A Little Zozo Mojo

Okay, everyone, cross your fingers and get out your rosary beads (how's that for a digital challenge?): Zelda is defending her dissertation tomorrow, and we all ought to send as much karmic goodwill her way as we can muster. This blog, for one, can't wait for her to kick a little academic ass.

(Well, not quite: I suspect it'll be a love-in, which she surely deserves, but I'm not gonna tell her that. )

And if ANYONE asks anything about my onetime dissertation, I will, of course, have to un-retire Petey the Problem-Solving Machete.

It's Offensive To Everyone

Finally, something that should amuse all of my readers.

Two Verbal Prose Arrangements

Briefly, two pieces of required reading for the weekend:

• This essay on the comic novel—and its importance given the recent proclivity toward High Seriousness in lit—is very good & worth further consideration. I have always thought that if I had a novel in me—I don’t— it’d have to be a comic one: who could tolerate all the angsty navel-gazing? CanLit has quite enough of that, thank you very much.
  
  
• This discussion on writing well is very, very funny and well-worth the read. It should also go without saying that I agree with just about every word of it. (Slight follow-up: Andrew Sullivan provides a noteworthy point which I offer as an addendum in this regard.)
  

Not too much to report from these quarters, save that it’s hotter than Hell.

Of a related nature, since rediscovering that old notebook I mentioned, I found a few more things lurking rattily about like Claudius behind an arras. Alas, I wish I hadn't. It's a particular type of torture reading one's own tortuous scribblings from days gone mercifully by. There were papers on Frye, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Harold Pinter and D.H. Lawrence, the undergraduate ones of which were grotesquely naive, while the graduate ones were grotesquely dishonest from trying to mollify the soft bigotry of theoretical expectations. (They all got A's of one form or another, though Ray Charles only knows how or why.) There were various attempts at verse, all rightly aborted and lined-through like security briefings. And there were bits & pieces of thought from and for classes, all scattered and probative, more aphoristic than refined-- and almost entirely unusable by my estimation. Some writers look back on their back-pieces with embarrassment and even regret. I do so with a dustman's sense of waste: so much stuff, none of it worth keeping, and not a little bit of shame that there's nothing to be salvaged from the cartage. John Lee Hooker was right: Don't look back.... Ever.

(And yes, I ended with navel-gazing. I. Am. Soooooo. Canadian.)

For Crying Out Loud

From a friend regarding the various Poetry Out Loud readings:

You and I in class did this so FUCKING much better.

Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh.

I'd like to think so, but vanity's a bitch of a thing, isn't it?

(In fact, we probably did, though I'm less and less sure about by my readings, prolly because I cringe every time I hear my tinny voice on tape. *shiver*)

Because Symbolism's For Sissies

In case you missed it, the season finale of 24 ended-- I jest thee not-- with Jack Bauer, gun in hand, gazing despondently over a cliff. Fox Television: as ever, nothing if not subtle.

***

FOLLOWUP: On season 7 of 24: The birth of Baby Chloe. Twenty-three hours and change of Chloe in labour, trying to form a personal perimeter, while Jack bitch-slaps the variously incompetent OB-GYNs with dialogue that includes:

• "We can't wait for her to dilate! There ISN'T TIME!!!"
  
• "Put the epidural DOWN! Don't make me shoot you!!!" and
• "Dammit, we have a BREACH. Repeat: We. Have. A. Breach!!!"
  

With special guest midwife, former First Lady Floppin' Funbags Logan, who will suffer a highly dramatic breakdown and stab a candy-striper in the chest with a speculum. Not possible, you say? Just you wait!

And of course, all your favourite villains and former presidents will remain conspicuously undead, smoking cigars ominously in the hospital's underground parking lot, until the season's Big Villain is finally revealed:

Or, rather Villains. Will Jack be able to stop them? How many ill-fated morgue attendants will Nadia get involved with? Is there a mole in the over-occupied thigh-trauma ward? Will Fred Thompson survive his term as president? Will the baby have an innie or an outie?!?!?!

If you thought fathers and sons were dysfunctional--- You. Ain't. Seen. Nuthin'. Yet!!!!!

Season 7 of 24: Giving new meaning to "mobile technology." (But obviously not Virgin.)

Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum....

Upsetdate

Okay, Lord only know how many hours later, but it seems-- seems, Madam, I know not seems-- I have finally won my battle against the stubbornly evil Windows monster. Almost a dozen reinstallations later, after hours & hours & hours of consulting Microflaccid's endlessly unhelpful "support pages," and just as many trudging through various internet fora trying to fix the problem, it seems everything is finally working again. What ultimately made the difference? This neat little gizmo which, among other things, did a complete check on potentially corrupted or out-of-date files (which, naturally, worked days ago), figured out the update gobbledygook, and reset all the ridiculous permissions that Windows arbitrarily and inexplicably imposes when it gets bitchy. Takes forever for it to plod through everything, but eventually it does work--- which is faaaaaar more than I can say for any of the official tips from the Gates gang of profligate bafflegabbers. Something to remember if any of you wind up in the unfortunate position of having to reinstall pre-Vista Windblows.

I'm now exhausted. Passionate-shag-in-a-tornado exhausted. And yet I feel I accomplished nothing. All that just to get back to where I was before, and not a spot better-off. Reminds me of grad school.... (And every bit as rewarding.)

Drowning By Numbers

Someone obviously had too much time on his hands. Fun nonetheless.

You'd think one number in particular would have garnered a more interesting clip, but....

If you're curious about the whole list, click here. Or click on it again to make it disappear.

1. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. L.A. Confidential
4. Fargo
5. The Godfather
6. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
7. To Kill a Mockingbird
8. Office Space
9. 12 Angry Men
10. Citizen Kane
11. This is Spinal Tap
12. Ghostbusters
13. Lawrence of Arabia
14. The Professionals
15. Being John Malkovich
16. The Natural
17. The Maltese Falcon
18. Almost Famous
19. The Shawshank Redemption
20. Boogie Nights
21. The Lion in Winter
22. Casablanca
23. The Wizard of Oz
24. Escape from NY
25. Sunset Blvd.
26. North by Northwest
27. The Usual Suspects
28. The Bridge Over the River Kwai
29. Young Frankenstein
30. The Wild Bunch
31. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
32. All About Eve
33. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
34. Marty
35. Harvey
36. Clerks
37. Men in Black
38. Aliens
39. The 39 Steps
40. Superman
41. Ben Hur
42. Finding Nemo
43. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
44. Dirty Harry
45. The Hudsucker Proxy
46. On the Waterfront
47. The Big Sleep
48. The Adventures of Robin Hood
49. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
50. Cool Hand Luke
51. Roman Holiday
52. Waking Ned Devine
53. Midnight Express
54. The Remains of the Day
55. The Blues Brothers
56. It's a Wonderful Life
57. The Manchurian Candidate
58. Goldfinger
59. The Awful Truth
60. Gone With the Wind
61. Singles
62. Mr. Roberts
63. Network
64. Yellow Submarine
65. The Princess Bride
66. Gentleman's Agreement
67. The King and I
68. The Breakfast Club
69. MASH
70. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
71. When Harry Met Sally...
72. Raiders of the Lost Ark
73. The Jerk
74. Ed Wood
75. The Hustler
76. The Great Escape
77. The Apartment
78. The Day The Earth Stood Still
79. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
80. Harold and Maude
81. Galaxy Quest
82. Rainman
83. The Magnificent Seven
84. Titanic
85. Silence of the Lambs
86. Quiz Show
87. Castaway
88. Back to the Future
89. The French Connection
90. The Fugitive
91. The Right Stuff
92. It Came From Outer Space
93. Midnight Run
94. Star Wars
95. Ocean's 11
96. The Lost Weekend
97. Bladerunner
98. Dead Poet's Society
99. Laura
100. Night of the Living Dead

Today's Mantra

I will not rant about Windows, I will not rant about Windows, I will not rant about motherf*cking Windows....

Okay, not just today's. For the past few days I've been engaged in a knock-down-drag-out with that infernal operating system, trying (probably in vain) to get the damned thing to work properly. Again. It's a bit more than an uphill battle; it's more of a St George versus the dragon sorta thing, and so far I'm losing. Several reinstalls later, and key components aren't working, and I've just had to go through the laborious, exasperating process of trying to repair the entire OS from the ground up, and I'm willing to bet that won't work. I swear, if I have to format my hard-drive, I'll probably have to demolish some perfectly innocent appliances in response. Ugh. As Norm Peterson once said of women, Windows: can't live with 'em, pass the beer nuts.

Which leads me to think Dante was wrong. He had no idea what the Gates of Hell were really all about.

UPDATE: Four hours later, and still no progress. Every single recommendation from Microtoss and various fora on the net have yielded SQUAT. My glee must be positively palpable.

UPPERDATE: M'kay, that last failure tears it: I'm drinkin' early today. Now where are those perfectly innocent appliances....

DOWNERDATE: Urge to kill rising....

Forgetting Us Perfectly

Like many people, I keep notebooks. Unlike most people, however, I seldom maintain mine. I have certainly never done so faithfully, or with any attention to vision, revision or-- least of all-- posterity. Yet today I discovered a notebook in which I had scrawled notes for a lecture on King Lear. (Did I deliver it? G-d only knows. Probably.) I was struck, however, by the straight-to-paper and completely unrevised nature of these lines from a prospective introduction:

Today I'm going to talk about Albany and his "story," a story that, once understood, takes us deeper into an appreciation of what is really going on in Lear. To understand Albany is to begin to understand Lear, not just as a play about the fall of a king, but as a tragedy about the mysteries of love and death, a tragedy which seems to suggest [that] the truth of either [love and death] depends upon the other. In effect, to understand the absolute value of one, one needs to understand the value of the other. But more on this later. First: Albany.

The notes that follow, about six pages worth, are actually pretty good-- something I seldom say about anything of my own making. The irony, however, is this: I have only a vague sense of where I was going with this. The notes are incomplete, and marked with a date in March of 2002. Sure, I used to do quite a bit on Albany when I taught Lear, but the connexion to love & death, as grand sublime issues, or however the hell I once conceived all this, largely eludes me now. Shame, that. I feel a bit like Guy Pearce in Memento, trying to solve a riddle I unknowingly created for myself but am now too addled to remember. The only thing more amazing, I'm convinced, than one's capacity to forget is one's capacity to remember-- and yet, I'm pretty sure I'd rather remember the stuff I've forgotten, and forget the stuff I remember. 'Tis the way, 'tis always the way....

All Her Pretty Follies Flung Aside

In for some literary oddities? Poetry Out Loud has put together a small vault of famous people reciting famous poems, including:

• Anthony Hopkins reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill";
• Angela Lansbury reading Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach";
• Alfred "Doc Ock" Molina reading Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Auden's "The Unknown Citizen";
  
• American poet Rita Dove reading Keats' "When I Have Fears"; and
• Alyssa Milano, for once not doing softcore porn, reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I think I should have loved you presently" and Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband." There, now that justifies the gratuitous picture at the right.
  

The real weirdness, though, comes with David Schwimmer-- of all people-- reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." *shiver* What, Lisa Kudrow wasn't available to read "The Raven"?

It could have been worse, though. Imagine Matthew Perry stammering his way through "Signor Dildo."

Ironically, they missed the obvious: they should have had Hopkins read Hopkins. Sir Tony would have had a field day with "The Wreck of the Deutschland" or "God's Grandeur."

It's Al In The Game

Time Magazine is excerpting a section of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason online. Consider it Required Reading, SVP. Goodness knows, Drudge is already branding it as paranoid lefty lunacy ('AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS NOW IN DANGER'), which of course means the Republican smear machine is just champing at the bit to unleash Alogical Hell. Key quote:

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Heaven forfend. Having read this, though, I'm almost certain Al is going to run for President after all.

NOTE: Don't know the song alluded to in the title of this entry? It's based on a song by another onetime Vice-President. How's that for cheek? ;-)

A Man Of Good Will

Most of the time Christopher Hitchens is such a compassionless contrarian, one hesitates to agree with him even slightly. Occasionally, though, he hits all the marks and delivers a denunciation so viciously erudite, you have to admire the form if not the content. Case in point: Hitch's utterly unmagnanimous anti-elegy for Reverend Teletubby on Anderson Cooper 360 below. (BTW, see also his piece for Slate.) In this case, the accuracy of content's gravy, but you have to respect the rhetorical quality of such sucker-punches that dismiss Falwell and his brethren as "Chaucerian frauds" and characterize the man himself as "pinching his chubby little flanks." It's vintage vituperation, pure vinegar without even a drop of pseudo-palliating wine. Enjoy.


How's this for a TV show: Hitchens and Anthony Lane conducting weekly excoriations of popular and/or intellectual culture? Now that'd be a bitch-fest worth tuning in to see.

GEEKY FOOTNOTE: Observe Hitchens' sentence in the article: "The evil that he did will live after him." Kewpie dolls and laurel-leaves if you can catch the paraleptic implications thereto. (Or should I say rendered unto? )

Somehow, You Can't Imagine The Church of England Behaving Like This

If you're in North America, all you probably heard about today-- before Reverent Teletubby's passing-- was the Church of Scientology's YouTube attempts to expose the insidious nature of the report done on it by the BBC's John Sweeney for Panorama. Well, you can watch the report here, and you can judge for yourselves who's right and who's wrong, or some complex admixture in-between. May also be worth casting a glance at the comments here: The Guardian's position is clearly to knock Sweeney, but the audience's response strikes me as constituting a pretty sharp rebuke to it.

Now, given room for editing-- that Sweeney may well have, and in fact probably did at least somewhat, reframe things for his own purposes-- I can't blame Sweeney for exploding. I, with very little doubt, would probably have clocked the malignant little twerp, repeatedly and bloodily, until my knuckles turned into something roughly akin to melted cheese. But maybe that's just me....

I hesitate, only slightly however, to note that, historically, most of the major religions have done exactly the same stuff the CofS seems to be doing. (Can we say Torquemada, boys and girls? I knew you could.) And yet we call them "religions," some of us much more reluctantly than others.

All's Well That Ends Fa---

Unkind as it may seem, it's hard not to wonder if G-d might be punishing him for something....

Deo volente, deo volente....

FOLLOWUP, 28 minutes later: He has, in fact, joined the mortal majority. And gee, it's such a sunny, sunny day here....

FOLLOWUP FOLLOWUP, in honour of the Good Reverend, with appropriate emendations made:

This bigot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the pulpit 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-BIGOT!!

Some Frye With That

An accidental (re-)discovery, from the Northrop Frye notebooks, circa 1991:

Derrida on the book between two covers as a solid object enclosing an authority is, as Derrida must know, complete bullshit:  nobody believes that a book is an object; it's a focus of verbal energy.  What he should be attacking is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that's the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands.  It's always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it.

Intriguing, but I doubt very few would think so poetically, or alternately scientifically, about a book.  But Frye sounds very much like De Man here, though certainly without De Man's sometimes implied and sometimes  explicit fear. 

New Rules

Bill Maher (see also here) comes up with his every week, so now & again maybe I'll come up with a few of my own. Heed them as you will, even if mine aren't half as funny:

• One Step Forward, Duceppe's Back: If you're going to decide to run for political office, don't change your mind a day later. Seriously, Gilles, your candidacy's now the stuff of Britneyesque legend, that equally comical icon of separation anxiety-- except her flirtations last longer.
  

• A Little Blow In The Can: Friends don't let friends take pictures of them snorting coke in a bathroom so they can be posted online for the tittersome edification of computer-bound cultural onanists. (Insert your own down-Lo download jokes here.) Let this be a new rule for ladies: Don't go to the can with your so-called friends! Or, if you must: Don't let them into your god-damned stall. Or, if you really really must have them into that bastion of personal privacy: Tell them to keep their mother-effing camera-phones off! Sheesh. You'd think the star of Mean Girls would have learned something from the experience. Men, by the way, if the recent news is any indication, should never, ever, say anything to their daughters except, "Yes, sweetheart. You're not recording this, are you?"
  

• The Gap: Poker commentators have to stop saying that players are "open-ended." Their hands may be, but unless there's something we don't know, the players probably aren't. At least not at that moment, anyway. (We hope.)
  

• Caveat Lecter: Anthony Hopkins has to stop playing murderers. He's done the shtick to, um, death: the seething glare, the menacing intonations, the smarmy smiles. Like Laurence Olivier, he has now reached the stage where every performance is a caricature of a previous one, and Hannibal Lecter's the pretext for most of them. Also much like Olivier, Hopkins has mellowed into the class-for-cash actor in Hollywood, the token British Thesp whose presence ostensibly, and ergo automatically, lends legitimacy to a project. Instead, he has become the film version of a high-end whore, and I'm just waiting for him to end up hawking fava beans and Chianti as Olivier did Polaroids.
  

• Tsk-y Business: Relatedly, if you finally get nominated for an Oscar, for God's sake, don't follow it up with a discarded Tom Cruise joint. Ryan ("My-Surname-Is-Not-Indicative") Gosling's option into Fracture suggests he needed cash, fast, and it's a trying shame watching him play the callow would-be legal-superstar who has to go through the oh-so-Cruisy too-damned-cocky-for-his-own-good path-to-redemption plot. (By a silly technicality that a first-year law-student would have caught, no less. So much for the superstar bit.) If you're a young actor building credibility in Hollywood, don't rush to destroy it by doing someone else's cast-off crap. Just ask Halle Berry.
  

• Matter and Impertinency Mixed, or Here Comes The Knight: And lastly, scholars have to stop acting like needy, approval-desperate politicians.
  
  I've recently been reading through Michael Taylor's blandly but aptly titled Shakespeare Criticism In The Twentieth Century, and have subsequently been reminded, as if I needed it, what a piss-pot of intellectual churlishness criticism so often is. When it's not ridiculously acolytical, it's sneeringly ahistorical and bizarrely Oedipal, as critics seem preternaturally compelled to assail most viciously their most significant forerunners. It's an anxiety of influence, and an imperious one at that, as they smirk with Commodian disapproval at the work of greater minds largely for show. It's the classic case of scholarly communities slaughtering onetime sun-gods for their own survival, and then slaughtering them time and time again out of agonistic habit. To this day, few scholars-- and God knows there are enough of them-- have contributed as much to the study of Shakespeare as A.C. Bradley, or G. Wilson Knight, or Caroline Spurgeon; and yet, they're the figures most likely (still!) to be attacked, reduced, vilified and generally dismissed. (So too C.L. Barber, Frank Kermode, T.S. Eliot and Helen Vendler, among others.) Translation: Go after the Big Guys, especially the dead ones. It'll show how smart and enlightened you are. And implicitly, how superior you must be, you with your darlingly contemporary thought!
  
  Well, balls. It demonstrates pettiness, righteousness, and fundamental weakness at the intellectual core. It's one thing to engage and to challenge intellectual and critical tradition; it's quite another to make your own name by belittling more Protean thinkers for your own aggrandizement. So where's the New Rule, you're asking. Here it is: Make your name in your own bloody terms. We remember Marcus Aurelius for his imperial legacy, including the Meditations; we remember Commodus, if we do, only as the guy who came after and did an appropriately craptacular job in the same position. Nigglesome disputation seldom accomplishes anything. Inspiration, breadth of vision, sincere negotiation with the lessons of the past: these qualities more usually do. It's one thing to want to make new tracks in the snow, to use one of Taylor's metaphors. It's quite another, however, to piss on the tracks left by others with much bigger boots. And it's pointless: those tracks are still there, and now they've had human highlighters taken to them in most odious fashion.
  
  Call me antiquated or old-fashioned, but what's so wrong with giving credit where credit's due? I reread Bradley and Knight at least once a year, regardless of need, because they're still worth reading. Can I say the same of most of the scholarship written in the past twenty or thirty years? Not even close. Most of it, in fact, barely warrants a preliminary glance, largely because it's predictable, cluttered and rigorously half-coherent. It's also painfully dull, and when combined with that ingracious and tendentious sniggering that's all-too-typical of the genre, I feel little remorse in tossing it so casually aside. It's the classic contradictional scenario, as historicists gladly de-historicize (how's that for tortured language?), and arbiters of intellectual tolerance practise everything but. But respect? Natch. Let's just say it's more common in the breach than in the observance.

Reminder of a Literate President

See how well you can do, going (ahem) head-to-head with Bill Clinton (PDF, alas, but printable). Feel free to celebrate with a cigar afterwards.

A Yard Day's Light

C'mon, admit it: you know your dad wants this. You also know your mother almost certainly doesn't.

A Mangled Web

Saw Spider-Man 3 this weekend. I could bother with a review, but it's just not worth the words. Summary? A clumsy, jumbled, battle-royal of a movie that seems very much to have been written by a committee of sixteen year-olds; and, ultimately, a real letdown for an otherwise solid series. Only saving graces: some fairly good CGI, and Rosemary Harris, back again as Aunt May and more radiant at 80 than any of her co-stars. A shame she didn't have more scenes. See Anthony Lane's review from The New Yorker for fuller commentary. He pretty much says it all.

Oh, and as you've probably heard: Kirsten Dunst sings-- badly. Is it just me, or does that lass get worse from one movie to another? A mighty feat, I know, but she makes me think "vapider" should be added to the OED.

A Comment On Now, And A Memory From Then

Almost done dog/house-sitting, and have to say things have gone delightfully well. Amber has been a sweet & patient dream, and though her hearing is sadly not what it used to be, she intuits well-- very, very well, in fact-- and behaves pretty much perfectly. When I'm with her, she doesn't go very far from my side, which is almost unbearably adorable. She's also a trooper: no whining or acting up, except at play time, when the latter's surely to be encouraged in a dog her age. (It shows vitality.) So beyond the relatively minor inconvenience of shuffling from here to there, the whole thing's been good, and remarkably easy. Animals, I'm reminded, do tend to be very good with me-- Jeremy and his animals..., as an ex once said to a visiting relation-- and so also remind me how much I prefer animals to humans. Animals are never false or malevolent. They simply are. Treat almost any animal according to the Golden Rule, and it'll respond in kind--- most of the time. Certainly the case with the animals I've ever owned or cared for.

All this also reminds me of a (true) story. When I was doing my MA, I agreed to housesit for one of my professors, which entailed caring for three dogs, five cats and three horses. Trouble did half my work for me, renegotiating the relationships among the cats & dogs so he was at the top of their chain, first by humiliating all but the oldest and frailest of both species, and then defending them in a beautifully elder-centric reconstruction. (Trouble, like me, has a fondness for old animals.) The horses, however, were my concern. After several days with them, and many warnings from the owning professor, I found myself in a dilemma as I tried to get two of the horses, the alpha horse and the old-and-loony-and-likely-to-cause-me-no-end-of-grief horse, up a steep and badly iced-over hill. Lead the alpha, I was told advisorly, and the loon will eventually follow.

Let's see if you can guess what happened.

The alpha started to freak, and here I was, all 110-pounds of me, trying to get both these beautiful animals up that hill. It was the crazy old horse that stood there and stood there, I think trying to survey the situation. As I tried to calm the alpha, the old horse (I'm sorry, I have since forgotten their names, unfortunately) must have taken pity on me or something, and began the slow-- and rather treacherous-- march. He did so steadily, sedately, beautifully-- and on his own. Eventually the alpha, whom I was holding by the reins only very barely, followed her elder's lead. It was as if the loon had said to the alpha, "it's a rough night, let's not fuck around with him now." And he-- not me, really-- escorted both of them back to their stables, and I just guided the alpha and locked them in when they arrived.

(Is there an allegory for teaching assistants in there? Hmmmmm.... No comment.)

It was something deeply beautiful. The wacky horse with the propensity for jumping fences and causing trouble turned for me into the docile master when things were obviously grim. The alpha scared the hell out of me several times-- and worse, fell once and nearly fell another three times making that scale. (I assure you, there's precious little more terrifying than a horse falling on ice.) But the so-called loon, the one more ostensibly given to injury by the situation, proved stalwart, and thankfully commanding, else I'd have turned up somewhere like a frosty and unquartered Hector.

The moral of the story? (Is there one? ) Maybe it's that eccentric beasts prove themselves, or prove themselves the most stable, when least you might expect they would. Or maybe it's that the ones most champing at the bit can be the ones most capable of taking you-- and themselves-- down. Or maybe it's just a tale about horses, heaven forfend.

As for me, I saw more nobility in that wacky horse's steady climb in that one night than I'll probably ever see in any animal politics, human or otherwise. It was sublime. Old, more often than we care to think, is beautiful. And crazy is as crazy does.

Roughing It On The Bush

Every now and then, someone writes a good, genuine rhetorical slamming-- a piece that takes its subject by the hair and pounds it repeatedly, viciously, and let's not forget righteously, against a metaphorical wall made of real concrete. (Martin Luther would be the patron saint of this if he hadn't rejected the position on principle. ) Here, however, is the best example of the form I've seen recently, offered for your cranium-crushing delectation. Sure, it veers into aborted epilogues four or five times, the conclusion's entirely too trite, and it loses points for electing a subject so low on the level-of-difficulty scale (as opposed to Christopher Hitchens, who invariably assails the unassailable and consequently comes off more battered than his subject). But it does manage some impressive polemical drop-kicks and piledrivings, most of which provide at least some perverse pleasure along the way. Read it in that light, and you'll have fun. Unless, of course, you're a die-hard Shrubbie, in which case fun's probably beyond your capacity.

The Very Simple Life

I'll bet she wishes she were Dyanne Thorne's daughter now. Or at least Sybil Danning's. (Too obscure? Nary and natch.)

In case you're wondering what her stay will be like, Forbes provides a hint. Key (partial) quote: "Hilton will be segregated from the general population for her own safety...." And our amusement, surely.

But In North York, It'd Be Given Tenure

I had thought the phrase "bat-shit crazy" could only be metaphorical. Silly me.

Because This Blog Doesn't Do Happy Dances

Let's just say Halle-bloody-lujah....

I'll Have What He's Having, or Melts In Your....

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

It Also Applies To Jerry Falwell

Shamelessly lifted from Christie, but it's always nice to be able to explain complex human processes with simple equations.

Being There

Ah, yes: Another Bloody Cat Picture. (I can hear all of you asking God plaintively why he has forsaken you.) Jenny looks gnomic in this one, as cats are wont to do whenever there isn't a camera handy. Picture's a little old, alas, as the space on which Jenny's resting is completely filled with books, thanks to a trip last week to see RK. Some neat acquisitions, those: some Heidegger, de Man, Frye; quite a few anthologies and essay-collections; some new-to-me editions of Donne and Herbert and Wordsworth; and a small tonne of stuff on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry & poetics. Came to sixty or seventy volumes in total, but-- as ever-- there's no room for them all. Argh. Skimming through some of those books, I finally remembered why I didn't do Renaissance as a specialization all those years ago: my lack of Latin and my French which, by then, had already gone from rusty to corroded. *shrug* At least I avoided ever having to pay lip-service to that atrocious phrase "early modern." *shiver*

In picking out those books, RK dared me to get through a hundred pages of Heidegger's Being and Time. He hasn't double-dog-dared me yet, but I'll not shrink from a dare. Feel free to set up your pools to place your bets on whether or not I can do it without putting a staple-gun to my head.

Okay, Now This Is Genuinely Sad

Tom Poston is dead. But if you think a little thing like death is going to keep him from making cameos on every show made and still-to-be-made, you've got another thing coming.

The Play's The Thing

This blog's just so conflicted....

If you're bored, feel free to roam around Elsinore and try to make Hamlet kiss Horatio. Curiously enough, the designer anticipated that you might want to do that.

Paging Helen Lovejoy

Once again, society is bedeviled by the dangers of eye-rhyme. Bedeviled, we tell you, bedeviled! Will someone PLEASE think of the children!!!

Seriously, if the campaign offends you, it says a hell of a lot more about you than it does about the campaign: specifically, that you're (probably) a self-righteous, ululating prig with nothing better to do with your much too ample time. In other words, you're a card-carrying member of the School of Injurement, and you desperately need to get a motherflicking life.

FOLLOWUP: Reminder from Leonard Cohen: "There are no dirty words-- ever." Except maybe ululate. That word just sounds kinky.