Plenty of Nothing

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

Skellefteå Slide

Since our last installment Skellefteå have slipped from eighth to tenth, are five games below .500 and minus 20 in goalscoring.  They tied Luleå 2-all on December 19.  Two days later they lost 4 to 2 to Malmö in a game they should have won.  The Yuletide break gave them twelve days to think about that, and they returned to beat Färjestad 4 to 3 on January 2.  But then Djurgården shut them out 2 to 0 January 4.  The black and gold beat league-leading HV71 3 to 2 on January 6, but then lost 3 to 2 to Timrå January 9.  Brynäs is the league-leader in tie scores, so it would be reasonable to expect one January 11, but Skellefteå lost 6 to nothing, their fifth shutout loss of the season.

If our guys finish eleventh (possible) or twelfth (less likely), they're going to have to play in the qualifying tournament against the top teams of the Allsvenskan.  One team hungry to come up is Kenny Jönsson's Rögle, last seen in the Elitserien in 1996.

It's three-quarters of the way through the season.

Relationships

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

I Am Four Degrees From David Bowie

My boss's son is friends with the percussionist of Arcade Fire who recently played with Bowie at Fashion Rocks in New York.  But it gets better.  My boss's son had the opportunity to have supper with Bowie, but blew him off to go on a first date with the woman who has been his girlfriend ever since.  It'll take him years to spent those hero points.  Douglas

[No, wait, three degrees.  I've met my boss's son.]

Siding Bee

    This past weekend a piece of aluminum siding came loose from the eaves and began flapping in the wind above my next door neighbour's driveway.  I left a message with a contractor who was to call me back Monday, then I went next door to suggest to my neighbour that he move his vehicle to my driveway till the contractor arrived, in case the piece blew off and scratched the car.
    "You're not going to pay to fix that!  We'll borrow my neighbour's ladder."
    "Okay ... but I'll go up," I said.  My neighbour is about 82.
    I went to find a hammer and some roofing nails, and by the time I came up from the basement my neighbour's neighbour's ladder was against my house with my neighbour's neighbour at the top.  I wound up passing him nails through the upstairs window while he hammered the siding back into place.  The whole thing took about five minutes and was motivated by the old guy's go-to attitude and by his neighbours' desire to keep him the hell off the ladder.

Douglas

What I Learned Today: Nearly Post-Flu Edition

After one miserable week and one draggy week, I'm approaching post-flu.  The two key signs of this are that my brain now thinks in sentences of more than five words and that my sense of smell is starting to come back.  I've never lost my sense of smell before and it's been more disconcerting than I would have predicted (see--long sentences).  And without smell it's almost impossible to cook well.

So today I learned two things.  The secret ingredients for any tasty meal are garlic and bacon fat.  This revelation brought to you by my laziness.  Yes, I know it's a shock, but I've been too lazy to clean out a  frying pan after cooking up our December treat of bacon.

The first bacon and garlic miracle was performed with kale--sauteed with garlic and a bit of bacon drippings. Amazing.

The second bacon and garlic miracle was performed this morning when I used the same (still unsoaped pan) to brown some stewing meat  which I plopped drippings and all into the crock pot with a lot of garlic, pureed tomatoes, and root veg.  Eight hours later very good stew was had.

The grannies with their cans of dripping were on to a good thing.

Heather

Growlers and Bergy Bits

    I encountered these two terms today while exploring the sea ice section the Environment Canada website.  Here's a site that explains the difference, so you don't embarrass yourself by calling one the other the next time you're up the Labrador.  Heather, of course, knows all this stuff already, being an Antarctic maniac.  She could tell you the name of the cat on Shackleton's last voyage.

    I was trying to think of whether I've ever seen an iceberg, or at least a bergy bit, and, yes, I have.  They used to be visible from the upstairs window of the house in Sydney Mines, the winter of 1970/71, menacing the North Sydney ferry.

    This image is by David Blackwood, Newfoundland printmaker, whose pictures of the natural world always seem to be so much more awesome that Christopher Pratt's, because he puts people in them for scale.  Douglas

Argosy Cartoonist Joel Duggan

Joel Duggan is republishing his strip Jungle Jazz which appeared in Mount Allison's student newspaper The Argosy Weekly around the beginning of the decade.

This has got me thinking about assembling a collection of Argosy Weekly cartoons.  When I worked at the paper (c1980) we had a wealth of cartooning talent.  Carlyle the Smart Chicken, for one, comes to mind.  I suppose a proper survey would have to involve a week at the university archives, but if anyone has any information, links, or back copies of the paper, please write.

Douglas