The Walrus
>The world no longer believes in suffering
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Atif Rafay, a convicted murderer, reflects on freedom and punishment @ The Walrus.
Once upon a time I saw a documentary featuring black and white footage of Glenn Gould, shot soon after his first recording of The Goldberg Variations, in which he had taken such extraordinary liberties — excessive liberties, some thought — with Bach. Although by then in his mid-twenties, the pianist gave the impression of being still almost a boy, still very much the prodigy. Seated outdoors, he answered his interviewer reluctantly, as if unused to conversation. Shifting around in the chair awkwardly, as if also unaccustomed to furniture, he spoke in quick runs, punctuated with abrupt halts. But gradually enthusiasm overcame diffidence. As he warmed to his theme, he became himself: voluble, playful, precise. The nimble fingers danced his ideas for the camera; the face radiated happiness and confidence. “I’ve often thought that I would like to try my hand at being a prisoner,” he said later in the film. “I’ve never understood the preoccupation with freedom as it is reckoned in the Western world… to be incarcerated would be the perfect test of one’s inner mobility.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I had known Gould’s recordings and writings for more than a decade when I heard this declaration, but though I had been incarcerated for just as long I didn’t think I understood freedom. I felt, rather, that prison had left me bereft. If I had been changed, it was not for the better.
>A world that was both familiar and strange
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Paul Wilson explores the life and landscapes of Stieg Larsson @ The Walrus.
I was late coming to Stieg Larsson and his wildly popular Millennium Trilogy. Last spring, when I started reading the first volume, some 20 million people had already beaten me to it. By August, when I finished the third, that figure had almost doubled. Numbers that big — phenomenal even beside such recent literary juggernauts as Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code — almost always result from word of mouth. But the buzz over Larsson’s books began even before they were published.
It started shortly after he submitted the manuscripts of all three novels to his Swedish publisher, Norstedts, in April 2004. Word spread quickly, and when the Frankfurt Book Fair rolled around that October publishers from all over the world were clamouring for a look. Translations were commissioned shortly after the first book appeared in Stockholm in early 2005, under the title Men Who Hate Women, and from there the groundswell grew, country by country. By the time it reached North America in 2008, as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, not even a bad review in the New York Times could stop it.
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I’m a fan of crime and espionage fiction, but the Millennium books were different. There was something mysterious about how, despite their obvious flaws, they drew you relentlessly into a world that was both familiar and strange. Instead of seeing that world from the perspective of a police force, detective agency, or newsroom, you saw it through a small magazine with big ambitions. Like his main character, Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson had been a journalist and a magazine editor, and I wondered how much of his own life had gone into his books? Or was I simply fascinated with Larsson’s Sweden, a country I’d always dismissed as being pretty much like Canada, only with more blondes, fitter grandmothers, and a better sense of design? His books made me want to know more.
>The 49th parallel
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Grant Stoddard explores a cartographer’s error and a town somewhere between the US and Canada @ The Walrus.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )One of the most striking things separating the United States and Canada is the line that divides the United States from Canada. While oceans, lakes, rivers, drainage basins, deserts, mountain ranges, and valleys dictate the size and shape of many nations, the pin-straight border running from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean is nothing if not completely and utterly arbitrary.
The western half of the world’s longest land border was laid down in three stages: In 1783, an understandably cocksure Benjamin Franklin won British acceptance of a border extending from the “northwesternmost point” of Lake of the Woods to the Boundary Waters laid out in the Treaty of Paris, the denouement of the United States’ fight for independence. This border would have made much more sense if the source of the Mississippi River had been where both parties suspected, but then it was a botanist, not a professional cartographer, who had created the map negotiators were working from.
In the aftermath of the second, wholly less conclusive war with Britain (the War of 1812), the forty-ninth parallel was established in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 as the border between Lake of the Woods and the Stony [Rocky] Mountains. In this agreement, the point identified by Franklin was linked to the slightly more southerly forty-ninth parallel by a north-south line that would later form the boundary between present-day Manitoba and Ontario.
A generation later, a potential third conflict with a Britain approaching the zenith of her imperial might was a risk US president James Polk was keen to avoid. Despite having run on an expansionist platform, and with hawks in his own party screaming “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” (the slogan of an initiative to push US territory north to the Russian colony of Alaska), Polk compromised, and the forty-ninth parallel boundary was extended beyond the Rockies to the Strait of Georgia. The Oregon Treaty in 1846, then, seemed to be the last significant amendment to the matter of the US-Canada border — until “Grumpy” Gary Dietzler had his revolutionary idea in the spring of 1997.
>It’s not possible to end it
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Matthieu Aikins on the counterinsurgency gamble in the Afghan war @ The Walrus.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It was the Fourth of July, and it was forty-five degrees outside. Under the blazing noonday sun, a few dozen soldiers stood around on bare gravel. They were mostly Americans from the 10th Mountain Division, in their distinctive black cavalry hats, mixed with a handful of Canadian soldiers and a few bearded civilians in jeans. Facing their semicircle was the short, stocky figure of Brigadier General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian commander of Task Force Kandahar.
We were at the Dand District Centre, a small compound in the heart of Deh-e Bagh, a village about five kilometres southwest of Kandahar City. Next to us stood the district police station and the headquarters of 1-71 Cavalry Squadron, an American armoured unit; behind us was the squat bulk of the district governor’s office. Dand District was one of the last areas in the southern province of Kandahar where Taliban insurgency — which a 2009 American intelligence report estimated to have grown fourfold in Afghanistan over the previous four years — had yet to take root. In Vance’s opinion, this success resulted from the military’s focused application of counterinsurgency principles: bringing security to the people, separating them from the insurgency, and building up their government by supporting development.
Vance wished the assembled soldiers a happy Fourth of July, then took them through the story of how they had come to be standing there sweltering in the highlands of South Asia. As he saw it, the war could be understood in three phases: The first, he explained, began with the aftermath of September 11, when the US and its allies toppled the Taliban government and established a minimal troop presence in the country, then, in the face of a growing insurgency, stuck to its development and counterterrorism missions.
The second phase, he said, started in late 2005 with the expansion of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) around the country. This phase was marked by the growing recognition that the conflict was a hot war against a resurgent guerrilla opponent. It featured pitched battles with Taliban fighters in the south, and then, after the Taliban scattered, a drawn-out struggle against a campaign of bombings, ambushes, and assassinations. The Canadian contingent of 2,500 soldiers had barely hung on in Kandahar. “We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win either,” Vance lectured.
>Steadfast Tel Aviv people
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Merielle Silcoff remembers the history and allure of the dancing Na Nach of Tel Aviv @ The Walrus.
It’s February in Montreal, and outside it’s freezing. I am walking through the echoing corridors of the Jewish Y on Westbury Avenue with three Hasidic men, two of whom are playing wind instruments. Doron is on sax, and David is on piccolo. Another guy, a local, is running ahead of them, peering into the windows of closed doors, looking for possible audiences. We are being kicked out of every room we enter. The Sephardic centre asked us gently to leave, the restaurant less gently. The nursery school told us to go away right now, assuring us that if we went near the Jewish library across the street, security would be called, if not the police.
The boys and their instruments reach one of the Y’s banquet halls, where 300 sixty-something, very blond Jewish ladies in spangled sweaters sit at card tables. A lady whose bouffant peaks at my shoulder scolds us before slamming the door in our faces. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you see we’re playing bridge? Go back to wherever you came from.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“These are cold Jews,” says Doron. “Cold souls. There is a great darkness in this city.” Doron has this rather scriptural way of speaking. He has been asking me the same questions all day. Where is the light? Where are the young Jewish people?
>Secrets, pain, and things going too far
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Writing from south of the border, J. Robert Lennon surveys the distinctive Canadian qualities of Margaret Atwood’s fiction @ The Walrus.
As an American writer, reader, and teacher, I would like to be able to tell you that we here in the States are big fans of the great Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. But it isn’t quite so. We are her fans, of course, but the idea of her as a Canadian novelist, however fundamental to her aesthetic and her identity, has a way of eluding our attention. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise: we Americans, worldly as we may be, tend to ignore our neighbour to the north. The exception is when something from Canada sucks, at which point we go out of our way to mock it. If something from Canada is awesome, on the other hand, we tend to claim it as our own, or at the very least file it away in our minds in a folder marked “Might as well be American.” Or, if we’re feeling generous, a folder marked “North American.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Atwood’s best-known novel here — and, I presume, among her best-known elsewhere, too — is 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a harrowing, dystopian metafiction about a concubine living in a phallocentric, theocratic dictatorship of the near future. This state of affairs has been arrived at by way of a military coup that brings down the government — the American government, I mean. You could write a novel about an overthrow of the Canadian government, if you really wanted to, but nobody here would read it. You could probably overthrow the actual Canadian government, and it would barely make the American evening news. They would put it on right before the late-night talk shows, perhaps preceded by a story about a horse that can multiply and divide. Which, come to think of it, sounds like something out of an Atwood novel.
>Striving toward the moment of waking
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![Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings [REFLECTIONS] [Paperback]](http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=B002VGWL58&tag=writing0f9-20)
I thought of this as I was walking near the Eiffel Tower the other day, itself a monument to the modern 19th century, when a stream of men, African immigrants mostly, came rushing toward me, bearing sacks of tourist trinkets, running from a barrage of police cars that has swarmed on the sellers in the shadows of the tower. As I got closer to the police cars, they were rounding up a number of men, handcuffed and empty of possessions. While the men rushing towards me were boisterous and chatty, talking to each and calling others on cell phones, the ones in handcuffs were quite and reserved. For the tourists, the scene of arrest was less spectacular than the monument they traveled to see.
“Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking.” The 19th century may also be a fantasy dream that we return to at moments as we, in the West, continue to wake from that past.
But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.
At Lapham Quarterly, George Packer finds Charles Dickens in the industrializing city of Rangoon.
Two years ago in Rangoon, I met a toothpick-thin, boisterous young Burmese man called Somerset. He had conferred this nickname on himself at age sixteen, after renting a collection of stories by W. Somerset Maugham from one of the bookstalls on Pansodan Road. By memorizing sentences from the collection, Somerset taught himself a somewhat formal and archaic English. Then he moved on to Charles Dickens. His identification with the works of these long-dead British writers was total. “All of those characters are me,” Somerset explained. “Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up. I am more equipped to understand Dickens than modern novels. I don’t know what is air conditioning, what is subway, what is fingerprint exam.”
Charlotte Gray at The Walrus rediscovers the life and times of Sam Steel, one of Canada’s pioneering figures of the late 19th century.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The story of Sam Steele and the race to secure his record raise two difficult questions: How was he forgotten so quickly? And why does Canada do such a poor job of securing its history? Both questions cause Dr. Merrill Distad — the associate university librarian at the University of Alberta who threw his considerable energies into the Steele papers acquisition — to roll his eyes with frustration. “If this were an American hero,” he insists, “every schoolchild would have heard of him, and there would already be a television series and several movies about him. He is our Wyatt Earp.”
>What Remains
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| “Still Life with White Box” by Raimonds Staprans |
It is August in Paris, and my friend Alexander with usual irony sent me this piece from The New York Times about the very fashionable things to do in Paris this month. While these items are not on my calender, I am (somewhat) surprised at how the Times can turn even the slow days of summer into a must-do fashion alert. The pleasure of Paris in August is that there are no lists of things to do. The city feels extraordinarily empty, with so many stores and cafes shuttered for two or three weeks. On a warm day (which are few), when you wander in places beyond the tourist centers you have the feeling you are in some small town in the countryside or near the sea. Those who remain in Paris are the tourists, the poor immigrants, those whose jobs keep them in the city, and others, like myself, who enjoy the city in its half desolate state.
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| “The Empty Table with a Green Stripe” by Raimonds Staprans |
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| “Jars #3” by Raimonds Staprans |
And Morgan Meis at The Smart Set reports on the tensions between the Flemish and the Walloons and wonders what if Belgium didn’t exist, maybe it shouldn’t, and what would be left if it didn’t? : “It is not surprising that such ideas are strange and confusing to many. The idea, for instance, that the entity called Belgium could simply go away feels, initially, like a loss, a failure. Even for Belgians who don’t feel any great national pride, the loss of their nation is a potential source of trauma. This feeling is heightened by the petty resentments and chauvinism that gets thrown about in the feuds between Flanders and Wallonia.”
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