26 August 2006

Crossing The Bar

    I forgot to mention this, but a few weeks ago the Not-So-Good Doctor's favourite haunt (Chester's, where tonight he will hopefully be forgetting something perfectly) was used as one of the locations in the upcoming film of Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride.  As several of my more regular readers have, er, "visited" this place, they may want to watch for the film when it appears on the CBC (or, I'm told, Oxygen in the US).  Watch for it, mes ami(e)s, and recall one of those nights you and/or yours prolly got blitzed-beyond-London there. 
 
    As for getting blitzed-beyond-London, I'm workin' on it.... I'm gonna fucking need it.

10 August 2006

Incidental Query

    Dear readers, or those of you that mysteriously remain, a poser came to mind today that I cannot unravel and this blog would like to ask you if you can.  Ladies, especially, I'd like to hear your response to this:  How can feminists, of any stripe or delineation, praise the representation of women on Sex and the City and yet insistently decry same on The West WingHow can they champion the vacuous stereotypes (quadrated, naturally, according to sexual behaviour) of the former, and deride the intelligent and developed characters of the latter?  If anyone out there has a sensible answer to this, I'd love to hear it.

09 August 2006

The Great Creator's Praise

     My onetime-colleague in academic corruption reminds me that today is the great John Dryden's birthday. Do him the honour: go and read him.  After all, precious few people do these days.

08 August 2006

On Quibbles, Collections and The Man

    Sorry, folks, for the lack of updates lately.  Can I be bothered to care?  Not really.  Colour me listless and cranky-- only moreso than usual.  So, to appease the need for an update, herewith a few short(er)-takes on items various and scattered:

  • Today the Doc is feeling especially osteoporotic, having spent most of yesterday helping his paternal unit install cement-board in preparation for retiling a room.  Both creaky and cranky, what a combination.... It's going to be a great day. 

  • Tonight also is the Van Morrison concert in Toronto, which alas I'm going to miss.  It's only his second appearance there in the past ten years, and I am going to have missed both of them.  Insert litany of profanities here--- or perhaps better, an extended melodic growl.

  • It seems the die is all but cast in relation to my employment situation, my employer completely snubbing me for positions for the second time in three years.  Some people keep insisting I have to get my union involved, but I'd rather respond to indignity with dignity, if that's possible.  Yes, there's a part of me that wants to make something of a response or a defense, but there's little point in doing so.  Then again, everything seems pointless lately.  Oh, it's a wonderful, affirmative world....

  • Into the Delectable Irony file must go, fittingly, a few words from the original Dr J ostensibly on Shakespeare but perhaps just as appropriate to his much-too-slender namesake.  Judge for yourselves, keeping in mind that "quibble" for Dr Johnson meant pun and not complaint or argument:
    A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
    Hmmm....  As the old exams used to say, "discuss and comment."
  • Kate's Book Blog asks an interesting question about the books that dominate one's private collection, and about how one organizes them.  My collection is moreorless organized by the "cram-them-in-there-with-a-shoehorn" principle, but I thought it worth taking stock of those authors in my collection currently represented by five or more volumes (only by, not about).  My list then, not including Shakespeare: 
    Graham Greene, Henry James, Northrop Frye, Tom Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, John le Carre, Hugh Kenner, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Harold Pinter, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, William Faulkner, George Orwell, Richard Condon, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Sigmund Freud, Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Adrienne Rich, Leonard Cohen, Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, William Empson, Margaret Laurence, Tom Stoppard, Dostoyevsky and Philip Larkin (among others, surely).
    The first several aren't surprising, but I have to admit I didn't think some authors were as well-represented in my collection as they in fact are, especially Lawrence (around 20 volumes), Freud, Shaw, le Carre, Bellow and Rich.  Greene, by far, leads the pack, which is a little ironic considering how many editions of Greene I have given away to students over the years.  I'm also surprised by how much James I own.  He seems to be everywhere.  What's in your collections?
Anyway, as you have surely gathered, there's nothing much new to report (is there ever?), save for trying (as ever) to figure out a future.  Can one make a living from boredom in a way that Beckett didn't?  Meh, methoughtst not.  But on with things--- and if any of you out there get to the Van Morrison concert tonight, know the Not-So-Good Doctor is intensely jealous of you and he wants a full report as soon as possible.  Grumble, grumble, growl, growl....

01 August 2006

August and Everything Prior, or
     There's A Trick With A Scalpel I'm Learning To Do

Summer's now three-quarters over, with only August left to roar before the onset of the dying fall. As ever, I can sum up the bloody thing before it's done. It's like a Henry James novel: once you're about halfway through, you know how it's all going to end, its trajectory all but certain, and the space between the halfway and the two-thirds mark merely preparing you for what you already expect, as if to suggest that inevitability is somehow intrinsically ironic, and seeing the thing through just a formality. (The same is true, by the way, of an Adam Sandler comedy, though the James novel usually isn't as depressing.) When you reach that point when the trajectory is clear, you begin hoping that you're wrong, but you know you're not going to be. You might as well hope that two speeding trains on course for one another might fly their tracks and begin doing loopdeloops. It just ain't gonna happen, and you know it.

So too with summer, at least for me. Its pattern never changes. It ambles in with hope and confidence and lumbers out with fatigue and frustration. Between beginning and end come the usual events: the tantalizing possibilities, the extended anticipations, the requisite complications, the tortuous attempts to resolve same, and, of course, the inevitable cutting of one's losses. The last two parts of the process are the ones I hate most, the former for the obvious reasons, the latter for its despicable and often callous necessity. In theory, the former should obviate the latter, but it seldom does. As I have often said, I don't mind tilting at windmills, but I draw the line at bashing my head repeatedly and pointlessly against a Chinese wall. The hard part, ostensibly, is learning to tell the difference. (It shouldn't be; it's always wall.) I wonder, though, if it's good that I'm getting better at walking away and letting things (and people) go. I'm certainly getting cooler (colder?) about it. Regrettably, necessity mothers amputation as much as it does invention, so one does as one must. There's never much point in delaying the inevitable, or feigning blindness to the obvious--- unless you're Henry James, of course. Even Hamlet does what he has to do eventually.

So, yes, as most of you have surely surmised by now, I'm in the process of cutting my losses, of salvaging what can still be salvaged and extracting myself from situations with, hopefully, at least a measure of dignity and self-respect. I hate the clinicism this demands, and I hate even more the incipient sense of waste connected to it all. I think here of the poor bastards who train for the Olympics in their respective events only to come in last, and so realize they could have done absolutely NOTHING and attained the same result. My situation, of course, isn't so devastating. Mine's just cynicising, or further cynicising. Work, effort, energy, experience, patience, ability, kindness, decency--- they never matter, or, rather, they never seem to matter. (He writes, just receiving via snail mail yet further proof of this; something to do with the veal and the Gestapo garb, perhaps?) Everything prior seems just another exercise in being strung along, and every effort finally a waste. One might as well have done nothing; the result would have been the same.

Ironically, everything comes back to waste and ventures forth from it, to getting past the indignities and the losses and the beleaguering questions of why and why not, and finally trying not to let all that waste hit you on the ass on the way out. It's easier said than done, amputating one's losses and simply moving on, regardless of feeling. (There's no anaesthesia, either, except maybe for those Henry James novels.) Just cut and go, I'm learning, is as Augustan a ritual as shoveling in December--- just cut and go . It's a trick with a scalpel I'm learning to do, albeit a solipsistic one. If I can ever get it right, it'll be really, really neat, I promise.

Until I do, though, you might want to stand back: I'm the Not-So-Good Doctor after all, and this thing's f&#king sharp.