Good To a Fault

The last temptation is the greatest treason
    To do the right deed for the wrong reason.


T.S. Elliot Murder in the Cathedral


So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.


Matthew 6:2-4

Number 4 of 5 in Canada Reads 2010 is Marina Endicott's offering.  

This book was sold on the nature of good deeds and of selflessness.  The theme is pasted as big as the title inside and outside the cover.  It's a huge challenge to write about and one of the central themes of sin, but in the text there isn't really any conflict of the sort.  The main character is completely sympathetic, she takes in a family of three children, partly because she feels responsible and partly because having a newfound family is profoundly life affirming for a very lonely woman.  When the children's mother recovers from a near-fatal bout of the Big C, Clary feels horribly as the children she has grown to love over several months instantly disappear from her life forever, and harbors mean feelings towards their actual parents for all of 5 minutes.  

Very early in her story, a mean church lady tells Clary her good deed doesn't count because she's just grandstanding.  Although this eats at the protagonist the whole novel, from the reader's perspective it's never the case and therein lies where the book is lacking.  This gal doesn't have a malicious bone in her body.  She is doing the right things for the right reasons and suffers heartbreak when her job is made redundant.  On top of it all, one of the children, the baby, has spent so much time with her that they've bonded the way babies and mothers do, so the reader instantly forgives Clary's moment of weakness even when she doesn't, because every parent knows exactly how horrible a feeling that must be.  The story is very pretty and pretty sad, particularly when told through the eldest daughter's perspective, but the characters never really move out of the first dimension.  It reads like Club Soda tastes.  I liked it, but it took me longer than I figured to finish it.

Un-Comment

This is me not blogging on a certain author's passing.

The End of Violence: A Lament

As First Published at www.Hockeyinsight.com

There is no nice way to put it. The National Hockey League is sharing a room with an elephant the size of Gibraltar and even if there were clear solutions neither the owners nor the PA have anyone in the driver’s seat with the fortitude to make tough decisions. It’s a case of a thousand cuts and if it doesn’t mean death it means a right proper castration at the alter of player safety.

Over the course of our favorite sport’s modern history, you might have been forgiven if you thought it mismanaged, bizarre, even a touch self-hating in parts, but you could never call it sterile. If fancy passing, iconic goals and Lady Byng-ing it up with the less fortunate are the head and heart of the league, then Sherwood dentistry, blood spitting fisticuffs and dirty checks are most certainly it’s guts. The Stan Mikita, Claude Lemieux and Gordie Howe legacies might not shine as brightly as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and … Gordie Howe, but they’re there nonetheless and history would be sorely lacking without them.

Fighting, for starters, is on the way out, beginning with the CHL (more a weather vane for hockey’s big league than any other feeder system for any pro sport). David Branch has said as much when pressed, and it stands to reason that if the kids aren’t allowed to fight, then the services of enforcers won’t be required in the minors. That all but evaporates the pool of tough guys for the league to draft, unless they want to go nosing around the octagon to see if Keith Jardine knows how to skate.

That’s ok, because on the one hand, most fans consider fights to be an amusing but ridiculous sideshow, but on the other hand, watching Iginla trade knuckles with Lecavalier after two and a half periods of agitation, that’s something you tell your grandkids about. Now fighting has taken a convenient backseat to the newest bugaboo, head shots. Talks of banning or even curbing fights have been pushed back for a while, but it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Head shots cause career ending concussions, brain spasms, and are in all ways a thing to be avoided. But players duck, players put their heads down, and in a league that lets mutants like Chara play against regular sized people, head shots are going to happen unless body contact is ruled out altogether.

The same forces that rally against demolition derbies, smoking in the workplace and unprotected sex are now lined against violence in hockey. No, not violence, just fighting, head shots, interference, charging, elbowing, hitting from behind, and a nice fat caveat reserved for whatever causes the next big injury.

So when Charlie Tator, the doctor with a man-sized hunger for his fifteen minutes, calls out Don Cherry for promoting an aggressive game, he does so with crippling, flat, sterile reason in his corner. Don can give him the one-fingered Kingston Salute, but he can’t sit down and argue because all the good doctor has to point to is Don Sanderson, or Steve Moore, or Mikael Tam or the dopey stream of players past and present coming out of the concussion closet. These are tragedies all, and products of violence in hockey. There is no more compelling motive than these examples, and no reasonable objections can be made against taking all measures to prevent them. Hockey is just a game, and a game is not worth more than life. End of story. Grapes will argue and preach for self-governance amongst the players, a policy he knows is doomed to fail, all the while loving the kids on the ice and the game itself the way guys like Tator can’t understand. The way Don sees it, hockey is one or two new rules away from cashing in the very spirit that makes the game great in the name of safety and reason.

Hockey is dangerous. These boys get paid to go real real fast, to throw their bodies around, to drop the gloves and to hurt each other on purpose. They do it because there is a desire for violence amid the glory, a need for the unsanitary that puts asses in the stands at Joe Louis Arena the same way it did at the Coliseum. You don’t get the frenzied electricity that makes hockey fans hockey fans without the threat of fists, sticks, shoulders and elbows bubbling in the pot. They go hand in hand and it’s what makes our sport better than anything else out there. No one would ever suggest that the game can’t change with the times, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. At some point, when someone gets hurt, the NHL, it’s players and it’s fans have to say “So it goes” or abandon it altogether.

Hockey is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be played tomorrow in such a way that would negate all but the most basic risks. Players could skate across center ice with their heads down, wingers could screen goalies with no thought of reprisals, and the weakest of men could taunt the strongest with as many barbs as they could imagine. We can have a kinder, gentler NHL and there is sickly, constant pressure to move in that direction.

The NHL’s debate about violence is really a debate about identity. Hockey is a sport like no other and the rough stuff is a big piece of what sets it apart. Without the mean body checks, the fighting, the missing teeth and the violence, how close does hockey really get to soccer on ice?

Fall on Your Knees: Bummer

What the hell do authors have against Cape Breton?  If you only read CanLit and never visited you would think the whole island is a festering pool of hateful priest rape, incest, polio, crippling poverty, depression, drownings, murder, am I missing anything?  This Bird, Marie Anne-MacDonald, follows a long line of hack Feminist authors and writes the most depressing tripe, full of evil weak-spined men and strong but bat shit insane women hacking their way through horrible lives.

Balls.

I'd like to think, and I suspect, that our author has gone through some horrible experience, and that this sort of sewage is her therapy rather than a product of manic depression for manic depression's sake.  The story is revolting and desensitizing for no good reason other than to shock.  Not shock us out of apathy, or into action, only to make us feel sick.  

I've been to Cape Breton, if it's poor but by god you couldn't want a more beautiful spot filled with the nicest people one could hope to meet.  So I spent the better part of the book irritated.

The text is minimalist in all the wrong ways, and the cadence makes you sea sick before you even realize that you're reading rape scene after rape scene.

Perdita Felicien presented this novel after consulting her "Literary friend".  If losing at your sport doesn't qualify you for CBC darling status, then not reading regularly will.

I am super glad this book is in the Circle of Winfrey, I was getting blue just thinking about the books I like that she has endorsed.  Steer Clear of Fall on your Knees  

Avatar: Good

Before I talk about Avatar, I want to talk about Transformers II.

This photo is not from Transformers II you say.  No, but I think it illustrates a point.

Transformers two was ridiculous and anyone who doesn't think so is foolish or a bean counter.  But Transformers had something going for it, not plot, not acting, not je ne sais quoi.  Transformers had Wicked awesome robots tearing each other apart for a good chunk of the movie.  Robots fighting Robots is very cool, so I liked Transformers, much to the chagrin of my more snobbish associations.  That said I had to like it despite what seemed like a great deal of effort on the part of the filmmakers to evoke a contrary Response.  My love for Optimus Prime can move mountains.
Avatar is not Transformers.  Avatar is passably acted, by that I mean it isn't revolting at any point.  There are no Jar Jar moments and there is no Shia Lebeouf.  The plot has been compared to Dances with Wolves, but I think gets closer to Braveheart.  Insofar as the plot is a vehicle for the visuals, fine.  They went to amazing lengths, considering the fantastic scope of the story, to avoid insulting my intelligence.  Avatar is a fucking great movie!  It's butter on whole grain popcorn.   The 3D is great without being ridiculous, the story is exciting and hits all the action high notes that make the 10 year old in me squeal.

There is a scene in this film where a Mech fights a Warrior Princess riding a Lizard Panther that lasts a good 5 minutes.  For all of you who know what I'm talking about, just rest your eyes for five seconds and think about that.

vs

The Film is PG but it didn't feel like that hampered it, you can get good action movies without chopping heads off it seems and I'd be pleased as punch to take my kids to see it for an excuse to don the Buddy Hollies again.

Calls of Racism, of Neo-Colonialism, of Blasphemy, of deep fried leftist propaganda, etc etc have been, um, called.  Maybe, but lighten up already.  It's a goddamn movie.

I had a coupon for a free movie, but the talking acne colony at the concession/ticket stand told me my coupon was only good for 2D movies, and Avatar was a 3D movie.  That extra D cost me a mortgage payment.  Imagine my surprise.  I was pretty uptight when I sat down, and because I had heard a handful of reviews that said it was garbage I was ready to ruin the movie for everyone, but it was not Garbage.  It was good.  The McDonald's Avatar toys that came with happy meals, they were garbage.   

This movie made more money than you could spend.  It is not the greatest movie ever made.  It is just awesome.

Nikolski: Multicultural Montreal Makes Me Merry

Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski is the reason "Canada Reads" is awesome.  I shouldn't think I'd ever have occasion to read this book otherwise, and I really liked it.  It was a charming, light and funny read and absolutely unlike anything I've read since Fruit last year.  That it won a GG for translation probably means it captures most of that which is usually lost in translation, so I do feel comfortable saying Dickner maybe swung for the fences a little bit more than he needed to, but the result still feels like a comfy small town story that spans the country and the Americas.

      The picture he paints of Montreal is really cool.  I'm so soaked with Toronto-centric media that having a go at the multicultural hodge podge of big cities through a different lens is refreshing to the point of giddiness.  The characters are troubled without being tragic, and the overall arc of the whole shebang is happy.  It's a quick read and it makes you smile.  I should be frequenting that city a lot more than I do. 

Generation X: Death to Hipsters

The world is going to end in a great ball of nuclear fission, and all the Pepsi bottles from all the landfills in Michigan and the great plastic garbage bag continent floating in the North Atlantic will be vaporized and instantly kicked up into a whirlwind the size of Australia. The prevailing winds from the fallout are going to rain down liquid polymers all across the eastern seaboard and well into Manitoba, instantly fossilizing anyone caught by surprise, fusing charred flesh with bits of snow fence and dismembered GI Joe arms and legs.  And when a society arises from the ashes, half-cockroach half-Nebraska field hands who's ancestors happened to be exploring Cold war bomb shelters at just the right time, they'll stare in awe at the Tableau of bipedal Titans frozen in time, wearing big bead necklaces and kaki shorts standing in line for chances to win six months of free text messaging.

Thanks to Canada Reads 2010 and Douglas Coupland, I've had to re-evaluate my stance on reading in public, kinder eggs and hygiene for hygiene's sake.

Verdict:  I cannot say I am very fond of Generation X.

 The heros of this novel clumsily hate all things plastic, workaday and futile.   Drinking themselves numb in the desert at what they suspect and hope is the end of the world, they tell beautiful little stories, true or otherwise, and seek out small measures of epiphany all the while minding their waistlines and abandoning all but the purely masochistic sexual relationships.  Dropping completely the ambition and money lust that characterized the eighties so appropriately for middle class America (Alex P. Keaton be Damned).  














Wikipedia declares that I belong to this navel grazing subcategory, and insofar as it means I am angst ridden, I suppose they have an argument.  So houses are too expensive, job security is a thing of the past (hehe) and the world is free falling to disaster whether I tell it to stop or not.  But I came of age in the tech boom and bust, where kids with vague ideas were driving cars normally reserved for first round draft picks, all on the tabs of Boomers and their mutual funds who had sensibly weathered a handful of nifty recessions and figured it all was fine  and dandy. There really is one born every minute and since we're not running out of bubbles any time soon all these fatalists could have had their three-car garages  if they had slugged it out for another 5 years.

Cynical is not the same as intelligent, but Coupland declares everyone should stare at his protagonists as if they were dilettante sages in a world gone stupid.  They can only feel in ironies; imagine achieving enlightenment by rolling your eyes for seven years.    

Maybe if I was born five years earlier, and in an AMC Javelin on it's third clutch, and tended bar across the street from a boarding house where William Burroughs once got arrested, maybe then I would "Get" Generation X, and then Ms. Ryder would be asking for MY number.



The saving grace of this book is the ending, a moment of beauty that has to be read to be believed and is really quite something.