Settle In, Because The Doctor's Going To Go Off On a Massive Muthableeping Rant

As I limped down the street every window broadcast a command. Change! Purify! Experiment! Cauterize! Reverse! Burn! Preserve! Teach! Believe me, Edith, I had to act, and act fast. Call me Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline.... All I heard was pain, all I saw was mutilation.

    --- F. in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966)

      Idiots.   Or, er, sorry, I should probably apply mimetic criticism: Fucking idiots. No, that's not right: Motherfucking idiots. That's better.  

      (Nothing says stupidity like Oedipal connubiality. Or at least the canoodling that so often leads to requisite copulation.)

      Actually, I expected this, Cohen's first-round (!?!?!?!!!!) removal at the CBC Canada Reads Thingamabobber, after hearing Molly Johnson's pathetic defense of the book on Monday afternoon, during which I was reduced to sitting there and shouting at the television screen like some deranged hockey nut.   Anybody would have been a better choice than Johnson to present the novel's case. Her tepid "it should win because it's important" argument would have been risible had it not been so aggravatingly insipid. No, it wasn't insipid, it was STUPID, which I will infer that most of you will read as I detailed yesterday, with that "u" containing more O's than a honey-nut cereal. Couldn't the CBC find someone who understood, or at least liked, even appreciated, the book, to defend it? Like Michael Ondaatje, or Linda Hutcheon, or Stan Dragland? Noooooooo. It reminds me of my MA defense, at which one of the professors on my committee sat silently for the plupart of the discussion, and then eventually and meekly shrugged that she had "troubles" with the book's subject matter.

      This also makes me wonder-- in a way that warrants, I think, a paragraph aside-- why so many people in literary academia get so touchy-feely about their responses, as if offending books were meant to injure them specifically.   In the non-literary academy, see the recent Larry Summers fiasco, which has every PC dunderhead wailing as if he or she had been lashed, scoured, and Gibsonially crucified. As for Summers, we should all be wondering why pundits and prognosticators seem invariably to hang on the same key phrases of his address without in the least assessing them in the context in which he delivered them, which was, by my reading, tentative, speculative, and hypothetical-- and not, as the P&Ps would have it, polemical. See, for example, this claptrap from the noted Miltonist Stanley Fish, whose remarks make me wonder if, indeed, there was any place for Summers' text in his stumping class. Stanley's usually wiser than this, but it seems he too has jumped into the corps of heavy-handed drum-beating for The Injured And The Troubled. This returns me to the issue at hand.

      It's one thing to have feelings about a book; it's quite another to be able to judge (or assess) it properly.   And, frankly, Olivia "I-Can't-Get-Elected-So-I-Stay-In-The-Public-Eye-As-Much-As-I-Possibly-Can" Chow's response -- "I don't want anybody to feel those passages. It disturbs me" -- is the epitome of this sort of PC idiocy, to say nothing of evincing a complete and utter miscomprehension of the book. It's like discouraging people from watching The Accused because it makes you uncomfortable.   Idiots, idiots, idiots. (And, briefly, this is where Professor Hopkins in the Summers case is so dreadfully wrong: political correctness IS the point. It was NOT the point of Dean Summers' speech, but the kafuffle surrounding his speech has become all about it.)

      How would you have defended the book, Dr J?, some of you might be prone to ask. I'd point to the technical virtuosity of it, the novel testing not only experiments in content but just about every prose form imaginable, and succeeding with most of them. I'd point to the humour of it, missed by so many, that is so dark as to render jet black autumn red. I'd point to those magnificent sections of mantraic writing that are almost as powerful as some sections of sacred texts, particularly the stunning "God is Alive" and "What is a saint" sections. I'd remind them that a novel that challenges is not a novel to be taken lightly, and that, in fact, Beautiful Losers has probably done more to challenge the placid provinciality that daunted, even stalked, so much Canuckistani fiction before 1970 (and, really, still does, though "provinciality" has morphed slightly into "diasporic"). I'd ask the fellow panelists if there was among the other novels even a single character as unforgettable as F., or if any of the others provided an ending that is as magical as a Christo "exhibit" and as genuinely inspired as Cohen's ending ("Hey, look, somebody's making it!"). I'd also ask if any of the judges other than Roch Carrier and Ms Johnson even bothered to finish the damned thing, surely one of most audacious books written in this silly country that chooses Tommy Douglas as its greatest citizen of all-fucking-time. Oh, that's right! We don't care for audacity or vision. We're CUH-NAY-DIAN!   Argh.  

      And, by the way, if you've read the novel and you come to our little Olympian's conclusion that the book is "not only depressing but completely void of hope," then you too are an idiot of Bushian proportions-- or, that you are an idiot of Bushian lack-of-reading. Any attentive-- and half-way intelligent reader-- would observe that so much of the book is about transcending the voids of hope, or the apparent voids.   I swear, of these five panelists, I'd venture that only M. Carrier, a novelist himself, very often a good one, too (and, oddly, the only male in the navel-gazing bunch), would survive ten minutes in my classroom, the idiotic remarks of the others even more obtuse and vapid than an eighteen year-old saying, "I don't like Shakespeare 'cuz he talks funny." At least there is hope for the eighteen year-old. The other four panelists -- aka the Waifish Whining Wymyn Brigade -- deserve the same whipping I gave Dennis Lee in my thesis, lo those many years ago. (I wrote, borrowing from a then-friend, that he suffered from "cranial-glutimal ensconcement." I am so amazed my generally-addled brain remembers that....)   No, the WWWB would have warranted, for uttering such drek, an intellectual bitch-slapping of Bobby Brown proportions were they in one of my classes.

      (I should add in fairness, though, that were they in the classes of some of my once-colleagues, they'd have been praised for daring to "speak against the text," and they'd be sent off to Graduate School where the REAL hatred of literature and literary study begins. After that, they'd likely by the end of the decade be professors at McGill, teaching literature courses with literature reduced in them to token black-guy-in-a-horror-film appearances.  

      **sigh, pause**

      For some reason, I'm now thinking of how mama-birds feed their hatchlings: by chewing the food and dispensing it as pule into the mouths of their babies.   I haven't the faintest reason why THAT image should come to mind right now. Not the faintest....)

      Oh, this has become quite the rant, hasn't it?   It steels me, though, in a way, or in a few ways, actually. One is that, if I am hired in the next bit to do an introduction course, I am now definitely putting Beautiful Losers on it, come Hell, high water, or a Grand Chorus of infantile protestation.   Another is that, frankly, I'm glad I did so much of my formative work on material that others find so controversial (not just BL), because it girded me against a lot of the drivel that drown, like that forementioned high water, what should be the substantial matters for debate and discussion.   I shudder to think what I might have been like if I hadn't developed a built-in bullshit detector to ward against such stuff. (Actually, I probably know the answer: hired. Or married to **ick!** Jack Layton.)

      Yet another is, that I'm now inclined to think (and I'm probably not the best judge on this) that my classes with aspiring young minds actually have been much more rigorous and intellectually-focussed than most. (My ex-charges might want to disagree with this. Vehemently, and with gallons of spittle to boot, and those of them that might be reading this are invited to get their glands going in the comments.) It's important to deal with Real Stuff, not just what I deride as namby-pamby effusions about "feeeeeeeeeeelings" and "I-don't-know-what-anybody-else-thinks-but" nigglings. It's also why I never believed in calling D+ papers Bs just for the sake of placating the masses with pitchforks-- the burghers (read in: department heads) that desperately want, little Neville Chamberlains that they almost always are, Peace In Our Time.

      Argh. Has this entry-turned-rant-turned-diatribe entirely fused the fact of Cohen's early ejection from the CBC Reads contest with an ejection of blisterous bile against the academy? Yes, though probably not for the reasons some of you may be (fairly) thinking at this point.  

      We've so watered-down our expectations of intelligent reading that now the prissiest statements can be made-- from authorities high and low-- and we not only indulge them, we accept them as being something more than prissy statements that effront intelligence; we instead accept them as intelligent. (I would call such stuff hysterics, but I'm sure the femi-nots reading this would look at the words 'prissy' and 'hysterics' and think there was a chauvinist agenda to my argument. Those of you in academic circles know I'm right on this one. I was probably already deepening myself in mire when I wrote 'namby-pamby' above.) We've so lowered the bar that not only can mediocrity hoist itself across, so can hogwash, so long as some jumps on the floorboard and projects the goo into the air-- and even Hannibal Lecter disapproved of the projectile issuance of gooey stuff. Not just being uncivilised, it's anticivilised. (There should have been time for such a word.)

      (I really do have to stop allowing myself so many parenthetical remarks. Yeah, like this one. Call it a curse of an endlessly annotating mind.)

      And here we are, the Doctor's fulmination nearly finished. I should add that it bothers me less that Beautiful Losers lost than that it lost on these flimsy grounds, and that this exercise demonstrated once again that myopia and stupidity, to say nothing of dismissive preening that recalls the current social climate, will out. I think it was Trevelyan, the younger not the elder, who once remarked that (then-)modern society had raised an entire generation of people who could read but didn't know what was worth reading.   He was right.   He was, I'm inclined to think, more right now than he was then, which should say something about the degree of the slippery slope. Think about that, please, for a moment or so the next time you reach for your TV Guide. Or, worse, when some provincial little unknown book wins-- as one now inevitably will-- the Canada Reads contest, when the votes line up behind respectability rather than daring, with sentimentality swaddled in-between.

      F. would have had something to say about that. And he wouldn't be entirely right about matters, he probably wouldn't be in the least bit wrong, either.

      BTW, the second book voted off was Carrier's choice, Volkswagen Blues. (Gee, whoda thunk it? The writer in the lot voted down? Never!)   Let us please, please hope that Atwood's Orifice and Crack is next to take the step to the block.   Though, one has to wonder how that book would look split down the middle.