Serendipity alaways seems to play a part in academic research. I finished my previous post having decided that I needed to do a more thorough exploration of what Lacan had to say about ideology. I turned to  Krutzen, who is not infallible, but normally delivers the main references, at least according to key words. The head word produced five references in four seminars: 14, 16 (2), 18, and 19. I will explore these texts in more detail later, but I want to finish the serendipity thread first.

The first piece of luck came through Academia.edu, in the form of an essay by Peter Caws, Goerge Washington University: "The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences", whose unpromising title led me to consider a new-to-me concept of the ex-conscious, a category to add to Freud's Conscious-Pre-conscious-Unconscious, which Caws created following a passage in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents:

    . . . Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical             entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once         come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist         alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium      of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S.         Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by      the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once         more stand—without the palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this         not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still     showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands     we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we           should find not only the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site,     the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the            church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer        would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one     view of the other . . . [Freud, 17-19]

Caws goes on to observe: 

    So there is a lot in cities that we don’t see, or can’t see, or don’t want to see. But it is there just the same,.... All of it, not just the early morning activity, is in Lacan’s words "the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts," even if not always consciously thinking thoughts.

Although Lacan in his Baltimore text (more on this later) does not state the parallel between those material expressions of "thoughts", his statement at least creates a metaphor between the ever-present but past-created thoughts and ideology, or at least one kind of ideology.

The second piece of serendipity, although coming out of a conscious search for "ideology in MUN's library catalogue, was an essay, "Ideology and the Question of the Subject" by Goldberg and Sekoff, published in a collection of essays, published 1978 by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology, London : Hutchinson & Co., 1978, pp.265. Further discussion of this essay will have to wait for my next blog.

 My best laid plans to make this blog a weekly event were set aside by the visit of a former student, now a dear friend, who was in town to see his ageing father. Time was not lost, however, since we had several lively discussions centred on the questions I posed in the previous blog. 

Tom's doctoral dissertation dealt in part with the ways in which First Nations have been dealing with the impact of North American culture on their traditional way of living in the land. We tried to thrash out the interactions between native culture -- all the various aspects of family relationships, role models, entertainment, rhythms of seasonal activities-- and the importation of mechanical devices such as guns, snowmobiles, radio, and planes. We differed in our approach: Tom preferred to think of the First Nations' world view as "culture"; I am leaning towards the cluster of ideas grouped under "ideology".

Lacan rarely used the term "ideology".  Instead, focussing on the preeminence of language, he developed his thinking according to the three orders: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The Symbolic deals with language. Beyond that simple statement lies: the language that the child learns in the context first of the family -- the "mother tongue" in common parlance, harking back to a time when children were raised in the early years by a mother (or mother substitute in wealthy families) -- then the extended family, early schooling, and so on up to the general level of the nation. Signifiers are grouped by sense into sentences, then into more complex conscious constructions. However, at some stage, links beyond sense are formed as the unconscious comes into play. Firstly, one signifier becomes "lost" -- it simply disappears from conscious recall. It will however play a role in organizing, beyond conscious control, other signifiers. Among these other signifiers, some will act as "quilting points", drawing some signifiers into chains or webs. When in early sessions the analysand is asked to freely associate, avoiding where possible conscious choice of words, the analyst is listening for those signifying chains, in order to determine the "quilting points", and eventually the "lost" signifier. This is a rather crude description of the Symbolic order.

The Imaginary is more difficult to describe. It includes all the visual images that surround the child and then the adult, which are absorbed without conscious effort. They include the obvious: buildings, advertisements both large and small, photographs (especially family photos that place the subject in the nexus of family relations), statues, monuments, and so on. And then the tricky notion of ideology. Most of ideology rarely receives conscious expression until it is analysed from a radically different point of view. Class consciousness, which may be dimly perceived by the subject through an awareness of the quality of clothing, accent, topics of conversation, cultural references, manners, and so on; religion or general world view, including race; political views. In a separate but related category I am placing work relations, and especially the relationship between worker and the means of production. My reasons for separating this aspect is because as the means for production remained stable over a fairly long period of time, there was a direct and sustained impact somatically. (I will deal with this in more detail later.)

The third order, the Real, is not to be confused with reality. Lacan came to identify the real with the "lost" object mentioned above, giving it the "title" (not the name) objet a. No signifier can be attached to it, but it has an enormous impact on the subject. If a metaphor might help, it is like a black hole -- nothing escapes from it, because its magnetic force is so great. The subject experiences it as the object cause of their desire, something they constantly strive to reach, but from which their drive is diverted.

Next time I want to focus more on the Imaginary, since I think that it is there that I will find some answers to my initial questions.

Robbe-Grillet in the light of Lacan

 This is a general title that I am going to use for what I hope will be a series of posts concerning my recent thinking about Robbe-Grillet. Why now? you may ask. Well in September 2022 I attended a conference on R-G to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in Brest, Brittany. The event had attracted scholars from various countries, some of them like me, old-stagers from previous conferences, and some new faces, an encouraging aspect for future scholarly work on this important novelist, cineast and essayist.We had the added attraction of R-G's wife, Catherine who attended every session, sitting in the front row and paying close attention to the proceedings. So much for the context that has prompted this series. The Actes of the conference will be published shortly, an event which may result in some attention being given to R-G's work; since his death in 2008, most publications have been edited versions of interviews he gave to various people in the last decade of his life., notably Roger-Michel Allemand's Entretiens complices and Benoît Peeters' Alain Robbe-Grillet: Réinventer le roman. Entretiens inédits.

In my presentation, I focussed on Lacan`s concept of jouissance as displayed/hidden by R-G in his repeated use of a gap or a hole which he attempted to cover over. A similar structure can be find in incidents involving doppelganger; and in his last major novel, La Reprise, repetition in various forms operates to provide jouissance for the author/narrator. I indicated, during the presentation, that some questions had to be left for a future work. I have not formed a complete plan, but I will be guided by the following questions:

The first major question, which I think R-G answers in part as early as Pour un nouveau roman, is answered by R-G's focus on the creation of the work itself, shifting away from a Balzacian depiction of reality. My question focuses more tightly on trying to explain what is going on when so many other artists in all disciplines are pursuing the same line. I think that the usual recourse to "influence" is weak and insufficient. Flaubert, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the "Art for Art's sake" movement, impressionism, cubism, Schonberg, Stravinsky: each in his own way was responding to aspects of their world that could not be approached through earlier means.

The three numbered questions represent my attempt to bring some kind of cohesion to my research. More broadly, I am looking to spell out the dominant ideology that individuals are reacting against, whether consciously or unconsciously.

This is the prologue.

It has been quite a while since I have posted on this blog. But recent events have prompted me to return.

Below you will find excerpts I have lifted from an article appearing on Truthdig that I hope will spark debate about Canada's currently pathetic response to infrastructure needs, and especially to climate change.

Germany has a public sector development bank called KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or “Reconstruction Credit Institute”), which is even larger than the World Bank

Unlike private commercial banks, KfW does not have to focus on maximizing short-term profits for its shareholders while turning a blind eye to external costs, including those imposed on the environment. The bank has been free to support the energy revolution by funding major investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Its fossil fuel investments are close to zero. One of the key features of KfW, as with other development banks, is that much of its lending is driven in a strategic direction determined by the national government. Its key role in the green energy revolution has been played within a public policy framework under Germany’s renewable energy legislation, including policy measures that have made investment in renewables commercially attractive.

KfW is one of the world’s largest development banks, with assets totaling$566.5 billion as of December 2017. Ironically, the initial funding for its capitalization came from the United States, through the Marshall Plan in 1948. Why didn’t we fund a similar bank for ourselves? Simply because powerful Wall Street interests did not want the competition from a government-owned bank that could make below-market loans for infrastructure and development. Major U.S. investors today prefer funding infrastructure through public-private partnerships, in which private partners can reap the profits while losses are imposed on local governments.

KfW’s role in implementing government policy parallels that of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in funding the New Deal in the 1930s. At that time, U.S. banks were bankrupt and incapable of financing the country’s recovery. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to set up a system of 12 public “industrial banks” through the Federal Reserve, but the measure failed. Roosevelt then made an end run around his opponents by using the RFC that had been set up earlier by President Herbert Hoover, expanding it to address the nation’s financing needs.

The RFC Act of 1932 provided the RFC with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. As with KfW’s loans, its funding source was the sale of bonds, mostly to the Treasury itself. Proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more; it funded all of this while generating income for the government.

The RFC was so successful that it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest banking organization. Its success, however, may have been its nemesis. Without the emergencies of depression and war, it was a too-powerful competitor of the private banking establishment; and in 1957, it was disbanded under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. That’s how the  United States was left without a development bank at the same time Germany and other countries were hitting the ground running with theirs.

Today some U.S. states have infrastructure and development banks, including California, but their reach is very small. One way they could be expanded to meet state infrastructure needs would be to turn them into depositories for state and municipal revenue. Rather than lending their capital directly in a revolving fund, this would allow them to leverage their capital into 10 times that sum in loans, as all depository banks are able to do, as I’ve previously explained.

The most profitable and efficient way for national and local governments to finance public infrastructure and development is with their own banks, as the impressive track records of KfW and other national development banks have shown. The RFC showed what could be done even by a country that was technically bankrupt, simply by mobilizing its own resources through a publicly owned financial institution. We need to resurrect that public funding engine today, not only to address the national and global crises we are facing now but for the ongoing development the country needs in order to manifest its true potential.

While the "country" referred to is the US, similar ideas need to be examined urgently in Canada, especially the move away from financing public works through private banks. A return to the original ideal for the Bank of Canada would be a good start.

Electricity Generation: A reposting from April 2014

In the light of recent revelations on the Muskrat Falls fiasco, I thought this earlier post was worth a second glance. Obviously NALCOR never considered options other than MF...

Electricity Generation

More musings. I haven't got facts and figures this time. I am still convinced that Integral Fast Reactors (I misspelled that in the previous blog) are the way to go. Far safer than current methods, using heavy or light water which rely on pressurized steam, and which leave a residue of fuel cells that need to be kept cool for thousands of years.

This time I want to ask questions about wave and tidal power. With Newfoundland and Labrador's highly indented shoreline, it would seem obvious that such methods should have been explored. While tidal difference on the east coast of the island is not as dramatic as that in the Bay of Fundy, it is sufficient to warrant examination. The type of installation that the French put in place in Dinard shows what can be done, and that site has been producing electricity for 50 years.

In the Bay of Fundy, a dam could not be built, but turbines anchored to the sea bed did produce electricity for a short while, but the tidal flow was so strong, the units were destroyed in short order, and the project abandoned.

Smaller projects on the island's south coast would, I am sure, prover feasible and profitable, especially if built close to the transmission line from Bay d'Espoir. Similar projects could be built on the North Shore of Labrador, providing power for coastal communities. Wave power could also be used in coastal communities.

The feasibility of using wind power has already been discussed and demonstrated, with some interesting solutions proposed to deal with the problem of intermittent supply.

The main problem remains in the heads of politicians. When vanity trumps sanity, no amount of evidence or common sense can prevail.

Gryphon Trio at the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival 2016

Monday night 15 August saw the welcome return of the Gryphon Trio. A near capacity audience in the DF Cook Recital Hall was testimony to the support in the St. John's area for high calibre chamber music, and the special place this trio holds in the hearts of music lovers.

The concert did not have a thematic title (the Trio's name is sufficient to draw in an audience without the need for spin), but in retrospect appassionata would have been appropriate, with two of the evening's offerings bearing that musical notation. More of that later.

The Tuckamore Festival brochure never offers program notes to help the audience prepare for performances, although sometimes a pre-concert talk is given. On Monday night pianist James Walker pithily described the circumstances surrounding Debussy's early work, his Piano Trio in G major, composed in 1882, but then "lost" for almost exactly one hundred years before re-emerging in 1982. Arnold Schönberg was not impressed when he first heard it, classifying it as juvenilia, a slur which may have contributed to the work not being performed very frequently since. The Gryphon Trio, clearly, think otherwise, and judging by the physical state of the scores they were playing from, have made it a part of their repertoire, at least for the moment.

Just at the end of his teenage years, Debussy was hired as a music teacher to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He was to teach the younger children the rudiments of music, develop the musical talents of a twenty-seven-year-old daughter during the day, and play duets with the mother in the evening. After travelling for part of the year the family settled in one spot and in short notice a 'cellist and a violinist were hired. Here (may I imagine?) was the beginnings of a double trio: Debussy, mother and daughter; Debussy, violinist and 'cellist. I don't know how long the arrangement lasted, but if you are looking for a narrative to underpin Debussy's composition, it is not hard to find. The first movement opens with a simple theme of five notes that do not make a tune but offer endless possibilities for variation. 'Cello and piano, piano and violin answer each other in a series of duets as the composer/piano interacts with the mother/'cello, then daughter/violin. The mood is, in contemporary spin parlance, sunny, the composer is contented to be in bucolic surroundings. The second movement moves into a slightly more sombre mood; there are clouds on the horizon, as yet unspecified. The scherzo in the third movement might be considered to be a series of images of the younger children in the family running around, with the composer joining in. The final movement, however, with its sudden changes in tempo and key, perhaps portrays the complications that arise with the introduction of two other performers in the real life situation: the original trio has superimposed upon it a trio of musicians resulting in the trio composition by Debussy. Fanciful? Perhaps.

James Parker yielded the microphone to Dr Andrew Staniland for the introduction to the two short works that concluded the first half of the concert. As he explained, "14 Seconds" is the fifth movement of a fourteen movement work Dark Star Requiem chosen to open the 2010 Toronto Luminato Festival. The libretto for this oratorio/opera was drawn from a series of poems written by Jill Battson in reaction to the AIDS epidemic that was sweeping, apparently unchecked and unstoppable in the 1970s and 1980s. The title alludes to the chilling statistic that world-wide, one person died from AIDS every fourteen seconds. Staniland has taken on a seemingly impossible structural limitation of composing fourteen short pieces, each lasting fourteen seconds. I have yet to hear the complete work, but this extract does provoke a question that has received a fair amount of debate: when faced with a massive trauma (Auschwitz is the perennial choice) is art even possible? Theodor Adorno posed the question (somewhat baldly, and later retracted it because it was so often cited without the full context of his argument). AIDS cannot be put in the same category as the extermination camps of the the Second World War, but it was a trauma that affected many individuals with enormous impact. The sole clue to the structure of the piece, which was, I am sure, a first hearing for the majority of the audience, was provided in Staniland's introduction: a theme and variations. The theme is simple, repeated, harshly accented notes on the piano at first, taken up by the 'cello and violin. If you are looking for narrative, then perhaps the sound of a heart monitor next to a dying patient, the pulse rate quicker than normal as the body tries to fight the spreading disease and the mind tries to cope with that realization. The first few movements are clearly marked off with a slight pause, the trajectory the music might be creating cut off abruptly. But as the work progresses, there is no pause, not the slightest relief. There are key changes, changes in rhythm and pace, but each fourteen seconds barely has time to establish itself before the next "life" moves to centre stage. Towards the end, the mood becomes more intense; is this rage against the dying of the light? Until finally, the beat of the heart monitor flatlines... a single note, high in the 'cello's register, morendo.

For the second of Staniland's pieces, "Solstice Songs", the audience was given no help. While the composer had indicated that it was to be performed attaca, with no break between to the two pieces, there was a pause while the trio, some more quickly than others, removed the first score from their stand and set up the second. It did give the audience time to take the impact of "14 Seconds", but we had no preparation. The musical notation the program simply said: "Lively, Dance-like", and while it lived up to the first, I defy anyone to dance to this music! I certainly enjoyed the music, as did the Gryphon Trio who bounced with the sudden stops and starts, fortissimo to pianissimo. But I will need to hear it again. Once again, the finale was characterized by passionate playing.

On the question of hearing contemporary compositions more than once, Dr Staniland, in his introduction to last Saturday's performance of new works by Tuckamore Young Composers, said how fortunate they were to hear their composition performed twice, once in the composers segment at 7pm, and again in the main concert at 8pm. He also observed that their new works were, in the second performance, being presented in the company of some of the Western tradition's greats: Brahms, Dvorzak, Fauré, and the like. It is a mark of Staniland's stature that his compositions tonight stood up well in the context of Debussy and Mendelssohn.

The second half of the evening consisted of the single work, Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio no.2 in c minor, op.66. This is a late work, composed just a few years before his death and shows the complexity of a mature artist's mind at work. James Parker's playful introduction offered up a narrative drawn from the Jason Bourne series of action dramas: first movement "full of car chases, explosions, narrow escapes; the second movement "a peaceful interlude in a Mediterranean luxury hotel (James Bond?); I can't remember Parker's characterization for the third movement; and, the fourth movement, more dramatic action, accelerating to a triumphant conclusion. My narrative would substitute a Victorian melodrama for Jason Bourne, with the villain tying the heroine to the railway tracks and... you get the picture. Such narratives do help the concert-goer who has no formal musical training (and perhaps little concert experience such as myself) to grasp complex artistic creations which take thirty minutes to unfold.

In response to a much deserved standing ovation, the Gryphon Trio gave us Piazzolla's "Autumn". I have become a fan of tango dancing, both the balletic, dancing-with-the-stars routines by young performers whose joints do not seem to obey the laws of physic, but especially those where the dancers are my age, their movements more gentle, but the sexual innuendo all the more powerful for being understated. So it was with last night's performance: the rubato passages only ever-so-slightly slowed, then quickened, the lingering slide of the trailing foot referenced by the glissando on violin and 'cello.

What a night!

Tuckamore Chamber Music festival

After a long gap in posting, I'm going to try my hand at something different: music reviews. I have no formal training in music, but I do know what I like, and what I don't want to see or hear repeated. For my first attempt, here are my observations of Friday night's offering at the D.F. Cook Recital Hall: "In My Love and In My Song".

While the title made obvious reference to the two song cycles "An Chloé" (Mozart) and "Sechs Gesängen"(Schumann), the other pieces seemed not to fit: "Valse" by Rachmaninoff, Hungarian Dance No. 15 by Brahms, and Beethoven's String Quartet No.7. This last, at a stretch, might have found justification in its dedication "To my brother", an expression of filial love, but a change in programming saw it replaced by the same composer's Op 74 "The Harp".

I am not familiar with this work (it was a first hearing for me), but for a quartet of players, who had not had much time to gel (this is the first week of the festival) their ensemble playing was remarkable. Given the foreshortened preparation time, the high level of co-ordination in the rapid scalar passages, and the syncopated rhythm sections in the final movement was breathtaking. Sensitivity in the pianissimo sections was to the fore, and the changes in prominence for each of the voices were seamless as each instrument sang clearly above the understructure provided by the other three. The exuberant finale brought out the obvious enjoyment the four individuals have in making music together, enjoyment conveyed readily to an appreciative audience.

Sophie Leblanc's performance of selections from "An Chloé" was preceded by a welcome introduction to the texts, since no translation had been provided to the audience. Her playful, even flirtatious depiction of the textual context of the songs prepared the audience well for her flawless singing: impeccable German diction, musicality, and an appreciation for the dramatic possibilities of the varying fortunes of the characters in the songs. Each of the four chosen presented love in a different light: "Dans un bois solitaire" shows the would-be lover alone; in "Abendempfindung" the lover discovers the gloomy mood of the dusk matches his mood; "Wie unglücklich bin ich nicht", with the double negative pointing to an uncertain positive, has the lover finding happiness, but not sure of its permanence; and "Der Zauberer" finds the lover robbed of his heart by the beauty of the beloved. Mozart found inspiration in simple, folksy tunes that he endowed with matching simplicity and wit.

Schumann in like manner chose to stay in the folk tradition of the Gesängen, rather than the more elevated art-song form of the Lieder. Again, Ms Leblanc provided a brief synopsis of each of the songs. The first five depict the unfortunate ones in love: "Herzeleid" (Heartbreak), "Die Fensterscheibe" (The Window-cleaner), "Der Gärtner" (The Gardener), "Die Spinnerin" (The Spinner), and "Im Wald" (In the Forest). In the first and fifth, the protagonist is not specified, but the emotion suffered could be shared by all, the heartbreak of a lost love in the first, the loneliness of the not-yet-loved in the fifth as the protagonist observes pairing up in nature -- two butterflies, two birds, and two deer -- and wonders implicitly when he or she may find love. The sixth song "Abendlied" (Evening Song) contrasts the first five by offering a more positive outlook on love, the title indicating a more noble approach, a Lied, and the choice of major key a more joyful outcome.

Rather than choosing the traditional accompaniment of piano, Ms Leblanc went for the twentieth century arrangement by the German composer Aribert Riemann for string quartet. Susan Waterbury played first violin, Nancy Dahn second (reversing the pairing in the Beethoven), Dov Scheindlin viola, and Vernon Regehr 'cello. The combination worked very well and I will seek out a recording of this version.

The only question mark I had for the evening concerned Ms Leblanc's constant reference to the score. Since the two song cycles are not arduous examples in the soprano's repertoire, why were they not memorized?

Finally, a word on the two pieces for piano-four hands. Rachmaninoff's "Valse", while posing some challenges for the upper hand, is not technically difficult. The composer's somewhat sardonic treatment of the waltz genre -- you can't dance to the music, and the lumbering, fortissimo section may have been an allusion to the brutal aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution -- turns the piece into a salon novelty rather than a serious concert offering. Brahm's Hungarian Dance no.15 similarly works best in a salon setting, though concert versions have become popular. Is it possible, as the late John Herriott was fond of pointing out, that such compositions for four hands, often played by tutor (male) and student (female), offered an opportunity for close physical contact, in public, under the guise of music-making? No such possible interpretation could be made for Friday evening's performance as Timothy Steeves and Robert Kortgaard gave us only fun-filled panache.

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Electricity Generation

More musings. I haven't got facts and figures this time. I am still convinced that Integral Fast Reactors (I misspelled that in the previous blog) are the way to go. Far safer than current methods, using heavy or light water which rely on pressurized steam, and which leave a residue of fuel cells that need to be kept cool for thousands of years.

This time I want to ask questions about wave and tidal power. With Newfoundland and Labrador's highly indented shoreline, it would seem obvious that such methods should have been explored. While tidal difference on the east coast of the island is not as dramatic as that in the Bay of Fundy, it is sufficient to warrant examination. The type of installation that the French put in place in Dinard shows what can be done, and that site has been producing electricity for 50 years.

In the Bay of Fundy, a dam could not be built, but turbines anchored to the sea bed did produce electricity for a short while, but the tidal flow was so strong, the units were destroyed in short order, and the project abandoned.

Smaller projects on the island's south coast would, I am sure, prover feasible and profitable, especially if built close to the transmission line from Bay d'Espoir. Similar projects could be built on the North Shore of Labrador, providing power for coastal communities. Wave power could also be used in coastal communities.

The feasibility of using wind power has already been discussed and demonstrated, with some interesting solutions proposed to deal with the problem of intermittent supply.

The main problem remains in the heads of politicians. When vanity trumps sanity, no amount of evidence or common sense can prevail.

I recently took part in a focus group discussing various aspect of electricity service in Newfoundland and Labrador. We looked at some fairly innocuous questions such as cost, value for money, maintenance or improvement of infrastructure, and so on. Many of the participants, including me, strayed from the intended pathway by introducing the issue of Muskrat Falls, but the moderator always dragged us back to the rather mundane list of prepared questions. We were there for two hours, but it was clear to me that a discussion or debate on Muskrat Falls alone would have taken up twice that time.

Now I don't intend going over what has already been said on that matter. Instead I want to raise a different aspect of the generation of electricity: the use of nuclear power. Until recently I was totally and absolutely opposed to the use of nuclear fission for this purpose. The examples of Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukiyama were enough to convince me that the dangers associated with the operation of nuclear reactors, and the intractable problem of the disposal of spent nuclear fuel, far outweigh any potential benefits in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Certainly, the cost of building and maintaining such reactors seem to lead to higher prices for the consumer. And those price increases have been mitigated by enormous government subsidies which, by sleight of hand, have been disguised as not coming from the pockets of taxpayers.

So what changed my mind? I came across an article on a blog called Brave New Climate (http://bravenewclimate.com) and read an item on Internal Fast Reactors (IFR). I had never before heard of such animals, and was intrigued to read more (I'm still reading the wealth of information that site contains). In simple terms, this form of nuclear fission can use existing spent fuel rods, or a form of uranium that has not been enriched to weapons grade, to generate electricity in a set-up that is designed to run virtually untended and that will in the event of a natural disaster -- flooding, earthquake -- shut itself down.

So, why has this technology not received wider publicity or support? It's hard to say. But one factor that has been cited is cost. In the facilities that were built (no more than one in any country up to now), the cost comparisons were skewed in favour of the Light Water or Heavy Water Reactors (the Canadian preferred type), because the experiments were small scale. There may have been another reason: IFRs do not produce weapons-grade material for nuclear bombs.

I'll contact the author of Brave New Climate to see if I can reproduce here some of his material, since his explanations of the technical aspects of IFRs are very clear.

One immediate benefit that comes to mind is that, if the technology can be cost-effective on a medium scale, we don't need to flood vast areas of Labrador, nor construct an absurdly long transmission line to bring electricity to markets in eastern Canada or the NE United States.

More to come.

My blog on the fishery got sidetracked.... (Is this a common problem among bloggers?). Since my last post, I have been thinking a little more about the structure of the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery, and here are a few, random comments:
1.  It seems that (I can't find confirmation of what I read) the Federal Government has slipped into the Omnibus Bill a statement that the fish in Canadian waters  in the North Atlantic will no longer be recognized as a Common Property Resource. With this designation, the fish in Canadian waters are deemed to be the property of the Canadian people, and thus nominally under the control of the Federal Government. This designation is important since it forms the ground for regulations governing quotas and disposal, that is it is the basis for setting the amount of fish caught, species to be harvested, and where the fish may be processed. There is overlap with provincial jurisdiction; the NL provincial government, for example, determines licences for fish plants and whether fish can be exported processed or whole.
But, without the designation of Common Property Resource, fish harvesters will be free to take what they can since no one entity owns the fish.
2.  It is becoming clearer to me that the decline, and slow recovery of the fish stocks, especially cod is not open to a simple explanation. Actions of fish harvesters have contributed: extensive use of draggers disturbing the sea-bed where cod spawn; the switch, after the cod moratorium, to shrimp fishing which reduced the available food supply for cod; the extensive over-fishing of caplin off Iceland which again reduced food supply for cod; and the continued high level of foreign fishing for cod on the noase and tail of the Banks.
However, another factor, which I have not seen discussed, is the effect of con trails, or vapour trails from transatlantic flights that reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ocean surface, thereby reducing the growth of plankton and other minuscule entities that form the bottom of the food chain. When, during the three-day hiatus in flights following the 9/11 disaster, it was observed that temperatures rose, there seems to have been little follow-up to see what other effects might have been produced. A study elsewhere (in Israel, I believe) did show that there was an increase in the amount of beneficial sunlight reaching the ground.
3.  The recent closure of five fish plants in NL (and the confirmation of two further closures) raises certain questions. On the one hand we are told, by plant owners and the government, that there is not enough product to keep the plants going. But at the same time at least two of the plants have applied for permission to export unprocessed fish to China.

I'll leave this blog for now, and look forward to receiving comments.

Making Waves II

Making Waves II

I couldn’t keep my promise to blog again on this topic on Saturday. But that has given me a little more time to reflect on Wednesday evenings event.

I pointed out in the meeting that Ryan’s first four points dealt mainly with failed parliamentary and bureaucratic strategies to deal with a crisis whose beginningpre-dated the moratorium. Only the fifth, replacing NAFO, seemd to point forward to a new, future action, although in itself it might not produce immediate results.

The way NAFO is set up now, it does nothing to protect current fish stocks, nor provide hope that a sustainable fishery can be developed for the North Atlantic. Meetings are held at regular intervals to set quotas for the various stocks, but member countries are free to ignore the quotas and set their own targets.

Replacing NAFO does not seem to offer a solution, since there is no incentive for any country to change its current practice. I repeated a startegy that has been proposed in the past, namely that the fishermen needed to take matters into their own hands, and follow the example of the Icelandic fishermen, who, when faced with a similar situation concerning their cod stocks, armed their boats with giant scissors and cut the trawl lines of the (mainly) British fishermen who were then not respecting even the three-mile limit.

I was quickly put in my place by two speakers: one pointed out that the Icelandic fishers’ actions were backed by their government; the other said that such an action put all the onus on NL fishers. Both were right.

But their comments highlight the problems that can be placed at the door of the provincial and federal governments.  Our provincial government is doing almost nothing to help the situation in rural Newfoundland (it affects the island portion of the province primarily) when it allows unprocessed fish to be shipped abroad for processing, thereby exporting much-needed jobs.  And by linking fish quotas to pants rather than communities, it hands over one of the most powerful levers in the industry to private, profit-driven companies.

At the same time, the federal government is doing nothing to protect our fishing industry in international relations. When the 200-mile limit was set up, the agreement of Russia (and other Eastern Bloc coutries) was secured by handing over a substantial quota of cod withing that limit. Similar “make-weight” agreements have also been made in trade deals that initially had nothing to do with fish. And the Canadian government has done nothing to secure the 200-mile limit. We don’t send out warships. We send out private planes to observe foreign fishing fleets, but infringements are never pursued.

I’ll have more to say in future posts.

Making Waves

It's been a while since I posted. I think I am now over my viral infection (personal, not computer) and have more energy. Today's short blog is the first of a series on the fisheries crisis in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Making Waves

I attended this discussion last night, organised by Ryan Cleary, NDP MP for St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.  Ryan started the evening with a 20 minute presentation concerning his attempts to have an official inquiry (parliamentary? Judicial? He did not make that clear) into the state of the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Some of the history of the collapse of the northern cod fishery I was familiar with.  Since my involvement with Michael Cook’s prophetic play “Head Guts and Sound-bone Dance” in 1972, I had been paying attention to the fishing industry, following the Fisherman’s Broadcast on CBC almost very day. So my background to last night’s discussion was fairly broad, if not detailed.

Ryan had identified some 160 recommendations from 21 years of reports of various kinds. He had boiled them down to 20, and then selected 5 to present to last night’s audience. They were:

1.     Clarify objectives for the industry and develp a policy framework.

2.     Fisheries and Oceans need to develop sustainable conservation quotas for straddling stocks

3.     FaO should prepare an annual report as outline in the 1996 Oceans Act.

4.     FaO should adequately fund research and make it public.

5.     NAFO should be replaced.

From my perspective the first four dealt with parliamentary/bureaucratic problems. Recommendations for action have been made in how the Department at the federal level should have been managed for at least 20 years. The lack of action, and at times deliberate political interference, have resulted in FaO becoming dysfunctional. Scientific research has been consistently underfunded; scientists, in a by now familiar scenario, are being muzzled. Not only can they not speak out about their research, they cannot publish their results in respectable journals, nor even attend scientific conferences.

More on this tomorrow.

Paint by Numbers — in Reverse

Today's press release from Ottawa starts to paint the NeoCon landscape by numbers — in reverse. Starting today, Harpo starts to erase elements of the Canadian picture with 5 curators eliminated from the National Gallery, and 50 scientists from Environment Canada.  OK, so the area of blank canvas is small...today. But wait for larger patches to emerge on Monday.

The NeoCons ideology claims that a smaller government is always better, and as a glib slogan, it doesn't sound too bad. It's in the details that the evil is to be found. Reducing the size of the Public Service may sound, at first hearing, a laudable aim; it's when the impact of the reductions hit that the Canadin public may finally awake from its media-induced slumber to realize that cutting the Public Service budget actually hurts real people performing real service.

Take the example of the slicing of fifty scientists from Environment Canada. That means 50 families have a month to find a new position to maintain their income. A hundred neighbours, at a minimum, will have their network of support strained. I don't know the details of the work these scientists were doing, but with 50 fewer brains at work protecting our environment, the restraints on businesses to do as they please in our environment have been slackened.

Five fewer curators at the National Gallery will mean fewer exhibitions in our Canadian culutral showcase. Five families may have to re-locate, if they can find work in their field in Canada; they may have to move to another country, as might the environmental scientists mentioned above. The potential loss to Canada is enormous.

But the NeoCons won't care. They don't care about the environment; they don't care about culture. (Harpo playing a Beatles' tune in public is about as high on the cultural scale as he goes. And of course, he couldn't bother to find a Canadian popular tune for his photo op.)

So, we have to care. It's up to us to put a stop to this ideological and fiscal madness.

Please, give a thought to the banks!

Please, give a thought to the banks!

We need more posts like the following, using humour to counteract the dumb stupidty of mainstream media, who mindlessly repeat the press handouts from corporations and corporate-fed governments.

Remember when teachers, public employees, planned parenthood, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me either.

We also need to wonder why governments, who provided billions in bail-out money to protect the banks, are now borrowing money from those banks to finance deficits… caused by bail-outs to the banks!

It really does boggle the mind!

Criticasters

Michael Quinion had this today in his "weird words" section of World Wide Words:

Criticaster  /krItI'kast@(r)/

---------------------------------------------------------

It's not much met with now, more's the pity. This is one of its rare modern appearances in print:

    If I were deemed kosher by that classist, racist,

misogynistic bunch of criticasters, I would consider it time to retire my pens and legal pads.

    [A letter by Erica Jong in The New York Times, 1 Feb.

1998, on learning that her book, Of Blessed Memory, had been nominated for The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award.]

You may gather it is uncomplimentary. It refers to those who set themselves up as arbiters of taste and literary discernment but whose sensibilities are inadequate to the task. A blast against such petty critics was penned 150 years ago:

    What amount of obtuseness will disqualify a criticaster who itches to be tinkering and cobbling the noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness, as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain? [Notes and Queries, 11 Jun. 1853.]

It was coined in the late seventeenth century by adding the ending "-aster" to "critic". The suffix came directly into English from Latin, where it meant an incomplete resemblance. English adapted it to refer to a person of inferior or inadequate qualities. It turns up in a small number of words, of which "poetaster", a person who writes bad poetry, and "philosophaster", a shallow or pretentious philosopher, are the least rare. Others of similar form - though almost never employed by anybody - are "politicaster", a petty or contemptible politician, "mathematicaster", a minor or inferior mathematician, and "witticaster", an inferior wit or witling.

I thought it worth quoting in full since it could so well apply to a large majority of bloggers. I must remember "witling" for future use. 

What's in a name?

This probably should have been the first post on this blog...

What’s in a name?

When I chose the name for this blog, Atlantic Whispers, I had several ideas in mind. One was an allusion to Chinese whispers, that childhood party game when a sentence is whispered around a circle, with sometimes hilarious results. The standard example, from the period of the First World War, is:

Starting sentence: Send reinforcements we’re going to advance.

End sentence: Send three and fourpence we’re going to a dance.

Blogs are a little like that process of transformation. The writer, often in a hurry to post the next number, writes something that could have been better expressed, and before you can say “Jacques Robinson”, the intent of the message has been misread and passed on, transformed.

Secondly, I don’t expect my blog to have a big following, so “whispers” seemed more appropriate than, say “Shout Out”, or “Roar”.

Thirdly, positioned as I am on the extreme eastern edge of North America, and with friends and family (potential readers) in Britain, the Atlantic had to be included somehow.

Of course, since starting this activity (it’s hardly and enterprise) the name has become self-fulfilling: my voice is so quiet as to be barely audible beyond the few who have endorsed it. No comments yet.

So maybe, just maybe, I’ll try being a little more provocative in my posts…

Beijing Diary: Final Post

Saturday 23 April.

We got up in time to have breakfast, but discovered with a shock that the price we had been working on for the hotel breakfast was Y30, not Y10 as I had been told. While it was still a bargain, Heather said that we should not take breakfast there, so off I went to the local store to get a couple of pastries, quite enough to keep us going until the meal on the plane.

We then had to check out.  Heather, meticulous as always, spotted a couple of charges that were not ours, so it took a little while before the account was finally settled and we were able to set off for the airport by taxi.

We got in line at the Air Canada counter 3 ½ hours ahead of time, but were, unfortunately, caught up in a school group from Calgary. Nether children nor most of the adults were well-behaved, so their antics made the wait even less bearable. The counter staff seemed incapable of dealing with a group booking where the individuals were listed on a sheet (as opposed to having individual tickets), nor with the regulations for luggage (the staff wanted to charge for the difference between international and domestic regulations. We waited over an hour before the problems were resolved and more counter staff brought in.

The formalities with the Chinese authorities were easily negotiated, although in the security check a 200ml tube of sun-screen was detected (it had been missed in Perth!) and we were obliged to surrender it.

The ten-day visit was far too short. And we have seen nothing outside Beijing. We plan on taking a similar route when next we are returning from Australia, but with more time spent in other cities, perhaps even a trip on the new train to Tibet.

Beijing Diary: Part 11

The rain eased off and we returned to the hotel to wait for Gordon who showed up promptly at 5 pm. We sat having a beer in the lobby, catching up on what we had been doing over the previous two days.  Gordon had been busy preparing for the opening of a show that was part of a large exhibition of photography and videos taking place in several galleries.

Then we set off to find the restaurant that had been recommended for Peking Duck. Since it was Friday night, the sidewalks were becoming crowded , so it was impossible to walk three abreast. Gordon had the address, and were were eventually on the right section, the east, of the right street. But the numbering system for businesses is not straightforward; as we first entered the east section, the first building on the corner was numbered 2-30, the second segment of the number then decreasing by two’s to about 2-20, then came 4-30, with a similarly decreasing number, then 6-xx,, 8-xx, then…28! The address we hd been given was number 26, but we had not passed a single restaurant in that section. Gordon knew that the next section of the road contained a large number of restaurants so we changed the focus of our search to look for a “good” restaurant, one that simply appealed to us. Most had barkers out front, trying to entice us in for a meal, but we eventually settled on one that had an interesting, if crowded interior.

It turned out o be a hot-pot restaurant. Each table for four had a recess in the middle with a gas burner. 

Gordon selected a number of plates of meat, fish balls and sauces for dipping, while we selected the vegetables. A large metal bowl was then set in the recess, the flame lit, and the broth we had selected (some kind of vegetable broth with wild mushrooms) was set to heat up. When that was ready we started adding sliced potatoes, and turnip sticks, and then waited for those to cook a little before adding some meat. We were the only westerners there, and in spite of Gordon’s expertise, were clearly not familiar with how the meal should proceed. At which point a waitress took charge. She indicated the order in which we were to add the various ingredients, and stepped in as well to help serve when they were cooked. At one point, Heather, who had added a fresh serving of thinly sliced marbled beef, removed some pieces to her plate, but Miss Dominant rushed in and ordered Heather to return them to the broth; in her opinion,they were not cooked. So much for medium rare!

It was a novel experience, and one I would love to repeat. Next time I would like to try have a supplementary bowl in the middle where fish can cook in its own broth, as we saw the adjacent table do.

When we left, it seemed that all the staff were lining up to say good-bye. We thanked them all with Xie! Xie!, and bowed just as they bowed to us. We strolled back in a leisurely fashion, taking in the sights and sounds for the last time on this trip.

At the hotel we said farewell to Gordon, with a promise to return to Beijing the next time we were on our way to Australia. He seemed a little sad to see us leave, as we were to leave him.

Beijing Diary: Part 10

Good Friday, 22 April.

Our last full day. But we are exhausted. So we decided, after looking at the possibilities both near and far, to head for the park on the other side of the main road that runs past the entrance to our hutong. It was sunny though cool when we left, and the previous day’s rain had obviously caused the poplar trees to shed more of their seeds; it was like walking through a light snow flurry!

We got to the lake and followed the bank towards the north. Some men were fishing, I would hope for sport and not for food, since the water did not look too clean, an impression supported by a dead fish which floated by. Further on we saw first one, then several men swimming across the lake. They had to make their way through a coating of poplar seeds on the water’s surface but they were obviously keen and not at all put off by the quality of the water or the cold. And then we saw the public notice with four warnings: one was in Chinese (with no translation, and the meaning of the graphic was not clear); a second one asked visitors to keep off the grass; and the third and fourth said “no fishing, no swimming.”

That was as far as we went, and so retraced our steps to the Drum Tower where we listened, outside, to the drum performance. Then lunch in the “Sculpting in Time” café, where we settled just ahead of a group of three German ladies, of a group of 10 Scottish persons, and of a thunderstorm. The café proprietors were in no hurry to move us out, so while Heather went to explore a nearby shop “for an umbrella”, I sat on watching the rain and the bicycle rickshaws now covered with tarpaulins, some completely leaving a small gap for passengers to look out, some just the roof.  Some drivers had adequate waterproof protection, some none at all, while a third class rode with one hand on the handlebar, the other holdng aloft an umbrella they had probably borrowed from their wife.