Why So Serious?

I am a native of Deadmonton.  Every inhabitant of this city recognizes and acknowledges that name.

As I mentioned in a previous presentation, we are the self-proclaimed dead.  But why?  Who can we blame but ourselves if we think the city and its walkers are dead?  Why are we so sullen and serious about our home town and its apparent lack of vivacity?  Before death there is life - if the city is truly dead, she must have lived before.  Many have no fond recollections of Edmonton before Deadmonton.  I believe that Edmontonians are engaged in poor and ineffective coping strategies when it comes to the death of our home.

In a psychological study by Susan Folkman and Judith Tedlie Moskowitz titled Stress, Positive Emotion, and Coping, they monitored gay men whose partners were diagnosed with AIDS to assess coping mechanisms and their effectiveness after the death of the partners.  The "creation of positive events strategy" in which ordinary, fleeting moments were imbued with special meaning was judged to be an effective means of coping.  Of particular interest regarding this strategy was that the ability to find humour in the situation aided in the creation of positive events.  As stated, the "gallows humour" helped to preserve the loved one in a positive light.  By wallowing in our misery and boredom after the death of Edmonton, we are suffering for our poor coping (or lack thereof).

Additional research by Dacher Keltner et al. focused on facial expression and personal adjustment.  They pinpointed a particular kind of laughter called "Duchenne laughter" which involves a specific muscle and indicates positive emotions.  When interviewing widowed adults about their deceased spouses, those who exhibited Duchenne laughter were seen in a more positive light by strangers and were better settled and more comfortable with their current significant other.  If we feel lost, trapped, or ill-settled within our lives, it may be because we have failed to engage our orbicular oculi muscles in genuine laughter - we have barred ourselves from true happiness and recovery.

The long and short of it is: why so serious?!  Sometimes you just have to laugh - even if it's inappropriate.  By creating positive events, we can create the city as we wish to remember it.  Find the humour in the city!  We can preserve the positive memories of Edmonton through good humour, a positive outlook, and a heartfelt chuckle.

Photo by Cathryn Beck

Susan Folkman and Judith Tedlie Moskowitz.  Stress, Positive Emotion, and Coping (Vol. IX, No. 4, 2000 pp. 115-118).


Dacher Keltner, Ann M. Kring, and George A. Bonanno.  Fleeting Signs of the Course of Life: Facial Expression and Personal Adjustment (Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1999, pp. 18-22).

Detour

Apologies for the delay in posting, I spent a full day at the office yesterday and somewhere in between booking subscriptions and printing invoices, the post slipped my mind. You do get a double feature on this glorious Saturday, though!

This poem was written on a bus trip I took on one of those nights where I was feeling restless. Rather than take the 8 Millwoods to my house, I took the 1 Capilano all the way to its transit centre, just to see what that particular route looks like.

last night, I took the bus

40 blocks past my street

just so I could glimpse

the unearthly lights of Refinery Row

this no-man’s zone, this lonely home

like something from a science fiction comic book

that single place unknown

as the bus bumped through

the cool, blue night

and the orange staring street lamps

become a thousand seers high above me

I realized how little I know about these sidewalks

the fluorescent signs scream through the dark silhouettes

WE EXIST

like the child who screams

for want of a tender touch

for want of recognition as something beyond

a shell to be filled

with the invented stories of the sea

and all its monsters

Insulated City

Last week I looked at how space can impose a regiment upon our day to day actions, effectively pushing us away from chance encounters. This week I want to continue in the same vein, but with more focus on the relationship between living space and social interaction. The way I see it, and please comment if you feel differently, Edmonton forces many of its citizens to make the conscious choice of interacting with the city or remaining insulated from it.

Photo by Erika Luckert

Many cities offer a barrier between the personal and the social, but they do so through the use of distant suburbs, while Edmonton nestles them right into the heart of the city, creating pockets of insulation. For example, areas such as Garneau, Windsor Park, and Oliver, are sanctuaries that shelter their inhabitants from the daily frenzy of the city, ultimately allowing for a more gradual immersion into social space.

I like to picture Edmonton as a gradient--a smooth transition--rather than it being confined to the simple pairings of inside-personal / outside-social. Edmonton allows its residents to wander outside of their homes relatively free from social bombardment; however, this range of movement necessitates that Residents must consciously move towards a social nexus, instead of suddenly being immersed in one; the connection isn’t forced, only the choice is. In contrast, larger cities, or those cities with space constraints, don’t have outside space that is free from the bustle of the city; the instant you walk outside you are soaked with social stimuli.

The choice, then, to enter into social space is linked with the outside in these larger cities, while in Edmonton the outside still has some connection to the personal (sidebar: or maybe in larger cities the abrupt collision of personal space and social space causes them to spill into each other. Edmonton then would be reinforcing personal space by allowing a buffer to develop between the personal and the social...). Whatever the case, I think Edmonton embraces an approach to space that favours slow transitions over instant immersion. Next week I will be looking at the implications of this conscious, gradual movement into social space.

in-between places

My first contribution to Journal Edmonton was going to be a love letter to the city's secondhand bookstores. But as I wrote I took a wrong turn at the thought of online book-buying, which led me to consider what's missing (materially, locationally) from places like kobobooks.com and thebookdepository.co.uk, and eventually I got lost, somewhere in the idea of the distances — and how essential they are to place and narrative.

I don't have anything against ebooks (dear publishing industry, stop panicking! The codex is not the be-all and end-all of this thing we call the book!), but personally, I like to experience my book-buying binges with all five senses and the unpredictability that accompanies walking in the city. If you order a book online, there's no chance of a chance encounter — having an allergic reaction to the cat presiding over the second floor; walking past the Wee Book Inn and seeing that they have Neil Gaiman's ten-volume Sandman series on sale. If you're clicking, not walking, you're not going to be able to duck into Block 1812 (or is it 1912? I always forget) for gelato, or drop by Chapters on Whyte to say hello to your friends who work there.

Photo by Erika Luckert.

Usually, we think of the distances between places as something to be overcome, like the fifteen-minute LRT ride you slip your earbuds in to get through. But I think that distances also bring places together, in addition to keeping them apart. Distances force you to travel, and that travel creates a kind of narrative. Narrative is essential to how we make sense of places, especially conglomerates of dissimilar places like neighbourhoods and cities.

And this only happens in physical city space. Hyperlinks are, of course, a form of travel. You can check browsing history to stalk someone's journey online. It's kind of mind-numbingly fun to go on Wikipedia for twenty minutes and see if you can get from "chocolate" to "Jesus." But online, it's all instantaneous, disembodied travel, characterised by sameness — like hermetically sealed airplanes, like spooling up the FTL drive and blipping from planet to planet without getting to see the stars.

This is the geography of the web: when you travel it you naturally follow metonymic or metaphoric routes, moving based on principles of contiguity and similarity. It's easy to blinker yourself and stay within communities tailored to your interests. Physical neighbourhoods, though, have a sort of necessary heterogeneity: the gas station is by the yoga studio is by the DQ is by the elementary school, and these are all juxtaposed; they coexist.

In the city, there is always a chance encounter. You can take a wrong turn and discover someplace you've never been before — a place that might be outside of your comfort zone, but which you have to confront anyway, because you can't just click a back button. You can set out to walk a preplanned secondhand bookstore crawl and end up lost, thinking about in-between places.

What’s in a Home?

Home?

Despite the major news stories of the past few days, I'd like to return to a more minor story that may have slipped through unnoticed. On Saturday, twitter (follow us @journaledmonton) led me to  CTV’s article titled “Fire leaves man with nothing.” I must confess, when I discovered that the man in question was homeless, my first thought was, “leaves man with nothing? Isn’t ‘nothing’ all that he had to begin with?”

But then I realized I was wrong. A shelter built of 50 old tires isn’t nothing. It’s an engineering feat. And the candle lit inside of it (the one that started the fire) isn’t nothing either. It’s light, heat, and a little bit of flickering companionship. CTV’s article says that the man “lost all of his possessions,” and I can’t help wondering what those possessions might have been. A few more spare candles? Some food, saved for a hungry day? A well-read paperback?

What’s in a home?

Is it the things inside that make it? The security of walls, of being able to make everything else “outside”?

There’s the old cliché, home is where the heart is. And most clichés come with an element of truth. But there seems to be a truth in our architecture too – in our obsession with building homes, defining spaces to call our own. Do we need to draw a line in the sand in order to feel that we belong someplace? Do we all need some form of house to call a home, even if it’s a collection of worn tires?

In many ways, CTV’s article read much like any other news report of a house fire. Everything was lost, nobody was injured, adjacent buildings still stand intact.

My grandmother recently told me the story of her daughter’s vacation house burning to the ground. She had been there for the weekend, and when she saw the nearby fire spreading, she phoned her daughter, who was out, to ask what she should save from the house. “Nothing,” was the answer she received. Still, my grandmother took a few family photos off the wall as she left. Later, she found out that there were digital backups, and she needn’t have bothered. But that instinct was there – to save something. Some piece of what we’ve built.

What’s in a home, when it’s burned to the ground? Will that man go back, after the cameras and fire trucks have gone, and sift through the ashes? Will he search for something to save, or will he simply move on, and start building again?

Portfolio [1]

Dwelling among the
bruised and infinitely binding world
are we not meant to
relinquish it all, to begin at last
the one abundant psalm of letting be?
-Dennis Lee, “Civil Elegies”

Edmonton is a difficult home. As much as I have longed for an easy definition of that word, “home,” over the years I’ve realized that this city will not offer it. When I think of Edmonton I feel a mixture of affection and alienation, sentimentality and sorrow. I could never quite explain why until about 6 years ago, when one of my older sisters introduced me to The Weakerthans. Through their music, the band attempts to negotiate their own troubled relationship with Winnipeg. Lead singer John K Samson questions why he cannot forgive the “frameworks labelled home” and mourns his city whose streets will “never take [him] anywhere.” I have often turned to the band’s work when I feel overwhelmed by the city, the land and our relationship with it.

Then, this year, I was introduced to Dennis Lee’s “Civil Elegies.” Lee wrote the long poem in 1967, when he was struggling to understand what it meant to live in an “outpost of empire.” He examines how Canada’s colonial legacies have manifested themselves in our oppressive urban environments. Our cities are clogged with spectres of those “born in Canada” who “died truncated, stunted, never at / home in native space and not yet / citizens of a body of kind.” Canada has “specialized in this deprivation.”

Taken together, the Weakerthans and Dennis Lee somehow manage to express those emotions with which I have struggled my entire life. While they write about Winnipeg and Toronto, respectively, their words easily apply to Edmonton. Moved by their honesty, I set out to document my own experiences in this city through photography. The result is a short portfolio featuring photos I have taken as I walk through Edmonton, accompanied by lines from both “Civil Elegies” and various songs by the Weakerthans. While I took the photos with the spirit of these works in mind, none of them were taken to match specific lines. This is the first of 6 installments.

Lee, Dennis. "Civil Elegies." Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. 33-57. Print.

Weakerthans. "Left and Leaving." Left and Leaving. Epitaph, 2000. MP3.

---. "This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open." Left and Leaving. Epitaph, 2000. MP3.