What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.

… You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat…

He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn’t learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they’d come up with would become known as Impressionism.

At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.

The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.

Renoir said, “In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat”.

It’s the birthday of filmmaker Robert Altman, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1925). His father was a successful insurance salesman, and a compulsive gambler. Altman said, “I learned a lot about losing from [my father]. That losing is an identity; that you can be a good loser and a bad winner; that none of it—gambling, money, winning or losing—has any real value.”

…to play it safe is not to play…

Altman served during World War II as a bomber pilot and then got a job making industrial films for various corporations. He started working on television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bonanza, but the television executives didn’t like him. He always wanted important characters on his TV shows to die unexpectedly because he thought that was more realistic. He didn’t think there was enough realism in television.

His first success as a Hollywood filmmaker was the movie M*A*S*H (1970). Altman has since become known for movies using large casts of characters and overlapping, improvised dialogue.

Robert Altman said, ““To play it safe is not to play.””

This morning I was at home, warm in my bed; safe, secure, happy. That was then (6:00 AM), and that was here. Now I’m far away, nine floors high in a strange room and a strange bed, in a room with a view of a giant parking garage. I’m not feeling very warm, I’m not feeling very happy. I’m just here. Again I find myself on the road for the corporation (hallowed be it’s name).

…wasting a day or more jabbering with vendors…

I’m attending a planning session. This is officespeak for wasting a day or more jabbering with vendors about how they can give us stuff if we give them money. In this modern age of technological wonder, you’d think something like this could be achieved by phone call or email. You’d be wrong. The exchange of money seems to require the exchange of verbal pleasantries for six or seven hours culminating in the sacrifice of a steak, a lobster, and some gin and tonic. If it had just ended there things would be fine…. unfortunately we are getting back at it again in the morning.

I’m not going to be home again until late tomorrow. I’m driving. I got to rent a shiny new car and I get to boot home along this path. It will take about three and a half hours, but due to a tear in the space time warp, it will be less time than it takes to fly and clear customs. I should roll into home sometime after 10:00 PM… back home, warm in my bed.

Today is Valentine’s Day, the day on which we celebrate romantic love. Every February florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About thirty-six million boxes of chocolates will be given as gifts today.

…one of the few times girls and boys were allowed to socialize…

The holiday comes, in part, from the ancient Romans’ holiday honoring Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, on the night before the Feast of Lupercalia. Roman girls would put slips of paper with their names on them into a clay jar, and the boys would choose their partner for the festival by taking a slip from the jar. This was one of the few times girls and boys were allowed to socialize, and the dancing and games often evolved into courtship and marriage.

Tradition has it that Valentine’s Day as we know it began sometime in the middle of the third century. Claudius II of Rome was waging several wars and needed to recruit more soldiers for his armies. He thought that many men were reluctant to join because they didn’t want to leave their wives and families, and so he temporarily banned engagements and marriages. Saint Valentine was working as a priest at the time and he and his partner Saint Marius broke the law and secretly married couples in small, candlelit rooms, whispering the ceremonial rites. Eventually Saint Valentine was caught and sentenced to death. While awaiting his punishment he would talk with the young daughter of the prison guard whose father allowed her to visit occasionally. Saint Valentine was killed on February 14, 269 A.D., but he had left a note for the guard’s daughter, signed, “Love from your Valentine.”

Time for a little personal revelation. I discovered this particular Meme over on Melly’s All Kinds of Writing. Please take a quick look, form some strange ideas of who I am, and if you have a blog, consider doing it yourself.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Franciscan Friar
2. Security Guard
3. Research Assistant
4. Network Engineer

Four movies I can watch repeatedly:

1. Cool Hand Luke
2. Lord of the Rings
3. American President
4. Hunt for Red October

Four places I have lived:

1. Toronto ON
2. Boston MA
3. London ON
4. Newmarket ON

Four TV shows I like to watch:

1. West Wing (NBC)
2. Star Gate (Space)
3. Big Ideas (TVO)
4. Mythbusters (Discovery)

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. Newfoundland
2. Germany
3. Central America
4. Barbados

Four favorite dishes:

1. Peanut Butter & Banana
2. Lobster
3. Haggis
4. Eggs Benedict

Four websites I visit daily:

1. nowpublic.com
2. bloglines.com
3. flickr.com
4. LinkedIn.com

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Log Cabin in the woods
2. Sunny Beach on an island
3. Sailing
4. In the mountains

Four people to tag:

1. You
2. The person behind you
3. You over there (I see you)
4. and you too.

It’s the birthday of the novelist Kate Chopin, born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1851). She married a wealthy owner of a cotton business and lived with him in New Orleans. But after her husband suddenly died of a fever, a rumor got out that she’d been having an affair with a married neighbor. The town turned against her and she eventually moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother.

…in less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories…

It was there that Chopin first began to write. She had six children to take care of, so she wrote on a lapboard in the living room while her children played around her. Because she was so busy, she tried to write as quickly as she could. In less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Chopin’s early work was melodramatic and sentimental, but everything changed when she first read the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She wrote, “Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes … [who wrote] without the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making.”

Chopin began to write more explicitly about dissatisfied wives and marital infidelity. Then she published The Awakening (1899) about a woman who leaves her husband and her children to have an affair and become an artist and then eventually commits suicide by swimming out to sea. It was one of the first novels ever written by a woman about a woman committing adultery and it was almost universally attacked by critics. The St. Louis literary community refused to review the novel at all and libraries and bookstores in Chopin’s hometown wouldn’t stock the book. Chopin was unable to publish her next book of short stories and she died five years later, in 1904.

Today, The Awakening is considered one of greatest novels of 19th-century American literature.

The ramp to the upper barn door was steep. The dirt was packed hard and even. The ramp had been there forever, at least as long as I could remember. It stood high and menacing, rising into the massive storage barn. Mom was clear that I should stay away from the place or I’d be sorry. "Jonathan Franklin Smith, you don’t go near that place. It’s dangerous. I forbid it. Are you listening to me?"

… a small boy with an appetite for adventure and a small wagon…

"Yes ma’am," I hated when she used my full name. I didn’t like people calling me "John" either, and the worst of all was when people used "Johnny". They always sounded like they were saying "John-nee" which to my mind sounded too much like baby. And that’s how I felt everyone was treating me all the time; like a little baby who couldn’t do anything.

Dad was more to the point. On the subject of the barn’s loading ramp his chief contribution to the discussion was, "Don’t."

The loading ramp however, had a more magnetic attraction. It loomed large in the physical world and likewise figured large in the imagination of a small boy with an appetite for adventure and a small wagon. The older boys on the farm were of no assistance in curbing my enthusiasm. Quite the opposite really. They told stories of their daring adventures on it’s slopes. Making the hard climb during the hot summer mornings pushing their bikes or pulling their wagons behind them. Careening down the near forty-five degree angle incline at break neck speeds. Wind in their hair, sun on their face, fear and exhilaration married as one. They made it sound as though heaven and earth held no meaning unless you made the trip yourself. I would have been fine. Satisfied with my lot. Happy to remain a spectator. That is until the taunting started.

Read more…

Life is full of coincidences, things that occupy the same temporal space, things that happen at the same time through some fluke of cosmic chance. Or perhaps that’s what they want us to believe…

… take a few seemingly unrelated facts…

There is another school of thought that holds that in relationship with the gods, fate, etc, we are like flies to mischievous boys, we get our wings ripped off for sport. Perhaps these many things are not coincidental at all, but are part of some deeper metaphor of what is going on in our lives. For example, take a few seemingly unrelated facts;

1. Winter has come back with a vengeance. Fluffy white snow continues to cascade from the heavens with the majority of it landing in my driveway.
2. A new Conservative government is being sworn in today in Ottawa. Some say a breeze of fresh air, some say a meaner leaner Canada, some say give it 6 months and we’re back at the polls again.
3. I’m sick at home with some ghastly urban retrovirus masquerading as a common-cold-slash-flu waiting to morph into the pandemic I know it to be.

Seemingly unrelated right? Three innocent little facts that on the surface have no links to each other at all? Well I disagree! It might just be the cold medications talking, but it is my contention that the Conservative freeze on Liberal extravagance in Ottawa, injected supervirus sustaining cold air into the Jet Stream above Toronto, raining fluffy white infected powder onto our unsuspecting heads resulting in aches, pains, runny nose and a host of other symptoms. Curse you Prime Minister Harper!

On the other hand, I could just be over reacting.