Black Swan week

It is early morning as I write. I couldn't stay in bed any longer, my brain was whirring restlessly. Some folks can quiet that monkey mind at 5am, I cannot. Coffee and homemade sourdough toast and quince jam were calling.

Now that the coffee is drunk and the toast and jam eaten, I can open the laptop without fear of dumping coffee and crumbs into the keyboard. I have two readings on the go, an umpteen-volume fantasy story and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan".

The fantasy story is slow-moving and I have read it before so sometimes I get bored with it, I wish it were faster-paced. But that makes it excellent middle-of-the-night reading, at a certain point sleeplessness looks less boring than the book. It's also good first thing in the morning when I'm not up to more mentally challenging entertainment.

Can't say the same of The Black Swan, this book is a bit of a feast. Taleb is a philosopher expounding on a novel idea, every other sentence is a zinger. Sometimes I have to put it down just to appreciate the last sentence I read. I have just read the Prologue and Chapter One and already he has changed my thinking about nationalism, the (so-called) Middle East and the financial world. And those aren't even his main topics, just prefatory remarks about his own background. I just read something he said about personal libraries. I have always felt a little guilty about how many books I have around that I have never read, as if I shouldn't have those books if I am not going to read them. Taleb says that the more unread books in one's personal library the better; they remind us of how much we don't know and the more we know about how much we don't know the better. I guess I'm doing pretty good on that score.

My writing group meets in a few hours. Yesterday afternoon I was working on having something to read at the meeting, so I feel like my homework is done and I can write whatever now. I have badly organized my week thus far, what started out looking like a busy week became less and less so as various events got sidelined. I was going to work in the garden but decided to postpone until after the expected deluge this weekend as there is no point planting stuff that is just going to drown. I had two events scheduled yesterday and decided to cancel one; the other cancelled itself and I regretted cancelling the first. I had a doctor's appointment that the doctor's office postponed. Went shopping for an item that was supposed to be on sale, the store had not received the item in the latest shipment so I went home empty-handed feeling like it was a waste of gas (the store is in the next town over). It went on like that.

I walked Hapi to her friend Eva's place yesterday morning and had coffee with Eva's owners. Friendship among dogs is a funny thing, Hapi is always eager to see Eva but after a few minutes of greeting Eva and checking out her yard for hidden food Hapi is ready to move on. If we happen to meet on a walk then the two will greet each other and then seem not to be interested anymore. They are both old ladies who have known each other for half their lives, I guess they've said all there is to be said to each other. Eva's owners are old friends of mine as well (40 years and counting), we nevertheless seem to find endless topics of conversation. Hapi just stares at me like: are you done yet? Can we go home now?

Tonight I am ushering, my one and only volunteer job. I have gotten fed up with volunteering, too often I end up frustrated and pissy; I say something I shouldn't and that bridge is burnt. But ushering is basically getting to listen to a concert or watch a theatrical production for free. I don't even have to speak to anyone, although I usually do. One chats with other ushers and exchanges a few words with the folks being ushered. Tonight I am ushering at a concert of a musician I have never heard of. He apparently has a string of sold-out concerts behind him on his current national tour, but there has been no local advertising. I did check him out on Youtube but I fail to understand the phenomenon. I'll find out tonight I guess. Unless it gets cancelled.

And tomorrow the deluge.

Refuge vows

It was my birthday a few days ago. I was not looking forward to it, if anything I was quite depressed about it. Funny how some birthdays mean nothing, some are happy events and some are dreadful. This was in the last category. My parents died in their 70s, neither saw their 79th birthday. I am now 10 years from that date with posterity, feeling my mortality in a big way. I know it's not rational, but it takes little excuse to get depressed. And it's not something one wants to talk about because everybody piles on with how silly you're being. Doesn't help, only makes it worse: not only am I depressed but I am also silly for being depressed.

Just so you know I am not depressed now, so I am not looking for advice.

A couple of days before my birthday I had a really bad dream. Trapped in a small fenced yard with someone shooting a gun at me. The bullets were really spots of grey-coloured liquid but I knew they were poison and the deadly effect would kick in very soon. Needless to say, I woke up breathless and stressed out. Went to the bathroom, got something to eat, had a drink of water and went back to bed trying not to think about it. Instead, I thought about all the things I'd ever failed at in life, all the things I had abandoned--you know--all the negative thoughts that come to you in the middle of the night when you're a little stressed out.

So one of those abandoned things was having taken buddhist refuge vows years ago and then promptly abandoned them. Supposedly lifelong vows, abandoned for something more interesting I guess. I tried to remember what they were. I spent a few minutes on that distraction and did manage to remember them. Thought about what they meant. It occurred to me that they weren't gone for good, I could always go back to them, if I so desired. That thought was actually comforting and shortly I was back to sleep again.

Next day I was supposed to go up the mountain to dogsit overnight. I thought I would just spend the time hanging out with the dogs and reading, so I looked through my books for something I haven't read in a while and might like to read again. In honour of the abandoned vows I chose a book about Buddhism that I remembered having enjoyed the first time but couldn't for the life of me remember the content. It was Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, by Stephen Batchelor. Turned out to be a very good choice. So good in fact that it snapped me right out of the depression within the first couple of chapters.

In the evening the dogs and I sat out on the deck in the dark. One of them had a bone, the other just watched and listened. I tried to listen too, I don't know what she was listening to because I couldn't hear it, just silence. I felt alive.

The next day was my birthday and I went to an art show with a couple of friends and then to a local restaurant for a burger; April is Burger Wars month so a lot of restaurants are featuring hamburgers in a competition and a portion of the cost is donated to a children's charity. I think. Then we went to a pub for chocolate cake and wine.

I've been avoiding my writing group because the depression has stopped me cold. But the morning after my birthday one of the writing group members texted me to say she'd be walking by my house to go to the meeting and she'd knock on my door. I texted I hadn't written anything and she replied she'd knock anyways, I could come and critique. So I scrambled out of my PJs and brushed my teeth and was ready at the door with my jacket when she knocked. The sun came out and it was the warmest day we've had since last fall, and Environment Canada says we were the warmest place in the whole country that day!

Finally, winter is over. Even if it snows again, it's over.

Steal Away Home

I think we got all of our February snow in one week, since then it's been melting and evaporating (lots of fog). In that one week we got almost as much snow as we did in February of the Dreadful Winter of 2015. It sure felt like it! But a lot of it is gone now, and there are no big storms forecast for the near future. I bought new skis and snowshoes last week but I may not get to try them out until next winter.

Since the week of blizzards I've only been able to shovel for a few minutes at a time before I start getting chest tightness, but no other strenuous activity affects me that way. I have a theory about that. I think I have a hiatal hernia and the twisting motion of shovelling just corkscrews my stomach up through my diaphragm causing the hernia to get worse. So right now I am concentrating on deep breathing from the abdomen to strengthen my diaphragm and a form of self-massage to help push my stomach back down where it belongs in order to relieve the hiatal hernia.

A couple of days ago I went to an author reading associated with Black History Month here. The book was Steal Away Home and the author Karolyn Smardz Frost. It was so much better than I expected! Quite an amazing experience in fact!

First of all, the author was introduced by Lynn Jones, a prominent black Nova Scotian activist, an amazing person herself. I'd never heard of her before (I am woefully ignorant of such things), but she radiated joyful wisdom and loving attention, her critical message couched in gentle but direct terms. She started by saying that in her culture it was appropriate to ask permission of the Elders present before speaking, so she was going to do that first thing. She said you are an Elder if you think you are and then asked permission to speak. She got a firm and loud "Yes!" Then she spoke about how her people followed an arduous journey seeking freedom, and that in coming to what would soon become Canada they brought a huge contribution to Canadian life that deserved honour and recognition. She believed that Karolyn Smardz Frost's book gave honour and recognition to that contribution and deserved to be widely distributed and read. She then lead us in singing the traditional spiritual "Steal Away Home" for which the book was titled.

Karolyn (I'm going to refer to her by her first name because it's simpler) then told us about the subject of her book, Cecelia Reynolds. She did a little bit of reading but mostly she told us the story. Clearly she loved her subject and was very excited to tell us about Cecelia. Her love and excitement was contagious, I don't think anyone left that event unaffected.

Cecelia was a 15 year old slave who left Kentucky to journey to Toronto in search of freedom. She was aided in her journey by a very sophisticated system known as the Underground Railroad. Like many former slaves who successfully journeyed to freedom she then spent a good deal of her life aiding others to make the same journey. Karolyn is an archaeologist who was involved in the excavation of the first Underground Railroad station in Canada, in downtown Toronto. It was the home of one of the men who helped Cecelia and who she eventually married. He was heavily involved in helping other slaves on their journeys to freedom. At one point he even travelled to Australia to participate in the 1852 gold rush there to make money to pay for the release of slaves in the United States.

There were several things I was struck by that evening. One was Lynn Jones' reference to her people as freedom seekers. They weren't escaping, they weren't runaway slaves, they were freedom seekers: heroes. A twist in one's way of thinking about what was happening there. Another was the sophistication of the Underground Railroad. I rather had the impression that this was somehow the work of idealistic do-gooder whites but it wasn't. It was a widespread movement of both free and enslaved African people who worked behind the scenes to help any freedom seekers find their way. While slave owners permitted some slaves to learn to read, allowing them to learn to write was strictly forbidden for fear that slaves would use that knowledge to escape.

The first thing Cecelia did after attaining her own freedom was to learn to write (she could already read). She used that skill to write to her former owner to negotiate the release of her mother and brother. There was an extensive written exchange between them, a few of those letters still survive and are probably the only letters extant between an owner and a former slave. In any case the letters were couched in affectionate terms but the owner insisted on an exorbitant price for the release of Cecelia's remaining family (her father had been literally "sold down the river" as retaliation for her escape).

I also learned a lot about black history both in Canada and in the United States. It's not the same as what is taught in schools, or at least what was taught when I was in school. The evening was definitely an eye opener. History is in the eye of the beholder, depending on who is telling it the story can be quite different.

The ice, the mail and a rug

We had a large amount of snow on the ground last week, I thought we were in for a white Christmas for sure. But over the past weekend we went from -15C to +15C (with rain) and then back to -15C (briefly) so most of the snow is gone and what remained froze. Most of the trails are now quite icy. But with sun and temperatures this side of zero in the daytime I expect we'll lose the remaining little bit of snow before Christmas.

I took the picture above at the reservoir; the pond that used to be full of ducks is now covered by ice so smooth and glassy you can see the reflection of surrounding trees in it.

In October I ordered a used book online that just arrived today. Very disappointing because it is not what it purported to be. I wanted the revised edition of A Handweaver's Pattern Book and got the first edition, which is a very different book. The revised edition is more extensive and errors in the first edition have been corrected. I ordered it form Abe Books but it came from Powell's Books in Portland Oregon. I called their 1-800 number and they apologized for it not being what it was supposed to be and told me they were unable to fulfill the order correctly, so they would refund my money and I could keep the book and perhaps pass it on to someone else who might like it, since I already have a copy. Very nice of them but still disappointing, I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this book.

I have now emailed a place in Ontario that says they have the book, both in new and possibly used copies. The used copies would be cheaper but at this point I am prepared to pay the extra for the newer version. From their online description they at least seem to understand the difference between the first and second editions so I await their response with optimism. Unfortunately they are closed over the holiday season so I doubt I will hear from them before January.

In my town we don't have door-to-door mail delivery, we pick up our mail at the Post Office. I read and hear about the controversy around discontinuing home mail delivery in favour of group postal boxes, and how it will be so hard on disabled and elderly citizens. But here, we have never had home delivery, going to the Post Office is the accepted way to get your mail. And it is such a social occasion: you meet people there, it's a great source of local gossip, and they give biscuits to dogs. My dog is hugely in favour of that. I would be far more concerned it they shut down the local Post Office. A Postal Outlet has opened in the neighbouring drugstore but it is not the same thing at all, all you get is mail and postal supplies, no socializing, no gossip, no dog biscuits.

I have devised a rug pattern in my head for my next weaving project. It is too difficult to draw it on paper (I wish I had software to do it for me) so I can only go by numbers (how many warp threads of each colour in what order, which heddles they must be threaded through) and hope for the best. It will be quite wonderful if it turns out more or less how I imagine it. I was just going to do a short warp—one rug—but then thought I might go for broke and make it a long warp. Once again I may be biting off more than I can chew, but I have a hard time keeping things simple.

I've been sick with a cold the past week and quite lacking in motivation so consequently I have not done the necessary sewing to complete the first project. I should really finish that before starting a new project I guess, but I am concerned that if I leave warping the loom for too long I will forget my hard-earned knowledge of how to do it.

February

Came down with the 'flu some time last weekend. Knew I was pushing my luck, I had something going on every evening for four nights in a row and I was not sleeping all that well in between, so by Sunday evening I knew I was in for it. Managed to get out for a dog walk on Monday afternoon, but not again until Thursday. Monday and Tuesday I had a fever although all I felt was bone-snapping cold. By Wednesday morning the fever had broken and I was relieved at getting off relatively lightly, but apparently that wasn't really the case.

Getting out for a dog walk is possible, but it is pretty much the extent of my energy for the day. As long as I don't move I feel fine, but the second I try to do anything the complete lack of energy kicks in and I am done.

I have been reading a lot. And I knit a cap. Made some soup, ate some soup.

Hired the girl next door to walk Hapi. Then I called an ad in the local paper for a dogwalker and tried her out too. I think I'll stick with the girl next door. At least she has experience with a large dog that can be aggressive toward other dogs, their family dog is not unlike mine.

My book discussion group is doing February by Lisa Moore this month, I completed that book and also read The Ocean Ranger by Susan Dodd. It all brings back terrible memories. Dodd notes that it has taken 30 years for people to finally be able to write and talk about that, three books came out in fairly quick succession dealing with the subject, Moore's and Dodd's books and also Rig by Mike Heffernan.

I have been all over the map with my own emotional reaction to discussing this book. I was fully prepared to dislike Moore's take on the story, but I am softening my stance. I thought Dodd's analysis was extremely good, I liked the way she mixed the personal (her brother was on the Ranger) with the analytical. I had a hard time relating to Moore's disjointed story, it seemed pointless to me, dismoored. Although that may have been the point. But some of the widow Helen's imaginings of what happened struck home.

There were three Nova Scotians on the Ocean Ranger that night, one of them a friend of mine. I said good bye to him only a few days before, as he was leaving for his two week shift on the rig. His wife was my best friend at school, I spent all that next day sitting with her while she waited for a phone call that never came.

I remember drowning dreams for months afterward. Waking in the middle of the night holding my breath, wondering when I could breathe again. Looking up at nothing but black water.

I also remember helpless rage and horror. The character Helen feels none of that, she retreats into herself and her grief. I can understand that, but it wasn't universal.

But in the end you had no choice but to get on with life. I talked to a friend about the Moore book, she said she couldn't read it. Not that one not any book. Too soon, too hurtful. I can relate to that too.

The other thing I have been reading is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy cycle. There are 14 books in the cycle and I have just completed the first.

I had been reading The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R R Martin ("Game of Thrones") and finished reading book 5 quite a while ago. Apparently there will be seven books in the series and book 6 has yet to come out. I had been quite into it but by book 5 I was having a hard time keeping track of all the characters and complications, and frankly almost relieved that book 6 was a ways off.

Some reviewers like to refer to Martin as the American Tolkien, however a short while ago I read somewhere that really Robert Jordan had prior claim to that epithet. Never having heard of him I looked him up and found out about the Wheel of Time series which was already completed. I thought it would be interesting to compare and also nice to know that the entire series was already in place. Unfortunately Mr. Jordan died before he could complete it but he left sufficient notes and outlines for his widow to select a suitable author to complete the series.

So far so good. I have the Wheel of Time on my Kindle and it promises to provide many hours of good fantasy reading. Good stuff when you are sick.

While home sick there was a great storm with raging winds and high temperatures that melted all the snow. Now we are back to freezing again, but this time with no snow cover. Although the weatherman says that will all change tomorrow.

Now I'm off to eat more soup.

The approach of winter

This picture of Hapi was drawn on a smartphone by a young woman standing behind me in line for the local ATM. I can't believe she did this so quickly and on a cell phone! She texted me the picture. Amazing, eh?

Coming 'round to Christmas and it has been a while since I last posted.

Pottering around doing this 'n' that, nothing so time-consuming as to justify leaving off the blog, on the other hand nothing so exciting as to inspire a new post.

I've been going to an exercise class, Triple-A (Acadia Active Aging), which is OK but I can't say that I notice any kind of physical improvement. I had a student trainer who was supposed to be training me on the various machines and tracking my "improvement". Mostly we chatted about dogs and her life in northern Ontario, where she is from. And I got tendinitis in my arms. Not sure what caused that, could be coincidental or it could be the Triple-A stuff. In any case I am back on the waitlist for physiotherapy and after a month and a half I have my first appointment coming up. In the meantime the tendinitis is subsiding.

I also started skating with a friend in Triple-A. We try to go once a week but it is kind of boring as it is just a windowless indoor rink with no music and hardly any people. At times we have the entire rink of clean ice to ourselves. If I was a great skater I would be tickled pink at the opportunity to have all that ice to practice my skills on, but I am not. I am one step removed from hugging the boards for balance. I can sort of skate backwards and in circles but that is the limit of my amazing skills on ice.

I joined the Baptist Church choir. Mostly because a friend of mine is the choirmaster and every time she sees me she mentions that I can join any time and the last time she did that she caught me at a weak moment and I agreed. Her enticement was that the annual Christmas Cantata was going to be a medley of Celtic carols, complete with Celtic band. My choirmaster friend has her doctorate in music and teaches music therapy at the university, as well as numerous students in her home. So working with her is a bit of a privilege, but seeing as how organized church religion is never going to be my thing and this is the Baptist church no less, it does feel a bit strange to be hying myself off to church every Sunday. However to my surprise the singing part is actually sufficiently pleasurable that it makes up for the churchy part. There are some Acadia music students in the choir with amazing voices and it is good to be singing along with them. I can sing in tune if I am singing along with someone else who manages to be in tune, otherwise I am quite hopeless.

To round out my musical career and as somewhat of an antidote to the churchy Sundays, I also joined a ukulele group that meets on Sunday evenings in each other's homes. We bring along snacks and "something to drink", sit in a circle and strum our ukes and sing silly songs. The "something to drink" is usually a mason jar of some anonymous alcoholic beverage, so the songs get sillier as the evening progresses. There is some talk of going out carolling, with our ukuleles, in a couple of weeks. We are torn between announcing our plans in advance and not. On the one hand neighbours are likely to turn out their lights and lock their doors when they hear our ukes coming, on the other hand there might be "something to drink" on offer.

Last week I went to PEI. The grandboys were spending a couple of weeks there as their parents were overwhelmingly busy with work. I took a couple of early Christmas presents and the dog. The resident dog Fiona was not thrilled with Hapi's arrival so there was a bit of tension in the house over that. The climax was a grand dog fight over food that sent dogfood and water bowls flying all over the living room. The fight was over in a matter of seconds but the cleanup took a little longer. The dogs were sent outdoors to have it out, and they did. After that no more fighting. the occasional warning growl, but they appeared to have settled the main issues.

We have had our first snows here. Locally they forecasted snow flurries and we got a blizzard instead. Kerthump and there was a blanket of snow everywhere. While I was in PEI another snowfall to the delight of the boys. In addition there were a couple Canada World Youth fellows in the house, one of whom hailed from Indonesia. It was his first snow ever. He said that in his home town, they considered +20C (68F) cold, +40C was normal. His counterpart was from Calgary so he was pleased to see the snow and insisted on dragging the Indonesian youth outdoors for a snowball fight. The grandboys started to build a snowman but got distracted by the snow-covered trampoline.

I took the boys and the dogs to the beach where we found a patch of thin ice on the sand with no water underneath. They had great fun sliding on it and throwing sticks for the dogs. The dogs skittered and slid over the ice after the sticks. Only feet away great white-capped waves crashed on the shore.

My truck is now ready for winter. It has been painted and waterproofed and snowtires put on. My neighbour found two rims for the snowtires, he says he will keep an eye out for two more. That way I don't have to keep having the tires removed from the rims and replaced with whatever tire is suitable for the season. The waterproofing was largely successful but one leak remains that we don't know the exact location of. Nothing a small towel can't catch though.

I still have carrots, kale and mustard greens in the garden. I worried about the carrots the entire time I was in PEI because the temperature dropped below -10C at night. But I had left them covered in snow and plastic and apparently snow is almost as good an insulator as the pink fibreglass stuff. In any case even the mustard greens held up under the snow and plastic. I also have some green onions that are going on two years old and are huge. I had left them out because I didn't know what to do with them, the green parts are way too tough to use in salad. But it turns out the that the white part is very usable and since that part is now as big as leeks, I have a tonne of "green onions". And since they grew through last winter I hardly worry about them this winter. A fellow "Newcomer" gave me a recipe for kale mashed potatoes that calls for a large quantity of onion, so I have a good use for all the kale and onion still in the garden and the potatoes now stored in the basement.

Speaking of potatoes. I read a while ago about the nutritious value of potatoes. When potatoes were first brought into Europe, the Irish went for them in a big way. In fact they became the diet staple which ultimately led to the infamous Potato Famine. But before the famine, poor Irish peasants subsisted on a diet largely consisting of potatoes and a bit of milk, while poor peasants elsewhere in Europe had diets based on grains. And apparently the Irish peasants were far healthier than their counterparts anywhere else, because the potato is almost a complete food. In combination with milk it covers all the nutritional bases.

In my hippy days we eschewed anything white as being bad for you: white flour, white rice, homogenized milk, potatoes and such. To this day I associate the colour white with poor nutrition, and I even have trouble with cauliflour. But this is just wrong. White doesn't mean anything. And potatoes are actually a very healthy food. Which is good because I have always loved potatoes and felt terribly guilty eating them. No more.

Another thing about the Irish, this is about Irish Soda Bread. Back in the day firewood was at a premium in most of Europe because the nobility controlled all the forests and common people couldn't access them for fuel. Except in Ireland where the laws were different and everyone could go into the forest to gather firewood. As a result, most European villages had community bake ovens to conserve fuel and most people ate yeast-leavened bread because that was most suitable for a community bake oven. But in Ireland, common people could bake at home, they had the fuel for it, so community bake ovens were not so common. And soda bread is a quick bread that wouldn't do so well if you had to wait your turn at the community oven but is just fine if you have your very own oven for baking on your own schedule. So the Irish made soda bread while the rest of Europe made yeast or sourdough bread.

Reading. Well I just read another really great book, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Very long book, over 600 pages. I found it a bit overwhelming at first, the pace was, to my way of thinking, extremely slow. I'd say the first 150 pages are about the birth of the story's narrator. But once I settled into the pace I found the book extremely interesting and thoughtful. And along the way learned a bit of Ethiopian history.

Ethiopia is the one African country that did not succumb to European imperialism until the 1930s when Mussolini came along. But for the centuries and millenia before that it was an independent land never warped by colonialism. It also is home to some of the oldest Jewish and Christian communities. The Queen of Sheba was thought to have come from there, although that is disputed now.

Anyway, the book is set in modern times and the story is set against the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie but it is not about that. The story's narrator is a conjoined twin separated shortly after birth and raised by adoptive Indian parents. He becomes a surgeon and ultimately practices in New York. That is the bare bones of the story, there is of course much more to it which you will discover if you decide to take on this giant of a book. Along the way you will learn a bit of history of a very interesting country. And since the author is a surgeon himself, you will learn a bit about surgery as well. But Mr Verghese is a very thoughtful surgeon with a lot to say about life in general and the practice of medicine in particular. Very satisfying read.

OK, sorry about the long wait, if in fact you have been waiting for my next post. And I imagine some people who might have waited have given it up so my audience is no doubt considerably smaller. Although I have always assumed that it was small to begin with, now it is probably just that much smaller. Eventually it will dwindle to nothing, I will stop writing altogether and nobody will notice.

...And then she said:

Yes it's been forever. Well a couple of months at least. I have probably lost any audience I ever had---I think there were maybe four of you---and am writing to myself. I have not set fingers to pen or keyboard keys (except to navigate through what other people write) in a very long time.

My last post was from PEI; since then I went kayaking once on Gaspereau Lake in a friend's kayak because my own was in drydock. It got badly scratched in the spring and needed a fresh coat of urethane which is now done.I also visited a friend's cottage on the South Shore, and went camping at Blomidon Park.

The friend I went camping with has set a goal of camping at least once in every provincial campground in Nova Scotia, I will try to accompany her. Blomidon was nice: well-maintained and quiet even though it was full, great views of the Minas Basin, several hiking trails in the woods and on the beach at the base of the cape. Hapi was on her best behaviour, she knew not to go off our tent site even when parades of other dogs strolled past, never even so much as woofed under her breath at the malamute in the adjoining campsite. She wouldn't sleep in the tent though, I had to tie her to the picnic table.

We hiked out Cape Split on the Labour Day weekend which was like hiking in rush hour (Blomidon and Cape Split form a hook-shaped peninsula separating the Minas Basin and the Bay of Fundy, Blomidon overlooks the Basin and Cape Split faces into the Bay). I didn't bring water for Hapi and there was none on the trail so at the tip of the Cape I went around begging water for my dog from all the people sitting in the grass enjoying the view. Got way more than enough thanks to people's generosity and Hapi's cuteness. Curiously, some people said No when they thought it was for me but changed their minds when I said it was for my dog. What, I am not cute enough?

The cabin on the South Shore was great, right on the shore overlooking a small beach on a large ocean bay. The cabin was built by my friend's father, she remembers when all there was was a platform to pitch their family tent on.

Speaking of whom, her 96-year old father was also there. He is busy working on his second book, a kind of summation of his religious and spiritual knowledge and beliefs. He is a retired Baptist minister and unretired Free Thinker. I imagine he had to keep a lot of what he really believed to himself when he was active as a pastor, now he is putting it out there for all to hear and read. He made up a little jingle to sum it all up: "God is Love, Salvation is Free, Why Worry About Eternit-ee?" 

When I wasn't listening to him expound on the nature of the universe and the history of mankind, we were hiking the shore with our dogs to a cafe for lunch, setting on the deck with wine under a canopy of stars, and watching the ongoing drama of the dogs, their respective food bowls and local marauding squirrels.

I made a hash of my garden but it turned out OK, I got 5 6 quarts of tomato sauce, 5 quarts of salsa verde (probably a lifetime's worth even after giving half of it away), a pint of pesto with more to come, a whole bunch of kale, beans and peas in the freezer, piles of potatoes, onions and carrots, and many meals of fresh peas, beans, broccoli, lettuce and cherry tomatoes. I had to finally compost the cherry tomato plants because I could not face eating another single one. Would you believe I planted 15 cherry tomato plants and every single one survived to produce gi-normous quantities of purple, yellow and red cherry tomatoes? I expect next year's garden will be full of cherry tomato upstarts.

I still have not harvested the squash (all 2 of them), the garlic was pathetic (planted 20 cloves got 8 tiny bulbs), and the green onions have become monsters I do not know what to do with. The tomatoes and cherry tomatoes were a near disaster because I did not stake or cage them and they sprawled everywhere. After the PEI trip I waded in and chopped off all the lower branches of every plant and attempted to prop some of them up against the garden fence. Amazingly, this did seem to help, but my garden pathways were quite obliterated so walking through the garden was very tricky.

But I have already planted a bed of next year's garlic, which hopefully will do much better for being planted in the fall instead of the spring. There is still more kale in the garden that I would like to turn part of into kale chips which I am told are quite good. I plan to make quince marmalade from the few quinces that grew on the bush in the front yard. And I am still getting regular meals of green beans from the pole beans.

Got all my firewood stacked away, the garden taken care of, the lawn mowed on a more or less regular basis. Killed my sourdough but fortunately had a little stashed away in the freezer so I was able to resurrect it. We had near-perfect summer weather, warm and sunny. There were a couple of weeks in early August that were unbearably hot and humid, I got very grumpy then. I don't do well in that kind of weather.

I decided to clean up my loom room which of late has turned into my junk room---anything I didn't know what to do with got tossed in there and the door closed. Eventually it got impossible. I did a pretty good job of cleaning it up if I do say so myself and then thought I should tackle the living room and bedroom. Last night in a frenzy of activity when I should have been hieing off to bed I put together a couple of shelving units and rearranged some of the living room furniture. The jury is out on whether that was a good idea.

Speaking of the loom I have revived the project started last fall and then abandoned through the winter. In the spring I dreamed about removing that warp and putting something else on the loom, I decided to follow through on that dream but at the last minute thought that if I removed the warp I would never in a million years put it back on and it might be easier, quicker and more economical just to finish the damn project. Then a friend said, instead of doing the project as is, why don't you modify it to turn it into Christmas presents for family members? Hot damn, two birds with one shuttle! That apparently was all the inspiration I needed, the project is now three quarters done and being worked on regularly. It is the kind of thing that I can sit down and work a few minutes on while I wait for tea to steep or sauce to simmer. And while it doesn't look like much to me, visitors have commented on how beautiful it is. Funny how when you have your nose buried in something for months on end that it ceases to have any finer qualities, all you can see is its faults and mundanity. And how much there is left still to do.

I moved into my basement guest room. Am quite surprised by how comfy it is and am thinking of making the move semi-permanent. Probably it will get too cold in the winter and I would rather not turn on the baseboard heater, but am enjoying it for the present. If I am not careful my old bedroom will turn into my junk room.

My neighbour up the street is helping me do some work on my truck. He painted the whole thing and undercoated it too. He put rock guard on the lower panels. He told me to buy some chrome tape to trim the wheel wells with and put it on for me. He tore out the headliner in the cab (it was sagging and disintegrating). Our next project is to remove the cap on the box (if anyone on the west coast is reading this, cap=canopy), replace the truck cap tape, add a bead of silicone and put the cap back on again. To keep the water out. My Blomidon camping friend wants to camp at Keji in October and I would like the truck box to be rainproof by then.

I joined the Newcomers Club. I don't feel like a newcomer but of course in many ways I am. And it turns out there is no time limit on being a newcomer, there are newcomers that have been members for years. Once you join you can participate in any or all of the interest groups, I signed up for three but there are many more. On Wednesday I went biking with the biking group; we did a leisurely ride to a bakery for coffee and muffins and then back again. We laughed ourselves silly over the coffee. The night before I went to the book discussion group; I read Wreckage by Michael Crummey for that group and the discussion was quite interesting.

Several of us mentioned the literary device of jumping around in time in the course of the novel, how it bothered us because it seemed kind of choppy and disorienting. But one woman said, Isn't this how we think of our lives? I mean, we don't remember things linearly, we remember bits and pieces all over time, whatever seems relevant at the time of remembering, or next in line in our own peculiar streams of consciousness.

I will mention three books I've read this summer that were really good: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill (memoir), Wreckage (novel,) and This is How by Augusten Burroughs (self-help non-fiction?). They have that quality of taking my breath away at how well written they are. Phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs jump off the page and demand to be memorized.

I am ploughing through everything Roger Zelazny ever wrote but I am thinking of giving that up pretty soon. Some of what he wrote I really really liked (Lord of Light is on my short list of all-time favourites) and the rest is anywhere from OK to boring.

Yesterday, in the course of thinking about rearranging furniture I was looking at my bookshelves. Many of my books are decades old and have only been read once, if ever ( I confess to buying books I should read and then never do). I picked up one at random, The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas, and realized that while I have a general idea of what Thomas wrote about I had no memory of the specifics except for one excerpt involving his thoughts after an accident lying on the pavement watching his blood flow out of a wound. Perhaps I should reread the book. Then looked at the books surrounding it and thought, perhaps I should reread them all. When?!? And if I am not going to reread them why am I keeping them?

I picked up a Fench language novel that once had been a favourite of mine (l'Ecume du jour, by Boris Vian), when I could read French reasonably well. Now, it is almost gibberish to me. I have no memory of what that book is about, and I would have to improve my understanding of written French substantially if I ever hope to find out. That book is over 40 years old, a musty old paperback. I remember a couple of other books that I bought around the same time and later culled; I wish I had hung onto them instead of this one, at least they had pictures.

The other day a friend of a friend dropped by to pick up something. As she was leaving she commented on the tree in front of my house, saying that I really should remove it. After having spent hundreds of dollars to remove the trees at the back and missing them afterward, the suggestion that I remove yet another tree was not really welcome. I pointed out the benefits of that tree, how it provided much needed shade in the summer and a degree of privacy as well. She continued to insist that it should go and my argument that it provided privacy spurred her to say that without that tree my house would be much more welcoming, and that I was just an old spinster hiding in my house behind that tree.

Well shut my mouth and call me speechless, as a childhood friend used to say. Who even uses that word anymore? I could only come up with Thank you for sharing as a response. Later I recounted this conversation to my neighbour and she laughingly suggested that I should have told her the tree was for hiding my constant stream of male visitors from prying eyes.

Other than the couple of short trips mentioned above I have been close to home and feeling a bit antsy about that. I feel like I should be somewhere else doing something else, but no ideas (or maybe too many ideas) about what. Tied to my garden as it were. Read a lot. Dream a lot. Wish I was there.

Last winter I kind of made a sort of new year's resolution, to give myself a year to figure out what I was up to next. Now that year is coming to a close and I have done very little to figure that out other than turn down or otherwise pass up opportunities to go somewhere. At one point it occurred to me that I was waiting for something to happen, something to change that would make it all clear to me and that really, if I wanted to change I had to change, not wait for change. From there I went to what would I change and quickly picked on several habits of laziness that I have fallen into that might be counterproductive time wasters. Things I do for the sake of comfort that are kind of addictions (TV, eating chocolate, web-surfing for hours on end). A little bit of TV or chocolate is nice but filling one's life up with it is not.

When my TV time rolls around each day, the pull of the TV is quite overwhelming, I make up reasons not to do anything else. And then I haul out the chocolate and there goes the evening. I figure between all of my addictions I am looking at half the day just gone. So now I am looking at how to deal with that. Quit cold turkey or pick at the edges? Figure out alternative activities to gradually replace the worst of my addictions? There is such a pull toward sloth, I can easily see myself sinking into some kind of oblivion of terminal laziness.

OK, a bit of a ramble, but that's all. Don't know when I'll be back...

My Kindle and Active Hope

I have started loading books on my Kindle and attempting to read them. I have to say that the experience of reading a book on a Kindle is not the same---for me---as reading a paper book. I am trying to figure out why that is.

One thing is the background colour of the page: it's an off-white colour, a kind of grey. That does not seem to be modifiable. I did modify the text to a sans serif which so far is a bit of an improvement, but the greyness of the page gets to me, it's depressing.

Another thing is that I find reading on a Kindle limiting. I am the kind of person who just cannot read in a linear manner from start to finish. I always read the end of a mystery before the middle. Likewise for most books, fiction or otherwise. I like to skim. With nonfiction I like scanning the subheadings and illustrations in as I go along, I jump around. The Kindle is just not set up for that kind of reading, it is best suited for linear reading. I chafe at that.

Nevertheless I am really trying to get over it, I really am. I have put a few things on my Kindle that I really want to read, and am hoping that the enjoyment of those books will overcome my objections. I do see the advantages of a Kindle, particularly for travelling or for sitting in wait rooms. So I recently bought a couple of Kindle books that I want to read and cannot get through the library, or at least not in a timely manner, nor find cheap used copies on Amazon or elsewhere.

The first is Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012). I don't know much about Johnstone, but Macy is a longtime engaged Buddhist and activist that I admire. I have read a couple of books by her, including an autobiography and The Work that Reconnects. She deals with the depression and despair that many environmental and social justice activists feel over their apparent lack of success. Active Hope addresses these concerns. I am only a chapter or two into the book, and the Kindle does not really allow me to scan ahead, so the impressions I describe here are limited to what I have read so far.

We see the world today through lenses that are in part of our own invention and in part provided to us by our society and culture. We are so used to these lenses we do not even see them as such, we think we are seeing reality in the raw, the world as it "really" is. Macy and Johnstone say that there are three major prevalent stories that provide the lenses most of us are familiar with.

The first story is Business As Usual, that our society is on the right track and we can continue with business as usual. Most of our media provide and reinforce this story, most of our daily lives are based on the assumption that this story is reality. Our culture is inherently stable and good, there may be a few perturbances but nothing our politicians, economists and other experts can't handle. And while the experts deal with the big problems, we deal with the small ones, getting and keeping jobs, raising kids, maintaining a home, friends and community.

The second story is The Great Unraveling. Our economy is at risk, our politics are deteriorating, our environment is being degraded and destroyed, our climate is on track for major disaster, social justice atrocities abound, our access to cheap energy is disappearing, ...I am sure you can add to the list, you don't need me to provide the details. In short, we are doomed.

This story is also promoted in the media, although more so in the alternative media than in the mainstream. For those who are sounding the alarm on these issues, and/or attempting to fight them, despair and cynicism about our future is rampant. For many of us, this story is too grim to contemplate personally, so we resort to distraction or attempt to focus on the small delights of daily life as the only defense against this rather overwhelming general nastiness.

The third story gets little coverage in the media, it is not particularly newsworthy, it is so big that it is hard to get a good viewpoint on it. This story is what Macy and Johnstone refer to as The Great Turning.

As a species we have gone through a few major cultural shifts---revolutions as it were---and we are going through one now. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions are examples of previous shifts. The current shift might be called the Ecological Revolution, or perhaps the Sustainability Revolution. It is the transition from a doomed economy to a life-sustaining society. In its early stages, such a major transition appears to exist only on the fringes, but as it develops it spreads and becomes the new mainstream. We are on the cusp of something we have never seen before, a way for all of us to occupy this planet in peace and security, while preserving our natural world and promoting the highest social and spiritual values.

This third story sounds a bit airy-fairyish, but Macy and Johnstone provide evidence and arguments to support it as a valid view of reality. They suggest reading Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken as further support for this story.

Many people are already involved in this third story, you may be yourself. Macy and Johnstone list three major ways that people are involved or could become involved. They seem to have an affinity for things in threes. Possibly because it is the first number after two, which is the number of duality, either-or, black-and-white. The world may be considerably more complicated than either-or. Anyway, the three major ways they describe are Holding Actions, Life-sustaining Systems and Practices, and Shift in Consciousness.

Holding Actions aim to hold back and slow down the damage caused by Business as Usual. Protest movements, raising awareness of social injustice and environmental damage, caring for the victims and vulnerable, safeguarding communities against exploitation and war; these are the nature of holding actions. Saving the bits of society and culture worth hanging onto, saving as much of our beleaguered natural environment as we can. These actions are taking place at every level, from local actions against fracking, mountain-leveling, and protesting the closure of a local school, to international movements to curtail whaling or the building of bitumen pipelines or going after multinational corporations for environmental damages or corrupt practices harming vulnerable people. These are essential actions but they are not enough.

Life-sustaining Systems and Practices are the concrete building blocks of an alternative way of life. Many people, including entrepreneurs, corporations and even financial institutions, are working at creating positive alternatives to Business As Usual. If you look for it, the internet abounds in examples. Local farm markets, ecologically sound farming practices, research and investment in alternative energy, opportunities to become involved in alternative communities, colleges, ways of living and earning a living that are both satisfying and sustainable. These things are happening all over the world, and multiplying rapidly. They provide ways of being involved that are inspiring and give positive reinforcement to the activity. Small success stories abound, and provide inspiration for further action in those directions.

The Shift in Consciousness is about connection, compassion and caring. Macy and Johnstone cite the Apollo 8 spaceflight of December 1968 as a significant turning point in this shift, this was the mission that provided the first photos of the Earth as seen from the moon.

As astronaut Bill Anders said, We came all this way to explore the moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

It is only recently that we have come to see the world as limited, and all of us in the same boat. Everything is connected, you cannot mess with one small or distant part of the world without significant impact on all parts any more. This awareness is growing exponentially, and every new disaster of The Great Unraveling only serves to amplify and spread this new consciousness. The very fact that we lament environmental degradation, wartime atrocities, abuse of children/animals/women and a host of other evils is some indication of the Shift in Consciousness we are participating in. There is a growing understanding that we cannot survive at the expense of others, we are too connected, our fates too entwined.

Macy and Johnstone point out that for individuals involved in these dimensions of The Great Turning, failure and despair is a constant threat. Not all holding actions are successful, and successful actions are often only partially so. Nevertheless, in the long view and the "grand scheme of things", there is a kind of relentless progress. One action may be unsuccessful but the movement as a whole gains ground, regardless of failure or success.

And that's just the first chapter, as far as I've gotten so far. I'll let you know how it goes.

As one example though of that last idea, I was listening to Thomas Mulcair (new leader of the NDP, official leader of the Opposition) being interviewed on CBC's The Sunday Edition, and he was asked about Harper's recent success in ramming through the omnibus Bill C-38 this month. Mulcair's response was that the Conservatives wanted to put that bill through in secret, to not have everyone know how it would gut our environmental and social legislation, changing Canada for the worse in a huge way, all behind the scenes. The Opposition was successful in revealing the extent of the awfulness, it is no longer a secret. Yes, they did not have the numbers or the time to thwart this bill or even to amend it, but they did put it into the open for all to see. This is important, and not a total defeat or failure by any means. In every defeat there is something to take away for future action. It ain't over.

Weaving, women and history

The last couple of weeks I have been immersed in reading a couple of books by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Dr. Barber is a professor emerita in archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College in California, and also a weaver since childhood. She has written a number of books, the two that I have been reading are The Mummies of Urumchi and Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years.

In The Mummies book Dr. Barber uses her knowledge of archaeology, linguistics and the craft of weaving to draw out some amazing information from her study of a set of mummies found in central Asia. The mummies were found in the 1980s and turned out to be several thousand years old. Due to the extremely dry conditions where they were dug up they were well preserved, the colours of their clothing as bright as anything you could buy new today. Dr. Barber could piece together interesting facts about how these people lived and where they came from just from the details of the construction of their clothing.

One of the interesting things about the mummies is that they are Caucasian, not Mongoloid. Their hair is brown and they have the big noses typical of Caucasians. Some of them are well over six feet tall. Urumchi is located in western China, an area now inhabited by Uighurs, who are also Caucasian in origin. It is quite possible that they are direct descendants of the people who left the mummies there. The mummies were collected from ancient cemeteries in the region, in particular from the Tarim Basin which is one of the bleakest deserts in the world.

Among other things Dr. Barber says that these were Indo-Iranian people who kept sheep and wove textiles from their wool. They also made felt products. One mummy had brightly coloured felt leggings, an infant wore a beautiful blue felt bonnet.

The Silk Road, the route taken by merchants and traders between the far east and the near east, passes through the Tarim Basin. One branch follows the northern edge of the desert, another follows the southern edge. Ancient documents describe some of the people living along that route, and between those documents and what can be gleaned from the mummified remains, it is probable that these were people who moved westward into that bleak part of the world in order to live in relative peace. They were not warriors.

The infant with the blue bonnet was buried close to another grave containing a man and two women. The infant was buried with a "baby bottle" fashioned from a sheep's udder. Dr. Barber guesses that one of the women in the other grave was its mother; someone tried to keep the infant alive with sheep's milk and a baby bottle but failed.

I am halfway through the other book, Women's Work. This book focuses on the ancient history of textile making, in particular spinning and weaving. It is rare to find textiles in very old archaeological sites, they simply don't survive. The mummies of Urumchi are very unusual in that regard. However, the imprint of textiles are sometimes found on clay objects, and sometimes clay or stone objects associated with spinning (spindle whorls) and weaving (warp weights) can be found. Also there are depictions of textile making in some ancient ceramics and wall paintings.

Ancient peoples were not particularly modest, they wore clothing for warmth and/or decoration, but not to hide "private" body parts. Also, they were more tolerant of cooler temperatures than many of us moderns are, going naked or near naked in temperatures most of us would prefer to be clothed in. Woven textiles were probably preceded by belts and string skirts. In fact Dr. Barber talks of a "string revolution", how a whole new dimension of tool making was opened with the invention of string. Think of all the things you can do with a bit of string.

Dr. Barber thinks that string skirts were probably the first bit of non-essential clothing invented. They would have been specifically intended to draw attention to a woman's fertility. Of course, you need something to attach the strings to, this would have been a kind of belt or strap, or girdle. The first fibres used in the making of these strings and belts would have been plant fibres like hemp or flax. These plants provide long strong and flexible fibres to work with. In those days wool was not yet available because sheep were not yet woolly. The first domesticated sheep would have been more hairy than woolly, and they would have been kept only for their meat. But along the way woolly sheep were bred and the multiple uses that sheep could be put to---meat, milk, wool---was recognized.

Wool is quite different from hemp or linen (flax). It takes a dye better and it is more stretchy. It is also a relatively short fibre. Yarn spun from wool is not as strong as the longer-fibred hemp and linen yarn. For this reason somewhat different weaving techniques were developed to handle it, in particular twill instead of plain weave, which put less tension on the warp threads.

In Egypt wool was rare, most clothing was constructed from linen. Since it does not dye well ancient Egyptian clothing was plain white. Instead of coloured textiles Egyptians adorned themselves with jewelry. In other areas where wool was more available people generally wore two or more layers of clothing, an inner plant-based layer and an outer wool-based layer. The wool layer could be brightly coloured and woven in interesting designs. Wool was scratchy so it was nice to have softer plant-fibres against one's skin. The French term "lingerie" derives ultimately from the term "linen".

Looms used for weaving were of several types. Egyptians used a horizontal loom staked out on the ground. This would have been very appropriate in a warm dry climate where you could set up outdoors where there is lots of space.

Another type was semi-vertical, the warp (the long direction of the textile) hung from a horizontal bar and was held in place by clay weights tied to the bottom end of the warp. This was the warp-weighted loom. This type of loom could be used indoors because it took up less floor space, it was better suited to cooler and wetter climates than a horizontal loom. But since it was set up to lean against another vertical surface, it could be moved around, indoors and outdoors if needs be. Warp weights have been found in many locations in Europe, it is safe to assume that this was the main type of loom used there.

The third major type was a vertical loom without weights, instead the warp was attached to both an upper and a lower horizontal bar. This type of loom was usually anchored to the floor by two vertical poles inserted in holes. It is thought that this was the main type of loom east of Europe since no warp weights have been found east of Kiev or south of the Black Sea.

Textile making was largely a women's activity. It was highly compatible with minding children and could be done in the home or nearby. Dr. Barber says that textile making was a hugely time consuming activity, more time consuming than anything else that humans did. Men also wove, but it was predominantly women's work.

Once invented, textiles became very popular and were in great demand. The earliest trade caravans packed tin for bronze making and textiles. Graves were filled with piles of clothing. It was also a prized item for theft; the word "robber" has the same root as the word "robe". Women in every culture spun and wove, it was probably considered as important if not more important than childrearing. Only highborn women did not, instead they were responsible for overseeing other women in those activities.

When industrialization got started in Europe, the first industry to be mechanized was textile making. This necessitated moving the activity out of the home and into the factory. Yanking women out of their homes and into factories was probably the single most disruptive aspect of industrialization.

Dr. Barber shows how the movement of peoples around Eurasia can be traced through the different styles and designs of textiles they left behind. The Celts of Europe are probably distantly related to the people of the Tarim Basin, as shown by their common use of twills and plaids, and also by some linguistic commonalities. Dr. Barber wrote these books in the 1990s when the use of DNA evidence for tracing human movements was still in its infancy; she looked forward to a time when that could be used to contradict or to corroborate her ideas about those movements based on her own studies of textiles and linguistics.

Other than Egypt Dr. Barber does not discuss the history of textile making in Africa, nor in the Americas. She touches only briefly on south and east Asia. Silk textiles were important in east Asia and cotton in south Asia and the Americas. Each of these types of fibres are quite different and require different techniques and tools for manipulating.

Don't know much about history...

Doing a lot of reading, books about slow cookers (I just got one), weaving, climate change and history. While I sit in my comfy chair waiting for this cold to go away and not come back...

Climate change: this one is kind of interesting but you might not agree with it. Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg (the Sceptical Environmentalist). He feels that climate change has been vastly overrated, in the sense that people have become downright hysterical about it. Not that he denies its existence or even that it is at least in part human-caused. But. His point is that rather than worry about future generations who may or may not be affected to a greater or lesser degree, it would be far better to worry about and spend our money on people alive today who are at risk due to lack of clean water, AIDS, malaria, social issues, malnutrition, etc etc etc.

Lomborg says that for a fraction of what it might cost to lower our carbon emissions to whatever level they are currently saying is acceptable, we could eliminate malaria, treat all HIV-infected people, provide clean water to everyone on the planet and a host of other lifesaving projects. And further, that the potential threat of climate change (flooding, drought, species extinctions, etc etc) might be better addressed directly rather than indirectly via reduced carbon emissions. For example, better to build better levees and dykes and protect crucial wetlands to protect vulnerable river and seaside areas than to impose exorbidant carbon taxes. And it would be far more doable politically than trying to convince every government and corporate polluter to change their ways. In fact, if we were successful in reducing carbon emissions around the world the effect would actually be devastating for poor people everywhere. The economic effect would be severe and mostly borne by those who can least afford it.

Lomborg provides evidence to support his position which I won't get into here. I am not expert enough to refute his arguments or supporting evidence, but perhaps you are; in which case I urge you to read the book. I thought that what he had to say made a lot of sense to me.

History: I just read Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (one of the first "organizers" of the Occupy Wall Street event in NYC last summer and fall) and am about halfway through The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama. They are both sweeping surveys of about the last 5,000 years, give or take. Fukuyama ends his book with the French Revolution, promising a sequel to follow addressing developments since that time. Graeber's book is shorter and ploughs on through to the financial crisis of 2008.

Fukuyama is or was famous for his previous book called The End of History and the Last Man. It all sounded kind of presumptuous and beyond me anyway so I did not read that book, but now I think I might go back and try it, I am curious as to how he came to that conclusion at the time. He is very readable although he does use some technical language I've never heard of ("enfeoffed"?) to describe particular historical situations.

Graeber is a little tougher, probably because of his subject matter. But the major difference I notice is that Graeber definitely has an opinion---an axe to grind---while Fukuyama is decidedly more objective and emotionally removed from his subject. So they tend to cover the same periods and events in very different ways. Not that they are necessarily opposed or that one is better than the other, just different. With both writers I feel like I am learning a lot and learning from perspectives I never would have dreamed of. Graeber definitely makes you think. And Fukuyama presents theories that sound very plausible, very explanatory and leave you thinking, "oh, so that's why...!"

I guess the big caution I would have is that Fukuyama makes it very clear when he is theorizing and Graeber doesn't. So with Graeber you're not quite sure how much of it is his opinion and how much is just accepted fact. However his footnotes and references take up a quarter of the book so if you are diligent you can check it all for yourself.

Slow cookers: Well, I borrowed a whole bunch of slow cooker cookbooks from the library in hopes of finding one that I liked and could buy (cookbook that is). So far I have been able to rule out a few pretty quickly, but I am down to three that I can't decide between and I still have a couple of holds pending for more cookbooks. So I don't know what I will end up doing.

I recently bought a book about the Middle Ages by Henri Pirenne; haven't read it yet but I had read on the internet somewhere that he is a recognized authority on that time period. And the book was cheap: $0.01 plus shipping. As soon as I get through the library books... I really must slow down with putting holds on stuff...

Two books I've read

I found this draft posting from a couple of months ago and thought it was still kind of interesting so I upgraded it from Draft to Published. These are books I read in February that I really enjoyed.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (2010).

This is the story of Louie Zamperini, who lived quite the amazing life as he moved from being a juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner to warplane crash survivor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to Japanese POW. The story is absolutely rivetting, I lost a night's sleep because I couldn't put it down at bedtime.

This guy, born in 1917 and still alive, lived through the most harrowing life-threatening experiences, first floating over 2,000 miles in a life raft during wartime and then surviving a Japanese prisoner of war camp where they thought the Geneva Convention was for sissies. He returned home to the United States at the end of the war, an emotionally scarred man who scared the heck out of his beautiful new wife with his terrible nightmares and heavy drinking. Fortuitously he went to a Billy Graham revival and turned his life over to God, which apparently saved him, allowing him to forgive his worst POW camp tormenter and move on in life without terrorizing the people who loved him.

As an enthralling true-life adventure story, this book takes the cake. The author, Laura Hillenbrand, previously wrote Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), so she is no stranger to best seller lists. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down until I finished it, losing a night's sleep in the process. The librarian also couldn't resist it either when it arrived at the library as the result of my interlibrary loan request. She borrowed it after I returned it.

Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected Past, by Robert Hunter and Robert Calihoo (1991)

This is the amazing story of Robert Calihoo, as told to Robert Hunter. Hunter was (he died in 2005) a journalist and one of the founders and the first president of Greenpeace; Calihoo is a First Nations man who for the first ten years of his life was raised by his white grandmother and did not know of his Indian heritage. On the death of his grandmother he was quickly returned to his birth mother, a woman he never knew until then. She also was white but had had three children by an Indian man on the Calihoo Reserve.

Life with his birth mother and her current partner (a white man) was a rough shock for the young boy and things quickly deteriorated for him. Eventually, as a teenager he sought out his birth father. He called 411 from a public phone booth and asked for him by name, but he didn't know his location so the directory assistance woman spent a good long time searching for the name in the listings for the entire province. Several hours later his father drove up to the public phone booth where Robert made that fateful call. For the first time in his life Robert realized his father was an Indian.

For a brief period Robert lived on the reserve with his new found father. It was an extremely rough life in the dire poverty typical of such reserves, but the highlight for Robert was going hunting and fishing in the bush with his Dad. Hunting and fishing in the bush was a wonderful life, and doing it with his father was icing on the cake. A far cry from his middle class upbringing in his grandmother's suburban house.

Through a bizarre turn of events Robert and all of the other Calihoos lost the reserve and ended up on the streets of Edmonton. Robert soon found that the only way to survive was through a life of crime, and the next dozen years or so were spent in and out of prison. However, during that time Robert pursued an education, eventually graduating with a university degree.

One life project Robert took on was to regain the old Calihoo Reserve that had been lost. By the end of the book we still don't know if he was successful in that project, but in the process he found out a lot about his ancestry and how exactly the reserve was lost. In essence it was stolen from them illegally.

The history of the Calihoos was fascinating, they were actually descended from Iroquois who migrated to Alberta in search of land. Two brothers, Louis and Bernard Karhiio, travelled all the way from what is now Quebec to the Rockies in search of unclaimed land, that is, land that no one, not even the native First Nations, had ever laid claim to. They actually managed to find a large parcel of land that fit the bill, in the Rocky Mountain foothills of modern day Alberta. So far as anyone knows this is the only piece of land on the entire continent that had never been claimed by any nation or tribe as part of their territory up until that time (the 1790s). The brothers returned to their village of Kahnawake just outside of present-day Montreal and convinced some family members to return with them to settle that piece of land.

The Karhiios (their name eventually changed to Calihoo) settled there, built log homes and proceeded to hunt, trap and raise crops and livestock. Unlike the Plains Indians, the Iroquois were ancient farmers. They were very successful in their new setting. Unfortunately they got caught up in the troubles that Plains Indians and Metis faced at the hands of the Canadians seeking to expand westward to the Pacific. When the Canadians made treaties with the Indians, it was assumed that the Calihoos were local Crees. To the Calihoos there was no advantage at the time to setting the Canadians straight on their identity. They took their treaty settlement and returned to farming.

But then the bison were hunted out and plague came to the Prairies. The Iroquois Calihoos were not dependent on the bison and had acquired some immunity to European diseases, but not enough. In the end they were just as ravaged and destitute as the rest of the Plains tribes, vastly reduced in population and ability to support themselves.

The duplicity of the Canadians who negotiated and enforced the treaties, who changed the terms of the treaties without notice and who created the Indian Act to further oppress native First Nations is described and documented in this book, as well as the racial discrimination and abuse heaped on the lazy drunken Indian. It is not an easy book to read, but Robert Calihoo's struggle to rise above all that is inspiring.

With a little research on the web, I found the website for the Calihoo Band, now called the Michel Band (after their first chief Michel, son of Louie Karhiio). Reading on this website, it would appear that the fight to regain government recognition as a bona fide Indian band is still in litigation.

What struck me about this book was both the personal struggle of the author and the peek into an aspect of history I would never have been aware of otherwise. When we think about the history of exploration of North America, we automatically assume the explorers were white Europeans, it never occurs to us that there might have been aboriginal explorers and settlers too. The Karhiio brothers knew a lot more about the lay of the land than the white explorers they guided, but they had the same curiosity and sense of adventure in exploring new territory. Their superior knowledge of the aboriginal peoples already occupying the land they explored helped them find what they were looking for, a bit of land to claim for their own.

Six Metres of Pavement

I thought this was kind of cool, what a great way to market a book!




This little video is set in my old neighbourhood in Toronto, the author of the book being "trailed" lives a few doors down from my old place.

Doesn't it make you curious to read it?

Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor (2011).

The War of the World

The book that currently sits at the top of the pile by my bed is The War of the World by Niall Ferguson (2006). Subtitled Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. It is one of those big fat daunting books with more than 800 pages of fine print, and I have three weeks to read it.

One thing I have learned to do with big non-fiction books is to read the first and last chapters first, and then read the middle. The author presents his thesis in the first chapter, and ties it up in the last; everything in the middle is details. By the time I've read the first and last chapters, I know whether I want to bother with the rest.

This book is no different, although there are in effect two first chapters, the preface and the official first chapter, and two last chapters, the official last chapter and an appendix. Oh well. It still works.

Parts of the middle were hard to read. This being essentially a book about war, it has its fair share of atrocities described in it. No one is spared, atrocities are committed by all, to all. The graphic detail is a little hard to read, and it is hard to escape the notion that atrocity is just under the skin for most peoples. However, having said that, obviously the first and last chapters were sufficiently interesting to entice me to dip into the middle. I am actually not done yet, I have only just made it to the end of "World War I".

It is Ferguson's contention that the entire twentieth century was just one big fat world war. The title of his book is a deliberate play on H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Ferguson says that Wells' book, written at the beginning of the twentieth century, was prescient; the only thing different from what actually happened was that it identified the enemy as aliens from Mars when in fact it was humans.

Another contention is that although the West thinks it won the war(s), it in fact lost. The underlying story is the Descent of the West and the Rise of the East.

In the opening chapters he describes what the world was like at the beginning of the twentieth century, how it was globalized to a point not seen before or for the rest of the century. He describes a world where products from all over the world are readily available, communications by mail, telephone and telegraph are highly developed and quite rapid, no passport is necessary for extensive travel and one is free to live almost anywhere. The movement of capital, labour, resources and products was free and extensive.

Racism and ethnic hatred was growing---the early twentieth century was much more racist than the early nineteenth century---and this was one of the major contributing factors to coming conflicts and warfare.

Another theme of this book is about empires and nation-states. Empires became too costly to maintain for most nations, all European empires were disbanded due to the cost. We think of empires as lucrative, the wealth of subject areas flowing to the centre, but what was actually happening was that the wealth was flowing to increasingly wealthier corporations and the expense of running the empire being born by central governments. The only thing that happened with the demise of an empire was that the central government divested itself of the cost; the wealth continued to flow to the corporations in most cases.

Nation-states are a recent phenomenon and have their own set of problems. The idea of a nation is that it should consist of people of a single ethnic "nationality", but the reality is that ethnic groups are too diffusely spread out to create geographic nations corresponding to ethnic nationalities. He describes the problem of Germany as a case in point, ethnic Germans being located as far east as Moscow, westward into the European lowlands and France, and southward into Italy. The "ethnic problem" is pervasive, examples abound in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

In describing the so-called Cold War, Ferguson says that it wasn't really cold, active warfare continued but not in Western Europe or North America. The Cold War merely spared those areas from being the battlefields, which were moved to Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Korea.

Something that Ferguson makes explicit and I have being suspecting, is that major conflicts are in effect swan songs, even (and perhaps especially) for the victors. Warfare is always expensive, winning a war in no way mitigates that. We are witnessing the swan song of Western power, the East is rising.

An interesting and ironic anecdote concerns CIA interventions. I don't know if they are quite so active in this regard now, but certainly in the '50s and '60s they were actively fomenting coups in countries seen as potentially threatening to the USA in some way or another. One of the coups instigated by the CIA was in Guatemala, which resulted in active genocide of thousands of Mayans over several decades. However, it also resulted in the politicization of a certain lawyer, Castro by name, who successfully instigated his own coup in Cuba and also successfully resisted several CIA attempts to overthrow him.

Ferguson points out that many wars fought to quell Communism around the world were actually genocides of aboriginal peoples in the countries those wars were being fought in. The CIA perceived Communism in every instance of poor people fighting for land and human rights.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I wrote this post several weeks ago, I have since finished the book and would recommend it if you have the stomach and perseverance for it. Or, you could just do as I do and read only the first and last chapters.

The Spirit Level

The little public library in my new hometown doesn't compare with the Toronto Public Library system. However it is part of a larger network, the Annapolis Valley Regional Library system, and has connections to other libraries, including university libraries, across the province. The interlibrary loan system lets me borrow from them all. And as a local university alumna, I also have a university library card here. Over the past few weeks I have been building up my Books on Hold list and it is starting to bear fruit.

A book that I had put on hold in Toronto almost a year ago just came to me via the local library, after only a week or two on my Hold list. So there are a few advantages to a much smaller system. I imagine the one copy in the Toronto library was much in demand necessitating a lengthy wait for it, while here in the Valley hardly anyone had ever heard of the book and I got it almost immediately.

The book is The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009). The authors are experts in social determinants of health and the book is a look at the statistics of various social and physical health indicators compared to relative income inequalities in various countries and American states. The final chapter of the book explains which statistics and countries they used and why they chose them. For the most part the countries are European and North American, generally the more affluent countries of the world. That's not why they were chosen, but rather for the availability of comparable statistics. No point comparing apples and oranges.

The most obvious conclusions one could draw from the many graphs in this book are:

1. There is a very clear link between levels of income inequality and both individual and social health indicators. The authors argue that the link is directional: income inequality causes health and social problems, not vice versa.

1. The USA does very badly: it has one of the highest levels of income inequality and very poorest levels of social, mental and physical health and educational attainment. The UK is in a somewhat distant second place for badness.

2. In almost every instance Canada stands in the middle of the pack, neither very good nor very bad. We Canadians are not surprised.

3. Japan does very well on all fronts, the Scandinavian countries also do well for the most part.

The authors attribute these findings largely to our human need for status. We are crushed by a sense of low status and thrive when we think we have high status. A sense of low status brings out the worst in us, young men respond with violence, young women with early pregnancy, everyone with headaches and sick stomachs.

In our modern world status is largely dictated by financial well-being, and the further the distance between the most well off and the least well off then the greater the inequality and the greater the pressure on status. Curiously, other forms of inequality do not have such a large impact. Gender inequality does not have the same repercussions for either men or women as does income inequality. In Japan women generally do not have the same levels of gender equality as we have here in North America and Europe, but nevertheless appear to fare very well with respect to mental, physical and social health. And educational attainment.

The achievement of greater income equality is accomplished in different ways in different countries. In the Scandinavian countries high redistributive taxes ensure that the after-tax income of all citizens is within a fairly narrow range; in Japan the same result is achieved by simply having a much narrower gap between high and low before-tax income levels. CEOs and labourers are not that different from each other.

A very interesting conclusion to this study is around the issues of climate change and social justice. The authors discuss what needs to be done in order to reduce carbon emissions globally, and essentially it requires the popular acceptance of serious curtailment in carbon consumption. The level of cynicism in a country with high income inequalities works against such acceptance. At the same time, it is clear that the greatest contributors to carbon emissions are the wealthy, those who can afford it. In broad strokes, the way to reduce global carbon emissions is to reduce the carbon emissions of the wealthy, which almost automatically alleviates income inequality as well. The two issues have the same solution, but will be difficult to implement in countries of high income inequality.

At the end of the book there is a graph plotting environmental footprint against income level for all of the countries of the world, and two lines indicating an environmentally sustainable footprint (horizontal line) and threshold of adequate income (vertical line). All of the poor countries of the world are also the most environmentally sustainable with respect to carbon emissions; the rich countries of the world are hugely unsustainable.

With one notable exception. One country---one country alone in the whole world---manages to be both environmentally sustainable and provide an adequate income for its citizens. Cuba?!?

Within the USA there is a range of income inequality levels across the states, and the global correlation between inequality and health also applies within the USA. Curiously, the state with the lowest income inequality level is Alaska. I guess the very wealthy don't see Alaska as their Shangri-la.

Something I did not know but learned from this book is about crime and punishment, penal policies in different countries. The USA has one of the highest per capita prison populations not because of its extremely high crime levels but because of its harsh sentencing policies. In California alone there are 340 prisoners doing life sentences for shoplifting. Amnesty International has repeatedly protested what amounts to torture in the American prison system.

Ironically, most of the routine forms of punishment in American prisons are far more likely to produce hardened criminals than to reduce crime levels. Prisoners are systematically isolated from normal social interaction and generally rendered incapable of functioning in normal social life once they are released. Prisons are being created and built at a much greater rate than universities, 'supermax' prisons are essentially and deliberately the most socially degraded environments possible.

Japan has one of the most civilized penal policies with noticeable good effects: low prison populations and low crime rates. In general accused lawbreakers are shown extreme leniency if they confess and express remorse and contrition. Once in prison the rules are very strict but social life is encouraged and positively directed. Prison guards are expected to perform as mentors and counsellors to prisoners. Former prisoners generally express satisfaction and even gratitude for the experience, it turns their lives around.

Another interesting factoid is around the issue of teenage pregnancy.

We generally think of teen mothers as a bad idea: bad for the mother and bad for the baby. However, in some populations the health of the mother is at its best in her teen years, and babies born to such mothers are ironically better off than babies born to the same mothers at a later age. These would be mothers of such low income and social status that their health is seriously challenged, and these would also be the ones most likely to bear children in their teen years.

The rate of teen pregnancy in the USA was declining until 2005, since then it has been rising again (likewise for the rate of violent crime). Most teen mothers in the USA are unmarried. In Japan the rate of teen pregnancy is low and the mothers are far more likely to be married. As a result these mothers and babies fare much better than their counterparts in the USA.

In light of all this, I think that it is very ironic that the USA was created out of the ideals of freedom and equality. The concept of equality was about equality of opportunity, everyone gets a shot at the goal. These ideals are still cherished but their reality in practice has not lived up to expectation. The USA has turned out to be a land of great inequality, and in some ways one can attribute that to the very pursuit of freedom and equality.

It should also be noted that many of the greatest critics of American achievement are Americans, they hold themselves to very lofty standards.

It is not surprising that Canada has turned out to be somewhere in the middle, not too good not too bad. Never in our history did we take on freedom and equality as our ideals, it was all about keeping the peace, whatever it takes. We try not to get too excited about stuff. Not to say we don't care about freedom and equality, but I think our attitude is more along the lines of good housekeeping; it saves a lot of trouble to not let things get too far out of hand.

Our country was born out of the passions of the American Civil War, we wanted to avoid that at all costs. The American Civil War ended in 1865, Canada began in 1867, it is not coincidental. Recent Wikileaks cables indicate that some American diplomats think Canadians watch the USA enviously and snipe at American political actions out of that envy. There is an element of truth in that, but we also watch in a bit of dread: whither thou goest...