Although pre-VIA Rail trains feature throughout this show, serious train talk and Gould's admission begins around the 4:55 mark. Both the talk and visuals are impressive. One comment of Gould's at around the 6:30 mark I found particularly interesting was in his introduction to the surveyor W. "Wally" V. Maclean:
"In the course of a day long conversation when we first met he [JDL: Wally] tried to explain to me the metaphorical significance, as he saw it, of his profession. He sort of parlayed surveying into a literary tool in the same way that Jorge Luis Borges manipulates mirrors and Franz Kafka badgers beetles and as he did so I realized that his relation to this craft, which has as its subject the land, enabled him to read the signs of the land, and enabled him to find within the particular a suggestion of the infinite, and vice versa I suppose.”
The other parts of the show can be found at these links:
Amazing! I know The Idea of North as a radio piece, but I had no idea that it became the stuff of a film.
ReplyDeleteThough there are no trains in it, Gould’s In Search of Petula Clark is another great radio piece. Gould thought of Clark as better than the Beatles.
I'll have to go look for that Petula Clark piece.
Delete