Camille Dumas Archive

Half-Life

Originally published 12/01/03 at CanCon

Livid, it proves
the absence of telepathy,
at least, in conjunction with compassion.
No one could hear
and let it go on:
under stolen blankets
with days dripping into weeks
and patience into panic
and tomorrow wearing white at the corners
from being worn in the same places
drinking only bottled water and
looking for an exit the way
one checks the same places over and over
for missing keys
in case they were right there all along:
stuck through your wrist, perhaps, or jammed
in your eyes.

Yet, every man's life ends the same way

Originally published 10/01/03 at CanCon

If you were not real, and wanted to lay train track,
the person you would want
is an Irving Thalberg lookalike, Monroe Stahr,
the millionaire filmmaker created by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(not the real porn actor).
He listens and researches, yes, but then
he puts his finger
(again, not the porn actor)
on the map and say 'that's where the track goes'.
And he's right: he
is created very good in business, and, parenthetically,
tragically incompetent with women.

That you're real means, flawed as is Monroe Stahr,
whomever you have putting the finger on your map
is probably less, probably worse.
He probably is mean as a sewage vent and
personable as unworn blue jeans.
No one has given him the ability
to do anything.
From what I know of men,
he won't have exercised his own, and,
when faced with potential for tragedy,
will want time off with pay for it.

You're not very tall, are you?

Originally published 09/01/03 at CanCon

I am normally given
to ask a lot of trivial questions,
like how the blind man
cuts his nails.

With each question
(this movie director? that talk show host?
this beer and that lime?)
I am sending out a sonar packet.
I am asking: Where are you?
It's a cowardly strategem
to build my charts,
like those practiced
by the girl with the glass of water
in the painting by Renoir.

So.

What's it like for you?
Covered in bits of noise, maybe even reading this poem? Becoming aware
that this is about you, that as we talked,
I was mapping you, yes, you in particular? Is
each question now puncturing you
like the spines of a stripped umbrella?
Were you standing stargazing
at a green post-sunset sky
and suddenly aware
of a ball of detached light
falling on a long slow curve?

Maybe -- I wish that -- you knew,
while you walk around, around,
expanding your perimeter
satisfyingly familiar with
each place you put your foot.
I admire that discipline,
I just don't have it.

With each dot on my chart, I am saying
"I can turn back, I can always turn back"
and each step argues cumulatively for my return,
as each mark on a map shows the way home.
They accrue gravity, pulling me away
but I will keep walking toward you,
if you spin faster than my shoes.

For I will throw my glove

Originally published 08/01/03 at CanCon

Cut the paper. One letter after another. Cut them deep. Dig until your hands are buried in tree sap. Carve each letter into a ream of paper.

Shoot the books. Put the muzzle to the author's temple and pull.

Stab needles into every round letter. Dissolve the glue with acid. Drown the pages. Crush them with cannon fire.

Slice off the spines. Decapitate the capitals. Tear along the fold that no pairing remains.

Burn the bodies. Drop them down a shaft so hot and long that they burst, bright, then ash, then nothing but powder down in the dark.

Whatever I do to my bright hair or praised cheeks, you will not get me. I am not there.

Dicktych

Originally published 07/01/03 at CanCon

It was hot, too hot. Now it's cool, except my breasts. The heat went into my breasts and they are waiting.

HEY JEQUEL SAND THE BROOM HANDLE BEFORE YOU USE IT

I pour oil on my body and wash it off. I pour it on and wash it off. I pour it on and rub it into my hands.

KRITAL WHERE ARE MY FUCK MACHINES?

I smell of almonds, oranges, nutmeg, olives.
I smell of soap.

I THOUGHT I SAW JANUS BUT IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DOOR

I keep my skirt knotted at my knees for an hour.

RANDS WHAT ABOUT THE SWARMS OF BURROWING PRICKS

I drink a lot of water. I try to think of what I should eat.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED HERE CORLOTH I MEAN WITH THE FUCKING

I brush my hair.

Tomorrow it will rain.

The lioness lay
by a pile of bones.
The moon blew above her,
close and cold as a comet.

"I may be under man's whim
and jabbed by instinct,
but as I know that I
am not a man, and
I know that
I am not a man.
If the ugliest man expects
the understanding of other men
then even the most carnivorous and
lascivious beast must
be so entitled."

She pulled up on her yellow paws
and walked around the bones.
She saw the same moon,
still an airless white rock.

"What's a man? He loves
and he cooks his food.
My food is raw
and I love who I may."

With Apologies to Dorothy Parker

Originally published 06/01/03 at CanCon

Can love you for
your corrugated eyes, the feel
of your hand on my arm,
where the music, skipping, repeated the same bits about love for an hour
while we drank the same cup of coffee very slowly and I imitated
someone I'd heard on the bus: "she sent her little brother
round to get the money, yes, her little brother, six foot four
and two hundred forty pounds, I left the money at my parents,
I just didn't need that"?
He said we must love one another and die.
I said I won't die at all. Does this mean
I forget your mottled hands and torn-off nails,
(too strange for there ever to be
more than one of you or me)?
Forget your jumbled teeth on my name?
I ask because I have never forgot you entirely.
Yet if I love you he says I will die. If that's true,
I take some satisfaction in knowing:
(you who first foretold our situation and its duration (hardier and
more profitable than weeds)
and yet no matter what you may take into your
resilent and ruthless heart
(the turbine that might power my greatest light)
it is of no significance, for your heart
is disconnected from your active body. Your role
is a dream from which you are sure
I will wake up. I say I am awake. There is always
a stair without a railing that, lightheaded, I
stumble against without your hand on my arm)
you'll die too.

"Memo"

Originally published 04/01/03 at CanCon

I say now death is an unacceptable superstition.
I guess this idea is natural
for one my age, but I'll be thirty sooner
than twenty five (when I'll be even more
untrustworthy than usual)
and the thought remains.
I don't believe it -- I don't believe death, applies to me.
It's effective and some I know
found it irresistible, but I won't let it have me.
I won't be stopped by a tradition.

In most stories where
someone works for love 24 hours a day without a break, like an ice machine,
he gets it for a minute and then it's over: it dies
(and often she dies along with it,
or it catches fire,
and sometimes, it can explode).
It may be satisfying
for you or I to pour out big
shots of his unhappiness from
a bottle with a loose cork (since
his happiness, undemocratically, makes only him drunk)
but you can't have it of me.
I'm giving nothing
to no one, and least of all to death.

I don't know what the dead ones said,
but maybe it didn't occur to them to say no.
Maybe they thought
it was a joke.
Or maybe they realized
denying death is a full time job,
and they weren't built for it.
Maybe they found retirement
unexpectedly compelling? Well,
I can't make you stay.
I can only say
I won't go.

Nineteen dollars and fifty cents

Originally published 02/23/03 at CanCon

I'm supposed to be working right now, but
nothing is more appealing than writing a poem
when one should be doing something else. There
is no better time to write a poem than when one
should be doing something one hates to do. Then
one can feel this particular time was spent as if
it was really expensive: it was time with a dollar
figure attached. So far this poem has cost me three
dollars just to write. If I spend too much time on it
now, then money will have to steal time from sleep the way
right now poetry is stealing time from money. That's how it
goes. Everybody steals from somebody else, with the whole body
eventually covering all the bills. You can steal time from work
and money and sleep but the body still pays for it all in the end.

I'll give it a little advance now:
I'll give it a little of the bad white
wine stinking up the fridge. The tongue
and the nose won't be happy, but the rest
of the body normally has no say. The body's
no democracy. So how can a bunch of bodies make one?

I stopped writing the poem for a minute
to get the wine and to check on the music
I'm stealing. I'm stealing it from money,
in the sense that I could pay for it, I guess,
although I can't afford to buy a hundredth as much
music as I need. To have no music would turn me blue
and not make anybody happier, except some record company
executives, and then only in principle. If I wrote them
and said, I'm very sick and broke and music would help me
but I'm not stealing it, would it make them happy? Time is
sort of finite but music feels like infinity. I can love the
same music over and over but I can only have this time once. When
I needed a break from the poetry I got wine and I took care of the
music, and when I was done getting wine and taking care of the music
I went back to poetry. What choices! I wish I got money to make choices
like this instead of to work!

Now this poem has cost about nineteen dollars
and fifty cents to write, in that I could have
done nineteen dollars and fifty cents worth of work
instead of writing it. Nineteen dollars and fifty cents
for a poem! What a bargain!

I am publishing a set of holiday cards this winter, featuring writing and photography by me. For more information, to see a sample, or to buy a set, visit 1/2 OK. The more you buy, the less government work I have to do, and the more weirdshit I make for your entertainment and edification -- everybody wins!

Update: Nov 7/02: Lost out to the little kids with Canadian flags. Puke!

Aloha,

Kindly trek over to:

http://www.monitor.ca/contest/final15/index1.htm

And vote for the pic in the bottom right corner, that's a young lady sleeping in a doorway near some Carravaggio sidewalk art. Here's the larger version:

http://www.monitor.ca/contest/final15/pages/fp831-gt-3_jpg.htm

It's already in the top five in People (and may have already won that category -- there's one other good shot and three PHOTOS OF LITTLE KIDS!). Unlike the contest earlier this year it will actually be done.

Obligedly, GT

1/2 OK is postcards (and probably eventually full letters) from me or someone else or someone who doesn't exist to maybe you, maybe somebody else, maybe somebody of me, maybe somebody of somebody else.

"Copycats," call two little girls walking down Wellington Street in Ottawa. "We already did it today!" But that was later, when I was going home again, during the day's second Middle Eastern demonstration on Parliament Hill.

The Devil and the Vivendi

Vivendi picked Moncton to make its way into private water management in Canada -- unsurprising as Vivendi is based in France, and Moncton is one of the larger French-English cities in bilingual New Brunswick. I was asked for a quick word on how to research Vivendi and what I thought.

The quickest way to find corporate dirt on the net is to search "companyname sucks" -- as in "Vivendi sucks". Not all protest sites identify themselves with "sucks", but an awful lot do. There was a vivendiuniversalsucks.com web site but it was taken away from its creator and given to Vivendi in a controversial decision by WIPO (the body governing, among other things, who has the right to use a given domain name). This is unfortunate, since "sucks" sites tend to attract a wide range of negative comment on a corporation. It's quite normal for that corporation to try to shut down a "sucks" -- the odd thing here is that WIPO, with its usual flair for random judgements, granted it.

So we're stuck with more conventional sources (Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, The Economist). The Economist has some excellent articles on Vivendi but unfortunately, they're now in the archives, and cost about $3 USD to retrieve. That's not an unreasonable charge, but it's unsuitable for a fishing expedition.

Besides, this is one of those scenes where it doesn't matter if Vivendi is charming and talented most of the time -- because "most of the time" is not an acceptable answer to "is my water safe to drink?" So while this article from Business Mexico about their positive privatization experience is interesting, what we really need to see is the downside -- the problems in Africa and South America:

There have been striking examples of private sector failures. When Cochabama, Bolivia, turned over its water system to a private consortium led by engineering giant Bechtel, water prices increased so dramatically that riots broke out. A 17-year-old boy was killed, and thousands were injured in clashes with police. Water services were returned to public control.
After water was privatized in Puerto Rico in 1995, poor communities complained that they had no water while water giant Vivendi supplied tourist resorts and U.S. military bases with as much water as they could consume.
In Argentina, when the French company Generale de Eaux got a contract for water delivery, prices doubled and quality deteriorated. The company was forced to pull out when people refused to pay their bills.

waterindustry.org does have some good information. I would expect Environment News to have good information as well but it has surprisingly little. Global water privatization is an issue that does not seem to be getting its due airtime in North America, however.

My take on all this:

The question is not, "should water management be privatized" -- the question is "how can the public enforce fair management on whomever is in charge of the water?" Walkerton -- the little town in Ontario where seven people died of e.coli poisoning amid government cutbacks and mind bogglingly lax water care -- has shown that government can't be trusted to keep water safe.

It doesn't matter if the water is managed by a government chimpanzee or a corporate baboon as long as the result is clean, safe water with equitable distribution and fair prices.

A contract with Vivendi must must restrict how Vivendi is permitted to raise the price, include regular public evaluations of infrastructure and water quality, establish a substantial emergency/good-conduct fund which a public water management body can draw on for repairs should Vivendi be found in breach of standards, and most of all, the contract should be terminable at the city's discretion with very little notice.

If Vivendi finds those terms inconvenient, tough. It's a competitive world and somebody else will be happy to make the money and provide you with some security. I would not accept corporate water control with anything less than the above restrictions, as corporations have no natural incentive to behave well -- they can only be provided with financial ones.

Corporations like to make money. They will make it any way they can. The only way to control them is to make it economically unfeasible for them to do anything but behave themselves, and make behaving themselves have enough payoff to be worth doing. That there is money in water management has already been established. Vivendi wants money -- so the best way to control Vivendi is to make it easy to take money away from it. Other cities have failed by not making it easy enough to take money away from Vivendi when it misbehaved -- so make the good conduct fund a big fat one, Moncton.

The Truncheon or the Twat

The Truncheon or the Twat
THE WARBLOGGERS

They also tend to have certain ideological characteristics: to a man (and woman) they are as scathingly intolerant of any and all dissent on the War question as they are vehement in their contempt for Arabs °© all Arabs: that is, Arabs as such °© and support for the state of Israel. It's frightening, really, with so many sites °© there must be hundreds of these little war-bots spawned in cyberspace, springing out of the psychic ether like Myrdmidons and lunging at anyone who doesn't toe the Party Line.

On the other hand, I'm in favour of the war -- not because the US has a (comprehensible) vendetta against bin Laden but because the Taliban were a pack of disgusting evil sadists and needed to go. Their treatment of women, homosexuals, and anybody else they considered a deviant was appalling. They had to go, and they would have gone sooner or later anyhow. Not being psychic, I can't be sure that the body count in the US-Afghan conflict is lower than it would have been if Afghanistan had had another civil war, but it seems likely that overall this was the most humane method (which is like saying amputation is superior to death by gangrene).

It's rare that an anti-war commentator offers a better way of handling the Afghan problem -- or related issues like the rise of aggressive anti-Semitism in pre-WWII Germany, apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Rwanda, und so weiter. You can't eliminate a theocratic dictatorship or oligarchy by sanctions because one of the first tenets of virtually all ruling theocracies is "the hardship of this life is inversely proportionate to the pleasure of the next". So anyone with substantial convictions will only be, paradoxically, strengthened by your resistance, and those who are not hardcore are probably not in a position to accomplish anything.

A better solution is to disrupt the state, either by smashing it or subverting it. Smashing it is quicker, but produces more recoil, and must be followed up by the same tactics involved in subversion. Subverting is slower, but has more lasting effects, plus introduces a strategy that can be supported on the long term. Out of the mouths of babes and Dubyas came that 'hearts and minds' crap which, though true, is being completely disregarded in any meaningful sense. Dropping food packets, vacillating about leaving a permanent garrison, sucking the Canadians in to do your dirty work, and then letting warlords like Rostum run all over murdering and looting is not a good way to win anybody's heart (outside of the Bush clan, at least, I don't presume to know what works for him personally).

While a long term, intelligent, and completely shameless subversion strategy would obviously be best, nobody has the realpolitik cold blood necessary. Positioning a hundred free-to-those-who-wash-their-hands porta-falafel-stands in the Tora Bora hills (though clear the mines first, wouldja boys) and, say, a thousand give-an-orgasm-get-an-orgasm prostitutes (protected by at least an equal number of SEALs or Marines) would've done more to win 'hearts and minds' than a thousand dumbass smart bombs. Sadly, I don't see anybody signing up to Whore For Peace (even though whoredom was a respected profession before you men were let in charge).

The real nature of this war was, and continues to be, about freedom versus repression. Whether the US gov't intended to serve freedom by booting the Taliban is irrelevant; they did a good thing by booting them. Human freedom is worth paying lives for -- if that's how it has to be got, which it is, because there is no government on the planet sane enough, or feminine enough, to win with the twat instead of the truncheon. Whoring for peace may not sound as nice as bombing for peace, but there's a much greater chance of physical love (even commercial, bought-and-paid-for-love) turning into emotional love -- than, say, a bullet in the head turning into emotional love. Isn't love what all this fighting's about?

However, solving global problems by ineffective sanctions or questionably effective violence is the order du jour -- while something better would be nice, one has to be intelligent about one's odds and take the best thing available (while continuing to agitate, of course). One has to keep one's eye on the goal and do anything that furthers that end. Any more fastidious attitude is egotistical and doomed -- the biggest problem with the left is that it predominantly wants what it wants and it wants it in a very specific and stylized sort of way. Sure, it would be nicer if the Taliban could be peacefully replaced with a democratically and gender-balanced set of wise elders. But put that way, doesn't it sound... unlikely?

So get over yourselves, warbloggers, and don't be so sure you can control the debate: there are some of us who just won't be "disciplined" all that easily.

Nobody controls the debate. Nobody can control the debate. The internet is live, global, and pervasive. I don't watch news on teevee because it is controlled; some idiot is deciding what's going to be interesting to me for the next half hour to an hour interspersed with commercials for stuff I don't want. I can get the same amount of information off the net in five minutes or my pizza's free. If I go to a website and it bores or otherwise doesn't impress, I click away. Everybody (with some exceptions in countries foolish enough to think they can control the internet, hoc etiam transibit) can do that.

With hundreds of millions of people online (some of us who have been blogging even longer than Mister Raimondo -- now now, I won't be like that) what's the point in flipping out about a few people who get excited enough to, on their own dime and time, do their own extended dance remix of the world news? Isn't it more amazing that, not only is it possible and cheap to do so, but that people care enough to get involved? This isn't high school, this is the world. There's room for more than one group of Cool People.

Impervious as a Mirror

"America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?"

"Love Me, Love My Dog"

And Wish Me A Happy 26th Birthday, While You're At It

What's this, a Millennium?

"That's What We Suspect Is Happening"

Mrs. Everywhere: An Honest Villain is a Cut Above

One Who Smiles and Smiles

Elect me? Elect you!

Remembering Trudeau

Mrs. Everywhere: Wherever You Go, There You Are

No breaks for the home wine crowd

Confederation or Guns

Mrs. Everywhere: We are not Property

Welcome to the National Capital

Mrs. Everywhere: When is the last bus to Athens?

What is Stockwell Day?

The War of 1812

All My Children

Getting and Spending

On the David Suzuki Foundation

On Conservatism I

Note128

Greetings from Nineveh!

Bagatelle 4

Bagatelle 3

Bagatelle 2

Bagatelle 1

Entire Archive

Note266

Note204

Greg Rucka Interview

Ron Goulart Interview

Great Gatsby Review [dead URL]

Death's Place: Fourth fit

Death's Place: Third fit

Death's Place: Second fit

Death's Place: First fit