Announcement: My review of Ariel Gordon's book of essays, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest, has just been published in issue 28 of The /tƐmz/ Review. A bit of a milestone for me, as it marks my first publication in a Canadian literary journal. Until now it's been all American/British places.
Kenneyism
I went to a great book event last week.
Jeremy Appel is a reporter for the Progress Report, a co-host of the podcast Big Shiny Takes, and he writes the substack newsletter The Orchard, all of which I highly recommend. He was in town to talk about his book Kenneyism: Jason Kenney's Pursuit of Power. In it, he chronicles the rise and fall of Jason Kenney, a conservative politician who served both as a cabinet minister in the federal government under Stephen Harper, and then as Premier of Alberta until the trucker convoy/anti-vax types decided Kenney wasn’t right wing enough for their liking. You can read my review of the book here.
In short, Appel does a great job of exposing the contradictions that led to Kenney’s political demise: on the one hand, Kenney liked to pose as a populist who would give the truck nutz crowd whatever they wanted in return for their votes; on the other hand, he’s the very image of an Ottawa elitist, a guy who cares about pomp and pageantry and upholding authority, and as such is always desperate for mainstream accolades. Covid did Kenney in, but the contradiction between his style and substance would have forced him from power sooner or later.
The talk was held by the local Pride group, and so Jeremy focused on LGBTQ issues, contrasting Kenney’s approach with that of the current premier, Danielle Smith. Interestingly, Jeremy pointed out that Jason Kenney was very ideologically opposed to any policy that benefitted LGBTQ rights, but he had a way of cloaking this with policy talk and would rather talk about just about anything else to avoid looking at the issue head-on. Smith, Jeremy argues (and I tend to agree), isn’t as ideologically invested. She’s mentioned having a relative who identifies as non-binary. But she’ll bring up transphobic talking points at the drop of a hat because it stokes her base’s reactionary tendencies. Kenney stuck to policy to fight the culture war, Smith fights the culture war to get a pass on policy. Either way, cruelty wins.
I think this was the first LGBT event I’ve been to, and I have to say, I felt a sense of admiration for the people who turned out. It isn’t easy being different in this province, and yet they do it with grace and good humour.
A quick note about book events. It’s funny: I prefer reading fiction, though I read a lot of non-fiction as well, yet when it comes to book events I prefer those of non-fiction writers by a wide margin. I think it’s because fiction writers always end up reading a section of their novel, and it almost always kills the event. The only exception I can think of where a reading improved the experience is an online event Geoffrey Morrison once held for his novel Falling Hour, where doing the dialogue in his family’s doric dialect leant a certain context to the novel. I’m sure it wouldn’t have even crossed Jeremy’s mind to read from his book, and the event was all the better off for it. It’s something I wish more novelists would keep in mind.
“In the Parlamento, Ruzante is a peasant conscripted into the Venetian army, and returned from a campaign further west in the Po valley. He has dragged himself back to Venice, in utter misery and destitution. He has a monologue, and then an extended dialogue with his friend Menato, in which the unheroic details of soldierly behaviour are starkly and comically revealed. (Menato would be played by Beolco's colleague Marco Alvarotto, who was regularly given a more solid peasant part alongside the unstable Ruzante figure.) Ruzante has failed to capitalize on the war, and has spent most of his time on the march or in flight––he even had a reversible surcoat, so that in a rout he could mingle with the enemy troops instead of his own. He none the less tries to extract status from his experience, with a repeated catchphrase 'If you'd been where I've been …'" ––From Scripts & Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy by Richard Andrews
I want this except as a sports jersey that I can change inside out so that I'm always cheering on the winning team
Movie review: The Beasts (2022, directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen)
Damn, this was great.
Antoine and Olga, husband and wife, have quit their jobs as schoolteachers in France to move to rural Spain, where they restore old houses and farm the land—work they see as their life project.
However, the neighbours don’t care for them, partly because they’re gentrifying the town (Antoine insists this isn’t the case), but really because they’re the holdouts in an energy company’s bid to pay off the local landowners so they can put windmills in the area. Without the couple’s vote: no windmills, no money. The husband is played by the farmer who hides his Jewish neighbours from Hans Landa at the start of Inglorious Basterds. The wife looks familiar too but I don’t know what I’ve seen her in. Their Spanish neighbour, Xan, starts a campaign of terror to drive them out of the village. He pisses on their lawn furniture and poisons their tomato crop by throwing car batteries in their well. He would kill Antoine except some private code of honour won’t let him harm Olga, so as long as husband and wife stick together, they’re relatively safe…
There’s a great meeting between Xan and the husband halfway through the movie where they’re so close to coming to terms with each other. Xan reveals he wants the windmill money to buy a taxi and help his elderly mother retire from the farm. But Antoine warns him: the payout won’t be enough to afford a taxi, if they get the money Xan will have, at best, a few fat months before joining the modern precariat, and probably he’ll be even worse off than most because Xan has no formal education, and his brother is a bit slow after having his head kicked by a horse. Meanwhile, Xan sees Antoine as having everything he longs for: an education, opportunities, a loving wife. He says women have always ignored him and his brother, because they’re poor and smell permanently of manure. He asks why Antoine won’t leave, farm somewhere else? By now, Antoine is ready to take the money, but after the loss of his harvest, it won’t be enough for the couple to reestablish themselves elsewhere. They’re stuck here because of Xan’s sabotage.
The movie opens with this dreamlike, otherworldly image of horses running in a circle in slow motion, the Spanish farmers wrestling the horses into submission with their barehands. The image is revisited as the conflict finally escalates to murder. Then, in the final act of the film, there’s an abrupt shift in focus: we begin to see the conflict through the eyes of the women. Olga finds herself determined to farm the land, even if all the local vendors take her for stupid and try to cheat her on every transaction. Her adult daughter visits, tries to convince her to quit the farm and move on. Meanwhile Xan’s mother watches on, worrying about her boys, still working the farm when she should be retired, and forced now to consider how she’ll manage once the conflict leaves her without anyone to depend on. Until the body is recovered, or one side gives up, the two families still have to put up with each other, running into each other at markets and on the road.
Beasts got me thinking about how Cervantes (and Ariosto, one hundred years earlier) told everyone that chivalry wasn't real––it took us until World War One to take them seriously, but we got there in the end. The same thing thing has been happening for the pastoral life, and probably for much longer, but we’re just not ready to listen. People are constantly telling us that the pastoral life is bullshit, all that idyllic/bucolic imagery is fake, and all that’s real is the hard toil that amounts to nothing. And yet we aren't going to listen until agriculture just collapses on us. I mean, even as I'm typing this, all I can think of is damn, Galicia looks so beautiful, I had no idea. It’s so green, and even the worst days in the movie have a delightful fog cloaking everything. It got me wondering what the rural real estate costs over there, even as I’m watching these miserable lives play out. It occurs to me that Titan, the film’s not-so-loyal guard dog, is the perfect example of this: you can’t help but love him, even though the movie subverts the old trope of the loyal dog standing guard over the master's corpse.
The Beasts is like an Icelandic feuding saga, but with that twist in the last act where it leaves the men behind and dives into how the women handle and are changed by the feud. This one is really worth your time, I promise.
That’s all for this week! I’m going to go back to the chansons de gestes for the next newsletter, I think. I’ve got a fun one lined up…
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