Clearly, The Gorge is spiked with Lethe water

[felis_ultharus]

A certain amount of fatalism is building up in regard to my exams -- I've hit a level of panic that prevents me from doing anything, and that means being even less prepared for my exam on Friday.

I've been poking around Wikipedia, and discovered to my chagrin that someone has added a very glurgy and highly biased piece at the end of the article I wrote about my hometown. I haven't altered the article, because I'm too new to Wikipedia to know how to go about cleaning it up.

This is actually part of a trend -- the whole Township of Esquimalt has sunk into a collective denial after the Reena Virk killing -- which happened a block from the house I grew up in, under the bridge I walked over to school -- and Nicholas Chow Johnson's murder.

Growing up, I saw a lot more violence than that in that town. So did everyone I knew. I'd say a good 99% of it went unreported, so it's not the kind of thing you can reference in a Wikipedia article.

But I probably knew more children being beaten by their parents than I knew kids who weren't. I spent grades 3 to 10 getting brutalized by classmates, and was getting death threats for being gay by grade 12. Bullying is rampant, and gangs have steadily gotten worse, more organized, and better armed.

There's a new anti-gang project there, but it's too soon to tell if it's effective. Everyone's already declaring victory, but the root problems are still there.

The boosterism disturbs me -- when I last tried to research crime and Esquimalt for my novel, almost no one was talking about the it.

Now it seems to be discussed all over the net, but mostly as a kind of weird public relations exercise where everyone invokes it to refuse to acknowledge it exists. The tone of the conversation is vaguely panicked and a little too enthusiastic -- like a pep rally where everyone's trying to ignore that the cheerleaders are dying one by one.

Since my novel deals so heavily with violence in that town, I can imagine how it'd be received there, if it's published and noticed. Obviously not well.

But I never believed that kind of PR is useful. Nothing changes until it's understood, and the mirror of art is the most useful route to that kind of understanding.

Esquimalt's problems go way beyond what a novel could do for it -- the poverty is problem number one, but in a neo-conservative society poverty is never seen as anything other than the result of laziness. But that's a different social problem to be addressed.

Beyond the poverty, art can help. Once the basic problems of food, clothing, and shelter are satisfied, a damaged society needs to remember and to reflect to heal. Art does that best.

Besides a novel can give a place a sense of its self -- a sense of its own existence. I doubt anything I'll write will be as good as Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'Occasion (The Tin Flute). But I'd like to think I could make a small contribution that way -- to help do for Esquimalt what she did for the St-Henri neighbourhood of Montreal by dealing head-on with its problems.

Maybe, at least, if Esquimalt had a sense of itself as anything other than an oubliette, people might stay and try to build a life there -- maybe its young people wouldn't look for a sense of self in gangs, or keep their heads down and flee into the world outside.

Timothy Findley said that novels and stories were a way "of singing our way out of darkness." I really believe that. I just hope someone hears the song, and understands.

Comments

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

I eagerly await your novel. These are important issues to deal with, and as Chomsky has pointed out, science is nowhere near the level of understanding of human afffairs as that exhibited in the novel. Or thereabouts.

In the meantime, I've been doing shit on Wikipedia since 2002 so maybe I can give you a hand there. You can leave any comments or questions at my WP talk page, if you like. There shouldn't be any difficulty in setting the record straight in the Esquimalt article, but there are some spoken and less-spoken protocols to deal with...

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I hope the novel is as good in the end as people are expecting. I've been reading Timothy Findley lately and that always gives me an inferiority complex about writing :)

I agree with Chomsky (there as in most things). I've always a little suspicious of the "social sciences" -- or downright sceptical actually.

Science is well-equipped to study the laws of physics, because those are pretty regular. I think it's poorly equipped to study human beings because we don't operate by the same regular rules. Generalizations about people or sub-groups of people are usually naive at best, and bigotry at worst. Plus, social statistics gathered from polls seem troubingly inaccurate.

On top of it all, I've seen such abuses from various social-science fields that I'm uncomfortable with any scientific approach to human behaviour. Sociology frequently slips towards racism, and the abuse of power associated with the right to define insanity has been a recurring theme of psychology. Economics (especially as "econometrics") has tried to define itself as a science when it's really more of a religion.

Social sciences make use of the aura of science to push particular agendas. I often wonder if they're even trying to understand people, or rather impose their view of things.

A good novelist approaches things holistically. Everything is in their purview, all possibilities are open, and they're not so much out to define and limit as to show vectors of possibility.

Timothy Findley's Headhunter is all about this question -- of what literature possesses that science cannot offer when it comes to understanding people and helping us to improve our lives.

And thank you for the kind offer, though I doubt I'll be able to take you up on it until after my second exam in a week.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you, and I am a 'social scientist'. There are two branches of sociology, quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative one gets entirely too much attention, considering their methods, although mathematically no different than the statistics done in fields like ecology, are conceptually about half a step away from reading goat entrails. The qualitative branch, where I sit, is not the science of human analysis, but the art of asking questions and proposing potential judgements.

Unfortunately, if you have numbers, you get money, which means that most qualitative sociologists don't make the news, and toil away for life as an associate professor somewhere, or make a sporadic living writing books like "Bowling Alone". A lot of the good models for qualitative sociology (and qualitative anthropology, for that matter) are not officially in the field at all. One of the best I've run across is actually Douglas Hofstadter, who is technically a physicist and mathematician. ^_^ Linguists are traditionally good at it, but from a language-based viewpoint. Media theorists, if they are not total crocks whose only trick is "proving" that video games cause violence, also tend to be good bets.

It's one of those subjects in which, to do well, you must also know a lot about other things -- essentially, you have to know about a good broad cross-section of human experience in order to have some worthwhile opinions on why we do any of it. It's really more akin to using literary analysis on human beings than it is to anything that involves hard numbers. These features put it beyond the reach of students who don't deal well in an interdisciplinary environment, unfortunately, so our ranks are usually fairly small.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

My roommate, montrealais, is a Hofstadter fan. I still haven't read his stuff.

I sort of sensed the difference between "qualitiative" and "quantitative" when I met you -- it's what I was trying to get at clumsily when I said I thought you were a symbolic interactionist :)

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Usually I am accused of being a "polymath" or a "freak". It depends on the vocabulary size of the person doing the talking. ^^;; I have my nose into everything, but social philosophy is what my degree is actually IN, thus ensuring that I can never, ever, not in a million years use it to get a job. It's a good thing I never really cared about being rich, honestly. ^^;;

I don't talk to your roommate much, actually. I have this vague suspicion he thinks I'm a gibbering idiot, but he can't think it too hard or I'd've heard about it, probably at greath length, by now. My social skills are interesting and occasionally non-existant, and I haven't talked to him enough to work out the non-surface parts of his personality yet... [END mad sociologst]

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

Roomie just brought this one to my attention. If I've done anything overt to give you that impression, I sincerely apologize! My opinion of you from your posts is nothing but good.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Oh no worries. I know I'm far more paranoid than life actually warrants. ^^; It comes from being one of the kids who got playground balls kicked at her head on a regular basis in school. It's just the little gibbering voice that worries about this; the sane part of me remembers that I ran into you first on the SDMB, and that if you really thought I was an idiot, I'd've heard about it at creative length by now. ^_^

If I'm making no sense, just give me a funny look and move on. ^^;;;

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

"...you have to know about a good broad cross-section of human experience in order to have some worthwhile opinions..."

I believe this is true in general. I find the obligation to specialisation in academia to be deeply disturbing and counterproductive. The real mark of erudition, I think, it to see the connections between things that otherwise seem far apart, and to be able to see and formualte general principles that underly, suffuse and unite many subjects in many fields. Knowing the lifecycle of a nematode is worthwhile in some way, but shouldn't be considered the pinnacle of a life of research and thought. If you know what I mean.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I don't know if that's specifically erudition so much as an educated outcome of end-of-the-bell-curve-smart. You can stuff some people full of knowledge until they burst at the seams and they can't make connections outside each individual subject; and there are other people who can walk into a course or a project totally ignorant and manage to learn by analogy. It is a mindset I've run into first and foremost in the hacker community (hacker, not cracker -- hackers are the white hats, or at least the hatless-and-somewhat-apathetic), where I essentially grew up. (My parents met when they were both working at BBN in Masachusetts. I have multi-generational geek street cred. ^_^) It's also part of a social structure I would love to study, but I'm having a hell of a time getting any instructors to back me, because no matter how you try to word the proposal it sounds horribly un-PC and elitist to the people holding the money.

If you have not seen it yet, and are willing to wade through pages and pages of geek sociology, the Appendices to The Jargon File contain one of the best, if sometimes eccentric, descriptions of that whole kind of Geist I've ever seen.

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

Holy crap! The jargon file is huge! I'll continue to check it out, though.

As for intelligence, etc., we all feel we know it when we see it, and yet... Intelligence (as Lewontin, Kamin and Rose said) is that which intelligence tests measure. I'm reminded of an interesting moment on CBC's The Fifth Estate many years ago, when the host, interviewing a young man with Down's Syndrome, said, you have one more chromosome than I, you must be lucky. And he said, Would you like my lucky chromosome?

Nevertheless, it's clear that people have different intellectual abilities. It's more problematic to say which are the more valuable. The measured/measurable abilities seem to hold sway in our culture.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

The Jargon File is indeed huge. There's some meta-info attached to it that gives it some backstory and also sheds some light on the self-analytic tendencies of the group whose linguistic history it chronicles. This is one of the reasons I think it would be fabulous to write sociological treatises on them. I'd never have to sneak around -- I may have picked the only group of people on Earth who would be deeply offended if I didn't plunk myself down in their midst and say, "Hi. I'm a sociologist. I'll be watching you as you run in your individual wheels like hamsters. If you have any personal observations you think would be valuable additions to my notes, please email them to me at..."

Incidentally, although the Jargon File itself is geared towards techncial slang, jargon and in-jokes, the hacker culture itself is open to other fields. You can 'hack' just about anything that requires intellectual ability and creativity. The internal definition of 'hack' is not the 'breaking into computers that you are not supposed to touch' of the popular media, but is more along the lines of 'taking a thing with multiple parts and aspects and making it do something clever, possibly (probably) something it was not supposed to do in the first place'. Anything that can be hacked also has a 'study of' subject that can also be hacked -- so, you can hack programming, or you can hack data organisation, which is the study of how to program. Likewise, in a less-technical field, a good author can be said to 'hack' languages in the same way as Chomsky 'hacks' linguistics, and musicians like the Beatles 'hacked' music in the same way as a friend of mine 'hacks' music theory by combining it with English lit and psychology.

Just about the only thing I know of that cannot be hacked is brute labor. And even then you can probably technically hack the job the labor was supposed to be applied to by being smarter than the shovel and making it easier on yourself somehow. ^^;

It's fascinating stuff, at least to me. More so because I grew up in it and was surprised (and frequently disappointed) when I learned that most people do not share the viewpoint.

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

It is fascinating stuff. intuitively I understood "hacking" in something like the way you describe, but I didn't know that the word was actually used that way.

Do some people "hack" brute labour by creating robots to work assembly lines? And do other people (say, CEOs) "hack" (in a negative sense) brute labour by compelling less well-off people to do it for them?

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

The actual act of hacking is neither good nor bad, although hackers as a group tend to be (sometimes overly-)sympathetic to other people and are generally folks you'd want on your side in a pinch. Constructing a robot would be a form of hacking robotics, obviously, but whether it's to be used for doing jobs other people don't want to, or used to force humans out of the labor market is not really a consideration.

Compelling people is the psychological equivalent of hitting them over the head with a shovel: it's neither elegant nor clever, and thus not hacking. (Hackers don't like brute threats and don't take well to them, although if you manage to subtly and intelligently weasel them into doing something, they may grudgingly respect you long enough to do it.) You *can* hack people. It's called 'social engineering'. Probably the most legendary form of it is calling up a telco operator and convincing him/her that you're a technician and you really just need this one passcode really quick -- it works a lot, and hackers collect passwords like they do stray keys.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Incidentally -- you can pop over to my journal and ask this stuff anytime. I don't do politics, as it makes me a terrified insomniac, but my first BA is in sociology with an emphasis in comm-theory. I grew up soaking in the kind of stuff the Jargon File talks about, so if you run into something that doesn't come across that well in the translation to 'normal', I can probably explain. ^_^ Nice to meet you, fellow social philosopher!

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

Ah, my BA is in Cultural Studies, but fortunately I've moved beyond that since. I have no genuine knowledge of the computer world, it simply seems to be the country I ended up in, with Michelin Guides written by non-literates... In other words, I will probably call on you. Nice to meet you!

[pinkville.livejournal.com]

That's a very good summary of some of the problems with social sciences, I think.

"Social sciences make use of the aura of science to push particular agendas. I often wonder if they're even trying to understand people, or rather impose their view of things."

And I think this is generally correct. The science of the social is certainly in its infancy (at best) and there seems to be a serious compulsion (often spurred by academic competitiveness and defensiveness vis-à-vis the hard sciences) to impose the beguiling formulas and mechanisms of, say, physics, on to the realm of the social and psychological. But Chomsky also points out that virtually nothing is known (in scientific terms) of the human mind (one of the key reasons he studies linguistics, becaue it's the part of the mind we understand the most, however little that still is), nor of the mechanisms of society, e.g. economics, etc. So it's extrememly premature to proceed as though these fields are on the same footing as thermodynamics.

I haven't read Headhunter (The Wars and Not Wanted on the Voyage, yes). Thanks for the tip.

[rougemacabre.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm definitely interested in reading your novel!

It's strange how small towns are. We have some very bad gang problems where I grew up as well. Actually, just last year, some gang members started a shootout in parking lots and the bullets ended up going into a nearby popular and very populated restaurant. Fortunately, no one was killed - which is pretty astounding - but it keeps escalating.

The drugs (especially the home meth labs), the spousal abuse, the bullying, the bigotry - they're all major issues, yet of course, it's just "good ol' small time America" to outsiders.

Your book may be about Esquimalt, but it sounds to me it potentially touches on issues that are prevalent and pertinent to small towns in general.

Sounds like a really interesting piece. I look forward to it. ^^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I sometimes joke that I ran away from my dangerous small town to the nice, safe big city ^_^

But it's true. Small towns are often dangerous places, but the myth portrays them as little paradises. I can see that from an ecological point of view -- the one thing I miss about BC was all the green space and lack of pollution.

But from a social standpoint, small towns are generally horrible places, generally bigoted, conformist, and crime-ridden.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

...Christ on a crutch. All I grew up with was a pervasive, flatline sort of dysfunction in the neighborhood, and of course the lunatics in my own home. Not that it was fun out there, mind, but I had a string of game consoles and an internet connection. You've seen Edward Scissorhands, yes? My neighborhood was just like that, except without the pretty paint colors, and, even more tragically, without Johnny Depp. My mother was even the damn Avon lady for a while. Our "violence problem" consisted of kids chucking rocks at other kids, and the occasional catfight out by the lockers. I was in the Yuppie part of the town, needless to say.

On the other hand, Arizona is a fabulous market for any kind of desert plant. Hemp and salvia are desert plants. So are agave and mescal. We were also bored out of our skulls. I'm surprised there weren't more drug busts at my high school. They may have just been quiet, or nobody cared enough to give more than a suspension for dime bags in the locker.

There is an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." It sounds like someone hit you with it -- good for you for getting some worthwhile art out of the experience.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's a curse that will always come true, because all times are interesting :)

But yeah -- I've seen the Edward Scissorhands worlds, too. I have an aunt and uncle who live in such a suburb of Toronto (which, interestingly, they share between time in Phoenix, where my uncle works.) There are some interesting psychological dramas going on in those places.

And I keep forgetting that there are places where smoking pot can get you arrested! It just goes to show how I've come to take Montreal for granted!

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Naaaa? I knew you were all crazy-liberal as compared to Arizona, but I wasn't aware that THC wasn't a controlled substance.. well, basically anywhere in the Western world that isn't Amsterdam. Or is there technically a law on the books that is never actually enforced, similar to the way it's technically illegal to cohabitate without benefit of marriage down here, but that doesn't stop anybody from shacking up whenever they feel like it?

I've never actually tried pot, I am vaguely embarrassed to report. Not directly anyhow; the dorm I lived in when I first got here has radiators that run through the walls and no baffles between rooms. Turns out pot smoke makes me sneeze unendingly, which is no fun. ^^; Salvia divinorum is legal in the state of Arizona, although not in some others, and a ruling against ephedra was recently overturned by a court in Utah, of all places. (Full of Mormons, National Guard installations, and empty desert. Hole on the face of the Earth, with few individual exceptions.) The only thing I've ever bothered using recreationally, other than alcohol, is DXM, which is an OTC cough medication down here.

Actually, I think I need to check out international travel regulations on drugs before I get too attached to any of the exchange programs I've been looking at. There will be hell and misery if I land myself someplace where I can't get diphenhydramine without a Rx -- no other antihistamine has ever worked on me, at all.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

We usually think you guys are crazy-conservative :p

THC is not quite legal. And there are parts of this country where I would not want to be caught smoking it -- rural Alberta, for example, which is our answer to rural Texas.

Still, in Montreal and Vancouver, you can pretty much get away with smoking it anywhere. If a kid is underage, or if the officer is in a bad mood, worst they'll do is confiscate it, often throwing it away in the presence of the people it's been confiscated from to prove the police aren't smoking it themselves.

Not sure about Toronto, but I suspect it's the same.

Marijuana has almost been decriminalized twice in the last few years -- meaning you'd get a parking-type ticket rather than jail time for it. The first time, Prime Minister Chrétien was forced out of office by the political machinations of his rival, Paul Martin, and all government bills not yet passed were cancelled.

The second time, Martin, under pressure for corruption within his party, gambled on an election and lost -- and now we have a really right-wing git of a Prime Minister, so it ain't happening soon.

Simple marijuana possession was briefly legalized by a court decision in Ontario, but a higher court overturned it. In that brief interval, a woman reported her bag of pot stolen, and the police had to get it back for her!

Civilization did not crumble.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Technically speaking, marijuana is or was legal at a federal level. The problem was, that to transport or sell it, you had to pay taxes on it, and get some special "tax paid" stamps from the government. In order to get those stamps, you had to show the nice g-man your stash.

Yeah, that didn't last long. They never printed any stamps either. I don't know if the law is still on the books, or if it was overturned when the DEA was put together.

It sounds like THC is treated like underage drinking in most college towns. Unless you have managed to give yourself alcohol poisoning and get EMS called on your idiot self, or have done something really stupid like drive, a bored policeman comes to the party and recites about a thousand times: "Underage drinking is prohibited in the state of Arizona normally I would be required to give you a ticket for the violation but since this is your first time (note: it is almost never anyone's first time getting nailed for this) I'm letting you off with a warning if you get someone sober to drive you STRAIGHT HOME." Sometimes if the party is small enough, they'll take you home themselves, and you get to come back to your dorm in a cop car.

I think we're crazy-conservative too, frankly. Arizona is especially bad. We're basically the redneck overflow seating section -- you know, in case Texas is full that day. My parents, who are also crazy-liberal by AZ standards, moved out here 20+ years ago because my father's an electronics engineer, most of the tech jobs are on either coast, and it's much cheaper to live here than in Massachusetts. Inexplicably, they didn't bother to leave once they were upper-middle class and could afford it pretty much anywhere else.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

"Arizona is especially bad. We're basically the redneck overflow seating section -- you know, in case Texas is full that day."

This is how I'll think of Aruizona from now on ^_^