A black-and-white ad near the northeast corner of Main and King Edward. What's it selling? Well, it's selling Dan!
Who is Dan?
Dan masquerades as a realtor for a large and long-running real estate company. He has made a small pile moving properties west of Main and is now turning his sights east. But how to do that?
To do that, Dan deploys intimacy. He tells the second-person pronoun how hard that pronoun works and assumes that those going by "You" possess unceded Coast Salish land in need of motivation. Dan has opinions on how hard that land should be working and is willing to sit down with it.
Dan is a Land Whisper. He talks to the land, reminds it of its commodification, and from there he builds it up, encourages it, and the land delivers -- to "You", first, but always through Dan.
Remember the boy in D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (1926)? Dan is not the boy who, while rocking his horse, predicts race horse winners to keep his family in the lifestyle it has grown accustomed to, but the reader of that story who wishes there were such a horse, and that he is the one who "bets" on it.
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