Hang a left, next exit

I have finally gotten around to moving all the stuff from this blogger site to the site I actually pay hosting for! So, slowly, this blog will be forgotten, though the entries will keep coming, slow and steady; gathering steam.

The ol' site is still "undergoing renovations", but they'll be sort of ongoing throughout anyway.

Click on the link below: it will take you to me blog/site.

deadwhitemales.net

With a little luck, i'll be updating regularly - more than I have been doing on this site.

See you soon.

The Gordian Knot of Literature

Gordian Knot: a difficult problem, generally solved through the aplpication of forceful and sometimes violent action. (Mythology: the Gordian Knot was a knot tied by a Greek king. It was said that whoever untied the knot would rule Asia. Alex here, in the picture, decided he couldn't take the time to work it out, so he took his sword to it and simply severed it.)

I'm just trying to dump a little baggage and get some clarity before getting back to the essay I have to hand in tomorrow.

Essentially, I have been asked to analyse a discourse. Which is? Well, it's basically a "theme", for lack of a better word, or maybe a socio-historical concern of the text, whether explicit or implicit. My problem with this: I don't think you can so easily separate and analyse separately different "discourses" in a text, because while it's talking about, say, Culture, it is also talking about progress, language, literature, nature, etc.

In my mind, this is an application of the sword to the knot. Cutting it short. Even harder than that, is trying to pin point what to call this supposed discourse in the text: "I am analysing the discourse of? Society? Writing? The City? Reason?" Maybe I am trying to go about this in too much of a holistic fashion and should just be content to draw the sword of Alexander the Great and cut arbitrarily in one spot and watch the excess fall away.

Frustration. Every time I get to writing a paper. I know I will do well (I always do) but I stress about it, circling in wide circles until after too much delibration I dart for the center-ish and start writing somethign out. Eventually, I end up with SOMETHING which often seems to me as intelligible as, say, "discourse."

Mandatory Comment followed by Cracking India

For those who don't speak French, the picture says: "Stephen Harper: What if you could do anything, just like George W. Bush, for 4 years?" The caption at the bottom, loosely translated: "Steph the All-Mighty!"

I don't want to harp on... no, I take that back. Lemme start again...

[beep!]

I don't want to go on about this: we have a new Prime Minister and government in Canada and this is he. What I do want to say though, is go visit this link: http://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/. Then, scroll down until you see an icon/box that says "Liberal" on it. This is a spoof of a Liberal add campaign that a Canadian comedian wrote up. I died of laughter when I saw it last night. In fact, I am dead now and writing this from beyond the grave...

So, the only other thing to say about the election: Jack Layton and NDP won 11 extra seats than last time, which is a good thing. And, despite Harper being (very likely) a total dick, I will at least give him the benefit of the doubt. Which really means: I will watch and wait for him to fuck up and then unleash my barbaric yawp in a maddening cacophany of protest! (If tries to fuck with my schooling, I will end him. In fact, i am well-acquainted with an individual who has volunteered to assassinate him if necessary...)

Enough about that, and on to things entirely unrelated.

I have discoverd, as of late, a deep fascination with South Asian history, particularly that history surrounding and defined by the partition of India and Pkistan, and the subsequent formation of Bengladesh. I think it is a mixture of romanticised notions of orientalism with the historical contrast of violence and peace. Think Gandhi. Then think of an entire train of dead Muslim bodies arriving at the station in lahore. Think the kindly-looking white-bearded Seik that takes the bus with you every morning to work. Then picture a guy much like him running into battle, his sword drawn, his hair let lose and falling down to his ankles as he decapitiates people of a different faith that he used to play with as a child...

Something about that mixture of peace and violence, of secular society and religious fervour just entices me. I think it's that I love tragic stories and that such a land and situation has all of the lements of a serious tragedy. And, of course, like all good tragedies, there is an element of culpability; the audience looks on and identifies with the players, and sees how they have been manipulated. And by virtue of being a psectator, you are in position to know enough to know better (or so you think) but are powerless to affect the outcome, or else get swept away in the madness. the culpability, in this case: I am an english-spekaing memeber of the British commonwealth, in this case, a canadian. But, the religious tolerance practiced in pre-colonial India/Pakistan was disrupted by the needs of the colonising force - divide and conquer. By the time the british withdrew, they had stirred the pot so much that now, rather than accepting a multiplicity of faiths, many extremest and fundamentalist groups have transformed religion into a defining characteristic of national identity.

it is odd to think that a problem seemingly so remote from my experience could move me so powerfully. I was reading Cracking India, by Bapsi Sidhwa and several of the scenes moved me to physical discomfort. Not tears - I think some of the attrocities presented there are beyond that, but a certain general discomort and sibeleif fighting with the horrific realisation that THIS IS TRUTH! (the more i read and learn about the colonial/postcolonial, the more the world seems broken, but the less it seems impossible to repair. Consciousness of the cuase and the issues can go a long way. Now, if ony we could get people to stop and listen for a few moments, long enough to stop killing each other for a few minutes, maybe this could work...)

Perhaps another aspect is how this is violence on a personal level - people are going after their neighbours and friend with clubs, axes, swords... some guns, but most of it was fire and hand-to-hand. It was not just killing, it was violation, humiliation, complete and utter dehumanization. here is just one passage to illustrate:

He saw a naked woman, her light Kashmiri skin bruised with pruple splotches and cuts, hanging head down from a ceiling fan. And looked on with a child's boundless acceptance and curiosity as jeering men set her long hair on fire. he saw babies snatched from their mothers, smashed against walls and their howling mothers brutally raped and killed.

I recommend the book to anybody and everybody. there is also a movie, by a canadian director called Deepa Mehta. The movie is called "Earth."

You can read up on the author here: http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/bsidhwa/biography.html

What is the Statute of Limitations on Debt?

Does anybody know what the Statute of Limitation on debt is, in canada/Quebec? I can't seem to find anything on this. I figure I will go visit my bank soon-ish and find out from someone there, but I would like to know just the same...

So, my friend sends me this wookbook about getting pumped for the new year and making resolutions and sticking with them. I know that much of my year will have to revolve around looking for extra income to build a pile of money I can use to climb out ot that hole in the ceiling of my prison. (I know this is a picture of the Pantheon in Rome, but I am asking you to work with the trying-to-claw-out-of-a-hole conceit here, which would assume this is a prison.)

So, year-old debts have started poping out of the woodwork. But they are so old that, by this point, one wonders if there is any way to wiggle out of them...

Valuable lesson of the day #1: debts that a company is not presently collecting do not freeze when they are passed along or seem to slink into obscurity. Interest is still calculated on a similar per annum type basis. Translation: you didn't have the money to pay it then, but now it's grwon like a cancer... Time to operate.

Valuable lesson of the day #2: judicial action os not a recourse collections have access to in order to get their cash back.

info: http://www2.publicationsduquebec.gouv.qc.ca/dynamicSearch/telecharge.php?type=2&file=/R_2_2/R2_2_A.html

So, my credit being shot, one wonders what options are available: off to the bank to see about "buying back" that debt with a 10% interest loan... which is less than half of the interest presently being charged. Will they lend me the money? Well, one way of looking at it is: unless you lend me this money (with deductions from my pay deposits going to the financial institution regularly) the likelyhood of the debt being paid (in the next year, say) is minimal at best. BUT! If I can get a head start buy lowering the interest rate, then I can start with minimum payments that will actually reduce my debt, rather than keeping it stable or just slowing its progress. And if I can eventually clear this debt, then I might up their business by eventually wanting more "credit products"...

IRONY! Countries, like Canada and the United States (just two examples of ALL!) are still able to go about their business and their conceptual "lives" without so much harassement.

IRONY! When I get back in the saddle with my debts, I will be investing in collection agencies. people borrow more and more and it stands to reason that htere are millions of people like me out there who made stupid mistakes in money mis-management in their youth and now must carry them like a heavy yoke.

But one must keep the faith that something will come around... I have bonuses coming to me at work... Interesting bonuses. I have to pay school (which is what I explained to the collections agency before lying and telling them that the address they had on file WAS the right one...) which is over 2000$... anything left = smack down on the debt.

Pleasant.
Fuck this sucks.

Under the Vent in Winter

At my last grade school, I remember that we used to have to go outside during recess. You could not go to the library, or some common room for 15 minutes, or an hour, you had to go outside. The fenced-in school yard was hal concrete and half grassy hill. Right smack in the back wall of the school there was a heating duct, I guess we can call it, with a grill on it, which was the exit for the school's ventialtion system. All of the air that had circulated through the school was expelled here in a constant rush of air. It stuck out of the wall about 2 or 3 feet or so, and blew all the air downwards so that in almost any weather, the cement directly underneath was dry. In the rainy spring and fall, and in the cold of winter, I would sit there alone waiting to go back in. I never understood why no one else ever seemed to be interested in that spot after I "discovered" it. Or why no one else faught with me for a little warm solitude there. I would watch the others running or playng and wanted no part on days like this. These were days for sitting still and watching the world go on without you.


I used to have a bedroom with no windows. There was always darkness for sleep. I never slep while there was light in the sky. I ceased to be diurnal. I lived at night. My mother's boyfriend called me the vampire living in the basement. I can't remember if he was the one who turned out to be a rapist or the one was was only verbally abusive. In the middle of the night, light was forbidden in that room by the commands of the mother-on-high: the computer screen flickering went on without notice most days. She needed only to fool herself into thinking I was sleeping, the rest didn't matter. Like a bear in a cave, I awoke one day to find that it was spring and I had missed a whole season.


I play video games, I read many books. I carry music in a portable format. Headphones protect my ears from the world. Opaque paper is a screen saving me from other beings. I always break eye contact first. Video games ensnare me and keep me isolated hours at a time, blissfully hibernating away the coldness of being, the terror of existence. I sit in public, unseen. I would pawn my savings for an ocean to cross, a country to explore, but I am always mysteriously broke. In my mind, I would conquer. But I never leave, never start. I am always finishing and refinishing the minutiae of my life in new and unexpected ways. When I finally go to war, my sword will reflect so much light from polish that I will have effectively blinded myself.


The imagination is free to dream up worlds as we would like to have them, as opposed to the one we have. Northrop Frye says that people who talk in prose are very rare. Prose is a literary conception - we recognize things which are laid out in prose as literary, as connected to literature, a world with it's own standards and realities. Ironically, literature tells us more about the nature of literature than the real world. People seem baffled by that. Even the most die-hard scholar of literature admits to an escapist urge in its study. Why does it not tell us as much about life? Life speaks in english; books speak in English. There is a difference. one deals with communicating on a superficial level - at the grocery store, at the nak, on the phone. Aother deals with forming mental concepts, such as theories inn physics and for the contruction of workable models we use to describe the world. The level of literature seeks to form a bond with and a control of, one's environment. It seeks to turn an objective, unfeeling environment into a home: we shape our lives into narratives because that allows us to relate events, elements, ourselves and other people to one another to forge the limits of our "world." It allows us to identify withthe world I suppose. Maybe I'll get into Northrop Frye's theories some other time. This is enough: literature speaks the language of myth and meaning, and like ancient magic, seeks to give us a feeling that, in some small way, we control the outcome.

Some want to run away and join the circus. I want to run away and join literature. But I am afraid to write myself in, to live on the page like everybody else. If we are to have the courage to live, we must see ourselves as the main characters of a book we are writing, to belive we can produce a life which makes for good reading and of which we are ultimately the masters.

But I just sit under the vent in winter, my claustrophobic world, until it's time to come inside.

Veni, Vidi, Vici!!! (or close enough)

This, incidentally, was the runner-up for the new picture on my profile. I decided to go with the anonymous poet picture, which i like a lot. (Did I mention I liked literature?) Nevertheless, this is a great pic, I believe. For those who may not know, this is Ares, Greek god of war. (Mars for those who prefer Roman terminolog.) He wasn't generally a nice guy. But, you wanted him on your team though, right?

Anyways, it so happens that Mars is "my planet," and I've always been drawn to and attracted to the idea of "warriors" in a general term. Not mindless killers, mind you, but rather I think I've alwyas had a love affair with this idea of the Heroic Code. Witness: Gaming? But also: Beowulf, "The Wanderer" and other Anglo-Saxon poetry... Hagakure and Samurai... Duelists. You get the idea. (I didn't find many good pictures of Beowulf...) And boxing...

So, yesterday I wrote my final exam of the semester: British Literature to 1660. So, lots of old warrior poetry. And then, noble knights and romances (Sir Gawain, Arthur and his knights, etc.). And, of course, those Elizabethans - courtiers with attitudes! No need to get that excited though - I start school again in less than 3 weeks, so I don't get much of a break. Still, I love it (see previous post) so it's really not that taxing. It really is quite fun! (Then again, I think Milton's Paradise Lost makes for some nice "light" reading... well, not quite, but you get the idea.) Another semester conquered and crushed beneath my conquering heel.

I'm trying to get my act together. Not like my life is in shambles or anything: I'm in school, which is really the main focus of my life right now. While this is great and I really want to do this, I've been feeling rather two dimensional right now. It seems to me I was "in to more things" and got enraptured more...

Essentialy, I'm aiming to get away from having to work at my crappy (but decent-paying) job as much as possible, all the while increaing my cash flow to give myself the ability to do some of the other things I want to do. Mundane things like by some clothes a little more often, to more lofty goals of wanting to travel, have extended stays in other courties, go do my Masters at whatever university I feel like. I'm trying to diversify my income, rather than have it all come from the same soul-sucking and redundant source of HELL!

See, money is not the problem: having more is good, not bad. What makes us feel at times like we hate it is that, I think, it tends to be associated with doing things we don't like in order to get it. It's the problem of seeing money in terms of how it is acquired vs. what it gets us. That, and the thought that tomorrow, we'll have to do that displeasurable thing again. What we hate about money is what it costs us in time away from what we would rather be doing - living our lives. So, finding shit that makes money and makes you happy...

So, i figure, this is where that warrior mentality / warrior code comes in.

I think I can say that I approach many facets of life as little wars and battles and that a warrior, if he knows how to handle himself in a fight, can handle various types of fights. That's why I like doing Muay Thai (which is one of the things that have suffered from this crappy work thing... not enough money, working extra hours there sucks and the shifts conflict with my classes.) Anyways, I'm one of those over-zealous sensei types who is always talking about how martial arts is life, but I think that to some extent it may be true.

Paraphrasing from Hagakure: "A samurai must make decisions in seven breaths. He does not doubt but takes seven breaths to make up his mind. Then, he dedictaes his entire being to bringing about the realisation of that thought. Doubt is death." (Something like that...)

See what I mean? These are words to live by. So, what's the secret? Well, allow me to point you to the following blog entry: http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/do-it-now.htm. DO IT NOW is presently my screen saver. (Overall, I must say, this blog is very good, though at times he's alittle extreme and, well, weird, for me. But, there is no arguing with the guy's dedication.) Anyways, to sum up the article (which is rather lengthy): you don't need to know how you are going to get somewhere, but you do need to know where you are going. And then just stay alert and open for opportunities rising up to make that happen. But you need to have a clear set of earnest goals, whatever they may be.

He keeps talking about intention-manifestation: imagining the outcome, really "intending" to do something, will "manifest" ways in which to make it possible. Or, will simply manifest it! Now, in terms I can realte to: (from hagakure again): "Even if his head is cut off, the samurai should be so focused on his goal of cutting down his opponent, that he should still be able to perform one final action."

So now all I need are some targets to hit. That's something I think I can work with..

What else is there?

I had a more twisted picture of Caliban (from Shakespeare's Tempest)to put up here, but I liked this one better - the others I have found (inclding pictures of a BAND called Caliban) didn't really have the feel i was looking for, for Caliban... But also the others.

Caliban's the dark, sort of beastly guy on the right. he's presently cowering in fear from Prospero, the guy with the beard who looks like he's casting a spell, or threatening to. the woman behind Prospero is his daughter, Miranda, a naive little woman who's never seen a woman in her life save her own reflection, and the only men she's seen are Prospero and Caliban. That fairy-looking thing in the backgroud is Ariel, an island spirit that Propero freed from imprisonment in a pine tree and who he has enslaved for a time so that it could help him get his revenge on the people who banished and usurped his throne. (Then again, it could be that's the ship that gets wrecked at the start of the play... Nah. Must be Ariel.) As you can see, they're standing at the mouth of the cave where Caliban lives. Hmm... I think this is in act I, scene 2... seems right: that's when they first visit Caliban in his cave, I think.

Tangent Alert: Everybody I know, it seems, has a blog. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. In fact, its likely a very good thing. I feel I've missed the point, though, you know? I don't tend to feel this urge to bitch about bad movies, or bitch about government, or what have you. The only two things I generally care to get excited about are: literature and gaming. And, after a while, what are you going to write about when all you really care to say is "Yup! I still really dig this stuff!?

What am I writing about anyways? I feel like the only thing I care to talk about much is literature and gaming. Maybe I'm becoming a little flat for it? A little 2-dimensional? Who knows?

Gotta make the money. (This has nothing to do with Caliabn, well, yes, it does, but not really. But I'll make ti work, I'm sure...) I feel like I'm right at the edge of a breakthrough of some sort, though about what, why, in what way? I have no fuckin' clue! But, whatever it is, it's like it's just out of reach. Lately, I've been really considering how to make money in a way that does not involve a quantified exchange of time for money, like most jobs out there. I'm in some weird Limbo space right now... Ah HA! This is how this all ties into the Tempest!!! (I knew I'd make it work.)

Consider a "traditional" comedy: you go to the theatre and it says: "The Comedy of the Tempest, by Bill S." and you know one thing right from the start: you'll end up with a happy ending, with likely at least one marriage on the horizon. Now, the marriage bit: I'm not talking about that. Ever. But the happy ending you expect to find: that's what I feel right now. I know, or feel for certain, that in a few years, once I get the right degrees and have jumped through the right hoops, I'll get my happy ending: I'll get that teaching job and I'll be able to, like Caliban, go back to living on my little island with the stuff that I like. But, in the mean time, I have to go through 5 acts of a play to get there, and deal with this asshole Prospero (who's not a bad guy, actually, unless you happen to be Caliban) until he finally gets what he wants and goes home to Milan.

So, I'm sort of at the " what do I do for those 5 acts until I get the happy ending?"

So I'm trying, as I said, to find ways to make money to give me more options and more time, so I can go out and do the things I want. And trying to get the balls to get off the island! (See how seemlessly I made that work? lol!) I feel I have all of these so-called "little dreams" but that none of it is getting done: want a motorcycle, want to travel a little, whatever. And I think still have this daydream of being paid to design/play role-playing games... (I guess you just keep bombing the shit out of other people with words until a few get through and you get a call back? Which is why I reread the Tempest in the firts place - to write a gaming article based on it.)

So, good news: I know what I ultimatley want to do. And I'm working towards it. great!
No-so-good news: Where does one turn for help, not with the big questions, but rather, the little questions of "Wanting a motorcyle" and wanting easy cash?...