Entries by Philip Turner

An Amtrak Storify—STL to CHI/CHI to CLE/CLE to NYC, August 2014

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Amtrak StorifyTo chronicle my recent Midwest August vacation, I’ve used Storify, the Web platform that lets bloggers incorporate social media posts in with their own writing. Once a piece is published on Storify, you can grab a handy embed code and paste it in at your websites, where it populates precisely as you’ve composed it. The piece is titled “By Train—STL to CHI/CHI to CLE/CLE to NYC, August 2014.” You may click here to read it at my page on Storify, or over at The Great Gray Bridge. I do hope you enjoy reading it, and if you also happen to enjoy writing sequential, diary-like narratives, I recommend you try Storify. It’s my second one, after “Great Music & Great Times in Toronto for NXNE, June 2014,” which includes travel and tourism info about Toronto, notes on restaurants, bookstores, shopping, and architecture, along with my music coverage of the NXNE festival, and which has now had more than 765 readers.

On the Rails Headed Home

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Canadian train travelers, I’m sure VIA Rail gives you headaches at times, but consider yourself fortunate you don’t have Amtrak as your national passenger rail carrier. On our recent vacation, my wife and I flew to St. Louis, and after seeing family for a few days there, began voyaging back east on the rails. From St. Louis, we took Amtrak to Chicago, arriving almost ninety minutes late that night. After three days there we took a 9:30 PM train, the Lakeshore Limited, that actually left at 10:30, then arrived the next morning in Cleveland at 9:30, instead of 5:30. Following three days in Cleveland, we boarded the Lakeshore Limited again, a 5:50 AM train that left at 7:10. It arrived thirteen hours later in NYC, about two hours later than its scheduled arrival.

In the course of these trips we learned that Amtrak doesn’t really own the track its trains ride on, and is thus subject to the schedules of the freight haulers who do own the rails. I love train journeys, but Amtrak makes it really hard to love it at all.

A Week of Worrisome News about the Siberian Permafrost & Arctic Ocean

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This tweet of author Robert Wright that I shared linked to a TIME magazine story about mysterious craters in Siberia, and an aerial video view of the holes in the earth.

Later, I read another story, in ThinkProgress, suggesting that the emergence of these holes in the earth may well be the result of permafrost melting in the Arctic tundra, auguring an accompanying release of tons of methane gas, a worrisome development that if correct bodes ill for its effect on the global climate. Here’s a screenshot from the article by Ari Phillips.

Ari Phillips story on Siberia The next day, I read Fred Barbash’s Washington Post article about the appearance of huge sea sells in the Arctic Ocean, where only ice has been seen before. These two discoveries leave little doubt in my mind that the coldest places on the planet are warming in ways that are having a dramatic effect on earth and sea.

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) July 30, 2014

My NXNE Storify: “Great Music & Great Times in Toronto for NXNE 2014”

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Storify screenshot
In completing my coverage of NXNE, the Toronto music festival I attended June 17-24 as accredited press, I’ve used Storify, the platform that lets bloggers incorporate social media posts in with their own writing. Once a piece is published on Storify, you can grab a handy embed code and paste it in at your websites, where it populates precisely as you assembled it. The piece is titled “Great Music & Great Times in Toronto for NXNE 2014,” “a collection of illustrated social sharing culled from my timelines 6/17-6/24, w/commentary; links to bands & venues; plus content I’m borrowing with acknowledgement of & appreciation for other music fans who shared about NXNE, creating a visual diary of the festival.” Please click here to read it on Storify, or here on Honourary Canadian. I hope you enjoy reading the piece which includes travel and tourism info about Toronto, offering some notes on restaurants, bookstores, shopping, and architecture, along with my music coverage.
 

 

 

How We May Grow Even After Losing a Part of Ourselves

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Naked Imperfection was my #FridayReads last weekend, and it gripped me straight through until early this week. Gill Deacon is the host of CBC Radio’s daily afternoon show from Toronto, Here and Now, with a voice that’s good company on the air, and which translates well in print. Prior to her broadcasting career, she was an environmental journalist and consumer health advocate. She lived consciously and consumed carefully, avoiding products that could harm her, her family, and her fellow denizens of the earth. She wrote an earlier book called There’s Lead in Your Lipstick. This made her all the more ill-prepared when she received a chilling diagnosis of breast cancer. She propels her narrative forward rapidly, in modified stream-of-consciousness style, with many of her paragraphs built of staccato sentences, like this one, after she’s had a mastectomy: “Tonight, as Grant and I move between the sheets in the blue-grey, pixelated, late-night bedroom light, I look down at my chest. A single orb of flesh presses up against my husband’s chest, its twin felled—an abandoned goddess, carrying on alone. Beside it, the graveyard of ribs. I am snatched by the escapist pleasure of my husband’s touch by the reminder of what had happened. Mourning the imperfect body I once had. I wish I still had two breasts. Sometimes the sadness surfaces like a beluga gasping for air. How can I be grateful for being misshapen.” The closing chapters were so well-crafted, I slowed my reading, lest I finish the book too quickly. I kept paging back to re-read passages I’d just read, so apt were they about living a full life, even if an imperfect one. After writing candidly about the prosthetic breast she got after her surgery, Deacon ends her book, some years in to the slow-motion crisis, with good news from her doctor, who “used the words cancer and gone in the same sentence. ‘Go out and live your life,’ she said with a smile. ‘You’re always going to have more doctor’s appointments than most of your friends, and technically it takes more than five years before the odds of you getting cancer drop down to match the general population, but for all intents and purposes your cancer is gone. Get back to whatever you were doing before this disease rang your bell.'”

Much of my recent reading and other cultural consumption has featured people who through accident or illness have endured the loss of parts of themselves, like Miles O’Brien, whom I tweeted about above. To his credit, he not only wrote in New York magazine about the frightening accident—when on a reporting trip to the Philippines last February he suffered an accident that led to the amputation of his left arm—he also reports on the neurological sources of phantom pain, and the design and engineering of high-tech prosthetics, a field that’s burgeoning due in part due to the return home of many wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growth of miniature electronics.(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Relatedly, I later listened to a gripping episode of a new CBC radio series called Live Through This. It featured an account of Paul Templer, a wilderness guide in Zimbabwe who survived an attack by an aggressive hippo that nearly killed him, though he lost an arm in the melee, during which he was for some time in the gaping mouth of the animal. Templer healed and was fitted with a prosthetic arm. He later guided another trip down the Zambezi River, to raise money that will help victims of land mine explosions receive prosthetic devices of their own.

These incidents reminded me of what my longtime author Lt General Roméo Dallaire told me in 2006, when he was in New York City, promoting Carroll & Graf’s edition of his Canadian bestseller, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Reflecting on the PTSD he’s been afflicted with ever since, as commander of the under-manned UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda in 1993 he endured the searing experience of trying to prevent the genocide, he told me: “When I slip into depression, the medicines and therapy act like a prosthetic and keep me from falling.”

It occurs to me that in some ways human evolution is a long-running narrative of the development of various kinds of prostheses, from the first crutch to aid a hobbled walker, to the development of finely ground lenses for eyeglasses, the fitting of dental plates (the latter two are prostheses that I use every day), limbs, and other miscellaneous body parts. Even the wheel can be seen in this light as an aid to our daily work, and the club or hammer. Whether affixed and integral to our body; an extension of our hand or arm; or wholly apart from our person, it it fair to say that tools = prosthetics, and vice versa.

These were among the reflections stirred up in me while reading Gill Deacon’s astonishingly fine memoir, a superb first person narrative. I recommend it if you want to read a candid memoir, and if you, or a friend or relative, has been ill. There’s lots of hope and bright humor in this honest book.

 

N.B. Gill Deacon’s book is the second terrific memoir I’ve read by a female Canadian writer in the past few months, the earlier one having been Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue, which I made a #FridayReads last March 14 and wrote about again on March 21, after I’d finished it.

When People Wish They Could Re-chart the Course of History

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Tandey paintingKudos to the Toronto Star for running this story on a fascinating historical what-if that is examined in a new nonfiction book, The Man Who Didn’t Shoot Hitler: The Story of Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler, 1918 by David Johnson. In a surprising twist, the mystery, a sort of urban legend about Hitler, is rooted in the painting shown here, depicting the aftermath of a battle in France, in 1914, early in WWI.

Star reporter Stephanie MacLellan writes that the oil painting—featuring the most-decorated British private, Henry Tandey, carrying a comrade on his shoulders—was commissioned in 1923 by Tandey’s regiment, the Green Howards, executed by war artist Fortunino Matania from a drawing made by a company draughtsman during a lull in fighting when a military hospital was being evacuated.

Many historians, including Tandey biographer Johnson, believe that Hitler was prone to embellishing his WWI record. For instance, his work as a runner, shuttling messages, was entirely behind friendly lines, not near hostilities. MacLellan picks up the tale in the 1930s, after Hitler had been elected to the office of German Chancellor:

“One of the German medical officers at First Ypres, [had been] a Dr. Schwend, [who] went on to join Hitler’s staff. According to Tandey biographer Johnson, Schwend stayed in touch with one of the British soldiers he treated, and in December 1936, the soldier sent him a copy of the Matania painting…. Hitler had his staff order a large photograph of the painting from the Green Howards. His aide sent a note thanking them for the artwork that captured a scene from Hitler’s first battle: ‘The Fuehrer is naturally very interested in things connected with his own war experiences. He was obviously moved when I showed him the picture. He has directed me to send you his best thanks for your friendly gift which is so rich in memories.’

“Hitler hung the photo in the study of his Bavarian retreat. It was here in September 1938, the story goes, that it was spotted by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had come to Germany in his famed attempt to secure ‘peace in our time.’ According to [a] 1940 Canadian Press story, Chamberlain asked his host about this unusual artistic choice. ‘That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again,’ Hitler told him, pointing to Tandey. ‘Providence saved me from such devilish accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.’ On his return to England, Chamberlain telephoned Tandey at home to relay the story. To biographer Johnson, this is where the story starts to fall apart—starting with the fact that Tandey didn’t have a home telephone.”

The legend began with that inaccurate article in 1940, which according to MacLellan, left readers with the idea that, as Germans were routed from a battle at Marcoing, “one of them caught Tandey’s attention. He was quoted at the time, ‘I was going to pick him off, but he was wounded, and I didn’t like to shoot a wounded man,’ he said, according to the Canadian Press story that ran on the Toronto Star’s front page. Tandey didn’t know it at the time, he said, but the wounded German he had in his sights was Hitler, then a 29-year-old dispatch runner with the Bavarian army. It’s one of the most tantalizing what-ifs in history: What would have happened if Tandey had killed Hitler in World War I when he had the chance? The only problem, historians say, is that the incident probably never happened.”

“A more likely possibility, according to historian Thomas Weber [author of Hitler’s First War is that Hitler]— ever the embellisher—used the Tandey story to win political points with Chamberlain, who had come looking for assurances of peace. ‘I think it was just a good tool for Hitler to tell Chamberlain the story of an amicable Anglo-German encounter that he had….Hitler had an incredible talent to tell people he met exactly what they wanted to hear.’ And if he was going to have his life spared by a British soldier, who better than a famous war hero who had won a Victoria Cross, Military Medal and Distinguished Conduct Medal in a matter of weeks? In other words, Tandey.”

In addition, MacLellan reports that Hitler’s service records show that he couldn’t have been near Marcoing, where Tandey certainly was, on the dates in question. MacLellan and her sources fall squarely in the skeptical camp. Their reporting makes it seem remarkable that for the past several decades there have been people who believed a British soldier might’ve killed Adolf Hitler long before WWII, but declined to pull the trigger. For his part, in later years, Tandey doubted it happened at all.

Counter-factuals in historical reading are fun to make up and consider, but sometimes a purported counter-factual may just be non-factual. I think this example, probably more urban legend than anything else, points to our human impulse in which we wish we could erase terrible things from our memories and our common history. How much better the world would’ve been better off if Hitler hadn’t even been alive in the 1930s. To the mindset that believes in something like Henry Tandey’s lamentable decency at not finishing off a wounded enemy soldier, there is the accompanying, “But, he might’ve done it,” therefore keeping alive the hope it needn’t have occurred. This incident also reminds that errors and mis-reporting in news stories can have a knock-on effect lasting decades! I recommend you read Stephanie MacLellan’s whole article, one of the best reads in today’s papers.