Spare The Rod

      Remember, ladies and gentlemen, only you can stop the cycle of abuse. The future is in your hands.

      (By the way, this blog is particularly fond of the use of the word "stranglehold." There's nothing like good, er, diction.)

"You Shall Not Pass!"

      And all along, I bet this man thought it was just the change in his pockets... Jingle all the way...

Ex Lege Naturae Jure Meritoque

      I ask you, what is most disturbing about this article:

(a) the event itself;
(b) the incredible understatement of the BBC reporter who described the event as "a stinking mess";
(c) the morbid fascination of the gawking residents;
or (d) the use of the word 'experience' in the article's final sentence?

This blog can't help but hear a hundred men walking away from the scene, sounding like Stephen Baldwin in The Usual Suspects: "It was the darnedest thing...."

^~~Tell It Like It Is...^~~

      "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! No truth-handler you! Bah! I deride your truth-handling abilities!" Oh, Sideshow Bob, where are you when we need you?

A Tad More Cunning Linguistic Play

      In mentioning anagrams earlier, I wound up stumbling on this page from Wordsmith, and thought it worth sharing for those geeks like me that just love playing with words. This blog's favourite: "Mother-in-law" = "Woman Hitler." Pardon me a moment while I roll around on the floor in uncontrollable laughter.

      Considering, by the way, the Not-So-Good-Doctor's postulation on marriage (those of you who know, spell Doc J's name backwards, and you'll understand perfectly), I had to offer this anagram, that "wedding ceremony" becomes "comedy grew in end" and "men cowered, dying." Ahem. Also, "Dying, men cede row." Ah, yes, men, now you know why you're never allowed to win an argument: it's written into the contract. ;-)

      For the ladies: "masculinity" = "It is calumny." Perhaps. ;-)

Fly Fishing (And Why You Should Hope A River Doesn't Run Through It)

      Here's something, perhaps, to, er, raise your spirits. Unless, of course, you are an easily-offended, humourless prude from Calgary.

      Then again, this may just provide further reason to be afraid, very afraid, at least if you live in South America. Yes, leave it to this blog to tackle the truly important issues of the day. Er, perhaps "tackle" is not the best word to use in that last sentence after all. *Gulp*

      On a side note, this blog will say absosmurfly nothing about this. Absosmurfly nothing.

R.I.P.

      I can't say I knew him well (his time on television long before my own as a watcher of it), but Jack Paar's passing yesterday was unfortunate, especially because he represented, among other things, an age when conversation was something more than a vague term for people talking at one another. A shame, really. This blog would also pause to think that only Sir Peter Ustinov, it seems, survives of the semi-regulars from Paar's show.

      I like these words from Paar: "I'm complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable and lonely. My personality is not split, it's shredded." Selah.

      Check out, too, this piece from Dick Cavett -- former writer for Paar-- from the New York Times. Curiously enough, Jack Paar is probably one of the few people for whom even Cavett couldn't come up with an anagram.

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner...

      This blog wonders if the subject of this article will supply his own Chianti and fava beans.

Parents Beware

      I don't know about any of you, but this story, plain and simple, gives me the creeps. *Shudder*

By The Pricking Of My Thumbs?

      Sheesh, it feels like there's something in the air, something pending, and I have no idea what the f*$k it is. For those who don't know me too well, for reasons quite beyond my capacity for explanation, my life, tends to have a specific rhythm to it, and it's certainly not I rhythm I particularly choose. But every now and again, something will happen-- something will be said, a memory will be evoked, a strange shiver will go down my spine-- and I will know (and I've never been wrong on this) that something is going to happen, or, usually, that something from my past is about to resurface, however welcome or unwelcome. And right now, I'm having that eerie sense set in again, and I'm wondering what the hell is coming down the pike. I seldom know what is coming down the pike, I just sense that something is. Tonight-- or, er, this morning, I guess-- the fourth straight 'shiver' happened in as many days.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know... This probably sounds like gobbledygook, like quasi-mystical bullplop, and, frankly, I'm kinda hoping it all eventually is such nonsense. All I can do is assure you that I try not to think supersititously or portentously, but such 'shivers' (for lack of a better description) tend to be early-warning signs, or primers, for whatever's going to land. This morning's 'shiver': watching, for the first time in eight or so years, Braveheart-- a movie I don't particularly like, but, hey, there was nothing else on the tube. Anyway, I'm watching, or half-watching, and then I look at the screen just as the actress Catherine McCormack (who plays Mel's ill-fated wife in the film) turns to the camera and burns a perfectly glowing smile into the lens. It wasn't that I suddenly developed a crush on the actress or anything as insipid as that. It struck me that I knew that smile, exactly, or that her smile was almost exactly the same as a smile I've not seen in years. It was if I were no longer in the room when I saw it. I was back at a very particular moment in time, in a very particular place. It was, in a way, like looking again at an old love-letter, and almost but not quite forgetting all the time -- and other stuff, too-- that had elapsed since.

      Odd thing is, this isn't just a nostalgic thing, and I know it, mainly because there was something inexplicably 'forecasting' about the feeling I had watching it. This wasn't just remembering the past, it was more like, as much as I hate the word, an omen telling me, "Remember where you've been before? You're going there again." And even more oddly, I know what, and who, this does not have to do with; that's the thing with 'omens,' you can usually rule out certain things. I don't know if other people get these 'feelings' (what a waffling word that has become!), and even for myself, I don't even want to venture if, let alone what, any of this means anything. Eerie seems to be the word of the day lately, and I have a strange feeling there's a kind of personal reckoning (and I don't mean that in an apocalyptic sense) looming on the horizon. Yes, I know, it IS very, very strange. But I also know my instincts are never wrong in such matters. It's like (yeah, yeah, yeah) there are 'forces' gathering, and I know that they are; but I'll be damned if I know what those forces are, or whether they'll prove for good or for ill, or even for the awkward 'naught-plus' of a minor chord. Maybe I'm just an animal that vaguely senses a seismic shift in the offing. I don't pretend to know anymore.

      Why am I writing about this here? I don't know that either. What I do know is this: that smile, that particular smile, I've had various reasons to recall four times in the past four days, after a very, very, very long time of not thinking about it or recalling it, and, indeed, long after I was sure I had completely forgotten it. What I do find myself feeling, in my gut, isn't happiness or joy or fear or anger or anything else at all like that, but a feeling best summarized by those classic words from Bette Davis in All About Eve: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" Or, more pessimistically, Shakespeare: "By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked..."

      Or perhaps even Rick Moranis in Spaceballs: "So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." But I digress. As always. One question, though: this thing, does it have airbags? ;-)

"Now If We Really Wanted To Do Whatever The Hell We Wanted..."

      Actual quote from Dick "Needy Chick" Cheney yesterday: "If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth's surface than we do. That's not the way we operate." Is there anyone in the Bush administration that can make even an ounce of sense, or at least possess a milliltre of logic? Oy vey.

Keeping The Home Fires Burning

      This blog suspects this idea was torn from W's playbook: call them freedom fires, perhaps? Mon dieu....

Gobble, Gobble, and The Aria of A Dyspeptic Werewolf

      Just in case you wondering about the similarities betwen the Jennufleck breakup and the howling political suicide of Howard Dean, Rex Murphy has a great piece in today's Globe and Mail that puts it all together. Very funny.

      Briefly, though, one has to wonder what happens when, not if, Dean loses the nomination. Will he step gracefully aside, or will he take his gobs and gobs of money and run as a Nader-esque independent? Let us hope not.

Dr. Strangelove, or,
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Enrage The Feminists

Warning: Long entry, destined to get me in no limit of hot water. Ah, c'est la vie....

      Oy, I had started to type an entry after watching Woody Allen's latest film, Anything Else, but my machine (as always, "my flurking computer") crashed on me several times, and lost the entry, before I wound up getting into an extended discussion with the Zaniac on matters entirely too intellectually convoluted to explain here. (Or, rather, for me to explain in my current rye-sible state. Ah, rye, precious rye, kinder to me than even less-spirited imbibements.) But I was going to report on the Allen film, and my guffawed reaction to it-- not to Allen's humour or his one-liners, but to his one character, Amanda, played by the ever-so-entrancing Christina Ricci. Why? No, I wasn't going to go on about Ricci's magnetism, or her time spent in underwear during the film. No, it was her character, a character I'm glad to report Ricci played wonderfully. More significantly, it's a character that critics, male and female alike, tended to describe as yet another one of Allen's nightmare women, yet another proof of Allen's supposed misogyny. Feminists, especially, hated the character.

      I can't say I loved or hated the character. I have to say, though, that I both loved and hated the character, and finally loved it, because my hatred is perfectly in keeping with the responses the character is meant to generate. There's another dimension to this, a dimension feminists will loathe, nay, disdain, eschew, eviscerate, and entirely deny. But they'd be wrong.

      What I loved and hated about the character are the same qualities I've loved and hated about almost all of the women that have sauntered in and out of my life (and, I admit, this may just be the result of miserable luck on my part). It's plain to see why the Jason Biggs character is attracted to her, beyond the physical: she has those magnificent eyes, the ability to charm and to speak intelligently about subjects of common interest and fascination, and she possesses too a kind of irresistible capacity to engage at every level. That is, of course, before the other shoe drops.

      Ah, yes, the other shoe always drops, with a thud slightly heavier than a meteoric landing.

      I won't go into this in too much detail, because I'm very much aware that many will read what I say according to their own self-defensive templates, whether personal, theoretical, ideological or political. I also want it clear that I don't think all women like Allen's Amanda. But it does bear stating: at least in my experience, more women (in their twenties, in this day and age) are more like Amanda than they'd ever care to admit, and more than they'd dare to see. Yes, Allen's Amanda is way, way, way, way, way too familiar. Stunningly familiar. Eerily familiar. I can still feel the reverberations to reality. And while I'm smirking as I write this, and I chuckled as I watched it, there was a horrifying humour to Allen's precision in cutting to the bone. Worse still, I suspect most of the men I know would silently nod in acknowledgment of Allen's figuration of this character, and think-- but not likely say-- "Oh, yeah, I know her." Worse, they'd tacitly say, "I loved a girl like her." Then they'd shake their heads in recognition of their embarrassment. (I fully expect no man in his right, pragmatic mind will comment on this post at all: I also fully expect to be flamed by my female readers.)

      I think this points, though, to a more significant issue, beyond any single person's experiences. It has to do, I think, with the tendency of some, like Allen's Amanda, to be personally and morally and insert-adverb-here obtuse, whether that obtuseness is intentional or not. Sometimes it's clear: there are aspects of manipulation, deception, narcissism, thoughtlessness, capriciousness, and vacuity; at other times, it's apparent she just doesn't see anything beyond own ken, and she's a character utterly blinkered in self-involvement. I'm not using this character as a basis to attack women. Rather, it's a reason to attack those self-imagists within the feminist movement who'd like to think idealistically about feminine representation. Sorry, I speak here only from experience, but a lot more "real" women have more in common with Amanda than than they have in discrepancy with her, and more than they have in common with their purported role-models or idealized self-comparisons with paradigms or credos. No wonder the idealists hate such characters: they desperately want to believe such characters do not have corollaries in reality. Sorry, very, very sorry, but such corollaries do exist, and they exist plentifully. The trick is learning to deal with such counter-examples to your argument.

      I don't want to make general statements about women, feminism, or any such thing, and nor do I want to take Amanda as an example in any sense, whether in terms of Allen's treatment of women or concepts of woman. All this strikes me as just a walk down a blind alley toward a gang with switchblades at the ready. But the familiarity of matters suggests an eerie proximation to a known, or knowable, reality, or a reality to some more common in the observance than in the breach, as much as we'd like to believe the breach the fact instead of that which we see in our ever-so-tainted experiences.

      It's cavalier these days to invoke Oscar Wilde in proof of an argument, but he fits here more than in most scenarios, and I offer this as cautionary and expository rather than accusatory: in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde notes that "the nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass." There's much truth in this, and I'm inclined, in this twisted way, of saying that Allen's Amanda offers a surprising realism of characterization. I hate to say it that way, I truly do. But, whoa, there are damned good reasons why I have shivers down my spine after watching such an otherwise lightweight film.

      See it for yourself. (And men, by the way, be willing, too, to see yourself in the Jason Biggs character; how many of us, for reasons one or another, have gone against better judgment in some desperate desire either to believe in another, or to avoid confronting fact, or, perhaps worse, loneliness.) What I finally love, though, about Allen's Amanda (as a character) is that she's not just physically attractive or whatever; even after all is said and done, there's a dimension of character and behaviour that-- however destructive, manipulative, or whatever-- remains engaging and enticing, even loveable. Translation: as monstrous as her behaviour can be, she never entirely becomes a monster per se. Guys, you know what I'm talkin' about. There's still something inexplicably there. And, damn it all, that's why so many of us keep making the same mistakes, and why so many keep acting in the same ways that we do, male or female, Biggs or Ricci.

      But, there it is, the strength of the film: more than any limp-minded Seinfeld episode, Allen at his best does observational comedy with an air of significance and self-awareness. But as much as Woody's more daunting critics, of all stripes, would like to dismiss him, and (frankly) as much as the film does falter in other aspects, he stands sometimes like a clothed Emperor, while the audience, thinking their leader parading himself about naked, stands mocking, but curiously air-conditioned.

      Oh, no wonder I felt a chill. Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph.

      Okay, now, ye may cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

While Day Decays

Here's a piece from Thomas Hardy's Satires of Circumstance. This poem was probably written in July of 1914.

A POET

Attentive eyes, fantastic heed,
Assessing minds, he does not need,
Nor urgent writs to sup or dine,
Nor pledges in the rosy wine.

For loud acclaim he does not care
By the august or rich or fair,
Nor for smart pilgrims from afar,
Curious on where his hauntings are.

But soon or later, when you hear
That he has doffed his wrinkled gear,
Some evening, at the first star-ray,
Come to his graveside, pause and say:

"Whatever his message-- glad or grim--
Two bright-souled women clave to him";
Stand and say that while day decays;
It will be word enough of praise.

I can't help but think there's something to this poem's notion of a poet's desired assessment, personal rather than critical or historical. Corny? Perhaps. Romanticized? Almost certainly. Universal? Not really, especially if one thinks of romantic misanthropes like Pound or technists like Dryden. But there's also a fair bit of truth to it, too.... I won't elucidate on that, but I think most poets would desire themselves eulogized for the measure of his emotional matter. And, frankly, I love those words, "two bright-souled women clave to him." The words are neither diffident nor rapturous; they seem, to me at least, perfect in their simplicity. I find I think a lot about poetic simplicity these days, perhaps because it's become so difficult to say the simplest things without lapsing into one form of misstatement or another. And perhaps, too, because there is little more affirming for a (heterosexual male, at least) poet than being desired by a "bright-souled" woman. In the end, even our most able poets are, in their own ways, soul-singers. Let us never overlook the obvious.

High and Lo

      Awwwwwh, it seems *sniff, sniff* it's over all over again. For now. But for real this time. Or maybe not. Frankly, I don't give a tinker's damn, but I have to confess this: this article's final sentence almost has me weeping with joy.

      On the flip side, this bit of news has me sitting with bated, terrorized breath. Oh, how I appreciate Johnny Carson, who, once he left the public sphere, left it for good (with the single exception of providing his voice for an episode of The Simpsons). So much for dignity.

For Zane: Marshalling Norrie Bits

      This piece. And this one, too. Chances are you've already seen these, but... *shrug*

Minus The Cheerleader

Well, I guess it's appropriate that my life should have this:

My life has been rated:
	Suitable for 18 years or older. This is real life. Anything in this category is considered to be of subject matter relating to adult life, that happens day in and day out. Walking down the street is an 18 certificate. You have a life, well done. Examples: American Beauty, Scary Movie	See what your rating is!

I dunno, I can more than see my life being a bit too similar to Kevin Spacey's story in American Beauty, but, damn it, were is my Mena Suvari??? *insert faux tears here* Scary Movie, however, sounds like a documentary about my romantic involvements, without the earth-splattering special effects.

Actually, I'm starting to think my life is more akin to Wonder Boys, right down to the bleedin' soundtrack (Dylan and Morrison et al). I'll just leave that as is. ;-)

I Assure You, None Of These Are From Nantucket

A few ten-finger exercises:

There once was a hooker named Venus
Who found all her tricks rather heinous,
So she had a surprise
Attached 'tween her thighs
To protect her locus amoenus.

(For those who don't know what locus amoenus means, click here.)

There was a young woman from Panama
For whom coffee was anathema,
But when she did find
Her butt in a bind,
She still chose it instead of an enema.

There once was a painter named Patrick
Whose models disrobed on the quick;
He'd toss one a smile,
And seduce her a while,
So he could limn her lithe limbs in a rick.


Here he was, addressing the chasm,
Awaiting a quake or even a spasm;
His energy tapped,
His cunning now sapped,
She saw her aim finally past 'im.

(Oy. Fools do go where wise mean fear to tread. And, yes, I know I'm rewriting the metrics. Sue me.)

It started with talk, followed by liquor,
But just as a passion seemed nearly a-flicker,
She suddenly paused,
She told him her cost,
And he sighed, "Alas, I'm not going to dicker..."

Oh well. A little verbal tinkering.... Nothing more than that... *shrug*

By The Light Of The Moon

Saw the categories for this on CSM's page, and figured I'd lift it for my own self-quizzing here. And, no I don't know why I do such things....

Seven things you like:

1. The poetry of Wallace Stevens (haunted still by the words "She sang beyond the genius of the sea")
2. Just about any movie with Alec Guinness
3. Sweet, sweet soul music
4. Irish Mist
5. Wit, whimsy, and fine raillery
6. Candour, sincerity and conviction
7. *ahem* Something I'm too much of a gentleman to mention here *cough, cough*

Seven things you hate:

1. Liars, hypocrites, backstabbers, and other ought-to-be-denizens of Dante's ninth circle of Hell
2. Pretense and arrogance (they're kissing cousins in my eyes)
3. Wolf Blitzer
4. "The School of Resentment" (literary critics that are really self-righteous ideologues)
5. Michael Bolton, of whom one writers once asked, can you imagine how this guy aches, begs, pleads, moans, yearns for a cup of coffee in the morning?
6. Humourless pedants
7. My flurking computer

Seven things in your room:

1. Lord knows how many books, including a signed copy of Northrop Frye's The Great Code
2. My flurking computer
3. The remainder of an 18 Year Old Wiser's Rye bottle
4. My apparently well-weathered fedora that is more popular than I ever will be
5. An 8-foot tall poster for Casablanca I don't have the room to hang
6. Zozo's Doctor J cartoons
7. Me (duh!)

Seven random facts about you:

1. Fills out inane things like this against his better judgment, largely because of (2).
2. Insomniac Extraordinaire.
3. Most-embarrassing fact: used to write love poetry. *covers face in shame* Doc J has since grown out of this, like others outgrow bed-wetting and other regrettable emissions.
4. Voted in residence days "Most Likely To Look The Same When He's 40 As He Does Now." Not sure if that was a good thing, in retrospect. Speculation has it there's a portrait of him in an attic somewhere.
5. Also known as: Jer, Papa Jer, Uncle Jer, Jerbo, Jerminator, Jerbear, Il Professori, Domino, Falstaff Junior, among others, and even "O Captain, My Captain!" (The last was a looooong time ago.)
6. Is actually a closet-romantic and a closet-idealist, but he will deny such things if they are suggested; no one ever fully believes such denials, including the utterer.
7. Tends inexplicably to refer to himself in the third person.

Seven things you plan to do before you die:

1. Read Don Quixote of La Mancha aloud, in bed, while drinking a good Manchegan wine
2. Write a poem I'm truly happy with
3. Drink famously in an Irish bar (four-thousand miles and thiry-years away)
4. Walk again through the streets of Old Quebec City and along the St. Lawrence promenade in the light of the moon
5. Figure out what I plan to do before I die
6. Remember what ambition is
7. Look into JL's eyes one more time

Seven things you can do:

1. Write
2. Teach
3. Out-innuendo the best of 'em, and generally make people laugh even when they least think they can
4. Give answers to silly lists and quizzes
5. Keep that secret you told me about the hamster, the bagpipes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
6. Something I'm too much of a gentleman to mention here
7. Something I'm too much of a self-guarding cynic to admit here

Seven Things You Can't Do (but really wish i could...):

1. Sing like Ray Charles or Sam Cooke
2. Write a poem I'm truly happy with
3. Understand feminine "logic" (now *that's* dreaming!)
4. Go back in time and fix the thing I regret most
5. Escape the curse of "Papa Jer"
6. Achieve enlightenment
7. Forget
(BONUS: 8. Create and savour the pleasures of the perfect seraglio.)

Seven songs people should listen to:

1. Van Morrison, "Angeliou"
2. Van Morrison, "Fast Train"
3. Leonard Cohen, "Take This Waltz"
4. James Brown, "How Do You Stop?"
5. Bruce Springsteen, "If I Should Fall Behind"
6. Robbie Robertson, "Broken Arrow" (not the cheesy Rod Stewart version)
7. Ray Charles, "A Song For You"

Brief Pet Peeve

      One of these days, when time avails itself, I'll comprise a list of words I wish people would excise from their lazy vocabularies. But I guess that right now one of the ones I am most agonistic toward is the word "fabulous." I have no problem when people use the word with a cognizance of its etymology. But I loathe, hate, detest, scorn, eschew, the tendency to invoke "fab" or "fabulous" in vaporous contexts. Yes, I'm bilious toward the "Ab Fab" mentality. (Sorry, Anna, wherever you are.) Call it a bee in my fedoral bonnet. I guess it comes down to this, my own (perhaps cantankerous) peevishness with people using words when they know not at all what they mean. Like "true love." (As if there were a meaning for that abstraction.) Like abstraction, to whit I'd remind everyone to trahere the word. I suspect I'm just cranky, and at that stage again of niggling.

      But I suspect, too, it comes down to this: know what you say, and know what you intend to say, and don't use a vocabulary dissociatively. It cheapens language, and it cheapens thought. And it makes miserable ole buggers like me want to take you to task unnecessarily. Language may well be the greatest of human concoctions, and even the more-apparently provident technologies depend on a common notion of language, whether computerized, mathematized, physicisized, or poeticized.

      Precision is everything. Ruddy and as slippery as such precision might be, it deserves our effort. After all, we'd not forgive a doctor for cutting into "that thing" we thought was something else. Or, we might, if it still turned out okay; but if anything went even slightly off....

^~~Let Me Spit Out My Bitterness...^~~

      After marking about four dozen essays, I want to aver this: the next time an undergraduate writes about love-- "true love" or "idealized love" or whatever-- I will force said student to ingest heavy does of oven cleaner before he or she is ceremonially bled and then fed to a cete of agitated badgers, adorned with chicken-bones for earrings and swaddled in any and all available forms of human waste. Oh, if it weren't thoroughly unprofessional, I'd share with you, my patient readers, material evidence that would certainly legitimate my current vitriolic state. Alas, the atrocities that are perpetuated on thought and language in the name of 'love...' Poor, poor "love," assaulted and tattered, left almost moribund by those that constantly and carelessly inflict themselves upon you, as a word and as an idea, let alone anything else, you deserve a better fate than you seem destined to receive....

Coppsing A Feel

      It's become a major story in current Canadian politics, as Liberal MP Sheila Copps tussles for her political survival against "colleague" Tony Valeri and the Paul Martin coterie. It's been clear for a very long time: as Martin's star ascended and his coronation as Prime Minister became inevitable, Copps' fate was inevitable. Indeed, her run against Martin for the leadership of the Liberals received far less attention than this, the obvious squeeze play being engineered by Valeri (and, tacitly, Martin, standing indifferently behind the scenes while pretending he's not controlling Valeri's leash) to remove Copps entirely from the political arena. The irony, of course, is that just when Sheila seemed most irrelevant, shuffled off to political oblivion, that she emerges as the major challenge to Paul Martin's leadership. She may have lost the battle for the position of Liberal leader, but she's scrappily fighting the ethicality of Martin's leadership more effectively than any of the Opposition leaders. She's gathering more attention, she's pointing out a lot of the hypocrisies intrinsic to Mr. Martin's supposed notions of "repairing the democratic deficit," and she's exposing a nasty underbelly to the Martinite methods of doing things.

      Like Martin or hate him, he's coming across in all this like an ingracious victor, and, more importantly, like a leader who cares more about devotional support rather than political wisdom. I've said before that Martin resembles Shakespeare's Bolingbroke: he has schemed his way to the throne, in many ways on the claim of being a better and more effective leader than his predecessor; but, like Bolingbroke, he's got serious problems in the ranks, and those problems are largely with those party-lifers (John Manley, Allan Rock, Stephane Dion, Charles Caccia) who dared question Martin in the least, and who showed even more than ounce of loyalty to his predecessor. Most of the others have stepped quietly aside, most notably Manley; Copps, however, typically adversarial, is trying to stand her ground, and in part expose the nasty backroom politics in the stacking of the Martin party. This is not to support either side: Copps was by no means an ideal MP or cabinet minister, and she proved very often an embarassment to the Chretien government; but she's not one to silence, or even merely to tangle with lightly. All in all, it has the makings of a great story, and her recent courtship with the New Democrats suggests there may be a possibility for a rupture in the hull of Liberal party support. Martin's coronation may have come with a larger cost than Martin and company first thought. Copps may have become the Hotspur in Martin's side, perhaps destined to defeat, but perhaps also a sign of disruptions on the horizon.

      Copps, like Mr. Chretien before her, is a street-fighter, and this image tends to go over fairly well in Hamilton East, where she's won her seat for the past 20 years. She has an air of legitimacy to her because of this long-stint of service, regardless of what one thinks of her politics. She also has more credibility in her current claims, because it's clear to just about everyone with eyes to see that this entire kaffufle could easily have been avoided, and that she is certainly being ousted in a fashion not in the least different than the method by which Martin (finally) ousted Chretien. One can very much imagine Copps spitting in Martin's face and charging, "I have done thee better than to be slighted thus!" Worse, Martin's claims that he won't get involved in local matters is hogwash, as he's very clearly getting involved where Martin loyalists are seeking election, and remaining indifferent where Chretien loyalists are facing challenges from Martinites. It also seems spurious that Valeri, fighting for the position of Hamilton lieutenant, is fighting to run in a riding in which he does not live. Polite political assassination doesn't come much more thinly-veiled.

      All in all, it's a great story, and it's anyone's guess how this is going to unfold. This much is clear: Hamilton is the first major proving ground for Martin's era, and his challenges are coming not from without but from within. If Copps does jump ship to the NDP, look for Hamilton East to become one of the most hotly-contested ridings in recent Canadian political history, especially as a former Deputy Prime Minister absents herself from the direction of a party she served so long (see also the Joe Clark scenario with the Conservatives, as a former Prime Minister rejects the movement of his own party's tidal shift). There are daggers flying in the air, and it's only a matter of time before the bloodstains become obvious. Who knew Canadian politics could assume such Shakespearean dimensions?

      One other brief thing: not to judge a book by its cover, but Tony Valeri is a scary looking man, and he has the political charm of a piece of cardboard. When I saw this article, I did a double-take: is this a man's face, or is it a Spitting Image puppet? Frighteningly enough, this is the man's face. Not that Copps is especially photogenic, but sheesh.... Cruikshank would have loved this man's face.

      Doctor J's useless (and probably wrong) prediction: Sheila jumps to the NDP. She and Valeri scrap, mercilessly, with Sheila's wrongedness and general charisma going up against Valeri's promises of political power and renewal; with Hamilton so hotly contested, and so vital to both NDP and Liberal prospects in the Southern Ontario region, the battle comes larger than these two, as the battle becomes between Jack Layton and Paul Martin, both of whom will pay much more attention to the riding than leaders have in the past. This too will verge on stalemate. In the end, spite will win out over pragmatism, and Copps will very barely eke out Valeri to stick in Martin's craw. Hamiltonians, particularly those in North and East Hamilton, will vote for opposition against consolidation, a visceral response more than an intellectual one per se. Copps will then survive one term and retire, her political currency exhausted. The big winner in all this: Jack Layton. The big loser: Tony Valeri. Or so it seems within the belly of the whale right now.

      But we shall see. And, damn, this should be good.

Aw Crap....

      Unfortunately, a site at which I had been storing some images for use on this blog has now gone defunct, and I frankly don't have the time to set up a new site anytime soon. So, if there are images missing in the archives or on the main pages, my apologies. Damn.

Salad Days Long Past

      Alas, we have become old and stale, and our numbers are few. Pardon this blog for thinking that if literary critics are going to be doing something for the world, we have to set aside our smug theoretical punditries and get back into the intellectual trenches. It's definitely time for a last march of the Ents.

In The Beginning Was The Word

      I always pity the poor bastards that deal with such matters. As someone who has been teaching Shakespeare for the past few years (though I by no means consider myself a genuine "authority" on him), I still find it hard to believe Shakie one of the King James translators. I have a number of reasons-- Shakie's relative disinterest in religious matters, his frustration with translation, his general disobedience and extroversion, his tendency toward stylistic roughness, these things all give me cause to doubt Shakie's involvement-- but it remains a mystery what writers were involved in the project, and Shakespeare's 'retirement' from drama leaves all of us with pause to consider that perhaps the Bard did have something to do with it after all. I have to say, though, that the acrostic and riddling dimensions mentioned in this article (and often invoked in other arguments about Shakie) seem to me what Huck Finn used to call "stretchers." I can see other authors of the time being interested in this sort of thing, but I have a hard time seeing the Bard as giving a good god damn about such tricksterism. The question remains, though: who could have provided the poetry? I can see Shakie perhaps having a hand in The Book of Job or the Psalms. Ecclesiastes and Daniel strike me as more specious. I'm willing to bet Donne and Herbert were involved. But Shakespeare? Meh. A shame it seems we'll never know.

The Browneing Version

      After reading RK's blog not too long ago, I found myself, rightfully, encouraged to look again at the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, someone I must confess I probably had not read since my undergraduate days (but only Religio Medici), but who I also vaguely remembered liking. Ah, such is the curse when reading is a huge part of one's profession: even those we enjoy can slide into the recesses of memory, whether by circumstance or forgetfulness, or some admixture thereto.

      But I offer this here as a kind of personal tale.

      After reading RK, I scanned about my room, sure Browne was lurking somewhere, but couldn't find him. Had I imagined this? Had I lost my copy of him, as I've lost so many things over the years? And all I could locate was an old set of Norton Anthologies with Browne included, but only in fragmentary form. No, this was not the Browne I read. Or was it? No, it wasn't. Or--- and backwards and forwards as memory tossed me around like a wet rag, or like -- no, I won't invoke that metaphor. But, alas, tonight, for some peculiar reason, I wasmarking a student paper and Will and Grace was on TV, and I inexplicably thought of Ben Jonson, by which W&G is the closest contemporary televised equivalent of Jonsonian comedy, and I thought: damn it, I know where he is... , and lo and behold, I dug deep (deep, deep, deep) into the mile of paperbacks situated in the alcove behind my television, and found my old copy of Browne's The Major Works, not an illustratious or academic edition (it's the Penguin), but there it was nonetheless, much to my own surprise, and much to my own memorial self-vindication.

      I was sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, Browne was lurking about here somewhere, but like a Hitchcock hero, my own inability to prove it was making me begin to question my own memory. Long story short: aside from seeing John Cleese again, watching Will and Grace actually proved beneficial. Browne's a very fine writer, and in the next little bit I'll post a few significant segments from him that I deem especially good (he reminds me in a way of Stevens, in no other way except in his counter-temporal capacity to surprise with his diction; he always seems to have a finer turn of phrase at hand than one expects, and so many of his phrases finish, like good wines, with a serendipitous aftertaste). The only thing that is preventing me from doing so now to Browne what I did to Strand less than a week ago is laziness with typing, and the knowledge that I have to get on to other matters, because of that cursed thing called time.

   In many ways, he's a conflicted writer, but at the same time, much of his prose technique is remarkably serene, even when he's turning his words upon himself. I said, I'm sure entirely erroneously, that I have always gathered from Browne a kind of Buddhist sensibility, which is definitely wrong in fact, but not necessarily wrong in interpretation, because he seems to balance himself so well, and he seems to find a kind of verbal circularity (without becoming repetitiveper se) that seems almost koan-istic. I'm still not sure how much I stand behind such a statement, just because I can't explain my response as accurately as I'd like. But I think it's rather like Kurosawa interpreting Shakespeare: the grasp of the ethos is there, and there's the appreciation of technique and even an awe at the form of expression, but the response seems to have to happen, for me at least, in a different, and perhaps inappropriate, form. But I ask you, whoever you are that constitute my readership, how can you deny the beauty of statements such as these, as much as you may object to their content:

Every man is not only himself; there have been many Diogenes and as many Timons, though but few of that name. Men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past. There wasnone then but there hath been someone since that parallels him, as if it were his revived self. (Religio Medici)

or

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. We are that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. (Religio, again)

or

Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of afflliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrow destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables Afflictions induce callusities; miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, an forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and, ourdelivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. (Hydropathia)

or, even this:

Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. (ibid.)

but just as that might seem cliched:

A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little for death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn. (ibid.)

My working edition is, as I've said, the Penguin, the C.A. Patrides edition. RK was, as so frequently happens (except in his defense of Glenn Close as Gertrude), right beyond measure. I'm hoping to be able to make the time to go through The Garden of Cyphus and Christian Morals before life reminds me she's impatient to her attendance. Though this may seem a trivial thesis to all this, it bears stating and restating: there's no reading like rereading, and there's no discovery like rediscovery. And to think I'd forgotten Browne, or relocated him, as many of us do with other writers and thinkers we respect and/or admire, to a corner recess of memory, especially when most of us seldom examine corners anymore, unless otherwise compelled to do so, usually in some form of adolescent punishment.

By the way, it took me the better part of five minutes of awkward stretching and relocating my books (I am working with very tight shelf-space), simply to dig by Browne Penguin out again. I'm relatively sure I pulled a few things doing so. I am more sure, however, it was more than worth it. Especially considering that, these days, Browne is seldom taught anymore, so most will never at all be exposed to him, just as most will not be exposed to Wyatt or Herbert or Lady Mary Wroth or Aphra Behn. Oh, hell, these days, most wouldn't even be exposed to Dryden or Congreve.

This (surpisingly) isn't rant. It's mere satisfaction on my part of rediscovering someone I'm now partially ashamed I'd moreorless forgotten. It's the contentment of rediscovering a fine-tasted wine that one had somehow let slip from memory. I have to admit, in a way, I'm a tad ashamed. How did I let slip someone with so much to offer, and how did I let slip, for so long, someone so masterful in his prosaic technique, a technique I did admire once, however naively?

If I can summon myself from my lethargic ass and post some links to Browne in the next bit, I will, though I hope I do so before I forget. I don't know why, but I have, and am now niggled by, a sense of fear the I'll not think too much on Sir Thomas again for some time, and I may treat him in the "yeah, when I get to it" mentality that is not so far removed from the "we'll do lunch" mentality as I'd more optimisically like to believe.

Oh, memory, she is a cruel bitch-- most of the time. But every now and again, she summons something you'd least expect. And sometimes, when she does this, she slightly recharges you, with another few distempered volts through the jumper cables.

Alas, must focus. Coriolanus pends, as does an olio of work. Cheers and thanks again, RK. Relatively sure you didn't mean it in quite that way, but reminding me of Browne did a lot to stir, and I thank ye for it. Complacency and forgetfulness are among the devil's best friends. (And, crap, I've gone on wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too long again. Yes, RK, another Castro-point.) ;-)

(And, btw, please pardon any typos in advance. To describe my typing as abominable is concomitant with saying that Hitler's crimes were "bad." Ah, lintotes.)

Yes, It's Immature But...

      Some words, let's just face it, don't sound right. Even highly literate people who are fully aware of the actual meanings of such wonders often find themselves tittering when other people use them, or when they use them themselves. As Colin Mochrie once asked, "Do you giggle when you say Regina?" The strange thing is, though, that as giggle- and titter-inducing as such words are, however puerile such snickering ultimately is, we continue to use them with as much of a straight face as we can muster. "Uranus" will always cause a little twitch no matter how sincerely we say it. But here are some words that will no doubt forever bring out the 13-year-old in all of us:

      >> rectory, rectify, recto; oddly, "rectangle" doesn't seem to have this problem, despite have a blatant suggestion of, er, a specific, ahem, positionality.

      >> caucus (especially as a verb, as CNN thinks it always necessary to use it), coccyx, cock, coquette; and yet, "cockatiel" and "cockatoo" don't have these problems...

      >> Regina and angina; and, for Canadians, the most famous Canadian town of all, Dildo, Newfoundland. Imagine if one of the subdivisions within Regina were named Dildo.... *rolls eyes*

      >> seamen is now moreorless out with the politically-correct bathwater, but... Anyone remember the bit from Wayland Smithers? "Women and seamen don't mix, sir."

      >> haemorrhage still often gathers giggles from people preoccupied with, er, speedbumps.

      >> probably the worst famous name in the history of language, Englebert Humperdinck.

      >> how did squirrel become so nasty? well, if you don't know, count yourself blessed.

      >> the term Homo Erectus will never recover will it? Same with "homo[genized] milk."

      >> woodpecker. 'Nuff said, no matter how tautologous the dirty-minded sense is.

      >> rather inexplicably, the word swatch gets some people a-titter; strange what an off-rhyme does.

      >> assuage. The proximity to "ass wage" tickles, however asinine (there's another word) the association is.

      >> shitake -- or Shittake, depending on the given spelling-- still has people pronouncing it "shit-take," which is just a little too ironic concerning the process for growing them. And on that note, fungi fits on this list too.

      >> finger, especially as a verb. Organ is in the same boat here, too. The illiterates still love 'organism.'

      >> masticate and matriculate. How odd is it that your parents will encourage you to matriculate but probably not to.... Extirpate fits in this category, too.

      >> swallow, as a noun (as in the bird). "Oh, look, what a lovely swallow..."

      >> ejaculate, as a verb. Oh, the Coleridgean exclamation is now the expression that dare not speak its name.

      >> moist and its cognates. For some reason, damp doesn't suffer from the same stigmatism.

      >> curiously, urges causes chuckles, but "urge" doesn't. Go figure.

      >> thrust and all its cognate, except, curiously enough, not when associated with swordplay.

      >> one has to wonder why schism inspires and prism doesn't. Hmmm...

      >> fallacy and fallacious. How appropriate a word to be misread.

      >> prostrate. Strange how this word has fallen into this list of words, and is now stuck there and can't get up.

      >> whacking, and wax; but curiously enough, 'whack' isn't bound to this, thanks, primarily, to the mafia-connections to that word. Don't tell me you don't snicker while watching "The Karate Kid."

      >> commodious but not commodity. Another oddity.

      >> slurp seems pretty much inescapable, though I can't help but wonder how much of the problem comes from the onomatopoeic dimension of that word.

      >> asteroid. Need I say more?

      >> sepulcher. Something in the sound of that word.... Something between that odd "ulch" sound and that proximity to 'pecker.' (This one's a personal favourite.)

      >> titter and twitter.

      >> all words erecting and erupting, and leaving quite a mess.

      >> pistil, but yet not pistol. Any ideas on this? See also anil.

      >> penal. Irredeemable, methinks.

      >> facetious-- oh, another shit-take...

      >> one has to wonder why penetrate is generally okay, but penetration is not.

      >> approbate, so reminiscent of reprobrate, needs mention here, as does the word probe, as a verb, anyway.

      >> and, of course, dictum ("Damn near killed 'im... "). This blog will add nothing of the English dessert "spotted dick," save to say that Doc J won't be eating it ever. Call it a matter of principle. ;-)

And, lo, there are so many more I should include here. Oh, our langauge, what have we done to thee? Alas, though, there's also a glee to such childish silliness. But consider it proof-positive that we all have a bit of the adolescent mentality stirring within. Perhaps we're all a little verbally priapic-- Y-chromosome or no. I don't wanna grow up....

^~~Stop, In The Name Of God...^~~

      Word to Max von Sydow: stay the hell away from Kenya.

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics

      The less I say about this, the likelier I am to remain with my appendages in tact. Let's just say that none of this surprises me in the least. *shakes head* O shame, where is thy blush?

      Contrast that article, by the way, with this. Hmmm....

Notes to Self

      Voici, mainly for RK, my outline for my lec today on A&C, which will probably sound cryptic... I assure you all, there is a logic thereto, and I stand surprisingly content with the order.

      Title: "The Love That Must Be Reckoned: An Apocalypse of Love."

          (i) The Triple Pillar and The Serpent of Old Nile
          (ii) Romance From The Outside
          (iii) Beyond Interiority: The Diva Mentality
          (iv) Enobarbus: That Truth Should Be Silent
          (v) Outstaring the Lightning
          (vi) Losing My Timing Like This: Send In The Clown
          (vii) Reckoning, and Metamorphosis: I Am Fire, Air

No particular genius therefore, mais... I'm glad merely I found a way to handle matters, within reason, within 50 minutes. Oy. We shall see. *shakes head vociferously*

Alas, were I still young and vital.... But still, Rocinante awaits.

Needling The Little Grey Cells

      Oh, damn, I am getting lethargic in my dotage. (Yes, I'm overstating, but a little histrionic language can be a welcome thing, especially when one is writing about one's banality.) I'm supposed to return my students' essays tomorrow, and for the life of me I can't gather any energy just to get the blasted things done. Each paper seems to take not just an hour (on a second reading!), but by the end I feel so sapped that I immediately seek some sort of relief, however, trivial, including writing-- er, venting-- on this blog. Why is it that as I get older, or rather that the more I do this, the more I wish to run away from marking? Why is it that completing a single paper more often than not prompts me to want to seek sanctuary from the process entire by any means possible? Alas, my brain hurts, and not in the good ways of muscular gain-through-pain. I also have to wonder, though, if I'm just losing patience with the whole process, or if I'm just becoming (God forbid!) even more cynical than I already am. Maybe I've just reached Sir Winston's plateau at which bad prose becomes an unforgiveable sin, or maybe I just wish it were as easy as striking a gong when my patience evaporates. But, no, one has to be encouraging, corrective, and hope maybe some of the effort eventually proves instructive. That's my higher self speaking. My lower self, my less noble and certainly more visceral self, though that I could say what I feel and not what I ought to say. Ah, to be able to write comments like, "Yet another example when the night before leaves other people with a feeling of the morning after," or "Reading this, now I understand why some animals eat their young," or "This is a hilarious satire on undergraduate writing, but, er, oops, sorry." I guess part of the problem is this need to be politic and to suppress my own immediate reactions of dismay and frustration and disappointment. Mais, zut alors, I must plod through, like trudging through a bog with anvils for anklets. My intellectual gait feels like it's reverted to some australopithican state. One day, I'll have to figure out a way to maintain a kind of zippy, glib optimism about such things. And damned be damned, I still haven't figured out what I'm going to say tomorrow. *shakes head* It looks like I'll be having to pull a minor miracle out of an orifice to remain unnamed here. Oy vey. Enough rant. Back to the grind. Time to hoist my axe again... Damn, why must marking and sobreity be so antithetical to one another?!?!?! Grrrr. Arrrgh. Eooow.

I Love That Word REFOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRMM!

      Now this is interesting. Goodness only knows how all of this will unfold, but such gestures remind me of the last-ditch efforts of the dying-guards in East Germany and Romania just over a decade ago. Problem, though: the same gestures have worked in spades in China and North Korea. So, who knows how this will turn out. My point, as much as I have one, is this: for all the current talk about establishing democracy in Iraq (yeah, right, that's exactly the Americans want in Iraq, especially if the populace votes for fundamentalist leaders), the real proof of any changes in the political air of the Middle East will come from Iran, the only country in the Middle East that has truly known theocratic government, and also the only country with a viable reformist movement. This is a Draconian gesture, and it will either prove a consolidation of power by the mullahs, or it will prove a desperate, and self-dooming, act by a group aware that its power base is eroding. Let us hope the latter; somehow, it would be appropriate if the Iranian theocratic hardliners met, er, shall we say, such a Farsical end. Oh, I know, that is a bad one. Forgive me.

A Small Affirmation, and Some Listing Quibbles

      Rolling Stone, that great paean to the trendy and the inane, has thoroughly shocked me by including in the "50 Best Albums of 2003" the latest releases from (of all people) those old-timers Johnny Cash, the Reverend Al Green, and Van Morrison. Unfortunately, the Stone website doesn't provide a list, instead you have to click through one-by-one to see each entry on the list; what a pain in the ass. You can start the list here, with that oh-so-talented 50 Cent. I also like RS's description of Morrison's What's Wrong With This Picture? as "the hangover album of the year."

      Also from RS, there's their somewhat spurious list of the 500 Greatest Albums of the "rock" generation, though the list includes such non-rockers as Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, and so forth. The thing I hate: the continued enervation of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which still seems to me to be one of the most vastly overpraised albums of all time. I'm not trying to diss the Beatles per se, but we continue to live in a culture that ceremonially fellates the spirit of John Lennon to the detriment of many artists that I think more significant and more influential. Here's the Top 25, with my own notes:

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (inevitable... sigh)
2. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys (last list I saw of this ilk, this was #1; didn't agree with that either)
3. Revolver, The Beatles (C'mon....)
4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan (Fair enough.)
5. Rubber Soul, The Beatles (But, of course... Slurp, slurp, slurp.)
6. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye (Fair enough. We still miss ya, Marvin.)
7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones (Fair enough.)
8. London Calling, The Clash (Not my cup o' tea, but understandable.)
9. Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan (Fair enough. It's easy to forget how profound Dylan's influence really was.)
10. The Beatles ("The White Album"), The Beatles (I'd have thought this would have been higher; but here we are again...)
11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley (I thought this would have been higher.)
12. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis (I'm surprised this wasn't in the Top 5)
13. Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground (Iffy. Maybe 'round 25-30...)
14. Abbey Road, The Beatles (Okay, 5 in 14. Gimme a freakin' break. And their poop was burnished gold.)
15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Top 10 contender, really.)
16. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan (About right. Maybe a tad higher...)
17. Nevermind, Nirvana (Hugely influential, but crap. Maybe Top 40 or 50.)
18. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (About right. Maybe a tad high.)
19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison (Used to be in the Top 5 all the time. This really seems low, and that's not my Van-Fan-ness speaking. This album used often to rank at #1.)
20. Thriller, Michael Jackson (I still hate this album, but you can't deny it's influence; I'd have thought top 15 or so...)
21. The Great Twenty-Eight, Chuck Berry (About right. Maybe a tad higher?)
22. Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon (Fuck off.)
23. Innervisions, Stevie Wonder (Fair enough.)
24. Live at the Apollo (1963), James Brown (Definitely should have been higher.)
25. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac (Hugely influential, great album, but 25 seems high; 40, perhaps?)

Some strange things to note here:

      Born to Run is an okay choice, but I would have thought Nebraska would have been up there somewhere in its place.

      As much as I loathe him now, it's a bit surprising that Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells A Story has now been seriously demoted.

      Bob Marley doesn't register until #45, which I find surprising, as I do the low level given to Never Mind The Bollocks, even though I'm no fan of the album.

      Hotel California is ranked at #37, which was panned by Rolling Stone when it was released.

      Not one of the Top 25 is a solo-female album, and the female presences are marginal. The first female solo album is deigned to be Joni Mitchell's Blue at #30. The uteri will be protesting this.

      Robert Johnson is not in the Top 25? P'shaw.

      Achtung Baby! (#62) ranks higher than Moondance (#65)? Methinks not; the former had some real clunkers on it; the latter is a near-perfect album.

      Sticky Fingers is also relegated to the 60s; odd.

      Aretha's Lady Soul doesn't come up until #84, and that just seems wrong.

      The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan only peeks into the Top 100 at #97, and this seems to be a serious underassessment.

      Ray Charles' landmark Modern Sounds... doesn't even scratch the Top 100: it lands at 104, in a mind-boggling placement, especially considering that it is/was one of the most significant albums of all time.

      B.B. King's Live at the Regal is relegated to #141, behind Dr. Dre of all bleedin' people, which seems significantly out-of-step with critical opinion.

      And where the hell is Corey Hart???? Okay, I'm just kidding on that one... ;-)

I could probably go on forever with this, and this is all -- as much as possible-- side-stepping my own opinions in favour of general critical surveyance. Further proof such lists are, indeed, highly questionable. I long for the day when people can begin to get some critical context on the Beatles. I know, I know-- probably not in my lifetime...

Argument In Favour Of Indolence

      Every now and again, I write a post that is thoughtful (and hopefully intelligent, but I leave it that there was merely some, however adequate or inadequate, thought involved), and such a post receives no comments, or very few -- and often minor-- comments. And yet, very often a one- or two- line entry will garner numerous comments.... Sometimes, I think I should just save myself the thought process. Or, perhaps, laziness is its own reward. Something to consider....

Whoa.

      Tonight's Alias was eff-ing excellent. I won't say anything more than that, except this: terrific work on narrative. The show was always pretty good, but tonight's just knocked it right out the proverbial ballpark. Watch, if ye haven't already.

Hey, Ho, And The Words And The Drain,
   And The Drain It Draineth Every Day...

      Well, it looks like I've inherited the lot of my colleague's marking, so Doctor J is going to be a busy little bugger in the next wee bit. So much marking, he thinks to himself, like a shell-shocked war veteran. Sometimes I wonder if one has to be Sir Henry Rawlinson to make heads-or-tails of undergraduate esperanto (as complex as cuneiform, but certainly less sophisticated). Oh well, as they say, when it rains...

      Just a few bits and pieces for today, before I retreat into my academic warren for the next several days (and cling to the likely vain hope that I'll be able to get out for a few drinks tonight):

>> Sir Frank Kermode has a review in the NY Times on three new books about Shakie, including yet another quasi-biography by the voluminous Shakespearean Stanley Wells.

>> Ah, and here's a brief piece about a matter near and dear to the Not-So-Good Doctor's heart. Pardon me a moment while I wax nostalgic for simpler days.

>> Dave Barry's current column might be subtitled "Real Men Don't Make Concessions," and is a delight to read; and, before any of you ask, I have to admit I am as subject to a lot of the same basic responses as Guy A and Guy B, if only for the sake of spite and giving as good as one bloody well gets. *smirk*

>> And then there's this, which RK forwarded to me this morning, but which I've seen floating about the net for a while now. I can't help but find it ironic that RK sent this the day after the detestable Dr. Laura appeared on Larry King Live (with, of course, the shocking headline that "Dr. Laura Speaks Out!"). Anyway, for those of you who've not seen this before, it's worth remembering the old credo, "God save me the righteous and the holy":

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a U.S.radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a U.S.resident, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I learn a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can.

When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15:19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.

4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

5. I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35: clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

7. Lev.21:20states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting twodifferent crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them (Lev.24:10-16)? Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws (Lev. 20:14)?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Alas, it's time to get some more work done, which should be heretical for a Saturday, which really is just par for the course. Off to do my flimsy impression of Rawlinson, praying I can sneak myself from this addling at least for a respite tonight.

Post-Script: The return to campus since my refashioning was partially hilarious, partially humiliating, as many of my older friends did their double-takes and pot-shots, the most typical being "You look sooooooooooo cuuuuuuuuuuuute," "You look like you're bloody 19!" and "Did you join the marines?" (On the latter, of course not: Canada has no marinary forces to speak of, save those submarines at the West Edmonton Mall.) But, oh it is fun fucking with people's expectations. *rubs hands villainously* But as I have wound up averring several times, the next person that uses the word "cute" in that pseudo-familial tone of a dozen W's strung together will find him- or herself subjected to a series of tortures and mutilations, including (but not limited to) gutting, garrotting, castrating, quartering, tarring, feathering, dissection, and public immolation. And if you tussle my hair at all, I'll think up even more excruciating punishments to visit upon you. Grrrrrrr....

Harbor Lights: On Mark Strand

      Here are yet some more pieces from Mark Strand's marvellous volume Dark Harbor (1993), which I still esteem as probably the finest volume of poetry of the last twenty years. Unfortunately, my copy of the book disappeared some time ago, and it's been a bugger trying to find a replacement. The truly aweing thing about Strand's poetry is that he seems to appeal to all sorts of audiences, educated and uneducated, romantic and postmodern, conventionalist and innovator. His poetic voice is astonishingly distinct: there's no confusing a Strand poem with one by anyone else, in large part because he marries aloofness with closeness in a way that no contemporary poet can seem to do so gainfully. He is by turns wry, gentle, touching, absurd, ridiculous, hilarious, sombre, surreal, sensual, intellectual, ironic, and even inspirational, and at his best, as he is throughout Dark Harbor, he avoids lapsing into emotional slither or poetic pretentiousness. Sure, an educated reader is more likely to get more out of a Strand poem, but an uneducated reader, or even an educated reader with little disposition toward poetry, can still find many, even most, of his poems rewarding at some level. Let me know what any of you think.

   These pieces are culled from this site, but they're numberings are not as they appear in the final volume. The last piece (III here) is actually number XLV, the concluding poem to the volume. I should add also that, by the time he formulated the volume, all of these poems were rendered in tercets, in part, I suspect to affect an appropriate Dantean air of traversing mystical territory.

I

When after a long silence one picks up the pen
And leans over the paper and says to himself:
Today I shall consider Marsyas
Whose body was flayed to an excess
Of nakedness, who made no crime that would square
With what he was made to suffer.
Today I shall consider the shredded remains of Marsyas
What do they mean as they gather the sunlight
That falls in small pieces through the trees,
As in Titian's late painting. Poor Marsyas,
A body, a body of work as it turns and falls
Into suffering, becoming the flesh of light,
Which is fed to onlookers centuries later.
Can this be the cost of encompassing pain?
After a long silence, would I, whose body
Is whole, sheltered, kept in the dark by a mind
That prefers it that way, know what I'd done
And what its worth was? Or is a body scraped
From the bone of experience, the chart of suffering
To be read in such ways that all flesh might be redeemed,
At least for the moment, the moment it passes into song.

II

Our friends who lumbered from room to room
Now move like songs or meditations winding down,
Or lie about, waiting for the next good thing
Some news of what is going on above,
A visitor to tell them who's writing well,
Who's falling in or out of love.
Not that it matters anymore. Just look around.
There's Marsyas, noted for his marvelous asides
On Athena's ancient oboe, asleep for centuries.
And Arion, whose gaudy music drove the Phrygians wild,
Hasn't spoken in a hundred years. The truth is
Soon the song deserts its maker,
The airy demon dies, and others come along.
A different kind of dark invades the autumn woods,
A different sound sends lovers packing into sleep.
The air is full of anguish. The measures of nothingness
Are few. The Beyond is merely beyond,
A melancholy place of failed and fallen stars.

III

I am sure you would find it misty here,
With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair.
Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields
Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite,
And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through,
Making a shushing sound. Not long ago,
I stopped to rest in a place where an especially
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,
Who claimed to have known me years before,
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group,
Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized
Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked
Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.

The last piece, with the "shushing sound" of the angels recalls the description of the sea in Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order At Key West" that is "Like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves." (Stevens was a major influence on Strand.) But the glory of these poems is their fundamental simplicity. Sure, there are a number of nuances and complexities and so forth, but the poems do not depend on a poet-qua-poet's vocabulary; the imagery is simple, precise, direct, and intensely knowable, as if, in part, Strand were borrowing a page from the popularistic (and sometimes rustic) tendencies of Robert Frost. Even the allusions to mythology and art are not that complex, and easily resolved if one doesn't know them immediately. Notice, too, the exactitude of the enjambements. The breaks, the implied pauses, seem perfectly placed, and perfectly natural, to the point that-- perhaps again following Frost's famous dictum about poetic clarity rather than ambiguity, that a poem tells you how to read it, rather than letting you decide how to read it arbitrarily-- it's almost impossible to misread the poem orally. As such, his pacing is beautifully controlled, each line a clear phrase unto itself, before adding to or amending what's just been said. The effects are ones of accretion and accumulation, each line a next step in kind of progressive verbal waltz.

      I'd ask those of you bothering to read this to observe also some of the lovely little "incidental" phrases that seem to add so much. "One of the good ones," for example, is a beautiful little detail, affirmative without being pretentious, casual without being shallow, and it somehow adds a touch of joy to the anticipation of waiting for the angel to sing (which, of course, it doesn't do within the scope of the poem proper). "I'm sure you would find it misty here" is a nice touch as well, a bit wistful, a bit fond, and even a bit epistolary, though the place itself is left almost entirely to one's imagination; this is a place, it seems, of mists and shades and auras, but the tone of the line is so casual and informal, that it seems to engender a memory of familiarity, of a remaining link to a more immediately tangible reality. Sometimes, it's stunning what a truly fine poet can do with a simple phrase, not necessarily anchored down by ambiguities and suggestions of semiotic alterity, with mere denotation. Placed in the right context, measured in the right syllables, such phrases can sing beyond initial meaning. Some other phrases are just as "right," examples of les mots justes. "Soon the song deserts its maker" rings of the fact of abandonment without mourning over it; it's a fact, a somewhat sad fact, but not one to be ring one's heart over. "Not that it matters anymore" has both a touch of sadness and a touch of humour to it, the kind of reminder of reality that helps to keep the poem from lurching into metaphysical self-purchase. That it follows the line about "Who's falling in or out of love," subtle in its humourous invocation of gossip, the tinge of wry dismissal somehow affects a note of loss (that even great loves and partings eventually cease to matter, in the practical sense) while at the same time it grounds itself in the awareness of historical inevitability, that such loss is not necessarily something on which to wax elegaically but to be accepted this side of stoicism as part of the inescapable entropic pull of time.

      But these examples speak to one of Strand's great gifts, the ease of his speech; he is fluid, he is direct, he is, one might say, plain without suffering from plainness. While these poems might have melancholic or elegaic propensities, they don't simply surrender to those propensities; just as the poem seems to tip slightly in one direction, the poem counterbalances itself, as if to regain its composure, and the result is a lilting effect, a sombre but not entirely sad verbal ambulation. In a way, if you'll pardon the metaphor, Strand's voice here is tied to a kind of self-aware gait, and if you'll accept (and ideally agree with) that metaphor, the synchronicity, and the apparent ease of that synchronicity, resonates with intimacy, something most contemporary poets shrink from in terror. This in itself marks Strand as a poet of greater calibre than just about any of his surviving peers, with the possible exception of Seamus Heaney. Yes, these poems have a dreamy, airy quality to them, but at the same time they seem more real, more vaguely tangible than most poems that essay to trunk themselves in the familiar and the everyday.

      Here is another piece from Dark Harbor, again, in part a response to Wallace Stevens ("Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu"), that somehow wrests poignancy and affirmation from an idea that might otherwise seem an endstop, an endstop Strand's poem doesn't entirely deny, but which he seems to see as having an un(der)explored dimension to it. Here's the poem:

It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,

Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,

The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.

And the imagery is beautiful, isn't it? "The weight of the pelican's wings," "the backs of bathers," "the moon's ripening," "the temptations of sleep," and the gorgeous concluding image of "the wine as it waits in the glass" -- there's a richness of vitality and sensuality to these images, as everything seems to proffer, to grow, to live in its own way, from the moon's maturing to the waiting of the wine. And the imagery seems unembellished, gloriously natural, as if these qualities of living are intrinsic to these things and merely not normally seen. There's a pseudo-romantic fecundity here that is, in the Modern period, rarely apparent, except in the poems of Wallace Stevens, and, like Stevens, he carefully steps around the trapdoors of hokeyness and soft-mindedness. This is a poem of surreal beauty rather than surreal disjunction or surreal ugliness-- and, as such, it speaks to, and touches, with a kind of mature sensuality, not unaware of death but astonishingly alive with the idea of death.

      I should tie this up shortly, but I mentioned Strand's humour earlier, and I fear none of the poem's I've offered really demonstrate that quality (even though Strand's earlier poetry waswell-known for it: see "Eating Poetry," for example). I'll end this discussion with a cheeky little play on naming (remember Strand's first name) and self-awareness, number XIX from Dark Harbor:

I go out and sit on my roof, hoping
That a creature from another planet will see me
And say, "There's life on earth, definitely life;

"See that earthling on top of his house,
His manifold possessions under him,
Let's name him after our planet." Whoa!

It's devilishly clever, and it's postmodern to the bone in the best sense of that possibility. In a way, this strikes me as a poetic version of a Far Side cartoon, even funnier for its undercurrent of serious possibilities, though the surface is pure stoner comedy. Leave it to Strand to do more with six lines than most could do with a chapter, and leave it to Strand to end a poem with "Whoa!" and still pull it off.

      Read Dark Harbour, my friends. It's a magnificent little volume, a mere 46 poems, none, I think, more than thirty-six lines. He deserves to be more widely read than he currently is.

Murdering Language

      Yeah, we all know that a group of crows is a murder and that a group of whales is a pod, but I've always had a hard time keeping track of the appropriate collective terms for certain animals. Well, here's a handy link to help you keep some of this stuff straight. Now, if only they provided explanations for why each of terms came into being... Nah, that'd be too much research, and I for one am too damned lazy to do it. Looking at this list reminds me of the genius of the phrase "Cry havoc / and let loose the dogs of war."

Please, Just So Kill Me Now...

      ... if this sort of crap qualifies as intellectual study. As I've said before, "colour me uninterested in the politics of masturbation and Friends." Oh, it looks as if Ms. Tagliamonte and her hired student had corn for lunch.

I Can't See The Difference, Can You See The Difference?

      Okay, fellow Ontarians, if you're reading this: give this article a gander, and, if you can, name me a single way in which Dalton McSquinty is different than Mike Harris or Ernie Eves. And you have to love the arrogance: “I am going to bring results-based budgeting to Canada for the first time.” Oh ho ho, "the first time." Thank you, our Messiah. And, by the way, if McSquinty is making "a case for government," the government truly needs a better advocate. In my books, Dalton is already looking like one of the most inept political leaders in Canadian history, and I'm sure that future portraits of the current premier will depict him with his fingers crossed behind his back, or in some sort yoga position which depicts the appropriate location of his head in the vicinity of his anus.

For Christie (and others)

      A reason to move to Austria. You've got to love the name: "The Super-Gau-Crazy-Card."

School Daze

      This blog just doesn't know what to say about this, except perhaps that innocence seems to have a shorter shelf-life with every passing day. It also makes me wonder how anyone can spout off about those media whores being decent role models for preteens.

Doh!

      Any man that does this, methinks, is probably just doing the human species a favour.

Brrrrrrrrrrrr.... The Discontent Of Our Winter, or
      Baby, It's F*$king Cold Outside!

      After what seemed a surprisingly mild introduction, winter has now set in with a vengeance. No, none of the pretty brown snow so typical of southern Ontario, but instead we've been assaulted with the skin-tightening chill that has, with midday near, temperatures in the -20C range, with a windchill factor that makes the temperature something more akin to -31 to -35C. (Of course this happens after I've abandoned my swarthy Celtic look; it makes me think there was something to the Samson story after all.) It is, as they say, colder than a Thatcher's teat out there, even if, thankfully, it's not as incapacitatingly frigid as it now is in Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec, and New Broomstick. Last night, the temperature fell to about -27C, combined with an ear-splintering windchill that made the temperature seem more like -40C. Worse, it seems it'll be like this for at least the rest of the weekend. I really hope all of the local alley cats are managing to find some sort of shelter from this deep freeze.

      As I write this, I'm reminded all too well of a report a few years ago that said that of the world capitals, Ottawa was the second coldest national capital in the world, on average warmer only than Ulan Bator in Mongolia. No wonder we Canadians spend so much time dithering and doddering about the weather, and asking mock-stoical questions like "Cold enough for ya?" whenever we're gathered at bus stops or coffee shops. Most parts of Canada are known for their schizophrenic temperatures, ranging from blistering cold in the deeps of winter to the thick, sweat-inducing humidity of summer, and I sometimes wonder if that's part of the sustained Canadian provinciality; restraint and self-ensconcement seems to be the necessary order of the day when one doesn't really know what the weather will be like from day to day. At least we're not usually treated to the more histrionic weather conditions-- typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and so forth-- that most other parts of the world know all too intimately. Or, perhaps, those typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes may just find Canada too damned cold in which to crack their vacationing cheeks. When the weather's like this, my rib cage feels like a set of Venetian blinds fluttering spasmatically about in a blizzard. Oh, for more temperate climes. Oh, how I long to establish the Doctor J School For Literary Studies at Barbados.... Sounds like a noble intellectual project, n'est-ce pas? Feel free to send your donations to Doctor J courtesy of....

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.