Reading the Spectator
Ostensibly an ongoing column about reading The Hamilton Spectator but not always…
So let’s start with the Victoria Times-Colonist. This is all from memory. I bought the paper in the morning for one dollar in the car line-up for the ferry from Nanaimo (Duke Point) to Tsawwassen. A young guy with a cart pushed up and down between the lines of cars and I bought the paper through the car window. And then I opened the car door and laid the paper across my lap in the sun and flipped through it. The guy had a variety of papers. I picked the Times-Colonist because a) I used to live in Victoria; b) the name of the paper always amused/disturbed me; c) Victoria is a city so I figured the paper might have some heft to it. I like a hefty paper, though not one bulky with flyers or other filler…
The only story I remember now from the Times-Colonist, Saturday June 7, 2008 was one about how some tourism people were promoting the idea of cutting down trees along roadways so that tourists would have a better chance of seeing bears. This was a ridiculous story that elicited a certain degree of in-car ranting but lurking behind the story was an even more interesting and more deeply disturbing reality: apparently tourists, especially Europeans (according to the Times-Colonist), hinge much of the success of a vacation to Canada on whether or not they get to see bears. Who taught them that? What is this mythology? We think the Canadian experience is all about hockey and double-doubles but we are clearly deluded. It’s really all about the bears. How could we not know that?
I didn’t read any more West Coast papers after that.
On Saturday June 14, on another part of the continent, I picked up the Burlington Free Press, “a local custom – serving Vermont for 181 years”. Flipping flagrantly through the entire paper (as I like to do initially – to warm up, I guess), I noticed the ad in the “Absolutely Free” section of the classifieds. It was for a 3-year-old Chocolate Lab…”moving, cant take, $50.” The rest of the paper was kind of like that too – absolutely free, yet demanding payment, encouragingly local, but not without poignancy and even bitterness. Much of the paper focused on school graduations and last-day-of-school smiles and tears. That was the middle of the front page. The plinth story (eerily holding up the front page) was about the Iowa floods. I read the two flanking support column articles: “Loyalty oath applies in Vermont too” about recent teacher firings in California based on refusals to sign loyalty oaths and “Senators donate Hollywood proceeds” about Senator Patrick Leahy who has a small speaking role and gets grabbed by The Joker in The Dark Knight and some other senator guy who was on a TV show.
My third non-Spectator newspaper experience was actually more of a cultural experience engaging me in a weird social phenomenon – competing for access to the paper. Usually, when I go camping, I just pick up the paper casually at the camp store and then read it and burn it. It’s a simple, beautiful process. But this time, after being disappointed by an empty paper rack two days in a row, I questioned the camp store guy closely. (He and I were on fairly intimate terms now because he’d surreptitiously given me a whole wad of vinegar packets when we discovered that the camp store was no longer selling vinegar by the bottle. The camp store guy could see that I was pretty desperate. I’d managed to fool the family once by mixing pickle juice and oil for the salad but I knew I would not be able to sustain that charade for long…). Anyway, the camp store guy told me that there was now fierce competition for the London Free Press because the truck was inexplicably not dropping off any copies of the Toronto Star. The other regular paper -The Detroit Free Press, was also nowhere to be seen. “What time does the paper get here?” I asked. The camp store guy says, “We open at 8 and the paper’s already here.” The next day, I was a little late, a few minutes past eight. Just before the bridge, I saw a woman walking towards me carrying the paper. It must have been 8:05. I peddled harder and got there just in time to pick up the third or fourth last paper. I was actually stressed about it. The only story I remember was the front page headline story which was about a bad car crash that killed a couple of people. The photos were gory and sensational and the main information highlighted was that the death vehicle had already been involved in another accident that night prior to the fatal one. This led to intense (albeit brief) speculation on my part (which I assume was one goal of providing such a cryptic, limited, lurid fact). I thought about whether the newspaper story is fundamentally a trigger for the imagination (a story in other words) and how the newspaper functions in the complex process of fashioning truth. It makes truth claims but simultaneously disclaims its foundation of truth by deferring to ephemeral values like custom and community– the Burlington [Vermont] Free Press is a local custom, the Hamilton Spectator is the voice of our communities (which doesn’t really make that much sense –the mingling of one voice with multiplicity).
I also read several days worth of The Toronto Star – mostly looking for two-bedroom apartments. The classifieds tend to just lead you to a real-estate company website which serves as the real advertisement for available apartments. The paper doesn’t really seem to play much of a role anymore. It’s given up. Those of us used to using the classifieds need retraining. The Star, though, as the paper my dad always read is comfort-food for me. I know the design has changed over the years but I must have experienced the paper so daily that design changes were internalized because I find the Star graphically recognizable in a way that most other papers are not for me. It would be worth contemplating that in more detail – even researching the design over the last 40 years – have they, for example, retained some graphic element that acts as the hook; after all, The Hamilton Spectator’s title has to bear a relationship intertextually to Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century British Spectator papers and other intervening Spectators…so I would think that the 2008 Star must bear some graphic relationship to its own history – just to forge its identity and stay in touch with itself – an acknowledgement of the newspaper as a living organism – I’d like to think about that more…The Star also always has something in it that interests me. In the Friday July 4, 2008 edition, it was the couture shows article, though mostly the picture of Coco Rocha wearing Gauthier. It was her hair-sculpture that arrested me: curved and tall and sprayed and independently architectural – beyond the beehive and a far cry from the messy updo. It reminded me of the other fabulous hair sculptures I’d seen recently in the Yves St. Laurent show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Also in that section was the story about how people want to get married and/or deliver their children (by scheduled Caesarean) on Aug 8 this year because it’s 8/8/2008 and 8 is a lucky number in Chinese numerology. Apparently “contemporary couples of all backgrounds are clamoring for the oh-eight anniversary date”. I also read a column about the controversy around Henry Morgentaler’s appointment to the Order of Canada with a warning that women’s right-to-choose is becoming increasingly threatened by the rise of right-wing groups, subtle and not-so-subtle changes to legislation, and popular culture (celebrity bumps and film fantasies - like Juno, I guess). I wonder if the Spectator has had anything to say about that?
I finally got to the Spectator on Monday June 30, 2008 and I’ve read it regularly since, not everyday, but maybe three times a week which has got to be enough to get an impression. I felt really disoriented on June 30th because I hadn’t read the Spec for over a month and things had actually happened that I didn’t know about or really understand. It’s almost like missing episodes of the Y & R. You get caught up quickly once you figure out whether Victor and Nikki are married or divorced, but it feels weird and alien at first. For example, I had a hard time understanding Andrew Dreschel’s column “Eisenberger’s night of the long knives” about a City Hall scandal that I had totally missed. There was also news about the Lister Block and Ivor Wynne Stadium. I had no idea anyone was thinking of building a new stadium for the Ti-Cats. Isn’t Ivor Wynne a perfect stadium? That’s what the guy who wrote the article seemed to be saying in “shed[ding] a tear” but then he suddenly advocated for a new stadium, just because. He also implied that Hamilton has a good record of preserving its heritage buildings (and so who cares if Ivor Wynne goes) but clearly that’s not the case. The op-ed pages are always problematic that way though. It’s one of my favorite parts of the paper because of the layout, the cartoon, the letters to the editor, etc. but then you get bylines like “Andrew Baulcomb is a freelance writer. He lives in Hamilton” or “James Travers writes on national affairs” and there’s no really grounding for the reader – who are these people…really? But then I flipped to the Go Section and looked at Amy Winehouse’s big hair on Go3 with envy. I wondered why there were two horoscopes in the paper that day – one for Monday and one for Tuesday and then I realized that Tuesday is Canada Day so there likely wouldn’t be a paper published and readers might be lost without the horoscope. Mine said that on Monday I should “work with one partner with an eye to possibilities” and on Tuesday I should “loosen up and be [my]self”. I also read an article about a drug the US FDA is seeking to approve called bimatoprost (Lumigan) – which could be used to stimulate eyelash growth, produce longer, darker, thicker lashes, and as a result reduce the need to use mascara creating consumer demand in the “medical aesthetic marketplace”. Or, at least that was the pitch of the article, because the drug is really used for treating glaucoma in elderly patients and the longer lashes and darkening of the skin around the eyes (raccoon eyes) are just (apparently potentially marketable) side effects. Yikes! I think I’d rather get an eyeliner tattoo.
The Friday July 4, 2008 Spectator felt more substantial. Maybe I’m better acclimatized but the C-Diff investigative series is very good. This is important work. Because I’ve got a parent in a long-term care facility and have had a family member made very seriously ill through a hospital infection contracted during surgery, this issue makes me highly worried, suspicious and angry. I’ve heard the Spectator quoted and complimented for this series by other media as well. It’s a good example of journalistic advocacy which is a slippery issue for news media in terms of bias and behind-the-scenes string-pulling, but giving voice to issues is really central to the practice of journalism. I like the calling-to-account implicit to this series. Questions like “why aren’t statistics being gathered?” and “why are the criteria for reporting cases so diverse and vague?” need both to be asked and answered. Of course, this is also the first day the Mount Albion Road hit-and-run was reported and the banner story “Grandpa’s cottage going” really disturbed me because I’ve always loved that cottage in front of the Dundurn Fortinos plaza just as a symbol of resistance and I feel really bad that a guy who left his house to the “people of Hamilton” gets shafted like this. Surely, the “people of Hamilton” want the cottage to stay…as a symbol of resistance…as evidence of a story of Hamilton, as a trace of change. I remember when that plaza was first built and there were milk wars where the price of three bags of milk dropped to almost nothing as the competing grocery stores tried to lure us in and that was before it was even Fortinos there. Things like the milk wars and Grandpa’s cottage possess a kind of postmodern heritage value. They are good to think on and need to be valued. Their visceral presence expands how we think about place and presence, how we come to think about place and our connections to the past, the here and now, what we do, and how we imagine the future. We need to remember, for example, that Dundurn plaza wasn’t “always there”, and that Grandpa resisted. And before that…?
