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.