...about Kyle Shewfelt's GOLD MEDAL performance in the floor exercise. It's Canada's first Olympic medal in artistic gymnastics EVER. The Calgary gymnast scored 9.787 on the event, which tied him with Romania's Marian Dragulescu. However, Shewfelt took sole possession of the gold after judges employed a mathematical tie-breaking system.
Watching his performance gave me goosebumps. The sheer beauty and elegance of his routine was astonishing. Sometimes we forget just how amazing the human body can be as a form of art. Kyle Shewfelt has reminded us, with exacting grace.
Let's hope he has more good news in the vault finals.
Summer book round up #2
Some more off-the-shelf selections I've managed to make it through this summer...
Boyhood, by JM Coetzee, is a companion piece to his coming of age novel, Youth. In this instance, we're taken into the life of a young boy growing up in the suburbs of post-war Capetown, South Africa.
This book veers between fascinating and terrifying. Fascinating because the voice of the young boy (possibly an autobiography of the author) is so strong, so vivid, and so evocative, that it may very well be the most realistic presentation of a young boy in all modern fiction. However, it's also terrifying in the depiction of the boy's hates, loathings, secrets, and opinions, especially towards his mother. Coetzee gives us a character with the perceptiveness of an adult, trapped in the body of a 9 year old. Can children truly be as cold as this protagonist? Or is it the author himself who was such a complicated, dark young soul? At times, it scarcely bears thinking about...but it was a novel I just couldn't put down.
Downhill Chance, by Donna Morrissey, was a book I was looking forward to reading. Her previous novel, Kit's Law, was a raucous, bawdy, bloody, glorious meditation on the life of a youngster trying to be an adult in the wild and wacky world of hard-up Newfoundland. I loved every word of it, and eagerly looked forward to picking up her second novel.
I was extremely disappointed. The prose is a slang-and-dialect overdose, something the first novel avoided. The depression -- the bleak ugliness of the situation -- is laid on with such thickness, such brutality, that it makes the novels of David Adams Richards look positively joyous. A quagmire of darkness and dreariness, I longed only to survive the story, rather than enjoy it. None of the characters garnered my sympathy, and all I desired was to escape this distraught landscape. A great, wasted opportunity.
The antidote to the above? Bellwether, by Connie Willis -- a novel that is wry, witty, hilarious, and wonderful in its meditation on fads and the roles they play in influencing human behaviour throughout human history. Are people immune to fads? Can a single person be responsible for the creation of a powerful trend? Are humans no different to the dumb-ass sheep that play such a pivotal (and obscenely funny) part in this book? All of these questions and more are debated and wrangled over throughout this delicious book, in between birthday parties from hell, observations on modern office management (before anyone had even heard of THE OFFICE!) & parenting, and whether or not Barbie will ever die! If this book doesn't put a huge smile (or even a wry smile) on your face, then you are a sad sack of hopelessness.
