JALNA

A family quarrel: "Renny stood looking from one excited face to another, feeling irritated by their noise, their ineffectuality, yet, in spite of all, bathed in an immense satisfaction.  This was his family.  His tribe.  He was head of his family.  Chieftain of his tribe.  He took a very primitive, direct, and simple pleasure in lording it over them, caring for them, being badgered, harried, and importuned by them.  They were all of them dependent on him except Gran, and she was dependent, too, for she would have died away from Jalna.  And beside the fact that he provided for them, he had the inherent quality of the chieftain.  They expected him to lay down the law; they harried him till he did.  He turned his lean red face from one to the other of them now, and prepared to lay down the law"--Jalna

Last week my Classic Book Club discussed The Name of the Rose. Now I've started reading Mazo de la Roche's family saga Jalna (for the second time) as our next book.  It's the first of 16 novels she wrote about the Whiteoaks, an old-fashioned landowning family on an estate in what's now Mississauga, named for the station in India where the founder and his wife met.

The series is rather middlebrow, of course, but I like them overall. (Today they're more popular in France than in Canada.) I think my favourite character is Piers, the brother who's a consummate farmer and gets most of the work done.  It isn't that I admire him--he sometimes bullies his younger brothers--but there's something genuine about him.

Last week John, Moira and I were working on the driveway in our back yard, digging up the soil and replacing it with gravel.  We no longer have a car, but it's useful for visitors.

Next month the History Meetup is discussing the Seven Years War, so now I'm reading Frank McLynn's 1759:  The Year Britain Became Master of the World.  It has an interesting discussion about how Edmund Burke published an essay that year distinguishing the beautiful and the sublime and European soldiers experienced the Canadian landscape in sublime terms.

We recently finished the fourth season of The Wire. (I'd seen the first three before, but this was my first time for the fourth.) It's an especially brilliant season, with things going wrong in a thousand different ways.  This one put a new focus on the school system as Prez, the cop who got into trouble over excessive force but has a brilliant mind, quit and became a teacher instead.  Herc screwed up even more grandly than usual!

Friday I'm getting my second COVID-19 vaccination!