Linda Finn. War Letters Project

     Linda Finn. War Letters Project (At the Timber Village Museum, Blind River, 2 November 2013 to 20 January 2014.)
     Linda Finn’s grandmother Essie Sann wrote letters to soldiers during World War One, and again during World War Two. She saved many of the letters written back to her. Linda Finn has created a number of pieces using scans of some of these letters along with found objects, parts of uniforms, scans of photographs, and abstract and realistic images. These items are layered onto painted or monoprinted backgrounds, some have translucent layers of paint added, and Finn incorporates one of her favourite media, hand-cast paper layers or pieces into several of the pieces. Finn is nothing if not inventive in her use and melding of media.
     She also has a gift for design, and knows how to use limited palettes. Visually, all these pieces are interesting, most are engaging, and a few are stunning. I especially liked Requiem and When Words Are Not Enough. Requiem shows the life-size outline of a dead soldier over blotches of red, ochre, and mud, with the pieces of a uniform glued onto the base of raw canvas. I don’t know why this picture is so powerful, perhaps it’s the dead soldier, whose image hovers at the edge of visual awareness while we focus on the details of the background and overlays. Words consists of digital images of dozens of letters glued onto the canvas, with a life-size soldier overlaid on it. The letters are almost all legible, here and there the smudge of the soldier’s figure hides the words like a scorch mark.
      Also impressive is War Marked the Landscape Like Language, in which Finn has placed twigs painted black onto small wooden plaques arranged on short ledges. Anyone who has seen images of the World War battlefields will recognise the allusions. Seeing so many miniature trees shattered by shellfire lined up in rows and columns emphasises their calligraphic qualities. The title is apt; the language of war is destruction and death.
     A very moving exhibit is a suitcase containing stories and reminiscences told by the relatives of the dead, along with some photos and drawings, which the viewer is invited to pick up and read. I had time to read only one, a daughter’s account of how she yearned to have known her father, who died when she was three, and who knew her only as a two month-old baby. She keeps his portrait on her bedside table still.
     These are art works with intended meanings and significance. The fashion for many decades has been for supposedly pure art, which at most expressed the maker’s individual responses to the world, or recorded the artist’s exploration of his or her visual dialect. But even these meanings were politely ignored: what was supposed to matter was the design, the palette, the dialogue with similar and contrary styles, the demonstration of how the new visual dialect could be used.
     But the making of artworks that made a public statement never went away. In the second half of the 20th century, the comment was as often as not satirical, ironic, or self-deprecating; or too solemnly serious to be taken seriously. The work of people like General Idea almost apologises for having ideas, and ideas about politics and culture at that. Their in-your-face commentary made them seem somewhat indecent.
     The kind of comment Finn offers, straightforward invitations to think and feel about what it means to know about and be linked with people in the viewer’s personal and collective past, that was largely left to the makers of greeting-card verse and calendar art. Linda Finn shows us that questions raised by memory are serious, not only for the viewer’s sense of his or her own past, but also for our collective understanding of our shared history. Memories are too important for sentimentality. Her work is about war, and the sacrifices that we offer to the god of war; but it is not a glorification of war. In this, it is a welcome counter to the current jingoism. Highly recommended. ****
     Disclosure: we own one of the works in this series, it is part of this exhibition.
Read the report in Standard, or go to the Museum's Facebook page.

What Would Jesus Do?

What Would Jesus Do?
      A meditation for the Interchurch Council in Blind River.
     Religion, like other institutions, goes through cycles of fads and fashions. A few years ago, we saw bumper stickers with What Would Jesus Do? Or the abbreviation WWJD? This question also showed up on buttons, on t-shirts, on hats, and much else. We don’t see that slogan much any more. Perhaps people have realised that it’s a radical question. If you take it seriously, it can change your life.
     So how does one answer this question? Seems to me, one thing we should do is look at what Jesus actually did. He didn’t do that many things. He preached. He told stories. He gave advice. He healed people. He wandered around with his friends, and accepted hospitality wherever he found it. He visited friends and acquaintances.
     And he got into trouble with the authorities.
     He got into trouble because he visited disreputable people, such as tax collectors, wine bibbers, and prostitutes. The respectable people were exceedingly annoyed by this habit, and used it as evidence that he wasn’t preaching true religion. Religion is for the right kind of people. People like us. People who don’t flaunt their bad behaviour. People who take care to obey the rules, and behave with decorum and good manners, and never, ever sin in public.
     But the respectable people were perhaps even more annoyed by the messages Jesus preached. In particular, they didn’t like the advice he gave. He told people that religion wasn’t about following the rules. It was about loving God and your neighbour. He told the rich young man that he should sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him on his wanderings. He expected everyone who witnessed this exchange to follow the same advice.
     He told people that helping when needed was more important than observing the Sabbath. He not only told people this, he demonstrated it by occasionally breaking the Sabbath rules. He healed a man on the Sabbath, and scolded the respectable people who objected. Religious truth, whatever they thought it was, wasn’t about the rules, but about how they dealt with other people.
     He told people that what they did for the least important people they did for him. He told people that they should visit the sick, the poor, the prisoners. He said that if someone asks you for a coat, you should give him your shirt, too. If someone asks you to go with him for a mile, you should go with him for two. He pointed to the widow who gave a few pennies as more generous than the Pharisee who gave many dollars.
     He told the story of the good Samaritan to remind us that what matters is not whether someone deserves our help, but whether he needs it.
     What would Jesus do? That’s a question that’s supposed to guide us as we follow him. If we want to follow his example, we too should do what he did. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable to help people we don’t like, or people that we think don’t deserve what we offer, or people that won’t thank us for helping them. But that’s what Jesus would do.
     That’s what Jesus did.
     2013-10-18
 

Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001)

     Martha Grimes. The Blue Last (2001) Jury’s friend DCI Mike Haggerty asks him to find out whether a girl, supposedly saved from the bomb that destroyed The Blue Last and killed her mother, is who the nanny claimed she was, or perhaps actually the nanny’s daughter. Mike’s suspicion that she was an interloper is correct. The mother had a child before her marriage, which she gave up for adoption: the child’s identity is the knot whose unravelling unties all the other knots.
     Along the way Jury uncovers an art fraud, meets a streetwise urchin (with dog) who survives on his own, and makes friends with a number of other odd characters. Grimes lets herself go in this book: she’s really more interested in the characters than the plot, which however is well done and only mildly facile in it solution. **½ (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973)

     Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty (1973) Lew picks up a girl at an oil spill, and is worried when she leaves with no forwarding address. His search for her leads him deep into the California ruling classes, where he encounters their casual corruption and overwhelming desire for power. Untangling the mess of lies and secrets takes Lew longer than usual. This narrative gives us more of his character and of the characters he meets along the way, but Macdonald’s characteristic style remains the same: he gives us almost nothing but the objective, observable facts, and lets our responses to them create the mood he wants. A good read. *** (2008)

Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937)

     Edward Beal. The Craft of Model Railways (1937) I’m rereading this book. Well, re-skimming it actually. It’s long-winded, poorly organised, opinionated, and badly laid out. Beal commits the cardinal sin of technical writing: he mixes levels of description, giving detailed instructions for some jobs and vague references to “subjects too large for this book” for other tasks. He digresses without warning. He starts on a subject, and then just writes things down as they occur to him, with no apparent effort to organise them. He’ll start a paragraph about, say, passenger train working, with a reminder of the desirability of understanding of how the real railways do it, and then give only the vaguest information.
     The book’s design is awful, with illustrations usually separated from the referring text, many illustrations not explained at all, and incredibly meager information about the layouts illustrated in the photos, despite a whole chapter devoted to “Notable Examples and Enthusiasts.” In short, the book needed thorough and heavy editing and rewriting, which Beal’s publishers did not insist on. At the very least, they should have insisted on sub-heads throughout, which might have made Beal aware of his annoying habit of treating a subject in several chunks more or less widely separated by digressions. Many things in the model railroad hobby have improved over the years, and writing about it is one of them. * (2008)

Ross Macdonald. Black Money (1966)

 

     Ross  Macdonald. Black Money (1966) Several murders connected to a tennis club, gamblers, gangsters, and a university French Language department resolve into a psychological motive: A prof has a thing for young women, a streak of possessiveness, and a fragile, deteriorating nervous system. Macdonald’s style, a cut or two above Hammett’s in my opinion, carries the rather thin story and makes for a satisfying entertainment.
     The characters are believable, but Lew Archer keeps himself to himself, and despite his carefully complete narrative we don’t get a good sense of the man. He is a point of view, a conscious camera, an artistic temperament. The metaphors that express his responses to the weather, the landscape, the anonymous streets don’t tell us about his inner life. The occasional comments on life, distilled from largely bleak experience, are the only clues we have, and they are so gnomic that they lack personality. Once in a while a profound sympathy slips past the mask. Yet we read on, because Archer is such a precise observer of the people he encounters and the places he goes. We can see what he sees, hear what he hears, but our feelings are our own. *** (2008)

Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006)

     Dale Wilson. Canadian Passenger Chronicle 1, 2, 3 (1998, 2000, 2006) Just what it says: three albums of photographs, timetables, a handful of first person accounts, and some general history. Nicely put together, each volume is roughly chronological by railroad and region. The photos vary from excellent to barely acceptable, most of the latter good examples of why one should never scan at a low resolution, and never “resize” digital images prior to fitting them into a page. Wilson and his coworkers have been able to trace the histories of most of the cars and engines depicted. I hope the series continues, and that Wilson finds more travellers’ stories for the next couple of volumes. Although the provenance of all the material is carefully documented, these are not scholarly works, thank goodness. Their audience will be limited largely to railroad fans, and the odd student of transportation who needs something to liven up an academic dissertation. Recommended. *** (2008)