What I'm Reading/Watching

First, what I'm currently reading:

This book, that I just finished this morning, is known particularly as the target of a vile attack. Wikipedia informs us:

In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government, and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including an attempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

I doubt very much the Ayatollah read a word of the book. It is a difficult read with a wealth of terms from Indian and Islamic culture, a wealth of characters and an extremely tangled narrative. That being said, it is a formidable piece of writing. The only work I could compare to it, though utterly different, would be James Joyce's Ulysses.

I read this book way back in the 70s and re-reading it now, it seems utterly different. Told in first person narrative, it is an observation of the life of an underachieving misfit, Holden Caulfield, who just got kicked out of a private high school and  is wandering aimlessly. He pretty much hates everything. One online critic thinks that the book captures the nihilism and malaise that infects current culture even though it was written just after the end of WWII, a time of optimism in America. Or maybe it is just the story of a jerk. That's my impression and I'm 4/5ths of the way through.

I'm rather a fan of Japanese culture and lately I've been delving into novels. I've read two by Yasunari Kawabata and, on the recommendation of another online critic, I'm just starting this one by Osamu Dazai. There are a couple of others, Yukio Mishima and Kazuo Ishiguro, that I am likely to look at. After that I am probably going to re-read St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler to see if Canada has any culture after all.

Ok, culture. After living nearly three decades in Mexico I have come to the conclusion that Mexico has a great deal of history (the small city where I live is 500 years old and the ruins of older civilizations go back to 1500 BC with the Olmecs) and a great deal of culture. Canada, on the other hand, has very little history and almost no culture. Let me defend that statement with a little video by Canadian commentator J. J. McCullough:

Yes, he does have a really exaggerated Canadian accent, but if you scroll to the 16:37 mark he tells us about Vincent Massey who between 1949 and 1951 headed a Royal Commission on the Arts which noticed that while Canada was, in the wake of WWII, a significant world power with growing prosperity, it had very little in the way of culture (outside Quebec, that is, more on that later). So the recommendation was to set aside $100 million to support the arts. That doesn't work of course. Culture is not something you sprinkle on a people like a condiment. Culture has to come from the people in my view. So what happened then and is still happening now is that government bureaucrats give money to their allies, friends, cliques of the well-connected and a couple of artists just for show. Genuine creative artists will see virtually none of it.

Quebec is a bit of an exception as they do have a local grassroots culture. If you make a list of non-popular Canadian musicians you might come up with Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Leonard Cohen, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and most recently Angine de Poitrine. With the exception of Glenn Gould they are all from Quebec.

Speaking of supporting Canadian culture, this is a nice satiric summary:

https://x.com/SatireSquadHQ

Actually, Canada does have a culture, but it is largely an imported one from the various peoples that have settled in Canada. But a lot of it doesn't survive the first blizzard, so it is more like faint wisps of European culture spread rather thinly. Again, with the exception of Quebec.

Finally, a fragment of a movie review. Lately I've been collecting a few DVDs of films worth having. The Seventh Seal, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Le Grand Bleu, Fanny and Alexander and lately, Ben-Hur from 1959. Apart from anything with Bill Murray I'm not a big fan of American cinema, but this film is widely admired. I won't go over the strengths of the movie--it won eleven Academy Awards--but I would like to share the oddities. Here are some things that you don't find in more recent movies: an orchestral overture before the film starts and another orchestral piece at intermission. This is thinking of a film as being vaguely like an opera. The soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa I found rather over-ripe. I like slow-paced French films, but I found this film to be excessively turgid with so very many long, long shots of the lead actors just standing there emoting soulfully. One very interesting oddity is that the protagonist, Ben-Hur is Jewish, something you would not encounter in contemporary film for political reasons. But the aspect that I found most curious was the religious one. The film takes place at the same time that Jesus is traveling in Judea and delivering his Sermon on the Mount. We never see his face, but he crosses paths with Judah Ben-Hur on a few occasions, once bringing him water. We also see his progression to the Crucifixion which Judah accompanies. What is the purpose of this, inserted into what is basically a story of vengeance? Well, it is essentially to make it not a story of vengeance and forgiveness. Judah never forgives the Roman responsible for the imprisonment of his mother and sister where, abandoned in a dungeon, they contract leprosy. The divine intervention is that during the Crucifixion a gentle rain falls on his mother and sister whom he brought out from their isolation in a leper colony, and they are miraculously cured of the disease so removing the need for forgiveness.

Divine intervention, a miracle, essentially ruins the moral quality of the narrative. The old name for this is deus ex machina and for me it is always a cheat and a disappointment. But that may be just because I am not religious. Another film where I thought the moral structure of the narrative was ruined is Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank's character is paralyzed through the vile action of an opponent, but the story from then on is about her acceptance and request for a merciful death when morally it should be about the punishment of the one who caused it. Or so it seems to me.

Let's have some religious music: Hildegard von Bingen.