I'm back

after a brief respite in which lots of exciting things happened. I will mention but one: I got a letter in the New York Times on Thursday....I suppose I should have a link to it.
The issue is about Google's initative to digitize a bunch of University libraries. In the letter, I raise a note of caution. I am concerned about the devaluation of printed matter, a denial of the real value of going to examine texts and talking with people -- librarians, scholars, others. Reading a work in front of a computer screen is one thing, and can in fact be very helpful, so I don't think the project is a bad one. But it should not, should never, be a question of either/or -- either the digital text or the printed text. Both are important in different ways.

Here are some other thoughts I posted on Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog:
Digitizing library collections, especially those of major national libraries and excellent research libraries is extraordinarily helpful for getting the ball rolling. However, it is important not to go utopian on the wonderss of digital technology. Here are three points:
1. Research value. There is a big difference between looking at an actual book (complete with oddities, squaring it with different editions, etc) and looking at it in digital form. Examining it in person, talking with librarians about collections, talking with others who have different sorts of expertise in book history (ie watermarks on paper) can shed light in all sorts of strange ways. This is especially true with manuscript material, but also true about books...books in libraries usually had original owners who made notes, had other collections, etc. You get none of this context with the digital version, as it is being conceived.
2. Technology issues. As was noted above, books are durable technologies. It is not clear how durable the storage and interface devices of the proposed databases will be. Can banks access computer records of two decades ago? How much does it cost them to reformat their stored data to new technologies? How many of us have what it takes to read the 5.25" floppies of a decade ago? What about the 3.25" disks?
3. Economic issues. a. Libraries, especially at Universities, are being pressured to go electronic. So we are under pressure to cut our subscriptions to paper journals in favour of their digital versions. Same thing with newspapers. All this is meant to help with the storage crunch. But imagine what a library would be like if it only shelved current books? What about if it had no books to browse? Would you be able to browse in the same way digitally? Never mind flirting with people in stacks.
b. Google, right now, is a socially conscious company. But it is publicly owned and traded. What price will it charge for access to these books? What about in the future? Will we need to succumb to advertising to consult works? What happens when the current owners get bored, or someone else takes over? Do we really want the historical cultural record to be privatized in this way? What are the constraints on Google's creation of the database?

Most people posting only use libraries in a casual way, or targeting in the way lawyers look up cases, or a blogger looks up on line articles. For these sorts of research, on line availability simplifies things tremendously. For others of us what we would be able to do, and to teach others to do, would not only change, but also be in many way completely different from what we do now. And we already experience the pressures in that direction. Its not Luddism, it is realism. And it is important to draw distinctions.

Nicholson Baker has an excellent book about the digitization of newspapers, Double Fold.

As for the weather: yesterday was a glorious day...balmy almost, with great suna nd blue skies. Today is distinctly grayer, but not a heavy gray...a light one, that seems to promise to break open at any moment...though it probably won't. And chillier, no doubt as well.

Civil Discussion of Same-Sex Marriage

In case you haven't been following how the issue of same-sex marriage has unfolded in Canada, I begin with a brief (and no doubt slightly off) history. After the history, I'll highlight a number of points which has allowed the discussion on this highly charged matter to remain civil and principled, and not subject to emotional manipulation of the citizenry.

Over the past few years, several provincial Supreme Courts -- Quebec, British Columbia, Ontario, and most recently Saskatchewan -- have handed down opinions which have claimed that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates a basic human right. The Ontario court has also ruled that the now married same-sex couple can divorce as well. These cases were headed for the Supreme Court, and if the Supreme Court had ruled on any of these, it would have been prescribing the law of the land. Rather than end up in a situation where the courts were making laws of such moment, the Prime Minister's office put a series of four questions to the Court, to pave the way for legislation to come forward before Parliament.  The court ruling last week made it clear that it was appropriate for legislation to come before Parliament on the matter of same-sex marriage, that any law must be civil only and not constrain church or other religious practice. The court refused to answer a question which asked whether not changing the definition of civil marriage constitutes a rights violation. After the ruling, Paul Martin (Liberal Party, Prime Minister) said he would be putting forward legislation in January when Parliament reconvenes. Ralph Klein (Conservative, Alberta Premier) called for a national referendum. All four major party leaders have quashed Klein's proposal. My question: What are the key ingredients that make the ways the issue has played out in Canada and the US so different?
A beginning of an answer:

The provincial rulings framed the issue in terms of human rights, and this is exactly how the media reported the rulings. There were some pictures of happy gay and lesbian couples, but there was sober rather than sensationalistic reporting.

Given the growing trend at provincial rulings, the federal government took the reigns on the issue and, after a period of soul searching, came out clearly on the side of human rights. Paul Martin's waffling angered some, but I think his honest and principled handling of the situation was wonderful. Martin was raised a Jesuit and still attends church and had personal qualms about same-sex marriage. But he took his role of PM seriously, and very eloquently spoke about how human rights considerations overrides his personal beliefs. This perspective gives others with similar issues a clear way of thinking through the issue for themselves.

The Federal Supreme Court did not legislate from the bench. They did not take up the provincial cases, and the refuses to rule on a hypothetical case. Instead they articulated unanimously a commitment to human rights, and a commitment to balancing this with freedom of religion.

The Federal government is taking responsibility for setting a national standard before the issue becomes too divisive.

The federal parties are united in rejecting a call for a public referendum (compare the 11 votes in US states in November). Here are the reasons:

 Stephen Harper (Conservative): "We haven't been demanding a referendum"
Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Quebecois): "We are speaking of rights. These must not be submitted to a referendum. A society has to be exxcessively vigilant of the rights of its minorities."
Jack Layton (NDP): similarly, he claimed that it is wrong to submit a question of rights to a majority vote in a referendum.
Paul Martin: "I think this is an issue that parliamentarians ought to decide. The courts have now given their direction. I think its one for Parliament and I think that Parliament ought to accept their responsiblity."

I see a respect for the legal process and court decisions, I see a fundamental respect for human rights and a clear articulation of those rights as an overriding principle. I see a government taking its responsibility seriously, and not overreaching its authority. I see a clear articulation of what is the proper role of a legislature (over the subjects for referendum) and I see a rational and measured discussion of an issue that is difficult for many. And I see non-sensationalised reporting. What do you see?

hurrah!

a grey day has turned to rain.
and rain.
and rain.
the night, such as it is, its not even seven,
is dark.
and the lights from the cars
and the windows
don't so much radiate as pop
through the darkness.

but its been a good day nonetheless.

a song for every occasion

Gang of Four: "We live as we breathe alone."
Today is a day of waiting alone, to be told that my life will be allowed to proceed on course.
Waiting alone is not enjoyable.
Would there were someone to say "I wanna hold your hand"

weather it is a dark and stormy morning, though I am now glimpsing a patch of blue.

Last night I saw 'Closer', the new Mike Nichols movie. It was bleak, but true, sort of like the heros of the movie. Its questions: How well do we really know those whom we call our intimates? How well do we really know ourselves? When do we dissimulate to others? When do we tell the truth? When are we kind? When are we intentionally hurtful and manipulative? Is professional success a mirror of our ability to withstand the cruelties of personal intimacy? Does honesty -- no, authenticity -- require the distance of an observer of human nature? Is that the same as irony?

"I feel like I am losing my mind"

she said to the campus security officer as she recounted the details requisite for reporting the leather jacket stolen. She had been in or around her office from 2:30-3-ish until 4:30, when she locked the door and went to a meeting -- without the jacket. She had worked in the office from about 6 until 7, when, in packing up to go home, she noticed the jacket missing. The department had been scoured. She had even checked her car. "Black leather jacket. That explains it," the security officer pronounced. "Christmas. People need extra cash, and that can be turned around quickly for an extra 50 dollars." It did make sense, but then why didn't the thief go for the wallet and the digital camera that were right in her bag, sitting on the chair? Why just the jacket? It did not make sense. She was losing her mind.

She had bought the jacket at TJMaxx in Ithaca. It was part of her effort to grow a thick skin. There were the Machiavellian machinations of the job she had left, and a year of anxiety around that and the prospect of finding another job. There was the disfunctional atmosphere of the department she found herself in, not to mention the glimpse of the girl sprawled limply on a rock at the base of the gorge. And then there was the event of September 11. She had found herself wanting a leather jacket -- which incredibly cheap at TJMaxx. And then she wanted leather pants. She supported the NYC economy by buying them on a massive sale at the Kenneth Cole store at Grand Central, at a time when the faces in the city looked more and more shell shocked the further south you went. And then she had found it: her thick skin.

The loss of the jacket was not so bad though. It was stylish and looked good -- it was a nice jacket. But she didn't really need that extra layer of flesh anymore. She had other jackets.

The jacket was found the next day in the common room of the department. This was certainly good, but she had looked there, hadn't she? There was this problem of losing her mind. What sort of clothing can solve that? A good hat?

[ weather report: grey, with a light wind. was raining earlier, but now its dry. If I didn't know better I would say it was threatening snow.

tumbling down

They say it might snow this morning.

There are two news stories that caught my attention this morning.
The first confronted me as I opened the browser: A US consulate in Saudi Arabia (Jidda) was raided and 18 local employees were taken hostage. In addition, several local staff (and the attackers) were killed. The US staff is all accounted for. My first thought was: 'Wonderful. The downhill spiral spreads, after the most violent week in Iraq since the invasion'. My second thought was: 'What does this really signify?"
The second story came from the radio: Jeremy Hinzman, an AWOL US soldier seeking refugee status in Canada, and others like him, have their immigration hearing today. It will be interesting to read about the argument and the decision tomorrow -- though of course it is not clear the decision will be made today.

uninspired

My mind seems to be emptied of all opinion. I am left to talk about the weather, which is grey and rainy. What kind of rain? A steady stream of drops keeping time on the pavement, but not beating down hard enough to be heard on the skylights. The kind of rain that murmurs. Always there in background.

the morning after -- Bush's visit to Canada that is

[by the way, it turned out to be a brilliant sunny day yesterday. Today, however, is more like I predicted yesterday to be...foggy, and drizzly]

In Bush's speech in Halifax yesterday, he invoked William Lyon MacKenzie King, the PM who brought Canada into WWII before the US, effectively comparing the terrorist enemies of 'War on Terror' to the threat posed by Hitler's Nazi Germany. (I could write a separate entry on the problems with that analogy, but I will leave that for some other time -- none the less the analogy itself is telling.) He also decided to press Canada to join the United States in furthering missile defense.

These two moves are astonishingly bold. Bush came to Canada for two days; the Canadians had modest hopes of resolving two trade disputes, neither of which went resolves, and found themselves having their history misrepresented and bullied into a defense plan most here find laughable.  And this was done on a stage in Halifax with Paul Martin standing by his side.

The columnists in today's Globe and Mail --some of whom were willing to give Mr Bush the benefit of the doubt in turning over a new leaf in foreign policy -- were left shocked, and consensus is that this speech by Mr Bush has made Mr. Martin's minority government more precarious.

Martin helped himself by asserting the inappropriateness of Bush's invocation of Mackenzie King: "Terrorism is a global threat that's very, very different from the situation we were facing in the Second World War."  And journalists are, in good Canadian style, asserting a 'I knew MacKenzie King, and you, Mr Bush, are no MacKenzie King' line.

But now he is in a bind with regard to missile defense, a very divisive issue here, that Martin was certainly hoping was just a bunch of rhetoric from the US and not really serious. Now it seems that Bush is going to try to tie Canadian economic issues to agreement on this issue. Bush may be calculating that the Conservatives, who do seem to support missile defense, would take over government in the next election. My sense is that the NDPs lot is improving, and the Conservatives under Harper will never have enough seats to form a majority government. Canada is not the US (thankfully).

At least Martin seems to be, quietly but strongly, insisting that US foreign policy involve a substantive multilateralism.

This visit was meant to be practice for Bush's European tour. It will be interesting to see how he compares terrorism and WWII on European soil.

UPDATE It seems Jack Layton is coming out swinging...calling for an export tax on energy going to the US -- presumably this would include oil, gas, as well as hydroelectric power. Gotta love Jack Layton.

Wednesday morning

its 7:05 and the sky has just started to turn from black to an indigo blue. I can't tell yet whether it will be clear or cloudy, but the road is dry.

UPDATE: the 'sun' is up. the verdict is in....Cloudy.

I am trying to get the last few papers marked. And it will be close.
Last night, a chamber music concert: Jacques Thibaud Trio with Anton Kuerti as pianist. The Dvorak piece was quite fine.

evening star

It's evening, but don't ask me to tell you where the stars are. It's raining. This afternoon, up on Burnaby Mountain it snowed -- the wet sticky sort. It stuck to the cars and to the roads. Not a big deal really, but there were a slew of squeamish drivers who wanted to move very very very slowly -- even once they were past the snow line and safely on rainy pavement instead.

I feel like I am living in a bubble that insulates me from culture and world events.

The US President GW Bush is making a state visit to Canada tomorrow. Protests are promised in Ottawa, Halifax and elsewhere. Bush has refused to speak to Parliament because he does not want to have to face the heckling of question time. Stephen Harper is posturing, sort of. Jack Layton is being statesmanlike in his dissent.
.

Ukraine

For anyone who is interested, there is a very helpful summary of basic background to the current situation surrounding the Ukrainian elections at Daily Kos. Just click on the title.

sigh

Its that kind of morning. a clear blue sky and cold. The sun hasn't risen enough in the sky to warm things up.

This is the weekend of powerless women. I went to the opera last night: Madama Butterfly. The singing was wonderful (Liping Zhang in the title role, a tremendous voice) and the staging was artful, but, you know, its just a bit dull. And painful. And there is something about the music in the last act that brought everyone to tears. I couldn't help it, they just started flowing, and I was self-conscious until I realized that everyone around me was teary-eyed too. Yes, the story is sad, very sad, and tragic, but lets just face it Butterfly is so naive that it borders on the delusional. You don't really like any of the characters, you think they are all annoying and pathetic, and yet you cry anyway. I have a new theory about Puccini: the major Hollywood genres derive from his operas. So far I count two: the Spaghetti Western, which finds its roots in The Girl of the Golden West, and now the Tearjerker, which clearly derives from Madama Butterfly.

But nonetheless this powerless women business seems to be going to my head. I feel heavy this morning. This must stop.

Vera Drake

[woke up this morning to a perfect blue sky -- well the sky wasn't blue when I woke, but you can tell that was what it would turn into. cool and crisp. lovely.]

I left the theatre with my guts wrenched, a sense of hollowness and powerlessness fitting to the subject of the movie: abortion in 1950 England. Vera Drake 'helps young women in trouble' simply out of kindness and sympathy, for no remuneration, though the person who puts her in touch with her clients does make a clean profit. Yet Vera is the one who faces punishment. Vera, who, because of her sheer goodness and her seemingly super human ability to be blind to the horrors of human existence, is the least equipped to face the punishment.

Mike Leigh fills his movie with contrasts. We see Vera living in dark, cramped tenement housing, but she keeps things clean and tidy and as bright as they can be, and so has it better than some of her neighbors who are incapacitated in various ways. But she has it far worse than those in the homes she cleans. They don't see her or her life, and it is the men of these very households who sit in judgement of her at court. Even as their daughters secretly secure their own, wholly sanitary and safe, abortions by telling doctors and psychiatrists what they need to hear (even if it may or may not be true) and handing over cash in amounts that Vera and her clientele would never see in a lifetime. We get a glimpse of these daughters through Susan, the daughter in one of the soulless homes Vera cleans. In many ways Susan is the counterpart to Vera's own daughter Ethel; they are both painfully shy and meek. But the privileges of class cannot help Susan when she is date-raped and finds herself pregnant. She manages to pull herself together enough to get herself out of trouble. In a similar way, Ethel manages enough charm to endear herself to the war-scarred Reg, and her soul is revealed in the way she stands by her mum. Through the men, we see a contrast between the moral and the legal judgement of Vera. On the one hand, the men who have been through war and hard times, and who have known Vera, are able to understand Vera's actions and to forgive her, and on the other, the men of privilege who sit on the court find Vera guilty of one of the most heinous of crimes.

And then there is Vera, someone who in her simplicity cannot lie to the police, or even fail to confess. She knows what she does is against the law, and at some level she thinks it is wrong. Yet she also at some level knows that it is not her place to judge the women she has helped. She finds her way to them because they are in trouble -- a trouble that far exceeds whatever failures of judgement might have allowed it to visit them. But Vera is someone who works at the level of intuition, and though her sensibility is good she is neither educated enough nor discursively minded enough to be able to articulate those intuitions in a way that might either change the system or persuade the court to grant clemency. Vera is someone whose actions reflect all the complexity of thinking about abortion, but who has no voice to express those thoughts.

It our identification with Vera Drake that has us walking out of the theatres feeling haunted.

morning coffee

grey sky grey air grey light. still the sky is high. a skateboarder coasts down the Davie hill when he should be careening.

The Ukrainian presidential election dominates the news. Viktor Yanukovich came out the winner, but by all accounts, there was substantial voting fraud. The opposition party leader Viktor Yushchenko is holding fast, and protestors turn the streets of Kiev into multi-coloured rivers. To date: no violence. I am not at all clear what the political differences are in the two parties

why weather?

Its American Thanksgiving, not that this fact has anything to do with the weather, or the title of this blog.

The sky has turned blue, and if it were summer, it would be bright blue. But its not. Yesterday, it was nothing but rain pouring down, and no one knew if the sun ever rose.

I want to try my hand at writing -- but what to write about? What do people talk about when they don't think they have anything to say? The weather.

I do want to write about the weather -- to describe the light, the passing of clouds and time, the rain, the sun, to revel in the small details that disappear. I might also try my hand at reporting on the everyday, expressing unsolicited opinions about world events and movies and the quality of coffee. Occasionally, some profession-related writing might creep in.