At McGill's Redpath Museum, a cold early June morning

It was a cold morning in early June when I visited McGill University's Redpath Museum, located on the McGill campus. I remember visiting the Redpath Museum when I was a student at McGill, many years ago. Perhaps the museum was closed for several years, and I was living outside of Montreal for many years, so it wasn't until June 2011 that I finally returned to the Redpath. It's a marvelous place! Meanwhile, on the campus, only a few hundred feet away, I had watched as William Shatner received an honourary Ph.D.; Shatner attended the same high school I went to; in Shatner's time it was called West Hill High School but by the time I got there it was Monklands High School. I have only happy memories of Monklands, especially after the miserable years I had put in at Willingdon School and especially Rosedale School. Shatner grew up in our old neighbourhood, Notre Dame de Grace. Here's an interesting link for more information on the Redpath Museum: http://redpathmuseumclub.wordpress.com/

More coming on that morning at the Redpath Museum!

Family Album: Parker, Chew, Richards (six)

Here we are back in April 1, 1992 in Kingston, Ontario, at the funeral of my Auntie Muriel. That's my son, Jake, on the far left; my mother Hilda Parker Morrissey (and later Nichols) next to him; an unidentified woman, perhaps the minister; my Uncle John Parker whose wife, Muriel Bott, with whom he had been married for almost fifty years has just died; then Erma and John Parker of St. Eustache, QC, the son of my uncle; and on the far right, John's sister, my cousin, Jo-Anne Parker. The two boys in the foreground are John and Erma's sons.

Here is my uncle with his son, John Parker, and daughter, Jo-Anne Parker, on either side of him.

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Family Album: Parker, Chew, Richards (five)

My grandfather's car, his wife Bertha Parker in the front seat; Uncle John in the back seat.

In Woodstock, Ontario: Irene Holden on the left, Hartley Holden with cigarette in the middle, and Jenny Holden on the right. All were born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England. Irene died before marrying.

It's the early 1930s, my uncle John Parker with his sister, my mother, Hilda Parker



My grandfather's brother Victor Parker; he lived with his mother Bessie Richards until her death. He used to work at a dairy located just below Rene Levesque and Lucien L'Allier (the streets had different names at that time). After his mother's death he spent many years at the Douglas Hospital in Verdun, Quebec. One day (in the early 1970s) my mother was reading the obituaries and came across his name. We visited a funeral parlour where he was laid to rest. His mother had intended that he be looked after by his brothers after her death, but this doesn't seem to have happened. He is seen here with the family husky.

Family Album - Parker, Chew, Richards (four)

Hilda Parker on a snowy day near the Mother House (corner Atwater Street and Sherbrooke Street West) where she was a secretarial student.

We're in the Laurentians, just north of Montreal, and that's my uncle John Parker eating an apple, then Iris Price, my grandmother Bertha Parker (ne Chew), and my mother Hilda Parker Morrissey.

This is my uncle John Parker, and his sister (my mother) Hilda Parker, at a cemetery perhaps visiting Bill. This must be in the early 1920s. Montreal.

At the same cemetery as above, Bertha (Chew Parker), her husband (my grandfather) John Parker, children John and Hilda.

Family Album - Parker, Chew, Richards (three)

.Here is my mother, Hilda Parker (Morrissey), at her First Communion at St. Jude Anglican Church in Montreal; the dress was borrowed from a Roman Catholic friend's family.

Here is my mother, Hilda Parker, with family friend Iris Price at Plage Laval. Iris was the daughter of a friend of my mother's mother.  



Here is my uncle, John Leslie Parker, my mother's younger brother, in front of or near a flour mill in Woodstock, Ontario, where other relatives from England had settled after moving to Canada.

This photograph was taken in the Laurentians just north of Montreal. That's my uncle John Parker eating an apple on the far left, then Iris Price, my grandmother Bertha Chew Parker, and her daughter Hilda Parker on the far right. John Parker in the photo is Bertha Chew Parker's son.

Family Album - Parker, Chew, Richards (two)

My uncle John Parker, in the Royal Canadian Air Force, during World War II; he was stationed in Prince Edward Island.

My uncle John Parker (on left) in front of a pharmacy on St. Antoine Street in Montreal. The friend on the right is the son of the "chemist." 

A drive on the Lakeshore in a car rented by my grandfather's friend Tommy Byron. Tommy arranged to bring over his sister, May Byron, in a stateroom on the ship on which he worked. From left: a young John Parker (my uncle) at the wheel, Tommy Byron, John Parker (my mother's father), my mother Hilda Parker, my mother's mother Bertha Chew Parker, and  May Kenyon at the far right. Photo taken in the early 1920s; looks like a fun time was had by all!

Photograph of Bertha Chew Parker. Not sure who the woman is on the right.

Family Album - Parker, Chew, Richards (one)

Bertha Chew, mother of young Bill, her son, in the backyard of her mother-in-law, Bessie Richards Parker..

.Bessie Richards, grandmother of young Bill. Bessie had four or five sisters, one was Bella who lived in St. Thomas, Ontario

Young Bill, my mother's older brother who died when still a child.

Young Bill. We always heard that Bill had a childhood illness and that my grandparents called for their family doctor, but the doctor never arrived, he was drunk.

F.R. Scott memorial plaque unveiling

The F.R. Scott Memorial, 12 October, 2011, at St. James the Apostle Church, Montreal

A commemorative plaque for F.R. Scott will be unveiled on October 12 at St. James the Apostle church here in Montreal. Scott was a constitutional lawyer, a McGill professor of law, and an important Canadian modernist poet; however, poetry was his first love. He states, “Everything in my life that I did was done with a feeling of making poetry.”

Below is an excerpt from an interview with F.R. Scott published in the Quill & Quire in July 1982. Scott’s answers here deal with the Canadian Constitution, Canada-Quebec relations, and the big multi-national corporations; his answers are prescient and insightful in light of today’s world:

Q&Q: Is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms entrenched in the new Constitution the one you would have wanted?

Scott: The Charter of Rights is certainly not the one I wanted. It was put together in such a hurried fashion. All these power boys running around in smoke-filled rooms. There are many things in it that will cause us tremendous headaches. Of course, I have been in favour of an entrenched bill of rights written into the old Constitution, it was understood that certain laws affecting freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or freedom of religion could not be tampered with beyond the surveillance of the court — on any condition. Now, although it is entrenched really it is only partially entrenched because there’s the clause allowing a province to opt out. Quebec wants to do this.

Q&Q: Do you think the current form of Quebec nationalism is a progressive force?

Scott: I think the Parti Québecois’ position of independence is reactionary. Furthermore, I think it is immoral. It will make everybody worse off. There’s no absolute right to independence. You’ve got to see what harm it will do. To take a functioning federal system and split it into pieces is doing so much harm all around and about that I say it is immoral. Quebec has not been so badly treated. Separatism is just satisfying an amour impropre.

Q&Q: Is it too late to bring Quebec back into the fold?

Scott: Quebec is more subconsciously in the fold than we think. You know, I was a great defender of Quebec’s rights when it came to compulsory conscription. That made me a total isolationist when the war broke out and got me into more trouble than being a socialist. But it has always been my hope and faith that Quebec will come back. It will take a good deal of common sense, which I’ve always felt French-speaking Quebeckers have, and which their English-speaking counterparts increasingly show.

Q&Q: When you entitled your brief to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, “Canada — One or Nine”, were you questioning the ability of Canadians to grasp the potential of their country and does this still worry you?

Scott: This problem is as real to me today as it was in 1938. The spirit of commercialism, the disregard of the community, this attitude is so powerful and has as its most active defenders the big corporations. Only a strong federal state can stand up to these gigantic corporations though even it seems to have a hard time doing so. But at least a strong federal state can evoke a certain national will that says this is our place, these are our resources. To hell with the continental arrangement where the corporations will take 90% and the country will be left with 10%. We must say, we’re going to come into our own slowly. And if we had nothing but little individual nation states, little feudal forts running Canada, we’d be completely swallowed. I think I was ahead of my time in saying we must strengthen the federal system.

Herbert Read on art

"Sailboats off Kitsilano" by Nellie McClung

Nellie McClung at the Art Gallery of Vancouver, 1993

Herbert Read writes:

Tolstoy's famous definition of the process of art is expressed in these words: 'To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movement, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art.

'Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'

Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, Pelican Books, London, 1950, pages 185 - 186.

Herbert Read on Celtic Art

Herbert Read writes:

Celtic art is one of the most intrinsically interesting phases in the whole history of art. By various historical accidents, the extreme Northern parts of Europe – Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and Northern Scandinavia – became the preserve of an indigenous prehistoric style. This style, which originated in the Middle Rhine area, was brought to the British Isles by the retreating Celtic tribes, and here preserved  its characteristics whilst successive waves of tribal invasion swept across the rest of Europe.

The development of European art during the so-called “Dark Ages” (A.D. 400 to 1000) is extremely complicated, and Celtic art is involved in the general uncertainty. But in spite of the rarity of survivals from the period, it seems certain that the early Celtic art of the pre-Roman period survived as a continuous tradition in Ireland until a new influence appeared in the North in the form of Christianity. In Britain, the introduction of Christianity was a very slow process, lasting over a period of 200 years at least. There is but slight evidence of the prevalence of Christianity in Britain during the Roman period; its real history in this country begins with the mission of St Ninian, a disciple of St Martin of Tours, who built a church at Whithorn, Wigtownshire, in A.D. 412. Not long after, Ireland was converted by St. Patrick, and during the sixth century the process of conversion spread to Wales, to the Picts in the north of Scotland, and then to the Saxons in England. During the sixth and seventh centuries this northern church became the shelter of Christianity in Europe; and at this period, one of the most important and significant for the whole development of art in Europe, direct contact was established between the North and the East.
. . . .

The whole range of Celtic art therefore divides itself into two distinct periods – the early, pre-Christian period, deriving its style direct from Neolithic Age, and the later post-Christian period, during which the stylistic influences from the east were incorporated. Dr. Mahr… has subdivided this post-Christian period into (1) the Vernacular style, from the seventh century to the appearance of the Vikings about 850; (2) the Hiberno-Viking style from 850 to 1000, the period of Viking domination in Ireland; (3) the last animal style, from 1000 to 1125; and (4) the Hiberno-Romanesque style, 1125 to the Anglo-Norman Conquest.

The ornament of the early Celtic period is linear, geometric and abstract; the type most familiar is the interlaced ribbon or plaited ornament vulgarized in present-day ‘Celtic’ tombstones. It is seen in all its purity in the Book of Kells, the eight-century manuscript belonging to Trinity College, Dublin.
. . . .

Into this gloomy and abstract field of art the symbols of Christianity come like visitants from an exotic land. In a prickly nest of geometrical lines, two birds of paradise will settle, carrying in their beaks a bunch of Eastern grapes. David comes with his harp, and the three children in the furnace; Adam and Eve, and the sacrifice ofIsaac, are represented in panels reserved among the ba ns of abstract ornament; and finally the stone is dominated by Christ in Glory and the company of angels. Such stones still stand where they were erected centuries ago in Ireland and Scotland; and no monuments in the world are so moving in their implications; they symbolize ten thousand years of human history, and represent that history at its spiritual extremes, nearest and farthest from the mercy of God.

Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, Pelican Books, London, 1950, pages 85-88.

from Herbert Read

 

2010

"...the Greeks were wiser than we, and their belief, which always seems so paradoxical to us, that beauty is moral goodness, is really a simple truth. The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves. That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision. When that vision is communal, it becomes a religion, and the vitality of art throughout the greater part of history is closely bound up with some form of religion. But, gradually, as I have already pointed out, for the last two or three centuries that bond has been getting looser, and there does not seem to be any immediate promise of a new contact being established."


                                            -- Herbert Read
                                            The Meaning of Art, page 190

                                            Pelican Books

                                            London, 1950