Olympic curmudgeonry

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Let me start by saying that I don’t get spectator sports and I don’t really understand why anyone would want to be an Olympic athlete. Let me continue by saying my heart sank when I heard Vancouver had won the 2010 Winter Olympics. Let me finish this portion of my post by saying one of the reasons I left BC in 2009 was because I don’t want to live in an Olympic host venue.

My worst fears have been confirmed, and the 2010 Olympics aren’t even over. So far we have had:

• one Georgian luge athlete killed.
• Two female Canadian luge athletes bitching about the fact that the course was changed (to make it safer for all) after the death of the Norwegian, thus impairing their performance.
• Allegations that we have been stingy with the training time we’ve allowed other athletes at the facilities we’ve constructed.
• As of Tuesday, February 16, 2010, CBC News reported that 28,000 ticket holders have been told they can’t use their standing room only tickets at Cypress Mountain for two days in a row because it’s unsafe – and there may be more cancellations of these tickets as more warm weather is expected this week.
• Horrendous lineups for concession stands and washrooms, also at Cypress.
• Delays, delays, delays and postponements due to weather. There’s a reason Whistler is no longer part of the FIS circuit – uncertain weather conditions, making it an unsuitable venue.
• Delays due to malfunctioning equipment at the Richmond Oval. Malfunctioning equipment at the Richmond Oval, which was one of the first new facilities finished for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We’ve been building skating rinks for how many years in this country? And somehow we can’t find rink maintenance machines that don’t ruin the ice and don't break down? Never fear, Calgary is now shipping its Zamboni by flatbed truck to the Richmond Oval, because theirs works.

The weather delays have caused serious problems for ticket holders who are now unable to get transportation to Whistler. Some people have had to leave town without seeing the events for which they bought tickets well over a year ago in an expensive lottery.

And then there’s the coverage by CTV, who outbid CBC for the right to be the official broadcaster. Not having watched much Olympic coverage in the past, perhaps I’m not in a position to judge. I’ve been astonished to discover that CTV isn’t interested in interviewing the gold medal winners at the Olympics – merely the Canadian participants, regardless of where they’ve placed in competition. I’ve also been astonished to discover that they’re showing snowboarding events three times in a single day (without benefit of a time stamp indicating that, contrary to what the announcer says, this is NOT a live event). Due to the delays at the Richmond Oval, CTV arbitrarily decided it wasn’t going to broadcast the pairs figure skating live program in its entirety and would stick to the speed skating events instead. The announcement was made long after it was possible to arrange to view on TSN at a friend’s house. I contemplated going to a bar to watch. And then I had to laugh at myself. What are the chances of getting to watch pairs figure skating at a sports bar? Yeah, right. Dream on.

As for the CTV web site: I have to download some Microsoft product in order to view archived footage on the site. And Chrome, the browser I use, isn’t mentioned as being compatible with the software. Oh – and only the gold and silver medal-winning pairs figure skating performances are up on the site.

And then there’s the truly inane filler. Saturday night (Feb. 13) CTV aired a piece on Whistler’s most eligible bachelor. Who wasn’t an athlete. Or an Olympian. Or even available – he’s having his first child with his partner. What does this have to do with the Olympics? Meanwhile, I watched three hours of CTV coverage Monday night (Feb. 15, 2010, from 11:30PM to 2:30AM) in an attempt to see some clips – or even hear the announcement – of who had won the pairs figure skating gold medal. Not one mention that the event had even taken place. Now I’m mad. Now I don’t just want to make sure CTV never gets the right to broadcast the Olympics again – I want their license to broadcast anything yanked.

CTV seems too lazy or too inept to even run a chart of events held and medals won as part of its news broadcasts – something the CBC excels at doing. Hire a computer graphics person and make use of them, CTV.

Let me make my position crystal clear here: if the Olympics are a competition amongst the world’s best athletes, patriotic boosterism is sadly misguided. And yet that’s what we’re getting. When I finally got to watch to the men’s short figure skating program Tuesday night, I was thrilled to see Canadians holding Canadian flags and cheering for American and Czech skaters who gave great, clean performances – and a Canadian journalist interviewing the Russian skater who’s leading after the short program. Finally – a celebration of the world’s best! I’m also glad a panel on CBC Radio One in Calgary this morning publicly decried the ‘own the podium’ mantra of the – well, I don’t know where it comes from – surely not the Canadian Olympic Committee? I certainly hope not. ‘Earn the podium’ is what it’s all about. Peter Mansbridge said last night on CBC TV news, 'Downtown [Vancouver] is a flowing river of patriotism.’ I think every Canadian should visit Vancouver if they get the chance. I think we should support our athletes too. Along with our writers, our scientists, our actors, our farmers, our intellectuals and our innovators. Let’s not break our arms patting ourselves on the back though.

For a brilliant suggestion on how to reduce the carbon footprint of the Olympics and perhaps help the events get back to the fundamentals of what they’re supposed to be about, read Jonathan Hiskes of Grist’s great article on greening the Olympics. Because winning the Olympics shouldn’t be what it takes to effect infrastructure improvements in our major urban centres, whether it’s transportation upgrades, badly needed facilities, or affordable housing.

Update: and for another perspective on what's going wrong, see The Guardian's Lawrence Donegan's round-up of coverage. Just ignore that bit about what you learn your first day in PR school - he's wrong on that front.

A war of attrition and punitive regulation

Thomas Pawlick's The War in the Country is an important book, despite its flaws. In fact, it's an inspiring book, and I find myself compelled to blog about it.

I also find myself wanting to follow his suggestion that more urbanites should join the National Farmers Union (if they're Canadians). Associate membership is only $50 per year.

The Globe and Mail's reviewer didn't much care for the book, and there's no doubt it's flawed - perhaps even deeply flawed. If I, as an editor, had seen this book as a draft, my advice to Pawlick would have been to come back to me with a second draft in which he extrapolated more from his Eastern Ontario rural base (Belleville to Ottawa, basically), paraphrased his conversations and actually told the story himself rather than quoting the individuals he interviewed at such great length, while providing some real figures on how the war in the country is going on everywhere rather than leave readers with the impression that it's happening primarily in Eastern Ontario. An appendix with that information would have been nice.

But essentially this is nitpicking. I heard Pawlick interviewed on CBC radio's The Current and was interested enough by what he said to look for The War in the Country. One of the reasons I recently relocated to Lethbridge, AB, was because of what a friend said to me about the city (pop. approx 85,000): "It's the centre of a farming community, not an oil and gas exploration and development community."

It's not that I don't think we need energy as well as food - it's just that, of the two, food is more important. The Inuit have survived without central heating for centuries, after all, and if we had to, us non-Inuit could too, with or without technical fibres.

In the last couple of years, the world's population balance has tipped from predominantly rural to predominantly urban, and much of the focus of Pawlick's book is the disconnect we experience with the food we eat. He points out that most people are now two generations removed from ancestors who actually tilled the fields or raised livestock. What's truly scary about this is that most urban dwellers don't have the faintest idea where - or how - the food they eat is produced.

There are, of course, exceptions. Local farmers' markets are in vogue, and some of them are huge. I used to love, in the early 90s, wandering through Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto during the summer and just browsing through the wondrous things on offer at the farmers' market there, returning at lunchtime or after work to make some purchases. The 100-mile diet and the (buy) and eat local movements have driven awareness of what we're putting on our plates and in our mouths. I'm encouraged to hear people in large cities like Calgary say things like, 'you know, I don't want to eat fresh peaches in January - I think that's wrong.'

There's lots of information in Pawlick's book that should make you stop and think: statistics on how the actual nutritional content of meat in particular has declined; an explanation that makes sense of the fact that when you eat an animal raised on corn, you are basically eating corn - whether you want to or not; an analysis of factory farming and the quota system, both of which represent serious barriers to the survival of small farmers - and the fact that invariably, smaller farms truly are more productive, more efficient, and far more eco-friendly than larger ones. That shouldn't really have been a surprise to me - when I visited a privately managed woodlot in Wisconsin a few years ago I realized that of course someone who has to make the income from the trees he's harvesting last at least his own lifetime is going to be a better steward of the forest than a multinational who can afford to move on to the next stand after clear cutting this one.

But perhaps the single most chilling feature of The War in the Country is Pawlick's description of the way the relentless drive to factory farming and the onerous regulations imposed on small farmers is driving not only them out of business, but is also killing small businesses in towns that have traditionally serviced rural areas. And he's right - it's hard not to believe it isn't the result of deliberate implementation of federal and provincial government policies concocted as a result of lobbying by agribusinesses. The question is - what are we going to do about it?

When heartbreak surfaces: Lisa Moore's February

Daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother, widow, grandmother, lover, wife – the phases of female life cycle rapidly in Lisa Moore’s February, the story of Helen O’Mara, whose husband Cal is killed when the offshore oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, leaving her with three children, pregnant with their fourth.

The novel weaves back and forth in time between 2008 and the late 1970s, from the time Helen first met and married Cal to her current life as a grandmother of two, running a dressmaking business and having finally achieved peace of a sort. There is still gnawing grief over what could have been, anger at the fact that she was denied closure since her husband’s body was never recovered, and a yearning for what could have been in an alternate universe, a universe in which men don’t leave home to take dangerous jobs to support their growing families, a world where unemployment isn’t systemic and the struggle to survive emotionally and economically doesn’t always seem epic.

Several years ago (I think it was in July 2002) I attended an amazing seminar that was part of Simon Fraser University’s Summer Publishing Workshop. Six authors and six critics formed the panel, talking mainly about the trend to – and redefinition of - historical fiction as a genre. No longer merely bodice rippers or period romance novels, authors like Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Guy Vanderhaeghe and Jack Hodgins had all recently published works of historical fiction.

That seminar was my introduction to Lisa Moore and her work. She told a charming story about the response she’d received to her second collection of short stories, Open. She said that one of the stories in the collection dealt with a philandering husband. And that after Open was published, her own husband had been upbraided on more than one occasion at the mall in St. John’s, Nfld., for being unfaithful to her, by readers who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe that art wasn’t thinly disguised life with only the names changed. So I leapt at the chance to read February when House of Anansi offered advance review copies (publication date is June 27, 2009) on Twitter.

Moore is a force to be reckoned with on the literary scene – a writer who has by no means reached the peak of her literary abilities and who continues to grow from book to book. I hear echoes of many other women writers in her work: A.S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields (Republic of Love and Unless), Anita Brookner, the two Janes (Hamilton and Smiley), a touch of Sue Miller (The Good Mother) and, if not Sylvia Plath, then certainly Anne Sexton. This passage immediately reminded me of Sexton’s poem “Clothes,” and its inimitable line about being still ‘sixteen in the pants.’

She watches Barry’s thumb press the caulking into the crack and she thinks again the thing every adult woman thinks of herself—that she is still her sixteen-year-old self.

It is not a thought. Helen becomes sixteen; she is sixteen: the shyness and wonder. It comes over her briefly. And then it is gone. She is forty-nine, fifty, she is fifty-two. Fifty-six. The world has betrayed her, arthritis in her wrists.

How deeply she craves to be touched. Because what follows not being touched, Helen has discovered, is more of the same—not being touched. And what follows a lack of touching is the dirtiest secret of all, the most profane: forgetting to want it.

You forget, she thinks. You forget so deeply, desire is obliterated. A profound and altering chill befalls.

The only cure is to chant: I want, I want.

I also see Moore writing in very much the same vein as Roddy Doyle in his Barrytown Trilogy (The Snapper, The Van, The Commitments). One of the responses to her first novel, Alligator, was surprise that St. John’s was portrayed as a metropolis with its share of grit, including vandalism, eco-terrorism, and infiltration by the Russian mafia rather than the happenstance capital of a province that specializes in quaint. More than anything, Moore’s Helen O’Mara is a woman who endures. In the face of blinding, unexpected grief, she concludes her role is to be there for her children – and that part of being there means teaching them that life is tough. By the time she’s a grandparent, after the sheer routine of 25 years of getting on with it, putting one foot in front of the other whether she wants to or not – her style has changed, and she finds herself wanting to indulge and pamper her grandchildren.

Moore was interviewed briefly on Canada AM this morning. During the interview she spoke of how little had been written about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, what a closed and unknowable environment it was, particularly to women. There were no women working on the rig that was declared ‘unsinkable’ and few visits from anyone not working on the rig were allowed due to the potential for industrial espionage. Not many of the bodies were recovered, and the lack of closure that resulted means the event is still alive for Newfoundlanders who lost loved ones. “The heartbreak comes to the surface,” when it’s mentioned, Moore said.

As long ago as Open, Moore’s verbal dexterity was evident. (“A woman with a toddler in a convenience store during a hold-up. I am an obdurate subplot, stubbornly present. How did I get here?” from “Natural Parents.”)

She’s only getting better, as you can see from this passage from February:

England looked like England rolling past the tinted windows. It was lush and green and there was a field of sheep. It was as if Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence had written down exactly what they’d seen and it had all stayed that way, or as if everybody here had read those books and made the landscape look like it was in the novels. There were trees and hedges and stone walls and sheep. The sheep, scattered here and there on the green hills, were an authentic touch.

Moore’s an author who never disappoints and February is no exception. My only regret is that we’ll probably have to wait another year or two for her next novel.