I flew into Pearson Airport in Toronto, then took a Red Car van to Guelph. My flight was enlivened by a party of about a dozen school teachers from Spain, who were returning after a month of teacher education in Edmonton, at some teaching institute I don’t know about. They were full of fun, chanting a countdown to takeoff and singing little songs together, one of which they’d made up about how great Canada was, then at the end riotously celebrating our successful landing. I got the impression that life in Spain must be full of enthusiasm. I was seated next to a couple of lovebirds who spent the whole flight facing each other, murmuring endearments in Spanish.
Fool’s Gold
As a child, I always enjoyed the inability of Goldie Hawn to make it through an entire joke on Laugh In, so I have followed the career of her daughter Kate Hudson with interest. This movie was primarily about how even a college graduate can’t resist Matthew McConaughey’s naked torso, accompanied with a slapstick checklist of how many ways he could get hit in the head. This says two things to me about the women who enjoy chickflicks that I would probably have been better off not knowing. Donald Sutherland reprised his role as Kate Bush’s father in the music video for Cloudbusting, and we all felt better when the smart girl, played by Kate Hudson, finally told Paris Hilton, played by Alexis Dziena, that we’d like her to act smarter than she does.
Aberfoyle Puppet Idol
I’m not sure I can clearly express the sense of fun I experienced on seeing this sign. I don’t much care for the various idols that have been foisted upon a dissolute public, but a puppet idol might be just the kind of idol I would enjoy going to see. This part of Ontario, also known as “move here to raise your kids dot com” seems to feature all kinds of rural delights, from spreading views to the company’s own water. It seems to me a quiet place, with homey pleasures. The Red Car stopped in a cul-de-sac last night to drop someone off, and we’d gathered a little crowd of onlookers by the time we left.
Canadian Design
I’ve occasionally waxed lyrical on the subject of the design of Finnish, for example, hotel rooms, so I thought it might be interesting to hear about where things could stand a bit of improvement. I’m staying at a very nice hotel chain in a beautiful room. However, the roll of toilet paper is fastened in such a way that a vertical line dropped from its edge would land on the toilet seat. So it actually rests against your ribs when you sit down. There is an elaborate light system with a master switch at the door, but no way to control the lights from anywhere near the bed, meaning you’d better plan ahead, or else you’ll be making a little nervous excursion in a strange room in the dark. The air conditioner has a large vent, the direction of which can’t be changed, and it aims directly at the only chair in front of the only desk with the only internet connection. Fortunately, one of the decorative blankets doubles as a shawl.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
Victoria
I’ve been to Victoria now a dozen times, almost entirely thanks to Ray S, who has arranged all kinds of enjoyable and productive activities for me, ranging from guest lectures to summer courses. I have the impression I may even be an Adjunct Professor here at the University of Victoria, which he arranged to make some of the paperwork easier. This time I’m in town for a week-long grantwriting session, and am staying in a dorm room on campus. I love the campus, in large part because it is littered with bunnies. There are often dozens in sight at any given time, and if you are interested, you can feed them, although it takes quite a bit of relationship-building before any of them will let you touch them. I saw Chris S. and Susan L. both manage it last summer when we were here for a thesisfest, and it was quite amazing. Under their influence, I even managed to pet an old veteran myself, which I would have given odds against any other time.
Hummingbirds and Deer
Feral bunnies aren’t the only neighbours you have when you are living in Victoria, and last night we were visited in Ray’s back yard by a hummingbird, who came and went throughout dinner. It was quite a large one, but as mobile as a shot, hovering for minutes at a time, then abruptly hovering somewhere twenty feet in another direction. I even got to see it perched for a while on a wire. Lynn says it is a regular there. Several years ago I was also pleased to meet some deer grazing early one morning on campus, and last night there was a big doe standing beside the road as we drove up. I like the idea that this environment supports all these creatures. As Susan says, the rabbits make it clear that there is a low bar for survival here, which should mean it is easier for us to survive too.
My Blueberry Nights
After I ate my dinner in the student pub, where the excitement included a very good soundtrack and a very dull array of television sets, nearly all of them dedicated to, of all things, watching other people playing cards, I decided to stop by the campus theatre and see if they’d sell me some popcorn. As luck would have it, they were just 15 minutes away from also showing a film I’ve wanted to see—the new one by Wang Kar Wai. So despite the fact that I was still wearing my sunglasses, I managed to round up a very bad latte and a very big bag of popcorn, then found myself a seat near the centre and about two-thirds of the way toward the back. The reviews of this film have more or less stated outright that it is gawdawful, but I wondered if maybe they just didn’t properly appreciate Wang Kar Wai, who does tend to put shit between the camera and whatever it is he’s filming, and he likes the occasional motion blur, and then there was that sequence involving Brigit Lin and all those East Indian guys. Nonetheless, he’d collected a lot of eye candy here, with Nora Jones and Rachel Weisz pretending to be most of the girls I grew up with, and Natalie Portman reprising a poker-playing version of my Aunt Lil. Unfortunately, Jones and Jude Law did contribute a lot of dialogue trouble near the beginning, but if they would only stop talking, I thought, this might be all right. Then they did stop talking, for a reasonable portion of the movie, with Jones just providing the soundtrack instead, and really it was quite good. There were all the broken hearts and homicidal, suicidal off-duty police officers you could hope for, and plenty of waitressing, all wrapped in at best a kind of bildungsroman and at worst a picaresque. I did think not understanding what they were saying would have improved the thing a great deal, but I’ve suspected that for some time now about Wang Kar Wai movies, and really this is the first one where I’ve had to face that fact head on. And, frankly, I do like seeing an actress wearing vintage clothing being poorly reflected in a wet dilapidated wall, and there was plenty of that kind of entertainment to be had. I’d give it three bad lattes and half a bag of leftover popcorn out of five.
What Rabbits Don’t Like
Well, I think they are a bit nervous about a guy wearing sunglasses after dark, which is something you could truthfully say about a lot of people, and fair enough. On the other hand, when I finally did coax somebody over, he couldn’t seem to believe that what I was actually offering him was a delicious piece of salty, buttered popcorn. It was as though I had decided to offer up a rabbit dropping. “If this is how you’re going to act,” he said, “you’re right to be wearing those sunglasses, matey. You wouldn’t want people to recognize you.” And off he went, muttering maledictions under his breath all the way.
Hummingbirds and Deer
Feral bunnies aren’t the only neighbours you have when you are living in Victoria, and last night we were visited in Ray’s back yard by a hummingbird, who came and went throughout dinner. It was quite a large one, but as mobile as a shot, hovering for minutes at a time, then abruptly hovering somewhere twenty feet in another direction. I even got to see it perched for a while on a wire. Lynn says it is a regular there. Several years ago I was also pleased to meet some deer grazing early one morning on campus, and last night there was a big doe standing beside the road as we drove up. I like the idea that this environment supports all these creatures. As Susan says, the rabbits make it clear that there is a low bar for survival here, which should mean it is easier for us to survive too.
My Blueberry Nights
After I ate my dinner in the student pub, where the excitement included a very good soundtrack and a very dull array of television sets, nearly all of them dedicated to, of all things, watching other people playing cards, I decided to stop by the campus theatre and see if they’d sell me some popcorn. As luck would have it, they were just 15 minutes away from also showing a film I’ve wanted to see—the new one by Wang Kar Wai. So despite the fact that I was still wearing my sunglasses, I managed to round up a very bad latte and a very big bag of popcorn, then found myself a seat near the centre and about two-thirds of the way toward the back. The reviews of this film have more or less stated outright that it is gawdawful, but I wondered if maybe they just didn’t properly appreciate Wang Kar Wai, who does tend to put shit between the camera and whatever it is he’s filming, and he likes the occasional motion blur, and then there was that sequence involving Brigit Lin and all those East Indian guys. Nonetheless, he’d collected a lot of eye candy here, with Nora Jones and Rachel Weisz pretending to be most of the girls I grew up with, and Natalie Portman reprising a poker-playing version of my Aunt Lil. Unfortunately, Jones and Jude Law did contribute a lot of dialogue trouble near the beginning, but if they would only stop talking, I thought, this might be all right. Then they did stop talking, for a reasonable portion of the movie, with Jones just providing the soundtrack instead, and really it was quite good. There were all the broken hearts and homicidal, suicidal off-duty police officers you could hope for, and plenty of waitressing, all wrapped in at best a kind of bildungsroman and at worst a picaresque. I did think not understanding what they were saying would have improved the thing a great deal, but I’ve suspected that for some time now about Wang Kar Wai movies, and really this is the first one where I’ve had to face that fact head on. And, frankly, I do like seeing an actress wearing vintage clothing being poorly reflected in a wet dilapidated wall, and there was plenty of that kind of entertainment to be had. I’d give it three bad lattes and half a bag of leftover popcorn out of five.
What Rabbits Don’t Like
Well, I think they are a bit nervous about a guy wearing sunglasses after dark, which is something you could truthfully say about a lot of people, and fair enough. On the other hand, when I finally did coax somebody over, he couldn’t seem to believe that what I was actually offering him was a delicious piece of salty, buttered popcorn. It was as though I had decided to offer up a rabbit dropping. “If this is how you’re going to act,” he said, “you’re right to be wearing those sunglasses, matey. You wouldn’t want people to recognize you.” And off he went, muttering maledictions under his breath all the way.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Aberdeen
We flew British Airways to Aberdeen, and I have to say it was the hardest landing I’ve ever experienced on a commercial flight. When I took my flying lessons 25 years ago, they told me that the idea on landing a plane is to fly it just slightly above the runway and slow down until the plane settles gently to the surface. In this case, the pilot seemed more inclined to just fly the thing into the ground and trust the tires not to burst. Perhaps they have short runways.
One door, two doorways
The bathroom in our hotel room here in downtown Aberdeen has a feature I’ve never seen before. The room has a somewhat irregular shape, with the sink, toilet, and shower in three separate areas. They are configured in such a way that the door leading into the bathroom swings inward to become the door that closes off the part of the room with the toilet in it. There are two doorjambs, each with a proper strike plate for the latch, but only one door.
The Granite City
Apparently that’s what they call it, and they aren’t kidding. In the same way that Bath is made of pale yellow stone, Aberdeen is constructed almost entirely of pale grey stone. They claim it will glitter in the sunlight, but I haven’t noticed any particular gleaming. Maybe the sun has to be at the right angle. What I have noticed, though, is a hell of a lot of roses. Some of the sidewalks are lined with beds of them, stretching off as far as my eye can see, which admittedly is not that far, but its impressive nonetheless. They also have many different kinds, so that in a single block you might have a dozen colours and smells. To get this kind of intensive rose action in Canada, you need to go someplace like the Bouchard Gardens, not down the street to the chemist.
Bricks and Mortar
I asked one of our cab drivers about housing in Aberdeen. He said there are very few vacancies because of the oil industry. There is also virtually no board construction, but there are cheaper places that are made of grey brick, then covered with a kind of surface he called “herle” or maybe “herel.” You basically plaster the surface of the brick, which is in itself considered too unattractive, then spray pebbles into the plaster. I was also surprised to hear that there is no longer a local supply of granite, since the quarry shut down ten years ago. New buildings either use granite recovered from old buildings, or else they ship it in from places like China. Or maybe he was pulling my leg.
Oystercatchers
These are quite an attractive little bird, about the size of a magpie, with a bright red or orange beak and a loud shrieking cry. They next in the rooftops around the University of Aberdeen, which is something they apparently don’t normally do. We saw one of them roughhousing with a gull, of which there are many in Aberdeen, their voices echoing into the bedroom all night long. Susan also noticed one of the oystercatchers landing in an unusual way, luffing its wings as it got close to the ground, if luffing is the verb I’m after, in order to shed the lift.
One door, two doorways
The bathroom in our hotel room here in downtown Aberdeen has a feature I’ve never seen before. The room has a somewhat irregular shape, with the sink, toilet, and shower in three separate areas. They are configured in such a way that the door leading into the bathroom swings inward to become the door that closes off the part of the room with the toilet in it. There are two doorjambs, each with a proper strike plate for the latch, but only one door.
The Granite City
Apparently that’s what they call it, and they aren’t kidding. In the same way that Bath is made of pale yellow stone, Aberdeen is constructed almost entirely of pale grey stone. They claim it will glitter in the sunlight, but I haven’t noticed any particular gleaming. Maybe the sun has to be at the right angle. What I have noticed, though, is a hell of a lot of roses. Some of the sidewalks are lined with beds of them, stretching off as far as my eye can see, which admittedly is not that far, but its impressive nonetheless. They also have many different kinds, so that in a single block you might have a dozen colours and smells. To get this kind of intensive rose action in Canada, you need to go someplace like the Bouchard Gardens, not down the street to the chemist.
Bricks and Mortar
I asked one of our cab drivers about housing in Aberdeen. He said there are very few vacancies because of the oil industry. There is also virtually no board construction, but there are cheaper places that are made of grey brick, then covered with a kind of surface he called “herle” or maybe “herel.” You basically plaster the surface of the brick, which is in itself considered too unattractive, then spray pebbles into the plaster. I was also surprised to hear that there is no longer a local supply of granite, since the quarry shut down ten years ago. New buildings either use granite recovered from old buildings, or else they ship it in from places like China. Or maybe he was pulling my leg.
Oystercatchers
These are quite an attractive little bird, about the size of a magpie, with a bright red or orange beak and a loud shrieking cry. They next in the rooftops around the University of Aberdeen, which is something they apparently don’t normally do. We saw one of them roughhousing with a gull, of which there are many in Aberdeen, their voices echoing into the bedroom all night long. Susan also noticed one of the oystercatchers landing in an unusual way, luffing its wings as it got close to the ground, if luffing is the verb I’m after, in order to shed the lift.
London
I flew in from Oulu and spent a night at the cheapest hotel near the airport, a Comfort Inn, for the low discount price of $250. Then I went back to Heathrow in time to meet Susan, Michael, and Marley as they came out from the arrivals gate in Terminal 4. In the meantime, I’d also stopped briefly at Terminal 5, where they have a fountain I liked. It is a 5x10 grid of water spouts that shoot out from nozzles that are flush with the tiles. Each spout is about my height. The system stops them abruptly, so the water all falls to the ground at once with a loud snap. I only wished I could run around in there in my swimming trunks.
The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”
The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.
The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.
The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”
The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.
The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.
Stonehenge, Salisbury, and Bath
We took a day trip on a bus to see some sights out in the country, and we loved them all. There isn’t a lot you can see in a day, and we spent most of it on a bus, but we got to see quite a bit of the countryside, which we’d never seen before, and there was an hour or two at each stop. It was interesting to see how narrow the roads were, and in some cases how close the farm buildings were to the road: right up to it, more or less, with just a couple of tufts of grass separating a stone barn from a two-lane highway.
Stonehenge
On the way to walk around Stonehenge, you pass a picket line of ancient people wearing the original hippie regalia. Our guide called them “a congregation of all the crusties of England.” They are standing with hand-painted banners that object to the site being treated as a tourist destination for other people who lack proper reverence. I admired their gameness in the face of absurdity, and they certainly looked like they could use a little help. They seemed to me a kind of grimy rearguard action from the few surviving souls of the original boomer flowering. It was hard not be reverent, though, because as Susan says, you stand in this vast empty plain and suddenly there’s a Neolithic monument, then more vast empty plain. The plain itself is attractive enough to a boy from Balgonie, but of course something made out of very large stones is even nicer. I wonder how they’ve managed to keep it from being completely soaked in colourful graffiti. The area is roped off, but only for the past ten years, when it became a real problem that people were chipping off souvenirs. So you walk the perimeter and take photos from every side, and you wonder about the ditches and try to guess what useful kind of shadows the heal stone could possible cast, then someone sold me a very good ice cream cone on the way out.
Salisbury
Salisbury struck me as a charming little city. It is inhabited, we were told, by 100,000 souls, quite small for a city, but they get the designation unequivocally because they are periodically host to a circuit judge. Now that I type that out it sounds unlikely, but that’s what I heard. One of the things they are famous for is a beautiful Gothic cathedral, which was quite a sight to see. Ruskin, I am told, once described Gothic cathedrals as “stone in bloom” and I could see his point. The place was littered with small surface features that seemed very organic against the square mass of the building itself. Inside said cathedral are many wonderful things, including various arches and sculptures and tombstones that you walk on, which made me a bit twitchy, truth be told, and also one of the copies of the Magna Carta. I’d expected something illuminated, God knows why, but in fact it was just a big sheet of vellum almost completely covered in lines of small black text. It was quite clearly a working document, a contract, rather than a display piece. Unfortunately, on the day we were in Salisbury, it was raining like the Dickens, and no ice cream anywhere.
Bath
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was where you went to stand around in pools with your fashionable pals, and drink bad water to encourage your bowels. They built these amazing streets lined with houses made of pale yellow stone, and at some point one of them fell in and they realized the Romans had bathed here, too. Now you can tour the Roman baths and get some sense of the complexity of what they built, which involved lots of water and heated floors and so on. Apparently you also came here to ask Minerva to curse people for you, mostly for having stolen your stuff and gotten away with it. The curses they had selected for posting usually required a blood sacrifice to offset them, and it had to be your own blood.
Stonehenge
On the way to walk around Stonehenge, you pass a picket line of ancient people wearing the original hippie regalia. Our guide called them “a congregation of all the crusties of England.” They are standing with hand-painted banners that object to the site being treated as a tourist destination for other people who lack proper reverence. I admired their gameness in the face of absurdity, and they certainly looked like they could use a little help. They seemed to me a kind of grimy rearguard action from the few surviving souls of the original boomer flowering. It was hard not be reverent, though, because as Susan says, you stand in this vast empty plain and suddenly there’s a Neolithic monument, then more vast empty plain. The plain itself is attractive enough to a boy from Balgonie, but of course something made out of very large stones is even nicer. I wonder how they’ve managed to keep it from being completely soaked in colourful graffiti. The area is roped off, but only for the past ten years, when it became a real problem that people were chipping off souvenirs. So you walk the perimeter and take photos from every side, and you wonder about the ditches and try to guess what useful kind of shadows the heal stone could possible cast, then someone sold me a very good ice cream cone on the way out.
Salisbury
Salisbury struck me as a charming little city. It is inhabited, we were told, by 100,000 souls, quite small for a city, but they get the designation unequivocally because they are periodically host to a circuit judge. Now that I type that out it sounds unlikely, but that’s what I heard. One of the things they are famous for is a beautiful Gothic cathedral, which was quite a sight to see. Ruskin, I am told, once described Gothic cathedrals as “stone in bloom” and I could see his point. The place was littered with small surface features that seemed very organic against the square mass of the building itself. Inside said cathedral are many wonderful things, including various arches and sculptures and tombstones that you walk on, which made me a bit twitchy, truth be told, and also one of the copies of the Magna Carta. I’d expected something illuminated, God knows why, but in fact it was just a big sheet of vellum almost completely covered in lines of small black text. It was quite clearly a working document, a contract, rather than a display piece. Unfortunately, on the day we were in Salisbury, it was raining like the Dickens, and no ice cream anywhere.
Bath
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was where you went to stand around in pools with your fashionable pals, and drink bad water to encourage your bowels. They built these amazing streets lined with houses made of pale yellow stone, and at some point one of them fell in and they realized the Romans had bathed here, too. Now you can tour the Roman baths and get some sense of the complexity of what they built, which involved lots of water and heated floors and so on. Apparently you also came here to ask Minerva to curse people for you, mostly for having stolen your stuff and gotten away with it. The curses they had selected for posting usually required a blood sacrifice to offset them, and it had to be your own blood.
St. Albans
We are staying in a private hotel about a half hour by train out of London, in the large town, or perhaps small city, called St. Albans. They have a very good cook here, so we are eating things like fresh tartar sauce on our fish and chips, which is apparently about as hard to make as fresh Hollandaise sauce, so kudos to the chef. Our first day here was spent wandering around literally smelling the roses, which included a big bank of my favourite orange ones. I have only ever seen them before in the form of one or two bushes in the grounds of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I also managed to find someone to sell me a soft ice cream cone. Susan’s crazy for Victorian homes, which means she’s in seventh heaven. We thought we might venture into the city at the end of the day, only to find there’d been some kind of mishap and the trains weren’t running.
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