Deep Hollow Creek (1992)

Thrace-born Spartacus was a slave/gladiator who led an uprising against the Roman Republic in 71 BC. Spartacus died in that fight, but his name -- and the hope his name engenders -- lives on.

Spartacus Books is now located at 1983 Commercial (1983 is an auspicious year in B.C. history), and as per the store's mandate (which includes getting books into the hands of those unable to afford them), there is a book rack out front where purchases are made by donation. There are some great books in this rack; not simply those that don't align literally with the store's politic, but those whose formal innovation could be considered in figurative resistance to a master narrative that favours linearity, transparency and closure.

One such book is Sheila Watson's slow-whirling Deep Hollow Creek, a book she wrote in the 1930s but for some reason wasn't published (by M&S) until 1992.

"I have always taken the compass as a thing to be held. Yet the hand falters measuring the fleeting body of flame." (13)

Destruction Site

I'm not much of a builder, but I have built things. Roughly. A rough carpenter. Most of what I have learned I have learned from demolitions, where something is subtracted and something new is revealed. Ah, that how's you do that! Then the shovel comes out of nowhere and that is subtracted, too.

The Help (2011)

I watched The Help last night, part of a recent haul of DVDs from I forget where. Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, and moving through the murder of Medger Evers and the arrival of the Freedom Riders, The Help (based on the 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett) is a women-centred story focused on those of privilege (white Southern belles), those of poverty (Black maids) and how the two contrast, parallel and intertwine. Because it explores the nuances of the racialized employer-employee relationship, it is not a film of our current moment, dominated as our moment is by extremes, but one that came out when people of different walks still had the courage, patience and strength to talk to each other on difficult topics. Nor is the film above critique. "White trash" culture is depicted in the form of those who, like Celia Foote (played by this year's Oscar-winner for Best Actress Jessica Chastain), marry into a society that deems them cheap for doing so.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I added this film to my pile. I didn't recognize the director, Tate Taylor (turns out he was born in Jackson), nor one of the production companies listed on the back cover --  Imagenation Abu Dhabi. Arab money, the date of the film's release, and the DVD's image-supported title made me curious enough to take a chance. And I'm glad I did, for a film like this -- a returning white college student who convinces a group of Black maids to tell their stories for what becomes an anonymously-titled best-seller called The Help -- wouldn't get past the vetting stage in Canada's public arts funding agencies, nor through those in the largely private-sectored U.S. People today are too rattled to imagine, let alone articulate, realties other than their own. How we got to where we are has a lot to do with where we came from. Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s is, was and remains such a place. 

King Smith

For the Academy to say it "doesn't condone violence of any form" has me wondering what the difference between "of" and "in" is, and whether it meant in when it wrote of ("of any form" is, oddly enough, favoured by the Guardian and the New Yorker). The Academy has done well by war films; but does this mean its members will no longer participate in the making of them -- because they contain violence? Is a representation of violence not an inciter of violence in this age of triggers? We are told again and again that cycles of violence are upheld by the ongoing glorification of violent acts, like the violence found in Hollywood films, but also in that more interactive form of entertainment that Hollywood is tied into: video games. 

The Academy Awards show is a theatrical production that has its participants playing themselves. Part of playing oneself these days seems to include the right to retain aspects of the character whose portrayal has earned an award nomination. Will Smith's acceptance speech last night -- for his portrayal of father/tennis coach/patriarch Richard Williams -- carried with it an in-character justification for walking through theatre's "fourth wall" earlier in the evening to strike comedian/host Chris Rock for likening Smith's wife Jada Pinkett Smith's "look" (she has alopecia areata) to Demi Moore's portrayal of a U.S. soldier in G.I. Jane (1997), a "joke" lost on those too young to know the reference.

 "Richard Williams," Smith began, "was a fierce defender of his family," and that's clearly what Smith thought he was doing when he struck Rock and, after doing so, shouted not once but two times: "Keep my wife's name out of your fuckin' mouth." For me, this line (especially in its repetition) is far more jarring in its policing than the blow Smith laid on Rock, and I wonder if there is anything like it in the script for the film where Smith played the father of tennis champions Venus and Serena. As for Richard Williams's earlier family, he walked out on them, leaving them destitute. Those in defence of Williams need look no further than the tagline to G.I Jane: "There are two sides to every conflict." Those in defence of Smith would include those who consider one's wife, like one's children, their property. 

"I will smelt mine in public"

A small, Deco-inflected statue, produced in limited editions yearly since 1929 and given to those who have achieved excellence in production categories devised by senior employees of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as voted on by its members. According to legend, the statue reminded an Academy librarian of her Uncle Oscar, and when she said so, the name stuck, and the statues were thus called Oscars.

The Academy Awards were first telecast in 1953 and have become a ritual event for many households, clubs and restaurants -- wherever people gather. Reasons for watching vary. Some watch for the fashion, others to see their favourite actors out of character, others still for the performances (the introductions, Best Song, the tributes, the acceptance speeches). I would even go so far as to say that some watch because they believe it to be a "live" event (it is slightly time-delayed), and as we all know, when something is "live", anything can happen, including announcing the wrong winner.

TV viewership for the Awards peaked in 1998, and since then has been in decline, with many complaining that the Awards are out of touch with current realities. The big story this year is not who will win, but what is it we are watching when we are watching the Oscars (this year, we've been told, Oscars for Editing and Cinematography will not be televised). Actor and CORE co-founder Sean Penn has promised to destroy his Oscar ("I will smelt mine in public") if actor and Ukrainian President Zelensky is not given time and space to speak (presumably in place of Editing and Cinematography presentations). Penn's plea is heart-felt, of course, and something of a boon to ABC, who is presenting the Awards through its network (ad slots for this year's broadcast are selling for upwards of $2M).

Will I be watching? No. But if something remarkable should happen (a pop-up smelter operating in the lobby of L.A.'s Dolby Theatre), I will look for it on YouTube, noting, as I always do, who is selling what before each clip.

Alley Alley Oxen Free

A couple hours of errands on Main and Fraser Streets yesterday, all of them conducted on foot. Walking back from Fraser along East 19th I felt the pull from an alley I had never been down before and was stopped in my tracks by a garage that had a lot to say about itself. A remarkable study in colour, line and form.

Hardly a kit, nor a madman's vision, the garage stands as a record of leftovers from other jobs. Did its vinyl covered door need painting, or was its painter moved to freshen things up with paint purchased for some unfinished lawn furniture (did the painter shake the paint before applying it, clean the surface)? As for the asphalt shingles stapled to its outer wall, were they purchased for the roof of the main house? I measured the boards above the door and they are not dimensions usually found in DIY stores, but custom cuts. (For what though?) As for the garden before it, I counted five kinds of lichen.

Best of all: not the garage itself, but the infill beside it. A study in contrasts, one that makes the garage less a work of improvisation and eccentricity than a luxury in the face of a city with a housing problem. Yes, it is likely you could put an infill where the garage is, but with building costs, property regulations and interest rates being what they are, who can afford to? Something about this garage, in this context. An emblem of our time.

First Full Garden Day of the Year

Yesterday was the first full top-to-bottom garden day of the year -- the goodness of the earth entering the body through hands and nose. Reaching up to trim the laurel hedge, the butterfly bush, prune the Widow Dallas's apple tree next door; bending down to clean the beds, transplant ferns I'd raised from pots, replace a broken paver. I have to slow myself to consider past vignettes, whether I'll repeat them or try something new, break from the overall structure. Right now it's the runaway Bishop's Weed I planted eight springs ago, to blanket a space I couldn't resolve. But now I can, and I took out some Bishop's Weed as well.

A Park By Any Other Name Is Just As Beautiful

Victoria, B.C.'s Beacon Hill Park is a 200 acre ode to empire that stands between Cook (east), Douglas (west) Superior (north) and Dallas (south) overlooking the Juan de Fuca Strait. It's central feature is a pond guarded by peahens and -cocks. Surrounding it, well tended garden beds, walking paths and a bandshell where I once saw the late-Hugh Fraser lead the Vancouver Ensemble of Jazz Improvisation (VEJI) in a musical rendition of (tribute to?) Mount St Helens a couple of summers after its May 18, 1980 explosion.

The postcard was sent to me by Richard Mackie, the editor of the British Columbia Review, who makes a practice of writing thank you notes on the back of old postcards when mailing out cheques to reviewers. Without looking at the text below I knew what I was looking at, but I looked anyway, to reward myself for knowing. But seriously, could it be? Could it be that the B.C Travel Bureau issued a postcard of Victoria's Beacon Hill Park -- but spelled it "Deacon Hill"? Back in the day, someone would have lost their job over this. Today, the mistake could well be the result of a toxic work environment and the proofreader would be put on stress leave. Which he or she or they would spend parts of in the park, naturally.

Canadian Politics

The NDP has signed a document to support Liberal budgets in exchange for the Liberal's expansion of the welfare state to include, among other things, "universal" dental care. In a fit of purity, the interim Conservative leader has condemned this agreement as "backdoor socialism," and in saying so I can't help but think of the "poor doors" in certain mixed-use housing projects in Vancouver's downtown eastside. Are poor doors something she might be amenable to? 

So far I have yet to hear a Liberal supporter say, This is not the government I voted for, because Liberals, like most U.S. Democrats, are generally disposed to bipartisanship (Conservatives, like U.S. Republicans, tend to loathe government and, especially in the case of the latter, have grown increasingly hostile towards liberal democracy). As for voting, we vote for parliamentarians as much as we vote for political parties. And as recent elections have shown, our country is split in ways that make a majority government impossible. 

While this seems like a sideshow compared to our current run of war and pestilence, it's a big deal, particularly at a time when liberal democracy -- and that fragile humanitarian project known as the welfare state -- is under siege. 

An Unfinished Poem for UNESCO's World Poetry Day (for Anne Carson)

Men is a Man men are increasingly uncomfortable with 

A Man with many heads who doesn't think with one

The weakest amongst them is the man all men are held to

Weakness as defined by monarcho-feudal behaviour

Who among us wants to be a king or a queen these days 

To rule is to retain too much of ourselves, our prejudices

Claudius was disabled yet became Rome's fourth emperor

His nephew, Caligula, held forth as all men, and was weak 

The Black Stallion (1979)

The horse -- "The Black," as he is known -- saves the boy from the sinking ship that takes his father and others to the bottom of the Mediterranean. The boy awakes on the beach, and the Black is nowhere to be seen. Eventually the boy stumbles on the horse, entangled in ropes. The boy frees the horse, and off he runs. 

Before the ship went down, the boy's father gave him a small casting of a horse he won in a poker game. The horse is Bucephalus, Alexander the Great's "untamable" horse, and the boy places Bucephalus on a rock and watches the Black race back and forth in the distance. One day he makes an offering to the Black -- a tray of seaweed -- and the horse accepts it.

"Dykes and Ditches"

An artist I know who is working on a project inspired by her Richmond, B.C. childhood and that city's dikes and ditches sent me an invitation by a Vancouver journalist looking to do a story on "Metro Van floodplains" (see the screen grab above). Close readers will note the writer's spelling of dikes (the preferred North American spelling) as "dykes" (the preferred spelling in other English-speaking countries and Special Administrative Regions, and one which carries an additional connotation), which tells me just how far the (North American) culture has come in recognizing those who once went unseen. As for those historic ditches, they've all but disappeared. (When I was a kid, they were everywhere.)

Marmalade Orange

The breakfasts of my childhood. Not mine but my parents.

Though by no means a Brit, my "colonial octoroon" father (a term Martin Amis used to describe Dad's veriegated ancestry), made fabulous weekend breakfasts. Eggs easy-over, bacon, sausages, potatoes, beans in molasses, fried tomatoes, kippered herring, rye toast smeared in butter with different kinds of jam on hand. My parents would devour these fry-ups and, as weekends were often long-walk-on the-seawall-days, my father would literally have to carry my mother to the car.

I remember the jams. I think we had an entire pantry shelf devoted to them. Strawberry, blackberry, blueberry, loganberry, mulberry ... Mom made all these jams at one point. But the one jam she never made (to my recollection) was the one that wasn't a berry. I asked her once if anything could be made into a jam, or was it just berries? and she said, Yes. In that case, I followed, Why is there no such thing as orange jam? to with my mother replied, Oh there is -- it's called marmalade. It's the orange-coloured jam you don't like because you find it bitter. I've seen the face you make.

Marmalade. When I hear the word my head leaves my body and I am afloat in a sunny morning springtime kitchen, adults moving slowly but purposefully, the heavy greasy air and the cool breeze from an open window, a spatula scraping at a pan. When I hear the word sung -- "Picture yourself on a boat on a river/ With tangerine trees and marmalade skies" -- as John Lennon sings it in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" (1967), I hear a man proud of his son's drawing, which I believe is where the song comes from -- when Lennon points to his son Julian's drawing and says, Who's that? and Julian says, It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

Last week I noticed a display of differently coloured oranges at Save On and saw that they were "Marmalade Oranges". Oh good, they'll be nice and tangy, so I bought four. After putting my groceries away, I took the orange I left on the counter, placed it on the cutting board and quartered it. Expecting to get that tangy taste, I was met with a mouthful of seeds. Same with the next quarter. And the next one even more so. All told I removed thirty-two seeds from this one small "Marmalade Orange". If I could take the rest back, I would!

Bedside Reading

"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages," said Samuel Johnson in The Idler, in 1758. 

The war in question was the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), beginning first with England declaring war on France over Spanish colonies in North America, and soon enough Prussia taking up arms against Austria, France, Russia and Sweden -- what Winston Churchill referred to as "the first world war," because it spanned five continents. 

Although Johnson's proposition is a late-comer to a species that has known war since time immemorial, its utterance has allowed us to consider war's more abstracted consequences, not just fallen buildings and piled up bodies, but a change in how we relate to each other in that increasing utopian state known as peacetime.

Today, Truth is out the window. Too many of us no longer believe in what is shaped by reason and politics, but what is drawn and quartered by emotion and quantified "likes". Unless it serves our opinions, History is a stumbling block in need of removal. (A recent example came while reading pop cultural analyst Roxanne Gay's 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist, where she has lots to say about feminism, despite admitting that "I am not being terribly well versed in feminist history" and "not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be."[xiii])  That we expect to have it both way is a further indication of our troubled times.

So what's next? What's next when everything thus far is History? The Future? (Gay has said little to prepare us for this Future, and that's why I have set aside her book for a second edition of Octavia Butler's 2005 speculative short fiction collection, Blood Child.) 

The Patron Saint of Alcohol

Ah Shane ya poor wean da booze it opened yer beak an da muse she sits on it an da words come out all lured. An years a dis Shane years ta da point where she's long bin done wit ya long since taken wid her yer wee teeth ta show fer it shittin in yer maw now usin yer soul to wipe her ass. Ah Shane were da words wert it da craps in the pants like yer ginch were da priests da disappointed in touch wit da muse who came out ta see her boy kids dey were in da same ol love-hate wid da language an all dey got was yer drunken ass clinging ta da mic stand no different from da lamp post's hatred? Eh Shane? Eh? Ah ya fecken melter. My heart goes out ta yer ma an ta doze who loves ya. 

Kingsway and Knight

The NE corner of Kingsway and Knight, looking south on the latter as I always do at intersections after years ago seeing a hubcap come off a car and rearrange a pedestrian's nose. If not a hub cap, then the car or the truck itself, particularly a truck, as this is the truck route to the container port, a descent that begins thirteen blocks south at 37th (also known as Ridgeway), where some tricky shifting is required. No trucks in this view, just some nicely parting clouds.

One Tin Soldier (1969)

 

Even the most indifferent student of History knows that the June 28, 1914 assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian national was not the reason for the First World War, only the last of many. Indeed, one of the greatest lessons of that war is its multiple triggers.

One of these triggers concerns the many and shifting alliances and treaties that had been forming and dissolving in the years prior to the Archduke's assassination, in part due to increasing paranoia (the Balkan Wars, militarization, imperialism, nationalism), and resulting in obligations by those allied with those declaring.

Not long after the Archduke's assassination, Austria-Hungry bombed Belgrade (Serbia), Russia mobilized, then Germany, and soon everyone was involved, not just in Europe and the UK, but in Arabia, Africa, the Far East ... Hence the name the Great War. Then a quarter-century later, World War I -- after the start of World War II.

NATO is a Treaty Organization that began with North Atlantic nations, and like an expansionist state (Germany and Italy in the 1930s, Israel since its inception in the late-1940s, China, India and Russia in our current moment), added those nations willing to join it, often to the chagrin of countries who had unfinished business with them.

Russia is an odd place. Neither Europe nor Asia, it is, continentally speaking, its own thing: a forest of poetry loving grumps with extreme and merciless positions on whatever matters most to those who disagree with them, certainly no less racist than Ukraine. And did I say paradoxical? The Russians I am descended from were wholly paradoxical. 

That Russia's Putin has laid claim to Ukraine has been justified for many reasons, among them the importance of Kiev as the spiritual (Christian Orthodox) centre of the Russian people. That Russia should destroy a country in an effort to connect with its spiritual centre is itself a paradox of the highest order.

For my part in the resistance I am currently at work on a Russian translation of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter's 1969 song "One Tin Soldier", which I am told through intermediaries that a Pussy Riot cover band has offered to perform (dressed as Cossacks) outside Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. More on this story as it unfolds.

Stars and Swipes

William Wright's Hellman bio keeps on giving, serving up equal doses of the writer's stage and screen successes with world events, like Germany's June 22, 1941 invasion of Russia -- less than two years after the two agreed not to beat on each other. If I wanted to invade the Soviet Union (for Romanian oil and Ukrainian grain), I would choose the summer to do so, too. Before the cold weather, and in advance of the August harvest.

Although Russia had three times the tanks Germany had, and many more times the foot soldiers (more than Germany anticipated), Germany's technical superiority, especially in the air, left Russia vulnerable and in need of alliances. The U.S became an ally, and within days of that, Hellman was hired by the White House to write a screenplay intended to make Russians "more likeable" to Americans. The result was North Star (1943), directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Samuel Goldwyn.

The choice of Milestone was a good one, since he in fact was born in Russia and spent his early years there. And whereas Hellman hadn't, she had as usual done her research and produced a script that she felt reflected that. Only Milestone disagreed ("Lillian knew nothing about Russia -- especially the villages"). But it wasn't so much Hellman's lack of knowledge about Russian life, it was her treachery, according to Milestone, that made working with her impossible. She refused Milestone's changes, complained to Goldwyn (who sided with Milestone) and bought herself out of their contract.

Yesterday I heard that Russia has asked China to assist with its invasion of Ukraine, and the day before that I wondered aloud (in this blog) if Russia and China had a non-aggression pact. If so, Russia more than certainly rubbed China's face in it by invading Ukraine before the end of the Beijing Olympics, something China had asked it not to do until the Para-Olympics were over. I'm sure not even North Korea would have done something like this without asking for China's permission first.

Some pundits have suggested China's long-term plan is to nurture Russia to the point of isolation, where its dependence on China turns it from the mighty empire Putin is striving for into a subordinate Chinese state. Something I haven't heard discussed is whether Putin's invasion is partially in service of the Trump camp's potential run at the 2024 election -- an open and free democratic election that many fear could be America's last (as if that country's electoral process isn't already compromised). Students of History will recall that not even successful wartime leaders like Winston "We shall never surrender" Churchill were re-elected once their wars were over.

Something else Wright points out is how Hellman's hatred of Nazi Germany was greater than her recognition of Germany and Russia as totalitarian regimes. George Orwell recognized this during the Soviet "Show Trials", as did Hannah Arendt, particularly during her coverage of the Eichmann Trial. Neo-liberalism is such that you can give the appearance of a liberal democracy while at the same time manipulate outcomes that serve the privileged few. And when we complain, we are told it is 'bots, algorithms, as if these "systems", like the dog who ate our homework, exist independent of us.

Biden (U.S.) and Trudeau (Canada) are content to work the neo-liberal levers, while Trump and Putin prefer to cast aside the artifice of democracy and parade around like the strong men they aren't, warriors in Brioni suits. For this they are regarded by there followers as honest, no bullshit types. Is it time to rethink our definition of "honesty"?

Here's how Wright sums up Hellman, post-North Star:

"Throughout her career she would try to avoid conflict by picking collaborators for whom her admiration was unrestrained (William Wyler, Tyrone Guthrie, Mike Nichols), or newcomers she outranked and could bully.  But once she had loaded the equation as much as possible in her favour, she was, from the testimony from many who worked with her, no more difficult than any other theatrical 'star' -- and a lot more reasonable than many." (169)

Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975) 2

Last week I had occasion to explain to the incredulous grandchild of a woman my age that when we were your age there was no internet, only a box called a TV and a larger box you walked into called a cinema. Oh? Yes, and rather than an increasingly infinite selection of URLs, you had only seven channels -- Canadian channels CBC (2) and CTV(8); a Bellingham, U.S. channel that came in fuzzy without cable, called KVOS (12); and cable channels KOMO/ABC (4), KING/NBC (5), KIRO/CBS (7) and PBS (KCTS) (9), all from Seattle. So you didn't get to watch very much TV? On the contrary, we watched it all the time. Like your thespian Nana, it was always on.

Later that day the three of us went thrifting, where I found the first season of Upstairs, Downstairs and held it up as an example of PBS's "grown-up" fare, in contrast to "kids" programming like Zoom (1972-1978). Zoom? Yes, Zoom. And as if on cue, Nana and I sang and danced the opening theme song -- "C'mon and gonna zoom, zoom, zoom-a, zoom ...," with me busting Luiz's move, and Nana Bernadette's. "Were you allowed to watch that?" asked the grandchild, pointing to the Upstairs, Downstairs box. "Ugh," I said, "there was nothing more boring when I was your age," and Nana nodded solemnly. "Will you watch it now?' asked the grandchild. "Yes," said Nana, taking the box from my hand, "if for no other reason than to find out what bored us."

After watching the opening Fay Weldon-penned episode, Nana and I concluded that Upstairs, Downstairs is brilliantly written and acted -- a brilliance that stands in contrast to its dimly-lit sets and occasionally caught-off-guard camera work. Could that dimness account for what bored us as children? "Hardly," said Nana, "it's nowhere near as dim as Dark Shadows, and we loved that." Which is true -- we did. As for themes, it isn't until the third episode, "Board Wages", that the class element is explored.

The picture up top is from a scene in the fifth episode ("A Suitable Marriage") that immediately follows the scene in the bedroom of seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Bellamy. As housemaid Rose is tucking-in Elizabeth, the latter tells the former how she has fallen in love with the visiting Baron Klaus von Rimmer, but doesn't like him much, and Rose has trouble with the paradox. "Oh don't be so shocked, Rose, we're living in modern times!" And indeed we are, for the year is 1906, and German spies, as we have come to learn, are everywhere in London, and like modernism itself, they are engaging in new methods of subterfuge. The scene that follows Rose and Elizabeth is of Rose walking into a guest bedroom, where she finds Klaus kneeling before the footman, Alfred, as he is doing up the buttons of his pants. 

Distraught, Rose tells the butler, Mr Hudson, and he tells Lord Bellamy, who is already wise to Klaus's spying and has arranged for Scotland Yard to arrest him during a parlour room gathering later that night.  Bellamy asks Mr Hudson not to tell anyone, but Alfred overhears this and, in the scene pictured below, delivers a note to Klaus who reads it, excuses himself and, along with Alfred, is never seen again. But as before, where Elizabeth's line about "modern times" precedes the discovery of a homosexual act, we have Sir Adam (far-left) responding to Lady Prudence's declaration of Adam's incorrigibility: "Incorrigibles ripen with age, like most other fruits."

"What's an in-cor-idge-ah-bull?" asks the grandchild, to which Nana, in the spirit of Lady Prudence, replies: "Someone who persists in equating homosexuality with villainy."  

Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) 2

A better sleep last night than yesterday's, if that makes sense, since last night's sleep began at 11pm, making yesterday's sleep and last night's sleep, etc. When I awoke at 4:50am yesterday (I'd forgotten to take the before-bed gummy that makes me think I can't sleep without it), my unmedicated mind went straight to work, sifting through the written and image rubble of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and trauma fantasy of trauma fantasies: the potential of a Russia-China Non-Agression Pact, like the one Soviet Russia signed with Nazi Germany in August, 1939, a week before Germany and Russia invaded Poland and Russia did the same to Finland, the latter an event that ruined the friendship of "fellow travellers" Lillian Hellman and Tallulah Bankhead, when the former refused to grant permission for a Finnish fundraising staging of her play The Little Foxes (1939) that had, by then, made the latter the star she was destined to become. On the topic of the Russian invasion, Hellman was reported as saying, "I don't believe in the fine, lovable Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I've been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me." Some people say the same of Ukraine, though our disgust with a post-Show Trial Stalinist Russia is nothing compared to how many of us feel about Putin and his Maldivian armada of oligarchs.

William Wright's Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman (1986) is turning out to be a great read. He writes precisely on the historical events paralleling Hellman's rise (particularly those she aligned herself with, such as the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War), and is most thorough in pointing out the facts of Hellman's life versus her fiction-as-fact insistences, which include the impossibility of her alleged visit to Finland. Further to that, we hear a great deal about Hellman's general disposition; not just in Wright's words, but from Hellman's great friend Dorothy Parker, who is quoted as saying, "When Lillian gets angry, I regret to say she screams," and there was much screaming on the topic of Bankhead. On the topic of Parker, a soft-pedal personification of Twitter if ever there was one, Wright provides this paragraph:

"Parker was a small, dark-haired woman, given to such girlish grooming flourishes as bangs and bows on her shoes. She was soft-spoken, quick to create a confidential intimacy with anyone with whom she was conversing, and while sweetly demolishing with her razor tongue whomever offended her -- and often fame or importance was sufficient provocation -- she never lost what Margaret Case Harriman called 'an overpowering air of dulcet femininity.'" (67)

And on Parker, Wright writes:

"Not long after their meeting [Hellman and Parker first met in NYC], Parker went to Hollywood [where Hellman was with her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett], and the friendship would not be ratified until Hellman herself return to Hollywood as a famous playwright. At that reunion they became lifelong friends despite Hammett's antipathy to Parker, which increased until eventually her appearance would send him running. He was once asked why. Although Parker was as radical as Hammett, they would often find themselves on the opposite side of a position. Hammett said he didn't want to be around Parker because he couldn't argue with her. "She cries," he explained. (68)

A Factotum in the Book Trade (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2022)

Books are submitted to journals for review. Sometimes a book doesn't appear to have any relation to the journal's mandate and is set aside, eventually taken to a used bookstore with other such books for cash or trade. If neither, some bookstores will offer to take the book anyway, to donate to a thrift store. I am told by my bookseller friends that the offer is rarely declined.

Sometimes the publisher who sent out the review copy will "follow-up" with a note and a conversation is started. Sometimes this conversation will allow for a re-consideration -- that there is something in or about the book that makes it relevant to the journal it was submitted to. That's how I will end up with my glue-and-paper review copy of Marius Kociejowski's A Factotum in the Book Trade. In the meantime, allow me to share with you an anecdote from the PDF: 

One day Allen Ginsberg came in, fresh from a trip to Poland, and was on the hunt for translations of Polish poetry. I pushed Zbigniew Herbert at him. I stayed quiet about Czesław Miłosz who had begun to irk me and who very soon, in one of poetry’s most cringeworthy moments, would kiss Ginsberg’s arse. My recently published collection Doctor Honoris Causa was on display. Ginsberg added it to his pile. I found myself in a moral quandary. I told him that the author of the title, although he had a Polish name might not qualify because he wrote in English. Ginsberg asked who he was and I said it was me. There followed a moment of confusion: Ginsberg removed the book from his pile and then gingerly put it back. After thinking a few seconds more, he returned it to the display.

A Lesson in Diffidence

This being the week I write my 6-8 exhibition previews for Preview, the bi- and sometimes tri-monthly guide that has been serving the Pacific Northwest (from Campbell River to Cannon Beach!) since 1986, though I have not been with the magazine that long. 

Yesterday I wrote a preview of Alison Yip's current show at the CAG, which I enjoyed for the most part. I began with a recollection of her 2016 contribution to the VAG's Vancouver Special Triennial, where she painted the alcoves of the rotunda, but especially the walls around them. These walls were given a white-on-black diagonal lattice motif treatment with periodic breaks that felt like violence -- "portals" that allowed the city and the exhibition to converse.

Sure enough, that crappy big box store lattice style found its way into one of Alison's current paintings, part of a series of small oils on metal surfaces based on questions asked of a) a psychic (Somatic) and b) a "neo-shaman" (Auratic). Alison's appearance in these pantings is through a proxy form (a mannequin), or let's say an avatar, even though it's clear she is uncomfortable being there -- in any form.

Yip's Soma Topika is up until May 1, 2022.

Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975)

The Bellamys, Richard and Lady Marjorie, provide the "Upstairs" portion of London Weekend TV's 1971 production of Upstairs, Downstairs, but it is the lives of the downstairs service workers that most of us relate to.

Last week I purchased Season One, and after two episodes I can safely say that I am under the spell of Sarah Moffat (played by Pauline Collins), whose arrival on a job referral (Underhouse Parlour Maid) opens the first episode -- written by Fay Weldon, no less.

Upstairs, Downstairs ran for five years (PBS in North America), then forever in reruns. The period covered is 27 years (1903-1930). In 1979, a spin-off series entitled Thomas & Sarah aired, based on Sarah and the Bellamy's chauffeur, Thomas (the two actors are married in real life). Here's the trailer for Thomas & Sarah.

Telling It Like It Wasn't

Lillian Hellman: the Image, the Woman. I'm not kidding, that's the full title of William Wright's so far engaging 1986 bio of one of America's most important 20th century writers. Why Wright put "Image" before "Woman" is alluded to at every opportunity, for Hellman had an odd relationship to reality, and some recall that much of what she said happened, didn't (recall Mary McCarthy's 1969 indictment of Hellman on the Dick Cavett Show, where she called Hellman a "liar"). 

Biographies can act as a palette cleanser after bouts of fiction, history and theory, and I try to choose those that remind us of a world outside the life of its subject. Peter Manso's 1994 biography of Marlon Brando (1924-2004) had its subject living in a world devoid of national and global events, a decision that irritated me until I realized Brando wasn't interested in the world the media told him to be interested in, but in issues of his own choosing -- more fundamental issues, like Indigenous rights to land, language and custom -- issues that no one in the media was talking about. For Brando, acting in a play or a film was a means of making money to fund such causes (and perhaps atone for his profligate lifestyle), and the best way to convey that was to bring down those trying to make the films where Brando's presence was enough to ensure their financial success.

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) also had her causes, most notably labour politics and her work towards a Screen Writers' Guild, which studio heads like Samuel Goldwyn pushed back at with the ferocity of an Alabama cotton boss. Throughout the first 100 pages (I am currently on page 113), Wright reminds us of the influence a no-bullshit paternal aunt had on Hellman's earliest years in New Orleans, where this aunt ran a boarding house that Hellman and her parents sometimes called home. But Hellman had a quieter, interior side too. Here's a passage drawn from one of Hellman's three celebrated memoirs:

"At times Hellman also gives us enough information to construct our own pictures, some of them lovely indeed. For instance, she writes of outfitting her fig tree bower with various comforts and conveniences, among them a nail in the tree trunk on which she hug her dress. Putting it all together we get the following scene: young Lillian cradled in the arms of a fig tree, above the street life of 1914 New Orleans, intently reading a book too old for her while she sipped a bottle of red soda pop, dressed only in her underwear." (17)

Day's Slacks

There is so much going on in the tag for Day's slacks. Yes, they're "slim," and maybe "bold," but you have to be slim to wear them, and if you're not, then a "bold" statement to be sure. As for "active," just putting on a pair of Day's slacks makes everyday a day at the drop zone.

The Modernia-esque "stencil" font is nice. So too are the desert boots. I'm guessing the car is a '64 Chevy Impala Super Sport, which is red like the grass and sits nicely before the golden sunset. What happens after that sun goes down is up to the imagination, but for the lonely Moose Jaw accountant who struggles with the truth of his imagination, not my business.

Here's another tag from Day's (also from Woo's latest haul of deadstock). This one I'm calling "No Hands Pissing":

Mac on Main

The red mac was well-received by Natalie (above), proprietor of Woo Vintage Clothing. Later, she sent pictures of her last days of winter "70s/80s Canadiana" window display.

"Fresh up" indeed, though I've always found 7up too sweet.

School Rules! (2021)

School Rules! is a picture book (ages 3-8) written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by David Whamond. It tells the story of Cassandra, a real-life person who wrote to Munsch as a child and told him the most interesting thing about herself is that she loves going to school.

Of course not all that happens at school is blissful (a "slightly scary principal," a tattooed janitor, etc) which I guess is the point of Munsch's book: to convince children who don't like -- or are afraid of -- school to think of it as good medicine (but not a vaccine, or a place where masks are worn).

When I checked the School Rules! publication date I saw that it came out in July 2021, a couple months before the 2021-2022 school year. This would be Year Three of the pandemic, when some kids still had no idea of what school was -- at least not as we knew it.

School for me was a highly regulated affair, where we pretty much learned by rote and routine. Today's Grade Three student has thus far had nothing but irregularities and improvisation, which is great for those who have adapted to it, because the super heroes of the future are more likely to be McGyvers than Batman, Xena or the Black Panther.

Red Mac

I never had much luck at Value Village because I never went enough. Like a lot of things in life, the more we show up, the greater the likelihood. 

Earlier this week I was at the Victoria Drive Value Village and found a barely-worn, red M-sized Champion brand "Mac" jacket marked $10.49. Madly, I snapped it up, held it to my breast, never checking to see if it fit until I got home, where I found that it didn't (too tight in the shoulders, too short in the sleeves). Oh well. Someone will love it. I took a look online and my god if these jackets aren't fetching a princely sum.

For those interested I will consign the garment at Woo on Main Street, where I will leave the pricing to professionals. Whatever I make from this sale I will spend on poetry.

Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021)

The British Columbia Review is the new name of the Ormsby Review, an online site whose focus is B.C. books, a determination based on B.C. authors or authors who spent time here, who published their books with a B.C.-based publisher and/or make B.C their setting.

"Ormsby" stood for Margaret Ormsby (1909-1996), a historian considered by some to be the first to write a comprehensive (if not ethnocentric) history of the province. But "British Columbia" is a double sin given that the British were a colonizing force when her ships dropped anchor in what is now called Burrard Inlet in the 1790s -- just as the Genoan Christopher Columbus entered Caribbean waters 300 years before that, when he claimed to have "discovered" America.

How long this new title will last will likely depend on how it is responded to. In the meantime, we still have a George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award despite the ex-Brit's own ethnocentrism, most notably in his provincial travelogue Ravens and Prophets (1952); and an Ethel Wilson B.C. Book Prize for Fiction, despite the South African-born author's own ghastly depictions of non-white British Columbians in the opening pages of her best-known novel Swamp Angel (1953).

With that said, my review of Larissa Lai's Iron Goddess of Mercy (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021) is now up on what is for now known as the British Columbia Review. 

No War on Main Street

No one wants war. Not even warring nations like Russia, whose Putin expected everyone to back down, like the USSR backed down during the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. No one backed down and Russian soldiers were ordered to plow ahead -- invading Ukraine, destroying its civic buildings, killing its citizens. What was said to be a liberation of two southern breakaway republics of Russian-speakers was suddenly an attack on the capitol. 

An invasion is not a war, nor is an attack. Ukrainians are defending themselves from invasion, attacks. When is war? Does it begin with a declaration? The Korean War was not a war -- not officially -- and as of this minute there is no formal declaration that it is over. Nor was the Vietnam War a war (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). To refer to what's happening in Ukraine right now as a war absolves the Russians from starting it.

I appreciate businesses daring to express their beliefs, particularly when these beliefs are unpopular. Such a gesture tells me that what one believes in is more important than money. But what is this sign saying? NO WAR, yes, but then Ukraine's flag, as if it is Ukraine we are saying "NO" to? And if I went inside this bar and asked for a Stoli rocks? How about if I went inside and offered them $100 to pour the bottle down the sink? Just how far are people willing to go to get it right? 

Apostrophes

The closure of the Army, Navy, Air Force Veterans (ANAF Vets) Legion Unit #298 (aka the Taurus Club) at 23rd & Main in 2019 preceded the pandemic. It had nothing to do with poor sales and everything to do with the inevitable accumulation of licensing improprieties that plague businesses run by people concerned less with profit than with living life in the moment.

Opened in the early-1950s, the Legion was both a pub for vets and for those in the neighbourhood who enjoyed an inexpensive draft without having to order food to do so (Vancouver liquor laws being what they were until the 1980s). The Legion also had a gorgeous shuffle board that the Galloway-Chong-Henderson Salon was partial to, a salon that met every Thursday night until the Henderson part moved to Victoria and the Galloway part learned the hard way that nothing good ever comes from drinking with your students.

A couple months ago I noticed the legion had reopened as a private business, and then a couple week's ago the name: Hero's Walk. Okay, so that's the new name. But is it really? Surely the owners don't mean "hero" in the singular; not when so many of us are exploring/celebrating our relational links to ancestry, identity, political economy, aesthetics, etc. Unless the apostrophe is less a possessive or a contraction than a stand-in for the letter "e" in "heroes". Is that it? Like the "and" in rock 'n' roll is an "'n'"? Heroes Welcome is a better name.

Oddly enough, just south of Hero's Welcome, a sign for an upcoming show whose title plays on its subject, the musical explorer Frank Zappa, who in 1974 put out a album called Apostrophe.