Sunday Salon: On Curling and Maritime Disaster

As I sit here in unexpectedly dry Nova Scotia, contemplating the three feet of snow that have just descended on Père Sycorax in Washington, DC in the second round of the Snowpocalypse and contentedly remembering the ceaseless mocking I got from so many friends along the east coast on the subject of the impossibly frigid northernness of my new home, I thought I would open with a picture from my autumnal trip to Puerto Rico.  There is something about it that tickles my more Baroque sensibilities: the combination of Caribbean landscape (palm trees and all) and the revelatory, Rococo roils of clouds and light.

All week my home has been flooded with light - more light than we got during out drenched day of sightseeing in Puerto Rico, with the curious effect that it feels warm and summery here.  But how have we (my visiting mother and I) spent our week, apart from working, cooking, cleaning?  We have devoted ourselves (in the absence of any sort of success for our beloved Tar Heels in our traditional winter sport of college basketball) to becoming curling junkies.

Those of you who live south of Minnesota and Scotland may find this raises the hackles of your skepticism, but curling (the icy equivalent of shuffleboard or  bocci or pétanque) is an incredibly engrossing spectator sport.  Which is lucky, because at any given moment in the day, it is showing on at least two major Canadian sports networks.

We are now deep in thrall to the personalities of the upstart PEI (Prince Edward Island) women's curling team, knee-high in incomprehensible discussions of the button, peeling, and all the minute considerations that come to bear when delivering the rock.  We have taken to yelling "HARD!!!" and "Whoa! WHOA!" at each other at unexpected moments around the house, which I am sure endears me to my neighbors. (Be sure to take a look at Stephen Colbert's attempt to decipher the sport and earn a place on the US Olympic Curling team, which includes an intervention in which Stephen prompts the guys to talk about how hurtful it is when the skip, or captain, screams instructions to the sweepers with what can only be described as bloodcurdling urgency.  That is the tone my mother and I have adopted in our domestic cries of encouragement.)  Still, it is preferable to last week, when we watched the entirety of True Blood's first season in an unnaturally short period of time.  After that, I kept catching my mother looking covetously at my jugular, just at the periphery of my vision.

Today we had a bit of an outing to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, down at the Halifax harbor, which, rather like curling, is unexpectedly delightful.  The exhibit on the 1917 Halifax Explosion (the largest manmade, nonnuclear explosion in history) was particularly moving.  It was finally brought home to me why Haligonians consider the city of Boston to be bound to them by indissoluble bonds of kinship: after the collision of two foreign munition ships caused the fiery destruction of all of the buildings and many of the residents of the North End of the Halifax peninsula, and a blizzard made life untenable for a now homeless population taking refuge in military tents, the city of Boston and state of Massachusetts immediately sent ships filled with doctors, medical supplies, and donated housewares to their neighbors to the north, the other major port city of the Northeast, with which Boston had been doing daily business for centuries.  The total value of Bostonian support to the struggling city of Halifax came to $750,000.  Three quarters of a million dollars! In 1917!! To this day, Haligonians speak with fondness of Boston, and send them the annual gift of an enormous Nova Scotian Christmas tree.

The Halifax Explosion was the Haiti or Katrina of its day, drawing support from the other corners of the Empire (a huge gift from Australia), from the monarch himself, from the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, from the company that owned the culpable munitions ship, from various churches, and from the city of Chicago (which sent $150,000, but gets no Christmas tree for their troubles).

The Museum also boasts an enthralling exhibit on the Titanic, whose messy aftermath the port of Halifax was almost solely responsible for cleaning up. Bodies clogged Nova Scotian waters and washed ashore in the days after the collision.  90% of men on second class tickets died in the disaster, I learned, but nonetheless the assertion that women and children were allowed into the life-rafts first seems to hold only partially true: adult men on first class tickets had a significantly higher rate of survival than children from third class.  And when every available Haligonian boat brought the salvaged bodies back to Halifax to be embalmed or claimed, the first-class passengers were brought ashore in coffins.  Second- and third-class passengers were placed in canvas body-bags.  Because death may part us, but it doesn't relieve us of class.

While we were there, we saw a rather surreal event: a theatrical performance about the second Canadian winner of the Victoria Cross, an Afro-Canadian soldier whose parents were escaped slaves from the American south.  This was not, in and of itself, surreal, but the piece ended with a hip hop performance by the youthful actors about the importance of self-esteem and self-determination, a performance which culminated in the assertion that we have no excuse for indolence, now that "we have a black president." Wait, my mother and I whispered to each other, Obama is the president of Canada?  We were still grappling with this question when everyone began to laugh and cheer, and the play as a whole concluded with a room-wide chant of "OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA!", which left us (the only people in the room who had voted for Barack) feeling oddly ... co-opted?  flattered? indoctrinated? proud? unsure what this had to do with nineteenth-century warfare?

What have I been reading this week? In class, we have moved out of the sex farces of last week, alas (Lysistrata and Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw), and into a pair of reflections on the violent intersection of religion and sexuality (Peter Shaffer's Equus and Dulcitius, a miracle play by the tenth century nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim, in which an evil Roman governor tries to rape some virtuous Christian maidens, but is miraculously befuddled by God into assaulting some kitchen implements instead).  The students don't seem to be wholly on board with this shift of gear. I, however, think it is a fantastic transition, and continue to harangue them about the social or moral value of comedy.

I continue to make my slow way through the Beckett trilogy of novels (my blogalogue partner's thought-provoking reflection on the first novel can be found here) and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which has taught me never to entail my property, always to leave specific instructions for the care of my daughters before I die, and, according to the refreshingly callow Marianne (a.k.a. Sensibility), that I somewhat beyond hopes of romance myself:

     "I know very well that Colonel Brandon is not old enough to make his friends yet apprehensive of losing him in the course of Nature.  He may live twenty years longer.  But thirty-five has nothing to do with matrimony."

     "Perhaps," said [her sense-filled sister] Elinor, "thirty-five and seventeen had better not have anything to do with matrimony together.  But if there should by any chance happen to be a woman who is single at seven-and-twenty, I should not think Colonel Brandon's being thirty-five any objection to his marrying her."

     "A woman of seven-and-twenty," said Marianne, "can never hope to feel or inspire affection again; and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife.  In his marrying such a woman, therefore, there would be nothing unsuitable.  It would be a compact of convenience, and the world would be satisfied.  In my eyes, it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing.  To me it would seem only a commercial exchange, in which each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other."

Oh, the shocking, thrilling cynicism of those last lines, which so cruelly (and with the myopic certainty of teenaged romanticism) pinpoint the harsh selfishness of many marriages.

I have read two remarkably enjoyable romances in the last couple of days (The Proposition, by the reliably fascinating Judith Ivory, whose exquisite, tormented Black Silk I just gave to my mother, and Laura Kinsale's newest, the charming and hopeful Lessons in French), and I hope to review them soon.  I am also on the very brink of finishing the mind-expanding 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick.

And, lastly, I have recently been glancing back over the now surprisingly long history of my blog.  I will leave you with a few of my favorite posts from the nearly four years of Sycorax Pine.  Till next week!

• The Pie of Dorian Gray and Other Tidbits , in which our heroine attempts to bake her first pie, and discovers in it an emblem for life in Los Angeles.
• A Little Touch of Harry in the Night, in which the author examines the nationalism of Harrys and Jacks, and thereby draws into comparison such disparate wastrels as Harry Potter, Shakespeare's Henry V, the heroes of Lost and 24, and (implicitly) the miracles of image-rehabilitation that are the current British princes.
• Returned! , in which yours truly reveals why her first romance novel will be largely based on true events from her own life, no matter what Marianne might say of her.
• The Road, which has proved to be the most traffic-generating moment in the illustrious history of Sycorax Pine.
• O Who Would be a Pudding, in which our heroine delves again into questions of national allegory, focusing this time on anthropomorphized Marsupials and Puddings rather than Harrys and Jacks.

Milestone

Something extraordinary happened to me today.

For the first time in my life, I went to look something up in the library catalogue at my university (it was a pretty general search - "Contemporary British Drama") and the first item that came up was my own name.

What the ...?, I thought, before being suffused with delight.

The oddest thing was this: this "other I" had two entries under her name, while I have only ever published one thing.  Odd.  My alter ego apparently has a publishing life twice as active as my own.  Either that or I have been publishing articles in my sleep.

For a moment I felt like the hero of Gogol's "The Nose," who is deeply unsettled when he awakes one morning to find that he no longer has a crucial part of his face, and even more unnerved when he sees his own nose wandering down the street later that day.  But all of this pales in comparison to his feelings of unease when he looks at the Nose's uniform and realizes that his own nose holds a higher rank than he does.

Or perhaps I felt like David Soyer, the original cellist for the Guarneri Quartet, as he did in a story told by one of the quartet's violinists, Arnie Steinhardt, in his book Indivisible by Four.  When cellists tour, they often pay for an extra airplane seat to hold their human-proportioned instrument safely.  Soyer did what a number of other cellists apparently do, which is arrange for his cello to be issued with its own frequent flyer number.  Imagine his surprise when he receives the statements one fine week, and finds that his cello has more frequent flyer miles than he himself does.  What has his cello been up to?  Has it been flying through the skies without him?

But, as it turned out, my catalogue doppelganger was not doppeling my output: the library simply has two different databases that carry my article.  That's a relief.

Although it would be nice if I would produce some research while I slept.

Sunday Salon: A Year in the Maritimes

A busy week: my mother has come to visit me in my new, snowy Haligonian home (hurrah!), and so far we have done such scintillating Nova Scotian things as 1) go to the DMV to get my new license plates, 2) return my new Tivo to Best Buy, and 3) shop at Costco for gargantuan packages of hummus and smoked salmon.  I hope to god that we do something more ... distinctively local in the week to come.  Although I guess the fulfillment of that wish may be in more human hands than that. Specifically, mine.

I continue to read the Beckett trilogy this week, as well as the perpetually nearly-finished  Sex Lives of Cannibals.  In my classes, we have been embroiled in a one-two punch of sex farces: Lysistrata in one class, and Joe Orton's anarchic What the Butler Saw in the other.  (This anarchic quality may be the difference between the two shockingly forthright plays: Orton uses sexual comedy in the service of overthrowing the oppression of social order, whereas Aristophanes uses it to restore and reassert order in a time of civic strife.) I have also just resolved to reread all of Jane Austen's novels, and have started with the earliest, which was also the first I read: Sense and Sensibility.  The last time I read it was 1993.  And, of course, it is pure delight, as well as excruciating social torment.  Quite the companion piece to Aristophanes and Orton.

Speaking of which, I have been watching True Blood with my mother, and placing a steady emphasis on the way the erotic and the repellent are played off against each other in the series (and, most pointedly, its opening credits), so that neither element of the vampire mythos ever gains the upper hand.  We have now seen just about every type of human bodily process and fluid represented on screen in the first five episodes, so our parent-child bond is all that much stronger for the crucible of comic degradation we have witnessed.  But I have to say, upon a second (or third?) watching, my verdict remains the same: Vampire Bill is awfully good at the beginning of the series, but the first season (and the end of the second) suffers mightily from a dearth of Eric the Viking Vampire.

We just finished watching Asif Kapadia's pensive and classical The Warrior, a tale of a brutal lord's bodyguard who turns to a life of peace after an epiphany about cruelty.  Irfan Khan, who was wonderful in The Namesake, is so hypnotic and expressive-in-repose here that my mother asked if I thought he had his eyes insured, as the source of his whole livelihood.  The film moves very slowly, but purposively so.  About a third of the way through the movie, my dear mama wondered this: "Why do they all keep staring at each other like that?".  There was a pause as I contemplated whether she expected a response.  After a moment, she continued: "Is it just because of man's inhumanity to man, and the loneliness of human existence?".

Yes. Yes, it is.

We are now midway through Spartacus, which I am glad to say is a much, much better film than Ben-Hur. After Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments I had begun to despair of ever enjoying an ancient film epic, but Spartacus is winning me over.  Perhaps it is the fact that Dalton Trumbo wrote a really remarkably left-wing parable about an alternate worker's society created when the proletariat cast off their chains, and each gives according to ability and takes according to needs.  Perhaps it is the stunning love scene at the midpoint of the movie, in which Spartacus speaks of wanting to learn his beloved's every curve while dragging a blade of grass through her mouth, and then kisses her upside down and twines himself around her as they roll towards the camera.  (Considerably more impressive than the surf scene in From Here to Eternity.)  Or perhaps it is my favorite scene so far, in which Laurence Oliver (playing the patrician senator Crassus) asks the slave who is bathing him (a heavily eyelined Tony Curtis) if he prefers to eat oysters or snails.  After a few moments of surreal, True Blood-esque conversation between the two ("Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?" "No, master." "Of course not.  It's all a matter of taste, isn't it?"), Olivier turns to Curtis and adds in sultry tones, "My taste ... includes both oysters and snails."

Oddly enough, the studio didn't fancy including this scene in the first release of the film, and then managed (how clumsy!) to lose track of the audio that had been cut from the original version.  When Kubrick was editing it for re-release, he wanted to restore the scene, which gives Curtis's character some key motivations for later actions, but he lacked both the audio and Lord Olivier himself, who had died in the intervening years.  He contacted Tony Curtis and Joan Plowright, Olivier's widow, who suggested that Anthony Hopkins might stand in (vocally speaking) for her late husband.  Curtis and Hopkins, working in separate studios on different continents, dubbed the scene, which to my ear was indistinguishable from the other dialogue in the film.  Thank god it's back.

So: a new project.  A few years ago I started a habit of taking up a new national or regional literature every calendar year, with the goal of expanding my knowledge of the chosen country during that year.  My aim (not usually successful, but nonetheless aimed for) was to read a book a month by an author associated with the theme country.  My most extensive achievement was in the first year, my Year of Down Under, when I read a bevy of Australian books I would never have considered otherwise (including the brilliant children's book The Magic Pudding) and greatly expanded the Australian presence in my library.

Now that I am settled in my new home, which is itself in a new country, it seems like 2010 would be a good year for a new project: The Year of the Maritimes.  My project over the next 11 months will be to read 12 works from/about Canada's Maritime provinces.  I have already collected a number of titles in my guest room that might serve me well for this project, including:

1. L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and Story Girl cycles. (I reread the first Anne book while visiting Prince Edward Island this summer with D.)
2. Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan (The classic novel of Halifax, it is set during the 1917 Explosion - the central event of the city's collective consciousness and the largest non-nuclear man-made explosion in history.)
3. Island by Alistair MacLeod
4. The Nymph and the Lamp by Thomas Raddell
5. The Birth House by Ami McKay
6. Rockbound by Frank Parker Day
7. Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
8. Whylah Falls by George Elliott Clarke 
9. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
10. The Museum Guard by Howard Norman

Do you have other favorite books that are associated with Atlantic Canada?  Pass 'em on. (Or at least the recommendations....)