I’m Jesuspenis and I’m taking over for Chantelle today because she is sucky and heartbroken still. Grrrr.*

I’m an expert on anthropomorphism and Twitter because I am both a four pound yorkshire terrier and a Twitter identity. So I get used phatically all the time on Twitter by Chantelle.

Some examples of my incredible tweets:

I’m staring at you. 9:18 AM Apr 20th

the rain really screws up my foot-hair 1:12 PM May 2nd (more…)

Lynda Barry visited Toronto recently to speak at a book festival, and to teach her class on creative writing, “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her lively festival talks — which felt more like happenings than your typical button-down, staid author’s reading — she presented excerpts from her latest book, What It Is, asked the audience to shout their first phone numbers out loud, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed. She also bemoaned her sometime status as a publishing industry “gateway chick” — she says she’s like the last girl guys go out with before they realise they’re gay, only in her case it’s publishers realising they want to “date” something completely different than Lynda Barry books.

That’s changing now that she’s settled with Drawn and Quarterly, who plan to collect all of Barry’s longrunning, seminal alternative comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and who recently published What It Is to tremendous acclaim. A memoir-cum-workbook, What It Is incorporates collage, cartooning, and longhand writing in an effort to explain and disseminate the author’s creative process—which, loosely, focuses on one word, image, or memory to begin with, then spirals out from there. Lynda Barry was gracious enough to browse through a copy of What It Is with me, all the while speaking about her craft, about the creative state of mind, and about the collage material she used from her neighbour’s mother, Doris Mitchell—as well as a little bit about Family Circus. This is the first part of that conversation.

* * *

What It Is goes back to all the different modes you’ve worked in, in terms of the different techniques like pen and ink and watercolour and so on, but to me it feels connected to One Hundred Demons.

Oh, it absolutely is. It’s the sister book.

There’s that autobiographical aspect, and in the prologue to that book you actually talk about the process of putting those demons to paper.

The method that I used to write One Hundred Demons was to put a bunch of nouns and -ing words, gerunds, in a paper bag and pull them out. It was all based on that method I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca. Right after One Hundred Demons came out my next plan was to do this book, but the publisher came out and admitted he was gay and he didn’t want to do another book with me [laughs]. But my plan all along was to do this, to try to do an instruction book, because it really is like following a donut recipe, and it was really fun. In What It Is I have a word list that I encourage people to just xerox and cut up. So that’s how I did One Hundred Demons. It wasn’t anything that I sat around and went, “I should think about smell, and come up with a story about smell.” No, I happened to pull that word out. Sometimes you pull a word out and you’ll just go, Nooooo! but I really stuck to my vow that I would do it no matter what. (more…)

How do you patent indigenous knowledge? Most pharmaceutical companies have stopped trying.

People often think of indigenous tribes as being backwards or ignorant, but they know a lot of amazing things that we don’t. Instead of English Lit or Poli Sci, they get fast-tracked into a far more challenging major: How To Thrive In The World’s Most Savage Environments. The producers of Survivor ought to add a local to the next series — they’d win every immunity challenge, clean the Westerners’ collective clocks, and probably still gain some weight while they were at it.

In my travels, I’ve seen an Australian aborigine, a Peruvian Amazon guide, and a Ugandan translator casually demonstrate that where I saw blank and forbidding jungle, they saw a hardware store, arsenal, pantry and pharmacy. Need some soap, or disinfectant, or poison, or polish, or a snack? Mother Nature can and will provide.

So: on one side of the rich-poor divide, you have a small and diminishing group of tribes who happen to be the last repository of thousands of years of collective botanical research. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies around the world are on a relentless hunt for biologically active compounds they can turn into lucrative drugs. Should be a match made in heaven, right? I wish.

(more…)

Exam testing informs every aspect of life in South Korea, and it doesn’t stop even after you’ve finished university

Last Thursday was test day in South Korea. Traffic stopped. Airplane schedules were altered. The military was told to shut up. The best rice cakes in the land were distributed, consumed, and most likely thrown up in anxiety. For nine hours, the universe froze.

The most stressful test of my life was my fourth-year university Anglo-Saxon exam, which required me to translate a chunk of the original text of Beowulf, and for which I studied hard for maybe three days. The stress stemmed primarily from my desire to protect my ego by way of my final average; ultimately, the exam meant nothing.

In South Korea, tests determine the outcome of every major event in your life, and the nationwide university entrance exam (officially, the “College Scholastic Ability Test”), which takes place annually on the third Thursday in November, is the mother of all tests — the doorway through which kids must pass to transform from mute, bespectacled children whose personality is subsumed by their identical school uniforms into burgeoning adults who can wear and drink and study what they want. (more…)

Microsoft’s Live.com just relaunched as a social network. It was very easy, all they had to do was copy Friendfeed badly.

Commenter Edwin Khodabakchian summed it up when he wrote: Interesting move. At least they are trying.

But Live.com’s reinvention has given me a great idea! What if I took my favourite animal - the goat - and relaunched them as a social network. After all, if Microsoft can do it with it’s dead fish Live.com then curious, rectangular-pupiled goats are a shoe-in.

From farming goats I learned that they are natural aggregators. They collect everything they see with their mouths, with no discrimination. On the other hand, for four years Live.com has aggregated nothing. So this feature would be much easier to implement with goats.

Goats are extremely useful and efficient machines. As revealed in this Wired video, goats can clear land quickly and without pollution. They even have tidy droppings. Live.com is a useless and inefficient machine because it does nothing and no one uses it. Microsoft in general has built it’s reputation entirely around it’s aggravating messy shit. Once again goats win out.

Finally, if worse comes to worse, you can eat a goat. An edible social network could really take over the world, I should think. And just now I tried to eat Live.com and nearly puked. If it weren’t for the new rounded corners on the unibody Macbook Pro I would have.

Final socialnet probability tally: Goats=100, Live.com=0.

Prove to me that goats aren’t by far the better choice to be relaunched as a social network. Go ahead - I dare you!

The purpose of this blog is to allow me to do what I enjoy doing more than anything else in the world. Let me describe it briefly for you.

I take popular culture — both past and present forms — and use it as a lens through which to contextualize electronic communication technologies (ECTs) within a framework of race, class and gender analysis.

So why the hell do I enjoy this so much? (more…)

As yesterday’s informal National Post poll showed, Joseph Boyden is the smart-money choice to win this year’s Giller Prize tonight. (Update: Huzzah! I was right.) And for good reason — his new novel, Through Black Spruce, is a methodical study of our relation to the land and each other, marked by Boyden’s characteristically beautiful prose and true, vivid characters. I spoke with Joseph a few weeks ago in Toronto.

* * * * *

I read in the interview you did with your wife, Amanda, for the CBC, that you handed her a hundred pages of an early version of the novel that just wasn’t working. How did this story originally come to you? And what did you change from those early attempts to make it successful?

The story originally—I knew before I finished Three Day Road that I wanted to write at least one other book, and very possibly two, try and create a trilogy of the family. Each novel could be read on its own, but they don’t have to be read in any particular order, although reading them from first to third might make the most sense. I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and go back to the contemporary—my first story collection was contemporary short stories—and I wanted to explore that world again because I think there’s so much going on, it’s really kind of exciting. And then this whole idea, kind of from a Leonard Cohen song, “Suzanne takes you down” was fascinating to me, and the original title was She Takes You Down, referring to Suzanne, traveling down South and that. But the original title had too many negative connotations that I didn’t want to imply.

(more…)

Most textiles and clothes are made in Asia, sold to the West, discarded in the West, and donated to charities who have too many dresses to know what to do with them. Then the charities send them to Africa. For example:

Fictitious Original Owner: Cindy Showalker’s 8th birthday party in Miami, 1993. Cindy and her mom went shopping at the local strip mall and found this doozy on sale. Cindy really loves the color pink, especially when there’s an iridescent sheen involved. Mrs. Showalker thought it was expensive, even on sale, but she swiped the plastic anyway since Cindy only turns eight once. Cindy only wore the dress once, and then Mrs. Showkalker gave it to their Hispanic maid, who already had so many party dresses that she passed it on to Goodwill.

Actual Current Owner: Lucy Mugisha, Gayaza District, one hour east of Kampala, Uganda, 2008. Lucy loves this dress when she rides bicycles with her friends. She wears it everyday since it’s her only dress besides her school uniform. Lucy just turned seven, and was getting a bit old to be running around the village without any pants on. Her tata (dad) bought it at a used clothing market in Kampala when he went to find the family a new frying pan. Incidentally, he is color blind. (more…)

“We love our King,” proclaims Kingal, a Bhutanese man I am chatting with.  I have heard this sentiment throughout Bhutan.  The people here keep pictures of him in their homes, in their businesses; they say prayers for him.  It is as if he is a part of their lives, and “love” is not a casual, metaphorical term. It seems to accurately describe the emotion they have for him.

This year is momentous for this tiny Himalayan kingdom: they are celebrating 100 years of the Wangchuck dynasty, and the fifth King, Druk Gyalpo Jingme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck,  was just coronated on November 6th — the date deemed auspicious by “three enlightened astrologers.”  Thursday was the eighth day of the ninth month of the earth male rat year.  But just as notably, Bhutan had its first election in March 2008.  The Kings deemed it important that Bhutan transition to a parlimentary democracy, with the king in a background role, much like the royal family of England.   (more…)

Desperate for exercise, I spent half an hour yesterday jogging around Liberty City. My cousin wanted me to steal a police Hummer and shoot innocent bystanders. Instead, I ended my relaxing run in an Emergency Room with grenades that put all us invalids out of our collective miseries.

Usually after a run I just do pigeon pose.

With my foot damaged and my mind speeding the internets have provided me with other less violent places to go.

I’ve proposed to a wide variety of rural Christian girls. I’ve been sending tinkly poetry composed of lines culled from my favourite horror novels/movies and songs. For example: Your new society sounds charming, Mine Mine Mind, My heart burns there, too.* No responses yet.

Yesterday I dropped a community move for a family whose patriarch is working in Egypt. It was amazing. So many people came to help, the trucks were unloaded and unpacked in less than an hour. (more…)

From the window of our 171-year-old hotel, the St James, I looked out onto the familiar sight of the Edmund Pettus Bridge gently bending over the Alabama River, covered in a layer of morning dew, and lit up by a brilliant sunny sky. The previous night’s celebrations left me feeling less than sparkling, but Birmingham was beckoning.

Since the beginning of our trip we had planned to visit the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, killing four girls and giving Birmingham the nickname “Bombingham.” When we arrived, the church’s stone steps were warm from the noon sun. The doors were closed, but a sign directed visitors to go through the office entrance. I was expecting a livelier gathering, but the quiet mood was a sign that people were taking a breather, retreating to the smaller communities of their families, and getting ready for the next chapter. (more…)

Well, I held off my formal endorsement because I didn’t want to be accused of attempting to influence a foreign election, but you might as well know I was pulling for Obama.

And you also might as well know that the reason I’ve been gone for a week (and the reason you’ll be waiting a few more days to read my promised chapter III of the whole annoying-to-childless-people mediation on kids and happiness) is because my daughter Irene was born last Friday morning. Halloween baby! Instant goth cred, no?

In any event, those two dominating events are the subject of an essay I wrote on election day for Eye Weekly. In the nature of these things, we had to cut it by more than half its length to fit it in the paper. So for anyone interested in the director’s cut — or uncut — here’s the whole thing as I wrote it. (The short version: I’m really happy this week.) (more…)