Singing Along
February 19th, 2010
My friend Sandy Clipsham had a few of his guy friends over last night, to sing, of course, which is what guys most often do when they get together, or so I hear. I had never met any of the others, but they were an eclectic and interesting group, and we spent as much time talking about new media and alternative publishing and movies as we did singing. There were also homemade brownies, which is never a bad thing. The singing was good too, by which I mean that it was good to sing rather than that the singing was of any great quality, and it made me reflect on the diminishing opportunities to sing with one another in our culture and on the loss that I think this.
I have no data to support this supposition, but I would say that people in our culture listen to music more than those of any previous culture, but that they actually sing and play music with each other less and less. They have an insatiable appetite for professional music, for popular music, for music that accompanies and defines certain mediatized and commercialized lifestyles, but they are increasingly uncomfortable with making music together informally, as amateurs, as communities. They no longer sing along with one another. This phenomenon, I think, is partially to do with the diminishment of a certain kind of church culture, and also with the diminishment of things like summer camps and school choirs, all places where people once sung together regularly, but I it also has something to do with a culture that understands music as something to be produced and consumed like any other product rather than as something to be shared within a community. Although people who call themselves musicians, either by profession or by vocation, are often willing to do music with one another informally, the greater part of our culture is content to consume music, and so it never learns what it is to make music as a community, as amateurs, simply as an expression of community.
Yet, the cost of this inability to sing with each other is considerable. Anyone who has sung around a campfire, or in a church service, or even in a car with some friends and the radio, knows that there is something immensely cathartic about this kind of singing. It does not require us to be musicians. It does not require us to be vocalists. It does not require is to be songwriters. It requires us only to sing along with each other, and this singing produces an intimacy between us. There is a social risk in this kind of singing, certainly, because it is a breach of normal social decorum and because it creates a space in which different rules apply, but it is this very risk, shared between us, that opens us to each other.
So, last night, the five of us took this risk. We sang along with one another, informally, unprofessionally, without the benefit of practice, without really knowing each other, and we risked looking foolish, or at least sounding foolish, and we got through a few tunes that were none of our favourites but that were recognizable and easy to sing, and it was good. We sang “Cotton Fields“,” I’ll Fly Away“, “Five Hundred Miles“, “He Aint Heavy, He’s My Brother“, “If I Had a Hammer“, and “Down by the Riverside“, and I went home thinking that I need to sing along with people in this way more often.
Microfinancing Affordable Housing
January 27th, 2010
I have this idea. It may or not be original, and it may or may not even be viable, but I have it, so here it is.
I want to apply the principles of microcredit to the problem of affordable housing, which is a significant issue here in Guelph, and make loans available for people to convert their basements or attics or other spaces into legal apartments that would be set aside to be affordable housing. The loans would have no fixed repayment term, but the owner of the house would agree to rent the apartment at rates within affordable housing allowances and would also agree to have the full amount of this rent be applied to repay the loan until the full loan plus an additional amount, perhaps ten or fifteen percent, has been repaid. This money could then be used to finance future projects.
There would also be an expectation that the owner of the house would not just provide an apartment for those in need of affordable housing but would also provide community and social support to those who are renting, in whatever form this might need to take, whether helping new immigrants negotiate the governmental and legal system, or driving the physically disabled to their medical appointments, or visiting with the elderly, or providing childcare for a single parent, or whatever. Ideally, the owners and renters would even eat together regularly and share some of the tasks of the house.
The loans would probably be provided by a non-profit group like a church or like Habitat for Humanity, but it might also be possible to do this through private means.
I see the following benefits of this approach:
1. It provides affordable housing outside of government housing projects that, even in the best cases, turn into ghettos.
2. It provides people who are at financial risk with both a place to live and also the beginnings of a community and a social support network.
3. It encourages more efficient use of existing housing rather than requiring the construction of new housing.
4. It encourages communal and relational rather than governmental and institutional solutions to social problems.
5. It encourages mixed income neighbourhoods, which reduces overall crime rates.
6. It forces people to encounter and relate meaningfully to others who are not in their existing social circles.
There are probably other benefits that I am missing here, and I am probably willfully overlooking the potential difficulties, but I am interested to hear what others think about this proposal. It is exactly the kind of intervention that I think needs most to be made in the world, but I am not sure whether it is one that will appeal to anyone else. Any thoughts or comments that you might have would be appreciated.
The Century of Solitude
November 23rd, 2009
I read an interview with Werner Herzog in the Globe and Mail this morning. I love Herzog, not just his films, of which I have seen too few, but his persona as a director, and the interview provides some fabulous examples of this persona at work. For example, how many Hollywood directors are capable of an observation this articulate and this profound: “I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can’t fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude.” If more of our directors were capable of this kind of thoughtful reflection, if more of them were capable of articulating themselves half so well, perhaps we would have more films worth watching.
The True Meaning of Halloween
November 6th, 2009
I realized today why I do not love Halloween in the same way that I love some of the other holidays. The problem is, for me, that it is so difficult to make Halloween less commercial and more familial and neighbourly.
With Christmas, for example, our family has stopped giving gifts except to children. Instead, we put our money together and give it to charity, and we make homemade things for each other’s stockings, and we bake, and we cook, and we eat. By replacing the commercial aspects of the holiday with family traditions, our time together is less stressful and more celebratory. It becomes something we can truly anticipate as a family.
It is more difficult to avoid the commercial elements of Halloween, however, because they are driven by a question of safety. It is no longer possible to pass out homemade candy apples or popcorn balls rather than mass produced candy, and this is largely because we no longer know our neighbours well enough to trust them not to hurt us. The evening becomes reduced to strangers buying huge amounts of poor quality commercial candy to hand out to the children of other strangers who are handing the same candy out to your own children. It is a candy exchange program, where nobody wins except the candy manufacturers and the dentists.
So, I have decided to make Halloween a little more neighbourly and a little more homemade. I will, for the first time in decades, have candied apples for the children who know me, for the children who make up my neighbourhood. I will also have mulled cider for their parents. Of course, I will still need to have a bucket of candies for the kids who do not know me, but I will make our porch a reminder of what Halloween might actually be like if we took the time to know each other as a community.
Perhaps you can do so too.
Alina Carere
October 11th, 2009
My friend, Alina Carere, died last night.
She lived in a town not far from mine, and she used to attend highschool very near to me, so we saw each other now and again in her town or in mine, but I knew her mostly from camp, where we have been leaders together over the past few years.
It was at camp that I saw her last, only a few weeks ago. We were cleaning up the kitchen together after most people had gone home, and we were eating homemade asiago and artichoke dip as we worked. She was shocked when I double dipped my pita, and she threatened to stop eating it altogether, but it was too good, so she ate it anyway.
This memory is not very remarkable, I know, except it is the last that I will have of her, the last of the many memories, most of them just as unremarkable, that nevertheless made a remarkable life, a life of gentleness and generosity and willingness to serve. There will be no more such memories, and there are no words adequate to this loss.
There never are.
Youth in the Market
October 10th, 2009
I went to the Guelph Farmers’ Market today, as I almost always do on Saturday. One of the things that I love about the market is that it allows people to enter the local economy even if they do not have the capital or the inventory to open a store on a larger scale, and today I saw two examples that made me realize that this is an opportunity that the farmers’ market also offers to youth,
First, I was at my regular vegetable vendor, a very large and closely knit family, and I was served by the youngest child, a boy of maybe eight or nine years old. He found the twenty-odd things that I wanted, wrote the prices by hand in a notepad, added the total correctly, took my money, and gave my correct change, all without the help of an adult or a calculator. Most kids his age would simply not be capable of doing what he did, but then, most kids his age have never had the opportunity to try, because there are very few places where an eight-year old boy is allowed to do things in the real world. The farmers’ market offers him an opportunity to enter into the economy in a way that is safe, that is meaningful to him, and that allows him to be a part of his family’s business.
Second, there was another vendor, a boy of twelve or thirteen, who was selling handmade wooden swords as toys or as decorations. He has his own booth where he sits and carves and which he runs himself, though he is accompanied by his grandmother. There is no other place where a boy that young would be able to own and run his own business. It is only in the unique environment of the farmers’ market that he is able to participate in the economy in a way that is appropriate to his age and his ability.
If we really do want to encourage small and local businesses, as I think we should, then it seems to me that these kinds of opportunities are exactly those that we should be encouraging. We need to be encouraging young people to learn as they go, to experiment with what it means to make and sell a product within their communities, to try their hand in the family business ar at running businesses of their own. This, at least in my opinion, would be far more useful than all of the business schools and tax incentives put together.
Someone Else’s Kitchen
September 12th, 2009
I was visiting some friends yesterday morning.
There were peaches in boxes on the diningroom sideboard, waiting to be processed. There were jars of freshly canned peaches on the kitchen counter. There was bread rising in pans beside the stove. There was basil drying in the oven. There were trays of freshly flaked oats on the top of the fridge. There was fresh coffee in the French press.
I suddenly discovered, in someone else’s kitchen, that I was at home.
At a Loss for Words
September 1st, 2009
I am at a loss for words, in a manner of speaking.
I am the program director at a children’s summer camp this week, so I am away from my reading and my writing, though I can steal moments, like this present one, in the crevices of my days. There are many with whom I can speak, certainly, old friends, and we do speak, in the language of friendships and reminiscences, and I am pleasantly immersed in this many-sided conversation, this ongoing and interrupted and continued conversation, but these are a different sort of words than the ones that I use from day to day. They are words that have little or nothing to do with a textuality, with the textual words that make up so much of my life, with the textuality that comes to inform so much of what I say and do. These words that I find myself speaking here are oral, not purely, certainly, since such a world no longer exists, not for us, not for me, but they are oral even so, more oral than textual, surely, and I find myself, at times, lost in them. There is no illusion of a certain path through them. They put me in my place, but it is a place that is no longer what I believed it to be. These words, this speaking, empties me and returns me to myself. Perhaps they even save me from myself, for a moment.
The Call to Turn
August 20th, 2009
I went for coffee with Dave Humphrey last night, and we both came away with homework. Part of mine was to clarify what I wrote yesterday about the idea of the face to face. I was not entirely satisfied with what I had written, and I was unsure how to address the concerns I had with it, but Dave was able to work through these things with me, so I will now do my best to rectify some of them.
First, though this was perhaps not entirely clear, I included the three examples of the face to face in order to illustrate that turning toward the face of the other always involves turning away from something else. James Shelley literally turns away from the road toward my house. Don Moore and John Jantunen and I turn away from the film we were watching. Tom Able and I turn away from the book that we were reading. In each case, we were initially turned toward something else and not each other. We were oriented with respect to one another, but not toward one another. In each case, therefore, turning toward each other meant turning aside from something else, from the journey, from the film, from the text, from the world, from ourselves. It is this turning that permits the face to face.
Second, this turning to the face of the other is not unmotivated, though I have perhaps made it appear this way. My turning is always a response to the other, just as the other’s turning is a response to me. I become suddenly aware of the other precisely as the other, and I respond by turning toward the face of the other. This response is instinctual, and it is often involuntary, so it is not yet concerned with an ethics, but my turning to the face of the other makes a space for the possibility of an ethics.
As we were talking last night, Dave suggested that the metaphor of the call or the cry might be useful in explaining what happens in this turning, especially in the context of digital mediation. Within the logic of this metaphor, the other calls to me, and I look up. I turn toward the call. I turn to face the call. It is the call that turns me and brings me face to face with the other. I am called out of myself, out of the world, out of the place where I am side by side with the other, and into a place where the other is unavoidable, where I must choose whether or not I will be open to encounter this other.
The call need not be a vocalization, of course. The other’s gaze may call me just as certainly, as may the other’s condition. I may see the other’s eyes on me and know that this gaze requires me to return it. I may see the other beaten by the side of the road and know that the other’s wounds require me to turn aside from my path. In this sense, the call is inclusive of what I have elsewhere described, following Ivan Illich, as the movement in the belly. It is what calls to me through the other, what makes me turn to face the other, what makes the other unavoidable, and what therefore clears a space for the moment of encounter, for the moment of ethical decision.
What this metaphor of the call also does is contest the assumption that the face to face depends on visuality or proximity. Someone may call to me from beyond my sight, from beyond my reach, from far away. Even still, when I hear the call, I turn instinctively in that direction. I turn my face toward the sound of the other’s voice. This turning has no practical meaning or use. It would be more practical by far to turn my ear to the sound, but I turn my face instead. I orient myself, not to the sound of the other, but to the imagined face of the other whose place is betrayed by this sound. I am called out of myself and out of the world, and I turn my face to the other’s face, though it remains beyond my sight and beyond my reach.
This bears intimately, I think, on what I was trying to say yesterday about the possibility of turning toward the digitally mediated other. I cannot see, have never seen, David Eaves or Mike Hoye, these two people whose blogs I will now be reading. Nevertheless, the email that we all received called us out of ourselves and toward each other. It called us, and we turned to face the sound of this call. Our orientation with respect to one another was changed. It was no longer possible to merely read one another, because our reading had become a part of a decision to open ourselves to each other, to respond to one another. We had ceased to by anonymously side by side in cyberspace, and had, perhaps, come face to face.
This is the possibility to which I would one day like to speak more certainly.
On Meeting Face to Face
August 19th, 2009
I have been wanting for some time, at least since the spring of last year, to write something about the nature of what I might call digital encounter, or the possibility of being truly encountered by the digitally mediated other, and I will write this post, I promise, at some point, probably. I even have a catchy name for it: “Face to Face in Cyberspace”, but I have been waiting until I finish Friedrich Kittler’s Literature, Media, Information Systems, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, and Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool, though I have not yet started reading any of these books after more than a year, so it might be wise not to expect this post too soon.
I had an email this week, however, that relates to this idea of digital encounter, and and I thought that I would take the opportunity to make some preliminary remarks to which I can return when I do finally take up the problem of the digital other more fully, whenever that might be. So, let me begin by roughly defining what I mean by the moment of the face to face.
The face to face is the moment, not necessarily of encounter wit the other, but of confrontation by the other. Without this moment of the face to face, the encounter is impossible, but the face to face does not itself guarantee that an encounter will take place. It is the moment when the other becomes unavoidable to me as an other, but where I have not yet opened myself to the coming of the other, to the approach of the other. It is not a moment that can be measured in time, because the “not yet” of the face to face is ontological rather than temporal. Since it is ontologically prior to the encounter with the other and to knowledge of the other, it is unconcerned with the other and with encounter and with ethics as such, but it nevertheless makes all of these things possible.
Let me give three examples of what I mean.
James Shelley came to stay with us on Sunday night. He was biking from London to cottage country, and took the opportunity to stop by our place along the way. Neither of us have a car any longer, which means that we do not often have the chance to see each other, so it was good to sit on the porch with him and my wife, talking about alternative education and about the potential of charter cities to enable social and ecological change, among other things. Somewhere in the midst of that conversation, Matthew Harrison, a friend and former student, arrived unexpectedly to return a CD, so he joined us for a couple of hours as well.
On Monday night, Don Moore and John Jantunen and I went to see District 9 by Neil Blomkamp, which, incidentally, much exceeded my very low expectations. We then spent several hours in Don’s backyard, drinking craft beer and talking about film and literature and whatever else. Our conversation added John Gardner and Roberto Bolano to my list of authors that I really should read and added an interesting chocolate stout to the list of beers that I really should drink more often.
Yesterday afternoon, Tom Able come over for our regular coffee. We are reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, slowly and distractedly, which is how we generally prefer to do these things. Our conversation did not remain long on Bonhoeffer, but meandered over Tom’s internship this fall and the course that I am designing for the coming semester. We mostly talked in the kitchen as I made split pea and ham hock soup.
In each of these cases, there was a moment when I, and those I was with, had to turn from whatever it is that we are doing alongside one another, and we had to face one another, across a table or a porch or a kitchen or a yard, and to become confronted by one another. We turned from the journey, or the film, or the text, and we saw each other face to face. We need not have opened ourselves to the others who faced us, need not have made ourselves available to this encounter, but the possibility of encounter could no longer be avoided. The question of encounter had been posed, and we were made to answer it, in one way or another.
The question is, however, whether this turning toward each other is possible when our faces are mediated, either by the text of a book, or the image of a film, or the code of an application, or the signal of a phone, or some combination of these things. The answer to this question has traditionally been that no such turning is possible, and certain poststructuralist thinkers have even argued that, since there can be no unmediated knowledge of the other as such, there can be no turning toward the other and no encounter with the other at all.
Though I would myself agree that there is no knowledge of the other that is unmediated, I would affirm another direction in poststructuralist thought that has maintained the possibility of an encounter with the other prior or beyond or otherwise to knowledge and to ontology. Though this other must therefore remain entirely unknowlable and ungraspable, it nevertheless opens the possibility of an ethical relation with the other. This implies, at least in my mind, that it must be possible to be encountered in this way, not only by the other in physical proximity to me, by the other who is mediated by my senses and my language and my self, but also by the other who is physically apart from, by the other who is mediated by text and by image and by wavelength and by code, though I do not yet have the language to articulate how this encounter might occur.
This brings me, finally, to the email that I mentioned earlier, in which Dave Humphrey invited David Eaves , Mike Hoye, and myself to join him in an experiment. He suggested that we read each other’s blogs for a few months and then arrange to meet face to face. We three invitees do not know each other at all, though we all know Dave, and his invitation certainly creates in me the desire to meet these others face to face, but I wonder whether a moment of the face to face has not occurred already. It occurred, perhaps, not when I was asked to read two blogs that I had never read before, but when I and three others agreed to read each other for the express purpose of coming to know one another. Perhaps this decision itself marked a kind of turning toward one another, a kind of looking up into one another’s faces. It seems to me that this decision causes me to attend to these blogs differently, causes me to be concerned with them in a different way, as if I am no longer side to side with them, as if I am now face to face with them. I cannot yet speak to this possibility, but perhaps I will be able to do so soon.
Gramophone, Film, Typewrit
From Word to Word by Jeremy Luke Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.