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.
I just finished Benjamín Labatut’s remarkable book When We Cease To Understand The World. It’s a book that blends non-fiction and fiction, that tells the stories of scientists of the twentieth century and teh price they paid for their discoveries. It is a subtle book, neither a collection of short stories or a single novel, but it is all tied together. Remarkably, the book begins in the world of non-fiction and gets more substantially fictional until the end. The last piece in the book is the most concrete – and teh most fictional- and references all the stories that were told before in a very fine-grained way. It is a book about uncertainty, singularity, probabilities and the price of seeing the world as it is.
What fascinates me is not so much science per se, but the limits of science: those ideas and discoveries that we are unable to fully comprehend. Science is a theme, but the larger theme is mystery. What I believe is captivating about these stories is not just their information content, but the enigma which lies at the heart of them. They seem to point past us, towards what is incomprehensible, or marvellous, or, indeed, monstrous. What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants – Because it needs! – to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.
You say that ‘the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book’ – why is that?
Several reasons: the ideas become increasingly complex and abstract as the book moves along, so it was necessary to increase the fictional content to captivate the reader, and to make very complicated (and usually very boring) ideas come to life. Another reason is that I was not merely interested in the outward development and impact of science, but on the personal cost of these strange epiphanies, and only fiction can delve into that particular void, the inside of the human mind. There is a lot of fiction in all the texts of the book, except the first, where there are only six lines. But it is a very specific type of fiction, one that tries to approach what non-fiction cannot achieve. I use it reluctantly, not merely as an ingredient to sugar the pill, but as a chemical fix, a shot in the arm that allows the reader to crawl into the strangest areas of reality, those deranged landscapes that, even if where to bump into them head-on, in plain daylight, with both your eyes wide open, you would have a hard time believing they are real.
I love a book that says what it needs to in 200 pages or so. More often than not a writer needs to rely on both dense narratives and rich language to do this, much as a movie maker uses image and plot, or a lyricist use the music and the words. It’s remarkable to read a book in translation that preserves this richness.
Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital was the last book I read that does something like this with imagery and a rejection of traditional narrative structure. I found both through the Booker Prizes website, which seems to be revelling in this type of literature these days.
Anchored at Ruxton Island, peering into the Trincomali Channel across a submerged shoal.
As we cruise through these islands I am travelling with David Rozen’s 1985 Master’s thesis, Place-Names of the Islands Halkomelem Indian People. It’s a useful collection of knowledge he recorded with Elders from the Halkomelem communities in these territories and records the many dialects and names of places and some of their stories in these islands. We anchored last night at Ruxton Island, a place that doesn’t show up in Rozen’s study so I don’t know the original name for it. Ruxton is one of the islands in this archipelago that shows off the tectonic forces at play here, tracing long thin reefs and shoals along the direction of geological uplift. We anchored in a narrow bay at the north end of the island with all kinds of little reefs and shoals upon which rest seals and oystercatchers until the tide flows in and washes them away.
We are near the original village site of the Lyackson people which lies across the channel on Valdes Island. There is a great story in Indiginews about how this community has finally found land for their village.
Last night a tsunami advisory was issued for nearly the entire coast of BC except for this part of the Salish Sea, where these islands and shallow channels protect us from damaging effects of most trans-oceanic tsunami waves. Damaging tsunamis can happen here, but only from local earthquakes or landslides. Trans-oceanic waves do enter this region (the linked paper has some great examples) but not in any damaging way. Thankfully this morning I’m not hearing of damage or injuries here, and only a little in Kamchatka and Kuril Islands and Hokkaido and Hawaii where these quake took place. The advisories have all been cancelled.
One of the things I love about my adult son is that he works a job he is good at and fills the rest of his time by what he calls “doing fun stuff.” When we traveled together in England back in April, he was up for anything. Museums, visiting the places I lived as a child, meeting cousins. All these ideas were met with “sure! sounds good!” and truly not the dismissive “whatever” that one sometimes worries about. He was able to find the fun stuff even between the six football matches we went to in ten days. For him, in his life, “fun stuff” might be downhill mountain biking or skiing or going out with friends or ripping around in a small boat or getting into all manner of mischief. He is capable of enjoying himself almost anywhere. He’s nailed it. Brian Klaas would approve:
“To me, the good life has more aimless wandering, less frantic racing, more spontaneity, less scurrying. It comes with a slower pace that allows us to catch our breath, to soak up wonderful moments, to savor what we have. It gives us the space to do one of the most important things a human can do: to notice and relish the joyful, the fulfilling, or even the merely pleasant bits of life.”
Philip Meters writes a very thoughtful meditation on Chekov, happiness and misery and the need for the contented among us to be reminded that people elsewhere are struggling. As Ivan Ivanich says in “Gooseberries:”
“At the door of every contented, happy man,” Ivan says, as if appending a moral to the end of his story, “somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however unhappy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer.”
Meters also quotes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christmas Sermon for Peace about the interconnectedness of the contentment and suffering of humans and how even before we have finished our breakfast we have become dependant on the people of the world.
Here in Canada the federal Liberal austerity program will go ahead. The CCPA published a piece based on this study which shows that austerity generally increases populism because it affects folks who are already disenfranchised to begin with. It is amazing the lengths that to which neoliberal politicians will go to ensure that rich folks aren’t taxed at the expense of a broad program of social welfare and decent services that can look after literally everybody in a society.
Our TSS Rovers men’s team had a brutal end to the season, having our title snatched away with a last minute penalty. I haven’t been able to write about it yet, but in the meantime my fellow Rovers owner Will Cromack has penned a beautiful piece on Socrates and the 1982 Brazilian side that hoped to deliver both politically and in footballing terms the revolution that Corinthians began in Sao Paolo.
My first facilitation teacher, Bruce Elijah.
I have told this story for decades but finally wrote it down today.
Back in 1992 I was working in Ottawa for the National Association of Friendship Centres. One of the Elders that worked closely without Board and staff was Bruce Elijah. Bruce is a wonderful Elder, brilliant leader, and teacher, raised in his traditional Oneida culture. His heart is unlimited in its goodness.
There was a day when I needed to facilitate a conversation on creating a domestic violence prevention program with a number of our member organizations from across the country and representatives of the federal government who were responsible for funding the effort. I was dreading the conversation, both because of the emotional weight of the conversation and the high stakes nature of the day. I turned to advice to Bruce. He gave me the briefest of facilitation trainings. He handed me the eagle feather that our organization used as a talking piece and he said “The Creator gave us two gifts — circle, and story. Use them.” And that was it.
When I arrived in the meeting room at a hotel in downtown Ottawa, it was set up with tables arranged in a hollow square, water and notepads in front of each chair and all facing one small table that I was supposed to sit at. With Bruce’s words in my ears, I did the unthinkable and had the staff reset the room with just a circle of about 24 chairs. When the participants arrived for the work, they were slightly taken aback by the room set up, but many of our members who had travelled from their communities expressed relief that the room looked different from traditional federal government consultations.
When we were ready to begin, an Elder gave us a prayer to bless our day and I introduced the day with a short speech about how we had gathered to generate ideas about a domestic violence prevention program and I knew that everyone in this room had some stories to tell about what that kind of program might mean to them and the people they served. I then invited people to share those stories and passed the feather to the person on my left.
By the time the feather got back to me, it was lunch time. Over three hours we heard stories of deep despair, of hope, of desperate need. We heard personal stories of violence and abuse, and stories of relatives and loved ones who had suffered at the hands of their intimate partners. We had humour as well, jokes and asides and situations so absurd that they were laughable. By the time lunch rolled around it was impossible to tell who were community workers and who were federal government workers; the issue was pervasive and crossed every line.
After lunch we repeated the process although this time I asked “we heard these powerful stories this morning. What then should we do about this?” Again the feather travelled its slow journey around the circle and this time everyone shared ideas about how such a program would look in their community, what it would enable, what kind of change it might make.
During these conversations my only job was to capture pages and pages of notes that I later turned into a report that informed the establishment of the off-reserve portion of the Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was a powerful way to make policy and also a powerful way to create commitment between people. We watched the bones of a federal government program emerge out of an empty circle and a collection of stories. Bruce was right: this indeed was the gift of creation.
That was some years before I stumbled on Open Space Technology and more formalized processes of large scale dialogue. But it taught me that simple constraints — a circle, a feather, a question — could result in profound outcomes. It taught me to make space for stories of the heart and deeply personal experiences. It taught me that attending to relationality was as important as attending to outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that there is hardly anything more powerful and profound than a group of human beings making meaning together in a life-giving context.
When he was Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney presided over the release of a remarkable report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy” which skewered the idea that governments print money and create inflation when it is actually private banks that do that. David Graeber’s 2019 paper “Against Economics” came at a time, perhaps the last time, when I think we could have retooled economics to redistribue wealth through policies more in line with the ones that created the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. Alas. The populists and oligarchs have now combined to divide up the world and everyone else is scrambling for cash. Carney knows better, but the coming federal government austerity is just what the richest want: make credit cheap so that more money is created that eventually ends up in their pockets. We are not on a track to create a prosperous society let alone use the money we have to reverse the social, educational and climate crises that require resources and public infrastructure investment to address. (H/t to Harold Jarche for the links).
While following a thread about systems thinking I was led to this blog called Perspicacity from cognitive researcher John Flach. Flach has recently co-authored a book called “Do Systems Exist: A conversation” which I am interested to read. I think there is a lot more to say about this, but if you were to ask me the question right now I would say “yes and no.”
I’m in Canoe Cove this morning which is a small boat harbour near Swartz Bay on the northern tip of the Saanich Penisula near Victoria, BC. This is a popular destination for the road bike riders who come up the peninsula from the City on a weekend morning. While having an espressos I. The very good Fox and Monocle bakery cafe, I saw a woman in a bike shirt that read “Samsara” on the sleeve. I am unsure if this is an ironic branding.