Before

After

Downtown at twilight

Bedroom window, dusk

Hi-tech

If you're trying to access the Internet with your DSL modem, you could do worse than to properly plug the phone cable into the jack in the wall...

The move is done. Long live the move.

Western Front

Sorry for the quiet. Fucking carpal tunnel syndrome. Bastards. We are indeed a stiff-necked people.

Anyhow, as my fingers seem relatively functional right now, I thought I'd answer the challenge from Phoff and Murphy and do this book list thing. By the way, on what 19th century planet was this game conceived? No magazines? Newspapers? Web sites? Anyway.

1. Number of books I own: About 200. Many of my faves have been lent out or were borrowed to begin with, meaning my shelf feels a little hollow. I recently threw out about 65 New Yorkers, so there's some free real estate.
   
   
2. Reading now: Sort of nothing. Trying to dig "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand, but am also flipping through "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris and "What's the Matter with Kansas" by Thomas Frank. Perpetually skimming "America: The Book" by the Daily Show writers. Thinking about finishing some others I've begun but abandoned (Bernard Avishai's "The Tragedy of Zionism." Isn't his Harper's essay enough?).
   
   
3. Last five I read: Who the hell remembers? Umm..., in some kind of non-chronological order:
   
1. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer
2. "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy"
3. "Bonfire of the Vanities," Tom Wolfe
4. (Most of) "The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed," Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
5. (Most of) "At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century"


4. Last five I bought:
1. The first three
2. "The Metaphysical Club," Louis Menand
3. Can't remeber. This exercise would rock if my books weren't packed in boxes right now.
   
   
5. Favourite books: This is tough. How about five I remember fondly?
1. "Empire Falls," Richard Russo. See old posts about Russo's craftsmanship.
2. "As a Drive Leaf," Milton Steinberg. A modern Jewish identity tale set at the height of Hellenic times.
   
3. "Shampoo Planet," Douglas Coupland. I hardly remember the book; I remember well that it was one of the first books I really read.
4. "Genesis," God/Moses/Some Guy (Ed. Ezra). Did a wonderful seminar with three other students and a philosophy teacher at Dawson College. Read Genesis after Plato's Republic, comparing the two as manuals of political philosophy. Mesmerizing stuff.
5. "The Devil, Delfina Varela and the Used Chevy," Louie Garcia Robinson. Who? What? An enchanting book I picked up at a used book sale for a dollar, on the strength of the odd title and the interesting cover. Lovable. Gut-busting funny. Many books paint pictures. Some play like records. This one smells of steamy kitchens and summer sun. A real treat; sadly, Robinson hasn't published since, and it's out of print.

Saturday

By far the King of All Days. Full of the optimism that comes with the knowledge that, no matter what, the weekend doesn't end soon (take that, Sunday night) and the energy restored by "some good sack time," as Kramer once put it. Add lots of sunshine and a nice breeze and you've got yourself a winner.

Montrealers have a bit of a geographical bias problem. Mt. Royal, the Plateau and the waterfront are more or less equidistant from pretty much any point downtown, yet the psychological distance of walking down Peel to the canal is much greater than than walking up to the Mountain or up and east to the Plateau. Part of the problem is that there's more to see walking up Peel than walking down.

Anyhow, this afternoon I took a long walk along the Lachine Canal, from the Charelvoix Lock to the Peel Basin, where I decided I'd probably tear a hole through my old sandals before making it to the port. I can't remember ever walking that stretch of the Canal; it was lovely. In-line skaters and cyclists whizzed by me, while many folks were picnicking or catching some shade under the trees that line the water. Kayakers and paddleboaters made the Canal seem beyond inviting, and the great views of Montreal's industrial past in the foreground and its unique downtown in the background were a treat.

The surrounding neighbourhoods are coming alive (some more than others, as I'll soon find out) and there's a feeling that they might yet be restored. I spent a weekend in Chicago two months ago and was thrilled to be in a major city that so embraced its waterfront. If you're ever there, take one of the architecture riverboat cruises (I caught mine at the Navy Pier and learned about most of the city's 100+ skyscrapers).

Montreal can continue to expand to the South Shore and Laval, or it can make the centre of town, much of which is down and out and ready for a comeback, chez-nous. There's some politial will, and real estate developers have begun to conclude that there's money to be made. The Société du Havre has done a great job imagining our city twenty years from now. Loto-Québec wants to bring the Casino downtown, which, though it would make gambling a bigger problem than it ought to be, represents some kind of vision for a large-scale project to invigorate the area south of downtown, stimulating further development and making the city centre its coeur. So who's going to lead the way? If Mayor Once, Mayor Forever Pierre Bourque makes it a priority, he'll be close to getting my vote this fall. Same goes for Mayor Uncle Junior. In the meantime, leave it to a bunch of bright McGillians.

Time to find a terrase.

HTML Broken

No idea why this blog has been coming up all screwy in IE lately. Must be some post with too many bandwidth-stealing pictures. Anyhow, I can't figure it out, so switch to Firefox or Opera.

Some Things Are Worth Repeating

And the inexhaustible Matthew Yglesias makes a point that isn't made enough these days:

It's all been said before, but it bears endless repetition -- it's a strange form of moral clarity indeed which argues that America's conduct in the world should be judged in accordance with the lowest depths of human depravity.

Indeed, one might say that the clearest signpost that a truly noxious rot has taken root in our culture is that it even occurs to people to argue in this manner. Can you imagine Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot all sitting in a dock somewhere in hell pointing fingers at each other and maintaining that they should be let off because the others were worse? "Stalin killed the most!" "But Pol Pot killed the most percentagewise!" "But just think what Adolf here would have done if he'd won the war!" I like to think we wouldn't take such statements very seriously. And, no, George W. Bush is not as bad as Pol Pot. Good for him -- mom and dad must be proud. He even compares favorably to Richard Nixon in most respects (albeit not in his attitude toward very poor Americans). Let's give him a medal.