This is the first post by our newest contributor and culture editor, cyam/pascal. He'll be offering up a regular mix of cultural threoy and everyday life, from a quirky, and I dare say, eccentric point of view. It's sure to be entertaining and informative. --Joel

the splices of local life

Welcome to the new James Bay Culture Blog.

fig. 1 - A monstrous French philosopher peers
down curiously at quaint James Bay.

Our plan here is to explore the shared reality of the James Bay community in all its different dimensions. We want to find the living web that is woven invisibly between us all – both the daylight and noctural minds of the region. Although we must give all fair praise to the garden markets and heritage plaques with which we identify ourselves, they do not always succeed in identifying the deep cultural field in which we are so intimately embedded. The organic mechanics of our mutual identity are surely not so easily determined by the regular routine of life.

It was the famous French philosopher Gilles Delueze (fig. 1) who said,

“Style is a quality possessed by those people of whom we say -- they have no style!”

This curious statement suggests that we define ourselves at our edges, by our exceptions and via our boundary conditions. The great "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville was denounced as trash by those few who read it and generally ignored by everyone else. It would come to define the style of American novels. Emily Carr was -- often as not -- a kind of alien or lunatic in the eyes of her neighbours – yet she would later symbolize both her era and her community. We inhabit culture just like fish live in water, usefully, sure, but with no real sense of its external qualities. The James Bay Culture Blog will attempt to open us to the great diversity and depth of our landscape no matter how strange or trivial it becomes.

I am a proud supporter of the halcyon ease and familiarity which hangs in the atmosphere over this beaucolic boot-tip of Vancouver Island. This sense in the air is our real legacy and, frankly, I see it as the root of an ethical approach to living. Yet this golden ease is not indestructible. In order to secure its continuation we must keep the hidden roots of the community churning out raw nutrient into our collective social space. Let us honour what James Bay stands for by seeking the odd perspectives, the curious glyphs, far-out paranoid notions and the true artistic-spiritual epiphanies that have always sustained us.

How's that sound? Too complicated or just-complicated-enough? I think you'll love it. It will be juicy, smart and full of attitude. Think of it as accupuncture down upon the social body of James Bay – with this blog as the needle!

Just remember:

1. I will be your proxy in the realm of local curiosities, always on the lookout for perplexing objects, visionary persons and weird reasoning of all kinds. If you spot fertile oddities in the community please contact me at pascal[at]jamesbay.org and you may find yourself woven into the fabric of the The James Bay Culture Blog.

2. Each short essay will address one unique vortex of local life, and then SPLICE it together with one high-concept thinker or historical event -- setting us in greater context. This welcoming entry, for example, touches on the recent French philosohper Gilles Deleuze. Researches suggest that our intelligence is not measured by the sheer quantity of our knowledbe but by the rich diversity of interesting connections we stretch between all the things we have learned.

3. This is going to be great fun, I assure you. The trivial will become vast and the great will be microscopically reduced just as occurs in comedy -- but that will not detract for the genuine ethical committment that I would like too see blossoming in this community and toward which all these blog entries will be reaching. I hope our mutual pleasure, our mutual increase of understanding, and the enlivenment of authentic community spirit will go hand in hand together.

Thanks for reading this!

“Hmmm.... sounds cultural.”

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