Four Photos: Faces at the DIA

Four Photos: Last Sunday's Pre-DIA Breakfast

Four Photos: The loveliest of trees

At the DIA last week, the trees were in full bloom. These photos don't even begin to capture how amazing they were.

eBook Blog: The Day Before Day One

The day before I picked up my Sony eBook Reader, I was at home; I’d been ill and was recovering at home. I’d spent much of the day reading and enjoying Adam Gopnik’s book Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. It was the first sunny day in a few weeks and I was grateful for a great book. At one point I paused, held the book in my hands and thought about the book as an object: I loved the aesthetics of the cover; I loved the scent of the new paper; I loved the velvety feel of the cover. I loved thinking about the day I bought it: a cold, grey day in February in Toronto when my friend John and I basked in the warmth and comfort of Nicholas Hoare books on Front Street. It was the kind of day and place that makes you want to put everything aside and read for weeks on end. I realized holding that volume that I love books for all sorts of emotional, aesthetic, social, and tactile reasons. I was, in short, perhaps not the kind of reader one might expect to buy an eBook reader. Indeed, I was surprised to find a number of my friends who see books in the same way that I do viewing my impending eBook purchase as a kind of mutiny against paper: “we’ve lost another one,” they seemed to lament. I am also, however, a curious reader and an academic librarian researching digital humanities: to ignore the whole eBook/ Kindle phenomenon was impossible.

Still, on the day before I would go out and purchase my eBook reader, I looked out the window at the burgeoning spring and held the Gopnik book in my hands a little longer than I might normally. I thought about the pleasures of my recent book shopping with John, about the way my husband and I swap books by the stack, about the conversations I have with the staff of my local branch of our public library when I go to pick up my books, about the feel of new (and old) paper and wondered— nervously, I’ll admit— about whether I’d fall in love with my eBook reader so much that I'd never go back to the printed book. Will it change me as a reader? Will it change how I see, read, think about books? Will it change what I read? These are questions in which I'm personally interested and professionally invested and I can't imagine they'll have easy answers.

As a way of thinking through these issues, I'll be posting some desultory thoughts about the eBook Reader question. This is the first in a series of blogs about my new eBook reader and the experience of getting used to it. I'm working on a formal project related to eBooks and literary history and am thinking through through a lot of these issues on a range of fronts. My informal thoughts will be posted here to the Cafe. A number of blog posts are written, although Ludditely, (if I may invent a word) only in a handwritten state. I'll type them up soon. Stay tuned...

More than 4 Shots for my Mum on her Birthday: Things blooming and growing in my garden just for her

4 Shots: Detroit on a ballgame afternoon

4 Shots (for Cameron): My Answer to Your Question

4 Shots: First Day Out in the Garden

Things Worth Saving: Thinking about Windsor

As an academic, you often don't get a lot of choice where you end up. Often you end up somewhere not knowing exactly how or why you arrived there. I knew very little about Windsor when D took a job here and my first visit to Windsor was a house hunting trip in May 2000. We had 48 hours to buy a house and we managed it in 24. On our last day in town I stood in the middle of Willistead Park, surveyed my new city and imagined our new life. Something about that new spring day made me think "I'm going to be very happy here." For whatever reason, I've been happy in Windsor since the moment our moving van arrived. "It will wear off," a friend told me but it never has. I talk to a lot of people about why I love Windsor and why I've been so happy here; some nod incredulously, others know exactly what I'm talking about. There are too many reasons to discuss here but one of the reasons I love this city is the existence of creative, visionary ventures like Broken City Lab.
Their current initiative "Things Worth Saving" where they encourage Windsorites to "venture out into the city and take five photographs that showcase what makes our city “worth saving.” These photographs will be turned into a series of postcards that will be mailed out to other cities across the country to prompt a discussion around the differences between how Windsor is viewed by its residents versus how Windsor is viewed by people from outside the city."

They asked for five photographic responses to the following criteria:

1) Someone you’d hate to see leave
2) Something inspiring
3) Somewhere that made you feel something important
4) Somewhere you know you’ll always find a familiar face
5) Something with potential

I'll post my initial responses to these five questions below; I'm not quite certain I'm done taking photos for this (I expect not) and I've not decided which of these images I'll select but here are my preliminary shots. Stay tuned. If you're in Windsor, I encourage you to go for a walk about think about the things worth saving.

1) Someone you’d hate to see leave

There are many friends in Windsor I would hate to see leave but I responded to this question as a Windsor citizen and thought about the kind of person I would hate to see leave Windsor. Here's what I came up with:

1. Chatty Collection on Ottawa Street. There's a lot of talk about the need to buy the things we produce locally be they cars or carrots; often we forget about the clothes we buy and where they're made. Chatty's in my neighbourhood and I've found some of my favourite pieces of clothing there. Best of all, it's made locally and/ or in Canada. Support them!

2. Phog's Frank and Tom: where would we be without them? Seriously.

2) Something inspiring

One of the things I did know about Windsor before I moved here was that it was a key part of the Underground Railroad. This monument (and a companion piece in Detroit) commemorates one of the most inspiring historical narratives I know. I knew instantly what I wanted to photograph for this one.

3) Somewhere that made you feel something important

As noted earlier, Willistead Park was where I first thought "I'm going to be happy in Windsor" and perhaps as a result, Willistead Park is a place where I think about what I love in my life. There are too many wonderful moments to list but I'll let the pictures do the talking.

4) Somewhere you know you’ll always find a familiar face

My dad says, "you know you're at home in a place where you've found someone to fix your car and someone to cut your hair." Very true. I'd add: "you know you're really at home when you've found a place where you can reliably know you'll see at least five people you know when you go there." For me, that place is the lovely-perfect Taloola.

5) Something with potential

News about the auto industry all ones tends to hear about Windsor in the national media. My house is several blocks from several assembly plants and tool and die shops; I can tell the state of the current economy by how long it takes me to cross the road when shifts let out: when it's good, add 10 minutes onto a bike trip; when it's not, you could safely eat a sandwich in the middle of the road. Some places have been moribund in the past few years but there is new life here and there. Recently, a tool and die shop a couple of blocks away has been re-tooled as an green energy site; I find these shifts pretty exciting for our city and for my neighbourhood.