Thought for the Day

The crux of solving a problem is first to invent a problem that needs to be solved.

Dancing the Demons Out

La Guitare

I am the head held high, the invasion
of aspirations to become part of the world, to
catch up with its spinning; I will the mysticism
of movement, the self-love of grace, the lovesick
bliss of moons too subtle to behold; I move
not only bodies, but souls, the emotions
in them kicking and straining to the sound
of fingers sea-sawing across ore dredged
up from the earth and stretched into strings
that sing into the anti-matter of the universe and draw
out its anti. The air
holds the memory of each of our positions
for a moment before it disappears
into the warm sheath of metabolism. I am the pleasure
given unto people by the empty body
of trees sacrificed to the health of a community, the dark
cloud spreading around the head
of the player, on which we can dance
to remember the reasons we are.

Jellybeans are the keys to the soul and other nuggets of wisdom

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H.L. Mencken

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
- Ronald Reagan

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire

The Joys of Bureaucracy

This is a still relevant re-post.

The Ontario government has started a pilot project of installing new smart meters that tell you how much electricity you use for activities such as laundering clothes, showering, and lighting so that you can reduce your electricity usage and therefore save yourself money. Their established targets are to have 800, 000 smart meters installed by December 31, 2007, and to have all residents using them by December 31, 2010. This plan also serves the purpose of bailing the Ontario government out because they have not planned out our increasing electricity needs enough. To their credit, they have stuck to certain goals of shutting down coal-burning generators, but they have not sufficiently planned to replace the lost megawatts. Investing more heavily in nuclear is an idea that has been bandied about, but really, who wants radioactive waste that takes tens of thousands of years to become harmless in their backyards?

To count myself among the fans of wind-generators (pun intended) is an honour, but there are naysayers who say they are eyesores. How can such a clean energy source delivered by such elegant structures be so maligned? The lines of a contemporary windmill are understated, and they are rounded rather than squared; as such, they contrast beautifully with the sharp corners of the modern citiscape. In large urban areas, skyscrapers form natural wind tunnels that might be areas ripe for smaller windmills, attached to the sides of buildings. Engineers should grab their Cray supercomputers and do some feasibility studies and cost-benefit analysis. The aesthetic eyesore argument is more of a parody of the NIMBY perspective, rather than a legitimate expression of it. The nuclear waste NIMBY argument is far more persuasive.

There are those bleeding hearts who worry about the birds who fly into the blades of windmills and die. Thousands of birds a year already die by flying into skyscrapers. To deny the value of birds in and of themselves as life forms, their value to people to brighten the visual and sonic atmosphere, and their value as key links in the food chains or threads in food webs that compose ecosystems is foolish. But what is worse: a few hundred birds dying per year, or billions of birds, people, and other animals suffering from air pollution caused by coal or gas-burning generators?

The concept of smart meters - another ingredient in the recipe of living sustainably - is sound, yet they have only made this meters available to the people involved in the pilot project. Therefore, those of us who already understand the benefits, both personal and environmental, of such meters, cannot get them because of this bureaucratic procedure. If this is what they mean by snail's pace, I'm looking for a solar-powered shell.

posted by Trevor_Cunnington @ 9:58 AM 0 comments

Thought for the Day, Coming Soon to a T-Shirt near you

If you think the world is full of assholes, try to be 3-ply toilet paper.

Rules governing the Road to Success: Part 1

1. Always read the last page of a contract first. People who write contracts often put contractees in pressure situations to read the contract quickly. They put the stuff that you will like least at the end in the hopes that you will not finish reading the entire contract and sign it with partial knowledge.

2. Learn to deliver information that you know people won't like with a smile. It is more difficult to take issue with a smiling fool than a hesitant person who makes disclaimers like nurses before they "drop the needle"

3. Find novel ways to promote yourself. A couple strategies I have found novel: putting stickers on $2 coins, putting cardboard flyers in the leaves of hedges in park settings.

Canada: why do you ignore me so?

Well, I received another rejection letter. This time it was Oolichan books rejecting my collection of villanellies, saying that it was "creative and well-executed, but not suitable for our roster." This sounds like most of the rejections that presses hand out. Not one editorial comment. I know that they have many submissions to wade through, but if they cannot martial the voluntary resources of literature-lovers to create time for the editorial board to make substantive responses to writers' submissions, then it's on them that writers like me are not getting published and overhyped writers like Atwood, Ondaatje, Martel are monopolizing the literary market. This is not to say that these writers are not worthy of their success, but it is to say that there is lots of raw talent not being published because of various forms of nepotism.

I get hits from all over the world on my blog: Finland, China, Japan, Korea, Spain, England, Slovenia, Germany. I think I have more readers in China than in Canada.

I am a gold mine waiting to happen. What publisher is going to get the privilege of publishing my first book?

Kyoto: took yo' toy!

The Canadian Government recently released a study of the costs of following through with Canada’s plan to accomodate the Kyoto Protocol. It said that such an act would cause the economy to shrink by 4.2 percent, equal to the recession in the early eighties. Well, this is ridiculous. First of all, the long-term costs of NOT accomodating the Protocol are greater than the inverse because much of Vancouver will be underwater within a few decades if we don’t implement the Protocol. Second, the study did not take the economic growth aspects of rallying around the Kyoto Protocol. My brother-in-law, who works at a fibreglass plant said recently that Fibrelaminations, a company I also used to work for, is starting to quote prices on wind-generator blades.

His company, should the Kyoto Protocol be followed to the letter, stands to gain from a business point of view because the taxes proposed to limit greenhouse emissions will increase the interest in greener forms of energy production such as the wind. Harper, an Albertan, and his government are looking to protect the economic growth promised by the oil sands. Ironically, it was Conservative Brian Mulroney who privatized Petro-Canada, which was previously a Crown corporation. Had Petro-Canada not been privatized, the government of Canada would be able to cut taxes even more than Stephen Harper has done.

Furthermore, the cost of greenhouse emissions on the health care system, largely unknown and unstudied, could undo any economic benefits that failing to live up to the Kyoto Protocol might bring.

Mass Murder and the Modern Age

There's lots of renewed interest in Hitchcock lately, perhaps the best filmmaker to never win an Oscar. You have Disturbia, a scarcely veiled remake of the master's Rear Window; you have Fracture which uses Hitchcock as a touchpoint in its marketing strategy (it is a suspense/thriller "in the tradition of Hitchcock"); and you have Vacancy a new "motel horror," a genre crowned by Psycho. I was thinking of doing work on Hitchcock for my PhD dissertation, but I'm reconsidering; he does have a whole academic industry picking him to pieces. Does this industry really need another gadfly growing up from maggot status in the master's corpse, oops, I mean corpus!

On the other hand, there are those people who were in the Hitchcock discussion group that I exiled myself from. Their analysis seemed so wishy-washy that it instilled me with a will to show them how it's really done. The discussion group was more like a cult; say a word against the moderator or his acolytes, and consider yourself hen-pecked. No thanks. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I want to pursue Hitchcock because he is eminently worthy of a creative and thorough eye and ear, such as mine are. Too many film scholars are epigones of epigones. I could complain, or I could make my own contribution; I think I would prefer to choose the latter.

A Humbling Experience

I submitted a partial manuscript to the legendary Coach House Press yesterday. It is a confusing place. I've passed it a few times, and I seemed to remember there being a door that opened onto bp nichol lane. Well, was I ever wrong. I walked around to the back, and at first found nothing but a tree and a door that didn't look much like a front door to a press. I returned to bp nichol lane, and saw someone working the presses through the window. I motioned to him, and he opened what was kind of like a door, but not really. I asked him about who made the decisions about which manuscripts get published. He didn't know, and he told me to go up front to find out.

No one was in "the front." There was a typeset office, and a crowded little compartment housing books and a computer that could have been an office had anyone occupied it. There was a narrow stairway leading upstairs, but I wasn't sure whether there was anything up there besides a bathroom. I looked around a bit, picked up a business card, and frantically tried to remember what the building looked like from the outside. Was there an extensive second floor? Finally I bit the bullet and ascended the stairs. I was stopped near the top by a fresh, earnest-faced woman named Alannah. I asked her about the protocols for submitting manuscripts, and suddenly I felt like a teenager again, approaching someone I'm crushing on. It wasn't her so much as Coach House Press itself. Their legacy is a little intimidating, I have to admit. I mean, bp nichol, Christian Bok, Darren Werschler-Henry, and Steve McCaffrey. Yikes!

Thankfully, Allanah cut to the chase and asked for the manuscript. I felt a little sheepish because I had only put my snail mail address on my cover letter, and they prefer to reply via email. But that's one of the advantages of going in person: you can compensate for such deficiencies by simply writing your email address on the cover letter.

When I think about it, I have manuscripts more appropriate for CHP than the one I handed over, but it's the project that has the most momentum for me right now. Yes, it's the collaboration with terminus' own Cecile Carriere.

You should check out Coach House's Websites, because they publish great books.
http://www.chbooks.com/