Good and Bad Stories from Montreal

Although if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you will know that I am a sports fan, I don’t write very much about sports on here (or ‘or anything, lately’, some of you will have pointed out, with a certain amount of justification) because it isn’t that kind of blog and honestly the lasts thing the internet needs is more Sports Opinions. However, I’m giving you one today anyway, and only partly because it gives me something to write about.

For people who are not sports fans, the attraction is often hard to understand, in the way that nearly any fandom that you’re not a part of can look incomprehensible from the outside. But basically, the appeal of watching sports is that it is entertainment: watching a hockey game or a 100m sprint or a gymnastics competition is watching a story that you don’t know the end of yet. Human nature being what it is, we can find our heroes and villains in the story, hope for certain outcomes. Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don’t. Things happen in these real-world stories that if you tried to put them in a fictional one, people would insist they are ‘too unbelievable’.

That’s the main reason why I watch, anyway, overlaid with other ones that we don’t need to dig into today.

As you will also probably have been unable to avoid noticing if you follow me on social media, this spring and summer my favourite hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens, gave us a heck of a story. They kind of scraped into the playoffs, which meant a first-round matchup with the arch-rival Toronto Maple Leafs (forever the villains in the Canadiens’ story). The Leafs were one of the teams favoured to win the Cup, so this was not predicted to go well. Montreal won the first game, which was fun, but then lost the next 3 (of a best of 7 series) and things did not look good.

But then the Canadiens won the next 3 games in a row to take the series and eliminate the Leafs. This was already a great story (for Montreal fans), but then they won the next round. And the next round, against another Cup-favourite team, enabling the Canadiens to reach the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in 28 years. Now, at this point ‘reality’ reasserted itself, and the Canadiens did not end up winning the Cup, but (again, for fans of the team) it was still an amazing, exciting ride that was perhaps especially appreciated as it came in what we hope are the latter stages of the pandemic.

The Montreal Canadiens told a wonderful story.

Then some time passed, and we got to last week’s NHL Entry Draft. With their first-round selection, Montreal took a player who had taken pictures of a girl while they were having sex, and distributed them to his teammates. He was found guilty and paid a small fine in Sweden, and had said (however we choose to assess the sincerity of the statement) that he did not want to be drafted this year because he didn’t deserve it. The Canadiens picked him anyway.

The Montreal Canadiens told a terrible story, an all too familiar one, where the violation and abuse of women is something to be forgiven and forgotten, especially if you happen to have a highly-marketable skill. ‘Good at hockey’ was a more important factor in deciding whether or not to add this person to their organization than ‘sex offender’ was. What a horrific message to send to the women and girls who are fans of the team, and hockey in general. What a horrific message to send to young men, also – that if you abuse women, it doesn’t matter if you’re good at hockey. We knew society sends this message, or ones like it, all the time, despite constant calls for change and commitments to change.

Lots of people have responded to criticism of the pick with comments on the age of the young man and calls for him to get a ‘second chance’. As far as I can see he’s still on his first chance, though – aside from the fine, the consequences for him have been a couple of awkward conversations with the press as he continues his express ride to the best hockey league in the world. His abuse of a young woman hasn’t even slowed him down. Of course he has a right to live his life and earn a living, but playing pro hockey in the richest league in the world? That’s not a right, but it is something the Montreal Canadiens insisted on handing him.

Meanwhile, we know that his victim will wrestle with this for the rest of her life, and doesn’t ever really get that ‘clean slate’ everyone seems so eager to give to her abuser. ‘Move on and let the kid play hockey’, except she doesn’t get to move on. The story our society is telling when we decide that doesn’t matter very much because someone is a marketable athlete isn’t a very good one at all.

There’s a decent argument to be made that our society gives sports, and athletes, far more prominence and influence than they should reasonably have, but have it they do, and as much as the organizations and owners love to exploit the wonderful stories sports can tell to sell tickets and merch, they should also think far more than they do about the negative stories they allow themselves to be part of, with the behaviours that are tolerated and rewarded if they can lead to some goals, strikeouts, or first downs.

Where does this leave me with the Montreal Canadiens? I honestly don’t know. There’s still time for them to rescind the pick, but no indication that they actually will do so. I stopped being a fan of the NFL when I found it impossible to continue giving my support to the culture and institutions around pro football. I don’t know if I’m there yet with the NHL, and the Canadiens, but they have decided to tell such a terrible story, and it killed the joy from the wonderful one.

Thanks for reading.

Imagining Escapes

Late one this week, and I don’t have a huge amount to write about (man, you really know how to sell these blog entries, Evan) but I have been reading an interesting book the last while that gave me something to think about. I’ve taken one of my forays into non-fiction and I’m reading The Art of Resistance by Justus Rosenberg. Boiled down, it is about a young man from Danzig who goes from ‘literature student at the Sorbonne’ to ‘underground resistance fighter’ in the months and years after the Second World War has broken out around him.

It’s a pretty amazing story, and I’m only about halfway through.

However, we’ve already been through a part where he was part of a network that helped a variety of intellectuals who would have been in danger from the Nazis get out of Occupied France. This included many members of the surrealist movement, and Rosenberg got to meet people like Chagall and Max Ernst, and have conversations with them (although these were apparently always hampered by the feeling on both sides that they were not quite on the same intellectual plane, which is a feeling I get a lot when talking to very clever people).

Among these was an opportunity to ask André Breton why it was that surrealist art needed to be quite so strange. (And again, I sympathise) Breton apparently responded (paraphrasing the book here) that the problems of the world could not be solved by small changes within established ways of thinking; what was necessary was a completely new way of imagining society and humanity, and that was what surrealism was meant to encourage.

For me reading this, right away it made surrealism make more sense to me than it ever had before (I am not what one would call a philosophy major), but it also crystallized for me part of what I think the strength of SFF writing is, and why I like it so much. Because a lot of SFF is doing that exact thing, even if it isn’t surrealist – it’s still asking you to imagine the world, or a world, in a completely different way. And see where that takes you.

Perhaps especially in times where things look awfully bad, a flight of the imagination is how we can see our way out.

That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Thanks for reading.

There it be

Ok, so obviously we missed an entry last week, primarily because I just didn’t have anything I felt like writing about. With all that has been continuing to happen in recent days, it just hasn’t felt appropriate to be yelling about stories with elves in them, even though I recognize very much that we absolutely all need our escape moments, especially in trying times.

So this week I was going to write another whole thing of some more of my thoughts on what is going on in Canada of late, hampered somewhat by my undying awareness that my thoughts on what is going on in Canada of late have probably already been said better by someone else, and we’re not dying for White Dude Opinion #8238 to begin with, and further that this is not really what this blog is usually for.

So I was back and forth on what to do this week until I was out on my back deck, and looked at the purple pansy plant (formerly Mystery Plant) and saw this:

Yes, that’s a tiny piece of lobelia. Obviously not the same plant as the one from this previous entry, the one I tried to over-winter, but some of its offspring, for certain. I’m not gonna write another long hacky metaphor about meanings to be attached to this plant but – I really, truly thought with all of the less-than-ideal conditions, and then another plant growing in its place, that the lobelia was fully gone. But there it is. A little bit of it made it through, and is blooming in the sunshine of another summer.

I’ll be back yelling about Iron Fist real soon, I promise.

Thanks for reading.