Notes from Winchester

I am sitting on a full-to-the-gills flight from Washington-Dulles to San Francisco and am crowded against the wall by a charming but very fat young woman who is sleeping through this sardine can. From time to time I have to put my right arm in the air because there is nowhere else for it.

United has managed to lose my luggage three times in a row now. I noticed ... too late, obviously ... that my baggage ticket was inscribed with the name of one Gavin Brown who is heading ... egawd ... to Johannesburg, and so, apparently, is my bag. The man in front of me in the check-in line had a red passport, and that has to have been Gavin. I guess the idiot at the counter didn't clear the name or something from the computer ... I had kiosk-checked-in my seating assignments, so no red flags. A fine customer service person, Sharon, at Washington Dulles headed off to head off my baggage. She thinks she got it, but no guarantees, and I get to find out in SFO.

Three times in a row. Life's like that.

Part of what bugs me in that is that once your luggage is lost, you leave the Internet world and head back to paper form world. I know that they have all my data in the computer ... I know when they look up my record that they can not only find my Social Security Number, but also probably have access to the NSA-screened calls I make to various other skeptics and atheists obviously unconvinced that what we need is to Palinize our security systems. Crude joke. Crude world.

I just want my bags delivered with me just once in 2008. Perhaps I will have to find somewhere else to fly if I am going to take that final shot at victory. Perhaps United will pay for that.

Visiting the aged parents is a tough and tender thing. I cannot stay as long as I would want, and especially as long as they want. The day of departure hangs over us from the moment I arrive. They live in a near-perfect senior housing complex in Winchester with a mob of the sweetest other aged p's you could imagine. They have their little dog, Hershey, and they have two sons within hailing distance. But Dad is almost 7 years out from a stroke, and life is hard work. Our visits break the monotony, I think, not to mention provide some love and comfort. But when the end of the fun is promised by the beginning, it is tough.

Life's like that.

I seem to say that to Mother a lot when I am around ... life's like that.

Sister and bro-in-law are on an around-the-world celebration of their 33 years of being together, most of those years having been spent in Australia. Sister and I take up as if we had not been apart for more than a day or two. But it was very cool to reconnect with bro-in-law whom I have not seen in almost exactly a decade. Funny the convergences that happen between dissimilar but not unalike souls. I suppose the fact that he is attracted to my sister predisposes him and me to have similar valences ... not exactly orientations or perspectives, but valances in the sense of wavelengths. If you are a physicist reading this, please roll your eyes and be appreciative of the fact that at least we-types believe in science even when we abuse its terminologies in our quest to concretize our humanism.

Life's like that.

Speaking of physics, I have rolled through a copy of Scientific American over the course of two airports today, and swam through the article on loop gravity which appears to propose that we replace the idea of the Big Bang with the Big Bounce. Sounds cool. The article wandered about the question of whether there was a pre-existing Universe that collapsed on itself and, if so, could we find traces of its history in our present Universe. I say "yes" ... that is the humanist response. Theists would have to go there too, I suspect. But the religious must glower "No".

I like to read Scientific American on flights, and I especially enjoy the cosmological arguments. Not because I grok them in any deep way, but because they inspire that poetry-of-the-spheres thing. Again, physicists, I accept your eye-rolling, and I obey ... but I plan to sneak back to my poetry as soon as you look away. Life's like that ... physicists beware.

Crowded in here, my right arm starting to ache ... and, christ, a ceaselessly nattering child babbling behind me, occasionally kicking the back of the seat. I half expect the little shite to pull out a drum and start banging. Still, I have a window seat and I can watch America slowly fade from green to brown and back to green again as we futily chase the slowly sinking sun.

So, the Universe, and the Big Bounce, and Theists. I have just plowed through a great read ... The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, By Paul Collins. I say plowed through ... should that be ploughed? ... because I hardly stopped for a breath. It is the sort of book that needs a glossary of characters because I kept getting lost. I especially enjoyed the reformed southern racist turned enlightened liberal rational Moncure Conway. Collins' great gift is to use his plot ... the search for Tom Paine's bones ... to allow his reader to wander almost convivially through the great budding of intellectual currents of the 19th century. We are their product, even if the vast majority of the ideas they produced are long-since garbage-heaped ... Darwin excepted, of course. That said, there is a confluence in ideation from the 19th century which is having a latter-day and unfortunate revival ... to whit a kind of half-baked theism in the sense of those who proclaim that there is no necessary contradiction between religious belief and science. Sorry, I beg to differ. It had a certain rationality in the 19th century given the dominance of religious thought over every aspect of life, but its revival now only proclaims that all that we know, all that we have discovered, every unearthing that we have done has yet to convince vastly too wide a swath of the species that religion is bunk. Depressing. Maddening.

That is what I mean by Palinization ... the revanche of the religious into your living room. Weak theism is no answer, but perhaps it is all we can get. See Obama as weak theism.

I saw another aspect of the 19th century in Ottawa when the whole lot of us ... aged p's, sis and bro-in-law, and myself ... tottled off to the spectacular Canadian War Museum. Notwithstanding the 18th century and the 20th century, Canada's self-invention is potted in the soil of the 19th-century. I saw the uniform of Sir Isaac Brock and the clean hole just under the broad lapel where the bullet that killed him entered at the battle of Queenston Heights in 1813 ... years ago we all climbed the obelisk at the site when we were a young family of six. A fine speaker of a docent, a 60s-something man with the classic jacket and medals of a Canadian legionnaire, spoke up on the point to us. He long wondered, he stated, why there was no blood until he ran into a group of Canadian Armed Forces surgeons who explained that the precise location of that hole predicted an almost instantaneous death in which all the bleeding would be internal. Fascinating. Father took it in silently.

Earlier the same docent-legionnaire had marveled in front of a large photograph of soldiers on their way back from the battle of Passchendaele at how fat and powerful their fingers and hands were. "These are farm boys," he said, and he was right of course. Passchendaele is likely the best place to say that Canada became Canada there. Our troops there proved themselves to be elite forces ... and as they participated in the great bloodletting that brought the long 19th century to a close, they defined Canada as a nation. Blood and nation. Life is like that.

On Saturday, there was an article in the usually quite underwhelming Ottawa Citizen about the role of Lester Pearson in the United Nations response to the Suez Crisis of 1956. A rather nuanced article that seemed simultaneously to support and undermine the thesis, broadly accepted, that the 40s and 50s were a high-water mark for Canadian diplomacy, and one from which we have shrunk ever since. Again, not precisely certain where the writer stands on the question, but he seemed to suggest that the undermining of that argument provided ground for those who do not lament the current Canadian irrelevance in international affairs. If we weren't so great then, so he suggests, then who cares if we are a bunch of duffers now.

I was raised on the notion of Canada's unique and liberal contribution to world affairs ... that our contribution of troops to solve the Suez Crisis in 56 was the road to a future without war in which rationality and sense prevailed over the bloody nationalisms born of that 19th century and which would not die. My family is NDPers ... the Canadian labor party ... but we admired Pearson even then. Pearson, of course, found his nemesis in the maniacal and eccentric Conservative, John Diefenbaker, who managed to take just enough of a bite out of Pearson's time on the stage to prevent him form being the greatest Prime Minister of our long century on the stage. Can't say I agree or not, but Pearson changed from being a liberal hero to a bit of a sad sack over time, and we remember him as a man just shy of greatness.

Life's like that.

Canada, too, just shy of greatness. I feel that all the time when I am there. Canadians do not know how good they have it ... no one does ... and they are just parochial enough not to be able to use their unique position to bless the world with the fruits of theirs insights. That's how I feel about it. That's how I feel about the election concluded during my stay in which the tiny minds of the Canadian Conservatives managed to deny themselves the majority which they do not deserve based on about 38% of the vote nationally.

Still, I love the country, and it is always bittersweet returning to my home for more than half my life. I want to be in my world, and I leave behind that fantasy land, Canada.

One more note as the ladies with the gin and tonic draw near. There was a piece on the National News on CBC about how Canadian banks are doing much better in the great financial crisis by reason of two factors ... they are more cautious and they are more regulated. Harrumph. Whoddathunkit. Caution and regulation, the cure for the American disease.

Or would you rather have Palinization?

Life's like that.

More photos from the Canadian War Museum here. I'll try to add some photos to illustrate this rant later.

My Winnipeg

Went with Christopher and Paulo to the San Francisco opening of a new film by Guy Maddin called My Winnipeg. It's a dreamy introspection worked around what the narrator describes as yet another attempt to flee the town in which he has lived for his entire life. He is on a train and much of what we see is projected through the window as the train rolls endlessly along. The cinematography is rough, black and white, choppy, raw, new footage mixed with old. Certainly avant garde, but compelling and demanding rather than aloof and evasive. I wrote a few quotes down as we accompanied Maddin on his flight, as we tried to flee with him.

How can one live without one's ghosts?

This is a film about memory, and its vagueness, and how it deceives and traps us. How you can only try to run away, but even in flight you are already heading back. Even at the end of the film, we do not know if he escaped, or if he really tried to escape. We know that he doubled back on himself and found a way to release himself from his self-made vow. But we do not know what happened, or indeed if anything happened.

Whatever happened only took 80 minutes to happen ... I appreciate a film that says what it has to say promptly ... but it was a long, drawn out 80 minutes. It seemed like two hours ... and I say that not with fatigue but with the entrancement of fixation. He didn't even lose me with his long riff on the travails of hockey rinks and hockey teams in town. He let go for a moment of the dreamy quality of his narration and got a little fevered ... though the dreaminess returned with the phantom hockey teams of aging stars.

The breath freezes in front of your face and falls to your feet with a tinkle.

You have to feel for a place like Winnipeg. It is truly lost in the middle of the continent. From a distance it is a haze of winter breath, vague, unknown, not on the agenda. But it is, more than any other city in the Canadian prairies, a real place with a history that mattered, with enduring cultural institutions. As the world collapses on itself, and as everything turns into suburbs and commodities and the latest thing, Winnipeg gets even vaguer, even less there. And this film accepts that vagueness. It lives entirely in the chill of the winter where, and I can attest to this, the crunch you hear as you walk is as much your breath as it is the snow under your feet.

I lived in Winnipeg from the summer of 66 to the summer of 68; I was in grades 9 and 10. I knew about this film only because Christopher told me when I told him that I have been planning a vacation that starts and ends in Winnipeg. When I lived there, I loved the winter. I rose early, even though I was in my young teens, to walk my dog Laddie in the dark and snow and freezing cold. I still dream about Winnipeg. And my dreams too are about being trapped there, even though I am not trapped there any longer.

Who gets to vivisect his own childhood?

Maddin took this film as an opportunity to revisit his childhood by reconstructing its key events. He got Ann Savage to play his mother, and he rented part of the house in which he grew up. Who gets to do that? He states in the film that Winnipeg has a law that everyone must carry a key to every house they have ever lived in ... were that the case, I would have quite a weight of keys. When we left Winnipeg in 1968, we were in a car on our way to the train ... not sure if it was a taxi or what, but my Father had left earlier and was already in Toronto. Mother asked where was the dog ... we looked around, and he wasn't there. So we had to head back to the house ... 181 Oak ... to get him, and the new tenants had already arrived and were examining this great placid beast who would not budge. We didn't need keys. Imagine, though, being able to stage that scene again, to pick the actors who play your family as it appears through the fog of years.

A little indulgent, perhaps, in the wrong hands. But in Maddin's hands, the scenes are haunting and elusive, foggy and alluring.


Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism.

Early in the journey, the film turns on sleepwalking ... Maddin asserts that Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world. Sleepwalking is a purposive vagueness, adroitly performing actions without knowing what you are doing. Zombie-like. Sleepwalking, I suppose, is the euphemism for enduring the torments of life, for growing up when we are so conscious and yet so out of control ... so totally in a situation that we do not know how large or small it is. The Maddin character is vaguely sleeping or dozing on the train ... here he is in full flight form everything he has known, but he cannot rouse himself to attention. Sleepwalking into freedom. Does he ever arrive?

Maddin is a classic unreliable narrator. Down the street and around the corner from where he lived is the Sherbrook Pool. Maddin claims that it is the only pool in the world where there are three pools built one on top of the other, that the bottom two were closed in 1966. I bolted up when he showed the pool ... because I had my bicycle stolen from in front of that building in the summer of 1967. A terrible day that pierced my innocent sense of right and wrong. I never got the bike back, but I did get trip to the police station to look at recovered bikes.

I didn't know about the three pools for the very good reason that there never were three pools; it's pretty clear he uses the stacked pools as referent for the Indian belief that there is another confluence of rivers beneath the confluence of the Red and the Assiniboine which is at the heart of Winnipeg. You never can know what to believe in this film, so it is the easier, and more fun, to give up at least as long as you are in his snare. The frozen horse heads are true ... and as I search the backrooms of my mind, I seem to recall that I knew about them. It's a great Winnipeg story ... a bunch of horses bolt from a fire in early winter, fall through the ice on the river, and are trapped, frozen to death, their heads projecting through the ice for the rest of the winter. The stuff about the gay mayors and the hot dude shows at the Golden Boy Club are at least partly true. But homeless people are not confined to rooftops in Winnipeg.

I guess all the rambling ends up with this: Guy Maddin is still confined, and so are we all. Confined not to memory but to memory's tricks, its deceits, the way in which it undermines truth and leaves us vulnerable. Confined to where we know who we are sufficiently that we can sleepwalk through the every day ... and confined sufficiently that even when we try to escape, we fool ourselves into not quite making it. Home is where memories are frozen in the ice, and yet where they sublime into an ether in whcih we are doomed to sleepwalk. That My Winnipeg for ya.



I do plan to return to Winnipeg, and I expect to use viewing this film as a goad. This is the plan: fly into Winnipeg in October, rent a Prius, drive to Ottawa, stay for five days to visit with my sister who is making one of her periodic pilgrimages from her home in Queensland, then drive back via the northern route (Hwy. 11) and spend another couple of days in Winnipeg. Lots of photos and blogging.

Nice interview with Guy Maddin here. Cleaner copy of the trailer here An intelligent reflection on the film here.

Blogging Winchester: Saturday

I am sitting here close to midnight in the tiny apartment of my sainted parents in a senior housing complex in Winchester, Ontario. I have a martini by my side ... the influence of my roommate and bartender caused me to abandon my previous habit of drinking wine by default. More on that below.

Tomorrow is my birthday ... 55 happy years on the planet ... or half way to one-ten, as I have been saying ... so the day was consumed in the slow build up to a family dinner at the Country Kitchen on Highway 31.

As the day passed, I caught up with sundry events I missed in the blackout of a day of flying Friday. Cal hired Mike Montgomery, late of Stanford ... old Blues like me are damned happy. Poor Ben Braun didn't seem to have the backbone to move to the next level. Meanwhile, things are heading for a nasty pass in the doomed Zimbabwe. Again, I think it is about the army .. if the army turns on him, he is lsot. They ought to assign a little troup of killers to end the misery.

But back to Winchester, the Cheese Capital of the Ottawa Valley. If that is not enough, it is also the birthplace of George Beverly Shea, for those of you who remember who he is. I do, which is saying something.

My paents found WInchester years ago when they took some drives in the countryside surounding Ottawa which is 50 kilmoeters from here. They liked the little town of 2000, appreciated the fact that it had a regional hospital, and also the fact that it did not appear to have been affected very much by suburban sprawl. That is still truw, and it largely dervies from the towns distance from any freeway. Nearby Kempville is another modern hellhole, best as I can tell from slender experience, because it sits astride of a freeway. People get suckered by freeways.

But Winchester is starting to suffer nonetheless. It is an aging town ... the young folks move away once they are adults, and aged stay put. That makes it perfect for Ma and Pa who have a great life in this little complex ... a little sad because Dad had a stroke 6 years ago. And everyone ahs a car, jsut like everywhere else. The businesses downtown compete with the eveil Walmart empires, not withstanding that theya re miles away. The Country Boy clothing store is closing, and that is a blow.

Winchester is small town, though. The last time I was here there was a story in the local paper that the cops had written a parking ticket. One parking ticket.

My brother found this place son after my parents did and he converted himself from city boy to country boy. He works in the city, but he is a happy camper, and I always try to see this little town through his eyes. As I walked around with him and his wife today, they knew absolutely everyone ... a place where everyone knows your name.

Getting fatigued here as we close on 1 a.m., so I will leave it at that. I'll get back to the family gathering, the two dogs, thes earch for a martini in a small town, and all that, tomorrow.


Photos by Arod, today.