Believe It Or Not, The Doc's Not Going To Make Even A Single 'Bermuda Triangle' Joke

      Okay, this blog is now starting to get concerned: Christie -- aka "Brat," née "The Grimsby Bloggerette" -- seems to have taken an unannounced retreat (sabbatical?) from blogging, and her page has been down for almost a week.   This is rather like the Not-So-Good Doctor going a month between bar visits, usually the standard period by which his bartenders officially start wondering if he has fallen off the face of the earth.   So, pretty soon this blog may have to post pictures of her on the sides of milk cartons-- and, kiddo, you know I've got the pictures that I can, er, doctor to most humiliating effect, so if you're out there, let us know. Father Flanagan is absolutely beside himself with worry.

      He he he: triangle....   Now there's a word one can never, ever, ever, ever look at again with innocent eyes after reading The Stone Angel.   And if you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself fortunate. Some us have been scarred for life.   Right, Zozo?

Raspberry Soirée

      ^~~Just like the kind you'd host /   for a second-hand war, /   They held a....^~~     

      (And that's what it sounds like -- when doves decry.)

The Best Offense

      Following this blog's recent rants about the cultures of childing and injurement, this piece on academic freedom by University of Kent sociologist Frank Ferudi deserves mention here, and to have this section in particular highlighted, asterisked to high heaven, and forwarded to those niggling about their discomforts with the ideas of others:

Of course words can offend. But one of the roles of a university is to challenge conventional truths - and that means academics questioning the sacred and mentioning the unmentionable. A proper university teaches its members how not to take hateful views personally, and how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas. It also teaches its members how to deal with being offended. And it never turns to the Inquisitor or the Censor for the answer.

I wonder what Voltaire would have to say about the current cultural hullaballoo.   Or Sartre? Ah, je pense que je sais: "L'enfer, c'est les auteurs."

      (And for once, I guess it's appropriate to interject, "Pardon my French" --- for more reasons than one.)

Growing Old Disgracefully

      If there's any truth to Michael Marmot's article in this morning's NYT, the Not-So-Good Doctor predicts for himself a life span of, oh, hmmm, 35 years. Thank goodness for small blessings.

Primates In The Mist

      In this ironic age, I guess all we can do is wait for someone to nail 69 Theses to a churchdoor in Nipigon.

      Somewhere, the ghost of Henry VIII is sounding very much like Homer Simpson.   Check out, by the way, these limericks on King Hank.

Settle In, Because The Doctor's Going To Go Off On a Massive Muthableeping Rant

As I limped down the street every window broadcast a command. Change! Purify! Experiment! Cauterize! Reverse! Burn! Preserve! Teach! Believe me, Edith, I had to act, and act fast. Call me Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline.... All I heard was pain, all I saw was mutilation.

    --- F. in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966)

      Idiots.   Or, er, sorry, I should probably apply mimetic criticism: Fucking idiots. No, that's not right: Motherfucking idiots. That's better.  

      (Nothing says stupidity like Oedipal connubiality. Or at least the canoodling that so often leads to requisite copulation.)

      Actually, I expected this, Cohen's first-round (!?!?!?!!!!) removal at the CBC Canada Reads Thingamabobber, after hearing Molly Johnson's pathetic defense of the book on Monday afternoon, during which I was reduced to sitting there and shouting at the television screen like some deranged hockey nut.   Anybody would have been a better choice than Johnson to present the novel's case. Her tepid "it should win because it's important" argument would have been risible had it not been so aggravatingly insipid. No, it wasn't insipid, it was STUPID, which I will infer that most of you will read as I detailed yesterday, with that "u" containing more O's than a honey-nut cereal. Couldn't the CBC find someone who understood, or at least liked, even appreciated, the book, to defend it? Like Michael Ondaatje, or Linda Hutcheon, or Stan Dragland? Noooooooo. It reminds me of my MA defense, at which one of the professors on my committee sat silently for the plupart of the discussion, and then eventually and meekly shrugged that she had "troubles" with the book's subject matter.

      This also makes me wonder-- in a way that warrants, I think, a paragraph aside-- why so many people in literary academia get so touchy-feely about their responses, as if offending books were meant to injure them specifically.   In the non-literary academy, see the recent Larry Summers fiasco, which has every PC dunderhead wailing as if he or she had been lashed, scoured, and Gibsonially crucified. As for Summers, we should all be wondering why pundits and prognosticators seem invariably to hang on the same key phrases of his address without in the least assessing them in the context in which he delivered them, which was, by my reading, tentative, speculative, and hypothetical-- and not, as the P&Ps would have it, polemical. See, for example, this claptrap from the noted Miltonist Stanley Fish, whose remarks make me wonder if, indeed, there was any place for Summers' text in his stumping class. Stanley's usually wiser than this, but it seems he too has jumped into the corps of heavy-handed drum-beating for The Injured And The Troubled. This returns me to the issue at hand.

      It's one thing to have feelings about a book; it's quite another to be able to judge (or assess) it properly.   And, frankly, Olivia "I-Can't-Get-Elected-So-I-Stay-In-The-Public-Eye-As-Much-As-I-Possibly-Can" Chow's response -- "I don't want anybody to feel those passages. It disturbs me" -- is the epitome of this sort of PC idiocy, to say nothing of evincing a complete and utter miscomprehension of the book. It's like discouraging people from watching The Accused because it makes you uncomfortable.   Idiots, idiots, idiots. (And, briefly, this is where Professor Hopkins in the Summers case is so dreadfully wrong: political correctness IS the point. It was NOT the point of Dean Summers' speech, but the kafuffle surrounding his speech has become all about it.)

      How would you have defended the book, Dr J?, some of you might be prone to ask. I'd point to the technical virtuosity of it, the novel testing not only experiments in content but just about every prose form imaginable, and succeeding with most of them. I'd point to the humour of it, missed by so many, that is so dark as to render jet black autumn red. I'd point to those magnificent sections of mantraic writing that are almost as powerful as some sections of sacred texts, particularly the stunning "God is Alive" and "What is a saint" sections. I'd remind them that a novel that challenges is not a novel to be taken lightly, and that, in fact, Beautiful Losers has probably done more to challenge the placid provinciality that daunted, even stalked, so much Canuckistani fiction before 1970 (and, really, still does, though "provinciality" has morphed slightly into "diasporic"). I'd ask the fellow panelists if there was among the other novels even a single character as unforgettable as F., or if any of the others provided an ending that is as magical as a Christo "exhibit" and as genuinely inspired as Cohen's ending ("Hey, look, somebody's making it!"). I'd also ask if any of the judges other than Roch Carrier and Ms Johnson even bothered to finish the damned thing, surely one of most audacious books written in this silly country that chooses Tommy Douglas as its greatest citizen of all-fucking-time. Oh, that's right! We don't care for audacity or vision. We're CUH-NAY-DIAN!   Argh.  

      And, by the way, if you've read the novel and you come to our little Olympian's conclusion that the book is "not only depressing but completely void of hope," then you too are an idiot of Bushian proportions-- or, that you are an idiot of Bushian lack-of-reading. Any attentive-- and half-way intelligent reader-- would observe that so much of the book is about transcending the voids of hope, or the apparent voids.   I swear, of these five panelists, I'd venture that only M. Carrier, a novelist himself, very often a good one, too (and, oddly, the only male in the navel-gazing bunch), would survive ten minutes in my classroom, the idiotic remarks of the others even more obtuse and vapid than an eighteen year-old saying, "I don't like Shakespeare 'cuz he talks funny." At least there is hope for the eighteen year-old. The other four panelists -- aka the Waifish Whining Wymyn Brigade -- deserve the same whipping I gave Dennis Lee in my thesis, lo those many years ago. (I wrote, borrowing from a then-friend, that he suffered from "cranial-glutimal ensconcement." I am so amazed my generally-addled brain remembers that....)   No, the WWWB would have warranted, for uttering such drek, an intellectual bitch-slapping of Bobby Brown proportions were they in one of my classes.

      (I should add in fairness, though, that were they in the classes of some of my once-colleagues, they'd have been praised for daring to "speak against the text," and they'd be sent off to Graduate School where the REAL hatred of literature and literary study begins. After that, they'd likely by the end of the decade be professors at McGill, teaching literature courses with literature reduced in them to token black-guy-in-a-horror-film appearances.  

      **sigh, pause**

      For some reason, I'm now thinking of how mama-birds feed their hatchlings: by chewing the food and dispensing it as pule into the mouths of their babies.   I haven't the faintest reason why THAT image should come to mind right now. Not the faintest....)

      Oh, this has become quite the rant, hasn't it?   It steels me, though, in a way, or in a few ways, actually. One is that, if I am hired in the next bit to do an introduction course, I am now definitely putting Beautiful Losers on it, come Hell, high water, or a Grand Chorus of infantile protestation.   Another is that, frankly, I'm glad I did so much of my formative work on material that others find so controversial (not just BL), because it girded me against a lot of the drivel that drown, like that forementioned high water, what should be the substantial matters for debate and discussion.   I shudder to think what I might have been like if I hadn't developed a built-in bullshit detector to ward against such stuff. (Actually, I probably know the answer: hired. Or married to **ick!** Jack Layton.)

      Yet another is, that I'm now inclined to think (and I'm probably not the best judge on this) that my classes with aspiring young minds actually have been much more rigorous and intellectually-focussed than most. (My ex-charges might want to disagree with this. Vehemently, and with gallons of spittle to boot, and those of them that might be reading this are invited to get their glands going in the comments.) It's important to deal with Real Stuff, not just what I deride as namby-pamby effusions about "feeeeeeeeeeelings" and "I-don't-know-what-anybody-else-thinks-but" nigglings. It's also why I never believed in calling D+ papers Bs just for the sake of placating the masses with pitchforks-- the burghers (read in: department heads) that desperately want, little Neville Chamberlains that they almost always are, Peace In Our Time.

      Argh. Has this entry-turned-rant-turned-diatribe entirely fused the fact of Cohen's early ejection from the CBC Reads contest with an ejection of blisterous bile against the academy? Yes, though probably not for the reasons some of you may be (fairly) thinking at this point.  

      We've so watered-down our expectations of intelligent reading that now the prissiest statements can be made-- from authorities high and low-- and we not only indulge them, we accept them as being something more than prissy statements that effront intelligence; we instead accept them as intelligent. (I would call such stuff hysterics, but I'm sure the femi-nots reading this would look at the words 'prissy' and 'hysterics' and think there was a chauvinist agenda to my argument. Those of you in academic circles know I'm right on this one. I was probably already deepening myself in mire when I wrote 'namby-pamby' above.) We've so lowered the bar that not only can mediocrity hoist itself across, so can hogwash, so long as some jumps on the floorboard and projects the goo into the air-- and even Hannibal Lecter disapproved of the projectile issuance of gooey stuff. Not just being uncivilised, it's anticivilised. (There should have been time for such a word.)

      (I really do have to stop allowing myself so many parenthetical remarks. Yeah, like this one. Call it a curse of an endlessly annotating mind.)

      And here we are, the Doctor's fulmination nearly finished. I should add that it bothers me less that Beautiful Losers lost than that it lost on these flimsy grounds, and that this exercise demonstrated once again that myopia and stupidity, to say nothing of dismissive preening that recalls the current social climate, will out. I think it was Trevelyan, the younger not the elder, who once remarked that (then-)modern society had raised an entire generation of people who could read but didn't know what was worth reading.   He was right.   He was, I'm inclined to think, more right now than he was then, which should say something about the degree of the slippery slope. Think about that, please, for a moment or so the next time you reach for your TV Guide. Or, worse, when some provincial little unknown book wins-- as one now inevitably will-- the Canada Reads contest, when the votes line up behind respectability rather than daring, with sentimentality swaddled in-between.

      F. would have had something to say about that. And he wouldn't be entirely right about matters, he probably wouldn't be in the least bit wrong, either.

      BTW, the second book voted off was Carrier's choice, Volkswagen Blues. (Gee, whoda thunk it? The writer in the lot voted down? Never!)   Let us please, please hope that Atwood's Orifice and Crack is next to take the step to the block.   Though, one has to wonder how that book would look split down the middle.

A Voice Still So Hollow, or Jer The Obscure: Notes On Rereading Thomas Hardy

      Strange: a friend casually mentioned Thomas Hardy last night, and I wound up returning to Hardy's poetry for the first time in a while, and my brain's now taken a bit aback. I should clarify this: I have thought semi-recently about some Hardy, mainly the more-typically anthologized pieces, and I've thought about him vaguely on occasion. But tonight I took to revisiting the poems from Satires of Circumstance, particularly the devastating ones that together are rather stoically called Poems of 1912-1913. Stoically, I say, because those are the poems Hardy wrote about the death of his wife Emma, poems he described collectively as "an expiation" and which Ezra Pound described, also collectively, as "the greatest elegy in the English language." (The Pound may be slightly off: in trying to find the exact quote, I keep coming up empty.) While reading, I was struck especially by "After A Journey," a poem about which I doubt I have nothing profound to say, but which is worth reproducing here for its own sake; I think it's haunting.

After A Journey

I come to interview a Voiceless ghost;
    Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,
    And the unseen waters' soliloquies awe me.
Where you will next be there's no knowing,
    Facing round about me everywhere,
      With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
    Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
What have you now found to say of our past --
    Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?
Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?
    Things were not lastly as firstly well
      With us twain, you tell?
But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on
    To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,
The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone
    At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,
And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow
    That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,
      When you were all aglow,
And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
    The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
    For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
    The bringing of me here; nay, bring me here again!
      I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

                                      Pentargan Bay

The strange thing is that in reading this I was-- or seemed to be-- in several places and several times all at once, too many things in my own memory going off like flash-bulbs that I kept wincing my eyes as if doing so would make a difference. For the first time, I think I had a true sense of the poem's sensibilities: its toughness, but its desperation; its melancholia and its hatred of it; its reach of longing and its frustrated awareness that such longing is futile. And, oh yes, regret, much regret, restrained but not stifled. It is, in a way, Hardy's "She should have died hereafter," but for a heart far less disciplined than Macbeth's-- and for a mind more haunted by apparitions. And in this piece especially, the tension between the language of emotion and the language of artifice is palpable, though I'd suggest neither emerges dominant over the other. Instead they're forced, almost like divorced parents, to coexist for some other reasons larger than either of them. There are dimensions of artifice, to be sure; but there are ways in which the poem is as transparent in its expression as a love note from William Carlos Williams. But it's not pure venting, or purely personal expression, either. The rhymes and rhythms are so deftly managed, and the poem's tropes harken back to long-standing conventions of elegaic love poetry.

      In sum, the poem's a small wonder of aesthetic and emotional balance, but it's a balance that often seems precariously kept, which, in turn, intensifies the experience of it, the centrifugal matter of a poet being able to maintain his composure without lapsing into solipsism or solecism on one side, or clinicism or euphuism on the other.   And there you almost have it, a perfect statement of elegy, perfect Hardy: a Romantic spirit governed by Victorian decorum, but conducted with many of the sensibilities of a Modern. And Hardy-- like Housman, and to a lesser degree Matthew Arnold-- never entirely belonged to the age (or ages) that contained him. No wonder he, again like Housman, seemed so disaffected with his times, with the notions of them or the capacities for hope in them. But Hardy could make despair beautiful, in part, I suspect, because his despair was never as utter as he may have sometimes feared, that there was still some dark shard of hope swaddled in all that fluorescent obscurity.

      (Okay, so I had more to say about that poem than I thought. This tends to happen to the Not-So-Good Doc.)

      I mentioned, though, that I was taken aback, and it wasn't simply for the beauty of the poem. If you want to know why, you can click here to read why.  

      I remembered as soon as I saw it again, some notes and doodles in the margins of my edition, how that poem was once one of the informing spirits behind a poem of mine. (For all you boring critics out there, read in "source-texts" for "informing spirits."   )   That poem, too, was about meeting up "for an interview with a Voiceless ghost," a mysterious figure that would prove the foil for a subsequent series of meditations. That poem-- which I'd tentatively called "The Place"-- just kept defeating me. After well over 250 drafts in two years, it stymied me to the point I had to let it go, and now I'm quite sure I don't possess even a single draft of it, so many of the originals done on the interiors of cigarette packs, loose scraps of paper and in notebooks lost and junked over the years. All gone, though surely to no one's loss. I wasn't Thomas Hardy.

      But I thought further, too, about other poems on my mind at the time, and they're all gone, too, no editions or versions of any of them in my possession anymore, fallen or blown away like scurf. It hardly matters, I guess. I wasn't Thomas Hardy, after all; I wasn't even Alfred Noyes, and I'd surely look at the lot now with the same embarrassment with which I look at my semi-annual doodles. But sometimes one wonders. And as I wondered, secondarily so as I reread through the Hardy, I came upon those last lines of that poem and realized something I had never known, how much Hardy's poem had in fact been lurking behind the arras of another poem, it too lost to time and circumstance. Let's just simply say that realization stunned me, and I had to set Hardy down for a while.   Something about that second poem's spirit now seemed so very different, as if it had been contaminated for reasons not worth explaining here, and I was then struck by the irony that said poem had very much been about the violence between what one wants to see (and, in fact, thought did see) and what is (and, in fact, inevitably will be). That, however, was never supposed to be the ethical center of the poem, but I now suspect Hardy's poem had imprinted itself into my thinking far more than I'd ever been aware.   Some bile in my mouth, some anger at my own obliviousness, I remembered once more how Time, like Love, finally satirizes us all. And Time, also like Love, prefers incision to jest, invective to raillery.   That's simply The Way It Is.   One simply smirks and moves on about one's business.   Except in this case, I guess, because I at least have a rejoinder to Time's sick joke, however smug and ill-tempered: Hardy Har Har.  

      Harrumph.

By The Pricking Of Their Thumbs

      Those perenially-bored religious nutters in the States are at it again, though I'm tempted to put the R-word in that clause in scare quotes to indicate the awkward parsimony and/or misnomiality of it in this context. Their target this time: Shrek 2. Somebody, somewhere, please, oh please, buy these people LIVES.   And maybe some humour.   Oh, and some education, too, because next thing you know they'll be sounding their priggish alarm bells over everything from Tootsie to Twelfth Night to Oedipus Rex.

      As for me, I've lost all patience for these self-important, sniggering whack-jobs that not only think "their" culture under attack from every which way, but WANT, desire with the desperation of Miss Lonelyhearts on a Saturday night, to believe "their" culture under attack from all sides. To them I say, Get over your frickin' selves.   Your CHILDREN are behaving more maturely than you are.   See also the response to last night's surprisingly tame episode of The Simpsons, which really should suggest how staunchly stupid (pronounced "stoooooooo-pid"), to say nothing of grossly intolerant, these self-important flagellants are.

      And, on the other side of the coin: I'm reminded of the desperate desire of so many in the caves of academia that tried, especially through the 80s and 90s, to asperse suggestions of sexual subversiveness to every possible dimension of every cultural artefact they could.   Well, congratulations.   Those conservative Christian cluckings are the sounds of chickens coming home to roost.   Those aspersions not only helped to create (or recreate) the culture of paranoia, but they also provided the tools and the rhetoric to seem to legimate that paranoia.   Both sides are like Blake's Heaven and Hell, making each other in the other's despite.   Felicitations-- you yourselves are Hell.

You Don't Want To Know Where That Thing Has Been

      Let's just say, it must have been one of those low-flow toilets.... **shudder**

      Might this blog suggest a new name for the item in question: "The Miraculous Eddy?" (It just keeps coming and going and coming and.....)   And does this blog dare to note the coincidence of the eviscerator in question being named "Tran"?   Oh, the irony, the slicing, execrating, gender-bending irony!  

Ugly People Everywhere, Rejoice!

      As the lottery commerical goes, "just imagine...."   Such a thing might even make the Doctor look good.   (Yeah, I know. That task would require an industrial strength version and thousand-dollar bills wrapped around the vials.)

"Consider This An Audition"

      To appropriate from Noel Coward, "Extraordinary how potent cheap humour is."  

Guided By Voices

      Something tells me this should have been the subject of a Wallace Stevens poem. Talk about your keener sounds.

One For The Gents

      Because guys always get forgotten on Valentine's Day.... Or, if not forgotten, then screwed more in the bad way than in the good one.   

      Caveat masturbator: Not Safe For Work, and the sight of Chuckie Heston might just cause certain things to cease functioning for a day or three.   And as for the choice for #1: well, that was a foregone conclusion, wasn't it?

      Now the Not-So-Good-Doctor's off to find himself a good stupor. Or at least a mildly numbing haze.

And You Already Thought The Big Guy Upstairs Had A Weird Sense Of Humour...

      Somewhere in this kooky, silly world of ours, Jonathan Culler just got a woody.

      (And yes, maybe only three people reading this blog will understand that reference, but I'm going to make it, anyway. I'm allowed a Dennis Miller moment every now and again.   Now pardon me a few weeks while I try to erase forever from my brain the thought of Jonathan Culler with a chubby.   *shudder*)

Just ASCIIng For It

      Some people have wayyyyyyyy  too much time on their hands....  

Captain Obvious Strikes Again, Vol. MMMDCCVIII

      This blog hates to use this expression twice in one week -- and it assures you it won't again any time soon-- but it seems the pithiest way of saying everything that needs to be said, so here goes: Ya think?!?!

      (Don't worry about her, though: as long as there are men who don't mind throwing away their careers and their reputations just to get near that over-pronounced booty, her greatest fear will remain very much unrealized. Whether these men are lemmings or salmon, I leave to your certainly-wiser judgment.)

Beyond The Casual Solitudes

      Reading former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's piece on love poems at Slate, I was drawn to turn to a poem by Wallace Stevens, "Re-Statement of Romance." There's a perfection of emptiness in Stevens' few love poems proper, though that emptiness is not the absence of feeling but the articulate transparency of it. Here's the poem:

Re-Statement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you.   Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

"So deeply by ourselves," a central notion to Stevens, and to more genuinely beautiful notions of Lerrrrrve. Something to remember on this day resplendent with clichés.

      The Doc, being the Doc, couldn't let this post go without offering another poetic persepctive on things, this time from W.B. Yeats, whose "The Hero, The Girl and The Fool" (sometimes called "The Hero, The Girl and The Fool By The Roadside") from The Tower (1928) warrants quoting.

The Hero, the Girl and the Fool

The Girl.   I rage at my own image in the glass,
That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it
It is as though you praised another, or even
Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;
And when I wake towards morn I dread myself
For the heart cries that what deception wins
Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go
If you have seen that image and not the woman.

The Hero.   I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

The Girl.   If you are no more strength than I am beauty
I had better find a convent and turn nun;
A nun at least has all men’s reverence
And needs no cruelty.

The Hero.   I have heard one say
That men have reverence for their holiness
And not themselves.

The Girl.   Say on and say
That only God has loved us for ourselves
But what care I that long for a man’s love?

The Fool by the Roadside.   When my days that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;

When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.

Indeed.   (To rewrite the old joke, faithful ain't nothing but a geyser.)   This cold blight will turns us all to fools and madmen.

      (You didn't honestly think the Doc was going to say something serious about love without giving it a good, swift kick in the teeth, did you? Tsk, tsk, tsk....)

A Prospect Of The Sea?

      Fascinating, simply fascinating.   Every Atlantis-theorist will be having, er, wet dreams for a decade.

You Got The Right One, Baby

      Un-hunh!   And that's all this blog is going to say about that.  

      Oddly enough, this morning the Not-So-Good Doc isn't listening to Brother Ray, but to Dire Straits' Money for Nothing. Particularly resonant this morning:

                  But the blind singer
                  He's seen enough and he knows
                  He do a song about a long-gone Irish girl
                  But I got one for you,
                  My Portobello Belle....

        There's always a long-gone Irish girl....

        ADDENDUM:   It seems some people really do need-- pardon the Doc's language-- to grow the muthafuck up.   Sheesh.   The culture of entitlement-- it's such a wonderful thing.

The Guile of a Vixen and the Disposition of a Shrew

      Because you were just dyyyyyyyyyyyying to know....  

The Culture of Childing

      Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to direct you to the best article I've seen in some time, a smart, shrewd, and wonderfully pointed (to say nothing of accurate) piece about smoking bans. There are two choice bits to which I'd call your attention, the first a series of speculations in Shakespearean terms:

You could extend the adult/smoker theory a bit to understand some of Shakespeare's characters on the basis of who might or might not smoke. Lady Macbeth definitely would ('Out, damned spot!'); Macbeth wouldn't. Polonius wouldn't even allow smoking in the family chambers, but his daughter Ophelia might sneak a few puffs each day in back of the castle; and of course Hamlet wouldn't be able either to enjoy the habit or quit. Iago would smoke and like it; Desdemona would smoke on the sly but never with Othello, who - poor dear - must have had terrible asthma. Shakespeare himself? Undoubtedly a pipe-smoker.

Cleopatra would definitely have been a smoker, I'd hazard, as would Jaques, Falstaff, the Bastard Falcounbridge, and Richard III. Prospero would have stolen a few drags when people weren't looking. Non-smokers: Henry V, who'd have enjoyed hanging around the smokers as Prince Hal but then banished smoking when he became king; Malvolio, obviously; Richard II, whose face was brittle enough as it was; and Coriolanus, because Mother would have disapproved. I'd rather be in the company of the former than the latter.

      But the crux of the piece, and the issue we all have to address, I think, as we consider the ramifications of these bans, is articulated here:

What worries me is the hum of panic that I sense underneath the public ordinance, a panic engendered by a cult of health that's taken so many forms over the past 30 years that it's become the single religion of much of Western society. You run across it everywhere: in our preoccupation with diet and exercise; the endless ads in the media - in the US at least - promoting new drugs for an increasing number of exotic diseases; and the inclination to turn all eccentric behaviour into a 'syndrome' that can be treated medicinally. While none of these is alarming in itself, they add up to a new Puritanism that turns the old paradigm on its head: now instead of tempting the Fates by being bad, we put all our efforts into being good. If smoking was about being grown up, the new Puritanism is about being a perpetual child, and living in a protected world that has never existed except in fantasy.

And there it is, precisely put, why this insidious new Puritanism is as, if not more, harmful than any of the things it opposes. It's the culture of childing-- one recalls the use of that word in King Lear and its repercussions-- that is perhaps most damaging to us, that is constructing us all as victims, as if liberating ourselves from choice might save us from our infantile selves. I find it odd that those defending the smoking bans never talk about choice, and the reason why should be blindingly obvious; to recognize, and to allow, people choices involves responsibility, and accepting the consequences of one's decisions without relying on excuse about victimization.

      My Canuckistani readers will be familiar with the current commercial in which an older woman chimes on about having worked in a bar for years to support her family, and how she got cancer through second-hand smoke. It's a sickeningly manipulative ad, not just for playing on the idea of death, but for casting the woman as a victim, as if she had no other choices for her life, as if, in fact, Life Itself, had forced her to work in that environment and that environment only, all other opportunities completely shut off to her, all decisions for the facts of her life not hers but those of some unkind, primordial Destiny. Adults make choices. Adults accept the consequences of their decisions, for good or for ill. But the new Puritanism cultivates, preys upon, the idea of victimization, and desperately seeks to blame other facts of life so as to exculpate people from their decisions. From there, it essays to reconstruct the world as some sort of childproof environment, childing others by constantly keeping others from The Bad Things. Notice that the smoking bans are no longer about accomodating shared-space, or ensuring smoke-free possibilities: no, they are about making everyone conform to larger suppositions about what is good and bad, and compelling us, or forcing us, to behave accordingly. Bars are not allowed to provide a choice anymore-- to declare themselves "smoking" or "non-smoking" establishments, or to offer customers options therein; they are obliged to be Non-Smoking because of an infantile notion that people are entitled to go anywhere they want and feel they are within a "healthy" environment. The proponents of the smoking bans talk about their "rights," about their right to go into a bar and not have to inhale other people's smoke, an argument not at all unreasonable. But making all bars (and restaurants and such) have to afford that right is culturally despotic, and it implies that we are not mature enough to make our own decisions. After all, that woman from the commercial didn't choose to work in smoking establishments-- rather than, say, getting another job, or working in places that didn't. No, she didn't make any decisions. Well, balls to that, and spare me, at least, the wails of victimization that people tend to think exonerates them from being responsible for those actions (or inactions, perhaps).

      Instead, this sickening Puritanism doesn't talk about allowances or permissions, or even tolerances: it makes decisions for others and imposes its will on them in the most nefariously patriarchal (or matriarchal) ways. That it does this while wrapping itself in the cloak of Serving The Greater Good makes this all the more despicable. The pretense that any act of prohibition is for "our own good" is smug condescension guised as concern when it most patently is not. (If it was even a kind of genuine concern, smoking itself would be banned, or made illegal, though that too may be coming down the pike eventually.) Such behaviour is moralistic and sniggering, which should be obvious by the fact that choices are being removed and smokers effectively being figured as pariahs. We've gone well past the terms of Please Do Not. We've entired into the offensive domain of You Cannot. And that, that my readers, is a territory of oppression rather permission.

      This returns me, long-winded argument later, to a central tenet which this blog holds dear: that we have to afford people choices. As for bars, which are, after all, privately-owned establishments, they should be allowed to declare themselves smoking or non-smoking, as they see best to their clients and their needs, and should they opt for the former, they can display "Enter At Your Own Risk" signs everywhere by which people would accept responsibility for deciding to enter or not. I'd rather live in Cleopatra's Egypt rather than Malvolio's vapid Illyria.

      Accept responsibility?!?! P'shaw! Not in this day and age. How on earth would we be able to blame all our problems on everything else in the world if did?

Alas, Only In Australia

      And people wonder why I so chagrin cell-phones.      Key quote: "The results showed women were twice as likely as men to use the tactic."    Duh.   Or, as the kids say these days: Ya think?!?

      The Doctor's Theory:   Bringing a cell to a date-- or bringing one and not turning it off-- entitles your date you walk out right away.   It's just bad manners.  

Come Again?

      The unkindest cut of all: the cuts.   Strange, we haven't matured at all since 1972, have we?

      (Hey, wait a second: I was born in 1973, which is.... Oh dear Lord.   )

And Oddly, Not Even A Single Mention Of Sheep

      Now you can really get that creepy feeling when the old man refers to his wife as "Mother."

Dear Addie

      This, my friends, is priceless. "Faulty address," indeed.  

      This blog's challenge: come up with the cleverest text for the card in question. If you're skilled enough to do it in German, please provide an English translation.

"An Unliving, Unholy Thing Filled Only With Stuffing"

      Continuing this blog's love-bashing theme for the week comes a chilling message courtesy The Onion. Yes, boys and girls, it's Threat Level Pink. Check out, too, these useful coupons, perfect for maintaining that sense of freshness to your relationship.  

      (Two funny items in The Onion this week?!?   Pretty soon the rivers will turn red with blood.   Horseman, pass by!)

Yankee Meddle Dandy

      Word to the Religious Right in Yankeeland: the more you try to get involved in the same-sex marriage debate in Canada, the more likely you'll convince MPs to vote for it.   If the religious right is going to argue, with great and holy fervour, that we should eat our soup with a spoon, the more likely we are to reach for that fork.   Likely? No-- Surely.

      In other news, it seems RK has cause to rejoice, while the Yanks have to consider the real monster they've now created. On the latter, check out Nicholas Kristof's piece on the issue from yesterday's NYT.

Hey, Big Spender!

      Slate's Stephen Metcalf, in a review of the latest biography of Stephen Spender, dares to wonder why the biographer chomps at the bit when it comes to assessing the quality of Spender's poetry. There's a touch of frustration in his tone, a tone that gets the better of Metcalf as he proceeds-- oh, p'shaw, the irony!-- to avoid entirely the question himself.  

      I never thought Spender a particularly good poet-- his rhythms always seems stilted, his voice awkward, his observations often trite and hackneyed, and some of his lines dreadful ("mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys" is a particularly bad one). But take a glance about the Net, and you'll find precious little of Spender, even the site with his name devoted not to him but to a trust. So, in a gesture of fairness, this blog would turn your attentions to this poem, which I provide all by its lonesome because the Doc is in no mood to type. But, in the end, one has to wonder: why won't we let him slide away into oblivion, and I think the answer has almost entirely to do with the sustained and rather facile fascination with hangers-on, with Dunstan Ramsays and Bosie Douglases (the first fictional, the second more fictional for having been real). That assessment probably seems horribly churlish, to say nothing of glib. But let's face it: too many, I would say "even" but "especially" in the academy, are less interested in matters of poetry than in matters of gossip and celebrity-- with the academy being particularly interested in skewing (and skewering) figures more than doing genuine criticism. (Gawd forbid.) And for those interests, figures like Spender seem delectable: a life in letters, a legitimate subject for study, and yet, and yet, an awesome backdoor into the world of sneakaboo name-dropping and callous life-judging. Now that's the real stuff. Grumble, grumble, grumble.   And as long as cultural materialism maintains its hold in the academy (though, it should be noted, its grip is loosening somewhat), I don't see any of this changing very fundamentally any time soon. Gar.... But here's a poem of Spender's, offered so you can read it and assess for yourselves. Me, I'm not impressed by it, but, who knows, I could very well be in a minority opinion around here.

Not Palaces

Not palaces, an era's crown
Where the mind dwells, intrigues, rests;
Architectural gold-leaved flower
From people ordered like a single mind,
I build. This only what I tell:
It is too late for rare accumulation,
For family pride, for beauty's filtered dusts;
I say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink from here energy and only energy,
As from the charge of an electric battery
To will this Time's change.
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Dinker of horizon's fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses;
Leave your gardens, your singing feasts,
Your dreams of suns circling before our sun,
Of heaven after our world.
Instead, watch images of flashing glass
That strike the outward sense, the polished will,
Flag of our purpose which the wind engraves.
No spirit seek here rest. But this: No one
Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally,
Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.

    That programme of the antique Satan
Bristling with guns on the independent page,
With battleship towering from hilly waves:
For what? Drive of a running purpose
Destroying all but its age-long exploiters.
Our programme like this, but opposite,
Death to the killers, bringing light to life.

--- 1933

"As from the electric charge of a battery...." Oh dear.... "That programme of the antique Satan?"   "For what?!?"   The less said, the better, probably.  

The Little Guy Was Back

      Only in Canada would a former Prime Minister go to the trouble of showing us his balls. And, of course, putting Prime Minister Bolingbroke Martin on the hot-seat: check out Chantal Hebert's discussion in The Star and Paul Wells' entry on his blog at Macleans for some more intelligent reflections on the former-PM's testimony at the Gomery Pyle Inquiry.  

      My preternaturally suspicious mind predicts the A-bomb of this scandal still hasn't been dropped yet, but it's coming, and it won't come until the current PM has testified.   Wanna bet? The loser has to fondle the ex-PM's balls in public.

      (It would have to be the ex-PM's.   The current one seems to have lost his since he launched the castle-coup.)

      This blog has to ask, though: Isn't it astonishing that these guys used to be in the same party? The intensity of this internecine warfare-- once thought ended when Chretien stepped down and Martin installed his own team-- is incredible, and it's all-but-impossible to view this inquiry as a genuinely probative exercise. You can practically see these guys, on both sides, steaming from their ears and chafing at their necks. You've got to hand it to the Liberals: when they fight among themselves, they fight-- like alley cats for chicken bones.   Mewwww!

Just A Whiff Of Desperation, or Sex And The Pity

      "Hmmm, smells like Matthew Broderick and Massengill."  

      In other news from the Charlie-Sheen-Help-Me-My-Career-Is-Utterly-And-Completely-In-The-Shitter File comes word that Jennifer Love-My-Boobies-Please-They-Were-Jessica-Simpsony-Long-Before-Hers-Were Hewitt will be starring in a new project. It will costar the redoubtably pathetic Joey I-Once-Was-A-Precocious-Kid-That-Said-Something-Funny-On-Johnny-Carson-But-Now-I'm-Just-An-Impossibly-Annoying, Fabio-Maned-Primate-Grasping-For-Any-Last-Shreds-Of-Fame Lawrence.   Gawd help us all. (And let our cries come unto Thee.)

      UPDATE:   Bonnie Bedelia did ask the right question all those years ago: "John, Why Does This Stuff Keep Happening To Us?"  

Dulce et Decorum Est

      This significant, late-breaking news is just in from Ananova:

Tom doesn't want to know the price of knickers

Tom Jones has asked women who come to his concerts to in future remove the price tag before they throw knickers onstage.

Jones, 64, told a female fan at a gig at Las Vegas' Hollywood Theatre, "Luv, you're supposed to remove the price tag before you throw it, otherwise that takes all the fun out of it."

The Welsh singer has just finished a sold-out engagement at Vegas' MGM Grand Hotel.

Yes, ladies, please-- a little courtesy! I know it just depresses me to no end when women toss their undergarments at me, La Senza markers still on them. I always get hit in the eye with those ink-spraying anti-shoplifting thingamabobbers. And if I want to be hit in the eye by something in your underwear, it surely wouldn't be one of those things.  

      And, ladies, please don't throw the soiled ones, either. They can be horribly distracting. That happened in a lecture once, and I was off my game for a whole thirty seconds.

      In other news, it seems Mr. Jones isn't the only one embarking on a futile project.   All considered, there has to be an irony to a zoo director -- managing birds no less -- named Kueck.

Doctor J's-- the ONLY place to read about the Pope, Tom Eliot, ladies' britches AND gay penguins all in the same day.   Even Fark is going to leave at least one of those out.  

Scattered And Shining

      Because this blog HAS to.

      For the record, 2005 marks the 75th anniversary of the poem's publication. Those of you wishing to hear the poem, may want to follow this link to a 1955 reading by Tom (see also this).   Those of you interested in the poem should take a gander at the late Dame Helen Gardner's The Art of T.S. Eliot, which I fear is now out of print. It remains the watershed study of Eliot's later poems, particularly the Four Quartets, but which have their central origins in Ash-Wednesday. You can find a few glimpses of her work here, though they're all about Burnt Norton. (The especially studious might find this of interest, too.)

      Note, by the way, this related news out of the Vatican, even if, for reasons not entirely explicable, the idea of an American performing Ash Wednesday services seems about as appropriate as a dog using a litter box. Then again, Tom was a Yank, but that doesn't quite count: after all, he became, as many used to say of New Zealanders, more English than the English, which at least engenders a vaguely continental air. Besides, we all know our neighbours to the south are always more worried about the flesh than the word. (See also this.)

      Teach us to care and not to care, and teach them to sit still....

      POSTSCRIPT: Ash Wednesday always for the Doc signals a period of mourning. Several of his colleagues in cavorting retreat from the corridors of alcohol for Lent, which truly is, er, Lamentable. O my people, what have I done unto thee....  

Vanity, Thy Name Is Burt

      Gentlemen: don't buy the metrosexual pap, just let yourself age as you're going to age. Case in point? This onetime star who now looks like Hitler in a car seat. This blog didn't think it was possible to make Dom DeLuise look like a poster-boy for facial normalcy, but there you go. Somewhere, the ghost of Jack Elam is peeing his ectoplasmic pants.

Rugby Scalpel

      Say what you will about the dangers of alcohol or the zealotry of sports fans, but you've got to respect -- however grudgingly -- a man who doesn't welch on a bet.

"A Mischievous Streak Is Present In Some"

      Well, apparently today initiates the Year of The Rooster, which I suspect will be about as propitious for this Ox as any other year.   **shrug**   (Just my motherclucking luck.)   I looooooove that I am supposedly "profoundly convinced of the merits of marriage." Oh, really....      

      Check out, for the record, these predictions from two different books for my so-called fate this year:

• "If life has been the doldrums over the last few years, take heart. The Rooster Year offers you chances to turn over a new leaf. This may involve a new relationship, a change of job or a major move, and the only proviso is: read the small print carefully. Year Trend: Upwardly Mobile."
  
  
• "It may seem unfair, but for no apparent reason, many of your friends could turn against you. Consequently you are likely to find the Year of the Rooster very difficult, and your career is also likely to suffer as a result."

I'm so glad there's a unanimity of opinion.  

      Note one of the great ironies in all this astrological bafflegab: D.H. Lawrence was a "rooster." Well, if that's what you want to call him. I'm sure he'd have preferred another word.

A Nineteen Year-Old With A Twenty-Eight Year-Old Arse

      Let's just say that this blog would have been deliriously happy to have attended those interview sessions.  

      In a rare display of discretion, the Not-So-Good Doctor will make absolutely no reference whatsoever to a certain movie, the title of which would proffer an unending and unseemly capacity for cheap, cheap punning. Who says the Doc has no restraint?  

      UPDATE: A courteous reader has provided an image appropriate to this, er, topic. Just click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of it.

Okay, What The Hell Do I Do With These?

      It seems the Not-So-Good Doctor now has 50 Gmail accounts to give away, though in fact there may only be seven people left in the world who do NOT have accounts. So, if anyone wants one, let me know.

Airport Insecurity

      And you ladies wonder why we're so protective of That Area.... Key, er, fragment: "Now vandals have bashed away at the penis...." That's right.   Bashed.    

And Though He Was Nobody's Poet, He Thought He Wasn't Half Bad...

      But, this blog has to wonder, did he ask if she liked Piña Coladas? (But evidently neither had half a brain.)  

      Life continues to imitate, er, "art," but-- naturally-- with far less romantic results. It's a Wilde, Wilde world....

      And in case you haven't guessed, this week is Love-Bashing Week at Doctor J's.

      ADDENDUM: It seems great minds think alike: Dave Barry's research department evidently thought the same thing about this piece.  

Where The Doc's Sympathies HAVE To Be

He still hasn't seen it yet, and but he has no choice: he absolutely HAS to root for this come Big Award Time.       This blog thinks The Real Thing will kick some butt at the Ever-So-Useless Grammys, but the movie, well, who knows, especially given that it's directed by that half-talent Taylor Hackford. But one can hope. One almost has to.       This blog's almost entirely sure it's a high-gloss biopic, but this blog is and always has been shamelessly Pro-Ray, so there. At least this blog is more honest than FOX News.       Sooner or later....       Now go out and shake your tail-feathers.

And Oddly Enough, Not Even A Word About Al Capone

      In love?

      Too much damned money on your hands?

      Want to give yourself memories you'll eventually regret later to the point that you'll wish you could just scour your brain with bleach, an abrasive cleanser and steel wool, but, dammit, there'll be photographs and credit-card payments to remind you regularly and acerbically of your naiveté and utter stupidity?

      Then has this blog got the stuff for you.

      Now, boys and goyls, go out and get your respective Lerrrve Thangs On.   This blog is SURE it'll be worth it.  

      By the way, when you go, don't forget the tacky souvenirs: no romantic excursion will be quite right unless you bring back silly momentoes that will inevitably seem to snigger at you for your foolishness like schoolgirls do at the local nerd whose pen has just exploded in his pocket.  

      As for the Doc, he'll be spending next Monday doing what he does every February 14th since he ceased to be an idiot: getting tits-to-the-gills, three-sheets-to-the-acrid-wind, Walter-Huston-on-a-bender DRUNK. And trying very, very hard not to give himself a migraine from rolling his eyes at all the sickeningly-earnest young lovers and tortured couples that think the day means anything.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah-- you're right. I shouldn't be so cynical. I'm sure it's a wonderful, blissful day--- for chocolatiers, florists and greeting-card conglomerates. They need their days, too. After all, how could we expect them to survive on Christmas and Easter alone? So, please, please, don't be cynical. Think of the little florists, walking the streets like desperate Ophelias begging for change.

      So, put a little love in your heart, even if it's like inhaling from a strychnine-laced cigarette, and please gift generously. Your local confectioners need you, and you won't get laid if you don't.

The last part of this message has been paid for by the Hallmark Corporation, where our verses may be empty and trite, but at least they're convenient. And they're for you. After all, you can't spell "Hallmark" without a "mark," and nothing says love like a culturally-coerced gesture of appeasement on corrugated cardboard.

Hallmark: Saving Your Sorry Ass With Disingenuous Tokens Of Affection For As Long As You Can Remember. We Care So You Don't Have To.

And have a very, very happy Valentine's Day.   Because you're special and you deserve it.

For those few of you interested, there actually is (at long last) an update on the Other Site. This blog recommends it only for those insane enough to care about the Doc and his cats and his ritualistic Changing Of The Face (such as it is). For the rest of you, I recommend sticking to the silliness of the main site.

      ADDENDUM: Wisdom from a scient reader:

Love is like a Nirvana song. You only think it means something when you're caught up in it. Afterwards you learn it's crap and you spend the rest of your life trying to understand what you ever saw in it.

(Or heard in it, the Doc dares to interpose.) Can't say I agree, but I can't say I disagree, either. (Smells Like Spleen Spirit?)

Some Bits From Ananova

      Just a few short takes on some rampant silliness in the world, all courtesy the less-than-reliable Ananova:

• Now if I were staging this, I'd be thinking Othello....  
  
• Looking to redefine the term "shameless"? Well, here you go.  
  
• Yes, I know, I know: "Leave it alone, Dr J, don't even go there...."  
  
• Symbolism or prophecy? You decide.   (Texas:    No wonder they're so fond of Dubya.)
  
• Just imagine the possibilities.... Itchy and Scratchy should be able to get a few good shots off, I think. Or perhaps he and Apu could exchange target-practice stories.
  
• "It'll get a rise out of ya!"   This blog shudders to think what this might taste like.  

And then there's this story, which is either genius or madness or some combination thereto. Okay, altogether: ~~sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-....   Oh never mind....