Kiddie Porn and The Public Good

Even literate Canadians can be excused for not paying much attention to federal Justice Minister Martin Cauchon’s introduction last week of new legislation designed to plug alleged loopholes in the nation’s child pornography laws. It is not just the press of seasonal events–from the incessant thumping of American war drums over Iraq to the permanent crisis in Ottawa, a.k.a. the Chretien government–that accounts for the inattention. Kiddie porn is simply one of those uncomfortable topics... 
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BIRTH

I was born in Chicago in 1941. A quarter-century later, a group of white Chicago musicians, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, recorded a song, "Born in Chicago," in which that sentence, "I was born in Chicago in 1941," repeated twice, provides the opening lines of their blues anthem. I was born in Chicago, in 1941, on January 19, a Sunday morning at about 3 a.m., into the hands of the attending physician at Lutheran Deaconess Hospital, Dr. Nathan Kane, my Uncle Docky. Actually, he was my... 
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(MY) BERLIN

“Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city,” is the way Walter Benjamin begins “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932). Let me do likewise. “For although the child, in his solitary games, grows up in closest proximity to the city,” Benjamin says, “he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses…” As does the stranger to the city. The first of my guides, on a mid-March afternoon in 1990, a day or two before the first election in East Germany since the... 
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THE BEGINNING OF THE SHORT VERSION: AN ABC’S BOOK

…Perhaps my ABC’s are instead of: instead of a novel, instead of an essay on the twentieth century, instead of a memoir. Each of the individuals [and places] remembered here sets into motion a network of mutual allusions and interdependencies linked to the facts of my century. In the final analysis, I do not regret that I have dropped names so cavalierly (or so it must seem), or that I have made a virtue of my casual way. –Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s... 
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JOHN BERGER

In one of the thirty or so "stories" in John Berger’s Photocopies (Pantheon, 1997), the then seventy-year-old Berger, who lives in a French alpine village, has just visited an old friend in Paris, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, at the time in his eighties. The two men had a rambling and suggestive conversation about "the instant of taking a picture… ‘the decisive moment,’" as the photographer had once put it. Later that afternoon, in the Paris Metro, as... 
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BANGKOK

At about 8 o’clock in the evening in Twilight Alley, there’s a suspended moment of languid nothingness mixed with tremulous expectation–and that moment is at the centre of my idea of Bangkok. Twilight Alley, named after the Twilight nightclub at its mouth, is a short, mostly pedestrian lane off Surawong Road, which is one of the two main thoroughfares of the Patpong tourist and sex district (the other one is Silom Avenue). At night both of these streets are filled with continuously moving... 
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David Berg

Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy, came to Vancouver around 1970, a couple of years before his death there. Gestalt, unlike protracted Freudian analysis, emphasised the existential "here and now," proposing a psycho-dramatic technique for "getting in touch" with one’s suppressed feelings, and enacting the divided elements of self in an effort to create a more integrated or whole person. Perls, a rambunctious man in his seventies–possibly a lascivious old fraud,... 
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Wilder Bentley and Walt Whitman

The first college course I took, at San Francisco State College in the early 1960s, was a survey of American literature taught by Wilder Bentley. Although in my naivete I had no idea of who Bentley was, he was well-known in the college, if not beyond it, as one of those professors who is an inspiring catalyst for receptive students. Going to college reflected a shift in my intellectual allegiances toward the views of the poet Robin Blaser, who was then working as an acquisitions librarian at SF State and who... 
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War and Peaceniks

Bombs are loud. So loud that it sometimes makes sense to wait until they almost stop falling if you want to be heard, or even if you just want to hear yourself think. However, one consequence of waiting is that you sacrifice whatever small opportunity there may be to raise your voice against the bombs, if that’s what you want to do. Thus, silence is not an option if you’re fighting for peace, as were most of my friends during the whatever-it-was– conflict/war/imperialist-aggression/event–in... 
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ROLAND BARTHES

The book by Roland Barthes that changed my idea of writing is titled Roland Barthes. Here’s how I became interested in it and him. In the early 1980s, I frequently spent my weekend evenings in a Vancouver gay bar called Buddy’s. I quickly recognized that Buddy’s was, for me and other of its patrons, a potent site–puns intended–that regularly generated not only adventures in cruising and sex, but also all sorts of scenes, stories, glimpses, thoughts, aphorisms, "moments"... 
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