Not sure if it's worth reading...

The Ottawa writer's festival is coming up this month, so I thought I'd write a little bit about books. I've started reading another of the extraordinary Canadians series, this time on Glenn Gould. It's been interesting to read the whole series, not as much because it gives a good overview of some important Canadians, though it does, but more as a meditation on the biography as a form. There is much in the Gould biography that speaks to the more philosophical and intellectual challenges the biography produces. This is not perhaps particularly surprising as the author is Mark Kingwell a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto.

The biographies themselves are relatively short, but interesting and the series is really about giving you a quick, taste of this particular cast of characters.

The other book that I guess has made quite a splash in some circles is Fearful Symmetry by Brian Crowley.The premise seems interesting if misguided. It's all Quebec's fault because Canada started engaging in trying to buy Quebec nationalists in the 1960s, and so we moved from a nation of 'makers' to a nation of 'takers', and the various regions of Canada now engage is trying to capture their fair share of national wealth.

This kind of claim, and book could only be written by an economist. Fittingly Crowley is President on the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) [think Fraser institute for Atlantic Canada].

The reason I say that it could only be written by an economist, is because of its lack of historical understanding and nuance. Now to be fair I haven't read the book. I was seriously thinking about it, but having read the review in the LRC, I'm not sure I want to.

The premise is based on the idea that we had strong work Anglo protestant values before the 1960s and now we don't. Or some variant of this idea.

According to the review he refuses to engage in a debate about how society has changed since the 1960s. He doesn't engage with the fact that the development the welfare state is actually a Western phenomenon. He doesn't talk about multiculturalism and how this has impacted our ability to have a 'cohesive' national 'character'. These are important factors!

Canada in 2009 cannot go back to the old boy's club that it was earlier in the 20th century.

That being said I think that he may be on to something interesting in terms of the idea of buying off the nationalists. But to ignore the cultural impacts of the quiet revolution, to ignore the international context in which these things occur, to pretend that the huge amounts of immigration from outside Europe we have experienced have not changed our ability to have a 'national character' seem to me to be pretty serious omissions.

Not sure if it's worth my time reading the book, but we'll see.

I've got quite a few other books on my shelf for the moment.

What I'm reading

I just ordered another three books from the Great Canadian series. They are great biographies because they give you a taste, but are short enough to read in a day or two if you want. It's also almost a project that feels like a meditation on the idea of a biography as you get a sense of what the biography can offer as your run through the many authors with their different styles and ideas.

I'm currently reading concrete reveries by Mark Kingwell, who I read quite a bit a few years back but haven't paid as much attention to since.

I just finished two books, one from the aforementioned Extraordinary Canadians series on Mordecai Richler, and though an interesting one, it wasn't one of my favourites. I guess it seemed to go more into his soul, than the others. His supposed arrogance and rudeness disappeared in this telling. Though it might have made it more human you felt like something was missing, that some things were glossed over. Interesting to learn about his story though, for example though attached and known as being all about Montreal, I was surprised to learn that he spent much of his life overseas.

The other book I read was by Tyler Cowen who's site marginal revolution has made it's way into my RSS reader. It's an interesting thesis, that the internet and modern technology now privileges those who can be more like autistics. In that they order information different and have other characteristics that so called 'normal' people should pay attention to.

Now it's an intriguing thesis and he sort of pulls it off, but aside from exploring some aspects of autism and labelling certain of their characteristics, the links he is able to make with them I find difficult to follow and not that useful. For example in a chapter about diplomacy, he suggests that we can learn from autistics to be more objective. I'm not sure how useful a lesson that is. Overall it was a disappointment, but it doesn't mean it wasn't interesting

Confronting difficult situations is never easy

There have been few occasions where I have felt so mad at myself for biting my tongue as two separate occasions where comments I would deem racist have been uttered and I remained silent.

These events occurred over the past year or so and I think they are always a bit of a difficult issue. Even more so in a country, which proclaims its colour-blindness and refuses to acknowledge race as an issue, or when it does simply claims " Things are better here than in the United States" rather than dealing with the substance of the issue. I think the best description of this is in the book Black Berry Sweet Juice by Lawrence Hill. Though there were some parts I couldn't relate to, the experience he tells, of being a mixed-race person, half-black half white, like I am in Canada resonates with me.

In each situation, I was the only non-white person in the room, and the person's comments clearly made me feel uncomfortable. How do you reproach someone for such comments though? It isn't easy, especially in a social situation, where there are others around, and raising your voice and yelling and screaming at someone clearly isn't appropriate. How do you even broach the topic without making everyone involved feel uncomfortable.

Now there are those who claim that making the person uncomfortable is the point, and that such comments need to be held up to scrutiny and shouldn't be allowed to pass unchallenged, and while that's easy in theory in practice it's much more difficult.

I will try to be more assertive in the future. After the second of these situations, and how angry it made me, I hope I can rise to the challenge, of confronting these kind of racist statements.

What would Harper actually do?

So I started a conversation with a friend this week, if you take the premise that Harper won a majority in the next election, what exactly would his platform be?

It's a hard question, given that he's been so focused on keeping his minorities alive. He seemingly hasn't had enough time to think through what he would do if given time and license.

The other difficulty is that he like many conservatives, is "against government". Now I've always had a problem understanding why someone who dislikes 'government' would want to run one, but that's another issue. The point being that he seems to be mroe interested in dismantling (destroying?) programs and also not all that interested in doing things that would involve more government.

So in the end there isn't much left. As far as I can see, there are a few things they feel strongly about. The big two are:

A national securities regulator
Dismantling the wheat board

Other than that, I'm not too sure what they really want to do, lower taxes of course. They seem to want to lower spending, but haven't to date.

I'm kind of curious to see what a Harper majority would do. One thing I think that would happen is is some kind of machinery of government changes. It's been a long time since there were any MOG changes, so it's a possibility. The last major changes were in 1993 and things have certainly changed since then.

Update

I forgot, they also want to get rid of the gun registry and stop financing poltiical parties and maybe stack the senate with more partisans to then "reform" it...

Maybe they should run on those 5 priorities and see what happens