Category: Certainties

Violets In The Sun

It doesn’t matter where you are.  A statement, it must be admitted, that is open to interpretation. It’s tough when you don’t know what “interpretation” even means.  A Quebecer who can speak French?  Quebecois?  La Langue Francais?  Quebecois?  So let’s leave it.

There’s also no longer any reason for it.  I wish I knew myself.  Sometimes it’s about Jasmine flowers.  Sometimes, very rarely, violets.

Violets in this continuing warm, dry summer.  There’s a controversy brewing in England now about Mr Bernard Hepton and Mr Geoffrey Rush.

They bear a striking resemblance.  And the problem with the site now is it’s been tasked with sorting this out.  Who is who?  And who are we to believe?

 

Bernard Hepton
Geoffrey Rush

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was in Manhattan longer ago than I like to admit.  I love Manhattan.  Freedom reigns and all the old saws about America are working for you.  They’re selling saws in the street and it’s for America and you could still buy a pack of Camels for 90 cents.  You can’t give Camels away these days.

But migrating towards the grasslands and abandoned supermarkets in that stretch that used to be there this side of the village, going down and down into Lower Manhattan with a white cab driver, semi-long hair, cooperative, but you brandish your pistol anyway because you’re back in the States and aren’t sure if he’s okay with this trip, and of course he is, but good on you for checking, and he actually appreciated the gesture, in his New York way, and it’s forward to the village and Washington Square, which, by the way, they’re gonna rename now because the name”George Washington” has become hateful to Americans.

It’s early but if any of our audience can explain why Bernard Hepton, a distinguished British actor, as they used to say, and still do, he was great in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and many, many other performances, greatly resembles Geoffrey Rush of “The King’s English” and subsequent triumphs, please come forward now.  Because something is going on.

And now, reasonably recently, Mr Geoffrey Rush is making his way even onto City of Vancouver transit stops via large, full frame posters— “Pirates of The Caribbean Dead Men Tell No Tales”— an image I was dumbfounded by the first time I saw it, and I nearly passed out stumbling onto the “15 Cambie” bus by the “Liquor Depot” and bank there, heading south to get my freedom.  The whole experience made for dizzy work and I hate that.

I couldn’t believe that was Rush.  I didn’t even know the man was in the pirate franchise. What else didn’t I know?  Gnn…  And at the same time, as I started thinking about it, I couldn’t believe how these gentlemen, Rush and Hepton, Hepton and Rush, together in their separateness, seem rather to blend together.  It’s a mystery.

Geoffrey Rush

 

Bernard Hepton

 

 

 

 

 

 

At some point it’s going to matter.  We’ll make it matter.  Because this is serious. You’ll never get any sort of explanation in England, not really.  In private, yes, maybe at the right clubs, but this strange coincidence, if that’s what it is, but I doubt it, has never really gelled with Britishers because, it could be, Mr. Rush is Australian, and nobody bloody cares about Australia, but of course good luck to him. And Mr. Rush is as English as Dover cream.  There’s nothing else in it.  Have a beautiful day.

Violets image courtesy CSN

 

 

A Marlon James Colloquy

“-Jet taking off and  nobody know where it going?  Boss, you taking ghetto man for idiot again?

-Mister, me say nobody duh know.  Not even the commissioner know.  He don’t even know that the Singer plan to fly out.

-Is a top secret?

-More secret than the colour of the queen panty.”

That’s the funniest line in Marlon James’ nearly 700 page epic “A Brief History of Seven Killings”.  In fact it has the distinction of being the only somewhat humourous line in the book which is populated by a very large cast of violent, murderous, corrupt human beings.  Find out more than you would probably ever want to know about Jamaican gangs.  Marlon James did.  He, in his own estimation, just used his imagination. It’s very good.

“In his Facebook post, James said that being famous hasn’t made him feel any safer in Minnesota.

“I have a big global voice, but a small local one, because I don’t want to be a target, and resent that in 2017, that’s still the only choice I get to have. … I go out of my way to avoid police, because I don’t know how to physically act around them. Do I hold my hands in the air and get shot?  Do I kneel and get shot? Do I reach for my ID and get shot?

“Do I say I’m an English teacher and get shot? Do I tell them everything I am about to do, and get shot? Do I assume that seven of them will still feel threatened by one of me, and get shot? Do I simply stand and be big black guy and get shot? Do I fold my arms and squeeze myself into smaller and get shot? Do I be a smartass and get shot? Do I leave my iPhone on a clip of me on Seth Meyers, so I can play it and say, see, that’s me. I’m one of the approved black guys. And still get shot?”

“… You will never know how it feels to realize that it doesn’t matter how many magazine articles I get, or which state names a day after me. Tomorrow when I get on my bike, I am big black guy, who might be shot before the day ends, because my very size will make a cop feel threatened. Or if I’m a woman, my very mouth. And a jury of white people, and people of colour sold on white supremacy will acquit him. And even me hoping for hipster points on my fixed wheel bike, is countered by them thinking I probably stole the bike.”

Quoted in the Washington Post June 2017 in an article by Susan Hogan

Marlon James is a big man.  He grew up in Jamaica, in Kingston.  I sorta figured that.  I didn’t know his mother was a cop and his father a lawyer and that he’s “gay” until a few days ago.  That’s the word he uses so I’m all right with it.  I just finished the book.

I didn’t have the guts to get in line to have “A Brief History of Seven Killings” signed by the author at the Granville Island Hotel these scant couple of years ago during the “Vancouver Writers Fest”.  “Don’t hurt me, Marlon.  Would you, ah, mind autographing or signing your, um, book?  Like, ah, before I faint?”

So I put my consort up to it.  Nursing my drink I was chatting with John Vaillant who happened by, hunkered down, and we reminisced about “Trivento Private Reserve Malbec” from my great days of wine consulting.  He was going on at the festival a bit later, same as Marlon.  We’d met before and I mentioned I’d reviewed his book “The Jaguar’s Children” for “Postmedia”.

“I never read my reviews,” he said.

“Totally understand,” I said.

And this is what Marlon James wrote on the title page of “A Brief History…” that fine early evening.  “To Cathy!  “If it no go so, it go near it” – Jamaican proverb.”  The date was October 27, 2015.

Marlon James

I wish I was back there in 2015 and had the opportunity again.  I’d know what to do.  “Marlon. Hombre.  Where you get that scar, man?  That is hot.”

samoyeddogs..

 

Image crop from “Signature”.

 

Literary Free Store

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch.

It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reductio ad absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Because no battle is ever won he said.  They are not even fought.  The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

What about woman?  What does the field reveal for her?  The same?  No time for that right now.

William Faulkner 1897 – 1962.  The Sound and the Fury.  One of the books that ruined my life.   Everybody’s back and we hope you had a fabulous vacation.  That smoke, though.

Not exactly ruined.  More like started me down that road.  A slow, spiralling descent through madness and ennui ending, sadly, in jobs in bookstores.  Gnn…

The problem was nothing else was that interesting.  Those golden moments in literature. It still left room for interest in other things, but not that kind of interest.  Thanks, though.

Who started that stupid expression?  “Thanks, though.”

Would you like an ice pick in the forehead?  How about a free bag?

“No.  Thanks, though.

It’s like when some ponus-sporting fat-gut you’ve never seen before in your life asks how you are and you say “okay” and he says, “Just okay?”

Just okay?

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Gabriel García Márquez  1927 – 2014.  Cien años de soledad.

Also known as One Hundred Years of Solitude.  A great book.

With Faulkner anything else I read or tried to read just seemed boring after “The Sound and the Fury.”  The book, or novel, is in four parts.

The first part is a day in April 1928, the second part is eighteen years earlier on a day in June, the third part is the day before the day of the first part, part four is the day after the day of the first part.

Why are three of the four parts set in 1928?  Who knows?  Why is part one narrated by somebody who sounds like he’s really messed up?  I mean the guy is deranged.  He’s a retard, as the expression used to have it.  “Mentally challenged” is the expression now, but let’s face it.  He’s an idiot.

Why did Faulkner do that?  I mean, besides to irritate people?  Which would include anybody who thought they knew the kind of novel “Count no-account”, as people called him in his youth, was going to write.

Why the book all scrambled up like that, boss?

The book is complex but that’s okay.  Art mimics life.  Life is complex even when there are those trying to make it look simple for you.  Faulkner got that and you should too.  I did.

I loved Marquez but it was the same feeling.  Years later, as I faced the prospect on our honeymoon of a long and happy life with mi esposa, I read his Love In the Time of Cholera.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera.  

I read all of it all the way through but it just wasn’t the same, okay?  Something about “a wagon driver’s fart” somewhere near the end is all I can remember of the entire big novel. It had nowhere near the impact of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And chopping wood and living on the beach for a week in our little 1930s cabin.  I remember that too.  It was from the 1930s and we were in our 30s so that worked out okay.