Posts by dyan campbell
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Dyan's excellent summary does miss one key fact: Canadian and US Thanksgivings are on different dates, so if you play your cards rights you get to do it all twice.
That's true, Canada's Thanksgiving is in October, USA's in November... this is because colder climate+earlier harvest.
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I'm with you Giovanni. It can also be a nice way to meet the neighbours or like Jackie create a little community spirit.
Heartily agreed, people like Jackie and Giovanni with friendly open attitudes towards others in the community make those communities better places to live.
(Also, I say adopt Thanksgiving! You get to eat lots of great things, and no one expects gifts or goes door to door.)
What do they give thanks for anyway?
The tradition started off as a kind of hybrid harvest festival and big thank-you to the indigenous people for helping them survive. It has evolved into a really nice gathering around a roast turkey and (sweet spiced) pumpkin pie dinner.
The "thanksgiving" part of it is a tradition that has everyone think of (and in the old days, say) at least one thing they are thankful for in their lives - it can be anything. Having running water when many in the world don't have clean water at all. Having health, when there's probably someone you can think of who doesn't. Having people to love and who love you. Until the 1960s or so people used to be asked this and make a small speech or declaration in turns around the table. This tradition is pretty much extinct nowadays, but still existed in my childhood.
This may sound sickening to those who prefer a more hip and cynical approach to life, but there are plenty of studies from Harvard and Johns Hopkins med schools that prove this sort of attitude can go a long way to keeping health problems at bay.
Between the fact that no gifts are exchanged and religion is completely absent from the festival Thanksgiving has been saved from being divisive in the community (the way Christmas is) or a commercial parody of itself, like Valentine's Day, Christmas.
There is a complete absence of any religious significance, no gifts are exchanged but the tradition does dictate that it should also include some sharing of resources, some recognition of people in the community who might need help. At Thanksgiving the city missions are always given a big boost in donations and volunteer help.
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I could observe the fear and trepidation on the creature assaulting my castle, i was a MOTHER!!!!!!
Should have read "It was a MOTHER!!!!"
Aww, spoilsport Steve.
I was particularly enjoying this ghoulish, Halloween appropriate, nature defied, man-gives-birth-and-terrifies-himself-in-his-foyer story.
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<quote>Continuing with Huysmans, I love this quote from Arthur Symonds (found on Wikipedia, natch):
Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor
What a great quote. And yes, Joris Karl Huysmans, not Adolph Huysmans, I hadn't looked at Against Nature in years and had the author confused with the artist Adolph Huygens.
All the authors that are a little nut-ball on closer reading - Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, Johnathan Swift, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, Cervantes - authors for whom plausible story lines weren't a priority - I was lucky enough to have these and dozens of other books read to me at a very early age before I had critical faculty whatsoever, so it was easier to enjoy. Mind you, I heard Don Quixote too early, and spent the whole book thinking I must have slept through the parts where that Donkey named Hotey featured. I figured Hotey the Donkey must be a friend of the horse Rocinante.
I was very taken with books that dealt with horrible themes, and particularly enjoyed Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Year of the Plague Year and Ralph Lapp's Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, the true account of the slow and agonising death of Japanese sailors who were too close to a US test bomb in the Pacific. My Mum was not aware of the concept of "age appropriate" so I was able to enjoy these accounts of gruesome deaths at age while my contemporaries heard The Cat in the Hat. This is not to say I understood everything I heard (clearly the case with Cervantes) but it did make me seem extremely well read when I started school.
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I loved Secret History for much the same reason that Emma stated (and possibly the same conversation). What I never forgave Donna Tartt for was her second book: The Little Friend
Agreed, The Little Friend was apalling, and I don't think it would have been published at all without all the massive success of Tartt's first book.
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Donna Tart's "The Secret History"; which is divided into two parts but contains just one event.
I enjoyed The Secret History, but I can understand a modern reader's frustration at the absence of events. One review called it a "whodunnit that tells you whodiddit right whentheydunnit" which is fair, except I don't think Donna Tartt set out to write a murder mystery, I think she set out to write a modern study of remorse. Themes like that are not usually found in modern books, which are usually plot driven.
"I'm 100 pages in and nothing has happened!"
That could be said of many of my favourite books, but then I don't read because I want things to happen, but because I love good writing. In A Rebours ("Against Nature") nothing happens what. so. ever. The "hero" Des Esseintes doesn't even leave the room for whole chapters (except to have a turtle encrusted in jewels).
Like you I don't care if events happen, and like you I loved Adolph Huysman's Against Nature. (That poor turtle, the book's hero should have stuck to his mechanical fish). I also loved Goncharov's Oblomov, the first slacker novel, where the hero does nothing except lie on a sofa and complain. Both of these were intended as cautionary fable or satire of a growing trend, like Brave New Word and 1984 a couple generations later.
But what someone (Craig?) said earlier about Forester being... "pretentious and dull" - I can't find the original quote, I agreed and it reminded me of what Katherine Mansfield said about Forester's writing (or was it Virginia Woolf's? It applied to both) "They are forever warming the pot, but when, oh when are we to have tea?"
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and at the risk of sounding like I'm pissing on the grave of a deeply troubled woman, would anyone really give a shit if she hadn't been one of Ted Hughes many mistresses and part of his whole psychodrama with Plath? I'm certainly no fan of Hughes' work -- and from what little biography I've read, not sure I'd have liked the man much either -- but you've got to feel some sympathy for a man who saw the ugliest and saddest part of his life dug up and subjected to the most degraded and degrading form of biographical necrophilia for decades.
Good god yes, sympathy for poor old Ted Hughes in that mess. I don't think he could possibly be blamed for either of their suicides, and as for Assia killing Shura, her 4 year old daughter with Hughes, well, I think that's evidence of her own mental instability rather than anything Hughes did. Plus she attempted suicide before, downing a bottle of asprin when she was still married to John Steele. But what an awful mess, I've other thought of Plath & Hughes's children, they would be about my age.
But no, I don't think anyone would care about any of them if it weren't for the suicides and the murder of Shura. I don't think Plath would be half as famous as she was if she hadn't killed herself.
But men certainly cared for Assia, that's for sure, they went mad over her. My poor teacher, he was still dying a bit every day, and Assia had been dead for years when I knew him, and his involvement has ceased pretty early on in the piece, long before she succeeded in killing herself. And Shura.
But in terms of writers who portray depression well, I think for instance NZ writer O.E. Middleton, who is barely read here is a vastly superior writer to Plath, in both conveying a nervous breakdown (__Killing and Ocelot__ I think his novel was called) but also in being able to observe someone or something besides himself during the deepest sort of depression, as in his short story The Duchess and the Doss House. But O.E. Middleton is pretty obscure especially in the world stage, while Plath is famous. Like lot of creative fields, people become famous for all sorts of reasons, not all of them really related to their creativity.
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__Why is the Bell Jar disturbing but Hamlet isn't?__
I actually think both are enormously disturbing, but for different reasons. I know there are certain quarters where I'll be spat on as a misogynistic patriarch for this, but I loathe Sylvia Plath (and Robert Lowell and the rest of the so-called "confessional" poets) because she never seemed to lift her eyes above her own navel.
I don't think this is a misogynistic view at all Craig. I find Sylvia Plath boring in her narrow focus, which is never taken off her own mental illness, paranioa and personal suffering. For someone who wrote obsessively about herself she was very short on insight.
We didn't study Plath, but my high school literature teacher John Steele was the first husband of Assia Wevill, the beautiful and toxic other woman in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's marriage.
Mr. Steele was an RAF paratrooper who met Assia Wevill in Tel Aviv (she'd fled Germany with family in 1933 or thereabouts). John Steele and Assia Wevill married in London shortly after and Assia promptly attempted suicide when Mr. Steele sprung it on her that they were going to emigrate to Canada. The thought of Canada horrified her, as she thought this would mean intellectual death. Turns out she loved Canada, found the intelligentsia right away, and embarked on a series of affairs with various students and profs at UBC, as well as iconic Canadian poet, Earle Birney.
John and Assia were friends with my parents, though Assia split from the scene pretty early on. Mr. Steele was profoundly damaged by his relationship with her, and still in love with her when I knew him (1975 or thereabouts) which by then must have been more than 25 years after she'd dumped him.
He taught my sister Shirley in grade 6, in Prince Rupert BC, and 18 years later he taught me English Lit in senior high school, in Victoria. He was a great teacher - had the most disengaged kids in the class hanging off every word of Milton or Byron - and he tried his best to introduce me to the literary world. No success, as I was only faintly interested in most of the writers to whom he introduced me (Alice Munro, Dorothy Livesay) but it was nice to be included for those kinds of dinners all the same. Actually he was an awesome cook. I disappointed him by going into biochem instead of literature.
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And while the Starlight Tours were courtesy of the Provincial police, (Saskatchewan) the RCMP (Federal Police) could be depended upon to find the provincial cops did nothing wrong...
And here is an RCMP investigation that absolves the RCMP themselves...
[(http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ccaps/sled_dogs_final_e.htm|Final Report: RCMP Review of Allegations Concerning Inuit Sled Dogs)]
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dyan, you remind me somehow of today's first comic from Kate Beaton.
Thank you Stephen, but much as I enjoy the RCMP's reputation as the most adorable of all Federal Police, I have to say their reputation is a little... nicer than the reality. [(http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/aboriginals/starlighttours.html|CBC News In Depth: Aboriginal Canadians )]