I think I’ve already said this in a different entry, about a year ago, but since I’m too lazy to look up my own posts, I’m having another go at it. 

I once heard a professor give a lecture on “Canadian Identity.”  I wish I could quote from it — it was the sort of lecture that ought to be published — but I remember the gist of it.  Didion had a phrase in “Many Mansions” (in reference to the boondogle of a governor’s mansion that Nancy Reagan built) — “a queer absence of ego.”  Canada is like that.  Which is to say, Canadian identity is notable more for its absence than its presence, more for its marginality than its centrality, more for its quietness than for its stridency, more for the good manners of Canadians than for their brashness.  It’s not that Canada defines itself in opposition to America — that would require too much agency, or at the very least too much confrontation — but more the fact that it simply isn’t quite America.  While our Declaration of Independent sets out an American identity grounded in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” the BNA delineates principles of “peace, order, and good government.”  What is one to make of such modest goals except, well, modesty? (would that we could hope for such a limited vision in this time of war, crime, and corruption).

I was reminded of this on my recent trip up Toronto way.  See, every time I visit a place, I like to go to the museums.  To get a sense of the place, of the story a place tells about itself, and about the people that live there.  I’m not terribly picky about the kind of musem — art, history, “living history” all appeal to me, though I will confess that couture (shoes, dresses, that sort of thing) hold little interest.  Just so long as there is a museum to go to.

In an interesting twist on the lacunal quality to Canadian identity, it turns out that it is rather difficult to find museums there.  And when one does, they’re almost entirely “quotidian” museums: museums of daily life (e.g., restored mansions).  So, what you get is the dress of a “fille du roi” (the young girls of low birth sent over by the King of France to marry the settlers of what would become Quebec), the rifles and cots and uniforms of the soldiers that guarded Fort York (though precious little on who or why they fought), or the trading goods and blankets exchanged between Hudson’s Bay men and the Cree or Mohawk (but rather less on the rise and decline of oldest contiuously-operating corporation in the world, and surprsingly little on the customs, beliefs, and narratives of the aboriginal peoples).  Finding a history museum, by contrast, is difficult if not impossible. 

What is this about?  I suppose it could be as simple as the idea that in order to tell a story (especially a historical story), one needs to leave something (which is to say someone) out.  And Canadians — for good reasons — are very careful not to leave anyone out.  So, in order to tell “the story of Canada” as the story of the United Empire Loyalists (does anyone still append U.E. after their name, as a sort of pseudo-title?) would, of course, leave out the Quebeckers (among others).  And to tell the story of Quebec is, of course, to leave out either the Anglos or the aboriginals.  To tell a story about the Maritimes probably means leaving out Labrador (who? I hear you ask?  Exactly).  To talk of the aboriginals would involve massive reductionism (what do the Cree have in common with the Eskimo, after all, aside from the accident of being the people that got here “first?”) and probably leave out the Metis.  Even to tell a story about all those escaped slaves that followed the “true star of the North” to freedom in Canada is (a) really to tell a story about America, not Canada, and (b) probably means skipping over the inconvenient fact that many of those folks eventually left Canada (for settlement in Sierra Leone, or back to the U.S. after the Civil War), and (c) leaves out all the previously mentioned groups.

Even to lay out the story in the manner I’ve done above — telling a story of Canada as the amalgam of all her peoples — is not to get it quite right.  In America one can go to immigrants’ museums all the time — Ellis and Angel Islands, various African-American history sites, the joss houses and fan-tan parlors that one can find marked in small towns all over California, the Mission trail, etc. — and they tell a very American story, right?  Of immigration, discrimination, and struggle; in a word of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  One does not tell the same or even a parallel immigration story in Canada (though she is a nation of immigrants), for such a story would require at the end some idea of “Canadianness,” as assimilation (we were that, now we’re this), or refuge (because we can’t be that, we are now this), or even (as in America) as entry into Heavan’s golden doors.

Part of the reason I find this curious is a personal matter.  I’ve been doing some genealogy on my mother’s side of the family, and I’ve run into a wall on my mother’s maternal grandmother’s family — half of whom came from Canada (Bay de Quinte, or “Bay Canta” — the north shore of lake Ontario a bit west of Buffalo), and the other half of whom came from nothern New York (Lewis County — which itself saw a good deal of trading back and forth of persons and goods with Canada).  I may not be able to find anything for the simple reason that they were probably poor(ish) dirt farmers.  With names as unremarkable as Murray or Madden and Hubbard or House, what is one likely to find, after all?  Or it could be that erecting cult objects out of family trees — the worship of history and narrative — is not something that particular interests Canadians.  The business of peaceful, orderly living does not leave much in the way of historical evidence, it would appear.

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Just back from Toronto for the long weekend.

Who wooda thunk that going to the third(?) largest city in North America could be so relaxing? 

While there, we saw this comedy act.   For $6 (Canadian).  Two thumbs up on that.  The very idea that one would have to travel to Toronto for irony is, in itself, kind of mind-boggling.

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So my partner and I decided to do something this past weekend we hadn’t done in a long time.  Something radical, or at least unusual, for middle class white folks living in this here “fair” city. 

We went for a walk.  In a public park. 

Now let me step back here a second and apprise my readers of a little anthropological truism I’ve gleaned from my time living in this blasted city of the plain. 

White people don’t go to parks.  At least not within the city limits, and if they do it’s only on very specific occasions: such as an annual “walk for cancer/AIDS/battered women/abused kids/etc.” or the one “citywide” fair we have in our oldest park, or when the Botanic Garden has its annual Plant Sale.  The very fact that the Botanic Garden is not de facto “white space” is, to my mind, curious.  After all, the BG functions almost entirely as a vehicle for the reproduction of elite social capital and status, what with its named gardens, its endowment, and its summertime concert series (which counts as one of the “very specific occasions,” of course).  But just showing up on your own, to enjoy a park by yourself, or with your partner or your family?  No.  This is not something white people do. 

Because parks, you see, are for brown people.  Not black people, interestingly enough, but brown – which is to say, Hispanic – people. 

Now what white people do do in their spare time on Sunday afternoons, I am not quite sure.  I suspect that it involves either staying at home, or attending some type of sporting event (see previous post: “The House that George Built”).  What black people do in their spare time is, needless to say, simply beyond knowing – because, of course, one of the perverse effects of social segregation is that white people simply don’t know shit about the lives of black people (other than the fevered and breathless reports we get on the nightly news.  A source to which, possessing neither cable nor rabbit ears, we no longer have access.  Thank God.)

But back to the park.  So we drive over to the East side of town.  Because, of course, walking to a park is nigh impossible from where we live (to be fair, we could walk over to the zoo and one of the country clubs, but that would involve risking an apoplectic rage).  Driving into the entrance, we notice a few parked cars – not loads, but some.  And rounding a bend in the road, we come to find out that the cars apparently belong to one of the scores of Hispanic families out for a day of picnicking and soccer.  There is a big, bare field, marked out with home-made goals and field boundaries (shirts and such), around which perhaps 100-150 people are sitting watching the apparently rather friendly game in progress.  So, a good size crowd, all having a good time.  We even see an ice-cream vendor (“Flor de Michoacan”) peddling sweet cold treats to kids and adults alike. 

We then park our car in what is an overly ample lot (we even get a spot in the shade!), and proceed to walk away from the playing field toward where (we think) we’ll find the river.  Crossing over an old levee (the park used to be flood plain, then a dump, before its current incarnation), we come upon a puzzling sight: a huge, beautifully manicured, sparklingly maintained, and completely empty baseball complex.  Not a soul in sight, but the paint is fresh, the metal gleams, and the grass is clipped perfectly (the soccer fields, by the by, were not a little raggedy, with some bare patches and quite a lot of weeds).  Posted prominently on several light posts (because of course this place is set up for night play – despite the big signs at the entrance to the park declaring it closed at sundown) are notices saying “Reservations required.  No pick-up games allowed.  Violators will be prosecuted and fined.”  Beyond the baseball fields are evidence of another complex under construction: chain link fences, trenches, and churned-up fields.  It occurred to me later to wonder whether that construction related to the building of a Barnett Shale gas well, rather than to another empty sports complex.

Avoiding this bizarre vista, we follow the levee around the field and find ourselves at the edge of a forest.  The trees, not too tall, are a mix of cottonwood, oak, pecan, and osage orange (bois d’arc).  As we’re not yet far enough east to be in the Cross-Timbers, this feels much closer (to me) to the riparian coolness of the American River bike trail.  Once in the shade, the temperature drops a good 5 degrees, there are butterflies, and even (still) some flowers left from the spring.  We can hear the freeway (which is only a quarter-mile or so away), but otherwise civilization retreats into our mental periphery.  We then follow a marked concrete path into the woods, and that eventually brings us to the river. 

The river here is lovely.  Now, to be fair, to call the Trinity a “river” is a bit of an overstatement.  It requires assuming that there is “water” (it’s really a good deal of treated sewage outflow), and that it “flows” (which it does, after a fashion – but probably with about as much volume as Cache Creek, if that).  But, once you get past those “technicalities” all the other accoutrements are there: wildfowl (we saw a great blue heron and a cattle egret), scads of turtles, and a rather stunning bank cut revealing the limestone strata that underlie that section of the city.  And as the river is in a little bit of a ravine there, the vistas are made even more dramatic from the fact that the trail follows the line of the bluff, and one can look down (perhaps 50 feet) to the river, or up to the next bend of the river, where it glints in the dappled shade of the overhanging trees. 

We walked for 40 minutes through this “forest primeval” and saw nary a soul.  Every so often we would come across evidence of infrastructure that had been taken out in a flood: e.g., a concrete pad that extended a full five feet into empty space, overhanging a bank that had eroded away from beneath it.

Emerging again into the punishing sun, we find ourselves on the far side of the soccer fields from whence we had begun our little hike and it is there that we discover what we had missed at our entrance. 

We discovered white people.  And what were they doing? 

They were gathered behind a chain-link fence.  With their dogs.

“Welcome to Fort Woof!” the sign said. 

This, then, is what gets me about this place.  This, then, is this town in a nutshell: total segregation; fearful white people (behind fences and with dogs?  Criminey); beautiful, expensive, and totally unused (because off-limits to anyone without insider knowledge) infrastructure; no black people to be seen at all (presumably they are imprisoned behind the real fences and dogs at Huntsville or elsewhere, not the plaything carceral space we saw at “Fort Woof”). 

Welcome, indeed.

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Okay, so this is a sign that we are way behind the times down here, since I’ve only just _now_ gotten to see something evidently released a _year_ ago. 

But I just saw the new R. Kelly video.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but that shit is f*ckin’ genius.  I would link to his site, but, um, yeah.  See the title of this post.

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The NYT recently published an article on some new findings regarding hominid genomics.

It’s interesting, to be sure.  But I’ve got this nagging voice in the back of my head after reading the piece.  And here’s what it’s saying: haven’t we read stuff like this before?  Like in, oh, say, the Silmarillion?  Or Clan of the Cave Bear? Or in pretty much any good social science treatment of the intersection of race and sexuality (e.g., Nagel’s new book Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, see chapters 3 and 4 especially)?

To summarize the arguments of Drs. Reich, Patterson, and colleagues: humans differentiated themselves from chimpanzees a long time ago.  And they lived sorta side by side for awhile (chimps in the dark recesses of the tropical forest, eating bananas or whatever fruit the ancestors of chimps ate 6-7 million years ago, while “humans” set off as pioneers into the light of the savannah).  But then a funny thing happened.  The human women went back and, well, got a little funky with their old cousins, the chimps.  Perhaps hubby was too busy off hunting, or perhaps… well that starts to get touchy, doesn’t it?  And this produced a hybrid set of creatures.  And being hybrids, they were sort of like mules, or ligers (the latter being pretty much my favorite animal).  Which is to say, the boys were sterile.  So the female offspring (who apparently were still fertile) followed in their mommas’ footsteps, and went back to the forest for some more chimp-ancestor-lovin’.   And it was the product of these liaisons that eventually became our ancestors.  Whatever became of the poor cuckolded pre-human “humans” is unclear (or as the article puts it: “In principle they [the female hybrids] could have mated with males of the human lineage, but genetic evidence rules out that possibility”]. 

Jungle fever indeed.

I don’t have the knowledge to question this sort of thing on the scientific merits, of course — not being a paleoanthropologist or anything.  But I will say that if you take the paragraph above and substitute “elf” or “cro-magnon” or “white” for “human” and substitute “human” or “neanderthal/troglodyte” or “black” for “chimpanzee” you pretty much have the plot of a poorly-coded science fiction race fantasia.  No wonder white men are paranoid about sexual honor — “our” women have been getting fertilized on the side for at least 5 million years.

Lordy it is just plain bizarre where these cultural tropes show up.

Update: Original Nature article here

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Because if so, I want to join it.

This is the woman who brought us such life-changing NYT Style articles as “And if it’s a boy, will it be Lleh?” as well as that stunning piece of cultural analysis on “Mandates” (article too old, so can’t link).  I suppose at least she’s not making shit up out of whole cloth like Lisa Belkin, who wrote that unutterably stupid article about all of her friends finding fulfillment in motherhood (again, article too old at this point) while their hubbies traded stocks in order to pay for their nannies, their house(s?) in the Hamptons or Vail or wherever the fuck these people vacation these days, and not least of all their damned pottery lessons so they can find meaning in their lives over and above spoonfeeding baby Blaine/Connor/Siobhan/etc. strained beets.

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Of all the particular brands of faggotry I could have adopted, it never occured to me, say, 10 years ago, that I would become a gardening-type homosexual.  But, at least for the time being, that appears to be what has happened.  So, blooming away quite merrily in my front and back yards are:

a.) flowers (allysum, gardenia, rose, canna, turk’s cap, blanket, balloon, narcissus, oxalis, iris, morning glory, evening glory, hollyhock, lily, red yucca, poppy).  Indifferent to most of it — kind of pretty, but tetchy to maintain, especially with regards to watering schedules in the punishing Texas sun.  Turns out I like the idea of growing flowers from seed (lupine, poppy, Mexican hat, blanket) but it’s pretty unpredictable.   So, growing things from cuttings (rose) or from bulbs (narcissus) is a lot easier.  Oh, and cannas?  That shit is aggressive.

b.) herbs (lavender, basil, thyme, rosemary, parsley, fennel, strawberry, tarragon, coriander/cilantro).  Thumbs up on almost all of it — easy to grow and maintain, except for the parsley, but that’s mainly because I hardly ever used it.  Will probably switch to flat-leaf next time.

c.) vegetables (broccoli, turnip, mustard, onion, shallot, garlic, spinach, cucumber, carrot, beet, blackberry).  Thumbs down on the broccoli (buggy, quick to bolt).  Indifferent reaction toward the mustard (greens too strong, not yet harvested the grains).  Thumbs up on the turnip, onions, and spinach (easy, tasty, quick to grow, and all filled to the brim with that I’m-holier-than-thou-because-I’m-eating organic feeling).  All the rest I haven’t harvested yet.

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Apologies for the delay.  Snark is back on the warming burner and will shortly be served.

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