The Weight

      Yet another argument why the Not-So-Good Doc is just destined to be miserable.... Argh!   Mother Nature is, as Mr Brooks observes, a saucy wench, indeed.   Mmmm, saucy.....

      Okay, all together now: ~~ Take a load off Annie, take a load for free.... ~~

Chutes and Ladders

Oh dear, this blog really, really, really shouldn't say a thing about any of this.   It really shouldn't.   Because there is absolutely no way in which I agree with even a jot of it.   Not even in the itsiest, bitsiest, teensiest, tiniest way.   There is abso-smurf-ly no truth to any of it.    None whatsoever.         ....       ....       Hey, stop looking at me like that!       ....       Ergh, argh, grumble, Mcgrumble....    As Lisa Simpson would say, "I'll be in my room."       UPDATE:   More discussion of the L-word.... Seems we have a theme today....

With Cherries On Top

      Contrary to popular speculation, the Not-So-Good Doctor is NOT the Canadian mentioned in this article.  

      And in related news: Duh.   Hmmm, now where is my copy of Blood On The Tracks?  

Our Craft And Sullen Art

      Gee, I wonder if any of my former students have read this....  

      Key quote: "This poem is about a lot more than a cranky teacher."    Well, thank goodness for that....

And This Little Coochie Had Hot Roast Beef

      Oh.   My.   Effing.   Gawd.    

      Pardon the Not-So-Good Doctor while he retreats into a semi-permanent state of catatonia.  

      Any bets on the titles to come of this unseemly marriage of word and skank?   I have it on good authority that Little Red Ridin' Tha 'Hood is already in pre-production.

You Put The Slime In The Coconut....

      From the "WTmotherF" file: this article that just completely beggars the imagination.   **shudder**

      Now where, oh where, is Max von Sydow when you need him?

Angels and Insects

      In a word: priceless.      

The Stories of O

      There's nothing quite like a bunch of scholars coming together.   This blog's favourite quote: "I guess you could say that I'm just a fan of the vagina in general."   I hear ya, sister, I hear ya.  

      Other key quote: "My parents said masturbation is fine, it's just something you do in private, like not in the sandbox...."   Good advice, good advice.... Notice, too, the name of the CAS freshman (?) quoted near the end of the article. This blog can't help but wonder if she qualifies either as a man or as "fresh."  

And Mills To Go Before We Sleep

      Saturday, we lost the last of a great generation of English actors, when Sir John Mills died at age 97 (see also here). Mills was never the "actor's actor" in the sense that others of his generation-- Olivier, Guinness, Gielgud, Ralph Richardson or even Michael Redgrave-- were. But he was the living definition of the word "stalwart," and he so often seemed not to be acting that one tended to overlook his craft.   Sadly, these days he's known more for fathering his daughters (Hayley and Juliet) than for his own career, which included an Oscar for his portrayal of the local simpleton in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.

      But Mills was so much better an actor than that.   He was the Herbert Pocket in Lean's 1946 adaptation of Dickens' Great Expectations, and his performance as the martinet Barrow in Tunes of Glory (pictured above with Alec Guinness, as his counterpart Jock Sinclair) is a marvel of subtlety. And let us not forget his work in such films as The Rocking-Horse Winner, Hobson's Choice and In Which We Serve. More recently, he was the coke-snorting elder in Stephen Fry's adaptation of Waugh's Vile Bodies called Bright Young Things, and he had the small part of Old Norway in Branagh's Hamlet. He also has the distinction of having appeared in Howard Hughes' favourite film, Ice Cold In Alex.

      Mills was, for all intents and purposes, the anti-Trevor Howard, though Howard was significantly his junior (and Mr. Howard, unfortunately, died the better part of twenty years ago). Where Howard could be a bundle of masculine passions, Mills was restraint. (The two appeared in six films together, including Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and the forementioned Ryan's Daughter.)   He played men, though, and not grown boys. His sinews, it seemed, were always made of steel-- or at least bronze. What he lacked in versatilty (see Guinness) or passion (see Olivier) or classical-training (see Gielgud), he made up for with a sense of understatement to make any of his counterparts jealous.   He, quite literally, was the figure of English stiff-upper-lippedness, as if he himself were the modern model of sharpened stoicism, though, of course, varnished with touches of cavalier grace and good humour.

      Almost five years ago, when Sir Alec Guinness died, newspapers round the world heralded the end of a generation.   It wasn't entirely true. Now, sadly, it is true. Sir John was the last of that remarkable generation, and surely the one least commonly thought of as being part of it. They are all gone now, and we're darker for it, a thought that hangs in my mind now with a funeral to attend tomorrow. G'night, Sir John. And thanks.

      Now go rent Tunes of Glory. And Great Expectations and In Which We Serve, if you can.

Faking It, As You Will

Gee, who'd have guessed this?

Desperate House Knives

      Let me now translate for my Canadian readers the text of Prime Minister Martin's address to the nation tonight: "Please, pretty please, pretty please with sugar on top, don't let the Opposition kick my sorry ass to the curb.   Please?   I promise I'll be good, I really, really will!"   My gut says this speech tonight will be the PM's death knell.   For a government that isn't facing a national unity issue, this has to be the most desperate gesture of any government in recent memory-- and that stench of desperation will, I think, make Canadians decide to send the PM to the showers.   Whatever one thinks of Mr. Martin as a man, this seems to me a political error of gargantuan proportions, because only the most ardently Liberal will view this as anything but a last ditch effort at self-preservation.   And with this speech, I think the PM will inadvertently anoint Stephen Harper as his successor, after cutting out his guts to spite his spleen.   Remarkable, this political sepukku, isn't it?

Horrible News

      I didn't want to post this on the larger site, but in case there's anyone I've forgotten from the old Open End crowd in private emails, there's sad news afoot, very sad news, indeed.       

The Debt To Pleasure

      Not too long ago I was asked-- again, for the umpteenth time over the years-- whether or not a student, this particular one ambitious and fairly bright, should apply to graduate school to do an M.A. in English.   In my early years as an instructor, I generally encouraged my students to apply, usually with the notation that, at the very least, the MA is a short degree and good test of one's genuine interest in a field. The MA is usually a baptism by fire, and I remember how many of my colleagues when I did my Master's degree fled from academic study with a fugitive's fear, or with the "thank God it's over" response typical to some women who, having just given birth, decide that one child is quite enough, thank you very much.   In short, I used to say roughly the equivalent of "try it, or you'll never know."   When asked, though, this question in more recent years, I've become more tentative, and certainly more awkward, in part because I'm no longer certain how much graduate school really offers anymore, at least to the student of literature.   I try not to let my own disaffection for the current state of the academy to colour my response, but it's inescapable.   I stuck to my old answer, but I felt vaguely dishonest about encouraging this student to pursue grad studies.   More to the point, I wondered-- in fact, worried slightly-- that I may have directed said student toward the gallows.

            Read on with this niggling?

      When I was younger (and stupider), I thought, as young idealists are wont to think, that grad school and life in the academy was the place to cultivate one's love of field.   Natch.   My recent thinking on the matter is that the academy is now the place where passions go to die, like elephants lumbering towards their ends.   I'm struck more and more with each year that passes how many of those people seem to lose any real interest in literature, and how many (especially those groomed by those professors in their late thirties and early forties) develop an intellectual smugness that is very often just a form of guised antipathy.   I've always chagrined these sorts of "scholars," because more often than not they tend to inculcate in others a sense of superiority over literature, by which all one's hard-learned apparatuses become more relevant than the intimate study of (heaven forfend!) literature qua literature.   Watching so many of my colleagues over the years, I've been struck by the extent to which thinkers either become so ensconced in their own senses of ironic sophistication as to end up as platitudinous vessels of the same-ole-same-ole criticism of little value except to one's c.v., or they end up pretending to be discussants of literature while talking about everything but, from hip-hop to Gallo-Germanic philosophy to political prognostication.   As more than a few of my colleagues have admitted to me in private conversations over the years, a lot of today's and tomorrow's teachers of literature really don't like literature very much, confessions I found alarming when I first used to hear them but which I now find par for the course.   And there it is, the disturbing, lamentable rub, that I've become cynical about the astonishing cynicism of so many of my colleagues and former instructors, and of so much of the academy as a whole.   I wish I knew better how to respond to this, but I don't.   It's almost become a truism that advanced study has become a process of stultification: far from teaching the disinterested study of a subject, it very often, at least in recent years, inculcates uninterested study-- or, just as bad, over-interested study that is really just ideological zealotry given a subtler face.   (The uninterested and the over-interested very often bleed into one another, folded into a single party and accepting a constitution of babble.)   Through it all, I guess I've become something of a despairing Quixote, the (Not-So-Good) Doctor of the Sorrowful Countenance.

      I've been thinking about all this a fair bit lately, partly occasioned by that student's question, and partly occasioned by a kind but certainly untrue compliment from friend at the university who said that I was "the most truly academic person he's ever met."   (This friend has been around said university for the better part of thirty years, so it's not exactly a light statement on his part.)   The irony here, of course, is that in an older context, I'd surely be considered "very" (not "most" by any stretch of the imagination) academic, but by current standards I'm surely considered one of the least academic.   It's a strange paradox, one by which I'm more unsettled than I perhaps should be.   I think I understand what he meant-- that I love what I do and what I study in a way that is different than the norm-- but it's that word "academic" that bothers me.   I can't help but feel that word has been worsened over the years, or redefined in ways that make it seem so pedantically-determined as to exclude some of its once-crucial dimensions.   Advanced study, for this dog at least, has lost most of its last vestiges of nobility and sincerity, only to replaced with ever more components of calculation and cynical contrivance. Soemtimes I'm inclined to wonder if graduate study isn't just for those precious few that aren't quick enough to learn the first time, in their undergradling stages, how to become good little paradigmatic thinkers.   And, for God's sake, don't love what you study. Or, at least, don't love those hairy, hoary, silly, unkempt, goofy humanistic dimensions of what you study that were drummed out when they finally got Matthew Arnold out of print.  

      Gar! There it is again, my own cynicism about the cynicism of others, which I guess is rather a lot like having a superiority complex about those with superiority complexes, and must surely be a hypocrisy of some sort.   No wonder it gets so difficult to seperate the paradoxes from the oxymora.   Damn and blast, damn and blast, damn and fucking blast.

      I guess what bothers me most-- however cynical or romantic this may be-- is the extent to which I fear young people will have their love of what (and how) they study neatly checked by our pretensions toward "awareness" and "knowing." By no means a religious man, I do still believe (ugh, there's that word, "believe") a little deference and an appropriate sense of one's capacity for mystification can keep one honest.   (And, oh yes, humble, a quality I unfortunately seldom see in academic circles anymore.)   Good teachers teach, as if by measure of their adequacy; great teachers demonstrate why they do what they do, and they impart at least a sense of their purpose, a sense of the voice in one's vocation.   Or, as E.M Forster might have said, they evince the passion beneath the prose.   Or, if not the passion, then at least the pleasure, even if, like the oaken taste of good Scotch, it's not one's own idea of pleasure.

      Right now, though, I'm uneasy with what I said to that student, wondering if I have given bad advice and sent that care and that ambition to be hanged-- or, worse, subjected to dehydration, that space upon which those gallows stand being arid and so very often isolated.   But I find myself increasingly frustrated by the sense that the academy tends not to think it owes a debt to pleasure, to the joy that might sustain our brighter and more ambitious minds through their darker nights of the withered, overworked soul.   We all need our checks and balances of faith, lest we walk away, cynical and abjuring, or lest we persist as poseurs of hackneyed and milquetoast (or would that be melba-toast?) thought.   I guess, at the end of things, I hope my awkward advice hasn't sent a student, with that undergradling energy increasingly rare these days, toward a place more mirage than oasis.

Every Leper's Nightmare

      This blog finds it fantastically comforting that the New York Times is always right on top of Issues That Really Matter (requires free registration to view entire article).   The NYT: Forever setting the American standard for journalism.  

      BTW, this blog's favourite bit: the use of the phrase "as if under ghostly control" in the second paragraph.   See, they go with us....   (And yes, it has officially reached the point where I see Tom Eliot hiding under my bed at night.   And he's always pointing to one end.)

Sharpening The Flashing Iron

      In a word: Neat.   In two: Profoundly cool.   Even though, I hasten to add, undergraduates everywhere are crying into their beers and muttering, "Great, another five million words to read!"

      For those interested, check out the material available at Oxford's papyrology site.   The images alone are worth the visit, particularly to appreciate the extent of the difficulty of working with these fragments shored against our ruins.

      (with thanks to Dave for the Independent link)

Ratz In The Belfry

      Not being Catholic -- or religious, or even particularly well-versed in Roman Catholic traditions and politics-- I really don't have too much to say about the election of Cardinal Ratzinger of Munich to the papal seat as Benedict XVI, but for those interested, I'd direct you to a brief (and reflective) note on the man who would be pontiff at RK's site that's a nice tonic to the procession of talking heads on the networks.   Worth a read, mainly for the last sentence which I find both mindful and faintly poetic.   And, as RK rightly enjoins us, to respond in comfy buzzword-labels to a man of Ratzinger's obvious nuance is to err on the side of reductiveness, which, of course, most of the mainstream media prefers to do with stupefying audacity.

      And this blog won't make even a single reference to now knowing for whom the bells tolled....

It's A Hard Knock Life

      As Falstaff would say, "'Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation."   Which suggests to me that I'm all-but-definitely in the wrong bloody vocation.  

      (For any of my students reading this, my apologies but, well, in a word, C'mon.....   )

Little Kidding (And A Bit Of Jennuflecktion)

      As they say in legal circles, "exception noted."  

      Call me conservative, but how flip-flops and loose-fitting pants help anyone to write is beyond my ken, unless, of course you're Jimmy Buffett.

      ADDENDUM:   And in other news from the world of pedagogy....      I'll now wait, with the excitement of a young bride, for my employer to tender a contract for me to teach a graduate seminar in advanced calculus.

Hoping For A Refreshing Hitler Documentary

      Ah, welcome to the information age....

      Also from the satire bin, this offering on what's on the American Presimuhdent's iPod.   They obviously forgot Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me."   ***shudder***

Coq Au Vin (er, Bière)

      I have no idea why I'm posting these silly Blogthings, but they tend to amuse some of you.   But this one makes absolutely no smurfing sense at all:

What Is Your Seduction Style?

Your Seduction Style: The Coquette

You are a pro at playing the age old game of hard to get. Your flirting style runs hot and cold, giving just enough to keep them chasing you. Independent and self-sufficient, you don't need any one person to make you complete. And that independence is exactly what makes people pursue you.

I was not aware a male could be a coquette.   (Sacré bleu!)   Besides, I think everyone knows I have no "seduction style."   We all know the Not-So-Good Doctor has no style whatsoever.  

"The Most Serious Crisis To Face The Liberals Since Last Thursday"

      Canadian?   Sick to death of the endless chatter about whether or not we're heading for another election?   Then Paul Wells has the nuts and bolts for you on what we've been abiding the last little while.   Worse, much worse: there's only more to come.   Grumble, grumble, grumble.

      My bet?   Stephen Harper will pull the trigger shortly.   I think he knows he's never going to have a better chance at forming a government unless they manage videotape Paul Martin having non-consensual sex with a goat in the Assemblée Nationale.   The only question is whether or not my fellow Canajuns decide to give Harper the David Peterson treatment.   Well, er, okay-- Ontarians.   I think we all know the rest of Canuckistan will vote.

      Gee, does anyone remember the days, a mere two years ago, when people thought the sun shone out Paul Martin's arse?   And, no-- this blog never, ever, ever predicted that PM PM would be a disaster for his party.      Somewhere, John Turner is lurking behind an arras with Mr. Martin's membership card to the "Select Few That Could Destroy The Liberals In Canada" club.

Beyond Is Anything

      This sort of thing always amuses me, but it's still not as clever as the Ern Malley affair lo those many years ago.   Go here if you want to try and make your own contribution to the current state of scientific scholarship.

Captain Obvious Strikes Again, Vol. 7,986,542

      Me wonders how many time I halve tolled my students this over the year.   And yet, beleive I they dew not.... (Si.)

There's Something About Harry

I know, I know, I know: Leave it alone, Doctor J, just leave it alone....         I promise, not even a single joke about their chambers of secret(ion)s.         It is nice to know, though, that the kids these days are at least learning the value of sharing.         ~~I'm goin' to Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell....~~

The Marred Q de Sade

      Last evening, in a fit of "oh-what-the-hell" impulsiveness, I treated myself to a trio of DVDs, a rare thing considering (a) I haven't bought a DVD for myself since I got the player, and (b) I can't even remember the last time I treated myself to a video of any sort.   So, I wound up snagging the original The Manchurian Candidate (one of my favourite films of all time, John Frankenheimer at his paranoiac best), Ray (all those various plans to see it gang aft agley), and, as you've probably surmised from the image atop, Kill Bill Volume 2.   Saving Ray for a rainy day, and having seen Manchurian as many times as some people change their hairstyles, I settled into the Tarantino last night and prepared for the awkwardness with which I have come to expect as my natural reaction to the ever-vaunted Quentin.   Having watched it twice now, I find myself questioning my critical position, for once again it seems I'm in an extreme minority, like a Puritan at a rave, in being one of the very few people unimpressed by the film, and as probably the only person who thinks the first film better than the second.   Kill Bill 2, plainly and simply put, caused in me the same reactions that Pulp Fiction, to my mind the most extravagantly overrated film of the nineties, did, by which I mean, among other things, frustration, snarkiness, and boredom.   To say that I rolled my eyes a lot is like saying Aretha Franklin can hit a few high notes: it would be an understatement of Wildean facetiousness.   I thought the movie nothing more than empty, stylish crap, pretentious and self-indulgent, to say nothing of tedious-- and because of that reaction, cast against what so many others have said about it, I'm wondering if there's something I'm just missing, or if the rest of the world has just been duped by Tarantino into believing that his shit doesn't stink.   Writing this now, I can't say I have any answers, but I should probably try to work towards some. You can read the effort here, though with the warning that there are spoilers and countless examples of exasperated invective to follow.   Consider yourselves warned.

      I should probably stick in a few clarifications here.   I'm not preternaturally disposed against Tarantino: I thought Reservoir Dogs one of the best movies of the 90s, a tight, quirky, ingenious little film as energizing as any film I can think of in the past twenty years.   I should also say that I'm impressed, generally, by his ambition and his audacity.   He has a great eye sometimes, and you have to respect his allusiveness and his generic virtuosity.   But let me describe my reaction to Pulp Fiction when I first saw it, years ago in a local repertory theatre in a double bill with Reservoir Dogs.   After loving, just loving, Dogs, I was ready for the new flick, but as it progressed I found myself getting so frustrated and so angry with the film that I wanted to throw my drink at the screen.   I'd never had that reaction to a movie before, and I haven't since.   I felt like my time was being robbed by a guy who knew full-well that he wasting my time, and who was making me sit through two hours and change of his cinematic onanism, not least of which was the idiotic two-or-so minute shot of Bruce Willis' arse as he walked away from the camera.   I didn't need this self-important, heavy-handed, narratologically-challenged crap.   I'd still contend that you could edit about an hour of that film and no one would miss it.   It was like watching one of those dreadful student "art" films that's all intention and no accomplishment: when I wasn't infuriated by it, I was so bored by it that I was (literally) rolling my wrists as if I, in that movie theatre, could make Quentin hurry the fuck up.   No such luck, of course.   But even now, having had to sit through the film several times in several contexts, my reaction remains the same.   I think I'd rather watch Surf Nazis Must Die! again than be forced to endure another sitting of Pulp Fiction.

      Mercifully, my reaction to KB2 wasn't quite as strong or as intense, but all the same elements were there: the trite dialogue that thinks it's brilliant, the annoying super-stylization that's really just a testament to Quentin's encyclopedic conceit, the long (long, long), drawn-out sections that could have been trimmed by half or two-thirds with absolutely no loss to the film.   I've come to believe that, in his films since Pulp Fiction (with Jackie Brown a bit of an exception here, but not entirely), Tarantino is at his worst when his films are at their talkiest, as in that horrible scene in which David Carradine relates the legend of Pai Mei, occasionally stopping to insert toots on his overly-used flute.   The rhythm goes off, the narrative seems to stall like a standard in a snowstorm, and I, sitting there watching the film, just want to grab that flute out of Carradine's hands and shove it right down his throat.   There are so many scenes like that in KB2 that I think my shoulders slumped enough times in defeat to have permanently dislocated my clavicle down around my ankles.   "Oh Gawd, not again" was probably my most repeated response through the first viewing. That, and Apu's sometime reaction on The Simpsons: "Shut up! Shut up! Why do you not shut up?"   Grrrr.   Arrgh.

      So, yes, I found KB2 tiresome (and booooring) to no end, to say nothing of being as predictable as an episode of Three's Company.   (With, I should add, one exception: the Bride's final discovery of Bill, which was both clever and effective.)   But it's frustrating when one knows what's coming, and one knows all too well that style is going to be far more important than story or characterization.   The Bride ends up buried alive? Oh, gee, how will she get out of that situation? Let me guess, we're going to have a backstory now to explain how she's going to get out, a flashback that adds precious little to the narrative as a whole. Wonderful.   Gee, we've been through a movie and a half in which the primary female characters are named after snakes? Gee, I wonder (I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of.... oh, never mind) when one of them will use a snake, of course in the heavy-handed Freudian would-be irony of a woman using a snake to kill a man. Ingenious!   We have a character with one eye.   I wonder what will happen to her.   How inspired!   Gee, Bill mentions a secret technique of killing that even he does not know, so how, how I ask you, do you think he is going to die?   Give me a bloody break.   The movie telegraphs all of its punches so far in advance that I wish my paycheque would come as early. And along the way, we're going to have hear a number of over-wrought, over-written, ham-fisted speeches, including a trite exegesis of the Superman mythology that seems like Tarantino imitating his own Madonna speech in Reservoir Dogs, but with the plodding, "duh-I-never-would-have-thought-of-that-Gomer" (yuk yuk) manner of M. Night Shyamalan.   I won't even get started on the film's would-be-noirish prologue that's as overripe as nine year-old bananas, and in which Uma Thurman overacts so badly that she made me think she'd put Bette Davis to shame-- if Bette Davis were high on cocaine and doing her worst snarling Barbara Stanwyck impersonation.   And let's not forget David Carradine, whose voice has become a bizarre but fascinating instrument, who seems to have learned from his Grasshopper-tenure at the William Shatner School of Pregnant Pauses.   (Michael Madsen has obviously been studying there at the sophomore level.)   Tarantino's film is so hammy, even his credits-- his bloody credits!-- are annoying, especially with the grade-three level of sophistication of the Q&U bit and the crossing out of the names of the leads killed off in the movies (with, God help me, that faux-coy sequel-suggesting question mark over Darryl Hannah's name that makes me fear for my sanity). This is the sort of inanity that makes me want to start drinking-- heavily, and straight from the bottle.

      The thing is, as much as I was awkward with some of Kill Bill Volume 1, at least it had vivacity to it, something I think sadly lacking from the sequel.   For the gaps in the first film's logic and story and characterizations, there was at least a macabre exuberance to it, especially in those magnificently choreographed fight scenes, evident in this film really only in the (unfortunately short) fights scenes with Elle Driver and Pai Mei.   Honestly, after a while, I reached the point where I was saying to myself, "Oh, please, don't let them start talking again," which, of course, they would, and I'd feel the story grind to a screeching halt.   Thank goodness I purchased the DVD, so I can find the more interesting scenes with ease.   Had I bought the damned movie on video, it'd probably never get watched again, and even still it might not.  

      But this returns me to my original dilemma: why are others so enamoured, even thrilled, by this movie?   I get certain reasons-- Tarantino's allusiveness and cheekiness, the would-be avant-garde-ry of the cinematography and the editing, the plain-old-fashioned violence.   Beyond those reasons, though, I just don't see what others see in this turgid flick (and it seems to me a "flick" more than it is a "film").    I'm increasingly of an opinion of despair about Tarantino, very much to my mind the Mariah Carey of contemporary film, once a figure of great potential but now given to ego-driven hack work that makes me think redemption is no longer probable or possible.  

      Perhaps I've become too aesthetically conservative in my old age, though I'd like to believe that's not the case.   Perhaps I'm just no longer impressed by the machinations of the so-called "cutting edge."   Or, perhaps, I'm just getting old, and I want movies to have both heart and intelligence, rather than just cheeky cleverness.   Tarantino is to me a kind of earnest smart-aleck, oxymoronic as that may see. I've become weary of his pretentiousness and his smirking, ironic self-awareness that is neither as ironic or as self-aware as it thinks it is.   It doesn't help, either, that I think he's basically become a one-trick pony, and now that I've seen his trick I'm no longer interested.  

      Or maybe I'm just out of step, which would not be a new thing.   I don't mind being the dissenting voice-- I have been so on such widely-praised junk as Friends, Sex and the City, and Seinfeld-- even if it means me seeming naive, traditional, curmudgeonly, or even clueless.   But for all the reviews that I've read of Kill Bill 2, as with Pulp Fiction, I haven't found a blasted one that inclines me even slightly to think I might just be wrong about the movies, that I might just be too set in my critical ways, which I do allow is certainly a possibility.   All these years later, I still think Pulp Fiction is a steaming pile of elephant turd, and I suspect my thinking on KB2 won't be any fundamentally different ten or twenty years from now.

      I just don't know anymore.   It bothers me that so many people are so enthralled by Tarantino's technique that perhaps they're completely privileging style over substance, loathe as I am to make such a distinction.   It bothers me almost as much that perhaps I'm missing out on one of the great directors of our time in his prime because I just can't see what other people see.   Call them aesethetic differences, if we must.   It's a shame, though.   I want so much to like Tarantino more than I do, because I genuinely appreciate what he's tried to do.   He has, however, become that most dreaded of things: painfully, painfully boring.    "Do you think I'm sadistic?" Bill asks at the beginning of both movies, and both times I heard Tarantino's voice lurking in the background.   To which I'm now regrettably forced to answer, yes, Quentin, yes, I do.   And give my best to Mariah Carey.

Like Moonlight Through The Pines

      Found this silly blogthing via Davyth over at Incendium Amoris, to which, well, read for yourself and try to contain, as much as possible anyway, your hysterical fits of laughter:

What is Your Celtic Horoscope?

You Are A Pine Tree

You love agreeable company, peace, and harmony. Compassionate and friendly, you love to help others. A natural poet, you have a very active imagination. You are very soft on the inside - needing affection and reassurance. You can fall in love deeply, but you will leave if you feel betrayed.

Very active imagination.... Very soft on the inside.... You can fall in love....        

      Oh, great-- now my sides hurt.... And here I thought I was still in contention to replace Walter Matthau in the Grumpy Old Men franchise....

      BTW, Clive Anderson points to the first one of you that can name the origin of the title of this entry.

      FOLLOWUP: Yet another one of those Blogthings to make you howl with laughter, or at least at the Not-So-Good Doctor's result:

What Age Do You Act?

You Are 25 Years Old

25 Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

Excited.....   Oh, I'm so excited, and I just can't fight it....   
  

The Harrowing Of Mel

      This blog isn't touchin' this one with a six-foot Pole....   Not.   At.  All.       

      And, in other news about things not to be touched with poles.... Excuse me while I pause a moment and weep portentously by the waters of the soon-to-be-fallen Babylon.

      UPDATE:   I'm detecting a theme today.... How-- how, I have to ask-- how incompetent (or would that be incompotent?) do you have to be?!?   **shudder**   Now, in my day....

The Digger And The Lantern: An Extended Birthday Tribute To Seamus Heaney

        A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
          For and a shrouding sheet;
        O, a pit of clay, for to be made
          For such a guest is meet.
      --- First Clown (or "the First Gravedigger") in Hamlet (5.1.94-97)

      Today In Literature reminds me that today is Seamus Heaney's 66th birthday, he the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and essayist who is, by just about all serious accounts, one of the very, very few Truly Important poets writing in this day and age that is not very conducive to the creation of Great Poets. (Or, to clarify: at least in this age in which a single figure does not tower over the poetic scene in the same ways that Tom Eliot or W.B. Yeats did.)   For those unfamiliar with Heaney, I'd recommend simply getting hold of his Opened Ground, a selected poems edition covering the thirty years between 1966 and 1996, probably the easiest way to witness the scope, intelligence, and lucidity of Heaney's work. (It's worth noting for the uninitiated that Heaney's poetry depends a great deal on various matters of Irish history, matters perhaps not known to most outside of Ireland. This site provides some useful contexts and informations, though I find the the choice of background image rather distracting.)   There's a small sampling of Heaney's poems here for those meeting him for the first time.

      From my own perspective, I find Heaney immensely rewarding-- and very often like a splash of cold, cold water on the face on an already wintry day-- but he's also one of those poets of whom I can honestly say I have no inclinations to imitate him at all.   His voice is rare: unique, steeled, particular sometimes to the point of indiosyncrasy, though seldom to the point of self-indulgence.   He's a poet of the earth in a very different way than Wallace Stevens demanded, Heaney not so much the poet of "significant soil" (to borrow from Mr. Eliot) but of harder stuff, of dirt and clay and rock. He is perhaps our most genuinely archaeological poet, an observation regularly trotted out by those referring to his famous poem "Digging," the first poem of his 1966 volume Death of a Naturalist:

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

And it's a fine poem, in many ways a pithy synopsis of Heaney's career entire.   But there's an aloofness to lines like these that remind me why I've no desire to imitate him, in part (perhaps) because to imitate that aloofness would only result in desperately amateurish parody.   Or, more to the point, I suspect I have no spade to follow a man like him.

      Earlier I suggested looking into Opened Ground, but I'd also encourage those of you that take any sort of liking to affinity to read him volume by volume, his individual books determining their own ethical and thematic circlings. The most famous of these volumes is, of course, Station Island, which brings us as close to Irish version of the Dantescan voice as we're ever going to get.   It also features the famous final poem, about the meeting with James Joyce ("[h]is voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers"), a carefully renationalized version of Eliot's terza rima imitation in Little Gidding.   In fact, I'd suggest that perhaps our two best living poets-- Heaney and the American Mark Strand-- should be read in tandem with one another, both imitating Dantescan voices and responding to Eliot in Station Island and Dark Harbor, respectively, though in Strand the presence nearing from the distance isn't Joyce (or Yeats, as in Eliot) but Wallace Stevens, surely one of the angels "fluttering its wings."   It occurs to me that in writing this paragraph I've probably found enough material for a graduate seminar on imitations and intimations of Dante in twentieth-century poetry, a course no one in North America would ever take because it would require reading the Commedia.   (Sigh....)   But check out some of the discussion offered by Heaney himself in this lecture largely about Station Island here; alas, I can't find an online edition of the poem entire for your perusal.

      Neglected, though, is Heaney's 1987 volume The Haw Lantern, a work worth discovering again and again, and perhaps less likely to leave his jejeune readers confused or thinking they're missing essential knowledge.   The poems are primarily about loss and regret, and the volume includes the genuinely moving "Clearances," a memorial poem too long to reproduce here. Instead, or until you can get to a library or a book store, take a look at "The Wishing Tree," one of those few poems of Heaney's, so simple in its structure, that I wish I had written myself:

The Wishing Tree

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,
Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale
Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail
Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved.   I had a vision
Of an airy branch-head rising through the damp cloud,
Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.

Typing out this poem, I'm struck by what I suspect is the same feeling my friend RK has towards Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, the reluctance to pull too much at the poem's sinews for straining it or subjecting it to unnecessary molestation.   It speaks in a clarity of imagery better left as is than parsed through or yanked at, however appreciatively, like taffy.   I'd only like to point out the brilliance of the opening line, which begins so traditionally in its pastoral romanticism before dashing it with the iamb "that died," two syllables that almost entirely on their own save the poem from cliché. Reminder to poets (and me): Sometimes it takes so little.

      There are two other short lyrics from The Haw Lantern to which I'd like to call your attention, one of which is the taut and shrewd title poem:

The eerie sense of suspicion, maintained because it simply moves on without declaring acquittal, reminds me all too well of the power of the obscured gaze under which one is more disquiet than unnerved.   We've been seen as if through a different kind of glass, but still and even more surely darkly.   One of Heaney's great gifts is his sense of verbal economy, he purchasing incredibly crystalline sensations with so very few words, though never with what might be described as the miserly austerity of some poets.   Heaney's poetry always seems to take into account that there are lay readers out there seeking to be addressed without the befuddling, oracular tendencies common to so many writing about themes similar to his.   It's little wonder why Heaney remains remarkably popular outside of the academy; he speaks with, one might say, a touch of Frost, but with a more secretive, or at least more mysterious, ministry.

      The last poem to which I'd turn your eyes is "In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald," the famous translator of so many Greek classics, including The Iliad and The Odyssey (the former used by my students this year, some of whom may be reading this entry with their eyes rolling like Irish hills).   Fitzgerald died in 1985, a year-and-a-half before The Haw Lantern.

Perhaps Heaney's last line should be applied to himself, so much of Heaney's poetry "perfectly aimed towards the vacant center," so much dragged from the harder and dustier places of the earth and reaching "out of all knowing." Joyce's Stephen Dedalus famously described history as the nightmare from which we are constantly trying to awake, but Heaney's history is very different, and perhaps more haunting for it.   Like layers of clay and earth, it (history) builds upon itself, waiting to be unearthed -- or reearthed, speaking to us from a center associated with place but only vaguely understood.   It speaks back, waiting for the squat pen that rests.   Or, history is the beginning and the end of us, before and after our reduction to detritus and bone, seen from beyond the pith and stone of a haw lantern, stern and scrutinizing.  

      No wonder we flinch: we're never settled, ever uneasy, handful of trembling dust, our perpetual disturbance bred in the bone.   We are the litter, both the offspring and the waste, of Adam, and so too are we the litter of adamah.   We are opened and still-opening ground. And dare we forget it, all we need to do, as Mark Strand might say, is "[j]ust go to the graveyard and ask around."   And once there, few of us have spades to follow a man like Heaney, he holding up, so much better than most, that dire profession of Adam.

      Happy birthday, Seamus.   Many happy returns.

      (And it now occurs to me that I've devoted Gawd-only-knows how long on a post upon which no one will comment. **sigh**   It's the blogger's curse: the amount of response you will get to a post will always, always, always be inversely proportional to the amount of labour and/or effort you put into it. Reminds me why I got so fond of the snarky one-liner.   **sigh, shrug**   Oh well....)

Remedying A Confusion

      In my last entry on Monday, I wrote about "aspects of the Not-So-Good Doctor's life flying about like furniture in a Leonard Cohen video."   I've since received some emails wondering to what video I was referring, which I find something of a surprise the video in question to my mind indelibly impressive-- and quite famous to boot.   I forgot, however, that said video was released a dozen years ago, and I feel now as I've done more to date myself than any carbon process could.   (Sigh.   I wish I didn't keep doing that.   No wonder I ache in the places that I used to play.)

      The video, for those curious, is for "Closing Time," from his 1993 album The Future. The song, for the record, was Leonard's biggest hit ever in Canada, and it was on the strength of that song that Cohen rather inexplicably won the Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist, to which Cohen responded that only in a country like Canada could he win an award for Best Male Vocalist.   (And, ironically, lose for songwriting that same year.)   It's a great video, but unfortunately I can't find a link to it online.   If anyone else out there knows where to find it online, the Not-So-Good Doc would be immensely appreciative.

      In the interim, the best I can do is provide you with this image, which includes not just a chair flying but a rather lovely young woman (so typical of Leonard), as well as shots of his then-backup singers, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla.   But what a terrific video, shot with surrealistic flair in gorgeous black-and-white, with probably the most photogenic shot-glasses in history.

      So, now you know.    Here's to the Johnnie Walker wisdom running high.

Royal Ruminations

      Oh, it's been a peculiar several weeks, with aspects of the Not-So-Good Doctor's life flying about like furniture in a Leonard Cohen video.   (That's probably appropriate since I've been lifting my glass quite a bit lately to the awful truth that you can't reveal to the ears of youth.)   But here I am, at long last, returning to update this blog after being awake for a day and more, thinking I really ought to though I can't honestly say I feel much like bothering.   This blog, however, has been left to gather weeds, and I should tend to it, so here I am, treating myself to the rare indulgence of drinking Crown Royal in the morning (out of the exact same glass as pictured at right) and smoking enough cigarettes to qualify me for inclusion in a John Lee Hooker song, ironically enough not "Serves You Right To Suffer." The songs of Curtis Mayfield are pumping through the speakers, unfortunately covered by a mixed bag of artists from Bruce Springsteen to Lenny Kravitz, of which the highlights are Steve Winwood's breezy "It's All Right," B.B. King's punchy "The Woman's Got Soul," and -- if only for the song and not the version-- (gulp, shudder, gasp) Rod Stewart's hackneyed, and "unplugged," version of the mercifully untarrable "People Get Ready."  

People get ready there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket, just thank the Lord.

There's something so rich and haunting about the song that even Rod's sulphurous stink doesn't attach itself permanently to it, which unfortunately one can't say of his vile versions of Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately" or Robbie Robertson's "Broken Arrow" or Tom Waits' "Downtown Train," fine songs all.   And, yes, for those of you thinking it: the Doc is very much of an older generation of music. Blessèd be for that.   Somehow I can't imagine myself savouring a Crown Royal to 50 Cent or the extreme gynotechnics of our current crop of vocally-challenged lolitas.

      But here I am, finally beginning to take stock of Things, so much of which seemed a flurry of late.   Flurry? More like a bombardment, and I fear I'm beginning to look like Dresden (but thankfully not Nagasaki). I've done most of my marking through their three passes, and I no longer have to make any silly trips to campus which always seem to last three times as long as I initally project them to take.   My private library is finally finding its form again after two months and change of disshevelment (read in: chaos), which means I've actually been able to find floor space again.   And I can honestly say that I've attended to as many of the personal obligations in the past while that I possibly could, including meeting up with some people that I had not seen in several years.   As if making up for lost time weren't enough of my task with my adopted workload, it was a huge part of my personal life of late, making the rounds in compensation for my recent absence.   See, he returns, and we come with him might be an accurate way of describing matters of late, though whether the Doc has been a chimera of life or death I refuse to hazard. Sometimes I wish Wallace Stevens had written a study of gypsies. It might help me make sense of things.   I don't suppose there are any gypsy sayings about Wallace Stevens? At this point I'd settle for Thomas Hardy.

      I've jumped now from Mayfield to Morrison, to the latter's A Night In San Francisco from 1994, a stunning live double-album of which James Brown would surely approve, not least of which for Candy Dulfer guest-leading the sax lines. Besides some nifty takes on some old classics-- Morrison's and not-- there's a striking version of "Vanlose Stairway," a song which supposedly takes its title and inspiration from a Dutch subway station, which bridges, in riveting fashion, with a declamation from Ray Charles' "Fool For You." It's one of the few examples of magisterial gospel dissolving into vicarious, reflective heartbreak, before emerging on the other side as a kind of breaking, scattershot-mystic's travelogue with "Trans-Euro Train." And it works.   It works beautifully, Crown Royal or no. It reminds me why I've always contended that Van Morrison is the closest we'll probably ever come to a combination of John Donne with Ray Charles-- with a dash of William Blake for good measure.

      It probably seems I'm writing so much about music because I'm getting drunk and just writing to the moment, but that wouldn't be entirely true. Fact is, I've had some stirrings of quasi-pseudo-would-be poetic thought in the past month, and I've been thinking a lot about sounds and rhythms, my own writing in the past too many years too prosaic by half, or (in fact) three-quarters. I've been caught for years in dealing with Morrisonian sentiment with the parsimonious niggling of Henry James, and-- alas-- my mind, not given to fineness, ends up chopping the garlic so fine it ceases to exist. It's like trying to return to one's elements long past the stage when one thinks one knows what they are: one keeps answering the questions before one truly knows the answers, like a teenager assuming an understanding of sexuality just because of a cognition of a few basic dimensions. No, no, no, what a certain way to make sure one's over before one's even begun, and rueing the fact. No: discipline, patience, control: these are the lessons those of us without genius must obey. And so too learning to listen all over again-- or listening to learn from the beginning, as if to discover the unknown, half-remembered gate, as one must eventually come to relearn Aristotle.

      But elsewhile, one comes to chagrin the things one does know. How Blakean. There's too much intolerable wrestling always having to happen, especially for those of us that are seldom entirely pinned but have a bugger of a time getting the better of things. Damn and damn and damn and blast. If only it were as easy as hearing diesels humming.