User:Skookum1

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Who I Am, or Might Be
This user is a member of WikiProject Vancouver.
This user is a member of the WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America.
es-3 Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel avanzado de español.
fr-3 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau avancé de français.
no-2 Denne brukeren har god kjennskap til norsk.
de-2 Dieser Benutzer hat fortgeschrittene Deutschkenntnisse.
grc-1 ὅδε ἐγκυκλοπαιδειουργὸς ὀλίγον ἀρχαίως Ἑλληνιστὶ γράφειν οἷος τ' ἐστίν.
ke-1 Ὁ χρήστης οὗτος δύναται συνεισφέρειν μετὰ μικρὰς γνώσεως τῆς Κοινῆς Ελληνικῆς.
is-2 Þessi notandi hefur miðlungs-
þekkingu á íslensku máli.
la-1 Hic usor simplice latinitate contribuere potest.
This user does weight training.
This user plays the guitar.
Image:Hdshot2xxx.jpg
mugshot in sepia

It's time to start my UserPage, even though I don't know fully what should be on here. I'm taking my lead from UserPages of Wikipedians I've corresponded with (or been corrected by) and will list my interests, non-accomplishments (?) and the Wikipedia articles I've started or augmented. I haven't earned any nifty Wiki-medals yet but may decorate this page with images and symbols from around my Internet Empire.

Pe naika ticky potlatch konaway window kopa naika skookum illahee, naika hyas hyas stone illahee, yakwa siah-siah kopa lamonti. Chako nah alki (And I'd like to give everybody a window into my "skookum country" (the Pacific Northwest), my great, high stone country, that's high and far away in the mountains. Come there sometime (Chinook Jargon)

In the meantime, if you spend time with the long list below of obsessions and delusions, please amuse yourself by visiting my music pages:

The above are recent guitar/songwriting hacks; the following two are previous keyboard-improvised neo-classical musings:

And what follows below needs major reorganization/focus, which I haven't had the stomach to re-do since through-writing it....

Contents

[edit] History of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest

Some topics I'm usually interested in and tend to quibble or kibbitz over; redlinks are articles intended or needed, and some non-redlinked articles may be things I intend to expand/rework but haven't gotten to yet. Some of the articles here are things I started; others those I've contributed to.:

and more

  • Mythography and Ethnography of the Pacific Northwest, pre and post Contact (quite often see the Discussion pages for these topics for my tendency to offer opinions/interpretations instead of "valid cites" because of my disputes as to what's valid and what's not, or why not):

and more

and more


[edit] Geography of British Columbia

added maps to various geographic features, including ranges, rivers and other areas/items not listed here (yet)

  • Environmental history, politics and protected areas/parks
  • Natural wonders and special features:

[edit] Mountains

  • For the last few years I was a volunteer for the [Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia], for a while daring to bear the sobriquet "Senior Cartographer" and/or "Senior Geographer". I began at "Bivouac" contributing historical writeups on various mountains and the origins of their placenames, as well as other geographic placenames and town histories for the CME, which is the most comprehensive index of North American mountains online (thanks to yours truly, he says modestly). I also posted my own collection of photo essays at that site, which are viewable with a paid membership only, as are the thousands of other photo essays in Bivouac's system. Ultimately I got sucked into helped out expanding the CME's infrastructure and so charted digitally thousands of miles of coastline and river and region boundaries, as well as thousands of "new" peaks (most of them unnamed). A big part of Bivouac's geographic work in recent years was tying the thousands of peak entries together according to their prominence relationships (definition below), and I am one of the most experienced of the online prominence community, which includes Peakbagger.com and Prominence.org as well as Bivouac.

[edit] Montane "Prominence"

See Talk page (actually I'll write a subpage...) for discussion of this topographic concept and my work on it for The Canadian Mountain Encyclpedia

[edit] Wikipedia articles I've either started or seriously augmented

or am intending to, if redlinked :)

Lots as yet unlisted as I don't come back here after creating things and/or editing/adding to them...

[edit] Lillooet, British Columbia and associated articles

View of Seton Lake from the Mission Mountain Road above Shalalth, near Lillooet, BC. My home turf, long ago
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View of Seton Lake from the Mission Mountain Road above Shalalth, near Lillooet, BC. My home turf, long ago

[edit] Early BC Notables and other bios

more to be added here, of all backgrounds, as well as historically or politically imporant chiefs and other native and other figures.

[edit] Geography of British Columbia

[edit] Historical British Columbia Electoral Districts:

I did most or the work for Nearly all of the pre-1966 riding histories for ALL British Columbia provincial ridings, historical and otherwise, and for many federal ridings. The easiest way to search these is to use the index of British Columbia general elections to find individual ridings in any given election, as there are too many to list here. Profiles of historical MLAs are one of my ongoing projects, although I haven't done any for a while.

[edit] Wikipedia articles I've meddled with

[edit] Music

I went to UBC and McGill in Composition, never graduating but wandered off to Europe in search of medieval song; in later years I began to write/play my own stuff, some of which is online at http://www.cayoosh.net/music/. Entirely improvisational and minimalist in inspiration and form, much of what's on that page will sound "classical" because of the instrument-patches I used; my instrument at the time was a Kurzweil PC-2x. Newer material on the guitar, also minimalist in form but because of the guitar more folk/traditional-sounding than classical I've posted onto myspace; translations of each pages Chinook name follow each link:

All of the tracks on those pages are song-writing bedtracks and are not to be considered finished material; put 'em up in the process of trying to find other players. Hopefully better tracks will be uploadable once I learn to record myself properly (and finish some lyrics).

I know much of what I know of musicology I admit to having learned from certain classes at university, and remain interested in:

    • Ethnomusicology and World Music and "Foreign Classical Music", esp. raga and gamelan and West African dance and afro-Braziliana
    • medieval and renaissance music and theory; modal counterpoint I was kinda good it, in fact
    • the Childe Ballades and the folk-song oral tradition in general, whether European, British Isles or North America
    • Mexican music and Latin-American music in general
    • Classical Greek musical ethics/aesthetics; recently re-studied; Euro-folk musics
    • Russian composers; recently read Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's autobiog and the Memoirs of Hector Berlioz plus the usual bio of Modeste Mussorgsky; lives (and deaths/bad habits/eccentricities) of the composers in general interest me although I wouldn't consider myself well-read.
    • instrument design and variation (not a collector though, except of pennywhistles - although I lost my main collection of them in a move a year ago....aaaaaargh). Don't play much anymore anyway; if I'd been playing them, they wouldn't have gotten lost, huh? I own a saz baglama and a bodhran and mbira and a few other items; hodcked a datur from Uzbekistan I'd like to get back. I wish I had a sarrusophone and also a euphonium, which was the first instrument I got capable on and still mentally run the fingerings for when I hear a melody (thirty-some-odd years later)
    • sight-reading stuff for fun, although I don't have a keyboard right now; I've been playing guitar and haven't played my pennywhistles in maybe over a year now, and not a lot for the last five years; just from living in the city and having nowhere to play (I play loud).

My favourite composers (some of whose music I can actually half-assed play) are:

[edit] Literature and Poetry

list is incomplete

[edit] Personal Bibliography

Way more than I could ever list; I've forgotten the titles of well over half of what I read (except the contents). I don't read any more because (a) my eyes are going and I'd rather talk and (b) an increasingly scattered attention span from having read too much...

[edit] Histories and Annals

  • 1066 and All That
  • Thucydides
  • Constantinople, City of the World's Desire, Philip Mansel
  • Black Elk Speaks; Red Cloud
  • James Teit - histories of the Plateau peoples
  • A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
  • A.J.P. Taylor, An Illustrated History of the Great War
  • A.J.P. Taylor, The Eastern Question
  • A.J.P. Taylor, The Austrian Monarchy
  • A History of Nations: Denmark, Norway and Sweden (1890s edition)
  • Stephen Runciman, Obolensky, George Ostrogorsky on Constantinople/Byzantium
  • Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin
  • The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture by Otto J. Mänchen-Helfen (ed. Max Knight):
  • A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
  • Heimskringla, Landnámabók and Fagrskinna and various sagas and all the Eddas; I'd like to turn Laxdælasaga into a film cycle...
  • anything by Colin McEvedy
  • Taigne bo Culagine
  • West-Viking by Farley Mowat

[edit] BC History

  • Short Portage to Seton by Irene Edwards - Bridge River-Lillooet-Fraser Canyon History
  • Halfway to the Goldfields, by Irene Harris - Lillooet-Fraser Canyon family histories
  • The Great Years', by Lewis Green - comprehensive history of the Bridge River goldfield towns and their societies and characters
  • Derek Pethick, First Approaches to the Northwest Coast and The Nootka Crisis
  • John R. Jewitt, The Adventurers and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt
  • Nemiah: The Unconquered Country by Terry Glavin
  • Chiwid by Sage Birchwater
  • In The Sea Of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia by Joseph Morton
  • Pemberton: History of a Settlement by Francis Decker. Did you know that the use of iodine to combat goiter was discovered in the Pemberton-Gates area of British Columbia, and that corespondence education was created in response to local parents in this area petitioning the BC government concerning their children's education? And more....

[edit] Criticism and historiography

  • The Disinherited Mind by Erich Heller
  • Beyond the Tragic Vision by Morse Peckham
  • The White Goddess by Robert Graves
  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
  • The Tools of Empire : Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century by Daniel R. Headrick. Amazing analysis of everything from steamboats to quinine re European expansionism and empire. More detail about bullets and gun/artillery bores in lay language than I've ever seen before.
  • Technology and Empire : Perspectives on North America by George Grant. OK, OK, so I tried reading it anyway...

[edit] Novelists, Cultural Critics and Social/Psychological Observers

[edit] Historical Novelists and sundry

[edit] Science Fiction and Fantasy worth mentioning

  • Frank Herbert - Dune series
  • J.R.R. Tolkien - LOTR, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and A Tolkien Reader; haven't bothered with C. Tolkien's posthumous rehashes as I find them not as well written; more compiled notes than literature. IMO The Silmarrillion is a vastly underestimated classic. The story of Turin Turambar floored me with its tragic power; had to put the book down for a few days afterwards.
  • James Blish - Cities in Flight, Fallen Star
  • Fritz Leiber - Lanhkmar series et al.
  • David Lindsay - I agree with Colin Wilson that Voyage to Arcturus is one of the great novels of the 20th Century...
  • Samuel Butler - Erewhon. The appendix entitled The Book of the Machines should be mandatory reading for anyone in engineering and compsci.
  • Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels - so much more than a children's book!

[edit] Space-y stuff

  • Crop Circles
  • Warp Drive
  • Lay Lines; Skara Brae, megalithic culture and belief, pagan worldviews and mysticism and ritual/lore
  • Tongues; created languages
  • Magnetic Resonance
  • Superconductivity and "Anti-Gravity"
  • Planetary Engineering
  • Tesla: How to Build a Raygun Contest
    • Resonater theory and application
    • field generators and power transmission (atmospheric and telluric)
  • "I hate temporal mechanics" - spacetime theory and practice on Star Trek, Farscape and other TV and film and in s-f and other popular novels.

[edit] Fantasy Fiction

Books/series I've read and am familiar with:

list is incomplete

    • Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelare, The Waking of Sleeping Beauty (Yikes!)
    • The Marquis de Sade, Juliette. Horribly enough I found it some of the most spellbinding writing, i.e. as ion expressive in its grammar and tone, of anything I've read.


[edit] Mysticism and Mind: Mythologies and Mythography

Readings in Languages and Philology: at some time or other, sometimes more than once, and others where once was enough.

[edit] Geopolitical Theory and History

[edit] Culture, Metaphysics and Philosophical Esoterica

  • The Disinherited Mind, Erich Heller - Goethe, Nietzsche, Burckhard, Spengler, Rilka, Kafka and Kraus in succession and context; reading knowledge of German required at critical points (dark stuff...).
  • Beyond the Tragic Vision, Morse Peckham (enlightening; you'll never listen to certain music or poetry or look at certain art again in quite the same way
  • Closing Time, Norman O. Brown (on Vico and [[Joyce) - hallucinatory and brilliant epigraphs collected and interwoven by Brown from the author of The New Science and Finnegan's Wake and lots of other stuff; very interesting take on, um, being human, or something. Got more out of it than from Love's Body and Love and Death, both of which I've had goes at
  • Julian Jaynes - controversial and largely dismissed by mainstream psychiatry and historical/literary theory, but compelling; the breakdown of the mythological (bicameral) mind to the right-brained rational order that emerged with Socrates and that age; the birth of the (self-consciously) historical mind (Thucydides and the Hellenistic Age). Heady stuff, and like *The White Goddess by Robert Graves and his other writings put ancient religion in a new context, and make me wonder any time I read anything out of northern Europe (Ireland to Sweden) before the Conversion about what else the stories might mean; what their hidden meanings are; and of the lost oral works that were known only by memory and never written down (a vast array); and also of lost written works of the Classical Ages, and even in our own recent time
  • in the same light the early histories of those countries, from an old set of my grandfather's books on Scandinavia (long out-of-print, "supermarket" edition is what my bookseller told me - common in the day). Also "How the Irish Saved Civilization"
  • "The Rival Teachings of Jesus and Paul" - which I'll have to dig out again and get the archbishop-author's name; written during World War I, beginning on the question of "Why all the great Christian nations were warring against each other when the central message of the religion is Love?" In answer, he begins an analysis of the philosophy of Jesus and the extrapolations and distortions of Saint Paul. I'm not in for religious reading although I do know a fair bit of religious history from having studied the Middle Ages, ancient history and non-European religions and magical/spiritual beliefs randomly; so I didn't finish it but got the gist. This was radical stuff; good fuel if you're caught up in religious controversy or quandary, perhaps, although I'm no practicing Christian (more pan-religionist; or individualist; or nothing). The book kind of like some of the commentaries on and ideas arising from the Gnostic Gospels and Nag Hammadi and such, combined with recent writings on the so-called "Gospel of Jesus" (not the one in the Apocrypha/Gnostics). I read another book recently on Manicheistic and other views of the Son of Man; it's a goodie too, but again so heady and ultimately you have to care about the religion to finish it in t he same way as the Paul vs Jesus book
  • Robert Graves The White Goddess and, of course, the Claudius trilogy and his poetry
  • First Lessons in Zen
  • William Butler Yeats - Complete Poems and Complete plays; some of his theosophical/pagan revival ponderings and other writings
  • Nietzsche; bits on the Tragedians
  • Franz Kafka: Parables and Paradoxes (Methuen)
  • The Epics; Volsungasaga, Drap Niflungs (i.e. the Edda and also all the sagas), Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod, Taine bo Culaigne, Amadis of Gaul, le mort d'Arthur (Tennyson's, which I realize just now I must have lost my ancient copy of twenty years ago; it was tattered and bought for five bucks, but it was nice to have; pocket sized, c.1910),
  • Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt
  • The Poetic Edda
  • Renault's Gods
  • The Lewis Spence Apocrypha:
  • The hidden city of Kaf that borders the world
  • the tribe of giants; other beings beyond count, and magical trees and plants and the properties of stones and bird; definitions of all forms of -mancy, the great immortals (Le Conte St-Germain and Cagilostro), secrets of the cults and brotherhoods, the lost arts
  • Gnosticism, the alchemists (by individual stories and by overall theory) and hermeticism, the apocrypha; 1890s-1900s views of Oriental religions and African, Brazilian, Caribbbean and European folk magic. Also exposes on contemporary psychics and mediums of the time, and straightforward accounts of curious celestial events and other phenomena over the ages.
  • Sufi, Templar, and other mystical beliefs/orders
  • Arthur Mesmer
  • The pre-Raphaelite, Irish and Theosophist literary-philosophical worlds, and invented worlds (e.g. Morris')
  • Roger Zelazny novels; Tolkien and others in the fantasy tradition
  • Clive Barker's Imajica
  • "I hate temporal mechanics" - timespace theory on Star Trek: n, Farscape, and in other science fiction shows/films/books.

[edit] Magical and Religious Books and Sages

[[Codex Mysterium]]


[edit] Transhistorical Theories/Realms

  • Dune (trenchant)
  • Faerie (scary)
  • Foundation (boring)

[edit] Geomantic architecture 'n stuff

[edit] Mythic Landscapes and Alternative Worlds

[edit] Acting and Screenwriting

I'm an aspiring (=starving) actor with a bunch of cool screenplay ideas. I got into acting after a life of doing everything else and discovering that I'd been everybody else but myself. I also quip that, since I'm 6'5, 265 lbs and kinda grim-looking, that I scare people without even trying; so why not get paid for it? So far just a lowly background performer for the most part, but with a recurring bit-part in the TV series Dead Zone. Screenplay ideas I'm not going to list until I sell/option them (if I ever get one finished, and on the market)....


[edit] Languages and how I (sorta) learned them

  • I was schooled in French from Grade 7 like all Canadians of my era, and from cornflake boxes, as the not-always friendly joke about bilingual packaging goes here in BC. True enough that at least it looked familiar when the book-learning came; but our teacher was from Toulouse - Mr. Tanguay - and while he spoke clearly and taught us as well as we could (half the kids in the room partly spoke either Dutch or German or Polish or Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Ukrainian and god knows what else; later on another sixth would be First Nations and most at that time still knew Chinook, and they spoke a special brand of English. This was the 1960s and people tell me that British Columbia wasn't multicultural until after 1986. Yeah, right...Anyway, I lived in Montreal and never got the hang of it there, but could speak it under duress while travelling in France and Switzerland, and in years since, in France and on trains and when necessary as an "interlanguage" around Europe with Hungarians, and in Brazil and so on. But it wasn't until I lived at Whistler, then a relaxed and summer-empty skibum and hippie town only starting to turn into the real estate monstrosity it has become today. And among the many varieties of local was a large number who were Quebecois, Acadien, or Ontarien in origin, or were from the Ottawa-Carleton region or Montreal and knew it anyway. It was the working life in the kitchens and the sangliers (construction sites) around Whistler where I first picked up my sense of speaking in French. I don't get to use it enough but apparently I sound pretty authentically Quebecois, even Saguenard (a bunch of my friends, true enough, were from St. Jean de Saguenay).
  • After a few years in Whistler I finally somehow got myself away from the cold and dark of BC winters (not as bad as the rest of Canada, but bad enough) and off to Mexico. I'd had some Latin exposure (see below) so Spanish came off as Latin without all that grammar, and I knew a lot of etymology in English so it was just a question of picking up on the rapidity of speech; and of course my exposure to French (gender and all that) also helped. I think I'm probably better at Spanish than I am in French, but I never get a chance to practice either much; I can read both fairly well (but not write either well, admittedly). I got the handle on my Spanish in a small beach pueblito about an hour and a half southeast of Acapulco, Playa Ventura, which is probably now an overblown destination resort (hopefully my hosts, the impoverished Perezes, did well, if that is the case; but likely not, given Mexico's way of things)
  • Norwegian. My Dad was raised speaking Norwegian and didn't really know English; even though he was born in Winnipeg. But when his father died at age ten, his mother told him to never speak Norwegian again to rid him of his accent, as since he was the eldest he'd have to support the others right away. And in those days (1916), you could deported for having an accent - even though Grandpa had helped found the Royal Canadian Viking Regiment, and died in the process. So Dad had a fully Canadian English accent during my upbringing, presumably pretty Prairie-sounding but he knew people from all over and of all kinds, so I wouldn't be able to define it. And he never taught us Norwegian - only a few phrases of endearment, thanks and such. But I think my Grandma Margit Cleven must have spoken it to me in my cradle when she came to visit us at Bridge River, west of Lillooet, BC. I don't remember her well, but went I went to Norway I found the language came to me like drinking water. I'd glanced at Old Norse in my early university years) but couldn't get the gist of it, except to recognize its Old Germanic familiarity to English and Old English. Dad had had some Norwegian books and dictionaries which I'd had a look at, but they were in old "Dano-Norwegian" and nobody from his part of the old country even spoke that. So I can't really explain why it is that it was so easy to pick it up, and get the sound of it (pretty rustic, even hick and almost comic book I think; not Osloer at all). I can halfway read Norwegian from my exposure to German; and Norwegian has more English-connected or French words in it (many English words are Scandinavian/Old Germanic origin and so in common between the languages, e.g. book=bok)
  • Old Norse - been reading in it, or trying to, lately, and getting the hang of it; like all my languages I need more vocabulary, and in this case I'd like to be able to act/orate the great dialogues in the Eddas. My speaking of it probably sounds pretty thickly Norwegian rather than Icelander in tone, and I know my cadence isn't right (yet). But it's stirring stuff, and crunchy to pronounce because of all that alliteration; and at times sublime....my interest came of course from my Norwegian heritage, a desire to know the pre-Christian religion and era, and what it was to be a Norwegian, since multicultural heritage was psyched into us in those heady early Trudeau era days (high school). But no, when I went to Norway, I realized I'm Canadian, even moreso a British Columbian. But like the language maybe it's my Norwegian blood that lets me love the mountains and their deep dales so much in my home turf. When I first formally studied Old Norse at SFU the professor wanted to talk about vowel shifts in the 9th century and other phonological stuff; nothing about the literature, the poetry, learning to read or be conversant in it; but it was eerie because passages of it I could just read; if I didn't understand the words I knew the tone. Might be from already having read Graves and lots of Tolkien, and Colin Wilson's commentary on Tolkien and the Eddas and other materials (another book: Dame Sybil Leek's Ring of Magic Islands), but I could hear the greatness of the poetry despite 90% or less of it being lost on me. Rather pissed me off that this wasn't university material but the phonological dry stuff was; even though we were all newcomers to the language and weren't there for the linguistic stuff (SFU had tiny classes in those days; 6 people max in this one, nice corner room overlooking the mountains and the inlet). Anyway, I'm not at the level where I can spontaneously speak much of it at will like I can in Norwegian, French or Spanish; but I know its grammatical flow now - if more the poetic than the
  • German - picked it up reading the Penguin Book of German Poetry and the Erich Heller The Disinherited Mind other stuff; also from studying music in general (lots of songs and masses and editions printed in German)
  • Chinook Jargon - the language that ends the introduction; learned from studying BC history and out of interest; see website at http://www.cayoosh.net/hiyu/ and others at http://www.cayoosh.net/hiyu/links. Pretty good at it, though I'm not a First Nations person and speak it white-man style (authentic enough). Drop by the site, learn some, and send me a note. There's an online community connected through my site somewhere that I used to belong to, but we had doctrinal differences which I won't discuss here and I've largely let my active research in the Jargon lapse, as well as further writing on the site. I remain interested in it because of my ongoing interests in BC and Northwest history, and may return to further study of it in later years. It's fun, somewhat practical, and easy to learn (800 words; and innumerable compounds and "creative" grammatical license, phonologically uncomplicated and expressively simple)
  • [[Greek language}Greek]] and Ancient Greek (a bit each only, but I'm fine with the alphabet and understand the grammatical principles and can halfway read simple stuff in both)
  • I'd been exposed to Latin quite a bit as a result of being a music student (one class, for about half a semester, we sang only Gregorian chant and organum; and then there's all those masses, .
  • Languages I wish I knew
    • (and am always welcoming to learn something about, given no attention span at all however:)
    • Russian
    • Finnish
    • Gaelic (trying to decipher "Teach yourself" lately but haven't had much luck)
    • Tibetan
    • Farsi and Ancient Persian
    • Egyptian
    • one of the Mesopotamian languages.
    • Thai
    • Sanskrit and Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu. I'd had some exposure to Dravidian languages, which are entirely different, by reading Speaking of Siva, a compendium of Virasaiva poets from Kerala (I think it was Kerala; around there somewhere). Remarkable stuff, and the poetry is alliterative like the Old Norse; the philosophy mind-bending....
    • Swahili
    • Nahuatl]
    • Cree
    • Mohawk
    • Sioux
    • St'at'imc or another Salishan language; because that's where I'm from; either that or Squamis or Halkomeylem, which are the traditional languages in the areas of the Lower Mainland I've lived in (where I live at the moment is in Tsleil-waututh traditional territory, though on the other side of the inlet from their main community; this was their hunting turf before it got industrialized and suburbanized; only 130 years ago...); their traditional language is Squamish, and generations spoke Chinook before the Squamish language revival. When I read Marius Barbeau's Totem Poles and other ethnographic stuff on the Northwest Peoples in my early university years (or late high school, somewhere in there) the language that resonated the most with me was Tsimshian - in sound that is. and the names for a few of the supernatural beings represented in totem-carving - hnarhnorh rhskyaek (the Thunderbird, the Supernatural Eagle), nharhnorh gispudwadwe - the supernatural killer-whale, and the "dirges", adaorh or as I think it is spelled now adaox, which are visionary poems resembling haiku and sounding like Tibetan chant. I've always like the Kwakiutl name for "Cannibal-Giant-Who-Lives-At-The-North-End-of-The-World", Babanux'alanusiwe, who is the closest thing in their mythology to the Devil, and probably nastier; his character is central in the dance-theatre-ritual of the Kwakiutl Midwinter Ritual, traditionally among the largest potlatches of the year and, as far as dance-theatricals go in the Northwest, one of the most spectacular. Salishan languages are diabolically phonological, with complex grammars and shades of meaning based on infixes and all kinds of transformations, including shuffling around the order of the consonants, which outnumber the vowels 5:1 from what I can see. I know a few spoken words from living around Shalalth, and like the sound of it; can't make about six of the ncessary sounds, though. Probably I'd have an easier time with Haida or Tsimshian; Kwakiutl looks cool but all those back-gutterals scare me...
yers truly, 2001
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yers truly, 2001
yers truly, 2001
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yers truly, 2001

[edit] My Checkered Past

By the time I was 25, I'd been through a range of experiences that many people who reach my current age (50) can't imagine; by the time I was 30, even more. An old friend who's known me from high school says I'm constantly re-inventing myself, and while always at core the same I'm constantly "going through things". It's poet's life; something like a dog's life, except not so sleepy and there's no regular bowl of food on the porch, if there's a porch. Somewhere on that Murphy's Law poster that's around (the one with "A Smith and Wesson Beats Four Aces" and other corollaries) it says "Self-discovery: the truest path to masochism"; but I had no choice in the matter. Sigh, no matter and too long a tale to tell. But along the way I got involved in a lot of interesting stuff, or at least unusual jobs and volunteerings/obsessions:

  • itinerant vagabond/minstrel in the Society for Creative Anachronism, under various names that shall remain nameless unless someone pesters me for my personae....
  • "Lord of the Feast" at the original Medieval Inn restaurant in Vancouver, c. 1977 (?)
  • office slave/volunteer for the Green Party of British Columbia during their start-up year in 1983 (see Talk:Green Party for whatever reminiscences I might have rambled on about there. Also involved with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in the same flow of events/people, but once I got burned out I went up to Whistler to take up sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.....two out of three ain't bad, I guess....
  • Pedicab driver at Expo '86 in Vancouver. Great job, fabulous experience, but I tore my piriformus muscle inside my hip, thereby collapsing my spine and suffering long-term acute pain and wound up having surgery I didn't need and being a basket case for most of my early '30s. Never did win my compo case (that's Worker's Compensation for those of you who don't speak Canuck) and largely had to rehabilitate msyelf on my own). See Talk:Cycle rickshaw#San Diego Controversy re Vancouver Expo '86 fleet for more details of this grand misadventure and huge good time (until the injury and its aftermaths)
  • World's first winter pedicabber: Even after debilitating injury and collapse, I loved pedicab work so much I invested in trying to start the world's first winter pedicab fleet in Whistler, British Columbia and lost my shirt as well as my sanity. The studded tires were a great idea, the tourists loved it, but Council shut me down (long story and lawsuit material if I spoke my mind about what went down...). My erstwile partner in the Whistler venture, by the way, was the great-grandson of Kintpuash (Captain Jack, of Modoc War fame). Willy where are you anyway?
  • That injury is how, after years of torturous pain and surgery I didn't need and endless relapses, I got into weight-training as well as Uechi Ryu karate, and turned myself into the fifty-year old chunk of beefcake I am now (still solo after all these years and liking it that way, but not a "player" either); after lots of false starts and re-injuries I'm now in better shape than I've ever been, even before the injury.
  • Weight-training got me, somehow, into the craft of black-and-white photography, suggested by a friend as a creative outlet, as my poetry and music were fallow or silenced or whatever at the time, and I was training lots anyway. The photo career, such as it was (and never quite made it as a business, not having any business sense) got me going on photographing local bodybuilding shows in BC, AB, WA and OR, and trying to make art photography (instead of the usual cheese and too-often porn of the muscle game). Never made a living, but did some great work and have gotten kudos from name photographers and having a great eye; also did some landscapes which I don't have a webpage prepped for (other than through www.cayoosh.net, which has lots of mine in its various pages, though only a few art-y), and for a long time I had a huge on-line gallery of contest pics and out-of-show muscle athletes from this region; now condensed to a few pages of the best:
  • Spun off all of that, sitting on top of thousands of negatives, many of which never got printed, just scanned, I began playing with kaleidoscopic principles on some of the choicest bits of various shots and came up with some pretty interesting material; not currently online but I'll load some to link here, possibly pick one to use within this page's decor. "New classicism" or something; you'll see...
  • 1989: Heritage and research assistant for the Gastown Business Improvement Society; during which I was drafted by old Western Canada Wilderness Committee contacts into helping organize and manage security for the 1989 Vancouver Walk for the Environment and the first Stein Voices for the Wilderness Festival. I gotta stop giving myself away for free...
  • I'm a practitioner of the Universal Form a qi gong-based movement meditation developed by Sifu Lawrence Tan of New York City, and while nowhere near a devotee have studied more than my fair share of Tibetan Buddhism and Zen.



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