I have to admit I have been really morose over the past few days, and I really don't know why. I'm trying to settle on some upbeat music to cheer me up, and I've finally landed on some Nat King Cole.
That's helping a little bit. I'm also going to write a post about positive government decisions, or at least ones that I agree with.
It is hard sometimes to appreciate it but city councillors are generally trying to balance a lot of competing interests and conflicting advice. I think it is fair to say that most take their jobs seriously, and it is often the fickleness of the public that leads them into some of the more puzzling decisions that they make. But there is one thing that is a constant, and that is that the city's legal staff are always recommending bylaws to limit the city's legal exposure.
And in the abstract, that is fine. That is what they are there to do, though over the past 20-30 years, the tort system has generally removed all personal responsibility from the equation and municipalities have been sued for some of the craziest things and often have lost. (I suppose in some cases it is questionable whether the municipality had done enough to warn of the risks, but generally these cases highlight an out-of-control legal system.) This leads to another round of CYA legislation.
Council always has the opportunity to override staff recommendations, though they rarely do. So I think it is worth celebrating that Toronto City Council has taken a few chances, particularly when it comes to allowing kids to play "the way they used to." Mayor Tory in particular has been willing to support this, accepting of just a bit of risk here and there. Maybe I am being too optimistic, but perhaps the pendulum is swinging back a bit to when most kids were raised "free range," as it were, and helicopter parents were rare. In general, there may be just a bit more common sense in Canada (and slightly fewer lawsuits) than in the U.S.
I'm specifically thinking about the recent decision to overturn a municipal ban on street hockey (and street basketball) in Toronto. Some information about this decision here and here. The vote really wasn't close at all (35-2). What's particularly interesting is that 5 years ago council was asked to overturn the ban, but the decision at that time was that since the bylaw was rarely enforced, it was better to leave it on the books (to not open the city up to liability and to leave the cops one more tool to break things up if a game was getting out of hand). I have to admit that seems an extremely cynical view of the role of municipal bylaws and one that leaves parents at the mercy of a rogue cop, who could hit them with $55 tickets. So I'm quite pleased that they changed their mind this time around, since it would have been easy to stay with the status quo.
Along similar lines, Toronto allows sledding and tobogganing on most hills (and Tory was strongly opposed to outlawing sledding), though there are a few specific hills that are considered too dangerous and are marked as "No sledding." Apparently, it is fairly hard to monitor these hills, but the city has basically covered itself to the point where it should avoid liability. To me, this is a very reasonable approach. Certainly, all the parks near us have decent sledding hills and they are heavily used in the winter. However, the City of Hamilton was burned by a lawyer who injured himself while sledding, and they had to pay out $900K! In consequence, the bylaws are not going to be dropped in Hamilton and technically one is not supposed to sled in the city, though the article goes on to note that no one has actually been fined in recent years. So the situation is a tough one for parents, who basically end up teaching their kids to ignore bylaws when they don't make sense or aren't actually enforced. (Not really a great life lesson...)
Also, Toronto is experimenting with bringing back legal skating to Grenadier Pond in High Park, trying to make the tradition legal again. This is a case where the lawyers may end up having the final say, but we'll see.
Sometimes the bylaws are written in a way that ends up being pretty broad. There was a problem with fighting kites in some parks, and then they passed a broad bylaw. In fact, someone told me that flying kites in Toronto is illegal, though that isn't entirely true. This is the bylaw:
While in a park, no person shall:
(1) Fly a kite with a string made of hazardous materials;
(2) Fly a kite within 25 metres of any tree, building, light pole or hydro or other utility pole;
(3) Fly a kite in parking lots, roadways or pathways;
(4) Fly a kite for the purpose of competitive flying unless authorized by permit;
(5) Fly a kite where posted to prohibit kite flying; or
(6) Leave in the park any part of the kite, including the string or other type of
tethering material, except in a waste disposal container
The rub is that "hazardous materials" includes materials made of metal, wire, piano wire, fishing line or any type of nylon that can be or is chemically treated or contains glass fragments.
Virtually any nylon string could be chemically treated. Obviously, the only string that would completely satisfy this bylaw is a cotton string. So while one could be hassled for flying a kite in a park, especially too close to trees, in general one is probably going to be left alone (and the liability is generally low so city council isn't likely to push for a wider ban on kites, particularly under Tory).
I did buy a kite a while back, and it appears that the string is cotton or a cotton/poly blend, and it probably doesn't violate the bylaw. This might actually be a good weekend to attempt to fly it, so I'll see if the kids are interested. That might be fun, provided we don't crash it into a tree...
I was going to write about the ridiculousness of Illinois State law with regards to bicycles, but I fear that would just upset me and undo the point of writing out this post. Perhaps some other time. For now, I will just focus on the fact that Toronto is willing to accept at least a bit of liability in order to let kids play the way they used to in generations past, and that, in my view, is something to celebrate.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Those meddling commissioners!
There is an interesting news story about a former camp in Clarington, Ont. used to hold German prisoners of war during WWII. This is the only intact camp used to hold German prisoners of war left in the world, so it is kind of a big deal, though it isn't in an obvious touristic location (about 1/3 of the way between Toronto and Kingston). Still, it is near the 401, so not too remote.
So there is a deal worked out with a developer to try to salvage 5 of the core buildings and turn it into a historic site of sorts. I hope it succeeds, though it will certainly require some government funding to keep going.
What gives me a bit of pause is that according to the article the vandalism is pretty extreme, with people coming over and spray-painting security cameras and then graffiti'ing up the place and trying to break down the walls with ATVs. It strikes me as the kind of thing that a small group of teens or bored young adults would do, and might have been doing for some time, escalating their mischief over time. I assume that they now consider the place more or less theirs, and it might take quite a bit of work to dislodge them. This being Canada, it might take less work than in the States, but it still won't be easy. I have a tiny bit of sympathy for people who probably don't have a lot, and just want a hangout where they can smoke weed or whatevs, but if they just hang on a bit longer it will be legal... That doesn't excuse the fact that they are being extremely destructive vandals and are claiming a space to which they have no rights.
I have this weird mental picture that this is a Scooby Do episode where the Gang is trying to figure out who is scaring everyone from the abandoned fun house or campground, and it turns out in this case to be a bunch of rowdy teenagers who want the place to themselves, though in a typical episode, it will turn out to be some businessman who doesn't want competition or a scientist who thinks there are valuable oil or mineral rights associated with the property.
Anyway, I am not enough of a WWII buff to go even if they do restore the property and chase away the vandals, but as I said it would be nice if they do succeed.
So there is a deal worked out with a developer to try to salvage 5 of the core buildings and turn it into a historic site of sorts. I hope it succeeds, though it will certainly require some government funding to keep going.
What gives me a bit of pause is that according to the article the vandalism is pretty extreme, with people coming over and spray-painting security cameras and then graffiti'ing up the place and trying to break down the walls with ATVs. It strikes me as the kind of thing that a small group of teens or bored young adults would do, and might have been doing for some time, escalating their mischief over time. I assume that they now consider the place more or less theirs, and it might take quite a bit of work to dislodge them. This being Canada, it might take less work than in the States, but it still won't be easy. I have a tiny bit of sympathy for people who probably don't have a lot, and just want a hangout where they can smoke weed or whatevs, but if they just hang on a bit longer it will be legal... That doesn't excuse the fact that they are being extremely destructive vandals and are claiming a space to which they have no rights.
I have this weird mental picture that this is a Scooby Do episode where the Gang is trying to figure out who is scaring everyone from the abandoned fun house or campground, and it turns out in this case to be a bunch of rowdy teenagers who want the place to themselves, though in a typical episode, it will turn out to be some businessman who doesn't want competition or a scientist who thinks there are valuable oil or mineral rights associated with the property.
Anyway, I am not enough of a WWII buff to go even if they do restore the property and chase away the vandals, but as I said it would be nice if they do succeed.
Sunday, July 17, 2016
WWSD (What Would Shakespeare Do?)
I was browsing through the reviews of Shakespeare in Toronto's High Park, and I read this one from the Globe and Mail, which threw me into a tizzy. Sometimes I have this bad habit of immediately reacting negatively and then only slowly can I argue myself into a more reasonable position. (I suppose this is better than never coming around or changing my mind.) Nonetheless, even if I calm down enough to not denounce these shows, I can tell that they would offend the purist in me and I wouldn't fully enjoy them. But I am trying to decide whether Shakespeare himself would have gotten so hot and bothered, and I suspect in most cases he wouldn't. So let me unpack that a bit.
Basically, nearly all contemporary productions of Shakespeare cut a little bit, especially some of the jokes that don't make much sense any longer, trying to wrestle the plays down to 3 hours or so. Outdoor Shakespeare productions usually cut more, aiming for 2 hours. This is certainly one reason why the comedies are put on more, since they are generally shorter to begin with. Hamlet is in fact the longest of all his plays, and it is not performed outdoors often (particularly if it must be squeezed down to 2 hours). Curiously, I was going to see it in Cambridge, and we made it through the first half, and they called it due to rain. That is more or less what happened to the preview performance the Globe and Mail critic watched. Last summer, Driftwood did an interesting hybrid where they took a shorter, faster version of Hamlet (the First Folio) but interpolated the more famous lines from the more polished 1623 Version. (Some details here.) That worked quite well actually.
Anyway, productions that basically just cut the lines and even some subplots don't fuss me. Shakespeare definitely would have done that. (And who knows how much of the original plays even made it into the Folios? This is a debate that has raged for centuries...) He would not have had any problem with changing the settings. I doubt he would have been too upset over gender swapping roles and reinforcing or adding homosexual tendencies in the plays (or in the case of Driftwood's production gender swapping Horatio and having her have an unrequited crush on Hamlet*).
He may or may not have balked a little bit at reordering his plays. It mostly would depend on whether it worked or not. There was that kerfuffle when Cumberbatch opened Hamlet with "To Be or Not to Be," and it was quickly put back in a more traditional place. This piece is relatively good on discussing how the speech might well have moved around in performance in Shakespeare's day, though I think it lets the producers off too easily in the sense that they monkeyed around with the play in a way that really doesn't make sense. If Hamlet starts off so low, even before seeing his father's ghost, then where does he go from there? Plus, it was clearly initially aimed at making sure the punters who were there just to see a celebrity (and might even have been subtly encouraged to leave at intermission) got to hear and see the money shot,** as it were. My understanding is that some of that went on in Shakespeare's day when the patrons could call for a scene to be replayed if it was a hit, though I may be mistaken.
Shakespeare probably would have a bit of a problem with any changes that really altered the meaning of the play.† While I am working off limited information in the review, I am not at all impressed with the changes that have been made to the High Park Hamlet, most notably that Hamlet is the only one that sees his father's ghost and that Horatio is only humoring him and basically agrees with Claudius and Gertrude when they send for the psychiatrist (Dr. Rosencrantz) to examine Hamlet. In general, Hamlet is a mopey hipster who actually is a "cutter." I think these changes do far too much damage to the play, and I certainly have no intention of going.
All's Well That Ends Well is basically a problem play anyway, and one that I didn't care for much when I saw it straight years ago in New York's Shakespeare in the Park. In this case, there is some trimming, but apparently to smooth things over, the director Ted Witzel has penned not just one, but 3 new monologues, given to a minor character. I suspect this would be too much for Shakespeare, and it probably will be too much for me. People are going to see Shakespeare and not Shakespeare + Witzel. But this is not at all made clear, and, unfortunately, given the state of reviewing in Toronto, audiences are not likely to know they are not getting "authentic" Shakespeare, and this is doubly true for All's Well That Ends Well, which almost nobody reads any longer.
It's a tough call. Shakespeare probably didn't consider his words "sacred," but I'm not sure he would have wanted anyone else doing the rewrites either. But that isn't exactly an option any more...
I've mentioned before that the ending of As You Like It is stupid‡ and a better ending could easily be derived (maybe from stealing a scene from another play?) but I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing without making it clear in the playbill that this was a hybrid and to point them in the direction of the original if they wanted to research on their own. (And I have seen some clever hybrids - The Merchant on Venice (Beach) - and some reworkings of Shakespeare, but they always made it clear on the tin that this wasn't unadulterated Shakespeare.)
After all this reflection, I've decided that I will give All's Well a shot, but I am skipping Hamlet. I'm still looking forward to Taming of the Shrew, which is actually coming to Withrow Park next week. The weather is a bit unpredictable, but it currently looks like Wed. or Thurs. would be the best nights. And most likely I will go to see Romeo and Juliet in Withrow Park in August.
* Apparently, there is a bit more of this in the Driftwood Taming of the Shrew this year, with Lucentio-Bianca a lesbian love story and Tranio is basically pan-sexual. It is all set during Pride weekend in Toronto in 1989. This sounds like an intriguing set of choices, but what tips me into the willing to go camp is that they while they certainly will be cutting, Driftwood doesn't alter the text that is left. Still, it doesn't sound entirely family-friendly. I'll have a bit more to say about the production later.
** While I am on the subject of "money shots" and outdoor theatre, I still can't believe that asshole a couple of years back that decided to leave the High Park production of As You Like It right in the middle of Jacques's 7 Ages of Man speech and disrupted the entire row. It was almost like he planned to spoil the play. What a jerk.
† And I suspect he wouldn't have much time for pointless wankery, as when the director of Stratford's Hamlet had Hamlet shoot rather than stab Polonius, which then required changing a line or two. I think it was a fundamentally misguided decision, since Hamlet really ought to have a physical connection to the death -- shooting is too easy, as we know all too well in urban centres in North America.
‡ If Homer nods (pace Horace), then Shakespeare certainly does as well at times, or at least whoever compiled these plays made a few mistakes here and there. This is the sort of thing that I can rationally admit, but then still get cheesed off when some upstart director decides to "correct" Shakespeare. Well, foolish consistency and all that. I guess it ultimately comes down to 1) whether I more or less agree with the changes, 2) is the result more entertaining than the original, which is not necessarily the same thing, though I find a lot is forgivable if the end result is entertaining and 3) are the changes glaringly obvious and distracting from the play? To a certain extent, All's Well That Ends Well is so obscure that few in the audience will even recognize the changes...
Basically, nearly all contemporary productions of Shakespeare cut a little bit, especially some of the jokes that don't make much sense any longer, trying to wrestle the plays down to 3 hours or so. Outdoor Shakespeare productions usually cut more, aiming for 2 hours. This is certainly one reason why the comedies are put on more, since they are generally shorter to begin with. Hamlet is in fact the longest of all his plays, and it is not performed outdoors often (particularly if it must be squeezed down to 2 hours). Curiously, I was going to see it in Cambridge, and we made it through the first half, and they called it due to rain. That is more or less what happened to the preview performance the Globe and Mail critic watched. Last summer, Driftwood did an interesting hybrid where they took a shorter, faster version of Hamlet (the First Folio) but interpolated the more famous lines from the more polished 1623 Version. (Some details here.) That worked quite well actually.
Anyway, productions that basically just cut the lines and even some subplots don't fuss me. Shakespeare definitely would have done that. (And who knows how much of the original plays even made it into the Folios? This is a debate that has raged for centuries...) He would not have had any problem with changing the settings. I doubt he would have been too upset over gender swapping roles and reinforcing or adding homosexual tendencies in the plays (or in the case of Driftwood's production gender swapping Horatio and having her have an unrequited crush on Hamlet*).
He may or may not have balked a little bit at reordering his plays. It mostly would depend on whether it worked or not. There was that kerfuffle when Cumberbatch opened Hamlet with "To Be or Not to Be," and it was quickly put back in a more traditional place. This piece is relatively good on discussing how the speech might well have moved around in performance in Shakespeare's day, though I think it lets the producers off too easily in the sense that they monkeyed around with the play in a way that really doesn't make sense. If Hamlet starts off so low, even before seeing his father's ghost, then where does he go from there? Plus, it was clearly initially aimed at making sure the punters who were there just to see a celebrity (and might even have been subtly encouraged to leave at intermission) got to hear and see the money shot,** as it were. My understanding is that some of that went on in Shakespeare's day when the patrons could call for a scene to be replayed if it was a hit, though I may be mistaken.
Shakespeare probably would have a bit of a problem with any changes that really altered the meaning of the play.† While I am working off limited information in the review, I am not at all impressed with the changes that have been made to the High Park Hamlet, most notably that Hamlet is the only one that sees his father's ghost and that Horatio is only humoring him and basically agrees with Claudius and Gertrude when they send for the psychiatrist (Dr. Rosencrantz) to examine Hamlet. In general, Hamlet is a mopey hipster who actually is a "cutter." I think these changes do far too much damage to the play, and I certainly have no intention of going.
All's Well That Ends Well is basically a problem play anyway, and one that I didn't care for much when I saw it straight years ago in New York's Shakespeare in the Park. In this case, there is some trimming, but apparently to smooth things over, the director Ted Witzel has penned not just one, but 3 new monologues, given to a minor character. I suspect this would be too much for Shakespeare, and it probably will be too much for me. People are going to see Shakespeare and not Shakespeare + Witzel. But this is not at all made clear, and, unfortunately, given the state of reviewing in Toronto, audiences are not likely to know they are not getting "authentic" Shakespeare, and this is doubly true for All's Well That Ends Well, which almost nobody reads any longer.
It's a tough call. Shakespeare probably didn't consider his words "sacred," but I'm not sure he would have wanted anyone else doing the rewrites either. But that isn't exactly an option any more...
I've mentioned before that the ending of As You Like It is stupid‡ and a better ending could easily be derived (maybe from stealing a scene from another play?) but I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing without making it clear in the playbill that this was a hybrid and to point them in the direction of the original if they wanted to research on their own. (And I have seen some clever hybrids - The Merchant on Venice (Beach) - and some reworkings of Shakespeare, but they always made it clear on the tin that this wasn't unadulterated Shakespeare.)
After all this reflection, I've decided that I will give All's Well a shot, but I am skipping Hamlet. I'm still looking forward to Taming of the Shrew, which is actually coming to Withrow Park next week. The weather is a bit unpredictable, but it currently looks like Wed. or Thurs. would be the best nights. And most likely I will go to see Romeo and Juliet in Withrow Park in August.
* Apparently, there is a bit more of this in the Driftwood Taming of the Shrew this year, with Lucentio-Bianca a lesbian love story and Tranio is basically pan-sexual. It is all set during Pride weekend in Toronto in 1989. This sounds like an intriguing set of choices, but what tips me into the willing to go camp is that they while they certainly will be cutting, Driftwood doesn't alter the text that is left. Still, it doesn't sound entirely family-friendly. I'll have a bit more to say about the production later.
** While I am on the subject of "money shots" and outdoor theatre, I still can't believe that asshole a couple of years back that decided to leave the High Park production of As You Like It right in the middle of Jacques's 7 Ages of Man speech and disrupted the entire row. It was almost like he planned to spoil the play. What a jerk.
† And I suspect he wouldn't have much time for pointless wankery, as when the director of Stratford's Hamlet had Hamlet shoot rather than stab Polonius, which then required changing a line or two. I think it was a fundamentally misguided decision, since Hamlet really ought to have a physical connection to the death -- shooting is too easy, as we know all too well in urban centres in North America.
‡ If Homer nods (pace Horace), then Shakespeare certainly does as well at times, or at least whoever compiled these plays made a few mistakes here and there. This is the sort of thing that I can rationally admit, but then still get cheesed off when some upstart director decides to "correct" Shakespeare. Well, foolish consistency and all that. I guess it ultimately comes down to 1) whether I more or less agree with the changes, 2) is the result more entertaining than the original, which is not necessarily the same thing, though I find a lot is forgivable if the end result is entertaining and 3) are the changes glaringly obvious and distracting from the play? To a certain extent, All's Well That Ends Well is so obscure that few in the audience will even recognize the changes...
Friday, July 15, 2016
10th Canadian Challenge - 1st Review - Burning Water
I didn't really remember much about George Bowering's novel Burning Water. I must have read it the first time back in 1994 or so, since I picked up a small stack of Canadian novels while going to grad school at UT (back before most of the used book stores in Toronto closed down or moved outside the downtown core).
Bowering is certainly better known as a poet, and I believe Burning Water is his only novel. (Of his various poetry collections, I think Delayed Mercy is particularly interesting.) This is a bit of a reverse from Robert Kroetsch, who did write poetry (Field Notes and the Ledger in particular) but is generally better known as a novelist. In addition, both of them used postmodern tropes and techniques in their novels. If I had to sum up postmodern fiction, I would say it is a playful stance where the author makes the artifice of fiction apparent, often by having the narrator realize he or she is a fictional character and/or writing "the author" into the text (a bit like breaking the fourth wall in film or television). It is a literature that basically emerged from boredom with conventional fiction. At least in my opinion, it is usually more fun for the author than for the reader, since postmodern techniques deliberately undermine the cohesiveness of the plot and ultimately the traditional interest that readers invest in characters. What's left is style and the cleverness of the author. Postmodern fiction can occasionally "work" for me, but it is a style with drastic diminishing margins of enjoyment. So that means that Paul Auster's New York Trilogy pretty much blew me away (when I was 18 or so), I enjoyed Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man quite a bit (mostly because the characters are so interesting they can survive being put through the pomo blender) and for most other postmodern fiction, I'm like "meh, it's all been done before." That's only a slight exaggeration, but I am bored with this literary trend that emerged from boredom. (Perhaps this is just a continuation of my rant against sterile art.) While Burning Water came out in 1980 (five years before Auster's work!), it just doesn't have the same impact for me, but perhaps if I had never read any postmodern novel previously, it would have been mind-blowing.
I think my problem is that the postmodern techniques just don't add anything here. We have several parts of the novel where the reader sees Bowering the novelist wandering around Trieste, Italy. He comments that he found it somehow easier to write about Vancouver Island from a distance. But all these moments don't really add up to anything, and certainly "the author" never interacts with the characters. It's just distracting. Then there are 3 sections where Bowering makes William Blake a character in the book, for no apparent reason, since Blake had nothing to do with Vancouver. It is slightly more defensible when Bowering makes an elaborate joke about Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Add to that 2 First Nations observers who occasionally watch George Vancouver and his crew carrying out their map-making up and down the coast, though in this case, one of the natives sells Vancouver a "dream" about a Pacific Northwest passage into the interior. Thus, there is a lot going on in the novel, including some bandinage amongst the crew, most of which detracts from the ostensible plot of the novel, which is Vancouver getting more cruel to his crew as the voyage comes to an end, partly because his health is declining from being outside in all the rain but also because he fell in love with Captain Quadra, who was in the Spanish navy (and being separated from his lover is making Vancouver uncommonly cranky)!
This love story is almost certainly a complete fabrication by Bowering, probably inspired by the relatively unknown fact that Vancouver Island was originally named Quadra and Vancouver Island! Still, it seems like this could have inspired a short article on the subject, not a full blown novel.
Bowering ends up playing the unreliable narrator in several ways, but to some extent, the most insidious is that he mixes up real facts with completely made up ones, so that anyone that cares about "the truth" will actually have to do some digging, or at least go off to Wikipedia. What's quite fascinating about the real-life Captain Vancouver is that while his maps were fantastically detailed (some being used well into the 20th Century!), he somehow missed the Columbia and Fraser Rivers! Bowering relates this, as well as the actions that Vancouver took in trying to locate some islands that the Spaniards had put on their charts (but apparently were just the Sandwich Islands put down very sloppily in the wrong place well over 100 nautical miles away from their actual position). But then Bowering goes an invents a love life for Vancouver, and perhaps most surprisingly, comes up with a very dramatic death scene for Vancouver that is a complete falsehood. (Vancouver did die very shortly after his mapping voyage was completed, but not at all how Bowering describes it.) I guess there is a point to be made that there is no absolute truth, and that history is always refracted through many lens, but if you are at all interested in Captain Vancouver as a historical figure (rather than a literary invention) then you probably will not enjoy Burning Water.
Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth is a novel that has some similarities on the surface to Bowering's novel in that it is about a historical figure (Simon Bolivar) and Garcia Marquez fills in a lot of personal details around the general's historical itinerary towards the end of his life, but Garcia Marquez ultimately hews much closer to a kind of historical truth than Bowering does. I guess it sort of seems redundant to require a sticker saying, "Warning, this is a piece of fiction and the novelist may mislead you about the life of Captain Vancouver," but we seem to be living in a shallow-era where everyone has to be warned ahead of time (but in a way that doesn't give away too many spoilers), so anyway, I have tried to do my duty. Whether the reader is at all interested in going forward at this point is another question. I probably wouldn't unless I was particularly interested in the Pacific Northwest as a region. Or if I was particularly turned on by fan fiction about sea captains, which is another thing the book has going for it. Or if I was really interested in postmodern fiction, though as I already relayed, I am basically indifferent to it at this point in my reading career.
Bowering is certainly better known as a poet, and I believe Burning Water is his only novel. (Of his various poetry collections, I think Delayed Mercy is particularly interesting.) This is a bit of a reverse from Robert Kroetsch, who did write poetry (Field Notes and the Ledger in particular) but is generally better known as a novelist. In addition, both of them used postmodern tropes and techniques in their novels. If I had to sum up postmodern fiction, I would say it is a playful stance where the author makes the artifice of fiction apparent, often by having the narrator realize he or she is a fictional character and/or writing "the author" into the text (a bit like breaking the fourth wall in film or television). It is a literature that basically emerged from boredom with conventional fiction. At least in my opinion, it is usually more fun for the author than for the reader, since postmodern techniques deliberately undermine the cohesiveness of the plot and ultimately the traditional interest that readers invest in characters. What's left is style and the cleverness of the author. Postmodern fiction can occasionally "work" for me, but it is a style with drastic diminishing margins of enjoyment. So that means that Paul Auster's New York Trilogy pretty much blew me away (when I was 18 or so), I enjoyed Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man quite a bit (mostly because the characters are so interesting they can survive being put through the pomo blender) and for most other postmodern fiction, I'm like "meh, it's all been done before." That's only a slight exaggeration, but I am bored with this literary trend that emerged from boredom. (Perhaps this is just a continuation of my rant against sterile art.) While Burning Water came out in 1980 (five years before Auster's work!), it just doesn't have the same impact for me, but perhaps if I had never read any postmodern novel previously, it would have been mind-blowing.
I think my problem is that the postmodern techniques just don't add anything here. We have several parts of the novel where the reader sees Bowering the novelist wandering around Trieste, Italy. He comments that he found it somehow easier to write about Vancouver Island from a distance. But all these moments don't really add up to anything, and certainly "the author" never interacts with the characters. It's just distracting. Then there are 3 sections where Bowering makes William Blake a character in the book, for no apparent reason, since Blake had nothing to do with Vancouver. It is slightly more defensible when Bowering makes an elaborate joke about Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Add to that 2 First Nations observers who occasionally watch George Vancouver and his crew carrying out their map-making up and down the coast, though in this case, one of the natives sells Vancouver a "dream" about a Pacific Northwest passage into the interior. Thus, there is a lot going on in the novel, including some bandinage amongst the crew, most of which detracts from the ostensible plot of the novel, which is Vancouver getting more cruel to his crew as the voyage comes to an end, partly because his health is declining from being outside in all the rain but also because he fell in love with Captain Quadra, who was in the Spanish navy (and being separated from his lover is making Vancouver uncommonly cranky)!
This love story is almost certainly a complete fabrication by Bowering, probably inspired by the relatively unknown fact that Vancouver Island was originally named Quadra and Vancouver Island! Still, it seems like this could have inspired a short article on the subject, not a full blown novel.
Bowering ends up playing the unreliable narrator in several ways, but to some extent, the most insidious is that he mixes up real facts with completely made up ones, so that anyone that cares about "the truth" will actually have to do some digging, or at least go off to Wikipedia. What's quite fascinating about the real-life Captain Vancouver is that while his maps were fantastically detailed (some being used well into the 20th Century!), he somehow missed the Columbia and Fraser Rivers! Bowering relates this, as well as the actions that Vancouver took in trying to locate some islands that the Spaniards had put on their charts (but apparently were just the Sandwich Islands put down very sloppily in the wrong place well over 100 nautical miles away from their actual position). But then Bowering goes an invents a love life for Vancouver, and perhaps most surprisingly, comes up with a very dramatic death scene for Vancouver that is a complete falsehood. (Vancouver did die very shortly after his mapping voyage was completed, but not at all how Bowering describes it.) I guess there is a point to be made that there is no absolute truth, and that history is always refracted through many lens, but if you are at all interested in Captain Vancouver as a historical figure (rather than a literary invention) then you probably will not enjoy Burning Water.
Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth is a novel that has some similarities on the surface to Bowering's novel in that it is about a historical figure (Simon Bolivar) and Garcia Marquez fills in a lot of personal details around the general's historical itinerary towards the end of his life, but Garcia Marquez ultimately hews much closer to a kind of historical truth than Bowering does. I guess it sort of seems redundant to require a sticker saying, "Warning, this is a piece of fiction and the novelist may mislead you about the life of Captain Vancouver," but we seem to be living in a shallow-era where everyone has to be warned ahead of time (but in a way that doesn't give away too many spoilers), so anyway, I have tried to do my duty. Whether the reader is at all interested in going forward at this point is another question. I probably wouldn't unless I was particularly interested in the Pacific Northwest as a region. Or if I was particularly turned on by fan fiction about sea captains, which is another thing the book has going for it. Or if I was really interested in postmodern fiction, though as I already relayed, I am basically indifferent to it at this point in my reading career.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
The revolt against the technocrats
Perhaps it is one of those things that if you blinked you missed it, but in the 1980s and perhaps even the early 90s, there were a few books out there talking about the abdication of the political process to technical experts and policy wonks, i.e. technocrats. And no question there are a fair number of transportation authorities that were set up explicitly to take technical decisions out of the political realm. (Doig's Empire on the Hudson is all about the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. No question that unchecked authority is a problem (as well as the tunnel vision (pun intended) of many engineers), though all evidence points to the complete inability of politicians to actually process complex decisions).
In any event, the pendulum has definitely swung back the other way with a vengeance, especially in the U.S. but also in Canada and somewhat surprisingly the U.K. (i.e. Brexit). Experts are routinely derided by political sorts and their followers, though it is also obvious that it is predominantly right-wing movements that are currently ignoring scientific and even most economic evidence. (Sadly, the one sphere where experts still seem to have their own way is in trade deals where perhaps a bit of populism or at least taking a broader view of the impacts on the whole of society and not merely corporate interests would be a good thing. As should be evident, I'm clearly in a major funk right now.)
I am actually sick to my stomach after watching the City Council debate the transit file. Final decisions aside, it has been distressing watching the politicians refuse to listen to any evidence that doesn't back their view, as well as hear mis-statements and outright lies presented during the arguments. On top of everything, the staff has been basically ordered to come up with absurd arguments to justify the unjustifiable. (According to Bent Flyvbjerg, that is what consultants are for...)
I recall many years ago, one of my colleagues was forced to justify a terrible decision on circumferential suburban transit (basically always a terrible idea...) and he did it, but felt that he had pointed out in the footnotes that the assumptions made no sense and thus the numbers were not to be trusted. I don't know what I would have done. That doesn't seem to go quite far enough in righting a wrong. At the same time, one can't always be resigning over one's principle, especially as a consultant. I suppose I was fortunate that most of my career has been spent a bit earlier in the process developing travel demand models and then letting other people run them and look over the results and justify (or not) the ideas with political backing. I can only think of one case where my professional judgement was completely ignored even in the setting up of the travel demand model, and I built that model under protest, as it were. I had a good laugh at the client's expense, when not six months later, they realized that the model should have been developed the way I suggested in the first place.
I haven't reached that place of detachment where I can just accept really heinous decisions being made in a biased way by politicians who have chosen to ignore the evidence. I probably will have to figure it out if I am going to finish out my career, particularly in an era where the no-nothings are firmly in control. (I realize this makes me a thorough elitist and one who thinks technocrats should be in charge, but if you haven't gathered that already from reading this blog (the elitism at least), it really shouldn't be a surprise.) There really isn't much point in going on much further along these lines. I'll just take a break from it all and lick my wounds and realize that, aside from the waste of tax funds, I won't really be affected by what happens further east. The people who will really suffer are the people who voted for those suburban-minded councilors, so they in a sense deserve the crappy transit service they will be getting down the road.
In any event, the pendulum has definitely swung back the other way with a vengeance, especially in the U.S. but also in Canada and somewhat surprisingly the U.K. (i.e. Brexit). Experts are routinely derided by political sorts and their followers, though it is also obvious that it is predominantly right-wing movements that are currently ignoring scientific and even most economic evidence. (Sadly, the one sphere where experts still seem to have their own way is in trade deals where perhaps a bit of populism or at least taking a broader view of the impacts on the whole of society and not merely corporate interests would be a good thing. As should be evident, I'm clearly in a major funk right now.)
I am actually sick to my stomach after watching the City Council debate the transit file. Final decisions aside, it has been distressing watching the politicians refuse to listen to any evidence that doesn't back their view, as well as hear mis-statements and outright lies presented during the arguments. On top of everything, the staff has been basically ordered to come up with absurd arguments to justify the unjustifiable. (According to Bent Flyvbjerg, that is what consultants are for...)
I recall many years ago, one of my colleagues was forced to justify a terrible decision on circumferential suburban transit (basically always a terrible idea...) and he did it, but felt that he had pointed out in the footnotes that the assumptions made no sense and thus the numbers were not to be trusted. I don't know what I would have done. That doesn't seem to go quite far enough in righting a wrong. At the same time, one can't always be resigning over one's principle, especially as a consultant. I suppose I was fortunate that most of my career has been spent a bit earlier in the process developing travel demand models and then letting other people run them and look over the results and justify (or not) the ideas with political backing. I can only think of one case where my professional judgement was completely ignored even in the setting up of the travel demand model, and I built that model under protest, as it were. I had a good laugh at the client's expense, when not six months later, they realized that the model should have been developed the way I suggested in the first place.
I haven't reached that place of detachment where I can just accept really heinous decisions being made in a biased way by politicians who have chosen to ignore the evidence. I probably will have to figure it out if I am going to finish out my career, particularly in an era where the no-nothings are firmly in control. (I realize this makes me a thorough elitist and one who thinks technocrats should be in charge, but if you haven't gathered that already from reading this blog (the elitism at least), it really shouldn't be a surprise.) There really isn't much point in going on much further along these lines. I'll just take a break from it all and lick my wounds and realize that, aside from the waste of tax funds, I won't really be affected by what happens further east. The people who will really suffer are the people who voted for those suburban-minded councilors, so they in a sense deserve the crappy transit service they will be getting down the road.
Darwin's Voyages at an End
It took me quite a while to get through Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, but I have finally read the entire work. I started when much younger (possibly late teens) when I was reading about various scientists including Galileo and Anton van Leeuwenhoek (who made improvements to the microscope). However, at that time, I only got about 25% of the way in.
This was actually part of a set, and after some searching I found an image of it.
The set was published in 1962 through the offices of the American Museum of Natural History. It's such a mishmash with two really short (and not particularly distinguished) biographies of Pasteur and Newton and James Conant's 4 essays (Modern Science and Modern Man) that seem fairly reminiscent of C.P. Snow's writings. These are all fairly forgettable. I think Stillman Drake's book on Galileo is better, and I probably skimmed it, though I think there are certainly better books on Galileo out there now. So honestly, the only reason to get the set, even in its day, was for a decent copy of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and indeed that was the only book I kept out of the set after I had moved a couple of times.
Of course, now you can go directly to Project Gutenberg for The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of the Species (and The Descent of Man for that matter). I'll most likely try to tackle the other two about a year apart, since Darwin writes extremely dense prose. Another very interesting site has just put up most of Darwin's working papers, but I think that is mostly of interest to serious biologists and not to armchair scientists such as myself.
It is quite interesting to learn that Darwin only made the one expedition on the Beagle, which did indeed circle the globe over a nearly 5-year voyage. After that, he basically never left the UK. In fact, he only made one trip to Paris in his lifetime (and that was several years before he embarked on the Beagle). Perhaps this is was related to Darwin's seasickness, which apparently never entirely left him (so to put up with this for five years!) and also his general decline in health (at least a few (but not all) researchers feel Darwin caught Chagas disease in South America). Still, it seems incredible to only have seen Paris once in a lifetime...
Some of the highlights for me were that Darwin found quite a few fossils in South America, though perhaps ironically he didn't find dinosaur bones, but the remains of a mammal called the toxodon as well as mastodon teeth. He did eventually see some dinosaur skeletons (back in London) but dinosaurs were never at the heart of his worldview or his theories.
He experienced a couple of earthquakes while he was in South America.
He rode an elephant, though it had been imported from India to Mauritius (a small island off the coast of Madagascar, itself an island). The Beagle didn't stop off in India, and as far as I can tell, Darwin never made a trip to India later in life.
Darwin did visit New Zealand and Australia, however. He went out looking for kangaroos several times, but never saw a live one (unless he saw one in a zoo at some point). He encountered a platypus though. Incidentally, one of the few predictions Darwin made that didn't come to pass (fortunately) is that he thought the kangaroo would be hunted into extinction.
If one is interested in only the best parts of The Voyage of the Beagle, I would recommend Chapters 1-3, 6-7, 14, 17 and the last half or so of Chapter 21. If one has time (or patience) only for a single chapter, then Chapter 17 is the one covering the Galapagos Islands, which really provided Darwin with the core evidence for much of his most important work later in life.
As noted, Darwin was a very keen observer and writes at a level of detail that can be a bit exhausting at times, which is why it did take so long to finish. But there are a few passages that I thought were quite good, even poetic and worth setting down here, so that I don't forget them.
From Chapter 14: "A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced."
From Chapter 18 (Tahiti): "We may now consider that we have nearly crossed the Pacific. It is necessary to sail over this great ocean to comprehend its immensity. Moving quickly onwards for weeks together, we meet with nothing but the same blue, profoundly deep, ocean. Even within the archipelagoes, the islands are mere specks, and far distant one from the other. Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a small scale, where dots, shading, and names are crowded together, we do not rightly judge how infinitely small the proportion of dry land is to water of this vast expanse. The meridian of the Antipodes has likewise been passed; and now every league, it made us happy to think, was one league nearer to England. These Antipodes call to one's mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our voyage homewards; but now I find it, and all such resting-places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch."
From Chapter 19 (Australia): "The inhabitants of this [Southern] hemisphere, and of the intertropical regions, thus lose perhaps one of the most glorious, though to our eyes common, spectacles in the world—the first bursting into full foliage of the leafless tree. They may, however, say that we pay dearly for this by having the land covered with mere naked skeletons for so many months. This is too true but our senses thus acquire a keen relish for the exquisite green of the spring, which the eyes of those living within the tropics, sated during the long year with the gorgeous productions of those glowing climates, can never experience."
This was actually part of a set, and after some searching I found an image of it.
The set was published in 1962 through the offices of the American Museum of Natural History. It's such a mishmash with two really short (and not particularly distinguished) biographies of Pasteur and Newton and James Conant's 4 essays (Modern Science and Modern Man) that seem fairly reminiscent of C.P. Snow's writings. These are all fairly forgettable. I think Stillman Drake's book on Galileo is better, and I probably skimmed it, though I think there are certainly better books on Galileo out there now. So honestly, the only reason to get the set, even in its day, was for a decent copy of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and indeed that was the only book I kept out of the set after I had moved a couple of times.
Of course, now you can go directly to Project Gutenberg for The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of the Species (and The Descent of Man for that matter). I'll most likely try to tackle the other two about a year apart, since Darwin writes extremely dense prose. Another very interesting site has just put up most of Darwin's working papers, but I think that is mostly of interest to serious biologists and not to armchair scientists such as myself.
It is quite interesting to learn that Darwin only made the one expedition on the Beagle, which did indeed circle the globe over a nearly 5-year voyage. After that, he basically never left the UK. In fact, he only made one trip to Paris in his lifetime (and that was several years before he embarked on the Beagle). Perhaps this is was related to Darwin's seasickness, which apparently never entirely left him (so to put up with this for five years!) and also his general decline in health (at least a few (but not all) researchers feel Darwin caught Chagas disease in South America). Still, it seems incredible to only have seen Paris once in a lifetime...
Some of the highlights for me were that Darwin found quite a few fossils in South America, though perhaps ironically he didn't find dinosaur bones, but the remains of a mammal called the toxodon as well as mastodon teeth. He did eventually see some dinosaur skeletons (back in London) but dinosaurs were never at the heart of his worldview or his theories.
He experienced a couple of earthquakes while he was in South America.
He rode an elephant, though it had been imported from India to Mauritius (a small island off the coast of Madagascar, itself an island). The Beagle didn't stop off in India, and as far as I can tell, Darwin never made a trip to India later in life.
Darwin did visit New Zealand and Australia, however. He went out looking for kangaroos several times, but never saw a live one (unless he saw one in a zoo at some point). He encountered a platypus though. Incidentally, one of the few predictions Darwin made that didn't come to pass (fortunately) is that he thought the kangaroo would be hunted into extinction.
If one is interested in only the best parts of The Voyage of the Beagle, I would recommend Chapters 1-3, 6-7, 14, 17 and the last half or so of Chapter 21. If one has time (or patience) only for a single chapter, then Chapter 17 is the one covering the Galapagos Islands, which really provided Darwin with the core evidence for much of his most important work later in life.
As noted, Darwin was a very keen observer and writes at a level of detail that can be a bit exhausting at times, which is why it did take so long to finish. But there are a few passages that I thought were quite good, even poetic and worth setting down here, so that I don't forget them.
From Chapter 14: "A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced."
From Chapter 18 (Tahiti): "We may now consider that we have nearly crossed the Pacific. It is necessary to sail over this great ocean to comprehend its immensity. Moving quickly onwards for weeks together, we meet with nothing but the same blue, profoundly deep, ocean. Even within the archipelagoes, the islands are mere specks, and far distant one from the other. Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a small scale, where dots, shading, and names are crowded together, we do not rightly judge how infinitely small the proportion of dry land is to water of this vast expanse. The meridian of the Antipodes has likewise been passed; and now every league, it made us happy to think, was one league nearer to England. These Antipodes call to one's mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our voyage homewards; but now I find it, and all such resting-places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch."
From Chapter 19 (Australia): "The inhabitants of this [Southern] hemisphere, and of the intertropical regions, thus lose perhaps one of the most glorious, though to our eyes common, spectacles in the world—the first bursting into full foliage of the leafless tree. They may, however, say that we pay dearly for this by having the land covered with mere naked skeletons for so many months. This is too true but our senses thus acquire a keen relish for the exquisite green of the spring, which the eyes of those living within the tropics, sated during the long year with the gorgeous productions of those glowing climates, can never experience."
Finally, Darwin sums up his adventures in a "Retrospect" in Chapter 21 from which I will quote extensively: "Our Voyage having come to an end, I will take a short retrospect of the
advantages and disadvantages, the pains and pleasures, of our
circumnavigation of the world. ...
Many of the losses which must be experienced are obvious; such as that
of the society of every old friend, and of the sight of those places
with which every dearest remembrance is so intimately connected. These
losses, however, are at the time partly relieved by the exhaustless
delight of anticipating the long wished-for day of return. If, as
poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions
which best serve to pass away the long night. Other losses, although
not at first felt, tell heavily after a period: these are the want of
room, of seclusion, of rest; the jading feeling of constant hurry; the
privation of small luxuries, the loss of domestic society and even of
music and the other pleasures of imagination. When such trifles are
mentioned, it is evident that the real grievances, excepting from
accidents, of a sea-life are at an end. ...
... But it must be borne in
mind, how large a proportion of the time, during a long voyage, is
spent on the water, as compared with the days in harbour. And what are
the boasted glories of the illimitable ocean. A tedious waste, a
desert of water, as the Arabian calls it. No doubt there are some
delightful scenes. A moonlight night, with the clear heavens and the
dark glittering sea, and the white sails filled by the soft air of a
gently blowing trade-wind, a dead calm, with the heaving surface
polished like a mirror, and all still except the occasional flapping of
the canvas. It is well once to behold a squall with its rising arch and
coming fury, or the heavy gale of wind and mountainous waves. ...
Let us now look at the brighter side of the past time. The pleasure
derived from beholding the scenery and the general aspect of the
various countries we have visited, has decidedly been the most constant
and highest source of enjoyment.
...
Among the other most remarkable spectacles which we have beheld, may be
ranked, the Southern Cross, the cloud of Magellan, and the other
constellations of the southern hemisphere—the water-spout—the glacier
leading its blue stream of ice, overhanging the sea in a bold
precipice—a lagoon-island raised by the reef-building corals—an
active volcano—and the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake.
These latter phenomena, perhaps, possess for me a peculiar interest,
from their intimate connection with the geological structure of the
world. The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive
event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of
solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in
seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the
insignificance of his boasted power.
...
The map of the world ceases to be a
blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated
figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not
looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere
specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe.
Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily
pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small
portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast
spaces on our immense world these names imply."
We certainly do not typically find such interesting asides in the scientific articles and treatises written today. But it was a very different era, when gentlemen scholars such as Darwin could make such a mark upon the world. I hope to have conveyed a bit of the spirit of The Voyage of the Beagle, so that you can judge for yourself if you want to follow along with Darwin on his travels.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Riverdale Farm
I don't recall how I found out about Riverdale Farm, although it's possible I was looking up summer camps and they had pottery and quilting/weaving in addition to "farm camp." While I did farm camp one year many decades ago, I didn't think that would be too appealing to the kids. However, a short excursion to the farm might be fun, so we set out Sunday morning to head over there, since it is tucked up next to the Don River Valley, not that far from our house.
It is more of a working farm than say the farm connected to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, which is more explicitly set up as a petting zoo. On the other hand, it is a very small farm, with most of the area for the animals on hilly ground, and thus they don't have larger animals such as horses or cows. Or certainly, we didn't see any. We saw goats and sheep, however. My daughter started complaining about the smell almost immediately.
We walked a bit further and saw they had some ponds that had been restored to a more or less natural state. One, however, was completely covered with algae and didn't look like a healthy pond at all. (The photo below is from a second pond that actually had a bit of open water. Just to the left of centre, there is a turtle sitting on the end of a large stick that has fallen into the pond.)
Unfortunately, during this short ramble, my daughter touched some plant that gave her a bad allergic reaction, so we had to walk very quickly back to the restrooms at the very front of the farm (all the other buildings were closed). She had pretty bad welts, though they faded in a couple of hours. Nonetheless, this was probably her only visit to the farm, since she has no interest in returning, and obviously farm camp is out of the question.
It put a bit of a damper on the day, and I decided we probably ought to avoid swimming, as I had no idea how chlorine would react with whatever natural oil or essence was still on her skin. I'm not sorry that we saw the farm, but it's not going to be a place that is very important to me, that's for sure.
It is more of a working farm than say the farm connected to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, which is more explicitly set up as a petting zoo. On the other hand, it is a very small farm, with most of the area for the animals on hilly ground, and thus they don't have larger animals such as horses or cows. Or certainly, we didn't see any. We saw goats and sheep, however. My daughter started complaining about the smell almost immediately.
We walked a bit further and saw they had some ponds that had been restored to a more or less natural state. One, however, was completely covered with algae and didn't look like a healthy pond at all. (The photo below is from a second pond that actually had a bit of open water. Just to the left of centre, there is a turtle sitting on the end of a large stick that has fallen into the pond.)
Unfortunately, during this short ramble, my daughter touched some plant that gave her a bad allergic reaction, so we had to walk very quickly back to the restrooms at the very front of the farm (all the other buildings were closed). She had pretty bad welts, though they faded in a couple of hours. Nonetheless, this was probably her only visit to the farm, since she has no interest in returning, and obviously farm camp is out of the question.
It put a bit of a damper on the day, and I decided we probably ought to avoid swimming, as I had no idea how chlorine would react with whatever natural oil or essence was still on her skin. I'm not sorry that we saw the farm, but it's not going to be a place that is very important to me, that's for sure.
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