closing up shop

Illness made me miss the last few days of classes, so I wanted to say a proper goodbye to this blog, and to English 380. Stealing an idea from Samantha -- if any of you have a tumblr, I can be found there @ dreamingspace. I'm also joining Erika, Jamin, and Ryan over at Journal Edmonton (oh wow, I JUST REALISED that that is an optional, clever pun about the Edmonton Journal, and now the internet can share my embarrassment) so maybe I'll hear from some of you in the future!

making an archive

Five significant Edmonton materials. Hm.

Let's start with a banal but necessary choice: a copy of The Edmonton Journal, because I think that an important part of representation is self-representation. I mostly read the BBC now, but my family still hasn't cancelled our subscription to the Journal, because where else are you going to read about Heritage Days and the proposed LRT expansion, and scan the food section every week for articles about restaurants that pique your interest?

This t-shirt I have, which says "future U of A graduate" on the back. I got it in third grade, for winning some U of A-sponsored writing competition. I remember shaking Lois Hole's hand in front of an auditorium. The shirt was a million sizes to big when I was eight; it fits perfectly now, and has this weird significance for me. I picked it because it was my first exposure to the University of Alberta, whose significance to defining the city we've talked about in class, and because it has an intense personal memory attached to it -- this is my history is part first-person contribution.

Something literary, to capture the poetic dimension of Edmonton. I can't decide what, because each of the texts we've read in class maps out Edmonton in a different way, and I can't decide which stories to privilege, both literally and metaphorically. (I'm sorry; what a cop-out.)

A picture of the Edmonton skyline. You know the one -- framed just so by the river, showing off our city to its advantage. And here's the twist: flip the picture over, and on the other side is the same shot taken from a different angle, so that it cuts down a different artery and you see industrial-looking greys and browns, low buildings instead of skyscrapers, dirt instead of money.

Lastly, car keys: because no matter how much money we pour into the LRT, six months of winter make Edmonton a driving city. I think that Solnit is right, that there's a fundamental kind of experiencing-the-city that you can only get by walking its streets. But I'm also keeping in mind how different ways of navigating the city expose different narratives (walking, driving, LRT, bus; several of you have made great blog posts about it, which I can't seem to find right now), and how it's become apparent that all of us know a part of the city and very few of us know the whole. If you define your city limits by how long you can walk for, you're going to end up like that student who had all of Paris at her disposal but only moved in a tiny triangle of it. You're never going to get out of Glengarry, so to speak. This is another reminder to myself, I guess: get your license; get out there; get to know Edmonton. And I guess that's an apt place to end.

imagining the everyday

When I think about Edmonton through the lens of childhood, what I remember most is how often I thought of certain places as totally different from what they actually were. My backyard was transformed by imaginary geography. The rock box my backyard (it's like a sandbox, but with … rocks) was actually an entire house! The garage was a stable where kept our horses (if by horses you mean bikes, and at that age, I did). The soccer goalposts in the field by the local elementary school were the gates to a portal that would TRANSPORT YOU ACROSS SPACE AND TIME! A lot of childhood narratives don't just shape a place; sometimes they completely superimpose an imaginary place over it.

What strikes me about A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry is that the narrator Neil doesn't seem "imaginative" -- in a traditional sense, anyway. He's a very head-in-the-clouds sort of kid, but there's no fantastical embellishment in his story. There's no attempt to mythologise Glengarry -- to imagine it as someplace else (think: Alice Major's layering of Roman history), or just as something other than what it is. Instead, he's all about persistent, curious investigations of the fabric of life around him: he's fascinated by places of origin, by markers of difference, by lived experiences.

So we could maybe call A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry parochial, but not in a derogatory sense. As we discussed in class, the novel seems to make an argument for the importance of embeddedness: how place shapes your growth as an artist, and by extension, the value of "local" art. Neil's observations about Glengarry are suffused with this really subtle, quiet kind of love -- he sees and decodes everything with the kind of childhood innocence that confers significance on everything, no matter how "small" or "unimportant." So I'd say that Neil is imaginative: it's just a different kind of imagination, one more in line with de Certeau's appreciation of the everyday.

To be honest, I hadn't really thought about place and authorship before this term (this year I've been reading a lot of speculative fiction/scifi, which has a totally different set of rules when it comes to writing/decoding place), and I hadn't seen the value of this "embeddedness" before reading McGillis. I've always found a strong sense of place to be a bonus, not a necessity, but McGillis has me rethinking that position. My favourite book, The Logogryph, is actually by another local author, Thomas Wharton; I hadn't realised it before this week, but even though book is 95% fantastical metafiction, that last, essential 5% is a frame story which anchors the narrative, and it's all about places and pasts.

desire lines

Nature in Edmonton's suburbs is kind of creepy.

It's corralled. It's mastered by human beings and strategically employed to create poor imitations of nature within the domain of culture. Park space is designated; trees are planted along a boulevard, spaced equidistantly; if you don't mow your lawn, your neighbours will hate you. I guess that this way of thinking implies that what we see as "nature" is, in cities, subsumed to the urban ecology.

As Mark Davis says, we are constantly expending energy to master nature and maintain our urban habitats, and "nature is constantly straining against its chains." Think about the millions of dollars the municipal government had to spend this year, post-snowfall(s), plowing the streets so that people could get around the city. David says that "the ability of a city's physical structure to organise and encode a stable social order depends on its capacity to master and manipulate nature," which I think can be translated, in this instance, into no streets = no urban traffic = social disruption = many problems in the everyday lives of people.

But if we collapse the nature/culture binary as Davis suggests and thinks of urban spaces and "nature" as the part of a single integrated system, nature and culture begin to interpenetrate, their interaction shaping the overall ecology. You can equate urban sprawl to weeds, or something like that -- they're both just structures which are attempting to follow the Darwinian rule and proliferate.

I've always been drawn to the idea of desire lines, at least 75% because it's such a poetic phrase. There's poetry in the concept, too. Desire lines are human-worn walking paths that disobey the rules laid down by urban organisational structures (roads, sidewalks) -- because desire paths are shortcuts, or more easily navigated, or maybe even more beautiful to walk. In winter they're particularly apparent because walkers wear down paths in the snow. Desire lines are beautiful to me because they represent two kinds of resistances, complicating the "wild nature"/"controlling culture" binary. Cities resist nature by setting out sidewalks and concrete and roads; then the inhabitants resist the city by carving out desire lines.

a room without books is like a body without a soul

(The prompt from two weeks ago; written belatedly, thanks to sickness.)

I realised after I drafted this post that Robert discussed the exact same thing ... which I choose to interpret as good taste on both of our parts.

Anyway: I think the Edmonton Public Library is awesome.

The library was my first connection to the institutional machinery of The City. I've never been part of any community leagues; everything I know about the municipal government comes from the City section of the Edmonton Journal. But I've been going to the Whitemud Crossing library ever since it was in the basement of Southgate and I was young enough to be excited about getting stickers in the Summer Reading Club.

What I love about the library is its attitude towards knowledge and the community. If you think of librarians as gatekeepers of knowledge, they're the inviting, open, forward-thinking kind, not elitist cultural custodians who are trying to maintain their grip on power (yes, I am kind of thinking of the literary institution). The library is also forward-thinking in its attitudes towards texts: it's an institution which realises that in order to best provide knowledge to the people, it has to change and adapt. Instead of freaking out about the Kindle like the rest of the myopic publishing industry, which seems to exalt the codex as the holy grail/be-all-end-all of print technology, the library does things like add audiobooks and .epub repositories to their collection. These attitudes are well-reflected in the EPL website, which I'm pretty impressed with. It's one of the best-designed websites I've come across -- easy-to-use and actually functional.

The EPL branches aren't just repositories of knowledge; they're sites of community, which put an emphasis on public spaces. One of the library's functions is community programming, which I didn't find out about until I started looking around at all of the pamphlets and posters a couple of years ago: computer classes, poetry readings, book club nights, English conversation circles. At the Whitemud Crossing library, in the magazine section, there's a nice, quiet lounge area arranged in front of a fireplace; there are chairs and tables and carrels everywhere, in quieter areas and louder common areas.

I kind of love that the library is a space where I can go and check out the fifteen books I requested through the online hold system, and then trawl through the fantasy/sf section for half an hour, while my grandmother uses the free internet and reads Chinese newspapers. It's impressive when an institution is savvy enough to serve a varied population like that.

if I didn't have a headache this post would have a title

To really fall in love with something, you have to know it.

I don't know Edmonton any better than I used to. I haven't had a chance to experience more of it yet. But my sense of the city, my feelings towards it? Different.

Studying texts of Edmonton and Edmonton-as-a-text have opened up the city to the possibility of signification. It's not like the city ever refused to signify. It's not artful enough for that. I just couldn't see it saying or being anything interesting, so I never tried to read it.

But now, the accumulation of texts around the referent of Edmonton intrigue me. I think of the concept of palimpsest, of multilayered, superimposed histories and memories, written over again and again but never quite erased, there to be read if you're willing to be patient, and squint a little. My main experience of an Edmonton text, before this course, was the Edmonton Journal: dry in the way that news reporting often is; on occasion kind of cheesy. But now I see the poetic dimension of Edmonton. This city can be home to vibrant subcultures, à la The Edmonton Queen. This city's history can be poeticised, the commonplace and the parochial overlaid with the grandiosity of Roman founding myths (see: Alice Major). I see the possibility of mythology and haunting in the everyday, which once seemed banal beyond rescue.

All of our creative cartography projects have got me thinking about maps, specifically about that Borges fable, Garret's favourite -- the map precedes the territory. I feel like my textual experience of Edmonton will soon outpace and supersede my actual experience of it, entering into the real of unmoored signifiers, of Baudrillardian simulation. Of course, it's not quite so literary and abstract and dire. All I need to do is revisit the referent.

And thanks to the course, now I have a map for how to do that. I want to see good drag, as recommended by Darrin Hagen. I want to explore shopping locally -- well, window-shopping locally, if I want to respect my bank account. I want to walk across the High-Level Bridge and try to give it a fair re-experience, after seeing Erica's map; I want to go hipster hunting (I don't really know how to extend that metaphor, but no hipsters will be harmed, I promise) on Whyte Avenue, thanks to Katie's.

So my plan for summer, basically, is this: I've stalked Edmonton for a couple of months. Now I'm going to date it.


I'll abuse crowdsourcing and end with an open question. Any more suggestions for things to do, places to see? Anything's welcome. Events? Your favourite spots? Places you think I might like? Places you think that everyone should like?

set file permissions to 666

Ever since Garret mentioned the idea, I've been thinking of Edmonton as a text. Dérive, then, with its attempt to perceive "principal axes of passage," "exits," "defences," and "psychogeographical pivotal points," seems to me like a sort of reader-response theory. Which complicates De Certeau's idea of walking as a speech act—writing—by positioning us as readers, whose bodies and choices interpret the contours of the text that is Edmonton. I'm getting the idea that traditionally, in English departments, there's this attempt to establish reading and writing as binary opposites, when actually they're everywhere inextricable and intertwined. Bodies and cities are just two examples of texts that are both readable and writable—can you think of any others?

The concept of the dérive isn't actually that foreign to me—I've been doing it accidentally for years, ever since I took up walking as my main form of aerobic exercise. In every season but winter, I go walking most days of the week and just drift aimlessly around the neighbourhood for forty minutes. I don't have a preferred path, but I tend to avoid certain places (the strip mall, the main road) and vary my route based on the time of day. During sunset, there's an open field underneath powerlines that gives a beautiful view of the sky; if it's dark, I prefer to be alone in the park. Now that I'm thinking in the context of the dérive, it seems like all these choices might be read as responses to the psychogeographical contours of my neighbourhood.

I don't think my dérives are in line with Debord's purpose, though. They don't pose questions to the city; they aren't aggressive. They probably resemble what Solnit describes more. She makes the point that rural and urban walking are fundamentally different: rural walkers appreciate "the general" (the beauty of nature, the landscape moving by as a "gently modulated continuity"); urban walkers are "on the lookout for particulars, for opportunities, individuals" (174). I'd say that when I go walking, I'm doing rural walking in an urban setting; I rarely take the opportunity to interact with the city around me, relegating it instead to the backdrop. This probably has something to do with the fact that I live in suburbia so banal that it would cause Debord great despair. Solnit writes, "the ideal city is organised around citizenship;" its spatial structure should encourage mobility and public participation. Suburbs, isolated enclaves that discourage social mobility, are totally antithetical to that.

Interestingly, the extension of the LRT down to Heritage (or Century Park, or whatever they're calling it now) introduces a new current of movement to the city that works against the enclaves of suburbia. Now, anyone is just an LRT trip and a bus ride away from Riverbend. I've heard people complaining about the fact that this opens up their precious south side to the homeless and the low-income from downtown—a complaint which I find really problematic and a little infuriating. God, how terrible to have to face a social reality which calls your privilege into question! To have to interact with people of different social classes, treat them with respect, and teach your children to do the same! I'm getting really off-topic, though. What I meant to say was:

When the snow melts, I'm going to start looking for excuses to take walks anywhere but here.

hardly a substantial post, but I just wanted to note --

"The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives."

Obviously, Debord's never experienced an Edmonton winter.

there's no such thing as a disembodied place

As I continue to study texts about Edmonton, it's become apparent to me how central memory and narrative are to a concept of place. But I keep returning to something else: the idea of physical, embodied experience. Different bodies move through the same space in different ways, which can create unspoken "city limits" that we might not even think of.

For example, appearance can code and telegraph certain things about a person, including class, sexuality, or gender, and open up the possibility of discrimination. I'm sure that at some point, all of you have felt uncomfortable somewhere you're underdressed/not wearing the "right" clothes -- now imagine that vague feeling of unwelcomeness magnified into the possibility of danger. I'm reminded of the anecdote in Darrin Hagen's The Edmonton Queen in which Gloria and Lulu, walking down Jasper Ave in drag, have to fend off attackers with their heels. It also brings to mind something Heather mentioned to me the other day: how the lack of gender-neutral toilets on the U of A campus is difficult for transgendered people.

And then there's the issue of various disabilities -- physical, sensory, intellectual; visible or invisible -- which I think is going to be the focus of my mapping project. Architectural ableism all over campus complicates the narrative of moving through the space of a day, presenting choices and defining what can and can't be accomplished.

If you can't do stairs, for example, your options are elevators and ramps. The elevators at the university LRT station sometimes don't work. Rutherford South doesn't even have an elevator. There are ramps for some staircases, but not for others -- and so you'd be limited to routes that incorporate them, routes which probably aren't the most time- and energy-efficient.

Or try chronic pain and fatigue. Let's say a typical day for you involves LRTing to school and walking to three classes scattered at opposite ends of campus. For someone with a fifth of the energy of an average person, it might be hard just to get to those classes, never mind retaining enough energy to stay awake and concentrate.

There's also the issue of mental energy, and what stressors someone is capable of enduring to get from place to place. I don't want to speculate and misrepresent peoples' experiences, but I imagine things like agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and social anxiety disorders (in which people become a factor of the space) would complicate a concept of space, too.

With only my own examples and experiences to draw on -- and very little knowledge of sensory or intellectual disabilities -- I can't even begin to imagine the scope of difficulties people deal with. If you have any other thoughts of examples of how your body, or other peoples' bodies, shape their movement through space, I'd love to hear them.

don't slam the ivory tower

I find it pretty disconcerting to meet the author behind a text. Usually when we interrogate the text in a 1,500-word essay, not in person, but I think I prefer the second option. I won't go off on a tangent about Barthes' "The Death of the Author" -- actually I did, but then I deleted it once I realised this post was already 700 words, and I apologise for that, I really do, no one has to read this. The ideas got out of hand! Next time, I'll try to corral them. (And stay on topic. Sorry for ignoring you this week, Edmonton.)

Anyway. The Edmonton Queen seems to contain two conflicting ideas: drag as an essentialist expression of one's "inner woman" and drag in a Judith Butler sense, exposing and deconstructing the social fiction of gender. When I asked Darrin about it, his answer was that he only learned gender theory after doing drag, and that the tension between those ideas probably comes from his attempt to reconcile the two.

Which eventually got me thinking about the question (which threw me waaay off-topic): why didn't the book reconcile the two? I'm not pointing my finger at Darrin specifically -- it's a problem I have with critical theory as a whole. Theory isn't always written from experience, but when it contradicts it, is that a problem? Which should we defer to? Does one have more validity than the other? Is there such a thing as a test of validity here, and should there be?

It's hard to come down on one side or the other, and I've been on both. For instance: as someone with an invisible chronic illness, I understand very well the complexities of what it's like to "pass" as an able-bodied person, but I have no experience of passing in terms of gender -- I experienced disability, pain, and illness before reading any theory on it, but most of what I have figured out about gender and sexuality came to me first through reading. I don't know if this invalidates the latter in some way. What I have noticed is that I tend to judge disability theory in a more affective way -- if it speaks to my experience of disability, I accept it, and if it doesn't, I have more of a knee-jerk "THAT'S NOT HOW IT IS AT ALL!" reaction. I think it's an oversimplification to map lived experience to affective response, though.

I'd also guess that many feminists have not personally experienced all of the things that they write about (for example: racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, etc.), but that doesn't mean that they can't make meaningful contributions to discussions about them, or act as allies to those who do experience them.

Sometimes, theory lines right up with experience. The social model of disability makes total sense to me. I live it. And I would have taken weeks, maybe months, to work out all of those ideas on my own, versus the couple of hours it took to read articles and nod a lot. But sometimes, it doesn't, and we can't exactly get Judith Butler and Darrin Hagen together to hash it out. I obviously can't speak from experience here, but I think it's possible that some drag queens do drag because it feels right to them, as feminine expression, and would rather not interrogate what that means about the (in)stability of the category of gender, even after the fact (as Darrin did). What does it mean, then, when a feminist co-opts this social phenomenon*, which may have a certain meaning (or several different, individual meanings) to its participants ... and gives it a different one? Does/should one trump the other? Is that question the wrong way of looking at things entirely?

*I can only assume that Butler has no personal experience with drag. I Googled "has Judith Butler ever done drag" -- yes, I really did -- but the internet can't turn up any answers for once.

I guess what I'm asking is, what is theory's relevance, especially to lived experience? And what happens when it seems to be irrelevant?

The closest I can come to an answer is something one of my other profs told me about how to work with Foucault: that his writings aren't meant to be some sort of unified, self-coherent Theory of Everything, but rather a toolbox, from which you can pick out whatever is useful for what you're attempting to think through.

the new york subway as a stringed instrument

A piece of creative cartography I stumbled across via io9: Conductor, a map of the New York subway system (kind of). I have no idea how to interpret the thing in a thematic, English-class way, but it's quirky and neat.

biomapping edmonton?

What fascinates me about Biomapping is how it sort of of disproves one of its own assumptions. It's a space-based concept, mapping emotional response to geographical location, and there were responses to specific, concrete locations ("Beautiful mural by Andrew Schoultz," "Really big hill") -- but there were also random experiences that could have happened anywhere in any city (my personal favourite: "I got startled by pigeons," followed quickly by "Tried to stomp on pigeons"). It might be worthwhile to do a statistical analysis and trace out ratios and patterns, but anyway the data indicates -- maybe -- that what seems like it'd be incidental to our experience of place is actually central to it.

Also interesting: responses to place that relied on memory ("Walked by ex-girlfriend's house"), foregrounding the way the project maps how people are embedded in places. As I discussed with my group at the end of Thursday's class, the map of Edmonton I would love to see is one in which five different people are "released" into the wild of Edmonton at the same spot, then allowed to disperse within a given area. Their autonomous journeys and emotional responses would be recorded and displayed -- each in a different colour, maybe? -- on the same map. While the biomaps we saw gave a sense of a synchronic moment, collapsing time into a bunch of data points, this could fold those scattered, striking moments into diachronic narrative strands, revealing the way individuals appropriate the same space in different ways.

It might also be a revealing experience for the participants. De Certeau says that walkers of a city write urban texts blindly, without being able to read them. A lot of the responses on Nold's biomaps indicated that wearing his scientific mood ring heightened their awareness-- of their mission, but also in general; they were, perhaps, not as blind as the average urban pedestrian.

my edmonton: terra incognita

Typing "my Edmonton" feels like stealing, because Edmonton's not mine at all.

It's sort of like waking up in bed and realising you're sleeping next to a stranger, even after twenty years of arranged loveless marriage. I always assumed I knew my city, but even though I've made its spaces into places they've never cohered for me in a way that gives me a sense of the local.

I go places to do things. Then I come home. It's hopelessly utilitarian. And so my sense of the city is just a handful of isolated, unconnected spaces: my house; bus stops and LRT stations; campus; the Whitemud Crossing library, to which I have paid literally hundreds of dollars in late fines; the Confederation pool, preferable to the YMCA because it's saltwater; friends' places; doctor's offices; bookstores on Whyte and coffee shops along 109th. I have an intimacy with the places themselves, but no idea of the communities that grow in and around them, no idea of their spatial interrelationships because my sense of direction is a joke which my friends laugh at often and loudly.

Rhetorically speaking -- in a de Certeau kind of way -- my Edmonton has no narrative. It's just sentence fragments, walked over and over again to create a familiar but incomplete poem. It's constrained by bus routes and truncated by self-created "city limits" like my comfort zone, mobility issues courtesy of chronic pain, the fact that I am just too lazy to get my drivers' license. (I know, I know.)

It's time to salvage this relationship. It's time to fall in love.

Since I was raised by books, my first instinct is "read lots of Edmonton books!" but I suspect the real solution is the same as it is for a lot of the Grand Theoretical Problems which sulk inside my head for weeks.

GET OUT MORE! DO THINGS!