A Rare Interesting Blog, And A Solipsistic Aside

      Plain and simple: I like this chap's blog, and not just because it is in large part about poetry and poetics (of which, this post had me chuckling in concord). The blog itself strikes me as well-designed and well-written, and generally quite thoughtful, though it seems that-- like this blog-- it tends unfortunately to elicit silence when topics are most literary. I must also confess that this chap's blog is more urbane than my own, and certainly more carefully edited. Particularly with the new changes to Blogger, it's all too easy to miss typos and dropped-words and the like, though I confess that my je-ne-donne-pas-une-merde attitude is probably not helping matters, either.

      I sometimes think this blog should be more disciplined, more focussed, and more strictly literary. Then again, my readership here would be almost non-existent. It's true, though, that this blog, like its creator, can no more deny its naughtier and goofier dimensions than it can its loftier and occasionally didactic ones. This blog, also like its creator, will always be a little disheveled, a little rough around the edges. For some reason beyond my immediate explanation, that doesn't bother me in the least. I'll chalk it up to necessary roughness and leave it at that. I'd rather not be Hal, promising to throw his loose behaviour off. The world becomes little more than grey when we banish plump Jack and what he represents. A health then, my friends, to ribaldry and silliness and the spirit of indulgence. A health, too, my friends, to all those minions of the moonlight for whom misbehaviour is a mandate. Cheers.

      (And, yes, I'm fully aware I may be paying lip-service to my own self-determined tradition. But that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So there. )

Rules Of The Game

      Or, "How To Avoid Getting Mercilessly Bitch-Slapped Without Really Trying," courtesy of Dave ("Mister Manners") Barry. Halle-lujah.

More Swimming In The Callow End

      What is it with people these days? Un-[expletive uncharacteristically deleted]-believable.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

      Sometimes, I think there should be a Dictionary For Ironists. See today's candidate entry for "progress."

Minority Report

      At the risk of seeming (let alone being) indignantly arrogant, it is this blog's not-so-humble assertion that if this is true, that if my fellow Canadians deem it fit to hand Paul Martin a majority government on a platter, then they truly DESERVE to get screwed. Yes, screwed, or perhaps more appropriately, sodomized sans lubrication. I don't care for whom anyone votes-- not even if it's to vote for "Team Martin" (notice no one calls them the Liberals anymore, really) -- but if we seat these sharks with a majority, then I wash my hands. So, what's the answer, Doctor J, at least as you see it?, I can hear you all sniggering. The answer, patient readers, is to vote strategically. Don't vote Martin just because you can't see any other party as a viable option (i.e., you don't like your other choices); watch what's happening locally, and weigh your judgment accordingly, particularly in terms of what your vote can do to keep our political system in check. What would I like to see? I'd like to see what some call "an Italian parliament," a parliament sufficiently spread among the various parties, with a minority government. Let's make these guys have to work together-- and be at least in some sense accountable to one another. If this means voting BQ or NDP or Conservative or whatever in your local riding, maybe it would be a good idea, especially if it's looking like a close race. A majority government is not one that should be handed over by default; it should be a statement of a collective sense of political direction. We have no specific political direction, and none of the leaders, none of them, have offered a unique perspective behind which people will stand with commitment and/or conviction. So, the answer, to me at least, is clear: fracture the parliament, make whatever party that comes to government know that they have to walk on proverbial eggshells. Let's not let them think, with a majority mandate, that the lessons of the sponsorship scandal-- remember: just one among many-- have been forgotten, that we'll be hooked and drawn again into buying the resigning logic of "who else is there to vote for." If my compatriots dish over another majority government to the Liberals, they will have proven themselves as little more than cynical fools, and they will have absolutely no damned right to bitch when the next series of scandals arises.

      Canada hasn't had a minority government since Joe Clark's. It's time we corrected that. Then, in the time that follows, let the hegemonies be broken and let us see what emerges from there. Let's also make our leaders actually have to earn government. Now wouldn't THAT be a novel concept? Imagine what that would do for "the democratic deficit" of which Prime Minister Martin speaks with certainly forked-tongue. I don't care if Martin wins the election and forms the next government, but let it be a minority. Let's make Bolingbroke prove he deserves the crown instead of shrugging passively as we hand it over to him.

      Have no fear: this is the last time I'll preach about the election. From now on, it'll be back to heckling, hooting and ribald hollering.

I'll Take "Things Involving Yeast For $600," Alex

      I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but the gag/game from today's Fark about replacing a key word in a famous lines with the word "muffin" is little more than a polite variation on an old drinking game in which key words are replaced with the word "vagina." Although there's no substantial drinking component specific to the game itself, it's much more fun (for obvious reasons) as a gaggle of people proceed to get royally blotto (it also makes the spirit of the game decidedly more infectious). I remember-- sorta -- with Mr Mitchell and company a couple of years ago, and the silliness was nothing less than replete. Our phrases, of course, had a largely Shakespearean bent-- "Ay, every inch a vagina!", "Is this a vagina that I see before me?", "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your vaginas", "Once more unto the vagina, dear friends," and so on and so forth. (Some phrases didn't even need the vaginal substitution, as from King Lear: "Look on her, her lips, her lips!") Anyway, it's something to do on your next drinking night-out, preferrably with literatue people. Or, should you so desire, you can practice your magic in the comments here. Just imagine Tennyson:

Half a league, half a league,
   Half a league onward,
All in the vagina of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the vagina of death
   Rode the six hundred!

Or Shelley:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my vagina, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Or Robbie Burns-- picture it:

My luve is like a red, red vagina,
   That's newly sprung in June...

Or, perhaps worst of all, Wilfred Owen:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, ---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro vagina mori.

Okay, now that I've used the word "vagina" more times than Keanu Reeves uses the word "Whoa" (and this will surely screw up my Google hits), I'll return you to your regularly scheduled blog. ;-)

Swinging Words Of Wisdom

      As heretical as it might be to declare, colour me a member of this school of thinking. I particularly like this statement-- however factually problematic-- as a code to live by: “I may sound old fashioned... but I think all women should be treated as I’d want my wife, daughters and granddaughters treated.” Indeed. See also this excerpt with which I am in total agreement:

Said Frank: “I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.” And if the Chairman of the Board couldn’t figure them out, what chance do we mortals have?

Hallelujah....

A Separate Peace

      For those of you with too much time on your, er, hands....

Hey, Dude, Where's My Cock?

      A terrified world waits for the inevitable.... Entire populations keeps asking, "And then? And then? And then?"

And People Say I'm Silly....

      On Fark today, replacing one word in a key phrase with the word "muffin." The various entries can be found here, but this one's my favourite, by a long shot, from someone named "GeneFrenkle":

The way your dad looked at it, this muffin was your birthright. He'd be damned if any of the slopes were gonna get their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright. So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this muffin up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the muffin. I hid this uncomfortable piece of muffin up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the muffin to you.

Hilarious, especially if you imagine Mr. Walken delivering the lines. Imagine Hamlet:

                  O, I die, Horatio,
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit.
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th' election lights
On Fortinbras, he has my dying voice.
So tell him, with th' occurents more and less
Which have solicited-- the rest is muffin.

May flights of bran flakes sing thee to thy rest.

Oh. My. God.

      Sadly, I know a few people who would defend the offending teachers in this article, which should tell you something about the tendency toward self-legitimating pretense in the contemporary educational streams. But check out this quote from one of the would-be apologists who evidently has absolutely no sense of tact, or good taste:

Some educators, including Susan Edwards, a substitute teacher, said showing the pictures may be appropriate under certain circumstances.

"Under certain circumstances, yes, because that's the world we live in, and we can't hide our head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist," said Edwards. [Emphasis added.]

Why does this polemicizing-- "This is why we shouldn't be at war" -- strike me as being of the same disturbing piety as that of anti-abortion activists that advocate blowing up clinics and killing doctors and patients in the name of saving the unborn? Disgusting, horrifying, hypocritical, and absolutely mad, these teachers deserve to be put through the terrifying sword ritual from that great old Edward Woodward film The Wicker Man.

      This blog cannot help but wonder if these same teachers would be so glib about matters were the victim a person close to them. Methinks not. God save us from the righteous and the unimaginably callow.

And Gentlemen In England, Now A-Bed

      Understatement of the day, quoted in this article the contents of which you all know by now: "From time to time, things like this would happen." This gives new definition to the word "casual." See also this quote from Sivits: "Our command would have slammed us." Oh yeah. I'm sure they'd all have enjoyed a good slamming....

Straight Try As A Queer Guy

      Now where, oh where, is Mr. Roper when we need him? R.I.P. John Ritter.

Let's Pronounce It Like Gnu

      So, what's the advanced word on Gmail, the beta version of Google's email service? Check out Extreme Tech's assessment here which seems pretty through. Surprisingly not much on the notorious privacy issues in re Google's monitoring policy, but one suspects more will come on this once all this is past the beta-testing state.

The Trifecta Of Bounce And Pout

      Rex Murphy's column in today's Globe and Mail is a chuckle-inducing exercise in Canadian mock irony, and is well-worth the read. What, you might logically ask, is "mock irony"? It's the name I give to that-- almost particularly Canadian-- tendency to write with a civilised, critical tone of irony, all the while subverting and mocking that tone by casually letting out airs of pretension with subtle self-rejoinders. The major rejoinder doesn't come until the end of the article, but it's there, and it's a typical self-subversion of the article's critique. It seems we've now made, though, a discomforting karmic trade, one bubble-bodied bimbo for one occasional Irish visitor who comes by now and again to float Canada's humanitarian boat. If we were going to trade for an Irishman, we should have gotten Van Morrison-- or at least Seamus Heaney. Or perhaps we should have gone for an equal trade of one bimbo for another? If we'd traded for Jessica, we'd at least have been able to say we went in for a newer model, even if it possessed the same carriage capacity.

And Not To Yield

      Last night's final episode of Frasier was a class act, and I hope that those of you that didn't see it but did watch the infernally idiotic send-off for Friends eventually get off your comic duffs and realize what adult comedy is about. Someone emailed me today asking about the poem that Frasier quoted at the end of the episode. Well, Frasier doesn't quote from the entire poem, but from the last nine lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses (1833, published in 1842), and the lines he recited are these:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The full text of the poem can be found here. And, no, I didn't need Google to identify the poem.

      Frasier went out as well as can be expected (given the series closers almost inevitably disappoint). Its final moments were genuinely moving-- and not in the least syrupy. Other series nearing their ends: keep this show in mind, please. It was a graceful exit, something more shows really need to learn how to do. That it ended with a kind of happy Prosperan wistfulness was appropriate: there was hope, but not certainty; a future left in ellipsis, but not hyperbolized. Well done.

Quote Of The Day

      Greg Proops, describing Canada to an L.A. audience, says that it's "just like America, except they read and they don't shoot each other so much. Wimps."

Slaughter And Blood And The Choking Groans Of Men

      Skimming through the various reviews of Troy (partially because I may or may not be teaching The Iliad next year, if RK and I get our respective ways), it seems the film has the following primary dimensions: expensive and elaborate special effects; a 20th century military mentality; a mildly attractive but not especially entrancing Helen; an almost androgynous Paris; lots of fancy battle scenes; a fine but brief performance by Peter O'Toole as Priam (O'Toole's the only one getting consistently good reviews); Brad Pitt's biceps; Brad Pitt's arse; Brad Pitt's arse; and, most significantly, Brad Pitt's absolutely heroic arse. Oh, dear lord.... And, oh yeah, they've apparently buggered up the Agamemnon storyline. I'm sure, however, that there will soon be an utterly unnecessary novelization of the film to come, Homeric aspects rent utterly asunder, chronicling instead, in finest detail, the intricacies of Brad Pitt's arse, which, apparently, explains all the seamen on those thousand ships.

Morning Shadows

      It's 7.30 in the morning on Friday as I sit down to write this entry, a lovely sunny day, a sort of genial, warm day to which many of us in Canada are only now becoming reacquainted. I've been up and at it now for about three hours: I'm a couple of coffees in, a few cigarettes down, the New York Times Sunday Crossword-- issued locally on the following Friday, so it just came this morning-- already complete. My cat, the aptly-named Trouble, is cleaning his chops after an evidently fulfilling breakfast, and, feline aside, I am wonderfully, blissfully, alone. There's a rare tranquility in the air, or a tranquility with which I've not been familiar in some time. A mix disc of soul classics is playing in the background-- "Midnight Train to Georgia" has just passed, the Reverend Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" is riding in the air-- and a sense of completeness hovers with it. Trouble now has perched himself at an open window, staring with his hunter's fascination at the birds chirping and squirrels darting about in the backyard. I have done something rare. I have left the news off for this morning. No CNN or BBC or Newsworld coverage of the atrocities and idiocies at play in the fields of the world. The music has now progressed to Ray Charles, in his inimitable way, crooning that he's a lover man in "I Gotta Woman." Well and huh and huh and huh and huh and huh and haaaa..... And the morning sails as such, like a Ray Charles groove, oh so comfortable, oh so removed from reality, or at least from the reality most of us know these days. The telephone does not-- cannot-- ring while I write this. I have no courses to teach, no silly details with which to deal, no letters to write, save for a few emails I've yet to answer but none of which are pressing in their urgency. There's something remarkably hale about this morning. Baby, I'm hot just like an oven.... Marvin. Help to relieve my mind.... This is the solitude that sails as if atop a crest. Another coffee, surprisingly good this morning, not needed but simply wanted. The music has now shifted to James Brown's infectious version of Charlie Midnight's "How Do You Stop?," a song that always induces me to a shuffle, a pleasant reminder of days when I used to dance. How do you stop / the tide comin' in? / How do you stop / the cold, cold wind? / Tell me, aha! The music is perfect. The coming "Livin' in America" won't ring with any sort of irony, and thanks be for that, at least for the moment. These voices this morning provide a pulse of punctuation. Ray's howls, James' grunts, there's a sunny funk to it all. There's not an ounce of burden to this writing, not a dash of labour; there's no sense of construction, no sense of writing with any purpose, cheeky or didactic, that reminds me of an audience. Ray's back, this time with his magnificent, haunting version of Leon Russell's "A Song For You," a song that always seems to cause an out-of-body experience for me, especially because of lines like I loved you in a place / where there's no space or time / I loved you for my life / 'Cuz you're a friend of mine. There's a half-broken majesty to all this: triumphant but humble, it's enough to suggest a monody could be happy. Dianoia is possible. Time can be held in some gentle arrest. Life is more than time's creeping toward a precipice's edge. It's also the study of a moment's meaning, of a sound, a pulse, a cadence, a certain slant of light. Ray's Simonizing. Oh, help me.... I'm still crazy after all these years.... I don't believe it... I wanna hold on to you.... That's why I'm still crazy after all these years.... The blessèd kairos without chronos. Augustine seems so far away, self-collection an abstraction perhaps to be considered later. There's a transparency to these moments, a transparency philosophy might muddy or mitigate. There is only song, sun, a cat now studying me with one eye open, and this me that doesn't care what this me is. It just is. And it's still crazy. After all these years. I don't believe it.... Oh baby.... You've got me by your little finger... And I ain't lyin'....

Noons Of Dryness See You Fed            

      Found myself reading again some of the poems of W. H. (Wystan Hughes) Auden the other day, a poet that always seems to fly under the radar of one's memory despite probably being the most prolific poet between the end of WWII and the 60s. He's mainly remembered these days (if at all) for "The Shield Of Achilles," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (though many think much of Auden's steam for that poem was stolen by Yeats himself with his own self-elegy, "Under Ben Bulben"), "The Unknown Citizen" and "Musée des Beaux Arts." Thought I'd include some of his more immediately accessible poems here.

If I Could Tell You

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

And there's this magnificent poem from 1948, one of Auden's best and one worth reading and rereading:

In Praise of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
      Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
      With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
      That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
      Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
      Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
      For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
      That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
      To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
      Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
      By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
      Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
      On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
      There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
      And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
      They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
      Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
      Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
      Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
      With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
      Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
      For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
                                                That is why, I suppose,
      The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
      The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. 'Come!' cried the granite wastes,
      "How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be
      Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels,
"On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
      Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
      Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
      By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
      That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad."

      They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
      Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
      And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
      Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
      It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
      Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
      By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
      Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
      Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
      Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
      Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
      Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
      To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
      These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
      Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
      Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
      Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Damn, he was good. I'll leave my assessment of him there. Would love to hear what anybody else thinks of him anymore. The line "I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong" is somehow more devastating in Auden's hands than they might be in those of almost any other modern poet.