Victim of Formality

Being a yuppie is hard. I had to jump out of the shower this afternoon to catch the UPS guy, a day later than promised, delivering my suit. It wasn’t entirely his fault, as whoever in Shanghai wrote the commercial invoice put down West Vancouver, as opposed to nth Avenue West, Vancouver. (They also claimed the suit was a sample worth $45 dollars, but that’s what happens when duty’s included). It didn’t turn out as badly as I’d feared, but it’s not a masterpiece by any means. In the great tradition of Chinese tailoring the sleeves were an inch and a half longer than I’d hoped for, and so I made the familiar walk over to my own tailor to persuade him to shorten them (we’re cool, he’s used to it by now).

The bigger problem was that, at this level of customization, there’s just no getting around my disproportionately square (and apparently mildly uneven!) shoulders, and so there was slight bumpiness across the yoke. It wouldn’t have been as noticeable but for the unexpectedly tropical-weight wool (who knew that’s what they meant by “thread count”?) I could have returned it, but I honestly just needed something to wear to all these career centre events apart from that old Eaton’s suit I got in Kensington with Josh (and yes, apropos of your postcard, I did get your Temple of the Golden Pavillion reference). When those lead to a job, then I can get something fancy.

While I was out I also dropped a good $130 at the cobbler’s. Got a mild scolding (I assume—It was in, I think, Cantonese) for not coming to them sooner. Given Vancouver’s weather I don’t think they really need the extra work.

Anyway, the real reason I’m writing is, natürlich, to get my mind off studying. Closely related to the travails of yuppiedom, Law School is also hard, or at least not easy. My first exam, Constitutional Law, was on Monday. Four normative essay questions, open book, 1 hour. I felt confident going in, to the point of annoying my fellow students with trivia (quick: where did Abel teach?) and I think I did moderately well, but you better believe I had pen to paper for 95% of the time allotted. It’s not like undergrad humanities, where they give you 2 hours to do a question which, for a top student, would take an hour, and which to physically write would take 45 minutes. Open book is also a misnomer, because if you’re looking at your textbook you’re doing it wrong. Much better to condense everything you have and to occasionally refer to those notes to make sure you haven’t missed/mixed a key point (are we talking about Bell #1 or Bell #2?)

Tomorrow I have Criminal Law. The fun part about that one is we don’t really know much criminal law yet: our exam will assume the accused are found guilty, and we’ll have to sentence them. I’m struggling to see how more than 10-15pp of our 400pp of assigned reading so far is directly relevant to the task. The bulk of it was designed to knock us out of our assumedly white, assumedly middle class complacency, and expose the shocking over-representation of aboriginal Canadians in all areas of the criminal justice system. Of course, one element of complacency is that you don’t necessarily think too much about the matter at hand, so as we’ve all become at least tangentially exposed to details like what constitutes a “major” versus a “regular” sexual assault, students are polarizing as to the merits of overarching themes like restorative justice, and more specific programs like daycares in prison—and not necessarily in the direction intended. I guess all the Professor can hope for is that more end up on his side than would otherwise, and it’s probably fair to say that those most resentful of his relentless campaign were never his to win. For my part, I’ll just say that, Rosie Dimanno notwithstanding, if the Toronto Star is a fair measure of my middle class complacency (and after some experience consuming Vancouver media I think it is) then I don’t think the Prof. ever had to worry about me.

Come December 20th I’m looking forward to sitting back in la Ville Reine, drinking some Creemore, and reading that Walrus I bought the other day at Caper’s out of pity. Or, finishing that Virgil I got in the bargain bin at Chapter’s. Or, maybe, to further cement my Canadian middle class credentials… first edition!

The art student who left a fake bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum last week, which halted an AIDS fundraiser after the building was evacuated, has told the Icelandic media that he remains ‘proud’ of his art.

‘I stand behind my artwork and I am proud of it,’ Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, told an Icelandic Web site.

…

OCAD president Sara Diamond, who suspended Mr. Jonsson and the faculty involved pending an internal investigation, met today with foundation officials to discuss ways the college could support CANFAR.

‘We want to repair any perceived damage,’ she said. ‘We feel that any actions that threaten violence or incite fear in the larger community are absolutely inappropriate. His actions do not fit within artistic ethics or even activist art.’

The ROM would not comment today on whether Mr. Jonsson’s fake bomb can be considered art.

‘The definition of art is very flexible,’ said Francisco Alvarez, director of communications. ‘It’s in the hands of the courts.’

Several thousand years of æsthetics, and it’s all going to end soon in a Toronto courtroom. I wonder if the Judge will call the president of OCAD as an expert witness? Maybe they can ask her what does fit within activist art? What are the boundaries from within which you can push at the boundaries of society?

That said, I’m not really sure about the art project. If the “sculpture” in question was recontextualized by being in a museum setting—that is, newly perceived as a bomb—what exactly what was it before?

Attached to the bomb was a note that read “This is not a bomb.” Jonsson thought that the note meant he wasn’t breaking the law: he had been advised by an OCAD Student Union lawyer before installing the piece, he says, against spreading false news, and told that he should not attempt to deceive people about the bomb’s legitimacy.

Moral is, if the assault with a weapon charge you’re prosecuting gets thrown out, you may have a back-up so long as it was carried out with an unloaded gun. “Spreading false news”, it’s like the “tax evasion” of 21st-Century crime-fighting.

There are of course two major reasons given for why one is in law school:

1. “I didn’t know what else to do with my degree… took the LSAT… why not?… certainly beats working.”
2. “I have a science background and am highly interested in intellectual-property law.”

The first answer, by far the more common, implies a lot about the probable background of the speaker. It takes a certain amount of effort on [some]one’s part in order to be so whimsical. The ritualized mutual interrogation which served to pass the drunken hours between first-week classes bore this out.

“You’re from where? Is that the [fancy] neighbourhood overlooking C.O.P.?”
“No, you’re thinking of S’s. I’m from the other one.”

For my part, whatever ease is to be gained by being amongst one’s intellectual equals (at least until the marks come in) is tempered by the constant awareness that they are, for the most part, and in a broad sense, at least one’s social equals.

I suppose my latest attack of bourgeois class consciousness (pace Lukács, on several counts) was primed by my trip to Winnipeg at the end of summer. As I get older, I appreciate how much I am the product of my wider family—I guess all those educational toys worked. Anyway, palavering over some boxed white with my grandmother we discussed her reading list:

1. The Winnipeg Free Press
2. The Globe and Mail
3. The National Post (“But only because the Aspers have been so kind to the city.”)
4. The Economist
5. The New Yorker
6. The Guardian Weekly (which, as you know, reprints some content from Le Monde)
7. The New York Times online, specifically for the TimesSelect columnists (“But not for Friedman!”)

Throw in some Lewis Lapham, a sprinkling of Marxist book critics, and substitute lemonde.fr for the paper Guardian and I’m not far off. We also covered our respective disappointment with The Walrus, later rehashed with Tina. (Perhaps it would be apropos to mention that, in Toronto, after I had poked fun at the whole idea of a Walrus Arctic Expedition my aunt informed me she’d already signed up?) Later on that week another aunt arrived from Germany, by way of Montréal, and we spent some time trying to figure out the pronunciation of the Economist’s British-affairs column.

But back to Law School. As I’ve come to appreciate since the first week, a common set of referents, and The Economist serves as well as anything else, certainly has its advantages. Passing the time, for one thing (after we had spent a class watching 2/3 of A Beautiful Mind, even before they started complaining that we’d spent a class watching a Ron Howard film, people felt the need to hold forth on Nash equillibria). Intuitively knowing my audience may also be one reason I’ve been able to cultivate a reputation as a class clown (though it’s probably just as much down to technical skill, as evinced by my in-class comment on the lingering presence of the community standards test with respect to consent to “deviant” sexual practices: “It’s hard to apply a harm-based test when there’s a whip involved.”)

Unfortunately, it’s not all Game Theory, Mozart, and “les scènes élevées en grec.” There’s also money, sexism, and certain lack of self-awareness that a more parochial student might attribute to those who haven’t had the benefit of extended inculcation in the lesser psychoanalysts (when I went to a Centre for Feminist Legal Studies talk I had to explain the Feminist to someone).

Humour actually provides a good example of the problems. Friday was the Guile debate, wherein law students, beers in hand, fill the auditorium and cheer on their colleagues in attempting to prove some proposition: in this case, “be it resolved Justice is blind.” I need only remind you that Justice is oft depicted as a topless woman wearing a blindfold to adumbrate the course of the next 2 hours. The high point was when A. stood up and, in so many words, said she wasn’t going to tell dick jokes, and that this whole exercise was patriarchal and problematic. The low point was when a drunken speaker handed the microphone to a homeless man collecting empties, who then, to entirely dissociated cheers, urged the students present to work toward the betterment of those less fortunate.

I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t good people here. I just wonder about their ability to effect change given the properly de-politicizing strictures of “professionalism”. I wonder what long term effects our ineluctable camaraderie will have when applied to an already homogenous group. And, concomitantly, I wonder what I’ll be like in a couple years after I’ve completed what, more every day, seems less like an academic institution and more like a finishing school (except you’re expected to take French after hours). Would I be willing to use the word “patriarchal” in front of 300 drunk students?

Then again, maybe the above is just an overreaction. Maybe, I thought to myself back in first week, overhearing the genuinely academic conversation of the nearby grad students, law school is about more than just consolidating one’s position in society. Maybe I was not simply taking up my appointed position as a scion of the State Nobility. Or, if so (as that’s an awfully hard thing to disprove), maybe I can be said to like law in some meaningfully independent sense. And so what if my friend is dating someone from JRR/Glenview/LP? We’re good people. And so what if my acquaintances’ tastes have shifted from veggie subs to lobster fresh off the plane? Isn’t that just getting older? It’s not like this is some sort of vast, well-shod, conspiracy.

So I tried not to think about it, as I waited for the first of many free burgers, and the imminent arrival of my 2nd year buddy…

“Wait a minute… weren’t you the Bishop of UAAC?”