Titanic, Period Pieces and Gambit to get your hubby to watch TV with you.

Colette in her cutting edge fashion hat from Marie Claire Magazine 1937.

My husband and I watched the new 2012 Titanic miniseries last night,well, the first two episodes, anyway.

 It was on the History Channel (in Canada) and that channel had just played a programme with ‘new evidence’ about the Titanic’s sinking (due to mirage/glare, a researcher says) which clashed with some of the old theories put forth in the mini-series.

But this Titanic miniseries was just Upstairs Downstairs on a big boat, a soap opera, so it didn’t matter. Julian Fellowes of Downtown Abbey fame penned this miniseries, which has a kind of Groundhog Day style of plot development, so the first episode seems weird.

Anyway, he clearly had lots of money so the hats were right on, with the first class women wearing Huge Merry Widow style hats and the French mistress of one rich guy wearing a smaller style more like Colette’s up there.

(In 1912, Coco Chanel was making her smaller hats for her boyfriend’s rich friends.)

Gee, you have to wonder if people are going to get tired of 1912, just I get my story Threshold Girl up on the Internet (it’s a free ebook) and I start writing the follow up Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

But my story is about the middle class in Canada, and even though it has suffragettes, I’m going to paint a more complex picture of the movement, from a Canadian Point of View.

This 2012 Titanic miniseries starts with a rich girl being released from jail for breaking windows or something with the suffragettes. (Played by Perdita Weeks, the girl who played Lydia in Lost in Austen but super thin now.) Yesterday I posted a first person testimony from the WSPU magazine,  suggesting something just like that happened. In April 1912.

Anyway, the science documentary Titanic: Case Closed featuring Tim Maltin’s theory (he apparently has an ebook or e-book out called “A Very Deceiving Night”).. supplied the new evidence that centers around the icebergs in Labrador in 1912. As it happens I’ve already posted an article from the Canadian Magazine, published in April 1912!  about those very icebergs. They were so numerous and splendiferous,they were almost becoming a tourist attraction. Hmm. Although the article was called Iceberg: Floating Menace.

Ironic, the date of that article. The History Channel Documentary revealed that the ocean liners of the time ran a gauntlet of icebergs, but it was especially bad in 1912.

It was interesting, but I thought there were some contradictions in Maltin’s theory or his presentation of same.. He goes to Hamburg to look at old boat logs from Germany. He says they’ve never been looked at before. That’s why it took until the  80′s to find Titanic’s ruins. But, a German boat that sailed shortly after Titanic apparently ran into debris and floating bodies. So the Germans knew where the boat was (around anyway) but never told because war broke out? Please explain. This documentary then recites the testimony of someone on that very German boat that clearly was published somewhere else a long time ago. Case not closed?

Anyway, this same Titanic investigator says the Titanic was very well built and very manoeverable for its size.

That contradicts James Cameron who supplied an interesting and daunting metaphor on a Titanic program aired just previous: that the Titanic is like modern man, powering along in one direction, but about to crash, (Global warming) because it is too big can’t turn fast enough, and no one is paying attention,or the wrong people are at the helm of the world, ie industrialists.

I guess the irony is icebergs play a  big part in this 2012 tragedy in the making.

Anyway, back to the Titanic Miniseries, I see that Julian Fellowes name isn’t on the IMDB entry for the series. Hmm.

Anyway, this Titanic miniseries shows why Cameron’s Titanic movie worked. It had a simple plot! I’ll still watch the other two episodes.

I found one of the miniseries’ subplots especially perplexing, a French mistress is snubbed by an upper class woman. I mean from what I’ve read of the era, the Upper Classes were all fooling around. It was what they did. Prudery was a middle class thing. Alas! (You just have to read the Nicholson Letters, upon which I based Threshold Girl.)

I noticed a while back that for the upcoming movie Gambit, Colin Firth isn’t listed as a star on IMDB.

Alan Rickman is. And yet in all the publicity around the shooting of Gambit, Colin Firth was showcased.

Speaking of Gambit, I watched Get Carter on Turner Classics last week. I recorded it thinking it was an In Like Flint movie, but it’s about a hood and pretty gritty, even for today. Not my kind of movie. But I stayed with it, as it is stylish and Michael Caine is terrific. He was very good looking, wasn’t he? Never really thought about it. I was 13 in 1968 and David McCallum was more my type

And then I watched a bit of Withnail and I,  liked it and saved it for Saturday (Titanic Night) with my husband – but my husband doesn’t get British comedy. That’s why we watched Titanic the miniseries, although my husband doesn’t get period pieces either.

I said “Wait a while and there’ll be some pretty naked people” just like your Throne of Kings. (I knew it wasn’t gonna happen, though.) He said “Game of Thrones, not Throne of Kings.”

Marion Nicholson of Threshold Girl in her big hat for 1912. I think she’s on the Charles in Boston. I will have to write about that trip in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, as she went to visit Dr. Henry Watters with her sister Edith, August 1912. Relations were trying to fix her up with another man, Chester Coy, who later went to war and lost his mind. Henry Watters never married, although very well off and about as nice a man as you could find. Hmm. He is buried in Melbourne. He died in 1937, a decade before Marion.

A hat like that could sink a boat, and I wouldn’t be writing these books.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

A monkey and Ma Mere, Old Orchard Beach Maine, probably 1925, as my mother there is about 3, I’d say. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was in is professional prime, Director of Services, for Montreal.

The roarin’ twenties.

I’ve finished off the 2nd series of Upstairs Downstairs and I seem to recall the final scene on the balcony when the King Edward VII dies. And I’ve ordered the next set which will only arrive end of May.
May 1910 was when Edward VII left this realm.

I know, not because I looked it up on the Net. Years ago, when I first found the Nicholson letters, I travelled to McGill to check out the Gazette and Montreal Star newspaper archives.

I was looking for news about a fire in a hotel in Cornwall, because Edith’s ‘fiance’ died in one.

I think I found a notice, but most of the newspaper was taken up by news of the King’s death – and about the Horse Show.

I was woefully ignorant about the Kings and Queens of England, although I took British History in school, as we all did. And passed.

I didn’t like or dislike history class.

But I didn’t take a history course in College, except for History of Art.

Now, I realize everything is history, except, perhaps, Science Fiction and Math.
(My father, an Oxford taught mathematician, said ‘everything is mathematics.’ )

Anyway, the royal nuptials are coming up. Soon. But so is an election, which is actually getting exciting toward the end. And Vancouver made the next round in the playoffs and Montreal will, if the team wins tonight. (They’ve closed the street around the Molson Center to traffic, in the case of ahh..either case, I guess.)

Who has time for Royal Nuptials. And no Royal will look handsome now that Colin Firth has played George VI. Not to me anyway.

Good luck to Will and Kate (sounds like a sitcom). Good luck to any newlywed couple about to live their life under the microscope.

I’m very happy, because I’m working on the DEFINITIVE draft of Flo in the City. I’m not posting it as I hope to get it published in hard copy form. I then have plans to make a sequel using Marion’s life and then Edith’s..all covering the same 1911-1913 period.

What’s in a Swear Word?

Colin Firth in the King’s Speech, looking an awful lot like my father. Oh well. I know how ‘ambivalent’ Queen E must feel looking at this movie.

Anyway, I spent the morning preparing a proposal for the publication of the Nicholson family letters and I was so afraid I’d get antsy and send it off before it was ready, (I can do that sometimes),I decided to go into town with my husband. He let me off at Atwater, so I went and had ‘tea’ in Westmount, at a place called London Bus, which had a red plastic London telephone booth in it. I thought the owner should go to Moe’s Delicatessen in Pointe Claire where they have a real one.

(Speaking of delicatessens, I also bought tickets for Schwartz’s, the Musical at the Centaur, for my husband’s birthday, April 24. It’ll probably be cheesy, but what’s wrong with that.) Anyway, I went to the Pepsi Forum, such a dark place you can hardly see the statue of Maurice Richard in the penalty box, and the AMC and there was no movie playing there that I wanted to see so I saw the King’s Speech again, even though it’s coming out on DVD and satellite next month.

My son’s girlfriend had just seen it and loved it, even thought Jeff Apatow movies are more her style.

She was moved by Colin Firth’s performance and she loved the interplay between the King and Lionel Logue.

My husband heard that they are putting the King’s Speech out in two versions, one with the swearing expunged. So I watched the movie with this in mind; and frankly, the swearing is key to the movie. I don’t understand.

And being a Montrealer, I understand even less.

On the weekend my husband and I had seen PAUL, a silly good natured movie about an alien, featuring the guy who played Scotty in Star Trek. Well, it was the middle of Saturday afternoon and the audience consisted of a few older couples, and a number of younger people and many parents and kids. In front of us was a row of 8 to 12 year olds, there alone. And then the movie started and my husband and I turned to each other and smiled. The movie is all swearing! And

I don’t just mean the F word, which is the ‘worst’ swear word in the King’s Speech. And a lot of TALK of sexual things, a la adolescent humour.

A couple of years ago my husband I went to see Tropic Thunder, with the theatre packed, a much funnier and edgier movie than Paul, and during a particularly amusing scene featuring Jack Black, withdrawing from cocaine, my husband turned to me and through his tears said, “There’s a 7 year old sitting beside me.”

Ratings make no sense. I recorded the French Lieutenant’s Woman the other day and watched it and the rating on movie was R 18+. Last night, I watched some silly 70′s movie, the Last of Sheila, because I had to stay away to pick up my husband at midnight from work, and that show had an 8+ rating, despite having some graphic murders and Raquel Welch and Dyan Cannon.

NO SENSE. What are they going to have The King saying in these two longish scenes where he swears. DARN DARN. Gosh Darn. Golly Gosh Darn darn. You cannot take the scenes out, they are pivotal. They speak to his letting go…remember, swearing in those days was a very low class thing. My parents never swore,(except my dad in the car.)(And it’s a fact that we store ‘swear words’ in a different part of the brain than regular speech and these scenes speak to that phenomenon.

Anyway, speaking of handsome, broad-shouldered men, driving into town, on Greene Avenue in Westmount, as I was pointing out the place where Edith’s Westmount Methodiste stood in 1910, I saw a Mountie walking on the street. A tall good looking Paul Gross style Mountie. And I didn’t have my camera! I turned to my husband and said, I hope there are some American tourists around. They’ll get their money’s worth.

In all my years, I’ve never seen a Mountie (in those dress reds) walking on the street in Montreal.

Stamping out History

Canadian (and one British) stamp from the Tighsolas Collection.

I have a lot of pictures of King George V in my house: that’s because I have over 1000 letters belonging to the Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec and Montreal – and many of them are from the 10′s and 20′s and thirties.

They start at 1887, actually and end in 1938.

Most are from Canada; many are from the US. and a few, but not many, are from England.

These letters still have their envelopes so you’d think I’d have a chance at having a rare postage stamp or two.

But no.

Somewhere along the line someone cut out or steamed off most of the interesting stamps. I even know who: a little boy who lived with his family for a period in the fifties and sixties in the Nicholson’s house on Dufferin in Richmond. I know because but a few years ago the wife of said little boy contacted me about returning something else belonging to the Nicholsons, Norman’s Masonic Sword.

To find me, she had used the Internet and a clue from her husband’s stamp collection book; a letter addressed to Mrs. Margaret Nicholson.

So, George the V, portrayed as a typical angry and cold Victorian father in the recent movie, the King’s Speech enjoys a definite presence in our house.

His father, Edward VII, though is more important to us as he represents an entire era.

My http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website showcases the letters of Tighsolas between 1908-1913 era, which I call the Tighsolas era.

It’s really the end of the Edwardian Era. (We call it the Laurier Era in Canada.)

Edward VII reigned for but 10 years, but he lent his name to an entire ERA. That says something! That speaks to the incredible changes that took place in that particular decade. That’s why the 1908-1913 Nicholson letters are important, and not just frivolous family fun.

I have one postage stamp of Edward VIII. It’s from England. His reign was so short Canada didn’t get around to making him a stamp.

And I have a few pictures of the next guy, Queen Elizabeth’s father, George VI, whose image just got a revamp due to a compelling performance from actor Colin Firth, who, as far as I know, has no royal blood, just bloody good genes.

The only stamp I have of Victoria, who reigned a long long time and therefore it’s no surprise an entire era was named after her, is not really a stamp. It’s on a postcard from the 1880′s. Good enough.

I do however possess a likeness of her on a coin, one belonging to my husband. It’s a 1 and a half cent copper coin from Upper Canada. Remember that place? It was just above Lower Canada.

I asked him where he got these coins and he replied, “I dunno. They were lying around the house. ” More proof that little boys have a vague grasp of the concept of private property. These coins might have once belonged to Flo and Edie, who knows?

He also has a coin from 1779, a bit faded, with the image of another King on it. Don’t know which one, although I guess I could Google.

I have decided to carry this 1979 coin around in my purse as good luck, as it is the oldest thing in my house, if I don’t count the dust the dogs drag in.

Last Friday, before the ballet, my friend and I went to Chinatown and ate at a restaurant there. The waiter was an older Chinese man (by which I mean a man about 50) with a sunny disposition and very pleasant face. He caught me showing the coin to my friend across the table and he told us a story about a long time ago, in 1971,when he had reluctantly let go of a George VI twenty dollar bill he had in his possession in order to buy a record, perhaps Led Zeppelin, at A and M Records around the corner on St. Catherine Street. (So, some of these bills were still floating around in the 60′s. I don’t recall ever seeing one.)

That’s how I know this man was fifty. A bit younger than me, maybe but definitely in the same ball park. When I got up to pay, I realized he was very very short, about 5 foot, no more. And as I am 5 foot 11, so he seemed to get embarrassed around me. (He wouldn’t be the first.)

Such a nice man, I thought, but we’re world’s apart, even if we had met on the streets of Montreal’s Chinatown (or in A and M, where I might have been accompanying my older brother) back in 1971.

…Anyway, I read somewhere, maybe in the NYT, that someone is taking old Civil War letters and tweeting them on Twitter. I had thought about doing this with the Tighsolas letters. I even mentioned it in an earlier post on this blog.

But now it won’t be a novel thing. Alas.

I must think of a novel thing to do with these letters. And that precludes putting it in novel form.

Shell Shock 1921

Pretty unknown girl found in among Nicholson pictures. Might be Sophia Nicholson, but more likely May Watters or perhaps a Peppler.

I’m watching Jules et Jim on Turner Classic Movies and I’m up the the war part. I have always considered this movie one of my favorites, but I saw it only in art cinemas in my twenties.

It seldom comes on TV. And here it is.

It’s a bit ironic that I’m watching this movie that begins in the Tigholas era, 1912, and has the Jeanne Moreau in the fashions of the day.

I’ve just read a letter from 1923, from Sophie Nicholson Bell, Margaret’s niece (well, Norman’s niece as she is the daughter of his brother, Gilbert.)

In 1911, she is off to Edmonton to join her father and drops in to see Margaret and Margaret is miffed as she doesn’t even ‘take off her hat.’ Margaret suggests she is a snob of sorts.

Anyway, in this letter, Sophie is answering for her father, who no longer writes letters. (Not a surprise, his earlier letters are almost illegible.)

Flora has written him. Norman died the year before.

“Dear Flora,

Your letter came to father at Christmas, and he was very pleased to get it as Uncle Norman always wrote at this time of year.

I am penning you a few lines tonight. I have just put the girls to bed and the baby doesn’t get fed until 11.00 so I have a whole hour at last.

I have a maid, but she used to make ammunition in England and should be somewhere doing that now instead of posing as a domestic.

It has been almost a year since the unexpected wire: we would be glad to hear just what happened and what the operation was for.

All we heard is the paper report which was mostly about the funeral. It was very real. I could see it all: going up over the hill to the old cemetery and I felt very badly as it recalled the others that rest there. (St. Andrew’s in Melbourne.)

(Norman’s death certificate says Pulmonary embolism and cardiac failure.)

Father is getting quite old in many ways. He does not try to do anything but a little work in the garden and take care of his hens. He is troubled with indigestion and stays indoors too much.

It’s much nicer for Aunt Margaret to be with you all in Montreal. How is Marion and the children? Some one said she has four and a boy among them. Well, I guess I’ll just put an ad in the paper for someone to leave one at my doorstep as it’s no use depending on the stork.

Kileen? says she won’t have a boy in the house, they screech and fight and you just can’t train them.

John is not well. Sick most of the time since coming out of the army. He has a nervous trouble, also a poisoned system so he is in soldier’s hospital.
The Drs. don’t seem to be able to do much for him. But now a new treatment has come out of California and seems to be helping some of the cases….

Hmm. An interesting lady, this Sophia. The only Internet mention of her is on a Wikipedia page about the Edmonton 1927 civic elections where she is elected as a school trustee, so also a politician like Marion. She seems to have Marion’s sense of humour, too.

Funny, the Nicholsons were so close to the Watters, the cousins related to one of Norman’s sisters, but his brother Gilbert’s kids were almost strangers to them. Gilbert inherited the family farm, which meant he was the one who didn’t get any schooling. His letters suggested as much.

I have her wedding invitation somewhere. I know she married a Bell. Well, that’s obvious, but is JOHN her husband? Is he the one with shell shock? Not likely as she is still getting pregnant. She mentions no husband, does she? Gordon is a brother. John may be another.

Shell shock! I recently wrote about Chester Coy’s madness and I have read other letters from the 1920′s discussing it. (One of these letters is from 1921 from a Reid in Carlisle England; the Reids are also relations of the Nicholsons and the Clevelands and Coys, but I don’t quite understand the connection. (My mother in law used to mentioned a Helen Reid who was related in some way to the skier Ken Reid.) I feel odd reading this particular letter, as Carlisle was where my father was lodged as a child when he was sent away from Malaya to school in England. An aunt lived there. This was from 1927 to the thirties, so maybe they passed in the streets)

Perhaps Chester Coy left his sanity at the Front. I hadn’t thought of that. And I just posted a bit about Herbert Tucker, Flora’s boyfriend. She never married him, but seemed to go out with him for many years… so maybe he too was ruined by the war. His letters show that he feels terrible that he survived and his brother, Percy, didn’t.

WWI destroyed many men, by death, by disfigurement and by insanity.

I just saw Colin Firth’s A Month in the Country, posed on YouTube. It’s about that very thing.

Why the King’s Speech Won

My son and me in some famous place I look pregnant. Maybe Zeus did it.. Oh well, All that GREAT Greek Food.

Hmm. I’ve been writing a lot about the Oscars because it is topical and I am experimenting with the blog format…trying to see what gets hits and when the busy period is…

I am also sick with a bug I caught in Vegas.

Anyway, I was listening to BBC Radio Four, their Today Program, and,of course, they covered the King’s Speech’s success at the Oscars, mentioning that Paul Bettany was first up for Colin Firth’s Oscar winning role… but he turned it down to spend more time with his wife, actress Jennifer Connolly, and family.

Well, on this trip to Greece last August, I messed up my reservation by taking a ferry from Lesvos to Athens on a whim and had to go to Athens airport to fix up the problem or risk having to buy an entire new ticket to get home.

I got to the airport really early, exhausted from not having slept in 3 days. I was first in line at the Air France booth, with one family group in front of me. My 25 year old son,who had met me in Greece and was only leaving the next day, came with me to provide moral support.

He elbowed me and said, “Look there’s Jennifer Connolly and her family right in front of us.”

“Oh yea, I said.”

“And her husband’s as famous as she is,” my son said. (But he was too tired to remember the name.)

I suddenly felt bad because I had been staring at them all. Not because they are famous. I hadn’t recognized them.. Only because they were right in front of me for a long time, working out a big travel problem too.

But also because the Bettany/Connolly’s have two younger boys and I have two boys, both big and grown, and it makes me nostalgic to watch families like that, families travelling with boys. Memories, you know.

In Plomari, there were many Australian families visiting as tourists and I found the family dynamic interesting to watch, in that it was the men who were in charge of the kids, it seemed to me. The woman, often very pretty, often just sat back. I wondered if this is how they did it at home, or if the women were ‘on a break’.

And, just like with these Autralian families, Bettany was the one dealing with the boys, and Jennifer Connolly was standing shy and delicate in the background (she is tiny of course) so I assumed he was Australian.(British accent.)

Anway, when my son told me who they were, I reflexively said something really stupid to my son…. I said, “I wish he were Colin Firth.” It’s a running joke in my family that I like Colin Firth. I play upon, in my role as silly old mom who likes Period Pieces.

And then my husband puts me in my place by imitating Fat Bastard from Austen Powers every once in a while, you know, the nipple thing. The Anti-Darcy.

(I’m actually glad Bettany wasn’t Colin Firth, because I was tired, filthy, FAT, wearing a HUGE dress I had bought for 2 dollars at a thrift shop and my ankles were really swollen from 2 weeks of 100 degree heat and I had an ear infection – in both ears.

I ended up taking the plane with them, of course. And the shuttle bus to the airport from the plane. Ordinary people. I don’t think anyone recognized them.

Kind of ironic.

Whatever, thank God the Academy Awards are over. I’m up to here with The King’s Speech “mythology” and incessant Oscar Promotion. Last Night, Tom Hooper (who seems boyish) thanked his own classy-looking mom, who was in the audience. Nice moment. He said she was the one who attended a reading of a play and came to him saying “I think I have found your next movie.”

But just a few weeks ago on CBS’s Sunday Morning, it was said that Geoffrey Rush was presented with the copy of the play and it was he who said “This would make a better movie.”

That’s what happens when you have so much time on your hands, and you are a PR person by trade…

Anyway, I think that the King’s Speech wins as Best Picture and Best Director, even screenplay, would not have happened were it not for Colin Firth’s performance. Colin Firth thanked Tom Ford, and I think he’s right. I’m not sure he would have won Best Actor, or even been nominated, had he not been nominated last year.

And remember, the King’s Speech bandwagon got rolling at the Toronto Film Festival, where Firth is a favourite (in large part because he has Canadian connections.)

(Oh, Sixty Minutes last week claimed that the King’s Speech critical and box office success was out of the blue: Nonsense again. )

But Firth deserves his award for 30 years of good and great performances.

We don’t want him to be another Peter O’Toole.

This is the LAST THING I write on the topic.

Need a new topic..

MY MOST POPULAR ESSAY EVER

Colin Firth as George Falconer has a bit of a tease with a GQ model style guy. Funny, I found an old article about Colin Firth online, from before he was famous, where the author suggested he was a GQ kind of looker. But you know, he can play a very unattractive man, as in the English Patient. All he has to do is gain 10 pounds or something. Male actors have to diet too. They criticized Hugh Grant latey for looking ‘fat’ in a movie, when, I’m guessing, he gained 5 pounds or so. But we are used to his lean look.

It’s hard being a leading man.

Anyway, I’m posting another old article “the Appalling Truth” on this blog. It was written over 10 years ago, but has the same theme as The Winter of Our Disconnect, a book just recently published, about a mom who banned all media in her home, for a time, anyway.

This essay was often published in certain ESL texts, but then it got too ‘old.’ I mean, we had one tv in those days. But many students still look this article up on the web. Don’t know why.

Now they talk about people stealing copyright, (I wonder if taking a picture of your TV is breaking copyright? Ridiculous if is.) I gave my essays to a small one-woman parenting website for FREE and she then sold it to a conglomerate (one of Canada’s major media players) and they published my essays and apparently, I have no right to them. Talk about stealing from the poor to give the rich…

The Appalling Truth

Technology changes us. With the invention of the clock we lost the ability to live in the present. The telephone made us Pavlovian slaves to the sound of a ringing bell. And with the advent of television, we removed ourselves indoors, for the most part leaving the streets to marauding canines and fancily-attired exercise addicts.

As a mother and very serious media watcher, I am as troubled as anyone about the violent and sexist content on television. But were television wall-to-wall programming of the PBS caliber, and commercial-free, I would be just as concerned.

I just don’t like what TV is doing to my family. It has become some kind of oracle — never mind McCluhan’s “electronic fireplace” — that commands all of our attention. We don’t listen to each other, husband to wife, mother to kids, kids to parents. It was with this in mind that I suggested to my husband that we ban the tube from the house, on an experimental basis, for, say, about a year.

“No way!” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because, it would be hypocritical,” he deftly answered. “We both work in TV.”

“You work in TV. I don’t.”

“Well, you like to criticize TV. How can you criticize something you don’t watch!” Good point.

“I just don’t like what the thing is doing to our family,” I continued. “It’s noisy. It jangles the nerves. It’s like a drug. It’s addictive. We watch anything, anything, even programming aimed at adolescents. I mean, I used to read Dostoyevsky. Now I watch Steve Erkle.”

“So you traded one idiot for another,” my husband quips, but I am not amused.

“Well, you know what I mean. Besides, the stupid contraption keeps us from doing what human beings are really supposed to be doing.”

“And what’s that? Foraging for nuts and berries?”

My husband, the TV junkie, sees nothing wrong with the boob tube. “I grew up on it, ” he answers, “and I’m no psycho.”

If my husband had his way, there would be a TV in every room. And they’d all be tuned into Star Trek. And I must admit, there are times I felt the only interest we ever had in common was Star Trek, oh and the X-files, and way back when, Cheers. In the early months of my first pregnancy we’d cuddle together on the couch like two spoons and I’d fall asleep, my head cradled in his lap, before Sam Malone’s first conquest. Togetherness.

But now we’re like two channel-zapping zombies. “You know, they say that spending time together in front of the television does nothing to enhance a relationship,” I tell my now bleary-eyed husband, trying to make him feel guilty. It’s a war of attrition and it is working, sort of.

“Okay. Two weeks,” my husband relents. “We’ll try no TV for two weeks. That’s all. But you tell the kids.”

We have two boys, Andrew and Mark, 7 and 4. They kick up a huge fuss when I tell them that our tiny bungalow has been unilaterally declared a TV-free zone. Now it’s their turn to try to make me feel guilty. They hang their pathetic little heads in genuine mourning as they watch their dad, the TV freak, reluctantly disconnect the enormous tangle of wires enabling the miracle of modern home theatre in our suburban castle. And am I feeling guilty? No way!

I stand tall and victorious in our living room, easy to do when you are five foot ten, a champion of my somewhat left-of-center family values, the protector of my children.

That evening, we read our children books, sing them songs and tuck them in for the night. I go to bed with that Margaret Drabble I’ve been using as a giant paper-weight for the past year and my husband snuggles up with Stephen King.

Two days pass. The kids have finally stopped complaining about The Terrible Loss. In fact, they don’t appear to care at all any more. They have found other, more interesting, things to do. Myself, on the other hand, I’m suffering from a mean case of withdrawal. “It’s Thursday Night. Must-See-TV. Do you think maybe you can bring the TV up for just one show?” I ask my husband, who happens to be down in his workroom drilling a hole into a six-foot piece of plywood for no apparent reason. “We’ll keep the sound really low,” I add, because kids can hear hypocrisy even in their sleep.

“Why don’t your read, Ms. Literature Freak? You haven’t exactly been burning up the library shelves,” my husband sneers rather condescendingly as he stops to wipe some sawdust from his nose hairs.

“Well, that’s because I only read the best, and my brain’s too fried at the end of the day to read the best,” I answer, convincing even myself. (That has been my pat excuse for my intellectual lethargy since becoming a mother.)

My husband rolls his eyes back into his head and puts down the drill. No further argument from him. He happily carries the TV upstairs and reconnects its myriad wires in no time. (A real pro, my husband.) We sit back and laugh at George and Kramer, Elaine and Jerry. “This show is just like real life!” I announce.

The problem is, we do the same for Murphy Brown a few days later. And for X-files, each night my husband clambering up the basement stairs with a twenty-inch Sony stuck to his face, and then stumbling down again thirty-something minutes later, trailing his wires behind him. Then the true test. Indeed, a real dilemma for us. A rerun of Star Trek: TNG is airing; but at 7:00, before the kids’ bedtime. What to do? Clearly, no sleazy hypocritical way around this. “I can always get a tape and watch it at work,” my husband, the news editor, smiles, taunting me once again. “You, on the other hand, will have to do without.”

A real dilemma, and I am not alone, I know. I recall a friend, fortyish, married with two kids, unapologetically telling me that watching Star Trek reruns was the highlight of his day. “It’s the only philosophical show on TV,” he claimed.

And, certainly, here is Captain Picard, perhaps the wisest man in the universe, forcing me to face a very ugly personal truth: It isn’t my kids; it isn’t even my husband. I am the real TV addict in my household

Colin Firth or Clive Owen?

Bette Davis in the Letter.

Hmm. I’m watching The Letter, the 1940 Bette Davis vehicle based on the Somerset Maugham short story.

I’ve been reading a lot about this year’s 2011 Academy Awards and the key media controversy: whether the King’s Speech (a throwback to Old Hollywood kind of movie and a revisionist view of history with respect to the Royal Family) will win over The Social Network – a movie for our times – but also a rewriting ‘history’- if you can call it that.

Both the King’s Speech and the Social Network are examples of great storytelling and all great storytelling entails stretching, varnishing, embellishing the truth.

This Letter movie is part of Turner Classic Movie’s 30 days of Oscar, it was nominated for a number of Oscars, including Best Picture.

This movie is an entirely forgettable venture (it ain’t no Wuthering Heights, although it is William Wyler’s signature flourishes and much like the King’s Speech, it has only indoor sets: CHEAP to make, I guess). I’m also guessing that I am one of the few people who purchased it over Amazon this year. Me and a bunch of Bette Davis fans.

It’s about the wife of a Malayan rubber planter who shoots her lover and tries to cover it up. It is based on a true story. And the real story (as least as printed in the local press, can be found in the Malaya Straits Times archives.)

I bought The Letter on DVD because I recently wrote a play about my own British grandmother’s experiences as the wife of a planter in Malaya in the 20′s and 30′s and her internment at Changi Prison in Singapore in late 1941, when the Japanese overran Malaya on bicycles after Pearl Harbour.

First thing I noticed today, upon a second viewing: there’s a problem with the dialogue. In one of the first scenes Davis’s character tells the police that as a planter’s wife, she is used to being alone. But then a little later the husband claims he has never spent more than one day away from her.

Apart from that… well, today, I found one point most interesting with respect to my grandmother’s Changi experience. The lawyer defending Davis’s character says at one point ‘any respectable woman would have shot a man who was making advances..’ they don’t mention the word “rape”.

I believe this really does reflect the thinking of the times. (And I guess that is all you can ask from historical fiction, some umbrella truths.) In the Double Tenth Trial, when the Japanese Kempetai is put on trial for torturing and sometimes killing certain European civilians, the real-life prosecutor for this trial suggests that the worse my grandmother suffered was having to sleep and go potty in front of men.

She was kicked and punched, threatened daily with beheading, and starved to within inches of death, and forced to sit cross-legged for 5 months in solitary confinement, but the worse thing she suffered was the indignity of having her feminity compromised by farting in front of members of the male sex.

The Prosecutor for this Double Tenth trial comes off as sexist. He suggests my grandmother has a good memory because married women are always vindictive.

(Of course, just recently in Canada, a Manitoba judge let a man get off with rape because the woman who was taken to the woods for the attack was wearing skanky clothing, a tube top and lots of makeup… (unlike the rest of us respectable gals who wear shirtwaist suits and corsets and niqabs.)

Ps. I saw a woman in a niqab in the Bellagio casino in Vegas. Why would a husband who believes that a woman should be shrouded in public go to Vegas? It’s like my husband forcing me to go to Hooters, which he joked about going to, until I set him straight.

My play, Looking for Mrs. Peel, tries to stay close to the ‘truth’ which, of course, is always point of view. I ‘m trying to do the same with Flo in the City. But it’s probably not the way to go, as the King’s Speech and the Social Network show.

This The Letter movie has the woman pronounced not guilty at trial, but I believe the woman in question was convicted, but the local Europeans raised such a ruckus she was allowed to leave. And that TRUTH tells alot about their clique back then.

Indeed, when I first found this stash of Nicholson letters I tracked down Canada’s best selling author of YA history novels. She told me flat out: Forget the History. Go for the Story.

Hmm the elements of this post would make for a good essay, but I’m too lazy to plot it out, today.

And even I have been saturated with Colin Firth media stories. They all contradict each other anyway. That’s the Hollywood publicity machine, I guess. The 60 Minutes King’s Speech story was obsequious and not investigative in any way and didn’t touch on the issue of the Royals and their iffy politics pre-1940, nor did it touch on Colin Firth’s left wing advocacy, widely-publicized in England, his recent endeavor for the History Channel: Democracy is not a Spectator Sport. I wonder why? But it did reveal that he liked to play-act in kindergarten. Now THAT won’t offend anyone in the US, will it?

I guess they are trying to get non urbanite, right wingers to go see the King’s Speech. They are even taking out the swear words as if no one ever swears in front of kids.

I think I have to find someone else to adore. James McAvoy is just SOOOO young, although he clearly likes older women…So Clive Owen it is!

Everything is Point of View

Flo and Marion in their big hats 1911 circa

You know, when I first found these Nicholson letters and decided to write a YA book, I contacted Canada’s top author of historical fiction for young people and she told me point blank: forget about the history, go for the story.

I didn’t want to do that, so it’s taken me 7 years to complete enough background research to make sense of the letters.

I was also invited early on to turn my website http://www.tigsolas.ca/, with its letters, into a social studies book (on the condition that I won a certain humanities grant from the government.)I didn’t want to do that: these books are priced too high and are read only by scholars.

Since then I stumbled upon Nella Last and the three wonderful books based on her diary and I realized I wanted to do something similar with the Nicholson Letters.

Nella Last’s “War” and “Peace” and “in the 1950′s” are all highly compelling as a narrative and character study and also true to history, although they were ‘edited which means the editors added their point of view, by virtue of what they left in AND what they left out. So, I’m going in that direction.

I read an article the other day, in the Guardian, (originally in Slate) criticizing the movie the King’s Speech because it rewrites history: Churchill was on Edward VII’s side; the Royals were appeasers.

Imagine that! A movie that rewrites history. I’m floored.

I think some message board commentators got it right: The story of the King’s Speech isn’t about George VI’s (Colin Firth) politics in the 1930′s but about his character, his struggles and the inspiration he provided to the British public at the onset of the War. (Here in the colonies, too, I suspect.) As it was pointed out, Churchill was voted the Greatest Briton and he was a bastard, but, as it happens, the right bastard at the right time.

Any critical thinker must know already that movies re-write history. Even if what they put into a movie is mostly ‘good’ history – there’s always what they leave out. Even documentaries are ‘point of view.” (I recall a National Film Board Director telling me that in the 80′s… That they were going to call all their critically-acclaimed docs “point-of-view documentaries”.)

Even news reports are point-of-view and these days these news reports mostly re-write history while the digital ink and pixels are still drying (they call it ‘spin’ ) and that’s much more worrying, I think. Because these revisionist versions get out so early, they get ‘etched’ into people’s brains as the definitive version. (As in WMD and Saddam.)

That’s why I like letters in general, and especially my Nicholson letters, because they are as close to the ‘truth’ as you get. And they still leave a great deal up to interpretation.

Anyway, the other day my husband saved a Turner Classic Movie for me, So Long at the Fair, from 1950 with Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons that takes place at the 1889 Paris Exposition. He knows I like watching the 1900 the French Exposition videos on YouTube. I’m glad he did, because it was entertaining in an Hitchcock (ian)? way. A brother and sister from England visit Paris for the Exhibition, check into a busy hotel, and over night the brother goes missing. Indeed, all trace of his existence are erased.

Scary.

The odd thing about this movie, it was bilingual. (Now, that’s fine for me but how about everyone else? Here in Quebec they can make bilingual movies ( Bon Cop Bad Cop) was a funny movie only Quebeckers get. They are coming out with another one, Funkytown, about the disco scene in the 70′s in Montreal. The movie centers around a place called the Limelight, Montreal’s Moulin Rouge in the era. (Or is that Club Super Sexe?) I never went to the Limelight (I think) but some of my weirder friends did – and often. I guess that’s why I didn’t go there. (I was at college in the 70′s.)

Anyway, this So Long at the Fair movie wasn’t true to life either. I mean the lead characters go to the Moulin Rouge for a night out. It is hardly likely that a respectable young girl touring Europe would be taken there by her brother in 1886. The place was a kind of brothel, after all.

There’s a Moulin Rouge act in Montreal during the Tighsolas era. I can pretty well guarantee Marion, Flora and Edith didn’t go. (Herb, maybe.)

The ending made no sense either. But, then, IT’S A MOVIE!

Bubble Speak and Stuttering.

1910 aeroplanes and blimps

Today I was working on a Nicholson Family Saga letter from June 1911 where Flora Nicholson fails French in her last year of Academy, but still gets into Macdonald Teaching School. That’s because, as I explain in the footnotes, they desperatedly needed teachers in Quebec in 1911.

That was a big relief for the Nicholsons, who were struggling financially.

Then I went out shopping with a friend of mine, Lise, who is French Canadian- but one of those French Canadians who is fluently bilingual and who has floated effortless all her life between Quebec’s ‘two solitudes’.

Lise was telling me about her mother, who is 92 and who has advanced dementia. Her mom, she says, can’t remember much of anything, but she can still understand both languages and beat her daughter at cards, Hearts or Cribbage.

The brain is a funny thing.

Anyway, my friend was also telling me that she went to see the movie the King’s Speech this week. I was surprised. I hadn’t bothered to ask her to go with me, assuming she would not like it. (And I would like to see it again.)

She went with a group of French friends, two of whom had already seen the movie once. “You have a rival,” she told me. “Rita can’t get over how handsome Colin Firth is. Maybe you should go to her house and play her my favorite DVD.”

Lise was being ironic. One Saturday evening a few years ago I brought my copy of Pride and Prejudice over and we watched it in lieu of the hockey game. Wet shirt or not, she wasn’t impressed. She has called Colin Firth “That guy who doesn’t smile,” ever since.

Yet everytime she sees Paul Gross on TV she remarks, “Quel bel homme.”

Lise enjoyed the King’s Speech, despite the fact Colin doesn’t smile here either. But she was really surprised how much her French Canadian friends liked the movie. One other friend was seeing it for the second time because “she cried all through it the first time.”

Now, I didn’t cry through the King’s Speech. I thought it was a funny film, for the most part. (Lise remarked, “OK, they had it bad, but that’s their job.”)

And I think I know why I chose not to cry. Because when I got home from my shopping excursion my husband was watching the CBS magazine Sunday Morning on tape and, as it is topical, that show had a feature on stuttering that showcased kids.

And THAT feature made me very sad, in a big punch to the stomach kind of way, because I ‘suddenly’ remembered that my twin brother used to stutter and that my father sometimes used to make fun of him.

I had repressed that in my memory, I guess, while watching the movie the King’s Speech and focused instead on the history and elegant period piece elements.

The brain is a funny thing.

My father, who was born in 1922, the year that Bertie and Elizabeth got married, had had a cruel Edwardian upbringing himself. His own father, a Malayan planter, used to lock him in a cupboard when he was bad.

That had once been a common Victorian practice, I have since learned.

Anyway, my father was sent away from Kuala Lumpur to Cumberland at 5 and hardly saw his mom and dad again. (He may never have seen his father again, although I’m not exactly sure.) That, of course, was a typical British practice among the upper classes and those in the middle classes who aspired to more.

He went to a public school, St. Bees in County Durham and lucky for him, he excelled at sports. He was Captain of all the teams. He told me that one day another student came up to him and said admiringly “It must be wonderful being you.”

“Yea, right,” he thought at the time.

Anyway, Sunday Morning also had a bit with fun visuals on the Wright Brothers that explained that Wilbur died in 1912 of typhoid fever.

Yesterday, I edited a letter from 1911 where Norman is worried for his wife Margaret, who is tending a relation with typhoid.

And then that same Sunday Morning show had a piece on Geoffrey Rush, who is going to be bringing Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to New York. That’s one of my favorite books, or stories, as it is very short. I love Gogol. He’s my favorite Russian writer.

A few years ago, I recommended Diary of a Madman to my bookclub and another person in the club, the widest read of all of us, objected passionately to its theme. She had a schitzophrenic sister and said that she found nothing funny about mental illness.

I don’t quite see this story that way, despite the fact that my twin brother, the one who stuttered as a child, also has severe mental health issues.

Anway, the final bit on Sunday Morning was the most interesting of all. It was a seemingly glib little animation describing how the brain works with respect to FEAR. In short, it showed that if a scary belief, however erroneous, gets into someone’s brain, it is next to impossible to remove it.

The brain is a funny thing.

The animation used the recently debunked autism/vaccination connection as an example, but I know it was really addressing the entire culture of fear in the US.

I’ve written extensively on that topic. And in this Flo in the City blog I’ve discussed all the fears rampant in Western Society at the turn of the last century: the white peril (tainted milk); the yellow peril of malaria; the social evil (prostitution); the evils of the Nickelodeon!! Aeroplane deaths. The Housefly. Typhoid. Immigrants. It was a true age of anxiety.

Fear is the key emotion underscoring the Nicholson Family Saga and it is in all the letters, either written flat out or lurking between the lines: the fear of destitution, primarily. The middle class generally lives in fear and flux as it is positioned between the poor and the rich. In good times, the middle class feels it can have it all. In bad times (or times of severe flux) it fears falling into the abyss.

In 1910, The Nicholsons were a middle class family on the bubble.

Today, 100 years later, most middle class families are on the bubble, whether they feel it or not.

So we go to see movies about rich, privileged people who are miserable, because it makes us feel better.