Tuesday Meld

Just a few notes on recent items & events:

• The much, much, much too-hyped CNN-YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential nominees wasn't the failure some predicted it would be, but it wasn't the political watershed moment CNN would have you think it was either. The big winner from last night? Democrats generally. With the Republican version not happening until September, the Dems will get almost two months of credit for engaging "the public" directly. The Republicans, however, are going to get crucified when their questions get sent in; by September, the schisms within the party will be plain and the calls for blood will be positively choral.
• You Jane Austen fans out there might appreciate this. In the Google age, this is inexcusable and should send more than a few heads rolling.
• The Guardian put together its list of the fifty greatest film comedies. Note some of the really bottom-of-the-barrel inclusions. We'll see if The Simpsons Movie makes a future version, but if the Guardian review is any indication, it will be; the review falls somewhere between supplication and fellatio.
• I will not link to any item about the LiLo fiasco. Period. I will only add this: given the paranoiac effects of alcohol and cocaine, and her constant realization that yes, she is being hounded everywhere, one should hardly wonder why she keeps going on and off the, ahem, rails. Remember the old adage: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that no one's following you.
• Recent online discovery: this wonderful reflection by the great lyric critic Helen Vendler. Pious Labours, especially: as RK would say, RLAID; read, learn and inwardly digest.
• After being reminded recently of Northrop Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic, I decided the other day to reread it in its entirety--- and which I did, in one sitting over pints at one of my locals. The first essay I'd still encourage everyone, of literary bent or not, to read & re-read & re-read yet again: it's brilliant, central and more valuable now than when it was written those forty-plus years ago. It also reminded me why I loathe the current critical trend to discuss literature as "discourse." Discourse, in its current usage, is really just an attempt to conflate the various areas of critical distinction which Aristotle rightly separated: the ethical, the rhetorical, the poetical. It also conveniently allows lit-critters to say and to write whatever the hell they want, regardless of disciplinary considerations, while guising it as scholarship. In short, it's a license to bullshit and has been used, egregiously, as one. No wonder I wince when I see the word in any scholarship in the past forty years; it has become meaningless, save to say that it indicates and enables pretentious prognostication of the broadest order. We'd do well, I think, to re-read our Aristotle--- without the commonplace sniggering about the convenient compartmentalization of elements.

Hair shorn and beard gone, believe it or not, I have been shocking the hell out of people lately. Further to the Ripley's file, from a young woman the other day: So how old are you? 22, 23?

If only, dear lass, if only....

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.)

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? ;-)

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.