Category: Culture

Thoughts about culture; arts, music, writing, sculpture, photography and more.

Victor Hugo’s Hunchback

Books & Reviews / Culture / Film & ReviewsLeave a comment

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I have just finished listening to a well-read audio book (in English) of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, Hunchback of Notre Dame, or more properly, Notre Dame de Paris, as the original title was written. I had read the novel several years ago in a more recent Penguin edition, but hearing it on my peregrinations around town with the dogs gave me time to focus on some sections I had glossed over in the written form. Unlike the abysmal Disney animation of 1996, and unlike all the films and TV series that have been made of the story since the first (Esmeralda, 1905), the novel ……… click below for more ↓

Thirty Seven Days

History & Biography / TV / War & Military / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Back in the mid-1970s, the BBC launched a dramatic, 13-part series called Fall of Eagles, about the last decades of the 19th century and the lead-up to World War One. It also chronicled the end of the royal dynasties in the aftermath of the war. It was a brilliant series, sweeping in its broad brush across the royalty and politics of Russia, Austria, Germany, and England. France got a mere cameo role because France was not ruled by any of the dynasties which form the central cast in the series. Viewers got from the series an image of the complex network ……… click below for more ↓

Another Archy Poem

Culture / Language & Grammar / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Most of Don Marquis’ Archy pieces were written in lowercase. The literate cockroach, we learned, would stand on the typewriter and dive, head first, onto the keys. But this way, he couldn’t use the shift key to get capital letters or punctuation (he did get capital letters, once, when Marquis left the shift-lock on the machine one night; Archy wrote about it in a 1933 piece called ‘CAPITALS AT LAST‘). But I’ve always felt one of the best pieces to come from the mind of Marquis was Archy’s commentary on criticisms about his grammar and punctuation from readers, in a ……… click below for more ↓

Killing Our Culture

Collingwood / Council / Culture / Development & Growth / Ethics and behaviourOne Comment

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Collingwood has killed Jazz & Blues at the Station – a popular, long-running, local cultural event second in audience only to the Elvis Festival. It brought some of Ontario’s top jazz and blues talent to play at the Museum. The hundreds of people assembled every Wednesday for the free concert – sometimes more than 400 in a single night, many of them coming from Blue Mountain, Clearview and Wasaga Beach – will be disappointed. As are the organizers, who have been trying unsuccessfully since late last year to get the town to commit to promised funding. All those people who came downtown ……… click below for more ↓

Great Minds, Small Minds

Critical Thinking / Culture / Quotes & Mis-quotesLeave a comment

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Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. That quote has been attributed online to Eleanor Roosevelt in the images shared by people too lazy to check the facts. And like so many other quotations that circulate on social media, it’s not by the person claimed. As far as has been determined, she never used those words. The saying offers a valid point, especially when it comes to local bloggers, but it was made by someone else, not the wife of the former U.S. president. Who, then, gave us these pithy lines? Wikiquote – one of the very ……… click below for more ↓

Prenzie Scamels

Culture / Language & Grammar / Literature / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymology2 Comments

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Four hundred years after he wrote them, we still use in everyday speech the many words and phrases Shakespeare coined. He gave us so many, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to list them all here. But two words he wrote have stopped us dead: prenzie and scamels. What do they mean? Were they more of his 1,700-plus famous neologisms like accommodation, castigate, frugal, inauspicious, premeditated and sanctimonious?* If so, no one today knows for sure what prenzie and scamels refer to. Or were they transcription errors? The typesetter or copyist reading from a crabbed, handwritten manuscript and spelling out for ……… click below for more ↓

Shakespeare Changed Everything

Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Pop Culture / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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I have been reading an entertaining little book called How Shakespeare Changed Everything, which, as the title suggests, is about the pervasive influence the Bard has had on pretty much everything in our lives ever since he started putting quill to paper. Stephen Marche’s book was described in the NatPost as a, “sprightly, erudite sampling of Shakespeare’s influence on absolutely everything.” Reviewer Robert Cushman isn’t always that laudatory about all of Marche’s claims, however. He concludes the book is full of, …rash generalizations balanced by elegant insights. Rightly, he links Shakespeare’s frankness about sex to our own; wrongly, he asserts ……… click below for more ↓

Too Many Books?

Books & Reviews / Culture / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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Tim Parks* wrote an intriguing essay in the New York Review of Books last week with that title. My first thought on seeing it was to wonder if one can ever have too many books. But of course, Parks – an author himself  – is looking at the bigger picture, not the ever-growing collection that clutters my bookshelves and litters my house. He asks: Is there a relationship between the quantity of books available to us, the ease with which they can be written and published, and our reading experience? I worked in book publishing as both an editor and ……… click below for more ↓

Rethinking John Carter

Film & Reviews / Pop Culture / Scifi and fantasyOne Comment

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After recently going through the first five of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 11 Barsoom books, I decided to give the 2012 Disney film, John Carter, another viewing. This two-hour-eleven-minute film bombed at the box office, and when I first saw it, I was deeply disappointed. But on reflection after a second viewing, it isn’t all that bad. It’s not great, but it deserves a better rating than it received, and it wears well in a second viewing. It isn’t quite the Barsoom I grew up with, true, but it borrows heavily from Burroughs, enough to make it a close cousin in ……… click below for more ↓

Musical Sources

Culture / Music & Reviews / Musical Instruments / Ukulele: instruments & musicLeave a comment

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Trying learn a song from an old songbook or sheet music can be difficult unless you already know how the song goes. Many of our group are introduced to the music in our songbook only through my version when I play in at our meetings. And, I admit, my version may not always reflect the original accurately. It’s good to be able to hear the song so you can  appreciate how it is arranged and where the chord changes will be. Here are a few of the online resources I recommend, you can go to where music from the 1920s and 30s ……… click below for more ↓

Defining Classical Music

Culture / Language & Grammar / Music & ReviewsLeave a comment

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT3SBzmDxGk] I listen to classical music a lot, even more than before since the arrival of the new classical FM station in Collingwood. But while my listening at home is through a selected collection of CDs, the content played on radio – internet radio included – is more eclectic. Airplay often includes soundtracks, music from musicals, even some modern pieces (the other day I heard a well-known tenor singing a somewhat romanticized version of Besame Mucho in Spanish, with orchestral backup). While I don’t object to this mix – in fact I enjoy it most of the time – it did ……… click below for more ↓

Master Shih Te’s Words

Buddhism / Poetry & Lyrics / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I see a lot of silly folks who claim their own small spine’s Sumeru, the sacred mountain that supports the universe. Piss ants, gnawing away at a noble tree, with never a doubt about their strength. They chew up a couple of Sutras, and pass themselves off as Masters. Let them hurry and repent. From now on no more foolishness. This is poem XI* from Master Shih Te, a hermit on Cold Mountain; contemporary of and close friend to the Tang dynasty poet, Han Shan. This verse is translated by J. P. Seaton from his book, Cold Mountain Poems (Shambhala, Boston, ……… click below for more ↓

Pompeii: Swords-and-Sandals Flop

Film & Reviews / History & Biography / Places & GeographyLeave a comment

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As a film setting, the town of Pompeii in the first century CE is a lot like the deck of the Titanic in 1912: no amount of special effects or clever script writing is going to save it from the disaster awaiting. As a film, Pompeii has a lot of the former, but precious little of the latter to rescue it. That’s probably why it’s in the $7 section at the DVD store. Let’s start with the history. Pompeii was a Roman town on the west side of Italy close to the slopes of an active volcano, Mount Vesuvius. The recipe ……… click below for more ↓

National Poetry Month

Culture / Poetry & Lyrics / Pop Culture / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

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April is National Poetry Month in Canada. I don’t know if this gets widespread acknowledgement much less appreciation among the public and in the schools, but it should. Poetry is an important part of our cultural lives, although it seems to me our collective passion for it has waned over the past few decades. I blame MTV, video games, rap music, Stephen Harper and cuts to education budgets. And maybe the phase of the moon. Whatever the cause, we seem to have less poetry in our lives, in our souls than we did in the past. Okay, I don’t know why ……… click below for more ↓

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