Michael Wynne's 2014 Reading Journal

I post this because an old friend, who telephones a couple times per year, and I talked

on the phone last night about books, among other things. As we age, I for one try to 

read and discard my books.  I hope that many will inspire young people, among whom I counted myself decades ago.  I rejoice that many inspire me after all these years, some more,

some less than when I acquired them.  Anyway, here's the email I sent to my friend after

last night's conversation, in which he asked me how many books I read in 2014. 

Tom,

Thanks for last night's phone call.  When I said that I have

kept a journal since 2000 to describe what I read, you asked

how many books I read in 2014.  Up a bit early for work today,

I listen to the podcast of "Radio EcoShock," a superb, wide-

ranging ecology show I listen to online weekly, from Vancouver

Coop Radio.  I also have before me the list of what readings I

described since January 1, 2014:

9 long poems (200-2000 lines)

24 plays

7 novels

10 biographies

5 autobiographies

5 histories

1 law

7 philosophy

1 literary criticism

2 science history

1 biology

3 economics

2 anthropology

1 geography

You might classify these works differently.  I might have mis-classified

them here, given that they are from a chronological, not a genre list. 

I also list each work in one or more category, which lets me look up

a certain work without wading through 14 years of the chronological list. 

I write a looseleaf page or so about each work I read.  I started this in

the fall of 2000, when I last taught school in Anaham.  Then I vowed

to read and discard my books, a page about each taking less space, and

giving me a record of books I read, how they affected me, and perhaps

contributing to some future literary effort.  My subconscious probably

wanted to preserve what's left of my academic pretensions.  Who knows?

As I listed 2014 above, I noticed the small number of novels and large number of social

science books.  The plays are numerous because in December, 2013,

I gathered all my Ancient Greek and Roman plays, then read most

of them during the winter.  I also read a couple Shakespeare plays in 2014.

The Ancient plays, long dear to me, were in a big box of books I spread on

a shelf in a student common room at the University of Northern

BC during a spring, 2014 overnight trip to Prince George. 

Giving away such precious books, I hope to someone as young and eager as I once was,

conditioned me to give away almost all my books after reading them.

I'm still eager; just older.  This seems miraculous given my life since I

met Carla and we had Chelsea, us all immersed in a culture that little values

book learning, or learning generally. 

This winter, I plan to read my 1800s English novels, mostly George Eliot

and Thomas Hardy; but I have one Charlotte Bronte novel left.  I

started reading it this month:  "Shirley," about early-1800s resistance

to job loss due to rising industrialism.  Her "Jane Eyre," which I read in

2012, was spellbinding.  Several years ago I read a bundle of Charles Dickens.

Dickens "Bleak House" was a monotony, like Somerset Maugham's "Of Human

Bondage."   I read the latter during my 2002 time teaching high school in Manning.

Every time I went away to teach, I brought, read, and discarded many

books.  I don't go away to teach anymore.

Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," a 2014

reading then given away, was comprehensive, modern in a secular way for

the 1770s, and full of parallels to the US empire's current decline.

Gilbert Highet's "Man's Unconquerable Mind," my latest reading, which I described to you last

night, argues that some people will keep thinking despite political and cultural

obstacles; but also that since the Renaissance, it is impossible to master

all subjects.  This tells me to use my time wisely, neither despairing of

learning at all because I cannot learn all, nor burying myself in books and

neglecting nature, which Highet is not the first in my experience to call edifying, which he

also calls music, as Nietzsche does in "The Birth of Tragedy" and

"Geneology of Morals," other 2014 readings.

So, blog readers, who wants this growing journal after I'm gone?  Any takers for the

remaining books, in case I die before I can discard them all. I intend to leave no trace that

I ever walked this earth.  Honor me by keeping your minds working, your hearts reaching

out to one another. 

Prokofiev Aquacise Music?

     Must aquacise music be booming, thumping, electronic dreck?

     Why not Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf?"  Why not Handel's "Water Music?"

     I thought of this the other afternoon in the local public swimming pool complex's hot tub.
My water was steamy wonderful, but the aquacise class in the nearby pool was splashing to
"music to weld by," "fascist disco music," as I have called such ear abuse before.

     Even Australian Mrs. Thompson in her tight red track suit wouldn't bop to that beat.  My Grade 3 teacher played for us Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," the version in which the conductor explains various instruments standing for various characters.   The oboe stood for the duck, I recall.

     Aquacisers could listen to that, splash their way to fitness, and go home humming a great tune.  Instead, a 20-something scrawn commands over the loudspeaker, which sadly has enough room for dance music from hell, too.  I'm not surprised that the ranted at, musically-mugged women left the pool with a shuffle, not a lilt, in their steps.  You can't lilt to that music, in water or on land.

    By contrast, Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" or Handel's "Water Music" might make people enjoy aquacises.  They might skip home, and hop eagerly to the next aquacise class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuw8YjSbKd4

That's Handel above.  Makes you wanna twinkle your toes, eh?

     While I'm on about music, Frederich Nietzsche's art form best able to narrate the human spirit, I'll mention Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson on the recycling dumpster behind the public library.  "How did I get here?"  they might ask, as the Talkings Heads did in a song, a song better for aquacises than what I heard this week.   The duo are safe, even if Nelson is dead; but their compact disk was atop the recycle dumpster, I noticed when I dropped in my own recycling.

    I borrowed and returned this disk months ago:  "Two Men with the Blues."   The library people said it did not rejoin the collection, but I convinced them that I returned it.  They never found it, but they believed me and did not make me pay for it.

     Imagine my surprise when I found this disk on the recycle dumpster.  The library shares a building with the regional district government offices.  Someone threw out this disk.  It seems I did get the disk back into the building, whose tenants later discarded it.

     The library clerk was happy to have it back.  "Did you find the case, too?  Now we can re-order."
It was miracle enough to find the disk, albeit too scratched to play again.  Perhaps she was trying to be funny.  Perhaps she just came from aquacises, and was therefore unable to be funny, let alone musical.

     Handel's link is above.  Have Prokofiev and the Talking Heads below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydOO91xQBH4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7pVjl4Rrtc

     When next you swim, think of oboes, ducks, Prokofiev, Handel, and anything but typical, terrible aquacise music.  Booma booma in a pig's eye.    

Would You, Could You, In the Dark?

     Would you walk 500 metres down a slippery, 45-degree slope in the dark?

      I wouldn't.  I didn't, although I walked up the slope before sundown.

     Curiosity didn't kill this cat, but it put him in danger twice; but the risks
were instructive, as the Ancient Mariner might tell the Wedding Guest.

     Riding my bicycle down the Williams River Valley trail ten kilometres to the Fraser

River last week, I noticed a cement retaining wall.  It was about 10 metres long and a metre

high.  It was about 200 metres above the trail, about two kilometres from the Fraser.  I wondered

why the wall was there, and planned to find out next trip, with new, grippier shoes.

     Only climb what's climbable in runners, I have long thought.  I don't fear heights.  I
only fear falling from them.  Actually, I only fear hitting the bottom:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=williams+lake+river+valley+trail&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Faw4VPOcOobfoAS4pIKoDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg&biw=1280&bih=565  

     A week later, wearing the grippier shoes, I biked down the trail to below the cement wall.
Various interruptions that day delayed my start until after 1600h, but there were still
three hours of daylight.

     Various interruptions arose while I composed this tale.  Perhaps an uninterrupted life,
like an unexamined life, is not worth living.  An unexamined, steep, rocky, ravine-slivered
slope is certainly worth examining, if one wants to climb it and live.  

     Bicycle stashed behind the shrubbery partway up the hill, I began to climb.
Work gloves helped my grip when on all fours, but prickles pierced the gloves, and
a couple remain under my skin two days later.  Rocks tumbled now and then, as I
slipped downward, but a couple sticks I found en route helped me stick to the slope.
They also eased my prickled hands.  I missed climbing hills and mountains in Alberta,
prickle-free.

     Dirt cascaded down my shoes sought traction.  There were few trees to hold.
The sun sank in the sky over the nearby Fraser River.

    Near the top, I met a steeper place, detoured around it, and reached the level of
the mysterious cement wall.  It was about 50 metres south of where I rose.  I
suspected the wall was for the railway track.  It was, for there was the track.
It  wound northward around a bend behind me, a few metres below the top of the
valley.  Ahead of me, Williams Lake lights twinkled about five kilometres to the south.

      I looked down the hill, noticed the sun lower in the sky, and began to descend.
I followed a rock-strewn spillway below a culvert, below the train track.  About
halfway down, the rocks met a drop too steep for me.  I went town-ward, along the
slope, but that way looked too steep, too, especially as the sun skimmed the horizon.

      Well, thought I, it took an hour to ascend, a half-hour to descend to this precipice,
and it would be dark within an hour.  A slip in the dark, a fall of even a couple
metres, could hurt me too much keep going.   Don't die here, I thought.

     Wanting neither to die nor to climb back up to the tracks and walk out that long
way, I was in a hillside dilemma.  My bike was below.  Walking out
on the train tracks, back to the start of the trail along the river, and back to my
bike, would be more than 10 kilometres, in the dark.

       I chose to incur less risk, walk up, out along the tracks, back to the start of the
trail, then back to my bike. 
 
      This first danger I had gotten into was over, now that I trod level ground; but
another danger was coming.

     I walked a few kilometres along the tracks.  As I walked into the city's north
end, past two sawmills, I thought I might be wise merely to walk home, and return
the next day for my bike.  A deer crossed the tracks a few feet in front of me.

     Then the Moon came out.  I recalled skiing in the moonlight near Chetwynd
in 1998.   I figured a moonlight walk along the trail in 2014 would be another
glowing memory.   I therefore went to the trail and started walking the three
downhill and three flat kilometres to my cached bike.

     Then the moon went behind growing clouds.  It got mighty dark along that trail.

     Here came my second danger:  bears.  In the past month, four bears have prowled
in the city.  Conservation officers, inaptly named, shot them, rather than tranquilizing
and relocating them.  Location is everything, realtors say.  Bears might agree.  My
outrage over shot bears diminished as I walked the trail, expecting fewer bears;
but one bear would be too many for me.

     Bears around here are not afraid of people, unlike bears where I grew up, in
west-central Alberta.  There, I would bicycle to the dump, watch bears eat the
garbage, clap my hands, and the bears would run away.  Clapping my hands here
might invite a bear to dinner, which might be me.  

     I had kept one of the two sticks I had found while I climbed the hill to the tracks.
The dark woods crackled with noises, not heavy enough to be a bear, I hoped.
The Williams River burbled beside the trail.  A couple times I raised my stick in
both hands, ninja-style, planning to whack or stab any attacking bear.  I hoped the
bear wouldn't notice that I was a mere fake ninja.  A whack or a poke might
make a bear mad enough to claw and chew me more.  Bears have pride.

     Ten or so years ago, a woman in the Kootenays survived a grizzly bear attack.
She lay on her stomach, as still as she could.  The bear sniffed and left.  She later
said that she noticed what bad breath the bear had.  She smelled grizzly breath and
lived to tell about it. 

     Eight years ago, I was untangling a boat from shore shrubs near Kluskus, about
200 kilometres northwest of Williams Lake.  A grizzly had been keeping children from
the school I then ran there.  I heard crunching ten metres away, and saw a grizzly,
downwind of me, foraging.  Not wanting to be foraged, I got that boat out
on the water pretty quick.  The bear could have swum to the boat, I suppose; but I felt
safer on the water than on the shore.

     School children could have given unique excuses for not doing their homework:
"A bear ate it."  "A bear ate my little brother." "The bear didn't know this math."   

     That was my second grizzly.  My first had been safely on the ground,  no blasting
conservation officers prowling.  I was in a helicopter flying over Virginia Falls,
twice the height of Niagara Falls.   The falls are on the Nahanni River, west of
Yellowknife.  Six of us working at the Fort Simpson Hudson's Bay Northern Store
had chartered the helicopter, for $100 each, in July, 1986, for a day trip.  We landed
near the falls, with no bear in sight.

     We also landed by Little Doctor Lake.  There, their food cached in a wooden box
up a tree, lived a man and his daughter, about 11.  She was preparing to go to school
for the first time in her life.  We visitors wrote our names in their autograph book.
An older book boasted the autograph of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His 1970 travels in the area would convince him to declare the area a national park.

   
      Back in the spooky woods, less than a kilometre from my bicycle, I heard a loud
splash in the river.  It sounded like a big rock thrown in.  I hoped it was a deer, not a bear.

     When I got to where I thought my bike was, I picked my way through the dark and
shrubbery.  I found nothing.  Then I walked back along the trail, through more shrubbery,
and found my bike.  Mary Shelley's The Last Man, from the Kamloops library, was still in
the saddlebag.  I was glad not to be the last man, as I rode out, slowly, on the trail in
the dark.

     An hour later, I was home, a bit scratched, my socks heavy with prickles.  As I soaked
in the tub, teapot nearby, I cleaned my socks and listened to the podcast of "Union Made,"
the weekly labor news show on Vancouver Co-Op Radio:   http://www.coopradio.org/

     I was glad for the adventure; testing myself, reasonably, was satisfying.  It increased my
respect for nature, for its superiority over us, and it made me want to reduce the tragic distance
between us and nature, of which we are a part.     

     The Dr. Seuss-style "Would You, Could You, in the Dark" title for this little tale
comes from the same book that someone working at the local, publicly-owned liquor
store knows.  There, by the bottle return, is a handwritten couplet to beer.  It asks,
"Would you, could you, with a goat?  Would you, could you, in a boat" drink beer?

     I was in the liquor store yesterday to buy a wee box of four 250-ml beers for $4.60.
They were brewed in Prince George, about 240 km north of where I type.  I am sure
there are many cliffs and bears between here and there.

     We share Earth.  In vain we try to dominate it, ultimately impossible, luckily.

     Would you fall off here or there, would you fall of anywhere?
     Would  you, could you, way out there, be eaten, eaten by a bear?

     ( I don't know why some paragraphs are screwy.  I don't blame bears, or beers.)

      

I Happen to Have Professor Eagleton Right Behind Pip

     In his 1975 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character overhears, in a movie lineup, an academic misconstruing Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan's theories.  His partner Annie, played by Diane Keaton, watches Allen grow more irritated until he tells the aca-windbag that he misunderstands McLuhan.  The academic retorts that he is a New York University professor, and implies that he knows McLuhan better than Allen does.  Allen says that he happens to have McLuhan nearby,  and fetches McLuhan from beside a nearby cigarette machine.  McLuhan agrees with Allen, tells the professor that he misconstrues McLuhan's media theories, and laments that the academic ever got a job teaching in a university.  Allen triumphantly turns to the camera and wishes that real life was more like this scene.

     The scene could have included fellow Canadian media analyst Harold Innis, a generation earlier than McLuhan, berating McLuhan for misconstruing Innis's theories.  Italian media analyst Antonio Gramsci, a generation earlier than Innis, could have berated them both.  This regression could continue, no doubt; but  I instead move forward in time, and wish for Terry Eagleton to humble Nick Mount. 

     Lancaster and Notre Dame Universities' English Professor Terry Eagleton (b. 1943, Ireland), a renown Marxist scholar, in his 2013 How to Read Literature, argues that scholars must understand plot, character, narrative, interpretation, and literary devices before they can adopt any theoretical stance, Marxist or otherwise.  He laments the neglect of textual analytical skills, historical context, reader context, and literary ranking in this era of post-modernist disregard, misunderstanding, and ignorance of literary analytical techniques.  In his preface, Eagleton says he remains a Marxist.

     University of Toronto English Professor and Walrus Fiction Editor Nick Mount, in "The uses and abuses of literature" (The Globe and Mail, May 25, 2013) argues that the book proves that Eagleton has renounced his Marxism.  Perhaps the good professor did not read the preface, although he  seems to have misread the book in general.

     Woody Allen makes films.  I write about books I read.  Some of what I wrote about this book follows.

     The book's "chapters are Openings, Character, Narrative, Interpretation, and Value, each spiced with rhetorical and whimsical flourishes, but also solid arguments.  Openings refutes post-modernism, a wayward path away from literary precision, respect, and context.  This easy task continues through subsequent chapters, which add Aristotelian categories, not immune from flaws themselves, given the historical context Eagleton stresses."

     "Form matters, dictates narrative, interpretation, and thus authorial intention, itself open to overthrow, given readers' different eras and values.  From Sophocles to Johnson, literature detailed the known; but Romanticism lauded the invented, and its legacy continues.  Still, literary device, density, diction, and themes common to many, death, life, love, and such, lend literature value.  Great Expectations and Carol Shields trump contrived Updike and inelegant Faulkner, for example."

     "Hypocrite attacks idealist for not recanting as he did," I conclude, wishing that I could pull Eagleton from behind Pip to berate Mount.  "How you ever got a job teaching at the University of Toronto is beyond me," I dream of Eagleton saying.  "Eagleton's Marxist analysis of me captures the rigid English class system which buffets me in Great Expectations," I dream of Pip saying.  The novel's author, Charles Dickens, would probably side with Eagleton against Mount. 

     To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Don't you wish life could be like this?"

     Instead, I ponder Alexander Pope, and dream of capping a Dunce who poses as an informed critic.  We endure Professor Nick Mount-ing the academic heights, and blowing his windy authority toward that trust fund baby The Walrus, an imitation literary magazine.  A book of Dickens in one hand, a book of Eagleton in another, Old Nick draws his rusty literary dagger.  He juggles sense and nonsense, carving texts to fit his polemical Procrustean bed.  The jester entertains students whose privileged backgrounds insulate them from understanding either the human condition or its literary reflections, and somnolent magazine readers who mistake childish contrivance for literary maturity.  Stop opening your mouth in newspapers and letting your brains fall out, Nicky.  Go back to barking in your fluffy sinecure, St.Nick, and leave the job of literary critic to the big dogs.

 

Binoche, Brando, Bye Bye

Sunday, August 24, 2014

In the 15 minutes I have before a tv special on the Tower of London's history, let me put Juliet Binoche atop Marlon Brando, so to speak, and of course mention Ecuador.

Last night's tv showing of A Streetcar Named Desire sent me to my last blank video tape, but the film I saw today made me glad that last night's taping ended before the immortal last lines of Vivian Leigh and Kim Hunter, however sad I was when the tape ended before the film last night.  The tape reached its end before it could record Leigh saying,  "I've always appreciated the kindness of strangers" and Hunter saying, "I'll never go back there."  Today's superior film stopped my lament for those lost lines.

I'd have been wiser to record Binoche's film Certified Copy, better scripted, acted, set, and directed than the Elia Kazan USian film of Tennessee Williams' play about dissolute Southern USians and brutish immigrant conditions in New Orleans.  Kazan did betray progressive people to a 1950s US government committee intent on purging leftists.  What quality from such a compromised artist?

Happily, France and Italy had no such purge, then or since.  Artists could produce art without looking over their shoulders for official approval.  Binoche and co-star William Shimell, an opera singer, far more deeply and sensitively and realistically probe the depths of human relationships than howling Marlon Brando, his earnest wife, and her nutty sister do.

So see it, even if you move to Ecuador, as someone I met today plans to do.  A retired ironworker, single with dog, told me today that he planned to pension himself in that equatorial clime.  I told him of a person I know who recently moved to Europe and I commended him for bravery and open-mindedness similar to that person's.

Now to the Tower of London's history on tv, which, had tv existed when the Tower was doing its bloody work for England, might have reduced the level of injustice of that work.  That's something to put your head around.  Also, rejoice that you have a head.

"The Red Path" Novel Corrections

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Have embarrassingly-many corrections, page by page, to  The Red Path, which I finally got by mail, and wish I had proofread before CreateSpace published it.  Underlined bits should be added to the text.  Novel writing is harder than it looks.

2.  RCMP were

2.  on his heels

2. who had parlayed

7. our daughter

8. he had been  listening

13. “She... tonight.”

13. Frank the maintenance man

17. It was

18. on the heels

18. it had given

20. (The supreme court decision, after the book was published, in fact recognized Chilcotin land title, not just the right to land use.)

22. had recommended

22.  system?

22. “Click” had intended

22. blindfold on  (Good grief, so many mistakes on one page!)

24. less violent (no hyphen)

30.  whites

37. Williams Lake branch

39. (Odious debt is that because it is incurred for anti-social purposes, not because because of social cuts to repay it.  Indeed, repayment is unethical.)

40. to Russia

42. closer to Great Grandpa

43.  century earlier

43. had invented

44. fewer than

44. knowing how rare

44. entitled them

45. she had reached

45.  His decline was

48. princess were

48.  Amelia Knight (not Brown)

50.  (Chris began with that name, but I changed it to Leon, but given the reference to namesake Christopher Wren, I should have retained “Chris.”  There’s no Leon Wren, Elizabethan architect.  In future I’ll edit by reading, not by relying on word-searching and replacing.  See “Leon” and read “Chris” throughout, please.  Or if you prefer “Leon,” which I do, then make Christopher Wren a philosophical, not philological namesake.  Hell, I didn’t even proofread this novel before printing.  Sorry, readers.)

50. was Piele, (The whole name, originally “Tudud,” got deleted in a word processor word substitution, with no substitute of a man’s name.  The mistaken “was,” is absurd, makes James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake look as plain as Hemingway.  Tudud is a woman’s name, I learned after I made it Chris/Leon’s middle name.  Oops.  My bad.)

51. and to be quick

51. with that handsome

53.  (That’s not Henry’s Crossing.  It’s the Davidson, or Taseko River Bridge)

54. and putting sculptures

59.  eighth generation (this misprint recurs)

59. (The Fish Lake mine was turned down by two federal governments, the second rejection coming after publication of the book, in which the second government approved the mine.)

60. courts have

64. on our island

66. Peter Posnan, not Peter Wajda.  (Both are Polish names, the first a place, I think, the second the last name of a famous Polish filmmaker.  Posnan recurs.  Use it.)

70.  sisters

70. Alfred Wallace

70. peaceful world

71. (No “ Can....”)

73. in India

77. and returned to the socialism

79. Chilcotin people (no “s” on Chilcotin)

81. boreal forest

84. and had self-destructed

85. would now build

86. well-heeled recently tripped up by bankruptcy

90. is in over his head (mistake twice on page)

92. “ I find myself

93. “These people...live in!”

94. presumed not

96. “Should the United States....country.”  (“, not ‘)

96. “Not a bit,”

96. she herself could keep up

97. so, to cover

97. People judge a person

98. many places

102.  had derailed oil

106. the referenda

106. about Joe Hills, safe not shot

109. more importantly

110.  soon defaulting itself

112. the eighth generation (error twice on page)

112. smallpox.  What

113. eighth generation (error twice on page)

114. on which everyone’s food (remove “that”)

115. he had lost his job when his mining company

115. That friend was Albert, less full of himself

117. Its mail, shipping,

118, is becoming

121. backdropped

122.  as well as provincial

124. Anchor Larsson

125.  Archie , not Paul Ittaq

126. Leon, not Chris (error twice on page)

127. is it that, not “is is that”

127. “Leon/Chris” problem again

128. “Leon/Chris” again

129. some charity

131. (remove “however; but”)

133. across the world

133. Bengalis’ discussions

134. covered by construction

136. Alberta was now

138. “Preserved” was the right word.

140. greedy bygone era?

141.  Leon/Chris problem again

142.  dismantle roads and use

142. more Leon/Chris confusion

145. (That analogy about the tree should start with the icy blasts of winter against the tree, not the tree enduring the blasts, to make better parallelism with the Chilcotins.)

145. healed of much of the harm

146.  Chris again

147. starkly-beautiful 

Wordsworth Burnaby Norway Salvation

That blog entry title raises reader expectations.  If you want to know what's at the root of this tale, then come with me back to an elementary school writing assignment.  I was nine or ten.  The teacher had us each invent an event, then write an advertisement for it.  Then he had us remove words from it, to teach precision, until we had to choose one word to advertise our event.   I think my word was the event's location.  I reasoned that people interested enough would merely go to the site and wait for the event.

As I pondered a title for this tale, I remembered that assignment.  "Norway Salvation" came easily, but "Burnaby" came later, and "Wordsworth" last.  The early-1800s English poet Wordsworth called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, recollected in tranquility."  Oil links the Canadian west coast city of Burnaby and Norway.  The setting, the where, was the local Salvation Army thrift store.  Where, with dashes of when and whom, made this event described below.   

As I walked back to tranquility, ah would tranquility always reachable merely by walking, to compose this little tale, I thought about Henry Miller.  This mid-1900s United States writer, whose prose was too obscene for there but fine for France, produced entertaining prose from routine events.  Here is my humble, similar effort, minus the sex, sexism, and swear words.  Perhaps those deletions are deleting some readers.

Quantum theory about being in two places at once, which would have undermined my elementary school writing assignment, aside; the physics of multiple simultaneous universes which would produce readers elsewhere for those lost here, aside; Mark Twain's mockery of German as a language with verbs at the end of sentences, hence a reader is mystified until the last page of the work, where he finds all the verbs, aside; Twain a hint that you've swum many words so far and reached no storied shore; all that aside, read on about a thrift shop sale, three men, and a 45 rpm record.

The Salvation Army had a sign on the sidewalk today advertising 50% off furniture and Easter items, and books for $4.00 per bag.  There was no advertised bag size, I would later think, as I looked at the books and pondered the weight of a big black plastic bag full of books.  Perhaps Easter furniture got a double discount; I didn't notice any life-sized, or other sizes of crucifixes in stock.  Perhaps an Easter or furniture book, or coffee table book big enough to be a coffee table, got a double discount.   A big coffee table book about Easter?  As well as many religious books, I noticed Frank McCourt's autobiography Angela's Ashes in stock.  In it, he says he and his Irish brethren, and sistern, spent much time in the church in rainy Limerick, more to get dry than to get religion.  I don't know what the discount would be on a book about building furniture, or on a chair shaped like an Easter basket.

Around a corner, where life often gets more interesting, I found two men discussing pipelines.  Neither wanted the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, planned to stretch from the petro-province of Alberta, to tidewater on the rainforest coast of British Columbia, 1500 kilometres west.  I don't think Enbridge asked for these men's opinions, but neither did the two men ask for mine after one said the pipeline should go south, through the United States, to tidewater on the Gulf of Mexico.


"Nebraska stopped that pipeline," I interjected cryptically, as Henry Miller would in a Parisian brothel, to interrupt a different sort of flow.   "There'll be no Northern Gateway Pipeline," I continued definitively.  "The people up North won't have it.  Also, the mayor of Burnaby is against more pipelines through his city," I finished.

One of the men then crowded this thrift store conversation by raising an oil refinery, although one wouldn't fit in the store.  "What about that guy who wants to build a refinery on the coast?  He owns The Tribune."

Invoking imitation journalism, such as that paper practices, didn't help the man's case.  "The problem is the pipeline," I continued.  "Enbridge couldn't even clean up a leak in Michigan, which is flat with lots of road access.  They wouldn't have a chance in the mountains around Terrace."

Wise nods all round.

"They should refine it where they dig it," the other man said.  Before I came upon them, they lamented that pipelines bring few jobs.  "More jobs that way." 

Norway is imminent, readers.  Be patient.

"Or scale down the tarsands," I added.  "Look at Norway," I dragged into this refinery-crowded thrift store conversation.  "They have almost a trillion dollars in a trust fund from their oil."

"I was in Norway," the second man said.

Who expects a customer in a Canadian Salvation Army thrift store to have been to Norway?  That statement made me want to write about this encounter.  There is a Sons of Norway club in this city, and there have been Norwegian language classes here, and the coast to the west of here boasts Norwegian settlers because its fjords resemble those of Norway,and the Lutheran church is the biggest building in the coastal community of Hagensborg; but I was surprised that this thrift shopper had been in Norway.  Of course, Norway is a thrifty country, banking oil money, moving its fish farms to Canada's west coast, spreading disease among local fish.

As English Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said when Iranians elected a socialist government and threatened to stop English theft of Iranian oil, "Socialism is fine in England, but not in Iran." 

The Norway traveler had my attention.  Now I have yours.

"I was there," he said.  "They have a whole underground city set up, with special roads and rail lines.  There's enough room for lots of people."

English writer HG Wells' story "The Time Traveler" and German film maker Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis" swirled in my mind, like Norwegians in a bunker.

"The Norwegians are ready for the future," I offered, lamenting that Canadians aren't, and are instead going into the past, this time as hewers of tarsands, drawers of water.

"They're ready for disaster," he amended.

"We have disaster already, in government," I added.

Laughs all round.

Then the first man said goodbye and headed toward the furniture.  The second man went the other way, toward the clothes.  I stayed there and found a 45 rpm record of "One Tin Soldier" by the Original Caste.  I didn't buy it, but I did think of adding something of it to this story's title.  The song played in my head as I looked at the books and pondered big black plastic garbage bags.  Nor did I buy Frank McCourt's autobiography, nor anything else.

On my way out, I looked at an old, heavy, sturdy table and chair set, too heavy for Jesus to overturn in the temple, but probably not gopher wood and therefore not optimal for a crucifix.           
      
 An old comic strip, "Hagar the Horrible", has a monk lament to Hagar the viking that more understanding among people would bring more peace in the world.  Hagar replies, "True, true.  How are we going to get everyone to speak Norwegian?"

Happy Easter, everyone. 


       

Great Blue Heron

I saw many birds during today's early-morning walk to the lake in my small Canadian city, but one bird stood out, then flew away.

During the who walk to the lake, crows croaked, on the ground, on treetops, on buildings.  Chilcotins  here call them ravens, but a Shuswap once told me they are mostly crows, which have black legs and feet, which she said raven's don't have.  Both Chilcotins and Shuswaps venerate ravens.  Many who venerate ravens know a dance called the Crow Hop, originally from Prairie indigenous people.    

Dozens of gulls milled in the parking lot between the curling rink and the rodeo grounds, too late to curl, to early to ride.  I don't know anyone who venerates gulls.

Redwing blackbirds are another story, and bird, rare enough to attract bird experts from far away.  One expert spoke at the lakeside nature centre a couple years ago.  A couple trees by the lake were a-chirp with these robin-sized birds.  Crows croaked in the same trees.  Two weeks ago, I saw my first robin of the year.

Geese honked on the ice and overhead.  Ducks paddled about.  A couple geese would waddle ahead of me on the road back from the lake, which the city surrounds.  Some would be on the rodeo grounds.

I interrupt this bird saga to mention three deer I saw yesterday in the field by my apartment building.  I now return to today and birds.

I walked the trail that goes to the tip of the peninsula in the lake, the woods and sky alive with the rustle and song of birds, geese milling and honking on the lake, ducks swimming in the few patches of open water.  I looked down the lake, the risen sun orange on the water, then turned around and looked over the city and the three kilometres I had walked.  I stood there long, thinking, happy to see another spring.

Then I started walking back on the peninsula trail.  I took a detour along a narrower trail that boasts some wooden walkways.  I stopped to look over an expanse of last year's cattails, dry and akimbo.

Then I saw it, across the cattails, at water's edge:  a great blue heron.  It was the first time I saw this long-beaked, tall, skinny, blue bird.  Stately.  Pretty.  Strong.  Within three seconds it launched itself quietly into flight.  I stood watching it fly out over the lake, which is a kilometre wide, five long, and very deep, like most lakes in the Western Cordillera.  Neighboring Quesnel Lake is 600 metres deep.     

The Boreal Forest around where I grew up had different birds, but never this bird.  It had chickadees, and I heard some as I walked this morning.  It had blue jays, sparrows, robins, starlings, grouse with their noisy flutter.  Where I live now, south of the Boreal Forest, I have seen eagles, hawks, owls, bluebirds.  A couple weeks ago I saw an eagle launch from a ditch:  six-foot wingspan, it seemed.

Today I saw a great blue heron for the first time in my life.  This shouldn't surprise me because I live along a major migration route for birds.  The local nature centre organizes a yearly bird-count day in which people recognize dozens of birds.  Today's heron counted for me.      

 

Pliny on Religion

Pliny the Elder, quoted in Benjamin Farrington's Greek Science 2, (Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1949) inveighs against religion.  Farrington introduces Pliny, and at the end calls Pliny's a cheerful life:

  "And here in conclusion, is another passage, which owes some of its arguments to Lucretius, but is completely personal and characteristic.  'Beyond the grave lie the empty speculations about the spirits of the dead.  For every man it will be the same after his last day as it was before his first.  After death neither body nor spirit will have sensation any more than they did before he was born.  This vanity of staking a claim on the future and imagining for oneself a life in the season of death takes various forms:  the immortality of the soul, the transmigration of souls, the life of the shades in the underworld, the worship of the spirits of the dead, even the deification of one who has already ceased to be a man.  As if, forsooth, we drew our breath in any way that could distinguish us from the other animals; as if there were not many creatures who live longer than we do, for whom nobody has imagined a similar immortality.  These are the inventions of a childish folly, of a mortality greedy of never ceasing to be.  Plague take it, what madness is this, of repeating life in death?  How shall those born ever rest, if sense is to remain with the soul on high or with the ghost below?  Nay, this fond fancy destroys nature's chief blessing, death, and doubles the smart of him that is to die by the calculation of what is still to come.  If life is to be so sweet, who can find it sweet to have ceased to live?  But how much  happier, how much more sure, that every man should come to trust himself and take from his proven insensibility of what was before he was born his warrant of the peace that is to be.'  The author of these words lived an active, cheerful life in the service of his fellow-men and died an adventurous death while making too close an observation of Vesuvius in eruption."  (136-137)

Farrington notes Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things I read years ago and highly recommend.  Farrington's book details Ancient Greek and Roman scientific achievements, despite religious efforts to corral and conscript science.  Judeo-Christianity,  like the war machine now, soon drew the best minds to its service, and science progressed little until the Renaissance. 

Interesting quote.  Interesting book.      

Israel in Dustbin of History?

Decades ago, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that socialism would leave capitalism in the dustbin of history, or words to that effect.  That's still a work in progress, but I made progress in a dumpster this week.  I found Israel there.

This phrasing recalls the religious zealot who asks, "Have you found Jesus?"  My reply,  "I didn't know Jesus was lost."

"Boy Scouts for Israel?" the hotel clerk asked a janitor on the phone.

"Boy Scouts for Israel?" I puzzled humorously to myself.  I had told the clerk that the pin said "Boycott Israel."  The janitor might have opposed the sentiment might have purposely thrown it out.

"It's hard to replace.  I got it in Edmonton," I explained.  I remembered the Palestine Solidarity Edmonton table at the north end Islamic cultural centre and high school.  There in December, 2012, a fundraising event for medical aid to Gaza raised tens of thousands of dollars.  There I got the pin, and another that said "BDS" for "Boycott Divestment and Sanction." 

History will leave Israel in the dustbin, but how did my pin get into a dumpster?  And how did I find it?

The hotel in question was the site of a two-day seminar on Canadian indigenous education.  South Africa got its apartheid idea from Canada's treatment of indigenous people.  This seminar was an effort to restore indigenous dignity through education.  One might argue that any parallel system, even one run by indigenous people, perpetuates Canadian apartheid; but that argument was absent at the seminar.  I would argue that a parallel system improves on the pathetic public system and anti-democratic private systems of education, and that this indigenous system should continue until the public system is really inclusive.  Indeed, the seminar argued for inclusion, against the racism that continues in the non-indigenous systems.

That afternoon, my pin was absent from my coat, which I had taken off at the seminar.  I went to the hotel desk to ask if anyone found the pin.  Two friendly women there were happy to call the janitor who cleaned the seminar site.  I explained the pin, which features a graphic of the Israeli apartheid wall.  I was happy not to meet a wall of indifference or hostility in seeking the pin.

Nikita Khrushchev's Berlin Wall is in the dustbin of history, waiting for the Israeli Apartheid Wall to join it.  The Soviet system wasn't perfect, but it aimed for that, aimed for a better future, unlike the Zionist system, which aims for a non-existent past at the expense of the present and future of Jews and non-Jews.    

"Yes, the janitor found a pin," one clerk told me as she talked on the phone.  "'Boy Scouts for Israel,.'" she confirmed into the receiver.

She confirmed something that doesn't exist.  The United Nations made in 1948 confirmed something that shouldn't exist when it allowed a Jewish state on Palestinian land.  Religous states should have disappeared with the Reformation, but a few hang on, like the greasy discarded food, coffee grounds, and napkins I found in the garbage bag in that dumpter, after I climbed in.

A bag of discarded seminar papers confirmed that I had found the one bag which the janitor had used for the site's garbage.  I poured out the bag.  I used one piece of garbage to poke through the rest of the garbage.  The United States, perched on stolen land,  uses Israel to poke the land it stole in 1948.

On the point of giving up, I saw the pin glint, among coffee grounds. 

Climbing out of the dumpster was much harder than climbing into it had been.  I commend the dumpster divers who troll these metal behemoths for beverage cans and bottles, for which recycling agencies pay deposits.

Climbing out of Israel apartheid will be harder than sliding into it had been, for Zionists, Palestinians, and the world.  Palestine has room for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as it had for centuries, until Zionism sabotaged peace and progress.

As I dug in the garbage, as I struggled out of the dumpster, as I walked away into a sunny winter day in my mountainous home in Western Canada, a home on indigenous land, I thought of Gaza, thought of Palestine.

People in Occupied Palestine suffer more than I did.  Soldiers stop them as they go about their peaceful daily duties, governments and courts rule against their human rights, jailers detain them unjustly, a few outsiders help by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning the Zionist state of Israel, and the world watches, wrings its hands, and does little, lest the United States, and increasingly Canada, attack the world for trying to bring justice in Palestine.

I live on stolen indigenous land, which is America, that New World which meant to improve on the Old World of European empires and wars.  That improvement is not here, but it is coming, thanks to such as the seminar I attended, thanks to people in solidarity around the world, thanks to justice, sometimes weak, but never dead, thanks to the harm that injustice does to others and to itself. 

Khrushchev's dustbin still has room for obsolete, hurtful ways of thinking and living, including  capitalism, racism, and anti-semitism and its spawn Zionism.  English poets Percy Shelley and Samuel Coleridge wrote of "Ozymandias" and "Kublai Khan," whose empires fell to dust.            

I recently re-read Ancient Greek tragic plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.  They put their cultural myths on stage.  The myths and the plays taught people how to live justly in an unjust world.  They showed history driving people to tragedy despite their efforts to avoid it.  Modern dramatists could stage our era's historically-driven tragedy of indigenous land called home by competing people.  Cassandra claimed "There's no way out."  Khrushchev and I beg to differ.  If not, better art as Aristotle might confirm, but worse life, as indigenous suffering implies today.  The Athenian Empire did suffer the fate of Ozymandias and Kublai Khan.

Well, readers.  Get to work.  Get writing.