Alex Colville

I knew he was a local artist with an international reputation, but did not realize until recently that much of his work is set in Nova Scotia. He spent the last 40 years of his life in Wolfville, where he and his wife lived in the house she had grown up in and which her father had built.

In looking at his work, I am reminded of Hemingway’s theory of omission, that leaving elements out of a story strengthens it. Colville does something similar in his paintings.  In many of them faces are obscured or hidden in a variety of ways. People have their backs to the viewer, their heads are turned away or are beyond the frame of the painting.  The result is that the context is incomplete, and we are left to fill in key details ourselves. Often there is a sense of impending danger.

The unsettling combination of beauty and dark possibility is evident in Horse and Train, To Prince Edward Island, Couple on Beach, and Berlin Bus.

In the National Gallery of Canada's website, Colville is quoted as saying, “I see life as inherently dangerous. I have an essentially dark view of the world and human affairs.”  

This view was doubtless a result of the time he spent in Europe as a war artist.  Additionally both he and his wife had traumatic experiences as children.  He was nine when his family moved to Nova Scotia, shortly after which he contracted pneumonia and nearly died.  His wife was around the same age when her father, sister and  brother were killed when their car was struck by a train at a level crossing just outside of Windsor NS.

Magic Realism

“...after the war he realized that his purpose as a painter was to translate archetypal myths into a contemporary visual style…  he abhorred abstract expressionism’s subjectivity and seeming undisciplined mode of representation” (Smart, p35)

Two famous American painters also associated with Magic Realism are Garth Wood (American Gothic) and Andrew Wyeth (Christina's World).

Blomidon

Another aspect of Colville's work that appeals to me is unrelated to Magic Realism. This is because the settings for much of his work are close to where I live, in the upper portion of the Annapolis Valley.  Colville had a cottage on the edge of Minas Basin, which provided the backdrop for many paintings, often with Cape Blomidon visible in the distance.

Blomidon is "a never-ending delight" wrote Esther Clark Wright on the very first page of her memoir, Blomidon Rose.

If we are coming over the hills from Halifax, "There's Blomidon!" we shout triumphantly, as soon as we catch sight of it, and we berate the roadmakers who chose a route that dips so soon behind hills and deprives us of a longer look at the beloved landmark. Outsiders are puzzled, and a little exasperated, by our enthusiasms for Blomidon.  They have seen higher mountains...

Blomidon is visible in the distance in Surveyor and Family and Rainstorm, as well in many other paintings. In West Brooklyn Road a man is waving from an overpass on Highway 101 just before it descends into the Valley and the view that Esther Clark Wright so cherished. Perhaps for Colville the serene rural environment was a suitable setting for juxtaposing the uncertainty of life.

In French Cross, a female rider passes a rigid iron monument, a memorial to the ethnic cleansing that took place in the 18th century when the British so cruelly displaced the Acadians who dwelt in the area.  The monument overlooks Minas Basin where Acadians were loaded onto ships like cattle.  In looking back over her shoulder, the rider is also looking back into history.

Sources

Alex Colville: Return by Tom Smart, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia/Douglas & McIntyre, 2003, 144 pages 

Ordinary Magic: A Biographical Sketch of Alex Coleville by J.R.C. Perkin, Robert Pope Foundation/Lancelot Press, 1995, 190 pages

Colville by David Burnett, Art Gallery of Ontario/McClelland and Stewart, 1983, 272 pages. In the book by Burnett there's a useful map showing the location of many of Colville's paintings in the upper Annapolis Valley.

Shakespeare in Swahililand

The author spent his youth in Kenya, and returns as an adult to track the spread of Shakespeare in East Africa. 

The book is packed with historical and literary detail, and at times reads like a travellogue as the author slips into the first person to describe the places he visits and recall some youthful experiences in Kenya.

The Lake Regions

Early travellers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley carried pocket versions of Shakespeare's works as a "talisman of Englishness."

Zanzibar

A British missionary, Edward Steere, translated into Swahili four of the stories in Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. He published them as Hadithi za Kiingereza.

Mombasa

A "vibrant culture of East African Shakespeare performance in the early years of the twentieth century" was brought from India by the labourers who built the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi. Travelling theatre groups performed versions of the plays in Hindustani, Gujurati, and other Indian languages. 

"This made these Indian communities in those years a considerably more concentrated centre of Shakespeare performance than London's West End." The plays received peevish reviews by the English.

Nairobi

This section is enlivened by quotes from Karen Blixen and Evelyn Waugh. The political awakening of Jomo Kenyatta is mentioned, as described in a novel by Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo.

Kampala and Dar es Salaam

At Makerere University in Kampala the future first president of Uganda, Milton Obote, played the lead role in a production of Julius Caesar. 

In Tanzania, Julius Caesar and Merchant of Venice, were translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere while he was president of Tanzania.

Miscellaneous Bits

• The half-year that Che Guevara spent hiding out in Dar es Salaam.
• The "uncannily parallel lives" of Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey'

Quotes

"It is inescapably true that the story of Shakespeare in East Africa is one caught up in colonial history and its failings."

"The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat,1967) of Kenya's most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, includes the story of a local official in the colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract entitled PROSPERO IN AFRICA."

 

The Library Book

Front Cover & Inside Back Cover

In 1986 the Central Library in downtown LA burned for seven hours with more than a million books damaged or destroyed. 

 

The suspected arsonist was a likeable fellow and would-be actor, as well as an inveterate liar who never told the same alibi twice. The evidence against him was circumstantial and he was never convicted. 

 

But true-crime is just one aspect of this marvellous book. Author Susan Orlean has found a rich source of material, including the evolution of libraries from horseback delivery to "nonphysical books," and the many other tasks that libraries take on today, particularly social ones. 

 

"Often at the library," she writes, "society's problems are magnified." Particularly homelessness, drug use, and mental illness. "The library's commitment of being open to all is an overwhelming challenge," and not only in large urban centres. 

 

The library, she observes, "is a good place to soften solitude."

Goings On at the Library

The strange concept of air rights, which the LAPL sold for $28 million in order to finance the rebuilding of the Central Library.

Movie studios in LA used to send people into the library to steal books for research purposes. One person would go inside, gather what was needed, and toss them out a window to an accomplice waiting below.

The library's network is often hacked, mostly by people based in China or Russia, but why? What is there to be gained? A staff member says it's because the library is a relatively easy target for hackers still learning their trade. It's a training exercise.

"People searching for missing loved ones sometimes scribbled messages in library books with the hope that the person they were looking for would see the message."

Drug dealers coming into the library for help with their income tax forms

A woman who made $40K a year selling books pinched from libraries,

A patron with a service wolf, and another who said on being told that eating was now allowed, "I'm not eating, I'm snacking."

Back to the Fire 

 

The fire was so fierce that it resulted in something called a stoichiometric condition, a rare combination of fuel and oxygen almost impossible to achieve outside a laboratory. 

 

"Usually a fire is red and orange and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot it appeared icy."

 

The temperature rose to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit, approaching a situation called a flashover, in which everything becomes so hot it achieves spontaneous combustion.

 

One of the most unnerving things that Orlean mentions is that some firefighters are arsonists.

 

Random Thoughts 

Most readers will have fond memories of libraries. I remember as a child looking for books about Freddy the Pig, and the excitement of my own children when many years I took them to the same library looking for titles in the Redwall series by Brian Jaques.

My mother-in-law was a librarian whose sole failing, as her daughters wrote in her obituary, was "the inability to cram more books into her library." One of her chief pleasures was sending books to her grandchildren for Xmas and birthdays.

I've been fortunate to work in a number of libraries -- providing technical support, giving computer tutorials, setting up Wi-Fi hotspots, and on one occasion writing a small program to automatically shut down computers at closing time because librarians were having trouble prying patrons away from them.

Books are important because they allow us to transcend our own fragile existence.

This is why I read. This is why I write.

The Blue Fox

Another unusual read from Iceland.

Set in 1883, the book opens with “a daughter of Reynard,” a blue fox indistinguishable from the stone she is resting beside. She is keeping an eye on a pursuer hiding in a snowdrift. 

He has not moved in the last 18 hours. Suddenly he receives a message telling him exactly how to intercept the fox. 

“Had the man received a thought message from the vixen?”

The prose is spare. Snippets of text give the opening pages the appearance of poems. On one page there is a single sentence. The visual effect suggests, for me at least, the snowy landscape in which the story takes place.   

II

The second part settles into a more conventional narrative, one that grows increasingly tangled and convoluted. It centres on Fridrik Fridjonsson, a herbalist and farmer who 17 years previously rescued Abba from prison.

(No, not the Swedish pop group.) 

She's a woman with Down syndrome. Her full name is Halfdis Jonsdottir and she has just died. Her sweetheart, Halfdan Atlason, has come to collect the body. He is also "the Reverend Baldur's eejit."

Fridrik gives Halfdan a letter for Baldur, who is conducting the burial service. At the end of the letter Fridrik mentions that he has dreamed of a blue fox.

The tale retreats further into the past to explain how Abba arrived by shipwreck, and describes the strange bundle she carried with her for the rest of her life. Fridrik opens the bundle and finds 48 wooden tablets. When properly assembled they reveal a quote (in Latin) from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

III

The third section continues the book's opening thread. We now know more about the person hunting the blue fox.

The shot he fired triggers an avalanche that sweeps him under a glacier, along with the fox. He meets a young woman and the Well of Life. The fox revives, digs out the shotgun pellets from her body, and engages the man in a discussion of electricity.

What happens next is even more incredible.

IV

The final section takes the form of the letter that Fridrik wrote to a friend. It sheds some light on the connection between Abba and the hunter.

Sjon

The author is a poet, playwright, and singer who has performed with Bjork. More about him can be found on his website. 

The Blue Fox was first published in 2004. The English translation by Victoria Cribb appeared in 2008, and clocks in at 112 pages.

Children in Reindeer Woods

A few years ago my wife visited Iceland and returned with a stack of books. One of them, Bloodhoof, a collection of poems in both Icelandic and English, she took a stab at translating herself with the help of a dictionary.

This is the first one I've dipped into it, and it's quite unlike anything I've ever read, It's a modern fairytale that takes place at a summer camp called Children in Reindeer Woods, and is linked by road to the Ceaseless Heath, the Endless Pass, and the Forever Valley.

The heroine is an 11-year-old girl named Billie. Her father believes he is a puppet. Whenever his arm is torn off, Billie's mother sews it back on. 

Billie has several dolls. One is named Guggalugga, another is bald, and a third is pregnant.

The man in charge of the camp is a former ballet dancer with splayed feet.

Somewhere in the Distance a War is Going on.

The story begins with the arrival of a soldier named Rafael. He wants to be a farmer and gets rid of his uniform but not his weapons.

Another soldier arrives. He parachutes in with a guitar. 

A pair of tax collectors show up with a briefcase full of money in the trunk of their car.

A nun comes to the back door and asks for food, then a cigarette. Rafael offers her a drink. She takes off her clothes, plays the guitar, and kisses Raphael.

The last visitor is a shepherd who has been tending a flock of sheep all summer. He plans on returning to university.

Except for Rafael, none of them stay around for any longer than a night. When he and Billie have an argument, they call each other idiot-head and pretzel-face.

Eyes of a Child

There are brief moments of violence but they are not gruesome, and some are absurd. Two dolls commit suicide. Raphael hangs a chicken for crapping in the house, and blows up two cars.

Many of the scenes are described with a childlike innocence.

The cow lowed from out back as though it was missing the fun. Mooooo.

[Billie] dried her mouth as if it were a stamp and the napkin an important document.

The automobile set off from the place.  Fart Fart.

When Rafael and Billie decide to get married, the dolls are witnesses. "We'll let the hens sign the contract," says Billie.

The final chapter caps the surreal nature of the book. It takes place on the planet of the puppeteers who control Billie's father. 

Author

Kristen Omarsdottir is an Icelandic author, poet, playwright, and visual artist. She has written other novels but this is the only one that has been translated into English. The translation is by Lytton Smith.

Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Operation Mincemeat was a part of a plan to convince Hitler that the Allies, following the success of their North Africa campaign, intended to mount a double-pronged invasion of Europe at Sardinia and Greece, and not Sicily, the most logical target.

Mincemeat was implemented by British Naval Intelligence.  The cadaver of a derelict was fitted out with a uniform, identity papers, and a sealed envelope containing information about the bogus invasion. The body was placed in a sealed cannister filled with dry ice, and carried by submarine to Spain and deposited close enough to shore where it could be found, with the hope that the envelope would make its way into Nazi hands.

A Novel Approach

The plan took an immense amount of planning and had many possible points of failure.  For example, it was not enough to plant fake ID papers on the cadaver.  An entire personality had to be created.  It was as if they were "constructing a character in a novel."

The author points out that "the greatest writers of spy fiction have, almost in every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing."  He mentions Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Graham Greene, John le Carre, and of course Ian Fleming, who happened to be the personal assistant of Admiral John Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence and a man with a "sandpaper personality."  He served as the model for M in his James Bond novels.

Twin Frailties 

Admiral Godrey described wishfulness and yesmanship as the "twin frailties of German intelligence" 

"The Nazi high command ... when presented with contradictory intelligence reports, was 'inclined to believe the one that fits in best with their own previously formed conceptions.'"  Hitler's "favourite intelligence analyst," Alexis von Roenne, told Hitler what he wanted to hear, that the information was genuine.

Yet the whole story does not end there.  Unknown to anyone, von Roenne had turned against the Nazi regime.  In 1944  he deliberately misled Hitler about Allied plans for the invasion of Normandy.  He was executed after the failed plot to assassination Hitler.  Although he played no part in it he was a close friend of several conspirators 

Illustrations

There are 14 pages of b&w photos. The person on the cover is Ewen Montagu, one of the masterminds of Mincemeat.  His brother, Ivor, was a communist spy.

The following map shows the route taken by the bogus information:

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