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By Ms. G, October 26, 2014 3:26 pm

As I say to my students, just because it’s on the Internet, it doesn’t mean it’s reliable. It seems Netflix needs to learn this lesson. Just because a documentary is on Netflix that doesn’t make it good.

A few weeks ago Val and I watched “Fracknation”, one of Netflix’s many documentary offerings. It even recommended it to us because we had watched other seemingly similar docs; how kind. I am wary of this feature now because it turns out that it’s more of a propaganda piece than an even-handed documentary. The journalist involved says he is a freelancer. I say he is a cad. His (that is Phelim McAleer) whole premise is that he wants to challenge the assertions of another documentary, Gasland, winner of an Academy Award in 2011, that fracking is environmentally unfriendly and dangerous. According to McAleer Gasland is full of factual inaccuracies. Certainly he proves some of them in his interviews with some of the weird subjects that Fox relied on in Gasland. However, he goes overboard and makes assumptions such as if we in the west reject fracking as an energy supply we will be enabling Vladimir Putin of Russia to rule our lives. Hmm.

With just a little bit of research it is possible to discover that Phelim has a strong anti-environmentalism bias. It also feels like he’s being paid by the fracking industry, though he says he’s not. He says that over and over.

I’m not saying Gasland is all true and Fracknation is all false. I wouldn’t trust either one as my ONLY source of information. I wouldn’t trust anything as my only source of information. That’s the problem living in the digital age; it’s so easy to get just a little bit of information about everything. Gasland II is now being promoted by HBO. I’m not going to see it.

On the other hand, I watched many good documentaries this summer on Netflix, most of them by American film maker Ken Burns whose works often premiere on PBS. Countless hours were spent in front of my tv viewing his offerings from The Dust Bowl and Prohibition to Jazz, a mega-million hour series about the social history of jazz and its players and promoters. By good I mean well researched, even-handedly produced, and having a viewpoint supported by evidence, including interviews and documents. I sometimes have problems with Ken Burns’ documentaries in that they can be a bit maudlin, such as The Civil War, or a bit one-sided. These ones were not, generally.

In the near future I assume Burns’s latest, The Roosevelts – Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor – will come to Netflix. It is his best work yet, primarily because it is not afraid to criticize all three of the larger-than-life figures it portrays and mostly celebrates. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt was a big character, but he was also incredibly bombastic and oddly hypocritical. Franklin was the longest serving president ever and ably led the country into and through World War Two, however, he was, in some respects, a selfish person who was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. Eleanor, my favourite character in the series, was an incredibly devoted servant of the state, particularly toward those most dispossessed by the state, yet she was a highly needy individual who couldn’t be alone and put up with her husband’s misbehaviours.

Honesty is a complicated thing. Sometimes it can’t be conveyed in a neat little package one hour long. Sometimes it needs eight hours. Those of us who have the patience for it are rewarded.

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By Ms. G, October 9, 2014 3:06 pm

Here is today’s presentation. Best of luck in your practicum!

Teach_Writing_Confidence _OISE_Oct_2014

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By Ms. G, October 5, 2014 11:43 am

We had one day in San Francisco and decided to go to Telegraph Hill. We didn’t have time to go inside Coit Tower but we certainly did enjoy the views from nearby.

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By Ms. G, September 21, 2014 2:41 pm

Finally, some pictures of the mysterious and aloof Bailey. It only took one year.

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By Ms. G, September 21, 2014 12:59 pm

We spent about a week at the cottage in August. We didn’t do much, but here is the evidence.

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By Ms. G, September 21, 2014 12:30 pm

Here are some pictures from Bells on Danforth, a bike-advocacy event that my husband, Val, helped organize. It is a group ride from Danforth and Woodbine to city hall, and it joins up with Bells on Bloor and Bells on Yonge. This year it culminated in Bikestock, musical performances at city hall. Photos courtesy of Val Dodge.

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By Ms. G, August 10, 2014 4:17 pm

It is odd that I picked up a book called Tobacco (2001). I hate tobacco in all its forms. It is a vile substance in my estimation.

So, oddly, I just finished Iain Gately’s Tobacco which had been sitting on my pile of cheap books for a while, at least two years. I like books about single subjects –  acorns, salt, cochineal beetles – because they reveal so much about social history. Tobacco is no different. Covering a very wide time span, from the Spanish conquest of the “New World” to the heyday of anti-tobacco law suits in the 1990s, the book tells the stories of fads, motivations, restrictions, gender roles, class differences, cultural preferences, advertising motifs and pure old dependence.

Gately has a very English style of understatement that made me laugh out loud quite a few times. He says this of the early Spanish conquest: “Relations between the Spaniards and Americans were limited to exploitation and sex.” I probably would have put the book away for another two years if I hadn’t stopped to read that line over a few times, now aware that Gately is capable of succinct mockery. As one who teaches this horrible period in human history I do appreciate the reference.

Hitler hated tobacco. Duke University was so-named after a gift of millions of dollars to Little Trinity College by Buck Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. Smoking jackets were designed so that weak women wouldn’t have to smell tobacco on their aristocratic husbands. Prohibition was a great boon to smoking. The book is full of interesting little nuggets like this. It is a quick trip through American and British popular culture.

What I didn’t like about the book was the ending. Gately seems to have succumbed to his own sub-title: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. In the end he is seduced by the allure of tobacco, good and bad: “Many great men and women have left elegant testimonies to their tobacco habits, which will be joined, I believe, with others made in centuries to come.” I don’t know if he’s a smoker or not, cigar or cigarette, but as a vehement anti-smoker I don’t have any sympathy for smokers whatsoever and I certainly don’t think their stories are elegant. More recently it seems Gately has taken up the subject of alcohol (2008’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol). As a non-drinker I will not be imbibing.

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By Ms. G, August 3, 2014 12:16 pm

Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson, is another in his historical murder series. Having previously read The Devil in the White City I knew to expect two intertwining stories set in a beautifully described city; this one involves Marconi and his development of wireless telegraphy plus American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen who gruesomely murders his annoying wife. The city is London in the Edwardian period. Certainly this book is not as exciting or gripping as The Devil in the White City but it does have the same easy to read yet not trite writing style. I enjoyed the descriptions of London’s neighbourhoods so much that I have determined to go there next summer. The two plots come together when the wireless telegraph is used to capture Crippen and his disguised lover on their way to Canada aboard a a Canadian Pacific steamer.

One of the difficult aspects of this book is the character of Marconi. He is awful: socially obtuse, ego-maniacal. Yet he is not the murderer in the book. Larson makes no bones about Marconi’s dislikeable character. Perhaps he is so accurate in his description that he leaves the reader disinterested and morally disgusted. I couldn’t wait for the Marconi chapters to be over. I knew that mild-mannered Dr. Crippen was going to turn out to be a murderer yet I enjoyed the descriptions of him so much more. Seemingly patient in putting up with his demanding wife, Dr. Crippen turned out to be driven to the wall, poisoning and dismembering his wife. His turned out to be one of the most famous murder cases in British history. I knew nothing of it.

Oddly, it turns out that Marconi’s chief rival, Tesla, who does not figure in this book, was severely lacking in social skills as well. He ended up befriending pigeons. Marconi did marry, twice.

I will read another Erik Larson book. The man is a sincerely talented writer.

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By Ms. G, May 19, 2014 11:21 am

Adam Hochschild. To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War. Pan Books, 2012.

Adam Hochschild is one of my favourite writers on depressing topics. Many years ago I spent a summer reading his chilling history of Belgian imperialism in the Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. Browsing in my local Book City on the Danforth several months ago I came across his book on World War One, To End All Wars. It was on sale at $7.99 so it sat on my pile of future books to read. Meanwhile, my fascination with World War One – not the actual war but its causes – was satisfied by reading Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace. When I started teaching Canadian history for the first time in 15 years I picked up Hochschild’s book from my beside table.

Given the blurb on the back cover, I thought the book would avoid coverage of the battles. And that I was happy about. I didn’t want to read about trenches or artillery. However, I soon found myself immersed in the horror of it all starting with the Boer War. At first I was nonplussed that I had to sit through military details in order to get to the good bits about the pacifists and socialists who did not support the war. I do admit that I was sometimes confused about the need for all the military chapters. Then it hit me (I guess I am slow); the protests and resistance  stand out all the more in the context of the stupidity and suffering of the war.

Many aspects of my personal viewing,  reading and teaching lives have revolved around World War One lately; there’s Downton Abbey and its class divide that weathered the storm of the war; Mr. Selfridge whose London department store found itself in the crosshairs of a procurement scandal during the war (at least fictionally); the above-mentioned Margaret MacMillan; and of course my beloved grade 12 world history course in which my students study the origins of the war quite deeply. Add in Netflix and a few World War One documentaries and the stage is set for complete obsession.

Hochschild’s book offers a completely different point of view from all the others, however. His is the story of those on the other side (in Britain): trade unionists, socialists, suffragists, conscientious objectors, dissenters. Their bravery came in a different, less celebrated form, one less likely to make it into the official or common story of war. As someone just bungling my way through the teaching of Canada at war for the first time in a long time (to ESL students who have very little context on Canada itself) I find it quite refreshing to see the war through these divergent perspectives.

War does things to families. Hochschild’s case in point is the Pankhurst family of suffragette fame. I knew in general terms that many of the most militant feminists became big supporters of the war. I didn’t realize how much of a 180 degree turn it was for the matriarch, Emmeline. She took her ferocity for women’s suffrage and turned it into rabid war support. Her daughter Sylvia, meanwhile, became a war opponent. In the book they are just one family torn apart by war. Brothers and sisters, parents and children on opposite sides seems to be a common theme. In hindsight it’s not so surprising that such a cataclysmic event would have different effects on people’s passions.

The case could be made that World War One did finally usher in the modern era. Big disappointment that has been.