I’ve been bothered for a long while – at least six years – about “what to do.”  I put that in quotes to emphasize the very broad and general nature of the problem.  Some people call it their ‘life’s work’, or their ‘calling’.  I like to avoid both of those, because I don’t like to work (haha – making fun of myself there) and ‘calling’ sounds too… papal. 

Whatever you want to call it, I’d some time ago concluded that whatever I do, I want it to be here in Thunder Bay.  Then slowly I realized that it would be something related to our local culture, something developmental, something creative.  Most recently, it’s been the idea of an online (and perhaps print??) social, cultural, and political magazine in the vein of Walrus, but with a strict emphasis on uniquely northern/rural perspectives and issues.  I have no idea how to make that happen.  But I like the idea, and I’m feeling some warmth under my backside, for once.  Wheels are turning…

So, during a recent conversation with my department chair (who was also my MA thesis supervisor), talking about bringing me in to help with an online journal and print magazine for a planned ‘Advanced Global Institute of somethingorother and Culture’ at Lakehead, I guess I kept mentioning my preference for rural and northern perspectives.  He wanted to keep it mostly global in nature, which is of course just fine.  Then later in the same conversation where he was kind of pushing the idea of further graduate studies, he was urging me to apply to York or Western, or better yet Chicago or SUNY (better for opening job placement doors, not just providing education), or – best possible – L’Ecole Normale Superieure or Paris IV (Sorbonne), all places where I could really dig into social and political thought, cultural studies, all the interdisciplinary continental pomo artsy-fartsiness I could handle.  I mentioned the PhD program in Rural Studies at the University of Guelph, to which he replied, after a pause… “You like that stuff, eh?”

I didn’t really have an answer.  All I could muster was a “yeah, I guess so…”

I should have had an answer, not because it would have mattered him, but because I’ve been rambling on about my desire to stay and work in Thunder Bay, about developing or contributing to our social and cultural community, about how much potential there is here and how we can ‘do’ better.  I should have had a reason for my preference that I could clearly state.  But I didn’t – and it surprised me.

So, since then I’ve been not just bothered but plagued by trying to nail down, exactly, why I am seeminly hell-bent on thinking about and acting in rural and ‘northern’ spaces – ‘spaces’ being all of those points of social, cultural, political, and economic interaction – and in Northwestern Ontario in particular.  A few things came to mind:

1. I don’t like cities.  At first when I realized that this was a motivation for my preference, I was tempted to pass it off as an emotional reaction to my unfamiliarity with cities, as if I had a fear of cities.  But that isn’t true – yes, big cities are a sometimes incomprehensible pile of unfamiliar signifiers, but I’m not afraid of cities.  I just don’t like them.  To put it as plainly as possible (because I could easily get out of hand here) I think cities – as they have been designed [important qualification because I don’t want to sound like a geriatric Mennonite – there is a great deal of economic, environmental, demographic, and possibly – possibly – social potential in increased urbanization IF policy and technology are developed accordingly] – are bad for people.  I prefer rural spaces and so I want to know more about them and why I prefer them.  Conversely, I do not prefer urban spaces and I want to know more about them and why I don’t prefer them.  My dislike of cities is foremost an emotional response, where roots are deep, so I figure it ranks as the primary reason for my interest in rural concerns.

2. Generally speaking, all cultural spaces (rural, urban, and the grey area between) have been urbanized by means of popular marketing and media, which I think can be said to be a reflection of a general cultural or social ‘will’ – it’s hard to say which is the chicken or the egg, but my gut (and a marvelous one it is) tells me it’s more social ‘will’ than market invention.  This pan-urbanization is happening for a perfectly good reason: in addition to cities being the natural economic centers, more than 80% of Canadians now live in cities as of 2006, and it’s in cities where the vast majority of growth is occuring in Canada.  Globally, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s “State of World Population 2007” (subtitled, “Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth”) more than half of the world’s population now lives in an urban center of one kind or another.  Urban spaces, therefore, are deserving of the market’s focus.  Cities are the market.  As a rural sympathizer, I don’t resent this at all – it’s merely a fact.  But rural interests and cultural representation in the marketplace and media spaces are being left by the wayside as a matter of course.  This concerns me, primarily because dominant media and marketing spaces do not represent the variety of rural spaces, nor can they – they don’t fit; urban social and cultural signifiers emerge in urban contexts and therefore only make any real ‘sense’ in those urban contexts.  But rural spaces are being dominated by urban signifiers and there’s little or no room for a local or rural perspective.  I’ll grant that there is some ‘resonance’ among some elements of the rural demographic with urban ‘things’, but that is not the same as ‘making sense’.  In fact, a lot of urban trends are passed of as ‘nonsense’ by rural folks – most notably fashion trends.  Rural spaces need to be reclaimed (hence the magazine idea above).

3. Aside from my emotional bias (see #1 – a result of always having lived in rural areas), my studies have also formed in me an intellectual or theoretical bias in which I’ve become sensitive to the claims of some postmodernists (Lyotard, Foucault) and their precursors (Critical School via Marcuse, and of course Heidegger) who not only emphasize the role of our peripheral spaces and language in the task of ‘deconstructing’ persistent (yawn) Western meta-narratives (where I see urbanization in all its forms as having become a meta-narrative of sorts), but also raise a call in warning of the homogeneity that tends to emerge from an increasingly technical and technological world.  That, my friends, was one sentence.  In the Canadian context, John Ralston Saul has convincingly argued that more and more the ‘great divide’ in Canada won’t be East/West or English/French, but Rural/Urban.  Roll it all up, and you get distrust.

So that’s a start, a kind of scratch.  The question now is ‘where?’ because I can’t study here.  I have to go away.

To a city.