transparency

Appropriate or not, I’ve just arrived home from a screening of Inside Deep Throat.

(Worth a look anyway. The major thesis is that Deep Throat was a significant sort of cultural nexus because so many different people had so many different things to say about it. The minor thesis is that old people get lumps in their throats looking back on when they were young and beautiful and thought the world was going to open up for them.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 8, 2005]

Attended a Donna Haraway http://humwww.ucsc.edu/histcon/faculty_haraway.htm lecture a few weeks back entitled “We have never been human – companion species in naturecultures.” Being totally out of the academic circuit I had never heard of Dr Haraway before but apparently she is a very popular academic thinker. I can certainly understand that she’s a popular speaker, being droll and animated. In her presentation she followed up some links in human/canine relationships across time, geography and politics establishing that we are connected through our dogs to everything that our dogs are connected to, and that our dogs are connected to us through their integral roles in our histories and ways of constructing ourselves.

Later in question period she pointed out that you could do the same thing with a mass-produced commercial object. So it wasn’t clear that the deliberate cultivation of webby thinking the way she illustrated it would necessarily lead to a commitment to the ethical treatment of animals; she just chose to present it that way. Which was confusing, because she initially seemed to be saying something specific about the relationships between dogs and people, but when she explained what she was saying it was no, she was saying something about people, that when you look at our connections in a webby way we have more in common than we might like to think.

Which seems to be a very old notion. One that has more to do with adulthood and becoming one’s parents and looking fondly at people who are young and leaving their parents than it does to do with dogs or cyborgs or naturecultures.

But given that I don’t know what a natureculture is, is not for me to say.

What disappointed me was her reply to someone asking how to apply her philosophy in such a way as to convince evil profit-centred capitalists of the necessity for veganism. She said that thinking of meat-eaters as concerned with profit did them a disservice, and that while it might be unfortunate that the entire planet wasn’t vegan at least there were active movements to improve the treatment of domestic animals, such as cage-free rearing of chickens and that we should think about these and be optimistic.

When sharing a planet with six to seven billion other people who are continuing to multiply, when many of them are simultaneously going to increase their abilities to consume, when the vision of the future is an increase in people increasingly competing for increasingly limited resources, when what we know of true poverty is that it breeds a philosophy of “life sucks and then you die,” what the **** does the niceness of cage-free rearing of chickens have to do with anything?

But I get the impression that I might simply not have understood any of the lecture at all. Like my mother says: “Sometimes you can’t tell whether you don’t get the joke or whether you just don’t care.”

Anyway. Went to something presented with much smaller words on Thursday, and even illustrated. With moving pictures. I’m pretty sure I understood it. “Turtles Can Fly,” a fictional movie about children in wartime in Kurdistan acted by war-injured children. I almost walked out in the middle of it. The experience recalled visiting television-owning friends in 1985 at the height of famine in Ethiopia. They would be watching the news and I would be desperately ordering them to Turn that thing off! “Why? What’s the problem? Aren’t you interested in international news?” That’s not the point! Maybe you can invite starving children into your living room to die in front of you while you don’t lift a finger to help them. Maybe you think that’s interesting. But I can’t do it and I don’t want to know how you can. Turn that thing off!

Am still a little shaken.

Hugs to all, dogs and children especially but chickens and academics too.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 5, 2005]

Since arriving in Canada, Mark has been on an aggressive campaign to introduce me to winter sports. Last year he bought me snowshoes, but finding somewhere you’re allowed to walk for which snowshoes are required is not always easy. This Christmas I got skis, so we’ve been doing lots of that.

Mark is a much more experienced and adventurous skier than I am but he’s usually very patient with me. We go doggy-style: I chug along, and he runs back-and-forth ahead of me. When he isn’t patient, he’s cross because my learning style isn’t what he wishes it were or because I’m refusing to try new things. Which means that we go skiing on days when I’m feeling good, but other days when I’m feeling tired and cross I balk and refuse: we go for a walk instead, and then Poupoune can come too.

Yesterday was a lovely sunny day. We packed up our skis to check out Oka where neither of us had ever been in the winter. Arrived at a giant parking lot. I needed to pee and Mark wanted a trail map, so we went into the service centre where I immediately got the willies from the sporty affluent white breeder crowd and became resentful. We hurried out to the ski trail which was nice and easy. Wide, flat and impeccably groomed. Wheelchair accessible, even. Literally. And crowded with sporty affluent white breeders of all descriptions. I rushed along to distance myself from all the people – I like going to the country to get away from people, not to gather in herds – but of course there were more people up ahead and all that happened was that I was rushing too much to pay attention to the landscape.

So I concentrated on composing an e-mail to you all about what a terrible time I was having, and about the grim looks on the faces of the sporty affluent white breeders. Fathers who had worked in an office all week and wanted nothing more than to be adventuring on a remote ski hill with a guy friend or a lover, but instead were following their undisciplined little whiners around with snot rags because that’s what good fathers do. Mothers who just wanted to be alone for once were pretending to be interested in going out for a family ski in hopes that their children would learn to like exercise and be better people than they were. Kids who were not really sure what was going on except that the activity was organised for their benefit and that they had better appreciate it or die trying.

“Mark,” I called, “We’re going to take the shortest possible trail and head home as soon as we can. I hate it I hate it I hate it. We don’t have to turn around, but let’s not prolong the misery.”

(Ooops, thought Mark.) Pause. Careful, upbeat reply, “Alison, this part of the trail is crowded because it’s the common access to five trails. It will be better when the trail splits into five.”

I stopped and took off my skis at the first intersection, which happened to be in the middle of a beautiful swamp, sat on a picnic bench and had something to eat and drink. Why am I so crabby? I asked. Why do I hate these sporty breeders so much? A trio passed by, the boyfriend challenging the girlfriend’s nine-year-old daughter to a race, the girlfriend following behind chanting “Pousse avec les bras! Pousse!”

“Anything to motivate her,” commented Mark. “But why,” I asked. Mark looked puzzled. Then patient. “They are doing what I’m doing. They’re teaching her technique and improving her fitness so that eventually they can take her interesting places they want to go.”

But why? Why isn’t the pleasure of being outside enough? Why can’t they stop and discuss the vegetation, try to figure out how they know they are in a swamp even though it’s covered with snow, how they know it was made by beavers even though they can’t see any beavers? If they aren’t enjoying themselves now, then why do they even want to bother teaching the girl to ski? Why would the girl want to learn to ski if skiing is only going to be about not being good enough? Because wherever they go, they are going to be better skiers than she is.

And Mark, if you aren’t having fun going out with me, if you are only tolerating me now, and taking me skiing on the most horrible trails in the most boring places you can think of in the hopes that next year you will be able to take me adventure skiing on remote slopes, we might as well go home right now because there’s no point.

I put my skis back on and we continued. Mark was right: the crowd thinned out. He asked me which trail I wanted to take, and I told him to choose: “I’m feeling crabby today and I want to be able to blame you if I don’t enjoy myself.” He picked a trail with an “intermediate” as opposed to “easy” rating, and while it was still extremely easy at least the landscape was more interesting. (The “intermediate” trail was easier than the “easy” trails he’d been on with his friend Paul the day before, in a different park.)

There were even some hills for me to practice going down. Mark coached me, then I told him to go down and keep on going and not look back. I skied down the hills without falling and was very pleased with myself. Mark was able to control himself and wait for me without going back to rescue me.

When we got back to the picnic bench in the swamp we took the snowshoe trail back to the service centre instead of heading back the way we had come. There were really no people there. At one point we saw ski tracks heading off into the woods, not following a trail at all. On a whim we followed the tracks, which took us to another trail. Still no people. We headed down to the beach, where I took some pictures of Mark skiing on the lake. Another picnic stop, Mark sitting on a tree stump and me stretching out on the snow, in the sun. Mark’s friend Paul is a good, fast, fit skier and they have a lot of fun together, but he won’t leave a ski trail. Too much work for not enough speed.

It was getting late, so we skied back towards the service centre across the lake; we didn’t go inside, just kept on going to the parking lot.

In the end I think we had a pretty good time.

[originally transmitted by e-mail February 28, 2005]

Just came back from a screening.

I recognise this world. The sound track and TV clips; the nuttiness, yes; but the killer was the sparkling puberty and adolescence giving way to disappointment as soon as the teen years were over.

Not that I can claim to be any Rosemary Labelle; I just recognise her world.

Hugs!

[originally transmitted by e-mail February 1, 2005]

Just came back from seeing Bad Education, the latest P. Almodóvar creation. I enjoyed it. While I don’t inhabit (or even care particularly about) Almodóvar’s world, his movies are colourful and interestingly paced. They are sufficiently narrative that I don’t feel left out of the moviegoing experience and sufficiently cartoonish that I don’t make too many demands on them. Their worst fault is usually overt and tiresome misogyny, the worst excesses of which were avoided in this particular film by the straightforward strategy of not using women.

So I liked Bad Education for the colour. It still falls far short of the dream I woke up to this morning: a church service, perhaps a funeral, which broke into an a capella, syncopated, hummed and sung and broken-into-rounds gospel arrangement of… In My Life. Now that was satisfying.

[originally transmitted by e-mail January 19, 2005]

I took pity on my poor old body and on the dogs and took them all for a walk to the park. The weather is not what most people call beautiful — windy with a light misty drizzle — but we all had a grand time. I love the light this time of year: indirect because of the atmospheric cover, never fierce because the sun is never high in the sky, but what remains is fully available and unfiltered by trees.

I bundled up in a jacket and scarf, wooly socks and a tuque pulled down over my ears. The dogs were naked. Poupoune deals with bracing weather by galloping exuberantly and raising her heartrate; Pepe doesn’t have that option, being snugly harnessed and leashed to me at all times. I fully expected him to ask to be carried about halfway through the walk, but he’s tougher than I thought: he made it through the whole circuit without complaint, grateful just to be outside.

[originally transmitted by e-mail October 17, 2004]