Looting, Quants and Fairness: Why 'Liberal Arts' Education Isn't a Waste

So the big guys at AIG will get their bonuses but the workers in the auto industry will get cut backs? Come on, that simply isn’t fair!

The New York Times has had some very illuminating stories in the last few days about the greed which was the evil genius behind this mess we’re in. One is a review of an interesting paper published 16 years ago called Looting by economists George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer. In it they detail, the way corporate pirates competely ripped companies apart during the 1980s, banking (quite literally) on the fact that they couldn’t be allowed to go broke because they were so big. The other, "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street" is a long story on the mathematical wizards that invented the exotic financial “products”and “models” whose manipulation fueled the markets.

The first case is an example of willful ignorance on the part of regulators, who should have been watching what was going on. The second is one of people being far too smart for their own good. A lot of the guys in the second group switched over from theoretical physics or arcane mathematical theory. As one commented anonymously, there are a thousand physicists on Wall Street: “They sold their souls to the devil.”

The story notes that the move from academe to Wall Street began when research funds were drying up. What will be the effect down the line of cuts in universities this time around? Certainly worrying about string theory would seem to be less harmful that quantifying finance.

And the sorry situation also brings up the possible results of cutting back on support for what used to be called a "liberal arts education" in the US, and in other countries provided the backbone for what might be called basic higher education. Where else are people to get a broad view of what civilization is and what our responsibilities are to each other? Specialization, be it for business or deep science, should be accompanied by exposure to ethics, history and the many deeply engaging stories people have been telling each other for years. Dr. Faustus, any one?

Saturday Photo: Sense and Sustainability

This is the frontispiece to my book The Walkable City, taken late last summer. It seems to me appropriate today as the days grow longer and the seasons of green, growing things draw closer.

But also I'm taking part in a conference this morning organized by the English Graduate Students' Society at the Université de Montréal on the theme of Sense and Sustainability. About 30 academics, future academics, and writers of various stripes will be taking part. I'm going to be reading from The Walkable City--or at least an excerpt taken from the first couple of chapters. This photo will be the first of several I'll show to illustrate the talk: a walkable city is by definition immensely more sustainable than one where the automobile is the default means of transportation.

Radio Two Loses More Listeners in Montreal, While All-Classical Station Gains

More evidence of the sad state of CBC and Radio Canada “cultural” services: the latest BBM Top-line Radio Report figures are out for listenership in Montreal, and the big winner is—surprise!—the all classical station.

The results are the first ones where two periods (September 10 to November 30, 2008 and December 1, 2008 to March 1, 2009) can be compared using a new metering system. No longer are selected listeners asked to keep diaries about what they listen to. Rather, the measurements are taken from devices which record what is playing nearby.

Radio Two’s share among Anglophone listeners dropped from 2.3 % to 2.2 % while the all classical Francophone station CJPX FM’s share rose from 3 % to 3.9%. The first period, you’ll remember, was that when Radio Two changed its programming substantially, gutting the classical content. Where are the new listerners? It looks like many of the old ones have switched over to the private classical station, Among Francophones, Espace Musique’s share rose slightly from 1.2 to 1.5 % while CJPX climbed from 4.3 to 5 %.

New statistics for Toronto, the other market where an all classical station competes with Radio Two, aren’t available yet. They will be tabulated by the diary method.

More Weather, Emotional, Financial and Otherwise

Wind followed rain yesterday, and to judge from the reactions to yesterday's post about Robert Louis Stevenson, it elicits stronger reactions.

Here's another poem from Stevenson that seems to fit right into set of emotions that strong winds raise.

The wind blew shrill and smart

THE wind blew shrill and smart,
And the wind awoke my heart
Again to go a-sailing o'er the sea,
To hear the cordage moan
And the straining timbers groan,
And to see the flying pennon lie a-lee.

O sailor of the fleet,
It is time to stir the feet!
It's time to man the dingy and to row!
It's lay your hand in mine
And it's empty down the wine,
And it's drain a health to death before we go!

To death, my lads, we sail;
And it's death that blows the gale
And death that holds the tiller as we ride.
For he's the king of all
In the tempest and the squall,
And the ruler of the Ocean wild and wide!



Certainly if you're at sea, a high wind can be pretty tricky to ride out. But it seems that on land we definitely respond to wind too. One study in Alberta, for example, linked increased incidence of migraines with Chinook winds. And certainly anecdotal evidence suggests that people feel on edge during periods of strong winds. One of the things I found extraordinary as a parent volunteering in my kids' classes was the general belief among teachers that an approaching storm provoked restlessness among the children. It wasn't a belief current in Southern California when I was small, but then the climate there is a whole different from that here.

This morning the winds have dropped, and the sun is out. Perhaps we're headed for better weather. Let us hope that the last few days of good economic news means that the financial "perfect storm" (given as an excuse by Quebec's pension fund manager this week for a loss of 26 per cent last year) is abating too.

Rainy Day Complaint, Perhaps in the Literary Sense As Well as the Meteorological

Rain today.

This is not weather I like. It reminds me of winter days in my California childhood when we came home from school chilled to the bone to stand in front of the space heater (no central heating of course) and shiver. Winter in Montreal is far better, I think: there is more sunshine, the houses are warmer, and snow brushes off while rain just soaks in.

That said I am always reminded on days like today of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Rain. His Child’s Garden of Verses was one of the first books read to me and even though I do not like most poetry his rhymes remain in my head—and my heart:

Rain

The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

For someone growing up in a port town, who loved the idea of running away to sea, this poem was extremely evocative. Perhaps my life-long attempt to connect disparate parts of the world even began with the image of the universality of rain.

And for those who wonder about such things: in literary terms a complaint is a poem in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition.

Mount Royal under Attack: Don't We Ever Learn?

There are times when the short-sightedness of people with a bit of power is breath-taking. I’m not talking here about the idea that letting the market work—a point of view widely held by a whole generation of government officials, business people and, sadly, economists until just recently—is anything but a path to disaster. That’s over and done for, perhaps. No, rather I’m talking about current decisions which are going to have long-lasting effects on the rest of us.

On the local level, this includes two projects that are going to affect the very heart of the city, Mount Royal. The Alouettes football team, has just announced that it will enlarge Molson Stadium on the edge of the mountain at a cost of $30 million, of which $4 million will come from the city, and $19 million from the province. Not only is this an extremely questionable use of public funds (the city’s contribution is 10 per cent of what it wants the transit commission to cut from its budget next year) but the change will increase traffic on the mountain and nibble away some more at it.

On the other side of the mountain, the Université de Montréal has just sold an old convent it bought a few years ago and is talking about selling its music school building. Both of these are set high on the mountain side with a glorious view north toward the Laurentians and the setting sun. No plans have been approved for what might take their place, but its clear that developers are going to want to put in condos. And that means the mountain will be under threat from this side too.

Montreal is special in part because of Mount Royal. It should be preserved for all of us to enjoy, not sold off a couple of acres at a time for the pleasure of football fans or people rich enough to afford luxury housing.

Boredom is Counter Revolutionary, and Other Words to Live By

Looks like we missed a great evening on Saturday.

When Lee and I were out walking early Sunday we noticed the posters for Boredom is Counter Revolutionary which took place the night before. Obviously it was aimed at a crowd considerably younger than we are—several bands with edgy names were listed as talent--but I loved the name. When I got home I did some roaming on the net and came up with the information that the evening was the launch of the tenth issue of an avant garde arts magazine, Four Minutes to Midnight.

The new issue, the website says, “explores the idea of radical beauty (a theme inspired from this year’s Memefest) interpreted through the words and images of over 30 artists. Our ‘anniversary’ issue is the thickest (and prettiest) one yet, clocking in at a tidy 180 pages.’

Well, good for them for sticking it out that long in the tempestuous world of small magazine publishing.

And bravo! for putting into words a sentiment I’ve held most of my life. Boredom in large part can be overcome by looking for something to do. Doing nothing is, almost by definition, counter-revolutionary. Doing nothing is no way to live at all.

Saturday Photo: Spring Sun at Parc Saint-Viateur

Tonight we lose an hour as we change to daylight saving time. A little early in the year, if you ask me, but it is true that the days are getting much longer, and the sun is higher in the sky.

One of the down sides of warmer weather is the gray piles of dirty snow that emerge as the winter's snow melts, but this picture, taken at the edge of a park looking into it, shows only the lovely, smooth snow that remains in places.

Earlier the borough regularly cleared the snow from the pond for skating, and in the summer, the fountain in the middle will make a lovely noise on hot days. Now is an inbetween time with hints of what is to come, and reminders of what we've just been through.

What Every Woman Should Have: Some Ideas for International Women's Day

Perhaps as lead-up to International Women’s Day on the weekend, a friend recently sent around a long list of things that a woman should have. Some of them were funny and a couple were wise. Here are a few that caught my fancy:

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ......
enough
money within her control to move out
and rent a place of her own,
even if she never wants to or needs to...

A WOMAN SHOULD
HAVE .
a youth she's content to leave behind....

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .
a past
juicy enough that she's looking forward
to retelling it in her old age....

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ...
a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and...
a black lace bra...


I think I like the last one the best, although I must admit I’m never had any of the three. Perhaps I should go shopping for them this week. A way to stimulate the economy?

Thanks to Élisabeth Humbolt-Lapointe pour the list.

Playing Chicken with Transit: Tremblay Wants Cuts, But Is He Hoping to Get the Feds and Quebec to Climb Aboard?

The Société de transport de Montréal was told to find $40 million to cut from its budget the next fiscal year by Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay yesterday. In all, Tremblay says that $155 million in cuts will have to be found to balance the cityi's books, since revenue from fees and taxes are falling. The borough administrations are going to have to find places to save, which may mean fewer services.

That would be too bad, but the proposed cuts to public transit budgets are the ones that are the most upsetting. Public transport is the way we have to go, both to solve our urban and climate problems and to relaunch the economy. Investing in public transit is an excellent way to provide more jobs as well as to get something that will last for our stimulus dollars. As I wrote yesterday, even a place like Tampa is hoping to use money freed up by the crisis to redress problems which come from our dependence on the automobile to get us around.

But it could be that Tremblay is hoping that the proposed cuts will raise enough concern for the federal and provincial governments to kick in more money for public transit. In that case, where’s the petition? I want to sign.

Tired of Holding Your Breath? Maybe It's Time to Whistle While We Work

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again

Copyright 1929 by Milton Ager (music) and Jack Yellen (lyrics)

Today is the day that things are going to look up. I’ve decided that. The rest of you may or may not agree with me, but I am getting tired of holding my breath. The Bank of Canada dropped its overnight lending rate to .5 per cent yesterday, an historic low. The move didn’t stop economic uncertainty and nervous markets, but, heck, let’s take it as sign that things will eventually improve.

The only questions are when? and in what form?

The song “Happy Days” was written in 1929 and we all know how long recovery took back then. Yet I think we should draw lessons from Naomi Klein and the mayor of Tampa, Pam Iorio. The former’s book The Shock Doctrine argued that we must guard against ideologues and monsters of corporate greed who would use disaster to make money and societal changes. Her message may be getting through: as Rahm Emmanuel says “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” and the Obama government seems ready to use this one to do away with several decades of movement conservative doctrine.

Pam Iorio told The New Yorker that the Tampa region should use the opportunity that federal anti-recession money offers to build a light rail system. Not only would such a project provide jobs it would help move away from automobile-centered development. It looks like the project is still a long way from realization—a referendum will probably be held next year--but that’s the kind of thinking we need.

Don’t get me wrong. Undoing the mess we’re in s going to take a lot of work and some fundamental changes in attitudes toward government. But not much is going to be done if we adopt a defeatist attitude. Singing (or whistling, as the Seven Dwarfs did in the Disney film) while we work may raise our spirits enough to get task done.

Note, by the way, the year that Snow White came out: 1937, just as North American governments began to follow what would later be called Keynesian economic policy.

This Is the Day That Spring Begins Chez Nous

The sun shone in the bedroom of our guest room this morning. The sunbeam entered for only a minute or so, and was just a sliver wide, but it is a true sign of the change of seasons even if the temperature was -17 C (about 2 F) outside.

Streets in Montreal run north and south or east and west—or are supposed to. Actually the basic grid is oriented not along compass lines but in relation to the St. Lawrence as it flows past what now is Old Montreal. This means that the windows on the back of our house—set on the “east” side of a “north-south” street—actually points considerably north of east. March 3 or 4 is the first day that the sun is far enough north in its annual progression toward summer that its rays can enter our house.

The ancients of most cultures had similar bench marks for the seasons—Stonehenge is an example—although usually the solar guides mark the equinoxes or the solstices. In this, as in so many other things, Montreal in general and we in particular are set up to respond to cosmic events in a very individualistic way.

Take for example the fact that this week is a holiday for most schools in Quebec and the Université de Montréal. Last week many schools in Europe had a holiday for Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, while the week after next schools in Ontario and much of the rest of Canada take a week off for March Break. Spring Break is what it’s called elsewhere. Here, however, nobody’s talking about spring yet. Instead this is the time to enjoy the good things about winter—skating, sledding, skiing, snow shoeing and sipping hot chocolate. Spring—which is a soggy, gray couple of weeks here just before the blast of summer begins—will come soon enough.

Three Good Books for a Lazy Sunday

I don’t know when the last Sunday was that I didn’t set foot outside, but yesterday I stayed inside all day. It was cold—near -18 C or 0 F when we got up—but the sun was shining and usually I relish getting out on brilliant winter days. But for whatever reason, once the usual Sunday laundry and chores were done I sat and read.

My excuse was the four book discussions I’m leading this week. While I read the books on the agenda long ago, I wanted to look them over again and to prepare some background information and leading questions. But the books are so good—Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Lise Tremblay’s La soeur de Judith and Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino—that I found myself reading large sections of them all over again. A great way to spend a Sunday. I’m looking forward to hearing what the book discussions groups think about them.

The Pierrefond public library and the Atwater Library groups will be discussing the Atwood short story collection, Outremont is reading the Tremblay coming-of-age story (alas! not translated into English yet) while the Kirkland library group has the enigmatic story of love and life in early 20th century Abjerbaijan on its plate. All three, I see now, contain interesting reflections on young love, education and the role of women. I hadn't realized that when I made up the schedules late last summer: sometimes serendipity gives you food for thought.

Saturday Photo: Getting Two for One in Montreal's Jardin botanique

Last week's Saturday Photo was Brother Marie-Victorin, the founder of Montreal's Jardin botanique, under the snow. This week two features of the garden are featured, which shows what you can get when you plan well.

The construction of the garden proceeded quickly once men with shovels were hired through make-work programs in the mid-1930s. One of the features that had long been planned was a large pond, and rather than haul away the dirt and stones they were moved a few hundred meters to the south to make a hill. The result is a most natural-looking mini-lake and a miniature mountain garden that is like a trip to the high country in the middle of the city.

The garden is a pleasure in all seasons, and an example of what can be accomplished when clever minds are put to work.

Note: These photos were taken several summers ago when I was working on my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens which has a chapter about the Jardin botanique.

Ian McEwan and Story-Telling: When Holding Back Informaion Leads You on

The New Yorker this week has a fascinating—if a little long—profile of British writer Ian McEwan. We learn he’s a great walker, a man who has become increasingly fascinated by science as he has grown older, a person with lower middle class roots who rose in a meritocracy.

We also learn a great writing lesson from this master story teller: “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.”

Yes: so simply stated, but so very true. As I struggle with my next fiction project, that aperçu seems extremely helpful. It is not what happens in a story, after all, but how you tell it. The difference between one-damn-thing-after-another and a work of art is the way the writer first makes us care what happens and then leads us along so we discover the story.

At the moment I don’t know how I’m going to tell River Music, which has as main characters three generations of women—a pianist, an engineer and a harpsichordist. The current tactic is to write three story lines and then figure out how to interweave them later. I've written quite a bit about the pianist, who is the mother and grandmother of the other two and who was born in 1928. I've also blocked out a meeting between her and her grandaughter in December 2009. Aside from that I don't know where all this is going. But apparently neither does McEwan when he starts out.

And that's a bit of helpful--and encouraging--information too.

Song from Burundi, But No Bilateral Aid to Rwanda

Something to make you sing from Burundi, while Canada cuts its aid to the country’s non-identical twin, Rwanda.

On Monday the Harper government announced that it will be “retargetting” foreign aid to 20 instead of 25 countries or regions. Under a system set in place by the last Liberal government, 14 African countries received bilateral aid, but now only seven will. Malawi, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Zambia, Niger, Cameroon, and Benin are off the list as well as Rwanda.

Government spokespersons say the total amount of bilateral aid won’t decrease, but it will just be focused more on countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Yup, and weren’t Canadians so proud when the one person who came out of the horrible Rwandan genocide with his head held high was a Canadian, Roméo Dallaire? I thought we were here for the long term.

ERDC a Year Later: Still Waiting While Watching CanWest Wrestle With Debt

A year ago this week friends of the Electronic Rights Defence Committee—myself included--were having our day(s) in court. At issue was whether the group, which claims that The Gazette stole work done by freelance writers for use in data bases and on websites, will be able to undertake a class action in order to be compensated for unauthorized electronic use of our work.

We had hoped we’d hear after six months or so whether we could proceed to the next step, but 12 months later there still is no news. Apparently it isn’t good form to nudge the judge, either, so we’re sitting here, biting our nails, waiting for a verdict.

But even if the judge does give us permission to proceed, the news is not looking rosy. CanWest is one of the defendants in the ERDC case, and as anybody who reads the financial pages knows, there’s talk of the media giant going bankrupt. The culprit, analysts say, in part is the recession which is cutting revenues for the corporation since much less advertising is being sold. But CanWest also is carrying a huge debt load at the moment, the result of some expensive acquisitions in the last few years. 1


While there is much speculation that if CanWest does have to restructure it will be able to sell off assets, the question looms in my mind: will there be any money to pay us if our class action is successful? Stay tuned.

Who's That Guy Waving? Harper in New York

The cartoonists are having a field day: Stephen Harper went to New York and nobody noticed. Or hardly anybody outside Fox News and the Canadian media: the newspapers this morning are full of cartoons showing just what a nonentity the Canadian prime minister is.

That probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Even President Obama’s visit to Ottawa didn’t get much coverage south of the border. Oh, The New York Times had a story, but my cousin Cathy in Reno says his visit received little notice because the financial crisis is taking all the space. Nevada is suffering because people aren’t gaming, and California had to lock up its legislators in order to get a budget passed. No wonder the comings and goings of the leader of a minority government who, no matter how you cut it, is a conservative in a time when people need change, doesn't make waves.

Or headlines.

Morning after a Dream Wins Oscars: Real Life Fairy Tales in The New York Times

So a fairy tale wins big at the Oscars? If you really want an abundance of happy endings, I’ve just discovered the place to go: The New York Times' Wedding and Celebrations section.

It used to be that wedding and engagement announcements were pretty dry stuff. Only the socially prominent got anything more than a couple of lines in local newspapers. For anything bigger, ordinary folk would (and still do in some cities) pay for a small ad with picture and text giving who, what, when and where.

But in recent years the NYT has burst that bubble. While there still may be small wedding notices in specific editions (I don’t know since I read the Sunday Times on line), each Sunday paper carries at least a half dozen mini-novels about couples getting together. This week the lead couple was a pair in their 60s who had had a fling as college students on a trip to Europe, but who had gone their separate ways afterwards. Until, that is, the woman wrote a short article about the European travel program, and they found themselves both free...and the rest is history including a wedding which their 10 grandchildren attended.

There also is a video of a high power couple—he, white psychotherapist; she, African American style consultant—who swept each other off their feet in their 40s, as well as a pair of rowers who met at the Olympics. Just to make sure we don't come away with the impression that marriage is always all roses, there's a feature "State of the Unions" which recounts how some long-married couple has met and/or is meeting the challenges of life to together.

They're all lovely stories, all enough to fuel your day dreams for a week. Or maybe to make a couple of movies. Comedies to be sure, because, remember, the classic definition of a comedy is a play which ends with a wedding.

Saturday Photo: Marie-Victorin, Montreal's Jardin botanique and Shovel-Ready Projects

Another botanical garden photo this morning: Brother Marie-Victorin, the Quebec botanist and cleric who championed a botanical garden for years. So convinced was he of the need for a garden for teaching, study and pleasure, that in the early 1930s he convinced Henry Teuscher, then working at the New York Botanical Garden, to start planning one for Montreal even though financing seemed a wistful dream.

But when several million dollars were advanced for make-work projects in the mid-1930s, the plans were ready to go, and, Teuscher later said, work started at the beginning, the middle and the end of the project. Today Montreal's Jardin botanique is one of the largest in the world and a delight in any season.

What is now the San Francisco Botanical Garden got a similar start in hard times: plans for such a garden in Golden Gate Park had been on the drawing boards for years when the Works Project Administration put men to work, digging, levelling and planting.

Today we're hearing a lot about the need for "shovel-ready" projects as the world struggles with another horrific economic downturn. There is a lesson to be learned from both botanical garden projects:

It pays to dream in detail,

and

The positive effects of stimulus packages will be with us for a long time.

Let us hope there are a lot of similar projects out there.

For more about Marie-Victorin and the Jardin botanique see my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens.

Book Clubs: More Than Just a Book Discussion, A Circle of Friends Too

The Globe and Mail has begun a weekly feature about book clubs across the country: this week Clubland features a group in Port Credit, ON. Most of its 17 members live in the same housing development and have been getting together monthly for about six years. The members of the English language book club I’ve belonged to more 40 years read their story, and decided we should submit ours too.

Can’t say that we have a name, although the group began as an activity of the McGill Women Associates--an organization which at the time was made up mostly of faculty wives--more than 40 years ago. At least one of our members was involved back then, but the group has changed over the years to include women whose connection with McGill is tenuous. The constant has been a willingness to get together every two weeks from September through early June to discuss books. One person leads the discussion, presenting reviews, biographical information about the author and providing background information about the situation in which the book was written or is about. The level of discussion has always been very high, although a great deal of gossip gets exchanged as we have dessert before hand.

For years when I returned from the first meeting in the fall my husband would ask: “Okay, who’s pregnant and who’s gone back to library school.” Now, as you might imagine, his question is more along the lines: “Okay, who’s retiring?” Eventually I suppose it will become: “And who’s passed on?”

That is, I suppose, the mark of a dynamic group, which has provided friendship and an intellectual stimulus for decades. The group has in fact produced off spring. Les Durochères, about whom I wrote yesterday, is a direct outgrowth. More than 25 years ago I brought as a guest a Francophone neighbor whose husband was briefly connected with McGill to a meeting, and she came away with the idea that we should organize a group of Francophone neighbors. The result for me has been encouragement to read a wide variety of books (mostly fiction) in both French and English, and a marvelous circle of friends.

Giving Prizes and Gracious Acceptance: Lloyd Jones and Mr. Pip

Les Durochères, a group of neighborhood women who’ve been getting together from more than 25 years to talk about books, will meet tonight, and I’ve got some good news for them. Each December we meet over supper to discuss the year’s reading and vote for our favourite. Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip won in 2008, and I spent some time in January tracking him down so we could send him a letter notifying him of the Prix des Durochère. Finally I found an editor at his New Zealand publisher who forwarded our letter by e-mail attachment.

I’d written : “While it carries none of the cachet of the many prizes you have been awarded—and certainly none of the money--I hope it will amuse you to know that Mr. Pip was the best book” we’d read last year. "It joins such other laureates of the prize as A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Soie by Alessandro Barrico and L’Aveuglement by José Saramago.”

Not 48 hours later I got this e-mail in return: “The best awards are always the ones least expected. How very flattering to receive the Prix des Durochères. I see by the previous winners I am in very good company. All the very best. A bientôt, LLoyd."

That makes five Prix winners who've responded to our "award." Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel, and Robertson Davies (the first writer we wrote to) all sent us short notes, while one of our number, Élisabeth Humblot-Lapointe was able to present the award in person to José Saramago at a book fair. Such graciousness!

P.S. For tonight, we’ve given ourselves a choice of anything by Nobel prize winner Le Clezio. Should be an interesting discussion.

Griffintown Down-sized and Jane Jacobs Would Likely Approve

Sometimes bad times lead to good things. Yesterday Devimco, the development company which wants to completely rebuilt Montreal’s historic Griffintown district, announced that it is radically down-sizing the project. It says it need only 30 per cent as much land as it originally proposed developing to the tune of $1.3 billion. The thrust will now be on residential development with some shops and offices. Gone—for the foreseeable future, at least—are hotel, entertainment and vast shopping features. The villain, Devimco says, is the economic crisis.

Montreal city council is set to vote today to lift the controversial expropriation orders it passed a year ago that were designed to pave the way for the redevelopment project. Since then it also has frozen permits for renovation in the district, but it was expected to lift that freeze today, too.

Critics of the project aren’t at all unhappy about the turn of events. The redevelopment would radically change the face of the old district, first laid on a grid pattern at the turn of the 19th century in a mix of industrial, residential and commercial uses. Not only does the district have great historic value, its layout should be preserved because it is a great way to organize cities, critics said. The introduction of so much commercial space was also closely questioned. A far better course would be to allow the kind of slow, parcel by parcel redevelopment that had already started in the district and which has worked very well in other parts of Montreal, they said.

Jane Jacobs, who was no friend of either economic hard times (she lived through the Depression, after all) or big developments, would likely be pleased. She'd probably say, though, that people who care about urban life should not let their guard down because redevelopment--like highway projects--frequently have to be cut down several times before they finally disappear

Photo: The narrow streets of Griffintown were designed for foot and horse traffic, and should not be modified, but incorporated in the walkable city.

Does Stephen Harper Have a Recycling Project to Tell Obama about ? (It's Better Than Burning Them)

As Ottawa and Canada as a whole anticipate the whirlwind visit of President Barack Obama on Thursday, much thought has gone to imagining what the encounter between him and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be like. Humourist Pierre Verville who impersonates figures in the news had Harper wondering Monday how to find common ground with Obama. “I could tell him how much I care about the environment,” Verville has Harper musing. “Take recycling: I’ve recycled all those books that Yann Martel has sent me.”

Of course, that might be part of the problem since author Martel has been sending Harper books every two weeks for nearly two years in an attempt to offer the PM some bedtime reading to give him some “stillness” because Martel found Harper apparently too preoccupied at a ceremony to care about culture. There was a short note of acknowledgment for the first book, but nothing since then, and who knows where they’d ended up.

But actually if Harper really wants to know what to talk about with Obama, he could do worse than to mention the book Martel sent him in early February, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The book apparently is one of Obama’s favorites. Martel writes in his accompanying letter: “If there’s a novel that should give you a sense of stillness, it is this one....I hope you like it. And if you don’t, remember nonetheless that it is one of keys that will let you into the mind of the current President of the United States.”

This week, Martel’s selection is one he acknowledges is not political: Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. “In politics, victory comes through victory and defeat only brings defeat,” Martel writes. “The message of Hemingway’s poor Cuban fisherman is purely personal, addressing the individual in each one of us and not the roles we might take on. Despite its vast exterior setting, The Old Man and the Sea is an intimate work of the soul.”

I bet Obama likes that one too.

So What's Happening in Ottawa? After the Budget and Toward the Future: A Meeting with Thomas Mulcair

Thomas Mulcair, the deputy leader of the NPD and MP for Outremont, will meet people interested in what’s happening in Ottawa at an informal get-together:



5 to 7 p.m.
Tuesday February 17,
Café Em, 5718 Park Avenue
Mile End district, Montreal.
Cash bar, but free nibbles.

I’m involved in the planning of the event, which should be the first of several sponsored by the NDP Outremont riding association. Others will feature discussions about the concerns of the creative community, what’s called here the “cultural communities” (ethnic groups, including new and not—so new immigrants) and students.

Stay tuned.

Saturday Photo: The Clusius Garden at Leiden

This week it's not a green house in a botanical garden that's featured, but the charming reproduction of one of the first modern botanical gardens, the Clusius Garden in the Hortus Botanicus at the University of Leiden in Holland.

Carolus Clusius was engaged in 1590 by the directors of the then-new university to set up a garden where plants could be studied in a systematic fashion. At the time only two others existed, in Padua and Pisa in Italy. The garden eventually outgrew its walls, as the Hortus became a well-respected centre for botanical study. But in 1931 the original garden was reconstructed following Clusius's plans. It was renovated in the 1990s for its 400th anniversary, and now is a true delight to visit.

We went there when we visited Elin when she was studying at the Royal Conservatory at The Hague, and I was researching Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens. At the time I hadn't intended to include the garden in the book, but seeing it convinced me any book about the history of botanical gardens wouldn't be complete without a chapter on it. The memories of the time we spent there remain very fresh--and extremely pleasant.

Getting the Trains to Run on Time, and Gas Price Gauging: When the Market Doesn't Work, Maybe Legal Action Will

Talk of class action in the transportation domain this week. First a group of dissatisfied users of commuter trains want compensation for bad service on two lines where schedule changes and faulty equipment have wreaked havoc since the fall. Then a campaign by Radio-Canada’s morning man René Homier-Roy to do something about apparent price-gauging at the gas pump seems to be picking up steam.

Ridership has been increasing on suburban trains, and in an attempt to improve service, it seems that the Agence de transport de Montréal (a public agency) juggled schedules without thinking through the problem. In addition, there have been equipment breakdowns, in part due to very cold weather. The ATM admits there has been problems and is offering discounts on monthly passes for the next couple of months in recompense. But some commuters are not satisfied and are going to ask for some big bucks: $65 million.

With gas prices, the situation is more complicated. The CAA-Quebec has been keeping track of gas prices daily, noting the cost to the retailer and the price at the pump. In 2007 the difference was 3.3 cents a litre, but in 2008 it jumped to 5.7 cents in the Montreal area. “It’s very difficult to understand this,” the CAA-Quebec’s spokesperson Sophie Gagnon said Thursday, because gas retailers in smaller centers haven’t resorted to the same increase. One would think that in the much larger Montreal market, competition would bring down the difference, she noted. CAA-Quebec figures that a 4 cent profit margin would be fair.

Homier-Roy has been joking about a class action over gas prices for some time, but Radio Can/CBC rules about non-involvement in politics may mean that he can’t start one himself. Yet I can’t imagine that one of his many listeners won’t take up the fight.

Moral: the market doesn’t work, but maybe threats of legal action will.

The Birthday Boys Abe and Chas: Men and Ideas That Made a Difference

What comment would you like to make on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s birthday? Le Devoir’s Hélène Buzetti asked many members of Parliament that question over the last few days and the results are very interesting. They range from “Happy Birthday, Charles!” from Stockwell Day, currently minister of international trade but an avowed to Creationist, to some who see no contradiction between Creationism and Evolution (Finance mimnister Jim Flaherty) and others who celebrate Darwin’s great contribution to scientific thought and method (Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Conservative Whip Gordon O’Connor.)

The most amusing response Buzetti cites comes from my own favourite MP, Thomas Mulcair. Darwin was one of the greatest thinkers of the last 200 years, Mulcair is quoted as saying. But, he adds that faced with Conservative back-benchers every day in the House, he wonders if some humans have evolved from apes more quickly than others. (My free translation.)

No one asked Canadian parliamentarians what they think about today’s other birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln, but we know very well what the current administration in Washington thinks. To be sure, Lincoln made some retrograde remarks about race in his time, but the fact remains that he was commander in chief during the Civil War and he freed the slaves. He also appealed successfully to the better side of human nature. Let us hope that Barack Obama succeeds in doing this as well.

Here are two reading suggestions for today, by the way.

The Voyage of the Beagle by Darwin, the journals of the young botanist (and fervent abolitionist) written during the around-the-world voyage that formed his ideas. A delightful look at the evolution (yes, that word!) if a man’s thinking, great for reading when one is travelling and discovering too.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The story of four girls growing up in Boston during the Civil War. Much moral talk, but characters that are convincing. It was the first chapter book I read, and I think it marked me more than any other reading.

And finally, a non-scientific note: how strange that these two great men were born the same day in the same year! I’m sure astrologers have had a field day with that coincidence, but perhaps a convincing explanation for it can be found in the luck of being in the right place at the right time that Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Outliers. More about that book later.

Telling It Like It Is: Appropriation of Voice and Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

Another interesting discussion of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, this time Monday at the Pierrefonds library, has set me thinking about “appropriation of voice.” The practice of a writer putting him- or herself in the skin of a person of different sex, religion or ethnic or racial group was a hot button topic in the 1990s. How could a man understand what a woman felt? some particularly enraged feminists argued. How could a white person understand the feelings of a person of colour? some advocates for minority group asked just as loudly.

The debate seems to have died down, not the least because excellent writers have proved that imagining the ideas and emotions of others is what literature is all about. Bad writers can’t do it, and so their stories may often be insulting, intentionally or unintentionally. Certainly two of the books we’ve discussed in Pierrefonds this year—Hill’s novel, as well as Lewis DeSoto’s Blade of Grass—give us sensitive and moving portraits of women told from the point of view of women although the authors are men.

By coincidence, though, I was gobbling up Samaritan by Richard Price at the same time that I was preparing for the book discussion. A friend suggested it because I am very interested in the motivation of people who try to help others, and the enormous question of how to help in a way that works. The book opens with a conversation between a white man in his 40s and his 13 year old daughter as they visit the housing project in New Jersey where he grew up. The story he tells about his youth and the verve of their dialogue were so captivating that I rode past my stop on the Metro reading it. The fact that the other main character is an African-American woman police officer, who grew up in the project too, also was interesting, and for a good part of the book, I was ready to give Price full marks for doing a brilliant job of appropriating voices.

But having finished the book, I’m not so sure. The man, who is something of an innocent despite having passed a good five years as a coke addict, tries very hard to do the right thing, yet the woman appears to be a much more admirable character. The book, however, is padded with long descriptions and dialogues thrown in to “authenticate” the book, to show that Price has spent time around people like his characters. In short, the voice appropriated doesn't ring true even though it is well-intentioned.

I’d like to know what Ophrah Winfrey thought of it. The Yale Review of Books says:
"as a piece of inner-city atmospherics, it falls far short of good journalism — like William Finnegan's blemished, brilliant portrait of New Haven in Cold New World."

Now, that raises another perennial question: which is the better form for telling a story and/or telling the truth, fiction or non-fiction.

Two Laughs for Tuesday, Apropos of Growing Older

Comment apropos of the 60 year old woman who just had twins:
If this goes on, a growth market may be walkers combined with strollers.

And

Two retirement age couples who are having supper together. The women are in the kitchen and the men begin to talk about movies they've seen.

"We saw a great one on the weekend," one says.

"Yeah? What's it called?" says the other.

"Just a sec, it's on the tip of my tongue. You know that flower that's red or pink and has thorns?"

"A rose?"

"Right," the guy says. "Hey, Rose. What's the name of the movie we saw..."

Greenhouse Effect in Quebec: Local Produce Even in Winter?

A guest from France for dinner on Saturday night, so I wanted to serve a Quebec meal--tourtière de Madame Gravel de Chicoutimi, green tomato relish, some of Quebec’s excellent artisan-made cheese and as much local produce as possible. Despite the fact that it is February, the last criterion is becoming easier to meet than it used to be. Beside carrots, potatoes and onions from last summer’s harvest, before dinner we had hors d’oeuvres of Matane shrimp in hollowed-out halves of cocktail tomatoes grown in green houses by Savoura up river from Montreal. The salad was Boston lettuce, green-house grown north of the Métropole.

What I didn’t realize until this morning was how much this largesse is due to another Quebec business, Industries Harnois, which has been pioneering green house construction for three generations. Using temporary shelters to start plants early had long been a practice where the risk of frost doesn’t pass until late May, but in the last 25 years light weight, energy efficient green houses have been developed by the firm, a story in Le Devoir recounts. They’re sold not only in cold climates, but also in places like Mexico and Brazil where wind and heat are factors. Irrigation is more effective in a controlled space, for example, while the firm contends that yields are much greater and reliance on chemical fertilizers less in greenhouses. The firm has cooperated with the Université de Laval in developing one which is not heated, relies on natural ventilation and is basically a large plastic tunnel. Organic agriculture is the wave of the future, says one of the current partners, Patrice Harnois.

A different kind of greenhouse effect, for sure.

Saturday Photo: Inspired by Kew

Last Saturday's photo was the first in a series featuring green houses in botanical gardens--a good way to think positive thoughts in the middle of winter. This week's picture is of one inspired by the great glass houses at Kew: the Enid A. Haupt Conservtory at the New York Botanical Garden. The picture was taken in summer from the courtyard outside, but it gives a sense of the lovely ironwork and detail of the great glass houses of the 19th century.

The New York garden owes more than the design of its conservatory to Kew, though. It began in 1888 as a project of Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth, a well-heeled couple of New Yorkers who also were passionate botanists. On a belated honeymoon trip to England, she is reported to have exclaimed, "Oh, why can't we have a garden just like that!" after a visit to Kew. While many young women have made the same wish, no other was able to make it come true.

The Haupt Conservatory--named in honour of the philanthropist who paid for a complete makeover near the end of the 20th century--was opened in June 1900 a few years after the botanical garden came into existence.

To read more about this garden and others, check out my Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens.

Really Elderly Primipara Gives Birth to Twin Boys: Who's Going to Wait up for Them When They're in High School?

A 60 year old woman in Calgary gave birth to twins this week after--of course!—undergoing fertility treatments and in vitro fertilization. The reports say that the babies, delivered by C section prematurely, are doing well. The mother is quoted as being ecstatic.

When I was pregnant for the first time at 32, I was called an “elderly primapara.” The term is probably not used these days for women beginning their childbearing career in their 30s. Advances in reproductive medicine have pushed the limit for bearing a first child by ten years for women with access to good health care: we know many 40 year olds who are enjoying first babies right now. But the Calgary woman is pushing the limit of what is feasible technically and wise socially. How are she and her husband going to cope as the children grow up? Will they still be around to see them through adolescence?

My friends who have grandchildren already say that while they love the little (not so little) ones, they are often very glad when the parents arrive to take them home. To everything there is a season, and childbearing past menopause is way past the proper time.

Oof, let me lie down. Just thinking about it makes me tired.

An Uncommon Case about Common Law Relationships: Words of Love on the Snow

Ti amo, je t’aime, yes! I found these words written in the snow this morning across the street from the huge house of a family involved in a complicated separation dispute where the stakes are extremely high. He is a billionaire; she, a woman he met on the beach her native Brazil when she was 17 and he was 32. They have three children together, but never married (a court order prohibits publication of the names, but who they are is pretty widely known.) Now that the relationship is over she is asking for $50 million for herself: currently he provides $35,000 a month for the staff and upkeep on the house (which is not in her name,) and the children’s education and activities.

Under Quebec law, as a common-law spouse she has no claim on the wealth he acquired during the time they were together. And while the amounts involved in the case make it seem beyond the realm of ordinary life, problems for unmarried partners after breakup are all too common here. Thirty-five percent of Quebec couples are not married, according to the 2006 census, and more than half of births occur to couples who are not married.

The woman’s lawyer in this case says it is an occasion to review and change Quebec’s laws. "If madam weren't in a situation where she could finance the case - because it's a case involving big money - the million or so women across Quebec who have no rights would continue silent, without a voice," Anne-France Goldwater said in interviews outside the courtroom last week.

This morning the words on the snow could be seen easily from the windows of the big house. I’d like to know who wrote them. and to whom they were addressed. Lover, child, friend? Perhaps. But maybe they should be seen as a thank you from all those who found themselves cut out when a relationship went sour.

Newspaper Subscriptions for Every 18 Year Old: The French to Increase Aid to Print Media

Tonight the executive of the Electronic Rights Defence Committee will meet to take stock of where its long-running class action against The Gazette and various other media interests is going. Nearly a year ago Madame Justice Eva Petras heard our request for authorization to proceed to the next step in the case which demands payment for electronic reproduction of freelance work. We have no news on that front, but we've gathered some interesting information about other cases and settlements.

The meeting comes just as the French government is proposing massive aid to newspapers in that country. I was astonished to discover that newspapers there already get 1.5 billion euros. The new aid package would put into the pot another 200 million euros a year for three years, which raises the spectre of more government control of media, but which also could save some very shaky print operations.

This kind of aid is so foreign to North American custom (governments aid newspapers here mainly by buying advertising, sometimes for campaigns that seem to make little sense) that it probably doesn’t merit consideration as a solution to print media problems.

But one thing proposed is interesting: a plan to give an 18th birthday present of a year’s subscription to the newspaper of his or her choice to all French young people. I don’t know quite how that might work here, but the idea of getting young people in the habit of reading print papers is worth thinking about.

Time for the Scales to Fall from Our Eyes: Private Cataract Surgery is Much More Expensive Than Public

Perhaps the message is finally getting out: the public sector has a lot going for it. Last week Le Devoir had a fascinating story about how cataract operations cost far more when done in private clinics than they do in publicly owned settings like hospitals. The difference is substantial: in some cases the clinics charge twice as much.

The reason is basically that private clinics have to turn a profit, whereas public ones don’t. Seems a no-brainer, but for far too long the ideologues argued that the private sector provided competition that cut fat from budgets.

That same kind of thinking lay behind the deregulation of banks and financial institutions, too, and we’re all getting hurt because of it.

As Barack Obama said in his inaugural address, The question ..."is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” The answer is that it works a whole lot better than the private sector does when it comes to providing health services--or regulating financial institutions.

Squirrels Are Out, But No Groundhogs in Sunny, Snow-covered Montreal

The fresh snow was crisscrossed by squirrel tracks this morning as I walked through Parc Joyce. The temperature is approaching freezing for the first time since mid-January, and obviously after weeks of deep freeze the beasties have awakened briefly to go looking for food.

But I suspect the groundhog who foraged in our bumper crop of pears last summer won’t make it out of whatever hole he hides in: there's too much snow. If he did manage to dig his way out, however, he’d see his shadow and that is supposed to mean six more weeks of winter.

Hah! In this climate, that’s a given!

So far this winter has been far more snowy than usual, and nearly as snowy as last year which everyone complained about. I did some rummaging in Environment Canada records to find that 198.4 cm (78.1 inches or 6.5 feet) of snow fell between October 2007 and the end of January 2008, while between October 2008 and the end of January 2009, 183.3 (slightly more than 6 feet) fell. That should be compared with the 72.4 cm (28 inches) which usually falls in the same period, and the 217.5 cm (about 7 feet) we get an average winter.

No wonder I saw some little kids cross country skiing to school last week!

Saturday Photo: The Palm House at Kew

As Patricia points out, botanical gardens and their green houses are marvelous places to escape from winter. Montreal's own Jardin botanique was a place where I took my kids when they were little on days when we just had to get out, but an afternoon in the snow seemed too much to comptemplate. A stroll around its glass houses was like a trip to the tropics or the desert, and we all came home much happier.

The seed was planted on those outings which led to my first non-fiction book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens (Véhicule, 2001.) Doing the research on it took me to nine gardens around the world, and Patricia's comment set me thinking: maybe winter is a good time to pull out the pix I took then.

So here is the first one: the Palm House in the Royal Gardens at Kew, London. Completed in 1848, it was one of the first large glass houses constructed, and became a model for conservatories around the world.

Who's Afraid of Beaumarchais, and Other Tales of the Relevance of Culture

One of the boulevards leading off the Place de la Bastille is Beaumarchais, and yesterday it seems it was full of demonstrators protesting the way the Sarkozy government has been managing the French economy.

Place de la Bastille and Place de la République are the usual places where manifestations start in Paris, and the name of the street that runs between them is extremely well-chosen. Pierre Beaumarchais, 18th century playwright, diplomat and inventor, is the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, both plays which caused a furor when they were presented in the years preceding the French Revolution. They were run-away successes in France and elsewhere, and became the inspiration for two of the world’s best operas.

This I've known for a long time, but I didn't appreciate how audacious Beaumarchais was. Viewed more than 225 years later, plays about a barber don't seem any big thing. But things came a lot clearer when we saw the Théâtre du nouveau monde’s production of Le mariage de Figaro last night. Emmanuel Bilodeau played Figaro as a common man who was more than the measure of his “betters.” The Count, debating about accepting an appointment as an envoy to London (a post which Beaumarchais held himself,) is a petty womanizer unaware of the great changes about to take place, the women in the play are given speeches which protest the way they are manipulated by the men and conventions of their lives, and everyone dances and jokes and sings. The production was a delight, and shed a lot of light on the atmosphere that led to revolution—and the nation which has evolved from the France of Louis XVI.

Who says that culture isn't relevant? The problem from a government's point of view is that it hits sometimes uncomfortably close to home.

Photo: Agence France-Presse taken from Le Devoir

When Chrystal Balls Are Snow-storm Paperweights and Other Profound Nonsense

Last weekend the forecast for this week was for mostly sunny weather. Some waffling followed, and then came the suggestion that we might have a little snow, Yesterday Montreal got 25 cm (about 10 inches) which is by no means terrible, but, coupled with the sight of Stephen Harper (yes, even he) and other disciples of Milton Friedman recognizing the important role of government, I am reminded:

That the reason we have economists making forecasts is to make meteorologists look good.

Who says that coalitions aren’t effective, by the way? Didn’t the mere threat of a Lib/NDP one change thinking in Ottawa profoundly? Now it remains to be seen what the Lib/Conservative one accomplishes.

Yes to Infrastructure, But Why Not a Tax Credit like Quebec's for Creators?

The basic idea behind the Harper budget infrastructure plan is good—heaven knows we need to replace roads, bridges and add better rail and commuter links—but it would have been a lot better if the $3 billion earmarked for tax cuts was in large part added to the infrastructure program. We’d get a whole lot more bang to our buck in terms of stimulus as well as have something to show or it ten years from now. Don’t forget how much we are still profiting from the stimulus programs of the 1930s: the network of trails in US National Parks owe much to them as do such disparate wonders as the Jardin botanique in Montreal and the San Francisco Botanical Garden. (If you’d like to see just how that worked, see my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, by the way.)

But while some of the money seems earmarked for cultural facilities and festivals, there appears to be nary a sou for increased support for creators either through the Canada Council for the Arts or programs to market Canadian culture abroad. That’s pretty short sighted when (as the Harper minions have begun to admit) culture makes up a large sector of the economy.

If the Conservatives had really cared about culture and still wanted to stick to their ideology of tax cuts, they could at least have extended the tax credit Quebec give to creators for income that comes from royalties. The first $30,000 of royalty income is tax free, but the benefit diminishes on a sliding scale until it disappears at $60,000. It’s been in place here for since 1995, helps out people who really aren’t making much, and without a doubt encourages cultural creation. To see how it works, go to line 297 in the Revenue Quebec work charts.

Recognizing Lives of Substance: A Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger and Ingerman Birthdays

On the weekend a friend sent a link to a clip of Pete Seeger singing at the pre-inaugural concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial January 18, along with the truly wonderful idea of nominating Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize.

I can’t think of an American who deserves it more at the moment. What a grand way to recognize the best in American culture: its rich musical heritage, its free-thinking critical side, its perserverance.

As it happens, last weekend we also celebrated the 80th birthday of Doris Ingerman, one of the world’s niftier souls with whom I went to see Seeger campaign for peace and clean water at least 35 years ago. Doris is of the same cru as Seeger: one of those children of the Depression who become stalwart lefties and who (unlike the creeps Doris Lessing portrays) remained true, and kind, and loyal. An African-American, she came to Montreal with her husband Sid (whom she met during the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948 and that’s another very good story) and their three children in 1967. Judy, Tom and Paula always seemed sort of like nieces and nephew to Lee and me, while Doris and Sid have been honorary grandparents to our kids, particularly since their real grandparents were so far away.

It was Doris who showed me New York for the first time, in the summer of 1969. Always ready for adventure, she also was ready one Sunday three or four years later to drive down to some place on the Hudson with her kids and me in order to join Seeger’s campaign to clean up the Hudson. The trip was a good four or five hours each way, but I don’t remember much grumbling from the back seat. Instead, my memories are of Seeger singing to a small crowd on the edge of the water, followed by a chance to talk about environmental problems, and the war in Viet Nam. Doris introduced herself, of course, and I think they discovered mutual friends from the Wallace era.

One of the great joys of the Obama inaugural was seeing people like Seeger in the spotlight again, and hearing the same kind of principled discourse that Seeger has always undertaken in his music and his life. Sign the petition to nominate him.

And happy birthday again to Doris! She, by the way, watched inaugural with sisters and friends from the house of a niece who lives in Alexandria, VA. A great experience, she says. Sid, a triathalete who turned 80 last November himself, held down the fort in Montreal, monitoring the world scene. He was the one who sent the Pete Seeger link, in fact.

“Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis:" A Must-Read Analysis in the New York Times

To understand what has happened to us over the last few years, my favourite economist counsels reading an article by Alan Blinder in Saturday’s New York Times. “Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis” gives an account of what happened, complete with the warnings which were made but not heeded. They begin with a call for more regulation in 1998—“the financial turmoil would have been less severe if derivatives trading had acquired a zookeeper a decade ago”—and include the decision to let Lehman Brothers collapse—“After Lehman went over the cliff, no financial institution seemed safe. So lending froze, and the economy sank like a stone”

Blinder attributes much of this blindness to what was going on to entrancement with “laissez faire-y tales,” but says that all is not lost. “Recognizing and understanding these errors will help us fix the system so that it doesn’t malfunction so badly again.”

I’d like to think that this article as well as Paul Krugman’s continuing economic critique are being read in the Obama White House. And I’m waiting to see what happens tomorrow when Stephen Harper brings down his own re-tooled budget

Saturday Photo: Poinsettia and Snow

For the first time this year, I succeeded in getting a poinsettia to bloom again. The trick appears to be life in a sunny window during days of short daylight, and low light at night. At any rate, this plant flowered just before the first of the year and so far is holding up well.

I like the contraast between the red bracts and the snow outside. House plants--like long walks on days of sun on snow-make winter not that bad at all.

Mother's Milk, Maternity Leave, Machines and The New Yorker:

Just as Facebook has a fit over pictures of mothers nursing their babies, The New Yorker publishes an interesting article about the commercialization of breastfeeding. High class breast pumps are now part of the must-have paraphernalia of new mothers, it seems. Because many woman must go back to work well before the age recommended for weaning babies these days (no earlier than six months,) ways to store breast milk for feeds when Mom isn’t around are necessary.

The subtext of the article is that maternity leaves should be more generous in the US, where a woman is lucky to get two months off. In Quebec working women can claim unemployment benefits amounting to 15 weeks sick leave, 15 weeks maternity leave and 20 weeks parental leave (Dad can share this) for a total 50 weeks. The figure is slightly different in other promises, but still much better than south of the border. Maybe this is something the new First Mom might take up as a crusade.

More generous maternity benefits are liberating for women and good for families. I always said that nursing was the lazy woman’s way to feed a baby—no formula to lug home, no bottles to fix, a good excuse to sit down occasionally. Even with another small child around you could read, although frequently it was only Good Night Moon for the Nth time.

The New Yorker was my favourite reading material during that period of my life, however. It opened nicely and could be held in one hand while you held the baby in the other arm. It also gave you the impression that you were still part of the larger world. As for breast pumps in those days, they were reserved for hospitals: if you wanted to express milk you had to do it by hand. But given the complete absence of maternity benefits, at least you ended the post-partum period with a new skill-- dairy maid.

Three More Books for Stephen Harper, One of Which I Bet Obama Has Read

Monday Yann Martel sent Prime Minister Stephen Harper a rather pointed gift as part of his on-going campaign to provide Harper with some good bedtime reading: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, by Michael Ignatieff.

“I believe you said in an interview not long ago that you hadn’t read much of Michael Ignatieff’s work. It’s obvious that you should, isn’t it? After all, you will be facing him every day in the House of Commons this year—he may even take your job—so it would be to your advantage to get to know his mind.,” Martel writes in his cover letter. Ignatieff has a great C.V., he adds, although that isn’t everything that it takes to be prime minister.

“Leadership can’t be reduced to academic credentials or books on a shelf,” he continues. “Personality, vision, instinct, people skills, practical knowledge, toughness, resilience, rhetorical flair, charisma, luck—there is much that goes into the making of a political leader besides grey matter.” Whether Ignatieff has all that isn’t clear yet, but I’d wager a bundle that Martel thinks he does.

The book he sent to Harper just after Christmas is quite a bit different: Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999, by Paul McCartney. Martel notes that Harper says he’s a Beatles fan, and he points out the marvelous way a good song addresses “feelings we might be too shy to deal with in plain speech—raw, hungering lust, for example—or ones that cut deep but are so mundane we are embarrassed to talk about them: loneliness, yearning, heartbreak.”

Loneliness, yearning, heartbreak: are those emotions Harper will know soon? Let’s see what happens next week when the budget comes down.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest another short book for Harper: The Reluctant Fundamentalists by Hamid Mohsin. It is a short novel by a Pakistani who’s passed many years in the West and has written a most engaging and convincing book about a man not unlike himself who changes his allegiances as he sees the world more clearly. This is a book that I bet Barack Obama has read: at least, he is acting as if he understands what lies behind such disillusion.

The New-Old Message of Barack Obama

The pundits seem divided about the thrust of President Barack Obama’s inaugural address. This division seems to me to be due to a perception that there is a major discontinuity between two main themes of his candidacy and his life, change and what some would classify as old-fashioned values.

Like so many others I watched the ceremony with tears rolling down my face: what a glory! What an accomplishment! Things may actually get better! The US and perhaps the world have undergone a sea change.

But that promise of change is firmly rooted in old ideas like justice, equality, the rule of law, the need for taking responsiblity for one’s actions and for good government. These are values that I grew up believing in and which few have mentioned in the last couple of decades. How wonderful to hear them evoked again!

The 49 Tunes for Barack: Some Not Bad Choices, Although Too Much Mainstream

Five classical selections made the CBC’s Obamaplaylist, 49 from North of the 49th Parallel. That’s not surprising given the way the list--to be sent to the new president for his iPod and exercise enjoyment--was set up. The 100 finalists were divided into four categories, with 11 classical possibilities, 60 mainstream, 20 “Francophone” and 10 jazz. Take the top 50 per cent of vote getters in each category, and voilà ! there’s your list.

The CBC says 130,000 people voted on line over the last week, and certainly there was some international attention, with coverage on the BBC and elsewhere. However I’d like to know just how the voting breakdown, as one of my fears about the contest was a hidden agenda designed to prove that nobody cares much about anything but mainstream music. As it is, there are some good songs among those chosen. I’ve bold faced my favourites, for what it’s worth.

* Arcade Fire, Rebellion (Lies).
* Barenaked Ladies, If I Had $1,000,000.
* Beau Dommage, La complainte du phoque en Alaska.
* Ben Heppner, We'll Gather Lilacs.
* Bruce Cockburn, Wondering Where the Lions Are.
* Buffy Sainte-Marie, Universal Soldier.
* Daniel Bélanger, Rêver mieux.
* Daniel Lanois, Jolie Louise.
* Daniel Lavoie, J'ai quitté mon île.
* Diana Krall, Departure Bay.
* Gilles Vigneault, Mon pays.
* Glenn Gould, The Goldberg Variations.
* Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
* Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
* Great Big Sea, Ordinary Day.
* Harmonium, Pour un instant.
* Ian & Sylvia, Four Strong Winds.
* James Ehnes, Barber Violin Concerto.
* Jesse Cook, Mario Takes a Walk.
* Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now.
* Joni Mitchell, A Case of You.
* Karkwa, Oublie pas.
* k.d. lang, Hallelujah.
* Leonard Cohen, Democracy.
* Leonard Cohen, Suzanne.
* Malajube, Montréal –40 C.
* Marie-Jo Thério, Évangeline.
* Marjan Mozetich, Affairs of the Heart.
* Measha Brueggergosman, I'm Going Up a Yonder.
* Mes Aïeux, Dégénérations.
* Michael Bublé, Home.
* Moe Koffman, Swingin' Shepherd Blues.
* Neil Young, Rockin' In the Free World.
* Neil Young, Helpless.
* Oscar Peterson Trio, Hymn to Freedom.
* Oscar Peterson, Place St. Henri (from Canadiana Suite).
* Parachute Club, Rise Up.
* Raymond Lévesque, Quand Les Hommes Vivront D'amour.
* Rush, Closer to the Heart.
* Sam Roberts, The Canadian Dream.
* Shad, Brother (Watching).
* Stan Rogers, Northwest Passage.
* Stompin' Tom Connors, The Hockey Song.
* The Arrogant Worms, Canada's Really Big.
* The Guess Who, American Woman.
* The Tragically Hip, Wheat Kings.
* The Tragically Hip, Bobcaygeon.
* The Rankin Family, Rise Again.
* The Weakerthans, One Great City!

Grace, Art and Barack Obama

Thought on the new president:

Watching him, listening to him, I am reminded of Norman Maclean’s phrase in A River Runs through It: “All good things...come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” We have before us a man whose effort has brought him as close to grace and art as is possible. Blessings on him, and on us too.

Globalization, China Butter Dishes and Chickens: the World Is a Small and Frequently Difficult Place

Dinner on Saturday with friends—a former colleague of Lee, his wife and a couple who had been their neighbors a few years ago. Delicious food, good conversation and some fascinating stories. Our host grew up on a chicken farm in New Jersey—“We didn’t have to kill them,” he said, “someone else did that” when I told the story about my grandmother chopping off chicken’s heads--and went on to become an economics professor specializing in globalization. The other couple were Germans who had ended up in Montreal through a long series of comings and goings, he as an avionics engineer and she as a trained midwife. Our hostess was from Cairo, I knew, but until we’d gone around the table with our stories, I’d never heard of her family’s flight from Egypt.

She was not quite 18 and her family was sitting at breakfast the morning when someone burst in to tell them they should flee because foreigners were being expelled from the country. They had very little money on hand, but they were able to make their way to the port where they got passage on a ship There followed several months going around the Mediterranean, but after several other stops along the way, they were able to settle in Canada.

For several moments we sat mutely after she finished, as we tried to assimilate her tale. Then she reached for the china butter dish sitting in the middle of table surrounded by plates and glasses and the crumbs of a good meal. “This is all that’s left. It had been my grandmother’s and we used it every day. I just picked it up off the table and put it my bag.”

The pattern on the china is very similar to that of the few pieces that have come down to me from my chicken-killing grandmother. They probably were bought in the same epoch and are likely of the same quality—dishes not for state occasions but for ordinary use by comfortably-off families. Emmanuel would say they are good examples of material culture, carrying with them layers and layers of living and meaning.

As our host said, globalization is nothing new. People and objects have been travelling and trading for millenia, witness the name we give to a certain kind of dish--china, of course. Those chickens weren't native to either New Jersey or Washington state, either.

Saturday Photo: Jogging on Mount Royal

Back before my knees began to give me trouble, I would switch from running to walking when the temperature hit -22 C. On Thursday morning when it was -26 C, however, I passed a small covey of very hardy joggers--very lean and rather young--as I trudged along wearing my full metal jacket: long johns, running pants, and sweats plus four layers of sweaters and hoodies on top.

Good on them, even though the cold air can do real damage to your lungs if you're not careful. That's one of the adaptive advantages of those funny hairs in your nostrils, you know. Not only do they strain out dust, they also frost up, making a little curtain behind which truly arctic air can become merely cold.

Sounds gross, I know, and my kids used to think the whole idea was hilarious. Maybe the real solution is to wrap a scarf around your face...

Forecast for today: high of -19C, or just below 0F. Who says things don't get better?.