Plenty of Nothing

The Kaiser!

This 1917 Conservative election poster condemns Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier for association with Quebec isolationist Henri Bourassa and by extension the Kaiser and by further extension beer, which the Tories made illegal after the election.

Donald Keene

Of the heroes that I had when I was twenty, it seems it's the translators who remain now that I'm fifty or so. I've been carrying around Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century all that time, and volume one of his A History of Japanese Literature is on the bedside table.

Keene has taught Japanese literature at Columbia for 55 years and now, at 88, he plans to emigrate and take out Japanese citizenship. There's little chance that the Japanese will turn him away, as they have already designated him a Person of Cultural Merit, making him one of only three Westerners to be granted that honour.

 (This is the 1500th Plenty of Nothing post.) D

Zinck Comix "Moloch!"

The Blind Leading the Blind

I had a copy of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Blind Leading the Blind (or La parabola dei ciechi as it is known in its home at the National Gallery in Naples) on my bulletin board as an undergrad at dear old Mount Allison so fair, many years ago. I liked its satirical quality, without having much idea how it worked as a composition. Nowadays I would be extremely proud to have come up with this group, especially the lurching figure second from the right, who would be played by Viggo Mortensen or Daniel Craig in the movie. What strikes me now, that I think I missed the first time around, is how much the landscape looks like Sackville, New Brunswick. Now I'm sitting here enjoying the thought of the Chancellor, President and Vice-Presidents of Mount Allison University staggering off Main Street into the waterfowl park. D

Coleman Anderson

The recent Cady Coleman/Ian Anderson flute duet in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight could be the Plenty of Nothing blog topic par excellence, combining outer space and classic Bach rock. Anderson gets the solos, and waggles the hell out of his eyebrows, but Coleman takes full advantage of weightless conditions to steal the show. D

Pâtisseries en plein air

Gormenghast

I'm gradually working my way through Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, often at the rate of a paragraph per sitting, because Peake's richly visual prose rewards slow reading, and because I'll only be able to read the books for the first time once so I want to make them last. This year would have been Peake's hundredth birthday, so it's a good time to get them finally read. I should really have done this in my teens, so that I might have better appreciated, for instance, David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch's vividly weird, disconnected characters owe more than a little to the vengeful dwellers of Castle Gormenghast. Doctor Prunesquallor and Cora and Clarice Groan would have fit right in at the Great Northern Hotel. Why is the first novel named Titus Groan and the second Gormenghast, and not the other way around? I don't know, but I hope to understand by end of Titus Alone. Part of the centenary celebrations will be the release of an unpublished fourth novel, Titus Awakes, begun by Peake and finished by his widow Maeve Gilmore.

[Review: Titus Groan: deft. Gormenghast: deft. Titus Alone: daft. It seems there is no good reason why the titles of the first two volumes are reversed. I suppose it's just one of those things that happens, and then it's too late to fix it. There are perhaps two good pages in the third volume.] D

Ellesmere Telescope

My only question being, why haven't we thought of this already?

2011 Men's Hockey Playoff Champions

Václav Varaďa successfully completes the weightlifting portion of the Czech competition.

Russian: Salavat Yulaev.

Swedish: Färjestads BK.

Finnish: HIFK.

Czech: HC Oceláři Třinec.

Slovak: HC Košice.

Swiss: HC Davos.

German: Eisbären Berlin.

Asian: Tohoku Free Blades and Anyang Halla.

Austrian: EC Red Bull Salzburg.

Belarusian: Yunost Minsk.

British: Nottingham Panthers.

Dutch: HYS The Hague.

Danish: Blue Fox Herning.

French: Dragons de Rouen.

Italian: HC Asiago.

Norwegian: Sparta Sarpsborg.

Canadian: Clarenville Caribous.

Tel & Tel