basil.CA
News, Miscellany, Arts & Letters
18 July 10: My very dear friend, John Ross Fraser, died earlier this week. I loved him, as I do his wife, Monica, and two sons, Christopher and Patrick. With Monica’s help, I wrote his obituary:
“FRASER, John Ross Born June 27, 1942, in Vancouver, BC, and died July 13, 2010, at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, after a courageous struggle with tongue cancer, surrounded by his two beloved sons, Christopher and Patrick, and his wife of thirty-five very happy years, Monica. John was an esteemed exploration geologist who worked and won friends around the world. For those who worked with him, John set the highest standard of professionalism. He had a brilliant mind and a kind heart and treated everybody with warm consideration and dignity. He was a great mentor, in his industry as well as in his community. For the North Vancouver Minor Hockey Association, for more than ten years he managed teams, organized tournaments, and looked after visitors who came from other nations to complete with the locals. The family would like to thank Dr. Scott Durham of VGH and Dr. Peter Edmunds and the Peacock Group of North Vancouver for their help in this hard time. Services and a reception will be held at Boal Chapel, Saturday, July 17, 1:30 - 4:30 PM, at 1505 Lillooet Rd. in North Vancouver.In addition to his wife and sons, John is survived by his brothers Donald and Peter Fraser, their families, and his aunts and uncles and their families who live all over Canada. Another celebration of John's life will be held by the Coast Mountain Group of Companies on September 9th in Vancouver. In lieu of flowers, the family would be grateful for contributions made to your local palliative care organizations or the Cancer Society.”
For the next month or so John’s friends and colleagues can sign his online guestbook here.
At his services yesterday my brother, Christopher, John’s long-time friend Tom Schroeder, and I spoke. I sure do wish I had the text of my brother’s beautiful series of profound, vivid, and spiritual vignettes, but I am sure these were composed without paper or pen, and the services weren’t recorded. My own remarks were very short, and largely taken from a piece included in a Festschrift I made, with his son Christopher, for John’s birthday last year. I needed a manuscript and something short, so that I neither wept nor fainted.
“For years John and Monica invited me into their art-filled home for their Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I always came early and sat in the kitchen drinking fine Scotch, talking with them while they prepare their great Hams and Turkeys and their wonderful Finnish side-dishes. Their two sons, Chris and Patrick, then would show up, usually with spectacularly beautiful women by their sides, and with their bright and worldly wise friends. These holiday evenings always featured delightful and super smart discussion about everything. Sometimes people sang. We laughed our heads off! We typically ended these evenings with some shots of Finnish drinks made from tiny berries that provide unique hangovers. Lakka!!! I love John and Monica and these boys. Being invited into the Fraser family has been one of the most wonderful things that have ever happened to me.
“John and Monica had a great love affair – something we all aspire to, most never get. John woke up every morning thinking how lucky he was to have gotten the best girl. Monica, you woke up every morning and said the same thing to yourself, but in a lovely different language.
“John’s Coast Mountain family – Heather, Gary and Chris, and June, and so many – looked up to John, and in many ways were cut out of the same cloth. I have trusted them all with my life. And still do.”
4 July 10: I’ve been spending a fair amount of my “free time” preparing a two-day P.D. module on “social media” (not the most felicitous phrase) for faculty in Kwantlen’s Marketing Management department, which is launching its B-BAMM degree (Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing) this fall. I was honoured to be asked. I’m no expert on the topic, actually, in that I have not studied it systematically. Rather, I have long been happily immersed in certain zones of the social media-sphere: my website, Twitter-feed, Facebook groups, Tumblr and Flickr sites, and so on. Note to self: Make sure to to start with an arrogant “profession of humility.” (See post from 19 April 10.)
26 June 10: Starting in July, basil.CA will be published as a WordPress rather than as a Mac site. I’m looking forward to the change; I’m looking forward to learning *how* to make the change, actually. It seems straightforward, and I already have put together the skeleton of the new site. Bells and whistles next. Goal: To bring back the all-over-the-place content targets of the original site, but with a hyper-lucid feel. Stay tuned!
20 June 10: Boy, I’ve been a ghost here recently. It’s summer, and my plate is crowded otherwise: I have my three upper-level Kwantlen classes working hard; one new requirement this year is that they contribute to a blog addressing professional communications: Check it out (lots of good stuff). With my partners at the Community-University Research Alliance’s “Acting Together” project, I am working to re-do our website and launch various knowledge dissemination initiatives. With a colleague, I’m preparing a two-day Social Media module for instructors in the Marketing Department. And: I’m playing with my iPhone blog and keeping up to date with my Facebook friends. And tweeting.
More actual real material soon, I promise.
28 May 10: In terms of teaching, summer has always been the busiest part of the year for me. I love this season’s vibe at Kwantlen: It’s flip-flops time, the sun’s still up when the night classes get out, and the students are especially committed. (You can read the nifty Tumblr blog and twitter feed this semester’s communications students have created. And here’s a Facebook Group, too.)
Other school news: My colleagues in the Applied Communications department have elected me as the new chair; I am deeply grateful for the confidence they’ve shown in me. This is a “time release” position; that means I will be teaching two fewer classes per year; and that means the news is bittersweet.
21 May 10: There are two kinds of people: People who find the course of their lives profoundly absorbing, and then people for whom the lives of others seem more worthy of attention than their own. Long-time basil.CA readers know that I’m in the latter category; a good many of my friends are in the former. I find my interests interesting; myself, not so much. This explains why I am drawn to teaching, editing, and publishing.
Still, this *is* my website, so I might as well put in a word about myself, in terms of who I am rather than what I’ve done (the latter is what the resume is for). Here goes: I don’t want to own a house or condo, or land, or a car, or stocks and bonds; I don’t want to have more friends; I don’t want to be thin or have enough hair to comb; I don’t crave the esteem of others, though I used to; I also don’t crave longevity, and never have; nobody knows my real views on religion or government, or ever will; in my youth I was obsessed by hitch-hiking because I had to have surprise destinations and conversations with strangers; and Vancouver is the love of my life.
8 May 10: Here’s part of what’s coming up for my students this summer. I’m teaching three upper-level professional communications classes.
20 April 10: One of the great pleasures of being a part of the Acting Together project is working with Jennifer Matthews, a researcher at UBC. Jennifer has an MSc in Health Promotion Studies from the University of Alberta. Her thesis detailed the sex-and-drugs habits of young men who party in Whistler, BC. The website devoted to this research is one of the best I’ve seen when it comes to conveying academic work in an engaging and truly lucid manner.
19 April 10: I met Jonathan Mayhew at Stanford University in 1982 in a seminar on William Carlos Williams taught by the late Gil Sorrentino. (There were many bright lights in that class, including Joseph Conte, Brett Millier, and Maria Damon, who have all achieved considerable academic distinction.) Essays Jonathan and I wrote for that seminar later appeared in the book William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet. If I remember correctly (I don’t own a copy), mine was a tad bit pretentious and derivative; Jonathan’s was bright, new, and clear as a bell. With that essay, Jonathan became one of my favourite writers.
One of the great joys of recent years has been watching how prolific Jonathan has become. In 2009 alone he published two books (Apocryphal Lorca and The Twilight of the Avant-Garde) and started a blog devoted to jazz -- this on top of posting regularly on his flagship blog ¡Bemsha SWING!
Recently I was invited to contribute to his newest blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks: Scholarly Writing and How to Get it Done. Before my summer classes start, I hope to do so. It will be an honour to have my stuff appear next to writing like this, a riff on captatio benevolentiae (a rhetorical gesture to win the good will of one’s audience):
One way of beginning an article or talk is by making a profession of humility. We'll call this a CB for short. Adeptly handled, this technique presents the speaking self of the article or book chapter as attractively modest, but without undercutting his or her authority. In other words, the audience understands that it is being seduced by the profession of modesty, but also understands that the modesty is a rhetorical device. There is an article by Derrida in The Translation Studies Reader (ed Venuti) that was originally a talk given to a professional association of translators. Derrida goes on and on at the beginning about how unqualified he is; he knows less about the subject (translation) than his own audience. Yet this CB does nothing, ultimately, to undercut his actual talk. Once he get into his main points he leaves behind this posture of modesty completely. Derrida is not a modest writer in the least.
I've seen people completely undercut their own authority by apologizing in a way that makes the audience think, "hey, he doesn't really know what he's talking about."
The paradox, then, is that the CB must be performed arrogantly enough so that it is transparently false. It must not be taken literally, but as a rhetorical ploy.
***
The Socratic dialogue is based on a profession of ignorance, but Socrates uses that ignorance (known as Socratic irony) as a form of rhetorical jujitsu, lulling his interlocutors into thinking he is going to be easy to debate. The CB is also rhetorical jujitsu. It's got to be performed from a stance of strength, not weakness.
13 April 10: The fashion show put on by graduates of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Fashion Design program is always a big event. It’s being held tomorrow afternoon and evening at the River Rock Casino Resort Theatre in Richmond, right on the Canada line.
12 April 10: It’s been slim pickings around basil.CA of late, alas. There’s been somewhat more activity, though, at my sister sites: the Twitter feed and iPhone Blog.
28 March 10: A former student turned me on to the short, often very poignant films sponsored by “The Responsibility Project.” The above image is taken from a pretty darned powerful eleven-minute film called “Father’s Day.”
25 March 10: Kwantlen’s Acting Together project has added several new video interviews with our community partners. I’ve found, in doing many of these, that our partners can say a whole lot in under a minute.
14 March 10: Domesticated animals are bred to trust. That’s why, when people hurt or abandon them, that’s worse than when people hurt other people, who learn the game, as it were, early on in their lives. We know, in some way, what’s coming at us. Pets don’t.
7 March 10: Happy birthday in Manhattan, Mom!
28 Feb 10: My iPhone Olympics.
27 Feb 10: Roger Ebert is one of my favourite writers. Since he lost his ability to speak a few years ago, his writing has become (even more) dazzlingly prolific. In addition to his articles and his blog, Ebert has taken to Twitter with wonderful and brilliant energy.
25 Feb 10: I’ve been so consumed with the Olympics (visiting with my son and his girlfriend, eating very well, and meeting great people) that, outside of emails to students and remarks on their assignments, I’ve been writing little of late.
15 Feb 10: You can get your anti-corporate-capitalist take on the Olympics and everything else at the Vancouver Media Coop.
14 Feb 10: Yesterday I went strolling around my beautiful city yesterday with my iPhone and Nikon camera. You see some photos here and two videos of the Olympic crowd here and here.
13 Feb 10: Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist/blogger Paul Krugman calls Canada’s banks “Good and Boring” (h/t to PM):
Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.
But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there. In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently?
It wasn’t interest rate policy. Many commentators have blamed the Federal Reserve for the financial crisis, claiming that the Fed created a disastrous bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long. But Canadian interest rates have tracked U.S. rates quite closely, so it seems that low rates aren’t enough by themselves to produce a financial crisis. ...
Canada’s experience does seem to support the views of people like Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional panel overseeing the bank bailout, who place much of the blame for the crisis on failure to protect consumers from deceptive lending. Canada has an independent Financial Consumer Agency, and it has sharply restricted subprime-type lending.
Above all, Canada’s experience seems to support those who say that the way to keep banking safe is to keep it boring — that is, to limit the extent to which banks can take on risk.
One thing I would add to Krugman's analysis is that in Canada there is no income-tax deduction for home-loan interest payments, which means that home-buyers here aren't encouraged by the government to buy homes they might not otherwise be able to afford. It also means that there is less real estate speculation. Yet: the percentage of Canadians who own their homes is basically identical to the percentage of Americans who do. And we have avoided the kind of housing bubble that wiped out so many Americans.
Canada also has the lowest debt-to-GDP radio of any of the G8 countries (under 20%). During Chretien's reign, virtually every year the government ran a surplus to pay down the debt. We are thus not owned by China.
12 Feb 10: Thinking of Mike Niman’s post, let’s not pretend we are dead.
11 Feb 10: Mike Niman is one of my favourite authors, indeed, one of my favourite people. We met one another more than thirty years ago, as students at SUNY/Buffalo. We became friendly journalistic adversaries, with Mike founding an alternative newspaper (wittily called “The Other One”) to counter the influence of the mainstream student newspaper I wrote for and helped edit. Our careers have had roughly parallel trajectories, as both of us made a name for ourselves publishing work on new Utopian movements in the United States (Mike studied the “People of the Rainbow,” and I delved into the “New Age”); now we both teach communications at a university.
Mike has long been an astute radical leftist-socialist when it comes to politics and policy. When he visited me last year in Vancouver, I felt I learned more about the world in the single afternoon we spent walking around the city than I did in the preceding month, not that I always agreed with him. Mike’s got a merry personality to go with the a very pessimistic outlook. As you can see from the following passage from his “Valentine’s Day Message,” Mike’s prose is filled not with anger -- how he accomplishes this, I have no idea -- but with lucidity:
Humanity is tied together with the common belief that the world is in trouble—politically, economically, and environmentally. Our problems, however, are bound together with a common thread. Whether we’re talking about resource depletion, as in running out of oil, fish, forests, arable land, and rare earth minerals, or whether we’re talking about the overproduction of wastes, as in carbon, chemical waste, nuclear waste, landfill wastes, or ocean trash vortexes, we’re talking about one issue—overpopulation. There are too many of us consuming too much stuff and turning it into too much garbage.
If the earth is alive, than we’re the pathogens that arrived relatively recently, spread exponentially, and are wreaking biological havoc. We’ve bred beyond the carrying capacity of the planet—beyond a climax population. For its part, the earth is running a fever, just like we do when we get sick. We’re seeing this in climate change, with the world turning both wetter and more arid, with wild weather making it colder and hotter. The earth is slapping us where we eat and sleep, making it more difficult for us to live and multiply—like a fever combatting a virus.
More people also means more political pressures as more of us fight over fewer resources. In American cities, yuppies are using financial weaponry to fight working families in an ongoing war over limited urban real estate. The result is gentrification-driven housing bubbles for the wealthy, or formerly wealthy, and homelessness and mortgage-induced poverty for the poorest among us. Too many rats fighting for too few nests.
Around the world we’re starting to see resource wars—nations organizing militarily to combat each other over energy and fresh water. Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really a war over two bands of bearded zealots arguing over how to worship the same god, or is it more about two civil organizations fighting for control of the same aquifer upon which both states depend for their daily survival? (It’s under the West Bank.) Expect intrastate water wars as well, as burgeoning desert cities in the US move to pump the Great Lakes into ecological oblivion in coming decades.
And expect wars and massive social disruptions as environmental refugees fleeing population-linked environmental devastations compete for scarcer resources and land. Think ocean level rises depopulating 13 of the 15 largest cities in the world—places such as Miami, Mumbai, Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, London, and Manila. Then think about cities depopulated due to fresh water depletion, such as Miami (again), Mexico City, Las Vegas, Delhi, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles.
Now think about the burgeoning market for pollution credits, as wealthy nations, like urban yuppies who displace the poor, try to buy their way out of a crisis—in this case trading money for the right to pollute, buying conceptual pollution rights from those too poor to pollute, in a neoliberal dance of eco-insanity.
10 Feb 10: My good friend and prolific, brilliant author Jonathan Mayhew has started a new blog, devoted to jazz, to complement his blog ¡Bemsha SWING! From a recent post:
When swing style pop vocals like those of Tony Bennett became eclipsed by rock music in the mid 1960s, it freed Bennett up to be a jazzier singer. The same happened with Rosemarie Clooney--a pop star in the 1950s but a jazz artist later in life. Interestingly, rock musicians popular in the 1970s like Linda Rondstat and Rod Stewart, Joni Mitchell, also turned to the great songs of the great American songbooks much later in their careers--with varying results, some good, some bad.
Nat Cole began as a jazz pianist. When he began singing that talent eclipsed his piano playing and he became an international pop star. His brother, Freddie Cole, has had an interesting career as a jazz singer, using a Nat King Cole-like voice but a more jazzy, less pop feel. Even Armstrong did pop vocals in his later career that have little to do (seemingly) with his jazz roots: "It's a Wonderful World" and "Hello Dolly."
Vocal music, then, has always been close to the commercial side of jazz, often to the point of not being jazz anymore. To what point the dichotomy between jazz singing and popular music is valid, I don't know. Is Sinatra singing jazz with Count Basie and pop with Nelson Riddle? For me, Sinatra is a jazz artist. He even tried to hire Billy Strayhorn away from Duke at one point...
6 Feb 10: With the Olympics in Vancouver, we’re going to see a whole lot more stories and slideshows like this one, in the New York Times, about the Downtown Eastside, alas. Visit Aha Media, run by the wonderful April Smith and her colleagues, to find stories and videos documenting that neighborhood’s many “positives.” [Stay up to date on Downtown Eastside news here. - 7 Feb 10]
3 Feb 10: Get your Human Resources questions answered at Zasada.CA, the blog published by a brilliant former student of mine, Agata Zasada. Her personal website, Agata.CA, is also very well worth visiting.
1 Feb 10: I’m still PhotoShopping my upcoming photo gallery. You can still visit my old gallery, though.
31 Jan 10: Regarding the new basil.CA design, my friend Val McMeekin writes: Thinking back to my first impression of your [old] website...it visually wowed me! It implied importance...vital information here...the art of communication in combination with the art of fast paced media attributes! The site looked more fancy...and importantly...it worked...yet the aspect of you was somewhat lost due to the linked-in aspect on your home page...being able to click to another person...the focus was less you...the concentration of your prior homepage was the links.
I just went through your site more in detail as it is set up easier for me! From my perspective...I spent more time on your site today. The prior times I went into your site I would click on something that was visually appealing or interested me through title. However, then I was in other peoples sites and not as concentrated on You! I went into your site because I wanted to learn about you!!
I like the new...but in all honesty...I prefer the more chaotic!
31 Jan 10: I’ve updated my iPhone blog to convey what a wonderful Sunday it was to walk around the West End and English Bay. I ran into some friends, including Val (by chance), and everybody looked beautiful and happy.
15 Jan 10: Kwantlen Polytechnic University has launched a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Visual Arts degree program. Offered at Kwantlen’s Surrey Campus, this program provides learning opportunities ranging from traditional studio arts to new media technologies in a critically engaged academic environment.
Scott McBride, chair of the Department of Fine Arts comments, “Kwantlen’s new BFA cultivates creative excellence through technical expertise, conceptual approaches and innovative applications in a diverse community of students, artists and professional faculty.”
Read whole story here.
15 Jan 10: TNR Gold Corp. (TXS-V:TNR) and wholly owned International Lithium Corp. are undertaking the option to acquire 100-per-cent interest in the Fairservice mining leases adjacent to the company's Mavis Lake property, located 15 kilometres northeast of Dryden in northwestern Ontario, from Rich Resource Investments Ltd., a private company in Edmonton.
The Fairservice property consists of six mining leases totalling 88.4 hectares and is dominated by east-trending spodumene-beryl-tantalite-type pegmatites considered to be part of the same dyke swarm as on the company's adjacent Mavis Lake claim block. Past exploration identified 10 pegmatites and delineated a historical (non-NI 43-101 compliant) resource of 500,000 tonnes at 1.0 per-cent Li2O at pegmatite No. 1.
To earn a 100-per-cent interest, TNR has agreed to make payments totalling $120,000 and issuing a total of 500,000 common shares of TNR over a three-year period and incurring exploration expenditures totalling $500,000 over a four-year period. The vendor will retain a 5-per-cent net profits interest royalty of which the company has the right to purchase in entirety by paying the vendor the sum of $1-million. The agreement is subject to regulatory approval.
8 Jan 10: I taught my first class of the semester today. It is a blessing to have this gig.
8 Jan 10: The wonderful Teri Gross talked to Vic Chesnutt on her radio show "Fresh Air" a few weeks before his death." Listen to the podcast, with comments by Michael Stipe and other friends spliced in. It is beautifully rich and smart and human, very emotional.
7 Jan 10: Dr. Deborah Henderson, director of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Institute of Sustainable Horticulture (ISH), was named educator of the year by British Columbia Landscape and Nursery Association (BCLNA). Read more here.
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