Waves Crashing on Towers Eternal

She sat with legs crossed and newspapers splayed across the table. She talked wisdom as half of her face exploded outwards in colour throughout the coffee shop. A night later, someone told me they got married in a city deep in my memory, between skyscrapers and the sea, wishing I was there. I closed my eyes and let them crumble backward into my skull.

The Yellow Mountains: Visual Hesse

I whistled a song down through the mountains around me and closed my eyes; I waited for the echo that never came; I let a few more breaths flow into the ether, turned around, and walked with my hands clasped behind my bank; the mountain grasses blew around me and trees bent; the dew clung on and only the mist around me stayed still; inside, things were turbulent.

Words: Who needs 'em?

As I slopped myself into my bed last night and covered myself up, I realized I wanted to read. I knelt up, leaned into my bookshelf and grabbed Herman Hesse's The Journey to the East; I began rereading the excellent book from the beginning.

I threw my head back into the pillow and covered my face with the book after reading:

- ..."Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."

To a writer of both fiction and nonfiction this strikes a deep, muscle-y chord; in a Monty Python death scene kind of way, one yells "S'TRUTH!" and keels over in cinematic fashion, grabbing their own heart.

Why do I have to go to bed like this?

Then I continue reading to discover:

He who travels far will often see things
Far removed from what he believed was Truth.
When he talks about it in the fields at home,
He is often accused of lying,
For the obdurate people will not believe
What they do not see and distinctly feel.
Inexperience, I believe,
Will give little credence to my song.

To which, I tossed the book beside my bed with the others (MAO, on which rests my alarm clock, The Road to Wigan Pier, which is a library book and consequently ill-treated, yesterday's paper, and a pencil-scrawl goodbye note I woke up to, written by a seldom-seen party-goer with whom I was hanging out and feeding hashbrowns to, before I went to bed on Friday), leaned back, and let my head explode into slumber.

NB - ob·du·rate: Hardened against feeling; hardhearted: an obdurate miser.

Newsflash: Iain Enters the Cartoonish Fray

My first and only Google-able reaction to the cartoon protests is thus: It is unfortunate that the decision to print, broadcast, or to omit to print or broadcast the cartoons of Muhammad is left to a select group of (mostly) men with extremely large and flammable egos; people whose job and responsibility revolve around generating curiosity in their end product; people who, by their very nature, are used to engaging in one-way dialogue and being cursory about their responsibility to anything and anyone except the tenets of their widely-detested profession; people who have something to prove; people who will, despite the gutterwash of blood in the Middle East, re-circulate jokey renditions of a prophet sacred to millions of people; people who choose to accept the nervously-moral, coffee-hazed newsroom view of free speech and not the laughably immoral high ground of gun-toting, intellectually-outdated lunatics; people more courageous than the moderates; people more interested in standing with the few rather than the many - whatever you think - and here, I will posit that you think thusly: the cartoons are bad; the reactions are also bad - you must hand it to the glory-seeking, egotistical, insensitive editors who spawned the crisis that has people shot dead in the streets, having embassies burned to the ground, having smoke-choked lunatics jump to their deaths, because they took a stand for something they believed in and refused to engage in a milky, copped out, half-assed, dilluted, and fully compromised view of the world and not bowing to the guns, Korans, Bibles, and religiously illogical lunatics of our world - and for that, I salute them: Cheers.

The Friday Morning Translator

I had seen her before.

It was Friday morning. I was half hung-over, from lack of sleep not lack of sense, and was nursing a coffee and a poorly-written paper. Class started and was inanely tepid; the teacher's interaction with the class was the only thing that kept me awake.

I sit in the same spot every week, beside a soft-spoken, well-meaning guy, and my friend Sam. In a similarly rooted spot, sits a woman I assume is a Chinese exchange student. I've noticed her before, she's always sitting there, smiling, taking in the class and opening and closing her text book as the professor occasionally skims over things in the readings.

It was the first morning I noticed a little glimmer of something we had in common: being alone.

I forget what we were all talking about, some cursory discussion of essay topics or something to that effect, when the teacher absent-mindedly wrote "...fending..." on the board in the middle of a sentence.

I don't know why I know it was the word "fending" that got her, but she turns softly to her side, and picks up a little silver (again, an assumption...) pocket translator. She looked so at peace while she did it. I wondered briefly how she could be so calm, when it's at the very least a 14-hour flight to her home country, let alone her province, or town, or village, or city; her friends, her dad, her grandmother, her teachers - wondering how their pupil is faring overseas, her little brother or sister, if she has one.

I can attest to how isolated (and exhilarated) you can feel when you're surrounded by people speaking either your second language, or one you don't fully understand, or for that matter, one you understand to the exact degree of being able to order food. It's a rush to realize you're on your own, "...fending..." for yourself; but it's an intense feeling when you leave yourself to some great, secular fate; going through a metaphoric, Anabaptistic umbilical cord-cutting ceremony of one's very own.

The expression on her face was telling; somewhat tragic, a stoic resolve, a calculated compromise between immersion and unfortunate, language-forced indifference.

A Lecture: Food Spreads and Ocean Spray

I have received a request to post gossip on here, instead of political commentary.

This is a valid demand, and as pointed out in the request itself, there is an ungodly amount of political commentary, as equally silly and pointless as my own, currently floating around on blogs.

However, there is perhaps even more gossip, rumour, festering pseudo-allegations against fellow bloggers and readers, etc, to sift through as well.

I will do my best to combine both in a terribly unlucrative compromise.

I went to the Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper's) lecture at Ottawa U. last night. A friend and I had a few drinks before, and as we left, we discovered an intense spread of giant shrimp, salmon wraps, sushi, bread, a wide variety of cheeses, and - my thanks here go to the Ottawa U. graduate student's association and all the tuition fees they skimmed - free booze.

After chatting with my friend and imbibing red wine and Stella's, I overheard someone say, extremely loudly, something to the effect of:

"Man, I'm a political analyst and I'm not going to take crap from anybody, even Lewis Lapham."

He was elaborating his point in a spray of vitriol all over the shirt of the woman he was addressing. She didn't looked amused and was verbally squirming in the surrounding awkwardness.

It was funny. It's not gossip, but it's the best I'm willing to divulge.

Speak no evil

Hello All:

I'm shutting up.

But I'm not just shutting up randomly or permanently, which is what you all probably want.

I'm shutting up for Journalists for Human Rights' Speak Silence campaign, where group members and volunteers take a vow of silence and raise money for journalists who get shut up by force, shot, killed, threatened, coerced and so on. Essentially, all those who don't enjoy the freedom to make pretentious and highly public farces of themselves in their attempts to stick it to those with power and privilege.

Last year we - the Carleton University chapter of JHR - used money we raised to send equipment to Radio Izuba in Rwanda, a country whose media inflamed a terrible conflict. We also put on human rights-themed documentary screenings and organized speakers. We plan to continue sponsoring media in developing countries and increasing the ability of young journalists to report human rights issues responsibly.

Please find the time and pocket change to sponsor me. You can do so at this link, via PayPal and other sorts of online financial mumbo-jumbo.

https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/personalPage.aspx?EventID=4625&LangPref=en-CA&RegistrationID=153568

Also, at this link, is a goofy picture of me for your enjoyment.

Thanks.

Iain