Videos and Books to Give

 Friday, February 24, 2017   Williams Lake, Canada

     "Chacun a son gout," "Each to his taste," the French expression says.  

     I hope that the people who get my giveaway books and video cassettes like one or more of them as much as I did, during the several years that I had most of them.  I pass them on before I pass on, which I hope is not soon.

      In 2014, when my Edmonton friend Doug turned 70, I shipped him one seventh of my videos, cassette tapes, and compact discs.  He brought most of them to his neighborhood seniors' centre and assured me that many found enthusiastic new owners.

     The video list below is about a third of my remaining videos, which I kept then because I was loath to part with them.  Now I want to spread these great stories.  I have therefore left many in the share shed by a dump 50 kilometres west of here, where they soon disappeared.  I left others in a free store 100 kilometres west, where they too disappeared. 

WILLING HANDS?

     I gave Romero, the video I have had the longest, to the Catholic school janitor, who was born and raised in El Salvador and lived there when Romero lived and died.  Maria came to Canada nine years later, after an army group killed several priests in 1989.  I gave Das Boot to a Williams Lake woman born in Munich in 1944 to a Hamburg mother.  In the Hamburg harbor in 2016, I saw a u-boat that had become a museum.   Happily, this one did not sink Dad, bur neither did one of many Royal Canadian Navy ships he was on in World War Two (WW2) sink it. 

     Today I write because I just watched, for giveaway, Montreal filmmaker Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal.  I wonder if he is related to WW2 Quebec fascist leader Adrien Arcand.  I will also watch his Decline of the American Empire and Incendies.  I hope to find someone, French speaking or not, interested in these subtitled, leftist films.  Perhaps I will find someone keen at the local French immersion school, where I spoke last June 24, in French and English, about St. Jean Baptiste Day.  I showed Dad's Dad's 1930s Morinville, AB ribbon and medal, perhaps worn on that day long ago.

     I write here after watching Jesus because I lived in Montreal just after its filming there, and either saw it in a theatre there or in Alberta.  I like everything about it and I hope someone else will.

RED FILM

 

     I recently watched, subtitled and home recorded, the 2000s German film Goodbye Lenin and the 1960s Italian film The Gospel According to Matthew.  I saw the first on a Williams Lake rental video and the second at a 1990-91 screening in the Concordia University film club in Montreal.  I found the latter, home-recorded on slow play, in a Kamloops thrift shop 10 or more years ago, and added the second to it when I found it on television a few years ago.  I forgot that Lenin was after Matthew, but there's a link because both Lenin and Pasolini, who made Matthew, were Communists; but Lenin is anti-communist, or at least critical of the Communist German Democratic Republic (1949-90).

NO REGRETS

   

     I will not regret discarding these videos, nor later pursue them on an internet that stores all, gems and rocks.  Instead, I will hope that someone, preferably younger than I, has the interest, and technology, to watch and enjoy them.  Have, below, the list so far, which I expect to increase until I have a mere handful of cassettes.  A proper teacher, a proper elder, seeks to pass on his knowledge.

Below this list, read about math and other books.    

Atanarjuraat (not working)  Jan 9/17

Bethune (1990 Donald Sutherland), Jan 18/17

Blue Velvet (1986), Jan 14/17 (PVR, Anaham)

Dance Me Outside (Adam Beach)  Jan 6/17

Goodbye Lenin (200?), Feb 23/17

The Gospel According to Matthew (1965), Feb/17

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 version)  Jan 6/17

Hanna, Jan 15/17 (PVR, Williams Lake)

Jesus of Montreal (1989), Feb 24/17

John A (2011), Jan 9/17

King Arthur:  His Life and Legends (library discard)  Jan 6/17

Leaving Normal (Meg Tilly)  Jan 6/17

Lonestar (1995, Elizabeth Pena (b Sep 23/59, d Oct/14 cirrhosis), Jan 16/18

Manhattan (Woody Allen; first saw it in Edmonton's Princess Theatre during my first university year, 1979-80)  Jan 6/17

Miss Congeniality (Sandra Bullock)  Jan 6/17

Mission/Stum Lake, Jan 9/17

Play It Again, Sam (Woody Allen)  Jan 6/17

Pygmalion (1938 Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller version)  Jan 6/17

Reel Injun  Jan 7/17

Riel (1979)  Jan 8/17

Roger and Me (1988), Jan 30/17

Romero (1989), longest-held video, Feb 1/17

Thunderheart (non-working)  Jan 8/17

William Shakespeare ((A and E biography, local library discard). Jan 6/17

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

     Tom Lehrer, a mathematician who sang its praises, might agree with me spreading math books around, beautiful seeds for young minds.   Have a link to his song "Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky:"

https://www.google.ca/#q=nikolai+ivanovich+lobachevsky+tom+lehrer&*

PASSING ON JOYS OF YOUTH 

    In my book room sits a stack of math books:  trigonometry, algebra, and the large calculus book I bought at age 17 in 1979 for my first-year university course, which I easily passed with a B+.  Edson high school teachers of science and math prepared many young people well for University of Alberta courses.  I next looked in that book in 2000 in Kamloops when I tutored someone, and a couple years later in Williams Lake when I tutored someone else.  Like an ageing soldier happy to have engaged the fight when young and strong, I am happy that I learned so much and did so much when young.  

     Old eyes are weaker than young eyes, I noticed awhile back when I looked at the tiny print of my two-volume Oxford English Dictionary.  My canny younger sister got it free for joining a book club. It's in the stack.

     Also in the stack is a reference tome about 20th century history, but I'm keeping, for now, my timeline of history book that goes back to prehistory, paradoxical as that sounds.  They came from a book club I joined more than 20 years ago here in the Cariboo.  I'll also keep, for now, my two-volume world history written by HG Wells.

     I'll haul these books in the car trunk to Kamloops next week, during our trip for my beloved spouse's medical appointment.  At Manchester University last summer I found a student lounge with many shelves crowded with giveaway books; perhaps Kamloops has such a venue.  I remember stacks and boxes of giveaway books outside professors' doors in Montreal and Ottawa, and in Edmonton's English department a table of giveaway books.  This was before the internet went public, but Kamloops, 80 000, is likelier than Williams  Lake, 8 000, to help these books spread their paper wings for new owners. 

ACCESSIBLE EDUCATION

     A 1989 encounter with a young university student on a train near Banff reminds me why I am discarding books.    I met an undergraduate English student, as I had been earlier that decade.  He worried about the financial cost of education and planned to use English as a route to law school.  I thought this demeaned English, and education generally; but the man's money worries were real.  Almost 30 years later, university has become so expensive that he would look idealistic to his like now, if they even dared to try university.   

     I have often thought of starting a study club in my little city; many people know many things that would interest many other people.  There live here people from my class, financially deterred from higher education such as I enjoyed.  This lack of access, university reverting to its traditional place for the rich, hampers progress, but it probably preserves the injustice that underpins society.

     For now, passing around a few textbooks might inspire someone who cannot buy such books new.  The local new bookstore, gamely surviving Chapters Indigo marketing tyranny, does not stock such books, anyway.  Neither does the wee bookstore attached to the local satellite campus of Thompson Rivers University, based in Kamloops. 

      If you doubt that such books interest people, I tell you that, at a local used book sale a year or two ago, someone bought several science and math books, including all the calculus books.  Isaac Newton and Karl Leibniz, co-inventors of calculus, truly created something interesting to many people in many times and places.

     My modest efforts are a mere "derivative" of their work, if you'll pardon the calculus pun.  I think popular education is "integral" to a decent society.  

          

One Day I Misplaced Ivan Denisovich

February 23, 2017   Williams Lake, Canada

     Today I misplaced Ivan Denisovich.
     I read that Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about life in a Stalinist prison camp before 2000, when I began writing about books I read.   The only Solzhenitsyn I wrote about is The Gulag Archipelago, which I read in 2010.  That larger novel, about many prison camps, was not at the local used book sale in the mall, where I freed Ivan from a backroom box today, only to misplace him.
     Perhaps I should blame my being sick, not sick as in Cancer Ward, whose inmates suffer from counterrevolution, not congestion.  I have congestion, but I haven't been tested for counterrevolution.
That third Solzhenitsyn novel I remember reading is not in the book sale, making losing it there impossible.
     The 1965 film version of Doctor Zhivago says, near the end, that Lara's name could have been on a list that got misplaced.  Such things happened in those days.  I misplaced the Ivan book this day.
     I volunteered my time at the book sale, as Solzhenitsyn did in a Stalinist camp.  I found Ivan, a couple Hemingways, no doubt counterrevolutionary, and various other interesting books imprisoned in back room boxes.  I filled and hauled out a couple boxes of such books, but I don't remember where I shelved Ivan for sale.
     Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union in the 1970s for the United States, but later criticized his adoptive country more than he had his birth country.  Perhaps he would have approved of my effort against the commodification of art, particularly his art.  He's dead now.  Used book sales send no royalties to authors, alive or dead.
     If the book landed among the books about nature, or children, or the mass-market paperbacks, someone not even looking for it might buy it.
 
     "Look, Ed," Sheila might say.  "Here's a book about a day in a life.  Remember that day the camper broke down and we had to sleep in it on the highway, until your brother Bill drove up with a u-joint the next morning?  That was quite a day.  Perhaps this Ivan guy had quite a day.  He must have had, to need a whole book to describe it."

     "Look at this book, Martha, right beside the Stephanie Myers books," Mary might say to her teenage friend at the sale.  "This book only covers one day.  Myers can put months in a book.  Should we buy it.   How interesting can a single day be?"

     "Ruby, I found the book for you, in with the Danielle Steele books, of all places.  It's about a day in man's life.  He sounds like a foreigner.  You know how those foreigners are.  Remember what I told you about the young men working on the cruise ship that Paul and I were on in the Caribbean?  Those bucks pack a lot into a day, let me tell you; but I'm married, so I didn't find out.  My friend Barbara, though.....Whoa!  She walked funny for days.  This book might be about some hot foreigner."
      
     A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is out of its back room box and displayed for sale, somewhere, in the used book sale.   Twice a year, the local Rotary Club sells used books, largely the same books that rotate through the club's collection bins, scattered around this city.  The Stalinists rotated people through prison camps.  If my sickness-induced ineptitude increased the chances of the sale of just this one book, then I spent my time well.
   Ivan might not have gotten along with Hemingway, who would fit better beside Danielle Steele than among real literature.  
     
        
           

Red Klister Era

Sunday, February 12, 2017  Williams Lake, Canada

     Is ours a red klister era?
     Red klister is a ski wax for warm temperatures.  I rarely used it when I skied in adolescence in the late-1970s.  From warmest to coldest, the waxes were red, blue, green, and white; green I used the most often; not much call for cold-weather wax in this warming climate

HAROLD AND PINE TAR
   
      I have my brother Harold to thank for starting me cross-country skiing.
      When I was 14 and he worked in social services and recreation in Wildwood, he brought several pairs of skis, his spouse Joanna, my younger sister Maryanne, and I to the Edson golf course one cold winter day.  We donned ski boots, mine too small, attached them to the three-point toe bindings on skis, and learned to ski.  After skiing around on the golf course for awhile, we packed into his and Joanna's station wagon, turned the heat on full, and held one another's cold feet and hands.
     Harold got me and Maryanne boots, poles,m and wooden skis.  My Finnish Splitkein skis covered many kilometres that winter and the next, until I skied off the edge of the bank of Millar Lake and snapped the top two feet off one ski.  Those skis had cost $20.  He got me a new pair,  Norwegian like our mom's dad's ethnicity, and I used them constantly during high school, and later in the Northwest Territories.  As I type this, I listen to a compact disc of Edvard Grieg piano music by Knut Erik Jensen, who performed here a few years ago:  good Scandinavian soundtrack for this story.
     After a day of high school, or during a weekend, I, and sometimes Maryanne, would go out back door of our Edson-area acreage house, put on our skis, and ski off into the nearby boreal forest, toward the gravel pit past the dump.  The gravel pit's hills were endless enjoyment, and regular wipe-outs.
     Those wooden skis required pine tar, heated and rubbed in with a rag, and wax, rubbed in with cork.  Harold had shown us how to do this.  We would go to gas stove in the Little House, the house my dad had hauled from Spike Island to the acreage in the early-1950s for his mother, our Irish-born granny (1879-1960).  Spike Island was the Edson neighborhood of railway workers.  A few old houses stood there the last time I passed through Edson, in 2016.
     Using a 3 cm paintbrush, we would paint tar from the 250 mL can onto half the length of the ski.  A stove burner lit, its iron cover removed using the iron lifter with the heat-resistant coiled handle, we would put the tarred ski over the flame, careful not to start the tar burning.  Remove the ski, rub the tar in with a rag, and tar the other end.
     The skis tarred, wax each with wax for that day's air temperature.  Sometimes put a different color wax under the part of the ski under the boot, for grip climbing hills.  This helped even if one encountered a steep hill, requiring fish tracks, that is, splaying the toes of the skis outward to walk up duck-style, or setting the skis parallel to the hill and climbing it by walking sideways.

"PFFF."

      In the Northwest Territories in 1986-87, I had those wooden skis, after Dad sent them by bus in early winter.  I did not tar them but I might have waxed them once or twice.  I skied mostly along trails beside the Mackenzie River in Fort Providence, where I lived from September-July to work in the Hudson's Bay Northern Store.  As I recall in Michael Wynne:  My Youth, some days the bush was so quiet that I could hear snow from trees hit the ground snow as it fell from tree branches:  "Pfff. Pfff."
     I also skied in Fort Resolution, in the Slave River Delta, when I ran that Bay for one week in late March, 1987, while the manager was in Edmonton for meetings.  The local priest had fixed wooden runners between the skis on a sled his snowmobile pulled.  He used this contraption to make ski trails, "Seven trails, numbered 1 to 7, like the seven highways in the Northwest Territories," he told me.

BOITANIO PARK

     Skiing for the first time this winter, finally, in Boitanio Park today, I remembered those days, so long ago.  My skis are fibreglass, a mid-1990s gift from my dear spouse Carla.  My old boots, which came with the wooden skis, were cracked and worn.  I skied using them and the wooden skis once or twice near Alexis Creek in 1991-92, and to teach children to ski at Alkali Lake a couple years later, using the shed full of skis and boots and poles the school had.
     I miss skiing more than I miss teaching.
     Boitanio Park, named after an Italian who settled in Williams Lake decades ago, is a  kilometre long and about a half kilometre wide, a hundred  metres down a walking path from our apartment building.  It's not skiing out the back door into the boreal, but it's what's available here, unless I want to drive 20 km north to Bull  Mountain, the local ski club's trail network, and pay to ski.
     Pay to ski?  That'll be the day, although I have downhill skied, the last time having been near Quebec City during the 1990 Christmas break from my McGill University teacher training program.  I also downhill skied at Silver Summit, near Edson, and Mount Timothy, near Williams Lake, where I cross-country skied the same day, our daughter's elementary school field trip day there.

CANADIAN COLONIALISM

     Making a wee trail network on the park today, and skiing over it a few times, I thought about colonialism and the upcoming 150th anniversary of the July 1, 1867 founding of Canada as a nation, on Indigenous land.  I had planned a trip to Ottawa for the anniversary, but knowing what I know about Canada's ongoing colonial legacy, I decided against the trip.  Once one has learned the truth, how can one revert to living the lie?
     "This land called Canada" is how the teacher of a University of Northern British Columbia First Nations history and culture course describes this land.  She's Metis and I'm her teaching assistant for this all-day Friday-Saturday course taught this month at Tl'esqox, a Tsilhqot'in community 50 km west of where I type today.
     The Tsilhqot'in never surrendered their land in battle or by treaty, although most do not go as far as many Mohawks, and deny they are Canadians.  Still, one elder said during a recent Tl'esqox meeting attended by the federal minister who oversees Indigenous people, there's little to celebrate on July 1.  He seems not to call himself Canadian.  His statement decided me against going to Ottawa, although I am not Indigenous.  Yet, once one knows Canada's sorry colonial history, continuing today via its Indian Act, among other unjust laws and practices, can one celebrate in good conscience?  I cannot.  Today's skiing made me wonder if I should help organize a critical celebration here on July 1.  Perhaps this elder has some ideas.
     Confederation in s 1867 was a deal made by white men of property to better exploit other settlers on stolen land.  Perhaps it helped prevent the United States from annexing Canada, a worry then, and still; but that was more scare tactic than real threat:  the U.S. could have annexed a British colony or a British dominion with equal ease.  See how much Canada has fallen under U.S. sway since 1867.

RED KLISTER RESISTANCE

     Resistance rises against colonialism, against capitalism around the world, including on Indigenous and, which the Americas, Australia, Africa, and much of Asia are.  These were rich places when European colonizers stole them; Europeans had battled for land for centuries before they left Europe. These places were not paradises; they had inequality and the wars is spawns.  Under colonialism, the descendants of the pre-contact people became poorer, many died, many collaborated, many resisted.  That history, the true history of Canada, is worth noting, and some of it is even worth celebrating.
     Resistance to colonialism sticks around, like red klister wax sticks to skis.
     To those who say, "It's over.  Get over it," I say that it continues, learn it, and  join the resistance, which begins inside each person.  You need not block pipelines or mines or retrieve Indigenous children stolen by the foster care system, or help prevent more Indigenous women disappearing while bringing to account those who made many disappear in the past and others who make many disappear today.  You need not inveigh against the systemic racism underlies all these injustices, and others.  
Instead, you need to learn the real history of this land called Canada.  This will help you understand why residential school survivors drink, why young people kill themselves, why a lack of trust and respect exists between Indigenous and settler people, and why some on each side strive to make a better land for us all. Join this red klister resistance to lies, and stick to the truth.

LAND, BEAUTIFUL LAND

     It's about land, at bottom.  It always has been about land.  I skied over settler-colonial land today, and decades ago, before knowledge of settler colonialism liberated me, as honesty and truth always liberate.  This ongoing liberation is joyful, as surely as skiing was joyful on this beautiful day, on this beautiful land.        

Groundhog Bottle and Can Deposit

Thursday, February 2, 2017  

     This overcast Groundhog Day, no overcast groundhog fled from its shadow hereabouts, which means that winter is over. 
     Today, I did not flee from 1066 pop and beer cans and bottles, as William the Conqueror did not flee from King Harold's army inEngland in 1066 A.D..  Instead, yesterday, our car hauled several bags containing 706 containers from Anaham to Williams Lake, where I sold the containers this morning to the local bottle depot for $41.99.  Today, helpful in-laws brought in the 360 containers that did not fit in the car yesterday, and I sold them for $23.42; the containers, not the in-laws.
     Pop cans, bottles, and tetra packs 1L or less pay $0.05, bigger than 1L pay $0.20, and beer cans and bottles pay $0.07; hence the uneven dollar totals.  Canada has had no penny, no $0.01 coin for a few years, the action of a centsless government, so the $41.99 rounds to $42.00.  Think of the 2 1/5 and 3s 10d of English money before decimalization there.
     Think of the day, decades ago, when a boyhood friend and I found in the neighborhood dump, washed, and brought to the bottle depot about 200 pop bottles, for $0.02 each, mere weeks before the bounty rose to $0.05.  The gopher bounty was $0.05 then, I recall from counting gopher tails before selling them to my uncle, who sold them to the provincial agriculture department. 
     Timing is everything in gleaning, as I know whenever I go to the local Salvation Army Thrift Shop's free food table and luck into bell peppers, tomatoes, or other earthly bounty from that other-worldly place.
     The Salvation Army's world headquarters is in London, England.  Last year I saw the church's impressive office building there. 
     William the Conqueror might have cleaned up after himself when he invaded, but the "green and pleasant land" I found in England was rotten with discarded drink containers.  The English pay no deposit, nor get none back for empties, which litter streets and parks.
     By contrast, Neugraben, a Hamburg suburb I spent August, 2016 in, courtesy of my generous sister, had a container-eating machine in a grocery store.  Feed it your empty, and it give you 0.25 Euros. 
     Perhaps discarded drink containers impeded German efforts to overrun England during World War Two.  Could a drink-container wall along the Canada-United States border keep the peace between these two countries?  Ask your local groundhog.