Random Souse

Seems Zelda has tagged me with one of those silly memes.  Oy.  I'm supposed to state the rules, which are:

• I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

Okay, eight random facts, eh?  Hmmm.... Are there even eight facts about me?  Forkstix.   

1. I hate-- loathe, despise, virulently detest-- writing about "me."  Experiences are fine, but ask me to write anything in description, categorization, figuration, etc., of myself, and I get downright surly.  And terse.
2. I have probably had more nicknames, monikers and soubriquets than a broken bluesman.  So many, in fact, I don't remember all of them anymore.  I have contained multitudes.... 
3. I am probably the only blogger in the world to have written about, or even mentioned, Flora Robson in the past month.  I am therefore either arcane or anachronistic.  Take your pick.
4. In case you haven't noticed, I'm having a very difficult time completing this thing.  Seriously.  See point #1.
5. I firmly believe all will be revealed to each of us-- the meaning of life and all that palaver-- exactly two seconds before we die.  I am convinced this is part of Dog's profoundly warped sense of cheek.  I'm not sure I believe much more than that anymore.
6. I badly need a hair-cut.  Again.  Am getting that swarthy Celtic look.  Again.
7. Have been rereading John Donne lately.  Infer from that what you will.
8. I get bored very, very easily.  (Obviously.)  I wanted to end this meme five points ago.  *shrug*

Okay, now consider yourselves tagged.  I'm off to pick up beer.

The Trickiest Dick

Well, it's only a little late-- how many years and lives since?-- but the Washington Post has issued the first of a four part series examining the machinations of Dick ("Go fuck yourself") Cheney.  Very little of it will surprise, I'm sure, but some of the details and the manipulations are downright eerie.  And, I tarry to say, not a little reminiscent of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. 

Footnote:  The more I learn about the inner working of the ChainGang, the more I find sympathy, partial and otherwise, for figures like Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and even the President himself.  They seem more and more like characters from a French farce stuck in a geopolitical version of Othello.  The hapless Desdemona, of course, is played by the American constitution. 

Frags and Shards

Not much to report from these dull but summery quarters, but maybe a few things of interest:

• In a move entirely too rare these days, Bytescout has shifted its blogging programme Post2Blog from pay-ware into freeware. It’s a flawed but basically solid editor, and one of its niftiest components-- conspicuously missing from heavier counterparts like Windows Live Writer-- is the automatic loading & storage of pictures on Flickr or ImageShack. If you’re running a blog, it’s worth checking out. Also includes emoticons & other neat little bits & pieces.


• Finally saw Knocked Up, which, though clumsily made, is something of a pleasant surprise, and I was impressed by the script’s willingness to make all of its characters, at one point or another, deeply flawed in one form or another. And, well, let’s just say that there are a lot of moments in it that ring astonishingly familiar. Good on it. I’m a little perturbed by the ways in the which the American punditocracy is using the film as a reason to dredge up the ever-circular abortion debate, but as someone once observed, in American politics, everything is about abortion.


• Those of you in Toronto for the next week with an interest in textile art might want to check out the Marie-Jose Danzon retrospective being held at the Gladstone Hotel until the 23rd. See here for a pair of samples.


• Today being Father’s Day, you might want to read about this martyr bloke. He gives new meaning to the old saw about grinning & bearing it, especially since you know that he hasn’t seen the inside of his own bathroom in twenty years.
  

Have to spend the next bit going over medical reports as part of my current freelance work. Almost thinking I should start impressing business cards identifying myself as a "freelance language advisor." Off to it. Enjoy thy weekends all.

Fuzzy Thinking

If you haven’t seen Hot Fuzz yet, do so ASAP. Yes: it’s funny, it’s cheeky, it’s smarter than hell. But here’s something you probably haven’t heard: It’s breathtakingly economical. There’s not a moment of fat in it, every scene, and almost every bit of every scene, proving relevant to something elsewhere in the movie. You wouldn’t expect such a film to be put together with such contrapuntal technique, but there it is, and it’s an impressive feat. It’s also deeply allusive, for those of you into that sort of thing. I spotted allusions to Yojimbo, Once Upon a Time In Mexico, The Omen, The Wicker Man (the original), Straw Dogs and Chinatown, among others. Bloody clever--- and yes, a bloody lot of fun. See it.

BTW, this page is loading very slowly because of some scripts and links to Enetation in the UK. Unfortunately, I can’t be bothered to go through the trouble of removing all such stuff right now. Oy. My apologies. Maybe I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

Meatball Surgery

Okay, so much for leaping boldly into the modern computer world. My upgrades arrived, and alas there was some confusion regarding them, so I'm still about three years behind the times, but at least things are noticeably better. At least I can run more than two programmes at a time now. *shrug* It's proof-positive, though, that nothing ever goes as planned for the NSG Doc. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....

Spent most of the past two days editing and recasting reports and was reminded of something which I had forgotten, namely the fundamental differences between one form of report and another. In my onetime field, repetition is a no-no, and structure & phrasing matter a lot. In other fields, however, especially science and social-science related fields, reports are all about repetition and jargon: all about, that is, using key words and phrases, shoehorning them in if necessary, and restating them as often as possible. Reminds me of an actor making his marks: make sure you step here, here and here; don't worry, it doesn't matter how you move between them, but dammit, make sure you hit those bloody marks. It was one of the first things I learned in academia, that what's acceptable, and often publishable, in the social-sciences-- for example-- wouldn't make even preliminary muster from a language-based, much less literary, standpoint. Sylvia, I'm sure, knows exactly what I mean--- and probably more intimately.

More than a decade ago, an anthropology student with an office across from mine asked me to edit a paper that she was submitting for publication. Going through it, I realized the thing was unreadable, and I set about trying to perform meatball surgery on it. Next time I saw this young woman, I apologized for taking so long (and, frankly, dreading having to relate the awful news), but she cut me short with her happy announcement that she had already submitted the piece and that it had been accepted. I smiled and was happy for her, of course, but you could have knocked me over with a feather.

As some of you reading this already know, I chagrin the social sciences, not because of what they study but because they actively encourage bad-- genuinely awful-- writing; illogical writing, mechanical writing, obtuse and professionally onanistic writing; writing that's based on the checklist, talking-point model. Coherence doesn't matter; language doesn't matter; and phrasing, well that matters less than nothing, if that's possible. Such writing is just point-form notes shoved into paragraphs when they really want nothing more than to remain point-form notes. Until one appreciates that sentences and paragraphs aren't just vague verbal forms, but units of logic, all those paragraphs are just going to be boxes into which as many objects as possible are carelessly shoved. Unfortunately, that's how most people think of paragraphs-- and sentences, for that matter-- because that's what they're taught to think, usually in high school. It's almost impossible to remedy that sort of thinking, especially when people get settled in their ways. Why care about grace, after all, if you're still making your marks? Who cares if you do so with the heavy footing of a Clydesdale?

It's a lesson I used to make, probably ad nauseam, to my students over the years, that language matters fundamentally because it's the central device of thought, in the same way that numbers are to a mathematician. Misplace a decimal, add a zero, miswrite an equation, and your answers will be skewed and almost certainly wrong. Same thing with language. Muck up the words, mash up the grammatical order, misplace punctuation, and your writing will collapse under the weight of your intentions and you'll be left standing on a pile of intellectual rubble. As Mr Eliot put it,

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Few care about this sort of thing anymore, though, and those of us who do are often regarded as tight-arsed purists clinging to some long-dead notion that language is unmalleable. It's quite the opposite, in fact. Those of us that care about such stuff are all too aware of the mutability of language. Using language is like making a wish in a fairy tale: if you're not careful, you'll probably get something quite different than you expect. Semantics are everything. Just ask my computer.

***

And yes, this is all probably just post-editing whinge. Meatball surgery, after all, isn't about getting things right or even best; it's about getting your patients back out in the field as quickly as possible. The words "good enough," however, will always bug the living hell out of me, even when I have to say them. C'est la vie, c'est la....

A Sense of An Ending

It seems fans of The Sopranos are livid about the series finale last night, and the Net nattering class is looking for someone to whack. Frankly, I don't think the ending could be clearer, though I'll concede there's a certain degree of ambiguity about it. So, I'll try to provide my take on it, though I think it's the only one that makes any sense in the show's universe.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW: Avert thy gaze now if you don't want to know what happened. Check here for the elemental summary if you're interested.)

I said "a certain degree of ambiguity," but the ending is NOT ambiguous. By my reading, Tony's dead, and probably the whole family. Why? Because those two classics of modern mafia movies, The Godfather and Goodfellas, tell us so. Just before the end, a mysterious and anonymous figure heads into the head, and if any of you remember The Godfather, the implication is deadly. But the jagged cut to black-screen reinforces the suggestion. Recall Goodfellas and Henry Hill's realization that he had been trapped by the feds and not by the mob. He says, "For a second I thought I was dead. But, when I heard all the noise, I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they'd been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead" (emphasis added). There's no noise in The Sopranos' resolution, no talk, no explanation; just nothing. The inference, I think, is inescapable, and only the most die-hard of Sopranos fans can deny they're condemned to it. (Why? Maybe because they "won't stop believing.")

For all these years, we—as an audience—have walked along-side him, and to some extent colluded with him in his activities, however vicariously. We've seen his world largely through his eyes, and now we're paying for that collaboration, because at least symbolically, we've been whacked too: denied action, denied response, and most of all omniscience; we're just plain dead, perhaps our price to pay for being his silent consigliores. In the 86^th episode, we get eighty-sixed along with Tony, and one presumes the rest of the family, with the possible, but I think unlikely, exception of Meadow. The manner of the ending, though, is perfectly mimetic, and though preliminarily frustrating, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. It's also appropriately ironic, given the ways in which we, as an audience, have apologized for and even valorized Tony Soprano: we have lived off him every bit as much as Carmela, she off blood-money, we off blood-TV.

That we never, of course, see Tony die can be used against us later, should buckets of money be dropped at David Chase's feet to resurrect the characters, and that's where that "certain degree" of ambiguity comes into play. It'd be a cynical gesture, however, and one I suspect Chase would decline to make. There's a particular genius about leaving the ending in ellipsis. Shakespeare ended Henry V on a rousing note, while only vaguely indicating what would happen after Henry's defeat of France, specifically that he'd die just years later and his premature death would England into years of internecine warfare. Shakespeare's audience knew exactly what would have followed the flourish, so leaving it unsaid was all-the-more powerful. So too with The Sopranos: we can infer, we can read the indications well-enough and surmise accordingly.

And the less we have to say, the better. No wonder we didn't hear a thing.

MMMSnap!

Rediscovered today this old bit from Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, "A Very Hanson Christmas." Those of you who remember those teeny-bopping twerps-- like Vietnam and that time Father Shaughnessy asked you into the rectory-- will relish the volta with which the third letter begins.

If you inexplicably managed to miss the phenomenon of that over-tressed trio in the late nineties, count yourself blessed. You can Google them yourselves should you wish, but I, for one, don't want that term anywhere in my search history.

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

Herewith, the most tortured-- and torturous-- interview you'll see all year, complete with utterly gratuitous product-placement. I guarantee you'll be squirming after the first minute, and writhing in outright agony by the third.



As the poster of this video noted, "This is why you don't homeschool your children."

UPDATE: Almost-exceedingly cruel follow-up here.

In A Word....

... Dammit. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.

I gotta get me a sugar momma....

Words To Die By

Finally, I think I have found the perfect words for my tombstone, courtesy an old episode of Frasier:

Thank you for your support, ladies, even if it was nakedly self-serving and insincere.

Could there be a better epitaph for the Not-So-Good Doctor? Now how do I incorporate the wry smile before I exit stage left?

(The best suggested epitaph will always belong, however, to Peter Ustinov: he demanded "Keep Off The Grass!")

FOLLOW-UP: Yes, there's an irony to me posting this as I knot my guts with inexplicable worry for a particular young lass. I do it, though, because she'd appreciate the macabre and half-ironic cheek. And she'd be mighty fucken pissed if I ever got totally sincere. ;-)

Ledger De Man

I'm suddenly thinking I have to see Knocked Up if this is the sort of scene they deleted. Most comedies should have even one scene this funny. Very, very, very much Not Safe For Work, though.

Some of you have probably heard that former National Post columnist Rebecca Eckler is claiming the movie stole its story from her. You may not have heard, however, that she has a blog. You can read it here and develop your own doubts regarding the merits of her case. She writes like a vapid eighteen year-old, right down to using "Can you fucking believe that?" as an independent paragraph.    Then again, Ms Eckler is all about the "me" back into "Mom mee...."

The Persistence of Memory

With any luck—yeah, I know, who am I kidding?—my aged computer will soon be, well, not entirely obsolete. I just shelled out to improve my machine's memory resources ten-fold, and though that won't bring me into the modern age, much less the Vista one, it should make a huge difference. Maybe it'll even do for my sad & ever-so-clunky machine what Viagra did for Bob Dole and inspire a new lease on life. (In case you're wondering how bad things had become: it would regularly take minutes, literally, to switch between two open programs, say Firefox and OpenOffice, minutes in which I, of course, would end up rolling my eyes like Ajax, or uttering litanies of obscenity that would make George Carlin blush.) So, fingers crossed, however creakily and osteoperotically.

Not much to report here, save the same old doldrums— shouldn't that be doldra?—and shit. Except: received a gift yesterday of the old Richard Attenborough pic, Guns at Batasi, courtesy a too-too kind RK. (Wiki link here.) Still to watch it, but it has two of my favourite English actors in it, Jack Hawkins and the sadly under-remembered Dame Flora Robson. Hawkins is well-represented in my movie collection—The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Theatre of Blood—but the only film in my DVD collection with Dame Flora is The Malta Story, also starring Hawkins, and that's hardly a stellar outing for anyone concerned. For you non-cinephiles, Dame Flora remains in many ways the film epitome of Elizabeth I: playing the Queen in Fire Over England and The Sea Hawk, she was terrific and steely, and more than able in both cases to upstage her co-stars, Laurence Olivier (with Vivien Leigh) and Errol Flynn, respectively. (No mean feats, those.) Some actors are welcome to be seen in anything. Flora's one of them-- moreso, in fact, now that older movies are so very, very rarely to be found on TV anymore. BTW, now you know against whom Cate Blanchett is daring to pit herself by playing Elizabeth again. It's like Eddie Murphy endlessly trying to outdo Alec Guinness: admirable to an extent, but entirely unnecessary.

And yes, once again the Not-So-Good, Not-So-Doctor ends up prattling on about an actor unfairly forgot. Please don't forgive me. Consider it an encitement to research.

Also, can't be bothered to give a damn about the Philip Glass setting of the Leonard Cohen pieces from The Book of Longing currently being performed in Toronto. I should be interested, very interested in fact, but The Book of Longing was such a piece of crap I decided it wasn't even worth writing about here. It also doesn't help that my initial response to Glass isn't much different than Springfield's. No one does Cohen well anymore, not even Cohen—or rather, especially not Cohen. Sigh.

On the other hand, there remains that Zelda is now dissertation-free, and now simply trudging through the last bits that will formalize her Piled Higher and Deeperness. (Don't make me drag Petey out again: I keep him retired for a reason.) Her success, well-earned but also inevitable, reminds me how little I ultimately have to say. Or, rather, how little I have to say in that form. I just don't give a damn about that audience anymore.

That realization, however, has led me to some much more awkward realizations, none of which I'll detail here. It's all so Henry James: And there we are….

Or maybe Leonard Cohen, fourteen years ago: Looks like freedom but it feels like death. Or maybe exactly the opposite. It's probably a paradox one has to be a Cavalier to understand, or a Yeats or a Vonnegut. G-d knows, I don't. Or even care. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....

The Charge of the Lie Brigade

Some comedy just writes itself:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty promised yesterday that he would not raise taxes if he is re-elected this fall and insisted he means it this time.

The Premier, who ran on a no new-taxes platform in the 2003 election and then introduced one of the largest income tax increases in provincial history, said Ontarians should believe him now "because I'm in charge."

Reminds me of Lucy assuring Charlie Brown that she won't pull the football away at the last minute--- this time.