Les Expos, Nos Amours: Gone, but not Forgotten
April 25, 2011 § Leave a comment
Last October, as the Expos should have been winning the World Series, I wrote a piece at the National Council on Public History‘s blog, Off the Wall, about the strange marketing after life of Nos Amours. This provoked a steady stream of comments, both on that site and into my inbox, as well, to a lesser degree, here at Spatialities. One of my readers, Sarah, pointed out Montréal rapper Magnum .357′s track “Expos Fitted.
It seems that rap has emerged as a key component to remembering our long gone baseball team here in Montréal. Aside from Mag .357, Anakkin Slayd, who is more famous right now for his viral hit, “MTL Stand UP”, also wrote a song about the Expos, “Remember”.
Old Hawley Town Commons Redux
April 24, 2011 § 2 Comments
Last October, I wrote a piece on the Old Hawley Town Commons in Massachusetts. Hawley is a tiny and sparsely populated township in the hills of Western Massachusetts. There isn’t more than 350 people in Hawley and there is no actual centre to the town, residents rely on neighbouring Charlemont for services.
The hills of Western Massachusetts are fascinating from an historical perspective, the landscape is dotted with abandoned homes and farmsteads. Up the hill from our home there, there is an ancient stone fence, designed to demarcate one farm from the next. Surrounding this fence is nothing but trees, there is no clearance, no evidence of there ever having been any agricultural, or for that matter, any human, activity there. At the bottom of our hill, there is an abandoned farmhouse, said to be haunted by the ghost of an old farmwife who lost her mind.
As I noted in October, when we think historically about the landscape, we tend to think of cities, of the archaeology of settlement and industry in urban centres. But the Old Hawley Town Commons reminds us that the wilderness also has stories to tell us. I am revisiting the Old Hawley Town Commons because of a comment I received on the October post from John Sears, the historian of the site. You can visit the website here, and you can take a virtual tour.
John also reports in his comment that:
Recently, the Sons & Daughters of Hawley received a new grant from MassHumanities to carry out an archeological dig at the site of the Sanford Tavern at Hawley’s Old Town Common in collaboration with Mohawk Trail Regional High School. Students from the school will participate in the dig under the supervision of an archeologist and a teacher. We hope to learn something new about life in Hawley 180 years ago!
Happy Failweek!
April 5, 2011 § 4 Comments
My Twitter friend, Emilie Wapnick, one, has a great website, and two, an interesting idea. She wants to celebrate failure.
But I object to the idea that failure is “feedback.” I don’t think so. Failure is failure. Calling it feedback just sounds like some touchy-feely way of making it feel like I never lose, of saving our self-esteem. We all win, we all lose, we all have successes and failures. That’s life. Indeed, Frank Sinatra made exactly that point in song:
That’s life, that’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April,
Shot down in May
But I know I’m gonna change that tune,
When I’m back on top, back on top in June.
To call our failures feedback, while an admirable idea in order to get us to learn from our mistakes, is wrong-headed. We need to learn from our failures, but we don’t learn from sugar-coating things, at least in my humble opinion.
But Emilie’s idea goes beyond this:
How about instead of denying the existence of failure (since it’s “all feedback”), we acknowledge that it exists and embrace it. What if we actually PRAISED people for failing? What if success were measured by ACTION rather than results?
I think that if we all took some time to praise failure and even encourage it on a regular basis, there would be much more experimentation, creativity and innovation in the world.
The more we celebrate failure, the more we’ll all be encouraged to take action. So lets do it. Lets take this week and celebrate our most mortifying, horrific, soul-crushing failures!
Alright, so I’m never going to celebrate my mortifying, horrific soul-crushing failures. I don’t think that does anything, I prefer to grieve in private, lick my wounds, and figure out how to go forward.
But I love Emilie’s idea of measuring success by action foremost. Results are important, but sometimes we need to take action even if we’re going to lose, to “fight the good fight,” so to speak. This is part and parcel of the working-class Irish-Catholic culture I come from, immortalised in song by the Dropkick Murphys in their song for “Irish” Micky Ward (who, I must gloat, got his clock cleaned by my hometown boy, the late Arturo Gatti), “The Warrior’s Code”:
Failure works in many ways. It can work in the Mickey Ward sense of not giving up, or in the sense any good activist knows, of fighting the good fight whatever the results. But sometimes success comes from failure, too, as some of the people Emilie talked to on her blog point out. One of my favourite Simpsons moments (yes, there once was a time when that show was funny) comes when Lisa points out to Homer that the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity. Homer, who had been down for some reason or other, immediately brightens up, allegedly recalling the word “crisitunity.” Ok, so we can laugh at Homer’s stupidity, but there’s a point to be made here.
And if we choose not to sink into the doldrums over failure, if we instead celebrate some forms of it, then perhaps we do get what Emilie wants, which is more creativity and experimentation and innovation. I’ve spent a lot of time of late reading about the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath, and one thing that is clear is that the brilliant successes and innovations of the likes of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, is that they are all built on earlier failures. But, in the spirit of scientific experimentation, they had no choice but to carry on. So perhaps we should engage with our inner scientists and take what we can from failure to figure out how to succeed?
So perhaps failure isn’t the evil we’re lead to believe it is, perhaps in failing we can continue to try to make the world a better place and we can learn from our mistakes, or we can recognise that our failures are the keys to our successes.
So, alright, it’s Failweek. The Twitter tag is #failweek. Rock on, my friends, celebrate your failures and figure how to gain from them. If anyone needs me, I’ll be licking my wounds and pondering my comeback.
The Redemptorists
January 10, 2011 § 2 Comments
I went to mass on Christmas Day, I’m not Catholic, but I kind of like the tradition. This year we were in Keene, NH, where my sister-in-law lives. The priest had as the theme of his Christmas morning sermon “redemption,” noting that that was the true meaning of the season. I like to think that is one of the good points of Catholicism, that redemption is granted through the fallibility of humanity, God’s forgiveness for our sins, in part through the sacrifice of Jesus, in part through confession. I presume that this is where the Redemptorist Brothers got their name, their job being to redeem the souls of both their parishioners, as well as their converts (they are a missionary brotherhood).
Anyway, all of this is by way of introduction of my destination tomorrow in Toronto: the archives of the Redemptorists. The Redemptorists were the parish priests in Griffintown from 1885 until the destruction of St. Ann’s Church in 1970, and the ultimate closing of the parish a dozen or so years later. So far as I know, no one has actually gone in and looked at the brothers’ records from Griffintown. I was told about them years ago by Rosalyn Trigger, who was at the time doing her PhD at McGill, but I never found the time to get to Toronto to look at them when I was researching my PhD. Funny: last time I saw my supervisor, Ron Rudin, a few months ago, I was telling him about my plans to go take a look as I finished off the research for the book. He wondered if he could take back my PhD for keeping knowledge of this archive from him. ‘Fraid not, Ron.
Anyway, I’m rather excited to be heading to the archive tomorrow morning to see what I can find, to deepen our general knowledge of Irish-Catholic Griffintown, it will also add something to my book that is not in other histories of the neighbourhood, including my own dissertation.
That the Redemptorist priests were popular in their parish of St. Ann’s is not in doubt. In 1885, when the Sulpicians were stripped of their parish of St. Ann’s, the Irish-Catholics of Griffintown were furious, to the point where they remonstrated with the Bishop of Montréal. However, the Redemptorists, upon their arrival, were able to almost instantly win the hearts and minds of their parishioners, by investing money in the church and parish. By the time that Father Strubbe, the “Belgian Irishman,” was recalled to Belgium, the Irish-Catholics were loudly remonstrating with the powers-that-be over this decision. All the former Griffintowners that I have done oral histories with fondly recall the priests of St. Ann’s, in particular Fr. Kearney.
So I’m hoping here to find out how the priests saw their impoverished parishioners, what they felt they could do for them, whether they enjoyed being in Griffintown, their impressions of the neighbourhood. I’m also interested in the question of faith. All of the former Griffintowners I’ve talked to, as well as all other evidence I’ve seen, shows a very Catholic community, one where people took the ceremonies and rituals of their faith. But what has always interested me is whether this was just that: familiar ritual. One thing the Church is very good at is giving its faithful ritual and ceremony that are both familiar and reassuring. But I’ve always wondered how deep the idea of faith goes, not just with respect to Griffintown, but the Catholic Church in general.
Then there’s the question of Irishness. One of the reasons the Griffintowners protested the removal of the Sulpicians in 1885 was because the Sulpicians were very good about ensuring the parish priests at St. Ann’s were Irish. The Redemptorists who arrived in Griffintown that year were all Belgian. Of course, Fr. Strubbe was able to win over his parishioners and even gain status as an Irishman by the time of his recall. And by the mid-20th century, the priests, like Fr. Kearney, were Irish once more. Was this a conscious decision by the Redemptorists and the Bishop to represent the faithful? What did the priests make of the Irishness of their parishioners?
So here’s hoping I can begin to find some answers to these questions in the archive.
Magnum .357: “Expos Fitted”
October 23, 2010 § 1 Comment
A tip of the hat to Sarah, who posted a comment in response to Nos Amours (and check out the original post at NCPH’s Off The Wall), directing us to a video of Montréal rapper Magnum .357 and his début single/video, “Expos Fitted.” She posted the video in her comment, but I think it deserves wider exposure. I especially love the nostalgia of the Expos dressed up as gangsta rap.
Mag .357 is practically my neighbour, he hails from Montréal’s Anglo-Black neighbourhood, Little Burgundy, which is across the Lachine Canal from me here in Pointe-Saint-Charles. Burgundy is a curious neighbourhood, as it is home to both inner-city gang violence and yuppies who have gentrified the old worker’s cottages and triplexes that line the streets. It is also one of the oldest Black communities in Canada.
Burgundy also has a long history of being a centre of entertainment in Montréal. In the wake of Prohibition in the US and before the rise of Jean Drapeau as mayor of the city in 1960, Burgundy was home to various jazz clubs, most notably the legendary Rufus Rockhead’s Paradise. Oscar Peterson and his student Oliver Jones, the two greatest jazz musicians this country has ever produced, also grew up on the streets of Burgundy. In this sense, Mag .357 is carrying on the tradition.
I have to say, I love this track and I’ve been checking out his MySpace page. Enjoy.
Nos Amours
October 18, 2010 § 1 Comment
I have a post up at the National Counil on Public History’s (NCPH) sponsored blog, Off the Wall, looking at the difference between marketing and nostalgia when it comes to the ill-fated Montréal Expos.
Old Hawley Town Commons
October 13, 2010 § 11 Comments
Driving through the hills of Western Massachusetts this past long weekend, we came across the old Town Commons of Hawley. Hawley today is a town that is home to fewer than 400 people and has no real centre to it. Aside from a Highways Department, there’s not much evidence of an infrastructure in Hawley, though there is also a Town Hall. There is no post office or schools in Hawley, nor is there, to my knowledge a church. There is one corner store, though, but no gas stations. For services, the people of Hawley tend to travel to neighbouring towns, in particular, Charlemont.
Hawley Town hall
But Hawley has a history. Pioneers from nearby Hatfield made their way up the mountains and into Hawley. It was incorporated as a town in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1792. From then until the mid-19th century, Hawley was a centre of the forestry industry, as well as several smaller businesses, like the usual: blacksmiths, taverns, etc. There was once an old town commons on what is today called East Hawley Road.
Today, the old Town Commons is the parking lot for a series of trails that explores the bog and lakes around the area. There is also an information kiosk about the old town commons, including a plan of what used to be there.
Now, it’s not like North America is a place without history, though sometimes it’s as though Europeans seem to think it is. The aboriginals have been here for thousands of years, and there are remnants and ruins of their cultures littered across the continent. The Spanish have been in Mexico since the early 16th century. The French have been in Canada since the early 17th century, around the same time the Dutch and the English landed in what is now the United States. And those European colonies conquered, colonised, and displaced the aboriginal populations as they expanded across the continent. So none of this is news, but my point is that there is evidence of earlier settlements and cultures across the continent.
Out west, there are ghost towns. These places were once booming frontier towns whose time has come and gone. The most recent spate of ghost towns date from the 80s and 90s, as frontier industry dried up and hit hard times. Sometimes, the ghost towns aren’t on the frontiers. As a teenager, I lived in Port Moody, BC, which itself had annexed and old Imperial Oil Company town, cleverly called Ioco (get it, Imperial Oil Co.?). By the time I lived there in the early 90s, the town had long since been abandoned, the oil refinery on its last legs (it’s since been closed).
Lawn Bowling in Ioco, c. 1920
In the eastern part of the continent, ghost towns are rarer, but if you find yourself in the countryside, there are abandoned farmhouses and homesteads. In the swamps of Eastern Ontario between Kingston and Ottawa, near the Rideau Canal, one sees countless abandoned homesteads from the windows of the train. This was marginal land, settled in the 19th century and then abandoned and farm kids moved into the industrial towns and cities that dot the landscape of eastern Ontario. In Western Massachusetts, the area around Hawley is littered with decaying stone fences that once marked of homesteads from each other. Now they appear as seemingly random markers in the woods.
But to see visual evidence of a settlement that no longer exists is something else. I found it slightly strange to be standing on a site that 150 years ago was home to taverns, churches, shops, and the like. More people lived in Hawley in those days, of course, and travel to the neighbouring towns wasn’t as easy as it is today. The roads of Western Mass are narrow and windy as they go up and down the hills, around corners, avoiding private property, mountains, hills, lakes, creeks, and rivers.
Drawing of Old Town Commons, Hawley, MA
But once there were people in Hawley, and there was a common. And that’s where they conducted their business, got married, had their children baptised, got drunk, fought, and came together as a community. It was rather eery to stand in that same place on a sunny Sunday 150 years later, contemplating whether or not the bog would be a good place to walk the dog, and pondering the Volkswagen, Subaru, and Volvo station wagons that brought the yuppies from Boston, New York, Northampton (and, of course, Montréal) to the trails that lead out from the Old Town Common of Hawley. The land today is owned by the 5 Colleges of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. And they’re the ones who’ve put the effort into at least re-creating the plan of the Old Commons and they take care of the bog and the trails.
The Shoe on the Other Foot
August 23, 2010 § Leave a comment
Being Canadian, it sometimes feels like we’re the ones on the short end of the stick in global affairs. We’re the ones the Americans invaded during the War of Independence and again in 1812. During World War I, the British used our troops as cannon fodder in battles like the Somme. We have been colonies of the French and the British. Economically, we’re largely dependent upon the Americans. Our peoples are descendent from the colonised of the world (ok, so is the rest of the Western world). In short, I think Canadians like to see themselves as victims, or at least feel like victims far too often. This is why winning double gold medals in hockey over the Americans at the Olympics is such a big deal. For that moment, we’re the winners.
The once-great Vancouver band, Spirit of the West, wrote a song back in the early 90s called “Far Too Canadian.” It’s a lament for our status as hewers of wood and drawers of water, amongst other things. The lyrics:
I’m so content, to stand in line
Wait and see, pass the time
Talk a streak, fall alseep, wake up late, whine and weep
I kiss the hand that slaps me senseless
I’m so accepting, so defenseless
I am far too Canadian
Far too Canadian
…I am the face of my country
Experssionless and small
Weak at the knees, shaking badly
Can’t straighten up at all
I watch the spine of my country bend and break
I’m a sorry state.
A sobering thought, that song. And all the cheesy, stupid, lame-brained Molson Canadian ads in the world (apparently has more square feet of “awesomeness per person” than any other nation on Earth) can’t change it.
That being said, we do have our moments, our victories, and our glories. But we tend to play those down, too (except when they involve gold medals, hockey, and the Olympics). We’re a modest people, I suppose.
So all of this being said, I’m always surprised to find Canadians on the other side, at least historically-speaking. Not far from Charlemont, Massachusetts, is the town of Deerfield. On 29 February 1704, during the War of Spanish Succession, a joint force of 47 French and Canadian soldiers and 200 Mohawk warriors (including the Pocumtuck, who had lived in what is now the Pioneer Valley before the English settlers arrived) raided Deerfield before dawn. The raid was partly in revenge for the settlers’ violent and callous treatment of the Pocumtuck, which culminated in a massacre in what is now nearby Montague Township in 1676.
The combined French-Canadian-aboriginal force caught the settlers unaware before dawn and massacred 56 people. 109 people survived the raid, they were captured and made to march 500km north to Québec, in harsh winter conditions. 21 of them either died or were killed during the trek. Most of those who made it to Québec were eventually ransomed and made their way back to Deerfield. A few, most notably the pastor’s daughter, Eunice Williams, chose to remain. Williams spent the rest of her life at Kahanwake, a Mohawk settlement near Montréal, marring a Mohawk man and having a family with him.
The Deerfield Raid was no doubt a traumatic event for the people of the small settlement. And it has lived on for the past 300 years, it is a foundational story in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. At times, listening to people describe it, reading newspaper stories about the raid, and seeing how it is represented in the pop culture of the Valley, I even get the sense that the trauma of the raid lives on. Certainly, it is strange for a Canadian to realise the Americans were victims of the colonial era. It is even more bizarre to realise that one’s ancestors were the ones who caused the trauma. We are usucally the victims, not the aggressors of historical trauma.
The fact that the 1704 raid lives on in Deerfield, and is largely forgotten in Québec (as France lost that war), is significant. No doubt it lives on in part because Deerfield’s raison d’être today is as a tourist site. Historic Deerfield is a national historic site, and the town’s economy centres around the historical experience there, and the 1704 raid factors heavily into it. It is no doubt the most significant event to have occurred in Deerfield in its 337 year history. And, as a result of the historicisation of Deerfield, the 1704 raid gets played out, reinterpreted, and re-assessed almost daily by the town’s residents, the historical educators, and the tourists who come to visit.
But for me, a Canadian, the first time I visited Deerfield, on a warm, sunny day in late May 2006, I was stunned to find a place that was traumatised by Canadians, at least a place that was not an aboriginal settlement/reserve. And as I took in the colonial American scene in front of me that day, I couldn’t help but feel a shudder of fear imagining that 247-man strong force crawling across the plain along the Deerfield River, coming out of the mist and the snow and laying siege to a small frontier settlement. And every time since that I have driven past, or been into Historic Deerfield, I cannot shake that feeling of terror that the colonist there must’ve felt that cold February morning 306 1/2 years ago.
New Project: NCPH’s Off the Wall
July 14, 2010 § Leave a comment
My friend, Cathy Stanton, has begun a new blog, sponsored by the National Council on Public History in the US, called Off the Wall. The aim of the blog is to offer up “critical reviews of history exhibit practice in an age of ubiquitous display.” Cathy has assembled an impressive set of contributors and commentators to facilitate discussion. Since the blog was launched last week, there have been a handful of posts, reviewing events, exhibits, and displays, my favourite being this one on Flick’s “Looking into the Past” project.
I am one of the contributors, though, so far, all I’ve added to the discussion is a single comment. But the discussions that are arising over there are rather central to the study of history in the digital age. History is all around us, and is a central component of pop culture. At Off the Wall, we’re interested in examining how history interacts with pop culture and the public, to examine how history is used (and abused), how usable pasts are created. Or not created, as the case may be.
Enjoy!
Historical Consciousness
July 13, 2010 § Leave a comment
So, I’m reviewing and revising a textbook right now (not mine, I’m just the outside expert). In this textbook, in the Introduction, I have come across the following passage, which I find amusing. I’m not sure I agree entirely with the idea, but it is an intriguing one for someone who lives in Québec and is a citizen of Canada and who studies Irish history:
In essence, reflecting on human reality means reflecting on ourselves, since we are all humans and nothing in the human experience is completely foreign to us. In this sense, history is to groups of people what psychology is to individuals. Imagine an historian talking to his “patient”:
You suffer from a colonization complex, compounded by a repressed rebellion and a weak constitution. I recommend that you go through a major political crisis every ten or fifteen years over the next 100 years. Then you should feel a bit better. But your past will follow you until the end of your days, in one way or another. You’ll be better off if you accept it right away.
Matthew Barlow 