Stream of Unconsciousness

Boys riding an automobile in 1910 era.

I am watching the fourth installment of Musee Eden and can say the plot is quickening… I can see where it is going and it is interesting and that cute Colin Firth lookalike actor, Eric Bruneau, is getting beaten up, which is hard to take, although I’m sure it will all end up well in the end.

I went through Google News today to see what women are in the news: not many and mostly actresses or minor celebrities. Hilary Duff etc. I think I will do this everyday. You can see what people look up, the zeitgeist, so to speak and it is tabloid, even in the legitimate news.

Oh well.

I really have to get going on my editing of the first chapter of Flo in the City, my story about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, based on http://www.tighsolas.ca/, but I can’t focus right now, with things to do related to parents and in-laws.

I did take up reading again (something I haven’t really done lately (I do listent to BBC Radio’s 4 and 7 for literary joys) I have three books on the go, Book of Negroes, Juliet Naked by Hornby and Andrea Levy’s first book. (I just loved Small Island.) The problem is my glasses, I need to buy new reading glasses and make sure they are full lensed, just for reading. I get dizzy adjusting my gaze.

My son came home and was writing a difficult philosophy paper and he read me the beginning, but I couldn’t help him. Didn’t understand a thing. Sign and signifier stuff which I remember not understanding when I went to school. Barthes and all that. Why Freud is wrong, so to speak. He’s big on why Freud is wrong. But I grew up with Freud, so I choose to invest in his theories.

But, yes, I did do something brash. I enrolled in a diploma program at Athabaska Online University, Heritage Studies. Museums and such. Since I’m so into Heritage, and I hope to upgrade my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website, I might learn something. This 3 credit course is more expensive than one year of tuition at McGill in 1974, when I went to school. I answered an online questionnaire that is supposed to determine if a person is cut out for self-study. A great deal of importance is placed on essay writing skills. Well, I can write essays, that’s my profession, but I wonder if I have the discipline and stamina to take such a complicated course.

Time out of Place..

A still from a film of Moscow in 1908 off Youtube. It was hard to catch this horse as it went by in a second. Amazing stuff now available for all to see. Imagine had there been film in 1800 or 1700 or earlier. Well, if there had been film, it the course of history would be changed, as ‘technology’ changes us.

Still, while Flo, perhaps, was sitting on the Tighsolas porch in 1908 this horse, I want to call in a troika, but it’s just one animal, was trotting through Moscow.

So, I’m going to get on this editing business, for by first rough draft of Chapter One of Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era, based on the real life letters of www.tighsolas.ca, but frankly, I’m tired. More than that, my eyes are tired. I’ve had a hectic week (life!) dealing with banks and government in the age of endless telephone menus and departments that call themselves “Customer Care” but should be called “Customer We Don’t Care.. Not a whit except about getting our money.” The conversations are always monitored, but I suspect it’s to make sure the agents don’t exhibit any human feeling or plain common sense. It’s as if they have been absorbed by the Borg Collective.

I watched the 3rd installment of Musee Eden on Radio Canada, on the TV, and it was quite gruesome, and graphic nakedness too that is soooo Radio Canada. And that Eric Bruneau is looking more and more like Colin Firth, each episode. (Nice!) But I was watching to see if the two sisters, installed in rooms over the wax museum they inherited in old Montreal, had a maid. It seems not. The episode had a couple of scenes in their home.

You see, in 1910, women weren’t allowed to live alone (well, it was considered unseemly) but they also couldn’t live alone because it was impossible to run a house back then and have a life. It’s not like they had microwavable meals and permanent press clothing!

I know for a FACT because the Nicholson sisters in 1913 took the bold step of taking a flat, with two other teachers, and it turned out badly. One, they had to promise that their mother was coming to live with them to get the place, and two, they had to give up the apartment because it was too much of a mess. Terrific story, really!

I mean this was VERY bold of them. I remember, in the sixties, a group of nurses lived in a duplex near us and how people, well, my father, assumed they were wild women.

I do like the costumes in the show: they look exactly like home-made clothes, the kind the Nicholson’s wore.

Again, the prostitutes are a little over the top, cliche.

Prostitutes were often very young and often just working girls, in the real sense. They worked in factories, or shops, but couldn’t make enough to live on. Maybe that’s why they decided to give teachers decent salaries!!

Musee Eden Episode 2: Looking Backward on 1910

A Valentine’s and Son postcard of 1910 Montreal. My favorite of them all. This picture evokes 1910 to me. It’s Park and Prince Arthur.

I didn’t watch an old movie last night, but I did see the second episode of Musee Eden from Radio Canada on their website, so now I am caught up and I have the third episode tapes for later viewing.

I spent the first little while mesmerized by how much one of the lead actors, Eric Bruneau looks like Colin Firth, so I had to rewind and start watching the episode all over.

The story is moving now, but it really does mix the genres, or tries to cover all the bases with respect to what people like. It is a crime thriller, forensic thingy (a genre I do not like at all) as well a a period piece, women’s social history piece (which I like very much)courtroom drama (which I like but only when well done)and political thriller (which I like). There’s a journalism angle, that I always like, although, so far, no deep insight into how newspapers worked in that era. Usually, shows which juggle too many genres fall apart, but this one seems to work.

The problem is the show is very dark. I keep hoping for a scene in the sunshine on the mountain. And it could use some levity. This episode had a scene with a maid and that could have been played up for laughs. Servants make good comedy. It was shot in Old Montreal, and that helps evoke a Victorian quality, which is what they are looking for, but it doesn’t show what huge changes were going on 100 years ago. So, in short, this story is not so much about 1910, or it is about 1910 but looks backward, and Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a woman coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era, based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca will look forward. Very much so.

Oh, there was a scene with a prostitute and, boy, was she a caricature. There were two prostitutes in the episode, both older women. The sad fact was prostitutes back then were mostly young. Girls left school at 12, after all.

Musee Eden, so far, doesn’t show that 1910 was actually, as the BBC put it, The Birth of NOW. It was the beginning of the modern age. Many Montreal streets hardly look different today from what they looked like in 1910, take away the trams and add satellite dishes.

I read that the production cost about a million to make (not a lot at all)and had 70 sets and 400 costumes. It’s not really a costume drama, in that it has middle class and poor characters, and, true to as it was, middle class women rotated only a few outfits.

In a review I read the writer complained that the women comport themselves liked modern women. As an ‘expert’ in middle class women of the era, I am not so upset about this. First, as I wrote before, most historical dramas are more about “now” than “then.” I Claudius isn’t about Rome, it’s about Britain. And from my Nicholson letters, it is clear that young women back then were really no different than us…and they had huge dreams of independence and emancipation back then too, although not with respect to sexuality.