Early Morning Thoughts on How to Save the Republican Party

Gay Mortgage.

Don't explain what it is, just insist you're opposed.

In which I am reminded that disbeleif does not exclude having A Sense of Wonder

Ottawa is a big town full of constrained office buildings and older architecture left over from back when the city was home only to petty gangsters (the Irish) and less petty gangsters (the Government). Shortly after arrival, I wandered three blocks away from the hotel and found a tiny Catholic church nearly lost amid the highrises. The doors were huge, and I struggled with pushing for a good minute before discovering that pulling was in fact the best strategy.

The interior was huge, ornate, beautifully painted with arching ceilings and a lovely marble baroque alter. It was empty except for a few elderly people at the front of the sanctuary, murmuring into the echoing overhead. An amplified voice periodically came out of nowhere, reciting prayers in French, too raspy to be God and too young to be from the crowd. The whispers of the few alternated with the voice of the one, each succeeding the other like waves breaking silently against the shoreline. Somewhere in the distance a siren started up, barely breaking the stillness of the afternoon. I sat for a while then left.

Trains

There's something deeply strange about traveling by train. You get on it and it goes and goes. Staring out the windows, you are struck both by the closeness of things, by the sensation that you could reach out and touch these leaves, these houses, but also by the impossibility of contact; the sheer velocity of the train isolates it from it's surroundings, makes it a world unto itself with the bright but unreachable outside as good as images thrown on the glass. Things burst into sight and just as quickly pass away, and you are left feeling strangely unsure of what's there outside the cabin. And then you arrive at a new station and a normal speed, and things pick up just as before, the faces are more or less familiar, the buildings more or less the same, a little more French in the cafes and a little more English in the accent.

To Ottawa!

And back! (Which I now am.)

Wow what a weekend. Lovely people. Lovely place. I am so tired.

(Posting will resume.)

This one's for you mom

Cute but also deeply creepy.

David Brooks, Heideggerian?

We report, you decide!

First:

Gail, you know one thing I didn’t get a chance to get into in that column was the theory of 10,000 hours: The idea is that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at anything, whether it is playing tennis or playing the violin or writing journalism.

I’m actually a big believer in that idea, because it underlines the way I think we learn, by subconsciously absorbing situations in our heads and melding them, again, below the level of awareness, into templates of reality.

-David Brooks, earlier this morning.

Templates of reality, eh? Lets go to the master, shall we?

That wherein Dasein already understands itself in this way is always something with which it is primordially familiar. This familiarity with the world does not necessarily require that the relations which are constitutive for the world as world should be theoretically transparent. However, the possibility of giving these relations an explicit interpretation, is grounded in this familiarity with the world; and this familiarity, in turn, is constituive for Dasein, and makes up Dasein's understanding of Being.

-M. Heidegger, Being and Time, page 119

Okay, it's definitely a reach. Posting regularly is harder than I thought it would be.

Lynch America

Well, what else are you going to call it?

Memorium

I don't know how many David Foster Wallace fans read this, but regardless of whether you know who he is or if his recent death matters at all to you, you should read this. It's a speech he gave at Kenyon a few years ago and like much of his work it sums up a lot of stuff all at once and doesn't turn away from dealing with hard things in a very real way. And, as usual, it's quite funny, which only makes his loss seem more sad.

Anonymity. Brutalistism. Classrooms.

Currently sitting in the Chestnut Skylounge (TM) again. The weather's shifted in a more autumnal direction this last week and so today the air's a bit cooler and the entire city is covered in a fog that's been thinning out since dawn. This is a huge step up from last week's muggy heat, which made me seriously consider giving up showering for the sheer futility of the thing, but it leaves everything seeming pensive in ways it wasn't last week.

Classes started on Monday after a week of thoroughly pointless Orientation Activities (TM) that I mostly skipped. I'll write more on it at a later date, but suffice it to say, whoever decided that giving A type personalities complete control of the lives of impressionable young'uns was the best way to establish genuine community must have been (a) out of their mind or (b) themselves an A type personality. I know they put in a big effort and all, but the events resulting from their decisions are mostly just draining and stressful and didn't result in knowing other people any better. (And a waste of money; I asked one of the group leaders what they were getting from being group leader, and she looked at me funny and said it cost her 75 dollars to even be one in the first place. Bizarre.)

Putting froshweek aside, however, all of my classes seem promising. I got seriously lost on Tuesday hunting for my Medieval Philosophy class, but ultimately found it in time to hear the second half of a seriously interesting lecture about Peter Abelard's castration. 19th Century Europe looks likewise positive, especially since it's given in an awesome two-tiered lecture hall and the professor is a Greek sixty-something with a ponytail and fluorescent green shirts. This morning I had my first class on the Holocaust to 1941, which is taught in a gigantic lecture hall by a professor who obviously feeds off the energy of large groups of students and used to do religious history at Notre Dame. It was a strangely anonymous experience, despite the fact I found myself participating more than in all the previous classes I'd had... Lonely too, since there's no real intellectual community there just yet and I'm sort of doubtful it'll ever grow up outside of the tutorial sections.

Much like the classroom experience, Toronto's campus is both inspiring and rather hard to feel connected to. Architecturally it's a fascinating place, with a lot of the standard fake gothic next to the brick-colored Victorian style that Canada uses for most of its federal buildings next to huge glass cubes next to a big chessboard held up by multi-colored pillars. The two centerpieces of the campus make a really fascinating contrast, with Hart House, the student union, trying very hard to be from Oxford, and Robarts Library trying hard to disguise itself as a concrete turkey. (See fig 1.1)

Fig 1.1
Robarts Library



(I was very excited to discover that there is a name for this style of building: Brutalism. Derived from the French word for raw, it doesn't actually refer to the psychological effects these buildings have on people, though it certainly does nothing to run away from them, perhaps best embodied by Morris's own brutalist masterpiece, Gay Hall.)

Alright, that's all I have to say for the moment. Tonight I have my first lecture on Charles Taylor, and I am very, very excited. I may even put on a fancy shirt.

We're doomed.

She doesn't know what the Bush Doctine is.

Dear God.

Sure beats stealing apples, eh?

I love me some late antiquity. Here's Augustine, massively out of context, courtesy of Intro to Early Medieveal Philosophy;

Gradually and unconsciously, I was led to the absurd trivialities of believing that a fig weeps when it is picked, and that the fig tree its mother sheds milky tears. Yet if some saint ate it, provided that the sin of picking was done not by his own hand but by another's, then he would digest it in his stomach and as a result would breathe out angels, or rather, as he groaned in prayer and retched he would bring up bits of God.
-Confessions, Book III.

Crazy bicycle man, part 2

I saw him again! He was wandering among the shops in the anarchist neighborhood, shouting at God to tear down the city.

If I see him again I'm asking for an interview.

Parade!

Just like last Saturday, I woke up this morning to the sound of booming megaphoned voices coming down the street. Staggering to the window, I peered out to see, again just like last week, large crowds gathered, signs hoisted high and banners waving. A rally, for what I don't know. Last week it was labor day. Today, I imagine it will be about the upcoming elections spurred by the United States continued economic stupidity. It's not that I'm unhappy to be here to see this; so often the foreign impact of the U.S.'s economic decisions is given a paragraph at the end of the coverage of its domestic impact, and duh, these things are important to understand. It's just that I didn't need to get up at 9:30 to hear it. (It's currently shifted over to a soul singer. Bizzarre.)

Jon Stewart on Double Standards

I know I swore I'd focus on Canada and not on American politiking. But this is really really really good. Watch:

First thoughts

And now, after months of fantasizing about brilliant things I was going to post on this space about Toronto architecture, Canadian culture, about the meaning of whatever I could lay my deconstructive hands on, I find myself completely stumped as to how to begin, or what to write about, or how to describe the experience of the last 72 hours.

Blast.

I'm currently sitting in the rooftop lounge of the Chestnut Residence, the converted luxury hotel that now serves as Toronto's international and "other" dormitory. Back when the building was a home for tourists, this room housed a restaurant featuring a 360 degree panoramic view of the city, made more dramatic by the slow rotation of the entire floor. Nowdays it serves as the space for makeshift ice-cream socials, like the one going on around me as I write this, and as a study space for students who can put aside the massive incongruity between the space's form and function. (Harder than you might think, as I'm discovering writing this post.)

Looking out from up here, it's hard not to spend a good moment thinking about the kind of hubris necessary to put up skyscrapers. Chestnut is a very tall building in a city of very tall buildings, all with comparably novel tricks. Ahead of me, for example, is the CN Tower, for many years the world's tallest free-standing structure and now yet another world landmark surpassed outside the developed world. There's a beautiful light show that they project on it at night, with alternating bands of red and white running up and down the whole length of the structure and circling the saucerlike viewing platform suspended midway to the top. It was surpassed earlier this year by the Burj Dubai, still under construction in the UAE, and will likely be surpassed again once that buildings exact height is announced. Soon it will be just another new world landmark like those possessed by most major cities; something to remember the city by, a reminder of past efforts and a place by which tourists can validate their experience of a place, but no longer a thing adequate to the purpose for which it was built. A monument to the game which has now forgotten it.

Laying negativity aside though, Toronto has been a fascinating place so far. It's definitely the most multi-ethnic place I've ever been. Just getting off the plane at the airport, I heard no fewer than eight languages being spoken, and saw some representative of most of the major ethnic groups of the city. Toronto International itself is like most international airports, huge and built to give the impression of enormous motion and importance; vast spans of steel thrown up at odd angles, blaring apocalyptic voices, well-dressed business people straying anonymously across the tarmac, etc. It made me incredibly nervous and I was glad to escape. I hoped a bus and a subway to Downtown Toronto, where Chestnut is located, and promptly got myself lost for a good hour, eventually arriving home and checking in.

It's probably too soon to be trying to describe this place in too much detail, since I've only wandered around Downtown and I have the feeling there are large and amazing parts of the city I'm neglecting. Still, the sections I've seen feel like a strange combination of San Francisco and Chicago. Lake Ontario shapes the geography of the city much like the Ocean does for SF, with huge highrises dominating the coastline and buisnesses becoming more prominent the further inland you go. There are not a lot of green spaces, sadly, but the feeling is definitely not cramped. There is room to breathe and people will not run you down if you cross the street to early. Their manners are also very friendly, much like the Midwest, though I did see a tiny man on a tiny bicycle screaming "Go to hell Toronto, you're terrible and I hate all of it!" (I muttered "I love you Toronto" after he was out of hearing range. A little premature maybe, but also completely called for.)

Anyhow, I suppose that'll have to do till my next post. Welcome to all the new readers who have hopefully gotten my email or hopped over from facebook. Keep your fingers crossed I don't die once the schoolyear starts.

In which I discover I live in a luxury hotel with sub-par bathrooms

Dear Readers,

I have arrived in Canada and am getting settled. Expect regular posting to resume shortly.