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Tunnel to Nowhere

Over the last couple of days I've become intrigued by the speculation surrounding a proposed tunnel across the Bering Strait—a rail and pipeline link between Alaska and the easternmost Russian province of Chukotka. Crazy, right? It's just south of the Arctic Circle. It's a forbidding environment, and there aren't currently any roads or railroads to the towns where the rail link is being planned. Both Alaska and Chukotka are barren, sparsely populated regions. In other words, this wouldn't exactly be the Lincoln Tunnel.

However, recent moves on the Russian side of things indicate this project may be more than simple fantasy.

*The Bering Strait tunnel seems to be a pet project of Putin's, at least according to reports that arose in April 2007.

*In March 2008, Roman Abramovich bought the world's largest tunnel borer, a $100 million machine that would be perfect for such projects as the Bering Strait tunnel. This is significant because Roman Abramovich is the governor of Chukotka. He also happens to be as close to Putin as an oligarch can get—Abramovich is said to have managed Putin's personal wealth while Putin was the Russian president.

*Then in early April Putin is reported to have wanted to bring up the project with U.S. president George W. Bush during their latest round of talks. I haven't seen any reports on whether he did, or for that matter the result of the conversation, mind you.

The tunnel would go from Chukotka province in Russia to the Russian Big Diomede Island, duck under the Strait again, cross the International Dateline, emerge on the American Little Diomede Island, and then head straight across the strait to Alaska—three links in total. Running a total distance of about 80 kms, no individual section would amount to the world's longest tunnel—that honour is currently held by the Seikan Tunnel joining two of Japan's major islands, which spans 53.85 kms. And then that record is to be broken by the currently-in-construction, 57 km-long Gotthard Base Tunnel going through the Alps and helping to link Switzerland and Italy.

I find the speculation intriguing in light of the excitement in Canada about the possible opening of a Northwest Passage, thanks to global climate change. Would a tunnel across the Bering Strait combined with a Northwest Passage create a faster link between Europe and China? Would it encourage trade between the United States and the resource-rich and mostly unexplored territory of eastern Siberia? And would it help give Canada some measure of control over a new trade route? Well, possibly, on all three counts. At an even deeper level there is something about this project that appeals to me. I have been fascinated with the slender separation between Asia and North America ever since I was a geography-obsessed youth, and like the Channel Tunnel or the Panama Canal, a transportation link across the Bering Strait appeals to the part of me that marvels at humanity's power to affect the environment. It's like playing with Legos, albeit on a grand scale.

Running + thoughts thought while running

Excerpt from my early-morning monologue, immediately after I've realized the alarm's going off: It's freezing. It's like two degrees outside. That's insane. Shut up, alarm. Shut up shut up shut up. But your shorts and your socks and your sweatshirt's in the bathroom already. The podcasts on your iPod are all set up. You don't really have an excuse. You'll feel so much better about yourself. Think of your blood pressure. How fat you got while you were writing your book. How you're supposed to be running a marathon this fall. Frick. And then it's up and out and huffing and puffing down to the waterfront jogging path.

I spent a lot of my run thinking about the piece in the most recent Book Review by New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, about Martin Amis's new book of essays on September 11, The Second Plane. Slagging Amis being one of the fastest-growing sub-genres of literary criticism. It's also one that has spawned some of the best lines in the whole pursuit of book reviewing. To wit, Tibor Fischer's one-liner about being a Martin Amis fan and hating his reviled novel, Yellow Dog -- that it's like catching your favourite uncle in a schoolyard, masturbating.

Well, this latest review by Wieseltier was full of nice ones, too. The chief criticism being that Amis is too much of a stylist -- his tendency to over-write is obscuring the point of his writing. On Amis's tendency to use words that are less frequently used, Wieseltier asks, "And what is gained by preferring 'horrorism' to 'terrorism' except perhaps a round of applause?" And citing the best-known advocate of the school of thought that says prose is best when it is easily understood: "[Amis] writes about politics and history as if Orwell never lived."

Wieseltier's criticism is, as Amis would perhaps say, bollocks. Overwriting and avoidance of any cliché is the point of Amis's writing. To criticize Amis for over-writing is a little like faulting Nabokov for using too much imagery. That's the point, yo. (Having said that, Amis has seemed to be struggling for inspiration since, say, the '90s. House of Meetings was OK, but it read like a literary exercise -- a warm-up for a really big, really important novel. Amis isn't an essayist, he's a novelist, and perhaps his talents would be better suited to making his points in novel, rather than essay, form.)

Rounding Up

This year I've been trying to track which books and novels I actually complete reading. My tenth this year was Richard Price's Lush Life. I get what some others are saying about a somewhat plodding section between, say, pages 300 to 350, but all in all I thought this novel was a masterpiece. Like a lot of Price's more recent work (Clockers, eg.) it uses crime as a plot device while sympathetically depicting characters on both sides of the law enforcement game. But this one is less about cops and robbers than a specific locale -- the Lower East Side of New York. In its portrait of a gentrifying neighbourhood, Lush Life manages to examine themes and issues that confront any developing area, with the inevitable mish-mash of artists, nightclubs, real estate brokers, junkies and cops. There were stretches in the book where I felt as though I could have been reading about Parkdale in Toronto, or Kensington Market. Even calling it a portrait of gentrification doesn't accurately depict why the book is so good. It's more a collection of the sorts of profoundly (for lack of a better word) human moments that occur in a diversely populated urban area. In its attempt to be a love letter to a city, it manages to be a love letter to city living, and the sort of messed-up occurrences that make living in a diverse city so interesting.

Came across a fascinating item in the fascinating battle between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal this morning in David Carr's media column, which depicts the going-away party for one of the victims of Rupert Murdoch increasing consolidation of control over the Journal. Here's a quote from Carr: "In order to make The Journal a first-read, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Thomson are toying with the interest of those of us who have always thought of it as a can’t-miss second read." The "first-read", in this instance, presumably being the Times -- and since this aside comes from somebody at the Times, it's an example of the sort of entitled superiority that must only add to the motivation of Murdoch et al. It almost makes me root for Murdoch.

Last week I dropped into a discussion on blogs hosted by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors, at Bar Italia. And to me it was an illustration of how out-of-touch CSME is that all three of the "bloggers" were over the age of 40--the panelists were Heather Mallick of CBC.ca, D.B. Scott of the Canadian Magazines blog, and Doug Bell, who writes Toronto Life's Spectator blog. My quibble on this isn't with the panelists -- I like what Bell does, in particular, and Mallick and Scott came off as likable. However, none of them would claim to be participating in the forefront of blogging. Mallick and Scott in particular are columnists who just happen to write for the web. What about younger, more experienced practitioners who can actually comment from inside the phenomenon?

One more thing -- last week, because I had a few meetings, I traded my extremely functional Mountain Equipment backpack for my satchel -- a decision I am now regretting. I tend to carry my laptop and at least a couple of books around with me as I go about town -- from the library where I like to write, then to a meeting, then back to the library, say. The backpack is great because it's comfortable, but it looks terrible with a blazer. The satchel looks great with a blazer, but anytime I use it to carry my laptop I end up wrenching my back. Which I did, once again, over the weekend. Grrr. So if you see a hunchbacked writer with a cricked neck as you go about the city, have some sympathy.

Speech Therapy

Photo: Gorbachev (l) and Yakovlev

Last week I gave my first book-related presentation. It was a rainy Friday afternoon at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for a talk sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. Because it was the last day of classes I wasn't sure how many people were going to show up. It turned out I needn't have worried. Or perhaps I should have worried more. Not many students showed up. Instead, it was a crowded room of about 30 academics and journalists. As rooms go this one was probably the most intimidating crew I possibly could have faced.

CERES director Jeffrey Kopstein was there, as was former CERES director Peter Solomon. Robert Bothwell, the historian and expert on Canadian foreign affairs, was sitting to my left. I'd used many of Bothwell's books and notes during my research, particularly his Pirouette, which is by far the best book I've come across on Trudeau-era foreign affairs. Next to Bothwell were the CBC producers Alex Shprintsen and Dan Bjarnason, who did a documentary on Yakovlev in 2002. Also in the audience was Sergei Plekhanov, the York University expert on Russian affairs who actually knew Yakovlev, back when Plekhanov was a young and democratic-minded scholar in Moscow at the Institute for the Study of USA and Canada.

My intent with this lecture, and others I'm planning on conducting for anyone who will invite me to speak, is to tell the story contained in my book, The Soviet Ambassador. The central thesis of my lecture is that Canada contributed to changing Aleksandr Yakovlev's thinking about the Cold War during the decade that Yakovlev was Moscow's ambassador to Ottawa. At the time, many in the West believed it was best to isolate the Soviet Union and senior Communist Party officials--the foreign policy equivalent of the silent treatment, in other words.

However, when Yakovlev was exiled from Moscow by his enemies in the Communist Party in 1973, many of the highest-profile figures in the Canadian establishment developed friendships with him. Rather than isolating Yakovlev, many Canadians sought him out and explored his thinking about politics and world affairs, including such figures as former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, McDonald's of Canada founder George Cohon and Trudeau's foreign policy advisor, Ivan Head. Over the course of his decade in Canada, Yakovlev grew convinced that the Soviet Union needed to reform itself to become more democratic and free. My lecture argues that Yakovlev's relationships with Trudeau, Cohon and Head, among others, contributed to Yakovlev's growing convictions. And it suggests that engagement and dialogue always are better in dealing with enemy states than such tactics as isolation and violence. I'm anti-silent treatment, in other words.

The lecture's premise went over really well -- in fact, after I finished talking, Alex Shprintsen, who has read an early draft of the book, piped up and told the room how much he enjoyed what he read. "I thought I knew everything there was to know about Yakovlev," he said. "But I couldn't put it down." Such words are nice to hear, particularly in the early days before the book's  release.

I was anxious about the Q&A session, but it turned out that was the part that I most enjoyed. After roughly two years spent researching Yakovlev's story, mostly in solitude, I find myself craving opportunities to speak about it with others. And speaking about Yakovlev's story with others who know about it, and who are equally fascinated by his ideological conversion, was particularly satisfying.

I have a lot of work left to do on the lecture itself, however. It is a challenge to distill the gist of a 360-page book into an informative, captivating lecture. On Friday, I spoke for about 80 minutes, which is way too long -- my target time is about 40 minutes. Clearly, I have a lot of cutting and refocusing ahead of me. Also, I put together a PowerPoint presentation to go along with the lecture, and I found that most of it didn't work. People responded to the photos, less to the slides with text on them. I'm planning on radically cutting back on the use of PowerPoint. I also have to practice until I have this thing down cold. I am passionate about Yakovlev's story because it's a remarkable testament to one man's intellectual courage, an underdog story about a guy whose mind-change ended up changing the world. And I have to refine and improve my lecture until it accurately reflects just how remarkable a story Yakovlev's is.

Friday's presentation was a first draft. Time to get working on the second, and then the third.

Scenes from a Vacation...

...with my family, with a couple of days of overlap with my brother's family.

A Little Light Vacation Reading

This week I head off for a week down south to make some sandcastles with Myron and Natalie. Before any beach vacation I try to hit a book store and this past Saturday I took an hour to go through my local establishment, the two-year-old Type. Weighing down my backpack as I traipse through Pearson will be books by J.G. Ballard (High Rise), Edward Lucas (The New Cold War), Richard Price (Lush Life) and then a two-volume copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I may also bring a novel by Kingsley Amis I've been meaning to read for ages, The Anti-Death League. This being our family's first solo vacation (with a child, I mean), I wonder whether I'll even be able to finish one of the novels I'm bringing. We shall see, we shall see. One thing's certain -- thanks to the weight of all these hardcovers I'm starting to see the logic behind the Kindle.