The Face That Launched A Thousand Chips

      As you might imagine, this blog thoroughly enjoyed this piece.   Three guesses as to what this blog's favourite part was-- and the first two absolutely do not count.   

Alberta, Alberta....

      For whatever reasons, I've neglected lately, until now, my usual scourings of the local dailies.   Don't ask me why.   But scouring the opinion/analysis pieces in the locals has become something like a necessary exercise, a way for me to keep up with what others are thinking, what other major spins are being given to the headlines, what alternate readings of things are possible (the last, perhaps, being the most important for someone of my creed and ilk).   What I've missed.   Well.   Oh.   Um.   Dare I say it?   Yay, I dare.   Call it licensed stupidity.   The typical post-election blather is finding its way out, with Alberta all het-up that municipal Ontario so heavily endorsed the Grits.   I wasn't too pleased with that either, but I was angry for what I think are the right reasons-- the re-endorsement of corruption, and so forth.   But True Blue Alberta-- or, more precisely, key mouth-foamers from that region-- are using the separatiste strategy of saying Ontario voted Liberal (now wait for it...) just to spite Alberta.   Check out this specimen [Ed: if link does not work, see below] of rhetorical bull-plop from Eternal-Senator-In-Waiting Ted Morton, proving that perhaps his continued exclusion from the Red Chamber may not be such a bad thing.   Even in a piece so mind-boggling stupid, to say nothing of offensive, statements like this are so maddeningly-idiotic that even Jessica Simpson might think this chap-- how shall we say it politely?-- a dim bulb:

If we cannot achieve more Western influence within Ottawa (the purpose of Senate reform), let's pursue reasonable policies to reduce Ottawa's influence in the West: Withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan and create our own provincial pension plans; collect our own income taxes; cancel our contracts with the RCMP, and create our own provincial police forces; take control of our health-delivery systems; and use the notwithstanding clause when nine, non-elected judges in Ottawa try to impose their notion of good public policy on our democratically elected governments.

Sadly, Morton's not a lone wolf here; there are countless others, many of them published in the Sun papers across Canada, howling at the moon with him.   Oh yes, Ontarians loathe Alberta so intensely that first and foremost in our minds when we go to cast our ballots is how to spurn Alberta.   It's all about Alberta.   It's always about you, Alberta.   Give me a smurfin' break.   The rest of us are getting more than a bit sick and tired of the "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" routine.

---

      Because the article mentioned above might not last at the Globe-- and because the paper is pushing for registration now-- I'll include Morton's wisdom here for posterity's sake. Yikeees.

The firewall's looking good again

By TED MORTON
From Friday's Globe and Mail

      Monday's election results were a bitter pill for most Western Canadians. Not only did Stephen Harper's new Conservative Party fail to make the necessary breakthrough in vote-rich Ontario, the so-called ''party of national unity'' again used the regional divide-and-conquer strategy to bring stray Ontario sheep back into the Liberal fold.

      For Westerners, all the old policy irritants remain (wheat board, gun registry) or get worse (Kyoto). All the structural reforms sought by Western reformers for the past 20 years -- Senate reform, a public vetting of Supreme Court appointments, democratic reform of House of Commons -- will remain frozen in the netherworld of think tanks and policy forums.

      To rub salt in the wounds, the Prime Minister will now fill the three Alberta Senate vacancies with some combination of defeated Liberal candidates, jazz musicians and ex-hockey stars. With two current Supreme Court vacancies and a third opening up next year, the Liberals, who have averaged only 40 per cent of the vote in the past four elections, will have appointed 100 per cent of the judges.

      It gets worse. Equalization payments and transfers to have-not provinces will now be increased. Jean Charest's Liberals are desperate for outside cash, and have been demanding that the "fiscal imbalance" be immediately addressed with an increase of $6- to $8-billion dollars a year, half of which goes directly to Quebec. Now that the election is safely behind him, Paul Martin will open the spigot and money will flow to Quebec and loyal Liberal Atlantic Canada.

      While equalization is nominally a transfer from the federal government, it is paid for mostly by Ontario and Alberta taxpayers. If it achieved its primary goals (national unity and economic prosperity), Alberta's complaints could be dismissed. Equalization achieves neither of these. Separatist sentiment in Quebec remains in the mid-40-per-cent range, double what it was two decades ago. Thanks to the Liberals' new electoral-finance law, the Bloc will now get millions of taxpayer dollars to stir the separatist pot. Some unity strategy!

      As for national prosperity, Canada continues to fall behind. In the decade of the 1990s alone, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Holland and Switzerland passed us in per capita income.

      The Liberals (and much of the national media) caricature Albertans as insular and backward. Perhaps it is Eastern elites that are preoccupied with re-fighting 19th-century French and Indian wars, rather than plotting Canada's path to prosperity in the 21st-century global economy.

      This refusal to contemplate change was most evident in the election's health-care debate. Three of the four national parties talked only of pouring billions of new dollars into the existing system, the very policy that has driven waiting lists to all-time highs while consuming ever larger percentages of provincial budgets. We all know this is unsustainable, yet noparty had the nerve to say so.

      What is Canada's future with this mindset? What is Alberta's future within this Canada? To pay the bills but have no say? To be vilified as un-Canadian every time we say something sensible about reforming an unsustainable health-care system or object to public policy being made by unelected judges? To watch our farmers go to jail for marketing their own grain, something Eastern farmers can do with impunity?

      In 1985, Bert Brown, my fellow senator-elect, plowed into his barley field Alberta's message to Ottawa: Triple-E Senate or else. That was 20 years ago. The West's complete failure to make any progress since then on Triple-E Senate reform is directly linked to our lack of progress on the "or else" side of the equation. Why would the beneficiaries of the status quo (Ontario and Quebec) agree to Senate reform if there are no costs for ignoring the issue? The Liberal Party knows that it can form governments without the West's support.

      If we cannot achieve more Western influence within Ottawa (the purpose of Senate reform), let's pursue reasonable policies to reduce Ottawa's influence in the West: Withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan and create our own provincial pension plans; collect our own income taxes; cancel our contracts with the RCMP, and create our own provincial police forces; take control of our health-delivery systems; and use the notwithstanding clause when nine, non-elected judges in Ottawa try to impose their notion of good public policy on our democratically elected governments.

      Media pundits characterize this as the radical firewall agenda. It's anything but radical. Each of these policies is already in place in either Quebec, Ontario or both. For many Westerners, it's time to start working on the "or else." Ironically, the model for Plan B --and its most likely ally -- is Quebec.

F. L. (Ted) Morton, a professor at the University of Calgary, is one of Alberta's two senators-elect.

---

      ADDENDUM: On the other hand, after reading this piece, I'm starting to think perhaps we "Ontarianses" ought to start doing whatever Alberta doesn't want us to do.   If Alberta's going to be the mad Gollum/Smeagol, then I guess that makes Ontario Samwise.   Sounds good to me.

Pro Serviam?

      Wow.   My regular readers here know that Doctor J's relationship with all things computeruhmated is at best strained and at worst down-right adversarial.   How adversarial? At least Milton's Satan only insisted that he would not serve.   This morning, however, I downloaded a patch from Microsoft.   Now, you'd think that with constantly checking to see if there are any relevant updates from Bill Gates' Megalith of Evil I'd receive notice to download this patch-- but natch, nay, nary and never.   Thanks, however, to a programme called BigFix my computer this morning is humming along at a (comparatively) brisk pace, a pace bordering on-- dare I say it? dare I risk jinxing myself?-- fast.   I am surprisingly content.   I am almost enjoying using this computer.   I am almost.... *he pauses and issues a furtive, guilty look*   Almost.   Go figure.  

      If you haven't seen it already, BigFix can be downloaded for free from MajorGeeks here.

Mmmmmm, Just Fourteen.....

      Thought for no apparent reasons I'd dare to remind people of a quartet of good sonnets (okay, one isn't that good, but...), ones I suspect most of you won't be coming across anytime soon.   Providing, that is, any of you bother to read them while you're here.  

      I'm relatively willing to bet, though, that even those of you who consider yourselves hostile to sonnets will find at least one in these four you'll like.    Go ahead.   Prove me right.   I darez ya.   I DOUBLE-dog darez ya....   I'll even BETS ya which one mosta ya will pick.  

Finite And Infinite

The wind sounds only in opposing straits,
The sea, beside the shore; man's spirit rends
Its quiet only up against the ends
Of wants and oppositions, loves and hates,
Where, worked and worn by passionate debates,
And losing by the loss it apprehends,
The flesh rocks round, and every breath it sends
Is ravelled to a sigh.   All tortured states
Suppose a straitened place.   Jehovah Lord,
Make room for rest, around me! out of sight
Now float me, of the vexing land abhorred,
Till in deep calms of space my soul may right
Her nature, ---shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
And rush exultant on the Infinite.

      --- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Work Without Hope

All Nature seems at work.   Slugs leave their lair---
The bees are stirring---  birds are on the wing---
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount where streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths!  bloom for whom ye may!
With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

      --- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Some Blaze The Precious Beauties Of Their Loves"

Some blaze the precious beauties of their loves
By precious stones, and other some by flowers,
Some by the planets and celestial powers,
Or by what else their fancy best approves;
Yet I by none of these will blazon mine,
But only say her self herself is like,
For these similitiudes I much mislike
That are much used, though they be divine.
In saying she is like herself, I say
She hath no like, for she is past compare.
Then who aright commends this creature rare
Must say, "She is"; and there of force must stay,
    Because by words she cannot be expressed;
    So say, "She is," and wond'ring owe the rest.

      --- John Davies of Hereford

Homage: Light From The Hall

It is Soul Brother Number One, James Brown,
Chanting.   "It wouldn't be nothing, noth-iiiiinnnnnggg...."
Dismembering the notes until everything hangs
On his mystical half-screech, notes skidding 'round
Your brain as you listen, rapt, thirteen,
Transistor and its single earphone tucked
With you beneath the midnight covers, station WKED,
Big Daddy Armand, The Ragin' Cajun,
"Spinning out the bossest platters for you all,"
Golden Age trance, when New Orleans stations
Traveling two thousand miles shaped distance
Into alchemy.   Beneath the door, a light from the hall
Bathing the bedroom in its stammering glow:
Cooke and Redding risen, James Brown quaking the Apollo.

        --- David Wojahn
            (from Mystery Train: A Sequence)

---

      What The Blunder Said Addendum:   When I typed out the first sonnet, the Browning, the line "Till in deep calms of space my soul may right" came out as "Till in deep clams of space my soul may right."   This blog will now consider what philosophical extra-terrestrial crustaceans might say-- let alone what they might correct.   Aw shucks, perhaps?

And Ye Shall Be As Gods!

      Unsettling Promotional Statement of The Day:

The Serpent Website receives many requests from individuals who wish to obtain a serpent in order to satisfy their enthusiastic urge to get better acquainted with it.

Uh, oh-kaaaaay....  

The Chicks And The Thing With Several Legs

      Breaking News:  Doctor J just used The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry-- appropriately edited by Fleur Adcock-- to crush a centipede that had somehow found its way among his books.   This blog will leave it to you to contemplate more fully the delicious implications of this.   

(Oh, the glorious wit of the unconscious act....)

But Did They Make It To Asgard?

      Well, that depends....

      (Or perhaps it's neither here Norse there...)  

What Sid Meier Forgot

The stuff here is mostly old news to me, but it's always a pleasure pointing out such stuff to everyone else.         This blog's favourite bit: "And while America's brewers were not making beer in ancient times, we are proud to provide Americans with beers of exceptional quality today."      Oh, I wish I could make that smilie turn on its side laughing....

But Will They Have Grounds More Relative Than This?

As Hamlet might have said, "The swab's the thing / wherein they'll catch the Khanscience of the King."       Perhaps the more-pressing question is: are they willing to wait two months for their meals?       (Geeks everywhere in the blogosphere will soon be Shatnering themselves to herniation.     )

Funniest Download Message Ever

      Here's something you don't see very often-- self-effacing humour on the internet.   If you want, you can use the link to download SpywareBlaster 3.1.   As one might expect, the self-effacing are never as bad as they pretend.

Young Man, Are Ya Listenin' To Me?

      Two things this blog would have paid good money to see: this and this. Good money. Right off the presses.   

Saturday Morning Cartoons

      Probably meaningless but perhaps profound realization: Watching Newlyweds for even a minute in the bright light of morning while sober can cause painful brain injuries of roughly the same intensity and effect as thirteen-thousand-six-hundred-and-seventy-four ice-cream-headaches occurring simultaneously.   This is why the show airs normally in the evening.   I'm not sure any of us could withstand such blistering neurological agony in the early offings of the day without completely losing it and Jack Torranceing any and all of the unfortunate loved ones within hatchet-reach.  

      With that in mind, this blog will now begin accepting speculations on how long it will be before Nick Lachey, no Solomon himself, finally, says the words we know have been oh-so-long in the coming:

Darling.   Light, of my life.   I'm not gonna hurt ya.   You didn't let me finish my sentence.   I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya.   I'm just gonna bash your brains in.   I'm gonna bash 'em right the fuck in.   Ha, ha.

Or until he starts looking like Herbert Lom, his face a bundle of spastic tics and twitches so barely restrained that even a miswisping of the wind might send him into a homicidal mania so fierce and prolific it would make Jason Voorhees blush right through his hockey mask in embarrassment.   Either/or.   You decide.  

      In the meantime, this blog's going to rest with a hot water bottle on its head.   (Ah, Jessica Simpson, the only person I know of that makes Yogi Berra sound like T.S. Eliot.)

The Foul Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart

      Flicking through a few volumes tonight I came across a poem by Thomas Blackburn (1916-1977), a poet almost completely unrepresented in contemporary anthologies and only vaguely represented on this thingamajig we call The Internet.   I have to confess that I'd not known of him until this evening when I was leafing through The Faber Book of 20th Century Verse (eds. John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright), which I'm fairly sure hasn't been updated since the release of the third edition in the mid-1970s.   The only poem of Blackburn's offered in that volume, however, is remarkably good, and I'd strongly encourage each of you to read it here -- because, as far as my searches reveal, it's not to be found anywhere else on the Net.   Here is the poem:

Oedipus

His shadow monstrous on the palace wall,
That swollen boy, fresh from his mother's arms,
The odour of her body on his palms,
Moves to the eyeless horrors of the hall.

And with what certainty the Revelation
Gropes for the sage's lips; a whining bark
Breaks from that crumpled linen in the dark,
To name the extremity of violation.

How should he not but tremble as the world
Contracts about him to his mother's room,
Red-curtained, stifling; in the firelit gloom
His bloated manhood on her bed is curled.

Then up and blind him, hands, pull blackness down
And let this woman on the strangling cord
Hang in the rich embroidery of her gown;
Then up and blind him, pull the blackness down.

But as he stumbles to the desert sands,
Bleeding and helpless as the newly born,
His daughters leading him with childish hands,
I see beyond all words his future shape,
Its feet upon the carcass of the ape
And round its mighty head, prophetic birds.

I'm not sure if it's significant or not that the poem is twenty-two lines long; certainly not in the sense that said number of lines is the standard length of Hebrew acrostics (or "abecedarian poetry"), like those contained in the Book of Psalms, but twenty-two lines is also the acrostic-liberated length of four of the five "chapters" of Lamentations (at least in the original Hebrew, and maintained in most English translations, including the KJAV).   But here's where Doctor J sets in with a stroke of self-proclaimed genius of observation that pries open this poem considerably (    ).   Do you want to know what it is? Probably not, so go on to the next post; if, however, you're willing to accept that wanting to know what this "stroke of genius" is means opening a Pandora's box (and Doc J prattling on at some length), then click here.

       Okay, you asked for it, you glutton for punishment, so here it is: the poem is also the same length as W.B. Yeats' oft-quoted "The Second Coming," which, if you don't know it already, you can read here.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      It should be obvious even to the deafest of ears-- at least now-- that Yeats' poem is lurking in the arras behind Blackburn's, with the words "I see beyond all words his future shape" sounding quite eerily like Yeats' "but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep," at least at the level of prophetic declaration and summary underscored by s-alliteration.   This is to say nothing of the correspondences between WBY's "indignant desert birds" and TB's "prophetic" ones, or Yeats's "rough beast" and Blackburn's "carcass of the ape," and the emphasis in both poems on the lower-bodies of such animals (TB's feet, WBY's "slow thighs").   I don't want to suggest that Blackburn' poem is an imitation of Yeats'; it's not.   Rather, it's a revision, and possible a furtherance, of it, a recasting of the form in relation to another "end-of-an-age" figure-- in fact, the antithesis figure to Christ, as posited by Yeats in A Vision.   Oedipus, for Yeats, was one of two central pre-Classical myths (the Leda myth being the other) that emphasized the tragical, the heroical and the individual, myths that found eventually meet their antitheses in the primary myths of the Christian era, ostensibly comedical, redemptive and collective, with Oedipus' antithesis being Christ (and the antithesis to Leda and the Swan being the Virgin and the Dove).   The story of Oedipus, then, is a kind of paradigm for the end of man, the beast tortured and re-childed by human transgression, an understanding given fine footing in Blackburn's poem with Oedipus being "bleeding and helpless as the newly born," and forced to lean on the leadership of his daughters, children themselves and also doomed to horrible fates.  

      In Yeats' figuration in A Vision, the antitype to that paradigm is the myth of Christian liberation, though Yeats certainly didn't accept that as an end of things; he, after all, anticipated the coming of another myth, supposedly to come around the year 2000, that would amount to a return, or a re-annunciation, of the Oedipus and Leda myths.    Put more simply, a new age with more in common with the pre-Classical periods would eventually emerge in to signal the waning age of the Classical/Christian period.   Seen in this light, Blackburn's poem may be more than just a reflection on a literary-dramatic-mythic character.   It may be an anticipation of where we're going, toward, perhaps, a new era of the tragical and the individual, an age it seems condemned both by fate and by human action to "pull the blackness down."   This is, though, not an entirely bad thing, for in such blackness is the spiritus mundi or the anima mundi, the great memory of the world, of its bits and pieces and thoughts and images, "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" from which the poet (and humanity as a whole) orders and essays to understand that world-- and thus truly creates.   The prophetic vision, it seems, can come only from darkness, blindness, even what I'll coin "childedness," the situations which most depend upon what Yeats elsewhere calls "the mill of the mind." It's in the "empathy" (for lack of a better word) with Oedipus that the "I" of Blackburn's poem can see Oedipus' "total shape," can see with a different kind of inspiration that which is "beyond all words."

      Beyond, of course, yet not entirely: the poem is within words; but that which was imminent is left unstated, in the ellipsis of a cultural memory that reminds us what finally happened to Oedipus (exile and finally death at Colonus).  That knowledge, however, is left conspicuously immanent to both the poet and the poem's readers, both peculiarly individualized rather than collectivized, concerted to the tragical and the pitiable rather than the comedical and the restorative.   The Christian and comedic perspectives emphasize restoration, the happy-ending or the reunification and reconstitution of societies and or spirits.   The Oedipal and tragic perspectives emphasize isolation, the extent to which time constricts rather than expands, and the individual is progressively shut out from society and left to his own suffering.   The poet, it seems, at least in Blackburn's poem, can perhaps only understand the world through an understanding of his own blindness, through a perspective more intensely individuated and informed by the imaginary rather than the strictly-visual.   The figure of Oedipus is the touchstone for genuine lamentation, for what one might call the pity that passeth all understanding.   This is what the poet must understand, or at least it's one of the lessons the poet must learn: to depend upon the mind's eye, to depend upon that dark storehouse of the imagination as one only generally does when one's vision is most obscured, to depend upon and indeed embrace the lucidity of darkness.   This is also to see with the child's eye, driven more by imaginative association than identification by sight, creating most when knowledge does not provide.

      This is all, of course, getting quite complex, perhaps labouredly metaphysical (to say nothing or metaphorical), and even digressive.   With, however, all of the above said, to return to the poem, one can now be more impressed with its accomplishments of phrase and modulation. The poem doesn't quite slide into pretentious oracularity, as some might argue Yeats' poem does.    In fact, there's a kind of restraint that subverts one's expectations.   The almost Stevensian dislocation of "prophetic birds" in the final line leaves the poem in unexpected tonal declension; it has chosen understatement rather than grand-chorusing, which, given the subject matter, is a tad surprising (and effective).   Then there's that curious self-revision in the penultimate stanza that turns "Then up and blind him, hands, pull blackness down" into "Then up and blind him, pull the blackness down."   The latter has a strange kind of raillery to it, a kind of rough and stubborn and almost "damn-the-torpedoes" heroic sensibility that carefully curtails the desire to pity Oedipus unnecessarily.   It's a nice trick, because the easier path, I sure, would have been to play to the sentimental, to indulge in an appeal to sympathy; but, given the subject, it's wiser, as he's done, to give the line a tough humour to remind us, however briefly, that one of the things we generally tend to appreciate about tragic figures is that they accept their fates instead of simply resigning themselves to them.   It's also a nice touch-- or merely a serendipity?-- that the revised line falls into a perfect iambic pattern that vaguely recalls Shakespearean battle-cries (like, say, Macbeth's final words, or the end of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech).

      And there are the number very finely-turned phrases: "swollen boy," "the eyeless horrors of the hall," "this woman on the strangling cord," "his bloated manhood," and even "the rich embroidery of her gown" which sounds to me suggestively Housman-like (c.f., "And set you at your threshold down / Townsman of a stiller town" from "To An Athlete Dying Young").   The poem also does a nice job of seeming to collapse temporal dimensions, as if to suggest a logic of determinism, as if to remind us that the various stages of Oedipus' being (as baby, as swollen boy, as man with his own manhood, as father) have been inevitable stages in his own unidirectional fate, toward the remaking of the blood-sotten child.    These times, these states of being within a chronology, are constantly overlapping with one another, those states not simply continuous but conspicuously and uncomfortably contiguous.   This is a very nice touch, indeed, and it's accomplished with such seeming simplicity that one might not immediately realize the calculation of it.   The poem's one awkward bit ("to name the extremity of the violation"), which on the first reading jars the rhythm, then even seems to develop a raison d'etre, to be as discordant as Tiresias' revelation.    I still think that line doesn't quite work, but at least there's an argument to be made for it.   So, all told, the poem works very effectively and very economically, and it does so within some potentially very demanding strictures-- all the while seeming rather effortless.   Indeed, a rhythm that might at first seem stage-managed by the tradition of iambic pentameter becomes, with more careful consideration, almost subliminally effective in suggesting a vatic articulation more assured than measured.   In short, it's a damned good poem, and one that grows with scrutiny rather than shrinking under it.

      Unfortunately, I can't say if any of Blackburn's other poems are as good as this one.    Here are a few others for your consideration, but none of them in my estimation are as strong or as rewarding.   But Blackburn's "Oedipus" is one of those poems that should probably be put more noticably along side some of the pieces by Larkin and Hughes and Plath as mid-century pieces that could survive suprisingly well into the ages.    If only, that is, people know it's out there.

---

      Read "An Invitation"

An Invitation

Holding with shaking hands a letter from some
Official — high up, no doubt in his Ministry —
I note that I am invited to Birmingham,
There pedagogues to address, for a decent fee.
‘We like to meet,’ he writes, ‘men eminent
In the field of letters each year’ — and that’s well put,
Though I find his remark not wholly relevant
To this red-eyed fellow whose mouth tastes rank as soot.
No doubt what he’s thinking of is poetry
When ‘Thomas Blackburn’ he writes, and not the fuss
A life makes when it has no symmetry,
Though, of course the term, ‘a poet’, being posthumous,
Since I’m no stiff, is inappropriate.
What I can confirm is the struggle that never lets up
Between the horses of Plato beneath my yoke,
One after Light, and for Hell not giving a rap,
The other only keen on infernal smoke;
And poems . . . ?   From time to time they commemorate
Some particularly dirty battle between these two.
I put the letter down — what’s the right note?
‘Dear Sir,’ I type, ‘how nice to speak to you!’

      Read "Café Talk"

Café Talk

'Of course,' I said, 'we cannot hope to find
What we are looking for in anyone;
They glitter, maybe, but are not the sun,
This pebble here, that bit of apple rind.
Still, it's the Alpine sun that makes them burn,
And what we're looking for, some indirect
Glint of itself each of us may reflect,
And so shed light about us as we turn.'
Sideways she looked and said, 'How you go on!'
And was the stone and rind, their shinings gone.

'It is some hard dry scale we must break through,
A deadness round the life. I cannot make
That pebble shine. Its clarity must take
Sunlight unto itself and prove it true.
It is our childishness that clutters up
With scales out of the past a present speech,
So that the sun's white finger cannot reach
An adult prism.'
                'Will they never stop,
Your words?' she said and settled to the dark.

'But we use words, we cannot grunt or bark,
Use any surer means to make that first
Sharp glare of origin again appear
Through the marred glass,' I cried, 'but can you hear?'
'Quite well, you needn't shout.' I felt the thirst
Coil back into my body till it shook,
And, 'Are you cold?' she said, then ceased to look
And picked a bit of cotton from her dress.
Out in the square a child began to cry,
What was not said buzzed round us like a fly.

I knew quite well that silence was my cue,
But jabbered out, 'This meeting place we need,
If we can't find it, still the desire may feed
And strengthen on the acts it cannot do.
By suffered depredations we may grow
To bear our energies just strong enough,
And at the last through perdurable stuff
A little of their radiance may show:
I f we keep still.' Then she, 'It's getting late.'
A waiter came and took away a plate.

Then from the darkness an accordion;
'These pauses, love, perhaps in them, made free,
Life slips out of its gross machinery,
And turns upon itself in unison.'
It was quite dark now you must understand
And something of a red mouth on a wall
Joined with the music and the alcohol
And pushed me to the fingers of her hand.
Well, there it was, itself and quite complete,
Accountable, small bones there were and meat.

It did not press on mine or shrink away,
And, since no outgone need can long invest
Oblivion with a living interest,
I drew back and had no more words to say.
Outside the streets were like us and quite dead.
Yet anything more suited to my will,
I can't imagine, than our very still
Return to no place;
As the darkness shed
Increasing whiteness on the far icefall,
A growth of light there was; and that is all.

      Read "Trewarmett"

Trewarmett

Darkness, feathers are shed;
These birds are gathered back
By the enormous hand
That cast them at dawn seaward
In crumbs of living bread
To their forefathering rock.

Piercing the lense of a wave,
From the beat of it and the swell
The feathered life they have
Is indivisible,
As from the undertow
And skin of a nervous sea
Fish and themselves also
They reap perpetually.
Being clothed and without a seam
In the pouring waters they thread,
How can they miss their aim,
By the loose surge targetted
Forever towards their home.

Darkness, feathers are shed,
From this bird-whitened stone
I watch a cormorant pluck
Life from the nervous sea,
With a moon behind my back,
Conscious of God knows what
Anxious irrelevance,
As these birds swim in the eye
Of the green circumstance
From which I am undone
By my duplicity.

Watching a bird, and a man
Watching a bird in the surf,
Watched by a man, and that faint
Rim of horizon far off
Where darkness breeds from a glint
Of metal, I wait for the tide
To work its equation out.
Though hunger, compulsive dread,
By a moon’s impetus
That takes the sea by the throat,
Are ghosts forever unlaid,
I assert as it gathers up all
Of night to one moment of stress
That is perpetual,
My own selfconsciousness.
The waters boom and rave,
Being human what else can I have
Than such good and growing pain,
Between the living and dead,
On this sea-shaken stone.

---

      By the way, the title of this entry, a phrase invoked by Blackburn in a 1962 discussion of poetry and poetic-principles for The London Magazine, is from W.B. Yeats' "The Circus Animals' Desertion."

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

       And here is Yeats' "Leda And The Swan."

Leda And The Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in the bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                        Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

(Phew, I'm exhausted.   Entirely too much writing for a Saturday morning.   I may have to have some "toast" for breakfast.   )

The Familiar Wallpaper Stain

      Call me a crank, a cynic, a bastard or whatever epithet comes leaping first to your mind, but there's a great deal of truth, as I see it, in Joan Houlihan's extended rant-cum-diatribe-cum-manifesto on the state of American poetry. At the end of the first section (of eight, for now) she launches into a familiar statement that would send most of our current clique of poets and academics to the foams of defensive rabidity:

There’s no doubt that it is important and necessary to declare the nakedness of the contemporary American poem, to reject the notion that a poet, renowned or not, can perpetrate this continuing fraud of passing off their amateurish or unfinished prose jottings as poems. The machinery of publication must have vigilant and knowledgeable editors, unafraid to publish excellent, unknown poets or to reject inferior poems from established poets—even their friends.Before they can presume to make another year-end collection of the best contemporary American poems, they should be sure they have poems to collect.

As much as I'd like to dispute Houlihan's assessment, I can't. I simply, sadly, can't.

      It's worth reading all of the sections of this jeremiad-- though probably not all in one sitting-- including the five stages of reading a contemporary poem outlined in section eight. The stages-- the same as the stages of death-- match up with a lot of my experiences in reading poetry after the 1950s. *shrug*

Another Passing

      The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.

      Whoa.   It seems the icons are dropping like flies this summer.

Like Cicadas From Hell

      Beyond the obvious T&A factor, this blog's favourite bit from this, er, column: "Gentle vacuum pumps do most of the work." Oh. Oh my.

"But Just Then, The Chapter Ended."

      This blog, for one, simply cannot wait to read The Constitution Conundrum.   In fact, this blog's getting all tingly just thinking about it.  

Remember The Geneva Convention!

      Oh no, oh no, please, please, for the love of God and all things decent and holy in the universe, please, I implore you, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....

      [Doctor J is then seen to break into defeated tears before collapsing to the ground, cursing the earth with his fists and quivering in untellable agony.]

Molehills Of The Caribbean

      Can we, ladies and gentlemen, get a collective "Awwwwh, poor baby?"    Thank you, thank you very much.

      (Actually, little K started early on the baring, lolitally flashing her goods in The Hole. Yes, I said "lolitally." It's fun inventing adverbs in the morning. )

"It's A Sociological Dissection..."

      Well, I guess it was only a matter of time....

      (By the way: to the question posed at the outset of this article, Doctor J's answer is an unequivocal maybe.   Maybe maybe.   Okay, probably maybe.   Okay, okay-- for the good of humanity, definitely, definitely not.   There, ya happy now?)

The Pluck Of The Irish

      Leave it to an Irish reporter to get right under President Bush's skin so badly that he's left to keep telling her to "listen" to him.   How frustrated was the President?    Well, read for yourself.    It should tell you something about the vapidity of the usual questions hurled at the President; this is a man who'd have been eaten alive in one sitting in the Irish or UK parliaments.

My Ever-Shifting Godliness

?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??

brought to you by Quizilla
This is rather funny. Last time I did this quiz (don't ask me why I stumbled on this again), I was told I was-- and try to restrain your laughter, please-- Aphrodite/Eros. Go figure. This is what happens when there's no Bacchus option. ;-)

Another Year, Another Birthday

Cheers, Canada.

The Ocean, The Bird, And The Scholar

      Helen Vendler's magnificently poetic 2004 Jefferson Lecture is available online, and despite its length (and its density) it's very much worth the time to read.   It becomes apparent very quickly that Wallace Stevens is lurking perpetually behind Ms. Vendler's thinking here, but there's much to be engaged in her discussion-- much, I'm relatively sure, that will be assailed by contemporary, and younger, critics as being too obscurantist and mythopoeic to be of much practical use.   I'd say, however, that her lecture is more genuinely attuned to the demands of critical process than most today would have it; what should be most immediately apparent to anyone reading her lecture is the prominence she accords imaginative reading. Helen Vendler is one of the better critics still alive, and she alone is worth more than the total contributions of most English departments in any given state or province in North America.

Culture Club

      One of the greatest ironies of this article is its invocation of Harold Bloom as a "giant" of "cultural criticism," a point that might seem minor to those that don't know Bloom very well but is a glaring gaffe apparent to those that do.   As large a figure as Bloom cuts in critical circles, he's very much seen as being on the outside of things, and most of his recent studies have been spined with attacks against the academy's current obsession with cultural criticism; he's chosen to serve the ages rather than the current.   I'd also posit that the article in question would rather talk about literary reputations and technological developments rather than examine the various changes that have taken place within current critical-- I shudder as I type the word, so abused has it become-- discourse.   It's well and good to cheer what is here called "the democratization of cultural criticism," but I think it's worth observing that democratization tends toward the expansions of quantity rather than quality, and I'd unabashedly align myself the so-called Jeremiahs most of whom worry not so much about bloated reputations or petty bickering as much as the general displacement of provocative and insightful analysis.   I'd suggest, too, that the real Jeremiahs (in the sense of being chastisers of art rather than merely lamentatious prophets) are those that treat culture (and particularly literature) as lightning rod for pretentious theoretical and ideological position-papers.   Sixty-odd years ago, G. M. Trevelyan-- commenting more on the democratization of education-- said that modern education "[had] produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."   The cheerleaders of democratization (in fact more a buzz-concept than a genuine aspiration) are loathe to admit there might be truth in such an assessment.   I think it's time to face the possibility that democratic choice is often used as an excuse to revel in mediocrity-- and worse-- and to abnegate a more focussed and disciplined sense of cultural history and responsibility.   Food for thought.

What Stagnation Holds For Us

      Searching the net for some decent material on the American poet Mark Strand, I came across this rather jaw-dropping page of poetic analysis.  I was comforted, alas when I discovered that this page (and the others tethered to it) were created by eighth-grade students, and then profoundly redisturbed when I realized that I couldn't tell the difference right away from eight-grade literary analysis and that which is generally encouraged to be deemed "acceptable" at the undergraduate levels.  Believe it or not, I see material of this calibre all the time when I'm marking essays; coming from an eight-grader this actually isn't too bad, but that there's so little fundamental progression in the analytical skills of students over the high-school and early undergraduate years is enough to make me think we've started treating even the vast majority of our "brighter" young people as if they were a collect of Lennys from Of Mice And Men.   The majority of undergraduates would probably come to the same conclusion about Strand's "It is true, as someone has said..." that this little lady does-- that Strand is "reminding us that we should live our lives to the fullest because we don’t know what death holds for us."    Oy vey.   It's occurred to me, though, that Strand is a poet that could be taught (however partially) at the early levels.   We really-- and I mean REALLY-- have to do something about the progression of critical and analytical skills over the teenage years.   Before, that is, we've gone whole hog and our adolescents and twenty-somethings start asking us to tell them about the rabbits.

      (By the way, the "someone" referred to in Strand's poem is Wallace Stevens.)

---

      ADDENDUM: Discovered this epistle to Strand from the poet Lamar Thomas.   Pretty turgid stuff, methinks. When you're stepping into lines like "I've entered the cities of Rimbaud's hashish dreams" and "I've sought out love in the great harbors of America," you know you're in a kind of poetic cabaret, as if the poet were a Ginsburg-queen impersonating Walt Whitman. Yikes.

One Set To Rule Them All

      For those geeks among you with way too damned much money on your hands: you're welcome.   And, please, try not to drool....

      For those of you with truly discriminating tastes, I'm certain you're just lurching in anticipation at absconding with this literary steal, even if it has "a small stain on the back cover." Indeed, "literature lost a potential giant."

Insert Your Own Beaver Reference Here

      Doctor J, after reading this article, wound up doing his best Johnny Carson impression, pausing, wrenching his neck, and bemusedly repeating the words "a hand-operated pumper from 1836."  Surely each of you felt the restrained karmic giggle somewhere in the ether.

The Double Double-Double Beat

I think Mr. King would have been proud to see his dream fulfilled; not Martin Luther, but Mackenzie.  This blog is simply beaming with pride.         This blog will not bother to explain to my non-Canadian readers the extent to which Canadian cultural identity is tied to coffee.  You'd just simply have to see it to believe it.  And suffice it to say, my American friends, that most Canadians are tearing up looking at the image at the right, the Great Canadian Drinkable Flag.

The Peter Principle

From Slate's review of Spider-Man 2: In the first film, Peter's discovery that his teenage body could suddenly shoot white sticky stuff was confusing, but also scary and exhilarating—as it is for so many of us. Now, he discovers that once in a while when there are a lot of other things on his mind, that sticky stuff won't come. In Peter's case, more than self-esteem is at stake: A couple of 30-story plunges to the street are enough to make even the most Olympian superheroic athlete quiver with performance anxiety.

Yes, this amused me. (It's very early.) You can read the rest of the rave here.   And before any of you say it: yes, I've been, argh, "surfing the web."   As have you, evidently....

      Well, I hope it's a good movie.   I was pretty much bored silly by the first one. *shrug*

Doctor J's Favourite Article Of The Day

      From Ananova comes this story which, for reasons that should be obvious, is worth quoting here in its entirety:

Cane or breast for naughty pupils        [Original story can be found here]

A schoolteacher has been suspended in Zimbabwe for allegedly giving pupils the choice of being caned or suckling her breasts.

    [Gee, I wonder what they chose....]

The woman faces a disciplinary hearing after one of the pupils reported the 'punishment' to his parents, reports the Herald.

    [Even the newspaper won't call it 'punishment'!]

The boy claimed he was asked to choose between suckling the teacher's breasts or receiving 100 strokes of the cane for being noisy.

The boy chose to suckle the teacher's breasts, as did 14 others, according to the newspaper.

    [Duh. Note also the key words, so casually subordinated, "as did 14 others." Fourteen? I'm not sure whether to be shocked or merely impressed.]

The headmaster of the Harare school summoned the teacher to respond to the allegations.

    [Bastard...]

The teacher allegedly admitted forcing the children to suckle her breasts but could not give reasons why she had done so.

    [Does there have to be a reason?]

Harare provincial education director Tomax Doba confirmed the incident and said that his office had been furnished with a report from the school.

"We received a report from the school and the report says it happened. We have already advised them to make a police report and the teacher is likely to face child abuse charges," Mr Doba said.

    [I'm still trying to figure out the 'abuse' part here...]

Okay, I'm getting a few ideas right now that I most certainly should NOT be getting....    All together now: ^~~Teacher, teacher / Can you teach me....^~~

Stamp Collecting

      Alright, let's see if Bart Simpson can help me get through this one.

I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will not comment.
I will NOT comment.

"Chronicled against each other."   Ahem....    I will not comment, I will not....

Doubting Thomas

      Of all the ways to describe Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, a "prostitution of poetic art" hardly fits the bill.   Now Hallmark cards: there's a prostitution of poetic art.

      This blog's favourite bit: "He does allude to sex but people do have sex - that's life for you."   Well, yeah, I guess they do.

"This Does Need To Be Taken Seriously."

      Seriously.   The breasticled will be absolutely devastated.

Words Strain, Crack And Now Collapse

      Good morning, people. As some of you who have been dropping by in the wee hours have noticed, I've been playing around with this blog, trying -- alone with my technologically ignorant self-- to fix a problem I've found pressing for some time. What is it?, you might ask. Well...

      With some posts becoming very, very, very lengthy indeed, I've finally (after much frustration) found a way to make this blog collapse and expand comments. Because of the limitations of Blogger (and/or because there's nobody around to give me easy answers), what you're getting is this. Unfortunately, the collapse and expand link doesn't move as I'd wish it would, but right now I'm even counting my blessings this is working. According to Blogger, there's no way to do this simply with specific posts. Evidently, that's not entirely true. But it's taken a fair bit of experimentation and jiggering on my part just to get things where they now are.

      (For those of you that don't know, and you missed my point above, I know jack-shit about JavaScript.)

      Please, BTW, if you're unable to read the extended comments let me know.

      But in the meantime, let's hope this will be my little, slightly-workable way of condensing matters on this blog. Er, well, we can hope. Unfortunately the current manner means I'll have to do most of the coding on an entry-by-entry basis, but, well, we shall see if I can figure out something more sophistemacated latster. You have to click on the "Well..." link to close it back up (or "Rave on" or "Read on" or whatever I use in an individual post), as I'm sure most of you have already surmised. Ah, well. It's a slight improvement, anyway. Cheers.

      So, what'd ya think? ;-)

Nobody's Gonna Love Ya Like I Do, Baby...

      Well, it's over: the election is done, at least for now.   Yes, we've given ourselves a minority government, but it's a tenuous one, so tenuous in fact that it's unlikely to last the year.   The oddity is that we won't seem to know the final results for a bit:   there are a number of ridings so closely contested that recounts are inevitable, and they may shake up the possibilities of an NDP-supported Liberal minority.   How close are the numbers?   Ay, there's the rub: none of them are consistent this morning. According to the Globe and Mail, it's Liberals 135, Tories 99, NDP 19, BQ 54, Other 1. Some numbers have the NDP slightly higher (as high as 21) and thus holding the balance of power; with 19, they're just shy (by one vote).    So, it's obvious who's in the catbird's seat after all this is said and done: B.C. independent Chuck Cadman who is now about to find himself the most fawned-over politician in recent memory.   Look at those numbers, mès amis: with potentially 154 seats on the Lib/Dipper pole and 153 on the Tory/Bloc pole, the situation is tighter than a nun's butt.   For Mr. Martin to maintain his hold on power, he's going to have to do some quick maneuvering: he's either going to have to get Mr. Cadman's support and surrender the Speaker's chair to a Tory, or he's going to have to convince Mr. Cadman to accept the role of Speaker, an unlikely prospect because then Mr. Cadman's vote would cease to be relevant.   Oh, Canada, you've sure made matters very, very precarious indeed.   Your parliamentarians won't be going overseas anytime soon for fear of a key missing vote.   That may sound good to those of your grousing for parliamentarians to be "showing up for work," but it will likely mean that a lot of projects toward encouraging international investment and such will be severely impeded.   And look for Mr. Martin to court some of the center-left-of-center Bloquistes to give him some breathing room.   We're looking at what could be the most adversarial parliament in decades.

[+/-] Read on...

      Last night's results are little short of enfuriating.   Enfuriating, that is, because of Ontario, because it seems the gutless cowards in the 416 and 905 area codes went massively Liberal red (in the area of 40% numbers) DESPITE the litany of protestations and frustrations with government corruption.   In short, people in these ridings did the worst possible things they could have done.   They endorsed the status quo.   They proved that voter dissatisfaction is irrelevant, and created something entirely new: Battered Voters' Syndrome.   They proved to the Liberals-- and the insidious team of David Herle and company-- that negative advertising and public demonization works.   They seem to have shrunk, too, their own support in this parliament-- for by using the "a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Tories" logic, they hurt themselves in a few key ridings that might have gone NDP instead of Conservative (mainly in B.C.).   In short, Ontario let itself be manipulated last night and it effectively refused change.    Yes, change, as Paul Wells rightly notes on his blog, was the big loser last night.   Southern Ontario-- not Canada-- chose the status quo.   Sure, a few ministers got turfed and all of the other parties made notable gains.   But it's in Southern Ontario that voters overwhelmingly fell for the Liberal scare tactics, and I'm ashamed of my neighbours right now.   With big black marks on their eyes, the voters of Southern Ontario went running back to the Liberals, held them tightly and said, "Oh, promise me you'll change this time, won't you, won't you? Please, I love you, but...." It's a sickening, sad display.   Watch your newspapers for the next little bit: I'm sure you'll see tons of pieces like this one about people who voted against rather than for, people who voted Liberal for fear of a Tory government, much to the consternation of the Tories and the NDP.   They bought the line: Nobody's gonna love ya like I do, baby...   Meanwhile, as the rest of the country looks at Southern Ontario with disgusted eyes, she protests, But you don't know him like I do....   Yes, dear, yes, yes we do. *sigh* Ontario did the unthinkable: it bitch-slapped itself. It thought it was biting the bullet, or swallowing its pride, or whatever; but, no, it bitch-slapped itself into submission.  They bought once more into The Myth Of The Natural Governors ^(TM) and the rancid rhetoric of "Either/Or" has moreorless prevailed.  Maybe people should check out the definition of this word.

      I'm being pretty flip about all this, but for good reason: in the end, people voted out of cowardice and I find that shameful. Warren Kinsella has speculated that much of the last-minute turnabout was done by female voters (and, one infers, from fear of the Tory Nobodaddyism on abortion and such). There might be some truth to that, but I'm not so sure. I'm relatively confident that a significant number of people were already harbouring Liberal support (fine and dandy, by the way, as long as you believe in them) but keeping it from the pollsters.   I also suspect that a lot of people figured "Liberals are scum, but my guy's not so bad," and voted that way.   But the swing, the greater tide, seems to have been the result of fear-mongering that thus rendered the entire election debate moot. 

      Believe it or not, I wouldn't object to the results here if Mr. Martin had articulated anything throughout the campaign that wasn't bile-inducing hypocrisy-- and, in fact, he could have done so in defence of his own record if he'd tried.  But instead he played the insidious game of manipulation and wrapped himself in The Health Care Flag.   The wisdom of the voters, indeed.

      So, for all the "strategic" (excuse me: ) voting, Canadians have elected what will likely amount to a hung parliament.   This means coalitions will have to be formed, but even those won't be enough to ensure victory or stability.   Instead, there will be a lot of hunting and pecking for party-breakers, a search that will more-than-likely prove futile. We may end up with a parliament that is even more rigid and inflexible as members of the opposing poles depend on the firmness of their alliances to maintain or to defeat the government.   What does this mean? There will be a lot more jockeying, a lot more bribery and pork.   Mr Martin's talk about a new way of governance-- by which members could vote their consciences on matters that weren't tied to the survival of the government-- is now moot.   Every vote will matter, every vote potentially a straw to break the camel's back.   Look for increased degrees of partisan intensity.   Look for politicians worrying obsessively about their immediate electability, lest a non-confidence motion or a sudden writ come down (which means, of course, "tough-stuff" won't get done).    Proportional representation is now likely to be stalled for a dog's age because with an election, like Odysseus, always seeming on the horizon, none of the big two parties will want to concede the structure which might lead them to government next-time around.   This is the minority scenario that those of us who championed the idea of a minority government most dreaded.   Everything hangs on sliverish threads, on a single vote here and a single vote there, and instead of groups having to work together in substanstial gestures of consensus, single members alone will be able to play their own sides against one another and possibly hold up legislation (or legislative defeats) depending on the ways in which they're courted.   It also means the Bloc Québécois is now far more important than those of us in the rest of Canada would generally like.   Congratulations, Canada, we've created a parliament ripe for blackmail. And congratulations, too; we'll be back at the polls more than likely within the year.

      What a tattered, tattered mess.   It is, I suppose, possible that the dangerous proximity to the precipice will force the parties to tread delicately and precisely, but, frankly, I don't see it happening.   It looks to me like we're in for a period of 50%+1 governance, a thing that should give serious pause to those of you that remember the dilemmas created by constitutional wrangling.  I'm sure that'll do wonders for the Canadian dollar, having a government that makes Avril Lavigne seem stable.

      Oh well, that's the way it works.  We're in for a turbulent-- and probably legislatively insignificant-- year or so, and we've ended one campaign to begin another already.   Now all eyes are on Mr. Cadman.  It's been a long time since one Member of Parliament mattered so much.  In the great words of Bette Davis, hold on to your hats, it's going to be a bumpy night.

      And Ontario: I don't know whether to describe you as cowards or sheep or dumbasses.   But I think this morning all three of the above apply.   By the way, the Battered Voters' Shelter is just down the street.

From The "But What Does That Really Mean?" File....

      Gee, it only took a few weeks (or so it seems now) for BlogsCanada and Blogwise to add this site to their directories. Don't ask me why I bothered because, frankly, I don't know. That BlogsCanada has noted this page with a "Site Favourite" icon () is a tad befuddling as I've little what might merit such a notation-- or, based on what I've seen of some of the other blogs to receive it, what might not merit getting one. *Shrug*

Leave It To Beaver

      Well, I'm back.    My cousin is now married, and my family had what seemed to be a decent time of it all.   I won't write much about the trip here, save for these brief observations: a) that American cigarettes remain abominations of good taste; b) that American beer remains an abomination of good taste, but thankfully Canadian beer remains relatively easy to find; and c) that American patriotism, as understandable as it is given the current international circumstances, remains an abomination of good taste.   On this last point: Canadians almost as a rule are muted in their patriotism (save for hockey games and beer-chugging contests), so the super-abundance of American flags, most still at half-mast after the Reagan funeral, is a bit disquieting; it's election day here in Canada, with only a few days until July 1st and Canada Day itself, and you'd be hard-pressed to find as many flags hanging from individual houses on those days as you would on any given day in the States.   It's hard to tell after a while how much those flags are really patriotic qua patriotic symbols-- and how much they're emblems of anger, injury, lamentation, resiliency, and even xenophobia, among other things.

[+/-] Read on...

      I should qualify this slightly.    I was, after all, in New York and Pennsylvania, two states that felt most intimately the pain of the attacks on September 11th, and it'd be churlish to expect people in those states to be anything but what they currently are.   And as much as I enjoyed certain aspects of the States, it sure felt good to get back across the border, even if our cigarettes and alcohol are at exorbitantly-inflated prices.   It was like a return to modesty.   With election day nearing in Canada, it was pause-inducing to think this weekend about the number of times over the past month-and-change that all of our political leaders were within direct physical contact with voters, whether for good or for ill.   I don't think it's seriously crossed anyone's mind here that a candidate could be a target of an assassination or that there might actually be a terrorist gesture, as in Spain or even in Bali (against the Australians), to try to manufacture a political result.   Instead, we're able to move about, griping about our relatively trifling concerns, with some kind of naïveté to the dangers of international terror.   (Canada had its innocence challenged in the 1970s with the FLQ crisis, but that was, for all intents and purposes, an internal matter, and that innocence has been moreorless restored.)   Our own Prime Minister, for however long, could still be seen in scrums of reporters and protesters, potentially wide-open targets for anybody who wanted to make Canada a victim.   But thankfully, nobody seems to want to do so; we in Canada are lucky enough, at least for now, to matter not much to anybody but ourselves, so we can keep running by the older and more simple ways of doing things.   The key words in that last sentence may be "at least for now," but it's worth observing what we have right now in case the day comes when we do lose that sense of security and naïveté.   When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR famously said that the enemy had awoken "a sleeping tiger," a metaphor reinvoked regularly since September 11th 2001. Well, we can count our blessings, those of you that are my countrypeople: no one in the world seems to be worrying about waking the sleeping beaver (an animal, by the way, that woke up on its own in 1939 and in 1914).   With the election almost over, we're one of the few countries in the Western world that hasn't had as one of its central electoral issues domestic or international security.   Be thankful for that today, my fellow Canadians, as we go to the polls and cast our votes based on matters most of the rest of the world would consider wonderfully, even blissfully, quaint.

      With all that said, I'd encourage all of my fellow Canucks to read this article from the comedian Bob Robertson in today's Globe and Mail. Aside from some typical (and still amusing) observations about the process, it contains this reminder of what we should be thinking about today-- and not about silly partisanship and working our vitriol:

The world doesn't care that most of the voters of Canada will decide who to vote for based on the following major areas: (a) not fond of that little moustache (b) has a sinister smile (c) stutters too much, or (d) looks better with the cheese-factory shower cap.

No, the world doesn't care about our little federal election. In fact, there is only one time that the world cares about Canada. It is when some poor, desperate human beings become driven enough to pack up their family and look for a land where they will be safe from torture, oppression and racism and where they can prosper at whatever they do, be taken care of if they're sick, and educate their children to their full potential. When that day comes, then they care about Canada.

Be careful how you vote. You wouldn't want to let them down.

Yes, there's an idealism in Robertson's words but it's a healthy idealism, one we're better to acknowledge and to address rather than to ignore.   Canada, at least for now, has the luxury of being able to worry more about what it wants to be rather than what it has to be.    Let's not only remember that, let's take advantage of the opportunity that the situation affords.   

      For me, I know how I'll be voting today, but I want to explain a few of the considerations that are going into-- or have gone into-- the making of that decision, imperfect as the end-result may be.   Like many voters, I'm voting based on a gestalt, on an assessment of the picture entire.   I'm not voting on policies and platforms per se.   We all know that parties and politicians talk about policies rather like teenagers talk about sex-- mostly in theory, mostly in anticipation, but with very little sense of actuability.   Think back on Mulroney's once-fervent dismissal of Free Trade and then his implementation of it in the 80s; think back on the Liberal Red Book's promises, and the very few items of it that were enacted.   No, situations create policy, as if to prove the saw that necessity is the mother of invention.   I judge, then, based on the ways in which I see politicians deal with issues as they arise, how they adapt, how they address matters and how they address us in the process; I judge based on what might be called issues of social character.  Call me old-fashioned, but a government has to have a kind of moral authority, a right to lead, and it has to represent, at least in part, a kind of native national intelligence, or knowing what issues are finally most important and which ones are less so.   Such decision-making is also intensely-particular: the garrison mentality of which Northrop Frye wrote so long ago has not totally vanished.   In the end, one weighs and balances and judges.

      My riding was used by one party to enact a political assassination, even if the target was a person I never particularly respected.   This demonstrated callousness by that particular party, and it demonstrated, too, an insidiousness of process.   I won't vote for a party that is led by a cadre of pseudo-Maoists, let alone a bunch of usurpers.   This isn't a matter of loyalty to the previous leader.   The question is much more crucial: how can we trust a party that doesn't care about its own stability and rules-of-order? Or, put more bluntly, if they'll treat the former king this way, how will they treat the rest of us?    The protestations of caring about "Canadian ideals" ring very, very hollow indeed when the Prime Minister has played Bolingbroke to his predecessor's Richard II and thus displayed a lack of concern with matters of propiety, civility, and inclusion.   Like Bolingbroke (and Macbeth), Mr Martin has political blood on his hands, and he demonstrated before he called the election a ruthless amorality that I will not endorse.   He demonstrated all-too-well why he cannot be trusted with governance: for him, and for his followers, the end -- his political rise-- justified the means taken to achieve that end, and this speaks very badly of how he will lead: with indifference, with cynicism, with utterly-selfish regard.   Add to this a number of other factors (a recent record of incompetence, flip-flopping of extraordinary dimensions, a cynical indifference to political sensitivities, and so forth), and it's clear to me: I cannot, will not, vote Liberal.   I will not reward usurpers and purgers, for as much as they preach about visions of a nation, those visions are tissue-paper thin.   Such people are the first ones to issue the public the Judas Kiss.   I've seen it in spades in my riding.   So, that's that: I won't vote Liberal, I won't endorse Martin, and I sure as hell won't vote for Tony Valeri whose own survival as a candidate in this riding reeks of insidious intent.   The Liberal red in this riding is blood red, and as far as I'm concerned that's the antithesis of what I want Canada to be and what I deem Canada to be about.

      I won't vote Conservative, either.   As much as Mr Harper has tried to play nice to the camera (and move his party ostensibly toward the centre), there's a shiftiness about his political machinations that I find disturbing.   His is a party without a substantial platform, a party born of something like a corporate takeover.   The Conservative party right now isn't the party it once was: it's a makeshift assembly, and there are a number of things about this assembly to give any center-of-the-road thinker the shivers.   The desperation for victory turned this party toward relative non-issues (child pornography, same-sex marriage, etc.) that were demagogic and evasive rather than genuine and substantial.   This is, in part, because the party hasn't figured out (and so doesn't know) what it's really about-- let alone what it would do.   I seriously doubt the Conservatives would be the Great Canadian Satan that the Liberals would have us believe.   I do, however, doubt the wisdom of their members. I do pause at the fringes of the party so frequently seething like single-minded zealots.   I do worry about electing a party that scoffs so ignorantly at environmental concerns (like the Kyoto Accord) and that would align us more closely with the highly-questionable Bushies downstairs.   And, perhaps most importantly, I distrust a party that so selectively revises its own personal history for the sake of political presentability.   Harper's own words on Canadian involvement in the Iraq War have been the epitome of convenient mutability.   Harper's done a good job of selling himself as the moderate, but it's a sell: it's revisionist history, and one has to wonder what sort of revisionist historicism would come into play if these people are given the keys to government.   If Mr Martin is the guilt-tainted usurper, Mr Harper is the Eddie Haskell of the neighbourhood-- or, rather, he's the seemingly nice guy who wants to borrow your house for the weekend, but one can only imagine what his less-than-trustworthy friends will do with the place.   No, not Conservative.

      That leaves Smilin' Jack and the NDP, really, so I guess that's where I'm going this time around.   Why? Because they're the underdogs.    Because at least the NDP, blunders and all, hasn't seemed to betray its own convictions for the sake of seeming electable.   Because I like the idea of having a stronger sense of relatively-conscientious opposition in a mercifully-divided Parliament.   Because I think the other parties much worse options, at least right now.   Because, in my riding, Tony Valeri needs to be taken out to the woodshed and paddled within an inch of his political life.   Because the NDP, however naïvely, has behaved more inclusively than exclusively in this campaign, and they don't reek so thoroughly of the stench of political saliva.   And they've actually talked about idealisms, about lowering tuition rates, about environmental matters and so forth.   Sure, they can talk about such matters so freely because they know they won't get elected.   It is, however, about expressing what I want Canada to be and what I want it to be about, and that's, finally, a country that at least aspires toward self-betterment.   I don't want people to think I'm buying the Layton spin that he's the only one who's been positive while the others have gone negative.   That's simply not true.   But on scale, on the gradations of the Great Canadian Political Butterslide, they're the least offensive to me, and the most positive, at least this time around.   And, as much as it doesn't matter as a point of personal action, I'd rather have a national party like the NDP having the king-making power rather than the Bloc Québécois.   So, it's not a ringing endorsement, and it's not an affirmation of belief in NDP policy as a whole, but it is my endorsement, such as it is.   Alas, sometimes one is left with only limited options, none of them entirely satisfactory.

      But that's where I am today, and that's how I see things. I should add one more thing here: I'm also voting NDP partially out of spite for Mr Martin, but not in the way you're likely thinking. In recent weeks, the PM has tried to cajole people into accepting an either/or decision by saying, outright, that a vote for the NDP is a vote for the Conservatives (and that a vote for the Bloc is one for the Tories, too).   This is the rhetoric of fear-mongering, and, sorry, but I refuse to accept such manipulative, cynical (and cynicizing) logic.   So, Mr Martin, my vote for the NDP is my own very minor way of telling you that I don't appreciate this sort of "you're with me or against me" posturing, and that this is not what I want Canada to be about.   You had the chance to appeal to our higher capacities and you didn't.   So consider my vote a polite way of saying, "I will not serve."

      To all our leaders: next time, give us a real choice.   Have the courage to lead rather than to pander.   We're a country-- when all is said and done-- more blessed than cursed, more fortunate than not.   So let's exercise our luxury to work on what we can improve and on what we represent.   A little well-tempered (and generally quiet) idealism is a good thing.   Goodness only knows how long it will be until we'll have to be sleeping with one eye open.

Run For The Border

      Back in a few days, peeps. I'm off the Painsylvania. Argh. I wonder what the border will be like.

I've Still Got Three Myself....

      Let the fellatio begin!      (Those with Y chormosomes need not apply.)

A Legitimate Abuse Of Power

      David Edelstein's review of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 sounds pretty reasoned and fair to me (given that, of course, I haven't seen the movie), approaching it with an eye for the movie's accomplishments and its shortcomings. This blog's favourite line, though, comes from the end of the review: seldom are the words "fat prick" so appropriately used in film criticism.

Hardcore Pussy

      I couldn't resist posting this here because this little guy looks almost exactly like my Blake used to.    There's even a picture of him somewhere with almost the exact same expression.    This is your "awwwwwh" moment, people.    Another one won't happen for quite some time.    Click the image to see some more pussy pics, some of them nothing less than creepy.


Remember these poor little guys next time you're about to articulate your gendericity, which for most of you will probably be sooner rather than later.   

"We're Sorry, Sir, There's Been A Problem With Your Package..."

      "It looks like everyone just plum forgot about it...."

Shiny Happy People

      You see: I'm the normal one.    It's you happy people that are the prejudiced, sicko freaks.  

The Court Of Shame

      In a way, I guess this development is a good thing. It is, though, a shame that it comes not from genuine conviction in the ideals represented than in having been embarrassed into accepting the conventions thereto. There's a peculiar sense of justice to this-- even if it was arrived at by the wrong means. I dislike it intensely when the proverbial ends justify the means, but sometimes circumstance leaves little other option. As idealistic and our governments may be or pretend to be, none of should ever cling too comfortably to the notion that we're always sunshine and peanut butter. Genuine accountability only happens when we admit that we're accountable, too.

Sorry, But....

      There's so much about this article that is right. There's also so much about it that is, at the very least, naïve.   If I didn't have other matters on my plate at the moment, I'd try to remedy the confusion and paint a nuanced response.   The problems here are not that far removed than the ones I cited in the Hitchens-Moore conundrum: the provided responses, on both sides, just don't fit the bill, and neither makes much sense when taken in totality. Actually, like nonsense poetry, it uses sense to defeat sense, rather like the snake eating its own tail. If I remember to come back to this when I return from the States, I will. It will, however, if I do come back to it, be as long and involved as a Henry James novel, so be forewarned. Let's simply hope I forget.