The Geography of Memory

Poets are the best at prose. In this case the poet is Jeanne Murray Walker, who wrote a memoir about her mother's years with Alzheimer's and her own memories of a Midwestern, fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I really enjoyed this book, so much that I stayed up way too late multiple nights in a row.

309
She talks about metaphor. Her mother's ("Mother's") speech can be compared to the poetry of surrealists like Pablo Neruda, who "stuff their poems so full of metaphor that it's next to impossible to find a literal meaning." Accept the metaphor. Work with the metaphor.

263
On deciding which items will go with Mother to the care facility: "...I'm horrified by the responsibility of making these choices."

331
When she breaks free from Mother as a teen to travel to Peru: "The steep, husky, endless, snowy mountains gave me vertigo. I felt thrilled by the smallness of my own body and by the way the road ahead dwindled to a gray thread."

343
Watching Mother in a hospital bed after a hip is broken: "Watching is like hearing an alarm wailing, like an arrow slowly going through my heart."

319
A recounted prayer: "Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love, make haste to be kind, live without fear. Your Creator has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother. Go in peace and follow the good road and may the blessing of God: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, be with you now and always."

Thanks for the tears, Micah White

I started crying last year after the 2015 Canadian federal election. It was not joy at Trudeau being elected, though I do remember tearing up with Karl on the phone as we read about the cabinet appointees, half of who were women. It was mainly the overextension of my nervous system, frazzled by organizing and mobilizing with the tactics I knew to get rid of pro-oil tanker MPs in British Columbia. That new experience destroyed much of the insulation between the world and my interior, ultimately cracking open my heart. I’m glad for it.

Cue Leonard Cohen, who left us yesterday:

There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.

Tracey and I went to a leadership training just a few days after the 2015 election; I burst into tears when I arrived late and the doors were locked, and again inside when the opening speaker described what led her to caring about change.

A year later, I can handle locked doors, but I’m still crying at so many stories: Christina embodying confidence as a new mother; Jordan having no words on Day 1 of a Trump win; Kath likewise not knowing how to face her high school students except with honesty of her own sadness; Jackie toasting Eoin on his birthday to celebrate not only 44 years of marriage, but especially the last four of intense, valiant climate activism that they have undertaken together; Naomi Klein including her son Toma in an article about the death of the Great Barrier Reef, because at the heart of climate change is intergenerational theft, the removal of immense biological heritage that was meant to be passed on.

Crying in these cases has nothing to do with hopelessness; rather, it's about connecting and feeling connected to something bigger than myself.

A moment of necessity

Author and book cover

This morning I cried at the end of Micah White’s book, The End of Protest, when he speaks to “the ones to come” – whether he means future children or emerging activists, I’m not entirely sure:

We are waiting for you.

Just that line, right? We are waiting for you. He continues:

A great mission rests on your shoulders. I know you did not choose to be born under this shadow of a collapsed earth, at a time of unrest. Yet history has selected you all the same. Remember that without our present faith in your future coming, civilization will slide into the madness of scorched earth consumerism. I do not know how long we must wait for you. We shall prepare for you to emerge like lightning.

Shortly before this passage, White envisions the world as it can be. Although it seems anachronistic to articulate it here, with so many people rightly sad and fearful about the cruelty and violence on display in the United States since Tuesday alone, I think it’s valuable:

Hear, people of the world, I bring glad tidings to you. Tomorrow will be better than yesterday. Your family will prosper. Songbirds will serenade. Eagles will soar. Life will flourish. The bumblebees will return and the destitute will be fed. Your neighbour will be your friend. Your communities will be rich with medicine and universities. Work will be plentiful, jobs fruitful and art revered. The tyranny of leaders has ended; the rule of the people has begun. The good times are ahead!

We are the people formerly scattered and divided into distinct creeds, nationalities and classes. We once fought among ourselves. No longer. Now our humanity is evolving. We are finding universal common cause and we are uniting, driven by an unconscious existential necessity, into one social organism with a will to fight for survival. This is our destiny.

I have addressed this epistle to your heroic self. I pray it reaches your heart. Each word is an invitation to accept your fate as a partisan in the people’s revolution, an ancient spiritual insurrection that is necessary for the survival of our families, friends and communities. True democracies–people’s democracies–emerge in moments of crises when everyday people are required by historical necessity to fend for one another, self-govern their communities and look after their collective survival. You are in one of those moments of necessity.

We are in a moment of necessity.

White spends most of the book describing what has not been working to achieve true democracy and what he thinks is mostly likely to work in the years to come. I synthesize them here, not in a perfectly summarizing way, but with attention to what caught my eye. 

What has not been working

 

1. Typical protest

Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy.

White uses the Occupy movement and the anti-Iraq war marches as prime examples of a failed theory of change. The theory was that if enough people stood up together in visible, mass, urban, non-violent events, that Western nominally democratic governments would change their ways. Enough people showed up; the governments did not change their ways.

Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens.

Moreover:

Repressive democracies encourage forms of protest that are least revolutionary and most ineffective. The ideal situation for a false democracy is to have frequent ineffective protests that give the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change the legal regime.

2. Rejecting the spiritual

White invites us to stop being so intolerantly secular. Of the four revolutionary frames he outlines, he suggests that we give less attention to voluntarism (belief that individuals make revolutions) and structuralism (belief that socio-economic forces cause revolutions), and more to subjectivism (inner transformation is necessary) and theurgism (divine intervention plays a role).

3. Leader worship

The story of the twentieth century was the mysterious obsession that developed among the people for a Leader. Across the political spectrum, the people wagered their aspirations on a single all-powerful living Father. We invested Him with omnipotence and prayed for benevolence. The result? Holocausts, famines, death camps on both sides. And the final proof humanity needed that absolute power corrupts (even the good) absolutely.

It's not going to be a single leader that saves us from climate change or global economic crisis. 

I think of the successful language exchange programs that I have started, and the significance of the absence of leaders or even teachers – there are facilitators, but the real work is done by partners that show up for each other. I think of Dogwood getting rid of an executive director position, and the times when I have been frustrated by an absence of top-down directives, but how it has forced me to figure things out or try things.

4. Ignoring the imagination

Activists of the future thus must be mental environmentalists, as concerned with the health of our interior world as we are about the natural world… At the most basic level, this is imperative because when our minds are polluted by commercialism, and our imaginations stunted by toxic advertising, we are unable to conceive of a better way of organizing society.

The future of activism is a struggle to capture the imagination of humanity.

What might work

1. Attention to intergenerational storytelling

Thomas Jefferson is quoted:

“The generation which commences a revolution rarely completes it.”

Revolution is akin to building a cathedral in medieval Europe. The architects who designed it and the masons who built it did not live to see their work completed… as you are not able to choose which part of the multi-generational cycle you’re born into, it may be that you will live your entire life in preparation for a revolution that your grandchildren will finish.

Part of our work, then, is to lay down the stories, narratives, myths, and memes that future humans will need to be heartened, emboldened, and capable. 

A couple years ago I watched How To Change the World with Stephanie at Queen Elizabeth Theatre – a documentary on Greenpeace’s origins in Vancouver. Watching the original boat push off the same dock at Granville Island where I chased pigeons as a toddler, sparked a small revelation: I’m part of a lineage. I also felt I'd been denied my heritage – why hadn't I been told these stories before? Mythology is essential.

From the perspective of a long-term vision, today’s protests aren’t failing: our protests are setting in motion a victorious process that will take generations to unfold. Activists must be patient and willing to wait hundreds of years, just as the early Christians endured persecution until a rare cosmological occurrence triggered the conversion of Constantine. Contemporary activists tend to overestimate the effect of a protest in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Activists of the future will privilege tactics designed to impact the world a hundred years after their death.

I don’t think that the rally this Saturday November 19^th against Kinder Morgan will change Justin Trudeau’s or the cabinet’s decision, but that does not mean it is unstrategic; for many people, the rally will be a crucial source of morale and solidarity, or even the start of a different life path. The stories that people hear and the relationships that people make on the 19^th will be like rocks dropped in a lake; the ripples extend outward.

2. Rural, cross-sectarian, electoral wins

Writing from the small town of Nehalem, Oregon, White is pretty specific about where he sees the potential leading edge of successful revolution: Cascadia.

The rural uprising begins when revolutionary activists distribute ourselves into pre-existing micro-cities in Cascadia, ensuring that in each place there are enough of us to sway every local election. And we embrace the hard work of self-governance. We aspire to master city administration.

The rural populist strategy that I am proposing will require laying aside sectarian divisions between left and right. These distinctions are no longer relevant in our struggle as we seek unification and cooperation. The left and right have a lot to learn from each other.

A unifying platform that works across the political spectrum, White argues, is based on the motto of the Grange, a rural secret society that is still active in Nehalem:

“In Essentials, Unity; In Non-Essentials, Liberty; In All Things, Charity.” 

(White suggests "mutual aid" in place of "charity".)

3. A World Party led by women

I can feel that women are on the brink of rising up against a male culture that has been fatally poisoned by pornography and video games… I wager that the greatest social movement of the future will be the fight for a global matriarchy–a post-feminist social movement to transfer sovereignty to a supranational government led by women.

In concrete terms, carrying out the mundialization strategy would involve building a women’s World Party that wins the elections of the world in chronological order.

I love the specifics of this last part, and I see it already starting with people I know traveling to different cities, provinces, and countries before elections to help win seats for smart, kind, capable people:

For example, the first election of 2015 was in Uzbekistan. Four days later, presidential elections were held in Sri Lanka and three days after that Croatia’s citizens went to vote. Nine days later Zambia chose its presidents. In this way, the elections of the world can be organized on a movement timeline. If the World Party were to win in Uzbekistan, the attention of the world would turn to Sri Lanka, sending resources and support, giving local activists a massive boost in time for a landslide. Attention would then shift to Croatia and so on. Each country’s World Party would aspire to gain a higher percentage of the vote in the preceding election. The electoral social movement would hop around the world from victory to victory.

4. Faith

Backed by the people’s will, all things are possible. Look historically and see that amazing transformations have happened in a generation or two. During the World Wars of the twentieth century, tremendous social changes (food rationing, conscription, new wartime social rituals) happened in the span of months. Occupy was launched in weeks. The next movement may arise in days. Mobilizations on a scale rarely seen in human history can strike at any moment, if the people are awake.

...an open embrace of people power is secretly what we desire, if not need.

Kai wrote, "This might make of my colleagues nervous, but I trust the citizens of B.C. I trust our people. I love every corner of this province." With the results of Brexit and with the results of the U.S. election, many are afraid of what can happen when we invite the population to vote. But I am with Kai on this. If we do capture imagination of how society can be, then I trust the people around me. 

Wiki "Friday": "Desiderata"

Small note: I am starting a regular job in two weeks. I will have better awareness of what day it is and Wiki Fridays may well come on Fridays.

Today, Sunday, we discuss a particular set of aphorisms.

"Desiderata"

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. 

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. 

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. 

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. 

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. 

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. 

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

This prose poem was written by Max Ehrmann in 1927.

I first saw it in New Zealand, on the wall of my cousin Blair's house. I assumed it was much older.

There has been widespread confusion about the origin date, actually, all because a reverend in Maryland included the poem in a package of devotional materials that mentioned the church's foundation date of 1692.

Wikipedia says that Pierre Trudeau, when the Liberal Party lost its majority in the 1972 federal election, quoted the poem by reassuring the nation that, "the universe is unfolding as it should."

Wonderful.

What about Max Ehrmann, you ask. The internet proffers little on him. He was a lawyer and later worked in his family's meatpacking business and in the manufacture of overalls.

At 40 he devoted himself to writing, and apparently worked at that each day, which I like a lot.

Other poems can be found, mostly spiritual. I find some dense, but some delightful, like this one, about enduring rainy days, endeavouring to be gentle, and, bizarrely, shooting at the archery range.

"Desiderata" came back into my life via Hisao, a Japanese Canadian man who lives in my neighbourhood and grows his own strawberries, grapes, and daikon. He spends very little money. Until last week, he collected sweet chestnuts from the back lane and roasted them for breakfast. His kitchen wall is covered with aphorisms for inspiring kindness in himself and others, including the complete "Desiderata."

The title in Latin means desired things, a phrase that inevitably reminds me of Jordan Karnes, my friend who is a poet.

Wiki Friday: Carmen / Apples / Synesthesia

Today’s themes are interconnectedness and the unimagined later lives of experiences and ideas.

Carmen

I saw my first opera last Saturday. It was four acts and set in Seville around 1820. The French composer Bizet had never visited Spain.

The character Carmen, perhaps “a realization of the composer’s own unconscious longing for a freedom denied to him by his stifling marriage,” has reappeared in cultural productions ever since her birth on stage in 1875.

I suspect the reincarnation you will appreciate most is this one featuring Beyoncé–

Carmen: A Hip Hopera

I know.

Bizet never saw great success in his lifetime. I doubt he envisioned his work being brought to life in 2001 by Wyclef Jean. If you haven’t read Cloud Atlas yet, by the way, go do so now.

Apples

Sustain me with flagons, refresh me with apples: for I am sick with love.

“Feed me apples, for I am sick with love,” is what I thought the line was. I thought it had been written by Walt Whitman or Robert Frost. Swing and a miss.

The line is from the Song of Solomon. Who knows how I heard it first.

The Song of Solomon, also known as The Song of Songs (swoon), is a section of the Bible with no mention of law, covenant, Yahweh, or wisdom. Instead, “it celebrates sexual love.” 

Some translations of the Bible, including one for young adults, talk of raisins or raisin cakes, but I prefer “flagons.” Weak with love? Open the wine. Biblical translation is suddenly very engaging.

Anyway, there is a poem about apples by Robert Frost, specifically about picking them. It is a fitting poem for the season. My housemate Delayne collected the last of our apple’s trees this week.

I gave five to Leah yesterday, at the same meeting in which she told me about visiting a First Nations community in Nimmo Bay and hearing that a traditional way of understanding wealth is not to tabulate the amount amassed but rather the amount given away.

Oh, it’s good.

Synesthesia

This is when one sensory experience cues a different sensory experience.

The condition is not in the DSM, be cause psychological conditions in the DSM have to interfere with life, and this is more like a bonus pleasure on top of life.

The most studied example seems to be people thinking of letters and numbers as associated with certain colours. As usual, academic researchers have found one minuscule thing to obsess about.

My own primary experience of synesthesia, in which touch cues visions, was not even mentioned. 

The coloured numbers and letters example may actually be understood better as ideasthesia–a cognitive input cueing a sensory experience. After all, letters and numbers are concepts more than experiences. Which leads us to something fun:

Researchers suggest that synesthesia/ideasthesia can be a cognitive tool or a coping mechanism for dealing with abstract concepts, including time. In Morocco, Alaina and I “mapped time” on hand-drawn calendars; certain weeks or months demanded to be yellow or green.

In the spring I lost my job, time was a white sheet gathered in folds to my chin, spread smooth toward the horizon.

That is from my friend Jordan’s newly published book, in an essay titled “The Ballad of John and Jon”. Later in the essay Jordan describes John Lennon’s “honeymoon Bed-Ins”,

when he and Yoko stayed in bed in various cities across Europe and even Canada. Sitting upright in long pyjamas, white sheets to their waists, they called press conferences and talked very calmly about their love and everything, eventually recording “Give Peace a Chance” on a four-track in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

It was the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver where I saw Carmen on Saturday. I wonder if Jordan’s idea of time as a white sheet came from seeing John and Yoko in bed years earlier.

I should be writing

"Your older blog posts were better."

"You haven't been writing much."

"You should be writing."

Yeah, I know. Writer-artist Mary was traded away at the end of August 2010, when I bought textbooks at the UBC bookstore. "Here's my debit card and my creativity." Classes started. Analysis began. Critique. Literature review. Sure, the professors invited discussion and welcomed "I" in papers and encouraged that touchy-feely collaborative atmosphere. But all along, in the back of my mind, knowledge: I am not making anything I value. Mostly we critiqued what other people wrote.

Fear not, though. Grad school ends tomorrow--tomorrow I have my last class. It's in #10 at the bottom of this list.

Classes I've taken toward the M.Ed in Teaching English as a Second Language:

Theories of Second Language Acquisition

Theory and Research in Teaching English as a Second Language

Research in the Teaching of Literature

Advanced Creative Forms and Techniques of Non-Fiction

Culture and Politics in Second Language Education

Theory and Research in Teaching Second Language Writing

Advanced Workshop in Literary Translation

Multilingualism and Multimodality: Diversity as a Resource

Research Methodology in Education

Applied Linguistics for Teachers

The program has been valuable, absolutely. But I really do look forward to talking to non-school people, to reading literature, to personal projects, to writing, to making things I value.

And to being less serious!

Texts from the new year

This new you is creepy.

How's the body? I know when I've wiped out on my bike, adrenaline gets me to where I need to be then a few hours starts to ache.

Did u put up porters for tandem lang. learning? if so, awesome and if not then we need to break some knee caps.

Hahahah. Sharmuta.

Um who is this? And i don't get pics

Yo yo homie? What good? I just got out da can and lookin 4 sum shorties. U down?

Amazing news so call home!

I'm glad that was g rated because I sent it to your mom first

Can type although im camless and my mother is sleeping in the next room. :)

Agreed. Meeting. Ugh.

We will drink Turkish coffee and everything..

Ridden? Rode? Oh god. English.

A date?!?! Gasp!

WHAAAAA? Where'd you find snow shoes from?

Hey doo you jabbed held?

Oh mah god so hot a canadian text MASSAGE

Happy * day

You are quite pretty, you know

The Many Faces of Treason

"We will sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set out to do."

Gregory Rabassa says this of translation, in The Many Faces of Treason. He says that when we sacrifice our best hunches, we commit the worst betrayal of all, worse even than betraying words, authors, and readers. Beyond the task of translating, I think, we often push down our hunches. I have a hunch that at least one person out there will have use for this reference.

Happy 2011. May we overturn some pedestrian norms.

A perfect day

For the writing portion of an exam, I asked my students to imagine "a perfect day."

"I wake up and I was so happy – extremely happy – I’ve finally taken all of my exams, by that time my best friend called me and that’s an important for him; he had his first date and he promised to the girl that someone will accompany him – I was this person – so I accepted. While I was talking into the phone, Grandma prepared the breakfast, I took a sit in front of the piscine and took it. Then Brahim arrived, and we went together.

As soon as we arrived Brahim became purple, I know that he has seen the girl. While I was parking my bike he began to ask for million time, What am I supposed to do? During the walk I began to ask myself what I’m going to do alone, but I quickly left my frustration she was with a friend of her – a very beautiful girl. I was charmed and I decided to do something, first, I told her some jokes, after this I had conversation with her, during this conversation I felt like a strange feeling – it was love. Suddenly I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend, I didn’t know what I was doing and thank’s god she accepted.

That the best moment of my life. When it was time to leave she gave me her number and we promised to see each other the end of day.

Brahim and I were like dreaming."

Hmm

It's coming up. Last year Greg and I threw ourselves in the race and dragged ourselves through the mental mud, arriving at midnight with a manuscript title Dream, Baby. I opened the document for the first time since last summer, and I see that even the last paragraph has dual fingerprints:

In a moment, he was curled behind her, left arm wrapped around her left side. The same sweetness that he smelled the first time they slept together emanated from the back of her neck. Hugo had time to register one breath of it, before he, too, was snoring. Their two textured breathing patterns blended like a perfectly tuned “Om” in a class of fifth level Tibetan monks, soaring even above the air pumps from the building across the street. Sixteen hours later, they awoke together. The sun was shining. Darcie had somehow kicked the covers off of them in the night, and found that even with a breeze coming in through the open window, she was warm.

I don't know if I'll do it this year. It's a little scary pscyhologically, and I'm not even sure where I will be geographically.

Anyone thinking about it?

Autobiography Chapters

1: Vancouver. Tearing worms and linking paper hoops.

2: Indonesia. Smacked my head on a tile floor, they tell me.

3: Saudi Arabia. Soccer, small town life, shawarmas.

4: California. Boarding school as you imagine, minus uniforms and lesbian encounters, plus conservatives and rock climbing.

5: University of British Columbia. Cherry blossoms, War Lit, Kath and Pearl.

6: Montreal. Hello, bohemia.

7. Saudi Arabia. "Holy crap! I love teaching!" 

8: Turkey. Wander a thousand miles on buses with flash cards and a smile. No theft, no harm, nothing but kindness and enough white bread to give me diabetes.

9: Vancouver. Culture shock, medicated with biking.

10: Galapagos. Long days, all the better for watching baby sea lions.

Who am I?

My Chinese-but-not-really friend Pearl sent me to an online mag called Denizen. It's about Third Culture Kids, of which I'm one; i.e. my Canadian parents raised me in Saudi Arabia, so culturally I'm not Canadian (toque? what?), but I'm certainly not Saudi (hello, male friends). I don't say "eh" but I don't speak Arabic (all those years, such an opportunity, I know).

Like most Third Culture Kids, I thank my parents for showing me the world and forgive them for denying me an identity bathed in nationality. Screw nationality. Screw nationalism. I'm a denizen, citizen of the world. Which brings me back to the magazine, just in its infancy. If it works out, it's because we expatriates love to talk about ourselves (see blog title). No one else cares that we that we know flight routes better than highway routes, international dialing codes better than national holidays (I still don't know Canada Day). In some ways, this internationalism is as bad as any nationalism. We wave no flag, but we still do us-them. For example, if you say "What the hell is sangria doing at a Turkish restaurant? Where's the ayran?" then I will say, "I know you. We have more to talk about than Arrested Development." Order the sangria and be judged.

Third Culture Kids are both enlightened and screwed. Enlightened because history chose us to inherit all the benefits of an increasingly globalized world, and we know it--we know how to move for work, how to adapt to the new grocery store and the new dress code, how to book flights on points before KLM changes the policy and tries to fuck us yet again, how to learn just enough of the local language to feel "in" and buy pirated DVDs, how to make alcohol if necessary, how to stand in all kinds of lines (straight, mob, elbows-up, etc.). We had Skype first. We have friends in all the right places (Beirut, Istanbul, London, LA, Dubai...)--

And screwed because we're nomadic parasites. I mean, if I actually had to live in Saudi--as in, live in a high-walled home with two sullen Indonesian maids, cover my head, and spend weekends with crusty in-laws--I would kill myself. The country on the passport's no better. I tried Canada, gave it a shot, and left within 6 months. Taxes? Commuting? Cold? $4 loaves of bread? No thanks.

So we live abroad without immersing ourselves, submitting our thoughts to places like Denizen. Or blogging. Apologies for the self-consciousness. Last night I finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Dave Eggers is still with me.

Submissions Deadline April 1st

Quick, my artsy friends!

One Cool Word is a Vancouver-based magazine. It likes all kinds of writing, art, and music, plus genres that don´t fit into those. Issue #13 is running at us, so if you´re a Vancouverite with creative loving to share, then please share.

Don´t be intimidated. Just click the link, figure out how to send your love (it´s easy), and wait a little while. You could be famous and beloved by all staffers at OCW, including yours truly.

Now, back to the vacation!

Non-linear love

Did you know that Nabokov wrote novels on index cards? And that he shuffled them to see where the plot might go? And that he died and left a packet of cards with a half-written novel on them, which he demanded his son burn? Wow. The son didn't burn the cards. He locked them in a safe with a plan to publish them later.

Index cards are wonderful. They don't exist on this island, so I intend to import them via a friend (shout out to Robin!). With index cards, you can even make your own Hipster PDA.

Taking shots

A Russian photographer took this in the President's Square of Quito when we weren't looking, and then walked over and asked if he could email it to us later. We watched him work for a few minutes. He was wearing brown and he moved very slowly to get different shots of people. He blended in quite well, but still, people noticed him.

I think that's why I'd prefer to be a writer than a photographer. To be a photographer, you have to wear the technology around your neck. Everyone knows what you are doing. To be a writer, you just have to have a memory. I could sit down and write an article about the quiet protest that was going on behind us, or a short story about the woman selling gum next to the fountain, and no one from that day would remember me taking the mental shots required to do it. Writers are sneaky in that way, I think.