Feldman's Faves: February 17, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope you are all having enjoyable Family Day weekends and have been able to survive Snowmaggeden......

Not a great weekend of hockey for those of us who are on Team Canada but I think there is still a chance for redemption here tonight.

If you haven’t had a chance I would strongly recommend that you read Randy’s brilliant and fascinating post on GoodNet for Black History Month. Randy may end up winning the title as the “most interesting person in the world”. A truly inspiring story with great life lessons throughout.

Finally, I am beyond ecstatic in being able to welcome Cailey back to Goodmans (as of tomorrow), showing once again how we are the Hotel California of Toronto law firms.  This is such great news and I know that having Cailey back on Team Goodmans will make us and our clients very, very happy.

No theme this week – just topics of interest.

DISGRACE By J. M. Coetzee -  Noble Prize and Booker Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee is an absolute master writer and Disgrace (written in 1999) is this master’s masterpiece.  I first read this book when it first came out and identified (at least from an age perspective) with the student that was having the affair with her professor, David Lurie (an expert in the life and works of Lord Byron and whose life has some parallels). Now I am the age of that professor and I can’t really identify with him or what he did.  The inappropriate affair between a professor and student kicks off this novel and is the first “disgrace” we encounter but it is not the last.  There is the disgrace that David’s daughter suffers at the hands of her neighbours and the disgrace that one character feels as the result of having an affair, and of course, the disgrace of a people trying to live their lives in the wake of the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.  How different characters in the novel consider disgrace permeates throughout and not everyone does and acts as one would expect.  This book is not light reading and it requires a bit of a thick skin, but it is excellent. Coetzee is a unique talent when it comes to dealing with complex characters, issues and situations.  I am really happy that I picked up this book again 25 years later as it has stood the test of time.  As one reviewer notes, “Disgrace was a Booker prize winner in 1999, making JM Coetzee the first writer to win the trophy twice (first with Life & Times of Michael K). In 2003, he was also awarded the Nobel prize in literature. But beyond the awards, Coetzee is notable as a great South African writer who, together with Breyten Breytenbach and the late André Brink, grappled with the savage complexity of the apartheid and post-apartheid years. Coetzee also took the novel in English into new imaginative and moral territory. From his many outstanding works of fiction, Disgrace is unquestionably his masterpiece. In an apt connection to the beginnings of the 100 best novels series nearly two years ago, Disgrace has been compared by some critics to the work of Daniel Defoe.   David Lurie, on whom Coetzee visits a contemporary catalogue of humiliations, is a fairly average, twice-married, fifty something lecturer at a Cape Town university who, accused of sexual misconduct with one of his students, chooses not to defend himself but rather to suffer his fate with a noble, slightly grumpy, stoicism. In his mind, Lurie has committed no offence; he prefers to get fired and suffer disgrace than endure a politically correct process of rehabilitation. He will not give his bien pensant academic tormentors the satisfaction they crave. “Pass sentence,” he says, “and let us get on with our lives.” He retires to the country to live with his daughter Lucy, and address the meaning of this self-inflicted injunction. It’s here that Disgrace, moving up a gear, begins seriously to engage with the aftermath of apartheid. At first, there is hope. Country life in the eastern Cape, and Lucy’s company, seem to offer the prospect of sanity. But the conflicts of South Africa will never go away. The farm is attacked by a gang of black men, Lucy is raped, and Lurie beaten up. His daughter refuses to press charges, even though one of her assailants is a former “dog man” on the property. The novel ends on a note of utter bleakness. Lurie resolves to stay on the farm to protect his daughter, a domestic act of love by a broken man in search of redemption but almost too confused to know where to find it. Everyone, Coetzee seems to be saying, is a victim. Somewhere, the shade of Samuel Beckett must be smiling.’”  I remember struggling with the harshness of this story the first time I read it and in that area, nothing has changed.  Disgrace shows us many sides of humanity that are very ugly but very real. Sometimes a difficult reality to understand and to accept. Here’s a good review from National Books Critics Circle- https://www.bookcritics.org/2008/03/31/in-retrospect-disgrace-coetzees-masterpiece/n

The Next Big Idea -  Winter: The Secret to Thriving in the Darkest Season –  As Canadians it’s kind of important to have an ability to deal with winter. Winter is a time of year where many people suffer for seasonal depression, lack of activity and general malaise.  I am not one of those people. I love the cold weather, the snow and winter sports but I realize I am not in the majority here.  In any case, the discussion in this PODCAST addresses this issue and offers solutions that in essence relate to mindset and reframing how one thinks of winter. I think it is a helpful approach to deal not only with winter but also anything that we find challenging and difficult. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “In our deeply divided nation, there's one thing many of us seem to agree on: winter is the worst. A recent study found that nearly half of Americans would skip winter if they could. Yet not everyone dreads the cold months. Psychologist Kari Leibowitz has spent years studying these winter-lovers, and she's arrived at a surprising truth: people who thrive this time of year aren't just born that way — they've learned to see the season differently. So can you.”: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000684214359

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon