bob tarantino

bookforum

I'm probably a few years behind the curve on this, but if you're looking for something beyond political news from the usual aggregators, check out bookforum.com, which contains links to, hands down, the most informative, insightful and diverse collection of content on the web.  You can thank me later.  Or curse me, depending on how many hours you waste as a result.

Where You At, Rock?

Back in November, when I decided to resume blogging, it was intended that this blog would function at least in large part as an exercise in narcissism self-promotion for various writing projects.  For a variety of reasons, but mostly due to laziness on my part, the extra-curricular writing hasn't proceeded at quite the pace I would have liked.  However, now that the release of Under Arrest is in the (relatively) near future, and having been inspired by a variety of sources (among them: James Bow's frequent progress reports on his latest book, and the news that Canadian sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's recent announcement of his inking of a six-figure (!) deal for republication rights to his previous novels), it's time to ramp up both the writing and the blogging about the writing.  Or something.  A few snippets, none earth-shattering:

• I had the pleasure earlier today of doing a seminar-style presentation on Canadian defamation law to the good folks at The Weather Network, at their offices in Oakville, Ontario; very cool building they're headquartered in, and the attendees had some perceptive and pertinent questions - hopefully I was able to provide some marginally interesting information
• Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe is evidently still on schedule for a June 30, 2007 release; as I navigate the creator side of the publishing industry (as distinct from the legal side) I'm learning some interesting tidbits; f'rinstance: amazon.ca lists the book (currently at #448,905 in sales! woohoo!) with a June 30 "release date" - but that just means the date the book is available for shipping from the warehouse - actual copies likely won't be in bookstores until early in July
• notwithstanding what I just told you, James Bow and I are finalizing plans for a big book-related blogstravaganza at the end of June
• I'm hoping to have a sample chapter from Under Arrest available for you to, er, enjoy (fingers-crossed) some time soon
• I found out earlier this week from my editor at Dundurn that Dundurn has followed through on plans to commission some illustrations for Under Arrest - I had initially been somewhat hesitant when the idea was presented to me, but I think it could work out quite well; I was somewhat concerned about the tone of the book being compromised by the illustrations - I tried to avoid having the book read like a "bathroom reader" of quirky laws, and the notion of illustrations seemed to weight the balance away from a more sober reading experience; in the end, though, while striking the right tone in the text was one of the most difficult tasks I confronted, I think I may have veered too far towards dustiness - so hopefully the illustrations will have the effect of correcting the sobriety of the writing; I'm expecting to see samples of the illustrations shortly and will report back here on the results
• here is the goal for the rest of the year: one short commentary piece on mechanical royalties in the Canadian online context; one long academic piece on copyright duration for Canadian film and television projects; one novel, currently entitled A Garbled Syntax; total progress on each to date: actually, this bullet point is pretty much it - time to go get started

Steynshire Redux

There was a Calvin and Hobbes installment from the early years of the strip which, if I recall correctly, chronicled some kind of negotiation between Calvin and his mother over bed-times, or TV watching or candy - the punchline was something to the effect of "we're both speaking English, but we're not talking the same language".  That has been echoing for me as I've been reading the point, counterpoint, comment and countercomment occasioned by the responses to the Virginia Tech massacre and, among other things, my own Steynshire Initiative post (as an aside, if you ever need to generate traffic for your blog, just write something which pisses off someone over at The Corner).  This is the last thing I'll be writing on the matter, since I'm pretty sure we're all talking past each other at this point, and the whole discussion has become slightly depressing - it appears that the mind of no one is going to be changed regardless of what is said and the bitterness of some of the debate, among people who are ostensibly at least vaguely on the same "side" of the political divide, is not going to be helped by further discussion - but I did want to clarify a few things.

Having now duly received the memo that sarcasm is a frowned-upon mode of rhetoric in blogging, I'll try to describe what I think happened in more sober terms.  We saw, I think, two different kinds of analytical disjunctions.  In the first instance, what I'll call the Steynshire side made comments about the reaction of the individuals present at VT - and some of their readers, myself included, read that as taking a morally neutral reaction (i.e., cowering and fleeing in the face of gunfire) and ascribing to it a morally negative judgment (i.e., cowardice - or, from Mark Steyn's April 18 post, emasculation).  Some of us, me included, were offended by that - I just don't see how that logical jump gets made.  For what it's worth, those on the Steynshire side insist that they were not, to use their own argot, "blaming the victim" - and I'm sure they were just as offended by the implication that they were.  When the reactions of those of us on the other side of the analytical divide were read by the other side, another disjunction occurred: they read us as being actively opposed to the moral virtues of bravery and courage.  For what it's worth, we insist we are not, and are offended by the implication that we are.

Goalposts then began to get moved.  The Steynshire side recast their comments as a cultural critique: querying whether, to quote, "cultural changes [have] moved us too far from the old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defense".  It was that post by John Derbyshire which prompted by own Steynshire Initiative post.  Of the dozens of comments and private emails I received, no more than a handful waded through my snottiness (Derbyshire's assessment) and failed attempts at humour to reach what I mistakenly thought was a fairly clear point: that using the reactions of unarmed individuals who are under fire by a crazed gunman as an indicia of cultural "courage" (which is as close as I can come to a succinct statement of Derbyshire's and Steyn's thesis, such as it is) is... well, ludicrous.  As some commenters pointed out (though apparently they were intending to buttress the Steynshire argument), there are numerous contemporary examples of people who, when faced with gunfire, have charged the gunman - which simply goes to disproving the Steynshire hypothesis that American culture has somehow become so "feminized" that people line up like lambs to the slaughter.  My own examples, hardly intended to represent serious research, went to the opposite point: that in previous generations, when confronted by crazed gunmen firing live ammunition, some Americans reacted precisely as some of the Americans at VT reacted - by trying to escape, not by trying to charge the gunman.  Does this prove that previous generations of Americans were less "courageous"?  Hardly.  There isn't any sort of Bravery-O-Meter which we can pull out and "measure" courage or bravery across a culture - they are, after all, individual virtues, not societal ones.

Whatever.  As I said, all of this is getting tedious for everyone involved.  But Derbyshire was gracious enough to respond to my post (his response here) - so I think I'll take the opportunity to point out that the analytical disjointedness appears to continue apace.  As Derbyshire notes, mass killings of unrelated victims by lone gunmen are exceedingly rare ("a very small dataset") - so analyzing them for some greater social import seems ambitious.  Which was my point - it was his point that a single instance (Virginia Tech) is indicative of cultural change.  He then cites both the 1991 Luby's massacre and the 1993 Long Island Rail massacre - but it's unclear what they are evidence of, precisely.  That some Americans are brave enough to tackle armed gunmen?  It wasn't me who was denying that - it was Derbyshire's entire thesis that some sort of societal metamorphosis has occurred whereby people seem unwilling to do precisely that.  It's not until we get to the end of his post that we see that the goalposts have moved yet again:

"So again, my suggestion that an unarmed individual has some kind of chance against a shooter seems to have some foundation in fact.  In the extremely unlikely case that you and several other unarmed citizens are confronted by a lone gunman plainly intent on mass murder, go for the guy. You might get killed, but then he plans to kill you anyway. You might stop him and save many lives."

Fine.  I have no quibble with that statement, nor have I ever - it seems like it would take uncommon courage to do so, but you're certainly not going to get an argument from me that (a) it's probably a good idea (as Derbyshire says, the odds are good you're going to get killed anyways) or (b) someone who does so is, as I mentioned, brave.  But notice how Derbyshire's argument has altered: it has become a kernel of tactical advice, whereas previously it was an assertion (sorry, sorry, a questioning) of declining cultural ethics.  It's one thing to say "Hey, you know what you should do if confronted with this?  Rush the guy", but it strikes me as quite another to say "Where was the spirit of self-defense [at Virginia Tech]? ... At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands" (Derbyshire), or "Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone. I have always believed America is different. ... this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and ... is an existential threat to a functioning society" (Steyn) or "if something has gone wrong in our culture, and if that something might have contributed to the Va. Tech. death toll, that needs talking about" (Derbyshire again).

We can't marshall convincing evidence for our positions, because the assertions don't lend themselves to empirical proof - how would one go about "demonstrating" that current American culture lacks bravery or courage?  Not even Virginia Tech is evidence of that: in addition to Liviu Librescu (previously cited by the Steynshire side as a counter-example of "old world" masculinity), some students in the VT classrooms acted in an almost identical fashion.  Would we hold up 9/11 firefighters or soliders in Iraq and Afghanistan - and then start arguing over whether they are anomalous cases?  The absurdity of it highlights the salient points: that pointing to the reactions of the victims at VT as being evidence of cultural ennui is bizarre, and more, that the absence of the moral virture of courage in a particular instance is not proof of either (a) the presence of the moral failing of cowardice or (b) the absence of courage in an entire society.

The Steynshire Initiative

This just keeps getting better and better.  John Derbyshire clarifies that his earlier post, wherein he queried why it was that none of the victims at Virginia Tech had "count[ed] the shots and jump[ed]" the guy who was busy filling them with bullets, was actually a finely nuanced cultural critique:

This issue is: Have cultural changes moved us too far from the old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defense, towards a more "European" style of responding to crises by waiting passively for the authorities to do something? Seems to me this is a perfectly valid topic for discussion, as are corollary questions like: Supposing the older ideal was still dominant, would it have made a difference in this particular case? ... If these are not fair topics for discussion, I wish someone would tell me why.

Set aside for the moment the creepy quasi-Troother mewling about how he's "just asking questions" and appealing to some vague insinuation that his brave quest for enlightenment is being suppressed.  Set aside for the moment his bizarre assertion that Mark Steyn is "fearless" for raising the same "questions" (people who were slaughtered by a madman = wimps; guy posting pithy columns = fearless; got it).  Let's focus instead on the primary assertion (also echoed in Andrea Harris' comments): that what we witnessed in Virginia Tech was evidence of some sort of societal breakdown whereby an "older ideal" of self-defence and self-reliance has not just fallen out of favour, but actually been determinedly bred out of the populace. In short, "Europeanization", as Derbyshire would have it. (We can note in passing that it's not the mass murder itself which is taken as evidence of some anomaly by Derbyshire and Steyn, but the reaction to it.)

Fine.  This assertion assumes that at some point in the past, red-blooded American males would never have reacted in the "passive" manner seen at Virginia Tech.  A "cultural change" has occurred - so we should be able to identify a point prior to the change, where these ideals were manifest.  Let's call the metric for determining the matter the Steynshire Test, and examine some previous mass shooting events in American history to assess how real men would respond, and not the puerile, de-fanged variety which seems to haunt the land these days.  Excellent.  Here's a first stab at doing so.

Let's step back roughly a generation - July 18, 1984, James Huberty walks into a McDonald's restaurant in California and, over the course of 77 minutes slaughters 21 people.  Massacre only ends when the nanny state shows up in the form of a SWAT sniper.  Steynshire Test analysis: the culture of cowardice is already well entrenched - no reports of victims charging at the gunman, nor any evidence of plans being put in motion to either circle around him, scuttle across the ceiling and drop in on him from above or employ ninja stars.  Especially odd, considering some of the victims were presumably of relatively small stature, meaning they would have been more difficult for him to hit.

Okay, let's try a further step back in time, roughly another generation.  August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascends a clocktower at the University of Texas at Austin, armed with various guns, and proceeds to kill 16 people and wound 31 others.  Whitman had encountered numerous individuals on his way to the top of the clocktower, including one couple who saw him brandishing his weapons.  No one stopped him.  The killings do not end until the nanny state shows up in the form of three police officers who finally manage to kill Whitman.  Steynshire Test analysis: still no evidence of the American ideals of self-defence and/or self-reliance.  No accounts of individuals scaling the outside of the clocktower with knives clamped between their teeth in an effort to take down the gunman.  And in Texas, no less!  Things are looking grim.  To rub salt in the wound, because Whitman was a former Marine, his funeral featured his coffin draped in the American flag.  Perhaps evidence of communist infiltration - should be followed up on.

[UPDATE: Shouts to those in the comments - evidently you really should not mess with Texas: "By now word of what was happening had spread, and police began returning fire toward the Tower, trying to pick off Charlie as he rose up over the parapet to take aim.  Citizens went home and got their own guns, and hundreds of shots chipped away at the Tower in the next hour." And: "As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition."]

Okay.  Maybe a still earlier generation had some brass ones.  Let's go back another twenty or so years.  The morning of September 6, 1949.  Howard Unruh prowls the streets of Camden, New Jersey, and kills twelve people with his gun - men, women and children among them.  Victims scramble out of the way, hiding behind houses, counters in shops and in closets.  But wait!  One man, Frank Engel, took a shot at Unruh, possibly hitting him (the forensics were a bit unclear on this) - but even this display of fortitude is compromised.  His resolve failing, Engel "could have fired again and killed him, but he refrained.  Later he would say, "I could have put a half dozen shots into him.  I don't know why I didn't do it.  I wish I had.""  Unruh would not be stopped until he barricaded himself in his house and was surrounded by dozens of police officers.  He eventually surrendered, and was committed to a mental institution.  Steynshire Test analysis: somewhat better, since someone took a crack at the gunman, but only a partial score is accorded - only one guy responded in a sufficiently "old American ideals" fashion, and even he lost his nerve.  Plus, Engel shot at Unruh from behind - further research required to determine whether this is sufficiently "manly" to warrant positive reviews.  Oh, and Unruh ended up in the loony bin, when he should have been hung by the thumbs.  Evidently the emasculation of America extends further back than we had feared.

Alright.  Twenty more years into the past we must go.  Francis Crowley.  In 1925, his older brother John got into a fight with a police officer in NYC, a fight witnessed by dozens of onlookers, none of whom intervened.  Crowley swore revenge against the officer.  A month later, the two encounter each other once again - this time a running gun battle between the two ends with both the officer and Crowley dead.  Again, no one interfered to assist the officer.  John's younger step-brother, Francis, grows up hating cops, eventually murdering one in 1931.  A massive manhunt ensues, until Crowley is finally located in an apartment on West 90th Street.  A virtual war ensues: hundreds of police officers, armed with everything up to and including machine guns, begin a shootout with Crowley, who fires back at the police and the gathering crowd.  He is eventually subdued when five officers break down the door of the apartment.  More than 10,000 spectators surrounded the building and watched the barrage.  Steynshire Test analysis: well, this is a little better (lots of guns!) but there remain a couple of problems.  First, it was the nanny state in the form of the police which really subdued Crowley (and why did it take five cops to take him down? he was only armed with .38s!). Second, the crowd, by some reports reaching nearly 15,000 people, just sat back like bovines, doing nothing - why didn't they rush Crowley in his apartment?  They had him outnumbered nearly 15,000 to one!  Wankers, the lot of them.

This is distressing.  We just know something has been irrevocably rent asunder in the body politic of the American people - yet we find it difficult to pinpoint either (a) when it happened or (b) events that occurred before it happened.  The challenge goes out!  Who can find documented examples of the "old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defence" being effected - we need examples of civilians under fire who did the manly thing: charged the gunman, kicked him in the ding-ding, grabbed the still-smoking weapon, cooly leveled it between his eyes and snarled "who's your daddy now, mofo?".  Or something like that.  And nothing too recent, mind you - that would throw off our whole "culture change" narrative.

*shakes head*

I suppose with respect to any saturation coverage event like the massacre at Virginia Tech, most people reach a threshold where they simply overload and say "enough".

For me, I'm pretty sure that moment occurred when some conservative commentators took time out of their day to make the repugnant argument that the victims were a bunch of pussies.

Take John Derbyshire, writing at National Review Online.  If he didn't begin the parade, he at least waved the standard with the most enthusiasm with a post that quickly degenerated from the pathetic to the hallucinatory:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. [emphasis in original]

Fertheluvva... That isn't written from the experience of inhabiting any world with which I'm familiar - that's the considered opinion of someone who exists exclusively in a Showtime action flick co-starring Steven Seagal and The Rock.  As I understand Derbyshireland, all red-blooded males come equipped with a mental catalogue of armaments, enabling one to not just identify the weapon being held by the evil bastard who is in the process of shooting at you, but also be familiar with the number of bullets held in the clip, thereby facilitating your efforts at "count[ing] the shots", so that you can rush him in a heroic blaze of glory - presumably accompanied by stirring slow-pan shots and a wicked awesome soundtrack.  Even more bizarre, on the laws of physics qua Derbyshire, is the fact that Cho Seung Hui managed to kill anyone, never mind thirty-three people - seeing as how he was equipped only with "two handguns for goodness' sake".  Clearly </sarcasm>, Cho just wasn't all that lethal.  And yet we've got all these bodies lying around... Strange, that.

While Mark Steyn isn't sure he's "ready to go the full Derb", he is pretty sure that there is a "corrosive passivity" at work in our society - whereby the victims of "murderous misfit loners" (Steyn's words) just didn't have the balls to... I don't know, kick some ass or something.  And what better time than the slaughter of thirty-three innocents to bring up the deficiency of testosterone suffered by "Canadian manhood" (evidenced apparently by the fact that, when Marc Lepine went on his own murderous rampage in Montreal, the men (or "men", on Steyn's formulation) at whom Lepine was pointing his weapons "did nothing".  The fact that the armed man was firing weapons in their general direction evidently doesn't factor in.

Even my friend Kathy Shaidle got in on the act: "when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position".  Well, "cowardice" or "self-preservation" - whichever works for you.  At Victory Soap, we get this:

my first thought was "how the hell can one guy walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will, with no one stopping him until several people are dead?" ... People wonder why so many apparently meekly lined up for their "execution style" deaths. I don't -- I've had the same public school education everyone else has.

Set aside the gross smear that those who fell prey to Cho's guns "meekly lined up" (really? Did they meekly line up? Or did they desperately fling themselves from fourth floor windows, cower behind barricaded doors and die screaming, weeping and bleeding?).  Ponder how someone can query how "one guy [can] walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will".  Perhaps because he's armed, dangerous and, permit me to stress this because apparently it isn't sinking in for some people, shooting at them.  With guns and live ammunition.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't my "public school education" that would prompt me to get the hell out of there - it would be my well-honed desire to stay alive.  And feel free to call me a coward - but it would be nice if people would let the bodies at Virginia Tech cool before sneering about their distressing lack of manliness.

I recall when it was some on the left who were clearly working out some daddy issues in public (anyone else remember Bill Maher, among others, criticizing Bush for not "demanding more sacrifices" of them in the wake of 9/11? What was that all about?) - now it appears that both sides of the aisle are a bit put upon.

Maybe Nietzsche really did have it all figured out.  There is a bizarre moral inversion at play here: the posts I linked to had little or nothing to say about the murderer, reserving their ire for the dead - the "meek", "passive", evidently emasculated dead.  So evidently their victim status is compromised.  Or something.  One wonders how long it will be before this morality of action turns its steely gaze onto, say, the murdered in, I don't know, Darfur, or the inmates of a Sobibor (why didn't they just rush the guards? after all, the guards were outnumbered! the voice seems to say).  To the extent there is any irony to be found in surveying these comments, we can note that the one individual who is being praised even by those who evidently have little to say about the victims at Virginia Tech is Liviu Librescu, a 76-year old Holocaust survivor teaching at the college who gave his life blocking a door so as to delay Cho's entrance into the room, thereby allowing some of the students in the room time to escape; Zach Petkewicz, a student who did essentially the same thing as Librescu, but was not killed, is rarely mentioned - perhaps because his youth doesn't follow the trope that courage or defiance has been "mostly bred out of people".  On the macabre accounting evidently favoured by a Derbyshire, perhaps Librescu was simply correcting an earlier deficit in the "manliness" department.  I feel soiled even writing that, but it is the inevitable conclusion of the slightly deranged passing of judgment which we're encountering.

The philosophical worldview that underpins the comments of Derbyshire, Steyn et al. isn't a conservatism of responsibility, or solidarity, to say nothing of compassion.  It isn't, in other words, a conservatism I recognize or even understand.

Neighbourhood Watch

James Bow marks five years of blogging.  Nice!

"shave your head, get you drunk, and embarrass you"

For my money (get it? it's all free!) Andrew Potter is one of the most interesting thinkers out there, and, since blogging is a medium suited to the brief but incisive missive, he has one of the best blogs.  He's awfully good at longer-form writing as well: check out this piece from the Ottawa Citizen (which, now that I think about it, has one of the best Op-Ed pages among Canadian newspapers), about sports initiation ceremonies.  Like the best columns, it goes places you really don't expect.

If there is one thing that is sure to get lost in all of this, it is the substantial virtues of initiation ceremonies. One of the most legitimate beefs against liberal democratic culture is that it leaves little room for the heroic dimension of life. The old "warrior ethic" ideals, of the honour that comes with competition, battle, and even death have almost completely atrophied, and while SUVs and iPods and flat-screen TVs give us plenty to live for, we no longer have a collective sense of what would be worth dying for.

Philosophers over the years have used different terms to describe this ethic. Plato called it thumos, usually translated as "spiritedness" or "passion." Hobbes called it pride, Rousseau talked of amour-propre, and Hegel described it as part of our desire for recognition. These are all ways of getting at the same phenomenon, namely, the desire to compete, to assert oneself over and against others.

Pictures and Glass

Checked out the Ansel Adams/Alfred Eisenstaedt Two Photographers. Two Visions. exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario yesterday, and it's worth the visit - at least the Adams portion (which is by far the larger) is worth the time.  I only possess a "I know what I like" critical appreciation for photography, but the pairing of these two by the AGO (the Adams portion of the show is on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) seems to endow Eisenstaedt with a bit more significance than he merits - at least judging by the quality of the prints shown here, Eisenstaedt's work is... rather pedestrian.  Yes, I get that that may be the point.  Perhaps Eisenstaedt suffers from the imposed banality of the pioneer: once his technical and compositional innovations have been adopted by everyone else, whatever his contribution was becomes impossible to discern.  Of course, perhaps I'm an entirely uneducated mook and I'm missing the whole point when it comes to his stuff.

Anyways, the confluence of museums and photographs reminded me of something I've been meaning to post about: the Corning Museum of Glass.  On December 21, 2006, I mentioned that I would be undertaking a road trip to New York City in the near future, and asked if anyone had any recommendations for things to see in upstate New York State along the way.  One helpful reader suggested a trip to the Corning Museum of Glass - which, since it's approximately half way between Toronto and NYC, seemed perfect.

And it was - for anyone who is ever in the Corning/Ithaca/Binghamton area, I highly recommend taking part of a day to check out the Museum of Glass.  This is one of my favourite pieces in the collection:

The facility is brand new and beautiful, and among the thousands of well-displayed pieces in the collection, which covers glass-making from its origins in the Middle East, through Roman, Islamic, Renaissance, Baroque, American and modern iterations are some breathtaking examples of glass as both a functional and decorative art form.  The Museum website recommends setting aside at least three hours to properly view the exhibits, and that seems about right - in addition to the exhibits themselves, the glass-making demonstration, scientific displays and even the gift shop reward attention.

The Museum of Glass is also one of the only museums I've ever been to which allows you to freely photograph whatever the hell you want.  I've set up a separate photo album here for anyone interested in checking out the pictures I took.  A couple of notes on the photographs: the batteries ran out before I reached the "modern" portion of the galleries, so to see some of the most innovative stuff, you'll just need to visit the damn place; I was having a hell of a time figuring out the proper settings to get good shots since the lighting was wreaking havoc with the flash, and most of the exhibits have panes of plexiglass in front of them; and a bunch of the shots in the photo album are poorly focused (that plexiglass thing again), but the colour effects of the pieces were more important than detail, so I've included them anyways.

Since our charter here mandates that a portion of our content be devoted to legal education, I should also point out something which may (should?) strike some lay readers as incredibly odd: most of the pictures in the photo album of modern works constitute infringements of copyright - having reproduced a piece of art in its entirety, the picture itself has violated the copyright of the artist in his or her work.  Ponder that.

Items which you may wish to keep an eye for among the pictures: the glass slipper; the Tiffany window; and the good-looking guy I happened to photograph while he, coincidentally, was also taking a picture.  Hah.

Oh, and yes, all of the pieces you see in the photo album are made out of glass.  Including the slugs.  Go figure.

Truly Random Musings

Substantive posting still to come (I swear), but in ranging through the Canadian blogosphere today, the following are my two favourite statements thus far in this young year.  Your mileage may vary.

• Jason Cherniak: "I saw Khan on [Delegate Selection Meeting] weekend for the Liberal Party. Khan was supporting Joe Volpe and he had organized a private dinner for all Volpe supporters. I thought it was a bit underhanded because you could smell the food all through the voting hall." [emphasis added - I have no idea why I find that so funny, but it's had me in near-hysterics for the last ten or so minutes]
• James Bow: [in making his predictions for 2007] "The Canadian political blogosphere will have its first sex scandal".  And that will have me in near-hysterics for the next ten or so minutes.  I say we open a pool on who the scandal will involve.

Neighbourhood Watch

Perhaps in honour of a new year dawning (then again... perhaps not), Rick McGinnis is blogging again.  No one could quite MC the secretive gatherings of our movie-watching cabal with the same touch of loathing and archival fetish that Rick manages.  Plus, I'm often slightly startled by what his employers at Metro will let him get away with in his review columsn.  Oh, and trolling through his accumulated writings at his homepage is often good for finding out interesting things (Rick appanrently once partied with Soul Asylum f'rinstance... back in the late '80s, that was a pretty frickin' cool accomplishment).  Finally [the crowd cheers], he's a hell of a writer.  So check him out.

"Where do you go from here?"

James Bow has posted an interesting article/interview (Part One here, Part Two here) with Canadian author Kenneth Oppel.

Like We Never Even Left

Fine.  So I owe Kathy Shaidle ten bucks.  I'm back to blogging.  For those of you with fond (or... other) memories of the late Let It Bleed, this current iteration of ramblings will be slightly different.  To the extent that the political can ever be stripped out of anything, this blog will be somewhat less about "politics" per se, and more about law, culture, history, photography, interviews, music, writing, movies... just more about more stuff (with an emphasis on the stuff, moreso than the more - I can't promise a posting schedule to match that in the early days of LIB).  Of course, every once in a while I'll feel some unavoidable tug to point out that Haroon Siddiqui is a shmuck, so for fans of LIB, keep an eye out.  For those who otherwise have an ardent desire to know what I think about various items political, well, you should've been around from late 2003 to mid-2005 - you snooze, you lose.

So what have I been doing since May 2005?  Working, mostly.  Reading.  Getting married.  Wrote a book.  Which brings me to one of the other primary motivations in getting back to blogging: as evidenced by the tagline above, I now (or will shortly) have something to sell, so this is as much an exercise in the somewhat loathsome endeavour of self-promotion as anything else.  Plus, I figure it would be helpful to have an online repository of my various published writings, so those will be showing up here as well.  The story of how Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe (scheduled for publication in June 2006 by Dundurn Press) came to be will be the subject of an ongoing series of posts, which will hopefully give some inspiration/guidance to others who are as desperate as me to get published.

Anyone interested in getting in touch with me can send an email by clicking on the link at the top left of the page.  This is still a bit of a work in progress, so the format and the contents on the sidebars will be changing over the next little while as I figure out where to put everything.  Oh, and a blogstravaganza seems appropriate as well - if I can pull it together, expect one before Christmas.  Let's do this.