The New Yorker Comes Too Fast

...Betty swings from the limb of a tree...

I can’t keep up my reading with the pace that The New Yorker drops through my mailbox. 

So I have a set of them, now clipped together with a wing-clip, and whenever I get a spare ten minutes I sit down to the delicious prose of the articles. 

 Bonnie had some time to read and asked me which of the magazines she should start with. 

 I thought the answer would be the latest one, otherwise she might feel the anxiety I feel about trying to catch up by starting back in May or June. 

... Betty plants her foot on the bole of a tree ...

 Later in the day I asked her if she was going to recommend the article she was reading: “Motherland” by Jiayang Fan. 

 “Nope,” she said. “Too painful.” 

 Later in the day she took back her no recommendation and said that some of the reading pain was lifted by the end of the article. Yes, I should read it. 

Bonnie, knowing I hadn’t read the article, went on to talk about our shared experience for three weeks in China and how her feelings about that experience were weaving in and out of the pages as she read Jiayang Fan’s prose. 

 I love living in a house where someone is reading the same book or magazine that I am reading. I stayed up late into the night, reading both the “Motherland” article and a few more essays – ready for the conversation to begin with her in the morning. 

 I read with a pen in my hand, lately, circling words I don’t know and running a line out to the margin where I put a question mark. 

... a little swinging force for a climbing start ...

 I hope that in the future, I will sit down and look up all of those words in an electrotonic dictionary so that I can feel more of the power of those words, having now only an intimation of what they mean to me, words like sycophantic, wan, precarity, reductive, hagiographies – beautiful words. 

I always have the power to understand words in their context.  Every Grade Oner catches onto that quickly.  But most of the words I find in The New Yorker, the ones that I stop to savour, I have never used when I am typing.  I wonder if the words will ever flow out of my mind and onto the page as they seem to with their authors. 

"I bet you didn't know a could climb a tree, grandmother."

I am looking forward to the article called “Aging Ungracefully”. 

Even at 1 am, I can stay awake to read the review of Sigrid Nunez’s novel, “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead). 

The novel takes on the theme of stripping old age of whatever illusions are left of it. 

Oh, so much in life to read. 

So much in old age to strip away.

Arta

Talking with Theorists

Yesterday, I watched Conversations with Legal Thinkers hosted by Julen Etxabe, Canada Research Chair, Jurisprudence and Human Rights.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0wHgIBZno

He was interviewing Rebecca Johnson.

Rebecca sent me the link, a zoom call I remember being made to her in the summer.  

That hour of conversation has been edited to one half hour.  Being her mother, I watched the link.  

I have been thinking about some of her points since then, discussing them with Bonnie.  

I am always curious about theory.  A couple of years ago I sat in a class Rebecca was teaching and she was talking about law theory through film.  She asked her students, "How many of you consider yourself theorists.  How many of you would, when asked what you do, say, "I am a law theorist."

Not a hand went up.  Not mine, either, though in my heart I was saying, yes, "I do law theory.  That is why I am sitting in this class and thinking about these films and about the law theorists Rebecca points to in her lecture."

In the video Rebecca invites all of us to think about theory again and invited us to consider the fact that we all live in theory, ... and do theory.

What did I enjoy about the film?

1. She reminded me again that all of us live in several legal orders though we may not have the language for that yet.

2. I liked the point that everytime we watch film, or listen to two people debate a point and then we add thoughts of our own to others who are listening as well, we are doing theory.

What made me nervous about the film?

1. I felt myself cringe when she referred to the drink of forgetfulness -- even though Wordsworth refers to it (Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ....).  I don't think Rebecca wasn't referring to that 'forgetting' but to a  path I have taken a little further down the line.

2. I don't even want to refer to the other cringe worth phrase.  Anyone can make a guess in the comment box below.  

Nowadays, giving 30 minutes to someone is a conscious gift, both when it is given and when it is received.  Thanks to Julen Etxabe and Rebecca for letting me listen in to their questions and answers.

Arta

PS.  For more about how Rebecca saw the interview see Conversations with Legal Theorists.  And a big thanks to Rebecca for making the links in this post to the interviews of other legal theorists.  I will have my note book out and eventually watch all of them.  What else could interest me on a lazy, warm, autumn afternoon.

Sociology and Duncan Carter-Johnson

 SOC 160  - Assignment

My name is Duncan Carter-Johnson and I am a 6’3 agnostic white Canadian male college student who lives in Victoria, BC. My family and I moved here before I was one year old from New Brunswick though I have no recollection of the place and consider my home town to be Victoria.

According to “23-and-me”, I have close to 100% western European DNA and what I know about my family solidifies this image.

Benjamin Franklin Johnson

On my mothers’ side of the family, there is a long history of Mormonism dating back hundreds of years where my ancestors traversed Canada and the United States leading back to Europe. My family are unquestionably settlers that came across from Europe in the 1700s, looking to find a place to live that was better than where they came from. I have been schooled in the history of colonization, which paints these ancestors in a negative light. Though this is entirely fair and justified, I do not have disdain for them. I have very strong connections with this side of the family, which is also unusually large. 

To make this simple, my great-great-great-grandfather had 7 wives and 45 children. My grandmother mocks him, telling us that at the end of his life, none of the wives would move with him to Mexico (they had all pretty much been strong women who raised their children on farms, doing the work to keep everything going). Luckily, there has been no polygamy in the family since then, but the family is large. 

Names of the wives of Benjamin Franklin Johnson

In the summer, I spend some time in the Shuswap (Secwepemculucw) with my family, on 60 acres of land along the lake. There are usually 80 or so people there, with all the great-aunts and uncles, and too many cousins and second cousins for me to reasonably count. There is so much variety in people’s politics and interests and abilities. There is lots of time for music, and games. Despite the size of the family, it is very close, and people are in contact with each other year-round. For example, we have a family blog with new posts appearing every few days.

Both my parents are important in my life, but my mom’s extended family has been more powerfully present in my life and has shaped my identity. My father’s side of the family is a bit more of a mystery. He was adopted by his parents when they were older. So he was raised by a father who had been wounded during the second world war, and by parents who had lived through the depression. They were also roman catholic. Apart from allergies and interactions with my paternal grandmother, my father’s family is less present in my life than my mother’s. Despite both my parents coming from religious households, neither enforced those beliefs on me or my brother. They gave us space to come to conclusions about religion on our own.

When I think about what makes up my identity or ancestry, I honestly am quite confused about how to think of myself. I was born in Canada which makes me a Canadian citizen through Canada as a whole was built upon another society that is still present today. Thinking about challenges to Canadian legitimacy throws into question not only how I think about the country but how I think about myself. My ancestors came to the Americas from England and parts of France. But other than knowing this, I have little to no connection with those parts of the world. In my life, I have many connections to my family in Victoria and in Salmon Arm. These are where I feel most connected to today.

When others see me, I presume they see the stereotypical white male that has a relatively easy life without any hardship. I would like to say that these presumptions aren’t true and that they misrepresent me and my life, but I can’t. In my life I have not been racially profiled, I have never had to worry about access to clean food, water, and shelter. I have had access to learning resources and private tutors to help me when I have had trouble in school. I live in an upper-middle-class household with two working white-collar parents that are present in my life. I know that I fit the stereotype to the letter. Part of this bothers me though I don’t let it affect how I see myself.

I see myself as someone who is first and foremost a total nerd; from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, I have invested hours of my life living these stories out in my head. I love to debate and question things I hear which has made me very interested in history and sociology. I am a fan of bland foods and like to expand my number of friends when I get the opportunity. I have grown up on traditional first nations territory both here in Victoria by Mount PKOLS and in Salmon Arm in Secwepemc territory during the summers. The stories I have heard (both from my grandmother and from Secwepemc storytellers) and the experiences I have had there have changed my perspectives on some established norms, and have helped shape me into the person I am today, regardless of my ancestry. It is true for me as much as it is for anyone, that you can’t fully understand a person by who their ancestors were. Our ancestry may provide a paper trail that lets us connect back to pieces of our history that may or may not be relevant today. To me, that provides only an outline of who you are, and the rest of your experiences fill things in.

Duncan Carter-Johnson

Deer hide tanning: Part 2 - fleshing the skin

So now that you have all the right tools and have watched a bunch of videos about fleshing the hide, it's time to get to work.  Lucky for me, I also had an in person coach -- Leo.  He has prepared many a goat hide to be used on his drums and has done this fleshing process on dozens and dozens of goat skins.

This is gonna get graphic.

 Take your skin out of the water and drape it over your fleshing station. 

 

It's going to have some knarly chunks of fat and meat that you need to pull off.  You can pull off the big pieces with your fingers/hands.

Next, get out your fleshing tool and start scraping from neck toward tail to gut under the membrane and the  rest of the fat and flesh. I clamped the hide to the pipe at first to get started, but then ended up just using my body weight to pin the hide against the tube as I drew the scraping tool down.

End, result:  two clean hides with gorgeous fur on one side.  So, so thick and beautiful (spot the dog wishing he could chew on the hides). You'd be surprised how "not gross" the hide is once all the flesh is scraped off.  It's really quite cool.

Now the hides go back in the bins in clean water to soak for a couple of days to help loosen off the hair.  I'll have to check on them once a day to see if the hair is loosening off and to make sure the water is not getting funky.  It may take 3 days and I will need to change the water a couple of times. Next step will be scraping all the hair off. 

Mary

Tanning a deer hide: part 1 -- acquiring a skin and the right tools

When we moved to Alberta last fall, Naomi was able to start learning about hunting with her Uncle Richard.  She got to go out with him a few times, but you don't skin a deer out in the field.  You only do the "field dressing" which involves taking out all the deer organs.  But once when we were in Calgary already, he was just coming back from a hunt and Naomi got to go help him skin the deer in his garage.  At the time I told Richard I would love to try to tan a skin, so he saved all his deer hides from the hunting season in his freezer for me.

Last weekend while in Calgary, I picked them up to bring back to Lethbridge.  I hadn't guessed how much space they would take up.  Most skins I have seen and worked with have been goat skins.  They have some fur, but not nearly as much as a deer.  Richard's deers had the thickest most beautiful hair.  So while they weren't as heavy as the volume of the bag they were in led me to think they would be, they did not fit in a rubbermaid bin the way I thought them might.  No matter, we just put each one in a large black garbage bag and threw them in the back of my van frozen.

Once in Lethbridge, 3 skins went back into my freezer and 2 were put in bins of water to soak and thaw overnight.  I had to weigh the skins down in the water with big rocks so they wouldn't just float on top of the water and not get fully saturated.

The next day I had to make sure I had all the right tools for the first job: fleshing the skin.  This is where you scrape off any meat, fat and membranes that are stuck to the non-hair side of the skin.

I got out on-line to find a fleshing knife.  The only place I could find in Lethbridge that have one was  Markman Guns and Sports.  But they had one, so off I went to purchase it.

 

You also need a slightly rounded surface to work on.  When Leo used to prepare his own goat skins for his drums, he had made himself a nice fleshing workstation with a piece of old water main pipe.  So off I went to drive around and find a construction site where the might have some scrap pieces hanging around. Not far from my house the City was replacing a underground sprinkler system in a park. I parked and walked over to the workers and asked if they had any old pipe I could take.  And indeed, they did.  What great luck.  It was not a pipe with as big a diameter as I would have liked, but I thought it would do the trick.

Back home I went where Leo sanded the sharp edges, drilled holes into it and fastened it to a 2 by 4 so we could clamp in on his workhorse.  

 

We put some bricks under one sideo the workhorse to tip it at an angle, and we added some large patio paving stones at the bottom of the workhorse to weigh it down, and voila.  I was ready to go.  

The last thing, I needed a bucket to drop all the scrapings off into. And the hose, so I could spray the dogs away when they got too close to my workstation, hoping to help me by chewing on the ends of the deer skin hanging down as I worked.  What torture for them not to get to help. Can you spot the dog below, desperate to chew on the skin?

Mary Johnson

Michael Hunter Johnson turns 9

Michael's cake decoration: an 18 sided die

Bonnie and I arrive in Calgary from the Shuswap just in time for Michael's ninth birthday.  

This was an all day celebration for family and friends.  

The morning started with "Crepes by Richard", some of them filled with sugar and butter, but the one for Mary was a crepe, an egg some pesto sauce and feta cheese.  I am glad she shared half with me.

Now feta-pesto was a god-like variation on Richard's icing sugar and butter presentation which is already the perfect crepe.

After breakfast, Michael and his dad sped off to the grocery store for ice-cream: Rainbow.  I didn't know the taste of Rainbow Ice Cream, but it was a rainbow taste was definitely in my bowl.

The gift of the day was a three-D pen with which Michael could create small vehicles which would have a roller derby with each other, propelled by a tiny motor inside.  Now that was sweet.

Paper was rolled out on the table and a colouring station established which provided hours of fun for Mary, Alice, Betty, Richard and me.  Mary took on the job of hand-sharpening the coloured pencils for us as we sat together and talked.

... a lemon filled cake -- a 9 year old boys' delight

Miranda brought out the lemon cake.  I had seen her making the filling in the morning, as well as baking the cake, which was now a four layer cake when it came time to consume it.

I didn't know if I should hurry and eat the cake, so that I could get seconds.  

Every bite seems so delicious.  I leaned over to Richard and remarked that I was having trouble trying to imagine that the cake that was left over could be divided equally again if every ]wanted seconds. .. thus the need to eat quickly.

He said he was having the same idea.  In the end, one piece was all the satisfaction either of us could manage.

After the cake was served we sat around and shared something favourite about Michael Johnson.  I love that part of the birthday celebration.  There was so much mirth that Richard remarked that we might have scared his children.  The scare was that he thinks they have never seen adults laugh so long nor so loud.  Now that could be a scare that would scar.

There was Mac and Cheese served at some point during the day.  

A game of "Here to Slay" began later in the day and was played into the evening hours -- until it was too cold to stay outside.

A Covid birthday to remember.  

Guest list:  

Mary Johnson, Rhiannon Brooks, Dr. Bonnie Johnson, Arta Johnson, Miranda Johnson, Richard Johnson, Betty Blanche Johnson, Alice Margaret Johnson

 

On watching #ScholarStrike

I wanted to say something about the #ScholarStrike 2-day teach-in which occurred Wednesday and Thursday of last week. 

Bonnie and I decided to treat this as though we were going to a conference: road trip and hotel, going out to dinner, making new friends, but since our lives are in the same full sweep of covid-19 that would mean we would stay at home to do all of this.

I hadn’t listened to more than two sessions, when I discovered that the event was too intense and I knew we would never make it through every session, as I had planned.

BC Scholars Support #ScholarStrike

I did take 11 pages of notes. 

As well, I have gone back over the notes to highlight some places with yellow colour, or big stars, or some kind of colourful asterisk reminder that I want to revisit an idea.

I want to say in response to the session by Bonita Lawrence called “Indigenous Responses to Black Resistance”, that I also felt an irresistible response to write her a letter, something I rarely feel when I listen to a speaker. 

Her argument was tight, concise, compelling, and struck to the heart of why coalitions are so difficult. She said that her research has centered around her own indigenous identity. When she spoke she looked like a retiring academician to me. She posted a younger picture of herself, long dark luminous hair past her shoulders, like a triangle spreading out over her back. I don’t know if she would have called herself radical, but I love that word and I could imagine it cemented across her photo like someone might print a WANTED poster to be hung in on old west post office bulletin board.

I am going to have to accept that I could only watch the number of sessions I got in, and that I am not gong to be able to take in all of them. Sometimes that happens at a conference to me too, though not often. 

In person I seem to be able to make myself walk to and sit in every session, but given the technology set up seems harm to me, I find it is just too many clicks away.

At one point the moderator to the session said, we’ve had 30,000 people tune in to #ScholarStrike. I think she also said 3,000 were attending the session I was watching. That’s one of the nice things about today’s electronics, you can count the number of people in an instant who are watching with you.

I wrote a note to at least 7 young people I know who are attending University right now, and alerted them to the fact that they could attend this free. I don’t think any of them did. As well, I know some professors who didn’t attend. They were busy with the extra burden of learning how to teach electronically, a hard task when much of their teaching skill is centered around watching their audience, picking up on cues of when people are lost and when it is time to move quickly ahead. I think they’ll miss seeing the twitch of an arm or the furrow of a brow on a student’s face as a signal that the lecture needs to broaden at that point. At any rate, I can see why people’s lives made it impossible for them to find the joy in those two days that I found.

It’s a week away now. I’m sure I’ll read my notes over one more time. There are some phrases I am not going to forget. 

One of them is “1492 Land Back Lane.” 

My typist just asked me what treaty occurred in 1492. I reminded her it rhymes with “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” She laughed and shook her head in disbelief that she had missed that one. I also want to say that for the first time in all of my studies about Indigeneity the penny dropped for me about two different world views: the one that the settlers have as contrasted with the one that the Indigenous people share.  The two major view points stem from the different creation myths they hold.

When I first began working at the University of Calgary, I was working in the University Library. The pay was low, but  the perks were high.  One of the benefits was that the department believed in educating its workers, so anytime we wanted time off to go to a lecture or a conference it was made available to us. I developed a taste for going to lectures, conferences, and talks at the Nickle Arts Museum.  I was up to exploring new forms of knowledge, and I’m glad that I still have that taste even though I don’t work there anymore.

Arta

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