The Divergence Of The Twain, or Another Smart Alec Entry

         Jamesir Bensonmum [Alec Guinness]: She murdered herself in her sleep, sir.
         Dick Charleston [David Niven]: You mean suicide?
         Jamesir Bensonmum: Oh no, it was murder, all right. Mrs. Twain HATED herself.

      With this blog's previous entry being called "Alec Guinness' Basement," and Philip Seymour Hoffman continuing to gather raves for his performance in Capote, I found myself today thinking about that delightful old chestnut, Murder By Death.   The movie, now almost thirty years old, was penned by Neil Simon, and it was a spoof of those drawing-room mysteries typical of the pre-WW2 period.   The premise: five famous detectives are invited to a spooky old mansion for a meal and, they soon discover, an evening of murder and mayhem, hosted by the ever-eccentric Lionel Twain, played by a feyer-than-fey Truman Capote. As you might expect from a Simon script, the movie is less satire than pastiche, but it's also a movie whose fingerprints I keep seeing in most forms of contemporary comedy from Airplane! to Family Guy, fingerprints arguably more pronounced than those of, say, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles.   Bring your encyclopedic memory for cultural references in with you, but leave the rest of your brain at the door: that's the movie's injunction as it seats you and prepares you for the gaudiness to come. When James Coco, in his take on Hercule Poirot, insists-- half-indignant, half-victimized-- declares "I'm not a Frenchie, I'm a BELGIE!", you know exactly what you're in for.   Noel Coward this isn't.

      The strength of the movie, though, was and remains its cast: Peter Falk, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Elsa Lanchester, Nancy Walker, and at the centre of it all, Alec Guinness as the blind butler Bensonmum, the greeter of the various detectives and their escorts. Guinness is especially fun to watch, first in his drollery, then in his silly miscommunications with the deaf-and-dumb maid played by Walker; and eventually comes the real treat, a miniature tour-de-force of silliness that culminates with Guinness proving that he can outfey the already overly-fey Capote, and doing so seamlessly. It's a flight of minor genius made slightly more ironic by the fact that the film he followed this with was Star Wars, as if this was one last incarnation of his Ealing days before he was forever pigeonholed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. There are even a few seconds of accidental footage in which it seems Peter Sellers is caught admiring his onetime mentor's performance, savouring the simultaneous campiness and wryness of it all. It's a shame that IMDB's quotes page does not include Guinness' final scene in its entirety; but suffice it to say that there's nothing quite so weird as hearing Guinness utter the words "That's what you think, big boy."

      The rest of the cast is good to adequate, some (Falk, Niven, Smith) coming off better than others (Sellers, stuck parodying Charlie Chan as Fu Manchu), but there's a distinct pleasure that comes from watching such a collection of fine actors working with one another. That pleasure, though, led me to the disquieting realization that all but five of the thirteen stars of the film are now dead, with only Richard Narita, Eileen Brennan, James ("That'll do, Pig") Cromwell, Peter Falk, and the impossibly-luminous Maggie Smith remaining. Try as films might now to compile impressive casts (c.f., just about any Robert Altman film, including Gosford Park, or Kenneth Branagh's overripe Hamlet), they just don't seem to engender the same sense of larkishly serendipitous coordination. More to the point, though, I think there's no longer any extent to which watching "great casts" seems to connect us with brighter days of cinema. Somehow, now, we're in Norma Desmond's world in which the pictures got small, as bloated and as over-budget as they may be. Murder By Death connected us with the 30s, with Elsa Lanchester especially recalling that golden age in which she was the Bride of Frankenstein. The best we can do these days? A CGI-enhanced Christopher Lee appearing for a few minutes in a Peter Jackson or a George Lucas film-tome. The connections seem weaker, the continuity less valid and less comforting. God love her, but Maggie Smith only seems to take us so far back, though I can't entirely explain why. As Sidney Wang (Sellers) says, "Answer simple, but question very hard."

      I was lucky, in a way. I grew up in the eighties, when it was still common to see TV stations airing black-and-white films, if only as regular time-filler. I could see Warner Oland do Charlie Chan without having to hunt for the flicks, or pray they might get an odd airing on TVO. Since the 90s, though, you just don't see the old movies, and the old actors, unless they're attached to unique circumstances, like watching It's A Wonderful Life a hundred-billion-gazillion times come Christmas season. We lose the references, we lose the faces and the history, we lose the konwledge that allows us to observe ironies and play, just as most of the people commenting on Murder By Death on IMDB could only see Alec Guinness as a Jedi sage, and not, for example, as the man who once played eight different roles in the same movie (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1948) at a time when this was a genuine tour-de-force.

      We lose perspective as much as we do history, but we lose too much more. There is no actor these days of whom I can think that even vaguely reminds me of David Niven, that particular figure of class and ease; try as Ewan McGregor has, he could not do in three films what Alec Guinness did in half of one; and I cannot find it anything but ironic that only Peter Falk could ape Bogart without simply becoming an aper of him. Perhaps I look back with a discolouring sense of nostalgia, and perhaps I privilege the past, but strange, isn't it, how even reflecting just a little on a small little film, a small guffaw in time with no social purpose whatsoever, can make one haw on where we are going and where we have been. In the meantime, go find Murder By Death, if you can find it, and enjoy the silliness. Somehow, I'm sure it'll do you good.

Alec Guinness' Basement

      It seems my latest entry caused (undue) some concern among a few of my readers.   Have no worries, and let me restate matters, perhaps more clearly: the ole Doc is just trying to find something better for himself, something that will pay better and may actually (Heaven forfend!) proffer some form of advancement.   My only immediate way to enable such possibilities within the academic world is to finish the blasted dissertation which has now become an albatross on my neck.   Given, though, that writing even a small entry for this blog has become as painstaking as passing a stone, my prospects for completing an entire dissertation are as likely as my chances for living in eternal connubiality with mine own private seraglio.   (The difference between the two is that one would rejoice at being done with the former.)   So I'm trying to extricate myself from this "Situation Hopeless But Not Serious" scenario.   There's only so long one can live in Alec Guinness' basement.

      As for other stuff, I keep thinking I should be able to write something here that is more profound (and surely more than whinge)-- about, well, anything. There's an election in the offing; there's no end of silliness and stupidity screaming for attention; and there's surely enough literature out there upon which I could summon some sort of commentary, insightful or not.   I find, though, I'm becoming more and more interior as time goes by-- for good or for ill, but comforted slightly by the surety that silence is a virtue inadequately appreciated.   Or maybe I've grown tired of proving Mark Twain right, especially after doing so with Wilford-Brimley-like regularity.   Something tells me I should insert a Quaker Oats logo at right.

      The winter break has now arrived for the academic year, and with it a dhowload of grading.   To that, add the lavish lunacy that is the holiday season, about which the less said the better. (Shopping remains to my mind an activity best accomplished with a machete and a broken bottle of Cutty Sark.)   Ah, December: you bump and grind away, like a crack whore with a credit card to pay....

      [Hey, where in the Hell did that couplet come from? Damn and blast, damn and blast!    And worse, I just dangled a preposition!   I'm imploding from within like CIA information!}

      Oh, yet another Christmas, and its particular bliss.... In the immortal words of Father Mulcahy, "Jocularity! Jocularity!" 'Tis sometimes the best way to keep one's sanity: irregularly, even in Alec Guinness' basement.

He Do The Police In Different Voices

      In the final throes of marking, the Doc has Winamp spinning (?!?) random tunes in the background, and he finds himself singing along in all the wrong ways.   The song?   De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.   The oh-so-relevant lines?   "When their eloquence escapes me, / their logic ties me up and rapes me...."   De do do do, de DA DA DA.

      Jeronimo's gone mad-- and Sloppy-- agine.   Shantih, shantih, shantih....

The Doors of Reception

      In case any of you missed the video of President Shrub at his press conference in Beijing yesterday, let's simply say that checking it out is NOT optional.   Evidently, the President went to the Midvale School for the Gifted.

Cases For Rigid Training and the Depp To Pleasure

      Just a hint of an update, folks, as I remain so far behind in my marking-- to be returned Tuesday-- that I'll no doubt be losing much sleep in the next while.   Strange it is, he mutters to himself and sounding like a perturbed Yoda: I used to be relatively energetic when it came to marking, but now I find it's a task all-but-destined to prove an exercise in instructional futility.   At least in recent years it has proven to be, and I fear I'm becoming sufficiently cynical to surrender to that old temptation of educators, simply slopping grades down with only the barest of commentary.   Van the Man's "Why Must I Always Explain?" should probably become my theme song, especially with that lyrical masterpiece "My Humps" being oh-so-certainly out of the question.   (Give me a brown-eyed girl over a bunch of black-eyed peas anyday.)

      Alas, there's not much new to report, save some family stuff I won't discuss here.   My Canuckistani readers might want to check out this ridiculous list of Canada's 100 most important books, a list which would be risible if it was not so infuriating. (Alligator Pie makes the list, but St. Urbain's Horseman does not; Beautiful Losers gets the shaft while Howie Meeker's book on hockey mysteriously stickhandles its way to significance.   Proof positive that Canadians should never be allowed to judge their own works of-- ahem-- "National Literature.")   Similarly, I see the newest chance to see Johnny Depp chew (and eschew) scenery is on its way to cinemas, but this time it's a biopic of the legenderary debaucherer John Wilmot, aka The Earl of Rochester.   Frankly, the previews have me worrying the film will just be Quills in England, and the thought of John Malkovich as Charles II provides with me enough doubt to sustain a Cartesian immortality, maybe the flick won't be so bad. Things can turn out better than I expect, right?   Right?   Oh.   Riiiiiiight....

      Ah, well, that's enough marginal optimism for now.   Any more would be as unnatural as Bushian oratory.   Back to reality, back to the grade-grind and its destructive nonsense.   And if anyone, ANYONE, ENNY-ENNY-ENNY-WUN, figures out the wordplay in my previous sentence, I'll cease to be such a cynical bastard.   For a day.   Maybe.   I'll do my best, anyway. Until later.

Ear's Pokin' At You, Kid

      Received this from the T.S. Eliot mailing list today, and it was too good not to share here:

So, why did Zeus and Hera have to ask Tiresias whether men or women enjoyed sex more? This is what one person submitted to Scott Adams who just published it in "Dilbert Newsletter 62.0:"

One of my co-workers (who is originally from Arkansas, just FYI) told me one day that he knew for a fact that sex feels better for women than it does for men. I asked, "How do you figure that?" His reply was (and I am not making this up!), "Because when you put your finger in your ear and wiggle it around, it feels better to your ear than it does to your finger."

Beware, gentlemen: repeat this, and you'll lose your fingeramajig as certainly as Tiresias did.

Lukn My Wrks Ye Myty& Dspar!

      As if students don't already write enough like e.e.cummings....

      (Somewhere, in the ether, Doctor Johnson is weeping into his orange peels. & so 2 bd.....)

The Drudge Report

      Ah, argh, it will be a familiar refrain by now: Sorry for not updating, things have been busy, I have essays, essays, everywhere, and haven't felt much at all like blogging lately....   I'm sure you're all spinning your eyes, understandably so. Worse, this entry isn't going to remedy anything.   Shrug.   I think I may be becoming the Dalai Lama of ambivalence, appropriately enough considering there's a whole Lhasa nuthin' goin' on.   Marking time, indeed.   Blehhhh.......

      But all goes well enough, I suppose, though grading student papers seems to take about five times as long as it used to take.   Yawn, I should probably try write something more substantial here, but work beckons-- natteringly and pointlessly, like a Sex and the City teleplay, but not quite so insufferably.   I should to it.   Until, well, whenever I can be bothered to add more here.

Sunday, Ruddy Sunday, or The Old, Grey Jer, He Ain't What He Used To Be

We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, titlted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat....

...

'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning.
'Yes, I think so.'
'I think so too.'
      --- from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

      After Goodness-Only-Knows how many consecutive hours of answering emails and commenting on essay drafts and so on and so forth-- and my back now as brutally buggered as Ned Beatty's butt in Deliverance-- I can finally utter those five little words I've been aching to say for days: "Wolf Blass, take me away!"  

      Right?   I think so too.   And I'm shiraz hell not coming back until my Bacchus better. Power grapez, my friends, power grapes.

Waiting For Godet

      Sorry, folks, not much of an update here, as I have too much to do in the way of preparing for this week's classes, but I found this quiz and had to post it here.   My result is only partially surprising.

What Religion Do You Fit In With? You fit in with: Agnosticism Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Agnostic. You are fairly ambivalent towards any religion or spiritual connection. You lead a very busy life and find that religion and spirituality are unnecessary to your life. 0% scientific. 20% reason-oriented.

A bit ironic I should find this after last week, when I was prompted to describe myself not as Agnostic but as an Ennuist. Boredom, the PoMo logos: In the beginning was the Meh (Jer 1:1).   Ah, enlightenment, don't know what it is....

      POST-SCRIPT:   I'm rather distubringly reminded that there was a time when some people-- buckle up your seat belts, people, hilarious turbulence is coming-- regularly described me as a mystic.   Yes, a mystic.   Oy vey.   Ah, the shame, the humiliation.   I was so much dumber then, I'm smarter than that now....

Hey, Where Did He Go (Days When The Rains Came)

      I can almost hear the Van Morrison refrain: Do you remember when / we used to blog?   Sha la la lalalala....   Oh, my brown-paged URL....

      Yes, blogging really has not been a priority lately.   Priority?   Natch, not even a passing interest.   Even this entry, I confess, is rooted more in sating concern than in writing for any sort of intellectual or communicative purpose.   So very little seems to generate anything more than a shrugging response from me that maintaining even a kind of facile pose of interest borders on pointlessness.   I hardly care that in that last sentence I mixed enough metaphors to warrant puréeing just for consistency.   I'm developing the same passion for writing that one assumes Julia Child had for bioethics and the history of cardboard.   Well, writing and just about everything else.   Is it possible to raise being blas&ecute; to an art form?   Methinks I am a prophet uninspir'd....   (Call it seeing through a glass, Gauntly.)  

      Anyway, a few brief notes on things. There's a piece from the Aussie paper The Age to which I'd turn your attention, because it makes an argument I'd make if I didn't feel I'd already made it over and over again; give it a gander.   Also, I understand there's a massive project to render the classics of the ages through contemporary eyes, a project I'd think more of it did not decide to Atwoodize Homer.   (That sound you're hearing in the background is the Not-So-Good Doctor stabbing himself repeatedly in the brain with a corkscrew.)   Check out the Grope and Flail's review of the preliminary editions here while I lament the predictability of it all (and collect the bloody remnants of my mind from my keyboard and attempt to stuff them back inside my cranium).  

      There's also a very funny review of the HBO series Weeds on the CBC's website that's worth a read, particularly for its hilarious opening paragraph.   Weeds, for those of you that have not seen it yet, is one of the better shows on the air right now, thanks to solid writing and more especially the wonderful Mary-Louise Parker, one of the best actresses working in the States right now.   Sexy, charming, and gifted with some of the most expressive eyes in Hollywood, she's one of the few actresses who can mingle daftness with caginess in perfect proportion, which makes her perfectly unpredictable, distinctly mannered without being manneristic.   She also has a slightly flaky air about her that makes her endearing-- in part, I confess, because she reminds me of the kinds of quirky femininity for which I've all-too-many times been, and remain, a sucker, damn it.   (Yeah, I know, I know, that's why I'm always getting myself in trouble....   Insert shrugging, grumbling and eye-rolling here.)   Anyway, give Weeds a viewing if you haven't yet already: it's what Desperate Housewives could be if it hadn't opted toward pretense and lurid contrivance.   Oh, and if it wasn't so manifestly stupid.

      In other matters, last week's classes on Lycidas went as well as I could have expected, though I am going to try to steal another half-week for it.   This will half-delay the planned Marvell (the Mower poems), which in turn will half-delay the beginning of Adam Bede, which I have not taught in a very long time.   That I will have to reread Eliot will no doubt please Zelda, who-- by the way!-- is about, with her hubby (the Had Matter??), to celebrate her first wedding anniversary tomorrow.   This blog would note that this normally means all signs of post-nuptial cuteness must cease, else incurring much-deserved mockery, so the true stuff of marriage (misery, dissatisfaction, china-hurling fury) can finally begin.   But as this blog is feeling uncharacteristically generous, it'll let their terrible cuteness continue unridiculed until it becomes truly unbearable.   Happy anniversary, you two, and many happy returns.

      With that, I'll finally end this entry, thinking with some temptation that writing all this may mean I can go another several days without having guiltily to write anything here.   Pehaps, perhaps?   Perchance to dream.

This Is Just To Say

      No, no-- I am not going to indulge in a pastiche of Williams' famous poem, tempted as I might be to do so.   No, this is just a short entry to allay (pre-emptively) some of the concerns about the Not-So-Good Doctor's apparent return to oblivion-- or obliviousness, whichever seems more appropriate.   The Doc's innate lethargy, combined with the frustration dealing with allergies, is making even the simple task of blogging inordinately difficult, to say nothing of trying.   When I'm not sneezing, I'm rubbing my eyes with a ferocity more appropriate to a recently-wisened Oedipus.   I guess it goes without saying that-- insert anticipatory groan here-- the Jocasta's on me.

      Anyway, today the Doc ventures up to Tokyoronto where he will, among other things, attempt to teach John Milton's Lycidas for the first time.   My charges, I suspect, will be suitably intimidated by the poem, and I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever gets accomplished today will only be an initial step into the deep.   I can my students echoes already mourning.   Wish me-- or, more appropriately, them-- luck.

      Now, off to earn my minor pittance.   Until later. Cheers and best, everyone.

Break, Break, Break

      (Points to those of you that understand the title's origin.)

      I should apologize to those of you that have been worrying about the Not-So-Good Doc, but I would also like to assure everyone that I am adequate and alive but just otherwise blasé about blogging or emailing. Occasionally I intrude, and I go silent; this is just me. This should also be nothing new to my regular readers, the Doc being as miserable and cantankerous as he is prone to be, and so silence is the better part of discretion. The Dawk, after all, is no Harold Pinter. His only art of silence is genuine silence. It compensates, he hopes, for the times he rambles like Al Gore at a press conference.

      With that, I should take the opportunity to note the passing of Wayne Booth, one of the few guys in Lit Crit still worth reading. Sad we lost him.

      Especially when there are guys when just can't get rid of. Especially, especially, when it makes the Doctor dangle a preposition in such a way. We will continue to blame Burgess Meredith for such stuff, just because we can't. Grumpy Old Bastards have to stick together. Especially in spirit.

Pure Genius

      Thanks to RK-- who alerted me over a pint on Tuesday to a CNN story on Ray Charles literally behind my head-- I finally figured out what the hub-bub was about: not just a collection of duets with musical lesser lights, but a 7 CD and 1 DVD boxed-set of the complete Atlantic recordings.   In a word: Awesome.....   In two: FUCKING Awesome.

      Amero-ethnomusicoligsts, however, have just-- pardon the phrase-- creamed their jeans, respectively and collectively, and probably cumulatively.

Children of the Corn

      Oddly enough, I stumbled upon this article just as Stewie Griffin claimed he had "half a pack of Rolaids in his diaper."   

The Presidential Seal

      When (sigh) a rubber stamp just isn't enough....  

      This blog's favourite bit: "We'd like to tell him how respected he is in China, so we can boost his confidence and help his career."   Ah, the (er) milk of human kindness....

The Weapon of Mass Seduction

      American writers, it seems, have seen the enemy, and it is Thomas Browne.   And Samuel Johnson.   And Evelyn Waugh. And Thomas Carlyle. And John Dryden.   And, in fact, any writer availed to devices of nuance.

      Gee, I wonder why....

      (Now rewrite that first paragraph with semicolons, and you tell me which works better, the hamfisted thumping of the periods, or the subtle twisting of the semicolons.)

Beating Around The Bush

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

Observation

      Consider it a wisdom:   If you know what a polymath is, you probably think you are one. (And, of course, you would probably be wrong.   Savour the humbling irony.)

Ligers, Not Daughters?

      It's not often I read a book review that makes me say to myself, "Damn, I HAVE to pick that book up!"   Consider this one of those instances.  

      (I can't wait: I can already hear the more pious and smug femipundits mewing like Goneril.   Hee hee!)