Pubdate: Thu, 10 Nov 2005
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Clint Burnham
Note: Clint Burnham is a Vancouver freelance writer and educator.

INSIDE THE BRAIN OF AN ADDICT

Downtown Eastside Drug Users' Book Selections Amassed In An 
Installation That Is An Allegory For Addiction

Addicts read books too. This may be the most commendable message that 
a new exhibit at the Central Branch of the Vancouver public library 
gets out. Nova Library, a "social sculpture" by New York artist Hans 
Winkler, is up until Nov. 30.

This library-within-a-library is a collection of a few hundred books 
selected by drug users in the Downtown Eastside, responding to a 
survey by Winkler. The artist has worked in Europe and North 
American, carrying out actions and projects that intervene into 
popular consciousness. This latest project aims at the heart of 
Vancouver's shameful present: it humanizes the addict.

Nova Library is named after William S. Burroughs' 1966 novel Nova 
Express. Written in Burroughs' cut-up style, the novel fused 
science-fiction with social satire: "Your cities are ovens where 
South American narcotic plants brought total disposal -- Brain 
screams of millions who have controller lives in that place screamed 
back from white hot blue sky -- Can always pull the nova equipped now 
with tower blasts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

With the Nova Library we hear those "brain screams" -- for we are in 
the brain of the addict, the junky, the user. Because what is most 
striking about this work is the sheer variety of books chosen for 
inclusion: from first nations literature to self-help, from 
children's books to literary classics, from genre fiction to West 
Coast classics.

So Curious George rubs shoulders with Waiting for Godot; How to Draw 
Comics the Marvel Way with The High Times Reader, Geronimo's Story of 
His Own Life with Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to Their History, 
Chemistry, Use and Abuse. Suddenly all of literature looks to be an 
allegory for addiction. Just what is George so curious about? And 
maybe Godot was Samuel Beckett's connection.

So this plenitude, this wide range of titles, reference, interest and 
reading, also does something else. The Nova Library reminds us that 
we read some of these books -- that indeed there is more that is 
similar in drug users and non-drug users than different. Indeed, with 
the range of drugs today from chocolate and caffeine to Paxil and 
Xanax, from pot to coke and sugar to heroin, who among us is not an 
addict, a junky, a user?

This might be the only criticism of the Nova Library. Why only survey 
drug users in the Downtown Eastside? We know that drug users live 
everywhere in this city -- province -- country -- but it is the 
Downtown Eastside that has been demonized as a junky haven, as though 
users aren't in Kerrisdale or Comox, Richmond or Regina, North 
Vancouver or North York.

Nonetheless, this is an affirmative project, an in-your-face 
affirmation that, yes, drug users, those pawns in the Drug Wars and 
the Four Pillars policies, have imaginations, have creative lives, 
and live in the world of books as much as any of us. For there is 
another Nova Library: the Carnegie Branch at Main and Hastings where, 
every morning when it opens, women and men are waiting, anxiously, to 
enter that world. It is to Hans Winkler's credit, and that of the 
grunt gallery that sponsored this project, that now we are aware of 
these connections.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman