you're bringing anyone else, which, of course, you can do if you want to. Go time will be 7:30. Please be prompt since the draft has to happen before the carving can begin. Further details will be provided by email once you tell me you're interested (you think I'm going to publish them out here for anyone to see?). If you want to drink something, bring something to drink. If you want to eat something, ditto. We'll lay out a general spread for sipping and nibbling.
Tonight I'll be checking out the Speak Up: When is There Too Much Copyright? panel at the Vancouver Public Library's central branch. The description of the events looks something like this:
Changes and challenges to copyright laws in Canada and around the world have been a hot topic of discussion among artists, writers, musicians, inventors, the public, and the businesses that profit from their work. Copyright was intended to balance the rights of creators and users, but who really benefits from copyright? What barriers do copyright create? What will be the impact of new copyright legislation and how does this have an impact on what you can read, write, listen to, and download on your computer?
If you're interested in the event and thinking of attending, let me know and we can meet up before or after.
Over the 5 weeks we travelled through England, Greece and Turkey I managed to read the following books.
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright - I know I keep going on about this book in blog posts (see Ephesus, Turkey and What We'll be Remembered For as examples) but it simply is one of the best books I've read in years. Reading it opened up a whole new perspective on the world for me. Just read it or listen to the lectures and you'll hopefully understand.
The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown - In a touristy bookstore in Thira, the largest town on the island of Santorini, this book appeared to me as the best option from the few muddled shelves of English titles. Apart from a story that is insulting to read, with simplistic characters and a perfectly unbelieveable plot, DaVinci delivers some interesting glimpses into what could have been a great story. Many times I groaned out loud while reading, but I managed to finish and liked the historical story. Overall the book reminded me of a caramel apple for the brain - you think it might be good for you if it weren't for all the crap packaged along with it.
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer - Of all the books I read this one is the most difficult to judge, though the easiest to describe. Krakauer retells the story of Christopher McCandless, a well-off American college graduate who donates his trust fund to charity and drops out of society to seek something purer in the Alaska wilds. McCandless died in the wild, and this is the story's beginning. Krakauer spends the whole book trying to triangulate the real story of McCandless, but without getting any nearer to the subject. I finished the book with only a little more understanding of the story than when I started. I knew the details of McCandless' trip, what he'd left behind, who he'd talked to before he died, but no larger story opened up. The details refused a narrative, which I suppose alludes to the dissatisfaction of actual realism. Both McCandless and the story of his death elude Krakauer and me, his reader.
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen - I'd read a few Hiaasen books before and enjoyed their fast pace, sense of fun and sly, subversive wit. The rats get their comeuppance and the good people make out well in the end. Skinny Dip delivered more of the same, with a little more sex, though it dragged a little 2/3 of the way through where the energy of the story flagged and the characters became too cartoonish, even for Hiaasen's version of Florida.
I almost also picked up London Fields by Martin Amis to reread, but my travel buddy reminded me that I had to drop a book to pick one up, and at that time I didn't have a book with me that was ready to seek its place out in the world alone. So I relented. I also read a novelized adaptation of a play called The Ringer, set in London during the end of the 19th century. It read as if Dickens had written a potboiler play - pure fun!
Over at the Kottke.org site a good discussion has sprung up around the lawsuit the Association of American Publishers (AMA) has filed against Google. The discussion centres on the complaint of one author, whose publisher is part of the AMA, who would like her booked to be included in Google Print - Book author to her publishing company: your lawsuit is not helping me or my book.
I feel like I have a horse in this race, since I also would like my book included in Google Print, so I added the following comment:
James says:
(obs)This may be the best comment thread I've ever read on a blog.(/obs)From the FAQs of Google Print:
===
How is my content protected?
Google hosts all material on our secure servers. We disable the print, cut, copy, and save functionality on all pages displaying book content, in order to protect your material. In addition, you can choose how much of your book a user will be able to view over a 30 day period, from 20% of your content up to 100%. Portions of your book will be available to all interested users, but those users wanting to browse additional pages must sign in with their Google Account to view the full pages. (They will still be restricted to the percentage of the book you choose to make available.) Google Print is a book marketing program, not an online library, and as such your entire book will not be made available online unless you expressly permit it."===
Q: Authors and publishers scrap tooth and nail to get their books serialized / excerpted in newspapers and magazines. So how is the same thing online different?
In my opinion, used book sales are far more a threat to author royalties than someone finding a book, deciding to highlight the whole thing and copy and paste it into another format on their desktop. Used book sales are almost 1-to-1 direct new book (read: royalties) lost since the price point is very similar.
To further muddy the copyright waters, almost all author copyrights are only sold to the publishers for a limited time, or until the book is ruled out of print. Then the copyright reverts to the author. So if they intend to respect copyrights, Google has to have agreements with the publisher (for the duration of the copyright assignment) and / or the author (if the copyright reverts), depending on the time and status of the copyright. Yeesh. No wonder Google is seeking foregiveness rather than asking permission.
And in case anyone is wondering, I want my book included in every online indexing mechanism that I've seen so far - Amazon, Google, etc. I think it drives interest and exposure and sales, not just for the searched-for book but for any additional material that I have written or will write. Being a writer is all about building and maintaining an audience. Anything that helps rocks.
Courtesy again of a handy Google Alerts notification I have found that Prairie Fire magazine has reviewed Up in Ontario. Thank you much for the generous review!
Growing up in the Winnipeg literary community I always wanted to see my work appear in Prairie Fire. It felt like a barometre of having something worthwhile to say. It validated your work and aspirations. I still haven't had anything I've written appear in Prairie Fire, but hey, I'm happy to appear at all.
A few observations and notes and perhaps indulgences from the past week of becoming aclimatized once again...
Look at all these white people! Sullen people, staring at the streets; cold people staring straight ahead when I pass and offer out an exploratory, "good morning." People on the street walking alone or in small groups, standing and talking. Aloof, pretty people carrying bright shopping bags from fancy stores with names to be recognized. And yet, there are so few people on the streets, and so many in huge vehicles on their own.
Look at all this space! Around me, the openness of the streets and sky above, the damp freshness of the air, the quiet and solace; it all stretches out as if it too were packed onto that airplane for 9 hours waiting to reach high to the sky above, to release the pressure on the spine and feel a few cracks as it elongates. It is so quiet and green here. Everything seems moderated and absorbed and evened out.
In Turkey and Greece whole conversations took place between drivers with only their horns and gestures. The following may illustrate and consists of my translation of the horn sounds and hand gestures. No words were used in the inspiration for this scene. The scene could take place at any of thousands of congested intersections of Istanbul or Athens.
Car 1: Is there room?
Car 2: There's no room!
Car 1: I'm going to try it.
Car 2: I don't know!
Car 1: I'm coming through!
Car 2: Okay but watch watch out there, right there, is that clown.
Car 1: Thanks, I see him. (to clown) Get out of the #$&@ing way!
Car 2: Get lost, malaka.
Car 1: Thank you, asshole!
On the eternal theme of Self Importance and its attendant Buffoonery: who are some of these Vancouverites with their impotent anger at traffic standstills and driver errors that I failed to remember? Yes, vehicles with plates from out of town may wander the streets at a crawl. So? Be flattered that someone from somewhere else has chosen to visit. We are a small, beautiful place and we are lucky to live here. Share and play well with others: basic playground rules.
Alright, so I've taken the small leap and joined the crowd by setting up a Flickr account. I'm free for now but foresee becoming a paying member very soon.
In about an hour last night I figured out a little of the way Flickr works and how to upload photos. Here are a selection of the photos of our first 2 days in London. I'll get a little more advanced with my organization of the photos as I get used to Flickr, but for now this ought to give the rellies some crumbs to nibble on.
I've tried to make liberal use of the description field, which acts as the photo caption. So look there to read about the photo and see why I've included it.
This morning the Duck and I toured the runes of the ancient city of Ephesus here in Turkey. Ephesus stands as one of the best preserved and restored ancient city sites of the world and its grandeur did not disappoint. (Here are some great Ephesus images to give you an idea of what we saw and where Ephesus is located.)
On a clear, blue-skied morning we arrived and wandered through the runes for 3 hours. What struck me most about the city, as we read through a guidebook about what we were seeing, was how similar this ancient city was to our own modern cities. The scale has changed and our cities are much larger, but the basic elements remain: a large theatre for the arts, a sprawling agora for commerce, roadways in and out with gates, houses of religion, monuments to prominent dead, residential districts where houses nestled next to each other, a stadium where the population watched sports and Ephesus' incredible Celsus library.
After many years of prominence the town of Ephesus died out. We heard different stories for the reason the town died out - political change in the Roman Empire, earthquakes, the rise of Christianity - but one compelling reason has not been mentioned and it makes more sense to me, as it aligns with what happened in another site we toured, the ancient site of Caunos (with its stunning tombs in the cliff side).
Caunos had been a very successful trading port and a strategic military and commercial site, same as Ephesus. In Caunos a huge shipbuildling industry had developed. The shipbuilding required vast resources of wood, so the shipbuilders cut down the surrounding forests to build boats. Without trees the topsoil ran off the hillsides. The topsoil began to build up in the river as silt, eventually hardening to make the river impassable and moving the shore a few kilometres seaward along the valley. With no port for trade no one remained in the city of Caunos.
The exact same geographic characteristics of Caunos can be seen in Ephesus. The ancient city site is a few kilometres from the seashore, which can be seen from high points. The period of expansion and wealth match along with the period of decline and extinction. I'm just an amateur sleuth but this all seems plausible to me. But no mention of it in the Ephesus guidebooks. No mention of the town brothel either. Seems none of us want to acknowledge the darker sides of humanity.
As a reason for making these observations, and perhaps as a reason for them coming to me in the first place, during our sailing trip I reread Ronald Wright's excellent A Short History of Progress. In it, Wright describes a few of the vast number of examples of human progress traps - ideas that seem good at the time and yet exhaust the resources of an area until the population there cannot sustain itself and dies out. Both Caunos and Ephesus strike me as examples of human progress traps - wealthy societies living beyond the carrying capacity of their environments. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate this theory to a global scale and to see the messages in it for all of us.
(Across the street from our hotel here is Selçuk, the mosque has just begun issuing its 1 o'clock call to prayer. The passion of the singer calling his people is a powerful thing to hear, as secularly insulated as we Canadians normally are.)
This afternoon we're off to Izmir airport to fly to Istanbul for the last stop on our trip. Fodor's has a great Instanbul mini guide if you're interested in seeing what we will be seeing. Stories and photos to come next week.
We're one day off the boat, here in a major port town of Marmaris, and I'm trying for the life of me to get this Turkish keyboard to work, so bear with my typographic and character mistakes.
The sailing trip was incredible. We sailed between 12 different ports in 14 days, through the Greek islands the first week and the Turkish mainland the second week. Aboard the 55-foot Anna Maria we sailed in winds up to 30 knots and reached a top speed of around 9 knots.
We swam every day in the salty, teal Aegean and then Mediterranean waters, and found 3 octopi (plural octopus) in our snorkelling adventures. The first one we found I was tempted to try to spear for dinner.
This morning as we woke for fairwells we felt our first rain of the trip, a fantastic thunder and lightning downpour of the intensıty that can only be generated ın very hot climates that poured rain on the Anna Maria, whıch led to leaks that dripped through the skylight above the galley where we'd cooked and mixed drinks and laughed wıth our crew Matthew and Jill and our fellow travellers.
We continue now the last week of our journey from Marmaris, where I now sit typing and wishing for a No Smoking sign. We'll travel to Istanbul over the next two days for our final stop before the long flight home to Vancouver, where my brother has told us he'll meet us at the airport and have a Thankgıvıng turkey in the oven waiting.
