A Poundish Cure?

      Read. Consider. Contemplate. (The option, alas, of the ounce of prevention now long lost.) With thanks, again, to Greg for the info on the book, whose blog as a whole is always worth a read. When he hits gold, it's not fool's gold.

Tuckered Out

      It seems Tucker Carlson is moving to MSNBC-- and thus prompting CNN to cancel Crossfire.   I can't believe it. What-- oh what-- will the world do without its mid-afternoon barking spectacle? And what will happen to poor, gentle Bob "The Douchebag of Liberty" Novak, now that he'll have one less show on which to snarl? What will Idiot America-- as opposed to Intelligent America, which watched Crossfire only to get its blood pressure up-- do without his pre-dinner servings of wisdom on a cob (and CIA agents on a stick)? Oh, this is a tragedy! A most lamentable loss! Rhetoric will never be the same again! Please, please, think of the douchebags! Oh, the vinegar! Oh, the water!

      (James Carville and Paul Begala-- well, goodness only knows where they can go. Just don't let them come to Canada, please.)

      So, let me add this up: Jon Stewart 1, Crossfire 0. If this had happened in time for Christmas (or, better, the election), I just might have come to believe in Sanity Claus after all.

      Aside: don't buy the plop from CNN president Joe Klein when he says, "We just determined there was not a role here in the way Tucker wanted his career to go. He wanted to host a prime-time show in which he would put on live guests and have spirited debate. That's not the kind of show CNN is going to be doing." Just wait until they can get some other name brands. And perhaps find a way to make Carlos Watson anything more than the Krusty the Klown version of Bryant Gumbel.

      Aside-aside: And can we do something, while we're at it, about the irrevocably obnoxious Wolf Blitzer, the vapid Paula Zahn, and the preening Sanjay Gupta? First, we take Atlanta....

The Sisters of Literacy

      Okay, so maybe she has one talent....     

      Coming soon: MTV's Pygmalion, with Ashton Kutcher as Henry Higgins-- and Jack Black as Colonel Pickering.

Cheeky, Very Cheeky

      Make your own cracks; I can't be bothered.

Rag Mama Rag

      Paul Wells' recent column on the deterioration of Canada's news systems is worth taking a look into, though I'm not sure his conclusion-- halting the protection of Canucki papers-- is necessarily the best answer. I suspect major international media outlets that might be interested in breaking into the Canadian market might be more in line with the Murdochites whose primary task seems to be the dumbing down (and titting up) of journalism.

The Don Of Time

       

      Still not too much to say on my part, but it's worth remembering and reflecting upon the image of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, as a current article in the Chronicle reminds me. You can read it below because of the Chronicle's inclination to remove articles from public access (the original article can be found here). The grand picaro has always been a central figure for the Not-So-Good Doctor, a character I grant a great deal more sympathy than a lot of contemporary readers, his "madness" -- I don't like the term in his regard-- noble and somehow more grounding than most other standards of "reality." People don't talk much about nobility, much less chivalry, in this increasingly graceless age, the very idea of it at best greeted as a kind of quaint naïvety and at worst as a tragic ignorance of the truer-- that is to say, harsher-- ways of the world. The article below hints that in this day and age it's unlikely a book like Don Quixote would get published, which strikes me as one of the great historical ironies of it, that the book like its hero would hardly be able to exist in a world too easily given to cheeky snarkings, nigglings and dismissals. But the book remains, Quixotically, tilting away through and at history, perhaps even more crucial now than ever. Sometimes a little noble madness isn't just a touching anachronism; maybe it's the last, and even redeeming, grasp we can have on a higher sense of ourselves. Food for thought as Don Quixote enters his 400th year.

Don Quixote at 400: Still Conquering Hearts

By ILAN STAVANS

The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is turning 400. By some accounts, the first part of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece, was available in Valladolid by Christmas Eve 1604, although Madrid didn't get copies until January 1605. Thus came to life the "ingenious gentleman" who, ill equipped with antiquated armor "stained with rust and covered with mildew," with an improvised helmet, atop an ancient nag "with more cracks than his master's pate," went out into a decaying world where there were plenty of "evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify."

Cervantes catches a glimpse of the down-and-out hidalgo at around 50, the prime of one's life by today's standards but a synonym of decrepitude during what was considered Spain's "Golden Age," an appellation Cervantes complicates. The protagonist, we are told, is weathered, his flesh scrawny, and his face gaunt. We know nothing of his childhood and adolescence and only a modicum about his affairs, including that too little sleep and too many chivalry novels have addled his brain.

Almost 1,000 pages later, Don Quixote (or Alonso Quixada or Quexada, some names Cervantes gives to the hidalgo) lies on his deathbed. Finally, well into the second book, issued in 1615, Don Quixote dies -- but only after an impostor, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, impatient that Cervantes kept procrastinating, brought out an unofficial second part that pushed the author to complete his work. Cervantes may also have been sensing that his own demise, which came in April 1616, was close.

About to die the exemplary death, Don Quixote is nevertheless consumed by the grief of countless defeats and frustrated in his impossible mission to see his beloved Dulcinea of Toboso. Is he wiser? Disenchanted? Does he die of melancholia? The limits of age?

"Don Quixote's end," we are told, "came after he had received all the sacraments and had execrated books of chivalry with many effective words. The scribe happened to be present, and he said he had never read in any book of chivalry of a knight errant dying in his bed in so tranquil and Christian a manner as Don Quixote, who, surrounded by the sympathy and tears of those present, gave up the ghost, I mean to say, he died."

Don Quixote might be dead, but his ever-ambiguous ghost lives on. His admirers -- and, in unequal measure, detractors -- are legion. Operas, musicals, theatrical and film adaptations, as well as fictional recreations keep piling up: Laurence Sterne was inspired by Don Quixote's misadventures when writing Tristram Shandy; Gustave Flaubert paid homage to him in Madame Bovary, as did Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" can be read as a reimagining of the knight's simplicity. And so on.

Then there are the multilayered interpretations of Don Quixote's pursuit. Anybody that is somebody has put forth an opinion, from Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, and Américo Castro, to name a handful of Iberians first, to Samuel Johnson, Denis Diderot, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Over the years, Don Quixote has been a template of the times: The 18th century believed the knight to be a lunatic, lost to reason; the Victorians approached him as a romantic dreamer, trapped, just like artists and prophets, in his own fantasy; the modernists applauded his quest for an inner language; the postmodernists adore his dislocated identity. Psychiatrists have seen him as a case study in schizophrenia. Communists have turned him into a victim of market forces. Intellectual historians have portrayed him as a portent of Spain's decline into intellectual obscurantism.

Some scholars call Don Quixote the first modern novel, a bildungsroman that traces the arch of its protagonist's life and the inner transformation to which it gives room. In the spirit of Erasmus of Rotterdam's In Praise of Folly, parody reinforces the divide between the life of the mind and the strictures of society. Others stress the novel's irony, the multiple voices and blurring of fiction and reality -- the latter an aspect that Gabriel García Márquez would pay tribute to in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don Quixote is one of the first characters to comment on his own readers ("for me alone was Don Quixote born," Cervantes writes in the second book, in response to the publication of the sham version); he is caught at the turning point of the Enlightenment, between the secular and the religious, reason and belief. Detractors argue that Cervantes is a careless stylist and a clumsy plot-builder, pointing out the fractured nature of the novel, the endless repetitions.

No doubt all that would have come as a surprise to Cervantes himself, a tax collector with a tarnished reputation, a soldier whose old battleground glories and often pathetic dreams of literary success kept him alive. He envied Lope de Vega, the dramaturge of 1,000 comedias, and was looked down upon by the snobbish literary figures of his day. In short, Cervantes was an outcast. Indeed, in spite of all the hoopla, he remains one in Spain, perhaps because Spaniards today still don't know what to make of him. In Madrid the house of de Vega has been turned into a museum; the one nearby where Cervantes wrote has been sold time and again, commemorated by a miserable plaque.

One wonders: Would Don Quixote pass the test and be published in New York today? I frankly doubt it. It would be deemed what editors call "a trouble manuscript": too long, the story line problematic, the plot stuffed with too many adventures that do too little to advance the narrative and too many characters whose fate the reader gets attached to but who suddenly disappear. And that awkward conceit of a character finding a book about himself! The style! Those careless sentences that twist and turn!

The first part of Cervantes's manuscript was sent (possibly under the title of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha) to the Counsel of Castilla for permission to print it. It then went to the Inquisitorial censors for approval. Around August 1604, Cervantes tried in vain to enlist a celebrity to compose a poem eulogizing his protagonist, as it was the custom of the time to include such praise at the outset of a novel. He failed, his narrative considered too lowbrow, and composed his own poems.

For all that, the first part of the novel was successful early on. The initial printing of some 1,800 copies was quickly insufficient, and new editions were issued (including one in English in 1612). By the time the second part was released in 1615, Don Quixote was a best seller. The parodic quality of the novel, the way it pokes fun at erudition and paints love as the only redemption for the heart, enchanted readers. As did Cervantes's digressions on his country's delusions of grandeur.

In my personal library, I have some 80 different versions, including ones produced for children, as well as translations into Yiddish, Korean, Urdu, and part of the novel that I translated into Spanglish. I guess my collection is proof of my passion. I can't think of a book that better illustrates the tension between private and public life, one that speaks louder to the power of the imagination in such an ingenious, unsettling fashion. If ever I wanted to live my life like a literary character, it would be as Cervantes's sublime creation.

As the forerunner of antiheroes and superheroes, Don Quixote, with his flawed aspirations, may not subdue giants or imaginary enemies like the Knight of the Wood, but he continues to conquer hearts, precisely because he is so ridiculous, inhabiting a universe of his own concoction. He is the ultimate symbol of freedom, a self-made man championing his beliefs against all odds. His is also a story about reaching beyond one's own confinements, a lesson on how to turn poverty and the imagination into assets, and a romance that reaches beyond class and faith.

Some authors are so influential that their names have been turned into adjectives: Dantean, Proustian, Hemingway-esque. But how many literary characters have undergone a similar fate? "Quixotic," "quixotism," and "quixotry," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are all related to "Quixote," "an enthusiastic visionary person like Don Quixote, inspired by lofty and chivalrous but false or unrealizable ideals."

To be an underdog, to be a fool content with one's delusions, is that what modernity is about? Or is it the impulse to pursue those delusions into action? Undoubtedly we will continue asking ourselves those questions as the enthusiastic visionary starts his fifth century, still as vibrant and mischievous, as resourceful and controversial as ever.

Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His next book, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, will be published this month. Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion will be published by Graywolf Press in April.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 18, Page B11

Dreadful Apathy

      Well, I guess I should write something here, especially for those of you that have been starting to worry-slash-wonder about my silence of late. Beyond the machinations of The Season (i.e., too many nights out and too many achy mornings afterwards), I've been in one of those stretches when it'd be more comfortable to swallow pinecones than sit down and write anything. Writing, after all, would require me to have to sustain a thought for more than a few seconds, and it'd require those qualities of patience and ambition in which I am in disastrously short supply right now. Simple fact is, sometimes I hate writing-- hate having to express things, hate having to labour to do so, hate even the idea of talking, as many of my past girlfriends and involvements know all too well. I just go quiet, a reaction as much voluntary as not. This isn't necessarily a sign of sullenness or ill-temper; in fact, it's seldom a sign of anything other than the desire to be quiet, particularly when one doesn't think one has anything substantial to say. And writing when one doesn't really feel like writing, well that's a special kind of torture. How bad is it? It's taken me almost an hour to write this paragraph, each clause an extraction, each sentence an amputation. And unlike other forms of torture, one meets it with dreadful apathy rather than fear. It has now been over an hour. Blah. I'm trying to remember what it's like to be inspired. And my memory is failing me. Surprise, surprise.

      With that, I'm filling out this post with another one of those silly memes that keep making the rounds.

A Year In Review

1. What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before? Nothing.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? No resolutions. Nothing to keep.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.

4. Did anyone close to you die? Yes-- one of my good friends, and one of the first people to nick me as "Doctor J."

5. What countries did you visit? The US, briefly.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004? Inspiration, money, and a harem.

7. What dates from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? November 2nd: a day that will live in infamy.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Did I achieve anything this year? Probably not. Next question.

9. What was your biggest failure? That I've gone another year in the same dull rut. Becketts do oft prove prophets.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? A flu bug.

11. What was the best thing you bought? Ray Charles' last album, which I loaned to a friend the night I bought it and haven't received back yet.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Those of Canadians who continued to put the letter 'u' in 'behaviour' where it belongs.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? The American President's.

14. Where did most of your money go? As far away from me as possible.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? You have to explain this "excited" thing. I don't seem to have that word in my vocabulary anymore.

16. What song will always remind you of 2004? Britney Spears' "Toxic." Sums up the year pretty well.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

      a) happier or sadder? Neither.
      b) thinner or fatter? Neither.
      c) richer or poorer? Poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? You name it.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? You name it.

20. How did you be spend Christmas? With family. As always.

21. How many one-night stands? None this year. I think. Not entirely sure on that one.

22. What was your favorite TV program? Meh-- can't say I have any favourites anymore.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Not really.

24. What was the best book you read? Who knows. Not sure if I bought anything new this year.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery? None. Correction: Lindsay Lohan's chest. Impressive range, there....

26. What did you want and get? Leonard Cohen's newest album. That's about it.

27. What did you want and not get? Inspiration, money, and a harem. And Van Morrison tickets.

28. What was your favorite film of this year? Maybe Shrek 2. Still haven't seen most other movies this year.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? Trente-et-un, and mutely lamenting the fact over beer and Irish whisky.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004? Same as always.

32. What kept you sane? Willpower and cigarettes.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Fancy? No one in particular.

34. What political issue stirred you the most? Praying that the Americans would elect the course of reason. They didn't.

35. Who did you miss? [silence] [greater silence] Ray Charles.

36. Who was the best new person you met? A "new person" would be a baby, and not having met many babies this year....

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004. The things that ought to matter don't, and the things that shouldn't do. And something about peanut butter that I'm too much of a gentleman to mention here.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year: "Yeah we're drinking and we're dancing / but there's nothing really happening / and the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night." (Leonard Cohen, "Closing Time")

Yawn.... So blasé today....

The Diamonds And The Shit

      Ah, this blog is slowly returning to its former self, the days of wine and hosers finally subsiding. New Year's Eve proved moreorless uneventful (read in: sober) and unmemorable (read in: too sober), which may or may not bode well for 2005, of which the pervasive thought among my group of friends is "may she be a damned sight better than the last one."   2004 surely had to be one of the worst years in recent memory, for which the horrifying events in South East Asia and East Africa were devastating coups de grace. The turn of a year inevitably involves contemplating where we've been and speculating about where the hell we're going, and so it's interesting to note Jared Diamond's article in today's NYT, which frankly gives this blog more reason for despair than for hope. Herakleitos once suggested that the way up and the way down are the same thing, but I'm not so sure, that itching in the back of my head reminding me about the crucial duosyllable in the name of Janus. Ah, time passes-- sometimes quite runnily. Churning and churning in the widening gyre....

Happy New Year, Everyone

      Just a brief note here to wish everyone a happy new year, 2004 certainly having proven a year more for bad news than good. My apologies again to everyone still waiting for emails. I'm off shortly to make fake merriment in a few of my locals, in itself not a wise idea given the ridiculous amount of imbibing that's been on the docket the past while. Ah, nobody ever said the life of a gad was an easy one.... One of these days I'm going to wake up and discover that my life has indeed become a Jimmy Buffet song. But, onward ho, he says steeling himself for another night of misbehaviour. Have a good one, everybody. Cheers.

~~ Oh, Oh, Domino.... ~~

      My apologies again: I'm writing now in some haste, and doing so because some of you might be given to worrying about the Not-So-Good Doctor. I'm off in an hour or so to meet up with a former student of mine from (gulp!) eight years ago, the only student of mine with whom I'm still in contact from my McMaster days. It's an open-house sorta thing, and far be it from me to decline drinks. (As my old friend Falstaff says, 'tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.) Will respond to emails and such either later tonight or tomorrow. Probably when I can begin to digest this fact that almost floored me last night. A bientôt, mes amies.

Puss In Box

      Trouble, adorably living up to his name.

A Spectacular Lack Of Creativity...

      ... results in this: this blog's decision to set up a dramatis personae of contributors to this blog. After all, it's bad enough I found myself having to describe myself on this blog, so you should be condemned to similar fates. Here's the catch: cite the name/alias you wish (and ideally have used in the past), and send me a 1-2 sentence description you'd like to have for yourself. Keep in mind: this is all tongue firmly-in-cheek. So, send me what you want and don't make me invent anything for you. Why? Cuz I'm old, tired, cranky, miserable, and just-plain generally disagreeable. This should surprise none of you. Grr. But I'm thinking more and more a cast of characters might be a good idea. So-- as the wife said to her husband-- take care of yourself, because you don't want to see what I might do.

      With that, back to the cranky box for me. And, alas, not the cranky box.... no, I'll not complete that sentence....

Susan Sontag Dead At 71

She was never this blog's favourite writer, but today comes the news that Susan Sontag has died at age 71. She always seemed to me something of an intellectual dilletante, but I can imagine that many fembots in the academy are absolutely lost with her passing.   Frankly, I don't have anything of significance to say about her.

"Honestly, It's Just So High Up There..."

      As the song goes, river deep, mountain high....

The Obligatory Post-Christmas Entry

      Christmas has come and gone again, a thousand little stresses finally given way to the tranquility of over-dome. It's late-- or early, one supposes-- as I write this, Leonard Cohen's Dear Heather wafting in the background, my darling visitor curled up on the floor a few steps away, and me, little drained me, drinking Ancient Coast Gamay Nouveau and smoking cigarettes with the ease of a man released. The day itself was exhausting but not bad, my little cousins, particularly the five year-old Nathan, having done their work of using me as a jungle jim, and thoroughly making sure their would-be uncle has compensated for most of the rest of the days in the year when I'm not around. Much of the past few hours have been spent doing, blessèd be, absolutely nothing, merely watching television with my little visitor cuddled up on my chest or against my legs or with her sweet head adoze on my hand, purring everso gently and letting me know that, yes, indeed, she is very happy here. Yes, for all intents and purposes, she's been adopted, and she's my adoptee-- or I hers-- such that she doesn't go more than a few feet from my side when I'm in the house. She's very, very clearly my girl, and there's an indomitable sweetness to her affectionateness. And she's won everyone over, even Trouble. I knew she would. I just knew it. This means coming up with a name for my rather lemur-like lass, a thing I'd avoided because I've no Adamic tendencies and I'd not wanted to get too attached to her. But there's something about an animal that brings out both the child and the parent in me, and in so many. That this is happening at Christmastime is no doubt grist for the mill for those that have dared to suggest that even the most cynical can be warmed by the spirit of the season. Kids and animals, kids and animals: they're the only things I'm not cynical about. And days spent with them can be wonderfully restorative, however exhausting they may be. That's what Christmas should be about-- restoration, replenishment, rediscovering one's capacity to be taken by a sense of wonder. So it has been Good. It still is. My little one hasn't budged.

      So now I should name my little one-- and even though I hate repeating myself, there's something about the word "little" that calls itself to be used, as if it were the crucial, inescapable adjective to which one simply must return. I'm thinking of calling her Raea (pronounced rai-yah), a name that means something to me but not to anyone else, which seems only appropriate. Am also thinking-- though much less so-- about Lorca, but again not for the reasons the more literate among you might expect. (Anyone expecting explanations will be sorely disappointed.) There's thankfully no hurry. She comes to "girl" and "girly-girl," a series of words that should have every heterosexual male thinking, "If only it were that easy." For the record, I'm increasingly convinced-- whether rightly or wrongly-- that she's a Tibetan, based on her markings, fur, disposition, and eye-colouring. A quick toss on the Net turns this up, which seems about right, even if the pictures don't entirely match up. And, yes, I've been writing a lot about this cat lately, which is probably as annoying as a new-parent ranting about his or her child. I plead guilty. Jer and his animals, Jer and his animals.... It's hardly an unfamiliar sutra.

      So, I confess, I'm probably a little-- there's that word again-- out of character right now, or seeming that way to those of you that only know me in one or three contexts. (Remember Whitman: I contain multitudes. And sometimes platitudes.) Be glad none of you have to see it. I'd probably make myself vomit right now. Don't worry, the Not-So-Good Doc hasn't gone soft; but let's just say there's a very slight lightening in the otherwise despicable air.

      It's now approaching "late," atleast for a night in which I've not been galivanting between public houses and behaving like an utter gad. The Gamay is all-but-finished, and enough of my nicotine-soldiers have fallen to warrant a Henrician mention. Dear Heather isn't terrific, but it features some lovely songs, including his adaptation of Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving" for Irving Layton, and "The Letters," "There For You," "Nightingale" and "The Faith" are pure Cohen. "Villanelle For Our Time," a setting of the poem by F.R. Scott, is very good, and a reminder of what Cohen really can do with more traditional lyric forms. There's nothing on the album as truly incandescent as, say, Van Morrison and Ray Charles' duet on "Crazy Love," but it's a gently restorative document, a caress of an arrest, or a warm but hoary purr from a voice hardly unfamiliar with its sutras. Raea, if I decide to call her that, keeps indicating that she wants me to go to bed. I probably should, this entry no doubt too long by half. But to those of you reading me here-- and especially to those of you doing that and waiting for me to answer emails you've sent of late-- you've now had a glimpse of things as they are, which hopefully pardons, or at least mitigates, my silence in recent days. If not, take a step askance and check out RK's blog, which features, among other things, a stunning portrait of Jill Furse, whose poem "Carol" really is very good.

      Good. I'm not used to using that word anymore. Colour this blog a-tingle to pleasant surprises lately. Don't worry: normal grumbling and grousing will soon return. You can probably count by seconds.

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Something-Or-Other

      Sorry-- not much in the way of updates of late, which is okay since everyone around here, RK excluded, seems to have gone quiet. Errands a-plenty, and my little visitor has, with the fall of a snowstorm warning last night, made herself right at home; I even espied her earlier this morning drinking from the toilet bowl in a position best described as "acrobatic." All shoveling activities have now been redirected from blog writing to snow removal, and there's the inevitable crash of incidences that must happen before That Day sets in. Will perhaps update sometime later this afternoon or this evening.

      Oddity, moderately worthy of note: in a short email, I wound up signing it by my Christian name-- just my Christian name, not my full name, or the main two components of it-- for the first time Gawd only knows how long. My Name Escapes Me, indeed.

Meeting The Breadth Requirement

      Remember: education is an investment, not an expenditure.   

"It Trips Dishonestly Off The Tongue"

      The funniest thing about this admittedly quite amusing piece on sarcasm-- despite the author not seeming to know much about what satire really means, i.e. the tearing of the flesh with the teeth-- is that he used to be a speechwriter for Joe-mentum Lieberman, which should indicate how long the poor guy's had to bury his sarcastic streak. Joe-Li, the guy whose singular charmlessness made Al Gore look like Groucho Marx's long-lost grandson.

So What Do You Want For Christmas?

      Ah, the persistent question at this time of year, at least for those of you that worship Baby Santa, er, Jeebus. So, what do you want? This blog's not answering that question for itself-- officially, it's part of that Buddhist "freedom from desire" thingamabobber, but, unofficially, it's because this blog's too damned lazy to think of anything-- so toss in your answers in the comment box. Some of you might want to consult Christie's list for a few ideas--- surprisingly, not all of them evil. You're even free to speculate as to what the Not-So-Good Doctor might want for the holidays, though he fully expects certain chuckling folks to answer "Christina Ricci" in triplicate.   

      As for the Doc, he's off to take care of some of those vile tasks attendant to the holidays, which basically means taking a lovely day so far and stuffing it in a sheep's stomach and pretending it's haggis. (While you're all thinking of December 25th, this blog's thinking about January 25th. Tells you something about priorities.) Time to get the machete out again, and slash through the uncivilized mobs of overweight housewives screaming at their children and clawing at polyester sweaters that have been discounted by two-dollars and thirty-seven cents. Shopping at Christmas always reinforces for me the old rule about historical change: revolutions never follow through when they're just men fighting and bickering among one another; they happen when the women get involved, when the war moves beyond the political backrooms to the bread lines and the meat shops. That's when things get really scary, as Christmas provides us an eensy-weensy glimpse every blasted year. I just thank God-- or Darwin, or Ray Charles-- I'm not going to Wal-Mart. Whew!

      UPDATE: Wow, that went well. In and out very quickly, as I moved and swerved around the throngs in some bizarre Canucki version of The Matrix. Topper: a brief glance at a sidewalk sale table caught me the '99 reprint of the Methuen Noël Coward Collected Plays One (including Hay Fever and The Vortex), normally $20+ CDN, for 99¢. Not bad, not bad.... Especially considering that some years ago I spent Gawd only knows how much more than that just to make a Xerox copy of Private Lives for my Modern comp. A Noël surprise, indeed.

The Best Laid Schemes O' Mice An' Men

      Gang aft a-gley.   And you thought it was only lonely masturbators at home with their magazines that had to worry about the staples.