We stayed another night at Ruxton Island. The day was hot and still and quiet in our little bay. Oystercatchers and heron raised the occasional fuss. A baby crow complained all afternoon and in the water fried egg jellyfish and otters slid by. The sea is warm here – more than 23 degrees and only the slightest breeze riffles the water. We are sleeping and reading and some of us writing a little and that is the story of summer on the coast.
So many links and thoughts today, scoured from a day of mammoth reading yesterday. Thank my ADHD brain for all this fun. I do.
If you thought enshittification was just your favourite apps jumping the shark, then you aren’t seeing what Cory Doctorow is seeing. Here is a grand chronicle of current surveillance and gouging practices used by big retailers to make everyone more poor.
A short story about an uploaded consciousness and its desire to be deleted. Being able to do all the things that can be done seems to be no substitute for being stuck with an unstructured memory. Petition to a Council by Justin Smith-Ruiu
I loved reading collections of letters when I first got into literature. They were right sized chunks of text for my brain, and thoughtful letters penned by authors lie somewhere between poetry, travelogues and aphorism. And I loved reading epistolary novels for the same reason. One of my favourite books of all time, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey is a masterful epistolary about jazz, and West African mysticism and friendship and art. The Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock (birthed on Bowen Island, where he lived at the time) is an incredible work of art that has to be held in one’s hands to be fully appreciated. This form, whether actual or fictional is probably why I enjoy blogging so much, especially now that I’m writer here again regularly instead of on social media. I was reminded of all this when I came across this selection of letters from the exiled Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay published in the Paris Review. Letters written in the 1920s to Langston Hughs, Louise Bryant and others written from France and Spain and Morocco.
My friends in Turkey who run the ATÖLYE design studio are doing some really interesting thinking about how to work with AI while still using the inefficient and trust-based mechanisms of community:
“In a world increasingly driven by acceleration, where machine learning predicts behaviors and algorithms shape what we see, hear, and value — communities still resist the fast lane. Why? Because communities, unlike networks or audiences, are not transactional. They are deeply relational, slow-growing organisms — woven together through shared purpose, mutual recognition, and collective, compounding trust.”
I don’t follow the WNBA, but I do have a stake in women’s football in Canada, and this analysis of the current WNBA labour negotiations is an interesting path forward for leagues like the Northern Super League and the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In essence, the strategy focuses on growing the pie rather than reducing the costs, and I would even add, giving players (and supporters too, why not?) direct financial stakes in increasing revenues.
In my area, the saying goes, if you can’t afford to tip your server well, you shouldn’t go out to eat. Tipping culture has been a subject of discussion recently in Canada. In Europe, wages are built into the price of food and tipping is uncommon. There is a move to do this in North America too, but predictably, the restaurant industry isn’t having it. Let’s push for fair wages, and in the meantime, tip your server.
It is said that time slips away here in the languid BC coastal summer, but on parts of our coast, time sometimes speeds up.
If you love David Mitchell (I do) and also struggle with eggs Benedict (I do) then you will appreciate this piece of whimsical Masto-art.
We sometimes call it the “best seat in the house” when we get loaded on the Bowen Island ferry on a forward facing ramp. This is my view this morning as I head into Vancouver to co-lead a workshop with my partner Ciaran Camman. We’re helping a service organization surface context specific strategies practices and principles they use to address crises across their operations.
I love a good football match. I love a semi-final in a major tournament. I do not love when an official gets in the way of a result, but that’s part of the game. Italy and England fought an epic battle yesterday in the women’s European Championship semi-final. Italy took the lead in the first half and England fought back and it looked like the underdogs had won it but the referee added seven minutes of time at at the end, and England used all of it to get the equalizer. Seven minutes. “Twas a bit much, I thought.
Extra time ensued and the Italians fought gamely (no, time wasting is not a “continental” specialty; England did it just fine too…) and late in the second period of extra time – like 119′ late – England were awarded a penally. ‘Twas a weak call, I thought. BUT Italian keeper Laura Giuliani made the save on Chloe Kelly’s penalty, BUT the rebound was poached by Kelly and England won. Cruel sport, this one.
I’m not a fan of the blog posts that begin with “I asked AI to…” but I will point to Tom Atlee’s recent conversation with an AI chatbot where he explored how AI can enable deliberative democracy to move at scale and at speed. I think there are some really thoughtful ideas here not just for governments but also for organizations or networks who are including large numbers of humans in ongoing sensemaking and deliberation. Tom’s grounding in this field and thoughtful questions helped the bot to think through some good ideas.
Celebrating a victory with our women’s team in our last home game of the season.
Our little supporter owned football club, TSS Rovers played our last home games of the season last night against our local rivals from Burnaby FC. The women clawed out a 2-1 win while the men broke their rivals apart with a 7-1 win on the back of a four goal performance from striker Koji Poon. It was a much needed win for the men. Going into the last two games of the season for the men we sit on 29 points, two points above Langley United, who have a game in hand. We need them to slip up and we need to win out our season on the road to have a shot at retaining our title. But last night we made it a three-horse race for first place, as Burnaby can no longer catch us.
One of the sayings at our club is “you’re always welcome back but we never want to see you again.” This reflects our commitment to giving players a platform to move on to the professional game. But our players and supporters often retain a strong attachment to one another as we are the only club in our second division League 1 BC with an active and rabid supporters group. TSS Rovers is a community-owned club with 477 community owners many of whom invested in what we are doing because of what it means for the women’s game. This league structure sits below our new professional women’s league in Canada, the Northern Super League and several of our former players including League 1 BC players Stella Downing, Tilly James and Kirsten Tynan now play in that league.
Two of our current roster of women’s players, Erin van Dolder and Delana Friesen are headed back to Europe for next season. They played together last year at Treaty United in Ireland and they are on their way to a new adventure in professional football. Delana came to us in 2023, and rediscovered a love of the game in a stellar season in which she led the team in goals and was named our Swanguardians Player of the Year. In 2024 she went overseas to play in Limerick and united with Erin, both Calgarians. In the meantime the Northern Super League was formed and both came home hoping to land jobs on one of the six new professional women’s teams. It was not to be, so they joined our club and kept themselves playing and in the shop window. And after touching back home they are off again.
Coming home. We are a club where young players can take the step up to the next level, or where they can come home and reground to get out there again. Because football is poetics, it puts me in mind of this recent Patti Digh post:
And yes, sometimes home is what we make in the aftermath. After the fire, after the grief, after the leaving. Maybe we build it in the quiet companionship of a friend. In the rhythm of morning routines. In the poems we write when we don’t know what else to do with our hearts.
What I know now is that home doesn’t have to be perfect to be real. It doesn’t have to be whole to matter. It just has to hold enough of you that you can recognize yourself in it. And if it doesn’t? Then we write our way back. We build with what we have—memory, language, love—and make something sturdy enough to come back to.
I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.
I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.
It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\
What’s on your bedside table this summer?
I like Bowinn Ma a lot. She is the British Columbia Member of the Legislative Assembly representing North Vancouver-Lonsdale. She’s a good person, attuned to local urban needs, and has all the right approaches to policy making. in her second term, she is now the Minister of Infrastructure, a perfect job for an engineer with an abiding interest in how people move around well. She has recently been the champion of some legislation that I vehemently disagree with, but that’s politics. On June 27, her constituency office was bombed at 4:15 in the morning. It was a small device that went off. It happened a week after Minnesota state speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, and another left wing Minnesota state senator was also shot. I have not heard any ongoing conversation in my circles about the fact that one of our MLAs had her office bombed during a time of political violence in North America. This strikes me as NOT OKAY.
Barak Obama spent an hour talking to Heather Cox Richardson, during which he dropped this line that “the system has been captured by this with a weak attachment to democracy.” Here’s the clip. Here’s the full interview. I appreciation Richardson’s commitment to the grass roots, but it’s not just the case that bottom up is the only way we make change. Bottom up vs top down is not a moral position. Bombing an MLA’s office and assassinating democratically elected representatives is also “bottom-up” change making. Democracy moves very slowly, which is its feature. But the public square has developed incredible potential to reinvigorate that, except that the tools of democratic engagement and grass roots conversation have alos been captured by “those with a weak attachment to democracy.” I don’t have answers, and Obama’s ideas sound old now, but in essence, I don’t know what other choice we have. We are quickly losing the ability to deliberate together, and that is the essence of democracy.
The guy who inspires me the most in this space of democratic renewal these days is Peter Levine, whose work I often share. Here he is in conversation with Nathaniel G. Perlman on The Great Battlefield podcast. He recently shared work on trust in institutions from CIRCLE which studies youth engagement in civic life. There are some good lessons in here for people working to keep robust democratic engagement alive, and especially making the generational hand off. I’m of the mind that one way to generate trust from citizens in democratic institutions is to bootstrap it by institutional leaders working from a basic stance of trust in citizens. The CIRCLE study is important work. If you work in a democratic institution, including education, media, government, and other organizations essential to a functioning pluralistic society, it’s a must read.
Community Foundations are a powerful group of civic institutions in this country. I have worked with many, including my own local one here on Bowen Island, and the Vancouver Foundation, the largest in Canada. Their work is important, influential and essential, especially as we enter a new period of austerity. A story this past week surfaced on how community foundations in Canada are working to support local journalism so that news on local issues can be properly covered. As a person who lives in a community with a great local newspaper, this is fantastic to see.