Baram Writer

Baram Writer is a hybrid videopoem/ screenplay fiction that I wrote around twenty years ago. It was originally published in the (now defunct but excellent) online literary journal Dark Sky.

The idea I had was to write a poem with accompaniment “stills”, as if the poem had already been produced as a movie (I’ve done the same with short stories and novel manuscripts). Because Dark Sky evaporated from its original site, in 2008 I archived the project as it originally appeared: https://baramwriter.blogspot.com/2008/11/baram-writer.html?m=1

And I’ve made a few videopoem versions of it since. 

For example:

 Baram Writer

https://youtu.be/oPHzuqDuAec

And here: https://youtu.be/Oc9PS6vXd40?si=YaoC7k87-iQyy3hB

한강에서/ At the Han River

 

경상남도의 하늘/ Kyoungsangnam do sky

 

Greener cities 1

A public conversation · Cities and ecology

How Can We Make Our Cities Greener?

Cities are fundamental to human society. They bring people together, make cultural and economic life possible, and create opportunities that would be difficult to sustain in isolation.

But cities can also damage the environments on which they depend. Traffic contributes to air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Roads and buildings absorb heat and replace living ground with impermeable surfaces. Urban development can fragment habitats, intensify flooding, generate waste and leave too little room for trees, birds and other forms of life.

These problems are not inevitable. Well-designed cities can use less energy, make walking and cycling safer, improve public transport, restore streams and green spaces, protect biodiversity and become healthier places to live. A densely populated city can even have a smaller environmental footprint per person than a more sprawling settlement, provided its infrastructure and policies support that outcome.

There is no single blueprint. The best ideas often begin with people who know a particular street, neighbourhood or city through everyday experience.

Your city · Your ideas

What would you change?

Think of a city you know well. It might be the place where you live now, somewhere you grew up, or a city you visit regularly. What practical change would make it more ecologically friendly?

• Could a dangerous road become safer for pedestrians and cyclists?
• Where would additional trees, parks or restored waterways make the greatest difference?
• How could public transport, delivery services or building design become cleaner?
• What local policy or community initiative is already working and deserves to be copied?

Join the conversation

Share the city or neighbourhood, describe the environmental problem, and suggest a realistic improvement. You can also reply to another reader's suggestion and build on it.

Read comments and add your idea ↓

Comments and replies appear in Blogger's comment thread beneath this post. They are shared with other visitors, subject to the blog's comment settings and moderation.

A public discussion about sustainable cities, urban ecology and the future of our communities.

나비

 

Seoul

 

The origins of the Great Depression

 

Two Industrial Nations · Interactive Chapter

After the Armistice

Canada and the United States emerged from the First World War with enlarged factories, heavy debts, restless workers and farms built for a wartime market that was disappearing.

The peace of 1918 did not restore the economy of 1913. War had changed what North America could produce, how governments raised money, and what farmers and workers expected from prosperity. The central postwar problem was conversion: how could economies organized for extraordinary military demand return to civilian life?

Two victories, different inheritances

Canada

≈ 8 million

population around the end of the war

Canada had mobilized on a remarkable scale for a small country. Munitions production enlarged manufacturing, Victory Loans deepened domestic finance, and federal income taxation appeared in 1917. More than 600,000 Canadians served and roughly 61,000 died. Veterans' pensions, war debt and demobilization followed the troops home.

United States

≈ 106 million

1920 census population

The United States entered the war much later, in April 1917. Its industrial base and internal market were vastly larger. Wartime mobilization accelerated shipbuilding, steel, chemicals and finance, while the country emerged as a major international creditor. Its postwar adjustment therefore occurred from a position of greater scale and financial power.

1918–1921: peace becomes an economic shock

1918

Armistice. Military orders begin to disappear. Factories must convert from shells, weapons and wartime supplies to civilian products while soldiers return to the labour market.

1919

Inflation and labour conflict. Wartime price pressures and workers' expectations collide. Canada experiences the Winnipeg General Strike; the United States experiences a major strike wave.

1920

The boom breaks. Commodity prices turn sharply downward. Farmers who expanded during wartime demand discover that debts remain even when crop prices fall.

1920–21

Severe recession. Industrial production and employment contract sharply. The recession is short compared with the Great Depression, but it exposes the instability of postwar conversion.

The overlooked beginning of the Depression story

The cities eventually recovered during the 1920s, but agriculture did not share the prosperity evenly. Wartime Europe had needed North American food. Farmers responded by expanding acreage, purchasing machinery and often borrowing. When European agriculture recovered, world supplies increased and prices fell. The mortgage did not fall with the price of wheat.

For many farm families, especially in export-dependent regions, economic insecurity did not suddenly arrive with Wall Street in October 1929. Its foundations had been laid during the postwar adjustment.

Same continent, unequal scale

These bars visualize the demographic difference that shaped the two industrial systems. Population alone is not a measure of industrial power.

United States — 1920 population, about 106 million

106m

Canada — 1921 population, about 8.8 million

8.8m

What scale gave the U.S.

A vast domestic market, deeper capital markets and the ability to sustain mass-production industries primarily through internal demand.

What Canada had to solve

A smaller population spread across great distances, high infrastructure costs and strong dependence on exports, British finance and increasingly American capital and technology.

Follow the postwar chain

The sequence shows how apparently separate sectors were becoming parts of one economic system.

War demand
High food and industrial orders

Expansion
More acreage, machinery and borrowing

Peace
European production recovers

Price fall
Income drops while debt remains

Farm stress
Less purchasing power

Rail & merchants
Lower traffic and sales

Factories
Weaker orders

Credit
Debts become harder to service

Industrial economies become powerful by connecting sectors. The same connections can transmit weakness.

Test the argument

Why is it misleading to begin the Great Depression story only with the stock-market crash of 1929?

Because important weaknesses preceded the crash. North American agriculture had already endured years of falling prices and debt pressure, while the postwar international financial system remained fragile. The crash was a powerful shock, but it struck an economy containing older vulnerabilities.

Did Canada's First World War deaths create the mass unemployment of the 1930s?

No. Canada's wartime losses were a serious demographic and fiscal legacy, but the Depression's labour problem was mass unemployment, not a shortage of workers.

Sources & further reading. Statistics Canada, historical census series; U.S. Census Bureau, 1920 Census; Veterans Affairs Canada and Canadian War Museum on First World War service and casualties; Library and Archives Canada on Victory Loans and wartime mobilization; Federal Reserve History on the agricultural depression of the 1920s; A. E. Safarian, The Canadian Economy in the Great Depression; Graham D. Taylor and Peter A. Baskerville, A Concise History of Business in Canada.

Les grandes dépressions

 Le Canada et les États-Unis sont souvent considérés comme des pays similaires. Toutefois, leurs histoires, bien qu'ayant suivi des trajectoires comparables, furent tout sauf parallèles. La Grande Dépression et ses causes sous-jacentes en sont de bons exemples.

The Great Depressions

 Canada and the United States are often considered similar countries. But their histories, although traveling similar tracks, were anything but parallel. The Great Depression and its underlying causes are good examples of this.

경상남도

 

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Finn Harvor

One author, every frame — image, text, sound, and edit.

Award-winning writer, filmmaker, and musician working across English, French, and Korean. Based in South Korea.

The practice

Authorial movies

Harvor's videopoems are what he calls authorial movies: films in which a single person originates every element of the work — the writing, the image, the sound, the performance, the edit — rather than directing a crew toward someone else's script or score.

The result sits closer to a poem or a piece of music than to a conventional short film: a single sensibility, followed all the way through.

Recurring concerns

Four subjects the work returns to

Nature and the anthropocene

How ecosystems and human systems now move together — extraction, weather, and the altered ground beneath ordinary life.

Addiction and family

Inherited patterns, dependency, and the fragile work of repair, drawn in part from the life of the artist's late brother.

Technology and contemporary war

Drones, surveillance, and remote violence — and what these instruments do to the people who use and endure them.

The nature of love

Attention, tenderness, and the long labor of staying, examined without sentimentality.

Presented internationally

Festivals and conferences

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