Salty Material and The Salto Mortale

      I wasn't sure I was going to be bothered to post anything today, but the latest victim of poor cbeck's "Forbidden P0rn sites" is, to say the least, a surprise.   I'm thinking this blog eventually have to do something to earn that assessment.

      That said, I should note that it's the Belfast Cowboy's birthday today, which should require that each of you go out and dig up a few tunes by The Man to which to listen, preferrably over a very potent series of potables. It occurs to me, though, that most of you will dig up The Best of Van Morrison or Moondance, the first the hit-compilation, the second probably the most romantic album ever made (no wonder I can no longer listen to it; well, I no longer have a copy of it either).   I, however, would encourage you to look out for songs like Stepping Out Queen, Part II or the live version of Rave On, John Donne, or his magnificent rendering of Caravan from the 1974 live album It's Too Late To Stop Now.   Better than anyone in "pop" music, Van The Man knows how to use a variety of different instruments to powerful effect, and not just guitars and pianos and saxophones, but trumpets, flutes, oboes, and strings; only Van would give the lead rhythm parts to piccolos, or conduct vibrant tête-à-têtes with a single violin.   Greil Marcus (methinks, anyway; memory slips at this age) once said that rock stars should realize that the quality of one's music is inversely proportional to the number of instruments one uses-- unless you're Van Morrison. There's a lushness to his best music that very, very few others can even come close to replicating.   Listen to it, as a famous Leonard Cohen character says, "with that part of your mind that you delegate to watching out for blackflies and mosquitoes." Search out albums like Astral Weeks and Into The Music and Veedon Fleece and No Guru No Method No Teacher and Enlightenment and Days Like This and Down The Road: there's some truly marvellous stuff in them thar hills.   Check out, by the way, this review from 1979 of Into the Music which remains one of the better rock reviews of Morrison I've ever read.  

      POST-SCRIPT: This blog (as of 3.30 PM EST) is astonished-- flabbergasted-- fucking amazed-- at who's on top here.   Nice to see, especially for an opus posthumous.   Or, as some might say, "pretty fly for a dead guy."

I Can't Believe He's Not Butter

      Well, it's the end of August, the season closed through with the delicacy of a butter-churn.   Everything, once again, turned out exactly as expected, no luck or saving graces daring to intercede.   The dreaded day came and went.   My mother's uncle, a kindly old gentleman, passed away Sunday.   And now the more bracing fact, that I won't be teaching this year at all, the last hope being needed as a pinch-hitter dashed by my employer's rather glib silence.   So much for respect.   I have to say, I'm not sure what's worse: the continuation of this bleak situation, the general tenor of my relationship with my employer of the past seven years, or the simple fact that I won't be teaching.   More I think than most of my colleagues, I enjoy teaching.   As frustrating as the job can sometimes be, there's precious little more rewarding than seeing a student light up with some new idea or new way of looking at things, the happy anagnorisis.   I'm going to miss it.   And, damn, I was good at it, too (though I never really did believe my own 'press,' thankfully).   But there we are.   And I'll miss the kids, too, at least the ones that actually cared.   There are always fewer of them than one would like, but always a few more than one tends to expect.

      In short, there's not much to be happy about.   The more optimistically-inclined would probably say that the Not-So-Good Doctor is now "at a crossroads."   Pardon me if I'm not so optimistic, given that my luck in the past several years has been the stuff of blues dirges.   Welcome to the butter-churn.  

      This means I'm going to have a find a way through all of this, which will require me to be things that I normally am not (and which I have a horrible time trying to be): aggressive, gregarious, self-promoting, 'hungry,' in the Cassian sense of the word.   In other words, it means having to be very, very fake-- and very much not myself, which always leaves me with a queasy, unsettled feeling in my gut.   Which, I suppose, is a way of saying that things are only going to get worse before they get better.   I am a grain of mustard seed, ready for the Great Poupon....

      So, don't count on too much blogging in the next while.   It's best if events inside the churn are left undescribed: I'm sure no one would want to read about them, and I'm even more sure I wouldn't want to write about them.   Makes me wonder, though, if happiness is a warm bun....

      In the interim, check out these two lengthy pieces, one, a surprisingly good assessment of the career of Graham Greene, and the other a study of the implications of daytime reality television which eventually reveals a very Bushian skew but does contain some good observations on the nature of that hideous beast.

---

      ADDENDUM: It never ceases to amaze me the ridiculousness of some parts of the academic world.   Evidently, the student in question could never, ever, ever have tolerated reading Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game (with Breavman's famous shouting of F G to summon the spirit of Bertha), let alone Beautiful Losers, or even my now-medieval M.A. thesis.   We both surely must have been harrassing somebody....

And So It Begins

The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

And it's over to you, Wallace:

Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of the sun, too, gone... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never-- shall never hear.   And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never been-- shall never hear that bird,
And the stillness is the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

Read that and tell me Stevens wasn't one of the best poets of the twentieth century, or any.   In this, can I be allowed a moment of indulgence of a fondness I should no longer have?   (Yes, those of you that know the etymology of the word 'fond' are chuckling.) Call it a further admission of weakness, if you wish.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
       Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
      Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
      Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
      Jenny kissed me.

      (Leigh Hunt, 1832, "Rondeau")

Have no fear.   The Doctor will shortly return to his cantankerous, even cankerous, self.   Even the ugly, miserable and disspirited are allowed their visions of Dulcinea, always more images than facts.   Most of us simply try not to admit we have them-- or, rather, that we still esteem them even when we've long-since lost them.   But Gawd bless Dulcinea.   She reminds us who we were when we were better people--- before, before, before.

      ADDENDUM: Don't worry, the cyncism and irony that each of you expects will soon return, no doubt "in spades." It's only a matter of time.   As Danny Glover oh-so-famously said, "I'm too old for this shit."   (This is probably now officially true.)   And of that, enough-- I've said far, far too much.

      UPDATE: The treat of skreaking arm-saws and pounding hammers. Happy Happy Joy Joy.

A Welcome Return

      It seems that the Zaniac has not only returned from his journey to the Middle East, but he has at long last been (kinda) updating his blog.   This blog's linking here to it (a) so any of you interested can check out what the little bugger's been up to, and (b) to encourage him, whether naggingly or supportively, to try and keep his blog going.   What can I say?   He's a former student of mine, so he deserves all the nagging he's gonna get.

Oh, Oh, Domino....

      Just a bit of fair warning: blogging for the next little while will very likely be spotty and maybe even non-existent as the Not-So-Good Doctor gets the Hell out of Dodge for a bit.   Yes, as Mr Eliot would say, now is "the dark time of the year."   In the words of Van Morrison, for whose Toronto gig I never did get around to getting tickets because of that trip to Pennsylvania:

Don't wanna discuss it
Think it's time for a change
You may get disgusted
Start thinkin' that I'm strange

In that case I'll go underground
Get some heavy rest
Never have to worry
About what is worst or what is best

Oh, oh, Domino....

Just let it all be over quickly.... I know, wishful thinking, wishful thinking....

      ADDENDUM: More Zozo sketches from a year or so ago:



"Just love" me.... Yeah, right........



Hey, in the first image, I look like a bloody pixie, flying about in the air.... Grr.   But I have to say, at the risk of sounding like an Air Farce parody, I love that word 'tingly.'

A Reminder

      The High Priest's final album will be released next Tuesday, as this blog has previously reported.   I know I'll be getting it sooner or later, and I'd encourage everyone else to as well, simply because it's our last chance to hear "new" Ray Charles, a last chance to listen to new material from a legend.   The album's last song is "Crazy Love" with Van Morrison, Charles' only true heir, a fitting closure matched by the peculiar synchronicity of the album being released on Morrison's 59th birthday.   You can find a prelimary review of the album here which suggests Charles indeed went out with a bang.

      Addendum: According to this article (scroll down), the Charles/Morrison duet is the only live track on the album.   How appropriate.

Erick and Clarabelle

      You've heard about those spam emails going around claiming to offer you access to a vault of money, if only you could help out some poor bastard who's been in hospital for xxx years.   Well, Gene Weingarten decided to entertain the idea, with amusing results.   This blog's favourite bit: "She [Gene's wife] likes compliments on account of she never gets them because of her personality." Ho-ho!

      Also, though it's a month old now, check out Gene's answer to a young lad named Erick who wrote in with a question about the "when I was your age" syndrome. The whole piece is very funny, but the beginning is a riot:

Dear Erick:

You ask an excellent question, and it deserves an honest, straightforward, respectful answer. Unfortunately, for some reason you asked me. What kind of a stupid name is "Erick," anyway? I realize this is not your fault, per se, but the apple never falls very far from the tree, if you see what I am saying. Unnecessary consonants are the enemy of brevity. And because brevity is the soul of wit, your name is an affront to the art of humor. And since humor is mankind's main defense against the existential horror of existence, you are a living embodiment of loneliness, despair, chaos, decay and death.

Thanks for writing!

"You are a living embodiment of loneliness, despair, chaos, decay and death."   Brilliant.

You All Know This Blog Had To Report This

      Why is the Not-So-Good Doctor so often in a dour or cranky mood?   Because of his commitment to truth.   And that's his story and he's stickin' to it.

      (It also explains why so many of you preternaturally cheerful people have very questionable memories.   Look for this study to be plied eventually in defense of the suffering-artist's syndrome.)

Unreal Titty

      And she will show us terror in a handful of bust.   This blog can only imagine the horror Tom would be in if he saw what passes now for popular culture....

The Blair Pitch Project And Other Blight House Stories

      More cynical posturing from the White House?   Nehhhhhhh-verrrrrr.

      See also this analysis of the Swift Boat Veterans For *ahem* Truth campaign from The Guardian.   It strikes me as being pretty much on point, and it sends a shudder down this blog's spine with its central observations:

There are three things we can learn from this. First, there is no level to which Republicans will not stoop to besmirch a character, belittle an issue or befuddle the electorate. Second, there is no level to which the Democrats will not stoop to attempt to neutralise these attacks. And third, that the Republicans will always win in this race to the bottom because so much less is expected of them and, when it comes to muck-slinging, they have no qualms about getting their hands dirty.

Dear lord, I hope not.   This blog was one of those that believed the Democrats were making a huge mistake in putting so much emphasis on Kerry's Vietnam record (instead of covering the gestalt of his c.v.), and that mistake is bearing poisonous fruit.   The Bushies have learned their lesson from the media: say something often enough and people will believe it, even if it's eventually proven false (c.f., WMD in Iraq, Iraqi involvement with Al Qa'eda); it's the lesson of printing the sensational headline now and publishing a correction later.   Problem is, as we all know, most people don't notice those buried corrections and retractions; they tend to remember the pap they were sold.   And if this doesn't suggest to you one of the fundamental problems with democracy as it now exists, I don't know what will.   Except, perhaps, remembering that the idiot down the road, the bigoted jerk with a nasty proclivity for hitting his children and screaming at his wife, has a vote too.

      ADDENDUM: The Neocons in Washington have come under attack from an unlikely source: Pat Buchanan, of all people.   Go figure.   Strange thing is, many of Buchanan's points are oddly salient, even if normally Buchanan's ideas are usually as offensive as a ripe fart in a small room.

      ADDENDUM ADDENDUM:   Check out Confusion Road's take on the Swifties. Key quote: "If he was a hero, we'd have tried harder to kill him."   Even better is CR's bit on the death of Dick Cheney, which features the oh-so-Bushian words, "I've always known Dick Cheney to be true to his word. I'd trust him a lot more than I'd trust some silly coroner."  

O O O O That Dylanesque Rag

      Wow: James Wolcott has issued a devastating review of Christopher Ricks' new study of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, concluding that "the nicest thing that can be said about Christopher Ricks's book is that it means well and won't hurt anybody."   Ouch.   Given the snippets that are included in Wolcott's review, I can see why he's so hostile to the book (with Ricks seeming very often to launch into Joycean indulgence), but Wolcott seems too to have his own axe to grind from the outset.   As the truism goes, academic debate is always so intense because the stakes are so small.

The Aura And The Coming On

      I don't know how this blog managed to miss this, but it seems that the American poet Donald Justice passed away two weeks ago. You can check out a smattering of his poems at this site, despite their infernal pop-up windows.   (There's also a few more at Plagiarist.) A minor favourite of this blog's is this poem, though its title is a bit cumbersome:

Love's Strategems

But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.

Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their strategems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.

Oh, so familiar-- and yet so far, far away.

      Check out, too, this interview with Justice with the Poetry Society of America, in which Justice says just what I expected he would say (though, all in all, he seems rather terse in the interview):

What do you see as the consequences of "political correctness" for American poetry?

Disaster.

I'd encourage you also to read "The Evening of the Mind," another very fine poem, indeed.   Rest in peace, Mr. Justice.

The Evening Of The Mind

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the page
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.
Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,
Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
Your name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and the coming on.
It is the thing descending, circling, here.
And now it puts a claw out and you take it.
Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.

You said you would not go away again,
You did not want to go away -- and yet,
It is as if you stood out on the dock
Watching a little boat drift out
Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish ...
And you were in it, skimming past old snags,
Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky
As soundless as a gong before it's struck --
Suspended how? -- and now they strike it, now
The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,
And you must wake again to your own blood
And empty spaces in the throat.

Your Horror Story For The Day

      Iranian justice strikes again.   Sickening, absolutely sickening.   And if anyone can make sense of that last sentence, you're a wiser person than I am.

Pinching Madonna

      Now, I dare ask, what would your reaction be?   Note this key sentence:

"What's strange is that in this museum, there weren't any means of protection for the paintings, no alarm bell...."

Oh, those trusting Norwegians, especially considering "The Scream" was lifted almost ten years ago to the day.

      This blog has it on Not-So-Good authority that Norwegian authorities are summoning Macaulay Culkin for questioning.

Arrrrrgh!

      I just tried to publish a meditation on Don Quixote and the modern internal exile, only to have the post lost into the ether.   As the meditation was rather dense and complicated, and not easily reproduced, I've asked Blogger to see if there's any way the blasted thing can be recovered.   We shall see.   But it's getting increasingly frustrating writing and rewriting and rewriting entries only to have them vanish and be lost more than likely forever.   And if I do say so myself, I thought it was marginally profound.   Too bad it's only those sorts of entries, and not the mere one-liners, that always seem to be the victim of Blogger Triangle Syndrome. Arrrgh!

Dragon Quest

      Ah, what love really accomplishes.... As someone used to say, "poor Dragon."

Into The Mystic

      Somewhere, oh somewhere, Leonard Cohen is reading this and smiling very, very wryly.   (The ghost of Janis Joplin, however, is probably heaving her ectoplasmic guts out.   Again.)

      In other spiritual news, the Not-So-Good Doctor remains a thorn tree in the whirlwind.

Lowering The Bar

You're just dying to know why that image is there on the right, aren't you?         It's absolutely killing you, isn't it?         Well, go ahead, touch it-- er, click on it, and see what pops up.         Or down, as the case may be.       Oh, the modern world, in which we make even the medium grande.   I tells ya, there's just no incentive for improvement these days.   We just keep lowering and lowering our standards....       (And, boys, do clean off your monitor screens when you're done.   Please.   Nobody wants to see those smudge-prints.)

The Unforgiving Minutes

      There's nothing quite like teenage ambition....

      (Note the laissez-faire response from one of the fathers at the end: "He has to be good at something, this is just as well."   I'm sure Mr. Kipling would be positively stirred.)

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

"I Mean, A Vulva's A Vulva, Right?"

      Just what this blog needed: a study in burnout.   (Talk about artificial Vanilla Icing.)   Key quote: "'But only a pervert would think this resembles something you put up your ass.'"

And Episcopalians

      Bespectacled one,
      Lead us to another form,
      Insecure and yours.

      (Yes, it's satire, but just you wait.   I'm sure the patches and updates are already in the works.)

Tahiti Treat

      Rex Murphy today takes us to the brink of the unimaginable:   forget global warning, forget the continued pollution of a world so near its own breaking point; no, let us, in a moment of tremulous bravery, dare to inhabit the possibilities of an idea so terrifying it will indeed scare even the most flip and cynical to activism.   I speak, of course, of Newfoundlanders with ukuleles.

Cakes And Ale

      The more things change, the more they stay the same?   Key quote: "We've tried to use as many local ingredients as we can in the beer and we use the same policy in our restaurant" (emphasis shamelessly added).

Keeps Going And Going And Going And Going.... (Just like this entry)

      Let's just say it now: Shakespeare has become the Keyser Soze of the literary world.   After all, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he didn't exist.   This antique debate seems less and less relevant by the minute.   (Although, to be fair, the Vickers work, of tracing collaborative possibilities and so forth is genuine literary research.   That Davies of Hereford may have had a hand in A Lover's Complaint is an interesting proposition, one I'll have to ruminate on for a while, and one which would certainly raise Davies' position in the Renaissance canon.)

      But this turns me to a complaint of my own. Click here to read it.

      Speaking of lovers, the Not-So-Good Doctor, while whiling away time in a few hours at a local haunt, was asked by one of his bartenders for "a good quote or something" for an engagement card for her son and his now-fiancée.   This turned into something of a fiasco, as, for the life of me, I couldn't find a decent quote in my head that wasn't either (a) too sappy; (b) too contextually problematic; (c) dark, ironic, or generally complicated.   The trick was to think of something for a couple that are going to be apart for a while-- you know, the star-crossed lovers' syndrome.   I jumped in my head through a number of possibilites-- through Shakespeare and Dickinson, Whitman and the Bible, even Cervantes and Keats (among far too many others)-- and came up with nothing.   Nothing.   Nothing seemed to fit the bill.   To which my bartender eventually said, in her inimitable Manchester accent, stressing all the key syllables in case I might miss them: "But Jeremy, you're a writer, just make up somethin'.   Be romantic!"   After some eye-rolling on my part and some prodding on hers, I eventually tried to jostle my brain to come up with something.  

      And, of course, the words just would not come.   Even expressing a simple, trite romantic sentiment, the sort for Hallmark cards and other poetic prostitutions, was dolorous.   And truth be told, it became apparent exactly how lapsed a Lapsed Romantic I've become.   Nothing would come, and even that nothing wasn't coming without a fight.   It took me the better part of an hour to come up with two utterly pedantic lines, pure kiss-off theory, pure platitude, pure "only-a-person-in-love-and-a-mother-of-a-person-in-love-could-possible-love-this" pap.   Don't ask me what the lines were.   I think I scoured them from my brain as quickly as I could so as not to develop some sort of bacterial infection.   And yes, I felt (still feel) dirty after writing them-- though my bartender liked them, but she's a proud, happy mother and therefore one of those susceptible to liking such stuff, at least for now.   But the experience reminded me of a basic principle of composition: that there's nothing more painful than writing two lines of bad love poetry, except writing two lines of good love poetry.   Blech.   Yuck.   I feel like I've left my own stool at the bar, a floater with corn in it.   How retrograde-- and how humiliating.

      So there's my little tale, from which I've resolved never to write anything "love-romantic" (as opposed to roman-Romantic or Coleridge-Romantic) ever again, however ichorous that resolution may seem.   (I'm even half-inclined to junk the stuff I've written in the past, all of it seeming so lamentable now.) I hereby license any of you to beat me to death with the nearest available deckchair should I even consider breaking this resolution.   (Yes, I'm licensing pre-emptive strikes. Welcome to Bushworld.)   I'm reminded of Chris Sarandon in that cult classic Fright Night, as he, a vampire, reaches for a cross brandished defensively by Rowdy Roddy McDowall, and seethes: "You have to have faith for that to work!"   Indeed.   Indeedy-deedy-do.   But, dammit, now I have a hankerin' to see Fright Night again.... Grrr, arrgh.

Required Reading: The Tangled Web

      Most of us with even an ounce of intelligence knew the charges from the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" were scurrilous and probably libelous.   But the NYTimes today outlines an organizational web-- and a series of extreme testimonial inconsistencies-- that suggests exactly how coordinated the attack has been, and I think the appropriate adjective here would be "Nixonian."   This is reprehensible, disgusting, and quite possibly illegal, and it's a sad statement that more people aren't livid at the extent of their informational abuse.   But, oh, then again, how could we ever think the Bushies would resort to misinformation, slander and conspiracy? Just ask Hans Blix.

      I've never said anything quite like this before, preferring to allow for differences of opinion and so forth.   But there is no legitimating the crap that the Bushies have perpetrated (of which this is just the most recently buffed example), and there's no excusing the stomach-churning manipulativeness of this tripe.   A vote for Bush, dare I say, is a statement of idiocy, and you'll get what you deserve.   Unfortunately, the rest of the world may have to pay dire consequences for such unpardonable stupidity.  

      UPDATE:   Truly there are suckers born every minute.

      UPPERDATE:   Now, I have to wonder, how much media attention will this gather in the US?

The Mother Of Invention

      It's comforting to know that there will always be creative, culturally-altruistic people to provide what we as a society have most desperately needed.  

A Quiet Normal Life

      It's been a while since I've let Mr Stevens sing on this blog. I should remedy this. Here is a piece from Mr Stevens' last series of poems, generally named The Rock but they were never published independently, appearing first in The Collected Poems.

A Quiet Normal Life

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not
In anything that he constructed, so frail,
So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,
He became an inhabitant, obedient
To gallant notions on the part of cold.

It was here. This was the setting and the time
Of year. Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cut
By gallant notions on the part of night---
Both late and alone, above the crickets' chords,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.
There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

It's a beautiful poem, one I'll let stand sans commentary. "The crickets' chords," though, is genius.

Back Into The Grey

      Oh, there's something in the water this summer. Last night in a Messenger chat with Young Jeremy, I wound up reflecting a bit on The Way Things Are, and the way one loses contact with so friends-- some close, some not so much, so very, very much so-- As Time Goes By. It led, of course, to a bit of melancholic thinking on the Not-So-Good Doctor's part, wistful rumination on the too, too many people that have for no particular reason vanished into the grey.   Fast-forward to this morning, when a new email reveals that one of my best friends from my residence days (when drinking was Drinking), she of The Penis Placement Torture Prank, got married on Monday, presumably some place in Austria. So that's two weddings and a funeral this summer, with another on the horizon. Will there be a fourth before the year's out? If so, Hugh Grant will deserve an ass-whipping that would make Red Forman proud.

      So,that's one friend from Ye Olden Days accounted for. The last with whom I'd talked was Sonnet, at a reading from her then-new book of poetry for McClelland and Stewart, four years ago or so. (For those not Canadian, M&S is probably Canada's most prestigious publishing house, perhaps the Canuck equivalent of Knopf.)   Alas, so many connections lost, so many misent en abyme. (Yeah, yeah, my French isn't what it used to be.) Such are life's strange divides, things that tend to nag more than sadden per se. It's one of the stranger dimensions, too, of being, as I have been, a teacher of sorts; no sooner does one come to know people than they're off and gone, more than likely never to be heard from again.   That sounds more pessimistic than I intend it; it's rather the fact that underlies so much of the poetry of Wallace Stevens and his heir Mark Strand, that every presence anticipates absence, and that every absence is in itself a peculiar presence, a strange constancy that perhaps one has to be a metaphysicist or a Hegelian to relish. As Mr Strand puts it in "Keeping Things Whole":

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mr Stevens says it differently: in a world without God, everything is farewell (an idea Mr Strand himself plays with another poem), and one of the implications of this is that even a greeting of welcome is always-already an implied goodbye. Who knows. I'm sure, were I given to think more on the subject, I'd be able to develop all this in relation to the idea of memory, or even to some validation of the Augustinian notion of time. I'm sure there's a sensible accord one could put on all this, on all this peculiar vorticism. But I guess right now, I'm bothered by the sense of time so definitely past, of feeling more old and full of days than I should legitimately feel at my stage of the game, and by the sincerely-asked but the apathetically-unpursued question, I wonder whatever happened to.... But then, of course, we go on with our day-to-day business, everything left to return, like some Homeric shade, back into the grey.

      Something, Mr Cohen says, forgets us perfectly. I wonder. Perhaps not perfectly.

---

POSTSCRIPT: Before anyone speculates on such, No, I am not talking about loves or romances; for such matters, I think Mr Cohen said it best.

Sentence Structure

      Eighteen months? Eighteen months? I could do eighteen months standing on my head. (Assuming one night surrenders to the madness of the moonlight do not count.)   And yes, I'm sure I'm sounding like a mobster talking about a prison sentence.   Imagine that.

Electoral Cross Roads

      Of all the silly discussions imaginable, there is actually a community of people speculating about the politics of Jesus.   The discussant quoted at the end of the article has matters more probably right; Jesus was a Youth Voter, aware of what was happening but loathe to get involved in such matters of politics. (This blog suspects he'd still be rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, even in Las Vegas.)   Now, if we were still in the Middle Ages, it'd be easier to see Jesus as a Republican, given the frequent association of him with the image of the warrior-king (there are countless icons depicting him as such, armed with a sword and a helmet and a certainly less than sunny disposition), but Jesus, like Hamlet, tends to be a character made more by the interpeting age rather than precise examination of "what we know." There are some things I think we need to remember when we entertain such questions as "what would Jesus do": which Jesus, and how well do we really understand what he was and that for which he stood? I'm pretty sure our answers would be rather insular.   Seems we're always make our god(s) in our own images.

      (With that said, pause for a moment to think of Jesus fussing over a hanging chad. Er, methinks not.)

The Sins Of The Fathers

      Beyond the inevitable snicker-inducing nature of this story, one has to pause at the situational irony of a gay male named Packard. You see, people, this why you don't give your children stupid names; it has to be some form of tacit child abuse.

The Unclean Thing

      Some have dared (natch!) suggest that this blog has a dirty mind. (Never! P'Shaw! Not. Possible.)   Well, okay, maybe it does have a dirty, rascally, prurient, utterly lascivious mind, but that can be a damned good thing sometimes. Why? Because it prevents this blog from making statements like these unless it damned well means to make them. (And, oh, yeah, that's to ignore the obvious, that a dirty mind is just plain fun.) Add that to the list of my superhero identities, or perhaps supervillain identities: beware the wrath of (dah-duh-da-da!) CAPTAIN INNNUENDO! He can turn even the most innocent statement into a profession of Clintonesque perversity! Beware, beware, lock up your language!   Somebody think of the children!

You Say It's Her Birthday?

      Hard as it is to believe, Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita was first published a mere 46 years ago today. The book, and that infamous title, is now so thoroughly ingrained into our cultural consciousness that even those loathe to put eyes to prose are familiar with it and its film incarnations.   I can only imagine the furor would any high school dare to teach the book.   Groucho Marx, ever the card, explained his own plans for the book:

I plan to put off reading 'Lolita' for six years -- until she's eighteen.

It's a terrific novel, and better remembered as such rather than as a tale of prurience and parthenophilia--- and I can't believe I've used that word twice on this blog this week. Simply put: go read it, if you haven't already; if you have, it's worth revisitng.

The Trudge Report

      It's nearly the end of the summer, with Dr J's Own Private Hell Week nearing inevitably like a debutante to old money.   Summers, generally, are awful things, or they are for me because I seldom get to enjoy them at all (haven't in fact since 1997 or so; a very long time) and because I don't really function with the same sense of purpose that I otherwise do.   I'm also profoundly unproductive.   My brain becomes a steamed clam with the heat and the overarching sense of entrapment.   With each year that passes, I start to wonder if I'll ever be able to enjoy, truly enjoy, summer again, though I realize that's probably just disenchantment manifesting itself as fatalism.   So I've come to greet the end of summer with a sigh of relief rather than one of regret.   I can't say, though, that's going to be true this year.   So much for relief.

      Before the relief doesn't come, I have to trudge through the next week and a bit and just wait for it all to end as quickly, and hopefully as dolorlessly, as possible.   There's a very particular kind of dread that comes with the approach of this time of year, with knowing all too well what's going to happen and what it will be like and what the effects will be, especially as my increasingly addled mind is perturbed by questions that are, to say the least, disconsolate.   So, if this blog gets even darker in the next little bit than it already is, you'll know why; call it giving you all fair warning.   Near the end of August, Doctor J, as invariably as the sun, tends to start sounding like a character in a Sartre play.   It is always this way.   It likely always will be this way, though I fear probably a bit more intensely this year.   Just get through it tends to be my personal refrain.

      So, if the Not-So-Good Doctor tends to be, in the next little while, cranky, caustic, miserable, even down right acrid, or if he tends to be any or all of these things to a greater degree than normal, please forgive him.   This is the bile season, and it too shall pass, sooner or later, and then Doctor J will return to singing "Joyful, Joyful" all day long and demonstrating his chipper, effervescent sunshine-and-peanut-butter personality .   Er, okay, maybe not, but you know what I mean.   Until then, I'm just gonna pretend I'm this guy.   Oh, to have it so simple.

With A Song In Her Heart

      This blog can't help but wonder if this means that Britney will soon start bitch-slapping the bloody bejeezus out of her wife, er, spouse, in coke-affected bouts of rage. Look for her next single to be Phil Spector's "I'll Keep You Happy."

The Sermon On The Mound

      Somewhere in the ether, Peter Cook is finding this story very amusing indeed.  

      It's an interesting fact, by the way, that services of such, or at least comparable, length used to be quite common. It's a neat little tidbit to share with undergraduates, most of whom are inclined to think themselves sufferers of extended oration like no others in human history. Then I tell them about John Donne, and the disappearance of colour from their collective faces is always, always, always its own reward. Tee hee. And yes, I am evil.   Sue me.

Good Mornin' Little Schoolgirl

      Remembering back on this blog's days in high school (way back when the Soviet Union still existed and the internet was but a gleam in Al Gore's eye), I have to say that this does not surprise me in the least.   It disturbs me, but it doesn't surprise me.   Ah, high school days, years I wasted worrying about grades and stupid stuff like that....

His Name's Just Soooo Dreamy......

      Doctor J is so glad that he has a name that can be rendered both euphonously and cacophonously because sometimes the ladies want it soft and tender and at others....   

      (And yes, one of these days I will do a tally of all the things that I've said and written that will one day get me sent straight to Hell, or, as it's otherwise known, Newark.)

You Won't Feel A Thing....

                    

      (The cure, by the way, for the "foul taste" is chocolate milk. Or so I've been told.)

Please, Sir, Just A Little More

      It's poetry I tells ya, poetry.   *sniff*

The Best Part Of Waking Up....

      An alternate answer, perhaps, for those with, er, veal shortages?

Blogger Strikes Again!

      It's always hard to tell what other people are seeing thanks to Blogger's tendency to insert interfering little things into one's blog. On my end, I'm now seeing an annoying silverish toolbar at the top of my blog. Is anyone else seeing this? If so, now I'm going to have to figure out how to realign the page so that damned thing isn't mangling the page. Arrrrrgh!

POSTSCRIPT: Okay, worked around this. Argh. Supposedly, the search function in the toolbar will allow you to search through this blog only, BUT (but, but, but) a preliminary test by the Not-So-Good Doctor has revealed that the results are extremely inadequate, and far from complete. Oh Google, oh Google, you screw us all over like poodles....

Carpe Scrotum

      Boys, you may not want to read the last of these....

The Wails of August

      From Christie's site, stumbled on this, a sort of thing that always leads one to awkward hums and haws and fine dicing. The original said to strike out what didn't apply, but I felt the need to italicize the "kinda but not kindas" for accuracy's sake.

AUGUST:
Loves to joke. Attractive. Suave and caring. Brave and fearless. Firm and has leadership qualities. Knows how to console others. Too generous and egoistic {that's a tricky one}. Takes high pride of oneself. Thirsty for praises {yes and no: complicated}. Extraordinary spirit. Easily angered. Angry when provoked. Easily jealous. Observant. Careful and cautious. Thinks quickly. Independent thoughts. Loves to lead and to be led. Loves to dream. Talented in the arts, music and defense {Maybe once; not anymore}. Sensitive but not petty. Poor resistance against illnesses {Awkward: in some ways indomitable, in others not so much}. Learns to relax {still learning}. Hasty and trusty. Romantic {I'm a Lapsed Romantic}. Loving and caring.      Loves to make friends {Meh.}.

I dunno about "extraordinary spirit," though. I'm surely not the one to judge. Strange thing, very few of the things that tend to crop up in such things: critical, intellectual, stubborn, self-righteous. Figures (crimony!) that the May babies get "Sharp thoughts." Ay cafuckinrumba....

      Check yourself out and feel free to post your results, though I don't think the "strike" function works in the Enetation javascript.

POSTSCRIPT: Oh boy-oh-boy-oh-boy was this wrong. So wrong.

Okay, Miss Morrissette, This Is An Irony

      You know it's bad when even the anarchists are organizing.   Next thing you know, even the apathetics will be doing something.  

      In somewhat related news, the family of Daniel Pearl has asked Dick "Needy Chick" Cheney to desist invoking the slain journalist's name in stump-speeches.   Let's now see if Mr Cheney has even an ounce of civility in him.

A Bray At The Races

      Now that's one smokin' ass.

Some People Are Just Dyin' To Give It Away

      Again, I may have -- actually, almost surely have-- missed my calling.

Coming To Terms

      For the sake, purely, of expanding everyone's vocabulary (yeah, that's it), this blog would like to direct you to a glossary of terminology that most of you sick, sick monkeys will find thoroughly fascinating-- and probably a little disturbing.   And although it's not the worst thing figured in the list, this blog has to pause and consider, with more than some discomfort, that there has actually been cause to come up with the words oculolinctus ("licking {one's} partner's eyeball") and taphephilia ("arousal from being buried alive").   **shudder**

      Which reminds me, I guess it was only a matter of time until this blog stumbled upon an article about, er, one of the Not-So-Good Doctor's tendencies (though it's not strictly parthenophilia or lolitaism).   The article makes a couple of good points, most notably the ones in this paragraph:

“There is actually quite a bit that young women have to offer older men besides looks alone,” Masini says. “On the most obvious level, there’s that fun, young energy they have. There’s naiveté, which can be attractive when compared with the cynicism of some older women. There’s a playfulness — a lack of the seriousness that can sometimes accompany being an adult and having responsibility. And, for some men, there’s the fact that these young girls look up to them — as father figures and as mentors. That, in and of itself, is very attractive.”

Problem is, though, the article falls into the same stupid assumptions about power-relationships that typify modern cynicism in it's cringeing, snarling ugliness.   What the author (a woman; surprise, surprise...) describes as "naiveté" is better understood as (relative) "innocence," but the later doesn't have the same dismissive element to it (especially if you're William Blake).   There a lot of other things she very brusquely misses.   A lot of us tend to think we have enough cynicism as it is, and so the air of innocence can be disarming, refreshing, and a reminder that things don't necessarily have to be the way the are (however much, though, that generally turns out to be a mirage).   And, let's face it, a lot of men become quietly nostalgic, not so much for days or things but for ways of thinking and feeling that life generally drives right out of them except for a tiny nugget of memory that they bury in a personal place slightly more secret than one of Dick Cheney's undisclosed, secure locations.

      There's a lot more to this, in fact, both positive and negative, but the bold, stereotyping strokes of this article border on the galling.   There's a lot more I could take issue with here, but I'm relatively sure most of my readers would start reading autobiographical venting everywhere, even if the basic impulses are also those of so much literature and history it would make one's head spin.   So, no, I won't go too much further.   What I will say is this: the article's smug assumptions about "power" are sickening simplifications that fail utterly to understand what's actually at work in such relational constructions and deconstructions.   Brush up on your Shakespeare (or even your Graham Greene) to see what I mean, and to see it in more carefully nuanced depiction.   If you're waiting for any elaborations or exasperations of the Papa Jer or Uncle Jer myths, you'll have to look elsewhere (the seven-volume set, complete with annotations and critical commentary, will be released by Norton later this year).   But let me say reaffirm this: power is not, not, not the pivot of such matters, and to read it in such ways speaks of a different kind of cynicism that is perhaps more correctly identified as callous punditry.   The article, alas, by the end is so caught in its own assumptions and delusions that it mucks everything up entirely.   But then again, maybe it takes a Blakean double vision to understand such matters fully.

      But, sigh o sigh, as Mr James would say, "and there we are."   And people wonder why I've quit playing that infernal game, in fact all silly, predictable jeux de coeur.   My cynicism is enough as it is; I hardly need more of it, let alone to have any of it reinforced.   And that, I'm sure, is a point with which you'll all agree.

13 x 13

      Imre Salusinszky's commentary on the IOC's decision to hold the Opening Ceremonies on Friday the 13th is a fun, worthwhile read, as is this piece from National Geographic that notes some of the "theory" behind (*deep breath*) paraskevidekatriaphobia, or, as it's "more commonly" known, friggatriskaidekaphobia. (Say either of those words thirteen times fast.)

From the "Get Over Yourselves, It's A Fucking Movie" File....

      Ready for your morning pule? Here ya go.  

Yellow Moons and Green Clovers

      In the name of being Fair and Balanced, this blog would like to direct you to Ten Reasons Why You Should Vote For George W. Bush. You're welcome.  

In A Manly, Heterosexual Way

      It seems that before he left to cover the Olympics, Dave Barry wrote a paean to one of his mentors, one of his true spiritual guides in this world.

The Profit And The Loss

      Rave on, Tom. Frankly, I'm just plain tired.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years---
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres---
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the articulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what is there to conquer?
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--- but there is no competition---
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

--- T.S. Eliot, from the fifth movement of East Coker (1940)

If Condoms Had Sponsors

Some of these are amusing.... But, strangely, no mention that pink does more than you think....

This should be dedicated, of course, to Mr Charles, who said it all: Uh-huh!

Bringin' It All Back Home

      This blog doesn't want to say too much about the Olympics (normally, this blog couldn't and wouldn't really care less), but it's got to say it: the Opening Ceremonies yesterday were glorious, a spectacle fitting the people that invented the term. It was surely a great deal removed from the tackier and more mind-numbing ceremonies of recent years, and amidst the pyrotechnics and the elaborate performances, there were bits of genuine visual poetry, not least of which was the "History of the Games" run, during which the runner, carrying his torch, stumbled; it seemed everyone gasped, everyone thought it an accident, until the runner rose and a voice in the background announced "World War One." All in all, an impressive show that paid a terrific tribute to history in the process. I guess I write this with a bit of contrition, because I had expected the opening ceremonies to be intolerable pap, but it wasn't, though it certainly seemed to please the crowd. Athens managed yesterday to restore some history and, perhaps more importantly, dignity to the events, and some parts of it were quite breath-taking. Sure, I could have done without Björk, but, one can't have everything. There are few enough pleasant surprises these days, and given the rumblings of scandal before and pending, Athens, in the end, can proudly say it shone. So colour this blog impressed. Goodness knows, I didn't think the Olympics could impress that way anymore. Who says you can't go home again?

Shades of Neville Chamberlain

      American Journalism 101: Class, you are dealing with an assignment that will make your local readership look very, very bad indeed, so you need to tweak the details of the story to make matters seem more gentle, more everyday than they would otherwise seem. How do you do it? The answer: the tried-and-true form called "Burying The Lede," in which you save what otherwise seem the most crucial details until the end of the article where they will most surely be minimized (and largely unread). By placing these details at the end of your article, you can realign the context of the reporting so that you can find a more neutral, and less offensive, way of reporting on an ugly incident, and you can install a built-in apology for those ugly details before anyone finally gets to them. After all, you don't want to make your readership angry by calling them on their astonishingly uncivilized behaviour. This will cause a drop in sales and hailstorm of hate-mail, particularly if your community has been dispensing a fair bit of hatred lately. Although some say this allows diplomacy to win out over morality and veracity, it's a classic peace-making exercise in "half-reporting," or what some call "spin." Your task for today is to examine this classic example of "Burying The Lede" and consider the various ramifications of this particular way of "reporting the truth" and other ways in which the story might, in fact probably should be, told. Extra credit: determine what H.L. Mencken would have done with this situation, and/or Edwin Newman. See you next week, and, please, clean up your Doritos: the cleaning lady's becoming right cranky about the mess. Cheers.

Premature Pull-Out?

      This blog reports, you decide.   As for this blog, well, in the words of just about every single character in every Star Wars film ever made says at one point or another, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Family Values: No Sex, But Racism's Fine

      Every now and again this blog dares to entertain the notion that Bush and his cadre really aren't the smug, mean-spirited, anti-intellectual rubes that they can seem to be. Every now and again this blog dares to think that maybe these guys actually might have their hearts in the right place. Then this blog stumbles upon something like this, and the moment passes:

"It's not John Kerry 's fault that he looks French," Smith told reporters on the conference call arranged by the Bush campaign.

"But it is his fault that he wants to pursue policies that have us act like the French. He advocates all kinds of additional socialism at home, appeasement abroad, and what that means is weakness for the future."

Talk about playing to racism and ignorance. If you have any question that the above statement is blisteringly racist, substitute the word "Jewish" where you see the word "French" and ask yourself if such language would be considered acceptable from leading politicians. The Bushies are reprehensible hucksters, and utterly bereft of redeeming qualities.

I Can't See The Difference, Can You See The Difference?

          

So what are we going to do tomorrow, Dick?
The same thing we do every day, George: try to take over the world!

"It's Like Being Bludgeoned By A Ham"

      Those of you with little wee ones might want to check out this article before you take the initiative and determine to do something about your shortcoming.   The article's a bit long (seven pages), but it's worth reading the whole hilarious narrative. Key quote:

Several nights ago, for instance, I had a dream in which my grandmother was performing oral sex on me. Considering that my grandmother has been dead for nearly eight years, I think you'll agree that this is pretty disgusting. I mean, why couldn't it have been my maternal grandmother? She's hot.

That said, this blog is packing more veal than Denninger's. Yee-haw.

Hands-On Education

      ^~~Teacher, teacher, can you teach me, / Can you tell me all I need to know? ^~~

      (Does anyone remember 38 Special? Okay, sue me: I'm now officially OLD.)

Spunk'd?

      This blog ain't sayin' a cotton-pickin' thing....       

      (You have sick, sick minds, the whole dirty rotten lot of ye.)

Glamour Pussies

      Ah, leave it to Stephen Fry to sum up the Vapid-Tramp Hilton sisters so precisely as having "the dim and glazed eye of a dead mullet."

      This blog has still not seen Bright Young Things, but it quite wants to see it: somehow, the idea of Sir John Mills, now 96, snorting cocaine is very, very curious. Besides, it's about time the film received full release.

Look On My Goods, Ye Mighty....

      Now let's reconsider that old notion of truth in advertising....

      This blog's favourite bit is a little touch about half way down the page:

Is your site secure?
Infinitely moreso than our customers are.

Perfect for the Not-So-Good Doctor and his increasingly "the glass is half empty, and I'm drinkin' fast" outlook on life.

(Thanks to Christie for the link.)

Tight In August

      Ahem. *cough cough* Er, how will you be, ahem, celebrating?

      And in related news....

/covers eyes in shame

Ever So Buoyantly

      This blog doesn't know how it managed to miss Rex Murphy's column on Saturday, but it's finally going to right that wrong.   The last two paragraphs are absolutely priceless.

      (Caveat: Wilde never suggested art should imitate life; in fact, there's an extent to which The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as an attack on that very idea.   He famously, and somewhat but not entirely facetiously, had one of his 'characters' --- Vivian in "The Decay of Lying" --- say that life imitates art more than the reverse.)

Respect For The Captain

      Doctor J's shortly off to a funeral showing and with his funeral service tomorrow, it's probably appropriate that I post this now in salute.

The Captain

Now the Captain called me to his bed
He fumbled for my hand
"Take these silver bars," he said
"I'm giving you command."

"Command of what, there's no one here
There's only you and me --
All the rest are dead or in retreat
Or with the enemy."

"Complain, complain, that's all you've done
Ever since we lost.
If it's not the Crucifixion,
Then it's the Holocaust."

"May Christ have mercy on your soul
For making such a joke
Amid these hearts that burn like coal
And the flesh that rolls like smoke."

"I know that you have suffered, lad,
But suffer this awhile:
Whatever makes a soldier sad
Will make a killer smile."

"I'm leaving, Captain, I must go
There's blood upon your hand.
But tell me, Captain, if you know
Of a decent place to stand."

"There is no decent place to stand
In a massacre;
But if a woman take your hand
Go and stand with her."

"I left a wife in Tennessee
And a baby in Saigon --
I risked my life, but not to hear
Some country-western song."

"Ah but if you cannot raise your love
To a very high degree,
Then you're just the man I've been thinking of --
So come and stand with me."

"Your standing days are done," I cried,
"You'll rally me no more.
I don't even know what side
We fought on, or what for."

"I'm on the side that's always lost
Against the side of Heaven
I'm on the side of Snake-eyes tossed
Against the side of Seven.

And I've read the Bill of Human Rights
And some of it was true
But there wasn't any burden left
So I'm laying it on you."

Now the Captain he was dying,
But the Captain wasn't hurt.
The silver bars were in my hand
I pinned them to my shirt.

--- Leonard Cohen, from the album Various Positions

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      The horror, the horror....

Snakes And Bladders

      This blog has been training all its life for this.

Oh Kitten, My Kitten

      Evidently, someone knew what was being done in that occupied lavatory. (Gee, I didn't know {name deleted to prevent libel suits} was on a plane lately.) M'row.

Those Wacky Dutch Do It Again

      This blog assures you, it has nothing to do with this. Mind you, if Doctor J hears the words "You're so skinny!" or "Have you lost weight?" one more time, he will more than surely have to get medieval on someone's ass.

To Serve And Protect

      Three little words: Oh. My. God.

Spin, Baby, Spin

      It's bizarre enough living in this terrorism-obsessed Western world. It's even more bizarre when the Bushies, known so much for their tact and their subtlety, turn a basic threat into a campaign legitimation:

"The goal of the next attack is twofold: to damage the U.S. economy and to undermine the U.S. election," the official said. "The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.'"

Okay, boys and girls, a vote for Kerry is a vote for Al-Qa'eda because Al-Qa'eda is Anybody But Bush. As a point of fact, if there's an "inaugural assassination" to their plots, if I were working behind the scenes, I'd worry about at an attack on Pakistani President Musharraf which could end up doing more political damage than a dozen small bombings. And yes, it is scary that we should have to think about things like this at all.

Who's Your Daddy?

      It looks like the Dubster's gonna make that Kerry dude his biatch.   Slammin'. (And yes, this blog rather likes the phrase "a kinder, gentler death toll.")

      Afterthought: Has anyone else noticed how thoroughly entrenched it has become to describe The American President as "incurious?"   I remember thinking around the time of its coining that the word was apt, but it's now become the polite way of point to a certain particular fault of Mr Bush's. Oh, what we do to language, especially when we pose to be "correct." You see, in Canada, we'd use a more direct, less evasive word: we'd call him a "moron." Or we would say that he is, not to put too fine a point on it, "stupid." But perhaps The President has a Kevin Kline fit every time he hears the s-word. Meh? Makes sense to me.

"Own A Part Of American History...."

      Strong enough for a man, but made by a wo--- no, no, no....

      Those Yanks just get freakier and freakier....

Pink Does More Than You Think

      What's worse, this blog has to wonder, The Most Retch-Inducing Commercial Ever Made or that so many people can discuss it that it requires a 42Kb size webpage? *shudder*   Well, okay, the latter is just a sad statement on society; the former is an exercise in cringe-related contortionism.   The worst part, methinks, is the woman at the, er, end and her "oops, I leaked!" gesture. Whatthemutherpluck?!?!?

Mary, Good Sir

      In a gesture I'm sure RK would think pitiable (or risible?), one scholar has rather fancifully suggested that the True Identity of William ("Superman") Shakespeare is none other than-- the envelope, please-- Mary Sidney.   For those you unfamiliar with her (and this includes the scholar in question, this blog suspects), Mary was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney and a prolific writer in her own right.   The argument for the Countess of Pembroke being Shakespeare is spurious and contrived, but it does occasion this blog to direct you to some of her writings, of which her translations of the Psalms and The Triumph of Death are quite good. Any other questions about the Penshurst bunch are best directed toward RK, this blog's resident Sidney authority. Wait, you mean everyone doesn't have a resident Sidney authority? Puh-shaw!

      To everyone else: this blog doesn't give a tinker's sugar-coated damn who Shakespeare was (I'm still inclined to accept that Shakespeare was Shakespeare), and all this rather idle speculation seems to me quite trivial-- and probably, but not necessarily, irrelevant. But if this muddle intrigues you, go wild.

Just Imagine....

      Read the fine print on this: "All winners are subject to people laughing at you."

You May Now Commence Shitting Bricks

      As if we didn't already have enough to worry about.... (But Iraq, of course, was a clear and present danger.)

A Flash In The Can

      This idea amuses me. It amuses me very, very much indeed.   

Missing The Obvious

      Okay: the University of Toronto sets up a Canadian Poets page which you can see here.   Now, for those of you that aren't avid readers of Canadian poetry (who is?), figure out which two top names are curious missing.   Now don't think too long.... Hint: one is the only Canadian writer to have a novel turned into a Best Picture award-winner; the other is, well, let's just say, a man who had no choice (he was born with the gift of a golden voice).

      Here, by the way, is Mr. O's best poem ever, in my not so humble estimation. The simple words "This ankle" have never been so erotic.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under the rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

                this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

                                  and knew

                    what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

The Rest

      One of The Musketeers has fallen.

      He passed away this morning around 10.30 after an intense six-month bout with cancer. He was 43.

      He was a good friend, and he will be missed--- very much so. The language of friends, Thoreau reminds me, is not words but meanings.

Baguette, Bébé?

      Offered for your consideration, insightful political analysis.   Favourite quote: "those are collapsed spider veins."

Xbox Tragedy

      There has to be a special place in Hell for these four monsters.   I can think of no response to this that does not involve an elaborate depiction of the violence these bastards deserve to have visited upon them.

The Next Target On The Axis of Evil

      Two words: Oh and crap.

Hawking His Wares

      This blog can just imagine RK's response to this article, something probably to the effect of: "Rent it, lad, don't sell it."  

Cute, Little Round Ones

      I haven't seen this list around since my residence days, when someone xeroxed a shorter version of it and taped it to all of the cubicle doors.   Oh, the old days....   See also this, which has been circulating about the Net for some time.

"It Is An Invitation To Put Our Bodies In Contact"

      And, strangely enough, this woman was not a York student.   Go figure.

      This entry, by the way, is dedicated to the memory of John Houseman.   If you don't know why, it surely doesn't matter anymore....

      (And, no, there's no chance Dr J could do such a thing-- ever.)

This Was His Finest Hour

      From The Globe and Mail, comes this photograph for this week's caption contest. Oh, so adorable. This blog's caption:

       Nancy, if I were your tom, I'd lap it.

Either that or, "I leave when the pub closes."

The Browning Version

      This blog is NOT reporting this, this blog is NOT reporting this, this blog is NOT reporting this....    *shudder*  

      (And if any of you sick puppies check out the so-called "photo-gallery," I don't think I ever want to talk to you again.   Handshakes are surely out of the question.)

Where, Oh Where, Is Aquaman When We Need Him?

      Yet another theory on Atlantis, this time that it is-- wait for it-- Ireland.   Or, as the author in question describes it, "The Fairy Land."  

The Legend of Bagger's Pants

      Ah, but will he put his money where his mouth is? Or his money-shot?

      Surely he's being facetious and/or hypothetical, but actually, I say he should do it, or something like it, and I mean acting and not just conveniently producing or directing.   Why?   After the well-reported Colin Farrell fiasco and the general Hollywood timidity with stars and actual sexuality (i.e., films that are about more than casual butt-shots and boob-flashes), it will take a few stars-- genuine ones with both popularity and credibility-- to break through some of the major barriers to begin even to get Hollywood near the more civilized European mentality towards sex in film.   After all, it took Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, by no means huge stars then, to make a stab at the X-rating with Midnight Cowboy, and it took Marlon Brando's raw but highly-affected performance in Last Tango In Paris to take it to a place Hollywood proper has been loathe to go since.   At least in theory, I agree with Damon, that there's no strict reason that such films have to be where they are-- but to make any sort of substantial changes (indeed, any that don't insist on having Bernardo Bertolucci as director) will require some bold, er, strokes, from the dramatic community.   The women generally have been more willing to press such matters-- and here I think of brave performances like Julianne Moore's in Boogie Nights, but there are several others-- while they cower, or else, er, end up doing stuff like Oz and Queer as Folk.   Hollywood's still the moon's distance away from making an intelligent porn film, but before it'll be able to do that it'll have to be able to do films like Bertolucci's The Dreamers or 1900, or Catherine Breillat's Romance X.   But to get Hollywood moving toward making more truly adult (rather than adolescent) films, some stars with some "cred" will have to be willing to take some damned big chances, and it'll have to come from the, er, up-and-comers, and not merely those, like Robert DeNiro in 1900 or Brando in Last Tango, for whom every cinematic gesture is always-already a statement of dramatic bravado.   So, go ahead, Matt, do it, or dare to push the envelope.   Go ahead, I darez ya.   Lead the pack.   Put the wood into Hollywood.   Show you've got as much balls as Julianne Moore.  

      Yeah, it'll never happen.   *smirk*  

      And in related news.... Who knew such a pretty young thing could look like Chrissie Hynde on her period?