Plenty of Nothing

Pony Girl

If you had ancestors in the western Roman Empire who had anything to do with horses, they may well have venerated the horse goddess Epona.  She was a Gaulish deity who made the step up to Roman cult figure, probably because everyone loves horses and the Italians hadn't thought up a horse divinity of their own.  European culture is sprinkled with little Celtic survivals: throwing coins into fountains, counting in twenties (e.g. quatre vingt deux), carving human heads into cathedrals.  Chances are good we call small horses ponies on account of her.

Here's a whole Epona site.

Three Fillums

Seems a body never stops having to catch up on popular culture.  Today I sat in front of the TV and watched three movies I should have seen years ago: Hud, Little Big Man, and The Producers.  Some random observations:

As Heather pointed out once or twice, Paul Newman is a very handsome guy.  I spent a while puzzling over why his character Hud seemed so familiar.  Then I got it--he's Sawyer from Lost.  Or rather Sawyer is Hud.  It reminds me of when I realized Alan Alda was playing Groucho Marx in M*A*S*H.

I saw The Outlaw Josey Wales a few weeks ago and am now prepared to declare that Chief Dan George belongs on the $20 bill.  What a lovely face he had, radiating humour and wisdom.  That sequence where Old Lodge Skins believes he's invisible is gold.  Little Big Man is one of the great Westerns, if a little too dependent on coincidence, and was pretty obviously the model for Dances With Wolves.  Dustin Hoffman is good too.

The Producers is pretty good, but confirms my belief that Young Frankenstein is Mel Brooks' masterpiece.  Still, "Springtime for Hitler" helped make South Park possible.

Douglas

Beasts of No Nation

I picked up Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation last week nudged by a memory of the positive press the book got in late 2005.

“Astonishing,” “staggering,” “harrowing,” “startling,” and “stunning” ring through the mostly positive reviews. Maslin’s unfortunately titled review praises the book while pointing to its lack of subtlety. The subject matter—child soldiers in Africa—is dire and the prose distinctive. Unlike other readers, though, I found Iweala’s avoidance of the past and future tenses annoying: there’s only so much present and past progressive I can take. And in the end, I don’t think the stylistic choice solved the difficulty of representing an African child’s war history.

This interview touches on one of the women whose war history inspired the story; and this longer one explores the novel’s language . And here’s an NPR interview which like much of the other coverage focuses as much on the child soldier problem rather than on the writing.

Winter

 

Winter rolled in with a will this week.  So after all that whining, bitching and complaining about global warming we can now return to what we normally do in January: whine, bitch and complain about the cold.

 

What Do People With No Lives Do On a Friday Night?

Bird sound wars. My site beats his--more variety.

Annie Buller (1895-1973)

It's odd where reading will take you.

I started with Bock's A Communist's Daughter and then dissatisfied with its portrait of Jean Ewen, I moved on to Ewen's autobiography, China Nurse. From there, I went to her communist father Tom McEwen's autobiography, The Forge Glows Red. And from there I ended up reading an uneven biography of Annie Buller.

Buller died thirty-four years ago today. Most of the photos I've seen of her are, like this one, very unflattering. (Photo source)

A founding member of the Canadian Communist Party, she was an union organizer who seems to have moved between Ontario and Manitoba in order to organize the needle trades. Like many of labour activists of the period, she spent time in jail. She did two stints--for a year after the Estevan Coal Miners Strike and for two years during the early WWII crackdown on the CPC party. (Her husband was interned at the same time.) After that, more CPC work, including a run in a federal election.

She must have been a woman with a great deal of energy.

Heather

Magnus Magnusson

Magnus Magnusson has died.   Though the Icelandic Scot will be remembered in the UK for his career on TV, I'll always think of him as a translator of the Penguin Classics' Icelandic sagas.  I have four volumes co-translated by him and Hermann Palsson: Njal's Saga (1960), The Vinland Sagas (1965), King Harald's Saga (1966), and Laxdaela Saga (1969).  The bare bones exposition, irascible characters and laconic dialogue of these books remain a model for me when I write.  Here's a bit from chapter 48 of Laxdaela Saga:

      Over at Laugar, in Saelingsdale, Gudrun rose early as soon as the sun was up.  She went to the room where her brothers were sleeping, and shook Ospak.  Ospak and his brothers woke up at once; and when he saw it was his sister he asked her what she wanted, to be up so early in the morning.  Gudrun said she wanted to know what they were planning to do that day.  Ospak said they would be having a quiet day -- 'for there isn't much work to be done just now.'

    Gudrun said, 'You would have had just the right temper if you had been peasants' daughters -- you do nothing about anything, good or bad.  Despite all the disgrace and dishonour that Kjartan has done you, you lose no sleep over it even when he rides past your door with only a single companion.  Men like you have the memory of hogs.  It's obviously futile to hope that you will ever dare to attack Kjartan at home if you haven't the nerve to face him now when he is travelling with only one or two companions.  You just sit there pretending to be men, and there are always too many of you about.'

    Ospak said she was making too much of this, but admitted that it was difficult to argue against her.  He jumped out of bed at once and dressed, as did all the brothers one after another; then they made ready to lay an ambush for Kjartan.

This prose style may be Magnusson's legacy.

Douglas

A Few Simple Facts About Glands

This 1928 advertising illustration is one of my favourite images of early women's hockey.  These winsome teenaged hockeyists exude vim, vigour and vitality.  The illustrator clearly adheres to the notion that hockey is a beautiful game of graceful playmaking, and it certainly can be, but these willowy kids are in for trouble once the hipchecks and slashing begin.  The 1920s are good for sympathetic images of female hockey.  Contrast the 1940s, when cheesecake calendar imagery rules, or the early 1990s, when cheesecake calendar imagery still rules.

Douglas

Craig Heron, Booze: a Distilled History

I've been chipping away at this behemoth for about a year and a half and am now within fifteen pages of the end.  My original impulse was to learn about the 1878 Scott Act, which gave municipalities the power to vote themselves dry.  This was connected to early hockey history in my mind because the Scott in question was related to some of Ottawa's earliest hockey figures.  It might seem odd to sidetrack through a 400-page history of Canadian alcohol as part of your hockey history research, but it's not really.  Alcohol is connected to everything in our society in so many complicated ways that the historian, or historical novelist, has to understand a person or community's attitude toward it in order to really get at their politics or religion.

The politics of booze is all about perception.  Here are some unorthodox perceptions from this book.  Early native negotiators sought to acquire European alcohol, then give it all to a few individuals in their group so they could attain out of body experiences.  Maritimers, especially Prince Edward Islanders,  are historically the most abstemious Canadians.  Middle-class and wealthy Canadians drink more than poor people.  The prohibition era witnessed greater and more widespread civil disobedience than any other period of Canadian history.

Douglas

Relationships

In your relationship, which one is Pinky and which one is the Brain?