Yesterday, which dawned and remained crisply cold and sunny, we drove into Halifax to participate in the anti-prorogation rally organized on Facebook and critically examined of late on almost every news broadcast in the country. I don't think I've pounded the streets politically since the first Iraq war in the early nineties, so it was heartening to see a great turn out and invigorating to be part of a grass roots movement once again.


Given the same response at the other rallies staged around the country, I really hope this government will take heed of all the divergent voices but I really doubt it. Stephen Harper doesn't appear to give a damn about the Canadians who don't vote for him and has little interest in modifying his agenda. Anyway you cut it, he's a "my way or the highway" kind of guy.


In seeking creative ways to be heard, some among us have gone in a slightly new direction, creating a website called Haikus Against Harper, on which people are invited to submit their opinion in haiku form to be added to the site. Here is my own contribution:-

Afghan detainees

Innocent people tortured
Stop the lying now!


While nursing a sore back this past week, I also took advantage of the opportunity to watch Francois Truffaut's wonderful 1973 film, La Nuit Americaine (Day for Night), touted by many to be best movie about making movies around. It was delightful. Married as I am to a property master in the film business, the film made visible for me many of the rhythms and processes that I'd lived with vicariously for many years. It also sparked a renewed interest in French cinema. 


I've already read some historical background and have decided to begin with Truffaut and make a point of watching as many of his films as can be accessed from my real life. Since Truffaut was part of the New Wave of French filmmakers, and a critic before that,  I'd also like to get my hands on the essays he published in Les Cahiers du Cinema. From a farm this isn't going to be easy.

The numbers who have joined the Facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, is growing at an amazing rate and I am, however cynically, riveted to the debate that surrounds the issue on all fronts. If I can’t concentrate any better on my work, I’m going to turn the radio off for awhile and glue my nose to the grindstone. I have deadlines that won’t wait.

Here things are otherwise very quiet. On Tuesday evening, with our friend Peter in tow, we went to see the Coen brothers newest film, A Serious Man, courtesy of the Lunenburg County Film Series. It seems that their work is always good for a spirited debate  which is exactly what broke out as soon as we got out of the theatre. Peter and I were generally very positive and even enjoyed the film for the most part, but my better half absolutely hated it on the grounds that, as film makers, the Coens are inordinately obsessed with violence. I don’t think he’s ever recovered from No Country for Old Men which I also disliked intensely. But then again, I don’t think I’ve ever met a single soul who didn’t love The Big Lebowski and that was done by the Coen brothers too.

Despite the likelihood that they will probably not be kept, New Years Resolutions, at least a few of them, get made around here too. I will watch what I eat, stick with a regular gym schedule,  take a yoga class, join a book club, plant a garden. He will write every day, spend more time in contemplation, keep up with the fencing, do some careful exercise for his bad knee. As a unit, we will entertain more often, see more movies, drive into Halifax more regularly, and get back into the habit of making our own wine. And so on.

In a joint effort to spend less time consuming mindless re-runs and other forms of junk television, we have recently committed to at least an hour each evening of quiet reading in front of the fire. For me this comes complete with a lap throw and at least one cat sitting like a tea cozy on the arm of the couch, near enough that I can just make out the sound of her purr. It’s a Norman Rockwell picture that may or may not last until spring.

My large holiday novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by the late Steig Larsson, is drawing to a close and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. A posthumous international sensation, according to the reviews, it was the first in a trilogy of thrillers written by the Swedish novelist before his sudden death at the age of 50 in 2004. I chose it after reading about Larsson’s career as a journalist, his lifelong fight against racism and right wing extremism, and his creation of a female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander (the girl with the tattoo) who cut very much across the usual grain. She’s a very angry, very punk computer hacker, for one thing.

The book is intellectually complex, tightly plotted and violent in the extreme. The investigative partnership that eventually forms between the male protagonist, Mikael Blomquist, a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander is like none other in the genre. The glimpses into Swedish life and Swedish law are fascinating, but there are so many gruesome crimes perpetrated against women and sometimes animals that the reader literally gets a chill, despite the correct political agenda.

Will I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire? Probably. But not until I’ve put something else in between. This might be a good time to return to the Picasso biographies or the Susan Sontag journals, where any ‘violences’ are not nearly so overt and the subject matter is somewhat closer to home. Sometimes a thriller can get too "thrilling" even for me.

The world outside my windows is a winter wonderland, the kind of landscape that cries out for boots, warm hats, scarves and mittens and the exhilaration of a long walk in the snow. Now past is my favourite part of every year,  when all the  Christmas hubbub and heavy eating are over and there are still a few precious days  that can be devoted to doing exactly what one pleases before the routine of normal life begins anew. 

Today reality sets in. For me this entails some domestic paperwork and the resumption of the legal research that earns me my living. Now that the Land Registry System in the province exists to a large extent online, I am fortunate to be able to work at home,  from a jumbled desk in proximity to my own coffeepot. Unless I have to concentrate deeply, the CBC provides the soundtrack to my work. 

This morning too we drove into Bridgewater to the annual book sale at Sagor’s Bookstore which is, believe it or not, one of the reasons we moved to this area in the first place. Run for over twenty years by Ron Topp and Susan Goodwin, it is one of the South Shore’s greatest treasures, a surviving independent  book shop of incredible variety and relevance in the era of the big chain store. 

The store was full of customers, browsing and chatting and careening cheerfully toward the cash. Since we missed the beginning of the sale, having chosen to remain cocooned here on the farm, the choicest selections had largely been scooped up already by others, but I did come home with  “Cezanne’s Quarry,”  described on its cover as “an elegant murder mystery” based on the premise that the painter, Paul Cezanne, might have committed a murder. Because my purchase was based on a fondness for art historical content and not on any reviews, this may or may not have been a wise choice.

To complete the return to reality was also a reappearance at the gym. Although we live in a small rural hamlet we are fortunate to hold memberships in a state-of- the-art fitness facility in a village some eleven kilometres down the road. Donated by the late lumber magnate whose family mill is the locus of employment in the area, it is well used yet somehow almost always empty when we appear to sweat and moan. This gives the experience a certain luxury unheard of at other facilities in the town.

Now exhausted, with a hot cup of Earl Gray, I plan on cracking the covers of my new book.

It was a perfect New Years day. The snow that began to fall in the early morning continued throughout the day and well into the night. We ate croissants and French scrambled eggs for breakfast, with mimosas and our own home made preserves. In the afternoon, following a ritual we have observed for almost twenty years, we watched Casablanca by the fireplace and sipped prosecco from the lovely stemmed glasses that are so impractical in our everyday life. We also followed Roger Ebert’s commentary on the film and it reminded me again that this should probably be the year that I find the discipline to study the history of cinema and not just think about doing it. I’d like to join a book club too and spend more time in the company of like minded others.

In the small rural community in which we reside, there are no like minded others. Two former urbanites who came to Nova Scotia from elsewhere, we are doomed to be eternally other, ‘come-from-aways,’ outsiders who are never quite going to fit in. As a couple. we are too eccentric, too well schooled, too left wing, too exotic in our tastes, too shy, and too closely bonded to find a comfortable  place in village life. Although I respect so many of the members and appreciate the good work they do, I am not the Women’s Institute type.

We enter this year quietly and with more political frustration than personal joy. The Canadian government, for the second time in recent history, has prorogued our parliament in a shameful attempt to forestall further inquiry into the situation of the Afghan detainees. It is difficult to contain the anger engendered by such blatant contempt for the electorate and more difficult still to think of productive ways in which to channel it.


As I write this, the snow is falling again in what is now predicted to be the "real" storm. I am going to spend the day reading fiction.