A City Collectively

Word clouds are so much fun, I needed an excuse to make another one. So here it is: via facebook, I asked people for one word that says “what this city means to you.” As expected, there were many references to winter weather, but there were some other, less expected words too. Here’s the image I ended up with, a collective perception of our city:

An Assemblage

In one of my other English courses, I’m studying the philosophies of Deleuze. It’s a lot of highly theoretical thinking that’s hard to pin down to earth, but one piece of Deleuzian theory has informed my perception of this city. He discusses literature which makes use of assemblages, an example being the work of Virginia Woolf, which I touched on in a recent post.

As a concept though, the assemblage need not be restricted to the literary world. By Deleuze’s definition, the assemblage is a whole that is not total – it is some group of entities that are brought together by a common affect which they create in their ensemble, and yet those entities remain distinct, and cannot be defined merely by the properties that they share.

That sounds abstract and completely inapplicable to an exploration of Edmonton, but bear with me here. See, as I write, photograph, map, and generally chronicle this city, I’m not finding entities that come together in a nice neat totality that can fit entirely within the name “Edmonton.” My experience of the city is more fragmentary, and yet it is not entirely unlinked. I’m not sure yet what the unifying “affect” is that this city holds for me, but I am beginning to get a sense of an assemblage.

Here is some form of illustration of that – perhaps it’s overly simplistic, but nonetheless, it creates another entity by which to examine this city. It’s a word cloud (thanks wordle), and essentially, it shows the various words from this blog, with font size indicating frequency. Common words like “a” and “the” are removed, but in an approximate way, it shows a literary assemblage of my Edmonton impressions. Make of it what you will, but at the very least, it’s kind of fun.

(click to enlarge)

Defining Home

Edmonton, n.

Pronunciation: /ˈɛdməntən/

1. The capital of the Canadian province of Alberta and the province’s second-largest city.

(adapted from Wikipedia, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

city, n.

Pronunciation:  /ˈsɪtɪ/

 

1. orig. A town or other inhabited place. 

2. spec. A title ranking above that of ‘town’.

e. In the dominion of Canada: a municipality of the highest class.

3. The community of the inhabitants of a city.

(adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

community, n.

Pronunciation:  Brit. /kəˈmjuːnɨti/ , U.S. /kəˈmjunədi/

1. A body of people or things viewed collectively.

a. The generality of people; the people as a group.Obs.

b. The body of people having common or equal rights or rank, as distinguished from the privileged classes; the commons; the commonalty.Obs.

2. A body of people who live in the same place, usually sharing a common cultural or ethnic identity. Hence: a place where a particular body of people lives.

 (adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed Feb 8, 2011)

Edmontonian, n.

1. A resident of Edmonton. 

As Seen from the Highlevel Bridge

Out of focus, blurry, over-exposed, then over-corrected, a photographic accident. But it also kind of looks like an impressionist painting of our city, of something that no impressionist ever bothered to paint.

Filmstrip

I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf. Think fragments of perception strung together in a fashion that is somehow meaningful, yet at the same time indefinable and elusive as you try to turn that string into a cohesive loop, a whole. And still, inexplicably, those pieces belong together. Somehow, I cannot perceive them as apart.

Edmonton is like that. The more I look at the city, the harder I find it is to apply that single word to it. What’s in a name? For me, in this case, not much. I don’t even know where the name “Edmonton” came from, though maybe at some point during this course, I’ll look it up. I see this city in snapshots, but not ones that can be divided into frames and distanced from eachother by vast expanses of white wall. It’s more like the negatives from old film cameras: independent pictures, but joined on a single length of translucent plastic, and held up to the same light in order to discern the images.

Whyte avenue bustle on a summer afternoon – orange, pink, green, blue, yellow, red bodies push past eachother, rainbow collision that defies an order of Roy G. Biv, favouring instead the contrast, movement, blend.

First snowfall (not actually the first, we’ve all seen it before, though that doesn’t seem to change anything) – the muffled silence of a blanket pressed over fall leaves, where the tips of brown grass can still be seen, and the shouts of snowball fights are just beginning to grow.

Heritage Days, and the smell of curry mixed with spring rolls, and every spice overlaced with the faint scent of sweat – it always seems to be the hottest weekend of the year. Or maybe that’s just the way it was once, the way I remember it.

Barren underground LRT stations filled to the brim with the song of a solo musician playing an untuned guitar and singing in a dischord that harmonizes perfectly with the notes of the city itself.

Limits

I took this photograph about a month ago, as our plane took off from the Edmonton International Airport. I thought I'd post this and talk about what Edmonton looks like from above, in the view that we usually get in maps, but then I realized that this isn't the Edmonton that we tend to look at maps of - in fact, I'm not even sure if this is Edmonton at all. 

Where do we draw the boundaries of our city? Does the land that we see in leaving a place, being linked to that place by our own association, become a part of it? 

Where are / what are our city limits?

Alberta Avenue

For my CSL (Community Service Learning) assignment as part of this course, I’m doing some work with the Nina Haggerty Centre, located at 9225 118 Ave. On Monday morning, I ventured over there for the first time, google map and notebook in hand.

On the bus from the Coliseum LRT station, I passed several pawn shops, a couple thrift stores, and in every shop window, a colourful sign reading:

We Believe in 118

Working together towards a safer community

I don’t know much about this part of town, mostly because it’s been designated as sketchy, risky, dangerous. 118^th Ave. is where the prostitutes work, that’s all I know. That’s all I’ve been told. Nobody ever mentioned that I might also find “Mama Afro Beauty” across from the “Kasoa Tropical Food Market,” and nearby, an intriguing little place called “The Carrot Community Arts Coffeehouse,” which has bright canvases displayed in its front window. It’s closed, but I read the signs on the door, and find that they have open mic on Saturday nights and Thursday afternoons, as well as live music on Friday nights. I’ll be coming back here, I can already tell.

The Nina Haggerty Centre itself, far from being the hole in the wall that I had expected, given the area, has a brand new storefront with big, welcoming windows. Already, this is a place where I’m excited to be.

View Larger Map

The Nina Haggerty Centre, under construction in this image, is now a beautifully finished building. Click the arrows to take a “walk” around the area.

Another thing I learned about the 118^th Ave. area: it has a name. Alberta Avenue. That sounds like a part of the city we ought to be proud of. And I think that it really is going that way – I’ve never been in a neighbourhood where its residents are so visibly trying to make their part of town a better place – not just safer, but more vibrant. The arts community is growing there, and I wonder if, ten or twenty years down the road, Alberta Avenue might be comparable to Whyte. 

Through

In my last post, I talked about trying to find the colour in a greyscale city. Today, when I was out and about, I came upon this picture, framed in the window of the University LRT station. I guess sometimes, the colour doesn't take much to find - sometimes, it's already bright, right there.

Greyscale

Reading Cathryn’s blog, I was reminded of this photograph that I took last summer: Edmonton in greyscale. The Highlevel Bridge, a chain-link fence, and buildings in the distance.

Cathryn said “When I think of Edmonton, I envision nothing but shades of grey”, and I have to say, oftentimes, I think similarly. In the wintertime especially, when I take my camera for a walk around the city, the images that I capture, although I’m shooting colour, seem to turn out black and white.

This photo, taken a few weeks ago, is not greyscale. If you look closely (click to enlarge), you can see a hint of blue around the grey corners of sky, and a suggestion of brown in the skeletal twigs. That’s what Edmonton is like for me – an image in almost-greyscale, but where, if you look closely enough, you can start to see (or maybe just imagine) subtle hints of colour.

And I like that. I like having to look through the grey to see.

X Marks the Spot

When I think of Edmonton as a city, generally, I’m not. Not thinking of it as a city, that is. I have my own places that constitute Edmonton for me. Not a city, but rather, for lack of a better word, a home. My places are clustered along lines – the line of the river, the line of the LRT. I visualize those lines in perpendicular intersection – perhaps because that’s how they run at their points closest to my house, or perhaps just because it’s simpler that way. In reality of course, the river winds as rivers do, and the LRT line is jagged to accommodate destinations and existing roads. Somewhere though, at the middle of this map, that imaginary perpendicular intersection does exist, as the train and the river both cross with my life.

I said that my Edmonton is clustered along those two lines, but I should be more specific. If you look at the cross on the map, the southwest section, just by that perpendicular intersection, that’s home. Or my house at least. Home extends to the right of the yellow line too – Whyte Avenue, Garneau, Old Strathcona. On the other side of the blue line, to the north, is my downtown – the Citadel, Winspear, City Centre Mall, Churchill Square, the Legislature.

Edmonton is not only that central intersection though – even though I may leave much of the city unexplored, those lines still define the breadth of the city for me. I’ve ridden the length of the LRT in one go: south to north to south again, and at least twice in my childhood, I’ve gone the length of the North Saskatchewan by canoe. So I suppose I have a sense of a broader Edmonton, an Edmonton as a city. But that broader Edmonton is not where I live – I live in the crook of river and LRT, a fictional perpendicular zone that’s real enough to me.

First, a name.

About a year ago, I came up with the idea of starting a forum for Edmonton news – but not your ordinary headlines, there’s plenty of that out there already. I wanted something more my style: something that would be creative in approach, less concerned about fact than impression, something that could show off the soul that I know this city has. The title would be clever: I would reverse the name of our city’s main newspaper, at the same time alluding to the more casual, creative form of my project. Journal Edmonton.

About a year ago, I abandoned the idea, leaving little more than a few preliminary sketches saved on my computer, and an empty blogger page. It wasn’t that I lost interest, I just didn’t know how to get a project like that off the ground. I wanted a collective of writers, but how would I recruit them? I wanted lots of readers to comment and open discussions, but how would I attract their attention?

I still haven’t really figured out the answers to those questions, but circumstances have lead me to open this idea once more. I’m now a student at the University of Alberta, where one of my courses focuses on Edmonton literature. As part of the course, we’re required to keep a blog that reflects our interpretations and discoveries of the city. So yes, I’m doing this for credit. But it’s more than that – I finally have an excuse (and yes, I know that I shouldn’t need excuses to do the things I love) to do something I’ve been pondering for some time.

By nature of my circumstances, this will begin as a classroom blog, and for the duration of the course, all of the posts will be my own. And the comments, for the most part, will likely be by my classmates. But I’m hoping that a few other readers might jump on board and write their comments too. And maybe, by the end of the semester, I’ll have the beginnings of a community forum like I envisioned a year ago. Maybe I’ll have the means to open this blog up to more writers, to let it grow with the life of this city. Maybe, after this semester, I’ll be too burnt out to ever write on this blog again. But either way, I’ll learn something about the feasibility of this project, and my place in a city that I call home.