Archive for new day
thanks-giving day
Americans in motion
Shortly after I started basil.CA in 2002, I wrote, “Much as I love my Canadian land, I do miss being in the United States for American Thanksgiving. If you put aside the historical ironies of the original Thanksgiving, you’re left with a day to meditate on the world’s generosity to you: My son, for instance, and my siblings, and my parents, and most of my favourite friends are still alive. Boats go by my apartment’s balcony. I’m reading Cookie Mueller for the first time. And I have a new favourite colour (light violet), a fact that delights me to no end, God knows why.”
This year has been filled with many new as well as recurrent blessings. Today I’ve been writing my students and colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I am so lucky to have a gig as an educator there. And tomorrow I’m taking a train to the United States, where, the day after, I will be cooking a turkey with some cherished friends.
Happy thanks-giving … to everyone.
Another Olympia, Washington scene
Kat in transit …
Kat writing
My friend Kat Kosiancic is hanging out at my place getting her notes together in advance of her flight to Thailand tomorrow. I hope she does a ton of writing, on the streets and on the beaches, and in the retreats, caves and hot springs there. I know she has several writing projects in the works, from fairy tales to pilgrimage memoirs. Years ago I called her “a polymath beat chick.” She still is.
Here’s a recent, really worthwhile Kat project: The C-free list. Kat writes: “The C-free list consists of things that I have personally found helpful on my quest for well-being after I was diagnosed with breast cancer over two years ago (see my story). The website [describes] alternative approaches that I feel help the body, mind, and spirit in recovering and maintaining good health and balance throughout life. The C-free List includes recommendations for alternative therapies, books, documentaries, diets, super foods and supplements, and also touches on how friends and forgiveness, love and laughter, mother nature, yoga, music, mantras and meditation, passion and purpose, power songs, the sisterhood, support, surrender, and words and thoughts help with the healing process.”
Here’s the Facebook Page for her project.
Paul Kurtz
Paul Kurtz: Photo from Buffalo News
The most important thing about Paul Kurtz, my mentor at Prometheus Books and Free Inquiry in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was that he gave his energy to people, who could then go out and create / write / organize in ways they would not have been able to otherwise. It was a wonderful gift he gave to me and others. I know many people owe their careers in academia, publishing, and activism to him. I do. I salute you, Paul, and thank you. I know you faced death bravely and with that curiosity you brought to every facet of human experience. (Obits: The Buffalo News, NYTimes, and Free Inquiry.)
Postscript [October 30]: “Jonathan Kurtz said his father was not afraid of death and spent a ‘joyful’ final day telling jokes and discussing his favorite football team. ‘His true religion,’ his son said, ‘was the NFL and the Buffalo Bills.'”
I Loved the Boy Scouts
The so-called Boy Scout Perversion Files describe more than a thousand molestations of boys by men who took them into their care. The scoutmasters my brother and I had aren’t on the list. I’m surprised by how emotional I was when I looked it up just now. We had a really good troop – an active and fun, funky bunch of dads and kids. The fellow who took over the troop toward the end of my tenure as a boy scout, and who stayed on for decades, was a spirited, single man, prone to irascibility but dearly devoted to scouting; I never got a weird vibe from him. The national director of USA Scouting Operations at the time lived a street down from my family, and his son, a star athlete, was in my troop.
I wasn’t the best scout – I typically returned home from camping trips dirty and often wet and cold as well, even in the summer – but I looked forward to our troop meetings and all our camping trips. I always felt included and protected, and I learned a ton that I still know.
These perversion files are sickening in so many respects, but not entirely surprising. Boy Scout troops were, if possible, even more ripe arenas for ephebophiles than Catholic parishes were not too long ago. They provided easy access to a larger strata of men, for one. And then throw in the whole “camping adventure” thing. Oh, boy: *awful*.
In our troop we had kids who were really hurting and vulnerable. Many were poor. Many had broken families. But they were looked after and were safe when they were around the men in Troop 209, Raymond Baptist Memorial Church, Fairport, NY. I believe that.
“The Dirty Dozen”
Mike Niman
Mike Niman was a fellow college journalist back in the late 1970s and early 1980s at SUNY/Buffalo. He was an activist in the true sense of the word — indefatigable and heading somewhere – and he founded a student newspaper (originally called, and wittily so, “The Other One,” and later titled “The Alternative Press”) to provide information and insight not found in the mainstream student newspaper, at which I was an editor. Mike was adversarial but always very friendly and thoughtful, friendlier and more thoughtful, typically, than most of his adversaries, if I remember right. Mike (the photo above links to his Facebook page) is now a communications professor at Buffalo State College, and still an activist and author whom I admire. Yesterday he published a column called “The Dirty Dozen,” in which he laments that a number of important issues are being ignored or “downplayed” in the United States Presidential campaign. “These issues are engulfed in a deafening silence, both on the part of candidates and the media. This is inexcusable. This toxic silence prevents us from having national policy discussions about crucial issues at the only juncture, election time, where we the people have a voice.” Near the top of that list is *poverty*:
“Yes, it sucks to be struggling in the middle class today, with so many middle-class families descending into poverty. This is why we need to stop ignoring poverty, which sucks even more. Our social inequality numbers are off the charts, with the one percent amassing wealth at a greater rate than even during the Gilded Age, while the number of Americans in poverty skyrockets, and the desperation of that poverty continues to fester. Tens of millions of Americans regularly suffer homelessness, food insecurity or malnutrition, and a lack of access to healthcare and decent educational opportunities. This is more than an issue that true values voters should abhor. Such social disparity is corrosive to a democracy and threatens to unravel the very fabric of society. Poverty leads to desperation, violence, pandemic health issues, and social and political disengagement. It is shameful that candidates, in their rhetorical obsession with the middle class, choose ignore the poor—or worse, scapegoat them as if it were the scraps we throw to the poor, and not our wars and corrupt financial sector, that crashed the economy and grew the debt.”
A New Grad
Today I was officially certified as a “Social Media” expert by Hootsuite University. Hootsuite U. is a nifty online educational program that local Vancouver “social media management dashboard” company Hootsuite has provided to students in my Digital Marketing course at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. It’s kind of nice, as a teacher, knowing that my students have such thoroughgoing back-up to the lectures, textbook, and in-class activities they are getting from me. I must say, the Hootsuite training and webinars reminded me why I need to be humble: I learned a ton, and it took me more than one try to pass some of the tests.
Canadian Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday, one whose name I obey, happily. This year I will be spending the day in two countries, starting in the land where I was raised and ending in the wonderful home I’ve found in Vancouver, where beauty and creativity abound everywhere. (I love that ad, above! The “Lab Art” show will be worth a visit, no doubt.) I’m a grateful man.
Jonathan Mayhew says …
… in his unsparing and witty way, if you don’t write like crap and don’t waste time, you could do just fine in academia when it comes to publishing articles and books. Mayhew’s blog, Stupid Motivational Tricks: Scholarly writing and how to get it done, is a great delight to read. (Note: I am nominally one of the blog’s “authors,” but that is because Jonathan is a generous fellow and not because I’ve contributed anything lately.)
“Culture Days” in Vancouver
From my friends and colleagues at AhaMedia: “Culture Days is a collaborative, Canada-wide volunteer movement to raise the awareness, accessibility, participation and engagement of all Canadians in the arts and cultural life of their communities. The first annual Culture Days event swept across more than 700 Canadian cities and towns during the last weekend of September 2010, generating an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm in the process. This year’s Culture Days weekend will take place on September 28, 29 & 30. … Once again, the event will feature free, hands-on, interactive activities that invite the public to participate “behind the scenes”—and to discover the world of artists, creators, historians, architects, curators, and designers at work in their community.” It will be a beautiful weekend for the event. I’m looking forward to stopping by. It will provide a lovely break in a weekend of marking student reports (though that, too, will be a lovely time).
Thomas Szasz: RIP
Dr. Szasz was “an author of mine,” for Prometheus Books Inc., back in the day. I was lucky to meet him once in person, on his 74th birthday, at his house near Syracuse, as the guest of his brilliant daughter, Suzy Szasz, also “an author of mine.” Drinking Johnny Walker Black with him and his daughter and their friends, and talking about drug laws and politics in the kitchen … that was indeed a very good day and evening.
I’ve given Dr. Szasz’s The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary to numerous friends and former students. It is just so beautifully put together, limpid and witty. He has a piece in On the Barricades: Religion and Free Inquiry in Conflict, which I coedited (the book was a “greatest hits” collection from Free Inquiry magazine). His essay, “Tea and Sympathy on the Way to Mecca,” is adjacent to one I contributed (on “New Age Gurus”).
From The Untamed Tongue:
“Beware of the psychoanalyst who analyzes jokes rather than laughs at them.”
“In science, it’s dangerous to lie: if discovered, the liar is cast out of the group as a faker and fraud. In religion, politics, and psychiatry, it’s dangerous to tell the truth: if discovered, the truth-teller is cast out of the group as a heretic and a traitor.”
“Mental illness is a myth whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other.”
Joe Sacco’s “Journalism”
Final panel from Joe Sacco’s piece “The Unwanted,” which describes the often hostile reception African asylum-seekers have received in the small island nation of Malta.
Joe Sacco’s reportage is presented in the medium of cartoons. His images are dazzling and detailed, though the scenes he depicts are more often than not ugly and awful, and his faces are *never* pretty. His most recent book, simply called “Journalism,” collects some of his shorter pieces and takes the reader to Chechnya, Iraq, India, Malta, The Hague, and back to Palestine (the subject of two earlier books).
In the preface to his book Sacco writes, “I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, and I don’t feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it. If I believe power brings out the worst in people, I’ve observed that those on the short end of the stick don’t always acquit themselves well either, and I’ve endeavored to report that.”
I finish a Sacco book feeling a lot better about art than I do about people.
Juliana Hatfield
Her new album of covers is astonishing. I love her voice inside of my head. Here is her cover of The Who’s “My Wife.”
Live chat with Hardball’s Executive Producer, John Reiss
MSNBC puts my buddy in front of the camera …
Kwantlen’s New President
As a long-ago graduate of SUNY/Buffalo, I’m pretty jazzed about the new guy, Dr. Alan Davis, whose most recent tenure was as president of Empire State College at the State University of New York.
From the Kwantlen website: “With his colleagues at SUNY Empire State College, he expanded the range of graduate and undergraduate offerings, worked towards more effective shared governance, improved retention and quality, and substantially raised the profile of the institution as an alternative and unique institution. His final contribution was a bold new proposal for ‘Open SUNY’ in which all the SUNY colleges and universities could collaborate to form the largest public open and online system in the US.”
Kwantlen was smart to get Dr. Davis. I am looking forward to working with him.
Break Down and Freak Out
This summer was a blessed vertigo. I’ve never taken so much time off before. Olympia, Washington is the least glamorous place in which I have ever lived. I was enchanted by its sounds and beauties.
Home in Vancouver now. First class was today. It felt fantastic.
This semester’s classes: Marketing in a Digital World, Advanced Professional Business Communications, and Writing for the Specialized Workplace.
Happy birthday, Dad!
George Basil turns 80 today. He’s the handsome guy in the photo above, next to my Mom, a few years ago in Montreal.
American Senses
Apartments above the great Fifth Avenue Sandwich Shop, in Olympia Washington
There’s barely a week left in my Olympian summer.
New mural (detail) near Percival Landing, Olympia
I would return in a minute.
Band of Olympians
The vibe is civilized and tolerant – that is to say, it is truly *hip*. On many nights there’s a happy racket of music and loud post-outings conversation in my neck of the woods, downtown in the historic district. I’m going to feel very much like an American again when I get off the train in Vancouver this Labo(u)r Day.
Old cities, old friends …
The proud seal for the Buffalo Seminary, “Western New York’s Only Independent College Preparatory School for Girls”
A few years back, Kato Kaelin (OJ Simpson’s noted house-guest) was being interviewed by Jay Leno, who asked Kaelin how he dealt with all of the derision and mockery he’d received. “My old friends were with me. You can’t make new old friends,” he said, with a wisdom I hadn’t anticipated.
I think of that line a lot.
It seems perhaps too obvious even to note, but you have to be well into middle age before you can have the experience of enjoying things that go on and on for a very long time, like decades-long friendship, and like loyalty that lasts even when you are being a problem, and like the way a city like Buffalo, NY – its people and indeed the neighborhoods themselves, too, it seems – can remember and welcome you.
– Photo by Miles Basil
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