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Book Review: My Town

The Kitchener public library has a pretty substantial collection of local history books, which are generally very rare and can’t be taken out of the library. One book there that I’ve been really taken with is “My Town”, by E. Joyce Thompson Byrnes. I have found no record of it online.

It’s an incredibly cool book, about Hespeler, Ontario as a small town in the 1930s. (It is now a neighbourhood in my current municipality.) Writing from 2013, Byrnes is playful, reflective, and extremely funny. Each chapter deals with a different facet of life at the time – commerce, medical care, holidays and festivals, and so on. This being Canada, there was in fact an entire section dedicated to hockey and ice skating.

More than anything else the comparison that springs to mind for me is Anne of Green Gables, in that it’s a very saccharine view of life in the period. But it’s also really well researched and I think does a good job of cleaving to reality. Sometimes the suck leaches in from the sides of her cheerful stories – offhand mentions of her classmates dying of smallpox, how shitty winter jackets were for keeping you warm and dry, the whole great depression thing. I kind of appreciated that. It really made me appreciate how good we have it, from the big stuff (like not having 100% of cancers be fatal) to the small (man, ice skates really sucked at the time).

There’s this line of thinking that goes – once a way of life is gone, there’s no way to really understand it. As an example, some might say that people who are working on rolling back post-9/11 surveillance laws are aspiring to a pale imitation of what we once had, and the incredible, ridiculous amount of freedom that was commonplace before then would spook the shit out of this wimp-ass generation. Or in this case, something like – we’ll never get to a truly inalienated world again and we don’t understand how much we lost to industrialization and atomization.

But this book had such vivid descriptions of life in the deliciously slow old days, and I feel like I genuinely understand a lot more now about what was lost. It seemed like a tightknit and wonderful community. Shit, is this why historians like firsthand accounts so much???

Between stories of the hilariously dark and fucked up pranks that her mom would pull, her incredibly unique vantage point into the advancement of medical science at the time, and fond recollections of ridiculously cool things that you are no longer able to do¹, what captivated me most was the descriptions of the horses.

The fucking horses, man. I cannot believe how cool they were, I had no idea how much of a tradeoff we made when we shifted to cars.

Get this. You are a milkman, because milk delivery was a commonplace thing back then. You have a horse and a cart attached to it, full of bottles of milk. You know what you were able to do? You were able to literally just chill and read a paperback between your deliveries, because your horse! Got! Your! Fucking! Route! Memorized! It will stop at the appropriate times and know what your routine is at each stop and when to get going again. I honestly had no idea that horses were smart enough to do that. So basically we literally had intelligent self driving transportation for centuries???²

Ok, sometimes horses threw a shitfit. There was a really funny story about the baker trying to teach his new apprentice how to do his route, but the horse really didn’t like the apprentice’s vibes. So when the apprentice tried to climb on, it protested by lying down on its side – toppling over the attached cart and sending baked goods flying into the street.

But you know, maybe we need more horse tantrums in our lives and that would make us all better people. I for one would like a greater percentage of my first world problems to be caused by something other than human coordination failures. I would pay money for more of them to be like “sorry, Applejack the horse threw a tantrum this morning and that’s why your package wasn’t delivered” instead of “the local amazon warehouse decided to cut workers and force the remaining ones to work longer shifts again”. Can the aspiring startup founders in the area start working on this please?

Anyways, this is what I got from the first third of the book. I’ve only been able to read it in fits and snatches since I can’t take it out of the library! I might start going over on my lunch breaks. Someone else should start reading it so we can start a fan club.

Final score: 10/10

Stuff like: getting freshly squeezed warm milk from the local farm a 10 minute bike ride away as a treat (she takes the time to assure you that this was nothing to worry about despite the lack of pasteurization, as “the cows had been tested for Tuberculosis”); being able to skate all the way to Guelph on the rivers that were frozen in the wintertime; have a favourite shoe design as a kid that your cobbler was always ready to make for you in the next size up [↩]
Byrne often jokingly questions whether or not society has progressed at all since the 30s after relegating some tale or another, but man, honestly I found myself nodding in agreement more than I expected to (so like – two times, instead of zero times). [↩]

Modern Art Museums

I was at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art today and I think it was slightly better than Seattle’s (which I visited in April), by which I meant the collection was only like 95% shit instead of 98% shit. The very cursed conclusion might be that its better because of increased competition amongst billionaires, since the one in Seattle was very inside this one billionaire couple’s ass for being like 50% of their endowment.

Anyways, with that experience super fresh in my mind I thought it could be nice to collect my thoughts on modern art museums and how to have fun in them, and maybe do a little photo essay of SF MoMA’s highlights and lowlights.

Things that modern art could make you feel:

Like you’re complicit in a billionaire’s tax evasion scheme. This is a collection that was made in like 2007 or something, which is like 60 years after people already thoroughly explored every variation of DrAwInG aTtEnTiOn tO tHe MeDiUm and made every thoughtful piece you can make about that.

If your Drawing Attention To The Medium art piece is worse than Rauschenberg’s White Painting, which was done in the freaking 50s (also available for viewing at SFMOMA!!!) DONT even talk to me, dont even look in my direction

The “my 5 year old can draw that” indignation, which you can feel even if you don’t have a 5 year old. Most of the time you’re right to feel indignant; like I said most modern art is garbage. HOWEVER, if you’re looking to decorate your apartment, the good news is, you can take pics of those pieces as inspiration if you like their vibe and then let your inner 5 year old go ham. I think Basquiat has the scribble game locked down too tight so I’m not too interested in making worse scribbly things myself when I can just get prints of his works. Here’s a cool one tho. Something about making some cool thing using math and randomness, but cheating a little so that it looks not entirely shit. Sure I can paint something like that why not

“256 Farben”, Gerhard Richter, 1974. From the slightly confusing placard description, I think what he did was randomly choose the intensity of the three primary colours plus green, for each square, and then mix the colours and paint a rectangle. The green helps make the painting a little more cohesive in colour, and I’m definitely sure he didn’t use true randomness because too many of these shades are vibrant instead of muddy. I’m on to you, Gerhard. But yea I can do something like this to cover up a big bland wall in my apartment

Sometimes you see a real piece by someone you’re expecting to be impressed by since it’s a Big Name and it’s just kinda lame

“Cronos”, Noguchi, 1947. Why is this guy considered visionary again?? Idk maybe it was cool for 1947

Other times pieces do actually live up to the hype if you see them in person. I did not expect to be so moved by Rothko, but at SF I saw my second Rothko piece and the experience was as weird and sublime as the first. I didn’t take a pic because it’s really much a deal of You Need to See Them in Person and Have Them Loom Over You Like A Cloud of Emotion, and the emotion felt too sacred to try to capture in a camera lens.
Can make you feel unexpected emotions, unintentionally. Here is a gallery description introducing you to the works of Günther Förg, whose works I enjoyed.

What struck me about this is that we will never, ever be able to use lead as a medium like this ever again – purely for its material properties, with no regard to the harm that they pose. Even if someone chooses to use lead like this they’ll be forced to like comment on the implications of the health risks of the medium, or deliberately not comment on it – you are no longer able to be neutral about it. The gallery itself mediated the experience of viewing the works in an unintentional way as well. Most placards around the museum had small, unintrusive “don’t touch!” icons that were easy to dismiss. The placards in this gallery said, in angry bold text, something like “no seriously do not touch these paintings, they will bring serious harm to your body and your children”. Unexpected frisson there for sure! ~~Maybe you can even say that it is a commentary on the power of art :y~~

Can make you feel unexpected emotions, intentionally, and possibly even grant you superpowers for a bit. I do have a pic for this one but it’s another example of something you need to see in person to understand.

“IKB 174”, Yves Klein, 1958. Before there was vantablack and the pinkest pink, this guy named Yves Klein invented a supersaturated blue pigment and became obsessed with it. All of his works use it, and he patented it as “International Klein Blue” (IKB). Having never seen IKB pieces in person, I kind of wrote it off as a gimmick, but it turns out that IKB is without a doubt the most beautiful colour that I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The screens and photos will never do it justice. The paint was thick, pastelly and a little gritty, and you can see bumps of it on the canvas. The shadow that they cast was a subtle and beautiful purple, instead of a more shaded blue, which delighted and shocked me. After noticing this, for the rest of the day, my eyes were a thousand times more sensitive to the shade that various colours turned when they were partially enshadowed, and that lead to a dozen more moments of awe. thank u yves klein i owe u my life

Things to keep in mind as you go through the exhibits:

It’s different than a classical art museum, because so many more things fall under modern art – weird sculpture, multimedia pieces, performance art, etc, and also a lot of the pieces come from newer artists that haven’t been time tested yet. I think this leads to a wider spread in quality: there are more pieces that are sublime, and more that are pretty trash. At a normal art museum you just look at paintings and feel slight emotions sometimes, it’s a much more reserved affair. You’re probably not going to find a piece that makes you feel like you’ve been punched in the gut or that teaches you to look at the world in a brand new light.
Some artists really phone it in sometimes and it shows. And again, a lot of the pieces are at the museum because of like, tax writeoff shenanigans. These come in the form of something like:
- Rich person buys art off a guy for 5k
- Rich person gets art appraised and now the art is worth 30k because the artist is very popular in the new york art scene or whatever
- Rich person donates art as an in-kind donation worth 30k and can write that off on their taxes.
Relatedly, you should feel extra ok about trusting your own analysis on modern art – we haven’t settled on whether or not any particular artist is good, the way we’ve settled on like, classical artists. (All the classical artists you know are “good”, the rest are lost to history or obscurity) And again, most of them are scams, so don’t feel the need to be like “I don’t get it probably because I don’t know enough art history” when you think a piece is really dumb.
Hell, most modern artists don’t know their art history. I know this is the case because the museums will very gladly and gleefully point it out to you each time when someone actually knows their art history and does something clever with it. Their pieces are definitely a lot cooler, but they’re definitely the exceptions more than the rule.

If you are an art person and pissed off about any of what I wrote, please invite me to go to a modern art museum with you so you can explain art to me! <3

We can only go forwards

I was talking to my partner the other day about how unlikely it would be for us to have children, and the tremendous sacrifices it would take on both our parts to raise a happy, well-adjusted child. One thing that kept coming up was the extreme difficulty it would be to raise a child away from screens and algorithmic content, when both of us are hopeless addicts ourselves. To us, and I think to most people, it’s a given that providing children with access to screens would be severely unhealthy for their developing brains, in some unique way. And that if you can raise a kid into their early teens without too much exposure to screens, your job is done.

But recently, I’ve been reading some stuff that challenges the “unique” bit, which really upsets this whole entire narrative.

Before the internet we had television sets. They came in the 50s and proliferated in our homes and by the 90s the average American was spending 6 hours a day in front of their sets. Descriptions of television and the culture around it at this time paints a fascinating picture that is very similar to how we think of internet culture today – cynical, self-referential to the point of blindness to the real, hyperreal. And heavily irony-poisoned.

pov: David Foster Wallace tells you to touch grass (1990)

(It’s honestly kind of weird that I forgot about this, considering how much anti-tv stuff was drilled into me throughout elementary school. People were banging on about this a lot back in the day! I remember watching PSAs about how watching TV was bad between cartoons. But maybe it’s not that weird, since it’s been like 12 years since the first iPhone was released and then the internet sort of ate the world. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s how anything that happens more than 10 years ago feels like.)

What does it mean to say that the irony poisoning isn’t new? That we’re three generations removed from a culture untouched by screens and mass media?

I think, first and foremost, it means that there’s no pure world, no strongtime that we can return to by logging off and touching grass. Not any longer.

It also means that every aspect of our lives and culture have been shaped by it. Depriving a child of a tablet might be in some ways as crippling as not teaching them how to read. I’m honestly not sure if there’s any real way of opting out of this culture, besides joining the Amish. If you’re not down for a life of churning butter and sexual repression, the only way forward is to make new theory and new strategies for the new world that we live in.

So this brings me to this recent piece that I can’t stop thinking about: Michael Cuenco’s “America’s New Post-Literate Epistemology” for Palladium Mag.

I think it’s a super insightful piece, that also doubles as a great survey of the media studies field, which first established in the 70s to critique television culture. I tried to find an excerpt but it’s such a weird, expansive piece that it’s really not possible. So instead here’s a brief summary of one section:

Modern humans interact with content by way of a never ending stream of articles, takes, and countertakes. Issues never feel solved, they only disappear from the timeline due to waning interest in due time. Reflecting this, there’s now a societal disinterest in reaching any sort of closure, and maybe even the feeling that the desire to have closure is somehow juvenile or naive. We should categorize this type of media interaction as having something closer to an oral nature rather than a literate one because of a lack of clear sequence, structure, or hierarchy in the information.

In oral structures, when we interact with new content, we can form associations between them and older stuff that we’ve seen pretty easily, but it’s much more difficult to form conclusions, to reach definitive endings. In this world it becomes increasingly difficult to think in terms of linearity, in terms of doing something and getting somewhere, to produce programs and manifestos and five-year plans.

Literate—but non-liberal—China has a goal: national rejuvenation by 2049. This is a concrete master plan bounded by a progressive notion of time, with numbered steps and specific metrics, and the planners are concerned with the reshaping of space.

Meanwhile, post-literate America has no long-term goals. Identity-slogans like “Make America Great Again” or “Defund the Police” may sound like goals, but they are in fact what Marshall McLuhan (a famed media theorist from the 60s) called “mythical environments,” which “live beyond time and space” and are therefore untethered to concrete linear action in the physical world. By when exactly is America supposed to be great again? Are there any metrics to help us determine if it is on track to becoming great? How precisely do we defund the police? What happens after?

One important thing to note is that the authors are actually quite ambivalent to this shift, from the literate to the post-literate. Sure, Cuenco seems to say, there’ll be growing pains as we make the switch in our epistemology, but can we really say that we’ll be worse off afterwards?

Of course, being a literate troglodyte in this “post-literate” world, my response to the question is an unequivocal YES, OBVIOUSLY. It seems objectively terrible, and what’s worse is how much I recognized my own style of thinking reflected in the description of oral culture, since I’ve been terminally online since I was twelve, and a pretty hopeless tv addict before that.

In adolescence, I began to see issues in hues of grey instead of black and white, and to see societal problems as parts of an ever-shifting ecosystem, paralyzingly wicked and complex instead of anything a single person could affect. Throughout high school and most of university I cultivated and refined this way of thinking. I think the pendulum is now starting to swing in the other direction. I want to develop my ability to think linearly. (I don’t think I’m like, abjectly terrible at this, but I think I could be better.)

So I’ve been taking time to read books again, lots of them, sequentially, from start to finish. I’ve started volunteering, and then working full-time for grassroots mutual aid organizations that do things right now, instead of returning to the public service policy positions I interned for, where my job was to analyze consideration after consideration for policies that might launch 10 years later. (This is important work, but I don’t think it’s the work for me any longer.) I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing, because blog posts need beginnings and middles and ends.

And I go on regular walks, and although I don’t touch the grass, I admire the wildflowers.