Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation

Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation, is not a pretty picture book meant to entice those from “away” to spend their tourist dollars on the “Rock”. Rather, Greg Locke’s collection is that of a professional photographer who has travelled the world as a photo-journalist and is now turning the camera on himself—so to speak. Where most would frame the picture to focus on the picturesque and avoid the eyesores; this book makes them front and centre. The last crumbling shack in an Outport depopulated by the policies of Joey Smallwood; children playing in the loft of a stage-euphemistically called a day-care; fisherman struggling to rescue their nets from a berg. The text which accompanies these pictures by Michael Crummey mirrors in words the pictures they describe. I might have preferred that they be incorporated more fully into the body of the work rather than appear as a lump at the beginning but together words and text present a lament for a way of life that is gone and will never return. It may have been hard-scrabble but it had dignity that was passed from generation to generation. These two are among the generation that were forced to leave the “Rock” to make a living and managed to make their way home again. Something about an island home stays in one’s soul even if one lives out one’s life “away”. This book attempts to illustrate the point and tug at the heart strings of all their fellow Newfies. It’s a sad world in which it’s illegal to row out and jig for your supper. There are no Newfie Jokes here.

E. J. Pratt

Edwin John Pratt was born in 1882 in a Newfoundland Outport to a Methodist Minister Father and as many a lad has done followed in his Father’s footsteps though he never served in a parish, choosing instead to become a teacher of Psychology and English Literature at U of T’s Victoria College.  He taught there until 11 years before his death in 1964.  Until I embarked upon reading his selected poems I knew of him only as a Canadian Poet added to an Anthology taught in my High School Curriculum.  I have a copy of that text which I studied forty years ago just 2 years after the author’s death.   The poem in question was Dunkirk—a fitting subject for a Canadian given the number of Canadian boys killed, injured and captured in that debacle.

 

It is interesting to note that although Pratt lived well into the second half of the Twentieth Century, his poetic style is rooted in the Nineteenth.  And, although he studied theology his personal philosophy tended toward agnosticism in his latter days.  His poetry, though lyrical, leans toward historical and technical matters—he wasn’t a writer of love poems. 

Harry Potter--the Half Blood Prince

I've written previously about the loss of innocence apparent in this present volume. Harry appears to be growing up with his readers. This book is definitely not for young children. Whether or not Harry is killed off in the upcoming volume of this series that possibility is definitely prefigured here. The death of his God-father in the last book ended his last familial attachment--he has also inherited Black's London home. The prophesy foreshadows the death of either Harry or his nemesis Voldemort; we learn in the first chapters that Malfoy has been recruited to kill Harry and that the sinister Severus Snape is still in league with the Deatheaters and operating undercover at Hogwarts. We keep hearing about people who have died and students who are withdrawn from the school, especially after a student is infected by a cursed bracelet. Favourite establishments on Diagon Alley and at Hogsmeade are closed and gone. There are definite sinister undercurrents at play here.

But it is Harry himself who is undergoing the greatest changes. He's undergoing puberty and the stirrings of sexual drives are disturbing his stability. His classmates are not as reticent. Ron and Hermione are still at odds over her attachments to outsider Krum. Ron is described as snogging another classmate much to Hermione's annoyance. French kissing or tonsil hockey may be activities that teenagers engage in but the use of this offensive word in a book for children is questionable. It's this last that I have found most jarring in this story.

Carl Sandburg Selected Poems

Even this writer doesn’t remember when Ozzie and Harriet were first allowed to be seen occupying the same bed on TV. Other more intimate activities came later. More of us can probably remember the sensation that ensued when it became public that Rock Hudson was gay. Most can remember when Ellen exchanged the first gay kiss on prime time television or the coming of Queer as Folk to Showtime. On radio there are certain words that still get bleeped out if someone lets them drop—sometimes referred to as the big four—and we’ve all heard about Don Cherry and Coach’s Corner. Anything less than live sexual penetration seems to be portrayed in movies these days.

With this as background it seems difficult to believe that when they were first published many of Carl Sandburg’s poems had to be edited to take out the “naughty bits”. When it comes to censorship I’ll admit to some ambivalence. On the one hand I bewail the loss of innocence in society at large and on the other I decry the excesses of McCarthyism. I object to the banning of books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Merchant of Venice from certain classrooms but I also bemoan the perversion of our rights of Freedom of Speech that allow Holocaust deniers such as Ernest Zundel to promulgate their messages of hate. By today’s standards Sandburg’s unexpurgated poems seem pretty tame but his response to an editor, written nearly 90 years ago isn’t:

“…it’s come over me clear that the last two or three years that in a group killing of a man, in a mobbing, the event reaches a point where all rationale is gone; such a term as “anarchist” and “traitor” or “Boche” or “Englander Schewin” disappears and they babble hysterically only one or two epithets, in our language usually a tenor of “Son of a Bitch” with a bass of “Cocksucker”. Since some of the finest blood of the human family goes this way poets and painters have a right to try to employ it or at least not kid themselves about what actually happened at Golgotha. Since I’ve talked with men who were in the trenches and since I’ve seen race riots I am suspicious that the sponge of vinegar on the spear is a faked legend and what probably happened, if the historicity of Jesus is ever established, is that they cut off his genital organ and stuck it in his mouth….”

I can’t think of a comeback line after that statement!