Oscarsborg

This is from the family reunion at Oscarsborg in 2006. It took place just after Suki and I were married. Richard and his then-wife Teena are in the foreground.

Oscarsborg is a fortress on a small island in Oslo Fjord. It proved important during the German invasion of Norway in 1940, when, armed with World War One vintage big guns and torpedoes (the guns, I believe, manufactured in Germany), the Norwegians manage to seriously cripple a German naval vessel. This delayed the German invasion for several hours, though in the end it did little to deter it.

The fortress is a castle, really. I'm not sure when it dates back to. Nowadays, it is used for events like weddings and large get-togethers -- and that's what we came to Norway for: our cousins on my paternal grandmother's side of the family are in the habit of organizing reunions every five years (or so), and this one was organized by our cousins Hege and Tone Bratsberg, along with help from many other cousins.

The weather was perfect. It was a bright and sunny summer in Norway. Again, like Canada, the summers are unpredictable, so we were lucky. I remembered all the cousins my age from earlier visits that Richard, my dad and I had made to Norway in the 1970s. But now a lot of them had kids. At times, keeping everyone straight was a little confusing.

Because of Norway's latitude, the evenings were extraordinarily long. One night Suki, Richard, Teena and I were out on the shore watching a cruise ship sail slowly past. By the time it was out of view, the sky was still light, but it was then past 10 o'clock.

Everyone got along, and that good cheer was like a long day, too. But the day faded, ultimately. Suki got to meet Richard and Teena. Suki and Teena would meet one more time -- at Richard's memorial. Richard and Suki never met in person again.

Noteworthy

Kevin from Canada on Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Stan Persky on the reading explosion.

The Greens

This was taken the same time as the earlier photo of Richard and me playing, with Richard holding a stick in his mouth. My mom, dad, Richard ("Dickie" then) and I went to Rockcliffe Park. It's an actual park, as you can see, and also a swanky neighborhood filled with the homes of the rich and the ambassadorial class. We lived on Rideau Terrace, east of Springfield, which was a dividing line between it and our neighborhood -- New Edinburgh. The layout of the neighborhoods was such that within short walking distance you could be in a working class area, for example Vanier, or the area around Crichton Street (where Richard and I went to school) or up in the enclaves of Rockcliffe, with its grand homes and trees everywhere.

Rockcliffe Park actually seemed to be several parks, all kind of interconnected: there was the Governor General's ground, some bush, Rockliffe Park itself, a tree-lined driveway that led to another park, the Rockeries, and then Mile Circle and Manor Park (the last not being a park at all but a neighborhood where Richard, Mom and I lived after my parents split).

It had a nice but slightly weird effect on me being surrounded by so much greenery while still in a city. When I learned how to bike I was pretty much everywhere, and expanded my stomping (pedaling) grounds until I knew the whole area well. I thought every city was more or less like this -- swank neighborhoods, middle-class neighborhoods, tough neighborhoods, but all of it linked up by long stretches of green.

This section of Ottawa still has the same essential lay-out -- but a lot of that green has been developed. For example, directly across from our house on Rideau Terrace, there was an acre or so of land we called "the bush". It wasn't a park -- it wasn't anything. It was just what it sounded like: a wild outgrowth of trees and brush. This is where we usually played. It stayed that way for so many years that I assumed it always would. I had no concept of zoning. But it wasn't zoned as parkland, it wasn't zoned as anything, I guess. It's all townhouses now.

Truth Marathon - homemade vid

This is a homemade video of the opening sequence of my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON -- in turn now a module of my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM. It is languishing at YouTube. Maybe I'm, ah, "pitching" it the wrong way. Other vids that YouTube considers thematically linked are:

• Wings of the Red Star: SU-25 Frogfoot!by BitnikGrRecommended for you
• 10:42Soul 1/3 zero battle, remarkable flight of Japanby jajamaru333Recommended for you
• 7:34Truth Marathon - Twoby Finn Harvor8 views
• 11:59Tripping With My Wife: Ohara/Kyotoby Finn Harvor37 views
• 7:03Truth Marathon - Threeby Finn Harvor3 views
• 4:35The Business Army: John Spivak at McCormack's Officeby Finn Harvor13 views
• 31:48INSIDE 9/11 : ZERO HOUR (PART 1 of 4)by daviddangermen
  
  

Truth Marathon - Korean version

From my first screenplay-novel, Truth Marathon:

밖. 세계 2차대전 직전 동경의 거리. 오후

 

제목 : 동경, 1941년 1월 26일

 

차 한대가 뉴욕 내셔널 시티은행(National City Bank)의 일본 지점 앞에 멈춰선다. 잘 차려 입은 서양 남자 한 명이 등장한다. 그는 은행 안으로 들어간다.

 

안. 잠시후. 은행.

 

잘 차려입은 서양남자가 줄을 서고 있다. 잠시 후 그는 은행 창구에 다다른다.

 

 

 More here....

.

 [sincere thanks to Arts Won for this]

Norway

This was probably taken during our first trip to Norway, in the park in Oslo next to where my paternal grandmother lived.

Norway has considerable advantages and disadvantages for a Canadian visitor: it's kind of like flying over the ocean to experience the same kind of weather: cold winters (natch) and dry, hot summers (that is, in years which are dry and hot) that are also short. But of course, one isn't in Canada, one's in Europe. Everything else, from the scale of the downtown to the cultural sense of self, is different.

The latter point is important. Living now in Seoul, I'm again in a society in which the cultural sense of self is strong. Being in Canada, on the other hand, is to always be a little bit hyphenated. Asia, then, is more "European" in this regard -- though of course the cities, in their scale, put both Norway and Canada into a rather pale spot.

We were in Norway for a month. We drove around though the mountains (not hot), but generally stayed in Oslo. Our grandmother made us start diaries -- an imposition for a teenager in the 1970s, even more nowadays ... though (as I tell my students before giving them yet another writing assignment) keeping a blog is just like having a diary! I had mine somewhere. Wish I could dig it up. Wish I could find Richard's, too.

Ottawa

This is a picture of Richard and me just after he was born. I'm not sure what park we're in. Another photo, probably taken the same day, suggests to me it was Rockcliffe Park. One of the real pluses of living in Ottawa is the sheer amount of nature one finds in the city itself; this seemed to be particularly true in the area where we ended up living -- New Edinburgh, on the corner of Rideau Terrace and Noel Street. (When this photo was take,we would have been on Hastey Avenue, close to the U of O library.) It was -- the 1960s -- a good time to be a city dweller in the sense that urban spaces hadn't been rationalized the way they are now: you could find lots of nature that were just sitting there, like parks that had happened by accident. All that is gone now -- developed to the umpteenth degree.

Enabler

Levi Asher on militarism: "War is also, according to this theory, a thing that blinds us. It's a camouflage curtain that affects our perceptions and makes us see enemies that may not exist. The most common direct cause of war is the belief in an imminent enemy attack, the fear of being caught weak against an unknown greater force. The more we militarize our societies, then, the more we perceive threats in the motives of our neighbors."

Richard and me III

Today is March 6. It's been two months since we received news of Richard's death. As Suki says, "chal-ga, Richard," which translates approximately as go in peace.

What is eerie about looking at old photos of Richard (with me, with my parents, with friends, with Suki in Oslo) is the sense of extreme temporal distance they create; but death, on the other hand, creates a sense of extreme speed and closeness in time ... things happening too fast, and too finally. It's unnerving, and makes one feel off balance, as if suddenly all the life around one is more fragile and needs to be protected all the more. I guess that's a good thing. But "fragility" is the operative word here ... and fragile feels fragile.

Richard and me II

This photo was taken when we were on a car trip by Lake Ontario. The joke-conversation was kind of along the lines of, "argh, ahoy, shiver me timbers, thar she blows!" Probably by coincidence, Richard never really tired of this tone of voice -- that of a crusty seafarer, the slang and idiom of a sailor -- this, I guess, because of all the time he spent in Cape Breton. He liked the social life he had with Teena; it was a different world for them .. I think one connected to but separate from their life in Montreal. But he also seemed to like the state of mind; the blunt, folksy sensibility.This is one of the ironies of the artistic world: it attracts people who are by nature thinkers -- but it also admires a certain taciturn quality.

Drawing III

These are two more of Richard at work when he was a kid. The lower image is particularly striking since (although it doesn't come through very well) he pasted down tape and used that as a basis for the drawing; the blunt verticals and horizontals of the tape form the columns and crumbling roof of a palace or fort. Around that, soldiers from two ancient armies in the midst of battle.