Happy New Year, Everyone

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

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

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

Puss In Box

      Trouble, adorably living up to his name.

A Spectacular Lack Of Creativity...

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

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

Susan Sontag Dead At 71

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

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

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

The Obligatory Post-Christmas Entry

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

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

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

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

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

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Something-Or-Other

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

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

Meeting The Breadth Requirement

      Remember: education is an investment, not an expenditure.   

"It Trips Dishonestly Off The Tongue"

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

So What Do You Want For Christmas?

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

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

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

The Best Laid Schemes O' Mice An' Men

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

Touché!

      More on the Wolfe in creep's clothing. Key quote: "He beat off stiff competition to win the prize...." Knowing Tom....   

"What Do Women Want?"

      You really ought to expect that an article with that question as a title is going to be as laboured, contorted and pointless as a John Kerry speech, right? Well, far be it from this blog to disappoint.

We Know, We Saw The Video....

      Let's just file this tidbit in the "No Shit, Sherlock" folder, okay?   [Insert here one of those condescending nods Stephen Fry does so well.]

      From a related article about putrid, tear-inducing undergarments, let's simply say that taking a shot at this is just too easy.      Then again, perhaps the answer to problem number one is problem number two, à la Kim Cattrall in Porky's?   Oddly enough, I suspect the baying of subject number one would sound a lot like the tortured masculinity of number two.

A Titter From A Bitter Critter

      At this rate, sooner or later you won't be able to use cell phones in bars, enclosed irradiated areas, or cell-phone-only members clubs in Ontario....

      Give it fifty years. The moral majority will have done away with all us normal pariahs by then.

Lowered Exultations

      As mes amis from la belle province would say: Tabernac! (Quoi?)    Key quote:

Bushman thinks Smith felt that God commanded polygamy but Smith needed to hide his involvement in the practice because he knew it was illegal. But Bushman finds it unsettling that 10 of Smith's 28 or so wives were married to other men.

[And yes, there's an evil pun buried in my previous sentence. Sniff it out, and we'll know that you can find truffles, too.]

The Madness of King George

      Just remember as you read this, Time also named Hitler Man of the Year, too.       Mr. Eliot was right: "All Time is unredeemable."

A Surprise In Every Box

      A story, boys and girls, to make you all good and cynical come Christmas. Key sentence: "Her name was Dawn -- we could never touch her at all, not in the girl spots."

The Lost Weekend

      My apologies to those of you that have been waiting for answers to your emails, but early Saturday morning I found myself sick as a dog-- yes, that old cliché again-- and wound up spending most of Saturday trying to recover. Even now, I'm only slowly getting back to normal, and it's a bit of small trial even bothering to write this entry. Don't worry, I'll spare all of you the gory details, but let's just say that I haven't come down with anything this flooring in years, such that I slept through most of Saturday, even though I kept waking up every hour or so. Thoroughly and grotesquely unpleasant, this thing's laid me up pretty badly, and I suspect I may not be back to normal by the end of the day-- and who even knows about tomorrow. So, please bear with me, and hopefully I can fight this thing off, whatever it is, as quickly as possible. Cheers and best everyone.

Taking It All In

      The fairer sex, my arse.... It may be time for the Not-So-Good Doctor to relocate to Britain.

A Portrait Of The Doctor As An Old Man?

      Meet Chen Ning Yang, Nobelist, Role Model and Outright Hero.  

Big Brother And Its Champion

      Well, this bloke's decided he's never buying a Toronto Star again after reading this turgid piece of pap that missed its place in an Orwell novel by 56 years, particularly this quote:

The legislation, introduced by Health Minister George Smitherman, will mean no more playing fast with the rules. Smokers will no longer be able to cross a municipal line to find a bar in a neighbouring city with less stringent smoking laws. Nor will bars and other businesses be able to circumvent local bylaws by opening "private" clubs, enclosing outdoor patios or setting up designated smoking rooms.

Gawd forbid people smoking in designated places where they're not hurting anyone, or on patios in the dissipating open air, or in private clubs in which non-participants would not want to go, anyway; Gawd forbid, too, people finding places that, even over municipal lines, that tolerate them and their behaviour. And you have to savour the New Puritanism of the last sentence, one so 'smart' in its putrefying piety that's it the high-and-mighty version of "who gives a shit": "But if a law can make life so difficult that they quit out of frustration, few will shed a tear. On the contrary, millions of Ontarians — smokers and non-smokers — will be healthier for it." I'm so glad the province is going to make me healthier, whether I want to be or not. The Star is never getting a cent from me again.

      (For those not aware of it, The Star is the principle mouthpiece of the Liberal Party in Canada and the provinces, the party now in power in Ontario.)

      And, by the way, that bit in the article food and cars having the same effects-- let's get real, they'd never touch those things. Ever. I'm waiting for those significant taxes on Big Macs that'll even the score. No? Gee, I wonder why not....

Yup, He Really Said It

      Key quote from the Economic Summit in the United States today (just minutes ago, in fact): "This nation must never settle for mediocrity." --- President George W. Bush. Ahem....   

      UPDATE:   It looks like the President's organizers aren't much better with language than he is:

The Wisdom Of Solomon

      There's only one word to describe this: Awesome.

R&B heavyweight Solomon Burke, who co-wrote the early Rolling Stones concert staple "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," has returned the favor by recording the group's soulful ballad "I Got the Blues" for his next album, his spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The Stax-infused tune, which originally appeared on the 1971 Stones album "Sticky Fingers," joins tracks written by the likes of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Robbie Robertson and Hank Williams on "Make Do With What You Got."

Morrison, Dylan, Robertson, and Dr John? I'm in. I'm sooo in.

      Don't know who Solomon Burke is? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You can check out his official website here, or, more particularly, this biography from the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.

Today's Public Service Link

      This blog ain't implyin' nuthin....

Let's See The Flop....

      *Sigh* Further proof, this world just isn't fun anymore.  

Dulce Et Decorum Est

      After almost two decades of utter and pathetic obscurity, Chevy Chase (!?!) launches a broadside that may seem indecorous to some, but which makes this blog smile. Key quote: "This guy started a jihad" (emphasis added). Well, not quite, but not entirely wrong, either....

      In related Bush-bashing exercises, Maureen Dowd's column on Rummy the Dummy is a pip, and-- whatever else-- there's a genius to her phrase "the 82nd Trumpbone" that tickles this blog. If only it had come up with it....

From The "What To Do With Useless Former Prime Ministers" File....

      Send them to the Ukraine to monitor elections. Query: can we send current Prime Ministers? How about, at the very least, current provincial health ministers?

      (And, yes, I fought-- desperately, urgently, passionately-- the urge to name this entry "Turner and Hooch." This blog's practicing for the day, one in the extremely distant future, in which it will actually try to make and to follow through on a New Year's resolution.)

And The "Disturbing Father Of The Year" Award Goes To....

      Joe Simpson. In related news, Doctor J's mother assures him he has an ass you could bounce a quarter off of.  

      (I kid, of course. Everyone knows, the Doctor has no ass.)

The Fuller Brush Girl

      Far be it from this blog to invoke reality TV -- beyond mocking it, or noting with typically rakish leering the attributes of a particular female contestant-- but Tuesday night's Amazing Race was truly one for the record books, the first time I know of in which audiences were treated to (prepare yourself for girlish glee!) out-and-out domestic abuse. The perpetrator? The genuinely psychotic Jonathan, who wailed on his wife (former Playboy playmate and onetime Whose Line Is It, Anyway? prop Victoria Fuller) in a manner so virulently rabid you'd think she'd Bobbitized him right there in the streets of Berlin. Check out TVGasm's report on the episode here, where you can also see in QuickTime format a display of hostility so intense that, had Victoria been a child, she'd have been escorted away from that bastard by Child Services without even a second's thought, doubt or appeal. All those previous hotheads you've seen on reality TV? They're Hugh Grant compared to this guy, who, in my estimation, should have been disqualified right there and then. Make sure you note the details that precipitated this galling little scene: a reace for second place, in which she's doing all the work. Paging Doctor Freud....

      (See also Maura's take on things at One Ping Only, from whence this blog takes the TVGasm link-- and which curiously places this site directly below TVG on its side panel. Irony, irony!       And, as for the title of this entry, yes, this blog is remarkly adept at recalling utterly irrelevant trivia.)

Cbeckois Agitations

      Since I'm not officially teaching this year, I can link to this article from Cbeck's site without worrying about a blessèd thing. RK and RG, on the other hand, might end up chasing after me with machetes for doing so.  

Most Isn't Good Enough, We Have To Have It All! Wenh!

      Don't even get this blog started....    (Something in me says this has to be unconstitutional.)    Suffice it to say, this blog's had it with the Holier and the Healthier Than Thou, all of whom frankly need to have those nasty Iowa-sized cucumbers removed from their recta. I'm reminded that the Taliban told the people of Afghanistan they were doing what was best for the country, too. (And I guess all of my bar-owner friends that paid out the big cash to redesign their places to accommodate recent municipal by-law changes will now have wasted their money doing so, just so they can lose all their customers, too.) This isn't health legislation: this is ludicrous, sickening Puritanism at its worst. Gee, who would ever have thought that Dalton McSquinty and his cadre of intellectual kumquats would manage to be both pious and fiscally-irresponsible? Not this blog....  

Snap, Crack Ho, Pop

      Where, oh where, is Barbara Billingsley when we need her?  

      (Somewhere in the mists of heaven or the fumes of hell, Doctor Johnson, with or without his towel, is suffering through a pain so intense you'd think Alderaan had been blown to smithereens all over again.)

      And in related Hoochie-news.... I guess all the tumescent teen-stalkers will simply have to wait for her to fall out of her clothes "by accident" again. Gawd that girl's just dyyyyyying to get out of her fabrics, isn't she? Not that I'm necessarily complaining, but one does start to wonder how guilty one should feel everytime one turns on the television set anymore.

      So, all together now: ~~ It's a Nabokov world when the whistle blows, / No one owns a piece of my time / And there's a Nabokov me inside my clothes / Thinkin' that the world looks fine, yeah.... ~~

      No? How about this one? ~~ Wastin' away again in Lolitaville, searching for my lost.... ~~

       **Er, ahem** Don't worry-- I'll feel appropriately ashamed of myself sooner or later. Probably later. Definitely later.

Not So Smart-- And Proud Of It

      Reading this article from The Chronicle (the original article is here, but I've reproduced it here because it'll soon be inaccessible, as articles there tend to become), I'm reminded that I don't think I was ever described as "smart."   The very-frequently-used assessment that I was well-named now seems more than ever a badge of honour instead of a toss-off compliment. Also in light of this article, I do recall many times being characterized in terms of rigor-- or "rigour," as well spell it in a country that knows how to spell--, a fact that gives me pause considering my general distrust of the theoretical. All that's neither here not there. What I want is this guy now to take a good look at the word "sharp."   As in "acrid," perhaps?   (Leave "pungent" alone, the lot of ye.)  

Here's the Problem With Being So 'Smart'

By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS

How often have you heard about someone's work, "You have to read it -- it's really smart."? Or "I didn't agree with anything he argued in that book, but it was smart."? At a conference you might hear, "I want to go to that panel; she's quite smart." You've probably also heard the reverse: "How did he get that job? He's not very smart." Imagine how damning it would be to say "not especially smart, but competent" in a tenure evaluation. In my observation, "smart" is the highest form of praise one can now receive. While it has colloquial currency, smart carries a special status and value in contemporary academic culture.

But why this preponderance of smart? What exactly does it mean? Why not, instead, competent? Or knowledgeable? Or conscientious? We might value those qualities as well, but they seem pedestrian, lacking the particular distinction of being smart.

Historically, smart has taken on its approbative sense relatively recently. Derived from the Germanic smerten, to strike, smart suggested the sharp pain from a blow. In the 18th century it began to indicate a quality of mind. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary notes Frances Burney's 1778 use in Evelina: "You're so smart, there's no speaking to you." (We still retain this sense in the expression "smartass.") Smart indicated a facility and manner as well as mental ability. Its sense of immediacy also eventually bled over to fashion, in the way that one might wear a smart suit.

The dominance of smart in the academic world has not always been the case. In literary studies -- I take examples from the history of criticism, although I expect that there are parallels in other disciplines -- scholars during the early part of the 20th century strove for "sound" scholarship that patiently added to its established roots rather than offering a smart new way of thinking. Literary scholars of the time were seeking to establish a new discipline to join classics, rhetoric, and oratory, and their dominant method was philology (for example, they might have ferreted out the French root of a word in one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). They sought historical accuracy, the soundness of which purported a kind of scientific legitimacy for their nascent discipline.

During midcentury the dominant value shifted to "intelligent," indicating mental ability as well as discerning judgment. Lionel Trilling observed in a 1964 lecture that John Erskine, a legendary Columbia professor, had provided "a kind of slogan" with the title he had given to an essay, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent." Trilling went on to say that he was "seduced into bucking to be intelligent by the assumption ... that intelligence was connected to literature, that it was advanced by literature." Literary scholars of this era strove to decipher that essential element of literature, and their predominant method was interpretive, in both the New Critics (of particular poems) and the New York intellectuals (of broader cultural currents).

The stress on intelligence coincided with the imperatives of the post-World War II university. Rather than a rarefied institution of the privileged, the university became a mass institution fully integrated with the welfare state, in both how it was financed and the influx of students it welcomed. As Louis Menand recounts in "The Marketplace of Ideas," the leaders of the postwar university, such as James B. Conant of Harvard, strategically transformed the student body to meet the challenge of the cold war as well as the industrial and technological burgeoning of the United States. These leaders inducted the best and brightest of all classes -- as long as they demonstrated their potential for intelligence. Conant was instrumental in founding the Educational Testing Service, which put in place exams like the SAT, to do so.

In the latter part of the century, during the heyday of literary theory (roughly 1970-90), the chief value shifted to "rigor," designating the logical consistency and force of investigation. Literary study claimed to be not a humanity but a "human science," and critics sought to use the rigor of theoretical description seen in rising social sciences like linguistics. The distinctive quality of Paul de Man, the most influential critic of the era, was widely held to be his rigor. In his 1979 classic, Allegories of Reading, de Man himself pronounced that literature advanced not intelligence but rigor: "Literature as well as criticism is ... the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself."

Since the late 1980s rigor seems to have fallen out of currency. Now critics, to paraphrase Trilling, are bucking to be smart. This development dovetails with several changes in the discipline and the university. Through the 1980s and '90s literary studies mushroomed, assimilating a plethora of texts, dividing into myriad subfields, and spinning off a wide array of methods. In the era of theory, critics embraced specialization, promulgating a set of theoretical schools or paradigms (structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and so on). But while the paradigms were multiple, one could attribute a standard of methodological consistency to them.

Today there is no corresponding standard. Individual specializations have narrowed to microfields, and the overall field has expanded to encompass low as well as high literary texts, world literatures as well as British texts, and "cultural texts" like 18th-century gardens and punk fashion. At the same time, method has loosened from the moorings of grand theories; now eclectic variations are loosely gathered under the rubric of cultural studies. Without overarching criteria that scholars can agree upon, the value has shifted to the strikingness of a particular critical effort. We aim to make smart surmises among a plurality of studies of culture.

Another factor in the rise of "smart" has to do with the evolution of higher education since the 1980s, when universities were forced to operate more as self-sustaining entities than as subsidized public ones. As is probably familiar to any reader of The Chronicle, this change has taken a number of paths, including greater pressure for business partnerships, patents, and other sources of direct financing; steep increases in tuition; and the widespread use of adjuncts and temporary faculty members. Without the fiscal cushion of the state, the university has more fully modeled itself on the free market, selling goods, serving consumers, and downsizing labor. It has also internalized the chief protocol of the market: competition. Grafting a sense of fashionable innovation onto intellectual work, smart is perhaps a fitting term for the ethos of the new academic market. It emphasizes the sharpness of the individual practitioner as an autonomous entrepreneur in the market, rather than the consistency of the practice as a brick in the edifice of disciplinary knowledge.

One reason for the multiplicity of our pursuits is not simply our fecundity or our fickleness but the scarcity of jobs, starting in the 1970s and reaching crisis proportions in the 1990s. The competition for jobs has prompted an explosion of publications; it is no longer uncommon for entry-level job candidates to have a book published. (It is an axiom that they have published more than their senior, tenured colleagues.) At the same time, academic publishing has changed. In the past, publishing was heavily subsidized, but in the post-welfare-state university the mandate is to be self-sufficient, and most university presses now depend entirely on sales. Consequently the criterion for publication is not solely sound disciplinary knowledge but market viability. To be competitive, one needs to produce a smart book, rather like an item of fashion.

Smart still retains its association with novelty, in keeping with its sense of immediacy, such that a smart scholarly project does something new and different to attract our interest among a glut of publications. In fact, "interesting" is a complementary value to smart. One might praise a reading of the cultural history of gardens in the 18th-century novel not as "sound" or "rigorous" but as "interesting" and "smart," because it makes a new and sharp connection. Rigor takes the frame of scientific proof; smart the frame of the market, which mandates interest amid a crowd of competitors. Deeming something smart, to use Kant's framework, is a judgment of taste rather than a judgment of reason. Like most judgments of taste, it is finally a measure of the people who hold it or lack it.

The promise of smart is that it purports to be a way to talk about quality in a sea of quantity. But the problem is that it internalizes the competitive ethos of the university, aiming not for the cultivation of intelligence but for individual success in the academic market. It functions something like the old shibboleth "quality of mind," which claimed to be a pure standard but frequently became a shorthand for membership in the old boys' network. It was the self-confirming taste of those who talked and thought in similar ways. The danger of smart is that it confirms the moves and mannerisms of a new and perhaps equally closed network.

"Smart," as a designation of mental ability, seems a natural term to distinguish the cerebral pursuits of higher education, but perhaps there are better words. I would prefer the criticism I read to be useful and relevant, my colleagues responsible and judicious, and my institution egalitarian and fair. Those words no doubt have their own trails of associations, as any savvy critic would point out, but they suggest cooperative values that are not always inculcated or rewarded in a field that extols being smart.

Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University and editor of the minnesota review. His most recent book is the collection Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (New York University Press, 2004).

When Lilacs Last In The Dead Land Bloom'd

He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience...

      It's a bit of a mammoth day today, at least historically, for it was 82 years ago that the moreorless full-formed version of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was first published as a book unto itself by Boni & Liveright, a firm now long-defunct although Liveright eventually established itself on its own terms and now publishes, among others, the collected works of Eliot's contemporary Hart Crane. The Waste Land (hear Eliot reading it here) had, by this point in 1922, already been through two publication versions in The Criterion and The Dial, but this new version was the first to include the now-notorious "Notes on The Waste Land." Those notes weren't Eliot's idea, and he in fact resisted somewhat the call for notes from B&L, but he eventually relented, much to his own eventual chagrin. Not only did the notes seem to become as much a part of the poem as the text proper, they for all too many readers seemed to eclipse it, such that Tom regularly lamented their inclusion in later years, suggesting that they had over-determined a very specific textual intention for the poem, as if it were merely a series of hieroglyphs that simply needed the notes as a Rosetta Stone.

      This perhaps needs more explanation. There's a great deal of debate on the issue of Eliot's notes, and many critics are skeptical of Eliot's hesitations about them, like Stanley Sultan in his Eliot, Joyce & Company. I can't help but think, though, Eliot had long-before pre-empted such suggestions in his seminal essay "The Music of Poetry," with his famous, although perhaps somewhat facetious, declaration about the meaning of a poem being merely meat thrown to the dogs while the poet-burglar does his work. The metaphor provides a rather grounding rejoinder to those clinging to the notes as a means to decipher the poem's code. On this, I think Tom's not only right, but he reproaches criticism for some of its more intellectually-effete tendencies, particularly its desire to speak "with authority" of what poetry is "really about." In a way, Eliot's rebuke is on par with Yeats' famous self-epitaph "Under Ben Bulben," the classic example of what I once called "a pre-emptive strike at elegy," the effective speaking-for-himself before anyone else dared. And just as Yeats stole some of the steam of those successors, like Auden, ready to speak of the great poet's passing, so too did Eliot undercut those critics desperate to render The Waste Land as a predominantly historical document. "Grumbling," Eliot once called his own poem, perhaps cagily, perhaps disingenously; or perhaps it was an articulation of his own frustration with what his readers were doing to him, a cynical version of those famous lines of exasperation from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all." This blog shudders to think what Mr. Eliot would think were he to see what is now rather haughtily labelled as "criticism."

      The problem with writing about The Waste Land is that one never knows where to stop, let alone where to begin. The poem is now such a monument of twentieth-century literary culture that the debates about it are intense, the history and folklore about it are absolutely Mongolian in their expanse, and the reputation of the poem is known even to many that aren't familiar with it. (And, with the possible exception of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, it was the last major poem to have so lodged itself in a collective cultural consciousness, an ignominious statement about our culture's increasingly dysfunctional relationship with reading and with poetry itself.) All I'll say for now is that I recommend people reread the poem, 82 years young in its permanent format but going on 200, and to direct those same people to Richard Parker's complex but immensely provocative "Exploring The Waste Land" page, most certainly the best online resource. It's also worth a look at this image, a facsimile of the first page of the poem when it was still in its "He Do The Police As Different Voices" form-- the page all but entirely scrawled through with Ezra Pound's editorial notes, and all of the words of which were eventually excised from the finished poem. (See also this very large image of the Tiresias section, in very much a different state than the final version.) Few poems have had such a profound impact on the ways in which we think about representation and performance, and-- as odd as it may seem-- its influences are still writ large into many of us now accept as familiar convention. Those that raved, for example, about the genius and ingenuity of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs tended not to recognize that Tarantino's techniques draw heavily from the methods of The Waste Land, the poem still making us as much as we remake it.

      It's a slight and probably unnecessary caveat that I want to add that, despite what I've said here, I don't think The Waste Land the best or most important poem of the twentieth century, nor do I think Eliot the century's best poet, or that The Waste Land is even Eliot's best poem. Four Quartets, for my money, outshines TWL by far; Eliot's overall stature, as history proceeds, seems to be diminishing in relation to other poets, particularly Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams; and it's perhaps still waiting in the rising of the bread that Stevens' Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction or Williams' Paterson may ultimately eclipse TWL in influence and prominence. That all this may be the result of wilfully-revisionist historicism is a debate best conducted over several pitchers worth of beer-- and it's probably a moot debate, a renaissant self-fashioning despite a preponderence of facts. But The Waste Land, finally, is a poem so central to our ideas of ourselves-- even those selves that don't read poetry and haven't even read the poem itself-- that we can't escape it, as much as a great deal of contemporary criticism is trying to wrest us from it. I'm reminded, in this regard, of the old story about the old woman that was taken for the first time to see a performance of Shakespeare. Asked afterwards if she enjoyed it, she responded mildly in the affirmative, but said too, "the play was filled with so many cliché's." Those clichés weren't clichés when they were written, of course (or at least most of them weren't); they became clichés because of the ways in which we'd inculcated them into our culture. The same is true of Eliot's Waste Land, less than a century after its publication. And to think we know ourselves without knowing that poem is as misguided as thinking we haven't been influenced by our parents or by our childhoods or by our peers. It is, in fact, one of those rare pieces of literature to which we're catching up rather than reflecting backwards. Really?, you might be thinking, a questioning tic manifesting itself in your troubled face.

      DA.

      Shantih, shantih, shantih

Careless Blisters

      Evidently, some piss-takes were built to last.... ~~ That's what ya get, that's what ya get, for changin' your minds....~~

      (Gawd, how is it that I remember that? *shudder*)

More Exercises In Bad Writing

      This time, they're intentional. Supposedly. This blog particularly likes this snippet:

It was a stark and dormy night--the kind of Friday night in the dorm where wistful women/girls without dates ovulated pointlessly and dreamed of steamy sex with bad boy/men in the backseat of a Corvette--like the one on Route 66, only a different color, though the color was hard to determine because the TV show was in black and white--if only Corvettes had back seats.

You have to love the words "ovulated pointlessly." You have no choice whatsoever.       See also this:

Looking up from his plate of escargots, Sean gazed across the table at Sharon and sadly realized that her bubbly personality now reminded him of the bubbles you get when you put salt on a slug and it squirms around and foams all over the place, and her moist lips were also like the slime on a slug but before you salted it, though after all these years Sharon still smelled better than slugs, but that could have been the garlic butter on her escargots.

After all these years.... Hysterical.

Exodus 7:19-20, Hoser-Style, or Cotton Mathers, Dammit!

      Just think, my fellow Canadians: if we were more like Americans, I suspect Lake Ontario-- or Hamilton Harbour?-- would be a very different colour right now.      (Put your thinking caps on, people....)

      So much for worrying about those mercury levels, eh chum?

      Yes, steep thoughts for a Tuesday afternoon....

Coming To A Box Near You

      This came in from RK yesterday via email, and I got a kick out of it:

For all my wine loving friends, Wal-Mart will have its own wine... Some Wal-Mart customers soon will be able to sample a new discount item: Wal-Mart's own brand of wine. The world's largest retail chain is teaming up with E&J Gallo Winery of Modesto, California, to produce the spirits at an affordable price, in the $2-$5 range. While wine connoisseurs may not be inclined to throw a bottle of Wal-Mart brand wine into their shopping carts, there is a market for cheap wine, said Kathy Micken, professor of marketing at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. She said: "The right name is important." So, here we go: The top 13 suggested names for Wal-Mart Wine:

13. Chateau Traileur Parc
12. White Trashfindel
11. Big Red Gulp
10. Grape Expectations
9. Domaine Wal-mart "Merde du Pays"
8. NASCARbernet
7. Chef Boyardeaux
6. Peanut Noir
5. Chateau des Moines
4. I Can't Believe It's Not Vinegar!
3. World Championship Riesling
2. Sam's Shiraz

And the number 1 name for Wal-mart Wine...

1. Nasti Spumante

The beauty of Wal-mart wine is that it can be served with both white meat (Possum) and red meat (squirrel).

Coming next, Canadian Tire Whisky, perfect for that dinner of catfish dragged from the muddy bottom of the Grand River.

"A Little Pleasure Dome If I've Ever Seen One"

      Why this stuff didn't manifest itself on the Lit Exam From Hell is anyone's guess.   Dear me, this is the sort of stuff Leonard Cohen parodied so audaciously in Beautiful Losers -- the better part of forty years ago.  

      (Actually, I'm wondering if there's a competition in here-- deliberately coming up with the worst such writing. But I'll leave that for someone else to do; I've had enough of labour for a bit.)

All That Bijjibajjazza

      Well, our four first, and almost certainly last, sets of answers are in for the Literature Exam From Hell, and after a bit of tangling and finagling with HTML and all that bijjibajjazza, they're ready for perusal -- by those of you that fled like COWARDS from the task and are now condemned to that future involving Liza, Celine and Reba.  

      By the way, bijjibajjazza: a new word, fresh from the Gates of Hell. It's been issued to replace the exceptionally annoying yadda yadda yadda, a phrase for which Seinfeld has permanently been saved a special place in Lucifer's rotten, sulphurous pits.

      And so, with all due dispatch, here they are, the answers from Cbeck, the Not-So-Good Doctor, RG, and RK. Feel free to discuss, assess, bijjibajjazza, as you wish. This blog should note that none of the respondents dared to write the life of Tom Jones-- probably for fear of having to write a tome anywhere near the length of Clarissa. Lucifer's not worried about that; refusing to write something of that length, well, let's just say it's not unusual.

      As for the respondents: this blog extends its thanks, and assures that at least three of them have now been issued pardons from Hell for their efforts. (They're in the mail. Promise.) This blog won't say who has been denied one, but let it simply say that that incorrigible bastard knew that answering a few questions, let alone proctoring the damned exam, wasn't going to help him anyway.     

NOTE: RG's exam answers have been temporarily removed upon her request. I'll reinstate the link when she deems best. Apologies for any inconveniences.

Terror, In A Handful Of Words

THE LITERATURE EXAM FROM HELL

Second Edition

Time: 3 hours

Instructions: Answer all of the following questions as instructed. Failure on more than two questions will result in the removal of English from your vocabulary, if you have ever indeed possessed it, and ritual public stoning. Write in grammatical English. Pay no mind whatsoever to the inevitable prospect of your impending doom, and please try not to evacuate your bowels during the examination period. Good, er, luck. And now, get ready to shizzle your poetical nizzles.

1.   Translate the entire tale of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the language of William Faulkner-- and translate the entire story of Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury into the language of a mid-tempo R&B tune. Of the latter, make sure the tune is catchy.

2.   You have been contracted to compile one volume of a multi-volume anthology of drugs in literature. What would the title of your volume be, and what texts might it include? Condition: Your title must make use of at least one word from either Greek or Latin. (Publishing companies, after all, want to sound authoritative and official.)

3.   Explain the relationship between the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and recent seasons of The Sopranos. Assess the extent to which the former is a pretext for the latter.

4.   Complete the following joke as creatively and as comically as possible: "A priest, a rabbi and Philip Larkin walk into a bar...."

5.   Complete the following joke as creatively and as comically as possible: "Samuel Pepys, Henry James and Whoopi Goldberg walk into a bar...."

6.   Perform a philological analysis of the phrase "ass-munching windbag," and assess the value of its contributions to English literary history. Do so without mentioning either Henry Miller or Maya Angelou.

7.   Did Sylvia Plath give head? Why or why not? Support your conclusion with specific reference to her poetry.

8.   Summarize the entirety of Dante's Inferno in no more than three words. Contrast this, in no more than two words, with the Inferno to which you are headed should you fail this examination.

9.   Identify your ten favourite ways to kill a mockingbird. Suggest what Harper Lee would subsequently tell you to do with yourself after reading your list.

10.   Justify Margaret Cavendish. (And do not play with typographical alignments as a previous examinee did.)

11.   Prove, as concisely and as concretely as possible, that Thomas Hardy's greatest literary inheritor is, in fact, Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry.

12.   Write the finest pantoum ever composed-- about the removing of one's pants. Make sure it's a leg-itimate pantoum.

13.   Translate the complete text of the Bible into functional, idiomatic Welsh-- except for the Book of Job, which you should translate into contemporary Sanskrit.

14.   Perform a lucid and insightful exegesis of the following sight poem, and suggest reasons for its exceptionally persistent relevance to contemporary cultural thought:

          You put your right foot in,
          You put your right foot out;
          You put your right foot in,
          And you shake it all about.
          You do the Hokey-Pokey,
          And you turn yourself around.
          That's what it's all about!

15.   Situate Jonathan Swift within a critical context that includes the following authors: Oscar Wilde, Stephen Fry, Quentin Crisp, Langston Hughes and Paul Verlaine. Do so in a way that Swift himself would appreciate.

16.   Explain the misprint that occurred with Michael Ondaatje's novel In The Shin of A Lion, and determine the implications of this alteration on current conceptions of Canadian fiction.

17.   Discuss the literary career of Virginia Woolf-- in Stevie Smith's terms.

18.   Explain, in as much detail as possible, the effects on international literary history had William Shakespeare been born a Canadian. Contrast this hypothetical situation with the equally implausible possibility of an Australian Shakespeare.

19.   Explain as precisely as you can how you might profitably teach the poetry of Wallace Stevens to a group of nine year-olds without confusing the bloody hell out of them.

20.   Who did more fucking, Edmund Spenser or Barry White? Support your conclusion with preferrably crust-free evidence. How might the two be effectively used in tandem with one another to help you get your groove-thang on?

21.   Write the sonnet that will make every woman's heart melt. Sorry, ladies-- unless you're vagitarians, you're probably, er, screwed on this one.

22.   Write the sonnet that will make every man's heart melt, if he has one. Sorry, gentlemen-- what's good for the goose....

23.   Provide the design specifications for the first-ever Mallarmé clock. Explain how it would wake people up in the morning, and speculate upon the tortures that will eventually be visited upon it by night-owls irritably facing daybreak, especially if they are hungover.

24.   Assess the extent to which the resolution of the crisis in the Middle East depends upon an accurate unriddling of the primary lessons of either Beowulf or Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno.

25.   Imagine Graham Greene and Samuel Johnson and a chicken jitterbugging outside a Turkish bath in nothing but their towels (the chicken, too). Now assess the prophetic implications of what you've just imagined.

        OR (if above is beyond your imaginative capability)

        Write the story of Tom Jones-- the singer, not Henry Fielding's lad-- as a Samuel Richardson novel. (Those of you opting to do this question are advised to ask for extra examination booklets immediately.)

26.   Perform a teleological analysis of this line from Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers: "Slof tlif, sounded the geysers of his semen as they hit the dashboard (surely the sound of upstream salmon smashing their skulls on underwater cliffs)." Additionally, how also might this sentence provide a meaningful way of reinterpreting the Irish Potato Famine of 1848?

27.   Write the first poem that is, in fact, a human tear, and explain the difficult publication history that poem would eventually have.

28.   Assess the significance of Robert Lowell's occasional experiences with writer's block on his fate in the afterlife. Those particularly inspired might dare to question why the great modern elegist hasn't been much elegized himself.

29.   Write the first novel that loves its readers as much as its readers are supposed to love it. Then describe your novel's emotional state after the world rejects it utterly. Then place into appropriate context the historical tendency for chronic alcoholism among novelists, providing you can take your hands off of that bottle.

30.   Understand and describe literary joy in a single, perfect word. Then deal with the fact that by naming that joy you've made it oh so horribly mortal.

POTENTIALLY SOUL-REDEEMING BONUS QUESTION:

      Speculate upon the impact on nineteenth century literary history if either Charles Dickens or Geoge Eliot had discovered the benefits of a double-ended dildo. Speculate also upon the impact on twentieth century literary history if either Allen Ginsberg or Marianne Moore hadn't. Do so without once invoking the tired phrase, "two heads are better than one." Extra-extra bonus points if you can transform your notes on this matter into the first ode to interpenetration. Regardless, please be certain to keep your pencil in plain sight and on top of your desk at all times.

Submit your completed examination paper to the attending proctors before you run home to begin what will surely be the longest period of sustained prayer in your life. (Be glad that the examiners kindly opted to exclude Milton from this year's exam, so make sure that your prayers are both thankful and beseeching.) Although we assure you prayer will likely not help, we are also fairly sure that it cannot possibly hurt.

      UPDATE (12/12/04): Unsurprisingly, RK's been first out of the gate with his answers, brave soul that he is. The Not-So-Good Doctor's answers are on their way now in. Both sets-- and those of any others of you hearty and hale, or foolhardy and aled, to take Ahabic stabs at this-- will be posted here shortly.

      UPDATE (12/13/04): Excellent! Cbeck has courageously thrown his answers into the lot, and I'm told another set of answers are soon to make their way through. Colour this blog IMPRESSED.      And, by the way, I don't know why there'd be any doubt about this, but apparently there is: Yes, you are free to pass on or link to this exam should any of you see fit; it's really no different than any other post on this site. And, of course, any of you still wanting to toss your answers into the ring are welcome to do so. Cheers.

Masters of Allusion

      For those of you that need it.... This blog'll be in its room if anyone needs it.   

Filthy, Filthy Lucre

      They never represented this on Frasier. Anyone else suddenly thinking grotesquely of The Color of Money?

              ~~ It's in the way that you use it.... ~~

My Tongue Gets Around

      It'll be interesting to see if this forecast for English worldwide comes true. It'll be even more interesting to see if this "English" of which it speaks even remotely resembles intelligible English-- and not simply some freakish esperanto of clicks, euphemisms, and buzzwords.

Hamburger Hill

      The Guardian sent a dozen of pop music's sacred cows through the critical abattoir last week, and some of the patties are surprisingly delicious: Neil Young is "a reminder of the drearier things of life"; Elvis is knocked as "the first Rick Astley or Gareth Gates"; Nirvana is "heavy metal without the consolation of Spandex and hairspray"; and Mick Jagger is "a hideous, tulip-mouthed cadaver with nothing interesting to say, and the most grating voice this side of Sybil Fawlty." And people say I'm harsh.... The ever-so venerated Beatles are, however, served tartare: "Between their toe-curling rhyming couplets, tax-dodging, horseshit 'spirituality' and Octopus's Garden, the Beatles embody everything wrong with the 60s in general and hippies in particular." Sometimes I love being an omnivore. Moo.

      UPDATE: Feeling like venison instead? Here ya go....

Lapses of Zanity

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

~~ But I Don't Want To....

      Arden, we never really knew each other, anyway.... ~~

      This blog now knows exactly what it would do if it had a million dollars. (Alas, I am to be made all of sighs and tears....)

~~ Simply The Best ~~ (Better Than All The Rest)

      A friend in an email recently wrote: "You do the best godawful puns of anyone I know...." **sniff, sniff** It's enough to make a groan man cry....    I'd like to thank the Academy....

      (To all those of you that, after reading the title of this entry, imagined Doctor J strutting about on a giant overlit stage like Tina Turner on a caffeine freak, this blog is truly, truly sorry.   Especially about the legs and the very low-riding one-piece.)

      (Okay, it's not in the least sorry. This blog will thoroughly savour your unmitigated agony as each and everyone of you tries to scour that image from your now permanently-injured brains.      Just be glad I didn't quote from "Private Dancer....")

      See, I can do godawful imagery, too....

Once More Unto The Streets

      So much for gentling their condition.... And this is surely going to get worse before it gets better. Just watch.   

~~ De Dude Dude Dude, He's Daft Daft Daft ~~ (Is All I Want To Say To You)

      From the "Publish Something, Anything, Just Pull Whatever You Can Out Of Your Ass And Call It Scholarship" file comes this proof that some linguists just aren't very cunning at all.... This blog's waiting for the definitive study on this subject-- by Keanu Reeves.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Buehring, or A Little Touch Of Rummy In The Night

      For a situation like this, only one word truly will do: Ha-ha!

      Note Rumsfeld's response to the charge that the troops haven't been supplied with adequate armour: "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up." Well, in that case, I guess they don't need armour at all then.... After all, not everyone can be as heroic as those truly patriotic Swift Boat Veterans.

~~ I Believe In Myrrhacles ~~ (You Sexy Thang, You)

      Ladies and gentlemen, for your Yuletide delectation: a Posh Mary, a shepherd sans Divine Brown, and the Incredible Magical Rainbow Coalition Of The Very, Very Willing. (And, yes, Mr. President, it seems they forgot Poland.) On the flip side, it's the best thing Sam Jackson's been associated with in years....

Getting The Wrinkles Out

      No sooner do I write about looking for a speculum-- and thinking of Dead Ringers as I did-- than I find this story best not thought upon too long. Probably best I reconsider my own position as an inveterate Ironist.   *shudder*

      (Poor Sinead Cusack, now likely condemned to a lifetime of being described as looking like two aspirins on an Ironing board.)

Yo Adrian!

      This just in: Bill Clinton has decided to emigrate to Romania.

Because, Believe It Or Not, People Keep Asking

      No, that's not Doctor J pictured at the right, although it's a pretty good likeness. It is, in fact, Kenwood the Moose, whose story has been reported here before, and who has become one of this blog's unofficial mascots. Why include his picture here? Why not, I say. And, as I noted above, our resemblances are quite striking indeed.

      This, however, leads me to the point of this entry, the questions I keep fielding from certain people which can basically be summed up as "Are you a real doctor?" The answer is no, although I do occasionally perform breast and uterus exams upon request. Unfortunately, when I answer that question I'm naturally accosted by subsequent questions, most of which come out as "So why 'Doctor J' then?" (Pardon me while I heave a sigh of exhaustion.) So, once and for all, I'm going to put this matter to rest.

      Years ago, I can no longer remember exactly when, as I was either finishing my undergrad or my MA, several friends of mine would ask me what I was going to do with my life, the question that daunts all people who study English literature. I speculated then I would probably get my doctorate and figure things out from there. So, among many of my friends in the alcohol-serving haunts in my little neck-of-the-woods, I became "the Doctor" or "Doctor J," the latter always said in fine raillery because of its implicit reference to the monstrously tall Julius Irving. (And besides, there's NO other way I'm ever going to find myself compared to a basketball player.)

      Over the years, my Christian name became an archaism. Doctor J had stuck, to the point that I assumed the moniker and now people who've never been to those haunts refer to me by that now-so-ironic nick. Why? I'll be damned if I know for sure, but I suspect that the alias has stuck for referring to the cavalier, beer-toting smart-ass, while my actual name has become permanently linked to formal gestures, bad news and desperate pleas for help. (That my given names are unbearably Biblical may also have something to do with this.) So one name supplanted another, and the rest, as they say, is history. Not very interesting history, mind you, but history nonetheless, with the slightly jazzier-sounding "Dr J" something in fact to be preferred as term of endearment or familiarity. It has more to do, though, with the same reason that we don't refer to John Wayne as "Marion" or Cary Grant as "Archibald": it just doesn't seem right anymore. A rose by any other name is still a prickly proposition.

      So, c'est ca. Now, hopefully, I'll not have to explain this again anytime soon. Too much to ask? Probably. But now you know, if you didn't already. And now, where did I leave that speculum? After all, if a goofy-looking guy like Kenwood can have a harem....

From Blind Air, From Complete Eclipse

      Well, it looks like we get to go through the Sylvia Plath debate again (read in: feminists ranting about the villainy of Ted Hughes) as a "restored" version of Ariel makes the scene. I place the scare quotes around the word restored because we'll never know exactly how Plath would have decided she wanted the poems published; she was, after all, given to changing her mind on such matters rather frequently. Meaghan O'Rourke's piece for Slate on the arrival of the old-volume-made-new is very interesting and quite good, I think; she identifies quite a lot of the problems of such a volume, and, indeed, with Plath's difficulty with shaping and establishing a poetic narrative (for lack of a better word). I particularly like O'Rourke's closing sentence, that Hughes, "like Samson, brought down the walls of the temple around him, even as he helped his wife take flight." This strikes me as spot-on. It's quite possible-- put more plainly and certainly less Biblically-- Hughes had to be the Ezra to her Tom, though Hughes surely was more troubled by his task than Ezra ever was.

      With this in mind, I thought I'd post one of Plath's lesser-known poems, one very different from the bilious charge of "Daddy" and the sororistic solipsism of "Ariel" and "Lady Lazarus" (good poems all, but too prone to give us a stereotyped Plath rather than a synoptic one). The poem provides us with a "gentler" Plath, one given to action and contemplation, but not to navel-gazing, and, as such, the poem reminds me more of poems like the stunning "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." Here it is:

Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds
In the public park; at home felt the want
Of a single rose present to imagine
The garden’s remainder in full paint.

The stone lion-head set in the wall
Let drop its spittle of sluggish green
Into the stone basin. I snipped
An orange bud, pocketed it. When

It had opened its orange in my vase,
Retrogressed to blowze, I next chose red;
Argued my conscience clear which robbed
The park of less red than withering did.

Musk satisfied my nose, red my eye,
The petals' nap my fingertips:
I considered the poetry I rescued
From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,
I stalled at sudden noisy crashes
From the laurel thicket. No one approached.
A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:

Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters
Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,
Mountaining them on spread newspaper.
They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,

And wouldn't pause for my straight look.
But gave me pause, my rose a charge,
Whether nicety stood confounded by love,
Or petty thievery by large.

(1958)

It's one of those anti-epiphanic vignette pieces that Plath does so well, and it features a sense of colour that one can come to miss in her writing. To read more of Plath's poems, follow this link right here. Let's just hope this reissue of the Ariel poems doesn't lead to the typical series of attacks on Hughes, especially now that he's no longer around to defend himself. Then again, he doesn't really need to: Birthday Letters pretty much says it all, or as much as any of us need to know. The rest, as Tom Eliot would say, is not our business.