Decided I'll do a weekly roundup of the various media I've consumed over the last seven days as a writing exercise and as way to build a new habit. My goal is to write 52 of these roundups, with the hope that by the time I post the last one I'll have established a habit of posting more frequently on this blog.
This week we'll look at an online event, a play, a film, a podcast episode, a band and two articles.
Building Solidarity: A Conversation with Niki Ashton & Jeremy Corbyn: This online event was easily the highlight of my week. Topics ranged from dealing with bad faith attacks by the corporate media to the need for food security to how Corbyn was able to beat the odds and become leader of the Labour Party. I did a thread livetweeting the conversation here, if your'e looking for the gist of it. Personally, I could listen to Corbyn speak for hours. He has a way of cutting to the moral heart of an issue that's neither condescending, jargonistic nor reductive, and he has a personal side that I can't help but find charming. At one point he said he keeps on eye on the temperature in Manitoba when it appears on the BBC's international weather broadcast and thinks of visiting whenever it gets above 10C. At one point Niki Ashton joked that they should thank the right wing media's smear campaign for their free advertising, though in reality that work was done by Ashton herself as she spent the week dong promotional interviews with various left wing podcasts and I recommend checking them out if you missed the even itself. She was Alberta Advantage, Habibti Please, and if you're willing to scroll through this four-and-a-half hour Twitch stream (!) she also spoke to Rob Rousseau for about twenty minutes.
Heart's Desire Hotel by Georges Feydeau (translation by Kenneth McLeish): I discovered Feydeau a few years ago from a title card in an episode of Frasier and it's the same sort of broad, farcical humour. Generally Feydeau's plays revolve around absurd love triangles (or more complex shapes, there's almost never only three), and this one is no different.
Here we have an engineer trying to sleep with his architect/neighbour's wife. The engineer's own wife locks him into the house for the weekend while she's away, meanwhile the architect is hired as a ghost hunter at the same shady hotel where the rendezvous is supposed to take place, and by happenstance the architect's student nephew, the engineer's maid and provincial family members are all booked in as well. The shady hotel full of respectable people gets raided by the vice squad and chaos ensues. The comedic possibilities are practically endless, though for me it didn't quite live up to the playwright's Le Dindon.
Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Procession to Calvary
The Mill and the Cross: this 2011 film from Polish director Lech Majewski blew my mind. It's like nothing I've ever watched before. CGI and fantastic casting come together to bring to life The Procession to Calvary, a painting by one of my favourite artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, played by Rutger Hauer. Bruegel was renowned for painting peasants and I was worried they wouldn't capture that aspect of his work, but I'm glad to be wrong. There's so many great oafs in this movie! This film is really about the images though, as there's less than five minute of dialogue throughout.
Acid Mammoth – Caravan: Music is probably going to be my weak spot in these round ups. I don't know much about it and I'm often accused of having bad taste. I would argue in my defence that my taste is just highly idiosyncratic. You'll see in the coming weeks, maybe.
Anyway, Caravan is the recently released third album from this Greek father-son doom metal band that formed just before the pandemic. I'm not really a metal guy, but I've been trying to listen to more recently (Amon Amarth, Conan, Electric Wizard) because it has an obvious connection to my interest in Sword & Sorcery fiction. If you look up Acid Mammoth's lyrics, they tend to be cultic, hinting at a mythos behind the band, but vague enough that you have to piece together a story for yourself as you're listening, something I've always appreciated about this kind of music.
What brought my attention to the band was the amazing artwork for Caravan and their second album, Under Acid Hoof. Mammoths walking among vaguely druidic figures or across the barren landscape of another planet––what's not to love?
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| Acid Mammoth – Under Acid Hoof |
You can listen to Caravan here.
You Can't Win: Episode 106 – Humour and Faith ft. Felix Biederman: Great discussion as inveterate posters Don Hughes and Muslim Tom are joined by Chapo Trap House's Felix Biederman. Don (a fairly serious Catholic) says that religion is like a joke: it's got a premise, a setup and a punchline, and you either get it or you don't. He's not being flippant about it either (which in itself is kind of funny). At one point Muslim Tom tells a story (I think from the Hadith?) about one of the Prophet Mohammad's followers that's both funny and sweet and comes off as a huge contrast to the normally stern image we have of Islam. The best part of the episode focuses on twitter shitposting and how the guys have sort of mellowed out over the years. I'm reminded of this Houellebecq quote from The Elementary Particles:
Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.
They also replayed a great episode a week earlier about their fascination with steppe peoples, a fascination I tend to share. You can find the You Can't Win podcast here.
International solidarity won’t be “cancelled” by Henry Lee Heinonen: the galaxy-brained columnists over at the National Post seem to be at the bargaining stage of grief, trying to hold a cancellation of Norman Bethune over the heads of those who would tear down statues of Canada's first prime minister, the notoriously racist (yes, even by the standards of his own time) Sir John A Macdonald. This Briarpatch article does a good job of demonstrating that the doctor who saved countless Chinese lives is not morally equivalent to the guy who levied a head tax on the Chinese immigrants he was using as cheap labour. From the article:
An estimated 200,000 people were killed by Japanese biological weapon experiments and germ warfare. Chinese soldiers, when not engaged in combat, had to contend with dysentery, measles, smallpox, and pneumonia. Altogether, an estimated 14 million Chinese people died during this.
Norman Bethune died from infection at the age of 49, performing operations with limited equipment during one of the most brutal and influential wars in history. He did not die for Mao Tse-Tung, but for the people of China, who had been trampled by imperial forces for more than a century leading up to that point. We should be thankful that Imperial Japan lost this war, and that foreign soldiers and doctors supported China in this struggle, regardless of our opinions on the eventual path of the People’s Republic of China, formed in 1949, a full 10 years after Bethune’s death.
Bethune wanted to make health care accessible to all people, and in particular the oppressed people of this world. As he once said, “Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels. … Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine and purify our profession of rapacious individualism. … Let us say to the people not ‘How much have you got?’ but ‘How best can we serve you?’”
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Norman Bethune was willing to step onto the battlefield for people he barely knew. He bucked the “norms” of his own nation in order to stand with the oppressed – while most white Canadians held attitudes similar to Macdonald’s about the Chinese, Norman Bethune was willing to sacrifice his life for the Chinese people.
Neat trivia: you knew about Bethune's contributions to the advancement of blood transfusion, but did you know that he also invented the Bethune Rib Shears, still in use by surgeons today?
You can read the article at Briarpatch.
They burned and looted with discrimination by Joseph Quinn: a review of the new book Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boin. These two paragraphs were really quite evocative:
It’s easy to find modern parallels for the plight of the Goths, and Boin does so with relish. Roman boats patrolled the broad and dangerous Danube, turning back refugee craft; when asylum seekers were permitted to cross they often faced brutal mistreatment. In one notorious incident in 376, a very large group of Goths came down to the Danube – hundreds of thousands according to one source – and begged the Emperor Valens for some land within his empire. In return, they promised to submit to him and provide soldiers for the army. When Valens finally agreed, they were permitted to cross in whatever boats, rafts and hollow tree-trunks they could commandeer, and many drowned en route. The survivors were admitted into a series of holding camps on the Roman side, where corrupt officials reportedly forced them to sell their children into slavery in exchange for dog-meat to avoid starvation.
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When another Gothic federation requested permission to enter the empire a decade later, they were instructed to cross at night, allowing Roman boats to surround and sink them, selling the survivors into slavery. Prejudice against foreigners increased within the empire too, especially from Christians. The poet Prudentius explained that ‘what is Roman and what is barbarian are as different from each other as the four-footed creature is distinct from the two-footed or the dumb from the speaking.’ Assimilation was enforced: in 399 the Western emperor banned trousers and boots from the streets of Rome.
I was reminded of something I'd read elsewhere about a Frankish bounty hunter who would stalk the Rhine at night, kill his fellow barbarians, and bring their severed heads into town during the day. For the life of me, I can't remember where I first read about this guy. Maybe a Philip Matyszak book or Alessandro Barbero's Day of the Barbarians? Either way, after reading this article I spent a good twenty minutes daydreaming about writing an historical fiction novel with Charietto as the major villain. Picture it: he's half Clint Eastwood, half Boba Fett, wearing scavenged Roman legionary armour decorated with the braids of his victims. Our heroes are a trio of Vandal teens trying to cross the Rhine or break their family out of an internment camp. Play up the parallels with modern refugee/border crises. Alas, I don't think I'm ready to take on such a daunting task. The idea of writing historical fiction in particular has always scared me. People rightfully complain about the smallest anachronisms, which now that I think about it, may explain why I'm such a fan of Bruegel and his purposeful anachronisms.
You can read Quinn's review at the London Review of Books.
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