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From a period that began in the late 1990s, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s writing studio in Istanbul sat in an apartment on Susan Sokak, a street name that translated into English as “Sesame Street.” I doubt this locale was what the Children’s Television Workshop was originally referring to, as Jim Henson’s Muppets wander their fictional fragment of Manhattan. Memory is often glacial, as we know, and accumulates as naturally as it erodes. Ernie and Bert sit on the front step as Oscar the Grouch barks at passers-by, monsters and Muppets and humans alike. Elmo, no longer the new kid, old enough now to have kids of his own. Big Bird, who only managed to correctly remember Mr. Hooper’s name once both actor and character had expired, his long-standing twist of a name that succeeding generations of children would most likely never be aware of.
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A British documentary on the Battle of Quebec and the Plains of Abraham opens with tales of British might and French near-dominance of most of what is now Canada and the United States, and closes with the American colonies independently uniting. For every battle the host mentions, he reports a humiliating defeat. Apparently this what British schoolboys were taught, a context far broader in scope than the one presented in Canadian schools: the Battle of Quebec—with no mention of American Rebellion a generation later—jumping directly to the War of 1812. There was little between the British North America Act and Confederation in our curriculum, rounding off our history with a leap across decades to our presence in the First World War. We were left with neither connections nor context, from the not-yet-Major-General James Wolfe’s experiences at the battles of Falkirk and Culloden, General George Washington pushing the French out of Virginia, or explorer James Cook traversing the St. Lawrence, producing the first intricate water-maps. Our list of histories edited, simplified, clipped and repackaged. Is it any accident that, near the end of the documentary, the word “Quebec,” the host says, translates as “narrows.”
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As part of the final scene of Mary Tyler Moore’s classic, namesake sitcom, her character, Mary Richards, should have returned to the streets of Minneapolis and recovered her hat. It was a very fine hat.