If you haven't already, try the new blogger.com Play:
It's fascinating, in a sort of horrific existentialist way, as it simply relays photographs which are being uploaded to blogs, to your viewer in real time. So it's a kind of continuous snapshot from right across the world, and raises all sorts of metaphysical and social questions.
Do add comments when you have looked at it!
The three-part series 'Music from the Middle of Nowhere', in which k d lang plays music by her favourite Canadian songwriters and explores the current Prairie music scene, starts in our 'Close Up' slot on Friday 28 September.
You will be able to hear the first programme on demand via a link on page
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/close_up.shtml%20
from 0832 GMT on Friday 28 September (2.32 a.m. in Alberta). The audio will remain available on demand for seven days, being replaced by Part 2 on Friday 5 October.
If it is interesting – or from our Albertan point of view, controversial, I might discuss it in class, so take a listen.
A link to the course timetable has been added on the left. I will be updating this timetable as necessary.
I blame Top Gear. The segment of the Famous Celebrity trying to drive the Very Ordinary Entry-Level Car hell-for-leather around the race track had just ended. The camera had cut to a long, dark, latent aircraft runway. The lens swung slowly along the empty asphalt, lightly salted with a smattering of rain. Every single person watching knew it was about to reveal the latest supercar, those rain drops suggestively sliding down an impossibly sloping windscreen, and Jeremy Clarkson about to climb in and start burning rubber. And what appeared was a Ford Focus.
As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted one. It was small. It was cute. It was a bright yellowy-orange. It also had just a hint of menace. Sitting on the tarmac it stated "I am not just any Ford Focus", and it wasn't. It had a five-cylinder turbo-charged Volvo engine, and I love five-cylinder turbo-charged engines, having had one in a succession of Audis. And this one took the car from 0 to 60 mph in 6.8 seconds, to match the 6.8 litres per 100 kms highway driving. Then Top Gear tested it. They burnt rubber down the straight, they shot it round corners, they wondered if they should take it up to 150 mph (it goes that fast), and they loved it. They loved a Ford, even after Jeremy Clarkson's unfortunate experiences in trying to live down buying a GT40. The demure little car quietly reminded everyone that its great-aunt wins World Rally Championships. It was good on gas, and it didn't even cost that much. I was now totally hooked.
It was also something of a synchronicity. I had started thinking about a replacement for my ageing Audi Quattro only a couple of weeks earlier. I love Audis in general (I've owned six of them) and I love my current car in particular. It's solid, it's fast, and it gets through whatever the weather. But if it isn't quite a gas-guzzler, it does like a good drink, and it's been the equivalent of ten times around the globe. When Audi Canada, one of those firms who are quite certain customers are there to serve them instead of the other way around, sent me incorrect door trims in boxes stamped with the correct part number five times, and then asked me to send them a photograph of the ailing trim in situ on the door, I thought it was time to think about a change.
Besides, I wanted something smaller, something that uses less gas. I know I am not alone in this. All over North America those SUVs are starting to be turned in, if not here in Western Canada, where satiated Albertans are still hurtling themselves like Norwegian lemmings over the gas-guzzling cliff, or rolling over in them on the Queen Elizabeth Highway on the first day of snow. Elsewhere, thousands of us are turning to smaller cars, cars a little kinder to the environment and to our wallets.
Therein lies the rub, at least for those of my generation whose children, if they have any, are leaving home, and the sheer size of that big vehicle really isn't needed any more. For almost all small cars here in North America are aimed at the entry-level buyer or the twenty-to-thirty-something-year olds. But I don't want to revert to a small Toyota, let alone to a boy-racer Hyundai pretending to be a performance car by adding a chrome end to the exhaust. That's what my students drive. I don't want Zoom Zoom, but I do want zoom. I want a bit of panache, a bit of razzmatazz – heck, my 81-year old father drives a Honda R2000 performance sports-car. I would like a hatchback, as I often carry a lot of photographic equipment about. But at the same time I want a car that is a little individual, a little different, but doesn't show off, doesn't draw attention to itself. I can leave that to the boy racers, to those who can afford Jaguar sports cars, or to those poor unfortunates who find it necessary to pretend to be a gangster by driving a black Chrysler 300.
Actually, I have seen just the car, regularly, in Europe. It is a little Audi A3. It has the Quattro all-wheel drive (great for Alberta winters). It is a three-door hatchback - plenty of room. It has a 1.8 turbo-charged engine – plenty of zoom. It has the luxury to which I am accustomed. And it is very kind on gas. My demographic and age-group loves them, and buys them in droves. But I already knew this was an impossibility. When Audi Canada eventually got round to bringing in the A3, the only version with all-wheel drive had five doors and a huge 3-litre engine, and a price-tag beyond my range. Well, that was about what I have come to expect from Audi Canada.
But now there was the Focus ST. I called my local Ford dealer. Not only did he not have one, he had actually never heard of one (even though they have the rally world-championship version on the front page of the Ford Canada website). So I contacted Ford Canada. The first person I got hold of there hadn't heard of it, either. The second told me Ford Canada had no plans to introduce it to Canada, perhaps I would like another car the Ford range, a Ford 500, maybe? No thanks, said I. Well, came the voice on the line, you could always import one from Europe…
Next stop, the Big Daddy of them all, the inventor of the mass-produced automobile, the most recognized name in automotive history, Ford USA, or more accurately, their Customer Relations Department. I explained my predicament. I explained I have owned Audis for 18 years and now I was actually thinking of switching to Ford. I explained I wanted a Ford Focus ST with the five-cylinder turbo-charged engine. I asked where I could get it.
The reply involved a prolonged silence as the Customer Relations person went off to Consult. Then came the bitter blow. "Ford North America has no plans to import that particular model."
"Why not?"
"It does not suit our customer research predictions," came the reply.
"But there can't be any problems selling it here – the Volvo engine is sold in Volvos here, so it meets the standards, and the rest, well the rest is…a Focus."
"It does not suit our customer research predictions."
"But this is an iconic little car," I pleaded. "I teach University, and virtually none of my students drive a Ford. They drive Toyotas and Hondas and Hyundais. Don't you want to catch this new generation?"
"It does not suit our customer research predictions."
No wonder Ford North America continues to lose a fortune.
But no little yellowy orange buzz-bomb from Dearborn, Michigan, pretending to be a three-door hatchback for me…
To be continued…
Wednesday, October 3, 3:30 pm, HC L-3
A Joint Reading by rob mclennan, Writer-in-Residence, University of Alberta and Jalal Barzangi, Writer-in-Exile, City of Edmonton
Born in Ottawa,
rob mclennan
is the author of over 13 trade poetry collections in Canada and England, most recently
The Ottawa City Project. He has published poetry, fiction, interviews, reviews and columns in over two hundred publications in fourteen countries and in four languages, and done reading tours in five countries on two continents. The editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine, the online critical journal Poetics.ca and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com), he edits the ongoing Cauldron Books series through Broken Jaw Press, edited the anthologies
evergreen: six new poets,
side/lines: a new canadian poetics,
GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003,
Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets and
Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers, and runs the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair. His online home is www.track0.com/rob_mclennan, and he often posts reviews, essays, rants and other 'nonsense' at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com.
An ethnic Kurd from Iraq,
Jalal Barzangi is a recognized poet and journalist who had a long literary career before he was forced to leave the country in 1998. He was imprisoned from 1986 to 1989 because of his writings. In Iraq, Barzangi edited several magazines and worked at many cultural organizations. He has published hundreds of articles and poems about human, cultural and women's rights. Barzangi served on the board of the Iraqi Kurdish Writers' Union and was executive director of the Culture Department of the Culture Ministry in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Since coming to Canada, Barzangi has continued to write and has published several volumes of poetry in Kurdish.
This event is made possible by grants from The Canada Council for the Arts (both WIR and WIE) and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and also by numerous WIE host/partners: Writers Guild of Alberta, PEN Canada, Faculty of Arts, Edmonton Community Foundation, Edmonton Arts Council, Athabasca University, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton Public Library, Edmonton Journal and Edmonton LitFest.
Derek Walcott
Friday, 28 September, 4:30 p.m., Convocation Hall – Arts Building
Derek Walcott is an award-winning poet, playwright and visual artist. Born in St Lucia, he studied languages and literature at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and theatre in the United States. He has published over 20 collections of poetry and verse, including In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962); The Castaway (1965), Sea Grapes (1976), Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (1986); Omeros (1990), and Selected Poems (2007). Founder of St. Lucia's Arts Guild and Theatre Workshops in Trinidad and Boston, Walcott also has published over 30 plays, among them, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958); Pantomime (1978); and The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993), which is currently playing at Statford's Festival Studio Theatre. His enchanting watercolours of Caribbean life are exhibited at June Kelly Gallery in SoHo. His collaboration with Paul Simon led to a 1998 Tony Award nomination for Best Original Musical Score for "The Capeman." He has been awarded the Obie Award for Distinguished foreign play, the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the Royal Society of Literature Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Derek Walcott currently spends his time in Boston, New York and Trinidad & Tobago.
This event is hosted by the Caribbean and African Diasporic Initiatives Program (CADI) and the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne (CLC), and sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Faculties of Arts and Education, the Department of Political Science,. the Department of English and Film Studies, the Office of Human Rights, the
Edmonton Journal, and Hole's Greenhouse and Gardens.
A steel drum performance starts at 4:00 p.m.; book signing and reception will follow.
You might also be interested in the following:
Poets, poetry, performance, premiere play, gala, and more…
The Edmonton Arts Council is sponsoring passes for interested students to attend the Word! Symposium, an innovative two day symposium that brings together presenters and performers locally, nationally and internationally on September 21-22 at Muttart Hall, Macewan—Alberta College Campus. Full symposium passes are free to interested students and include all sessions and special events, plus lunches. Passes are available upon registration by phoning Chrystal Seutter at 780-497-2336. For information about the Word! Symposium, go to:
http://edmontonculturalcapital.com/word.asp. This event is produced by The Edmonton Cultural Capital Program.
For those of you who have the new Office suite (2007), or Word 2007, you can write your posts in Word, and then publish them directly from Word. This is very useful!
To do this:
Clicking the 'home page' button (top left) opens your blog in your browser. Like most things in Word 2007, it is very well designed, and very easy to use. It also means you have the usual things in Word to use – such as the spell-checker, bullets (as in this post) and so on.
