To thine own self be true

Oldest wants to be a futurist architect-scientist.
Youngest is more here-and-now.

via two Winnipeg teachers. Betty Shaw (grade 5: 1959-60). Brian Kells (grade 11: 1965-66).
Betty–we email back and forth.
Brian–we phone back and forth.

Brian called this morning and we talked for an hour about his studio apt. at an old Oddfellows home in Winnipeg, him going to see Glenn Gould at his first concert in Winnipeg, him circling Rodin’s birthdate on his calendar, him singing “I feel witty, o-so witty” from an old musical, his interest in Alice Munro (coincidentally, I was listening to an ’80s interview with her as I feel asleep last night and reading her “Turkey Season” and “The Moons of Jupiter” yesterday).

Never a dull moment here, being cooped up because of Covid.

Brian 1966, my gr. 11 English teacher

My gr. 5 class with Betty, 1959-60, Bannatyne School in St. James, Wpg.

A man with a knife on the street surrounded by many police with guns pulled out.

Instead of say, using a Taser or net to control him or, at worst, shooting him in the leg to stop him, they outright kill him for no reason.

Doh! No imaginations. Limited reason and critical thinking skills.

Perception is reality. What you see/subjectively experience is what is fact/true. Shades of George Berkeley and the role of consciousness on the ‘inner’ side/experience of perception. For the individual, it exists if you can perceive it.

Trump’s “alternate reality” crapola. He is right in that he sees the world as he wants it to be: an alternate world, not verifiable by objective fact and empirical evidence. One not corresponding to most people’s sense and understanding of the world/their reality.

About these two, I say that we know and interpret the world as we see it, largely on personal experience and knowledge. That is the world each of us holds within us, even when we see it changing and disappearing externally as we age, for instance.

Reality, as such, is largely subjective experience–a world within us that we carry from birth to death. Once in a while, someone else pierces our shells/exteriors and finds out/learns what we see, feel, know, and think. Those are often moments of higher communication and higher, truer connection.

But the worlds we know and are inside change and diminish with aging. We may have less contact and connection, especially in a pandemic that makes our external world smaller for starters. But our inner worlds change and diminish over time in any case.

Finally, memory plays the key role in maintaining our inner worlds/lives and who we basically are. Without memory, there is total isolation and the end of authentic individuality. Ourselves and personal worlds cease to exist for most or all people and they certainly cease to exist for us when we no longer can remember, think about or conjure them up anymore.

I have spent many days and moments staying connected to the past and sharing this information with others (family and friends) through my blog and e-mail, for instance. “Only connect!” as E.M. Forster wisely stated. In that way, I and my world, as I know it, remains connected with others for the time being.

But all this requires a conscious mind–which is what I have spent most of my time/life in developing during my adult years and life-long learning. This blog, for example, has been an exercise in memory and consciousness, and entries have been shared with family and friends since it started back in 2012. Otherwise, I would have lost a lot of memories and original thinking and creation which has appeared here. And, as always, I have to express and write myself into existence.

I would just make one final point and that is to be true to oneself (much in the spirit of this blog’s title) and to how one sees the world. Regardless of mistakes and bad choices, how we see the world is simply who we are: our attitudes, views, and bank of basic beliefs.

We are born as separate beings and remain separate entities largely unknown to others, even to those closest to us. It is no wonder that we hear the tree that falls in the forest even if others don’t or never do. Our worlds are and remain, largely, are our own inner ephemeral experience regardless of how many external social-media ‘Friends’ we may have.

(above: my signed photo of GL)

Well, of course, there are Bruce, Joni, Buffy, and Ian, but–going back to the 1960s– Gordon Lightfoot has had a solo career spanning 7 decades. There are two large audio archives of his consistently strong and memorable material.

For those who remember the early days up to 1970, there’s The Original Lightfoot which covers the early United Artists albums of some 60 songs. There are many highlights including “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, “Early Mornin’ Rain”, “For Lovin’ Me”, “I’m Not Sayin'”, “Steel Rail Blues”, “Walls”, “Go Go Round”, “Home from the Forest”, “Song for a Winter’s Night”, “Wherefore and Why”, “Black Day in July”, “Pussywillows, Cat-Tails”, “Did She Mention My Name”, “Bitter Green”, “The Circle Is Small”, “Affair on 8th Avenue”, “Softly”. Unfortunately, this set does not include “Spin, Spin, Spin”–one of the catchy first 45s he released which got a lot of Canadian radio play.

Below: Gordon Lightfoot Songbook.

His initial success and strong concerts led to a Warner contract and many more hits such as “If You Could Read My Mind”, “Summer Side of Life”, “Cotton Jenny”, “Don Quixote”, Old Dan’s Records”, “Sundown”, “Carefree Highway”, “Rainy Day People”, “Summertime Dream”, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, “Dream Street Rose”, “Shadows”, “Baby Step Back”, and “A Painter Passing Through”. (This set includes his best UA work on disc 2 BTW.) There are also plenty of strong album cuts including “Sit Down Young Stranger”, “The Pony Man”, “Alberta Bound”, “In My Fashion”, and “Someone to Believe In” among the 88 songs.

I’d still recommend his U.A. album The Way I Feel, the first Lightfoot LP I bought back in 1967. Every song on that is a winner plus you get the rearranged Indian-sounding version of “The Way I Feel”.

If You Could Read My Mind was his first big American production album in 1971; the songs on it are strong, anchored by his classic breakthrough hit of the same name.

His next consequential album is Sundown–featuring the cool single, and there is not a remotely weak cut on this LP.

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I have many Lightfoot memories. I first saw him on Canadian tv on Saturday afternoons, then went to see him in Winnipeg at the old Civic Auditorium circa 1967-8. I have seen him several times. Another memorable concert, again in Winnipeg, at the Centennial Hall, had him stopping his show a couple of times to intermission the crowd, while he stayed inside with the band adjusting the sound–he was not happy with it–a fussy perfectionist.

I’ve seen him here in Edmonton 2-3 times at the Jubilee Auditorium–the last time several years ago when it looked like he might stop touring. The vocal range had narrowed by then and there were songs he no longer did. Since then, he has kept up his annual Massey Hall shows. The poor guy was falsely fake-newsed as dead at one point and when he lost a lot of weight when he gave up alcohol, people thought he might have cancer.

Lightfoot is a Canadian institution who had quite a following in the States, but he chose to stay and live in Canada: a homegrown boy popular with Canadian audiences. A new album has just come out in 2020 and he keeps rolling along in decade 8 of his career; he actually started out on the old CBC Country Hoedown show back in the 50s and his first 45s were actually country in flavor.

Roget’s College Thesaurus. I first acquired the one on the right in 1965-66 (grade 11) and still use it today as a basic, fast thesaurus when writing. The 2002 edition on the left is well-worth picking up as well: many more entries, words not found in the original, expanded entries of the most common words, quotations using the common words. If I had 5 desert island reference books, the revised ed. would be one of those books. A good dictionary another. Shakespeare’s Words another. The old Reader’s Encyclopedia (from the ’70s) another. And my fifth, likely The All Music Book of Hit Singles: Top Twenty Charts from 1954 to the Present Day (1996). The latter because I could relive all those formative songs of childhood and youth in my memory, my imagination, and inner ear. A non-stop, limitless hit parade of memory and identity for my head.

The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s spooky novel The Haunting of Hill House. I taught it once in grade 10 in my first year of teaching (on the curriculum then)–1972. Kids loved it.

The 1963 movie is faithful to the original. Excellent direction by Robert Wise, very atmospheric, strong cinematography, well-acted by Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. Highly recommended and still startles viewers today.

“You see but you do not observe” and many other Holmes quotations.

1950s game inherited from their great grandfather

Kids love working on big sheets of paper!