Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

     Happy happy joy joy, happy happy joy joy! 

 

      The Doctor had expected to spend today ramming through the rest of his marking with the manic speed of a Benny Hill chase.  But, lo and yeah!  A brief reprieve has come, so I can slow the pace a bit and amble (nay, saunter!) through the last.  Sure, that doesn't mean much to any of you, but it means a fair bit 'round these humble quarters.  The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen are gettin' jiggy with it old school.  Wheee! 

 

     So, what's the Not-So-Good Doctor going to do?  Well, he isn't going to Disneyland, that's for certain, but somewhere there are empty pint glasses whispering sweetly his patient syllables. 

Bard Times

     Reading this summary of the plans for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, it occurred to this blog to posit this to my readers:  What would be the most disturbing production of Shakespeare you could imagine-- if you dare?  Added level of difficulty: Do not cite a production that has actually happened.  (This gets rid of Keanu Reeves as Hamlet right away.)  So, c'mon, what's the most dreadfully Avon-garde production you can fathom-and-half?  Try to avoid, if you can, the obvious combinations, like those involving Jessica Simpson playing Cleopatra, her barge like a bikini-burnished throne and her something-something beaten gold.

 

     Personally, I'm waiting, with a Jaques-like despair, for the David Mamet version of As You Like It.  Joe Mantegna as Touchstone?  Natch...

 

     Utterly unrelated post-script:  As my marking continues, a recurring error that's cause for contemplation:  apparently several of my charges believe that a "one-night stand" is a "one nightstand."  Should I find this, er, alarming?  Then again, both usually do involve wood in some way....

How Greene Was Our Valli

    

 

     Unfortunately, most of my readership will have no idea who she was, but (Alida) Valli has passed away at the age of 84.  An actress who never really became famous in Hollywood, she is, however, assured a permanent place in film history because of her stunning performance as Anna Schmidt in one of the great movies of all-time, Carol Reed's magnificent The Third Man.  (If you haven't seen it, do so.  Immediately.  And take a look at the excellent collection of images here.)  Few actresses ever have one of those moments that will live enshrined in cinema history as Valli will, namely the final shot from The Third Man in which Joseph Cotten waits casually for her to walk down the cemetary road--- and she simply passes him by.  To me, she remains the eptiome of a Graham Greene femme exotique.   May she rest in peace.

Look As Good At 442 You Will Not

     A little tribute to the birthday boy seems in order.  Click on the pick to read a delightful piece from today's NYT (link courtesy RK). 

 

 

For the record, my first Shakespeare professor is still teaching, and several of my students have now had him as their professor.  (I remember a gaggle of young women who used to sit in the back row of his class and titter to each other that he sounded like Sean Connery.)  Teaching Shakespeare is always a particular delight, like being able to deliver a course on the best wines, beers or whiskies.  Go read him today--- and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow....

A Sharp, Indrawn Breath (Life's Like That....)

     Sorry, folks, but it looks like the Not-So-Good Doctor, after a short rustle of activity on this blog, will probably be falling silent again for a while as he rushes feverishly to get all of his marking done in time.  This is why he is not going to bother responding to this article, which is cause for no end of unconvinced "okay, buts" on his part.  Perhaps some of you might be sufficiently bored to offer the all-too-obvious counter-arguments.  Those of you looking for interesting reading should check out RK's blog , which too has rustled to life with the near-end of the academic year.  Dr J, however, looking again or still very much like his alter ego (Kenwood the moose, pictured above, whom some of you may recall), must get to scoring assignments, in whatever sense of the word "scoring" you elect to infer.  But, oh, to be in pleasanter pastures like Kenwood here....

 

     Post-Script:  Wondering about the title of this entry?  Then follow the Bishop....

If Only, If Only...

A domestic policy I only wish I could adopt: 

Writing Tragedies, Comedies, and Errors

     Asea in marking still, the Not-So-Good Doc turned this morning for solace to the ever-playful, and occasionally instructive, Richard Lederer, whose website you should all visit and peruse, especially the various articles in the archives.  (Check out especially "Four Cheers Five Victor Borge.")  If only my students-- this year and in any given year-- would read Lederer and discover the lunacies of their own language....

 

    In my own marking, I'm always stunned how some students can manage high-falutin' theory but cannot differentiate between "lose" and "loose."  Especially frustrating is the general inability to coordinate subject-verb agreement; it's as if Wordsworth's tree of many one has totally buggered up language forever.  Most bizarrely, one of my students seems to think that the protagonist of Groundhog Day is Phil Collins, which, as you can imagine, puts to mind nightmarish images of Bill Murray singing "Sussudio."  **shudder**

 

     Also worth checking out, the classic chestnut from Lederer, "The World According to Student Bloopers," which explains that "[John] Milton wrote Paradise Lost.  Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained." 

The Mound And The Fury, or Mama's Got A Brand New Frag

      Apparently, you could have heard a pin drop.... Who knew you could fit a pineapple into a pomegranate?  

Tentanda Via?

     Truly unbelievable quote of the day, from some poker competition in the UK, in which a woman named Helen Chamberlain was competing and whose chip count was being depicted as a pink share of a pie graph:

Helen Chamberlain has eaten her pink way across this field.

Now THAT's what I call skill....

The Evidence Of Things

     Many of my pseudo-colleagues in the academic, and especially the literary, world very seldom appreciate that they are among the most dangerous influences on language and thought.  Check out this mea culpa from The Guardian from a counterfeiter begging forgiveness, and this sampling of some of the more egregious examples of intellectual piety run amok.  All this reminds me of George Orwell's claim that language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts"  ("Politics and the English Language").  I wonder how many articles in any given year's publications of the MLA would pass Orwell's muster.  Two?  Maybe three?  Probably not.  Orwell's rule number five, on not using jargon terms, would surely slay all but the most truly maverick pieces with Kurosawan ferocity.  (It's okay, though.  Most academics don't respect Orwell anyway.  Snort.)

 

     Today, I'm reminded, is Easter Sunday, a day I always find alienating, my agnosticism precluding me from accepting the idea of resurrection as anything but a hypothesis.  It's also a day that makes me wonder about the possibility of faith.  Faith has always left me cool-- and skeptical, and occasionally downright put-off.  It's just something I don't have, and almost surely never will have, and I'm deeply distrustful of it.  I often wonder if faith is just an extended lullaby people sing to themselves to allay their own fears and anxieties.  Then again, belief is something I've had trouble with for some time, and faith is effectively a more radical form of belief.  Resurrections?  Ascensions?  Redemptions?  The most stunning resurrection I've ever observed was John Travolta's, and look what he did with it-- namely, Battlefield Earth, a film so wretched that even the most ardent Scientologists have disavowed it.  And people wonder why I'm cynical....  No, faith, like love and calculus, is better left to imaginations greater than mine.  The only miracles I can believe in are the ones that used to backup Smokey Robinson. 

 

     That said, I'm not completely churlish: Happy Easter to those of you celebrating today.  Gather ye gaudily-painted ova while ye may. 

 

     Meanwhile, I get to press through my pile of essays and exams which seems to get larger and larger each time I check my email.  I'm sure I'll be treated to some examples of slovenlieness and foolishness, but will there by any miracles in the lot?  Hmmm.... I'll wait for the evidence of things not yet seen.

Hymn To His Silence

And I'm tore down a la Rimbaud
And I wish my writing would come....
--- Van Morrison, "Tore Down A La Rimbaud," from the album A Sense of Wonder (1984)

     It seems I'm forever making apologies on this blog lately, but I guess yet another one is in order.  The past few weeks have been chaotic and silly (and even a bit moribund), and now I'm hip-deep in end-of-year grading which includes both essays and examinations.  I'm pretty sure a few of you out there are at least slightly miffed at my recent lack of communication, and for that I am sorry, except to say that sometimes discretion is the better part of dolor.  (Boredom and business, I'd hasten to remind anyone with doubts, are not mutually exclusive.)  I haven't even had the energy to remark on the typically silly trials and tribulations that hang, perpetually, from me like pubic hairs from Pamela Anderson's teeth.  Even the latest Van Morrison effort, the country album Pay The Devil, has gone entirely without remark here, which is perhaps the clearest testament to my general indifference to expression.  Email has gone by the wayside, except to deal with matters directly related to work.  It has, alas, been one of those spells.  I should probably not even be writing here now, marking beckoning me like misery to Mr. Beckett, except that guilt still can get the better of me.  Oh, and temporary procrastination, too.  To leave that out would be utterly dishonest.

     There are, alas, also a number of things on the radar that bleat more than they bleep.  So much to do, so little energy to do it with.  (I'm temporarily allowing myself to dangle that preposition.)  Worse still, I find myself more and more with less and less to say, or at least less and less anything that will either (a) matter or (b) at least seem worthwhile.  These problems have tarnished my creative and critical work for some time, but they seem now even to be daunting my other forms of communication.  Beyond immediate conversation, I can feel myself drying up like a worn-down rag.  (Make your own wet-blanket associations as you wish.)  "I've cleaned up my diction," Van Morrison once sang, adding that he had "nothing left to say."  Increasingly, I am understanding what that might have meant.  After all, I've been saying less and less for years, though usually in far too many words.  "There is nothing new under the sun," says the Preacher from Ecclesiastes.  He, of course, neglected to note that the sky was perpetually overcast.  (Once upon a mid-lilfe dreary?)

     This probably sounds depressed, which is by no means how I intend it to sound because it by no means reflects whatever the fark it is I'm "feeling" (G-d, what a dreadful word that has become!).  The French word blasé   perhaps sums things up best.  Discretion, I know, is not the better part of dolor-- but what else is there when one senses there's so very little left to say?  After all, didn't Mr. Beckett say it all? 

     And yet, knowing this, some of us still do not move. 

Yes, Arnold, Maybe It Is A Thumos

      So what-- at such long last-- could finally stir the Not-So-Good Doc to post an entry on this blog?  Believe it or not, and I only barely do, it's this article about the current state of gender theory, couched as a review of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness, from The Weekly Standard.  It's a clever, observant, and almost unerringly astute discussion that broaches issues all-too-commonly dismissed these days, days in which gallantry is expected but sneered upon as an insincere projection, and in which the term "gender neutrality" is cognate with "gender neutered" in practice but not in theory.  Best of all, it's written by a woman-- and a wonderfully tough-minded but intellectually-patient woman at that.  Hurrah, hurrah and huzzah.