felis_ultharus

So I finished John Ralston Saul A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada last night. It's a brilliant book, although with a lot of tangents that don't seem to quite fit -- Saul is a little like that brilliant professor who tends to ramble off down brilliant side roads and forget what he's lecturing on.

But still, all Canadian progressives need to read this book. His basic argument:
( Cut for length )

Saul said in an interview that Canadians who read this book say he put into words something they'd always felt but could never put into words. I concur.

The most interesting criticism is that people have accused him of romanticizing or misrepresenting First Nations people, or of oversimplifying the relationship between them and Europeans. Interestingly, none of these responses seem to be coming from First Nations people, and he's leaned heavily on their own words over four centuries for his arguments.

There are problems here, though. Saul is a little too much a booster of capitalism for this socialist to handle. I thought he'd given up on that after The Collapse of Globalism. Interestingly the book was finished just a little before the credit collapse, and I notice he's downplaying these elements in his interviews.

I also wonder what's up with him and gay people. He only seems to mention us dismissively in passing, whereas he has no problem championing other marginalized groups. This in spite of the fact that the relatively easy time we've had in Canada compared to other European countries (no recorded use of capital punishment for the 270 years when it was punishable by death) would seem to support his arguments.

Still, it's a great book, and highly recommended. Saul writes about history and philosophy in plain, easy-to-understand English, so it shouldn't be intimidating for anyone.

Just thought I'd mention that I've updated my historical website. Today it's about two celebrity trials, one local and one international.

Widdows, in particular, was fun to research. He seems to have been very much a victim at his first trial -- he was the one who go seduced, by the look of it, but his lover confessed and not him. He gets less and less likeable, though, as his story continues.

I really didn't need to mention much about Oscar Wilde, though. Everyone knows his story.

History

I've posted another entry in my historical blog, this one about the end of the death penalty for homosexuality in Canada in 1869.

I sifted through a lot of 138-year-old political debates to find out how controversial that provision in the criminal-law reform bill of 1869 was. The short answer: it wasn't.

The politicians spent a lot more time arguing whether garotting should be punishable by whipping -- which sounds like a debate from "The Onion in History," or one recalled by Grandpa Simpson.

Politics

Harper prorogued Parliament, meaning he's shut it down for a month. This is the culmination of the tantrum-throwing in the committees, the blanket secrecy Harper demanded from the bureaucracy, the secret trade discussions, the illegal campaign financing, and the refusing the implement the Kyoto requirements voted on as law by parliament.

This means, in practical terms, that a lot of high-profile bills have died on the order paper before they became laws, including the highly flawed and unconstitutional "age of consent" bill.

It also means the Clean Air Act is dead, and hearings into the RCMP pension theft have stopped. Convenient, eh?

I updated my mostly-history blog. This one is about the Jesuits and France's clergy.

I've been reading a lot about sex in New France, lately, which is a fascinating subject (it'll be the topic of my next blog entry). I'm amused that in 1699, two soldiers from Trois-Rivières were charged with witchcraft for possessing a magic spell to cure impotence.

They only got a slap on the wrist for possessing ensorcelled Viagra -- a few livres in fine, rather than being burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Maybe the judge was sympathetic?

Things have been good. I'm finally getting caught up on my own writing, and I've hit the one-third mark in my massive edit.

I updated my history/political blog. This historical entry's mostly filler -- it's an introduction to other entries that I've been researching quite heavily, and which won't be ready for a couple of days.

Towards that end, I've been poring over the complete judgements rendered by New France's highest court -- its court of appeal and high criminal court, the Conseil Souvrein. I'm looking for cases involving homosexuality, and also trying to get a sense of New France's legal culture -- what it punished and how, which is almost always a different thing from what the law says.

I found it tedious, at first, but I've developed an odd fascination with some of the cases. The same names crop up again and again as the cases wind their way through all the formalities over a course of months, and it's become a little like a historical soap opera:

• On Mar 5, 1691, Guillaume Hébert was commanded to give back François Poissot de la Couche's beavers. No explanation was given as to why Hébert had de la Couche's beavers, or whether beaver-theft was a common crime in New France, but the affair was considered so important that an assessor was assigned to watch over the beaver-transfer and make sure it happened honestly.
  
  
• On January 11, 1694, a woman asked the court to annul her son's marriage to a Native woman. According to her, her son didn't know he was getting married -- he didn't know the language. The boy's wife only spoke Cree, while he only spoke French.
  
  
• In March, 1694, a Father Foucault of the church of Batiscan felt so insulted by accusations a certain Captain François Dejordi had made against him -- unnamed accusations involving a young woman -- that he not only banned Dejordi from his church, but preached from the pulpit that he would have Dejordi tied to a post in a cabin in the woods, and whipped by little boys who Father Foucault had bribed into the act with plums and candies. So I'm guessing the Catholic Church hasn't changed much since then.

More as I tumble across these things. I still have about 9 decades of material to plow through.

Things are a tad less crisis-y right now, and I've very slowly begun to get caught up on my friends' pages.

Again, let me know if I've missed anything vital.

The last few weeks have been hectic and sleep-starved. Two weeks ago, I prepared an exhaustive presentation on the first 200 years of the sonnet in Canada -- using mostly poets who've been long-forgotten, but were popular once.

Poets disappear in this country, like words written in sand beneath the rising tide.

Then I polished off my journal for that class, and submitted it (it came back with an A).

For my rare-book class, I was also doing research into the long-forgotten. I'm now probably the sole living expert on one of the Schoolbook Battle of 1866 -- mostly because no one else knows it even happened. Virtually all my sources were things written last century.

The battle was a major public controversy at the time, but has nearly disappeared, except for a few experts on early-Canadian publishing. Strange since it involved two figures who are actually remembered -- George Brown (a father of Confederation and founder of the Globe) and Egerton Ryerson (father of universal education and the guy Ryerson University is named for).

I have one last essay until this semester is over.

I am looking forward to the game this Saturday, though -- it's keeping me sane. And D&D will be Saturday this time, at noon. We shall have an extra guest. And foi_nefaste, get back to me as soon as you know what he's playing...? And he'll have to come up with a reason why he's on the one trade route through the world's most desolate desert. This reason must be a) imaginative, b) interesting, and/or c) funny.

My old-book teacher is batshit crazy, but I learned a lot in that class.