Some things

[truepenny]

1. Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen reviews The Bone Key, which mrissa and stillsostrange have also recently confessed to liking. (Given mrissa and given stillsostrange, I consider this a very neat trick indeed.)

ETA: buymeaclue also likes it.

2. I have not abandoned the Due South episode analyses, but in the meantime I have a question for persons more knowledgeable about Canadian literature than myself. Is there a sub-genre of Mountie-lit, and does it replace or overlap with or otherwise have a relationship with the Western? Does Canada have an indigenous tradition of the Western (i.e., stories about cowboys and wild frontiers and lawmen and rustlers and robbers rather than stories about, say, Vancouver) or is that genre American?* I have a rather muddled idea about Due South and the Western, and it could use some grounding.

3. BPAL's Titus Andronicus (Dark musk and black amber with frankincense, red sandalwood, neroli and bergamot.) may be edging out Sin (Thoroughly corrupted: amber, sandalwood, black patchouli and cinnamon.) in my affections. Considering my unholy love for the play, this seems no more than appropriate.

4. Speaking of unholy love and Renaissance drama, if you're interested in revenge tragedy at all, I highly recommend Revengers Tragedy (2002). It's like the psychotic bastard child of Almereyda's Hamlet (2000, Ethan Hawke) and Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes), and like any self-respecting bastard in Jacobean tragedy, it takes down both its progenitors and does the Monster Mash on their faintly twitching corpses.

(N.b., our excellent local indie video store shelves Revengers Tragedy under Comedy. Be prepared.)

5. The Formerly Feral Ninjas are very odd little girls. I don't know if this is to do with being feral rescues, or to do with being warped in their childhood by me and mirrorthaw and heresluck, or if they would have turned out this way regardless. But definitely odd. They have Designated Petting Places. Outside a DPP, one does not touch the cat; inside a DPP, one MUST PET the CAT, biPED. The First Ninja will actually come fetch me and lead me with imperious mews to her DPP. Her sister, the Second Ninja, is more flexible about these things, and will designate temporary PPs as needed (You may pet me when I stand here as opposed to the true DPP: I am standing here! You must pet me!), although some places are simply Not Suitable and you will NOT touch the cat you icky biped. Neither of them approves of bipeds bending over them. The Second Ninja's DPP (the radiator cover in our bedroom) puts her at waist height, whereas to pet the First Ninja, even in her DPP (the front stairs), it is necessary to sprawl full length on the stairs and follow her as she weaves up them. Or down them, for that matter, although she's only persuaded me to do that once. What's interesting is that they have quite distinct and nontransferable DPPs. I've never seen the First Ninja in the Second Ninja's DPP at all, and while the Second Ninja perforce transverses--and often hangs out in--the First Ninja's DPP, she does not want to be petted there and attempting it will get you fled from as perfidious and untrustworthy and probably planning to eat cats.

Catzilla and the Elder Saucepan think the Ninjas are very weird.

---
*Yes, it is embarrassing how little I, as an American, know about Canada. Also embarrassing that I am, in this, typical of my countrymen and -women. :P

Comments

[kelliem.livejournal.com]

They have Designated Petting Places.

Wow! I didn't know other people's cats did that too. One of my two does it. Riku (the silver tabby) has 3 DPPs-- my bed is the main one, then the other two are the spare chair in the office, and 'his' chair in the living room by the TV. Anyplace else, forget it. He also will only tolerate petting and/or cuddling for a maximum of 15 minutes, (which is rare). The usual maximum is about 3 minutes.

Our other cat, Sora (the ragdoll), is a complete slut and will be petted anywhere, any time, for as long as you want. Or longer. ;D

They're like night and day. Seriously, we should've named them Laurel and Hardy.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If the Ninjas have time limits in their DPPs, we have yet to find them. Thus far, the biped always blinks first.

4th Thing:

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

What a coincidence - I watched 'The Revenger's Tragedy' on Tuesday! It's fanTAStic! (Though I'd have loved to see Eddie Izzard and Christopher Ecclestone in full Jacobean rig.) And the names! Lussurioso, Vindici and, best of all, Supervacuo. Woot!

Re: 4th Thing:

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Marc Warren stole every scene he was in, the shameless hussy.

Re: 4th Thing:

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh, I'd never heard of this and now I must go get my mitts on it! Thanks for the recommendation!

the grrly grrl

[electricland.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can think of is Susannah of the Mounties. And I only know about her because my grandparents still had my mother's old copies on their shelf when I was growing up.

I could very well be wrong, but I don't think we have much of a pulp fiction tradition of any kind, which I think is sad. CanLit is Serious Business, yo. Margaret Atwood spits on your genre fiction.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

There was that Heritage Minute (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lab6gyWsMXo), too, but I don't think that counts.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Clearly this is a niche that requires filling. If nothing else there has to be a sub-genre in the Romance field for it.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Note: I ought to have said at once, all of this applies to ENGLISH Canada and English Can-Lit.

I am shamefully behind on what is happening in French Canadian culture, except for music. (Though if you can lay hands on Bon Cop Bad Cop, do so.)

Oh, there is, there is *points at comment re: Harlequin*.

See, pulp, being regarded as unimportant to the formation of a national identity, hasn't had the sorts of protection and encouragement that other sorts of Canadian culture have. It's considered perfectly acceptable if we get school stories and thrillers and mysteries from the UK and westerns and sf and horror from the US.

(We have very good writers in all of these genres. What we don't have is an INDUSTRY of these genres, or a critical mass of writers playing off each other. Twenty more years, possibly.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I don't think we do either, and IIRC Robertson Davies says as much in A Voice From The Attic; pulp is something we tend to import, either from the UK or from the US. Children's books we do, and literature, and even some genre, but your basic pulp, not so much. (Though now that I think of it, Harlequin is in Canada. That's a pretty respectable load of pulp right there.)

The Mountie Myth is basically American, though; The Mountie Movies (http://www.b-westerns.com/mounties.htm) were all Hollywood. I think this is the main genre that DS is playing with tropes from.

(Are you by chance familiar with the Arrogant Worms' Mountie Song? It post-dates DS, but plays with the same ideas. And is amusing.)

The archetype in Canadian fiction (and cinema) that I think Fraser's character plays with is the, hmm, let's call them the Outside-Insiders. Outside/Insiders are characters who are integrated into their community but not easily, if that makes sense; it's not like the US myth of the Lone Outsider. Integration is desireable, even necessary; the struggle is to become oneself without going away for ever. (One of my anthropology profs talks about this in talking about how the proper function of a Vision Quest or other spiritual or coming-of-age journey is twofold -- first you go outside and learn, and this is about you -- but then you must come back and share, and that is about your community as well as about you. If you don't do that your journey -- wish is made possible by your community as well as by your own powers -- is partly wasted.)

Fraser doesn't fit in, but he stays. Fraser doesn't belong, but he is loved. And in the end he goes home.

This is all I have for now. :)

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind me intruding as you don't know me, but I've greatly enjoyed your analyses of Due South and wanted to provide what info I could in answer to your question...

I have not encountered a great deal of Canadian Western literature, Mountie-based or otherwise. There could be some, but I haven't seen it. However, I can tell you that the myth of the Canadian West is that 19th century settlement push was much more civilized here than in the U.S., in part because of the Mounties (then known as the North West Mounted Police). I don't know whether it actually was more civilized--I'm sure we had our fair share of violence--but that's what Canadians tend to believe, and stories like Sam Steele (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Steele) and the Klondike Gold Rush (http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10187) tend to reinforce that belief.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're not intruding at all! Thank you, that's most interesting.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

My impression (gained almost entirely from Susannah of the Mounties/of the Yukon cited above) is that it was much more a narrative about law and order and keeping the peace (rather than the lone gunslinger/range war/freedom of the frontier etc mythos of the American West). I also seem vaguely to recall Nelson Eddy as a Mountie warbling to Jeanette Macdonald, but the context has completely faded.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly! The narrative is of an orderly, peaceful process supervised by a centralized, federal police force rather than independently-elected sheriffs. It's the whole "peace, order, and good government" versus "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" difference played out yet again.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

::sigh::
::wants to emigrate to Canada::
::again::

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*would be thrilled if you did and would show you around*

*nevertheless*

It's a nice myth, but it's not really true. At least, it is true to a point, about as true as the US myth of Pilgrims and Pioneers is.

Canada was settled as a business proposition, first (The North West Mounted Police used to belong to the North West Company, btw) by the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company (still selling rifles, blankets, and nearly everything else today; I buy my bras there). Fur trading and lumbering requires social order.

Next it was settled as a means of establishing and maintaining national control over said assets: the French and the English both played the 'we have a trading post so we need a town and now we need a garrison to defend it' game up until the Battle Of Quebec.

Thereafter Great Britain added "relocating excess and inconvenient bodies while keeping them as subjects" to the list of reasons, a pattern that continued until about 1920, in some for or another.

By 1774, "protecting the border against the revolting colonies" came in -- this is one reason why our cities are where they are.

"Paying off troops" was relevant as well -- soldiers in both that war and the War of 1812 were entitled to passage home and the arrears of their pay, but were often offered land plus the value of their back pay in goods (at Company prices, but in truth it was an honest enough deal that most of them prospered) plus help transporting their families if they wanted to stay in Canada.

"We need people to hold this land against the US" continued, along with "bleeding off the surplus or farmers, etc as the Brits industrialised", until WW1 created a temporary but serious shortage of young healthy European men and the days of mass migration from Europe basically stopped, though by 1867 Canada itself was an entity capable of soliciting and supporting immigration, at which point immigration became 'pull' rather than 'push' and all of Europe was solicited for immigrants.

The process continues today, though now we get group migrations from Asia and Africa, mostly. We're still not full. We'll never be full. We're the biggest nation in the world and we get bigger in terms of living space with every tech advance.

We had -- and have -- a very simple, very powerful thing to sell: tired of being a tenant farmer? Landlord replaced you with sheep? Can't get a living off two fields of bad soil? Come to Canada, we have LAND. GOOD land. LOTS of Good land. Now it's not farmers we're after but it is still people who want a lot of room and to be safe in it.

That last bit is what the Mounties are for, btw. Where there's a community -- and the basic unit of Canadian settlement is the community, not the family -- there's a Mountie outpost. Even today, if a place is not big enough to have a police force of its own -- outside Ontario and Quebec, which have Provincial Police -- it's the RCMP's job.

Peace, Order and Good Government indeed, and the people who think that's a soft goal have never seen a mining town during a boom, whether it's the Yukon then or Calgary now.

The good side of it is that it allows people to get on with making a life. The bad side is it exists to a great degree to protect business interests, and will always tend to put
Treatment of natives is a whole 'nother story, and a long one. Much depended on the intersection of which company -- North West or Hudson's Bay -- and which church -- Catholic French of C of E -- a group dealt with, and at what stage. It was never what it ought to have been, but often it was surprisingly good -- and often those were the places where the natives became most integrated, so integration was thought to be the answer. This... did not work. Integration worked where the churches went to the natives and built schools and churches where they lived; it was a horrorshow where the churches tried to bring the native children to the schools and churches.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh totally. Historiographic myths are historiographic myths regardless.

It's that whole "peace, order, and good government" as an ideal that rings my chimes at this particular moment. That's a national ethos I can get behind.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm right there with you. Just, you know, I like geeking on about it :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And your geeking is awesome.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

yay!

For your geekiness

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

The Charter of the Company Of Gentleman Adventurers (The Hudson Bay Company) in words (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6580) and pictures. Well, picture. (http://www.manitobamuseum.ca/images/charter.jpg")

[papersky.livejournal.com]

"Literary writer" scores surprisingly highly on the immigration tables. (I was surprised anyway!)

wups, abandoned a paragraph

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

The good side of it is that it allows people to get on with making a life. The bad side is it exists to a great degree to protect business interests, and will always tend to put [ETA] business considerations first. It also establishes our ongoing anxiety with International Relations; we're a country of exporters. This has led to some very positive and some extremely negative forms of international involvement; on the one hand peacekeeping, OTOH more integration with the US than is healthy for us.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Newfoundland also has its own police force: the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

So it does! My bad, and thank you!

[wuxiadaddy.livejournal.com]

Also an unknown to you but I thought I'd throw out an idea:

There were quite a few serials in the 40s and 50s that featured mounties.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/7982/Canadian-Mounties-vs-Atomic-Invaders-Serial-/overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Mounties
http://www.b-westerns.com/mountie3.htm
And Zane Grey wrote some stories about them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Royal_Mounted

I think most of these are U.S. myths of the mounties but...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I knew about Sergeant Preston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_Preston_of_the_Yukon)--although I'm clearly going to have to read up on him, since I observe in the Wikipedia entry that Preston got promoted for catching his father's killer, not banished to Chicago--but hadn't heard of these. Thank you!

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about the literature, but I wanted to pop in and say that jives with what I understand of the history. From what little I know the Canadian government was more likely to aggressively acculturate Native Americans/First Peoples (including the forcible removal of children from their homes) than to pretty much commit slow genocide, as happened in the US.

[belmanoir.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....I know there is a genre of Canadian mass market fiction because my mom lived there for a couple of years. She was in a small town and a friend of hers decided to start a library there. The government sent them some equipment and some boxes of books, and my mom told me most of them were corny sagas of early Canadian life. However, I don't remember any details about the content or if Mounties were involved, and I can't ask her as she passed away a year and a half ago. Hope other people can be more helpful---I am intrigued to hear your theory!

[belmanoir.livejournal.com]

PS---This was in the seventies, so it's possible the genre has died out considerably, but it might still have had an impact on Due South creators/writers.

[greek-amazon.livejournal.com]

I won't bother repeating commodorified's comments about Mounties and the 'Western' tradition, but I will agree with them. Early Canada was pretty much a big business, and the Natives were more trading partners than enemies.
Unfortunately there's not really a Mountie sub-genre of Canadian literature, at least not one that I've found. (And I have looked, and lamented the lack of it.)

That said, if you're interested in Mounties from a slightly later date, I suggest the autobiographical book Undercover for the RCMP 1902-1979 by R.S.S. Wilson. It's a good read, and has a lot of interesting cases.

And if you're interested in Canadian History, Pierre Burton's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Berton) historical works are a good starting point. He's very readable. Unlike a lot of others who write Canadian History.

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

Once last thought: I think in Canadian mythology, the North kind of takes the place of the American West. It's the North that desperate men fled to, the North where people went for a new start, etc. The Mounties are still omnipresent (and there aren't a lot of cowboys), but I think the North is perceived as wilder than the Canadian West.

On the non-myth side, I once read a biography of the wife of an early twentieth century northern Mountie. The extent of her husband's duties was fascinating. He wasn't just responsible for law enforcement--he had to vaccinate people during epidemics, provide nearly all basic medical treatment, serve as the main interface with the local aboriginal community--he was pretty well the single government government representative in the area.

[tasyfa.livejournal.com]

My cat's DPP tends to be on carpet, most frequently the small mat in the corner of the kitchen (that IS there just for him). Of course, that means that I get to kneel on the ceramic tile, which is usually freezing.

Other Canadians with more in-depth knowledge than mine have already weighed in, but I'll add that as a kid (in the 70s), I devoured my dad's Zane Grey books because I could never find anything else like them in the bookstore. I have to agree that the majority of Canadian stuff is Serious Literature. For a nation that produces some riotously funny people, we have a tendency to take ourselves a little too seriously at times, particularly where the arts are concerned. That's one of many reasons I adore Paul Gross: he works his butt off to produce wholly Canadian ventures that are actually entertaining. If you've never seen Men with Brooms, you MUST get hold of it and watch it. :D

[cinnamon-sakaki.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Have you seen Titus with Anthony Hopkins and Alan Cumming? There are some annoying bits but overall it has a lot of pretty anachronisms which make me very fond of it.

[cathschaffstump.livejournal.com]

I thought you should know that your name came up at an academic panel at Fantasy Matters as a female fantasy writer that should be watched in future years.

So, the academy likes your work. :)

Catherine

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, that's good to know. Thanks!

[gardensoil.livejournal.com]

This has absolutely nothing to do with your post.
I just want to say: I've finally been able to buy The Mirador!
So there.

Didn't dare come here fo fear of spoileries and such.

[cheshyre]

And your blog is about the third place this week I've been recommended the film of the Revenger's Tragedy.
Unfortunately, among the four library networks I belong to, there's only one copy and it's both distant and checked-out...

[wychwood]

You're probably over this by now *g*, but I just started watching Due South and reading your analyses along with it. I don't know much about your question, but there's an article on Wikipedia on the genre of the "Northern" which may prove interesting. And thank you for posting these; they're really adding to my enjoyment of the show :)

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Since it was two years ago that you posted this, I dunno if you're still interested in pulp lit about Mounties. I happen to have in my possession at least one example. It's a boys' adventure story from 1911 called "Steele of the Royal Mounted." It may be part of a series--the outer title page just says "Phillip Steele." I haven't read it yet because it's old and delicate and I have to be careful with it, which I don't like being with books. (I like to take them in the bath and eat while I'm reading and leave them splayed out all over the place.) Someday I'll read it and post about it. The interesting thing that I've been able to figure out about it, from the perspective of your (very old, I know) question is that it doesn't seem to actually be Canadian--it's from a New York publisher. But the copyright page mentions another publisher, who a quick google search turns up used to be based in Indianapolis, when it still existed. There's no advertising matter bound into the back, which is a little unusual for that sort of thing. If it had, that would tell me more about genre and audience. But it doesn't, so that's all I can figure out about the book without reading it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Neat! Thank you!