Quotulatiousness

May 8, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on perhaps the best-known song of the late Gordon Lightfoot:

Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons

In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking author, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:

    The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
    Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
    The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
    When the skies of November turn gloomy …

“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 — just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports … until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves […]

That said, human tragedy alone does not make for singable material. The last contact from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was with another ship, the SS Arthur M Anderson. Yet “The Wreck of the Arthur M Anderson” would have been a far less evocative title. Arthur Marvin Anderson was on the board of US Steel, as Edmund Fitzgerald was on the board of Northwestern Mutual. But there is something pleasingly archaic about the latter name: in fact, as I think of it, I believe the last Edmund I met was one of Gordon Lightfoot’s fellow Canadian singers — the late operetta baritone Edmund Hockridge. Pair “Edmund” to “Fitzgerald”, and you have something redolent of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, of shipwrecks off Cornwall or the Hebrides. Perhaps that’s why “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” either sounds like an old Scots-Irish folk tune or, alternatively, actually is one. For any IRA members reading this, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who starved himself to death in a British gaol, wrote in his cell a song called “Back Home in Derry”, about Irish prison deportees en route to Australia and set to a tune remarkably like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, which it seems unlikely he ever heard.

I see some musicologists claim the tune is in Dorian mode, although it sounds Mixolydian to me (like “The Wexford Carol”). Whichever it is, there is a perfect union between the emphatic melody, the crash of the waves, the antediluvian moniker of Northwestern Mutual’s chairman, and even the obvious filler phrases, so typical of ancient folk songs:

    The lake, it is said
    Never gives up her dead

— which returns far more effectively in the final verse:

    Superior, they said
    Never gives up her dead

— as if Gitchee Gumee is some vast ravening beast. Go back to Orillia, to Fourth Grade in 1947, and the parents listening to Mr and Mrs Lightfoot’s little boy sing “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” as if a bit of synthetic shamrock from an old Tin Pan Alleyman were a genuine Irish lullaby from the mists of Emerald Isle antiquity. That’s the genius of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: It was born sounding as if it’s a hundred years old. And its agelessness is all the more amazing when you consider that it’s essentially an act of journalism, an adaptation of a news report about something that happened a few days earlier – just the facts, ma’am, with minimal artistic license:

    In a musty old hall
    In Detroit they prayed
    In the maritime sailors’ cathedral …

“Maritime sailors” is surely a redundancy, and it’s not a cathedral but the “Mariners’ Church”, which doesn’t quite go the distance syllable-wise. And a parishioner wrote to Lightfoot to say the church isn’t in the least bit “musty”, so these days he finds alternative adjectives.

But that’s all details. The power of the song lies in its storytelling. It immortalized the fate of the freighter not just for the families of the dead, “the wives and the sons and the daughters”, but for everyone, and it made the Edmund Fitzgerald the Titanic of the Great Lakes – except that the Titanic never inspired any song like this. The mournful toll of the lakes in the penultimate stanza is Gordon Lightfoot at his very best:

    Lake Huron rolls Superior sings
    In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
    Old Michigan steams Like a young man’s dreams
    The islands and bays are for sportsmen
    And farther below Lake Ontario
    Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
    And the iron boats go As the mariners all know
    With the gales of November remembered …

The gales of November howl and the waves rise up and devour the ship. And then the gales subside and the placid surface betrays no trace of twenty-nine men, taken deep into the rooms of an ice-water mansion and never to be found.

Grrrrrrl Power is the only acceptable mode for new female characters, it seems

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo on the strictly monotone representation of female characters in recent years:

The trend to make female movie characters tough and abrasive has been proceeding for some time. We can all predict that the new partner in the police procedural, let’s say a petite black woman whose entrance surprises (and thus reveals the bigotry of) the white man she’ll be working with, will turn out to be the biggest badass on the force. She’ll almost certainly save her partner’s life — and unearth a crime-solving detail he’d overlooked — before the first episode is over. At the same time, viewers will be treated to her sneering refusal of the partner’s banter, her steely gaze, and her fearless embrace of outrider status. She’s a woman with wise-cracking disdain for men as a group who takes quick revenge for even the smallest hint of sexism, benevolent or otherwise, from her fellow officers. And she quickly earns not only their respect but also their unwilling awe.

Whether police officers, first responders, detectives, firefighters, FBI — or, for that matter, nurses, ER doctors, politicians, or lawyers — the message is clear: these women are at least as capable and fearsome as any man: tough-minded, smart as a whip, and street-wise. Even in this era of agitation about the trans peril to women’s sports, the fictional females are as physically strong and combat-ready as any male, their fists and kicks aimed with staggering accuracy. Even tiny Lucy Tara on NCIS Hawai’i comes to the rescue of her far-larger male colleagues in impressive physical struggles with suspects.

But physical characteristics, the notable fearlessness and strength, are to some extent less striking than the women’s personalities and demeanor. An entire character transformation has been taking place, as traditionally feminine characteristics have been decisively minimized and masculine bravura brought to the fore. These women are, seemingly without effort, brusque, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous, particularly of male authority — and we’re to love them for it. They’re often beautiful, but they never try to be. With hair pulled back and aggressive booted stride, they are independent, uninterested in male approval, and largely indifferent to men as romantic partners, unless they are shown pursuing their occasionally voracious sexual needs, at which times their approach is direct and unsentimental. After an evening of bronco-riding athleticism, they wake up in a tousled bed with a slight grimace and duck out of the lover’s offer of breakfast. They’re not interested in commitment or any continued intimacy. A call comes in on their cell phone, they pull on their clothes nonchalantly, and walk out of the man’s life. They’ve already forgotten him as they prepare to conquer evil once again.

A popular new Netflix series, The Diplomat, takes these now-standard elements to the next level, profiling an ambitious, sexy, oft-frowning, brilliant, and explosively hot-tempered woman, Kate Wyler, who engages in uncontrolled physical and verbal abuse of her husband without remorse or narrative comeuppance. Though one might expect that a portrait of reckless physical violence by one spouse against another would be evidence at least of a serious character flaw — if not criminality (as it certainly would be if the male spouse were delivering the blows) — it is not at all clear in this case that the character’s actions deserve any condemnation. Her violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of her (rather admirable and plucky) unconventionality in breaking the rules of propriety in order to save the liberal world order.

Father Ted as Ireland’s answer to Fawlty Towers

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conor Fitzgerald on the tragically short run of the classic Irish comedy Father Ted:

Fondly remembered and occasionally quoted, Father Ted has its place in the broad canon of the British sitcom. But in Ireland, even 25 years since its finale, it has always been so much more. Its status is closer to Fawlty Towers in England or Cheers in the United States: the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us.

Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.

Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.

Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.

This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.

Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.

Inkunzi Strike 20mm Grenade MG

Filed under: Africa, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jan 2023

Tony Neophytou developed this for Denel Land Systems, which has completely fallen apart as a company and left it now as his own independent design, with no manufacturer. I filmed this video in 2018, to show the prototype version of the Strike, which has since been improved and further developed. Perhaps some day it can find a manufacturer?
(more…)

QotD: The “science” of history

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s how they saw it in the 18th century, of course, and even more so in the 19th, when Science — capital S — really did seem triumphant. It’s hard to overstate just how optimistic the 19th century was. In some ways, the earliest statement of this optimism — and, significantly, its most overwrought warning — was the best: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. The creation of life itself in the lab! If Science could do that — and there’s a reason Shelley’s rather crappy novel was a massive bestseller, y’all — then it should be child’s play for Science to predict the course of human history …

A moment’s glance at the “science” of history guys like Marx actually produced, though, show the flaw in that line of thought. Here again, Shelley’s novel is instructive. Victor Frankenstein could give his creature life, but it wouldn’t obey him — being alive, it had free will and a mind of its own. So “scientific” history always, in the end, means something like “anthropomorphic History, capital-H”. “Life” obeys certain laws, the way falling objects obey the law of gravity, but just as there’s no such physical object as “gravity”, there’s no such thing as “life”, an abstract notion over and above the behavior of individual living things. I know Aquinas is dead, and we have killed him (to steal a phrase from Nietzsche), but these things only make sense in Thomist terms: Just as “gravity” is mathematical shorthand for the actualization of an object’s potential to fall towards a center of mass, so “life” is just the blanket term for actualization of a living thing’s various potentials. When we say things like “gravity caused the avalanche”, we don’t mean that a living, purposive force decided to pull the rocks down …

… and yet, when you get down to it, “scientific” history always ends up meaning “History — a living, purposive force” — decided to do this or that. We assign a telos to history, in other words, in a way we simply don’t to any other “force” governed by “scientific” “laws”. Sorry for all the quotation marks, but I want to make this as clear as I can. Nobody but a poet would say that Gravity, a living force, longs for all things to return to its bosom, but the authors of “scientific” history all write as if History, a living force, longs for this or that outcome. C.f. Karl Marx and his merry band of murderers getting all lathered up about The Revolution. The words on the page are all about scientific necessity, but the tone is pure hosanna.

Severian, “The Science of History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2010-09-22.

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