felis_ultharus

I was greatly disappointed by Timothy Findley's Pilgrim. I had high hopes for it -- I mean, how could you go wrong with Findley writing a magic realism piece about Carl Jung? He's a great craftsman, and it's great material.

The first fifty and last hundred pages were excellent -- pity that it's a 520-page book. The middle is a sandwich of Findley's usual obsessions -- bad fathers, bad psychiatrists, bad fathers, bad psychiatry, bad fathers, World War I, bad husbands, and bad fathers.

We've seen it all before. He did it much better in Headhunter, The Wars, and Famous Last Words. This mixes those three books together into a rather unsatisfying glop.

Also, the spirit of Leonardo of Vinci probably prefers his portrayal in the Da Vinci Code to Findley's version of him.

I can't say I'm used to straight authors portraying homosexual men as monstrous rapists of children and adults, or particularly grotesque johns and sugar daddies. But from a gay author like Timothy Findley -- who spent the last 51 years in what was by all accounts a happy marriage and artistic collaboration writer Whitehead -- it'd be nice to have, say, one gay character who didn't read like a propaganda pamphlet from the religious right.

At least his Oscar Wilde wasn't that vile.

A certain amount of fatalism is building up in regard to my exams -- I've hit a level of panic that prevents me from doing anything, and that means being even less prepared for my exam on Friday.

I've been poking around Wikipedia, and discovered to my chagrin that someone has added a very glurgy and highly biased piece at the end of the article I wrote about my hometown. I haven't altered the article, because I'm too new to Wikipedia to know how to go about cleaning it up.

This is actually part of a trend -- the whole Township of Esquimalt has sunk into a collective denial after the Reena Virk killing -- which happened a block from the house I grew up in, under the bridge I walked over to school -- and Nicholas Chow Johnson's murder.

Growing up, I saw a lot more violence than that in that town. So did everyone I knew. I'd say a good 99% of it went unreported, so it's not the kind of thing you can reference in a Wikipedia article.

But I probably knew more children being beaten by their parents than I knew kids who weren't. I spent grades 3 to 10 getting brutalized by classmates, and was getting death threats for being gay by grade 12. Bullying is rampant, and gangs have steadily gotten worse, more organized, and better armed.

There's a new anti-gang project there, but it's too soon to tell if it's effective. Everyone's already declaring victory, but the root problems are still there.

The boosterism disturbs me -- when I last tried to research crime and Esquimalt for my novel, almost no one was talking about the it.

Now it seems to be discussed all over the net, but mostly as a kind of weird public relations exercise where everyone invokes it to refuse to acknowledge it exists. The tone of the conversation is vaguely panicked and a little too enthusiastic -- like a pep rally where everyone's trying to ignore that the cheerleaders are dying one by one.

Since my novel deals so heavily with violence in that town, I can imagine how it'd be received there, if it's published and noticed. Obviously not well.

But I never believed that kind of PR is useful. Nothing changes until it's understood, and the mirror of art is the most useful route to that kind of understanding.

Esquimalt's problems go way beyond what a novel could do for it -- the poverty is problem number one, but in a neo-conservative society poverty is never seen as anything other than the result of laziness. But that's a different social problem to be addressed.

Beyond the poverty, art can help. Once the basic problems of food, clothing, and shelter are satisfied, a damaged society needs to remember and to reflect to heal. Art does that best.

Besides a novel can give a place a sense of its self -- a sense of its own existence. I doubt anything I'll write will be as good as Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'Occasion (The Tin Flute). But I'd like to think I could make a small contribution that way -- to help do for Esquimalt what she did for the St-Henri neighbourhood of Montreal by dealing head-on with its problems.

Maybe, at least, if Esquimalt had a sense of itself as anything other than an oubliette, people might stay and try to build a life there -- maybe its young people wouldn't look for a sense of self in gangs, or keep their heads down and flee into the world outside.

Timothy Findley said that novels and stories were a way "of singing our way out of darkness." I really believe that. I just hope someone hears the song, and understands.