The Amalfi Effect

There is an Italian restaurant I love in London. Located near the British Museum, in Southampton Row, it's called the Old Amalfi.

I keep returning to this place not so much for its food or service, although these are good, but for what I have come to think of as the Amalfi effect.

What I love best is to sit beside the mirror wall and look out into the street, watching as two big red double deckers appear to drive into one another and disappear, as seen above.

It's also exciting to watch cars appear from nowhere and dash away from one another, and to watch pedestrians clone, walk towards one another and then vanish.

Joy of ironing

Picture from Richmond Auctions Service

Today I made a couple of tablecloths from lovely scarlet brocade. After patiently straightening and measuring and hemming, I ironed the hems flat.

It brought back memories. First, of the "sad irons" we had when I was a kid. There were two cast iron blades and a handle doohickey that was used to pick them up. When the one you were using cooled, you pulled a lever and dropped that back on the stove, then picked up the other one, by now nicely heated.

I didn't know why they were sad -- but they did have to be heated on top of the wood stove, but the pain of sitting on top of the stove could have done it, I thought. Turns out that sad is a throwback to an older meaning, heavy, which is now obsolete.

As a kid, I loved ironing. But things sometimes went wrong. I remember leaving the iron on a nylon lace trimmed collar too long, and being dismayed when I half melted it. I also remember that one time my little brother's hand somehow got between the heavy iron and the ironing board. Unfortunately for him, I wasn't fast enough to avoid giving him a slight press.

These days, we rarely iron. Many fabrics don't need pressing, and besides, few people feel they have the time for such details. Most clothes can be caught on the fly as they come out of the dryer, and folded or hung up before they have a chance to develop any wrinkles.

The sad irons and holders in the picture are being offered for sale in Coderre, Saskatchewan, as "antiques and collectibles."

Turn, Turn, Turn

Original cover image from sound stage direct

"To everything there is a season."

The words are from the Bible, and the idea they express is bedrock.

And not only for the cultures descended from the Judeo-Christian tradition by way of Europe.

But who would have thought that the hit song the Byrds brought out in the midst of the heady social rebellions of 1969 would be built around a quotation from Ecclesiastes?

When I first listened to the lyrics, I was a naive young teenager. Drawn to the song for its music and poetry, I sensed its profundity too.

Now I wonder: what impelled those young musicians to express such sentiments in song? Listening to the lyrics as I looking back over the intervening forty-years, I now know the truth of the lines as told through my own experience.

The Byrds album with that song on it was the first one I ever bought. I was working in The Hub, my first real job. We sold tobacco and magazines, books and souvenirs, and we weighed out warm roasted peanuts and red-dyed pistachios from a nut machine of a type then fashionable.

At the back of the store was the music counter. Pure bliss, especially in the midst of that rich renaissance of folk music.

Before I got the album, I had to buy a turntable, because we didn't have one at home. Dad installed it in an old Marconi radio cabinet, and hooked it up to the single radio speaker. No stereo, but the album still sounded good.

How radically access to music has changed. Now the internet makes it possible to listen with joy, at a moment's notice, to any of numerous versions of any song online. So here is is, from 1969, "Turn, Turn, Turn."

By the way, The Byrds are not the only ones to be taken by this ancient line. Canadian writer Alistair Macleod has used this as a title for a Christmas story, which can be heard as a CBC radio podcast here.

Thomas King and Candace Savage

Book cover picture from CBC Books

The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King (Doubleday 2012) recently hit the top of the bestseller Non-fiction list in The Vancouver Sun. The author begins his discussion with the lack of shared assumptions between "Indians" and "whites," the terms he has settled on for the purpose of this discussion.

For one thing, the Canada - US border is a construct that has no intrinsic meaning for native tribes, says King.

Though this book is discursive, funny and personal, the author's academic rigour is unimpeachable as he exposes the propaganda and bombast behind the history we've been taught. King's unique history should be required reading for high school students.

This author is a master storyteller, as he demonstrated in the Massey Lectures of 2003. In "The Truth about Stories, a Native Narrative" King discussed the white man's irrational antipathy towards Indians. Five lectures were done in the format of a single story, re-told five times with new variations. These series showed King at his most brilliant, as he moved from comedy to tragedy and back in a powerful act of oral storytelling.

The current book has recently been reviewed in the Vancouver Sun, the Star (Toronto), and the Montreal Gazette.

Though Candace Savage was interviewed about her book on CBC radio, her book, A Geography of Blood: unearthing memory from a prairie landscape, (Greystone, 2012) is not on the lists. Her work resembles King's in that it reports the author's personal experience, in her case, coming to terms with the fact that the proud mythology of the prairie settlers is a partial fabric with gaping holes.

Savage's description of opening herself to the consciousness of the morally reprehensible aspects of our nation's history is impressive. She writes of the slaughter of the buffalo, and of the painful displacement of aboriginal peoples who paid in suffering so that land could be surveyed for settlers, and the unifying railroad built. She describes the horror of the Cypress Hills Massacre, so little known though it happened such a very short time ago.

It's interesting that these two works came out so close in time, and so near the time of  the hunger strike by Theresa Spence and the associated Idle No More movement of aboriginal people from all over Canada to get some serious recognition from the federal government, which is in the process of passing legislation that deeply affects the future of aboriginal groups, once again without having consulted them.

A checkered career?

I held my glasses up to the light to see how badly they needed cleaning (or was it my blurred vision?)

And I made an interesting discovery. They magnified and warped the grid lines of the screen door.

In metaphorical terms, this raises questions.

First, though I know what it means to look at the world through rose coloured spectacles, I now wonder what it means to look at the world through tiny squares. A tendency to compartmentalize?

Also, if I looked backwards through these glasses, would I perhaps be regarding my checkered past?

Groundhog Day prognostications

Photo from borealforest.org

At Geekquinox, they say in rhyme that he didn't see his shadow, but Canada is a big place.

If a groundhog peeped out of his burrow in Surrey today he definitely saw his shadow. Does this truly portend six more weeks of winter? Considering today's balmy weather, that seems hard to believe.

Or am I tempting fate to say so?

Bridging the green gap

Book cover from Vancouver Observer website

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a book launch. Published by the Vancouver Observer, Extract: The Pipeline Wars Volume I Enbridge is a collection of writings that oppose the building of the Northern Gateway Pipeline on environmental grounds.

The event was to be held in the fashionable downtown Ceili's Irish Pub, but the venue was changed at the last moment because of a police incident in the area. I had planned to go by transit, but the other Ceili's location was not so accessible by transit.

Also, it had free parking. I changed my plans and drove. My writing friend Carrie Saxifrage was a contributor, and I wanted to turn out and hear her read.

Half the pub was reserved for the launch, and screens were set up around the room showing a series of beautiful slides of wild country and the animals that live there.

The half of the pub where the launch was not going on was occupied by pairs and groups of drinkers, many of whom were intent on a football game being broadcast on huge televisions that clashed with the silent salmon and grizzly bears on the other screens.

Between football footage, ads on these huge TVs promoted "Canada's Number One Pickup Truck," shown traveling through the forest with a Bobcat in tow. Now isn't that a wise use of fossil fuel?

On the other screens, the sponsors of the nature pictures were shown in tasteful small logos around the edge: LUSH, Spud, Hollyhock, Board of Change.

Contributors to the book rose gamely and read or spoke, but the only voice that was really audible on our side of the room was that of Tzeporah Berman. The others were mostly drowned out by the din of the packed pub.

The only refuge for the eardrums was the ladies' room. From there I could hear the speakers better than I could from our table, though it was quite near where they stood.

Like the football fans on the other side of the pub, the young of the green energy lobby were in one another's arms and also on their smart phones.

At the next break in the football game, TV commercials showed motorcycle races and blared out ads for oil-guzzling dirt bikes.

When I made my escape from the noise, this is what I was thinking. We may talk green, but we're all implicated. Enslaved by all those toys that require more and more energy. We're involved in a spiralling addiction to wasting oil that is planet wide.

What we are doing is insane. Building a pipeline to carry Alberta bitumen to the coast where we can waste more oil shipping it by tanker across the ocean to a distant continent where it will be used as fuel to make more stuff -- most of it unnecessary. That stuff will be shipped back over here to be sold, wasting still more oil.

It's beyond crazy. And it has to stop.