The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

Tomorrow at 7 am we will form a small caravan with the car carrying JL, P. and D.,and head out to Cape Breton Island. The first day we will go north to Quebec, then head east, staying in a motel outside Fredericton. The next day, we hope to arrive at Belle Cote, where our rented cottage stands, by evening.We will be stopping for picnics, of course, but for the most part we will be in a car on Canada Day.

We will be on CBI for ten days, visiting JL’s parents, sightseeing, and hopefully having some time sitting on the beach watching D. swim with JL or J. The forecast is for cold weather, but little rain. We will be staying at a cottage with a radio, but no tv and certainly no vcr, so it will be interesting to see if we (and especially D.) can do without such things, especially if it rains steadily. At least there is electricity (see blog below about island off Vancouver)! And we’ll have a bedroom with a door! And, with luck,the seafood will be readily available. And, I hope, we will see some of the Scottish roots of Canadians, including the Celtic college near Bras D’Or. And, speaking of things Scottish, we want to tour the CBI Scotch distillery that P and JL have told us about.

Back on July 13. Wish us luck!

With the help of JL, I have managed to find out how to paragraph my blog. And have gone back to edit the previous blogs accordingly. Now my blog actually looks literate, worthy of a retired English teacher.

Of course, this has taken me all day, so it’s a good thing I am retired. My old iMac moves so slowly that it takes ages just to get onto my blog.Still, it can do it, which is good, since I won’t be able to afford a new computer for quite a while

I have finally tweaked this blog so that it actually looks like a real blog even on my monitor! And I changed the heading, which never showed up on my monitor, but which I can now see as well. And best of all, that pesky ad that I spoke of in earlier blogs is now where it belongs, in the sidebar. Now, if I could just figure out how to paragraph, I’d be a truly happy blogger. However, this may be one of the many things that I will be able to do once I stop being a freebie, less than a month from now.

Last week we went to see “A Prairie Home Companion.” Now, I listen to this show weekly on Nation Public Radio (107.9 FM if you are in Montreal) and feel affectionate towards it, but this film was a disservice to it. A documentary would have been great, just to let us see what everyone looks like. But no, the filmmakers had to have a plot, and a stupid one at that, something about the Angel of Death, with Virginia Madsen in a white trench coat, intoning drivel. The show, by itself, is always balanced precariously on the edge of twee-dom, but this movie pushed it over the edge, I’m afraid. And it didn’t even include the News from Lake Woebegon, my favorite part.

Then, yesterday, we went to see “Word Play”, which focuses on the “puzzlemaster of the NY Times”, Will Shortz, editor of the Times crossword. (He also has a Saturday show on NPR on with word puzzles, where people phone in to compete, and, if they win, not only get a Scrabble game but Will Shortz’s voice on their answering machines.) This movie was what the previous movie should have been–a documentary–and briefly covered the phenomenon of crossward puzzles before going on to cover the 2005 Crossword Puzzle Competition. But it was so slight a piece that one really felt that it should have been on PBS as 1hour item. It just wasn’t real movie-theatre material. We had a free pass, but even so–! And I say this as a crossword lover. (Although I can’t get past Wednesday with the NY Times crossword, I can do the daily Gazetter one, and the Tribune crossword that appears in the Gazette on Saturdays.)

I can’t seem to get the Powers of the Blogosphere to accept and post my blogs with paragraph indentations. No matter what I do–including leaving two lines between paragraphs–my blog ends up all one chunk of writing, as if I don’t know how to paragraph. GRRR.

In four days, we will be leaving to go on vacation to darkest Cape Breton Island. We will be staying in a cottage at Belle Cote, which has been described to me as being close to a bay where fresh lobsters can be purchased every day, and equally close to a nice beach–just across a field from it, actually. Which sounds very nice. JL’s Cheticamp relatives rent it out cheaply to visiting family members. The weather forecast for next week is for coldish temperatures–none over 20, for example–although there’s mention of rain for only two days. I hope it’s not too cold and grim.
At present, the record for worst weather on a vacation is still Pasley Island, in the islands off Vancouver, in the summer of 1975, when we were renting a cottage with no electricity or indoor toilet, and it rained buckets every day. It was so wet that the giant banana slugs that are prominent in that part of the country were drowning–or climbing the cabin walls. And we were with J’s mother, sister and nephew (age 3) with our own daughter (age 4).

All we had was a radio that got CBC, and a fireplace that kept us warm. And an oven that ran on propane. And we were basically stuck inside for a week. Well, except for at night, when J’s mother insisted that everyone but her sleep in tents that leaked terribly. Still, we managed. The kids played in the cardboard boxes we had used to bring food up in, we went for walks in the rain, all of us clad in slickers and boots, I read to the kids a lot (I recall them standing, rapt, listening to “The Golden Pinecone”, which was technically much too advanced for them and had no pictures.) And I baked 2 loaves of bread every day, bread that we all devoured in hours.

That was the summer I started reading the Agatha Christie novels that the cottage’s owners had. I had never read mysteries before, but I was desperate for something to read. (That started my interest in mysteries, which sparked a course I taught for ages called “Detective Fiction”, which later morphed into “Modern Crime Fiction.”) And now I look back on that summer with some fondness….But I don’t really want another like it.

Friday evening, we went with P., J., and D to Westmount Park to celebrate the Fete Nationale. I think it’s the first time that Westmount has done something like this for the June 24 holiday. Anyway, people were picnicking on free hotdogs and soft drinks in family groups on the grass at the edge of the playing fields

Around 7, men in the uniforms of the 18th century French marched out on the field to the sound of fife and drum. They organized a child army with volunteers between 6-12 and gave them blue tunics to wear and pikes to carry. It was weird to see everyone placidly watching as the faux French militia marched these kids all over, then taught them how to present arms. At time I thought, “Where are the pacifists in this crowd?” but no one seemed to mind.

Then there was dancing. A French Canadian fiddler instructed people–mainly parents and their kids–on the various steps for folk dancing, until dozens of people were dancing on the grass to fiddle music, ending with a contra dance that stretched in two long lines and was quite jolly. Surprisingly, the anglos and the francophones danced merrily together along with many ‘visible minorities’. Proving that Westmounters aren’t as white and staid as they are rumored to be…..

There’s a nice little part I love in The Odyssey, in which this myth is told, about Vulcan’s calling on all the gods to view his faithless wife and her lover and make fun of them. The male gods come; the goddesses all stayed discreetly on Mt. Olympus. But as they regarded the couple, strung up in their net of shame, Apollo, the most noble of all the gods, and god of the sun, whispered to Mercury, the messenger god, “Wouldn’t you be willing to be caught up like that, in a net, and stared at by all, if you could lie with golden Venus for just one night?”

A few evenings ago, I watched a Nova show on Sir Isaac Newton’s “Dark Secrets”. Apparently Newton was a part-time alchemist when he wasn’t writing up the principles of calculus or gravity. He was looking for the elusive ‘philosopher’s stone,’ which was believed, throughout the medieval era and into his own, to be able to turn base metals into gold. On this show, viewers were told that alchemists in that era believed that Greek/Roman myths were actually coded ways to convey secret information about alchemy.

For example, there is a myth about Vulcan, blacksmith god of fire, his wife Venus the goddess of Love, and her lover, the god of war, Mars. In this myth, Vulcan discovers that his wife has been making love to Mars. He plans to catch them in the act and humiliate them. He makes a metal net and suspends it over the family bed, rigging it so that at a certain point, when the two lovers are in the bed, the net will fall on them and catch them, preventing them from escaping. And that is just what happens.

In any case,apparently they believed that this myth was just a coded message telling how to handle copper and iron. Copper was symbolized by Venus, and Mars symbolized iron. If they were put together in a cauldron (as in a bed) and fired up (as in making passionate love), the result would be something called the Net. And we were shown this in a demonstration at a foundry: the result is a lump of iron with bits of copper scattered through it in a pattern that looked net-like.

The only trouble was, this tv show didn’t say what such a metallic result was useful for. The implication was that it was something to do with alchemy, some step along the way to making gold out of base metals. However, the show emphasized that alchemists described all their steps in this process in the language of myth or Romance, so that in some steps, a knight slays a green lion, for example. Very odd, but interesting, I think. Which reminds me: somewhere on the internet I saw a theory that stated that the Holy Grail was really the Philosopher’s stone; that the search of King Arthur’s knights was all a metaphor for trying to find how to achieve the philosopher’s stone–which was supposed to not only turn base metals into gold, but somehow lead to peace, prosperity and physical healing. According to this theory, this secret dated far back in time to its origin, in ancient Egypt and Babylon. More of this in another blog.

My son-in-law, Jeff, tells me that when people access my blog, they see a heading with my blog’s name and a little square of letters spelling ‘art.’ And no ad obscuring anything! This is quite a revelation, and only goes to show how old our iMac is. All I see when I access my blog is a blank space above the message, and a square of white with an ad on it. Jeff says that the latter is to one side when he looks at my blog. So, I guess my comments about an ad obscuring things must have seemed puzzling to anyone trying to read it, right? Jeff says to get a new search engine like Foxfire. I’ll leave that to John to do tomorrow….