Month: November 2008

Oh, To Remember

Quite a few years ago now, I was living up at Yonge and Eglinton, my least favourite neighbourhood in the city, in an awful city-run apartment building with cockroaches and crazies. The rent was cheap. The commute was easy. I was also working in the financial industry and trying like mad to get some of my writing published so that I could simply call myself something other than a “customer service representative.”

My brother often stayed in the tiny apartment that I shared with another girl (keep in mind it was a bachelor; I don’t know how we all fit) because he was going to school in Toronto at the time and living in Markham. We were up late one night talking about war and Robyn said, “I don’t believe in war,” or something of the like. My brother turned to her and said that if it wasn’t for the Second World War he wouldn’t be here at all — and that’s just the plain truth of the matter.

My maternal grandfather fought, as his father had in the First World War, for the Allies. He met my grandmother in London, where she was born and raised, and they married even before the war had finished. I have copies of their letters to his parents and they are gorgeous. Full of the first blush of love and the kind of happiness that comes just after one gets married, the letters are a wonderful time capsule of their lives. Yet, they’re also so representative of the spirit of the times; I think, at one point, my grandfather writes, “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re fighting a war over here…” to his father. Young men in uniform and young women fighting beyond the homefront. Lives forever changed and generations existing simply because these young men and women were brave enough to make the sacrifice.

Living through a war, I would imagine, is not something one easily forgets. For years my grandmother did not waste anything. She washed and bent the tin cans so they could be easier reused. She made our clothes. She gave me cups of tea and a half an aspirin if I was feeling poorly. But she never really talked about the war. And because she died before I knew enough about the history to ask, I read her letters and feel as though I know her better. I miss her every day. So now when I listen to the pipers on Remembrance Day, I think of all of my relatives here in Canada and abroad who made it possible for me to type these very words you’ve just finished reading. Lest we forget.

The Ridiculous To The Sublime

I’m a little foggy-headed this morning so in between fiddling with HTML code for work, I surfed the rounds and discovered:

1. I am usually the last to see these things. That doesn’t make them any less disturbing (totally NSFW).

2. Like so many people in the world, I celebrated the results of the US election. But this picture / piece of art grabbed my attention because when you see so clearly the stunning truth of history in the making it’s really quite incredible.

Now I’m going back to my code.

TRH Movie – Pride and Glory

Not feeling happy with my own company yesterday, I needed to get out of the house. Feeling suburban and kind of exhausted, I drove myself out to the Queensway cinema to see Pride and Glory (sometimes you can take the girl out of Mississauga but you can’t always take Mississauga out of the girl). From the tagline and trailer you’d expect a fairly typical good cop vs. bad cop drama set on the gritty streets of NYC, and that’s pretty much what you get, but the script is good (save for a couple of quasi-lame, quite derivative sub-plots; tell me, why do all abandoned their “difficult” marriages cops end up living on boats?) and so are the performances.

Ed Norton wears a jagged scar on his cheek and a clean cut “cop” goatee. He’s a very serious detective who made a bad judgment call a ways back and now atones for that sin toiling his time away in Missing Persons. The entire 31 division (is that right?) is playing a football game when the call comes in that there’s been a terrible incident in Washington Heights that’s left four cops dead. Pulled back into mainstream cop life by his high-up cop father (Jon Voight), Ray Tierney (Norton) joins the task force and starts pulling down the cards supporting the “house” and revealing some pretty crooked business. The trouble? His brother, Francis (Noah Emmerich), is the CO and any wrong doing will end up stacked high on his shoulders. Toss in the fact that the trouble is somewhat caused by his brother-in-law (Colin Farrell) and suddenly this the “blue family” of cops now has bloodlines and baby sisters and all kinds of other sibling rivalry to cope with on top of the usual ideals of loyalty.

See, when I spell it out like that it all comes across as a little cliche, but the film itself is pretty good. It’s not an over-bloated epic like last year’s We Own the Night but it’s certainly not as complex and intriguing as The Departed. Yet, I liked the movie because the performances were honest, Norton and Emmerich play brothers, and while a lot of the action may be stereotypical, neither give a performance where they’re “playing” cops, if you get my meaning. There’s a particularly poignant scene where Emmerich simply stands up to become the kind of man his wife expects of him (she’s sick; you know where that’s headed and where it’s came from; there’s nothing new there) and it’s subtle, effective and somewhat moving. On the whole, it’s a solid picture, exactly what you’d expect from those involved.

#63 – Hunger

In my last post about the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, I was full of resentment over having slogged my way through American Pastoral. With Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, I’ve now forgiven the list. As the unnamed protagonist wanders around Christiania (Oslo) starving and half-mad, he narrates the decline of both his physical and mental states. Hunger is a striking, captivating novel that feels utterly modern in its conception with echoes of the stream of conscious-type narratives that I am ever-so fond of reading.

Originally published in 1890, the struggles of the writer to simply live, to find a warm, dry place to sleep, to keep his body protected, to find food to satiate the most basic of the body’s expectations, seem beyond him for many reasons. He has no money because he hasn’t sold an article (he has sold many articles to the pawnbroker, though). He’s been evicted because he can’t pay the rent. His appearance deteriorates as the novel continues leaving bits and pieces of his hair all over the city (it’s always falling out!). While respite comes throughout the book in various different places, the overall suffering and consistent starvation of the narrator, his awful living conditions, and the fact that at one point he resorts to sucking on wood chips ensures that he never really comes through the other side.

In a life where a few pennies (øres?) would make a world of difference, the writer clings to a sense of his own morality. He refuses to steal any food for survival. He pays back his debts (even if it means he’ll starve once again). He believes entirely in the value of his written words if only he could get his mind to work. He simply never asks for help. Then, driven to the brink of madness, the writer finally sacrifices his freedom for survival, and it’s a bittersweet moment.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, and from what I can discern from the biography in the back of the book, his own struggles to make a living from his work inspired aspects of Hunger. The author’s strength of character comes through (sitting atop a train after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and breathing in as much air as humanly possible) both in terms of the power within this novel but also in his personal story. Balancing out the basic needs of life with the kind of hard work the narrator resigns himself to just in order to survive, the entire book feels like a testament to the kind of men who value ideals of strength in character above all else. All in all, it’s a magnificent book. One that I would have never discovered had I not embarked upon the whole 1001 Books Challenge in the first place.

READING CHALLENGES: Killing two challenges with one book: Norway for Around the World in 52 Books and another 1001 Books title.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: My second-hand copy underneath my 1001 text, which has a far superior jacket image.