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.
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