The Beauty of 8 Degrees Fahrenheit, and a Light Breeze

In the hour between getting to the bank and the town dump, and school dismissal, I went out for a walk on my snowshoes.  The town recreation path is conveniently located between the dump and the school and every nickel of our tax dollars is very well spent on it.  Don't you agree?

Too Cool Shopping

I was catching up on back episodes of Portlandia as I took down the Christmas stuff today.  This was a highlight.  (You've seen this store, right?  I never have the nerve to face down the two girls or to look at their two shirts).

As the World Turns...

One last spin for 2012.  We are back up at the Last House after too long away for a very modest New Year's Eve celebration.  It will feature Italian Sparkling Wine Product at midnight.  Wooo hooo! The Infanta is off at her own New Year's Eve celebration, a sleep over with friends (one last first for 2012).  So it is just Whusband, Shackleton, Maisy and I.  No complaints though. The snow is fluffy and knee deep here and the world is all pewter and white.  A standing rib roast is in the oven, Maisy is under my feet (in the gap between the wing chair and the footstool).  A fine farewell to 2012 and best wishes to all for the year ahead.

"The Weary Time Between Dinner and Dark"

Hi all (three of you).  Sorry for the inactivity here.  The dust lies deep and crisp and even.  But I am back! And with a little bit of thrillingly well-composed English prose for you.  (Not mine, as if!).

I have posted a few of my favorite passages from classic books here, very occasionally, and I am back with one more today.  I have been re-reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, which I have not read since high school.  Hardy became one of my enthusiasms way back then, and re-reading him now I find more (great insight into the human condition) and less (plot device overreaching) to admire about him.  He was a poet as well as a novelist and it shows.  I bookmarked many passages as read, but this one was so wonderful I felt it my duty to share.  Here he is describing the losers of Casterbridge, the distinctions between them and the distinctions between town bridges to which they repair in their bad moments:

There was a marked difference of quality between the personages who haunted the near bridge of brick and the personages who haunted the far one of stone.  Those of lowest character preferred the former, adjoining the town; they did not mind the glare of the public eye. [...]

The miserables who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer stamp.  They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class--shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark. The eye of this species were mostly directed over the parapet upon the running water below.  A man seen there looking thus fixedly into the river was pretty sure to be one whom the world did not treat kindly for some reason or other.  While one in straits on the townward bridge did not mind who saw him so, and kept his back to the parapet to survey the passers-by, one in straits on this never faced the road, never turned his head at coming footsteps, but, sensitive to his own condition, watched the current whenever a stranger approached, as if some strange fish interested him, though every finned thing had been poached out of the river years before.

I am not much of a joiner, but if there were a society for the defense of well-written novels, I would join.  I know they are still out there, but the huge successes of E.L. James and her ilk has me depressed.  Happily, I do find lots of gems are there to be discovered, often in books now in the public domain.  Since no one has a financial interest in promoting them anymore, it seems they go largely unnoticed and aren't read unless under compulsion of an English teacher.  The good news is that they are often FREE on Kindle or on the internet if you have an interest.

I am always looking for recommendations.  I prefer works of staggering genius.  Contemporary writers are welcome but no mediocrities please.  Best wishes for the week ahead...

My Letter From Robertson Davies

I know at least one thing that Robertson Davies did on June 9, 1987.  He wrote (well, probably dictated) a letter to me.   

I have been moving pictures around these last months and this letter, in the cheap plastic box frame in which it has been housed for 25 years, just came up for rotation.  I re-read it yesterday and got quite choked up.  Davies once said: "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."   Likewise, a great letter.  

I was thrilled at 22 to have a little notice from the great man.  At 47 I am touched by the kindness he showed to an earnest and rather ridiculous 22-year-old.

I can't remember just what I wrote but his response refreshes my recollection. I finished my B.A. at old McGill in the Spring of 1987.  My "Honours" essay (the scare quotes are for the English/Canadian spelling and for what I imagine was the quality of the essay) was about the way Davies' sets up his characters for their punishments or rewards in his famous Deptford Trilogy.  (Goodness and badness are complicated matters there - much to do with spiritual courage and psychological honesty rather than any outward do-goodism).   I felt deep sympathy for Davies' worldview (and still do). When I finished the paper, I was compelled to write to him about it and to tell him how much his books had meant to me.  Good, kind, wise man that he was - I found this in my Schenectady mail box a few weeks later.  

He is responding in the first paragraph to what I said to him about my feeling for McGill.  I went there following a freshman year at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  I loved McGill - an English Colonial dream of a university - from the moment I set foot on the campus.  Binghamton was an important experience too, but a (foolishly) romantic girl who thought college = Brideshead Revisted could not find a lot to love in the Rockefellerish prevent-a-student-riot aesthetic of the buildings and the pragmatic good-value-seeking student body.  Not a clock tower or a grey stone in sight and no one who would have wanted to pay for one even if available.  (Many very bright people were there, though, and I know that is really more important but, as noted, I was a little deluded).

Robertson Davies died in 1995 and it seems to me that he is fading (unjustly) into obscurity.  I re-read his best and most famous book, Fifth Business, this summer.  His observation about the benefit of a lifelong involvement with a good book was wholly borne out.  
After I re-read the letter yesterday, this relic from a the pre-internet age, it seemed to me almost a duty to share it.  I hope you will like it too.

As a few of your regular-stoppers-by know, I have been engaged for years in writing a book of my own.  (Coming January 2013-Watch this space!).  A central character is my own Professor Davies - Morgan Davies, that is, a time traveler with a biography wholly different from R. Davies, but very much inspired by his example - and looking just like him.

Most Useful Information on Twitter So Far

One of the people I follow on Twitter informed us today that "not my problem" translates into the Polish idiom "Nie moj cyrk nie moje malpy."  Literally:  "Not my circus.  Not my Monkey."

Thank you Poland.

Learn to Love Me, Assemble the Ways

    Sooo.  Saw Morrissey tonight in Burlington.  A few post concert observations before bed: a lot of it was assaultive, but in a good way (mostly).  There was some sonic activity that I can't quite explain or make sense of; a lot of film clips of bad TV variety acts of the 60s and early 70s with horrible audio - a group called "The Sparks" sang (in their 1974 pants) about not turning your back on your mother while Dutch subtitles explained something about the Sparks' career ups and downs (I could puzzle out just that much, though it may not have been Dutch...).  A long-bangs-60s-girl-singer rode through  Leicester Square? Picadilly Circus? apparently on the top of a bus or van and mouthed the words to a banal 60s song.  An extremely low tone was blasted through the house at one point and made me fear for the building's structural integrity.  Pity the poor non-Morrissey fan who may have stumbled in... esp. for the slaughterhouse sequence that played on the screen during a protracted red-lit version of Meat is Murder.  But I was ready for him, and I mostly just loved it.

One big thing is that Morrissey can sing.  His voice is right there where it was when I was shouting over it in bars on Saturday nights in the 1980s.  Also, there is something terribly authentic about him.  I sense that other (bigger) stars, like Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson, would probably be a little afraid of him or feel intimidated.  Still, I am guessing he must really need money to be doing such a tour and he's not above putting his face on $30 T shirts (yes, I bought one).  How does he do it?  Be the artist apart and shill like this?

Also, he actually looked great - that vegetarian diet begins to really work its magic when one hits one's mid 50s.  And the crowd was full of (young) fans (bolstered, one suspects, by recreational pharmaceuticals) who kept leaping on stage to try and hug this charming man.  

The show was very disciplined and professional.  Plenty of money had been spent on excellent musicians.  Morrissey was working (and sweating) out there.  As much as I liked the music I also liked pondering the man himself.  I kept thinking, as the show progressed, of (bear with me) Stewie Griffin from Family Guy.  I could imagine Morrissey coming to consciousness as a child (a la Stewie) realizing that life means death and lots of suffering before death and being extremely pissed and unresolved to any such system.  "You mean I'm going to die and everyone and everything I ever loved will die too?  Whose crappy idea was that? I'm not having that. It sucks and I'll never stop saying so."