The new library — the Terry Salman library — at the Hillcrest Community Centre has this super-duper check-in machine that excited me. You place your book and the machine sucks it in and up on the screen hops the title of your book. Eh voila it’s checked in!
It was so smooth, I wanted to climb up there place my shoulders and head down on the ledge and slide inside physically there just to see what might appear on the screen. “Unidentified Title. Woman who needs more sleep. Or spends way time too much wondering about the weather”
Another thing I like about this machine is how it could help reduce RSI in wrists of the workers, which appears to be a chronic injury for library staff.
Occupy Vancouver
Yesterday in the course of media questioning the Mayor noted that the number of homeless and mentally ill people at the Occupy Vancouver site was growing. He mentioned a number of the original activists had left the site.
I had begun to note extraordinary hostility on twitter towards to protesters, not unusual since twitter seems to spawn hostility and incoherent hostility because many of the hostilists had clearly never visited the site. Then in recent days the tone towards the protest began to switch on Facebook, fairly generous-minded lefties began dismissing the protest with ease. The language with which they dismissed it seemed to reference the young and the homeless and mentally ill. “Not here” came up. Whatever their beef, Occupy Vancouver was “not the place for it.”
Apparently now the homeless and mentally ill (many of whom will be both) have arrived at the protest, it is no longer a legitimate protest. Equally their arrival legitimizes closing it down.
What’s curious in this is how a class system of protester has evolved. The legitimacy of the protest depends on who we can stand to look at. Thus if you look like a union worker with tethered hair and you’re holding “recognized” signage (that may not relate to where we live) we can tolerate you. Apparently homeless people are expected to protest singularly rather than in groups. You’re also required to keep your protest in motion and not settle in a particular spot.
What’s demonstrated in the city’s attempt to scapegoat what are the very people who have the most reason to protest is how indifferent they remain to one of our most significant problems. Why did the Mayor not recognize this as an opportunity to have mental health outreach teams enter the tent city site and endeavour to hook some of these people into services or offer support to them.
What disturbs me the most is the reaction their mere presence or visibility creates.
I can’t help wondering if these responses are not based on the fact that people with their hair brushed do not threaten us because we know they cannot remain at the Occupy Vancouver site and in essence there’s no suggestion the protest might succeed. However a more marginalized person will have a great deal more stamina and can endure the conditions and perhaps that’s what we troubles us most. The continued presence which is the strongest feature of the Occupy movement. Collective presence that doesn’t go home at nightfall. Collective presence that says we are not going anyplace because we’ve tried protest and going home afterwards and it hasn’t worked.
The line between legitimacy and illegitimacy is erasable it seems and yet who exactly decides it and how is it being used in this situation, to what end is it being employed to ensure the protest or movement dissolves.
What needs to be examined is why the protest has proved so affecting and that includes the insistence the protesters aren’t going anywhere.
It brings to mind Brian Bay (?) the protester who lived outside the House of Commons in London for so many years and how hard they worked to be shut of him. When they work hard to be shut of you all the more important you remain.
Extended rain event today with the temperature hovering around the 5 degree mark. We’ve been in a cold system that has obviously warmed up a bit to bring this rain in, which must mean the daytime high was up around the 8 degree mark.
I was loving that cold, dry system and took so many walks and a few runs in it. It’s the perfect Autumnal weather for walking over bridges and ploughing around corners.
Today, however, is not a day you would have wanted to get lost on and of course, we managed to get lost, in the rain, fumbling on a phone to find a poster that I couldn’t read that had the address of where we were supposed to be. I tend to imagine I know where buildings are. I dream up locations for them over a time and then eventually discover … at inopportune moments… no, the place is not where I thought it was and indeed we are miles away from it.
I am paying close attention to the forecasted mid-month temperature drop to see if it materializes.
Cerveau-ing Certeau & socks
Yesterday while corresponding with a friend I accidentally renamed de Certeau .. de Cerveau. There was something cervical in way I renamed him, not least because the chapter of his work I was referring to was called Walking. Walking around as de Cerveau, not de Certeau, momentarily.
*
This morning it was 3 degrees, I was arranging to meet a friend for coffee. She writes back that we are to meet and have coffee outside. By return I admit I am perishing cold inside and can do no such thing. Right now I am indoors complete with thermals and my poor feet are down at the end of my legs begging to be placed inside two foot-sized polar sleeping bags.
Have you noticed the arrival of fuzzy socks? I now see them installed in whole racks of their own. Of course I am referring to shops where they also sell industrial fluorescent jackets, steel toed boots, and hard hats. Tell me they’re also making their debut into the mainstream surely….
*
There are so many pregnant women and babies, we are in the midst of a population explosion.
There’s also yet another massive increase in nail salons.
I conclude we must be growing extra digits.
Must apply for a set.
I just sanded and finished the 7 foot hand made table and the tips of my current ones are hardened with varnish.
In weather related news the daytime low today was low. I estimate it in the 3-5 degree mark. I am now consumed with trying to keep warm and this is just indoors. I was explaining to a young fella that I was wearing a thermal, a shirt, a cashmere cardigan, plus a Down jacket and was freezing and this was inside a well-heated shop that sold, well major snow wear and parkas.
He was a bit astonished, squinted and then took me to the mountain climbing thermal underwear department.
I have to confess I love a good chat about coats. The coat is a mighty invention, rather like the hoover. I never find coats boring in the way I find most items of clothing tedious, except cardigans. Cardigans are in a realm of their own greatness. I still mourn the loss of my Icelandic cardigan, lost in a move between London and Dublin.
Walkers
Thank you so much to everyone who came out to Not Sent Letters at VIVO on Saturday night. The documentation for the event is on both the Not Sent Letters blog and youtube I believe. Our piece Walkers had some technical challenges being documented and another version with inserts from the text projection will likely replace the one that’s up there.
It was such an intriguing process for me creating this piece with Leanne. The process mainly was built around and out of response. I can’t quite describe why it was a very different way of working for me (since I’ve built other platforms of response ), but it was. The piece will also be published in some format.
I just visited my first Vancouver High School in the role of selecting one. What a terrifying experience. It reminded me of documentaries I’ve seen on American prisons or those industrial photographs from Chinese factories or well, yes, the military.
It was massive! These endless lines of lockers, identical blue doors and it was empty, so I have to try and imagine what they are like full.
Perhaps this goes someway to explaining the large number of novels in this country that invoke or refer to High School, something that previously perplexed me, now understood.
We did locate the vending machine — certainly a priority! And I was impressed by a room that said knitting club on Mondays. I was completely unprepared for how big these places are. Clearly they need to make more films about Canadian high schools to educate people like me through popular culture, however then I’d have to also watch the films that were made. .. thus I propose one film about a knitting club in high school that shows how big these places are to those of us who haven’t attended them.
“These people are not crackpots or loons.”
The long-term risk of dying from donating a kidney is no greater than for anyone of a similar age who has not had a kidney removed.
Paul Gibbs, consultant transplant surgeon for Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, has performed nearly 200 kidney transplants. Speaking about altruistic donors, he said: “These people are not crackpots or loons; they are very normal yet extraordinary individuals. They come from all walks of life: men, women, young and old.”