Submitted by Geoffrey Dow on Fri, 2013-01-18 01:15
Should we be cheering?
Kathleen Wynne (left) is congratulated by runner-up Sandra Pupatello on Saturday.
And something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
— Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"
January 28, 2013, OTTAWA — Early Sunday morning on Facebook, I posted a knee-jerk response to the selection of Kathleen Wynne as the Liberal Party of Ontario's new leader — and thus, the province's new Premier. Wynne won on the third ballot, edging out Sandra Pupatello. The women had been the front-runners right from the start. (Entirely coincidentally, but most serendipitously, Wynne's victory came only two days before the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada's decision declaring that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies.)
I wrote:
Those of you who think that nothing changes, please take note. In some very important ways, the world *is* getting better and it's important we remember that. A divorced, gay, woman is now Premier of Ontario.
Woman. Gay. Divorced. 30 years ago (or less!) any *one* of those facts would have automatically disqualified her.
That's a sea change, ladies and gentleman. A fucking sea change.
There is more to it than that, of course, and finding myself living in a country in which six of its 14 First Ministers are women does not mean we have reached Utopia.
But it is significant.
So significant that it deserves not just an emphasized paragraph all of its own, but consideration at some length. The perfumes of change.
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January 22, 2013, OTTAWA — Some people think Man was put on this earth to pray, others to work, and still others, to tell one another stories.
I think, at least for some of us and for some of the time, our purpose is to play. And that's not such a bad thing.
This morning, allow me to present to you, a man who spent 40 years tape-recording radio programs, and one who has built a full-scale model VIA Rail car in his basement. (I'll leave it for you, the reader, to assign significance to the fact that both men claimed to have wonderfully understanding wives.)
The full story lies behind the link (of course).
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Catching up on 2012, Part I
Reviewing Christopher Hitchens' Mortality
January 21, 2013, OTTAWA — P.T. Barnum is alleged to have said, "There's no such thing as bad press, so long as they spell your name right." But what is one supposed to do when the press is good, but the spelling is not?
Shoot the messenger, bite the hand ... and toot one's own horn, I guess. So damn the clichés and full speed ahead.
I suppose I would better have done all of the above when I first got my complimentary copies of the magazine in the mail back in December, but illness and the press of other business got in the way of proper self-promotion.
Those copies made for a sort of early Christmas present, but signed with an insult (presumably unintentional).
Or, as the old joke goes, I found good news and bad news in my mailbox.
Since I am one who prefers his misery lessened rather than his happiness punctured, that's how I'll tell the (brief) story.
The bad news was that Humanist Perspectives magazine thinks my first name is spelled GeoffEry, not GeoffrEy.
The good news is, its Winter 2012/2013 edition contains my review of Christopher Hitchens' post-humus meditation on living with the cancer that led to his death, Mortality.
(And, perhaps karmically, though the ultimate E and R are reversed in my byline and the table of contents, both my name and my website address (that's www.ed-rex.com folks!) are exactly right inn the two-line bio below the essay.)
I won't pretend it isn't gratifying to see some of my work in actual (paper) print again. 2009 was a while ago.
But, though the Winter issue of Humanist Perspectives is still the current issue and can still be found on better newsstands across Canada, I think it's time to share the work with the rest of the world.
The full text (very slightly modified from its magazine publication) lives behind this link.
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By my own, idiosyncratic, calendar . . .
January 18, 2013, OTTAWA — What a year it's been. Okay, 17 days, but it's almost *felt* like a year since, and more, since I last rode my bicycle, leaving it at the airport on the Friday before Christmas. The snow started coming down, joined by freezing rain, just as I started to head for home, so I circled back, parked the beast and took a bus.
Do you want to know what kind of year it's been (so far) for your humble narrator? Please click here for the good, the bad and the sickly.
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Spread the word!
Submitted by Geoffrey Dow on Sat, 2012-12-08 09:30
Detail from a painting by J.R.R. Tolkien
December 29, 2012, OTTAWA — Believe it or not, Peter Jackson's latest film is only indirectly responsible for my decision to re-read The Hobbit (again). The proximal cause was Tor.com's (no-doubt entirely commercial) decision to ask the redoubtable Kate Nepveu to lead a weekly, chapter-by-chapter "re-read" of the novel in conjunction with the release of the first (of three!) movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's 300 page children's story.
My intention had been to follow along at Nepveu's chapter-a-week pace and, perhaps, to contribute to the ongoing conversation she was (and is!) sure to inspire, but Tolkien's deceptively simple prose and thematically complex fairy story swept me away (as it has a number of times before). I finished the book in a couple of days.
The short version is that The Hobbit remains a delightful adventure story and fairy tale, even if it is the work of a writer who has yet to reach the full extent of his creative powers.
That said, it also a very strange book, that strays very far indeed from a typical heroic path in favour of wandering the fields of moral complexity and (relatively) complex characterizations. The protagonists are far from perfect and even the villains show surprising signs of humanity.
A lovely book to read aloud to a child, there is every chance that you will have to read it twice, since you'll likely treat yourself to the whole thing before you sit down for Chapter Two with said youngster.
The long version lives inside. (As usual, there are spoilers.)
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December 14, 2012, OTTAWA — I'm more than halfway through the new novel by the excellent story-teller Kristine Kathryn Rusch. As I fully-expected, Blowback is proving to be a hell of a page-turner — or rather, a hell of a screen-changer.
"Screen-changer"? Okay, I'm sure there's a better term out there. What I mean is, I bought Blowback as an electronic book, not paper book.
I pretty much fell in love with e-books from the moment I bought an reader just over a year ago, but it's been a problem getting books for it. Too often, new books are either not available in electronic versions in Canada or else they are available but encumbered by Digital Rights Management systems that don't play nice with my Linux-based operating system.
So it felt almost revolutionary to be able to simply buy, and then read Rusch's new novel without either stealing it or jumping through a myriad of electronic hoops in order to do so.
Defeating Piracy: Kristyne Kathryn Rusch is doing it right.
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Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Ottawa, November 24, 2012. Screen-shot lifted from a video posted to YouTube by Tom Kelly. |
December 10, 2012, OTTAWA — I did something I swore I'd never do again a couple of decades ago: saw a concert at a big venue.
The band was Neil Young and Crazy Horse, on whose film, Rust Never Sleeps, I walked out in outrage when I was a kid.
I've written about that memory here.
As for the concert (and what a concert!) itself, my review lives at Young and Crazy: The alchemy of defiance.
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Spread the word!
Submitted by Geoffrey Dow on Fri, 2012-11-16 02:52
Helsinki, Moscow, Oslo ... eat your hearts out!
Ottawa is the world's real Winter Capital!
The weather tried to freeze him
it tried its level best.
At a hundred degrees below zero,
he buttoned up his vest.
— James Stevens, 'The Frozen Logger'
November 17, 2012, OTTAWA — With the official start to winter still more than a month away, the evening of Wednesday, November 14, 2012, felt unusually cold to Ottawa bicyclist, writer and all-round bon vivant Geoffrey Dow when he unlocked his bicycle outside the Ottawa International Airport.
His machine's saddle was dusted with frost, as if the atmosphere itself was freezing out of the sky.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he deemed it unusually cold for the middle of November.
Cycling towards home he soon saw why. He pulled to the side of the road to document the situation some 15 kilometres south of his home in downtown Ottawa.
Electronic sign seen on the evening of Wednesday, November 14, 2012, near the MacDonald-Cartier International Airport.
"Why yes," Mr. Dow agreed when asked if he felt cold. "Now that you mention it, it is a touch on the nippy side!"
Having snapped the photo, he zipped up his jacket and clambered back aboard his bicyle for the long ride home.
— 30 —
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Submitted by Geoffrey Dow on Sun, 2012-10-07 13:18
In lieu of trick-or-treating
October 31, 2012, OTTAWA — Click here for the details if you missed the link below. And happy Hallowe'en for real.
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Magazine, found at a newstand
October 31, 2012, OTTAWA — Click here for the details if you missed the link below. And happy Hallowe'en for real.
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Happy Hallowe'en, bitches!
October 27, 2012, OTTAWA — It's nearly two o'clock on a Saturday morning. I'm tired and cranky and feeling a tad contrarian.
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October 7, 2012, OTTAWA — Drawing on myths from Jamaica to Russia, on folk tales of Coyote and Brer Rabbit, and maybe from sources as disparate as Chuck Jones, J.R.R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake (not to mention Lewis Carroll), Nalo Hopkinson's "Young Adult" debut is as singular a creation as it has been my pleasure to read in a very long time.
All at once a surreal adventure, a subtle exploration of privilege in caste-ridden society and a daring push against the walls of narrative fiction itself, The Chaos has no villain and its (black, Canadian) heroine never wields a blade nor fires a gun.
Though questions of race and identify form organic parts of how the novel's characters view and interact with the world (none of the book's major characters is white), race is not what the book is about. Hopkinson is telling a story, she is not preaching.
Narrated by probably the most fully-realized teenager I have come across in fiction, The Chaos is always surprising, a thoroughly unconventional page-turner you owe it to yourself to read — to pass on to any literate young person you know.
For my full review, click, "When I cried, the tears were black."
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October 5, 2012, OTTAWA — It might only be a one-shot title (mine, that is; Humanist Perspectives itself has been around since 1967), but "Art Director: Geoffrey Dow" has a very nice ring to it.
I've always enjoyed layout and design, going as far back as the halcyon days of Letraset, and getting the chance to produce a 40-page, slick magazine was the fulfillment of a dream I had almost forgotten I had.
Though the work is now done on computer, not paper, the sensation of doing tactile work remains.
At this point, I don't know whether I will get the chance to repeat the process, but I hope so!
Click here for details.
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Submitted by Geoffrey Dow on Fri, 2012-09-14 14:59
Linguistic relativism or, Losing my obsession
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| Does anybody have a photo of the facade of the old KOS (just around the corner from this streetcar)? I'd be most gratified to use it here. |
September 14, 2012, OTTAWA — As one of maternally Finnish origin, I for many years insisted that the word, sauna, is properly (Correctly! I would insist) pronounced SOW-A-NA, not "SAWN-A" as is the flat and nasal fashion among Anglo-Canadians.
I knew it was a losing battle, yet I kept up the fight; in life, as it would be on the internet, I could not easily let anyone just get away with Being Wrong.
I must have been in my late 20s or early 30s when, having a drink at the restaurant, KOS, in Toronto, I had a similar argument with my friend John.
John, who is of paternally Greek background, corrected me when I uttered the restaurant's name as COSS. The word, he insisted, is pronounced KHOCSH, not COSS. "It's a Greek word," he said, "and I know."
"Oh come on," said I, "we're in Toronto and it's become an English word now. So let it go."
We argued about it for a while, until the parallel with John's obsessive need for me to pronounce Kos "correctly" and my own to correct others in their pronunciation of sauna finally dawned upon me, a slow-motion intellectual sunrise.
And so, upon reflection, did I give up my fight. Languages evolve, and there is little to be gained in raging against the tides of pronunciation, or even (usually) of definition.
Let's let XKDC plays us out ..., since Randall Munroe's latest cartoon inspired this in the first place.
Cartoon is reproduced under the Creative Commons Licence 2.5. The original lives at http://xkcd.com/1108/.
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