blogcutter

So I recently got back from Belfast, where I was attending the second Noireland crime fiction festival:

http://www.noireland.com

It was my first trip to any part of Ireland, be it Ulster or the south. And I figured now would be a good time to go, while the U.K. pound is still pretty affordable and before Brexit wreaks whatever havoc it's going to wreak over the next month or so.

While the event was held in Belfast and focused particularly on Northern Ireland writers - people like Adrian McKinty and Brian McGilloway who write about the Troubles - there was also a strong contingent from the Republic of Ireland and from Scotland and England too. It was great to discover a lot of new (to me) Irish writers. Claire Allan. Claire McGowan. Jo Spain. Gerard Brennan. Steve Kavanagh. Andrea Carter. Haylen Beck (Stuart Neville). Scotland has Bloody Scotland, held annually in Sterling; England has Crimefest (amongst others), held annually in Bristol; but Noireland to my knowledge is the first crime fiction festival to focus on Ireland.

But Noireland also bills itself as an international crime fiction festival, so there were lots of big name authors too. Anthony Horowitz. Denise Mina. Ann Cleeves. Stuart MacBride. Belinda Bauer. Scandinavian authors Thomas Enger from Norway and Will Dean from Sweden. It was a full weekend of programming, running from early evening on the Friday through 5 PM on Sunday. I played hooky on the Saturday morning to visit St. George's Market and do a bit of a walking tour of downtown Belfast. It was good weather for it then. I was impressed at how pedestrian-friendly their downtown area is, with little maps all over the place so you can locate their major landmarks. Then I had lunch at the Crown Bar opposite my hotel before going back to the conference for the afternoon and evening sessions. Sunday I attended all the sessions and when the festivities ended at 5PM I ventured out on foot again (the weather was not so great by then - windy and rainy/sleety), determined to find a dinner venue where I could enjoy some good live music.

I headed for the Dirty Onion in the Cathedral Quarter but discovered that it was strictly a drinking venue; it had a restaurant upstairs (the Yardbird) but that was mainly chicken-oriented, so I went to the nearby Thirsty Goat which was still pub fare but rather more vegetarian-friendly. After enjoying a decent meal washed down with Irish coffee, I was ready to enjoy their live music which began at 7 PM. One guy with a guitar, a fairly traditional folk-singer who may or may not have been mostly performing his own compositions, although he did a couple of covers too that I recognized - The Boxer and Working-class Hero. After sitting through one set, I decided to return to the Dirty Onion for a nightcap. The live music there was strictly instrumental, on traditional Irish instruments (or what I think of as traditional instruments anyway) and I enjoyed that as well. When I got tired, I left and found a few taxis waiting patiently outside, so I took one of those back to my hotel.

Monday was my free day and while many museums are closed on Mondays, the Titanic exhibits along the waterfront were open and after seeing several dramatic versions of the Titanic story, I knew I wanted to see those. So after a leisurely breakfast, I got a taxi outside my hotel to take me there. I spent the next few hours wandering through the exhibits and the gift shop and ambling about outside, then gradually made my way on foot back to my hotel, stopping anywhere that looked interesting along the way. I was very impressed with their post offices - not only can you buy stamps there but you can perform a number of other transactions there including exchanging Canadian dollars for U.K. pounds. I wish we'd get proper postal banking here in Canada!

By the time I got back to the hotel, it was time for afternoon tea - the piano lounge there serves it seven days a week from 2 to 5 PM - and since I hadn't had lunch and didn't want to be out too late as I had an early flight next morning, that seemed like a suitable occasion for a lunch/dinner combination-meal.

Then it was back to my room for packing, napping and a bit of TV-watching before turning in for the night. Coronation Street, I discovered, is about 2 weeks ahead of us in Canada. The time shift to Daylight Savings, on the other hand, worked in my favour for once - they had "sprung ahead" in Canada over the weekend I was in Belfast, whereas the U.K. was still on winter time; so it was only a 4-hour time difference when I flew home.

I want to say something about Brexit before I conclude this piece, since it is so much on the minds of folk over there (and in fact, one of the conference panels was devoted to that very subject). Generally speaking, it seems to be the "little guys" who are apprehensive about the prospect of Brexit and would prefer to ally themselves with the Big Boys, the European Union. Back in 2014, the Scots held a referendum and voted to remain within the U.K. But then in 2016, when the U.K. opted for Brexit, Scotland made noises about staying within the EU, even if that entailed another referendum. Northern Ireland is similarly uneasy about Brexit, fearing that it could result in a "hard border" with Ireland-the-separate-country and perhaps compromise the delicate truce reached twenty years ago at the end of the "Troubles". It's the "big guy" (or gal) - England - who wants out of the larger trading bloc. And they, in a way, were never fully in, in the sense that they maintained their own currency and their habit of driving on the other side of the road!

Comparing it with the Canadian situation, I find myself a little baffled. Here we're so defensive about Canadian content, culture and identity. Thirty years ago with Brian Mulroney and the FTA, all my friends were lamenting that under a Mulroney government, Canada was doomed to become the 51st state (Canada 5-1?) Then we had the Mulroneys and the Reagans (he probably already descending into dementia, though it wasn't acknowledged back then) singing "When Irish eyes are smiling" on prime-time TV, followed by the great federal public service strike of 1991, and... well anyway. My point is that we over here have always cherished our unique identities and distinct societies and have prided ourselves on being a mosaic rather than a melting pot. Why are the Scots, the Northern Irish, and for that matter other unique groups like the Welsh, the Cornish, and so on - so anxious to be assimilated - or re-assimilated - into the European Union?

It's their decision, of course. And I can fully understand that people want the trains between Belfast and Dublin (like those between Ottawa and Montreal or even Ottawa and Gatineau if we ever get our bridges and light rail) to continue to run smoothly without annoyances and delays like Customs and Security checks. But is that really what the future holds? Will it even be an issue a year or two hence? We'll see.

I'll tackle the "how" first. The truth is, reading has become a bit more of an ordeal than it used to be. It's not a matter of being illiterate or dyslexic - the problem is much more physical and mechanical than that, the result of my ageing eyes. Still, I'm very interested in the whole relationship between medium and message. If you listen to a novel as an audiobook, how does that affect the way you relate to the characters and the story? I've never been much into audiobooks, although I've listened to one or two. I've read a handful of large print books (although the selection as far as paper books go is a bit limited). Then of course there are the ubiquitous e-books. I have a kobo e-reader (which always seems to need recharging, even when it's been mostly turned off), and a kindle program on my laptop. But that's never been my preferred way to read, although the adjustable font size is certainly a useful feature.

For now, I'm mostly reading the same formats I've always preferred: traditional paper newspapers and magazines, and books on paper. It's just that I generally have to look over my glasses or remove them completely and put the page right up to my face. It means I don't generally read for long periods at a stretch like I used to.

Anyway, on to the "what".

I recently finished The Arc of the Swallow, by S.J. Gazan. Her first book, The Dinosaur Feather, was voted Crime Novel of the Decade by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

Like The Dinosaur Feather, Arc of the Swallow takes place in an academic setting. A biology professor is found hanging in his office one day and the death is dismissed as a suicide. But the PhD candidate whose work he was supervising is aware he was just on the verge of releasing some groundbreaking and highly controversial research regarding vaccination in the developing world. She and several of his colleagues are convinced that he would never have killed himself, particularly at this point in his career.

The book combines an enthralling murder mystery, which is pure fiction, with some interesting and factual information about the Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau, where a Danish-founded research group discovered some disturbing non-specific effects of the high-dose measles vaccine on the mortality of girls - their mortality DOUBLED after the vaccine was introduced. Had the WHO not withdrawn the vaccine (albeit very quietly), it could have cost at least half a million additional female deaths per year in Africa alone!

Subsequent research points to the conclusion that ALL vaccines have some nonspecific effects, though luckily most of them are beneficial ones. And in April 2014, the WHO finally decided that more research into the nonspecific effects of vaccines was warranted. For more on the Bandim Health Project, see http://www.bandim.org

My own take on this is that there was resistance to acknowledging the findings in both the prosperous first-world nations and in the developing world, but for very different reasons. In the former case, the attitude was "Well, we mustn't encourage Jenny McCarthy and all those wacko antivaxxers who think vaccines cause autism, so vaccination must be presented as unambiguously positive in all instances"; in the developing world, girls and women are considered (at least by those in power) as inferior and expendable so the attitude is "Well, if the effects are limited to the female of the species, then who cares?!" Needless to say, both extremes are severely misguided. "Vaccine-hesitancy" as I've recently heard it called, is a legitimate stance that deserves a thoughtful addressing of concerns on both an intellectual and an emotional level.


The other book I recently finished reading was Us Conductors, by Sean Michaels, about the inventor of the theremin. I've seen and heard a thereminist in action a few times now, at both this year's and last year's Music and Beyond festival. It's a fascinating and eerily ethereal instrument. And Us Conductors, a novel about the inventor of the theremin, his life in New York City, his marriages and doomed love affair and his subsequent return to and imprisonment in the Soviet Union, makes for some gripping reading.

Finally, I'm about two-thirds of the way through one of Doris Lessing's shorter books, Memoirs of a Survivor. While she called it something like an attempt at or a fragment of an autobiography, it certainly doesn't read like a traditional memoir or autobiography, although it's told in the first person. But the characters in it, be they fictional or otherwise, are certainly preoccupied with survival, so at least that part of the title is accurate! The "I" of the story - I don't think we actually learn her name - finds herself early in the book saddled with a girl of about 12 or 13, named Emily, brought to her by a man who assures her that Emily is her responsibility now. Emily and her cat-like dog named Hugo live with her for the next year or two and Emily gets drawn into the street-culture of transient children and youth outside, who seem to be homeless or at least more or less left to their own devices most of the time. In the building where the narrator and Emily are living, a wall periodically opens up and the narrator sees visions of the recent past - perhaps ten years ago - when Emily was a much younger child and had parents and a baby brother. She tries from these visions to piece together who Emily is and where she's come from.

I'm trying to decide what books to tackle next... something not too long or challenging, while still being interesting.

Will we in our lifetime see the end of the book as we know it, or used to know it? The evidence, I think, is mixed.

On the one hand, a lot of small independent bookshops are closing, downsizing, or becoming online-only booksellers. On the Ottawa scene, the following spring to mind:
Mother Tongue Books (to close July 21); Nicholas Hoare; Shirley Leishman; Prime Crime; Patrick McGahern; at least two incarnations of a science fiction bookstore; The Bookery (children's books); Books Canada; Jarvis's; Classics (these last three are long gone). On the other hand, we still have Perfect Books on Elgin Street; Collected Works on Wellington; Books on Beechwood (location obvious); plus the chains - Chapters/Indigo, Smithbooks, Coles - and a number of second-hand bookstores.

Many people have e-readers, of course, or other devices like iPads on which they can read books and other text that they download. I have a Kobo (non-touch version) which came pre-loaded with about 100 classics - and it's wonderful knowing I've got them there in easily portable and accessible (at least till the next great technological development comes along) form.

Many people also order the traditional paper books but from an online source - or they take them out of the library. I buy a lot of books through Abebooks (which apparently is now owned by Amazon, though I've discovered a number of the individual booksellers who sell through Abebooks): it's a great source for out-of-print items.

Then there's the second-hand booksales. Two months ago, I wrote about my haul from the Rockliffe Park book sale. A quick update about that - thus far, I've read the memoir of an Ottawa family by Grace Day Hartwick; I've baked muffins, adapting a recipe from the Veganomicon; and I've watched one of the videos I bought there.

What else is Blogcutter reading? Well, at the moment it's John Irving's latest book, In One Person (may not be the exact title) as well as Jan Wong's Out of the Blue (her self-published book about her experience with depression). I recently read a number of the books by authors who were appearing at Bloody Words the weekend of June 1-3 (including Gayle Lynds, Lou Allin, Janice Macdonald, Garry somebody, Erika Chase (a.k.a. Linda Wiken) Hilary McLeod, Kay Stewart); I read Anne Holt's first Hanne Wilhelmsen mystery, Alexander McCall Smith's "The Great Cake Mystery" (a children's book about Precious Ramotswe when she was a little girl); and a history of the free public library movement in Ontario from 1860-1930.

And today, I went to the Friends of the Experimental Farm booksale. They were a little better organized than they seemed to be last year; I joined the line-up around 9:45 where a woman was distributing plastic shopping-bags (I wonder what they do in Toronto now that plastic bags are to be banned?) You could fill one of their bags with paperbacks for a flat fee of $15; hardcover books were $2 apiece.

So here is a list of what I brought home:

Hardcovers - Karol Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II), Collected Poems
John Masefield - Poems

Crime novels - The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco, by Dennis Shasha (about a mathematical detective in Greenwich Village)
- The Dying of the Light, by Robert Richardson
- A Wreath for my Sister, by Priscilla Masters
- Striding Folly, by Dorothy L. Sayers
- Thrones, Dominations, by Dorothy L. Sayers, completed posthumously by Jill Paton Walsh
- The Point of Murder & Almost the Truth, both by Margaret Yorke
- By Hate Possessed, by Maurice Gagnon
- Beware of the Trains & Frequent Hearses, both by Edmund Crispin
- All Shall be Well & In a Dark House, both by Deborah Crombie
- The Keys to the Street, by Ruth Rendell

Canadiana - Dancing in the Dark & Family News, both by Joan Barfoot
- The Husband, by Dorothy Livesay
- Swann: A Literary Mystery, by Carol Shields
- The Falling Woman, by Shaena Lambert

Other fiction - The Woman and the Ape, by Peter Hoeg (translated from Danish - the author also writes crime fiction)
- The Search, by Naguib Mahfouz
- The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch
- Blitzcat, by Robert Westell
- Jizzle, by John Wyndham

Non-fiction & Reference
- The Ojibwa Woman, by Ruth Landes
- Early Irish Myths and Sagas
- The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller
- Dictionary of Classical Mythology, by Pierre Grimal
- From Abacus to Zeus: A Handbook of Art History, by James Smith Pierce
- The Book of Classical Music Lists, by Herbert Kupferberg

Total haul, 30 books.

I'll issue an update later on where I am with my various reading.

Meanwhile, I've been dismayed by the demise of some newspapers, including the Sunday edition of the Ottawa Citizen and the entertainment weekly, Xpress. But further commentary on that will have to wait for another time.

So today, Queen Victoria is a ripe old (yes, very old and no doubt very ripe too!) 193. We celebrated "Victoria Day" three days ago; the day is also supposed to be in lieu of celebrating the birthday of the currently reigning monarch, Elizabeth II. But even in the U.K., they don't celebrate her birthday ON her birthday - it actually falls in April, but they don't celebrate till June.

I've always thought it must be nice to be able to have free rein and free reign as to what day you'd like to celebrate your birthday. My birthday falls in the first half of August, when the weather is often nice enough, but people tend to be away on holidays. That made it hard to organize birthday parties when I was a kid but on the plus side, I never had to go to school on my birthday! Some people who have their birthdays on Christmas Day, or just before or just after Christmas, feel somewhat cheated because they don't have a day just for themselves. And of course in some families, more than one member shares a birthday. In my own family, I was born on my father's birthday, while one of my sisters was born on our mother's birthday. My daughter was born on what would have been my grandmother's 91st birthday. Twins and other multiple birthlings are obvious examples of shared family birthdays. Then you get people born on February 29, who only get to celebrate that specific date once every four years.

In honour of Queen Victoria's birthday, I recently re-read a biography of her by Molly Costain Haycraft, which I originally read for school in grade six. It basically emphasized the same period of her life as that covered in the movie Young Victoria, with only one chapter at the end dealing with all the things that happened after Albert died. There were two big differences between the book and the movie, however. First of all, the book was clearly written for children while the movie was directed at a more general audience. Secondly, the book was written about fifty years before the movie was made, and both reflect the sensibilities of their respective times.

The book had quite a lot of descriptive details in it - what type of lessons Victoria was taught by her tutors; extensive descriptions of her wardrobe and meals on various occasions, description of palace architecture and grounds (including a somewhat coy observation that indoor plumbing was an "innovation" in Victoria's day). It made liberal and (one assumes) quite innocent use of the word "gay" in the then-prevailing sense of cheerful or cheery. It also included quite a bit on Victoria's difficult relationship with her mother and the whole situation with suitors and arranged marriages. There was some reference too to what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, including the "problem" of Canada (referring mainly to the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada) and of the Irish (including an observation along the lines that they had always been an excitable people).

I actually found myself remembering parts of the book, though through a rather different set of lenses! Reading books, especially about the past or the future, involves such a complex interaction between the viewpoints of author, reader, characters... and re-reading at different times in your life complicates those complexities still further. Not a new insight, but that's my thought for the day.