About Time....

The newest selection...I should be done in three days...A part a day...Seems likely...Alaina will begin the journey with me, and finish long before I do I suspect. So far so good. The first tenth is all nobility and their scandals. Eventually a battle occurs, and the most interesting aspect is the thoughts of the soldiers in the midst of battle. Often they don't seem to comprehend the scale of the decision they have made to go to war. The idea of social class is also an important part of the novel so far. Granted I am only 1/2 through first book.

To Be On a Curriculum Near You Soon...I Hope.

I am in the "Louis Riel--Hero" camp of historians. Therefore, this great bit of poetry by Scofield is a welcome voice. If it were up to me we would read it in its entirety for either ELA A 30 or History 30. Or possibly, both. It covers his life from childhood to hangman's noose and is all the more powerful as a result of Scofield's First Nations' heritage and inclusion of Cree words every now and again. The Orange Poems are intersting as they rife on the Orangman conflict and Thomas Scott. However, the very best work comes from the section that uses excerpts from a Canadian Settler's Almanac. The almanac is legit Canadian history (primary document and all that) and Scofield's poems are responses to those European settlers that rolled on into the Prairies to change everything, forever. 

The Other Less Dense Dennis Lee book of Poetry

Ok, this one has moments of utter confusion, but unlike Un, some of it makes sense. From the opening line, "If it walks like an apocalypse" to the finishing notes of "But the breadcrumbs are gone, and the story goes on." one gets the sense that the world is a messy mess of messdom BUT that we can fix it. Do I recommend reading this? Not so much, but it's much better than Un. Again, not a student of poetry so maybe I am completely daft. 

WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF

This is Dennis Lee's critically acclaimed book of poetry Un. I am clearly too dumb to understand what the hell is going on it. Even reading the blurbs that support it leave me at a loss. This is how the book opens:

In wreck, in dearth, in necksong,
godnexus gone to the fat of the land,
into the wordy desyllabification of evil - small
crawlspace for plegics, 4, 3, 2, 1, un...

Well now that I type it out it makes complete sense. 

Sorry Dennis, I don't have the skill set for this. 

A Great Canadian Writer, but maybe a wee bit misogynistic

Of course this is a must read, and for me it's a re-read of sorts. "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door" are among the greatest Canadian short stories ever written. After further discussion, maybe its not so much misogynistic but rather realistic. The men were absent and focused wholly on their farm and the women were trying to survive.

The Current Book...ABANDONED

Started this yesterday, so far so good. Science Fiction for the 1980's kids. John Hughes references and Atari gaming galore. More to follow. So, the more to follow includes the realization that this is not an important book and that people like it because of their ridiculous feelings of nostalgia for the 1980's. This includes those that never experienced the 1980's who feel nostalgic about them anyway. It's as if the author was trying to cram in as many allusions and references from his past that he could. Ah well, 1/3 through...time will tell. So at 3/4 the way through I realized I did not care how this finished, did not care about video game allusions, did not care about all his obvious movie allusions, and tore the book to shreads in a fit of pique. 

A Life...a sad life.

The story of a man...a poor man who becomes a teacher, then a professor, has a wife, then a daughter, then a career, and writes a book, and deals with life's ridiculous disappointments, and an affair, and then death. It's fairly sublime, well-written, but very little actually happens. The wife is a horrific shrew of a woman...but maybe that was the author's fault, rather than the woman's. I'll come back to this later.