feeling old and helpless

i have for years now been navigating the blogosphere and its predecessors. from the old pyroto and affiliated BBS systems to their java-enabled inheritors, irc and mIRC platforms and their subsequent social networking sites (Bolt, mySpace, Facebook et al). i have joyfully embraced them and expanded myself through them. i play with data clouds, i network RSS feeds, i spend an obscene amount of time investigating the world through my web portal. i am genX turned cyborg and had no real trouble making the switch from dBase to Flash, even though i learned typing as a youth, rather than keyboarding, as is now taught.

there are, however, limits. i don't tweet - the form is too schizophrenic, even for me. and say what you like about the creative possibilities of the 140 character constraint (sorry Arjun Basu, Sina Queyras) but the simple fact is that the Haiku existed for thousands of years with much greater constraints and it's highly unlikely that the flaccid channel surfing automaton that is the twitter nation will ever produce anything of comparable value in form and content.

within the context of this course, i confess, i struggle. when i read Randy Bass's comment to "slow down and look at learning" i begin to twitch. slow down? i enrolled in english studies because i like to read books. my dissertation is an examination of cultural interfaces with the book object. my life online is characterised by spastic hoppings and jerky reactions to the barkings and hoppings of others. my love life, on the other hand, moves languidly between cover boards. navigating the network of blogs, the ever-shifting lines of inquiry, the rotating reading room (where there is neither room nor reading in rotation, as i must print the vast majority of what i read in order to read it) the snarl of paths and links and sites overlaid upon the incessant noise my laptop already creates...it's too much.

my computer is chained to my leg and it grows heavy. my eyes miss the sun - remember reading on grass outside? i feel weak and myopic and no longer one who directs my research but rather one who is channeled and played by the conductor of an invisible cyborg opera. perhaps, given our subject matter, that is the point. perhaps helplessness in the face of a communication media controlled by another is a worthy experience to have as i engage with the subject positions of people for whom canadian experience can have little other definition.

or perhaps i'm just turning into a curmudgeon and think Brass's "bridge to know-ware" is too symptomatic of an age where our interface with language and information lacks a substance replaced by snide homo-linguistic fluff.

time invested in blog entry: (17 minutes)
time invested in know-ware: i don't no, where has the time gone?

body bags

in case you missed it, here's an interesting story on the federal government response to the aboriginal communities being hit by swine flu in manitoba

the cbc story has a network of links leading up to this story, if a bit less detail.

Some thoughts on _Unrepentant_

and on Kevin Arnett's persistent evocation of the holocaust in pursuit of his definition of the residential schools as agents of white Canadian genocide on the native peoples of Canada. Primo Levi wrote in SE QUESTO È UN UOMO of his survival of the Auschwitz death camp: "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died" and considered as later does Hayden White and Berel Lang, that to write of the holocaust could only diminish its horror.

bearing this in mind, it is quite easy to see the white Kevin Arnett as quite fit and an able survivor of what he presents quite convincingly as a home grown genocide. his churlish "i can see through all the bullshit" quips combined with his unconvincing attempt to pin his divorce on United Church officials (c21:40- Q: did you talk about your intentions to do this [challenge church directives] with your wife? A: well, yeah. later we talked all about it. but they sent someone to my house to...) pale in comparison with the actual pain shown by the Native subjects of the film who, as both Levi and Lang note in their holocaust writings, do not talk directly about what happened: the survivors memories are buried, often vague, and the language they use is indirect. you do not hear them say 'the teacher put his penis in me'. rather, the victim says "and he was there, with the vaseline and, you know, he did that three times with each of the boys. for his pleasure. i was six, or eight. maybe nine - i am unsure". this, then, the believable response of a holocaust survivor. not eloquent, barely said, often drawn out by other events.

i suppose what i am saying is that Kevin Arnett and Louie Lawless are unsavory profiteers in the sense of the Native politicians they decry and the Michael Moore's who make such a self-aggrandizing spectacle of other people's suffering. distasteful and, in Levi's sense per the above quote, perhaps the worst of us. that said, someone must tell the story to prevent such atrocities from recurring...though interestingly, that reason for truth-telling is never given by Arnett. i don't profess to understand why not, though perhaps that is because i can not, as Arnett does, reasonably consider myself in the light of a holocaust survivor.

blog time: 23 minutes.
film and research time: 2h17m.

A beginning and a tentative plan

a first step, then. blogging, like most literary arts, germinates from self-writing, from a sort of public journal-keeping. despite its publicity, it seldom achieves communal status and remains the literary equivalent of flashing. one seldom learns much from such glimpses, whether subject, object, or auxiliary clause. it's a dinkus, or pudenda. surface.

blogs are more, now. they surpass even streaking. active, logging cultures and structures more massive and less accountable than selves. this space, perhaps, interstitial. academic, literary, political - all structures abutting and squeezing the fluid. all need lubrication. that shit is money, baby.

here's a space, then. it's linked to another: colinmart@blogger.com but doesn't forward to facebook or myspace like that other. it has a log component (today's investment in course thus far: 1:07:31) and a critical research component (a cursory look at the roughly 700 authors at http://quebecbooks.qwf.org/authors reveals only two authors of native canadian extraction and they do not write their communities) and a creative component. more on that to come, though ideas whirl.

enough. another 23 minutes invested and much more to do.