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Fungi in Gatineau Park

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Warping light

I was going through some old photos and I found this one. I have always been fascinated by pattern, and I love how the glass of the wine goblet warps the light. 

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Artificial Intelligence

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Kasparov, young and cocky 

from last year’s match

sits down at the knotted wood table 

on which the flat chess board 

sits, tessellated with white and black 

space

and the pieces glower in anticipation.

a man sits across from him, a cypher 

carrying out the instructions of a machine – 

Deep Blue – a black tower with silicon chips 

inside

that pulse with coded information. 

move, countermove. again. a gain. 

hundreds of millions of possibilities 

course through the computer’s circuitry. 

then, Blue forces Kasparov into a bad move. 

a shadow flickers across his face, a twitch 

he cannot be aware of. 

he sees it, the mistake played out 

in quadratic lines blurred by time. 

the recognition contorts his face; 

he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

he pushes the table away in frustration 

and stands up, walks away: one fluid motion. 

the people watching open their mouths; 

History has been made today. 

soon human dominance will fade

today chess, tomorrow the novel, 

the next day brain surgery. 

humans will have to stake their claim in a world that 

doesn’t need them 

any more.

White Guy Diary: The Cultural Appropriation Edition

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How can we reconcile the anthropological concept of cultural diffusion with the arising critique of the practice of cultural appropriation? I will never argue against the idea that systematic oppression exists, or that it marks with trauma wherever it goes, but the instinct to always protect against hurt -- a noble one surely -- is it always in our best interests? When I was hurt, I knew where my cards lay, where others' cards lay, so I could best play the hand I'd been dealt. The asymmetrical power of a host and a minority culture makes the profiteering off the minority culture certainly odious in a Marxist framework of understanding.

Critiques of cultural appropriation tend to be morally consequentialist. That is, they focus more on the outcomes of actions and behaviour, rather than on the motivations and intents of the actors in such actions and behaviour. They argue that the harm done to those traumatized by oppression by these images, by the act of appropriating culture, often rooted in rude parody, taken up by the host culture renders them morally suspect at best and simply morally wrong at worst. They tend to discount the intent of any member of the host culture as insignificant to their moral calculus, to use a term of William Vollmann's. Certainly the appropriation of cultural practices can come out of a place of respect, admiration, and love. But by sacralizing the trauma of the oppressed's experience, by prioritizing theoretical future pain against any notion of beneficial intent, they reify it and make it harder to overcome. I tend to lean consequentialist, but I must admit outright eliminating considerations of intent makes me uncomfortable. But who knows. . .perhaps this is white fragility, and perhaps they are right.

We cannot be killed with even a thousand paper cuts. On the other hand, pain is an obstacle to pragmatic organizing in anti-oppression work. Humans have always learned from each other; learning is always an appropriation. How am I, as a white guy, supposed to engage this great "shut-up and listen" exercise, without being somehow influenced by what I hear, by taking it to heart (too much, some will whisper to each other behind their backs). And hasn't this "taking it to heart" affected me, consciously and unconsciously, such that I might not appropriate that culture without any conscious intent at all, but simply through the processes of psychological sublimation and Freudian slips? Does this not produce a cyclical relationship between host and minority, where I listen, learn, appropriate, then lose the cultural war? Nobody likes losing all the time. Cultural diffusion: contact produces sharing, whether you like it or not.

One thing that irks me about cultural appropriation debates is how inconsistently they are applied. A straight, white man writing through the voice of a black woman is a no-no, but a Korean family in Toronto opening a Sushi shop is a-ok. Again, here is where the asymmetrical power card comes in handy, because we can aver that the Korean family is making a peer-to-peer cultural appropriation, whereas the white man, even if he is "raising awareness" of issues faced by black women,  is making a downward appropriation. No Korean family is going to chastise a white guy eating in their restaurant, no matter how blatant a downward appropriation it is because you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The irony cuts both ways. That Korean family could not give a flying $^$# about cultural theorists' arguments about appropriation, or they might have a college-going child who does, at most.

Cover art for bands that don’t exist 2.

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Cover art for bands that don’t exist

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The Daily Regimen - Trevor Cunnington

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The sound of aggregate activity

Breezy in the late, stabbingly bright blue

Of an afternoon

Soft yellows caress

The late-out-of-the gate lilacs

Smelling sensual, lurid.

What rest can be got from this swirl

Of smells overpowering

Malefactors everywhere

Actors and blinks, nods, and who’s hooligans.

Read them the Cactus riot act.

She flowers every seven years

Or if the new moon follows on the first

Friday after Easter infection,

Then, only then, will she spread her. . . petals

It was in a photograph, or –gram

Heavy metal pelt stain melt brain; ham radio

Operator; one caught in the electricity

Wires.

I saw him on my walk home from world.

Singing ‘ole glory to the world,

A face turned murderous

As if a cloud smirched the soulful sky.

In the corner of the photograph,

A figure in sticks, wrapped in the dangerous

Sourcery of the exorcism,

Darkness swirling off him in colour grids

Dextrous fingers of the toppling dominoes

In the foreground, under the table,

Barely visible.

Flim flam, hone it for the street corners.

In the hides of summer, wearing

Sun’s great glory on the sweat-sheened skin

We can write about life,

Or we can write about life.

Precipitating the “oh, not the ‘we’ shit again.”

II

The happiness of a single fuck not given

The apathy trickle-down vectors

Swerving high on unpredictable

Ever veritably new, improved

Dazzling desuetude.

III

Suet in a fur-trap.

A straw, balanced on a camel’s back,

Photographed.

For a response to a query

Responded to and refuted

From every corner of the crypto-verse.

The cacti, in a row, made a fence

To keep the cattle in,

Some do it,

Some don’t.

IV

The next time she appeared,

A blue streak ran rampant around

The orbituaries climbing out of the newsstands.

Surprise factor, attention disperser.

Social facts uncalled upon.

This is poetry’s rent.

Tantamount to a slope of fine powdered salt

To cushion our 20 feet jumps

Down a steep incline.

Don’t think too much

Or you will start to smell the cowpaste
Piling up in the meadow. 

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 Photo taken at Guildwood Park, Toronto

Filtered with Photoshop App