Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 113

It was good to learn that the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold Obamacare this morning. That's basically good news, even though the plan has great problems.  Chief among them is that it is insurance-based and not single-payer.

The former sort of plan integrates all the inefficiencies of insurance run by for-profit companies into the health system.  An example of where this sort of system can go awry is Quebec's pharmacare plan.   Sure, everyone  is protected from the high cost of drugs, but since there is no central body negotiating drug prices, they are going up and up. 

In contrast, the single payer provincial health insurance schemes are remarkably efficient when it comes to administration.  Most also are able to bargain good prices for drugs used in hospitals.

The adminstrative labyrinth in the US health insurance scheme seems certain to raise costs.  Too bad Obama and company weren't bolder when they set out their program.  Hindsight is better than foresight, of course, and who would have thought that the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts would have sided with those in favour of Obamacare?

Everyone seems to  think that he or she can use just anything that's out there for private use.  A case in point is a video made during a demonstration during a recent by provincial by election north of Montreal where Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois banged a couple of pot lids together.  She doesn't do it for very long, and appears to do it only because she's handed the lids.

The  clip was slashed from a longer video posted on Youtube and massaged a bit for use in an ad by the Quebec Liberal Party.  In it Marois looks clumsy and appears to be playing out of rhythm with the protesters.  That's bad enough, but the PLQ's message is that she is supporting violence etc.

I went looking for it this morning, but it's been withdrawn, apparently because the amateur photographer sent a lawyer's letter in protest, saying he never gave permission for its use .  Bully for him!

Now, if other people would get the message...  The passage of the new Copyright law in Canada, opening up the educational exemption for copying is just another example of the way that creators of all sort are being forgotten in the equation when they are not being simply ripped off. 

The photo (from the CBC) shows the latest in a series of holes that have developed in Montreal streets over the past few weeks.

One opened up on Sherbrooke St. in front of McGill University during the massive protest May 22 against raised tuition fees and the anti-demonstratio law Bill 78.  Nobody fell in, thank goodness, but traffic was snarled for a couple of weeks while repairs were done.

Then several other other large holes have showed up in.  One, which came to light June 11, wasn't immediately recognized, since the asphalt near the busy interestion of Peel and Ste Catherine streets appeared to be merely sagging.  But when city crews looked urther they found a huge cavity where part of  a water line dating from 1888 had washed away.  The only thing holding up the roadway was the remnants of trolley tracks.

Montreal neglected renewing its infrastructure for several decades, and now cost of that is being totted up.  The fact that we've had several heavy thunder storms where more water rushed through storm sewers than they could handle hasn't helped any.

Bottom line: you've got to pay for neglect whether it is a manifestation  of denying the need to maintain infrastructure, or--even worse--forgetting that what we're doing to the climate is going to have an impace on us. 

The Montreal Gazette's Mike Boone likes the idea of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure. In a column the day the book was launched, he wrote:

"It is tempting to make a piscatorial comparison:

In Making Waves, Mary Soderstrom's latest book, the Portuguese are packed like sardines into 171 pages.

Soderstrom's style, however, isn't dense, claustrophobic or oleaginous. Making Waves is not a bite-sized condensation of 600 years of history but rather an appreciation of people who have fascinated Soderstrom since her 1950s childhood in San Diego."

He goes on : " Making Waves includes a timeline. But the meat of the book is taking readers to particular places and explaining the locales' significance in Portuguese history. And if you want to skip ahead, the chapter titled Sex begins on Page 78. "

Well, yes, the story contains some steamy stuff, and not just because a lot of the Portuguese adventure took place in warm climates. It will be interesting to see just how much other readers are hooked that part...

The first copies of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Aventure arrived at Véhicule Press a week ago, and bookstores are getting them as I write. We'll launch the book officially on Wednesday, November 24 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Bobards, 4328 St. Lawrence in Monteal. It's a bar just across the street from Parc du Portugal and where Brazilians hung out during the World Cup last summer.

All Lusophiles are cordially invited.

The revisions are nearly completed and we're headed for a publication date in early October for Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure.

The book is the latest in a series of non-fiction books arising from reflections and travels over the last decade. While it seems to be quite a departure from The Walkable City and Green City, there is a direct link. As I traveled to research them, I kept coming across the Portuguese, who had been there before other Europeans.

As I investigated, two things happened. First, the great story of the Portuguese adventure became clear. Second, I began to remember my own contact with stalwart Portuguese immigrants as a child: people who had come from mainland Portugal, Madeira or the Azores to San Diego and whose children and grandchildren I grew up with.

Other reflections followed. Amazingly, Portuguese descendants in Brazil seemed to have built a multi-racial society where skin colour mattered much less than in the US where "any known blood" was enough to make you a second-class citizen. The Portuguese had also overthrown a dictatorship almost without bloodshed, and the Brazilians appeared to be rebuilding their civil society successfully after decades of dictatorship, also.

The result will be, I hope, a readable account of under-appreciated cultures and societies, which offers some hints of what might be done elsewhere.

Stay tuned for details about a book launch near you!

Susan Olding, a Kingston-based writer and reviewer, asked Mary a few questions recently for her blog which regularly features interviews with writers. She thinks highly of The Walkable City, particularly the idea of having the architect of Paris's 19th century make-over, Baron Georges-Etienne Haussmann, and urban cage-rattler Jane Jacobs exchange ideas about cities.

The book, she says, is "an original idea, gracefully executed," which " compels us to think harder about our own neighbourhoods and what we expect and hope from them. "

She also asked about what project Mary's working on these days. Here's the reply:
" Well, there are two. One is a novel I've just sent to a possible publisher. It's called River Music, and is about three generations of women: the grandmother is a pianist, the daughter is an engineer and the granddaughter is a harpsichordist. The time runs from 1935 to Dec. 6, 2009, and I hope in addition to a good story, the novel says something about North American women over the last 75 years.

"The second, called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure, is a direct outgrowth of my three non-fiction projects, although it doesn't seem so at first glance. During the travel I did for them and for Violets, I kept running into the footprints they left—in Brazil, of course, but also in East Africa, the West coast of India, and Singapore as well as other places. Then I began thinking about the Portuguese kids I grew up with in San Diego, whose families had come from the Azores and Madeira to fish tuna off California, the Portuguese sailing ship we saw in 1972 in St. John's Newfoundland (one of the last of white fleet cod fishers) and the 40,000 people of Portuguese descent in Montreal. In short, I was bowled over by the worldwide legacy of this small nation on the edge of Europe.

"A great deal of research and some more travel followed, and I'm now revising a manuscript for Véhicule Press which is scheduled to publish the book next fall. Although I picked up enough Portuguese on my own to be able to read newspapers, magazine articles and history, I ran into a wall, trying to speak it, so this winter I've been taking an intensive course at the Université de Montréal. So I'll sign off, and get back to the oral presentation on Brazilian singer/songwriter/novelist/dissident Chico Buarque that's due for Monday."

Photo: Strollers in the Chiado district of Lisbon, taken in May 2009 on a research trip to Portugal.

On Saturday November 7, I'll be giving the closing address at the Fields of Walking conference at The Walking Lab in Kamloops, British Columbia. The gathering will feature walks around the town and much talk about the social and other benefits of walking. It is being organized by an inter-disciplinary group from Thompson Rivers University.

They got my idea of including me, I gather, from reading The Walkable City. For more information, contact Bruce Baugh at TRU: [email protected] Here's what I told them I'd be talking about:

Baby Needs New Pair of Shoes: the Gamble Necessary on the Road to Walkability

The idea that a city might not be walkable would never have occurred to anyone who lived before 1800. Walking was the way everyone but a few gentry and soldiers got around, but the Industrial Revolution changed that, as it changed so many other things. The private automobile pushed walkability only further into the background in the 20th century.

Why should that bother us? We've got our cars and our patch of green outside the center of the city: we're pretty well set, aren't we? Perhaps, as long as we don't put much value on the time we need for commuting, for what we're doing to our planet as we guzzle petroleum products, or for the kind of social interaction and convenience that living where walking reigns can bring.

Is there any exit from this highway along which we're racing toward social and environmental crisis? That is a question that will occupy us increasingly in the 21st century. We are going to have to take some chances, and make some gambles about the way we live in the very short term if we are to survive in the long term.

It's always encouraging to hear words of praise from someone who cares passionately about cities and who has thought about them carefully and in depth. That's why the words of Christopher B. Leinberger, author of The Option of Urbanism, are particularly welcome.

The Brookings Institution Visiting Fellow writes: "Mary Soderstrom's The Walkable City addresses one of the most important environmental, economic, social, public health and foreign policy issues of our day that is also the most unexpected and simplest; building walkable urban places. Using an approach I personally enjoy, taking a long historical perspective from pre-history through the various ages of city building, Ms. Soderstrom demonstrates that we as a civilization know how to build walkable cities. We just have to speed up our efforts."

What to do when a review isn't a particularly good review, especially when it is published some place where a lot of people are going to see it? The past few days I've been faced with this dilemma over a review of The Walkable City by Ezra Klein, the Washington Post reporter and master blogger, in The Barnes and Noble Review.

Klein, in short, says the book isn't tough enough. He likes the chapter about Carlsbad, California, and shopping centers, but says that the book doesn't include enough research about questions of urban policy. Nor does he like the conversations I imagine between urban planning icon Jane Jacobs and Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was responsible for rejigging Paris in the mid-19the century (which, by the way, are taken word for word from their writings or interviews, as is noted in the book.)

Well, I'm sorry I didn't write the book he would have liked to have read, but I wanted to make my book as amusing as possible. I tried to keep the tone light, particularly because the implications are pretty heavy, and I'm convinced that ordinary folk turn off when things are painted in somber colours. Klein and I had a very civilized e-mail/Twitter exchange about this, from which I think we both gathered that we don't disagree very much.

And there's a lot to be said about getting even a doubtful review from Barnes and Noble. They haven't carried my books in numbers in the past, but apparently they are with this one. An old high school friend just wrote that she'd been able to get her local B&N store to order it for her, and I know my publisher did a reprint because of B&N orders.

So maybe the old adage is correct: it doesn't matter what they say, it's whether they spell your name right. Check out the review, take a look at the book, and see if you agree. In addition to Barnes and Noble, it's available at many independent book stores, on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and directly from Véhicule Press.