Ho Leigh Crap!

      Tucker ("Spin My Bowtie And Watch Me Fly!") Carlson is calling the election for John Kerry?!?!?!? This can't be possible. The world must be imploding. Maybe Jon Stewart noogied his results. The other stats are mostly the typical prognostications of partisan day-dreamers on both sides, but Carlson's numbers are conspicuously out-of-whack with the strictures of ideological wish-fulfillment. This blog suspects he knows something, factually or instinctively, that the rest of us don't know-- perhaps internal Republican polling numbers. Note: he gives JK the win in the Electoral College by, for this election's standards, a whopping lead of 278-260, in part, one suspects, because he's giving JK the call in (deep breath before saying the F word because it now holds the same superstitious effect as mentioning the Scottish Play by name before a performance) Florida. The irony is that the student pundits may have it right-- a tie popularly, or a close thing to it, with an EC victory for The Dubster. Out of the mouths of babes? Let us hope not.

      By the way: for those you despairing that the Not-So-Good Doctor has turned into a full-bent political pundit of late, I should add two defensive caveats. First: the Rotten Doc has always been an observer of major current events and such, as much as he's often ill-disposed to "be political." Secondly: my arguments here are not now nor have they have been Democratic/Republican, they've been virulently, insistently, even vitriolically opposed to those conditions I've always deemed worthy of mockery-- absurdity, stupidity, ignorance, hypocrisy, xenophobia, manipulativeness, and the lot, typical targets all for the N-S-G Doctor's venom. Dubya and his cronies aren't Republicans, though they were their clothes. Let's face it: if these guys were not in politics, they'd have no defenders whatsoever, and they'd be the laughing stocks of page A22 filler pieces. Ideological incest breeds a strange crop of hypocrites and malfeasants.

      And a further point: any of my American readers that might be chomping at the bit after Osama's "October Surprise" (that should have surprised no one), thinking maybe it's wise to stick with Bush, let me put this to you: how can you trust a man who, with all the ecoutrements of what we call Modern Power, has not been able to locate a 6" odd' Arab man in constant need of a dialysis machine after three years of searching? And yet tapes of him keep arriving, untraced, in Islamabad and other locations, ready to be passed on to Al Jazeera? Use a little logic here.   (The Israeli Mossad would have dispensed with this schmuck by now, or, at least, had him treed.) I'm not saying he should necessarily have Osama drifting in the Ross Sea on a rubber duckie with a can of Lysol, but he should be hot on his tail. But nay. Nay, nay, neigh. Now tell me how he's making you safer in this "War On Terror." Most generously, he's scotch'd the snake-- but he surely hasn't killed it, and he hasn't even caged it. Instead, he's sent those of us with rational minds back to rolling our collective eyes of the old who's sane-Hussein puns that became so tiresome over a dozen years ago. Curious George, indeed.  

      As for me, I like the idea of Osama floating smack-naked in the Ross Sea with only a noxious cleaning product, a raft, and a false glimmer of salvation. There's something fitting to it. Now if only there were such a flip way of dealing with the problems in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Belarus, the Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Egypt, and-- for good jesting measure-- the Faroe Islands.

Would You Like Fries With That?, or (gulp, sigh, groan) Grease Is The Word....

      Glancing over some of the blogs from RK's students in anticipation of my lecture before them on Monday, I'm impressed by the energy and ambition of some of them (you, perhaps, if you've been directed here by RK) and I'm realizing that some of the concerns I simply may not be able to address adequately in the short scope of an hour's lecture. That's not to short-shrift those issues, because, in fact, they are germane and they are bound to supplement and to add much-needed historical texture to the issues with which I will be dealing. Lecturing, alas, is a lot like hopscotch, carefully jumping from point to point rather than navigating or mapping the nuances of one's area in complete detail. So, in anticipation of such jumping on my part, here are a few concerns, developed here a bit more fully, particularly in relation to the historical development of language and poetry.

Stressing and Kenning

      One student, Maggie Thompson, provides a nice summary of the development of English as a language, taking from Sweet's A Short Historical English Grammar. It's an effective overview, and she names most of the key surviving texts of the Old English period, and their surviving manuscript sources. Although I will talk a bit about Beowulf and probably a few extant texts (The Dream of The Rood, Caedmon's Hymn, The Seafarer), it's rather difficult to consider them closely in any form but translation, and this puts us in a very awkward position because so much of the organizing principle of OE poetry was aural rather than conceptual. A great deal of OE poetry is based on relatively straightforward concepts, on issues and matters that are represented in chairoscuro (light/dark) terms and in relatively "typical" (i.e., of a type) tropes and symbols (the warrior-chief, the darkened hall, crows, ravens, to name a few). This is surely reductive, but will have to do for now to make a larger point: that the emphasis in these poems is on SOUND, on the matters of rhythm and musicality, the key issue to the latter most often that of alliteration. I'll speak a bit more about this in the lecture, or the tutorial I'm conducting (time depending), but to modern ears, my own included, listening to these fascinating constructions of sound and language without a strong sense of their word-per-word meanings can end up being like listening to opera without having a running translation: one can end up, as Mr Eliot has put it elsewhere, having the experience but missing the meaning, or, alternately, getting the meaning but missing the experience. The very principle, in fact, of poetry is being able to do both at the same time, unless, of course, one is reading Lewis Carroll.

      Carroll provides a wonderful "making-sense-of-things" tale, and goodness knows that every edition of OE poetry now has to provide its own Humpty Dumpty in the footnotes. Those with a knowledge of Germanic or Scandivanian languages might not be quite as lost as the rest of us, but even for such people the act of translation can be prohibitive rather than progressive: the concord between sound and sense is constantly disrupted. There are, however, a few central dimensions which should be observed. One has to do with rhythm and alliteration, for which this site provides a good elemental summation. This rhythm is strongly accentual rather than syllabic, and the result, generally, is a poetry that is more forceful, and in some ways more guttural: the accents are driven by what would have been the progressions, or the strums, of a harp (and, as some have argued though not altogether successfully, perhaps drums or similar percussive instruments that needn't have been played by the scop himself). Soon (if not already), the prominence of the caesura should become clear: not only does it enforce a rhythmical structure, but it points to one of the central concerns of OE poetry, the putting-together (or collusion, or even marriage) of two different parts, with an underlying unity between them, sonically the repeated alliteration that unites the first, second and third accented syllables.

      This putting-together is not just related to sound; it is also related to sense, evidenced most plainly in the OE fondness for kennings. Kennings are metonyms ("name changes"), compound words built to describe everyday (known) objects in alternately appreciable (perceivable) terms; the classic example of this is hronrade, or whale-road, which is used to mean "sea." Kennings have become rare in modern language, and they demand a more distinctly metaphorical imagination, our age more given to calling a sea a sea and leaving it at that. (Not entirely, of course; the first example that leaps to my mind, as CNN blares in the background, is the term "idiot-box.") The linking of two related ideas, though, should emphasize to you how much this sensibility is comparable to the caesura, of marrying two images or ideas together or colliding them to represent another thing. I suspect-- and this is merely a suspicion-- this may have something to do with a culture that was not just more rooted in the metaphorical, but with a culture more rooted in the crossing or traversing of great spaces, not least of which were the spaces of land and water that so dominated the post-Roman mentality. The idea of crossing-over (in many senses) was a pervasive one in the OE cultures, with even more settled tribes carrying with them a relatively recent history of seafaring and resettlement, often in less than receptive environments. So, even in the techniques of poetry one can begin to see the dominant concerns of a people of the time: concerns with journeying and traversing, of which more Monday.

      I said earlier that it's difficult struggling with that gap between sound and sense for those of so far removed from the actual words of the original poetry. It may help some of you, as you try to wrap your heads around these particular sounds, if you glanced at some of the poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the very few employers of OE sounds in his poetry. Hopkins uses what he called "sprung rhythm," a strongly accentual verse form that is often very close to OE forms, even when they may seem very far removed, indeed. In a poem like "The Wreck of the Deutschland," the opening lines of each stanza start in an OE form (four stresses, with a caesura) before expanding into structures that eventually progress to more complicated patterns (and, plainly put, more stresses). Also check out the immensely-complicated but rhythmically very forceful "That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire, it's caesurae writ large, but generally with four stresses on each side of the break. For those especially interested in this sort of thing, you can also check out some of the poems of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (alas, not avilable online) or Earle Birney's "The Gray Woods Exploding" (also, alas, not online).

      Have I drifted? Yes, probably. But it's often helpful to see how such patterns can be developed for modern usage, even if the currents and trends of English language, especially since 1066, have tended to lead us away from them.

Formulations Of The Peacock

      Unfortunately, time is always crushing, and I find myself not dealing with the Middle English period, but which will receive more attention in the lecture than the OE will (so, yes, this is a study in compensation). ME poetry, which I'm considering here as a giant lump sum rather than in the generally-accepted tripartite divisions named in Maggie's post, is that poetry composed after the Norman invasion when the French invasion almost completely razed and salted the earth for OE verse. ME poetry also tends to be sharply alliterative, though the genres of poetry expand considerably. I don't want to antedate too much of Monday's discussion, but there's an interesting point to be made here, especially in relation to Alexandra MacInnis's invocation of Thomas Love Peacock's theory of poetic history. Peacock's is one version of this (of course), and can be contrasted, say with Giambattista Vico's model of history offered in The New Science, and which is modified again by Harold Bloom in his much-maligned The Western Canon. (Simply put: there are three or four ages-- the Theocratic, the Aristocratic, the Democratic, and the implied Chaotic ages, the last elided over by Vico but used by Bloom to characterize the late 19th and early 20th centuries-- that are passed through before one ventures through the last and re-emerges in the original. In other words, we're in the Chaotic Age, waiting to discover a new Theocratic Age. But enough of that.) But I want to take a spot to reflect on Peacock's model, which is useful to a degree.

      Peacock's model, one has to note at the outset, is a bit simplified. (Again, read Alexandra's rather goos summation, or check out her link to the actual text at the University of Toronto Online Library.) It seems to me that Peacock's scope is a little too broad, and it missed what seems to me a crucial step, one between the Iron and the Golden Ages, and which in the scope of English poetic history is represented by the Middle English Period. This period-- the Steel Age, perhaps? so muses the boy from Hamilton.... -- can be characterized by the introduction of a new (smelting? forging?) force that initiates and conducts a series of cultural transformations. In England, this is the Norman conquest, and the institution of feudal and chivalric codes, and as the Old Language finds itself being expanded and reconstituted to reflect a series of cultural shifts from the tribal to the "national" or "the global" (for lack of better terms). There's a pretty crucial fact that Peacock misses, that for a Golden Age of the type he describes, there would have to be a period of consolidation and expansion, and even stabilization. Some might say this is a putative stage, or even a pupative stage, the initial period in which a chrysalis forms, the development before the change proper. One scholar, Alois Brandl, divides the ME period into four sub-periods, all significant in their own rights:

1066-1250: the Anglo-Norman period, or "The Period of Religious Record": minstrels are producing for French-speak patrons; the Church is largely handling its own material and holding onto it. This is the period the Ancrene Riwle and the medieval Bestiary and much hagiographical literature (saints' lives). Also the lays (or lais) of Marie de France.

1250-1350: the Norman-English period, or "The Period of Religious and Secular Literature": the Norman nobility is adapting to English, and so comes with more popular forms of literature. Writings of this period tend to be moralistic and even mystical, as the didactic begins articulate itself in more popular verbal forms (songs, ballads, romances). Typical writings: early lyrics ("Sumer Is Icumen In," "Edi Beo Thu, Heuene Quene," "Alysoun," "Nou Skrinketh Rose"), the Fabliau (e.g., "Dame Sirith"), Havelok the Dane and King Horn among the romances.

1350-1400(+): "The Period of Great Individual Writers": Linguistic climate is stabilizing, and availing itself to "professional" writing. This is the age of Chaucer, Gower, Wycliffe, William Langland, and the so-called Pearl-poet.

1400-early 1500s: "The Period of Imitation or Transition": Sometimes thought of as the revving of the engine before the drive, or the calm before the storm, as writing tends to repeat itself and anticipates a major epistemological shift. This is the age of Malory revamping the tales of Arthur, of the retelling of long-told tales as in Gesta Romanorum, even the burlesque The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell

This is rather long and involved (and round-about), but it's perhaps worth explaining that this is the period in which language, like steel, is used more pliably and in more varied ways. Techniques and genres become more refined, more nuanced, and certainly more complicated. As some of you will see, by the time of the Pearl-poet and Chaucer, poetry is increasingly elaborate and ornate, even if, at times, it hold what some might call rougher-hewn sounds. Indeed, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in my estimation one of the most truly marvelling poems in the English language, we meet a poem that is so carefully crafted that even deal with it's central structure one finds no end of patterns and orders.

      It also bears stating that, historically, many, if not most, cultures go through a similar period, and if we speak in larger historical terms, one might see poets like Virgil and Ovid in the Latin period as Chaucers to the Greeks like Homer. That's broadly simplified, but not, I think, entirely off-base. In English poetic history, though, this period is the progenitive period for what is alternately called the Early Modern period or the English Renaissance when English poetry becomes a house afire with innovation and reinvention: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and so many others. But consider all this discussion of the ME period as a caveat, or a qualifying addition, to Peacock's theory.

      Whew. Yes, this has gone on rather long, for which I apologize. Profusely. For those of you reading this that are in RK's class, be aware that this is ONLY SUPPLEMENT, French-- not freedom-- fries for the main dish. Pick away at any of this as much as you like, and discard the rest. I assure you, Monday's lecture won't be anywhere near this elaborate, winding, intimidating, or (blessèd be) specific. I promise. This is for those of you wishing for a bit more to gnaw on. Some of you, like me, may have smaller appetites. But the fries are cheap, so help yourself if you want.... Cheers and best.

Madness, Madness!

      Here's a flabbergasting possibility: how John McCain could be president in 2004. Unlikely, surely, but.... If this doesn't suggest to you why the American electoral system is a rotten mess, then perhaps this should. Frightening. And if anyone thinks for a second that Bush and his boys would refuse to avail themselves of this corrupt little contingency, you're deluding yourself.

Presidential Qaqaa

      Is it possible, at long last, that this drudgerous, exasperating, manifestly manipulative election campaign in the United States might finally be petering to an ending? I shouldn't tease myself with the possibility, because I think we all know, short of some mysterious tsunami of heretofore unstated support arriving to drive one candidate to a watery fate, there aren't going to be any graceful concession speeches anytime soon and we'll all be retreading that oft-quoted (and misquoted) nugget from Shakespeare about killing all the lawyers. But some of us can cling to some morsel of hope that this idiot's carnival that has consumed so much attention in this increadingly ADD society will soon find an ending. This blog's only reason for hope? John Zogby's recent guest appearance on The Daily Show. Asked by Jon Stewart who was going to win the election, Zogby, he of more polls than Warsaw, answered quickly and with a certainty normally restricted to more partisan circles, "Kerry." I'm not sure how Zogby can be so confident (he anticipates the undecideds will break for Kerry on election day), though reading polls can have the same dizzying effect as a Rimsky-Korsakov piece, and, worse, the retarding effect of overproof moonshine. The headaches are only just beginning, and the hangover is going to be a right bitch, so much so that today's NYTimes notes a bizarre possibility that the real winner in this election may finally be neither Mr Bush nor Mr Kerry but (wait for it) John Edwards. There are two things one has to take from this: that now more than ever that the largely-unpolled youth vote may make the difference in this election, and, more importantly, that American politics has now become such a farce that, were only there more bed-hopping, Feydeau would have been brought to the floor in fits of laughter. This blog's now praying for the tsunami-- and, frankly, attending to more important matters that offer a more blithe suggestion of what Roveing means, or, frankly, what it ought to mean.

      Back to the Qaqaa-mamie bullpoopery of the Bushies, it seems the Pentagon's attempt to suggest that the explosives that disappeared from Al Qaqaa has been appropriately nailed as a misdirection worthy of Penn and Teller. How? By a Minneapolis reporter that was embedded with American troops providing footage from after the invasion of Baghdad that proves the explosives, or some of them at least, were still there. CNN's Aaron Brown, talking with former US weapons inspector David Kay, was uncharacteristically blunt about the matter, saying that this footage was "game, set and match." The NYT's coverage is here.   Bush and his team, as the spoonerism suggests, truly are a bunch of shining wits (to say nothing of their cunning array of stunts). See also, by the way, Frank Rich's indictment of the Bushies in this article, and the New Yorker's devastating review of the Bush administration's cavalcade of lunacy. You really have to wonder how so many people can be so utterly oblivious to the preponderence of facts that demonstrate, with no shortage of defensibility, the ineptitude of this crew. Odd, isn't it, that those, like the folks at Slate, that follow news closely are so overwhelmingly opposed to The Dubya, who with each passing day makes Jerry Falwell sound like a voice of reason. Regardless, you have to love this victory for the President: maybe some us have misunderestimerated him.

      Oh, enough of all this: we all know that if you're going to talk about flipping and flopping, there are so many more serious concerns for this. (No, I won't make any Bush references at all.) But this blog is reminded of the words of Colin Mochrie, playing Props on Whose Line Is It Anyway, after Wayne Brady passed himself through this circular object crying like a baby. He stood there in checked disapproval and said, "That's the flimsiest vagina I've ever seen." Perhaps; or maybe it's just another cunning stunt. Flippy-floppy. Oh dear.... That's the grossest example of onamotopoeia I've ever heard. Cheers.

      (And I hesitate to observe it, but doesn't the woman in the site banner there look more than a bit like Christie, or like she did when her hair was dark? Er.... Um.... I am SO dead. But, sorry kiddo, she does, she really, really does. )

Bewitched (And With Agnes Moorehead Nowhere In Sight)

      My apologies to all of you for not updating this blog of late, but, alas, there's not been much time (and certainly no energy) to write anything here. I'll spare you the boring details and simply attend to matters coming instead of gone: it seems more than appropriate that my return to Toronto, and to Pork Spew, will fall on Hallowe'en, for which the night of and the day after I'll be masquerading as an academic guest star. So, it's official, I'm turning into Dick Cavett or Zsa Zsa Gabor for a day, a disarming thought especially if one doesn't think too long on their bizarre collusion in a certain film also associated with spooky silliness. (RK's unfortunate charges might end up invoking Cavett's words to the Double-Zsa in that film: "Who gives a fuck what you think?") Anyway, this means I'll be in Toronto sometime Sunday evening, and then cavorting about Falstaff-like Monday afternoon. My lecture? I'm sure it'll prove another exercise in ritual humiliation, though it will ostensibly be on the subject of heroic and metaphysical poetry in the pre-Renaissance days. It'll be a generalist's discussion, and I suspect I'll touch on The Iliad, The Odyssey, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Caedmon's Hymn, Beowulf, and maybe, just maybe, The Vision of Piers Plowman and Dante's eternal Commedia. It'll be more thematic than intensive, an outline of basics rather than specifics, and I think I'll take it to that crucial nexus point for the heroic, when heroism is finally fused with the comic, the ironic and the tragic: Cervantes' Don Quixote, which seems to have redrawn the template for our understanding of the heroic in the Modern age. We shall see.

      It has just occurred to me that me talking about the heroic is rather like Rush Limbaugh talking about feminism, but there we go.

      So, I'll be trying to get in touch with most of you in the Toronto region before I head up, but, failing that, all I can say is this: you know where I'll be, and so you can probably guess how you can find me if you want to, though I may be outside now that Toronto, like my own primitive little burg, has banished those of that smoke to the bluster of the cold. So gather ye round, if ye wish, and tell me about the beauty of your lives, and you can lie robustly if you need to. We can knock back a few and party like it's 1399. Costumes, of course, are entirely at your own discretion. I'll be dressed as a guy that supposedly has something important to say. They key word there, of course, is "supposedly."

      So, feel free any of you in the area to join the Not-So-Good Doctor's table once more. For old time's sake. Let us be, once more, Diana's foresters, let us be minions of the macabre moonlight....

Y Merej?

      That this article by Nicholas Kristof should appear in today's NYTimes strikes this blog as gallingly ironic.   (And, no, for those of you thinking it: those aren't 6s on the Doc's scalp but 9s.)   But ho!   Zelda, aka Zozo, will be gliding down an aisle today!   For the life of me, I don't think I've ever seen Zozo in a dress or even a skirt, so imagining her in a wedding gown is truly mind-blowing.   I can't wait.  

      If the Not-So-Good Doctor, simpering singleton that he is, ever decides to tie the endless knot, I'm sure the spectacle will be on par with a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, replete with explosions, fireballs and Kate Beckinsale.   Neh?   Okay, maybe a Noel Coward play with a Mel Brooks cast....

The Woes Of Helpless Lovers

      It seems that RK's young charges are preparing to take the dive into the works of John Dryden, one of this blog's more admired poets-- and, sadly, one of those poets generally taught much in universities anymore (at least not in North America). I don't particularly have anything new or significant to say about Dryden-- at least not at the moment-- but that thing called timing posting something. One of the assumptions about Dryden is that he's "all technique," elaborately skillful but emotionally empty, largely because of the dryness of his wit and his gift for satire (Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe now being his most commemorated pieces). With that assumption in mind, it's something of a refreshment looking back on some of JD's "love" lyrics, pieces that tend never to reach the light of day. Admittedly, these are not JD's best poems ("A Song For St. Cecilia's Day" remains a personal favourite), but there's a kind of "sensible sentimentality" to them; they're never quite as saccharine as they could so easily be, and there's a toughness, to say nothing of clarity, of mind that suggests something roughly akin to a wistful discipline. Any of you interested can check out some of previous remarks on Dryden by clicking here (scroll down). I still think I was right with my note that Dryden "represented passions... as well as anyone could in the days of Nahum Tate." I also still hold that I may indeed be entirely off my rocker. Anyway, give these poems a read.

ONE HAPPY MOMENT

No, no, poor suff'ring Heart, no Change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish'd eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her:
One tender Sigh of hers to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish:
Beware, O cruel Fair, how you smile on me,
'Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

Love has in store for me one happy minute,
And She will end my pain who did begin it;
Then no day void of bliss, or pleasure leaving,
Ages shall slide away without perceiving:
Cupid shall guard the door the more to please us,
And keep out Time and Death, when they would seize us:
Time and Death shall depart, and say in flying,
Love has found out a way to live, by dying.


SONG TO A FAIR YOUNG LADY, GOING OUT OF THE TOWN IN THE SPRING

Ask not the cause why sullen Spring
So long delays her flowers to bear;
Why warbling birds forget to sing,
And winter storms invert the year:
Chloris is gone; and fate provides
To make it Spring where she resides.

Chloris is gone, the cruel fair;
She cast not back a pitying eye:
But left her lover in despair
To sigh, to languish, and to die:
Ah! how can those fair eyes endure
To give the wounds they will not cure!

Great God of Love, why hast thou made
A face that can all hearts command,
That all religions can invade,
And change the laws of every land?
Where thou hadst plac'd such power before,
Thou shouldst have made her mercy more.

When Chloris to the temple comes,
Adoring crowds before her fall;
She can restore the dead from tombs
And every life but mine recall.
I only am by Love design'd
To be the victim for mankind.

[Song from Troilus and Cressida]

Can life be a blessing,
Or worth the possessing,
Can life be a blessing if love were away?
Ah no! though our love all night keep us waking,
And though he torment us with cares all the day,
Yet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking,
There's an hour at the last, there's an hour to repay.

In ev'ry possessing,
The ravishing blessing,
In ev'ry possessing the fruit of our pain,
Poor lovers forget long ages of anguish,
Whate'er they have suffer'd and done to obtain;
'Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish,
When we hope, when we hope to be happy again.

Nobody gets away with repetitions like Dryden does. "The ravishing blessing" is a wonderful line.

What The Not-So-Good Doctor Will Be Watching On November 2

      You have to love the title: "Prelude to a Recount". Check out, by the way, this interview with Stewart from The Canadian Press which culminates, as all things must, with a reference to Carol Channing.   As for the Yank election, Slate has its current assessment of the State of The Union, and it's not pretty: Slate is giving the call to Kerry in the electoral college, though recent polls seem to suggest Bush could win the popular vote. If that happens, expect Al Gore to literally die laughing. (And yes, I split that infinitive. Why? Because I could, damn it.)

But How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck?

      This blog has to provide this just for Zozo, for reasons all too obvious.     

One Hoser To Rule Them All

      The CBC's much-ballyhooed "The Greatest Canadian" has wittled down its nominees, with the top ten a peculiar lot:

Frederick Banting Alexander Graham Bell Don Cherry Tommy Douglas Terry Fox

Wayne Gretzky John A. Macdonald Lester B. Pearson David Suzuki Pierre Trudeau

Don Cherry?!?! David Suzuki?!?!? I need an aspirin now. The rest of the list (or, numbers 11-100) is a mishmash of overvoted celebrities, including (dear Lord) Avril Lavigne, Pamela Anderson, Sarah ("Help Me, I Can't Stop Yearning") McLachlan, and William Shatner. Okay, Pamela Anderson makes the list when Northrop Fye does not (though I'm glad Misters Cohen and Richler found places on it)? One has to note, though, the irony of the man at #69: I'm sure Monsieur Levesque would be absolutely livid at being called a Canadian.

      In the end, I think it's pretty clear who will be Number One, even if it would make the current Prime Minister shout "fuddle-duddle" in frustration. That, too, would piss Monsieur Levesque right off. But I'm heartened to see Mike Pearson and Tommy Douglas on the list. Shows that the popular memory isn't as short as it so often seems.

Doubt

The truth, however, is that voters are not idiots. They are capable of independent thought.

I am not so sure. They evidently were not capable of independent thought before war was initiated in Iraq. Sheesh, the rest of THE WORLD knew what was coming and the Yanks didn't. Go arfing figure.

My Murrican friends: if you vote for Bush, you are an idiot. Plain & simple.

Hope Springs Eternal

      Who knew Atlanta had such sage justices? It almost allays one's fears. Alas, I'm no sure this would hold up on appeal, especially if it gets presented to the Supremes. Key quote that should end up in papers everywhere in the next few days: "September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

      In other "news," tonight I wound up watching two films as different from one another as possible (neither for the first time), Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 Alexander Nevsky and Y Tu Mama Tambien. That's a double bill I'm sure no one would have imagined, but thanks to Canuckistani television, that's what came up; and Nevsky was in the original Russian but with French subtitles, which made things a trifle difficult for someone whose French is as rusty as the Tin Man's pecker. Watching Nevsky again, I was reminded of how ill-at-ease I am with Eisenstein, and I was nagged by questions of Eisenstein's reputation, and how much he tends to forgiven for what, even at the time, was rather jagged and awkward storytelling. (These questions were once much more central to my work; I was, a lifetime or three ago, supposed to be co-authoring a book on the bugger, but like almost everything else it never finally happened.) But we're a sophisticated lot these days, at least when it comes to film; we're so used to elaborate special effects that most movies before 1970 tend to look rather naive. So, yes, we're a more "sophisticated" lot in that sense, but we're far less sophisticated in other ways. Our use of language is surely far less sophisticated than it was in the past, as we've inched toward dryer and more descriptive sensbilities and we've become more manifestly prosaic. Strange the two directions of things, don't you think? It probably says something about our imaginative capacities. But, then again, even in critical circles no one talks about imagination anymore, unless one's trying to historicize Wordsworth or Coleridge or Blake. And we surely don't listen to ourselves, let alone others, very much anymore, attending on "points" we assume people are trying to make rather than engaging in the active process of hearing. We've become the culture of opsis to the chagrin of melos. There's something very worrying about that, at least to me. And people wonder why their kids don't listen; they've never been trained to listen. By the way, the chap in the picture there is the Soviet actor Nikolai Cherkassov, who plays the title role in Nevsky (and the infamous czar in both completed parts of Eisenstein's truly bizarre Ivan The Terrible); he was a formidable dramatic presence in his way, and it's a bit of a shame almost no one knows his name outside of the former SSRs. There was, after all, a snowball's chance in Hell that I'd post any images from Y Tu....

      With that, I should apologize for what will likely be a minimum of posting this week as I take care of a bunch of matters, almost all of which have to do with figuring out Things To Say. I'm no longer used to having to have relevant or meaningful things to say, as all of you reading this blog can surely discern. Tomorrow promises trying to make a silk purse out of a cow's arse (the traditional pig's ear being unavailable) with a minuscule array of largely (to me) undecipherable engineering material. It's proof positive that I must have been a very, very, very bad man in a past life. So, onwards & upwards. Cheers.

Where The Good Doctor Belongs?

      Much more appropriate.... And surely moreso than those white-on-white cliffs of Dover.... As someone once observed, the N-S-G Doctor can always be counted on to provide the dark side of even the peppiest situation.  

      (All those of you planning to send images of the shores of the River Styx are warned in advance not to bother.    )

"An Instrument Of God"

      It looks like the NYTimes is pulling out the stops in its efforts to get its readers to think critically about the dangers of re-electing George W Bush. This week's NYTMagazine features a devastating (and long) article about the faith of the President, a thing that has been profoundly disturbing to those of us with more rational inclinations for years. Unfortunately, the article is written by Ron Suskind, so it will probably be dismissed by the White House as a mere attack piece. I think Suskind identifies many of the things that make so many of us not merely uneasy with the President, but genuinely fearful. Reminds me too much of Yeats' line about the worst being full of "passionate intensity." Truly bone-chilling.

      ADDENDUM: I think I've kept forgetting to link to this piece by Frank Rich that seems to be getting more play in the NYTimes than an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. Corruption and paranoia in the White House? No! P'shaw! Worse than the Nixon days? I'm aghast. Sim-ply a-GHAST!

      ADDENDUM ADDENDUM: Mo Dowd's column today reports a disturbing matter, that Catholic bishops are raising the stakes in this increasingly vile election campaign. According to the Archbishop of Denver (!), a vote for Kerry is tantamount to "cooperating in evil." No, that's not a smear tactic far worse than Kerry mentioning the long-out Mary Cheney....

Does This Parchment Make My Ass Look Fat?

      As most of you will have observed, this blog's been officially diddled with. This, I assure, was not the result of any particular ambition. The site on which this blog had been hosting its images decided, without warning, to become a pay service, taking access to all my images stored there with it, including the Irish coast that was featured so blindingly in the background. So, I let retirement take, and shifted to this new parchment-sorta design. We shall see how long it lasts. At the very least, it's a change.

      And with that, I'm off.

Jon Stewart: Hero, Patriot, Political Bitch-Slapper

      Thank God for Jon Stewart, contemporary media's unlicens'd fool and natural postmodern man, for going on CNN's Crossfire and dressing down the political hackery central to it (and endemic in media circles at the moment). I recommend reading the transcript of the show, of which this excerpt with Tucker Carlson is the kicker:

CARLSON: I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion.
CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans...
STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

Beautiful.       

      Oh, dear lord, if only he'd been on with Bob "The Douchebag for Liberty" Novak.   As a certain family guy would say, that would have been freakin' sweet. You can also check out the episode proper by clicking on Jon's pic, or on this funny little word coming up right about, er, maybe, just a second, right HERE.

Kerrying A Torch

        Mr, er, Senator Kerry has to say, after the inappropriate mentioning of the VP' s daughter: "I misspoke. I was searching for an example of a family that understood that situation well, and did so with compassion. I erred. Yes, I made a mistake. But I acknowledge when I make mistakes, and then I aim to rectify them. Being resolute is one thing; being muleish is another. I believe in learning from my errors, and I believe in mending them. I believe in making things RIGHT. Part of which I aim to do tonight. I believe in making things right, even if it means a little humple pie for me. I erred. I admit it. But now knowing my error, I'll make things right, even if that means admitting my own mistakes. Ask that of the President."

      Game over, checkmate.

      Imagine if a candidate did that. Am I wrong?

Pulling A Train

      The N-S-G Doc has just learned that YET ANOTHER friend is getting married. Crikey. That makes five this year, or will when they're all actualized. Did somebody put something into the water? Is this what happens when people don't get their flu shots? Sheesh.

      I kid. There's no shortage of flu shots in Canada.  

The Little Engine That Could

      "Singin' hot, hot, hot...." (O lay, O lay, O lay, O lay....)

Genghis Khan: Compassionate Conservative

      Oh, that revisionist history.... And, of course, the article has, has, absolutely HAS, to end with a limp retreading of Shelley.   It may time to declare a moratorium on invoking "Ozymandias" in discussions of fallen empires.

A Tough Roe To Ho-- And A Tough Ho To Row

      As if watching the debate last night between Kerry and Bush (or would that be carrion Bush?) wasn't absurd enough, I rather inexplicably found myself watching poor Neil McDonald's interview yesterday with the all-licens'd prevaricator of political hatred, Ann Coulter, on the CBC's Face to Face.   It was a horrifying experience. McDonald-- a reasonable, deliberate journalist-- seemed to make the mistake of confronting She Of The Jagged Lips (you can choose which ones) with facts and studies and quotes, as if it were somehow possible that he might be able to have a civilized discourse with her. 'Twas not to be.   She steamrolled over facts, over details, over even the basics dimensions of polite conduct, making President Bush's charging of Charlie Gibson seem a mere bumping of elbows.   It's no secret that Coulter's a fire-breathing hag, but watching her in an extended session as she issued her sulphurous and racist spew (insulting not just those ever-targetted Fr-ehh-nch, but also Canadians), I couldn't help but wonder who pissed in her genetic pool. She's Barbie with Hitler's disposition, a twisted, hostile, ignorant loon who talks so much about America but evidently thinks America should only consist of people that think (and I use that word guardedly) exactly as she does. And there is poor Neil, nobly trying to carry on a serious interview, she barking at him like some rabid Cerberus as he tries to finish a question, trying, that is, to be courteous and professional, and only barely concealing his exasperation.   I pitied him, having to deal with this embodiment of political and spiritual Turret's syndrome.   I swear, that malignant tumour of a woman makes Goneril look like Anna Karenina.

      In other stuff: did any of you wonder what was up with Dubby's reference to the Dred Scott decision in the second debate? Well, read this, and then this, and be appropriately distressed. It's been one of the underlying urgencies to the defeat of President Bush that he might be able to stack the Supreme Court and so remake jurisprudence in his own image, a prospect that in itself should scare the bloody bajeebus out of those of sound mind. Yikes. See also this interesting piece from Thomas Friedman on the Republican addiction to 9/11.   Sometimes I really do wonder how much the Shrubberies simply can't see the wood for the trees, and how much they've desperately convinced themselves of their delusions.   I'm just praying that Birnam Wood is indeed moving. By the way-- you want some wood, Mr President?

      Totally unrelated: there's a good reminiscence and reconsideration of Derrida in today's NYTimes. Maybe it's a good time to remember how easily things can be deconstructed--- and deliberately misconstructed. Sometimes, I wonder if Derrida felt like the accidental Doctor Frankenstein of contemporary thought, releasing a creation that would become so perverted and misunderstood. Jacques, methinks your former speeches have but hit our thoughts which may interpret farther.

The URL of Surrey

      As the Ever-So-Rotten Doc said to the Very Good Mr Mitchell recently, I've been reappreciating Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, of late, an occurrence that seems to happen almost bi-annually. (Bushies respond: he's BI-annual!) Forebearing a more involved (i.e., boring, to most of you) discussion, in which the N-S-G Doc will surely ramble beyond the rules of most nuclear proliferation treaty discussions, This Minor Place In The Cyber Universe would entreat that you glance at the Stuff of the good Sir Henry, generally regarded as the first adapteer of the sonnet into the English language. Check out the increasingly guarded Luminarium site on HH by clicking here.   I -- and I should probably enhance the I there-- have an inexplicable fondness for him-- and respect. I'd frankly like to know what you think. Even-- at least as far as I've seen-- the specialists in the field treat him with slouching shoulders and rolling eyes. I like him. I like him, quite a lot, thank you. But maybe I remain just another all-licens'd fool, courtesy modern technology. The heart, well--- the heart. And yes, even this miserable bastard has one, as much as that may seem unfathomable. It's scarred, gangrenous, and probably unusable, but it remains, a fact of the curmudgeonly day.

      But, Gar! and Argh!--- a thing that won't make sense to most of you unless you know the NSG Doctor's personal proclivity to break conversational lineage with pirate-like snarls-- I was rereading Frank Kermode's Preface to his book Shakespeare's Language tonight. Strikes me that he's sterling in the issues he raises. Like Bloom, he feels the need to step away from an increasingly pedantic, to say nothing of punditrous, academy, to reach those Few That Care. His is the wisdom of temperance, a thing sadly disallowed by increments as this culture aggravates itself for its own onanistic sake. More on this tomorrow, if (yeah, RIGHT!) you care. In a strange way, Kermode's preface is worth more than his already immensely-appreciable remaining chapters. This is also why he remains a critical titan.

     But, as for me, I fear that with each day I become Grandpa Simpson. Gar! Argh! D'Oh! At least I don't look like him. Shuddup, shuddup, shuddup....    Okay, but at least I'm skinnier..... (Okay: just the throw this very, very fugly mutt a bone.....)      We assure you you'll never have to explain it. Gar!

Bounty Call At The Pelting Farm

      For those of you wondering what-the-fark (this blog refuses utterly to use the "wtf" abbreviation so common to "the internets") the difference is between Canadian and American Thanksgiving, this site should help to remedy your confusion.   There are a few other dimensions worth noting, some worth noting if only to inform those outside of the Great White North what Canada really is like, and, in fact, what a "distinct society" we well and truly are:

• Canadians eat beaver instead of turkey;
  
• We bless the beaver before we eat it (oh boy, do we ever);
  
• We do so generally after much-too-much beer has been consumed, and usually after hockey games, though not this year;
  
• The beaver is usually complemented by a buffet of fine juices, though not all of them are aromatic per se;
  
• After several morsels, we keep turning up our heads and asking, "Eh?"
  
• There is occasionally some activity to follow the eating of the beaver, but almost definitely then followed by a very deep sleep;
  
• There is an ancient ritual of reciprocating back to the beaver on Thanksgiving: if it truly has given a dam, it is rewarded with praise, deference, and greater attention in the preparation than it normally receives;
  
• Burping during the dinner is strictly forbidden;
  
• Burping after the dinner is discouraged but tolerated, and in some circumstances it is taken as a demonstration of appreciation;
  
• Men are occasionally allowed to go to Tim Horton's after dinner, but only if they have eaten all of what's been presented;
  
• Stuffing is entirely at the discretion of the hostess;
  
• Vegetables may or may not be included in the proceedings, but usually only carrots, cucumbers, tubers, and for the truly hearty, rutabagas (baby-corns being frowned upon);
  
• Although pie is generally served, hostesses regularly insist that their diners take care of their own whipped cream;
  
• We truly do end up giving thanks for giving, even if many wish the holiday were called "Thanksreceiving";
  
• And, perhaps most oddly, the more you spill in your lap, the better. But do not describe the meal as "bounty-licious." This will surely get your barred from eating for a very, very long time.  

You'll observe the Canadian avoidance of corn on this holiday, a fact some consider a strange ceremonial hole, but which is perhaps best understood as a distaste for maize for basting, though it's not uncommon among those that spend the holiday alone.   But the rest, as they say, is gravy.   So, my fellow Canadians, let us bow our heads and enjoy.   Eat up-- and remember: We Are Canadian!

Rushing The Plate: TRULY REQUIRED READING

      Nicholas Lemann has in this week's The New Yorker one of the most probing, and I think genuinely insightful, considerations of President Bush that's yet been written.   It's a charged study, sympathetic but unapologetic, and, finally, a sobering account of things past and present that should make even those not naturally trepidatious of the President's re-election bid pause.   It is, in short, an article that should be read in full.   Both nuanced and impressively synoptic, Lemann's article may do the impossible, accounting for those qualities that have endeared him to many, but also accounting for why those qualities (to say nothing of his lesser ones) may also make him one of the most dangerous candidates for the Presidency in recent memory, and certainly at this awkward and very fragile point in modern history.   It's a terrific piece.   Look for it to be making major headlines in the next week-- and look for it, perhaps, to provide the arguing points for the Democrats and Senator Kerry to attack the President not as a caricature, but as a kind of tragic hero to whom Americans risk tying their own future at their own immediate peril.   And it does so, I hasten to add, without lapsing into the glibness or the anger that so often seems to get the better of those of us that regard the President as a genuinely worrisome, and even stupefying, figure.

      I strongly encourage everyone to read Lemann's article, and to direct others to it.   It may prove to be more valuable than a dozen Bob Woodward books.   Hell, I'd even encourage the President to read it: I wonder if he might be overcome with that same sense of disturbed self-awareness that one normally has when hearing one's voice on tape for the first time.

The Reeve's Tale

      Alas, it's turned out very differently than Chaucer's.   *sigh*   RIP.

      At the risk of seeming callous, one has to wonder if this will have any effect on the stem-cell debate in the US, especially given Senator Kerry's invocation of Mr Reeve in the debate on Friday night (for which, see Wonkette's very funny blow-by-blow account).   Where President Reagan's age may have immunized some to the urgency for the research (i.e., "it's sad, but he was old and I don't think anything would have made a difference"), Mr. Reeve's relative youth might expose those same people to it.   Who knows.   But I have a funny feeling this issue's going to take a more prominent place in the debate than it has of late.

Grasping At Straws

      As absurd and as ridiculous as this sounds, this blog suspects it's only a matter of time before the New Puritans make their move in this regard, too.   I'm sure the Holier-Than-Thou in Toronto will think it an idea whose time has come.     

      In related news, the "I'm Such A Victim" Mentality has won yet another ridiculous and absurdly-complicating victory, this time courtesy the New Broomstick Human Rights Commission.   And, no, this blog simply cannot imagine what might go wrong with this scenario.   But you have to laugh at the twistedness of this photoshop piece from someone nicked BearToy in a comment at Fark.   Oh dear.... So wrong, so very, very wrong.... I guess it's not just for Bob Dole anymore....

      Argh: And before ANY of you that may have seen pictures of the N-S-G Doctor when he was a lad, I have two words for you, repeated severally and pre-emptively: Shut up, shut up, shut up....    You're sick, sick, sick -- but at least predictable-- little monkeys, the lot of ya....

Hey, What's That Smell?

      It's the long-awaited return of Mr Language-Person, delivering on a very Tall order, indeed.

Jacques Der Day (Er, think about it.....)

      My apologies to those that have been waiting either for an email or for posting on this blog, but the N-S-G Doctor now and then, as most of you know, needs to slough off the idea of communication for a bit.   It's one of the few prerogatives that remains to males in this day and age, the freedom (nay, the right) to be insular and unresponsive.   Or, at least, we retain that prerogative for now.   I'm expecting soon that the psychobabblists and their imitators are soon to launching their second wave of attacks against it, of which the "you-have-to-learn-to-talk-about-your-feeeeeelings" movement was just the initial melee.   Oy vey.   Sometimes I think such types will not be happy until all those of us with Y-chromosomes are utterly metrogenous.   But, as so often happens, I've gone rather far afield.   Add that to the panoply of the doctorial aliases: Inspector Tangent.

      Seems in recent days there's been much happening in the literary world, not least of which is the recent passing of Jacques Derrida from pancreatic cancer, the disease that seems to be rearing its ugly head in too many corners of the N-S-G Doctor's life of late. (See also The Independent's short piece here.)   I don't want to say too much about Derrida, for many reasons, but not least of which is that because I haven't read him in the original French I hardly consider myself an authority.   I'm certain RK will post here or elsewhere some remarks that will prove much more sage than any I could provide.   But Derrida's death is an event of awkward symbolism for me: like most literature students of my generation, I was introduced to his ideas, very often with the attached implication that those ideas were laws rather than theories.   That's one of the facts of a literary education in North America in the last quarter of the twentieth century.   Derrida was right about so many things-- about the conditions of language, about the various informations and histories of language and their ultimate consequences-- but Derrida, especially in the hands of North American acolytes, always seemed to me in the end unsatisfactory, incomplete.   I suspect Derrida would not only have understood that sense of frustration, but he'd likely have encouraged it, so much of his work in fact an exercise in academic, intellectual, philosophical and verbal play.   But in the end, I could never accept Derrida, could never reject him, either; or, rather, I could do neither entirely, though I could -- and do-- reject the majority of his followers.   In many ways, Derrida and Northrop Frye stood in utter opposition to one another, and I keep thinking there has to be a Hegelian synthesis that can be drawn from the two.   I feel, I guess, a bit like Henry Drummond at the end of Inherit The Wind, pressing copies of Darwin and the Bible together, much to the chagrin of the science-professing cynicism of E.K. Hornbeck, the play's version of H.L. Mencken.   Too corny a summary-feeling?   Probably, but I guess I'm stuck there.   As Hornbeck snipes, "We're growing a strange crop of agnostics this year."   Yes, very much so, though I was probably reaped before I was sown.

      In other literary news, Mr Bloom has a new book out, for which the NYTimes review can be found here.   Bloom, another critic with whom the N-S-G Doctor is alternately chummy and uneasy, seems to be writing these days with a kind of vatic urgency, as if he alone has to carry the torch for The Love Of Literature, even if some of us more than others see why he would think he needs to do so.   (Don't worry: I'll spare you all the sermon to which I'm sure most of you know all the words.)   But Bloom seems to be writing with such rapidity and force, one begins to worry if he's not being driven by concerns with his own mortality, concerns that seldom come from strict hypochondria.   I hate to write that, especially since Bloom has always been prolific, often alarmingly so, such that one begins to wonder how seriously he considers his own ideas before he releases them for publication.   One stoops by worrying, one supposes; but I can't help but chuckle at Amazon's decision to sell Bloom's book by linking it to Greenblatt's new book on Shakespeare, a fact that has to have Harold rubbing his eyes in despair.

      And, lastly, there's the release of the first volume of Bob Dylan's memoirs, Chronicles (NYT review here).   Strange how much Dylan and Van Morrison are sounding alike.   But reading some of the fragments of Dylan, I can just imagine how much he LOATHES Christopher Ricks' recent book.   My mother would probably tell me that I shouldn't snicker; I'd probably have to explain how hard it is not to.   Methinks we've seen the Ricks of the litter.

      Yes, this has become a large post.   I'm so behind on my email correspondence now, I'm almost ecstatic.   I'm trapsing through some material (as Mr Eliot would say) "forgotten, half-remembered," including The Iliad and Beowulf, as I reel back into The Past.   Reeling back?   Yes, after a day spent with Family, and thinking back on days when (gasp!) the now twenty-year-olds were five-year-olds and so subejcted to all forms of throwing, tossing, tickling, and teasing.   Reeling back, too, because I have been instructed that I have to give a toast at an upcoming, er, Wedding (*cough cough*), and going through the motions of creating a mental "Do Not Say" list.   Suffice it to say that whatever the Arf I say won't be "all warm and fuzzy, about picnics and ponies."   Oh, it's a fine, fine line.   *Must. Suppress. Evil Nature. Must. Not. Mention.....*   Don't worry, I'll be nice.   I won't even do my Peter Cook impression.   My James Brown, on the other hand.....

      Is that enough? Yes, that's enough.   Consider yourselves righteously updated.   Now back to being insular and unresponsive, back to the war against metrogeny.

      .... and yes, the title of this post alone has guaranteed the Doctor an eternity of having his chestnuts roasting on an open fire.   But Derrida would have liked it.   Methinks.   Not?   Yeah, now that you mention it, it is getting a bit toasty in here....

Further Proof God Is An Ironist

      You know what?   I'm not even going to say a word about this.  

Beaver Season!

      Although this blog likes, in theory at least, that the Canuck dollar is surging like a priapic teenager, it likes even more that there is an economist out there named "Warren Lovely."   No kidding.   Must be the Canadian equivalent of "coyote ugly."

      In other Canuckistani (or can we just say Canucki?) news, Paul "Bolingbroke" Martin has decided that it's important to have unity within in the Liberal party, and that it's not a good idea to talk about the leader behind his back.  

*You may all infer here a stunned pause that lasts slightly longer than it takes for The American President to spell the word "leprechaun"*

       I'll let Paul Wells do the honours: "That fluttering sound you hear is the sound of Canada's new national bird, the chicken coming home to roost.   It is one gynormous freaking chicken."

The Dissemblance Of Things Past

      Pithy response to this article, in a "word": Duh.   Same, too, goes for the Prez--- aka Stuart Belittle-- and his "How the Hell do I justify those faces I made" retort, a shameless example of rhetorical distortion.  

      Before I get it: No, this Blog isn't enamoured of JFK's seecond-coming. But compared to the alternative, he's Benjamin Farkin' Franklin, which should say something about the slippery slope of intellectual and rhetorical standards.   Welcome to the Perish Hilton world. Cognitive subsistence is futile.

      And, much as I am reluctant to say it, for certainly it will be read & spun inappropriately, but, listening to The Prez yesterday, all I could think of was Hitler's great lesson, that the greater number of people will sooner believe a great lie than a small one.   Why is it that so many of my Murrycan friends can't see that W is the Omarosa of Yankee politics?

      If only John McCain had won the nomination in 2000. This blog can't help but suspect W has Mike Harrised the Republicans.

Putting Off Today

      Just a short note to tell anyone that might be waiting on an email from the N-S-G Doctor that I am very sorry-- well, not really THAT sorry-- for the delay in writing.   Something will come sooner or later.   Tomorrow perhaps.   Oh, I remember the days when receiving and sending email weren't sign-inducing chores.

      And, in a "because it was there and because it was free" line of thinking, I've pitched a tent (an impressive one, of course) at the suprisingly-available doctorjs.blogspot.com. There is absolutely nothing of significance there, if there ever will be.   But, like I said, it was there and it was free, the same rationale that one uses in snacking and having one-night stands.  

      In the interim, indulge in a score and ten of bits from the late Rodney. Cheers.

• When we got married my wife told me I was one in a million. I found out she was right!
  
• I saw my psychiatrist. I told him, "Doc, I keep thinking I'm a dog." He told me to get off his couch.
  
• Oh, when I was a kid, everyone thought I got plenty of girls. I used to go to a drive-in movie and do push-ups in the backseat of my car.
  
• I was making love to one girl, I told her, "You're so flat-chested." She said, "Get off my back."
  
• I said to one girl, "Come on, honey, I'll show you where it's at." She said, "You better, 'cause the last time I couldn't find it."
  
• Oh, when I go to a nude beach, I always take a ruler with me. Yeah, just in case I have to prove something.
  
• Oh, when I was a kid, when my parents went shopping, they always took me with them - that way they could park in a handicapped section.
  
• What a childhood I had, why, when I took my first step, my old man tripped me!
  
• Last week I told my psychiatrist, "I keep thinking about suicide." He told me from now on I have to pay in advance.
  
• I know the best way to get girls. I hang out at prisons and wait for parolees.
  
• Oh, this girl was fat, when she walks backward, she starts beeping. I mean, fat. She asked me why my eyes were bulging, I told her, "You're standing on my foot!"
  
• A lot of girls turn me down. One girl turned me down, she said she had to go to work in the morning. I told her, "I'll be finished by then!"
  
• I tell you, I'm not a sexy guy. I was the centerfold for Playgirl magazine. The staples covered everything!
  
• I'm getting old. I got no sex life. I get tired just holding up the magazine. At my age, I like to get sex over quickly. Then I can get to the nap.
  
• My doctor told me to watch my drinking. Now I drink in front of a mirror. And I drink too much, way too much; my doctor drew blood he ran a tab!
  
• One time my whole family played hide and seek. They found my mother in Pittsburgh!
  
• Oh, last week was a rough week. I noticed my gums were shrinking. I was brushing my teeth with Preparation H.
  
• Oh, my wife loves vacations. The other night she told me, "I wanna go someplace I've never been before." I took her to a men's room.
  
• With girls, I don't think right. I had a date with one girl, she had mirrors all over her bedroom. She told me to come over and bring a bottle. I got Windex.
  
• I'm trying a new diet now. The diet is Viagra and prune juice. I tell ya, I don't know if I'm coming or going.
  
• People say fish is good for a diet. But fish should never be cooked in butter. Fish should be cooked in its natural oils - Texaco, Mobil, Exxon...
  
• Oh, when I was a kid in show business I was poor, I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.
  
• Oh, when I was a kid I was poor. We were so poor, when my father died; they asked my mother, "Paper or plastic?"
  
• Last night I came home, I walked in the house, I picked up the extension. My wife was having phone sex with some guy. I told the guy, "Don't let her fool you, she's faking it."
  
• I'll tell you one thing, I know how to satisfy my wife in bed, yeah, I leave.
  
• I tell ya, my wife was never nice. On our first date, I asked her if I could give her a goodnight kiss on the cheek - she bent over!
  
• You wanna have laughs? Do what I do. When I go through a tollbooth, I keep going. I tell the guy, "The car behind me is paying for two."
  
• I had a good time last week. I did a show; the whole audience was midgets. I got a standing ovation - I didn't even know it!
  
• I tell ya, with me, sleep is important. Well, last night I went to bed, I couldn't sleep. I started to count sheep - I got horny!
  
• When I was a kid I got no respect. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I'd get.

Best. Headline. EVER.

      Finally, a headline to make the N-S-G Doctor tear up with joy and, indeed, PRIDE.... Ya see?   You just can't hide The Truth.   And there it is, in black and white, for All The World to know.    I think we've found the new Seven Words You Can't Say On Television.   To quote Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles: "It's twoo, it's twoo!!!"       (It applies to Canada, too.   So There.     )  Hehehe: Melvin....     

      Other stories at Ananova: the wife from Hell, the husband-slash-charity-pimp, and the undies of celebrotrash.   But I love, I love that headline....    And, no, I am not overdoing it with the smilies.  

      Did I mention that I love that headline?     

And Now To Get Your Sick, Naughty Little Minds Firmly In The Gutter Where It Well And Truly Belongs

      Take a moment and consider the dimensions of this story, in which huge quantities of a gooey substance ends up all over something named after a beaver.   Oh, God truly is an ironist.   Lather up!

      (For those of you that have never worked in a shampoo factory, well, let's just say it's, er, um, eh, hmmm, "not pleasant." Especially not when it gets dirty and crusts over, he adds shutting his eyes in perverse despair.   About the only thing worse is dealing with vats, slightly larger than Lichtenstein, of Crisco.   That would scar your imagination for life, I assure you.)

Save The Wales!

      Sometime in the distant future, the Star Trek gang are going to have to go back in time and.... nah, I'm just going to leave that dumb joke right there....

      In completely unrelated news, this blog knows exactly how all of you are going to react to this story, so if you absolutely must Shatner yourselves, please do so privately....

Shorts Shrift

      Oh, The Evil That Is Michael Moore has struck again:

The Michigan Republican Party is asking four county prosecutors to file charges against filmmaker Michael Moore, charging that he illegally offered underwear, noodles and snacks to college students in exchange for their promise to vote.

This blog wonders if the more confused of those students would eat Moore's shorts.   (And Republicans: c'mon; get over it.   It's not like they used a conveniently-timed tax-cut to try to leverage votes, right?)

Virtues and Vices

      The N-S-G Doctor didn't catch the entire Veep Debate last night, but he did manage to catch a reairing of it on PBS in the wee hours.   So this means there won't be any considered assessment of the debate here, but The Christian Science Monitor has a pretty good one you can read instead.   Short takes?   Edwards didn't do badly, but he was at times too obviously chomping at the bit, and too Bushy in his repetitiveness (and his contrivance to get back to those repeatable sound-bytes).   Cheney looked authoritative, and very much at ease, and he issued a kind of dignity that Edwards did not; he spoke crisply, and his trademark gnarlishness was kept mostly at bay.   (That whopper he told about not having met Edwards before the debate was perhaps the most insidious suggestion from a man famous for insidious suggestions.)   In the end, Edwards looked earnest while he sounded hucksterish (and, alternately, he sometimes looked hucksterish when he sounded earnest), and his defenses of Kerry tended to come across as a little desperately apostolic. Cheney's demeanour will be a model for the President on Friday: stern, unshakable, but not strictly rigid, he was the figure of cranial (but not cerebral or intellectual) intensity, look more than a little like Brain to the President's Pinky.   All in all: Advantage Cheney.

      (Observation: it's probably a good thing they didn't have the Veep Debate in Miami, where they held the debate Thursday past.   Imagine all the "Miami Vice" puns there would have been in the headlines.)

      Post-Post Post:   The chaps at Slate obviously disagree, arguing that Cheney got his ass royally kicked.   I must have missed the stomping....

Goodnight, Rodney

      Alas, in a sign of long-needed respect: Mr Dangerfield has died at age 82.   Always the Everyman mischief-maker, the lovable mess and glutton, Rodney -- for all of his turkeys, for all of his jokes that became as tired as a hooker on $2.50 Tuesdays -- will be missed.   Go out and rent Back To School or Easy Money or even Caddyshack in remembrance; maybe even check out his surprisingly chilling performance in Natural Born Killers.   You have to love the spirit that could remark, after brain surgery, that people "should ask [him] about things [he's] familiar with, like drugs and prostitution." This blog doffs its hat-- yes, in respect.

      And in the words of Van Morrison, after performing "Have I Told You Lately" at a concert some time after Rod Stewart had taken to butchering the song for the Top Ten charts: "And thank you, Rodney. You've made a happy man very old."

Elaine Showalter Rejoices!

      Thanks to cbeck, the N-S-G Doctor stumbled upon this and nearly vomitted all over his computer screen.   Enjoy the Dick Cheney debate tonight, folks. See if you can swallow the tripe. (This blog has to laugh: in its vicinity, Fear Factor now airs at dinner time. Mmmm, mmmm, good.... This blog loves the idea of roadkill in the mid-evening.)

Wooden Performances, or A Splinter Runs Through It

      Enjoy-- NAY, savour-- the stupidity of this situation, which would no doubt call for an X-rating onto Julie Hagerty's smoking of a cigarette after restoring Otto the Auto-Pilot in Airplane!   Then sniff the wafting aroma of this sentence: "A resolution to this dispute is particularly urgent because the film-makers are contractually obliged to deliver an R-rated film for release by October 15, but the film is scheduled for sneak previews this coming weekend" (emphasis added).   Urgent?   Urgent?   (And for the more esoteric among you: Ur[-]gent?)   Beyond the idiocy of the stupidity of the matter of immediacy, the pun is just too precious.   Again, I am SOOOOO glad to be Canadian right now; after all, we have Puppets Who Kill (and everything else) on basic TV regularly.   Oy vey.   (Yes, I'm getting increasingly flustered by the galling inanity of America right now.    May she return to her wiser self soon. Very soon. Sooner rather than later.)

      In the interim: toothpicks, anyone?

Scaping Not The Thunderbolt

      This blog is SOOO not linking to this.     

      In other news: today's contest: submit your entry for the Not-So-Good Doctor's obituary notice.  

Like Nose Hair After A Sneeze

      Received this today from my long-quiet friend and former student Mr Mitchell, a variation on an old email that's been going around for a while, but with some new material.   Perhaps the most jarring thing?   That more people write such analogies than don't.   Jinkies!

Bad Analogies

• She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
  
  
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
  
  
• McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
  
  
• From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.
  
  
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
  
  
• Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
  
  
• Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
  
  
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
  
  
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
  
  
• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
  
  
• Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."
  
  
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
  
  
• The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
  
  
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.   (This blog's favourite)
  
  
• The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
  
  
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like socks in a dryer without Cling Free.
  
  
• The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
  
  
• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
  
  
• "He smells bad," she thought, "As bad as Calvin Klein's Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances."
  
  
• After having printed the book, he felt that very few would remember his participation. Like the football player who passed to the goal scorer.
  
  
• The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.
  
  
• I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like geschpooklicheit or something, but I don't speak German. Anyway, it's a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don't know the name for those either.
  
  
• She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can't sing worth a damn.
  
  
• His fountain pen was so expensive it looked as if someone had grabbed the pope, turned him upside down and started writing with the tip of his big pointy hat.
  
  
• After sending in my entries for the Style Invitational, I feel relieved and apprehensive, like a little boy who has just wet his bed.

Now go and turn your Pope upside down.  

Beyond Thunderbox

      For dads, for Christmas, in loo, er, lieu of ties and golf balls and books he'll never read?   Perhaps.  

Ay, There's The Rube

      Oh, Billy Bob, you sage critic you....      This blog LOVES IT when American actors display their rubeishness like their ex-wives vaunt their admittedly ample cleavage.   Query, ye of the BB, how many people will be quoting Sling Blade in 400 years?

The Dog Kinnell

      RK's young charges are grappling with the question of Good/Bad Poetry, and though I'm reluctant to make any concrete statements on the matter, I'd like to offer a minor classic from Galway Kinnell in response, especially as one of those people regularly subjected to requests for "assessments" of their poetry.   (Yes: Oh. Dear.) Take it away, GK:

The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
"Clinical Sonnets"; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"
instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of long,
neat-scripted letters demolishing
the pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had
of trying to guess which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say what I thought was the truth
in the mildest words I know. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, would tingle
in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses
to write.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmarks again
of shattered towns--- Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell---
their loneliness
given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

Am invoking the poem not to rebuke student efforts, by the way, but for the poem's opening stanza, which so perfectly sums up the hideous stuff that tends to make up so much Bad Poetry. One day, we'll have to start compiling the World's Worst Poets. The sad thing is, I'm relatively sure the 20th century would be vastly overrepresented.

      UPDATE:   The page to which RK refers in his comment can be found here.   Once again: Oh. Dear. And Maggie Cavendish, she'd be risible if she weren't so putrefying....

This Blog Knows What You're Thinking...

      ... and the first one of you evil little monkeys that asks if she died in the shower will be sent directly to Hell, without passing Go, and without collecting $200.   Oh. Blast!  

It's A Buuuuuh.....

      No, it's a bomb.   Well, no, it's not a bomb, either.   But it can cause significant explosions.

Crapsticks!

      It seems I'm getting clumsier with age-- or just plain sloppier.   In my haste to submit some material today, I wound up not noticing a few blunders in my writing that now have me smacking my increasingly-addled head in frustration.   It reinforces my thinking, though, that writing on a computer-- and using the horrible MS Word-- encourages sloppiness. One's eyes wax over, and the text becomes a glare; the absence of those annoying Word underlinings lulls one into glossing over boo-boos, especially when Said Programme so often underlines an sentences that require more than ten words.   But, alas, because I was rushing toward a deadline, I didn't notice the mistakes until after I'd sent the material off, which will of course make me look somewhere between incompetent and careless-- though hopefully not "incurious," as so many say of a certain someone else prominently stuck between being incompetent and careless. MS Word, for all its virtues, reminds me of the stereotypical mother-in-law, hovering constantly over one's shoulder, correcting anything it can find, with or without reason, with or without sense.   (And don't even get me started on that infernal "Clippy," a character most deserving of a good Itchy-and-Scratchying.)   I can't, however, blame computers for everything.   I find that with age, and with so much of what we do now being computer-related, I want to be able to hold text in my hands, to have it real, tangible, ON PAPER.   There's something about the digital world that will always feel ephemeral, vague: it works like a visual form of the incantation, the ease and comfort of that white, white screen that seems to put to sleep one's critical sensibilities.   The errors that I'd spot on paper I tend not to notice right away on a computer screen, the brain always about two steps ahead of itself.   Sometimes, I really do miss the days of pounding out material on a real typewriter or scrawling things out meticulously. (Those of you that remember typewriters-- and I mean remember using them-- should also recall how tentatively one approached writing for fear of having to do it all over again.)   Oh, don't get me wrong; I'm not being as nostalgic or as Luddite as you may be thinking; I'd surely prefer to keep the technology we have now than return to the labour-intensive alternatives.   But sometimes I miss the discipline those forms required.   It reminds me, too, that for every comfort we gain, we tend to lose something in self-control.   It is, in fact, the very basis of decadence.   Oh, the double-gyre of progress, by which we lose as we receive.