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| Fall has finally come to Toronto, it was actually minus one when I woke up this morning (according to CBC radio). This weekend Krystal and I went to see the CUFLA lacrosse finals, and it was freezing cold. Thanks to some tea from Loblaws we made it through. Here is an article on the second game we saw (that is right, triple overtime). It is written by a friend of ours who also manages the UofT Lacrosse team:
http://www.insidelacrosse.com/page.cfm?pagerid=2&news=fdetail&storyid=170852
In book news, I am reading the new Michael Chabon, so far it is quiet good. That is the second great novel in a row I have read. Not sure if mentioned it, but I read Philip Roth's new novel Exit Ghost and it was fantastic, he is still one of the best American writers. Michael Chabon is another of my favorites, so I was very glad to see he had a new novel even though he just published one in the spring (which was also very good).
School is getting VERY busy, and should be until the end of the semester. I have been starting to think about where I might want to work after I am done and have come up with three possibilities so far: Toronto, Ottawa, New England (probably Boston). Not sure if any of these will have archives jobs, but here is hoping.
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| First of all I would like to offer my apologies to my once regular readers. I have not updated in quite sometime because things have been kind of crazy busy. I am back in Toronto, have moved downtown, started second year, decertified the union at the bookstore, Tory (et al.) moved to Toronto and other such happenings. Mostly I have just been lazy, which isn't really an excuse, but I apologize and will try to be more diligent.
Now to sum up! Second year at FIS is going well. I am taking four classes (that is a full load): Administrative Decision Making (yawn! But useful for indecisive people like me), appraisal (yay for Craig!), specialized archives (should be better than it has been), and Advocacy and Outreach (so much fun, Duff is such a great prof when she likes the subject matter). I am the VP of the ACA student chapter this year. We are hoping (and it looks like it will happen) to get Ian Wilson (our National Archivist/Librarian) to come and speak. I was reading something he wrote the other day about Canadian history being in the first person singular and thought that was a really neat way to express the personal aspect of Canadian history. Having moved from a history program into an archival program the uniqueness of records has broadened my view of what history is and that maybe it is being war, politics, and such things and is much more a story of people and the records they have left behind. Something to think about I suppose.
The United Church Archives is still closing. There is now an online petition to save it (www.savethearchives.ca). I am not sure if this petition will work, but I think that what needs to be addressed is how the archives can move forward. I know its probably too late to keep them at Vic, so I am hoping that the United Church comes up with an alternative location that will keep them open to the public and accessible to anyone who wants to use them.
There has been much floating around the archives and history world about LAC cutting back their hours. This has now leaked into mainstream media (CBC and the Globe&Mail). I have a couple of things I want to say about it. First, I think that the most important thing for LAC should be the greatest amount of accessibility for the greatest number of people. The primary reason given by LAC for cutting the hours is that they are concentrating on digitisation. Although not good for historians or students lucky enough to make a trip to Ottawa, online service is much greater than in person service. This benefits those across the country who can't make it to Ottawa and is particularly useful for genealogists. I think it is time that the historians stop thinking they are the primary user of archives. They aren't, genealogist are and the types of records that tend to get digitized are those that help genealogists, and not historians. That being said, I think what should be considered is the fact that LAC doesn't have a budget to fund both its reading room and online services. This is a concern to be directed at the government. So rather than signing a petition with a very small amount of signatures (500 when the LAC website gets millions of hits a year), we should be writing our MPs and expressing concern about how much money is being devoted to our cultural institutions. I do think that LAC should consider the idea of a user group, but not one solely run by historians, but instead taken from a variety of users (both online and in person). Anyway, that is just what I think. After reading the letter that Craig Heron (sp?) the president of the Canadian History Asssociation wrote to Ian Wilson I lost alot of respect for their cause.
Since I last posted I have actually not read that much. I read an interesting, though poorly written book called Proust and the Squid about how our brains function when we read and how reading developed in society. Very interesting, the women who wrote it specializes in kids with learning disabilities, primarily dyslexia, so she had some interesting comparisons between the normal brain and those that don't function normally. Unfortunately, she was a scientist and not a writer.
I also read a biography of George Kennan by John Lukacs, although he calls it more of a character study than a biography. Kennan's life is quite impressive and interesting, so the book was carried on that, but I have never been a huge fan of Lukacs writing style. Nonetheless it was interesting and it makes me even more excited for John Lewis Gaddis to finish his bio of Kennan.
Peter Sis has come out with a new book. He is my favorite children's illustrator and his new book continues with his already wonderful work. This one is a biography of what it was like to grow up under communism in Czechoslovakia. Not your typical book for kids, but it works.
Time Canada has a section dedicated to the arctic this month, although not very long and probably not worth buying I would advise you all to spend twenty minutes reading it at your local bookstore or news stand. Next month another magazine (I am not sure which one, possibly MacCleans) is devoting their issue to the arctic as well.
That is all I can think of right now. I am sure I am forgetting things I am supposed to post about. Its plenty long anyway.
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| Only two more weeks in Ottawa! Its going by pretty quickly. I think it helped that it was a short week last week. This Saturday I went to Gananoque with some other librarian interns to see Corb Lund play. We went earlier in the day and did a boat tour of the 1,000 Islands. Very nice area, although alot of boat traffic. Mostly the boat tour shows you all the really fancy cottages people have built on these islands. We didn't get off at Boldt Island (big castle) because its American territory and one of the girls didn't have a passport or birth certificate. Corb Lund was great. We had to buy tickets for the entire Festival of the Islands though ($25) and then another $5 for the concert. You couldn't just buy tickets for the one night. Kind of annoying. Blue Rodeo is playing next weekend, so maybe I will go back and see them.
I finished Shackleton's book. Very good. Here are a final couple of quotes:
"We had "suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole." We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man."
"When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during the long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, "Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us." Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels "the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech" in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts."
"We were listening avidly to his account of the war and of all that had happened while we were out of the world of men. We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad. Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and unimagined slaughter, of a world conflict that had grown beyond all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us."
On the last point, Shackleton's journey began in 1914, very soon after the declaration of WWI. At the time he and the crew had offered their ships to fight, but the belief at the time that the war would be over by Christmas, caused them to continue their plans. No men from the Endurance died, despite their hardships. Three men died from the Aurora, which had set out from the proposed end-point for the Endurance and had planted depots of food and supplies that the Endurance would pick up as it traversed the continent. Most of the crew, of both the Endurance and the Aurora went on to fight in WWI when the returned. Shackleton recounts that since they all enlisted 3 had been killed, 5 wounded, many received honours, including Shackleton himself.
Now I have returned to Andrew Wheatcroft's history of the Hapsburgs. Those avid readers of my blog (the two of you) will recall that I read 50 pages of this earlier this summer, but then new books came out and I gave it up for other reading. I am now committed to finishing it. When I last read it I had just finished the twelfth century and two Hapsburgs had already been Emperor. They take a bit of a break from being emperor and work on developing a family mythology for a bit (largely based on their relation to the Babenberg line). Anyway, today I read by the canal for a while. I have covered another chunk, including the era of three popes, some crusades, the Hussites, and a bunch more Hapsburgs, including two more emperors.
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| A thought on arctic sovereignity: | "In the high Arctic Ocean, the rules of the land do not apply. The six months of sunless winter skies, the grinding ice, the fearsome winds, the freezing depths and the remote seafloor make this a place where sovereignty has a different meaning from sovereignty on land."- Joe Macinnis (Globe and Mail) As I continue to read Shackleton's description of his Antarctic voyage, it becomes more and more obvious that both arctic are two places on earth where regular conventions don't and shouldn't apply. How can you claim ice that is constantly in motion? How can you claim a territory that is uninhabitable, particularly since there is a much larger chance of that territory claiming you? |
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| Just a few snippets from the book I am reading:
"The cook got the blubber stove going, and a little later, when I was sitting round the corner of the stove, I heard one man say "Cook, I like my tea strong." Another joined in, "Cook, I like mine weak." It was pleasant to know that their minds were untroubled, but I thought the time opportune to mention that the tea would be the same for all hands and that we would be fortunate if two months later we had any tea at all. It occurred to me at the time that the incident had psychological interest. Here were men, their home crushed, the camp pitched on the unstable floes, and their chance of reaching safety apparently remote, calmly attending to the details of existence and giving their attention to such trifles as the strength of a brew of tea."
"At the head of an ice tongue that nearly closed the gap through which we might enter the open space was a wave-worn berg shaped like some curious antediluvian monster, an icy Cerberus guarding the way. It had head and eyes and rolled so heavily that it almost overturned. Its sides dipped deep in the sea, and as it rose again the water seemed to be streaming from its eyes, as though it were weeping at our escape from the clutch of the floes. This may seem fanciful to the reader, but the impression was real to us at the time. People living under civilized conditions, surrounded by Nature's varied forms of life and by all the familiar work of their own hands, may scarcely realize how quickly the mind, influenced by the eyes, responds to the unusual and weaves about it curious imaginings like the firelight fancies of our childhood days."
-From South: the Endurance expedition by Sir Ernest Shackleton
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