Quote for today

From Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner:

"Because who...has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse - the hats and pants and shows which you drag through the world - and retreat since the gods condone and practice these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trammeling and harried instant, the: was-not: is: was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return."

Words

While I was in Taiwan these last two months I was reading, when I was reading which wasn't that often actually, Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!; a hell of an interesting book by a truly great writer. I'd tried to read Faulkner before (The Sound and the Fury), but it was too much for me at the time; I was too young and inexperienced a reader. He's a writer who you have to work at to read; fight with almost at least at first until you begin to grasp the poetics of his language that once suitably immersed come to possess you with its intensity of expression. I'm still not finished, but I decided that I could use a break from it and that for this short trip to Thailand I should bring something else along so that I wouldn't run out while I was here. Spadework by Timothy Findley was the book thus chosen to accompany me; one I'd been curious about having read others by him (The Wars and Not Wanted On the Voyage) and having it sit in front of me on the coffee table where I've been living these last two months. My roommate Caitlin had got it from an ex-Canadian boyfriend but had yet to read it so I thought I'd give it a try.

Interesting it was. Set entirely in Stratford, Ontario of all places. Not exactly a difficult read anyways; I finished it in all of two days. An All's Well That Ends Well kind of book taking place as it does among the theatre gliterrati of Stratford's annual Shakespeare Festival. Happy family with underlying conflicts, crisis brought on by same conflicts, eventual resolution - hardly original plot structuring. But of course, what novels these days are in anyway original. Not too many. Instead, the characters are what's important and in this book, as in the others I've read by him, Findley does a pretty good job of telling us their story and thereby convincing us of their reality. Certainly not a great book, but rather a pretty good one.

One thing that bothered me about this book in which nearly every character smoked cigarettes at least a little, if not a lot, was his consistent usage of "lighted" as in "She lighted a cigarette as...". I know it's grammatically correct, but it sounds so stilted and awkward compared to the equally sensical and much more flowing "lit"; "she lit a cigarette..." sounds so much better don't you think?

And while on the topic of word usage, when did the indefinite article "an" become usable in front of words that don't start with vowels? Having finished Spadework I went out last night to find something new to read and at one of the many used bookstores scattered around Khao Sarn Rd. found The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History by Phillip Bobbitt. A very good read so far, but he consistently writes (not a quote since I don't have the book with me, but a similar example): "It happened in terms of an historical event not previously seen..." Huh? Since when has this been deemed grammatically correct? As I've been trying to teach my students in Taiwan, one of the vagaries of the English language is the different usages of the indefinite articles: "a" in front of words that begin with a consonant, and "an" in front of any word that begins with a vowel (a,e,i,o,u). Yet a Professor of Constitutionl Studies at a major American university with a PhD from Oxford apparently thinks differently and somehow managed to get his editors and publisher to go along with him. Can anyone explain this one?

Get me out!

It's been a long time since I've been punched in the face, but, as if I could find any less reason to want to be in Bangkok, I had such a thing happen to be a short while ago. As I was walking down a street shared by pedestrians and motor vehicles, a taxi pulled up in front of me and just as I walked by the back door of the side I was on opened just as I happened to be walking by it nearly smashing my knee if I hadn't jumped out of the way. Not sure the exact words that came out of my mouth, but an expletive of some sort it was as I kept walking. Perhaps ten seconds later I hear a voice behind me and am pushed in the back. Turning around I find myself confronted with an enraged Thai guy screaming at me, throwing punches (most of which I block, but one of them lands on my left cheek) and kicking. I, of course, try to reason with the guy (I guess I somehow insulted him though he was the one who nearly hit my leg with the taxi door), but whether he just couldn't understand English, just wanted to fight, was flipped out on speed (leading to not very calm personalities; a very common problem here depsite the government's anti-drug crackdown of recent years) or a combination of all three all I could do was block his repeated attacks and try to talk some sense into him. Thankfully his friend came and pulled him away though he continued to scream at me for my apparent indiscretion. Thank god I have only one more night in this city...

Bangkok blues

Sartre's dictum that (translated from the French of course) hell is other people has never been an opinion I've wished to grant my aquiesance to, but after another day spent in the environs of Khao Sarn Rd. in Bangkok I'm prone to agree. I'm only in Thailand to renew my visa that was going to run out in a few more days and so this whole trip, far from being a desirable escape/vacation from Taiwan is rather an expensive annoyance I wished I could have avoided. So I find myself yet again in this traveller ghetto of ghettos. Sick of these masses of middle/upper class western humanity strutting their usually drunken selves down these streets of casual cavortment; all attempting to impress with their so hip, yet completely conventional relative to everyone else fashion sense. Yes, this is sadly the future right now...

My apologies...

For not having written anything of late; a couple weeks even. Lazyness undoubtedly has something to do with it, but I also have been feeling pretty lousy the last week and a half due to a cold/flu leaving me not very inspired to put words to thoughts. Has been relatively eventful though. About a month ago now I went and checked out a live music club called Grooveyard that's been open since May or so of this year and who should I find behind the soundboard when I walked in, but a guy named Patrick from Edmonton who used to play in a band called Wide Awake and Dreaming with two friends of mine Ross and Jacob. I never really knew him back home, but I recognized him though I hadn't seen him in probably 5 or 6 years. He runs the place with an Aussie guy named Roger, plays (tenor and soprano sax) around Taiwan and does booking and managing for some bands on the side. To make a long story short I soon started playing with him and Roger in their jazz group and given that the Taichung Jazz Festival's going on, we played this last Sunday to a fair sized crowd. I bought an acoustic guitar here, but for playing with a band a guy I met that I'm in the process of starting a country band with lent me his surprisingly good Aria Pro II electric, a Les Paulish thing that actually plays and sounds quite good. He also lent me his delay and volume pedal for the gig; definite treats for one who loves effects like me. The people seemed to like it anyways, even being asked to have my picture taken with a woman. The $3000 NT (about a $110 Canadian) was certainly nice as well...

Unfortunately, my visa runs out next Monday so I have to leave the country to renew it. Hong Kong's the cheapest place to go, but they also therefore happen to be the stingiest when it comes to visa renewals. So back to Bangkok I must go being the next cheapest place. Though I finally have a job, I haven't been working long enough to make very much so I can ill afford it, but it's not like I have much choice in the matter; visa overstays get you into a mess of problems I have no desire to deal with. At least I'll have a time-out from Taiwan, though since I actually quite like it after only being here two months it's rather a waste, but hopefully I'll enjoy Bangkok more than my last time spent there when I spent far too many frustrating days waiting to get my first visa to Taiwan.

Maybe it's not so bad after all...

So the theory that the use of marijuana makes people stupid has suffered yet another setback. (Of course, one of the supposedly definitive proofs of said theory was an experiment undertaken in the 70's while Ronald Reagan was governor of California that involved force feeding pure marijuana smoke to monkeys - literally suffocating them - and then using the inevitable brain damage that resulted as "proof" of marijuana's toxicity. Could anyone imagine a more biased "scientific" experiment? Details here: http://www.sumeria.net/politics/noclo.html; and for some still needed for many marijuana de-mythologizing go to http://paranoia.lycaeum.org/marijuana/facts/mj-health-mythology.html) Recent studies at the University of Saskatchewan seem to indicate that substances found in marijuana actually promote brain cell growth.

Most "drugs of abuse" such as alcohol, heroin, cocaine and nicotine suppress growth of new brain cells. However, researchers found that cannabinoids promoted generation of new neurons in rats' hippocampuses.
Hippocampuses are the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory, and the study held true for either plant-derived or the synthetic version of cannabinoids.

"This is quite a surprise," said Xia Zhang, an associate professor with the Neuropsychiatry Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
"Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months," he added.
The research by Dr. Zhang and a team of international researchers is to be published in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, but their findings are on-line now.
The scientists also noticed that cannabinoids curbed depression and anxiety, which Dr. Zhang says, suggests a correlation between neurogenesis and mood swings. (Or, it at least partly explains the feelings of relaxation and euphoria of a pot-induced high.)

The rest of the article can be found here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051014.wxcanna1014/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/
And for a reminder of the insanity that is continued prohibition laws against marijuana (via http://www.andrewsullivan.com) go to http://www.mpp.org/releases/nr20051017.html.

About The Dead

You may or may not know of my love for the music of the Grateful Dead. Though I never had the opportunity to see them live being from western Canada where they hadn't played since the early 70's and only 18 when Jerry died in August of 1995 when I was just getting into their music I truly feel that they were one of the greatest musical groups ever. (I did see one show of the simply re-named The Dead's 2003 summer tour and three of their 2004 tour and though there was no Jerry, they were great shows played by a phenomenal group of musicians that I thoroughly enjoyed.) I actually even managed to tie them into my undergraduate honours thesis, which was entitled "A Critique of Adorno's Theory of Popular Music: On Improvisation, the Realization of Difference and the Grateful Dead" in which tried to work out of the possibility of a truly progressive "popular" music practice using the model of the Dead's live music ethos.

I'm working on an article that I'm going to try to get published in Bass Player or Musician discussing the bass playing of Phil Lesh, which is to me one of the fundamental innovations of the Dead's music and once it's done I'll post it here or link to it, but in the meantime I found this discussion of their uniqueness to be a worthwhile read so I thought I'd pass it along.

http://www.crecon.com/davidwomack/dead.html

Key quote:

...the Grateful Dead were perhaps the most artistically sublime of units, with band interaction that must be equated with genius given their unflagging devotion, prodigious output and unparalleled resourcefulness. The trick was in absorbing influences from absolutely every direction imaginable, from the "simple" forms of country, bluegrass, rural blues, pop and soul, to the esoteric realms of avant garde, classical, jazz, and cultural music from around the globe. Channellers with gates wide open, spirit, music and life flowed forth. Beatific and reverent, unplanned and contrived, sloppy and perfect, erratic (day to day) and consistent (ultimately), clumsiness only enhanced their high wire act. Analytical rigor mortis was held at bay by refusing to chart destinations; simplistic redundancy was eluded by big, complex, ideas. Communication was clear, if elliptical. The Grateful Dead were a stunning mixture of the hearts of simple music lovers with the minds of self-conscious, ambitious aesthetes.

In the words of Bill Graham, they weren't the best at what they did, they were the only ones who did what they did.

Post Double 10 Day ruminations

I haven't posted in a while due to...well a number of things. It was Double-10 days on Monday here (10/10), which is Taiwan's National Holiday and celebrates the founding of the original Chinese Republic in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen after the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, and so for the long weekend (a rare occurence here in Taiwan where many people still work six days a week) some friends and I went to check out some hot springs that my roommate Caitlin had been to a few weeks before. Since then I haven't felt too inspired, but thankfully that's at least somewhat changed.

Googling "Double ten day Taiwan" I came across this article written marking the holiday, "Taiwan: Double Tenth: A Time for Rededication to Freedom" with no stated author on the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization website at http://www.unpo.org/ news_detail.php?arg=50&par=3055. It points out how dramatically Taiwan has changed for the better over the last 20 years from a forty year long military dictatorship by first Chiang Kai-Shek and then his son Chiang Ching-kuo that lasted until 1987 to a multi-party democracy that is among the most free in Asia, if not the world. This contrasts sharply, of course, with mainland China that has been under the despotic, authoritarian rule of the Communist Party of China for the last 56 years. For those of you who have read my article (posted below) discussing this in relation to U.S. foreign policy this is fairly familiar, but it is well worth reading. Here's an excerpt.


According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2005 survey, Taiwan is one of the few countries in Asia that qualifies as ``free.’’ It shares that with two other nations, Japan and South Korea. Taiwan ranked Asia's most free with overall rating of 1.5 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 represents the freest.The same survey rates China ``not free,’’ at 6.5, only a half point away from sharing the world's worst rating with Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar.Here lies the greatest external threat to Taiwan's free and democratic way of life.The tyrants who ruthlessly oppress the Chinese and Tibetan people declare the Taiwanese their chattel and rant that they will stop at nothing to crush Taiwan's sovereignty.In March, the rubber-stamp Chinese parliament unanimously approved a so-called ``anti-secession law,’’ which claims that the Chinese Civil War is still on and will end only when the Taiwanese people, who, except for those forcefully conscripted, took no part in that war, are united with a society that does not share their appreciation of human rights, freedom and democracy.In their hypernationalistic rhetoric, Beijing officials have claimed that Taiwan poses the gravest danger to China's national security. The world can see through such hysterical raving.


Well I would hope so, but it's still the case that most countries in the world, my country of Canada included, would rather not stand up to defend Taiwan against its expansionist neighbour preferring to accept China's line about it being but a "renegade" province that must eventually be ruled again by the mainland in order to keep good relations with the butchers of Beijing. Sadly, with the general incompetence that has plagued U.S. actions in Iraq since the war began (primarily due to Rumsfeld's desire to "do it on the cheap" with 175,000 troops as opposed to the 300,000 plus that many generals were advocating) and the continuing morass that is at least partly the result of said incompetence in plain view for all to see, America's, being the country that has kept Taiwan free for 50 years, resolve to defend Taiwan were China to invade lacks the credibility it once had. China would still have to be insanely self-destructive to take such an action, but then who thought the "progressive" Deng Xiao-ping would countenance the slaughter of hundreds, possibly thousands of protestors in Tianenmen Square on June 4, 1989? (If you need a refresher on what exactly happened that very sad day, check out http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/tiananmen.html for an overview that also has some incredible pictures posted. For a very interesting read about the U.S.' view of the situation, see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/; a declassified history from the U.S. National Security Archives) An event that should certainly not be forgotten.

A new look from the Left?

On Open Democracy (at http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict) Sasha Abramsky has an interesting article entitled: "Whose al-Qaeda problem?" which takes to task those on the Left (Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, George Galloway, Naomi Klein, and John Pilger specifically) who have ever since the attacks of 9/11/2001, and again since the bombings in London of this year, done their rhetorical best to argue that it is the fault of the United-States and Britain that these events happened at all. Whether because of their (primarily the U.S.') support of Israel, or because of the sanctions on, and then later invasion of, Iraq, al-Qaeda is, these people insist, with some justification punishing these countries for their imperialist ways. The errors of this line of argumentation should be obvious to anyone: al-Qaeda's motivations stem from far deeper roots than American support for Israel or for any actions taken in recent years in Iraq. To understand Islamist fascism, of which al-Qaeda is one notable example, one must go back at least as far back as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the decades that followed. What was involved here (and still is today) was a reaction against the Enlightenment derived ideals of secularism, individual rights and the emancipation of women (among other things). These ideals, traditionaly celebrated and fought for by the Left, have instead been ignored in favour of finding common cause with reactionary religious fanatics who want to re-conquer Andalusia (Moorish Spain that came to an end in 1492), have targeted Australia (the Bali bombings of 2002 and again within the last week) for daring to help predominantly Christian East Timor become independent of Muslim dominatated Indonesia and have attacked any groups - the United-Nations, the Red Cross, Shi'as (who are seen as unredeemable heretics by Sunni fanatics like bin-Laden and Al-Zarqawi), Kurdish rights groups - who dare oppose their authoritarian ambitions.
Critiquing this "blame the West" mentality, Abramsky writes:

They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.
It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional “third-world” liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.
Simply blaming the never quite defined, yet implicitly all-powerful “west” for the ills of the world doesn’t explain why al-Qaida slaughtered thousands of Americans eighteen months before Saddam was overthrown. Nor does it explain the psychopathic joy this death cult takes in mass killings and in ritualistic, snuff-movie-style beheadings. The term “collateral damage” may be inept, but it at least suggests that the killing of civilians in pursuit of a state’s war aims is unintentional, regrettable; there is nothing unintentional, there is no regret, in the targeting of civilians by al-Qaida’s bombers.
Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it. If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force. But given the fundamentalist prejudices that are so much a part of bin Ladenism, the cry of western racism is a long way from being a case-closer.
We should attend to the way bin Laden and his followers invoke “the west.” They do so alternately to describe any expansive and domineering “first world” economic and political system and, even more ominously, to demarcate a set of ostensibly decadent liberal political, cultural, social, and religious beliefs and practices.
Indeed, what al-Qaida apparently hates most about “the west” are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment. These values stand in counterpoint to the tyrannical social code idealised by al-Qaida and by related political groupings such as Afghanistan’s Taliban.
In that sense, “the west” denotes less a geographical space than a mindset: a cultural presence or a sphere of anti-absolutist ideas that the Viennese-born philosopher Karl Popper termed the “open society.” In his day, when fascists and Stalinists held vast parts of the globe, the concept of “the west” prevailed over a smaller territory than today. But with the rise of bin Ladenism, the prevalence of this concept again is shrinking.
It is because bin Ladenism is waging war against the liberal ideal that much of the activist left’s response to 11 September 2001 and the London attacks is woefully, catastrophically inadequate. For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women’s rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.

His comments against Christopher Hitchens are, I think, undeserved since Hitchens, contrary to the polemic of many on the Left, has been nothing if not consistent in his anti-fascist viewpoint (check out http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/09/26/ to see an example of his contrarianess), but then bashing Hitchens ("traitors" to a cause are always the most hated afterall) seems to be almost a requirement for many to be taken seriously on the Left. The article is a good one though. Let's hope others on the Left start to see past their dislike of Bush to the real danger we who believe in secularism, individual rights and democratic freedoms face.

The condoning of torture

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