Doctor J's Words, Words, Words

Wednesday Night Notes

2008-02-21T14:17:00.001-05:00

So, I haven't posted here in a while. Part of the reason-- fatigue and general business-- is old and well-known, while the other is very much less so; lately I've been writing, if at all, on Facebook mainly because only my friends can read those entries, something that's increasingly important as I recall how easily people can misconstrue material, whether deliberately or accidentally. Frankly, I'm just not sure I care much about blogging anymore. After almost five years of it, I'm increasingly inclined to give up the pretense of maintaining a web-site, however nominal.

That said,a few random notes on Life In General, collected for, well, no reason whatsoever:

I'm increasingly aware that my training-- or my experience, or whatever-- has made it almost impossible for me to be surprised by a movie anymore. As I've noted elsewhere, some movies, trying to be cheeky or self-aware, indicate their own spoilers with ostensibly sneaky winks at the audience so they can justify their big surprises. In The Usual Suspects, it was Kevin Spacey talking about the texture of his piss; in Lucky Number Slevin, it was Josh Hartnett's initial manifestation in nothing but a towel. Today I was (finally) watching Brick, the high-school reinvention of Dashiell Hammett fiction with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. At one point in the early going, a young woman, I don't know the actress' name, appears at a party in a silk, Chinese-patterned gown, all eyes and would-be sophistication. First thing I thought? "It's Chinatown." I knew right then who the real villain was going to be, and the movie didn't disappoint. It's a good film, all in all, but directors really do need to be more careful about tipping their hands too early.

Similarly, in the remake of Sleuth with Michael Caine and Jude Law, as soon as I saw Law going into one his ambisexual cooing-poses, I knew exactly how the film was going to resolve, and it didn't disappoint, either, at least not in that context: the film itself is a depressing affair, given the immense talents involved (Caine, Law, Kenneth Branagh and Harold Pinter). I wonder if many other people suffer this sort of accidental prescience when they watch these sorts of movies. Probably not. By the way, Brick did one thing very, very smartly: conflating the Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and Wilmer the Gunsel (Elisha Cook, Jr.) characters from The Maltese Falcon into one figure. It borders, in its allusive simplicity, on a masterstroke.
I have been rereading Conrad's Heart of Darkness for one of my courses, and am remembering what a genius Conrad was with language. Sure, I have read it several times before, the last time maybe five years ago, but I think it's only with this reading that I'm truly savouring the language like fine whiskey. There's not an ounce of sentimentality to it, and in a perversely mimetic way there's a sublime sense to which Marlow's narration resembles the mysterious undulations of sea-travel-- or, rather, river-travel. I started teaching it last week-- on Valentine's Day, of course, my subtlety too smug by half-- but I think my first week on it, content-wise, was one of the best lectures I've given in recent years. There's so much to say about that magnificently miniscule text, one hardly knows when to stop. I am now teasing through a possible article on it in comparison with Graham Greene's revision of it in A Burnt-Out Case, though I'm dubious about when I'll ever have the time. Greene once said that he had to stop reading Conrad for twenty years for fear he would "colonize [his] style," but I suspect A Burnt-Out Case was a much more studied response to Conrad than many of Greene's critics have previously realized, particularly in Greene's transformation of Conrad's persistent "uneasiness" into his (or his character Querry's) "discomfort."
The more time passes, the more I want to teach Shakespeare again. I miss it, immensely. I keep inserting bits of Shakie into my courses, usually to surprisingly good effect considering the courses themselves, but I want to be able to talk about literature passionately again. My short story course, with its heavy emphasis on Modernist writing, tends to disallow that, simply because of the profoundly ironic nature of so much of it. If I had my way, I'd establish myself as my own Shakespeare Department at Current Institution and build it from the ground up.
Considering both Conrad and Shakespeare, I was reminded of the simple fact-- and it is, despite what others may say-- that the two greatest periods for literature in English were the Renaissance and the Modern (1890-1945) Era. The former's obvious, but why the latter? And it occurred to me today that it was in the Modern Age that, for the first time, writers could discover one another without really meeting. In previous decades and centuries, they would do so in centralized loci such as Paris or London; but with the technological advancements of the time, and the mass production of texts reaching new capabilities, authors could, with legitimate excitement and/or antagonism, respond to other authors, other movements, other concepts, without limitation. Moreover, there were specific Modernist projects, goals, aims. This thing we loosely call Post-Modernism, for whatever its other virtues, is pretty much toujours-deja cynical about Everything, so no wonder it (and its various subsequent posts) has failed to find its genuinely crystallizing voices.
I'm increasingly aware that my students really don't think of me as a capital-T teacher. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; I find it sometimes undermines the authority, but it underlines the credibility, especially as they don't put me into the pedestal-based camp. It often seems I'm more like a residence don than a professor per se. I'm glad in most ways that I'm seldom seen as the "typical" prof, but it also disaffords me of some of the aspects so crucial to the imperious assertion of control that's often necessary in managing & co-ordinating large groups. It reminds me, though, of something I find fundamentally distressing, the extent to which most in my profession work upon assumed authority rather than earned authority. It remains to this day that students of mine from ten years ago still go out of their way to see me; somehow, that's more intensely meaningful than any course evaluation ever would be.

I don't know: that should probably just be my mantra henceforth: I don't know. Intelligence ultimately defeats itself, as does instinct. One simply goes, and moves, like Marlow's steamer, through the stillness and the calamity. One should be so zen-- and yet never tip one's hand.

The Beale World

2008-01-28T16:33:00.001-05:00

I have been reluctant to comment openly about the Democratic and Republican nomination campaigns for a number of reasons, not least of which is the interminable ramble already being given them by media outlets in the United States. CNN, with its self-proclaimed "Best Political Team on Television" (as the network incessantly reminds viewers), is by far the worst offender, jack-hammering away at the same events and issues with particularly pernicious vapidity, but it's no less guilty than the panoply of other outlets passing off pointlessly speculative political yammering as insightful documentation and analysis. The effects of all this prattle are two-fold, depending on one's response to it: either one becomes addicted to it, a junkie demanding one's daily fix, or one becomes inured to it, a cynic begging, pleading, for a reprieve from constant clamour. I'm convinced that if there is a Hell, at least one of its tortures is a steady stream of American political coverage, a kind of Promethean punishment for those unable to extract themselves from their couch-potato related sins. It'd be a Dantescan punishment by way of Paddy Chayefsky, but a Dantescan one nonetheless.

Yet, I think we may, finally, be entering the peace before the General Election storm. The worst of the acrimony and contempt seems finally to be petering out, and the results coming largely to naught. The Republicans seem to be inching closer to accepting John McCain as their date to the prom, hesitant as they may be about it, while the Clintonian implosion of the past few weeks has probably all but coronated Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Today's endorsement of Obama by Sen. Edward Kennedy may finally have tipped the scales in the latter: in a stunningly scrupulous rejection of self-interested slash-and-burn politics, Sen. Kennedy may well have directed Democrats away from immediate immolation. Make no mistake: this is a Good Thing. Democrats, like Hamlet, are usually their own worst enemies, destroying themselves rather than their opponents. In recent weeks, the Clintons all but discredited themselves from the running not so much by any particular action but by demonstrating the willingness to return the party to internecine warfare, and while that may have worked well enough in other circumstances, the current ones demand otherwise. People are mad as Hell about politics as usual, and they're not going to take it anymore.

But, I think, it's also about people being furious about the various forms of fury itself. One of the reasons Senator Clinton was given a reprieve by Democrats in New Hampshire and Nevada was the vulturous behaviour of media figures like Andrew Sullivan, whose insistently vituperative derangement about the Clintons was perhaps the best gift he could have given them. Sullivan, though by no means alone in his position, represents the kind of 90s vitriolic, visceral and counter-sensical monomania that fed American politics of the past fifteen years, and people have seen where such thinking has led them. The Clintons, similarly, represent the win-at-all-costs strategy, and they're being rejected, too, though it's probably crucial that Democrats are doing the rejection of them on their own terms, and not those of others. (The same is true of Romney, whose over-packaged "say anything" campaign is being received with relative ambivalence.) The media generally are being punished, too, with last-minute mind-changes and disingenuous self-reporting, it seems, designed to throw all of that polling, prognostication and general gotcha-ism into disrepute. The electorate seems to be asking, "You think you know what are issues are," before immediately answering with a stern, "No. No, you don't." There's a whole lot of whoop-ass to go round, and voters seem very much unafraid to dole it out. Howard Beale would be proud.

And yet, for all that anger, for all that a-pox-on-all-your-houses kind of fury, the voters in both parties seem to be leaning toward the figures who represent at least some kind of integrity and some kind of trans-party appeal. McCain is about the only Republican candidate with a chance of winning Democratic voters, while Obama is the only Democratic one capable of doing the reverse. Neither are ideal candidates, but they serve in counter-point to one another, with McCain the voice of experience and Obama the voice of youth (I will not say "hope," a word now largely bereft of meaning in this context). All those of ideas of political predestination that once surrounded Clinton and Giuliani are on the verge of being relegated to the historical junk-heap, and all the political calculus that had become conventional wisdom in recent years is already there. It's as if voters have become cynical about-- wait for it-- cynicism and they're responding in kind, as well they should. It has been a long time in the coming, and while this could, admittedly, be premature, it's almost cause for-- dare one say?-- hope.

Nodding Off

2008-01-22T14:53:00.001-05:00

Just a few short notes, writing from one campus before I set out for another, on the Academy Award nominations announced today:

Conspicuously missing: Marisa Tomei for Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, Donald Pinsent for Away from Her and Max von Sydow for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. When will the academy stop ignoring Max? He's the Joseph Cotten of foreign films: in every bloody classic there is, or so it seems, and he's usually tremendous; and yet, nary a nomination. C'mon-- he's Max von fucking goddamn Sydow! He had two scenes in that movie, and yet every critic I've read felt compelled to remark on his brilliance in them. Maybe the power of you-know-who compelled them.
Pleasant surprises: Ruby Dee and Hal Holbrook, for American Gangster and Into The Wild, two performers capable of changing an entire movie with a single scene. For Mr. Holbrook, it's about bloody time. Hal might actually win it: in a year when it looks like non-American talent will win big, his nomination will allow the academy to assert its appreciation of home-born legends.
Foregone conclusions: I think the top acting honours are set in stone. It'll be Julie Christie and Daniel Day-Lewis. Do any of the other nominees in either categorty even stand a chance? The academy is dying to reward Julie Christie, as well it should. Her performance is absolutely heart-breaking. Also look for Tilda Swinton to grab the award for Michael Clayton; it'll probably be the acknowledgement the academy gives for not being able to reward it in other categories.
Insult to injury: after being robbed last year, and maintaining the longest losing streak in Oscar history, you'd think the Academy would have had the grace to toss Peter O'Toole a nod for Ratatouille. The poor bastard just can't catch a break. He should have won for Venus, just as he should have won for Lawrence of Arabia -- wait for it-- forty-five years ago.
Look for No Country For Old Men to win Best Picture. I'd be shocked-- shocked, I tell you-- if it didn't. Why? Because it doesn't deserve to. Consider it the Coens' version of The Departed. Best Picture is always about cultural cachet, and No Country has it in spades right now.
Striking the Match: Will the writer's strike end in time for the ceremony? Count on it. There's just too much money involved in the Oscars for everyone to let it continue and disrupt the grand tradition.

So there we are. Dispute as you will. Must to campus number two. It's going to be a long bloody day.

Collective Commentaries

2008-01-04T01:10:00.001-05:00

One of the odder things about the English language is the panoply of words that act as collective nouns. Some are still in common use-- a litter of puppies, a range of mountains, a bed of flowers, a class of students, a crowd of people-- and some are just odd enough that some remember them just for their oddness, like a murder of crows. How some of them came to be, or how they're ever used, is curious and often fun stuff; sometimes, however, they're just outright funny, especially when they've obviously been adapted to contemporary purposes. Here are a few samples from academic contexts:

A group of academics is called a faculty;
A group of Assistant Professors is a clamber;
A group of Associate Professors is a tenure;
A group of Full Professors is an entropy or an entrenchment.

You have to adore the progression. Some other related collectives: a oversight of deans; an essence of existentialists; a lack of principals (savour the irony); a brood of researchers; a drowse of underachievers; a leap of overachievers; and, of course, there's a nullity of nihilists (say that ten times fast). Even the student year-levels have their own collectives: a plenitude of freshmen, a platitude of sophomores, a gratitude of juniors and an attitude of seniors; better yet, there are also fortitudes of graduate students and doggednesses of doctoral candidates all working on their angsts of dissertations. Lovely when language offers its implicit commentaries, non? Frankly, I think a group of doctoral candidates should be a delay or an insecurity; even a poverty would do.

Some other choice examples, even though surely the catch of collective nouns is language at its most sly:

an ingratitude of children
a rash of dermatologists
a guess of diagnosticians
a gross of farts
a conjunction of grammarians
a smear of gynecologists
a thicket of idiots
a spread of nymphomaniacs
a tenet of palindromes (clever indeed)
a babel (or a babble) of words

Many of these were surely invented only recently, of course, but one has to admire the elegance of them. You can read amusedly through some sites through the link above. Reminds me, though, that I'll have to pick up James Lipton's An Exaltation of Larks (yes, that James Lipton), which seems to have been the source for many of the above. Makes me wonder what a group of partial-load professors would be. A posse? A parade? A temper?

After Christmas and Disclaiming Care

2007-12-28T13:45:00.001-05:00

So Christmas has finally come and gone, and with it the end of first term at New Institution. My workload has briefly subsided, but the post-class period demanded a mad dash of more than 80 hours of marking in a week and in many ways I'm still recovering from it. Come January, I'll have six courses, up from five this term, which augurs for a repeat of the end of term insanity unless I can figure out a way to coordinate a more professor-friendly calendar rather than the student-friendly one I ran with this time. Is that selfish? Probably, but it's a necessary selfishness, I fear. That means, though, that I'm going to have to be something of a so-called "hard-ass" next term. I'm sure that'll thrill my future charges.

Onto another matter. Now and then, something happens culturally that makes me feel very much like an odd man out, particularly when critical and general responses are largely laudatory while mine is ambivalent or worse. Such is the case of No Country For Old Men, a movie I find myself unable to like. Certainly, there are many admirable things about it, including the performances, the cinematography and the direction. In many ways, it's a study in stillness and silence which surely makes the interruptions of violence seem far more brutal than they otherwise might be. It's also perhaps the most genuinely nihilistic film I've seen in years, even outpacing the dark-comic-cum-revenge-tragic Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.

So, what's missing, or what am I missing? There's something passionless about the whole project, something too artificial by half, that I find too distancing, and consequently dull, as the vastness of it all seems to choke off any capacities for empathetic or visceral response. There's nothing purgative about the movie, which I suspect is supposed to be the point, but it ends up short-circuiting anything emotive or ostensibly "satisfying," using that word in the largest dramaturgical sense rather than the colloquial one. As a meditation on violence and chance, it works, I guess, but only in the sense that A History of Violence did, another film whose praise I did not understand and thought inexplicably effusive. Everything is treated with a kind of clinical coolness that's supposed to be intellectual or at least objective, but the result is counter-intuitive and anti-climactic. Yes, that's probably a mimesis of the film's nihilism, but it renders the film little more than a mental exercise, and irresolute and intractable one at that. That's probably why the film ends with Tommy Lee Jones describing a dream, as if provoking us to decipher the dream when it's probably just a disconcerting koan. Violence is swift, arbitrary, discordant, beyond the limited methods of rational understanding; it just happens, both within and beyond the pale, as incidental as a mosquito bite. No wonder the withered "hero" of the piece (Jones) is so ineffectual; he's supposed to be, lest the film suggest that violence can be countenanced or confronted. It just simply is, and we're left to respond to it with the troubled indifference that the Jones character does. The film's violence is the stuff of waking nightmare, and just as preventable. And yet, like a nightmare, the film is visually vivid but oddly alienating. I reached the end of it wondering, beyond the intellectual circularity (to say nothing of defeatism) of it all, why I should care. That's the problem with the film, and nihilism generally; they both have only themselves as their own rewards. It's a peculiarly tepid reminder that nihilo ex nihilo, nothing comes from nothing.

I realize I'm nearly alone in this response. No Country for Old Men (its title torn from Yeats) feels too much like a crossword puzzle or a sudoku, admirably constructed to be sure but manifestly trivial; it resolves itself rhetorically, pointlessly, a resolution for resolution's sake; it is the sum of its parts and nothing more. It's thoughtful but not insightful, and because of its mimetic approach to its central themes, too aloof to be involving and too significant to be finally substantial. There's a scene near the end where one of the characters, I won't say who, is encouraged to call head or tails on a coin flip to determine his or her fate. The character's refusal to do so is supposed to suggest a refusal to play by the fatalistic rules of the villain's game. Ultimately, however, the character seems to reflect the Coen brothers' abnegation of the rules of their own cinematic game, and while that's laudable, even admirable in a way, it's probably also why the film is so staunchly unsatisfying. It invests our time and offers nothing afterward, perhaps like life itself, and while I suspect that's supposed to be disquieting, it's just barren and dyspeptic, offering experience but disavowing meaning. Maybe that's what's most profoundly unsatisfying about the movie: it's all unjust just-ness, just a darker version of Fargo, or a less gripping version of Blood Simple; it's all just a moody parable, a stilted and relentlessly ambivalent allegory of nothing signifying nothing. It all just is-- passionless, pointless and surprisingly painless. And if the film doesn't care, why should we? Or maybe it's just a coolness which I can neither countenance nor confront, except as an intellectual exercise, passionlessly, pointless and, yes, painlessly. It's all too easy when one simply doesn't care.

Now, Then and the Half-Poetic Shrug

2007-12-17T04:49:00.001-05:00

It's all too tempting to use this space to rant about the insanity of things: the lunacy of trying to mark piles and piles of assignments in a fruitfly's lifetime, the impossible me-me-me-ness of (certain) students who think one has nothing to do but tend to them, the crests of snow that will surely bollix up the traffic in these parts for days; all too tempting to resort to the cyberspace equivalent of a primal scream only thinly-disguised as either a screed or a jeremiad. Let's just say that with the end of term, the dramatic entry of winter, and the drudgerous demands of the "holidays" (yeah, right...), there's just too damned much going on to begin whining. If I did, I'd never stop.

Unfortunately, I can't say I have much of interest to report. It looks like I'm going to have at least six courses come January, though I suspect at least two and maybe three of them will be smaller classes (he writes with fingers crossed, which, he assures you, is a feat in itself). As I understand it, there are even possibilities for more, not that I want them, but I guess the demand is there and I haven't entirely farked up my current lot of students (though a little bit is, in fact, required by law). It's a little surprising, really; I had been told to expect a decrease in workload. So much for that, I guess. I'm really looking forward to one of the courses, though; it should be fun.

And, I guess there's one other bit of "news," such as it is: I lost my hat. I'm not sure how I feel about that, as there are various connexions to it to incur something very near ambivalence, but that fedora had become, over too many years, something like a Dr J trademark with so many of its indicative, and sometimes ironic, characteristics. But it's gone now, almost certainly for good, and I can't help but wonder if that marks the end—or the beginning—of an age. Times, like old loves and former selves, pass away into accident and circumstance, for good or for ill, and it's too easy, like complaining, to fuss too much about them. Best, I think, just to shrug them all away. And yet, maybe that's a problem for all of us, how easily we shrug things all away. After all, those easy answers, they're so tempting, aren't they? Because all of life's sensible answers, right or wrong, are always too temptingly easy, or too easily tempting, by half.

Another Fry Up

2007-11-27T00:10:00.001-05:00

So you can share my addiction: herewith the YouTube links for the most recent episode of QI: part one, part two and part three. It's a pip. If you don't end up hooked on the show, you're a stronger soul than I. (Careful, NSFW due to bits of naughty language.)

Also, finally picked up Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls, which I had been trying to locate for some time. You have to love his bio from it:

Stephen Fry was born in the twentieth century and will die in the twenty-first. In the course of writing six books he has drunk four hundred and twelve thousand cups of coffee, smoked one a half million cigarettes and worn out nineteen pairs of trousers. He has no birth sign.

The novel's a variation on The Count of Monte Cristo, though its title is torn from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Can't wait until I can actually take the time to read it.

A Little Note For Now

2007-11-25T16:12:00.001-05:00

Consider this an update more in theory than in fact. As ever of late, I'm whelmed by marking that seems only to worsen with each passing week; in the past week alone, I've probably been grading assignments for thirty to forty hours entirely exclusive of my normal teaching duties and (worse inevitably following worse) making all kinds of extra-curricular meetings for students who didn't, or couldn't be bothered to, signup to discuss coursework in normal times. Let's just say it's exhausting and leave it at that.

In the interim, until I can actually think about a real entry, herewith a few short takes:

Finally watched, in bits and pieces, the Guy Pearce film of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a travesty of a film for anyone that knows the Dumas novel. While it's nothing new for Hollywood to revamp a tale for its own purposes, the unmitigated evisceration of Dumas' plot, right down to excluding major characters and excoriating all of the issues of mercy so key to the novel, is utterly unpardonable. More sadly, though, it reminded me of how long it has been since I read anything for pleasure; seems like an eternity.
Though I can't feign much interest in the technological material, I discovered to my great joy that Stephen Fry-- the actor, director, novelist, comedian and general polymath-- has a blog. I was particularly impressed by his discussion (a "blessay," as he calls it) of the global warming debate, partially by way of Pascal's Wager before he rightly rejects Pascal's practical cynicism. It's long, and perhaps too dense and tangential for most, but it's a terrific read, especially if you know Fry's voice and can it hear it in your head as the words roll by; he and Lewis Black are the only comedians capable of regularly turning material into virtuoso comic arias.
Speaking of Stephen Fry, unfortunately we in North America are not privy to most of his television projects as they inexplicably don't get aired over here. Blessed be, then, YouTube, which offers most of the episodes of his brilliant series QI, a rare programme that's both delightfully informative and deliciously funny. I highly recommend going over to YouTube and entering "QI Fry" as your search terms and savouring the results. I also managed to purchase Fry's Bright Young Things last week, his film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; it's quite good, though the last sections drag a bit. Watch it if you can find it, though the latter will certainly be more difficult than the former.
Can you tell I'm procrastinating from marking? I thought so.
Have been trying with some of my classes in recent weeks to add some oddities to add some spice to the duller lessons of grammar & writing. Did some lectures on the history of the word "word," contranyms, and the counter-instinctive nature of prose, as opposed to the instinctual nature of poetry (with the primary unit of logic for the former being the sentence, but the latter being the line). One wonders, however, how much any of this takes in convincing my young charges to thing more actively about language. It has, at least, to be more interesting than the myriad rules for comma usage. *shrug*

Okay, I've obliged this blog long enough for now. Marking beckons like an angry shrew, so I'd best attend its call. Until later, probably much later,

the increasingly recondite, scattered and almost completely exasperated Dr J

Bloody Brilliant

2007-11-20T01:30:00.001-05:00

Although I should note that XP never, ever rebooted so quickly before. And Vista, well Vista, the less I say about that intrusive piece of fecund technology the better (lest Microflaccid decide to make any George Lucas-like "improvements")....

link via Clevergirl, with thanks.

She's Baaaaaack....

2007-11-15T14:44:00.001-05:00

And this time, she's got company. Gawd help the Internets-- and all of us. ;-)

(Historical side-note: It was Christie and RK that were primarily responsible for kicking this blog into existence so many years ago, way back when I actually thought I would maintain it diligently. Anyway, now you know whom to blame.)

Spending all day marking & trying to figure out how to handle a new transit strike that promises to start very soon. Life, ain't she grand? Pffft.

Jesus H. Kristeva

2007-11-11T02:27:00.001-05:00

Sorry, everyone, but I haven't had any time whatsoever in the past-- has it really been?-- two months to write. Such is life at New Institution, alas. That's also unlikely to change anytime soon, unfortunately.

I was reminded tonight, though, of an old "issue" for (inter-)textualists, the one commonly called Tommy Westphall Syndrome. (Make sure you read the "external links" at the bottom.) Given the spectacularly, to say nothing of circularly, onanistic nature of such thinking, I was reminded that the Westphall Syndrome is probably the best example in the past thirty years of a broad cultural koan, and a ludicrously over-considered one at that. Two other thoughts occurred to me. One: that this "riddle," if it deserves to be called that, reminds me of the episode of Frasier in which the good shrink, bored at work, subconsciously manufactures for himself a dream that's psychologically indecipherable just for the challenge. The other, of course, was much cheekier, and speaks to the absurdity of the riddling itself: that the pontificators should be well and gladly pleased that St. Elsewhere never crossed over with Newhart. Then whose dream would television be? Or would all dreams be collective after all? In which case, not only would the world, and all its fictional worlds, be dreams within dreams, but shared ones to boot? In which case, we'd have gone beyond Kristevan incredulities and landed somewhere in Jung's town. How's that for an imponderable ponderable?

Wow. Just Wow.

2007-09-11T16:54:00.001-04:00

Someone clearly needs a life--- and a little disassociation therapy. And probably a island's worth of sedation. (Link courtesy Christie.) Warning: prepare your pity sacks! Or at least you vomit bags.

Apologies for the lack of posting lately: life is nuts-to-the-wall insane, and I'm spending much too much of my time either in transit or in recuperation. As Danny Glover famously put it, "I'm too old for this...."

God Help Us All

2007-09-01T10:33:00.001-04:00

Just when you thought television couldn't get any worse.... At least it won't feature Ben Mulroney.

Under The Fold

2007-09-01T06:59:00.001-04:00

Subtext? SUBTEXT?!?! We don't need no stinkin' subtext....

(Key quote: "This is hurting...." Indeed.)

And Turn Away Thy Face

2007-08-31T09:36:00.001-04:00

Now this is what you call "dramatic irony."

Brief Update

2007-08-27T17:14:00.001-04:00

Hard as it is to believe, the NSG Doc has finally caught up with the times. Well, kinda. I'm writing this entry from my long-wanted but only recently-acquired laptop. It's a neat little system, with a great display and a nifty design. It is, however, causing me to install all the programmes I use on a regular basis, and I'm having to deal with the various frustrations caused by Microsoft Vista. I can certainly see why people aren't enamored with it. It's slow, bloated and irksome, especially when it nags you about every single task you attempt. I'd remove it, but something tells me that'd be more hassle than it'd be worth. Otherwise, though, I love the new system and I can only imagine how much commuting time won't be going to waste anymore.

BTW, thanks to those of you who sent kind wishes regarding yesterday. They were much appreciated. Perhaps more later. Cheers.

At Long Last

2007-08-27T13:12:00.001-04:00

And it's about effing time ....

Logical Positivism

2007-08-22T06:05:00.001-04:00

Wow, it has been a long time since I updated here: have been crazy-busy lately with various things (writing, editing, reviewing medical briefs slightly larger than Montana) and desperately pretending that it isn't really August. I am in the slow process of setting up at New Institution which, it turns out, is much more complicated than it used to be: contractual stuff, net access, voice mail, the whole drill. (I shudder to think how exasperating it'll be checking voice mail on even a semi-regular basis; email alone has become a chore.) I'm also trying to figure out the eventual purchase of a laptop, which is an odd thing since I've been using the same desktop since Clinton left office. As I'm planning to continue my freelance work, I'm going to need one with all the work I'll have to do. Turns out I'll also have to use a laptop in my teaching, which I've never had to do before. It feels like I'm being dragged into contemporaneity, and in my experience that usually means more work rather than less. C'est la vie.

I've also learned that one of the things I'm going to have to teach is the tired chestnut of the five-paragraph essay. Surely you all know the structure. It's also one I used to rail against in class, as many of you also know (probably too well). That structure, in the hands of some genuinely awful teachers, has probably been responsible for some of the most turgid and thoughtless essay-writing I've had to endure because so many people think in rubrics rather than argumentative or analytical logic. No religious man I, suddenly I'm praying I can impart the fundamentals without accidentally becoming part of the problem-- specifically, contributing to the breeding or enabling of Baaaaaad Writing. The structure works as a teaching device because it's simple and memorable; but as an organizing principle, it's often woefully misleading and functionally impractical. When I taught first-year courses at Place Of Which I Do Not Speak, one of the first things I used to do was demolish that model. Now I have to promote it. I'm sure several of you are laughing your butts off as a result.

So, yeah, there's a lot cooking these days with only more to come. I can't promise, alas, a return to form in re blogging any time soon. It's that time of year when I normally become most elusive (and, if caught, surly). It came to my attention, however, that this year-- for the first time-- I will officially be twice as old as most of my students. Twice. As they say, if I were a horse, they'd have shot me by now. How's that for logical positivism?

Delays and Dissonances

2007-08-09T11:58:00.001-04:00

Sheesh: lately it seems every time I go to update this blasted blog, I feel I should apologize; same, in fact, for finally answering any of the emails that have gathered like moss recently. With things being the way they have been, combined with a general distaste for writing, I must have seemed at best erratic and at worst rude. My apologies. And, I should add, my thanks to those who've expressed congratulations and such, even if I haven't gotten around to thanking everyone individually.

Just some random bits and pieces for your consideration:

Watching The Simpsons Movie, I was struck by one sight gag that has to be one of the most insightful observations I've seen in a long, long while. At one point, as a giant dome is falling upon Springfield and the direness of the town's predicament becomes apparent, the movie cuts to a shot of the town church and Moe's Tavern. The denizens of each stare up into the sky, panic, and run into the opposite building: the drunks to church, the religious to darkened stools. Ah, truth in satire. When the shit hits the fan, the familiar crutch just won't do. Bloody brilliant.
Ironic moment pending: Occurred to me the other day what a joy it would be to fly-on-the-wall when Nelly Furtado's daughter becomes an out-of-control teenager. The precocious But Mom!s would be priceless. *snicker*
Ever like ships in the night, it seems that just as I'm about start working in the same city as Zelda, she's off to another city. The story of our lives: always in the same area, never in the same place at the same time....
Since being sheared like a New Zealand lamb, I've been inundated with "Oh-my-God-you-look" [insert number here between 19 and 22, with or without a colourful expletive]. Sure, it's all supposed to be complimentary & all that, and I'm equally sure most of the remarking is exaggerated. It reminds me, though, why I started growing in beards all those years ago; one tires of the "do you have ID" and effusive darlingism. There's something desperately wrong with the world when people start calling me "cute." *Shiver* Especially when I know it's meant in the Gary Coleman sort of way. Ugh. Talk about your cognitive dissonances; it's like describing Burgess Meredith as "cuddly." Or Trouble, pictured at right doing his best impression of a possum, as "ambitious." (Old Cat's Book of Practical Possums, anyone?)

Oh well. It's August, that most dread-inducing month. It's enough to drive a man to drink--- even more than usual. Then again, I like my crutches tried and true.

Kinda Sorta

2007-08-06T14:26:00.001-04:00

Yes, yes, yes: I have been delinquent in updating this blog, so my apologies to those of you who keep checking it so inexplicably dutifully. Have been asea in issues and paperwork, and generally exhausted, but I have finally (and surely temporarily) alighted from the waves long enough to catch my breath. And yes, as Zozo tweaked in one of her comments, there is a bit of a change for the Ole Doc, as he will be assuming a new position shortly at a local institution. (As opposed to my last institution, the position for which I was constantly forced to assume zoologically constituted "presenting.") But good news in my own regard has been so rare, that every little bit counts.

So, there you have it. Kinda sorta. Discretion, better part, you know the drill. But now you know. Kinda sorta. ;-)

Scum and Villainy

2007-08-02T00:38:00.000-04:00

You must be cautious.

And yes, he does do a better job than Ewan.

From There To Where?

2007-07-25T00:37:00.000-04:00

Something to remember from Alan Watts, with a little help from Stone & Parker. Key words: "And it was a hoax...." Yup.

One of the ironies, of course, is that if you study (say) Tom Eliot or Wallace Stevens, you need to know this sort of thinking intimately. Then they tell you to-- what?-- go do this and then this and then that. Oh, and that too. No wonder so many of us, to steal Mr. Yeats' image, cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

Tuesday Meld

2007-07-24T16:17:00.001-04:00

Just a few notes on recent items & events:

The much, much, much too-hyped CNN-YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential nominees wasn't the failure some predicted it would be, but it wasn't the political watershed moment CNN would have you think it was either. The big winner from last night? Democrats generally. With the Republican version not happening until September, the Dems will get almost two months of credit for engaging "the public" directly. The Republicans, however, are going to get crucified when their questions get sent in; by September, the schisms within the party will be plain and the calls for blood will be positively choral.
You Jane Austen fans out there might appreciate this. In the Google age, this is inexcusable and should send more than a few heads rolling.
The Guardian put together its list of the fifty greatest film comedies. Note some of the really bottom-of-the-barrel inclusions. We'll see if The Simpsons Movie makes a future version, but if the Guardian review is any indication, it will be; the review falls somewhere between supplication and fellatio.
I will not link to any item about the LiLo fiasco. Period. I will only add this: given the paranoiac effects of alcohol and cocaine, and her constant realization that yes, she is being hounded everywhere, one should hardly wonder why she keeps going on and off the, ahem, rails. Remember the old adage: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that no one's following you.
Recent online discovery: this wonderful reflection by the great lyric critic Helen Vendler. Pious Labours, especially: as RK would say, RLAID; read, learn and inwardly digest.
After being reminded recently of Northrop Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic, I decided the other day to reread it in its entirety--- and which I did, in one sitting over pints at one of my locals. The first essay I'd still encourage everyone, of literary bent or not, to read & re-read & re-read yet again: it's brilliant, central and more valuable now than when it was written those forty-plus years ago. It also reminded me why I loathe the current critical trend to discuss literature as "discourse." Discourse, in its current usage, is really just an attempt to conflate the various areas of critical distinction which Aristotle rightly separated: the ethical, the rhetorical, the poetical. It also conveniently allows lit-critters to say and to write whatever the hell they want, regardless of disciplinary considerations, while guising it as scholarship. In short, it's a license to bullshit and has been used, egregiously, as one. No wonder I wince when I see the word in any scholarship in the past forty years; it has become meaningless, save to say that it indicates and enables pretentious prognostication of the broadest order. We'd do well, I think, to re-read our Aristotle--- without the commonplace sniggering about the convenient compartmentalization of elements.

Hair shorn and beard gone, believe it or not, I have been shocking the hell out of people lately. Further to the Ripley's file, from a young woman the other day: So how old are you? 22, 23?

If only, dear lass, if only....

It's, Like (You Know), Unmitigated Bullshit (updated)

2007-07-18T09:58:00.001-04:00

Here's the biggest, steaming, corn-infested lot I've seen in some time. Key quote:

Parents may gnash their teeth, but language scholars like like.
"It's a shame this poor little usage gets such a bum rap," says Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain, an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. Dailey-O'Cain, who has published an often-cited study on the use of like, says, "It's innovative, it serves a particular function and it does specific things that you can't duplicate with other quotatives."

Someone needs to revoke that woman's tenure-- even if it is at U of A.

FOLLOWUP: I mentioned Frye in the comments. Here's a good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, and for which the common usage of "like" is cognate:

The other day a student came to consult me about a failure in English, and what he said, as I recorded immediately he left, was this:

Y'know, I couldn't figure what happened, cause, jeez, well, I figured, y'know, I had that stuff cold-- I mean, like I say, I'd gone over the stuff 'an figured I knew it, and-- well, jeez, I do' know.

I submit that this is not prose, and I suspect he had failed because he had not understood the difficulties of translating his speech into prose. He was, of course, "taking" English. But English was not taking him: fifteen years of schooling had failed to make any impression on his speech habits.

(Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic)

(That speech, by the way, I heard, in one form or another, countless times in my day.) With Dailey-O'Cain and those who concur with her, we have academics acting as apologists for filler "language," for the babble of syllabic fumbling and stumbling. In short, it's the evidence of inchoate thinking-- and a result of untimely and ill-considered expression. So, yes, if you will: like is, quite literally, a premature ejaculation. Something to consider, non?

You have to love the (Groucho) Marxist turn by Frye there: "But English was not taking him." Alas, English isn't taking a great number of its students these days....

The Loneliness of Muggles

2007-07-16T12:57:00.001-04:00

As you ought to have expected, the pending release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has finally started to elicit the "Harry Potter's killing literature" laments. Here's one example. I think, as usual, such rueful assessments diagnose the symptoms rather than the disease. So what is this disease? Glibly put, autophobia. Western culture has become profoundly terrified of solitude; people have become so deeply afraid of being alone with themselves that they do everything they can to salve that loneliness, as MySpace, Facebook and other such systems attest all too well. Reading, however, is a solitary activity (at least most of the time). It demands concentration, patience and the willingness to be alone with just a book and oneself. That's why reading and literature have suffered so much in this age in which technology means we never have to be totally alone.

So why is the Harry Potter series such an exception? Because it has become a kind of cultural juggernaut that familiarity with it enjoys one into a huge company of others with conversational currency. It is, after all, the same thing we've seen time and time again over the years-- with Star Wars, E.T., The Lord of the Rings and even specious phenomena like Survivor and The Apprentice. The Rowling books really offer very little insight about literature or about reading and encouraging people to do so; they're symptomatic of a different cultural loneliness that I'm beginning to believe may now be beyond treatment. (Just think of the books' overarching premise: the maturation of a lonely, unappreciated boy into a powerful, destined wizard.) To read the Potter novels at this point is to participate in a collective activity rather than an individual one, and that I think makes all the difference. To read them means to remain current, to engage in a cultural process with others, and, in a curiously utilitarian way, to keep from being on the outside of something deemed to be culturally significant. I'm sure many out there are genuinely interested in what will happen in the last book, but the "must-read" status it has acquired seems to confirm the autophobic anxiety. And yes, it's ironic that the Global Village of networks, connections and "friends" has exacerbated this endemic loneliness, but-- as Henry James, that great defender of loneliness, would say-- There we are.

We'd do well, however, to remember James' caveat in this regard: "Deep experience is never peaceful." There's precious little more genuinely turbulent than solitude, and until we embrace solitude-- to cherish it, to appreciate it-- literature will continue to suffer. And it'll have nothing to do with Harry Potter whatsoever.

Terry, Terry, Quite Contrary

2007-07-16T10:08:00.001-04:00

After what had seemed to be some indications of cranial-glutimal extraction, Terry Eagleton has firmly burrowed his head right back between his buttocks. One presumes he saw his shadow, so prepare for six more years of academic winter.

For a good response to Eagleton's whingeing piffle, see here, especially for this lovely little question:

The very greatest writers among all these seem to be on the “bad” list. Is it possible that Professor Eagleton’s political views are simply not that attractive or intelligent?

Also, savour this older consideration of Eagleton's profligate vapidity. This blog can't help but delight to this assessment:

Yet no one acquainted with the intellectual habits of academic Marxists will be surprised to discover that they are as unfazed by contemporary world events as they always have been by their own tartuffian buffonery.

Marxist literary critics of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your perpetually-victimized brains.

Shiver Down The Backbone

2007-07-16T08:46:00.001-04:00

Consider this proof-positive that bravery and outright lunacy are usually the same damned thing:

But yesterday, protected by nothing more than a pair of Speedo trunks and his extraordinary central heating, Lewis Pugh took the plunge and became the first man to swim at the North Pole.
The 36-year-old Londoner spent almost 19 minutes at minus 1.8C as he front crawled for a full kilometre - more than half a mile in the coldest water a human has ever swum.

With video and squirm-inducing picture (er...) "goodness." Frankly, I'm not sure what's more chilling: the feat, or the sight of this dude in a speedo.

Key quote: "I will never give up in front of a Norwegian!" Oh, those damned Norwegians!

A Brock and a Hard Place

2007-07-11T13:45:00.000-04:00

Consider it a timely reminder that American shouldn't invade places they know nothing about. Or aboot.

(And yes, only Canuckis will get the title of this entry. But, boy, will they get it.)

Honesty Shmonesty

2007-07-11T12:36:00.000-04:00

Graduates around the world are utilizing the skills they gained from their Bachelor of Arts Degree from ****'s Faculty of Arts. We want to know how your degree helped you get to where you are today.

Simply answer the following question for your chance to win:
How did your Bachelor of Arts degree from ****'s Faculty of Arts prepare you for your future?

I will not laugh hysterically, I will not laugh hysterically, I will not laugh hysterically. Discretion is indeed the better part of valour....

Bastards and Disasters

2007-07-11T11:55:00.000-04:00

Not often I find myself agreeing with Camille Paglia, but with her response to this letter, I do, at least in part:

The teaching profession in the humanities has lost an entire generation of smart, imaginative young people who were driven away from graduate school because of its infestation by pointless, pretentious, Continental "theory." What a disaster for American intellectual life!

Not much will change until the oppressors (my baby boom generation of trend-chasing p.c. faculty) retire over the next 10 to 15 years. Then perhaps young people can begin to breathe free and reclaim their own originality.

It's hardly worth restating my issues with the farcical nature of most areas of academia, but it's worth clarifying that the theory is less the problem than the professional marginalists who have built their own hectoring intellectual hegemony upon railing against hegemonies. (Yes, it's an awful sentence, but trudge it through. I think it scans-- eventually.) Academia lost its sense of humour, particularly as it invested itself so heavily in the turgid promises of professionalization. It became joyless, self-justifying, and spectacularly onanistic. I am repeatedly told by more optimistic people that Things Are Changing, but I remain unconvinced. In fact, I suspect things are only going to get worse, particularly as the current power-holders realize there's dissent in the ranks. (It's the lesson of Robespierre.) But I do agree that, probably within the next 20 years, things will change and a great sigh of relief will emanate from the once-hallowed halls. How many fine minds, however, will we have lost in the meantime? That, I think, is the quiet cost, the collateral damage, of which no one speaks. Except, of course, for recalcitrant bastards like YT. Now gods stand up for....

Mediaeval On Your Ass, or Rag Mama Rag

2007-07-11T10:49:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought crappy writing was a bad thing....

The Asset-Minded Professor

2007-07-09T16:20:00.000-04:00

Something says I should direct your attention to this. Why? Because, er, um, well.... *rolls eyes impishly and steps gingerly away*

Key, unbearably putrid quote: "Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity." Someone clearly wants PILF added to your vocabularies.

Not Malice, But Pause

2007-07-09T04:09:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I think it'd be a worthwhile project to compile a list-- a volume perhaps?-- of lamentable, and eventually disproven, assessments in history. It's an idea some of us have casually, as when we first come across Neville ("Peace In Our Time") Chamberlain or first read Tolstoy's implausibly inane assaults upon King Lear. Sometimes, though, it's curious how some people, people normally known for astute and prescient observation, could ever get things so wrong. Thought first came to mind some time ago, when reading through Philip Larkin's All What Jazz and realizing how badly he'd judged the then-young talent named Aretha Franklin; and then again when rereading Kenneth Tynan, when he said that Alec Guinness would "illumine many a blind alley of subtlety, but blaze no trails." Tynan hadn't seen the Peter Sellers effect yet, much less the Jerry Lewis or Dustin Hoffman ones, and Larkin would probably shrink to see the influence of Ms Franklin (aka, "The Queen of Soul"). One then remembers how many publishers rejected A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and how the Hearsties so savagely railed against Citizen Kane. Not all such idiocies occur contemporaneously and can be corrected with the sleight of "20/20 hindsight." Think of Elvis Costello's-- probably drunken-- dismissal of James Brown as "a jive-ass nigger" and Ray Charles as "a jive-ass, ignorant nigger." (Costello apologized shortly later, but he still regrets it, deeply, and not just because of the vileness of the language.) One could go on and on, so-- mercifully for you-- I won't. But it's a tempting prospect: Greatest Boners By Our Ostensibly Greatest Figures. It's an idea I entertain not with malice, but with pause. We need always to remember that even the smartest, sharpest and most profoundly encyclopedic among us can drop the ball; and while to some that might seem disillusioning, to me it's reassuring. After all, no one truly grasped Blake's genius in his lifetime, or van Gogh's. Sometimes our greatest minds can be the wrongest, something both Einstein and Newton acknowledged. It's not always the clamouring fools, or the rancorous or unprescient. It's all of us-- or, in most cases, most of us. Now pause on that for a while.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

2007-07-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

Because I Haven't Done An Entry Like This In A While...

2007-07-05T18:45:00.000-04:00

No. Comment.

Brother, Can You Spare $218.88?

2007-07-05T09:48:00.000-04:00

Oh, woe is me....

Once again I’ll have to miss a Van Morrison concert in Toronto, all my trawling for sugar mamas having come to no avail. *pout* His gig at Bluesfest in Ottawa is getting good reviews, though it sounds very much like he’s sticking to his recent setlist of material: Brown-Eyed Girl, Gloria, Days Like This, Have I Told You Lately, Gloria and Moondance; in other words, the moneymakers. Like Dylan, Morrison has a huge canon. He could mix it up a bit, and if I had the funds I’d rather hear some of the old ass-kickers he used to do: a Caravan that veers into James Brown’s Sex Machine; an epic Lonely Avenue that tears through every bloody tune known to man; a staggering And The Healing Has Begun; or even one of those takes on Summertime in England that has wowed just about every lass I’ve ever dated. (There’s a pale version of the last here.) But ’tis neither here nor there, as I won’t be there tonight. Again. Excuse me while I go and sulk in a corner.

Yeah, and Dylan’s in the neighbourhood, too. Fucksticks....

Footnote: If you’re curious.... And it's raining today, too....

The Evidence Of Things Conveniently Not Seen

2007-07-03T11:59:00.001-04:00

I don't want to write too much here about The Shrub's ludicrous commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, especially since I think most of us with empirical minds will agree that the Official Line is utter balderdash. But Andrew Sullivan-- a conservative after all, though not a NeoCon, but a (gasp! Heaven forfend!) gay one at that-- says it best:

We now have a clear and simple illustration of the arrogance of this president. Tell the American people the core narrative of this monarchical presidency: this president believes he is above the law in wiretapping citizens with no court oversight; he has innovated an explosive use of signing statements to declare himself above the law on a bewildering array of other matters, large and small; he has unilaterally declared himself above American law, international law, and U.N. Treaty obligations in secretly authorizing torture; he has claimed the right to seize anyone in the United States, detain them indefinitely without trial and torture them; his vice-president refuses to abide by the law that mandates securing classified documents; and when a court of law finds a friend of the president's guilty, he commutes the sentence.

Duh. No offense to Andrew, but hasn't the evidence for this arrogance-- the clear and simple illustration of which-- been in superfluous availability for years? Let's not pretend this is the first, or even the tenth, instance of indication. And yet the press still-- still!-- refuses to Joseph Welch this serial perpetrator of mendacity. He combines, in spectacular fashion, Nixon's corruption with Carter's ineptitude and Johnson's bluster. Yet the gallery demures. In the age of Conkrite or Murrow, this would not have gone unanswered; and in the age of Mencken.....

It's a Mochrie, I Tell Ya...

2007-07-02T07:09:00.000-04:00

Sorry, folks: not much for blogging lately. If, however, some of you retain doubts about the onanism of so much contemporary scholarship, check this out (PDF version here). It’d be risible if it weren’t so humourless--- and so manifestly typical.

Gawd, though, I miss the British Whose Line.

And, in a totally unrelated item: let's simply say that from this place, you don't want to request extra sauce. *shiver*

Random Souse

2007-06-26T16:46:00.001-04:00

Seems Zelda has tagged me with one of those silly memes. Oy. I'm supposed to state the rules, which are:

I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

Okay, eight random facts, eh? Hmmm.... Are there even eight facts about me? Forkstix.

I hate-- loathe, despise, virulently detest-- writing about "me." Experiences are fine, but ask me to write anything in description, categorization, figuration, etc., of myself, and I get downright surly. And terse.
I have probably had more nicknames, monikers and soubriquets than a broken bluesman. So many, in fact, I don't remember all of them anymore. I have contained multitudes....
I am probably the only blogger in the world to have written about, or even mentioned, Flora Robson in the past month. I am therefore either arcane or anachronistic. Take your pick.
In case you haven't noticed, I'm having a very difficult time completing this thing. Seriously. See point #1.
I firmly believe all will be revealed to each of us-- the meaning of life and all that palaver-- exactly two seconds before we die. I am convinced this is part of Dog's profoundly warped sense of cheek. I'm not sure I believe much more than that anymore.
I badly need a hair-cut. Again. Am getting that swarthy Celtic look. Again.
Have been rereading John Donne lately. Infer from that what you will.
I get bored very, very easily. (Obviously.) I wanted to end this meme five points ago. *shrug*

Okay, now consider yourselves tagged. I'm off to pick up beer.

The Trickiest Dick

2007-06-24T16:34:00.000-04:00

Well, it's only a little late-- how many years and lives since?-- but the Washington Post has issued the first of a four part series examining the machinations of Dick ("Go fuck yourself") Cheney. Very little of it will surprise, I'm sure, but some of the details and the manipulations are downright eerie. And, I tarry to say, not a little reminiscent of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate.

Footnote: The more I learn about the inner working of the ChainGang, the more I find sympathy, partial and otherwise, for figures like Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and even the President himself. They seem more and more like characters from a French farce stuck in a geopolitical version of Othello. The hapless Desdemona, of course, is played by the American constitution.

Frags and Shards

2007-06-16T17:42:00.000-04:00

Not much to report from these dull but summery quarters, but maybe a few things of interest:

In a move entirely too rare these days, Bytescout has shifted its blogging programme Post2Blog from pay-ware into freeware. It’s a flawed but basically solid editor, and one of its niftiest components-- conspicuously missing from heavier counterparts like Windows Live Writer-- is the automatic loading & storage of pictures on Flickr or ImageShack. If you’re running a blog, it’s worth checking out. Also includes emoticons & other neat little bits & pieces.

Finally saw Knocked Up, which, though clumsily made, is something of a pleasant surprise, and I was impressed by the script’s willingness to make all of its characters, at one point or another, deeply flawed in one form or another. And, well, let’s just say that there are a lot of moments in it that ring astonishingly familiar. Good on it. I’m a little perturbed by the ways in the which the American punditocracy is using the film as a reason to dredge up the ever-circular abortion debate, but as someone once observed, in American politics, everything is about abortion.

Those of you in Toronto for the next week with an interest in textile art might want to check out the Marie-Jose Danzon retrospective being held at the Gladstone Hotel until the 23rd. See here for a pair of samples.

Today being Father’s Day, you might want to read about this ~~martyr~~ bloke. He gives new meaning to the old saw about grinning & bearing it, especially since you know that he hasn’t seen the inside of his own bathroom in twenty years.

Have to spend the next bit going over medical reports as part of my current freelance work. Almost thinking I should start impressing business cards identifying myself as a "freelance language advisor." Off to it. Enjoy thy weekends all.

Fuzzy Thinking

2007-06-15T00:13:00.000-04:00

If you haven’t seen Hot Fuzz yet, do so ASAP. Yes: it’s funny, it’s cheeky, it’s smarter than hell. But here’s something you probably haven’t heard: It’s breathtakingly economical. There’s not a moment of fat in it, every scene, and almost every bit of every scene, proving relevant to something elsewhere in the movie. You wouldn’t expect such a film to be put together with such contrapuntal technique, but there it is, and it’s an impressive feat. It’s also deeply allusive, for those of you into that sort of thing. I spotted allusions to Yojimbo, Once Upon a Time In Mexico, The Omen, The Wicker Man (the original), Straw Dogs and Chinatown, among others. Bloody clever--- and yes, a bloody lot of fun. See it.

BTW, this page is loading very slowly because of some scripts and links to Enetation in the UK. Unfortunately, I can’t be bothered to go through the trouble of removing all such stuff right now. Oy. My apologies. Maybe I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

Meatball Surgery

2007-06-13T13:27:00.000-04:00

Okay, so much for leaping boldly into the modern computer world. My upgrades arrived, and alas there was some confusion regarding them, so I'm still about three years behind the times, but at least things are noticeably better. At least I can run more than two programmes at a time now. *shrug* It's proof-positive, though, that nothing ever goes as planned for the NSG Doc. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....

Spent most of the past two days editing and recasting reports and was reminded of something which I had forgotten, namely the fundamental differences between one form of report and another. In my onetime field, repetition is a no-no, and structure & phrasing matter a lot. In other fields, however, especially science and social-science related fields, reports are all about repetition and jargon: all about, that is, using key words and phrases, shoehorning them in if necessary, and restating them as often as possible. Reminds me of an actor making his marks: make sure you step here, here and here; don't worry, it doesn't matter how you move between them, but dammit, make sure you hit those bloody marks. It was one of the first things I learned in academia, that what's acceptable, and often publishable, in the social-sciences-- for example-- wouldn't make even preliminary muster from a language-based, much less literary, standpoint. Sylvia, I'm sure, knows exactly what I mean--- and probably more intimately.

More than a decade ago, an anthropology student with an office across from mine asked me to edit a paper that she was submitting for publication. Going through it, I realized the thing was unreadable, and I set about trying to perform meatball surgery on it. Next time I saw this young woman, I apologized for taking so long (and, frankly, dreading having to relate the awful news), but she cut me short with her happy announcement that she had already submitted the piece and that it had been accepted. I smiled and was happy for her, of course, but you could have knocked me over with a feather.

As some of you reading this already know, I chagrin the social sciences, not because of what they study but because they actively encourage bad-- genuinely awful-- writing; illogical writing, mechanical writing, obtuse and professionally onanistic writing; writing that's based on the checklist, talking-point model. Coherence doesn't matter; language doesn't matter; and phrasing, well that matters less than nothing, if that's possible. Such writing is just point-form notes shoved into paragraphs when they really want nothing more than to remain point-form notes. Until one appreciates that sentences and paragraphs aren't just vague verbal forms, but units of logic, all those paragraphs are just going to be boxes into which as many objects as possible are carelessly shoved. Unfortunately, that's how most people think of paragraphs-- and sentences, for that matter-- because that's what they're taught to think, usually in high school. It's almost impossible to remedy that sort of thinking, especially when people get settled in their ways. Why care about grace, after all, if you're still making your marks? Who cares if you do so with the heavy footing of a Clydesdale?

It's a lesson I used to make, probably ad nauseam, to my students over the years, that language matters fundamentally because it's the central device of thought, in the same way that numbers are to a mathematician. Misplace a decimal, add a zero, miswrite an equation, and your answers will be skewed and almost certainly wrong. Same thing with language. Muck up the words, mash up the grammatical order, misplace punctuation, and your writing will collapse under the weight of your intentions and you'll be left standing on a pile of intellectual rubble. As Mr Eliot put it,

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Few care about this sort of thing anymore, though, and those of us who do are often regarded as tight-arsed purists clinging to some long-dead notion that language is unmalleable. It's quite the opposite, in fact. Those of us that care about such stuff are all too aware of the mutability of language. Using language is like making a wish in a fairy tale: if you're not careful, you'll probably get something quite different than you expect. Semantics are everything. Just ask my computer.

***

And yes, this is all probably just post-editing whinge. Meatball surgery, after all, isn't about getting things right or even best; it's about getting your patients back out in the field as quickly as possible. The words "good enough," however, will always bug the living hell out of me, even when I have to say them. C'est la vie, c'est la....

A Sense of An Ending

2007-06-11T10:10:00.001-04:00

It seems fans of The Sopranos are livid about the series finale last night, and the Net nattering class is looking for someone to whack. Frankly, I don't think the ending could be clearer, though I'll concede there's a certain degree of ambiguity about it. So, I'll try to provide my take on it, though I think it's the only one that makes any sense in the show's universe.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW: Avert thy gaze now if you don't want to know what happened. Check here for the elemental summary if you're interested.)

I said "a certain degree of ambiguity," but the ending is NOT ambiguous. By my reading, Tony's dead, and probably the whole family. Why? Because those two classics of modern mafia movies, The Godfather and Goodfellas, tell us so. Just before the end, a mysterious and anonymous figure heads into the head, and if any of you remember The Godfather, the implication is deadly. But the jagged cut to black-screen reinforces the suggestion. Recall Goodfellas and Henry Hill's realization that he had been trapped by the feds and not by the mob. He says, "For a second I thought I was dead. But, when I heard all the noise, I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they'd been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead" (emphasis added). There's no noise in The Sopranos' resolution, no talk, no explanation; just nothing. The inference, I think, is inescapable, and only the most die-hard of Sopranos fans can deny they're condemned to it. (Why? Maybe because they "won't stop believing.")

For all these years, we—as an audience—have walked along-side him, and to some extent colluded with him in his activities, however vicariously. We've seen his world largely through his eyes, and now we're paying for that collaboration, because at least symbolically, we've been whacked too: denied action, denied response, and most of all omniscience; we're just plain dead, perhaps our price to pay for being his silent consigliores. In the 86^th episode, we get eighty-sixed along with Tony, and one presumes the rest of the family, with the possible, but I think unlikely, exception of Meadow. The manner of the ending, though, is perfectly mimetic, and though preliminarily frustrating, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. It's also appropriately ironic, given the ways in which we, as an audience, have apologized for and even valorized Tony Soprano: we have lived off him every bit as much as Carmela, she off blood-money, we off blood-TV.

That we never, of course, see Tony die can be used against us later, should buckets of money be dropped at David Chase's feet to resurrect the characters, and that's where that "certain degree" of ambiguity comes into play. It'd be a cynical gesture, however, and one I suspect Chase would decline to make. There's a particular genius about leaving the ending in ellipsis. Shakespeare ended Henry V on a rousing note, while only vaguely indicating what would happen after Henry's defeat of France, specifically that he'd die just years later and his premature death would England into years of internecine warfare. Shakespeare's audience knew exactly what would have followed the flourish, so leaving it unsaid was all-the-more powerful. So too with The Sopranos: we can infer, we can read the indications well-enough and surmise accordingly.

And the less we have to say, the better. No wonder we didn't hear a thing.

MMMSnap!

2007-06-09T16:03:00.000-04:00

Rediscovered today this old bit from Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, "A Very Hanson Christmas." Those of you who remember those teeny-bopping twerps-- like Vietnam and that time Father Shaughnessy asked you into the rectory-- will relish the volta with which the third letter begins.

If you inexplicably managed to miss the phenomenon of that over-tressed trio in the late nineties, count yourself blessed. You can Google them yourselves should you wish, but I, for one, don't want that term anywhere in my search history.

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

2007-06-09T12:55:00.000-04:00

Herewith, the most tortured-- and torturous-- interview you'll see all year, complete with utterly gratuitous product-placement. I guarantee you'll be squirming after the first minute, and writhing in outright agony by the third.

As the poster of this video noted, "This is why you don't homeschool your children."

UPDATE: Almost-exceedingly cruel follow-up here.

In A Word....

2007-06-08T08:06:00.000-04:00

... Dammit. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.

I gotta get me a sugar momma....

Words To Die By

2007-06-07T16:34:00.001-04:00

Finally, I think I have found the perfect words for my tombstone, courtesy an old episode of Frasier:

Thank you for your support, ladies, even if it was nakedly self-serving and insincere.

Could there be a better epitaph for the Not-So-Good Doctor? Now how do I incorporate the wry smile before I exit stage left?

(The best suggested epitaph will always belong, however, to Peter Ustinov: he demanded "Keep Off The Grass!")

FOLLOW-UP: Yes, there's an irony to me posting this as I knot my guts with inexplicable worry for a particular young lass. I do it, though, because she'd appreciate the macabre and half-ironic cheek. And she'd be mighty fucken pissed if I ever got totally sincere. ;-)

Ledger De Man

2007-06-06T10:45:00.001-04:00

I'm suddenly thinking I have to see Knocked Up if this is the sort of scene they deleted. Most comedies should have even one scene this funny. Very, very, very much Not Safe For Work, though.

Some of you have probably heard that former National Post columnist Rebecca Eckler is claiming the movie stole its story from her. You may not have heard, however, that she has a blog. You can read it here and develop your own doubts regarding the merits of her case. She writes like a vapid eighteen year-old, right down to using "Can you fucking believe that?" as an independent paragraph. Then again, Ms Eckler is all about the "me" back into "Mom mee...."

The Persistence of Memory

2007-06-05T12:48:00.001-04:00

With any luck—yeah, I know, who am I kidding?—my aged computer will soon be, well, not entirely obsolete. I just shelled out to improve my machine's memory resources ten-fold, and though that won't bring me into the modern age, much less the Vista one, it should make a huge difference. Maybe it'll even do for my sad & ever-so-clunky machine what Viagra did for Bob Dole and inspire a new lease on life. (In case you're wondering how bad things had become: it would regularly take minutes, literally, to switch between two open programs, say Firefox and OpenOffice, minutes in which I, of course, would end up rolling my eyes like Ajax, or uttering litanies of obscenity that would make George Carlin blush.) So, fingers crossed, however creakily and osteoperotically.

Not much to report here, save the same old doldrums— shouldn't that be doldra?—and shit. Except: received a gift yesterday of the old Richard Attenborough pic, Guns at Batasi, courtesy a too-too kind RK. (Wiki link here.) Still to watch it, but it has two of my favourite English actors in it, Jack Hawkins and the sadly under-remembered Dame Flora Robson. Hawkins is well-represented in my movie collection—The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Theatre of Blood—but the only film in my DVD collection with Dame Flora is The Malta Story, also starring Hawkins, and that's hardly a stellar outing for anyone concerned. For you non-cinephiles, Dame Flora remains in many ways the film epitome of Elizabeth I: playing the Queen in Fire Over England and The Sea Hawk, she was terrific and steely, and more than able in both cases to upstage her co-stars, Laurence Olivier (with Vivien Leigh) and Errol Flynn, respectively. (No mean feats, those.) Some actors are welcome to be seen in anything. Flora's one of them-- moreso, in fact, now that older movies are so very, very rarely to be found on TV anymore. BTW, now you know against whom Cate Blanchett is daring to pit herself by playing Elizabeth again. It's like Eddie Murphy endlessly trying to outdo Alec Guinness: admirable to an extent, but entirely unnecessary.

And yes, once again the Not-So-Good, Not-So-Doctor ends up prattling on about an actor unfairly forgot. Please don't forgive me. Consider it an encitement to research.

Also, can't be bothered to give a damn about the Philip Glass setting of the Leonard Cohen pieces from The Book of Longing currently being performed in Toronto. I should be interested, very interested in fact, but The Book of Longing was such a piece of crap I decided it wasn't even worth writing about here. It also doesn't help that my initial response to Glass isn't much different than Springfield's. No one does Cohen well anymore, not even Cohen—or rather, especially not Cohen. Sigh.

On the other hand, there remains that Zelda is now dissertation-free, and now simply trudging through the last bits that will formalize her Piled Higher and Deeperness. (Don't make me drag Petey out again: I keep him retired for a reason.) Her success, well-earned but also inevitable, reminds me how little I ultimately have to say. Or, rather, how little I have to say in that form. I just don't give a damn about that audience anymore.

That realization, however, has led me to some much more awkward realizations, none of which I'll detail here. It's all so Henry James: And there we are….

Or maybe Leonard Cohen, fourteen years ago: Looks like freedom but it feels like death. Or maybe exactly the opposite. It's probably a paradox one has to be a Cavalier to understand, or a Yeats or a Vonnegut. G-d knows, I don't. Or even care. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....

The Charge of the Lie Brigade

2007-06-04T13:30:00.000-04:00

Some comedy just writes itself:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty promised yesterday that he would not raise taxes if he is re-elected this fall and insisted he means it this time.
The Premier, who ran on a no new-taxes platform in the 2003 election and then introduced one of the largest income tax increases in provincial history, said Ontarians should believe him now "because I'm in charge."

Reminds me of Lucy assuring Charlie Brown that she won't pull the football away at the last minute--- this time.

A Little Zozo Mojo

2007-05-30T10:06:00.000-04:00

Okay, everyone, cross your fingers and get out your rosary beads (how's that for a digital challenge?): Zelda is defending her dissertation tomorrow, and we all ought to send as much karmic goodwill her way as we can muster. This blog, for one, can't wait for her to kick a little academic ass.

(Well, not quite: I suspect it'll be a love-in, which she surely deserves, but I'm not gonna tell her that. )

And if ANYONE asks anything about my onetime dissertation, I will, of course, have to un-retire Petey the Problem-Solving Machete.

It's Offensive To Everyone

2007-05-28T02:20:00.000-04:00

Finally, something that should amuse all of my readers.

Two Verbal Prose Arrangements

2007-05-25T15:17:00.000-04:00

Briefly, two pieces of required reading for the weekend:

This essay on the comic novel—and its importance given the recent proclivity toward High Seriousness in lit—is very good & worth further consideration. I have always thought that if I had a novel in me—I don’t— it’d have to be a comic one: who could tolerate all the angsty navel-gazing? CanLit has quite enough of that, thank you very much.
This discussion on writing well is very, very funny and well-worth the read. It should also go without saying that I agree with just about every word of it. (Slight follow-up: Andrew Sullivan provides a noteworthy point which I offer as an addendum in this regard.)

Not too much to report from these quarters, save that it’s hotter than Hell.

Of a related nature, since rediscovering that old notebook I mentioned, I found a few more things lurking rattily about like Claudius behind an arras. Alas, I wish I hadn't. It's a particular type of torture reading one's own tortuous scribblings from days gone mercifully by. There were papers on Frye, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Harold Pinter and D.H. Lawrence, the undergraduate ones of which were grotesquely naive, while the graduate ones were grotesquely dishonest from trying to mollify the soft bigotry of theoretical expectations. (They all got A's of one form or another, though Ray Charles only knows how or why.) There were various attempts at verse, all rightly aborted and lined-through like security briefings. And there were bits & pieces of thought from and for classes, all scattered and probative, more aphoristic than refined-- and almost entirely unusable by my estimation. Some writers look back on their back-pieces with embarrassment and even regret. I do so with a dustman's sense of waste: so much stuff, none of it worth keeping, and not a little bit of shame that there's nothing to be salvaged from the cartage. John Lee Hooker was right: Don't look back.... Ever.

(And yes, I ended with navel-gazing. I. Am. Soooooo. Canadian.)

For Crying Out Loud

2007-05-24T15:46:00.000-04:00

From a friend regarding the various Poetry Out Loud readings:

You and I in class did this so FUCKING much better.

Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh.

I'd like to think so, but vanity's a bitch of a thing, isn't it?

(In fact, we probably did, though I'm less and less sure about by my readings, prolly because I cringe every time I hear my tinny voice on tape. *shiver*)

Because Symbolism's For Sissies

2007-05-22T00:49:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, the season finale of 24 ended-- I jest thee not-- with Jack Bauer, gun in hand, gazing despondently over a cliff. Fox Television: as ever, nothing if not subtle.

***

FOLLOWUP: On season 7 of 24: The birth of Baby Chloe. Twenty-three hours and change of Chloe in labour, trying to form a personal perimeter, while Jack bitch-slaps the variously incompetent OB-GYNs with dialogue that includes:

"We can't wait for her to dilate! There ISN'T TIME!!!"
"Put the epidural DOWN! Don't make me shoot you!!!" and
"Dammit, we have a BREACH. Repeat: We. Have. A. Breach!!!"

With special guest midwife, former First Lady ~~Floppin' Funbags~~ Logan, who will suffer a highly dramatic breakdown and stab a candy-striper in the chest with a speculum. Not possible, you say? Just you wait!

And of course, all your favourite villains and former presidents will remain conspicuously undead, smoking cigars ominously in the hospital's underground parking lot, until the season's Big Villain is finally revealed:

Or, rather Villains. Will Jack be able to stop them? How many ill-fated morgue attendants will Nadia get involved with? Is there a mole in the over-occupied thigh-trauma ward? Will Fred Thompson survive his term as president? Will the baby have an innie or an outie?!?!?!

If you thought fathers and sons were dysfunctional--- You. Ain't. Seen. Nuthin'. Yet!!!!!

Season 7 of 24: Giving new meaning to "mobile technology." (But obviously not Virgin.)

Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum....

Upsetdate

2007-05-20T18:23:00.000-04:00

Okay, Lord only know how many hours later, but it seems-- seems, Madam, I know not seems-- I have finally won my battle against the stubbornly evil Windows monster. Almost a dozen reinstallations later, after hours & hours & hours of consulting Microflaccid's endlessly unhelpful "support pages," and just as many trudging through various internet fora trying to fix the problem, it seems everything is finally working again. What ultimately made the difference? This neat little gizmo which, among other things, did a complete check on potentially corrupted or out-of-date files (which, naturally, worked days ago), figured out the update gobbledygook, and reset all the ridiculous permissions that Windows arbitrarily and inexplicably imposes when it gets bitchy. Takes forever for it to plod through everything, but eventually it does work--- which is faaaaaar more than I can say for any of the official tips from the Gates gang of profligate bafflegabbers. Something to remember if any of you wind up in the unfortunate position of having to reinstall pre-Vista Windblows.

I'm now exhausted. Passionate-shag-in-a-tornado exhausted. And yet I feel I accomplished nothing. All that just to get back to where I was before, and not a spot better-off. Reminds me of grad school.... (And every bit as rewarding.)

Drowning By Numbers

2007-05-20T14:46:00.000-04:00

Someone obviously had too much time on his hands. Fun nonetheless.

You'd think one number in particular would have garnered a more interesting clip, but....

If you're curious about the whole list, click here. Or click on it again to make it disappear.

1. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. L.A. Confidential
4. Fargo
5. The Godfather
6. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
7. To Kill a Mockingbird
8. Office Space
9. 12 Angry Men
10. Citizen Kane
11. This is Spinal Tap
12. Ghostbusters
13. Lawrence of Arabia
14. The Professionals
15. Being John Malkovich
16. The Natural
17. The Maltese Falcon
18. Almost Famous
19. The Shawshank Redemption
20. Boogie Nights
21. The Lion in Winter
22. Casablanca
23. The Wizard of Oz
24. Escape from NY
25. Sunset Blvd.
26. North by Northwest
27. The Usual Suspects
28. The Bridge Over the River Kwai
29. Young Frankenstein
30. The Wild Bunch
31. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
32. All About Eve
33. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
34. Marty
35. Harvey
36. Clerks
37. Men in Black
38. Aliens
39. The 39 Steps
40. Superman
41. Ben Hur
42. Finding Nemo
43. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
44. Dirty Harry
45. The Hudsucker Proxy
46. On the Waterfront
47. The Big Sleep
48. The Adventures of Robin Hood
49. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
50. Cool Hand Luke
51. Roman Holiday
52. Waking Ned Devine
53. Midnight Express
54. The Remains of the Day
55. The Blues Brothers
56. It's a Wonderful Life
57. The Manchurian Candidate
58. Goldfinger
59. The Awful Truth
60. Gone With the Wind
61. Singles
62. Mr. Roberts
63. Network
64. Yellow Submarine
65. The Princess Bride
66. Gentleman's Agreement
67. The King and I
68. The Breakfast Club
69. MASH
70. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
71. When Harry Met Sally...
72. Raiders of the Lost Ark
73. The Jerk
74. Ed Wood
75. The Hustler
76. The Great Escape
77. The Apartment
78. The Day The Earth Stood Still
79. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
80. Harold and Maude
81. Galaxy Quest
82. Rainman
83. The Magnificent Seven
84. Titanic
85. Silence of the Lambs
86. Quiz Show
87. Castaway
88. Back to the Future
89. The French Connection
90. The Fugitive
91. The Right Stuff
92. It Came From Outer Space
93. Midnight Run
94. Star Wars
95. Ocean's 11
96. The Lost Weekend
97. Bladerunner
98. Dead Poet's Society
99. Laura
100. Night of the Living Dead

Today's Mantra

2007-05-20T08:09:00.000-04:00

I will not rant about Windows, I will not rant about Windows, I will not rant about motherf*cking Windows....

Okay, not just today's. For the past few days I've been engaged in a knock-down-drag-out with that infernal operating system, trying (probably in vain) to get the damned thing to work properly. Again. It's a bit more than an uphill battle; it's more of a St George versus the dragon sorta thing, and so far I'm losing. Several reinstalls later, and key components aren't working, and I've just had to go through the laborious, exasperating process of trying to repair the entire OS from the ground up, and I'm willing to bet that won't work. I swear, if I have to format my hard-drive, I'll probably have to demolish some perfectly innocent appliances in response. Ugh. As Norm Peterson once said of women, Windows: can't live with 'em, pass the beer nuts.

Which leads me to think Dante was wrong. He had no idea what the Gates of Hell were really all about.

UPDATE: Four hours later, and still no progress. Every single recommendation from Microtoss and various fora on the net have yielded SQUAT. My glee must be positively palpable.

UPPERDATE: M'kay, that last failure tears it: I'm drinkin' early today. Now where are those perfectly innocent appliances....

DOWNERDATE: Urge to kill rising....

Forgetting Us Perfectly

2007-05-19T18:09:00.000-04:00

Like many people, I keep notebooks. Unlike most people, however, I seldom maintain mine. I have certainly never done so faithfully, or with any attention to vision, revision or-- least of all-- posterity. Yet today I discovered a notebook in which I had scrawled notes for a lecture on King Lear. (Did I deliver it? G-d only knows. Probably.) I was struck, however, by the straight-to-paper and completely unrevised nature of these lines from a prospective introduction:

Today I'm going to talk about Albany and his "story," a story that, once understood, takes us deeper into an appreciation of what is really going on in Lear. To understand Albany is to begin to understand Lear, not just as a play about the fall of a king, but as a tragedy about the mysteries of love and death, a tragedy which seems to suggest [that] the truth of either [love and death] depends upon the other. In effect, to understand the absolute value of one, one needs to understand the value of the other. But more on this later. First: Albany.

The notes that follow, about six pages worth, are actually pretty good-- something I seldom say about anything of my own making. The irony, however, is this: I have only a vague sense of where I was going with this. The notes are incomplete, and marked with a date in March of 2002. Sure, I used to do quite a bit on Albany when I taught Lear, but the connexion to love & death, as grand sublime issues, or however the hell I once conceived all this, largely eludes me now. Shame, that. I feel a bit like Guy Pearce in Memento, trying to solve a riddle I unknowingly created for myself but am now too addled to remember. The only thing more amazing, I'm convinced, than one's capacity to forget is one's capacity to remember-- and yet, I'm pretty sure I'd rather remember the stuff I've forgotten, and forget the stuff I remember. 'Tis the way, 'tis always the way....

All Her Pretty Follies Flung Aside

2007-05-19T08:45:00.000-04:00

In for some literary oddities? Poetry Out Loud has put together a small vault of famous people reciting famous poems, including:

Anthony Hopkins reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill";
Angela Lansbury reading Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach";
Alfred "Doc Ock" Molina reading Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Auden's "The Unknown Citizen";
American poet Rita Dove reading Keats' "When I Have Fears"; and
Alyssa Milano, for once not doing softcore porn, reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I think I should have loved you presently" and Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband." There, now that justifies the gratuitous picture at the right.

The real weirdness, though, comes with David Schwimmer-- of all people-- reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." *shiver* What, Lisa Kudrow wasn't available to read "The Raven"?

It could have been worse, though. Imagine Matthew Perry stammering his way through "Signor Dildo."

Ironically, they missed the obvious: they should have had Hopkins read Hopkins. Sir Tony would have had a field day with "The Wreck of the Deutschland" or "God's Grandeur."

It's Al In The Game

2007-05-17T08:15:00.000-04:00

Time Magazine is excerpting a section of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason online. Consider it Required Reading, SVP. Goodness knows, Drudge is already branding it as paranoid lefty lunacy ('AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS NOW IN DANGER'), which of course means the Republican smear machine is just champing at the bit to unleash Alogical Hell. Key quote:

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Heaven forfend. Having read this, though, I'm almost certain Al is going to run for President after all.

NOTE: Don't know the song alluded to in the title of this entry? It's based on a song by another onetime Vice-President. How's that for cheek? ;-)

A Man Of Good Will

2007-05-17T07:22:00.000-04:00

Most of the time Christopher Hitchens is such a compassionless contrarian, one hesitates to agree with him even slightly. Occasionally, though, he hits all the marks and delivers a denunciation so viciously erudite, you have to admire the form if not the content. Case in point: Hitch's utterly unmagnanimous anti-elegy for Reverend Teletubby on Anderson Cooper 360 below. (BTW, see also his piece for Slate.) In this case, the accuracy of content's gravy, but you have to respect the rhetorical quality of such sucker-punches that dismiss Falwell and his brethren as "Chaucerian frauds" and characterize the man himself as "pinching his chubby little flanks." It's vintage vituperation, pure vinegar without even a drop of pseudo-palliating wine. Enjoy.

How's this for a TV show: Hitchens and Anthony Lane conducting weekly excoriations of popular and/or intellectual culture? Now that'd be a bitch-fest worth tuning in to see.

GEEKY FOOTNOTE: Observe Hitchens' sentence in the article: "The evil that he did will live after him." Kewpie dolls and laurel-leaves if you can catch the paraleptic implications thereto. (Or should I say rendered unto? )

Somehow, You Can't Imagine The Church of England Behaving Like This

2007-05-15T16:00:00.000-04:00

If you're in North America, all you probably heard about today-- before Reverent Teletubby's passing-- was the Church of Scientology's YouTube attempts to expose the insidious nature of the report done on it by the BBC's John Sweeney for Panorama. Well, you can watch the report here, and you can judge for yourselves who's right and who's wrong, or some complex admixture in-between. May also be worth casting a glance at the comments here: The Guardian's position is clearly to knock Sweeney, but the audience's response strikes me as constituting a pretty sharp rebuke to it.

Now, given room for editing-- that Sweeney may well have, and in fact probably did at least somewhat, reframe things for his own purposes-- I can't blame Sweeney for exploding. I, with very little doubt, would probably have clocked the malignant little twerp, repeatedly and bloodily, until my knuckles turned into something roughly akin to melted cheese. But maybe that's just me....

I hesitate, only slightly however, to note that, historically, most of the major religions have done exactly the same stuff the CofS seems to be doing. (Can we say Torquemada, boys and girls? I knew you could.) And yet we call them "religions," some of us much more reluctantly than others.

All's Well That Ends Fa---

2007-05-15T12:57:00.000-04:00

Unkind as it may seem, it's hard not to wonder if G-d might be punishing him for something....

Deo volente, deo volente....

FOLLOWUP, 28 minutes later: He has, in fact, joined the mortal majority. And gee, it's such a sunny, sunny day here....

FOLLOWUP FOLLOWUP, in honour of the Good Reverend, with appropriate emendations made:

This bigot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the pulpit 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-BIGOT!!

Some Frye With That

2007-05-13T18:15:00.000-04:00

An accidental (re-)discovery, from the Northrop Frye notebooks, circa 1991:

Derrida on the book between two covers as a solid object enclosing an authority is, as Derrida must know, complete bullshit: nobody believes that a book is an object; it's a focus of verbal energy. What he should be attacking is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that's the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands. It's always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it.

Intriguing, but I doubt very few would think so poetically, or alternately scientifically, about a book. But Frye sounds very much like De Man here, though certainly without De Man's sometimes implied and sometimes explicit fear.

New Rules

2007-05-13T14:21:00.000-04:00

Bill Maher (see also here) comes up with his every week, so now & again maybe I'll come up with a few of my own. Heed them as you will, even if mine aren't half as funny:

One Step Forward, Duceppe's Back: If you're going to decide to run for political office, don't change your mind a day later. Seriously, Gilles, your candidacy's now the stuff of Britneyesque legend, that equally comical icon of separation anxiety-- except her flirtations last longer.

A Little Blow In The Can: Friends don't let friends take pictures of them snorting coke in a bathroom so they can be posted online for the tittersome edification of computer-bound cultural onanists. (Insert your own down-Lo download jokes here.) Let this be a new rule for ladies: Don't go to the can with your so-called friends! Or, if you must: Don't let them into your god-damned stall. Or, if you really really must have them into that bastion of personal privacy: Tell them to keep their mother-effing camera-phones off! Sheesh. You'd think the star of Mean Girls would have learned something from the experience. Men, by the way, if the recent news is any indication, should never, ever, say anything to their daughters except, "Yes, sweetheart. You're not recording this, are you?"

The Gap: Poker commentators have to stop saying that players are "open-ended." Their hands may be, but unless there's something we don't know, the players probably aren't. At least not at that moment, anyway. (We hope.)

Caveat Lecter: Anthony Hopkins has to stop playing murderers. He's done the shtick to, um, death: the seething glare, the menacing intonations, the smarmy smiles. Like Laurence Olivier, he has now reached the stage where every performance is a caricature of a previous one, and Hannibal Lecter's the pretext for most of them. Also much like Olivier, Hopkins has mellowed into the class-for-cash actor in Hollywood, the token British Thesp whose presence ostensibly, and ergo automatically, lends legitimacy to a project. Instead, he has become the film version of a high-end whore, and I'm just waiting for him to end up hawking fava beans and Chianti as Olivier did Polaroids.

Tsk-y Business: Relatedly, if you finally get nominated for an Oscar, for God's sake, don't follow it up with a discarded Tom Cruise joint. Ryan ("My-Surname-Is-Not-Indicative") Gosling's option into Fracture suggests he needed cash, fast, and it's a trying shame watching him play the callow would-be legal-superstar who has to go through the oh-so-Cruisy too-damned-cocky-for-his-own-good path-to-redemption plot. (By a silly technicality that a first-year law-student would have caught, no less. So much for the superstar bit.) If you're a young actor building credibility in Hollywood, don't rush to destroy it by doing someone else's cast-off crap. Just ask Halle Berry.

Matter and Impertinency Mixed, or Here Comes The Knight: And lastly, scholars have to stop acting like needy, approval-desperate politicians.

I've recently been reading through Michael Taylor's blandly but aptly titled Shakespeare Criticism In The Twentieth Century, and have subsequently been reminded, as if I needed it, what a piss-pot of intellectual churlishness criticism so often is. When it's not ridiculously acolytical, it's sneeringly ahistorical and bizarrely Oedipal, as critics seem preternaturally compelled to assail most viciously their most significant forerunners. It's an anxiety of influence, and an imperious one at that, as they smirk with Commodian disapproval at the work of greater minds largely for show. It's the classic case of scholarly communities slaughtering onetime sun-gods for their own survival, and then slaughtering them time and time again out of agonistic habit. To this day, few scholars-- and God knows there are enough of them-- have contributed as much to the study of Shakespeare as A.C. Bradley, or G. Wilson Knight, or Caroline Spurgeon; and yet, they're the figures most likely (still!) to be attacked, reduced, vilified and generally dismissed. (So too C.L. Barber, Frank Kermode, T.S. Eliot and Helen Vendler, among others.) Translation: Go after the Big Guys, especially the dead ones. It'll show how smart and enlightened you are. And implicitly, how superior you must be, you with your darlingly contemporary thought!

Well, balls. It demonstrates pettiness, righteousness, and fundamental weakness at the intellectual core. It's one thing to engage and to challenge intellectual and critical tradition; it's quite another to make your own name by belittling more Protean thinkers for your own aggrandizement. So where's the New Rule, you're asking. Here it is: Make your name in your own bloody terms. We remember Marcus Aurelius for his imperial legacy, including the Meditations; we remember Commodus, if we do, only as the guy who came after and did an appropriately craptacular job in the same position. Nigglesome disputation seldom accomplishes anything. Inspiration, breadth of vision, sincere negotiation with the lessons of the past: these qualities more usually do. It's one thing to want to make new tracks in the snow, to use one of Taylor's metaphors. It's quite another, however, to piss on the tracks left by others with much bigger boots. And it's pointless: those tracks are still there, and now they've had human highlighters taken to them in most odious fashion.

Call me antiquated or old-fashioned, but what's so wrong with giving credit where credit's due? I reread Bradley and Knight at least once a year, regardless of need, because they're still worth reading. Can I say the same of most of the scholarship written in the past twenty or thirty years? Not even close. Most of it, in fact, barely warrants a preliminary glance, largely because it's predictable, cluttered and rigorously half-coherent. It's also painfully dull, and when combined with that ingracious and tendentious sniggering that's all-too-typical of the genre, I feel little remorse in tossing it so casually aside. It's the classic contradictional scenario, as historicists gladly de-historicize (how's that for tortured language?), and arbiters of intellectual tolerance practise everything but. But respect? Natch. Let's just say it's more common in the breach than in the observance.

Reminder of a Literate President

2007-05-09T15:18:00.000-04:00

See how well you can do, going (ahem) head-to-head with Bill Clinton (PDF, alas, but printable). Feel free to celebrate with a cigar afterwards.

A Yard Day's Light

2007-05-07T04:29:00.000-04:00

C'mon, admit it: you know your dad wants this. You also know your mother almost certainly doesn't.

A Mangled Web

2007-05-07T01:44:00.000-04:00

Saw Spider-Man 3 this weekend. I could bother with a review, but it's just not worth the words. Summary? A clumsy, jumbled, battle-royal of a movie that seems very much to have been written by a committee of sixteen year-olds; and, ultimately, a real letdown for an otherwise solid series. Only saving graces: some fairly good CGI, and Rosemary Harris, back again as Aunt May and more radiant at 80 than any of her co-stars. A shame she didn't have more scenes. See Anthony Lane's review from The New Yorker for fuller commentary. He pretty much says it all.

Oh, and as you've probably heard: Kirsten Dunst sings-- badly. Is it just me, or does that lass get worse from one movie to another? A mighty feat, I know, but she makes me think "vapider" should be added to the OED.

A Comment On Now, And A Memory From Then

2007-05-05T02:02:00.000-04:00

Almost done dog/house-sitting, and have to say things have gone delightfully well. Amber has been a sweet & patient dream, and though her hearing is sadly not what it used to be, she intuits well-- very, very well, in fact-- and behaves pretty much perfectly. When I'm with her, she doesn't go very far from my side, which is almost unbearably adorable. She's also a trooper: no whining or acting up, except at play time, when the latter's surely to be encouraged in a dog her age. (It shows vitality.) So beyond the relatively minor inconvenience of shuffling from here to there, the whole thing's been good, and remarkably easy. Animals, I'm reminded, do tend to be very good with me-- Jeremy and his animals..., as an ex once said to a visiting relation-- and so also remind me how much I prefer animals to humans. Animals are never false or malevolent. They simply are. Treat almost any animal according to the Golden Rule, and it'll respond in kind--- most of the time. Certainly the case with the animals I've ever owned or cared for.

All this also reminds me of a (true) story. When I was doing my MA, I agreed to housesit for one of my professors, which entailed caring for three dogs, five cats and three horses. Trouble did half my work for me, renegotiating the relationships among the cats & dogs so he was at the top of their chain, first by humiliating all but the oldest and frailest of both species, and then defending them in a beautifully elder-centric reconstruction. (Trouble, like me, has a fondness for old animals.) The horses, however, were my concern. After several days with them, and many warnings from the owning professor, I found myself in a dilemma as I tried to get two of the horses, the alpha horse and the old-and-loony-and-likely-to-cause-me-no-end-of-grief horse, up a steep and badly iced-over hill. Lead the alpha, I was told advisorly, and the loon will eventually follow.

Let's see if you can guess what happened.

The alpha started to freak, and here I was, all 110-pounds of me, trying to get both these beautiful animals up that hill. It was the crazy old horse that stood there and stood there, I think trying to survey the situation. As I tried to calm the alpha, the old horse (I'm sorry, I have since forgotten their names, unfortunately) must have taken pity on me or something, and began the slow-- and rather treacherous-- march. He did so steadily, sedately, beautifully-- and on his own. Eventually the alpha, whom I was holding by the reins only very barely, followed her elder's lead. It was as if the loon had said to the alpha, "it's a rough night, let's not fuck around with him now." And he-- not me, really-- escorted both of them back to their stables, and I just guided the alpha and locked them in when they arrived.

(Is there an allegory for teaching assistants in there? Hmmmmm.... No comment.)

It was something deeply beautiful. The wacky horse with the propensity for jumping fences and causing trouble turned for me into the docile master when things were obviously grim. The alpha scared the hell out of me several times-- and worse, fell once and nearly fell another three times making that scale. (I assure you, there's precious little more terrifying than a horse falling on ice.) But the so-called loon, the one more ostensibly given to injury by the situation, proved stalwart, and thankfully commanding, else I'd have turned up somewhere like a frosty and unquartered Hector.

The moral of the story? (Is there one? ) Maybe it's that eccentric beasts prove themselves, or prove themselves the most stable, when least you might expect they would. Or maybe it's that the ones most champing at the bit can be the ones most capable of taking you-- and themselves-- down. Or maybe it's just a tale about horses, heaven forfend.

As for me, I saw more nobility in that wacky horse's steady climb in that one night than I'll probably ever see in any animal politics, human or otherwise. It was sublime. Old, more often than we care to think, is beautiful. And crazy is as crazy does.

Roughing It On The Bush

2007-05-05T00:43:00.000-04:00

Every now and then, someone writes a good, genuine rhetorical slamming-- a piece that takes its subject by the hair and pounds it repeatedly, viciously, and let's not forget righteously, against a metaphorical wall made of real concrete. (Martin Luther would be the patron saint of this if he hadn't rejected the position on principle. ) Here, however, is the best example of the form I've seen recently, offered for your cranium-crushing delectation. Sure, it veers into aborted epilogues four or five times, the conclusion's entirely too trite, and it loses points for electing a subject so low on the level-of-difficulty scale (as opposed to Christopher Hitchens, who invariably assails the unassailable and consequently comes off more battered than his subject). But it does manage some impressive polemical drop-kicks and piledrivings, most of which provide at least some perverse pleasure along the way. Read it in that light, and you'll have fun. Unless, of course, you're a die-hard Shrubbie, in which case fun's probably beyond your capacity.

The Very Simple Life

2007-05-04T23:53:00.000-04:00

I'll bet she wishes she were Dyanne Thorne's daughter now. Or at least Sybil Danning's. (Too obscure? Nary and natch.)

In case you're wondering what her stay will be like, Forbes provides a hint. Key (partial) quote: "Hilton will be segregated from the general population for her own safety...." And our amusement, surely.

But In North York, It'd Be Given Tenure

2007-05-04T00:08:00.000-04:00

I had thought the phrase "bat-shit crazy" could only be metaphorical. Silly me.

Because This Blog Doesn't Do Happy Dances

2007-05-03T17:17:00.000-04:00

Let's just say Halle-bloody-lujah....

I'll Have What He's Having, or Melts In Your....

2007-05-02T21:26:00.000-04:00

Or at least the steamed squid: "A mouthful starts out damp and chewy, then resolves itself into a liquid gooeyness that resembles the aftermath of a blowjob."

This blog assumes it went down easily, but did it leave a bad taste in his--- oh, never mind....

Too many jokes, too little time. And they're all too easy....

It Also Applies To Jerry Falwell

2007-05-02T17:14:00.000-04:00

Shamelessly lifted from Christie, but it's always nice to be able to explain complex human processes with simple equations.

Being There

2007-05-02T15:37:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes: Another Bloody Cat Picture. (I can hear all of you asking God plaintively why he has forsaken you.) Jenny looks gnomic in this one, as cats are wont to do whenever there isn't a camera handy. Picture's a little old, alas, as the space on which Jenny's resting is completely filled with books, thanks to a trip last week to see RK. Some neat acquisitions, those: some Heidegger, de Man, Frye; quite a few anthologies and essay-collections; some new-to-me editions of Donne and Herbert and Wordsworth; and a small tonne of stuff on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry & poetics. Came to sixty or seventy volumes in total, but-- as ever-- there's no room for them all. Argh. Skimming through some of those books, I finally remembered why I didn't do Renaissance as a specialization all those years ago: my lack of Latin and my French which, by then, had already gone from rusty to corroded. *shrug* At least I avoided ever having to pay lip-service to that atrocious phrase "early modern." *shiver*

In picking out those books, RK dared me to get through a hundred pages of Heidegger's Being and Time. He hasn't double-dog-dared me yet, but I'll not shrink from a dare. Feel free to set up your pools to place your bets on whether or not I can do it without putting a staple-gun to my head.

Okay, Now This Is Genuinely Sad

2007-05-01T21:43:00.000-04:00

Tom Poston is dead. But if you think a little thing like death is going to keep him from making cameos on every show made and still-to-be-made, you've got another thing coming.

The Play's The Thing

2007-05-01T11:27:00.000-04:00

This blog's just so conflicted....

If you're bored, feel free to roam around Elsinore and try to make Hamlet kiss Horatio. Curiously enough, the designer anticipated that you might want to do that.

Paging Helen Lovejoy

2007-05-01T10:41:00.000-04:00

Once again, society is bedeviled by the dangers of eye-rhyme. Bedeviled, we tell you, bedeviled! Will someone PLEASE think of the children!!!

Seriously, if the campaign offends you, it says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about the campaign: specifically, that you're (probably) a self-righteous, ululating prig with nothing better to do with your much too ample time. In other words, you're a card-carrying member of the School of Injurement, and you desperately need to get a motherflicking life.

FOLLOWUP: Reminder from Leonard Cohen: "There are no dirty words-- ever." Except maybe ululate. That word just sounds kinky.

Skin Deep

2007-04-30T09:51:00.000-04:00

Proof positive: Drudge knows his news.

Only in America....

And in other news: ~~Gawd~~ ~~Darwin~~ ~~Marx~~ ~~Roland Barthes~~ Peter Cushing help us all. I'm sure it'll be every bit as funny as we expect it to be. (You know, just like that time Marlo Thomas met the abortionist for dim sum....)

The Power of Myth

2007-04-29T11:21:00.000-04:00

Briefly: If you missed it, check out Bill Moyers' report Buying the War online here. It's a fairly searing indictment of the journalistic complicity that helped get the US into the Iraq debacle, though it's largely old news to those of us in other parts of the world. In Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and many other countries, the media were deeply-- and often quite profoundly-- skeptical of the case for war. (And that's why Canada, for example, stayed the hell out of it.) The failures of the American fourth estate were as horrifying as they were galling. BTW, since Moyers' report was aired this week, you'd think the major Sunday chat-shows out of the States would have addressed some of the issues raised and accusations made. You'd think.

Something to remember: the Shrubbies aren't the only ones in a state of denial. Enablers always are.

Colour Me Amberdextrous

2007-04-28T22:35:00.000-04:00

Sorry, folks--- very much behind on just about everything, email & blogging included. For the next several days I'm dog-sitting Amber, the darling pictured at the right, while her owners are off in Florida. She's a very sweet dog, and she's getting on in years, so she needs a bit of extra care. Have to say, it's nice having a dog around again.

So for the next while, I don't know how much I'll be able to post/write/whatever. Am shuffling between two abodes for now, and only fleetingly attending to Other Stuff. Will try to catch up when I can. Until then....

And Finally The Miscellany

2007-04-24T17:43:00.000-04:00

And on this day of non-stop (read in: compensatory) blogging, a few short-takes on Recent Things:

Some of us remember too well the terrible insecurity when Mikhail Gorbachev was ostensibly ousted all those years ago. Insecurity is a bit of an understatement. I remember watching the TV without stop, wondering if we were witnessing a giant leap back in time. Then Yeltsin happened. He literally "happened." And from there, the rest is history, even if his successor, Mr Putin, these days sounds and acts more like a ~~mafioso~~ Secretary-General than a President. For whatever his faults, for whatever his inadequacies as a reformer and/or statesman, Mr Yeltsin stood up and said, defiantly, that there was no going back, there was only going forward. That, my friends, took courage. Let that be what he's remembered for.

And, to all you right-wing Reaganite nutjobs: Gorbachev and then Yeltsin ended the Soviet Union, so stop taking credit for something you didn't bloody well do. Let us pray (pray, pray) we're finally near the end of this age of willy-nilly historical revisionism.
Yesterday was Saint George's Day-- and as I meant to note, the date of Shakespeare's death. (Some claim it as his birthday, too, but the evidence for that's iffy at best.) So, go celebrate by reading, and ideally viewing, some Shakespeare for the rest of the week. And please, please, please, don't just reread Hamlet. For God's sake, don't. Try King John or Cymbeline, just for a change.
24 continues its full-throttle dead-slowness in resolving a season best forgotten, like that thing you did with the gerbils, a tuning fork and the cast of Oz. For those of you not watching, as if you should, there are still a stabbed President, a murderous Farmer Hogget and a one-armed Russian terrorist unaccounted for. Oh, and a story that, I think everyone agrees, sucks bloated, muddy donkey balls. Or so say the show's fans. Those of us more critical would say much, much worse.

(Correction: I was wrong. These preening, clueless dunderheads disagree. Then again, they use the word "significant" where most of the rest us would use the words "laughably ridiculous.")
I imagine Sylvia is ecstatic that I mentioned her specifically in my earlier re-crud-escent post. I assure all of you, she is NOT the first person of whom I think when poop comes to mind. I also imagine Syl's equally thrilled I've felt the need to qualify this. ;-)
If I hear one more thing from CNN about the Virginia Tech massacre, I think I'll beat my TV into a mass of busted circuits. The ghoulish, pretentious, manipulative "all-massacre-all-the-time" coverage has finally waned, but the cheap cynicism of their reportage remains shameless. I won't even begin to comment, so of course I will, on its "show-the-Cho-tape-ad-nauseum" day-later reversal as it feigned sensitivity to viewer disgust. Once it had decided to air the material, it had to stick to its journalistic guns, arguing relevance. But it didn't. So, beyond being pandering and exploitative, it's also gutless and unprincipled, which renders it lower-than-Mitt-Romney-low.
Opening line for a Cohenesque novel, if one can still be written in this tsk-tsk-tsk-ing age: "She was a damsel in gossamer, but only because of the cobwebs that had formed permanently around her dank and forbidding cu...." [Stop! Stop! We interrupt this sickening, sexist perversion to protect you, the genteel and possibly innocent readers of this blog. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blathering.] Okay, maybe more Mailer than Cohen, but six, half-dozen and the other....
Andrew Sullivan offers an interesting but nearly-hagiographical assessment of Obama-mania. (As Homer Simpson would say, "Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending.") Obama, for now, is getting the RFK man-who-would-be-king treatment, but I remain skeptical. He can't, at least, be any worse than the current President. Inanimate carbon rods, however, couldn't be any worse.
And two items, both brought to my attention courtesy Hockey Jones. First, evidently "old, inefficient bulbs" in Ontario will be reduced to running for parliament, with the dimmest and most wasteful vying for the Premiership. Secondly, this link will provide you with some of the most disturbing images you'll ever see. Gives new meaning, however, to Phil Collins' "Coming In The Air Tonight." *shiver*

Okay--- enough. Some stuff on the burner now, so don't be too surprised if I go quiet for a bit. Until time avails itself again. Best.

Once More Unto The Well, Once More

2007-04-24T15:17:00.001-04:00

Didn't this appropriately-URLed blog already rant about such despicable cynicism? And only two months ago, no less. Pffft.

Notes for the less-familiar: Tracks collected here are mainly from albums from 1993-present, some good ("Days Like This," "Steal My Heart Away," "Crazy Love"), some bad ("Too Long In Exile," "Georgia On My Mind," the torpid "When The Leaves Come Falling Down"), and only a few excellent ("Ancient Highway," "Shenandoah," the epic, electric and righteously-asskicking "Lonely Avenue"). The album's hardly necessary and inexplicably selected, with no real insight offered by the compilation, as the songs are merely presented in chronological order. To rewrite a certain urban phrase, it seems this damn Van's gonna get ridden 'til the mutherfuckin' wheels fall off.

Mystery Meat

2007-04-24T13:13:00.000-04:00

Because some jokes are just too obvious.... Key quote: "Last night cops were trying to establish the Pole's background."

UPDATE: An eminently reliable source adds this: "And the best thing is that in French slang your 'zizi' is your, well, you know." Well, definitely not my, thank ~~God~~ ~~Darwin~~ Ray Charles.

Scatman Druthers, or Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Plopping

2007-04-24T12:24:00.001-04:00

For your, er, delectation: Laudator Temporis Acti spoons-- er, ladels-- out a bit of shining wit. (A crusty trap, or just a plain dropping?)

And remember: The world's most famous anagram of toilets is T. S. Eliot. The waste land, indeed.

FOLLOWUP: I wonder if Sylvia will recall this from our Foundling days. If she's lucky, not.... ;-)

O Commodore, My Commodore!

2007-04-24T10:57:00.001-04:00

Most of my readers either won't remember or won't want to remember the Commodore 64, but some of us, way back when dinosaurs were turning into oil, spent more hours on it than we would care to admit. Oh, the sophistication! The graphical detail! The luxury of having to type LOAD "*.*", 8,1 every time you wanted to run a programme! (On the other hand, your computer served you rather than you endlessly serving, and servicing, it.) I won't even begin to bore you by explaining how many hours I spent playing Qix, Ghostbusters, Bruce Lee, Alter Ego and Defender of the Crown; or how I turned the entire Spanish Main Dutch in Pirates!; nor even how I eventually and heroically-- to my friends at the time, anyway-- disproved the titular claim of Impossible Mission. ("Stay a while! Stay forever!!!" It's also where most of us learnt the word "cormorant.") At long last, however, those of you brave, bored or nostalgic enough can finally play some of those warped blasts and blast-em-ups from the past, collected for your retrogressive satisfaction here. Then tell me how much time you ~~spend~~ waste on all that antiquated silliness. ;-) Providing, of course, you can get the games to work....

Not For Your Eyes Only

2007-04-23T17:20:00.000-04:00

It’s amusing how petty some corporations can be. The article’s author might be a tad over dramatic comparing BA to Soviet Russia -the company's behaviour seems more akin to a teenager cutting an ex's head out of photographs after a break up.

O My Darling Clement Times

2007-04-22T18:06:00.000-04:00

Here in my little neck of Southern Ontario, we're on our third consecutive day of genuinely gorgeous weather. The sun's out, the sky's blue-- and best of all, forgive me ladies, halter tops are back, and they truly comprise a sight for sore eyes. (*Sigh.* Go ahead, sue me for having a Y chromosome.) We've been through a long & dreary winter; not a brutal one by any stretch of the imagination, but a bleak and apparently-endless half-suffering, like a Henry James paragraph. So we're in a period of probably too-brief beauty here. Canadians are to climatological goodness as pimply teenaged boys are to sex: they're grateful for any little bit they can get.

And for all that sunny talk, one of the items most on my mind of late is Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, a brilliant film in so many regards, though sadly these days it's largely remembered for its so-called stunt-casting (Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland; and, though not stunting at the time, William Shatner's presence will invariably but ahistorically seem a stunt of some sort). Watching it again lately with many interruptions, and ergo pausing it, I was impressed by how easily one can cease the movie's movement and land upon a perfect still shot. Kramer had a magnificent eye, and everything about that film sustains visual arrest. I can think of no recent director of whom I could say same, and very few of the classic ones.

Another thought thereto: It's easy to forget, amid the respect generally conceded him, what a truly magnificent presence Spencer Tracy became in his later years. Beyond playing the legal-judicial part to which he got regularly assigned in this period (Inherit The Wind, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?), he manages to indicate so much with so little. There's a scene in the film in which he has drinks with Marlene Dietrich, and you can perceive, in the mere postulations of his eyes, first his desire to understand Germany, then his disgust with it, and then his disgust with himself for lapsing into (temporary) hatred as he tries to remain objective as a judge in the Nuremberg climate. Tracy knew how to register to a camera, and he reminded me of the critic who said that Alec Guinness could say more with a furrow of his brow than most actors could by shouting from the rafters. Tracy was probably the Robert Frost of modern acting, deceptively folksy, but always making the complexity of his art seem so easy, or at apparent ease, you'd never notice it. Consider it a bit of a reminder, or a cautionary suggestion: sometimes the most transparent is the most opaque-- and the most opaque the ostensibly clearest; and that there's sometimes genius in being so manifestly clear. Something to keep in mind?

And-- And-- And--- You Put The Load Right On Me-e-e-e

2007-04-21T17:56:00.000-04:00

This blog will not comment. This blog will not comment. This blog will not comment.

*whistles innocently*

Nope, still not commenting.

*continues whistling*

This blog knows she's from Wales. From Mold, Wales, no less. But it STILL isn't commenting.

*glances evasively askance*

Don't look at this blog like that.

*looks directly at feet, which are beginning to shuffle anxiously*

Okay, okay: key quote from the judge: "I cannot ignore the difference in your ages - you were 34 and twice his age." And thrice his....

This blog feels so dirty right now. Thank you, thank you very much.... Rotten filthy perverts, the lot of ya....

A Metaphysical Dilemma (updated)

2007-04-20T19:00:00.000-04:00

Seems everyone's favourite hate group is at it again: this time, they're planning to picket funerals for Virginia Tech victims because "God does not do [this] to his servants." The logician in me wants to point out what their God allowed to happen to his own son, but that'd be too snarky by half. Instead, I prefer to wonder: If these people hold a picket, and one of the grieving friends or family members gives one of their revolting brood exactly what they all so richly deserve, would the survivors have to picket the funeral for their own fallen one? After all, God wouldn't do that to one of his servants, would He?

If nothing else, we'd quickly learn the answer to that old question about how many asswipes can dance on the head of a pin.

SEMI-RELATED UPDATE: The intellectual and moral skidmark that is Dinesh D'Souza has essayed spitting in the face of atheists (and, presumably, agnostics & alternate believers) using the VT shootings as his platform. One professor from VT, an atheist, responds to him beautifully here--- though, like almost anyone with a PhD, he unfortunately doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. His initial response, however, is pitch-perfect.

D'Souza is a grotesquerie, and a despicable one at that. The difference between D'Souza and the Phelpses is, as Northrop Frye used to say, merely one of degree and not of kind. Worth remembering, I think.

Slipping you some tongue

2007-04-20T14:54:00.000-04:00

Possible consequence of dating someone who is either really into you or hasn't been kissed in 38 years.

Also, I'm now thankful that the incident with the alphabits cereal made me take mine out years ago. Always listen to your dentist!

Words Fail

2007-04-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

And sometimes they just seem inappropriate.

Admit It, You'd Hit It

2007-04-16T07:05:00.000-04:00

Because there's nothing like pokin' it old school....

If it weren't for those meddling kids

2007-04-16T00:11:00.000-04:00

Tonight, I went to see Disturbia. Technically it was my choice, but I was only given a choice between it and Blades of Glory so my expectations were pretty low. It’s really not that bad, a bad Hitchcock rip-off maybe, but the suspense is so far from the quality of Rear Window that the only connection between the two is that the plucky hero is stuck in his house with binoculars (and a whole assortment of stalker-recommended equipment). All things considered, it was probably best that the filmmakers decided to just run with the premise in a b-movie way instead of trying to remake the original –it would’ve been disastrous particularly since the 'Lisa' character is noooooo Grace Kelly. Instead it was just a smart-alecky, mildly amusing and voyeuristic bit of fluff for the tween crowd (I kept wondering: ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ Oh yeah, Will Ferrell in lycra pantsuits and relentless boner jokes…)

Here’s the scary part about it -I cannot remember the last time I watched a movie in what felt like, a high-school cafeteria with the lights out (Maybe Billy Madison? Long, long time ago that’s for sure). There was stuff being thrown around (mostly popcorn but I think napkin spit balls are making a comeback), kids yelled out at the screen, made cat calls, threatened someone 2 rows over to ‘turn off your f#%king phone!’ they screamed unnecessarily at all the predictable jumpy parts and then- they clapped (clapped, for godssakes as if we were sitting at a Cannes screening).

Deeply disturbia.

Quarrel In A Straw

2007-04-15T13:11:00.000-04:00

What, dare I ask, is worse: being called a "nappy-headed ho" by a disheveled crank, or being falsely labeled a rapist by a county prosecutor and most of the national media? Watching the news coverage out of the States this week, you'd think the former. In fact, watching the various programmes that constitute the tradition of Sunday morning talk, you'd think Don Imus the worst person since Joe McCarthy. On Meet the Press, Reliable Sources and This Week, one story dominated the other completely by a huge margin in terms of air-time devotion. Guess which one. Meet the Press didn't mention the other at all; This Week elided over it almost completely; and Reliable Sources came to it only in an epilogue that rhetorically, and utterly emptily, asked if the media should apologize.

I wonder-- could there be an ulterior reason for this? The media couldn't be using Imus as a straw man to deflect attention from their irresponsibility, and their fundamental complicity, in the Duke fiasco, could it? No, the American media would never do that. It's just that there was no vigil to keep outside Mike Nifong's house.

So it comforts me to know that, as the clamour suggests, it's okay to make and perpetuate criminal allegations against male athletes, and to actively participate in grand public libel. But toss off a crude and thoughtless epithetical slander against female athletes, and there will be Hell to pay. It comforts me that being slurred in a couple second sound-byte is a greater act of victimization than being dragged through the courts for more than a year on the most serious and invidious charges. It comforts me that every news programme in the US, and every talking head featured on it, will go on effusively about how impressive the Rutgers women are, while those few that bother to mention the unimpressive Duke boys do so now to emphasize that they came from wealthy families who could afford fancy-shmancy legal representation. It comforts me that we're supposed to feel the pain these young women felt, while we're supposed to slough off the pain those young men felt because they were college boys and must have been bad in other ways we just don't know about. It comforts me that the social priorities are so clear.

Now, please, let's get on to the important business of going after certain cultural sections that use what's now clearly taboo. Let's get the rappers and the shock-jocks and the comedians and the satirists and the moviemakers. We all know they're the real problem.

After all, since we're discussing so intently the damage that can be caused by words (so much for sticks and stones), it's good to know which ones are really hurtful. So, feel free to call me a rapist. Just don't call me a ho.

Who Gives A Friggatriskaidekaphobia....

2007-04-13T09:47:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's Friday the 13th technically, but as far as I'm concerned it's still Thursday the 12th. Hit once again with a brutal bout insomnia (an affliction since kid-hood), this morning's just a daze until I can finally attempt sleep again, and this entry just an exercise in killing Time. But to send you off onto your weekends with stuff about which to think:

Easter came and went with nary a resurrection to be had, but I did realize something bizarre. For reasons beyond my ken, my maternal unit insists on buying me chocolate and other confections, but which I never end up touching. (A mother who repeatedly buys you something you neither need nor want? Imagine that.) Then it occurred to me: without a girlfriend, or a semi-steady involvement, this stuff will never, ever get eaten. For as long as I can remember, the only people who ever ate any of it were-- you guessed it-- entanglements of one form or another. Strange thing to realize as a new stockpile begins to build. And ladies, before any of you try to Imus me: Any of the women that actually dated me would adore being described as "entanglements." Without that peculiar sort of humour, they'd never have cast their eyes in my direction in the first place. ;-)
I started to write a discussion of the Imus brouhaha, but it became apparent the bloody thing would turn into a tome before I knew it. Maybe I'll put it all down eventually, but as you can probably imagine, I've watched the spectacle with worried eyes. For reasons far too complex to explain now, I regard the situation as a dangerous crisis point with no good result in the offing. Imus' firing will be seen-- is being seen-- as the legitimation of swarming upon improper speech with pious imperative, and, of course, selective ignorance of hypocrisies and mob-mindedness. It worries me-- no, alarms; nay, terrifies-- that the idea of "free speech," however offensive, has become nothing more than a phrase to be inevitably followed by a giant, contradictory "but." The hypocrisies of those that led the charge against Imus are myriad and manifold, and the bases for their attack equivocal (and oft-qualified) at best. And now they've effectively been encouraged to pursue further agendae of silencing and correction. This does not portend well, because those that taste the victory of (faux) moral outrage can never have just one bite. My reasons for thinking this are only slightly less-involved than a Henry James novel-- it has to do with, among other things, race-baiting, metonymic thinking, PoMo silliness, arch-Puritanism, and the historical evolution of (small p intended) protestant piety. It also has nothing to do with Imus himself, who's largely beyond defending. The righteous, and conspicuously unforgiving, bullies won a significant skin this week. God help us all if they win another.
Okay, yes, that rambled BIG-TIME, and became much more anticipatory than I'll probably ever be able to satisfy. Shall I curtail? Every single commentator, protester, scholar and activist who supported this move should be willing to stand by this resolution: Should I ever, for any reason, slip from the standard I've just established, may I be treated as I have treated. (Professors, that ~~may~~ will mean renouncing your tenure so you can be fired, too.) Then watch how many stand back from their stalwarcy in stone-throwing. (And, by which standard, both Jesse "Hymie-town" Jackson and Reverend Al would already have been exiled to pariah-land.)
There's a bizarre irony that all of this is playing out against the much-too-late indemnification of the Duke lacrosse players. Shouldn't we ALL beware the rush to so-called justice? Shouldn't we all beware the cheap satiety that comes from advancing before one sobers with thought? You'd think Americans would be especially wary after the rush to action that led them into Iraq. Evidently not, alas. And gee, what did Reverend Al say about the Duke accused before the evidence was in? How conveniently we forget.
Which, by the way, is why Reverend Al is a poseur. The Right Reverend Al is an entirely different person altogether. Sharpton's a mullah. Green's an Ayatollah, and a mercifully honourable one at that. What was his most famous song again? "Let's Stay Together...."

Forgive me, please. I'm old, tired, ranting, and subject to flights of cultural, social and intellectual offense and anger. The difference between me and Reverend Al? I admit my Claptonian capacity for folly and stupidity-- regularly. (And probably demonstrate it at least twice as often.) Reverend Al, however, is to civil rights as Mrs Malaprop was to language.

And The Voice Of This Calling

2007-04-12T14:39:00.000-04:00

Because the Doctor is sooooooooo In.... As the lotto ad goes, Just imagine....