That's Where It's At
Alas, Bernard Shaw's question to Michael Dukakis about what he'd do if he came home and found his wife raped and murdered now seems astonishingly civilized....
04 March 2004
How To Be An Artist
1. Insert object into anus.
2. Gesticulate oddly and find way to pass object from anus to mouth.
3. Receive plaudits and the Governor-General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Ridiculous. Note the explanation of "neoism," which is embarrassingly (but evidently not for this yutz) idiotic.
Someone Who Cares Enough About Physical Comedy To Put His Whole Family At Risk
This blog knows that this news will make some people absolutely pee themselves with glee. Anything to be of service.
"A Large Load"
Need to feel better about yourself? Need to read a story about such phenomenal stupidity that it could make just about any error you've committed, from the sex-acts you performed on that hamster to your involvement in Haliburton, pale by comparison? Well, here it is. You can now proceed with your day knowing that you are probably not the worst person in the universe. You may now return to your hamster.
Alexander Ye're Not
With all due respect, your Eminence, don't quit your day job.
If you want to find the source
You have to go up, against the current
Tear through, seek, don't give up.
You know it must be somewhere here.
Where are you, source?
Where are you, source?
Scooby-dooby-doo, where are you, you know you've got the source now. Come on Scooby-Doo.... Yes, I may be going to H-E-double-hockeysticks for that, but I am sure I'll be in good company.
O What A Rogue and Peasant Slave Am I...
Poverty bleedin' sucks. Send your donations to Doctor J, courtesy....
Irving? Guinness? Treasures, I'm sure.
The Fourth Estate
It's comforting sometimes to contemplate the service the press provides. Journalism at its perkiest.
Welcome Back, Khadr
"But I would say he's a normal human being. He has issues with his wife, he has issues with his kids. Financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening . . . and this and that. So it comes right down to he's a father and he's a person."
If this doesn't anger, horrify or otherwise astound you, this blog would like to pause to question your humanity. Pardon this blog its moment of Toronto Sun-style reportage while it anticipates the promotion of "Osama Knows Best." (Yes, it will probably air on FOX.)
01 March 2004
Some Random Notes On Blogging
When I first started this blog (almost a year ago, and it boggles my mind that by the time that year-mark comes, this page will have been 'hit' around 5000 times), I conceived of it as a kind open notebook for whatever thoughts and ramblings and the like that I might have. In some ways, this blog is still that way, but as time's passed, well, it's mutated. It's become a kind of Frankenstein's monster of bits and pieces, mostly humourous; the literary aspect has been far less pronounced, and the philosophical aspect has all but fallen by the wayside. Now this blog is less an open notebook than a log of what I've found on the net, things to share with those of you with minds approximately as twisted as my own. Somewhere along the line, adding stuff to this blog became a kind of responsibility more assumed than imposed; after all, if people are going to all the energy and labour of clicking to go to your site, you'd better damned well have some new stuff. No, not quite. It's also that this blog also became a kind of open email that my friends could check to know that, yes, Doctor J is indeed still alive; it's also meant that writing individual emails has become as monotonously draining as Kantian prose in translation. There's a degree to which blogging extends or enlarges one's public life. I can't say this is anything especially new. Teaching is a much more public profession than most, and if you have any pause on that just think of how you think of teachers from your past; and now imagine them in their underwear. 'Nuff said? That's another oddity to this whole scenario, that as 'public' as I am in maintaining this blog, I have very little idea who's out there reading any of this, and those that I do know I'm sitting and praying that they're not reading this blog in their underwear. (I assure ye all, I'm writing this fully clothed.) Somehow, this isn't quite the same thing as reading Dickens while you pick a booger out of your nose.
This leads to another question, one RK mentioned on his blog, and that has to do with the persona one assumes when blogging. Some people tend to rather overt in their blogs, using the blog more expicitly as a capital D diary. Others are much more clipped, refusing to talk at all about anything in their personal lives, and these blogs are more like issue boards. Then there's the wide gap in-between. It can be a tricky gap to navigate, though. I know that my response to this is to play on the Doctor J persona, a persona not fake but not completely genuine, either; this Doctor J is the mildly amiable, generally casual, often cynical, and occasionally quite serious figure that tends to what some would call "the pub personality." It's a bit of self-mocking persona, but it works, and generally I like it. In Leonard Cohen's words, "It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and ever face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance." Logicians, I'm sure, will want to splatter their brains across their computer screens after reading that, but there's a truth to it. Oh, the little tricks of the trade-- referring to oneself in the third person, playing up an image one minute then playing it down another, and so on and so forth. I have to say, though, that I find a lot of the blogs out there pretty tasteless in their solipsism ("I found out I got gonhorrhea and I'm going to kill that rat-bastard that gave it to me. Went to the store. Bought chips. And I'm like Helllloooo! but the counter-guy didn't recognize me. And here's a link to a porn site I found when I got home. Gee, I need to go take a dump. Back in a bit."). Ah, the underwear image seems pretty relevant now, n'est-ce pas? I guess the key is to negotiate a persona with which one can be comfortable, without vaulting headforth into blatant exhibitionism or general emptiness of character. Oh, RK, doesn't this sound like a puzzle for French philosophers? Lots of absences and traces and authorial undeadness. The playfulness would be the thing.
Another point about all this. I find blogging is encouraging verbal sloppiness on my part, at least when it comes to writing entries more than two sentences long. My typing isn't the best to begin with, but between typos and collided words (one of my most common goofs, typing "withe" when I meant to write "with the"), the akwardness of writing without a paper product, and the general 'aw-fuck-it'it's-good-enough' mentality that comes with writing something to which one doesn't commit oneself whole-heartedly, one can get lazy, sloppy. And, yes, I see myself getting that way, making errors I wouldn't likely make in a more substantial (read in: less digital) form of writing. Blogging is chattier than normal writing. It's also more onanistic. More publicly onanistic. I imagine D.H.Lawrence would have loathed blogging.
Oh well. There we are. My apathy -- and my fatigue-- are setting in. Did I make any significant typos, or any stylistic blunders I'll for which I'll be kicking myself later? Who know. Aw, fuck it, it's good enough. Post and Publish. It's time for Doctor J to get to bed. And, no, Doctor J will not reveal what underwear he's wearing, and he will not be reading Dickens. I'll leave the booger-picking to your imaginations. Achoo.
O Sweet Arachne...
This man obviously had no Spidey-Sense. (Read at your own risk. Doc J is still cringing, and thanking God that Joe Rogan doesn't live in Germany.)
"Watch This."
Today, Bravo aired the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing, the finale to the show's second season. For those of you that don't follow the show, this was a magnificent episode, as Martin Sheen's President Bartlet had to deal with a series of personal issues, including his deception of the American people about his MS diagnosis, a hostage situation in (of all places) Haiti, and the kick in the stomach, the sudden death of his longtime secretary Mrs. Landingham. (A great character: losing her really was a shame.) The episode had shades of King Lear (including a mysterious storm ravaging the Atlantic seaboard), but the tough-stuff moment comes in a powerful soliloquy that gives Bartlet his Job-moment. Aggressively tramping through the cathedral after his secretary's funeral, Bartlet lights a cigarette and launches on God:
You're a son of a bitch, you know that? She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What, was that supposed to be funny? "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene. I don't know whose ass he was kissin' there, 'cause I think you're just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman, a warning shot? That was my son. What did I ever do to yours but praise his glory and praise his name? There's a tropical storm that's gaining speed and power. They say we haven't had a storm this bad since you took out that Tender ship of mine in the North Atlantic last year. Sixty-eight crew. You know what a Tender ship is? Fixes the other ships. It doesn't even carry guns, it just goes around, fixes the other ships and delivers the mail. That's all it can do.
Yes, I lied. It was a sin. I've committed many sins. Have I dispelased you, you feckless thug? 3.8 million new jobs, that wasn't good? Bailed out Mexico, increased foreign trade, thirty million new acres of land for conservation, put Mendoza on the bench, we're not fighting a war, I've raised three children... that's not enough to buy me out of the dog house?
Am I really to believe that these are the acts of a loving God? A just God? A wise God? To hell with your punishments. I was your servant here on Earth. And I spread your word and I did your work. To hell with your punishments. To hell with you. [He throws his cigarette on the floor and steps on it.]
(The Greene quote, by the way, is from his novel Brighton Rock, and is delivered by an old priest whose wisdom on matters is a tad tenuous; Bartlet's missing a few minor words in his citation.) But watching Sheen deliver those lines, I had shivers. This was brilliant television writing, audacious, tough, literate, but also stern; Bartlet isn't exculpated, and nor is God. It's as if God and Bartlet have become political enemies, each doing what each needs to do, but there's a bilious antagonism between them, though God, of course, says nothing in response. I was also admiring the intelligence of this man, and thinking to myself that if George W displayed even a fraction of this man's intelligence, I'd renounce my opinion of him as a dangerous buffoon and give him more than an ounce of the benefit of the proverbial doubt. Of course, Bartlet is fictional, and I'm sure Aaron Sorkin worked his butt off on that speech. But one can dream, can't one? As distraught as Bush may have been, say, on Septemeber 11th, there's no way in hell he thought of calling God "a feckless thug." (No, that's not an attack on Dubya's beliefs; it's an attack on his banality and general stupidity.) Those are the two anchors of The West Wing, though: sharp writing by Aaron Sorkin, and Sheen's very commanding presence as Bartlet. Sadly, since Sorkin left the show last year, the writing has gone to pot, and the stories have become increasingly desperate and contrived, leaving Sheen's Bartlet less of a Commander-In-Chief-cum-titan than the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Watching that episode today (which, of course, I'd seen several times before, but which seems only to get better with repeated viewings), I knew I was experiencing television pretty much at its dramatic best.
I mentioned that the episode doesn't play the sappy card, and the President isn't exculpated for the errors of his past. Instead, a vision of Mrs. Landingham, not a ghost but an imaginary presence, gives Bartlet the swift kick in the ass, saying "God doesn't make cars crash and you know it. Stop using me as an excuse." Ah, Mrs. Landingham, Bartlet's only real foil. Their exchange is worth quoting here, as the President asks for facts, asks how he can get past this:
Bartlet: Give me numbers.
Mrs. Landingham: I don't know numbers. You give them to me.
Bartlet: How about a child born in this minute has a one in five chance of being born into poverty.
Mrs. Landingham: How many Americans don't have health insurance?
Bartlet: Forty-four million.
Mrs. Landingham: What's the number one cause of death for black men under thirty-five?
Bartlet: Homicide.
Mrs. Landingham: How many Americans are behind bars?
Bartlet: Three million.
Mrs. Landingham: How many Americans are drug addicts?
Bartlet: Five million.
Mrs. Landingham: And one in five kids in poverty?
Bartlet: That's thirteen million American children. Three and a half million kids go to schools that are literally falling apart. We need a hundred and twenty-seven billion in school construction and we need it today.
Mrs. Landingham: To say nothing of fifty-three people trapped in an embassy.
Bartlet: Yes.
Mrs. Landingham: You know, if you don't want to run again, I respect that. But if you don't run because you think it's gonna be too hard or you think you're gonna lose, well, God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.
The economy of language (and the language of economy, for that matter) is effective, and the effect is to turn Bartlet around, to get him back to the foundations of facts and lift himself up from there. Most of the rest of the episode, a good several minutes, is done almost entirely without dialogue, as Dire Straits' "Brothers In Arms" plays moodily in the background, all building up to the moment that Jed decides whether or not to answer the question of whether or not he's going to run for a second term. Bartlet doesn't say anything, he doesn't explain, doesn't indicate, but all of us in the audience know what's coming, and it's wonderfully evocative because it's done with out the desperation of language. Bartlet becomes a force of nature, his body language the only thing needed to convey the change. "Watch this," says the Chief of Staff, gazing with muted glee at Bartlet taking command of the podium. And, damn it, I'm watching it, probably with as many tingles as the President's staff would have had. And, damn it, I'm watching this and thinking, TV doesn't get any better than this, even if, more of than not, TV is little for than a feckless thug. We need more forces of nature, more forces of intellect, more people willing to rattle our assumptions. Now if only Dubya had a Mrs. Landingham.
Waay! Haw 'aalmeenaayaa hwaa!
Need some handy Aramaic phrases for watching The Passion Of The Christ? Well, here they are.
"You Know, The Whatchamacallit By The Doo-Dad There"
My mother seems to be suffering from this condition. Does this mean RK will soon lose his faculty with nouns? Methinks not. See, studying literature may not be such a waste after all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)