It's The Stuff Of Song

      Think about it.   And if you don't know the song, you're just too darned young....  

      (Or I'm just getting too darned old. Take your pick.)

The Great Escape

      You know this story had to appear on this blog sooner or later. Simply HAD TO.   

Notes Toward Supreme Personal Fictions

      Tasks of late have had me reconsidering matters about Myself, and not in the maudlin or melancholic ways but in the more descriptive and -- dare I say? -- marketable ones. Blech. This has of course led me to some curious revelations that aren't in the least curious to me, and they certainly aren't new (like returns to TSE's "unknown, half-remembered gate," they can be apocalyptically familiar). Such as?

• I hate second-year courses. No, not because of the students or anything like that; but I loathe the air of representativeness that seem to entail, and the extremely broad nature of their surveyances remind me all too well of limitations rather than expansions. Such courses set too many of one's pedagogical concerns in conflict with one another, and they niggle at each other like impulses in a Danish prince. In second year courses, one normally has to pay lip-service to the idea of history, to which I am not hostile at all but which reminds me all too well how much one's omissions, if only for the sake of getting things done manageably, ends up doing history a disservice. My current bane is the idea of a second-year course on Modern literature, and given the fecundity of that age one's choices become challenging: how do you leave out Henry James, but how do you keep him in, given that 19 year-olds aren't going to sit through The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl, and Portait of a Lady while it may be done will require a huge chunk of time? Any course is heavy enough with Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Woolf, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and the others. But what about Ralph Ellison or Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene or Bill Faulkner or E.M. Forster or even that salacious mucky-muck D.H. Lawrence? And that's just a rough sampling of the prose writers. The poets could be -- should be-- entire courses on their own, as should the prose writers and the dramatists. But take the poets? Who gets screwed? Yeats? Hardy? Frost? Surely not Ezra or Tom or the War Poets (Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon), but teaching modern poetry without Yeats is like teaching contemporary music and having to start with Bob Dylan; it can be done, but the disservice is great. Fuck. First, third and fourth-year courses are much different, or at least can be. One's sense of historical responsibility is ripped asunder by one's sense of responsibility to providing a roughly tenable history. In fact, it's always a bridge across the River Kwai built with chopsticks and playing cards.
  
  
• Considering the daunting task of "describing my teaching philosophy," I'm torn between two realizations, both connected to my two favourite modern poets. One is to Tom: what I do put down always feels inadequate, like a charcoal sketch, more rough design than detail, and prone to anticipating, "but that is not what I meant at all." The more precise one, though, connects to Wallace. I actually do have a philosophy, a theory, but it's best perceived in actions not immediately addressing it, or in adagia that express fragments of it coherently but not academically. Without praising, or knocking, myself, I think it's true that what I do is best seen in process, and very often isn't realized until much later. After a while, so much becomes intrinsic and instinctive rather than theoretical, even if there is always a theoretical scaffolding beneath it all. Scaffolding, however, is preliminary, like all theory and philosophy; it is never the reality. It helps one build; eventually it has to fall away. Or so I say now. As much as there are central dimensions to the things I do, there is always room for mutability. There has to be. Or, if not mutability, then at least flexibility. I don't know. It buggers all description. In the end, I think I'd say that I fall somewhere between Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens, but if I said that even readers of Matt and Wally would ask what the Arf I meant by that. Don't break down my adage, I'm sure I'd want to say.
  
        SO-- for those of you that have seen me doing what I do: if you have any ideas on what you think my philosophy is, I'll be glad to hear it. I promise, I won't Well yes, but..., even if that's might be in fact needed. Oddity is, there was a time when my ideas of what things were crucial to a university education didn't need such laboured explanation; they would have, at least in many corners, have been understood as implied, inferred or simply basic. Not so now.

But there we are again, I realize now. I can defend myself, and I can explain myself; but I cannot describe myself, at least not to my own satisfaction, and at least not in any way I trust for fear of my own intentions and self-implications interposing themselves. Again, fuck. If I had my way (yeah, right), I'd simply be able to say, "well, let me do and you decide." I've never in my life really sold myself; if I've ever done that, and I mean that purely in the sense of proving my own worth, it's always been in doing whatever it is I do, and anything else has strictly been gravy. Or so I think. Some of you may disagree. Either way, I'd appreciate whatever any of you may have to say on this. I in the end am my own harshest critic.

      But before any of you start to think me being too hard on myself I'd like to say this: reading Viv's comment the other day that she could see how Johnny Carson had in a way influenced the way I do things, I was heartened a bit. I was glad she could see that. There are so many others, some obvious, some not, from clowns to writers to even great characters, the Not-So-Good Doctor being a bit-- from among so many others-- of Groucho Marx, Tom Eliot, John Donne, King Lear, Colin Mochrie and Dave Barry, the stew perhaps now too Irish to discern potatoes from meat.

      I don't know anymore.

      I'm reminded of one of my old mentors, the great Dick Ewen, who once said that there was no confusing anything I'd done with anything anyone else had done. (In a statement that would have ired the high formalists.) "Jeremy," he said, in that inimitable brogue, the emphasis on the R more than the J, and from here I think I'm quoting but I may in fact be paraphrasing, given my brain's capacity for slippage: "what you do is You. Your fingerprints are everywhere." (I remember mid-cigarette hacking here; this could be wrong.) "No one could confuse you with anybody else." (There was laughter here, as I recall.) "I just know to get out of the way." Or something like that. And we both chortled, and buried the subject. I'm pretty sure I was too green to say much to that. I think we just sat in his office and smoked for another minute before we changed subjects.

      Those were better days. And more real ones, too. I should probably explain that, but Jenny has informed me that in writing this I've kept her abed too long, she strangely and in ways so atypical of a cat unwilling to rest until I do. I wonder in retrospect if I should have named her "Shadow" instead. But, after all the silly excoriations one does to oneself for one reason or another, perhaps it takes an animal to remind one of what really matters. What you do is You. Out of the mews of babes.

Some Random Time-Killing Observations

      Just a few loose notes here on some of the minor oddities as the Not-So-Good Doctor procrastinates ever-so-slightly from more pressing tasks at hand:

• Jenny, it seems, is here to stay. She has in the five weeks she's been here gained more weight than I have in the past fourteen years. Like all the females that come into the Doc's life, she eats like you wouldn't believe. It has become practice: feed Jenny first, and then while she's eating feed Trouble, and then go get Trouble and put him right in front of the food so he'll eat. Jenny finishes first and watches from a distance until Trouble is done and saunters away. Within a minute, she's up wolfing down what she can of Trouble's food. Don't feel too sorry for Trouble, though. He sneaks her water when she's eating his food.
  
  And the irony of all this: Trouble is the fat one. For now, anyway. That's okay. It seems she's the one with the crush on him. He wisely sloughs it off most of the time. Unless, of course, he wants to terrorize her for his own amusement-- which, of course, amuses me, turn-about being fair-play indeed.
  
  
• Imagine two universities within an hour's drive of one another. One claims to be very student-driven while the other is very administration-driven. Guess which one charges $10 for a copy of one's transcript, and makes students sit through bank-like procedures simply to place the order for them, and does not accept cash in payment. Guess which one charges nothing, processes the request with great dispatch despite the alum in question long having forgotten his student number, and allows the alum to order extra copies just to save him having to make unnecessary trips. Now guess which one has alumni that support it, and which one doesn't. Now guess why the Not-So-Good Doctor brandishes this logo in his sidebar:  .
  
  
• I hate my CV. I just have to say that.
  
  
• My beard-- now grown over like a hypothetical garden in a Shakespeare play -- is, for the first time I can recall, turning blonde at the edges. Blonde. White or grey would not surprise me, but blonde?!?!??! As the Farkers would say, "WTF?!?!?" The last time I was blonde, a different actor was Governor of California.
  
• Weirdest search term ever to bring anyone to this blog: "theories in minimizing chicken odor."  
  
  I couldn't have made that up if I had tried. The runner-up? "Dr J's nose drops."   
  
  
• I still hate my CV.
  
  
• Reading this news reconfirmed my gratitude for living in this wonderful, frozen land we call Canuckistan.   Well, okay, not all of it, particularly not these paragraphs:
  
  

  The woman had been watching television with her two young daughters in their family room, a room lit only by a television screen and light from the adjoining kitchen.
  
  The woman moved to another room for a better view, then called her husband. The pair watched Clark for up to 15 minutes from the privacy of their darkened bedroom.

  For a better view.   It's always the ones in the cheap seats that are the first to complain.   After all, if they had been in the front row, they might have gotten something on them.  
  
  
• Blonde. BLONDE. Does this mean I have to start wearing my underwear around my ankles? Wonder if that would improve my CV at all. And RK thought I'd already permanently scarred some of his students.  
  
  
• I've now wasted enough time on this blog entry that I'm going to have to feel guilty about it. Maybe not. After all, this discovery of my peripheral blondeness suggests that the process of whoring myself may not be quite so far removed from my disposition as I'd first thought. Now I just have to learn the swagger. Dear, dear me.

Okay, back to work. And now, my fellow Canadians, you may return to your living rooms to do what you do so well. At least now you know it's legal.

"Mommy Has Dirty Chest Bumps..."

      Is it possible? Has The Onion finally managed to be funny again? Er, likely not, but it's nice to see there's still hope in them thar hills.

The Doctor's Absence

      No, he's not gone fishing, and he's certainly not on the golf course, as those of you that remember the Doc's place of habitation should surmise. After a jaunt up to my old stomping grounds to take care of some rather silly matters of paper and tape (and, of course, a few words and pints with some old friends), the task of finishing things off for a few applications is taking over. And, of course, much time spent in much snow has meant that the Not-So-Good Doc is a sneezing, sniffling and coughing machine, an invention so obvious that it's amazing no one in the deep cold of Canuckistan has yet come up with one. (Work that must be done in winter must, alas, also be met with some form of cold or illness; 'tis as inevitable as the turning of the tide.) So, with all apologies offered in advance, don't look for this blog to be too active for the next little while. Even writing this is taking forever, my head something of a haze and my stomach something of a butter-churn. And still there are curses, er, courses to write, and "statements" to be made, the weight of the latter well-known to those of you that have ever applied to graduate schools or for other miscellaneous positions at universities. Ugh. So, he says, sighing with more than a touch of lethargy, this blog will be back to normal sooner or later. Maybe I should consider following the recently-departed Mr Carson's lead and appoint a guest blogger to do my job for me. **shrug** Things will return to normal. Eventually.

Requiescat In Pace

It's a sad day, indeed.

Tom on Arnold, or Doctor Kinko Strikes Again

      Yes, it seems I'm turning into a scanning machine these days, so much of which on Matthew Arnold. There's a reason for this, beyond providing some stuff for RK and his charges: for too many reasons, it's bizarrely difficult to get hold of much of the material by or about Arnold, and it tends to be only in the old books of packrats like me that such stuff can be readily found, university libraries often seeming after a while like plundered villages. (And I only consider myself a minor packrat: my library is surely smaller than the libraries of many I know.) So, here we are, the Not-So-Good Doctor acting as a do-it-yourself Kinko's.   

      Anyway, for those of you interested, here's a short essay on Arnold and Walter Pater -- by Tom Eliot. At least this time, it's short, and scanned in grayscale, so it should be less punishing on the eyes. Here are the pages:

Page 1       Page 2       Page 3
      Again, those of you here from RK's journal that are looking for the other Arnold stuff and would like to skip over my junk, just follow this link right here.

Stop The Music!

      Okay, even **I** think this is just plain mean.   Some shots are just too easy. Case in point: this blog simply ain't gonna say a thing about this:


That would be cruel and lascivious-- and probably very messy.      It had to be Sprite, didn't it? She may want to switch to Orange Crush. Definitely not Cream Soda, though.

So, Is This Hypotaxis Or Parataxis?

      It seems Condi Rice has done away with that nefarious "axis of evil" notion and replaced it with the more colonial-sounding "outposts of tyranny," and naming six countries as such: Cuba (big surprise), Belarus, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, and North Korea. Oddly, I don't think there's much to disagree with here, all six being legitimate "problem states." But notice the obvious omissions: Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Albania, China, Pakistan, most of the -stans, in fact, and so many others, including between a third and a half of the nations of Africa. These are hardly surprising, given various geo-political conditions and entanglements, and the simple fact that we can hardly expect every tyrannical regime to be named like agents and managers in a Golden Globe acceptance speech. But where is Syria, one of the triple pillars of the original evil axis, now suddenly forgotten? Has Syria quietly abandoned the dark side of the force and joined the Coalition of the Increasingly Unwilling? Have the Bushies embraced Syria as the Prodigal Country, or have they just Oops-ed them as they've oopsed so many things?

      Something has definitely shifted here, because Syria is an easier post to kick than, say, Belarus. I suspect the Bushies have made some sort of deal with Syria that kept that country of this list, perhaps it having something to do with Israeli-Palestinian relations and tightening the Syrian border with Iraq. Whatever happened, Syria's absence from this list is very suggestive indeed. My guess? Syria's been helping the Americans develop intelligence on Iran, and this was one of its rewards. Sy Hersh may have been cutting closer to the bone than most of us had initially thought.

      UPDATE:   Seems there's another outpost of tyranny to be named, at least according to this blog: Bhutan.   Key quote: "If Bhutan were a celebrity, it would be Johnny Depp—reclusive, a bit odd, but endearing nonetheless." To others, perhaps.

"And, By The Way, Your Kid Is Fat."

      I'd like to say, "leave it to Texas," but I suspect Ontaryaryaryary-o is only about a year away from this, given the McSquinty government's tendencies. Reading this, the first thing I thought of-- after, of course, the initial "oh my God"-- were those lines of Paul Simon's from Graceland:

She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed
As if I'd never noticed
The way she brushed her hair
From her forehead....

Welcome to The Biggest Loser: Kids' Edition.   As if kids don't have enough insecurities, let's add another one, make it official by putting it in black and white, and plain-out make the poor kids feel like pariahs.   Oh, I'm sure this will help the kids oh so much.   Idiots, idiots, idiots; and obliviously cruel ones at that.

      And, not to be mean (of course...    ), but look at the woman who's pioneering this move: kinda like the pot asking to label the kettle black, isn't it?   And though couching it in the terms of "the best intentions," isn't this also a signal condescension to parents, by which inaction is wiped away as stupefying ignorance? This blog would like nominate this preening Senatorial dunderhead to replace Doris Roberts should they ever decide to do Everybody Still Loves Raymond.  

Poetic Justice

      I'll let Maura explain.   Can we say schadenfreude, boys and girls?   I knew you could....  

      Gee, there seems to be a lot of assplay today, doesn't there? Hmmm. It may be time to raise a glass in praise of Donkey Otay.

      UPDATE:   Dear lord, there's even more-- courtesy Gene Weingarten.   Key quote: "Yeah, the ceiling, too." Oh my. And yes, I know this article's from December 29th. Let's just say I'm a little behind.  

Caught In The Course Hairs

      Oh, it's that time again, as the Not-So-Good Doctor has to put together sample syllabi for specific applications to less-than-specific academic instimahtutions. Over the years, I've drafted several of these, whether as corollaries for active courses or as proposals for my own, particularly in relation to Shakespeare and Genres courses. This time, though, I'm putting together a whack of them, as much as they are genuine pains in the arse to do. Survey courses (in Canada, generally those courses done in second year), in my estimation, are the worst, mainly because such courses are so broad that one can very easily end up stymied by the questions of what to keep and what to omit, questions that can only be answered, however tentatively, once one selects an approach to use, which I'm pretty much loathe to do. (As much as students need structure, teachers, or good ones at least, need flexibility.) The nag on my shoulder for the past little bit has been coming up with a course for a survey course in poetry, a puzzle indeed because there are very few historical boundaries to ensure one stays inside. But, finally, I came up with a preliminary response to the nag, at least for what is best described as a "comprehensive" course in which one desperately tries to cover most of the significant bases. I still have yet to decide on an "intensive" course, in which one admits one can't do everything and so one decides to focus on a few particular authors or themes or genres. Argh. Never one, however, to trust my own judgment on such things-- at least not until I see them in action-- I figured I'd open up for your perusal my draft (and keep in mind, it is just that, a draft) for the comprehensive course and see what any of you think, even though it seems comments around here have been as rare as Bushian wisdom. So, if you're curious, you can check it out right here. Feel free to say whatever you think, including "I'd sooner French kiss a hippopotamus than take that course." And before anyone says it: Yes, it's a highly canonical course, Yes, there are almost no women on it, Yes, there's no Post-Colonial stuff in there, and, Yes, there are some notable omissions. Guilty, as charged. It's my thinking that the kids these days need more of the canon than they're getting. Goodness knows, most of the students who graduate with English degrees these days do so without any knowledge of what happened before 1900, save what they get in their mandatory Shakespeare course.

      Other courses currently in design: a survey on Modernism; various freshman introductions; a Shakespeare course; a version of RK's Writer/Critic course; third-year courses on a few poetic periods (the Renaissance, the PreModerns [Hardy, Housman, Hopkins, etc.], the Moderns); an American literature course; a Canadian literature course; a Shakespeare and his contemporaries course; a film and literature course; and a few senior-level seminars on specific topics and authors, including ones on Graham Greene, Tom Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. It's tempting to think of designing a fourth-year seminar called "Literature and the Academy" which would examine the often sneering relationship between the two, though I'm sure that course would dub me too subversive by half. But with all of these courses, my tack would be to emphasize close reading as much as possible. As people like Vivian and MD may recall, it does precious little good charging through texts as if they were dummies on a jousting course. Reading should be like love-making, I've always said: take your time and don't hurry, because there's a lot more to it than getting it all over with. Right? Right.

They Got Bamboozled!

      For a while, anyway. To rewrite a line from Mr Thurber, I guess the moral of the story is this: Don't count your man-boobies until they are Hatched.   Paging Willie Nelson....

And The Bad Headline Of The Day Goes To...

      ... The Washington Times.   Leave it to a figure as Oedipal as the Dubster to need a bunch of phallic symbols at the ready.

      The runner-up for the award is The National Post with this headline that qualifies as one of those things that make one go 'Duh.'   Strange how much the word 'terrorism' has, as Mr. Fowler would say, worsened over the past four years.  

The Chuting Gallery, or I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face

      This blog really, really, really should NOT link to this, but.... The frightening thought: I got 13 out of 16.      I have to add that, appropriately enough, I found Number Two the most obvious.

      Should I have described this as NSFW?   I'm not quite sure....

      With, er, thanks to MD for the link.   I think.   It's, um, hard to maintain one's chivalric sensibilities in the, er, face of such, um, stuffing.   Er, stuff.   

      (It haaaaad to be "Brown-Eyed Girl" in the background, didn't it?      ESPECIALLY considering my own history with that song, way, waaaaay back in my residence days....      So wrong, so very wrong--- on soooooo many levels....)

Watch Out For The Staples

      For those of you that are interested, the trailer for the new Chronicles of Narnia movie are available here. Can't say I'm particularly excited about it, given that it's being done by Disney, but that hardly matters-- I can count on one finger the number of movies I've actually gone to see on its initial release in the cinemas in the last five years, despite countless we just HAVE to go see that's and such. The irony (such as it is), though, is that about a year ago I was entertaining-- very glibly, really-- a call for a short biography of C.S. Lewis for some Canadian publisher whose name I now forget. Needless to say, I didn't. The publishing company wanted the manuscript done on such short notice that I doubt I could have done Lewis justice, and my patience for biography isn't what it should be for someone assuming such a task. You'd think someone with as much training in history as I have would be more interested in biography, but no: although I was never one to subscribe entirely to the whole "Death of the Author" theory, I was also never one to give much of a tinker's damn about an author's private life. Not even William Empson's Using Biography could make me rethink my position. **sigh** But there we are, another tale of a book that got away. One day I should write a book about all the ones that did.

Johnny Come Lately

      It really is a shame primogeniture doesn't mean anything anymore. (Face it, this is cool: some of us have missed Johnny, lo these almost thirteen years, and it's heartening to know he occasionally still throws a joke or two into the ring.)

From The Sublime To The Ridiculous, Vol. 273,429

      Dammit, Janet-- now look what you've done.   Un-fucking-believable.

I'll Have What He's Having

      This blog reports; you decide. Actually, nothing in this article surprises me. Especially not the first clause of 'paragraph' three.   

Looking For Ahhhhh-nold?

      For those of you that have arrived here from RK's blog looking for the Matthew Arnold material, you can skip-- if you so desire-- right over my ramblings and go straight to the pages that you seek by clicking right here.

The Shot Before The Race

      And you thought reality television was bad now....

The Last Hurrah

      Sy Hersh -- the man who brought to the world's attention the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam all those years ago -- has an extended report in this week's New Yorker that should give us all pause--- and reason to be very, very alarmed, indeed. Note this highly ominous paragraph:

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.” [my italics]

Dear lord, the natters are really going to take this world to the apocalyptic brink, aren't they? (Not that it matters: if there's any nuclear warfare in the Middle East, the dunderheads will likely think they're bringing about the Rapture. Sheesh.) Read further in the article, and know exactly why some of us describe November 2nd as a sad day for humankind. An exaggeration? Perhaps. But we should all be worried that these incompetents seem to be wishing, as they did in Iraq, for peace processes to fail. As the forequoted intelligence official tells Hersh, "It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it." You see what happens when you give this wingnut a mandate?

Lo and Behold!

You're Bob Dylan! You're simple yet complex. You think of great ideas but you come across as someone who doesn't think that much. It doesn't matter anyway, people probably can't understand you much anyway. Which Revolutionary Icon in Rock Music Are You? (Now with Pics) brought to you by Quizilla

Oh really....    Well I guess it's at least better than the other options. As for the quiz itself, I assume most of you can guess what the Not-So-Good Doctor answered for the last question. And if you can't, you haven't been paying much attention, have you?         As The Bob would say, Blah blah blah blah blah blah....

Oedipus Had It Easy

      I assume most of you have never wanted to splash bleach in your eyes, right? Let's correct that, shall we (scroll down)? Hands up all those of you that would have preferred to see your parents fucking in a German scat film rather than see those images. I thought so....

      UPDATE: Masochistic? Want more, you sick, demented little monkey? Here you go. I swear, she looks like Ruth Gordon, only creepier, if that's possible. Beware the tannis root, lad, beware the tannis root! I'm sure that little guy will be the first boy in history to pray his mother hasn't got milk.

Moaning Becomes Elektra

      If only....  

      On a related note: has anyone else noticed that the new season of Alias is off to a (how do I put this?) shitty start? Talk about contrived idiocies....

GOT MLK?

      It's a comedian's field day: the collision of Martin Luther King Day with the passing of the creator of those insidious GOT MILK? adds that have disturbed most of us more than once. Ah, the stuff that dreams are made of....  

      /Yes, I'll be over in the corner being righteously ashamed of myself.

      Oh, by the way (he says, still lurking in the corner), the Double-L's ad reminds me: Herakleitos was right. The way up and the way down are the same thing.  

Like Rose-Buds Fill'd With Snow

      It's a question I often get from people first getting to know me, they learning what I've studied and so going for the most obvious question possible: So, what's your favourite poem? It's a question I'm loathe to answer most of the time, for obvious reasons, not least of which is my hesitance to name "favourites." One also ends up realizing-- true to anyone's experience-- how much one's answers to such a dreadful question are likely to be different from one day to the next. To deny, though, the influence of certain writings on one's life, and one's way of thinking about literature and indeed the world, is also to evade a legitimate question, because as much as one may admire or respect certain poems or poets, one might not be all that significantly influenced by them, while others will lurk like deep, dark secrets in the back of one's mind forever and ever. In effect, they become part of one's genetic code, for better or for worse. Graham Greene once said he had to stop reading Joseph Conrad for twenty years because he feared Conrad would have "colonized his style," and he'd never have established his own literary voice. Look at so many of the youngsters writing poetry these days, and you'll see the typical indicators of their colonization, more often than not by the usual suspects-- Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Leonard Cohen, e.e. cummings, to name a few. I decided, then, that it might be worthwhile to compose a list of ten of my favourite-- in most strictly subjective sense-- poems through the ages, poems that have nestled themselves into whatever nooks and crannies of my gangrenous heart, and which will always be there in some form or another. I decided to limit the list to ten, keeping in mind that such a list might change in a week or a month or a year as certain poems become more prominent and others less so. Here's what I came up with, in no particular order:

• Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West"
  
• Thomas Campion, "There Is A Garden In Her Face"
  
• T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
  
• Mark Strand, Dark Harbor (excerpts and short discussion here)
  
• A. E. Housman, "To An Athlete Dying Young"
  
• Leonard Cohen, "You Have The Lovers"
  
• John Dryden, "Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (1687)
  
• Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd"
  
• Thomas Hardy, "The Voice"
  
• Leigh Hunt, "Rondeau"

And yes, it probably is a bit odd that so many of the Usual Suspects aren't there: no Donne or Shakespeare or Yeats or Browning or Dickinson or Thomas, no Milton or Tennyson or Pope or Heaney, and not even Lowell or Wyatt or Howard or Layton or Bob Dylan. There are no women on the list, a fact that may offend some but does not surprise me. But when it comes down to it, I guess these are my Desert Island poems, as it were. Looking at the list now, I'm almost tempted to schaden-Freud myself, to remark upon what these choices say about me (in not necessarily flattering senses), but I'm not going to bother. What's interesting, I think, is that all of these poems are very strongly end-stopped, all of them given to clarity of expression and forcefulness of line, though almost all of them tend to be meditative in nature, particularly about love and death, the great emotional end-stops. I suspect this suggests something about my own poetic sensibilities, but I'll leave those possible inferences unstated. All in all, though, it's an interesting exercise. It makes one look again at the rocks from which one has been hewn, to which one all-but-inevitably returns. Which, of course, prompts the question: so what are your ten favourite poems? And, perhaps more interestingly, are you willing to name them, or do you keep them in the closet with your mothballs and natty sweaters?

      As my "favourite," as much as I have one, I'd probably have to lean on experience and fact. Years ago I was delivering a lecture on figures of speech to a first-year class, and I decided to use Stevens' "Idea of Order..." as my focal poem. It's likely telling what happened: after I told the students to open their anthologies so they could follow along as I read the poem aloud, a sea of heads went into their books, all of them bobbing up one by one and staying up as they realized I wasn't reading from the text. You could have heard a pin drop during that reading, and by the end no one was looking at their books. I guess that just about says it all, doesn't it? Too bad my memory isn't good enough to do that with more poems; if it could, I'd probably be the next Harold Bloom. Naomi Wolf and nutty psychoanalytic theories, of course, excepted.

On Rocinante Once More

      It's great to have Don Quixote back in the newspapers again, the Knight of Sorrowful Countenance turning 400 and all, but this blog's can't help but imagine what it must be like to roam the Don's old stomping grounds. As much as I'd love to do the annual Dublin tour that's held in memory of Joyce's Ulysses, I hate to say the Don's got Poldy beat.

"No Ma'am"

      Good Rule of Thumb #467,215: Beware those that say they have no regrets. Shades of Nuremberg, methinks, especially when the old chime about "just following orders" is rung like the death knell to morality.

In Our End Is Our Beginning?

      I'm not sure how long this has been out there, but last night's airing of Star Wars on the CBC included an interview with one of the Canadian ILM employees as well as the teaser trailer for the last film in the series, The Revenge of The Sith, or, as it's otherwise known, Star Wars Episode III: The Fans' Last Hope. The trailer looked, I have to say, cooooool, far more interesting than the previews -- or the results-- of the first two films in the trilogy. Most intriguing: the preview's beginning with the back story of Darth Vader-- from Episode IV, delivered by the late, great Sir Alec Guinness, which is almost enough to suggest that Lucas is going to find a way to include the original Obi-Wan Kenobi in the film in some fashion or another. Also back, mercifully: the voice of James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, which is cause for much rejoicing; and, too, the presence of Christopher Lee, by far the most elegant villain in the films since Peter Cushing. The N-S-G Doctor's own biases notwithstanding, this film needs Jones and Guinness to give the series, finally, some genuine gravitas, to get, at long last, some of those hairs on the backs of our necks to stand up straight. Watching the first film again last night, though, I was struck by a simple fact-- that Guinness did more in his smallish role than poor Ewan McGregor has been able to with the same character, Guinness' eyes all caginess and wise humour, McGregor's visage a bland saltine with facial hair. Shame that, because McGregor's not a bad actor, but watching his Kenobi is like watching Kevin Pollak impersonate Peter Falk's Columbo: there's a degree of neatness to his imitation, but there's not a whit of depth to it, nor a jot of the humour so central to the original creation. Anyway, you can check out the trailer here, much as it behooves me to link at anything at AOL.

      UPDATE: Much downloading later, and the link didn't work on my end of things, so I don't know if it's the same preview I saw last night. Figures with AOL, doesn't it. Quicktime -- to use a friend's expression -- blows serious doggie cocks. You might want to give this site a gander-- I can't be bothered.

Some Tissues Of Elevated But Abstract Verbiage

      This probably won't be of interest to most of my regular readers here, but for the sake of convenience of a small collect of people, you can read below the difficult-to-locate text of Matthew Arnold's famous essay on Wordsworth. For the life of me, I can't seem to find a decent and complete edition of it online, despite the text being long out of copyright. So, here we are, delivering over nine scans, with each page opening up in a separate window. May it be of use. Cheers.

Page 1
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Page 7
Page 8
Page 9

      (Actually, it occurs to me, glancing slightly askant at the portrait of WW, that the old bugger looks rather resembles Jonathan Pryce. Now we know who to send to the Lake District should anyone decide to do a movie of his life. But what's with the pauncy look on WW's face? I think I'll be having nightmares about those eyebrows for a week.)

      ADDENDUM: For those interested, here too are the pages from MA's Preface to his Poems of 1853. If you are one of RK's students seeing this, as of this posting (January 18), you're not required to read these. You're welcome to, but you surely don't have to.

      Page 1     Page 2     Page 3     Page 4     Page 5     Page 6     Page 7

Cry Me A Fraser

      Reading Jeffrey Simpson's column from Wednesday's Grope and Flail, I was struck by a peculiar thought, that the Canadian government may right now be in the final act of Measure for Measure. Former PM Jean Chretien -- well, his spokespeople -- has emerged from a self-imposed exile, suddenly looking so much wiser against the Angelo-cum-Paul Martin administration, the new PM's treatment of the Sponsorship Scandal now as tainted as the scandal ever was. The major figures of PM PM's actions-- Sheila Fraser, Justice Gomery-- are now circling the wagons, and there's more than a whiff of embarrassment in the air; you'd almost think the ex-PM had deliberately concealed the facts that might prove this fiasco a tempest in a teapot just so his successor could demonstrate his ineptitude in handling large government crises. Yes, Chretien's looking like Duke Vincentio, under-appreciated and much-maligned, but ready to clear up all the confusion and take matters into his own hands. Angelo's now sufficiently exposed himself, ironically enough gaining nothing from his would-be altruistic road trip through South East Asia. I can't say for certain that this was Chretien's plan all along, the complexities of such a contrivance almost impossible to fathom, but if it was, it demonstrates an amazing degree of political savvy and cunning that's worthy of his mentor Mr. Trudeau. It's looking with each day's headlines that Mr. Chretien simply stood aside and let Mr. Martin John Turner himself, readying the stage for his own return-- or, more probably, the return of a Chretienite king. Shades of Mark Twain? "It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." And Mr. Martin just couldn't keep his lips pursed. Brace yourself for the hilarity that now seems inevitable to ensue.

The Wolff And The Rabat

      Interesting, very interesting....   I can't help but wonder what the historical ramifications of this scheme might have been if it had succeeded.

To Know A Veil

      Let's just say this blog ain't touchin' this story with a ten-foot....  

      I really have to stop being so elliptical today.

On The Rood Again

      It figures that this story crops up, as the song goes, just as the weather has started getting rough. Let's hope the tiny bits aren't tossed, or else they'll have to depend upon courage of the fearless crew so the sliver isn't lost.

      Key quote: "After the election, everyone is saying God is back."   Perhaps-- but this time, it's personal.

The Kwicker Picker-Upper

      I guess there's no accounting for-- oh, never mind....  

~~The Bomb's Made For Lovin' And You Can Shoot It Far~~

      Just imagine if they'd figured out it was easy as blasting Barry White over loud speakers.... (After all, they figured out the opposite with Noriega.) Or, one gathers, in this case, Madonna's Greatest Hits. Key quote:

Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

Blow? Evidently, editing isn't a priority at the New Scientist. But now we know where the Pentagon's mind is: getting the enemy to Ghraib each other as intimately as possible.

Another Reason To Smirk When The Word "Virgin" Is Used

      You'd think people of this world were squirrels, clinging to their chestnuts as they do. But how-- oh how-- did half these songs end up in the Top 20? Robbie Williams? It staggers the crippled mind.

Deconstructing Harry

      Query: what's worse, Prince Harry's idiotic wearing of a Nazi outfit to a costume party, or that commentators worldwide still bother to assess his potential as a future King? Let's face it: Harry's cultural and political relevance, even if he did become King, wouldn't even be within shouting distance of his grandmother's or (more especially) his great-grandmother's, the royal family now reduced to little more than an upscale national version of Coronation Street. The royals seem more and more like caricatures than figureheads, and their relevance in countries as far afield as Canada and Australia seems dubious at best, reality TV personalities long before reality TV came to be. Now the lad will learn the life of his uncle, the condition of being an anachronism even before you're born. Come to think of it, that might end up proving his father's condition, too. No wonder the lad's acting out. I probably would, too.

This Great And Intelligent People

      It's a curious thing: this article, a discussion of the idea (for lack of a better word) of Americanism, begins historically and develops an interest series of thoughts and observations about the development of that particular ism. But reading through it, one eventually reaches a volta, or a "turn," and the author's bent makes itself apparent, a presence more discomforting than affirmative. (See if you can spot the turn: it happens in one very specific spot, and from there, one's in the land of no return, tempered critical thought jettisoned in favour of a larger declarative purpose.) As for the American tendency to try to press "democracy" about the world-- a broad stroke, but it will have to do for the sake of brevity-- may have had some of its genesis as a kind of international noblesse oblige, but it's becoming more and more apparent, at least in these quarters, that the result has become a kind of noblesse oblique, with President Bush the demonic parody of Woodrow Wilson (and Reagan the demonic parody of Lincoln). When the columnist concludes that Americanism is a religion that "chooses life," this blog can't help but think there's a peculiar slant to that suggestion which isn't quite disingenuous but isn't quite honest, either-- and which is all the more unsettling for the incongruity. Noblesse oblique, indeed.

Do No Charm

      Given the state of her career, she should probably be wearing an albatross instead. (Although this blog has to confess it's a bit surprised she didn't opt for simple pearl necklace; one can imagine that her brother has a similar trinket, but the object, one would surmise, would be significantly smaller.)

"We Are Contemporizing It...."

      Anyone remember the old SNL sketch about "Bad Idea Jeans," in which a bunch of basketball-playing thirty-somethings threw out some of the most insipid ideas for their lives as if they were wise life choices? This blog is beginning to suspect there's a lot of hoop-shooting going on in Hollywood these days, and this idea -- we are convinced-- must have been a result. Oscar Wilde was right: life imitates, er, "art" after all.

The Boxer Rebellion

You Are a Boxer Puppy
Energetic, playful and good with kids. You've also got a wild spirit that can't be trained or tamed.		What Breed of Puppy Are You? Oh, yes, Doctor J and his wild spirit....          (I ain't wild-- just plain feral.)

Rhetoric Butler

      Wonder what all those funny terms we nerdy English types use when we're talking about aspects, dimensions and constructions of language, like antimetabole and sententia and expletive? (The last, for the record, does not refer solely to swearing, even if swear words are usually interruptive rather than central.) Well (he says expleting), look no further. This is a handy little resource, especially for those of us that are getting forgetful in our old age. My former students from last year's Shakespeare class will no doubt look at this page and shudder. Oddly enough, the most famous example of chiasmus in the English language isn't mentioned in relation to the term. The example? James Joyce's Pull out his eyes, / Apologise, / Apologise, / Pull out his eyes from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which pops to mind, in part, because today is the 64th anniversary of Joyce's death.

Google Fails Me.... **sniff**

      This blog has learned that according to Google's Page Rank it merely rates a failing grade of 4 out of 10. How devastating....      It, of course, matters not a whit (see here to have the ranking process explained), but I have to say I find it amusing I rank even that highly. Let us revel-- glory!-- in this blog's failure. Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho....

      ADDENDUM: Wow, it's come to my attention that someone today will be visitor # 15,000 to this blog, a number I confess surprises me. (It's about 14,500 more than I'd ever have expected.) So, whoever # 15,000 is, congratulations: you've won, well-- you've won PDA, but thanks, anyway.  

The Howdy Dowdy Show

      RK sent me this piece from Maureen Dowd in today's NYT, though I surely and honestly cannot fathom why.      Fact is, there's a lot I could say in response to it, but I'll be unharacteristically subversive and simply say this: the guys know what's happening here.... Insert two nudges and a pair of winks accordingly. And, ladies, it has precious little to do with power, intelligence, income, or even youth or beauty. Leave it to Ms Dowd, though, to use this argument to ask if the feminist movement was just "some sort of cruel hoax."

      Also in today's NYT, Frank Rich has a scouring indictment of CNN's Crossfire and the Bush propaganda machine.   It never ceases to amaze-- or appall-- me the depth of corruption and collusion within the ranks of the media these days.

Barrying The Lede

      Is it true, is it really? Dave Barry on open-ended sabbatical from writing columns? This ought to be a heresy, a crime against humanity. But, alas, there are things we cannot change, and so it's worth giving a gander to Slate's elegy for the Dave, a neat little summary of some of Barry's funnier bits over the years. No one, though, could say farewell like the man himself, so-- in case you missed it-- check out Dave's final column, more an envoi than a conclusion, which begins with one of those great introductory sentences: "There comes a time in the life of every writer when he asks himself -- as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Hemingway all surely asked themselves -- if he has any booger jokes left in him." (In case the link breaks, you can read the article by clicking here.) It's also worth checking out this email interview with Dave about his retirement, and so is Art Buchwald's piece wishing him well. Mercifully, we'll still have Dave's blog, though it's now mostly handled by his Research Department judi (aka "The Stealth Bloggerette") who, we are constantly reminded, is interested in men. Make sure you check out today's education item of the day; very funny. Well, Dave, the world's going to be a little less charming without your weekly odes to lunacy and toiletries. Feel free to send your Pulitzer over this way if you're not going to be using it.

      This blog also recommends reading Dave's old editor Gene Weingarten's column about (ugh!) getting old, which begins with a reminiscence about an English professor "who was, as Chaucer might have said, a fayre mayden, betrothed not / with flaxen hayre and bodye hotte."  

The Last Laugh
Dave, we hardly knew ye
By Dave Barry

Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page W32

      There comes a time in the life of every writer when he asks himself -- as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Hemingway all surely asked themselves -- if he has any booger jokes left in him.

For me, that time has come. I've been trying to entertain newspaper readers since the '60s, when I wrote "humor" columns for the Haverford College News. I put "humor" in quotation marks because when I go back and read those columns today, I don't get any of the jokes. But at the time, they were a big hit with my readership, which consisted pretty much of my roommates.

After college, I got a job as a reporter at the West Chester, Pa., Daily Local News, where I was also allowed to write humor columns. I thought they were pretty good, but after my third one, an editor took me aside and told me -- this is an absolutely true quote -- "You used to be funnier."

That was more than 30 years ago, and since then hardly a week has gone by during which somebody has not told me that I used to be funnier. I sometimes got discouraged, but I kept at it, year after year, the past 22 of them at the Miami Herald. Why didn't I give up? I'll tell you why: I have no useful skills.

Also, this job has been a lot of fun. Here are just a few of the things that, as a professional humor columnist, I have actually been paid to do:

-- I picked up my son, Rob, at his junior high school in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. (Rob, now 24, claims he has forgiven me, although, to be safe, I'm still in the federal witness protection program.)

-- After I wrote a column suggesting that opera might be fatal to humans, I was invited to Eugene, Ore., to participate in the Eugene Opera's performance of the Puccini opera Gianni Schicchi. I played the part of a corpse.

-- An Air Force pilot took me for an F-16 fighter jet ride, during which, while hurtling through the brilliant blue sky high above the Straits of Florida at faster than the speed of sound, I threw up.

-- After I made fun of North Dakota, the city of Grand Forks, N.D., invited me up there one January, and, in a deeply moving (also deeply cold) ceremony attended by a crowd of dozens, the mayor of Grand Forks, Mike Brown, dedicated a new sewage-lifting station in my honor. (Mayor Brown's official proclamation very eloquently compared my work to the production of human excrement.)

-- I went on "The Late Show With David Letterman" and demonstrated to a nationwide television audience that it is possible to set fire to a pair of hairspray-soaked men's underpants using a Rollerblade Barbie doll. (To my knowledge, Rollerblade Barbie is the only Barbie ever recalled as a fire hazard, although I am not taking credit.)

These were all fun things to write about. But many of my favorite columns have been suggested by you readers, an amazingly alert group. If an important news event occurs -- a toilet exploding, for example; or a boat being sunk by a falling cow; or a cow exploding -- I can count on my readers to let me know about it. On the other hand, if I write something that turns out -- despite my relentless fact-checking -- to be inaccurate, such as that Thomas Jefferson invented the atomic bomb, I will receive dozens of letters, often very irate, correcting me. I cherish those letters most of all.

So this is a great job. And yet I'm quitting it, at least for now. I want to stop before I join the horde of people who think I used to be funnier. And I want to work on some other stuff. So for the next year, I won't be writing regular columns, though I hope to weigh in from time to time if something really important happens, such as a cow exploding in a boat toilet.

At some point in the next year, I hope to figure out whether I want to resume the column. Right now, I truly don't know.

So in case I don't get to say this later: Thanks to all you editors for printing my column, and thanks especially to all you readers for reading it. You've given me the most wonderful career an English major could hope to have. I am very grateful.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut

      Evidently this bloke never learned the two words every man needs to get through life: Yes and dear.

      Key quote: "Monti initially tried to hide the testicle by putting it in her mouth, but released it."       This blog haws to wonder if it was either chocolate or salty.

Situation Hopeless But Atleast Not Serious

      And I thought I hated my middle name.... (In case you're wondering about the title of this entry, look only this little bit further.)

Pimpin' Barbara Bush

      So much for the Kid staying in the picture.... (At the very least, if John Kerry had won the election, there'd have been decent music at the inaugural concert; the Republicans seem to have some odd fascination with teeny-bopper-lolitas that can't sing to save their tiny little butts.)

Springtime For Harry, or Eine Kleine Berührung Harrys In Der Nacht?

      In one of the first episodes of the UK version of Whose Line Is It, Anyway? (way, way back in 1988), the contestants were asked to come up with the world's worst things to say to a member of the Royal Family. Stephen Fry, not surprisingly, came up with most of the best answers, one of which included the drop-dead funny, "Oh, that reminds me, I have to buy a stamp." Another of his answers came to mind this morning as I read about Prince Harry's little sartorial stupidity: "So, really, you're just bunch of middle-class German folk, aren't you?" More, perhaps, than we'll ever know.

      (As for the MP's suggestion that this should disallow Prince Harry from service at Sandhurst, this blog has to wonder if there wasn't method to Harry's madness; after all, if you wanted to avoid Army service....)

      (With thanks to RK for correcting my very poor German, which I probably haven't used in fifteen years-- the very, very, very little I acquired. Ach du lieber!)

Stanley And The String Theory

      In case you give a tinker's damn, here's the (naturally NSFW) deleted orgy scene from Stanley Kubrick's lamentably bad swan song, Eyes Wide Shut. The stuff one finds on the Net....

      Cranky hump-day aside: Let me pause a second to take issue with the word "Interweb" which is gaining ground in common parlance. The word "interweb" is a lot like the word "postmodern," an absurdity: modernity refers to what is happening now, so for anything to be after it is futurism, prediction, or prophecy, and so to categorize anything that has already happened as postmodern makes absosmurfly no sense; similarly, a "web," by its very nature and design, is always already a thing of connections and nexus points, so to identify a web as being "inter" anything makes no smurfin' sense. A web that is not a thing of interconnections is a string, or a thread, or a line; it is not a web. Oh, what a tangle interweb we weave....

Ross Dross

      Yet another scientist demonstrates that ferculent thinking isn't limited to the Bush administration. "Love's fire heats water...." Oy vey....   

A Rare Quasi-Poetic Doodle

      And before I get emails from one corner of the world or another, keep in mind this is merely a doodle -- and so not a poem, and so just a teasing through. Even a parody, if you will.

Love and I-- we had a row--
A wail-- now we no longer talk--
We helled ourselves, piqued, unpacked,
Struck each with Ahab's mark and thought,

There with some hron-wracked sense
Of revenge. And so we warred--
Would still war-- but attrition
Wisped-- and we stood unwater'd

Down. Dickering was pointless.
We gathered nothing. Instead we sang,
Murmured, inebriate with peace
And its maudlin thoughts of hope,

Those tortured duns of Emily.
There's no farewell upon these seas,
Merely this and that and waves--
And that we had to say goodbye.

Read too much into this and prepare to DIE. Maybe one century I'll finally get a poem right. This isn't one of them; it's just a doodle.

Ten Long Years With The Weight Of Ten Long Winters

      Oh, the irony: in this year's Canada Reads battle of the books, the nominees have been named, with Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers -- held by many to be the first postmodern Canadian novel, and the subject of the Not-So-Good Doctor's MA thesis -- unequally pitted against four significantly-lesser literary lights, Margaret (*shudder*) Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Frank Parker Day's Rockbound, Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair, and Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues. But, just over a month before the presentations, the novel's "defender," Rufus Wainright, has dropped out to be replaced by the taffy-minded Molly Johnson. How is this ironic, I'm sure most of you are wondering. Well, the decision will be made on -- wait for it -- February 25th, 2005. For one person anyway, this will be truly ironic. For the rest of you, alas, you'll never know 'cuz I ain't explainin' it, and I ain't talkin' bout it-- ever. Let's just say that the gods of coincidence have a morbid sense of humour. I'm sure they're sniggering away, enjoying the gongs that are ringing in the background.   Har-bloody-har-har-har.  

      Further proof the gods must be bastards, and snarky ones at that. Even moreso if Cohen's book doesn't win. If Orifice and Crack wins, those gods aren't just bastards, they're farking arseholes, and this blog, for one, will be out for ichor.

      (The title of this entry? Doc J's history through Mr Cohen-- "Five years with the length of five years" -- through Billy Wordsworth. So much for connecting nothing. )

The Horror, The Horror

      It's tragic, I tells ya, tragic....  

These Kids Today

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.... Harrumph.   Welcome to the 21^st century.

She's More Flexible Than You Think

      Scroll down to the last item on this page, and understand the joy the Not-So-Doctor took in imagining Ann Coulter, if only in effigy, being manipulated by Helen Thomas. Glad to see there's still a little humour in the Washington press gallery.

      Want to see the toy in question? Here you go. You can decide which is more plastic, the doll or the real thing.

Another Disappointment For The Ladies

      Sometimes a little space makes all the difference.

Timing Is Everything Part 6,786,542

      Oh, God, you card, you....

"A Cute, Cuddly Uterus Doll"

      What else does one have to say? Key quote: "And, of course, the human uterus is not normally bubblegum pink." (Too bad-- pink, this blog recalls being informed, does more than you think, even if, in this particular case, it seems to be able to play the piano and swing from trees.)

Paradigms Lost?

      The most interesting thing about this article from today's NYT is this paragraph, which should suggest to some of you what's really happening at the outer edges of the academy:

"Shakespeare After All" is, in many ways, a return to the times when the critic's primary function was as an enthusiast, to open up the glories of the written work for the reader. It is free of cultural studies jargon, a work more in the vein of A. C. Bradley, Mark Van Doren, Auden or T. S. Eliot than of Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida.

More and more it seems the figures that clung most tightly to the apron-strings of literary theory are stepping away from them, or at least from the now-dominant modes of examining literature. One wonders if the counterfeiters are now begging forgiveness. But why?, one stoops to consider. This blog's answer, however tentative and qualified? It's not just the New Boredom, as some have called it, the fatigue with the same-ole-same-ole models and paradigms that have privileged theory over literature. No, more and more, this blog suspects a darker result, that the super-elevation of theory-- and the academy that did the hoisting-- had all but rendered literature irrelevant, and so removed itself from interested creative reality. In short, they'd put the cart before the horse and sat there until the horse collapsed from exhaustion. I'm not ready to say the tide is turning, he says jumping from one metaphor to another, but it seems that slowly there's a sea change in the making, even if this blog's been washed up on shore for a while and waiting for it to happen. There may still yet be a text in this class after all. Alas, I won't hold my breath; the rank and file now have too much invested in the current modes of thinking and writing "about literature" to abandon them so easily. But one can at least hope the waters are shifting. Or at least I can. Who'd have thought being "old-fashioned" in one's approach might turn out to be one of the benchmarks of one's academic value?

Strictly Ballroom

      Because, admit it, you were wondering....

      And in deeply disturbing related news.... Strangely, the ghost of Martha Raye has no comment.

How To Make Doctor J Do His Frankenstein Impression In Which He Wanders The Countryside Wringing The Necks of Small Children And Other Innocent Victims

      Just show him this.   GARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ERRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!

      Number 5, by the way, features a two-to-three page discussion of -- I kid ye not -- The Last Action Hero, which should just about say it all, shouldn't it?

      Oh, these studies, all laden with their would-be hip bents, the key buzzwords worn like the latest pieces of haute couture, fashionable but pretentious, and surely quite gaudy.

      On the other hand, this-- this is hip, pretty babies.... It might even stop the Monster on his rampage. The key word there, I hasten to add, is "might."

      UPDATE:   It may be strangulation time again, boys & girls. One of the few things to keep the Doc moderately sane when insomnia strikes and he's facing a long day contiguous to a long night was admiring the eminently alluring Peta Wilson come 6am in reruns of La Femme Nikita. (Still photos tend not to do her justice; she always looks better in motion than in stasis. I choose the word "alluring" very specifically.) Showcase, in its inveterate wisdom, has decided we insomniacs no longer need this oasis, and have so opted to replace the show with-- damn and blast-- Emily of New Moon. Emily of New FREAKIN' Moon. Now if that's not enough to turn a man to homicide, I don't know what is.

      UPPERDATE: Need a biography of Shakespeare that's clear, informative, and useful? Well, I wouldn't suggest looking here then. Among the more frustratingly glib statements: "Shakespeare's plays fell into four major categories -- comedy, tragedy, history and The Tempest." Oy. Sounds like something one of my old 3190 students would have written, only less grammatically. (And no-- no one in particular, just generically.) Oy.

Pitty, Isn't It?

      I remember some years ago seeing an interview with Knowlton Nash-- longtime anchor of The National on the CBC, for those of you too young to remember him-- in which he explained that in the early 60s, it was the worst-kept secret in Washington that JFK was having various dalliances with squads of young women. In fact, Nash explained, on the Kennedy campaign, JFK would seldom carry his own cash with him and would bum money from members of the reporting pool for such dalliances. Why didn't anyone report it? It wasn't considered news, and there was a sort of gentleman's-agreement against reporting such stuff. More importantly, most newspapers wouldn't want to trade in such smarmy allegation, even if it was true. (Those were the days before the Profumo scandal in the UK.) Now fast-forward forty-odd years. Somewhere Edward R. Murrow is turning in his grave-- and Hedda Hopper is cackling in Margaret Hamilton-glee, "Oh, my pretties! I'm free at last, oh Lord, I'm free at last!" Welcome to the Compromised Land.

O Captain, My Faaaaaabulous Captain!

      Sadly, I know some people who are all-but-surely drooling over the re-emergence of this perversely silly-- and pointless-- debate. Infer snarky reference here to a time when lilacs last in his backdoor bloom'd.   

Karma Bums

Way to go, your alter poet is Jack Kerouac, who is by FAR the coolest!

Er, I don't think so.... The cig, maybe, but surely not the rest....    Who is Your Alter Poet? brought to you by Quizilla Note the very limited set of options there.... And, of course, that the quiz designer can't spell the word "smooth."

The Old Man From The Sea

      Toooooo cuuuuuuute.....:

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday.

      The year-old hippo calf christened Owen was rescued last month, suffering from dehydration after being separated from his herd in a river that drains into the Indian Ocean.

Absolutely adorable. With thanks to RK for the link.

      And in other quadrupedal news, I've decided to name the adopted one Jenny. If you think I'm going to explain that decision, you're right out of your cotton-pickin' minds. ("Strife," as RK suggested, was cute, but I couldn't bring myself to name her such a thing, especially since she's taken to trying to clean my beard everytime she gets the chance.) I will say there's a convenient coincidence to the name: a jenny is a female donkey, and considering her tendency to scamper about braying at me, it seems appropriate for a goofy companion for a fellow stuffed with sawdust.


Bouncy or coffy, it's all the same at the bottom of the river.... Right, Mzee?