Archives Updated

      Yes, yes, yes, I had been putting it off for some time (well, since September, really), but I've finally updated the Archives page, so that more significant additions to the blog (poems, literary material, more extensive discussions of subjects) now have direct links. Gawd, this is such a pain in da butt, but, alas, it is finally done. Feel free to check it out, though I'm sure most of you aren't here for the literature, but for the goofy stuff. :-) Ah, it's all good. Anyway, cheers.

^~~Wouldn't It Be Nice^~~

      Question: How much money would you pay to make this come true? To watch the two of them run along a beach-side, hand in hand? This blog's answer: One hundred billion gazillion dollars. And one appendage.

      For the record, this blog would pay even more to watch Jack van Impe-- that fear-mongering, senior-swindling blowhard of the apocalypse-- undergo gang-sodomy by the entire inmate population of Oswald penitentiary while the boys from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy provide the Faaaaa-bulous colour commentary. Well, on second thought, I think I'd rather just listen to the radio broadcast... Ah, to dream...

      On the other hand, this sounds more like fact than fiction to me.

"The Juiciest Thing"

      Well, this just ruins my lesson plans for the rest of my teaching life. RK, perhaps something to do in your last class before retirement??? Just hope it doesn't turn out quite as this story does. ;-)

Bent Out Of Shape

      Okay, when I was twenty I did some pretty stupid things, but this takes the cake. This blog shudders at speculating what exactly this fool was "trying" to do...

Milking the Electorate

      This blog knew Dennis Kucinich was desperate, but....

Three Poems By John Ashbery

A triplet of offerings:

Knocking Around

I really thought that drinking here would
Start a new chain, that the soft storms
Would abate, and the horror stories, the
Noises men make to frighten themselves,
rest secure on the lip as a canyon as day
Died away, and they would still be there the next morning.

Nothing is very simple.
You must remember that certain things die out for awhile
So that they can be remembered with affection
Later on and become holy. Look at Art Deco
For instance or the "tulip mania" of Holland:
Both things we know about and recall
With a certain finesse as though they were responsible
For part of life. And we congratulate them.

Each day as the sun wends its way
Into your small living room and stays
You remember the accident of night as though it were a friend.
All that is forgotten now. There are no
Hard feelings, and it doesn't matter that it will soon
Come again. You know what I mean. We are wrapped in
What seems like a positive, conscious choice, like a bird
In air. It doesn't matter that the peonies are tipped in soot
Or that a man will come to station himself each night
Outside your house, and leave shortly before dawn,
That nobody answers when you pick up the phone.
You have all lived through lots of these things before
And know that life is like an ocean: somethimes the tide is out
And sometimes it's in, but it's always the same body of water
Even though it looks different, and
It makes the things on the shore look different.
They depend on each other like the snow and the snowplow.

It's only after realizing this for a long time
That you can make a chain of events like days
That more and more rapidly come to punch their own number
Out of the calendar, draining it. By that time
Space will be a jar with no lid, and you can live
Any way you like out on those vague terraces,
Verandas, walkways-- the forms of space combined with itme
We are allowed, and we live them passionately,
Fortunately, though we can never be described
And would make lousy characters in a novel.

--- 1979

Parts of that poem are quite good, others quite weak (particularly the latter stages of the third stanza), and the poem ends on a closing note that sounds as if it were too desperately trying to imitate Robert Lowell. Then there's this poem, partially clever, but a little too typical of contemporary poetry, a little do endeared with its own cleverness:

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it missed you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and canoot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeped outside thing, a dream role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the stream and the chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

--1981

Once again, the poem struggles a great deal, and leans on some rather banal language and imagery, such that the poem engenders a few bits of eye-rolling badness ("The poem is sad"; "You miss it, it misses you" seems to me especially presumptuous). But then, except for that awful intrusion of "Open-ended" in the third stanza, things pick up, and imagery imrpoves, as does the language. But, as with the previous poem, it goes a step too far in the final line, and spoils itself: the closing for the poem would have been stronger with a slightly stronger of the development of the poem being set "softly down beside you." No, though; Ashbery can't leave well enough alone, and he goes too far by saying "The poem is you." Oy. Corn. Is Ashbery intimidated by final lines? How about another example?

Hard Times

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell
And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere
In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

But by then it will be too late, the festive ambience
Will linger on but it won't matter. More or less
Succinctly they will tell you what we've all known for years:
That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.

Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never
Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And
He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness
To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.

Once they made the great trip to California
And came out of it flushed. And now every day
Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.
In time, its gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.

--- 1981

Whoa, that last line, not so bad in its imagery, at least in principle, is a metrical mess, a Whitmanesque onanism. While the first three lines of the poem set up an effective tone of cynical whimsy, the poem just falls apart in its middle-section, again as if the poet fell in love with his own cheekiness. Ashbery seems to feel he has to belabour points in his poetry, and the effect, at least to this reader, is one of boredom. Indeed, as I read him, much of Ashbery's verse seems to teeter toward the truly amateurish, as if an idea gets the better of him and he doesn't know what to with it; so he struggles, he labours, he moves toward a way to get out of his own poem, and so his final lines often seem like pallid imitations of other poets (Lowell in the first, the young Strand in the second, and a Strandian Whitmanism in the third, complete with a Lowell-esque tonal finish).

      Oddly, Ashbery is often considered one of the best of the late 20th century American poets, and even high-critics like Harold Bloom are prone to suggest that he's an heir to Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. I just don't see it. The tones are too irregular, the meters too awkward, the imagery often forced, the language often banal. Does anyone see what I obviously do not see? Does anyone see virtues herein that I am overlooking? I do like the line "Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring." Problem is, it seems to me, Ashbery's poems seem to run on a shoestring, too, a string pulled too much at both ends and wearing at the center. He's certainly not the worst poet I've ever read, but I just don't see greatness here. Thoughts, anyone?

Jeremiad In The Morning; or, The Vagueries of Ignorance

      Hard as it is for me to admit this, but Margaret Wente and I are actually in agreement with one another for once. The most frustrating thing about this article is that Wente doesn't quite acknowledge the depth and degree of the problems that she identifies. As tempted as I am to go off on a rant here, I won't. Suffice it to say, though, that we've created a culture in Canada in which verbal precision is seen a bonus rather than a necessity, and in which knowledge itself is less important than "having a vague idea of a thing" and substantiating the notion that degrees and diplomas are rights guaranteed by the payment of tuition or the enrolment in schools. Yes, the situation is very much the same in the university and college environments as it is in the secondary- and probably elementary-schools. Let's face it, the system has been dumbing itself down for decades, demanding less from its students and so getting less, and bending over backwards to justify a namby-pamby post-modern idealism that encourages intellectual mediocrity and pressures instructors and disciplines to lower their standards in the name of "other concerns." We've created a culture that desperately wants to think that everything, and I mean everything, is only a matter of context, if we can only find a way to create a context which justifies saying that something is actually satisfactory when, in fact, it is not.

      No wonder we live in a culture that resists calling Dubya a moron, despite his fundamental inability to articulate himself without the aid of rote-rehearsals and thumping phrases. No wonder our politicians, of any stripe, never answer the questions they are asked, preferring to return to their talking points like frightened children to their security blankets. No wonder our newspapers, television shows, and the like are rife with redundacy and pedestrian explanations of the obvious. (After all, every reality show could demonstrate its content in 10 minutes, but instead drags it out over 45 minutes.) No wonder clarity, nuance, detail, and precision are all as rare as unicorn horns. No wonder we perform mental gymnastics trying to argue that someone's opinion is valid, just because it's his or her opinion, and that it doesn't need to be substantiated coherently or specifically. No wonder the "humanist" academy desperately tries to assuage itself that there is no such thing as an idiocy, and that there's no such thing as an incompetent. No wonder we've created a defensive, self-legitimating culture of soft-mindedness. No wonder we've created a blameless society in which twinkies and mommies and McDonald's are to blame for our actions, because we've gone so far into the realm of minimal expectation and perpetual justification. No wonder we've created a culture in which people talk incessantly without genuinely listening to a damned thing anyone else has to say.

      And no wonder we've created a culture so hostile to poetry, a culture that does not raise itself to the rigors and demands of engaging language and content, a culture in which literacy and thought are used as sporks rather than as scalpels or even as chopsticks. It'll do, we tell ourselves, that Jimmy can read a headline but not the rest of the article; it'll do, we tell ourseves, that Joanie can put words together that look like a sentence but which make no grammatical sense; it'll do, we tell ourselves, if Jerry says that Shakespeare was an anti-Semite because he knows there's a Jewish villain in the The Merchant of Venus. It'll do, we tell ourselves, in that last example, that Jerry knows the words we want to hear and there's a legitimate argument to be made for such an assessment, but it hardly matters that Jerry could never make that argument persuasively himself. Yes, this is what we're creating, what we've created. And if this makes me a conservative for lamenting that we're now stuck in such a position, so bloody be it.

      So much for not getting off on a rant. But, it's okay. Doctor J is tired, and only partially awake, and even though he's not being systematic in his thoughts, people can get his general meaning. That'll do, Doctor J, one can almost hear James Cromwell saying. Oink, oink. But that's okay, he's just alternately intelligent....

      Okay, now where is that darned spork of mine????

Paul Martin: Tragic Doofus?

      Slinger's column in The Star today is a marginally funny reading of the Martin fall-from-grace, as a Greek-Canadian tragedy ("a souvlaki covered with maple syrup" is disallowed but probably not entirely wrong).

Words To Instill Terror In Christie's Heart

      "We are not going away. We are staying together, unified, all of us." --- Howard Dean

      Why does this remind me of the old joke about the difference between love and herpes? (For those of you that don't know: "Herpes lasts forever.")

Brief Statement

      Fuck, I wrote a lot today. I am insane. Those of you waiting to chime in, shut up, shut up, shut up.... ;-) Aw, crap, I'm sure there'll be a comment on this as soon as I publish it. Crappity crap crap crap.

Kowit Of The County; or, To Our Too-Coy Mistress

      I am sure this very lengthy article by Steve Kowit will be of absolutely no interest to most of my readers, but I feel compelled to post it here. This is the sort of article that I frankly don't know what do with, short of writing an article of my own that would be almost as long as this one. And, frankly, I have no intention of setting onto such a project at the moment. The article does make some important points that about contemporary poetry, and the direction of poetry in this day and age, that need to be considered and carefully thought-through. Just a brief example, though, in the interim. Kowit argues that the current poetical and critical privileging of the 'incomprehensible,' or the 'difficult,' is one of the primary reasons for the current disinterest in poetry. As I see it, there's a great deal of truth to this, but like a statistic and a bikini, what is concealed is often more interesting than what is immediately revealed.

      One thing not revealed: that the Eliotic notion of 'difficult' poetry in the modern age seems always to return, as if it were the delta of modern poetical thought, has been pretty profoundly misunderstood, and needs to be throughly recontextualized, not just in a theoretical light, but in the light of what Eliot understood as difficult poetry; Eliot's notion of difficulty was not a call to make poetry beyond understanding, or to make meaning irrelevant it was a Carrollian call to make the poem something deliberately countersensical, to effect sensibility without reducing the poetic form to little more than a versified thesis. This is where Carroll's influence becomes increasingly important: the poem, not unlike, say, Carroll's "Jabberwocky," has to penetrate the intelligence without pandering to it in some desperate plea for acceptance and acknowledgement. Eliot did famously say, although there was always an aspect of facetious and desperate self-explanation on his part, that meaning was a piece of meat to be thrown to the dogs while the poet did his job. What Eliot never said explicitly was that meaning was irrelevant. No, in fact, quite the contrary, if one follows Eliot's metaphor appropriately. It is, indeed, central, a device without which the poet cannot commit his larceny. Remove the meat, however apparently tangential to the project at hand, and the poet walks head first into the dog's jaws. Stevens said it more plainly, though certainly more densely, that a poem must resists the intelligence almost completely-- with the key word there being "almost."

      The idea of poetic difficulty, of elusiveness, is not really that of the perpetually ambiguous or "indeterminate" (how insidious that word has become thanks to contemporary critical parlance!), but rather the poetic of gamesmanship, or even anticipatory courtship: the mind is sufficiently engaged, and participant in the creationary process, to have a sense of an idea, a sense of meaning and/or purpose, but not a concrete sense or a fixed sense. In invoked the idea of "anticipatory courtship." Think of it this way: the mind has to be allowed to think that it is "pretty sure" it understands what is happening, but not be sufficiently confident in that to reduce the poem, to be able to reduce its workings and say, "well, that is that." No, poetry has to maintain a kind of mystery to it, a mystery one needs engage longer and more intimately; more importantly, it must be a kind of endless mystery, a constant process by which a new aspect is revealed, or at least glimpsed, with each new encounter. This what one might call the poetics of alien familiarity, or perhaps tangible mystery. Perhaps what Eliot and Stevens (among others) were really calling for was a poetry that was a Coy Mistress, not so much refusant, but constantly nudging readers to court it further, all the while never specifically "promising" anything.

      Maybe that's the lynch-pin: "promising." Eliot and Stevens, among others including the New Critics, became increasingly frustrated with the paraphrase, and the heresy of it (as Cleanth Brooks once put it), and it was a legitimate concern: think of the frustration of poets and other creative writers confronted with audiences searching for "the point" so they could abnegate the responsibilities of the reading process, forget the work in question, and move on to some other matter. All of the latter tendencies undermine literature, and they undermine art in itself. No, the pull was toward a more meditative poetics, a more contemplative one, and (as is typical) that was blown entirely out of proportion and into the realm of the ridiculous (one suspects, in many ways, the accidental result of Joyce, among others). For all our pretensions toward contextualization, we exist in a culture that is indeed very poor at properly understanding context: just look what the Canadianists did to Northrop Frye, and what the Yale School did to Derrida, and what the New Historicists have done to Barthes and Foucault. We're a culture that takes the sublime to the ridiculous, the difficult to the impossible. No wonder so many aspects of our cultural (and political, and social, and on and on and on) thinking are so firmly wrapped inside of our asses. "Promising," above is really a crucial idea, because the idea of delivering on a poetic promise for meaning is rather like expecting a loved one to put out: it may or may not happen, but that's thinking toward a goal rather than the process, emphasizing your desired result rather than beholding within the moments of being and appreciation. It's bad enough having the experience but missing the meaning as getting meaning but missing the experience.

      So, it really comes down to detail, to nuance, to understanding, among other things, that the pattern is movement, as in the figure of the ten stairs, and that sublimity is not something we look directly into else we'd not see it for what it is; these are the primary gestures and impulses of difficulty in poetry, toward keeping us from looking into the sky and saying, "Oh, yeah, that's just an eclipse," and turning our heads away in bland cognition of that fact. It's also perhaps better understood as the idea that poetry was conceived to need to move toward what I would call a process of (Henry, not William) Jamesian nearing, of observing and perhaps understanding but possibly not the subtle progression of aesthetic intimacy.

      Sigh, I am now exhausted, and, frankly, I didn't expect to write as much as I have. I meant to deal with a single basic point, but before I knew it, it had exploded in front of me like a speech by Howard Dean.

      There has to be a place for simplicity, or for apparent simplicity, and on this Kowit and I agree. I should also add that I agree with much else of what he writes, as well with that of his whipping-elder Mr. Bloom. But I'm too drained, and not sufficiently fueled by (ahem) spirited elements, to engage those issues here and now. I also have to find it curious that those poets most ostensibly significant to an understanding of relatively transparent or 'clear' poetry receive almost no mention in Kowit's article. Lowell warrants a brief mention, and Mark Strand appears not at all; though they're geographically out of his scope, the likes of Larkin and Heaney are left out entirely. These seem to me pretty suggestive absences.

      But natch. I've gone on way too long, and if I write much more right now, I'll probably end up in a either a full-scope tome, or a full-scale coma. Such is the life of Doctor J. Always on the razor's edge, and it's so seldom Achem's.

      My apologies to the 99.999% of you that I've either bored with this, or that have scanned through this looking for something accessible. Scroll down. There's lots of puerile stuff just *waiting* for you there. (Also: this blog apologizes for any sloppiness in this entry; talk about writing off the cuff, this damned thing just possessed me as if I were its Linda-Blair-bitch. Agh! This blog will now retire for the time being, exhausted from its pea-soup-expurgating activities du jour.)

"But There's No Room For That"

      Apparently, rugby has indeed become a game of, ahem, single digits. *Shud-d-d-d-d-d-derrrrr*

Kickin' It Old School...

      For RK: had you heard anything about this? Certainly an oddity. Also, I can't help but wonder if Ms. Hayward is any relation to John Hayward, the academic, and friend and some-time poetic advisor to the American Eliot.

The Bear Facts

      It's pretty sad reading The Onion these days, as its satire gets increasingly tired and its desperation for weekly material becomes abundantly clear. But I had to point this out, niggling as it may well be.

Ahem.... Do any of you remember any bears chasing Polonius? A great Dane, perhaps, though "great" isn't a word this blog would use... No, the character should be Antigonus from The Winter's Tale. This blog will now stop being pedantic. For a moment.

Hot Midget Sex!

      C'mon, with that title, you know you can't resist clicking on this link.

      You did, didn't you? You pervert... In that case, I'm sure you'll want to read this, you sick little monkey. Heed the advice, this blog assumes, on avoiding the "blind jab."

      And let me guess, you're a misanthrope, too, aren't you? Then you'll want to check these out, you vile, despicable person, you. ;-)

            

      You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

      Doctor J's: Encouraging Perverted Internet Searchers Since 2003.

Oh, Really??? I Did Nawwwt Know That....

      This blog really does hate to keep doing this, but, DUH!!!!!!!!!!! No, seriously.... DUH!!!!!!!!! Sorry, but, come on.... DUH!!!!!!!!!!!

      "Women are actually competitive." LOL... Love that word "actually," as if it were a genuine surprise. I am agog in disbelief. How can anyone NOT know this? I mean, come on, how woefully, wilfully ignorant does one have to be to be surprised by this? Jeezus, Mary, and Joseph P. Kennedy... Pardon me now while I massage my eyes with sufficient pressure to shiatsu an elephant. And pardon me, too, that I, I, I'm sorry, I just can't stop laughing at this... Now if only I could stop the tears running from my.... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA.... Sorry, I'll be back in a moment.... Oh, God, my stomach hurts....

      (Zelda, if you're reading this, I'm soooooooo sorry. You must be so proud to be a member of that department right now....)

      Oh, yes, it seems today indeed will be a day for fractured, colloquial associative writing...

      Ah, Mr. Eliot: Young men ought to be deplorers...

...Everything But Temptation

      *Swoon.* Yeah, yeah, yeah: I don't wanna hear it.... *grumble, grumble* How, after all, can the NSG Dr not adore a lovely, honey-voiced young woman that sings Dinah Washington songs? How? HOW, I asks ya, HOW?!?!? *Dr J retreats into a corner, punching the air in embarrassed frustration before returning in defeat* Fine. Hey! Don't look at me like that! *He meets his accusers' stares, first with a pause, then with a snarl* Okay, ya got me. Hey, stop it! You win, you've got me. *grumble, grumble, grumble* Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know... Now shush. *Dr J walks away, deeply ashamed of himself, still grumbling in guilt* Damn it.

      Vultures, I tells ya, vultures...

The Haemorrhaging Continues

      In another turn of the political screw, John Bryden has quit the Liberal Party, and it's possible that he will join the ranks of the new Conservatives, or that he will run as an Independent in the next election. Bryden's departure from the party isn't too much of a surprise: he was a target of the Martin machine, as much as Sheila Copps has been, but he was always a pretty vocal critic of his own government's activities, partially the result of Bryden's own training as a reporter and editor. Oddly enough, these articles don't mention Bryden's book on the Canadian government's role in the development of chemical weapons which was headed up, in part, by Sir Frederick Banting, the lead-scientist in the discovery of penicillin. Bryden's always had as his pet-concern the access-to-information policy, a policy more frequently beached than observed. Bryden's defection is interesting, because perhaps more than most members of the disgruntled Chretienites (Sheila Copps, John Manley, etc.), he's always been a kind of outsider, a kind of internal critic, and so his defection may be seen more as an act of conscience than of political expediency, however much the latter may indeed be an issue. It'll be interesting to see the reaction, especially from the editorials, later today and tomorrow. Surprisingly enough, Bryden's debarkment from the Liberal ship of state even made its way, briefly, into the New York Times. Oddly enough, as I've been writing this entry, John Ibbitson's column has just been published, and, ever more oddly, Ibbitson seems unusually right on this.

      But I think Mr Bryden's departure from the Liberals will have greater resonance than, say, if Sheila Copps were to jump ship. There's a very strong degree to which Bryden is a "plain speaker," a direct and not-necessarily couth politician whose concerns have never been entirely in line with any political stripe. This story, though, of the implosion of the Liberal party within the scope of just over a week, just seems to get more and more interesting, and more and more insidious. And, it seems, if Dr J's extended metaphor about the current Canadian political climate being a great deal like Richard II is true, then we've just discovered another character in the play: Mr Bryden has become the Bishop of Carlisle, except that Mr Bryden is leaving of his own free will, and not being jettisoned as Carlisle was. Word to Mr. Bryden: if you're going to run in the next election, do so as an Independent. Tempting as it may be to join another party and its backup mechanisms, if there's ever been a situation for breaking-through on your own, this is it. The way it seems to me, an all-out war between the Liberals and the Conservatives in your riding will be pyrrhic. Stand outside it all, and run on your own, as the figure who's been on the inside, and will not serve any dominant ideological structure. That appears to be the only way to be re-elected, to ride through as the incumbent dark horse. To join the Conservatives will only serve to suggest that you're just playing political musical chairs, and that your defection is one of political expediency. Stand on your own, and stand with the credibility of an individual; this is your way to speak to the voters, while the politicos go after each others' throats.

Oh, Conan, Say It Ain't So...

      Remember the wisdom, Conan: "Shrink not from blasphemy; 'twill pass for wit." Shrink not, I say, shrink not! (Mind you, with a small penis and having spent the night wetting the bed like a little girl, perhaps shrinkage was inevitable.) *shrug*

      I maintain my thesis: those that were offended were the real fools in all this. It speaks, sadly, to our thin-skinnedness as a nation, and to the disturbing fact that perhaps our well-cultivated sense of humour has grown over with weeds and becomes infested with caterpillars.

^~~I Cross The Line^~~

      Dr J found this on Christie's site --- yes, a rare reversal, as I steal a link from her! ;-) --- and had to post it here. Although the disturbed humourist in me thinks the original idea hilarious, I'm certainly glad there is, after all, still an iota of decorum left in this world.

      This blog, however, has it on good authority that The Band's Rag Mama Rag will be used in the next Stayfree campaign. What then? Smells Like Teen Spirit for Massengil?