something i enjoyed...

There is a special place in my heart reserved for people so dedicated to language and writing that it utterly transforms their fundamental relationship with the world around them.

If you also have a soft spot for 'wordies' then you'll enjoy this as much as I did.

quote of the day...

"Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed."

- Baz Kershaw, 'The Radical in Performance'

cats of many colours...

Today the CBC has released the most comprehensive broadside against the Federal Conservative election machine since initially outing the Guelph robo-call scandal.  If reports are to be believed, and most of them seem already to have been publicly substantiated by Elections Canada, then the last federal election was quite likely marred by a stunning polling station shell game played by CPC 'get-out-the-vote' operatives to knowingly misdirect enfranchised citizens and in some cases to frustrate them to a degree that they chose not to vote at all.  Yep, this is what voter suppression looks like.

The NDP are right to shout loudly in the press about this issue, given that the Liberals seem to have sullied their own hands in a few less-than-ethical uses of so called 'robo call' technology.  It is imperative that the Official Opposition hold the Government to account on this behaviour, which can only increase voter cynicism and from this follows that great enemy of political engagement: voter apathy.

If it is shown that centralized Conservative agents set out to willfully misinform Canadians in a coordinated nation-wide campaign of voter suppression then the last election should immediately be declared invalid, the House of Commons prorogued and an election called immediately.  What is most sad is that the CPC came riding into Ottawa with a high idealism of cleaning up corruption, promoting transparency and most importantly championing accountability.  And now?  With a spotty record on all their key ideals, and with a very real possibility that some within the ruling party believed themselves so close to a coveted majority that they were willing to sideline Canadian voters to get it, will Canadians still buy the goods that the Conservatives stand for moral government in Ottawa?

Tommy Douglas once said Canadians were mice perpetually voting for cats of different colours and calling that change.  Given this latest scandal, that has never felt more true.

"the artist is a kind of bourgeois"...

An axiom of the novel is that people whose lives are devoted to the competition for status--the bourgeois, the philistines--are inferior to those who devote themselves to the realization of an aesthetic or ethical ideal.  The very fact of being a novel reader is the badge of this distinction: to be a reader, in this sense, is really to be a writer of one's life, to try to shape one's life in the image of the values promoted by what one reads.  Yet the proud reader should remember that the pursuit of outward status and the pursuit of inward perfection can both be understood as ways of imposing direction, and therefore narrative, on a life.  Both status and goodness are useful for this purpose because both are fundamentally unachievable: it will always be possible, and therefore necessary, to become "higher" or "better" than one is.  These ways of imposing meaning on life are more similar to each other than either one is to the horrible vacancy of the vast majority of lives, which are composed simply of endless repetition.  Compared to the peasant, the bourgeois is a kind of artist--and the artist is a kind of bourgeois.

Taken from this extraordinary collection of "Meditations on life and letters."

the pen is mightier than the...

Another strike for technology.  

I may try and put pen to paper at least one a day for a week to see if my writing does in fact get "psychologically denser," whatever that might mean...  I'll keep you posted.